In Britain’s new defence review, Russia is the enemy it needs — not the one it fears

In their defiance, their solitude, and their suspicion of the continent, these are kindred nations — divided not by difference, but by denial.

You can tell a lot about a country from the enemies it imagines. Britain’s latest defence review declares that Russia poses the “most urgent threat” in a new era of warfare — a claim delivered with full Whitehall solemnity, complete with references to drones, artificial intelligence, and the need for “mass” in a shrinking military. But for all the expensive language, this is not a sober assessment of strategic risk. It’s a psychological projection.

To believe that Russia constitutes a clear and present danger to the United Kingdom requires a certain willing suspension of disbelief. There have never been Russian troops on British soil. For them to get there, they’d have to cross the full breadth of Europe — Poland, Germany, France — a geopolitical absurdity unless you’ve spent too long in a NATO simulation room. The threat, then, is not about tanks or battalions. It’s about something deeper, harder to admit: the slow, grinding fear that Britain matters less than it used to.

For the architects of this review, Russia is less an adversary than a device — a villain to justify budgets, revive old alliances, and project relevance. Because the true crisis facing Britain isn’t from Moscow. It’s in its housing estates, its classrooms, its creaking public services. It’s in the knowledge that its global footprint has shrunk, and no one quite knows what to do about it.

There’s a particular irony in choosing Russia as the stand-in for this anxiety. For all their mutual suspicion, the British and the Russians have far more in common than either side is comfortable admitting. Both are historic European powers that have long regarded Europe itself with faint disdain. Both prefer the open sea or the open steppe to the committees of Brussels. Both are haunted by the grandeur of empires long gone, and both possess an elite class deeply nostalgic for the days when the world bent more easily to their will.

Neither country has ever really accepted being ordinary. And that, more than ideology or geography, is what binds them. Britain and Russia are mirror images — proud, prickly, stubbornly sovereign. Their shared impulse is to act, to warn, to posture — anything but concede that the axis of power has shifted elsewhere. And so they perform: Russia with its swaggering defiance, Britain with its ritualised reviews and the conjuring of external enemies.

If The Guardian's preview is accurate, what this latest document lacks is honesty. It gestures at innovation — drones, AI, cyber capabilities — but its spirit is old, almost Edwardian. It seeks to reassure, not to rethink. There is no clear-eyed appraisal of what modern security actually demands. No frank reckoning with the domestic vulnerabilities — political volatility, economic fragility, cultural drift — that would keep any real strategist awake at night. Instead, it offers the comfort of familiar antagonists and recycled ambitions.

Talk of revitalising home defences and rebuilding military accommodation sounds practical, but the subtext is theatrical. A “volunteer home guard” to protect airports from drones may warm hearts in some quarters, but it is hard to see it as anything other than symbolic. Britain is not preparing for war. It is preparing to feel prepared. And that is not the same thing.

The danger in all this is not that Britain is caught unawares by a Russian strike — that remains vanishingly unlikely. The real danger is that a great deal of money, time, and political capital will be poured into ghost-hunting while the real rot goes untreated. That the country will continue to mistake performance for purpose, military nostalgia for geopolitical relevance.

Meanwhile, the cultural connection with Russia remains largely unspoken, yet ever-present. The contempt for technocracy, the instinct for drama, the weight of historical grievance — these are not purely Russian traits. They are British ones too. The great lie of the Cold War era was that the two nations stood at polar opposites. The deeper truth is they share a temperamental aversion to being ruled from elsewhere, and a reflexive need to define themselves in opposition to continental norms.

Of course, none of this will appear in a defence white paper. Official documents cannot acknowledge that the theatre of global threat is as much about identity as it is about danger. Nor will they admit that invoking a supposed Russian menace is often more about shoring up domestic morale than responding to genuine risk.

But the public — cynical, weary, and more worldly than they’re often given credit for — can smell the pantomime. They know that Britain’s challenges are not on the horizon, but at their doorstep. They are watching real wages stagnate, public services buckle, and housing crises deepen. They are not asking for Cold War cosplay. They are asking for competence.

If Britain is to navigate this so-called new era of warfare, it might begin by identifying the real battlegrounds. They are not in the Urals or in Kaliningrad. They are in the towns and cities where cohesion is fraying. They are in the quiet recognition that the empire is over, and the next chapter has yet to be written.

Until then, Russia will remain a convenient spectre — not because it is coming, but because it reminds Britain of what it used to be, and what it fears becoming: ordinary.

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