Denis MacShane / Apr 2026
Image: Shutterstock
25 years ago a US president paid a state visit to UK. President George W Bush was seen by many Labour MPs and a broader liberal-left community as a war-mongering moron after he invaded Iraq in a futile search for weapons of mass destruction in response to the thousands killed in Manhattan.
My friend, Christopher Hitchens, was delighted. He had written endlessly about Saddam Hussein’s cruelties as a dictator whose preferred method in holding his country together was to detain, torture, execute opponents by placing explosives around the neck of a victim and blowing them to pieces as well as to launch an invasion of Iran supported at the time by Washington.
The US sent billions of dollars of military and economic aid to Iraq and its cruel dictator. But there was no evidence that a single cent was sent by Saddam to Osama Bin Laden the author of 9/11 and his Al Qaeda terrorist network which was financed by rich donors in the Gulf states whose kings, princes and emirs turned a blind eye to Bin Laden ‘s crusade against Jews, Shias or any aspect of western democracy.
Tony Blair relied on MI6 and its chief, Sir Richard Dearlove, who still signed letters in green ink with “C” and later lent his status to the Brexit campaign. The Chilcot Inquiry later condemned his use of faulty sources and failure to check on the sources the government used to justify the invasion.
Donald Trump is now in the firing line of left-liberal fury which at times simply ignores Iran’s anti-Jewish hate and open calls for the elimination of Israel and Jewish existence in the Middle East. He is accused of being the useful idiot of Israel’s far-right prime minister Bibi Netanyahu who has longed for a super-power attack on Iran. He has got one but it has turned into a global Trump recession casting fear into every household and business in the world.
Trump delighted the far-right leaders of Israel when he promised to eradicate Iranian civilisation. But once again he blinked and left Iran in control of the Strait of Hormuz, in possession of enriched unranium and still running a full-on religious dictatorship. Israel is repudiating the latest Trump deal by insisting it will continue its anti-Hamas military campaign with de facto annexation of southern Lebanon. Now trump in turn has turned on US allies insulting their leaders like Sir Keir Starmer or even the wife of France’s president Macron.
25 years ago the opposition to George W Bush’s sending US armies to invade Iraq and Afghanistan produced a similar negative rection from European leaders like France’s Jacques Chirac or Germany’s Gerhard Schröder who refused military backing as long as Bush’s war defied international law as the UN refused to vote for it.
But Bush reacted quite differently from Trump. Far from insulting the European leaders who refused to send their citizens of die in the American invasions, Bush played up the need for Europe and America to keep working together. He came to London in 2003 and told MPs and ambassadors: “My nation welcomes the growing unity of Europe, and the world needs America and the European Union to work in common purpose for the advance of security and justice.”
Thirty years earlier, US President Lyndon Jonnson had taken the same approach when European leaders like Charles de Gaulle attacked US intervention in Vietnam to try unsuccessfully to prevent the nation from turning into a fully-fledged communist police state. Johnson instructed his aides to say nothing about de Gaulle’s anti-American tirades saying that France and America were old allies and even older friends and the current Gaullist lectures and finger-wagging would soon fade away.
Sir Keir Starmer is surely right to follow the LBJ example and not stoop into the gutter of exchanging insults with Trump. And those like me who think Britain’s isolationist rejection of friendship and partnership with fellow European nations should not wish for some kind of rupture into a new 2 camp – US versus Europe – world.
America was born out of Europe and the values of democracy, rule of law, freedom of expression still form a transatlantic bond the ending of which will only benefit Putin, Xi, and the world that rejects democracy and core human freedoms.
