Great powers can decline with dignity. Formerly great powers, by contrast, often compensate for diminished means with inflated rhetoric. Britain has chosen the latter course.

It still speaks in the accents of a serious military state. Ministers talk of deterrence, strategic leadership and Britain’s indispensable role in Nato with the practised confidence of a country that imagines itself central to the western alliance. Yet the reality is now uncomfortably different. The language of power remains; much of the power itself does not.

This is what makes reports that Donald Trump could turn on Sir Keir Starmer at a Nato summit not merely plausible but logical. Trump has always reduced alliances to a coarse transaction: who pays, who shirks and who expects the American taxpayer to underwrite their illusions. It is an ugly view of the Atlantic alliance. It is also, in Britain’s case, not wholly wrong. If Trump decides that the UK is now one of those countries still trading on old prestige while allowing its military capabilities to erode, it will be hard for Downing Street to claim the accusation is unfair.

The more awkward truth for Starmer is that Trump appears to have little real respect for him. Diplomatic pleasantries should not be mistaken for esteem. Trump does not admire caution, moderation or legal neatness. He admires leverage, spending and visible strength. Starmer’s prosecutorial calm may reassure officials in Whitehall, sympathetic centrists in Brussels and the dwindling class of Atlanticists who still believe that the careful wording of a communiqué is a strategic asset in itself. It is less likely to impress a man who judges allies by whether they can fight, spend and act without first consulting their finance ministry.

If Trump does turn on Starmer, he will do so for reasons that are as much British as American. The collapse in Britain’s military credibility did not begin with Labour.

It was the work of Conservative governments that wrapped themselves in martial rhetoric while steadily hollowing out the armed forces beneath it. Tory ministers were fond of photographs in front of fighter jets, naval vessels and Union flags. They were less enthusiastic about the tedious business of funding enough soldiers, enough sailors, enough munitions, enough maintenance and enough deployable platforms. The result was a peculiar form of patriotic austerity: defence as pageantry, rather than defence as capability.

Yet if the Conservatives began the process, Starmer’s government risks becoming the administration that quietly completes it. Labour’s instinct, as so often, is managerial. It has inherited a weakened force and appears tempted to treat that weakness as an unfortunate but manageable baseline, rather than as a strategic emergency. The danger is not simply that Starmer has presided over decline, it is that he seeks to normalises it, preserving the rhetoric of a military power while adjusting policy to the reality of a diminished one.

The problem is not only the headline level of defence spending, although that matters. It is the widening gulf between Britain’s stated ambitions and its usable capabilities.

Britain still likes to think of itself as Europe’s leading military power, or at least one of the continent’s two genuinely serious armed states, alongside France. Yet an honest audit would reveal an institution under prolonged strain: an army too small for the demands made of it, naval assets spread thin, chronic questions over munitions stocks, a procurement system that remains a monument to delay and waste, and an industrial base that has never been reorganised for an era in which hard power has returned to Europe.

Britain can still do impressive things. What it struggles to do is do them at scale, over time and without exposing just how little margin for error remains.

Nothing illustrated the problem more vividly than the Iranian attack on RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. Here was not a think-tank seminar about some hypothetical future contingency, but a direct strike on a strategically vital British base on sovereign British territory. Akrotiri is not a colonial relic maintained for ceremonial reasons.

It is one of the UK’s most important military footholds in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East, central to surveillance, air operations and Britain’s claim to remain a consequential security actor beyond Europe. When Iran’s missile attack reached Akrotiri, the question was brutally simple: could Britain visibly and rapidly defend a critical piece of its own sovereign territory?

The answer was not flattering. Britain looked less like a power in command of events than a state caught awkwardly between inherited pretensions and diminished means. The most revealing part of the episode was not merely that Akrotiri had been targeted, but that the British response conveyed the unmistakable impression of strategic insufficiency.

A country still fond of describing itself as a leading military power ought to be able to move quickly and decisively to reinforce sovereign territory at the centre of its regional posture. Instead, Britain seemed unable to generate a response proportionate to the symbolism and seriousness of the moment.

The failure to dispatch, efficiently and immediately, even a single warship to reinforce the defence of the territory was not simply an operational lapse. It was a reputational one. It suggested to allies and adversaries alike that Britain’s global reach may now extend rather less far than its political class likes to imply.

In Washington, and particularly in Trump’s Washington, such episodes are not treated as unfortunate complications. They are treated as evidence. Trump has always had a predator’s instinct for weakness, especially among allies who continue to trade on inherited status while quietly shedding the means to justify it. If he concludes that Britain has become a country that invokes the special relationship while lacking the military depth to defend even a sovereign base under direct pressure, the charge will be difficult to rebut. It will also contain enough truth to sting.

This is Starmer’s strategic problem. Labour came to office promising steadiness after Conservative chaos. On foreign policy it has largely opted for continuity: support for Ukraine, commitment to Nato, a conventional Atlanticist posture. In calmer times that might have sufficed. These are not calmer times.

The war in Ukraine has exposed the centrality of industrial capacity, stockpiles and the ability to replace what is fired, flown or destroyed. Russia has reminded Europe that deterrence is not a speech, a values statement or a summit communiqué. It is mass, production and readiness. The US, meanwhile, is moving — under Trump or any future administration shaped by similar instincts — towards a more conditional view of Europe’s security.

In that world, Britain cannot continue with the old trick of sounding Churchillian on a peacetime budget. Yet that remains, too often, the governing model. Ministers speak of national renewal and strategic seriousness, but the country is still some distance from the kind of defence settlement that would match the scale of the threat. If Starmer wishes to avoid being treated by Trump as another European leader sheltering under American power while spending too little, he will need more than diplomatic poise and a handful of carefully calibrated speeches. He will need to decide whether Britain intends to remain a credible military power or merely a nostalgic one.

That requires accepting a painful proposition. Defence is no longer a discretionary line in the public finances to be raided whenever governments run out of money or nerve elsewhere. Britain must either spend materially more and reform the machinery that turns money into usable capability, or stop pretending it is still what it was. What has become untenable is the present arrangement: Churchillian rhetoric, shrinking armed forces and a political class still trying to govern decline by managing appearances.

There is, then, a certain rough justice in the prospect of Trump turning on Starmer. Not because Trump is a trustworthy custodian of the alliance — he plainly is not — and not because public humiliation is a sensible method of alliance management. But because Britain has spent too long pretending that posture can substitute for power.

The Conservatives began the degradation. Labour appears uncomfortably close to administering the final rites. If Trump chooses to say so in his own vulgar fashion, the most uncomfortable fact for Westminster may be that he will not be entirely wrong. Given the present state of Britain’s defences, he would have a case.

For Starmer, the lesson ought to be obvious. Respect in Washington is not bestowed out of sentiment, historical memory or the ritual invocation of the special relationship. It is earned by capability. Britain still has a narrow window in which to recover some of that credibility. But the window is closing, and Westminster still seems more interested in curating the optics of decline than in arresting it.

“No Winston Churchill”: Keir Starmer’s Credibility Shrinks with the Royal Navy