It’s all an absolute waste of time. It’s malevolent, of course, and vindictive and petty and vicious and ignorant and insane. But most importantly, it is a waste of time.
We’re now a few weeks into Donald Trump’s latest assault on our attention span and we can surely understand the process by now. He says something dreadful and then we all freak out about it. Occasionally something happens. Most of the time it doesn’t. But by then we barely notice because he’s said something else dreadful and the whole godforsaken cycle begins again.
The British foreign policy establishment is currently reeling from Trump’s insistence that the US “will take over the Gaza Strip” and permanently displace the Palestinians living there. That’s decades of US policy up in smoke. It’s a grenade into any notion of a peace process, an insult to the very notion that there could ever be a peace process. It’s an explicit and clear-cut call for ethnic cleansing by the world’s leading military power.
Keir Starmer will have spent the evening trying to formulate a response. On the one hand, he must try to avoid alienating Trump and precipitating a tariff attack. The Government is just about within its own fiscal rules. Any detonation of its US trading relationship will plunge it into chaos. But at the same time, he cannot just hand Palestinians over to the wolves.
In the end, Environment Secretary Steve Reed said he wouldn’t “provide a running commentary” on Trump’s pronouncements, but insisted that “Palestinians should be able to return to their homes”. Every word rings with the anguished conversations which formulated them.
Over dinner yesterday, Starmer met Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, which almost certainly centred on what they were going to do about Trump’s imperialist threats against Greenland. Again, Starmer is stuck. He cannot condemn Trump or he leaves himself exposed. But he cannot allow these matters to proceed, because it destroys international law.
In public, he stayed schtum. In private he was probably more friendly, or at least that’s the impression you got from Frederiksen’s effusive statement afterwards. “I consider the UK as one of our biggest and most important allies,” she said, “and he is a close friend and colleague to me and to Denmark.”
Will any of this happen? Will we really see American troops launch an amphibious assault on the Gaza Strip and start shooting at people? Will we see an invasion fleet launch for Greenland?
Probably not. A US occupation would invariably involve reprisal attacks, which would go on indefinitely. Every Islamist terrorist on the face of the Earth would have a new target. The US would be bogged down, stuck, hemorrhaging cash, shedding lives. And for what? Some seaside real estate in the Middle East? Some transitory own-the-libs tears?
We are all caught in this vortex of this nonsense. Big loud colourful horror stories we can’t help but pay attention to but which add up to nothing. It was like this during the first Trump term. It remains the same now.
World leaders are just as stuck as the rest of us. Starmer’s choices over Greenland and Gaza are just the start. He must somehow battle this firestorm of daily controversy without being enveloped by it. How can he do it? How can he strike his own course and achieve his own objectives when the world is composed of such utter chaos?
The first priority is to set up mechanisms for the things he wants to do at home and make sure they are insulated against distraction. Downing Street must be working with relevant government departments on his core aims – the NHS, the economy, education – in a way that is completely closed off from the geopolitical firestorm, in a manner which cannot be blown off course by day-to-day madness.
The second is to resist putting out constant statements on whatever Trump has said. This is easier said than done. I feel a powerful sense of frustration at Starmer’s silence every day. Canada is one of our oldest and greatest allies. The King is their head of state. I despise that we have sat mutely as they are wrongly slandered and attacked. Denmark is a close ally. We should be standing up for it in the face of imperialism. We should be standing firm on the existence and importance of international law, not just muttering consoling words to their prime minister behind closed doors.
But what is the outcome if Starmer comments on everything that Trump says? First, he triggers a tariff war against himself. Second, his own time as Prime Minister becomes entirely defined by whatever is happening in the White House. He loses the ability to set his own agenda, to talk about his own issues. He becomes just another amplifier in the Trump chaos circus.
Finally, Starmer can delay decision-making until the last moment. It is perfectly obvious that there are zero-sum outcomes in EU and US trade talks. On agricultural standards, for instance, the UK has to sign up with one or the other. Starmer knows this is true, but he does not admit it because it limits his room to manoeuvre. It opens up attacks from Leavers if he sides with Europe and Remainers if he sides with the US. The better tactic is to deny there is a choice to be made, pursue parallel trade talks, and delay these decisions as long as possible.
Who knows? Perhaps no decision will ever have to be made. Perhaps Trump will forget about a UK-US trade deal. Perhaps he will never do anything about Greenland. Perhaps his absent-minded thoughts about Gaza will never be realised. If so, Starmer will have avoided a trap.
Brexit cheerleaders have gone awfully quiet – so let me remind you what they did to Britain
Read MoreOr perhaps, in the end, a decision will need to be made – on agricultural standards, or Greenland, or Gaza. That’s fine. It can be made then, when it is actually happening, rather than when it is just another feverish idea which may well be forgotten tomorrow.
Trump is madness. You can see quite clearly that his mind is in chaos and that this chaos is being projected onto the world. He is an animal in a cage, prone to sudden bouts of violence. The world leaders who deal with him look like Thomas Cromwell negotiating with Henry VIII – hoping they can manage him, knowing they might fail, and wary all the time of what he might do to them if they do.
Despite all the noise, the issue is primarily one of management. So far, Starmer has proved highly effective at this. It is not inspiring. Of course it isn’t. But it is probably the only viable avenue open to him. How long he can keep this approach up is another matter.
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