“No one is as deaf as the man who will not listen” – Proverb
Sir Keir Starmer has a huge opportunity coming, and if he gets it right, it might buy him the fresh start he’s been desperately needing. It would earn him a badly needed badge of statecraft, to overcome the boy-scout approach he’s been hit with so far.
It’s a big if.
The Prime Minister will go to Washington next week to be ‘a bridge’ to the White House from a ‘deeply concerned’ and frankly frozen-out Europe, over President Trump’s direct negotiations with Vladimir Putin over the future of Ukraine.
Before we even tackle whether President Trump will listen to Sir Keir, it’s worth asking ourselves whether Europe has ever really been listening to Trump, and the MAGA movement. The evidence suggests not.
I get many don’t want to listen, furiously disagree, and dislike the man intensely, but had they listened they might not have been so surprised that Ukraine could now be let down after so many promises from ‘The West’.
It came to head in Munich. With war that’s happened before.
“He hardly mentioned Ukraine, and yet it transforms their future. It angered his audience and delighted his real audience. Welcome to the next tricky five years. Starmer I fear is going to struggle”
My conversation with a senior Conservative had honed in on Vice President JD Vance’s speech last week to the Munich Security Conference and we’d got to the very crux of things.
Trump, the ultimate political ‘disruptor,’ sent his uncompromising VP to drop a MAGA ‘truth bomb’ designed to detonate right in the midst of this established annual security gathering. It was designed to cause maximum damage to the long held paradigms of the doyens of the European defence and diplomatic corps. They hated it. I suspect they were meant to. Reported responses from some, vary from ‘it’s an attack on European democracy’ to ‘puerile bullshit’.
Vance won’t care, his real audience was America and those who’ve yearned for the full Trump doctrine to burst concussively into the ears of, as they see it, a complacent European elite that has taken US security for granted for 80 years. Vance hardly mentioned it but just so we are clear: Russia is going to be our problem now, once they’ve haggled over Ukraine without us. That’s really the message – aside from the problems Europe genuinely has domestically.
For many Conservatives, what Vance said is worth listening to. They are comfortable with him leading a charge on confronting illegal migration and applaud an aggressive push-back on the ‘woke mindset’. This is exactly where Kemi Badenoch was pitching in her speech to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship in London yesterday:
“If we throw this opportunity away because of anger or self-doubt or weakness, our country and all of Western civilisation will be lost. And that is why we, the next generation of Conservatives, must lead the world back from the precipice. It is time to speak the truth.”
The problem is, people here have woken late to the fact that however much they feel alignment with the domestic warning, in MAGA world a strong American leader defending his country against ‘woke liberal decline’ and the ‘enemy within’, pushes those Americans closer to how Putin sees himself, than, for example someone like Volodymir Zelensky.
Now Trump and Putin have started talks on ending the war.
Two men, one of whom started the war, are going to ‘stop’ that war without too much reference to the country in which the war is being fought. It also throws an unflattering light of doubt on sincerely made commitments, from people who aren’t even invited to the table. Lord Ashcroft’s polling on attitudes in the UK, US, Russia and Ukraine to a negotiated settlement are well worth a read.
Two years ago in Munich I was in a room with a venerable group of republican senators where the aim was to persuade them someone like Ronald Reagan would never have given Putin an inch, and anticipating Trump might win again, to urge them to make the case internally to stay the course with Ukraine, if he did.
The problem was we needed venerable Republicans to make such an argument because Trump is not Reagan or his generation. In his view, as Vance articulated, freedom in Europe is not about deterring a threatening Russia, but to save “western civilisation” – just the phrase Kemi Badenoch used in her speech.
Today Marco Rubio meets with Sergei Lavrov in Saudi Arabia having said on Sunday that the coming weeks and days would determine whether Putin is serious about making peace. Well he is if it suits him and he can sell it domestically as a win.
Lavrov for his part has dismissed any European involvement in talks
“The Europeans’ philosophy hasn’t gone anywhere. I don’t know what they should do at the negotiating table. If they are going to ‘beg for’ some sly ideas about freezing the conflict, while in their own way, character and habits they mean continuing the war, then why invite them there.”
It is typical Lavrov to replay an opponent’s fears about Russia as the argument against them. But then, his master isn’t really listening to anybody. No deal he signs up to will involve giving annexed land back. No deal he signs up to will involve Ukraine in NATO. It’s hard to see what if any concession he will offer bar a ceasefire. It’s hard to know what Trump can get him to agree to, that isn’t exactly what he wants – and shouldn’t get.
The European concern is any peace imposed on Ukraine, that seems to reward Putin with land-for-aggression means he’ll pause, rebuild, and go again to finish the job, when America has handed responsibility to Europeans to keep the peace, and Trump focusses on China – and Taiwan.
So, next week to Washington our Prime Minister will go, a man who yesterday was branded, on the strength of the Chagos deal and his hunger for closer ties with China ‘the world’s worst negotiator’. His aspiration is to be, as so many Prime Ministers have tried before, ‘the bridge’ to Washington. In his back pocket a promise that Britain is ready to put peacekeepers on the ground. ‘Ready’ is a word many in the defence establishment think is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting, especially with Labour’s ‘commitment’ to spend 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence seemingly years away from delivery.
Trump doesn’t even want two point five per cent – he wants five. That would be a fundamental shift in European political mindsets.
So Starmer has an opportunity next week to persuade a man who’s shown no inclination to sign up to the idea at all, to make sure Putin doesn’t get too many concessions, and that Europe will have a role in how any negotiations on ending the war play out.
I sincerely wish our Prime Minister success. For Ukraine’s sake.
Meanwhile, fresh from her speech yesterday, and with a somewhat febrile party watching, Kemi Badenoch also has an opportunity.
Out gun her opponents on defence and security spending, carve out a security message that is as new and distinctive as her aims set out at ARC. The world has changed and is still changing. Russia, North Korea and Iran, she described as a threat to democracy.
‘Strong on defence of the British people, strong on the defence of our culture and values’ is not the worst political call to arms to face the future with.