The new global divide makes Brexit an anomaly

The new global divide I’ve been talking about in recent posts has deepened very sharply again since my most recent one. It is a divide that is likely to become as profound as that of the Cold War and, although it doesn’t yet have a snappy name, its existence has been recognized by just about every political commentator. Something very basic has shifted, summed up by the headline to Martin Wolf’s recent Financial Times article (£): “The US is now the enemy of the West”. As a result, according to former Ambassador Sir David Manning, there is a “seismic change” underway in the UK’s relationship with the US.

That has happened quickly, and in ways which are unfolding daily, if not hourly, around the world. In the UK, with almost equal rapidity, it is beginning to shift the tectonic plates of politics, and in particular the shape of post-Brexit politics, in line with this new global divide. However, although the global consequences are alarming and potentially horrific, the impact on British politics may in some ways be positive.

The new global divide

At stake, as recently discussed on Professor Ben Ansell’s Radio 4 strand, Rethink, may be the survival of liberalism itself. That is a useful way to frame things, because it is not just ‘liberal’ journalists and writers in the ‘Establishment’ or ‘mainstream’ media who do so. It is equally explicit amongst ‘radical right’ populists and their Putinist allies that their project is to fight and destroy the liberal order in domestic and international politics. In an era when, often, it seems as if the competing sides cannot even agree on the most basic of facts, or the most basic rules of logic, on this one, overarching, issue they are at one.

I’ve pointed in recent posts to some of the ways that Brexit relates to this new divide, but it is worth spelling out how it sits squarely within the ‘anti-liberal’ camp. At the most basic level, support for Brexit is one of the many things Trump and Putin share. Beyond that, Brexit and the anti-liberal axis share the same hubristic nationalism, the same quasi-mystical invocation of ‘the people’, the same vicious anger against ‘the liberal elite’ and the ‘globalist establishment’, the same xenophobia, the same nostalgia for an imagined past, the same self-pitying victimhood, and, of course, the same loathing of the EU. They also share many of the same rhetorical strategies, especially that of promulgating false, often convoluted, claims as truth and then, when they are challenged, using that very challenge to ‘prove’ that there is at least ‘something to be debated’ in those falsities.

But if this consonance were all there were to it, then the current situation would look very different. Post-Brexit Britain would be neatly dovetailing into the Trump-Putin side of the new divide. It would, to take an important recent illustration of that divide, have voted with the US, Russia, Belarus, and North Korea in their opposition to the UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Or at the very least, it would have abstained, like China. Of course, in that situation, many British people would be horrified by what their country had become, just as many Americans are horrified by what the US has become, but, with Brexit, as with Trump’s re-election, the die would have been cast.

Britain agrees its position

That isn’t the situation, though, and in fact the UK voted with all the other liberal countries, including Japan, Canada, Australia etc. as well as those in Europe. And this is because, although Brexit has happened – the UK has left the EU – it does not entirely define Britain, certainly not in the way that Brexiters had hoped and expected. The reasons for that are complex, but obviously include the fact that Brexit was so narrowly supported in the first place, and that for almost the entire period since it happened it has been supported by only a dwindling minority. As I’ve remarked before, having won the referendum, the Brexiters went on to lose the battle for the post-Brexit narrative.

Allied to this is the fact that most of the tenets of liberalism, both in international relations and domestic politics, whilst taking a battering from Brexit, have survived, sometimes precariously, in the UK. Most particularly, British support for Ukraine, both as a matter of principle and because geography makes it vital to national security, is strong and popular. That, in turn, is reflected in the way that most Brexiters, especially within the Tory Party, unlike Trump and the US radical right, are supportive of Ukraine, hostile to Putin, and pro-NATO.

For this reason, politicians of almost all parties, including populist Conservatives, condemned the literally stomach-turning bullying to which Voldymyr Zelensky was subjected by Trump and JD Vance. It’s too early to be sure, but I have a strong sense that this was a turning point for the British public, and it certainly united the British press in revulsion. That revulsion came even closer to home when Vance made dismissive comments about, apparently, the British military (although he later denied they were the target), something which caused genuine anger cutting across political divisions, including that of remainers and leavers. Probably nothing could have done so much to cement the view that the US under Trump has become a nasty, rude, and hostile power.

At all events there is now a new political consensus emerging in response to the choices Trump has forced upon us. For example, even if we had a Conservative government, it would all but certainly have voted the same way as the Labour administration did in the UN vote. More generally, the Conservatives have both supported and praised Starmer’s general handling of what the eminent War Studies Professor Lawrence Freedman has called “the great crisis”. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage, with his open admiration of Putin and Trump, his apologism for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and his support for the bullying of Zelensky has become an outlier, even amongst most of his own supporters, never mind the country as a whole [1].

The limits of choice

All of this means that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK remains in its values, interests, and allegiances a ‘liberal European’ country. However, the UK, under any government, and with or without Brexit, is not able simply to align ‘against’ the US. Trump may have made his country the enemy of the West, but many countries in the West, not just the UK, cannot make themselves the enemy of America. That is one reason why the last few weeks have been so profoundly shocking. For the UK, specifically, the scale of its trade and investment relationship with the US, and the scope of its defence and security relationship, make it impossible to undertake such a re-alignment, certainly in any short timescale.

Those relationships reach deep into the central, and the most secret, parts of the British state, including its nuclear capacity (although the common claim that the UK does not have operational independence in the use of is nuclear weapons, or requires ‘codes’ from the US to do so, would seem to be a myth) and, perhaps most profoundly of all, its intelligence capacity. Regarding the latter, former diplomat Arthur Snell has argued that, especially with respect to signals intelligence (sigint), there is almost no way of effectively detaching the UK capability from that of the US. If there is, it will take time. The US is by far the senior partner of the ‘Five Eyes’ partnership (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) which shares both facilities and yields of sigint operations and, as such, is vital to the UK for military, counter-terrorism, cyber-security, and others purposes.

This makes it all the more concerning that at least some in the US administration are pushing to exclude Canada from the Five Eyes (£), in the context of the wider economic and political aggression Trump is directing at Ottawa. The threat may well come to nothing, but it is a reminder, not least to the UK, of the hazards of being dependent on the caprice of a partner that is no longer a friend. It is also one of many indications that Trump’s America is vindictive and bullying to those it perceives negatively, whether for being enemies, or parasites, or competitors, or weak, or just for having in some way offended against Trump’s pathologically colossal vanity. (This link, to a free-to-view piece by Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times, is well worth reading for a sense of the horror of what Trump is doing, and why.)

That is why Keir Starmer will go on publicly insisting – as any British Prime Minister would, with or without Brexit – that there is ‘no choice’ to be made between the UK’s relations with the US and those with Europe, and that the US remains a reliable ally. They are necessary diplomatic fictions. It is why anyone expecting to see a dramatic big gesture from Starmer, denouncing Trump for the disgrace he is, will be disappointed. It is why we witnessed the sphincter-tightening spectacle of Starmer having to subject himself to stiltedly lavishing praise on Trump, in return for some tepid compliments delivered with barely concealed contempt. It is why he invited Trump for a State Visit which, for all the growing opposition to it, will almost certainly go ahead. And it is why, when it does, King Charles will grit his teeth and smile. The rest of us should just be grateful we don’t have to do the same.

The realities of sovereignty

What we are actually seeing is a hard lesson in the reality of what sovereignty and the limits to sovereignty mean. The Brexiters were and are entirely deluded to think that this reality has anything to do with the ‘imposition’ of Brussels regulations on widgets – regulations made, when we were an EU member, with the UK having a prominent and respected voice. A far better illustration is the way that the British Prime Minister literally dares not speak anything close to the truth to or about the US President for fear of being publicly humiliated and the nation punished. Similarly, whereas leading British politicians were able to liken the EU to Nazis or the Soviet Union with impunity, no such politician, and certainly no serving government minister, would dare say the same of Trump’s America.

Of course, there is nothing new in the disparity between US and UK power, and there have been previous occasions, most obviously the Suez crisis, where that has been humiliatingly revealed. The US has the power to coerce us and to hurt us. The difference under Trump is that he would be quite willing to do so on the flimsiest of pretexts, in the most brutal of ways, and would enjoy it. What was once a power imbalance within a broadly reliable alliance has now become a power play within something more like a mediaeval court in which Britain is a minor, ageing aristocrat. And there’s not much we can do about it. It is no good reaching for the historical analogy of 1930s appeasement here. When Imperial Britain faced the threat of Nazi Germany, it did not face an adversary with which the bulk of its military and intelligence capacity was intertwined, or one which dwarfed it in resources.  

Similarly, the answer to the question posed by George Monbiot in the Guardian last week – what if Britain had to defend itself militarily against the US? – is depressingly obvious: we couldn’t. However, we aren’t in this situation, but in a different and perhaps more complex one [2]. Crazy as this US administration is, it is not bent on going to war with the UK or Europe. The military threat comes from Russia, and from the withdrawal of reliable US security guarantees to deter that threat. Here the appeasement analogy does apply, in that if, with US complicity, Ukraine is dismembered and subjugated, Russia will be emboldened to go after other European countries, both directly and indirectly, including the UK. (Indeed, the Brexit sovereigntists seem remarkably sanguine about Russia’s many incursions into UK territory as if it were metric measurements, rather than these acts of territorial aggression, which were the most real and pressing threats to British sovereignty.)

Minor powers

Equally, for all the real constraints on what the UK can say or do to the US, it is not completely powerless and, as a matter of fact, Starmer is being far from supine. There are several illustrations of that, including the way the UK voted at the UN. Related to that, Starmer has been insistent, despite Trump’s brazen lies to the contrary, that Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine.  Another example is the way that, during his Washington visit, he pushed back against Vance’s barbed comment about lack of freedom of speech in the UK (this is one of the many alt-right canards about both Starmer and Britain, heavily promulgated by Elon Musk). Then, at this week’s PMQs, he unfussily but pointedly issued an implicit reprimand to Vance for his own implicit dismissiveness of the British military.

Most prominent of all, the warmth with which Starmer welcomed Zelensky to the UK just a few hours after the Ukrainian leader’s appalling treatment in America, and the immediate arrangement of a meeting with King Charles, were clear rebukes to Trump, even if not vocalized as such. Moreover, no one could miss the contrast of the genuine regard between Starmer and Zelensky with the precarious brittleness of the Starmer-Trump meeting. These things are probably as far as the UK can do without attracting Trump’s ire; it may even be that they go beyond it.

Starmer and the UK also have some cards to play with the US which, though they shouldn’t be over-stated, are not entirely negligible. For all that it is very much the junior partner, the UK does contribute some things the US needs, with sigint capacity being one. And whilst Trump is undoubtedly too self-involved and too ignorant to do so, there are still some US Republicans who recall with gratitude the UK’s support after 9/11 and even, for those with longer memories, the Reagan-Thatcher relationship. (I make no comment on those things in themselves, just the point that they still carry some meaning for some in the US). Even the ghost of Churchill still has some residual currency, as the (re-) placement of his bust in the Oval Office attests.

In that respect, it is perhaps telling that Vance felt obliged to deny that he had been referring to the UK (or France) in those scornful comments about the militaries of ‘random countries’. He can hardly have done so because he had been misunderstood, since no other countries have yet proposed to deploy troops to Ukraine. And there is nothing in his character to suggest he did so out of personal graciousness, still less from any sense of shame. So the implication is that there is still some vestigial realization in the White House that it cannot be totally disrespectful to its notional allies, at least in public.

The way ahead

Be all that as it may, what is certainly the case is that over time, without publicly admitting there is a choice being made, the UK is going to increase its contributions to, and deepen its relations with, a massively re-vamped EU and European defence capacity and, in the process, reduce its dependence on the US. Indeed, Trump can hardly object to that, since it is what he has asked for and, in doing so, differs from previous US administrations only in the brutality and crudity of his demands.

It is now becoming clear to many commentators that, as I wrote exactly a month ago:

“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel.”

It is far too early to know where this will lead, but last weekend’s convenorship of a meeting involving the EU, most of its members states, Turkey, Canada, and Ukraine was a clear example that Starmer is trying to grasp this opportunity. And already he and Britain are attracting appreciative comments from other European leaders, something that hasn’t happened for long enough.

But none of this is going to be easy, and it certainly isn’t going to be pretty. Those who are squeamish about realpolitik and who like their politics to be morally-elevated had better look away for the next few years. That doesn’t just apply to the UK, but here it will include the fact that, like it or not, Starmer is going to make use of not being in the EU in various ways. That will include using the symbolism of that as a way of getting heard in a White House that loathes the EU, something which has already enabled Farage to claim, predictably but misleadingly, that we are seeing some kind of benefit of Brexit [3]. It may include some kind of substantive agreement to avoid new tariffs and, perhaps, to develop an AI regime in conjunction with the US, rather than with the EU. Personally, I’m not convinced these things will happen, but they will certainly continue to be talked about.

The trick for the UK will be to combine this not just with getting closer to the EU on defence, but with effecting the most maximalist version of the 'reset' (and, it shouldn’t be forgotten, fully implementing the existing agreements with the EU, including the Windsor Framework, as well as completing the still unresolved, and apparently stalled, negotiations over Gibraltar). This in turn means the careful curation of relationships with other countries, within and beyond Europe, to defuse any sense that the UK is selling them out by making some agreements with the US. As such it will call for extremely astute diplomacy, but it is not an impossible task, since other national leaders understand perfectly well the difficulties of navigating relations with Trump.

Moreover, none of this is going to be cheap. The recent announcement of increased defence spending is only the beginning of what needs to come and the fraught political choices this will entail have yet to be faced up to.

Back to Brexit

In these ways, our country is going to have to simultaneously placate a dangerously unpredictable US whilst acting on the consequences of it now being undeniable that Europe is where the UK belongs. The great fantasy of Brexit, and its central strategic folly, of thinking otherwise has now been exposed, far more dramatically and suddenly than by Brexit itself. That is now becoming accepted, at least according to the commentator Janan Ganesh, even by British Conservatives. Indeed, for at least some of them, the new situation creates a welcome way out of the cul-de-sac which Brexit has taken them, not least as regards electoral strategy.

As the veteran international politics sage Philip Stephens puts it, “Trump’s America has made its choice”. In doing so, it has imposed one on the UK which, though ragged, in that it can’t be made through a single decision at a single moment, could through a series of decisions gradually re-integrate us with the EU. For within this new global divide, it is crystal clear that Brexit is an anomaly, a policy which belongs on one side of that divide yet is being pursued by a country located on the other side. At the very least, the Brexiters’ claim, which was always flawed, that the EU is irrelevant to the UK’s security needs and that these were fully catered for by NATO, has now been exposed as disastrously false.

This doesn’t, in itself, mean that rejoining the EU is on the political agenda, but it does make the timescale for that being a realistic possibility shorter than seemed likely even a fortnight ago. It already cements the pre-existing public sense that Brexit was a terrible error. So, frightening and disorientating as the last few weeks have been, I think there are at least some grounds for hope. Trump feels like a disaster, and in general terms that feeling is well-founded. But for post-Brexit Britain he might just be a reprieve.

 

Notes

[1] This could turn out to be one of the most important, and most positive, domestic consequences of the new global situation, sidelining Farage for the first time for decades. Subscribers to Byline Times can read some of my initial thoughts about this in the next issue (April 2025), and I am sure I will write much more about it, here, in the future.

[2] Thus those who, in comments on one of my recent posts, thought I was anticipating, or even advocating, the UK ‘standing up to’ the US militarily entirely misunderstood me. It may well be true, though, that there are inconsistencies in the content and tone of my recent posts but, if so, I think that is understandable – even inevitable - given the rapidity with which events are unfolding.

[3] It is misleading because although it is possible that the UK being out of the EU helps to get a hearing from Trump a) it is wrong to claim that this is because the UK now has an independent foreign policy, because it always did; b) any gain from that is offset by the very much reduced influence the UK has within the EU; c) it is only because Trump is so bent out of shape about the EU rather than being because Brexit has, in general terms, given the UK any benefits in its relationship with the US; and d) precisely because Trump is Trump it doesn’t count for much anyway. He’s perfectly likely, if he takes umbrage at something, to turn on the UK, Brexit or no Brexit. Hence the need to tip-toe around his freakshow vanities.