Starmer hasn’t put a foot wrong over Ukraine – but he can’t win

Keir Starmer would not be “derailed” by announcements from the White House, Angela Rayner insisted, after the prime minister was derailed by the announcement that US military aid to Ukraine was being suspended. What else could the deputy prime minister say?

In other interviews, she said the UK wouldn’t be “blindsided”. Yet the prime minister had been blindsided even while he was basking in praise from both sides of the Commons on Monday. While he was speaking, President Trump criticised European leaders in a post on Truth Social.

Starmer also told parliament: “I have not seen reports of the United States withdrawing support for Ukraine, and, as I understand it, that is not its position.” He then spoke on the phone to the US president, we have been told today, but he was blindsided again late on Monday night, when the White House announced the pause in military support for Ukraine.

It is not as if Trump’s view was unknown, although there might have been some grounds for thinking he didn’t mean what he said. So Starmer hasn’t exactly been blindsided – he has just been taken by surprise by Trump turning out to mean what he said. The US president really thinks that Europe is too weak to help Ukraine hold the line against Russian forces, and he really intends to force Volodymyr Zelensky either to resign or to surrender to Vladimir Putin.

How can Starmer be a bridge between making Ukraine strong and making Ukraine weak? All the cross-party praise ringing in his ears cannot drown out that contradiction.

Maybe his calculation is that if the European strategy fails, he will at least have stood for the right principle. It is not obvious that he would gain much credit for that in the long run, even if he has done his reputation some good in the past few days.

No wonder commentators have been casting about for parallels. Trump’s sellout of Ukraine has been compared to Suez, when the US pulled the plug on a British attempt to defend its interests in the Middle East. It has been compared to the Falklands, a foreign policy success that helped rescue a British prime minister from early unpopularity.

Alternatively, it has been compared to the Iraq war, a military intervention in the name of high principle that tarnished a prime minister’s reputation. Each of those analogies has one aspect that might be relevant today, but none of them is much use in analysing what is happening now.

The Iraq parallel is possibly the least useful, because Starmer agreed on Monday that it would be “folly” to deploy British troops in Ukraine without a US security guarantee. So we can wax indignant and incredulous at JD Vance’s crass insult and his attempt to back out of it, but it is not relevant. The vice president dismissed the idea of a peacekeeping force in Ukraine as “20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” – forgetting that British service personnel had fought alongside the US in Iraq and Afghanistan – before he tried to pretend that he was talking about troops from some other random country.

The best historical analogy, unsurprisingly, is a policy from the first Trump administration: Trump’s decision to announce a deadline for withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan. Kabul did not actually fall until seven months after Trump left the White House in 2021, but Joe Biden failed to reverse the policy and the allies of the US, including the UK, had no choice but to join the scramble at the airport.

In the end, the options facing Europe are pretty much the same as those facing the Ukrainian people themselves. Volodymyr Ariev, a Ukrainian MP, said on Sky News on Tuesday: “The choice is between bad, very bad and catastrophic, and we need to choose the best one.”

Starmer may be saying the right things, and defending the right principles, but if Trump has it in his power to ensure that only bad outcomes are possible, it is hard to see how this can end well for the prime minister.