U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s congratulations for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump this week signals his pragmatic willingness to forge a working relationship with the incoming president. Starmer, striving to bridge differences, finds himself in the unenviable position of balancing his party’s distaste for Trump with the U.K.’s long-standing strategic reliance on the United States. Starmer’s outreach may smooth over initial tensions, but when Trump returns to power, maintaining this fragile connection may prove difficult.
Starmer finds himself on the more conciliatory end of his party. David Lammy, now the foreign secretary, has described Trump as a “racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser” and a “neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath” and sought to make him the first U.S. president denied a state visit to the U.K. Parliament. He has compared Trump consistently to Adolf Hitler.
It has been widely reported that this history might sour relations. In the run-up to the vote, Woody Johnson, the former U.S. ambassador in London and a Trump ally since at least the 1980s, warned that Trump “will remember” Lammy’s remarks. Trump has a habit of paying close, almost neurotic attention to the negative things that people say about him, especially online.
Lammy sought to put distance between himself and his past comments in a BBC interview before the election, attempting to downplay his insults as being broadly in line with what others were saying, and adding that “lots of people have had things to say.” Lammy has so far refused to retract his comments, but what Lammy will be regretting most is the tone he struck—one closer to Trump’s own Twitter style than a foreign secretary-to-be.
It is certainly an embarrassment, but relations between the very oldest of allies do not break down over little spats like this—especially when they are recoverable. Trump himself has shown he can be willing to overlook past indiscretions. His pick for vice president, Sen. J.D. Vance, has self-evidently been forgiven for his very vocal criticism of Trump, but only after making his apology public.
Should an appropriate face-saving apology be drafted, this attitude to bygones could work in the Labour Party’s favor. Johnson, the former U.S. ambassador, added that “there’s always a way to recover if you want.”
Indeed, ever since it was clear that Trump was going to win the Republican Party nomination again, Lammy and others have been expending considerable effort to increase outreach to key members of Trump’s team. Lammy is now much better counseled with a new team of special advisors, not to mention the Foreign Office establishment at his call, despite his own ignorance and history of undiplomatic statements. He met Trump’s team in the run-up to the election, and he has made genuinely impressive moves to win over the French. Former U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s sudden departure from an event commemorating the 70th anniversary of D-Day, which caused embarrassment for the then-prime minister during the election campaign, was exploited by Lammy not just politically, but also diplomatically, which shows a degree of tactical skill missing from his time in opposition.
But Labour has headaches from outside, too. The one becoming clearer by the day is that created by Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party, a frequent confidant of Trump’s. He’s Trump’s man on the ground in the United Kingdom. He will wield considerable advisory weight and shape U.S. policy toward the U.K. Decisions such as the discussions around Diego Garcia—the remaining U.S. base in the Chagos Islands, which the U.K. recently returned to Mauritius—and those regarding any interventions in the Middle East will, to some extent, be filtered by Farage’s influence.
This, should it come to pass, will be a direct consequence of Farage’s friendly overtures and Lammy’s past hostility toward Trump.
Though far from a breakdown, interpersonal spats such as this still leave behind frictions. That prestigious first phone call. Those decisions at the margin about how to engage the other party diplomatically. And those eyebrow-raising interventions, including the infamous “back of the queue” remark that former U.S. President Barack Obama made to support former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron during Brexit discussions.
But Lammy’s other problem is that he also has to answer to a British public that largely dislikes and distrusts Trump—and could see an apology as a sign of weakness or appeasement.
The scramble to shake hands and smooth over Lammy’s lack of grace shows a lack of foresight and preparedness for office. Starmer himself has a largely underdeveloped foreign policy. Unlike their predecessors in the Conservative Party, who had the “Integrated Review,” the new Labour government so far lacks a unified foreign-policy strategy. The nature of the election campaign—and particularly, its lack of focus on international issues—has allowed Starmer’s strategic thinking to remain only loosely defined.
Similarly, there are more continuities than differences between Trump’s foreign policy and Biden’s. Both were adversarial to China. Both have kept up sanctions on Iran and officials within the ICC. Both essentially take the “America First” attitude of the purported prioritization of the working-class American as the keystone of any foreign-policy question.
Initially, Biden sought to recast this objective with a more progressive touch, rescinding the proscription of the Houthis and announcing his intention to restart the Iran nuclear deal—both stances that would not last long after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Starmer may find Trump’s foreign policy to be, in the main, mostly continuation with added showmanship. It is on the topic of Ukraine where the major divergence will be seen.
Indeed, Lammy has, while searching for compliments he could pay Trump at low political cost, praised him for his early supply of delivering Javelin anti-tank weapons systems and rockets to Ukraine. This all builds upon a background of Trump as consistently pro-British and in favor of the U.K.’s “Global Britain” approach (insofar as that remains government policy).
From a trade perspective, it was former Prime Minister Theresa May who buried the prospect of a U.S. trade agreement in 2017, not Trump. There are overtures that a pivot from Starmer could bring enormous dividends for the U.K. Compared to a Biden who snubs royal coronations and visited Northern Ireland to ensure “the Brits didn’t screw around,” the United Kingdom has some real soft power in the White House once more, if Lammy and Starmer don’t blow that goodwill.
A less optimistic story, however, warns of a Trump intent on reducing military aid to Ukraine, in line with a wider reevaluation of “NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.” This will be Starmer’s, and Europe’s, greatest fear. The U.K. and Europe will need to pivot to a new Ukraine strategy without the same levels of U.S. money. It’s by no means guaranteed—there are strong reasons to prevent a Russian victory—but Trump’s obvious ire at the financial cost and hostility toward Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will put Europe on the spot.
Secondly, it is near certain that Trump will attempt to repeal Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which is spurring global green subsidy races—something that Starmer is keen to participate in domestically with large state-led plans for clean energy investment. A U.S. exit from the subsidy race is strictly a good thing for the short-run costs of the European energy transition, but a very bad thing indeed for international climate politics, and for the West’s strategy for promoting compliance with the Paris Agreement.
The U.K. strategy has been to cooperate and lead on climate abatement to encourage third nations to carry their own weight. New U.S. oil drilling, a potential departure from international climate agreements, and the blocking of green energy sources undermine global cooperation and make European efforts look naive and futile.
Starmer will also have to look at backtracking on his flagship Great British Energy scheme, a plan to tax oil giants to pay for publicly owned domestic green energy farms. His plans, now confirmed in the budget, involve removing investment incentives in oil fields in the North Sea, located to the northeast of Great Britain. These incentives currently shelter those companies from headline tax rates on oil and gas of 78 percent—some of the highest levels in the world.
Oil firms have warned of these rates risk crushing revenue over the next five years through starving those projects of investment, and at a time when old rigs still need expensive decommissioning. Within half a decade, the United Kingdom is likely to be facing collapsing oil production as new investment fails to compensate for the wells reaching the end of their lifetime. The country therefore faces collapsing tax revenues for a green transition. A cooling of the global subsidy race could allow Starmer to pivot to a smoother and cheaper energy transition without the scale of deadweight loss in the North Sea.
But by far, the largest sticking point will be the inability to rely on the United States going forward. Trump himself is the most obvious example, but isolationism has become politically popular in the United States again.
Britain’s armed forces have, until this year, largely conceived of themselves as an American division under British officers. They have prioritized logistics, quality, and rapid mobilization—largely as part of a wider NATO force underpinned by the United States—over depth, manpower, and stockpiles. But if the Americans never show up or don’t commit, then that posture is completely undermined. Even outside of the European theater, Britain’s previous advantages—for example, in aircraft carriers—would be completely outclassed if they were sent to the Pacific to protect Taiwan.
Britain is urgently reassessing its posture because it knows that the writing on the wall shows the United States disengaging from Europe once again. Starmer is too much an institutionalist and a legalist to have serious answers to these problems because he is committed to European structures, and commensurately to the old format of NATO. This Trump presidency will expedite and cement these long-term structural issues, but by the time that they have become obvious, Starmer may have run out of time to pivot.
Yet the Trump headache is not quite as piercing as many commentators believe it to be. Both sides are professional enough to navigate an awkward past. It’s clear, however, that the more profound challenge for Starmer is not about remarks from the past, but about policy.
Without a clear strategic vision, it is not easy to imagine how Starmer can take on the mantle of leadership in Ukraine and climate change alongside his European counterparts.
The challenge will be one of pragmatism—can Starmer change his tune domestically and strategically to optimize against the backdrop of a Trump presidency? Can he recognize the warning signs? Can Starmer control his party, many of whom will oppose any collaboration with Trump?
This, of course, remains to be seen. But it is still far too soon to write off this chapter in U.K.-U.S. cooperation.
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