Britain, we are told, must become more resilient. A nation once content to outsource its military muscle to the Pentagon is now advised to rearm its people with first aid classes and cadet drills. Fiona Hill, co-author of the government’s Strategic Defence Review and former Russia adviser under Trump, puts it bluntly: “Russia is at war with us.” Not metaphorically, not ideologically—at war. And the US, once presumed to be the reliable guarantor of Western security, is no longer to be trusted. What follows is a politics of precarity dressed up as stoic realism.
It is rare to hear such clarity from inside the establishment. Rarer still to hear it paired with a coherent sense of decline. Hill is not peddling triumphalism. She is sounding the alarm. Her warning: we are caught between two collapsing empires. One increasingly hostile, the other erratic and transactional. And in the middle, a hollowed-out Britain, clinging to the myth of its own relevance.
“Russia is at war with us,” Hill says. “And we haven’t been paying attention.”
Hill’s argument is grounded in fact. Poisonings on British soil, sabotage under the North Sea, a relentless barrage of cyber-intrusions. Add to that the growing tally of Russian war crimes in Ukraine: high-rise flats in Kherson reduced to rubble, civilians butchered in Kharkiv, emergency workers killed in Kyiv by double-tap drone strikes. The brutality is not new, but it has reached a new level of impunity. As Ukraine retaliates with ingenuity, sinking Russian ships without a navy, blowing up airfields with hidden quadcopter drones—the Kremlin doubles down on the terror.
Yet Britain’s position in this global storm is increasingly fragile. Trump’s return to the White House, backed by a coalition of vengeance, business interests and authoritarian ideologues, has left our security assumptions in tatters. The US “umbrella” no longer shields us. It is, at best, an erratic squall. Trump “wants a separate relationship with Putin,” Hill notes—one based on arms deals and “business that will probably enrich their entourages.” There is no ideology here. Only transactional power and the accumulation of wealth.
“The Trump White House is not an administration,” Hill reminds us. “It is a court.”
And courts, as we know, are governed not by law but by whim.
Britain’s establishment is beginning to panic. Hill, to her credit, does not reach for easy nostalgia. She has no illusions about the hollowed-out state she now advises. Her call for “cohesion” and “resilience” is not mere sabre-rattling. It’s a plea to stitch something back together from the wreckage of deindustrialisation, social atomisation, and state retreat. But the means on offer are almost laughable. School cadet schemes. Community-building exercises. First aid training. We are being asked to confront 21st-century geopolitics with the toolkit of a parish council. Don’t panic.
The problem, as always, is that the British state refuses to reckon with class. Hill gets close. She talks about inequality, populism, the social roots of collapse. But the defence review is not a class analysis. It is a panic document. A technocratic rearranging of priorities in the face of terminal decline. And when she nods towards Farage and Reform UK, it becomes clear that the collapse of American liberal hegemony will be mirrored here, unless something gives.
“Farage wants to do a Doge against the local council,” Hill notes, in disbelief. “He should come here and see what that looks like.”
What it looks like is 800,000 layoffs. Entire departments gutted. A state stripped of capacity but dressed in the finery of efficiency. Musk’s influence on the American state is not a joke. It is a laboratory for post-democratic governance. And Farage. Ever the mimic, ever the salesman. Is already importing the model.
The war in Ukraine is not only a tragedy. It is a test. And Britain, so far, is failing it. Zelenskyy is right: delay is complicity. But this government, like the last, prefers delay. It favours strategic ambiguity over material support. It preaches resilience while hollowing out the public realm. And the Labour leadership’s chief concern appears to be managing relationships. Whether with a weaponised Trump, a belligerent Russia, or an increasingly impatient British public.
Putin does not want peace. Not in Ukraine. Not in Europe. Not even in rhetoric. This isn’t a negotiation gone sour or a border dispute spiralling out of control. It is a project of imperial restoration, waged with missiles, drones, and the language of annihilation. Every so-called ceasefire is a trap; every lull, the opportunity for his military to regroup. Civilian apartment blocks are not collateral damage. They are the strategy. This is not a man seeking security guarantees or concessions. It is a man who sees chaos as leverage, destruction as diplomacy. To imagine otherwise is to mistake propaganda for policy and to indulge the fantasy that this war can be ended by words alone.
This is what decline looks like. The old alliances don’t hold. The new enemies are inside the walls. The rhetoric is resolute, but the response is anaemic. We are left with speeches about unity while energy bills soar, housing crumbles, and fascist culture warriors win council seats across the country.
Britain doesn’t need more cadets. It needs political courage. Cohesion cannot be summoned by appeals to patriotism or nostalgia. It must be built on material foundations. Housing, education, energy, redistribution.A sovereign people is not one trained to perform CPR on a failing state. It is one equipped to transform it. It is one that can resist domination, foreign or domestic.
“Don’t tell us how shite we are,” a family friend told Hill. “Tell us what we can do.”
We could start by refusing the decline. Refusing the warlords. Refusing the subcontracting of British foreign policy to American billionaires and the outsourcing of public life to nationalist grifters. A defence review that doesn’t address the economic order we live under is not a strategy.
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