As the Us-europe diplomatic gulf widens, which camp will Britain be in?

The consequences of Brexit and the power struggle with East Asia leave the UK in a dilemma

This week the news was dominated by the two issues which will do much to identify Britain’s future role on the world stage. They may seem unrelated, but the crisis in North Korea and Brexit are both crucial battlegrounds in the central strategic question of our time: is the Western Alliance splitting up? And if so, which camp will Britain be in?

On North Korea, Theresa May has publicly backed President Trump’s stance. The reason is clear, Britain still has significant strategic interests in a region which is now engulfed in its most serious crisis since the end of the Korean War.

Kim Jong-un rightly identifies Japan and South Korea as weak spots in the armour of the West, and he is testing America’s resolve accordingly. This stand-off, reminiscent of the worst crises of the Cold War, has made neighbouring countries extremely anxious. It should prompt a moment of reflection in the West, notably because a diplomatic gulf is growing between the US and Europe, and the EU’S own foreign policy ambitions are becoming manifestly more assertive.

There was a watershed moment in this strategic divergence between the Old World and the New at the end of May, when the German Chancellor expressed a fear that had been in the minds of many on the Continent for some time: that Europeans might no longer be able to rely on America, their principal ally.

“The times when we could fully depend on others are – to a certain extent – over,” Mrs Merkel said.

We have been here before. In 1953 America threatened, in the famous formulation of the secretary of state John Foster Dulles, to make an “agonising reappraisal” of its security support for Europe unless European nations themselves contributed to the defence and armament of Western Germany against the Soviets. The key difference today, however, is that for the first time it is not Americans, but Europeans like Mrs Merkel who are speculating about the potential unravelling of the transatlantic partnership.

This is happening because the West has always been a values-based partnership; if it breaks apart it will be due to those values changing and reflected in diverging interests. Take trade. In championing free trade, and criticising what it considers to be Trump’s protectionist policies, the EU looks as though it is positioning itself for a trade war with the US – one that it believes it can actually win.

While the bedevilled EU-US trade deal known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement (TTIP) has been put on ice, the EU recently agreed a trade deal with Japan. When it’s ratified, this will cover nearly 30 per cent of the global economy, 40 per cent of global trade, and will create a trading bloc about the same size as NAFTA.

President Trump has been an outspoken critic of NAFTA – calling it “a very, very bad deal for our country”. So while America under his leadership rethinks multilateralism, Europe is extending it.

This goes to the core of their increasingly divergent world views. For the EU, trade agreements are at the heart of an ambition to sustain a rules-based international order, wherein relations between powers are governed by institutions and agreements. While the US professes an interest in defending that order, it has lost faith in the absolute virtues of free trade. Instead, the White House sees only two enemies: Islamic fundamentalism and China.

In this view Putin is a natural ally as the defender of traditional Christian values. Contrary to the view you will hear expressed frequently in the cafés of Berlin and columns in The New York Times, Trump himself doesn’t think he is selling out Western values, but defending them.

Even on the campaign trail he committed himself to defending gay-rights as well as those of women in the Middle East. He even returned to that theme in his State of the Union address. His assumptions were perhaps best summed up by Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist: “I want the West to look back in a hundred years and say their [China’s] capitalist Confucian system lost and the Judeo-christian liberal West won.”

The growing rift between the US and Europe on trade could not come at a worst moment for the Western Alliance. The Cold War, it is true, involved constant sniping between the US and its European allies as to where the main danger lay – the inner German border or theatres of conflict further afield like southeast Asia (where the Americans found themselves fighting alone in the Sixties).

It also involved a protracted and often bitter discussion about burden sharing – who was paying most for Europe’s defence? But one thing on which there was no disagreement was the identity of the common enemy: the Soviet Union. Now there is.

Trump may have been foiled in his wish to forge a special partnership with Russia but he is likely to continue to press the issue. And that is because he has a completely different worldview from Europeans like Merkel or even May.

Bannon may have gone, but he hasn’t gone away. The generals who persuaded Trump to part with him may not share his historical perspective or even care much about civilisational clashes and the values associated with them, but they certainly care about interests. They certainly see China as the central historical challenge of the 21st century. And there, other than encouraging words, Europe can offer precious little to help.

Where, in this increasingly divided alliance, does Britain position itself? The UK’S free trade credentials are exemplary, but on the 21st-century battleground of East Asia it is hard power that counts. Even in Japan, trade deals or no, Tokyo knows that ultimately it has only one significant ally – and it’s not the EU.

Whatever the consequences of Brexit at home the geopolitical facts speak for themselves. By leaving the EU, the UK may avoid becoming implicated in a trade war with the US.

But the present government must face the fact that Merkel might be right: the US can no longer be counted upon, not because America is likely to sell the alliance short, but because the alliance can do so little for America in the region where its future as a Great Power will be shaped.

So while Britain’s greatest investment since the Second World War has been in the Western Alliance for which it has gone to war in Afghanistan and, arguably against its own better judgment, Iraq, this country’s task now is to resolve the contradiction between what it would like to believe about the transatlantic partnership and what stares it in the face.

For back in Washington there is a growing feeling that the West is becoming a superannuated civilisational community. And, to be frank, at times who can blame them?