The president who championed Brexit and predicted others would follow has done what no Remain campaigner managed: made European reunification look inevitable.

Donald Trump did not intend to push Britain back toward Brussels. But across security, economics, and domestic politics, his second term is accelerating exactly that.

On April 1, Keir Starmer delivered his sharpest pivot yet. At Downing Street, the prime minister said Britain’s “long-term national interest requires closer partnership with our allies in Europe,” called Brexit’s economic damage “deep,” and promised a summer summit in Brussels that would go beyond a stocktake — “a deliberate ambition on our part to go further.”

The catalyst was Trump. He had again threatened to quit NATO, calling it a “paper tiger.” He had dismissed Starmer as “No Winston Churchill” and Britain’s aircraft carriers as “toys,” all because Britain refused to join the US-Israeli war on Iran. The special relationship is crumbling in real time.

The Security Calculation

Trump’s contempt for European defense has focused minds across the continent. Britain’s nuclear deterrent depends on the United States; only France maintains an independent European nuclear capability. The EU’s defence commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, proposed in January that the bloc build a standing force of 100,000 troops and a European security council including the UK.

A Centre for European Reform policy brief makes the connection explicit: Trump’s hostility to NATO “may even increase the pressure on the UK government to seek a wider rapprochement with the EU.” Every American threat to abandon European security pushes London and Brussels closer together — precisely the outcome Trump’s doctrine was supposed to prevent.

The Economic Math

The Office for Budget Responsibility estimates Brexit will reduce UK GDP by 4 per cent long-term. A US National Bureau of Economic Research study puts the damage at 6 to 8 per cent. By contrast, the deals currently being negotiated with Brussels would add roughly 0.1 to 0.3 per cent. The gap between the cost of Brexit and the benefit of the current reset is enormous, and officials know it.

Starmer’s government is exploring “dynamic alignment” with EU rules — sector-by-sector regulatory convergence covering food standards, medical devices, chemicals. One model under consideration resembles the framework Switzerland agreed with the EU in March, covering energy, health, and science.

But self-imposed red lines — no customs union, no single market, no freedom of movement — constrain what’s achievable. Anand Menon of UK in a Changing Europe, writing in The Independent, described the contradiction: ministers are “emphasising the significant costs” of Brexit “while being equally forceful in ruling out the steps that would be needed to reduce these.”

Negotiations show the strain. A sanitary and phytosanthetic deal agreed in principle last May has made slow progress. Youth mobility talks are deadlocked over EU demands for home-fee university tuition for its citizens in Britain. The UK was excluded from the EU’s Security Action for Europe defence procurement programme after Brussels demanded an up-front payment of roughly 10 per cent of Britain’s annual defence budget.

The Domestic Squeeze

Starmer faces pressure from both flanks. The Conservatives accuse him of trying to “reopen the old wounds of the Brexit years.” Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s rising populist party, pushes for harder Brexit, not softer.

The Centre for European Reform frames the choice: the government can “double down on emphasising national sovereignty” or “prioritise more integration with the EU as a way to generate growth.” With the economy stagnating and the Iran war disrupting energy markets, the arithmetic may be shifting — though how far Starmer can go without provoking a backlash remains uncertain.

The Pattern

Trump set out to fracture Europe — to prove multilateral institutions obsolete and bilateral leverage supreme. Instead, he has reminded every capital on the continent why those institutions were built in the first place.

The EU-UK summit expected this June or July will test whether the moment has genuinely changed or whether old grievances will reassert themselves. The EU has its own reasons for caution: member states worry about concessions a future Reform UK government might tear up, and some European firms are content watching their British competitors struggle.

But the direction of travel is clear. A Britain that left Europe because it believed the United States would always be there is now looking back across the Channel — precisely because it learned that it won’t.

Sources