Starmer said he would continue pressing Trump for US security guarantees – a lobbying effort that he shares with French President Emmanuel Macron. “I’ve been clear that it needs to be done in conjunction with the United States,” he said. “We are talking to the US on a daily basis.”
Whether Starmer will succeed in turning around Trump is anybody’s guess, given that the US president has veered between bitter denouncements of Ukraine and threats to impose sanctions on a recalcitrant Russia. Putin reacted warily to an offer of a 30-day truce made by Ukraine and the US this past week, while rejecting all talk of a European peacekeeping force.
“Of course, there’s a risk,” said Peter Ricketts, a British diplomat who served as national security adviser to former British prime minister David Cameron. “But I think Starmer sees a greater risk of an avoidable catastrophe.”
Blair, he said, failed as a bridge because the divisions between European nations over Iraq were insurmountable. Starmer’s challenge is an erratic American president, who seems determined to reset relations with Russia and is openly hostile toward the European Union.
“Starmer’s going to do his very best not to have to choose between Europe and the US,” Ricketts said. Dealing with Trump, he added, “makes him vulnerable to sudden lurches, but so far, he’s managed to stay on the tightrope”.
Starmer, he said, had been helped by his seasoned and widely respected national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, who travelled to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, to help lay the groundwork for Zelensky’s rapprochement with the White House, and to Washington this week to consult with Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz.
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A one-time chief of staff to Blair, Powell served as Britain’s chief negotiator for the Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. He was also on hand for Blair’s fruitless effort to bring France and Germany along in the military campaign against Iraq.
Even before the crisis over Ukraine erupted, Starmer’s government was seeking closer ties with the continent, not just on defence and security but also on trade and economic policy.
But thanks to Brexit, Trump appears to place Britain in a different category from the European Union, which may help make Starmer a more effective broker. The president has suggested, for example, that he may not target Britain with sweeping tariffs, though he did not exempt it from a global tariff on steel and aluminium.
“Having one foot in, one foot out is a good thing for the UK in the present context,” said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, “but only if we remain in the current state of phoney war.
“If it becomes a real trans-Atlantic rift, then it is better to have the protecting power that the EU offers, at least in some areas. And in such a context, the UK would steer things better if it had two feet in.”
Shockwaves give Starmer political cover
At first, Starmer’s re-engagement with the bloc was distinctly a half step. After coming to power last July, he set about patching up post-Brexit relations in various European capitals but ruled out two conspicuous measures that could significantly boost trade: rejoining the bloc’s giant single market and its customs union.
His cautious approach, analysts say, is rooted in a fear of angering Brexit-supporting voters and of giving ammunition to Nigel Farage, the Brexit champion and leader of the anti-immigration party, Reform UK, which has surged in opinion polls.
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But the shock waves caused by Trump’s recent pronouncements on Ukraine and Russia have swept away some of the roadblocks to a broader reset. They have given Starmer political cover, with even those on the right in Britain acknowledging the need for greater co-ordination on Europe’s defence.
“It changes the whole context and puts everything else in perspective,” said Ricketts, who served as ambassador to France.
Ivan Rogers, a former British ambassador to the European Union, said Starmer’s diplomatic heavy lifting had impressed other European leaders, who had become used to a Britain that was either absent or vaguely antagonistic.
“All of that has reminded people that the Brits have re-engaged, and they might be more serious,” Rogers said. “You are now facing such an existential crisis in the EU that the mood has changed a bit.”
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That could open a path to more profound British re-engagement, especially if the Europeans decide to increase co-operation on military spending by creating a new initiative outside the existing structures of the European Union. Such an initiative could involve countries, including Britain, agreeing to common standards on issues such as military subsidies and weapons procurement.
That would essentially “create a defence single market, which has never been there before”, Rogers said.
For all the potential upside, Rogers, who worked in Downing Street during the Iraq War, said he worried that Britain’s role as a trans-Atlantic bridge would be hampered by its efforts to use its post-Brexit status to avoid the tariffs imposed by Trump.
“My worry is that it could appear to others that the UK wants to have it both ways,” Rogers said. “We want to be a bridge, have the trans-Atlantic alliance, be central to it, while simultaneously making the argument that we are very different from the EU, and the US can exempt us from its tariff action.
“It’s a little difficult,” he said, “to run both those arguments at once.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.