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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is a former British diplomat and author of ‘Hard Choices’
“France and the United Kingdom agree that there is no extreme threat to Europe that would not prompt a response by our two nations.” This sentence in the Northwood declaration issued by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and President Emmanuel Macron at the UK-French summit last week signalled a potentially far-reaching shift in the defence priorities of both countries as they come to terms with Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine and Donald Trump’s unreliability as an ally.
The most productive UK-French summit since 2010 will be followed by the first visit of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz to London this week. There will be none of the pageantry and glitz of Macron’s state visit, but it will also be an important moment. Merz and Starmer will sign a wide-ranging treaty of co-operation, strengthening what has been the weakest leg of the London-Paris-Berlin triangle as the three countries take on more responsibility for European security. These agreements turn the page on a decade in which Brexit overshadowed relations between the UK and its neighbours.
UK-French nuclear co-operation is at the heart of the debate on how the Europeans should respond to the weakening US commitment to Nato. For 30 years, London and Paris have stuck to the formula that the vital interests of one of them could not be threatened without the vital interests of the other being engaged as well. But what about the rest of Europe? As Merz said just before becoming chancellor: “The sharing of nuclear weapons is a subject we need to talk about . . . We have to be stronger together in nuclear deterrence.”
The Northwood declaration’s confirmation that the two countries will “co-ordinate across nuclear policy, capabilities and operations” is a response to the concerns of Merz and others. Quite rightly, there is much ambiguity in this careful phrasing. That is how deterrence works. But the overall message is clear enough. The new wording is more groundbreaking for France (which has always been Delphic about whether its nuclear deterrence extends to its European partners) than for the UK, whose nuclear weapons have long been declared to Nato for the defence of all allies. Nonetheless, it is a powerful mark of the growing strategic confidence between London and Paris.
In another sign of the times, Macron and Starmer agreed that their armed forces should move away from expeditionary operations far from Europe and establish a combined joint force on a “sufficient scale for warfighting”.
The proximate cause of this rapprochement is the joint effect of Putin and Trump. But the improvement in relations between the UK and EU has also given Macron the political space to conclude ambitious agreements with the UK. The French president clearly wanted to help Starmer with his difficulties on irregular migration by agreeing to a pilot scheme allowing limited returns to France, balanced by family reunification cases coming to the UK.
It would have been much harder to sell this deal in Brussels if the UK and EU had still been at loggerheads. It may still face legal challenges on both sides, and may well not reduce migrant flows unless it can be expanded to an EU-wide agreement. But the fact that Macron has opened a door that had been resolutely closed shows the value he puts on reinforcing the alliance with Starmer, which has grown out of their joint leadership of European support for Ukraine.
Merz will visit London in a similar frame of mind. From his first speech in the Bundestag as chancellor, he has been calling for deeper co-operation with the UK. He, too, is a strong advocate for greater European military and economic backing for Ukraine. Germany has committed to meeting the new Nato target of spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence, including 3.5 per cent on hard defence. It is one of the very few European Nato members that can credibly undertake to meet this goal by 2032, given its low level of government debt.
Britain is a natural partner for Germany in this transformation. The two countries have traditionally bought far more US military equipment than France and have a shared imperative to develop European alternatives. It helps that their defence industries are less mutually competitive than those of the UK and France. To enable real progress, there also needs to be a rapid deal to give the UK access to the EU’s new Safe defence investment fund.
The task of weaning Europe off its decades-long over-dependence on US military power is so vast that close trilateral co-operation on defence, security and foreign policy between London, Paris and Berlin is essential. The foundations for that are being laid now.
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