The problem is not Russia's strength...
...it's our weakness. A speech I gave recently in central London
I am not going to warn you about a future war and how to avoid it. I am here to talk about one that is already under way. It will get worse before it gets better, and I am not at all confident that we will win.
It is easy to blame President Trump, and I will have plenty to say about his incompetent, cynical administration later.
But we cannot blame Trump, or the Americans, for mistakes we have made ourselves.
It was not Donald Trump who made us in this country open our financial, and then our political system, to dirty money.
It was not Donald Trump that made continental European countries open their energy markets to Russian oil and gas.
It was not Donald Trump who made all of us, with a handful of honourable exceptions, cut our defence budgets to the bone and beyond.
It was not the Donald Trump who made us spend our £60 billion defence budget so badly, leaving us with more admirals than ships, more generals than tanks, aircraft carriers without planes, ships without sailors, planes without pilots, the smallest number of artillery pieces since the 14th century, an army than cannot field a single warfighting division, and ammunition stocks that would run out after a week.
It was not Donald Trump who made European defence so utterly dependent on US stockpiles, plans, command and control, intelligence, logistics and firepower, let alone the nuclear umbrella.
It was not Donald Trump who made us construct critical infrastructure and business systems that are vulnerable to cyber-attack and sabotage.
It was not Donald Trump who made us ignore the repeated warnings, warnings that date back to the early 1990s, from Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and others, that we faced a serious and growing danger from Russia. It was not Donald Trump who issued an invitation to Ukraine to join Nato in 2008, and then failed to support Ukraine when Russia attacked it.
These were all things we did to ourselves.
We did them because we were naïve.
We did them because we were complacent.
Because we were arrogant
Most of all because we were greedy.
And now we are reaping the consequences.
I’ve spent most of my life dealing with the region we used to call Eastern Europe. I’ve lived behind the Iron Curtain. I’m probably the only person in this room to have been interrogated by the KGB – anyone else want to claim that title? I’ve been arrested, deported, beaten up, spied on. I’ve covered two wars and three revolutions. I’ve fought two libel actions against dangerous Russian oligarchs.
In 2018 I was the first witness to the Intelligence and Security Committee inquiry into Russia, warning Parliament’s most important committee of the dangers to our democracy, protected by both the Official Secrets Act and parliamentary privilege, enabling me to be frank about what I’ve witnessed in a way I cannot be here with you.
I’ve never, ever, been as gloomy as I am now.
The main reason is that the world has changed, it’s changed with lighting speed, and gravely to our peril.
Looking round the room I do not see anyone even in this venerable company who is likely to have a clear memory of the world before December 11th 1941. As I will not need to remind you, that was the day when Franklin D Roosevelt declared war on Nazi Germany. That wartime bond was the foundation of the Anglo-American alliance, the bedrock for decades of what we have come to call the West.
It provided the basis for the D-Day landings, for the Marshall Plan and for the reconstruction of Europe after the defeat of the Nazis, for the Berlin Airlift, for the foundation of Nato, for the colossal military and political efforts first not to lose the cold war, and later to win it, for the reconstruction of eastern Europe after the collapse of communism, for the globalised, rules-based system of finance and trade that has brought billions of people out of poverty, and much more besides.
That world ended just under five months ago. It ended with Donald Trump’s administration voting alongside Russia in the United Nations, against America’s oldest and closest allies, on a question of peace and war in Europe. That was not an aberration. It is part of a pattern. The weaponisation of tariffs. The bullying of Greenland, Denmark and Canada. The cutting off of intelligence and other aid to Ukraine. The gratuitous insults to allies –
“Posturing freeloaders”… “Random countries”, according to the vice-president, that have not fought a war in 30 or 40 years. Countries that are decadent. Countries that must be made to pay for their defence, like some kind of protection racket.
The astonishing assertion that the European Union was created to screw the United States. The secretary of state’s refusal even to meet the European Union’s top diplomat.
The astonishing paper just published by the State Department which says, and I quote
Across Europe, governments have weaponized political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.
The threat is clear
Europe’s democratic backsliding not only impacts European citizens but increasingly affects American security and economic ties, along with the free speech rights of American citizens and companies.
As my American Trump-supporting friends remind me, the United States intervened vigorously in European internal politics during the cold war, using financial, propaganda and legal tools. Then the aim was to save Europe from communism. Now it is to save Europe from wokery.
I am not nostalgic for some mythical golden age of transatlanticism. This has always been a difficult relationship. The US drove the hardest of bargains with this country during the fight against Hitler, and scraped our bones again in the post -war era. Anyone know when we finally finished paying off our wartime debt to the US? (2006).
Anyone here remember 1956? The US pulled the rug from under Britain and France, supposedly its closest allies, during the Suez crisis
Anyone here remember the Vietnam War? Afghanistan? Iraq? Anyone here remember the Nixon Doctrine – that was the Trumpian demand that the West Germans pay for the US bases there. Nixon also imposed tariffs on allies, and blew up the world financial system.
We have no shortage of US military blunders that have strained our alliance, and no shortage of diplomatic ones too. The US has frequently botched its Europe policy. It got the collapse of communism wrong – trying to keep the Soviet Union together, it propped up the corrupt and increasingly authoritarian Yeltsin regime in the 1990s, and systematically underestimated the threat from Putin.
But these difficulties and disagreements were mere nuances compared with what we face now.
You may wonder why I haven’t mentioned Russia. Surely we should be worrying about the three-year war following the invasion of Ukraine, the war crimes, the kidnapped children, the trillion-dollar bill for damage, the million or so casualties killed and maimed, the millions more traumatised, bereaved, made homeless? Surely we should worry about Russia’s formidable war machine, the fact that right now, measured by the bang for the buck – or purchasing power parity in economists’ jargon — Russia’s outspends all of Europe on defence.
Believe me, I can bore for Britain on this subject.
But I’m going to leave the threat from Russia to one side, for a simple reason. The problem is not that Russia is invincible. Russia is not China. It has an economy the size of Italy’s. It has a population one third of the size of Europe’s.
500m Europeans are begging 380m Americans to defend them from 140m Russians, who in the space of three years have not managed to beat 40m Ukrainians. How pathetic is that?
Putin, like his predecessors and perhaps his successors, gets away with his murderous imperialism and military why?
Because he is decisive and we are not. He is willing to take risks and we are not. He will suffer economic pain and we won’t.
The problem is not Russia’s strength. It’s our weakness. The war in Ukraine was a catastrophic failure of Western deterrence. We are scared of confronting Russia, and Putin knows it. We were more afraid of Russian defeated than we should be of what is now looming — Russia victorious.
We do not see Russian tanks trundling through the streets of Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Rome. Europe’s governing elite has not been rounded up in the small hours and deported to chop trees in labour camps. Kremlin commissars have not imposed controls on public debate, the media and academia. Nobody risks losing their job for arguing for unity and resolve in standing up to the threats from Washington and Moscow. In short, nothing is stopping Europe’s leaders from leading, and doing so effectively—except those leaders.
Ukraine bought us time. Paid in blood sweat and tears. We wasted that time. We dithered. We deferred to the Biden administration. It dithered too. We never imposed real sanctions on Russia. We froze the central bank assets — $300bn of them — but we did not seize them. We drip-fed weapons to Ukraine. We drip-fed money. If we had given Ukraine what it needed at the start of the war, the war would be over.
And the world has changed. Trump sees Putin as a friend, and Europe as an enemy.
The cake’s not quite baked yet. It’s still possible, just, that Putin will overreach, annoy Trump sufficiently that he starts putting at least some pressure on Russia.
It’s possible too that the chaos at the heart of the Trump administration will settle down. It’s possible that pressure from the markets, from the voters, from the courts and from the Republicans in Congress will put the brakes on.
It’s possible, if we are lucky, that we see an orderly withdrawal of US power in Europe. An orderly shift in burden-sharing.
Even that will be a huge scramble. If we hurl money at the problem, tear up the rule book, sacrifice national pride, we might just be able to replace most of the American military presence in Europe in the space of six or seven years. A decade is much more likely.
But we don’t have a decade. We don’t have even six years.
Putin’s war machine runs 24/7. 365 days a year. If we get some kind of ceasefire in Ukraine, Russia’s military readiness rockets upwards. No more losses on the front line. More tanks, more munitions, more vehicles, more rockets more drones, more bombs. And a political imperative to keep the xenophobia and anti-western sentiment at full boil.
Don’t for a moment give the Russian people time to think about their crooked and brutal leaders, who have stolen the country’s future.
So whereas we need six years at the absolute minimum to make up for the American withdrawal, Russia can be ready again in two or three years – while Donald Trump is still in the White House. Or even earlier. Europe is getting stronger by the day. Why would Putin wait until we are ready. He does not need to mount a full-scale attack on Nato, he just needs to attack what’s left of Nato’s credibility. A landgrab somewhere in the Baltic states, or some islands in the Arctic, the Baltic Sea or elsewhere, followed up nuclear sabre-rattling, missile test-fires and cyber-attacks. Accept the fait accompli, or face nuclear war..
The point of this attack will not be to gain a bridge, a village, a road or a field. It’s to destroy Nato by exposing our divisions. The countries on the front line will fight. They know what’s at stake.
But what about the rest of us? What about the United States? Will this administration really want a full-on confrontation with the Kremlin over what JD Vance will dismiss as a “border skirmish?”
Will the F-35s, the HIMARs, the ATACMs, all the other high-tech American weaponry, running on American guidance systems and American software – will that work when we need it? I wouldn’t bet on it. Moreover, without the United States, Nato’s planning and command apparatus is crippled.
The Baltic states, Poland, Finland, Norway – they’ll be fighting on their own. A big question for this country – will we join them, and risk Russian bombs and rockets landing on our cities too? Remember, our air defences are so weak that we can defend one major city for one day. After that, we are in a worse position than Ukraine.
Putin has the initiative. So does Donald Trump. As I mentioned, his priority, for whatever reason, is friendship with Russia now. He’s prepared to sacrifice Ukraine for that. And, I fear, European allies too. What happens if Trump tells us to make Ukraine submit to whatever deal he cooks up with Putin. We say no. And then what?
That sets the stage for a disorderly, hostile US withdrawal from Europe, a slash and burn in which the US behaves vindictively, petulantly towards the Europeans. If so, we are heading for a collision which we can neither avoid nor survive. We are caught between the Russian hammer and the American anvil.
And that’s not the worst of it. The sense of betrayal and looming defeat could prompt a political, economic, and social implosion in Ukraine. That would leave an embittered, failing rump state — think of Bosnia, but ten times worse — and millions of furious, miserable refugees heading west, many of them battle-hardened and traumatised.That will be hugely destabilising for all of Europe
Then there’s another big worry. Method may emerge from the policy-making mayhem. Some would-be Kissingers in Washington want a game-changing new deal with Moscow, in which the Americans would give Russia a free hand in Europe in return for the Kremlin ending its partnership with Beijing.
Some of the worst damage is done already. We’ve already sent a deadly message to the world: nuclear blackmail works. Ukraine should never have traded its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal for goodwill and the empty promises of the Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994. The non-proliferation treaty, let alone hopes of ridding the world of nuclear weapons, is dead, along with the American nuclear guarantee. Countries in Asia (and in Europe) that do not have nuclear weapons are now considering, in great secrecy, if, when and how they should acquire them. It won’t stop there. China and Russia will treat such plans as existential threats and threaten war to stop them. The brinkmanship over the Iranian nuclear program is a mild foretaste of what awaits us in the ruins of Pax Americana.
So how do we deal with all this?
One option is wishful thinking. Many of our allies cannot believe that the US has changed. Like a spouse in an abusive relationship, they make excuses. It must be a misunderstanding. It’s our fault for getting him angry. He loves me really. He’ll come to his senses eventually
Another option is bravado. Fine, we’ll go it alone. Tell Trump where to get off. Defend Greenland. Send the King to Canada. Match him tariff for tariff. Send a token military force to Ukraine, even without American backing. Cobble together some kind of nuclear deterrent using British submarines and French aircraft. Try some threats – make the US pay for its bases. Make new alliances. Flirt with China.
But when you bluff, you need to think what happens when that bluff is called. In one post on social media, Trump can remove the US nuclear umbrella from Europe, simply by stating that he will not risk World War Three for warmongers. He cannot withdraw from NATO, but he can turn the alliance into an empty shell. American troops in Europe will be back to barracks by nightfall, and home to the US within the year.
If we send our troops to Ukraine, what happens if Russia attacks them? We were not willing to defend Ukraine properly when it was winning. Are we really willing to do it now when Ukraine’s losing?
Britain, as the closest of all American allies, is in the weakest position here.
Our nuclear deterrent, for example, relies on American-made Trident missiles. They require regular servicing. What happens when one of our clapped-out nuclear submarines turns up at King’s Bay Georgia, and is told “Sorry, no appointments today”. We might be able to maintain our deterrent for six months, perhaps a year at a stretch. But what then?
As Donald Trump told Zelensky, “you don’t have the cards”.
To be fair, a lot is now happening. The European Commission’s defence white paper is a notable step forward. The Rearmament Bank—a plan I co-authored—is gathering support. Behind the scenes I hear rumbles of hectic discussions on topics ranging from conscription to nuclear weapons.
Politicians will need to talk clearly and firmly about all this to their voters. They should be humble too. All these changes in our defence, deterrence, resilience and security will be far costlier, riskier and more disruptive now. But it all takes time. And we don’t have time.
But there’s one thing we can do right now. It’s to support Ukraine. By far the largest and most battle-hardened armed forces in Europe. By far the most innovative and productive defence industry. A country where people not only believe in our values but are willing to die for them. If Ukraine wins, we all win. If it loses, we all lose.
I’d like to be optimistic. On paper, we can still turn this round. In practice, I doubt it. Nothing I have seen in the past months and years makes me think we are willing to avert the dangers hurtling towards us. Even less do I think we are ready to survive them.