Politics and the Past: A spring update from Unseen Histories

We are living in dangerous times. 2026 is not yet three months old but already we have seen the legally-questionable seizure of the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, the assassination of Ali Khamenei during Operation Epic Fury, the resulting mayhem in the Middle East and the fracturing of key Western alliances. President Trump is currently furious with Great Britain, whose Prime Minister is, in his view, certainly 'no Winston Churchill’.

This might not quite be the insult Trump intends. Churchill was, of course, the man for the moment in the spring of 1940 when the Nazi army was 25 miles from Dover and moral courage was required. Today’s situation, however, is quite different. Brutal as the Iranian regime is, in the view of Trump's counterterrorism chief, Joe Kent, it 'posed no imminent threat' to the US at all.

While others will pick over the accuracy of Kent's view, what's more clear is that we are living in a world of expansive, testy and heavily-armed nations. And if history is to be mined for a parallel, then the summer of 1914 is one that fits much better than the spring of 1940.

That was the moment when Europe raced into a fierce and dreadful conflict after the assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Churchill was at that time serving in Asquith's cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty and it was said that 'of all the cabinet ministers' Churchill 'was the most insistent on the need to resist Germany'.

Historians continue to discuss whether the Great War that followed, in which an estimated 15–22 million people were killed, was at all necessary. For Britain, at least, it had disastrous consequences – financial, social and political.

A century on, after another assasination, every single European nation has resisted US pressure to join their operations around the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump doesn't strike me as much of a reader of history, but if he was perhaps he would not be so surprised.

As any historian will tell you, there’s no better tool than the past for unlocking the present. Here at Unseen Histories we’re having our own busy start to 2026. The website that you are reading at the moment went live a few weeks ago and it has allowed us to present our range of features and interviews in a more accessible and comprehensive way.

I have been busy recording new podcasts as well. For the moment you can find these on our Travels Through Time feed: Hannah French on Vivaldi, Charles King on Handel, Marc Mierowsky on Daniel Defoe, Tharik Hussain on Cordoba in the Islamic Golden Age and plenty of others too. We’ll be publishing features to accompany all of these episodes shortly.

The disagreement between President Trump and Prime Minister Starmer is part of a continuing story that still intrigues me. I wrote about the early relationship between Great Britain and America a few years ago in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness and there's another book that keeps flashing back into my mind at the moment.

In 2021 the journalist Philip Stephens’s Britain Alone: The Path from Suez to Brexit was published. This work attempted to make sense of Britain’s postwar identity crisis – one which saw successive prime ministers, from Wilson to Heath, Thatcher to Blair, pivoting from Europe to America as they sought to establish Britain's place in the world.

When I spoke to Stephens five years ago, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden seemed the best of friends and Britain the model of Atlanticist obedience. Now, it seems likely to me at least, that we might be back off to Europe again •

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