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Analysis
When
Trump comes to UK, normal rules of state visits will not apply
Patrick
Wintour
Diplomatic
editor
Keir
Starmer will have to choose how to spend limited political capital, with most
pressing issues ones UK and US do not agree on
Tue 16
Sep 2025 06.00 BST
Donald
Trump has repeatedly described Keir Starmer as a “good man”, distancing himself
from the attacks on the UK prime minister mounted by other figures on the US
far right such as Elon Musk.
One of
the many known unknowns, however, of a Trump state visit is what kind of Trump
will show up when a microphone is placed in front of him.
The US
president is often a bundle of contradictions. During his first state visit in
2018 most UK diplomats said he was a picture of affability, yet he took it upon
himself to conduct an interview with the Sun in which he insulted Theresa May,
and said Boris Johnson would make a great prime minister. He seemed unaware he
might have caused offence.
Starmer
as host will have to grin and bear whatever brickbats Trump sends his way about
the state of free speech in the UK, recognition of the state of Palestine,
immigration, or the possibility that Reform will lead the next government in
the UK. The one thing the Foreign Office knows is that the normal rules of
state visits do not apply.
An added
loose mooring will be the absence of the former UK ambassador to Washington
Peter Mandelson, who was dismissed for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein.
Ambassadors are known to personally visit every site of every stop on a state
visit. Their job is often quite literally to look round corners for what might
be coming. Lord Mandelson, a stickler for detail, would have been poring over
every angle of the state visit in conjunction with Buckingham Palace and the
White House. Fortunately, most of it will have been battened down weeks ago.
But his knowledge of the mood inside the Trump administration in the days
before the visit will be missed.
Behind
the formal glamour, and pre-cooked agreements on tech and nuclear power
cooperation, Starmer will have to choose how to spend his limited political
capital. The two most pressing foreign policy issues are ones on which the UK
and the US cannot agree: Israel’s future relationship with the Arab world, and
the threat posed to Europe and Ukraine by Vladimir Putin. But it is the latter
on which Starmer hopes to make progress.
Speaking
at the weekend in Kyiv, Jonathan Powell, the UK’s national security adviser,
gave a glimpse of current Downing Street thinking. “Putin’s sport is judo. He
likes to counterbalance the action with reaction. He likes having options. If
we can close his options off and leave him with only one, he will take it,”
Powell said.
“The main
message we should be sending is real pressure to convince [Putin] the war will
go on for a long time if he doesn’t make peace. His summer campaign more or
less has failed already, the Russian economic position is not good, the whole
economy is a war economy. If we can apply the pressure the US president is
talking about in terms of targeted sanctions, and tariffs that he put on India,
we might bring him to the table.”
But
Powell skirted around whether Trump’s latest proposal for sanctions was serious
or a smokescreen to avoid doing anything. After months and months of
patience-sapping delay, Trump has set out in the past fortnight new
preconditions that would need to be in place before the US would ever massively
sanction Russia. He said he would only do so if every Nato country, including
Turkey, stopped importing Russia energy and also punished China with 50%-100%
tariffs for its imports of Russian energy. Trump has already put 25% tariffs on
India, the other great importer of Russian energy.
The
Republican senator Lindsey Graham, who has spent a lot of time trying to blend
the European and US approaches to Russia, explained on Sunday: “We have tried
the red-carpet approach. It is not working … It is now time for the Europeans
to follow President Trump’s lead to go after India and China – if China and
India change their practices towards Putin, this war will end.”
Starmer
intends to test Trump on whether 50% tariffs on China, which would rupture
China-Europe trade, is a deal-breaker. Concerted transatlantic sanctions might
yet be possible if Trump demanded a ban on Russian crude imports by Hungary and
Slovakia, or of imports of fuel made from Russian crude refined in third
countries such as India. A ban on seaborne Russian crude oil has already cut
the EU’s Russian oil imports by 90%, but Hungary and Slovakia still import it
via a pipeline.
Starmer’s
task will be to steer Trump to more targeted sanctions on Chinese and Indian
refineries, as well as yet more measures against the Russian shadow fleet.
Trump’s Ukraine special envoy, Keith Kellogg, said: “If you look at the
strength of sanctions from a scale of one to 10, we’re at a six. But we are at
an enforcement level of three.”
Starmer
will also try to convince Trump the incursion of about 20 drones into Polish
airspace by Russia was not the accident that Trump has suggested. Radosław
Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, ridiculed the accident theory in Kyiv,
saying: “We don’t believe in 20 mistakes at the same time.”
Behind
this argument is the fundamental discussion that Starmer tries to avoid in
public – whether Trump knows Putin is stalling on a ceasefire but does not
greatly care, since he believes Ukraine will lose the war and inevitably will
have to cede large tracts of its territory.
That
requires going back to the very first principles about the victim and aggressor
in Ukraine.
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