Trump is America’s logical destination

The Trump-Zelensky meeting was a new low. Two grotesque swaggering bullies in the Oval Office, president and vice president of the US, trapped and taunted and attempted to humiliate a courageous man who has led his people in a fight for freedom for three years. 

For its equal, you have to look back to 1938, when the Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg met Adolf Hitler at Hitler’s Berchtesgaden, and Hitler insulted and humiliated him. “I have only to give an order and your ridiculous defences will be blown to bits,” said the Fuhrer.

But Trump isn’t an outlier. He’s the logical destination of US foreign policy. Until the Second World War, the US largely kept out of European affairs. The Monroe Doctrine, named after the fifth president, James Monroe, said that Europe should stay out of the Americas, and the US would stay out of Europe. The US sent troops in 1917, but after the armistice, America retreated into isolation. 

In 1940, when Britain was in mortal danger, the US refused to intervene. The only thing they gave Churchill was lend-lease: American military equipment, for which payment would be deferred. Churchill publicly called lend-lease “the most un-sordid act in the history of any nation”, but his foreign secretary Anthony Eden recalled in his memoirs a tough and unsentimental negotiation.

“At one time the suggestion was put forward in Washington that the entire British West Indies should be handed over for the cancellation of our war debts. I thought this less than friendly bargaining… The West Indian bases alone were certainly worth more than 50 or 60 old destroyers. Our desperate straits alone could justify its terms.” Trump is not the first president to wish to profit from a democratic nation’s desperation.

In September 1944, Churchill begged for aid to prevent Britain starving. Roosevelt, in his teasing, elliptical way, told long anecdotes, forcing the prime minister over and over again to drag him back to the question of Britain’s desperate plight. At last Churchill cried out: “What do you want me to do? Get up on my hind legs and beg like Fala?” Fala was Roosevelt’s dog.

The moment the war was over, lend-lease was stopped, and Britain had to pay on the nail for everything supplied by the US. The change was so sudden that two ships leaving New York for the UK had to turn around and go home. The new British PM, Clement Attlee, said that the US had expanded its markets while Britain was being bombed and his statement was reported in the US with headlines calling the British “cry-babies”.

Attlee begged for a loan, and secretary of state James Byrnes responded by presenting the foreign secretary Ernest Bevin with a list of the locations inside the UK where the US would like to have its military bases. Attlee got a smaller loan than Britain needed, on terms that made Britain an economic vassal to the US. 

The US had wrecked the League of Nations by its refusal to join, so in 1945 the United Nations was headquartered in New York. Even so, for many years the US refused to pay its dues. 

During the war, Britain had shared its nuclear research with the US, on the understanding that US scientists would share further development with Britain. Attlee wanted the research to be handed over to the UN. But this is not the American way. The US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan without consulting Britain, and refused to hand over any research, either to Britain or to the UN.

In 1950, when president Truman sent US forces to Korea, he demanded that Attlee send British troops. The British arms budget was substantially increased, with disastrous economic and electoral consequences for Attlee, and conscription was raised from eighteen months to two years, imposing an enormous strain on the economy. 

The Americans did support Britain enthusiastically on the stifling of democracy in Iran. Churchill’s government was furious when the country’s first elected prime minister Mohammed Mosadegh, nationalised his nation’s oil. They called on the US for help, and in 1953, secretary of state John Foster Dulles gave the CIA $1m to be used “in any way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddegh”. 

Thus Britain and the US collapsed the only democratic government Iran has ever had because they wanted the country’s oil. Without the “special relationship” and the US’s new role as global policeman, Iran’s fragile democracy might have survived. Instead the nation was handed back to the dictatorial Shah, who was eventually overthrown by the Ayatollahs. 

But it was the Suez crisis in 1956 that spelled out the nature of the so-called “special relationship” in a way that no one could misunderstand. Eden’s invasion of Suez was foolish, but the withdrawal of those troops on curt instructions from president Eisenhower was a humiliation for Britain which Eisenhower did not bother to soften.

A decade later another US president, Lyndon Johnson, demanded British soldiers for America’s war in Vietnam. Fortunately for those of us who were of military age in the sixties, Harold Wilson persuaded Johnson that refusing to condemn the bombings, the napalm and the burning of villages was the best he could deliver.

After 1981, two ideological soulmates emerged – Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. When Reagan wanted Thatcher’s support, he only had to ask. 

But when Thatcher wanted Reagan’s support, it was a different matter. Reagan was not keen on Britain bringing down the Argentinian dictator General Galtieri, whom he saw as a bulwark against communism. The State Department tried to deny fuel at the British-owned Ascension Island to Vulcan bombers on their way to attack the runway at Port Stanley.

By contrast, the French gave unstintingly of their technical information, including on the Exocet missiles they had sold to Argentina. Mitterrand and the French were our greatest allies.

When Reagan invaded Grenada, which was a member of the Commonwealth with the Queen as head of state, Thatcher did not receive a warning phone call. The day before the invasion, foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe told the House of Commons truthfully that he had no knowledge of any such plan. As Thatcher wrote in her memoirs, she and Howe “would have to explain how it happened that a member of the Commonwealth had been invaded by our closest ally.” 

Reagan’s most spectacular contribution to freedom and democracy is said to be victory in the cold war and the end of communism in Russia. I was in Moscow shortly after this triumph, and saw for myself how American companies went in fast and broke things. 

I met a distinguished paediatrician who worked five days a week in Moscow’s children’s hospital. This did not bring in enough to feed her family, and on the sixth day she went to an American businessman’s flat and ironed his shirts, for which her payment, in dollars, bought far more than what she earned in the hospital for the whole of the rest of the week.

I met a Russian translator who worked beside an American doing exactly the same job. The Russian, paid in roubles, could not keep her family on what she earned. The American, paid in dollars, lived like a millionaire.

I met a schoolteacher, struggling to survive on her income, who told me: “I wish we could have the Brezhnev days back again. My qualifications were valued and I could keep my family with what I earned.”

The events surrounding Tony Blair, George Bush and the second Iraq war are too well known to need setting out here. It’s now widely accepted that the world would be a better place if the British prime minister had said “No, Mr President” instead of “At once, Mr President.”

To say that the USA has suddenly descended into fascism is to miss the real dreadfulness of what has happened. Fascists want a corporate state. Trumpers want to give the state to corporations. To do this, they must undermine the state itself and convince us we would be better off governed by big tech corporations, hence “deep state” conspiracy theories and demonising of the civil service, police and judiciary. But when you get rid of the civil service, the judiciary, the police, who will protect you when the leader you have elected turns on you? 

That is the dark pit that the USA has been ambling towards for 80 years. Trump has only sped up that process.

If Britain persists in believing we have some sort of “special relationship” with the USA, if we turn our backs on our neighbours in favour of the burgeoning monster on the other side of the Atlantic, we will follow it into that pit. 

That is what people like Nigel Farage really want. The greatest lie of all is that they want to give Britain back its independence, when really they want us to be a vassal state to corporate America, and they hope to share the spoils when the state is captured. 

I hope that our prime minister understands this. It may be necessary in the short term to smile and flatter the vain and vindictive child who now sits in the Oval office. But very quickly, we need to be back in the European Union, planning with our neighbours a democratic future for our continent and the world.