THE ASIAN INDEPENDENT UK
Bal Ram Sampla
Geopolitics
For decades, Britain has traded on its reputation as one of the world’s foremost military powers — a permanent member of the UN Security Council, a founding member of NATO, and the custodian of a nuclear deterrent. Yet in April 2026, Lord George Robertson, the former NATO Secretary General who was commissioned by Prime Minister Keir Starmer to lead the government’s own Strategic Defence Review, delivered a damning verdict: Britain is
“underprepared, underinsured, under attack, and not safe.”
That such a warning comes not from a political opponent but from a Labour grandee and the government’s own defence adviser makes it all the more striking. It demands serious examination of how the UK arrived at this point — and why it continues to fall short.
The Legacy of the Peace Dividend
The roots of Britain’s current vulnerability stretch back more than three decades. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, successive governments — Conservative and Labour alike — drew down defence budgets on the assumption that the era of great-power conflict was over.
Defence spending fell from around 5% of GDP during the Cold War to barely above 2% by the 2010s. Troops, ships, aircraft, and stockpiles were all reduced. Lord Robertson himself has acknowledged shared responsibility for this, noting that there was “over-optimism, at worst wishful thinking” about the permanence of peace.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 shattered that illusion — yet even this brutal wake-up call has not produced the decisive policy shift that the situation demands.
A Hollowed-Out Military
The consequences of years of underinvestment are now alarmingly concrete. Britain’s armed forces lack sufficient ammunition, spare parts, trained personnel, and medical capacity to sustain high-intensity warfare. The Royal Navy, once the cornerstone of British global power, cannot deploy a single large warship at pace to protect British interests — as was starkly illustrated during tensions in the eastern Mediterranean. The army has shrunk to its smallest size in centuries.
Recruitment and retention remain chronic problems, with service life offering little competitive advantage over civilian employment. The cumulative effect is a military that, in Robertson’s words, is “hollowed out” — capable of projecting symbols of power, but not necessarily the substance of it.
Political Complacency and Treasury Resistance
If the historical causes are clear, the current failure is one of political will. Lord Robertson has accused the Starmer government of “corrosive complacency” — paying lip service to defence while failing to translate words into action. The government’s own 10-year Defence Investment Plan, which was due for publication in autumn 2025 following Robertson’s Strategic Defence Review, had still not appeared by April 2026. Without that plan, defence manufacturers cannot confidently scale up production, workforces face uncertainty, and the military cannot plan effectively for the long term.
At the heart of the problem sits the Treasury. Robertson has accused “non-military experts” there of “vandalism,” and pointedly noted that Chancellor Rachel Reeves devoted just forty words to defence in over an hour of Budget speech — and not a single word to it in the Spring Statement. The Treasury’s priority has been to protect the welfare budget, which now consumes roughly one pound in every three of public spending, compared with one in seven a generation ago. Robertson’s argument is blunt: Britain cannot be defended with an ever-expanding welfare budget while starving the armed forces of investment.
The Gap Between Rhetoric and Reality
Prime Minister Starmer has pledged to raise defence spending to 2.5% of GDP from 2027, rising to 3% in the next parliament. These are meaningful commitments on paper — but they are deferred commitments, and the world is not waiting. Russia continues its war in Ukraine. Iran has been drawn into direct conflict. China is expanding its military reach. North Korea is supplying munitions to Moscow. The pace of global deterioration has accelerated while Britain’s response has lagged. Robertson has been explicit that there is a yawning gap between the prime minister’s rhetoric on defence and the action he has actually delivered.
Meanwhile, NATO allies are under intense pressure from the United States to demonstrate genuine burden-sharing. President Trump’s demand that European members pull their own weight has added political urgency to what was already a strategic necessity. Britain’s standing as a credible ally — and its influence within the alliance — depends on matching its commitments with capability.
Conclusion
Britain’s defence failures are the product of decades of wishful thinking, compounded by contemporary political timidity. The country has known since at least 2022 that the strategic environment had fundamentally changed. It has had Lord Robertson’s review since 2025 spelling out what needs to be done. What it has lacked is the political courage to make the hard choices — to prioritise defence spending over other commitments, to challenge Treasury orthodoxy, and to be honest with the public about the scale of the threat. Until that courage is found, Britain will remain, in Lord Robertson’s stark phrase, simply not safe.
References
1.https://www.gbnews.com/politics/george-robertson-ex-nato-chief-keir-starmer-britain-national-security
2.https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/labour-grandee-uk-peril-defence_uk_69dde446e4b00247ba9d8735
3.https://www.thenews.com.pk/latest/1398887-uk-why-starmer-and-reeves-face-backlash-over-corrosive-complacency
4.https://www.easterneye.biz/ex-nato-chief-uk-not-safe-warning/
