View from London: Trump controls the world, and Britain ought to let him have it, because “our nation rots from the inside”

Sir Keir Starmer and Donald Trump speak at a NATO summit in The Hague. Trump tells Starmer: “Don't tell me what to do, mate. Got it?”
Photo: AP

Donald Trump’s crazy Venezuela adventure seems to have persuaded Europe that “everything has changed.” Keir Starmer has gone quietly mad. The PM is negotiating to dispatch troops to Ukraine and Greenland, stretching the army so far that by the time we – inevitably – go into Iran, we’ll be down to deploying the catering corps. Happily, they do serve Halal, ‘The Telegraph’ writes.

In fact nothing has changed at all. Trump is very familiar. The radical thing was to run for the White House pledging no foreign entanglements, but America First always conflicted with Make America Great Again, because the latter depends on being top dog abroad.

“We are now explicitly an empire,” isolationist Tucker Carlson told his Maga audience following the arrest of Nicolas Maduro – but this was old news. The republic got into the empire game explicitly in the 1890s, when it invaded the Philippines, then rebranded itself as implicitly imperial after taking Cuba, having realised it would be cheaper to let the locals run it on the understanding (written into the very constitution) that the USA could return if its interests were threatened.

The cheeky monicker “Don-roe” doctrine is a corruption of the Monroe doctrine, which gave America a freehand within its sphere of influence, and brighter sparks have noticed a parallel between the arrest of Maduro and Manuel Noriega of Panama in 1989. But what about US-backed coups in Chile or Guatemala, its occupation of Haiti, or even meddling in the far-flung Iran, where America installed a shah, triggering the 1979 revolution that still haunts us today?

Liberals have expressed surprise that Trump arrested one alleged drug dealer having recently pardoned another, the ex-president of Honduras, linked to the distribution of 400 tonnes of cocaine in the USA.

What do American voters make of all this? A recent poll found that only a third support the arrest and nearly three quarters worry it’ll lead to long-term involvement.

But what we cannot accuse the President of is being opaque: weeks prior to the assault, he blew up Venezuelan boats, sent in warships, and privately invited Maduro to flee to Turkey. He also talked about Greenland in his first term – so Europe can’t claim to be surprised about that, either.

It’s been noticed that hours before Maduro’s arrest, an anonymous gambler laid a $32,000 bet that Maduro would soon lose office. This remarkably perspicacious person made a profit of over $400,000.

Europe uses the narrative of “America has suddenly become unreliable” as an excuse for decades of atrophy, of failing to build an independent defence or the economy that could sustain one. Note their inconsistency.

When Trump ran as anti-war, they called him irresponsible. Now he’s done some mild, war-like things, they call it reckless. What they really want is for him to go on bankrolling their security, while he’s forced to attend a calendar of summits at which Belgians in bad suits talk about a rules based order that died before Trump.

Europe’s hypocrisy is matched only by its impotence, and if Britain had any sense it would accept the Pax Trumpus and politely ask to join it. Instead, MPs will put on a righteous act and demand that we send the few soldiers we haven’t put on trial yet to assert our values and influence over somewhere far, far away.

Our country is getting poorer; we couldn’t conscript our young because half of them are strung out on Diazepam. Acknowledging that the UK is no longer a top tier power is the first step towards fixing such problems, because it means we can redirect resources and adopt the attitude of a nation starting from scratch. We cannot defend Ukraine. We might, if we try very hard, be able to, say, construct a decent system of care for the elderly.

Let us imitate Thomas Jefferson, abandon empire and build a republic – with a king – that preaches freedom and honest labour, sublimely uninterested in foreign affairs. Let’s be a nation at peace with itself and with the world.

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