The unilateral decision to send four Uighurs from western China to Bermuda without consulting London is the latest example of American governments ignoring Britain when it comes to US interests in British territories abroad.
The move is a wake-up call for anybody who believes that Britain still has any significant influence on US foreign policy. It does not, and has not for many years. US foreign policy is guided by national self-interest. Britain is a useful ally when needed, but what it thinks or wants is largely irrelevant.
Even the famously close personal and ideological partnership between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher masked the truth that the Reagan Administration never remotely considered Britain an equal. Crucial US foreign policy and defence decisions were taken without consulting Britain.
For example, Reagan announced the “Star Wars” missile defence programme without addressing British concerns that the plan would leave Western Europe vulnerable to Soviet attack.
In 1983 the US invasion of Grenada — a member of the Commonwealth — took place without Britain being warned, let alone consulted. Margaret Thatcher said: “I felt dismayed and let down. At best the British Government had been made to look impotent; at worst, deceitful.”
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Last year David Miliband was forced to apologise to the Commons after it emerged that US military flights transporting “rendered” terror suspects twice landed on Diego Garcia, a British territory. It was a major embarrassment for the Government because it had denied that any such landings had taken place. It transpired that the US had again not consulted Downing Street before the flights landed on the giant US base on the British island in the Indian Ocean.
It does not matter whether a Democratic or Republican administration is in power. The nexus of global influence and money in Washington is staggering. British sensibilities are barely on the radar.