Simon Dawson / No 10 Downing Street
If history repeats itself first as tragedy and second as farce, Keir Starmer’s war leader posturing probably counts as both.
His statement to the media after the summit of European leaders at Lancaster House on Sunday had every cliché one might expect in such circumstances. We were ‘at a crossroads in history.’ This was ‘not a moment for more talk’. It was ‘time to act’ and ‘to step up and lead’.
And, don’t worry, Starmer reassures us, it won’t cost British taxpayers a penny because we’ll use ‘the profits from frozen Russian assets’ and we’ll supplement them by giving Ukraine a loan to buy 5,000 missiles ‘creating jobs in our brilliant defence sector’. Britons can sleep easy in their beds because Sir Keir says he is keeping them safe at zero cost.
Or is he? The sting in the tail is that all this stepping-up and action is heading to one thing: putting ‘boots on the ground and planes in the air’ in Ukraine. In other words, it will ultimately involve sending our own service personnel – at our expense and at risk to their own lives – into a war zone to confront Russia.
Most of the British media are aiding Starmer by calling this ‘peacekeeping’, but it isn’t. Peacekeepers are neutral. The British soldiers sent to Ukraine will be partisan, allied to one of the protagonists. It may be that a genuine peacekeeping force is needed to police whatever deal is finally struck to end this war, but it will need to be drawn from countries acceptable to both sides – and that’s hardly likely to include a supplier of missiles that have been fired deep into Russian territory.
The farce here is the gulf between Starmer’s rhetoric and his resources. Britain may have the sixth largest defence budget in the world, but it’s tiny by comparison with the US military might that a motley ‘coalition of the willing’ has pretensions to replace.
The tragedy is that Starmer is, in effect, prolonging the war even as Ukrainians themselves evidently feel enough is enough. A poll conducted in Ukraine by British firm Survation last week found that 39% wanted an end to the war now, a further 39% would consider negotiations and only 16% would keep fighting until victory.
War weariness is also growing in the countries that would have to be mainstays of Starmer’s coalition. In Germany, France, Italy and Spain, a YouGov poll in December found that those who would ‘encourage a negotiated end to fighting, even if Russia still has control of some parts of Ukraine’ far outweighed those who ‘support Ukraine until Russia withdraws, even if this means the war lasts longer’. In Britain, the lead for the latter view was down to only four percentage points – and, in a YouGov poll two weeks ago, 51% were against sending British troops to Ukraine, while only 28% were in favour.
Nicholas Watts, BBC Newsnight’s political editor, said on X last week that some Labour MPs think the Ukraine war could be ‘the making of Starmer’ in the same way that the Falklands War boosted Margaret Thatcher’s popularity. That seems as ludicrous as it is self-serving. A more likely scenario is that Starmer’s ‘coalition of the willing’ will be as much of a vote loser as Tony Blair dragging us into George Bush’s Iraq coalition proved to be.
You do not have to be a fan of Donald Trump to recognise that he reads the popular mood better than most politicians. During the presidential election campaign, he routinely boasted that ‘we had no wars’ during his first term and that he was ‘going to stop wars’.
This chimed with the electorate. In the three swing states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, all of which he won, polling two months before the election found that most voters felt the US was ‘too involved’ in global conflicts, thought that US foreign policy doesn’t put American interests first, and feared that the US was ‘closely’ approaching World War III.
Trump does not, of course, actually care what people think, other than when he needs their support. His foreign policy is not driven by what Americans generally want, any more than it is based on a desire to ‘do Putin a favour’, as some Democrats claim.
The roots of Trump’s foreign policy position can be traced back to the height of the Cold War when President Nixon and Henry Kissinger were grappling with how to exploit the split between China and the Soviet Union. In a fascinating exchange on the subject on February 14, 1972, Kissinger said:
‘In 20 years, your successor, if he’s as wise as you, will wind up leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese. For the next 15 years we have to lean towards the Chinese against the Russians. We have to play this balance of power game totally unemotionally. Right now, we need the Chinese to correct the Russians and to discipline the Russians.’
That strategy of opening up relations with China to ‘discipline’ Russia remained US policy until Mikhael Gorbachov became the Soviet leader and the US saw an opportunity to draw him into their orbit. With the Cold War won, Washington thought it no longer had any enemies that a few regime-change wars could not dispose of. It entered what Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called a period of ‘triumphalism’ during which the ‘dangerous delusion’ of a unipolar world would be the bi-partisan consensus.
That delusion has, over the last ten years, come face to face with the reality of China’s economic rise and produced a split in US ruling circles – mainly on party lines – between those who think they can take on Russia and China simultaneously and those returning to the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of Kissinger, albeit later than he had anticipated.
Neither Starmer nor his US ambassador, Peter Mandelson, will be able shift Trump from this strategy. The US has largely got what it wanted from the war in Ukraine. Above all, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany has been destroyed, leaving Europe buying vast quantities of Liquefied Natural Gas from the US. The last round of military aid to Ukraine – supported by both Democrats and Republicans – included a loan that Kyiv will have to repay, regardless of any further deal on minerals.
Democrat politicians talk as if – unlike Trump – they are motivated by high-minded goals. Their rhetoric is, of course, belied by them giving – in most cases – unstinting support to Israel’s slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians. Their similarly-hypocritical European bedfellows may be hoping that Trump’s foreign policy is an aberration, that perhaps the midterms next year will at least deliver a more amenable Senate and Congress.
However, even if that happens, it will not necessarily lead to another big cheque for war in Ukraine. The Democrats may dress their foreign policy up with nice platitudes about Europe, but they will also put American interests first, even if they don’t use the term. It was, after all, an Obama administration official, Victoria Nuland, who was famously caught on camera saying ‘f**k the EU’ when she was busy orchestrating the formation of a new government in Ukraine in 2014.
A foreign policy and security rethink in Europe is long overdue, but the Lancaster House ‘coalition of the willing’ is not it. Even Starmer admitted in his post-summit statement that ‘to succeed, this effort must have strong US backing’, though with Europe doing ‘the heavy lifting’.
It is thus a second-rate variant of the same old thinking – politicians groomed in a NATO mindset acting like a rock band that thinks it can top the charts without a lead singer. It’s surely more than time to change the song. How about trying ‘Give peace a chance’?
Source: Labour Outlook