Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for free
Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
The writer is an FT contributing editor
Sir Keir Starmer imagined himself a domestic policy prime minister. The mission was to revive the economy and refurbish the public realm. Nearly five months after the election, Starmer is confronting Britain’s Zeitenwende. With Donald Trump’s victory in the US election, the last of the familiar pillars of the nation’s postwar foreign policy has now been upended.
The pressing danger is clear enough in the rising tempo of the war in Ukraine. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has deployed North Korean troops. In the US, Joe Biden is pre-empting Trump’s eagerness to “cut a deal” with Putin by using the last months of his presidency to step up military aid to Kyiv. Washington and London have lifted a bar on the use of western-supplied long-range missiles against military targets in Russia. Putin is rattling the nuclear sabre. Britain’s military chiefs mutter privately that their forces would struggle to fight a European war lasting more than a few weeks.
Ukraine, however, is only part of the much bigger story. The international order is cracking almost everywhere. The world is a more dangerous place than at any time since the end of the cold war. Britain is particularly vulnerable. The self-inflicted wound of Brexit sundered the close economic and political partnership with the EU. Putin’s war has torn down Europe’s security architecture: national borders, Russia has declared, can be changed by force.
For his part, Trump has cast doubt on Europe’s long-standing US security guarantee. The president-elect may not quit the Nato alliance, but his eagerness to do a deal with Putin promises to badly undermine it. The alliance has been the keystone of British security. Without Nato, one senior official confides, Britain does not have a defence policy. All this before it begins to think about China’s strategic challenge to western power.
Starmer has commissioned a strategic defence review, calling in a host of experts led by Lord George Robertson, the former Nato secretary-general. It’s a necessary start, but an inadequate one. The hallowed tradition of such reviews is that they pretend to reconcile grandiose ambitions with economic austerity. The result is that Britain has a Potemkin village military retaining the emblems of a pocket superpower, but without the necessary hard capabilities. The present disordered world does not leave room for such tricks.
The grim conclusions of a recent report from the House of Lords international relations and defence committee are viewed within Whitehall as wholly uncontroversial. The UK’s armed forces, it said, have neither the “mass”, resilience nor internal coherence for a sustained high-intensity war. In the absence of a missile defence system, the nation’s critical infrastructure is highly vulnerable.
The hollowing has left an army smaller than at any time since the Napoleonic wars, a navy that cannot afford an adequate strike force for its flagship aircraft carriers and Royal Air Force pilots denied flight training by budgetary constraints. These are not gaps that will be filled by a small uptick in defence spending from the present 2.3 per cent of national income. Britain, it should be obvious, needs to prepare for a prolonged rise in the resources devoted to the nation’s security.
The carriers reflect persistent delusions about Britain’s global role. It is only a few years since Boris Johnson was proclaiming “Global Britain’s” tilt to Asia. Absurdly, the navy lacks the destroyers, frigates and submarines needed to defend its flagships. A hard-headed review would conclude Britain cannot afford status symbols when the threat is on its own continent.
A brave government would also ask whether it is wise to spend so many billions on a nuclear system maintained by the US when it lacks funds to buy enough of the drones and digital systems dominating the battlefield in Ukraine. The big danger is that the review will see arguments about how to maintain existing capabilities as a substitute for recognition of the big picture.
The world is a different place. Europe has left behind the era when national defence was an afterthought. Britain’s two most important sets of relationships are in a state of disrepair. Wars are being fought in cyber space, on social media and through political subversion and sabotage as well as on conventional battlefields. A reshuffling of budgets — and a necessary commitment to significantly increase them — will make sense only if they are set in a fundamental reassessment of Britain’s foreign and economic policy. Diplomacy, intelligence, trade policy and controls of advanced technologies must be counted alongside the military hardware.
So must be alliances. Britain, of course, should do what it can to ensure Nato survives the Trump presidency. But the compelling reality is that Europeans will be required to do more to organise their own defence. Britain, along with France, Germany and Poland should be at the centre of the effort. A bilateral defence accord with Germany is a start. So too is a proposal to forge a security pact with the EU. These, though, are baby steps.
There is also a big political task at home. Building a new national security framework requires voters to wake up to the transformation in the geopolitical landscape. Russia’s war on Ukraine has yet to bring general recognition of the dangers that Putin’s revanchism could trigger a wider European war. If Starmer’s government is to begin rebuilding Britain’s security, the nation will have to be persuaded that it needs to pay for it.