London tries to lead Europe while Washington stops listening

Britain spent the spring trying to lead an anxious Europe while the American partnership it has built its foreign policy around stopped behaving like one. The hinge was the Iran war. On the eve of the late-February strikes, Donald Trump asked Keir Starmer for two British bases as launch pads for American bombers. The national security council said no. Days later, with Iranian retaliation already under way, Starmer reversed and granted access for what he called defensive operations. The cost was visible within hours. Iranian drones hit the British base in Cyprus and missiles landed near British forces in the Gulf. Royal Air Force fighters shot Iranian drones out of the sky over Iraq, Qatar, and Jordan. A destroyer was pulled from the English Channel to the eastern Mediterranean, and the Foreign Office began planning to evacuate three hundred thousand British nationals from the region.

The political fallout came from Washington, not Tehran. Trump spent April lashing out at Starmer in public, first over the base refusal and then over Britain's two percent digital services tax on American tech firms, threatening a big tariff if it was not dropped. The threat reopened a trade deal already capped at a ten percent baseline and forced London to prepare quietly for escalation. The answer was to pivot. A free-trade agreement with the six Gulf monarchies was signed late in the window, the first any Group of Seven country has reached with the bloc. A roughly eight-billion-pound Eurofighter contract with Turkey was sealed in London earlier in the spring, the largest British fighter export in two decades. The trilateral combat-aircraft program with Italy and Japan moved into full design with a new contract in early April.

On Russia the line held and then thinned. Starmer announced in late March that the Royal Navy would board the shadow fleet of tankers Moscow uses to evade oil sanctions when they entered British waters. By late April the press was reporting nearly a hundred sanctioned Russian vessels had crossed those waters with no boardings at all. London also wired about a billion dollars to Kyiv from profits on frozen Russian assets. The coalition Britain and France had built to put troops into a postwar Ukraine kept meeting, but no peace was on offer to underpin it. Mark Carney came to London in mid-March to coordinate. Then Starmer flew to Yerevan, the first British prime minister ever to visit Armenia, into a room organized around resisting Russia and a Caucasus tilting west. The week he came home, his ministers moved to nationalize the Scunthorpe steelworks owned by the Chinese conglomerate Jingye, breaking the careful reset with Beijing he had built in January. Beijing protested. London moved anyway.