Britain’s May bears gifts for Trump administration

Since Donald Trump’s shock election victory in November, Britain’s ruling Conservatives have been the least reserved among Europe’s leaders to welcome the new administration. That’s partly because for all of British officialdom’s bullish confidence about what life will be like for Britain once it has exited the European Union, the country’s establishment is deeply alarmed about the political and economic prospects for a go-it-alone Britain.    

As far as Britain’s establishment is concerned the United States represents the only salvation for a post-Brexit Britain.

Britain’s Conservatives are eager to pull off a transatlantic trade deal to boost the country’s post-Brexit economic prospects and to compensate for the likely commercial and financial losses the country will sustain once outside Europe’s Single Market in two year’s time.

{mosads}And they want to firm up the so-called “Special Relationship,” which dimmed in the Obama years, to ensure Britain’s global political clout isn’t diminished post-Brexit. EU membership has magnified Britain’s influence in much the same way as London’s global clout was enhanced by the special relationship in its heyday, especially during the Thatcher-Reagan era.

Behind-the-scenes a tremendous British lobbying effort of the Trump administration is underway.

British ministers Boris Johnson and Liam Fox, foreign and international trade secretaries respectively, have visited the U.S.. And British Prime Minister Theresa May will become this week the first head of government to meet the new U.S. president — that partly thanks, a British official conceded reluctantly, to Brexiter Nigel Farage, a Trump favorite and ideological ally of presidential adviser Stephen Bannon.

In fact, the British have been pulling out all the stops they can to strengthen the special relationship and they are using every formal and informal channel available to them to try to fix in the collective mind of the new administration that Britain is America’s indispensable ally — certainly when it comes to Europe.

Pres Trump to hold joint WH news conference tomorrow with British Prime Minister Theresa May, announces @PressSec on Air Force One.

— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) January 26, 2017

Possibly not since the pre-Pearl Harbor Second World War years when the Churchill government set up the the intelligence-run British Security Coordination bureau in New York to to promote British interests in the United States have they been been so determined to get their case across to an American administration.

The BSC — James Bond author Ian Fleming worked for the bureau for some months — was headed by William Stephenson, whose adventures as head of British intelligence in the Western Hemisphere was chronicled in the 1979 bestseller ‘A Man Called Intrepid.’ The bureau’s efforts are credited by historians as having played a major part in shifting American public opinion from isolationist to anti-Nazi.

A BSC has not had to be formed for the current British endeavor. A network of boosters and lobbyists is already at hand in the U.S.— others when needed are able to fly across the ‘pond’ quickly. Current and former diplomats, American comrades-in-arms with the British in the Cold War era, and Britain’s spooks with long ties to America’s intelligence community have all been promoting the importance of Britain and how invaluable Britain can be for Trump, especially when it comes to defense, fighting terrorism and intelligence assistance.

“The Trump team realizes it needs a good international friend,” a former senior British intelligence official with deep connections to U.S. security agencies told me. “I think you will see them turning to three countries in particular: Australia, India and most of all Britain,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity. He was speaking before an invitation to visit the White House was extended this week to the Indian Prime Minister.

“The aim is to anchor Britain in America’s protective waters,” a British official told me as he sipped on a Scotch in his club in London a short walk from Buckingham Palace. “America is key for us post-Brexit,” he added. He said that London is emphasizing in discussions with Washington that the Anglo-Saxon Five-Eyes intelligence relationship should now be seen as the real bedrock of Western defense.

Five-Eyes is an alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and the United States in a joint cooperation scheme whereby they share signals intelligence, military intelligence and human intelligence.

Pro-British think tanks in Washington have needed little prodding to advocate Britain’s case and to explain why a stronger relationship is good for both countries.

An example of that could be seen this week on the Heritage Foundation website, where British-born analyst and former Thatcher aide Nile Gardiner crowed that Friday’s meeting between the British Prime Minister and Trump will send “a clear signal that the Anglo–American alliance will be at the heart of strategic thinking in the new Trump Administration.”

.@NileGardiner‘s must-read recommendations for advancing the Special Relationship ahead of the Trump-May meeting https://t.co/zz5uuJt1D4

— Heritage Foundation (@Heritage) January 25, 2017

And in case the White House misses the point, Gardiner along with a colleague at Heritage’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom supplied the answers of why Britain should be seen as the indispensable ally: the special relationship “has played a vital role in the defense of the free world since World War Two;” the EU is crumbling and a supranational European Union is not in America’s national interest (the authors don’t seem to notice a contradiction here); and any efforts by the European Union to create a competing EU defense identity or EU Army would detract from NATO.

Exactly the same arguments have been heard for weeks since Trump’s election in London’s Whitehall, the seat of British government, in the capital’s wood-paneled clubs British officials frequent and in the senior common rooms of Oxford and Cambridge universities.

There is, of course, special pleading involved in the British case, and it is seamed with a distinctly anti-EU flavor that appears geared to please the Euro-Skeptic Trump. The anti-EU tone undercuts what Theresa May has said publicly to the EU about wanting the European bloc to survive. At Davos last week she said, “it remains overwhelmingly and compellingly in Britain’s national interest that the EU as an organization should succeed.”

“The British denigrate the EU in Washington and then argue we should give them a good Brexit deal,” complained a London-based French diplomat. “La perfide Albion,” he added.

Jamie Dettmer is a former comment editor at The Hill. He is an international correspondent mainly covering now Europe and the Middle East for VOA. He was recently reporting from the front lines in Mosul.

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