When the UK’s newly appointed foreign secretary, Liz Truss, met her US counterpart Antony Blinken for the first time last September, the conversation was far from diplomatic, Financial Times reports.
According to people briefed on the discussion, Truss questioned the special relationship between the two countries — a concept that has underpinned the US-UK alliance since the phrase was popularised by Britain’s wartime prime minister Winston Churchill in the 1940s.
Truss said she had seen few tangible examples to support the idea that the relationship was particularly unique, one of the people said, citing Britain’s better trade relations with Canada, Japan and Mexico, as well as a dispute over steel tariffs with the US. “Her attitude was ‘what have you done for me lately?’,” the person said.
That conversation was emblematic of a style described as blunt, binary and assertive by US officials and analysts, some of whom said Truss was quick to take maximalist positions without thinking of the consequences.
With Truss on course to become the next UK prime minister on September 5 following a bruising Conservative party leadership election, the US foreign policy establishment is asking whether she will bring her bombast from the Foreign Office to Downing Street.
“Truss is going to be a lot more assertive in standing up to the Biden administration than Boris Johnson,” said Nile Gardiner, of the rightwing Heritage Foundation think-tank in Washington. On the Ukraine war, which has dominated Truss’s period as foreign secretary, the US and UK have presented a united front and co-ordinated closely to declassify intelligence before and after Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
But beneath the veneer of solidarity, Truss has at times irked her American counterparts, according to people briefed on their thinking. In a speech in April she called for the countries to work together on a Marshall Plan for Ukraine, an echo of the US programme that funded the reconstruction of western Europe after the second world war.
The speech “raised eyebrows” in the Biden administration, according to a US official, given that Britain has given billions less in economic and lethal aid to Kyiv than Washington has. It was but one instance of an approach that another senior administration official described as “very black and white”, where her rhetoric has frequently outstripped British commitments and American policy.
In March, Truss said the US and UK must “work together to ensure that Putin loses in Ukraine”, while in July she said the Russian president needed to “suffer a strategic defeat”. Meanwhile, the US has recently backed away from talk of outright defeat of Russia.
And after President Joe Biden used a speech in Warsaw in March to declare that Putin could not remain in power, his aides were forced to make clear the US was not advocating for regime change. Truss and her team, meanwhile, have at times been frustrated by Washington’s unwillingness to take a harder line on Russia, said a person familiar with the matter.
“As the administration is trying to find ways to navigate through increasingly tense situations, her clarity can work against some of their interests,” said Heather Conley, president of the German Marshall Fund of the US. Conley added that Truss appeared less concerned than the US about “provoking a potential escalation” and had not engaged in the same “sort of hedging” as American diplomats.
However, some US officials characterised the tensions as the kinds of squabbles that siblings often have and said they would not fundamentally alter Anglo-American ties. The US state department declined to comment. The White House and Truss’s leadership team did not respond to a request for comment.
