‘Our Ministry of Defence needs to wake up — Donald Trump is not playing’

The days of buck-passing and free-loading are over. A tough new future beckons. Europe is now in the grip of a deepening security crisis unleashed by a series of extraordinary interventions from the White House over the war in Ukraine, led by Donald Trump’s savage, personal attack this week on President Zelensky.

Fear and outrage are sweeping through the chancelleries of the continent. Here in Britain, the main party leaders denounce the US President for bolstering Putin, inverting morality about the conflict and abandoning the defence of Europe, which has been a cornerstone of American foreign policy since the Second World War.

Regardless of the outcome of the negotiations over Ukraine if they proceed, it is clear that Europe must take far more responsibility for our defence. Our past, unbalanced relationship with America bred a mood of complacent dependency, where European governments could lavish money on generous benefits and bloated state bureaucracies without having to worry too much about self-protection.

It is a remarkable fact that Europe contains just 7% of the world’s population and 25% of the global economy, yet it accounts for more than half the world’s welfare spending.

But now our leaders will have to make national defence a top priority. This will represent a mighty change in outlook, requiring determination, vision and perseverance.

Tragically those qualities seem to be in short supply at present. Cowardice, weakness and panic are more apparent, as shown by last week’s Munich Security Conference where the US Vice-President JD Vance gave a bracing address on Europe’s failure to defend essential democratic liberties.

Making the final speech at the event, the Conference Chairman Christoph Heusgen, a veteran German diplomat, started to cry as he referred to Vance. In response to this lachrymose display, the audience applauded in hysterical sympathy. It was a pathetic scene that perfectly symbolised the self-indulgent feebleness of Europe’s political class.

Sobbing is not the way to defend our society. We need warriors, not weepers. In the wake of the present crisis, attention in Britain has focused on increasing the defence budget, a very necessary step for the neglect of the armed forces has long been a national scandal.

Our army is the smallest it has been since the beginning of the 19th century, while our navy is so short of sailors that two warships, recently refurbished at great expense to the taxpayer, have had to be withdrawn from service.

But better funding is not the sole answer. We also need a drastic change in the Ministry of Defence and wider society to restore our sense of national pride and solidarity. That means dumping destructive woke ideology, particularly the fashionable drive to pour contempt on our heritage in the name of “decolonisation” and “cultural sensitivity”.

If a country and its past are routinely denigrated, few will fight to defend it. The axe must also fall on the obsession with diversity recruitment targets which treat military units as arenas of social engineering rather than agencies of protection. This neurosis about inclusion plumbed new depths of absurdity two years ago when the RAF imposed a temporary ban on the recruitment of white men.

By promoting open discrimination, such a policy made a mockery of justice and was eventually declared illegal by the courts. Just as damaging is the focus on identity politics, which not only undermines unity through its emphasis on differences but also fosters a divisive atmosphere of grievance-led victimhood.

Incredibly, the Ministry of Defence has 92 internal groups to address staff concerns. Among them are the Defence siPagan Network, the Breastfeeding Network, the Vegan and Vegetarian Network and the Black and Minority Ethnic Women’s Network.

On a wider level, Britain needs to regain its resilience. Keener on social security than real security, we have become a flabby nation of open borders, soft sentences, rampant grade inflation and ever wider definitions of poor mental health. Our decline in patriotism is dressed up as tolerance, our lost cohesion as the strength of diversity. If the present crisis starts to reverse these trends, it may serve some purpose.