Is Britain’s dithering on defence damaging our alliances?

Anyone hoping a renewed Labour government would get serious on defence have been treated to the most unserious of political summers in recent memory. Andy Burnham’s more hawkish rhetoric on NATO, Ukraine, Trident and the defence industrial base has failed to be matched by the hard spending decisions required to improve the parlous state of Britain’s armed forces. Such dithering, after two years of a shambolic Starmer government, is further damaging Britain’s credibility with its alliances around the world.

The Prime Minister’s first Downing Street speech explicitly linked our domestic fiscal choices to the need to “honour our commitments on defence to our international partners.”. But the former Defence Minister Al Carn’s refusal of an offer to return to government over defence-spending concerns was an early warning sign that Burnham might just be continuity Starmer. This was later compounded by the Prime Minister refusing to commit to Britain spending 3% of its GDP on defence by 2030 and again by the Defence Secretary Wes Streeting who, when pressed by journalists, refused ten times to say that Britain would hit the defence spending target.

The effect of Britain’s reduced military clout and scepticism about our willingness to fight are already being felt amongst our partners. Back in 2014, then US Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel was unequivocal in describing Britain as a “credible, capable and reliable ally”. In 2026, when US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked about whether Britain’s planned military spending was enough, he cast doubt on even 3% being sufficient and raised the question of whether Britain and other allies would “step up the way we need them to.”

Earlier the same year, when seeking allies to help reopen the Straits of Hormuz and protect shipping passing through it, Hegseth expressed bewilderment at the lack of British military presence in the Gulf region, “Last time I checked, there was supposed to be a big, bad Royal Navy that could be prepared to do things like that as well”. And who can blame him when Britain has been sending an increasingly weak signal to the world on our preparedness and military strength.

To gain a sense of the decline, take our overseas military combat rehearsals and wargames - which are both a useful barometer of British capability and a demonstration of political will. Saif Sareea, Arabic for “Swift Sword”, is a major joint UK-Oman military exercise – one of Britain’s largest outside of NATO. Held in Oman, it is designed to test whether Britain can deploy, sustain and fight with a sizeable joint force thousands of miles from home. Diplomatically, it also reinforces the depth of the UK’s longstanding defence relationship with Oman and sends a message to all our allies in the Gulf that Britain will back up its political assurances with military force to protect them.

For Saif Sareea II in 2001, Britain deployed 22,500 personnel from all three services alongside the Sultan’s Armed Forces, 6,500 vehicles and trailers, 21 naval vessels, 49 fixed-wing aircraft and 44 helicopters. Amongst the UK’s allies only the United States had demonstrated an ability to deploy a force of comparable size.

For Saif Sareea III in 2018, Britain mustered a mere quarter of the manpower of 2001. Only 5,500 personnel deployed, 1,100 vehicles, and a mere seven vessels from the Royal Navy.

This conspicuous display of Britain’s diminishing power and ability was intensified in January 2026 by the departure of HMS Lancaster from our naval base in Bahrain, Britain’s sole stationed vessel in the region - leaving Britain without a permanent fighting presence there for the first time since 1980.

When the RAF base at Akrotiri in Cyprus was attacked by Iranian drones in March 2026 and our Gulf allies were struck by Iranian ballistic missiles, Britain then struggled to deploy a single Destroyer to the region to defend itself and our allies. Forced to rely on the French Carrier Strike Group to protect us, our own HMS Dragon arrived three weeks late and soon had to be diverted to Crete upon suffering maintenance issues. Now it was clear that not only could Britain not muster its strength for a major exercise during peacetime, it couldn’t even manage it when under assault.

Such a farce, played out for all our allies to see, is what chronic underinvestment in Britain’s armed forces by successive governments has wrought. Military credibility is ultimately converted into diplomatic currency, and Britain urgently needs to invest before it runs out of both.