At home, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has framed his trip to meet Donald Trump as a bid to save Ukraine and the trans-Atlantic alliance. At the White House, he’ll argue that the U.S. president needs Europe to come out a winner.
Starmer will be in Washington on Thursday to hold his first face-to-face meeting with Trump since the populist Republican’s election to a second stint in the White House. The stakes couldn’t be higher for the prime minister, who faces a career-defining crisis, with generational implications for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the British-American "special relationship” at its core.
While Starmer can gesture toward the bust of Winston Churchill recently restored to the Oval Office, he’s hoping the U.K.’s fresh plans to boost defense spending to 3% of economic output over the next decade will prove more convincing to Trump. His main objective is to secure an American "backstop” for any truce between Russia and Ukraine, a cause French President Emmanuel Macron also pushed in his own White House visit earlier this week.
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