Labour cannot ignore Donald Trump’s impact on defence

Good morning. The US voted with Russia and China at the UN Security Council to pass a resolution calling for a “swift end” to the war in Ukraine yesterday.

It underscores the extent to which the US’s role in global affairs has been changed by the second Donald Trump presidency, and the challenge for the British government and Europe as a whole. Some thoughts on how open they will have to be — and should be — about the changed world they face.

The T-word

For some politicians, Europe should treat Donald Trump like an intimate rash: take steps to respond to it, but don’t talk about it in public. As Jeremy Hunt put it on X yesterday morning:

If they serve their full terms both Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz will still be in post after Donald Trump has left the White House. Their number one objective — more important than any domestic consideration — must be to ensure Nato survives as a credible defence alliance during that period. That means biting our tongues diplomatically and biting the bullet on defence spending.

The argument here is simple. Don’t get involved in tit-for-tats with JD Vance about whether Europe has forgotten its values. Don’t talk, as Merz has, about the importance of ending Europe’s dependency on the US. Just increase defence spending. An explicit expression of the strategy that the government is pursuing is when it says eccentric things such as Trump has changed the conversation around Ukraine “for the better”.

Hunt is right that European security under Nato is a better arrangement than “European security guaranteed under anything else”, because the world in which the continent’s security is not guaranteed ultimately by the US’s nuclear shield is a world in which many more European states acquire nuclear weapons. That means a world in which the possibility of a catastrophic miscalculation of one kind or another gets larger.

Don’t forget that the world as we know it could have come to an end in 1983 had one Soviet lieutenant colonel not gone “hang about, that can’t be right”. But there are, I think, four holes in Hunt’s argument. The first is that there is no guarantee that the end of Trump’s term in 2028 means the end of Trumpian politics. The second is that not only Merz and Starmer have agency: other European politicians will want and — depending on when their elections are — need to respond in ways that formally acknowledge the changed world. The third, of course, is that in the 25 hours since Hunt’s post, the US government has, in effect, done a pretty good job of declaring Nato dead. When the US is voting differently to both the UK and France at the UN about the defence of Europe, Nato is in big, big trouble.

The fourth is that, ultimately, voters aren’t idiots. Any argument for increasing defence spending sufficiently for Europe to be able to defend itself without the US — read this piece for an idea of just what a big undertaking that is for Europe as a whole — is going to have to acknowledge what we are doing and why.

That’s all the more so for the UK, which this week will join EU nations to discuss ways of financing the increase in spending. One option being considered is a Europe-wide defence funding arrangement, which eases some of the UK’s self-imposed constraints from its fiscal rules. But no funding vehicle frees the UK from the hard choices involved in moving resources from private consumption to the domestic and defence infrastructure the country badly needs.

The idea that you can sell to the British public the hard choices the UK needs to take to defend itself and its allies without ever acknowledging the big change in global affairs I think is just a bit too farfetched, particularly given the Conservatives do not have a leader who, like Hunt in his post, is acting in a critical, constructive and reality-based way. They have Kemi Badenoch, a leader whose interventions are critical, but they are not constructive or reality-based. In her speech later today she will say the following (and I haven’t edited or truncated this extract at all):

If we approach this challenge as a zero-sum game — as a simple choice between defence spending and public services — we will struggle to persuade the public to back it. And there will be painful decisions on government spending. Any country that spends more interest on its debt than on defence, as the UK does today, is destined for weakness.

What does this mean? In policy terms, nothing. It is incoherent. But the politics are clear: it means that although she doesn’t know what decisions Starmer and Rachel Reeves are going to make about how to increase defence spending, she intends to oppose them.

As desirable as it is for Europe to defend itself while keeping open the possibility of returning to the pre-Trump status quo, it’s not the kind of thing that governing parties can attempt without a helping hand from the opposition. The tough choices that Labour needs to make will, inevitably, have to be argued for in the open. Hunt is right that it is desirable, and the government is right to give it a try. But I doubt that it is sustainable or achievable.

Now try this

This week, I mostly listened to Home by the Miró Quartet while writing my column.

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