Trump’s National Security Strategy called ‘manifesto for global far right’
Writing in the Guardian’s Wednesday First Edition newsletter after traveling with Burnham to New York for his first face-to-face meeting with US President Donald Trump at the UN General Assembly, the Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar reported that “Burnham doesn’t want to take the Carney approach of all-out diplomatic war with the US, because the US is still our biggest security and economic ally.” Crerar framed the choice in starker terms: “we live in a world of spheres of influence — the US, China, and the EU — and that means having to make decisions about which sphere we want to belong to, whether geographically, or ethically.”
Crerar described Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s earlier sanctions on trade with Israeli settlements as “a promising start” and noted Burnham used his UN speech to announce a new international center for setting global standards on AI, but added that “nobody knows yet how far Burnham will be willing to go.”
In a Davos speech earlier this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney spoke of “a rupture in the world order” and called for the world’s democratic “middle powers” to come together to build alliances based on shared values. Crerar said Burnham does not plan to follow that approach.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, published in December 2025, was described by one former Pentagon official as a “manifesto for the global far right.” The strategy declared that Europe faces “the stark prospect of civilizational erasure” — language Crerar’s newsletter said echoes the far-right “Great Replacement” conspiracy — and that America would encourage the promotion of “patriotic European parties.”
Since taking office in 2025, Trump has installed loyalists in key positions, flirted with the idea of withdrawing from NATO, abolished USAID, gutted the US State Department, threatened to acquire Greenland “by any means necessary,” captured the president of Venezuela and recast foreign policy as a brutal means of putting “America first,” the Guardian reported.
Burnham’s posture drew on, and partly diverged from, that of his predecessor. Crerar said Starmer “got quite a lot of criticism for being obsequious to Trump,” citing a royal visit that gave Trump a dinner-party seat next to the Princess of Wales and a controversial trade deal that could cost the NHS as much as £44.7 billion more on US-branded drugs by 2030, according to her Guardian colleague Aditya Chakrabortty. Starmer later refused to allow the US to use UK military bases for strikes on Iran but was still seen by some inside the UK government as “too flattering and fawning,” Crerar said.
The Tuesday meeting capped a sequence that began hours earlier, when a plane carrying Burnham, a handful of UK ministers, a group of British political journalists and Burnham’s wife, Marie France, landed at a New York airport. Save for “a few minor hiccups,” Crerar said, the meeting went “remarkably well.” Marie France attended a “spouses lunch” with US first lady Melania Trump.
Trump had previously described Burnham, the former mayor of Manchester, as the mayor of “a town”; Burnham had answered by saying Trump would not be welcome in Manchester. At the meeting, Trump called Burnham a “natural businessperson,” a characterization Crerar said “will be news to Burnham.”
Burnham has said since June that he intends to take a different approach to US relations, telling reporters he would not “just go along with anything they say.” The clearest test came earlier this month when Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband imposed sweeping sanctions on trade with Israeli settlements, a move Miliband and diplomats at the Foreign Office had built around a 12-nation coalition over the summer. When a journalist asked Trump at the meeting what he thought of the decision, “Trump didn’t take the bait,” Crerar reported, “and instead deferred to Burnham” — what she called “an unusual show of reticence.”
Downing Street is sticking with Starmer’s proposal to cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius while retaining the right to operate the Diego Garcia military base, Crerar said, even though Trump at the meeting called the arrangement “terrible.”
On artificial intelligence, the two leaders took visibly different positions. In his UN speech, Burnham announced he would launch a new international center to set global standards on AI, though it remained unclear whether the UK would emulate Norway and Finland in backing legislation to prevent the launch of new AI models that haven’t undergone rigorous safety testing — an option ministers in Starmer’s government had previously been exploring. Trump, the Guardian newsletter said, “described attempts to regulate AI as a ‘globalist scheme’, and declared that from now on, his administration will now be referring to AI as SI: Super Intelligence.”
On Iran, Burnham told journalists on the flight to New York that he would press Trump to de-escalate the conflict; Trump said on Tuesday he would strike a deal with Iran after the US midterm elections — a timeline Crerar described as “highly unlikely.” Separately, Burnham has agreed that the UK would help refuel Saudi jets that are defending energy infrastructure against Houthi rebels, a decision Crerar said puts the UK on “a fine line between assisting a regional ally, and getting drawn into a wider conflict.”
The cordial atmosphere in Manhattan did not extend to Trump’s broader UN appearance. In his address to the General Assembly, Trump called on nations to “unite to isolate Tehran and bring down global energy prices,” openly contemplated the “annihilation” of Iran — a UN member state — took a shot at Cuba and attacked the UN for “imposing a radical left-wing agenda.” Trump also told a CNN journalist, one of three networks Trump has banned from the White House, that “you should not be here covering me.”
In other UK reporting the Guardian newsletter flagged: charities condemned footage of a far-right activist using a blade to slash an inflatable dinghy in the English Channel while a rescue worker was onboard, in what the paper described as a further escalation of organised anti-immigration protest; children as young as 13 in the UK have been referred to a specialist clinic for a “devastating” bladder condition linked to sustained ketamine use; British banks and financial institutions are receiving warnings from MPs that they should not invest in Israel’s E1 settlement project; and Burnham has opened the door to fighting the next election on the UK rejoining the EU.