Starmer's directionless national security strategy fools no one

Spectator

5 hours ago

Sometimes it feels as if the government's approach to defence and security could be summed up by the venerable punchline of the Irish farmer, 'I wouldn't have started from here'. Despite having had more than four years as Leader of the Opposition to prepare, Sir Keir Starmer never quite seems able to seize the initiative as Prime Minister, often being left puce and blinking.
Yesterday saw the publication of the UK's national security strategy (NSS) 2025, Security for the British people in a dangerous world. It had been announced in February and promised before this week's Nato summit (in fact, it was released on the summit's first day). The Prime Minister argued it would pull together a number of extant reviews: the Strategic Defence Review, the AUKUS review, the Defence Industrial Strategy, the China audit, the FCDO's three internal reviews and the strategy for countering state threats, among others.
The danger is that if everything is 'national security', then nothing is
It was obvious at the time that this sequencing was nonsensical. The UK's first national security strategy, Security in an interdependent world, was a product of Gordon Brown's government, issued in 2008, and it was genuinely innovative. It was meant to conceptualise 'national security' in a new and broad way, taking in not just traditional elements like military operations, diplomacy, intelligence and counter-terrorism, but 'threats to individual citizens and to our way of life, as well as to the integrity and interests of the state'.
Brown billed it as 'a single, overarching strategy bringing together the objectives and plans of all departments, agencies and forces involved in protecting our national security' From it flowed a number of discrete tasks and policies. The approach was not complicated: determine the big picture, then decide how to support it in practical terms.
Starmer's national security strategy has done almost the opposite (though that ascribes to it too much coherence). We have seen the Strategic Defence Review setting out the future shape and tasks of the armed forces, three internal FCDO reviews have reported to the Foreign Secretary (but not released) and as much of the China audit as we will see is in the National Security Strategy.
Meanwhile the Defence Industrial Strategy is a work in progress, and the AUKUS review risks being made irrelevant by the Trump administration's own re-examination. So it is neither top-down, nor bottom-up, but rather lacking any direction at all. I wouldn't have started from here.
One important element of the NSS is an announcement on expenditure. The Nato summit is expected to agree a spending target of 5 per cent of GDP, made up of 3.5 per cent on core defence capabilities and 1.5 per cent on 'resilience and security'. The NSS contains an 'historic commitment to spend 5 per cent of GDP on national security', which is encouraging, but the detail is teeming with devils.
First, the date by which the UK is expected to meet this level of spending is 2035. That is at least two general elections away; Vladimir Putin will turn 83 and Donald Trump will be 89, if either is spared. Meanwhile, the Royal Navy's Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines will be coming out of service. It is a long time away, and it remains a target without any practical steps to reach it.
The NSS also widens the scope of 'national security' further than ever before. Including energy policy may seem defensible, but attaching the label to 'green growth', 'inequality' or 'stripping out red tape' starts to stretch credibility. The interdepartmental nature of the 'national security' umbrella is vital – but the danger is that if everything is 'national security', then nothing is.
This matters because if the government simply moves spending from one column on its mother of all spreadsheets to another, it does not acquire a new capability. Equally, there is no deterrent effect on Russia or China, or 'Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe, should dare to invade the borders of my realm' – as Elizabeth I once so neatly put it. If the Prime Minister designates Border Security Command as a 'national security' asset, that is £150 million he had already earmarked, not new investment.
The 2008 national security strategy was a serious and systematic attempt, supervised and delivered by Robert Hannigan and Patrick Turner, to design an overarching framework for the defence of the UK and its interests, then develop policies to support that framework. Its 2025 successor does not –by its nature and timing cannot – achieve that same goal.
The national security strategy is not all bad; it comes in large part from the pen of the formidable Professor John Bew, who spent five years in Downing Street as foreign policy adviser to four successive prime ministers. But he has been asked to change the tyres on a moving car, creating a strategy around half a dozen other reviews in various stages of progress. There must be very serious concerns now that it is little more than a centripetal instrument for pulling in enough government expenditure nominally to meet our Nato obligations. Our allies are unlikely to be fooled, and our enemies will certainly not be.