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Keir Starmer, spooked like other European leaders by Donald Trump’s apparent willingness to abandon Ukraine, and by J D Vance’s gaslighting of the Munich Security Conference, has announced a substantial rise in UK defence spending. In a gesture designed to appeal to the US autocrat, he has said this will be paid for by slashing the aid budget.
This crude positioning at the expense of Britain’s international commitments – adding further deep cuts to the savaging of the aid budget under the Tories – should be ringing alarm bells across the centre and left of British politics.
Even before Starmer’s announcement, commentators were falling over themselves to join an unthinking chorus for more military spending. There was widespread praise for MI6 chief Alex Younger’s claim that “hard power” is the continent’s only possible entry ticket to the new world order. “The UK has to raise defence spending”, said Will Hutton in The Observer. “There is no good argument against increasing defence spending”, chimed in the left-wing The Lead. And there was no pushback when Friedrich Merz, Germany’s new chancellor, said: “We need to have discussions with both the British and the French — the two European nuclear powers — about whether nuclear sharing, or at least nuclear security from the UK and France, could also apply to us.”
These responses involve more heat than light. Clearly, Putin’s Russia presents a threat to Europe beyond Ukraine, and Trump, Xi Jinping, and he envision great-power dominance –might is right. But is it really the case that Europe can only become secure by spending 3, 4 or even 5 per cent of GDP on the military – or by converting British and French nukes into a “Eurobomb”?
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These knee-jerk reactions beg a lot of questions. EU member states spent €326 billion on defence in 2024, a rise of over 30% in just three years. Adding in the UK, the total was nearly €400 billion, almost three times Russia’s military spending. Globally, the UK, France and Germany have the three largest national spends apart from the US, China, Russia and India.
No one really explains why the huge sums the UK and Europe already spend on the military could not be made adequate to deal with Putin – the USA itself spends under 3%, and Trump has made his demands for higher levels of European military spending precisely in order to siphon resources from Europe to the USA.
Hutton mentioned, as many have, the small size of the British army. It is widely agreed that if Europe had to provide a peacekeeping force for Ukraine’s long front with Russia, as Keir Starmer has proposed (prematurely, since there is no peace to keep), the UK might struggle to find a large contingent from its 74,000 regular troops, which are far fewer than Poland, France and Germany maintain. Yet, why is the army relatively small? Chiefly because since 1957, Britain has hitched its defence to nuclear weapons, to which it currently devotes a massive chunk of its spiralling equipment spend.
It is not clear what military function these systems perform – many have long considered them primarily totems of national prestige, and that is certainly why they are sacrosanct for Labour. Yet there is also the large matter that the Trident system is purchased from the USA and is, for most practical purposes, dependent on it – it is not an “independent deterrent” in the UK’s hands, and it will not be in Europe’s either.
Will Europeanising these weapons provide an effective security response for the continent – or simply a new European totem that will make little difference in the struggle with Putin?
Hybrid and Drone Wars
Nuclear weapons are not the only part of the UK arsenal which is of dubious military value. How useful are aircraft carriers, battleships and tanks in an age where missiles and drones are so devastatingly destructive?
Over forty years ago, Mary Kaldor highlighted the problem of the “baroque arsenal”, the tendency to constantly refine inherited weapon platforms to the point that they became virtually unusable in warfare.
As the Ukraine war is constantly demonstrating, this problem is vastly more acute in the age of the drone. The UK’s and western Europe’s military infrastructure are largely slimmed-down versions of what they had in the Cold War, and much is no longer fit for purpose.
There needs to be a root-and-branch examination of security threats and needs. Putin’s Russia is an enemy, but European governments need to consider the real nature of the threat it poses: eleven years of war have given it only small areas of Ukraine and drained its economy. The military threat is chiefly to Ukraine and the other post-Soviet states; Russian troops will not be entering Warsaw any time soon, as Younger puts it, and there is no imaginable scenario in which they try to conquer Western Europe.
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Here, Russia is more of a hybrid, cyber and political destabilisation threat, as the USA is too – indeed, they are combined. Europe needs to upgrade the protection for its economic and technological infrastructure and its political systems.
Defence priorities, especially in the UK, are hopelessly out of sync with these new realities. The £6 billion wasted on two new aircraft carriers, now vulnerable to cheap missiles if not drones, has been called a “national embarrassment”.
Fourteen months ago, the National Audit Office found that the Ministry of Defence’s decision to prioritise delivering the replacement nuclear system on schedule, together with other naval spending, had rendered its equipment plan “unaffordable”. The Labour Government’s defence review, expected this spring, must be critically examined to see how far it takes the measure of these realities.
Once the ideological blinkers are removed, any rational assessment will show that there is fat to be cut from the military budget. Certainly, no increases should be countenanced until a radical reallocation of defence spending has been undertaken.
American Co-Dependence
This is only the beginning of the re-examination that needs to take place. The UK’s nuclear dependency on the USA is the tip of the large iceberg of British and European military industries’ problematic interdependence with US, Canadian, Israeli and other “Western” industries.
The costs of this are underlined by the Labour Government’s brazen defiance of international humanitarian law over Gaza, which it admitted to the High Court last year: it excluded F-35s (the principal bombers that Israel uses to devastate the strip and its people) from sanctions because of the effects of including them on the international F-35 programme.
It is not acceptable for the new European defence debate to leave Israeli aggression out of the picture – now in Syria and Lebanon as well as the West Bank and Gaza- it is every bit as serious a threat as Russia’s. While it doesn’t pose the same direct military threat to Europe, the threat it poses to the stability of the Middle East will undoubtedly affect Europe.
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If “hard power” is needed to deter Putin or to keep peace in Ukraine, it should not be deployed – as the RAF is in its surveillance flights from Cyprus – in support of Israeli genocide and aggression. If Starmer wants to persuade the public to take security seriously, how is he going to do this, if the international principles he purports to uphold in Ukraine are so easily sacrificed when it comes to Palestine? The UK, Germany and many other European states have already squandered much of the moral high ground that they want to claim against Putin and Trump through their complicity in Israel’s crimes.
As we begin to take the measure of the new realities, it is vital that the public, whose taxes and social spending could be diverted to a new arms race – and some of whom could end up dying alongside the Ukrainians who have already given their lives – should enter the debate too.
As I describe in my new book, The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, this happened across the continent in the 1980s, when millions protesting nuclear weapons on the streets in Western Europe and demanding democracy in Eastern Europe helped end the Cold War. It happened again when millions protested against the Iraq War in 2003.
The grim new security environment created by Putin and Trump has so far not aroused large-scale popular engagement in Britain, despite the massive movement against Israel’s destruction of Gaza. But now is the time for a public debate about the progressive alternatives to the Eurobomb and blind rearmament.