{"id":295758,"date":"2026-01-21T12:24:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T12:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/295758\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T12:24:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T12:24:13","slug":"us-uk-relationship-hits-bump-as-trump-scoffs-at-ally-starmer-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/295758\/","title":{"rendered":"US-UK relationship hits bump as Trump scoffs at ally Starmer \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump<\/a> isn\u2019t known for giving gifts, but he delivered one to Tory leader Kemi Badenoch<\/a> overnight, wrapped in a big bow. UK prime minister Keir Starmer<\/a>, meanwhile, got the proverbial lump of coal.<\/p>\n

The US president may have been irked by Starmer\u2019s mild public admonishment of Trump on Monday as \u201cwrong\u201d for threatening to take over Greenland<\/a>. Overnight in British time, Trump retaliated by taking to social media to mock \u201cour \u2018brilliant\u2019 ally\u201d Britain.<\/p>\n

Trump chided Starmer for agreeing to hand back to Mauritius the Chagos Islands<\/a>, where the US has a military airbase at Diego Garcia.<\/p>\n

Starmer\u2019s domestic rivals such as Badenoch\u2019s Tories have lambasted the UK prime minister over the deal, which has yet to clear the House of Lords. The Tories and even some of his own Labour MPs believe Starmer acted weakly in the face of risks to British and US security \u2013 China<\/a> is active in the region. The prime minister, however, says the opposite because the future of Diego Garcia base is guaranteed with a century lease.<\/p>\n

Starmer was careful to get Trump\u2019s imprimatur for the Chagos deal earlier this year, when their mutual bonhomie was in fuller flow. Trump, to the surprise of many at the time, suggested he was okay with the decision when he said in February he was \u201cinclined to go along\u201d with it and that it could \u201cwork out very well\u201d.<\/p>\n

Now, in the midst of the diplomatic maelstrom over Greenland, Trump appears to have changed his mind and has trained his sights on the Chagos agreement.<\/p>\n

He took to his social media platform Truth Social to decry Starmer\u2019s \u201cact of GREAT STUPIDITY [sic] and total weakness\u201d, which he said would benefit China and Russia<\/a>. His sarcastic dismissal of Britain as \u201cbrilliant\u201d in quote marks has gone down badly in Westminster, where there is growing unease that the relationship carefully cultivated by the UK leader with his notoriously unpredictable US counterpart could unravel.<\/p>\n

The irony is the Chagos deal could be a template for a Greenland resolution: an example of how bigger western military powers can have their security concerns addressed in a compromise with a smaller nation worried about its sovereignty.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday, Starmer risked upsetting Trump further. His government gave formal approval to a planned Chinese huge new embassy<\/a> to Britain that the Tories and others argued could be used as cover to tap into sensitive financial data from cables near the City of London.<\/p>\n

The giant institutions of Wall Street all have a presence in the area. Yet plans for the embassy on the site of the Old Royal Mint Court near the Tower of London in eastern central London show its basement could come within a single metre of the cables. Badenoch has criticised the decision. Will Trump do the same again?<\/p>\n

Dan Jarvis, the UK\u2019s security minister, on Tuesday afternoon addressed the House of Commons, where he had to shout over the rowdy Tory benches. He said Britain\u2019s security services had agreed that the consolidation of China\u2019s London presence from seven London sites to one actually had \u201cclear security advantages\u201d. He said Britain had acted to secure the cables, without giving further details.<\/p>\n

That didn\u2019t placate the Tories. What about Trump? Starmer is widely seen to have allowed the Chinese so-called \u201csuper embassy\u201d to smooth the way for a visit to Beijing later this year to meet president Xi Jinping<\/a> and to boost economic ties and defrost UK-Sino relations that have been in a cool-box for several years.<\/p>\n

Starmer\u2019s delicate balancing act of staying close to Trump, while trying to derisk the UK\u2019s over-reliance on the US, continues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump isn\u2019t known for giving gifts, but he delivered one to Tory leader Kemi Badenoch overnight, wrapped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295759,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[9,10,381,356,13,14,17768,6,5446,18028,11,12,15,16,5,550,7,8,1294,393,65,66,67,3997],"class_list":{"0":"post-295758","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world","8":"tag-breaking-news","9":"tag-breakingnews","10":"tag-china","11":"tag-donald-trump","12":"tag-featured-news","13":"tag-featurednews","14":"tag-greenland","15":"tag-headlines","16":"tag-keir-starmer","17":"tag-kemi-badenoch","18":"tag-latest-news","19":"tag-latestnews","20":"tag-main-news","21":"tag-mainnews","22":"tag-news","23":"tag-russia","24":"tag-top-stories","25":"tag-topstories","26":"tag-uk","27":"tag-united-kingdom","28":"tag-world","29":"tag-world-news","30":"tag-worldnews","31":"tag-xi-jinping"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/115933076823283357","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295758"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295758\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}