THE UK’s defence policy has been left “twisting in the wind” because the country has followed the US along “like a little lapdog”, journalist Ash Sarkar has said.
Sarkar appeared on a panel on BBC Politics Live where guests were discussing whether America is “destroying” the world order as we know it.
Following an extraordinary clash in the White House between Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy last week, the US President has suspended military aid to Ukraine and has paused intelligence sharing with the nation.
When Sarkar was asked if she felt the US is destroying the world order, she said she found it appalling the UK had “paved the way” for the weakening of international law with its actions in Iraq in 2003.
She also criticised how the UK had shaped its defence policy around the US, questioning why the country has two aircraft carriers which have been repeatedly mocked as being obsolete in the age of drones and hypersonic missiles.
Sarkar said: “Donald Trump’s world view can be boiled down to this – he thinks there are three global apex predators: there’s America, there’s China and there’s Russia.
"We've spent decades following America along like a little lapdog hoping to get the crumbs from them," Novara Media's Ash Sarkar tells #PoliticsLivehttps://t.co/KGUjz1PMYu pic.twitter.com/zB2Eepczmp
— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) March 6, 2025
“When he says America First he doesn’t mean America plus Ukraine, he doesn’t mean America plus Britain, he means America first, America’s interests first.
“For me the thing which, I think, is appalling about this situation is one, we have paved the way in many respects in weakening international law, so that’s why you have Russia waging a war of aggression.
“I mean, we kind of did that first with Iraq. We led the way when it came to unlawful invasions on flimsy pretexts.
“The second thing is we have spent decades following America along like a little lapdog hoping to get the crumbs from them and shaping our defence policy around them.”
But Sarkar argued following the US had left the UK “twisting in the wind” when it comes to defence.
“It’s left us in a bad position,” she said.
“Why do we have two aircraft carriers? They’re not useful for a land war in Europe.
“Russia doesn’t have a single functioning aircraft carrier because they know what they’re looking to do. We’ve got two aircraft carriers which were very expensive, came in 50% over budget, because we thought we’d have to follow America into a war in the Pacific.
“Now America’s changed its geopolitical orientation, we’ve been left twisting in the wind.”
The HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales are the UK's two aircraft carriers which cost more than £6 billion to build.
Ukraine's ambassador to the UK and former military chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi said the US is "destroying" the established world order on Thursday.
He said the White House had "questioned the unity of the whole Western world".
He told an audience: "We see that it is not just the axis of evil and Russia trying to revise the world order, but the US is finally destroying this order."
On Wednesday, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz confirmed the US had paused intelligence sharing with Ukraine.
He added that the Trump administration was pausing and reviewing "all aspects of this relationship".
The US has shared intelligence with Ukraine since the early stages of Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022.
It paused military aid to Kyiv on Monday following a dramatic breakdown in relations in the Oval Office last week, when Zelenskyy was told to leave after an angry meeting with Trump in which the US President accused him of “gambling with world war three”.
