The Leave camp used to think we’d stride the world hand in hand with America after burning our bridges with Europe. Donald Trump’s latest tweets – first retweeting Islamophobic messages from a far-right Brit and then attacking Theresa May for saying he shouldn’t have – show there’s fat chance of that happening.
One might think the Brexiters’ geopolitical plan has only gone awry because the wrong man is in the White House. Yes, Trump is an extraordinarily bad president who has been damaging British interests without so much as a thought for our so-called “special relationship”. He used to say Nato is obsolete, he has pulled out of the climate change pact and he has undermined the Iran nuclear deal.
Trump has also become the world’s best recruiting sergeant for Islamic terrorism. By inflaming Islamophobia, he plays into the extremists’ hands. How can that be in our interests?
But it would be wrong to blame our geopolitical plight solely on Trump. Great powers – and, despite everything, America still is one – respect power. And Britain, for all our qualities, is no longer a great global power. In recent decades, we have been able to keep influence with the US because we are still a great power by European standards – and Washington has seen us as a bridge between America and the EU.
Brexit badly damages that bridge and with it our influence. Not just with America but with other great powers, especially China.
This is also why Theresa May only bears part of the blame for the plunge in our global standing. Yes, it was silly for her to rush to Washington just after Trump was inaugurated and offer him a state visit.
It was also inept for her to head off this week to Saudi Arabia rather than going to the Ivory Coast for a major summit of EU and African leaders. One of the biggest challenges for Europe and the UK in the coming years and decades – possibly the biggest – will be to help maintain stability in the vast continent just to our south where millions of people are on the move. Couldn’t May see that, Brexit or not, it is vital for us to be at the table crafting plans? Doesn’t she understand that this is the migration issue of the future rather than the migration of European citizens fetishised by Brexiters, which is anyway dropping sharply as shown in today’s statistics?
But it was the weakness of our geopolitical position that drove May to suck up to Trump – just as it has driven her to make friends with unsavoury dictators around the world such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
It also presumably explains why, despite all the guff about global Britain, the prime minister has yet to visit China. One might have thought she’d make a beeline to what in a few years will be the world’s largest economy. The sad truth is that, shorn of our influence in Europe, we are much less interesting to Beijing. Thanks Brexiters.