UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has never had a bad word to say in public about US President Donald Trump.
That is not being reciprocated now as the American president lambasts the British prime minister over his reluctance to join the US-Israeli strikes on Iran.
“This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with,” Trump said Tuesday at the White House, blasting Britain’s reluctance to let US warplanes use its bases.
The dispute is roiling a relationship that Starmer worked hard to forge, and further straining trans-Atlantic ties frayed by Trump’s “America first” foreign policy and transactional approach to international relations.
“This was the most solid relationship of all. And now we have very strong relationships with other countries in Europe,” Trump told British tabloid The Sun in an interview published Tuesday.
“I mean, France has been great. They’ve all been great,” Trump said. “The U.K. has been much different from others.”
“It’s very sad to see that the relationship is obviously not what it was,” he said.
Starmer initially blocked American planes from using British bases for the attacks on Iran that started on Saturday. He later agreed to let the United States use bases in England and on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to strike Iran’s ballistic missiles and their storage sites, but not to hit other targets.
