OPINION
Donald Trump's contempt isn't just aimed at who you think it is (Image: Getty)
For as long as I can remember, America has been our friend and ally. As a child it was Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher, standing firm against the Russian occupation of eastern Europe.
Later, the US and UK together liberated Kuwait after the Iraqi invasion. Tony Blair flew to Washington to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with President Bush after the 9-11 terror attacks. Of course, the US (like every other country) ultimately looked after itself, and was happy to undermine the UK when it was in American interests - as it did during the 1956 Suez crisis, for example.
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And when we did work together, UK was very much the junior partner.
But we were partners nonetheless. The US felt an alliance with the UK was in its interests, and the alliance prospered.
Today, our countries are intertwined. The US is our biggest trading partner (though we are their eighth biggest). Our armed forces use American equipment and operate on the assumption that when they fight, it will almost certainly be alongside the US.
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But we may not be allies any more.
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Today, a Russian dictator is trying to invade a European country. There are explosions in Kyiv, which while hundreds of miles away is closer to London than Washington is to Dallas. The Ukraine war is our war or, at the very least, this is what the UK believes.
US President Donald Trump knows this, and his response is to point out that there’s “a big, beautiful ocean” between America and the bombing.
Some of Mr Trump’s apologists argue that you can’t take everything he says seriously. But it’s clear that he and his team don’t just hate Ukraine’s President Zelensky. They have contempt for Europe - and that doesn't just mean the European Union. It means the continent as a whole, including the UK.
For example, on Monday Mr Trump made a deliberate effort to undermine the London summit chaired by UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and attended by Ukraine’s President Zelensky on Sunday, stating: “Europe, in the meeting they had with Zelenskyy, stated flatly that they cannot do the job without the US – Probably not a great statement to have been made in terms of a show of strength against Russia. What are they thinking?”
Vice President JD Vance mocked Keir Starmer’s plan to send a European peacekeeping force to Ukraine by saying: “20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.”
Of course, the UK has fought wars in recent years - in Iraq and Afghanistan alongside America, at the cost of 636 British lives. Vance has his facts wrong but his attitude to the UK is very clear.
Donald Trump may love the royal family, Scottish golf courses and our plummy accents but he doesn't make foreign policy on that basis.
The US President is quite right to say that there’s a big ocean between his country and Putin’s invasion. And America doesn’t have to be our ally. It’s up to them, obviously.
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But it’s certainly a change, and one that we in the UK have to recognise and respond to.
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We’d be mad to end the alliance with the US voluntarily. It’s very much in our interests to preserve it, but that may simply be impossible.
The US President used to be called “leader of the free world” but who can say with a straight face that Donald Trump is the leader of the world’s democracies today, or that he even wants the role? There have always been Americans who hated their tax dollars being spent on the defence of foreign countries, and now they’re in the White House.
So what do we do? Right now the horrible truth is that we can’t defend ourselves without America. But we’re going to have to find a way to change that, however expensive and painful it may be.