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20 January 2025

How will Labour handle Trump 2.0?

Japan’s Shinzo Abe is viewed as a pragmatic model for Keir Starmer to emulate.

By George Eaton

One of No 10 chief of staff Morgan McSweeney’s favourite words is volatility. In opposition it described the vertiginous world in which Labour could go from a landslide defeat to a landslide victory in a single term. In government it captures one in which the news moves at warp speed and Donald Trump is once again US president.

As cabinet ministers look towards Washington, it is Trump’s sheer unpredictability they emphasise above all. The challenges are those that have confronted every government: when to take him literally (as well as seriously); how to determine who is speaking on his behalf (witness the drama over whether Peter Mandelson will be approved as the new US ambassador).

And Labour has no option but to treat with Trump. It has upheld the UK’s traditional security model of which Nato, the nuclear deterrent and the Five Eyes intelligence alliance are cornerstones. It has pledged not to rejoin the single market and the customs union – placing hard limits on its reset with Europe. And, while courting China, it dismisses any talk of a new “golden age”. In some respects, the UK has never needed the US more.

But for Keir Starmer, the “special relationship” is now fraught with peril. Trump has declared “tariff” the most beautiful word in the dictionary; Elon Musk, who fantasises about ousting Starmer, is running a US government agency; Nigel Farage, who daily vows to become prime minister, is lionised by Trump as “Mr Brexit”. How to navigate this surreal, Ballardian landscape?

For Labour, Trump 1.0 provides opportunities to learn for Trump 2.0. The party has studied in detail the contrasting approaches that global leaders took.

In the first camp were critics such as Germany’s Angela Merkel and Canada’s Justin Trudeau who relished drawing contrasts between themselves and Trump and were predictably marginalised. In the second camp were sympathisers such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Australia’s Scott Morrison who lavished praise on Trump but received less in return than hoped. Finally, in the third camp, were the pragmatists – those who defended their national interests while also enjoying constructive relations with Trump. This approach, Labour believes, was embodied by one leader above all – the late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe.

At first sight, Trump and Abe were perhaps unlikely allies. The US leader’s protectionism dates back to the 1980s when he railed against Japan’s trade terms with the US. “A lot of people are tired of watching the other countries ripping off the United States,” he told Larry King back then. “They [Japan] come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs, they knock the hell out of our companies,” he told Oprah Winfrey in 1988.

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Mindful of this troubled history, Abe moved swiftly to charm Trump. He defied diplomatic convention to meet the then president-elect in November 2016 and presented him with a gold-plated golf club. When Trump later visited Japan, Abe named a sumo wrestling trophy after him and granted him the honour of becoming the first foreign leader to meet the newly enthroned emperor. Perhaps most astutely, Abe addressed Trump’s economic concerns directly, presenting the president with colourful maps highlighting new Japanese investments and job creation in the US (Trump has a preference for visual aids over dense documents).

This strategy bore fruit – Trump praised Abe for “working with me to help balance out the one-sided trade with Japan”. Initial threats to impose a “big border tax” on Japanese car companies and to charge Japan billions more for hosting US armed forces were averted. “Abe proved that you can put your nation’s interest first, while still maintaining a strong alliance with your allies,” Scott Bessent, Trump’s nominee for US treasury secretary, has written.

What will define Labour’s pragmatic approach to Trump? Wherever possible, expect the government to appeal to his self-image and his world-view of “peace through strength”. “What I do know about Donald Trump is that he doesn’t like losers and he doesn’t want to lose,” Foreign Secretary David Lammy said of the war in Ukraine when I interviewed him in New York last November. “He knows that the right deal for the American people is peace in Europe and that means a sustainable peace – not Russia achieving its aims and coming back for more in the years ahead” (Trump has retreated from his initial vow to end the war on “day one”).

This hard-headed approach is shared by the public. While Trump himself is highly unpopular among UK voters, polling shows they narrowly believe Starmer should prioritise “working with” Trump rather than “standing up” to him (by 44 to 37 per cent). In other words, more Abe than Merkel.

Here is the middle course that Labour will seek to steer. But danger lurks at every turn. Politicians to Starmer’s left and to his right will seek to magnify every tension between the UK and the US. Farage is positioning himself as Britain’s true American ambassador; the Liberal Democrats are pitching themselves as “the only party that will criticise Trump”.

Ministers hope that bonds of history – Trump’s British ties, his affection for the royal family – will shield them from the worst. While the US runs a trade deficit with China and the EU, they note, it has a trade surplus with the UK. Along with France, Britain remains Europe’s leading military power and will increase defence spending to at least 2.5 per cent of GDP.

All of this resembles a plan. But in Trump World, it pays to remember the words of another inauguration attendee, Mike Tyson, “everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face”.

This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here.

[See also: Has Biden buried the American left?]


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