UK prime minister Keir Starmer seems intent on sending British soldiers to Ukraine to police any future ceasefire with Russia. Having first mooted putting ‘troops on the ground’ a couple of weeks ago, Starmer has since doubled down on this plan at Sunday’s emergency summit of European leaders in London.
Speaking afterwards, Starmer said that he and French president Emmanuel Macron were prepared to form a European ‘coalition of the willing’ to secure any ceasefire in Ukraine. Starmer provided few other details, other than that this military force will comprise troops from ‘European and other partners’. In an interview with Le Figaro, Macron was more forthcoming. Apparently, he and Starmer are cooking up a proposal to be floated under President Trump’s nose, that would begin with a one-month truce between Ukraine and Russia, followed, in the second phase, by ‘European troops on Ukrainian soil’.
Britain has since distanced itself from this ‘French’ proposal. In any case, Starmer seems to be suffering from delusions of military grandeur. He can draw up plans for British forces’ involvement in Ukraine all he likes. He can claim to be standing at ‘the crossroads of history’, and declare ‘it’s time to act, to step up and lead’, if he insists. But no amount of self-aggrandising bluster can magic a serious military force into being. As it stands, Britain has a mere 56,000 deployable troops – in total. Its naval force comprises barely a handful of warships and its airforce is minimal.
It’s difficult not to see Starmer’s talk of boots on the ground as anything other than posturing. A textbook example of a rudderless, domestically unpopular leader grandstanding on the world stage for a PR win. Like far too many of his prime-ministerial predecessors, Starmer seems to be using foreign policy for domestic purposes – as a means to provide his government with a semblance of the purpose it so clearly lacks.
But the problems with Starmer’s military posturing go far deeper than Britain’s military incapacity. Even if the UK, thanks to the government’s much-trumpeted increases in defence spending, were to become capable of maintaining a military presence on the furthest reaches of Eastern Europe, that still wouldn’t make it a good idea.
The UK government seems to have forgotten that it was precisely the West’s military overtures to Ukraine, in particular the insincere dangling of NATO membership, that helped pave the way for Russia’s invasion in the first place. Putin used it as a specious justification for his neoimperial aggression back in February 2022.
The idea that Moscow would suddenly tolerate British and European troops on its borders as part of a peace deal is fanciful. Kremlin officials have already condemned the proposal, warning that the presence of troops from NATO countries in Ukraine would be seen as a direct threat.
In the end, the only real guarantee of Ukraine’s future security is its capacity for self-defence. After all, it has been Ukrainians’ own fierce determination to fight for their nation – in tandem with Western aid and support – that has fuelled their defiance of the Russian invaders thus far. Meanwhile, Ukrainian ingenuity has led to significant innovations on the battlefield.
Rather than throwing their own citizens into harm’s way, Western European leaders should focus on ensuring the Ukrainians have what they need to defend themselves. As one foreign-policy analyst puts it, ‘a rebuilt and adequately supplied Ukrainian military would be a formidable deterrent to Moscow’. A focus on Ukrainian self-defence is all the more crucial given Starmer and Macron have made abundantly clear that any Western European troop presence would need to be backed up by the US, which the Trump White House suggests isn’t going to happen.
Starmer’s right about one thing. After decades of deindustrialisation and cuts to defence spending, Britain’s military capacity has been severely degraded. That capacity certainly needs to be rebuilt, as Labour’s planned increases to military spending indicate. But not to send countless young British men to fight battles thousands of miles away, or to allow British leaders to engage in grandstanding interventions for domestic political consumption. It needs to be re-built in the interests of Britain’s own national self-defence.
And here we come to another key problem. Our cultural and political elites, Labour included, have spent years running Britain down. They have damned it as an incorrigibly racist nation, born of the sins of colonialism and empire. They pine for its re-immersion into the globalist structures of the European Union. It doesn’t matter how many Union flags now adorn the background to Starmer’s every speech, he and his ilk clearly regard British nationhood as outmoded and patriotism as a bit suspect. They don’t really have any sense of what it is about the UK that might actually be worth defending.
This is what has produced the bizarre spectacle of the past fortnight: a prime minister who seems far happier talking up sending troops to Ukraine than he does defending the national sovereignty of the UK. It is a posture that will do neither Britain nor Ukraine any good.
Tim Black is a spiked columnist.
