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Will Jones
Dr Will Jones is editor of the Daily Sceptic. He has a PhD in political philosophy, an MA in ethics, a BSc in mathematics and a diploma in theology. He lives in Leamington Spa with his wife and two children.
Donald Trump has threatened to rip up his trade deal with Britain after Rachel Reeves said she was “very frustrated and angry” with the US president over the war in Iran. The Telegraph has more.
The US president suggested that he could change the agreement he reached with Sir Keir Starmer last year, because of Britain’s lack of support in the Middle East.
In May 2025, Britain became the first nation to agree a trade deal with the Trump administration in what was hailed as a show of the strength of UK-US ties.
However, in a thinly veiled threat to the prime minister and the chancellor on Wednesday, Trump said: “We gave them a good trade deal – better than I had to, which can always be changed.”
The chancellor attacked the White House on Tuesday, saying she was “very frustrated and angry” with the US president’s “folly” in going to war without an exit plan. She blamed the conflict for an expected rise in the cost of living in the coming months.
Reeves will attend a crunch meeting to discuss the crisis in the Gulf with Scott Bessent, her American counterpart, at the International Monetary Fund in Washington on Wednesday.
Relations between the UK and US have soured after Sir Keir refused to join Trump’s war against Tehran, which began in late February. The prime minister has repeatedly stated that “this is not our war”.
Sir Keir delayed giving permission for British military bases to be used for defensive purposes. He declined to send British warships to help the US navy enforce its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping route in the region.
Britain’s 2025 deal with the US, which included a baseline tariff of 10 per cent, was lauded as a victory compared with the 15 per cent facing EU goods. Steel and aluminium imports from Britain were taxed at 25 per cent, half the rate of most other nations.
However, on Wednesday Trump issued his first direct threat about the future of the agreement when asked about the state of the special relationship with the UK.
He told Sky News: “It’s the relationship where when we asked them for help, they were not there. When we needed them, they were not there. When we didn’t need them, they were not there, and they still aren’t there.”
It was then put to Trump that the state of the special relationship sounded “very bad”.
He responded: “Well, it’s been better but it’s sad and we gave them a good trade deal – better than I had to, which can always be changed.”
In an interview on Tuesday, Reeves said Trump’s actions in the Middle East amounted to “a war that we did not start” and “a war that we did not want”.
She told the Mirror: “I feel very frustrated and angry that the US went into this war without a clear exit plan, without a clear idea of what they were trying to achieve. And as a result, the Strait of Hormuz is now blocked.”
Reeves added that “to start a conflict without being clear what the objectives are and not being clear about how you are going to get out of it… I do think that is a folly”.
The US has remained the UK’s largest single-country trading partner and in 2024 accounted for 17 per cent of all trade, as well as 24 per cent of exports.
Some elements of the deal have already come into force. However, the White House warned of “glitches” in the agreement in January following a rift over the deal to hand the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
While Trump initially supported the deal to give away the territory, which contains a joint UK-US military base, he later rejected it as an “act of stupidity”.
Worth reading in full.
Why isn’t Reeves “frustrated and angry” at Iran for engaging in piracy, closing the strait and holding the world to ransom? Directing anger at a key ally instead of the rogue state that has actually blown up civilian ships to make the waterway unusable – while refusing to get involved in America’s efforts to reopen it – reflects a poor grasp of what is really going on here.
While it appears to be true that Trump didn’t properly anticipate Iran shutting the strait, thereby preventing him making a clean withdrawal from Iran when the bombing campaign was over, his administration does now have a plan to reopen it: pressure Iran by threatening it with extreme damage and, more recently (and palatably), blockading the strait itself.
What it really comes down to is whether the world should stand up to Iran and take action that will actually curtail its genocidal ambitions, or whether merely symbolic gestures should be made while Iran advances towards its goals regardless. Reeves and Starmer, like most European leaders, seem to be in the latter camp, hence not supporting the war and just wanting another round of ineffective talks. They didn’t want the bombing, even though diplomacy over decades had manifestly failed, and now Iran has shut the strait they don’t want any coercive action taken against it to pressure it to reopen, apparently agreeing with Macron that reopening it by force is “unrealistic”. Instead their plan seems to boil down to asking very nicely if Iran will simply start letting ships (with military escorts) through again. If there is a plan B for the (very likely) scenario where Iran simply says no, there’s no sign of it yet, though Macron has said that America along with Israel and Iran will be excluded from the arrangements as “belligerent” nations, which hardly seems conducive to an effective settlement.
Like the small boats crisis, when the ‘proper’, ‘legal’, ‘nice’ ways of trying to solve the problem fail (as they predictably will), the closure of the Strait of Hormuz – or ‘reopening’ entirely on Iran’s terms – will just become another of those problems that Western states can’t solve because doing so might involve standing up to bad people and ‘breaking international law’.
This article was originally published by the Daily Sceptic.
