This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
Things are bad in Britain in many ways. Its neighbourhood is more unstable and more conflict-prone at precisely the time the shadow of Trump hangs over everything. Europe’s long-standing senior ally, the United States, is distancing itself from European commitments. There is an accelerated shift of the defence burden under way.
British resources, too, are scarce. On current settings, the outlook is for persistent low growth and long-term economic stagnation. Deteriorating conditions cause ever greater strain, with self-inflicted policy errors, such as the highest energy prices in Europe, turning the vicious circle ever inwards.
Eroding British capabilities make it harder to create and project power abroad, as the Royal Navy’s depletion makes clear. There is little reserve fiscal firepower or surplus capacity for handling another unforeseen crisis. Likewise, there is little reserve capacity across the board, from energy storage to water reservoirs.
The arms industry itself is unfit for purpose, having been geared more towards efficiency and short-term bottom lines than resilience and the national interest. Exacerbating all this is a common thread of general state incapacity. And material strain affects the general will, leaving little appetite for a significant increase in defence spending.
We are also intellectually unprepared. Much of our debate has for decades presupposed arrangements we took as facts of life but which were of course impermanent and dependent on contingent circumstances.
Policymakers simply assumed there would be a tolerable superpower which would pick up most of the tab and keep our region under its protective wing.
Many mock Francis Fukuyama’s vision of the triumph of Atlantic market democracy, but many also turned out to share his baseline expectation. Maybe Western triumphalism will ultimately be right, but Russia in combination with China and Iran stretches Western power, America’s priorities are tilting towards Asia, the desire for an authoritarian strong hand remains strong everywhere and war refuses to confine itself to the shadows. So until the end of history arrives, we have thinking to do.
If we need an organising idea for foreign policy, it is not “progressive realism”. We have already seen the fruits of this surreal doctrine as articulated by the Starmer government. Consider the Chagos Islands settlement that hands a valuable base and billions of pounds to a country that never possessed the territory and marginalises the islanders themselves.
The world is not a progressive place. It is anarchic
Note the ill-conceived, abortive policy for an Anglo-French-led coalition in Ukraine, doomed by foreseeable difficulties, from Washington’s refusal to underwrite it and Moscow’s refusal to settle on those terms to our own ultimate unwillingness to fight for a second order cause that we have already declined to fight for [see “LET’S BE REALISTIC ABOUT UKRAINE”, May 2025].
And look, too, at the Net Zero-in-one-country when China increases its use of coal-fired energy daily. Pragmatic alternatives were available at all three turns. Yet progressive realism tends towards projects of irrational self-harm.
We don’t need progressive realism. We need realism. That is, we need a prudent foreign policy outlook that accepts the dark facts of international life for what they are, in particular the ones that cannot be altered. As the policy misadventures above suggest, the world is not a progressive place. It is anarchic. It cannot be converted into the global equivalent of a benign sovereign state, governing cooperative citizen-members. Ukrainians, Gazans, Tibetans, Kurds and Armenians are waiting for your call if you doubt this.
One enduring reality is that there are no permanent friends. Friendship is a dubious concept when applied to international politics. Countries are not individuals but aggregations of people with distinct and at times conflicting interests. That being so, we must adjust to the trend-line of America distancing faster than we expected. In the realist tradition, Britain should respond to its predicament by first of all accepting that our security will once again increasingly pivot on coalitions whose interests overlap.
Increased reliance on coalitions is hardly ideal: today’s partners can be tomorrow’s rivals. But hawks who clamour for an increase of national defence spending to 5 or 6 per cent of GDP lose sight of one reality that binds the government: that there are hard political limits to how much investment in hard power British voters and taxpayers will tolerate. Whilst there does need to be an internal reordering of what we arm ourselves with and how, alliances and cooperation will be needed.
To deter and counter Russia, it will take Polish and Finnish land forces at scale, French and British air-maritime and technological strength and the hard fighting experience of powers J.D. Vance scorns, such as the Danes. A relationship where Europeans bear a significantly greater load is possible, as it was in the Cold War when West Germany fielded 12 divisions (it currently has three and is proposing a fourth). But to stand up a robust European deterrence force will take intensive horse-trading and negotiation over the division of labour.
Second, in taking the measure of Washington, Britain should try to nudge it to accept merely a “less” American Europe, rather than a post-American continent. The difference matters. Rather than idealising the transatlantic relationship of the past or urging Washington to restore its “role” in Europe, Britain should gather information about what kind of retrenchment is likeliest and sell the case for America keeping a balancing hand in the region.
For one thing, we need time to wean ourselves off our dependence, becoming less reliant on the things Washington provided, such as intelligence and targeting from satellite reconnaissance. For another, deterrence will be stronger if adversaries fear that they might embroil America.
Thirdly, to maximise the resources that are available, to increase “means”, a fresh and better economic relationship with the European Union will be needed. This is not a relationship between power equals, but the potential reduction of US commitment may strengthen Britain’s hand. Britain’s continental neighbours will need British military and technological support, and the UK needs better access to European markets. It’s worth trying for.
Fourth, Britain and France should act to bolster nuclear deterrence, since a less American Europe places its extended nuclear umbrella in doubt. As David Blagden and I have argued, there is a dangerous gap in the escalation ladder at present, whereby in a crisis Britain might face a binary choice of stepping back or intensifying a conflict to unthinkable levels of destruction, between inadequate conventional forces and last-ditch, apocalyptic strategic nukes. Part of the answer lies in creating more credible battlefield nuclear forces that can check Russia’s arsenal of tactical nuclear weapons and its coercive threats.
This is a matter both of prudent war avoidance and war termination. Having believable intermediate nuclear weapons makes it harder for Russia to calculate that it can attack and seize targets as a fait accompli. And in extremis, with conflict under way and our conventional forces overmatched, it provides a way to hold an aggressor’s own forces at risk and back it off with the threat of their military adventure spiralling out of control. This is not experimental thinking but a return to classical deterrence doctrine that succeeded against the Soviet Union. A less American Europe should look dangerous to attack, whilst at the same time being wary of going to the brink unnecessarily.
And so we come to Ukraine, the theatre where all Britain’s security issues converge. Realism dictates being honest with Kyiv about what we are and are not truly willing to do for them. For too long, the West has conducted a dalliance with Ukraine, going beyond sensible efforts to arm and supply it by dangling the prospect of a binding alliance or forward in-country military presence.
Unwilling to make such commitments today, it serves some kind of psychological purpose to pledge allegiance always some time in the future. This is bad for Western security, not only because it might encourage half-cocked measures that a more resolved Russia will test. It is bad also because it obstructs Ukraine from facing fully the reality of its own predicament. That reality being, Britain and Europe might be its arsenal, but only Ukraine will defend Ukraine.
Ultimately, realism must inform Britain’s dealings with the rest of the world. States of the so-called Global South are not principally passive victims of colonialism waiting for guilt-ridden Westerners to atone and rescue them. They are ruled by ruthless, self-seeking regimes. Their businesslike hedging and non-alignment on Russia demonstrates it. They pursue what luckier states have: core technologies for growth, advanced military hardware, essential commodities such as fertilisers and metals and restructured debt.
In bargaining with these regimes, we need less high-minded vision and self-obsession with the legacies of empire and more pragmatic hustle. Those postcolonial countries, like us, inhabit a realist world, and we should proceed accordingly.
Nothing is certain, but if Britain can build effective local coalitions, help bring about a less American rather than a post-American Europe, negotiate a mutually stronger economic relationship with the EU, bolster European deterrence, be super-real with Ukraine about our commitments and their limits and treat “the Rest” as the ruthlessly self-interested states that they are, we might all emerge alive.
