Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain and President Emmanuel Macron of France announced on Thursday the details of a new defense relationship, including a first-ever pledge to have their nuclear arsenals work together in the event of serious danger to allies in Europe.
The announcement came as the two leaders concluded a three-day state visit with a trip to a British military base, Northwood, as they seek to underscore their support for defending Ukraine against Russian aggression.
The agreement between the two countries — which the leaders referred to as “the Northwood Declaration” — means that any attack from an adversary will result in a “response from our two nations,” Mr. Starmer said.
The British prime minister and Mr. Macron, who last held a similar summit before President Trump’s return to power in January, also announced a migration agreement that could reduce the number of people attempting to cross the English Channel in small, crowded boats launched from the beaches of northern France.
Both topics are at the core of what the two leaders say is an improved diplomatic relationship between the neighbors that was frayed when British citizens voted, by a narrow majority, to leave the European Union in 2016.
In a speech to the British Parliament on Tuesday, Mr. Macron said the two countries “have to work together in order to defend an efficient multilateralism and to protect the international order.”
Europe has long been reliant on the United States for nuclear protection, as many nations are members of NATO. But Mr. Trump is increasingly talking about the need for Europe to defend itself against potential adversaries. Britain and France are the only two nuclear powers in Europe.
The pledges of defense cooperation come as Ukraine continues to fight Russia more than three years after President Vladimir V. Putin ordered an invasion of his neighbor.
As the Trump administration has backed away from military support for Ukraine, Mr. Starmer and Mr. Macron have struggled to push forward with the “coalition of the willing” that they created to stand up to Russia. Some of the other countries have hesitated to pledge military assets like planes. And a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine, promised by Mr. Trump, has yet to materialize.
On Thursday, at a British military base outside London, the prime minister and the French president joined a call with the leaders of the other coalition countries to jump-start the plans.
On migration, British and French officials have been in talks for months on how to respond to an increase in the number of small boats filled with migrants arriving in Britain, almost all of whom are seeking asylum. Mr. Starmer and his Labour majority are under increasing pressure to reduce the number of unauthorized migrants without abandoning the country’s humanitarian obligations.
In Parliament on Wednesday, Nigel Farage, the leader of the populist, right-wing Reform U.K. party, demanded that Mr. Starmer “say to the French president we will not accept undocumented males across the English Channel, and that you are not dictated to by an increasingly arrogant French president.”
Mr. Starmer shot back at Mr. Farage, who made anti-immigrant sentiment a cornerstone of the Brexit campaign to leave the European Union in 2016. He said Mr. Farage’s solution to migration “has been to break everything and claim that’s how you fix things, and to stick two fingers up at your neighbors and then expect them to work with us.”
Mr. Starmer said, “He has no interest in fixing the problem because he wants to milk it and exploit it.”
The small boats became a popular method of making the journey to Britain after the authorities’ successful crackdown on migrants using trucks carried by ferries or driven under the channel.
After the 2016 Brexit vote, unauthorized migration from France to Britain became harder for Britain to tackle, because it was cut out of a European agreement that had allowed the transfer of asylum seekers back to countries where they previously lived or claimed protection. Britain also lost access to a biometric database used to establish people’s identities and previous applications.
Since then, several European countries have rebuffed efforts by Britain to seek bespoke returns agreements with individual nations, arguing that such arrangements about migration must be made with the bloc as a whole.
Michael D. Shear is a senior Times correspondent covering British politics and culture, and diplomacy around the world.
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