Are we ready for war? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers tackle a question that, until recently, few had thought to consider.
• Britain is closer to nuclear war than you think. This is how it will unfold
• This generation of Britons couldn’t handle the death toll of a modern war
• Russia is aiming to control the UK. It would tear society apart
• Britain’s tanks would be eviscerated in a war with Russia. Here’s how to fix them
• The UK’s plan for civilians in a war is terrifying – you’re on your own
• World War 3 is closer than you think. And still Britain is half asleep
• The cascading catastrophe that would push our military to breaking point
Donald Trump’s second turn as president has turbo-charged worries for states who see themselves as America’s natural allies. While much has been said about Nato, less has been said about Trump’s impact on a more secret partnership: intelligence-sharing between the US and Britain under the UK-USA agreement, much better known as Five Eyes.
The partnership’s closeness is eyed jealously by other US allies, hence periodic stories about which country – Japan, perhaps – might aspire to be the sixth pair of eyes. The exceptional nature of the partnership, stitched together by a culture of eighty years of inter-organisational collaboration, makes it difficult to imagine it adding new members. The upheaval of Trump’s second term poses a sharply different question: could the partnership break down?
The deep organisational ties that breathe life into the partnership are not immune from politics. With the Mueller Report and furore about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, it isn’t a mystery why the Trump administration has a more adversarial relationship with America’s “deep state” than previous presidencies. Unlike during his more constrained first term, this time Trump has moved early to exert his control over the intelligence community, selecting senior leaders less on competence than perceived personal loyalty and shared scepticism about the status quo.
But US political controversies about intelligence powers clearly did not begin with Trump. There is FISA Section 702, which authorises the interception of foreign communications but has caused long-running controversies over its reported misuse to search the data of US citizens.
There have been tensions within Five Eyes before. Where the US and UK disagree, it isn’t unheard of for this to have an impact on specific lines of intelligence sharing – such as reported UK reaction to Trump’s campaign to sink alleged drug boats in the Caribbean. Similarly, Henry Kissinger wanted to disrupt intelligence sharing with Britain when the Nixon and Heath governments were at odds in 1973 – arguably a more challenging time for Five Eyes than anything Starmer has yet faced with Trump. And the obvious point is that, while both countries can withhold information from each other, the relationship is one-sided: today the total UK intelligence budget is around five per cent of the US budget. The UK stands to lose much more if the US were to expand and prolong such cut offs.
Trump’s foreign policy highlights a trivial but important truth: nothing is guaranteed to last forever. The inter-institutional ties between Britain’s GCHQ and the US National Security Agency (NSA) are arguably deeper than any other collaboration in intelligence history. But they depend on a shared strategic outlook. Developments in US politics – developments that will outlast Trump himself – could lead to the US and UK drifting further apart. An America less committed to European security would call into doubt the sense of common purpose behind the partnership.
The Five Eyes partnership is not a grounded in a treaty. There is a lot that any given president could do, unilaterally, that would undermine it. But equally, a partnership that has endured for so long is not something that any of the national intelligence communities would give up on lightly. For the UK and other non-US members, “Plan A” will inevitably be how to survive the Trump storm any way they can.
The nightmare scenario rests on the fact that there is very little, in theory, that could stop Trump from suspending any partner’s continued participation – if he was sufficiently angry (and he does get angry) and sufficiently persistent (a less obvious character trait). If history is a reliable guide, expect pushback from within the US intelligence community. But, given Trump’s willingness to reshape the federal government to do his bidding, it is by no means certain that “deep state” resistance would stop him.
Could Britain cope with a possible future in which it had to go without US intelligence-sharing? Yes, but not without real loss. US intelligence spending dwarfs all the other partners combined. A rump Four Eyes could carve out a smaller partnership, but would each need to spend more to achieve less. Fewer geographical missions and patchier coverage would be the reality. It is easy to imagine how Britain might adjust, focusing more narrowly on its top priorities, and by pursuing narrower collaborations with European allies. But any solution that involved spending more would inevitably be a smaller version of the current political debates about how to pay for more defence spending.
Britain could survive without Five Eyes, but the new normal would be more constrained than ever. The example of France is instructive: middle powers can pursue their core interests without such a close relationship with the United States. But France’s greater commitment to Europe also points to the reality that middle powers will always need allies.
Britain benefits much more from the existing partnership than the United States. That’s ultimately not a healthy position to be in. One way of improving its chances of surviving the Trump storm is to demonstrably increase the UK contribution to the partnership. The more Britain brings to the table, in theory at least, the more secure it will be.