British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s revamp of defense policy intended to show US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin that Britain is serious about maintaining its role as a key power in Europe and NATO.
However, Starmer’s failure to explain how and when he would find billions of pounds of extra spending to pay for the new weapons and personnel left him facing doubts about the UK’s commitment to follow through.
His plans must also survive rising pressure from Labour lawmakers, who want to prioritize domestic issues blowing back on the left-leaning party at the ballot box, such as controversial benefit cuts.
The UK government on Monday released a long-awaited blueprint to move its depleted military to a position of “war-fighting readiness.” Among other things, the Strategic Defense Review called for building as many as a dozen new attack submarines as part of the AUKUS partnership with Australia and the US, invest ￡15 billion (US$20.3 billion) in nuclear warhead development and expanding domestic production of drones, munitions and long-range missiles.
Still, Starmer has repeatedly sidestepped questions about when he would firm up his “ambition” to expand defense spending to 3 percent of economic output in the next parliament, compared with 2.3 percent now and a planned 2.5 percent in two years’ time. That risks undermining British leadership on European security issues, with NATO leaders expecting to commit later this month in The Hague to an expenditure target of 3.5 percent to appease Trump’s demands on the alliance.
“The key question remains: What’s the planned pathway from 2.5 percent in 2027 to 3 percent in 2034, itself short of a likely new NATO target?” said John Foreman, former UK defense attache to Moscow and Kyiv. “Without that, any plans are worthless.”
Starmer is vying to reverse decades of decline in the British military as Whitehall policymakers directed resources toward health and social programs while enjoying the protection of the US nuclear umbrella. The UK’s inability to credibly defend its interests at home and abroad led then-British secretary of state for defence Ben Wallace, a Conservative, to declare that the military had been “hollowed out” since the end of the Cold War.
The last defense review — drafted under former British prime minister Boris Johnson in 2021 — was more focused on force projection and naval power, with a shift toward the Indo-Pacific region. Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s return to power upended those plans, forcing the UK to turn its attention to security concerns closer to home.
Since taking power last year, Starmer has sought to put the UK at the heart of European security, helping forge a “coalition of the willing” of nations supporting Ukraine and striking a defense pact with Brussels. For the Labour leader, who opposed leaving the EU, it was a chance to reassert British leadership on the continent without re-litigating Brexit.
“The threat we now face is more serious, more immediate and more unpredictable than at any time since the Cold War,” Starmer told workers on Monday at BAE Systems PLC’s Govan shipyard in Glasgow, Scotland. “A new era in the threats we face demands a new era for defense and security, not just to survive in this new world, but to lead.”
Yet military experts warned that the prime minister’s lofty aims contrast with what he has been willing to commit to spending on defense and look in danger of appearing off the pace when compared with commitments being made by other NATO members.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte is pushing for members to pledge to spend 3.5 percent of GDP on core defense activities by 2032, with another 1.5 percent going toward adjacent projects such as on cybersecurity and border control. That is an effort to assuage Trump, who has called on NATO members to spend 5 percent of GDP, a goal that the US itself does not meet.
Asked for a clearer statement about when his 3 percent spending goal would be met, Starmer declined to give what he called an “arbitrary date,” insisting he would only set out plans for further spending once the economic and fiscal situation allowed.
The lack of clarity prompted criticism from left and the right, including the now-opposition Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Starmer will be expected to provide answers to NATO leaders when he attends the organization’s summit in the Netherlands.
While the prime minister has so far avoided the sort of criticism that Trump has directed at other allies about their security commitments, it remains to be seen how the US leader will respond to the UK’s spending plans.
There was at least one potential boost for UK-US relations in Monday’s announcement: Britain indicated it would consider buying F-35A jets capable of firing tactical nuclear weapons, made by Lockheed Martin Corp.
The international context was laid out at a meeting of eastern European and Nordic leaders in Vilnius on Monday, where Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda and Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen suggested that NATO’s target for 3.5 percent of core defense spending should be brought forward to sooner than 2032.
Former British secretary of state for defence Grant Shapps similarly told Bloomberg that Starmer should commit to spending 3 percent of GDP on defense by 2030 to ensure that Britain maintains its position at the fore of NATO.
“That figure isn’t decorative — it’s the entry ticket for modern kit, a resilient industrial base and credibility with our allies. Anything less is theater,” said Shapps, a Conservative who left office last year. “Moscow can spot the difference between a slogan and steel.”
Starmer’s backers argue that he has already proved his intent by lifting projected defense spending earlier this year and accuse his Conservative predecessors of handing him a poisoned inheritance including a threadbare military and overstretched public finances.
Ultimately, Starmer has decided where government expenditure should be focused, choices which are in the spotlight again at next week’s spending review.
With the Labour government struggling for popularity less than a year into power and Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party surging in the polls, Labour’s lawmakers have already forced a reversal on a plan to cut cold-weather payments for pensioners and are pushing for him to increase benefits for parents.
Simultaneous calls from international allies to raise defense spending and from Labour lawmakers to raise welfare spending pose an obvious challenge for British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves. She might soon be forced to decide whether to bow to demands from within her party to loosen her fiscal rules or compromise on Labour’s campaign pledges not to raise broad-based taxes.
Paul Johnson, director of the Institute of Fiscal Studies think tank, told Times Radio that he expected some “some really quite chunky tax increases.”
That is “the only choice that is available,” Johnson said.
On May 7, 1971, Henry Kissinger planned his first, ultra-secret mission to China and pondered whether it would be better to meet his Chinese interlocutors “in Pakistan where the Pakistanis would tape the meeting — or in China where the Chinese would do the taping.” After a flicker of thought, he decided to have the Chinese do all the tape recording, translating and transcribing. Fortuitously, historians have several thousand pages of verbatim texts of Dr. Kissinger’s negotiations with his Chinese counterparts. Paradoxically, behind the scenes, Chinese stenographers prepared verbatim English language typescripts faster than they could translate and type them
More than 30 years ago when I immigrated to the US, applied for citizenship and took the 100-question civics test, the one part of the naturalization process that left the deepest impression on me was one question on the N-400 form, which asked: “Have you ever been a member of, involved in or in any way associated with any communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?” Answering “yes” could lead to the rejection of your application. Some people might try their luck and lie, but if exposed, the consequences could be much worse — a person could be fined,
Xiaomi Corp founder Lei Jun (雷軍) on May 22 made a high-profile announcement, giving online viewers a sneak peek at the company’s first 3-nanometer mobile processor — the Xring O1 chip — and saying it is a breakthrough in China’s chip design history. Although Xiaomi might be capable of designing chips, it lacks the ability to manufacture them. No matter how beautifully planned the blueprints are, if they cannot be mass-produced, they are nothing more than drawings on paper. The truth is that China’s chipmaking efforts are still heavily reliant on the free world — particularly on Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing
Last week, Nvidia chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) unveiled the location of Nvidia’s new Taipei headquarters and announced plans to build the world’s first large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer in Taiwan. In Taipei, Huang’s announcement was welcomed as a milestone for Taiwan’s tech industry. However, beneath the excitement lies a significant question: Can Taiwan’s electricity infrastructure, especially its renewable energy supply, keep up with growing demand from AI chipmaking? Despite its leadership in digital hardware, Taiwan lags behind in renewable energy adoption. Moreover, the electricity grid is already experiencing supply shortages. As Taiwan’s role in AI manufacturing expands, it is critical that
RSS