Sunak is right to put Britain on a war footing. Its meaning goes beyond defence

It is notoriously hard to predict a war. This week, in Warsaw (the right location), Rishi Sunak said we must put our defences “on a war footing”.

When he spoke, I happened to be reading the essays of Dean Inge, one of the most brilliant columnists and thinkers between the wars. In his preface, composed in January 1937, Inge wrote, “The opinion on the Continent is that we are approaching a new and terrible European war … I do not believe it … Germany is in such a plight financially that I have grave doubts whether the Hitler regime can last the year.” The Second World War began in September 1939. Warsaw fell that same month.

Poor Inge was making a mistake common among rational, intelligent people. He thought that, because a course of action cannot ultimately work, it will not happen. He added that Germany could never win a war against Russia. He was right about that, but drew the rational, wrong conclusion that Hitler would never attack.

I have Mr Sunak down as a hyper-rational, hyper-intelligent man and, for that very reason, liable to underrate the risk of human evil and madness. He prefers the careful deliberations of the counting house to the clash of human passions.

So his Warsaw speech is particularly welcome. He has, belatedly, noticed just how serious the danger is. He may have cast aside hesitation partly because Labour’s defence spokesman, John Healey, was chasing similar thoughts.

The Prime Minister is not the first to announce an increase in British defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030. The person who gave me Inge’s book is Mr Sunak’s old boss, Boris Johnson, who now lives in “The Gloomy Dean’s” former country house in Oxfordshire. At the Nato summit in Madrid, not long after Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Boris made a similar commitment to 2.5 per cent, for a similar reason.

Some say that the target is pretty much inevitable anyway because of existing defence commitments. Others point out that percentages are useless in themselves: what matters is how the money is spent.

They are right, but they should not forget that, for Mr Sunak, like Boris, the context is the current 2 per cent spending commitment made by all Nato members but fulfilled by so few. The point of announcing 2.5 per cent is to lead a European response to the famous Trump challenge to pay our defence dues.

Mr Sunak wants to show Putin that Europe and Britain won’t let him win. Germany, Britain, and France each has a higher GDP than Russia, four times higher when combined. Although Nato, 75 years old this month, desperately needs continuing US support, the idea that it cannot resist Russian military threats is untrue. It is a question of will.

Not long after our Prime Minister, President Macron of France spoke in the Sorbonne for a couple of grandiloquent hours. This being France and he being Macron, the speech had an anti-American tinge and unrealistically high-flown rhetoric about an EU defence dimension.

Its underlying message, however, complemented that of Mr Sunak. The frenetic Macron who, in early 2022, was chasing last-minute deals with Putin, now aspires to lead the fightback of Western civilisation against him. Good: it shows the way the wind is blowing.

It had come so close to blowing the other way. For six months, we heard that the Congressional package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan that the Republicans were blocking would come through in the end, but the end seemed never to arrive. Russia slowly advanced and many brave Ukrainians died deaths that could have been avoided if US supplies had kept flowing.

The one benefit of the delay is how clear and deliberate the US decision now is. Instead of waving any package through, as happened in the past, America, as Air Marshal Edward Stringer of Policy Exchange puts it, “teetered on the banks of the Rubicon and then decided to cross”.

US Republican isolationists were, to their annoyance, isolated. Is it even possible that Donald Trump will now see electoral virtue in helping Ukraine?

In his Warsaw words, Mr Sunak was careful to emphasise that a war footing does not mean “on the brink of war”: it is designed to mean the opposite, to act soon enough to prevent. He therefore quotes Churchill from an early date – 1934 – when rearming might have deterred Germany.

He is trying to develop a defence and security strategy arising from his analysis of the state of the world. President George W Bush famously referred to Iran, Iraq and North Korea as “an axis of evil”. Evil they were; an axis they weren’t. Mr Sunak has identified “an axis of authoritarian states with different values to ours” – Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.

This axis genuinely exists, although Mr Sunak is a bit coy about how far to take this. It goes beyond different values. It is hostile not only to our beliefs but to our economic, military and cultural power.

China wants to become the top nation and is upping its threats to Taiwan. Russia wants to crush central European freedom and regain its imperial/Soviet grandeur. Iran wants to lead the Muslim world via the destruction of Israel. And “little rocket man” would like to blow up as many of us as possible. These tyrannies privately dislike one another, but their sense of their common enemy – us – is strong.

The axis gets bolder. China smashed our agreement for the special status of Hong Kong and exported Covid worldwide. Putin invaded Ukraine. Iran broke its habit of 45 years of indirect attack and flagrantly (though unsuccessfully) bombed Israel full-on, emboldened, not chastened by the disgusting massacre of Jews on October 7. You might say a war is already going on, on two fronts – one in Europe, the other in the Middle East.

For our part, the West pursued policies that were blind to danger – letting China into the World Trade Organisation; letting Russia grab South Ossetia, then Crimea and then build up against the rest of Ukraine; wooing Iran with the promise of a nuclear deal. The locusts began to eat those years faster and faster.

In Warsaw, Mr Sunak sketched out ideas of what moving to a war footing means. It involves war stocks, reserve forces, drone technology, a recognition that stuff for Ukraine is not charity but policy, and a domestic defence industry that aligns with our declared aims.

It requires what the PM calls a “fully functioning strategic HQ” through which the defence chiefs can be held accountable for delivering the war preparations. At present, there are no real aims and therefore no real accountability for achieving them.

One thing Mr Sunak did not discuss is that preparing a war footing is not only a matter for the Ministry of Defence. It governs our alliances and diplomacy, how we trade and which immigrants we admit. It affects how we deal with issues like the Chinese Communist Party’s penetration of most British universities.

It also puts a security lens on policies that already exist. Of these, perhaps the most important is net zero, whose effect is to weaken Western energy security and prosperity, while making us ever more dependent on China for batteries, electric vehicles and so much more.

If he means what he says, Mr Sunak has started something big.