WHEELS UP

Can the U.K.’s Foreign Secretary negotiate a course between the E.U. and President Trump?

- BY SAM KNIGHT

"The history books are far from being written," David Lammy said. "Let us reckon with that second Trump term."

Shortly before 3 P.M. on a Tuesday in late September, David Lammy, the British Foreign Secretary, sat down at the blond horseshoe-shaped table of the U.N. Security Council chamber, in midtown Manhattan. It was High Level Week for world leaders at the General Assembly. Outside, on First Avenue, the traffic was unbearable. Lammy, who is one of Britain’s most prominent Black politicians, entered office this past July, when the Labour Party, under Keir Starmer, swept to power after fourteen years of Conservative government. His schedule in New York was heavy and mixed: hurried conversations with Najib Mikati, the Prime Minister of Lebanon, about the fighting between Hezbollah and Israel; a U.N. summit to address the global health risks posed by antimicrobial resistance; a “fireside chat” with the actor Benedict Cumberbatch and his wife, Sophie Hunter, an artist and a director, about salt marshes and the ineffable qualities of British soft power.

The Security Council meeting was about the war in Ukraine. A large mural in the chamber, by the Norwegian artist Per Krohg, loomed over Lammy’s right shoulder. At the base, a dragon was removing a sword from its own body. “The world we see in the foreground is collapsing,” Krohg explained seventy-five years ago. When the meeting began, the Russian representative, Vassily Nebenzia, spoke first, saying that he had no intention of listening to “hackneyed, cookie-cutter statements” from Ukraine’s allies, and then pointedly stopped paying attention, scrolling on his phone.