Puppetry of the Heinous: Dependence and delusion in UK defence strategy

As US strategic bombers and special forces deploy at British air bases, the UK is yet again getting sucked into a major war in the Middle East. Richard Reeve examines how London’s delusions of status and influence condemn it to repeating past mistakes and exacerbating dangerous crises.

Whether Keir Starmer admits it or not, the UK is once more involved in a war-of-choice in the Middle East with regime termination as its apparent endpoint. After seven such campaigns in the last 25 years[1], so now to the biggest of all: Iran. While reluctant to endorse the overall US and Israeli campaign, which most international law experts regard as illegal, Starmer has nonetheless caved quickly to US demands that its bombers should be able to operate against Iran from air bases in England and the Chagos Islands. RAF and Royal Navy bases across Europe are vital nodes in the movement and resupply of US forces. The reported arrival of multiple MC-130J aircraft to Suffolk in early March further suggests that the UK may be used as a base for infiltrating US special forces into Iran.

The PM’s apparent reticence is well placed. YouGov polling suggests that 49% of Britons oppose US military action against Iran (mostly strongly) compared to 28% who support it (mostly weakly). The same survey also finds that 50% of Britons oppose (again, mostly strongly) his decision to allow US bombers to attack Iran from UK air bases, against 32% who support it (again, mostly weakly). Worse for Starmer, Labour voters are overwhelmingly opposed to both US and UK actions, with opposition to his approach particularly concentrated in Wales, London and Scotland, where Labour will face its main challenge from left-wing parties at elections in May.

How then to explain this, if not enthusiasm, at least acquiescence in this unpopular new war? 14 months into a US presidency defined by its controversial actions in Gaza, Yemen, Ukraine, Iran, Venezuela and Greenland, is the UK no more able to reject American calls to arms? With the UK under Labour having supposedly moved to a ‘NATO First’ defence posture, why is it being sucked into another war in Asia? Can Starmer resist being Trump’s puppet in Europe?

While much of the billionaire-owned British media has fixated on the purported ‘special relationship’ and pilloried Starmer for undermining UK national security by not sufficiently backing Trump, the truth lies deeper, in the structures of dependence baked into the relationship and reaffirmed in successive security reviews, most recently those of 2025 when the rupture of the Western alliance was already obvious.

The paradox of influence

Paradoxically, the UK depends more on the United States than almost any other country because the United States depends more on the UK than it does on almost any other country. Such linkages include: entwined intelligence capabilities (especially electronic/signals intelligence) via Five Eyes, the use of supposedly sovereign UK bases in Britain and on various overseas territories for military projection, missile defence and surveillance operations, and a raft of joint military industrial projects from the F-35 through AUKUS to quantum computing and nuclear weapons systems.

This degree of interdependence gives Washington both enormous leverage over London, and a very strong interest in the UK not exerting its own leverage on America. In a relationship of near-equals, and with a convergence of values, such mutual dependence might induce stability. In a very asymmetric relationship, it results in extreme, often uncomfortable, dependence for the junior partner. Spain, France, Türkiye or New Zealand can be worked around if they oppose US actions, but from the UK cooperation is a default requirement.

In this asymmetrical relationship, the strengths the UK shares with the United States readily become vulnerabilities. Few countries or territories have this importance to Washington, but we can see some reflection in the relationship between the United States and Denmark over control of Greenland, or in Washington’s refusal to consider decolonisation of Guam. And if the US needs Greenland for ‘hemispheric’ security, and disregards international law, why shouldn’t it need British Bermuda, 700 miles off shore of its largest naval base at Norfolk? If it needs Guam to dominate the Western Pacific, why not the Chagos Islands to dominate the Indian Ocean?

Together with the concerns that many smaller US allies share over US ‘security guarantees’, support for Ukraine, access to US tech and weaponry, and fear of tariffs, this is the ‘national interest’ logic that politicians are talking about when they present otherwise unfathomable arguments for going along with US actions. It is not so much a knee-jerk reaction to believe that Anglo-American interests and values align as to avoid the pain and humiliation of being coerced back into line. Trump has revelled in reminding Starmer of this through his social media comments on the status of Diego Garcia. One might speculate that stronger arm-twisting by US diplomats may occur behind closed doors on a range of issues.

Status anxiety

Part of the problem is that from the range of soft targets that the UK presents to its ‘special’ friend, hitting it where it hurts often means undermining the international status that UK leaders most crave. The key criterion is relevance: whether the UK is seen to matter to the rest of the world.

For much of the policy and media establishment this boils down to whether the UK is a member of the tiny, elite club of nuclear weapons states. Yet – putting aside all questions of whether the UK derives any credible deterrent value from nuclear weapons – it is more than ever clear that the UK nuclear programme is far from sovereign, as it depends on US components, technology and goodwill to design, build and maintain. Few insiders want to say it out loud, but retaining this US license to remain a nuclear power is a sine qua non for many foreign and most defence decision-makers in the UK.

Meanwhile, much of the noisy criticism of Starmer for his reluctance to directly join US/Israeli offensive operations focuses on the fear that Britain will lose relevance if it sits on the sidelines. It rests on the delusion that playing deputy to a superpower brings the UK status by default. To fail as America’s loyal lieutenant (or henchman) is to risk forsaking the global role baked into Britain’s self-identity.

In a striking demonstration of this iron cage of bureaucratic reasoning, former UK National Security Adviser Lord Sedwill argues that the UK has “chosen not to influence the outcome” of war on Iran, citing as an example of “Britain’s overriding national interest” how Tony Blair chose to align with Bush on the US invasion of Iraq. Yet in Iraq, Blair achieved neither functional influence on the objectives or conduct of the campaign, nor did he secure any benefit to the UK by participating in the single greatest Western strategic and moral failure since the Vietnam war. When Starmer claims to have learned the lessons of the Iraq war, we should all be asking for the receipts. 

Value propositions

Why has the UK been content to entwine itself with and depend upon the United States for security and self-worth for so long? Have the threats Britain faced really been so stark and consistent that greater independence was not an option? What was the shared project the UK hoped to achieve with the United States? Do the two nations still share the same aspirations and values?

I would argue not. While neither country lived up to the lofty liberal ideals they espoused throughout the Cold War and beyond, most recently and hollowly in the New Atlantic Charter of 2021, the MAGA regime is building on the charnel house of Gaza to chart a different course, openly hostile to liberalism and the constraints of international law. This is not speculative inference; it is set out clearly in December’s US National Security Strategy and speeches by JD Vance and Marco Rubio to the Munich Security Conference. Washington is prepared to renew the special relationship but is inserting white Christian nationalism and aggressive imperialism into its heinous new terms and conditions.

The UK’s own National Security Strategy of last June responded to this new context not by affirming the UK’s own values or aspirations to rebuild a more cooperative, law-based international system but by removing any statement of values or principles, while the Strategic Defence Review doubled down on dependence on the United States in new areas of weaponised technology. Ambassador Mandelson’s Tech Prosperity Deal compounded the damage later in the year. The message is clear: that the partnership transcends shared values, is infinitely elastic in its interests, and too big to fail.

Strategic incoherence meets strategic lunacy

Yet fail it will. When the UK strategy declares that “we and our allies are engaged in medium to long-term systemic and strategic competition with those who do not share our values, have divergent interests, or have the capability to undermine our security and prosperity”, it could just as easily be talking about “the UK’s most important defence and security ally” as about Iran, Russia or China. Pretending that the United States is a dependable ally, with shared values and interests, or will revert to being so soon, makes for a convenient and compellingly Manichean narrative that coheres with decades of media conditioning. But it is also strategically incoherent, blinding us to this glaring source of current threat as well as to the need to reckon with and learn from recent strategic and humanitarian disasters in Iraq, Libya and Palestine.

In recognising this, we cannot make the mistake of being blind to the costs of rupture with the United States. Even setting to one side the potential subversive wrath of a state whose forces partially occupy the British homeland and overseas territories, the medium-term cost of replacing at least some of the military command, logistics and reconnaissance capabilities that the United States currently provide in Europe would be high. Yet there would be upsides too in disentanglement from wars of regime change in the Middle East, in abandoning the delusion of projecting power into the Pacific, and (if the delusion of an independent nuclear deterrent were also abandoned) in ceasing to funnel one-third of the military budget to nuclear weapons. Not to course correct now means not only heading for a permanent war economy but following the course to permanent war.

It cannot be surprising that the Prime Minister would prefer a gradual transition from dependence on the United States over the cost, exposure and uncertainty of a sudden rupture. But the overt signalling suggests an uneasy doubling down rather than a deliberate, coherent transition. And while transatlantic relations have stabilised somewhat since the Greenland crisis in January, the incompatibility of values, approaches and demands is surely too huge to endure. A new approach to national security is overdue and must be prioritised by whomever is prime minister if and when the dust from this latest act of strategic lunacy settles.

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[1] These are: Afghanistan (2001-2021), Iraq (2003-2009), Libya (2011), Syria (2011-2024, covertly), Islamic State (since 2014), Yemen (since 2015) and Gaza (2023-2025). The Taliban, IS, Houthis and Hamas were not recognised as legitimate governments by the UK but it has sought to overthrow their de facto control of their territories.

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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.

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Image Credit: U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Benjamin Cooper via Picryl. A U.S. Air Force MC-130J Commando II, assigned to the 352d Special Operations Wing, approaches the runway at RAF Mildenhall, England, April 23, 2019. The Commando II flies clandestine, or low visibility, single or multiship, low-level air refuelling missions for special operations helicopters and aircraft. The MC-130J can also support infiltration, exfiltration, and resupply of special operations forces. At least nine such aircraft are reported to have arrived at RAF Mildenhall in early March 2026.