Bridge-building has been a struggle for recent British prime ministers. Boris Johnson was widely mocked when he proposed a 28-mile link from Scotland to Northern Ireland, spanning a trench containing 1mn tonnes of unexploded munitions, chemical weapons and radioactive waste.
Sir Keir Starmer was also greeted with some incredulity when he suggested on the eve of this week’s trip to Washington that he could be the link between an unconstrained White House and a Europe traumatised by Trump’s trade threats and overtures to Russia. In the view of Michael Clarke, a professor from King’s College London: “The west is dead.”
Yet after warm talks in the White House on Thursday — in which Starmer and Trump lavished praise on each other — there are hopes in London that something can still be salvaged from the wrecked certainties of a postwar order scorned by the US president. “I’m happy,” said Starmer, as he briefly greeted journalists packed into his “Keir Force One” aircraft.
On Sunday, Starmer will convene 18 European leaders at Lancaster House in London, a 19th century mansion adjacent to Buckingham Palace. He will debrief them on Trump’s frame of mind and try to co-ordinate efforts to secure any peace deal in Ukraine and the biggest rearmament seen in Europe since the end of the cold war.
Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, will also be a key player and is working with Starmer to seek to preserve the American security guarantee in Europe. But the British prime minister believes he has a unique role to play.
“The president genuinely loves Britain,” says one British official, noting that Trump’s mother was Scottish. “And he has a genuinely warm relationship with the prime minister. He doesn’t do bombast with Keir.”
The scale of the task facing Starmer and Macron was put into sharp relief on Friday when the US president had a shouting match with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office. “You’re gambling with the lives of millions of people. You’re gambling with world war three,” Trump said. “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out.”
The very public disagreement underlined just how far the US has moved in recent weeks away from its previous position of sustained support for Ukraine against Russia — and the distance now between Washington and its European allies.
In a bid to bridge this yawning gap, Starmer has been trying this week to put in place a new strategy: an effort to bolster Europe’s ability to defend itself, while also attempting to persuade Trump to stay militarily and economically engaged with the old continent.
Starmer told journalists en route to Washington: “When it comes to defence and security, we have for decades acted as a bridge because of the special relationship we have with the US and also our allegiance to our European allies.”
Even before Trump’s public spat with Zelenskky, however, the question was whether it was anything other than wishful thinking for Britain to attempt to be a bridge in a world where — as Starmer put it to MPs this week — “everything has changed”.
For Starmer, it is not just about trying to construct a working relationship with the new Trump White House, but also mending fences with Europe. After all, Britain voted to dismantle its ties with its European neighbours in 2016, with Brexiters holding out the prospect of the country forging closer ties with the US. But a promised UK-US trade deal never materialised.
“There are three elephants in the room and we just have to be careful we don’t get trampled,” is how one British official describes Starmer’s attempt to navigate between the global economic powerhouses of the US, EU and China.
The reality is that Starmer is having to reinvent UK foreign policy on the hoof. As David Miliband, British foreign secretary under the last Labour government, tells the FT: “The idea of the west is not dead, but its current incarnation is in intensive care.”
During his brief trip to Washington, Starmer did his best to maintain the US president’s interest in Europe. He showered praise on Trump and celebrated the offer of an “incredible” second state visit to Britain — the first time such an honour has been bestowed on an elected leader. Trump gushed back that Britain was “fantastic” and King Charles was “a beautiful man”.
In the short-term, at least, it seems to have paid off. Trump suggested Britain might escape his tariff onslaught if the US and UK could reach some kind of economic agreement, focused on technology. The president also backed a controversial deal, brokered by Starmer, to hand over British sovereignty of the Chagos Islands in exchange for securing the future of the UK-US base at Diego Garcia for 140 years.
But Trump failed to offer what Starmer craved most: an offer of US military guarantees over any Ukraine peace deal and a more general reassurance that Washington will remain a reliable partner in preserving European security.
That presents both a threat to Starmer and an opportunity. The threat is to European security in the face of Russian aggression; Trump was clear this week. “I’m not going to make security guarantees beyond very much,” he said. “We’re going to have Europe do that.”
The opportunity for Starmer is to leverage Europe’s growing security fears in order to resurrect British influence in the continent, a role squandered by Brexit. Along with Macron, who also met Trump this week, he leads one of only two western European countries with significant military muscle, even if that has shrivelled over decades of incremental cuts.
After years of post-Brexit estrangement, Britain is now talking again about closer European co-operation. Rachel Reeves, UK chancellor, this week met EU counterparts at a G20 summit in Cape Town to look at ideas for a multilateral European defence fund, which could help pay for the biggest rearmament since the cold war.
Starmer’s Lancaster House summit, which leaders including Macron and Ukraine’s Zelenskyy will attend, will discuss a European response to Trump’s warning about a retreat from the continent. “I accept that European allies, the UK included, must do more and that means on capability, co-ordination and spend,” Starmer told journalists.
That view is widely shared across the continent. Friedrich Merz, German chancellor-in-waiting and an avowed Atlanticist, said this week: “My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA.” He added that Trump was “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”.
Starmer’s allies hope that British leadership on defence in Europe can be leveraged into a better post-Brexit deal, as the UK and EU begin “reset” talks.
Lord Peter Ricketts, former UK national security adviser, warns that “Starmer should stop talking of bridge-building. This doesn’t work when one bank of the river is subject to violent earthquakes.”
But he sees “a real opportunity” for Starmer to lead the redesigning of European security, working together with Macron.
“One man has experience, the other political longevity. They should build a coalition of the European willing — capable of acting outside rigid EU rules. A Ukraine force should be the first step. The next could be galvanising defence industry joint-working,” he tells the FT. “All this needs boldness and tactical agility. Not Starmer’s natural game.”
Starmer insists he has not given up on Trump or the US. Indeed, the British prime minister’s announcement on the eve of his Washington visit to boost UK defence spending by £6bn from 2027 — up from 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent — was intended as a signal to the White House that Europe had received the message and was looking to solve some of its own security problems.
But, for Starmer, European defence needs America. Lord Peter Mandelson, Britain’s newly installed ambassador to Washington, told the FT this month that maintaining the US security guarantee in Europe was his number one priority.
“We are living through a very, very significant moment in our lives, between our two countries and indeed for all the freedom-loving democracies in the world,” Mandelson told a packed welcome reception at the refurbished Edwin Lutyens-designed ambassadorial residence on Wednesday.
British officials admit there is a “chicken and egg problem” when it comes to confronting Russia. Europeans are reluctant to commit troops to police any peace in Ukraine without US air cover, while Trump does not want to commit to anything until he sees concrete evidence that Europe is serious about defending itself.
Some believe that the days of America seeing itself as a protector of western values is finished — whatever the Europeans might do. Bronwen Maddox, director of the Chatham House think-tank in London, says the concept of the west — including liberal democracies outside the geographical region such as Japan, Australia and New Zealand — is “probably” over.
“I think the assumptions that underpin the idea of the west . . . a set of principles that these countries felt that they were defending and advocating to the rest of the world — agreement on that has gone,” she says.
Starmer believes that Britain can help to shore up the west, leading efforts to show that Europe, instead of being a problem for Trump, is part of the solution. And the prime minister’s allies insist he can curry favour in Washington without alienating Europe. “It shouldn’t matter,” says one official. “It’s what everyone is trying to do.”
Mandelson, who was a staunch opponent of Brexit, has conceded that leaving the EU has opened up an opportunity for Britain to carve out a role in Washington by “being not Europe”. For Trump, who claimed this week the EU was set up to “screw” America, Britain may become a useful interlocutor on the continent.
“We must reject any false choice between our allies — between one side of the Atlantic and the other,” Starmer told MPs this month.
On Thursday night, as his flight tracked the Connecticut coast — before Trump’s angry exchanges with Zelenskky — he seemed content with his day’s work. Asked how it had gone, he smiled and simply gave a thumbs-up.
But the prime minister is also well aware of the old diplomatic adage that if you are a bridge, it can be easy for people to walk over you.
Data visualisation by Keith Fray
