President Donald Trump has often frustrated European allies with his overt entreaties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and harsh words for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But behind the seeming imbalance is a longer-term strategic goal – countering China. The Trump administration believes that incentivizing Russia to end the war in Ukraine, welcoming it back economically and showering it with U.S. investments, could eventually shift the global order away from China. It’s a gamble – and one Ukrainians are concerned with – but it underscores the administration’s belief that the biggest geopolitical threat facing the United States and the West is China, not Putin’s Russia. While countering China isn’t the only reason the administration wants a truce, it does help explain why after more than 15 months of fruitless talks and multiple threats to walk away, the president’s team – special envoy Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner – keep looking for a breakthrough. A Trump administration official, granted anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations, said finding a “way to align closer with Russia” could create “a different power balance with China that could be very, very beneficial.” The administration’s desire to use Ukraine peace negotiations to counter China has not been previously reported. But many observers believe this plan has little hope of succeeding – at least while Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping remain in charge. And the idea of giving Russia economic incentives to grow closer to the U.S. is concerning for Ukraine, said a Ukrainian official, granted anonymity to discuss diplomatic matters. “We had such attempts in the past already and it led to nothing,” they said. “Germany had [Ostpolitik, Germany’s policy toward the East], for that and now Russia is fighting the deadliest war in Europe.” And when it comes to banking on breaking apart China and Russia, the Ukrainian official noted that both countries “have one [thing] in common which you can not beat – they hate the U.S. as a symbol of democracy.” Still, the strategy is in keeping with the administration’s broader foreign policy initiatives aimed at least in part in countering Chinese influence. Taking out Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and pressuring Cuba’s government to the brink of collapse all diminishes China’s influence in the Western Hemisphere. The administration threatened Panama, which withdrew from Chinese leader Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative a month after Trump took office and called Peru’s deal with China surrounding its deepwater port in Chancay a “cautionary tale.” And striking Iran shifted China’s oil import potential, as Tehran supplied Beijing with more than 13 percent of its oil in 2025, according to Reuters. Indeed, the Trump administration official noted that between Venezuela, Iran and Russia, China was buying oil at below-market rates, subsidizing its consumption “to the tune of over $100 billion a year for the last several years.” “So that’s been a massive subsidy for China by being able to buy oil from these places on the black market, sometimes $30 a barrel lower than what the spot market is,” the person said. Even as there are reports that Russia is sharing intelligence with Iran, the U.S. and Russia keep talking. Witkoff and Kushner met with Kirill Dmitriev, a top adviser to Putin, last week. The Russians called the meeting “productive.” Witkoff said they’d keep talking. These negotiations and the broader efforts to counter China now take place under the spectre of Trump asking several countries, including China, for help securing the Strait of Hormuz. The National Security Strategy, released in November, spilled a fair amount of ink on China, though it often doesn’t mention Beijing directly. Many U.S. lawmakers — from both parties — consider China the gravest long-term threat to America’s global power. “There is a longstanding kind of U.S. strategic train of thought that says that having Russia and China working together is very much not in our interests, and finding ways to divide them, or at least tactically collaborate with the partner who’s less of a long term strategic threat to us,” said said Alexander Gray, Trump’s National Security Council chief of staff in his first term. Gray, who is currently the CEO of American Global Strategies, a consulting firm, compared the effort to former Secretary of State and national security adviser Henry Kissinger, who spearheaded President Richard Nixon’s trip to China during the Cold War in an effort to pull that country away from the Soviet Union. The State Department declined to comment for this report. However, a State Department spokesperson previously told POLITICO that China’s economic ties with Latin American countries present a “national security threat” for the U.S. that the administration is actively trying to mitigate. The White House declined to comment. Fred Fleitz, another Trump NSC chief of staff in his first term, noted that the president has “pressed Putin to end the war to normalize Russia’s relationship with the U.S. and Europe,” and wants Russia to rejoin the G8. “It is clear that Trump wants to find a way to end the war in Ukraine and to coexist peacefully with Russia,” said Fleitz, who now serves as the vice chair for American Security at the America First Policy Institute. “But I also believe he correctly sees the growing Russia-China alliance as a far greater threat to U.S. and global security than the Ukraine War and therefore wants to find ways to improve U.S.-Russia relations to weaken or break that alliance.” Others, however, remain skeptical. Craig Singleton, senior director of the China program at Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said the goal to break Russia and China is “appealing in theory, but in practice the partnership between Moscow and Beijing is iron-clad.” “Obviously there is nothing wrong with testing diplomacy and President Trump is a dealmaker. But history probably suggests that this won’t really result in much,” Singleton added. “The likely outcome [with Russia] is limited tactical cooperation with the U.S., not some sort of durable break with Beijing.” And China seeks to keep Russia as an ally and junior partner in its relationship as a counter to Western powers. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reaffirmed the relationship in a press conference this month, saying, “in a fluid and turbulent world, China-Russia relationship has stood rock-solid against all odds.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio, shortly after his confirmation, hinted at the broader strategy, saying in an interview, that “a situation where the Russians are permanently a junior partner to China, having to do whatever China says they need to do because of their dependence on them” is not a “good outcome” for Russia, the U.S. or Europe. But Rubio, like the Trump administration official given anonymity to discuss ongoing negotiations, both acknowledged that fully severing those ties would be a tough lift. “I don’t know if we’ll ever be successful at peeling them completely off a relationship with the Chinese,” Rubio said in February of last year. Adam Savit, director for China policy at the America First Policy Institute, argued that “Russia matters at the margins, but it won’t be a decisive variable in the U.S.-China competition,” and that the “center of gravity is East Asia.” “Russia gives China strategic depth, a friendly border, energy supply, and a second front in Ukraine to sap Western attention,” he said. “Getting closer to Russia could complicate China’s strategic position, but Moscow is a declining power and solidly the junior partner in that relationship.”

With a roar of rockets and bombs, a gasp of international outcry and the death of Iran’s supreme leader, President Donald Trump’s legacy became clearer than ever. He is burying the 20th Century: Its villains, its alliances, its political norms and ceasefires. And he is unleashing a future of uncertainty and disruption with no new equilibrium in sight. Across both his terms as president, and in so many different areas of policy and governance and culture, his signal achievements have been acts of demolition. His Supreme Court appointees struck down Roe v. Wade, ending the seething political and legal stalemate on abortion rights that governed America since the 1970s. His military interventions in Latin America have brought the Cuban government, one of the last surviving Cold War regimes, to the brink of collapse. His tariffs and trade threats have blown apart the Reagan-Clinton policy consensus on free trade, upending half a century of global commercial arrangements and diplomatic relations. His America First worldview and contempt for Europe’s political establishment have increasingly relegated NATO’s charter, the 1949 accord forging the globe’s most powerful military alliance, to antique status. His acts of corporate favoritism and personal enrichment, and his use of the justice system as a weapon of vengeance, have erased the post-Watergate regime of legal and ethical norms for the presidency. And in the first few hours of war in Iran, Trump’s attack killed the enduring leader of the 1979 Iranian revolution, Ali Khamenei, a dictator as cruel as he was ancient. In every instance, Trump’s allies and admirers say he is completing the unfinished business of a generation: doing the work that other American leaders have been too weak or too conventional or too unpatriotic to do themselves. In each case, too, Trump is tearing down old structures and systems without a vision for replacing them. At age 79, Trump is himself a creation of the age he is now unwinding, with a worldview molded in America’s prosperous, socially turbulent decades after World War II. It is not evident that he’s interested in designing the grand policies of the future. Even if Trump had a modernizer’s imagination, there is not too much time left for him to build a new world. Trump has about 35 months left as president – about as long as it takes to make one major motion picture – and just eight months before a midterm election that could sap his power. It is not likely that before he leaves office we will see a stable global trade order, thriving new governments in Havana and Tehran or a post-NATO order of international security that reflects America’s overdue destiny as a Pacific nation. It is harder, still, to imagine that Trump might help lead a hard process of legislative compromise on other issues that have been intractable for decades, like abortion or the national debt — though he may be the one president who could force a grand bargain on immigration. Trump’s opponents have often criticized him for his vacant sense of history: his too-hasty dismissal of 20th Century achievements like NATO and NAFTA and START, his middle school-level commentary on figures like Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson, his weird public musings about Frederick Douglass being recognized more and more. This philistinism and historical ignorance was at the heart of Joe Biden’s case against Trump. Biden deplored Trump as an insult to the American political tradition and promised to make Washington work, repair broken norms and turn over power to the next generation. His slow-moving, self-admiring, politically dysfunctional administration achieved none of these things. If there was a chance then to build a bridge to the 20th Century, Biden lost it. The next time the country chooses a replacement for Trump, resurrecting the past won’t even be an option. For American policymakers and voters, there’s no longer any prospect of mimicking détente with regimes in Iran and Cuba that are unraveling at this very hour. Barack Obama pursued that aim as part of his own 21st Century agenda; that path is now closed for good. America’s credibility as a trade negotiator and commercial partner is already changed forever; the next president will be unable to restore Bush-era trade relations even if he or she wants to. NATO’s place in the world won’t return to where it was in 1998 just because the next president says the right words about Washington’s commitment to its allies. This is already obvious to leaders looking at the United States from the outside in. “We know the old order is not coming back,” Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada said at the World Economic Forum last month. His speech, declaring an epochal “rupture” in geopolitics, was the climactic event of Davos for a reason. Yet for all Trump’s zeal to crush big institutions and enemies and conventions of the past, he has also failed so far to lock in an agenda for the future. Many of his policies — on technology, energy and international security — can be changed or undone with the stroke of a pen, as Biden’s were. Others, like Trump’s landmark tax cuts, are unpopular and face a dim fate whenever Democrats next win power. The variegated coalition that won the 2024 election for Trump, and raised Republican hopes of a lasting realignment, fractured within months of his inauguration. If the 20th Century is finally dead, this country’s trajectory in the 21st is an immense question mark. That is the great challenge Trump has left for the next president. For a visionary successor, it could also be an opportunity unmatched in recent U.S. history.

PARIS — Far-right leader Jordan Bardella pushed back against President Emmanuel Macron’s plans to make France’s nuclear doctrine more European in an interview Friday. “What I dispute in this dialogue [with European countries] is that we are wrong to think that deterrence is only nuclear; it is primarily conventional, and here again we have missions in Eastern Europe that must be maintained,” the National Rally’s president told TV news channel LCI, referring to French troop presence in Romania and Estonia and air policing missions in the Baltics. “As members of NATO and the EU, we have a duty to provide mutual assistance,” he added. Bardella acknowledged that France’s nuclear doctrine has always foreseen that the country’s vital interests do not stop at the French borders. “When it comes to nuclear power, I defend principles, and those principles are that there can be no sharing, no co-financing, and no co-decision-making on the nuclear button,” the MEP also said. The Elysée Palace has always stressed that any decision to launch a nuclear weapon would remain with the French president. The National Rally, historically skeptical of engagement with both NATO and the European Union, is leading early polls for next year’s pivotal presidential election. If longtime leader Marine Le Pen’s appeal to shorten or overturn her five-year election ban related to embezzlement charges is unsuccessful, the 30-year-old Bardella will likely run in her place. Bardella’s remarks come a few days ahead of a landmark speech Macron is set to deliver on how France’s nuclear weapons can contribute to Europe’s security. Paris has been in talks with European capitals such as Berlin, Stockholm and Warsaw over how French nukes could help the continent deter Russian President Vladimir Putin. Alongside the United Kingdom, France is one of two Western European nuclear powers. Its arsenal is both airborne and seaborne, with at least one submarine patrolling the seas at all times. When asked whether the National Rally would be open to bringing back a land-based nuclear deterrent — a capacity that France has abandoned after the Cold War — Bardella replied: “It could be part of the debate.” During the interview, Bardella also reiterated his party’s pledge to leave NATO’s integrated command if it came to power. Bardella’s comments come across as more nuanced than other members of the National Rally. “If Mr. Macron thinks he can give France’s nuclear weapons to the EU, he will face impeachment proceedings for treason,” said Philippe Olivier, another MEP from the far-right party and a close adviser to Le Pen.

PARIS — With only 14 months left in power, President Emmanuel Macron is now in a race against the clock to chart how France can wield the full force of its nuclear arsenal to guarantee Europe’s security more widely. Much will boil down to whether he makes concrete commitments in a landmark speech on France’s atomic strategy on Monday, to be delivered from the Atlantic peninsula where the country’s nuclear submarines are based. After decades sheltering under the American nuclear umbrella, European governments — particularly in Berlin and Warsaw — are increasingly warming to the idea that Paris could use Western Europe’s largest atomic arsenal to play a bigger role in safeguarding the continent’s security. They will be paying close attention to how far Macron goes in Monday’s speech. With the war in Ukraine entering its fifth year and fears about U.S. President Donald Trump’s reliability as an ally, they will want pledges of action rather than the president’s traditional rhetoric. Their big question, however, will be how much of a new European atomic architecture Macron can realistically lock in, with the NATO-skeptic, far-right opposition National Rally party of Marine Le Pen leading in early polls ahead of the 2027 presidential election. European officials, military officers and diplomats who spoke to POLITICO for this article said they hoped he proposes something substantive. One senior EU government official said they had “great hopes,” while a European military officer expected “a major change.” The speech will lay out whether Macron is willing to do something that the National Rally will find hard to unwind. Only the most far-reaching moves — deploying nuclear-capable Rafale fighter jets in European nations, for example, or stationing French nuclear warheads outside the country — would prove difficult for the next French president to reverse without weakening France’s credibility. “It would appear that the president has a genuine desire to commit France to something that the National Rally would not be able to overturn if it came to power,” said Florian Galleri, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who specializes in nuclear deterrence. However, he conceded, “under political or economic constraints, the speech may be much more cautious, even deliberately vague.”  France has long suggested its roughly 300 warheads could play a bigger role in a wider European security strategy, but Germany, with more developed transatlantic instincts, has traditionally been warier. That’s changing, though, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz earlier this month opened the door to German forces operating with French and British nuclear weapons. There are also concerns that some countries could decide to go it alone: Polish President Karol Nawrocki said earlier this month that his country should start developing nuclear defenses to face the threat from Moscow. FRENCH-LED EUROPEAN DETERRENT Elysée officials declined to predict what Macron would say, but options include an increase in France’s nuclear warheads, and the participation of European countries in France’s flagship Poker exercise that simulates a nuclear raid. European lawmakers have told POLITICO they would like to see French nuclear-capable fighter jets stationed in other countries.  The expectation is that Macron “will confirm nuclear deterrence is and will remain one of France’s priorities, and also that France is continuing to invest” in its arsenal, Estonia’s Undersecretary for Defence Policy Tuuli Duneton told POLITICO.  Alongside the U.K., France is one of two Western European nuclear powers. Its arsenal is both airborne and seaborne, with at least one submarine patrolling the seas at all times. | Alexis Rosenfeld/Getty Images However, French officials have one clear red line: Any decision to launch a nuclear strike would remain in Paris. “At the end of the day, who would be able to push the button? Only France. That’s also what makes the conversation complicated,” said a second European military officer.   Alongside the U.K., France is one of two Western European nuclear powers. Its arsenal is both airborne and seaborne, with at least one submarine patrolling the seas at all times. Unlike the U.K., Paris is not part of NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group, although French presidents have always stressed that France’s vital national interests have a European dimension.  Paris’ push to discuss how French nuclear weapons could contribute to the continent’s security wasn’t always welcome among European leaders — but Trump’s return to the White House has changed that calculus, including in countries such as Poland and Sweden.  Germany’s about-face has been the most striking. Berlin was once among the capitals most opposed to such talks, and is now openly confirming discussions with France. But there are definite difficulties if the umbrella is expanded on a country-by-country basis. A senior German official told POLITICO that Berlin would not foot the bill for an arsenal fully controlled by the French.  A NATO official also cautioned that limiting France’s defensive circle to specific EU countries could send the wrong signal to Russian President Vladimir Putin and expose the rest — a concern Merz himself raised at the Munich Security Conference earlier this month. “We … will not allow zones of differing security levels to develop in Europe,” he said. SHADOW OF 2027 Crucially, Macron’s nuclear speech comes just 14 months before he leaves office. “We need to understand how sustainable France’s commitment is,” a European defense official stressed.  All eyes are on the National Rally. The far-right party’s leaders have openly spoken against Macron’s nuclear dialogue with European allies. The party is internally divided over its stance toward Russia, and believes in pulling out of NATO’s integrated command structure. While Le Pen has stressed that “nuclear power belongs to the French,” her protégé Jordan Bardella — the current favorite for the presidency after Macron — has struck a more open tone, insisting that the defense of French interests “does not stop at [French] borders.” He has not, however, endorsed Macron’s outreach on the nuclear umbrella.  European governments — particularly in Berlin and Warsaw — are increasingly warming to the idea that Paris could use Western Europe’s largest atomic arsenal to play a bigger role in safeguarding the continent’s security. | Ludovic Marin/AFP via Getty Images The prospect of a National Rally win next year is creating “a credibility problem for the French offer,” a European diplomat conceded.  Some European capitals, along with some EU officials in Brussels, are already factoring that in. That’s especially true in Germany, where some German officials and lawmakers are already working under the assumption that the next French president will be Le Pen or Bardella, several French and European officials told POLITICO.  Jacopo Barigazzi reported from Brussels. Victor Jack contributed to this report.

PARIS — There is a risk of nuclear proliferation in the world today, according to a French official from the Elysée Palace. “We are living in a period that is fundamentally conducive to nuclear proliferation,” the official told reporters on Wednesday, adding that pressure was mounting on the international non-proliferation regime. The comments come ahead of French President Emmanuel Macron’s speech on France’s nuclear doctrine, scheduled for March 2. He is expected to provide more details on how France’s nuclear weapons can contribute to Europe’s security. Countries such as Germany and Sweden have publicly confirmed talks with France about the country’s nuclear deterrent. Since the war in Ukraine started, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has made repeated nuclear threats, also updating the country’s doctrine to lower the threshold that would trigger a nuclear strike. In the past few years, several Cold War-era treaties that limited nuclear arsenals have also expired. The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, known as INF, ended in 2019. The New Start agreement, which capped American and Russian strategic nuclear warheads at 1,550, expired earlier this month and is not expected to be renewed in the near future. “We are clearly witnessing an erosion of everything that remains of the arms control framework,” the Elysée official stressed, adding that nuclear-armed countries now no longer shy away from military confrontations, pointing to India and Pakistan. China is also pushing to increase its nuclear arsenal — the U.S. estimates that Beijing could have 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030 — and other countries, such as Iran, are looking to develop their own. The French official addressed the open desire of some countries in Europe and Asia to have their own nuclear weapons. “Another reason [for the risk of proliferation] is the feeling of insecurity in a number of countries, particularly when political shifts among various actors mean that those who believed they could rely on guarantees are no longer assured of them,” they said, in a thinly veiled reference to Washington’s recent geopolitical actions under President Donald Trump. While no countries were named, there are talks ongoing in South Korea and Japan about whether they should develop homegrown nuclear deterrents. Earlier this month, Polish President Karol Nawrocki said his country should start developing nuclear defenses, given the threat from Moscow. However, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, known as NPT, still remains one of the cornerstones of arms control in the world, the official said: “NPT is not dead.”

BRUSSELS — The U.S. under Donald Trump is pushing NATO to slash many of its foreign activities including ending a key alliance mission in Iraq, four NATO diplomats told POLITICO. The U.S. has also in recent months lobbied to scale down NATO’s peacekeeping operation in Kosovo and keep Ukraine and Indo-Pacific allies from formally participating in the alliance’s July annual summit in Ankara. The effort reflects a White House drive to treat NATO as a strictly Euroatlantic defense pact and roll back decades of expansion into crisis management, global partnerships and values-driven initiatives that have long irritated the U.S. president and his MAGA base. Under the drive from Washington, NATO would curtail so-called “out-of-area activities” that are beyond the alliance’s core tasks of defense and deterrence. The push has become known internally as a “return to factory settings,” the four diplomats said, all of whom were granted anonymity to speak freely on the sensitive internal matter. The effort could see a rapid scale back of NATO’s activities in former war zones, as well as shutting out capitals including Kyiv and Canberra from formal discussions this summer. The White House declined to comment publicly on NATO’s partnership programs and global operations when contacted by POLITICO. The fresh details come after U.S. deputy Pentagon chief Elbridge Colby recently spelled out the administration’s thinking behind what he called “NATO 3.0.” “Not every mission can be the top priority. Not every capability can be gold-plated,” Colby told alliance defense ministers last week, while reiterating that the U.S. was still committed to European security. “The measure of seriousness is whether European forces can fight, sustain, and prevail in the scenarios that matter most for the defense of the alliance.” The U.S. campaign is prompting blowback from some allies. Dropping the alliance’s overseas initiatives is “not the right approach,” said one of the four diplomats. “Partnerships are crucial to deterrence and defense.” Since Trump returned to the White House last year, he has slashed U.S. commitments abroad, pulled troops and NATO personnel out of Europe and handed some of the alliance’s top commands to Europeans as he seeks to refocus his foreign policy around “core national security.” OUT OF IRAQ NATO maintains an advisory mission aimed at strengthening Iraq’s security institutions like its police and stymying the return of the Islamic State group. The operation was set up under Trump’s first term in 2018 and repeatedly expanded since 2021, at Baghdad’s request. Washington has asked allies to end the mission as early as September, the first diplomat quoted above and a second diplomat said. Separately, the U.S. is also set to withdraw around 2,500 soldiers from Iraq under a 2024 deal with the Iraqi government, something a U.S. administration official told POLITICO is part of Trump’s “commitment to ending forever wars,” while stressing that the move is happening in “close coordination” with Baghdad. Tamer Badawi, an Iraq expert and associate fellow with the Center for Applied Research in Partnership with the Orient think tank, said the NATO mission itself is not “crucial” for the country’s security. But scrapping it alongside a U.S. pullback could empower militia groups, he said, and be “destabilizing” for the northern Kurdistan Regional Government. The U.S. request is also facing pushback inside the alliance. “It’s not the moment to get out of Iraq … the government wants us there,” said the first diplomat.  The second diplomat said “the majority” of allies agree the Iraq mission should be scaled back but over a longer timeframe, while keeping a smaller operation in place. KOSOVO DRAWDOWN The U.S. has also signaled it wants to wind down the NATO-led Kosovo Force (KFOR), according to the four diplomats, which is even more concerning for European allies, even if discussions on that remain at a very early stage. The U.N.-authorized international peacekeeping mission, which debuted in 1999 after the Yugoslav wars, currently includes around 4,500 troops. Engjellushe Morina, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the mission remains “indispensable” for regional security. If NATO pulls out, it could embolden Serbian separatists in northern Kosovo, she said, creating a copycat effect among ethnic Serbs in Bosnia’s Republika Srpska region. “We’re quite concerned” about attempts to wind down the mission, said a fifth senior NATO diplomat, since “things in the western Balkans can escalate quickly.” Contacted by POLITICO, a NATO official speaking on behalf of the organization said there is “no timeline associated with NATO Mission Iraq … or with KFOR,” adding: “These missions are based on need, undergo periodic review, and are adjusted as circumstances evolve.” For now, no decision has been taken on ending either operation. All 32 allies must approve the start and end of missions, a process that typically involves jockeying and pressure campaigns from multiple allies and not just the U.S. NO EXTRA ALLIES The U.S. is also pressing allies not to invite Ukraine and the alliance’s four official Indo-Pacific partners — Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea — to the formal meetings at NATO’s July summit in Ankara, the four diplomats said.  The countries could still be invited to side events, they added, with the request partly justified as reducing the number of summit meetings. Keeping NATO partner countries on the sidelines of the summit “would send a signal that perhaps the focus is much more on core NATO issues,” said Oana Lungescu, a former NATO spokesperson and a senior fellow at London’s Royal United Services Institute. The official speaking for NATO said the alliance would “communicate on participation of partners at the summit in due course.” Meanwhile, NATO staff have also proposed cutting a public forum from this year’s gathering, a side-event hosting country leaders, defense experts and government officials on various discussion panels that typically boost the visibility of the yearly summit.  The NATO official said: “NATO has chosen not to organize a Public Forum this year but will host a NATO Summit Defence Industry Forum in the margins of the Ankara Summit.” NATO civil servants have told capitals the move is designed to cut costs amid a lack of resources. But the first and second diplomats said they believe it could also be driven indirectly by U.S. pressure, given Washington’s broader crusade to slash funding for international organizations. Lungescu said scrapping the forum was in line with the “downgrading of the public diplomacy division,” under NATO chief Mark Rutte, who has sought to slim down and restructure the department since taking office in late 2024. But at a time when the alliance is trying to persuade the wider public of the merits of its activities and increased defense spending, that’s “very harmful,” said a third diplomat.  “NATO has to communicate what’s happening — and what it’s going to do,” they said.

BERLIN — Germany is moving to fortify its foreign intelligence agency with sweeping new powers in preparation for a potential divorce from the United States.  The plan comes as German and other European leaders grow increasingly concerned that U.S. President Donald Trump could move to halt the American intelligence sharing Europe largely relies on — or exploit that dependence for leverage. Just as European countries must radically bolster their militaries to gain more autonomy, officials in Berlin argue, so too must Germany’s intelligence apparatus grow far more capable. “We want to continue working closely with the Americans,” Marc Henrichmann, the chairman of a special committee in Germany’s Bundestag that oversees the country’s intelligence services, told POLITICO. “But if a [U.S.] president, whoever that may be, decides in the future to go it alone without the Europeans … then we must be able to stand on our own two feet.” German leaders believe the need is especially urgent in their country, where the foreign intelligence service, or BND, is far more legally constrained than intelligence agencies elsewhere. Those restraints stem from intentional protections put in place after World War II to prevent a repeat of the abuses perpetrated by the Nazi spy apparatus. But those restraints have had the side effect of making Germany particularly dependent on the U.S. for intelligence gathering, and this is now seen as a potential danger. “The intelligence business is one where the question always arises: What do you offer me, what do I offer you?” Henrichmann said. “And of course, if Germany is only a taker, the risk is simply too great.”  German Chancellor Friedrich Merz now wants to boost and unfetter his country’s foreign intelligence service, giving it much broader authority to perpetrate acts of sabotage, conduct offensive cyber operations and more aggressively carry out espionage. Thorsten Frei, the chancellery official overseeing the intelligence reform, this week likened the plans to the Zeitenwende, or “historic turning point,” Germany’s former Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. At the time, Berlin announced major investments to bolster its long-neglected armed forces. A similar shift, Frei said, “must now also be applied to our intelligence services.” NAZI LEGACY Germany’s BND was founded in 1956 with legal limitations intended to prevent a repeat of the abuses perpetrated by the Nazi Gestapo and SS — though, at the time, many of its agents were former Nazis. To strictly divide the BND from the police and prevent interference with domestic affairs, the agency was put under the oversight of the chancellery and bound to a strict parliamentary control mechanism. Its powers were limited to collecting and analyzing intelligence. Agents were not given the legal capacity to intervene to foil perceived threats. Friedrich Merz wants to boost and unfetter his country’s foreign intelligence service. | Sven Hoppe/Getty Images Such restrictions persist until this day. German spies, for example, could through surveillance become aware of plans of an impending cyberattack, but are virtually powerless to stop it on their own. They can bug a conversation with strict legal oversight, but are unable to carry out acts of sabotage to undermine a discovered threat. Germany’s stringent data protection laws — which are also largely a reaction to the legacy of the East German secret police, or Stasi — restrict the BND further. The agency must, for instance, redact personal information in documents before passing them on to other intelligence services. Such restrictions are no longer justified especially in light of the rising threat of Russian sabotage, say German officials. “If there are attacks on Germany, then in my view it is not enough for us to simply watch, we must also be able to defend ourselves,” said Frei, the chancellery official in charge of the BND reform. “All other countries in the world that have corresponding services of a corresponding size do this.” As a consequence of Germany’s intelligence weakness, the country has heavily relied on U.S. clandestine activities to stop planned attacks. The U.S., for instance, provided warnings about a Russian plot to assassinate the CEO of Rheinmetall and a plot by a Chechen national to attack the Israeli embassy in Berlin. Only about 2 percent of terrorist threat warnings come from the BND itself, according to a report in Germany’s Bild that cited a confidential agency document. This heavy reliance on the U.S. has led some German leaders to warn that the alliance with Washington must be preserved to the extent possible even as Berlin gradually moves to become less dependent on it. Without U.S. intelligence sharing, “we are defenseless,” Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul said in a radio interview this week. “That is the pure reality, which I cannot spare anyone from.” ‘GAME WITHOUT RULES’ German officials were shaken when Washington temporarily halted its intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March last year to pressure Kyiv during peace negotiations with Russia, a move that effectively blinded the Ukrainian military in the middle of the war. The episode showed that the Trump administration is willing to use American dominance in intelligence gathering to exert leverage over allies. Several months later, Merz vowed to significantly increase the BND’s capabilities.  “Old certainties have been devalued, tried-and-tested rules no longer apply,” Merz said in a speech to agency officials. “Given the responsibility we bear in Europe in view of our size and economic strength, it is therefore our aspiration that the BND should operate at the very highest level in terms of intelligence.”  Merz’s government has increased the BND budget by about 26 percent to €1.51 billion this year. The chancellor is also moving to relax the data protection regulations to which the BND is subject, allowing use of AI and facial recognition. The chancellery hopes to bring a full package of proposed reforms to a vote in parliament by the fall. German officials were shaken when Washington temporarily halted its intelligence sharing with Ukraine. | Sergey Bobok/AFP via Getty Images Still, considerable restrictions on the BND are likely to remain in place. The agency’s expanded powers will be contingent on the chancellery’s national security council declaring a “special intelligence situation” that is also subject to the approval of two-thirds of lawmakers in the parliamentary committee overseeing the BND, according to German media outlets citing a draft of the chancellery’s proposal. But many lawmakers belonging to Germany’s coalition government still believe the proposed changes will put the country in a far better position to defend itself. “Those who are working against us — Russian state actors, Russian cyber factories — are working in the same way as the Nazi intelligence services did back then,” Henrichmann, the conservative lawmaker who heads the parliamentary committee, said. “In a game without rules, we cannot stand by and impose artificial restrictions on ourselves.”

BRUSSELS — NATO is beefing up its Arctic presence in a move designed less to deter Russia than it is to deter Donald Trump. As the alliance rushes to increase its activities in the Arctic ahead of a defense ministers’ summit in Brussels on Thursday, diplomats and experts said the effort is mostly a rebranding exercise aimed at mollifying the U.S. president — in response to a largely exaggerated threat. POLITICO spoke to 13 NATO diplomats, alliance officials and military analysts, some of whom were granted anonymity to speak freely about sensitive matters. They pointed to a significant shift inside NATO toward the region thanks to intense U.S. pressure prompted by Trump’s threats to annex the island, but one that is primarily driven by politics rather than immediate military necessity. With NATO officially framing its new “Arctic Sentry” mission as critical, the diplomatic effort shows the intention by U.S. allies to keep Washington onside amid concerns that failing to appease Trump on Greenland could be disastrous.  “In the face of Russia’s increased military activity and China’s growing interest in the high north it was crucial that we do more,” NATO chief Mark Rutte told reporters on Wednesday. Trump’s Greenland threat in January was a breaking point for many European countries, cementing their view of the U.S. as a permanently unreliable ally. The issue hangs over this weekend’s Munich Security Conference, where U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with many allied leaders.  Experts say any security fears are largely overblown, with NATO more than capable of handling Russia in the Arctic. “I hope they will just rebrand some ongoing activity,” said Karsten Friis, a research professor and Arctic security expert at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. “If there’s a lot of manpower … especially if it’s in Greenland, then it will come up expensive.”  “The threat is more hypothetical than real,” acknowledged one NATO diplomat, who added the initiative has a clear “symbolic and communications aspect to it.” A Public First poll conducted for POLITICO across five countries found that a majority of people in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K. and Germany said Trump was serious about his effort to take over Greenland, with most saying he was doing so to gain natural resources and to increase U.S. control of the Arctic. Only a minority felt he was motivated by any threat from Russia and China. IDLE THREAT After repeatedly refusing to rule out the use of force to take Greenland, the U.S. president finally walked back his campaign to acquire the Danish territory last month. The climbdown was helped by a pledge from Rutte and allies that NATO would take Arctic security more seriously.  But experts remain deeply skeptical about the military need for such a venture. After repeatedly refusing to rule out the use of force to take Greenland, U.S. President Donald Trump finally walked back his campaign to acquire the Danish territory last month. | Shawn Thew/EPA “I do not think that NATO has a capability gap in the Arctic … the United States has the ability to deploy its capabilities to Greenland to defend the alliance,” said Matthew Hickey, an analyst and former official at the U.S. government-affiliated Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies. With the U.S. able to dispatch “thousands” of troops to Greenland from Alaska “within 12 to 24 hours” and experience operating in the region from its biannual Ice Exercises, “it’s really more of a communication gap,” he said. Washington has cited various future threats to the Arctic island: Moscow’s outsized icebreaker fleet and its hypersonic missiles that could one day fly over Greenland undetected, growing Russian and Chinese collaboration and thawing sea ice opening up new shipping routes for suspicious vessels.  But in practice, “the threat hasn’t changed since the Cold War,” said Friis, the professor.  The U.S. can easily upgrade its early-warning missile radar system in Greenland, he argued, while melting ice will only boost the very marginal commercial shipping route in the Northern Sea Route near Russia — nowhere near Greenland. Icebreakers have few military uses and and are easy to track, Friis added. Chinese and Russian collaboration in the Arctic, meanwhile, will remain “largely symbolic,” said Marc Lanteigne, a political science professor and China expert at the Arctic University of Norway, as Moscow is “nervous” of Beijing’s long-term designs on the region and is unlikely to grant it extended access. If there is a threat, it’s in the European Arctic. There, Russia’s Northern Fleet based in the Kola Peninsula includes six operational nuclear-armed submarines, according to Ståle Ulriksen, a university lecturer at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy. Even so, Russia is “significantly outmatched” by NATO, said Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank. Since its full-scale war against Ukraine, Moscow has lost two of the three brigades that had been stationed in the far north, with their replacements expected to take “half a decade or more” to train. Meanwhile, Norway, Germany, Denmark and the U.K. are all buying Boeing P-8 maritime patrol aircraft to better surveil the region. Sweden and Finland both joined NATO as a result of Russia’s war, further beefing up the alliance’s Arctic muscle. As a result, an additional Arctic mission focused on Greenland looks “a bit pointless,” said Ulriksen, the military expert. However, the official alliance line is that this is a needed force projection. A NATO official told POLITICO the initiative “will further strengthen NATO’s posture in the Arctic,” including with joint exercises  “involving tens of thousands of personnel and the equipment … to operate successfully in Arctic conditions.” POLAR PROBLEMS Initially, the Arctic Sentry mission will bring existing exercises such as the Danish-led Arctic Endurance in Greenland under the auspices of NATO’s Joint Command in Virginia. Eventually, it could mean dispatching planes and maritime patrols, according to two NATO diplomats, or setting up a permanent command. The Trump climbdown on Greenland was helped by a pledge from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and allies that NATO would take Arctic security more seriously. | EPA Inside the alliance, the thinking is also that the mission could provide an early-warning signal to Russia and China to stay clear of Greenland in future, the NATO diplomats said, in particular if the Arctic island decides to become independent, and then decides to leave NATO (something its leaders insist won’t happen). “If Greenland were to become independent, you have … a country [that] would become therefore outside of NATO and could be subject to influence from our adversaries,” U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker said Tuesday. An alliance mission should therefore “make sure we know who is there and or who is transiting through there,” he told POLITICO. In fact, some further measures could be helpful, said Kaushal, the naval analyst, deploying more unmanned surface vessels to keep track of Russian submarines and filling the shortage of sonar operators at sea. But a standing maritime presence in the Arctic would be “entirely superfluous” and even dangerous, Kaushal said. “That places vessels potentially in very difficult climates near Russian-held territory, where the only support infrastructure is Russian.” The U.S. currently has about 150 troops at the Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland. Both Denmark and Greenland have stressed they are open to the U.S. stationing more forces on the island under existing arrangements. However, basing more troops in Greenland would be wasteful, according to Rose Gottemoeller, a former NATO deputy secretary-general and U.S. under secretary of defense. “Permanent deployments are expensive and not warranted by the current circumstances.” Nevertheless, for some allies, forking out cash and equipment is a fair trade to prevent the alliance from collapsing. “Perhaps it’s not … the best way to use the limited resources we have,” said a fourth NATO diplomat, but “letting the alliance disintegrate is the alternative.” “If the price to pay is sending two ships to Greenland and 500 troops to do occasional joint exercises, then perhaps it’s worth it.” Jacopo Barigazzi and Chris Lunday contributed reporting.

5 TIMES THE WINTER OLYMPICS GOT SUPER POLITICAL Invasions, nuclear crises and Nazi propaganda: The Games have seen it all. By SEBASTIAN STARCEVIC Illustration by Natália Delgado /POLITICO The Winter Olympics return to Europe this week, with Milan and Cortina d’Ampezzo set to host the world’s greatest athletes against the snowy backdrop of the Italian Alps. But beyond the ice rinks and ski runs, the Games have long doubled as a stage for global alliances, heated political rivalries and diplomatic crises.  “An event like the Olympics is inherently political because it is effectively a competition between nations,” said Madrid’s IE Assistant Professor Andrew Bertoli, who studies the intersection of sport and politics. “So the Games can effectively become an arena where nations compete for prestige, respect and soft power.” If history is any guide, this time won’t be any different. From invasions to the Nazis to nuclear crises, here are five times politics and the Winter Olympics collided. 1980: AMERICA’S “MIRACLE ON ICE” One of the most iconic moments in Olympic history came about amid a resurgence in Cold War tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The USSR had invaded Afghanistan only months earlier, and Washington’s rhetoric toward Moscow had hardened, with Ronald Reagan storming to the presidency a month prior on an aggressive anti-Soviet platform. At the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, that superpower rivalry was on full display on the ice. The U.S. men’s ice hockey team — made up largely of college players and amateurs — faced off against the Soviet squad, a battle-hardened, gold medal-winning machine. The Americans weren’t supposed to stand a chance. Then the impossible happened. In a stunning upset, the U.S. team skated to a 4-3 victory, a win that helped them clinch the gold medal. As the final seconds ticked away, ABC broadcaster Al Michaels famously cried, “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!” The impact echoed far beyond the rink. For many Americans, the victory was a morale boost in a period marked by geopolitical anxiety and division. Reagan later said it was proof “nice guys in a tough world can finish first.” The miracle’s legacy has endured well into the 21st century, with U.S. President Donald Trump awarding members of the hockey team the Congressional Gold Medal in December last year. 2014: RUSSIA INVADES CRIMEA AFTER SOCHI Four days. That’s how long Moscow waited after hosting the Winter Olympics in the Russian resort city of Sochi before sending troops into Crimea, occupying and annexing the Ukrainian peninsula. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych had fled to Moscow days earlier, ousted by protesters demanding democracy and closer integration with the EU. As demonstrators filled Kyiv’s Independence Square, their clashes with government forces played on television screens around the world alongside highlights from the Games, in which Russia dominated the medal tally. Vladimir Putin poses with Russian athletes while visiting the Coastal Cluster Olympic Village ahead of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. | Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images No sooner was the Olympic flame extinguished in Sochi on Feb. 23 than on Feb. 27 trucks and tanks rolled into Crimea. Soldiers in unmarked uniforms set up roadblocks, stormed Crimean government buildings and raised the Russian flag high above them. Later that year, Moscow would face allegations of a state-sponsored doping program and many of its athletes were ultimately stripped of their gold medals. 2022: RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE … AGAIN There’s a theme here. Russian President Vladimir Putin made an appearance at the opening ceremony of Beijing’s Winter Games in 2022, meeting on the sidelines with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and declaring a “no limits” partnership. Four days after the end of the Games, on Feb. 24, Putin announced a “special military operation,” declaring war on Ukraine. Within minutes, Russian troops flooded into Ukraine, and missiles rained down on Kyiv, Kharkiv and other cities across the country. According to U.S. intelligence, The New York Times reported, Chinese officials asked the Kremlin to delay launching its attack until after the Games had wrapped up. Beijing denied it had advance knowledge of the invasion. 2018: KOREAN UNITY ON DISPLAY As South Korea prepared to host the Winter Games in its mountainous Pyeongchang region, just a few hundred kilometers over the border, the North Koreans were conducting nuclear missile tests, sparking global alarm and leading U.S. President Donald Trump to threaten to strike the country. The IOC said it was “closely monitoring” the situation amid concerns about whether the Games could be held safely on the peninsula. South Korean Vice Unification Minister Chun Hae-Sung, shakes hands with the head of North Korean delegation Jon Jong-Su after their meeting on January 17, 2018 in Panmunjom, South Korea. | South Korean Unification Ministry via Getty Images But then in his New Year’s address, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un signaled openness to participating in the Winter Olympics. In the end, North Korean athletes not only participated in the Games, but at the opening ceremony they marched with their South Korean counterparts under a single flag, that of a unified Korea. Pyongyang and Seoul also joined forces in women’s ice hockey, sending a single team to compete — another rare show of unity that helped restart diplomatic talks between the capitals, though tensions ultimately resumed after the Games and continue to this day. 1936: HITLER INVADES THE RHINELAND Much has been said about the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, in which the Nazi regime barred Jewish athletes from participating and used the Games to spread propaganda. But a few months earlier Germany also hosted the Winter Olympics in the town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, allowing the Nazis to project an image of a peaceful, prosperous Germany and restore its global standing nearly two decades after World War I. A famous photograph from the event even shows Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels signing autographs for the Canadian figure skating team. Weeks after the Games ended, Hitler sent troops into the Rhineland, a major violation of the Treaty of Versailles that was met with little pushback from France and Britain, and which some historians argue emboldened the Nazis to eventually invade Poland, triggering World War II.

LONDON — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney left Beijing and promptly declared the U.S.-led “world order” broken. Don’t expect his British counterpart to do the same. Keir Starmer will land in the Chinese capital Wednesday for the first visit by a U.K. prime minister since 2018. By meeting President Xi Jinping, he will end what he has called an “ice age” under the previous Conservative administration, and try to win deals that he can sell to voters as a boost to Britain’s sputtering economy. Starmer is one of a queue of leaders flocking to the world’s second-largest economy, including France’s Emmanuel Macron in December and Germany’s Friedrich Merz next month. Like Carney did in Davos last week, the British PM has warned the world is the most unstable it has been for a generation. Yet unlike Carney, Starmer is desperate not to paint this as a rupture from the U.S. — and to avoid the criticism Trump unleashed on Carney in recent days over his dealings with China. The U.K. PM is trying to ride three horses at once, staying friendly — or at least engaging — with Washington D.C., Brussels and Beijing.  It is his “three-body problem,” joked a senior Westminster figure who has long worked on British-China relations. POLITICO spoke to 22 current and former officials, MPs, diplomats, industry figures and China experts, most of whom were granted anonymity to speak frankly. They painted a picture of a leader walking the same tightrope he always has surrounded by grim choices — from tricky post-Brexit negotiations with the EU, to Donald Trump taking potshots at British policies and freezing talks on a U.K.-U.S. tech deal. Starmer wants his (long-planned) visit to China to secure growth, but be cautious enough not to compromise national security or enrage Trump. He appears neither to have ramped up engagement with Beijing in response to Trump, nor reduced it amid criticism of China’s espionage and human rights record. In short, he doesn’t want any drama. “Starmer is more managerial. He wants to keep the U.K.’s relationships with big powers steady,” said one person familiar with planning for the trip. “You can’t really imagine him doing a Carney or a Macron and using the trip to set out a big geopolitical vision.” An official in 10 Downing Street added: “He’s clear that it is in the U.K.’s interests to have a relationship with the world’s second biggest economy. While the U.S. is our closest ally, he rejects the suggestion that means you can’t have pragmatic dealings with China.” He will be hoping Trump — whose own China visit is planned for April — sees it that way too. BRING OUT THE CAVALRY Starmer has one word in his mind for this trip — growth, which was just 0.1 percent in the three months to September. The prime minister will be flanked by executives from City giants HSBC, Standard Chartered, Schroders and the London Stock Exchange Group; pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca; car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover; energy provider Octopus; and Brompton, the folding bicycle manufacturer. The priority in Downing Street will be bringing back “a sellable headline,” said the person familiar with trip planning quoted above. The economy is the overwhelming focus. While officials discussed trying to secure a political win, such as China lifting sanctions it imposed on British parliamentarians in 2021, one U.K. official said they now believe this to be unlikely. Between them, five people familiar with the trip’s planning predicted a large number of deals, dialogues and memorandums of understanding — but largely in areas with the fewest national security concerns. These are likely to include joint work on medical, health and life sciences, cooperation on climate science, and work to highlight Mandarin language schemes, the people said.  Officials are also working on the mutual recognition of professional qualifications and visa-free travel for short stays, while firms have been pushing for more expansive banking and insurance licences for British companies operating in China. The U.K. is meanwhile likely to try to persuade Beijing to lower import tariffs on Scotch whisky, which doubled in February 2025. A former U.K. official who was involved in Britain’s last prime ministerial visit to China, by Theresa May in 2018, predicted all deals will already be “either 100 or 99 percent agreed, in the system, and No. 10 will already have a firm number in its head that it can announce.” THREADING THE NEEDLE Yet all five people agreed there is unlikely to be a deal on heavy energy infrastructure, including wind turbine technology, that could leave Britain vulnerable to China. The U.K. has still not decided whether to let Ming Yang, a Chinese firm, invest £1.5 billion in a wind farm off the coast of Scotland. And while Carney agreed to ease tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), three of the five people familiar with the trip’s planning said that any deep co-operation on EV technology is likely to be off the table. One of them predicted: “This won’t be another Canada moment. I don’t see us opening the floodgates on EVs.” Britain is trying to stick to “amber and green areas” for any deals, said the first person familiar with the planning. The second of the five people said: “I think they‘re going for the soft, slightly lovey stuff.” Britain has good reason to be reluctant, as Chinese-affiliated groups have long been accused of hacking and espionage, including against MPs and Britain’s Electoral Commission. Westminster was gripped by headlines in December about a collapsed case against two men who had been accused of spying for China. Chinese firm Huawei was banned from helping build the U.K.’s 5G phone network in 2020 after pressure from Trump. Even now, Britain’s security agencies are working on mitigations to telecommunications cables near the Tower of London. They pass close to the boundary of China’s proposed embassy, which won planning approval last week. Andrew Small, director of the Asia Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank working on foreign and security policy, said: “The current debate about how to ‘safely’ increase China’s role in U.K. green energy supplies — especially through wind power — has serious echoes of 5G all over again, and is a bigger concern on the U.S. side than the embassy decision.”  Starmer and his team also “don’t want to antagonize the Americans” ahead of Trump’s own visit in April, said the third of the five people familiar with trip planning. “They’re on eggshells … if they announce a new dialogue on United Nations policy or whatever bullshit they can come up with, any of those could be interpreted as a broadside to the Trump administration.” All these factors mean Starmer’s path to a “win” is narrow. Tahlia Peterson, a fellow working on China at Chatham House, the international affairs think tank, said: “Starmer isn’t going to ‘reset’ the relationship in one visit or unlock large-scale Chinese investment into Britain’s core infrastructure.” Small said foreign firms are being squeezed out of the Chinese market and Xi is “weaponizing” the dependency on Chinese supply chains. He added: “Beijing will likely offer extremely minor concessions in areas such as financial services, [amounting to] no more than a rounding error in economic scale.” Chancellor Rachel Reeves knows the pain of this. Britain’s top finance minister was mocked when she returned with just £600 million of agreements from her visit to China a year ago. One former Tory minister said the figure was a “deliberate insult” by China. Even once the big win is in the bag, there is the danger of it falling apart on arrival. Carney announced Canada and China would expand visa-free travel, only for Beijing’s ambassador to Ottawa to say that the move was not yet official. Despite this, businesses have been keen on Starmer’s re-engagement.  Rain Newton-Smith, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, said firms are concerned about the dependence on Chinese rare earths but added: “If you map supply chains from anywhere, the idea that you can decouple from China is impossible. It’s about how that trade can be facilitated in the best way.” EMBASSY ROW Even if Starmer gets his wins, this visit will bring controversies that (critics say) show the asymmetry in Britain’s relationship with China. A tale of two embassies serves as a good metaphor.  Britain finally approved plans last week for China’s new outpost in London, despite a long row over national security. China held off formally confirming Starmer’s visit until the London embassy decision was finalized, the first person familiar with planning for the trip said. (Others point out Starmer would not want to go until the issue was resolved.) The result was a scramble in which executives were only formally invited a week before take-off. And Britain has not yet received approval to renovate its own embassy in Beijing. Officials privately refer to the building as “falling down,” while one person who has visited said construction materials were piled up against walls. It is “crumbling,” added another U.K. official: “The walls have got cracks on them, the wallpaper’s peeling off, it’s got damp patches.” British officials refused to give any impression of a “quid pro quo” for the two projects under the U.K.’s semi-judicial planning system. But that means much of Whitehall still does not know if Britain’s embassy revamp in Beijing will be approved, or held back until China’s project in London undergoes a further review in the courts. U.K. officials are privately pressing their Chinese counterparts to give the green light. One of the people keenest on a breakthrough will be Britain’s new ambassador to Beijing Peter Wilson, a career diplomat described by people who have met him as “outstanding,” “super smart” and “very friendly.”  For Wilson, hosting Starmer will be one of his trickiest jobs yet. The everyday precautions when doing business in China have made preparations for this trip more intense. Government officials and corporate executives are bringing secure devices and will have been briefed on the risk of eavesdropping and honeytraps. One member of Theresa May’s 2018 delegation to China recalled opening the door of what they thought was their vehicle, only to see several people with headsets on, listening carefully and typing. They compared it to a scene in a spy film. Activists and MPs will put Starmer under pressure to raise human rights issues — including what campaigners say is a genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province — on a trip governed by strict protocol where one stray word can derail a deal.  Pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai, who has British nationality, is facing sentencing in Hong Kong imminently for national security offenses. During the PM’s last meeting with Xi in 2024, Chinese officials bundled British journalists out of the room when he raised the case. Campaigners had thought Lai’s sentencing could take place this week. All these factors mean tension in the British state — which has faced a tussle between “securocrats” and departments pushing for growth — has been high ahead of the trip. Government comments on China are workshopped carefully before publication. Earlier this month, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told POLITICO her work on Beijing involves looking at “transnational repression” and “espionage threats.” But when Chancellor Rachel Reeves met China’s Finance Minister He Lifeng in Davos last week to tee up Starmer’s visit, the U.K. Treasury did not publicize the meeting — beyond a little-noticed photo on its Flickr account. SLOW BOAT TO CHINA Whatever the controversies, Labour’s China stance has been steadily taking shape since before Starmer took office in 2024. Labour drew inspiration from its sister party in Australia and the U.S. Democrats, both of which had regular meetings with Beijing. Party aides argued that after a brief “golden era” under Conservative PM David Cameron, Britain engaged less with China than with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The result of Labour’s thinking was the policy of “three Cs” — “challenge, compete, and cooperate.” A procession of visits to Beijing followed, most notably Reeves last year, culminating in Starmer’s trip. His National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell was involved in planning across much of 2025, even travelling to meet China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, in November. Starmer teed up this week’s visit with a December speech arguing the “binary” view of China had persisted for too long. He promised to engage with Beijing carefully while taking a “more transactional approach to pretty well everything.”  The result was that this visit has long been locked in; just as Labour aides argue the London embassy decision was set in train in 2018, when the Tory government gave diplomatic consent for the site. Labour ministers “just want to normalize” the fact of dealing with China, said the senior Westminster figure quoted above. Newton-Smith added: “I think the view is that the government’s engagement with eyes wide open is the right strategy. And under the previous government, we did lose out.” But for each person who praises the re-engagement, there are others who say it has left Britain vulnerable while begging for scraps at China’s table. Hawks argue the hard details behind the “three Cs” were long nebulous, while Labour’s long-awaited “audit” of U.K.-China relations was delayed before being folded briefly into a wider security document. “Every single bad decision now can be traced back to the first six months,” argued the third person familiar with planning quoted above. “They were absolutely ill-prepared and made a series of decisions that have boxed them into a corner.” They added: “The government lacks the killer instinct to deal with China. It’s not in their DNA.” Luke de Pulford, a human rights campaigner and director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, argued the Tories had engaged with China — Foreign Secretary James Cleverly visited in 2023 — and Labour was simply going much further. “China is pursuing an enterprise to reshape the global order in its own image, and to that end, to change our institutions and way of life to the extent that they’re an obstacle to it,” he said. “That’s what they’re up to — and we keep falling for it.” END OF THE OLD ORDER? His language may be less dramatic, but Starmer’s visit to China does have some parallels with Canada. Carney’s trip was the first by a Canadian PM since 2017, and he and Xi agreed a “new strategic partnership.” Later at Davos, the Canadian PM talked of “the end of a pleasant fiction” and warned multilateral institutions such as the United Nations are under threat. One British industry figure who attended Davos said of Carney’s speech: “It was great. Everyone was talking about it. Someone said to me that was the best and most poignant speech they’d ever seen at the World Economic Forum. That may be a little overblown, but I guess most of the speeches at the WEF are quite dull.” The language used by Starmer, a former human rights lawyer devoted to multilateralism, has not been totally dissimilar. Britain could no longer “look only to international institutions to uphold our values and interests,” he said in December. “We must do it ourselves through deals and alliances.” But while some in the U.K. government privately agree with Carney’s point, the real difference is the two men’s approach to Trump. Starmer will temper his messaging carefully to avoid upsetting either his Chinese hosts or the U.S., even as Trump throws semi-regular rocks at Britain. To Peterson, this is unavoidable. “China, the U.S. and the EU are likely to continue to dominate global economic growth for the foreseeable future,” she said. “Starmer’s choice is not whether to engage, but how.” Esther Webber contributed reporting.