Five years after it left the European Union, Britain may have finally found a new role on the global stage — a gig that looks curiously like its old one.
In the frantic few weeks since President Trump upended the trans-Atlantic alliance with his overtures to Russia and rift with Ukraine, Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, has tried to act as a bridge between Europe and the United States.
Mr. Starmer and his top aides counseled President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in phone calls and face-to-face meetings about how to mend fences with Mr. Trump after their rancorous White House meeting. The prime minister has energetically lobbied the American president for security guarantees to deter President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia from future aggression.
In his high-wire diplomacy, Mr. Starmer is reviving a role Britain routinely played before Brexit. He bears comparison to Tony Blair, a previous Labour prime minister, who tried to mediate between President George W. Bush and European leaders in the fraught lead-up to the Iraq War in 2003.
Mr. Blair’s bridge-building didn’t end well, of course: France and Germany refused to join Mr. Bush’s “coalition of the willing” against Iraq, and Britain’s lock-step alignment with the United States frayed its relations with its European neighbors.
Now, as Mr. Starmer puts together a new “coalition of the willing” to protect Ukraine, he faces a similarly tricky balancing act. He is sticking close to the United States while trying to marshal a European military deterrent formidable enough to persuade Mr. Trump to provide American air cover and intelligence support to peacekeeping troops.
On Saturday, Mr. Starmer is convening a virtual summit meeting of as many as 25 leaders, from Europe, NATO, Canada, Ukraine, Australia and New Zealand, to muster support for his coalition, which Britain is cosponsoring with France. He is expected to announce additional countries that will supply troops or logistical support to the coalition, which is designed to be a shield against Russia after a peace settlement with Ukraine.
After talking to the leaders by videoconference, Mr. Starmer is likely to continue his lobbying campaign with Mr. Trump for security guarantees — an effort that he shares with President Emmanuel Macron of France.
Whether Mr. Starmer and Mr. Macron will succeed is anybody’s guess, given that Mr. Trump has veered between bitter denouncements of Ukraine and threats to impose sanctions on a recalcitrant Russia. Mr. Putin reacted warily to an offer of a 30-day truce made by Ukraine and the United States this week, while rejecting all talk of a European peacekeeping force.
“Of course there’s a risk,” said Peter Ricketts, a British diplomat who served as national security adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron. “But I think Starmer sees a greater risk of an avoidable catastrophe.”
Mr. Blair, he said, failed as a bridge because the divisions between European nations over Iraq were insurmountable. Mr. Starmer’s challenge is an erratic American president, who seems determined to reset relations with Russia and is openly hostile toward the European Union.
“Starmer’s going to do his very best not to have to choose between Europe and the U.S.,” Mr. Ricketts said. Dealing with Mr. Trump, he added, “makes him vulnerable to sudden lurches, but so far, he’s managed to stay on the tightrope.”
Mr. Starmer, he said, has been helped by his seasoned and widely respected national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, who traveled to Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, to help lay the groundwork for Mr. Zelensky’s rapprochement with the White House, and to Washington this week to consult with Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Waltz.
A onetime chief of staff to Mr. Blair, Mr. Powell served as Britain’s chief negotiator for the Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. He was also on hand for Mr. Blair’s fruitless effort to bring France and Germany along in the military campaign against Iraq.
Even before the crisis over Ukraine erupted, Mr. Starmer’s government was seeking closer ties with the continent, not just on defense and security but also on trade and economic policy.
But thanks to Brexit, Mr. Trump appears to place Britain in a different category from the European Union, which may help make Mr. Starmer a more effective broker. The president has suggested, for example, that he may not target Britain with sweeping tariffs, though he did not exempt it from a global tariff on steel and aluminum.
“Having one foot in, one foot out is a good thing for the U.K. in the present context,” said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, “but only if we remain in the current state of phony war.”
“If it becomes a real trans-Atlantic rift,” Mr. Rahman continued, “then it is better to have the protecting power that the E.U. offers, at least in some areas. And in such a context, the U.K. would steer things better if it had two feet in.”
At first, Mr. Starmer’s re-engagement with the bloc was distinctly a half step. After coming to power last July, he set about patching up post-Brexit relations in various European capitals but ruled out two conspicuous measures that could significantly boost trade: rejoining the bloc’s giant single market and its customs union.
His cautious approach, analysts say, is rooted in a fear of angering Brexit-supporting voters and of giving ammunition to Nigel Farage, the Brexit champion and leader of the anti-immigration party, Reform U.K., which has surged in opinion polls.
But the shock waves caused by Mr. Trump’s recent pronouncements on Ukraine and Russia have swept away some of the roadblocks to a broader reset. They have given Mr. Starmer political cover, with even those on the right in Britain acknowledging the need for greater coordination on Europe’s defense.
“It changes the whole context and puts everything else in perspective,” said Mr. Ricketts, who served as ambassador to France.
Ivan Rogers, a former British ambassador to the European Union, said Mr. Starmer’s diplomatic heavy lifting had impressed other European leaders, who had become used to a Britain that was either absent or vaguely antagonistic.
“All of that has reminded people that the Brits have re-engaged, and they might be more serious,” Mr. Rogers said. “You are now facing such an existential crisis in the E.U. that the mood has changed a bit.”
That could open a path to more profound British re-engagement, especially if the Europeans decide to increase cooperation on military spending by creating a new initiative outside the existing structures of the European Union. Such an initiative could involve countries, including Britain, agreeing to common standards on issues like military subsidies and weapons procurement.
That would essentially “create a defense single market, which has never been there before,” Mr. Rogers said.
For all the potential upside, Mr. Rogers, who worked in Downing Street during the Iraq War, said he worried that Britain’s role as a trans-Atlantic bridge would be hampered by its efforts to use its post-Brexit status to avoid the tariffs imposed by Mr. Trump.
“My worry is that it could appear to others that the U.K. wants to have it both ways,” Mr. Rogers said. “We want to be a bridge, have the trans-Atlantic alliance, be central to it, while simultaneously making the argument that we are very different from the E.U., and the U.S. can exempt us from its tariff action.”
“It’s a little difficult,” he said, “to run both those arguments at once.”
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