Sir Keir Starmer faces the biggest test yet of his diplomatic skills when he travels to Washington this week. No doubt his advisers will be war gaming the Prime Minister’s approach for talks with Donald Trump.
Get this wrong and the fate of our economy, the Special Relationship and perhaps even the future of Western Europe could be at stake.
How can Starmer try to win over the world’s most unpredictable and often irascible leader – who has broken the Western consensus on Ukraine and is said to be contemplating imposing trade tariffs of up to 24 per cent on the UK?
Kevin Carroll, a former CIA officer who was a senior member of Trump’s Homeland Security team for two years during his initial term in office, hopes the British Prime Minister can somehow achieve a miracle this week.
Carroll makes no pretence of supporting Trump. Troubled by what he saw and heard inside the first administration, he quit in December 2018 alongside his boss John Kelly – the former White House chief of staff who has since called Trump a “fascist”.
However, Carroll believes he can offer a few fundamental rules of engagement which Starmer shouldn’t stray from.
First off? Bring a good present.
With almost any other leader, ceremonial souvenirs tend to be mere bows to etiquette, instantly forgotten and of little diplomatic substance. With Trump, says Carroll, “the gifts can matter”.
He recalls how the late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe presented Trump with a gold-plated golf club worth $3,775 soon after his election victory in 2016, which was said to have impressed the incoming President so much that it apparently helped convince him not to impose trade tariffs on Japan. However, Trump later revealed he had temporarily lost the club, never used it, and suggested the gold was actually just “paint”.
Saudia Arabia invested a lot of hope – and money – in gifts during Trump’s first term in office, given the President and his top team a total of 82 items in four years. These included three robes made which appeared to be made with cheetah and white tiger fur, but later turned out to be fake. Trump’s officials handed them over to a government store when he left office in 2021.
The UK could offer “to lend America the Crown Jewels,” says Carroll, but half-jokingly he adds: “You wouldn’t get them back.”
He suggests that what the President would really value is a tax break for his two Scottish golf courses: Trump Turnberry in South Ayrshire and his loss-making Trump International Scotland in Aberdeenshire.
The Turnberry club benefited from more than £100,000 of business rates relief from the Scottish Government in 2017-18. Those rules were later dropped, but in 2020 his courses reportedly qualified for a tax rebate of nearly £1m under Holyrood’s Covid bailout scheme.
Would the Prime Minister consider greeting Trump with a lucrative tax deal? Carroll suspects not. “Starmer is the last guy in the world who would be comfortable with something like that.”
Whatever he takes on the plane, he can only hope it will impress Trump as much as the Argentinian president’s gift of a chainsaw last week to Elon Musk, who also opposes US support for Ukraine.
Once gifts have been exchanged, Carroll says: “The advice I would give to the PM is that Trump is very susceptible to flattery. He is proud of his Scottish roots on his mother’s side. He is fascinated by the idea of royalty. So Britain’s soft power can be very powerful.”
He admits there may well be a personality clash. “Boy, it’s going to be a tough meeting,” he says. “Starmer does not seem like a people person to begin with. He seems like a cold bureaucratic fish. I don’t see him and Trump hitting it off at all.” Things could be even more frosty after the President said that Starmer has “done nothing” to stop the war in Ukraine.
With that in mind, perhaps Starmer should consider ponder how to utilise the Royal Family. Trump met Prince William in Paris in December and said the pair had a “great, great talk“. It’s understood that he won’t be joining this trip – but could the heir to the throne send a signed letter of goodwill, for example, or promise to travel to the US another time? Carroll thinks it’s worth considering the options. “Having one of the Royals pay him some attention could be helpful,” he says. “It matters to him.”
Given the various falsehoods Trump has already stated about Volodymyr Zelensky – such as calling the Ukrainian President a “dictator” – Carroll also warns: “Don’t assume that Trump knows basic facts. John Kelly eventually figured out that Trump didn’t know who had fought on which side in World War Two.”
The trick is to establish fundamental truths without appearing to be patronising, which can rile the President. Carroll points to an infamous briefing at the Pentagon in 2017, when the US Secretary of Defence Jim Mattis and senior colleagues reportedly tried to tutor Trump with a slide show on foreign affairs. They are said to have angered the President so much that, according to the book A Very Stable Genius, he apparently called the military leaders “losers” and told them: “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”
Carroll is optimistic that Starmer can find “a deft way” of laying out basic principles through charm, perhaps by emphasising the historical traditions behind the US-UK relationship which the two men are part of.
“He can say, ‘We’ve been on the same side of every armed conflict since 1917, and our intelligence collection is pretty much done jointly, and there are US air bases in Britain, and your ships use our naval bases.’ I would try, in a tactful way, to let him know how deep the security relationship is.”
There could also be a harder edge to the messaging, Carroll believes. “Trump is a fundamentally insecure man who is very afraid of appearing weak. So if Starmer could say, in a non-threatening way, ‘If the Russian army rolls into Kyiv, it’ll make you look bad,’ that might be something that has resonance with them.”
The stakes couldn’t be higher if Trump decides that Starmer is just another “dope”. If things go badly, the President might even be tempted to withdraw from Nato.
“Trump wanted to pull out Nato during the first term, 100 per cent,” says Carroll. “Kelly, Mattis, McMaster, the usual suspects, kept him from doing so. He sees Nato as cheating him out of money, so he’s still eager to get out.”
He worries that when Trump apparently spoke on the phone to Vladimir Putin in recent days, the Russian leader will have been able to “exert a strong influence on him”, although some experts are sceptical of how true this is.
The former CIA officer says: “What has been the main foreign policy goal of Moscow since 1949? To break the unity of Nato. So you can be sure that in private, Putin is urging Trump to leave Nato.”
Trump is often said to see politics as being purely transactional, so there are questions about what Starmer could offer the President in return for any concessions or guarantees. Some believe it should be a promise to increase UK defence spending three per cent of GDP, but the Government has resisted those calls so far.
Trump has begun talks with Russia without involving Ukraine. He has also demanded that Kyiv give half of its mineral wealth to the Washington as payback for military and economic help while fighting off Putin’s invasion. This has worried European allies that the US could renege on security guarantees to the continent.
Carroll admits to holding serious doubts that Trump can be brought back onside by now.
“This would have been a different conversation a week or two ago,” he says. Since then, not only has Trump falsely claimed that Ukraine started its war with Russia, but the US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has also “made two gigantic concessions”.
“I thought that a deal might possible if the Russians were allowed to keep the territory they had taken, but Ukraine would join Nato. Or alternatively, if Russia agreed to pull back, in return for a commitment that Ukraine will never join Nato… Once you take both those things off the table, I don’t see what deal there is left to be made, that doesn’t involve throwing the Ukrainians on the bus.”
Reports that Hegseth has told Pentagon staff to cut the US military budget by eight per cent each year for five years will further embolden Putin, Carroll fears. He thinks that getting the US to delay announcing any unilateral deal with Russia is “probably the realistic goal” for Starmer, allowing for further talks.
Some experts argue that foreign leaders should resist being too outraged by Trump’s unconventional – and often untrue – proclamations. The former Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, wrote online last week: “Trump’s statements are not intended to be historically accurate but to shock Europeans into action.” Trump’s former ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, has repeatedly urged people not to interpret the President’s words “literally”.
Carroll disagrees. He says that Starmer must take Trump’s words “seriously” and not brush over any inconvenient turns in their conversation.
And he cautions that some of the President’s ideas are as dangerous as can be, citing an alleged example from 2017 that eventually emerged six years later. “Trump proposed a nuclear strike on North Korea. He said we could just deny that it was us. It had to be explained to him: ‘Sir, there are radars and satellites designed precisely to see where ballistic missiles are launched from, and there are forensics on radiation – God forbid if it ever happened – so they would know it was us.”
Back then, Carroll says, Trump had serious and experienced advisers around him like Kelly, who could persuade him why his ideas were wrong. “But now, he doesn’t have staffers that would walk him back from stuff like that.”
@robhastings.bsky.social
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