As a past chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, I am well aware of the extent to which our national security and defence is bound up with the United States. This interdependency is more than just our common membership of Nato, which has undoubtedly secured peace in Europe and helped win the Cold War. Our strong ties with America have also enabled the UK to have the assurance of access to defence and security technologies without the cost of full national investment. We have been able to use these for our defence and security even when we have had to act alone. The relationship is so deeply embedded that it has not required constant political direction to function well. This is due to high levels of mutual trust, as evidenced by the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which brings us together along with Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
It has not, however, been a one-sided relationship. The US as a “Great Power” has benefitted greatly from the support of other western democracies, both in an emergency, as we saw after 9/11, and more generally in its foreign policy and efforts to secure an international rules-based system. There have of course been past disagreements, but shared values have ensured that any differences have been overcome.
We are thus facing, in the current Donald Trump presidency, an unprecedented challenge. Leaving aside his open contempt for the constitutional norms of his own country, Trump is intent on abandoning shared values in the international sphere. He is doing this for transactional relationships viewed only from the perspective of the perceived immediate advantage he sees for the US or himself.
How else can one view the past week? It is hard not to see it as a performative pantomime. The treatment and outcomes of Trump’s summits with Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer may have been marginally placatory of their concerns, but these meetings were also intended to encourage Britain and France to acquiesce in his approach. Trump then delivers in public a choreographed attack on Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, a visiting head of state, that was designed to humiliate him.
The behaviour of the vice president, JD Vance, was outrageous. In tone it came straight out of the playbook of Hitler’s 1939 summons of President Emil Hacha of Czechoslovakia to Berlin to sign away his country’s independence. Zelensky, as the leader of a country fighting a war for its survival, was entitled to say what he did. There was nothing remotely disrespectful about it. He just stood up to the crude bullying that now seems the hallmark of the Trump administration.
At Sunday’s summit in London, European leaders have sought to minimise the crisis with Trump’s America. It is being suggested that if he is humoured in the right way by Zelensky and if a minerals deal is signed, then an acceptable peace deal underpinned by US guarantees and logistical support for European armed forces as peacekeepers could be achieved. If such a deal was rejected by Vladimir Putin, it is thought that US support for Ukraine could continue.
Friday’s Oval Office scene is dismissed as some unfortunate aberration. This may be so, but it is hard to see how this squares with the chilling and deliberate decision of the US to vote with Russia in the UN—and against its allies—on the motion condemning Russian aggression on 24th February. It is difficult, too, to reconcile such a reading with the torrent of social media tropes by close Trump allies routinely vilifying Ukraine and Zelensky in terms lifted straight from Putin’s propaganda machine. Trump seems much more interested in a deal with Putin than in Ukraine’s future as a free democratic country. It looks like Trump is seeking another transactional arrangement, reminiscent of the Hitler-Stalin pact, by which parts of the sovereign territory of Ukraine and the people in it will be traded for US access to Russian raw materials.
But Sunday also saw the first steps at a collective European level to rise to this crisis by taking responsibility for the continent’s defence and helping Ukraine. That will not be easy but it is possible—if the will is there. The UK having left the EU has not made matters easier. We have lost this crucial forum as a place to exert influence and engage bilaterally with our key European allies, and this is to our disadvantage. The EU may have no role in military deployments but unless these are underpinned by extensive co-operation in armaments procurement and manufacture, as well as technical development, we will get nowhere. In such a scenario, being outside the single market will be an obstacle to our much needed participation.
So we need a new European vision if we are to meet this challenge, and one that is not dependent on the EU. Over a century ago, during the First World War, the UK faced a problem in maximising its war fighting capacity, as did France. It took an Anglophile French businessman, Jean Monnet, to start the process of co-operation to achieve this. Today, leadership in European unity is what we need again if we are to build a coalition of the willing to defend our freedom.
We can all hope that this rift between European democratic states and the US is temporary and certainly try to minimise it if possible. But we should not delude ourselves. The world of shared values that took me and my committee on regular visits to our US counterparts and to its agencies, the world in which I met with the US attorney general to discuss international rule of law issues when I held that office here, looks to me, for the present, well and truly over.
The survival of a free and sovereign Ukraine from Putin’s malice is a vital national interest. The alternative does risk war on our continent. With or without America, we are going to have to shoulder with our friends the burden of preventing this unconscionable outcome.
