The Telegraph 1.1M Followers -- America is irreplaceable. Europe better start acting like it Opinion by Mark Sedwill • 1d

 The Telegraph

1.1M Followers

America is irreplaceable. Europe better start acting like it

Opinion by Mark Sedwill • 1d • (Former Cabinet Secretary ad National Security Adviser)

4 min read

Trump hosts European leaders including Ursula von der Leyen, Friedrich Merz and Emmanuel Macron in the Oval Office last summer

Watching Donald Trump’s address about Iran while travelling in the Gulf this week, two aphorisms from another era of superpower and ideological rivalry came to mind. 

The first, usually attributed to Napoleon, is: “Never interrupt your enemy when he’s making a mistake.” The second is ascribed to Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s first Prime Minister: “What I want is men who will support me when I’m in the wrong. Any fool can support me when I’m in the right.”

Both feel uncomfortably relevant.

Start with Napoleon. The principal beneficiaries of Operation Epic Fury so far are not America, not Israel, not the Gulf states and certainly not Europe, but Russia and China. Even though Iran’s conventional military is being decimated and regional proxies defanged, both are providing intelligence for Iran’s missile and drone attacks. 

Russia is spending the bonanza from the spike in oil prices on weapons to attack Ukraine, and Beijing, having invested in energy security for decades, is quietly advancing China’s reputation as the stabilising superpower.

The harder truth for Britain and Europe is the Melbourne insight. Trump has launched a war that many in Europe consider illegal, strategically reckless and damaging to their own security. 

His demands for allied support arrive wrapped in the same contemptuous packaging as his Greenland threats and his tariffs. Every instinct of a political class conscious of its domestic gallery says: not our war, not our problem. The Mark Carney argument at Davos for cooperation between middle powers as an alternative power fulcrum is resonating.

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Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney delivers a speech during the World Economic Forum in Davos - AFP

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That instinct is understandable. It is also strategically blinkered.

First, the missing phrase from the Carney speech was “as American allies”. The US is irreplaceable as the ultimate guarantor. The Gulf countries, despite having endured more Iranian attacks than Israel because of a war they didn’t want and don’t support, recognise this, which is why their criticism of Trump’s war is private not public.

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Second, whatever one thinks of the legal or strategic basis for this campaign, or American responsibility for picking up the pieces, the day after is everyone’s problem. And the day after is arriving faster than anyone planned as Trump heads for the off-ramp.

While he could veer again, Trump’s national address this week indicated that success will be defined as smashing Iran’s conventional military capability and blocking its pathway to nuclear weaponisation. Bluster about mission accomplished and Nato cowardice will be deployed to cover two gaps in that narrative large enough to drive an oil tanker through. 

The enriched uranium is still buried somewhere in Iran, probably dispersed. Absent an extraordinary military operation to secure and remove those stocks, Iran will retain the material and know-how, if not currently the means, to weaponise. The nuclear genie is not back in the bottle.

Meanwhile, Iran’s most effective weapon was, and remains, asymmetric leverage over the global economy through: 

- The Strait of Hormuz: a choke-hold on Gulf energy flows;

- The Houthis’ grip on the Red Sea and Suez Canal via the Bab al-Mandeb;

- The capacity to destabilise neighbours and sustain proxy networks across the region. 

None of that disappears with the decapitation of Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime, especially as what is emerging from the rubble is an Iran under the full control of the IRGC: harder-line, more radicalised, more militarised and with a profound grievance to prosecute. That threat haunts Gulf capitals. It must be contained. Gulf governments have been saying precisely this – quietly, persistently – to those willing to listen.

The strategic logic for them is the same as for Europe. Neither can replace American power, both need the US to remain invested and both win that argument not by lecturing Washington but by demonstrating they will take more responsibility for their own defence and sharing the burden elsewhere. The Gulf leaders already understand this. You will not hear many speeches from them. But you will see action.

This is why the Melbourne logic matters. It isn’t about Trump. It’s about our ally America. Although he denies it, they need our help. We cannot affect the outcome of the war. Our national security interest lies in the state of our alliances the day after. Nato First is how we defend our national territory and continental allies. But, as I once explained to a sceptical Trump, alongside that, Global Britain is how we defend our national interests and global allies.

So we must now lean in, not to endorse Trump’s actions, but to shape what comes next. This week’s British-led conference on Hormuz should be the first step in strategic engagement with our Gulf allies to reconstruct the architecture of regional security. Secure Hormuz and the Bab al-Mandeb. Contain Iran, stabilise the Gulf.

I have long argued that the UK and our European allies should increase defence investment to wartime levels. European military hollowness was always a vulnerability. The wars in Ukraine and Iran have made it a liability. 

Political commitments are not yet matched by credible capability plans, defence industrial integration or the hard choices about what to cut to pay for it. Britain’s Strategic Defence Review has been gathering dust for a year while the Defence Investment Plan stalls in Whitehall. The choices are hard and the cost is real. The alternative is worse.

This Easter, European leaders should take a break to enjoy Love Actually with their families and luxuriate in Hugh Grant standing up to a bullying US president. As long as they remember it’s just a movie. When they return to work to survey the wreckage of the old strategic order and try to discern the shape of the next, the Melbourne and Napoleon aphorisms point in the same direction. Get over the anger at Trump and help America deal with the day after. Above all, don’t posture, act!

Lord Sedwill is a former Cabinet Secretary and National Security Adviser