Starmer escapes the worst of Trump’s insults but the special relationship is still on the rocks

‘I don’t want to insult anybody,” Donald Trump began his speech in Davos, before spending most of the next 75 minutes being rude to just about everybody listening in the mountain top resort.

His nastiest mockery was directed at Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, and Emmanuel Macron, the French president. It is surely no coincidence that they have been the two Nato leaders who have been most robust in pushing back against the US president’s attempted land grab of Greenland. There were also mocking passages about Germany, Switzerland, the UK and Europe as a whole. “Without us, you’d all be speaking German, and a little Japanese perhaps.”

Keir Starmer, the target of a sudden blast from Typhoon Orange about the Chagos Islands deal on Tuesday, escaped without being mentioned by name. For that at least No 10 will be relieved.

Nothing Trump said is likely to induce Greenlanders to think any more warmly about being annexed to the US in the name of American security. He claimed it was a mistake for Harry Truman to hand it back to Danish control at the end of the second world war, repeatedly referred to Greenland as “a piece of ice” and confused the territory with Iceland. Good luck with building that “Golden Dome” when the US president doesn’t know one island in the high north from another.

Since he generated this crisis, it has been repeatedly asked why the US needs to own Greenland in order to defend it from the menace he says is posed by China and Russia. His answer was that “you can’t defend it on a lease”. In saying that, he undercuts all of America’s defence treaties and basing agreements around the world, including those with Japan, South Korea and us.

The one sliver of soothing news is that he ruled out, as he has not before, using military force to seize control. The key passage is this: “We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be frankly unstoppable. But I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to use force, I won’t use force.”

He added the menacing rider: “You can say no and we will remember.” For all the typical Trumpian bluster, that implicitly concedes some weakness in his position.

This reduces the heat a little, but it does not defuse the crisis in the trans-Atlantic alliance, the most acute rupture since the inception of Nato, mendaciously derided by Trump as an alliance which has done “nothing” for the US.

Starmer, who has devoted huge amounts of time and energy attempting to preserve the alliance, is trying to navigate a path that is neither humiliatingly supine nor irretrievably destructive of the relationship. In the Commons today , the prime minister generally pleased Labour MPs in the audience for PMQs by striking a rhetorically harder tone than he has done before. Calling it “completely wrong” of the US president to threaten punitive tariffs if he isn’t given what he wants, there was a faint whiff of Churchill about Starmer’s declaration: “I will not yield, Britain will not yield.”

But also note that he’s not going as far as Carney or Macron in his willingness to confront Trump and what the French president denounces as an attempt to create “a world without rules”. Starmer said no to a leftwing Labour backbencher who urged him to introduce retaliatory tariffs against the US.

When Ed Davey told him to “stand up more strongly” to a US president who acts like “a crime boss running a protection racket”, Starmer dismissed the Lib Dem leader as someone only interested in soundbites. He told MPs that it was “foolhardy” to think that “we should rip up” our relationship with the US when it is so vital to the UK’s defence, intelligence and trade.

Here, in a nutshell, is the horns of the dilemma on which the prime minister finds himself impaled ever more painfully. The UK can’t live with this version of America, but he can’t see a way to live without it either.

Photograph by Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images