Ukraine (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Baroness Fall Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Fall (Con)]

My Lords, like other noble Lords, I congratulate the chair and members of the committee on this thoughtful and timely report. Although it is ostensibly about Ukraine, it focuses, of course, on the fragility of western security as we know it—or have known it since the Second World War. That is underpinned by NATO, the future of which now lies in the balance.

As the committee articulates so clearly in the report, things were already shifting before Trump started to take down the western security umbrella. They changed on the day that Russian troops marched into Ukraine, in February 2022—a clear failure of NATO to deter Russia in the first place. All this begs the uncomfortable question of whether we can claim to have a credible deterrent; many noble Lords have mentioned this today.

What do we actually mean by “deterrent”? I argue that it must have three factors: capability, preparedness and intent—that is the believability that an actor or set of actors will use force if they have to. It is possible that we have gradually been losing sight of this since the Cold War. The alarming question on all our minds today is whether we are seeing the end of the US-driven western alliance, as the USA’s statements about its preferred way forward on Ukraine, the role of NATO and the expectations from Europe, alongside the onslaught of geoeconomic weapons such as tariffs, have unnerved us all and led us to question America’s commitment to the transatlantic partnership from a military, political, economic and cultural perspective.

I mention this last point because here was the surprise. Much of the rest was already in the market, as others have said: the rush to peace with Putin, the not-unreasonable call for more European defence spending and the signal that American priorities may lie elsewhere. We knew, too, that Trump liked the word “tariff”—he called it “the most beautiful word”—but it was the Vice-President’s comment that Europe’s greatest threat lay within, and was not China or Russia, that really shocked us to the core. It made us wonder whether America is on our side.

In the past few weeks, we have heard accusations that the invasion was Ukraine’s fault and concessions were handed out to Russia without seeking its representations. Ukraine’s tireless and brave leader, holding the front line against tyranny, was branded a dictator. There was the ugly unravelling of talks in the Oval Office last Friday. All that came at the end of a week when the Americans sided with Iran, North Korea and Russia in the UN, as my noble friend Lord Roberts said.

Here, we have a sense of America treating its friends like its enemies and its enemies like its friends, as many noble Lords have said. This is the uncomfortable reality in which we find ourselves, but what does it actually mean? First, there is clearly a resetting of US-Russia relations. Is it to prise Russia away from China in a sort of reverse Kissinger move—many people have said that that would not be a good policy—or does Trump simply prefer to make deals with the strongmen of the world?

That begs a second question: what does all this mean for the China-US relationship, whose fraught relations have so dominated geopolitics in recent years? On the western alliance, the bottom line for us is that the security dynamic with a Trump-led USA is fundamentally shifting. I think that Trump would support a Europe that supports itself. We now need to decide how to respond and come up with a strategy. Herein lies the challenge but also the opportunity—one that opens up big strategic questions for us as a nation about who our closest allies are. What of NATO? What of Five Eyes? How much money will we need to spend on defence? Should we build a European defence umbrella within NATO or elsewhere? Is this umbrella something that we could offer as a new security home for Ukraine?

We are already seeing some choices—the decision to increase defence spending last week, for example. I support that, as other noble Lords have done today. I understand the decision to find that increase from ODA, which looks like a quick fix—no doubt there are savings that can be made there—but I have grave concerns about putting soft power against hard power, especially at such a critical moment when USA is retreating from the global stage. We must think strategically about how we influence and protect ourselves in the world, without leaving an opportunity wide open to the likes of China. This also means addressing some of the issues around the mass resilience and internal coherence of our own Armed Forces, as many noble Lords and noble and gallant Lords have pointed out today.

To return to what we mean by deterrence, we must also look at our society and its willingness to defend our values—or, as the report puts it, the human aspects of war. According to a Times survey in recent weeks, Gen Z—of which I have a few living with me—say that they would not want to go to war. We cannot know that for sure, but we can know that a divided, unresilient society that has forgotten the price of peace is unlikely to unite under a common purpose.

I end by paying tribute to the sacrifices that the people of Ukraine have made and continue to make for their freedom since the Russian invasion of their country just over three years ago. I find their determination and courage humbling and a reminder of the values that we hold dear but are often complacent about. We must remain firm in our loyalties; they are not, and never will be, to Putin’s Russia.