Starmer the Tortoise could offset Trump the Hare and buy time for Europe
The collision between Trump’s impulsiveness and Starmer’s caution has had the bonus effect of creating new options for the Labour government.
Donald Trump has been back in power for barely eight weeks. It is eight months since Sir Keir Starmer moved into 10 Downing Street. In much less time, the US president has had a far greater impact on the state of his country and the rest of the world than the UK prime minster.
That is largely explained by the power disparity between the two countries and the different mandates of a US president and a UK prime minister. The United States is still this planet’s dominant superpower. Trump has found a way of governing by Executive Orders and declarations of intent which go unchallenged even when misspelt on social media sites. Trump is fortunate that both Houses of Congress are behind him. Starmer is accountable to parliament where by definition he must command a majority.
The two men are at opposite ends of the spectrum of leadership style. Starmer is cautious and deliberative and inclined to play down what he will be able to deliver. Trump is impulsive and routinely overbids regardless of the veracity of his boasts. Just look at their campaign slogans. Labour’s “change” was framed negatively, promising nothing beyond escape from the Conservatives. To this day, nobody berates the Biden administration like Trump but nothing could be more aspirational than “Make America Great Again”.
Trump’s apparent willingness to withdraw from the defence of Ukraine has generated a crisis for the Western Alliance, in which he and Starmer are effectively on opposite sides. But the interaction between the two leaders could yet work to their mutual benefit, helping each of them out of the tight corners in which they have painted themselves.
Trump is a hare demanding instant political gratification. Starmer is a tortoise, warning that things will get worse before they get better. The Prime Minister is an introvert, who keeps colleagues at a distance and struggles to deliver an inspiring speech. Trump surrounds himself with cronies and admits he “can’t stop dancing” at the rallies he continues to hold long after winning the election. The president’s communication strategy centres on the digital age of influencers and social media posting. Starmer still inhabits the analogue world of photo-opportunities, statements, parliament and summits.
Trump seized the initiative as soon as he was inaugurated in January, with a blizzard of policies and executive orders designed to disrupt conventional assumptions at home and abroad, so that he could divide and rule. In his home market, he is discovering that he is not an absolute ruler. Uncertainty and unpredictability have prompted big falls in stock prices. Trump still insists he will make everybody richer, at the moment they are getting poorer.
So far, he is finding it easier to deliver results in foreign policy. What he says immediately resets the terms on which nations try to relate to each other. Here too he may have gone too far. For all the power of his office, his words, and his cajoling, he cannot force others to do exactly as he wants. To insulate himself from failure he constantly tries as president to recreate the glory days of his hit TV show The Apprentice in which everyone followed his orders and he fired people. He has already set up Secretary of State Marco Rubio, “Little Marco”, as the fall guy if the Ukraine peace efforts go wrong.
Like every British prime minister for fifty years, Starmer was always going to flatter and conciliate the Americans. He was never going to “poke the bear” or act like Hugh Grant in Love Actually. Successive governments consider the “special” relationship with the US to be vital to the UK’s economy and defence. The prime minister was ready to flatter and grovel to keep Trump sweet, even if this president seems to have only a passing interest in keeping up appearances. Trump has attacked key allies verbally, imposed tariffs on their trade and expressed ambitions to take over Canada as a 51st state and to “buy” Greenland from Denmark.
Starmer and his team are attempting to calm this volatility while doing what they can to prepare for a possible future without America as a key player in NATO. In the short term, Starmer and President Macron of France have managed to protect Ukraine’s interests as Trump strives for a self-aggrandising peace “deal”. President Zelensky’s latest conciliatory moves towards the White House seem to have come under advisement from the UK’s National Security Advisor Jonathan Powell.
Ukraine has accepted the terms for a proposed thirty day ceasefire and Trump says “Hopefully Putin will agree too”. Russian acquiescence seems unlikely, given the demands for Ukrainian submission they have laid out in advance. Nor does Trump seem inclined to pressure “genius” Putin in the way he was prepared to bully “moderate comedian” Zelensky. At a minimum, the UK and France have erected a ladder for Trump to climb down quietly and with dignity, and without crushing Ukraine on the way.
The collision between Trump’s impulsiveness and Starmer’s caution has had the bonus effect of creating new options for the Labour government. On coming into power, the government procrastinated by setting up more than a hundred reviews of policy areas.
Foremost among them are the Strategic Defence Review and the Chancellor’s Spending Review due on 26 March. Thanks to what Starmer terms “the generational” challenges precipitated by Trump’s unreliability as an ally, both reports are out of date before they are published – or at least the original assumptions on which they were established will have to be abandoned.
The government has already raided the foreign aid budget for defence spending. The present crisis, and what some are calling the shift from a “welfare to a warfare economy”, could open the way to make substantial changes in welfare spending, without provoking the massive rebellion by Labour MPs which would have been expected in normal times.
Perforce the crisis has allowed the UK to re-establish necessary ties to European allies without rousing the sleeping dogs of Brexit.
America’s rogue administration has done Sir Keir Starmer the favour of giving his government a sense of purpose that it was otherwise lacking. In turn, in the areas of greatest importance to this country, Starmer’s polite, principled and respectful decency could curb some of Trump’s most alarming excesses and buy time for Europe.