The election victory of Donald Trump is a disaster not only for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, but even for the U.S.-U.K. special relationship. “America is now Trump country, at war with progressivism, open borders, international bureaucracies, net zero, Jihadism, military adventurism and the Left-wing media,” writes Allister Heath, editor of the Sunday Telegraph, in a Nov. 6 commentary . “The old order is dead, never to be resuscitated; for better or for worse, American politics has finally caught up with globalisation, deindustrialisation, the resurrection of history (contra Francis Fukuyama) and the internet’s explosive rise.”
“For Keir Starmer, the EU and the West’s Left-wing elites more generally, the scale of Trump’s triumph, and the fact that his team is much more professional this time around, is an existential disaster, the greatest blow since Brexit,” Heath goes on. “Trump will rightly want Britain and the rest of Europe to spend more on defence: this will ruin Rachel Reeves’ fiscal plans (Reeves is Chancellor of the Exchequer). If he imposes a 3 percent of GDP military spending target for Nato, where will she find another 0.7 per cent of GDP? Will Britain allocate more resources to Ukraine if Trump cuts Volodymyr Zelensky off, or will Starmer, humiliatingly, sign up to whatever deal Trump forces upon Kyiv? As to the EU, it will prove itself irretrievably split.”