Theresa May’s speech to the Republican party conference in Philadelphia on Thursday has been interpreted as a break with the past in US-UK foreign policy thinking to mark the Donald Trump era. Yet in most respects it was no such thing. In fact, it was mostly a staunch and subtle argument for renewing the status quo in order to stop any such break from happening.

Great care obviously went into the drafting of the speech, partly so that it would impress the US Republican audience, partly so it would not frighten the suspicious horses back in Britain, and above all so that it could begin to frame the conversation between the May and Trump teams that got under way in the White House on Friday.



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Key bits of language were particularly skilfully chosen. May talked about America’s “destiny”, a hugely freighted word in US discourse, but one that she invoked to urge a globally engaged America not an inward-turned one.

She said Britain was proud “to walk alongside you at every stage”, a biblical cast of words that goes down well in America. The image also evokes a famous 1941 speech by President Roosevelt’s wartime envoy Harry Hopkins which made Winston Churchill weep and which Tony Blair cited when he wooed Bill Clinton, who also wept when he heard it, at the White House nearly 20 years ago.

Like Blair’s speech in 1998, May’s speech was pitch-perfect in its flattery of America. It found the sweet spot of modern Republican thinking and language and was gracious about Philadelphia’s historic importance in early US history.

But it barely mentioned President Trump – just two references, neither of them either cringing or cringeworthy. It seemed to imagine Churchill and Ronald Reagan – both of whom were regularly referenced – as the platonic ideal of the so-called special relationship, to whom their successors must try to live up.



Trump’s isolationist America First rhetoric undoubtedly signals a new foreign policy approach in Washington, as the astonishing mass resignation of state department officials this week spectacularly confirmed. But May’s speech, while acknowledging that this is a new chapter, was full of quietly determined efforts to wean the new US leader back towards multilateral institutions and cooperation between allies. Will she succeed, especially in getting the trade deal that “works for both sides” she talked about in the speech? Good luck with that one, prime minister.



So, early on, she extolled the special relationship as the source not just of victory in war but of the institutions that try to bind the world together. This sounds predictable, but not in America. Trump would not say such a thing and nor would many in the Tea Party wing of the Republicans.

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These Republicans despise the United Nations, while Trump has attacked the Bretton Woods financial institutions and dismissed Nato as obsolete. But you would not know that from May’s speech, which said the aim was to rebuild confidence in the institutions, not to junk them.



Hardly less striking was the care that May took when talking about Brexit. There was no boasting, and no Faragist rhetoric about independence. Instead she depicted the referendum vote as an act of “determination and quiet resolve”. And she went out of her way to stress that she wants the EU to succeed, unlike Trump. He seems to want to encourage the EU to unravel, as do some in May’s party.



There were other sharp differences, courteously and emolliently expressed though they were. The Iran nuclear deal, for instance. Trump calls it “the worst deal ever” and has said his “number one priority” is to dismantle it. May said in Philadelphia that the Iran deal “was vitally important for regional security” and had “neutralised” Iranian nuclear weapons efforts “for more than a decade”.



In the most heavily reported part of her speech, May said that while the US and the UK must lead, “this cannot mean a return to the failed policies of the past”, specifically those that “attempt to remake the world in our own image”. Those days were over, said May.



Yet a close reading of May’s words does not support the view that she is now an isolationist or that she wants Trump to be one, too. On the contrary. May’s speech celebrated engagement not retreat, even including praise for overseas aid policy.

Her section on Islamic State, on support for Estonia and Poland, on backing for the Afghan government and on peacekeeping in Kosovo, South Sudan and Somalia read like a list of commitments to stay engaged, not a prelude to the pulling up of any drawbridges.



She even said: “We cannot stand idly by when the threat is real and it is in our own interests to intervene.” That was, in essence, also the message of Blair’s Chicago speech in 1999, yet May’s Philadelphia speech has been promoted as a clear break from Blair’s doctrine. Clearly it is not.



It is, though, a break from Iraq-style intervention and nation-building. Yet so too, though people now forget it, was David Cameron’s unsuccessful policy in Syria alongside Barack Obama, as his August 2013 Commons speech explicitly makes clear. Much has changed, but if May has her way, much will also remain the same.

