The misconception that America serves as the world’s generous benefactor has been dispelled. While I hold no admiration for Donald Trump and sympathize with Ukraine’s President Zelensky, the recent events at the White House can have positive implications if we take heed. Contrary to the belief that such occurrences are unprecedented, history tells a different story.
In the aftermath of World War I, the US played a crucial role in preventing Britain from a likely defeat against Germany. However, the response from the British Ambassador, Auckland Geddes, during a visit to the US Secretary of State, Charles Evans Hughes, was far from what was expected. Instead of a cordial exchange, Geddes was subjected to a furious outburst.
Hughes unleashed his anger on Geddes, emphasizing that America’s intervention had saved Britain and that gratitude was now in order. With a tone escalating to a shout, Hughes, known for his reserved and liberal stance, directed his fury at the envoy: ‘You would not be here representing Britain if it weren’t for America’s intervention. England’s voice would have been silenced, with the German Kaiser prevailing, had America not entered the war and emerged victorious.’
Around this time, Mr Hughes’s boss, President Woodrow Wilson, was telling aides of his plans to build a huge new US Navy bigger than Britain’s then was. And if we would not limit the size of our fleet, ‘there will come another more terrible and bloody war and England would be wiped off the face of the map’.
Volodymyr Zelensky and Donald Trump engaged in a tense war of words inside the Oval Office on Friday over US military help to Ukraine
President Zelensky left the White House having not had scheduled talks over US access to Ukraine’s minerals
In fact, within a few short years, after negotiations during which fist-fights almost broke out between British and American admirals, we were indeed forced by US blackmail into limiting the size of the Royal Navy, spelling the end of our days as a world power.
To the Americans, Britain was about as important as Serbia, and they didn’t hide it. Wilson, very unlike Donald Trump, was a generally mild-mannered college professor, not a foul-mouthed rabble rouser. But the message is the same. The US, since it realised its almost boundless power, can do what it likes.
As I’ve pointed out before, during the 1956 Suez Crisis, the chief of the US Navy, Admiral Arleigh Burke, seriously discussed opening fire on British warships, in a conversation with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. And when, for cheap electoral reasons, Bill Clinton decided in 1993 to support and befriend Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams, the British Embassy in Washington was brutally cut out of the loop of knowledge.
Our then Premier, John Major, felt so humiliated that relations between him and President Clinton (never good) almost entirely broke down. There is no ‘special relationship’, and the US has no permanent friends.
What happened to Zelensky was this. Donald Trump comes from an older tradition of American foreign policy, called ‘America First’. This was an actual movement, begun by students and then sweeping the country, which in 1939 and 1940 campaigned hard against the US aiding Britain against Hitler.
This wasn’t, as some now believe, a pro-Nazi outfit. Many of its early members were liberals, even socialists. It was just an expression of a very old American desire to stay out of foreign quarrels, first proclaimed by George Washington himself at the foundation of the nation.
With Donald Trump in the White House, this policy has come back with a bang. It has pushed aside the neo-conservative idealists, who sought to impose what they saw as democracy on the whole world. And it has ended a matching policy of trying to keep Russia from rising again, at any cost.
Quite why British and European leaders were so keen on the neo-cons and their wild, invariably disastrous adventures, I have no idea. I suspect they just wanted to suck up to America whatever it did, and now look foolish because Washington is under new management, and they will – in the end – have to be just as servile to the opposite policy.
If they had only kept their cool, and continued to express doubts about expanding Nato up to the gates of Moscow (always likely to cause trouble) they might be in a better position now.
And Ukraine would still be at peace with its ill-tempered neighbour, its cities unravaged and its young men alive, rather than mouldering in war graves.
