The median British voter and the typical Labour MP think that the prime minister spends too much of his time on foreign affairs. It is worse than they know. Many of his days over the past year have been entirely consumed by the world. Sir Keir Starmer will be scrambling to Berlin on Monday for yet another set of crisis talks with other European leaders, hoping to prevent an American sell-out of Ukraine that rewards Vladimir Putin’s aggression by handing swathes of stolen territory to the tyrant of the Kremlin. The world never stops spinning for the prime minister – and its wildest gyrations are the work of the resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC
At the risk of sounding wildly unfashionable, I think Sir Keir has navigated the many horrors of the relationship with Donald Trump just about as well as any prime minister could. Would Angie or Ed or Shabana or Wes – or any other putative replacement – have made a better fist of it? Consider me sceptical. Might a different prime minister have fared considerably worse? Quite possibly. At some cost to both personal dignity and domestic popularity, Sir Keir has kept what some people still insist on calling “the special relationship” more or less on the road.
For a stark illustration of what he is up against, I refer you to the chilling rewrite of American national security strategy that has recently landed with an alarming crump. The 32-page document has nothing condemnatory to say about Russia, an absence which is shocking without being surprising. It doesn’t even mention the possibility that Putin might be a threat. Moscow has gloatingly noted that official US policy is now “largely consistent” with the Kremlin’s view of how the world should be ordered.
The document oozes contempt for America’s traditional allies in Europe, who are allegedly facing “civilizational erasure”, a favoured trope of rightwing extremists. While generally disowning any global responsibility for defending democracy, it urges regime-change in Europe. Washington will “promote patriotic European parties”. By which it surely means Alternative für Deutschland, National Rally in France and Reform UK on our own shores. The leak of a longer, classified version suggests it is active US policy to foment the disintegration of the EU.
This is no way to speak about your allies. But then it is a category mistake to think that Trumpian America regards us that way. In a recent interview, the US president attacked Europe as a “decaying” continent led by “weak” people. A smart rebuke to that characterisation would be for the EU to cease its dithering and release billions in frozen Russian assets as collateral for a reparations loan to Ukraine to increase its leverage in negotiations and help keep it in the fight against dismemberment. The strategy document casts profound doubt on whether we can have any further confidence in the US security guarantees upon which UK defence policy has rested since the 1940s.
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Some wiseacres in Whitehall tell us to calm down, dear. They sniff that we should not take this stuff too seriously. On their account, this is rhetorical grandstanding rather than a guide to how the US will behave in practice. Yet it is authentically Trumpian in its hostility to liberalism, its promotion of ethnonationalism, as well as its transactionalism and mercantilism. If you want to be optimistic, you’ll tell yourself he won’t be there forever and he may be succeeded by someone friendlier to freedom and a rules-based international order. But then again, maybe he won’t. You wouldn’t want to bet the farm against JD Vance becoming the next occupant of the Oval Office. The vice-president’s bellicose speech to the Munich Security Conference back in February prefigured the strategy document by declaring ideological war not on the autocrats of Russia and China, but on the democracies of Europe.
It is hard to quarrel with Matt Western, the Labour MP who chairs the joint parliamentary committee on UK national security, when he says that decades of assumptions about US values and intentions are being “shattered”. Sir Keir has responded to this scary US pivot by pretending that it isn’t happening. Challenged by Sir Ed Davey to “pick up the phone” to the US president and tell him that it is “totally unacceptable” to interfere in our democracy, the prime minister blandly replied: “What I see is a strong Europe united behind Ukraine.” Seema Malhotra, the Foreign Office minister sent to respond to an emergency parliamentary debate, insisted repeatedly that the US “remains a strong, reliable and vital ally for the UK”.
I can see why the government doesn’t want to acknowledge that it cannot be business as usual with this version of the United States. The US has been the backstop of our security for eight decades and the UK’s most vital interests are tightly enmeshed with it. Our military is configured on the assumption that any serious conflict will be fought alongside American forces. The lead manufacturer of the much-troubled Ajax light tank is General Dynamics UK, a subsidiary of a major contractor for the US military headquartered in Virginia. The Five Eyes intelligence alliance is a critical pillar of UK security when it comes to combatting terrorism, hostile states and cyber-attacks. As one very senior member of the government told me: “You can’t just turn it off.” The UK’s supposedly independent nuclear deterrent, primarily composed of Vanguard-class submarines, has its missiles maintained by the US at the Kings Bay base in Georgia.
Mark Rutte, the secretary general of Nato, bleakly warns that the alliance must be ready for direct armed conflict with Russia within five years. The UK and the rest of Europe urgently need to do the necessary to defend our own continent. Emmanuel Macron and Friedrich Merz are among those who have suggested that the European members of Nato need the strategic autonomy to make themselves capable of deterring and resisting aggression without requiring American agreement or reinforcement. Sir Keir is highly wary of such talk, fearing it will sound the final death knell of US security guarantees.
The prime minister has invested too much time and faith into trying to sustain the relationship to want to accept that all his efforts may have ultimately been in vain. He’ll keep on gritting his teeth, swallowing his pride and trying to keep the show on the road – even as the road vanishes beneath his feet.
Photograph by Tolga Akmen/EPA/Getty Images