By:  Brandon J. Weichert

Europe and Britain have allowed themselves over the past decades to fall into irrelevance in the geopolitical context. Facing the consequences of that irrelevance, they want America to bail them out again. America can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, speaking for many European leaders as well as the leadership of Canada, is supposedly taking the lead in supporting Ukraine in their war against Russia. This has come in the wake of what many have described as a shambolic White House Oval Office meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and U.S. President Donald Trump.

A series of confabs between the various leaders of Europe has resulted in stunning pronouncements by those leaders. Notably, Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced that he has crafted a plan to send British troops and tanks to Ukraine as a peacekeeping force. These statements came just a week or so after French President Emmanuel Macron made similar remarks about sending French troops to Ukraine in a peacekeeping role.

We are at a crossroads in history,” Starmer declared. “Europe must do the heavy lifting.” Such rhetoric is especially gratifying for many Americans to hear who have pleaded with their European counterparts to pick up the slack for what is fundamentally their own security. Trump is not the first American president to have pleaded with America’s European and British partners to do this. He’s just the latest—and the only one to actually act on his castigations of his European and British counterparts.

Keir Starmer Goes Full George W. Bush—For Better or Worse

Dubiously evoking U.S. President George W. Bush on the eve of the Iraq War in 2003, Prime Minister Starmer called for the creation of a “coalition of the willing” coming together to create “a plan that we will work with.”

But here is where Starmer’s plan goes off the rails. The Prime Minister went on to say that this military mission in Ukraine “will have U.S. backing.” That is exactly the opposite of what Trump has said—and what he and his followers in the United States want. 

If Britain and the rest of Europe want to fund Ukraine out of their own coffers and send their own soldiers and equipment into the meat grinder against Russia, they should of course be free to. Here again, however, the Europeans cannot simply do something on their own. They always have to seek out American support to ensure that, if things get too dicey for this “coalition of the willing,” Uncle Sam will come riding to the rescue.

In fact, a more cynical person might say that the entire exercise that Britain is going through in terms of leading a peacekeeping force to Ukraine is itself a trap designed to force Trump to commit American forces to a direct war with Russia over Ukraine—seeing as British and French troops and equipment are wholly incapable of deterring, let alone defeating, the raging Russian Armed Forces in Ukraine on their own.

British Involvement in Ukraine Is a Trap

After all, what happens if British troops—or French troops, or any other NATO nation’s troops—are killed by the Russians? Article V, the mutual defense clause of the NATO Charter that binds all NATO elements together, is invoked. At that point, Trump is in a corner. Either he fulfills America’s NATO obligations and declares war on Russia, thereby inviting the very world war he’s trying to avoid, or he ignores the invocation of Article V and potentially ushers in NATO’s collapse.

Consider this: the British Armed Forces, across the board, is the weakest it has ever been. One might have thought that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would have triggered some round of military modernization. But that was not the way London went. Last year, the Business Insider’s Michael Peck reported that the British Army had “shrunk to its smallest size since the Napoleonic Wars.” After years of “relentless budget cutbacks,” the British Army has been “left with just 73,000 active-duty soldiers.” Compare that to 1.3 million in the Russian Army.

Don’t forget Britain’s Main Battle Tanks (MBTs). Two years after London gave a tranche of British Challenger-2 MBTs to the Ukrainians, those tanks were chewed up by the Russians in combat. Since then, Britain has substantially lacked an adequate MBT force in general. In 2023, it was reported that Britain had around 200 MBTs in their arsenal. But a mere 20 percent of those tanks—around 40 in total—were combat-ready. The reason for the paltry tank force in Britain is, again, severe budget cuts over the last several years. 

Britain’s Plan is All Style, Little Substance

Prime Minister Keir Starmer knows all this, of course. So what is he really planning to do with such a paltry force? Again, the obvious plan is to have the Russians take some potshots at the British troops or platforms, justifying London’s calls for Article V invocation. To head this off, Trump must make an immediate statement disavowing the British plan and making clear that the U.S. will not assist the British.

The bottom line is that Europe and Britain have allowed themselves over the past decades to fall into irrelevance in the geopolitical context. Facing the consequences of that irrelevance, they want America to bail them out again.

America can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t. Let Starmer and Macron figure out how best to proceed.

Brandon J. Weichert, a Senior National Security Editor at The National Interest as well as a Senior Fellow at the Center for the National Interest, and a contributor at Popular Mechanics, consults regularly with various government institutions and private organizations on geopolitical issues. Weichert’s writings have appeared in multiple publications, including the Washington Times, National Review, The American Spectator, MSN, the Asia Times, and countless others. His books include Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life, and The Shadow War: Iran’s Quest for Supremacy. His newest book, A Disaster of Our Own Making: How the West Lost Ukraine is available for purchase wherever books are sold. 

2025 Center for the National Interest.