Six hundred years ago, at Agincourt in northern France, King Henry V’s outnumbered, English army faced the flower of French chivalry. French knights were expensive, each warrior the product of many years of training, his armour and warhorse a major investment for him and his family.

Henry’s archers carried longbows that cost little, drawn by men trained in every village across the kingdom. When the volleys came, the knights fell quickly. Quantity overwhelmed quality, and the mud helped. France lost the battle, but defeat in the war came not just because the knights had died, bowmen had been killed too, but because the knights could not be replaced.

We’re seeing the same in the Iran War today. Patriot interceptors are exquisite, a wonder of engineering, the product of decades of accumulated technical mastery, each one the labor of hundreds, perhaps thousands. The Iranian drones they intercept are arrows: cheap, plentiful, made in bulk.

Since February, the US has fired more than 1,300 Patriot interceptors against Iranian missiles and drones. Each interceptor costs around $4 million to destroy weapons that cost between $20,000 and $50,000. Based on the most recent rate of production, it will take two years for Lockheed Martin to replace what has been fired in the past 2½ months. That is the economics of defeat, and our adversaries understand it.

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Each Patriot is also a creature of supply chains we don’t fully control. The US-made guidance chips depend on helium, supplies of which have been disrupted by the war in Iran. Even if Congress voted the funds tomorrow for 10,000 new interceptors, the metal and the gas would still have to be found, the workforce trained, and the production lines tooled. We are running short of the raw materials for our exquisite weapons while our adversaries flood the battlefield with cheap drones.

Next-generation fighters, multibillion-dollar carriers and so much more mean that although each is a marvel, we have too few, and they’re too hard to replace, making them too valuable to risk.

Sophistication has become our vulnerability. Ukraine shows the alternative. More than 1,000 interceptor drones roll off Ukrainian production lines every day, at $1,000 to $3,000 apiece. The bodies of Kyiv-built attack drones are redesigned within months, not years, their engines even more quickly, and their guidance software within a matter of days. By keeping costs down and rapidly iterating simple technology, at scale, Ukraine is delivering a devastating effect.

Behind this show of force sits a market the government built. Programs like Brave1 connect investors directly to startups and to the user on the front line, giving fast feedback. That’s how a country at war fields more than 2,000 defense companies and runs production cycles from outline to front line in months, not years.

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Ukraine produced four million drones last year and plans to produce seven million this year, 10 times its output three years ago.

We’re not the only ones who have noticed. Gulf monarchies, which have bought American for decades, are looking at Kyiv as the partner for drone warfare. Their models are cheap, quick to produce and still in active development on the Donbas front.

While the U.S. is cautious about allowing even close allies to use cruise missiles, Ukraine has an alternative. See Spider’s Web, the June 2025 operation that smuggled more than 100 drones deep inside Russia and struck four air bases and 41 aircraft, including several bombers, causing an estimated $7 billion in damage.

For Ukraine, that’s the economics of victory: billions of dollars of weapons destroyed by drones that cost around $2,000 each.

The cure to what ails the North Atlantic Treaty Organizations’s militaries isn’t another exquisite platform. It’s an industrial base that can take an idea and turn it into a million in a year. That means pivoting civilian production lines to defense and giving contracts to the manufacturer that can deliver 100,000 drones a month, not the one that delivers a dozen platforms in a decade.

The goal is no longer the perfect weapon. You build the best you can. Then build it again, 90% as good, at 80% of the cost, in 50% of the time. Then do it again and again, a thousand times more. That not only fills the armoury; it creates a system to keep it full.

In the Iran war, we’re equipping like the French at Agincourt when what we need is an army of archers.

First published in the Wall Street Journal 19 May 2026

And in the years since I’ve left the Army, you’ve given me, kindly, a platform. And I’m grateful that today you are giving me a chance to share some thoughts on the dangers that we face, too many of our own choosing and exposed by a war we should have predicted that will have a much more fundamental impact on our lives than many that we choose to remember.

The Iran War has revealed in many ways the reality of the British way.

It has shown us to be legalistic, ill-equipped and unprepared. It has revealed our dependencies, not our partnerships, the risks that we’ve hidden, not the resilience that we’ve built, and, perhaps most gravely of all, our casual confidence of a return to a normal when the disrupted alliances and energy flows will do anything but.

We have come, in many ways, to a moment like William Stead’s in 1884, when he had to ask: What is the truth about the Navy? What followed was the realisation that the maritime power that sustained empire had rotted in port. What followed that was the Naval Defence Act of 1889.

We are at a similar moment as, if you will allow me, I hope to demonstrate this morning. In the past two months, let’s just look at what has happened.

Allies for the past century have wondered if our own legal constraints mean that we can be relied on, not just to plan operations from our bases, but to fly defensive sorties from theirs.

Our sovereign bases have come under attack and been defended not by British forces, but by French.

And the Defence Secretary has confirmed that Russian submarines spent much of March and April mapping our undersea cables, while the best that we could say was that we had watched them do it.

We have ceased to be a serious military nation, and if we fail to use the moment that this gives us to realise the challenges that we face, the next wake up call may cost us very dear indeed.

That’s why I wanted to talk to you today.

Now, many of us have known the truth about our defences for some time. The facts are not hidden and many of the gaps have been visible for decades, not just years. But today, with the threats to our allies in the Gulf, and to the communication cables around our coast, the risks are not theoretical.

They have already arrived.

We are no longer planning for an uncertain future, but a clear and dangerous present.

Without changing our approach we won’t be stocking up on self-built security, we’ll be panic buying whatever we can at the highest prices when the urgency demands immediate action. If there is one lesson from the Covid pandemic, it’s that behaving like that will cost us for generations to come.

And that is the reality of where we are now.

British defence, under governments of every political stripe over three decades, has deteriorated steadily, in plain sight, and as the end-product of a series of democratic choices whose cumulative effect was not so much concealed from the public, as simply unquestioned within it.

When the Iran campaign began, there were no Royal Navy vessels in the Gulf after the admirals were forced to choose between protecting our home waters or our vital interests.

And as the drones struck cities now home to thousands of Brits, the Royal Air Force was limited in its ability to defend our interests and our allies despite the United Kingdom maintaining four airbases in the Gulf.

Set that against 1982, when a Royal Navy task force capable of retaking the Falkland Islands at the other end of the earth was assembled in a weekend. That Britain and this Britain can hardly be called the same country.

The purpose of speaking to you this morning is not to diagnose any single failure of policy, because one attributable failure doesn’t exist.

I want to offer a rather fuller audit. A reckoning of where British defence actually stands and to argue that the accumulated evidence compels a diagnosis, and that that diagnosis, however unwelcome it will be, is the necessary precondition of any serious prescription.

That cure, a grand strategy backed by a clear-eyed understanding of how things really are, is what we have failed to achieve because the defence and security reviews – including the last one drafted by my friend John Bew and others – have lacked the resources they required.

For three decades we have been projecting an image of a Britain that no longer exists. Before it can decide what to do next, we must be prepared to look honestly in the mirror and realise the truth about ourselves.

I’m not just talking about kit.

Over the last few days we’ve seen stories that bring home the true erosion of the fighting capability of our forces that I first described in a report for this very organisation some years ago entitled ‘the Fog of Law’.

Over a generation, the legal expansion has enshrined a pharisaic approach, building fence upon fence around the law in the belief that this constitutes moral seriousness, mistaking the mechanism of legal process for justice itself.

The revelations published in the Telegraph in recent days confirm what many of us had long feared: the legal culture that grew up around operations in Iraq and Afghanistan was not, in its most aggressive expressions, a neutral application of principle.

It was instead the instrumentalisation of law, the deliberate use of legal process not to defend justice but to pursue a narrow political agenda, at the direct expense of the men and women ordered into battle by the British state.

The choice to fetter our forces with reams of red tape, and to help our enemies continue the fight when the guns go silent, has done more to weaken our country and endanger our future than any number of lost battles in foreign lands.

Let’s be clear what we have seen:

Soldiers fighting hand-to-hand against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, being hounded by those same militias under a legal mandate carved out by solicitors paid by the very taxpayers who looked to these soldiers for protection from Iranian aggression, only to see that aggression empowered by the courts while their protectors are persecuted.

And that’s not just a one off.

Ever-higher fences of prohibition around every possible action, and then accountability for decisions made in the most confused and conflicting of circumstances has created a straitjacket leaving British forces constrained in ways that have no parallel in our own history and no equivalent among our closest allies.

This isn’t abstract or theoretical, it has direct operational consequences.

Soldiers are paralysed as both action and inaction leaves them liable to prosecution and danger.

Commanders are unable to react, changing tangibly what a force can accomplish and what it cannot.

And who pays for that? Not just the millions in legal fees, but what are the consequences? Well we know, don’t we, it’s the British people.

By treating our soldiers as scapegoats we have torn down our walls and punished our guards. Now we’re surprised that too often our friends ignore us and our enemies mock us. We shouldn’t be.

We have done more to undermine morale than any failure of accommodation or pay.

I will turn to the hardware audit but this is never discussed enough in procurement debates and it should be.

As Napoleon said, morale is three times more important than kit.

Two former SAS commanding officers and a former Chief of the General Staff have already exposed how corrosive this has been to unit morale as this inversion of responsibility has seen those who order an action washed of consequences as the burden falls on those ordered to act.

Those who order wars know what will follow. It is absurd that those who take the greatest physical risks are also those left most personally exposed to legal jeopardy for decisions made from necessity in the confusion of battle. It is no surprise so many are choosing to leave.

Just to be clear, none of this is an argument for immunity. Crimes happen in war and they must be prosecuted.

But the civilian law is pointless in battle. Actions essential to victory in war are absolutely intolerable in peace, and confusing the two simply leaves the vulnerable weak, and the tyrant strong.

We can all see it. That’s what makes the events following the Battle of Danny Boy in 2004 so offensive to us all.

British soldiers fought and survived one of the most intense engagements of the Iraq war and then spent years, in some cases the better part of a decade, under investigation for alleged unlawful killings.

The Iraq Historic Allegations Team pursued them and the Al-Sweady Inquiry consumed millions of pounds and caused immeasurable personal suffering to those soldiers who were caught up in it.

Its conclusion, when it finally came, was that the gravest allegations were not merely unproven but had been entirely false and based on “deliberate lies.” In effect, the Iranian IRGC had exploited our own system to punish soldiers for their courage and deter others from following them.

Can we honestly say, seeing the failure of recruiting today and the gaps in our defensive support to our allies in the Gulf, that their strategy failed? Can we honestly say that Russia and others having witnessed the example as an effective way to undermine morale of every soldier who may be sent against them won’t try and do the same?

And all this comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding. A soldier is by definition the state’s instrument of violence in pursuit of national policy.

They do not act alone or on their own behalf and their actions should be weighed as part of a whole. It is the nation that bears the responsibility for the use to which they are put.

Instead we have seen moral cowardice from politicians who asked soldiers to step up, and then left them to hang alone.

What is worse is the complicity shown in those who seek to poison the reputation of our forces by some of our most senior lawyers. What they have done is not just immoral, it is a betrayal.

Knowingly spreading lies about our forces, or recruiting others to do the same, or praising others who have done the same, leaves our soldiers more likely to face attack from those misled into hating them; and puts our country at greater risk.

You may have thought that praising the recruiting sergeant of His Majesty’s enemies would make you ineligible to serve in His Majesty’s Government. Well, apparently not.

The government asks why they can’t hit recruitment targets for our Armed Forces. They ask why half of our young people say they would never fight for their country. Well, they should start by looking at their Attorney General.

His position is completely untenable. He has prioritised – by choice, if also by ignorance – the interests of agents of the IRGC, a terror organisation.

Even if his action was unwitting, his belief that those who pursued prosecution of those we ask to protect us are more worthy of praise than the soldiers who risk their lives demonstrates a failure of judgement and raises real questions about the advice he offers this government.

Those who lie about our troops encourage others to kill them. That’s treason. No minister, no citizen, should praise that.

This new legal dominion is putting creed over need and doing more than just eroding our fighting power, it’s leaving our allies and friends wondering what we have become.

Just look at the words of our ministers.

In recent debates on European security and rearmament, Baroness Chapman, responding to contributions from Lords Godson and Verdirame, saw fit to criticise Lithuania for wishing to withdraw from the Ottawa treaty so that their small army could use landmines to protect their children from the Russian troops who we have seen raping and murdering civilians in Ukraine.

It is, frankly, extraordinary that a British minister should criticise a NATO ally for putting the safety of their children over a treaty which others – including, of course, Russia – have not signed.

To some it seems their aim is to be the most righteous soul in the graveyard. Those words come from those who do not understand war and do not believe in the devil.

Our government should support our friends, not lecture them with pompous piety about legal compliance.

Poland, Estonia, Finland – countries that have made admirable investments in their own defence, that have looked at the world as it is and responded with seriousness – do not need lectures from us, they need our commitment.

They need to know that if the moment comes, the British state will act with them, not judge them for the violence that has been brought to their homes by the enemies we all see.

In the United States, the lesson has been heard even more starkly. Senators who oppose the war in Iran, who judge the action unwise and the strategy unsound are appalled at the absurdity of Britain refusing to allow bases to be used against a nation that has spread death across the region and tried to murder even our own citizens.

There is a strong political argument against the war in Iran.

There is a powerful strategic argument against the war in Iran.

But the idea that there is no respectable legal argument for striking the missiles and bases of a regime that has killed British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and murdered thousands, hundreds of thousands, across the region is ridiculous, as Professor Ekins and others have made clear and as the government itself has now conceded.

We need to choose – are we here to patronise or to partner? Unless you believe in miracles, only one of those will keep us safe.

Now I will turn to hardware.

Threats that the United States may consider leaving the NATO alliance have left many on this side of the Atlantic nervous, but it’s worth asking: who is really pulling us apart?

If we’re not capable of carrying our share of the burden, why are we surprised when others consider going it alone?

Let’s start with the Royal Navy.

Despite months of warning and the biggest military build-up since the Iraq operations, not one of Britain’s six purpose-built vessels capable of air defence was in position and ready at the start of the Iran War.

Three were stuck in Portsmouth for engineering work. One had spent more time in refit than at sea, and another was in maintenance.

The last one remaining was dragged from her dry dock to be dispatched leaving the region without a British naval presence for 17 days as the war began.

Now, that’s not a huge surprise. We commissioned 12, we built 6, we got missiles for 5 and parts for 4. Frankly, this is a Dutch auction of capability that is coming home to roost.

The same is true across the rest of the fleet. HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales are extraordinary ships built for a combined cost of approximately £7 billion, but that doesn’t include the planes.

Without the US Marine Corps’ F-35Bs and the Dutch and US escort ships, the Royal Navy’s flagships would have never been operational.

This is in stark contrast to our history. In 1982, Admiral Leach was able to assemble a task force capable of retaking the Falkland Islands in a weekend. 127 ships set sail to reassert Britain’s commitment to global order, and to defend our people.

Today the Royal Navy has 13 frigates and destroyers, not 17 Mr Healey, down from 59 back then.

The standing tasks – the work we must do just to play our part in NATO and keep ourselves safe, requires more hulls than actually exist.

Now, every First Sea Lord has known this for decades but it has taken the actions of this February to make it clear to the world.

After needing the army to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course surely that must be different? Right?

Wrong.

The British Army is down to approximately 74,000, from 109,000 in the year 2000. That’s the smallest force since Bonaparte threatened invasion. That’s regiments gone and battalions disbanded, eroding capability and cohesion.

Some have been replaced with tech, and the advances that have been made by the Army are impressive, but people still matter.

Poland is building a standing army of 300,000 and Germany has announced 460,000 trained personnel as its target. We’re not even close.

Worse, we’re not even close to what we promised.

NATO’s Force Model expects Britain to contribute a corps headquarters and two divisions. That’s simply not credible. We’d be hard pressed to deploy a brigade and as a General who commanded a brigade in the 1990s told me, the entire fire power of the British Army is less than he had in his brigade then.

The Falklands, Cyprus, Brunei, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, the Ukraine training mission, and the enhanced Forward Presence in Estonia each demands troops and is only possible if every other operation remains quiet.

That’s a strong bet in this world.

At least the Air Force, the home of innovation for a century, will have what it needs? No.

Royal Air Force fast-jet numbers couldn’t sustain a campaign at the scale of recent operations. F-35 deliveries remain below the programme’s own ambitions and the RAF has gone from 54,600 personnel in 2000 to 31,940 today, the steepest cut of any of the three services and not all of this is down to automation.

Amongst that is an ambition for an air-launched nuclear weapon, adding cost when we can’t even resource what we have today.

Even our allies are wondering what comes next. The Global Combat Air Programme, a strategic partnership with Italy and Japan and an initiative that this country should support, is years from delivery, underfunded by the Treasury, not by Tokyo or Rome, and dependent on them for its continued progression.

Alliance brings strength, dependency breeds resentment.

Across all three services we are seeing budgets of billions delivering outputs that leave us short of personnel and power.

This isn’t about housing or pay, it’s about mission and purpose, and neither are possible without the vision we’re lacking.

The Strategic Defence Review of 2025 tried to fix this with a reset in ambition. But since it was published, each of its authors has pointed out that without corresponding spending commitments the review is just a wish list, not a strategy.

That’s not good enough. Since the end of the Cold War, we have slashed the defence budget and failed to re-equip for the world as it is, not as we wished it was.

For all our talk of hitting 2.5 percent, and now boasting of the largest increase in the defence budget, let’s face it we’re just not being honest.

Ever since the nuclear deterrent was included in the defence budget in 2010 and pensions added in 2016, we have really been spending about 1.7 percent, now that’s much closer to the derided Spaniards than the prepared Poles.

From 2027, the Single Intelligence Account, £4.6 billion this year rising to £5.4 billion by 2029, will be reclassified as NATO-qualifying defence expenditure, to push the defence budget, in name only, to 2.6 percent.

In other words, we are busy playing accounting tricks in the purser’s office of the Titanic. Do you really think that anyone believes that Treasury tricks make us safer?

It’s a con and we can all see it. And worse, when the Prime Minister goes to the States, or sees our NATO allies, they see it too. He’s selling them a lie.

But that’s not all.

There is another number that every officer and analyst in this room I’m sure already knows, but must be repeated constantly to burn the shame of it into the hearts of those who can change it - that number is Eight.

The United Kingdom can sustain major combat operations for approximately eight days. That’s it.

Eight days.

The Chief of the Defence Staff didn’t contest this figure when pressed on it in the Defence Committee. Others have reported it clearly. We now have, according to some, the thinnest munitions stockpile of any first-tier NATO state.

In Ukraine, Russia is firing up to 10,000 shells a day and has learned to use drones at scale. Ukraine is said to be building as many as 9 million drones this year.

We’re losing credibility and as history shows, not least when we last left the Falkland Islands unguarded, weakness is provocative and costs many many times more than deterrence.

Let’s just look at what’s happening at home.

We have no integrated short-range air defence protecting critical national infrastructure.

We have no contracts or budgets allocated to repair our airfields if they’re damaged or destroyed.

The seas that carry the vast majority of intercontinental data that powers our economy through undersea cables are being systematically surveyed and mapped by Russian naval vessels, and may already be being sabotaged.

As the Russian tankers breaking sanctions through the English Channel show – we’re not really deterring that much.

Just imagine, if you will, the frustration of those who are capable of intercepting our enemies, but are forced to watch – restricted not just by kit but by the quiet suffocation of overcautious legal interpretations.

That doesn’t stop our enemies or encourage our forces, and our civilian resilience sadly is no better.

The National Health Service has no mass-casualty plan designed for industrial-scale warfare. The Cold War infrastructure that provided such a plan was dismantled in the late 1990s on the assumption that it would never be needed.

Indeed, when 9/11 happened, Number 10 couldn’t even find the key to the Prime Minister’s bunker.

We have made choices and saved pennies until the gap between what we say and who we are has become a chasm.

That’s not bad luck. That is the bill for 30 years of choices, arriving all at once.

Now, the hardware can be fixed with cash. What’s harder to change is the understanding that we need to make tough choices – now.

So let’s be honest – this isn’t just about politicians, we have our own share of the guilt. It’s about all of us and the kind of country we want to be.

In 1990, as the Berlin Wall came down, most people wanted to cut defence. Of course they did. Peace allowed us to spend more on our wants not our needs.

And that switch in focus – the so-called peace dividend – has left us disarmed but it wasn’t imposed on an unwilling electorate; it was demanded.

Successive governments delivered what was consistently asked of them.

In forced-choice polling even today, defence ranks eighth out of 13 priorities, behind the NHS, pensions, disability benefits, education and policing.

The question is not whether Britain can afford to do better than this. We can. The question is will we choose to change our priorities to make sure we stay safe.

While we’re spending just over £63 billion on defence, we spend more than five times that on welfare – more than 10 percent of our GDP.

The state pension costs taxpayers £146 billion and other pensioner-related benefits bring the total to about £180 billion.

Health and disability benefits cost £76 billion, more than we spend on deterring war, and that’s likely to rise to £100 billion by the end of the decade because the demographics are just so unforgiving.

Now today, there are three and a half working people supporting each pensioner. By 2050 there will be only two.

I don’t believe our economy can shoulder more taxes than today’s peacetime high. That’s why I argue we need to look again at where money is going.

By 2030, the Triple Lock will cost £15.5 billion more a year than if it were linked to earnings – that is three times the original forecast.

In cash terms, that’s the equivalent of a 20 percent increase in the entire defence budget.

A pensioner-protecting alternative which still tracks earnings but smooths out the volatility would save £6 billion a year by the end of this decade.

That’s five frigates, or 70 F-35s. Every single year.

That’s not all. As Fraser Nelson has shown, the number being moved on to sickness benefit has surged to a scarcely-believable 5,000 a day against 2,000 a day when Labour took office.

Around 90 percent of those granted sickness benefit were still on the benefit, and not working, two years later pushing the annual sickness and disability bill higher by £20 billion since 2019 alone.

That’s how much we spend on every soldier currently serving in the British Army, nearly four times over.

Let’s be clear, those bills are not being paid through taxation but debt. The costs are falling on our children.

What we owed cost us approximately £49 billion in 2019, today it’s £110 billion. Quantitative easing, Covid and welfare all racked up the bill. And it keeps rising.

That’s why this can’t go on. We can’t promise pension rises or sickness benefits that leave us so exposed.

We won’t be able to pay for anything if our cables are cut and energy is severed. The Triple Lock and health demands of a generation that should be at work, not off work, have left us living on a prayer.

These choices haven’t been foisted secretly upon an unknowing electorate. They’re the cumulative product of government policy, the legal culture, and our public discourse – and now we’re here living with the consequences of those choices.

We can blame others and play politics but that will change nothing.

This is our watch and the seas have turned rough.

It’s time that we were honest with ourselves.

At one time, we were.

When Britain helped write the rules of the post-war world we knew we had to help enforce them.

Along with other free nations, we invested in the Bretton Woods framework, the Atlantic alliance, the United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Commonwealth, and so much more.

British diplomats drafted the language that British ships, garrisons and planes made count. We knew that soft power was the velvet on the mace – softening the ask, veiling the threat.

Rule-writers and rule-enforcers were the same countries, because the architects of the post-war settlement understood that words without weapons are just wishes.

After the end of the Cold War, we forgot that we still had to pay the bill.

The speeches from Number 10, the Foreign Office and the MoD have barely changed, but the ships, planes, people and bases; the factories and stockpiles, have all dwindled.

We told ourselves fairy tales, we remembered the glorious past that was written in our history and pretended that that would automatically lead to a gentle future forgetting the price of peace.

Our diplomats, the BBC, the British Council, the City of London, the English language itself are all soft power. They can, we are told, carry a load that, until 1990, had needed steel and strength.

We’ve forgotten the truth:

Soft power is not just weaker than hard power, it depends on it.

The institutions through which soft power operates – the alliances, the multilateral frameworks, the treaty bodies – derive their authority from the order that hard power maintains.

Britain didn’t trade hard power for soft power, we sold it, just as a banker has sold the gold that underpins a currency and is now surprised when there is a run on his trust.

The consequence, as every senior civil servant involved in multilateral diplomacy privately acknowledges, is that Britain has fewer seats at the tables where the rules are made.

Because power is not hereditary. It’s bought with ships, aircraft, battalions and the industrial capacity to make them and the willingness to act.

As I warned when I took over the Foreign Affairs Committee 8 years ago, you can’t hide behind treaties and pretend peace is eternal. You will be found wanting.

Now, with the world in flux and the tide going out, I’m reminded of the words of Warren Buffett: we’re finding out who has been swimming naked.

For a trading nation that depends on the sea, there’s a threat, not just to our influence but to our economy. For a rules-based state that needs to shape the words that constrain us, our voice is quieter than it has been for generations.

We’re spending our children’s inheritance and we’re not securing their tomorrow but comforting our today.

The evidence is now too great to be ignored.

France defends British sovereign territory.

The United States takes decisions that determine our future without consulting us. And the reason is clear.

We have too few ships, too few soldiers and too few planes.

We have factories receiving too few orders and the armouries holding too few stocks. And worst, we have a government too keen to punish those who try to protect us. Those are not opinions. They’re facts.

But I’m not going to end on that.

I think there are three tests for us to turn around where we are:

The first, is a short term test: the ‘Falklands test’ if you will. Britain must be able to assemble a credible task force within 72 hours and deploy it to any sovereign British territory within the time window required to prevent its loss.

Second, is the medium term test: the ‘Technology test’, if you will. Britain must be able to match and defeat a modern, fully equipped peer adversary in the air, on land, at sea, and in the electromagnetic and cyber domains, with the drones, integrated air defence, long-range fires, and the resilient command-and-control that contemporary warfare actually requires.

And the third, in the long term: the ‘North Atlantic test’. Britain must be the most capable European power in the most important domains for our national life: the North Sea, the Baltic approaches, the North Atlantic, and the GIUK Gap securing our energy and communications connections.

Over the coming weeks I’m going to be setting out the choices we must make beyond the tax changes and legal reforms that have been demanding our attention for so many years. What must be built is the work of the speeches that I will draft in coming days.

We face an industrial question: can we restore the sovereign capacity to produce the ships, the steel, and the munitions on which hard power depends?

A technological question: can we keep up and overtake the advances in drone warfare, artificial intelligence, and open-source intelligence being demanded by today’s battlefields?

A diplomatic question: can we reawaken the partnerships that will endure for another generation or more and remember the ties that bind?

And lastly we have a legal question: can we rebuild a framework of laws allowing British forces to operate in the world as it is, not as we wish it had become?

I will be addressing each in turn.

Now this has been pretty bleak, but let me be clear, it’s not too late.

Poland has tripled its defence spending in a decade because successive Polish governments made the case and argued the need.

Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia all spend more than we do as a proportion not because they want to, but because their leaders said the hard things clearly, and their citizens, who want peace as much as ours do, chose to be serious when presented with the reality of the choice before them.

What we need now is not just the money or the mass; most importantly, we need politicians willing to say, clearly and repeatedly, things that for thirty years have been thought unsayable.

The diagnosis has not been comfortable and the remedy won’t be simple or cheap. The evidence, however, is clear. And the choice, for the moment at least, remains ours to make.

The last remaining question is whether the national conversation that reinforced our predicament is capable, in the years immediately ahead, of producing that cure. Now that question, well that’s really for all of us to answer in our own way.

Thank you.

The Iran war has revealed the reality of the British way. It has shown us to be legalistic, ill-equipped and unprepared. It has revealed our dependencies, not our partnerships, the risks we’ve hidden, not the resilience we’ve built, and, perhaps most gravely of all, our casual confidence of a return to normal when the disrupted alliances and energy flows will do anything but.

We have come to a moment like William Stead’s in 1884, when he had to ask: what is the truth about the Navy? What followed was the realisation that the maritime power that sustained empire had rotted in port. The Naval Defence Act of 1889 was the fix.

We are now at a similar moment. In the past two months, let’s just look at what has happened. Allies for the past century have wondered if our own legal constraints mean we can be relied on, not just to plan operations from our bases, but to fly defensive sorties from theirs.

Our sovereign bases have come under attack and been defended not by British forces, but French. And the Defence Secretary has confirmed that Russian submarines spent much of March and April mapping our undersea cables, while the best we could say was that we had watched them do it.

We have ceased to be a serious military nation. If we fail to use this moment to realise the challenges we face, the next wake up call may cost us very dear.

Many of us have known the truth about our defences for some time. The facts are not hidden and many of the gaps have been visible for decades, not just years.

But today, with the threats to our allies in the Gulf, and to the communication cables around our coast, the risks are not theoretical. They have already arrived.

Without changing our approach we won’t be stocking up on self-built security, we’ll be panic buying whatever we can at the highest prices when the urgency demands immediate action. If there is one lesson from the Covid pandemic, it’s that behaving like that will cost for generations to come.

That’s the reality of where we are now.

Visible decline

British defence, under governments of every political stripe over three decades, has deteriorated steadily, in plain sight.

It is the end-product of a series of democratic choices whose cumulative effect was not so much concealed from public view as simply unquestioned within its gaze.

Just look at the past several months. Our military bases in Cyprus have come under rocket attack, but the anti-missile batteries deployed to defend British sovereign territory were not British. They were French. So that’s French crews and French equipment defending British soil.

When the Iran campaign began, there was no Royal Navy vessel on station in the Gulf after the admirals were forced to choose between protecting our home waters and our vital interests.

And as the drones struck cities now home to thousands of Britons, the Royal Air Force was limited in its ability to defend our interests and our allies, despite the UK maintaining four air bases on the Gulf littoral.

Set that against 1982, when a Royal Navy task force capable of retaking the Falkland Islands at the other end of the Earth was assembled in a weekend. That Britain and this Britain can hardly be called the same country.

The accumulated evidence compels a diagnosis, and that diagnosis, however unwelcome it will be, is the necessary precondition of any serious prescription. That cure, a grand strategy backed by a clear-eyed understanding of how things really are, is what we have failed to achieve because the defence reviews have lacked the resources they required

For three decades, the country has been describing a Britain that no longer exists. Before it can decide what to do next, it must be prepared to see clearly what it has become.

This is about more than kit. The revelations published in The Telegraph in recent days confirm what many of us had long feared: the legal culture that grew up around operations in Iraq and Afghanistan was not, in its most aggressive expressions, a neutral application of principle.

It was the instrumentalisation of law, the deliberate use of legal process not to defend justice but to pursue a narrow political agenda, at the direct expense of the men and women ordered into combat by the British state.

Soldiers are paralysed as both action and inaction can leave them liable to prosecution or danger. Commanders have their confidence eroded, reducing speed of action and changing tangibly what a force can accomplish and what it cannot.

The government asks why they can’t hit recruitment targets for our Armed Forces. They ask why half of our young people say they would never fight for their country.

Well, they should start by looking at their Attorney General, Lord Hermer. His position is completely untenable. He has prioritised – by choice, if also by ignorance – the interests of agents of the IRGC.

Even if his action was unwitting, his belief that those who pursued prosecution of those we ask to protect us are more worthy of praise than the soldiers who risk their lives demonstrates a failure of judgment and raises real questions about the advice he offers the government.

Those who lie about our troops encourage others to kill them. That’s treason. No minister, no citizen, should praise that.

It’s no accident then that pride in Britain’s history has fallen. The reason isn’t lost in the enigmatic mystery of our national character, it’s what a country looks like when it has spent 30 years telling itself that defence is someone else’s problem.

Since the end of the Cold War, we have slashed the defence budget and failed to re-equip for the world as it is, instead of how we wished it were.

And for all our talk of hitting 2.5 per cent, and now boasting of the largest increase in the defence budget, we are simply not being honest. Ever since the nuclear deterrent was included in the defence budget in 2010 and the pensions included in 2016, we are really spending about 1.7 per cent. That’s closer to the much derided Spaniards than the prepared Poles.

Shrinking Royal Navy

The reality of decline is visible in every service. Let’s start with the Royal Navy.

Despite months of warning and the biggest military build-up since the Iraq operations, not one of Britain’s six purpose-built vessels capable of air defence was in position and ready for the start of the Iran War.

Three were stuck in Portsmouth for engineering work. One had spent more time in refit than at sea. Another was in maintenance. The last one remaining was dragged from her dry dock to be dispatched leaving the region without a British naval presence for 17 days as the war began.

The last one remaining was dragged from her dry dock to be dispatched leaving the region without a British naval presence for 17 days as the war began. That’s no surprise. We commissioned 12, built six, with missiles for five and parts for four. Our Dutch auction of capability is coming home to roost.

Britain’s two aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, are extraordinary ships built for a combined cost of approximately £7bn – but that is without the cost of the planes.

On its first major deployment, HMS Queen Elizabeth didn’t carry a full British fast-jet air wing. The United States Marine Corps provided the F-35Bs.

The escort ships (without which a strike group cannot operate), were also provided by the US, as well as… the Dutch. In other words, the platform exists but without our allies it is a stage without the full cast.

The escort picture is starker. In 1982, Admiral Leach had a task force assembled capable of retaking the Falkland Islands in a weekend. A force of 127 ships, 43 of them Royal Navy warships, set sail to restate Britain’s commitment to our place in the world.

Today the Royal Navy has 13 frigates and destroyers overall, down from 59 in 1982.

The standing task list – the work we must do just to maintain forward presence, protect the carriers, and deter our enemies from cutting our energy and communications cables, leaving us cold and silent – requires more hulls than exist.

Every First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff has known this for years but since the American campaign against Iran began in February it became clear to the world: not a single Royal Navy vessel has been in the Gulf. Not one. Two months on, that hasn’t changed.

Dependency does not bring strength

Surely, though, the Army is in better shape, given it was needed to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan? No.

The British Army’s regular strength stands at approximately 74,000, down from 109,000 in 2000. That’s the smallest force since Bonaparte threatened invasion.

Since 2010, we’ve lost 23 regiments through amalgamation masking battalions disbanded and capability not replaced. Meanwhile, Poland is constructing a standing army of 300,000 and Germany has announced 460,000 trained personnel as its target. We’re not even close.

Nato expects Britain to contribute a corps headquarters and two divisions. But that’s not credible. We’d be hard pressed to deploy a brigade. Alliance brings strength, dependency does not.

The reserves are also under-strength, under-trained, and poorly integrated into any realistic mobilisation plan.

But that’s not all. One further figure, which every officer and analyst in this room already knows, and which should nonetheless be stated aloud at every address on British defence until the picture changes is the number eight.

The United Kingdom can sustain major combat operations for approximately eight days before running out of bullets. Eight days.

Meanwhile, in Ukraine, Russia is expending up to 10,000 artillery shells a day and has learnt to use drones at scale. We’re losing credibility and that erodes deterrence. And weakness is provocative and can cost us at home.

At the same time, Royal Air Force fast-jet numbers couldn’t sustain a campaign at the scale of recent operations. F-35 deliveries remain below the programme’s own ambitions and the RAF has gone from 54,600 personnel in 2000 to 31,940 today, the steepest cut of any of the three services (and not all of that is due to automation).

As for the ambition for an air-launched nuclear weapon, it adds further cost when we can’t even resource what we have today. Further, we have no integrated short-range air defence protecting critical national infrastructure.

The National Health Service (NHS) has no mass-casualty plan designed for industrial-scale warfare. The Cold War infrastructure that provided such a plan was dismantled in the 1990s on the assumption that it would never be needed.

Let’s be honest. This isn’t just about politicians. It’s about all of us and the kind of country we want to be.

Welfare, pensions and the NHS

When 9/11 happened, Number 10 couldn’t even find the key for the prime minister’s bunker.

We have made choices and saved pennies until the gap between what we say and who we are has become a chasm. That’s not bad luck. That is the bill for 30 years of choices, arriving as one.

Successive governments delivered what was consistently being demanded of them. In forced-choice polling, even today, defence ranks eighth out of 13 priorities, behind the NHS, pensions, disability benefits, education and policing.

While we’re spending just over £63bn on defence, we spend beyond five times that on welfare – more than 10 per cent of GDP.

The state pension costs taxpayers £146bn and other pensioner-related benefits bring the total to about £180bn, nearly three times what we pay on defence.

Today, health and disability benefits cost £76bn, already more than we spend on deterring war, and that’s likely to hit £100bn by the end of the decade because the demographics are unforgiving.

Today, there are three and a half working people supporting each pensioner. By 2050 there will be two.

I don’t believe our economy can shoulder more taxes than today’s peacetime high. That’s why I argue we need to look again at where money is going.

By 2030, the triple lock is projected to cost £15.5bn a year more than if it were linked to earnings – three times the original forecast. In cash terms, that’s the equivalent of a 20 per cent increase in the entire defence budget.

As for debt, it is still rising and the interest bill, which was approximately £49bn in 2019, has nearly trebled to £110bn annually because of quantitative easing, Covid and welfare.

And it keeps going up. With inflation-linked debt likely to drive costs higher we are set to go beyond double the defence budget on paying the interest on what we owe.

That’s why this can’t go on. We can’t promise pension rises or sickness benefits that leave us exposed.

Soft power is not enough

It’s time we were honest with ourselves. At one time, we were.

When Britain helped write the rules of the post-war world we knew we had to help enforce them. Along with other free nations, we invested in the Bretton Woods framework, the Atlantic alliance, the United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Commonwealth, and much more.

We knew that soft power was the velvet on the mace – softening the ask, veiling the threat. Rule-writers and rule-enforcers were the same countries, because the architects of the post-war settlement understood that words without weapons are just wishes.

After the end of the Cold War, we forgot that we still had to pay the bill. The speeches from Number 10, the Foreign Office and Defence have barely changed, but the ships, planes, people and bases; the factories and stockpiles, have dwindled.

We told ourselves fairy tales, myths of our glorious past and gentle future forgetting the price of peace. Our diplomats, the BBC, the British Council, the City of London, the English language itself are all soft power. They can, we are told, carry a load that, until 1990, had needed steel and strength. We’ve forgotten the truth:

Soft power is not just weaker than hard power, it depends on it. The institutions through which soft power operates – the alliances, the multilateral frameworks, the treaty bodies – derive their authority from the order that hard power maintains.

Power isn’t hereditary. It’s bought with ships, aircraft, battalions and the industrial capacity to make them and the willingness to act. As I warned when I took over the Foreign Affairs Committee eight years ago, you can’t hide behind treaties and pretend peace is eternal. You will be found wanting.

The evidence is now too great to be ignored: France defends British sovereign territory; the US takes decisions that determine our future without consulting us. And the reason is clear.

We have too few ships, too few soldiers and too few planes. We have factories receiving too few orders and the armouries holding too few stocks. And we have a government too keen to punish those who try to protect us. Those are not opinions. They’re facts.

But I’m not going to end on that. There are three tests for us to turn this around.

It is not too late

First, in the short term: the “Falklands test”. Britain must be able to assemble a credible task force within 72 hours and deploy it to any sovereign British territory within the time window required to prevent its loss.

Second, in the medium term: the “technology test”. Britain must be able to match and defeat a modern, fully equipped peer adversary in the air, on land, at sea, and in the electromagnetic and cyber domains, with the drones, integrated air defence, long-range fires, and the resilient command-and-control that contemporary warfare actually requires.

Third, in the long term: the “North Atlantic test”. Britain must be the most capable European power in the most important domains for our national life: the North Sea, the Baltic approaches, the North Atlantic, and the GIUK Gap securing our energy and communications connections.

It’s not too late. Poland has tripled its defence spending in a decade because successive Polish governments made the case and argued the need.

Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia all spend more than we do as a proportion not because they want to, but because their leaders said the hard things clearly, and their citizens, who want peace as much as ours, chose to be serious when presented with the reality of the choice before them.

What we need now is not just the money or the mass; most importantly, we need politicians willing to say, clearly and repeatedly, things that for 30 years have been thought unsayable.

The diagnosis has not been comfortable and the remedy won’t be simple. The evidence, however, is clear. And the choice, for the moment at least, remains ours to make.

The last remaining question is whether the national conversation that reinforced our predicament is capable, in the years immediately ahead, of producing the cure. That is a question for all of us to answer in our own way.

First published in the Telegraph on 29 May after the speech was given at Policy Exchange.

In May 2004, at a checkpoint in southern Iraq, the British had named Danny Boy, an ambushed British patrol fought the Mahdi Army hand-to-hand for three hours. Twenty-eight insurgents were killed. No British soldier died, and five were awarded the Military Cross.

What came next did not happen on the battlefield but in Birmingham. Phil Shiner of Public Interest Lawyers paid fixers in Maysan to find Iraqis willing to accuse British soldiers for money. By 2008, he was holding press conferences claiming British soldiers had captured 20 Iraqis alive at Danny Boy, taken them to Camp Abu Naji, and executed them.

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The claims were extraordinary. If true, there would have had to have been a conspiracy among the British troops at the base, reaching from the commanding officer and the padre to the most junior soldier. Still, the Al-Sweady Inquiry sat for 169 days and cost the taxpayer £31m before Sir Thayne Forbes found every serious allegation to be the product of deliberate lies, reckless speculation and ingrained hostility.

Shiner’s firm had by then been the source of around 65 per cent of the Iraq Historic Allegations Team’s 3,392 cases. IHAT cost the taxpayer some £60m and was disbanded in 2017 without a single prosecution. Shiner himself was struck off, bankrupted, and in December 2024 sentenced on three counts of fraud. But he had also defrauded the British people by accusing the soldiers who had defended them.

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This week, The Telegraph published its investigation, having scoured 25,000 pages of papers from the Al-Sweady case. It showed that the lead counsel for eight of Shiner’s Iraqi claimants was Richard Hermer, now Lord Hermer, the Attorney General of the United Kingdom, He took the brief not under the cab rank rule, but on a conditional fee arrangement with a success uplift: he deliberately chose to do this work.

What’s more extraordinary is that he chose to continue even after he suspected the claims might not be credible. In 2008, Hermer advised Leigh Day on a draft press release. His own suggestion, which we have in writing, was that a particular wording would “give us some wriggle room if the killings did not in fact happen”, and that the release needed to be “slightly more explicit” about “executions of prisoners” to “generate sufficient interest”. Shiner replied: “I think R is right, so let’s up the ante.” A line alleging torture and execution of witnesses was duly added.

Those allegations weren’t just lies: they put British troops at risk. Those words were recruiting sergeants for those who saw our troops not as friends trying to protect Iraqis from Iranian-backed militias, but enemies come to murder their sons. How many soldiers died as a result of what was said at that press conference? We will never know.

Five years later, as the case collapsed around him, Hermer didn’t back down. Instead of encouraging the claimants to go quietly, he was advising that they seek settlements of between £45,000 and £55,000 per claimant. Not to vindicate his clients, whom his correspondence with his solicitors shows they doubted, but to conclude settlements before Sir Thayne Forbes gave what was ultimately his damning judgment. That is not service to the country.

The Prime Minister himself worked the same seam, pro bono, for interveners including Amnesty International and Liberty. Out of choice, not obligation, Starmer and Hermer brought to bear the full weight of the British human rights industry against the junior soldiers their own leaders had already shamefully abandoned.

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I wrote about this betrayal as the first thing I did on leaving the Army, in The Fog of Law with Laura Croft for Policy Exchange in October 2013, and in Clearing the Fog of Law with Richard Ekins and Jonathan Morgan two years later. I could already see what was coming.

The operational consequences are no longer speculative. Lieutenant General Sir Paul Newton observed a decade ago that commanders at every rank were registering creeping risk aversion, pre-empting the inquiry they knew would follow any decisive action. The question had shifted from what the enemy would do to what the judges would say. That is not a framework in which wars are won, the weak protected, or lives saved. It is one in which they are slowly, expensively, lost.

Hermerism today is the defining creed of our Government. It is the clerical dogma that democracy is subservient to an eternal law interpreted by a cult that puts the security of the British people under the most expansive reading of human rights law. It is the luxury belief only possible among those who have no understanding of true danger and the cost of war. It leaves us weak, unable to protect ourselves, and empowers those who are willing to use force and ignore the pompous piety of the legal priests.

Not content with emasculating our forces, Hermerism is also neutering our foreign policy. In a Lords debate last April, pressed by Lords Verdirame and Godson, Foreign Office minister Baroness Chapman defended her Government’s “regret” at Lithuania’s withdrawal from the Convention on Cluster Munitions and at Poland and the Baltic states’ withdrawal from the Ottawa landmines treaty. Frontier democracies preparing for a Russian army that has raped and murdered innocents were being reproached by a British minister for defending their own soil.

It’s no surprise that in Washington, British soldiers – who once stood as America’s most trusted wingmen – are now seen as little different from the Dutch peacekeepers who cited their rules of engagement and stood by as the men and boys of Srebrenica were marched away to be murdered in 1995.

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The hypocrisy is complete. These lawyers claim courage as they pursue 80-year-old paratroopers for decades-old allegations long since disproved, then fall silent when the Uyghur community in Xinjiang asks for protection from China, or the villagers of Darfur for protection from the Janjaweed. If courage costs nothing and pays well, perhaps it has another name.

People are busy. They do not follow every disclosure or tribunal ruling, every email released five years too late, and every allegation, but they know recruitment is down, and those they respect are walking away from uniformed service. We all know something is wrong.

When I first wrote about this poison, I could see its effect on the young men and women who were risking everything in battle. Their lives, in the heat and confusion of combat, weighed less than the views of lawyers in the cool and order of a courtroom. Now the poison, like Wormtongue at Théoden’s ear, sits at the heart of Government.

British people value rights and will fight to defend them. We welcomed Ukrainians whose lives were at risk and offered sanctuary to Afghans who fought alongside us. It is not justice the public recoils from, it’s the con: the rights of the nation’s enemies placed above the safety of its children, and the lawyers who claim to defend the weak profiting from legal tricks against those who stand between us and the devil.

These revelations must mark the end. Parliament should derogate from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in deployed operations, as Article 15 expressly permits. It must legislate a clean doctrine of combat immunity, and restore the primacy of the Geneva Conventions, not of civilian courts. And Parliament should not repeal the Northern Ireland Legacy Act. It should keep it, strengthen it, and apologise to the octogenarians it was written to protect.

Lance Corporal Brian Wood of the Princess of Wales’ Royal Regiment, awarded the Military Cross for Danny Boy and then falsely accused by Lord Hermer’s clients of executing prisoners, has called this week for the Attorney General’s resignation. He did not fight his heroic battle so that the lawyers who called him a murderer could run the country that sent him.

It wasn’t just soldiers who were used. Iraqi families who wanted nothing to do with the militias were exploited, their grief hired out, their dead made into props in a litigation business.

The industry that committed these legal atrocities calls itself the defender of human rights, and its most accomplished practitioner is the Attorney General of the United Kingdom. It is nothing of the kind. It is the slow, deliberate crippling of the only hand that, when the screaming starts, has ever reliably been raised to stop it.

First published in The Sunday Telegraph 26 April 2026

Who is in charge of the clattering train? asked Edwin Milliken, writing in Punch after the fatal crash at Eastleigh in July 1890. His answer was simple. Death was at the controls.

The axles creak and the couplings strain. As the train careered through the night, no one was driving.

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The same question could be asked in Westminster today. The footplate is empty and the driver is missing.

Some are pointing the finger at Sir Oliver Robbins. But where does that lead?

Robbins has left his post as Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office after it emerged that Peter Mandelson had been appointed Britain’s ambassador to Washington despite failing his developed vetting. The civil servant, it is said, overruled the security professionals and failed to tell the Prime Minister. His political judgment was off, they say, and he must go. And go he has.

But what is the order of things? And what should have happened?

By the time Robbins arrived, we could already say: the pace is hot, and the points are near. Mandelson’s appointment had been announced publicly before Robbins took up his post. That key fact determines everything.

A public announcement of an ambassadorial appointment is not an invitation for discussion. It is a statement of fact, made only after agrément, the formal acceptance of a representative from a foreign state, has been received from the host government.

The announcement, made on 20 December 2024, meant, or should have meant, that the White House had already confirmed it would accept Mandelson as His Majesty’s representative.

That is not a bureaucratic formality but a formal diplomatic exchange between sovereign governments. You do not request agrément before vetting is complete, because to do so is to state, on behalf of the British Government, that the candidate is suitable. It is not an opinion. It is a statement.

Once given, agrément is extraordinarily difficult to rescind without a diplomatic incident.

So what was Robbins supposed to do? He arrived in post in January and read a file that, in all likelihood, said nothing new. The signals had flashed through the night in vain. The cautions in that file had already been communicated to Number 10 by journalists and, as the Prime Minister confirmed in Parliament, the security services before the appointment was announced.

But no one was listening. Sleep had deadened the driver’s ear. The Prime Minister had been told of the concerns, understood the reputational risk, and proceeded anyway. He judged Mandelson’s commercial and political usefulness in managing the early Trump relationship outweighed the warnings. Or perhaps he just owed Morgan McSweeney a favour. That is a political judgment, and it is, in the end, the Prime Minister’s to make.

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Which brings us to the constitutional question. If Robbins had walked into the Foreign Secretary’s office with the file and said the appointment could not proceed, what exactly would he have been doing? He would have been a civil servant vetoing a political decision taken by an elected Prime Minister who had been informed of the relevant facts. That is not his role.

Civil servants advise, ministers decide. The moment a Permanent Secretary substitutes his judgment for that of an elected government on a matter that government has already considered and determined, he is undermining British democracy. That is far more serious than any failure of process.

There is a second question. Why, having identified the vetting failure, should Robbins have escalated it? To what end? The decision was taken. The agrément had been given and publicly announced. Broadcasting the concern at that stage would not have protected national security. The appointment was already in train and the envoy already on his way to Washington. Robbins’s principle would have been vanity. He would have achieved nothing but the undermining of a British ambassador, depriving him of the authority he needed to do the job the Prime Minister had sent him to do. That is not governance. It is petulance, and it damages the nation.

The real sequence of events is now coming into focus, and it is rather different from the narrative Number 10 has offered. The Prime Minister made a political judgment about a twice-disgraced candidate whose vulnerabilities we all knew. He assured the White House the candidate was suitable by seeking agrément before he could have been confident that what he was instructing the King to say was true. Vetting was not complete, or at least the failed result had not formally communicated to him. Then he announced the appointment publicly before the process was concluded.

In short, the Prime Minister is not right when he says that “process was followed.” It was not. Against the advise of the then-Cabinet Secretary, Sir Simon, now Lord Case, Starmer announced before the vetting had been completed.

By overriding the Foreign Office advice politically, and announcing publicly a result while the process was ongoing, he removed the brakes from the clattering train and silenced the signals. He stripped officials of any practical ability to act on an adverse finding and ensured one outcome.

That is not a failure of process by the Permanent Under Secretary. It is an evasion of process by the Prime Minister himself.

As the red-tape-tied lawyer always explains when he doesn’t know what to do and gets himself into a tight spot, process must be followed. In this case the sequence is long established: internal selection (always conditional and subject to vetting), then vetting, then agrément, then public announcement. That’s not bureaucratic conservatism. It is the architecture of accountability. Each stage is a brake, allowing officials to slow the train and warn of danger. Collapse the sequence through political override and the brakes become decorative. Officials are left powerless.

Keir Starmer has said he is furious. He has called it staggering and unforgivable that he was not told. But look at the timeline. What more was there to say? Did he need another letter for the file repeating the caution he had already received, reported in the newspapers, broadcast in so many podcasts, and judged acceptable? Would a note formally recorded in a file have had more power than the massed ranks of the British press? Should he have been told that the process he had already short-circuited had produced the result that short-circuits tend to produce?

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Milliken was right, and the change of centuries has changed nothing. It was not the points or the flashing signals that drove the train to destruction. It was the inattention of the driver.

In this case the driver was not asleep, but he might as well have been. The Prime Minister heard the signals and saw the lights, but the train careered on. That is the charge that matters, and no resignation by any Permanent Under Secretary can hide it.

Who is in charge of the clattering train?

The axles creak and the couplings strain,

And the pace is hot, and the points are near,

And Sleep has deadened the driver’s ear,

And the signals flash through the night in vain,

For Death is in charge of the clattering train.

The first few hours on the run are exhilarating; everything seems to happen at once. The noise and the danger are so present that the drills kick in and for a while, time seems to slow down. Later, as the adrenaline wears off, exhaustion and fear take over. That’s when resilience and courage are needed.

Alone, without a team, the US F-15 airman who crashed in Iran would have needed every ounce of his training and strength to continue to hide, move, communicate and pray for rescue. He wasn’t on the run for a night with his team, as I was 20 years ago, but for two days with no one. That’s tough.

Though the details are sparse, what is becoming clear is that the US combat search and rescue team have achieved a remarkable success. Across hostile ground, with a local population aware of the prize within their grasp, and with capable units tracking and searching for him, the airman was brought out.

That speaks to a military team of huge power and resourcefulness. There’s no other nation that could have done it. Fifty years ago, even the US wouldn’t have been able to do it.

One of the defining moments in recent Iranian-US relations was the attempted rescue of the so-called Iran hostages. In those first days after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, it wasn’t clear that the regime would be so hostile to Washington. The cries of “Death to America” were yet to be heard on every street. Many in the Iranian military, which had switched allegiance from the Shah to the ayatollah, had trained alongside US troops or at US bases.

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The first attack on the US embassy that February by a Marxist guerrilla group was condemned. After storming the mission, capturing a Marine and threatening to kill the ambassador, the Iranian government helped retake the compound and restore US control. In September, another Communist group tried again, but the Islamic regime restored order. That’s what made the kidnapping of the 66 American men and women working at the US embassy in November so surprising.

This time, the assailants weren’t Leninist atheists, but Khamenei-supporting students who had not been stopped.

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What followed was Operation Eagle Claw, the catastrophic failed rescue attempt that left eight American rescuers dead and ushered in the end of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, the election of Ronald Reagan, the creation of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), and the beginning of four decades of hostilities between Tehran and Washington.

It also saw a young Donald Trump saying in an interview: “That this country sits back and allows a country such as Iran to hold our hostages, to my way of thinking, is a horror.”

With a history like that, in hunting for the missing airman, Iran’s forces were looking for a prize to remind the US of the price of failure. While Americans were desperate not just to find their comrade, but also to ensure they could avoid a repetition of Iran’s capture of British Royal Navy personnel in 2004, and again in 2007.

No one was in any doubt that the stakes were as high as they could be from the moment the airman ejected. Every element of the US military machine would have been devoted to his recovery. The US has always seen the protection of its own forces as a key moral element of its fighting capability. Since the Second World War, pilots and special forces operators have been issued with silk maps that can be folded up and sewn into uniforms, and gold coins that can be taped to belts or hidden in boots, to help them orientate themselves and bribe their way out of trouble. No doubt, this airman had them too.

Maps were not only good for directions. They contained words written in all the languages that were likely to be useful, including requests for help and promises of reward. And the maps themselves would have their own value. Some armies promise their troops that should the serial number on the map be matched with a name, it can be turned into thousands of dollars at any embassy in the world. Again, a way of making it easier for them to hide or escape.

But the key is to remain hidden. In the desert, where few people are around and any outsider would be noticed, that’s not easy. After 24 hours, he would have been looking for water, not food. And while it wouldn’t have been too cold, he would have needed to hide from watchful eyes.

Still, technology would have made that easier. The airman would almost certainly have been carrying a personnel recovery device capable of sending encrypted bursts to satellites overhead, allowing rescue teams to track his position without him needing to break cover or risk a voice transmission. And drones would have been redirected to watch over him, marking threats and mapping routes in the area.

When the opportunity finally came, the combat search and rescue team, which was likely to be a mix of air force pararescuemen and special operations helicopters who had rehearsed this scenario hundreds of times, would have been sent in.

That’s why this succeeded while Operation Eagle Claw failed. In 1980, the teams hadn’t trained together, the helicopters broke down. Most fundamentally of all, the command chain was confused, leading to conflicting assumptions and orders. The disaster at their forward base, Desert One, was a system failure that the US military has corrected.

This rescue is proof that the years of integration and leadership that SOCOM offers have prepared the American military better than any other. That deep understanding of joint operations and relentless rehearsals has made US special operations the most capable in the world. Losing a C-130 and a helicopter won’t matter, so long as everyone is brought home.

For Britain, there is a harder lesson. We couldn’t have done it. We do not have the platforms, the satellites, the reach or the mass. Our rescue plan, if the airman were British, would be to call the US. Our only choice would have been reaching out to Washington or capitulating to Tehran.

The Americans got their man out because they decided, decades ago, that they would never accept the alternative. That’s given them a power that demands respect. Britain once had it. Like America, we could decide to have it again.

First published in The Telegraph 05 April

Stirling Castle controlled Scotland throughout the 16th century. Its position, scale and splendour spoke of a monarch dominating his kingdom with military and moral power.

That was no accident. James V was in his pomp when he called artists from across Europe to make his new French wife, Mary of Guise, feel welcome. The palace he built, begun in the 1530s, was the first Renaissance palace in the British Isles.

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French masons carved the façade. German engravings supplied the patterns. Scottish ambition paid for it all. Walk outside the Royal Palace today and the statues still stare down at you. Warriors line the south parapet. Below them stand the full-size figures: Venus, the goddess of love and fertility, is rendered twice for emphasis but it is no coincidence that the first of these is Abundance.

James V had understood what too many have forgotten: his legitimacy came not just from God, but from his bounty. He knew that he needed to provide for his people. Abundance was not a luxury; it was a doctrine.

Today, across Europe and here at home, too many have replaced the pursuit of abundance with the management of constraint and this fundamental defeatism is costing us all.

Energy, the foundation of every industrial economy since James Watt, has been deliberately restricted through carbon targets, planning vetoes, and a regulatory apparatus that treats the production of power as a problem to be contained rather than a capacity to be unleashed.

Britain’s Grangemouth refinery is closed, North Sea plans are vetoed, and the Gainsborough Trough sits untapped for its gas. In Germany, the story is similar: shuttered nuclear plants and American gas imports at four times the price it once paid for Russian supplies.France alone is resilient with its own nuclear plants, but even they depend on other sources.

The continent that launched the industrial revolution is choosing to make energy expensive and is surprised when industry leaves.

In Britain, we’re doing the same with capital. Pension funds that once financed railways in Scotland and bridges in Wales, creating the infrastructure to connect a growing economy, have been herded by regulation into government bonds.

The money isn’t destroyed but nationalised: extracted from productive investment and lent back to the state to fund its own consumption, generating the returns of the bureaucrat, not the entrepreneur.

That is, starving companies that might have grown cannot find backing. The heirs of Adam Smith look elsewhere as the savings of millions of working people are converted, silently, into gilts that fund today’s spending rather than tomorrow’s prosperity.

James V would have recognised the parable of the talents enacted as fiscal policy, but seen us as the foolish servant who was scolded, not the wise ones who returned a profit.

The result is invisible but can be felt: Europe today is ageing and protecting the past, instead of aspiring to the future. That’s not just bad for the young; it hurts us all.

Emigration is as important as immigration and seeing rural communities from the Scottish Highlands to southern Italy leave is heartbreaking.

To the family, it’s a lost connection; to the state, it’s a debt paid in education now uncollected in taxes. That’s no way to build a future.

Losing abundance has also unbalanced our relationships, as Henry Kissinger saw decades ago. In 1966, he warned that it was in neither America’s interest nor Europe’s that Europe should become “the Greece to our Rome, a political backwater, interesting culturally but unable to play an active role”.

Hegemony without allies is demoralising, he argued, and the only way for America to sustain its influence was to share both the costs and the responsibilities of the common defence.

The alternative was that its allies would simply shift those burdens onto Washington. That is precisely what happened. And now Washington is deciding, not unreasonably, that it has had enough.

Stirling Castle is a museum now and tourists, many American descendants of those who once built it, walk through rooms where James V once danced. It is beautiful, lovingly restored, and entirely powerless.

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That is the fate Kissinger described, and it is the fate Europe is choosing: culturally interesting, strategically irrelevant, a playground for visitors – underwritten resentfully by another’s protection.

This is bad for Europe, for America and bad for the West. A world in which the United States carries the full burden of defending the liberal order is brittle. Alliances work when every member has something to offer and something to lose.

A Europe that has outsourced its energy, nationalised its capital, and hollowed out its defence industrial base has very little left to contribute and very little leverage with which to shape its own security.

The statues at Stirling Castle depicted abundance because James V understood that abundance is the precondition of power. We have chosen scarcity, called it virtue, and wondered why the power followed the energy to where it is welcome. It is time to build again.

First published in The Telegraph 23 March 2026

This is a modern-day Manhattan Project, again a partnership between the U.K. and the U.S. The team behind Helios began in 2014 as Cambridge Quantum in England before joining with Honeywell Quantum Solutions, an arm of the U.S. industrial giant, to create Quantinuum. The field of quantum computing makes possible cracking encryption, creating innovative technologies, and discovering new drugs. Classical computers process information as ones or zeros in bits. A quantum computer uses qubits—shorthand for quantum bits—to harness the behavior of subatomic particles, which can exist in multiple states at once. That lets it explore vast numbers of possibilities simultaneously, a capability that could accelerate artificial intelligence development.

The Quantinuum team had a major breakthrough this month, solving quantum computations using 94 error-protected logical qubits. Quantum machines are sensitive to noise, or outside interference that disrupts a qubit’s state and causes errors. This test demonstrated that the computer can correct errors from qubits, indicating that larger computers without errors are possible.

The comparison with Los Alamos may sound extreme, but the stakes are comparable. A nation that masters this technology will be able to break any standard encryption on earth and accelerate other sciences beyond the understanding of countries without quantum computing. This holds the same profound implications for defense and intelligence today as nuclear physics did 80 years ago.

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Quantinuum couldn’t have been built by one country alone. The software, algorithms and theoretical science came from the U.K. The hardware, manufacturing infrastructure and capital came from Honeywell and the U.S. investment ecosystem. Cambridge Quantum’s founder, Ilyas Khan, was a fellow of the University of Cambridge Judge Business School. Quantinuum’s chief executive spent nearly 25 years at Intel. Its head of AI previously worked at Google DeepMind in London. This is an Anglo-American enterprise in its DNA, just like the Manhattan Project, though this time our race is against China.

In 1943 the Quebec Agreement formalized a collaboration between British and American scientists who would build the atomic bomb. The Americans provided scale, industrial capacity and money, building on scientific breakthroughs from Britain. The British government moved its nuclear work to the U.S. to complement the work done by U.S.-based scientists. Together they changed the world.

Britain has produced more than 70 quantum companies. PsiQuantum emerged from research conducted at the University of Bristol and now is based in Silicon Valley. Oxford Ionics, acquired by IonQ for more than $1 billion, is an Oxford University Innovation spinout. Riverlane in Cambridge is building quantum error-correction technology that may prove as important as the hardware itself. The U.K.’s 10-year National Quantum Strategy is backed by £2.5 billion (about $3.3 billion). Under the Aukus security partnership among the U.S., U.K. and Australia, the Quantum Arrangement known as AQuA is already accelerating joint military quantum capabilities.

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The U.S. brings scale, capital markets and defense procurement to turn breakthroughs into deployed systems. Together with the U.K. we are in the lead.

But others are moving fast. China has committed an estimated $15 billion to quantum research, with its new Five-Year Plan listing quantum among high-priority future industries. Origin Quantum in 2023 announced the sale of China’s first commercial quantum computer and made the Origin Pilot operating system open source this year, allowing it to reach beyond U.S. export controls. France has committed €1.8 billion (about $2.07 billion). Germany €3 billion, Japan $7.4 billion. Major world powers know this technology will deliver a strategic advantage for the rest of the century.

There are echoes of the explosion in artificial intelligence. In December 2015, Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others co-founded a small laboratory in San Francisco called OpenAI. Almost nobody noticed until seven years later when ChatGPT arrived and the world understood that AI companies had achieved a massive technological leap.

Quantum computing is perhaps a decade behind AI. The science is real, and the money is flooding in, but it is still a niche field. While AI companies are raising hundreds of billions of dollars, quantum investment is measured in single-digit billions.

That is changing. While global public investment exceeded $10 billion early last year, IBM has targeted 2026 to demonstrate scientific quantum advantage. Google’s Willow chip has shown error correction improving with additional qubits, a milestone pursued for 30 years. With the last stage complete, Quantinuum’s road map targets fault-tolerant quantum computing—where the computer can operate correctly even in the presence of errors—by 2030. To get there, majority-owner Honeywell announced plans in January for an IPO expected to value Quantinuum at $10 billion.

But this story is about more than money. As in 1943, most people haven’t yet grasped what is coming. When they do, the countries that moved first will hold advantages and those that didn’t will discover that the future belongs to those who build it themselves.

First published in the Wall Street Journal, 23 March 2026

On Monday, Mark Carney arrived at Downing Street and Keir Starmer wished him a happy birthday. Ottawa and Westminster are always close, but with oil surging past US$100 a barrel and the war continuing in Ukraine, the need to plan together for what is to come has never been more important.

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The next morning, President Volodymyr Zelensky flew in. The two conflicts on two continents are both fuelling challenges that we will have to face at home as the world scrambles to adjust because of our dependency on chokepoints we struggle to secure.

Iran has made the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s crude still nominally flows, the centrepiece of its retaliation against the American and Israeli strikes. It has already disrupted prices, and very soon it could have an impact on supplies – affecting shipping and repricing, in real time, every good travelling anywhere, from Seoul to Saskatchewan.

Despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s demands for cooperation, countries have been reticent to involve themselves in the operation. Japan said it would be legally “very difficult.” France and Britain ruled out a naval contribution. Australia’s transport minister declared the country “well prepared to weather the economic crisis” and confirmed no ship would be sent, though her statement that Australia holds 37 days of petrol and 30 days of diesel sounds more like a warning than a reassurance should the blockade endure.

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All this points to a reality the world has not calculated: resilience is more than volume, it’s options. With little flowing from the Persian Gulf, that means thinking hard about those we can trust. And when it comes to CANZUK – Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand – there’s no one we can trust more than each other.

I’ve seen what we can do when we choose to act together. In Iraq, my commander was Australian, there was a Canadian in the unit and we had a New Zealand doctor. The Aussie was in his own armed forces, the others in the British, and none had changed their passports. But that didn’t matter. We all held Crown commissions and operated under structures of command, law and trust that have been built over generations.

We didn’t need a new treaty to fight together, just the political will to show up. That interoperability, tested time and again, is an asset no other group of nations possesses, and it goes beyond the battlefield.

Between us, we can offer each other resilience based on trust that none can match. Canada produced 5.3 million barrels of crude oil per day last year, a national record, and is now increasing output by a further 140,000 barrels daily as part of the International Energy Agency’s emergency response. Australia holds the world’s largest uranium reserves, roughly a third of all known deposits, centred on the Olympic Dam mine, the single biggest uranium deposit ever found. Canada, too, holds enormous reserves in the Athabasca Basin in Saskatchewan. New Zealand already generates more than 80 per cent of its electricity from renewables, principally hydro and geothermal. Britain retains a substantial North Sea production base, which needs drilling, and is building the largest offshore wind capacity in Europe while committing to a nuclear program whose fuel needs could and should be met from within the alliance, through Edmonton and Adelaide, not Astana and Moscow.

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Together, we represent a combined GDP of US$8.85-trillion, defence spending at over US$140-billion and rising. We’re already in Five Eyes, and the CPTPP, but most importantly united by the constitutional reality that each recognizes the same head of state. These are more than sentimental ties. They are institutional facts with practical consequences for how fast agreements can be reached and how far trust extends when supply chains come under pressure.

Hormuz and Kyiv remind us what matters. Energy dependence finances the very aggression that threatens us and leaves our friends exposed.

Together, we can build the resilience in arms and energy based on preferential supply arrangements, shared strategic reserves, aligned nuclear fuel cycles and joint investment in critical infrastructure, which would cut costs and create opportunity for us all.

Sharing the burden of protection, the security of supply, and the cost of innovation would build on the interoperability I witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan, in the intelligence sharing that runs daily through Five Eyes, and in the submarine program AUKUS is delivering.

The objection will be distance, but that’s a strength, not a weakness. It gives us each a footprint in a part of the world we could never control but from which we can draw strength.

With liquefied natural gas (LNG) crossing oceans by tanker, and uranium shipped in containers, distance is no longer as great a problem as political imagination. Closer cooperation has been treated as nostalgia, but the reality is that the wars in Iran and Ukraine show it matters today. From Alberta to South Australia, the trust already exists. What is missing is the decision to act.

Mark Carney was in London this week. He met Britain’s Prime Minister and our collective King. The conversation should not end there.

First published in The Globe and Mail 17 March 2026

The Conflicted Podcast is well worth subscribing to if you are interested in following what’s going on in the Middle East. You can link to it here:

Ignore the Western voices and listen to the Iranian people themselves. After living for two generations under a regime more violent and brutal than any this century, they are speaking clearly enough. Iranians around the world, and inside Iran itself, are celebrating the death of Ali Khamenei. Recordings from Tehran show people pouring into the streets. These are not orchestrated displays. They are the spontaneous relief of a nation that has endured decades of murder, oppression, and corruption at the hands of a theocratic tyranny.

The scale of Khamenei’s brutality deserves to be stated plainly. In recent months alone, his security forces may have killed between thirty and fifty thousand young Iranians. Women were murdered for refusing the veil. Gay men and women were persecuted and killed. And alongside the violence, enormous corruption left ordinary Iranians unable to obtain the most basic medicines: aspirins, blood thinners, the things we take entirely for granted. People have been dying in misery while the regime hoarded the nation’s wealth.

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This was not merely an Iranian tragedy. Khamenei’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps tried to kill British soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. They sent agents to London to murder journalists at Iran International. Khamenei supported the fatwa against Salman Rushdie that resulted in one of Britain’s greatest living novelists being blinded in one eye. Through the IRGC and its proxies, his regime murdered tens of thousands of Lebanese and Syrians, slaughtering Sunni Muslims across the Middle East for decades. I will not mourn this man, and nor should anyone who values human life and human liberty.

The strategic picture is shifting rapidly. Maduro has gone in Venezuela. Assad has gone in Syria. Khamenei has gone in Iran. Putin is watching and what he sees should concern him. Russia has lost its supplier of the Shahed-136 drones, manufactured in Iran and fired at Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure. Yes, there are risks. Higher energy prices could temporarily benefit Moscow. A successor in Tehran could prove more hardline. Iran could attempt to close the Straits of Hormuz. The picture is uncertain, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. But the broader trajectory is unmistakable: the network of authoritarian client states that has sustained Russian and Iranian power projection is fracturing.

The real question for us is not whether Khamenei’s death is welcome, the Iranian people are answering that. It is what Britain intends to do about what comes next. We have allies and citizens in the region. Rockets are falling on the UAE, a country that has welcomed people of every faith and background, including many British citizens who have built their lives there.

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There is a clear and obvious distinction between participating in strikes against Iran and deploying a Type 45 destroyer to the waters around the United Arab Emirates to defend against ballistic missiles. I cannot think of a single credible argument against protecting people from incoming rockets. The Royal Navy exists precisely for moments like this.

Equally pressing is the need to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. Approximately a third of the gas that keeps the lights on in the United Kingdom comes from Qatar, transiting those waters to Milford Haven. There is a ship roughly every three or four hundred miles in that passage. Keeping that flow moving is not a matter of foreign adventurism. It is a matter of keeping the British economy running and British homes heated.

Any Prime Minister worth their salt should be ordering the Royal Navy into the Gulf: to provide anti-missile defence for our allies, to protect British citizens, and to ensure the energy supplies on which this country depends continue to flow. The Iranian people are speaking. The strategic landscape is transforming. Britain must not stand idle while the world changes around it.

Instead we have a leadership paralysed by indecision, unwilling to declare the war illegal and oppose it or to support our allies in countering the biggest threat to our economic security, and the security of our allies in the Middle East in a generation.

We’re doing worse than nothing. Britain is stating clearly that is has nothing: no leadership, no strength and, if this continues, no friends.

The IRGC, under the orders of Ali Khamenei, have murdered British soldiers, tried to murder our citizens around the world, and many thousands more in Syria and Lebanon, I will not mourn his death.

We do not have the assets to get involved in attacking sites in Iran, but we should be defending our interests. Where are the British ships providing missile defence for the UAE? Where are the Royal Navy vessels keeping the sea lanes open and the energy flowing to the UK that will keep our lights on? We have found ourselves silenced by the worship of a dead god as the priests of international law are not recognising what it is for: keeping us safe; and are instead using it as an excuse for inaction.

A British Prime Minister who isn’t prepared to put our forces on readiness to protect our allies in the UAE, Bahrain, and elsewhere is not defending our interests.

We have HM's Armed Forces but Belgium's PM.

The end of Nicolás Maduro’s rule in Venezuela along with U.S. threats to Iran shows we are in a new imperial age. This time, it isn’t only about armies, it’s about data. Artificial intelligence is revising our concepts of sovereignty and power, adding an important realm in which two nations dominate: the U.S. and China. The story is still being written, but power is concentrating in these two poles.

Sovereignty here doesn’t mean access to powerful tools or building applications on top of them. It means the ability to design, train, operate, secure and deploy foundational AI systems capable of highly advanced functions in national defence and other sensitive areas of the state without external permission or dependence. By that definition, the field already looks far narrower than most policy debates assume.

Look how the global environment has changed. For roughly 35 years after the Cold War, globalisation favoured efficiency. Supply chains linked across continents. Manufacturing migrated to lower costs. Capital and talent flowed freely. States accepted dependence in exchange for market access. The internet connected markets, narratives and politics.

That era began to unwind in the early 2020s. The pandemic exposed the fragility of supply chains, borders closed, and governments rediscovered sovereignty under pressure. What began as diversification hardened into localisation. Migration slowed across the U.S. and Europe. Security displaced efficiency as the organising principle of economic policy.

Geopolitics followed. China accelerated its bid for primacy. Russia chose war and severed itself from Europe. Across the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific, integration gave way to rivalry, and dependence became a liability.

Yet even as globalisation reversed, connectivity didn’t. Space-based networks extended internet access. Data, content and influence continued to move across borders. The result is a world that is simultaneously deglobalising and hyperconnected. In this strange new environment, modern AI emerged.

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As frontier models, the technology capable of large-scale problem-solving, became widely available starting in 2022 as ChatGPT, adoption occurred at an unprecedented pace. Within months, billions of people had access to these powerful cognitive tools. Control over the underlying systems, however, concentrated into the hands of a few firms in the U.S., with China as the only rival ecosystem.

This concentration reflects three hard requirements of AI sovereignty.

First, elite competence. Not mass digital literacy, but a very small pool of people capable of building, training and operating large-scale frontier AI models. This talent is scarce, globally mobile and increasingly clustered.

Second, energy at scale. AI is power-intensive. Training and operating frontier models requires vast quantities of reliable electricity. This is a physical constraint, not a regulatory one.

Third, financial depth. Frontier AI demands sustained investment over long time horizons, often without near-term returns. Only systems with extraordinary amounts of capital can absorb that cost.

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At present, only the U.S. and China appear to have all three at the necessary scale and under sovereign control.

A few countries have some of what AI sovereignty requires. The Gulf states have capital and energy but lack elite AI competence. The U.K. has exceptional talent but lacks energy scale and sufficient financial depth, as shown by the sale of DeepMind to Google in 2014.

Britain can claim DeepMind as a national success, proof that British universities and culture can produce world-class AI talent. But that talent now serves U.S. strategic priorities, operates under U.S. corporate governance, and would be subject to U.S. export controls in a crisis. The building is in King’s Cross. The sovereignty is in Mountain View.

Continental Europe should possess all three requirements but has struggled to retain its best people, many of whom now work for American-owned firms. Russia is perhaps in the worst position: It has energy, but elite competence and capital are fleeing.

There is also a fourth, less-discussed constraint. AI isn’t merely built; it must be trusted. As AI becomes embedded in the military, intelligence and cyber programs of the state, dependence on foreign systems becomes harder to justify. So autonomy is yet another requirement of AI sovereignty.

For countries outside the U.S. and China, this doesn’t mean the race is over, but it is narrowing. Some will align closely with one of the leaders. Others will seek partnerships to secure influence at the margins. Few will be able to sustain the fiction of full independence.

AI sovereignty isn’t a prize many nations can win. The strategic task then is to determine how to retain agency when technological power is concentrating rather than dispersing.

First published in the Wall Street Journal 29 January 2026

Every day this year something has gone wrong for the Islamic regime in Tehran. Now, protests have erupted across the country, more widespread than any since the government murdered Mahsa Amini in 2022.

Now, we’re seeing clashes with groups from shopkeepers to students of every age and demographic. Calls for the end of the ayatollahs, the restoration of the monarchy and for freedom have been heard from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf. It’s true the economy is collapsing, but this isn’t about economics – it’s about liberation.

In the Caribbean, things have gone from bad to worse. For decades, Venezuela provided the enabling functions that allow a terror-state like Iran to operate. After sanctions froze their assets, stopped trade and interrupted operations, who would step in to help? Early on there were some Middle Eastern nations only too willing to take a cut to launder money, but as Syria has fallen and others have stepped away, Caracas became the most important enabler. A week ago that changed.

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Removing Nicolás Maduro may have violated Venezuelan sovereignty but it eviscerated Iranian logistics. Where will the stormtroopers of the regime, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and their terrorist proxies in Hezbollah, get diplomatic passports now? How will they get around sanctions to pay agents across Europe and America to threaten BBC Persian Service journalists in London or US-based dissident Masih Alinejad? Where will they machine parts for their ballistic missiles and the drones they target across the Middle East, and sell on to Russia to murder Ukrainians?

They will now have to pivot in a way that would make the most networked nations struggle. The Iranian regime has few friends left and Moscow, their most important partner, is busy.

The start to 2026 could hardly have gone worse for the 86-year-old Supreme Leader, but the

year has only just begun and the direction is set. What’s likely to follow shows why this regime is finished. Despite his age, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is fighting back. He has called for the protestors to be dealt with, encouraging the security forces of the regime to murder those who come on to the streets.

Already we’re seeing the results. Morgues full, prisons stacked, many injured and the hospitals that care for them raided. This is full-spectrum repression. But it’s struggling. The regime is just over. The factors weighing down the ayatollahs now are just too great.

Iran is a young country. Less than half the population remembers the time of the king so their idea of tyranny isn’t monarchy but theocracy. They’ve forgotten the downsides and instead now hear the stories of freedom – no veil, no corrupt IRGC, no religious enforcers – that their grandparents recount. It sounds like a liberation.

Executions in jails doubled in 2025

The regime has also grown more repressive. Norway-based Iran Human Rights said that the number of people executed in Iran’s jails doubled in 2025 from the year before. That hardly speaks of a stable dictatorship. And of course the strikes by Israel and the US didn’t just knock out the nuclear sites, they decapitated the military and demonstrated the impotence of the regime despite the billions spent on weapons and the lies told about Iranian greatness. Is it any wonder the Emirati gold souks have been filled with Iranian buyers for the past months?

The question now is: what next? That’s hard to predict but it doesn’t look good for the ayatollahs. Despite a helicopter crash killing the last president at the start of 2025, this regime has managed to right itself from previous earthquakes. This time, though, it feels different.

The gap between the elite and the masses has grown as the IRGC has enriched itself through corruption and left the police, army, navy and air force out of the industrial level of graft. Even the rurally-drawn militia, the Basij, has found itself struggling as acts of god and man have left them thirsty with water shortages. Even Tehran is gasping.

And now there is the question of succession. After almost 50 years of condemning the hereditary monarchy, the only viable successor to the leader is his 56-year-old son, Mojtaba. We’ve reached the final stage of the revolution George Orwell described in Animal Farm: four legs good, two legs better.

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But the economy is in free fall. Inflation is rampant. The government is buying rials to try to stabilise prices, and it’s bringing whatever weapons it can get from Russia. But none of that is enough. Reports of gold going overseas are growing, army and police defections are rising and without drone sales or transatlantic drug deals from Venezuela, there’s no money coming in.

Whether the king returns, democracy succeeds or another tyranny replaces the current one, we can’t know. What is certain is that this regime is over, at the latest, when the ageing Supreme Leader dies.

First published in the Daily Telegraph 8 January 2026