In the ‘new global divide’, the last fortnight has not been a happy one for what can variously be called the anti-liberal, anti-rules, populist, authoritarian or radical right side of that divide. The decisive defeat of its figurehead, Victor Orban, in the Hungarian election last weekend is having ripple effects across the world. Meanwhile Donald Trump’s increasingly unhinged presidency has become ever-more bogged down in the still unfolding consequences of his spectacularly ill-judged attack on Iran. Yet whilst the world continues to re-calibrate, post-Brexit Britain remains largely stuck in the same old debates.
The hope and the warning from Hungary
The significance of Orban’s defeat is undeniable - for Hungary, of course, but also for the EU and Ukraine. At the same time, it was also a defeat for his backers, Trump and Putin, and for his many friends and admirers in the ironically global network of populist nationalists, not least Nigel Farage. But Orban’s importance went well beyond these high-level connections. His ideology and, equally important, his money made Hungary a crucial node within that global network, insinuating his influence into every dank crevice of the radical right, perhaps especially those where ethno-nationalism and ‘cultural Christianity’ are to be found lurking.
Thus, as regards the UK, not just Farage but many of the more minor figures who crop up recurrently in this blog have connections of one sort or another with Orban. These include Matthew Goodwin and Frank Furedi (both mentioned, for example, in a post last month), many of those in the overlapping ‘History Reclaimed’, ‘Brains for Brexit’ and ‘Briefings for Britain’ activist groups (discussed, for example, in a post last November), and many of those in the ‘National Conservative’ movement (discussed, for example, in a post in 2023). The latter movement is notable for having enfolded numerous politicians associated with both Tory and Reform parties and many of the ‘intellectuals’ of Brexitism including James Orr, Reform’s recently appointed Head of Policy.
For many of these people Orban’s Hungary became not just a source of funding but an inspiring model. That is worth reflecting upon since, were there ever to be a Reform government, its template would be the authoritarianism and grotesque corruption of the Orban regime [1]. For whilst the end of that regime is certainly a defeat for its admirers, denting their confidence of being in the vanguard of an unstoppable arc of history, it would be quite wrong to imagine it will inspire any change of heart or mind amongst them. And whilst there is inspiration in seeing the Hungarian people defy domestic intimidation and external pressure by voting in droves to throw Orban out, the more important message is of the danger of getting into the situation of that being necessary. After all, not only has Hungary endured sixteen years of misrule but it will also be a long and complex task to undo the damage caused by those years.
Cautious praise for Starmer
Damaging as Orban has been to Hungary and malign as his influence has been upon the wider world, that is nothing compared with the damage being caused by Trump and his administration. Like a great many people, I was much impressed by Mark Carney’s Davos speech earlier this year, precisely because of its crisp articulation of the new global divide and how to respond to it. In brief, what quickly became called the ‘Carney Doctrine’ was a call for “middle powers” to operate and co-operate on the basis of “values-based realism” so as, at least by implication, to navigate around the increasing unpredictability and hostility of the United States.
The immediate context of that speech was the ‘Greenland crisis’ created by Trump’s unprecedented threat to take, possibly by force, the territory of another NATO member. That this seems longer ago than the three months which have actually passed only serves to underscore the validity of Carney’s analysis. Since then, of course, there has been the chaos and devastation caused by Trump’s attack on Iran, including his chilling threat to destroy its “whole civilization” and the now growing rift between the US and China over the US ‘counter-blockade’ of the Strait of Hormuz.
There are several signs that the British government is enacting something like the Carney Doctrine, some of which I outlined in a post in February. Since then, the Iran war has provided further examples of that, most obviously the decision not to join in with it and, most recently, the decision not to participate in the ‘counter-blockade’. For all the many legitimate criticisms of Keir Starmer, he has, as the commentator David Aaronovitch convincingly argues, “got the big one right”.
Along with that, there has been a notable hardening in Starmer’s approach to relations with the US more generally. This hasn’t taken the form of any dramatic statement, and certainly nothing as openly insulting as what Trump has continually said about Starmer and the UK, but at least by implication something has shifted. For example, Starmer recently spoke of being “fed up with the fact that families across the country see their bills go up and down on energy, businesses' bills go up and down on energy because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world”. It is really quite telling to have bracketed Putin and Trump together, and to have denied Trump the courtesy of the title ‘President’. It is certainly difficult to imagine Starmer, or any of his predecessors, speaking of an American President in this way.
And this shift is not just about rhetoric: it is reported (£) that US officials seconded to UK government departments are increasingly being asked to leave meetings when sensitive information is discussed. This is at least conceivably a sign that the government is beginning what would be the long, slow (and expensive) process of following the recent advice of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy to reduce its reliance on the US as a security and defence partner. At the very least, it is a sign of how Trump has banjaxed the UK’s trust in the US as, indeed, he has with almost all America’s major allies (£).
Starmer’s approach to Trump and the Iran war is made politically easier because, for once, he is broadly in line with public opinion. Disapproval of the US military strikes on Iran increased as the war went on, rising to 65% (and approval falling to 16%) prior to the ceasefire (if such it be). Meanwhile, support for the government’s handling of the conflict has risen sharply, albeit only from the low base of 20% in March to 31% at the beginning of April, and albeit still lower than the 35% who think the government is handling it badly [2]. It is difficult to separate out opinion on this issue from the general unpopularity of Starmer and his government, but I think there is fair case that Labour’s policy in this area is close to public opinion or, at least, that the alternative of acting with the US would have been very substantially divergent from public opinion.
Discarding Trump, retaining hubris
The unpopularity of Trump and the war have also had the interesting effect of causing his allies and disciples in other countries to distance themselves from his increasingly deranged conduct. In the UK this has a particular significance because of Brexit, since it was central to the Brexiters’ case that the US in general, and Trump specifically, would provide a solid and supportive geo-political and economic anchor for post-Brexit Britain. That became increasingly indefensible in the face of the Trump Tariffs, the Greenland crisis, and his disparaging remarks about the British military, but has been almost entirely abandoned since the short-lived attempt to argue that the UK should have joined in the attack on Iran.
Thus, in the last few weeks (£), Kemi Badenoch, David Frost, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, and other prominent Brexiters have started to criticise Trump and the Iran war. Farage’s apostasy has been particularly piquant given his previous boasts of his close friendship with ‘Mr. Brexit’ and his interest, expressed as recently as last September, in being appointed as the UK’s Ambassador in Washington. Now, he says merely that “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by”, and professes to be “shocked” by the threat to destroy Iran’s civilization. Perhaps, apart from electoral calculations, Farage also feels slighted, given the recent snub he endured when he attempted to have dinner with Trump in Florida.
However, there is absolutely no reason to think that this volte face on the pro-Brexit right betokens anything remotely like the pragmatism envisaged by the Carney Doctrine. It certainly doesn’t betoken any recognition of the folly of Brexit, in the sense of recognizing that the UK’s strategic interests align with those of the EU and would be better served by being a member of the EU. On the contrary, it betokens a continuation, even an intensification, of the familiar bellicosity, at once hubristic and self-pitying, that lay behind Brexit. For, as I pointed out in a recent post, the accent is always on national humiliation and betrayal.
So, for example, a recent Daily Mail editorial thundered/whined that:
“Even a few short years ago, the prospect of Britain appearing irrelevant on the global stage would have been unthinkable … our great nation is now little more than a bit player in the geopolitical arena. The war on Iran has put a sharp focus on Sir Keir's inglorious role in consigning Britain to the margins.”
It is an almost unbelievably foolish analysis in its assumption that Britain could, or even should, still be a global power and, certainly, an analysis which is entirely ignorant of British history since Suez, if not since 1945. And, in the process, it is redolent of all the delusions about ‘Global Britain’ that permeated the case for Brexit, both as a reason why the UK could ‘go it alone’ and a promise of the glories which would result from doing so.
Going back to the Carney Doctrine, then, such a posture entails a refusal even to accept the basic reality of ‘middle-powerdom’, since to do so would itself be a betrayal of what “our great nation” should be. From that it follows the kinds of cooperation Carney advocates are deemed shameful. Hence, the editorial asked rhetorically, “would a PM with even a smidgen of respect for either the office he holds or the nation have allowed a situation where the Navy was reduced to asking Germany for the loan of a warship?” And hence, elsewhere in the Mail, a report about the “humiliation” our “once-mighty Navy faces begging French fleet for help to patrol our OWN waters” [emphasis in original].
The Brexit blockage
It is certainly true that the erosion of UK defence capacity is a serious problem, as was forcibly spelt out this week by former NATO boss and Labour Party grandee Lord Roberston. It’s also true, by the way, that for several years now UK defence procurement has been scandalously incompetent, rendering what defence spending there has been less effective than it should have been. What is emphatically untrue is that there is anything inherently shameful in working with allied countries so as to share each other’s resources and assets.
Indeed, it is precisely the implication of the Carney Doctrine, and the lesson to be drawn from America’s now at best questionable commitment to NATO, that such cooperation intensifies. For the UK, whilst that cooperation isn’t confined to its European allies, that must principally mean cooperation with them since, as last week’s revelations about Putin’s offensive activity against underwater cables re-emphasised, Russia is the most direct threat to our national security and it is a threat we share with the rest of Europe.
It is therefore hardly surprising that there is renewed discussion of the case to create an EU army, the most recent example being a speech by Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. A rather different, and perhaps more likely, scenario would be to create a European defence capability within the structures of NATO but without reliance on the US, something reported this week in the Wall Street Journal (£) to be under active discussion. Such a capability would not, in itself, be confined to EU members and it seems to be envisaged that the UK could be involved as well as other non-members like Norway and Turkey.
However, at least as reported, the discussions to date are being driven by thinking in Germany and France in particular, and it is difficult to see how such a development could be separated from EU initiatives to boost the capacity of its defence industries. More generally, it is hard to doubt that the centre of gravity of influence and decision-making of a ‘European NATO’ would be the EU simply because the bulk of the countries involved would be members of both. Almost inevitably that would fall foul of the kind of sentiments expressed in the Mail editorial and, indeed, the idea is already being reported in The Sun as “Europe’s secret plan” – not, admittedly outright Brussels-bashing, but certainly there is no suggestion in the report that this plan is something the UK is, could, or should be involved in.
At all events, the prospect of a British government making a whole-hearted commitment to this, or any other version of a regional security alliance, seems remote for so long as the belief that the UK still is, or could be, a global power in its own right remains so entrenched [3]. That belief is part of what brought us Brexit, and it continues to dog post-Brexit Britain. Equally, the Brexit pre-occupation with sovereignty intrudes not as a matter of principle (such an alliance would have no more, and no less, implication for sovereignty than NATO itself) but because of the irrational loathing of, specifically, European sovereignty-sharing.
Marmalade and markets
A clear sign of just how far the UK is from even entertaining something as profound as a Europe-wide integration of defence capabilities can be seen in the hysterical row that broke out this fortnight over – yes – marmalade. In brief, there was a sudden rash of reports that the effect of the government’s plans to align with EU food regulations as part of the (still not agreed) SPS deal would mean that marmalade would have to be called ‘citrus marmalade’. The story was not just confined to the usual tabloids but appeared on the BBC and elsewhere.
Everything about it was stupid. To take the most obvious thing, it isn’t true, because the regulation will allow jars to be marked orange marmalade (or lemon, or grapefruit etc.). For another thing, it will have little practical impact since most marmalades are already labelled in this way (follow this link for more on the whole ‘controversy’, and its relationship to Brexit). However, it would be wrong to add to the list of stupidities the criticism that the issue is a trivial one or, rather, whilst trivial in itself it illustrates two important things.
Firstly, it is actually a downstream ripple of the jingoistic rants about “our great nation” that characterise the discussions of defence, with the issue presented in the Express as an attack on “the nation’s iconic marmalade”, something which according to the BBC has “long been a quintessential British preserve”. In this way, it is an illustration of how deeply embedded this nationalistic hubris is embedded, and how readily it provokes affronted anger. Secondly, the story was presented as an example of Brussels bureaucracy getting in the way of business, and this shows that the meaning of a single market is still not understood. For the point of all these ‘trivial’ regulations is to enable business through harmonization: that is, it removes the barriers of national regulations by creating a single set of trans-national regulations. Just as there could not be an effective national market if each county had its own product regulations, so there cannot be an effective European single market without a shared set of product regulations.
The row quickly morphed into a wider one about the entirety of the dynamic alignment of SPS regulations of which the labelling of marmalade in just one example. This wider row seemed to begin with what the Guardian last weekend rather cheekily called its ‘exclusive’ story about planned government legislation to facilitate such dynamic alignment, which then got picked up by other media outlets including the BBC. Actually, far from being an ‘exclusive’, I discussed this planned legislation in my post two weeks ago and that discussion was itself based upon a report in the Financial Times (£) over a week before that!
At all events, there has been a fresh outburst of screams about ‘Brexit betrayal’ (we might wonder, and wonder at, just how many times it is possible to ‘betray’ something which has so often been betrayed), and beneath that, again, the same inability to understand the meaning of a single market. With tragic inevitability, Daniel Hannan provided one of the best examples of this, showing himself to be still unteachably ignorant about the difference between a free trade agreement and a single market, still hopelessly confused about what ‘mutual recognition’ means, and still pitifully convinced that EU “spite” is the only obstacle to his fantasises.
I’m skipping rather lightly over this as, frankly, I don’t have the strength to unpick all this junk yet again and I suspect most readers of this blog will not need me to do so (although those wanting more detail on the possibly less-well understood rabbit hole of ‘mutual recognition’ will find it in a post from February 2025).
A dangerous obsolescence
The distance between the issues discussed at the beginning of this post and those with which it has finished discloses much about the condition of post-Brexit Britain. The wider world is in a profound state of flux and crisis. Like every other country, Britain is caught up in that. Starmer, to his credit, is at least inching towards a Carney-type recalibration, although he probably lacks the vision, and certainly lacks the political capital, to do much more than that. But the dominant terms of political and media discourse are woefully inadequate for the strategic challenges it poses.
That would no doubt have been true even if Brexit had never happened. But Brexit means that those terms of discourse are inadequate in a particular way, stuck in the lexicon of the 2016 referendum and its aftermath, anchored in a world which is already disappearing from view. That is depressing in itself but, given the nature of the world that is emerging, it is also deeply dangerous.
Notes
[1] For an indication of what would be in store, consider Farage’s financial interest in the cryptocurrency firm Stack BTC (led by that renowned financial mastermind Kwasi Kwarteng) in the context of his policy to deregulate cryptocurrencies and his avowedly anti-globalist, anti-elite party’s reliance upon cryptocurrency donors, most notably Thai-based, McKinsey alumnus, Cambridge graduate Christopher Harborne (aka Chakrit Sakunkrit), and Hong Kong-based, J.P. Morgan alumnus, Oxford graduate Ben Delo. Compare also with the way Trump has used his presidency to enrich himself and his family, not least through his cryptocurrency ventures. Fun fact: in March 2025, Trump granted a pardon to Ben Delo and his two co-founders of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX following their conviction for money-laundering offences.
[2] The 35% disapproval figure probably has to be treated with considerable care. It presumably includes some who, whilst agreeing with the decision not to join in war, are critical of other aspects of how the conflict is being handled (e.g. preparedness to deploy ships to protect UK bases in Cyprus), and it surely includes some who would want the UK to have distanced itself even further from the conflict than Starmer has done (e.g. by refusing any use at all of UK airbases or airspace).
[3] In this context, a re-emerging Brexit-related issue is that of the UK’s bases in Cyprus. As with the Diego Garcia base on the Chagos Islands, the Cyprus facilities are one of the ways Britain retains the vestiges of a global role and, in both cases, their existence, use and role have been brought to prominence during the Iran crisis. Early on in the Brexit negotiations, the future of the Cyprus bases was a matter of considerable complexity and uncertainty but, in the event, proved to be less intractable than the somewhat comparable issue of Gibraltar (the agreement on which, by the way, will come into force this July). Now, partly because of the Iranian drone attacks but also in the light of the (now-suspended) Chagos deal, there are renewed calls in Cyprus for their status to be re-negotiated, and indications that the EU is supportive of those calls. Yet it seems plausible that if the UK were to commit to the development of a regional security alliance along the lines of a ‘European NATO’ these bases could become part of its pooled assets.
Showing posts with label NATO. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NATO. Show all posts
Friday, 17 April 2026
Friday, 23 January 2026
Making sense of the madness
The press of events in the fortnight since my last post has been dizzying and disorientating. Even at the height of the ‘Brexit battles’ it was not so difficult to keep abreast of what is happening, let alone to acquire some degree of analytic distance so as to make sense of it. Indeed, it is perfectly possible that within minutes of publishing today’s post it will be made obsolete or irrelevant by some new shock.
I’m obviously referring to what can be called the ‘Greenland Crisis’, and its scale means that it will be the subject of the whole of this post. So I won’t be able to discuss the latest rash of Tory defections to Reform, important as they are to the politics of Brexitism, except to say that they show the growing difficulty of Reform’s attempts to depict themselves as outsiders and insurgents. Nor will I discuss the reports that the EU is seeking a ‘Farage Clause’ in any ‘reset’ agreement with the UK as insurance against a future government reneging on any such agreement. However, I have done so in a recent article in Byline Times.
In my previous post I argued that Trump’s demand to take over Greenland, rather than his attack on Venezuela, was going to be the crucial tipping point for relations between the US, the EU, and the UK. In particular, I suggested that it gave new urgency to the need to massively deepen UK-EU defence and security cooperation. Subsequently, a slew of articles by rather more heavyweight political commentators made versions of the same point (examples include Gideon Rachman (£), Martin Sandbu (£), and Philip Stephens). It also featured within the much wider tour d’horizon of the current geo-political scene provided by Bronwen Maddox in her annual lecture as Director of the Chatham House think-tank. Nevertheless, I’m not sure that anyone expected the Greenland Crisis to escalate as rapidly as it did, or to at least apparently subside with equal rapidity.
The Greenland crisis
The first key event was last week’s decision by several European NATO countries, including the UK, to send military forces to Greenland to undertake or prepare for training exercises. The numbers were very limited, in the UK’s case reportedly only a single soldier, but the deployment was highly symbolic. One important aspect of that symbolism was that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK aligned with those EU countries taking part.
However, the wider symbolic meaning of the deployment had a degree of ambiguity. Some declared it to be a warning to the US that any attempt to take Greenland by force would be resisted, and it is worth re-iterating that the very possibility of this being its meaning shows the extraordinary situation we are now in. Others presented it as a sign that, just as Trump had demanded, Europeans were stepping up to contribute to NATO’s security rather than just leaving it to America.
The next key event showed that Trump, at least, interpreted it as having the first meaning and took it as an affront, prompting him last weekend to threaten to levy tariffs on goods from the UK and the EU, or at least those EU countries which had sent forces [1]. Yet this response was itself open to two interpretations. One was that Trump was showing he would attack those who defied him, and in that sense was a show of strength. The other was that, by making it an economic rather than a military attack, it showed the limits to his strength because he was signalling that he did not intend to take control of Greenland militarily in the face of the resolve shown by Europeans (if only because he would not have domestic political support for doing so). That he does not now intend to do so was stated explicitly in his subsequent, rambling Davos speech on Wednesday, during which he repeatedly confused Greenland with Iceland, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the fear that he would do so arose from his own previous statements. He created the crisis.
Then, abruptly, later on Wednesday, Trump announced that he had struck the “framework of a deal” with Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, and that the threat of ‘Greenland tariffs’ had been withdrawn. The nature of this framework remains unclear, and its details have not been finalized, but it seems sure to fall short of what had been the demand for Greenland to become unequivocally part of the United States. It may even be scarcely different to the existing situation. Many analysts attribute Trump’s about-turn to the stock market falls his tariff threats had caused earlier in the week, just as bond market reaction led him to retreat from many of his ‘liberation day’ tariff threats last year.
Of course, trying to explain or make sense of Trump’s words and actions is difficult since he has always been capricious and now appears to be going senile. It is certainly impossible to predict what he may do in the future. He may decide ‘the deal’ he has done with Rutte is not good enough. He may change his mind about the Greenland tariffs again. Or he may revert to his threats to take Greenland by force. What is clear is that his motivations are bound up with his monstrously rapacious ego, as shown by the insane letter he sent to the Norwegian Prime Minister in which he linked his designs on Greenland to his pique at not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Even so, it would be a mistake to ignore that, Trump’s baroque psychology and mafia boss persona aside, Washington’s conduct is also driven by the hard-eyed men who have re-drawn the entire shape of US foreign policy. For them, US ‘hemispheric hegemony’ is not about placating ‘a King gone mad’ but a deadly serious ideological project which, amongst other things, dispenses with the idea of NATO as a vehicle for collective security. Trump may like that idea for egotistical reasons, but his henchmen have their own motivations and, even if the attempt to annex Greenland founders, those motivations remain intact. At all events, as Bronwen Maddox argues, it cannot be assumed that the US is going to “snap back” to its traditional post-WW2 posture, even once Trump has gone. Nor has the apparent resolution of the immediate crisis over Greenland ended the wider crisis faced by NATO and multi-lateral institutions more generally.
The unavoidability of choice
For the UK, this means that Keir Starmer’s continuing insistence that there is no choice to be made between its relations with the US and the EU is becoming ever-more implausible. The decision to be included in both statements and military deployments with Denmark, France, Germany etc. was a decision to side with Europe against the US, if only because that is how Trump interpreted it. And Starmer’s insistence on Greenland’s sovereignty and criticism of Trump’s tariff threat, an insistence which has always been unambiguous and became more robust as the week went on, is also a choice to side with the EU and against the US, and has also been interpreted by Trump in that way. On the other hand, his implication during this week that, unlike the EU, he was not prepared to retaliate against the tariff threats could be interpreted, if not as siding with the US, then at least as not showing solidarity with the EU.
I don’t mean by this that there’s any real prospect that Starmer will ever openly acknowledge that there is a choice to be made, nor that he needs to. I mean that, acknowledged or not, there is no decision the UK can take, and no statement it can make, including taking no decisions or making no statements, which avoids that choice. The choice, or at least the sub-choices within it, have to be made because they cannot not be made.
This situation would pose acute problems for the UK even if it were still a member of the EU (just as it does for the EU, itself, its individual members, and for other countries around the world), but Brexit undoubtedly makes it far worse. To take the most obvious example, were there to be a trade war with the US, over Greenland or anything else, then the UK would be far better placed if it were an EU member, both in terms of its offensive capacity (against the US) and its defensive capacity (integrated trade within the single market).
However, it is the wider, strategic issues which are even more important. The Brexiter insistence that the EU was irrelevant to UK security, which they claimed was entirely catered for by a US-led NATO, which was always ill-informed, is now exposed as the greatest strategic miscalculation in modern British history. And, not coincidentally, those who still support that miscalculation are the very same people – Farage, Hannan, Johnson, Rees-Mogg etc. – who hailed Trump as the great ally of Britain. In this sense Britain faces a double problem in addressing the US-EU choice: first, the damage of Brexit itself and, second, the continuing influence of Brexitism.
A second chance for Starmer
This being so, Keir Starmer has the possibility both to address the strategic failure of Brexit and to gain domestic political advantage over Reform and marginalize Brexitism, as I've been arguing for at least a year when I wrote that:
“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel. Similarly, resistance to closer EU ties from the Conservatives and their media supporters could be positioned as undermining Britain’s staunch support for its allies.”
That opportunity has not, to date, been taken, although, recently, Starmer has been slightly more willing to mention at least the economic damage of Brexit and to draw attention to Farage’s pro-Russian affinities. The opportunity re-presents itself, now, because the way in which Trump has bullied and belittled the UK this week, including his dismissive remarks about NATO, and therefore British troops, in Afghanistan, will have been offensive to the majority of British voters. This makes it a good time to remind them of Farage’s adoration of the American President and, more generally, to justify the case for recalibrating towards the EU.
Farage is evidently well aware of his vulnerability on this score, hence his criticism of Trump’s tariff threat, and he also stated his support for Greenland’s right to self-determination, but he cannot completely protect himself from it since – perhaps from his own fear of Trump publicly attacking him – in the same breath he argued that it would be desirable if the US owned Greenland. Whilst Starmer did not say the latter, he is unable fully to capitalise on Farage’s vulnerability because his own response had a degree of similarity in that both men criticised the Greenland tariff threat, but both highlighted the UK’s ability to negotiate with the US over trade terms as being advantageous.
For Farage, that is taken to be a vindication of Brexit, for Starmer it is taken to be a vindication of his attempts to manage Trump. But, on either account, it is a specious argument: the reality is that the so-called US-UK trade deal, supposedly agreed last year, was limited in scope, has still not been fully implemented, and seems to be subject to ongoing negotiation. In any case, it is always liable to fall victim to Trump’s caprice since, for him, ‘the art of the deal’ is that a deal is never done and can always be reneged upon or made subject to new demands (the same may well apply to the supposed ‘deal’ over Greenland).
Indeed, the latest reports are that the US is still pushing hard to get the UK to adopt US standards in various areas, including food and agriculture, and, more complex but also important, for the UK to recognize US conformity assessment bodies [2]. If that were to happen, then even the modest reset with the EU would become impossible, especially as regards an SPS agreement. So here, again, the UK faces a choice between the US and the EU.
Fine lines and hot takes
One thing which the last week’s events have made abundantly clear is just how difficult it is to navigate that choice. Having been fairly robust in his support for Greenland’s sovereignty and in his criticism of the tariff threat in a speech on Monday morning, the following night Starmer was subjected to Trump’s vicious verbal assault on the “stupidity” of the UK’s Chagos Islands deal, citing it as one of the reasons for his claims on Greenland. He had never made that linkage before, and it is significant that over the day or two prior to that, numerous figures on the British right, including Farage, had been doing so, though in a different way to Trump, by claiming that there was an inconsistency between Starmer’s defence of Greenland’s sovereignty with his supposed betrayal of Britain’s sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. It’s a ridiculous argument, on multiple levels (not least because the Chagos deal has a legal basis), as is Trump’s argument that the Chagos deal, which he previously supported, damages US security interests (since the UK-US base there is protected).
I can’t be bothered to unpick all that, but my point is that it seems clear that it only occurred to Trump to link Chagos and Greenland because his ideological soulmates in Britain were doing so. Indeed, it has since emerged that it may have come about because of remarks made by Kemi Badenoch to the US Speaker on Monday evening. At all events, whereas there was a brief moment early on Monday when all UK political parties, including Reform, were united in objecting to Trump’s Greenland tariffs, by Tuesday both Reform and the Tories were attacking Labour over Chagos and saying that about that, at least, Trump was right. Tellingly, that great patriot Farage was delighted at the prospect of ‘sovereign Britain’ being told what to do by a foreign leader (equally tellingly, it looks as if he was wrong). Thus, whether by accident or design, Trump’s outburst had the effect of splintering the nascent consensus against him within the UK polity and, as Starmer rightly said during Prime Minister’s Questions, by endorsing Trump’s criticism of the Chagos deal Kemi Badenoch (and others) were supporting his attempt to punish the UK for standing up to his demands for Greenland.
Moreover, many news outlets, including the BBC, started to report Trump’s attack on the UK as demonstrating that Starmer’s approach to handling Trump through flattery and sycophancy had failed. That reporting was deeply wrong-headed. In fact, Trump’s attack showed two things. One is just the sheer impossibility of dealing with a President who is unpredictable, dishonest, and very possibly mentally ill. The other, which those criticising Starmer for not being bolder should ponder, is that by departing only slightly from the ‘flattery and sycophancy’ approach, with a politely-worded criticism of the Greenland policy and tariff threat, Starmer immediately faced a thuggish response from Trump and, with it, accusations from the Conservatives that he was failing to maintain ‘the special relationship’. In any case, these events also showed that it is unwise to provide ‘hot takes’, especially in relation to Trump, because by the end of the week the BBC and others were at least implying that Starmer had handled the crisis effectively.
The Carney doctrine
Whatever now happens with respect to Greenland, which is very far from clear, there can be little doubt that the events of the last fortnight have crystallised the situation which has been developing since at least the re-election of Trump. The UK’s choice between the US and the EU is only one manifestation of the wider choices this situation poses. For, as the Bronwen Maddox lecture I linked to earlier suggests, the Greenland crisis is only one instance of a much bigger transformation in the global order, a point also made this week by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Previously, I’ve written about this transformation in terms of a ‘new global divide’, as profound as that of the Cold War, between a broadly, if imperfectly, liberal, rational-legal framework for international relations, and an international order based solely on power-plays and gangsterism (and, as the use of increasingly unconstrained paramilitary violence and the erosion of the rule of law by Trump’s regime shows, this applies to the domestic order as well). A naked illustration of this gangsterism is Trump’s latest plan to create a ‘Board of Peace’ to oversee Gaza and, potentially, other conflict zones. This body will be chaired by Trump during his lifetime, with power to hire and fire its members and to name his successor, and with permanent members reportedly required to pay $1 billion into a fund personally controlled by Trump.
The nature and implications of this new global divide were articulated with great cogency in a widely-admired speech given by the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Davos this week. It was a speech which may well come to be seen as being as epoch-defining as Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech in Missouri almost exactly eighty years ago. Carney spoke of the concept of “values-based realism”, a combination of principle and pragmatism, whereby “middle powers” could and should respond to a world in which multilateral institutions have been diminished and “great powers” seek to act as regional or even global hegemons. Note that this does not imply ‘having nothing to do’ with those hegemons, or publicly vilifying them. Certainly as regards the US, that is a luxury that Canada, like the UK and most other countries, does not have. The issue is how to navigate relations with them.
It was an optimistic speech in suggesting such navigation was possible, but by no means an idealistic one. Pragmatism demands some unpalatable choices such as, implicitly, Canada’s recent trade deal with China. It was also realistic in insisting that – as, in Britain, Brexit should have taught us – “nostalgia is not a strategy”, meaning that the old order, effectively that established since the time of Churchill’s Missouri speech, is not coming back. However, that does not mean that the future order must necessarily be dictated by hegemons and characterised by gangsterism.
Above all, Carney’s speech stressed the centrality of cooperation amongst middle powers:
“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”
It is at least possible to interpret Trump’s apparent climbdown over Greenland as a vindication of this, in that it came when faced with the concerted opposition of numerous countries and other actors, including market actors (the two are linked, since a big reason for the stock market falls was the possibility of EU retaliation). But, even if so, the Carney doctrine calls for more than co-ordinated diplomacy; it requires the development of substantive co-operation amongst middle powers over defence, security, and trade.
Thus, although speaking primarily about Canada, Carney’s speech can be read as a general prescription for middle powers, of which the UK is one, in the rapidly emerging new order. It can also be read, not coincidentally, as a devastating repudiation of the core propositions of Brexiters and of Brexitism. Taking those two readings together, the Carney Doctrine could offer the UK a chance of moving forward from Brexit. It’s no longer a matter of revisiting the decision made in 2016. The Greenland crisis has been a stark reminder that, in 2026, the brutal realities of global politics impose their own imperatives on national strategy, and mandate a new and better decision about its direction.
Whether domestic politics will allow such a decision to be made is an open question. It is doubtful whether the present government is capable of rising to the challenge. But it is beyond doubt that a Reform, or Reform-Tory, government, still entirely committed to the logic of Brexit and Brexitism, would be totally incapable of doing so.
Notes
[1] Many commentators wondered if it is possible for the US to levy tariffs on individual EU members, given that the EU trades as a single tariff entity (i.e. the customs union). The trade expert Sam Lowe has explained that the short answer is that it is. However, because it is a single tariff entity, any retaliation against the US would have to be made by the EU and not its individual members.
[2] I don’t have space to discuss it here, but conformity assessment is, as an anonymous source in the Politico report aptly describes it, the “invisible infrastructure that no one really knows about but which keeps everyone safe”. It also has much salience to Brexit, including to the ‘reset’, because it is at the heart of why regulatory alignment does not in itself give market access, and amongst other things explains the strange situation whereby foodstuffs may meet EU standards but are nevertheless marked ‘Not for the EU’ when sold in British shops. And of course conformity assessment marking lies behind one of the most abject farces of the Brexit saga, namely the abandoned attempt to replace CE marks with UKCA marks.
I’m obviously referring to what can be called the ‘Greenland Crisis’, and its scale means that it will be the subject of the whole of this post. So I won’t be able to discuss the latest rash of Tory defections to Reform, important as they are to the politics of Brexitism, except to say that they show the growing difficulty of Reform’s attempts to depict themselves as outsiders and insurgents. Nor will I discuss the reports that the EU is seeking a ‘Farage Clause’ in any ‘reset’ agreement with the UK as insurance against a future government reneging on any such agreement. However, I have done so in a recent article in Byline Times.
In my previous post I argued that Trump’s demand to take over Greenland, rather than his attack on Venezuela, was going to be the crucial tipping point for relations between the US, the EU, and the UK. In particular, I suggested that it gave new urgency to the need to massively deepen UK-EU defence and security cooperation. Subsequently, a slew of articles by rather more heavyweight political commentators made versions of the same point (examples include Gideon Rachman (£), Martin Sandbu (£), and Philip Stephens). It also featured within the much wider tour d’horizon of the current geo-political scene provided by Bronwen Maddox in her annual lecture as Director of the Chatham House think-tank. Nevertheless, I’m not sure that anyone expected the Greenland Crisis to escalate as rapidly as it did, or to at least apparently subside with equal rapidity.
The Greenland crisis
The first key event was last week’s decision by several European NATO countries, including the UK, to send military forces to Greenland to undertake or prepare for training exercises. The numbers were very limited, in the UK’s case reportedly only a single soldier, but the deployment was highly symbolic. One important aspect of that symbolism was that, Brexit notwithstanding, the UK aligned with those EU countries taking part.
However, the wider symbolic meaning of the deployment had a degree of ambiguity. Some declared it to be a warning to the US that any attempt to take Greenland by force would be resisted, and it is worth re-iterating that the very possibility of this being its meaning shows the extraordinary situation we are now in. Others presented it as a sign that, just as Trump had demanded, Europeans were stepping up to contribute to NATO’s security rather than just leaving it to America.
The next key event showed that Trump, at least, interpreted it as having the first meaning and took it as an affront, prompting him last weekend to threaten to levy tariffs on goods from the UK and the EU, or at least those EU countries which had sent forces [1]. Yet this response was itself open to two interpretations. One was that Trump was showing he would attack those who defied him, and in that sense was a show of strength. The other was that, by making it an economic rather than a military attack, it showed the limits to his strength because he was signalling that he did not intend to take control of Greenland militarily in the face of the resolve shown by Europeans (if only because he would not have domestic political support for doing so). That he does not now intend to do so was stated explicitly in his subsequent, rambling Davos speech on Wednesday, during which he repeatedly confused Greenland with Iceland, but it shouldn’t be forgotten that the fear that he would do so arose from his own previous statements. He created the crisis.
Then, abruptly, later on Wednesday, Trump announced that he had struck the “framework of a deal” with Mark Rutte, the head of NATO, and that the threat of ‘Greenland tariffs’ had been withdrawn. The nature of this framework remains unclear, and its details have not been finalized, but it seems sure to fall short of what had been the demand for Greenland to become unequivocally part of the United States. It may even be scarcely different to the existing situation. Many analysts attribute Trump’s about-turn to the stock market falls his tariff threats had caused earlier in the week, just as bond market reaction led him to retreat from many of his ‘liberation day’ tariff threats last year.
Of course, trying to explain or make sense of Trump’s words and actions is difficult since he has always been capricious and now appears to be going senile. It is certainly impossible to predict what he may do in the future. He may decide ‘the deal’ he has done with Rutte is not good enough. He may change his mind about the Greenland tariffs again. Or he may revert to his threats to take Greenland by force. What is clear is that his motivations are bound up with his monstrously rapacious ego, as shown by the insane letter he sent to the Norwegian Prime Minister in which he linked his designs on Greenland to his pique at not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Even so, it would be a mistake to ignore that, Trump’s baroque psychology and mafia boss persona aside, Washington’s conduct is also driven by the hard-eyed men who have re-drawn the entire shape of US foreign policy. For them, US ‘hemispheric hegemony’ is not about placating ‘a King gone mad’ but a deadly serious ideological project which, amongst other things, dispenses with the idea of NATO as a vehicle for collective security. Trump may like that idea for egotistical reasons, but his henchmen have their own motivations and, even if the attempt to annex Greenland founders, those motivations remain intact. At all events, as Bronwen Maddox argues, it cannot be assumed that the US is going to “snap back” to its traditional post-WW2 posture, even once Trump has gone. Nor has the apparent resolution of the immediate crisis over Greenland ended the wider crisis faced by NATO and multi-lateral institutions more generally.
The unavoidability of choice
For the UK, this means that Keir Starmer’s continuing insistence that there is no choice to be made between its relations with the US and the EU is becoming ever-more implausible. The decision to be included in both statements and military deployments with Denmark, France, Germany etc. was a decision to side with Europe against the US, if only because that is how Trump interpreted it. And Starmer’s insistence on Greenland’s sovereignty and criticism of Trump’s tariff threat, an insistence which has always been unambiguous and became more robust as the week went on, is also a choice to side with the EU and against the US, and has also been interpreted by Trump in that way. On the other hand, his implication during this week that, unlike the EU, he was not prepared to retaliate against the tariff threats could be interpreted, if not as siding with the US, then at least as not showing solidarity with the EU.
I don’t mean by this that there’s any real prospect that Starmer will ever openly acknowledge that there is a choice to be made, nor that he needs to. I mean that, acknowledged or not, there is no decision the UK can take, and no statement it can make, including taking no decisions or making no statements, which avoids that choice. The choice, or at least the sub-choices within it, have to be made because they cannot not be made.
This situation would pose acute problems for the UK even if it were still a member of the EU (just as it does for the EU, itself, its individual members, and for other countries around the world), but Brexit undoubtedly makes it far worse. To take the most obvious example, were there to be a trade war with the US, over Greenland or anything else, then the UK would be far better placed if it were an EU member, both in terms of its offensive capacity (against the US) and its defensive capacity (integrated trade within the single market).
However, it is the wider, strategic issues which are even more important. The Brexiter insistence that the EU was irrelevant to UK security, which they claimed was entirely catered for by a US-led NATO, which was always ill-informed, is now exposed as the greatest strategic miscalculation in modern British history. And, not coincidentally, those who still support that miscalculation are the very same people – Farage, Hannan, Johnson, Rees-Mogg etc. – who hailed Trump as the great ally of Britain. In this sense Britain faces a double problem in addressing the US-EU choice: first, the damage of Brexit itself and, second, the continuing influence of Brexitism.
A second chance for Starmer
This being so, Keir Starmer has the possibility both to address the strategic failure of Brexit and to gain domestic political advantage over Reform and marginalize Brexitism, as I've been arguing for at least a year when I wrote that:
“Starmer has a real opportunity to exert leadership, and in the process has been gifted an opportunity to release Britain from the drift and dither to which it has been consigned by Brexit. He could, in one bound, position the UK as an international beacon of probity, as a strong regional partner, and perhaps even as a galvanizing convenor of medium-sized and small powers, and in the process marginalize Farage as an unpatriotic scoundrel. Similarly, resistance to closer EU ties from the Conservatives and their media supporters could be positioned as undermining Britain’s staunch support for its allies.”
That opportunity has not, to date, been taken, although, recently, Starmer has been slightly more willing to mention at least the economic damage of Brexit and to draw attention to Farage’s pro-Russian affinities. The opportunity re-presents itself, now, because the way in which Trump has bullied and belittled the UK this week, including his dismissive remarks about NATO, and therefore British troops, in Afghanistan, will have been offensive to the majority of British voters. This makes it a good time to remind them of Farage’s adoration of the American President and, more generally, to justify the case for recalibrating towards the EU.
Farage is evidently well aware of his vulnerability on this score, hence his criticism of Trump’s tariff threat, and he also stated his support for Greenland’s right to self-determination, but he cannot completely protect himself from it since – perhaps from his own fear of Trump publicly attacking him – in the same breath he argued that it would be desirable if the US owned Greenland. Whilst Starmer did not say the latter, he is unable fully to capitalise on Farage’s vulnerability because his own response had a degree of similarity in that both men criticised the Greenland tariff threat, but both highlighted the UK’s ability to negotiate with the US over trade terms as being advantageous.
For Farage, that is taken to be a vindication of Brexit, for Starmer it is taken to be a vindication of his attempts to manage Trump. But, on either account, it is a specious argument: the reality is that the so-called US-UK trade deal, supposedly agreed last year, was limited in scope, has still not been fully implemented, and seems to be subject to ongoing negotiation. In any case, it is always liable to fall victim to Trump’s caprice since, for him, ‘the art of the deal’ is that a deal is never done and can always be reneged upon or made subject to new demands (the same may well apply to the supposed ‘deal’ over Greenland).
Indeed, the latest reports are that the US is still pushing hard to get the UK to adopt US standards in various areas, including food and agriculture, and, more complex but also important, for the UK to recognize US conformity assessment bodies [2]. If that were to happen, then even the modest reset with the EU would become impossible, especially as regards an SPS agreement. So here, again, the UK faces a choice between the US and the EU.
Fine lines and hot takes
One thing which the last week’s events have made abundantly clear is just how difficult it is to navigate that choice. Having been fairly robust in his support for Greenland’s sovereignty and in his criticism of the tariff threat in a speech on Monday morning, the following night Starmer was subjected to Trump’s vicious verbal assault on the “stupidity” of the UK’s Chagos Islands deal, citing it as one of the reasons for his claims on Greenland. He had never made that linkage before, and it is significant that over the day or two prior to that, numerous figures on the British right, including Farage, had been doing so, though in a different way to Trump, by claiming that there was an inconsistency between Starmer’s defence of Greenland’s sovereignty with his supposed betrayal of Britain’s sovereignty over the Chagos Islands. It’s a ridiculous argument, on multiple levels (not least because the Chagos deal has a legal basis), as is Trump’s argument that the Chagos deal, which he previously supported, damages US security interests (since the UK-US base there is protected).
I can’t be bothered to unpick all that, but my point is that it seems clear that it only occurred to Trump to link Chagos and Greenland because his ideological soulmates in Britain were doing so. Indeed, it has since emerged that it may have come about because of remarks made by Kemi Badenoch to the US Speaker on Monday evening. At all events, whereas there was a brief moment early on Monday when all UK political parties, including Reform, were united in objecting to Trump’s Greenland tariffs, by Tuesday both Reform and the Tories were attacking Labour over Chagos and saying that about that, at least, Trump was right. Tellingly, that great patriot Farage was delighted at the prospect of ‘sovereign Britain’ being told what to do by a foreign leader (equally tellingly, it looks as if he was wrong). Thus, whether by accident or design, Trump’s outburst had the effect of splintering the nascent consensus against him within the UK polity and, as Starmer rightly said during Prime Minister’s Questions, by endorsing Trump’s criticism of the Chagos deal Kemi Badenoch (and others) were supporting his attempt to punish the UK for standing up to his demands for Greenland.
Moreover, many news outlets, including the BBC, started to report Trump’s attack on the UK as demonstrating that Starmer’s approach to handling Trump through flattery and sycophancy had failed. That reporting was deeply wrong-headed. In fact, Trump’s attack showed two things. One is just the sheer impossibility of dealing with a President who is unpredictable, dishonest, and very possibly mentally ill. The other, which those criticising Starmer for not being bolder should ponder, is that by departing only slightly from the ‘flattery and sycophancy’ approach, with a politely-worded criticism of the Greenland policy and tariff threat, Starmer immediately faced a thuggish response from Trump and, with it, accusations from the Conservatives that he was failing to maintain ‘the special relationship’. In any case, these events also showed that it is unwise to provide ‘hot takes’, especially in relation to Trump, because by the end of the week the BBC and others were at least implying that Starmer had handled the crisis effectively.
The Carney doctrine
Whatever now happens with respect to Greenland, which is very far from clear, there can be little doubt that the events of the last fortnight have crystallised the situation which has been developing since at least the re-election of Trump. The UK’s choice between the US and the EU is only one manifestation of the wider choices this situation poses. For, as the Bronwen Maddox lecture I linked to earlier suggests, the Greenland crisis is only one instance of a much bigger transformation in the global order, a point also made this week by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Previously, I’ve written about this transformation in terms of a ‘new global divide’, as profound as that of the Cold War, between a broadly, if imperfectly, liberal, rational-legal framework for international relations, and an international order based solely on power-plays and gangsterism (and, as the use of increasingly unconstrained paramilitary violence and the erosion of the rule of law by Trump’s regime shows, this applies to the domestic order as well). A naked illustration of this gangsterism is Trump’s latest plan to create a ‘Board of Peace’ to oversee Gaza and, potentially, other conflict zones. This body will be chaired by Trump during his lifetime, with power to hire and fire its members and to name his successor, and with permanent members reportedly required to pay $1 billion into a fund personally controlled by Trump.
The nature and implications of this new global divide were articulated with great cogency in a widely-admired speech given by the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney in Davos this week. It was a speech which may well come to be seen as being as epoch-defining as Churchill’s ‘iron curtain’ speech in Missouri almost exactly eighty years ago. Carney spoke of the concept of “values-based realism”, a combination of principle and pragmatism, whereby “middle powers” could and should respond to a world in which multilateral institutions have been diminished and “great powers” seek to act as regional or even global hegemons. Note that this does not imply ‘having nothing to do’ with those hegemons, or publicly vilifying them. Certainly as regards the US, that is a luxury that Canada, like the UK and most other countries, does not have. The issue is how to navigate relations with them.
It was an optimistic speech in suggesting such navigation was possible, but by no means an idealistic one. Pragmatism demands some unpalatable choices such as, implicitly, Canada’s recent trade deal with China. It was also realistic in insisting that – as, in Britain, Brexit should have taught us – “nostalgia is not a strategy”, meaning that the old order, effectively that established since the time of Churchill’s Missouri speech, is not coming back. However, that does not mean that the future order must necessarily be dictated by hegemons and characterised by gangsterism.
Above all, Carney’s speech stressed the centrality of cooperation amongst middle powers:
“When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”
It is at least possible to interpret Trump’s apparent climbdown over Greenland as a vindication of this, in that it came when faced with the concerted opposition of numerous countries and other actors, including market actors (the two are linked, since a big reason for the stock market falls was the possibility of EU retaliation). But, even if so, the Carney doctrine calls for more than co-ordinated diplomacy; it requires the development of substantive co-operation amongst middle powers over defence, security, and trade.
Thus, although speaking primarily about Canada, Carney’s speech can be read as a general prescription for middle powers, of which the UK is one, in the rapidly emerging new order. It can also be read, not coincidentally, as a devastating repudiation of the core propositions of Brexiters and of Brexitism. Taking those two readings together, the Carney Doctrine could offer the UK a chance of moving forward from Brexit. It’s no longer a matter of revisiting the decision made in 2016. The Greenland crisis has been a stark reminder that, in 2026, the brutal realities of global politics impose their own imperatives on national strategy, and mandate a new and better decision about its direction.
Whether domestic politics will allow such a decision to be made is an open question. It is doubtful whether the present government is capable of rising to the challenge. But it is beyond doubt that a Reform, or Reform-Tory, government, still entirely committed to the logic of Brexit and Brexitism, would be totally incapable of doing so.
Notes
[1] Many commentators wondered if it is possible for the US to levy tariffs on individual EU members, given that the EU trades as a single tariff entity (i.e. the customs union). The trade expert Sam Lowe has explained that the short answer is that it is. However, because it is a single tariff entity, any retaliation against the US would have to be made by the EU and not its individual members.
[2] I don’t have space to discuss it here, but conformity assessment is, as an anonymous source in the Politico report aptly describes it, the “invisible infrastructure that no one really knows about but which keeps everyone safe”. It also has much salience to Brexit, including to the ‘reset’, because it is at the heart of why regulatory alignment does not in itself give market access, and amongst other things explains the strange situation whereby foodstuffs may meet EU standards but are nevertheless marked ‘Not for the EU’ when sold in British shops. And of course conformity assessment marking lies behind one of the most abject farces of the Brexit saga, namely the abandoned attempt to replace CE marks with UKCA marks.
Friday, 16 February 2024
Brexit, Brexitism, and the Trump and Russian threats
In the Brexit debate, discussion of its geo-political damage has often been the poor relation of that of its economic damage. It’s easy to understand why, as the economic damage is more tangible and, to a degree, more quantifiable. The latest evidence of that came this week in a new analysis by Goldman Sachs, the significance of which is that, for the first time, it drew together all of the different counterfactual models, with the headline finding being that that UK GDP is now 5% lower than it would have been without Brexit.
However, ultimately, the geo-political damage may be even more important and more likely to lead to a softening, or even reversal, of Brexit. That isn’t because Brexit is the cause of all Britain’s geo-political problems, any more than EU membership would resolve them, but because Brexit has created additional problems whilst doing nothing at all to help those which would exist anyway.
Geo-politics does not just mean defence, and certainly not just defence in its traditional military meanings, but includes those things along with the wider panoply of security, soft power, diplomacy, and international relations. Thus configured, it is climate change which presents the biggest set of geo-political challenges for Britain, as for every other country, but, for all the urgency of that, those relating to war in its various forms have a particular immediacy.
That immediacy has been ratcheted up several notches by Donald Trump’s latest comments about Russia and NATO, including that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to members not reaching the 2% of GDP defence spending target. That would be a direct violation of the basic principle of mutual defence, leading the NATO Secretary-General to say that the comments “undermine all of our security”.
This comes at a time when, of course, there is a real possibility of a second Trump Presidency and, if that comes about, there are now multiple signs that it would be (even) more extreme than the first one, and far less constrained. The liberal Conservative historian and journalist Anne Applebaum has argued that Trump would “abandon NATO”, even if not formally leaving it. Whether or not that proves true, there can be no doubt of the close affinities between Trump and Putin, something in plain sight last week when Tucker Carlson – who has been described as “perhaps the highest-profile proponent of ‘Trumpism’” – conducted a sycophantic interview with the Russian leader.
General background
I’ve written at length before about the nexus of geo-political issues around Brexit, Trump and Russia, initially when ‘previewing the geo-political costs of Brexit’ at the time of Putin’s poison attacks in Salisbury in March 2018, and then in March 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Much that is in those two posts still stands, and I will avoid repeating them save to briefly draw out three general points.
First, Brexit necessarily fractured the central tenet of UK geo-political strategy by destroying its role as a US-EU bridge. Burning one end of that bridge was bound to fray the other end, under any US Presidency, and the Northern Ireland aspects of Brexit were always potentially liable to cause further tensions in UK-US relations. Equally, whilst a Trump Presidency would have been difficult for the UK even without Brexit, and will be if it recurs, it is a particular delusion of Brexiters that Trump regards Brexit Britain with some kind of special affection. In fact, whilst he may be happy to heap praise on sycophants like Nigel Farage, the idea that he has any interest in what happens to the UK, or even any loyalty to such court jesters, is preposterous.
Secondly, Brexiters showed a crucial strategic ignorance in configuring NATO as the only international organization needed to meet Britain’s security and defence needs, and the EU as entirely irrelevant to these, when, in fact, the two have become increasingly intertwined. That has become even more obvious since the invasion of Ukraine, which also showed the absurdity of the Brexiters’ vision of ‘Global Britain’ and its associated ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’. As the revised Integrated Review of 2023 recognized, the European continent remains the UK’s primary defence theatre and, within that theatre, Russia its sole, but considerable, threat.
Thirdly, even without delving into the murky question of direct Russian interference in the Referendum (a question which could only really be answered by the intelligence services, who were not asked to do so for the 2021 ‘Russia Report’), Brexit was undoubtedly welcome to Putin, and fully consistent with his longstanding attempts to destabilize both the UK and the EU. It is a point insufficiently made to the plastic patriots of Brexit just how comprehensively they played into his hands, even if it cannot be proved that they were his puppets.
The Russian threat and responses to it
These general points provide the background to the current situation. It is one in which the threat of Russia is undeniable. Putin may not have had the swift victory he expected in Ukraine but may salvage something he will be able to claim as victory, especially if a Trump presidency withdraws US support to Kiev, or even without that, if Republican resistance to such support persists. Nor has prosecution of the war prevented continuing Russian aggression, both overt and covert, elsewhere in Europe.
For example, last year, NATO intercepted over 300 Russian planes threatening its airspace, mainly over the Baltic states, with the RAF responsible for at least 50 of these interceptions. Meanwhile, Russian interference and influence in Kosovo and Serbia, Moldova, Bosnia, and Montenegro continued. Just this week Moscow put the Estonian Prime Minister on a so-called ‘wanted list’, as part of its ongoing attempts to bully and intimidate its neighbours. And whilst the 2021 Russia Report may not have delved into the Brexit referendum, it gave no room to doubt the extent of Russian activity in political disinformation campaigns against the UK, whilst as recently as last December the intelligence authorities revealed the ongoing nature of Russian cyber-attacks.
All of this, and more, is what underlies the recent upsurge of concern about the possibility of a major conflict on European soil, including Grant Shapps’ reference to this now being a “pre-war generation” in his first speech as Defence Secretary. Personally, I don’t take Shapps seriously as Defence Secretary or in any other capacity, but I do take seriously the warnings of the Chief of the General Staff. Such warnings certainly should not be dismissed as coming from blimpish or self-interested military ‘brass hats’; for example, the left-wing journalist Paul Mason has been vocal in making the case for Britain to re-arm in the face of the threat from Putin’s Russia.
Moreover, the same warnings are being sounded in several other European countries, building upon pre-existing concerns about Russian aggression, concerns which led, amongst other things, to Sweden and Finland seeking NATO membership. The last barrier to Sweden’s application, approval by Hungary, looks close to being cleared, and the country is already participating in NATO exercises as well as preparing its citizens for the possibility of all-out war. Finland’s membership has already begun, and is being actively operated, with that country, too, being in an advanced stage of readiness for war. Meanwhile, Germany has embarked on a major rearmament programme whilst Poland has doubled the size of its armed forces (£) in recent years and looks set to continue to prioritize defence under its new government. Given these, and similar, developments, British political and military leaders have if anything been rather slow to prepare the public for the threat we face.
The Trumpist-Putinist-Brexitist axis
However, Britain’s capacity to prepare is hobbled, and not just by the fact that we are economically struggling, the more so because of Brexit. It is also because there is a very powerful, if contradictory, axis which undermines attempts to do so.
On the one hand, there are those on the populist right like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson (despite his professed support for Ukraine), and Nigel Farage who are openly supportive of Trump’s re-election, and, at least in the case of Farage, public admirers of Putin. They have been joined this week in their support of Trump by John Hayes, a less well-known but highly influential right-wing Tory MP, and it’s noteworthy, in itself, just how many Tories are lining up to offer such endorsements in what is, after all, a foreign election.
On the other hand, there is the unreconstructed old hard left, including Jeremy Corbyn and the Stop the War Coalition, elements of which are “among the worst disseminators of Kremlin propaganda in the UK”. These are not the words of a ‘Centrist’, still less a Conservative, but of the radical journalist George Monbiot, and the veteran campaigner Peter Tatchell has made similar points.
Spanning these two groups is the peculiar, and peculiarly influential and well-connected, one of the Revolutionary Communist Party turned Libertarians who coalesce around Spiked, which constantly mocks and undermines the warnings about Russia, including these most recent ones.
It is not a coincidence that all three of these groupings are also pro-Brexit and anti-EU. What links Brexitists, Trump, and Putin is a shared hatred of any notion of a liberal, rules-based international order. And whilst it would be fatuous to deny the many criticisms of that notion, and what it has meant in practice, most disgracefully as regards the Iraq War, it is far more fatuous, if not downright evil, to suggest that illiberal, lawless international disorder would be preferable. Yet, although they would never put it in those terms, that is precisely what all those groupings would prefer, albeit for wildly different reasons. Some dream of a global powerplay between Great Nations led by Strong Men, some of the chaos upon which disaster capitalists can thrive, some of the final collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions to usher in a socialist utopia.
Actually, they only differ wildly in what they ultimately want. They are identical in what they see as the route to getting it: if all the cards are thrown up in the air, then it becomes possible that they may be made to land at the desired outcome. What gets left out of that analysis is the fact that amongst those ‘cards’ are the lives of millions of people which will be disrupted, deformed, and destroyed in the process; the dead, the maimed, the tortured, the dispossessed, the damaged, the broken. And whilst historical parallels are never exact, we’ve seen all this before in Europe. The same utopian dreams, the same subjugation of means to ends, the same grand power-plays in which ordinary lives are just collateral damage in the service of great dreams and causes.
The logic of integration
In this context, Brexit is only a minor event, but with a European war now being widely discussed as a serious possibility it takes on a new importance. Of course, such a war is by no means inevitable, but it is the decisions taken in the period after possibility and before inevitability which are crucial. Those decisions are quite as acute for the EU as for the UK. It isn’t that staying in the EU would have made them go away, and the EU is deeply divided between countries (£), including the Baltic states, Finland, Sweden, Poland and some of the Balkan states, which are acutely aware of the Russian threat and preparing to meet it, and those, including Hungary, Austria, and Slovakia, which are in various ways allies or appeasers of the Putin regime.
Yet such divisions would exist, and probably to a greater extent, if the EU did not exist. And, either way, the UK would have to have a relationship with what is, after all, its own continent. Brexiters may wax lyrical about the days when Britain ‘stood alone’, but forget that this wasn’t its choice, and was its moment of maximum peril precisely because of its isolation. In fact, the EU does exist, so what is that relationship to be? At the very least, there is now a stronger case than ever for a deep UK-EU security and defence pact – something always envisaged by the Political Declaration that accompanied the Withdrawal Agreement, but which got sacrificed by the Johnson-Frost antagonistic ‘sovereignty-first’ negotiations – and, unlike any proposals Britain might make to deepen trade and economic relationships, this is an area where the UK genuinely has something to offer the EU.
This is because, despite cuts in personnel numbers, especially army personnel, and despite some recent high-profile equipment failures, the UK still has profound defence capabilities – not in the sense of a capacity to be ‘Global Britain’, but in the context of a European conflict. It remains the world’s sixth military power, and the most powerful in Europe (not including Russia), with on some estimates the best special forces in the world, and has a substantial cyber-war and intelligence capacity, probably second only to the US as a regards signals intelligence. There is far too much self-congratulatory guff about Britain’s ‘world-leading’ capabilities in all kinds of sectors and, no doubt, much hyperbole about its military capacity, but that capacity is real and, importantly, provides a base that could rapidly be built upon, though the longer that is put off the harder it will become.
At the same time, the UK is never going to be strong enough to go it alone, and whilst it has much to offer the EU it has as much or more to gain from cooperation, perhaps even integration, with the EU. The idea of an EU army, for so long the imaginary bugbear of Eurosceptics, has recently been re-proposed by the Italian government, although the reactions from other EU members make it unlikely to gain traction for now, and the barriers to such an entity are technical as well as political. However, post-Ukraine there has been an intensification of integrative measures, and an exercise last October involving the forces of nine EU countries was for the first time conducted from an EU operational headquarters, as part of an attempt to enable the EU to act independently of NATO.
This seems set to be the direction of travel for the EU and, if so, the argument for UK involvement, and ever-deepening involvement at that, becomes stronger, the more so if Trump does come to power. That’s speculative, but it is justifiable given that we have already witnessed the way that the Ukraine war served to improve what at the time were very acrimonious UK-EU relations. In the event of actual hostilities breaking out the logic would surely become stronger still and if, in that scenario, the US failed to meet its NATO commitments it might become irresistible. For it is difficult to over-state just how profound the impact of such hostilities would be, not just in terms of military operations and alliances but for everyday life.
What would war mean for Britain?
During the Cold War it was generally assumed that if there was a conflict with Russia it would be a nuclear one. Einstein supposedly said that whilst he didn’t know what weapons would be used in World War Three, he knew that those used in World War Four would be sticks and stones. Within that climate of Armageddon, many if not most of us became fatalistic: if war happened, survival was highly unlikely and perhaps not to be desired anyway. The kind of advice offered by the infamous 1976 ‘Protect and Survive’ pamphlet, which included making a shelter from a large table surrounded by furniture and bags of earth, seemed, to say the least, hopelessly optimistic.
However, nuclear war isn’t the scenario we are facing. Rather, it is one of forms of more or less conventional warfare, probably conducted mainly on Eastern European soil, though in a wider airspace, and also cyber and information warfare. For the UK, according to security expert Professor Anthony Glees, the consequences would include food, fuel and medicine shortages, rationing, and curfews. Glees also envisages that “a British Quisling government would be established, probably under a well-known domestic politician known to be sympathetic to Putin”. One wonders who he might have had in mind.
Perhaps this is unduly grim, but, on his first prediction, we have already seen with Ukraine, the pandemic, and Brexit the fragility of supply chains, and have ample evidence of how quickly such fragility engenders panic-buying, hoarding, and de facto rationing. As for Glees’ even grimmer second prediction, it is certainly obvious that, at the very least, the strange but powerful pro-Trump, pro-Putin alliance I identified above would be vocal in demanding British disengagement from the conflict.
Indeed, it is all too easy to anticipate that they would cry that here, finally, was the great Brexit dividend: what has conflict between Russia and the EU got to do with us? Once again appeasers would talk of quarrels in faraway countries, between people of whom we know nothing. It is equally easy to anticipate how, just as Johnson dismisses those who are alarmed by Trump as the ‘wokerati’, these voices would be declaring, in their various accents, that it was only the liberal/imperialist/globalist/Europhile elite who want conflict with Putin. So, even if such a war did not produce the Quisling government Glees anticipates, it would be enmeshed within the Brexit or Brexitist culture war, with Brexiters acting as Putin’s fifth column. Just in itself, this is a good reason why Brexitism needs to be driven to the margins of British politics.
The European ideal
To re-emphasize, none of this is to suggest that Brexit is the cause of the threats and challenges posed by Putin and Trump, or that those threats and challenges fall less heavily on the EU and its members. It’s more subtle than that. Brexit doesn’t prevent British military and other cooperation with the EU, but it makes it less straightforward and certainly doesn’t help it. Brexit certainly removes UK influence on the EU’s response to Russia, and to other geo-political threats. And to the ways that geo-politics impinges on supply chains, Brexit adds additional frictions.
But the biggest point is this. Brexit has put a fracture in the basic idea of ‘Europe’, expressed institutionally by the EU, as a defining bulwark of liberal democracy and freedom. The need for such a bulwark becomes more important if the US retreats further from what has been, warts and all, its global role in that respect (£). Any groans from Brexiters about democracy and sovereignty (as discussed in last week’s post) don’t negate the fact that EU membership entails commitment to the EU’s founding values of “human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities”. Nor is that fact negated by any whataboutery relating to Hungary, currently, or Poland, recently: such anomalies as there are don’t detract from the enormity of having united a continent around such values, every word of which stands in stark contrast to Russia, not to mention many other parts of the world.
The word ‘united’ is the key one. Brexiters may say that Britain need not belong to the EU to share its values in these respects. But sharing is not the same as uniting. There is, to coin a phrase from a different context, power in a union. Having witnessed the break-up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the rise of the European Union, including the alacrity with which the one-time Warsaw Pact countries signed up for it, there’s probably no one who understands that as well as Vladimir Putin.
However, ultimately, the geo-political damage may be even more important and more likely to lead to a softening, or even reversal, of Brexit. That isn’t because Brexit is the cause of all Britain’s geo-political problems, any more than EU membership would resolve them, but because Brexit has created additional problems whilst doing nothing at all to help those which would exist anyway.
Geo-politics does not just mean defence, and certainly not just defence in its traditional military meanings, but includes those things along with the wider panoply of security, soft power, diplomacy, and international relations. Thus configured, it is climate change which presents the biggest set of geo-political challenges for Britain, as for every other country, but, for all the urgency of that, those relating to war in its various forms have a particular immediacy.
That immediacy has been ratcheted up several notches by Donald Trump’s latest comments about Russia and NATO, including that he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to members not reaching the 2% of GDP defence spending target. That would be a direct violation of the basic principle of mutual defence, leading the NATO Secretary-General to say that the comments “undermine all of our security”.
This comes at a time when, of course, there is a real possibility of a second Trump Presidency and, if that comes about, there are now multiple signs that it would be (even) more extreme than the first one, and far less constrained. The liberal Conservative historian and journalist Anne Applebaum has argued that Trump would “abandon NATO”, even if not formally leaving it. Whether or not that proves true, there can be no doubt of the close affinities between Trump and Putin, something in plain sight last week when Tucker Carlson – who has been described as “perhaps the highest-profile proponent of ‘Trumpism’” – conducted a sycophantic interview with the Russian leader.
General background
I’ve written at length before about the nexus of geo-political issues around Brexit, Trump and Russia, initially when ‘previewing the geo-political costs of Brexit’ at the time of Putin’s poison attacks in Salisbury in March 2018, and then in March 2022 following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Much that is in those two posts still stands, and I will avoid repeating them save to briefly draw out three general points.
First, Brexit necessarily fractured the central tenet of UK geo-political strategy by destroying its role as a US-EU bridge. Burning one end of that bridge was bound to fray the other end, under any US Presidency, and the Northern Ireland aspects of Brexit were always potentially liable to cause further tensions in UK-US relations. Equally, whilst a Trump Presidency would have been difficult for the UK even without Brexit, and will be if it recurs, it is a particular delusion of Brexiters that Trump regards Brexit Britain with some kind of special affection. In fact, whilst he may be happy to heap praise on sycophants like Nigel Farage, the idea that he has any interest in what happens to the UK, or even any loyalty to such court jesters, is preposterous.
Secondly, Brexiters showed a crucial strategic ignorance in configuring NATO as the only international organization needed to meet Britain’s security and defence needs, and the EU as entirely irrelevant to these, when, in fact, the two have become increasingly intertwined. That has become even more obvious since the invasion of Ukraine, which also showed the absurdity of the Brexiters’ vision of ‘Global Britain’ and its associated ‘Indo-Pacific tilt’. As the revised Integrated Review of 2023 recognized, the European continent remains the UK’s primary defence theatre and, within that theatre, Russia its sole, but considerable, threat.
Thirdly, even without delving into the murky question of direct Russian interference in the Referendum (a question which could only really be answered by the intelligence services, who were not asked to do so for the 2021 ‘Russia Report’), Brexit was undoubtedly welcome to Putin, and fully consistent with his longstanding attempts to destabilize both the UK and the EU. It is a point insufficiently made to the plastic patriots of Brexit just how comprehensively they played into his hands, even if it cannot be proved that they were his puppets.
The Russian threat and responses to it
These general points provide the background to the current situation. It is one in which the threat of Russia is undeniable. Putin may not have had the swift victory he expected in Ukraine but may salvage something he will be able to claim as victory, especially if a Trump presidency withdraws US support to Kiev, or even without that, if Republican resistance to such support persists. Nor has prosecution of the war prevented continuing Russian aggression, both overt and covert, elsewhere in Europe.
For example, last year, NATO intercepted over 300 Russian planes threatening its airspace, mainly over the Baltic states, with the RAF responsible for at least 50 of these interceptions. Meanwhile, Russian interference and influence in Kosovo and Serbia, Moldova, Bosnia, and Montenegro continued. Just this week Moscow put the Estonian Prime Minister on a so-called ‘wanted list’, as part of its ongoing attempts to bully and intimidate its neighbours. And whilst the 2021 Russia Report may not have delved into the Brexit referendum, it gave no room to doubt the extent of Russian activity in political disinformation campaigns against the UK, whilst as recently as last December the intelligence authorities revealed the ongoing nature of Russian cyber-attacks.
All of this, and more, is what underlies the recent upsurge of concern about the possibility of a major conflict on European soil, including Grant Shapps’ reference to this now being a “pre-war generation” in his first speech as Defence Secretary. Personally, I don’t take Shapps seriously as Defence Secretary or in any other capacity, but I do take seriously the warnings of the Chief of the General Staff. Such warnings certainly should not be dismissed as coming from blimpish or self-interested military ‘brass hats’; for example, the left-wing journalist Paul Mason has been vocal in making the case for Britain to re-arm in the face of the threat from Putin’s Russia.
Moreover, the same warnings are being sounded in several other European countries, building upon pre-existing concerns about Russian aggression, concerns which led, amongst other things, to Sweden and Finland seeking NATO membership. The last barrier to Sweden’s application, approval by Hungary, looks close to being cleared, and the country is already participating in NATO exercises as well as preparing its citizens for the possibility of all-out war. Finland’s membership has already begun, and is being actively operated, with that country, too, being in an advanced stage of readiness for war. Meanwhile, Germany has embarked on a major rearmament programme whilst Poland has doubled the size of its armed forces (£) in recent years and looks set to continue to prioritize defence under its new government. Given these, and similar, developments, British political and military leaders have if anything been rather slow to prepare the public for the threat we face.
The Trumpist-Putinist-Brexitist axis
However, Britain’s capacity to prepare is hobbled, and not just by the fact that we are economically struggling, the more so because of Brexit. It is also because there is a very powerful, if contradictory, axis which undermines attempts to do so.
On the one hand, there are those on the populist right like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson (despite his professed support for Ukraine), and Nigel Farage who are openly supportive of Trump’s re-election, and, at least in the case of Farage, public admirers of Putin. They have been joined this week in their support of Trump by John Hayes, a less well-known but highly influential right-wing Tory MP, and it’s noteworthy, in itself, just how many Tories are lining up to offer such endorsements in what is, after all, a foreign election.
On the other hand, there is the unreconstructed old hard left, including Jeremy Corbyn and the Stop the War Coalition, elements of which are “among the worst disseminators of Kremlin propaganda in the UK”. These are not the words of a ‘Centrist’, still less a Conservative, but of the radical journalist George Monbiot, and the veteran campaigner Peter Tatchell has made similar points.
Spanning these two groups is the peculiar, and peculiarly influential and well-connected, one of the Revolutionary Communist Party turned Libertarians who coalesce around Spiked, which constantly mocks and undermines the warnings about Russia, including these most recent ones.
It is not a coincidence that all three of these groupings are also pro-Brexit and anti-EU. What links Brexitists, Trump, and Putin is a shared hatred of any notion of a liberal, rules-based international order. And whilst it would be fatuous to deny the many criticisms of that notion, and what it has meant in practice, most disgracefully as regards the Iraq War, it is far more fatuous, if not downright evil, to suggest that illiberal, lawless international disorder would be preferable. Yet, although they would never put it in those terms, that is precisely what all those groupings would prefer, albeit for wildly different reasons. Some dream of a global powerplay between Great Nations led by Strong Men, some of the chaos upon which disaster capitalists can thrive, some of the final collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own contradictions to usher in a socialist utopia.
Actually, they only differ wildly in what they ultimately want. They are identical in what they see as the route to getting it: if all the cards are thrown up in the air, then it becomes possible that they may be made to land at the desired outcome. What gets left out of that analysis is the fact that amongst those ‘cards’ are the lives of millions of people which will be disrupted, deformed, and destroyed in the process; the dead, the maimed, the tortured, the dispossessed, the damaged, the broken. And whilst historical parallels are never exact, we’ve seen all this before in Europe. The same utopian dreams, the same subjugation of means to ends, the same grand power-plays in which ordinary lives are just collateral damage in the service of great dreams and causes.
The logic of integration
In this context, Brexit is only a minor event, but with a European war now being widely discussed as a serious possibility it takes on a new importance. Of course, such a war is by no means inevitable, but it is the decisions taken in the period after possibility and before inevitability which are crucial. Those decisions are quite as acute for the EU as for the UK. It isn’t that staying in the EU would have made them go away, and the EU is deeply divided between countries (£), including the Baltic states, Finland, Sweden, Poland and some of the Balkan states, which are acutely aware of the Russian threat and preparing to meet it, and those, including Hungary, Austria, and Slovakia, which are in various ways allies or appeasers of the Putin regime.
Yet such divisions would exist, and probably to a greater extent, if the EU did not exist. And, either way, the UK would have to have a relationship with what is, after all, its own continent. Brexiters may wax lyrical about the days when Britain ‘stood alone’, but forget that this wasn’t its choice, and was its moment of maximum peril precisely because of its isolation. In fact, the EU does exist, so what is that relationship to be? At the very least, there is now a stronger case than ever for a deep UK-EU security and defence pact – something always envisaged by the Political Declaration that accompanied the Withdrawal Agreement, but which got sacrificed by the Johnson-Frost antagonistic ‘sovereignty-first’ negotiations – and, unlike any proposals Britain might make to deepen trade and economic relationships, this is an area where the UK genuinely has something to offer the EU.
This is because, despite cuts in personnel numbers, especially army personnel, and despite some recent high-profile equipment failures, the UK still has profound defence capabilities – not in the sense of a capacity to be ‘Global Britain’, but in the context of a European conflict. It remains the world’s sixth military power, and the most powerful in Europe (not including Russia), with on some estimates the best special forces in the world, and has a substantial cyber-war and intelligence capacity, probably second only to the US as a regards signals intelligence. There is far too much self-congratulatory guff about Britain’s ‘world-leading’ capabilities in all kinds of sectors and, no doubt, much hyperbole about its military capacity, but that capacity is real and, importantly, provides a base that could rapidly be built upon, though the longer that is put off the harder it will become.
At the same time, the UK is never going to be strong enough to go it alone, and whilst it has much to offer the EU it has as much or more to gain from cooperation, perhaps even integration, with the EU. The idea of an EU army, for so long the imaginary bugbear of Eurosceptics, has recently been re-proposed by the Italian government, although the reactions from other EU members make it unlikely to gain traction for now, and the barriers to such an entity are technical as well as political. However, post-Ukraine there has been an intensification of integrative measures, and an exercise last October involving the forces of nine EU countries was for the first time conducted from an EU operational headquarters, as part of an attempt to enable the EU to act independently of NATO.
This seems set to be the direction of travel for the EU and, if so, the argument for UK involvement, and ever-deepening involvement at that, becomes stronger, the more so if Trump does come to power. That’s speculative, but it is justifiable given that we have already witnessed the way that the Ukraine war served to improve what at the time were very acrimonious UK-EU relations. In the event of actual hostilities breaking out the logic would surely become stronger still and if, in that scenario, the US failed to meet its NATO commitments it might become irresistible. For it is difficult to over-state just how profound the impact of such hostilities would be, not just in terms of military operations and alliances but for everyday life.
What would war mean for Britain?
During the Cold War it was generally assumed that if there was a conflict with Russia it would be a nuclear one. Einstein supposedly said that whilst he didn’t know what weapons would be used in World War Three, he knew that those used in World War Four would be sticks and stones. Within that climate of Armageddon, many if not most of us became fatalistic: if war happened, survival was highly unlikely and perhaps not to be desired anyway. The kind of advice offered by the infamous 1976 ‘Protect and Survive’ pamphlet, which included making a shelter from a large table surrounded by furniture and bags of earth, seemed, to say the least, hopelessly optimistic.
However, nuclear war isn’t the scenario we are facing. Rather, it is one of forms of more or less conventional warfare, probably conducted mainly on Eastern European soil, though in a wider airspace, and also cyber and information warfare. For the UK, according to security expert Professor Anthony Glees, the consequences would include food, fuel and medicine shortages, rationing, and curfews. Glees also envisages that “a British Quisling government would be established, probably under a well-known domestic politician known to be sympathetic to Putin”. One wonders who he might have had in mind.
Perhaps this is unduly grim, but, on his first prediction, we have already seen with Ukraine, the pandemic, and Brexit the fragility of supply chains, and have ample evidence of how quickly such fragility engenders panic-buying, hoarding, and de facto rationing. As for Glees’ even grimmer second prediction, it is certainly obvious that, at the very least, the strange but powerful pro-Trump, pro-Putin alliance I identified above would be vocal in demanding British disengagement from the conflict.
Indeed, it is all too easy to anticipate that they would cry that here, finally, was the great Brexit dividend: what has conflict between Russia and the EU got to do with us? Once again appeasers would talk of quarrels in faraway countries, between people of whom we know nothing. It is equally easy to anticipate how, just as Johnson dismisses those who are alarmed by Trump as the ‘wokerati’, these voices would be declaring, in their various accents, that it was only the liberal/imperialist/globalist/Europhile elite who want conflict with Putin. So, even if such a war did not produce the Quisling government Glees anticipates, it would be enmeshed within the Brexit or Brexitist culture war, with Brexiters acting as Putin’s fifth column. Just in itself, this is a good reason why Brexitism needs to be driven to the margins of British politics.
The European ideal
To re-emphasize, none of this is to suggest that Brexit is the cause of the threats and challenges posed by Putin and Trump, or that those threats and challenges fall less heavily on the EU and its members. It’s more subtle than that. Brexit doesn’t prevent British military and other cooperation with the EU, but it makes it less straightforward and certainly doesn’t help it. Brexit certainly removes UK influence on the EU’s response to Russia, and to other geo-political threats. And to the ways that geo-politics impinges on supply chains, Brexit adds additional frictions.
But the biggest point is this. Brexit has put a fracture in the basic idea of ‘Europe’, expressed institutionally by the EU, as a defining bulwark of liberal democracy and freedom. The need for such a bulwark becomes more important if the US retreats further from what has been, warts and all, its global role in that respect (£). Any groans from Brexiters about democracy and sovereignty (as discussed in last week’s post) don’t negate the fact that EU membership entails commitment to the EU’s founding values of “human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities”. Nor is that fact negated by any whataboutery relating to Hungary, currently, or Poland, recently: such anomalies as there are don’t detract from the enormity of having united a continent around such values, every word of which stands in stark contrast to Russia, not to mention many other parts of the world.
The word ‘united’ is the key one. Brexiters may say that Britain need not belong to the EU to share its values in these respects. But sharing is not the same as uniting. There is, to coin a phrase from a different context, power in a union. Having witnessed the break-up of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the rise of the European Union, including the alacrity with which the one-time Warsaw Pact countries signed up for it, there’s probably no one who understands that as well as Vladimir Putin.
Friday, 28 January 2022
All too predictable
I’ve noticed recently that I’ve started making cynical jokes on my Twitter account, which I set up to disseminate serious news about Brexit, as well as posts on this blog. They aren’t funny enough to be worth linking to (well maybe this one is), but I think my new-found levity reflects a certain grim despair about Brexit in general and the current political situation which, as I argued in last week’s post, grows out of it. Like this apparently endless January, we seem to be stuck in a recurring cloudscape of Brexit dullness, decay and depression to which mordant humour seems the only sane response.
Business as usual
So, of course, there are reports of delays and queues at cross-channel ports. Of course there are claims that they aren’t anything to do with Brexit. But of course they are at least compounded by and at most caused by Brexit. We’ve had this on and off for over a year, and of course it will continue to happen as the rest of the import controls get introduced in the course of this year. It’s one of the things which happens when new barriers to trade are introduced.
Equally, it’s not the only thing that happens, so even when there aren’t queues it doesn’t mean the barriers are having no effect, just that the costs of dealing with them are less visible, taking the form of individual companies introducing and using new systems or of simply not engaging in trade, which in aggregate slowly feeds into declining productivity, tax base, public spending, competitiveness, employment and consumer choice, and into increased prices and taxes.
It’s not even worth arguing about this anymore. We know the economic damage that was done between the referendum vote and actually leaving the EU. We know the damage that has happened to UK-EU trade since then. We know, and no one seriously contests, the predictions for what will happen to the economy as a result.
Similarly, it’s no surprise (but still scandalous and shameful) that the EU settled status scheme is still causing misery for untold numbers of British citizens, EU citizens and their families. It’s no surprise that the talks over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) ”stagger on” with no sign of resolution, or that, as ever, they are bound up with the apparently endless crisis of the scandal-ridden, inquiry-riven, ramshackle, Heath-Robinson excuse for a government that Boris Johnson presides over.
Nor is it a surprise – in fact, it’s almost a given – that the Brexit Ultras have lighted upon a new ‘article’ as their saviour, as they have so many times before. Step aside Lisbon Article 50, GATT Article 24 and NIP Article 16, the latest wheeze is NIP Article 13 (8) which according to Bernard Jenkin, amongst other nonsenses, puts the EU under some kind of obligation to drastically revise the Protocol. Jenkin was one of those identified by Dominic Cummings as part of the “narcissist-delusional” subset of the ERG who were “useful idiots”, a harsh judgement in that it is only half-true.
If Jenkin’s barrack room lawyering had any meaning, it was as a reminder to Johnson and Liz Truss that the ERG are watching the NIP negotiations and will jump on anything which to the addled brains of its members is a betrayal of Brexit or a diminution of sovereignty. In fact, the entire Conservative Party now seems to have dissolved into a series of groupuscules in a way that used to be more associated with the political Left. Apart from the ERG there’s (at least) the Covid Recovery Group (CRG), the Northern Research Group, the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, the Blue Collar Conservatism group, and the Common Sense Group (for once, the clue isn’t in the name).
Still, the ERG remains important. And since on the wilder shores of Brexiter thought (yes, I’m referring to clergyman Dr Timothy Bradshaw) the NIP is regarded as an EU annexation of British territory akin to that of the Crimea by Russia in 2014, it’s no surprise that the Ultras aren’t likely to accept any conceivable resolution to the current talks. Which is unfortunate, since it is Russia’s current territorial ambitions which point to the urgent need for a rapprochement with the EU.
Ukraine crisis policy: not a Brexit bonus
For what is very much not business as usual is the Ukraine crisis, and the continuing threat of a Russian invasion. Though here, too, there is a predictable Brexit angle in attempts to suggest that post-Brexit Britain has somehow become “freed of the shackles of Brussels” so as to be the “leading” European power, as argued by Conservative foreign policy analyst Nile Gardiner in the Telegraph (£). It is an analysis shared by the Telegraph itself in its editorial comment (£) and, inevitably, by numerous articles in the Express, including boasts that Britain has been free to act without “endless EU waffle”.
The gaping hole in this analysis is that, even as a member of the EU, the UK operated an entirely independent foreign and defence policy. Moreover, when a member, it was one of the main blocks to the EU developing its own foreign and defence policies, and to the wider project of EU strategic autonomy’ favoured, in particular, by Macron and Merkel.
It’s true that the UK now has an independent sanctions policy but, since sanctions will always be more effective the more countries that apply them, that’s of limited benefit, whilst entailing a loss of influence over EU sanctions policy. Hence Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s “diplomatic blitz” around European capitals (£) this week to garner support for the UK’s plans for sanctions against Russia. This is the reality of the alternative to the “endless waffle” of EU membership – a similar process of consensus-building but undertaken as an outsider, with correspondingly less leverage.
So the idea that what a good discussion of the whole issue by Mark Landler in the New York Times calls the UK’s “more muscular role” in the Ukraine crisis is made possible by Brexit is an absurdity. Britain has long been relatively ‘hawkish’ with respect to Russia, albeit not to the extent of investigating its possible role in influencing elections, including the Brexit referendum or of doing very much about Russian money-laundering in Britain. For that matter, it seems extraordinary that Brexiters have chafed so much against the EU’s supposed infringement of British sovereignty when, for years, Russian planes have actually violated our airspace and waters, and have actually murdered British citizens on British soil.
Brexit Britain: not in the room?
Still, the point holds that the current British stance on the Ukraine crisis certainly could, and possibly would, have been pretty much the same even if we had still been in the EU. Equally, it is absurd to suggest that now, as an ex-member, the UK can emerge as a leader of European strategic autonomy. It’s certainly right to seek to work with the EU over the crisis, but that’s made more difficult by Brexit and certainly not easier. Indeed, the challenge the Ukraine crisis poses for the EU and the UK serves to show their common security interests and the way that Brexit is unhelpful to pursuing those interests. For whether or not Russia played a role in Brexit happening , it was Putin’s “dream policy” and both “diminishes the UK in Russia’s eyes” and contributes to the fracturing of Western solidarity that he is now exploiting.
That would be so however Brexit had been done, since at the very least it makes the structures for cooperation more complicated and cumbersome. But it is all the more the case because the way Brexit was done has engendered such profound distrust in the UK, especially over the Northern Ireland Protocol, with particular damage to relations with France (£), the only EU country with a genuinely significant defence capability. This isn’t a minor point. ‘National reputation’ is a fuzzy notion but a real one, and in the last five years Britain’s has plummeted, both because of its highly antagonistic approach to the EU and its carelessness with its relationship with Biden’s administration. That has profound consequences, especially when trying to urge EU nations to take a harder stance: even this week, as Wallace did the rounds trying to drum up support for sanctions against Russia, Johnson was denouncing the EU for its “insane” insistence that the Protocol be implemented to the letter.
One particular thing the Ukraine crisis shows is the, at best, naivety of the Brexiters’ constant claims that UK security was entirely about NATO membership and nothing to do with EU membership, ignoring the extensive and multi-layered relationship between the two. It is a folly now baked in to post-Brexit policy, with the Integrated Review of March 2020 barely acknowledging the EU’s existence, whilst Liz Truss’s first speech as Foreign Secretary pointedly did not mention the EU at all. Notably, she did not attend a major US-Germany-France meeting of her opposite numbers to discuss Ukraine (though a junior minister was sent). Instead, she was in Australia. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and it was a pre-arranged visit, but it’s indicative of priorities, and perhaps of misplaced priorities given the scathing attack from Australia's former Prime Minister (£) on Britain’s “delusions of grandeur” and on Truss herself, who he described as “demented”.
Truss did find time to meet with NATO’s Chief in Brussels, and affirmed NATO’s importance to European defence, and she will go to Ukraine next week. So she’s by no means inactive in the crisis, but seems keen to approach it in a way which downplays the EU dimension. Yet the EU has not disappeared just because the UK has left it, and pretending otherwise is silly. Thus, whilst the primary axis of the primary Western response is the US-EU discussion of economic sanctions, Truss was reduced to boasting about the UK “leading by example” without being an integral, central part of that discussion. A key rule of politics is that you need to ‘be in the room’ and Brexit Britain isn’t, at least metaphorically and sometimes literally. That doesn’t mean it has no role, or that its role is insignificant, it’s just that it’s a bit less significant than before and a bit less significant than it claims.
A post-Brexit performative policy?
Whilst EU membership would not have precluded the UK making a ‘muscular” response to Russia over Ukraine, it is absurd and potentially dangerous to think that the UK, with or without the EU, or the EU, with or without the UK, can do very much to face down the Kremlin. Regardless of Brexit, it is not even NATO but the US which plays the crucial role. The UK – and the EU – should in my view be strongly supportive of that, but neither economically nor, most certainly, militarily (including supplying equipment, training, and intelligence) can it lead the effort. It’s foolish to pretend or imply otherwise.
For if the UK gives the impression that it can do more than in it is able to there is a terrible danger that it will lead to the Ukrainian people being let down. It may be that ‘God Save the Queen’ was trending on Twitter in Ukraine on Monday, after the arrival of British anti-tank weapons and military trainers, but (as, to be fair, Wallace has acknowledged) there is little or no chance of the UK being able to do more than make very marginal contributions to Ukraine’s defence if Russia were to invade.
Again, that would be true regardless of Brexit. But there is a sense that a desire to assert its post-Brexit identity is leading the UK to take a particularly assertive posture, in order to demonstrate its self-professed status as ‘Global Britain’ (£). In Landler’s New York Times article, Lord Darroch, former UK Ambassador to the US and former National Security Advisor, is quoted as saying “I suspect this is part of showing we’re not bound up with the European Union”.
Seen in this way, UK policy on Ukraine might be as ‘performative’ as its independent trade policy – where trade deals are celebrated simply for being made independently, regardless of their economic value. If so, that would be deeply reprehensible. Performative trade policy is ludicrous; performative defence policy is reckless, and not only for the UK. For whilst no British politician is suggesting direct military involvement in Ukraine, expectations may be very different amongst ordinary members of the Ukrainian public, perhaps overly-impressed by Global Britain’s posturing.
I don’t suppose The Sun is that widely read in Kiev, but headlines such as “Ukraine needs our help. Being British means we stand up for FREEDOM” above an article by the Armed Forces Minister James Heappey, which starts with a reference to British soldiers’ lives lost in the Korean War, might suggest a promise of more than the UK can realistically deliver. Moreover, as a matter of fact, British public support for NATO to commit to defend Ukraine is, at 47%, the lowest of the six countries surveyed, slightly below Germany (49%) and well below France (57%). In any case, it’s at least arguable that the best approach to Russia is the combination of economic and military pressure and the kind of diplomatic efforts at de-escalation being pursued by France and Germany within the ‘Normandy format’ meetings.
Brexit point-scoring
Even if post-Brexit posturing isn’t what drives Britain’s Ukraine policy, it is impossible to read the press coverage of that policy without spotting how it is shot through with Brexit point-scoring. Most predictably, that is at the expense of the EU and especially Germany: “Europe shamed” as “Brexit Britain cares more than Germany”, as the Express renders it. On this showing, cocking a snook at the EU, rather than aiding Ukraine, is the important part of the story. Even more grotesque in this coverage is the jeering that the policy has somehow put one over on “bitter remainers” and the “American liberal elites” which “similarly sneered at Brexit”, in Gardiner’s words.
Less grotesque but even more fatuous is the suggestion, again in the Express, that the crisis discredits the “remainers’” claims “that the EU was the best hope for peace on the continent”. It’s fatuous for the same reason as it was when deployed during the referendum campaign in relation to the Bosnian War: the claim about the EU’s role in peace was only ever about it ensuring peace amongst its members, originally and most notably France and Germany.
That fact is neatly avoided in Heappey’s Sun article, which doesn’t mention the EU at all as part of the Western response to the Ukraine crisis, but trots out the standard line that it was NATO (alone) that “guaranteed peace in Europe for over 70 years”. Nor does he mention Brexit directly, but can’t resist a Brexity culture war jibe at “people who sneer at patriotism and the Union Jack”. Meanwhile, a Sun editorial explicitly repeats the strawman of what remainers supposedly claimed about the EU and peace (as well as explicitly trumpeting Britain’s Ukraine policy as some kind of justification of Brexit).
It has been familiar since the referendum that Brexiters’ main pleasure seems to come from discomfiting remainers but, even if there were grounds for discomfiture in this case which, as I’ve argued, there aren’t, it would be a terrible rationale for defence policy. About the only less defensible one would be to distract from the government’s ongoing domestic crises, as some commentators suggest is what Johnson is doing. Equally indefensible is the attempt to downplay the seriousness of those domestic crises by suggesting they are trivial compared with the Ukraine situation. The problem is rather that Johnson’s government is so pre-occupied with trying to scrabble out of its mire of scandal that it’s incapable of serious focus on Ukraine and other policies, including, indeed, the ongoing damage caused by Brexit.
Two years on
As we approach the second anniversary of Britain leaving the EU, things have settled into a drearily predictable and monotonous pattern, with this week a fairly typical example. The drag weight of Brexit to the economy in plain sight yet denied or ignored. The lingering scar of what was done to Northern Ireland, and the preposterous bluster of the Brexiters about it. The steady undertow of declining influence and damaged reputation. The bogus claims of Brexit benefits and the pumped-up posturing of post-Brexit Britain. The gimcrack government that created Brexit and was bequeathed by it.
In such circumstances cynical jokes are not just permissible but Inevitable, even if any laughter they give rise to is that of desperation.
Business as usual
So, of course, there are reports of delays and queues at cross-channel ports. Of course there are claims that they aren’t anything to do with Brexit. But of course they are at least compounded by and at most caused by Brexit. We’ve had this on and off for over a year, and of course it will continue to happen as the rest of the import controls get introduced in the course of this year. It’s one of the things which happens when new barriers to trade are introduced.
Equally, it’s not the only thing that happens, so even when there aren’t queues it doesn’t mean the barriers are having no effect, just that the costs of dealing with them are less visible, taking the form of individual companies introducing and using new systems or of simply not engaging in trade, which in aggregate slowly feeds into declining productivity, tax base, public spending, competitiveness, employment and consumer choice, and into increased prices and taxes.
It’s not even worth arguing about this anymore. We know the economic damage that was done between the referendum vote and actually leaving the EU. We know the damage that has happened to UK-EU trade since then. We know, and no one seriously contests, the predictions for what will happen to the economy as a result.
Similarly, it’s no surprise (but still scandalous and shameful) that the EU settled status scheme is still causing misery for untold numbers of British citizens, EU citizens and their families. It’s no surprise that the talks over the Northern Ireland Protocol (NIP) ”stagger on” with no sign of resolution, or that, as ever, they are bound up with the apparently endless crisis of the scandal-ridden, inquiry-riven, ramshackle, Heath-Robinson excuse for a government that Boris Johnson presides over.
Nor is it a surprise – in fact, it’s almost a given – that the Brexit Ultras have lighted upon a new ‘article’ as their saviour, as they have so many times before. Step aside Lisbon Article 50, GATT Article 24 and NIP Article 16, the latest wheeze is NIP Article 13 (8) which according to Bernard Jenkin, amongst other nonsenses, puts the EU under some kind of obligation to drastically revise the Protocol. Jenkin was one of those identified by Dominic Cummings as part of the “narcissist-delusional” subset of the ERG who were “useful idiots”, a harsh judgement in that it is only half-true.
If Jenkin’s barrack room lawyering had any meaning, it was as a reminder to Johnson and Liz Truss that the ERG are watching the NIP negotiations and will jump on anything which to the addled brains of its members is a betrayal of Brexit or a diminution of sovereignty. In fact, the entire Conservative Party now seems to have dissolved into a series of groupuscules in a way that used to be more associated with the political Left. Apart from the ERG there’s (at least) the Covid Recovery Group (CRG), the Northern Research Group, the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, the Blue Collar Conservatism group, and the Common Sense Group (for once, the clue isn’t in the name).
Still, the ERG remains important. And since on the wilder shores of Brexiter thought (yes, I’m referring to clergyman Dr Timothy Bradshaw) the NIP is regarded as an EU annexation of British territory akin to that of the Crimea by Russia in 2014, it’s no surprise that the Ultras aren’t likely to accept any conceivable resolution to the current talks. Which is unfortunate, since it is Russia’s current territorial ambitions which point to the urgent need for a rapprochement with the EU.
Ukraine crisis policy: not a Brexit bonus
For what is very much not business as usual is the Ukraine crisis, and the continuing threat of a Russian invasion. Though here, too, there is a predictable Brexit angle in attempts to suggest that post-Brexit Britain has somehow become “freed of the shackles of Brussels” so as to be the “leading” European power, as argued by Conservative foreign policy analyst Nile Gardiner in the Telegraph (£). It is an analysis shared by the Telegraph itself in its editorial comment (£) and, inevitably, by numerous articles in the Express, including boasts that Britain has been free to act without “endless EU waffle”.
The gaping hole in this analysis is that, even as a member of the EU, the UK operated an entirely independent foreign and defence policy. Moreover, when a member, it was one of the main blocks to the EU developing its own foreign and defence policies, and to the wider project of EU strategic autonomy’ favoured, in particular, by Macron and Merkel.
It’s true that the UK now has an independent sanctions policy but, since sanctions will always be more effective the more countries that apply them, that’s of limited benefit, whilst entailing a loss of influence over EU sanctions policy. Hence Defence Secretary Ben Wallace’s “diplomatic blitz” around European capitals (£) this week to garner support for the UK’s plans for sanctions against Russia. This is the reality of the alternative to the “endless waffle” of EU membership – a similar process of consensus-building but undertaken as an outsider, with correspondingly less leverage.
So the idea that what a good discussion of the whole issue by Mark Landler in the New York Times calls the UK’s “more muscular role” in the Ukraine crisis is made possible by Brexit is an absurdity. Britain has long been relatively ‘hawkish’ with respect to Russia, albeit not to the extent of investigating its possible role in influencing elections, including the Brexit referendum or of doing very much about Russian money-laundering in Britain. For that matter, it seems extraordinary that Brexiters have chafed so much against the EU’s supposed infringement of British sovereignty when, for years, Russian planes have actually violated our airspace and waters, and have actually murdered British citizens on British soil.
Brexit Britain: not in the room?
Still, the point holds that the current British stance on the Ukraine crisis certainly could, and possibly would, have been pretty much the same even if we had still been in the EU. Equally, it is absurd to suggest that now, as an ex-member, the UK can emerge as a leader of European strategic autonomy. It’s certainly right to seek to work with the EU over the crisis, but that’s made more difficult by Brexit and certainly not easier. Indeed, the challenge the Ukraine crisis poses for the EU and the UK serves to show their common security interests and the way that Brexit is unhelpful to pursuing those interests. For whether or not Russia played a role in Brexit happening , it was Putin’s “dream policy” and both “diminishes the UK in Russia’s eyes” and contributes to the fracturing of Western solidarity that he is now exploiting.
That would be so however Brexit had been done, since at the very least it makes the structures for cooperation more complicated and cumbersome. But it is all the more the case because the way Brexit was done has engendered such profound distrust in the UK, especially over the Northern Ireland Protocol, with particular damage to relations with France (£), the only EU country with a genuinely significant defence capability. This isn’t a minor point. ‘National reputation’ is a fuzzy notion but a real one, and in the last five years Britain’s has plummeted, both because of its highly antagonistic approach to the EU and its carelessness with its relationship with Biden’s administration. That has profound consequences, especially when trying to urge EU nations to take a harder stance: even this week, as Wallace did the rounds trying to drum up support for sanctions against Russia, Johnson was denouncing the EU for its “insane” insistence that the Protocol be implemented to the letter.
One particular thing the Ukraine crisis shows is the, at best, naivety of the Brexiters’ constant claims that UK security was entirely about NATO membership and nothing to do with EU membership, ignoring the extensive and multi-layered relationship between the two. It is a folly now baked in to post-Brexit policy, with the Integrated Review of March 2020 barely acknowledging the EU’s existence, whilst Liz Truss’s first speech as Foreign Secretary pointedly did not mention the EU at all. Notably, she did not attend a major US-Germany-France meeting of her opposite numbers to discuss Ukraine (though a junior minister was sent). Instead, she was in Australia. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, and it was a pre-arranged visit, but it’s indicative of priorities, and perhaps of misplaced priorities given the scathing attack from Australia's former Prime Minister (£) on Britain’s “delusions of grandeur” and on Truss herself, who he described as “demented”.
Truss did find time to meet with NATO’s Chief in Brussels, and affirmed NATO’s importance to European defence, and she will go to Ukraine next week. So she’s by no means inactive in the crisis, but seems keen to approach it in a way which downplays the EU dimension. Yet the EU has not disappeared just because the UK has left it, and pretending otherwise is silly. Thus, whilst the primary axis of the primary Western response is the US-EU discussion of economic sanctions, Truss was reduced to boasting about the UK “leading by example” without being an integral, central part of that discussion. A key rule of politics is that you need to ‘be in the room’ and Brexit Britain isn’t, at least metaphorically and sometimes literally. That doesn’t mean it has no role, or that its role is insignificant, it’s just that it’s a bit less significant than before and a bit less significant than it claims.
A post-Brexit performative policy?
Whilst EU membership would not have precluded the UK making a ‘muscular” response to Russia over Ukraine, it is absurd and potentially dangerous to think that the UK, with or without the EU, or the EU, with or without the UK, can do very much to face down the Kremlin. Regardless of Brexit, it is not even NATO but the US which plays the crucial role. The UK – and the EU – should in my view be strongly supportive of that, but neither economically nor, most certainly, militarily (including supplying equipment, training, and intelligence) can it lead the effort. It’s foolish to pretend or imply otherwise.
For if the UK gives the impression that it can do more than in it is able to there is a terrible danger that it will lead to the Ukrainian people being let down. It may be that ‘God Save the Queen’ was trending on Twitter in Ukraine on Monday, after the arrival of British anti-tank weapons and military trainers, but (as, to be fair, Wallace has acknowledged) there is little or no chance of the UK being able to do more than make very marginal contributions to Ukraine’s defence if Russia were to invade.
Again, that would be true regardless of Brexit. But there is a sense that a desire to assert its post-Brexit identity is leading the UK to take a particularly assertive posture, in order to demonstrate its self-professed status as ‘Global Britain’ (£). In Landler’s New York Times article, Lord Darroch, former UK Ambassador to the US and former National Security Advisor, is quoted as saying “I suspect this is part of showing we’re not bound up with the European Union”.
Seen in this way, UK policy on Ukraine might be as ‘performative’ as its independent trade policy – where trade deals are celebrated simply for being made independently, regardless of their economic value. If so, that would be deeply reprehensible. Performative trade policy is ludicrous; performative defence policy is reckless, and not only for the UK. For whilst no British politician is suggesting direct military involvement in Ukraine, expectations may be very different amongst ordinary members of the Ukrainian public, perhaps overly-impressed by Global Britain’s posturing.
I don’t suppose The Sun is that widely read in Kiev, but headlines such as “Ukraine needs our help. Being British means we stand up for FREEDOM” above an article by the Armed Forces Minister James Heappey, which starts with a reference to British soldiers’ lives lost in the Korean War, might suggest a promise of more than the UK can realistically deliver. Moreover, as a matter of fact, British public support for NATO to commit to defend Ukraine is, at 47%, the lowest of the six countries surveyed, slightly below Germany (49%) and well below France (57%). In any case, it’s at least arguable that the best approach to Russia is the combination of economic and military pressure and the kind of diplomatic efforts at de-escalation being pursued by France and Germany within the ‘Normandy format’ meetings.
Brexit point-scoring
Even if post-Brexit posturing isn’t what drives Britain’s Ukraine policy, it is impossible to read the press coverage of that policy without spotting how it is shot through with Brexit point-scoring. Most predictably, that is at the expense of the EU and especially Germany: “Europe shamed” as “Brexit Britain cares more than Germany”, as the Express renders it. On this showing, cocking a snook at the EU, rather than aiding Ukraine, is the important part of the story. Even more grotesque in this coverage is the jeering that the policy has somehow put one over on “bitter remainers” and the “American liberal elites” which “similarly sneered at Brexit”, in Gardiner’s words.
Less grotesque but even more fatuous is the suggestion, again in the Express, that the crisis discredits the “remainers’” claims “that the EU was the best hope for peace on the continent”. It’s fatuous for the same reason as it was when deployed during the referendum campaign in relation to the Bosnian War: the claim about the EU’s role in peace was only ever about it ensuring peace amongst its members, originally and most notably France and Germany.
That fact is neatly avoided in Heappey’s Sun article, which doesn’t mention the EU at all as part of the Western response to the Ukraine crisis, but trots out the standard line that it was NATO (alone) that “guaranteed peace in Europe for over 70 years”. Nor does he mention Brexit directly, but can’t resist a Brexity culture war jibe at “people who sneer at patriotism and the Union Jack”. Meanwhile, a Sun editorial explicitly repeats the strawman of what remainers supposedly claimed about the EU and peace (as well as explicitly trumpeting Britain’s Ukraine policy as some kind of justification of Brexit).
It has been familiar since the referendum that Brexiters’ main pleasure seems to come from discomfiting remainers but, even if there were grounds for discomfiture in this case which, as I’ve argued, there aren’t, it would be a terrible rationale for defence policy. About the only less defensible one would be to distract from the government’s ongoing domestic crises, as some commentators suggest is what Johnson is doing. Equally indefensible is the attempt to downplay the seriousness of those domestic crises by suggesting they are trivial compared with the Ukraine situation. The problem is rather that Johnson’s government is so pre-occupied with trying to scrabble out of its mire of scandal that it’s incapable of serious focus on Ukraine and other policies, including, indeed, the ongoing damage caused by Brexit.
Two years on
As we approach the second anniversary of Britain leaving the EU, things have settled into a drearily predictable and monotonous pattern, with this week a fairly typical example. The drag weight of Brexit to the economy in plain sight yet denied or ignored. The lingering scar of what was done to Northern Ireland, and the preposterous bluster of the Brexiters about it. The steady undertow of declining influence and damaged reputation. The bogus claims of Brexit benefits and the pumped-up posturing of post-Brexit Britain. The gimcrack government that created Brexit and was bequeathed by it.
In such circumstances cynical jokes are not just permissible but Inevitable, even if any laughter they give rise to is that of desperation.
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