The Trump presidency and its promotion of the ‘America First’ agenda, as well as the prospect of Britain leaving the EU, has generated renewed debate over the nature of political, military, and economic relations between the US and UK. Trump’s visit to the UK in 2018 engendered large-scale protests while Jeremy Corbyn has been distinctly cooler than Theresa May about the merits of close relations between the two countries. The political and personal relationships between prime ministers and presidents have clearly been very important for post-war British foreign policy, though the health of transatlantic relations has fluctuated over time.
The broader structure of UK-US relations has been compared to a ‘layer-cake’, ‘with personal leader relations at its apex, bureaucratic interweaving in the middle, and public-level cultural interaction at its base’. CONT.
Ben Clements (U. of Leicester), LSE British Politics and Policy
