War Is Not In Britain’s Interests

Philip Cunliffe writes:

Having earned MAGA’s respect for Brexit, Britain was in prime position to exploit the shift in global order heralded by Trump 2.0. After all, Brexit Britain broke with globalism long before JD Vance came to bury it at Munich. The Labour government’s new doctrine of “progressive realism” was intended to anticipate such a world, combining a clear-sighted pragmatism with attachment to liberal values. But so far, Britain’s politicians have decided to blunder on, spurning the opportunity for greater independence.

The talk in the UK is now of rearmament and conscription, as Kyiv’s future is contested from afar. Britain is being drawn into plans for a post-American Europe, with suggestions floated of an Anglo-French “reassurance force” to oversee any armistice line in Ukraine. There are whispers, too, that Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves will impose austerity and tax rises in order to boost the country’s defence spending. The British public is largely supportive, for now, of sending troops to prop up the Ukrainian war effort, with 58% agreeing with the need for sending peacekeeping forces when polled last month. But such attitudes are invariably challenged when the reality of the measure — and the state of our depleted army — comes into focus.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, support for Ukraine has been a bipartisan affair in Britain. Boris Johnson, the former Tory prime minister who oversaw the withdrawal from the EU, abandoned a party meeting to visit Kyiv in July 2022. Starmer, a fierce opponent of Brexit, has been no less vociferous in his backing of Kyiv. With enduring folk memories of the Cold War fed by a steady stream of villainous Russian gangsters on television, a surge of popular support for Ukraine helped to plaster over the single greatest fault line in modern British politics: Brexit.

As both sides of the Brexit divide were able to meet in the middle, neither had to confront the real question for policy: what was Britain’s national interest in the conflict? What interest was served by supporting Ukraine? If nothing else, Brexit thrust questions of Britain’s future and priorities to the forefront of our political life. Yet neither side was able to give a convincing national answer to why Britain should support Ukraine. As this question remained unresolved, Britain is now contemplating sending troops it can hardly spare from its severely under-equipped army to man frozen ditches in the Donbas and patrol the Black Sea.

To this day, Britain’s liberals have continued to use the Ukraine war as a way of aggressively rolling back Brexit. By claiming that Trump is appeasing the Russian dictator in seeking a negotiated end to the war, the very same people who sought to overturn the single largest democratic vote in British history are now posing as champions of democracy. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey yesterday harried Nigel Farage for “explain[ing] away” Trump’s dismissal of Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator”, after the Reform leader said the remarks should “not be taken literally”. Labour Parliamentarians have also joined the online fray, their attempts to dragoon populist voters into a new cold war demonstrating that their foreign policy is not really about Russia or Ukraine, but rather about suppressing dissent in Britain itself.

Farage’s own base is more likely than Tory- or Labour-voting counterparts to favour a reduction in support for Kyiv. A third of Reform voters think Britain should cut its assistance to Ukraine’s war effort if Trump winds down US contributions, compared to 19% of Conservatives and 15% of Labour voters. Party MP Rupert Lowe yesterday chimed with his leader in suggesting that Zelensky is not, in fact, a dictator, but added that “Trump’s right. The war cannot go on forever. We need a long-term settlement tolerable to all involved.” Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice, for his part, encouraged European nations to “step up” their defence spending.

“Farage’s own base is more likely than Tory- or Labour-voting counterparts to favour a reduction in support for Kyiv.” A dilemma thus presents itself to Reform: to maintain ties with Trump and demonstrate a tangible difference from the “uniparty” position on Ukraine is also to risk going against what remains a popular view among the British public. While voters’ openness to a negotiated peace has risen as Kyiv’s campaign has faltered, a plurality still want aid to be provided until Ukrainian victory can be achieved following a withdrawal by Putin.

It’s worth remembering that the Russian threat to Europe — let alone Britain — is essentially negligible. Assuming the negotiations to end the war proceed, Russia has won at best a Pyrrhic victory in Ukraine. Conservative estimates of Russian casualties run to many tens of thousands of dead young men, in a country that was already teetering on the edge of demographic collapse before the conflict. Putin’s initial war aim of installing a friendly regime in Kyiv was already abandoned in 2022, when Ukrainian militias successfully fended off an elite Russian special forces assault on the Antonov Airport at Hostomel outside Kyiv.

Putin’s forces have very clearly struggled to occupy the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine; the notion that they will now overrun Europe is scarcely believable. Only in the fantasies of retired British colonels writing for The Telegraph, vicariously dreaming of Leopard tanks sweeping across the steppe to the gates of Moscow, could one picture a negotiated end to this war as some great victory for Russia. What’s worse, in portraying a negotiated end to a bloody three-year war as capitulation to the Kremlin, Britain’s laptop bombardiers are doing Putin’s work for him, allowing him to portray a bungled and costly war as a great and gruelling victory for the Russian people.

And while a defence spending hike will doubtless be better for British industry than pursuing Net Zero, it is worth recalling that defence involves more than churning out armour and shells: you also need the people to fight — and potentially die — with those weapons. And who will fight once the war ends in Ukraine? As recent polling shows, Generation Z — prime military-age voters — has no wish to fight for Britain. Given that national identity and patriotism have been actively disdained for decades as politically toxic to the cause of globalised Britain, and with ethnic polarisation from mass migration growing, it should hardly come as a surprise that this country’s multiethnic, multicultural youth have little desire to take up arms.

British and European politicians have taken Vance’s Munich address as the signal to rearm. Yet in all the hue and cry of being forced to take responsibility for their own security, these very same politicians missed the crucial element of his speech — that national strength lies not in restarting the assembly lines in weapons factories, but instead in democratic renewal.