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Is Starmer’s reluctance to criticise Trump smart tactics – or the sign of a man without a plan? | Rafael Behr

For an inveterate liar, Donald Trump is remarkably honest. The best guide to what he thinks is what he says. When forecasting his likely course of action, start with his declared intentions – removing the president of Venezuela, for example – and assume he means it. When he says the US must take possession of Greenland, he is not kidding.

The motives are sometimes muddled but rarely hidden. Trump likes making deals, especially real estate deals, and money. He wants to be great and to have his greatness affirmed with praise and prizes. He craves spectacle. The world as he describes it doesn’t always resemble observable reality, but there is an effortless, sociopathic sincerity to his falsehoods. The truth is whatever he intuits it to be in the moment to advance his interests and manipulate his audience.

Trump’s freewheeling brazenness lies at the extreme end of a spectrum where the opposite pole is Keir Starmer’s verbal constipation on camera. It isn’t the most profound difference between the two men, but the contrast reveals something significant about the prime minister’s present difficulties.

It isn’t just a deficit of telegenic panache. Saying whatever comes to mind is a privilege of unaccountable power. Trump doesn’t have to care about the consequences of his words. Minding your language for fear of offending a vindictive despot is a habit well known to subjects of authoritarian rule. It has now become the diplomatic mode of the US’s former allies.

It took Downing Street 16 hours to comment on the US seizure of Nicolás Maduro from Caracas. The position, once revealed, straddled the gulf between the government’s stated commitment to international law and its undeclared policy of never impugning Trump. Ministers have held that pose now for days. The strain is showing.

Given Starmer’s background as a human rights lawyer, he surely has a view on whether governments can legitimately abduct foreign heads of state, regardless of whether they are vicious dictators. It is also part of the normal diplomatic process that he keeps that view private when formulating the official response to the actions of a country on which Britain depends for its security.

Trump’s actions in Venezuela, as in so many other areas, invite condemnation on points of principle. But the prime minister has to consider scenarios for the day after condemnation, and the days after that. He looks at his diary and sees a “coalition of the willing” meeting in Paris with fellow European governments that are committed to the defence of Ukraine. Trump’s negotiators are attending. At stake is the scope of any future security guarantees for Kyiv.

Maybe the Americans wouldn’t notice if the UK prime minister had spent the previous 48 hours denouncing their foreign policy with high-minded rhetoric to satisfy backbench Labour MPs. Maybe they wouldn’t care. But maybe they would. Maybe they would insist on a grovelling retraction as the entrance fee back into Trump’s favour.

What would Ukrainians under Russian bombardment want Starmer to do? Perhaps they would see the unequivocal assertion of international law regarding Venezuela as a requirement of moral consistency to reinforce the case against Vladimir Putin for violating their own sovereignty. Or perhaps they would prefer that their European friends simply do whatever it takes to prevent Trump bullying Volodymyr Zelenskyy into accepting Kremlin terms.

People can reasonably disagree on whether Starmer has got this choice right. But no one who demands a different course has to weigh the cost of getting it wrong, of saying the wrong thing, as seriously as the prime minister. Saying nothing would obviously be his preference. That option isn’t open when massive international events require a response. So Downing Street does the next best thing, drafting a script that comes as close to saying nothing as words will allow.

The defence of this approach is that Starmer’s relations with Trump are better than anyone might have anticipated given their differences of temperament and ideological provenance, and that the national interest is thus served.

The evidence is mixed. On the economic front, Britain hasn’t exactly enjoyed leniency under the new US tariff regime, but nor has it been singled out for exceptional punishment. Progress on a “tech prosperity deal”, notionally agreed last September, has stalled. Maga ideologues talk about London as patient zero in a Europe-wide plague of civilisational collapse, spread by non-white immigrants and treatable only by far-right insurrection.

With Ukraine, the picture is less bleak. Starmer has played a lead part in the orchestrated campaign by Nato leaders to charm Trump into a more amenable attitude to the alliance and a more sceptical view of Putin. The White House still regularly pings back to indulgence of the Kremlin, but Trump has been successfully persuaded that Europe is now paying for the war. The scorn he once showed for Zelenskyy was closely tied to his horror of the US being ripped off. Neutralising that fear has discernibly curbed his eagerness to throw Ukraine under a Russian tank.

If the best that can be said of Europeans coddling Trump is that they are merely postponing the day when the US cuts them adrift, well, that is not a negligible achievement. There could be merit in flattery if it delays a US decision to blow up Nato by annexing Danish territory, perhaps even putting it off to the point where a less volatile president sits in the White House. It all depends on how profitably the extra time is spent.

And that is where Starmer’s caginess gives the most cause for alarm. There is a valid tactical rationale for the prime minister’s reluctance to criticise the US right now, but it has to serve a strategic recognition that Britain’s future lies with Europe. There is not much evidence that this is the plan. Starmer talks up the value of closer economic ties to the EU, but in vague terms and always with the caveat that nothing agreed in Brussels should compromise relations with Washington.

If, behind the scenes, Starmer does actually grasp the epic character of the changes that Trump’s presidency is wreaking on the world order, and the way that combines with Brexit to put Britain in a vulnerable position, he is doing a great job of pretending otherwise. Few of his foreign policy positions are asserted so confidently as the denial of any geopolitical dilemma. “I am never going to choose between the US and Europe,” he said in an interview last week.

He seems to think he can rehabilitate Britain’s late 20th-century role as an Atlantic bridge at the centre of the western alliance. But Trump burns bridges. A highly globalised world is disaggregating into regional and continental blocs. Even with a different US president, the old norms will not spontaneously reassert themselves. Starmer’s determination never to choose amounts to acceptance that vital choices for Britain will be made by others.

This quiet inertia is more dangerous than refusal to moralise about illegal escapades in Latin America. There is a realpolitik justification for not calling out Trump’s military gangsterism, but it is also an argument for getting out of the White House protection racket as quickly as possible. The problem with Starmer’s reticence is that, in the context of everything else he says and does, it is indistinguishable from paralysis by indecision. A case could be made for a pragmatic prime minister who sometimes prefers not to speak his mind. But it relies on the audience believing he has something serious in mind that isn’t being spoken.