Churchill showed Starmer the way

Trump is causing big problems. A big plan is needed to stop him

I shall come to Keir Starmer’s latest speech, but first let us put it into context.

We all know the mantra. Globalisation has been a mixed blessing. Overall, it has made the world richer and vastly expanded consumer choice in every continent. At the same time, countless workers have lost their jobs, and the greatest benefits have been secured by the super-rich.

None of those observations are new. Nor are the calls for globalisation to be toppled from its throne. What is new is that these calls are now being led from the White House. More than that: President Trump’s decision to erect a tariff wall round his country is of a piece with other policies: to make nice with Vladimir Putin, refrain from criticising Israel’s violations of international law in Gaza, withdraw from the World Health Organisation and the Paris Climate Change Agreement, tear up the US-Mexico-Canada trade treaty, and cause turbulence in Nato and the European Union.

These things are not separate actions that have just happened to occur simultaneously. We are in danger of entering a new dark age: the brutal destruction of humanity’s greatest collective achievement, the construction of systems for countries to work together for the common good.

The danger is so great because that achievement was so extraordinary. Debates about countries working together can be traced back centuries. But the breakthrough came with the Second World War. Somehow pride, calculation, cynicism, self-interest, fears of another global conflagration and – perhaps – an occasional dose of idealism came together to give us the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, the UN’s blue-helmet peacekeepers, the World Bank, NATO, the Council of Europe, and the forerunners of the European Union, the World Trade Organisation and the International Criminal Court.

The point here is not that they are perfect. All have flaws, some of them serious. The UN’s veto system means that it can take no big political decision without the acquiescence of Russia, China and the US (and France and Britain for that matter). The Security Council has hosted sharp exchanges over the attacks on Ukraine and Gaza but neither prevented nor stopped them. The IMF has faced many criticisms down the years for its harsh treatment of poorer countries. And so on.

However, these truths stand out.

· Trump is the first significant leader to challenge not just specific features of this architecture, but the very principles on which the post-1945 world has been built. Every other leader has been keen to remain a member. And unlike the League of Nations in the 1920s and 30s, which the US never joined, the UN is truly universal – hence the sight down the years of America’s fiercest enemies from Moscow, Havana, Pyongyang, Tehran, Phnom Penh, Tripoli and Kabul arriving in New York to address the UN’s general assembly.

· The origins of almost every significant intergovernmental body around today can be traced back to a period of just six years between 1945 and 1951. It is not just that the Second World War led to a flowering of international cooperation. It is that it wass unique in human history in achieving so much so quickly

· Despite the things that have gone wrong (wars, tyrannies, inequality etc) almost every indicator of the human condition has improved since 1945 almost everywhere – prosperity, life expectancy, literacy and women’s rights are all up; poverty and deaths from war and infant mortality are all down. For all its frustrations, the journey towards co-operation has been good for the world, as has the principle of open markets both protected and disciplined by rules agreed across national borders. Reversing them would be madness.

· The good news is that the institutions that grew from the ashes of the Second World War are still with us. Trump has weakened them but not – yet – killed any of them.

· The bad news is that unless the non-Trump world combines in coalitions of the willing to defend these institutions and the principles that gave rise to them, then the whole world will suffer. If they are wrecked, as Trump seems to wish, the conditions in which they were born are never likely to be repeated.

Which brings us to the choice facing Keir Starmer and leaders of other countries. Nobody can blame them for scrambling to protect their economies as best they can. The World Trade Organisation will inevitably take a back seat while ministers from the world’s capitals rush to Washington for bilateral talks with the Trump administration.

But what then? It might seem pointless to start thinking about a post-Trump world while the President sets about disrupting the post-1945 order. In fact, it is not pointless at all: it is essential. Our multilateral world did not appear by magic once Germany and Japan surrendered. Its principles were established not just while the war was going on, but when the allies had suffered reverse after reverse. The story is relevant today.

At the end of 1941, German troops were close to Moscow, Japan had attacked Pearl Harbour, controlled much of China and was about to overrun South East Asia, and British troops were struggling to avoid defeat in North Africa.

This was when the term “United Nations” was coined. That December, Franklin Roosevelt used it during a meeting with Winston Churchill in the White House. The following month, 26 countries, including the Soviet Union, signed the “Declaration by United Nations”. They committed themselves to “a common struggle against savage and brutal forces seeking to subjugate the world” in order to “defend life, liberty, independence and religious freedom, and to preserve human rights and justice in their own lands as well as in other lands”.

Subsequent conferences in Moscow, Tehran, Washington, Yalta and San Francisco converted the aspiration into an institution. The process was not always smooth. In the Yalta conference in February 1945, Stalin was effectively given the green light to take over and tyrannise most of eastern Europe. Nevertheless, the UN came into being in January 1946, when its General Assembly first met, in London’s Central Hall. Gladwyn Jebb, a British diplomat, was appointed as the UN’s interim secretary-general.

Here are three lessons from this excursion down memory lane.

1. The darkest hour is the time for the boldest thinking. It is when the dangers of an unresolved crisis are greatest, and the appetite for fresh ideas are at their greatest.

2. The UN could not avert the Cold War; but the Cold War did not destroy the UN. Trump can pull out of various international institutions, but he can destroy them only if the rest of the world lets him.

3. More parochially, Britain played a big part in creating the rules-based world order: from Churchill, with Roosevelt, devising the concept of the UN, to Britain hosting the first meeting of the General Assembly – and a British lawyer (and Conservative MP), David Maxwell Fyfe playing a leading role in drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Given all that, let us now consider Starmer’s speech yesterday (Monday). He is plainly right to say the world has changed, and that he must take urgent action to protect British jobs, living standards and the government’s finances. But that is not enough. If Churchill could play a big role in designing a better world when British civilians were being bombed, British ships sunk and British soldiers in retreat, then it should not be asking too much for today’s Prime Minister to look beyond his immediate problems. They are large – but larger than Churchill’s?

Starmer’s speech contained statements that are obviously correct. We face global instability and an age of insecurity. Outside America, “nobody is pretending that tariffs are good news. This is not a passing phase. This is a completely new world. Old assumptions don’t apply any longer.” The Prime Minister did not blame Trump, but he did not need to.

The gap in Starmer’s speech was any vision of what he wants his “new world” to look like. Indeed, he gave no indication that he wants to revive a rules-based order in which countries come together for their common good. He talked of a “fight for the future” but insisted that this was national rather than international project: “our future is in our hands”.

He spoke of hopes for a better trade deal with the US, and also more trade with the rest of the world. He sees no contradiction between these two goals – no suggestion that the best way to reduce trade barriers with the rest of the world, above all the European Union, is for the largest possible coalition of the willing to join forces to stand up to Trump. The EU wants this; so does Mark Carney, the former Governor of the Bank of England and Canada’s new Prime Minister.

In his heart, does Starmer? Perhaps he does. Perhaps he will end up having his cake and eating it: better trade terms with both Trump’s America and the rest of the world. Maybe he has a vision for his “completely new world” which is as bold as Churchill’s, but keeping it under wraps for now. As we watch events unfold we can only hope so – or at least that he has a plan B if cakeism doesn’t work, and he has to choose which side he is on: Trump’s or the rest of the world.