The Times – 19 February 2025

Further to William Hague’s article (“Here’s how Starmer should pay for defence rise”, Feb 18), successive governments have presided over a trajectory of decline in defence expenditure — from more than 5 per cent of GDP in the mid-1980s, falling to 3 per cent in the mid-1990s, to our present sorry state. Arguing about when, exactly, to reach 2.5 per cent is an exercise in irrelevance.

Dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938 did not secure peace: it left a vacuum in Europe which invited further Nazi aggression. By contrast, the division of Europe in 1945 left no such vacuum, once the iron curtain descended and the democracies combined to form NATO. The result was a successful policy of containment until Soviet communism imploded.

To prevent the ruinous human and economic costs of an East-West conflict, the European NATO nations must oppose, at all costs, the demilitarisation of unoccupied Ukraine. Incorporation within the alliance might then become a practical possibility sooner than people at present believe.

Sir JULIAN LEWIS MP
Chairman, Defence Committee, 2015-19
House of Commons
London SW1A 0AA