So much for the trade deal we were promised. President Donald Trump came to Britain, said all the right things, invited the king for a return visit, and then went home, leaving in place the highest tariffs in a century.
His justifications keep changing. Sometimes tariffs are a way to protect jobs, sometimes retaliation for overseas protectionism, sometimes a form of revenue, sometimes punishment for selling Americans things they want (that is, running a trade surplus).
I can’t be bothered to rehearse the case against tariffs yet again. If the loss of 12,000 manufacturing jobs last month in industries whose costs have gone up because of the tariffs doesn’t jolt MAGA out of its protectionism, nothing will. What is striking is that, even in Trumpian terms, there is no justification for the tariffs against Britain. The United Kingdom is too overregulated to undercut the United States on price, American trade is in surplus, and there are almost no U.K. tariffs on U.S. goods. If there was one country where the levies could easily have been lifted, it was Britain. Yet, for all the warm words, they remain in place.
It’s true that the two countries agreed to work together on tech and artificial intelligence, which is fine as far as it goes, but, frankly, it’s happening anyway. Britain, being one of just three countries (along with the U.S. and China) with any serious industry in this sector, offers American investors much cheaper wage costs and, because of Brexit, it has escaped the European Union’s regulatory immobilism on AI.
Still, by any definition, the economic relationship between the two nations is more distant than it was before “Liberation Day” in April — especially since the scope of the steel tariffs was extended last month.
Brits are starting to notice. As in Canada and Denmark, the sharpest reaction has been from those who, until now, have been uncomplicatedly pro-American. On the day the state visit ended, I spoke in a debate at St. Bartholomew the Great, the oldest parish church in London, which has a tradition of holding an annual “Great Disputation” that stretches back, rather amazingly, to 1133.
The motion was “This House believes that America is still the Shining City on a Hill,” and, in proposing it, I drew on Benjamin Franklin, who had worked as a printer in that very church in 1725. Franklin came late and reluctantly to the Revolution. As late as 1773, he was urging the patriots not to sever the union with Great Britain lest they thereby tilt the scales in favor of Europe’s Catholic powers. When he embraced the cause, he did so skeptically and empirically, as a good scientist should. He remained cautious right up to the agreement of the Constitution: “A republic — if you can keep it.”
We ought, I argued, to judge the U.S. in a similarly proportionate spirit. Not against a Platonic ideal, but against the actual, real-world alternatives — Algeria, Bolivia, Cambodia, Dominica. The fact that, being populated by human beings, it sometimes fell short of its ideals was not a condemnation but rather a compliment to those ideals, which inspired better behavior. Hence Martin Luther King’s description of the founding documents as a “promissory note.”
Trump, I argued, was precisely the kind of two-bit Caesarist those documents had been designed to constrain. And you know what? The system was working. Much as he would like a third term, Trump cannot have one — unlike in 90% of countries, where the strongman would simply change the rules. For all the talk of how he has packed the Supreme Court, it struck down his illegal tariff policies (though sadly, he is finding more constitutional ways to pursue the same objective).
REACTIONS TO THE CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSINATION REVEAL A NATION ON THE BRINK
The audience wasn’t buying. The hard Left has always been anti-American, just as in the U.S. itself. But the moderates, the people who until now would have taken the special relationship for granted and who would have been quietly pleased to have such compliments from a U.S. president, were — well, not so much hostile as sad. They no longer saw America as a beacon for democracy or the rule of law or even, as the authorities remove critics from the airwaves, free speech.
Perhaps it was inevitable. Hardly anyone remembers the Churchill-Roosevelt partnership, and even the Thatcher-Reagan alliance means nothing to anyone under 50. Still, I can’t help feeling that the real watershed was at the beginning of this administration, when a U.S. president began making annexationist claims against allies. That is not a moment that can be unseen. I am not sure things can ever go back to where they were.
