In the very long term it is yes but sadly not whilst Farage is looming large over us. The EU won’t contemplate UK rejoining UNTIL there is no prospect of us leaving again. That takes us well into the 2030s I am afraid.
Well written Lewis and really scary too. I think many of us who watch the political landscape are feeing very troubled. Your piece is hard hitting too. Britain is drifting and we can’t seem to place our anchor anywhere. I was always a glass half-full, optimist, but I feel that we are fast losing. I’m not against Starmer like many commentators in the press seem to be. I can see that he is trying his ‘Ming Vase’ type of diplomacy on the world stage, to try and track a path for the UK in what is an unprecedented (but is it?) febrile time. While I think he is a better PM and person than he is given credit for, with a better support team trying their best in the short time they have been allocated, I personally don’t think he’s got the time, the electoral backing or the personality to land the country safely. We truly are in the hell and a hand cart moment. I’m shocked that the UK electorate wants to vote in a company (according to many commentators, Reform is headed up by a charlatan CEO), that has been at the forefront of the most recent schism with our nearest trading neighbour for a position that amounts to a diminished role on the world stage. The UK appears to be destined to be someone’s vassal state in this current climate. We let go of one position of strength I felt we had. I can’t help feel that we are at the tail end of our sphere of industrial power and empire legacy influence. The UK electorate are mired in the day to day and not at the bigger picture level…had they been, perhaps Brexit might not have happened. We truly are living in the “Vibe” era. I’m not sure what comes next, but it isn’t going to be pretty. I sort of fear for my children’s generation, but I’m also slightly hopeful (glass-half full optimism!), maybe they might be better at handling and navigating this next era, because my generation X, millennial and baby boomer cohorts, have lost the plot. I don’t imagine a kinetic war (do we truly even have the energy and resources for one, even on the world stage…I mean, look how we are letting the poor Ukrainians hold the front line), but as the head of MI5 or was it MI6 said, we are potentially already in a cyber one. I fear we will definitely be in a climate one before too long!
Every word of this is true and it astounds me that Starmer and others cling to a false hope that Trump will come good. Trump only understands the laws of bullying. If you push back he backs off. He is a deeply damaged and disturbed child who has a black hole he cannot fill. Even if he took over every country in the world, that void would be gaping. Europe must push back hard and the uk must reject Reform and realign with the EU and start preparing to rejoin.. if they’ll have us
The ultimate winner in all of this is Russia. If Trump had been President in 89 the wall would still be standing. He is psychologically damaged by his child hood. It seems obvious to me that his dad was a bully and he blames his mother for not defending him. Ultimately he is a coward who masks his inferiority complex with bombast.
Lewis, you and your team have your finger on the pulse better than any others. Thank you for your reporting.
May I be so bold as to make a suggestion for one of your next podcasts? Invite a Professor of Geriatric Medicine (or two) on and hold an open discussion about Trump's mental acuity. That's the elephant in the room which is not being discussed in public. We don't need to hear other politicians saying how they'd manage Trump, we need to hear medical experts diagnosing his behaviour. There are plenty of allusions to dementia but no-one has yet focused in on a medical assessment of his health. Could the NewsAgents do this?
I watched Carney’s Davos talk yesterday, no other leader is as articulate, honest and analytical as he is. A bright contrast to Trumps childish, incoherent gibberish. Surely, at some point someone will stand up to him within the GOP?
That speech was inspiring. 'Middle' countries like Canada and the UK will need to form strong alliances and there are already signs of that happening. I don't think Starmer is as clueless as some are making out but we will judge by his actions - a closer relationship with the EU has already been signalled. Bullies like Trump are scary, until you start standing up to them and then they tend to crumble. Most people have personal experience of this, I know I have! Let's not talk ourselves, or our leaders, down, and assume the worst. We have a lot to offer on the world stage and are respected still. We should be proud of that.
Thank you for this pragmatic if depressing piece Lewis.
In the UK the 1956 Suez Crisis is often cited as an inflection point in the UK's influence because it marked the definitive end of Britain’s status as a top-tier global superpower. In the decades to follow Americans will cite Trump"s presidency as their inflection point marking a point in America's declining influence in the world.
Many people who have been through a 'high conflict divorce' with children involved know this all too well. The only thing that matters for some people is total domination, and once you understand even that won't be enough you can start to mentally create space to limit their impacts on your day to day life. Unfortunately in this case they're the president of the USA with all the power that goes with.
The international 'Make America Go Away' push maybe very powerful in the end, at least within the US. America wants to be loved and admired. If enough supporters feel the incumbent bully is making them the subject of derision or dislike, it may signal his end. My feeling is that the cult is withering.
Trump is showing many of the symptoms of Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) and it appears to be accelerating. The world has a madman in charge and unchecked.
He has always been mad, his obvious dementia, of whatever type, has stripped what little filter a functioning pre-frontal cortex previously provided. Unfortunately, his mental state and (misunderstood benefits of his) position are such that he will assuredly never receive proper punishment for his innumerable crimes. He knows right from wrong still today, however. He is fully culpable.
Thank you Lewis, grimm but very true. Do we do something like the Pulitzer in Europe? Besides the only thinh missing is your view in how far Greenland is also a dead - cat for the Epstein files (which still seem not be released completeley)?
Ah, but there is. Much of what is happening now has been a part of Putin's grand plan for decades. This is payback to Trump's benefactor and inspiration. Other elements derive from Project 25 and various billionaire tech oligarchs' evil agendas.
Trump was elected because millions of Democrats recoiled from the horrors and idiocies of graduate class progressivism and, although barking mad himself, Trump looked, by contrast, like a relatively sane alternative. The attitudes of the grown-ups in the US have not really changed. There is still a large majority in the governing class for the traditional Atlanticism of Clinton or Bush - probably even, if the truth is told, within the Trump inner circle itself.
Trump's power will soon be neutralised by the coming congressional elections and he'll spend the next couple of years in impeachment battles. Just like last time around.
Britain needs to ride out the storm without antagonising his possible successors. The last thing we should do is pivot towards Europe, which faces decades of economic decline and political turmoil as the consequence of forty years of quite staggering economic illiteracy and administrative incompetence. Soon even the average denizen of a Mississipi trailer park will be richer than a middle class European. The British state needs to start paying attention to the needs and aspirations of the working population - not just the Oxbridge playpen class - and abandon the ludicrous fantasies of global leadership which Goodall et al cling to even as they systematically destroy the commercial and industrial base upon which those aspirations were once built.
Hugh - you make fair points about how Trump is here and how many still exist who wish another style of American leadership.
However, you're mistaken firstly on 'Trump's power will soon be neutralised' - the mid-term elections aren't until the end of this year and it's already apparent in twelve months how much constitution, oversight, regulatory norm, and basic adherence within law has already been jettisoned with a weary populace just accepting it now. What more, in ten further months? ICE is already an intimidatory presence on some city streets and the outcome from those votes which do get cast will not be meekly accepted. There will be bitter challenge to anything other than a win for Cult of Trump (formerly Republican Party). Trump has all the resources to puncture any kind of instruction to concede, while he reigns on in chaos. Meanwhile, he retains the levers to bully abroad (security and defence, and all the tech stack that we depend on - we have no resilience alternatives. At all).
Secondly, it's not about returning us to some fantasy of ordered US-led 'Western' dominance. That's gone - this is China's century now; but while Trump is in office and his infantile instincts steered by malevolent forces, the decline of the West will be frighteningly accelerated. If the US is reduced to a rotten oversized Russia within ten years - the likely outcome of three more years of Trump - then all our economic futures and alliances will soon be irreparably damaged. Reclaiming just some sense of certainty and partnership at global level would buy us the few decades of First World living we previously still thought likely.
One man threatens it all. Not hysterical nonsense: the US Congress, Senate - and military if necessary - must stop him.
It's really foolish to take sides in American politics in this way: there are no good guys.
You say 'basic adherence within law has already been jettisoned' as if this is something that's happened since November 2024. Attempting to gerrymander red state elections by opening the borders to unlimited illegal immigration, covert media censorship, weaponising the judiciary against your opponents, abusing your elective position with insider trading, using the agencies of the state to fabricate 'conspiracies', concealing the incompetence of the world's most powerful elected official - all the corrupt endeavours of the Biden regime represent every bit as profound a jettisoning of the law as anything Trump has done. Whether you like it or not, ICE is on the streets to enforce the law, however brutally, in the face of state governments that are blatantly flouting it for entirely corrupt motives.
I'm afraid your geopolitics are pure wishful thinking as well. This isn't 'China's century' at all. In a few years the majority of Chinese will be too old to work. The Chinese state won't repeat the failed efforts of European governments to replace those workers with immigrants - such a thing would be anathema to them for racial reasons, quite apart from the fact they've seen what it's done here. You may remember the 'Japanese are coming' scare of the late eighties. The 'China century' narrative is just as nonsensical. Next it will be India or Vietnam, both growing at unprecedented rates.
Provided the Wall Street globalists and their lackeys in the Democrat Party can be routed, the Americans will still be the predominant power in the world 100 years from now. In fact the US is already more powerful in global terms than it has ever been thanks to its near-absolute control of the oil price. This means it can direct events everywhere in the world to a degree no empire - even ours - has ever managed. (please no 'net zero' fantasies - ain't gonna happen)
I don't disagree with a number of your points Hugh (sure, previous administrations weren't pure - although they transgressed within some kind of conventions of practice; and yes China - for all its state-as-primary-organism highest principles - has a stinker of a demographic problem clearly visible ahead).
What I'm not clear on is what you're saying will be the actual outcome here, as a more accurate long-term picture than Lewis articulates?
Are you saying that the 'First World' needs to get shot of moralistic pearl-clutching and just accept as a fait accompli that those with massive weaponry, control of critical resources, and casual disregard of human capital (who we thought were individuals with fulfilled lives creating a greater good) will - now that Trump has imposed it on the First World - start to really get traction and shape a global order very different to the last 80 years? And, hey, tough, we just accept that? Fine if you genuinely believe this; but be assured that more of us will be worse off and live day-to-day more wracked with doubt and cowed submission. Which is a bit of a shame... We're worth more. We've proved it.
"shape a global order very different to the last 80 years?"
I think yours is very much a class-based perspective and, forgive me, horribly complacent.
Let's take the UK. In the thirty years since the boomer graduate class took power in the shape of New Labour we've lived through the largest upward transfer of wealth in our history - or at least since the time of the Enclosures. It's still going on: according to the ONS another £2trillion+ has flooded into the leafy suburbs just since the pandemic via Gordon Brown's rigged property market. This is before we talk about the unfunded pensions and all the other electoral bribes which have converted a welfare system designed to help the poor into a gravy train for a parasitic middle class. This is asset stripping on a titanic scale.
We've witnessed a series of pointless, mostly illegal and extraordinarily costly foreign adventures not pursued in our country's national interest but solely to further the ambitions of narcissistic politicians. Our military have been forced to participate in the utter destruction of a perfectly functional civil society in Libya for absolutely no good reason at all other than to boost the ratings of a US President and his disgusting Secretary of State in an election year.
Meanwhile, a terminally corrupt governing and media class have deliberately stood by and refused to act whilst tens of thousands of children have been kidnapped, tortured and raped in what must be the most widespread criminal conspiracy in our history. We know that large numbers of public officials, police and Labour Party people not only turned a blind eye to this but often actively participated. No-one has been held accountable and no-one will, unless we can bring about some kind of regime change.
The same governing class has systematically broken its own laws and electoral promises with the importation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, many with known criminal records, as part of a mass gerrymandering operation similar to that undertaken by the Biden administration in the US - or as part of a treasonous under the table agreement with European bureaucrats. This has been done expressly and blatantly against the wishes of the electorate. At the same time they have released many dangerous offenders from prison in order to replace them with harmless people guilty only of challenging their self-serving policies with tweets! FFS.
Is your lovely 'liberal order' really worth keeping? Don't think so.
In my experience of being bullied by a manipulative person, the only option is to step back. Step away. Not a retreat, but a clear sign that any former connection no longer exists.
That's the grim reality.
It's the worse possible position any UK PM could find themselves in.
The UK relationship with the USA is not salvageable (unless we want to be a Belarus, a vassal state) but the position with the EU is.
In the very long term it is yes but sadly not whilst Farage is looming large over us. The EU won’t contemplate UK rejoining UNTIL there is no prospect of us leaving again. That takes us well into the 2030s I am afraid.
Well written Lewis and really scary too. I think many of us who watch the political landscape are feeing very troubled. Your piece is hard hitting too. Britain is drifting and we can’t seem to place our anchor anywhere. I was always a glass half-full, optimist, but I feel that we are fast losing. I’m not against Starmer like many commentators in the press seem to be. I can see that he is trying his ‘Ming Vase’ type of diplomacy on the world stage, to try and track a path for the UK in what is an unprecedented (but is it?) febrile time. While I think he is a better PM and person than he is given credit for, with a better support team trying their best in the short time they have been allocated, I personally don’t think he’s got the time, the electoral backing or the personality to land the country safely. We truly are in the hell and a hand cart moment. I’m shocked that the UK electorate wants to vote in a company (according to many commentators, Reform is headed up by a charlatan CEO), that has been at the forefront of the most recent schism with our nearest trading neighbour for a position that amounts to a diminished role on the world stage. The UK appears to be destined to be someone’s vassal state in this current climate. We let go of one position of strength I felt we had. I can’t help feel that we are at the tail end of our sphere of industrial power and empire legacy influence. The UK electorate are mired in the day to day and not at the bigger picture level…had they been, perhaps Brexit might not have happened. We truly are living in the “Vibe” era. I’m not sure what comes next, but it isn’t going to be pretty. I sort of fear for my children’s generation, but I’m also slightly hopeful (glass-half full optimism!), maybe they might be better at handling and navigating this next era, because my generation X, millennial and baby boomer cohorts, have lost the plot. I don’t imagine a kinetic war (do we truly even have the energy and resources for one, even on the world stage…I mean, look how we are letting the poor Ukrainians hold the front line), but as the head of MI5 or was it MI6 said, we are potentially already in a cyber one. I fear we will definitely be in a climate one before too long!
Every word of this is true and it astounds me that Starmer and others cling to a false hope that Trump will come good. Trump only understands the laws of bullying. If you push back he backs off. He is a deeply damaged and disturbed child who has a black hole he cannot fill. Even if he took over every country in the world, that void would be gaping. Europe must push back hard and the uk must reject Reform and realign with the EU and start preparing to rejoin.. if they’ll have us
The ultimate winner in all of this is Russia. If Trump had been President in 89 the wall would still be standing. He is psychologically damaged by his child hood. It seems obvious to me that his dad was a bully and he blames his mother for not defending him. Ultimately he is a coward who masks his inferiority complex with bombast.
Lewis, you and your team have your finger on the pulse better than any others. Thank you for your reporting.
May I be so bold as to make a suggestion for one of your next podcasts? Invite a Professor of Geriatric Medicine (or two) on and hold an open discussion about Trump's mental acuity. That's the elephant in the room which is not being discussed in public. We don't need to hear other politicians saying how they'd manage Trump, we need to hear medical experts diagnosing his behaviour. There are plenty of allusions to dementia but no-one has yet focused in on a medical assessment of his health. Could the NewsAgents do this?
I watched Carney’s Davos talk yesterday, no other leader is as articulate, honest and analytical as he is. A bright contrast to Trumps childish, incoherent gibberish. Surely, at some point someone will stand up to him within the GOP?
That speech was inspiring. 'Middle' countries like Canada and the UK will need to form strong alliances and there are already signs of that happening. I don't think Starmer is as clueless as some are making out but we will judge by his actions - a closer relationship with the EU has already been signalled. Bullies like Trump are scary, until you start standing up to them and then they tend to crumble. Most people have personal experience of this, I know I have! Let's not talk ourselves, or our leaders, down, and assume the worst. We have a lot to offer on the world stage and are respected still. We should be proud of that.
Thank you for this pragmatic if depressing piece Lewis.
In the UK the 1956 Suez Crisis is often cited as an inflection point in the UK's influence because it marked the definitive end of Britain’s status as a top-tier global superpower. In the decades to follow Americans will cite Trump"s presidency as their inflection point marking a point in America's declining influence in the world.
Many people who have been through a 'high conflict divorce' with children involved know this all too well. The only thing that matters for some people is total domination, and once you understand even that won't be enough you can start to mentally create space to limit their impacts on your day to day life. Unfortunately in this case they're the president of the USA with all the power that goes with.
The international 'Make America Go Away' push maybe very powerful in the end, at least within the US. America wants to be loved and admired. If enough supporters feel the incumbent bully is making them the subject of derision or dislike, it may signal his end. My feeling is that the cult is withering.
Trump is showing many of the symptoms of Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) and it appears to be accelerating. The world has a madman in charge and unchecked.
He has always been mad, his obvious dementia, of whatever type, has stripped what little filter a functioning pre-frontal cortex previously provided. Unfortunately, his mental state and (misunderstood benefits of his) position are such that he will assuredly never receive proper punishment for his innumerable crimes. He knows right from wrong still today, however. He is fully culpable.
Thank you Lewis, grimm but very true. Do we do something like the Pulitzer in Europe? Besides the only thinh missing is your view in how far Greenland is also a dead - cat for the Epstein files (which still seem not be released completeley)?
I think Lewis has answered that question in his piece - there is no strategic thinking behind what Trump wants/demands
Ah, but there is. Much of what is happening now has been a part of Putin's grand plan for decades. This is payback to Trump's benefactor and inspiration. Other elements derive from Project 25 and various billionaire tech oligarchs' evil agendas.
Thanks Lesley, yes you could conclude so
Excellent insight as usual. Unlike the verbal diarrhoea currently flowing from London tv hacks
Mark Carney's DAVOS speech shows a hopeful yet tough road ahead - well worth a listen.
So much hysterical nonsense.
Trump was elected because millions of Democrats recoiled from the horrors and idiocies of graduate class progressivism and, although barking mad himself, Trump looked, by contrast, like a relatively sane alternative. The attitudes of the grown-ups in the US have not really changed. There is still a large majority in the governing class for the traditional Atlanticism of Clinton or Bush - probably even, if the truth is told, within the Trump inner circle itself.
Trump's power will soon be neutralised by the coming congressional elections and he'll spend the next couple of years in impeachment battles. Just like last time around.
Britain needs to ride out the storm without antagonising his possible successors. The last thing we should do is pivot towards Europe, which faces decades of economic decline and political turmoil as the consequence of forty years of quite staggering economic illiteracy and administrative incompetence. Soon even the average denizen of a Mississipi trailer park will be richer than a middle class European. The British state needs to start paying attention to the needs and aspirations of the working population - not just the Oxbridge playpen class - and abandon the ludicrous fantasies of global leadership which Goodall et al cling to even as they systematically destroy the commercial and industrial base upon which those aspirations were once built.
Agreed. Deleted my post. Apologies!
Hugh - you make fair points about how Trump is here and how many still exist who wish another style of American leadership.
However, you're mistaken firstly on 'Trump's power will soon be neutralised' - the mid-term elections aren't until the end of this year and it's already apparent in twelve months how much constitution, oversight, regulatory norm, and basic adherence within law has already been jettisoned with a weary populace just accepting it now. What more, in ten further months? ICE is already an intimidatory presence on some city streets and the outcome from those votes which do get cast will not be meekly accepted. There will be bitter challenge to anything other than a win for Cult of Trump (formerly Republican Party). Trump has all the resources to puncture any kind of instruction to concede, while he reigns on in chaos. Meanwhile, he retains the levers to bully abroad (security and defence, and all the tech stack that we depend on - we have no resilience alternatives. At all).
Secondly, it's not about returning us to some fantasy of ordered US-led 'Western' dominance. That's gone - this is China's century now; but while Trump is in office and his infantile instincts steered by malevolent forces, the decline of the West will be frighteningly accelerated. If the US is reduced to a rotten oversized Russia within ten years - the likely outcome of three more years of Trump - then all our economic futures and alliances will soon be irreparably damaged. Reclaiming just some sense of certainty and partnership at global level would buy us the few decades of First World living we previously still thought likely.
One man threatens it all. Not hysterical nonsense: the US Congress, Senate - and military if necessary - must stop him.
It's really foolish to take sides in American politics in this way: there are no good guys.
You say 'basic adherence within law has already been jettisoned' as if this is something that's happened since November 2024. Attempting to gerrymander red state elections by opening the borders to unlimited illegal immigration, covert media censorship, weaponising the judiciary against your opponents, abusing your elective position with insider trading, using the agencies of the state to fabricate 'conspiracies', concealing the incompetence of the world's most powerful elected official - all the corrupt endeavours of the Biden regime represent every bit as profound a jettisoning of the law as anything Trump has done. Whether you like it or not, ICE is on the streets to enforce the law, however brutally, in the face of state governments that are blatantly flouting it for entirely corrupt motives.
I'm afraid your geopolitics are pure wishful thinking as well. This isn't 'China's century' at all. In a few years the majority of Chinese will be too old to work. The Chinese state won't repeat the failed efforts of European governments to replace those workers with immigrants - such a thing would be anathema to them for racial reasons, quite apart from the fact they've seen what it's done here. You may remember the 'Japanese are coming' scare of the late eighties. The 'China century' narrative is just as nonsensical. Next it will be India or Vietnam, both growing at unprecedented rates.
Provided the Wall Street globalists and their lackeys in the Democrat Party can be routed, the Americans will still be the predominant power in the world 100 years from now. In fact the US is already more powerful in global terms than it has ever been thanks to its near-absolute control of the oil price. This means it can direct events everywhere in the world to a degree no empire - even ours - has ever managed. (please no 'net zero' fantasies - ain't gonna happen)
I don't disagree with a number of your points Hugh (sure, previous administrations weren't pure - although they transgressed within some kind of conventions of practice; and yes China - for all its state-as-primary-organism highest principles - has a stinker of a demographic problem clearly visible ahead).
What I'm not clear on is what you're saying will be the actual outcome here, as a more accurate long-term picture than Lewis articulates?
Are you saying that the 'First World' needs to get shot of moralistic pearl-clutching and just accept as a fait accompli that those with massive weaponry, control of critical resources, and casual disregard of human capital (who we thought were individuals with fulfilled lives creating a greater good) will - now that Trump has imposed it on the First World - start to really get traction and shape a global order very different to the last 80 years? And, hey, tough, we just accept that? Fine if you genuinely believe this; but be assured that more of us will be worse off and live day-to-day more wracked with doubt and cowed submission. Which is a bit of a shame... We're worth more. We've proved it.
"shape a global order very different to the last 80 years?"
I think yours is very much a class-based perspective and, forgive me, horribly complacent.
Let's take the UK. In the thirty years since the boomer graduate class took power in the shape of New Labour we've lived through the largest upward transfer of wealth in our history - or at least since the time of the Enclosures. It's still going on: according to the ONS another £2trillion+ has flooded into the leafy suburbs just since the pandemic via Gordon Brown's rigged property market. This is before we talk about the unfunded pensions and all the other electoral bribes which have converted a welfare system designed to help the poor into a gravy train for a parasitic middle class. This is asset stripping on a titanic scale.
We've witnessed a series of pointless, mostly illegal and extraordinarily costly foreign adventures not pursued in our country's national interest but solely to further the ambitions of narcissistic politicians. Our military have been forced to participate in the utter destruction of a perfectly functional civil society in Libya for absolutely no good reason at all other than to boost the ratings of a US President and his disgusting Secretary of State in an election year.
Meanwhile, a terminally corrupt governing and media class have deliberately stood by and refused to act whilst tens of thousands of children have been kidnapped, tortured and raped in what must be the most widespread criminal conspiracy in our history. We know that large numbers of public officials, police and Labour Party people not only turned a blind eye to this but often actively participated. No-one has been held accountable and no-one will, unless we can bring about some kind of regime change.
The same governing class has systematically broken its own laws and electoral promises with the importation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, many with known criminal records, as part of a mass gerrymandering operation similar to that undertaken by the Biden administration in the US - or as part of a treasonous under the table agreement with European bureaucrats. This has been done expressly and blatantly against the wishes of the electorate. At the same time they have released many dangerous offenders from prison in order to replace them with harmless people guilty only of challenging their self-serving policies with tweets! FFS.
Is your lovely 'liberal order' really worth keeping? Don't think so.
You're right. Your superbly articulate and well-argued post has completely persuaded me.
Such clear-eyed analysis.
Trump’s “allies” have been watching through their fingers and hoping….
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time”
In my experience of being bullied by a manipulative person, the only option is to step back. Step away. Not a retreat, but a clear sign that any former connection no longer exists.