In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Sir Alex Younger, the former head of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, says that the United Kingdom needs to rearm. He is right.
As he says, the threat from Vladimir Putin’s Russia is real. “Putin and Trump together have done their best to persuade us that the rules have changed,” he said. He captures the sense of unease that Britain, having “for many years been completely free of any form of existential threat”, has allowed itself to assume that war is something that we can choose to take part in or not – rather than something that may sometimes come to us and for which we have to be prepared.
“We’re more comfortable thinking about the army as like the England football team,” said Sir Alex. “They go and do their thing over there and we watch it on telly – and that can’t happen anymore.”
Part of his suggested policy response, apart from the increase in defence spending that the government has already planned, is to build up the military reserves – that is, paying people to train with the armed forces outside working hours. This, said Sir Alex, “needs to be a more integrated feature of everyday life”.
Again, he is right, but the shift that is required in popular attitudes towards military service is dramatic. We only have to recall how Rishi Sunak’s proposed return of national service went down at the general election last year to realise that.
But the world has changed. Or, rather, Donald Trump’s alignment with Putin has crystallised a change that has been happening for some time. We thought that the existence of nuclear weapons meant that conventional warfare could not threaten us in Europe, but the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the attempted advance on Kyiv in 2022 should have opened our eyes.
We should keep as much of the special relationship with America as we can, but we should recognise that the United States’s guarantee of Europe’s security has expired. Mr Trump will not always be president, and his successors may take a different view, but the assumption that the US will always back us up cannot be relied on in future.
That means that not only must Britain rearm, but the rest of Europe must too, and that Europe will have to take responsibility for its own collective security, in alliance with the US where possible but without the US if necessary.
To his credit, Sir Keir Starmer understood this new reality earlier than most. He sought to maintain good relations with President Trump while taking a leading role in the collective stiffening of the European defence posture.
In a way, however, the big policy change was too easy, in that the increase in UK defence spending will be achieved by a straight switch from the foreign aid budget, which requires no sacrifice from the British people.
Hence the importance of the wider change in attitudes towards national defence that is implied by Sir Alex’s mention of the word “conscription”. He suggests that there is “great cynicism about this idea of collective effort to defend your country”. If that is true, it needs to change.
We should all be clear by now that Putin’s intentions towards eastern Europe in particular, but also towards the rest of Europe, are malign. We should be sceptical that his friend Mr Trump can persuade him to give up his war of aggression in Ukraine. Even if there is a pause in the fighting there, Putin will continue to “chip away” at the other countries on Russia’s border, as Dr Rachel Ellehuus, the director general of the Royal United Services Institute, said in her joint interview with Sir Alex for The Independent.
This means a “remilitarisation” of society that will be as unfamiliar as it may be unwelcome to many British citizens, but it is necessary.
