The UK military appears to be revolting.
Not revolting as in gross, nor are they picking up their guns and storming No 10. But apparently, if The Telegraph is to be believed, military leaders are trashing Keir Starmer’s tough talk and vague plans for putting boots on the ground in Ukraine should Trump’s efforts to end the war succeed.
Sir Keir Starmer’s plans for a “coalition of the willing” to keep the peace in Ukraine have been dismissed as “political theatre”.
The Prime Minister proposed the peacekeeping initiative earlier this month, insisting several countries were prepared to enforce any peace deal.
But few concrete details of what troops and equipment would be sent have emerged.
On Sunday, senior military sources dismissed the plans, telling The Telegraph that Sir Keir had “got ahead of himself”.
Earlier this weekend, Donald Trump’s special envoy dismissed the plans as “a posture and a pose”. Steve Witkoff said the idea was based on a “simplistic” notion of the Prime Minister and other European leaders thinking “we have all got to be like Winston Churchill”.
Sounds like some things I have said in recent weeks, although I am far too lazy to go back through my posts to find out if I have been that elegant in my dismissals of Starmer here or merely laughed at the prig while discussing his attempts to appear Churchillian.
Starmer is a lightweight–a political peacock who puffs up his feathers while trying to look mean–whose understanding of strategy, military capabilities, and how to deter somebody like Putin was developed by attending Model UN club as a teen.
Imagine being a top military commander who has to listen to him. I weep for those men and women.
One senior Army source said it was not “remotely possible” for a plan of support for Ukraine to be drawn up in that time.
He said: “There is no defined military end-state or military-strategic planning assumptions. It’s all political theatre.
“Starmer got ahead of himself with talk of boots on the ground before he knew what he was talking about, which is why we hear less about it now and more about jets and vessels which are easier to do and don’t need basing in Ukraine.”
People both inside and outside the UK military are all scratching their heads about Starmer’s unwillingness to face reality. As I have many times, people on the left side of the political spectrum have an unnatural belief that saying the right words magically changes facts on the ground and what can work in the real world.
Sir Keir Starmer has been accused by military experts of hiding behind “cringey” cliches over his plans for a peacekeeping coalition in Ukraine.
John Foreman, a former UK defence attache to Moscow and Kyiv, told The Telegraph there were concerns that the Prime Minister’s initiative was proving hollow and had no clear objectives.
It came as US and Russian officials on Monday began talks in Riyadh to discuss a ceasefire in Ukraine.
Despite 30 nations meeting last week at Permanent Joint Headquarters in Northwood for talks led by Lt Gen Nick Perry, the commander of joint operations, the Government was unable to set out what concrete plans had been made regarding what troops and equipment each country could send to Ukraine.
Speaking after the meeting, Sir Keir said the coalition, which was launched on March 2, had moved from “political momentum” to “military planning”.
However, Mr Foreman said: “If the Government won’t level with the people, especially things on national security, they will rightly ask what is going on?
“We are a mature democracy with centuries of parliamentary procedures and a free media. The Government needs to treat us like adults, not hide behind cringey, gnomic cliches.”
He said Sir Keir’s words amounted to a “tentative first step”, adding: “They are still in the very early part of the planning process, with weak strategic objectives.
“People both in the military, and also those involved intimately in the military planning process, feel sorry for General Nick Perry, who has been landed with the baby due to unrealistic political assumptions.”
Cringy cliches. I like that. It is like something Beege would say, and I like Beege.
It’s no surprise that Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, has dismissed the Starmer proposal as a “a posture and a pose,” and if the criticism stopped there, Starmer would probably benefit from, rather than be hurt by, the opposition. But when leaders within his own military trash him like that, it is a signal to the rest of the world that Starmer has himself in a pickle and may be drowning in the stinging juice.
Europeans have been infantilized by America’s willingness to indulge their security fantasies for 45 years since the end of the Cold War. What seemed like a good idea–keeping the Europeans under our thumbs by providing for their security needs and making them dependent on us, leaves us in the position of an overindulgent parent who has let their 35-year-old son live in the basement to play video games.
They have no idea how the real world works, and yet they think they know better than their parents how things “really” work.
A good parent would invite that child to leave home and prove that, indeed, they know better than the old fogies. Show us, Keir, don’t tell us.
