At the Tehran Conference in 1943 Churchill presented Stalin with George VI’s gift of the Mech Stalingráda. Acid-etched, the inscription on it reads: TO THE STEEL-HEARTED CITIZENS OF STALINGRAD • THE GIFT OF KING GEORGE VI • IN TOKEN OF THE HOMAGE OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE.
In Evelyn Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender the sword of honour is introduced in Westminster Abbey, adored on a “counterfeit altar”, with the press mocked as much as the credulous people. The Times “dropping into poetry” (“Then bow’d down my head from the Light of it./Spirit to my spirit, the Might of it”), whilst the Express’s gossip columnist suggested it ought to tour the kingdom.
We should be grateful then for what we are spared. The prime minister’s recent signature upon the “UK–
Ukraine 100 Year Partnership Declaration” has not even been attended by officially-inspired street parties, never mind secular art. But perhaps we merely have winter to thank for that?
For those who missed the precise details involved in this century-long commitment, the pleasant vibe one can at least enjoy is that Sir Keir Starmer and President Zelenskyy both believe their countries shall still exist in 2125. How are we to get to that happy place from here?
Our cover story this month by the US foreign policy thinker, Reid Smith, builds on the work that our frequent contributor Sumantra Maitra — of “dormant NATO” fame — has led the way on: wondering what the alliance actually does? And, whatever that is, who does it do it for?
Smith’s point is rightly made in his country’s interest: which, in short, is that the NATO which has metastasised since the end of the Cold War doesn’t serve sensible American purposes. But does it serve British ones either? This is not a question our own conservatives are wont to ask. We should reflect that the modern Tory record of unasked questions is not encouraging.
One Conservative politician who is being provocative is the defeated, but hardly daunted, 2024 Tory leadership contender Rob Jenrick. An article by him in the Daily Telegraph in early December came to the attention of the national security end of Trumpworld.
As you might hope would something headlined “Neoconservatism is dead — good riddance”.
In this widely shared article, Jenrick laid into the British policymakers responsible for our share of the failed wars of choice, and their propagandists. He noted Donald Trump’s success in doing so in the US: “American trends tend to seep into UK discourse by cultural osmosis. But until that happens, the guilty men on this side of the Atlantic who prosecuted these disastrous wars continue to be rewarded by polite society.”
Who did Jenrick damn? Blair, of course, and Alastair Campbell, naturally, and Starmer’s newly-minted national security advisor, Jonathan Powell. But who did he not? The Tory guilty men.
We can ignore journalistic noises off such as 2003’s Michael “I can’t fight my feelings any more: I love Tony” Gove (“Central to any current assessment of Mr Blair has to be the manner in which he is handling the Iraq crisis … Indeed, he’s braver in some respects than Maggie was”) or 2005’s Douglas “Neoconservatism: Why We Need It” Murray. These men didn’t cause the disastrous wars; they merely cheered them on and got them wrong.
Whereas, from the then leader of the opposition, Iain Duncan Smith, compliantly failing to cause Blair any domestic political difficulty over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (due to his imbecilic support for them), to the Tory prime ministers after 2010 who, in office, presided over their humiliating ends for this country, Tory guilt is stark and, as yet, still unaddressed.
Compare this silence with what Trump did as a mere primary candidate. At the February 2016 Republican debate in South Carolina, he humiliated every other man on the stage by dismissing with contempt their steadfast support for these catastrophes. Or so it surely seems now.
Back then, honestly recalled, yet again it was an instance of “he’s really done it this time” for blowhard conservative pundits on both sides of the Atlantic — who assumed that challenging unthinking right-wing shibboleths, such as preposterous, insulting claims about the military triumphs ongoing in Baghdad and Kabul, would doom Trump’s quixotic bid for the nomination.
Far from it: ordinary American conservatives responded with tumultuous gratitude to a would-be leader who would finally tell them the truth. Sadly, the British right is at least a provincial decade behind.
What should NATO do for us? To answer this question we need to know two things above all others: what threatens us, and what should we want? The former is simple to answer, in negative form anyway: Russia does not threaten us. It might want to, and certainly has tried to.
But it is in truth a pathetic, feeble state which cannot. “Mussolini with nukes” hardly covers it, as at least Il Duce managed to win his wars against feeble foes. Putin can’t even manage that against Ukraine. This point cannot be made emphatically enough.
Tellingly, the unrepentant fools on the right who supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the ones who argue that Ukraine is still there but for the grace of God, and, according to grifting inclination, the lavish supplies with which the West has either munificently supplied Kyiv, or insufficiently provided.
In fact, the thing that must be noted is how Russia’s war of choice has failed utterly despite her prodigious external aid.
Where exactly has that come from? Us, “the West” (Britain certainly included, with our own plentiful and obvious sanction-busting businesses). The Europeans, most noticeably Germany — risibly so, in terms of her vastly increased trade supposedly with the paltry economies of central Asia, if palpably really with Moscow.
But it has also come from the continent’s ongoing hunger for Russian energy, as the madmen in the EU, in the manner of our own unlamented Tory government, divorce themselves from any domestic ability to provide it themselves instead, because of their allegiance likewise to absurd green dogma. And then there’s China, into whose waiting arms we have gifted resource-rich Russia.
Looked at this way, it’s a marvel that a country as badly governed as Putin’s Russia has sustained its war this long. We and the Americans are rich: we were able to pay for our follies in Afghanistan and Iraq for so much longer after all. If, therefore, we conclude Russia remains, as she has done since the end of the Cold War, no serious threat to the UK, the question remains: what should we want?
It is not “what do we want?” We know that from every aching sigh from everyone centrally involved with British foreign policy: they want their “special relationship”. They want Atlanticism. If NATO has a purpose for them, it’s hardly to provide a defence against a threat which manifestly doesn’t exist; it’s to better secure American patronage. Why?
What does subordinating ourselves to American needs and wants actually do for us? Our willingness to humiliate ourselves over the Chagos archipelago comes most painfully not from the liberal legal proceduralism which saw Starmer want to give the islands away, but in the degrading fact that we could not even divest ourselves of this pretended British possession without American permission.
This country is not immortal. Maybe we will be here in a century in something like our current state; maybe we won’t. Nor, though, are political parties undying either. The Tories have learned nothing from the worst defeat in their long history. They have noticed nothing either of the fate of other conservative parties overseas who also failed to deliver what their should-have-been supporters actually wanted.
Reform now provides an opportunity for British conservative voters to say to those who would lead them what ordinary American conservative voters said to their leaders as far back as 2016: we do not want what you want; what you want has not worked. The Tories would be wise, however late in the game, not to sit back and idly let Nigel Farage give them the answer.
By definition, NATO is an alliance based on shared values. The founding charter’s preamble proclaims a treaty of states “determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage, and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty, and the rule of law”. Ideally, this unity of purpose serves as the plaster that binds “efforts for collective defence” and the “preservation of peace and security”.
This ordering principle, present at its creation, has remained a popular refrain throughout the alliance’s evolution. Of late, former President Biden served as its most zealous evangelist, regularly praising NATO as the key bulwark in a Manichean struggle between democracy and autocracy. In the former president’s telling, an alliance that was once regimented to deter Soviet aggression in Western Europe had matured into something grander.
In a highly publicised speech delivered in Warsaw one month after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden explained that “the battle for democracy could not conclude and did not conclude with the end of the Cold War”. To the contrary, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world “emerged anew in the great battle for freedom: a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force”. America’s “sacred obligation” to her NATO allies would serve as the bedrock upon which the “full force of our collective power” rests.
President Trump will offer a study in contrast. Whereas recent occupants of the Resolute desk have discussed NATO as a values-based alliance — expressing familiar exhortations to democracy, freedom, and the rule of law — Trump has repeatedly stressed the financial burdens imposed on the US by its weaker allies. He has also questioned the tangible benefits of the alliance for the United States.
“Europe is in for a tiny fraction of the money that we’re in. We have a thing called the ocean in between us, right?” he pondered frankly at a recent press conference at Mar-A-Lago. “Why are we in for billions and billions of dollars more than Europe?”
Of course, those stated principles were always more aspirational than authentic. From its signing, the democratic values that supposedly braced the security collective were mostly bunk. Prime Minister António de Oliveira Salazar’s Estado Novo in Portugal might be catalogued as corporatist or clerical-fascist but nobody confused it with a democracy. Turkey and Greece, who entered the alliance at the 1952 Lisbon meeting, routinely wobbled from democratic governance to military dictatorship. The stark irony of the alliance expanding to include two undemocratic countries — their accession minted in the capital of a third — went unremarked upon.
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The “values” rhetoric reached its climax in the aftermath of the Cold War with the alliance victorious but suddenly locked in a novel existential crisis. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, depriving NATO of its primary adversary, member states found themselves searching for a collective purpose. Originally designed to counter communism (politically) and provide collective defence against the USSR (militarily), NATO struggled to adapt to this new geopolitical landscape.
The ensuing debate hinged on NATO’s relevance as a stabilising force after the Soviet collapse. In a 1989 speech delivered in Mainz, President George H.W. Bush introduced the concept of “Europe Whole and Free” and thus universally bound by liberal democracy. Reflecting on the providence bestowed upon member states, he remarked, “This inheritance is possible because 40 years ago the nations of the West joined in that noble, common cause called NATO. And first, there was the vision, the concept of free peoples in North America and Europe working to protect their values.”
From his vantage point at the Rome Summit in 1991, Secretary-General Manfred Wörner observed, “We need a new picture of NATO, not as a military alliance confronting the Soviet Union, but as a military alliance confronting instability and uncertainty; and as a political alliance gaining in importance for establishing and carrying out this new European and world order.”
This vision was not without its detractors. The presidential candidate Pat Buchanan argued the alliance had outlived its original purpose after the Soviet Union’s collapse and that the United States should reconsider its military commitments in Europe. In A Republic, Not an Empire, Buchanan pronounced, “The US should withdraw all its ground troops from Europe and amend the NATO treaty so that involvement in future European wars is an option, not a certainty.”
Criticism was not confined to the harangues of the cable news set. François Mitterrand departed from conventional logic, explaining to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that he was “personally in favour of gradually dismantling the military blocs”.
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This debate over NATO’s purpose after the Cold War was never fully settled, but the declamatory commitment to shared values gained momentum with the alliance’s eastward lurch. NATO ploughed through a crumpled Iron Curtain, absorbing former Soviet Bloc countries in its wake. Officials validated enlargement as a means of fortifying liberal governance in Europe.
This logic has been tested as NATO has frequently tolerated democratic backsliding within its own ranks. Lately, these tensions have come into sharp relief, raising uncomfortable questions about whether NATO can credibly present itself as a coalition of democracies when some member states accuse others of authoritarianism.
More recently, the European Parliament issued a statement that Hungary can “no longer be considered a full democracy”, expounding that governance in Budapest had “deteriorated such that Hungary has become an ‘electoral autocracy’”. Less remarked upon are the behaviours of newer members — including rampant corruption, organised crime, and political turmoil across Eastern Europe and the Balkans — which belie NATO’s double standard on democratic governance.
At least in the United States, none of this matters. The pitch for defending democracy has already fallen on deaf ears. In a recent survey examining Americans’ top foreign policy concerns, the promotion of global democracy ranked last. Of course, the corresponding report concedes “democracy promotion has typically been at the bottom of Americans’ list of foreign policy priorities, even dating back to George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s administrations”.
More alarmingly for friends of the transatlantic alliance, such emergent scepticism may weaken the values-based case for NATO. This past summer, as the alliance celebrated its diamond jubilee, only 43 per cent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents rate the treaty organisation favourably — a sharp decline from 55 per cent after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
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What explains this negative shift? One might hypothesise that conservatives differ sharply with the alliance’s current raison d’être: namely, aiding Ukraine against Russia. Republicans are unmoved by Democratic talking points — which emerged most fervently from the Biden White House — that the battle for Ukraine and US support for the NATO alliance exists at the frontier of freedom. This divergence has undoubtedly shaped attitudes about the broader transatlantic alliance and Europe’s share of burdens. They also undoubtedly take cues from President Trump.
Meanwhile, a cultural disconnect has developed whereby secular and progressive institutional elites in Brussels scold American conservatives about deeply held cultural priorities. For instance, strongly worded statements from several NATO governments — including France, Germany and the United Kingdom — after the landmark Dobbs ruling (which overturned the US Supreme Court’s earlier Roe v. Wade ruling) obliquely challenged the ritual insistence upon, and strategic necessity of, a collective ethos.
Responding to this affront, Elbridge Colby — the prominent American defence strategist and, more recently, President Trump’s selectee for the influential undersecretary of defense policy slot — remarked: “The very strong statements from several NATO governments on yesterday’s Court decision on abortion are truly striking. I’m not sure they fully appreciate the implication, as they implicitly but profoundly cut against the trope that these alliances are based on shared values.” This matter is a prime example of the NATO bureaucracy’s alignment with and promotion of bien-pensant elite European values clashing with the priorities of the Republican policymakers, elected officials and the constituent base.
American conservatives increasingly prioritise a more narrowly tailored national security posture. After 30 years of mostly failed expeditionary missions that have taken the alliance from the Balkans to Afghanistan and Libya, they are sharpening their focus on the home front. The appetite for prolonged foreign entanglements has evaporated, replaced by a demand for policies that address domestic vulnerabilities and threats to national sovereignty. For many on the right, curbing national debt and inflation, securing the southern border, and countering fentanyl trafficking are more pressing imperatives than underwriting the defence of wealthy and capable security clients.
Substantively, for Republicans, there are legitimate reasons to prioritise issues like the debt, which the IMF recently warned poses “significant risks” to the international economy; our border, where, according to the RAND Corporation, the volume of migrants arriving without prior authorisation is record-breaking; or, deaths from fentanyl, which now surpass combat death from America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam combined.
Such concerns are not unfounded, and they won’t be shouted down. They also matter more to many Americans than demarcation in the Donbas or political applause lines about the defence of some distant democracy.
If the treaty organisation reflects neither the cultural tenets nor security priorities of these Americans, this presents real problems for the future of NATO as a putatively “values-based” alliance. Should the alliance want to celebrate its centenary, real reassembly, around real interests, will be required.
In 2024, reflecting a popular Western belief, former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said: “NATO is the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” Yet just two years earlier in 2022, after a 15-year campaign, NATO was defeated by the Taliban, a rag-tag group of poorly armed insurgents.
How can NATO’s humiliating defeat and Austin’s view be reconciled?
Of course NATO was never the most powerful military alliance in history — that accolade surely goes to the World War II Allies: the U.S., Russia, Britain, and the Commonwealth nations. Nevertheless, after 1945, NATO did its job, did it well, and those of us who served in it were proud to do so.
Since the Berlin Wall’s fall, though, its record has become tarnished. Satisfactory in Kosovo. Humiliated in Afghanistan. Strategic failure looming in Ukraine. Are we really sure NATO is up to the job of defending democratic Europe from a supposedly expansionist Russia in the doomsday scenario of a conventional NATO-Russia war?
The doomsday NATO-Russia war scenario is the defining way to explore this question. “Amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics,” and our strategic analysis needs to start all the way back in NATO’s logistics rear areas, then work forward to a future line of battle on the continent of Europe.
First, unlike Russia, no major NATO nation is industrially mobilized for war, as evidenced by the fact that Russia is still outproducing NATO on 155mm shells for Ukraine. Which, incidentally, gives the lie to the view that Russia is poised to take more of Europe — if we in NATO truly believed this, we would all be mobilizing at speed.
More importantly, it is not clear that NATO could mobilize at the speed or scale needed to produce the levels of equipment, ammunition, and people to match Russia. And certainly not without a long build up that would signal our intent. This is not just about lost industrial capacity, but also lost financial capacity. Of the largest NATO nations, only Germany has a debt to GDP ratio below 100%.
Second, to have the remotest chance of success in this doomsday scenario of a NATO-Russia war, U.S. forces would need to deploy at scale into continental Europe. Even if the U.S. Army was established at the necessary scale — with a 2023 establishment of 473,000, under one third of the current Russian Army, it is not — the overwhelming majority of American equipment and logistics would have to travel by sea.
There, they would be vulnerable to Russian submarine-launched torpedoes and mines. As a former underwater warfare specialist, I do not believe that NATO now has the scale of anti-submarine or mine-warfare forces needed to protect Europe’s sea lines of communication.
Nor, for that matter, would these forces be able to successfully protect Europe’s hydrocarbon imports, in particular oil and LNG so critical to Europe’s economic survival. Losses because of our sea supply vulnerability would not only degrade military production, but also bring accelerating economic hardship to NATO citizens, as soaring prices and energy shortages accompanying an outbreak of war rapidly escalated the political pressure to settle.
Third, our airports, sea ports, training, and logistics bases would be exposed to conventional ballistic missile attack, against which we have extremely limited defenses. Indeed, in the case of the Oreshnik missile, no defense.
An Oreshnik missile arriving at Mach 10+ would devastate a NATO arms factory, or naval, army and air force base. As in Ukraine, Russia’s ballistic campaign would also target our transport, logistics, and energy infrastructure. In 2003, while I was working for the British MOD’s Policy Planning staffs, our post 9/11 threat analysis suggested a successful attack against an LNG terminal, such as Milford Haven, Rotterdam, or Barcelona, would have sub-nuclear consequences. The follow-on economic shock-waves would rapidly ripple across a European continent, now increasingly dependent on LNG
Fourth, unlike Russia, NATO nations’ forces are a heterogenous bunch. My own experience, while leading the offshore training of all European warships at Flag Officer Sea Training in Plymouth, and later working with NATO forces in Afghanistan, was that all NATO forces were exceptionally enthusiastic but had very different levels of technological advancement and trained effectiveness.
Perhaps more contemporarily important, other than a handful of NATO trainers forward deployed in Ukraine, our forces are trained according to a pre-drone “maneuver doctrine" and have no real-world experience of modern peer-to-peer attritional warfighting. Whereas the Russian Army has close to three years experience now, and is unarguably the world's most battle-hardened.
Fifth, NATO’s decision-making system is cumbersome, hampered by the need to constantly communicate from Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe to national capitals — a complexity made worse each time another nation is admitted.
Worse still, NATO cannot do strategy. Shortly after arriving in Afghanistan in 2007, I was shocked to find that NATO had no campaign strategy. In 2022, notwithstanding numerous Russian warnings about NATO expansion constituting a red-line, NATO was wholly unprepared, strategically, for the obvious possibility of war breaking out — as evidenced again by our inability to match Russia’s 155mm shell production.
Even now, in 2025, NATO’s Ukraine strategy is opaque, perhaps best summarized as "double-down and hope.”
In summary, NATO is positioning itself as Europe’s defender, yet lacks the industrial capacity to sustain peer-to-peer warfighting, is wholly dependent on U.S. forces for the remotest chance of success, is unable satisfactorily to defend its sea lines of communication against Russian submarine, or its training and industrial infrastructure against strategic ballistic bombardment, is comprised of a diverse mix of un-bloodied conventional forces, and lacks the capacity to think and act strategically.
An easy NATO victory cannot be assumed, and I am afraid that the opposite looks far more likely to me.
So what? Conventionally, we could now work out how to redress the manifest weaknesses revealed. Strategic audits to confirm the capability gaps. Capability analyses to work out how to fill the gaps. Conferences to decide who does what and where costs should fall. Whilst all the time muddling on, hoping that NATO might eventually prevail in Ukraine, notwithstanding all the evidence to the contrary.
But without unanimous agreement of the NATO nations to increase military investment at scale, we would be lucky to solve these capability shortfalls within ten years, let alone five.
Or we could return to consider — at last — the judgement of many Western realists that NATO expansion was the touchpaper for the Russo-Ukraine War. The Russians warned us, time and again, that such expansion constituted a red line. So too did some of our very greatest strategic thinkers, starting with George Kennan in 1996, Henry Kissinger, Jack Matlock, even Bill Burns in his famous ‘Nyet means Nyet’ diplomatic telegram, and most recently John Mearsheimer with his 2014 forecasts. All ignored.
The truth is that NATO now exists to confront the threats created by its continuing existence. Yet as our scenario shows, NATO does not have the capacity to defeat the primary threat that its continuing existence has created.
So perhaps this is the time to have an honest conversation about the future of NATO, and to ask two questions. How do we return to the sustainable peace in Europe that all sides to the conflict seek? Is NATO the primary obstacle to this sustainable peace?
