Britain’s slide down the Nato league table is an embarrassment
The Strategic Defence Review (SDR), published a year ago and meant to be the fundamental framework of the government’s defence…
Trump is hollowing out America’s intelligence agencies
Donald Trump never loses the ability to astonish. Many people will have breathed a sigh of relief last month when…
Keir Starmer is not serious about defence
Today marks a year since the government published its Strategic Defence Review (SDR). From the outset, it was clear that…
Why is Andy Burnham asking Sue Gray for advice?
As Andy Burnham, who is still mayor of Greater Manchester in his spare time, campaigns to win the Makerfield by-election…
The Ministry of Defence is failing to prepare Britain for war
In the last 20 or 25 years, there has been a much greater understanding that a country’s ‘national security’ encompasses…
Trump’s NATO troop reduction isn’t Europe’s biggest problem
Before Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, there were many commentators who sought to sanitize the President.…
Why Trump is threatening the Falklands
There are still those who argue that President Trump’s aggressive, impulsive and inconsistent foreign policy is radical and disruptive, and…
War bonds won’t fix Britain’s creaking defence
The Chancellor Rachel Reeves is reported to be considering proposals to issue war bonds to fund a splurge in defence…
Treasury squabbles are harming Britain’s national security
The symphony of criticism aimed at the government for failing to live up to its promises of boosting Britain’s defences…
Starmer is being ‘corrosively complacent’ about defence
The old joke runs that you can tell when a politician is lying because his lips are moving. It is…
Can the Royal Navy really deter Vladimir Putin?
The Royal Navy has not had a good few weeks in reputational terms. It was nothing short of humiliating that…
Putin has called Starmer’s shadow fleet bluff
Theodore Roosevelt, the blur of energy who occupied the White House for the first years of the 20th century, famously…
The Iran deal has shown Britain’s irrelevance
With Donald Trump’s threat that ‘a whole civilization will die… never to be brought back again’ looming on Tuesday night,…
The fate of this US pilot could determine the Iran war
Around dawn on Friday, a McDonnell Douglas F-15E Strike Eagle from the US Air Force’s 494th Fighter Squadron was shot…
The one hurdle to Trump taking America out of Nato
Donald Trump has never liked the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato). Disagreements have been managed before and problems deferred, but…
Civilian ships can’t do the Navy’s job in the Strait of Hormuz
There are those who will claim that Sir Keir Starmer has handled the UK’s response to America’s war with Iran…
Could Britain help unblock the Strait of Hormuz?
It has not required advanced training in detecting nuance or reading between the lines in recent days to understand that…
Should Nato help America defend the Strait of Hormuz?
As soon as Operation Epic Fury, America’s latest campaign against the Islamic Republic of Iran, got underway on the last…
The glaring problem with the RAF’s new helicopters
It was good news, albeit good news of the your-house-hasn’t-burned-down variety. Last week, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) announced that…
Does Trump really have ‘whatever it takes’ to win in Iran?
With Operation Epic Fury in its sixth day, it is hard to tell how long the current United States military…
Iran has shown how naive Keir Starmer truly is
Being one of America’s closest allies – which Britain remains – is like having a very rich friend. You are…
Why Starmer must raise defence spending fast
Britain’s armed forces lack the mass, readiness and resilience needed to produce a credible deterrent in an era of intensifying…
Do Labour MPs even know what a leader looks like anymore?
Last week could have been worse for Sir Keir Starmer, but only because he remains Prime Minister – for the time being.…
Ireland had no right to name agent Stakeknife
Micheál Martin, now in his second stint as Ireland’s Taoiseach, is by our standards a political veteran, having led Fianna…
Parliament’s modernisers have been foiled
Parliament is pointless without debate. It is there in the definition of the word itself: the Old French parlement derives…
