Keir Starmer needs to prepare for a world without America

Today's empires, tomorrow's ashes.

The best case scenario is that the next four years are like the first Trump administration¹.

In a sense we were lucky last time around.

During his first term, there was a set of shared incentives that saw Republican elites attempt to engage with the Trump White House. Traditional, establishment Republicans took jobs to stop the foundations of American government falling apart. And Trump himself was persuaded that it was sensible to (appear) to play ball with them, at least to a certain extent.

Obviously, as we know now, it still turned out to be a disaster. But even if they were wildly ineffective at reining Trump in politically, at least there were people in the room for most of Trump’s time in the White House who you get a sense would have physically tried to wrestle him to the ground had he tried to press the nuclear button². This time around, however, they won’t be there and we’ll be in crazy-town from the beginning.

So let’s do some catastrophising.

The immediate problem will be that from day one Trump will be bitter, angry, and out for revenge. He’s had eight years to mould his party in his image, and the changing faces in Congress are further evidence that the Republican Party is really Trump’s party now.

So from the start we can expect an extremely contentious relationship with America’s governing institutions, because as Yascha Mounk correctly argues, populists nearly always get worse in their second term.

He points to the likes of Narendra Modi in India and Viktor Orban in Hungary as examples³, and basically argues that re-election is a validation that they do not need to behave with the forbearance that the rule of law and democracy requires. They’ve been rewarded for their poor behaviour.

So I think we can have even lower expectations that Trump will respect democratic norms than last time around.

But what’s perhaps even more frightening is that even if Trump leaves office as he’s supposed to do in 2029, it is arguably only delaying the inevitable.

Even if Trump retires without incident to Mar-a-Lago, or better yet, prison, many of the structural issues with the American political system will remain the same.

The Republican party was radicalised before Trump, and there are no real reasons to expect it to moderate once he has gone. As Sam Freedman has written, the United States is stuck a “partisan spiral”, and there isn’t an obvious mechanism through which the country can escape. There isn’t an obvious path back to a politics where both sides disarm from playing constitutional hardball.

This means that even if Trump isn’t in office, for the foreseeable future, every US election will continue have an apocalyptic feel to it. Polarisation has raised the stakes of each vote, to the point where to both sides it feels like democracy itself is on the ballot every polling day.

And given these structural issues with American politics, I don’t think it is inconceivable to imagine a future where the United States enters a fairly profound crisis of governance. I’m not predicting civil war, or anything quite so hysterical⁴. But there have been many, many millions of words written about the various constitutional crises and nightmare scenarios that could further paralyse the country.

(Though if you want a reason for optimism, one pleasant surprise of the first Trump administration was – slightly unexpectedly – how robust some of its norms and institutions actually were in the face of an unprecedented challenge⁵.)

However, if there ever is such a crisis moment, I do think there is a significant risk that America’s domestic problems could diminish the capacity of the state. And this wouldn’t just be bad for America, it would be bad for the rest of the world too.

This is because we don’t need the United States to completely collapse to cause problems. We just need it to degrade to a point where it is no longer willing or able to act as the sole superpower that underpins global security and trade.

For example, imagine if America were to suffer such a profound domestic constitutional crisis that it simply didn’t have the capacity or inclination to care about its obligations to the rest of the world.

Or imagine if some of the profoundly fucked up foreign policy crises flirted with by Trump actually played out, like the United States pulling out of NATO, or (as now seems inevitable) ending support for Ukraine.

Such changes of approach would transform America’s role in the world from the world’s policeman, to the world’s absent father. And that would have massive consequences for everyone, everywhere⁶.

A world without America

There are few of us old enough to remember the world before American hegemony.

Since 1945, America has been the preeminent world power. It has constructed a security and trade architecture that is today referred to as the “rules based international order” or the “liberal international order” – shorthands for a network of institutions that have underpinned how the post-WWII world is structured. The United Nations, NATO, the World Trade Organisation, the IMF, the World Bank, and so on.

Each are controversial for a million reasons, but fundamentally these institutions have promoted and enforced norms that have maintained global stability and facilitated an unparalleled period of economic growth and prosperity.

But each institution is also, explicitly or implicitly, underwritten by American power. If America were to withhold support for a given institution, it would quickly become irrelevant, and the norms and rules that it enforces would instead be shaped by other actors.

So what happens in a world where America abdicates its responsibilities?

I’m not sure the liberal international order will collapse overnight. I think it’s unlikely American hegemony will end with an obvious “Berlin Wall” moment.

But I do think the world would change perceptibly over time. As the west’s strategic adversaries push the boundaries and feel more emboldened, they will increasingly act without a cage of liberal norms defining the rules of acceptable conduct. And with this erosion, there will be parallels with how the fall of the Soviet Union reconfigured the global status-quo.

For example, when Germany initially reunified in 1990, there was an agreement that NATO troops wouldn’t be stationed in the former East Germany. It was only after the turn of the millennium that the alliance fully deployed to the newly ceded territory, and it was only in 2004, over a decade after the end of the Cold War, that the East European countries formally became members of the alliance⁷, as well as the European Union.

Crucially, though the Cold War ended with a massive victory for the west, we still moved relatively carefully. The process of the Eastern European countries joining NATO and the EU was done slowly, inch-by-inch, as the west carefully pushed and prodded to test Russia’s ability to push back at what it saw an encroachment on its sphere of influence⁸. But over time this made a difference. Today we can see the tectonic plates have permanently shifted, as it is almost inconceivable that, say, Lithuania or Poland will ever again be Russian satellite states⁹.

In the same sense then, you can imagine how in the absence of American power that the plates will slowly shift in similar ways. Perhaps Russia would more aggressively pursue its irredentist territorial claims in other countries, beyond Ukraine. More importantly, perhaps China would feel as though it can be even more assertive in the South China sea or in its support for all manner of dodgy regimes in Africa and the wider world?

And if American security guarantees are no longer considered reliable (even if they remain on paper), war over Taiwan or on the Korean peninsula becomes scarily more imaginable as the risk calculations in Beijing and Pyongyang will change.

Finally, as for the Middle East, I can’t even begin to imagine what an absence of America might mean given the complex web of alliances and relationships the United States has with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, and the other gulf monarchies. Given the psychodrama between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and the current nightmare in Gaza, perhaps it is best not to think about it.

Taking ‘Securonomics’ Seriously

And this brings me back to Britain.

In May last year, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves tried to turn “securonomics” into a fully cromulent word.

“To witness Britain today, is to witness a country buffeted by global forces,” she told a think-tank audience in Washington DC, characterising the current global situation as an “era of insecurity”.

And her remedy to this new uncertainty made all of the right noises:

“We must foster new partnerships, between the free market and an active state and between countries across the world who share values and interests,” Reeves said,“Nations who share values and concerns, and who want to seize the opportunities of tomorrow, can and must work together to boost our collective resilience and security.”

I completely agree with her. Reeves makes it clear that it is a strategic imperative to improve Britain’s resilience to changes in the global order – and to hedge against the threats that China and Russia pose to our society.

Then once you throw into the mix my scaremongering above about the United States not answering our calls, then these are geopolitical threats that deserve to be taken very seriously indeed.

That’s why I’d argue that from a securonomics perspective, the most strategically effective thing a medium-sized power like Britain can do in response to these perilous circumstances is to hug the other liberal democracies around the world as tightly as possible, for the sake of protecting our shared values.

And this is also where I finally mention the elephant in the room.

Because the only logical way to meet the moment given these new perilous international circumstances is to do the thing no politician wants to talk about, and put Britain back at the heart of the European project.

Our natural allies

The 27 other European democracies we left behind after Brexit are the allies we need right now. For all of our arguments over fishing and immigration, it is Europe, and not China, Russia or the Trumpist United States that most closely share our values (democracies and market economies with social characteristics are good). They also happen to be close-by, which means these countries that are just like us also face the same geopolitical threats too.

At risk of being incredibly tedious, like a Remainer who just won’t give up banging on about it, that’s why Brexit was a terrible idea back in 2016, and is an even worse idea now. But given the new circumstances, going back into Europe isn’t just a nice-to-have thing for out-of-touch metropolitan elites like me – it’s a strategic necessity in the medium term.

That’s why I’m still mad that we quit.

And sure, 2016 was a different time. Back then, relations with China were much warmer, and Russia had only illegally annexed a much smaller part of Ukraine. But it did always seem odd to me that the entire referendum campaign was fought with barely a whisper about our broader geopolitical situation.

Similarly, after Russia invaded the rest of Ukraine, if we lived in a rational universe where we could act strategically, that should have been the wake-up call where we realised that it’s important for Europe to knit itself together not just militarily, but economically, and diplomatically, as tightly as possible. Because only when fully aligned together can we actually provide an effective counterweight to the United States, Russia and China.

Yesterday was another inflection point, just as the assault on Ukraine was before it. And if Britain is to be resilient in the face of an uncertain world, then Keir Starmer should make the politically difficult decision to dramatically change course on Europe much sooner than he would probably like to.

By January we will be dealing with an America that is led by Donald Trump, so we need to hedge our bets. We can no longer rely on an America that may not always be there.

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1. The word ‘administration’ is used loosely.

2. I know there’s not a physical button but you know what I mean.

3. Putin is another example of this phenomenon. Remember when he at least went through the motions of giving up power to a successor, because he felt constrained by the rules?

4. The real problem with modern day civil war speculation is that aside from being a bit hysterical, it’s not like you would have different states taking up arms against each other. A more realistic – while still very unlikely – model for an ‘apocalyptic’ scenario would be the army stepping in, or putting their fingers on the scales.

5. America has an enjoyably robust culture of free speech.

6. I hate to say it but it would probably be an even bigger problem than if we didn’t liberate the Postcode Address File.

7. I’m conscious of being accused of buying Russian propaganda talking points about NATO expansion here, but my point is that whether or not there were any formal or informal promises made to Russia, the fact is that NATO and the west moved relatively slowly and cautiously, before upending the geopolitical order.

8. The fact that Russia is wrong to think this is immaterial to my point. Obviously Eastern Europe was a bunch of sovereign democracies who chose to join the EU and NATO freely, as Ukraine is attempting to do so now. But the reality was that Russia saw things differently.

9. Sure we get the occasional scary election, or a little backsliding, as we’re seeing now in Hungary or Slovakia. But even then, these countries are now pretty solidly considated members of The West.