For a prime minister who has spent so much of his time in office out of the country, this week’s high-stakes trip to Washington DC may well be the one for which Sir Keir Starmer ends up being most remembered.
At a time when the Western alliance seems close to fracturing over Donald Trump‘s verbal evisceration of Ukraine and enthusiastic embrace of Russia – the PM’s mission is to smooth over those cracks, to advocate for Ukraine, and attempt to bring the White House back around to the European point of view.
Can he succeed in convincing President Trump of the need for the Ukrainians and Europeans to be part of his negotiations with Russia – and commit to backing up any resulting peace deal with American firepower?
Or will he face the kind of humiliation endured by Theresa May when she visited Mr Trump in 2017?
The former Conservative prime minister scored a diplomatic coup in becoming the first world leader invited to the White House after Mr Trump’s first election win, and hoped to shore up the president’s support of NATO.
While she succeeded in getting a public commitment to NATO – and incidentally, promised to encourage other European leaders to spend more on defence – the image of a domineering president grabbing her hand while she smiled awkwardly is what has gone down in history.
This time the stakes are much higher.
Over the past week, the mercurial new president has pulled the rug from under Ukraine and ripped up the post-war expectation that America could be relied upon as the Western world’s protector.
While Mr Trump’s insistence that European leaders should spend more on defence and take up the burden of their own security comes as no surprise, his outright hostility to Volodymyr Zelenskyy and apparent embrace of Russian propaganda has blindsided the rest of Europe.
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Starmer and Macron ‘haven’t done anything’
This weekend, Mr Trump has criticised both Sir Keir and President Emmanuel Macron – who will visit the White House three days earlier than the prime minister on Monday – as having done “nothing” to end the war in Ukraine.
Downing Street is maintaining a dignified silence in response. The last thing it wants to do ahead of Sir Keir’s visit is to provoke any further ire from the president. It’s already charting a difficult course in publicly contradicting the president’s description of President Zelenskyy as a “dictator” by making a rapid, supportive phone call and reaffirming Ukraine’s “democratically elected leader”.
Sir Keir has made three phone calls to Mr Zelenskyy in just over a week and clearly wants to make a point that the UK’s support for Ukraine is unwavering, whatever the president says. It’s expected the UK will announce an expansion of military support and a package of Russian sanctions to mark the third anniversary of the invasion, which runs counter to Mr Trump’s ambition to stop the fighting as soon as possible.
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But Sir Keir will go to the White House bearing gifts in an attempt to mollify the president.
It looks like he is going to make an announcement this week about the timetable of increasing defence spending from 2.3% to 2.5% of GDP, which hadn’t been expected until the spring. The president has repeatedly argued about the need for all NATO members to grow their defence budgets.
The Telegraph reports the prime minister will also present Mr Trump with an invitation from the King for a state visit to the UK – a tactic previously employed by Mrs May.
Will this be enough to nudge Mr Trump into greater enthusiasm for Sir Keir’s plan to deploy British and other European troops to help keep the peace in Ukraine, backed up by US security guarantees?
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Ukraine needs ‘security guarantee’ from US
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The Russians are clearly against the idea, and the president has made it clear he has no wish to deploy American forces to Europe. But perhaps US air support could provide the necessary “backstop”, as Sir Keir calls it.
But beyond Ukraine there are many other areas where the PM will need to deploy his best diplomatic skills.
The Chagos deal is one such bone of contention. Labour has drawn up a plan to hand the remote Pacific archipelago to Mauritius, in line with international court rulings, but pay to continue leasing the UK/US military base there for the next 99 years. The government insists the arrangement is necessary for national security reasons, but the Trump administration has made it clear it is not happy with the plan.
The other elephant in the room is the issue of tariffs, with Mr Trump threatening to slap “reciprocal tariffs” on imports to the US, citing VAT as an example of an “unfair, discriminatory, or extraterritorial tax”. The White House is also promising a 25% tariff for overseas steel and aluminium.
The UK is hoping to negotiate some kind of exemption due to the relatively even balance of US/UK trade, although that didn’t work the last time the president was in office.
In a worst-case scenario, economists have estimated tariffs could cost the British economy £24bn.
It’s a packed agenda – even without the added complication of Elon Musk getting involved, given his outspoken antipathy to Sir Keir.
Talk of a Love Actually-style moment – any kind of open critique of the US president’s wild approach to diplomacy – is hardly the prime minister’s style. Mr Trump recently described Sir Keir as a “very nice guy” – but that personal relationship will only carry the negotiations so far.