By all accounts, Andy Burnham thinks Keir Starmer has spent too much time abroad in his two years as Prime Minister and will not seek the same sort of profile on the global stage. In response, Starmer – still smarting from what he perceives as a political and personal betrayal from his own side – has pointedly suggested that Burnham may not find it so easy in practice to organise his time this way, such is the intertwined nature of domestic and international affairs. The conduct of foreign policy in almost every advanced industrial democracy is becoming more centralised, so it will not be easy to buck the trend. As will become apparent from the first briefings of the new No 10 team, national security is not only the first job of every prime minister; it is also one of the few areas in which the sovereign decision-making power of the principal is genuinely consequential.
And should Burnham spend much time in the new No 10 North – let alone get to as many Everton games as his predecessor did Arsenal – the already formidable pressures on his diary will grow even more. There are some discretionary international meetings he may choose to miss, though noisy stakeholders in the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) and elsewhere will be quick to appeal. The first internal battle will be over whether he goes to the leader’s week of the UN General Assembly in New York in September, bumping right up against the Labour Party Conference. The next will be over his attendance at the UN Climate Change Cop summit in Turkey in November. “Can we afford to cede the ground to the Greens or Lib Dems on climate, particularly if we’ve just decided to drill in the North Sea?” his team will ask. “Can’t we fit in a visit to Ukraine before Christmas, lest we risk losing a leadership role painstakingly built over the previous five years?” they will add, as a slew of European leaders jump on the train to Kyiv for crucial talks.
It may be that Burnham intends to appoint a higher-profile foreign secretary, possibly operating from the less time-intensive House of Lords, to which he may delegate some leader-level engagements. But his No 10 operation-in-waiting, which has some wily characters, fully understands that the international arena will play a significant part in the fate of his government (not least prospects for economic growth) and that just leaving it all up to the Cabinet Office, Foreign Office or Ministry of Defence comes with its own risks. Persuading Jonathan Powell to stay – the model of a political rather than bureaucratic national security adviser, as originally intended when the position was first created in 2010 – is a sign that this is understood.
Indeed, Burnham has already made his first major national security decision in acquiescing to Starmer’s desire to publish the much-delayed Defence Investment Plan on 30 June, following the resignation of John Healey, the former defence secretary, in a row over the funding shortfall. There had been some fleeting hope in the military top brass that a new Burnham government would look at this issue afresh, or that the more hawkish parts of the PLP – perhaps organised around Healey or another former minister, Al Carns – could make increased defence spending the price of their compliance to a Burnham coronation.
Understandably, there was no desire in Team Burnham to inherit the burning platform of defence spending that had already put paid to Starmer’s rapidly diminishing chances of political survival. The realpolitik calculation was to let the sitting PM pass the stool and suffer the pain of doing so. As it turned out, it was only after the deal was done that it was revealed approximately £5bn over four years in additional savings would still have to be found in time for the chancellor’s autumn statement. Worse still, these savings will most likely have to come from cuts in regional transport and infrastructure projects. The net result is to put defence on a collision course with Manchesterism at the Burnham government’s first major fiscal event.
There will be a bitter irony for Starmer that his last major international engagement as Prime Minister will end where it started for him two years ago: at a Nato summit. I was a No 10 adviser when he made his first international trip, just days after finishing an exhausting 2024 general election campaign, to Washington DC. The meeting he attended was supposed to be a crowning moment for Joe Biden and his allies but it will forever be remembered instead as evidence of his mental and physical decline. Having shorn themselves of any whiff of Corbynism and with no Trump in the White House, the British delegation had a relatively easy ride in expressing their full fidelity to Nato, evoking Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin. The other message was one of continuity with the Sunak government’s approach, including strong support for Ukraine and a reset with the EU that was already in motion. We even had time to watch the Euros – and see Harry Kane score a penalty against the Netherlands – in the conference foyer with the Dutch PM.
But I remember talking to colleagues from other Nato member states who were amazed by the lack of time for orderly transition in the British political system – as a new set of ministers were thrown straight into the lion’s den with heavy ministerial folders and barely a few hours to master their brief. Burnham has more time – albeit just a few weeks – and perhaps more governmental experience in the form of figures like James Purnell.
In the final analysis, despite best efforts on Ukraine, and blessed with the astute help of Powell, Starmer goes out with a bit of a whimper. It will be painfully obvious at the Ankara summit that the UK still has no clear plan to reach Nato’s new defence spending target of at least 3.5 per cent, nor even agree on a pathway to 3 per cent, an issue that will continue to trouble the next government. What Burnham will find in his wake is that good-mannered diplomacy and automatonic expressions of respect for the rules-based international system does not quite cut it as much as the British self-image would like to imagine. Geopolitical relevance today is measured in hard metrics: the amount put into the military and the outputs it delivers; the ability to put drones in the air or ships in the sea; a country’s place in the AI stack; and, above all, its fiscal and economic power. Just turning up and putting an arm around Volodymyr Zelensky is not enough. There is an important difference here between diplomacy – which is too often regarded as an ameliorative, reputation-enhancing and innately civilised activity – and statecraft, which is a sharper practice better understood as instrumentalising the tools of state power with the intention of getting your way.
A comforting version of a possible way forward for the new government is provided by the Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper’s long essay, published on 6 July, for the website of Chatham House. It is, in essence, a conventional argument for multilateral cooperation, particularly around climate change and AI, and a notable lean away from the US into an explicitly more European approach. It is the stuff of mainstream liberal-left sentiment and a description of existing Foreign Office activities that is well-tuned to university faculties and median PLP sensibilities. The three main recommendations – “greater strength and resilience”, “determined diplomacy” and “more confidence in our values” – are hard to argue with but could have been in any foreign secretary speech of the past two decades.
What is missing are the things that are likely to collide with Burnham’s government from the moment he steps into No 10 – from the trade-offs to the sharp dilemmas that are cresting on the horizon. In this, there are likely to be steep and disorientating pendulum swings between risk and reward.
[Further reading: Which god does JD Vance kneel to?]
The first, which gets scant attention in the Cooper essay but has huge potential consequences for the UK, is the changing shape of the war in Ukraine. It has been evident for months that Russia’s war is not going well, with vast casualties on the front line and scant territorial gains. There is talk of another wave of mobilisation, possibly after the Russian elections, while the economy is beginning to show signs of significant strain. This is accentuated by the ever-greater effectiveness of Ukrainian strikes on targets in Russia, from major cities to supply lines and oil refineries, causing large queues at fuel stations and a growing sense of vulnerability. Just this month, the Ukrainian military’s ability to hit occupied Crimea has been demonstrated with a series of strikes that Russia has been unable to stop. In response, there have been several deadly attacks on civilian targets in Kyiv as a sign of the growing desperation in Moscow.
Against this backdrop, the E3 – the UK, France and Germany – have begun to consider a scenario in which Vladimir Putin may finally be more amenable to negotiations, in the hope that he may solidify the gains he has made. Part of the rationale is that Europe cannot entertain a situation in which another US-Russia negotiation emerges that threatens to impose an ill-conceived peace on Europe, possibly to the grave misfortune of Ukraine, which it then has to live with for years to come.
It is right and proper that work is done to anticipate this scenario in which the intensity of the fighting peaks and begins to dissipate, leaving the space open for talks. But there has been no evidence – and not since the war began – that Putin is inclined to settle in this way. In fact, it is just as easy to entertain a counter-scenario in which, with his back to the wall, Putin seeks to change the dynamic of the war with an act of escalation. The former would imply a great intensification of the war in Ukraine and possibly a return to nuclear sabre-rattling. The latter, which he seems to have been signalling by calling out Ukraine’s supporters in Europe, would involve an attempt to impose a security dilemma outside the main theatre of war. According to a series of well-sourced briefings, this could range from a significant increase in hybrid activities in Nato countries like Poland, to the engineering of a direct confrontation with a Baltic state. Any such prospect would mobilise the concerns of every part of the British government, including the Treasury. Even if one viewed them as isolated, the growing frequency of maritime confrontations involving British and Russian vessels – some interdictions and others more haphazard – is rife with the risk of further miscalculation and confrontation.
This is the type of thing that unavoidably lands on the desk of the prime minister and cannot be delegated. Rishi Sunak was not even three weeks into his premiership when we had to wake him in the middle of the night at the G20 in Indonesia after reports that a missile had landed in Poland. After investigation, it turned out that it was a stray Ukrainian projectile, but there were a few hours in which the assembled delegates had to ponder the prospect that it was a scenario involving Nato Article 5. Sunak was to appoint David Cameron to the Lords to serve as foreign secretary for the last eight months of his government, but the truth is that delegating too much was more challenging in practice due to the sheer volume and gravity of decisions that run through No 10.
A second major strategic challenge comes from the Middle East. Cooper’s essay also talks of injecting “new energy” into the Middle East peace plan and the two-state solution, following recognition of Palestine. It refers to the government’s efforts to assemble a coalition of nations to “defend the principle of freedom of navigation” in the Gulf – albeit one that was high on principle and rather less effective on action. But those valiant principles are bumping up against some fearsome realities. Europe breathed a collective sigh of relief when Donald Trump indicated an end to the Iran war. But the botched and haphazard peace deal negotiated in Islamabad leaves several major strategic fissures highly likely to open up again soon.
Principal among these is the nuclear issue, which has not been properly addressed and does not feature in Cooper’s essay. Robust verification was nominally agreed to in the US-Iran memorandum of understanding, but inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency have so far been denied access to sites in Iran. Open-source intelligence experts assess that Iran is reinforcing tunnel entrances at the so-called Pickaxe Mountain site near the Natanz nuclear enrichment facility, in violation of the deal. The Iranian regime – which MI5 says retains significant intent and capability to hurt the UK homeland – is engaging in a fierce internal debate about how to reconstitute its military strength, with some calculating that the war has cost Trump the Senate and the House, meaning that it will have more freedom to assert itself once more in the region from the autumn. Add to that the prospect of an Israeli election by November and a suite of unresolved issues around navigation of the Strait of Hormuz, including indirect tolls for shipping, and one can see the prospects for another energy and security crisis – and possibly even another war – in the second half of the year.
A third issue surrounds the urgency of the AI agenda, underscored by the US government’s recent export ban of Anthropic’s AI systems, Claude Fable 5 and Mythos 5, for fear of their exploitation by adversaries or hostile actors. This is a policy area that is vital for accruing power in the modern world and where the UK has certain pre-existing strengths, as well as a capacity for significant growth. It is also inextricably interwoven with defence modernisation, in which there is a chance – notwithstanding the funding shortfall – to develop a competitive edge, and leverage this to good effect on both sides of transatlantic relations.
All the evidence suggests that Team Burnham will lean quite heavily towards greater regulation and social oversight of tech platforms. Sensibly, Cooper’s essay also nods to this in highlighting the importance of establishing better international mechanisms to manage AI risks. But such an agenda requires a deftness and a realism about the UK’s relative strengths and weaknesses that a crass and over-heated debate about the sins of Big Tech does not lend itself to.
For example, the aspiration to create “AI sovereignty” and an entirely admirable desire to empower local communities sometimes clouds thinking on this subject. The smart money is around creating interdependence. Poking a finger in the eye of Big Tech might play well at home. But it will have a rapid and deleterious impact on the existing AI hotspots and talent pool in places such as King’s Cross and the wider Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle. Those at the forefront of this work have plenty of concerns about elements of US policy, but none of them will be solved by flouncing. It is a highly complicated process that requires negotiation and a new form of statecraft. It has profound implications for our political economy in which the state will need to be an economic actor as well as a regulator. We need to consider the implications of the US government taking significant shares in some of the major AI providers, partly to mitigate against a popping of the tech bubble and partly because they are understood to be fundamental to the rudiments of future national power.
Of all the major economic ministries in the advanced world, the Treasury is the most resistant to such proactive acts of state economic policy. This is even before we begin to consider the radical and politically explosive changes in energy or education policy that would have to accompany these highfalutin aspirations to sovereignty.
These arguments are not easy to take from the mouths of the Big Tech bogeymen; but they are understood among those at the forefront of Britain’s impressive AI community and those who appreciate these realities from the perspective of the intelligence agencies and military. Even the big beasts in the US and China understand that the tech stack is so overlapping and supply chains so intertwined that aspirations to complete sovereignty are empty. As such, on the grounds it might be more palatable, Team Burnham should read “Strategic Autonomy in the Age of Artificial Intelligence”, a recently published essay by two former Biden policy planners, Salman Ahmed and Matan Chorev, who are now at the Rand Corporation. They argue, sagely, that the “defining challenge ahead is not to escape dependency but to manage it wisely: building strong national capacity across the stack while shaping the cooperative architectures that an era of transformational AI – full of civilisational risks and opportunities – will demand”.
Every new government likes to develop its own foreign policy identity. But the requirements of national and economic security in today’s world should caution Burnham’s team from lurching towards simple-sounding answers to complex problems. The UK is not well-served by an international arena in which big blocs assert themselves through the tools of economic statecraft such as tariffs, dumping, export controls and import screening. For that reason, the full implications of pursuing our own form of blocism via a prioritisation of a European agenda in these areas has to be thoroughly tested – the more so because any such reset is restricted by Labour’s own manifesto commitments and quite hard to imagine yielding significant results in time for the next general election.
Added to this are political trends that are difficult to anticipate. Right now you would get reasonable odds on the Democrats looking ascendant from November. Meanwhile Marine Le Pen’s National Rally is leading in the race for the presidency of France. In Germany, Friedrich Merz, a willing partner for the UK, is struggling badly. But in any case, the really clever thinking in Europe – from key capitals to Nato and the EU Commission – is geared towards a recalibration and renegotiation of the entire transatlantic relationship. It might take years to come to fruition but it is far more sensible than succumbing to the mandate of the arsonists who want to burn it all down.
If there is an advantage to Burnham not doing as much international diplomacy, it may be that some of the emotion is removed from these debates. With a less lawyerly government, one may also get less theologising about international law and more grunt work to make it work for the interests of British people. What is needed is something unsentimental, painstaking, discreet and cognisant of the fact that the desirable answer may not always be attainable – or that the popular position may sometimes grind up against the long-term national interest. There is a small window to get this right.
[Further reading: The US at 250: the Degradation of Independence]
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This article appears in the 08 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great Con
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Subscribe here to commentAll this analysis and no mention of GCHQ which is the nerve centre of British Intelligence. By all means govern as if you are going to be in power forever, as any future government of any party or coalition, should govern but remember it is the future of all our liberties that is at stake. Burnham has the experience and if he appoints David Miliband to any office he will have access to the best brains available. I am not surprised at your low opinion of the Treasury mandarins who, along with the Office for Budgetry Responsible, manage to arrive at different forecasts on the British economy from both the Bank of England and each other, using the same data imputs. This problem of Putin and Russian imperialism must be solved.