The special relationship is in as much difficulty today as it has been probably since Suez. Look what Donald Trump had to say about our current leadership.
He said: “I’m not happy with the UK either. That island that you read about, the lease, for whatever reason, he made a lease of the island.
“Somebody came and took it away from him, and it’s taken three, four days for us to work out where we can land.
“There would have been much more convenient landing there as opposed to flying many extra hours. So we are very surprised. This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.”
Well, it’s clearly not Winston Churchill, who spent so much time, effort and energy making sure that the special relationship worked.
And why does the special relationship matter?
We are, of course, two independent sovereign countries, but with a degree of shared history, a common language and an affection for each other.
You have a president who has a romantic view of the United Kingdom who’s friendly, well-disposed towards us, whose mother was British. And yet the relationship has deteriorated.
In his early days as Prime Minister, Keir Starmer actually did remarkably well in developing a good relationship with Donald Trump in managing to reduce the tariffs that were imposed on the United Kingdom.
Jacob Rees-Mogg has shared his opinion on the special relationship
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GB NEWS
Because of that pulling out of the bag, the state visit of Donald Trump to see the King managing to flatter the most important and powerful man in the world in the interest of the United Kingdom.
And this is the key thing. The US and the UK have many shared interests. We want a stable West.
We need the US to carry on helping in Ukraine. We wanted help more as it happens, and should be concerned about Donald Trump’s caution there.
Nonetheless, we don’t want to annoy him so that he does less.
We need to be on the same side as America in relation to China, where Xi Jinping is going back to a Maoist approach to running the country and could be a threat to Taiwan.
The special relationship dates back centuries
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POOL
We also need to be supporting the United States in relation to Iran. Why? Because Iran has promoted terrorism around the world, in this country.
Journalists in this country lived in fear of the Iranian Government that tried to kill them. This was taking place on British soil. They have called us the little Satan.
They view us as an enemy. They have been hostile to us. And therefore, when America wanted to destroy the leadership that was hostile to us, we weren’t going to be able to stop it. It’s perfectly reasonable to debate whether it’s a good thing to do.
It is perfectly reasonable to consider our relationship in the Middle East going back not just years, but centuries, going back to Sykes-Picot, going back to the Crusades.
All sorts of problems in the Middle East, not least Iraq and Libya.
Nonetheless, whatever our concerns, we weren’t going to stop it.
And we were faced with the choice of supporting our closest friend, our most important ally, and the most powerful nation in the world, or appearing to be weak and therefore losing credibility and influence with the President of the United States.
And all of this falls down to Sir Keir Starmer, who seems to have been guided by an interpretation of international law that never allows you to do anything, that if international law means that you have to allow a state that wants to create nuclear bombs should be free to go ahead and do it, then international law is, to coin a phrase, a ass.
And that is also a law that has no legislature that can change it, no democratic accountability.
It is just made up by the people who view themselves as the great and the good, and then stops us doing things that will defend our nation or defend our crucial national interest, which is remaining close to the United States as ever.