It's time for the English speaking world to come together – but we can no longer rely on the US

Telegraph

15-03-2025

Within hours of Britain's declaration of war on 3 September 1939, Michael Joseph Savage, New Zealand's first Labour prime minister, made a statement from his hospital bed (he was to die seven months later).
'Both with gratitude for the past and confidence in the future, we range ourselves without fear beside Britain. Where she goes, we go. Where she stands, we stand.'
With how many nations do we have such a bond, an alliance so instinctive and automatic that it needs no explanation? The list is a short one, but it surely includes the three countries with whom we truly do have a special relationship, namely Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
We are linked by language, culture and kinship. We share a legal system, drawing on one another's precedents. We have similar parliamentary forms, complete with maces, state openings, green benches, the works. We salute the same king.
The modern campaign to knit the four chief realms into a closer association was launched in British Columbia in 2015, and goes under the acronym CANZUK, a term first coined by UN officials because the four nations almost always voted en bloc.
CANZUK campaigners want closer diplomatic and defence collaboration, an automatic right to work in each other's countries and a common market based on mutual recognition of standards in goods, services and professional qualifications.
For a decade, CANZUK was treated by politicians as a worthy idea, but not an urgent one. Then came the second Trump term, the tariff wars and the upending of US foreign policy. Both main Canadian parties have warmed to a CANZUK-type deal, as have all three coalition parties in New Zealand. In Britain, too, the idea is gaining in popularity. And you can see why.
To grasp the extent to which the world has tilted on its axis, try the following thought experiment. Suppose that Donald Trump were secretly working for Vladimir Putin. What would he be doing differently?
It is one thing to halt weapons shipments to Ukraine, including those batches already in transit, and to cut off intelligence-sharing. But Trump is going well beyond such measures. He has repeated Putin's propaganda claims, calling Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator and accusing him of having started the war. He has told his cybersecurity agency to deprioritise the threat from Russia. He has relieved pro-Ukrainian US generals of their commands. He has voted in the UN with Russia, Belarus and North Korea against a motion condemning the invasion of Ukraine from which even China abstained.
Most seriously, he has picked fights with Nato countries, threatening to annex Greenland and waging economic war against Canada.
The leaders of the other Anglosphere democracies have been left stranded, like governors of outlying Roman provinces when the Eternal City was sacked. Consider, if nothing else, the impact on Britain's defence procurement.
Since the 1950s, we have assumed that, in a big war, we would be fighting alongside our American allies. Yes, we could manage smaller wars on our own: Aden, the Falklands, Sierra Leone. But, if things turned truly nasty, we'd be in a US-led coalition.
Like other Western allies, we therefore specialised rather than developing full-spectrum defence capacity. We relied on the US for heavy lift, advanced satellites and intelligence. More seriously, we depended on it for the development and maintenance of our nuclear missiles.
Our current deterrent, Trident II, will last until 2040. And then? Can we be sure that the US will be a dependable ally? I think it likely; but, after the past two months, I can no longer be certain.
What of Europe? Again, I like to think that we will still be on the same side – the side of freedom and democracy – but it was not long ago that the EU planned to close the Irish border out of pique because our vaccine roll-out had been faster than its own.
In the run-up to Brexit, Jeremy Hunt, as foreign secretary, was astonished to find that Britain's investment in the defence of Europe – armoured regiments in Estonia and Poland, the RAF effectively acting as Romania's air force and much else – generated no bankable goodwill. Even now, when you might think the EU would be falling over itself to draw Britain into a closer defence arrangement, it sticks doggedly to the position that it won't talk to us about anything else until we give its vessels the right to fish in our waters.
No, there is only one set of countries with whom it is unthinkable that we would fall out 40 years from now: the other CANZUK nations. This matters, among other things, because we need to make decisions soon about our next-generation deterrent.
If we decide to build a fully autonomous nuclear capability – one that needs no US storage or spare parts, like France's – we will need our own rocket-making capacity. That will cost around twice as much as buying the off-the-shelf US alternative. On our own, we couldn't afford it; as part of a CANZUK consortium, we could.
CANZUK has consistently polled at around two-thirds support in the four putative constituent nations, making it by far the most popular policy that governments could feasibly implement but haven't.
Why haven't they? Partly because enthusiasm, until recently, came largely from parties of the Right: Conservatives in the UK and Canada, Liberals in Australia, and all three Right-wing parties (National, New Zealand First and ACT) in New Zealand.
Some Leftists reflexively opposed anything that looked like imperial nostalgia or, worse, a pining for the White Commonwealth (though, in reality, all four nations have larger non-white populations, proportionately, than the EU has). In Britain, Euro-nostalgics were upset to see Leavers proposing free movement with distant countries, on grounds that British people could more easily imagine themselves working in Australia or Canada than Finland or Slovakia.
But all that was before Trump began menacing Canada with annexation – and, indeed, roughing up other US allies. When Australia signed its trade agreement with the US in 2005, it specifically exempted its steel exports from any tariffs decreed in the name of national security. Trump has imposed them anyway.
Suddenly, CANZUK is beginning to look both inevitable and urgent. At Canada's Liberal leadership debate last month, the candidates were falling over each other to demand closer economic links with the other great English-speaking monarchies – despite it being the French-language debate.
When I suggested CANZUK in the House of Lords this week, the level-headed minister, Baroness Chapman, replied that the government would listen sympathetically to any proposal.
I don't, from first principles, prefer a CANZUK pact to a US-led one. I would rather keep the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement, Nato, AUKUS and all the rest of the apparatus we have built since the 1941 Atlantic Charter. I am delighted to see New Zealand, under its impressive defence minister Judith Collins, lining up with AUKUS.
If the American alliance can be salvaged, CANZUK will complement it. But if not, it is a comfortable fall-back, constituting, as it would, the third most powerful military force on the planet.
How quickly can we put it in place? Well, October of next year is the centenary of the 1926 Imperial Conference which began the formal transformation of the British Empire into a voluntary association, a Commonwealth.
As George V hosted his various premiers on that occasion, so his great-grandson, Charles III, should invite the prime ministers of his four chief realms – who by then, with a bit of luck, might include Peter Dutton in Australia and Pierre Poilievre in Canada as well as Christopher Luxon in New Zealand. That meeting should announce the formal creation of a CANZUK secretariat, based, for time-zone reasons, in Vancouver, and tasked with ensuring free movement of labour, market reciprocity and a common defence among the four kindred nations.
It would give every participating premier a massive electoral boost. And you know what? If Sir Keir Starmer can pull it off, he'll deserve it.