In the 1980s it was widely supposed that there was an intimate bond between President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. She liked him personally and shared his free market and anti-Communist convictions, but she had her private misgivings. Shortly after Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, Thatcher was talking about the new president with Lord Carrington, her foreign secretary, when she tapped the side of her skull and said, “Peter, there’s nothing there.” Later, she was enraged by Reagan’s opéra bouffe invasion of Grenada, whose head of state was Queen Elizabeth II.
Twenty years later there was certainly a relationship between President George W. Bush and the man he called “my closest friend and partner on the world stage,” Prime Minister Tony Blair. And see where they landed us, special partners in a catastrophic invasion. Any intimate British American relationship should have met its nemesis in the sands of Iraq.
Even then, still suffering from the same delusion, Mr. Starmer sat in the Oval Office in February groveling before Mr. Trump. The performance culminated in his theatrical gesture of producing an invitation from King Charles III to visit England, which Matthew Parris, a journalist and former Thatcher aide, called “a cheap, embarrassing and degrading stunt, undoubtedly painful to the king.”
Since at least one poll has found that a clear majority of British people have a negative view of Mr. Trump, a state visit by him and his wife, Melania, could well have an effect far from what he hopes. It might be less like the popular 2009 visit of President Barack Obama, and the first lady, Michelle Obama, than that of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu of Romania, when Buckingham Palace staff were reportedly told to lock up the valuables.
Rather then invoking a mythical special relationship, Mr. Starmer might do better to recall the wise words of a predecessor, Lord Palmerston, who said that England has no eternal friends and no eternal foes, only eternal interests. Has any serious nation, including the United States, ever followed any other principle?
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