Britain may not be at war, but the backdrop to next Monday’s strategic defence review is the greatest geopolitical uncertainty since 1945. A set of loosely interconnected conflicts – led by Russia’s continued assault on Ukraine and its related shadow war in Europe, and Israel’s seemingly unending war on Hamas, which may lead to an attack on Iran – have not at all been restrained by a skittish White House with little interest in helping to promote peace in Europe.
One of the three-strong review team is Fiona Hill, who was briefly and famously an adviser to Donald Trump in his first term. She is so worried about the disintegration of postwar norms that she believes the world is drifting towards a “scenario that you had in world war one” where, in the run-up to the war, “suddenly all these different interests and these different conflicts became, you know, basically intertwined with each other, [and] it becomes extraordinarily hard to disentangle”.
