Donald Trump’s America will be a different type of partner for the UK

Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the US presidential election came as a surprise to some. But nobody should be under any illusions about the plan for his second term. Trump has always been a nativist at home and a cavalier realist abroad – encapsulated by his “America First” slogan – and the way he campaigned this election showed those instincts have heightened, rather than mellowed, over time.

For decades, the UK has sheltered under the US’s security umbrella and liberally shared intelligence, including through the Five Eyes network (alongside Canada, Australia and New Zealand). The two countries have deep institutional partnerships, with government departments and public bodies often having trusted working relationships with US counterparts. The two also collaborate in a range of sensitive areas. Recent examples include the Sunak-Biden ‘Atlantic Declaration’, in which the countries agreed to share research on quantum technologies and engineering biology, amongst other things, and a memorandum of understanding between the UK and US AI Safety Institutes to collaborate on testing the safety of frontier AI models. 

But Trump’s victory means a shift in the institutional ties between the two countries. UK-US relations are about to move into a different era.

The securocracy must adapt to ‘America First’ 

Trump will do what he thinks is best for the US ten times out of ten – international norms and relationships with allies be damned. The extent to which America can be trusted to always engage in good faith in groupings like Five Eyes and pacts like NATO has reduced. 

The securocracy – the parts of government tasked with national security, including the Home Office, parts of the Cabinet Office, and intelligence services – will need to adapt to a more circumspect relationship with the US. As soon as it became clear that Trump was the presumptive Republican nominee, different parts of government will have begun planning for the impact of his presidency on the UK’s direct interests and the global context more generally. In areas where those plans need more work – or were never initiated at all – work must be accelerated urgently between now and January’s inauguration.

Trump makes the government’s domestic agenda more difficult to deliver

There are all kinds of inefficiencies in the UK’s defence spending. ⁴ Public Accounts Committee, MoD defence equipment systems “broken and repeatedly wasting billions of taxpayers’ money”, 3 November 2021, https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/127/public-accounts-committee/news/158463/mod-defence-equipment-systems-broken-and-repeatedly-wasting-bill…  But Trump’s election creates a more uncertain world, in which it is less clear where the UK stands under the American security umbrella and with an American president clearly irritated at low levels of European defence spending. Spending more money on defence anyway despite these inefficiencies might be necessary – at least in the short-term, and as long as it is spent on next-generation capabilities not legacy matériel. That is even before considering the cost of continuing to support Ukraine (if doing so is both desirable and possible) in the potential scenario that Trump drastically cuts US military support and pressures president Zelensky to accept a peace deal, probably on terms favourable to Russia.

Keir Starmer has already pledged to increase defence spending to 2.5% of GDP but has refused to put a timeline on the change. Events might force him to find those funds sooner than he would have liked given other priorities, and – in time – to raise spending even further. 

This additional spending would be painful no matter how it is paid for, particularly in a situation where the government has just raised tax by £40bn and still remains only just within its fiscal rules. Spending more on defence will make it harder for the government to spend more elsewhere, to get ailing public services back on track or make investments that help it to grow the economy. If it chose to prioritise defence, the government would need to clearly explain its choice to the country and hope that emphasising national security would be electorally rewarded.

The difficult questions do not stop there. In a more protectionist world, an effective industrial strategy – and closer integration between that industrial strategy and trade considerations – might become more important. The government’s manifesto pledge to produce a defence industrial strategy could be crucial to unlocking how the UK could produce more, and cheaper, matériel.

The government will also hope that Trump’s protectionist instincts, and the high tariffs he says he will impose on goods imports, do not have a negative impact on the global economic situation and make the economic growth Starmer came into office promising to achieve even harder.

The government needs to appoint a US ambassador who can work with Trump’s administration

Labour sources have spent the last couple of days briefing out optimistic lines about the government’s ability to work with Trump. But Trump and surrogates like his son Don Jr. and Elon Musk took a prickly approach to the Labour government on the campaign trail. A statement on Trump’s website said that Labour were “far-left” and had “inspired Kamala’s dangerously liberal policies and rhetoric” and Musk spent the summer posting his criticisms of Starmer on X. The furore around Labour staff being encouraged to travel to battleground states to support Kamala Harris’s campaign was unhelpful for the government, even if some of the Trump campaign’s outrage was performative.

The Starmer administration has sensibly waited until after the US election to appoint a permanent national security adviser (NSA) and US ambassador. But the waiting is now over. Jonathan Powell has been appointed NSA, and it is time for Starmer to appoint an equivalent heavyweight to the US ambassadorship –  who he trusts to represent Britain’s views to the Trump administration, and who he thinks that administration will be receptive to.

Appointing an ambassador who can build strong relationships with the Trump White House while also promoting the UK’s interests – which under a Starmer government will sometimes be antithetical to Trump’s agenda – is the way to meet the moment. Deftly navigating Washington and Mar-a-Lago will be difficult and someone with enough diplomatic experience that they do not have to learn on the job may be the wisest choice. Extending the term limit of the incumbent, Karen Pierce, should be on the table

The election of a new US president is always consequential, but Trump’s second term has the potential to reshape relationships – both personal and institutional – across the globe. Keir Starmer’s government has a precious few months to prepare for the return of a very different kind of president to the White House.