British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s “reset” of relations with the EU has so far yielded little, but he may yet be able to strike a deal with the US.

Donald Trump told the BBC on Sunday that he would “definitely” slap tariffs on the EU. But while he hinted that he could do the same to Britain, he added, “I think that one can be worked out. Prime Minister Starmer has been very nice.”

Trump, as it happens, has been very nice to Starmer lately too. In late January he said the prime minister is doing a “very good job.” This is in stark contrast to Trump’s close ally Elon Musk, who has called for Starmer to be jailed.

Britain is caught in a weird love triangle. Starmer wants to get as close as possible to the EU without looking like he’s trying to rejoin it. The US president, whose mother was born in Scotland, is signalling his interest in Britain, a country that – whether it admits it or not – likes the attention. But Trump is hostile to the EU, the object of Starmer’s affections.

The prime minister has to decide how to get what he needs out of Brussels and Washington.

His options are actually pretty good.

Brussels presses Starmer’s red lines
Starmer, who leads Britain’s centre-left Labour Party, is an unlikely Trump-whisperer. But he presides over a large anglophone economy that’s no longer part of the EU, allowing him to act unilaterally on trade.

Trump has “a clearer understanding of the UK as a unitary actor and is disinclined to favour negotiations with the European Union,” said Ian Lesser, a political analyst at the German Marshall Fund, a transatlantic think tank.

“He simply doesn’t like the idea of negotiating with a multinational institution,” Lesser told Euractiv in an interview.

Lesser said that while Trump might feel an affinity with certain EU leaders, like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, “on trade issues in particular, the EU is the interlocutor and I think that is something he finds uncomfortable.”

In fairness to Trump, the EU is difficult for Starmer to handle too.

Britain has a trade agreement with the EU, but the prime minister says he wants a closer relationship – provided it doesn’t involve re-entering the European single market or customs union, or restoring free movement.

There are a few problems with that. The first is that the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) is very comprehensive as it is.

That means it’ll be hard for Starmer add to it without aligning some British regulations with those of the EU, in order to guarantee what Brussels calls a “level playing field.” There’s even some danger of that in the current TCA.

Another is that there are things the EU wants too, and it’s already pushing on Starmer’s red lines.

For example, Brussels wants all Europeans aged 18-30 to be free to live and work in the UK for up to four years. London wants to water down that idea as much as it can, because to many Brits, it will sound like free movement-lite.

UK ‘best positioned’ for a US trade deal
But Britain does not have a free trade agreement with the US, meaning in theory there are far more possibilities for both Starmer and Trump from the outset.

Lesser said it’ll be easier for Starmer to strike a new agreement with Trump, because unlike Brussels and the EU’s 27 member states, Washington is “not constrained by by the need for broader consensus, and it’s a less technical negotiation.”

Similarly, London is a far more likely prospect from Washington’s point of view, argued Emanuel Adam, executive director of British American Business, a lobby group.

“The UK is by far best positioned right now. I don’t think an agreement between the US and the EU would be possible at that stage,” Adam told Euractiv.

Just as Brussels has driven a hard bargain with London over the last several years, Trump’s demands of Starmer will likely go beyond the simple lowering of trade barriers.

“In the past he has asked the UK to follow the US in its approach vis-à-vis China, to initiate import bans, to have stronger outbound investment screenings and so forth. We could easily see that happen again” Adam said.

He said the British government “will know how to navigate that.”

Technically, Britain and the US have been negotiating a free trade agreement since 2020. Talks kicked off near the end of Trump’s first term as president, when Boris Johnson was prime minister. But there was little progress under Biden, who took over in January 2021.

“The UK was among the last trade agreements that the US negotiated,” Adam said. “The UK was essentially the one that Trump left behind unfinished.”

But Biden saw trade “as a way to form relationships that help him and the US achieve broader global goals.” That made it difficult for his trade chief, Katherine Tai, to pursue a “more traditional trade policy,” Adam said.

With Trump back in town, “that has clearly been reversed.”

‘We’re not choosing between them’
Starmer says he wants to get along nicely with both the EU and the US.

“Both of these relations are very important to us” he said at a press conference in Brussels on Monday. “We are not choosing between them.”

Nobody has really said he has to. The BBC reporter he was responding to had asked not which relationship he would choose, but whether he would “water down” his EU reset policy “to keep President Trump on side.”

There is a risk that the two priorities could be in tension, said Adam, but he added that Whitehall mandarins are already at work in ensuring they don’t have to be in conflict.

“The UK government is currently doing a lot of due diligence in looking at what options they have,” Adam told Euractiv. “The government will have to look into how to strike that right balance.”

[OM]