Sir Keir Starmer’s announcement that he plans to send British peacekeepers to Ukraine raises two immediate questions. First, do we have the military capacity and the means to pay for it? Second, what exactly would we aim to achieve?

The answer to the first question is depressing. We have been running down our Armed Forces for 35 years, mainly to fund an unprecedented expansion of the welfare state and the NHS.

When the Prime Minister asked his generals whether they could patch together a brigade to patrol those sparse steppelands, they doubtless told him that they would manage. That is what soldiers do. 

Unusually among public-sector workers, they look for answers rather than excuses, and make do with whatever resources they have rather than insisting on bigger budgets.

But do the maths. There is peacekeeping and peacekeeping. Deployment in a largely stable zone – Cyprus, say – needs little more than a beret and suncream. But peacekeeping in Ukraine would require a full brigade at battle-readiness.

Britain has already committed a brigade to the defence of Estonia – at least in the sense of having it on standby, ready to reinforce the battle group on the front line. A second full brigade in Ukraine would consume every drop of our remaining resources. We would have no capability left. All our energies would be devoted to deterring Russia from invading the EU and its applicant members. So much for global Britain.

In any case, we don’t have the stockpiles. We have been giving away kit and ammunition since 2020, and started replacing it only patchily and late.

But there is a deeper problem. For at least six decades, our defence procurement has been built around the assumption that, in a serious scrap, we will be part of a US-led bloc. We might manage little local wars on our own – Aden, the Falklands, Sierra Leone – but, for anything bigger, we would be one component of a mighty Western coalition.

Sir Keir Starmer meets British soldiers at Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, where the Army has trained Ukrainian forces

In common with every other Nato member, we therefore specialised rather than building full-spectrum capacity. It left us with significant gaps. We are short of air defence systems, strategic intelligence and surveillance, electronic warfare and logistical lift.

Even if we replaced all the artillery we sent to our Ukrainian allies, we do not have anything like their ability to produce drones swiftly and at scale, because they are not ruled by health and safety bureaucracies. Fixing these things will take time and money. But procurement is the least of our worries. The American withdrawal from Europe upends all our strategic assumptions.

Why, after all, were we interested in Ukraine in the first place? Its geography is of little strategic value, and if our concern were for the free flow of its grain and other food exports, we would have pushed for the earliest possible settlement.

The answer is that we have a stake in a rules-based international order. Since 1945, we have sought to run our foreign policy on the basis of certain principles: borders should not be altered by force; territorial sovereignty should be recognised; disputes should be put to peaceful arbitration; basic human rights should be respected; civilian government is preferred to military rule.

Those principles, sometimes flouted but never abandoned, distinguish the relatively stable post-war order from the chaos of the 1930s. And they have their origin in a specific text, namely the Atlantic Charter, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt in Newfoundland in August 1941.

That charter became the basis of the Allied war aims when the US joined the war four months later. Its precepts informed the foundation of the United Nations, and served as Nato’s guiding ideals during the Cold War. But they always rested, in the last analysis, on American weaponry.

Donald Trump has turned his back on it all. I don’t just mean that he has abandoned Ukraine, ignoring the commitment that the US, along with Britain and Russia, made to protect its independence within its recognised borders back in 1994.

I mean that US foreign policy has itself given up on the Atlantic Charter’s insistence that countries should not help themselves to slices of their neighbours’ territories.

Ukrainian forces fire a Leopard 1A5 tank during training, in the country's Zaporizhzhia region

Ukrainian forces fire a Leopard 1A5 tank during training, in the country’s Zaporizhzhia region

Daniel Hannan warns that plans to send peacekeepers to Ukraine by Sir Keir Starmer, pictured with president Zelensky, would drain Britain's dwindling military resources

Daniel Hannan warns that plans to send peacekeepers to Ukraine by Starmer, pictured with president Zelensky, would drain Britain’s dwindling military resources

Never mind allowing Vladimir Putin to hang on to the lands he has stolen from Ukraine (and, for that matter, from Georgia). Trump is himself making aggressive territorial claims on Greenland, threatening economic sanctions against Denmark, the sovereign power, to make it give the territory up.

Denmark has been an ally of the US since 1941, going so far as to send troops to Afghanistan after the horrors of 9/11. But its nose is being rubbed brutally in the fact that it was a client state all along. Trump means to be transactional in his relationships. Loyalty is accepted but not reciprocated.

No longer will the US be swayed by common values and beliefs. No country is culturally closer to it than Canada. Yet, even as he rewards autocratic Russia, Trump menaces democratic Canada with annexation.

How should Britain respond to the sudden re-emergence of great power competition? We are better placed than most countries. We are a nuclear power. We have no quarrel with the US – nor even, directly, with China. We have allies in the Commonwealth.

But, even so, we need to adapt very quickly to the changes around us. We need an independent military capacity, which will mean rebuilding some of our manufacturing base. We need to increase our defence expenditure in absolute rather than in proportionate terms.

Never mind whether we spend two, three or five per cent of GDP on defence when our GDP is flatlining.

What we really need is growth, which will only happen when we scrap regulations, cut taxes and, above all, reduce spending – including on social security and the NHS which, together, account for half the national budget.

We also need to look at whether our deployments, from the battle group in Estonia to the RAF acting as the Romanian airforce, are optimal. 

These investments got us no return in goodwill during the EU disengagement talks, and it is worth asking whether our chief priority should be the defence of a European bloc which shows us no affection.

In the end, though, it all comes down to military capacity. I hope you won’t mind if I quote Churchill at length, because – though this is not among his more famous speeches – he made the point beautifully.

‘The army is not like a limited liability company, to be reconstructed, remodelled, liquidated, refloated from week to week as the money market fluctuates… If it is bullied, it sulks; if it is unhappy, it pines; if it is harried, it gets feverish; if it is sufficiently disturbed, it will wither and dwindle and almost die; and when it comes to this last serious condition, it is only revived by lots of time and lots of money.’

Britain and Europe can hardly claim to be shocked that the US is not going to defend them forever. As Ricky Gervais says of getting fat, you get lots of warning, plenty of opportunities to change course.

The best time to have trimmed our domestic budgets and invested in defence was a decade ago. The second-best time is now.

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