The first time Ben Judah walked into the White House in spring 2024 to meet Jake Sullivan, then the all-powerful US National Security Adviser, he went as an Atlanticist. By his final visit to the West Wing in January, accompanying Foreign Secretary David Lammy to see J.D. Vance, he had become what he calls an Anglo-Gaullist. What changed his mind, "Hvylya" reports citing The Spectator, was "the humiliation of Chagos, twists and turns over Ukraine, surprise American strikes on Iran and the realisation that our closest ally, the superpower we had built our entire security around, had become erratic, emotional and unpredictable."
Judah's central argument is that a political movement like MAGA "is not an aberration but fundamentally a part of what America is: a society too polarised to practise predictable long-term geopolitics in Europe or Asia." The United States, he wrote, "cannot be trusted to stay with us on Russia." Britain, in his view, is "too dependent, in too many ways, on an unpredictable superpower whose zig-zagging trajectory is not ours to influence."
The former adviser drew a sharp distinction between what most Britons understand as the "special relationship" - one in which America gives Britain special treatment - and what he said actually exists. In reality, Judah argued, Britain has a "specialist relationship" with Washington limited to "spying, surveillance and Trident, which confers real capacities at the cost of independence." The gap between the myth and the reality, he suggested, leaves Britain dangerously exposed.
Nothing frustrated Judah more during his time in the Foreign Office, he wrote, than "chunks of our national security state just waiting for cues from Washington on what to think." He recalled often asking officials: "Can't we be a little more French?" Ending this culture of followership, he stressed, does not mean rejecting Washington or abandoning Five Eyes. "Becoming steadily less dependent on America militarily means becoming a better, less needy ally to them," he wrote. From his meetings with Vance, Judah concluded, that was what the vice president really wanted.
The harshest truth Britain needs to admit, Judah argued, is that the US "no longer only cooperates with us as allies but coerces us as vassals." Anglo-Gaullism, in his framing, is not anti-Americanism but a strategy for a world where America's closest allies can no longer count on predictability from Washington.
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