When Keir Starmer meets Donald Trump in Washington next week, I’m told he will tell the president that the US can achieve much more working with its allies than it can alone.
The prime minister will reassure Trump the UK will boost its defence spending. He will define what he meant by the US needing to be a crucial “backstop” for European forces to safeguard a ceasefire or peace deal in Ukraine – probably air support, intelligence, satellite communications and reconnaissance, but without US combat troops (even if European forces were killed by the Russians).
But can Starmer really be a bridge between the EU and the US?
True, the crisis sparked by Trump has blown away some EU reservations about post-Brexit Britain and in effect being represented by an outsider in the White House talks. Previously unthinkable, now a case of needs must.
Some Starmer allies believe it will be easier for him to be the transatlantic bridge than it was for the previous prime minister who aspired to the role: Tony Blair, when the UK was still an EU member. (Blair’s critics say his bridge collapsed when he rejected the idea of a “European solution” on Iraq, and wrongly claimed Jacques Chirac, the French president, had completely ruled out military action.)
One UK government source told me: “It will be harder for [Starmer] with the Europeans, but easier with the Americans. We are one foot in and one foot out of Europe, so it’s easier to be looked to and trusted by the US.”
However, some EU diplomats are less sure. One said Starmer’s pledge of UK ground troops split Europe just when Trump had united it: “We were united at the Munich security conference on Sunday, and then divided when we met in Paris on Monday.”
If Starmer persuades Trump to give the UK a carve-out from the proposed US tariffs on steel while imposing them on the EU, the UK would not join the inevitable EU retaliation. That would anger Brussels and could make Starmer’s reset with the EU much more difficult.
It would call into question Starmer’s optimistic claim that the UK does not face a binary choice between the EU and US, and can enjoy the best of both worlds.
Indeed, Blair now admits he made a choice to make “a real commitment” to the US after the 9/11 attacks, rather than “merely cheer from the sidelines”. In his book On Leadership last year, the former PM said: “It was a choice… such foreign policy choices can be really tough. Only the foreign policy experts sitting in their armchairs believe in the ‘have your cake and eat it’ philosophy of policymaking.”
Although Starmer is right to try to be the bridge, experts doubt he can pull it off. The historian Margaret MacMillan described the idea as “an absolute pipe dream”. She said: “It is not a bridge that is going to last. Trump and co will just give it a kick one day. They don’t believe in the special relationship. There may be people in Britain who still believe in it. It is certainly not given any credibility in the US, particularly by this administration.”
Timothy Garton Ash, professor of European studies at Oxford University, told a webinar held by the UK in a Changing Europe think tank: “The UK can be a bridge, not the bridge.” He said Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s right-wing prime minister, is better placed to woo Trump on Ukraine than Starmer, and the US would also have relationships with Germany, France and Poland.
It’s an understatement to say Starmer can’t be sure how the unpredictable president will respond to his pitch. Some Labour MPs now fear the prime minister will be on a mission impossible after Trump’s incredible “you should never have started it” outburst at Ukraine last night in which he parroted Russia’s lines and in effect switched sides in the war. Trump seems to have made his choice and for Ukraine, the EU and UK it is at the darkest end of their nightmare scenario.
The prime minister will wonder whether the uncompromising Trump will ever listen to a message he does not want to hear. Only last week, one Starmer adviser told me that having “a transactional president is better than one who acts unilaterally”, because at least the UK would have a seat at the table. Then came Trump’s extraordinary, unilateral action on Ukraine, ditching America’s friends around the world while going soft on its enemy in Russia – with no seat at the negotiating table for Ukraine or Europe.
But in one sense, Starmer has no choice at all: he must handle the scary new world order as it is, not as he would wish it to be.
