The return of the Western Question

This year marks two very important anniversaries. In late June it will be ten years since the United Kingdom voted by a small margin, but in the country’s largest exercise in direct democracy so far, to leave the European Union. A few weeks later, in early July, we will mark what is 250 years since the rebellious American colonists issued their famous Declaration of July 1776, in which they announced their ‘separation’ from the mother country across the Atlantic Ocean. Then, in November, it will be ten years since the first time that the United States elected Donald Trump President. The three events are interconnected through the twin ‘Western Questions’ that so long exercised British policymakers and have now returned in different form.

Generations of schoolchildren used to study the ‘Eastern Question’ that contributed so much to the outbreak of a catastrophic war in 1914. Yet, for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, London was also grappling, and usually more concerned with, the situation in Western Europe and in the Western Hemisphere. Ever since the late Middle Ages, England, and then Britain, had battled to contain the threat of Spanish, Dutch, or French domination of the North Sea, English Channel, and the Low Countries. At times, some of these powers had used Ireland, Wales and Scotland as ‘backdoors’ to attack England.

In the meantime, a second Western Question emerged across the Atlantic. At first, this was about which European power – Spain, France, the Dutch Republic or England-Britain – would control the Americas. It was widely regarded as axiomatic that access to the resources of the ‘New World’ – especially sugar, slaves, sailors, and settlers – would tip the balance of the old. This Western Question was an extension of the old European one. Eventually, after a series of conflicts culminating in the mid-18th century Seven Years’ War, Britain won out. France was expelled from Canada, though Spain remained supreme, for now, in the west (at least notionally) and the south of the Western Hemisphere.

In 1776, though, the American colonists declared their intent to leave the British Empire and to establish alliances with foreign powers. France, Spain and eventually the Dutch piled in on their side. Several European powers, led by Russia, were so sickened by Britain’s maritime high-handedness that they banded together to form the League of Armed Neutrality in 1780. London was so isolated that Lord Sandwich, the Chief of the Admiralty, warned that it would soon be ‘literally speaking be in actual war with the whole world’. In 1781, with some help from France at sea, the Americans decisively defeated the British at Yorktown. Legend has it that as they surrendered, British bands played the ballad ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. Two years later, London threw in the towel and recognised the United States.

This created a new Western Hemisphere Question, for Britain in the first instance, but also for the other European powers with colonial holdings in the Americas. The new republic was inherently expansionist and rubbed up against Canada (which it invaded in the War of 1812) to the north and Spain to the south, and of course the native American tribes to the west. There was also the issue of slavery, which divided the South from the abolitionist North, and the United States from Britain, which was leading the charge against the international slave trade.

The struggle for mastery in the Western Hemisphere interacted with the old Western (European) Question in several ways. First, many Irishmen, both Catholic and Protestant, opposed to the British connection looked to America for inspiration. Secondly, for some time after independence, the United States feared partition by the imperial powers. Thirdly, and relatedly, they (the US was generally referred to in the plural at that time) sought to keep the Europeans as much as possible on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1823, this sentiment culminated in the declaration of the Monroe Doctrine, by which the United States promised to stay out of Europe and in turn demanded that there be no new European colonies in the Americas.

In the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, the old Western Question, which had mainly centred on France, was largely resolved. The Unions with Scotland (1707) and Ireland (1801) rallied the entire British Isles, and shut the ‘back door’, at least for the time being. France was repeatedly defeated by British-led coalitions in the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years’ War, and (eventually) in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, culminating in its containment through the Treaty of Vienna in 1815. Though Franco-British rivalry persisted, the two powers did not go to war again for the rest of the 19th century. By the early 20th century, the two countries were so firmly connected that they achieved a naval division of labour by which Britain was primarily responsible for the Atlantic and North Sea and France led in the Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, the future of the Western Hemisphere was decided. Thanks to a bloody civil war, the United States joined Britain and France as abolitionist powers. Equally importantly, but bloodlessly, America emerged as the hegemon on its side of the Atlantic. The Monroe Doctrine was enforced by the Royal Navy until the United States was strong enough to do the job itself. The border with Canada was largely agreed in the mid-1840s and finally settled in the early 20th century; the last raids launched from American territory were by Irish nationalists in the 1860s and 1870s. Tensions over Venezuela were defused. Transatlantic trade blossomed; the British and Americans began to celebrate their ‘Anglo-Saxon’ kinship. London and Washington were not formally allied but they viewed the world in increasingly similar terms. The Western Hemisphere and North Atlantic, once an area of contention, now became a space of Anglo-American collaboration. Britain was now largely free on that flank.

In Europe, the main enemy was now Germany and, from 1917, the Soviet Union. During the First and Second World Wars, the Germans directly threatened Britain with submarines, air power and (in 1944-45) rocket attacks, but were seen off. The United States eventually joined both conflicts and its comity with Britain was epitomised by the Atlantic Charter agreed by Roosevelt and Churchill in August 1941. With the significant exception of the departure of 26 counties in Ireland to form the Irish Free State, the UK Union held firm. France, despite serious conflict during the Vichy period of collaboration with Nazi Germany, remained allied. The Soviet Union was contained during the Cold War. Britain’s co-founding of NATO in 1949, and its belated entry into the EEC in 1973, together with Denmark and the Republic of Ireland, marked the final closure of the Western European Question, or so it seemed.

Even more significantly, the European settlement was folded into a wider Transatlantic order. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization also embraced Canada and the United States. It was flanked by the creation of a system of global economic governance through the Bretton Woods system – what became the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund – and then the G7. After the end of the Cold War, these institutions became the bedrock of what many called the liberal or rules-based International Order. From 1998, the Good Friday Agreement began to bring peace to Northern Ireland. Britain was now surrounded by friends, north, south, east and west.

Over the past ten years, however, the two Western Questions have returned. In June 2016, the British voted to leave the European Union, a structure through which London – for good or for ill – had done so much of its economic and political ordering on the continent. The immediate result of this ‘British Declaration of Independence’ was that the United Kingdom’s immediate neighbourhood threatened to become part of a rival geo-economic and geo-legal force-field. Because support for Brexit was weaker in Scotland and Northern Ireland, the UK Union also appeared at risk. The Western European space which generations of British policy makers had struggled to settle was now in contention again.

Over the next five years, in fact, the United Kingdom’s role in the British Isles, the Channel and North Sea was repeatedly questioned. The European Union demanded that London guarantee that Northern Ireland be excluded from the UK single market and customs union before it would even begin negotiations on the future economic relationship. In 2021, it briefly instructed the Republic of Ireland to close its border with Northern Ireland in order to prevent the export of vaccines. Boris Johnson – half in jest, half in earnest – asked about the feasibility of sending special forces into the Netherlands to secure vaccines that Britain had paid for but whose export from the EU was embargoed.

At around the same time, France threatened to cut off the electricity supply to the Channel Islands if its demands with respect to fishing rights were not met. More generally, throughout the Brexit period Paris exercised leverage over the United Kingdom that it had not enjoyed since the early 19th century. Likewise, after his election as President Joe Biden – himself of some Irish descent – issued a series of ‘candid’ warnings to London over Northern Ireland. Not since the Revolutionary period had America played such a role in the Irish Question.

During the early 2020s, therefore, a new Western European settlement was hammered out. After a certain amount of pushing and shoving, the United Kingdom agreed its departure from, and new relationship with, the EU. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which highlighted the continent’s military reliance on Britain, helped to smooth relations. The contentious Northern Irish ‘Backstop’ was progressively watered down, leading to the Windsor Agreement of 2023. This settlement remains fragile, however. It is vulnerable to changes on both sides: for example, the election of a Reform government, or the introduction of EU or UK measures which might require either Dublin or London to erect border infrastructure between the six Irish counties in the United Kingdom and the 26 in the Republic of Ireland.

If the new Western European Question has achieved a measure of equilibrium, for now at least, the same cannot be said of the Western Hemisphere and the Transatlantic Alliance. Donald Trump’s first election as President in November 2016 caused widespread consternation in Europe. He threatened to withdraw American support for NATO if member states failed to spend more for their own defence. In 2019, Trump first articulated a claim to Greenland, a self-governing part of Denmark but did not pursue it. The President also loudly signalled his contempt for the structures of international governance by withdrawing from climate treaties.

To the relief of many, Joe Biden – who, aside from his Irish faiblesse, was a traditional transatlanticist – succeeded Trump as President in January 2021. Under the slogan ‘America is Back’, he proceeded to reassure allies in Europe and Asia. In June 2021, 80 years after its original was agreed between Roosevelt and Churchill, Biden announced a ‘New Atlantic Charter’ between the United States and the United Kingdom. Three months later, America concluded the AUKUS submarine deal with Australia and the UK, which was roundly condemned by Paris, Moscow and Beijing as an Anglo-Saxon plot.

Unfortunately, the Europeans did not use the first Trump Presidency and the Biden years to better fortify themselves for the challenges ahead. They were therefore completely unprepared when the second Trump Presidency not only sought to force Ukraine into an unjust peace but also announced its intention to focus aggressively on the Western Hemisphere in what rapidly became known as the ‘Donroe Doctrine’. The challenges this presented to the Liberal International Order became clear when American special forces seized the Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and arraigned him on charges before a court in New York. America also issued threats against Mexico, Colombia and Cuba.

What nobody expected, though, was that Donald Trump would make a formal demand that America’s loyal NATO ally Denmark – which had suffered heavily in support of the US campaign in Afghanistan – should hand over Greenland. The President deemed the territory vital to the defence of the United States, and home to critical minerals, but he was also open about his ambition to be the first President since William McKinley to expand the territory of the United States. When many of Denmark’s allies – including Britain – jumped to her defence, Trump threatened them with tariffs. For a brief moment, it looked possible that the UK might have to respond to an armed attack by the United States on a NATO member. It seemed as if the world was being turned upside down again.

At the same time, Trump repeatedly suggested that Canada should become the 51st US state. This was the first time since the late 1860s that the annexation of Canada was seriously discussed. The Western Question, which had opened up 250 years ago, and had been resolved by the start of the 20th century, was now well and truly back on the agenda again.

This growing estrangement was flanked by an escalating ideological rift. The United States and Europe had frequently been at odds, of course. If the Americans were from Mars, Robert Kagan once memorably wrote, the Europeans from Venus. They were also frequently divided in terms of social and economic outlook, for example, if one contrasts the Reagan and younger Bush Presidencies with the more left-leaning German governments of Helmut Schmidt and Gerhard Schroeder. But nothing prepared Europeans for the virulence of Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech attacking the old continent’s alleged shortcomings at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, the main charges of which were repeated more politely by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio a year later. The days of the Atlantic Charter – old and new – seemed very far away. The West and the Western Hemisphere were fracturing.

Things have improved a bit recently. Trump has backed off from Greenland for now, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has firmly rejected any suggestion that his country might join the United States. But the old strategic assumptions have gone, at least for now. For about 120 years the United Kingdom could regard its western flank as secure. That is no longer unambiguously the case.

This brings both advantages and disadvantages. So long as Britain’s defence is properly resourced, and assets sensibly deployed, America’s unreliability will make the UK a more important partner for the European Union, including the Republic of Ireland. The rising global uncertainty and looming presence of Donald Trump to the west should also make Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland less likely to want to leave the Union. The disadvantages are clear. The return of the Western Question is a massive distraction at a time when efforts should be concentrated on Europe, Asia and the Middle East. It means that, after a very long period of more or less exclusively looking east, north or south, we will once again also have to look back in a westerly direction.