Trump has lost his right to lead the free west – Starmer must step up

No American president had less understanding of history or liberty than the irascible Donald Trump. With global alliances already shifting after his Oval Office meltdown, our prime minister is ideally placed to be the leading peacemaker, says Anthony Seldon

The unprecedented and premeditated outburst of President Trump and Vice-President Vance against President Zelenskyy in the Oval Office on Friday shocked the world. But it should not have come as a surprise.

Prime minister Keir Starmer the day before had given a pitch-perfect performance with Trump, even if the substance of their encounter is still to be decided. Starmer had elected to listen to his foreign policy experts who know how a prime minister does diplomacy. Had he listened to similar voices on domestic policy, he would have largely avoided wasting his first six months. Harsh, maybe – but true.

The Friday meeting between Trump and Zelenskyy, in contrast, was a car crash.

The Ukrainian president came across as naive. Unlike Starmer, he hadn’t studied how to hold the high ground against the irascible and unpredictable Trump. But he was not the one at fault; Trump and Vance are wholly to blame.

We might fulminate about how unpresidential and inappropriate Trump’s behaviour was for the most powerful man in the world. But it won’t change anything. The expressions of horror and indignation across the world at Trump’s explosions are water off the duck’s back.

Trump, a force of nature, is a million miles apart from the great US presidents of the last century: Woodrow Wilson, who committed his country to the First World War; Franklin D Roosevelt, who brought the US into the second; John F Kennedy, who travelled to Berlin at the height of the Cold War to say this is the US’s front line; or Ronald Reagan, who looked Soviet leaders in their eyeballs and saw off them (and their taunts of a third world war).

No American president had less understanding of history and liberty than Trump. And he doesn’t care. The free West now needs a new leader.

The message for Britain is clear. The special relationship, for all the warm words, is over. Yes, there will continue to be selective genuflections towards Britain, and more generally to Europe. Yes, Starmer needs to cosy up to Trump, not least to ward off tariffs. But Trump and his administration have their eyes fixed elsewhere, on China and the Pacific. Like Hitler signing the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union in 1939, he wants to square off Russia while he turns his attention west.

Whoever succeeds Trump as president – likely JD Vance, who could be in office until 2036 – will not alter this fundamental reorientation of US policy: Europe will be useful in this quest only in so far as Europe is useful.

Everything in history comes to an end. The “Concert of Europe” that kept peace across the continent after the Napoleonic wars eventually fell apart. Some 150 years later, the overly bureaucratic and anti-entrepreneurial European Union is also now falling apart. The prize will go to the European leaders who realise it, and who articulate a new, looser and wider union.

Change in history comes at times of disruption: now is such a time. They will be the heirs of figures like Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman, who devised the EU out of the still-burning embers of the Second World War.

Keir Starmer, hosting a conference of European leaders in London this Sunday, is ideally placed to lead this process. He’s not a natural at domestic party politics but his lawyerly mindset is adept at large structural change. To get him ready – as I have previously suggested here – he should convene a day-long seminar of historians and thinkers at his country residence, Chequers. Ex-head of MI6 John Sawers, historian Margaret MacMillan and former EU supremo Cathy Ashton should be on his list.

Lead Starmer, lead. You’ve just had your best week since you’ve become prime minister. Make it only the beginning, and do something magnificent for Britain, Europe and for peace in the world. The prize is there for the grabbing.

Anthony Seldon is walking across Europe, creating a path of peace: his next book on the quest, ‘The Path to Light’, is published in October