President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain will have to navigate shifting alliances as they meet with President Trump in Washington. Photo / Edouard Monfrais-Albertini / Hans Lucas via AFP
President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain will have to navigate shifting alliances as they meet with President Trump in Washington. Photo / Edouard Monfrais-Albertini / Hans Lucas via AFP
The leaders of France and Britain are both due to meet with President Trump. Approaches previously tried with him may no longer work.
When the leaders of France and Britain meet President Donald Trump at the White House this week, they can draw on a well-worn playbook for dealing with their mercurial host. But it is not clear that the old tricks will be enough to meet the new challenge.
After a week in which Trump branded President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine as a dictator, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain are no longer merely navigating a norm-busting President with a distaste for multilateral institutions and decorous diplomacy.
They are also trying to salvage a trans-Atlantic alliance that has suffered a mortal blow.
Trump’s hostile statements, coupled with his overture to President Vladimir Putin of Russia to go over Europe’s head to strike a peace settlement in Ukraine, have left some Europeans wondering whether the alliance that protected the Continent for more than seven decades is already defunct.
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So inviting Trump to a French military parade, as Macron did on Bastille Day 2017, or to a lavish banquet at Buckingham Palace, as Queen Elizabeth II of Britain did in June 2019, might not be sufficient to get things back on track.
“This is the moment of truth,” former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia said in an interview. “They simply have to have the steel to stand up to Trump and tell him what they think, namely, that siding with Putin against Ukraine is a devastating blow to America’s prestige and standing in the world.”
Turnbull, who had his own clashes with Trump over refugees early in the President’s first term, said that efforts to charm or cajole him on an issue this fundamental would likely go nowhere. “If the price of getting along with Trump is abandoning your allies, that is too high a price to pay,” Turnbull said.
Members of Ukraine's 148th Separate Artillery Zhytomyr Brigade firing a howitzer toward Russian targets near Kurakhove, Ukraine, this month. Photo / Tyler Hicks, The New York Times
A critical problem, said diplomats who dealt with Trump in his first term, is that he is not the same leader he was then.
“When Trump arrived in 2017, he knew nothing and nobody,” said Gerard Araud, who was France’s ambassador to Washington and accompanied Macron to multiple meetings with Trump. “Now he thinks he knows everything, he’s more radical on the substance, and he is surrounded by yes-men.”
That will make it harder for the European leaders to move Trump off his erroneous claim that the United States, in giving billions of dollars of military support to Ukraine, was essentially the victim of a con job by an unpopular, undemocratic Ukrainian leader. Nor will it be easy, diplomats say, to warn Trump of the dangers of giving too much away to Putin in a negotiation.
That doesn’t mean the leaders won’t try.
Macron, who is set to arrive at the White House on Monday (Tuesday NZ time), said during a live broadcast on social media last week, “I’m going to say to him, basically: ‘You can’t be weak against President Putin. It’s not you, it’s not your trademark, it’s not in your interest.’”
Starmer, who is to be in Washington on Thursday (Friday NZ time), has not publicly shared his strategy for dealing with Trump. But British diplomats said they expected him to emphasise Britain’s willingness to do more to provide for Europe’s defence by contributing troops to a Ukraine peacekeeping force. Starmer made the troop commitment last week, but said it would work only if the United States acted as a “backstop”.
“Trump doesn’t do gratitude,” said Kim Darroch, who served as Britain’s ambassador to Washington during much of Trump’s first term. “But you will at least get some recognition that you are the most forward-leaning of the European countries about buying into his idea of a peace deal.”
President Trump, said a former French ambassador to the United States, now "thinks he knows everything" and "is surrounded by yes-men". Photo / Tierney L. Cross, The New York Times
British officials said Starmer would tell Trump that Britain was considering additional military aid to Ukraine and planned to increase spending on its own defence. Darroch said Starmer should pledge to boost Britain’s military spending to 2.5% of economic output by a specific date. (Starmer has promised to reach that threshold but has not set a deadline.)
The Prime Minister, Darroch said, should also press Trump to describe the peace deal he is seeking with Russia and what pressure he plans to put on Putin to achieve it. While Britain is expected to announce additional sanctions against Russia before Starmer goes to Washington, Trump has signalled a willingness to end Russia’s economic and diplomatic isolation.
Starmer showed some daylight between him and Trump after the US President’s condemnation of Zelenskyy, telling the Ukrainian President by phone that he was a “democratically elected leader” within his rights to “suspend elections during wartime as the UK did during World War II”.
On Saturday, Starmer and Zelenskyy spoke again, with Starmer discussing his upcoming meeting with Trump and reiterating that “Ukraine must be at the heart of any negotiations to end the war,” according to a readout of the call issued by Starmer’s office.
Having made his point, Darroch said, Starmer should avoid getting drawn into a debate with Trump over Zelenskyy. Instead, he said, the Prime Minister should play to Trump’s vision of himself as peacemaker.
Araud agreed, saying: “It would be a mistake for the Europeans to argue with Trump about who started the war, or whether Zelenskyy is a dictator. That is a nonstarter for a Trumpian approach.”
Araud said he expected Macron to press Trump for security assurances in return for Europe’s assembling a deterrent force. France and Britain are trying to persuade Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and the Baltic countries to join such a force.
Other French officials said they worried that Trump would insist on putting a ceasefire in place in Ukraine within weeks, with a goal of celebrating it with Putin in Red Square in Moscow on Victory Day, which commemorates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany, on May 9. He would be the first President to visit Russia in more than a decade – striking evidence of Putin’s diplomatic rehabilitation.
With little time to prevent that, French officials said they were scrambling to limit the damage. Among their deepest fears is that Trump will try to force an election in Ukraine, which would open the door to Russia-backed candidates, online smear campaigns and other forms of election interference.
Some experts argue that the leaders should appeal to Trump’s other priorities, notably America’s competition with China. Conceding too much to Putin, they said, could embolden China in its designs against Taiwan. It would also give China an incentive to draw closer to Russia in a coalition against the United States.
“If you make peace or impose peace in Europe and on Ukraine, on terms favourable to Russia, that actually makes it harder for you to deal with China,” said Nigel Gould-Davies, a former British ambassador to Belarus who is a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategy, a research organisation in London.
But Gould-Davies and other analysts said that drawing Trump into a discussion of grand strategy had its limits. “For Trump, even more than most leaders, the personal is the political,” he said.
On Friday, Trump described Macron as a friend, but complained that neither he nor Starmer had “done anything” to end the war.
Starmer and Macron have both worked to cultivate Trump. Starmer did not get to know him until a dinner at Trump Tower in New York last September, but the two seemed to get along. “I like him a lot,” Trump said recently. “He’s liberal, which is a bit different from me, but I think he’s a very good person.”
Macron’s relationship with Trump goes further back and has weathered more bumps. After a honeymoon period marked by Trump’s attendance at the French military parade, the two leaders clashed over Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal.
Macron continues to reach out. In December, he invited Trump to attend the reopening of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. He also scrambled to get on the President’s calendar in Washington before Starmer, whose Washington trip has been in the works for a few weeks.
None of that guarantees that his diplomatic efforts will work this time. During a state visit to Washington in 2018, Araud recalled, Macron mistakenly believed he had talked Trump into not withdrawing from the Iran deal.
“There is this element of unpredictability and unreliability,” Araud said. “Whatever he says on Day 1 doesn’t mean anything on Day 2.”
