The United Kingdom is edging toward nuclear cooperation with France even as Brussels refuses to let London tap the European Union's new collective defense funds, Ethan B. Kapstein and Jonathan Caverley have argued in Foreign Affairs. The authors describe the deadlock as the clearest example of how EU sovereignty politics can cut against the continent's own security.
"Hvylya" covered the Foreign Affairs essay, in which Princeton's Kapstein and the International Institute for Strategic Studies' Caverley place the United Kingdom alongside France, Germany and Poland as one of the four states that will actually decide whether Europe can defend itself. London, they note, has kept a nuclear deterrent and "a thin but deployable joint land, air and naval force" despite tight budgets.
Russia's war in Ukraine, the fraying U.S. commitment to NATO and the Iran war have all pushed Britain back toward the continent. Discussions concerning nuclear cooperation between London and Paris are ongoing, the authors note, a prospect that would give Europe a more convincing deterrent than Paris alone can provide. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has sold rearmament at home as "the engine of national renewal," promising a "defense dividend felt directly in the pockets of working people, creating the jobs of the future."
Yet the EU has so far refused to give London access to its new collective defense initiatives. "The best short-term step the EU can take for collective defense," Kapstein and Caverley write, "may be to ease its sovereignty-obsessed neighbor's re-entry into the continent's defense funds and institutions."
The authors frame the United Kingdom as the test case for whether the EU can put security ahead of institutional politics. With Germany buying from its own firms, France exporting its best hardware to India, and Poland routing contracts to Seoul and Washington, a British defense industrial base fully plugged into the bloc could be one of the few levers left for genuine continental cooperation. "Hvylya" earlier reported how a new nuclear arms control proposal would replace binding treaties with "disciplined ambiguity," a framework that would make bilateral deterrence arrangements like the looming Franco-British one even more consequential.