Starmer shows global leadership over Ukraine

... but the challenge ahead is to form and execute a new UK grand strategy

Since Trump and Vance decided to blow up the Western alliance, in an ill advised attempt to browbeat President Zelensky in the Oval Office, events have moved at pace among Europe’s NATO allies.

Not only did we see strongly-worded expressions of support for Zelensky from both Starmer and the King. We’re seeing the rapid formation of a “coalition of the willing” in Europe, prepared to arm and fund Ukraine’s continued resistance, if the US pulls out.

Plus there are big moves both at the EU level and in the UK to assemble the fiscal firepower needed to rearm.

Labour chancellor Rachel Reeves has changed the rules of the National Wealth Fund, worth £27bn, to allow it to invest in defence as well as infrastructure and green energy. In the EU there are moves to exempt debt incurred through rearmament from the debt ceilings.

In this edition of Conflict & Democracy I want to outline the most pressing issues that lie before decision makers in the UK, Canada and Europe. It’s a mixture of strategy, force design, innovation management and industrial strategy.

A statement of UK grand strategy

First off: neither the EU nor the UK currently has a “grand strategy” – that is, a long term vision of the position it wants to achieve in the world, given the evolving threats. The decline of British grand-strategic thinking has been well documented and long lamented.

But until 2016 the UK had an explicit strategic vision: uphold the rules based global order, exploit our two major special relationships – with the USA and EU - and thereby prosper as a global trading nation. The shape of our military, though depleted, reflects this goal: the UK armed forces are designed for global power projection as part of an international alliance to maintain the rules-based order.

Brexit blew one hole in that strategy; Trump’s first election blew a second. The Integrated Review (2021) was an attempt to reformulate grand strategy from first principles, based on a recognition that the rules based order was disintegrating, and that the UK should now concentrate on building islands of order and operate through “minilateral” alliances. To this, Boris Johnson added the ill-timed and hubristic “global Britain” rhetoric and the Indo-Pacific tilt.

But the fall of Kabul, the fullscale Russian invasion of Ukraine, and then the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea showed that those of us who had opposed the I-PT, and argued for an emphasis on the NATO and High North theatres first, were correct.

The IR Refresh in 2023 was a missed opportunity for course correction – falling as it did into the policy hiatus that characterised the Truss-Sunak era. Those who argued that, for the UK, grand strategy is a dead concept were temporarily proven right by the government’s inability to formulate one.

When Labour came to power, instead of commissioning an update of the IR, it commissioned a much narrower Strategic Defence Review. Instead of locating the review inside the Cabinet Office, it allocated the review to an external team, tasked with assessing the threat and matching the armed forces to it – albeit within the confines of a 2.5%/GDP spending envelope.

One rationale behind this was that things were moving too fast to do an IR-style conspectus. And that has proved correct. Even the SDR process has now been extended and will be wrapped into a broader National Security Strategy to be produced in June.

It is vital that, in the next phase of development, the debate on UK strategy moves from behind closed doors, and away from force composition, to the basic question: what the hell are we going to do if the Article V guarantee is worthless?

That is the question all European governments are asking themselves in private, and we are now at the stage where the public needs to understand the stakes.

If the USA is no longer a 100% reliable ally in an Article V situation, and if its politicians and senior businesspeople are going to try to disrupt and influence European state elections, then it is clear that Europe will need to become the independent guarantor of its own security.

Assumption #1 in UK grand strategy formulation has to be that Europe will seek strategic autonomy, technological sovereignty and co-equal status with the emergent great powers of the USA, Russia and China.

Assumption #2 must be that Russia remains the primary threat: even if the Putin regime were to collapse, in a democratic revolution, the scale of disorder on Europe’s borders would be immense and prolonged. More likely is that an even more radical ethno-nationalist authoritarianism succeeds Putin.

From these two assumptions it follows that the UK’s grand strategy must be built around leadership in Europe. That’s tough for a country that just left the EU, and where large parts of the media and a burgeoning far right party want nothing to do with Europe. But what Trump just did to Zelensky could easily have been done to a British PM.

It doesn’t help that large parts of the public imagination are still focused on the UK as legacy global empire, and that the biggest spending part of the military – the Royal Navy – continually lobbies for global power projection.

But the political heavy lifting has been done. Since 2021 Labour has been committed to “NATO First”. The only question now is whether NATO survives as the primary vehicle for collective security and deterrence in Europe. Peter Hegseth ruled out US or NATO participation in a peace force in Ukraine – and also ruled out extending an Article V guarantee to any UK forces stationed in Ukraine.

If I were asked to formulate what UK grand strategy looks like going forward it would be:

• To be the co-leader of a European security alliance, alongside France, Germany, Poland and Ukraine, which upholds the existing borders of European states, including in the High North, using the surviving structures of the international order – namely the UN, ICC/ICJ, NATO, OSCE, the European Union and its wider customs frameworks.

• To maximise conventional and nuclear deterrence through the rapid, collaborative rearmament of ourselves and our European allies.

• And to enhance prosperity, security and democratic resilience at home and across the Western world through a mixture of soft power and “militant democracy”.

Fortunately, I think the intellectual framwork Labour is working within should have no problem accepting that. The bigger problem is the emergence of a pro-Trump, Ukraine-skeptic, anti-globalist wing of Conservatism and the sudden rise of Reform, whose current social media dominance owes much to Russian influence operations, whether its leaders and supporters understand this or not.

Winning the argument with conservative, xenophobic and even outright racist sections of the right-wing electorate, that we need to lead and organise Europe, and that we need to face down Russian aggression, is the primary task of domestic centre-left politics. As we do so, we have to take account of the widespread pacifist internationalism of the progressive electorate – including among the current Labour membership and some unions, as well as the Green Party, Plaid and the SNP.

The first step to doing this is to make an explicit, challengeable statement of UK grand strategy. Soundbites and non-public discussion documents cannot have the same signalling effect, either internationally or across the UK’s governance structures, as a clearly enunciated statement with precise professional language.