Europe's concerns Can Starmer influence Trump's new world order?

In November 1940, Winston Churchill sent a telegram to Franklin Roosevelt expressing relief both at the US president's re-election and the victory of his anti-appeasement policy.

- Patrick Wintour

In November 1940, Winston Churchill sent a telegram to Franklin Roosevelt expressing relief both at the US president's re-election and the victory of his anti-appeasement policy. "Things are afoot which will be remembered as long as the English language is spoken in any quarter of the globe, and in expressing the comfort I feel that the people of the United States have once again cast these great burdens upon you, I must now avow my sure faith that the lights by which we steer will bring us safely to anchor," he wrote.

As Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron prepare to meet a very different US president, things are once again afoot that will live long in the memory - but this time the lights seem to be going out on a ship adrift in a sea of chaos.

In his "arsenal of democracy" speech, Roosevelt spurned those who asked to "throw the US weight on the scale in favour of a dictated peace". He also saw past Nazi Germany's "parade of pious purpose" to observe "in the background the concentration camps and 'servants of God' in chains". Donald Trump, by contrast, glories in the prospect of a US-dictated peace and in Russia he sees no gulags.

Starmer's nightmare is that the transatlantic alliance forged in the second world war is crumbling before his eyes. The inconceivable has become not just possible, but probable, or as Macron put it on Wednesday: "Do not think that the unthinkable cannot happen, including the worst."

If the central tenets of the postwar order are disintegrating, one of the casualties is likely to be Britain's self-appointed role as the US's bridge to Europe. There is a macabre circularity that France and the UK feel it necessary to plead with Trump to recall the US's history as the generous country that kept the flame of freedom alive in Europe.