Britain’s new ambassador to the US on Friday said that she looks forward to expanding the traditional security and economic partnership between the two nations to new areas such as artificial intelligence and to having talks with US President Donald Trump, who has always been “gracious and friendly” to her.
Karen Pierce, a veteran diplomat who is Britain’s ambassador to the UN, was named to the new post on Friday.
She said she thinks that the “special relationship” between the UK and the US will stay the same following Britain’s departure from the EU, “because some of what binds us together, particularly on the security side, is deep and enduring and it’s also two-way.”
Photo: AP
She recalled US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent statement in London that British intelligence has helped prevent attacks on US soil.
Pierce, 60, replaces Kim Darroch, whose critical portrayal of the Trump administration led to an embarrassing trans-Atlantic spat and his resignation from the Washington ambassadorial post in July.
Trump expressed fury when leaked diplomatic documents from Darroch, published in Britain’s Mail on Sunday newspaper, called the US administration’s policy toward Iran “incoherent,” said the president might be indebted to “dodgy Russians” and questioned whether the White House “will ever look competent.”
Trump tweeted that Darroch was “wacky” and “a very stupid guy.”
Pierce said in an interview at Britain’s UN mission in New York after her appointment was announced in London that she has been “lucky” to have met the president several times, with the prime minister and the UN Security Council, stressing how “gracious” he was.
While “one would always be nervous meeting a head of state,” Pierce said she looks forward to conversations with Trump about all the areas “our countries care about so much.”
One critical issue would be Britain’s need to strike a trade deal with the US following its EU exit.
Pierce said there are also areas “where we disagree,” some where disagreements are “quite deep — but I don’t think that affects the overall health of the relationship.”
Britain and the US disagree about the Iran nuclear deal that Trump pulled the US out of, the Paris climate agreement that the US also exited and Chinese tech giant Huawei’s 5G network, which the UK opted not to ban as the Trump administration sought.
Pierce recalled that when she served at the British embassy in Washington in the 1990s, there was “a big gulf” between the US and Europe over Bosnia and the Balkan Wars, saying the rift “did leak into all different aspects of relations.”
“I’m not seeing that now,” she said. “Obviously I will do my best to put the British point of view across and do my best to narrow differences, but I think it’s also about exploiting opportunities for both America and for Britain in this relationship.”
In the announcement of her appointment, British Secretary of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Dominic Raab said: “It is a time of huge opportunity for the friendship between the UK and US and I am delighted that Karen Pierce will take forward this exciting new chapter in our relationship.”
Pierce, who was the first woman to be Britain’s UN ambassador and will be the first woman to be its US ambassador, said she does not think Trump will be disappointed she was chosen rather than Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party leader who is Britain’s leading champion of Trump.
The US president had said that Farage would make a “great ambassador.”
Pierce said she is looking ahead to expanding UK-US relations.
“It’s a huge honor anywhere to represent your country, but to be able to do that in Washington ... at a really important time in Britain’s development of the nation, I have to say I’m slightly overwhelmed, but I am really, really looking forward to it,” she said.
The US is really “a land of opportunity,” Pierce said, “and now we’ve left the European Union I want to find out those new opportunities and exploit them, use them, develop them for the benefit of the UK but also for the benefit of America.”
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS