Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 24 January 2026. © Richard Kemp

Of course those of us who served alongside the Americans in Afghanistan are going to get defensive when hearing President Trump’s harsh accusations against our forces and those of our other Nato allies. And there has already been a torrent of outrage. But more instructive are American reactions to his suggestion that European forces in Afghanistan ‘stayed a little back, a little off the front lines’.

For example General Ben Hodges, who was commander of the US Army in Europe, said: ‘This is about as angry as I’ve been for quite some time. … There’s no American soldier that believes what our president just said’.

Trump’s views are contradicted also by what other senior Americans have said before. At the height of the Afghanistan war, General James Mattis, who commanded US forces in Afghanistan and later served as defence secretary in Trump’s first term, said of the British: ‘I can assure you that it is a delight, if we must go into a brawl, to do so alongside your competent, valiant troops.’ And last year the vice-president, JD Vance, who served with the US Marine Corps in Iraq, said that British forces ‘have fought bravely alongside the US for decades’.

Actually it’s rather more than decades. The first time British and American troops were in action together was in 1859 in China when the US Navy came to the assistance of British forces, breaching American neutrality in the Second Opium War. Our unbreakable military partnership – the backbone of the special relationship – continued through the First and Second World Wars, in Korea, the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact the only major American conflict we did not join was the Vietnam War.

Pondering whether other Nato countries would step up to the plate if required, Trump said: ‘We’ve never needed them.’ That, too, is far from reality. US General David Petraeus, who commanded American and coalition troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, was quite clear: ‘As was (more…)