The UK needs to treat Donald Trump as a risk to be managed and mitigated

Less than a month into the Trump presidency, the impacts are becoming clearer day-by-day. 

This government had not proved that adept at controlling its “grid” of announcements, even when Joe Biden was in power, but now any hope the government might have that its preferred subject might lead the news for the day routinely evaporates with the latest pronouncement from Washington. Whichever unfortunate minister is lined up for the morning or Sunday media round needs to be prepared with whatever line the government has come up with to react to the most recent bombshell.

Trump has undermined the basic tenets of the post-WW2 order

While some are mere inconveniences, other interventions are much more profound and obvious. Last week alone saw Trump impose 25 per cent tariffs on steel and aluminium imports into the US, provoking the EU to threaten retaliation, while the UK kept its head down; the President doubled down on his nebulous plans for Gaza (which could potentially blow up the fragile ceasefire); all while appearing to throw Ukraine under the Russian bus. His Defense Secretary made clear that European security was being deprioritised, the Vice-President made clear the US was not up for European interference in their tech businesses – and then went to Munich to tell European politicians how to react to the rise of the far right in their elections. 

Within a week the President and his team had torched the world trade order and the bedrock of Western security since the second world war. 

Trump’s decisions are already having an impact in the UK

There will be blowback from the termination of most USAID programmes – whether in terms of direct humanitarian consequences, the impacts on recipient governments, the voids left which create opportunities for China and the increased risks of cross-border spillovers. The US seems determined to give its companies licence to bribe – turbocharging corruption risks. The confirmation of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence has provoked concerns about future security around intelligence sharing. Bird flu is spreading in the US – but the US is withdrawing from the WHO, defunding medical research and its institutions that would normally be in the forefront of handling a public health emergency and the new Health and Human Services Secretary is a vaccine sceptic. 

At the same time, the activities of DOGE risk hollowing out US state capacity – whether through targeting individual agencies or its general bid to persuade the federal workforce to quit. While the primary impacts will be on those who live in the US and depend on its government functioning effectively, the UK cannot be entirely insulated.  We saw the impacts in the 2000s of the failure of US financial regulation compounded by our own regulatory failure. But this could manifest itself in other ways – for example if aviation safety is compromised. 

The UK needs machinery to anticipate, plan and coordinate its US strategy

It will be impossible to Trump-proof government policy or the potential for Trump and the US lashing out, but it will have to be factored into policy-making across the breadth of government departments and agencies – even though this raises the risk of incoherence or inadvertent oversight. At present the UK seems to be using its post-Brexit status to go a la carte – siding with the US over the AI communique, risking alienating President Macron but turning up at his Ukraine summit – and also plead UK exceptionalism (notably being exceptionally bad at exporting goods to the US) to wriggle out of tariffs.

It is not clear yet how the UK is coordinating its response to the US. Much will depend on the Mandelson-Powell axis – with the UK’s new US ambassador working with the national security adviser, who is effectively Keir Starmer’s foreign policy chief of staff. Beneath that the national security side of the Cabinet Office will need to coordinate with the new EU and International Economic team under the newly returned Michael Ellam, and they will need to help a cabinet secretary with wide domestic but zero international experience. But there will also be a need to coordinate across domestic policy too, as many of the choices the UK will face will be about following US or EU regulation at home. There needs to be a point where all this comes together. That comes on top of the upending of the spending review to accommodate near inevitable increases in defence spending which will preoccupy much of Whitehall for the coming months. 

The government needs to have a clear apparatus to manage the risks emerging from the new US Administration. This is not the sort of acute crisis that requires COBRA (though there does need to be a clear rhythm to work out and agree what the minister on the morning news rounds should say about whatever news comes from over the Atlantic overnight). But it may require something modelled on the National Economic Council that Gordon Brown set up to manage the response to the Global Financial Crisis in 2008-9, with core departments, notably FCDO, Defence, Treasury and DBT, and wider Whitehall engaged to look both at immediate responses and to develop longer-term strategy.