Principles must not be the victim of Starmer’s embrace of realpolitik

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The writer is an FT contributing editor

Goodbye fluffy liberal internationalism. Hello hard-headed pursuit of the national interest. Western democratic norms and values are all very well. But homeland security in a dangerous world requires military strength and shameless deals with unsavoury regimes. Welcome to a new age of realpolitik.

Keir Starmer’s government does not put it quite like this in its 2025 National Security Strategy. But its warning that Britain must step beyond its “comfort zone” to defend itself consigns to the scrap heap the “let’s-make-the-world-a-better-place” multilateralism of the post cold war era. The “rest”, it turns out, do not want to be like the west. Britain’s approach must be transactional, and “unapologetic” in pursuit of its national interest.

To dispel any doubt, Starmer joined other Nato leaders in pledging a steep increase in spending on defence and national resilience. The plan is for a rise from the present 3.8 per cent of national income (2.3 per cent of which is core military spending, the rest protecting digital and energy networks, raw materials supply chains and such like) to 4.1 per cent by 2027 and to 5 per cent by 2035. These are big numbers.

As a downpayment, Starmer announced an order for 12 US F35 fighter jets equipped to carry tactical nuclear weapons. They will reinforce the strategic deterrent provided by the Trident submarine force. The Royal Air Force carried such bombs during the cold war but Britain opted out of Nato’s nuclear mission amid the peacenik optimism of the 1990s.

The government says it has not abandoned the pursuit of multilateral rules and norms. And shared democratic values, it says, remain at the heart of the Nato alliance. But the priority is to harden and sharpen “sovereign” strengths. We can no longer expect international rules to do the work of the armed forces.

You could say this is simply a belated recognition of the new disordered world. Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine broke the spell. China’s military build up in the western Pacific and its high tech support for Moscow’s aggression reveals a power set on overturning the old order.

The Middle East tells a similar story of state collisions. In the wake of the Hamas atrocities in southern Israel on October 7 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has thrown off all constraints. International calls for an end to the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza go unheeded. The attack on Iran’s nuclear and missile sites brushed aside US and European diplomatic efforts to get Tehran to step back from the nuclear threshold. The rules in the Middle East, Netanyahu has declared, are now written by Israel’s military might.

Starmer’s new strategy does a fair job in disabusing those who think Britain can escape the consequences of these fires. China, it notes, is already engaged in systematic espionage and interference with democracy and is seeking to undermine the UK’s economic security. Russia menaces the undersea cable networks providing energy and communications links with the outside world. Iran and North Korea are among other adversaries waging cyber war against our government and businesses.

As for Putin, his ambitions do not stop at Ukraine. Britain, the government warns, must now prepare for a possibility of direct attack on its homeland — a “wartime scenario” last imagined when the Soviet Communist party held sway in Moscow.

So far, so convincing. The warnings, though, would have been more potent had the government said what it really thinks about Donald Trump. European leaders at the Nato summit lauded the US president’s new strike-and-talk approach to Iran. In real life, Trump’s America First unilateralism could prove an existential threat to collective western defence. What price a rules-based system when a US administration casually challenges the sovereignty of neighbours such as Canada, Greenland and Panama?

The US, as any European policymaker you care to ask will tell you privately, has become at best an unreliable partner. But it will take time for Europe to “de-risk” the relationship. Such is the present dependence on US military might, no one can say what they think out loud. The bombs to be fitted to the RAF’s new F35s, after all, will belong to the Americans.

Temperamentally, realpolitik suits Starmer. By instinct he is a pragmatist. He has never quite signed up to the liberal internationalism of the progressive, metropolitan wing of his Labour party. He is unapologetic in declaring that some of the new military spending is funded by cuts in the overseas aid budget, The prime minister’s political pitch is to those still wearing blue collars, the workers who will be grateful for the jobs provided by a military-industrial build up.

For all that, there is a gap between rhetoric and substance. The spending promises remain conditional. The only ironclad pledge is for an increase in the core military budget to 2.6 per cent by 2027. Beyond that, everything has still to be signed off by a Treasury obsessed with its fiscal rules. If the dangers are so acute, why not raise taxes to pay for defence of the homeland?

That said, hard power is not everything. The new global disorder demands western democracies compete against belligerent autocracies for the support of the world’s nonaligned states. International respect for Britain is embedded in its commitment to the rule of law, its democratic values and, yes, to the generosity of assistance to less fortunate nations. Realpolitik is all very well, but it has to leave room for principles.