Defence policy falters when given the wrong prompt

Good morning. Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland have once again thrown a spanner into US-UK relations and, more importantly, the security arrangements that have kept the UK prosperous and secure since 1945.

Obviously this is very bad. However, I wanted to talk about one small silver lining to what is otherwise a very dark cloud in today’s note: that it may mean the UK can move away from its input target on defence spending to a more useful output target.

Capability test

I promised last week that I would return to the UK’s commitment to spend at least 5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2035 as part of its Nato membership.

I do not in general like input targets (“we will spend x share of GDP on y policy area”) because I think they are generally not a good way to ensure value for money or policy effectiveness. There are two important exceptions to that in my view: research and development, because frankly you are always going to need more, and global poverty reduction, because we are not going to see the end of poverty around the world anytime soon. The latter, particularly when paired with the various changes former international development minister Andrew Mitchell made to how foreign aid is scrutinised, is essentially fine.

But for defence spending I think it leads states into pointless accounting tricks and incentivises poor spending. It doesn’t matter if your defence procurement continues to be a mess, if you aren’t successfully weaning yourself off US dependency or knowhow, if your armoured vehicles make your soldiers sick whenever they use them . . . who cares! It’s all hitting the GDP target.

Bureaucracies are a lot like ChatGPT in that the quality of what they produce is heavily dependent on the quality of the prompt (and the knowledge of the person scrutinising the output at the end). If you ask a state to produce defence spending as a share of GDP then you are begging for expensive procurement and poor-quality kit.

The initial target was essentially how Europe self-soothed after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Crimea, and subsequent upward increases became about reassuring Donald Trump that the US was not being taken for a ride. I think in its new form it is even less helpful than the original — the UK met the post-2014 target, which is why the last Conservative government was able to provide aid to Ukraine. The Labour government is “meeting” the target revised upwards by Trump in that it has a rhetorical commitment to doing so but has no clear path to get there.

What would be a better target for states? A capability-based one! Britain doesn’t need to target a specific level of GDP. Instead it needs to be confident that it can a) defend undersea infrastructure that safeguards the UK’s prosperity b) resist and counter hybrid and cyber attacks on British institutions and businesses and c) defend our allies in the High North and the Baltic States. This is not an exhaustive list of examples but they are in my view the bare minimum to meet the foreign and domestic policy objectives that all our party leaders, with the exception of Nigel Farage, are explicitly committed to in one way or another.

It is, as I say, a very small silver lining on a very large cloud, but if the confrontation between Europe and the US over Greenland means that Europe and the UK can no longer meaningfully soothe Trump’s concerns, they should also take the opportunity to switch from an unhelpful and near-meaningless spending target on defence to one on capability and capacity instead.

Last week, we asked you who stood to gain more from Tory MP Robert Jenrick’s defection to Reform. Some 31 per cent said Kemi Badenoch, 25 per cent said Farage, 24 per cent said it would make little difference either way, 9 per cent said it was a loss for both and 11 per cent said the two party leaders would gain equally. Thanks for voting!

Now try this

I saw Rental Family. A charming feelgood film — it adds just the right amount of traditional Hollywood schmaltz to a classic bit of “people in Tokyo are sad and alienated in the big city and do crazy things” filmmaking. A co-production in the best sense. My sense from Danny Leigh’s review is that he enjoyed it, but not as much as I did. You can read what he made of it here.

Top stories today

• Troubled transatlantic relations | Keir Starmer will urge Donald Trump to drop his threat of tariffs on European countries for resisting his attempts to annex Greenland. Trump’s intervention on Saturday night, which blindsided European leaders, poses big economic challenges for the UK’s fragile economy and also threatens to unravel Starmer’s painstaking attempts to keep the US president onside.

• Another Tory jumps ship | Andrew Rosindell, who was shadow minister for foreign affairs, announced his defection to Reform last night, just three days after the departure of Robert Jenrick, former shadow justice secretary. 

• Rooting out waste | The Treasury is to tell UK government departments to co-operate better to cut wasteful spending in areas ranging from NHS treatment to homelessness and building maintenance.

• Red, red lines | Donald Trump’s trade negotiators are pushing for the UK to adopt American standards in a move that would derail Britain’s post-Brexit relationship with the EU, two people familiar with the talks have told Politico.