Bridge to Nowhere: UK security strategy in the ruins of Atlantis

6 March 2025: Rethinking Security: Bridge to Nowhere: UK security strategy in the ruins of Atlantis

As Western security alliances fragment, Richard Reeve charts the implications for the UK’s most fundamental strategic assumptions, and makes the case for ‘thinking beyond the unthinkable’ in the government’s next National Security Strategy.

While Ukraine has acutely felt its vulnerability since 2014, only in the last month has the precarity of Europe’s position become startlingly clear. Having already laid claim to Canada, Greenland and Gaza, this past month Trump and Vance have attacked and undermined European democracies, dubbed Volodymyr Zelenskyy a ‘dictator’, and grasped at his country’s mineral wealth while unilaterally seeking to end the Russia-Ukraine war on Moscow’s terms. With Trump burying America’s closest alliances beneath his clear contempt for multilateralism, international law, and liberalism in all its forms, by 23 February Germany’s incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz was pledging “to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can really achieve independence from the USA”.