It would be absurd to claim to see a silver lining behind every US President Donald Trump cloud. Those clouds are too many, too dark and too dangerous. All the same, viewed from a domestic political perspective, there is a clear emerging UK upside to Trump’s efforts at crashing the post-Cold War order. It might even get a boost from Thursday’s Washington visit by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
In July last year, when Starmer became prime minister, the Labour Party was rigidly on the defensive about Europe. Brexit was seen as an electorally unstable issue for a party whose priority was to reconnect with leave voters. Everything about Europe was thus sidelined during the election. Only vague generalities were permitted. The only foreign leaders pictured in the party manifesto were Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Since July, Labour in government has continued to tread warily. Starmer’s personal goodwill toward Europe was clear in international meetings, especially bilaterals. However, he remained circumspect and nervous about re-engaging on policy specifics, especially with the EU itself. For instance, a report last week that the UK would agree with the EU on youth mobility visas was quickly knocked down by the government.
Illustration: Yusha
Downing Street’s response here was explicit. Such a scheme, even though only applying to 18-to-30-year-olds, restricted to a three-year limit and subject to an annual numbers cap, would be depicted as a resumption of pre-Brexit freedom of movement.
It was not going to happen, Starmer’s office said. The reason is simple. Starmer is determined to prevent any replay of the Brexit years from entering the domestic political arena. Liberal Democrats leader Ed Davey’s recent proposal for the UK to rejoin the EU Customs Union also got a similarly immediate brush-off.
Importantly, the Conservative Party opposition is also cautious about Europe, although for quite different reasons. Brexit still remains part of the Tory party’s creed. However, even some Tory true believers can see there is a problem.
Brexit is synonymous in the public mind with the chaos of the years under former British prime ministers Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, which led to the party’s worst modern election defeat last year. Nor has Brexit delivered any of the advantages promised in 2016. The Tories are therefore content with the standoff too. Even the Reform UK party said little about Brexit. Only the Liberal Democrats and the Scottish nationalists feel unfettered by the issue.
The politics of the UK-Europe relationship might have stayed quietly frozen there for the next two or three years, despite Trump’s return. That was, after all, the original Labour government plan. So much has happened in Washington so quickly that it is perhaps hard to remember that, just after the Jan. 20 inauguration, the UK was wholly focused on trying to embrace Trump as much as practicable, as well as on keeping out of the developing US-EU tariff battle.
That changed forever with Trump’s volte-face on the Russia-Ukraine war. By embracing Russia, and trashing Ukraine and Zelenskiy, Trump exposed the true scale of the security threat to Ukraine and Europe that would result from a deal between him and Russian President Vladimir Putin. US Vice President JD Vance underlined the realities in Munich shortly after. As a result, Trump drove the UK and Europe closer together far sooner than might have happened if former US vice president Kamala Harris had become US president. Starmer now talks almost daily with Zelenskiy and, just as importantly, with French President Emmanuel Macron.
That change is the product of necessity. It has been brought on by Trump’s recklessness. However, it has a positive side. It forces Starmer to engage far more actively with Europe on defense and security. That is desirable all round. One consequence was Tuesday last week’s defense spending hike announcement. However, this might be only the start.
A further paradox is that Trump has also forced British Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch and the Tory party to support Starmer’s more Europe-oriented response. Having backed Ukraine so passionately under Johnson from 2022, anything else would discredit the Conservatives further. Remarkably, the Tories have almost nothing to say about a shift that would have been anathema in Johnson’s day. Even Reform UK leader Nigel Farage, although less heavily politically invested in support for Ukraine and Zelenskiy, has had to join the slipstream.
All of which has gifted Starmer a new and previously closed space in British politics. Building up Europe’s defense effort is suddenly the patriotic course. In the past, it would have been depicted as divisive, anti-US and anti-NATO. Instead, with the US threatening to turn its back on Ukraine, Europe and even NATO, it is Trump who is now divisive. There is an echo here of modern UK’s Churchillian mythology, and of the words uttered by a defiant British soldier who raises his fist to the gathering storm in political cartoonist David Low’s iconic 1940 cartoon, Very well, alone.
Now, though, it is all Europe, not the UK, that stands alone. Trump deserves two sorts of credit for that amid all the justified condemnation.
First, because all of Europe should have seen and acted earlier on the security need anyway — not exactly difficult after Putin’s seizure of Crimea and Trump’s first term.
Second, because it pushes the UK closer to Europe more generally. That increases the possibility for other forms of European joint action, not just in defense, that would sometimes be based on nation states and not exclusively on the disturbingly unwieldy EU.
Last weekend’s German election is potentially pivotal here. The likely German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has long been open to stronger German defense and, like Macron, to what is known in EU-speak as “variable geometry” relationships. That is where the priority for Europe’s future lies, not just for the UK. Whether those things would happen, and whether they would be sustained by the Merz-Starmer generation of leaders, are different questions altogether.
However, Trump has given Europe a chance. There is a gleam in the dark.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist.
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