Why Trump, not Starmer, is to blame for UK cutting foreign aid to boost defence spending

The return of Donald Trump as US President has changed all that and the UK will now turn ploughshares – in the form of international aid to some desperately poor countries – into swords. This is a price the whole world will pay for Trump’s isolationism.

That Keir Starmer chose to announce that defence spending would rise to 2.5 per cent – a much-needed step that we welcome – and aid would be cut shortly before his meeting with Trump underlined who was to blame or should take credit, depending on your point of view.

Labour already taking heavy flak

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth described the move as a “strong step from an enduring partner” – precisely the kind of reaction Starmer would have been hoping for as he works to keep the US in Nato and within the global family of liberal democracies.

Predictably, the decision to cut aid was attacked by people from across the political spectrum. But the hard reality is this: Labour has already caused uproar by means-testing pensioners’ winter fuel payments, refusing to compensate the Waspi women over pension-age changes, and introducing the “family farm tax”.

There is only so much political flak a government can take. In this context, the aid budget was the obvious target. Starmer owned the decision “that I’ve taken”, saying it had been “very difficult and painful” but “necessary”.

Trump’s shift in long-standing US policy – signalled most strongly by his disgraceful description of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator” and parroting of Russian propaganda – was unacceptably abrupt and it will make it hard for allies to trust America again. Trump won’t always be president but a fellow traveller may well replace him.

The return of 19th-century ‘spheres of influence’ and ‘great powers’ diplomacy is recreating a dangerous world in which might is right, blood-soaked dictators are lauded as great men, and the world’s poorest are increasingly left to their fate.