CNN
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A bust of Winston Churchill will gaze at Keir Starmer on Thursday as he executes one of the trickiest visits by a British Prime Minister with a US president since the days of the great World War II leader.
Starmer has a critical mission in the Oval Office — to peel Donald Trump away from Russian President Vladimir Putin, to extract security guarantees for Ukraine following an eventual peace deal and to save the transatlantic alliance.
His chances of success seem slim. French President Emmanuel Macron visited Washington on a similar quest Monday and, despite rekindling his bromance with Trump, got no concrete assurances.
The task before the more taciturn Starmer became even more complex as he flew over the Atlantic on Wednesday. Trump, in the first Cabinet meeting of his new term, dismissed the idea of robust US security guarantees for Ukraine that Starmer sees as vital to ensuring that any peace agreement can endure.
“I’m not going to make security guarantees beyond very much. We’re going to have Europe do that … Europe is their next-door neighbor,” Trump said.
But on his plane, Starmer argued that a peace agreement would not be viable without such a US pledge. “I’m absolutely convinced that we need a lasting peace, not a ceasefire, and for that to happen we need security guarantees,” Starmer told reporters, according to Reuters.
Starmer is looking for a US ‘backstop’
Starmer also said he’d press the US president for another undertaking he’s so far been loath to give – a “backstop” for a “reassurance” force Britain and France have said they are ready to send to Ukraine in the event of a peace agreement. Europe’s militaries lack the logistical, intelligence and anti-aircraft missile assets needed to secure such a force on their own, without the US. Starmer said en route to the US that “my concern is if there is a ceasefire without a backstop, it will simply give him (Putin) the opportunity to wait and to come again because his ambition in relation to Ukraine is pretty obvious, I think, for all to see.”
Starmer and Macron rushed to Washington after Trump sent shockwaves through the West by telling Europeans they must take primary responsibility for their own security and by siding with Putin over the war in Ukraine, which Trump falsely said was started by Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Starmer told parliament on Tuesday that Britain now faced a world where “everything has changed.”
He’s not wrong, but while the West may be entering a perilous new age, there’s very little clarity on what it will look like – especially over how Trump plans to end the war after US talks in Saudi Arabia with Russia.
The US president has offered no detailed strategy – other than ruling out Ukraine joining NATO and hinting that Putin will be able to keep all the territory captured in its vicious three-year war. These apparent concessions were seized by Trump’s critics as granting Russia its bottom-line goals even before negotiations start. Doubts the administration will be an honest broker were further raised when the US voted with enemies Russia and North Korea at the United Nations this week against a resolution condemning Moscow’s aggression on the third anniversary of the war.
Rare earth minerals deal
There is also confusion over a proposed deal for the United States to profit from Ukraine’s rare earth minerals, which Trump has claimed will repay Washington for its military and financial aid to Kyiv during the war. “The deal we’re making brings us great wealth,” Trump said in the Cabinet meeting. “We get back the money we spent.” The president has previously claimed that Washington would make up to $500 billion from the agreement, which Zelensky refused to sign when it was first presented to him and that Trump critics warned amounted to the colonial pillage of a desperate nation.
But in an example of the whiplash typical of Trump’s foreign policy, the president said that Zelensky will be coming to the US to sign the agreement on Friday. A draft copy of the updated agreement seen by CNN makes no mention of Trump’s claims that Washington could recoup money the Biden administration sent to Ukraine.
Instead, it, calls for the establishment of a “Reconstruction Investment Fund” that will be jointly managed by the US and Ukraine and used to rebuild the country’s cities and infrastructure. And Zelensky said Wednesday the agreement with the US was merely a framework for future cooperation. The Ukrainian president wants to make the final agreement conditional on the US offering security guarantees for his country. But the draft of the text seen by CNN makes no such commitments, saying only that the US “supports Ukraine’s efforts to obtain security guarantees needed to establish lasting peace.”
Which all means that, pending further clarification, Zelensky may have faced down Trump’s demands for a massive share of the proceeds of Ukraine’s mineral wealth and laid the groundwork for future US investment in his country. Still, it’s possible the US president — who craves deals for their own sake — will still bill the agreement as a massive victory even if the substance suggests otherwise.
Trump, whose worldview is transactional and refracted through his experience as a former real estate developer, has also said he’s pursuing big economic deals with Russia as he eyes up a summit with Putin perhaps within weeks. Such a meeting, and any deals on heavily sanctioned Russia, would bring the Kremlin in from the cold and fracture the western effort to punish it for the invasion of Ukraine. This is one reason why Starmer will be seeking clarification of the president’s plans as he also tries to ensure that Europe and Ukraine, who see the war as existential, will not be cut out of future talks as was the case in Saudi Arabia.
The latest shift towards Putin, to whom Trump often genuflected during his first term, alarmed US allies in Europe, who fear that surrendering Ukraine would embolden the Russian leader to take more land, possibly even by threatening the Baltic states that are NATO members once annexed by the Soviet Union.
Starmer on a political tightrope
Starmer’s visit to Trump represents the most testing moment of his young premiership following his landslide election victory last year.
He’s not the first British leader to hold critical talks at the White House. Margaret Thatcher, for instance, helped President Ronald Reagan take on the Soviet Union. And Prime Minister Tony Blair traveled to visit President George W. Bush as the two leaders led their nations into the ill-fated Iraq war.
But Starmer is visiting a president taking previously unfathomable steps to threaten the rules-based global order sketched out by Churchill with President Franklin Roosevelt early in World War II.
Some European NATO states are now making hurried pledges to spend more on defense following Trump’s bitter complaints that Washington has long been bilked. In a bid to impress Trump, Starmer this week announced that Britain would hike its military spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 with the hope of a further spike to 3% after the next general election in 2029.
“We must change our national security posture because a generational challenge demands a generational response,” Starmer said. The British government had previously made the 2.5% pledge but not a target date. The number might not impress Trump however, since he’s demanding defense spending rise to 5% of GDP from NATO members — even though the current US spend is around 3.4%.
Meetings between US presidents and British prime ministers habitually stir misty-eyed conjuring of wartime solidarity and tributes to the “special relationship” even if that relationship often seems more special to the former colonial power than the nation that replaced it as the world’s dominant superpower.
But Trump is less impressed by historic allusions and common democratic values than most presidents – despite returning the Churchill bust to the Oval Office when his second term started last month. He has a feral sense instead of the relative weakness of most foreign nations relative to the United States.
Starmer, an understated former barrister and left-of-center human rights lawyer, is the opposite of Trump in almost every respect. He’s also less likely than the theatrical Macron to try to match Trump’s showmanship. But he does share one thing with the president — an insatiable will to win that was displayed in his revival of the Labour Party and its march to victory last year.
Starmer made sure to meet Trump even before his election victory last November at Trump Tower in New York, and the president praised him as a “nice guy.” Such compliments, however, are fungible in Trump’s world. This week, for instance, he accused Macron and Starmer of “not doing anything” about the Ukraine war.
The prime minister does have one unique trick in his bag for the Oval Office meeting, a potential invitation for Trump to make a state visit to Britain at the invitation of King Charles III. The president loves British pomp and loved Queen Elizabeth II – a favorite of his Scottish-born late mother. The since-deceased Queen hosted Trump for a state visit in 2019 after which Trump insisted she hadn’t “had so much fun in 25 years.”
But given the differences between Britain and Trump on Ukraine, Starmer was unwilling to forecast his chances of success in Washington.
“I’m not going to get ahead of myself on it, other than to say I’m very clear about what the principles are,” he said on his plane, Reuters reported.