After Brexit, British bolshie-ness will be up against the great powers

Tom Cotton is a US senator from Arkansas, the state that Britain and much of the world would chiefly know as being the home state of president Bill Clinton. Mr Cotton is also a close ally of Donald Trump, someone that Britain and much of the world knows to be bullying, transactional and utterly uninterested in anyone’s opinion or preferences.

Mr Cotton is probably destined to become well-known in Britain, on his own merits. He recently tweeted about the UK government’s decision to rely partly on Huawei, the Chinese company, for the development of Britain’s 5G cellular networks. Mr Cotton said: “This decision is deeply disappointing for American supporters of the Special Relationship. I fear London has freed itself from Brussels only to cede sovereignty to Beijing.”

There you go then. What’s increasingly clear is that Trump’s America expects Brexit Britain to be properly subservient.

Fabian Zuleeg, head of the European Policy Centre, a Brussels-based think-tank, says that the UK is now going to be “caught between the global superpowers”.

The special relationship wasn’t really ever that special but with Mr Trump in charge it’s meaningless, except as a pressure point.

Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com on January 30, 2020.