This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

At the Tehran Conference in 1943 Churchill presented Stalin with George VI’s gift of the Mech Stalingráda. Acid-etched, the inscription on it reads: TO THE STEEL-HEARTED CITIZENS OF STALINGRAD • THE GIFT OF KING GEORGE VI • IN TOKEN OF THE HOMAGE OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE.

In Evelyn Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender the sword of honour is introduced in Westminster Abbey, adored on a “counterfeit altar”, with the press mocked as much as the credulous people. The Times “dropping into poetry” (“Then bow’d down my head from the Light of it./Spirit to my spirit, the Might of it”), whilst the Express’s gossip columnist suggested it ought to tour the kingdom.

We should be grateful then for what we are spared. The prime minister’s recent signature upon the “UK–Ukraine 100 Year Partnership Declaration” has not even been attended by officially-inspired street parties, never mind secular art. But perhaps we merely have winter to thank for that?

For those who missed the precise details involved in this century-long commitment, the pleasant vibe one can at least enjoy is that Sir Keir Starmer and President Zelenskyy both believe their countries shall still exist in 2125. How are we to get to that happy place from here?

Our cover story this month by the US foreign policy thinker, Reid Smith, builds on the work that our frequent contributor Sumantra Maitra — of “dormant NATO” fame — has led the way on: wondering what the alliance actually does? And, whatever that is, who does it do it for?

Smith’s point is rightly made in his country’s interest: which, in short, is that the NATO which has metastasised since the end of the Cold War doesn’t serve sensible American purposes. But does it serve British ones either? This is not a question our own conservatives are wont to ask. We should reflect that the modern Tory record of unasked questions is not encouraging.

One Conservative politician who is being provocative is the defeated, but hardly daunted, 2024 Tory leadership contender Rob Jenrick. An article by him in the Daily Telegraph in early December came to the attention of the national security end of Trumpworld.

As you might hope would something headlined “Neoconservatism is dead — good riddance”.

In this widely shared article, Jenrick laid into the British policymakers responsible for our share of the failed wars of choice, and their propagandists. He noted Donald Trump’s success in doing so in the US: “American trends tend to seep into UK discourse by cultural osmosis. But until that happens, the guilty men on this side of the Atlantic who prosecuted these disastrous wars continue to be rewarded by polite society.”

Who did Jenrick damn? Blair, of course, and Alastair Campbell, naturally, and Starmer’s newly-minted national security advisor, Jonathan Powell. But who did he not? The Tory guilty men.

We can ignore journalistic noises off such as 2003’s Michael “I can’t fight my feelings any more: I love Tony” Gove (“Central to any current assessment of Mr Blair has to be the manner in which he is handling the Iraq crisis … Indeed, he’s braver in some respects than Maggie was”) or 2005’s Douglas “Neoconservatism: Why We Need It” Murray. These men didn’t cause the disastrous wars; they merely cheered them on and got them wrong.

Whereas, from the then leader of the opposition, Iain Duncan Smith, compliantly failing to cause Blair any domestic political difficulty over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (due to his imbecilic support for them), to the Tory prime ministers after 2010 who, in office, presided over their humiliating ends for this country, Tory guilt is stark and, as yet, still unaddressed.

Compare this silence with what Trump did as a mere primary candidate. At the February 2016 Republican debate in South Carolina, he humiliated every other man on the stage by dismissing with contempt their steadfast support for these catastrophes. Or so it surely seems now.

Back then, honestly recalled, yet again it was an instance of “he’s really done it this time” for blowhard conservative pundits on both sides of the Atlantic — who assumed that challenging unthinking right-wing shibboleths, such as preposterous, insulting claims about the military triumphs ongoing in Baghdad and Kabul, would doom Trump’s quixotic bid for the nomination.

Far from it: ordinary American conservatives responded with tumultuous gratitude to a would-be leader who would finally tell them the truth. Sadly, the British right is at least a provincial decade behind.

What should NATO do for us? To answer this question we need to know two things above all others: what threatens us, and what should we want? The former is simple to answer, in negative form anyway: Russia does not threaten us. It might want to, and certainly has tried to.

But it is in truth a pathetic, feeble state which cannot. “Mussolini with nukes” hardly covers it, as at least Il Duce managed to win his wars against feeble foes. Putin can’t even manage that against Ukraine. This point cannot be made emphatically enough.

Tellingly, the unrepentant fools on the right who supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are the ones who argue that Ukraine is still there but for the grace of God, and, according to grifting inclination, the lavish supplies with which the West has either munificently supplied Kyiv, or insufficiently provided.

It’s a marvel that a country as badly governed as Putin’s Russia has sustained its war this long

In fact, the thing that must be noted is how Russia’s war of choice has failed utterly despite her prodigious external aid.

Where exactly has that come from? Us, “the West” (Britain certainly included, with our own plentiful and obvious sanction-busting businesses). The Europeans, most noticeably Germany — risibly so, in terms of her vastly increased trade supposedly with the paltry economies of central Asia, if palpably really with Moscow.

But it has also come from the continent’s ongoing hunger for Russian energy, as the madmen in the EU, in the manner of our own unlamented Tory government, divorce themselves from any domestic ability to provide it themselves instead, because of their allegiance likewise to absurd green dogma. And then there’s China, into whose waiting arms we have gifted resource-rich Russia.

Looked at this way, it’s a marvel that a country as badly governed as Putin’s Russia has sustained its war this long. We and the Americans are rich: we were able to pay for our follies in Afghanistan and Iraq for so much longer after all. If, therefore, we conclude Russia remains, as she has done since the end of the Cold War, no serious threat to the UK, the question remains: what should we want?

It is not “what do we want?” We know that from every aching sigh from everyone centrally involved with British foreign policy: they want their “special relationship”. They want Atlanticism. If NATO has a purpose for them, it’s hardly to provide a defence against a threat which manifestly doesn’t exist; it’s to better secure American patronage. Why?

What does subordinating ourselves to American needs and wants actually do for us? Our willingness to humiliate ourselves over the Chagos archipelago comes most painfully not from the liberal legal proceduralism which saw Starmer want to give the islands away, but in the degrading fact that we could not even divest ourselves of this pretended British possession without American permission.

This country is not immortal. Maybe we will be here in a century in something like our current state; maybe we won’t. Nor, though, are political parties undying either. The Tories have learned nothing from the worst defeat in their long history. They have noticed nothing either of the fate of other conservative parties overseas who also failed to deliver what their should-have-been supporters actually wanted.

Reform now provides an opportunity for British conservative voters to say to those who would lead them what ordinary American conservative voters said to their leaders as far back as 2016: we do not want what you want; what you want has not worked. The Tories would be wise, however late in the game, not to sit back and idly let Nigel Farage give them the answer.