From Iran to Ukraine: Is Sir Keir Starmer’s Donald Trump ‘appeasement’ strategy falling apart?
23 June 2025, 23:28 | Updated: 24 June 2025, 07:45
As I flew into the last NATO summit in Washington nearly a year ago, America and the wider world stage looked quite different.
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Outgoing President Joe Biden hadn’t yet stepped aside from the race for the White House.
What turned out to be his final summit in charge was spent batting off questions about his suitability to continue to hold high office, after he introduced Zelensky as Putin.
12 months on, and a lot has changed. A new President back in the White House, a humanitarian crisis brewing in Gaza, and Israel and Iran firing missiles across the Middle East.
One thing has not – and that is Downing Street’s Trump appeasement strategy.
But there are some serious cracks starting to appear in the transatlantic alliance.
NATO bosses will this week deliver the fudge of all fudges on defence spending in a bid to keep him on side.
The PM and other allies will agree to spend a whopping five per cent of GDP on defence by 2035, just as he called for.
To mark Trump’s first NATO summit back in charge of the free world, keeping its biggest spender firmly on side looks on the face of things, like a smart strategy.
And with the President’s other foreign policy promises – peace to Gaza and Ukraine – looking stubbornly stuck, the President desperately needs an international win to hail on the home front.
Our prime minister will be the first to praise the President’s heroics in making that happen, if he hopes it will keep in his good books.
But insiders fear the whole thing risks unravelling faster than Trump can take to Truth Social.
For a start, the extra ‘defence related spending’ NATO chief Mark Rutte will hail is not all ships, planes, bombs and drones.
Eyebrows will be raised at the uplift including roads and rail, energy infrastructure, and even spending on small boats, like the PM’s Border Command.
It sounds like all nations will be allowed to fiddle the figures to include certain types of non-core defence spending.
Spain won’t sign up to the new five per cent target at all, which risks creating exactly the kind of ‘two tier NATO’ the alliance has always tried to avoid.
Sir Keir Starmer will argue today that our national security is all tied to defence, and the boundaries between traditional defence and the modern world are blurring.
I doubt some of this will wash with the public, who can see the need for extra spending on security playing out across the Middle East as we speak.
But the PM won’t announce any extra spending this week, and will point to his existing plan to reach 2.6 per cent by 2027.
The rest is for another day, another parliament, and possibly even another prime minister to deal with.
And there’ll be a review by 2029 (handily the year of the expected next election) to see if by then, we even need to be spending that much.
Some in government and in the industry fear the PM just isn’t taking defence as seriously as he should, still.
And with China, Russia and other adversaries quietly growing in capabilities, defence leaders privately discuss what it will take for the UK to really wake up to the threats on our own soil too.
Of course, the latest Iran and Israel crisis risks throwing another huge spanner in the works of the best-laid plans.
Trump cut short the G7 to take intelligence over Iran, and insiders fear he may leave early again if he decides it’s not a good use of his time to be in Europe, away from the situation room and his top advisers.
Countries are privately divided about how to deal with Trump’s unilateral action, and how to get all sides back around the negotiating table to thrash out some sort of arrangement.
As allies of the foreign secretary have set out, simply bombing a nuclear site won’t take away the decade’s worth of knowledge now in Iran about how to build and handle it.
Sir Keir has been desperately playing diplomat, with an extensive ring around over the weekend set to play out on the world stage.
But some fear America could use the summit to force other nations to publicly support the strikes – a move bound to spark chaos and push any tensions right to the surface.
That’s something the PM is incredibly keen not to do.
The tightrope balancing act of appeasing the President and being a ‘bridge to Europe’ is starting to look a little frayed.
Just a week ago the prime minister insisted he’d spoken with Trump and he had no doubt he was not about to become involved with action on Iran.
Was the prime minister incredibly convinced by his persuasive story, and shouldn’t have been?
Or is the President is just as whimsical and hard to predict as he always was, in which case the PM should never have been so empathic in the first place?
Both outcomes are more than embarrassing.
It’s just another example of how a ‘Trump first’ strategy isn’t always going to pay off.
Sir Keir’s refusal to say whether the UK supports US strikes on Iran is the latest example of how highly the PM views keeping the President onside.
The PM will also use the summit to urge allies including Trump not to give up on Ukraine - as he stands shoulder to shoulder with President Zelensky.
Yet on that front, Trump has not moved either side any nearer to a ceasefire, let alone a peace deal.
It was the Pope’s funeral, not Sir Keir bending the President’s ear, which led to the two leaders getting back in each other’s good books.
Downing Street hopes Sir Keir and Trump’s diplomatic friendship will be enough to avoid a NATO blow-out, but the edges are beginning to fray.
How far will Sir Keir’s ‘bridge’ stretch before it breaks, leaving the UK and the rest of the world slipping through the cracks?
Is it better to be in the Trump tent, or outside of it? We are about to find out.
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Natasha Clark is LBC's Political Editor.
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