Will Trump embrace the idea of an ‘Anglo Union?’

Goodbye EU, hello AU? It’s been evident for a few months now that Donald Trump’s second administration will be more geostrategically ambitious than his first. Yesterday, in another extraordinary press conference in Mar-a-Lago, we got a glimpse of what Trump and his advisors are thinking for the planet in 2025 and beyond. 

Trump reiterated his desire to annex Canada and Greenland. He declared that the Gulf of Mexico should be called the Gulf of America and told Hamas “all hell will break loose” if its Israeli hostages are not returned before his inauguration. 

Earlier, as if to underscore the Greenland point, Donald Trump Jr. flew on Trump Force One with some of his buddies to Nuuk to spread the Make America Great Again message to the frozen north. Like bros on a bachelor party, the adventurous boys even wore “Trump Force One” bomber jackets as Jr. princeling told Greenland’s residents “we’re going to treat you well.”

Where does Britain fit into Trump’s new world order? It’s clear that Elon Musk, in his semi-official role as first buddy to the most powerful politician in the world, is conducting his own somewhat quixotic campaign on X to absorb the United Kingdom more fully into America’s orbit. Yesterday he asked, impishly yet earnestly, if America should liberate the United Kingdom from its “tyrannical government.” Later, Dan Hannan, the Brexiteer Atlanticist, suggested “we bring together the five great Anglosphere democracies [America, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand] in a diplomatic, military and economic union, including unhindered free trade, free movement of labour and an institutionalized military alliance.” Musk replied: “Good idea.”

An Anglo Union (the AU), then? If this all sounds bonkers — like billionaires playing a futuristic version of the board game Risk through world politics — that’s precisely the point. But Trump is about to be once again the leader of what used to be called the free world, so it’s worth taking him seriously, and even literally, for once. 

For more than a decade, analysts have been talking about America’s Pacific tilt — the turning of its strategic focus towards China. Team Trump, it seems, has bigger plans, including a scheme to answer China’s rise by creating a US equivalent of Beijing’s “Belt and Road Initiative” through the North Atlantic. That’s why Trump is so exercised about Britain’s disastrous decision to shut down our exploration of North Sea oil. Trump doesn’t want to disband NATO, he wants to make the North Atlantic stronger for the twenty-first century, which is why yesterday he repeated his demand that NATO members spend 5 percent of their budgets on defense. 

He sees the European Union’s economic power receding, and wants to refashion and reorient the West towards a new age. 

It’s unlikely that Hannan’s Atlanticist fantasy will be realized any time soon. Britain has a Labour government, which is innately suspicious of all American-led global projects, let alone Donald Trump’s. Then again, everything about the ascent of the Make America Great Again movement is improbable. Quite a lot of British people, despairing as we are of our own government, will be wondering if now might be the time to open our minds to the Trump 2.0 global agenda.