British Foreign Minister David Cameron headed for a visit to the United States to persuade the authorities to unblock aid to Ukraine, but his mission appears to have failed, The Guardian reports.
The minister was not even able to meet with Congress Speaker Mike Johnson, who theoretically could have put the package to a vote. Instead, Johnson was attacked by far-right Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green, who renewed her threats to hold a special vote to remove him from office for agreeing to the vote in the first place.
At a private dinner at Trump’s Florida base, Mar-a-Lago, Cameron urged the former US president to acknowledge that it was in Washington’s interest for all NATO members to meet or exceed the defence spending target by the NATO summit in July this year. He hoped Trump would signal a change of course by at least facilitating his meeting with Johnson.
At a joint news conference in Washington on Tuesday, Cameron and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken again called on Congress to unblock military aid. Cameron insisted he did not come to the United States to meddle in domestic American politics, but said he was willing to drop the “diplomatic language” because he is so emotional about the need for the US and Europe to come together to defend Ukraine. Cameron 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?
However, Cameron’s arguments – both rational and emotional – appear to have run into an ongoing power struggle within the Republican Party, as hardliners opposed to continued financial support for Ukraine threaten to oust Johnson if he puts the aid package to a vote when Congress returns from its two-week recess. Taylor Greene wrote in a fresh attack on Johnson:
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.
Cameron is the latest representative of foreign governments to call on the US Senate to vote on the aid package, which is expected to pass if Congress is allowed to vote. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on Sunday that Ukraine would lose its battle without further US aid, including needed money for defence development.
Cameron took a calculated risk by flying to Florida to try to persuade Trump to change course as they are at odds over Brexit (which the former PM opposed but Trump enthusiastically supported). The minister defended his meeting with Trump as a “perfectly proper” meeting with an opposition figure and said it covered “a number of important geopolitical topics”.
Trump’s campaign team said the dinner discussed “the upcoming US and UK elections, policy issues related to Brexit, the need for NATO countries to meet their defence spending needs and stopping the killing in Ukraine”.
Trump’s foreign policy advisers argue that if elected president, Trump could end the war within 24 hours, largely through territorial concessions to Russia, including handing it permanent control of Crimea and Donbas.
In Washington, Cameron cited decades of security co-operation 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 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 our 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 argues that the US aid package of $60 billion is excellent value for money, since for about 5% of the US defence budget, almost half of Russia’s pre-war military hardware has been destroyed at no loss to the Americans.
