Hard, disconcerting times; and a week that will be remembered in history. Keir Starmer is not popular. But who, on behalf of Britain, would you rather have negotiating with a man as unpredictable and as dangerous as Donald Trump?
Recalling his past enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin, would you prefer Nigel Farage? Would you feel safer had Kemi Badenoch visited the White House this week? Or jolly Boris Johnson with his fist bump? Or fervent Liz Truss?
Starmer’s decision to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent – or 2.6 per cent if you cook the books and add the intelligence services – will not be regarded as enough by the defence establishment. But bringing forward the timing to 2027 will please military chiefs; and holding open a 3 per cent target for the next parliament is at least an important moment in the propaganda war with Russia. The truth is that given the fiscal straitjacket and weak economic position Britain is in, a much more radical defence answer could only come by beginning to demolish the welfare state. If, from a defence perspective, the commitment could have been bigger, from a Labour perspective, it could have been a great deal worse.
Dramatic, too, was Starmer’s decision to fund the reinvestment in defence and security by cutting overseas aid. That is a brutal decision which, coming after the US’s demolition of USAid, will affect some of the poorest people in the world. It could be argued it was also politically a bit too easy – a hard choice for the Tories or Reform to attack, and one that avoided still more difficult choices around tax rises or welfare cuts.
But it showed a decisive turn towards a government serious about the possibility of a more widespread war in Europe and ready to take early action to rebuild our diminished forces. Had Starmer told Rachel Reeves to find cuts, they could not have been done quickly enough by rationalising health benefits, but would have required a far more aggressive assault on welfare generally. I think he could have raised income taxes instead and won the argument with British voters about essential security for extraordinary times. But that is an easy thing for a journalist to say and there is no doubt he would have been laying his reputation on the line forever.
I have always argued that Starmer is the toughest of tough nuts. This is highlighted by the aid decision because at a personal level, it cuts this north London human rights lawyer off from his natural environment – the richly coloured flora and fauna of the idealistic, liberal, internationalist NGO world he emerged from. Among those who will be most distressed by the decision are, I suspect, some of his old friends. “Ruthless” is an understatement: this week something in the political tone of this government has changed forever.
There is one other important aspect to record: in his defence spending speech Starmer rejected the idea that Britain now needed to make a different strategic choice and ally herself much more strongly with Europe, rather than with an American-dominated Nato. Yes, he rightly spoke of a closer defence and industrial relationship, covering British universities, companies and industry, and the military; but he is determined to stick with America as well.
That puts him at odds with, among many others, the next German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who calls for European independence from the US, accuses Trump of being “largely indifferent to the fate of Europe”, and asks whether Nato will still exist in the same form by June. It also puts him against the former Nato boss Anders Fogh Rasmussen who says that Europe is being left alone by Washington and faces dramatic defeat.
Less surprisingly, Starmer gave his riposte to Putin’s claim that Trump is bringing order to Europe and the European nations sit at the master’s feet “wagging their tails tenderly”.
But he is putting all our eggs in the Trump basket. On 24 February there was an extraordinary moment when at the UN, the US voted with Russia and China and against European democracy for the first time since 1945. Trump is extraordinarily mercurial. His messaging changes every day. But if we get Trump grinding Volodymyr Zelensky’s face into the mud of a humiliating and unsustainable capitulation, then what Starmer said will seem naive.
On the aid issue, Starmer is distancing himself from some of his closest Europhile allies who hoped this would lead to a turn towards rejoining the customs union or single market. The cosily liberal, centrist bastion of decline we left in 2016 no longer exists. It’s interesting, though, that this naturally cautious and often slow-moving man has taken such a big, strategic, instinctive decision so fast. For the truth is, these are days when it is hard to keep your feet. In AD 79 Pliny the Younger wrote to Tacitus describing the eruption of Vesuvius over Pompeii. First, on the distant horizon, a strange cloud spreads its dark arms across the sky. Then – still quite a long way away – come the belches of fire, and the ground rumbles. Suddenly, there’s a pitter-patter of hot stones and ashes, against which people vainly try to protect themselves.
The opening weeks of Trump’s second term have been like this: a giant eruption far away, a rumble growing nearer, and each morning, as we wake, bright ashes floating in the air.
Or so it seems to me. One experienced minister reflected to me that the brightest minds around the world were expending all their mental energy trying to decode the ideas of a man whose brain was more like a box in which half a dozen fireflies were constantly banging into one another.
Either way, this is a week when two political questions must be asked. How radically should British political strategies shift right now? And how can we start to get our heads around the uncomfortable reality that is Trump?
We have to start on the battlefield. New Statesman readers were well-served last week by Lawrence Freedman’s reflections on the Munich Security Conference. The sheer scale of the threat and need to rearm across Europe is still not generally appreciated.
Trump’s dangerous and graceless undermining of democratically elected President Zelensky points to the collapse of Ukraine. Washington appears to want a Ukrainian election carried out in wartime conditions in a country partly outside Kyiv’s control – an election that would be manipulated and frantically contested by Russia. It means chaos at the moment when discipline is most required.
That would produce a demoralised front line and, across the rest of Ukraine, a further flood of migration. Even if the front line held, behind it would be a hollowed-out, half-empty half-country with no security. Six months later, there would be a border “provocation” or demand by the Kremlin that X or Y be arrested; and then a further invasion of the country. Then Moldova and the Baltic states; who believes Trump would stand up for them? Then Poland…
It is Starmer’s job to emphasise to Trump that such “peace” may prove to be a decisive jolt towards a much wider European war instead; or if not, a Russian hegemony over western Europe unlike any since Tsar Alexander marched his troops into Paris in 1814.
Perhaps it is too easy to be catastrophist. An outcome which sees a long, frozen new border between democracy and dictatorship, with which we all learn to live, is also possible.
The trouble is we must act now, as if a wider conflict is possible, even probable, if we are to ward it off. A vanguard of Russian military imperialism pushing deep into our world might not physically reach the UK. But with our energy and internet cables traversing the oceans, and our history as a European country the Kremlin particularly dislikes, we would be vulnerable to physical and political threats. We’d feel it every day as we shrunk. This week it became clear that Starmer has got the memo.
All the above simply lays out some of the new politics taking shape around us. But it takes us to the heart of the question in Washington: how best to think about, and deal with, Trump. People with a background in property development or real estate (like Trump) say that his behaviour is in fact so repetitive as to be predictable. He opens with an outrageous demand, designed to destabilise the other side. He lets them seethe and quake. Then he comes back in an apparently soothing mood and moves the conversation to what he always wanted, which now seems like a compromise. But he must seem to “win” and nothing matters more to him than keeping face.
If this is right, then Starmer has done the right thing by downplaying his comments on Zelensky. Nothing could be more counter-productive than demonstrating patiently to Trump why he is wrong. Instead, we should support Ukraine in signing the deal on rare minerals the president wants for the US – not because it’s a good deal for Ukraine in financial terms but because those mineral deposits are largely scattered underground near the front line. Having American “property” close to a Russian army may be as near as anyone can get to a meaningful security guarantee.
But is focusing on transactional politics failing to recognise the creep of fascism in what used to be the world’s great fortress of democracy? As I’ve written before in these pages, Nazi comparisons are not useful or warranted – but this is a difficult question and to help get a handle on it, I recommend the 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis, It Can’t Happen Here. Aimed at a complacent 1930s American readership, it narrates the rise and fall of a US dictator-president, initially by election.
Between Lewis’s fictional Buzz Windrip, and Trump, there are indeed unsettling parallels. Windrip is a manipulative actor of genius: “He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes… But he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowd with figures and facts – figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.” As with Trump, Windrip’s core audience are people who feel excluded economically and sneered at socially – “the league of forgotten men” – and as with Trump, Windrip bullies the mainstream media and goes after the universities. He is crude and clownish and voters love him for it.
There is no Elon Musk in the book, of course; no social media. But there is a pair of darkly brilliant manipulators of radio, the new medium of the time, who keep Americans distracted with shocking scandals and equally fake-news, homegrown triumphs. Like Trump, Windrip has his greatest rally at Madison Square Gardens, and like Trump he wants to take over Canada, as well as Mexico – though not Greenland or Gaza.
The novel, influenced by the Third Reich, introduces a paramilitary bully-boy army, concentration camps, torture, book-burning and underground resistance. Windrip eventually falls not because of an uprising but because of poisonous rivalries in his Washington court of jealous egomaniacs.
The parallels with Trump’s court are obvious, as JD Vance, Musk and Steve Bannon seek to push their often conflicting ideologies. But today, wider Republican America is a bigger part of the story. Shockwaves have been rippling out from Washington over sackings of senior military personnel, cuts in public services, the practicalities of mass deportation, and the danger of a new inflation imported by tariffs. It’s clear that – as in Lewis’s novel – the real jeopardy for a president distorting the constitution will come at home.
In other words, Starmer has bigger reasons for playing it cool. Trump is already talking of an unconstitutional third term (as are figures such as Bannon, interviewed by my colleague Freddie Hayward) but the likelihood is that the British Prime Minister can wait him out. This period of belligerent unpredictability won’t go on forever.
And yet, while it lasts, Britain must change its behaviour. That long graph of military decline must reverse. We must shed our final imperial delusions, join hands with the French and the Germans, and look after our own patch of the world once again. The US may come back to us, or it may not. But for now, we must behave as if it has gone. For when it comes to the security of Europe, there is no waiting-out to be done. The crisis is here, and the crisis is now.
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This article appears in the 26 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain in Trump’s World