Issues PM hopes to raise in Washington

Keir Starmer is in Washington for a visit that will be brief but watched intensely in the UK and many other European capitals - particularly Kyiv. What will the prime minister hope to get from his talks with Donald Trump today? And how can he get the US president to listen? These will be the main issues.

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Starmer will arrive in the US during a period of political and strategic turbulence in Europe as deep as anything since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Trump began his second term promising to stop the war caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine three years ago, and seems to be trying to achieve this largely by listening to the desires of Moscow.

European leaders have been alarmed by Trump's seeming preference for talking to Vladimir Putin rather than Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and his refusal to even see Russia as the aggressor. Starmer's job is to persuade the president that a settled, fair peace is in his personal interests, and that this cannot and will not happen if a deal is imposed on Ukraine.

The Nato alliance

Another big shock for European nations took place earlier this month when Pete Hegseth, Trump's controversial choice for defence secretary, arrived at the Munich Security Conference and essentially tore up the postwar defence consensus. The US, he said, was no longer "primarily focused" on European security, spelling an apparent end to one of the central tenets of Nato.