With an electorate that doesn’t back higher defence spending, Healey’s promise to put troops in Ukraine looks like political grandstanding, writes Michael Martins
When I worked at the US State Department during Donald Trump’s first term, it was abundantly clear that most European leaders hoped to wait him out before opening their wallets. Why confront his demands for higher defence spending when Joe Biden might win in 2020 and take the pressure off? Strategic patience was cheaper than raising taxes or asking electorates to make sacrifices, while publicly criticising him and his brutish negotiating tactics would probably help their own polling numbers.
Fast forward to today, and defence spending across the continent has surged. On a per capita basis, some European states now outspend the United States.
Into this moment of flux and following of last week’s meeting between President Trump and President Putin, the UK’s defence secretary, John Healey MP, committed UK forces to be on the ground from “day one” of any ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine as a “reassurance force” and a bulwark against renewed Russian aggression.
The framing was one of leadership, but Healey’s confirmation is more likely an attempt to bounce the United States into providing Ukraine with a de facto security guarantee, even if President Trump proves unwilling to commit to one. If NATO remains paralysed by internal vetoes, then a “coalition of the willing”, heavily peopled by consenting NATO militaries, could offer a workaround, or so the thinking likely went. Healey’s implicit bet is that if Russian troops attacked the coalition, Washington would respond, much as if a US vessel were attacked in the South China Sea, American allies would rally regardless of institutional technicalities.
It is a bold and meaningful gamble. The only problem is that it comes at a time when the electorate is not prepared for it.
Brits don’t back higher defence spending
According to recent YouGov polling, 75 per cent of Britons believe a major world conflict is likely in the next two decades, but two-thirds oppose higher defence spending if it means tax rises; opposition is even stronger if it means cuts to public services. We are clearly a country that senses looming conflict but still longs for the comfort of the pre-2022 world order.
That disconnect matters to how our friends and adversaries perceive us. A government with a four-year mandate and a 155-seat working majority should be in a strong position to make hard fiscal and security choices, including military commitments like Healey’s. Yet few MPs, staffers and party members have grasped the scale of his commitment, never mind the average voter. I have no doubt we would rally behind any Prime Minister in the event of a direct clash with Russia. But right now, Healey’s rhetoric rings hollow, not because the threats or his own ambitions are exaggerated, but because the fiscal and electoral maths do not add up.
This is, after all, an administration that delivered its Strategic Defence Review months late, still has no Defence Industrial Strategy and has MPs on the Defence Committee without functional parliamentary office phone numbers. Rule changes at last year’s Labour Party conference made it much easier to depose the party’s leader, requiring just 81 rebel MPs, significantly fewer than caused the government’s most recent U-turns over heating subsidies and welfare reforms.
Against that backdrop, grandstanding about reassurance missions and military deployments looks more like political brinksmanship than grand strategy and will be readily apparent to UK watchers around the world.
As ever, President Trump, ahead of his Alaska summit with Vladimir Putin, put it bluntly on Truth Social: “HIGH STAKES!!!” Healey seems to be angling to play this game of poker, too, but until he reconciles the government’s self-imposed fiscal constraints and political vulnerabilities, alongside nearly absent public appetite for further conflict or belt-tightening, he is gambling with our allies’ chips.
Michael Martins is founder of Overton Advisory and a former political specialist at US Embassy London