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The UK Defence Industry in the 21 Century
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The Five Forces of Americanisation

In 2025, the resurgence of China’s foreign ambition, the uninhibited aggression of Russia in Ukraine,
conflict throughout much of the Middle East and civil wars in Africa and Asia all suggest that peaceful
coexistence demands an increasingly complex international framework. As 2025 dawns, statements
by the new US President on the future of the Panama Canal, Greenland and Canada and his
administration’s apparent legitimisation of Russian aggression, suggest more structural complexity,
notwithstanding a clearer, more aggressive and more transactional doctrine. The UN, NATO and the
EU, seemingly ill-equipped to deal with civil wars from Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan and Syria to Rwanda,
Bosnia, Croatia and Yemen, are struggling to maintain their authority within an environment that looks
very different to the “new world order” declared by the then US President George Bush and his Soviet
Union counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev, back in 1990.
This has intensified a shared appetite among nations to maintain their autonomy whilst joining
together in peaceful co-existence in order to confront a common threat.

• The US Vice President questions the compatibility of European and US values and security
policies and expresses the USA’s intention to act independently of NATO
• The EU has responded with “Re-arm Europe – Readiness 2030”, setting out a plan for
increased investment and capacity to achieve defence self-sufficiency. It also addresses
“enlargement”, whilst both existing and aspiring member states focus on bolstering national
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defence, including their national defence industries
• While new US foreign policy has challenged relationships with both Europe and the Americas,
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Australia has progressed its membership of the AUKUS alliance with the USA and UK
alongside efforts to revitalise an independent domestic defence industry
• In eastern Europe, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation’s stance on collective security
resembles NATO policy, owing more to Lenin and Gorbachev than Stalin and Brezhnev
• BRICS has resisted the creation of an overtly anti-western policy, citing the risk it poses to
trade
• Amid shifting forces affecting the entire international security framework, the UN Security
Council continues to consider enlargement, notably to admit Brazil, India, Japan and Germany
as new members, together with representation from Africa
Notwithstanding the UK’s departure, “enlargement” is a major theme in the EU. Ten new members
had just joined in 2005, with a further three countries, Bulgaria, Romania (in 2007) and Croatia (2013)
following. The EU has developed a “stabilisation and association process” (SAP) to accommodate the
advances of Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, Montenegro, North
Macedonia and Serbia. Whilst talks with Turkey have remained stalled since 2018, accession
negotiations with Ukraine started in 2024.
Whilst the new US administration seeks to reconcile America First with the complexities and
sophistication of global trade and security policy, elsewhere, the need for structures enabling both co-
operation and national independence appears to be a shared response to world events. It certainly
reflects current EU member sentiment. Whilst taking action to accommodate new members seeking
increased security in response to Russia’s military aggression, and now, its seems likely, to US trade
aggression, and in spite of its efforts to boost defence collaboration between members, the EU’s
defence industry has become more domestically-orientated and fragmented since the start of the
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Russo-Ukraine war .
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The desire for international collaboration may reflect a 21 century recognition that we live in a less
safe world but the principles for a similar change in the Balkans were reasserted back in the late 1980s,
within the “Perestroika” reforms of Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev.

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07/07/2025 Richard Hooke 2025