What precedent was there, the foreign affairs committee chair Tom Tugendhat asked McDonald straight off, for the head of state of a friendly government to do what Donald Trump has done this week and make it impossible for Britain’s senior representative in that country to do his job? McDonald’s answer was monosyllabic, crisp and explosive. “None,” he said.
Labour’s Chris Bryant followed up. Surely there were precedents from unfriendly countries such as Venezuela? “I know of none,” McDonald replied again. Not even hostile states have behaved like Trump, he insisted. Had there been some distant occasion when a British ambassador fell foul of the White House in such a way? There was, McDonald admitted, a “difficulty” in 1856, when President Franklin Pierce accused the British ambassador of recruiting Americans to fight in the Crimean war. The listeners in committee room 16 laughed, but McDonald did not.[...]
Yet it is increasingly hard to take this view seriously. Too much is changing on too many fronts. Trumpism may not be temporary. He may well be re-elected next year (as Darroch himself pointed out in a memo). The underpinnings of Trumpism, in the shape of populist nationalism and contempt for other countries, alliances and accords, go much deeper, both in the US and in Brexit Britain. If Johnson, or any other Brexiter leader, gets his way, Britain may once again embrace the US. But the America they embrace will not be the outward-looking republic of presidents from Eisenhower to Obama but an inward-looking exceptionalist country that seeks to disrupt everything about the international order. In such a world, Britain risks becoming the vassal of a capricious unilateralist state. Johnson or his successor would be Britain’s Carrie Lam to Washington’s Xi Jinping.
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