Burnham seeks common ground with Trump at UN summit meeting

Andy Burnham arrived in New York on Tuesday carrying the weight of a first meeting with Donald Trump—a moment that has long been a test of any new British prime minister, but one that felt especially fraught given the unpredictability of the current American president. The two men were in the city for the annual United Nations General Assembly, a gathering that had become, for Burnham, a stage for both diplomatic overture and careful navigation of a relationship that remained, in his telling, fundamentally sound.

The prime minister had spoken to Trump twice by phone since taking office in July, conversations that Downing Street had characterized as productive. Those calls had apparently established enough rapport that Burnham could speak to reporters on his flight across the Atlantic with genuine optimism. "We've found a connection," he said. "I will go with where I feel it's right, to meet him where he is at, and search for that common ground, which I'm sure we'll find." When asked about the state of UK-US relations more broadly, he offered an unqualified assessment: "as strong as it's ever been."

Burnham had travelled with his wife, Marie-France Van Heel, and his schedule in New York included a speech to the UN General Assembly focused on artificial intelligence—a technology he saw as both opportunity and peril. In his remarks, he planned to make the case for closer international cooperation on AI, to call for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine, and to push for renewed efforts to end the conflict in the Middle East. "What happens abroad impacts each and every one of us at home," he told reporters. The UK and US were also set to announce a new AI and Autonomy partnership, one designed to protect critical national infrastructure through artificial intelligence technology.

The timing of that announcement was deliberate. Just days before the meeting, the two countries had conducted a military exercise that underscored their technological ambitions and their capacity to innovate together. For the first time, the UK and US had fired an American torpedo from a British undersea drone—a 12-metre vessel called Excalibur, built in Plymouth. The torpedo, which Downing Street described as "heavyweight" and designed to sink ships and deep-diving submarines, represented a breakthrough in protecting vital infrastructure like the deep-sea data cables that carry global communications. Neither country had previously launched a torpedo from an uncrewed underwater vessel; the exercise was being framed as evidence of what the two nations could achieve when they combined their expertise.

Yet beneath the carefully constructed narrative of partnership and common purpose lay a more complicated reality. The Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey was already preparing to criticize the AI partnership, arguing that it fell short of the scale of the threat and risked making Britain more dependent on a Trump administration he characterized as "in the pocket of the tech bros." Davey would call for a global pause on superintelligent AI and propose a new International AI Safety Agency—a direct challenge to the government's approach.

There was also the matter of the Chagos Islands, a territorial dispute that had become entangled with Trump's priorities. In April, the UK and Mauritius had paused a deal to hand over the islands and lease back the joint US-UK military base on Diego Garcia after Trump withdrew his support. Burnham had spoken to Mauritian Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam on Monday, and when reporters pressed him on what he had said, whether he supported the deal, and whether he had a plan to convince Trump to back it, his answer was notably cautious. He said he had assured Ramgoolam that the UK remained determined to secure the long-term operation of the base, which he called crucial to British security and that of its allies. "At the moment we don't have" a resolution, he acknowledged, but he committed to working toward one. It was a promise without a timeline, a commitment without a clear path forward—the kind of diplomatic language that acknowledged the limits of his leverage with a president who had already shown he could reshape the terms of negotiation simply by withdrawing his consent.