But now, all the Russian tourists are gone and the border traffic has ground to a halt. The Allegro train no longer runs. Finnish media recently called Imatra “the emptying city”. Its sprawling Tsar Outlet Village, which once catered to Russian shoppers, is deserted. Imatra’s economy, already reeling from the pandemic, is seriously ailing. The city has an unemployment rate of 16.4%, well above the national rate of just under 12%. And South Karelia is said to be losing an estimated €1 million in tourism revenue each day.

Many residents say it’s a worthwhile sacrifice. The border with Russia has been closed since late 2023, when the Finnish government accused Russia of weaponizing migrants by sending waves of asylum seekers into Finland. Helsinki claimed this was retaliation for the Nordic country’s decision to join Nato earlier that year, a choice made in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Finnish government responded by closing the entire 1,340-kilometer border and announcing the construction of a 200-kilometer border fence. The forbidding metal barrier was finished last month, but the beefing up of security continues. On Monday, the Finnish government announced that it was procuring one million anti-personnel landmines for the border, following a decision by Helsinki and other regional capitals to withdraw from a humanitarian UN treaty banning their use.

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The cursed outposts of America's empire

By Lily Lynch

The border region’s economic decline and rapid militarization are emblematic of the entire Nordic region’s radically changed approach to relations with Russia and the United States. During the Cold War and to a lesser extent after it, Finland and Sweden managed relations with Moscow through a combination of pragmatic diplomacy, deterrence, and trade. Today, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both diplomacy and trade have been severely downgraded. These two Nordic nations, which touted an enlightened neutrality during the Cold War and maintained good relations with both the Soviet Union and the West, have recently joined Nato. Meanwhile, New Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCAs) signed with Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, have given the US armed forces “unimpeded access” to 47 military bases across the region, some of them perilously close to the Russian border. Sweden and Finland are even weakening their long-standing taboo on nuclear weapons.

As the region’s security order has undergone an accelerated Americanization, Nordic societies have also increasingly been remade in America’s image. They have become more militarized, more hawkish and more hostile to diplomacy, while their once-robust social welfare states have been gutted and inequality has soared. In Finland, there has even been a marked increase in homelessness. Many say the deteriorating quality of life is a small price to pay in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But others warn that the Nordic countries have surrendered their sovereignty to an unpredictable United States, which has left them weaker and more exposed — rather than more secure.

Overt dependence on the United States would have been unimaginable not so long ago. During the Cold War, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen saw neutrality as a natural state for his country, a function of both its geography and its history of wars with Russia. Neutrality, Kekkonen said, “is not the product of abstract thought nor is it imported from elsewhere: it has grown out of the soil of Finnish history”. Finland’s neutral position was articulated in the preamble to the 1948 Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, which emphasized the country’s desire “to remain outside the conflicts of the great powers”.

Complicating matters, however, was the fact that the same agreement also contained a military-consultation clause: if an adversary like Germany were to launch an attack on the USSR from Finnish soil, then Finland was expected to consult with Moscow about a response. The clause was politically sensitive, as it would permit the Soviets to exert diplomatic pressure on Helsinki. Indeed, Atlanticist critics have characterized Finland’s Cold War neutrality as quasi-neutrality, one that supposedly cloaked deference to the Kremlin in neutral garb. There is even a pejorative word for it: “Finlandisation”. And yet, Finland’s foreign policy was also effective. It kept the peace, and by the Eighties, Finland was one of the richest countries by per-capita income in the world, exceeding both Britain and France. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Finland lost one of its most important trading partners. The effect was immediate and devastating: Finnish economists call the ensuing crisis “The Great Depression of the Nineties”.

Sweden embraced neutrality much earlier, following a succession of wars with Russia, particularly the devastating 1808-9 Finnish War that saw a defeated Sweden lose more than a third of its territory. The country’s longstanding doctrine was “non-alignment in peace, so as to maintain neutrality in war”. Indeed, non-alignment was part of Sweden’s nation-branding as a “moral superpower”, which supporters saw as a “cherished model for the world” ripe for emulation. During the Cold War, the policy was best embodied in the figure of Social Democratic Prime Minister Olof Palme. The late premier, who was assassinated in 1986, presided over what Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn has called “a radical independent internationalism”. Over the years, Palme was photographed chomping on cigars with Fidel Castro, protested the war in Vietnam (prompting the US to recall its ambassador on two occasions), and likened the 1972 American bombing of Hanoi to “Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, and Treblinka”.

While Finland’s and Sweden’s decisions to join Nato may have looked like an abrupt decision made entirely in response to the war in Ukraine, Euro-Atlantic integration had actually been a long, gradual process that started soon after the 1991 Soviet collapse. Finland’s choice to purchase 64 McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 hornet fighter jets from the US in the early Nineties was a critical turning point. Finland and Sweden joined the Partnership for Peace program in 1994, and began participating in military exercises with Nato. The next year, Finland and Sweden joined the EU, unofficially ending their neutrality. Throughout the early 2000s, both countries supplied troops to Nato-led combat and stabilization missions, including in Afghanistan and Kosovo. These steps laid the groundwork for their rapid accession to Nato. All that was required was a trigger that could convert public opinion to Atlanticism en masse, and Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine provided it. Nato accession was presented as the only response to the shock of the Ukraine war, and with no alternatives discussed and the public afraid, the final push towards membership was made with a conspicuous lack of debate.

But Nato accession was just the start. Some commentators, including former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö, say the recent defense agreements have been even more pivotal than Sweden’s and Finland’s decisions to join Nato. The surge in DCAs actually began shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion, with Norway. In 2021, Oslo and Washington signed an “SDCA”, or Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement, which eventually gave US forces and contractors “unimpeded access” to 12 military bases. After the Russian invasion, the SDCA with Norway served as a template for the entire region. In December 2023, the US signed new DCAs with Finland, Sweden and Denmark, bringing the total number of Nordic military bases granting unimpeded access to the US military to 47. The DCAs also authorize the US to take “necessary and proportionate measures” to protect US forces “within or in the immediate vicinity of” said bases, meaning they give US military personnel and military police power over local civilians in and around these locations. In addition, they grant the US exclusive control over who enters specified military facilities, construction rights to build on Nordic soil, and jurisdiction over crimes committed by American soldiers.

The DCAs have not passed without controversy. In 2022, the top military and civilian prosecution authorities in Norway expressed concern that the Americans’ threat perception might differ from that of Norway’s. Some fear that US forces might therefore drag the country into a confrontation without its consent. Others worry that an enhanced American military presence in Nordic countries would make them obvious targets in a war between the US and Russia. These concerns grew more acute after the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, when American allies in the Middle East found themselves on the receiving end of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Meanwhile, analysts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute have warned that a US decision to deploy missiles to Nordic bases close to Russian assets could provoke a situation akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The agreements were signed with an initial duration of 10 years. Researcher Joel Linnainmäki, at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs, notes that this 10-year duration “somewhat cushions against political turbulence in the transatlantic relationship”. The DCAs were drawn up at a time of both deteriorating regional security and uncertainty over trans-Atlantic security guarantees. With the specter of Donald Trump omnipresent, the Nordic states sought stronger bilateral defense relations with the US outside of Nato. The DCAs also reflect the belief that even the Nordics’ accession to Nato is insufficient to counter the Russian threat.

“The underlying idea has been that Nato alone is ultimately not enough,” Markku Kangaspuro, professor and research director at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, tells me. “Rather, the commitment of the United States is indispensable for a military deterrent that, in the final analysis, rests on nuclear weapons.”

Indeed, Sweden and Finland are doing away with their long-standing aversion to nuclear weapons, another dramatic transformation. During the Cold War, Finland championed disarmament and nonproliferation, hosting the first US-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Helsinki from 1969 to 1972. Over in Stockholm, Prime Minister Palme joined a 25,000-strong anti-nuclear protest in 1983; demonstrators formed a four-mile human chain linking the American and Soviet embassies to protest against the planned deployment of 108 American missiles in Western Europe. The Stockholm protest was part of that year’s Europe-wide demonstrations against the stationing of US “Euromissiles” on the continent, which drew up to five million people.

The mass mobilization of the Eighties contrasts with the comparative silence that reigns today. In June, Finland lifted its blanket ban on nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Energy Act, on the books since 1987, had criminalized the import, transport, and possession of nuclear weapons on Finnish soil; amendments passed this summer have lifted those prohibitions. Kangaspuro tells me: “Finland is now signaling in many ways that its priority is no longer to promote international control and limitation of nuclear weapons, or nuclear disarmament, as it has done until now.” While there was political opposition to the decision and some small protests, it did not prompt demonstrations of the kind seen during the Cold War.

Similar changes have been floated in neighboring Sweden. Earlier this year, Defense Minister Pål Jonson said that Sweden should consider allowing nuclear weapons to be deployed on its territory in wartime. It was a pronounced shift from even just a few years prior, when both then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and conservative leader Ulf Kristersson agreed that Sweden’s decision to join Nato should not change its prohibition on nuclear weapons on Swedish soil. Earlier this year, Sweden, Norway and Denmark were also among the first countries to join France’s Forward Nuclear Deterrence Initiative, while Finland became a member in mid-December last year. The war in Ukraine and Trump’s unpredictability have again made the unthinkable thinkable.

Meanwhile, Nordic countries have dramatically increased their defense spending in recent years. Sweden, Norway and Denmark have more than doubled their spending since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while Finland has nearly doubled it. In Finland, the government has tied brutal austerity measures in part to wartime necessity. Campaigning in 2023, Riikka Purra, the chair of the nationalist Finns Party and current minister of finance, declared culture “a luxury service, which unfortunately costs too much money in present-day Finland”. As the Nordic countries have adopted a more US-dependent security policy, their economies have also grown to resemble the American one. The marketization of education and health care, rising inequality, and beefed-up military budgets are bringing once strong welfare states more in line with American free-market orthodoxy.

The Atlanticization of the Nordic states’ security policies occurred in tandem with the liberalization of their economies, and with direct and indirect influence from the United States. As Swedish historian Jenny Andersson describes it, during the late Sixties, the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF) began to “actively promote international neoliberal ideas”, with the aim of changing attitudes towards the welfare state within Swedish society. Meanwhile, the neoconservative Swedish think tank Timbro, founded in 1978, “was directly modeled on the American Heritage foundation”. In 1982, SAF director Sture Eskilsson initiated the Market Economic Alternative for Sweden (MAS), adopted from the Heritage Foundation’s own Mandate for Leadership, a vast policy program prepared for Ronald Reagan’s administration during the early Eighties. One of the activists for MAS was Sweden’s uber-Atlanticist former Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who was a young MP at the time. In Finland, meanwhile, the adoption of economic liberalism was directly tied to the notion of “joining the West” — liberalization and free markets were always bound up with geopolitical alignment with Nato.

Today, between Trump’s demand that Europe spend more on its own defense and the threat of war with Russia, Nordic social welfare is being squeezed out of existence. The remnants of Cold War Nordic distinctiveness in both security and the economy are disappearing. These nations are gambling that all the breakneck changes are worth it. But by allowing the US armed forces unimpeded access to their military bases, the Nordic countries have sacrificed some of their sovereignty in pursuit of security. This has been presented to the public as an unambiguous good, with little discussion of the risks. But in tethering their fates to Washington’s whims, Nordic nations have reduced their own ability to act autonomously and painted a target on their own backs.

Trump is such a natural at this, though, that he can have a similar effect on Europe’s elite. There’s the spectacle of Emmanuel Macron massaging his ego and Mark Rutte calling him “daddy” — but however unedifying this may be, it is just diplomacy. Stranger still is the way they often seem to cede to him, unforced, a kind of moral authority. Trump brings out their masochistic streak; they become eager participants in his hobby of Europe-bashing. What pathetic little leeches we are, they cry out, when the President attacks them for being defense freeloaders, exploiting American goodwill: he has us bang to rights. 

They do not take this line on other aspects of the White House’s critique of European policy. They do not say that Trump has them bang to rights on free speech or trade or energy or immigration — to say this would be to admit the defeat of an entire moral worldview. But on the specific subject of defense their usual reflexes are suspended. All of a sudden they turn MAGA. We have been free-riding for decades, they say; Trump is “simply right” that Europe should spend more. It was only a matter of time, one can almost hear Mark Rutte suggest, before somebody intelligent and manful enough would catch on.

This is not the posture of MAGA’s European outriders. Europe’s insurgent Right-wing parties tend to take a more hard-headed view of American objectives. The nationalist Right in France, Italy, and Germany has a long tradition of anti-Atlanticism: they never subscribed to the view that American support for European defense was an act of supreme, selfless benevolence. Indeed, they increasingly appear to recognize that MAGA is an albatross around their necks. Giorgia Meloni recently had a public falling-out with Trump; she knows, in a country where only 8% have a favorable opinion of the President, that some distance from the White House can only be a good thing. Beatrix von Storch of the AfD may have a “Make America Great Again” cap on her desk in the Bundestag; but, at the same time, her party and its base tends to look at Trump’s America with a certain coolness. 

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The case for de-escalation with Russia

By Wolfgang Münchau

They are well aware that Trump is extremely unpopular in Europe. His reckless statements and interventions, and his encroachments on the sovereignty of other countries, can be a major liability for Right-wing politics internationally — as the cautionary tale of Pierre Poilievre in Canada goes to show. One wonders sometimes whether MAGA understands the toxic effect it can have on “sovereigntist” Right-wing parties in the rest of the world, and even exploits this in order to keep the establishment parties in charge.  

For Europe’s establishment parties are the real marks for Trump’s rhetoric on defense. They are the lackeys whose humiliation Trump craves and enjoys. They are used to taking their orders from Washington, and defense spending is an easy concession for them to make to Trump, in word if not in action — easier, anyway, than accepting his counsel on immigration, energy, or other areas of policy that he is wont to berate them about. So somehow, in this single instance, the Trumpian line has become a piece of European elite consensus. Sanna Marin, the former prime minister of Finland and now a strategic counselor for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, wrote for the Economist last year commending the American taxpayer for having aroused from his slumber to question “why they should shoulder more of the cost of European security than Europe itself”. Alex Younger, the late chief of MI6, said similarly: “We have been infantilized and it hasn’t been healthy… we should be extraordinarily grateful to America for its generosity.” He likened Europe to a spoilt child on a “trust fund”, a spoilt child which now has to toughen up, get wise, and make its own way in the world. A belligerent Russia, the argument runs, is Europe’s problem, not America’s — and so it’s high time that Europeans take matters into their own hands. 

That Europe should spend more on defense, and on containing Russian aggression, is a fair proposition, and one which many previous American presidents have supported. “Nato 3.0”, where Europe assumes principal responsibility for its own defense, could indeed be a good thing for Europe — and, perhaps especially, for Ukraine. This is a message which Britain badly needs to hear, especially now that John Healey has conveniently forgotten the national security imperatives that caused him to resign as Defense Secretary less than three months ago. None of this means, however, that Europe’s leaders should accept the framing that American support for European defense was motivated by “generosity”, which Europeans have been greedily exploiting and for which we should now be “extraordinarily grateful”. If Europe has been “infantilized”, then that is something that the Americans deliberately engineered, over the course of many decades. Trump is not meting out “tough love”; he is not Matron making the medicine go down, or a wealthy father cutting off his pampered, profligate children “for their own good”. The “trust fund” was always an investment, and quite a profitable one at that. 

The Americans realized, after being drawn into two world wars, that isolationism was a risky and unworkable strategy. They had an interest in preventing future war in Europe. They were anxious to prevent nuclear proliferation, and to stop countries like France and Italy from falling into Communist hands. The end of the Second World War left them in a fortuitous position in Western Europe, and one they were in no hurry to relinquish. They got — and still enjoy — a military foothold in Europe, which can come in handy when, say, they want to direct logistics and communications from somewhere within striking distance of Iran.

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Suicide is a tragedy, not an argument

By Samuel Rubinstein

It was a good arrangement, while it lasted. America got fat off Pax Americana. We in Europe got a lot out of it too: a “holiday from history”, the luxury to spaff billions on welfare; billions which, in a previous age, would have been spent on dreadnoughts and munitions. Not that we Europeans were totally useless on military matters: we tended to accept that our obligations were a two-way street. If the Americans were footing the bill, then it was only fair for them to expect what little military assistance we could offer during their moments of need. That guided the decision made by many European countries to join the American-led coalition in Afghanistan and Iraq. One reason Trump’s Greenland gambit earlier this year left such a bitter taste in many European mouths is that Denmark was one of America’s more devoted European allies. Denmark had the third-highest per-capita casualty rate among Nato nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, behind America and Britain. Trump’s obsession with gratitude could easily be turned on its head. The Americans could say thank you for our help in the War of Terror; the Americans could say thank you for Ramstein, Lakenheath, and Fairford. 

The European country which has come closest to implementing Trump’s advice is of course France. France clears its Nato target of 2% of GDP on defense, and seems to spend it more effectively than other countries do, including Britain. Earlier this year this caused Britain some embarrassment when French warships, rather than British ones, sailed to Cyprus after the RAF base at Akrotiri was hit in an Iranian drone strike. France pulls its weight. And France, to the chagrin of George W. Bush’s White House, did not join the war in Iraq. Nor does it host US bases on its soil: General de Gaulle chased all of them out in the Sixties. Because France has tended to pull its weight, it has also enjoyed more strategic independence from America in foreign policy. The two go hand-in-hand. 

Suppose, now, that the rest of Europe were to follow Trump’s admonition to the letter. Suppose that the rest of Europe were to become truly “sovereigntist”, perhaps under the aegis of MAGA’s sister movements on the populist Right, and to figure out what the French figured out long ago. Is that an outcome that Trump and his coterie would actually want to come about? Recall Trump’s fury earlier this year when the Kingdom of Denmark moved a few dozen troops to another part of the Kingdom of Denmark; or his rage that European countries did not fall immediately into line when he embarked on his Iran adventure. Those countries would be a lot less pliable than they currently are if they really did get their defense spending in order. Nor is it the case that Trump is that invested, in general, in the sovereignty of his European allies. He routinely makes demands about how they should direct policy on fossil fuels and immigration, and with whom they should and should not trade. 

Europe’s leaders should, as ever, be careful not to take Trump’s words at face value. But even if they do, they are unlikely to put them into action: as John Healey’s recent U-turn reveals, welfare spending must always come first. Their hope is that Trump is succeeded in the White House by someone with a less capricious attitude toward their allies, someone who understands the upsides of the postwar arrangement, and thinks that it is still worth paying for. The alternative — slashing welfare to fund defense — is somewhat more conceivable under parties on the nationalist Right; but the practical consequences of that, a Europe composed of sovereign states capable of pursuing their own interests as they define them, would not be to Trump’s liking. Trump claims to want Europe to stand on its own two feet, but he does not want Europe to be strategically independent. He should, perhaps, be careful what he wishes for. 

Such was the pre-Suez balance of power that these ideas were seriously entertained: not as idle reveries but as genuine strategic debates, with the outcomes backed up by the hard power of Britain’s military-industrial strength. Nor was this thinking the preserve of public-school soldiers and jingo adventurers; it was common in the Labour movement. Clement Attlee himself remarked that “we ought not to give the Americans the impression that we cannot get on without them”, while Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin called the Middle East a “lifeline” for the Commonwealth.

Today, such confidence has passed into history. The idea of a mighty Albion projecting her influence in the Gulf is laughable — whatever Donald Trump might now demand. Such is the state of our armed forces, indeed, that we are unable even to play the supplicant role afforded to us two decades ago during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Instead, Britain looks on in horror as Trump adds his own forever war to America’s growing list. Meanwhile, our prime minister makes a virtue of necessity. For once, his anti-interventionist position chimes with the public mood, even if it has been forced upon him by the ascendancy of Labour’s soft Left and the impotence of a mostly ship-free Royal Navy.

Common to many national disgraces, these embarrassments become an opportunity for a kind of military palingenesis: a rebirth of national prowess like a phoenix from the ashes. From the humiliations of the last decades, and with Britain confined to a spectator role as the “rules-based order” burns, a new political tendency is gaining popularity in the more intellectual corners of the Labour Party. A substratum of “Anglo-Gaullism” is now concentrated among the Left’s self-proclaimed realists, hawking a message of salvation-through-defense spending, with rearmament presented as a catalyst for national renewal.

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Ed Miliband: patriot

By Jonny Ball

Already last year, the government’s Defense Industrial Strategy promised military spending would become an “engine for growth”, creating a “strong industrial base” and a “defense dividend” for “every nation and region”. Starmerism’s media outriders have demanded a “new political economy of defense” that integrates “Labour’s goals of economic, social and climate justice”. A defense-industrial “securonomics” will, they claim, reindustrialize Britain’s left-behind regions. If Glubb Pasha’s British Monroe Doctrine is no longer available, at least the hardware of defense-industrial capability can be restored, not least as it offers the kind of secure manufacturing work that makes nostalgic Labourites dewy-eyed.

The Iran War has turbocharged this new thinking, which sees war-like preparedness as the panacea for a policy trilemma: the solution to low growth, persistent regional inequality, and our newfound irrelevance on the global stage. Learned essays in the house journal of Labourism have lamented the unsustainability of the welfare bill, while bemoaning a Treasury orthodoxy for which “reindustrialization through defense spending will never meet a value-for-money test”. The argument has found fertile ground among Blue Labour types, with Maurice Glasman declaring upon the invasion of Ukraine that the return of war to Europe’s periphery “has given us the possibility of an industrial strategy”.

As far as it goes, this argument is appealingly simple. As the transatlantic alliance falters, now is the time to reallocate capital away from the benefits bill — and towards gleaming new arms factories, cyber war labs, drone swarms, frigates and the new domain of space. The New Jerusalem, in short, will be built with a bomb factory in every drab provincial town.

But the new military Keynesianism is based on a delusion. It refuses to confront the fact that defense spending is, in strictly economic terms, one of the very worst ways to promote broad industrial rejuvenation. The growth multipliers are weak and the long-term productivity gains are non-existent. Unlike, say, investment in large-scale capital projects, building things, creating new fixed assets in energy, transport or digital infrastructure, there’s little diffusion of defense spending through the wider economy. While the construction of new roads, power stations or tram networks might provide decades of cheaper inputs, rearmament has a severe opportunity cost. An arms factory might create demand for steel and provide jobs for workers in much the same way as a high-speed rail link — but the former produces few positive spillovers, while the latter can regenerate whole regions. Rather than building the lifeblood of work, jobs and economic activity for the next century, in short, this khaki-clad Keynesianism sacrifices domestic prosperity for a real or perceived threat from without, or else because of an illusory attachment to the idea of Britain as a “global player”.

In truth, building and maintaining a world-class military exists downstream of a serious level of industrial capacity that Britain now sorely lacks. In the days of Bevin and Glubb, Britain built over half the world’s exported cars. Today it’s around 4%. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the UK was second only to the US in its steel production. Today, it manufactures less than Iran and Brazil, not enough to satisfy even half our own national demand. For all Labour’s rhetoric about a manufacturing renaissance, we simply don’t have the basic foundations of a durable industrial ecosystem: steel production; petrochemicals; plastics and advanced materials; energy independence and abundance; and a self-reliant productive base that isn’t subject to the whims of international oil shocks or geopolitical wrangling.

Each, in turn, has been allowed to atrophy. Against this backdrop, the notion that Britain can will itself back into great-power status through defense investment alone is incoherent at best and fanciful at worst. You simply can’t build a credible military in an industrial void, and military spending is a terrible option for closing our yawning productivity gaps. If the opposite had been true, the Soviet Union would have been buoyed by the Politburo’s excessive commitment to the Cold War arms race — rather than brought low by system-wide sclerosis.

Bevin’s Britain was able to take a seat at the Potsdam conference as a global military superpower because postwar Britain was a great industrial exporter, not vice versa. Today, by contrast, we are a country disastrously unsuited to a deglobalizing, dog-eat-dog, protectionist age of competitive national production; a poor country by OECD standards, with Eastern European levels of GDP in some regions, but with a rich capital city that distorts our more dismal averages. If resilience is the watchword of our age, it is surely economic, not military, resilience that should take priority. This is a country facing its second major energy shock in less than a decade, and without any significant per-capita growth in the last two.

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Then arises the question of which war we are preparing for: a counter-insurgency; a neo-imperial intervention in the Gulf; a standoff with China in Taiwan; or a continental land war with Russia? Given the parlous state of procurement at the Ministry of Defense, are we to spend billions building yet more faulty hardware? Will we make the common mistake of every general, fighting the last war, building old-fashioned ships that can be destroyed by a naval drone costing a few thousand dollars in an age of asymmetric warfare?

If the principal threat today comes from Putin’s revanchist nationalism, it will be up to the new military Keynesians to explain why Britain must stomach yet more years of belt-tightening to prepare for war with a country that has failed to occupy even the Russian-speaking territories of a poor, dysfunctional, non-Nato country in which many voters habitually plumped for Russophile oligarchs. Having turned its nation into a pariah, and almost suffering a palace coup after attacking perhaps the most propitious place on Earth for a Russian invasion, is the Kremlin really about to attack Nato? That uncertainty is shadowed by the societal challenge here at home. In the dilapidated high streets of Britain’s regions, it is doubtful whether a beleaguered public see our capacity for military deployment, let alone the protection of some far-off military base, as an urgent daily concern.

Rather than busying ourselves with the dead end of Gaullist posturing, in short, perhaps we should start thinking of ourselves as the developing country that, in many ways, we so obviously are. Certainly, financial analysts have already begun tempering their investments in Britain, a country now displaying the dysfunctional features of an “emerging market”. Rather than Anglo-Gaullism, then, surely a far better model is Anglo-Dengism. Echoing the Chinese example, Britain today should look inwards, focus on problems closer to home, build, develop, reform, innovate, and Make Britain Rich Again, before finally concerning ourselves with the global status games beloved of men-of-a-certain-age who played too much Risk as a child.

As the pro-market reformers of the Chinese Communist Party understood, following the privations of three decades of peasant communism, to project yourself abroad, you must “hide your strength, bide your time”. Before sending aircraft carriers to reopen faraway straits or threatening foreign regime, we must first become a country capable of raising real wages and living standards for our own British citizens.

Ernest Bevin once demanded a nuclear bomb “with a bloody Union Jack on top of it!”. The Anglo-Gaullists fancy themselves his heirs. But Bevin — and Glubb before him — knew that power had to be consistently built at home before it could be brandished abroad. Today, we are attempting a reverse Bevin: indulging in a fantasy of power without the necessary foundations, painting the flag onto imaginary weapons we no longer have the means to sustain.

Commentators agree that most of the credit here is due to Takaichi herself, and to those around her, for making a wildly successful gamble on her personal popularity. “Sanamania” gripped the country during the short election campaign as people queued up to buy Takaichi’s trademark black leather handbag and her famous pink pen. While Japan’s humiliated opposition, the Centrist Reform Alliance, picks itself up off the floor, the country’s currency is riding high — suggesting at least modest market confidence in what Takaichi’s reign might bring.

The question now is what Takaichi may do with her mandate. The last time a comparably emphatic victory was won in a Japanese election, back in 2012, it marked the start of Shinzō Abe’s long and decisive premiership. Those hoping for strong leadership on Japan’s domestic challenges — its intertwining demographic and debt crises — and on regional tensions in the Asia-Pacific, will be looking to Takaichi to deliver. She is due in the United States in mid-March to meet Donald Trump; a few weeks later, President Trump is expected to make his highly-anticipated visit to China. A reset in East Asia is on the cards — but what does Takaichi want?

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Meet Japan's Iron Lady

By Christopher Harding

The Prime Minister’s reputation is that of a China hawk. Last November, she angered China’s leadership by appearing to suggest that Japan’s Self-Defense Forces might be deployed in the event of an armed Chinese attempt on Taiwan. This violated a long-standing Japanese policy — mirroring that of the United States — of strategic ambiguity when it comes to what the country might do in the event of a “Taiwan contingency,” as the standard euphemism goes. The Chinese response was swift: a ban on Japanese seafood imports, the shutting down of Japanese films and music concerts in China and hints dropped about restricting supplies of rare-earth minerals to Japan.

Evidence from the campaign trail, however, suggests that Takaichi’s refusal to apologize for her remarks helped her cause with the Japanese electorate. Public opinion on China is hardening, while long-standing opposition to the Self-Defense Forces — particularly among older Japanese, committed to post-war pacifism — has softened in recent years. This will give Takaichi confidence in continuing the pivot, from defense to active deterrence, that she inherited from her predecessors.

Takaichi has already brought forward a target of spending 2% of Japan’s substantial GDP on defense, from 2027 to March this year. She is lavishing money on south-western Japan, near Taiwan, and on sites around the country’s coastline. Japan is also making heavy investments in aerial, surface and underwater drones, alongside long-range strike capabilities including American Tomahawk missiles. Japan’s comparatively small domestic defense industry is now being developed at pace. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries enjoyed a landmark win last year when it was awarded the contract to build Australia’s next-generation frigate.

For Takaichi, these moves promise a triple benefit. They signal to China that Japan is serious about its defense. They reassure an ever-transactional Donald Trump that, as requested, Japan is doing more towards its own security. And they build Japanese resilience for the day — should it ever arrive — when American interest in the Asia-Pacific region begins to recede.

Even if its interest fluctuates over the years to come, the US will always have to pay careful attention to what is happening across the Pacific. The downgrading of the threat from China in the latest US National Security Strategy no doubt came as a shock in Tokyo, but the basic underlying geographic and strategic realities haven’t changed. Japan remains the most important link in the “First Island Chain”, which runs from the Kuril Islands down to Borneo and constrains Chinese access to the Pacific. The US-Japanese aim remains, for now at least, the cultivation of a coalition that is capable of balancing out Chinese economic and seaborne military power in the Asia-Pacific and maintaining freedom of the seas.

Key to these efforts are the Quad (Japan, the US, India and Australia), ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), and a series of bilateral relationships including Japan-Vietnam and Japan-Philippines. Japan has been remarkably successful in cultivating regional relationships in recent years, using Official Development Assistance (ODA) to fund the building of ports, railway systems and more in countries like Vietnam. Japan also has an ODA-funded agreement in place to fund the building of six patrol vessels for the Vietnam Coast Guard. In the Philippines, Japanese finance is contributing toward new roads, new bridges and the Metro Manila Subway Project.

A major question for what may become a historic premiership is what use Takaichi has for the past. Looming over Japan’s relationships with China, Korea and its Southeast Asian neighbors is the grim and ever-contested history of Japan’s 20th-century empire. A regular refrain in postwar Chinese critiques of Japanese defense spending, right up to the present day, has been that it risks awakening a dormant militarism. Those critiques hold less weight now that China is expanding its naval and nuclear capabilities at a rapid rate. But attempts by Japanese governments as recently as the Seventies and Eighties to woo Southeast Asian neighbors with economic assistance foundered on a perception of Japanese self-interest — even, in some quarters, neo-colonialism. Originating with postwar reparations, much of that aid and investment looked suspiciously like an attempt to find profitable outlets for Japanese export goods, helping it to rebuild its war-ravaged industries.

Japan has had a happier history with Southeast Asia in the decades since, but Takaichi’s personal convictions demand that she look backwards as well as forwards. She has declared her desire to revise Japan’s American-authored postwar constitution in order to clarify the role of the Self-Defense Forces. She is a member of Nippon Kaigi (Japan Conference), a powerful conservative lobby group dedicated to a traditionalist vision of Japan with the Emperor at its core. And she is now mulling a first visit as prime minister to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine — a lightning-rod issue in East Asia. The shrine’s original purpose was to honor Japan’s war dead from the Boshin War of 1868-9 but it also commemorates those who died in Japan’s mid-20th century wars. Any potential visit pits those in Japan who wish to honor their war dead with those in countries like China and Korea who focus on the fact that among the 2.4 million souls enshrined at Yasukuni are convicted war criminals from World War II.

Relitigating these controversial episodes and cultural consequences — which many in Nippon Kaigi equate with excessive Americanization following Japan’s defeat in 1945 — may well prove counterproductive. If Takaichi wants to revisit that period, she would be better off studying the intensifying perception in Japan, around a century ago, that it was becoming encircled by hostile powers: Soviets, Chinese nationalists, Europe’s Asian colonies and the United States. China may soon find itself in a similar position. It may feel it is surrounded by insufficiently friendly countries just at the point where an aging population and a slowing economy suggest that the window for reorganizing its neighborhood is beginning to close.

A careful reading of the past may also help Takaichi and her administration think through China’s likely long-term intentions. This is a topic on which analysts around the world are deeply divided. There are those, in the United States especially, who believe that Chinese reluctance to pronounce on the internal affairs of other countries is about current capabilities rather than political culture. Once its military is able to project power in the way that the United States can, and European nations once could, then we will begin to see a more interventionist China.

Another way of reading the past and present is that the benefits of territorial or maritime expansion are not what they once were. Power and prosperity in the mid-21st century rest more on economic and commercial leverage than boots on the ground. Taking direct responsibility for other countries’ affairs is both risky and costly, and Takaichi’s conclusion may be that China seeks prestige rather than empire. Rather than replace the US as global policeman, it may simply want to do away with that role, exchanging a postwar international culture of liberal cooperation under American auspices with one defined by national self-interest and multipolarity. But this may happen slowly. China will want to avoid the risk of upsetting its highly globalized economy and meanwhile allow the impression to set in that it is a natural rather than a managed transition.

Perhaps Japan could live with this. It could maintain credible self-defense while continuing an economic partnership with China that is currently valued at around $300 billion per year and involves deep integration of Chinese and Japanese manufacturing. It is worth remembering that for all the appearance of an unassailable position in China’s national life, the principal source of the Chinese Communist Party’s appeal is its ability to raise living standards and restore Chinese pride internationally. Takaichi’s own party dominated Japanese politics for nearly four decades on much the same basis, beginning in the mid-1950s. She knows only too well how quickly public support can drop away once people no longer see the expected returns. There is a limit to how far China and Japan’s political arrangements can usefully be compared. But the CCP’s leadership appreciates that when it comes to getting people to do what they want, even a very high-tech stick requires a little carrot alongside.

For now, then, it is in both Japan and China’s interests to continue their economic co-operation, even while Japan and its partners try to balance out Chinese attempts at gaining economic leverage in parts of Asia, Africa and South America via loans, investments and supply-chain dependency. Japan is already at the forefront, globally, of reducing reliance on China as a supplier of key components and raw materials including rare earths. That leadership role may expand under Takaichi.

There is one last way in which Takaichi might usefully look back in order to forge a path forward. It is not so much a clear-cut lesson as a question: at what point does a relationship between rival nations shift from prioritizing prosperity through economic co-operation to allowing strategic aims or fears to dictate their actions? And what, if anything, can Takaichi do to prevent that shift occurring when it comes to Taiwan? If hers ends up being a lengthy premiership, it is highly likely that the Taiwan question will be “resolved” on her watch.

For all the anger in China when Takaichi made her comments last November about the Self-Defense Forces becoming involved in a conflict over Taiwan, the chances of Japan remaining unaffected by a Chinese attempt on the island are slim. War games consistently emphasize the importance of Japan as a re-supply base for US forces responding to such an attempt and as a source of essential supplies for the Taiwanese population in the event of a Chinese maritime blockade.

There is a chance that China may yet engineer a peaceful takeover of Taiwan. The island’s domestic politics are divided and China is making ongoing efforts to normalize such an outcome both in Taiwan and internationally. This, however, would hardly bring tensions in the region to an end. Japan would face the very dangerous scenario of having the People’s Republic on its doorstep — visible, on a clear day, from the south-western Japanese island of Yonaguni.

This would be worrying enough for Japanese security. But the next question would be whether or not China’s strategic aims end there. From the Chinese point of view, taking Taiwan is a matter of bringing a renegade province to heel rather than expanding its borders. In time, however, that same logic could be used to make and perhaps enforce a claim over some or all of the Okinawan islands — of which Yonaguni is one.

At present, such claims appear periodically in Chinese media and academic writing, rather than in government pronouncements. Still, they are encouraged by China’s leadership at times of tension with Japan, including late last year in the wake of Takaichi’s comments about Taiwan. And for analysts who suggest paying more attention to the balance of military power than to political rhetoric — or indeed to what historians or legal scholars might argue about Okinawa — it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that soon after talk of a “Taiwan contingency” ends, talk of an “Okinawa contingency” might begin.

Even if China had no intention of pursuing a sovereignty claim on the Okinawan islands, the stoking of nationalist sentiment in China would be useful to the CCP while the effects on Japan could be profound: a drop in international investment and a constant sense of threat — after all, if China’s leaders proved willing to act on their Taiwan rhetoric, why wouldn’t they do so on Okinawan rhetoric too?

Takaichi’s political leanings mean that the past is often on her mind, as it was for her mentor Abe. As she sets about reviewing Japan’s National Security Strategy this year — while continuing to woo Donald Trump and perhaps thawing her relationship with Xi Jinping — we must hope for a creative and purposeful approach to Asia’s history. The wrongs and the suffering of the 1930s and 1940s are not to be forgotten. But the stakes are now too high for indulging in the weaponization of those wrongs and that suffering. Rather than refighting the last war, we must focus on preventing the next one.

While Putin has not yet achieved the fast-moving operational breakthrough that has eluded him since the war’s first hours, the acceleration of Ukraine’s territorial losses on the eastern and southern sectors of its frontline paint a grim picture of the coming months. Now the situation is such that, as America’s army secretary Dan Driscoll reportedly told his Ukrainian counterparts last week, Kyiv’s military position can only worsen, and Moscow’s can only improve. America’s skepticism of Ukraine’s chances is itself a self-fulfilling prophecy: in these circumstances, it is hard to argue against Driscoll’s reported warning to Kyiv that “you are losing… and you need to accept the deal”.

The war’s outcome will now be decided by Russia and the United States, over the heads of both Ukraine and Europe. If this is a defeat for the European Atlanticists who are most determinedly hawkish against Moscow, it is also the end result of the worldview they embody. So enmeshed are European nations within America’s defense structures, that it is impossible for Europe to sustain a major war without US support: and which only a fool could now believe is guaranteed. The Ukraine war was an opportunity for Europe’s leaders to radically transform our continent’s security framework towards a vision of strategic autonomy — in which, by taking responsibility for our own defense, we Europeans could assert our own interests and shape our own futures. Yet as the Russia analyst Jade McGlynn, a Ukraine hawk, observes: Europe “has chosen paralysis while others determine the fate of our continent” — a fate which is “the product of decisions not taken, responsibilities avoided, and illusions clung to for too long”, not least the “bizarre teleological liberalism that sees liberal democracy as somehow feted to win out according to the laws of history”.

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Putin is facing his Waterloo

By Aris Roussinos

As the war’s early days revealed, Putin is no strategic genius. But with Europe’s current leadership, he does not need to be. If it is Emmanuel Macron’s tragedy to be a great man of history, trapped in the role of a 21st-century European leader, it is our far greater misfortune to be ruled by his peers. Europe failed at the historic task with which it was presented, settling back into its comfort zone of demanding a satisfactory outcome to the war it is not in a position to impose. Veering between a hawkishness that it cannot sustain — see Kaja Kallas this week demanding Russia’s demilitarization — and humiliating tributary missions to our Washington overlord which reflect our true situation, Europe’s bellicose rhetoric on the Ukraine war has become increasingly detached from reality.

The simple facts of the matter are that the United States, on whom Europe’s defense depends, is keener to end the war than Russia, which scents total military victory. Ukraine’s overriding interest, in preserving the Kyiv government’s independence from Moscow, increasingly diverges from Europe’s, which is for the Ukrainian armed forces to distract and degrade Russia’s military power long enough for Europe to effectively re-arm, or for some, so far unknown, deus ex machina appear to resolve the situation in a satisfactory manner. From its earlier heady expectations of total victory, and resultant disastrous overreach, Kyiv must now find a path to negotiating the least painful defeat the circumstances offer: Europe’s political discourse is yet to catch up with this harsh reality.

Yet even still, for Britain, losing a proxy war is a better outcome than losing a war in which we are ourselves engaged. Due to the Army’s prolonged mismanagement, Britain cannot field artillery or air defense to speak of. Nor can it cobble together the armored brigade that is its Nato responsibility, nor sustain the munitions expenditure of a high-intensity war for more than a few days. The next prime minister will find themself at the helm of a country that has simultaneously enmeshed itself to an alarming degree in a losing war while bulldozing, through sheer incompetence, its own ability to field an army. Having entirely failed to rebuild its deterrent power in the nearly four years since the beginning of the greatest land war in Europe since 1945, it would take great optimism in Whitehall’s wisdom and ability to assume that matters would suddenly improve if Britain were itself forced to fight. This is not a reassuring position to be in, and Washington enforcing a peace settlement that extracts us from this worrying bind should be accepted, even if its terms are no cause for celebration.

Yet dragging Britain’s political class to hard reality is not an easy task. Though no doubt well-meaning, the pundit hawkishness that undermined previous attempts at peace negotiations has not served Ukraine well. It would have been better for Ukraine, and Europe, to have negotiated peace from a position of relative advantage, as the country possessed in 2022 or 2023. Yet those chances were squandered, with those urging negotiations condemned as Putinist appeasers by a commentariat which apparently believed that Ukraine was destined to liberate Crimea, topple Putin, and carve Russia into a constellation of weak ethnic statelets. Discounting the possibility of Zack Polanski hypnotizing Putin into shrinking his munitions stockpiles, we are perhaps fortunate that the likeliest next prime minister will be either Nigel Farage, leading a Reform government with a mandate for total change, or an intervening Labour reformer. Shabana Mahmood has already set out her stall as a purveyor of uncomfortable truths and hard-nosed realism, while another likely contender for a Labour coup, the defence secretary John Healey, possesses the credibility to recalibrate Britain’s rhetoric to its diminished capability.

Britain’s next leader will be forced by events to construct a new and cautious vision for British security managing four separate poles: the United States, whose will and ability to defend Europe is clearly waning; Europe itself, which has proved itself disunited and incapable of sustained and concerted action; Russia, whose assertive foreign policy will have been bloodily vindicated by the war’s conclusion; and the greatest industrial power in world history, China.

In our current circumstances of military and economic weakness, and near-revolutionary domestic political discontent, a continuation of Britain’s hawkish stance on world affairs is simply not viable. Even if an interventionist foreign policy were wise — which it is not — or electorally popular — which it is not — it is simply now beyond our ability. It is unfortunate, then, that in his choice of the neoconservative Henry Jackson Society’s Alan Mendoza as foreign policy adviser, Farage has settled on an advocate of total, ideological war against rivals great and small at which even Washington balks. It is, indeed, worryingly plausible that the domestic demands of neutering claims that he is a Russian asset, a Brexit-era liberal fantasy entirely downstream of the Clinton campaign’s Russiagate conspiracy theory, will force Farage into reckless hawkishness to win the approval of the commentariat which will never come.

If Ukraine manages to retain its functional independence from Russia, obtain meaningful security guarantees from the United States, and join the European Union, then the cession of territory it currently does not hold and will not soon recapture is hardly the worst outcome. Certainly, it is a better than the looming loss of territory currently in its possession, and an even worse peace deal in the future. The Trump administration, proposing lucrative joint economic projects with Moscow, openly covets a stable future diplomatic relationship with Russia. Whether this is feasible may be doubtful, but so is Europe’s current stance of simultaneous subordination to the former and hostility just short of open war with the latter.

Like Ukraine, Europe and Britain are forced by military and political disadvantage to take their orders from their imperial patron: America has decided that the war must end, and is now persuading Russia to agree. If this damages European pride, then it should: the continent will now pay the price for the weakness our leaders chose for us. Absorbing a bruised and shell-shocked postwar Ukraine, whose economy has been wrecked, a quarter of whose population has already fled to the EU into European political structures will be a generational challenge in itself. So, too, will be stemming the illicit westward flow of weapons, once the shooting stops.

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Trump forces Europe to face facts

By Edward Luttwak

Trump’s Thanksgiving deadline for a peace deal has already passed. If the war is over by Christmas, it will be a miracle. Yet its likely unsatisfactory conclusion, and the narrow escape it may grant us from a far worse outcome, require a measure of sober reflection alien to Westminster’s political culture. The Ukrainians, rightly, now place little faith in Europe’s empty assurances. As Zelensky this week warned his nation, “Ukraine may now face a very difficult choice, either losing its dignity or the risk of losing a key partner, either the difficult 28 points, or a very difficult winter.” If only our own leaders were so frank with us. Britain’s rivals are growing in power, and our allies are demonstrably unreliable: yet as the Commons Defense Select Committee warned this week, Britain’s ability to defend even the homeland itself is doubtful in the extreme. Farage is perhaps fortunate that the burden of defeat will fall on a Labour prime minister, and that Reform’s foreign policy is so far little more than an empty page on a website: with his current foreign policy adviser, it is better that this is remains so. Losing a war is, historically, one of the greatest spurs to serious projects of national reform. In preparing for government, Farage must make use of what may only be a lull in hostilities to chart a swift and viable path towards guaranteeing the nation’s basic security, and ensuring that Britain is never again left so dangerously exposed between its commitments and its capabilities.

It happened. Despite intense advocacy by voices of restraint inside and outside the administration, President Trump has joined Israel’s conflict with Iran by launching targeted air and cruise-missile strikes on three Iranian nuclear facilities — at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. The move carries immense risks, potentially plunging the United States into yet another costly, dangerous quagmire in a region that is less important to Washington than foreign-policy elites would have you believe. But guided the right way — and with a bit of luck — it is possible to keep this intervention limited.

One key reason we’re here is the perception of Iranian weakness. Since the start of hostilities between Israel and the Islamic Republic, Trump has wavered between diplomacy and the use of force, searching for the best tactic to block Tehran’s path to nuclear weapons. At the same time, ever attuned to optics, the President prefers to align with winners. And in the immediate aftermath of Israel’s initial military operations — marked by the killing of senior commanders and nuclear scientists, and a highly modulated Iranian retaliation — Israeli dominance and Tehran’s vulnerability became the prevailing narrative in the West.

Often, our first impressions of a conflict go a long way to determine how we approach it over time. For instance, despite Israeli strikes on Iranian missile launchers, Tehran’s offensive military capabilities have remained intact. Over the past week, Iran has struck key strategic targets in Haifa and Tel Aviv using fewer missiles with better (and improving) accuracy. Yet Iran’s tactical focus — coupled with its proportional, calibrated response — actually encouraged public perceptions of Iranian weakness. And in such moments, when the fog of war thickens and facts are murky, perception often becomes reality.

“Trump faces two possible scenarios following the US strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

But aligning a perception with prudent statecraft is the real challenge. A false perception almost always distorts decision-making, leading to bad policy. The better path is to game out potential outcomes in the light of the best available information.

Trump faces two possible scenarios following the US strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities. The first is the ideal outcome: the B-2 and Tomahawk cruise missiles executed against the three Iranian nuclear facilities significantly checks Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, while opening the door to more robust diplomacy.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic limits or forgoes retaliation — or conducts a tightly choreographed and telegraphed counterattack similar to its response to the assassination of Quds Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani in January 2020 — in the hope that Washington won’t pursue regime change. According to this scenario, assuming the US doesn’t fall victim to mission creep or becomes locked in an escalation spiral, Trump could claim victory without entangling America in yet another open-ended Middle-East conflict.

As it is, there are early signs that the Iranians are prepared to treat this as a calibrated mutual dance. On Sunday afternoon local time, IRIB 1, state television’s main channel, broadcast footage of captured US sailors from a 2016 incident, as if to give the Islamic Republic and its people psychological succor. Meanwhile, IRINN, the state news network, took a curiously legalistic line, highlighting what the Iranians see as the illicit nature of Trump’s actions under international law, as well as US congressional Democrats’ outrage at the President for circumventing their legislative role.

Still, success depends on precision, discipline, escalation management, and a willingness to take diplomatic off-ramps that may appear unsatisfying at first — traits not often associated with wars that begin amid great fanfare and inflated expectations.

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The second and more dangerous scenario is attritional escalation. Even if Trump’s strikes inflict some damage, Iran’s nuclear infrastructure may prove resilient, and the regime’s response — through proxies, missile attacks, or maritime disruption — could spiral into a broader, long-term regional war against the United States.

Unlike other recent adversaries, such as Iraq or Libya, Iran has aggressively prepared for this scenario and adapted its military doctrine based on lessons learned from previous American military operations in the region. And the rally-around-the-flag effect is real, no matter what gleeful regime-changers claim. “Whatever God wants, we are ready,” an old woman told state TV while shopping for groceries the day after the US attacks. “Because we had eight years of war with Iraq, we don’t fear anything.” Anyone who assumes that such sentiments are pure regime propaganda is unfamiliar with Iranian history — recklessly so.

A grinding war would drain American resources, undermine regional stability, and risk turning an operation intended to be a targeted counter-proliferation strike into a failed regime-change war. The lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan loom large while America’s true global competitor — China — would benefit from America’s continuing distraction in the Middle East.

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If Trump’s military operation isn’t tightly defined or properly managed, or if actors in the US government or outside of it are allowed to willfully expand the scope of the operation, the second outcome is the most likely — and the most disastrous.

Trump has shown in the past — whether in assassinating Soleimani or targeting Yemen’s Houthis — that he prefers swift Machiavellian decisiveness over lofty adventurism. If he is to uphold his red line against an Iranian bomb while avoiding another disastrous, endless entanglement abroad, he must be ruthlessly pragmatic in pursuit of realistic and effective diplomatic solutions.

Any military operation against Iran must be firmly centered first and foremost on America’s national interests — above all, the avoidance of yet another protracted war in the Middle East that could claim thousands of American lives, cost billions of dollars, and become a further distraction from more urgent priorities. To preserve American power and secure his legacy, President Trump must reject the temptation of unchecked escalation and maximalist goals masked as victory.

For a 35,000 word document, it is markedly thin on detail, which will, we assume, be released in dribs and drabs over the coming months. Its funding commitments are vague and aspirational, and are already subject to the perennial Whitehall dispute over whether Britain’s defense spending is an adequate proportion of the country’s GDP. Yet as a realistic appraisal of a dangerous world, and of Britain’s role within it, it is not a bad document. Through the “collapse of the post-Second World War consensus”, it observes (meaning, in reality, the post-Cold War consensus) “the certainties of the international order we have accepted for so long are now being questioned — and not only by authoritarians” — a nod to Britain’s mercurial imperial patron, whose dubious commitment to Europe’s security is a prospect too alarming to be addressed frankly. “More broadly,” it cautions, “the West’s long-held military advantage is being eroded as other countries modernize and expand their armed forces at speed, while the United States’ (US) security priorities are changing.”  

In advance of the document’s publication, I expressed concern that its convenor, former Nato Secretary-General Lord Robertson’s fanciful declarations that the Ukraine War had proved America’s unshakeable commitment to the Atlantic alliance boded ill for the SDR’s correspondence with reality. As it transpires, the document is more subtle than we may have expected. Declaring, once again, Britain’s Nato first strategic worldview (and politically, it can hardly declare otherwise), the SDR is more notable for its observation that “‘NATO First’ does not mean ‘NATO only’.” The UK, it says, should build stronger bilateral and minilateral partnerships, particularly with France, but also Germany, Poland, and Norway creating what it describes as “strategic depth, strengthening the Alliance and stability in the Euro-Atlantic”. As such, these partnerships are to be a supplement rather than a replacement for Nato structures. Yet such an approach can also be read as vindication of the influential (within the Trump administration) defense analyst Sumantra Maitra’s prediction of de facto “mini-ententes” developing within Nato, even as the alliance remains in existence de jure. 

The Indo-Pacific Tilt, long a source of ecstatic fantasizing within the British defense commentariat, has, rightly, been demoted to an afterthought, without being formally dropped. The ongoing war in Europe has returned Pacific affairs to its rightful subordinate role in British defense, and a commitment to be shared with European allies (notably, not pledging interoperability with the United States), as and when the occasion demands — it is a long way from the underfunded, over-promised boosterism of the Johnsonian Tilt. As the SDR notes, “Military deployments beyond the Euro-Atlantic should be used to retain deeper and broader ‘match fitness’ of the Armed Forces” with caution being taken to ensure these deployments do not prevent it from returning at speed to the Euro-Atlantic if necessary — its core function. 

The SDR’s firm refocusing of British defense to “the Euro-Atlantic” region is to be welcomed, particularly its emphasis on Britain’s maritime responsibilities to the NATO alliance. Indeed, tucked away in a section on climate change, comes the important observation that the Arctic and High North are likely to be ‘ice-free each summer by 2040. This, then, will create a new site for competition within our “wider neighborhood”. It has long been a critique leveled by the security circle around Trump (though something of a minority view in British defense commentary,) that Britain has neglected its core NATO role of defending the seas around our home islands in favor of scattershot and distracting deployments elsewhere. This SDR firmly and sensibly recenters our near abroad as the primary focus of British defense. With a defense press, reflecting inter-service rivalries, inclined to view such documents as creating winners and losers among the services, it is fair to say that the Royal Navy is thus the “winner” of the SDR. The sections on the Navy possess the most fleshed-out proposals on modernization, with a strong emphasis on Atlantic Bastion: “the Royal Navy’s plan to secure the North Atlantic for the UK and NATO against the persistent and growing underwater threat from a modernizing Russian submarine force.”

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The sections on the Army are, by contrast, relatively vague, reflecting the land service’s functional non-existence as a serious warfighting entity. “Last recapitalized in the 1990s,” the SDR notes, “much of the Army’s capabilities—including Challenger 2 tanks, AS90 artillery, and ammunition—have rightly been gifted to Ukraine.” As we are told, “The Army must modernize the two divisions and the Corps HQ that it provides to NATO as one of the Alliance’s two Strategic Reserves Corps”. But at the moment this is just a vague aspiration rather than a fleshed-out commitment. It is not hard to detect a note of frustration in its observations that investment must be paired with drastic changes to how it is organized and equipped, and that “it should be bolder in its ambition, seeking to increase lethality ten-fold”. It is a classic “must do better” teacher’s comment in a school report.

As for the RAF, which garnered breathless weekend coverage over its alleged procurement of a tactical nuclear weapons capability, no such commitment was to be found in the document itself, save for perhaps the comment that Britain should “increase options for retaliation in response to an attack—or the threat of attack— on the UK and its allies”, and the suggestion that the service may, or may not, at some point in the future acquire the F-35A (which would enable such a capability). Overall, the section on British airpower is dominated by its focus on platforms still in development, and has rightly been characterized as “jam tomorrow” by defense analysts.

Effectively, the SDR is a clear-eyed assessment that Britain is, currently, in no position to fight a major war, while stating an ambition to move to a position of “readiness”. As it observes, the most plausible conflict now facing the country would be “high-intensity, protracted, and costly” — though it is hard to see how the Ukraine war’s lavish burning through of men and materiel justifies the assertion that “simple metrics such as the number of people and platforms deployed are outdated and inadequate”. After all, Russia’s strong negotiating position against Ukraine derives precisely from its superiority in both people and platforms. Indeed, as the SDR later notes, there has been “a hollowing out of capability due to a focus on ‘exquisite’ capabilities” and “Stockpiles are inadequate, further reduced by the important and necessary transfer of materiel to Ukraine”. Capacity and resilience, meanwhile, are lacking following years of underinvestment. Later on, though, the SDR recognizes the importance of mass, pledging to reorient service personnel from back-office roles to the core business of warfighting, and indeed, to build mass through lowering medical standards for recruitment. There may be more to modern warfare than mere mass then, but it retains a quality of its own.

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On materiel, similarly, the SDR introduces a strong and sustained emphasis on rebuilding industrial capacity, stating that a new Defense Readiness Bill should allow the Government powers to mobilize Reserves and industry should conflict necessitate it. Britain is not ready for war in the immediate future: yet the SDR lays out a concrete and urgent industrial roadmap to war-readiness which is, unfortunately, necessary, and this is to be unequivocally praised. As it observes, “Russia’s war economy, if sustained, will enable it to rebuild its land capabilities more quickly in the event of a ceasefire in Ukraine.” The cessation of the Ukraine war thus holds threats as well as promises for Britain, and time is of the essence.

Ignore the excited pre-publication commentary and interservice bickering, and the SDR presents a solid portrait of Britain’s current unreadiness for war and of the vital, if unglamorous work needed to amend this. There is a strong and necessary emphasis on home defense, hardening and resilience; on rebuilding industrial capacity; and a certain cutting of Britain’s defense coat to its under-equipped cloth through a recentring of Britain’s Atlantic front as its core area of responsibility.

This is fundamentally a defensive document which recognizes that previous decades of misallocation and squandering of resources have left Britain on the back-foot in relation to its strategic rivals. For all that one may disagree with the current government in other matters, it is a sober and serious work: it is not too little, but we must hope that it is not too late.

How did the US pay for that first wave of cheap low-tech imports? Partly with earnings from American agricultural exports, as well as some irresistible consumer products such as Coca Cola and cigarettes. Increasingly, though, America paid for its Adidas by selling Treasury bonds, eagerly bought by up exporters. That, in turn, drove up the dollar, and made foreign wares even more competitive.

But this model came with a downside. In the US, producers of low-tech and craft products started going out of business, even as the newly unemployed were encouraged to abandon hard industrial jobs for splendid new positions in the services sector. Go into foreign-exchange trading, they were told, whose winnings could earn you more money in a day than a lifetime spent turning out garden tools — which now anyway arrived more cheaply from overseas.

In speeches, articles and lectures, the country’s elite hailed the passing of our grim industrial economy, instead looking forward to a future where everyone could be a marketing consultant or a financial adviser.

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How rearmament can make us rich

By Edward Luttwak

It was only small-minded people, fixated on the hourly-wage data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who noticed that industrial workers who made $30 an hour working on assembly lines did not in fact become foreign-exchange traders earning $3,000 an hour. When their competition-hit factories shut down, rather, they were much more likely to turn up as shopping mall security guards paid a pittance.

As far back as 1993, I myself published a book called The Endangered American Dream, in which I tested the claim that the replacement of the industrial economy by the service economy was a Good Thing. In the event, I found that it was only a Good Thing for South Korea, Taiwan, the lower end of the Japanese economy and the poorest European regions. All these places kept out foreign — including US — imports while exporting vigorously to the US. Stateside, where lower-tech industries were collapsing, the American heartland suffered too.

Fentanyl had yet to arrive. But in those towns, fathers could no longer provide a dignified life for their children, heading off with their lunchpails to work in the factory down the street. Instead, they counted themselves lucky if they could get a job at Walmart, at much lower pay, and selling cheaper imported versions of what they once made themselves.

My book included a warning that social breakdown would open the way for some form of product-improved fascism in the US. But reviewers failed to notice that, as they contemptuously slammed my protectionist idiocy, daring as I had to question the secular religion of the ruling elite: unlimited free trade that would make the whole world richer. That is true, but globalization also made American industrial workers poorer, certainly too poor to send their children to college, at a stroke destroying the American Dream that was.

Worse was to follow. Instead of prudent and limited protectionism — replacing industrial collapse across the US with a much slower transition, providing enough time to upskill at least the sons of industrial workers — Bill Clinton and the Davos free trade consensus opened the US to unlimited imports from North America. That was a great blessing for local industry, and the foreign companies from all over the world that started producing in Mexico, which then trucked their products across the Rio Grande without any limits.

Nobody in the US elite noticed that every other industrial country impeded US industrial imports, either via arbitrary regulatory hurdles or even outright conspiracy. Consider South Korea. The government finally removed its de facto prohibition of US car imports (rich Koreans loved utterly impractical Cadillacs), only to ensure that General Motors would not be able to rent a showroom anywhere in Seoul. Traitorous landlords tempted to offer their space were threatened with harsh retaliation: by the very same officials who had smilingly signed the auto free trade agreement with the US. South Korea, of course, is a country that enjoys the protection of US troops until today.

Then, China’s industrialization accelerated. That carried the country from Mao’s deep misery — which I experienced first-hand in 1976, when the whole of Beijing smelled like an open sewer — to great prosperity. Once again, this wealth was largely built on industrial and craft exports to the US, whose market was totally open to China, even as China’s market was largely closed to US exporters. Some of these barriers have since come down, but the process is not complete even now.

It was Chinese imports that finally drove most US factories out of business, taking much of our remaining industrial base with them. Increasing quality at a steady clip, while constantly expanding capacity, Chinese industrialists were also helped by continued purchases of US dollar bonds. Artificially pushing up the greenback, this again made Chinese imports even cheaper.

Why balk at China’s generosity in offering 97-piece toolsets that can be picked up for a few bucks at Walmart? No reason at all — if Americans are only viewed as consumers. But while the entire US elite celebrated free trade, an astonishing number of Americans lost the last of the good jobs that upheld families, towns and cities.

Trump’s tariff plan is simple: impede free trade so that surviving industrial and craft enterprises can survive, while other firms both old and new are re-launched with better technology, allowing them to become global exporters while still paying good wages. True, global wealth is favored by unlimited free trade. But, in the process, lower-income workers in developed countries are impoverished, even as higher income people everywhere get wealthier. While Clinton, the Bushes, and the lord of Martha’s Vineyard Obama supported free trade, as did the wealthy elite they hang out with, Trump is keen to reward his lower income supporters. Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times are outraged.

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And then there is another thing. It turns out that without a civilian shipbuilding industry, the US Navy can only make hugely expensive prototypes, not the 200 warships we need. The same is true of other sectors, including civilian aviation: Boeing is currently years late in delivering tankers to US and allied air forces (the Israelis must rely on 65-year-old converted airliners), and also terribly behind in fulfilling orders for commercial airlines around the world. Why? Because of the collapse of those machine shops, which trained skilled workers, and which ensured they could walk into any Boeing factory at a pinch.

As for the labor supply, cutting gigantic Federal gifts to rich universities — which turn out unlimited numbers of sociologists and sexologists, and who often end up working for the government in some capacity — will give us more workers, and perhaps some more plumbers too.

All of the above is more than enough to justify today’s temporary global turmoil, but there is one more consideration too. Unless the US industrial economy is vigorously rebuilt, the US armed forces will have to import their vehicles and weapons. From where? Likely China, so good luck with that.

Yet this confidence is misplaced. Years of underinvestment have left Germany’s military and defense industry depleted, while a deeper failure to reckon with the past has drained societal will. The common thread running through the country’s economic, political and social struggles is a lack of cohesion — an underdeveloped sense of togetherness that saps Germany’s ability to act with resolve. Money alone won’t fix what is broken.

The Bundeswehr, once a formidable force, is now a shadow of its former self. At its Cold War peak, the Federal Republic’s armed forces boasted more than 500,000 soldiers, sailors and aviators. Today, that number has shrunk to barely 180,000, with one-in-four new sign-ups quitting within six months. Despite Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende pledge following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, battle-readiness has deteriorated. Just half of brigades are deployable, down from nearly two-thirds in 2022, while soldiers on Nato’s eastern flank lack basic communications gear. A parliamentary oversight report exposed critical deficiencies in weapons, equipment and infrastructure. The head of Germany’s armed forces association put it bluntly: the Bundeswehr is “blanker than blank”.

Part of the blame lies in what Germany is supposed to be so good at: making stuff. But the inconvenient truth is that the country’s defense industry is fragmented. Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems, a maker of non-nuclear submarines and surface vessels, can’t match the scale or capabilities of Britain’s BAE Systems, much less giants such as America’s General Dynamics, Russia’s United Shipbuilding Corporation or the China State Shipbuilding Corporation. Rheinmetall, a manufacturer of land weapons systems and Germany’s largest defense contractor, took two years to open a new munitions factory after the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. So, while Moscow has long since shifted to a war economy, Germany is struggling with logistical and industrial shortcomings.

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Beyond military weakness, Germany’s economic entanglement with China presents another grave vulnerability. Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, BASF, along with a host of smaller manufacturers, derive a substantial share of their revenues from the Chinese market. And given that China maintains its strategic alliance with Russia, Germany might struggle to stand its ground with regard to Ukraine. Any diplomatic pressure from China might lead to more Scholzing.

We have already seen Germany’s reluctance to challenge China. The 2022 purchase of the Tollerort shipping terminal in Hamburg, by China’s state-backed COSCO shipping company sparked alarm, but it went through all the same — albeit for a reduced stake — after Scholz intervened, wary of China’s reaction if it were blocked. Duisburg, home to Europe’s largest inland port at the confluence of the Rhine and the Ruhr rivers, is a crucial node in China’s Belt and Road Initiative and over 100 firms from the country have set up offices there. Leipzig-Halle Airport has seen Chinese investment in cargo operations. China’s Huawei has been a major supplier of telecommunications infrastructure to Germany, despite warnings from allies of espionage risk.

Germany’s Western loyalties are also undercut by a rogue’s gallery of Kremlin and Beijing sympathisers. That’s especially true for the Alternative für Deutschland, which doubled support to become the second-strongest party in the February election. The far-Right nationalists want to reestablish normal relations with Russia, including restarting gas imports, and would unwind Germany’s integration with Europe. It’s not just the political fringe though. The Social Democrats have had an ambivalent relationship to Moscow, even after Gerhard Schröder left the chancellery for well-paid roles in Russian boardrooms.

And compounding these political shortcomings is Germany’s fragmented counterintelligence system, a byproduct of the country’s federalist mindset. Unlike the British or American centralised services, Germany’s apparatus is divided across multiple agencies with overlapping jurisdictions. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) monitors domestic threats, the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) handles foreign spying, and the Military Counterintelligence Service (MAD) focuses on defense-related espionage. Complicating matters, Germany has 16 regional intelligence services, charged with roles from counterespionage through to monitoring extremists. The result is bureaucratic inefficiencies and inter-agency rivalries that have left Germany vulnerable to foreign infiltration.

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These weaknesses were laid bare last year, when a German general inadvertently provided intelligence on the Taurus missile system on an unsecured Webex call. The information was swiftly leaked by Russian media. Former UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace has warned that German intelligence and political networks are deeply infiltrated by Russian operatives. Carsten Breuer, inspector general of the German armed forces, called the division between internal and external security a “gateway” for hybrid Russian attacks.

Germany’s inability to take clear positions stems from decades of failing to create a cohesive national identity. As we have detailed, only a thin fabric holds the country together: a shared economic prosperity — known as Wohlstand für Alle — and the uninspiring concept of not being Nazis. As the economy sputters, and ethnic nationalism reemerges, the country is left with little consensus. This fragility was evident in Merz having to push his spending reforms through the parliament that was voted out of office in the February election. That’s because in the new Bundestag, the AfD and other fringe parties had enough votes to block constitutional changes. So even if he has the authorization to raise money, it’s based on a frail foundation that’s ill-suited for long-term military revival.

And the internal divisions run deep. The trauma of reunification left parts of the East with lingering affinities for Russia. The growing ranks of the poor see no reason to fight for a system that has left them behind. The wealthy are comfortable and detached with little interest in the suffering of the broader populace. Immigrants are often treated as outsiders, and show little loyalty to a nation that doesn’t fully embrace them. A broader societal reckoning is needed, and Germany is far from having it.

While Germany has been one of the prime beneficiaries of the postwar order, there is scant support for defending it. Despite rising concern about Russia, only about 15% of Germans support a significant increase in military spending or troop numbers, according to a recent study from the Center for Military History and Social Sciences of the Bundeswehr. While Germans strongly back NATO, they are less supportive of aiding the Baltics or taking a leadership role in the alliance, and most Germans under 50 say they wouldn’t take up arms to defend their country.

Young Germans, in particular, are opposed to the build-up, and are already more polarized than the rest of the population. In the latest election, the two strongest parties among voters under 25 were the Left-wing Die Linke, which is against Germany’s rearmament, and the Russia-friendly AfD. Both parties opposed Merz’s spending plan when it was pushed through the old Bundestag, driving a deeper wedge in society. The entire process of securing the billions for defense creates an existential risk for Merz.

So, at a time when young people face dwindling prospects from Germany’s sputtering economy and are being tasked with paying pensions for a growing number of retirees, a 69-year-old conservative is laying the groundwork for them to fight and potentially die for their country or some vague notion of Western ideals. That was already a foreign concept for a country that embraced demilitarization after reunification and deepened that post-security attitude after compulsory service was suspended in 2011.

Just how difficult it will be to win over the younger generation is evident in Ole Nymoen’s new book called Why I Would Never Fight for My Country. “Yes, I’d rather live less freely than be dead,” the young German writer told Berlin’s Tagesspiegel, summing up the apathy of his generation. For a country where militarism has brought only pain and suffering, there is no tradition of heroism. No “Greatest Generation” to invoke. No parades celebrating national pride. War memory is dominated by images of gas chambers and collective shame, not the societal effort that’s remembered in Britain.

That means when Merz says, “Germany is back,” he doesn’t mean it’s ready to fight. At best, he means it’s ready to spend, and he seems to be slowly coming to terms with the risks. “We are aware of people’s many concerns,” the conservative leader said recently as he battles to retain support. “A lot is at stake these days. It is about the future of Germany and Europe.”

Merz is right. There is a lot at stake. But without a drastic shift in the country’s culture and debate, Germany will simply be blowing hot air.

In much the same way, it would be unwise in the extreme for a country’s leaders to embroil their people in a distant foreign conflict without a confidence approaching certainty that their military, industrial, economic and political resources are matched to the great challenge ahead. Were one, like one of our ambitious renovators, proceeding from a state of near-dereliction, then the confidence that the necessary reserves are there to be drawn upon would need to be even greater still; the risks of disaster all the starker. For those granted the power of the British state and the trust of its people to make these decisions, as the analyst William D. James observes in his penetrating 2024 book British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony, these basic calculations come under the intimidating rubric of “grand strategy”.

James’ view is that the essential calculation of grand strategy is “proportionality”. Ultimately, James observes, grand strategy is simply “the sustainable balancing of means and ends, based on a prudent calculation of the state’s interests and the threats to those interests”. Strategy of this kind requires the identification of “interests or objectives that are commensurate with the state’s aggregate power (economic strength, technological prowess, and military capabilities), its geographic location, and the nature of its security environment”.

In contrast, a “disproportionate” grand strategy would be based on imprudent calculations. The result, James warns, would be “overstretch (pursuing overly ambitious goals given available means) or underreach (identifying overly conservative goals given the security environment)”. For Chamberlain not to have rearmed in the late Thirties, given the precarious security environment, would have been irresponsible underreach. Yet for Britain to have sent a military expedition to support plucky Finland against the Soviet Union in 1939, as politicians and military planners convinced themselves was a strategic necessity, would have been catastrophic overreach, given the balance of power that a combined Nazi and Soviet juggernaut could bring to bear.

Today, Britain’s grand strategy, in as far as it exists, is set by the Government’s Strategic Defense Reviews, such as the one the Labour government commissioned last year, due to be released next month. Yet as James notes these works of distilled Whitehall wisdom are often triumphs of the willing spirit over the weak flesh, ending up “thin on the main question: the dialectic between a country’s aims and its ability to meet them”. No man can read the future; even so, the defense reviews of recent years have fared poorly. All too often, planning assumptions are rapidly overtaken by real-world events. In this vein, the 2021 Integrated Review, a triumph of Johnsonian cakeism aiming to enshrine post-Brexit Global Britain into defense policy, vastly understated the approaching risks to Europe’s security. As James notes, “Just three months before Russian armor rolled into Ukraine, Prime Minister Boris Johnson boldly asserted that ‘the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on the European land mass are over.’” Instead, the driving concept of the Integrated Review was Britain’s “Indo-Pacific Tilt”, the goal of which was for Britain to establish “a greater and more persistent presence than any other European country” east of Suez.

While “the Tilt” caused much excitement among defense wonks, no one could say with any certainty what it actually meant or what the purpose was. As the Commons Defense Committee warned in 2023, “the UK’s regional military presence in the Indo-Pacific remains limited and the strategy to which it contributes is unclear”, given that “fundamentally UK Defense is already under-resourced for its role within NATO in the Euro-Atlantic, which is the core current and medium-term security challenge for the UK and Europe”. Without effectively doubling the size of the Royal Navy, the committee warned, and also defining Britain’s actual strategy in the Pacific and how to achieve it, “the UK may need to curb its ambitions in the region”. As one expert witness, the Professor of Strategic Foreign Policy Greg Kennedy, more bracingly phrased it, the Tilt “is a distraction and costly prestige exercise that will have no significant impact, apart from a fleeting appreciation from the USN (US Navy)… The costs of operating beyond the Straits of Hormuz are not profitable in any sense: pounds, politics or prestige.”

Reading Policy Exchange’s initial argument for the Tilt, one is struck by its divergence from the actually-existing world of 2025. Aside from the scheme’s essential paradox — that of preserving Britain’s trade links with the Pacific, in which China is by far our greatest trading partner, through a policy of confronting China — the proposal rests on planning assumptions that must now be re-examined from ground-up. “To fully globalize Britain,” it states, “the Indo-Pacific region… must become a priority in the UK’s overall foreign and security policies.” Yet what is the advantage of fully globalizing Britain in a world of frantic deglobalization, where over-extended supply chains outside national control have become a major source of strategic anxiety?

The Tilt commits Britain to a project of “reinforcing its commitment to a rules-based international order” by confronting global autocracy, yet this order not only does not exist but is anathema to the Trump administration, happily engaged in carving up the world into civilizational spheres alongside likeminded autocrats. The conceit was that committing the armed forces to a project beyond their abilities, to defend a fictional order that the United States wishes to firmly bury, would boost the Special Relationship; and this conceit must surely now be consigned to the dustbin of bad ideas. Not only are the ends beyond the existing means but those ends are illusory. By any definition this is the antithesis of grand strategy.

Yet the same can be said of the Integrated Review’s hurried, post-invasion of Ukraine update, the 2023 “Refresh”, which, while reverting to Europe as Britain’s prime source of strategic anxiety, rests upon two worryingly dubious planning assumptions. The Refresh states with unshakeable certainty that “NATO remains the bedrock of collective security”, and “The United States remains the UK’s most important ally”, two assertions, made just two years ago, that the entire ongoing European defense crisis now treats as false. With no certainty of success, European leaders are currently engaged in persuading America not to walk away from NATO for the five to 10 years it will take Europe to fill its role. Both the Integrated Review and the Refresh revolve around a “NATO first” defense vision, preservation of global free trade, and a “high cooperation and low-tension Arctic”, all of which now put the UK in direct confrontation with the US, not least because the greatest current threat to NATO’s Arctic possessions in Canada and Greenland is American annexation.

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Reading the expert testimony around the Refresh, we see the “dean of British strategic studies”, Sir Lawrence Freedman, tell Parliament in 2022 that we need not worry unduly about the Army’s current state of readiness, as “I find it hard to believe that we will be sending a division into battle because Russia is now a diminished power”. Instead, he asserts, “The hardest thing for us to get our heads around is the implications of a Russian loss.” Three years later, it is precisely the opposite fears now driving Whitehall’s mounting sense of strategic panic, with the same voices that condemned any talk of peace negotiations while Ukraine had the upper hand now condemning Russia for not coming eagerly to the table when it is winning.

While Freedman’s repeated analyses of Russia’s inevitable defeat in the intervening years have not weathered well, the aim here is not to mock him for his lack of a crystal ball. Rather, it is to underline the observable fact that Britain now finds itself in a situation where the resources at hand are vastly below its commitments, because those commitments were made through faulty analysis regarding achievable ends, available resources, and probable outcomes. To have presided over two failures of grand strategy in half a decade might be considered unfortunate. To bolt on a third, at this perilous juncture, could prove fatal.

There is an old Irish joke where a driver stops to ask a weathered countryman directions to a nearby town: the response, that “First off, I wouldn’t start from here,” characterises Britain’s current search for a grand strategy. In normal times, as James states, “Decisions over commitments, as well as military capabilities and force posture, are rarely taken at rapid speed”: yet, overshadowed by the Ukraine peace talks to which Britain is not a party, this is precisely what is happening. The last two documents setting out Britain’s grand strategy were made under the planning assumption that what was always probable, a second Trump term and waning commitment to European security, was unthinkable. That failure of imagination is now a strategic threat of the highest order.

Yet the terms of reference of the ongoing strategic defense review, which promises “a root and branch review of British defense” also pledges “a ‘NATO-first’ defense policy”, asserting that “NATO will remain the cornerstone of UK Defense…” Its guiding hand, Lord Robertson, confidently assured the Commons Defense Committee back in 2022 that the Ukraine war had led to a firm American recommitment to Europe and the Atlantic alliance. As ever, the British state’s incapacity to distinguish wishful thinking from reality remains its greatest strategic deficit. Just as the engine of tragedy is an inbuilt and overriding character flaw, Britain’s material shortages of men, munitions and industrial capacity all flow downstream from this willed blind spot.

For Britain to rearm now, given the perilous security environment, is essential. Regarding a land war in Europe, James accurately warns: “Not only does the UK currently lack the necessary depth for such an engagement, but its military-industrial base is ill-equipped to fill any gaps in the short-to-medium term.” Yet the basic work of ensuring economic, industrial and political security and stability necessary for such a deployment — the testing of foundations and fixing of the roof that precedes choosing wallpaper for the nursery — must come first. Despite two great societal and strategic shocks in 2020 and 2022, this work simply was not done, while Britain instead piled greater and greater foreign commitments onto an unstable base, in a frenetic, and still accelerating burst of directionless activity.

We must hope that the forthcoming review displays a ruthlessness Labour have yet to display in other areas. The Indo-Pacific Tilt, we may assume, will be consigned to the graveyard of Johnsonian optimism. As the Defense Secretary, John Healey, has rightly observed, there needs to be “a realism about military commitments into the Indo-Pacific” and a renewed focus on our near abroad. If America, as is its right, does not wish to underpin Europe’s security, then the British goal of supplementing US power at the furthest edge of the Earth can likewise be laid aside.

Since the Suez humiliation, a guiding principle of British strategy has been that “we must never allow ourselves to be put in a position where we have to make a final choice between the United States and Europe”. Yet events now appear to be forcing that choice, with the hurried quest for a role in the Ukraine settlement occluding cool, long-term strategic thinking. Britain is fortunate enough to be a collection of North Atlantic islands, far from Russia, whose home defense ought to be a trivial matter. Instead of distant long-term commitments that cannot currently be met, a genuine root-and-branch rethinking of British defense would radiate outwards, establishing a sense of security within Britain’s borders that few currently feel, before extending outwards to Britain’s Atlantic near abroad, and onwards only as far as material conditions allow. The Spring Statement will bring an increase in defense spending, but nothing that will be transformative. This is, perhaps, the work of decades.

Yet those most insistent of a British role at the forefront of world events are too often eager to overlook the growing insecurity and instability of the home front. As James observes, “The ability to mobilize and allocate resources depends on a stable domestic political environment.” Denmark’s social democratic Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen addressed this problem with rare frankness last week, telling Politico that while Russia remains Europe’s greatest threat, “security is also about what is going on in your local community… Do you feel safe where you live? When you go and take your local train, or when your kids are going home from school, or whatever is going on in your daily life?” Devoid of both domestic stability and expeditionary capacity, perhaps Britain’s current weakness is a hidden opportunity. The risks of underresourced adventurism are greater than the immediate risks of inward-looking withdrawal from world affairs. Until the structure is solid and watertight, the need to make harder and more expansive geostrategic choices can be deferred as a future luxury.

The extent of Europe’s current defense vulnerability is perfectly illustrated by the F-35 fighter jet. Sold to us by the American defense company Lockheed Martin, eight countries are involved in its manufacture and 14 NATO member states use it. They all cooperate on matters like training, and maintenance.

But according to the magazine Stern, the contract with the Germans stipulates that the Americans have the right to withdraw support for delivery of the aircraft, and maintenance at any time if the President decides to invoke national security interests. There is talk among European security officials that the Americans might even use something called the “kill switch” to immediately deactivate the planes, should their erratic President see fit to do so. While there is no credible evidence that such a thing even exists, the US certainly has many other ways to frustrate its use in the field — including refusing to service them or supply parts. Meanwhile, European defense ministries are committed to the jet as it allows them to remain under the US nuclear umbrella. France, the only nuclear power in the EU, doesn’t have sufficient capacity to provide the scale of defense services to other members of the EU that the US has been willing to do until now.

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So, where does that leave Europe? What they are agreed on is the plan is to increase military spending. The EU will follow Germany’s example and partially exempt the defense budget from the fiscal rules. But the truth is, no amount of investment will wean the EU off its American dependency any time soon. It will take decades to close the immense defense technology gap.

To build entire industries from scratch takes time. You need defense companies, supply chains, and know-how. Europe is far from the cutting edge of 21st century defense technology and its expertise in that sector has been diminished since the end of the Cold War.

A graphic example of what happens when you lose industrial know-how can be seen in the civilian nuclear sector. Germany used to build the best nuclear power stations in the world but had changed by 2023 when it closed the last of its own plants. That same year, the country only had eight professors active in nuclear research — there were, by way of comparison, 173 professors in gender studies. This is what happens when you drive down industries. They can’t just be switched back on.

The same applies for defense. The US is miles ahead of us thanks to decades of investment into digital-era technologies. From the Manhattan Project onwards, American military investment and innovation has pioneered civilian spin-offs: the transistor in 1947, the integrated circuit a decade later, and the communication technologies in the Sixties that morphed into the technology behind the internet. When the US was investing in AI, the Europeans were fussing over the Green Deal. We spent our peace dividend on social transfers. As a result, the German military still uses the fax machine and we are similarly in the dark ages when it comes to building ballistic missiles, AI-powered satellites, and electronic warfare.

It is laughable, then, to think we could possibly match Russia’s defense capabilities in the next five years. Even with investment in place, given the weakness of our industry, we would have to spend it on defense imports from the US. At which point, action is thwarted by Europe’s age-old problem. Politics. There are no indications that political majorities in Berlin or Paris are willing to trade off welfare spending to pay for US arms imports. Italy and Spain are already recusing themselves from re-militarization because they are far away from Russia, and because they have much less fiscal scope.

Even the more realistic goal of a gradual Europeanization of defense spending over a period of 10-15 years would go beyond anything Europe has done in living memory. Key to their current position is the fact that the EU is not a military alliance. Defense is explicitly excluded from the single market. The UK is not in the EU, and yet it is indispensable in the construction of any functioning European security architecture. But Europe, obdurate as ever, launched a €150bn defense fund with the participation of Japan and South Korea, and without the UK. This tells us that they are still in business-as-usual mode.

Another obstacle to military greatness is Europe’s demographics, and its lack of young people willing to join the military. There is now growing support in several EU countries to reinstitute the draft. Interestingly much of this pressure comes from politicians of the Left, who themselves avoided the draft when it was in place, and who opted for social work instead. But even if the draft were brought back, that would not suddenly present Europe with the specialist troops they need to drive battle tanks and fly F35 fighter planes. I heard of a young man who wanted to join the Bundeswehr a decade ago but was rejected on the grounds that he was overqualified. He was told that preference was given to people from difficult social environments.

Our current predicament dates back to the woman once celebrated by pro-European liberals as the leader of the Western world, Angela Merkel. She left a long legacy of unsolved problems, including that of a depleted Bundeswehr.

But of all the terrible decisions Merkel took, by far the most consequential, the repercussions of which we are feeling now, was her refusal to accept a strengthening of the EU’s institutions during the eurozone financial crisis in 2012. For the briefest of moments that year, there was pressure on EU leaders to agree a timetable for a single European sovereign bond and a fiscal union. The sovereign debt crisis led to an increase in interest rates in several European countries that would have invariably led to an implosion of the eurozone if it had been allowed to continue. Merkel decided in the summer of that year that she did not want to pick a fight with the conservatives in her party. As a result, the EU was left trapped in a dependency on the US dollar, on US financial markets, and on US defense. If the EU had started the long process towards a fiscal union in 2012, it might have been better equipped to respond to the geopolitical shocks of this decade.

Instead, it was left to Mario Draghi, then president of the European Central Bank, to roll out a backstop to prevent the eurozone from imploding. That accomplished the technical job of containing the rise in interest rates, but it was also the point at which the battle for a political union was lost. In the years since, the EU has only become more fragmented.

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By 2022, when Putin invaded Ukraine, the debate about further integration was fading. In 2023, the European Parliament did propose a reform of the European treaties, mostly about voting rights and changes to how the EU works internally. But even those pathetically insufficient ideas have since been dropped.

It was only this year, 11 years after Putin’s annexation of Crimea, and three after his invasion of Ukraine, that the EU started to panic. With the return of Trump, EU leaders finally realized that the combination of their under-investment in defense and their over-reliance on the US had left them dangerously exposed to global shocks.

There is a cliché about the EU that if only the crisis were big enough, Europeans might wake up and do the right thing. They had a financial crisis. They had a pandemic. They had Putin. They did not wake up. It reminds me of the Parable of the Drowning Man, about a devout Christian minister, trapped in a flood, refusing successive rescue attempts by boats and then a helicopter, all the while praying that that God would come and help him. The man drowned, and when in heaven, he asked God why he had refused to help. God responded: “What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”

The EU has not drowned quite yet. It is at a point where it can choose between stepping into a US-made helicopter, or a European-made boat. My guess is that some Europeans will choose the boat. Others will choose the helicopter. And some will make no choice at all.

All the Pentagon had to rely on were CIA defector reports, rarely helpful and quickly outdated. But it was a second display, in 1955, that sowed panic in Washington. That July, 10 Mya-4s flew past the Tsushino airfield reviewing stand, before diving out of sight and returning with eight more, creating the false impression that the Soviets had 28 such aircraft overall. Wrongly assuming that Moscow had ramped up production from two to almost 30 in a single year, the US predicted that, by 1960, the Soviets would have 800 Mya-4s, enough to attack even smaller American cities.

In the meantime, the Mya-4’s Mikulin engines primarily designed by captured German engineers proved unsuitable for intercontinental flight: they were too fuel-hungry to reach Washington DC. But terrified into action, the US military establishment started down a path that would revolutionize technology for the rest of the century, while also turning the US into a computer superpower. So long as it pays for truly new technology with a broad scope, and not for more of the same, even unnecessary military spending can still prove very useful, turning the wealth it absorbs into innovation and economically important technological advances. It’s a valuable lesson for governments considering how to rearm in our own time.

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From Britain to Germany, Europeans finally seem serious about rearmament. Given that will inevitably require cuts in pensions and other public services, the economic benefits of innovative military spending deserve special scrutiny. Certainly, this has been the secret recipe of the Israeli economy, which has grown very well over the decades despite colossal military spending. Even during the war year of 2024, with much of the labor force under arms, the Israeli economy still grew by 1%.

The key here is Israel’s focus on truly advanced weapons, mostly absent from Europe’s antiquated armed forces. The Iron Dome is one familiar example, but there is also the “Arrow” that intercepted Iranian ballistic missiles well above the atmosphere, in mankind’s first experience of space warfare. Soon, Israel will also launch the world’s first directed-energy weapon, much like the Martian “heat ray” that H.G. Wells described back in 1897.

What all these systems have in common is their very advanced software, whose broad commercial applications employ many of the 15% of Israelis who work in high-tech, the highest proportion of any nation on earth. These people are all members of a still-expanding profession — one ultimately sparked by the Mya-4 panic.

After those Soviet fly-pasts, the young Jack Kennedy, already campaigning for the White House, ferociously denounced Eisenhower’s lethargy on the so-called “bomber gap”. The American elite and public had barely absorbed the huge shock of the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb, which had come just a year after America’s. It was therefore with broad support that the Pentagon decided to go all out in response to the perceived Soviet threat.

Even though the Korean War was over, and the Vietnam War had yet to start, the 1955 defense budget consumed 9.4% of the US GDP. Today, despite the collective groans over Pentagon spending, its budget comes to just 3.4%. One US response to the seemingly formidable Mya-4 threat was to build over 2,000 four-engined B-47 jet bombers, which needed refueling bases across the Atlantic to reach Russia and back. Next came more than 700 eight-engined B-52s, which could fly anywhere in the world from bases safely inside the US. They still fly today, and remain the only aircraft capable of destroying an entire military base with a single bomb load.

Both bomber programs were tremendously expensive — but nowhere near as costly as the defensive response to the Soviet threat, whose momentous consequences still linger.

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The US Army had lately lost its air arm — in 1947, the US Air Force became a separate service — but strongly asserted its own air defense role. It spent hugely on upgraded German anti-aircraft rocket projects, resulting in the Nike anti-aircraft missile system, whose batteries protected both home cities and US bases abroad. For its part, the Air Force produced jet interceptors, which just like the British Spitfires were designed to swiftly gain altitude and target Russian bombers. They were followed by the unmanned Bomarc, effectively nuclear-armed drones designed to destroy two or three bombers at once.

To detect approaching Soviet bombers, radar stations were built along both US coasts, and up in the Arctic along the “Distant Early Warning Line” spanning Alaska, Canada, the Faroe Islands and Iceland. But the principal challenge remained: how to direct (“vector”) interceptors all the way from take off, until they could detect Russian bombers on their own short-range nosecone radars, and then target them with their guns and air-to-air missiles.

That was not just difficult, it was mission impossible. True, the British had managed it in the Battle of Britain, when fighter pilots were informed by radio where enemy squadrons were arriving, to then see them through their windscreens — if the visibility was good enough. Later in the war, the first airborne radars could detect bombers a few miles out even in dense clouds — if they worked perfectly, as they sometimes did.

But this solution could not simply be scaled up. First, incoming Soviet bombers would drop thermonuclear weapons. That meant it was no use to intercept just some of the attackers, as the RAF did with Luftwaffe bombers on their way to London or Glasgow, in order to wear down enemy attackers over weeks and months. In the nuclear age, there would be nothing left to defend, unless all or almost all enemy bombers were successfully stopped.

Then there was the simple question of scale. The US and Canada are some 80 times larger than the United Kingdom. Unless fighter aircraft could very reliably be directed to the enemy over long distances, the entire defense plan would crumble.

The difficulty, then, was to integrate radar readings from many different stations, while ensuring that radars could distinguish between individual enemy aircraft. Informal gatherings of radar and early computer experts — so-called “summer studies” — provided the answer to this apparent mission impossible: giant computers distributed across the US and programmed to track Soviet bombers from first detection to interception. The problem of course was that no giant computer existed, nor any way to program them.

With unlimited funds and the methods just invented in the “summer studies” both were developed in record time. The result was SAGE: the Strategic Air Ground Environment. There were 27 stations in all, each boasting a pair of huge AN/FSQ-7 computers. Doubling up was necessary as a failsafe: if even one of the 60,000 vacuum tubes in each computer failed, which happened often enough, the machine malfunctioned, though data processing would continue on its own. Together, the twin computers weighed 250 tons and required an acre of floor space (and yes, my cheap old laptop is more powerful). Each was operated from 100 “system consoles” which included the already familiar circular radar display — and a lighter and ashtray because an entire intercept sequence might fail if the operator had to leave the room for a smoke.

IBM — already famous for typewriters and cash registers — built the AN/FSQ-7s by adding some 7,000 engineers and technicians. They soon acquired the skills that would allow IBM to conquer the world. The company’s 360 “mainframe” model knocked foreign manufacturers right out of the market.

But it was the least visible part of this vast enterprise that proved most consequential. In order to operate, the computers needed detailed step-by-step instructions: in other words software. Because of its enormous scale, SAGE trained the first ever cohort of software writers, and indeed it was the mathematician Margaret Elaine Hamilton, who programmed for SAGE from 1961, who invented the term “software engineer” to describe her trade.

Given all the advantages the United States was to derive from its leap forward in producing both mainframe computers and software, it would be churlish to claim that SAGE was unnecessary because the Soviet bomber threat never materialized. But the great lesson of SAGE is that rearmament can advance economies as nothing else — so long as the money is not spent mostly on the classic weapons that both generals and established military industries invariably want.

A similar conflict between rival ways of interpreting the world around us can be seen in the dispute between Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man Theory of History, in which the willed actions of specific individuals shape world events, and the social-scientific emphasis on grand and impersonal economic and social forces as the prime engine of history. Yet like the Azande answer, the latter does not preclude the former, as we are seeing with Ukraine. For Realists such as John J. Mearsheimer, Russia’s opposition to an independent Ukraine on its border, a potential launchpad for invasion from the West, is structural: any Russian leader, once strong enough to do so, would be compelled to remove the threat. Yet who can deny that it took Putin’s individual agency to launch history back into motion? If Ukraine’s strategic location provides the proximate cause, Putin’s personality answers the Why now?, just as Zelensky’s decision to stay and fight, rather than flee the invasion, provides a version of the Great Man Theory of History socially acceptable to otherwise skeptical centrist liberals. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine may be structural, as Realists correctly observe: yet it took the clash of two specific personalities for the war to take its current form, and thus define the future of our continent.

If anyone can be accused of magical thinking, it is those European liberal Atlanticists currently bewailing Trump’s turn to naked imperialism, as though some dark sorcery has suddenly overtaken the empire they eagerly subjected us to. Quoting an Economist piece, the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman mourns on X that “I think it’s often those in Europe who have been most pro-American that are now reacting most strongly to what Trump is doing. Huge sense of betrayal and disgust,” as if neither of the two leading organs of the Atlanticist worldview that brought Britain and Europe to this moment of humiliation had any role to play in the disaster. Those who forged our manacles are now complaining that they chafe. Yet even if it took Trump’s personality to make Europe’s implicit subordination to the American empire explicit, the causes are also structural. The power imbalance between the two is so stark that some Trump or other was destined to come along eventually: the termites gnawing away at Europe from within long made sure of that.

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As a result of our rulers’ policy choices, Europe is now so weak that it presents an unguarded feast for the great powers carving up the world between them. The emperor on the Washington throne now seeks to detach Greenland from Denmark and add it with Canada to his vast American domain. When Trump can say of Canada that soon “the artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear”, the dynamics are not so different from Putin harking back to Kyivan Rus and the Rurikids to justify his war of imperial expansion. Empires ebb and flow, as they always have: the weaker states between them, whether Ukraine or Europe as a whole, must either accept having their fates determined by great imperialists, or prepare to fight for their own survival.

The talk, then, of European rearmament as a means to save Ukraine from American retreat and Russian dismemberment is best understood as a form of noble lie to prepare European voters to stand alone. When Emmanuel Macron called Nato “brain dead” five years ago, suggesting America’s waning commitment, he was mocked by the very same Atlanticist voices which now, too late, demand a strong and sovereign Europe. These are the very same voices that three years ago, when Russia first invaded, were proclaiming that “Nato is back”, with the relief of born vassals suddenly rescued from the fearful responsibilities of freedom. Had Macron been listened to back in 2020, perhaps matters would be different now; perhaps, indeed, the Ukraine war would never have begun. But Europe’s empty commitments are simply too late: without American support, Ukraine has lost the war. And a Europe capable, with great exertion, of patrolling Ukraine’s eastern frontiers in a decade’s time is simply of no use in determining the outcome of the peace talks taking place now. Once again, it is those most culpable for present failure spurring us to future action: yet whether or not it is also too late for Europe remains an undetermined question. The assumption belatedly dawning on European policymakers is that Nato’s Article 5 is already dead, and with it, the Atlantic Alliance. If Nato still exists in a decade, it will do so only in the sense that Charlemagne was a Roman emperor. The titles may remain the same, perhaps the great ritual gatherings will continue, but the hard facts of power will have changed utterly, and the frontiers to defend will have shrunk.

With Nato moribund, it is difficult to think of a Western state, apart from Canada, worse prepared or politically situated for Trump 2.0 than Britain. In security terms, we are almost uniquely over-exposed, having long settled on a posture of America’s yappiest and least threatening lapdog. Trump’s annexation threats to Canada derive from Canada making itself so interwoven, economically and in security terms, with the US that its independence is essentially fictional. Yet in the security sphere, this is precisely what decades of Atlanticism have done to Britain. A close defense relationship with the US, once an asset to leverage over rivals, now looks a dangerous vulnerability. Just as is the case with Ukraine, whose future will be decided by the interaction of two opposing levers — Russian military force and the supply or withdrawal of American military aid, as imperial diplomacy dictates — so has Britain’s willed dependence on American military power eroded its sovereignty.

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Our nuclear deterrent is leased from the United States, drawn from pooled stocks held in Virginia to which access can be denied as Washington sees fit. Our Army can only function as an American auxiliary unit, and our Navy has refashioned itself, at vast expense, as a means to supplement American power projection into the Pacific for American ends, with the two carriers serving as a platform for American jets whose operation and maintenance are subject to Washington’s goodwill. Dependent on a logistics chain we do not control, Britain is no more in control of its destiny than Ukraine, the result of a security establishment whose think tanks and policymaking organs, heavily funded by American largesse, have been explicitly designed to achieve this outcome. And yet the Trump administration seems to have a strangely benign approach to Britain so far. The explanation given by the Westminster lobby is that this is the result of Starmer’s political skill and personal charm: time will reveal if there are other explanations.

Even Starmer’s closest allies, who have likened him to a passenger in the front seat of the DLR pretending to drive the train, accept that he is no great man of history. Yet the moment has arrived for a great exertion of will in the service of seizing Britain’s sovereignty, a moment of grave peril which demands vision and foresight. The great unasked question in all the current flurry of panicked meetings and delusional op-eds is how the new, nakedly imperial American regime actually views its future relationship with Europe. Is our continent to remain an imperial possession, drawn tighter into America’s embrace through increased spending on American arms and munitions that deepens its dependence, or is it a rival power, as Trump’s trade tariffs imply?

The Pentagon’s notorious leaked 1992 planning document observed that through “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests”, the United States “must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO”, as Europe is “a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power”. Europe’s post-Cold War weakness is as much the product of cold American calculation as of European delusion. While the Continent’s inability to defend itself is shameful, Trump’s declared shock at this outcome rings hollow, given the great American efforts, over decades, to enable our present weakness and dependency. A Europe that does not rely on America’s defense umbrella, that develops its own defense-industrial base, its own surveillance and target acquisition capabilities, its own nuclear shield and own reliable sources of energy is also a sovereign Europe, whose interests will of necessity diverge from those of Washington. Vassals or rivals: either path is now fraught with risks.

For Britain and for Europe, everything must be thought through again, from first principles. Strategic autonomy is at least a decade’s work, yet the hurried focus on achieving a tolerable solution to the Ukraine war, now beyond Europe’s power to negotiate or enforce, displays only panicked activity in place of cool decision-making, tactical maneuvering bereft of a wider strategic vision. The risk for Europe now is that Trump walks away from peace negotiations with Putin leaving European leaders committed to a confrontation with Russia for which they are entirely unprepared. Shorn of a role as America’s most committed European franchisee, Britain’s security elites are suddenly bereft of purpose, the incoming Strategic Defense and Security Review less useful than a blank sheet of paper. The moment requires sober reflection, for the decisions made now will define Britain’s future for years to come. Yet the urgency of the Ukraine crisis, and the commitment to sunk political costs, has outrun any wider reappraisal of Britain’s role in the world, as Starmer bounces from conference to lobby briefing, scrambling to catch up with events beyond his control.

Seeking to fill the gap between rhetoric and capacity, Europe’s leaders have hurriedly settled on Turkey as a force enhancer, without reflecting that Turkey’s rise under Erdogan is that of a cynical, self-interested actor expert in playing great power blocs against each other for advantage, building a domestic industrial base to hedge against dependence on patrons. Surely Turkey’s ruthless and transactional pursuit of its national interest presents a model for a mid-size peripheral power such as Britain? The hour of Europe’s independence has dawned, but there is no Bismarck or Mazzini to meet it, merely Von der Leyen and Kallas, regional HR managers for Washington’s soon-to-be-wound-down European operation. Macron excepted, Europe has no great men waiting in the wings: but the conflict between a truly sovereign Europe and an imperial America presents challenges that have not yet been articulated, let alone planned for. In plotting Britain’s next steps Starmer must set aside Whitehall’s tendency towards magical thinking, and ruthlessly pursue the national interest. Yet even as the international order collapses around him, fate has granted Britain a leader committed to multilateralism and international consensus-seeking at the very moment that will determine the nation’s destiny for decades to come.

The world of February 2014, when Vladimir Putin’s “little green men” began popping up in Crimea has now — beyond doubt — irrevocably disappeared. That was the world of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel, European demilitarization and global interdependence. Back then, Russia provided Europe its gas and the United States its defense, while China provided the entire world with the raw materials needed for the technologies which would drive the future. All these assumptions now lie in tatters; that era finally brought to a cataclysmic end by Russia’s attempt to finally subjugate Ukraine in February 2022.

Three years on from that fateful decision, a million men at arms are still battling it out in trenches, hunted by drone armies powered by artificial intelligence. Imperial carve-ups are taking place in the marbled halls of Saudi Arabia while the transatlantic alliance teeters on the brink of collapse. And a new trade war is threatening to send the world economy into recession, risking not only the future of NATO but Europe’s entire social-democratic model. Yet behind the scenes in Europe’s capitals, a dispiriting refusal to abandon the dogmas of old still lingers. And among the worst offenders are those who are performatively leading Europe’s response to Donald Trump: the British and French.

Beyond the warm words over the past few weeks, London and Paris are largely sticking to the tired national strategies they have clung to for much of the past 50 years: the French talking of European autonomy but in reality pursuing national autonomy; the British pretending they are a mini America but, instead, becoming an ever cheaper imitation. The irony is that, as much as it might pain either side to admit, each would be stronger if it became a little more like the other.

As the former French ambassador to the US, Gerard Araud, has repeatedly pointed out, the Gaullist insistence to retain some national independence from America has proved more farsighted than Britain or Germany would like to admit. While the British military has long prioritized obtaining the latest shiny piece of American military kit available — even at the cost of becoming ever more dependent on the States — the French have prioritized retaining national autonomy, even at the cost of paying more for less.

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One such example is the French insistence on a sovereign space policy. They spend around three times more than we do on space programs, but end up with an inferior product to the one we access courtesy of the Americans, according to those I spoke with. Another example is the French satellite communications operator Eutelsat, which now wants to replace Elon Musk’s Starlink in Ukraine in order to protect European autonomy. But Eutelsat has far fewer satellites operating at far higher altitudes resulting in slower connections. European autonomy, in other words, means paying more for a worse product — at least in the short term.

The upside of this French insistence on national resilience is that in the event of a genuine American withdrawal from NATO — and, perhaps, even an alliance with Russia — the French would at least have the foundations upon which to construct a genuinely independent military. Britain, in contrast, has built its entire strategy around the principle of interoperability with the United States, and so would be sent into a crisis, forcing it to question everything from scratch.

Yet, the corollary of the French insistence on national resilience is that, for all their talk of European autonomy, they cannot bring themselves to do what is necessary to genuinely move in this direction — since it would inevitably undermine their own independence. The most obvious example of this paradox is the fact that in Ukraine’s great battle for survival against Russia — a war Emmanuel Macron has held up as an existential test of European security — France has fallen far behind the UK and Germany in supplying the necessary arms for Kyiv to prevail. Why? The answer, it seems, comes in two parts: first, France continues to prioritize national self-reliance over European solidarity; and, second, as one analyst put it to me, France appears “more genuinely broke” even than Britain.

In total, Britain has contributed around €10 billion in military aid to Ukraine, compared with just €3.5 billion from France. As part of this, Britain has been prepared to run down its military stocks. “We’ve given it all away,” said one official I spoke to. By one estimate, Britain has just 14 pieces of heavy artillery left in Estonia, I was told. The French would never entertain this level of exposure. The result, however, is that in the fight for Ukraine’s national survival, Britain has shown more European “solidarity” than France.

Talking European but acting French is the straitjacket Paris seems unable to escape, limiting its ability to lead the Continent into the European revolution it has long championed. Again and again this conundrum plays out. Twenty EU states — including Germany — have called for greater coordination with the UK defense industry to boost the Europe’s resilience, but the French rejected the proposal. Britain has sought a defense pact with the EU in recent months, the process has been held up by the French insistence on negotiating access to Britain’s fishing waters. The inevitable result: French autonomy, European weakness.

A similar story has played out on the biggest question of all: nuclear weapons. In France, the independence of the country’s deterrent is sacrosanct. There is understandable pride — especially today — that it is less dependent on American cooperation than British equivalent. Yet, for this very reason the French have proven unable to move beyond the Gaullist doctrine which states that its nuclear deterrent serves only its vital national interests. Yet, this means it cannot be extended to Europe. And so it is stuck.

Britain, in contrast, has always been much more willing to be dependent on American cooperation, but also to place its deterrent at the service of NATO. In the event of full-scale American isolationism, the cost for Britain of maintaining its nuclear deterrent would be prohibitive. As such, the lack of interest in strategic national autonomy has left it in the similarly invidious position of being tied to a superpower that increasingly fails to hide its contempt for its supplicant partners. Whatever happens over the coming months and years, Britain will at some point be forced to confront the question it does not want to answer: what will it do when the Americans are gone and there is no NATO?

The costs of real independence from the United States, then, remain too high for either Britain or France to seriously entertain. The scale of our dependence was revealed by the former head of British intelligence, Alex Younger, this week when he said there were “no circumstances” under which European troops could be sent to Ukraine without a peace deal — and that even with an agreement it would be “irresponsible” to do that without strategic support from the US. According to one senior military adviser I spoke with, Europe needs to spend around 3.5% of its GDP for the next decade simply to get its armies into a position to independently deter Russian aggression. Until then, Europe’s collective forces would be vulnerable to a Russian incursion into the Baltics without the Americans.

Yet, even at this level of spending, Europe would still have to remain under the American nuclear umbrella. Without it, military advisers believe, Europe remains vulnerable to nuclear coercion. “We don’t have the answer to tactical nukes,” as one official put it to me, bluntly. An answer would cost Britain and France more like 4.5% of GDP — unless the Germans finance it. But while nuclear autonomy remains “the big play” for France and Britain in the coming years — the grand offer reshaping the continent for the 21st century — neither seems capable nor willing to make it.

In Ukraine, as many as two million drones are now produced each year, an increasing number of which are being controlled by artificial intelligence. Ukraine now trains its soldiers to launch combined operations with drone armies at land and sea, while its traditional military is dependent on high-end American intelligence and technology that Europe does not have. The nature of war itself is changing, which in turn, will force the armies of Europe and the United States to revolutionize themselves irrespective of the outcome.

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In turn, both Ukraine’s drone production and America’s military might are dependent on the supply of critical minerals — including rare earths — which are sourced via an extraordinarily complicated global network which must be protected, in the end, by military power. Strip away everything and there is a Leviathan holding a sword and a scepter — the only question is who that is.

If Europe is serious about its autonomy, then, it will need not only its own militaries, but its own supply of critical minerals, artificial intelligence, semiconductor plants and reliable sources of energy. It is for all these reasons that neither Britain nor France today is rushing to grasp the opportunity presented by Trump of “independence” from the United States. Neither can afford it.

Here is the rub. Britain and France are far too poor to play the role they want. Last year, the French government ran a deficit of more than 6%, far outside the limits demanded by the European Commission. Yet it has so far proved impossible to assemble a majority in the National Assembly to pass a budget to bring this under control. Instead, Paris has relied on constitutional powers to enact the budget without a parliamentary vote. In Britain, meanwhile, which has similar levels of national debt, the Government has a large majority, but is gearing up for a Spring Statement which most analysts believe will contain fanciful forecasts of undeliverable spending cuts.

The painful truth facing both London and Paris is that while Britain will need to become more French to thrive in a world of American withdrawal — and France will need become more British in its willingness to rely on others — both countries will need to become something new if they are ever to become truly independent in this new world. Henry Kissinger did note that Donald Trump may be “one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”. The trouble is, neither Britain nor France seems willing to stop pretending.

This analysis sprang to mind when I saw Powell arriving in Paris alongside Starmer on Monday. The two were there to attend Emmanuel Macron’s hastily arranged meeting of European leaders to discuss Donald Trump’s decision to open peace talks with Russia. The talks, which began in Saudi Arabia yesterday, came after Trump’s Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that the US would not provide any peacekeeping troops to Ukraine in future, nor provide any further funding to keep the war going. The message was clear: it was up to Europe to protect itself from now on. Taken alongside J.D. Vance’s uncompromising attack on European domestic affairs in Munich last weekend, the past week has been a geopolitical shock to Europe — the moment the curtain may have started to fall on the transatlantic alliance and a new world came into being.

Can Starmer turn the crisis to his advantage? With Powell at his side, the Prime Minister has taken a notably resolute posture, declaring his willingness not only to share the responsibility for Europe’s defense, as demanded by Trump, but even to consider sending British troops to Ukraine to defend the country in future if necessary. “We have to recognize the new era we are in, not cling hopelessly to the comforts of the past,” Starmer declared after the meeting in Paris. “It is time for us to take responsibility for our security, for our continent.” If true, this really will be a moment of history.

For many on the Left of the Labour Party, such statements are evidence of Powell’s Blairite influence over Starmer. “Advising Starmer about sending UK troops to Ukraine are Jonathan Powell and Peter Mandelson,” wrote Diane Abbott on X. “Both relics of the Iraq War era. What can possibly go wrong?” Since his return to Downing Street in November, nearly two decades after his stint in Tony Blair’s No. 10 came to an end, Powell has established himself as a figure of significant influence in the Starmer operation, trusted by both the Prime Minister and his influential chief of staff Morgan McSweeney. In fact, inside Downing Street, The New Machiavelli is held up as something of a guidebook for how to wield power in modern politics.

The irony of Powell’s return to Downing Street, however, is that Starmer — at least on the face of it — appears to be anything but the “conviction” politician praised in The New Machiavelli. In a new book on the Labour leader, Get In, written by the journalists Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund, Starmer himself appears to make this explicit. “I don’t have any ideology at all,” he reportedly declares at one point. “There’s no such thing as Starmerism and there never will be. I will make decisions one after the other.”

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Despite Starmer’s openness to sending British troops to Ukraine, his response to the Trump crisis hardly fits Powell’s definition of a conviction politician. Just after saying that it was time for Europe to take responsibility for its own security, for example, Starmer also insisted that there had to be a “US backstop” to any future peacekeeping effort in Ukraine. The comforts of the past are not easy to give up.

Domestically, too, Starmer is facing a battle just to marginally increase defense spending from the current target of 2.5% — half the level the Trump administration has demanded from Europe. According to influential UK advisers I have spoken to this week, Britain’s spending on conventional military forces in reality amounts to little more than 1.5% of GDP once its spending on other areas of defense, like Trident, are accounted for. Britain simply is not capable of stepping into the gap left by any US departure. Starmer’s mission to Washington next week is that of a supplicant. And Trump knows it.

So far, Starmer’s response to the crisis has been entirely conventional. Much like all British prime ministers since 1945 — with the one notable exception of Ted Heath — Starmer wants to act as the bridge between Europe and the United States as part of a wider strategy to protect the transatlantic alliance and the primacy of NATO as the guarantor of European security.

Yet the danger for Starmer is that he finds himself being buffeted by events in much the way Powell set out, reacting to the latest challenge without any overarching strategic goal beyond the conservation of a rapidly vanishing  order.

There is, of course, every reason to be cautious about Trump’s bombast. During his first term, he repeatedly chastised Europe about its defense spending but left office with more American troops stationed on the continent than he inherited. The read-out from yesterday’s talks in Saudi Arabia did not suggest any real progress had been made.

As one influential UK adviser put it to me, it makes sense for Starmer to do all he can to protect the status quo and hope it survives Trump’s second term. Practically, there may be little other choice. From Starmer’s perspective, neither the UK nor Europe as a whole is in any position to step into the United States’ shoes. Britain has no industrial capacity to replace American arms manufacturers. And besides, as the former head of the British Army, Lord Dannatt, said, Britain simply does not have the numbers of troops available to make any significant contribution to Ukraine’s defense. The British Army today has barely 75,000 personnel. The Russians, in contrast, are recruiting 30,000 soldiers a month.

Europe’s political and fiscal restraints are so acute that it is inconceivable that a European army could replace the US in any meaningful sense. Starmer’s government is already perilously close to breaking its borrowing rules. France is unable to pass a budget without presidential decree. And Germany is about to enter a period of coalition-building instability. Only the Poles today are spending the kind of money the Americans are demanding, but even they have signalled they are unwilling to allow troops on the ground in Ukraine. If Europe is about to be humiliated by the Americans in Riyadh, it will have brought it upon itself.

Yet every crisis offers political opportunity. Having spent his first six months as Prime Minister being buffeted by events, Starmer could seize this moment to reset the terms of British politics. As one influential figure told me: “People are yearning for a change in direction after all the years of muddling through. This is it.”

Some of those close to Starmer are now advising him to cast off the shackles of the Treasury so as to rapidly increase defense spending and rebuild Britain’s domestic industrial capacity. Perhaps he will need to cast off Rachel Reeves in the process. Yet, in order to succeed, such moves cannot be mere tactical maneuvers. To reset his government in a moment of global crisis, Starmer needs to make a political argument to the country for why everything has changed and so too, therefore, must his program of government.

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He could turn to Ted Heath for inspiration. In 1971, Ted Heath used the sense of malaise which had settled over the country as the context for his push to lead Britain into the Common Market — an ambition he’d had since the birth of the Coal and Steel Community two decades earlier. “For 25 years we’ve been looking for something to get us going again,” Heath said. “Now here it is.” Today, with Britain in a new age of stagnation, Starmer too needs a national mission — and some of those close to him believe that mission should be one of national security. And not just military security, but everything from energy to food and industrial capacity.

To achieve this, however, Starmer would have to make sacrifices that would be difficult for his party to accept. If more borrowing, higher taxes or further spending cuts are required to protect Britain’s national security, Labour will struggle to maintain spending on foreign aid and welfare at today’s levels. In this scenario, energy security would also have to become a priority, which would mean subordinating the drive to Net Zero and pushing ahead with a host of grand projects from the roll out of small nuclear reactors to the rapid expansion of Heathrow and the like. Starmer, meanwhile, is being advised to use the crisis to pursue closer alignment with the EU in areas such as food and animal safety.

Yet this path is fraught with geopolitical dangers. The American commitment to NATO may really be coming to an end. Serious analysts close to the PM are concerned Trump might well agree terms with Russia deemed unacceptable across European capitals. And even if he does, there is little proof that attitudes in Europe will shift in any material way. For all Macron’s talk, British officials believe there is no evidence that he is willing to consider a new security infrastructure outside the confines of the EU to accommodate the UK. The reality is that Britain — like the rest of Europe — is not in control of events. The decisions that will shape the future of the continent are being taken in Washington.

In The New Machiavelli, Jonathan Powell wrote that leaders needed not only to be “blessed with fortune” but also the ability to “take advantage of her”. This, ultimately, is the alchemy of political leadership. So far Starmer has shown little sign of possessing the gifts necessary to master such a crisis. Yet this may be his last opportunity to reset his government before it is too late. He should take it and show us he has a sense of direction after all.

More to the point, much of this bonanza in theory belongs not to the penguins, or even humanity, but to His Majesty’s Government. Consider the numbers. A new discovery in British Antarctic Territory could hold more oil than the North Sea’s entire output over the last five decades, while the world’s largest fish stocks are found at the poles too. 

Yet we shouldn’t necessarily expect Britain to suddenly become another Opec member overnight. Apart from the legal hurdles — there are strict rules around industrial exploitation at the poles — it’s unclear whether London could protect these far-flung territories even if it wanted to. With rivals circling, and foreign investors already rushing ahead with claims of their own, Britain risks losing out, particularly when its rulers seem so unwilling to protect their possessions overseas. 

Britain has interests around both the North and South Poles. As far as its vast British Antarctic Territory is concerned, that’s clearest around black gold. Beyond that striking comparison with the North Sea, experts believe that the most recent oil discovery, in May 2024, could meet the entirety of global demand for almost 15 years. 

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The North Pole, for its part, is important less for physical resources — and more for communications. Modern staples like GPS and satnav can only happen because many satellites connect to Earth via Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago some 2,000 kilometres north of Oslo. Whether it’s home food deliveries or Nato missile guidance, both would be impossible without Svalbard’s network of satellite ground stations. No less important, these barren islands also host a vital high-speed internet cable. No wonder Sir Tony Radakin, head of Britain’s armed forces, has stressed that the region represents a fulcrum of British security.

Now, however, this security looks threatened. In January 2022, someone cut the main subsea cable in the area. In April this year, the cables at the Evenes Airbase were disabled too, especially ominous as it’s where Norway and Nato keep a fleet of F-35 aircraft. The Norwegians have investigated both events and concluded that there is no clear culprit. But some believe that they’re skating around the problem because they don’t want to provoke a direct confrontation with Russia. 

Given all this, at any rate, it’s unsurprising that Whitehall is upping its presence both north and south. In 2023, for instance, the Ministry of Defence announced it was founding a Royal Marines camp near the Norwegian town of Tromsø. As I write, the UK is also upping its presence on the other end of the planet too, promising repairs to a key RAF base on the Falkland Islands. This surely makes sense: its Argentine rival has clearly noticed that the Antarctic oil fields stretch as far north as the Falklands, with Britain preparing to tap oil from 23 wells in the Sea Lion oilfield.

In practice, though, Britain’s commitment to its territorial defence remains suspect: just look at its surrender of the Chagos Islands and Diego Garcia. Sensing a cash cow, meanwhile, Argentina’s foreign minister has now vowed to “recover full sovereignty” over what he calls Las Malvinas. Britain officially insists its position is “unwavering” — but Keir Starmer appeared, at least at first, surprisingly reticent about keeping the Falklands British.

Even if Britain suddenly turned its foreign policy on its head, meanwhile, it seems unlikely that it’d actually make use of its vast polar hoard. For one thing, London strictly abides by the 1998 commercial protocol of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which prohibits seabed extraction. The UK seems equally unwilling to approve of deep-sea mining in its oceanic preserves, particularly now that scientists have discovered so-called “dark oxygen” some 4,000 metres beneath the surface of the chilly Southern Ocean. To quote Nick Owens, director of the Scottish Association for Marine Science: “The fact that we’ve got another source of oxygen on the planet other than photosynthesis has consequences and implications that are utterly profound.” 

Yet whatever Britain’s ethical scruples, it’s now becoming much simpler to harvest resources at both poles. One reason is climate change: with the ice sheets melting, the goodies below are easier to access. Another factor is technology: China recently unveiled the Kaituo 2, a 14-tonne deep-sea mining vehicle that can dredge the polar seabeds below a record-breaking 4,000 metres. Britain, for its part, has no such machines. 

There are signs, in short, that the polar regions could soon be subjected to an industrial rush. Indeed as we approach 2048 — the year the Antarctic Treaty can finally be renegotiated — Beijing and Moscow are already trying to gather enough allies to overturn the 1959 ban. They’re prospecting too: it’s no accident that the recent mega-discovery in the British Antarctic Territory was found not by the Royal Navy, but by Russia. Nor are the West’s headline geopolitical foes alone here. As one Iranian rear admiral recently (and somewhat implausibly) claimed, the Islamic Republic has “property rights” in Antarctica. 

The interest of national governments is echoed in the private sector too. Chinese investors recently tried to buy Søre Fagerfjord, which was the last remaining parcel of private land on Svalbard. China thought the 60 square kilometres of pristine wilderness was a steal at $326 million. In the event, the Americans and British apparently warned their Norwegian counterparts of the deal, and the acquisition was squashed. Unperturbed, China is teaming up with Russia to invest in mining firms, scientific research stations and policy programmes right across Svalbard. That echoes a long-standing Russian policy: the Svalbard town of Barentsberg has long been dominated by Russian miners, many of whom later went off to fight in Ukraine. 

While, therefore, our minds may first go to Ukraine or the Middle East, the poles could yet become geopolitical flashpoints. Svalbard, after all, is just 400 nautical miles from the Russian mainland. Elizabeth Buchanan, head of research for the Royal Australian Navy, has described the South Pole in similar terms. Fair enough: what if Russia or China started drilling there, or else erected critical infrastructure, just as Beijing has done in the South China Sea? 

Nor is this necessarily just a theoretical threat. China currently has five research stations right across Antarctica. The 1959 treaty specifically prohibits military activity anywhere on the icy continent. In practice, though, it’s hard to tell what China is up to because they seem to use radar to block overhead satellites. Rumours abound that they park their planes sideways on their runways, so that no one else could land even if they wanted to. At the same time, Western observers worry that the People’s Republic’s new Qinling Station is being used to spy on Britain and her Five Eyes intelligence partners.

Given all these opportunities for conflict, at any rate, could Britain and its friends defend their varied polar interests? Perhaps not. Faced with draconian spending cuts — day-to-day spending on defence has been slashed by nearly £10 billion since 2010 — the Royal Navy now only has 16 “major surface combatants” in its fleet. To offer just one point of comparison, the Chinese navy is the world’s largest, boasting almost 800 vessels of various sizes. 

To be fair, 2021’s Aukus treaty means that London could rely on US and Australian support in any Antarctic conflict. And there are signs, too, that London isn’t totally insensitive to the threat. Apart from dispatching troops and repairing airfields, Britain has also led the charge in encouraging the building of two entirely new subsea cable systems to Svalbard. One is the so-called IOEMA Project, which is due to go live by 2027. NORDUnet is another. Linking Svalbard with Scandinavia — as well as Japan and other Western allies — it’ll bypass Russia and China entirely.

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Yet Britain’s resolve will only truly become clear if and when a contest for polar assets — or indeed fully-fledged polar war — finally arrives. And in the event, any showdown could come sooner than we think. Long-term oil reserves are one thing. But Russia also has a profound strategic interest in the Arctic in the here-and-now. Last February, Norway’s normally reticent intelligence service publicly warned that nuclear weapons could be present on Russian vessels in the High North. No less important, Sweden and Finland’s accession to Nato also brings the possibility that Western nuclear weapons might be deployed in the Arctic too.

China, for its part, needs the Arctic as well. With sea lanes in the Red Sea threatened by the Houthis, and the Panama Canal with problems of its own, Beijing needs a reliable route from its port at Dailan to Rotterdam in Europe. The Arctic is the obvious choice here, not least when Chinese ships can now make the journey in less than 25 days, and when its economy would surely struggle without it. Britain, in short, seems unwilling or unable to exploit its polar bounty. But its future here may ultimately depend on decisions taken by others — something Keir Starmer and his admirals would both do well to remember. 

Today, the capital of Shaanxi Province has another source of renown: its armaments research and manufacturing hub, which serves the burgeoning strategic requirements of Qin’s distant successor, President Xi Jinping. The Xi’an Aircraft Industrial Corporation builds many of China’s bombers and assault planes, and the city houses four separate universities where staff conduct defence and weapons research.

Appropriately enough, then, starting on 23 September, Xi’an’s cavernous Quijang Convention Centre will play host to a high-profile four-day meeting, the fourth International Conference on Defence Technology (ICDT), at which some 2,000 scientists will discuss the latest research into ways of making weapons more deadly. The conference will examine work in highly sensitive fields that are already transforming the way nations wage war, and its considerable cost will be met by China’s weapons industry. Unsurprisingly, most of the delegates will be Chinese, although two of the listed keynote speakers happen to be citizens of China’s ally, Russia. However, somewhat less predictably, the conference’s co-chair will be a Briton who lives in Kent.

A tall, bald and bespectacled figure in his late sixties, Clive Woodley is one of Britain’s leading weapons technology experts, with much of his own ground-breaking research funded by Britain’s Ministry of Defence. Having worked closely with Chinese colleagues for at least a decade, he is set to play a central role in Xi’an; indeed, he is the author of the ICDT’s welcome message encouraging other scientists to attend the conference. The conference, he writes, will “allow exposure to the most current state-of-the-art technology in defence science”, and “provide opportunities for interactions with some of the world’s leading experts in the field”.

He goes on to explain how “new topics have been added which are at the frontiers of defence science and technologies, including hypersonic technology, artificial intelligence, directed energy, optoelectronics, stealth technologies, and electronic countermeasures”. Also promised are sessions on “explosions and impacts”, “armour and protection”, “advanced launch technology”, and quantum computing.

The full conference programme has not yet been issued, but the list of keynote speakers reveals an interesting array of expertise. Joining Woodley as co-chair will be Professor Baoming Li of the Nanjing University of Science and Technology — one of the “seven sons of national defence”, a group of Chinese universities which are especially close to the military. Baoming Li is also a high-ranking member of the Communist Party, and the Principal Scientist of the China Academy of Ordnance Science.

Elsewhere, accompanying Woodley will be at least one British colleague — Anthony Vickers, emeritus professor of computer science and electronic engineering at the University of Essex, who has published research on both lasers and quantum computing. (Like Woodley, Vickers did not respond to requests for comment.) Other keynote speakers listed to appear include scientists from Germany, Singapore and South Africa.

It’s not hard to see why Woodley tops the bill. His international stature as a scientist, and his long, close relationship with Britain’s Ministry of Defence, grant heft to his presence and add to the prestige of the ICDT. Having worked directly for the MoD after graduating from the University of Southampton in 1978, he went on to spend 17 years as Principal Scientist at Qinetiq, the MoD-controlled defence and security firm created when the Ministry privatised its laboratories in 2001. After leaving Qinetiq in 2018, he joined the Department of Shock Physics at Imperial College, London, where he stayed until 2022. He also served for several years as president of the International Ballistics Society, which has thousands of members across the globe. He remains the chair of its membership committee.

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But what does this mean in practice? Well, according to his online biography, issued by the Chinese publisher of Defence Technology, a journal that Woodley co-edits and is closely linked to the ICDT, he is a “world expert on the mathematical modelling of the internal ballistics of guns”, who has “contributed to many of the gun systems used by the UK Armed Forces”. He has, it adds, also provided “critical insight” into the behaviour of explosives, and devised “innovative numerical modelling techniques” that have enabled the development of next-generation hypersonic artillery weapons such as railguns, whose shells are propelled not by conventional explosives but by electromagnetic pulses — weapons in which China appears to have developed a decisive lead.

Woodley insists that his involvement with the ICDT and his broader relationship with China is innocuous. While he declined to speak to me, he recently announced on LinkedIn that he is looking forward to an “impressive lineup of over 100 presentations and papers”, saying the conference will serve “as a conduit for the exchange of ideas, fostering collaboration”. (He also writes that he is “really looking forward” to staying at the five-star conference hotel, the Xi’an South Ramada Plaza by Wyndham, which “looks very comfortable”, and where he hopes “the breakfasts are good”.)

Yet not all are so blasé about his involvement. According to Charles Parton, formerly a Foreign Office China-watcher who spent several years stationed in Beijing, his presence in Xi’an is “extraordinary”. The only purpose of the ICDT, he told me, is to “attract people with his sort of experience to China in order to share that experience with China”. Moreover, “any usefulness which the Chinese can extract from his participation will be relayed into Chinese weapons programmes”, and if they believed his presence were not invaluable, “they would not have invited him” — and the weapons that China is trying to enhance “are intended for use against the UK’s allies, and even possibly in the unforeseeable future against UK forces”.

Parton’s assessment is supported by sources in China. In 2018, when Woodley co-chaired the first ICDT, the China Daily reported that it would “let China’s scientific researchers come into close contact with outstanding foreign scientists in the field of defence technology without leaving the country, conducting in-depth exchanges and gaining insight into the work being done on international academic frontiers in the field of defence”.

What this meant in practice became clearer in 2022. After that year’s ICDT in Beijing, Sun Zhuzhu, a young Chinese scientist based at Baoming Li’s university in Nanjing, posted a report on the event in Mandarin on his department’s website, saying that thanks to the “insights in the international academic frontiers in the field of defence” provided at the conference, it had “served the innovative development of [the Chinese] weapons industry”. He continued: “Not only is the gap between our product and technology level and the advanced level of foreign countries getting smaller and smaller, the influence of international defence technology is also increasing rapidly.” If any clarification was needed, he emphasised that the aim was for China to “truly grow into a scientific master”.

As UnHerd readers will know, Woodley’s involvement stretches back well beyond that conference. In May 2022, I drew attention to his appearance the previous October at a conference devoted to “New Material Technology for Ammunition” in Jinan, the capital of China’s Shandong province. According to the subsequent official Chinese report, the event “marked a new chapter in the development of artillery, shells and missiles”. Just a few weeks later, the MI6 chief Richard Moore gave a speech warning that the threats posed by China had become his agency’s “greatest single priority”, warning of “large-scale espionage operations against us, targeting those in research of particular interest to the Chinese state”.

I also revealed that, between 2014 and 2022, Woodley travelled to China to participate in seminars and lectures with senior defence figures and academics at least seven times. He had also published eight research papers either in Chinese journals or written jointly with Chinese scientists who worked for Chinese weapons firms.

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Of course, when Woodley’s relationship with China began in 2014, Anglo-Chinese relations were still basking in the “golden age” inaugurated by David Cameron and George Osborne when Xi visited Britain in 2012. It took years for its warm glow to cool: it was not until 2020 that Britain decided it had to eradicate equipment made by the Chinese firm Huawei from its 5G phone networks on grounds of national security. In 2014, there had been no Uighur genocide, and the basic rights of Hong Kongers had not been crushed.

But if it was clear that the geopolitical landscape had shifted in 2022, the evidence is now impossible to ignore. “Xi Jinping has become even more authoritarian, the threat to Taiwan is greater than ever, and China is backing Putin’s brutal campaign in Ukraine,” says Professor Anthony Glees, the founder of the University of Buckingham’s Institute for Intelligence and Security Studies.

Indeed, the ICDT’s main sponsor, the China North Industries Corporation (Norinco), a manufacturing giant whose products include military jet aircraft, drones, artillery guns, shells, mortars, missiles, bombs, small arms, radar and anti-aircraft guns, has reportedly shipped guns and other military equipment to Russia for use against Ukraine. Having first been sanctioned by the US in 2003 for selling missile technology to Iran, Norinco fell within the scope of President Biden’s 2021 Executive Order prohibiting Americans from doing business with what he termed China’s “military industrial complex”. Woodley himself appears to realise how much things have changed. The futuristic technologies that will be discussed in Xi’an, he said in a recent LinkedIn post, are now “very topical, given events worldwide”.

Yet for now, the new British government appears just as reluctant to criticise, let alone block, Woodley’s involvement with the Chinese weapons industry as its Conservative predecessor — despite a Labour manifesto pledge to conduct an immediate “review” of UK relations with China. Last week, when I asked the MoD to comment on Woodley’s trip to Xi’an, its spokesperson replied with an emailed statement: “We have robust procedures in place to make sure research contracts do not contribute to overseas military programmes and that individuals or organisations with foreign-state links cannot access our sensitive research.” Somewhat disappointingly, the statement was a verbatim replica of the statement the MoD issued when I asked about Woodley two years ago.

Others are more forthright. According to Glees, “on the face of it, Woodley’s behaviour is astonishing”. It is, he says, just possible that Woodley has been a British intelligence asset all along, tasked with penetrating China’s defence establishment. But if this is so, none of the several sources from Britain’s defence and intelligence communities with whom I have consulted has made any suggestion that this might be the case.

Meanwhile, a curious stipulation set out on the ICDT website appears to support the fear that the direction of traffic in sensitive knowledge taking place in Xi’an will be strictly one way. Chinese scientists who wish to submit papers must sign a declaration that none of their contents is classified, and that they have obtained approval from the “comrades” in their department’s “confidentiality unit”. Scientists from abroad, however, are not bound by this rule. Should they wish to divulge, the ICDT will not stand in their way.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a former Whitehall security official with long experience of trying to stop the transfer of sensitive technology to potentially hostile powers says that while Woodley has done nothing unlawful, he appears to be disregarding “ethical and moral norms”. His apparent impunity, the former official says, will only make it more difficult to stop other military experts from sharing their knowledge with China, while Russia’s involvement with the ICDT makes it still more dangerous: “In my view, what he is doing does not align with Western interests.”

If there were fissures, they had been smoothed over: deviant Hungary, long a blemish on the pact’s public-facing unanimity, had agreed not to block military aid to Ukraine provided it would not have to partake in any Nato operations there. All members of the alliance were in total agreement on the basic facts of the war, Stoltenberg insisted. Under Biden’s steadfast leadership, he asserted, the world had united behind Ukraine.

The self-mythologising PR was fitting for a summit that was also the 75^th anniversary of the alliance’s founding. And 75 years after the 12 original signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty gathered in Washington to pledge collective defence, the alliance and the world look very different. NATO has always cast itself as a moral arbiter, disseminating “values” and ideology, while simultaneously fostering member states’ dependency on the United States and securing American hegemony over Europe. But this vassalisation has reached a new stage since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The invasion brought a Cold War alliance of questionable 21st-century utility roaring back to life; the long-time neutral holdouts of Sweden and Finland have even opted to join. During the Cold War, NATO counted many of its most ardent critics among left-wing opponents of US militarism; today, its most prominent skeptics are on the Right, and include Donald Trump.

Small wonder, then that American domestic politics loomed large. Held just days ahead of the Republican National Convention, the gathering was timed perfectly to allow Nato leadership to ensure one of their key points for this year — that many hitherto freeloading allies had stepped up their defence spending — would be fresh in the minds of its Republican critics. Back during the now infamous 2018 summit, Trump lambasted flunkies for not paying their fair share and even threatened to withdraw the US from the alliance. This year, though, Nato leaders could boast that at least 20 out of 32 member states would be spending 2% of their GDP on defence. Both anxious Atlanticists and Nato sceptics would be reassured that the alliance was, as Stoltenberg said, adaptive and agile; it would endure, regardless of dramatic changes in political leadership in its member states. And it was responsive both to events on the ground and internal criticism.

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But efforts to make the event about the steadiness and durability of Nato — a rare fulcrum of stability in an unpredictable world — were challenged by mounting concerns about the cognitive fitness of 81-year-old President Biden. Despite the usual pomp and pathos, along with attempts to pander to Trump Republicans, inevitably, it became a referendum on Biden’s age. Then, during the brief interlude between the summit and the start of the Republican National Convention, an assassination attempt on Trump’s life made it clear that there would be no assurances forthcoming about Nato’s future, that nothing would be predictable.

Things had begun on a triumphant note, in the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, where the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 1949. There was no shortage of grandiosity on display. “The most successful military alliance in history”, claimed Stoltenberg, had now become the longest-lasting — outliving even the Delian League of ancient Greek city-states. The auditorium looked like Nato’s holy temple, with Biden describing the US commitment to the Alliance as a “sacred obligation”. His performance was better than at last month’s debate, but it wasn’t reassuring. His eyes were glued to the teleprompter as he seesawed back and forth between jingoistic shouting and barely audible, indecipherable mumbling. He managed to muddle through.

The President’s lapses of memory and coherence weren’t such  a surprise. Earlier this year, Biden twice referred to dead European leaders — former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and former French President François Mitterrand — when referring to recent discussions with foreign counterparts. At the summit, Biden did not mistake contemporary leaders for those long dead, but he did confuse allies with enemies, calling Ukrainian President Zelensky “Putin” and Kamala Harris “Vice President Trump”.

With Biden faltering so badly, the spectre of a new Nato-sceptic Trump administration drew closer, prompting some of the more hawkish member states to tailor their talking points to address the Republicans. At one panel composed of the three top defence officials from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, participants spoke in a language they knew the Trump camp would understand: golf. “Nato is a club,” Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur said. “When you have club rules, then you respect the rules and you expect that everyone will also respect the rules. When you pay your fee in the golf club, you can play. It doesn’t matter how big is your wallet.” They hammered away at the idea of all those members who were now spending 2% of GDP on defence, hoping to convince Republicans that Europe was now pulling its weight. And yet, as international relations theorist Patrick Porter told me, this “magical 2% figure” was arrived at with full US commitment in mind. Europeans are still avoiding the difficult question: if America scales back its commitments in Europe under a Trump presidency — many in his camp advocate for a “pivot to Taiwan” and a shift of focus to the Indo-Pacific — who will fill in the gap?

In fact, much of the summit did seem to be a carefully calibrated pitch to America — or at least those Nato sceptics at the RNC. Kosovo’s Prime Minister Albin Kurti, whose country is a Nato aspirant, wrote a front-page op-ed in the New York Times with the title “Don’t Doubt NATO, it Saved My People”, outlining the role the alliance played in ending the Kosovo conflict in 1999. Meanwhile, Latvia’s President Edgars Rinkevics addressed the criticism that the US does much more than Europe to support Ukraine, claiming that in truth, it was the other way around. “It’s also very important to explain to the American public,” Rinkevics said in a speech on Tuesday. European Atlanticists fear an American retreat from the continent under Trump, who has complained that Europe has given too little aid to Ukraine, while the United States has given too much.

The contentious subject of Ukraine’s future membership in Nato was the other big theme of the summit. Germany and the United States are unwilling to extend full Nato membership while Ukraine is still at war with Russia. Instead, they say, Ukraine should be granted a “bridge to Nato”, a nebulous promise that fell far from aspirations of full membership that Ukraine has been waiting for since 2008. However, some felt the language of the communique was made stronger by the insertion of the word “irreversible”: apparently the bridge to Nato can only be crossed in one direction. But the Ukraine section of the Washington Summit Declaration, published last week, was ambiguous about its future. “We reaffirm that we will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.”

Meanwhile, Ukraine and its supporters in Eastern Europe are adamant that the country be granted membership, or at least a timetable for it. Only full membership, they claim, can deter Russia. Some suggest that Article 5 security guarantees — the provision that states that an attack on one member state is an attack on all — be introduced incrementally, first on territory already under Ukrainian command, and eventually under those parts of the country Zelensky’s forces win back.

But critics counter that admitting Ukraine risks triggering all-out war with Russia. They contend that membership would make it far more difficult to negotiate a ceasefire or engage in peace talks, since Russia has long insisted that Ukraine in Nato is a “red line”. And they point out that, contra the exalted Atlanticist rhetoric surrounding the current war, Nato has no intention of fighting for Ukraine. And if Nato is not committed to entering the war now, as Ukraine is fighting for its life, then it certainly isn’t going to make any promises about some undefined point in the future. They suggest a dialing down of the rhetoric and scaling of expectations. In fact, dozens of foreign policy experts signed a controversial letter ahead of the summit urging caution. “If Ukraine were to join NATO, Russia would have reason to doubt the credibility of NATO’s security guarantee — and would gain an opportunity to test and potentially rupture the alliance. The result could be a direct NATO-Russia war or the unraveling of NATO itself.”

Notwithstanding membership, Ukraine won’t leave the summit empty-handed. Nato has pledged five strategic air defence systems over the coming year, as well as F-16 fighter jets. These will be donated under the proviso that they can’t be used to strike targets inside Russia. Along with the equipment, a new Ukraine command, staffed with 700 employees, will be established in Germany, and Nato will deputise a senior representative to Kyiv. Ukraine will also receive at least €40 billion of assistance within the next year. The Alliance is also looking to “Trump proof” its assistance for Ukraine and will take over coordination of military aid for Ukraine through the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, a role hitherto played by the US Department of Defence. This reorganisation was made to ensure that Ukraine will continue to receive military aid, even if a new Trump administration decides to cut it.

With Biden’s cognitive state drawing all media attention, some significant developments received far less scrutiny. There was, for example, a joint-statement by the US and German governments announcing that the US would, in 2026, begin “episodic deployments” to Germany of long-range missiles, including SM-6, Tomahawk, and developmental hypersonic weapons. Some of these weapons have a range that would have seen them banned under the defunct Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987. Russia’s response to news of the planned deployments was dramatic. “Without nerves, without emotions, we will develop a military response, first of all, to this new game,” deputy minister, Sergei A. Ryabkov, told Interfax. But what was most remarkable about news of the imminent deployment was how closely it echoed events of the Cold War — but with one glaring difference. During the early Eighties, the United States began deploying Pershing II missiles to West Germany. The news was met with deep anger by the European Left. More than one million people took to the streets in West Germany as weeks of demonstrations also swept through Paris, Stockholm, Rome, and London.

Today, in contrast, the announcement was met with comparative silence. This is doubtless down to the fact that the Left is being slowly absorbed into the Nato project. All four of Nato’s newest member states — Sweden, Finland, North Macedonia and Montenegro — opted to join with Social Democratic-led governments in power. Emblematic of this shift are the German Greens. One former party leader, Petra Kelly, was a star of the anti-missile protests in West Germany, yet some 40 years on, the Greens are now among the most hawkishly Atlanticist in Europe. Meanwhile, many peace initiatives and calls for a ceasefire in Ukraine have come from the Right. Hungary’s Viktor Orban has been on a self-styled “peace mission” in recent weeks, visiting Moscow, Kyiv, and Trump in Mar-a-Lago in an effort to bring the warring parties to the negotiating table. Orban and his ilk are not the dedicated anti-war activists of the Cold War. They support conflict; they just don’t like this one, which they view as an unwinnable liberal pet project. But broad swathes of the Left have also proved inconsistent: they may say they dislike the foreign policy of the United States, but they have uncritically embraced a military alliance that ensures its hegemony over Europe.

As Biden stumbled through his final, possibly terminal, press conference, he did manage to make one clear point: that Trump and his ilk were a threat to Nato. Why the average American voter should care as much as the tbose assembled in Washington, he did not say. And while the eyes of the world watched this very public demonstration of his vulnerability, it was clear that the future of Nato and the entire transatlantic order will be determined by who is elected president in November. The summit that was supposed to be a celebration of the alliance’s stability and longevity was instead a testament to its frailty.

The poorly concealed truth was that the helicopter and DUKW belonged to the British armed forces. They had been disguised as being Irish to avoid starting a riot.

The vehicles were in Ireland with the cooperation of the Dublin government as part of Operation Sandstone, an attempt to create military maps of every part of the Irish shore. This was taking place at the request of the US, in case Soviet troops overran both the UK and Ireland and Washington needed to launch a counter-invasion. It is a little-known episode in Anglo-Irish relations that neatly demonstrates Ireland’s ambivalent and highly flexible attitude to military neutrality. The government was allowing, and assisting, what was essentially a Nato military operation on its shores — just two years after Ireland had refused an invitation to be a founding member of the Alliance.

Irish neutrality has been in the spotlight over the last two years. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2020 raised the question of just how much assistance Dublin can provide Kyiv without rendering neutrality completely meaningless. More recently, and more in keeping with the principle of neutrality, Ireland, unlike most western countries, urged Israel to comply with international law in responding to the Hamas terror attacks. Of course, an independent foreign policy stance does not always go hand-in-hand with military neutrality — but more on that later.

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For the strongest defenders of Irish neutrality, it is a concept that predates the foundation of the state — and is a key motivation for the revolutionary leaders of the early 20th century. But this is a distortion. Neutrality was chiefly a way of distinguishing a new Irish State from Britain, rather than an ideological principle. Irish men should no longer be sent to die in British wars, Ireland’s founders argued: “Ireland cannot,” declared the section of the Irish Volunteers which went on to carry out the 1916 Easter Rising, “with honour or safety, take part in foreign quarrels otherwise than through the free action of a National Government of her own”. But a Dublin Government should be able to join whatever military alliances it saw fit. Indeed, one of the foundational documents of Irish statehood, the Proclamation of the Republic — which was issued during the Easter Rising — pays tribute to “our gallant allies in Europe”: a reference to Germany, which helped arm the rebels. Some of the main leaders of the Rising even favoured an Ireland with a German prince as its head of state. Some neutrality.

When the War of Independence ended in 1921 with a ceasefire, the Irish side went to the negotiating table in London with some aspirations to neutrality. But these were quickly dropped when it became clear that the British side, at the insistence of Winston Churchill, would not countenance an Ireland with an independent defence policy. On too many occasions, Ireland had been used by Britain’s enemies in attempts to open up a western flank. This could not be allowed to happen again, Churchill said.

The final settlement, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, denied the new Irish Free State the right to a navy and left three of its major ports in the hands of British forces. Britain would remain responsible for the external defence of the fledging state, rendering the question of neutrality largely moot for the next 15 years. But with the dismantling of the Anglo-Irish treaty by Taoiseach Éamon de Valera in the Thirties, neutrality again became a viable prospect. As the failure of the League of Nations became apparent and war clouds gathered over Europe, de Valera declared “we want to be neutral”.

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But his decision was practical rather than ideological: he judged neutrality to be the best way to protect Irish lives and sovereignty. Then, as now, Ireland’s military was entirely incapable of fending off invasion or making any contribution to the war effort. And joining the war on the Allied side could have reinvigorated support for the IRA and potentially even led to civil war. But most important for de Valera, a declaration of neutrality was a way of announcing to the world Ireland’s final and complete independence from its former colonial master.

Still, de Valera knew that the neutrality employed by Ireland would have to preference the Allies. Otherwise, there was a very real possibility that Churchill could order a pre-emptive invasion to deny the island to the Germans. (In fact, Churchill had ordered his generals to prepare plans to do just that.) And so, Ireland allowed crashed Allied airmen to cross into Northern Ireland. Sometimes the Irish would even fix up Allied airplanes and send them back, too. Crashed Germans, on the other hand, were interned until the end of the war, as per international neutrality law.

Then there was the almost complete cooperation in intelligence between Ireland and the Allies. After the war, MI5 concluded that Irish “neutrality” actually helped the war effort, as it freed up tens of thousands of Irish workers to enlist in the British war effort while allowing Dublin to covertly collaborate with London in almost every way short of joining the hostilities. Unlike the policies relating to airmen, much of this assistance remained secret for decades after the war: in the eyes of the world, Ireland seemed much more neutral than it was.

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Throughout history, then, Irish neutrality has meant whatever the government of the day has needed it to mean. Sometimes it has meant not taking part in sanctions against an aggressor nation, such as during the Falklands War when the government withdrew from European sanctions against Argentina. More recently, neutrality has been defined by the government in the narrowest way possible: not being a member of Nato.

Ireland’s refusal to become a founding member of the Alliance after the war has been held up as a clear example of the nation’s commitment to neutrality. But the truth is, the government of the day was very keen to join Nato, which it viewed as the best defence against the encroaching threat of godless communism. The only obstacle, it said, was partition. If America would pressure the UK to return the six counties, Ireland would be happy to become a member, Irish diplomats said. The gambit failed. “We simply replied, in effect, that ‘it’s been nice knowing you’,” an American official later recalled.

Over the subsequent decades, neutrality was rarely discussed in the public sphere. This suited the government perfectly, as its definition of the concept was becoming even more muddled. Having no air force to speak of, Dublin was happy to rely on a secret deal with the RAF to defend Irish airspace. It was also more than willing to support the western side in the Cold War when it came to dealing with Soviet spies. Meanwhile, it took comfort from the fact that if war did break out, Nato would, out of necessity, have to defend Ireland to ensure its own security.

The process of European integration only served to intensify the ambiguity. When Ireland voted to join the European Economic Community in 1972, various Irish leaders had publicly stated that the endpoint was likely some form of joint defence league — but the public did not seem to care. The prospect of economic stability and an avalanche of infrastructure funding from Brussels was enough to quieten any concerns about a potential loss of neutrality at some undefined point in the future.

But over subsequent decades, as EU military cooperation became more concrete, neutrality started to factor into decisions by Irish voters. Starting in the Nineties, whenever an EU treaty appeared promising closer union, including in military matters, the public were sceptical. Twice, in 2001 and 2008, Ireland rejected these treaties in referendums. This led to the insertion of significant opt outs for Ireland regarding military cooperation. In the Irish mind, neutrality had become what it remains today: an extremely popular if poorly understood concept.

Even after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, support for a general policy of neutrality remained as high as 70%. Events such as the 2021 cyberattack by a Russian hacking group, which crippled the Irish health service, or the presence of Moscow’s spy ships in Irish waters, have done little to change minds. And yet, other recent polls show a majority in favour of increased EU military cooperation, while support here for military assistance to Ukraine is among the highest in the EU. Trying to explain this contradiction to an outsider is difficult. The simplest and most cynical explanation is that most people don’t really understand what neutrality means or that it offers little defence against modern security threats. A somewhat kinder interpretation is that Irish people see their country as a force for good in the world and are therefore willing to adapt their definition of neutrality when necessary.

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Take its response to Ukraine. Ireland has committed to providing millions in military aid but only of a “non-lethal” nature. As a result, it provides fuel for Ukrainian tanks but not ammunition for guns. It is training Ukrainian troops in “humanitarian” areas such as demining, while ignoring the fact that demining operations are a major part of Ukraine’s counteroffensive. Last month, it emerged that this training also includes basic weapons instruction.

But how much longer can Ireland afford the luxury of ambivalence? Threats are mounting on the horizon, including growing espionage activity by Russia and China. Ireland’s vital subsea communications cables are vulnerable — as is its open, tech-based economy. In 2022, a government-appointed commission found that Ireland is almost entirely defenceless when it comes to military threats. Since then, the situation has only worsened. As it stands, the Defence Forces can only put two of Ireland’s eight naval ships to sea due to a lack of crew. When a helicopter was needed to carry out a maritime drugs bust last month, an air ambulance had to be used.

Some have seen warnings about Ireland’s vulnerability as an attempt to bounce Ireland into Nato against the wishes of the people. This is a conspiracy theory. Applying for Nato membership would be political suicide for any Irish party. While closer EU military cooperation may be palatable to the electorate, joining the Alliance remains deeply unpopular. Besides, the state of the Irish military means Nato probably wouldn’t want Ireland as a member anyway.

But ministers are conscious of the concerns of Ireland’s neighbours, including the UK, that it represents a weak point in European defence. The Government is making some moves to allay these fears. It has promised to increase Irish defence spending by 50% in the next five years, though that would still leave it with one of the lowest defence budgets in the EU. And Dublin has committed to the newly revamped EU Battlegroup system, which will provide an expeditionary force to carry out the EU’s foreign policy objectives overseas. In order to provide enough troops, Ireland has withdrawn from a major UN peacekeeping mission in Syria.

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Critics of the Irish government have accused it of incrementally dismantling neutrality. Here they have a point, insofar as Irish foreign policy is now belatedly adapting to 21st-century threats. More is being spent on defence — although not nearly enough — and there is closer cooperation with other militaries, for instance when it comes to cyber threats. At the same time however, national security remains a low priority domestically; the government doesn’t even have a standalone defence minister and soldiers and sailors are leaving the Defence Forces in droves for better pay and conditions in the private sector.

But while neutrality is changing incrementally, the possibility of abandoning it completely and joining a military alliance remains remote. Moves towards a genuine EU common defence pact have stalled; Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has convinced many member states that Nato is the best guarantor of their security. This suits the Irish government perfectly. The simple fact of geography means, in protecting its own territory, Nato also protects Ireland without the need for any potentially divisive national debate. For a while longer at least, Ireland can claim a form of neutrality, safe under the security umbrellas of its neighbours.

Because I only wear ties when I really must, I kept a few and would bring the rest as gifts when meeting prime ministers in other countries. Over the years, however, it increasingly transpired that these men had also met Berlusconi and received their own Marinella. They would respond with a Berlusconi anecdote, which invariably included a very good joke and some useful advice, delivered in his exuberant manner with the happy smile of a lifelong optimist.

That was the secret of Berlusconi. For, in spite of its beauty, Italy is a country of pessimists, while Berlusconi always believed that something good was waiting for him just round the corner — and, for decades, there was.

Berlusconi never had to climb Disraeli’s greasy pole to become Italy’s prime minister. When the moment came in 1994, Berlusconi simply went on his three television channels to call for mass support for his brand-new Forza Italia party, which he readily obtained from a frightened electorate. All the moderate parties had collapsed, and a takeover by the Communists, who had renamed themselves the Democratic Party of the Left, seemed imminent.

The cause of this chaos was the Mani Pulite investigative campaign started by Antonio di Pietro, a then-unknown prosecutor who used Italy’s unique and abusive system of “preventive detention” — which allows prosecutors to imprison people without any evidence, ostensibly to fight organised crime — to lock up politicians and make them talk. Di Pietro was soon imitated by other prosecutors across the country: by the end of 1993, more than 4,000 elected officials at every level of government had been investigated or remained under investigation, with others released only if they denounced a higher-level official or major business figure.

Because suspects could be re-arrested once the original time limit had expired, a number of prominent politicians and businessmen killed themselves in prison — including, in July 1993, Gabriele Cagliari, the head of the ENI oil company, Italy’s largest enterprise. This was a great shock to an already demoralised political and business establishment. Everyone at the top knew Cagliari personally, as I did myself (I went with him to Leningrad, as it then was, to negotiate with mayor Sobchak and his German-speaking foreign affairs director Vladimir Putin).

It was in this context that Berlusconi founded Forza Italia. A few months later, on 11 May 1994, he won enough seats in the Chamber of Deputies and Senate to form a government. At first there was promise: it tried to initiate liberalising reforms of Italy’s highly deformed state-directed economy. But before it had made much progress, Berlusconi fell from power. What was left of Italy’s political and business establishment could not accept that the upstart, incurably lower-middle-class Berlusconi was the country’s political leader — and by January 1995, he was intrigued out of office, with president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro engineering the defection of some of Berlusconi’s new allies.

There was no new general election because Scalfaro contrived a regrouping of parties that formed a new government under the technocrat Lamberto Dini. But Berlusconi’s party faithful remained in control of regional and local authorities across Italy, and its parliamentary votes were still needed. This yielded real power, which was often used to favour Berlusconi’s widespread business interests, but also to promote the liberalisation of Italy’s state-heavy economy. It eventually yielded tangible benefits, including the transformation of the decrepit money-losing Poste Italiane into an efficient modern service that is still present in every village.

It was not, however, until June 2001 that Berlusconi had enough votes to be made prime minister again and form Italy’s longest serving government since the Fifties. Over the next five years, the country’s economy was further liberalised, and its defence strategy, particularly after 9/11, strengthened. Even before then, under the influence of Francesco Cossiga — who was a real security expert while variously serving as interior minister, prime minister and president — Italy had taken firm measures in response to its own Red Brigades domestic terrorists. But Berlusconi’s decidedly pro-American and pro-Israel stance induced him to do even more, palpably strengthening the government’s resolve to prevent, and not just “fight”, terrorism like every other country. The result, 22 years later, is that while Italy’s Muslim population has continued to increase and its borders remain porous, not a single person has been wounded, let alone killed, by an Islamist terrorist on Italian soil since 9/11.

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This was the Berlusconi that I dealt with in those post-9/11 years. Not Berlusconi the energetic playboy, who at different times kept an entire harem of young girls to be made available to visiting political leaders who were so inclined, as most were; not Berlusconi the businessman, who continued to watch over his many different businesses while managing state affairs; but rather Berlusconi the industrial executive who had learned that sometimes the chief executive must engage with the most minute details to do his job — and there was nothing facile or irresponsible about that Berlusconi.

In many ways, his final government between 2008 and 2011 was a tale of personal decline, culminating in the peculiar circumstances of his downfall. He was neither deposed by a cabal of rival party leaders nor by the treachery of members of his coalition, but by his own minister of the treasury and Italy’s president. To avoid Greece’s fate, Italy had to raise taxes just enough to persuade investors that it would control its public spending. But Berlusconi refused. In fact, he refused to look even at the numbers his finance minister was proffering; he was then in his maximum harem phase, with a dozen young girls housed in a luxury dormitory from which they were ferried to attend his after-dinner entertainments.

After that, his leadership waned, never really recovering even after he gave up his harem to marry a new wife. By the time he died on Monday morning, Berlusconi had led several lives, mostly rather well, and always in great part successful.

This was the reality for Britain at the close of the Edwardian era, and it echoes our fraught position now. The Edwardians responded, as Aaron Friedberg has noted, by trying “everything they could think of” to “shore up their position without forcing them to spend more money”. A touch of Edwardian prudence would be similarly helpful today.

Across Europe, a strategic shock lies dormant in the shifting structure of world politics — namely, a partial US withdrawal from Britain’s wider region, and the realisation that locals must shoulder most of the security burden themselves. Faced with such a predicament, the British Government should revive a strategy that dates back more than a century: an Entente Cordiale with the other leading military states of Europe, such as France and Poland.

In some ways, circumstances today are milder than at the turn of the 20th Century. There is no equivalent of the German Kaiserreich, threatening to seize hegemony over the region, while Britain then was close to civil war over Ireland and the constitution. In other ways, however, the situation is worse. Nuclear weapons make even a depleted, thwarted Russia an enduring problem, a giant North Korea on Nato’s frontiers. Britain is also no longer the world’s leading state, measured in naval reach or financial sinew. It lacks the imperial resource base and the reserve currency of a century ago. And there are now forces loose in the world, shifts of wealth and power, that Britain cannot extinguish.

In turn, this means the United States will be increasingly unable and unwilling to do the heavy lifting as Europe’s security provider. British defence planning, like its statecraft, long worked on the assumption that the American colossus would underwrite it. A US forward presence in the form of continental garrisoning was a given, as was the ultimate assurance of extended nuclear deterrence under an American “umbrella”. The issues that divided strategic minds — the balance between continental and domestic commitments; the division of labour within Nato; the trade-offs between flexibility and specialism — rested on the assumption that America would stand sentry.

But as China’s bid for primacy in Asia forces Washington to focus on one theatre above others, this assumption has become increasingly unsound. Even if American politics is led by European-friendly primacists for the next generation, and even with a rear-guard effort by the foreign policy establishment to resist, new realities will bear down upon Washington and force it to prioritise the largest, richest near-peer adversary in its history.

This won’t be immediate. The prospect of a drawdown is clouded by Washington’s recent partial re-pivot to Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But the contest for primacy in Asia is intensifying, and will soon assert itself at the top of America’s agenda. Only this month, China conducted the largest simulation of a naval blockade against Taiwan, the epicentre of the US-China struggle. This is part of a wider escalating rivalry, with Washington legislating to kneecap China’s microchip imports.

The scale of the challenge to America’s pre-eminence in the Indo-Pacific region is likely to exert a near-gravitational pull on its attention. It will increase the demand on its diplomacy, its military power, its industrial base and presidential time. Americans will be increasingly reluctant to maintain a global posture. Something will have to “give”. And the likeliest candidate will be America’s commitment to wealthy allies in a region where its competitor is 10 times smaller in GDP terms than China, and cannot hope to overrun or dominate the continent. While the US is likely to retain a balancing “hand” in Europe, it will become averse to playing Uncle Sucker.

Faced with this change in priorities, it would be foolish for British or European policymakers to just muddle through and wish away the problem. Even within alleged “special” transatlantic relationships, Washington, like all great powers in history, has unilaterally imposed ruthless policy change, to its allies’ disfavour, with little warning. Recall President Harry Truman’s about-face in the early post-war period, terminating the Lend-Lease Act which transferred war supplies to any nation vital to America’s defence, ending talks over nuclear cooperation, and imposing fixed dollar-pound convertibility, which caused a currency and dollar/gold reserves crisis in Britain.

It would also be imprudent to imagine that the US will delay its withdrawal because the proxy war in Ukraine is comparatively “cheap”. A diversion of 20,000 military personnel into Europe is not cheap, strategically, especially as it also diverts precious air, naval, logistics, surveillance and reconnaissance assets. Neither is it cheap to deplete weapons and munitions stocks to the point where it exceeds capacity to reproduce it.

Instead, given the difficulty of its senior ally sustaining commitments in two theatres at once, it would be wiser to anticipate the shock, and enter into a form of security cooperation, recast from history. This would be an informal channel of cooperation between the leading military states of the region — Britain, France and Poland — that would collectively negotiate the strengthening of capability in the neighbourhood independent of the United States. It would proceed on the common assumption that European powers will soon be forced to shoulder far more of the burden of their own defence, and will have to develop the ability to operate independently of their traditional guarantor. It would work both on a diplomatic level and between military staffs.

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Ententes have the benefit of offering the advantages of informality and flexibility. A new formal organisation would be too long and complex to set up, raise anxieties about the supplanting of existing institutions, such as the EU, and impose credibility pressures to live up to. A less conspicuous Entente, by contrast, away from the glare of summits, would facilitate bargaining over hard capabilities, intelligence, interoperability and defence resilience in general (including cyber, stocks of materiel and supply chains). It would be austere in its political focus, centred on a common concern, countering any hostile attempt to weaken Nato or dominate the region while steering clear of ideological differences over liberal values that could strain ties.

In political terms, this should all be achievable. A new Entente would align with and give shape to France’s call for “strategic autonomy”, but in a more practical and less performative fashion. It would soften the message of autonomy, shifting it towards burden shifting, but with the welcome benefit that it would give France a greater say in European defence. In Warsaw, meanwhile, the country most anxious about the impact of American drawdown, it would shift the focus away from France’s dalliance with neutralism over China, and towards hard commitments towards defending Europe. And for Britain, an Entente would mitigate the security disadvantages of Brexit, by inserting it more centrally into a dialogue over collective defence that does not presuppose common EU membership.

Perhaps most important, with joint military planning the Entente, like its precedent, would help its members neutralise wider points of friction. While in the Edwardian era that was an imperial bargain over respective spheres in Africa and the Middle East, now it would focus on easing post-Brexit quarrel where the three countries most collide, namely over the division of labour over borders and migration.

Of course, this new Entente would probably create friction with the United States. That friction, however, would surely be a price worth paying for all sides. It would meet America’s traditional request that its allies shoulder more of the security burden. And as the US becomes increasingly preoccupied with the Indo-Pacific, it will find the Entente actually facilitates its efforts in the Asian theatre; it will free up its people, money and equipment to concentrate power where it matters most. As America prepares to downgrade its European profile — for the sake of the entire Western alliance, Europe should be ready.

“I hated the pointless discipline,” he tells me 60 years later. But in hindsight, he sees the value of spending 18 months in the Bundeswehr against his will. “Working with people from very different backgrounds helped me manage all sorts of people” — a useful skill for later in life, during his career in business. It also made him a more organised person. “We had a drill called ‘Nato alarm’. We had to get out of bed and be ready to go within 10 minutes. That was only possible if you had all your things in order.” To this day, he’s by far the tidiest person I know.

It was a very different time. Europe was constantly on edge. The 1961 stand-off in Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis were recent memories, and the prospect of a hot war between the Eastern Bloc and the West was not out of the realm of possibility. West Germany and Nato trained for what was considered a likely scenario: Soviet tanks pouring in from communist East Germany through the Fulda Gap towards Frankfurt. At the height of the Cold War, the Bundeswehr counted 495,000 soldiers in its ranks.

Now, Nato’s eastern flank is more than a 1,000km to the east and Germany has just 180,000 troops. But, having suspended mandatory military service in 2011, Germany is talking about reinstating it. After the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Chancellor Scholz gave his now-famous Zeitenwende speech, which supposedly heralded a new era of defence readiness. Last month, the new, gung-ho defence minister Boris Pistorius said it was a mistake to end conscription. Inspector of the Navy, Vice-Admiral Jan Christian Kaack agrees, arguing that it’s good for society in uncertain times: “I believe that a nation that needs to become more resilient in these times will have a better understanding if we have intermingling with the soldiers.” It seems that the public is on board. A recent survey found that 61% of Germans believe it was a mistake to suspend conscription.

Despite the conflict raging to Germany’s east, most advocates for conscription’s revival don’t focus on the military benefits. Last summer, when German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier proposed reviving national service in the form of Dienstpflicht, compulsory military or civil service, he used an old argument: that serving your country is a way to integrate young people. “Especially now, at a time when understanding for other ways of life and opinions is waning, compulsory social service can be particularly valuable. You get out of your own bubble, meet completely different people, help citizens in distress.”

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In post-war Germany, Wehrpflicht, or military duty, always allowed for conscientious objectors to opt for civil service. By the Nineties, half of the selected young men chose non-military work. A friend of mine drove an ambulance in Munich — an intense, life-changing experience, which included rescuing a man who was romantically entangled with a Hoover. Others wiped bums in care homes or kindergartens. Like my father, most ultimately benefited from serving in their different ways, even if it seemed hard and senseless at the time, an obstacle on their path towards university and a career.

But does it really make sense, in 2023, to reinstate mass conscription? In the decades following the catastrophe of Hitler and World War II, the army was tightly controlled by parliament, and soldiers were meant to be “citizens in uniform”. If all men participated in the armed forces and then went back to normal life, the military could not be a powerful “state within a state”, which is how my dad describes the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Interestingly, after conscription was halted in 2011, Germany’s all-volunteer army attracted proportionally more unsavoury, far-Right crackpots; some former professional soldiers have even cooked up unrealistic but potentially dangerous plans to overthrow the government or trigger a civil war. Conscription, one could argue, could not just integrate young men into society, it also could help to better integrate the military in the nation.

Compulsory service doesn’t necessarily make military sense, though, even in light of the threat presented by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Carlo Masala, professor at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich, imagines two scenarios in which the German army would be deployed: either a Russian attack on an eastern Nato country, most likely one of the Baltics, or a force directly invading Germany’s borders. A large army of conscripts only makes sense in the latter scenario; when your nation is directly under siege, a mass of troops is crucial. But the former scenario is far more likely — in the next two decades at least — and would require Germany contributing a small force of highly trained professionals armed with complex, high-tech kit.

Besides, Germany can’t afford a return to conscription. Masala says it would take five to ten years to build the barracks, purchase training equipment, and hire teaching staff. Annual costs would run in the double-digit billions. It would be much wiser to spend that money on attracting better volunteers by paying them higher wages — and buying them modern weaponry that works.

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Because the Bundeswehr has a lot of problems that an influx of new soldiers won’t fix. In the three decades after 1989, German defence fell into complacency, but from around 2015, the dismal state of the military became impossible to ignore. Angela Merkel’s last defence minister tried to boost appreciation for the troops with perks like free train tickets if they travelled in uniform — which wouldn’t be a big deal in most countries, but was controversial in Germany, where pacifism is deeply entrenched. By that point, defence was out of sight and out of mind: something rather distasteful that the Americans conveniently took care of from their huge base at Ramstein. Ironically, it was Donald Trump, a deeply unpopular figure in Germany, who prodded the country to change, with his insistence that Nato members spend 2% of GDP on defence. The Germans, and many other nations, are now aiming to do just that.

The conscription debate has flared up elsewhere in Europe. Latvia reintroduced it in January — hardly a surprising move, given the nation’s proximity to Russia. But Western European leaders are also dusting off the old-fashioned idea that shared military experience is a glue that keeps society from fragmenting. In 2019, Macron introduced a new four-week programme of national service, which will become compulsory. (He has said: “Military experience not only leads you to develop experiences but also behavioural qualities.”) In Italy, Right-wingers like Matteo Salvini have long advocated conscription’s revival: “I believe that a year of teaching the rules, good manners and duties would make good citizens.”

As for Scandinavia, Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea reawakened fears of Russian aggression. Sweden reintroduced conscription in 2017, as the number of volunteers was steadily falling. The move was backed by parties on the Right and Left. There is a broad consensus that national service is good for democracy. Every year, the nation selects about 6,000 male and female recruits based on an online survey, with questions about their physical condition and their attitude towards military service. Attitudes are similar in Norway, where 15% of 19-year-old men and women serve. Here, a shared border with Russia adds to the sense that conscription and a large number of citizens with some military training are necessary.

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But where I live, in Denmark, the hottest debate about conscription is very different from the one happening in either Germany or nations that share a border with Russia. At the moment, a small number of men are selected each year via a lottery, while women can sign up as volunteers. The government, led by social democrat Mette Frederiksen, is putting together legislation that will make service compulsory for women, too. It’s backed by feminist organisations such as Kvinfo, whose director Henriette Laursen writes: “If women and men are to be included in the Armed Forces on equal terms, military service should be the same for women and men. Therefore, Kvinfo recommends that military service be either extended to women or abolished altogether.”

Of course, forcing women to join the military might not be in their best interests; it can be a dangerous environment for them. Female veterans complain about sexual harassment and tell stories of women sleeping with knives under their pillows to ward off advances. But Laursen thinks the presence of more women will help, saying that the military needs to be cleansed of “macho culture”. Indeed, a Swedish official recently said that the main change since female conscription has been better hygiene among the men.

Equality sounds great on paper. But prominent voices object to the move. Anna Libak, a journalist and veteran, writes: “All women who have served in the armed forces — like myself — must admit that, all other things being equal, men are better soldiers because they are physically stronger than women.” There is, she argues, a fundamental reason why only 8.9% of uniformed soldiers in Denmark are female, and it’s not sexism. Her conclusion might provoke some feminists: having children is necessary for the survival of Denmark and women continue to bear the physical and financial burden of reproduction, so they shouldn’t be forced to carry arms on top. “There are many ways to defend the nation. For example, by giving birth to the conscripts of the future.”

Still, 55% of Danes favour the draft for both sexes — perhaps because most of the young people who serve these days appear to have a blast. The #værnepligt tag on Instagram reveals women in full camo floating in a lake, or a troop marching along a pristine beach at sunset, with captions like, “Hard, fun, challenging, educational, exhausting, adventurous, breaking down, building up, comradely, meaningless, meaningful, memorable! Would love to do it again!”. A far cry from the grim drudgery my father went through in Cold War Germany. In peaceful, prosperous Scandinavia, conscription really is an opportunity to make friends and learn something, just as it would be in Germany. But, in 2023, the image of the army as an Instagrammable adventure clashes violently with the horrors being broadcast from the trenches of Bakhmut.

On the brutal, 1,000-mile front that has divided Europe, the true cost of conscription is revealed: men of fighting age, and it is still largely men, being fed to the meat grinder, whether they like it or not. If, God forbid, war were to spread to Western Europe, having six months’ experience in the army wouldn’t save our young people. As peace continues to reign here, we still have the luxury of debating whether conscription will integrate disaffected young men into society, or whether mandatory military service for women will boost diversity and inclusion. But when push comes to shove, that’s not what the military’s about.

In a 2am tweet yesterday, Ellwood claimed: “Pleased to see powerful voices joining my call for a humanitarian partial or total NO FLY ZONE. What scale of war crimes, what numbers of civilian deaths must we witness — before Nato, the most powerful military alliance in the world, is tasked to intervene?”

While wars are not won by manic late-night tweets, they can nevertheless create much damage, in this case the risk of significantly escalating the conflict through creating unrealistic expectations among the British media class about what should be done, and among the Ukrainians about what will be done.

As the Biden administration’s spokeperson Jen Psaki very sensibly observed last night in her attempt to persuade journalists to tone down their rhetoric, a No-Fly Zone “would essentially mean the US military would be shooting down planes, Russian planes. That is definitely escalatory. That would potentially put us in a place where we’re in a military conflict with Russia. That is not something the President wants to do.”

As Psaki continued: “We are not going to have a military war with Russia with US troops. And [Biden] thinks it’s vitally important… to be direct with the public about that.”

Aside from dramatically increasing the risk of a nuclear exchange with Russia, the idea of a No-Fly Zone is a non-starter for many reasons. Even if it did not cause Russia to heighten its preparedness for a nuclear strike against us — which is surely reason enough — shooting down Russian jets would make Nato a military party to the conflict in a way that could soon spiral out of control. This ought to go without saying, but apparently it is now necessary to explain to Britain’s political class in very simple terms.

If Nato jets are flying from airbases in Central and Southeastern Europe to shoot down Russian aircraft, not only would the jets become military targets for Russia’s air defences, but those bases would themselves then become likely targets for Russian military retaliation, along with the basing locations of Nato air defence systems covering Western Ukraine. For all their diplomatic support of Ukraine and their supply of vital munitions to Ukrainian forces, countries such as Poland, Romania and Bulgaria will naturally shy away from a course of action likely to lead to Russian air and missile strikes on their own territory.

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When advocates of a No-Fly Zone in Syria demanded such a course of action, it was before Russia entered the Syrian war, when Syrian airbases could reasonably be put out-of-action by long-range missile strikes without any serious risk of retaliation. This is not the case with the Ukraine war: is Ellwood seriously advocating that we strike the airbases in Russia and Belarus from which Russian aircraft are deployed? If so, then he should be explicit about what he is calling for, and the consequences that will ensue.

In any case, Russia has so far refrained from utilising its vast air superiority against Ukraine, for the possible reasons outlined in this excellent RUSI essay; namely, the lack of guided munitions to strike targets without causing widespread civilian deaths, the poor coordination of Russian air defence systems deployed in Ukraine which may cause jets to be downed by friendly fire, and the relative inexperience of Russian pilots when faced with competent opponents.

Monday was the first day in which Russian jets were visible in the conflict, flying close air support missions over the Kharkiv front. The only meaningful Russian air activity so far has been the use of helicopters to land airborne forces at the Hostomel airbase outside Kyiv in the war’s opening phase, to create a staging ground or potential bridgehead for the coming assault on the capital, and the limited use of attack helicopters to destroy Ukrainian ground positions and vehicles moving along the roads in convoy.

Instead, the most dreadful Russian bombardments of the war so far have been by ground-based artillery and long-range missile systems against the besieged city of Kharkiv on Monday and yesterday, causing great destruction and terrible civilian casualties among the city’s mostly Russian-speaking population, as well as on Ukrainian military installations elsewhere in the country.

The Russian way of war is based on heavy artillery barrages to soften up defences for a ground assault, unlike the Western approach in which aerial bombardment has become the dominant tool. A No-Fly Zone would do nothing to prevent this outcome, though rhetoric demanding one may well play a role in encouraging Russian decision-makers to intensify their artillery bombardment in search of a swift and overwhelming victory — one which would cause vast numbers of civilian casualties.

Our aim at this point should be to dissuade Putin as far as we can from deploying the artillery assets he has so far barely used, not in encouraging him to go all out before a Western response can realistically be organised. We do not want Putin to turn Kyiv into Nineties Grozny or Aleppo, and over-promising and under-delivering military support is an almost guaranteed way to speed up this outcome.

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Perhaps Ellwood and others have had their expectations of what is possible or desirable raised by the NATO No-Fly Zone against Libya in 2011. Cautiously agreed to by Russia at the UN Security Council, it swiftly evolved into a close air support campaign against Libyan ground forces which allowed the rebels to defeat Gaddafi  — an outcome which enraged Putin, and shaped his attitude to the following Syrian conflict.

But Gaddafi’s decrepit Libya is not Putin’s Russia and such a campaign is simply not achievable. Does Ellwood want us to strike Russian tanks and artillery in Ukraine? Again, he should be honest about what he is calling for and about what the Russian response would look like.

We should sigh with relief that Johnson yesterday uled out the No-Fly Zone idea that America has already dismissed, telling a Ukrainian journalist, with painful but realistic frankness, that “Unfortunately the implication of a [No-Fly Zone] is that the UK would be engaged in shooting down Russian planes … and be in direct combat” with Russia, and with consequences “truly difficult to control.”

Britain, and other Nato countries are already doing about as much as we can, by supplying Ukraine with the munitions making the Russian advance so costly, and by imposing great financial and diplomatic costs on Russia for Putin’s invasion. Beyond this, there is little more we can do other than encourage Russia towards meaningful negotiations before Kyiv is encircled and Ukraine’s bargaining hand is dramatically weakened.

Unless he has genuinely taken leave of his senses, Ellwood’s “hold me back!” posturing is possible purely because he knows the course of action he is calling for is already out of the question. He can raise the stakes in this dangerous and irresponsible manner because it wins him attention for the forthcoming Tory leadership contest, and because there are no negative consequences for him doing so.

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That must change: the risk of escalation is too great for this rhetoric to be permitted at so dangerous a moment for Britain and Europe. The Conservative party must get a grip on Ellwood and others’ irresponsible late-night interventions in an already fevered online discourse: the whip has been withdrawn for far less.

Nothing good will come of such insane talk, for Britain, or most acutely, for the Ukrainians seemingly about to suffer a devastating campaign of artillery bombardment. Raising their expectations with false hopes at this stage of the war will not help them. But raising Russia’s threat calculus may harm them a great deal, at a time when Putin seems already poised to take his gloves off after a so-far half-hearted campaign. That is too great a price to pay for Ellwood’s desire to raise his profile — and the party needs to step in soon.

Clive Woodley, 67, currently attached to the Department of Shock Physics at Imperial College in London, has worked on high-tech weaponry since his youth. So he had much to say about the conference theme: “New Material Technology for Ammunition.” The event “marked a new chapter in the development of artillery, shells and missiles”, according to an official report issued afterwards.

Most of Woodley’s research has been funded by the Ministry of Defence. A former president of the International Ballistics Society, he served as Chief Scientist at the MoD-controlled company QinetiQ from its inception in 2001 — when the MoD privatised its own labs — to 2018. He has advised the MoD about many of its key lethal systems.

Woodley’s contributions in Jinan followed a grand opening ceremony conducted by Qi Xiaoliang, the Communist Party Secretary of the Shandong Institute, one of China’s top military research centres. Joining him, the conference literature makes clear, was almost every leading figure in the Chinese weapons industry, including key figures from Norinco, a Chinese state-owned giant that makes tanks, fighter jets, drones, missiles, big guns, and bombs. Another sponsor was the China Ordnance Society, which brings together 22,000 researchers from both China’s universities and its arms firms, all devoted to “fostering the development needs of national defence”.

Most extraordinary of all was the timing. In 2012, and for some years afterwards, Britain and China basked in a “golden age” of warm relations initiated under David Cameron. China was not then so widely known for the genocide of its Uighur Muslim minority, nor had it crushed Hong Kong’s freedoms. It was not until 2020 that the UK government decreed that equipment made by the Chinese telecoms firm Huawei must be ripped out from Britain’s 5G networks on grounds of national security.

However, the conference in Jinan took place very recently, on 14 and 15 October 2021. It was supposedly “international”, but in fact, the only non-Chinese delegates were Woodley, a Russian and a Pole. A few weeks later, MI6 chief Richard Moore gave a landmark speech, saying the threat from China was now his agency’s “single greatest priority”, and warning that we must beware of “large-scale espionage operations against us, targeting those in research of particular interest to the Chinese state” — in other words, experts such as Woodley.

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Yet the Jinan event was no one-off. Working with an expert who is fluent in Mandarin, I have established that over the past eight years, Woodley has participated at least seven times in seminars and lectures for senior figures from China’s defence industry and university departments that work with its military. He is also a co-editor of two Chinese journals funded by weapons firms. Since 2014, he has had eight papers either published in Chinese journals or co-written with Chinese scientists working with Chinese arms makers — the most recent, in 2021.

And Covid rules permitting, Woodley will soon be jetting off yet again to Beijing. There, over four days in July, he will co-chair the International Conference on Defence Technology, presiding over sessions covering the latest discoveries in sensitive military technologies. Helpfully, Woodley lists their subject areas in his “welcome letter” on the conference website. They include hypersonic weapons (as deployed by the Russians with lethal effect in Ukraine), “explosions and impacts”, new types of armour, quantum computing and “wound ballistics”.

Just as in October, most of those in attendance will be from China’s weapons industry: Woodley’s co-chairs will be two of China’s most eminent defence scientists, Feng Changgen of the Beijing Institute of Technology and Li Baoming of Nanjing University and the Ordnance Science and Research Academy of China. Both are high-ranking members of the Communist Party, and their careers have been dedicated to China’s military.

In recent months, newspapers have carried many stories about China’s involvement with British academics and universities, and the risks this may pose. But until now, Woodley’s activities have gone unreported. The MoD says it does not recognise they might pose any risk. Its spokesperson refused to answer a single question about Woodley’s involvement with China, other than to say: “We have robust procedures in place to make sure research contracts do not contribute to overseas military programmes and that individuals or organisations with foreign-state links cannot access our sensitive research… we ensure that stringent vetting checks are carried out.”

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Imperial College said: “We take our responsibilities to UK national security seriously”, but also refused to answer questions. Its spokesperson added, somewhat bizarrely, that when Woodley wrote papers jointly with Chinese colleagues, he “should not have used” his Imperial College title. Here, Woodley appears not to have got the memo: for the forthcoming Beijing conference, he is, as usual, billed as an Imperial researcher.

As for QinetiQ, its spokesperson said the firm had “robust processes in place to vet our people and their activities both within and outside the business”. He said that Woodley was working there, and that he “frequently engaged with a number of other countries across the world, working collaboratively to support the international scientific community. Our UK Defence customer was both aware of and supportive of all these activities.”

Others, however, have expressed concern. A former senior MI6 officer told me: “The fact there have been not just one or two talks but a consistent and continuing pattern of meeting and contact is deeply concerning. I can’t think of another case where a British lecturer has visited China many times to talk about weapons technology, nor written papers about it in Chinese journals.”

Woodley’s intentions, he went on, were, presumably, innocent: a desire to share research with colleagues abroad. But he was, the former official added, at best deeply naïve: “An open relationship, with talks or lectures in scientific forums, can all too easily be a cover for attempts by a hostile intelligence service to conduct more in-depth discussions. To me, this looks like a classic example of the way China’s intelligence service works.”

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He added that China may have tried to steal data from Woodley’s laptop or phone during his visits there, without him even knowing it: “Business people travelling to China are always advised to take only burner phones and computers with no sensitive data on them.”

Indeed, in 2013, the year before Woodley’s work with China began, it emerged that Chinese spies had stolen vast amounts of sensitive information from his then employer QinetiQ by hacking its computer system via two employees’ laptops. They stole 13,000 QinetiQ server passwords and acquired more than 1.3 million pages of documents.

I shared my findings with the Tory MP and former army officer Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. He said that after this article was published, his committee would investigate. Tugendhat said: “This case raises serious concerns about the integrity of our military secrets and the level of cooperation between a British expert and a potentially hostile state, and we will be looking into what exactly has happened — and why no one has raised such concerns before. No one could say his work is dual use. His career has had one end only — the development of weapons.”

Woodley’s activities are particularly concerning, given his long-standing reputation as a giant in his field. His contributions have included the development of plasma-powered cannons, fired by high-voltage electric pulses in place of old-fashioned explosives; ingenious ways of improving firing mechanisms and shells using mathematical modelling, so that big guns can be targeted more accurately; and ways of increasing the violence and speed of their shells’ detonations. Another of his areas of expertise is railguns — next generation hypersonic artillery weapons that fire projectiles at six times the speed of sound, so that a shell fired from London would land somewhere in Manchester in just over a minute.

There is, it should be noted, no suggestion that Woodley has disclosed classified information, or consciously tried to damage Britain’s national interest. Nevertheless, it is a fact that China has acquired a decisive lead in the race to deploy railguns. In 2020, it revealed a prototype mounted on a naval vessel and said it planned to deploy these “superguns” widely by 2025. Britain and America are said to be lagging far behind. In 2019, Woodley delivered a conference paper co-written with Li Baoming and his Nanjing University colleague Qin Linhua. Its title? “Recent Update on the Multi-Physical-Model of Electromagnetic Railgun.”

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Woodley has been visiting China since 2014, when, Mandarin websites say, he gave “an important lecture” to scientists from Norinco. The same year, he joined the editorial board of a journal published in Mandarin, The Chinese Journal of Explosives and Propellants, co-owned by Norinco and the China Ordnance Society. The head of both institutions is a senior member of the Communist Party, Jiao Kaihe.

Woodley’s first paper for the journal was published in its December 2014 issue. It described how microscopic particles of aluminium could speed the detonation of explosives, and so make guns more deadly. The paper stated that this innovation would be “of great benefit to all small arms, medium calibre and large calibre gun systems including naval guns, land-based artillery and direct fire guns”. The paper’s acknowledgements stated: “This work was funded by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), part of the UK MoD, under the Hazard Modelling and Simulation task of the UK Energetics (UK-E) programme.”

Woodley published another paper in the same journal in 2015, and a third in 2018, about mathematical modelling of the behaviour of guns and explosives. His last Chinese Journal of Explosives paper to date, published last August, dealt with new forms of explosives in what were termed “closed bombs”. It was co-written with four Chinese experts from the Xi’an Modern Chemistry Research Institute, part of Norinco. The Institute’s website says it is “China’s largest comprehensive research institution working on explosives and damaging combustion technologies”.

Meanwhile, in 2016 Woodley authored a paper in a second Chinese journal, Defence Technology, which is sponsored by the weapons industry body, the China Ordnance Society. It discussed the use of explosives at low atmospheric pressures and in temperature extremes, stating it was based on research “funded by the MoD”, under its “Weapons Science and Technology Centre” (WSTC).

He also became one of the journal’s three executive editors, along with the two scientists who will be co-chairing the conference with him in July, Li Baoming and Feng Changgen. Feng is a former member of China’s puppet parliament, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, and is based at the Beijing Institute of Technology, one of China’s “seven sons of national defence” — universities with especially close military links and numerous top secret military labs. He sits on the Science and Technology Committee of the State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence, which coordinates China’s weapons research.

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Until the pandemic, Woodley visited China almost every year. In 2015, he attended the autumn seminar at the State Key Laboratory of Explosion Science, part of the Beijing Institute of Technology. The following year he gave a week-long series of seminars at Li Baoming’s lab in Nanjing about his work at QinetiQ — which, photos reveal, were illustrated with slides bearing the QinetiQ logo. According to reports in Mandarin, as well as his lectures and seminars, he held private talks with his Chinese colleagues.

In 2018, he co-chaired the first International Conference on Defence Technology in Beijing, together with Feng and Li. The event was sponsored by Norinco, the China Ordnance Society, and the China South Industries Group Corporation, another major weapons maker. The event was attended by personnel from Norinco, several “seven sons” universities, and the Army Engineering University, which describes itself as “the premier research and educational institution for the PLA Ground Force”. The second of these conferences, in the autumn of 2020, had to be held online thanks to the pandemic. By then, the “golden age” was well and truly over, amid emerging evidence that China had concealed the true source of the Covid outbreak. Nevertheless, Woodley was there.

I have tried repeatedly to ask Woodley questions about his publications and trips to China in a series of emails. When he failed to respond, I visited his home in Kent. He told me that if I didn’t leave he would call the police, slammed the door in my face, and refused to accept my questions in writing. Among the things I had wanted to ask were whether he has received any payment for his work with Chinese colleagues and journals; what security precautions he has taken during his visits; and whether he considers collaborating with researchers from China is any different to working with experts from countries allied with Britain.

Charles Parton, a former diplomat and China expert at the Royal United Services Institute, who has written extensively on the need for the UK to improve its defences against China, told me that the curious case of Mr Woodley “requires urgent investigation and explanation. What was discussed with whom and in what terms? Were any benefits received? It also shows badly we need to up our defences. We need to define the areas of scientific research where we can cooperate with Chinese scientists and those which we must rule out on security grounds.”

Espionage expert Professor Anthony Glees, the founder of the Institute for Intelligence and Security Studies at Buckingham University, added: “Engaging with China over weapons research today represents the height of folly and could have potentially catastrophic consequences. Even with the best intentions, Woodley’s visits to China and his relationships with those who are bound to be Chinese intelligence assets places him in the utmost danger.”

As the scale of the strategic threat China poses becomes clearer, it may just be that Woodley’s friendships could have endangered the rest of us, too.

Over the past year, the question of whether or not the United States will defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion has shifted from abstract speculation to an almost existential question for America’s foreign policy elite. For decades, the US has pursued a policy of “strategic ambiguity” on this question — an ambiguity arguably heightened by Biden’s recent claims that it will defend Taiwan, swiftly followed by the State Department’s corrections that US policy on the matter has not changed (whether or not Biden’s personal ambiguity is intentional is of course another matter). 

In a new book, The Strategy of Denial, the American strategist Elbridge Colby aims to resolve this ambiguity once and for all: not only should the US defend Taiwan, it must — for the crucial reason that the integrity of the American empire depends on its winning or preventing this looming conflict. As one of the writers of the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which reset America’s defence posture away from the greater Middle East and towards strategic competition with China, Colby is an influential voice: and if followed, the policy prescriptions within this book will affect Europe perhaps more than European policymakers realise.

A foreign policy Realist, Colby aims to bury the atmosphere of triumphalist liberal imperialism which has served America so badly since the fall of the Soviet Union. “The generation of post–Cold War primacy unmoored some Americans, or at least some of their leaders and eminent thinkers, from underlying realities, giving them a highly exaggerated sense of what the United States could and should accomplish in the international arena,” he notes at the beginning. But “that world is gone. The fundamental reality is that there are now structural limitations on what the United States can do — it cannot do everything at once. Thus it must make hard choices.”

Stripping away all the accretions of “defending liberalism” or “promoting democracy” with which American politicians are accustomed to shroud their defence of empire, Colby breaks down the raw facts of power to their essentials. Asia is the most important economic sphere in the world, and thus, to maintain its global preeminence, America must maintain hegemony in Asia. 

Europe is of secondary importance, and with no realistic hegemonic challenger to American dominance, can be relegated to a second-order priority. The rest of the world is of very limited importance: there is no challenge in the Western Hemisphere, and Africa, if of interest at all, will likely be dominated by whoever wins hegemony in Asia. 

To prevent China dislodging America from hegemony in Asia is, therefore, the central task of US foreign policy: but it is not an easy task. As Colby notes: “Restoring military dominance over China is infeasible, given its size and growth trajectory.” China’s economic growth has been of such historic, transformative proportions that “in purchasing power parity terms it is already larger than America’s, and China has been vigorously turning this economic strength into military power”.

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As Colby notes, the result is that a simple Cold War arms race to maintain military dominance is out of the question: China currently spends far less of its GDP than the US on defence, and can potentially vastly outspend any American increase. Moreover, he adds, “given the enormous demands of attempting to attain dominance against a power like China, the economic costs could be crippling, seriously stressing the US economy, the ultimate source of America’s military strength”.

Instead, the US must pursue a role as “cornerstone balancer” in International Relations terminology, the central linchpin of a vast multinational alliance which, when combined, will outweigh China’s military might. Rattling through the list of potential allies, Colby observes that Japan is central, and India, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia highly desirable, along with the militarily insignificant but geographically useful island nations of the Pacific. Other countries, such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, should be armed so that they can mount a solid defence of their own territory, without the US extending them a security guarantee it will find itself unable to fulfil. 

But for Colby everything centres on Taiwan: exploring all the potential rationales and options for China, Colby settles on a military fait accompli by China — an invasion — as the most likely course of action. Taiwan, internationally recognised as part of China even by the US, is politically the most obvious target, as the ratcheting up of bellicose Chinese rhetoric makes clear. Strategically, not taking Taiwan will prevent Chinese expansion in the wider Pacific, and taking it will offer China greater ability to project its power in the region. And invasion it must be: strategic “Greyzone” tactics short of war like a blockade, or “punishment” tactics like bombardment, are unlikely to succeed, he argues, as they would firm up Taiwanese and international resolve against China without delivering victory to Beijing. 

Having focused on the most likely Chinese course of action, Colby war-games how to defeat it. Allowing China to invade Taiwan is highly undesirable: to wrest back control of the island once the Chinese have gained a foothold and erected defences would place the US at a great structural disadvantage, forcing it to escalate the conflict into something akin to the great amphibious campaigns of the World War Two Pacific. This would, Colby notes, be “a highly costly, risky, and arduous venture for the United States,” in which America and its allies “would need to redirect their economies to develop and sustain the forces needed for such a conflict, which would likely involve high rates of attrition,” and in a situation, unlike World War Two, where “the United States would not enjoy a decisive advantage in industrial capacity”— indeed, where industrial advantage has already passed to China.

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With recapture out of the question, the American focus must be one of denial: denying China the ability to seize Taiwan, and preferably, dissuading it from even attempting it. Colby suggests that the US and its allies “seek to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft before they left Chinese ports or airstrips,” to “try to obstruct key ports; neutralize key elements of Chinese command and control and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance networks; or attack other critical enablers, including other targets on the Chinese mainland, so that surviving assets were more vulnerable to interdiction when they entered the Taiwan Strait” — and then disabling or destroying any ships that made it through.

Yet here we enter the most contentious aspect of Colby’s strategising. As he himself observes repeatedly, once the shooting starts, it will be very difficult to prevent a Taiwan conflict between the American-led alliance and China escalating into a broader war. Colby is bullish at the prospect of avoiding a nuclear exchange, reasoning that the consequences would be as catastrophic for China as they would for the US. Instead, he argues, America should make clear that it is interested only in fighting a limited campaign centred on the defence of Taiwan. 

But such a campaign would not be limited to the Taiwan Straits, with Colby observing that “if the United States forswore the ability to attack targets on the Chinese mainland that were materially involved in the war, it would gravely weaken its ability to defend Taiwan. After all, treating mainland China as off-limits would raise questions about American resolve.” And yet the consequence of such an approach would surely be retaliation, which “would likely include at least some air and naval bases in the United States as well as cyber and space assets. The defenders should therefore propose and seek acceptance only of rule sets, Colby argues, “whose implications they can live with”. How much bombardment of the American mainland the American public can live with for Taiwan’s sake is, of course, an open question.

The essential thrust of Colby’s argument is that America is unlikely to win an all-out war with China: the costs for America will be too high, and China’s geographic and industrial advantages are too great. In his words, “The plain reality is that China is too powerful for the United States simply to make it cease fighting; the United States and any engaged allies and partners would therefore need to persuade it to do so.” Ultimately then, it is on America’s diplomatic and military powers of persuasion that his strategy stands or falls. Firstly, he proposes to “bind” American partners and allies into a web of Pacific alliances, through treaties and joint military basing and operations in the region (we think here of AUKUS). Even if, for European allies like ourselves, our military contribution will be marginal to any Pacific campaign, the moral shock of being targeted by the Chinese in a pre-emptive strike might “bind” us further into the American-led system, Colby argues, as the outraged public demands a response to Chinese aggression.

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Indeed, such political considerations are essential to maintaining the great, if loose, alliance system to maintain American hegemony in Asia. China must be provoked into initiating any escalation of the conflict, so that it will always appear the aggressor; it must be permitted to strike as indiscriminately as possible (Colby urges the US not to provide potential civilian targets with air defences, reasoning that collateral damage will whip up the public anger against China necessary to winning a war); at every stage, China must be manoeuvred into situations where it is forced to escalate the conflict and so lose world sympathy, or back down. Over time, he reasons, the Chinese leadership will realise that the costs of seizing Taiwan will outweigh the benefits, and will be reassured enough by American pledges that the US will not aim to launch a wider war or dismantle their state that they will sue for peace.

Perhaps. It is a strategy that involves a great deal of careful, narrowly applied violence, which depends on what is ultimately the hope that China agrees to fight a war on America’s terms, playing to America’s advantages and negating its own. His hope is that by forcing Beijing to escalate the conflict beyond Taiwan, the American public, along with the publics of its allied nations, will fling themselves into support for a war to deny an aggressive China mastery of Asia; and that by forcing China to escalate, the war is, paradoxically, kept limited to the narrow bounds in which American victory is, though far from certain, at least possible.

This is a difficult balance, as Colby himself makes clear, “it is hard to overstate the scale and sophistication of the resources Beijing can bring to bear to subordinate Taiwan,” and even fighting a war against China on America’s chosen terms “would be exceptionally challenging”. And yet, Colby argues, it is necessary. Will the American public agree? It is difficult, from where we stand, to see that they agree on anything much. As Colby himself observes, “Americans may not be convinced that taking a leading role in denying another state hegemony over a distant region, however key, is worth the sacrifice and risk entailed”. Colby argues his case well, but there are a lot of ifs to think about here, not least for modestly capable allies like Britain plunging headlong into an Indo-Pacific tilt.

Colby himself argues that European countries such Britain would serve the American war effort more effectively by taking a greater role in the defence of Europe itself. Unlike British and German defence analysts who, for their own different reasons, are aghast at the prospect of American diminution of its commitment to Nato, Colby stresses that America’s interests in Europe are by a long way secondary to its interests in Asia, and that European countries — particularly Germany — should be obliged to take up the slack.

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A foreign policy Realist, Colby rightly urges America to give up its draining Middle Eastern commitments, to force Europeans to defend themselves, to extricate itself from the web of defence guarantees it has given to nations of no meaningful strategic importance and to focus all its efforts towards maintaining its global dominance through the defence of Taiwan against a rising China.  Colby’s strategy rightly roots itself firmly in a clear-eyed understanding of America’s diminished global reach following its unchallenged period of post-Cold War dominance, and indeed, Biden’s foreign policy so far has followed Trump’s (and Colby’s) Realist lead. Yet even after its pragmatic listing of all the ways it could fail and the great odds stacked against victory, Colby’s analysis seems to glide over what is surely America’s greatest weakness. 

Which actual or potential ally can be certain that an internally-divided America, whose chaotic politics is beamed daily across the world, has the solidarity and wherewithal to maintain even a limited shooting war at the other end of the world against the most powerful rival it has ever faced? How well-placed is 2021 America to walk such a narrow political, diplomatic and military tightrope, where the prospect of success is so slender, and where the risks of escalation are so great? Colby places great emphasis on the difficulties the US will find in holding together a fractious alliance in East Asia: yet whether it can hold itself together long enough to fight and win a costly major war is surely the greatest question challenging the empire’s survival.

A newcomer to the US, I had been hired off the streets by Francis J. West, Schlesinger’s Special Assistant, a young Marine combat veteran who had already published a celebrated book about the Vietnam War. Schlesinger liked to collect brains (one, Andrew Marshall, served as Director of Net Assessment for 42 years, retiring at age 94), but with me he was habitually quarrelsome, in part over his obsession with Jews — he was a convert to Lutheranism of all things.

When Donald Rumsfeld arrived, his very elegant suits cut a sharp contrast to Schlesinger’s tweedy birdwatcher clothes . Unlike his predecessor, he had no intellectual credentials at all but he was certainly a political prodigy; he had won a seat in Congress when he was 30, became a White House Cabinet-level counsellor for Nixon at 37, and then Ambassador to Nato before he was recalled to serve as Chief of Staff for President Ford in 1974.

When he asked me, with an openly sardonic grin, what I was doing on the premises, I explained that the Secretary of Defense must present a bulky annual report to Congress, and I was writing the “national strategy” front-matter, which Congressmen and lobbyists usually skip over to devour what follows: details about the various weapons and other purchases that will rain down dollars on their districts.

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“Why you?” he asked. “You are not even a US citizen!” So I explained that lots of others were also sharing the burden, and that I would not even be in the room when the final editing would be done. Then I gratuitously added that strategy was beyond the capacity of Anglo-Saxons because they are gloaters, while only brooders seriously think about threats.

His reaction was unsettling: he burst out laughing and went on laughing, stopping only to start again. Finally, he said that in Brussels at Nato they were all brooders, still resentful for no longer lording it over the Congo, Surabaya and Ceylon. As I walked out, he asked me if I wanted a job. I reminded him that as a non-citizen I could only consult. “So consult away,” he said, still laughing.

It was only later that I understood why Rumsfeld was in such an uproarious mood. He had just pulled off the bureaucratic coup of the century: with the amiable President Ford as his frontman, he had demoted Kissinger to Secretary of State, removing him from his more important job as the White House National Security Advisor. He had effectively hoisted Kissinger with his own petard; it was Kissinger himself who had shifted all the power from State to the National Security Council.

But Kissinger wasn’t his only target. At the CIA, meanwhile, Rumsfeld had removed the embarrassingly truthful William Colby and installed his associate and future President H.W Bush, sacked Schlesinger from the Pentagon and appointed his own loyal protégé, Richard Cheney, as his successor as Chief of Staff — to protect himself from further White House intrigue.

It was only later that I understood the logic behind Rumsfeld’s political masterplan: Kissinger had to go because the “Ford-Brezhnev” duopoly of power — which aimed to control Third World troublemakers and deflate the pretensions of their tiresome European allies — was viewed as a pact with the devil among the anti-Communist wing of the Republican Party, which now demanded his removal. Getting rid of Kissinger would keep them at bay. But to demote Kissinger would unleash the power of Schlesinger, who was already demanding sharp increases in defence spending and had irritated President Ford by encouraging anti-Kissinger hard-liners. So the perfect solution was to fire both, and then use the dust-up to get rid of Colby.

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This collective defenestration was Italian-renaissance politics at its best, with Rumsfeld playing its Machiavellian puppet-master, though the vernacular press preferred the folksy “Halloween massacre”. It was a feat entirely beyond the imagination of Gerald Ford, an all-round decent fellow who became the uncontroversial Republican leader in 1965 because of his distaste for intrigue, and then Nixon’s obvious “squeaky clean” choice to replace the scandalous Spiro Agnew as Vice President.

It was Rumsfeld who had laid the entire plot and persuaded the mild-mannered Ford to act against character, especially in regard to Kissinger whom he greatly admired. Evidently, Rumsfeld had decided that the time had come for him to emerge from the back rooms of the White House and receive some career-enhancing publicity as Secretary of Defense. The then ample Pentagon press corps has the “SecDef” as its focus just as its White House counterpart has the President — and not his underling Chief of Staff, however powerful.

That, in turn, reflected another of Rumsfield’s priorities: he must have calculated that Ford’s election chances the following year were very poor, especially after eight Republican years, and he needed the prestige of being Secretary of Defense for his future job hunt. At the age of 45, he wanted to become a very well-paid CEO and not just sit on boards for small change.

He succeeded in that as well, becoming seriously rich during President Carter’s four years then Reagan’s eight years, initially by becoming CEO of a pharmaceutical company. During this period, he once invited me to dinner solely to complain about a passage in one of my books that he found objectionable. As he spoke, I realised that he was following the defence scene very closely. And as a prior appointee, and still quite young, he was an obvious candidate for high office when his party won the White House again with Reagan, and then again with Bush senior.

But he was still in his money-making phase, and was also flirting with Presidential ambitions of his own. In any case, had he wanted to return under Bush senior, Schlesinger’s admirers — a tenacious lot — were very well placed to block him. And so it was not until January 2001 that G.W. Bush re-appointed him Secretary of Defense.

It was, however, an unlucky return. In his years of reflection since his last Pentagon passage, he had applied his business brain to the business of the Pentagon, and he was looking forward to implementing drastic reforms, once he had staffed the department with likeminded officials. He told me that he wanted to change the very nature of the Department; he viewed it as an inefficient machine that turned every weapon purchase into an endless quest for perfection, and he wanted to change the military mind-set that turned every operation into another D-day.

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In its place, he wanted intelligence-driven “manoeuvre warfare”, and focused combat efforts that replaced bulk with precision, along with efforts to set limits on bureaucratic overspending.

It was not to be — or, rather, it was starting to be. But after September 11, 2001, when the Pentagon itself was attacked, the Joint Staff started looking at different options of implementing another D-Day: there was talk of sending large forces with mountains of supplies to march up from Pakistan, some even amphibiously via Pakistan’s Baluchistan coast. Rumsfeld wanted none of it: he wanted to knock out the Taliban with small teams of green berets backed up by precise bombing directed by hand-held laser designators.

Rumsfeld pulled it off. He overruled the D-day crowd in the Joint Staff — though not without the support of Richard Meyers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and an airman who saw nothing wrong with relying primarily on air power. What followed was a triumph for Rumsfeld and his “light footprint”: the Taliban crumbled and everything went very well, except for the total failure of the CIA “operatives” who were supposed to help the Green Berets communicate with the anti-Taliban Tadjiks and Uzbeks: none knew a word of either language.

The much bigger failure for Rumsfeld was to come later, with his inability to persuade Bush and even Cheney that with the Taliban defeated and Al Qaeda camps liquidated, the next step was to leave Afghanistan to pursue his own history. Instead, what followed was the prolonged farce of “counter-insurgency warfare” (military malpractice institutionalised) with its corrupt “nation-building” twin (a very expensive and impotent form of colonialism).

Yet the great success of Rumsfeld’s own light-footprint method in invading Afghanistan was also the proximate cause of his own great failure of Iraq in 2003.

The plan was to conquer Baghdad swiftly from the north, via the Kurdish region where US troops would be welcomed. To get there, 80 shiploads of equipment for 60,000 US troops would land in Turkey’s port of Iskenderun to be trucked more than 400 miles into Iraq, while the troops would be airlifted into Incirlik base and to more forward airstrips.

When I heard about the plan, it struck me as foolish because I did not believe it possible to have Turkish parliamentary approval, given that the entrenched Kemalists and the newly empowered Islamists would both refuse. I explained that to Rumsfeld , only to be told that I was wrong and that the newly elected Islamist PM Erdoğan had just agreed everything in a meeting with his Deputy, who was in Ankara as we spoke.

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When, on March 1, the Turkish parliament refused to allow US forces to drive into Iraq via its Kurdistan region, as Erdogan had promised, the bulk of their equipment was loaded on to the 80 ships in the Mediterranean. It could not possibly be ready for the planned start of the invasion on March 20; aside from the long passage around Arabia via the Suez Canal, Kuwait’s unloading facilities were remarkably undeveloped — not much infrastructure is needed to unload Rolex watches, Rolls Royces and other Kuwaiti necessities.

As a result, the bulk of the invasion force, built around the 4^th Infantry division (that had twice the men of a normal division and lots of armour too) was missing when Rumsfeld decided to invade on schedule nonetheless, with just one Marine division and one infantry division as well as smaller units. Moreover, those scant forces were still strung out over the distance from Kuwait when the lead units entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003. The division and extra brigade stranded on the side of the Suez Canal would not arrive until later, while the British armoured division remained to secure Basrah and its surroundings, and that too with great difficulty because the US Marines who were supposed to secure their flank had been dispatched to Baghdad instead.

Two months earlier, on February 25, 2003, General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, had testified in an open hearing of the United States Senate Committee on Armed Services that “something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would probably be required “for postwar Iraq”. Accepting Shinseki’s estimate would not have required any change of plans, because no plan would be needed, given that there would be no invasion of Iraq because it was unimaginable that the bulk of the US Army would be converted into a Mesopotamian constabulary, ad infinitum. But instead of paying attention, Rumsfeld was scathing in his dismissal of Shinseki’s opinion.

Indeed, it was hardly surprising that his “light footprint” approach turned into an irremediable disaster when mobs across the country came out to destroy all they could. The Ba’ath militia had disappeared, the 500,000-strong Iraqi army had disintegrated, the local police were barricaded in their stations or at home and there were so few US troops in Baghdad — and in Falluja and in Ramadi and in other towns — that they could only protect themselves.

Whatever slim chances there were of quickly forming a provisional government — in spite of Sunni-Shia hostility, Kurd-Arab-Turkmen hostility, intra-Sunni tribal hostility, Barazani-Talebani intra-Kurd hostility, and the murderous rivalry of the Shi’a prelates — could not survive the complete collapse of public order.

And this time, Rumsfeld could not recommend evacuation: the United States had broken Iraq and now it owned the pieces, as Colin Powell had warned. Rumsfeld’s agony lasted till November 8 , 2006, when President Bush Jr announced his resignation, which Rumsfeld had actually proposed earlier. The delay cost Republican seats in the mid-term election the day before. American public opinion, disgusted by the war, did not turn against the generals, let alone the troops, but against Rumsfeld, whose elegant good looks merely added to his reputation as a slick manipulator.

Until his death this week, he tried to live down his arrogant rejection of the Shinseki warning — without, it must be said, much success.

Like the Karabakh conflict last year, when Turkish-backed Syrian rebel militias fought Armenian conscripts as disposable cannon fodder, as they had previously done in Libya, while Turkish drones cleared the way for Azerbaijani forces to advance, we were presented with a sobering image of the new face of war. Like the Spanish Civil War before it, the decade-long Syrian Civil War, a conflict perpetually about to conclude which yet may never fully end, has revealed itself as a harbinger of dangerous new trends the full implications of which we are yet to fully understand.

It is only natural, for example, that last week’s Integrated Review notes that Britain’s state competitors are likely to use proxy forces to challenge the international order, while the forthcoming defence review will mandate the creation of a new elite “Rangers” regiment formed precisely to advise and fight alongside proxies of our own.

A recent new book, Surrogate Warfare, by the professors of Security Studies Andreas Krieg and Jean-Marc Rickli, does much to synthesise recent academic work on the deteriorating global situation brought about by both technological advance and globalisation. Echoing research on neo-medievalisation within International Relations — the dawning realisation, first voiced by the theorist Hedley Bull in 1977 that late modernity was heading inexorably to the weakening power of the Westphalian state system and its replacement by an overlapping web of transnational and sub-national actors — its authors present a stark vision of a world of growing anarchy brought about by the intersection of new technologies and the unintended consequences of globalisation.

As they warn, “the world arguably looks more anarchical in the early twenty-first century than it has ever been in modern times,” as ”with its 9/11 attacks and the spread of global jihadism, massive transnational migration streams, the financial crisis of 2008, and the wide-spread collapse of state authority across Africa and the Middle East — the idealist, classical conceptualizations of conflict in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear as historical anomalies.”

The liberal world order, and the unhindered global movement of information, goods and people it accelerated, was intended to usher in an age of global peace and harmony. Yet instead, it has undermined the basic foundations of the global order, and “state-centrism, the idea that individuals can escape the state of nature only through a covenant binding them to an authority modeled on the Westphalian nation-state, has become archaic in a world of porous borders and growing migrant populations”. Instead of promoting good governance across the globe, postmodernity has eroded the authority of the state at home and the stability of the international system itself, returning us to a situation analogous to that of the Middle Ages, where sovereignty was widely dispersed, contested and partial.

By dismantling physical and informational barriers across the globe, the basic capacity of states to provide security for their citizens has become weakened, perhaps fatally. By eroding the lines between home and abroad, postmodernity has globalised conflicts, and eroded even the very distinction between war and peace. Instead of perpetual peace, it has ushered in an age of perpetual anarchy that states are finding themselves powerless to contain. As Krieg & Rickli note, “the globalised conflict is transnational in nature and disregards the state-centric norms, conventions, and laws put in place in the nineteenth century to limit war.” We have entered an era of “everywhere conflicts” where “the authority of the state in the twenty-first century is the weakest it has been since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.” 

Which cheerleader of globalisation a generation ago would have foreseen that children in Manchester would be blown apart by a British Libyan suicide bomber as a downstream consequence of wars in Syria and Iraq? That social media would inspire young British citizens to journey to the Middle East to keep captured minorities as slaves and slaughter their compatriots on hi-definition video for the horror and delight of their online audiences at home? Such atrocities, and the state’s desperate attempts to provide security to an increasingly unsettled public, are not anomalies, but the natural outcome of the waning of the Westphalian state and the rise of challengers to its authority from both above and below: “insecurity, not security, has become the norm in postmodern society.” 

As a result, both liberal Western states and their illiberal competitors are driven to intervene in complex and tangled wars with strong ethnic and sectarian dimensions by an unstable and often contradictory mix of humanitarian concerns, security fears and realpolitik. Yet at the same time, both are conscious that their domestic publics are increasingly averse to casualties, particularly in wars not of obvious strategic necessity, with the result that the burden of fighting is shifted to expendable local proxies, while the brunt of casualties is borne by civilians on the ground at the mercy of stand-off weapons. 

Eager to avoid unpopular casualties in these “wars of choice,” states are subcontracting the bloody business of fighting on the ground  to local proxies, whose goals may differ from those of their sponsors, and whose behaviour is not subject to any meaningful legal oversight. As Krieg & Rickli note, “the need to remove military action from society’s checks and balances is the single most important driver and aspect of postmodern surrogate warfare in liberal and illiberal states,” driving the push towards stand-off weapons like drones and local proxies on the ground, almost entirely to the detriment of the civilians who live there. 

The catastrophic civil war in Syria, the parallel conflict in Yemen and the widening destabilisation of Iraq, Lebanon and Libya exemplify these trends, where external actors like the United States, Russia, Turkey, Iran and the Gulf kingdoms manipulate their local proxy militias like chess pieces while their drones, ballistic missiles and jets lay waste to the ground on which they fight. Instead of democratising the  Middle East as pundits first hoped, the unintended intersection of the Arab Spring, globalisation and new technologies have seen the entire region spiralling into a giant arena of experimentation in 21st century warfare, almost wholly disastrous to its people, as a result of global trends they had no part in making.

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It is precisely the internationalisation of the wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen that has made them so deadly. Insulated from taking casualties of their own, intervening states have little or no inclination to moderate their activity. Drones and proxy militias are cheap, compared to the mass mobilisation of armies in the 19th and 20th centuries: proxy-centred conflicts  are affordable for even mid-ranking powers, lowering the barrier for entrance into conflict and limiting the need to end them quickly. Claims that Russia, or Iran, or Turkey would soon find themselves bogged down in wars they cannot afford have been repeated for years now, without this moment ever being reached. It is for these reasons, and not solely the inherent instabilities of the nations suffering them, that the conflicts of the Arab Spring have continued for so long. Like the Congo war, a parallel case of intervention by regional powers worsening a local conflict, there is no particular reason why they should not smoulder on for decades.

Yet one innovation marks out the Syrian War from its neighbouring conflicts: the centrality of social media in its prosecution. Beginning in 2011, the Syrian conflict’s early stages tracked the transition from Facebook to Twitter in the global information economy, as the site became the chosen platform of journalists, activists and policymakers. The result was not good for journalism, nor for Syria. As Krieg & Rickli note, “the emergence of social media has not just changed patterns of communication across communities but has become a major means of warfare in itself,” where, “in conjunction with kinetic operations on the physical battlefield, the clash over narratives in the cyber sphere sets the parameters for strategic victory.” 

Social media is not just a novel add-on to the modern way of war: it is a weapon that actively shapes the war itself, turning those sharing it into participants themselves. The inherently toxic dynamics of Twitter’s discourse, which inexorably blurs the distinction between journalists, analysts, activists and trolls, reflected the growing divisions on the ground in what became a shifting multipolar conflict between Assad’s loyalist forces, rebels, al-Qaeda and then Islamic State jihadists and Kurds. It also, arguably, exacerbated them. As the Syrian journalist and revolutionary activist Zaina Erhaim remarks, “international experts and media have also played a role in over-simplifying our complex conflict into two dimensions — ‘good vs bad,’” hardening and exacerbating the divisions lived by the Syrian people themselves.

In that the perceptions of intervening actors, whether governments, foreign fighters or NGOs, were partly moulded by this hyper-combative Twitter environment, it can be argued that Twitter helped shape the choices made by external actors which prolonged the conflict. Certainly, Twitter was the dominant means by which Western recruits were entranced by the war’s drama and bloodshed to actively take part: simply by acting as the recruiting sergeant for the Islamic State, Twitter demonstrably worsened the war’s outcome for both the Syrian people and those of neighbouring Iraq. 

The Syrian War blurred the distinction between fighter and content creator, armed group and social media account. Militias proliferated on YouTube videos designed to  be shared on social media to attract funding from external sponsors. ISIS cynically gamed journalism, producing lurid and exciting content expressly designed to be shared on social media, and relying on journalists — including me — to spread their propaganda for them. Indeed, ISIS had a symbiotic relationship with both legacy journalism, itself struggling to navigate the new world of social media and declining budgets for original reporting, and on the new hybrid role of online analyst midwifed by Twitter. 

As Krieg & Rickli note, journalists and analysts are themselves surrogate actors in the new conflicts, active participants in a new and only partly-understood form of warfare.  “ISIS’s strategy as a global terrorist organisation relies on social media influencers to target the sociopsychology of Western publics,” they write: “Superinfluencers, such as journalists, analysts, and commentators, become unwilling, somewhat coincidental surrogates for the Islamic State as they spread the images and messages of terror.” 

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Perhaps no state actors have understood these new dynamics as well as Erdogan’s Turkey and  Putin’s Russia. While both use their respective television news networks, staffed by ambitious Western journalists, as traditional forms of propaganda, they are also both sophisticated and competent manipulators of the online battlefield. In Libya and the Karabakh war, Turkey exploited the Syria-derived fashion for online “OSINT” analysis in its favour by opening social media accounts in their image, utilising the high-quality cameras on their armed drones to provide exciting war imagery that online journalists would eagerly share on its behalf, just as Russia produces thrilling gonzo war footage from Syria for its social media fans. Drone, camera and social media sharer thus become a single, integrated weapon system, a hybrid semi-autonomous proxy as useful and as cheap to operate as the expendable proxies fighting on the ground. 

With the barriers between home and abroad, war and peace eroded by postmodernity, it is not difficult to interpret our own interminable culture wars as part of the globalised everywhere war, with the social media platforms celebrated a decade ago for upturning the sclerotic states of the Arab world now vilified for doing the same at home. Now that our own systems are the focus of popular discontent, we are lectured on the evils of social media, and treated to long and convoluted conspiracy theories of foreign bots and disinformation campaigns precisely mirroring those used by Arab regimes to explain away their peoples’ anger. 

America’s generation-long war on terror has come home, as a new Green Zone sprouts up in the heart of the imperial capital and terror experts refocus their gaze on the internal enemy. Journalists are no longer chroniclers of political conflict but active participants, proxies in a sprawling, decentralised war of narratives. Instead of the claimed depoliticisation of liberal technocracy, every aspect of life now functions as a source of conflict. There is no objective truth or reality, just warring narratives dismantling the political contract between people and their governments, “unable to contain the multiplicity of opinions, narratives, and messages being exchanged in an unconstrained cyber sphere.” 

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Like the new print media which drove the rise of nationalism, we can interpret the global internet as the mother of new political identities, of micro-nationalisms and never-before-seen ideologies, imagined communities birthed by the online world’s partisan dynamics. Yet perhaps the death of the Westphalian state has been pronounced too early: we are already witnessing the first stirrings of deglobalisation as the nation-state, desperately fighting for its own survival, seeks to regain control of its own destiny. 

The increasing regulation of social media, like the re-erection of barriers between the free flow of capital and people, perhaps marks a resurgence of the Westphalian system. States that have come to rely on proxies to do their fighting for them may yet be forced to return to wars of citizen soldiers to preserve their place in a newly fractured global system. To win a conflict between peer competitors, wars of necessity and not choice, states will be forced to reassert their control  of both physical and virtual space in a way we have not seen in decades. Krieg & Rickli’s book is a valuable study of a neo-medieval order that may already be receding: if the high water mark of globalisation has already been reached, then its ebbing tide may yet reveal the Westphalian system born anew. 

The overall context of the Review is that of a global system marked by China’s rise and its corollary, America’s decline. Like Ham in Genesis ashamed by his father Noah’s nakedness, the British defence establishment finds the stark facts of American decline too shameful to face directly. Though American decline is referred to only obliquely through the polite euphemism of “a more competitive and multipolar world”, its consequences are the thread which runs through the entire review. 

It acknowledges that China’s growing international stature is by far the most significant geopolitical factor in the world today, “with major implications for British values and interests and for the structure and shape of the international order”. And with archetypal British understatement, it adds that “the fact that China is an authoritarian state, with different values to ours, presents challenges for the UK and our allies”.

While Russia is described as “the most acute threat to the UK” on our continent, it is China that threatens to overturn our strategic world. Addressing the hard facts of China’s rise squarely, the Review observes that “the international order is more fragmented, characterised by intensifying competition between states over interests, norms and values”. A defence of the status quo, it insists, “is no longer sufficient for the decade ahead”, and a strategic tilt towards the Indo Pacific is outlined.

Justifying Britain’s much-vaunted tilt, the Review observes that China’s rise is now the engine of world history: “by 2030, it is likely that the world will have moved further towards multipolarity, with the geopolitical and economic centre of gravity moving eastward towards the Indo-Pacific”. And it describes China’s increasing power and international assertiveness as “the most significant geopolitical factor of the 2020s”. 

Yet the nature and intensity of Britain’s new Indo-Pacific tilt seems less marked than either its proponents were urging or its detractors cautioning against. As much as China is Britain’s greatest strategic challenge, the Review also welcomes continued Chinese investment in the British economy, and commits to engaging with China on climate change, while promising action to prevent British vulnerability to Chinese economic pressure, and urging the construction of a new diplomatic framework to manage the increasingly tense relationship. In all this, the Review strikes a cautious and sensible middle ground between confrontation and engagement.

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In reality, it is not vastly different to the much-criticised EU trade agreement with China asserting much the same things. We are more rhetorically opposed to China’s human rights abuses than the EU is, and it is right that the Review seeks to “ensure that British organisations are neither complicit in nor profiting from them”, while remaining realistic enough not to promise we can prevent them. Indeed, it does not commit Britain to any concrete goals to contain China’s rise other than in the vaguest terms — there is no commitment to defend Taiwan, for example, which given America’s growing anxieties over its own ability to do so, is only sensible.

Nevertheless, for all that the world is reorienting itself around China, the Review reaffirms the strategic centrality of the Special Relationship to Britain, situating the transatlantic alliance in the realm of eternal values as well as hard power. It claims that “the heart of the relationship is a human one: the flow of people and ideas between our countries, our shared history, and a common language”, and “also one of common values – a shared belief in democracy, the rule of law and fundamental freedoms”. If any thought has been given to how America’s political ferment might lead to a divergence in our common values or interests, as our closest European allies are now finding, the Review gives no space to such considerations.

Indeed, in its commitment to preserving an open world system of free trade and purported “universal values”, the Review leads Britain into the 21st century committed — at least rhetorically — to the defence of 19th-century liberalism. A markedly Whig document, it asserts that we will “support open societies – characterised by effective governance and resilience at home, and which cooperate with other countries on the basis of transparency, good governance and open markets” with the intention to “shape an open, resilient global economy, restoring trust in free and fair trade”. The emphasis on, or at least aspiration towards, free trade is indeed one of the central planks of the review, which asserts that “the UK’s openness to the flow of trade, capital, data, ideas and talent is essential to our long-term prosperity”.

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This may not reflect the realities of a rapidly deglobalising international system — or the scepticism of British voters — yet a degree of realism is permitted to intrude upon our aspirations. Much as we may wish to defend an open global economy, it cautions that more states will adopt economic statecraft as a lever in systemic competition,  involving “greater protectionism and economic nationalism” and “the deliberate use of economic tools … to target and undermine the economic and security interests of rivals”.

The sections on our military posture, including cuts to the numbers of jets and tanks have already grabbed headlines. But it is unclear how boosting our numbers of nuclear warheads will qualitatively enhance our security, other than deepening the defence relationship with the US and acting as an assertion that Britain still has teeth while we hurriedly rebuild our armed forces. Its promise that the Army will undertake a rapid modernisation programme, an urgent concern highlighted by the title of the recent Defence Committee paper on our armoured component, Obsolescent and Outgunned, is necessary, and should be carefully monitored following the Army’s manifold failings so far. 

The emphasis on training allies rather than committing to defend them with massed forces, on cyber warfare and the challenges and opportunities offered by the technological revolutions reshaping modern war are all sensible — and given our denuded military capabilities, perhaps as much a case of necessity as desire.

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There are other new and welcome elements: the pronounced emphasis on scientific research as well as its insistence that green energy is a matter of national security and economic growth. Also strong are the sections on increased focus on space, as well as action on climate change, mass migration and terrorism. Its commitment to an open global internet in the face of tech authoritarianism, however, is counterposed by a need to defend Britain from “disinformation” — the similarities with the restricted virtual spaces of rival powers may end up greater than anticipated.

High on lofty aspirations, short on detailed policy and maps, the cautious, sober document realistically outlines the challenges facing Britain — without overstating our capacity to prevent them. If a criticism could be made, it is that the Review commits the UK to managing the deleterious consequences of a globalised international system it pledges itself to defending. The first principles underlying Britain’s strategic posture are not questioned. The problem of managing divergence between the Atlantic alliance and an increasingly independent-minded EU is not addressed. Nor is the likelihood that China’s statist example will prove inspiring to disaffected political entrepreneurs at home, with the CCP remaining largely indifferent to the political enthusiasms of the outside world as long as wealth and power continues to flow its way.

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Perhaps the central, and so-far under-discussed claim that the Review makes, which underpins the choices it urges, is its assertion that in the new multipolar order, instead of a return to “Cold War-style blocs”,  the “influence of middle powers is likely to grow in the 2020s, particularly when they act together”. This immediately strikes the reader as a realistic outcome whose full implications are worthy of further consideration. This is the same analysis which drives the EU’s appreciation of a multipolar world as a strategic opportunity, though the policy choices Britain derives from this of cooperation between far-flung nation states, and not consolidation in a continental power bloc could not be more different. Which, if either, approach will prove to be the best bet can only be a matter of speculation.

The deepened strategic cooperation with France, Japan and Australia which the Review urges follows from this analysis, and offers the potential to enhance Britain’s place on the world stage. Though it frames these strategic decisions in terms of shared values (as it markedly does not when discussing Britain’s Middle Eastern alliances), this is a sensibly Realist appreciation of how to use shifting power dynamics to enhance Britain’s influence. Indeed, by underpinning its lofty rhetoric with a sober appreciation of the world as it actually is, the Review manages to balance the ethical and ideological impulses of international politics with a frank and cautious analysis of hard power. It can see Britain’s place in a dangerous and volatile new world, without over-promising our capacity to shape it. 

The hated, notional “EU Army” of Brexiteer campaign literature, much mocked by Remainers, now appears closer to fruition than it did during the referendum debate — at least if we take the ongoing debates over European military autonomy seriously. 

Partly as a result of Brexit itself, and partly due to the withering of US power and attention on Europe’s frontiers, and the consequent opportunistic rushing of rival powers to fill the empty space, a sense of the European Union as a coherent strategic actor is coming into being. One willing and capable of defending its own interests in a hostile world.

Distracted though we are by our various internal crises, the nature of Britain’s strategic relationship with this aspiring power bloc on our doorstep ought therefore to be discussed more seriously than it currently is.

Most of the debate so far on Europe’s defence has circled around Macron’s attention-grabbing and controversial statements on the “brain death” of Nato, and the question of how far European autonomy can be interpreted as a breach with the United States. But a more measured and perhaps more useful insight into European strategic thinking can be obtained by analysis of last week’s blog post by the European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles. 

Outlining the stakes with remarkable clarity, Borrell observes that “the next two decades are going to be crucial because China will use them to become the first global power”, a noteworthy statement in itself. China’s rise to global dominance, and its corollary, America’s relative decline, are presented as faits accomplis — there is no notion of challenging China’s ascent, as there is in the drive towards great power competition guiding American policy (and thus, we can assume, Britain’s). 

Europe will need to develop the euro as a global currency, he asserts, to avoid “secondary sanctions”, indicating that the trading relationship with China will continue despite expected American pressure. Europe’s strategic task will be to safeguard its position in a new and more competitive global environment, where “if we do not act together now, we will become irrelevant”, and where strategic autonomy is simply “a process of political survival”.

Borrell’s intervention in the debate can be read as an expression of support for Macron in France’s ongoing and rancorous debate with Germany’s Atlanticist foreign policy establishment. Smoothing the troubled waters by assuring Macron’s critics that no-one is calling for leaving the Nato defence umbrella, Borrell nevertheless emphasises that, as a consequence of America’s strategic shift towards the Pacific, the US is more or less inactive on Europe’s troubled peripheries of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.  There is no choice but for European nations to take their security into their own hands: “the exclusive reference to NATO is no longer enough.” 

As Borrell notes, “Europe is today confronted on its periphery with a certain number of conflicts or tensions in the Sahel, in Libya and in the Eastern Mediterranean. In these three cases Europe must act even more, and alone, because these problems do not primarily concern the United States.” Indeed, the Eastern Mediterranean crisis within Nato shows that the Atlantic alliance has already been superseded as the dominant security provider for France, Greece and Cyprus, busy constructing a web of alliances with friendly Middle Eastern states instead.

Like the Holy Roman Empire in its dotage, there is no point in these countries formally leaving Nato: it has simply become irrelevant to their most pressing security concerns, and if this trend continues in Europe’s eastern waters, or spreads over the coming decades to the western or central Mediterranean, then we will already be living in a post-Nato continent, with all the risks and opportunities that implies.

Nevertheless, the fierce resistance of German foreign policy thinkers to any strides towards strategic autonomy acts as both a brake on European ambitions and an opportunity for the UK. At a stroke, Brexit deprived Europe of one of its two most powerful military actors, the only nation other than France capable of projecting force far beyond its immediate borders. As an excellent briefing from the German analyst Fabian Zuleeg in the Berlin Policy Journal last year underlined, “the UK has — together with France — been the only big power in the EU that has had a more strategic approach to external affairs and a more global strategic culture than that of other member states.” 

If a French-led European Union intends to establish itself as a strategic military actor on the world stage, then Britain possesses a uniquely attractive hand waiting to be played. Even in their much-denuded current form, our armed forces are a dramatic force multiplier for Europe. If we consider France’s bloody and not especially successful war in the Sahel as a model of a future European campaign, the initial French deployment to Mali in early 2013 relied on RAF C17 strategic airlift capacity to move armoured vehicles into theatre, and even now RAF helicopters are vital for French troops forced to avoid the country’s increasingly dangerous roads.

Only last week, 300 British troops deployed under the aegis of the UN to support what is fundamentally a French war fought for French interests: we are already France’s military partner of choice, and much more diplomatic capital could be made of this relationship than is currently the case.

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So far, we have kept our close military relationship with France separate from Brexit negotiations— though whether this has worked to our advantage is doubtful. As Perry Anderson noted recently, the most obvious British card to play against the EU’s punitive Brexit negotiating tactics was a “warning that if pressed on this plane, the EU could suffer security — military and diplomatic — costs as well.”

Yet as he notes, “any such notion, above all, May and her ministers were voluble in disavowing,” and the opportunity to use this gambit has long since been lost. Nevertheless, the lure of Britain’s strategic muscle remains a powerful diplomatic tool waiting to be deployed, and our greatest asset, perhaps unexpectedly, is the fecklessness of Germany’s foreign policy establishment, still trapped in the conceptual safe space of the early 2000s and America’s unipolar moment. 

Merkel is, fundamentally, a relic of the age of Bush and Blair, and the think-tank establishment around her is similarly unwilling to face the unwelcome realities slowly dawning on the rest of Europe. While still loudly proclaiming its loyal Atlanticism and rejecting all talk of European autonomy, Germany is deeply invested in its trading relationship with China, all but ensuring a future crisis as this essential paradox plays out and the world is forced to choose between the two opposing blocs.

This situation is perhaps unlikely to long survive her retirement — there is an amusing irony to the fact that the neurotic Atlanticism of the German establishment is not shared by German voters, who are probably the most indifferent to America’s survival as global hegemon in all of Western Europe. As a recent poll showed, 82% of Germans would wish to remain neutral in a Cold War between America and China, and this indifference to the interests of Germany’s superpower sponsor can in itself be read as a certain popular will for autonomy. 

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Yet until the desires of Germany’s voters are reflected by the policies of its government, any European effort towards an autonomous strategic vision will founder on German intransigence, leaving Britain looking more and more attractive as a strategic partner. In any case, the inherent difficulty of marshalling the varied and often opposing interests of the EU nations together in the service of a common goal, whether geopolitical or otherwise, will always counteract any attempt at unified foreign policy action, again enhancing our appeal.

Whether or not future strategic cooperation would be with a European Union in which France has become the  dominant diplomatic power, or simply bilaterally with France, can only be determined by the course of future events, by their nature impossible to foresee. Yet with our strategic utility already established, the greater question is whether such deepened cooperation with a Union we are leaving in such traumatic and contested circumstances is in our national interests. 

Until the delayed SDSR is released, we will not know for certain the strategic assumptions underlying future British policy. It is likely, and fortunate, that the British Government has finally lost its appetite for idealistic crusades in unstable or failing states in the Islamic world, yet the search for a new role brings with it new dangers as well as opportunities.

The options, fundamentally, are that we consider ourselves a European power, and focus on maintaining the continent’s security by sea in the North Atlantic and by land on NATO’s eastern frontier, or that we continue to maintain a tenuous status as a global power, which will in effect mean a predominantly naval effort stretching from the Persian Gulf to the western Pacific. Neither option would mean a breach with the Atlantic alliance; either option would be an attractive addition to Europe’s capabilities.

If the publication, last week, of the MoD’s guidance on Multi-Domain Integration can be read for clues on Britain’s future strategic orientation, then the statement that “Russia is our primary adversary and pacing threat” indicates the European continent and perhaps its near abroad will remain our area of strategic focus; yet the investment in naval rearmament, with the future status of our land forces remaining unclear, implies the opposite: a naval orientation centred on our two giant new carriers will naturally lead us eastward on the open seas, where the obvious future adversary will be a rising China.

The fundamental assumption driving European strategic thought, if Borrell’s blogpost is an accurate guide, is that the outcome of a contest between the United States and China in the Pacific will be China’s winning of hegemonic status. Perhaps this is wrong: perhaps China will blink first, or perhaps both superpowers will exhaust themselves in the struggle, leaving space for smaller powers, like India, or Russia or even Europe, to expand their reach as a result. What seems clear is that this historic future struggle, whose outcome is so uncertain, is not one the European Union has any interest in actively taking part in, and this is probably a sensible decision. 

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Whatever the outcome of the future contest in the Pacific, the shift in American attention away from Europe and Middle East is most likely permanent, with the result that Europe will be forced to defend its territorial and political authority even on the edges of our own continent. Whatever our global aspirations, or memories, we are a European power and it is in Europe’s near abroad that our interests will primarily be threatened. 

Serious engagement with the European debate on grand strategy should therefore be a British priority: once the dust settles on our rancorous departure from the union, the fact will remain that, to defend our interests, we will still need them and they will still need us. Once we’re finished haggling over fish, it should be the Government’s priority to determine what a long-term, self-interested strategic relationship with our closest neighbours — distinct from, though not in opposition to NATO — would look like.

Europe’s strategic autonomy may end up less something to be consciously aimed for than a situation thrust upon the continent by events. We would be wise to carefully consider the full range of possibilities for Britain offered by the aspiring regional power bloc on our doorstep.

Tobias Ellwood, the chair of the committee, was alarmed by the admission. Britain was at greater risk at the moment, not just because of Covid-19, but because, as Wallace had attested, our traditional enemies were not stopping in their testing of Britain’s defences.

Worse still, by confirming the Council had not met, had not Wallace bequeathed an advantage to those enemies? The NSC, after all, is the only meeting of all the major figures involved in maintaining the security of the nation.

Covid-19 is Britain’s most serious national security event since the Second World War. But the UK was well prepared, according to international standards, for a pandemic that had for years been deemed a Level 5 national security risk — the highest level — in the National Risk Register, the formal measure of ranking the risks to the country.

In the 2015 Strategic Defence and Spending Review (SDSR), the foreword by David Cameron, then prime minister, mentioned the threat of a pandemic in the same sentence as the threat from Isis, Russia’s annexation of Ukraine and cyberattacks. It was also there in the foreword to the 2010 SDSR, and the 2017 National Security Review said: “…one or more major hazards can be expected to materialise in the UK in every five-year period. The most serious are pandemic influenza, national blackout and severe flooding.”

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Yet despite this acknowledgment of the threat of a global pandemic, a disturbing picture forms: no one can recall, with any certainty, ever discussing pandemic preparedness policy at the National Security Council. One attendee, with the benefit of hindsight, said, “they never took it seriously”.

Speaking under condition of anonymity, politicians and officials who have served on it, in it and around it for the past decade paint a picture of disastrous structural problems in dealing with threats not considered to be “immediate enough”, huge issues with accountability, even once decisions were made, and of a perceived over-focus on specific, operational risk. The NSC, to quote one long-time attendee, had been “captured by the security services”; a perception that the focus become tilted more towards intelligence and immediate challenges than longer-term strategic aims.

It is only now, as the previously abstract pandemic now kills tens of thousands and causes an economic catastrophe, that the shortcomings of Whitehall’s national security apparatus are being laid bare. One NSC source said: “The crisis handlers are actually handling immediate crises, [those planning for one] are theoretical people who don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.”

It all started with the best of intentions. The NSC was formally set up in 2010 by David Cameron partly in reaction to the informal way in which decisions about the Iraq War were taken under Blair, and partly, says one, because they were “sort of copying the Americans”. It was, another says, established to “do the thinking that would then go across all the departments”.

It is all very secretly done and protocol strictly adhered to. Minutes of the meetings and the outcomes of decisions taken are closely guarded: sometimes, not closely enough. It is perhaps surprising, given how much of a toll global health insecurity can take, that the Health Secretary is still not an automatic member of the Council: another example of the types of security threats that were deemed most immediate and most worthy of the NSC’s time.

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To discuss certain topics, a non-member Secretary of State would have to submit agenda items and be invited into the meeting. Those items would then be filtered by NSC officials over a lengthy period. Given the Council normally meets weekly, items would be put on the agenda three or four months in advance with the running order of that agenda discussed with the different departments over the preceding three to six months. Discussions were focused on those areas where ministers needed to make choices about what to do next: “this isn’t a ‘show and tell’ meeting”, said one senior official, “we need a decision [from it].”

But members of the Council were frustrated at what they saw as a lack of time for the politicians to be given the space to make decisions and interrogate the advice. “By the time we had heard from the deputy national security adviser, the Joint Intelligence Committee chairman, each of the agency chiefs, the Foreign Office’s Permanent Under-Secretary, the ambassador to the country concerned, and the Chief of Defence Staff, there was relatively little time for the senior ministers present to review and test the merits of the policy or findings in discussion,” says a previously long-standing member. “It became a cumbersome process with too many officials, and too little political input”.

In order to achieve decisions, those officials within the National Security Council (NSC-O) meet to refine agendas and coordinate departments, along with at least four sub-committees including one which looked after “threats, hazards, resilience and contingencies”. This sub-committee, despite having its membership listed at Secretary of State level, was “mainly attended by junior ministers”, and one of those who did attend said “there was one discussion of bio-warfare”, but at no stage did a need arise for senior ministers to make a decision on policy relating to a pandemic. “We never had it flagged as an issue,” said one former NSC official, “if there was no policy decision to be taken there was no particular reason for it to come back to the NSC”.

When asked about the types of discussions had inside the NSC, Liam Fox, former Conservative Defence Secretary, told the Rule Britannia podcast: “I always felt there was too little discussion about what one might describe as blue-sky thinking — what are the things that are not happening yet that we need to incorporate into our planning?” In describing the ineffectiveness of parts of Whitehall Rory Stewart, the former Conservative MP and cabinet minister, puts it more bluntly: “Nobody on the National Security Council wants to tell you what a total joke the National Security Council is.”

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Given that pandemics were rightly identified as such a significant threat, why wasn’t there more discussion about a response? If the meetings became focused on ministers making policy decisions, could it be because policy towards a pandemic was settled outside the NSC: why ask for discussion and decision on a policy that causes no disagreement?

There was, after all, a strategy in place. In 2011, the Department for Health produced the UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy that superseded a previous plan produced in 2007. The document “describes the Government’s strategic approach for responding to an influenza pandemic”, displays the “lessons learned” from the 2009 H1N1 swine flu pandemic. Its target audience was health bodies, and the professionals within them, as well as children’s services and local authorities.

It was produced by the Department’s own Pandemic Preparedness Team in consultation with other departments deemed important to carrying out its directions. A senior figure in the Department of Health at the time recalls that the general response from the public health community was that the plan was as good as anywhere in the world and that the Department had put considerable effort into the preparation of it. Rightly, the document was discussed with the-then Secretary of State for Health, Andrew Lansley.

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But as Covid-19 arrived and spread, the policy advice, which even until very recently was being cascaded down to local NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups, had to be ripped up. It was inadequate. On mass gatherings, the document states that “there is very limited evidence that restrictions on mass gatherings will have any significant effect on influenza virus transmission”, and nowhere is the need for social distancing mentioned: the view was that those unaffected would be allowed to carry on with “business as usual”.

“We planned,” recalls a senior figure in the Health Department in 2011, “for an influenza pandemic, not coronavirus.” When asked whether there were similar plans drawn up in response to a SARs-like outbreak, a respiratory virus closer to Covid-19, the source said “we didn’t think about SARs in an influenza plan — we needed to think separately about SARs”. The source did not know if the department had done that.

So how was it that the lauded text on pandemic preparation, used as the formal guide by government departments and public health bodies nearly a decade later, and which set out the response to a Level 5 national security threat, and which then had to be ripped up, was never discussed by the National Security Council? According to one source involved in the 2011 strategy: “Why would you go to the NSC? Everybody who needed to have input had it. You’d call for the NSC to meet if the threat actually emerged.”

Surely this is a significant failing. How can the NSC be helping to protect the nation, its primary task, if those with the greatest responsibility for that protection never saw, discussed or questioned the only plan in place to tackle the greatest threat?

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There are several reasons, as I see it, it failed in this task. The first, is that ministers did not push hard enough in tasking officials to show they had thought through the various possible scenarios. Preparation had only been done for an influenza pandemic but no questions seem to have been asked at NSC level about whether that template would cover other types of pandemics, or indeed whether plans for different types of pandemics had even been considered. As one NSC attendee told me: “There is nobody who has got the power and heft and who understands the problem who will say to their departments and officials, ‘You will spend another £100m on preparing kit.’ Putting things aside wins no votes.”

Another flaw can be found in the national security system in Whitehall as a whole. “David Cameron wanted the NSC meeting to be operational rather than strategic and Theresa May was mostly focused on domestic security and cyber,” says an ex-senior official. Liam Fox has said previously that the NSC “focuses too much on the traditional security threats, largely terrorism, and in recent times that has been more than enough of a threat to take up the time of the National Security Council”. In any case, even if emerging threats had eaten up more of the thinking of NSC members and even if decisions had been taken on those strategic threats, a highly-regarded security source asked, perhaps rhetorically, “who would be charged with following up on that?”

There is no doubt that many of the decisions made at the NSC have saved lives and protected the United Kingdom. But the fact that the policy response to the top-tier threat was not discussed at the top-table of our national security structure in the years before it happened, surely points to a weakness in the effectiveness and assiduousness of that system.

After correctly identifying a pandemic as a serious risk to the country, the NSC did not interrogate the policy response to it: a lack of oversight that would be unthinkable for threats from terrorism or kinetic warfare. Why does it seem that no one on the NSC asked to see the preparations? Why was time not built-in to discuss them? Either the National Security Council is where decisions about the UK’s responses to managing serious threats to the nation are taken, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, what is it for?

In the 10 years since its inception, the most august and important meeting of the most senior ministers responsible for the security of the nation did not pay enough attention to what they themselves acknowledged as one of the biggest threats. And not only did it fail to properly contemplate the British response to a conceivable pandemic, it has now gone missing during it, as the Defence Secretary confirmed.

If the system is not made more effective, more robust and is given a clearly defined purpose, not just to anticipate threats but to question the preparations for them, what happens next time catastrophe falls?

In response to the issues raised in this article, a Government spokesperson said: “We do not routinely comment on matters relating to the National Security Council.

“The government continues to protect the UK’s national security, while addressing the pressing demands of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“We have been proactive in implementing lessons learned around pandemic preparedness. This includes being ready with legislative proposals that could rapidly be tailored to what became the Coronavirus Act, plans to strengthen excess death planning, planning for recruitment and deployment of retired staff and volunteers, and guidance for stakeholders and sectors across government.”