Diverting funds from aid and soft power to pay for hard military power is alarming for a country like the UK, recently divorced from the EU project. 

The proponents of Brexit wrongly believed that EU membership was wasting the country’s riches by diverting them from its own welfare state to Brussels’ bureaucracy and regulations, hampering its ability to provide more for its citizens. 

Today, however, the winds blowing from the east, the need to protect Europe’s flank and the uncertainty of the transatlantic alliance create a moment of history that might upend Keir Starmer’s premiership into one that advocates for the rebirth of hard power.

Since his election last summer, the UK has been pondering how and when Starmer would find his mojo and morph from a chief prosecutor, or Labour Party convenor and operator, to a leader with a capital “L.” 

Some would have liked that to be achieved by the prime minister taking charge of rebuilding the state machinery after 14 years of chaotic Conservative government and its policy of austerity. 

Or by making Britain’s welfare system more reliable, investing in the police and courts or even finding a magic formula for growth, albeit without rejoining the EU’s customs union or reversing Brexit. 

But no, it seems that, rightly or wrongly, advocating for hard power and finding the means to get the UK and Europe to the table to negotiate peace with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump is what might make or break Starmer’s premiership.

Harvard professor Joseph Nye contrasted soft power with hard power in his book “Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics.” According to Nye, hard power refers to the use of force or coercion to achieve one’s goals, typically through military intervention or economic pressure. 

It is the art of compelling others to act in a way that aligns with one’s own interests, using tangible means like military force or economic sanctions.

I am not one to claim that the UK is turning to hubris here, but Starmer and the country feel they are being pushed into an existential crisis. 

It is an ally that seems to be exerting maximum pressure, which can only be mediated by opting for hard power pledges, even if this means a U-turn and a return to the old principle of spending more on guns and less on welfare and development, which has been increasingly shunned since the end of the Cold War.

Starmer has shifted in an unusual way and seems to have acted impulsively in an effort to buy favor and influence with the resident of the White House. 

Recognizing that the flow of money must go in another direction, the prime minister last week vowed to raise the UK’s defense spending to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product from 2027, up from the current 2.3 percent, with 3 percent as the eventual target. 

Initially, this funding increase comes at the expense of the overseas aid budget and, symbolically speaking, reorients the British posture from a soft power base to hard power.