IN Facts: Flattering Trump is no substitute for close EU partners

30 May 2019

Former UK ambassador to the EU and UN David Hannay writes that the UK will need to practise more, not less, close working together with other European countries and with like-minded countries around the world, instead of blindly following the US under Donald Trump's erratic leadership.

[...]If we look at the whole range of the Trump administration’s international policy decisions over the last two and a half years, it is hard to identify a single one which has been of benefit to the UK, or on which the UK has been consulted and had some influence before they were announced. If true, that is a sobering assessment to reach.

So let us look at the detail.

The full list is longer. And what is perhaps most striking is that on every one of these issues the UK’s policies and interests are more closely in harmony with those of other European countries than they are with those of the Trump administration. An odd moment, you might think, to be distancing ourselves from EU policy making, which the UK has done so much to shape over the past 40 years.

What conclusions should be drawn so far as the UK’s future foreign policy is concerned? We should certainly not slip into that knee-jerk anti-Americanism which was so prevalent at times during the Cold War. But nor can we afford to assume that we will always want to follow a US lead, particularly when US policy is formulated so erratically and with so little concern for the interests of its allies. And we will need to practise more, not less, close working together with other European countries and with like-minded countries around the world.

Full article on IN Facts


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