What Trump’s Ukraine betrayal means for Britain

At the Ukraine Contact Group in Rammstein, Germany, Hegseth ruled out the prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine. He proposed security guarantees for Ukraine but said there would be no US troops, nor NATO involvement in enforcing those guarantees. 

“Europe,” he said, “must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and non-lethal aid to Ukraine”.

With the British chief of defence staff and defence secretary John Healy sitting grim-faced alongside him, he urged them to tell Europe’s voters that the Russian threat can only be met by spending a bigger percentage of GDP on defence:

“2% is not enough. President Trump has called for 5% and I agree”.

It was a spectacular moment in world politics and one that should command the attention of every politically engaged person here. 

What it means is that America is no longer a reliable guarantor of European security. Even if the US Democrats recover from their collapse and win back the presidency, and if American democracy survives the silent coup being staged by Elon Musk and his teenage army, Europeans can no longer rely on the USA not to stage future, 180-degree turns.

So while Hegseth is wrong to attempt to bully Kyiv into territorial concessions to Moscow, he is right about the money.

The UK and its major European allies must now not only pour material and financial aid into Ukraine; they must rapidly hike defence spending. For Trump is not only capable of strongarming Ukraine into submission: our reliance on the USA for key military hardware means he is also capable of doing so to us.

Despite the fact that Britain has spent tens of billions of pounds building aircraft carriers, and will spend tens of billions more renewing its nuclear-armed submarine fleet, the warheads are made in America.

Our nuclear deterrent is independent – in the sense that we control its use – but it is entirely reliant on US commitment to collective defence. If that commitment is called into question, all Britain’s freedom of action in the world evaporates – from our ability to refuse Trump’s trade terms, to our support for UNWRA and the International Criminal Court.

So what the assembled European defence ministers got at Rammstein was a glimpse of their own potential powerlessness in the face of a global order that is visibly cracking up.

Their initial response was encouraging. A statement from the so-called Weimar-Plus group – including France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain the UK and the EU – said “We are ready to enhance our support for Ukraine. We commit to its independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity”. The statement also committed Europe’s major military powers to “strengthen our collective defence capabilities”.

But the scale of the challenge is huge. Not only will Ukraine need tens of billions of euros a year to go on defending itself and running its battered economy. Europe’s militaries are entirely reliant on the USA for what planners call “strategic enablers”: satellites that can spot incoming nukes, heavy transport aircraft, AWACS planes and intelligence gathering.

No single European country can build these alone, and without them we are entirely reliant on nuclear weapons to deter Russian aggression – at a time when Russia is ramping up research and production of all kinds of “intermediate” nukes that could be used short of all out Armageddon.

So the task for European states is both to collaborate and to rearm. There needs to be a European pillar of NATO with formal status and a coalition of the willing to reinforce commitments to mutual aid.

Here, the debate on defence spending has to get real. The FT reported this week that the Treasury is trying to block a request from service chiefs to hike defence spending to 2.63%, instead pegging it at 2.3%. With slow growth and high borrowing costs you can see their point – but Hegseth’s intervention just changed the nature of the world we live in. 

Labour politicians are fond of quoting Ernest Bevin, who devoted his time as foreign secretary to keeping America invested in the security of Europe. But what does a Bevinite do faced with an America like this? It is not just that the USA’s strategic interest is drawn to the Pacific: that was true under Biden. It is that American democracy is unstable – probably permanently so.

That is a situation beyond any playbook Labour politicians have been brought up with. And it demands strategic thinking. 

John Healey’s speech at Ramstein was exemplary. He said “This war was never just about the fate of one nation. China is watching. Iran and North Korea are watching. All, like Putin are looking for signs of weakness”. That, effectively, is Europe’s strongest Bevinite argument with the Trump administration.

The chance remains that Putin will fail to take the deal Trump is about to offer him. Much of the outcome depends not on the coterie of gangsters in Moscow but on whether China is prepared to tell their Russian ally to cut his losses.

But the most likely outcome is an unjust peace and territorial division. That is a second Munich – and like the betrayal of 1938 is certain to embolden Russia strategically. 

In the face of that, Labour’s front bench must face the facts: Britain needs to rearm – and will need to do so through borrowing to invest. The upside, as in the 1930s, will be economic growth.

But the bigger wakeup call is to us, the British people. The far-right political revolution that swept Hesgeth from Fox News to the Pentagon is coming here. 

We can defeat it, but the outcome has to be a clear decision: our security and our economic future lie depend on strengthened ties to Europe. America just showed us: there is nothing else.