Theresa May’s assignation with Donald Trump - in which he declared the countries were “joined at the hip” – looks at best like a snatched opportunity, at worst like an afterthought. But it is just the latest in a series of diplomatic missteps made by the UK in its dealings with the present US administration that have left the relationship looking special in all the wrong ways.
One can only imagine the response in the Foreign Office and No 10 after the announcement this week that the first foreign leader to be honoured by a state visit to the Trump White House would be Emmanuel Macron. So near, yet so very far.
The matter of a state visit – of the Trumps to Britain – was not the first of the UK’s misjudgments, but it was perhaps the biggest. In terms of protocol, a state visit is not in the prime minister’s gift; the invitation comes from the palace. It also tends to be something that is somehow earned. So for Theresa May to make the offer, on her first visit to the White House, within a few days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, smacked of clumsy over-eagerness. No wonder it became such a bone of contention back home in the UK.
Warnings of street protests followed. MPs, up to and including the Commons Speaker himself, made clear that they would take a very dim view of Trump delivering an address to parliament in any shape or form. Embarrassment, it was subsequently mooted, could be avoided by timing the visit for a recess. Speculation was then encouraged to the effect that the state visit might take a minimalist form – say no coach procession on the Mall, the ceremony confined to Windsor – or that it might be downgraded to an official visit, hooked on to the official opening of the new US embassy.
By which point the White House had clearly got the message, and Trump finally called time on the whole unhappy episode by disparaging the US embassy move and its “off” location and saying he would not be coming at all.
The UK thus became another US “flyover” state. Trump has now been to Hamburg (for the G20), to Brussels (for a Nato meeting), to Paris (at Macron’s invitation for Bastille Day), and now to Davos, without even so much as a refuelling stop in London.
The aborted state visit might have been the most glaring British misstep, but it was one of many. The earliest was perhaps the failure – now denied – to anticipate a possible Trump victory and forge serious pre-election links with his team. This had the added liability of allowing Nigel Farage to pose as a belated go-between. The government’s determination that May should be the first foreign leader into the White House – and its satisfaction when she was – was the next mistake, because it made the UK look fawning and very much the junior partner. The hand-holding was hardly May’s fault, but it was an eloquent image that would not go away.
Others, benefiting perhaps from not having the “special relationship” baggage that so burdens the UK’s transatlantic diplomacy, have managed the Trump presidency rather better. Angela Merkel has kept a judicious diplomatic distance – even during her White House visit – and talks about European values; she has done so again at Davos. Justin Trudeau, too, has balanced Canada’s geographical proximity with maintaining a distance on values.
But it is Emmanuel Macron who has played a blinder. From his first handshake contest to the invitation to the First Couple for Bastille Day, preceded by dinner at the Eiffel Tower, Macron adroitly negotiated the Trump challenge, displaying at once a degree of personal and political strength, a sense of what would please the US president and a certain take it or leave it nonchalance that the UK has never mastered in its dealings with the US. If anything has emerged from the first year of Trump it is that he respects strength and clarity in others, and despises weakness.
It remains to be seen whether the UK can pick up some of the pieces from a year that has essentially been squandered. And it will certainly take more than a side-meeting at Davos, even if the UK tried to set the tone in a statement saying that the relationship was “as strong as it has ever been”. The difficulty is that, just when the UK needs the prospect of a cast-iron transatlantic relationship because of Brexit, the character of this particular president and the weakness of the current UK government have conspired to make it less attainable than for very many years.
• Mary Dejevsky is a writer and broadcaster and a former foreign correspondent in Moscow, Paris and Washington
