Trump meets Starmer - 'Special Relationship' in the balance
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Welcome to the World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Toby Gillis, and I'm joined by Alex Dibble. On the day the UK Prime Minister, Sakhir Starmer, visits the White House, there could hardly be more on the line.

Delicate talks about the future of Ukraine await, as does America's commitment to NATO, the threat of tariffs on British and European trade, the Middle East, China and defence spending. However Mr Starmer chooses to approach Donald Trump regarding each subject, about which they disagree to a significant level...

he will also be mindful not to damage the historic so-called special relationship between the two nations. But with the US president's increasingly isolationist ideology, is it even still worth fighting for? Our guest today is Edward Lucas, European and transatlantic security consultant and Times columnist. Edward, an easy question to ask first, perhaps a harder one to answer. How do we define the special relationship?

The special relationship is one of those comforting diplomatic fictions, a bit like the rules-based international order. In the narrowest sense, it's about close cooperation on nuclear weapons and on intelligence. And to a large extent, close cooperation on more mundane military matters. That dates back really to

1940-41 when Churchill was getting first of all some help from the United States driven in a rather transactional way and then once the United States came into the war rather a lot more and it's carried on ever since but the more you look into it the more questions come up. And so what are the questions that you're asking in that case? Do you even think it still truly exists?

The special relationship will continue at some level so long as we're using American missiles to deliver our nuclear warheads. So Trident and its successor assume that the special relationship will continue. And if that stopped, we would have very serious difficulties in maintaining our nuclear deterrent. So that's kind of fixed, I think.

The intelligence relationship is under strain because if you're a British intelligence officer, you don't necessarily want your top secret to land in the president's daily brief because he might blurt it out to the next person who walks into the Oval Office or Elon Musk might look at it. But at a more mundane level, that intelligence relationship will continue if you're interested in working out how much manganese goes into the latest Russian tank barrel. There

you'll probably find a British and an American analyst working together. The real problem is values, that we can no longer really say Britain and America united by a common worldview, a common set of values, common goals, because Trump's goals seem to be so different. And that's got a profoundly corrosive effect on the special relationship, I'm afraid, in most of its aspects.

It's interesting the way you've boiled it down to basically a military level, because you often find diplomats and politicians using special relationship almost as a sign of friendship between the two nations. Does it not extend to that? Well, I think the special relationship is a slightly cringe-making phrase, and I try to avoid it outside the sort of narrow worlds of nuclear weapons and

espionage and military cooperation there's a slightly sort of desperate needy feeling of Brits wanting the Americans to say it it's a bit like this sort of in a troubled marriage that the

nervous spouse asking the other spouse to say publicly, you do love me, don't you, darling? Well, can you say so, please? There are a lot of very close friendships, American and British officials who've worked side by side on many different issues over many years. So there's a level of personal trust, which is a thing in the relationship. And that's probably closer than with any other country, really, possibly.

But I do think that this special relationship, as broadly sort of interpreted in the sort of public, is on the rocks now. This marriage has just suffered a massive episode of domestic abuse and trust is shattered. And I don't think it's ever going to be put back together again.

That being the case then, Edward, does it even still matter anymore? As long as the UK's nuclear deterrent is secure, should, for example, Sakhir Starmer even have the special relationship in his mind as he talks to Donald Trump?

Well, I think the point is not the closeness of the relationship, but what you can achieve through it. And if Donald Trump decides that he's going to hand Europe over to Russia in the hope of splitting Russia and China...

then we don't want a special relationship with America because America is going to become an adversary. If Donald Trump decides he wants to have a MAGA international and wants to do everything possible to make Nigel Farage prime minister,

That's a kind of interference in British domestic politics, which is also antithetical to any idea of a close relationship. So we will see how things go in Washington. My guess is that this is going to settle down into being a rather difficult

unpleasant presidency, but probably without the catastrophes that people are fearing at the moment. But the relationship will be very transactional. And I think that we're going to see a lot of sort of minor frictions now with our relationship with America, which in the past would have been eased by the general trust and goodwill. And when that trust and goodwill aren't there, these frictions will feel a lot more painful.

And both sides will be the losers. It's bad for America not having any allies. It's bad for us not having the world's most powerful country on our side. But unfortunately, stuff happens and this has just happened. So we've got to live with it. So do you think for Starmer this week, then, that the reason not to risk the special relationship by, I don't know, being particularly robust with Trump is actually more political? Because being the prime minister who brings it down would be a PR disaster, wouldn't it?

There's plenty of potentials for disaster. I mean, one is that America just goes ahead and does its own thing. And it's very bad for us. So massive tariff wars that break down the world trading system and

The difficulty for Keir Starmer is we're not in a very good position to stand up to Trump. We can sit back and do nothing, just ignore it, rather like we ignored the Vietnam War when Harold Wilson and Ted Heath were prime ministers and the Americans wanted us in. We said we're not coming. So we might be able to sit it out a bit. But if we actually want to confront Trump, he basically holds all the cards.

And in the end, our status as a sort of superpower rests on a pretty flimsy bureaucratic hook, which is the nuclear agreement we have with the Americans. And if Donald Trump says I'm cross with the Brits, they're always criticizing me. Starmer came over to Washington and told me I had to do all these things I didn't want to do. I don't see why we should service their Trident missiles.

We have maybe two years worth of time before our nuclear deterrent becomes inoperable because those missiles need regular servicing. It's possible America could even disable them before then. This stuff is very secret.

That is a huge bet we've placed on America's friendship. And if we get into a spat with America, they can play that card pretty quickly. Trump does things like that. So it's a very high stakes thing if you really want to confront Trump. And I'm not sure that Starmer wants to do that. I'm not sure it'd be wise for him to do that. Edward, last thoughts. It all sounds very one way, this.

Would there be no downside to Trump, to the US even, to damage the special relationship? Does anyone in America really care? We probably feature in the sort of American mental landscape more than most countries do. And so we have perhaps more cultural, psychological capital in America than most countries.

I think the problem with regard to MAGA supporters is that they think that Britain is turned into a kind of multicultural hellhole. So if you're an Anglophile MAGA supporter, you probably think you're doing the right thing by beating up Britain. It's for your own good. And that was J.D. Vance's line with his notorious Munich speech. This is, I'm trying to help. I'm trying to rescue you from your descent into darkness and get you back onto the path of virtue.

We obviously don't see it like that mostly in this country. It's interesting to speculate what would happen if we had a general election and reform one, perhaps in the final year of a Trump presidency and Nigel Farage was prime minister. Would that rekindle the special relationship? Well, it would be a very different sort of thing, but it's not impossible.

OK, Edward Lucas, transatlantic security consultant and Times columnist. Thank you for joining us. Now, after Trump's meeting with Starmer, his one with Volodymyr Zelensky will be incredibly significant. The Ukrainian president will be at the White House to, we expect, sign over the rights to Ukraine's rare earth minerals.

For more on that deal, listen to yesterday's episode where our US assistant editor David Charter explained why Zelensky has agreed to it and also what else might be included in the deal. For now though, thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow.

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