What Andy Burnham needs from Donald Trump at their New York meet

Por Dan Bloom — POLITICOPolitics » POLITICO

LONDON — When Keir Starmer had his first dinner with Donald Trump, he strained so hard to impress the U.S. president that his host offered the British team a second helping of chicken.

Andy Burnham’s face-to-face introduction next Tuesday will look very different. Instead of the two-hour Trump Tower rendezvous that Starmer enjoyed in September 2024, British officials expect their new prime minister to sit down with his U.S. counterpart on relatively neutral ground in the United Nations headquarters at the far edge of Manhattan.

Their meeting is currently penciled in for Tuesday afternoon, sandwiched between Burnham’s 15-minute address to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday evening and Trump’s morning speech to the same hall — which given his past form, may drown out other headlines with whatever he says there.

That may prove convenient for Burnham.

“There will be so much going on that it reduces the intensity and scrutiny,” said Claire Ainsley, a former aide to Starmer who is now at the center-left Progressive Policy Institute think tank.

POLITICO spoke to a dozen current and former senior U.K. officials, ministers and MPs, many of them granted anonymity to speak frankly, about Burnham’s likely handling of the visit. Almost all predicted he would opt for a middle road somewhere between Starmer’s initial charm and the more combative approach of Canadian PM Mark Carney: Get in, smile, press the case for Ukraine, and try to leave without a major upset.

Downing Street’s overwhelming priority for the New York visit has been to squeeze in an IRL meeting with Trump, with whom Burnham has now spoken to by phone twice, according to a person familiar with the preparations. It will allow the two men to engage but with far lower stakes than a one-to-one visit in Washington or London, just one of a series of leader meetings that blend into the noise of a multilateral summit.

The hope, one U.K. government official said, is to “get the Trump meeting done and dusted in a relatively safe environment.”

That was then

The shift away from Starmer’s more high-pressure encounters is driven not so much by Burnham’s laid-back style — the new PM said last month he will “say what I feel” to Trump while also trying to “find a connection” — as by a profound change in the balance of risk since 2024.

Burnham has less to prove. Starmer, who took office shortly before Trump’s second election victory, signed deals on tech, trade and pharmaceuticals from scratch. Warming to Trump was the “medicine required at that period,” said a U.K. diplomat.

His successor’s job is to fix the mess of unresolved threads left behind. 

Burnham also has the benefit of hindsight, having watched Starmer’s efforts to praise Trump lead to embarrassment when the president lambasted the PM over the Iran conflict, oil drilling and tech taxes. Trump at one point even dissed Starmer as “no Winston Churchill.”

The new PM won’t “bend the knee in the way Starmer did,” predicted the same U.K. diplomat. He won’t be going to “kiss the ring,” added the first U.K. government official quoted above. “It’s completely different this time. There’s no drama about having to stay in his good books.” 

Yet Trump still has two years left in office, and a smooth relationship will be vital for the U.K. leader who has tried to keep his focus on domestic issues — but is watching his promises to ease living costs be buffeted by rising defense pressures and inflation from the Iran war.

The two men will also meet at a point where Britain and its allies are turning their heads away from the U.S.

Two years ago “Trump was at the height of his powers,” said one Starmer Cabinet minister. “The reality is different now.”

While November’s looming midterm elections threaten to dent Trump’s authority at home, abroad his approaches to NATO and the Middle East have led European allies to find solace elsewhere. Britain and its allies are forming groups of so-called middle powers, while Carney pushes closer ties between Canada and the EU that will still be in negotiation long after Trump’s departure. And Burnham has repeatedly talked about strengthening ties with Brussels — seeing through a reset in relations that Starmer initiated.

Olivia O’Sullivan, director of the U.K. in the World Programme at the Chatham House think tank, said the country is now “testing the waters” of loosening its strategic alignment with the U.S. — even as it continues to rely on America’s security and nuclear weapons architecture. (And even as Burnham continues to let the U.S. use Britain’s air bases for limited strikes on Iran.)

Emily Thornberry, the Labour MP who chairs the House of Commons’ foreign affairs committee, said there’s a reason for that: “I think a couple of years ago, the hopes were high that Trump would help with Ukraine, we would have a proper trade deal, and so on. He hasn’t delivered on those things, so we’re getting used to the disappointment. We don’t expect as much.”

One former senior official under Starmer put it more starkly: “The world is just viewing the United States differently. He is doing enormous long-term damage to the U.S.’s relationship with all of its allies. Institutions that have stood for decades can no longer do the jobs that they used to be able to do, because America is proving to be an unreliable ally. This is hugely significant in the long term.”

No list of deliverables

Burnham, whose two calls with Trump since July have both run far over their allotted time, is at least looking to keep things friendly. 

The new prime minister is not expected to take a big list of deliverables or policy goals into his meeting, two people familiar with the planning said.

Burnham is expected to press Trump on U.S. support for Ukraine after paying his first overseas trip there last month. British officials hope there is now a more pro-Ukraine atmosphere on Capitol Hill after the House of Representatives passed a sweeping Russia sanctions bill long championed by the late Senator Lindsay Graham.

Thornberry said the PM should urge Trump to speed up supplies of Patriot missiles to Ukraine ahead of the winter. Ukraine’s forces are “winning without the Americans, but they could actually win if the Americans did help,” she added.

Britain’s wider activities at UNGA — which Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband will also attend — could be dominated by a clash over the hardening stance of the U.K., France and Canada against Israel. The three countries issued joint sanctions against West Bank settlements earlier in September, after what one U.K. official described as a “tag team” coordination effort between Miliband, Burnham and the leaders and foreign ministers of allied countries.

The U.K. is hoping to use UNGA to work on the next steps in the humanitarian response for Gaza. British officials are privately hopeful that the U.S. response will continue to be muted; two U.K. government officials said they believed Secretary of State Marco Rubio viewed the intervention as helpful, given it applies pressure to Israel without it coming from the U.S.

Burnham faces a choice about how hard to lean into the issue of the Middle East in his own speech to UNGA. His closest No. 10 aides have kept a “tight hold” on the thinking around his remarks, said the person with knowledge of the planning quoted above.

Whatever he chooses, plenty of dangers lie in wait — not least Trump’s views on oil and gas in the North Sea. Industry figures believe Burnham’s government has delayed a decision on whether to drill at two fields until after an Oct. 8 special election to replace Starmer, where Labour is battling the Green Party. Trump has long been perplexed by the delay.

Burnham’s government has also delayed a key decision on defense spending until 2027, despite pressure from the U.S. to set out a clearer timetable.

And Britain is stuck over how to proceed with its deal giving up sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, a strategically crucial archipelago in the Indian Ocean, after Trump disowned the pact earlier this year. Mauritius — the beneficiary — could agitate at UNGA to unfreeze the deal.

But it’s the issue of artificial intelligence that has lately rocketed up the news agenda. Here, Burnham faces a conundrum.

On the one hand, Britain can sell a “third way” in AI development between Trump’s free-for-all and burdensome regulation in the EU, argued Emily Darlington, a Labour MP and member of the Commons Science and Technology Committee.

“There are things that [U.S. tech firms] need from us, not least some of the really advanced stuff that we’re doing around quantum, and in the future neuromorphic computing,” she said. “We’re a huge market for them. Large language models are desperate to train on British material that goes back centuries. The BBC archive, all of these sorts of things, are what they’re desperate for. There’s a bit of a fight over whether there is a British advantage to allowing them access to that material, and so there is a bit of a negotiation.”

Yet the U.K.’s digital services tax has drawn Trump’s repeated ire, while PoliticsHome reported this week that U.S. officials warned Britain at the London embassy against its online safety restrictions and plans to ban under-16s from social media. One minister said Burnham’s conversation “can’t be on the digital services tax or regulation like the Online Safety Act, because there’s a tangible risk Trump will go ballistic.”

‘Andy has been a lucky general’

The same minister suggested Burnham will want the sort of relationship that Tony Blair had with George Bush — respectful, even if not as equals. 

It is a tall order for a president as mercurial as Trump, yet old allies of Starmer insist he paved the way for it. They point to Starmer’s decision to push back against Trump to defend Greenland’s sovereignty, to bring together a “coalition of the willing” for Ukraine and to welcome Kyiv’s leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy after Trump hectored him in the Oval Office. 

Starmer was not being nice to Trump because he liked him, argued the Starmer Cabinet minister quoted earlier in this story, but because he had to bring him back from the brink on NATO and Ukraine.

It means Burnham has inherited an established relationship in which he has no need to lavish the president with praise. All he has to do, argue some, is avoid a barrage of abuse on Truth Social.

“Andy has been a lucky general in the calming of Trump,” argued one U.K. official who worked under Starmer. “Keir was dealing with a completely different beast.”

And yet, this person added: “It could all change in the space of two weeks.”

Esther Webber contributed reporting.

Fonte: POLITICOPolitics » POLITICO