The king’s speech pushed in interesting ways at the boundaries of what a British monarch might be expected to have said in Trump’s America.
国王的演讲在一定程度上挑战了英国君主在特朗普的美国应该说的话的界限。
King Charles’s speech to the US Congress – only the second such address by a British monarch – demonstrates how much both the US and the UK have changed in the last three decades.
查尔斯国王在美国国会发表的演讲——这是英国君主第二次向国会发表演讲——展示了过去三十年里美国和英国都发生了多大的变化。
The first speech was in May 1991 during his mother, Queen Elizabeth II’s, third state visit to the US. The underlying purpose of both speeches was the same: to stress the enduring links between Britain and the US. But the circumstances in which they were delivered were very different.
第一次演讲是在1991年5月，当时伊丽莎白二世女王第三次访问美国。两次演讲的根本目的都是相同的：强调英国和美国之间持久的联系。但它们发表的背景却截然不同。
The late queen’s speech came in the wake of joint action by US and British forces, along with other allies, to eject Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi troops from Kuwait. She referenced this in her speech as a concrete example of the strength of the Anglo-American alliance.
迟逝的女王在演讲中提到了美国和英国军队，以及其他盟国，联合行动将萨达姆·侯赛因的伊拉克军队从科威特驱逐出来的事件。她将其作为英美联盟实力的具体例证。
In 2026, the UK has pointedly refused to join the US-Israeli attack on Iran, angering President Donald Trump. Charles’s speech adroitly inverted the moral of this apparent diplomatic rift, suggesting that tensions in the past had always been overcome. Referring to the revolution of 1776 he noted: “Ours is a partnership born out of dispute, but no less strong for it”, because ultimately “our nations are in fact instinctively like-minded”.
2026年，英国明确拒绝参与美以对伊朗的攻击，激怒了唐纳德·特朗普总统。查尔斯国王的演讲巧妙地扭转了这种明显的外交裂痕的道德意义，暗示过去的紧张局势一直都能克服。他提到1776年革命时说：“我们的伙伴关系源于争端，但因此没有减弱其力量”，因为最终“我们的国家事实上是本能地心意相通的”。
A speech like this, voiced by the monarch, can serve at least two useful purposes. The first is to portray things that are, at heart, profoundly political, as being somehow above politics. The second is to place the transitory difficulties of day-to-day diplomacy within the much longer-term perspective of a dynasty that traces its lineage back to the Norman Conquest.
像这样的演讲，由君主发表，至少可以发挥两个有用的作用。第一个是把本质上极其政治性的事情描绘成某种超越政治的层面。第二个是将日常外交的短暂困难置于一个可以追溯到诺曼征服的王朝的更长远视角中。
These two elements featured in how both Elizabeth II and Charles’s speeches depicted the Anglo-American alliance. The latter was the basis of a joke by the king, who referred to the actions of the Founding Fathers “250 years ago, or, as we say in the United Kingdom, just the other day”.
这两个元素体现在伊丽莎白二世和查尔斯国王的演讲描绘英美联盟的方式中。后者成为了国王的一个笑话的基础，他提到开国元勋们的行动是“250年前，或者，正如我们在英国所说，就在前几天”。
Charles’s speech was beautifully crafted and delivered with a degree of warmth and conviction that was always beyond the range of his mother’s public oratory. That, in itself, was almost an implicit reproach to the president’s own rambling, undisciplined public pronouncements.
查尔斯国王的演讲措辞优美，并带着一种温暖和信念，这始终超出了他母亲公开演讲的范畴。这一点本身，几乎是对总统自己冗长、缺乏纪律的公开声明的一种含蓄的指责。
And in more than one way the address was pitched over the head of Trump. The lack of any immediate pushback from the president suggests that the subtlety of some of the messaging eluded him. But in a more significant sense, it was an appeal to causes that still resonate with much of the American political class if not with the Trump administration itself.
在多个层面上，这次演讲都是在特朗普的“头上”进行的。总统没有立即反驳，表明他未能领会其中一些信息传递的微妙之处。但在更重要的意义上，这是对那些仍然能引起美国政治阶层共鸣的事业的呼吁，即使这些事业与特朗普政府本身无关。
Charles stressed the value of Nato and the importance of “the defence of Ukraine and her most courageous people”. He made a sly reference to his proud association with the Royal Navy – an institution that has been the subject of some disparagement by Trump in recent weeks.
查尔斯强调了北约的价值，以及“保卫乌克兰和其最勇敢的人民”的重要性。他巧妙地提到了自己与皇家海军的深厚渊源——这是一个在最近几周里曾被特朗普贬低的对象。
He emphasised the importance of protecting the environment, although couched in a Trumpian language of profit and loss: “We ignore at our peril the fact that these natural systems – in other words, Nature’s own economy – provide the foundation for our prosperity and our national security.”
他强调了保护环境的重要性，尽管措辞上使用了特朗普式的盈亏语言：“如果我们忽视了这些自然系统——换句话说，自然自身的经济——为我们的繁荣和国家安全提供了基础这一事实，我们将面临危险。”
Perhaps his most pointed remarks – and those that generated the loudest applause from some (although not all) in the hall – were directed at the US itself. He described Congress as “this citadel of democracy created to represent the voice of all American people”. He mentioned the role of Magna Carta in laying the foundation for the constitutional principle that “executive power is subject to checks and balances”. Trump’s opponents clearly enjoyed that.
也许他最尖锐的言论——也是在场一些人（尽管不是所有人）鼓掌最热烈的言论——是针对美国本身的。他将国会描述为“这座为代表所有美国人民声音而建立的民主城堡”。他提到了《大宪章》在奠定“行政权力受制于制衡”这一宪法原则基础中的作用。特朗普的反对者显然很喜欢这一点。
Saving the special relationship
维护特殊关系
State visits by British monarchs to the US have been relatively rare, and state visits to London by US presidents are even rarer. Trump is unique in having made two. This in itself is a mark of the desperate attempts by British governments, both Tory and Labour, to find ways of managing relations with his administration. This desperation was also apparent in Keir Starmer’s reckless decision to appoint Peter Mandelson as British ambassador to Washington.
英国君主访问美国的次数相对较少，而美国总统访问伦敦更是罕见。特朗普是唯一有两次访问记录的人。这本身就标志着英国政府（无论是保守党还是工党）为寻找管理与其政府关系的方法而做出的绝望尝试。这种绝望感也体现在基尔·斯塔默鲁莽任命彼得·曼德尔森为英国驻华盛顿大使的决定中。
The king’s speech pushed in interesting ways at the boundaries of what a British monarch might be expected to have said in Trump’s America. Yet some of the sentiments in his mother’s 1991 address to Congress – considered uncontroversial at the time – could no longer be expressed without the risk of offending the current administration.
国王的演讲在一定程度上挑战了英国君主在特朗普的美国应该发表的言论的界限。然而，他母亲1991年对国会发表的演讲中的一些观点——当时被认为是无争议的——现在却不能再表达，否则就有冒犯现任政府的风险。
Queen Elizabeth noted: “Some people believe that power grows from the barrel of a gun. So it can, but history shows us that it never grows well nor for very long. Force, in the end, is sterile.”
伊丽莎白女王指出：“一些人相信权力源于枪口。它确实可以如此，但历史告诉我们，它既不会长久，也不会长盛不衰。最终，武力是无效的。”
That may be a lesson Trump will have to learn the hard way. But for the moment, he and his immediate circle seem to have an unwavering belief in the primacy of kinetic force, and have little interest in the objective Charles described of stemming “the beating of ploughshares into swords”.
这可能是特朗普必须通过艰难方式吸取的教训。但目前来看，他和他的核心圈子似乎对动能力的首要性抱有坚定不移的信念，对查尔斯描述的遏制“将犁铧打成剑”的目标兴趣甚微。
The queen also commended “the rich ethnic diversity of both our societies”. Charles spoke instead about interfaith understanding. This is not quite the same thing – but is certainly more compatible with the Trump administration’s disturbingly relaxed approach to the rise of white-supremacist politics.
女王还赞扬了“我们两个社会丰富的民族多样性”。而查尔斯则谈到了跨信仰理解。这两者并非完全相同——但与特朗普政府对白人至上主义政治兴起所采取的令人不安的宽松态度，无疑更为兼容。
Perhaps the saddest feature of a comparison of the two speeches is the queen’s proud boast in 1991 that “Britain is at the heart of a growing movement towards greater cohesion within Europe, and within the European Community in particular”. If the US has changed since 1991, so has Britain. It would be nice to think that one day the monarch might give an equally generous speech about shared history and values in front of the UK’s European neighbours.
也许比较这两篇演讲最令人伤感之处，是女王在1991年骄傲地宣称“英国处于一个日益增强的欧洲凝聚力，尤其是在欧洲共同体内部运动的核心”。如果美国自1991年以来已经改变，那么英国也一样。如果有一天君主能在英国的欧洲邻国面前，发表一篇同样慷慨的关于共同历史和价值观的演讲，那该多好。
Philip Murphy has received funding from the AHRC. He is a member of the European Movement UK.
菲利普·墨菲获得了英国人文与社会研究理事会（AHRC）的资助。他是英国欧洲运动（European Movement UK）的成员。
