The UK’s latest National Security Strategy heralds a radical redistribution of national resources from social spending to defence. Richard Reeve argues that it not only brushes aside the looming reality of irreversible climate breakdown but also represents a fundamental abandonment of an eight-decade project to learn the catastrophic lessons of World War Two.
‘Security for the British People in a Dangerous World’ is the prosaically ominous sub-heading of the UK’s new National Security Strategy (NSS), updating and upgrading the national strategy’s tag line from ‘a more contested and volatile world’ in its 2023 predecessor (the Integrated Review Refresh) and ‘a competitive age’ in the 2021 iteration (the Integrated Review). Clearly the mood is darkening rapidly among UK security policy-makers. We are entering, the NSS informs us six times, “an era of radical uncertainty”.
Striking a Churchillian tone beloved of British prime ministers launching security strategies[1], Keir Starmer writes in his Foreword that, “it is no longer enough merely to manage risks or react to new circumstances. We must also now mobilise every element of society towards a collective national effort.” What follows echoes June’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) in its “call to action for an all-of-society effort to make our country stronger and more secure”.
Yet ‘society’ and the ‘British people’ are perhaps the elements that a sober, un-journalistic reading of the NSS may find most lacking. Much is promised for the people but what is asked of them is unclear beyond acceptance of looming danger, and it is apparent that no one thought to ask the people what they think, need or aspire to.
Process errors
The flaws in the new Strategy begin with the process of its drafting and particularly its sequencing with other reviews and strategies. In all previous iterations, the UK National Security Strategy has preceded or been conjoined with a more specific defence review. In 2025 this has been up-ended, with the SDR being a much more comprehensive review that preceded the NSS. Indeed, the NSS process was only initiated in February when Starmer began responding to a series of pronouncements by Trump administration officials distancing themselves from commitments to Europe, NATO and Ukraine. Announced alongside a major transfer of resources from international development assistance to the Ministry of Defence (MoD), the NSS review always felt ancillary to the SDR, despite supposedly being informed by the findings of at least another ten reviews begun since Labour’s July 2024 electoral victory.
At least three times the length of the NSS and released with greater fanfare three weeks earlier, it was duly the SDR that set the somewhat histrionic tone of “war-readiness” that the NSS later responded to. And indeed, there is little in the NSS that extends far beyond the realm of military defence or what it calls a “hard and sharp” approach to national security. This should not be the case. Security – especially when, as here, rightly identified with the “wellbeing of the British people” – is far broader than physical defence and requires a far broader and subtler range of tools. Yet again and again it is militarised technology that is presented as the solution to security problems and the SDR that is referenced far beyond any other input-review.
Since, unlike the SDR, there were never any public terms of reference for the NSS, it can be hard to know whether it has achieved what the government wanted it to do. Moreover, the NSS followed the precedent of Rishi Sunak’s Integrated Review Refresh in having no open consultation process nor outreach to society beyond a small group of security specialists (many from military and tech industries) brought in to test some of its findings in its final weeks. Far more useful, had Starmer allowed his team the time and space to do so, would have been for government to ask the people how they define their wellbeing and security and what they would prioritise.
Don’t look up: Threat inflation, diversion and misrepresentation
Sequencing and process issues likely also impacted on the threat analysis of the NSS, which is overwhelmingly focused on the kind of hostile state-based military threats already identified (fairly logically) by the SDR. Certainly, the threat to the UK and allied countries in Europe from Russia has grown over recent years but this has to be kept in proportion to both a far-from-defenceless NATO (with or without the United States) and to the multiplicity of other threats undermining the welfare of the British people. There is a dangerous sense of inevitability of war with Russia in the NSS and the rhetoric of all three major British parliamentary parties that could easily be construed by Moscow as offensive rather than deterrent in intent. This could all too easily predetermine a destructive fate that we should be desperate to prevent at all costs.
Up to 2015, UK national security strategies came with a matrix of risks that government reviewers had ranked into tiers based on likelihood and impact. This often led to unwelcome questions as to why resourcing of responses to some tier one risks lagged behind those of other risks, but the risk assessment gave a useful sense of what the identified risks were and how the government prioritised them. This is sorely lacking in a document that sets clear priorities of defending Europe against Russia and keeping up with China, Russia and others in militarised technologies but offers little sense that the UK is prepared to meet other risks, even where they have very high likelihood and catastrophic consequences.
Staggeringly, such a threat from climate and ecological breakdown is treated only in passing by the NSS. This is unlike any of its predecessors, which tended to err by diagnosing the problem without any commensurate remedy. Here, having stated that, “We will have to contend with the effects of climate change and potential ecosystem collapse” the NSS goes on to ignore any significant efforts that the UK can or should make to avoid this most existential of threats to citizens’ welfare. The effect is very much ‘Don’t look up!’ It is the opposite of sustainable security.
The sovereign-dependency paradox
Similarly overlooked is the threat posed to the UK and NATO by their “most important defence and security ally”, the United States. Clearly, the British government has many reasons not to want to antagonise the Trump administration at this time. Which begs the question: why, at a time when Europe’s security dependence on a volatile, resentful United States was revealed to be a catastrophic risk, would the UK undertake to do a public review of its international security? Two answers seem logical: either to assert a definitive move away from that risky dependence, or to present some new form of tribute that would redeem the troubled alliance.
While the NSS is keen to assert a move toward greater British “sovereign capability”, a phrase it deploys dozens of times, and coyly hints at unnamed others being willing to weaponise trade and use economic coercion, its impetus is clearly to “reinvigorate” and double down on the relationship with the United States, including “a deeper trade, technology and security deal”. No mention is made of the US threat to annex Greenland or absorb Canada, nor of the overt support that Washington offers to far-right parties that threaten democracy and social cohesion across Europe.
Herein lie the two great paradoxes central to the new NSS and the 24-25 June NATO Summit that its publication prefaced. First, that the UK and the rest of European NATO will commit to do whatever the Trump administration demands – in this case a commitment to doubling or tripling national defence and security expenditure to reach 5% of GDP by 2035 – in order to secure a rhetorical pledge that the US military will protect Europe, despite the United States both threatening military action against other NATO members and publicly rejecting the ‘liberal’ values that the alliance long proclaimed as the reason for its existence.
The second paradox is that the “defence dividend” that the NSS claims to be providing to the British economy and society through the spending of that 5% on ‘security’ will be achieved through large cuts to other areas of UK government expenditure that more directly affect the welfare of its people. This will deepen their alienation from the state, and undermine cohesion and the “new social contract” that the government sees as central to a resilient society. A similar point can be made about the dangers of subverting the green transition via a surge in greenhouse gas emissions from military production, AI infrastructure and diverted resources.
From cooperation to confrontation
Reading the NSS and all its talk of “tough choices” it is worth recalling the difficult decisions the new strategy has avoided. The most concerning feature of the NSS is its shift from aspirations to build cooperative positive security to enforcing negative security within an anarchic and confrontational system. It rolls over and agrees that the old order of rules and international legal constraints, built (imperfectly) from the ashes of WWII and bolstered (imperfectly) amid the post-Cold War ‘peace divided’, has been replaced by an era of transactionalism and barely constrained might.
While there was fairly blatant hypocrisy in the UK long advocating for a ‘rules-based international order’ while so often acting in exception to the rules, there was also value in the recognition of the desirability of such an order. Until this decade the UK was also a global leader in conflict prevention and mediation, an international development superpower that believed in and backed transformational change and centred eradicating poverty in its international strategy. Successive Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat governments invested billions in a ‘comprehensive approach’ to building stability and peace in conflict-affected regions. In this NSS, international development gets just one 87-word paragraph to say that it must now be focused on addressing upstream threats to UK security.
Where the NSS and SDR are largely framed around an urgent response to Russian aggression in Ukraine and beyond, the truth is that the context that has changed dramatically since the last such reviews (in 2023, over a year after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine) is Israel’s genocidal assault on Palestinians and its unrestrained campaigns against adversaries in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran, directly aided by the United States and, slightly more opaquely, by the UK and NATO. This is no longer the selective application of international law but the outright denial of an international legal order, with the United States being overtly hostile to not just the International Criminal Court but also the United Nations and its many institutions. The precedent of Gaza is that genocidal rhetoric and violence need not provoke even a façade of opposition from the Security Council. The precedent of Iran – echoing US/UK actions in Iraq and Russian action in Ukraine – is of a right to pre-emptive defence by those that have the might to make it right.
The tougher choice would have been for the UK to stand up for an international legal order, acknowledging its own role in undermining the rules it prescribed for others. It would have been to argue that values and principles still matter and to take action and be accountable on them. British values are suggested in Starmer’s foreword to be “freedom, democracy and internationalism”. Nothing in the rest of the strategy suggests any effort to uphold these values; there are actually more mentions of how they may need to be compromised and traded off. Doubling down on the alliance with the United States is the case in point. Easier to appease Trump and Vance with an extra £30+billion/year for defence than to build collective, sustainable security in Europe.
Don’t look down: The brittleness of British security
There is much bitter irony in this, Labour’s first attempt at a National Security Strategy in 17 years. This begins with Starmer, one of the UK’s most acclaimed international human rights lawyers, leading the charge into a lawless, transactional future. It ends with a call to mobilise a “whole-of-society effort” inspired by the 1940s to keep us all safe. Yet not only is the strategic direction antithetical to the cooperative spirit of 1945, but there is a society-shaped hole that runs throughout it.
For all the talking down, no one in government seems to have thought to look down. Nowhere here has society been engaged to find out what it thinks and values. And despite the media headlines, there is actually little in the NSS that society as a whole is called on to do, presumably other than to pay more taxes, accept cuts to social programmes, believe in its government’s dark vision of “radical uncertainty”, and to curb its appetite for freedom, democracy or internationalism. Citizens and civil society are actively and increasingly vilified, suppressed and even proscribed when they resort to legitimate protest against government actions.
In talking up resilience while refusing to look up or look down the NSS fails to see the brittleness of its “hardened and sharpened” approach to security. Instead of recognising global interests in planetary ecological security, it fiddles with technology while the world burns and our ecosystem faces collapse. Instead of building common security and cooperation, it abandons international solidarity to pile up resources and court the most egregious partners to fight the war that cannot be won and must never be fought. Instead of building the human security of the British people, it diverts billions away from the very wellbeing that it purports to safeguard. Little could be further from the sustainable security strategy that the people of Britain and the world deserve.
[1] Keir Starmer is the fifth British PM in under a decade to launch a security review or strategy. The sixth, Liz Truss, initiated one two weeks after becoming PM but it fell to Rishi Sunak to complete and launch it.
The views and opinions expressed in posts on the Rethinking Security blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the position of the network and its broader membership.
Image Credit: Stefan Rousseau, via Alamy. Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer (centre) and shadow defence secretary John Healey (left) during their visit to meet British troops at a NATO forward operating base at Tapa, near the Russian border in Estonia, December 2023.
