After a grueling 27-hour flight to Samoa, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was entitled to a few hours of rest and recreation amid the tropical surroundings of a Commonwealth summit banquet on Wednesday last week. Unfortunately, the heavens opened, and the downpour never stopped. It was not the only rain on the UK prime minister’s parade: The PM was greeted by a chorus of Caribbean leaders demanding reparations for Britain’s part in the slave trade 200 years ago.
The no-shows were also significant: The leaders of South Africa and India snubbed the Commonwealth for the BRICs summit in Kazan, Russia. Dinner with Russian President Vladimir Putin — for whom the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant — and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) was deemed more congenial or lucrative. Russia’s leader boasted that the gathering heralded a “new world order” to challenge the old Western rules-based system.
Days before his Pacific shuttle, Starmer attended a Berlin summit for the NATO’s biggest leaders — presently a league of losers, or at least exhausted volcanoes. US President Joseph Biden is a lame duck, French President Emmanuel Macron is scrambling to recover from a gamble to contain the far right, while German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats-led coalition is irrevocably fissile.
Even though his party’s opinion-poll ratings have plummeted, Starmer’s government remains in robust health; he presides over a huge parliamentary majority that guarantees him a full five years in No. 10, with the promise of a second term. The British leader’s voice therefore carries weight at a critical moment for the West.
By instinct, Starmer is a cautious multilateralist who has inclined to view foreign policy through the prism of international law. Former British prime minister Tony Blair’s enthusiasm for furthering democracy abroad at the point of a bayonet is not shared by his successor. Starmer opposed Blair’s support for the US Republican-led Iraq war, although today he is content to shadow the Middle East policy of a Democratic US president, albeit by framing these arguments as also being about the rule of law.
It naturally follows that Starmer is a staunch pro-European, committed to rebuilding post-Brexit ties with the UK’s continental allies. His strongest cards are Britain’s armed forces and London’s traditional role as a hinge in the transatlantic alliance. The question is how and when he intends to play them.
The Russian army, now reinforced by North Korean troops, powerful Iranian drones and Chinese materiel, is intensifying its war of attrition with numerically inferior Ukraine. Meanwhile, the US presidential election is on a knife-edge. No one knows how former US president Donald Trump would try to end the conflict if he recaptures the White House, but Ukraine and its friends fear the worst — that he is naive or foolish about the durability of making a hasty peace settlement with Putin.
Two adventurous Conservative spirits, former British prime minister Boris Johnson and his defense secretary Ben Wallace, led the way in rearming Ukraine when it first came under attack from Putin; it is easy to forget that this was far from an obvious UK commitment at the time. Starmer has hitherto been content to follow Washington’s lead here too, but he has a role to play in bolstering Europe’s defenses for the long term. Today the UK, like its continental military ally France, is preoccupied with balancing the fiscal books. The British government has promised to raise defense spending toward 2.5 percent of GDP, but only when conditions permit — a highly elastic condition.
This week, British Secretary of State for Defense John Healey, a staunch Atlanticist in a party that under previous leaders has flirted with pacifism, told a Politico podcast that the UK’s armed forces are not ready to fight a war.
That is the first such admission I have heard in my lifetime; it would have been unthinkable at the time of the Falklands War. The British military was “hollowed out” and “underfunded,” Healey said, adding that “the UK, like other countries, has essentially become very skilled and ready to conduct military operations. What we’ve not been ready to do is fight. Unless we fight, we are not in shape to deter.”
Labour’s first budget next week is unlikely to herald a dramatic reversal of fortune for the armed forces, though the timing of Healey’s intervention is telling. Healey signed a defense pact with his German counterpart last week, echoing similar arrangements between the UK and France in the past. Optimists keen on a rapprochement with Berlin would see this as heralding the creation of a European defense industry. However, a reality check is needed — neither of the two ministers talked of giving Ukraine access to long-range missiles — the German Taurus system and the British Storm Shadow — that could strike Russian forces behind the lines and give a decisive boost to Ukraine’s fortunes.
Starmer has spent diplomatic capital cultivating Scholz too. However, it is most likely the center-right Christian Democrat leader Friedrich Merz, latterly a more robust critic of Putin than the German chancellor, who he would soon be facing.
Across the Atlantic, Starmer has wisely reached out to Trump. The PM secured a dinner with the Republican candidate during his visit to New York for the UN General Assembly, and he was the first foreign leader to speak to Trump after he escaped an assassination attempt. British Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs David Lammy, making up for Twitter indiscretions some years ago when he called Trump “a tyrant in a toupee,” has tried hard to strike up a relationship with his running mate JD Vance.
In their understandable enthusiasm to see their traditional ally, the Democrats, win the race for the Oval Office, not every Labour official has been so tactful. Sofia Patel, the party’s head of operations, hinted on her LinkedIn page last week that volunteers campaigning for US Vice President Kamala Harris in North Carolina might be paid for their board and lodging, allowing Republicans to storm about “foreign interference.”
Labour is perhaps taking too much interest in the US election; Downing Street Chief of Staff Morgan McSweeney also gave Harris’ team the benefit of his campaigning wisdom at the Democrats’ Milwaukee convention.
There are limits to bilateralism. A Labour government is not a natural fit for a Make America Great Again administration. Trump has a nose for weakness too. Unless he is prepared to increase defense spending, the PM would find he is treated with contempt. In the high-stakes game of geopolitics, Starmer is likely to discover he must pay to play. More than that, Starmer should take a lead in Europe by beefing up UK military capacity and concentrating its resources on the defense of the continent — where Britain’s interests lie.
Martin Ivens is the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. Previously, he was editor of the Sunday Times of London and its chief political commentator. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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