Britain has an America problem - New Statesman
4 March 2026
Our old ally has grown untrustworthy. We must end our co-dependence
By Ben Judah
The summer of 2024 was a strange time to arrive in the Foreign Office. One US president, Joe Biden, was politically dying in office while another, Donald Trump, was looming over every issue and campaigning on the promise that he would bring us “world peace”. The year I would spend there, as special adviser to David Lammy when he was foreign secretary, was to watch from the headquarters of British diplomacy as the rules-based order began to collapse.
Trump won. Seven swing states chose the man promising to “stop the wars” and with him they cracked the old order apart. Soon, the Foreign Office was struggling with the world. Supporting the foreign secretary meant shifting through daily contradictory advice. The Middle East team pushing human rights and the UN General Assembly first. The eastern Europe team arguing Zelensky is the priority. The embassy in Washington insisting: special relationship über alles. This wasn’t anyone’s fault. Each team was a different part of Britain’s old grand strategy – international law, fighting the Kremlin and being America’s best friend – that now pulled in different directions inside Trump’s disordered new world.
It wasn’t just our ability to strategise that was in trouble. It was our ability to speak. Shifting through comms was like trying to avoid tripwires every day: you can’t say that because of the Americans; you can’t say that because of the Official Secrets Act; or you can’t say that because of the Chinese. I sympathise with ministers, and now the Prime Minister, struggling through this: there is so much at stake, so much to lose from saying the wrong thing. Our security dependence on Americans often forces us to speak in riddles. Never has there been a better example than Trump: the strong may not only act, but speak the way they like. The weak say what little they can.
George Gilbert Scott’s Foreign Office – King Charles Street as its Whitehall familiars call it – is the most spectral building I’ve ever worked in. The corridor along which great officials toiled, was haunted, at least in my mind, by the telegrams sent during the chain reactions of summer 1914. The grand office was haunted by the window where Edward Grey twitched the curtain to look at the street lights, observing that August that “the lamps are going out all over Europe”. And haunt-ed too, in 2024, by the UK’s failures in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, where so many of those around me had begun their careers and wasted years.
Being in politics means living various lies. That’s part of the job. In the Foreign Office you live, more than most, the old British lies. That we have “the best small army in the world”, now strained to breaking point, and of course the “special relationship”. Dutifully, I found myself ticking lines to approve sent by the embassy: we were the US’s “day-one, night-one partner” for interventions, or “America’s closest ally” – but we were just living in a different age from the one those slogans came from. It’s the Ukrainians who have Europe’s biggest, toughest and most drone-savvy fighting force – not us. It was painfully clear to me under both presidents whose teams I met that their real special relationship was with Israel.
What Britain really has is an America problem. That’s why, brutally, our grand strategy no longer makes sense. The superpower we have built our security around has become erratic, unpredictable and unmoored from its old alliances.
Our Washington strategy has been about nailing deals with Trump’s courtiers: Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff for Ukraine, Howard Lutnick for trade and tech, or Mark Burnett, his London-born envoy to the UK, over Chagos. I will not easily forget, sitting in the Foreign Office, how a Trump delegate explained why we needed to accept his 10 per cent tariffs and not overplay our hand in negotiations. “You’ve got to remember,” he grinned, “it’s like being at school. America’s the big kid and it’s coming for your lunch money.”
Neither a Ukraine deal, a trade deal nor a Chagos deal have come to pass. We have learned the hard way with the courtiers that nobody can speak for the emperor. It’s all about him. One of the truest things anyone ever said to me about Trump, in that time, was John Fetterman, the hoodie-wearing senator from Pennsylvania. “He’s like a black hole,” he said. “Scientists said it would be impossible. But it exists.” Trump is a vortex: I saw him change JD Vance from a great critic of interventionism into a supporter of the neocon dream. That’s why I’ve ended up believing in the great-man theory of history. It’s been said before, but I truly felt it: Trump is the spirit of the age – channelling oligarchy, social media and a mastery of TV into a new form of power. What Hegel called the Weltgeist. The man history works through. As the philosopher saw Napoleon, so I considered Trump up close: “I saw the emperor – this Weltgeist – riding out of the city.”
I often used to joke to colleagues that, irrespective of our grand offices, Trump was behaving like the emperor of the West: “And here in the far-off province of Britannia, we did wait for news from Rome.” A joke or the truth? I felt we weren’t fully independent. As the UK, or as Europeans. In fact, we were so built in to the American security system, we couldn’t function or protect ourselves without them. I sat in the grand office, with its green-and-gold patterned wallpaper, noticing that low-slung sofa that had been there when Anthony Eden was foreign secretary, and thinking that unless Keir Starmer draws a line we will end up feeling like a Canadian or Australian minister in the early 20th century. Notionally free to choose a way on war and peace, but in reality being told what to do. A dominion, if we let it be; not truly a middle power.
But we have a Europe problem too. None of us are remotely ready for this. The current situation is one we’ve all been happy to accept so long as it was economically beneficial. Shall we let the Americans lead on owning that super-sensitive defence infrastructure, with us getting to use it, Mr Prime Minister, Herr Bundeskanzler, Monsieur le Président – or shall we make voters pay for it in tax rises? We all know how Europeans will answer that question, as long as they can get away with it.
A culture of dependence has taken hold that has softened our ability to think strategically. Last June, in the final hours before Trump gave the order for his B-2 bombers to hit Iran’s “nuclear mountain” at Fordow, I was in Switzerland with three European foreign ministers and the Iranians. What I saw depressed me. The German, living in yesterday’s world, was convinced the attack was never going to happen, while the Frenchman, living another world, was convinced we had months for some vague, parallel negotiations. Europe wasn’t moored to reality, or having the kind of talks it needed: what about an independent defensive opera-tion, under our own joint independent command, for our allies and citizens in the Gulf if war hit?
Starmer has now drawn our line. If he stays out of offensive operations, he will be more Harold Wilson in the history books, saying no Vietnam, than Blair. Our pivot to Europe, simple enough economically if it were to include rejoining the customs union or the single market – isn’t so easy for us geopolitically, as I saw in Geneva. There still isn’t a geopolitical Europe, with its own ideas, its own capabilities, or the ability to fully articulate, let alone defend, its own interests.
In my time at the Foreign Office, it felt like it had a crucial part of its brain removed by moving work on the EU to the Cabinet Office. But so too did the rest of Westminster, which only considered a decisive pivot to Europe domestically, not geopolitically. This is the truth. We can’t solve our America problem – only Americans can make their country less erratic – but we can solve our Europe problem by building up our independence, and theirs.
Our security shouldn’t be subject to aggrieved Midwesterners every four years. But we need to be honest about how painful, expensive and slow it will be to reduce our dependence on the US. This is a decades-long project, not an overnight switch.
“It’s a court, not an administration,” were the words I heard the most often from our diplomats working with the White House. Maybe this was why I found it impossible to read the books I had bought, such as former US secretary of state Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation on Nato’s beginning. I only found sense in Roman history or novels. Things like Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars or I, Claudius by Robert Graves. I later found out that Clement Attlee, at a more precipitous mo-ment of British decline (of which I was at the bottom), had done similar, reading the entirety of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall in office. In December I heard that Benjamin Netanyahu had spent time poring over Jews vs Rome by Barry Strauss, a history of how Herod expertly played Roman politics only for his successors to lose everything by misjudging the empire.
This has helped me think through what’s coming next. America is turbulent and unreliable. But the appropriate Roman analogue is not the reigns of fifth-century Honorius or Majorian, squalid tyrants unable to rule or govern as the empire collapsed, but Nero or Caligula: mad and decadent at the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, 400 years before. Flush with all the wealth accrued from the rise of Rome, the young empire was still unused to wielding its awful powers, with centuries to come. Every metric tells us this is true for America, too. Neronian erraticism was succeeded by the Flavian dynasty: dour military men who burned the Temple, built the Colosseum, and trumpeted the imperial ideology louder than ever before.
Erratic America means the highly intelligent, highly professional Washington China hawks – that think-tank-cum-security-state world of which Jake Sullivan as Biden’s national security adviser was king, with their green-industrial Atlanticism, and plan for allies to be both respectfully integrated but subordinated into a global contest with China – could easily return. And return for good once our great man of history is dispatched to whatever form of St Helena the Democrats have in store for him. (He has already done his time on Elba.)
Britain’s task today is working to solve our Europe problem and building up the continent as a geopolitical pole, with a plan of its own for this century. That, at least, will turn whatever Washington intends for us into a negotiation rather than them telling us which way the legions are marching from imperial Rome.
[Further reading: Trump, Iran and America’s years of iron]