Keir Starmer returned from his meeting with Donald Trump in Washington on Friday morning convinced that he had enjoyed the best week of his premiership. He had good reason to be satisfied and not just because he safely delivered a letter from the King. Starmer’s government has lacked purpose and definition. It is unpopular in the country. Rachel Reeves’s tax-raising Budget alienated the business community, and the economy is stagnant.

Starmer himself has been caricatured as a north London progressive, a “Corbynista in an Islington suit” (© Boris Johnson), a liberal human rights lawyer by training and instinct but not a natural politician. He is or has been all these things, but he is something else as well. What he has demonstrated in recent days is that he is a cold-eyed realist, a necessary condition for a British prime minister whose country is menaced by hostile foreign powers and internally divided.

We knew Starmer was ruthless and motivated by personal ambition. But was he prepared to take big risks in the national interest, demonstrate Britain’s commitment to defence and hard power and, therefore, help shape the new cultural and political realities of our age? Or would Labour under his leadership continue to flounder like so many other centre-left governments in the West, most recently Olof Scholz’s Social Democrats who were abjectly defeated in the German federal elections?

Starmer and his advisers used to believe that, once in power, Labour would form an international progressive alliance with other “sister” parties: Scholz’s SPD, Joe Biden’s Democrats, Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party in Australia. Labour always believes in the coming “social democratic moment” that never quite arrives. At least Starmer now accepts the era of progressive hegemony is over. What was left of liberal idealism and Tony Blair’s mission “to reorder the world” after America’s ignominious retreat from Afghanistan died on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine.

Throughout the West far and hard right parties and movements, some pro-Kremlin, are rising as disaffected voters turn away from the mainstream. Donald Trump’s election for a second term confirmed the emergence of a new era in the West led by the populist, anti-woke right in alliance with Silicon Valley plutocrats. Trump, JD Vance and Maga neo-isolationism have shattered the post-war security guarantee to Europe. At the United Nations’ General Assembly, the United States voted with Russia, Belarus and North Korea, and against a resolution reaffirming the territorial integrity of Ukraine on the third anniversary of Putin’s full-scale invasion. China abstained.

These are dangerous, unsentimental times. They demand not a performative politics of left-wing righteousness and the obligatory pronouncements about “international law” and “the rules-based order”, with which Labour people are so comfortable, but hard-edged Hobbesian realism. Without ever appearing entirely comfortable Starmer showed in Washington that he could flatter and indulge a capricious US President but without selling out Ukraine or Britain’s national interest.

The planned increase in defence expenditure and proposed cut to the once-totemic overseas aid budget is what the Oxford academic economist Paul Collier calls a “signalling action”, the first of Starmer’s premiership. Before the announcement, Starmer made no effort to reassure liberals or senior “soft left” colleagues such as Ed Miliband, the net zero evangelist, or the already marginalised Anneliese Dodds, the international development minister, who resigned in protest on Friday. The blowback from David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, Starmer’s old friends in the NGO community, Dodds and other Labour MPs was as expected. It was notable that, the day after Starmer’s statement in the Commons, he and Reeves published articles justifying the increase in defence spending in hostile right-wing newspapers. They knew the cut to the foreign aid budget would be popular with the right and more straightforward than cutting the welfare, education or health budgets. Further and deeper cuts to unprotected departments will follow but must wait for the spending review later this month [March].

Starmer and his chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, speak repeatedly of the need to put country before party. The proposal to raise defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, and then by 3% in the next parliament, is the action that signals the government’s priority is national security. This is what it means to put the country first. Nothing else is as important. Rachel Reeves has said that economic growth is the government’s “number one priory”. That is wrong: growth is not an end but a means to achieve economic, military and political security.

For all the incoherence and dysfunction of the government’s first 100 days in power, which I wrote about here before Christmas, Labour under Starmer is at last showing that it understands what is at stake and what sacrifices will be required as the western-alliance system is upended by Trump’s pitiless, transactional style. The humiliation of President Zelensky in the Oval Office revealed the true character of this new American administration. The world is being remade and Britain and other European powers are being forced to reassess how they defend themselves and how they might work more closely together on security as America ruthlessly pursues its interests.

In November, Bill Gates visited Starmer and Reeves in Downing Street. He wanted to persuade them to reinstate the UK’s commitment to spend 0.7 per cent of national income on international aid and development. Before it was abolished by Boris Johnson, the Department of International Development(DFID) worked closely with the Gates Foundation; Britain was one of six original donors to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (Gavi), and the largest sovereign donor to its core programmes. Gates and I met when he was in London, and he spoke to me nostalgically about the pre-pandemic years, a period he said that was defined by international collaboration on foreign aid and philanthropy: child mortality and rates of infectious diseases were halved and Gavi immunised more than 1.1 billion children.

The harsh truth is that Gates personifies the liberal optimism of a dead era. JD Vance has denounced his Foundation, and other quasi-state, non-profit organisations like it, as “cancers on American society” and champions of “well-endowed leftism”. When Reeves did not raise spending on international development in the Budget, Gates said Labour was withdrawing from its overseas aid leadership role and this “leaves us all at greater risk”.

But politics is about priorities. After this week we are much clearer about the strategic objective and purpose of the government. We have reached a turning point: Britain’s version of Olaf Sholz’s “Zeitenwende” which he announced after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This is just the beginning of a long process of rearmament and reindustrialisation. Spending on defence will have to rise further and deep cuts will follow, particularly to the welfare budget and bureaucratic state. There will be more unrest and resistance on the Labour benches. But the course is set.