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Something seismic has changed in the US-British relationship that will require the UK to look elsewhere for allies and accept that deals such as cooperation over the British nuclear deterrent are now in question, a former British ambassador to Washington has said.
Sir David Manning told a Lords select committee on international relations that something fundamental was happening to the special relationship and the change was not a blip.
Speaking alongside three other former UK ambassadors to Washington, he added that a divergence in values as much as policy was driving the two countries apart.
All four warned that future intelligence sharing with the top level of the Trump administration, once the bedrock of the relationship, was likely to become more difficult.
Manning, the ambassador between 2003 and 2007, said the issue was not policies but a worldview, adding: “What worries me about what is now happening is that the basis of the special relationship so-called has been about trust and shared values. I think in the future, can we expect that to continue?
“It’s much more difficult to be confident about that. It seems to me there has been a seismic change. We seem to have a president who is willing to bully, cajole the Ukrainian forces into doing things they don’t feel is in their interests.
“This is not a blip in the relationship, something fundamental is going on, and we need to look very closely about what we now do about Europe.”
He said it was even possible that Trump would end the nuclear cooperation deal with the UK or that the US commitment became so equivocal that Nato’s article 5 mutual defence clause no longer looked plausible.
He said such thoughts had been inconceivable until six weeks ago. “I think we now have to conceive of them and address them because they are on the table.”
Nigel Sheinwald, the ambassador from 2007 to 2012, said: “America is genuinely changing and the American leadership has changed.”
He added: “It’s difficult to find either a conceptual area in international relations or a particular geographical area where our interests are really converging at the moment.
“It’s more divergence than convergence. The President [William] McKinley worldview of land grabs … might is right, and all that, that isn’t our view. It won’t be our view, whatever government we have here, given that we are a middle power that uses international institutions for our own advancement as well as because that is morally right.
“So at the macro level, there is a huge divergence. On more or less any big foreign policy issue that we’re dealing with today, we don’t agree with the United States and have more alignment with our European partners – whether that is the Middle East, whether it’s Iran, whether it’s climate change, China, but above all on Europe itself.”
Sir Peter Westmacott, the UK ambassador from 2012 to 2016, said respectable voices were warning that the US was giving up on Europe in favour of Russia. He said: “That’s pretty alarming. We haven’t had that for decades, and we have to deal with that current reality, and that is the biggest strategic problem.”
He said: “Even if we are now back in the business of trying to find a way forward with a combination of a ceasefire plan and security guarantees that Ukraine needs, we still have got that fundamental problem of a very different approach to Russia.”
He added that it was unclear if the US had a grand strategy to split off Russia from China, or if instead it was seeking to divide up the world into three big beasts in the jungle – China, Russia and America – with the rest to be told to go hang.
