The Gulf of America

FOR MORE THAN 80 years the mainstay of Britain’s foreign policy has been to stick close to the world’s economic and military superpower – the United States, for right or wrong.

The transatlantic alliance was the spine of NATO as it won the Cold War. It also led to grave errors such as our support for the exploits in Iraq and Afghanistan. For generations, the ‘special relationship’ has underpinned our nuclear deterrent, our intelligence services, and military bases across the world. But is the realpolitik logic of ‘safer to be wrong with America than right with anyone else’ still true and in our national interest?

With the re-election of Donald Trump, the threat of trade wars, his backing Putin’s demands of Ukraine, and all the ‘America First’ lawlessness, the relationship is clearly no longer ‘special’ to the US – and looks like becoming an abusive co-dependency for Britain.

We are already captive to American tech and social media. Our right-wing newspapers rely on the owner of X, Elon Musk, for front-page stories and ideological guidance. Millions of Brits will now be inundated with disinformation on Facebook given that Mark Zuckerberg has stopped any attempts at third-party fact-checking.

Meanwhile, in another craven move to appease the new administration, Google has stopped marking Pride Month, Black History Month, and other ‘diversity’ celebrations in its online and mobile calendars, and renamed (in brackets outside the US) the Gulf of Mexico as the ‘Gulf of America’, according to the President’s whim.

The Gulf of America is an apt metaphor for what is happening.

The tectonic plates of geopolitics have been shifting for a while, but this is the first real transatlantic earthquake, and it leaves Brexit Britain vulnerable and isolated.

The Trump revolution – or ‘coup’ – is led by Big Tech, particularly Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency, which has been granted access to the most sensitive data of the state, bypassing Congress, and apparently hundreds of laws. Tellingly, the initial targets of his destructive disruption have been the investigators, inspectors, and federal agencies that provide transparency or fight disinformation, kleptocracy, and corruption.

Sound familiar? For Brits, there is an echo of the Johnson administration (albeit on a vaster scale) with Musk playing a grander version of former chief advisor Dominic Cummings, who managed the unlawful overspending of Vote Leave as its campaign manager and engineered the unlawful prorogation of Parliament.

When in No 10, Cummings also pushed for greater access to government data and made regulators such as the Electoral Commission and the Information Commissioner’s Office look useless and toothless.

Unsurprisingly, Cummings has recently expressed enthusiasm for the tech-authoritarian Trump-Musk Project. “It’s basically all great from my perspective”, he told The Times.

The external threat to the UK from Musk has been clear since the X-fuelled racist riots of last summer, but the inner threat – the number of patriotic politicians in the Conservatives and Reform UK willing to prostrate themselves before a foreign billionaire – shows a contempt for Britain that beats a half-century of fawning before Rupert Murdoch.

The cowardice seems to affect the Labour Government too.

Whereas French investigators have opened an investigation into how X manipulated its algorithm, and a German court has ruled that Musk’s platform must provide access to politically related content in the run-up to national elections, Britain seems powerless – like a rabbit frozen in the digital headlights.

Starmer’s Government has failed to tighten up laws that would prevent Musk from funnelling foreign millions into British politics, reportedly after a pre-election intervention by its donor Lord Waheed Alli. It appears to have capitulated to Trump and his ‘broligarchy’ by moving away from the EU’s strict data laws and joining the US by refusing to sign an international agreement at the global summit on AI in Paris.

This is the wrong move.

If there is anything ‘special’ in our relationship with the US, it is in defending its democracy not succumbing to its downfall. The havoc of Trump’s first few weeks suggests his chaos is unlikely to progress in any direction positive for the UK.

Even if we still turn our backs on Europe, we don’t need to appease Trump. Facing the turmoil of the Gulf of America, we are better off standing, like the famous 1940 David Low cartoon (pictured above) of the soldier holding his fist to a raging sea after the fall of France: “Very well, alone.”