British Prime Minister Keir Starmer can barely keep his footing under his desk in No. 10 Downing Street before flying to Washington for a NATO summit next week. A week later he will host 50 European leaders at a security conference at Blenheim Palace, the birthplace of Winston Churchill.
For Starmer, Britain’s first Labor prime minister in 14 years, it was a crash course in global statecraft. But it also gives him a chance to project an image of Britain that is unusual in the post-Brexit era: a stable, traditional, center-left country surrounded by politically unstable allies.
In Washington, Starmer will meet President Joe Biden, who has resisted calls to abandon his re-election bid because of his age. He will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron, whose attempts to fend off the far right in France appear to have backfired, and with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, whose coalition has been blocked by the European Parliament weakened by the electoral rise of the far right.
Starmer’s success in Labour may raise hopes among some that Britain’s support for centre-left parties can be replicated in France and the United States. But it’s equally possible that Britain could be a harbinger of something else: that the anti-incumbency rebellion and simmering populism embodied in Britain by the insurgent Reform Party could play out elsewhere. That was the case in 2016, when voters supported the Brexit referendum six months before the United States elected Donald J. Trump.
Analysts point out that Britain’s shift to Labor is not so much a matter of ideology, but rather a matter of weariness with the Conservative government and distrust of the overall political system. The same fatigue exists in France under an unpopular centrist president and in the United States under an aging Democratic president.
For now, though, diplomats say Starmer’s extraordinary electoral victory will give him a patina of political stardust among other leaders, for whom such victories have been rare in recent times.
“A huge victory means he will be under siege at the NATO summit,” said Kim Darroch, a former British ambassador to Washington. “Everyone wants to talk to him; everyone wants to take a selfie with him.
Depending on how the U.S. presidential election goes, Starmer may one day even find himself in a position not unlike that of another German chancellor, Angela Merkel, who was seen as The bastion of the rules-based international order.
However, Darroch said that for Starmer to take on this responsibility he would have to find ways to boost the UK economy. Diplomatic strength is linked to economic strength, and Britain’s economic weakness, combined with its decision to leave the European Union, has reduced the country’s role in international affairs.
Darroch also said Starmer should overcome his reputation for caution and try to take some bold action on Europe. He ruled out rejoining the EU’s vast single economic market because that would mean allowing Europeans to live and work freely in the UK or its customs union, which would mean accepting some of the EU’s rules on tariffs and tariffs.
Any major deal will involve difficult trade-offs, but Mr Starmer, who opposes Brexit, does not carry the baggage of his Tory predecessors like Boris Johnson, who spearheaded the Brexit campaign and won the likes of Reputation for quarreling with the EU.
“They were not insulted by Labor in the same way they were by the Conservatives,” said Mr Darroch, who also served as Britain’s permanent representative to the EU. “He doesn’t have that legacy; he doesn’t have that baggage.
Mr Starmer traveled extensively abroad while working as a human rights lawyer. But his expertise does not lie in foreign policy, and during the campaign he mainly tried to avoid major conflicts with the Conservative government on two major issues: Ukraine and the Gaza war.
Starmer pledged to maintain Britain’s military support for Ukraine, which has enjoyed broad public support from the start of the war. As Labor leader, he has struggled to shake off a reputation for hostility to Nato and suspicion of the military that was entrenched under his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.
“One of the disastrous things about Corbyn’s leadership is that he had no commitment to NATO, no commitment to defence, and people didn’t like that,” said political science professor Robert Ford.
Israel and Gaza present a more thorny issue for Starmer. He called for a ceasefire in the conflict, but it took him a while to achieve that, angering those on the left of the party as well as Labour’s Muslim supporters.
The response to the election was greater than expected. Labor MP Jonathan Ashworth, who is likely to be appointed to Starmer’s cabinet, unexpectedly lost his Leicester South seat to independent Shockat Adam, who won “This is for the people of Gaza,” he declared in his speech.
Even Mr Starmer’s vote share in his own north London seat fell by 17 percentage points from the 2019 election, This was partly due to a challenge from an independent who expressed anger at Labour’s stance on Israel and the Gaza war.
Israel is likely to continue to haunt Mr Starmer as much as it does Mr Biden and Mr Macron. Both men have been criticized for staying away from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for too long and for not condemning Israel’s war conduct in Gaza more strongly.
David Lammy, who was appointed foreign secretary by Starmer on Friday, said his boss’s approach to the war was shaped by his background as a human rights lawyer. He said in an interview in April that Starmer would continue to support Israel but require it to abide by international law.
“The situation in Gaza is a description of hell on earth,” Mr. Lamy said. “There was a man-made famine, there was no vital medical aid and people were eating cactus. Labor was at its best as the opposition party.
Mr Lammy said a Labor government would blend progressive values with a realistic worldview – what he called “progressive realism”.
“There were a lot of magical ideas in the Boris Johnson, Theresa May, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak years,” Lamy said, referring to the four Conservative prime ministers who preceded Starmer. . “It harkens back to a long-gone era, while not paying enough attention to today’s challenges.”
