The Trump administration is filled with Eurosceptic – from Elon Musk, to JD Vance, to Trump’s own son Donald Jr – who have ridiculed European leaders and endorsed alternate histories of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that skew closer to Kremlin dogma than to those of Ukraine’s allies in Brussels or Washington.
And many in Washington, particularly in the Republican party, see Europe’s politicians as ideologically opposed to the US, culminating in recent remarks by Trump that the EU was founded to “screw America” and JD Vance’s speech at the Munich security conference where he told European leaders that “if you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you”.
He said: “I think it does matter that you’ve got the you’ve got the country that’s been invaded, Ukraine, and you’ve got the two biggest and most powerful military powers in Europe, the UK and the French, having their president, prime minister, come visit in the same week.”.
Trump and his allies have said that they want to turn America’s focus away from Europe toward China and the Indo-Pacific, and have mulled pulling troops out of Europe – including in the Baltic countries bordering Russia.
That is the question that Keir Starmer arrived in Washington to pose at what Sir Peter Westmacott, Britain’s ambassador to Washington from 2012 to 2016, called “one of the most consequential meetings of a British prime minister and president that we have had since the second world war”.
