No alternative to NATO – ex-British PM

Europeans should not be “deluded” that there is an alternative “defense pillar” to NATO, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said. In an article in the Daily Mail on Friday, he argued that European countries should allocate more funds to defense.

The Atlantic reported this week, citing a conversation in the encrypted messaging app Signal, that US Vice President J.D. Vance said he hated “bailing out Europe again” by launching military action against Houthi rebels, ostensibly to protect European trade. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly also slammed “pathetic European free-loading.”

In his article, Johnson pointed out that the US defense budget “is the thick end of a trillion dollars a year, more than 12 times the UK defense budget, even though the US population is only about five times bigger than ours.” He added that “the US allocates about 3.5 per cent of its GDP to defense while the UK spends about 2.3 per cent.”

Just prior to taking office in January, US President Donald Trump called on European NATO allies to increase their military spending, calling on each member state to spend 5% of GDP on defense. UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that British defense spending would rise to 2.5% by 2027, three years earlier than planned. Meanwhile, EU countries have announced their own defense strategy aimed at breaking security dependency on the US.

Johnson opined in the Mail that there is no candidate for replacing America’s role on the continent. “We must not be deluded into thinking we can create some European alternative defence pillar, as a substitute for Nato. Who would lead such a thing? France? Britain? Germany? You only have to ask the question to see the problem,” he wrote. The former conservative PM hailed the defense budget boost announced by London, but called it “only a start, and nothing like enough.”

America should be “the hegemonic power of the Western world” to stick up “for freedom and democracy, especially in Ukraine,” Johnson claimed.

According to Kiev, it was Johnson – then still prime minister – who convinced Ukraine to keep fighting and derailed its 2022 peace talks with Moscow. Earlier this week, Russian President Vladimir Putin recalled that episode, saying that “Western handlers... arrived and persuaded the Ukrainian leadership to continue armed resistance to the end, essentially to the last Ukrainian, with the goal of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia.” Currently, Moscow and Washington are engaged in talks aimed at finding a peaceful resolution to the conflict.