Keir Starmer’s commitment to send British troops to Ukraine is possibly the most consequential decision he has made as Prime Minister so far. Labour List niggled that it had won a mixed reception at this weeks meeting of European leaders in Paris. With impending elections for the German Bundestag and the Polish Presidency, this is no surprise: Olaf Scholz and Donald Tusk would both have wanted to avoid speculative statements
Europe is right to be cautious. Who knows whether Trump’s attempt to do a deal with Russia will produce a ceasefire that the Ukrainians can live with. It is welcome that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said Ukrainian consent would be a precondition of a successful outcome to the Trump-Putin negotiations.
Europe should now work privately with the Ukrainians to define what might be an acceptable settlement: a ceasefire, not a permanent and irreversible cession of territory, apart from possibly Crimea; no demilitarisation of Ukraine; recognition by Russia of Ukraine’s medium term path to EU membership; what to do about war crimes, in particular Russian forced deportation of Ukrainian children; and most of all credible security guarantees for Ukraine’s future.
To be credible a European force on the ground would require continued US high tech support in terms of missile defence, real time information on military movements in potential battlefields and sophisticated targeting capability. It is a disgrace that Europe and the UK lack these capabilities, but the reality is one of high US dependency if the presence of European troops is to be a credible deterrent to Putin.
The upside of this European commitment to Ukraine’s security is that it would demonstrate to Trump that Europe including Britain are prepared to step up to the plate with men, materials and money in its own defence. At considerable cost. He would have achieved his goal of making the Europeans pay their fair share, as he sees it.
The overriding political objective must be to keep the Americans in Europe through more equal burden sharing in NATO. The harsh truth is that Europe at present cannot defend itself without a continued US presence.
There will be those who argue, without perhaps realising the historic parallel, “why should we go the defence of a far away country of which we know nothing”. Neville Chamberlain’s words on presiding over the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference in 1938. Yet Putin is a much wider threat to peace and democracy in Europe than anything we have seen since Hitler and later the Soviet threat. Look how the democratic opposition in Belarus has been crushed with Putin’s help, how he is trying to destroy the pro-European aspirations of Georgia and Moldova, how he interferes in recent democratic elections (for example the Romanian Presidency; how his troops threaten the independence of the Baltic states which he has never recognised.) And consider how the Russians are actively threatening our undersea pipelines and cable networks, threatening to launch cyber attacks, and goodness knows how they may be manipulating social media to promote far-right ideas.
This is painful to recognise. When I worked for Downing Street in the Blair years, I remember the sense of optimism when Putin became Russian President. George Robertson played a key role in attempting to bring Russia into a closer role with NATO.
For Germany, recent events are part of a far bigger historical tragedy. My SPD friends always yearned for the post war reconciliation with Russia that they so nobly achieved with France, bilaterally and through the gradual buildup of the European Union, the most successful peace project in modern history.
In that Downing Street period, I headed a delegation that regularly met with the Ukrainian presidential administration. The tensions were obvious between those who saw their country as a Moscow satellite, and those who broke out in great smiles when I told them that Britain and Tony Blair accepted the validity of their long term “European vocation”. It is a great tragedy that Britain itself never understood the emotional and practical power of this great ideal.
Of course, ideals cost money. There are those within Labour who will question how are we going to make this new and bold commitment to European security “within our fiscal rules”. My response is that a decision of this political magnitude is not one for Treasury bean counters. I am confident that Chancellor Rachel Reeves will see the big picture. The Treasury is right that there is gross inefficiency in British and European defence spending. The solution lies in cross border mergers between defence companies and the creation of a European single market in defence supply and equipment. We have every interest in participating fully in such endeavors.
The European Commission has already announced that it will relax its fiscal rules to allow for the necessity of increased defence spending. Also the possibility is under active consideration of launching European defence bonds (borrowing outside national budgets) for this essential support. I support this idea; I doubt however it will receive unanimous assent from EU member states like Hungary. If the defence bond instead becomes a ‘coalition of the willing’, I see no reason why the UK should not seek to participate.
This is a critical moment for our future. The situation may not be quite as bad as Ernie Bevin faced from his new desk in the Foreign Office in 1945. But there are similarities; people now think Bevin’s great achievements were the creation of NATO and the implementation of the Marshall Plan, one of the greatest acts of generosity by the United States in world history. But he gradually realised his aim to keep the Americans in Europe by step by step European efforts to sign a mutual defence treaty with France in 1946, to create the Western European Union in 1947 (UK, France and Benelux, later joined by Italy) and by the huge British effort which Bevin actively promoted to to rebuild democratic institutions in Germany that became the Federal Republic in 1949.
Today, building up Europe compliments, not contradicts, keeping the Americans in Europe. It is also the key to Ukraine’s survival as an independent country and the realisation of its European vocation.
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