Step out of the Foreign Office—now inelegantly renamed the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office—and almost directly in front of you is the Cenotaph, Britain’s stone memorial to its war dead. Walk north past a gallery of bronze sentinels, including Field Marshal Douglas Haig and Montgomery of Alamein, and before long Trafalgar Square opens before you, Admiral Nelson standing on his column high above it. Go south instead and the road widens into Parliament Square, where, ringed by yet more monuments to Britain’s political and imperial past, stands a brooding old bald man, hunched in his heavy coat and leaning on a stick.
As a synecdoche of British—and ultimately Western—power, Winston Churchill is unparalleled to the point of cliché: confident, clear of purpose, and victorious. He’s a shorthand of what, for a time, we were.
I thought about that grid of streets, loaded with the relics of past glory, when Donald Trump recently mocked Washington’s “once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them all” for finally considering sending aircraft carriers to the Middle East. “That’s OK, Prime Minister Starmer, we don’t need them any longer—But we will remember,” he posted to Truth Social. Trump later called out the Europeans, saying that French president Emmanuel Macron had been an “eight out of 10 on Hormuz,” before adding, “not perfect, but it’s France.”
More recently, on March 31, Trump was back on Truth Social calling out America’s European allies even more strongly for their failure to work alongside the U.S. more fulsomely, and threatening to wash his hands of the entire problem of the virtual shutdown of global oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which he claimed was really Europe’s problem anyway. “Build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT. You’ll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us,” he wrote. “Iran has been, essentially, decimated. The hard part is done. Go get your own oil!”
