Britain Debates ‘Special Relationship’ with and without Trump

June 8, 2020 (EIRNS)—London’s daily Guardian ran an article reporting comments by British foreign policy figures on fears that if Donald Trump wins a second term as President, it would be the end of the British Empire’s so-called “special relationship” with the U.S., as mooted in the House of Lords’ Dec. 5, 2018 report on “U.K. Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order.” At the same time, the British seem not very upbeat about the prospects of a Joe Biden Presidency either.

To an event at Cambridge University’s Center for Geopolitics, Sir John Sawers, the former head of the U.K. foreign intelligence agency MI6 and a leading Trump-hater, said, “There is no doubt President Trump is the most difficult President for us to deal with. He does not really feel that sense of being part of that trans-Atlantic community; he does not really believe in alliances. He does not really believe in American leadership in the world. We are seeing in this pandemic for the first time what a crisis is like without American leadership. It is the first time in our lifetime we have experienced that.

“If he gets elected for a second time, some of the changes we have seen in the past few years will become embedded and entrenched and then, absolutely Britain will not be so much a bridge between the U.S. and Europe. We will need to be bounding closely together with our European partners.”

Sawers lamented, according to the Guardian, that if Trump were re-elected “the U.K. would not simply be able to get back into bed with the U.S. as it had been in the past.” He then called for “middle-level powers to come together to tackle China and climate change.”