Trump uses press conference with UK Prime Minister May to restate anti-EU agenda
By
Robert Stevens and Chris Marsden
28 January 2017
UK Prime Minister Theresa May suffered a public humiliation at the hands of US President Donald Trump during their joint press conference Friday.
May arrived in the US Thursday with her government trumpeting the fact that hers was the first visit of any foreign leader to the White House since Trump’s inauguration.
On her first day in the US, she addressed senior Republican policymakers in Philadelphia offering a series of eulogies to the “special relationship” between the US and Britain and pledging to do whatever was required to preserve it.
The “burden” of democracy for the past century had been shared with the UK and “defined the modern world” in the course of two world wars and during the post 1945 Cold War period. Today Eastern Europe lives “in freedom and peace” thanks to “Mrs Thatcher and President Reagan,” she concluded.
Maintaining the special relationship, embedded in the US-led NATO alliance, was essential to avoid “the eclipse of the West” by Russia, China and India, May declared.
In her negotiations with Trump, May was charged by competing factions of Britain’s ruling elite with firming up the promise of a US trade deal to offset the impact of Britain’s leaving the European Union in two years’ time. But this would ideally be backed up with a pledge of continued US support for NATO and Trump rowing back on his overt support for the break-up of the EU—so that the UK could placate the angry response of Germany and France and maintain the possibility of tariff-free access to the market of its largest trading partner.
The New York Times accurately summed up the crisis facing the British ruling class,…