Britain told to plan for war without Trump’s America

Defence spending should go to five per cent of gross domestic product immediately, the country should be prepared for a wider European war and planning should assume Britain may have to fight without the United States, according to a security academic at the University of Leicester.

Dr Simon Bennett, director of the Civil Safety and Security Unit in the university’s School of Business and author of a 2025 book on security lessons from the war in Ukraine, set out the argument in comments issued through the university press office.

Bennett said: “Given these facts, we must prepare ourselves to fight alone. Like Keir Starmer, Prime Minister Andy Burnham is in denial about Trump. The American president is a lost cause. Better to focus finite energies and budgets first, on supporting Ukraine, and secondly, on preparing this country for a wider European war. Defence spending must be increased to 5% of Gross Domestic Product immediately and, as suggested by former Secretary of State for Defence Lord Hutton of Furness in the 17 October edition of The i Paper, the British public must be told the truth about Russia’s hybrid warfare campaign.”

On the range of threats he believes the country is exposed to, Bennett said: “The United Kingdom faces a spectrum of threats. The country has suffered two Kremlin-initiated chemical warfare attacks, in London in 2006 (Polonium) and in Salisbury in 2018 (Novichok). The Council on Strategic Risks recently highlighted the UK’s vulnerability to biological weapons. Prime Minister Burnham, it is time to focus on what really matters – giving Ukraine the weapons it needs and securing a vulnerable United Kingdom. Do not prostrate yourself before Trump, as your predecessor did. As Volodymyr Zelensky and Mark Carney have shown, the only way to deal with Trump is to stand up to him.”

Bennett is asking for far more than the government has signed up to. Ministers have committed to NATO’s target of three and a half per cent of gross domestic product on core defence by 2035, with a further one and a half per cent on defence-related resilience and infrastructure making up the alliance’s headline five per cent figure. Bennett is calling for core defence spending itself to reach five per cent now, a distinction ministers have had to set out repeatedly.

Lord Hutton of Furness, whose intervention Bennett cites, was Secretary of State for Defence from 2008 to 2009. His argument that the public must be told the truth about Russian hybrid warfare runs close to what ministers have themselves begun saying. Wes Streeting told the Defence Committee this month that hybrid activity of this kind amounts to state backed terrorism, and Louise Sandher-Jones confirmed in a written answer last week that “we know Russia is conducting a campaign of hybrid attacks and sabotage across Europe.”

Ministers have also confirmed that government messaging on defence and security will build ahead of Exercise ALBISTON SHADOW and NATO’s crisis management exercise in spring 2027, and the Cabinet Office launched its Be Ready campaign this month asking households to prepare to look after themselves for three days.

The two chemical incidents Bennett refers to are the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210 in London in 2006, which a public inquiry found was probably approved by the Russian president, and the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, which killed Dawn Sturgess and which Britain attributed to the GRU. The Council on Strategic Risks is a Washington-based institute publishing on biological, climate and nuclear security.

Bennett’s case rests on his reading of the American president, whom he describes as a Russophile and, in his words and expressly as his opinion, a traitor to the West’s liberal-democratic values. He said he predicted in March 2025 that Trump would ally the United States with Russia through accords and treaties, and took criticism for saying so at the time.