Opponents of Keir Starmer would be well advised to concentrate on his many real weaknesses rather than inventing non-existent disasters just to bolster their own prejudices.
The British radical online Right spent the last 48 hours not only hoping for the UK Prime Minister to be humiliated by Donald Trump, but then pretending he had been even when he clearly hadn’t. The reality is that Starmer’s visit to Washington DC was very successful, at least in the short-term.
As well as establishing an unlikely public rapport with Trump, the Prime Minister advanced a promising dialogue on tariffs and trade and got the President to endorse his Chagos Islands deal. British Trump-worshippers are at this very moment still trying to devise fresh arguments as to why this development – the very opposite to what they predicted – shows that their hero has still dumped on Starmer. What it actually shows is that Trump thinks the outline agreement is compatible with American security needs and doesn’t really care that it is an anti-patriotic embarrassment for Britain.
On top of all this, only someone with an acute case of Starmer Derangement Syndrome could deny that the deployment of a letter from the King inviting Trump for an unprecedented second state visit amounted to the brilliant use of a political prop. The triumphant theatricality of the moment suggested to me that it could only be the work of a high-calibre and seasoned political choreographer. So, congratulations may be due to Peter Mandelson on an early success in his ambassadorial role.
Yet there is a strong prospect that a couple of years down the line, this visit will be seen very differently: as the moment when the seeds of Starmer’s downfall were planted. Because it has potentially cleared the way for the most perilous deployment of British military power overseas since the Falklands War. While that conflict ended in triumph, it was the proverbial damned close-run thing and involved our country taking back sovereign territory from a lesser power. Starmer’s proposed deployment of British “boots on the ground” in Ukraine is a very different kettle of fish.
The Prime Minister is proposing that British soldiers be a leading part of a European peacekeeping force, alongside French troops and presumably a rag-bag of whatever other infantry units are going spare from other EU nations. The plan is to send the force into Ukraine without any US troops to serve alongside them. America is only being asked to offer a “backstop” involving providing air cover should the European force come under attack.
One does not need to be a strategic military genius to suppose that Vladimir Putin will be licking his lips over this idea. The country that did most to help Ukraine fend off his planned full takeover, leading to an enormous Russian death toll, is proposing to put a necessarily small troop deployment within a few miles of his frontier. He will know that British public opinion will not be steadfastly behind entanglement in yet another foreign conflict. He will be fully aware of just how difficult a depleted British military will find the task of rotating forces every six months or so to sustain such a commitment. The temptation to humiliate us and chase us out will surely prove overwhelming.
So stand by for an escalating campaign of sniper attacks – no doubt to be attributed to local pro-Russian Ukrainian partisans – of “border skirmishes” to be blamed on UK soldiers allegedly straying a few yards out of their zone and eventually to a concerted Russian attack on our lines. Would Trumpian “air cover” turn up to defend British soldiers in such an event? Not until after the damage had been done. A US President fixated on the smooth workings of a lucrative minerals deal with Ukraine would probably be more interested in just calming things down than in piling in on the side of our beleaguered forces.
Perhaps just the idea of a British-French force waiting in the wings may help Ukraine secure better peace terms over the next few weeks. But for it then to turn into a reality would be an act of reckless folly on the part of both Starmer and President Macron. This one has disaster written all over it.
If the backslapping bonhomie of Starmer’s Washington visit is seen in retrospect as the moment that cleared the way for it to happen then that meeting will go down in history very differently from the way it has gone down in the British media on Friday morning.
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