A principled, conservative stalwart, former Foreign Minister Liz Truss has won the leadership vote of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party to become Britain’s 56th prime minister. A formidable politician, Truss is capable and dynamic, and embraced the sound economic policies that lifted her nation out of the miseries of its socialist hangover — the polar opposite of doddering, globalist President Biden. While her predecessor, Boris Johnson, accomplished the Herculean task of finally accomplishing Brexit, albeit with unresolved issues pertaining to Northern Ireland, Truss inherits a premiership fraught with challenges, foreign and domestic.
So, who is Liz Truss? The 47-year-old who was foreign minister in Johnson’s administration did not start out in life as a conservative. She grew up in a left-wing family, the daughter of a professor and a nurse, and cut her teeth on the ideological left, serving as student head of the Liberal Democrats student group at Oxford University, where she studied politics, philosophy and economics. Truss explains her political epiphany late in her studies at Oxford, where “she had met like-minded people who shared her commitment to ‘personal freedom, the ability to shape your own life and shape your own destiny.’”
After working in the private sector, Truss won a seat in Parliament in 2010 with a committed philosophy of free market principles. Through a combination of excellent promotional skills, political acumen and effective career management, she not only survived but excelled in three changes of government. In 2012, she was named an education minister, and in 2014, was elevated to environment secretary, and then climbed higher to Justice Secretary and Chief Secretary to the Treasury.
Johnson appointed her to head the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, putting her in line for the top job upon his ouster. Queen Elizabeth will invite Truss today to form a government in her name.
While Truss’s rise up the greasy pole may sound effortless, she capably managed opposition to emerge triumphant. She will need to deploy such skills to the geopolitical situation in which the UK now finds itself. Truss must address a dire inflation-triggered, cost-of-living crisis that is likely to lead to recession; surging energy prices; disruptive labor disputes; and some unresolved Brexit stalemates that continue to poison the waters with an intransigent, spiteful European Union.
Sadly, Britain’s foreign policy challenges extend far beyond the EU, and thanks to the Biden administration’s policies and posturing, our strongest ally has no confidence that it can rely on American support. Consequently, Truss inherits a situation in which the time-tested “Special Relationship,” which has tended to stabilize markets and global conflicts, is severely taxed. While the U.S. and Britain are largely aligned on issues relating to Ukraine and NATO, the Biden administration has been a false friend and antagonist to the UK — most notably with respect to defense cooperation and support of its Brexit position.
Biden’s catastrophic troop withdrawal from Afghanistan without coordinating with our British defense partners — gifting control and an enormous weapons cache to the Taliban and sacrificing the lives of American service members — earned widespread, vocal scorn from our British fighting partners and, unprecedentedly, from the UK Parliament.
Moreover, in one of the most highly charged, unresolved issues of Britain’s leaving the EU, Biden chose to sell out our stalwart trading and intelligence partner, preferring instead to accept the bad-faith positioning of the EU with regard to the post-Brexit trading relationship involving Northern Ireland.
The West is severely imperiled at the moment, thanks in part to a lack of effective U.S. leadership. Biden’s instincts have inflamed the catastrophe. There is a legacy of Britain holding the U.S. to positions of resolve, as when Margaret Thatcher brought around George Bush Sr., warning him to not “go wobbly” regarding Saddam Hussein, with resolve that created a coalition to fight and win the first Gulf War. To that end, one would hope that Truss can have a positive influence on Biden’s errant foreign policy instincts. At best, perhaps she can coax the Biden administration toward better international policy.
The concept of the Special Relationship, as Winston Churchill baptized it, arose when Britain and America were on wartime footing. This partnership enabled the conquest of the darkest threats humanity faced. Not since those days has the West been as imperiled as it is at the moment, without such luminaries as Churchill, Thatcher and Ronald Reagan to guide it against aggression by Russia and China. Let’s hope that Britain’s new prime minister can play a constructive role to fill the leadership void.
Lee Cohen, a senior fellow of the Bow Group and the Bruges Group, was adviser on Great Britain to the U.S. House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee and founded the Congressional United Kingdom Caucus. Follow him on Twitter @LeeLeesco3.