The government’s announcement that it will crank up defence spending and shrivel the international aid budget amounts to a big shift in strategy, posture and political positioning.

Take a look at the Labour Party’s election manifesto, written less than a year ago, if you would like proof of that.

On page 125, it says: “Labour is committed to restoring development spending at the level of 0.7 per cent of gross national income as soon as fiscal circumstances allow.”

The party is now committing to doing the precise opposite – cutting development spending by the same amount by which it had promised to raise it.

There is nothing like an outspoken American president and an imminent visit to the White House to sharpen the mind – and hey presto, along came this announcement just as the prime minister packs his shirts for his trip across the Atlantic.

Along came the thumbs-up from the Trump administration not long later.

But it is also true that there has been a growing recognition for some time and across several parties that more money had to be spent on defence.

The prime minister has taken to recalling how the Berlin Wall coming down made him feel. “It felt as if we were casting off the shackles of history, a continent united by freedom and democracy,” as he puts it – contrasting that with the reality of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

A wider critique along these lines has been crystallising for some time: the sense that the 1990s were a holiday from history, as Jonathan Freedland called it, and that the end of the Cold War had created a peace dividend where defence budgets could atrophy and the money could be spent on hospitals and schools, for instance.

Instead, not only is there war in Europe, there is an occupant of the White House with seemingly little regard for the American security umbrella this continent has relied upon since World War Two.

Little wonder, then, that we have seen a blitz of the jitters in European capitals as presidents and prime ministers try to work out what it may or may not mean.

The task facing Starmer – the second strand of the European tag team of leaders to visit Washington, after President Emmanuel Macron on Monday – is to attempt to mould President Donald Trump’s position.

Over the coming weeks and months, can a deal be done where the war stops, Ukraine does not feel defeated, Europe does not feel imperilled and transatlantic relations are as near to conventional as possible?

It is not going to be easy.

The prime minister’s trip to the White House is but one building block in developing answers to these questions.

And then, over the following weekend, Starmer will host a gathering of European leaders to reflect on where the conversations so far have taken us.

President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected in Washington soon too.

The next few weeks could prove crucial.

The thing is, there hasn’t been any, or next to none of it.

This is a problem, for the daily lives of millions of us, and the government’s prospects and popularity, when, as the prime minister puts it in an article in The Times today, “growth is the defining mission of this government”.

The economy is coughing, spluttering and wheezing – “the sickness of stagnation and decline” as Sir Keir Starmer puts it — and the government’s critics – including, privately, some of its own senior ministers – reflect now that their doomy and gloomy language early on did not help, and perhaps made things worse.

So now they are trying to change the vibe. The talk will emphasise action, dynamism and optimism.

Here are eight words, in four quotes from the Chancellor Rachel Reeves’ speech to business leaders this morning which give you a sense of that:

“Huge potential.”

“Exciting developments.”

“Great companies.”

“Fundamental strengths.”

The mantra from folk at the top of government is their craving for what they call “visible proofpoints”.

This is Westminster speak for cranes in the sky and shovels in the ground – things they can point at which people might associate with progress.

But here is the rub: so many of these ideas will be keenly contested.

That is precisely why some of them carry the distinct aroma of déjà vu – ideas tried but never actually delivered before.

Take the expansion of Heathrow Airport. There has been talk of a third runway in west London since not long after the Wright brothers were first airborne.

Now there will be more talk of it and no planes for ages, even if a planning application is actually successful.

I hear that an internal piece of work commissioned within government concluded the new runway would not be finished before 2040 and the biggest rise in passengers would be people in transit – getting off one plane and immediately getting on another – and so some wonder how much benefit that would actually bring the country.

All those arguments begin now, or start again now.

But what the government wants to achieve here is deliver a massive signal of intent – and a willingness to embrace those inevitable arguments and win them.

There will be more of them, and noisy ones too, with their plans, again not original, to economically turbo charge the areas around and between Oxford and Cambridge.

A corridor of massive potential but pathetic transport connections is the thrust of the argument – how come it takes two and a half hours by train to make a journey between two cities 66 miles apart?

Now there is talk of a dual carriageway, better rail services, new homes, new reservoirs; a splurge of busyness to transform the region into “Britain’s Silicon Valley”.

There is little doubting the government’s ambition: the prime minister is comparing his vision to the deregulation of the City of London under Lady Thatcher and the revolutions of globalisation under New Labour.

The big questions are will it work, and what happens if it doesn’t?

So many western economies are weathering an era of the scars of the financial crisis, conflict, pandemic and the colossal and rapid transfer of economic heft to China and the east.

Sclerotic has become the new normal, with huge consequences politically, economically and socially – how we see ourselves, how many imagine the future.

Can, this time, a big shove from the government turn things around?