The speech by Pete Hegseth, the US Defense Secretary, to Singapore’s Shangri-La Dialogue was addressed to a Pacific audience. His sharpest messages, however, were for Europe, and especially for a British Government that still hasn’t explained in practice how it plans to deliver the political commitments made a year ago in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR).
Healey claimed that talking too much and delivering too little has now changed. The Defence Investment Plan is where that claim gets tested
‘Push-up Pete’ – who ostentatiously styles himself the Secretary of War – is a controversial figure. European governments have found it convenient to dismiss him. That is a mistake. Hegseth came to Singapore to unveil the US National Defense Strategy. The priorities: homeland security, the Western Hemisphere, the Indo-Pacific. The message to Europe is explicit, substantive and, whomever occupies the White House next, enduring.
‘We need partners, not protectorates’ is not a statement that America is abandoning NATO. But it is an unambiguous warning. NATO as a protected enterprise, where Europeans shelter under American security guarantees while managing defence budgets for domestic political convenience, is finished.
Trump has set 3.5 per cent of GDP as the new American benchmark for defence spending. Hegseth dismissed NATO’s existing 2 per cent target as ‘freeloading’. Those who reach the new threshold become “model allies’, moved to the front of the queue for arms sales, intelligence sharing and industrial collaboration. Those who do not will face a “clear shift in how we do business’. This is not a threat. It is a description of American policy likely to outlast the current administration.
The message to Britain was personal. ‘As my friend John Healey knows,’ Hegseth said, ‘I’m probably the most blunt with our closest friends about what their capabilities are and where they need to be’.
Later, announcing alongside Hegseth and Australia’s Richard Marles that the three nations will invest in a fleet of underwater drones, Healey admitted: ‘For too long with AUKUS, we talked too much and delivered too little. That has now changed’. It is a welcome commitment. But the self-indictment cuts wider. Talking too much and delivering too little is also a serviceable description of British defence policy since the SDR.
The still-unpublished Defence Investment Plan – intended to lay out how the SDR’s strategic objectives will be met – is the place to prove otherwise. But only if the Government gets it right.
The MoD is locked in a battle with the Treasury over the spending trajectory from the current 2.6 per cent. Meanwhile, genuine strategic choice is being resisted in favour of the traditional ‘balanced force”: everything, everywhere, all at once. When I asked in Parliament what new capabilities the 1.5 per cent resilience commitment would actually deliver (rather than re-labelling existing activity to satisfy NATO definitions) the minister could not name a single example. That is headline management, not defence planning.
Hegseth framed America First as realism: national interest correctly understood. The United States is a continental economy: trade amounts to roughly a quarter of GDP and America largely produces what it consumes. In truth, America First is retrenchment, ceding influence as China steadily advances its trade and tech agenda worldwide, but the American economy can prosper behind a protectionist perimeter with cheap energy and light-touch regulation.
That calculus leads Britain to a very different posture. Trade amounts to two-thirds of UK GDP. Ninety-five per cent of Britain’s international data travels through undersea cables. Almost half our energy is imported. As I once explained to a sceptical President Trump, Global Britain is not a moralising slogan. It is the British national interest: the position of an island economy that cannot opt out of the world.
Since February, Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz has disrupted a fifth of the world’s oil and LNG, plus fertiliser and other essentials. Over three-quarters of world trade moves by sea. A third of that passes through the Malacca and Taiwan Straits. The Bab al-Mandab, Suez and Panama are equally critical chokepoints. Trade, data and energy networks are the arteries of an island nation’s economy. Trump has warned that a less-exposed America will not keep them open alone.
The good news is that Britain can meet both our NATO commitments and our global interests – if the Government is prepared to make real choices. Our critical contribution to the Alliance is on the northern flank: maritime, amphibious, air and land forces keeping the North Atlantic and High North open against Russian aggression, while holding Russia’s strategic forces in their Arctic bases at risk. That integrated capability translates directly to the Gulf, the Indo-Pacific and wherever the next Hormuz crisis erupts.
Delivering it means confronting legacy force structures, reversing the erosion of our armed forces through years of cuts to training, maintenance and ordnance, and investing seriously in the technologies of modern warfare that Ukraine has deployed to such effect.
Hegseth closed with the motto of his first platoon: ‘Those who long for peace must prepare for war’. The insight is as old as organised warfare. Healey claimed that talking too much and delivering too little has now changed. The Defence Investment Plan is where that claim gets tested.
Publish it. Soon. But more important: get it right.
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