The Guardian view on US-Europe relations: Britain is coming to a fork in the road | Editorial

No country can avoid the economic impact of Donald Trump’s aggressive trade policy. There are no exceptions to the president’s global tariff on aluminium and steel and no escaping the general volatility and constant uncertainty provoked by a capricious regime. But Britain is lucky not to be a direct target.

Mr Trump has no border-related grievance against the UK, as he does with Mexico and Canada. The balance of bilateral trade is neutral enough for Britain to avoid being listed among the nations that sell more to the US than they buy from it. The White House sees that asymmetry as a devious scam, for which tariffs are a form of retribution.

The European Union is despised as an egregious offender in this regard, so, in the short term, Brexit affords the UK some shelter from Mr Trump’s ire. It would be a mistake to see that brief respite as some kind of opportunity. Mr Trump has always been a fan of Brexit because it weakened the EU and because an isolated Britain would be vulnerable to economic colonisation.

A US-UK trade deal was cited by British Eurosceptics as a great prize, although they overstated the benefits much as they catastrophically underestimated the cost of leaving the European single market.

A succession of pro-Brexit Conservative prime ministers failed to seal a comprehensive transatlantic trade deal. What sounded easy on the campaign trail proved trickier in confrontation with the awkward economic and political reality. The US is vast, mighty and drives a hard bargain. British consumers are wary of having their supermarket shelves stocked with American chlorine-washed chicken or hormone-treated beef. British farmers do not want to be put out of business by an influx of those products. And that is just one small element of a negotiation that would mostly amount to Washington presenting London with degrees of regulatory vassalage: American goods on American terms.

Not only goods. Mr Trump takes a maximalist and wholly one-sided view of barriers to trade, seeing anything that curtails the operations of any US business in an overseas market as an offence against basic freedom. That explicitly includes anything that, in the White House definition, “incentivises US companies to develop or use products and technology in ways that undermine free speech”.

In other words, any moves by the UK to regulate digital technology in ways that Mr Trump’s friends in the tech sector don’t like – and the Online Safety Act already falls into that category – risks incurring the president’s wrath.

Sir Keir Starmer has so far navigated the caprice of the current White House administration shrewdly. He has been warmly received in Washington. But avoidance of conflict should not be confused with significant leverage.

The prime minister seems to think he can restore the UK’s pre-Brexit status as a strategic bridge between Europe and the US, but Mr Trump is not in the bridging business. He sees Brussels as the capital of an economic conspiracy against American interests.

In trade talks with Washington, Sir Keir will be presented with a choice between submission and enmity. He insists that there is a middle way to be navigated between Brussels and Washington, but there is a fork in the road ahead. Britain’s economic and strategic interests will point to the European path.

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.