Britain’s Choice: Europe or a Collapsing America

As the USA withdraws from European security, Keir Starmer faces a defining moment: realign with Europe or cling to a fading alliance.

Keir Starmer faces a seemingly impossible task. The entire raison d’etre of British foreign policy since the 1940s has been to keep the USA invested in European security, yet the policy of the White House is now to walk away. 

Britain has fought alongside America in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Kosovo intervention and the war on terror, and indeed fashioned its armed forces into the “sharp edge” of a much bigger American blade. Yet it is now derided by JD Vance as a “random country” whose offer of 20,000 troops to secure peace in Ukraine is worthless.

As European capitals reeled from the announcement that the USA would no longer prioritise conventional deterrence in Europe, and Musk’s blatant attempt to meddle in the German election, Starmer adopted the role of convenor.

After the debacle in the Oval Office – when every European leader understood that, instead of President Zelensky getting humiliated it could have been them – Starmer adopted the role of peacemaker, not only publicly feting Zelensky but flying him in a military helicopter to meet the King.

But though Starmer publicly insists the USA is still a reliable ally, and told Parliament he would refuse to “choose between Europe and America”, the scope for bridge building is limited and the window of time for it has narrowed.

Europe has chosen rapid rearmament, with Germany and Norway set to bring their enormous fiscal firepower to the task. France has publicly offered to extend its independent nuclear deterrent to the rest of Europe. And though Britain and France have offered to place troops in Ukraine following a peace deal, Starmer knows that unless the USA backstops that plan with its own nuclear deterrent, Ukraine’s future survival depends on European willpower alone.

Beyond all the tactical phraseology the fact is that Pete Hegseth’s speech at NATO HQ on 12 February 2025 was the formal start of a new era of Great Power geopolitics. Since both China and Russia had announced the end of universalism and the rules-based order as early as 4 February 2022, the USA’s decision to refocus on the Pacific posed Europe with a straight choice: to become either the fourth chess player or the chessboard.

That in turn demands and concretises ideals President Macron had fought for in vain for much of the decade: European strategic autonomy and technological sovereignty.

If a European “coalition of the willing” is formed to keep Ukraine in the fight, with money, arms and ultimately a tripwire force of Western troops on the River Dnipro, that’s strategic autonomy achieved. If, in the scramble to divest European armies of technologies that the USA can disable, a united European defence industry will drive growth and innovation in a continent starved of it.

So the choice facing not only Starmer but the British political class is unenviable: either detach from Europe, aligning fundamentally to the new geopolitical goals of the USA or realign with Europe in the hope of shaping and leading its strategic response.

In the process, both Britain and the major European powers will have to start practising a political skill they had forgotten: grand strategy, or the art of defining geostrategic goals and achieving them through the co-ordination of military, diplomatic and economic power, alongside domestic prosperity and social resilience.

If you find yourself disagreeing with my snap definition of grand strategy, you may not be alone: there is no agreed definition of it in the academic literature because, with the rise and fall of Great Powers in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, each power has defined the essential problem of geostrategy differently.

For the German Kaiserreich it was, said the British diplomat Lord Esher, essentially a set of simple, stable, military challenges in Europe, while for the Brits it was global and complex: nowhere on earth can the power balance change without affecting our national interest, he wrote. 

The same contrast prompted Leon Trotsky in 1921 to remark that the British imperialists “do their thinking in terms of centuries and continents”. Thereafter, only three countries have entitled themselves to think in such an expansive way about the world: the Soviet Union, almost from its inception; the USA from Roosevelt onwards; and China under Xi Jin Ping.

One could argue that, in addition, Putin’s Russia practises grand strategy, only from the point of view of an elite whose theme tune is – like Wagner’s Wotan – their own inevitable demise.

But both in Britain and the EU, the art of grand strategy has arguably been lost. In Britain, it was replaced by a mixture of pragmatism and delusion. Pragmatically, from 1945 until the mid-2010s, Britain’s security was assumed guaranteed by the rules based international order, plus membership of the European Union from the 1970s onwards, and its leading role in NATO.

As a result, you can scour the great Edwardian buildings of Whitehall to exhaustion in search of a desk at which UK grand strategy is made. There is military leadership, there is diplomacy, there is a National Security Cell in the Cabinet Office, and there is a shiny report entitled “Integrated Review Refresh: Responding to a more contested and volatile world”. 

But there is no British grand strategy. No answer to the question: how shall we create and project national power now that the rules-based order is collapsing. Only a series of assumptions in rapid need of revision.

Likewise for Brussels this is a new and urgent question. France, arguably, has had a clearly defined national strategy – as evidenced by its possession of a truly independent nuclear deterrent, a strong defence industry and combat aircraft that the USA does not control the software for.

But the challenge facing Europe’s major powers, is – to continue the chess metaphor – to decide a game plan: where to defend; where not to defend; who to appease; who to resist.

Probably the biggest grand strategic question facing Europe is the future relationship between Trump and Putin. If Trump is, in essence, trying to appease Putin in order to detach Russia from its strategic alliance with China, and is prepared to sacrifice European security – let alone Ukraine – in the bargain, then the peoples of Europe will have to seek their own grand bargain with Beijing.

If, as is more likely, the Trump experiment fails domestically, after four years of geopolitical chaos, Europe will face not a strengthened Russia but a weakened one.

What’s making all European politicians nervous at present is their simple inability to read Trump’s intent. Those who have met US diplomats report that not even the most senior of them know what Trump’s real plan is – either for Ukraine, Greenland, Canada or Mexico.

But the intent will become clear through action. Right now, the Labour government of the UK is, rightly in my view, trying to keep Trump invested in European security, if necessary by proxy – backstopping a Western security force in Ukraine and maintaining commitment to Article V. 

That is an entirely reasonable and rational goal. But it is not a grand strategy. The only viable grand strategy for Britain is now to be part of Europe. It doesn’t mean rejoining the Single Market. It does mean aligning itself as far as possible with the emerging European Defence Industrial Strategy, and becoming the co-leader of a coalition to support Ukraine.

In the worst-case scenario, if Trump were to begin publicly coercing not just Kyiv but its European allies – for example withdrawing US troops to the 1997 line demanded by Putin – the speed and explicitness of Britain’s European orientation would have to increase.

Keir Starmer has risen to the challenge. Much of Britain’s response to the crisis has been shaped by his own, instinctive grasp of the historic situation. But he, like everyone else, is still flying blind. 

Never in the history of the industrial capitalist world system have we faced a situation where the hegemonic power willingly self-destructs, and where the rising power sees influence and responsibility flowing towards it before it is ready to assume leadership. 

Into these geopolitical mean streets must go, to paraphrase Raymond Chandler, a continent that is not itself mean, and the UK has to be part of it.

The choice facing the UK, whether it wants to acknowledge it publicly or not, is whether to align with a collapsing American democracy or to be a leading player in the resurgence of Europe. Every Briton who has set foot in the Uffizi, the Louvre or the Acropolis knows there is only one answer.

This is a joint column with IPS Journal