{"id":21677,"date":"2026-04-25T06:18:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-25T06:18:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/21677\/"},"modified":"2026-04-25T06:18:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-25T06:18:08","slug":"trump-can-smell-britains-weakness-like-blood-in-the-water","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/21677\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump can smell Britain\u2019s weakness like blood in the water"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is\u00a0Dispatches\u00a0with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from\u00a0The i Paper. If you\u2019d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week,\u00a0you can sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Suppose Peter Mandelson<\/a> was still British ambassador in Washington, and had not been sacked last September following lurid revelations about his relationship with the paedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Would the continued presence of Mandelson as UK envoy in Washington have benefited Britain in any significant way? Sir Keir Starmer and his now-sacked chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney<\/a>, clearly thought so, otherwise they might not have devoted such major, and ultimately self-destructive efforts, to getting their chosen emissary in place in time for President Donald Trump\u2019s inauguration on 20 January, 2025.<\/p>\n

His appointment is now condemned universally, if hypocritically, as an obvious timebomb bound to detonate in the Government\u2019s face, though at the time most UK media lauded the move as a deft bid to insinuate our very own Machiavel into the good graces of the Trump White House. Even then, this would not have been as clever as it seemed because Mandelson\u2019s previous closeness to Epstein might have made him toxic to Trump, who was seeking to minimise his own past connection to Epstein.<\/p>\n

But was Mandelson ever up to the job? He was even more sympathetic than Starmer towards Israel during the destruction of Gaza. Going by his past record, he might have been privately supportive of the US-Israel attack on Iran, as is his former boss Tony Blair. Would the arch intriguer have been the right person to respond robustly to a US threat to review its support for de facto British control of the Falklands?<\/p>\n

The visit by King Charles to the US next week<\/a> is taking place against a background of anti-British jibes and insults from Trump, and may further convince him and his crackpot lieutenants that the UK is a pushover in all circumstances. I am not suggesting any high-minded refusal to bend the British knee to King Trump on grounds of national pride, but rather as a matter of realpolitik. As the British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, famously skillful in dealing with Queen Victoria, said: \u201cEveryone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem is that with Trump this simply does not work. On the contrary, his track record is that he enjoys the self-abasement of others, but interprets it as a sign of weakness to be mercilessly exploited. The deeper Starmer\u2019s kowtow, the more Trump abuses him and appears to regard him as a convenient punch ball or a figure of fun. From Ottawa to Beijing and Tehran to Minnesota, the lesson learned in any confrontation or fight with Trump is that it is better to resist him and avoid compromise until he backs off and chooses a softer target.<\/p>\n

Having achieved the status of British national scapegoat, displacing Boris Johnson and Liz Truss as holders of the post, Starmer is now blamed for almost everything that goes wrong in the UK<\/a>. Even so, his critics often except his conduct of foreign affairs. Yet while he repeatedly claims that he is standing up for British interests, he is in practice an ineffectual player when it comes to wars in Ukraine and the Gulf or in handling relations with the US, as Trump turns it into a rogue state. <\/p>\n

But blaming Starmer for everything is a shallow and misleading way of looking at Britain\u2019s relations with the wider world. Almost everything he does has been done before, the problem being that traditional approaches are obsolete.<\/p>\n

Go back almost a century to 1929, just before the Great Crash, when the British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald\u2019s official visit to the US was reported by my father, who was then a correspondent for The Times in New York. Then as now, the British thought too much about what impression they were making on Americans. My father found that MacDonald and his party were in a high state of agitation, as their ship sailed into New York port, about whether the prime minister should wear a top hat (perhaps too aristocratic for American sensibilities) or a cloth cap (perhaps a shade too proletarian). <\/p>\n

\u201cMacDonald,\u201d wrote my father, \u201cwho could not decide the question of whether he wanted his eggs light or hard boiled\u201d without dithering, ultimately referred the matter to the Foreign Office back in London who promptly radioed back advising the top hat option.<\/p>\n

British attitudes to America often combine being over-impressed by American power \u2013 and sucking up to those who wield it \u2013 with an unspoken condescension, wrongly persuading themselves that Americans are bigger suckers for a bit of British soft soap than they really are.<\/p>\n

It is no fault of King Charles<\/a>, but host countries \u2013 and Washington in particular \u2013 generally take foreign visits less seriously than the visiting panjandrums. A reset in US-UK relations is, so to speak, for the birds. Trump\u2019s visit to Windsor last year, complete with horse-drawn coaches and antique uniforms, produced no appreciable improvement in the attitude of Trump and his acolytes to Britain \u2013 other than possibly to persuade them that the country belongs in a museum.<\/p>\n

The pay-off from these humiliations in terms of influence on US decision-makers has been in decline for years. I was a correspondent in Washington in 1994 when, despite the furious opposition of the British government, President Bill Clinton decided to grant the Irish Republican leader, Gerry Adams, a visa to visit the US. Along with other resident British correspondents who had written about British official anger at the rebuff, I was summoned to the British embassy where the ambassador, visibly trembling with rage over the granting of Adams\u2019 visa, tried to tell us through clenched teeth that he could scarcely find words to express how little he cared about it.<\/p>\n

A decade or so later, Blair committed British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq, justifying this by saying it gave Britain important influence over US policy. But the heavily researched Chilcot inquiry into the war found no evidence that Britain had any influence on US actions in Iraq whatsoever.<\/p>\n

The Mandelson appointment was a bad idea whose day had come. Starmer has shown himself duplicitous and ruthless in trying to blame others for the debacle that followed. Yet the devil, contrary to the old clich\u00e9, is not in the details. It is in the overall misconception about how to handle Trump and the US. Starmer proudly says that he has kept Britain out of the US-Israeli war on Iran, but self-marginalisation is not enough as the British economy is battered by the impact of the war.<\/p>\n

Driving home the hardball nature of Trump\u2019s relations with US allies is the crude search for pressure points, such as suggesting that the US might review its position on British control of the Falkland Islands as punishment for the UK not supporting the US in its war on Iran. <\/p>\n

Sending Mandelson or the King to Washington no longer works, and projects timidity to a US administration that responds to weakness like a shark detecting blood in the water.<\/p>\n

Further Thoughts \u00a0<\/p>\n

The attention of the world is all on the US and Israeli war against Iran and the future of the precarious ceasefire. The Ukraine-Russia war has dropped down the media agenda as the stalemate enters its fifth year. It has now gone on for longer than the war between the Soviet Union and Germany (1941-45), during which the Red Army advanced from the outskirts of Moscow to Hitler\u2019s bunker in Berlin. In sharp contrast, Putin\u2019s Russian army has scarcely advanced at all since the failure of its invasion in 2022.<\/p>\n

Western leaders are paradoxically so eager to demonise Putin as a Stalin reborn, capable of menacing the rest of Europe, that they underplay his disastrous record as a warlord. Russia remains a nuclear power, but in every other way this disastrous war has vastly weakened it as a regional and global player. Putin\u2019s initial goal was to install a friendly pro-Russian regime in Kyiv, but he has utterly failed in this at the cost of more than one million dead and injured Russian soldiers. The Russian economy is showing signs of severe strain under the impact of sanctions. <\/p>\n

Ukraine is in many ways in a worse state, despite the European Union making a \u20ac90bn (\u00a378bn) loan to it after a prolonged delay because the Ukrainians were allegedly slow to repair a Russian pipeline through Ukraine supplying oil to Hungary. President of the EU commission, Ursula von der Leyen, was in a self-congratulatory mood this week announcing that Ukraine will get the money, but she showed a blithe indifference to the tens of thousands of Ukrainians who will die as a result of the war during the lifetime of the loan, with no achievable goal in sight.<\/p>\n

Aside from President Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukrainian political and military leaders are decreasingly prepared to fight a forever war according to observers of Ukrainian politics. Ukraine effectively won the war in 2022 when the Russian attack swiftly collapsed. Clearly the war must end in a compromise peace, something that has been inevitable ever since the Ukrainian counter-offensive in 2023, heavily supported by the West, failed to gain significant territory. <\/p>\n

Zelensky lost his all-powerful chief-of-staff Andriy Yermak and other senior members of his entourage in a corruption scandal last November. I\u2019m told the Ukrainian National Corruption Bureau (NABU), which acts in close co-operation with the FBI, had bugged an apartment for over a year where it listened to senior Ukrainian officials discussing their corrupt deals.<\/p>\n

The outcome of the scandal was to damage Zelensky\u2019s reputation domestically and force him to appoint the former head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov, as his new chief of staff. But Budanov is very much his own man, closer to the Americans than Zelensky, and is a credible candidate come the next presidential election. <\/p>\n

Crucially, he is also more open to a compromise with the Russians, supposing one is on the table. In a recent Ukrainian opinion poll, voters ranked Budanov in third place in any future presidential contest after Zelensky and former army chief, Valery Zaluzhny, who is now the Ukrainian ambassador in London. <\/p>\n

According to the bne IntelliNews agency, all of the Ukrainian leadership, \u201carguably except Zelensky, understand that the prolongation of the conflict will only bring Ukraine more misery and no respite\u201d. <\/p>\n

Although Ukraine has effectively won the war, a compromise peace with Russia will be a disappointment because it will be far from the victory which Zelensky has promised. Territorial losses will not be reversed and there will be no entry into Nato or the EU and no Western security guarantee. \u201cWhat did we fight and die for will be the main question Ukrainian voters will be asking in the next election,\u201d says the report. <\/p>\n

Much depends on what the Americans think of all this. They would like to get rid of Zelensky. Trump would also like some form of negotiated peace for him to boast about before the midterm elections.<\/p>\n

Beneath the Radar\u00a0<\/p>\n

The decline of the high street in British cities and towns has long been a lament, but who would have predicted that their saviour may be black market cigarettes and the drugs trade. For some years, small groceries have been mysteriously popping up in dismal streets with boarded shops in towns and cities all over Britain where rents are high. <\/p>\n

Clearly, they must be selling something more profitable than bread and teabags, such as black market cigarettes at \u00a35-7 for a packet of 20 compared to \u00a320 for a legal pack. Some also sell cocaine, cannabis, laughing gas and prescription pills, according to a BBC investigation.<\/p>\n

What I find striking is the sheer number of these shops, often identifiable because of tough-looking young men standing or sitting in a chair outside them, possibly to keep an eye out for the police but more likely to deter rival black marketeers. <\/p>\n

Cockburn\u2019s Picks\u00a0<\/p>\n

Amal Khalil is the latest journalist to be killed by the Israel Defence Forces in what the Lebanese authorities say is clearly an unofficial Israeli policy of killing journalists \u2013 something the Israeli military denies. Some 15 journalists have died in Lebanon in addition to 235 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed in Gaza.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is\u00a0Dispatches\u00a0with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from\u00a0The i Paper. If you\u2019d like to get this direct to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21678,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,361,94,1049,5035,2618,1573],"class_list":{"0":"post-21677","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-keir-starmer","11":"tag-king-charles-iii","12":"tag-peter-mandelson","13":"tag-royal-family","14":"tag-special-relationship"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116463894876515745","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21677","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21677"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21677\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21678"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21677"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21677"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21677"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}