UKs Starmer to Meet Trump With a Boost on Defense and Pleas for Ukraine
Now it’s Keir Starmer’s turn.After President Emmanuel Macron of France navigated his meeting with President Trump on Monday, skirting the rockiest shoals but making little headway, Mr.Starmer, the British prime minister, will meet Mr.
Trump on Thursday to plead for the United States not to abandon Ukraine.Mr.Starmer will face the same balancing act as Mr.
Macron did, without the benefit of years of interactions dating to 2017, when Mr.Trump greeted the newly elected French president with a white-knuckle handshake that was the first of several memorable grip-and-grin moments.Unlike Mr.
Macron, Mr.Starmer will arrive in the Oval Office armed with a pledge to increase his country’s military spending to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2027, and to 3 percent within a decade.
That addresses one of Mr.Trump’s core grievances: his contention that Europeans are free riders, sheltering under an American security umbrella.To finance the rearming, Mr.
Starmer will pare back Britain’s overseas development aid, a move that echoes, on a more modest scale, Mr.Trump’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development.
Mr.Starmer’s motive is budgetary not ideological — he says the cuts are regrettable — but Mr.
Trump might approve.British officials said Mr.Starmer would combine his confidence-building gestures on defense with a strong show of support for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and a warning not to rush into a peace deal with President Vladimir V.
Putin of Russia that fails to establish security guarantees for Ukraine.“The key thing is, we don’t want to repeat the previous mistakes in dealing with Putin, in going for a truce or cease-fire that doesn’t convert into a durable peace,” said Peter Mandelson, who became Britain’s ambassador to Washington three weeks ago and has helped arrange the visit.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank ...