Despite starkly different origins, they are personally “thick as thieves” and “unmatched” allies on the world stage, from defense and security to hi-tech and investments. Yet, they remain incapable of bridging their “divergences” on the two most severe and bloody current crises: the three-and-a-half-year war between Russia and Ukraine and the nearly two-year-old Israeli escalation in the Gaza Strip. This is the paradox that emerged from the Chequers summit near London between Donald Trump and Keir Starmer, the final act of the American president’s unprecedented second state visit to the UK.
The event was an unqualified success in terms of choreography and royal hospitality, allowing a heavily guarded Trump to bask in the settings of Windsor Castle and the Elizabethan country residence of UK prime ministers in Buckinghamshire. However, it was decidedly not a turning point on the Ukrainian dossier, let alone on the Middle Eastern one.
As became clear in the concluding press conference, beyond the display of mutual recognition and praise—with Trump eager to extol the Labour premier’s negotiating skills on tariffs and hail King Charles III as a “great king,” and Sir Keir highlighting a “sincere” bromance with his “friend” Donald—the Ukraine conflict took center stage. This coincided with Vladimir Putin upping the ante by explicitly claiming for the first time the presence of a 700,000-strong military force in Volodymyr Zelensky’s country. The Kremlin leader “really disappointed me,” Trump retorted, reiterating his credit for stopping “seven intractable conflicts” while admitting he has so far failed on what he thought would be “the easiest” to tackle, given his “relationship with President Putin.”
Starmer, a promoter of the so-called European Coalition of the Willing for Kyiv in tandem with France’s Emmanuel Macron, tried to leverage these words by calling for “extra pressure” on the Russian tsar, especially from America. However, he made no headway, as the man from the White House merely expressed hope for “some good news” in the coming days and shifted the onus onto Europe to halt all Russian oil supplies as the key to forcing Moscow to negotiate. He defended the planned August summit with Putin in Alaska and reiterated his absolute refusal to risk a “Third World War” between nuclear powers. He also offered no concrete details on vital US security guarantees for Ukraine’s future, a point even raised by King Charles in a toast at the Windsor state banquet, which praised the magnate-president’s “peace efforts” but also warned of the danger of “tyrannies threatening Europe again.”
The same tune played on the Palestinian question, on which Trump was even more unequivocal. He rejected the formal recognition of a Palestinian state, announced at the UN for the end of the month by London alongside Paris and others, as “one of our few points of divergence.” He ignored Starmer’s references to Gaza’s “intolerable situation” to instead point the finger solely at the “brutality” of Hamas, the events of October 7th, and the “immediate release of Israeli hostages” as a precondition for pressuring Netanyahu to stop.
These disagreements, however, do not negate the rest. The summit began with the signing of a mega technology partnership agreement, focused on the new frontier of artificial intelligence and backed by $250 billion in cross-investments. In Trumpian language, these figures seal the “indestructible bond” between the US and UK, going beyond the traditional “special relationship.” This bond was strengthened on the business front, symbolized by the presence of an impressive lineup of billionaires from both sides of the Atlantic, and revealed unexpected alignment even on the hardline policy of expelling “illegal migrants.”
On tariffs, Trump for now did not go beyond the “privileged” bilateral agreement (at 10%) granted to London months ago. The issue of the Epstein scandal, embarrassing for both leaders, was resolved in a sort of pact of silence, underscored even by the disavowal of Lord Peter Mandelson. The British ambassador to Washington, whom Starmer was forced to sack just last week over his associations with the deceased New York pedophile financier.