Britain has made moral and military support for Ukraine a fundamental plank of its post-Brexit foreign policy, winning support in Eastern Europe and aligning itself with the US, Alexander Zevin writes is this month's Monde Diplomatique
Charles de Gaulle, explaining his veto of Britain’s application to join the EEC for a second time in 1967, pointed above all to ‘the special relations between Britain and America with their advantages and also limitations’; earlier, he had dismissed the idea of British membership more brusquely, as a Trojan horse for the economic and military domination of Europe by America.
That impression was not unfounded, as first Dwight D Eisenhower and then John F Kennedy pressed their counterparts in London to take the lead in further European integration.
Yet it was not until 1973 that Britain managed to join the Common Market, and by then France had a new president, Georges Pompidou, with fewer misgivings about the UK’s privileged ties to Washington.
The ensuing union turned out to be fragile. Less than 50 years later, the UK became the only country ever to leave the EU, with the referendum of 2016. If Brexit has caused endless recriminations within Britain focused mainly on the economic costs, the questions raised outside it have been of the sort posed by De Gaulle, albeit turned on their head.
Once the UK’s Trojan horse was wheeled away, what might Europe become – and could it be expected to act with more independence, less like the ‘colossal Atlantic community’ De Gaulle had warned against than the ‘European Europe’ he advocated?
Predictions that post-Brexit Britain would find itself isolated in Europe, adrift at its edge or caught between the tug of Washington and Beijing – or that Europe might regain some of the initiative it had lost due to British intransigence on political federation or common defence – have not survived contact with the geopolitical shock that arrived 14 months after the end of its ‘transition period’ out of the EU.
The war in Ukraine that began in February 2022 has acted like a chemical bath in a dark room, revealing an image of power hidden under the surface of words and events – both in the relationship of Britain to the EU, and of each of them to the US.
‘Britain is on our side’
Far from sitting on the sidelines, the UK has forced the pace of the European response to Russia’s invasion. From the start, it advocated sanctions to ‘squeeze Russia from the global economy, piece by piece’ – including a ban on global payments via SWIFT, tech exports, travel, a freeze on Russian assets, and an end to Russian oil and gas imports.
The UK has also supplied £2.3bn of military hardware to Ukraine, from anti-tank and ship missiles to artillery and drones, along with a just-announced squadron of 12 tanks, a total level of aid second only to the US.
Ukrainians are trained to use these weapons not only at bases in Kent and the Salisbury plain, but by British special forces in and around Kyiv, alongside an unspecified number of British intelligence personnel.
According to a senior general, Royal Marines are also there, engaged since April in ‘discreet operations’ in a ‘hugely sensitive environment and with a high level of political and military risk’ . By the spring, Volodymyr Zelensky declared British prime minister Boris Johnson his favourite European leader, telling The Economist (22 March 2022) that, in implied contrast to France or Germany, ‘Britain is definitely on our side. It is not performing a balancing act.’
That popularity extended to the Baltic states, where Johnson dispatched 8,000 soldiers to conduct military drills. They joined 1,700 already in Estonia, as part of a Joint Expeditionary Force to the Baltic, set up in 2012 and led by the Royal Navy.
When Russia and Ukraine seemed on the verge of agreeing to an interim peace deal in late March, it was the British prime minister who arrived in Kyiv as messenger of the ‘collective West’ to press Zelensky to break off negotiations, on the grounds that ‘Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined’ and that here was a chance to ‘press him’.
Britain now plays the same basic role it once did as an EU member, partnering with actors that share its scepticism of EU budgetary largesse, federalism or independent military action – Poland and the other Visegrád states, as well as Romania, Bulgaria, the Netherlands – if now on bilateral, trilateral or ad hoc bases.
In contrast, the core EU member states that stood to gain in stature from Brexit have faced just the opposite outcomes. Germany is threatened with an economic wipeout – squeezed between the explosion in energy prices stemming from sanctions it has adopted against Russia, and the falloff in oil and gas supplies since; and a slowdown in China, its largest trading partner, exacerbated by a campaign devised in Washington to isolate Beijing.
The problem goes beyond that of a recession to the demise of an entire growth model and the ‘threat of deindustrialisation’.
France’s goals frustrated
France, meanwhile, is now the only nuclear power and permanent member of the UN Security Council in the EU, and has its strongest military. But Paris has been unable to deploy these elements of power in or outside the bloc.
Globally, its position was brought home after the humiliation of the AUKUS affair in 2021 – which saw Australia renege on a deal to buy 12 diesel submarines from it, in favour of a wide-ranging security pact with the US and UK to build a nuclear flotilla to patrol the Pacific against China.
In the EU, Macron’s stated goal of strengthening European ‘strategic sovereignty’ in cooperation with Germany has also withered. Under the coalition headed by Olaf Scholz, and as a condition for the Greens’ participation, Berlin agreed to buy American F-18s – putting the future of the Franco-German-Spanish fighter bomber project FCAS in doubt – while influential figures openly moot the possibility of transcending the old idea of a Kerneuropa with France, in favour of the inclusion of new partners driving EU expansion to the East. Of the momentum that Brexit was expected to give EU security and defence policy, not a peep can be heard.
The autonomy of the EU with respect to the Atlantic alliance has since the 1990s been more self-conceit than reality. President Clinton pressed for EU enlargement to the east as the complement to NATO membership, which in all cases preceded it – in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999, before NATO launched its offensive in the Balkans; and then in Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia, as well as Slovenia and the Baltics in 2004, soon after the alliance began its first ‘out-of-area’ operations alongside the US in Afghanistan.
In 2003 France may have threatened a veto in the UN Security Council on the war that followed in Iraq, but provided the air bases needed to carry it out – just as eastern Europe became the host of black sites for the CIA, in its campaign of ‘extraordinary rendition’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ in the American ‘war on terror’.
Almost two decades later, the extent of this subordination has been made plain in Ukraine. Readers of the quality press in Europe may still find reassurance there: as the philosopher Slavoj Žižek told Le Figaro (31 October 2022), ‘We can still be proud of Europe’, combining respect for individual dignity, the fight against climate change, and capacity for self-criticism.
Yet it is hard to ignore that whatever its other virtues, the bloc has shown almost no diplomatic or military initiative since the demise of the 2014 Minsk accords (of which Europe and not the US was the guarantor).
Once the war began, those roles were outsourced to Washington. The incapacity to act independently of the US stems above all from longstanding tensions within the Franco-German tandem, which this latest crisis has intensified.
The issue is not lack of means since France, Germany and Italy collectively spend more than twice what Russia does annually on arms. For economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, a different logic is at work, inscribed in the nature of the EU project since the end of the cold war: it has become, in his words, a ‘civil auxiliary of NATO’ – registering symbolic protests against decisions of the Supreme Court in the US, while huddling ever more tightly under the nuclear umbrella it holds aloft.
The next test is China
Can Europe diverge from the US where fundamental interests are at stake? The next test hovers well beyond Ukraine, in China. Beijing, argues the Biden administration, must not be emboldened to move on Taiwan by signs of weakness against Russia. So far, European leaders have not shown much inclination to publicly question the wisdom of following the US into this new great power confrontation.
At the June 2022 NATO summit in Madrid, they agreed to label Beijing a ‘systemic challenge’ for the first time, inviting South Korea, Japan, New Zealand and Australia to stake out the more and more nebulous perimeter of the ‘North Atlantic’.
It is unclear if they can tolerate the trade war that comes with this posture, now that China accounts for a larger overall share of EU imports and exports than the US. More to the point, will Washington allow the exemptions that Germany, the Netherlands and others may seek for their high-tech sectors, when its vast powers of financial compulsion can so easily be turned on them?
Even the unity attained over the war in Ukraine is being tested by pressures it has created at national level, from popular protests in the Czech Republic over household energy prices, to open fissures in the governing elite of Italy on weapons shipments, to the bitter anger of German businessmen at US ‘profiteering’ on natural gas.
If the UK has appeared to lead rather than follow in Europe, that is in large part a function of the special relationship, lending it the sort of prestige enjoyed by a prefect over younger pupils at a public school. Few were better prepared socially to take on this role than Johnson, who staked his premiership on Ukraine – from photo ops in Kyiv even in his last hours, until manoeuvring inside the Tory party finally ousted him.
How did the country he led become the most intransigent of the states supporting Ukraine at the side of the US? Just as in continental Europe, the war has exposed a longer-term UK dependence, made all the more apparent in the wake of Brexit. Policymakers have of course signalled the opposite: a commitment to ‘British leadership in the world’.
That was the message behind the first ‘Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy’ (Global Britain in a Competitive Age, March 2021) calling for a smaller, leaner army, but also one that was a ‘more present and active force around the world’, capable of rapid deployment alongside naval and special forces strike groups, and a larger stockpile of nuclear weapons.
This was backed up by two projected bursts of military spending: to 2.5% of GDP in a decade, announced by Johnson; and to 3% under his short-lived successor Liz Truss, for a real-terms increase of £20-25bn. (Under current prime minister Rishi Sunak, the commitment has changed to ‘at least 2%’.)
The UK remains one of the largest arms exporters in the world, with a particular strength in aeronautics that its diplomats have tried to leverage abroad – most recently in a complex deal to co-develop its next-generation Tempest stealth fighter jet with Japan and Italy.
Overlap with US priorities
As journalist Tom Stevenson has argued, however, the most consistent leitmotif of these attempts to chart a strategic path for ‘Global Britain’ is its overlap with American priorities. If plenty of imperial nostalgia is evident among the ‘defence intellectuals’ who inform policy – at a few institutions like the Royal United Services Institute, Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) and Department of War Studies at King’s College (London) – it is not always clear for which empire. This is especially glaring in the official volte-face on China.
The ‘golden decade’ of bilateral trade relations with Beijing announced under David Cameron in 2015 as a key vector for renewed inward investment lasted barely a few years, and is now over. It is not difficult to see why, given the aims of the integrated review: the dispatch of a new aircraft carrier to the Indo-Pacific, to be ‘permanently available to NATO’; making Korea a ‘highly significant area of focus’; and returning to points ‘east of Suez’ – already visibly underway since 2018, when Britain opened a naval base in Bahrain to assist US operations in the Persian Gulf and beyond.
The ‘special relationship’ is often seen as informal and ill-defined, even as a tremendous amount continues to be said and written about it. In fact, from the 1940s it has had fairly concrete effects: in exchange for keeping forward operating bases on its territories, the UK has gained privileged access to American technology – if not always over how and when it is used.
Since the failure of its own Bluestreak programme in the 1950s, the main form this has taken is a succession of ballistic missile systems: Thor, Skybolt, Polaris and Trident, without which Britain could neither target, launch and deliver, nor maintain and test, its nuclear deterrent.
A more flattering version of the real ‘special relationship’ stresses intelligence sharing – another wartime collaboration carried over into the UKUSA agreement of 1947, and since extended to Australia, Canada and New Zealand, the other three members of the so-called Five Eyes. The number of US bases has fluctuated over the same period. In 1986 one investigative journalist counted over 130 facilities in Britain, making it a veritable ‘unsinkable aircraft carrier’ in the North Atlantic, pointed at the Soviet Union.
Though the US presence has declined since the end of the cold war, it remains significant: RAF Menwith Hill is the largest military spy base outside the US, run by the NSA; RAF Lakenheath is the largest US fighter base in Europe. Britain is the third-largest outpost of the US Air Force in the world, after Japan and Germany, with around 10,000 personnel.
Decline of dissent
What has changed most dramatically since the 1990s is the kind of opposition these features of the ‘special relationship’ engender, and the attention they receive.
That is true at elite level, where undue deference to the senior partner in the relationship once elicited criticisms and questions not just from a handful of leftwing MPs, but also from Conservatives with a sovereigntist streak. Today it is hard to imagine a prime minister refusing a US request to use RAF airfields, as Edward Heath did in 1973 during the Yom Kippur war.
It is just as evident in the waning influence of a grassroots anti-nuclear movement that reached its apogee in the early 1980s.
Then Michael Foot, co-founder of CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), led Labour on a platform of unilateral disarmament while calling for the withdrawal of US cruise missiles and ‘phasing out’ NATO for a European security pact.
Under its current leader, Sir Keir Starmer, those views would be grounds for expulsion: de facto banned since February from rallying with Stop the War and from any criticism of NATO, socialist members and MPs continue to be purged after the ejection of the last Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn – the only one besides Foot to seriously question the Atlanticist basis of British foreign policy.
Starmer played a similar role as head of the crown prosecution service (2008-13), when his office sought to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the US’s behest. Assange awaits the outcome of his appeals in a British prison.
The irony is that in the climate this has created it is far easier to criticise US foreign policy in the US than in Britain, including over Ukraine. In the UK, no equivalent has emerged of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a thinktank that in 2019 set out to disrupt the liberal interventionist orthodoxies that dominate the foreign policies of both parties in Washington. If disagreements exist among policymakers, or between civilian and military leaders, these have largely remained hidden.
Not so in the US, where Pentagon officials have regularly leaked against hawks at the National Security Agency (NSA) and the State Department.
The mainstream press has likewise been more uniform across the board: from the Guardian to The Economist to the Telegraph, opinion has favoured supporting Ukraine until it ‘defeats’ Russia – while news is so slanted towards Kyiv as to create an expectation that victory is imminent, as Russia is reported to be running out of weapons, conscripts, and other key resources.
The result is not simply a distorted image of the war, but a kind of analytical vacuum at the centre of British politics. Sanctions severe enough to ‘bring down the Putin regime’ (coming on top of the impact of Brexit, Covid and Tory incompetence) have instead seen two premiers disappear, amidst a rise in energy prices for the poorest households that is more severe than anywhere else in western Europe.
Next year the British economy is set to grow more slowly than that of every developed nation besides the one it has sought to ‘hobble’.
‘The worst crisis since Suez’
Rather than a run on the rouble, a selloff in gilts provoked by September’s mini-budget threatened pension funds with insolvency and raised borrowing costs to the point of forcing the Bank of England to intervene to stabilise them.
As power quickly ebbed away from Truss, a new chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, announced further spending cuts, even as public sector workers prepared to strike against a backdrop of median pay that has not risen since 2008. No announcement will be made on the defence budget until yet another integrated review, but defence secretary Ben Wallace let it be known that in his view there is no room to cut: at 72,000, the army is only big enough to ‘do a bit of tootling around’ at home.
The most striking comment about this panic came as it unfolded on TV (Sky News, 17 October 2022), when Tobias Elwood, chair of the Commons defence select committee, called it ‘the worst crisis since Suez’.
Yet his analogy was more than a little cryptic: for where, in that case, was the equivalent of the military adventure that in 1956 spurred a run on the pound and the ouster of Sir Anthony Eden?
This was left a discreet blank. One lesson of Suez was that Britain could no longer act with so much independence vis-à-vis the US. Over half a century after taking this lesson to heart, can it afford to act with so little?
