Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently refocused more on his European allies after Trump took office, seeking even renewed cooperation with the European Union. He could also have said, we don’t need to explicitly engage with Europe and further develop the relationship with the United States. In light of European rapprochement, how do you see the UK-US transatlantic relationship?

“I think that the future of the UK-US relationship is currently being decided in Washington, because the UK is in a very reactive mode right now. There’s always going to be a desire in the UK to maintain a close relationship with the US. There is a really long tradition in British foreign policy of trying to position the country as the bridge between the EU and America and Keir Starmer is continuing that tradition. The intelligence cooperation we have is incredibly important to the UK, just like our nuclear deterrent dependency on the US. There is a hypothetical point at which the UK would realise that it is not dealing with the same United States that it was dealing with before and that there needs to be a more dramatic break in policy. But right now, that’s not what the British government is trying to do. It is trying to be close to Trump.”

“There’s a lot of political support within Britain for pursuing good relations with the US. And if a British prime minister is seen to have a bad relationship with the American president, then that’s damaging for them in the eyes of the public opinion in Britain. But it’s incredibly difficult for Keir Starmer because also the British public don’t really like Donald Trump that much.”

”Starmer announced a European reset. He wants to pull closer to the European Union. In some aspects like defence and security, there is a very obvious area for vastly increased cooperation between the UK and the EU. If you discount Nigel Farage’s new right-wing Reform party, who is gaining popularity due to immigration rhetoric, almost everybody across our political spectrum agrees that Russia is the primary strategic threat, that the security of the Atlantic area of Europe is our primary foreign policy goal. But everything else, such as the youth mobility scheme, migration and the economy, which touch on British sovereignty, is so difficult for Starmer. The British political debate is still kind of locked in what I think is a really unproductive mode, as a result of Brexit, where no politician wants to suggest any undoing of Brexit, or any steps back towards European integration. And as long as the Reform party continues to do well, it is just going to become even harder to do.”

The United Kingdom was spending just above the 2% norm of NATO last year. There are a lot of talks going on, and it looks like that it will become a 5% spending pledge during the summit in The Hague. How do the British view this possible commitment?>

”That 5% target, even if made up of 3.5% on defence and 1.5% on defence-related expenditure as Rutte is suggesting, is difficult for any British prime minister to deliver domestically. The British economy is not doing well and the public services are doing badly. There are many domestic priorities, especially given the recent success of Reform in the local elections, that a British prime minister needs to attend to. Starmer will probably try to increase it but they also play around with the reclassification of what counts as defence spending. The argument that we have always made to the Americans is that our intelligence apparatus, which is tremendously valuable to the Americans, ought to count as part of that defence spending.”

Do you also see a particular strategic role for the UK within NATO, if the US would back off from their responsibilities within the alliance?

‘’If the US backs away from NATO, which might take different forms, NATO then ceases to be NATO. The primary function of NATO has always been to bind the United States to the defence of Europe. Britain and France, of a combination of them with other countries, cannot come anywhere close to making up for what the US contributes towards NATO. It becomes a completely different conversation then. European countries then have to find a new security architecture for Europe. They will attempt to expand their militaries and expand their defence industrial bases. But that is a process of 5 to 10 years. I actually think that if it were to happen that NATO falls apart, we could also see a fracturing of Europe into different blocks and different interests regionally.

Why do you think that those blocks will arise?

“There are always these divisions within the European Union that have existed, south versus north and east versus west. And particularly in times of high stress and economic and fiscal difficulties, these become more pronounced. Many people in Britain never wanted Poland and Romania to be part of the European Union. The way that that was viewed in parts of political discourse in Britain was that this will lead to hundreds of thousands of migrants coming from these less developed countries. Many people in Britain don’t feel a cultural attachment to this idea of the European Union, and so they’re not necessarily going to be really in favour of subjecting Britain to the possibility of a nuclear attack in order to defend Warsaw.”

“I think that at the same time, publics across Europe will be making this same calculation. It is not really clear to me that the Western European countries are going to want to bear the consequences of the defence of Eastern Europe, or the defence of the Baltics and the risks that brings. People are always hoping for this miracle, this optimistic picture that if America pulls back, we will finally get our act together and we will unify. But I am not sure that that would be the outcome. To be honest, I think it would be much more divisive than that. And this kind of problem of solidarity that’s always existed in the European Union and particularly exists between the UK and the European Union, would become very pronounced.”

How do you see the role of the United Kingdom in this coming period, of highly reactive geopolitical ongoings?

”The main issues right now are trade and Ukraine. The UK is basically trying to cut a separate deal with Trump, attempting to solve the problems that Trump raises with the US bilaterally. That would not have been my preference. I would have rather seen that we combined with the European Union and stood together against Trump, but we are instead trying to just to get the best deal for ourselves. And then at the same time, the UK is trying to have a productive role in the conversation about Ukraine and to steer Trump towards a harder line against Russia and to still stand by Ukraine. But I don’t really believe that we have that much influence over that. But that is what the UK will be trying to do. If a more formal peace process starts to happen, the UK will try and get a seat at that table, and probably in conjunction with France and other countries to put forward productive ideas too for that peace agreement. We have very big ideas about how much we can influence these things. But we usually just a rule taker, not a rule maker. It is however important for British identity and political discourse that our Prime Minister is seen to be influencing these issues. I am just not sure that influence them that much at the end of the day.”

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