The world has changed.” The reliably dog-ate-my-homework excuse before Rachel Reeves’ Spring Statement has the bracing advantage of being unarguably true. But its truth matters far, far more than simply for civil service numbers or tax rates. We are living through a new world, one of competing empires, in which old language and thinking fails.
The most obvious example today is the Ukraine war negotiation in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which asks hard questions of London. Consider Keir Starmer’s mysterious 31-nation “coalition of the willing” whose military planners have been hard at work, yet which is being derided in Washington.
What is it for? Since it envisages British troops moving soon into Ukraine, and therefore into harm’s way, this urgent question ought to be asked. Yet it is barely discussed. The official answer is bland enough; that “the willing” will police, or guarantee, or “bolster” whatever peace deal is agreed between Russia and Ukraine. But how does that work? The Kremlin has said time and again that it will never sign a peace deal that allows Western troops inside Ukraine. Perhaps that’s a rare Putin joke but… if he won’t sign, there is no peace deal so there is nothing to police. There is no role for “the willing”.
Here is an obvious, logical problem of sequencing which only President Trump could resolve. But that’s only the start: the Starmer plan, as John Healey, the Defence Secretary, has reiterated, requires US intelligence and air cover; and there’s no indication of that being on offer. The coalition of the willing appears, at first sight, to be an independent European initiative. But it is not. It leans entirely on the US. You would almost think that western Europe is standing on the edge of the real action in Riyadh, shouting and waving. Still, the planning and the rhetoric – “ironclad support… as long as it takes”– go on.
Has the coalition of the willing, therefore, also been created with the intention of moving swiftly into Ukraine if these peace negotiations collapse – which they very well might – and if the Americans then walk away, which they probably would? That would be a glorious opportunity for Putin. “Boots on the ground” might also put Britain into immediate military confrontation with Russia.
If we raise defence spending consistently and use it wisely, and the Germans and French do the same, then in ten years’ time we might be in a position for that. But right now, it would be disastrous. Is it too much to say that in this changed world, such prospects deserve public debate?
Now, if Downing Street could speak frankly, I think what they would say is: yes, conflict with Russia would be a catastrophe, but we can’t give Putin any sense that Europe, like the US, might desert Ukraine. We must maintain Ukrainian morale. We must prevent, if we can, some kind of battlefield collapse. We must be there with them as we said we would be. To do anything less would be to stab President Zelensky in the back, at his moment of maximum danger. It would be a kind of surrender. What would you have us do?
They might go on to say that the most important thing is to keep the Americans on side; and that demonstrating European determination is a good place to start. In other words, “the coalition of the willing” is a powerful rhetorical device, not an army, and it helps nobody to point this out. It’s doing no harm. Move on, Andrew.
Not so fast. There are replies to the reply. The first is that our initiative does not seem to have impressed Washington. In an interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump’s Moscow negotiator Steve Witkoff, described it as “a combination of a posture and a pose” and also “simplistic”, because it is based on a Churchillian illusion about the Russians marching across Western Europe.
Witkoff regards that spectre as ridiculous. His slap-down of Starmer has made headlines in the UK, but the full interview repays watching – less because of Carlson’s interview technique, which consists of energetically applauding Witkoff’s remarks, but more because Witkoff gives us the best insight into Donald Trump’s thinking so far. Carlson himself went to Moscow in February last year and interviewed Putin in a notably friendly way, allowing the Russian leader a lengthy lecture on his view of Russian imperial history.
If that felt surreal at the time, in the past few days Witkoff, a diminutive but poised property executive and Trump’s golf partner, took us back into a world we’d almost forgotten, when emperors called one another brothers, and great wars could be started or ended on the basis of personal relationships.
Witkoff was awed that Putin was “gracious enough” to see him because of his “huge respect” for Trump. “I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy,” he insists. “I like him; he was straight up with me.”
Indeed, the Russian president had commissioned a “beautiful” portrait painting of Trump by one of “the greatest Russian artists”, and asked Witkoff to carry it back to Washington. With this gift came a special personal message – that Putin had gone to his local church and prayed with his priest for Trump when the ear-clipping assassination attempt was made on his friend. Result? Witkoff says there will now be “two great leaders figuring out this conflict”.
With its flattery and elaborate exchange of personal courtesies and gifts, this all sounds much more like Napoleon and Tsar Alexander at Tilsit in 1807 than modern leadership.
[See also: Putin’s endgame]
The world increasingly feels like a cut-and-paste rendition of older times. China is back in a position of technical and military dominance she hasn’t enjoyed since the Ming dynasty of the 1400s. America is returning to monarchical ambitions, drooling as it eyes Canada. Nearer to us we see the return of Turkey as a major European power. We Europeans are, in Tucker Carlson’s words, “dying economically”.
Seen from Washington, Beijing and Moscow, this is a world of competing empires, run by imperial rulers, with the rest of us mere rubble under the chariot wheels. It’s disorientating.
For most of my adult life, the United States was the obvious vision of modernity and a better tomorrow – democratic, liberal, open, generous, optimistic. No longer. We are going to have to make our tomorrows here in Britain. So again, we must think differently, and fast.
We should start with a cold acknowledgement of these new realities. As David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, likes to say, “our foreign policy has to meet the world as it is”, not as we would like it to be. It means, today, that the Americans are determined to do a deal with Russia at almost any cost. Witkoff seems hugely impressed by Moscow’s nuclear sabre-rattling. He insists that Ukraine is fated to be ground down by the Russian military machine with its tactical nuclear weapons: “We cannot allow [Ukraine] to drag us into World War III,” he told Carlson.
Witkoff and Carlson therefore, agree between them all the key Putin talking points: the necessity of Russia taking eastern Ukraine which is, they declare, Russian-speaking and voted to return to Russia in referendums; the impossibility of Ukraine joining Nato, and the need for early elections there because of what they see as Zelensky’s position as an unelected leader. They ridicule the idea of Russia going further into Ukraine or anywhere else in Europe: “Why would they want to?”
Now, it would be unfair to say there is no nuance here. Witkoff seems completely committed to Nato and even raises the possibility of the Article 5 mutual-defence pledge being extended to the rest of Ukraine after a peace deal. But it is clear where this is heading.
Staying with the world as it is, the second thing to point out is that British armed forces are nowhere near big or able enough to confront Russia today. Starmer understands this perfectly well. In recent days, words about “boots on the ground” have vanished and the talk is of air and sea support for Kyiv, again presumably relying on the Americans.
This may be related to the growing realisation that putting 10,000 Western troops into Ukraine would pretty much involve the entire British Army, exhausting logistics, spare parts, training capacity and leaving, for instance, no support for the front-line Baltic states at all. As Tucker Carlson said with incredulity, the British Army is smaller than the US Marine Corps.
To say that isn’t defeatism or treasonous: the Russians are neither stupid nor badly informed and can see perfectly well how things are. But the inescapable conclusion is that the Ukraine war will be sorted between the “two great leaders”. Really, all we can do is to politically and morally support Zelensky for the least-bad bargain he can get from this.
This should not involve the delusion that we are going to fight Russia in Ukraine. The alternative to a peace agreement is for the war to go on, without American help. Even if we initially put “peacekeepers” or some kind of training force into western Ukraine – Lviv, say – there would come a moment when some were killed by a Russian drone. Or there might come a sudden successful Russian advance in the east, causing civilian panic. What would the British army do then?
One day we may again be able to survive without the Americans. Across Europe, politicians are making the same calculation about whether Washington can be trusted again. This may be a long turning point in history, not a blip: it is only prudent to prepare for the likelihood that Trump will be followed by Vance.
So, we must put our European house in order and look to our own defences. The UK and the EU are embracing again. Germany has voted for a huge shift in resources. France is once more offering her independent nuclear force to European allies. Portugal, like Canada, is considering cancelling its order of US F-35 fighter jets.
But rebuilding European security is a long game. For now, we desperately need the Nato umbrella. This year, and next, our strategic ambition should be to avoid war with a mobilised if bleeding Russia, while enabling some kind of independent Ukraine to survive.
That is going to be difficult enough. Public opinion has perhaps not yet woken up fully to the seriousness of where we are. So, we need maximum candour, and clarity about the hard realities, not rhetoric about – or preparation for – a war we cannot yet fight.
[See also: The warfare state needs the welfare state]
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This article appears in the 26 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Putin’s Endgame