The fantasy of British defence We can offer Ukraine nothing but dreams

British party politics has in recent decades become an exercise in evading reality, only dealing with the world — and our country’s material conditions — as our leaders would wish them to be. Westminster’s chaotic reaction to Washington’s abrupt, if long-telegraphed, about-turn on the Ukraine war and European security reveals that our rulers are belatedly discovering the cost of inhabiting a dreamworld. This is a far graver crisis than Suez, in which Britain was forcefully shown that, rather than being an equal partner in global affairs, it was merely a subordinate client. Today’s events, proceeding so rapidly that almost any commentary is immediately out of date, shows we are not even that. I cannot think of a British government in my lifetime more hostage to events outside of its control. In the sudden loss of decades-long defence assumptions, it is a crisis closer to that of 1940 than 1956.

Yet having failed to read the runes decades ago, or even since 2022, Britain will not create a functioning new security architecture over the course of this week. If we were as close to war as Keir Starmer suggests, the Government would not be proceeding with the ruinous Chagos deal nor Net Zero: Britain’s need to rethink its strategic assumptions over the coming years must be distinguished from Labour’s desire to strike a patriotic pose for narrow electoral purposes.

Given this, the bombastic talk from Britain’s cohort of ageing centrists of sending troops to enforce a peace deal in Ukraine seems to validate Kyiv’s policy of primarily mobilising late-middle-aged men: beyond the Westminster bubble, there is little appetite to commit our broken Army to a task far beyond its material abilities. In the last few decades, the British Army has entirely refashioned itself as a colonial gendarmerie to serve in America’s imperial wars; in Iraq and Afghanistan, it failed even at that. The war in Ukraine is one of industrial capacity and manpower, both of which, through decades of political failure, Britain now entirely lacks. Even if the Army entirely reconfigures itself for this new task, devoting all its resources to the effort, it will not be ready for three to five years. Even then, that single task is all it would be able to do: patrolling the ceasefire lines of eastern Ukraine will mean withdrawal from the deterrence effort in Estonia, and the absence of a strategic reserve for an emergency. In any case, Starmer’s prevarication, even now, over raising defence spending to 2.5% of GDP before 2030 puts even this Lilliputian deployment beyond reach.

So all this week’s drama was just another exercise in fantasy defence policy. As one observer has correctly noted, the mooted deployment would not be a peacekeeping mission, traditionally understood as the imposition of forces by a greater power between two weaker warring sides which have agreed to disengage. In reality, it would be a deterrent effort which, overmatched by both hostile Russian forces and our Ukrainian allies, entirely lacks the ability to deter: a vulnerable tripwire that summons no response. The United States has already firmly stated that any European forces in Ukraine will not be a Nato mission, and will not be granted US support; Russia has warned that in negotiating a peace deal with Washington, it will not accept troops from any Nato country in Ukraine. In proposing a British mission against Russia’s will, without US backing, Starmer is pledging Kyiv something that is not in his power to offer. It is akin to his recent promise to Ukraine of a century-long security pact. Who can say that Ukraine will still exist in 100 years? Who can say that the United Kingdom will? Short of hard power, Britain can only offer dream policies, so abstract and unmoored from reality as to be meaningless. Whatever Britain may finally be able to offer at the end of the decade, if hard decisions are made now, will happen either with the joint approval of Washington and Moscow — or not at all. The hard truth is that, without American backing, Britain has now run out of road in supporting Ukraine’s war effort.

The past week, then, has served as a test of our leaders’ ability to distinguish between high-sounding but content-free sentiment, and objective reality: it is a test that most of Westminster has failed. As the military historian Robert Lyman, long a critic of Britain’s self-disarmament, observes, this week’s discourse has been “embarrassing rubbish, political sound bites by empty people allowing them to sound tough and virtuous”. The week’s events centre around the gravest matter imaginable, concerning questions of the nation’s security and ultimately survival. To see a political homunculus like Ed Davey, leader of the country’s fourth most popular party and best known for dancing on TikTok, condemning any expressions of caution as Putinist bootlicking extinguishes whatever credibility he may have possessed as a serious figure.

Instead, the sober, cautious appraisal of Britain’s dwindling military options by the Liberal Democrat MP and strategic analyst Mike Martin may be read as a quiet rebuke of his absurd party leader. As Martin notes, the idea of any immediate British troop deployment is both “premature and strategically illiterate”. Furthermore, he adds, “‘fixing’ European troops in Ukraine makes Poland, Finland and the Baltic states much more vulnerable” — by denuding the EU and what remains of Nato’s ability to defend its own borders, in sending its entire military capacity off on a vulnerable and unsupported mission to a distant front. It is for this precise reason that Poland, a Ukraine hawk and serious military player on the front line against a resurgent Russia, has disavowed the proposal: such sober realism is almost entirely absent among our own political class.

Few Westminster personalities have emerged from this crisis well. Beyond Martin, one exception is the Conservative MP Nick Timothy, who has accurately observed that the only credible response to the current crisis is not empty pledges to Ukraine now, but a rapid effort of rearmament and industrialisation to defend Britain in the future. Labour’s essay-crisis approach to national security — dashing around making promises to Kyiv it cannot keep, while attempting to convince Washington to commit to a “backstop” it has already rejected — shows our government refusing to accept the reality of the world in which it lives. At a time of national crisis, the British state is as convincing in its flurry of businesslike activity as children in a nursery playing shop.

It is much of a muchness with the European leaders sitting around a table in Paris, like a spouse refusing to accept that their marriage is over: we’ll change, they promise, we’ll get in shape and commit more to the relationship. But Washington has moved on, eyeing more attractive partners. For the Americans, Russia is a serious power with which they can deal, if not as equals, then with a level of respect that Europe does not deserve. Had Europe not shuttered its industrial capacity, had it seriously rearmed in 2022, its leaders would be in a position to offer Ukraine security guarantees now. That Europe chose Estonia’s Kaja Kallas, former prime minister of a country whose bellicose rhetoric against Russia was backed by a population the size of Birmingham, as its foreign policy chief reveals the continent’s preference for high-sounding rhetoric over action, stern words concealing empty armouries. Less than a year ago, Kallas was engaging in public fantasies of carving up Russia into weak ethnic statelets; now she’s begging Washington for a place at the table to decide Europe’s future. It is our fate to be ruled by unserious people, and to suffer in consequence.

Europe’s weakness, it must be remembered, is as much a product of American policy as of our own fecklessness. After the Cold War, it suited Washington to keep Europe as a subordinate partner, just as it suited Europe to fritter away the peace dividend on its own imaginary vision of world order. Our class of European securocrats, most fawningly servile in Britain, were elevated to their roles precisely because of their commitment to dependency: Washington has now abandoned them as abruptly as it did its Afghan equivalents, yet unlike Afghanistan they remain in role, servants without a master. They hold conferences that cannot decide anything, because any decisions suitable to the moment are beyond their reach; they move phantom armies across maps purely as an exercise in signalling resolve to the Russians, gravity to the Americans and competence to their own voters. As in every aspect of post-Cold War Europe’s disastrous governance, it is the people who created the crisis who remain in control. To even admit their failure, and of the worldview that led to it, is to accelerate their replacement. So, for now, the same old rituals are performed, the same mantras intoned to stave off disaster. Yet their patron has turned his back, and their publics increasingly hate them: Europe’s leaders are Ceaușescus on the balcony, nervously waving at the crowd.

It is impossible, therefore, to take seriously Labour MPs like Paulette Hamilton, until now best known for mulling an armed black uprising against the British state, urging conscription of Britain’s “disengaged youth” to defend Ukraine’s borders. Like 20th-century mass democracy, the ability of a country to wage total war through mass mobilisation is the product of a society which has spent decades, or centuries, ironing out internal differences, and building a sense of common identity. Like Hamilton, the voices now trying to summon up a martial spirit among their young are precisely the ones who have eroded this same common identity: something they achieved in a single generation. Their frantic exhortations now prove they do not even understand the new and fractured country they have so effectively created. In the same week the Government attempted to reignite residual patriotism over Ukraine, both Dominic Cummings and a King’s College London professor mused on the likelihood of serious civil conflict in Britain within a decade. One may dispute the specifics, but the fact the issue can credibly be raised at all highlights the dangerous internal divisions preventing Britain from now engaging in a major war — at least with any chance of success.

After all, the Army’s prime recruiting grounds, the post-industrial cities of northern England, were just last summer the hotbed of violent revolt against the British state: it is doubtful that the same young men will fight to preserve the current dispensation. The state, in its current form, does not command the loyalty to persuade young men to go to war. Nor does it have the power to compel them: any such attempt would look more like the Irish conscription crisis of 1918 than the mass mobilisation of 1939. The top-down party political and diplomatic trends driving Britain deeper into involvement in Ukraine are now at dangerous odds with the growing bottom-up disenchantment with the existing Westminster system. Britain’s internal dysfunction not only hollows out the country’s will to fight; it is also an easy internal vulnerability for Russia to exploit, to bend Westminster to its will — or indeed, for Washington’s new revisionist regime to do the same. All told, it is difficult to imagine Britain entering a conflict for which it is entirely unprepared, led by a government which is overwhelmingly despised, and exiting with its unloved political system still intact.

As with Britain’s domestic politics, the country’s leaders avoided essential strategic reforms when they were unpalatable but controllable processes. Now, heightened and intensified, both have escaped Westminster’s control, risking unmanageable disaster. Because its American patron has lost interest, Ukraine has lost the war, turning a grindingly slow collapse into a sudden hard peace. The commentary from Westminster, raw with shock and genuine disbelief, is the product of a political class which has until now happily enjoyed a parallel reality of its own construction, where Western resolve was firm and Russia was always a few short months from collapse. Any suggestions, even from America’s most senior generals, of negotiating peace while Ukraine commanded a brief position of strength were shot down as defeatism — or worse, Putinism. Through their evasion of reality, Ukraine’s maximalist foreign cheerleaders now own the country’s harsh ceasefire terms. There is a lesson here, if they are willing to learn it. If all this sound and fury results in Europe finally being able to defend itself and the interests of its people, engaging with the hard world of reality, then it will all have been for the good. Our leaders may either accept that the world they live in has vanished, as swiftly and irretrievably as a comforting dream, and control their descent into the new order. Or they may continue their reverie, only to risk sudden, total collapse.

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Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

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