To celebrate Commonwealth Day, on Monday, March 10, King Charles III shared a curated playlist on Apple Music. From Bob Marley to Kylie Minogue, via Grace Jones, the British monarch wanted to celebrate tunes that will take listeners on "a musical journey." This was Charles III in his element: using the usual soft power of the royal family, a symbolic and ceremonial influence. Like his mother, Elizabeth II (1926-2022) before him, the king is keen to maintain the link between the 56 members of the Commonwealth, a very disparate club of ex-colonies of the United Kingdom.

But since Donald Trump has been busy destroying the Western liberal order inherited from the post-war era, by dropping Ukraine or flaunting his territorial ambitions over Greenland and Canada, Keir Starmer's Labour government has been assigning Charles III far more serious and risky missions. Downing Street and the Foreign Office rightly saw him as their trump card for avoiding punitive tariffs on British exports to the United States, or for preserving the "special relationship" so dear to British diplomats and leaders. The monarch's official invitation to Trump's second state visit to the UK played a large part in the success of Starmer's first visit to the White House on February 27.

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