Keir Starmer has the measure of Donald Trump ...Middle East

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Meanwhile, European leaders are huddling. Sir Keir Starmer had dinner with President Macron at Chequers on Thursday evening, and next month he will be the first UK prime minister for five years to join in a meeting with all his EU counterparts. The Foreign Secretary is constantly travelling, and even the Chancellor Rachel Reeves is in Beijing this weekend.

Trump is talking tough. All that matters to him are American interests, which the US is entitled to because, in the words of his aggressively outspoken aide Sebastian Gawker, it is “the most powerful nation in the world”. America’s allies in Nato and the G7 are trying to work out if this assertiveness will be all bad news for them, or whether Trump’s bombast can be made to work to their advantage.

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No wonder the US’s main allies in Europe are apprehensive. Greenland is an autonomous part of Denmark and thus covered by the EU. France and Germany rushed to condemn his plans for territorial expansion by force or economic coercion if necessary. “There is obviously no question that the European Union would let other nations of the world attack its sovereign borders, whoever they are”, the French foreign minister Jean-Noel Barrot declared.

Lammy may well be correct. Trump is surely trying to get his way with threats and the coercion of allies who, in Lammy’s view, are “required” to work closely with the US. In practice Trump is both personally and politically conflict averse.

Many in Trump’s team, including vice president elect JD Vance, nominee defence secretary Pete Hegseth, and Ukraine-Russia envoy Keith Kellogg are dismissive of Ukraine. Others in the embryonic administration led by nominee Secretary of State Marco Rubio are staunch supporters. If and when it comes to Trump’s talks with Putin, Trump will be caught in a dilemma. In the words of the eminent US historian Robert Kagan: “Trump must now choose between accepting a humiliating strategic defeat on the global stage, and immediately redoubling American support for Ukraine”.

Ukraine will not be “settled” before Trump becomes president, as he once boasted. Nor will a deal be done on day one in the Oval Office. As yet neither side has firm plans for the Putin-Trump meeting. Lammy does not expect it until Easter time, which is in late April this year. The incoming Trump administration is obsessed with appearing strong, ready to “fight, fight, fight”. There is a growing realisation in Mar-a-Lago that abandoning Ukraine would not be a good look.

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There is no indication that Putin is in a position to compromise now. Territorial concessions in Donbas and Luhansk have always been a possibility but those have never been Putin’s war aims. He wants the annihilation of Ukraine as an independent sovereign state and the installation of a pro-Russian puppet government with no links to Nato and the EU. Trump may have no love for either of those institutions, but the “most powerful” leader in the free world could never accept such a humiliation. It would mean open season for Russia and China to expand their territorial ambitions and completely undercut the credibility of Trump’s ambitions for Greenland, Panama or Mexico.

Either way, the UK faces hard choices, as do the EU member states. In their own interests they cannot countenance a sell-out of Ukraine. Lammy has written that “keeping the British people safe means standing up to the Kremlin, working with our friends and allies to deter Putin’s mafia state”. That cannot be done without America’s continued support.

There will also have to be an uncomfortable rethink of the alliance-based liberal worldview. There are indications that the Starmer government is more prepared for this than most US allies, as Lammy talks of “transactional, hard-headed diplomacy”. On balance America’s interests still align with the UK’s, and Russia and China’s do not. Trump’s worldview must be given a hearing.

Adam Boulton presents Sunday Morning on Times Radio

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