From reliance to dependence: The risks of “NATO first”

Rightly and inevitably, Britain’s new strategic defence review has been shaped by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—and by the unexpected successes of Ukraine’s resistance. Vladimir Putin’s ambition to reconstitute the old Russian empire can no longer be wished away. Meanwhile, Ukraine has demonstrated that on today’s battlefields heavy metal counts for less than missiles and unmanned systems stitched together by technology and innovation.

So there has been little dispute about the radical transformation demanded by the review in how Britain’s armed forces operate, how new technologies are harnessed and how procurement is managed. Critics have focused largely on the doubtful affordability of everything the review recommends. While it naturally concentrates on all the new institutions and capabilities it wants to see funded, the review is unhelpfully silent about just what old stuff to get rid of to make room.

In an increasingly dangerous world, Britain’s security clearly depends not just on its own efforts but on its partnerships and alliances. Here, the review is unambiguous: “NATO first”. It is almost as though the reviewers have failed to notice that the Ukraine crisis has morphed into a European defence emergency only because of the arrival in the White House of a rogue president—one who shows every sign of a readiness to abandon Ukraine, and no sign of any willingness to stand up to Putin, ever.

Diplomacy, of course, demands caution in any criticism of Trump. But this looks like a genuine blind spot. There is no sign in the review of any recognition that discreet reinsurance against American abandonment of their European allies is now essential; or that the scale of Britain’s defence technological dependence on the US is something to worry about. How else to explain the relegation of the EU, sponsor of the continent’s crash rearmament programme, to just one cursory reference in 140 pages? The implicit, foundational assumption of the review is evidently that NATO will run on into the future much as it has in the past. So, when the review fails to find an immediate solution to the problem of air and missile defence (a long-neglected European capability which is now at the top of everyone’s new priority lists) it contents itself by supposing some future NATO programme.

Worse, the review doubles down on Britain’s reliance on NATO. It hails the alliance as the best place for defence industrial cooperation—when decades of experience have shown that American refusal to share defence technology makes transatlantic defence collaboration impossible unless Europeans are prepared to cede control of the product to the Americans. Incorporation of even the smallest American component in European equipment has repeatedly stymied Europeans’ ability to export, while even collaborating partners in the US F-35 combat aircraft programme are now asking themselves whether their operational freedom to use the aircraft could end up constrained.

Even odder is the strange idea that Britain might place its nuclear deterrent even further in US hands

Even odder is the strange idea that Britain might place its nuclear deterrent even further in US hands (ie, beyond its existing Trident missile dependency) by buying yet more American F-35 jets to drop American nuclear bombs.

There are arguments that the credibility of the British deterrent would be enhanced by restoring an air-launched component (the home-grown WE177 free-fall bomb was retired without replacement in 1998) rather than continuing to rely on submarine-launched Trident to provide a nuclear sub-strategic or “warning shot” capability, short of the full Armageddon. But such a warning shot would serve its purpose only if it were a sovereign act of the British prime minister. Dropping an American bomb from an American (even if British-operated) aircraft would manifestly be a sovereign decision made in Washington. Other, non-nuclear, European allies can and do provide such a delivery service.

Moreover, the very existence of the British nuclear deterrent has long been justified in NATO communiqués as providing the allies with a “separate centre of decision-making”—a polite hint that the Kremlin, foolishly, might discount US readiness to go nuclear in defence of Europe, but would then still have to reckon with Britain (and France). Now that the US president has gone out of his way to imply Russia might not be at all foolish to discount his readiness to defend Europe—that he would indeed “encourage” them to “do whatever the hell they want” to under-spending allies—the importance of the sovereign independence of the British nuclear capability becomes all the more fundamental. Making some vast new investment to be able to drop US nuclear bombs defies logic. If Britain’s nuclear deterrent is to be strengthened, this can only make sense in the context of developing, with France, a properly European deterrence capability.

The strategic defence review is a game effort to confront the British defence establishment with the scale of the transformation it needs to make. But in failing to recognise the dangers of blind trust in Trump’s America (to be followed, who knows, by Vance’s?), it only encourages an even more dangerous complacency.