Listening to Sir Keir Starmer explaining why standing up to Russian tyranny and bending over backward to get the United States to stay engaged in Europe is like reliving the early dramas of post-war Europe 1948-51.
Starmer’s flat, uninspiring style is almost a parody of Clement Attlee’s dull, clipped upper-middle-class tones as he brutally shattered the illusions of the Labour left and many British opinion formers that a post-war world based on an alliance with Moscow—the left talking with the left—could be built.
London, like Paris and other European countries, has seared into institutional memory what happened when the United States went home after 1918 and Roosevelt won re-election in 1940 with this Trump-like pledge to the mothers of America: “I have said and will say again and again and again, your sons will not be sent into any foreign war.”
FDR’s pledge was welcomed in Berlin and caused despair in London. The endless babble from UK politicians about the “special relationship,” a phrase coined by Winston Churchill in 1946 at the time Washington was helping dismantle the British Empire based as it was on white supremacist rule but one that I never heard from American lips in years going to Washington as a British foreign minister under Tony Blair, obscures the fact that US presidents are not notably pro-Brit.
President Eisenhower shouted at Harold Macmillan during the Suez crisis: “Are you mad, Harold!” and the US pointedly refused to back Britain as London tried to hang on to its colonies.
American presidents turned a blind eye to fundraising and weapons shipments by Irish ultra-nationalists who thought their campaign of killing children and women would prevail and did nothing to help Mrs. Thatcher win the Falklands conflict. Trump is far from the first president who sees the world through his own eyes, not those of superior Brits.
And Starmer, like Attlee after 1945, is very gently playing the US president as he ignores the moralistic denunciation of British bien pensants who think the UK should break relations with Washington as they watched Trump follow Vice President JD Vance into a stupid shouting match of insults with President Zelensky, who forgivable lost his cool and tried to talk over the arrogant, cock-sure vice president.
Zelensky quickly recovered and sent out tweets and later a speech expressing his gratitude to the United States for military, diplomatic, and financial support to Ukraine since 2022.
In the same period, Britain was running down its armed forces to little over 70,000 soldiers—the lowest level in nearly 300 years. Boris Johnson studied classics at Oxford but forgot the Roman adage, “If you want peace, prepare for war.” Britain, along with France and Germany, sent some military support to Ukraine but not anything like the amount of modern weapons and ammunition Ukraine needs, where the US has been the main supplier.
