28
International Relations and Defence Committee
Corrected oral evidence: The UK’s future relationship with the US
Wednesday 5 March 2025
10.30 am
Members present: Lord De Mauley (The Chair); Lord Alderdice; Baroness Blackstone; Lord Bruce of Bennachie; Baroness Coussins; Baroness Crawley; Lord Darroch of Kew; Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie; Lord Grocott; Lord Houghton of Richmond; Baroness Morris of Bolton; Lord Soames of Fletching.
Evidence Session No. 1 Heard in Public Questions 1 - 14
Witnesses
I: Dame Karen Pierce, former British Ambassador to the United States (until February) and incoming UK Special Envoy to the Western Balkans; Sir Peter Westmacott GCMG, LVO, former British Ambassador to the United States (retired); Sir Nigel Sheinwald GCMG, former British Ambassador to the United States (retired); Sir David Manning GCMG, KCVO, former British Ambassador to the United States (retired).
Dame Karen Pierce, Sir Peter Westmacott, Sir Nigel Sheinwald and Sir David Manning.
Q1 The Chair: We are trying to focus on the long-term UK-US relationship. That will not always be that easy, but it is where we are headed. This session is being held in public and is scheduled to last about an hour and 15 minutes. We might get carried away in asking questions. I always ask colleagues and those being questioned to try to be as concise as they can, but we will see how it goes. Normally, we ask our guests to give us some opening remarks, but I will ask you to do that as questions arise—otherwise, we will literally be here all day.
Let us kick off with some questions. Normally, we ask our questioners to warn the person who will be asked to answer the question first. It would be good if you can do that, but sometimes it may be difficult to know who is best placed to answer it.
I will fire off with my first question. Is there a special relationship? If so, is it in the US’s interests to maintain it, and how important is it to the UK? I invite whoever wishes to leap into the breach to have a go at that.
Dame Karen Pierce: Thank you very much, Chair. Hello to the committee. Thank you very much for asking me here today with my predecessors. I have just come back from Washington at the beginning of February, but I am still a civil servant so I will be ‘the party line’.
To answer your question, I think there is a special relationship but there is no standard definition of what that might be. It goes back to speaking English, historical values and common law. We have very similar legal systems. They do not always manifest themselves in the same way but are based on the same fundamental principles. It goes back to a particular view of freedom. If you look back through the centuries, that relationship has grown, even more so after 1814 and the Second World War. I like to think that in almost every nook and cranny of public life between the US and the UK there is some manifestation of the very close working that we have together. It is a unique, deep and successful relationship, whether or not you use the word “special”. I think it is unlike any other relationship that America has with any of her allies, even though some are physically closer and some, such as France, have a different set of historical ties.
I think it is in America’s interests. It is not sentimental about it; we fool ourselves if we think it is. When I first went to West Point, I put a very similar question to the cadets. These were 17 year-olds. One of them said immediately, “Oh, yes, ma’am, the UK is ally number one, ma’am”. I think that still holds. We are America’s truly global ally. We are both reliable and capable. We have what I would call global reach and are a day one, night one ally. We are ready to go and stand shoulder to shoulder with America in a whole range of ventures. It is not absolute, because we did not take part in Vietnam, but on the whole we will be the ally who is there most.
Is it important to the UK? Yes, I think so, precisely because of the very close identity of view about the way the world works, whether that is economy, a certain liberal approach to regulation or security and defence, which is the bedrock of the relationship.
The Chair: Would anybody like to add anything?
Sir Peter Westmacott: I am happy to add a couple of words. I do not want to repeat what Karen covered but, for historic context, the language of a “special relationship” was coined by Winston Churchill at a time when we desperately needed the United States to come into the war. There was a great reluctance to join us in both the First and Second World Wars on the part of the Americans. If we had not had the sinking of the “Lusitania”, or Pearl Harbor in December 1941, we might not have had the Americans coming in on our side. Let us be aware that “America first” and a degree of not wanting to get involved in other people’s battles has always been part of the psyche. We need to keep that in mind.
That said, it did make all the difference. Even then it was transactional, to coin a phrase. We ended up with destroyers for bases and still live with the consequences of that. Diego Garcia is part of it. We had lend-lease, which became war debt. Not many people remember that we were still paying more than £100 million per year in war debt to the United States until 2006. Nobody in France or Germany was paying that kind of money but we were, because we borrowed and had to repay. This is not new; this is part of the culture.
Over the years, I think the United Kingdom made a major contribution to that relationship. We were there in Korea; we were not there for Vietnam, as Karen said; we were there in Afghanistan and made a big difference; we were there in two Gulf Wars—the first one and then the invasion of Iraq. We have been helpful to the United States on a number of military occasions where they needed a plucky ally. They have not always been terribly helpful; they were not very helpful at Suez, and at best they were neutral, shall we say, over the right of the Falkland Islanders to self-determination.
We continue to provide a great deal that is not just about the defence of Europe, despite some of the language we hear from the current Administration. Look at the facilities that the United States enjoys in UK bases, whether those are in Diego Garcia, Ascension Island, the Falkland Islands, Cyprus or Oman. Around the world, there are things we do—and indeed bases in the United Kingdom—that are fundamental to the security of the United States at a global level. It is not just about the protection of Europe.
We provide quite a lot more than we sometimes give ourselves credit for. I think that the United States, which has made a huge difference to our security over the years, has always been transactional. Your question is whether that relationship is still important to the United States at the moment. I would say that it is. We have done all those things in the past; we remain important intelligence allies. We have a level of integration of our equipment, although we probably buy rather more from America than it does from us. It may be that we need a defence-industrial strategy for the future, given that we have an Administration who seem less committed to the defence of Europe now than they were in the past, but as of now we are very closely integrated. We need the Americans to make our nuclear deterrence system function, even though we have our own warheads. They need us for a number of other things. We are a significant player in the Five Eyes intelligence relationship.
There are bags of substance to that relationship and it is very important. The question we have to ask is to what extent the United States, as now configured and managed, will remain interested in and committed to the defence of Europe, as opposed to the United States being part of a slightly different international order whereby it is the big guys—China, Russia and the United States—that get what they want and the smaller countries, to coin a phrase from Thucydides, have to suffer what they must. I do not think we yet know the answer to that. The professional diplomats and military people in the United States are pretty clear about the relationship. At the moment, I am not so sure about the new political leadership.
Sir David Manning: Thank you very much for the invitation, Chair. I do not want to repeat what my colleagues said. I agree that there has been a very important special relationship between Britain and the United States. I confess that I do not always like the term, not because it is not special but because I think it has made us lazy on occasion: we can always hope that the Americans will bail us out. We have this sort of alibi mentality that means we do not have to look elsewhere. That is relevant to this morning’s discussion because I think we will have to look elsewhere.
I absolutely endorse everything my colleagues said about these close connections. It is not always about what has been going on in terms of our policy and whether our policies are congruent and close together, or whether our aims are the same. It has been about our worldview. What worries me about what is now happening is that the basis of the so-called special relationship has been trust and shared values. We are trying to look forward, not backwards, and the question is: can we expect that to continue? I think it is much more difficult to be confident about that. It seems that there has been a seismic change.
Ukraine illustrates this very clearly. We have admired the Ukrainians and Zelensky for defending the values that we adhere to and that until very recently the Americans championed. Now, it seems much less clear that that is the case. Peter talked about the transactional nature of this. We seem to have a President who is willing to bully and cajole the Ukrainians into doing things that they do not think is in their interests. That is clearly not where Britain is. Indeed, the present Government have stood out very clearly, and I think quite rightly, in continued defence of Ukraine.
As Peter said, we have had differences in the past, but this does not feel to me like, say, Grenada and the differences there. This is a fundamental challenge to whether we still share the same values. I think we have to work to stay as close as we can. Of course, it remains a critical relationship. Let us see where we can get with Trump, but do not let us kid ourselves. This is not the normal US Administration; it is not a blip but a change. I think we need to reinforce and look elsewhere. We need to think very closely now about what we do with Europe and about our relationship with Canada, again picked off by Trump as some sort of proto-adversary, and probably Australia. We need to remain very clear and true to our own values. It is a very difficult line to tread. We will be under pressure from Trump to conform, but we should be very clear-sighted. This is not just another blip in the relationship; there is something fundamental going on here.
Sir Nigel Sheinwald: To add to what my colleagues said, with which I agree, it seems to me that historically this relationship—special, enduring, essential, whatever adjective we attach to it—is of declining importance in world affairs. The power that Roosevelt and Churchill between them and individually could deploy is very different from the joint impact of the UK-US relationship today, mainly because of the decline in relative power of the UK and, arguably, the United States as well. That is one thing. It has been kept going and reinforced by working together in crises over the decades that my colleagues talked about—joint projects and endeavours in which we have both been involved—and by some extraordinarily close political relationships, some of which have crossed the traditional political divide. That is what has kept it going, but I think that in the sweep of history it is less important, and less should be placed on it, than was the case in the past.
Secondly, to be explicit—as I think David Cameron rightly was—this is an unequal relationship. The asymmetry is baked into it and creates political problems, particularly on our side because we are usually the demandeur for things to happen and for the United States to pay attention to the junior partner along the way.
My last point is David’s point. The sort of relationship we had—mixing strategy with trade, diplomacy and the cultural interpenetration that we enjoy—was based on being together in an alliance and a broad measure of agreement on our worldview, which is a power thing, and our values, which are very broadly based. I think that is now genuinely in question. America is changing; the American leadership plainly has changed. That is what your committee will want to disinter in one way or the other.
Q2 Baroness Coussins: The special relationship—what it has been and how it might be changing—is usually considered from the perspective of government or institutions, whether intelligence, defence, cultural or whatever. Are you aware of any evidence of the extent to which American people share or differ from the definition of, concept of or support for the special relationship, and how it is changing?
Dame Karen Pierce: You are exactly right, and it was what I just tried to convey. Because of the bedrock not just of defence and intelligence—which, as you say, are Government-to-Government instruments—there is a perception and an attachment to tolerance and liberal democracy in its broadest sense that I think runs through most of America. Common law and a particular view of freedom, as well as the English language, contribute to that. If you go into an American classroom, look at the way the Americans do science or are co‑operating with them on the F35, say, some of those things would come out, allowing for individuals. But it is true that the demographics in both our countries are changing. I do not think that you will any longer find people with an automatic connection to Europe and the UK in the same way you would have done, say, 25 years ago.
One thing it is incumbent on the embassy and consulates to do is to keep renewing those people-to-people ties in all their myriad forms. They do not always have to be done by government, but the diversity of both our societies and that changing demographic is something we can put to the service of the relationship as a whole.
Q3 Lord Grocott: Thank you very much for that. That is a very interesting kick-off to our inquiry. It took you all into broadly the same territory in quite a few words. That is not a criticism: you cannot give a snappy definition to a special relationship. Yet somehow or other in our inquiry we need to have somewhere in our mind what it is that distinguishes our relationship with the United States from other friendly states. I noted two or three interesting things that you said. It is a relationship of declining importance and subject to fundamental change. Karen Pierce, I think, said it was unique. Most relationships are, but can we get at this negatively, by asking: what is fundamentally different between our relationship with the United States and our relationship with other friendly western countries? If we find it difficult to have a positive description of it, what is the negative one?
Sir David Manning: A fundamental difference in our relationship with the United States from those with our other partners is that we depend on the US for our defence. It is very difficult to imagine what we will do to defend ourselves if, for example—this is very hypothetical—the Trump Administration decide that they will end our nuclear co‑operation deal, or Trump moves out of NATO, or even becomes just so equivocal about NATO that the Article 5 guarantee is no longer plausible. I am not saying those things will happen. They were inconceivable until six weeks ago. Now we have to address them. That does not mean they will happen, but I think they are on the table. I do not think we have a relationship with any other country that is absolutely fundamental to our defence. That is changing, and we have to start thinking about that. What would we do if we found that this post-war defence relationship, which has been so vital to us, becomes questionable? That makes this relationship unique. I stress that I am not saying it will happen, but it is a completely different dimension of dependence.
Sir Nigel Sheinwald: The United States has its own type of special relationships with a whole bunch of countries, some of which were mentioned earlier. There are obviously the western European countries but also Japan, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Ireland. They all have a version of a special relationship. I think ours starts with what Karen talked about at the beginning. It is two countries that traditionally have had a broadly similar worldview based on power and the willingness to intervene internationally, with a high degree of intimate, upstream foreign policy co‑ordination and a high degree of interoperability between our armed forces and intelligence services. To me, that is the first part of the UK-US relationship.
Three other things together create this sense of something unusual. Number two is the scale of our trade and investment relationship. Number three is the cultural ease that we have. When I was around in Washington, the opinion polls would put Canada as the most popular country to Americans, with the United Kingdom second. In public opinion polling, that is roughly where we come out, which would support the idea that there was something in popular esteem and affection that validated the intergovernmental relationship. Lastly, there is process and the way this relationship is conducted. More than the UK’s other relationships, the UK-US relationship is peculiarly conducted from the top. It depends a lot on relationships between the Prime Minister and President of the day, and between the White House and No. 10. That is different from pretty much any other UK relationship with another country.
I think those things are different and together they make up what we are trying to say is unusual. I too rather avoid the word “special”, because it carries too much baggage and is too much of a target.
Sir Peter Westmacott: I agree with what my colleagues have said. On the cultural ease that they talked about, that is important but it depends a bit on who is the occupant of the Oval Office at any one time. Let us also not forget the asset we have in the Royal Family. The way in which the King now relates to other critical Heads of State—Donald Trump is one of them but President Macron is another—is a very important part of the panoply of what I suppose we have to call soft power. It is part of the special relationship and is unique. That does not exist between the United States and anybody else. President Trump is not the first Head of State in the United States who has been enamoured of our Royal Family and has very much appreciated the attention he has received from it.
On the point about defence, David is dead right to say that the defence relationship and the interoperability and so on that Nigel mentioned are critical parts of this, but we must not forget that we are not in great shape on capabilities. Even 10 years ago when I was ambassador, I had the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the President of the United States of America saying to me, “You’re not where you should be. We relish the fact that the United Kingdom is a loyal, often unquestioning ally and has been there for us, but the capabilities of your UK Armed Forces are not what we would like them to be”. Ten years have passed, and I suspect that George Robertson’s report, which will come out soon, will lay bare how empty the cupboard is. That is a real issue and we should not be blind to it. We will have to raise our game, not just to strengthen that relationship but because Europe will have to do more to look after its own security in the future.
Dame Karen Pierce: The Prime Minister said in the House last week that America is indispensable to us. I think that is different from any other of our allies, important as they all are. It is very much in the UK’s interests that America prevails as the major power in the world because anything else fundamentally brings along closed societies and systems rather than open societies and markets. If you look at scale, right the way across the board, we are America’s closest ally, without wishing to attach a particular label. If you think of America as indispensable and us as being incredibly close across the board, that is what makes it different from any of our other relationships.
Q4 Lord Houghton of Richmond: One thing we are trying to conclude by the end of this is our start point in how we categorise elements of this special relationship and what sort of repair it is in. Would it be too simplistic to say that the relationship is composed of two different parts? One is a sort of shared subjective reality, which is about the history, values, royalty and those sorts of things. Another part is shared objective reality, which is about measurables: intelligence, defence co‑operation and trade. In many ways, the shared subjective reality is in decline and the shared objective reality is in a state of disrepair to which we need to pay attention—or is that too premature a distillation of what you have said so far?
Sir David Manning: It is a very helpful distillation. All distillations obviously are to some extent rather broad-brush. The cultural ease, common heritage, history and so on are very important, but you cannot further your interests based solely on those. I do not underestimate how important they are. It is fascinating that people are still focused on whether Winston Churchill’s bust is in the Oval Office. It is rather like, in the old days, seeing who was on Lenin’s tomb. Are we up or down for the Red Army parade?
We have to focus on what is objective, whatever the sentiment or cultural ease has been. I agree with my colleagues but think that cultural ease differs enormously from one part of America to another. If you go to California—I defer to Karen, who has been there much more recently than I have—it is all about Asia there. Culturally, it is not about what Britain is doing and what is going on in Europe. It may be in terms of tech and so on. The issue is exactly what you said. Goodness me, my Lord, you know more about this than I do. When in Washington we play our defence card as an ace, but there has to be something on that card. I absolutely agree with Peter. We talk a good game, but I am not quite sure what is behind the façade. If we are serious about continuing to have the position that Karen quite rightly explained, where we are the go-to ally, you go to that ally only if it has something to offer. We are increasingly stretched.
It is a long time since I was ambassador in Washington. We could certainly put a division in the field back then. During the Iraq war, because we had the capability, we did all sorts of things that perhaps we were not entirely enthusiastic about because the Americans asked us to. It is very doubtful we could do that today; you would know more than I do. If that is the case, this card in our hand is not the ace it once was. Thinking objectively about how we forward our interests, we must avoid pretending that we can base it on the objective division you point to, which is real. At the same time, we have to bring something to the party. We have to be very confident that the American response is predictable and that we share the values and objectives. As I said at the beginning, that is an area that is now much harder to be confident about.
Q5 Lord Soames of Fletching: The job that the embassy does in Washington is absolutely wonderful. I am very much taken with David Manning’s point about trust and values. The trouble is that we cannot subscribe to a lot of the values now. Some 45 days in, there is not a lot of values stuff there. That does not stop the relationship being unbelievably important in every way, but it will no longer be as it was because I do not think they want it to be. They do not see a role there. I think the Trump people despise Europe. I agree with you that this awful ghastliness about whether there is a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office and what that means for the special relationship is simply rubbish, but that is fomented here.
Assuming, as I do, that things are going to go dreadfully wrong, we will be left with no military card to play. We will play such a card as we can, but it is tiny. It seems that the one thing we are still very good at is intelligence. Do you think collectively that the intelligence and security card, which is a powerful one, will survive the trauma of what is happening and what is going to happen?
Sir David Manning: Is that question initially addressed to me? I do not want to dominate my colleagues. On defence, slightly against what I said, we still have real niche capabilities that are valued. I do not want to say that we are completely hollowed out and worthless. I look down the table at a real expert on this who will know much better than I do. We can seriously still bring niche capabilities. When you look at America’s other allies, we are still a serious player. It is about scale, scope and commitment, and what we really mean to do. I do not think we should get to the stage where we beat ourselves up so much that we do not think we have this card. We need to be very clear about what its face value is now.
Intelligence is obviously a very sensitive area. In my view, it will be more difficult to approach the whole question of intelligence sharing if you have a problem over trust. I do not know how that will work itself out practically. That is for Richard Moore and others to talk to you about. Clearly, if some of Trump’s appointees in key jobs have very strange track records and have said very strange things about NATO allies, the NATO alliance and so on, and people in the Administration seem to be, let us say, looking for ways to appease Russia, you have a problem on the intelligence front. These are not our values. They are not your party’s or the present Government’s values, and they are not where we have been traditionally. That is a big question mark against how the special relationship is sustained during the Trump Administration.
Dame Karen Pierce: We help each other in a way that is unique, whether that is on the ground, in analysis or in simply sharing information. There is an interoperability that you do not find with any other ally.
Lord Soames of Fletching: Is that going to last? The predilection will be to steer clear of what we can do.
Dame Karen Pierce: The intelligence part of the relationship is so valuable that it will last. Even if, as David explained, at the top level there are things we might wish to be a bit circumspect about, the daily habits of co-operation between the agencies—on crime as well—are extremely good, and I think that will continue.
Sir Nigel Sheinwald: I agree with that, but the nature of the people at the top of the US intelligence and security apparatus today—the ones chosen by the President—may present some difficulties in terms of their view of us and of co-operation. Since our relationship has always been based on a high degree of professionalism and sense of commitment to respective services, the hollowing out of some of these American services based on a narrow view of loyalty will place some bottom-up strains on professional relationships. I do not think any of us can say exactly how that will pan out. This will be trickier to handle than probably at any previous time.
Sir Peter Westmacott: Very briefly to complement what Nigel just said, the professionals may well want to keep things going as they are and be absolutely committed to that, operating on the basis of trust, the shared values and the interoperability that we know and love. The problem is that, from the top down, it is partly the hollowing out and partly the political directives that seem to be being applied to those institutions of the state that were apolitical and professional that seem to be changing the culture as well as the personnel. A lot of very good people are being thrown out simply because they do not pass the loyalty test. That is likely to affect some things.
To be a little less gloomy, in the past we have sometimes had to manage the way in which intelligence is shared even within Five Eyes. There are moments when, because of the risk of an inadvertent leak to a journalist, specific source information is held back for very good reasons. That does not in any sense invalidate the intelligence or the value of sharing, but sometimes, even when you have the most perfect working political relationship, some work around source protection is necessary. You can carry on doing that and it will by no means be the end of the world.
Q6 Lord Alderdice: I would like to focus a little further on the likely friction points that could make co-operation challenging as we move ahead. You have spoken about a number of things here. Sir Nigel, you mentioned that we have engaged in joint projects and that they had been helpful in maintaining this relationship. Are we moving to a very different kind of focus, where this country might be looking to delicately co-operate on various fronts with China, whereas the United States Administration might be looking much more at confrontation with China? We also have other relationships that can produce challenges. Sir Peter will remember very well that the difference in the relationships between Ireland and the United States and Britain and the United States led to some interesting developments, which we were able to find our way through. But on things such as China, and maybe in the future Israel, we may find ourselves with a more challenging difficulty because of other relationships, not just ours.
On defence, which you flagged up as being part of the bedrock, the character of war is changing quite dramatically. We will have to look at our own defence but we may be looking at different places that need to be defended, perhaps much more focused on the home territory. Therefore, should we send an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea to defend interests that may not be entirely aligned with ours? Indeed, if we look at what is happening in the Middle East, where we find ourselves responding to extremely cheap Houthi drones with extremely expensive western missiles, that changing character of war might mean that a very different profile of our own defence matériel might be appropriate, and the Americans might not be looking at changing in the same kind of way. I guess I am really asking: are there challenges on defence, other relationships and our own focus on international affairs? Can they be overcome or will we diverge further on them in future?
Sir David Manning: Your first point was about divergence, but let us start with convergence. There are areas—goodness me, Karen will know better than I do—where we can hope to work with the Trump Administration. Indeed, we must. I will not say that we need to “salvage” it, which is too loaded a word, but we need to maintain the relationship in the best state we can manage despite the enormous uncertainties that now surround it. That is a given. The Prime Minister’s visit suggests that Trump is looking for some sort of sectoral deal. Maybe that is on AI or tech. We should explore those sorts of openings. It is obviously vital that we make the case that we should not have tariffs slapped on us. I expect some debate about the impact of Trump on the global economy.
On points of friction, we have to be realistic. We do not necessarily have exactly the same view on a lot of policies, and it may be much worse than that. You mentioned the issue of China, where there is a lot of common ground. Both in the United States, where it is a bipartisan issue more or less, and in this country, as I understand it, we accept that China is a disrupter, that it wants to change the status quo and certainly not in our interest, that its Marxist nationalist leader Xi Jinping is certainly not a lover of democracy, and that we need to be clear-eyed about that. For us, the issue is what we do about this. The previous Government, as I understand it, and the current Government have a view that you co-operate where you can. China has 1.3 billion people. It is vital to the international global community, not least economically. In the old days of the Cold War, we could pretend that the Soviet economy was not there. We cannot do that with the Chinese economy.
Our view is that you have to co-operate where you can, with your eyes open, but you also have to contest and confront where you think you must. Where does that line come? For us, it may not be in the same place as where the Trump people want to draw it. That will be a source of constant negotiation for us. We will not necessarily see eye to eye on things such as electric vehicles or whether we speak out on Chinese performance on human rights or whatever it may be. As far as I can see, the Trump Administration are not much exercised about global human rights, but we will be. How you draw this line of distinction is difficult.
We also need to be aware that if we do not toe the line, we may come under pressure. This is not a China-specific problem. If we do things that the Trump Administration do not like—we will not be unique in this—what will the reaction be in Washington? That is very difficult to calculate. Will it be private or in public? Will we get a dressing-down on TV? We do not know. Every Government will have to worry about that. We have to be very careful not to be caught flat-footed, because my guess—it is entirely a guess—is that Trump longs to do a great big deal with China. If we have been busy toeing the line, doing all sorts of things that are quite difficult for our economy—this applies also to our European partners—and then Trump suddenly comes with a piece of paper saying, “I’ve done this massive deal”, we could find ourselves scrambling to catch up. My view is that we need to have a China policy that is about Britain and in our interest. Of course we have to adjust to the realities of working with our partners, but we should resist assuming that it will necessarily be easy to draw the line in the same place.
I must not go on, but you mentioned other points of contention. There is Palestine, climate change and the whole question of support for multilateral organisations. There are big differences of philosophy and view, and in my view these come back to values. It is no good pretending that our policies and Trump’s policies will converge on a lot of those things.
Sir Nigel Sheinwald: In a sense, I would say the opposite. It is difficult to find either a conceptual area in international relations or a particular geographical area where our interests really converge at the moment. It is more divergence than convergence. The President McKinley worldview of land grabs—Peter mentioned Thucydides earlier, might is right and all that—is not our view. It will not be our view, whatever Government we have here, given that we are a middle power that uses international institutions for our own advancement as well as because that is morally right.
At the macro level, there is a huge divergence. On more or less any big foreign policy issue that we are dealing with today, we do not agree with the United States and have more alignment with our European partners, whether that is on the Middle East, Iran, climate change, China or, above all, Europe itself. The difference with this Administration is their antipathy towards Europe and the European Union. We are held in the balance somewhat but not tarnished in quite the same way in their eyes (as EU members). That is a new and malign factor that I hope will not deflect our Government from the path they have set for a reset with the European Union, which is important not only strategically but also in the economic basket. I know, Chair, that you probably want to come on to that later. That seems to me the area where we, if anything, need to be most rigorous in defence of what is in our long-term interests, and not be swayed too much by the Vance-Musk-Trumpian view of Europe, which is extremely one-sided.
Q7 Lord Darroch of Kew: On the issue of likely future differences between this US Administration and us, I want to drill down into two of them. On China, in Trump’s first term there was a trade war lasting two years, which involved some $500 billion-worth of tariffs, and we are already into a tariff war in the second term. How likely do you think it is that the UK and Europe will be asked at some point in the next four years to take specific measures in our own economic commercial relations or even political relations with China that back up whatever the new Administration are trying to achieve there? How difficult is that likely to be for us? What sorts of decisions might be asked of us, if you are prepared to speculate a bit about this?
Another clear area of likely dispute is the Middle East. If this Administration’s policy on Gaza and the Palestinian issue stays where it is, there is a fundamental divergence, is there not? If a ceasefire holds and we get to a place where the question is about Gaza’s future, who runs the administration of Gaza and how reconstruction is done, will there not be a huge gulf between us in Europe and the US Administration on how all that works out?
I do not know how much you are willing to speculate on this. What would be your advice if you were advising the Prime Minister on how he should navigate these issues and handle this US Administration to avoid us then getting hit with measures? You have seen from those tariffs threatened briefly against Colombia, for example, that tariffs are a multiuse weapon for this Administration. They are not just about trade issues; they can be used if you take a divergent, unhelpful policy on almost anything. There are real risks down the line, not just a political disagreement about the way forward.
Dame Karen Pierce: Thank you for that. I do not quite start where Nigel starts. I do not think there are a huge number of disagreements between us and the Trump Administration across the board, but I also make the point that it is very rare that a point of disagreement disrupts the whole relationship. The last time I can think of that happening was with Bosnia in 1992, when America had a very anti-European attitude to what we and the French were trying to do. We will see how Ukraine plays out, but the Prime Minister has made it very clear that we will work with President Trump and put our ideas to allies, including President Trump. He shares President Trump’s desire to have a lasting peace deal.
On something such as the South China Sea or the Houthis, we are upholding the UK national interest and our belief in freedom of navigation. That also answers one of the earlier points about other allies. The UK, under successive Governments, sees it as part of our role in the world to uphold international and national goods. Freedom of navigation would be one of those.
On Lord Darroch’s question on tariffs, Americans traditionally, going back to the Civil War, have had a very different view of how you use tariffs from the way we view them. They are indeed an instrument of policy, of incentives and compulsion. They are not just there to restore a difference in a trade deficit. We obviously do not believe in that way of using tariffs. The Prime Minister has also been very clear, including to Parliament, that we will not choose and do not think that we have to choose between the EU and the US, and therefore by extension what that means for China policy. He and the Government will pick a way forward that is most in the UK’s interest for any set of given circumstances. So I do not think there is a blanket answer to that. At the point at which we might get a US request, we will have to weigh whether it is in our interest to accede to it, looking right the way across all the equities that might be involved. The answer might well turn out to be different in each case. I do not think it is possible to lay down a template for how we might handle that.
On Gaza and the Middle East, I agree that there are some points of divergence there. I remember the first Trump Administration, as you do, when we had the Kushner plan for the Middle East. The important thing that the then British Government wanted was to try to see whether that plan could be used to find a way forward. Again, I do not think it is a question of rejecting or accepting something; it is that this is the start of a conversation, a discussion that will have to bring in a huge number of countries including, importantly, Israel, Egypt and Jordan. Let us start having that conversation. Let us use what openings we can to try to find a way forward. It is pragmatic.
Sir Peter Westmacott: I have a couple of points. The others, of course, are right that we have to be realistic about the extent to which there will be continuing divergences. There always were and always will be divergences. You can manage some of them relatively easily. Karen talked about Bosnia. I remember that not long after, in the 1990s, we had squabbles over Northern Ireland—Lord Alderdice will recall that as we were both in the middle of it—and we got through it. The single most important strategic divergence that we will have to deal with is the management of the relationship with Russia. We have done very good work—I will come back to that in just a second—in trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and good language came out of the State of the Union speech last night. There is the letter from President Zelensky and there is a chance of that relationship being put back together. But fundamentally, the way in which the Trump Administration have positioned themselves is much more pro-Russian than the rest of us would have gone along with.
When you have the Economist, the Financial Times and a number of other serious organs saying that America has given up on Europe and is siding with Russia, that is pretty alarming. We have not had that for decades and we have to deal with that current reality. That is the biggest strategic problem. Even if we are now back in the business of trying to find a way forward with a combination of a ceasefire plan and security guarantees that Ukraine needs, we still have that fundamental problem of a very different approach to dealing with Russia. Is that part of a grand strategy to split off Russia from China or, as Karen suggested, the Americans deciding that the three big beasts in the jungle—China, Russia and America—divide up the world between them and the rest of us can go hang? Perhaps. I do not know. I do not know whether there is that degree of strategic thinking, but we need to be thinking in these terms about those big issues.
There are a couple of other tiny things. We will be doing some nimble work on tariffs. Lord Mandelson will do some work on this. He knows a lot about trade policy. The only thing I would add is that, for Donald Trump, “tariffs” is not only the most beautiful word in the English language but, as I understand it—the others may correct me if I am wrong—it is a means of not putting up taxes when the existing tax cuts come to an end later this year. He will have to find some additional revenue. For Trump, in many ways, a tariff equals a federal income alternative to tax rises, which would be very bad for the base and for people who voted for him. He will be with tariffs whether we like it or not. Whether we can negotiate a better deal because our trade is more or less in balance remains to be seen, but the concept is there, it is not going to go away, and that is what I hear from a number of people who are close to the President on that issue.
On the Middle East, the others have said the key points. I just add one four-letter word: Iran. There is talk that once the whole Ukraine issue is resolved—let us hope it is and the slaughter stops—and once whatever the Israel-Gaza package with Hezbollah and Hamas becomes, maybe Donald Trump, squeamish though he can be about starting wars and seeing people killing on the battlefield, might be persuaded by a number of his donor friends, and possibly even by the Israeli Government, that a weakened Iran is an Iran that it is worth giving one more push to, to see if you can deliver something resembling regime change. My own view is that regime change does not come from external military pressure. That tends to consolidate the hold on power of an incumbent regime. But let us not forget that Iran is a possible future foreign policy issue where we might not see eye to eye.
Sir David Manning: If I may, I will come back to Lord Darroch’s question on the Middle East and have a shot at responding to it, because it is a very profound problem for us. Our philosophy about how to handle the Israel-Arab problem is basically different. For Trump in the last Administration—goodness me, you know this better than I do because you were there—working to resolve the crisis, from the outside in, is more or less what they did with the Abraham Accords, and I applaud that. It is obviously important that Israel should improve its relationships in the region and feel it can live at peace with its neighbours. The core issue, for me anyway, is Israel-Palestine.
It is very difficult to imagine a settled solution in the Middle East without finding some way of providing for sovereignty and independence of some kind for the Palestinians. If we are able, as the British Government, to encourage Trump to keep pushing the Israelis to return to the table with the Palestinians—there have been hints of that, and it seems to me objectively that we have an ally in Saudi Arabia here—maybe, just maybe, we can find common ground on this whole issue. But it would be foolish to pretend that we have seen this crisis in the same way as the US Administration. I think back to the previous British Governments that we have all worked for. For them, it is absolutely essential that there is an Israel-Palestine solution, and this is not something you can tack on to a regional plan.
If I could just say a word about Ukraine, as my colleagues said, I applaud what the British Prime Minister has been doing and what we have been trying to do. Anything we can do to get the Ukrainians and the Americans back round the table, and forward movement to some sort of acceptable solution, is absolutely desirable. I would make the point that there is absolutely no sign that Putin is interested in this peace deal. A ceasefire is not a peace deal, and we need to be very clear about this. At the moment, Putin is sitting there, and, as I understand it, the Americans have said, “They certainly can’t join NATO. You can keep the occupied territories. We’re going to divide up their minerals between us”, and that is before this negotiation has begun. What more does Putin need to do to encourage that? We do not know.
It is also worth saying that the Ukrainians have agency in this. At the moment, a lot of people are addressing this crisis as though the only people who count are the Russians and the Americans. Actually, the Europeans do have a role in this. We have a great many of Russia’s frozen assets in European capitals. The Ukrainians have fought for three years for their independence. It is a long time since I served in the then Soviet Union, but I would be quite surprised if they were willing to say after three years, “Well, we’ve been fighting like this, but Trump’s told us to give up”. There is a long way to go in this. With Trump being in a hurry and wanting to do a deal, there is a very fundamental difference of approach. Despite the Prime Minister’s best efforts, we may find it very difficult to hold together over what happens to Ukraine.
Q8 Baroness Morris of Bolton: Sir David, you have mostly answered my question, but could I probe a little more on the relationship that we have with Saudi Arabia and the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia? On Monday, the Arab leaders met in Cairo to put forward a plan for Gaza. Yesterday, it was rejected by the US. Do you think there is a place for dusting down the Arab peace initiative, probably with Saudi Arabia taking the lead, which has offered peace with Israel over all these years? Could we play a part in that?
Sir David Manning: My answer comes with an immediate health warning: I am certainly not an expert on Saudi Arabia. Indeed, if you want to get into this, you need to ask colleagues of mine who are much better qualified. I am sure there has to be a place for the Arabs in the solution for the region. I have no doubt about that. It is interesting that they have rejected Trump’s suggestion of taking over Gaza and turning it into some kind of massive real estate project. They have come up with what seems to me to be a plan that is seriously lacking in detail, but they have come up with a plan about what to do for Gaza. I do not believe it makes sense to try to impose from outside a solution on the region. It is very important that Saudi Arabia is a key player in this, because it has the heft and the money, and it is the dominant regional power. I am sure that it should have a vital voice in it. My view is, by all means keep the western powers involved. It is inconceivable that there can be a deal without the United States, but I also think it cannot last, any more than a deal imposed on Ukraine can last. You must have the people who are involved with you who are going to subscribe to it.
Q9 Lord Bruce of Bennachie: Karen, you said that we have a common law and culture, but there is a difference, because they politically appoint and elect their judges, and we now have executive orders setting law aside. That is a very big divergence.
You also said we are America’s go-to ally and that is of value, but why should we be their go-to ally if they will not defend us in Europe? That becomes a really fundamental question. We are deploying aircraft carriers for American interests, and they are not prepared to back us up in Europe. Within that context, we are trying to reset our relationships with the European Union and, bilaterally and multilaterally, with our European neighbours. The Prime Minister is doing a strenuous job on that, but we are told that the EU was set up only in order to screw America and that, frankly, the President is not really interested in what happens to Europe. That raises the issue of how we can ride between our interests in Europe and maintain this relationship. I am not saying we should not try. I think we should, and you have all given indications of how and why we should, but there comes a crunch point where there might be a fundamental choice between the US and Europe. Is that something you think is a fearful possibility?
Dame Karen Pierce: The Prime Minister is very clear that we are not going to choose between our allies: both are very valuable to us. If you listen to President Trump’s press conference with the Prime Minister, he did stick by Article 5. It is a congressional decision put there by Secretary Marco Rubio that America cannot leave NATO without congressional agreement. Although you are quite right that there is a difference of view in the Trump Administration from many of their predecessors about Europe, they do help us; they will help us. We are in the South China Sea for our interests, not just America’s. They have assisted us. They still have troops in the Balkans, for example. It is a much more symbiotic relationship than you implied. I turn to Nigel.
Sir Nigel Sheinwald: I was going to talk more generally about the tension that Lord Bruce talked about between the United States and Europe—an old, familiar tension. The Prime Minister is right to try to hang on to what we can of the relationship with the US and its commitment to European security. As we have seen from the last few days, that will be tough, but it is the right objective, and on trade as well. In terms of what will change, the UK has been left since Brexit more exposed to the United States. The US has been through a difficult period with Trump 1.0 and the foreign policy pressures on the Biden Administration. That affects the UK probably more than anybody, because we are so closely connected to the way that the US conducts its foreign policy. In a way, strategically, the most important thing for us, as well as maintaining what we can of the UK-US relationship, is moving ahead with Keir Starmer’s initiative with Europe. That has at least two fundamental elements to it.
The first is the security/defence/foreign policy element that we have talked about this morning, caused by this new world order that confronts us and a diminished, at least, American support for NATO and for Europe. The second, obviously, is the review of the trade and co-operation agreement that we negotiated five years ago, the defects of which are apparent in British public opinion and need over time to be corrected. If we are able—there is a UK-EU summit in May —to create a much closer relationship between the UK and Europe on defence, for all the difficulties of that, which go back a long time, including some real-life efforts in areas of defence procurement and kit, if that is possible, it ought to be not only acceptable but supported by the United States because it goes in the direction that it is asking us to go. Whether it does so without an unpleasant interview here or a comment there, we will have to see, but it ought to be saleable to them.
The second issue is much more difficult because in Trump’s first term he encouraged the UK Government of the day to go for complete rupture with the Europeans, and that is obviously not the mood today. This will take some explaining to the United States, but it is an area where our Government will have to be firm. This, to me, should not be up for negotiation. We will have to do that if we are to rebalance our own long-term security interests and respond to a world that requires us and other Europeans to act much more confidently on our own.
Q10 Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: Obviously, the challenge for us is to unpick what is happening in the here and now and try to identify some long-term trends. I want to come back to the international and multilateral organisations in this new world order. One would think that they might provide some sort of ballast in our relationship with the US, although I do not think any of us could have imagined the US voting with Russia and North Korea at the UN a few weeks ago. How important is our membership of these organisations, whether it is the UN, NATO, Five Eyes or AUKUS, to our ongoing future relationship with the US?
As a subsidiary question to that, Karen touched on the attitude of the younger generation and mentioned the 17 year-old graduates at West Point. Our research seems to say that there is a generational shift going on in domestic American public opinion about their attitude to not only the importance of the UK but how much America should concentrate overseas. Could you comment on those two shifts?
Dame Karen Pierce: I served at the UN, as you know, as well as in Washington. We do not always have the same interests in the multilateral organisations, but more often than not we do, even with the Trump Administration, and we work through that. I am afraid it will not be just the Ukraine resolution in the General Assembly. I suspect differences will start to show on some of the more social policy-related resolutions that will come, such as with the Commission on the Status of Women, and we will have to work through those as we did before. We add in the international multilateral dimension to all aspects of government dealings with the Americans, whether the Americans are members of X or not. President Trump wishes to pull out of the WHO. We would still discuss world health and pandemic issues with the United States, and how the international system is doing anyway. It is an important part of the conversation that particularly the Foreign Secretary has with his counterparts, but, obviously, it is not the only aspect.
Something like CPTPP, where we, Canada and Mexico are members but the US is not, is a very interesting contribution to any debate about prosperity in the Pacific area. Again, it forms part of the regular discussions that the Foreign Secretary would have.
On the younger generation, there is some really fascinating polling that I cannot remember all of, but the embassy could easily send you. It depends on which questions you ask, but on the whole Britain comes out either top or near the top, as Nigel and Peter said. Australia comes out pretty high. Some of that is very much around Australian cultural things like surfing, so it depends a little bit on what question you ask. Certainly, if you go round the US and visit institutions, whether they are individual state level or city halls, there is enormous interest in and affection for the UK—a kind of understanding that we are cousins, if you like, and that we start from the same place even though we do not always agree.
Sir David Manning: On your question on multilateralism, there is probably a philosophical difference. For us, as a medium-sized power, we believe that it is important that there is a rules-based international order that is policed, or at least that there is a framework provided by multilateral institutions that we all belong to, and we observe the rules. I do not think there is the same view in Washington. I defer to Karen on this, but, to some extent, this is true of the Democratic Party now as well as the Republican Party. My view is that this Administration in the person of Trump will see multilateralism in a completely transactional way, and unless it is useful, it gets in the way. You would rather deploy American power on a one-to-one basis than have to go through the bureaucratic procedures and the voting procedures of being in an institution that is an inhibition to your exercise of power.
So I think there is a fundamental difference. That is partly about our size. It is also partly about values and attitude to international relations. It was quite clearly performance politics to pull out of the Paris climate change agreement on day 1, to get up and walk out of the WHO, which Trump has accused of misleading everybody on Covid, and so on. You point to the extraordinary, absolutely unprecedented vote in the UN. Even if it is gesture politics and showmanship on one level, it comes back to the question of trust and whether you can work with people who subject you to this kind of shock.
Multilateralism is important for us. We need to be absolutely clear that we are committed to it. It could easily backfire on the Americans if they take it too far. Multilateralism is not going to go away. There may be a vacuum because the Americans leave. That may be filled by the Chinese, and other western countries will suffer for that. Without the American voice in place in key institutions, whether it is climate change or whatever it is, we are weakened, in my view. I am not sure that in the long run it will help the United States very much if it does that. To your point, we need to be clear that we do not see multilateralism in the same way.
Sir Peter Westmacott: I have a couple of general points. First, we have to be ready for the reality that, whether it is in the international organisations or in terms of our own determination to reset relations with Europe while fixing relations with America or keeping them in good repair, there will be some nasty surprises. We often will not be consulted very closely. Even after the very close consultation between President Trump and the Prime Minister, we did not know—the British Government were not tipped off—that he was about to suspend all military assistance to Ukraine immediately afterwards. Nor do I think we knew that they were going to vote at the United Nations General Assembly as they did. I would be fascinated to know how that actually happened, with that ludicrous resolution in which they declined to apportion blame for the Ukraine war to the Russians for having invaded.
It will be like that. It was always a bit thus. Sometimes the process of consultation in the US system was for it to whirr the cogs and work out what it wanted and then call up the allies and say, “Here’s what we’re doing. Are you with us?”, rather than consult at an earlier stage of the policy-making process. We made a lot of progress in recent years. Maybe at the moment we are going a little bit backwards, but we will have to live with that.
On Lord Darroch’s question about how you advise the Prime Minister to deal with all this, in a sense it is not so much about “challenge and confront”, which we may need to do sometimes with the Chinese, but about nudging and adjusting in a different direction. That may be part of the answer on tariffs. It certainly needs to be the answer on the commitment that this Government is making, quite rightly, on Europe. The reality is that, if we can project what we need to do in fixing our relations with and interests in Europe in the context of what is good for America as well—in other words, if it wants the European Union to have economic growth and to do more in shouldering the burden for NATO—we need to have economic growth and closer relations with European neighbours for that to work; otherwise, we will not be able to meet a stated objective of the United States Government. Phrasing stuff in the context of what matters to them and persuading them, if you can—this is back to the point about personal relationships—to adjust their fire in the light of new facts that they might not have thought about, will be a part of this.
There is lots of hard work to be done there. There will be bumpy surprises and sometimes there will be stuff that is chucked out in a stream of consciousness that, two days later, does not actually turn out to be American policy. We should not take every single utterance as being ex cathedra, but we need to face up to the fact that it will be different and, to the extent we can, try to nudge and adjust things in a different direction to take account of what we think is in our interest, in the context of what is in their interest, too.
Q11 Baroness Crawley: In our earlier discussion on the non-definition of the special relationship, David Manning raised one of the ingredients being our relationship as far as nuclear weaponry is concerned. Perhaps we could delve a little deeper into that. We have an enormously close relationship with the US. It produces and services the Trident missiles. We supply the warheads. Do you think, looking ahead, that that will remain the case in President Trump’s efforts to decouple from Europe?
Sir David Manning: I see no reason at the moment to panic on this. I raised it because it would be wrong not to put this on the table. This is a key part of the special relationship. If we are worried about its future direction and contours, it is an absolutely integral part. The nuclear relationship, of course, includes all sorts of aspects; it is not just Trident. The fact is that it is absolutely vital to us and we have to think about what that will look like under President Trump.
You can make the case that it is very convenient for the Americans because it is very useful for them. If we get into this argument about leverage, this is leverage, so why would you put it at risk? In thinking about our defence posture, I very much agree with Nigel and Peter, who have spoken about the need to think hard about the European relationship and to make the case that we need to develop that. We need to do that in parallel. Logically, that ought to be welcomed in Washington. There is a question mark in my mind about how co-operating with Europe goes down with Trump and his entourage at all. I cannot speak about Trump, but JD Vance has come to Europe. We had Musk interfering in our internal politics. We know that there is much greater—let me put it like this—MAGA sympathy for the populists in Europe than there is for the moderates. Calculating the attitude to us moving closer to Europe on defence or economically—and I am sure Nigel is right; we need to do both—is quite a difficult thing to get right.
On the other hand, I do not see any signs at the moment that President Trump is threatening us over this or that there is any inclination in the United States to call into doubt the nuclear agreement. If I dare say this to your committee, I think it would be wrong for you not at least to think about what, if the relationship of trust and common view is in jeopardy, that might mean.
Dame Karen Pierce: May I add a fact? The Mutual Defence Agreement is the original, 1958 nuclear agreement and is renewed every so often. We have just renewed it and renewed it indefinitely rather than on a 10-year cycle, so that is a piece of good news. The investment from Britain and Australia into the AUKUS submarine development, matched of course by America, is also a positive factor for the future.
Baroness Crawley: Was it renewed under Biden or Trump?
Dame Karen Pierce: It was renewed under Biden, but at the time the Trump camp, for want of a better word, was informed about it.
Q12 Baroness Blackstone: First, I am terribly sorry I was late, for the ridiculous reason that I have lost my phone. That means I missed what you said at the beginning about the special relationship. I want to be slightly provocative about the way in which this debate has gone up until now. It seems that all of you, perhaps to slightly different degrees, are very committed to keeping the relationship with the United States pretty well as it is. I wonder whether that can possibly happen while this divergence is so great and is likely to become greater, as one or two of you said. This brings in the issues of trust and values, which Lord Soames mentioned.
Three categories will need to be taken into account in this context. The first is Parliament. There is already a lot of restiveness among Members of Parliament, particularly on the Labour side, about what is happening in the United States under President Trump. That restiveness will continue if they perceive that there is not enough toughness from their leader, our Prime Minister, in dealing with this response.
Secondly, there is the electorate. We know from public opinion that there is a tremendous amount of sympathy with Ukraine, a lot of sympathy with the Palestinians especially among young people, and this all affects their perception of the United States as well.
Thirdly, there are our allies. The US is not our only ally. I have a special interest, or have had, because I used to be the chair of the Franco-British Council, and we cannot at any point dismiss the importance of the French to us. They are our nearest neighbours and have been our close allies for a very long time. The rest of Europe—the European Union, the Germans and so on—is also equally important. We must not forget Canada. Canada is under enormous threat at the moment and would expect the UK to take up its cause with the Americans, forcibly and publicly. We have not yet really seen that.
I also believe that there is a lot of scope, as more than one of you suggested, for a much closer relationship with the European Union on defence. We already have quite a close one with the French, and this is likely to grow. If that is the case, surely, that can be seen in part as a move away from such dependence on the Americans on the defence and security front. Nothing is for ever in this world. It seems we are going to see this huge movement in where the Americans stand on so many international issues, whether on multilateralism, aid for developing countries or Russia. I was going to raise Russia and am extremely glad you did, because we have a completely new position now from the United States on Russia. It is not one that we hold, nor do any of our allies.
Can you see a point where the conventional wisdom about this special relationship is really deeply threatened, and we should talk about a reset with not only Europe but also the United States?
Sir Nigel Sheinwald: I agree with that. A reset is going on. The profundity of the challenge and what we have heard over the last few weeks has genuinely sunk in, in the UK, elsewhere in Europe and so on. I do not think that that is in doubt.
On what it means, the incoming German Chancellor after the election used the word “independence” from America. I am not sure that that works as the end state, and certainly not as the transitional state that we are in. Nor would it work for the UK—not complete independence. We need to aim at giving ourselves more options and trying to keep the best of the UK-US and transatlantic relationship, while at the same time finding other partnerships, particularly in Europe, which is still 50% of our trade and already has a lot of security and defence links. To me, that is what we need to be aiming for.
I also agree with you that foreign policy is the result of an often intangible sense of feeling in public opinion, and public opinion at different stages has had a negative opinion of developments in the US, of cultural change and differences between us. That is very profound for obvious reasons today. You have already seen in British public opinion polls a reduction of support for, interest in and liking for the United States, and the same across Europe. That must affect the political environment in which Ministers are going to operate if they want to have very close, sometimes risky, operational projects with the United States. There is nothing they can do about that unless there is a fundamental change of heart on the Trump side, which does not look very likely. But I agree with your fundamental point. I think we are at a turning point. Whether it is talking about a peacekeeping operation in Ukraine or about the nature of European security in a transitional five to 10-year phase, we will still need a lot of American involvement and support.
Sir Peter Westmacott: We did talk, Baroness Blackstone, about some of the things you mentioned before you joined us. I do not think we were really saying, “Keep the relationship as it is”. We were trying to say that there are a number of ways in which we must face up to new realities and we must learn to be a bit more transactional, rather in the way that the Trump Administration are, and be pretty hard-headed about where our own interests lie. I talked a bit about the threat posed to our security by the cosying up to Russia and handing Putin a number of negotiating points in advance of a negotiation even beginning, over the heads of the Ukrainians. We had that in Afghanistan and look how that ended. The Trump Administration negotiated with the Taliban over the heads of the Afghan Government and that ended up with the mess that we have now, even though Trump tried to blame Biden for it.
We are trying to understand the new realities and I do not think we were saying, “Keep it as it is”. But we need to be transactional, too, and pragmatic. At the moment, when you are trying to deal with the security threats posed to Europe by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, America is an indispensable partner, to take the phrase that the Prime Minister used. It seemed to me that there was pretty widespread support for the way in which the Prime Minister played a British role, not so much bridging but trying to fix a problem that had broken out between different friends, partners and allies. That is partly what the British public would like us to do, almost regardless of who is in power. That is a role that we can play because of the fact that we are European and also a very close ally of the United States.
I do not think we are doing this starry-eyed because we want to hang on to nanny as if nothing has changed. We know that a lot has changed. I could not agree with you more about engaging with our European partners. But I do not think that, for example, President Macron in any way would want the Prime Minister not to try to use what relationships and influence he has in Washington to make things better. He is doing the same thing. It is rather remarkable that, even though post Brexit we are outside the European Union, the political relationship is working extremely well between us and the French, and to some extent the Germans, although they are an unknown quantity at the moment, and with Giorgia Meloni—a lot of the European partners. It is not “either/or”, as we said before. It can be “both/and”, and that has to be the right strategy for now.
Dame Karen Pierce: Just to underscore Peter’s point, it is not a zero-sum game. That is very much how the Prime Minister sees it. If you think back to January 2022, before Putin invaded Ukraine, you had the US and the Brits reading the intelligence in one sense and Europe reading it in a very different sense. In the end, it was the UK-US interpretation that was correct—Putin did invade. I cannot see it fundamentally changing so that you have different people on different sides of the aisle.
Tech is one reason why the relationship with America will continue regardless of the relationships between Downing Street and the future White House. America’s approach to tech and AI is so advanced compared to Europe’s. Britain is the third largest AI sector in the world after the US and China, and the Prime Minister and the Government are going to want to keep that. In themselves, those technological innovations will keep us moving with America even as the Prime Minister rightly builds up the relationship with Europe.
The Chair: It is now midday. Two more people would like to ask questions. Can we prevail upon your good will to stay for a few more minutes? Thank you so much.
Q13 Baroness Coussins: Going back to Baroness Fraser’s question about international organisations, now that Trump has stated he wants to come out of the World Health Organization, can we expect any further disengagement from other UN agencies? Looking at the possibilities for more positive action within the UN, is there any scope or appetite for encouraging US-UK pragmatic co-operation where they have overlapping penholder responsibilities at the Security Council? I am thinking in particular of Sudan. Separately but on the same theme, what do we know, if anything, about Trump’s attitude to the BRICS countries, the bloc that seems to be expanding rather rapidly at the moment, including a number of major Commonwealth countries?
Dame Karen Pierce: We will still keep a very broad dialogue with the United States, Government to Government but also NGOs to NGOs, about a whole range of multilateral issues, even if the US pulls out of various agencies. You would want to discuss a reaction to a future pandemic or other global health threat with the United States regardless of whether it was following WHO rules. The nature of American programming—we will have to see where the review of American programmes gets to—allows it to still participate individually in different ventures. I could see that happening on a range of issues currently dealt with by UN agencies. The WHO may not be the last pullout but you can keep the dialogue going. In fact, in Trump 1.0 we were able to do that.
On the BRICS countries, the Trump Administration tend to deal with them individually rather than as a bloc. You will know that President Trump has a very warm relationship with Modi, and the relationship between India and the US is one that has only grown stronger under both Administrations over the past few years. They will continue to want to do that on a bilateral basis rather than try to engage with them as a bloc.
Baroness Coussins: What about co-operation over the penholder responsibilities? I just wonder if that relationship can be leveraged when it comes to a challenge such as the war in Sudan, and whether the US and the UK have the potential to work together in a pragmatic way to actually achieve something.
Dame Karen Pierce: Definitely. There is no suggestion that I have seen that it would not want to co-operate with us—and, indeed, with France as the P3, the western members of the permanent five—on a range of issues. The Foreign Secretary raised Sudan in particular with Secretary Rubio and I think we will be able to find a good way forward at the UN together.
Q14 Lord Houghton of Richmond: Can we have a final comment from any or all of you, from the experience of Trump’s first presidency, about how this one might go? I have heard it said that we are almost at the end of the pre-scripted bit of his Administration, where he has come in with 60 days of shock and awe. There will be some natural checks and balances as the Administration go through, the midterms arrive and all this, so perhaps we are at peak chaos. Can you offer any sense of abatement in this where, even within the back end of his presidency, there may be an element of return to some normality because his power is somehow constrained, or do you think he might be hell-bent on remaining unconstrained?
Sir David Manning: It is worth remembering that the United States is a federal country. There are a lot of state authorities that may or may not see eye to eye with his programmes and I suspect will put up resistance to some of them. There is Congress, which was accused by the FT yesterday of being missing in action. His majorities in those two Houses are very slim. They have the midterm elections coming along. That is not to say that Trump will lose them. Congress will not necessarily accept everything he wants to do. I am sure it is worth while for people, not least on your committee, talking to your American counterparts in Congress. When I was ambassador, I was very keen that parliamentarians on both sides should remain really engaged with each other, because you can have an impact. The point is that an awful lot of Americans do not know about Europe and really do not understand our point of view, so you can make a real impact. There is also the judiciary.
For me, above all what will count for Trump is what the markets decide. We touched on tariffs. If the markets decide that they are really losing confidence in the Trump Administration, there is the possibility of quite serious pushback by business. They will be worried about their profits, shareholders and all sorts of other things. The bond market in particular cannot be legislated or dictated to. Will the Trump economic policy produce lower growth, higher inflation and disappointed people in Trump states? All of that is possible. It is very hard to say.
At the moment, we are in a situation where they are triumphant and carrying all before them. I am not a politician and plenty of people in this room are, but politics does not usually continue like that for very long. I suspect that things will start to get more difficult and go wrong, and Congress will find its voice, as will business and other players. Imagining that this, at the moment, is how it is always going to be for the next four years is probably a mistake. I am sure that is how they would like it to be but I am sceptical that it will actually turn out like that.
Sir Nigel Sheinwald: I would not count on that. It would be lovely to believe that we are at the peak. Maybe it is a little like peak oil a few years ago. I suspect quite a lot of it will continue because Trump envisages a different world order and a different way of doing politics nationally and internationally. You saw that again last night. Maybe it is a matter of degree but this was another campaigning speech, not a governing speech. The way in which the politics of campaigning are being transferred to America’s international relations is, to me, one of the very important and regrettable medium-term issues that we face, not least in relation to their attack on Europe and the use of powerful social media to push European politics in a particular direction. It is a way of operating. I cannot see him becoming a President who goes away at the weekend and spends his equivalent of time reading his box. It does not feel to me that this is going to be that sort of presidency. It will carry on being a presidency conducted in the public eye with policy being made on the hoof, although some of that may abate somewhat.
On David’s checks and balances, on the basis of the first six weeks it really does depend on the courts. We must hope that the courts, including the Supreme Court, offer that check because for the time being there is not very much on the political side. American business opinion is more muted and more concerned today than it was in 2017. In 2017, there was that sugar rush and that feeling that they were on to something, that the economy would do very well on the back of tax cuts and other changes. Today, there are tariffs and the hollowing out of the public space, which works at a general level of deregulation, but people worry about the detail and the funding for American universities and research. All these things make American businesses uncertain. They are probably supportive as much as they can be, but if you look at the markets, they have taken a tumble in the last few weeks.
Dame Karen Pierce: You have to remember that President Trump has put his finger on something that the American people deeply feel. He won every swing state. He got, for the first time, a popular majority. It has been put to me by members of the Senate that part of the reason for this is that America has never faced, at least since 1814, an adversary with as strong an economy as it has. It has always had the upper hand economically. Now, in China, it has a different sort of adversary and has not yet calibrated exactly how it wants to deal with that. Some of what President Trump is doing, some of what is happening on the business and economic side, is a response to that visceral feeling of things not being quite where America wants to be.
As Nigel and David mentioned, some of the executive orders he issued have gone straight into the courts or other parts of the checks and balances system, and we will need to see what is done about those, whether the courts decide them or they put them up through the system. There is also a difference of philosophy in the Trump Administration about the powers of the President legally and constitutionally, and that is a debate that America will need to have with itself.
Sir Peter Westmacott: I have a couple of tiny things to add. Yes, there are courts and judges, but some of them are, of course, Trump appointees. He has a Republican majority in the Supreme Court, which gave him, essentially, presidential immunity more sweeping than most people would have expected. Generally, both in that respect and in the way in which he has filled the Administration with appointees who are there for loyalty rather than necessarily competence, he was ready to win. Last time round, he was surprised and a whole lot of people from more traditional Reagan Republican backgrounds served for a while. Some got spat out and some resigned—it did not work out—but they did operate to some extent as a constraint. I do not see much at the moment in the way of constraints other than, as Karen says, markets and some of the Trump voters who might find that they are out of a job or out of an income and will eventually conclude that that is the result of his policies.
As for Congress, the arithmetic that I have seen suggests that it is inconceivable that the Republicans would lose the Senate, but there is a good chance that they will lose the House. That presupposes that the Democrats begin to get their act together, and so far they have not done a brilliant job of that.
The Chair: Thank you for giving us a very sound base on which to proceed with our inquiry. We may need to ask you to speak to us again towards the end, to see how things have developed. Thank you so much.