Starmer’s make-or-break moment

What was agreed? That’s the problem. Trump appeared to back the UK’s deal with Mauritius over the Chagos Islands. We know the two men publicly disagreed on whether Russia can be trusted. Trump slapped down the idea of putting US troops into Ukraine following a peace agreement, arguing that the presence of US workers hauling away the country’s mineral wealth would be deterrent enough – but then suggested that if British troops were attacked “we’ve got your back”. He also suggested Britain could be exempted from tariffs imposed on the European Union, if it were to sign a swift trade deal with America.

But with the Trump administration, traditional diplomacy has become impossible. First and foremost because the administration itself is fragmentary. 

British diplomats do not believe that any of Trump’s key subordinates – Rubio, Hegseth or Kellogg – know what the president’s plan for a Ukraine-Russia peace deal is, or whether one exists at all.

Second, because where the Trump administration does act coherently, it is through passive-aggressive behaviour: talk nice about King Charles and vote with North Korea at the United Nations. 

The entourage around Keir Starmer will have spent their time in DC being mollified by US officials, and reassured by British diplomats, but they will come away no wiser about the critical questions facing the UK. 

Will the USA offer a concrete security guarantee to Ukraine if it trades land for peace? If Trump and Starmer had agreed that, one of them would have said it. So we must still assume the answer is negative. 

On the bigger question, of whether the USA is still morally invested in the defence of Europe against Russian aggression, again the jury must remain out. Trump’s decision to inject tariff bargaining into the conversation has to be read as an offer as well as a threat: sign a trade deal that floods the UK with chemical-ridden chicken, and we will refrain from shutting down vital parts of your defensive arsenal.

So what can Starmer tell his fellow European heads of state and government? Not much. The Trump administration is acting as a chaos engine in world affairs, not a pole of attraction with a clear long-term objective.

And that’s why what matters is what Starmer said in Parliament this week, not what he said in Washington.

Labour announced it is hiking defence spending to 2.5% of GDP in 2027, and raising it to 3% in the next parliament. If you think they did this simply to give themselves negotiating leverage with Trump over Ukraine, think again. This is a major turn, premised on the realisation that Europe may be left to defend itself.

Starmer’s identified Russia as a “menace” to the UK’s security. He committed to deepening the UK’s commitment to collective European defence and announced a “change in our national security posture”. The Strategic Defence Review, which had been stalled by the Treasury’s unwillingness to fund the new military capabilities needed, has been rolled into a wider Single National Security, which will be presented in June.

“Our whole approach to national security must now change,” Starmer warned MPs; “We will have to ask British industry, British universities, British businesses and the British people to play a bigger part, and to use this to renew the social contract of our nation – the rights and responsibilities that we owe each other.”

That is a signal of major change. It means, for example, stronger state direction of industry. It means universities will be asked to align their scientific research with national security – and to resist those trying to drive defence firms and the armed forces off campus. 

Basically, from schools and universities through to the churches, mosques and temples of our ultra-diverse communities, people are going to be faced with the question: as Russia and China push their project of autocracy and lawlessness, and Trump walks away from collective security, which side are you on? The same question will be asked of those parts of British society that have become enthralled with the Russia-aligned far right.

It will be asked gently at first, because Labour is essentially a liberal party, with a strong pacifist morality at its core going back to Ramsay Macdonald and Clement Attlee. But when Starmer speaks of renewing the social contract he means getting every community and every public institution signed up to a project of national defence and resilience.

So whatever happens next in the diplomatic fandango being danced with Trump, this is the start of the British Zeitenwende.

We’ve always taken our defence seriously, but as a society we’ve outsourced it to a warrior caste, whose bizarre rituals and self-absorbed language we were happy to stay away from. Now, as our grandparents did in the run up to 1939, we’re going to have to shoulder the burden ourselves – physically and culturally.

For Starmer this is a make-or-break moment. His stature – and the stature of pivotal politicians like John Healey and David Lammy – has already grown. And the challenge of leading and unifying Britain gives him the golden opportunity to see off the threat from Reform.

In the history books, Britain’s fate in the 1930s is entirely defined by “what the Tories did”: half-hearted rearmament, non-intervention against fascism in Spain, the Munich Agreement, the Norway crisis and the fall of Chamberlain in May 1940. British history in the late 2020s will now be defined by “what Labour did”.

Did they revive political cohesion and democratic resilience, bringing the Tories round to a project of national unity in the face of the disintegrating global order? Did they pull sections of the working class back from the magnetic forces of racism and xenophobia? Did they bring the unions, the left and millions of their own Muslim voters round to support for British resistance to Putin’s imperialism?

Those are the tasks that lie ahead of Keir Starmer as he flies back from Washington.