Donald Trump’s shake-up of the old world order may have sent shockwaves through Europe, but it has provided a chance for Nigel Farage to give the clearest definition yet of what Reform’s foreign policy would look like.
Reform’s platform is slowly developing as the party joins up the dots on economic, domestic and overseas positions. Its approach to Russia is more nuanced than a year ago. Whether leader Nigel Farage’s Trump-at-all-costs foreign policy can survive contact with the electorate is another question.
At a news conference on Wednesday, Farage said Trump’s threat to use military force to take Greenland is “outrageous”, but unlike other British politicians he also said the ends justify the means, arguing the US President has legitimate security concerns over the Danish territory. No one else in the UK is making that argument.
“As ever with things that Trump says, they may sound outrageous – and in the case of potentially using force, they are – but there is a point behind it,” Farage said. “If he were to do this using military force, that probably would be the end of Nato, which is why he won’t do it, in my opinion.”
Keir Starmer has spent the week trying to shrug off his natural instincts as a lawyer to avoid condemning Trump for breaking international law. Farage appears to want to tear up the international rule book entirely.
Trump has consistently shown his disdain for international groupings, snubbing the G20, rebalancing Nato, and preferring a transactional leader-to-leader approach.
Farage also has his eye on walking away from post-war international institutions like the International Court of Justice, the World Health Organisation and the European Convention on Human Rights.
“We are moving into a very new world of national self-interest, where countries will put their own national self-interest first,” Farage said. “And that, by the way, will not be a bad thing, provided those countries are democratically run and have accountable leaderships. The danger actually is not the existence of nation states. The danger is when nation states are not democratic, or the leaders are not accountable.”
But if Farage is now pursuing an individualist foreign policy emphasising national sovereignty, self-reliance, and prioritising the national interest, there is an obvious question the day after UK and France signed a declaration of intent to deploy peacekeeping troops to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal. Would he lean towards isolationism as well and refuse to engage in future foreign conflicts?
“I’m not a pacifist,” Farage said when asked by The i Paper if he would decline to commit British troops in future conflicts. “If there are times when we should and we do need to use our military. But I was vehemently opposed to the Iraq War going back over 20 years ago; deeply sceptical, in many ways, about Afghanistan, because I couldn’t, in either case, see what the exit strategy was.”
Farage accused Starmer of pledging “a modern-day British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) without the facilities to do it”. He was referring to British forces that maintained a presence in Germany decades after the Second World War, finally ceasing to exist under the BAOR name in 1994.
“If lots and lots of countries were involved, great, but the Germans aren’t going to send anybody,” he said, and as if to emphasis his point, added: “[Italian Prime Minister] Giorgia Meloni was having a cigarette outside and the Americans are saying, ‘Jolly good, chaps. Off you go’.”
Farage has significantly toughened his language against the Kremlin in recent months after Labour’s accusations that he’s too soft on Vladimir Putin appear to have cut through to voters.
He called Putin “a very bad dude” in an October interview and again on Wednesday said Putin was the second biggest loser after Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro had been deposed from Caracas because it deprives the Russian president of a potential bolt-hole if he is deposed from power.
His Reform base tends to poll sceptically when asked about sustained British support for Ukraine without US guarantees. But although Farage has in the past backed Kyiv’s aspiration to join Nato, he has also previously said the expansion of Nato and the European Union both “provoked” Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Those comments, made during the election campaign last year, went down badly with the majority of voters who back continuing support for Ukraine.
“Bold interventions on foreign affairs can be politically risky. Farage’s comments on the Ukraine war towards the end of the 2024 general election campaign proved unpopular with voters and may have even capped their support in that result,” Scarlett Maguire, founder of Merlin Strategies pollsters, told The i Paper.
But if Farage is taking a more nuanced approach to international affairs, Labour is affecting not to notice. Within moments of Prime Minister’s Questions kicking off in the House of Commons on Wednesday lunchtime, Starmer poked fun at Reform UK, suggesting Wednesday would be a day of jubilation for them because it is the day Russia celebrates Christmas.
Starmer has put a series of sharp dividing lines with Reform at the heart of his attempts to revive Labour’s and his own political fortunes this year. Foreign policy may not win many votes come May’s local elections, but being on the right side of the ideological argument will provide the backdrop to domestic concerns.
Farage is gambling voters – awe-struck by the new world order – will come round to his way of thinking. His opponents are wagering they won’t.
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