The UK foreign secretary, David Cameron, has taken the unusual and potentially risky step of travelling to see Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida before a visit to Washington DC on Tuesday.
Cameron was hoping to persuade the presumptive Republican presidential candidate to drop his opposition to a new package of aid for Ukraine that is being held up in Congress partly on Trump’s instruction.
It is Cameron’s second visit to the US to try to convince Republicans that it is in America’s national interest for the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, not to make any further military advances in Ukraine.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said on Sunday that Ukraine would lose the war if US aid was withheld and Ukrainian air cover not improved.
The risk is that past bad blood between Cameron and Trump over issues such as Brexit have poisoned the well, and Cameron, for all his persuasive skills, is not the British political leader most likely to make Trump change his mind.
Cameron is scheduled to hold talks with the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, in Washington on Tuesday. Although they have much to discuss covering the future of Nato, China and a possible ceasefire in Gaza, the foreign secretary’s key goal is to shift Republican thinking in Congress on the relevance of the threat posed by Russia to American interests. A steady stream of European politicians have travelled to Washington on similar missions, only to return frustrated at the growing US indifference to Ukraine’s fate.
The Republican speaker, Mike Johnson, has so far declined to allow the Ukraine aid issue onto the floor of the Congress, but has indicated he might do so next week when Congress returns from recess. In February, the speaker refused to consider a Senate-passed foreign aid package that would have included $60bn for Ukraine because it lacked measures relating to security on the US-Mexico border.
In a statement on Monday, a Foreign Office spokesperson played down the rarity of a Conservative foreign secretary trying to persuade a Republican not to make concessions to Russia over the future of Europe.
The Foreign Office said it was “standard practice for ministers to meet opposition candidates as part of their routine international engagement”.
Although Conservative politicians have met Trump, as has his great ally Nigel Farage, Monday’s meeting was the first between a senior UK minister and Trump since he left office insisting that the presidential election had been stolen from him.
Trump has said he can negotiate a peace deal on Ukraine in 24 hours. His allies say the deal will involve ceding Crimea and the Donbas region to Russia, formalising the land grab that Putin started in 2014 and continued with the full-scale invasion in 2022.
“Success for Ukraine and failure for [Vladimir] Putin are vital for American and European security,” Cameron said before his trip. “This will show that borders matter, that aggression doesn’t pay and that countries like Ukraine are free to choose their own future. The alternative would only encourage Putin in further attempts to redraw European borders by force, and would be heard clearly in Beijing, Tehran and North Korea.”
Earlier this year, he warned Congress not to show “the weakness displayed against Hitler” in the 1930s.
Cameron is also arguing that Ukraine has shown time and again that if it is given the resources it can succeed and would be ready to “go on the offensive” in 2025. Aware that Trump believes Europe does not pull its weight in defending itself, Cameron is armed with statistics to show more than $184bn (£145bn) has already been committed to Ukraine by European nations including more than $15bn (nearly £12bn) from the UK.
Cameron will say in DC that nothing can match the pace and scale of US support, which remains “the keystone in the arch” in the fight for democracy, the Foreign Office said.
The US sent its final tranche of munitions and equipment in December, using the last of its funding from a previous supplemental to assist Ukrainian forces.
On a previous trip to the US, the rightwing congresswoman and staunch Trump ally Marjorie Taylor Greene told Cameron to “kiss my ass” and “worry about his own country”.
A key test for Cameron’s trip is whether he gains meetings with the swing Republican congressmen including Johnson. At present no meeting with Johnson is slated for Tuesday.
Talks will also focus on the Middle East, with the foreign secretary expected to set out the UK’s reasoning for not suspending arms sales to Israel. Ministers face Labour pressure to disclose the official legal advice on the trade.
Downing Street said it had no plans to publish the advice but that it wanted to be transparent about its decision to continue exporting arms during the Gaza conflict.
Cameron will also be pressed on whether the UK supports an Israeli offensive in Rafah, the southern hold-out town in Gaza, if the current round of talks between Hamas and Israel being staged in Cairo fail.
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