Truss learns the hard way that Britain isn’t America
I was reading this article earlier and I thought it brought up an interesting point: due to the relation London has with Wall Street and America, along with similar cultural aspects such as speaking English, many of the UK's power players completely miscalculated how much negotiation power they actually had.
Quote:
So much of what Britain has done and thought in recent years makes sense if you assume it is a country of 330mn people with $20tn annual output. The idea that it could ever look the EU in the eye as an adversarial negotiator, for instance. Or the decision to grow picky about Chinese inward investment at the same time as forfeiting the European market. Or the bet that Washington was going to entertain a meaningful bilateral trade deal. Superpowers get to behave with such presumption.
Why does Britain think that it can, too? Don’t blame imperial nostalgia. (If it were that, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal would show the same hubris.) Blame the distorting effect of language. Because the UK’s governing class can follow US politics as easily as their own, they get lost in it. They elide the two countries. What doesn’t help is the freakish fact that Britain’s capital, where its elites live, is as big as any US city, despite the national population being a fifth of America’s. You can see why, from a London angle, the two nations seem comparable.
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I can see some truth to it. It almost felt like the last few years, the UK was mirroring US politics (Boris Johnson being the Trump-lite UK version), but maybe there is a different aspect I am not thinking of. What do you guys think?
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