Brits are falling out of love with America | The Economist

[0:00]Britons have been falling out of love with America for a long time and you see the first dip right after the start of the Iraq war. Before that, sort of favorability of America is almost at an all-time high. Then Iraq happens and you see a really steep decline which never really recovers. And then you have the two Trump administrations that you see again, particularly the latest one. Britons in particular seem to be very irked about the war in Iran, as well as actually the seizing of President Maduro. You see a very steep decline since January this year in how Britons see America. More than half think it's a negative force now. Do you think this fraying is, you know, particularly the result of this presidency? I think that there is some degree of fraying that was going to happen under not fraying even, but just a loosening that would have happened under any president. Uh it is the case that America needs Britain much less than Britain needs America. I don't think that that's a controversial fact. I think there is something that is important stylistically though about the way that this president talks about Britain. And then what that does politically for the person who's in office, of course, right now, Kier Starmer, but for any subsequent prime minister, right? Because if rhetorically America is in the position of consistently putting Britain down, then the the the mood politically in Britain is going to be that the Prime Minister has to balance domestic politics, which is uh increasingly less favorable America with the strategic need to kiss up to America. And that's very difficult and I think that then you get something that becomes more and more corrosive over time, where the Prime Minister in that situation can't quite achieve both the goals of maintaining domestic popularity while also serving this broader strategic relationship, and I think that is quite insidious.