In the annals of history, Britain’s military might has always been a Dad’s Army. Part-time, under-resourced, a bit of out of breath and really only in it for the biscuits.
It’s always been like that. The Saxon farmers were overrun by 5,000 men on horses in 1066, our empires were built though marriage and commerce, and as a nation we’ve all agreed never to remember that once upon a time our royals were so rotten we invited the French to have a go. On the eve of what we’re still taught is our greatest moral and military victory, we were so unprepared and docile that it was generally thought Adolf Hitler would walk it.
We’re not very good at fighting. Stand outside any pub at closing time, or watch any military parade. We’re good at puffing out our chests, strutting up and down, polishing buttons and faces until they gleam. Our soldiers have fabulous hats, our pilots the sort of planes that make Tom Cruise drool, and our navy still sails the seven seas. It’s just that, when they spot a Russian doing something bad, the toughest thing they’ve done to date is say “OI. YOU. I CAN SEE YOU, YOU KNOW. YOU COME OVER HERE AND DO THAT, I DARE YOU.” And the Russians slink off snickering, and we pat each other on the back about surviving another tense stand-off, like youths wearing too much aftershave in the queue for a cab outside a regional nightclub.
So now that Keir Starmer has become the first European leader to commit British troops to peacekeeping duties once war ends in Ukraine, there are any number of people saying, oh yes mate, you and whose army. Because we have one of the smallest armed forces west of the Urals, and the same threat and heft as a substitute teacher on the last day of term.
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Only this is nothing but a political win for the Prime Minister. He’s first out of the blocks ahead of an emergency summit with other EU leaders today about how they’re going to deal with a lack of American support. He looks tough when he more often seems wishy-washy, and principled when he can seem rather bendy. The Opposition won’t be able to find much to criticise, and Boris Johnson will be wondering what the hell he’s got left to fulminate about in his overpaid, under-read column this week.
Yet as servants of two of the world’s biggest bullies sit down in Saudi Arabia to finesse the deal Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have probably already agreed, they’re denying a role to everyone else. Volodomyr Zelenskyy has been sidelined, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov – the one who looks like Herman Munster – has said there’s no point talking to European leaders.
What’s left is two major powers, with combined militaries a hundred times greater than ours, arguing about where the edge of each’s influence is allowed to be. With US hegemony via Europe and NATO in the west, and Russian expansionism in the east, wherever the Ukrainian border ends up being will be a new Iron Curtain between competing world views. Thieving crypto-Nazis on one side, crypto-Nazi thieves on the other, and the old world order in the middle, in need of a good guy.
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Britain is good at being small. Small-minded, often, but nimbler and more adaptable than massive militarised states spending billions on militaristic willy-waving. And when a small voice pipes up about what’s right and wrong, it is often heard. The one thing every elephant is scared of is a mouse, and you don’t get to be a tyrant without becoming paranoid about those first squeaks of your authority being undermined.
In Russia it gives pause for thought because these are NATO forces. They could be a threat, or an escalation, and even if it’s just a handful of units performing command and control functions and running surveillance, they’re a thin wall of fog which cannot be easily breached. In the US, it’s the mother country intervening, a moral voice that Trump cannot dismiss, for Britain buys his nukes. Whatever the bullies say publicly, in private they have to tap their teeth and think.
The talks will progress. The Ukrainians may win concessions before they have to capitulate. Europe will organise its own defence, as arguably it should always have done, while Trump and Putin each walk away claiming victory, the one having risked nothing for it and the other having slaughtered a million people.. And then comes the peace, which everyone agrees won’t last forever.
And that’s the real risk of Starmer’s choice. When Putin moves again, in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, or Estonia, it will be the peacekeeping forces who will either take the brunt or move out of the way. Will the Prime Minister’s moral courage desert him then, or will he still be a determined squeaker standing up to the big bad wolf?
Putin will never give up. Trump will never offer to help without payment. And Britain will have to do what its generals have been screaming about for a decade, and ramp up military production and recruitment. But you do not need a massive force for modern warfare; not even for the old school meatgrinder that Ukraine has become. You need drones, satellites, precision weapons, and intelligence. Britain can do all that and more, because we’re not trying to fight a war.
The aim is to win the peace – a more delicate, strategic, valuable target, and not something that can be seized by a big country run by a small mind. Better to be the other way around, with a chance to prove that Russians, Ukrainians, and all Europeans are capable of better than their leaders will allow.