Three months ago Iran launched two intercontinental ballistic missiles toward the U.K.-controlled island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. Neither reached its target: A U.S. destroyer shot down one and the other broke up in flight. Yet the strike blew an enormous hole in the credibility of Prime Minister Keir Starmer\u2019s grandiose foreign and security policy.<\/p>\n
That insight is now not only shared by his critics. His own Defense Secretary John Healey has issued a blistering resignation letter, essentially saying that Britain\u2019s leader is not capable of dealing with threats to the country and NATO.<\/p>\n
Like the rest of Europe, the U.K. is vulnerable to missiles and drones. But unlike some allies it has almost no independent air defenses. According to defense analyst Francis Tusa, in March the Royal Navy could deploy just one serviceable Type 45 destroyer equipped to shoot down ballistic missiles. That ship would have had to be permanently based in the Thames estuary to defend London, leaving the rest of the country totally exposed.<\/p>\n
This unpreparedness for war is replicated across Britain\u2019s shrunken, ill-equipped armed forces. In March, ministers tried to reassure voters that the U.K. had everything it needed to defend the country. It wasn\u2019t true and Healey knew it. The prime minister ignored the wake-up call and the rot set in for one of the most crucial relationships in government, between leader and defense chief.<\/p>\n
Not given to fits of pique, the pragmatic loyalist Healey decided to quit, saying he had \u201cno other option.\u201d On Thursday he delivered a devastating rebuke in his letter, using Starmer\u2019s own acknowledgment that \u201cthere could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030\u201d as a call to arms. The charge against the prime minister is that he\u2019s jeopardizing the security of the nation.<\/p>\n
This is not so much a flounce as a gesture of despair. Healey has been pleading with the Treasury for almost a year \u2014 long before the Iranian war started \u2014 to commit resources to the government\u2019s own defense investment plan. Some \u00a328 billion ($37 billion) over four years is required to fulfill it. This week he was offered \u00a313.5 billion \u2014 perhaps as little as \u00a310 billion in new money once \u201cTreasury tricks\u201d or backloaded financing is taken into account.<\/p>\n
Healey accused Starmer of playing cynical games with the numbers. The U.K. is meant to be committing 3% of gross domestic product to defense by 2030. Yet this spending \u201crises to just 2.68% of GDP in 2030, when we will reach 2.6% next year with the investment we are already making,\u201d the exasperated minister wrote. Poland already invests 5% of GDP in its armed forces.<\/p>\n
In his…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Three months ago Iran launched two intercontinental ballistic missiles toward the U.K.-controlled island of Diego Garcia in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":42466,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[30306,3606,30304,13,1958,1707,654,14,8,29344,21623,25469,1474,33,16660,30305,636,446,7839,84,3282],"class_list":["post-42465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-japan","tag-british-economy","tag-cold-war","tag-diego-garcia","tag-donald-trump","tag-eu","tag-europe","tag-gdp","tag-iran","tag-japan","tag-john-healey","tag-keir-starmer","tag-labour-party","tag-nato","tag-nihon","tag-poland","tag-royal-navy","tag-russia","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-u-k","tag-u-s","tag-ukraine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42465"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42465\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/japan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}