UK will pay the price for tying itself to rogue state’s 'descent into madness': analysis
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U.S. President Donald Trump smiles at Britain's King Charles ahead of a state dinner at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 28, 2026.
King Charles is engaged in a high-profile visit to the United States, and while some are applauding his apparent ability to impress and navigate President Donald Trump, others in the United Kingdom are decrying that their monarch has them “trapped in a relationship of one-sided dependency with a sociopath.” Writing for the iPaper, political columnist Ian Dunt expressed a rising sentiment abroad: that it’s better to envision a world “without” the U.S. than it is to coddle its madman leader.
At a glance, notes Dunt, it could appear that the King had delivered Trump a proper rhetorical thrashing while addressing the U.S. Congress on Tuesday. “Over and over again, he took aim at the MAGA movement,” praising efforts on behalf of Ukraine, NATO, multiculturalism, the environment, and delivering “the most important lesson of all: the restraint of executive power.”
“None of Charles’s messages get through to Trump because he is too venal to comprehend them. None get through to his entourage because they couldn’t care less.” And, says Dunt, “Even as Charles spoke, liberal norms crumbled around him.”
Here he references the Trump Administration’s renewed legal assault on former FBI director James Comey — the charges against whom have been widely criticized as baseless — and the concurrent announcement that a photo of the president would be put in passports, which, writes Dunt, “Looks like the product of any old humdrum tinpot dictatorship in Central America or the Middle East, the unmistakable tell-tale aesthetic of tyrant-kitsch.”
As Dunt explains, the King’s visit is part of an effort to rein in some of the excesses of one of the UK’s most historically linked allies. But, he asserts, “all it will have done is to convince us, once again, that we have a useful role trying to influence the U.S. when the most useful thing we can do is to ostracise it, and prepare ourselves — with speed and urgency — for a world without it.”
“For years,” says Dunt, “the British political class has tried to convince itself that it held some sort of authoritative senatorial relationship with the U.S. — that it could be the wise old Greek to their thrusting young Roman, or Alfred to their Batman.” The King’s visit theoretically provides the opportunity for Britain to fix the relationship with the U.S. while “Trump gets the bauble… That’s what the Royal Family is to him, a shiny glowy thing in which he can admire his reflection.”
But Dunt argues that the royal visit should have been canceled to demonstrate with conviction “that America had now entered the arena of the socially shunned… That there were prices to be paid for its descent into madness and horror. Instead we have stated that you can threaten genocide and all you’ll get is a subtly telling-off, but nothing so obvious it would embarrass you.”
According to Dunt, this is a terrible mistake because “the US is a rogue state. Just weeks ago it was threatening genocide against Iran. This is already being forgotten, as if it never happened. But it did happen. It was said. It cannot be forgiven or accepted.”
Citing the mass deportations and immigrant detention camps, the arrest of political opponents, the normalization and celebration of racism, the ending of public health initiatives in favor of conspiracy theory, the worship of war and violence, and the mockery of kindness, Dunt’s assessment is blunt: “We cannot validate this regime. We must not launder its reputation.”