Britain is at war with Russia already, one of the authors of the government’s strategic defence review has warned, while arguing that we can no longer depend on the US as a reliable ally.
Dr Fiona Hill, who served as the White House’s chief Russia adviser during Donald Trump’s first term in office, said the UK is in “pretty big trouble”, warning that the country is stuck between “the rock” of Russia and the “hard place” of an increasingly unreliable US under Mr Trump.
It comes after the government’s strategic defence review – unveiled last week – found that the armed forces are not ready to fight opponents like Russia or China.
“Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn’t fully anticipated,” Dr Hill told the Guardian, concluding that “Russia is at war with us”.
Arguing that the Kremlin has been “menacing the UK in various different ways” for years, she pointed to “the poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all kinds of cyber-attacks and influence operations. The sensors that we see that they’re putting down around critical pipelines, efforts to butcher undersea cables.”
Unveiling the SDR last week – authored by Dr Hill, Lord Robertson and General Sir Richard Barrons – defence secretary John Healey said Britain’s army needed to become “10 times more lethal” in the face of the “immediate and pressing threat” from Russia and the rise of China.
“We are in a new era of threat, which demands a new era for UK defence,” he told MPs.
The review found that the armed forces are not ready to fight its opponents as a result of inadequate stockpiles of weapons, medical services that cannot cope with a mass-casualty conflict and a personnel “crisis” that means only a small number of troops are ready to be deployed.
Meanwhile, General Sir Richard Barrons, warned that a cruise missile was “only 90 minutes away from the UK”.
But Sir Keir Starmer vowed to make Britain “a battle-ready, armour-clad nation” as he unveiled the SDR at the Govan shipbuilding yard in Scotland, which included an army boosted to 100,000 personnel, 12 new submarines, drones and a rollout of Artificial Intelligence.
But questions were raised over the government’s big ambitions to make Britain “safer and stronger” after Sir Keir refused to commit to spending 3 per cent of Britain’s gross domestic product on defence by 2034 — which the review warned was essential to ensure the plans were affordable.
Dr Hill, who was highly critical of the Trump administration, said Britain could no longer rely on the US’s military umbrella as it did during the cold war, at least “not in the way that we did before”.
It comes after the SDR contained a similar warning, saying: “The UK’s longstanding assumptions about global power balances and structures are no longer certain.”
The defence adviser argued that the US president “really wants to have a separate relationship with Putin to do arms control agreements and also business that will probably enrich their entourages further, though Putin doesn’t need any more enrichment”.
Speaking about Mr Trump’s White House, Dr Hill warned it is “not an administration, it is a court”, arguing that the president is driven primarily by his “own desires and interests, and who listens often to the last person he talks to”.
Speaking about the rise of the populist right in the US, she expressed concerns it could do well in British electoral politics if “the same culture wars” are allowed to grow in influence.
Warning of the impact of Reform UK, she said: “When Nigel Farage says he wants to do a Doge against the local county council, he should come over here [to the US] and see what kind of impact that has.
“This is going to be the largest layoffs in US history happening all at once, much bigger than hits to steelworks and coalmines.”
Doge (the Department of Government Efficiency) is an initiative by the second Trump administration, which aims to cut wasteful spending.
