Tag Archives: Munich Security Conference

Britain is caught betwixt and between emerging international power lines. It supports Ukraine against Russia and Denmark against America. Whitehall is all for a European defense build-up.

It wants free trade and hates tariff.  MAGA, the cult of Trump and the American swing to authoritarianism is extremely distasteful.

Mark Carney’s middle countries bloc appeals, and the UK is likely to sign up to a Carney-proposed trading bloc that includes Canada, the EU, Britain, and the Pacific Rim countries and excludes the US.

But the British “Establishment” can’t bring itself to break with the US. Britain and America’s economies are too intermeshed. So are the military and intelligence establishments. But perhaps  most telling of all, the “independent” British nuclear deterrent—the deterrent which allows the UK to lay claim to reduced great power status—is dependent on American made Trident missiles.

Britain may no longer be a member of the European Union but the EU is still the UK’s largest trading partner and geographic realities dictate that  Britain’s security is inexorably tied to the continent. In fact, British trade, prosperity and security is tied to both Europe and America and it prospers most when the two sides of the Atlantic work together.

So the Foreign Office mandarins are likely to fall back on the traditional strategic narrative of UK acting as the link between Europe and America; calming troubled waters one day, offering wise counsel another and shifting its limited political weight back and forth to achieve an equilibrium. In short, the UK will “muddle through” with strategic anchors in lands to the East and the West.

It was clear from the recent Munich Security Conference and the NATO defense ministers meeting that an honest broker between Europe and America is becoming increasingly essential.  A furious Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told the Munich conference that trilateral talks between the US, Denmark and Greenland are floundering  as President Trump continues to demand ownership of Greenland.

Meanwhile, in Brussels, US Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby told NATO defense ministers that Europe was no longer a defense priority and that “the US would be reducing its capabilities in Europe to a more limited and focused presence” in order to move troops to the Indo-Pacific region.