Winning the War for Democracy

What we're living through will be written into the pages of the history books. It's time to take hold of the pen.

It is easy to feel powerless right now.

Talking to the human rights defenders, dissidents and democrats who I worked with in the decade before I was elected to Parliament has left me utterly despondent. The United States has shuttered its support for those working for liberty around the globe.

In place of that support for liberal democracy, something else has emerged. Vance and Musk, Trump’s de jure and de facto Vice Presidents, are now backing the authoritarian far right around the world.

They even offer the legitimacy of their office to the AfD, a far-right party whose leaders use slogans once engraved on the daggers of Nazi stormtroopers and call for an end to German atonement for the Holocaust. One can only imagine how awkward it will be when leaders of the wartime allies come together later this year to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the defeat of fascism in Europe.

As Phillips O’Brien has written, we may be witnessing the United States changing sides in the global struggle for democracy. The US President has embraced Putin the imperialist aggressor and side-lined Ukrainian and European democracies.

Madeline Albright’s ‘indispensable nation’ is currently indisposed. The USA which, for all its failings and hypocrisies, acted as the guarantor for freedom in much of the world, may never return. As others have set out at length, it isn’t easy to reverse a slide into authoritarianism.

My mind keeps returning to “the clever hopes” expiring on Auden’s “low dishonest decade”. We all now have a new understanding of how democratic leaders can allow a sophisticated culture to descend into ignorance and brutality. However, if we make historical comparisons we should recognise that the risks today are different and, in many ways, more difficult to confront than those our grandparents faced.

The USA isn’t just appeasing authoritarians, it may be joining them. In the 1930s Churchill contrived to ensure the United States engaged with the defence of European democracies, today the effort is to prevent disengagement. Today, it isn’t only that the USA is unwilling to confront the external threats to European democracy, it is that they are actively supporting the internal threats to those free societies. In this war, we must win in foreign fields and on the home front.

The Trump administration’s officials had other priorities than European security while at the Munich summit. They reportedly travelled to the meeting to pressurise Romania’s Foreign Minister to lift travel restrictions on Andrew Tate - a man who is currently under investigation for trafficking of minors, sexual intercourse with a minor and money laundering.

It might be that the best we can hope for when faced with such people is delaying the total abandonment of democratic allies by Washington. Delaying for two or three years until Trump is a lame duck or, if his authoritarian project looks likely to outlast his time in office, until we can create an alternative international security alliance.

Generations of complacent European leaders have left us without the budgets or defence manufacturing base to defend ourselves. When you hear easy talk about Europe filling the gap left by Trump’s authoritarian pivot, remember that since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine the USA has given more military aid to Kyiv than all European nations combined.

Building the political, financial and practical means to set this right will take time. Our leaders will have to find a way to delay complete US disengagement in our defence. It’s better late than never that European leaders are meeting to respond to the crisis we now find ourselves in - but it is unforgivably late.

Our Prime Minister will follow up today’s meeting with EU counterparts with a White House visit shortly. Already we can see a narrative building as those stuck in post-Brexit tribes see the crisis as an opportunity to prosecute old arguments. They see a binary choice between Europe and the US. In the minds of some commentators, the Prime Minister hasn’t noticed that the holder of the most powerful office in the world is a petty, vindictive, far-right demagogue.

Keir Starmer’s visit to Washington may well be of historic significance. For sure, he will arrive with impossible expectations. He will carry with him hopes that he can arrest the disintegration of the transatlantic alliance; prevent the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and annexation of the West Bank; and avoid a global trade war - or at least keep the UK out of the firing line. He is supposed to secure all this from an interlocutor diametrically opposed to him in terms of ideology, personality, and temperament.

To those who dream of a Love Actually moment, I can only say this: your sense of geopolitics is as poor as your taste in movies. When our Premier meets the President he shouldn’t think for one second about liberal opinion on Bluesky. His is an audience of one. He must swallow personal and national pride and do anything necessary to buy some time for those of us still committed to liberal democracy. A performative fight with Trump, however satisfying to watch, would be the worst outcome for Ukraine and for our collective defence.

If we are now playing for time, what can we use any delay for?

In my view, we should prioritise four things:

1. Rearm Europe.

Maintaining the fading hopes of influencing Washington will require a strong signal from Europe that we are willing to pay for our defence. Democratic Europe’s GDP is ten times that of Russia. This was always a fight we could have won alone. The difference was that the Kremlin has moved to a war economy while we have naïvely expected wartime outcomes to emerge out of peacetime sacrifices. That must now change. It’s time for Europe to grow up.

Building a defence industrial base won’t be cheap or quick. Even if today’s summit creates the sense of urgency that has been lacking across the continent, budgets will take time to ramp up and defence companies will only invest in productive capacity if governments provide certainty of demand.

In the short term, many of the armaments for our collective defence will have to come from outside NATO Europe. The USA has a unique productive capacity and an avaricious leader who imagines himself as a deal-maker. His demand that Ukraine give up mineral rights for security assistance shows how transactional his worldview is. Europe should make him an offer his ego won’t allow him to refuse.

If the United States offers immediacy, Ukraine offers efficiency. Even as it faces an existential threat, Ukraine has proven its ability to produce armaments quickly and, importantly for a cash-strapped continent, cheaply.

Increasing UK defence expenditure to levels called for by this crisis will mean painful political decisions.

We must ensure value for money and strategic focus. Facing so many threats we have hard choices. Do we prioritise naval power, projection into the far north or defence of subsea cables? Is missile defence or UAVs the real priority? Do we step back from global power projection and focus instead on Europe and the home front? In peacetime we could afford to fudge such questions, we cannot anymore.

It is remarkable that, at a time of extreme political polarisation, the main political parties of the UK have maintained unity in support of Ukraine. There is a cross-party consensus that we need to spend more on defence, we now need a cross-party consensus on how to pay for it.

This is not just about political cover for tough fiscal decisions - defence manufacturers and our enemies need to know that the UK is serious about becoming stronger in defence of our values.

A genuine approach should be made to opposition leaders - but any leader who plays politics in this time of crisis should be made to pay a heavy political price. Today Badenoch took another step towards Trump with her desperate JD Vance tribute act. Even as limited a political leader as she must recognise she is now dangerously exposed. Her refusal in interviews today to accept that oppositions and not only governments have a responsibility for national security matters looked small compared to Rishi Sunak’s firm support of his successor.

2. Defend British Democracy

As I have written in previous editions of this newsletter, defeating the populist forces who seek to undermine our liberal democratic society will take political skill. It will also require structural reform.

Too much of the debate around the resilience of our democracy has accepted the framing of those who want to see liberal values eroded. For example, when we debate the regulation of social media platforms we should frame the conversation as being one of national security. Focussing on the fight against real enemies will expose those who tilt at the imaginary threats of wokism.

Brazil’s action against Twitter and Meta reminds us that states are still more powerful than the tech oligarchs. Whether because they are obsequious cowards like Mark Zuckerberg, or far-right true-believers like Elon Musk, they have chosen a side in this struggle, so should we.

With Musk telegraphing his intention to support the UK far-right with dark money, Labour should urgently close loopholes for foreign donations entering the UK. We should stop feeding the mouth that bites us, move all public bodies off x.com and recognise it as a radicalising and dangerous platform for destructive disinformation.

We should also rebuild the institutions that create cohesive societies, starting with journalism.

The tech oligarchs destroyed local news by removing their advertising revenue stream. That was damaging enough while they claimed to be cleaning up their platforms. Now that pretence is gone. Australia has demonstrated how governments can force platforms to pay for the journalism their sites host. Alternatively, we could tax online advertising and invest in supporting journalism through an arms-length fund. Whatever we do, we cannot continue to accept a market failure that is having such far-reaching consequences for our society.

3. Go on the Offensive for Democracy

The destruction of democratic assistance around the world by Elon Musk’s vandalism has barely been noticed amid the chaos. From Belarus to Hong Kong, from the caucuses to the Balkans, those who are campaigning for democratic values have been abandoned. Dictators now face less of a challenge in their own backyards and will be freed up to be more assertive internationally.

The good news is that plugging the gap left by America’s authoritarian realignment is relatively cheap. The total USAID budget for democratic support worldwide was $2.3 billion. This spending has an impact out of all proportion to its cost. A budget equivalent to a few Storm Shadow missiles spent by the West in Georgia over the last few years enabled sustained opposition to the increasingly pro-Kremlin government in Tbilisi, creating a strategic headache for Putin in his neighbourhood.

Of course, the UK can’t fill all the gaps in democratic support where America used to stand. However, we could easily triage the regions of most geopolitical significance, such as Georgia, Armenia, Belarus or Moldova. We can lead by example.

This is an easy win - but only if we act now. The infrastructure of democratic opposition forces is being dismantled around the globe as you read this. These are extraordinarily brave people. They have risked their lives and liberty to stand up for the freedoms we take for granted. To leave them standing alone would be unconscionable.

We should also reverse the years of cuts to the BBC World Service. In the war against authoritarianism, truth is the ultimate weapon. It should be a source of pride that the most trusted source of the truth in the world is British. The new government has given a more generous settlement to the service than in recent years but in this crisis we need to go further. Again, we need to frame this as a national security priority. When the Tories cut the World Service its critical and independent journalism was replaced by the propaganda arms of dictatorships.

4. Make the Argument for Democracy

Arms alone won’t secure victory for democracy. That has always been true. The development of the Spitfire coincided with Churchill’s critique of the “conflict of spiritual and moral ideas” between Nazidom and democracy. Kennedy and Regan faced down the Soviets in the arms race but they also went to The Berlin Wall to proudly argue for universal human rights. That confidence in liberal values was replaced by a cringing self-consciousness.

For audiences at home, we need to place difficult decisions in the context of the wider struggle that is ahead of us. For friends around the world, especially in the Global South, we need to show that the cause of freedom will survive America’s realignment.

The fundamental weakness of the authoritarians remains the same. Every act of brutality by a dictator is a confession of their own weakness. They know they would not survive if the truth could be freely spoken.

For the authoritarians, the individual exists to serve the state, for liberal democrats, it is the other way around. We represent equality, opportunity, the rule of law, creativity and a belief in the inherent dignity of every individual. They offer only subjugation, misery, corruption, conformity and brutish violence.

Our offer is vastly superior, yet almost nowhere is it being sold by our leaders. One of our strongest weapons in this fight lies rusting, unused.

This list is just for starters. We have huge strategic challenges to meet: disengaging sovereign economic capacity from China, winning the battle for the hearts and minds of the Global South, exposing the new colonial projects pursued by Moscow and Beijing, dealing with the economic inequality behind the discontent that authoritarian exploit…

The Irish poet and priest John O’Donohue wrote about the fear and doubt that times of great darkness provoke. His blessing For Courage reminds us that feelings of powerlessness are subjective:

Steady yourself and see

That it is your own thinking

That darkens your world.

The last few days have been traumatic for liberal democrats everywhere. Trump and his team of destructive disruptors aim to leave their ideological opponents feeling impotent and confused. Until we are strong enough to stand up for ourselves as Europeans we may be at his mercy - but we are far from powerless.