27 February 2025

Today, Keir Starmer will travel to Washington D.C. for his first face-to-face meeting with President Trump since his return to the White House.

For Starmer and his Government, the stakes could barely be higher, as the US pushes ahead with controversial peace talks with Russia, from which Europe and Ukraine have both been excluded, and prepares to implement new tariffs that could impact British exports.

A month ago, both Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer assumed that the focus of their White House conversations would be trade and tariffs. Now, while those subjects are still on the agenda, the overriding issue is the future of Ukraine and the United States’ strategic commitment to the security of democratic Europe.

In the last fortnight, the worst fears of European leaders about Trump have come to pass. The President called Putin, initiated moves to bring him in from the diplomatic cold and offered Russia major concessions over Ukraine without consulting any of America’s allies. Trump’s personal animosity towards Zelenskyy (which dates back several years to Zelenskyy’s refusal to launch an investigation into what Trump claimed was criminal action by the Biden family) has become more open and vicious. Defense Secretary Pete Hesgeth and Vice President JD Vance have spoken in terms that brought into question not just America’s commitment to Ukraine but its willingness to defend Europe as a whole against Russian aggression. On Monday, in an astonishing UN General Assembly vote, the United States voted with Russia, Belarus and North Korea against a European-sponsored motion on the third anniversary of the 2022 invasion, to criticise Russian aggression and call for peace.

This week, in Macron’s own visit to the Oval Office, the French President navigated the tightrope relatively well – although what was clear is that the US and Europe remain an ocean apart. Macron and Starmer will have shared tactics for handling Trump and will speak again before the UK Prime Minister arrives at the White House. Both have decided against megaphone diplomacy. But both have quietly but firmly made clear their disagreements with the White House: asserting the truth that Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine; defending Zelenskyy’s legitimacy as a democratically elected leader; rebutting the assertion that the United States has spent more money than European countries in supporting Kyiv.

In private, both European leaders have three principal objectives: to try to get a better understanding of Trump’s underlying aims; to demonstrate to him that European nations will take action, and swiftly, to beef up their contribution both to their own collective security and to future security guarantees for Ukraine; and to persuade him that it is in his own political interest and the national interest of the United States to put Ukraine in the strongest possible position to negotiate a peace settlement. Trump frequently denounces Biden’s retreat from Kabul as a disaster for America’s standing in the world. Macron and Starmer will try to convince him that a bad deal for Ukraine would encourage would-be aggressors elsewhere and be seen globally as a defeat for the West and further evidence of what Xi Jinping describes as the decline of US power and influence.

Starmer and Macron know that on even the most optimistic assumptions it will take Europe years to substitute for American capabilities within NATO. They judge that evidence of greater European commitment stands the best chance of keeping the US involved as the ultimate guarantor of European security while building up Europe’s ability to act without the US if necessary.

On economics, both leaders will want to explore whether a deal can be done that Trump would accept as a win, but which did not come at a big cost to European economies. They will talk about how a trade war could make it harder for Europe to increase defence spending. Starmer will want to test whether a UK exemption from tariffs directed at the EU might be possible. Both leaders will explore in their meetings how Trump sees digital taxation and regulation and assess the extent to which he has bought into Musk’s attempt to harness US coercive diplomacy against EU and UK measures.

Whatever the outcome of the White House meetings, European democracies will spend more on defence. Stock prices for defence companies are likely to remain strong, especially after Friedrich Merz’s comments about the need for Europe to become independent of the US for its defence and his call for the outgoing Bundestag (where no one-third blocking minority exists) to consider lifting Germany’s constitutional debt brake to permit higher defence spending, which will reinforce this trend.

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