Unravelling the Atlantic alliance will be hardest for the UK and hardest of all for the UK's spies

In fact, I doubt it can be done

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

                                                                                     Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll

The impossible things keep coming thicker and faster, certainly as many as six before breakfast. As GOP politicians man the airwaves insisting that Russia didn’t invade Ukraine (have a look at the video below), the United States votes with Russia, North Korea and Belarus at the UN to oppose a motion condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Oh, and Nicaragua. Yep, the country that almost personified Reagan-era antagonism, whose government was so hated by the Republicans that it was worth creating a baffling conspiracy that involved sending weapons to the Iranians to fund a far-right militia fighting the Sandinistas that ruled the roost in Managua. That Nicaragua now votes with Trump’s America against Europe, Ukraine and what we used to call the Free World.

Another thing that would have been hard to believe any more than a few days ago is one of the most consistently atlanticist conservative politicians in Germany, whose party has just won an election, declaring, “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.” This was Friedrich Merz, whose will be the next Chancellor of Germany and who is the personification of pro-business, pro-American centre-right German politics.

The unravelling of European defence and security from its erstwhile American ally is happening, live, in front of our eyes. Part of that will be driven by America pulling its resources out of Europe; part of it will be from European leaders such as Merz, Macron and maybe even Starmer sitting up and making bold commitments. The reason I pause before believing Starmer might join is not any doubting of his ability to read the unfolding situation (the essential imperialistic madness of the Trump administration and the collapse of US institutions). But British defence, foreign affairs and intelligence officials are completely instinctive in their transatlanticism. Talking to some of them in recent days I have a sense of a class of people still refusing to face the new reality unfolding before them. This is unsurprising as the dominant culture in their world for the past 80 years has been that if you want to appear serious or ambitious in British government service you propose joint work with the Americans, or you apply to work in Washington DC or - better still - you get seconded to a US government institution to ‘build your networks’ in the imperial capital. It was not exactly like that for French or Germans.

But that was when, in the nauseatingly smug language of Harold Macmillan, we the Brits found “the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans – great big vulgar, bustling people”. We’re no longer the Greeks in Ancient Rome, a faded civilisation still highly regarded by our imperial ally. We’ve gone back to being the Britons, around the time the legions were withdrawn from Hadrian’s Wall: marginal, no longer of potential economic interest, certainly not worth defending.

Modern Europe is rapidly discussing how it will finance a post-American defence structure, whether with a ‘Defence Bank’ or similar. But the harder part will be how to operate it. There has been much talk of the British nuclear deterrent being part of a new nuclear umbrella for European defence. But, unlike France’s nukes, ours don’t function independently. We rely on American technical support for every aspect of the support and maintenance of the US-made missiles that are the key delivery element of the Trident system (the nuclear warheads are British made, but without a delivery mechanism, they aren’t particularly useful). The missiles that aren’t deployed onboard our submarines are kept in a communal pool at the US Strategic Weapons facility at King's Bay, Georgia. If we decouple from the US, what would be the status of these missiles and would the UK continue to have access to them? What would stop a Trump-led US from unilaterally shifting the agreements around these missiles?

Intelligent signals?

If we turn from the world of nuclear weapons to the even more secretive world of signals intelligence (SIGINT), it is here that the challenges get even greater. The degree to which the US SIGINT agency the NSA is institutionally and operationally intertwined with our GCHQ is rarely understood. But it is a deep, structural phenomenon. There are numerous capabilities and geographies that both sides depend on the other to deliver, and whilst the UK is obviously the smaller partner, it is by no means irrelevant to the American side. (This is also the case for other Five Eyes allies, albeit on a slightly smaller scale.) There isn’t a current version of GCHQ that exists without the NSA (this is not the case for the other agencies, SIS and MI5, which have strong, but not irreplaceable, transatlantic relationships).

Is the British state even prepared to give up its special relationships with American institutions when it comes to the intelligence world? It is also reasonable to assume that American espionage against the British, if we were to cut ties to an adversarial United States, would be highly effective and hard to limit, such are the extensive networks of pro-American officers all over the British services. For an analogy, think of the ease with which the Russians have penetrated many of the security and intelligence services in former Soviet states.

For these reasons, I am not convinced that the British state would ever be willing to separate itself from its American alliances, to achieve the ‘independence’ that Merz talks of. It’s easy to imagine this becoming the sticking point in a future Euro-Atlantic Treaty Organisation of the sort that I discussed with Mike Martin on the most recent episode of my podcast (see below).

Perhaps the debate will solve itself, either by the Trump administration weakening his intelligence services to the point that the rupture is made easier, or by a British fear of Russian infiltration of the US structures (another of the six impossible things you now have to believe in) driving it towards deeper engagement with Europe. But changing a fundamental culture, such as exists in the British Deep State with regards to America, is incredibly hard to do and would need an entirely new leadership determined to make it happen.