London (CNN) — It’s time for Keir Starmer to make his move.
Britain’s prime minister has spent months carefully crafting a chummy relationship with Donald Trump. He has showered the US president with flattery since even before his November election win; he has been, in Trump’s words, “very nice.”
On Thursday, Starmer could finally extract something tangible in return. His visit to Washington is the biggest foreign policy challenge yet for a leader who, at a critical time for Ukraine’s future, has emerged as a potential bridge-builder: someone who can sway Trump from his confrontational tendencies and communicate to him the anxieties of the West.
The other scenario is less rosy: Starmer might discover that he’s been building a bridge to nowhere. He and Trump are not natural political bedfellows; there is baggage in their past, and a glaring chasm in their worldviews. Starmer talks up the “special relationship” between Britain and the US at every opportunity, but that relationship is getting bumpy. They want different things.
“The stakes couldn’t be higher,” Claire Ainsley, Starmer’s former executive director of policy who now works at the US-based Progressive Policy Institute think tank, told CNN. “(The visit) is a big test for the relationships between Europe and the United States, and Europe and the United Kingdom.”
Urgency on Ukraine
Trump’s stance on Ukraine has tipped this centuries-old transatlantic alliance into uncertainty, as it has done to so many others – including the American relationship with NATO. The president has purred at the advances of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, attacked Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, and has barely returned Europe’s calls, cutting the continent out of negotiations over the end of the conflict.
Starmer follows French President Emmanuel Macron, who visited Washington on Monday, in attempting to straighten those jumbled ties, and he will set the table for Zelensky’s trip to Washington on Friday. All three want to secure a version of peace that Ukraine and Europe can stomach: one that doesn’t sell out occupied Ukrainian territory, and that America will work to maintain.
Britain and France are leading diplomatic efforts on putting together a potential European peacekeeping force, which could enter Ukraine if a ceasefire deal were agreed, but the plan hinges on an American security presence: a “backstop” likely centered on air power, based in a nearby NATO country like Poland or Romania.
On Monday, Trump told reporters that “Europe is going to make sure nothing happens” after a deal is agreed. But Starmer has insisted Europe can’t carry that burden alone, and that American support is the only way to prevent Putin from attacking again. He reiterated that point on the flight to Washington, telling journalists that American security guarantees were the only way to prevent Putin from attacking again.
More urgently, Starmer will seek to persuade Trump to include Zelensky in talks over his country’s future. That is Europe’s most fundamental demand of Trump; the continent is intensely anxious about a pro-Moscow deal being forced on Zelensky.
But he is stepping onto an uneven playing field. Starmer’s problem is obvious: This visit matters far more to him than it does to Trump. The president has little time for European powers; he has threatened to impose major tariffs, and turned his back on decades of American foreign policy, which had placed Europe’s security at the top of Washington’s own priorities.
Starmer presented Trump with a significant gift ahead of his trip, announcing on Tuesday that Britain would hike its defense spending to 2.5% by 2027, and to 3% by the middle of the next decade. That is an unexpected acceleration of his government’s goal, and represents massive expenditure. It is also desperately needed; the British military is much depleted, experts say. A massive review of Britain’s army is due to conclude soon, and nobody expects its findings to be complimentary.
“We must change our national security posture, because a generational challenge requires a generational response,” Starmer said as he unveiled the new policy. “Courage is what our own era now demands of us.” Speaking to journalists later, he admitted the obvious: that events of recent weeks have hastened the move.
A complicated relationship
Thursday’s conversations will test more broadly the twin-track approach that Europe is taking towards Trump.
One camp wants to disengage. Germany’s likely next leader Friedrich Merz said after his election win on Sunday that Europe should “achieve independence” from the US, and slammed “outrageous” American interventions in his country’s politics.
Starmer, like Macron and Italy’s leader Giorgia Meloni, is firmly in the other group; he believes that Trump, if properly convinced, can be retrieved from the clutches of Putin’s embrace.
And there are few other leaders who can do it. “We’re not going to have an election for the foreseeable future. We’ve got a stable, center-left government. Therefore we can play an integral part in these conversations, in a way that other leaders may find difficult,” Ainsley, the former policy chief, said.
But there may be awkward questions for Starmer to answer when he and Trump face the media. Several members of his center-left government have historically condemned Trump. When he was an opposition MP, Starmer himself said Trump’s endorsement of Boris Johnson showed that Johnson “isn’t fit to be prime minister.”
Last October, then-candidate Trump returned fire, accusing Starmer’s Labour Party of election interference after it emerged that dozens of activists had campaigned for Kamala Harris.
Since then, Starmer has kept a tight lid on any criticism of the president from within his ranks. But privately, Trump’s recent interventions on Gaza and Ukraine have appalled most within Labour.
“Diplomacy by Twitter isn’t the usual approach to managing complex geopolitical issues,” one MP told CNN. “It raises questions about European defence going forward under this presidency, (since) misinformation can be so widely believed.”
An ‘insane’ deal
Starmer has several obstacles to clear at the White House, and they go beyond Ukraine. The visit is more broadly a challenge of his people-pleasing approach to global affairs.
The prime minister wants to keep everyone happy. He has been loath to criticize Trump, has warmed up Britain’s post-Brexit partnership with the European Union, avowedly backed Kyiv and thawed ties with China. At a time of geopolitical upheaval, he is attempting to squeeze Britain into an impossibly tight Venn diagram.
A case in point: Starmer’s intensely controversial plan to hand the Chagos Islands, Britain’s last African colony, to Mauritius, ending a years-long legal and ethical quandary.
Downing Street says the deal will secure the future of Diego Garcia, a US-UK military base on one of the islands, for 99 years. But Starmer needs Trump’s approval to finish the paperwork, and Westminster does not expect the self-stylized dealmaker-in-chief to be impressed by the terms: London is expected to pay billions of pounds to close the deal, and Mauritius is heavily reliant on imports from China, which has raised national security concerns on both sides of the Atlantic.
The deal is “insane,” according to a former Conservative minister, Grant Shapps, who as UK defense secretary halted the negotiations that Labour later revived.
“(China) will use territory to expand their influence. They will spy,” Shapps told CNN. “A lot of sensitive stuff goes on at British military bases. So you don’t want to be surrounded by potential adversaries.”
Mauritius has pushed for control of the islands for decades, and bodies including the International Court of Justice have backed its claims. But Shapps said: “You sometimes, as Trump is proving to the world, just have to say ‘no.’ You have to think about your own national interest.”
Another former Conservative defense secretary, Penny Mordaunt, also criticized the deal, which has been championed by current Foreign Secretary David Lammy. “The suspicion is that (Lammy’s) desire to atone for Britain’s colonial past has seen him enable China’s colonial present,” Mordaunt told CNN.
There are notable pockets of opposition from within Starmer’s camp, too. “The only thing that matters is what’s best for our national security. I am keeping an open mind, but I’m yet to be convinced this deal is that,” a Labour MP told CNN. “I’d have no problem if it were kicked into long grass because the US took considerable time to review the deal.”
Ukraine, Chagos, China and a colorful history of remarks about Trump are all awkward conversation topics that must be broached on Thursday. Starmer will do so delicately; unlike Macron, he is unlikely to fact-check Trump in front of the cameras. But he has run out of room for flattery; there is little time left to start some difficult discussions.
Starmer did not necessarily choose to be a statesman. His foremost stated objective is to grow Britain’s economy; he doesn’t want enemies, he wants investment and trade. But the world has had other ideas, and willingly or not, Starmer has found himself a key cog in a global structure on the verge of collapse.
On Monday, Starmer admitted Trump has “changed the global conversation” on Ukraine. Now it is Britain’s opportunity to do the talking.