David Cameron’s attempt to persuade Donald Trump to permit the US Congress to push through $60bn in military aid for Ukraine appears to have failed, after the British foreign secretary was not even granted a meeting with the congressional speaker, Mike Johnson, who could in theory put the package to a vote.
Johnson instead found himself assailed by the hard-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who renewed her threats of a snap vote to remove him from office for even countenancing a vote.
At a private dinner in Trump’s Florida base, Mar-a-Lago, Cameron had urged Trump to recognise that it was in the US’s interest that Vladimir Putin not be rewarded for seizing land from Ukraine. He also insisted that by the time of a Nato summit in Washington this July, plans would be in place for every Nato member to reach or pass the target of defence spending. He was hoping Trump would signal a change of course at least by easing the path to him meeting Johnson.
At a joint press conference in Washington on Tuesday, Cameron and the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, repeated their longstanding appeals for Congress to unblock the assistance. Cameron insisted he had not come to the US to lecture anyone or interfere with internal American politics, but said he was prepared to drop the “diplospeak” because he felt so emotional about the need for the US and Europe to stand together to defend Ukraine against Russian aggression.
He warned: “Future generations may look back at us and say, did we do enough when this country was invaded by a dictator trying to redraw boundaries by force? Did we learn the lessons from history? And did we do enough?”
But Cameron’s arguments – both rational and emotional – seem to have run up against the continued power struggle inside the Republican party, as hardliners, who have cooled on continuing to support Ukraine financially, threaten to oust Johnson if he puts the aid package to a vote when Congress returns from its two-week vacation.
“This has been a complete and total surrender to, if not complete and total lockstep with, the Democrats’ agenda that has angered our Republican base so much and given them very little reason to vote for a Republican House majority,” Taylor Greene wrote in a fresh attack on Johnson.
Cameron is just the latest in a string of foreign government officials who have called for the US Senate to vote on the aid package, which is widely expected to be passed – if Congress were allowed to vote. The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, said on Sunday that Ukraine will lose its battle with Russia without further US aid, including necessary money to develop air defences.
Cameron took a calculated risk in flying to Florida to try to persuade Trump to change course since there is a history of disagreement over Brexit (which the former prime minister opposed, but Trump enthusiastically supported).
Cameron defended his meeting with Trump as an “entirely proper” encounter with an opposition figure and said it covered “a range of important geopolitical subjects”.
The Trump campaign team said the issues discussed at the dinner were “the upcoming US and UK elections, policy matters specific to Brexit, the need for Nato countries to meet their defence-spending requirements and ending the killing in Ukraine”.
Trump foreign policy advisers have claimed that if elected president, Trump would be able to end the war within 24 hours largely by making territorial concessions to Russia, including ceding Russia permanent control of Crimea and the Donbas – terms that the west would regard as a reward for aggression that would be noticed by China and Iran.
In Washington, Cameron invoked decades of security cooperation between Britain and the US, saying: “I think of my grandfather landing on the Normandy beaches under the cover of an American warship. I think of how I worked together with President Obama to deal with the Isil [Islamic State] threat in Syria and Iraq, how we hunted down those terrible killers of British and American hostages.
“We face a huge threat from an aggressive Putin, taking a country’s territory by force. And it is so important that we stick together. The great lesson from Nato celebrating the 75th anniversary this year is that if we stick together, if we work together, we can create a more secure Europe, but also a more secure US.”
The foreign secretary added: “I say this as someone who doesn’t just like and respect America, it is someone who loves this country. I mean, of course, I love my own country more than ever. But I do love the United States, I feel passionate about this country, its role in the world. I try to keep the diplomatic language but sometimes it spills over into an emotional language because it’s the right thing for us to do.”
He insisted the American aid package worth $60bn was great value for money since for about 5% of the US defence budget, almost half of Russians pre war military equipment has been destroyed without the loss for single American life.
