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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Britain has an uncharismatic, accident-prone, over-regulating but ultimately serious prime minister. Imagine, for a moment, how much it must sting a man of the liberal left to cut foreign aid to fund a larger defence budget. Sir Keir Starmer is making that decision, because the world has changed. It is now his opponents’ turn to set aside a shibboleth of their own for the national interest.
The British right, whether in Conservative or Reform UK clothes, has to let go of its suspicion of Europe. Their country will not just have to spend more on defence, but to co-ordinate this generation-long project with the rest of the democratic continent. In fact, Britain might rationally spend less on some kinds of kit and expertise to avoid the old European curse of military duplication. Forgoing some things on the premise that, in a crisis, France or Poland will provide them and vice versa: this will demand unprecedented trust among neighbours.
And that isn’t nearly the end of it. Europe will need more of a central voice in security matters, from procurement (a single buyer to drive down the cost of armaments) to policy itself (a single interlocutor for the US president and other leaders of power blocs). Fanciful? Perhaps, but not as wild as the alternative, which is to bet the UK’s security on a Nato that can, at best, be counted on when a Democrat is in the White House.
The concept of “Global Britain” expired this month. A country that hasn’t recorded a fiscal surplus since the millennium, whose regular army wouldn’t fill Wembley Stadium, was not going to be a Pacific player even before Donald Trump threatened to pull away the financial cushion of Nato. Now, with a defence shortfall in its own continent to make up, all UK governments for the foreseeable future will have to husband scarce resources for the European theatre.
The theme here is hard to miss. Geography matters. The UK is an archipelago in northwestern Europe, already exposed to a degree of Russian attention that Starmer is only allowed to discuss with the public in elliptical terms. If there is an “Anglosphere”, just one member of it is anywhere near the business end of Russia, which lies west of the Urals. Some of the others are as far away as it is possible to be without leaving the planet. While a great asset, then, members of the Five Eyes — the intelligence club of Britain, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand — were never going to have the same threat perception indefinitely.
There is no guarantee that Europe will either, of course. Not long ago, Emmanuel Macron made diplomatic overtures to Russia that dismayed the rest of the west. If a meaningful European security union emerged, a populist government on the continent could subvert it. But two facts stand out.
First, a European state at least has to live with the consequences of its Russia policy, to an extent that America doesn’t. Second, Britain, having military clout that France alone on the continent can match, will have a big say in any such Pax Europa. Contrast this with its lack of purchase in Washington. Three years of rock-hard British support for Ukraine, and almost 80 years of the same for Nato, couldn’t deter a US administration from undermining both those entities in a matter of days.
“The west has not done enough to support Ukraine”, said Kemi Badenoch this week. This is the opposite of what many of her friends on the US right believe, which is that all too much has been done, that China is the real threat and that Vladimir Putin has things to teach a decadent, post-Christian Europe. In foreign affairs, the Tory leader is not on the same page — the same book, the same genre — as Maga but she cannot bring herself to admit it, such is the muscle memory of embracing the US. At least she just ignores the clash of world views. Others on the British right are in active denial. Boris Johnson is “absolutely sure” that Trump sees Russia as the aggressor, even as his UN delegation votes otherwise. Nigel Farage goes through contortions of speech to pretend that Trump is as one with Britain.
This is called putting on a brave face. I sense that British conservatism knows its American dream is over. The nation will have to immerse itself in Europe for decades to come, not as an idealistic project but as an existential must. For the right, counting on Nato will be what scepticism of it was for the left: electoral death. If Tories want a consoling thought, other countries in the American orbit will feel the same pressure to make alternative security arrangements. Imagine watching the treatment of Ukraine as an Asian state caught between the US and China.
This column hasn’t mentioned that other Brussels-headquartered club that an anglophone nation forsook. Most of what Europe has to do to protect itself can be done outside the EU. You can be a staunch Leaver and want a militarily sovereign continent, with Britain at its forefront. But Brexit was sold on a premise that is relevant here: that geography had been demoted as a factor in world affairs, that Australia or Brazil and above all the US could matter to Britain as much as its neighbours do.
As an economic claim, this has been merely wrong. (The EU remains by miles Britain’s largest trading partner.) As a strategic one, it has been a dangerous farce. Johnson once described Europe as a “continent which we will never leave”. Replace “will” with “can”, and the phrase takes on a menacing ring, and a no less true one.
