Shortly after Keir Starmer arrived in Washington to fight for the future of Europe, two men who make a mockery of everything he stands for touched down on American soil. The toxic YouTube influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate have spent years under investigation in Romania on charges of rape and human trafficking, which they deny, Andrew is now wanted by British police over allegations of rape, and both brothers for tax evasion in this country. But to MAGAworld they are martyrs, unjustly persecuted abroad for the crime of saying what they think on the internet.
Sitting beside Starmer, Trump protested that he knew ‘nothing about’ the Tates’ triumphant homecoming, though it follows reported US diplomatic pressure on the Romanian government to lift its travel ban and Andrew Tate has bragged of his friendship with the president’s son. But it was a small, stark reminder of just how far apart our two continents have become. It’s freedom of speech that reliably seems to galvanise Trumpworld, not the freedom of millions of Europeans to live in peace along Russia’s borders; as the president breezily told his cabinet this week, “we’ll have Europe take care of that”. Yet on the crucial question Starmer brought to Washington - of whether America will in turn take care of its old allies, offering the military backup without which its forces will be dangerously exposed - the best that could be said for Trump’s answer was that it wasn’t the anticipated outright no, and even that may come with trade-related strings attached.
Starmer laid on the flattery with the recommended trowel, handing over an invitation from King Charles for an unprecedented second state visit that evidently delighted the president. But though Trump praised him as a ‘special man’, this no longer feels like a special relationship; more the kind of loveless transaction that leaves both sides feeling grubby.
Europe still believes in building alliances, in special relationships, in rules-based world order and in the very idea of the west. But Trump believes in none of that. To him, old allies are little more than “relatives that come round and use your pool for free”, as Britain’s former chief of the general staff Gen Sir Patrick Sanders recently put it; those loser siblings who didn’t make it big like their billionaire brother has, and are increasingly just a drag to have around. And so he has decided to cut off their allowances and make them earn their own keep, forcing Europe first to pay for its own defence and second to do business on terms vastly more favourable to him.
Britons long for a cathartic Love, Actually moment where Starmer thrillingly lays down the law to the US, just like Hugh Grant’s fantasy prime minister. But while Emmanuel Macron got away with publicly correcting Trump when he visited earlier this week, Starmer isn’t a man to take risks: he couldn’t even bring himself to publicly condemn Trump’s threats to annexe Canada, a Commonwealth country. He will have been aware that he was in Washington not just on behalf of his own country, but to plead the cause of a continent at the most dangerous moment for Europe that I can remember in my lifetime.
There will be no peace in Ukraine, nor in any other country along Russia’s borders, unless Vladimir Putin knows there would be a heavy price to pay either for breaking a ceasefire with Kyiv or destabilising neighbouring states. Though EU leaders are now scrambling to find the money to build their own collective defence, following the US’s abrupt decision to pull the plug, in practice it will be years before they are ready to stand entirely on their own two feet and Putin knows it. A European deterrent force deployed in Ukraine without US backup risks being at best no deterrent and at worst a sitting duck. If Starmer’s dignity is the price to be paid for doing a deal that could save countless lives, then frankly America can have it. But even that may not be enough.
Battle-scarred Trump whisperers have queued up in recent days to offer Europeans the same advice: don’t waste your breath appealing to Trump’s better instincts, or even the US’s national interest, since what he mostly cares about is himself. Tell him that whatever you want is also his route to a Nobel peace prize, or that signing a peace deal favourable to Russia makes him look weak in China’s eyes, or that there’s money in it. “We’re taking what we’re entitled to take,” Trump told his cabinet this week, of a grimly mercenary deal Volodymyr Zelenskyy is currently being pushed to sign which effectively trades Ukraine’s natural resources for its survival.
The US will get to exploit the country’s valuable rare earth mineral deposits to the tune of billions of dollars, which could otherwise have been used to fund the rebuilding of a shattered country, in the kind of deal that countries defeated in war are more often forced to sign with their conquerors than with their supposed friends. In return, Ukraine hopes that US mining companies’ desire for a safe operating environment will motivate the US to offer some kind of security – or, at the very least, a backstop to whatever force his EU neighbours can assemble. If Starmer’s dignity is the price to be paid for doing that deal, or even for buying more time, then frankly the US is welcome to it.
Accordingly, Starmer brought gifts to lay at the feet of the self-anointed king: the urgent rise in defence spending Trump is demanding – from 2.25% to 2.5% by 2027 initially, with more to come – funded by a painful cut to overseas aid. (Though it mirrors Washington’s own spending priorities, in truth that may have less to do with flattery than domestic reality: there is no time to roll the pitch for manifesto-busting tax rises or to build creative solutions such as the rearmament bank proposed by the former chief of the defence staff Gen Sir Nick Carter, though those may well have a role to play in getting to the longterm goal of 3%.)
Beyond that, Starmer has two cards to play, neither of them particularly comfortable ones for the Labour party: not being a member of the EU (an entity that Trump increasingly sees as a means of screwing over Americans) in the middle of a trade war, and the offered social cachet of that royal visit.
But while Trump talked in vague terms about how American companies’ mere presence in Ukraine would ensure nobody took liberties, that’s far short of the hard commitment to air cover and other critical functions that Europe seeks.
Until that changes, what is left of the transatlantic alliance looks uncomfortably like two countries separated by a common threat – the collapse of a rules-based world order that has broadly kept the peace in Europe for almost 80 years – a threat that only one of us still even recognises as dangerous. And there may be no coming back from that.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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