Can Starmer exploit Europe’s crisis? It's an opportunity to reset Britain

“The big dividing line among political leaders is between those who are conviction politicians and those who are not,” wrote Jonathan Powell, Keir Starmer’s National Security Adviser, in his 2010 book, The New Machiavelli. “Strong leaders go into meetings knowing what they want the outcome to be and have a sense of direction, while weak leaders are merely buffeted by events.”

This analysis sprang to mind when I saw Powell arriving in Paris alongside Starmer on Monday. The two were there to attend Emmanuel Macron’s hastily arranged meeting of European leaders to discuss Donald Trump’s decision to open peace talks with Russia. The talks, which began in Saudi Arabia yesterday, came after Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that the US would not provide any peacekeeping troops to Ukraine in future, nor provide any further funding to keep the war going. The message was clear: it was up to Europe to protect itself from now on. Taken alongside J.D. Vance’s uncompromising attack on European domestic affairs in Munich last weekend, the past week has been a geopolitical shock to Europe — the moment the curtain may have started to fall on the transatlantic alliance and a new world came into being.

Can Starmer turn the crisis to his advantage? With Powell at his side, the Prime Minister has taken a notably resolute posture, declaring his willingness not only to share the responsibility for Europe’s defence, as demanded by Trump, but even to consider sending British troops to Ukraine to defend the country in future if necessary. “We have to recognise the new era we are in, not cling hopelessly to the comforts of the past,” Starmer declared after the meeting in Paris. “It is time for us to take responsibility for our security, for our continent.” If true, this really will be a moment of history.

For many on the Left of the Labour Party, such statements are evidence of Powell’s Blairite influence over Starmer. “Advising Starmer about sending UK troops to Ukraine are Jonathan Powell and Peter Mandelson,” wrote Diane Abbott on X. “Both relics of the Iraq War era. What can possibly go wrong?” Since his return to Downing Street in November, nearly two decades after his stint in Tony Blair’s No. 10 came to an end, Powell has established himself as a figure of significant influence in the Starmer operation, trusted by both the Prime Minister and his influential chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. In fact, inside Downing Street, The New Machiavelli is held up as something of a guidebook for how to wield power in modern politics.

The irony of Powell’s return to Downing Street, however, is that Starmer — at least on the face of it — appears to be anything but the “conviction” politician praised in The New Machiavelli. In a new book on the Labour leader, Get In, written by the journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, Starmer himself appears to make this explicit. “I don’t have any ideology at all,” he reportedly declares at one point. “There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be. I will make decisions one after the other.”

Despite Starmer’s openness to sending British troops to Ukraine, his response to the Trump crisis hardly fits Powell’s definition of a conviction politician. Just after saying that it was time for Europe to take responsibility for its own security, for example, Starmer also insisted that there had to be a “US backstop” to any future peacekeeping effort in Ukraine. The comforts of the past are not easy to give up.

Domestically, too, Starmer is facing a battle just to marginally increase defence spending from the current target of 2.5% — half the level the Trump administration has demanded from Europe. According to influential UK advisers I have spoken to this week, Britain’s spending on conventional military forces in reality amounts to little more than 1.5% of GDP once its spending on other areas of defence, like Trident, are accounted for. Britain simply is not capable of stepping into the gap left by any US departure. Starmer’s mission to Washington next week is that of a supplicant. And Trump knows it.

So far, Starmer’s response to the crisis has been entirely conventional. Much like all British prime ministers since 1945 — with the one notable exception of Ted Heath — Starmer wants to act as the bridge between Europe and the United States as part of a wider strategy to protect the transatlantic alliance and the primacy of Nato as the guarantor of European security.

Yet the danger for Starmer is that he finds himself being buffeted by events in much the way Powell set out, reacting to the latest challenge without any overarching strategic goal beyond the conservation of a rapidly vanishing  order.

There is, of course, every reason to be cautious about Trump’s bombast. During his first term, he repeatedly chastised Europe about its defence spending but left office with more American troops stationed on the continent than he inherited. The read-out from yesterday’s talks in Saudi Arabia did not suggest any real progress had been made.

As one influential UK adviser put it to me, it makes sense for Starmer to do all he can to protect the status quo and hope it survives Trump’s second term. Practically, there may be little other choice. From Starmer’s perspective, neither the UK nor Europe as a whole is in any position to step into the United States’ shoes. Britain has no industrial capacity to replace American arms manufacturers. And besides, as the former head of the British Army, Lord Dannatt, said, Britain simply does not have the numbers of troops available to make any significant contribution to Ukraine’s defence. The British Army today has barely 75,000 personnel. The Russians, in contrast, are recruiting 30,000 soldiers a month.

Europe’s political and fiscal restraints are so acute that it is inconceivable that a European army could replace the US in any meaningful sense. Starmer’s government is already perilously close to breaking its borrowing rules. France is unable to pass a budget without presidential decree. And Germany is about to enter a period of coalition-building instability. Only the Poles today are spending the kind of money the Americans are demanding, but even they have signalled they are unwilling to allow troops on the ground in Ukraine. If Europe is about to be humiliated by the Americans in Riyadh, it will have brought it upon itself.

Yet every crisis offers political opportunity. Having spent his first six months as Prime Minister being buffeted by events, Starmer could seize this moment to reset the terms of British politics. As one influential figure told me: “People are yearning for a change in direction after all the years of muddling through. This is it.”

Some of those close to Starmer are now advising him to cast off the shackles of the Treasury so as to rapidly increase defence spending and rebuild Britain’s domestic industrial capacity. Perhaps he will need to cast off Rachel Reeves in the process. Yet, in order to succeed, such moves cannot be mere tactical manoeuvres. To reset his government in a moment of global crisis, Starmer needs to make a political argument to the country for why everything has changed and so too, therefore, must his programme of government.

He could turn to Ted Heath for inspiration. In 1971, the Tory prime minister used the sense of malaise which had settled over the country as the context for his push to lead Britain into the Common Market — an ambition he’d had since the birth of the Coal and Steel Community  two decades earlier. “For 25 years we’ve been looking for something to get us going again,” Heath said. “Now here it is.” Today, with Britain in a new age of stagnation, Starmer too needs a national mission — and some of those close to him believe that mission should be one of national security. And not just military security, but everything from energy to food and industrial capacity.

To achieve this, however, Starmer would have to make sacrifices that would be difficult for his party to accept. If more borrowing, higher taxes or further spending cuts are required to protect Britain’s national security, Labour will struggle to maintain spending on foreign aid and welfare at today’s levels. In this scenario, energy security would also have to become a priority, which would mean subordinating the drive to Net Zero and pushing ahead with a host of grand projects from the rollout of small nuclear reactors to the rapid expansion of Heathrow and the like. Starmer, meanwhile, is being advised to use the crisis to pursue closer alignment with the EU in areas such as food and animal safety.

Yet this path is fraught with geopolitical dangers. The American commitment to Nato may really be coming to an end. Serious analysts close to the PM are concerned Trump might well agree terms with Russia deemed unacceptable across European capitals. And even if he does, there is little proof that attitudes in Europe will shift in any material way. For all Macron’s talk, British officials believe there is no evidence that he is willing to consider a new security infrastructure outside the confines of the EU to accommodate the UK. The reality is that Britain — like the rest of Europe — is not in control of events. The decisions that will shape the future of the continent are being taken in Washington.

In The New Machiavelli, Jonathan Powell wrote that leaders needed not only to be “blessed with fortune” but also the ability to “take advantage of her”. This, ultimately, is the alchemy of political leadership. So far, Starmer has shown little sign of possessing the gifts necessary to master such a crisis. Yet this may be his last opportunity to reset his government before it is too late. He should take it and show us he has a sense of direction after all.

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