This article appears in the August 8, 2025 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Britain Drives Towards War with Russia, Dragging France and Germany With It
July 29—Within the space of a week in July, the British government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer signed a defense treaty with France and then a defense treaty with Germany. Both built on previous treaties that Britain had signed with the two countries, and also a Franco-German defense treaty. These treaties, taken together and combined with other steps the Starmer government has taken since the beginning of June, are an unmistakable indication that the United Kingdom, joined by Germany and France, is preparing for a major war against Russia that would likely include the use of nuclear weapons.
“German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was in London this week, where he met with UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and signed a landmark UK-Germany friendship treaty. His visit follows that of French President Emmanuel Macron last week,” Nicolai von Ondarza wrote in an article published on July 18 by Chatham House, the British Empire’s leading foreign policy think tank. “These back-to-back visits symbolize and reinforce a return of the E3 group—France, Germany and the UK—as the driving force of European security. Despite Brexit, this configuration has the potential to tie the complex European security architecture together.”
Von Ondarza, a Chatham House associate fellow, stressed that the treaty’s “pillar on defense, which incorporates and extends last year’s UK-Germany Trinity House Agreement, is the most substantial of the treaties. It includes structured cooperation on defense industrial projects, such as a deep precision strike capability, defense exports coordination, cooperation on NATO’s eastern flank and in the North Sea, as well as a bilateral mutual defense clause on top of existing NATO commitments.”
Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche, in remarks during the July 18 meeting of the International Peace Coalition, noted that the British-German treaty is called the Kensington Treaty. “Kensington being a reference to a palace and the role of Queen Victoria,” she said. “Merz actually named her, which shows you this Chancellor has no sense. Victoria’s rule was the time when the British were actively planning World War I, mainly against Germany among others. To make that reference just shows you for sure that Chancellor Merz has a liking for the British Empire, which he is now gladly submitting to. But it also is an extremely worrisome development.” The main target of the British is Russia, but as with the Triple Entente of pre-World War I, things could turn out very badly as well for those who join the British in this march of folly.
Zepp-LaRouche observed that it is generally estimated that Russia, and its President Vladimir Putin in particular, will try everything possible to avoid the trap of being entangled in something which could get out of control and end civilization. “But Russia will be reacting in a very measured way. The Oreshnik moment would be the moment when they are sending the equivalent of an Oreshnik missile, however without a nuclear warhead—because that could be put on the Oreshnik,” she said. “But just by the kinetic energy of this new type of hypersonic missile, they could demonstrate that there are new physical principles at work. Such a reaction has to be expected soon.
“Now, I think this will happen, because if the West is continuously upping the ante, as with the Malcolm Chalmers appointment to be strategic advisor to the British Defense Minister, this should get everybody alarmed. Because these people are in a Cuban Missile Crisis-on-steroids mindset; or breaking the emergency glass; just break the rules and go completely out of control. That will be the moment when we have really the existence of civilization at stake.”
The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), the British monarchy’s leading military policy institute, where Chalmers served as deputy director for 17 years, announced on July 3 that he would leave RUSI to take up new positions as Strategic Advisor to Defense Secretary John Healey and Head of Review and Challenge in the UK’s Ministry of Defense. The announcement was another signal that the United Kingdom is actively, methodically preparing for nuclear war with Russia, arguably the greatest nuclear power on the planet, with the criminally insane idea that a nuclear war can be fought and won. Chalmers, as the number two at RUSI, is on the record advocating the use of nuclear weapons against Russia as a live option to force a Russian capitulation to NATO in the Ukraine conflict. Take two of the more egregious examples of his view:
In May of 2022, Chalmers infamously proposed, in the Financial Times and on RUSI, that a “Cuban Missile Crisis on steroids” with Russia over a Ukrainian attempt to seize Crimea, might be the best option to force Russia to capitulate. Chalmers admitted that “it would be a moment of extreme peril,” but he argued that “a nuclear crisis of this sort could make it easier for leaders to make difficult compromises.”
This past March 24, in a discussion with Shashank Joshi, defense editor of the imperial magazine The Economist, Chalmers argued for the possibility of the UK firing a “demonstration shot” nuclear strike on Russia from one of its submarines. He dismissed Royal Navy objections that if the UK fired a nuclear strike at Russia it would expose the positions of the UK’s strategic submarines, thus allowing Russia to neutralize the UK’s entire nuclear deterrent capability (so far, only submarine-based) in retaliation. That’s “ropey,” Chalmers argues. Not all missiles have to be fired at once; perhaps just one could be fired. Furthermore, the strike would not have to be on a large city; targeting a Russian military base and limiting the yield to that used in Hiroshima or Nagasaki might avoid the larger casualties entailed in nuking a large city. Thus, he and other “strategists” believe they can stay below the threshold of a full thermonuclear war.
UK Strategic Defense Review
The latest sequence of documents and treaties began with the June 1 release by the UK Ministry of Defense, of the Strategic Defense Review (SDR), composed by a panel co-chaired by former NATO Secretary General Lord George Robertson, General Sir Richard Barrons, and Fiona Hill, the British-American “Russia expert” who advised U.S. President Donald Trump during his first term. “Russia is at war with Britain, the U.S. is no longer a reliable ally, and the UK has to respond by becoming more cohesive and more resilient,” Hill told on June 6.
“Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn’t fully anticipated,” Hill claimed, arguing that Putin saw the Ukraine war as the starting point for Moscow becoming “a dominant military power in all of Europe.” As part of that long-term effort, Russia was already “menacing the UK in various different ways,” she said, citing alleged “poisonings, assassinations, sabotage operations, all kinds of cyber-attacks and influence operations. The sensors that we see that they’re putting down around critical pipelines, efforts to butcher undersea cables.”
The conclusion, Hill said, was that “Russia is at war with us.”
The SDR places Britain’s nuclear arsenal at the center of its military strategy in combination with its conventional forces. “The UK,” it says, “ must continue to dedicate its independent nuclear deterrent to NATO, adapting its alliances, industrial base, and military capabilities to ensure it can continue to deter the most extreme threats. The UK will need a full spectrum of options to manage escalation as part of NATO, delivered by its nuclear and conventional forces in combination. Defense should commence discussions with the United States and NATO on the potential benefits and feasibility of enhanced UK participation in NATO’s nuclear mission. Further investment in conventional deep precision strike and Integrated Air and Missile Defense would increase options for deterring and responding to high-impact threats.”
The review calls on the government to make sustaining the British nuclear deterrent the top priority of the Ministry of Defense (MoD), and to continue the program to develop a new “sovereign warhead” for the Trident missiles that arm the Royal Navy’s Vanguard ballistic missile submarines and that will arm the Dreadnought-class submarines that will replace them.
Also being expanded is the UK’s nuclear warhead program. A June 1 MoD press release says, “It is the first time the UK has outlined the full scale of its investment plans in its warhead programs and is further evidence of the Government’s triple lock commitment to the nuclear deterrent: to maintain our continuous at-sea deterrent; to build the new fleet of Dreadnought submarines; and to deliver all future upgrades necessary.” It continues, “This will see significant modernization of infrastructure at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) in Aldermaston [the British counterpart to the U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories with which it collaborates closely under the 1958 Mutual Defense Agreement—ed.]. The nuclear warhead program includes some of the most advanced and sensitive science, engineering and manufacturing facilities in the UK.” The release claims, “Both the UK’s sovereign warhead program and the UK’s conventionally-armed submarine fleet will make Britain and NATO safe for decades to come.”
In accordance with the SDR’s recommendation for enhanced UK participation in NATO’s nuclear mission, the Starmer government announced on June 24 that Britain will buy a dozen F-35A nuclear-capable stealth fighters and join NATO’s nuclear sharing program. “The new fast jets will be based at RAF Marham, with the Government expected to procure 138 F35s over the lifetime of the program,” the Prime Minister’s office said in a statement. “The purchase represents the biggest strengthening of the UK’s nuclear posture in a generation. It also reintroduces a nuclear role for the Royal Air Force for the first time since the UK retired its sovereign air-launched nuclear weapons [in 1997] following the end of the Cold War.”
Bringing the UK into NATO’s nuclear sharing program will have obvious implications for the U.S., as it is the U.S. that will provide the B61-12 nuclear bombs that the F-35A’s will be equipped to drop, but this is not mentioned in the statement. RAF Marham is about 25 kilometers north of RAF Lakenheath, where the U.S. Air Force has recently upgraded the existing nuclear storage bunkers. Evidence, including publicly available flight data, emerged in the third week of July that the U.S. had returned nuclear bombs to Lakenheath for the first time since 2008.
The statement quotes Starmer as saying: “The UK’s commitment to NATO is unquestionable, as is the Alliance’s contribution to keeping the UK safe and secure, but we must all step up to protect the Euro-Atlantic area for generations to come.”
It also says: “The Strategic Defense Review recognized that the UK is confronting a new era of threat, including rising nuclear risks. It recommended that the UK further strengthen our commitment to effective deterrence and our partnership with our NATO Allies, building on our unique role as the only European power to pledge our nuclear deterrent to defend our NATO allies.”
National Security Strategy Takes Aim at Russia
On June 26, the British government released its “National Security Strategy 2025: Security for the British People in a Dangerous World.” Starmer, in the document’s forward, declared that the world has changed. “Russian aggression menaces our continent,” he claimed. “Strategic competition is intensifying. Extremist ideologies are on the rise. Technology is transforming the nature of both war and domestic security. Hostile state activity takes place on British soil. It is an era of radical uncertainty, and we must navigate it with agility, speed and a clear-eyed sense of the national interest.”
The report draws on what it claims are three lessons that are fundamental to British national security today: “First, that foreign policy should answer directly to the concerns of working people”; second, “that collective security, led by NATO, remains the cornerstone of our strategy”; and third, “that nations are strongest when they are bound together by a shared purpose.”
“One look at the world today shows the security challenges we face demand nothing less than national unity. Therefore, it is no longer enough merely to manage risks or react to new circumstances,” Starmer continued. “We must also now mobilize every element of society towards a collective national effort.” The idea behind the strategy is “a hardening and sharpening of our approach. It means viewing higher living standards as an essential national security goal. It means restoring security to our borders as a crucial test of fairness and social cohesion. It means marshaling our comparative advantage in science and technology to create new opportunities for working people….”
“Protecting the UK and promoting British interests is becoming increasingly hard, however,” the document says in the introduction, in very war-like language. “Threats are proliferating. We are entering a period in which we are likely to face indirect and potentially direct confrontation with adversaries, the intensification of strategic competition—including the increasing salience of nuclear weapons in the policies, doctrines and approaches of our adversaries—and a radical renegotiation of the terms on which we cooperate with allies and other partners, with major implications for how and where we invest our resources.”
The main target of the strategy is Russia, though it doesn’t neglect China, Iran, or North Korea. The strategy is based on a “threat focused paradigm” which “places particular importance on the role of our armed forces, intelligence, security and law enforcement agencies. The SDR has identified the most acute threat as that posed by Russia and prescribed a ‘NATO first’ but not NATO-only plan for the modernization of our military—with a more integrated, digitally-enabled and lethal force.” In response, the UK “will adopt a campaigning approach to: minimize the ability of others to coerce us or undermine the foundations of our national strength; and maximize opportunities to enhance our security and prosperity, sometimes acting alone but mostly acting in concert with others.”
A New Nuclear Entente Cordiale
On July 10, Starmer met French President Emmanuel Macron at the Northwood military base outside of London, and they issued a number of documents on tightening Anglo-French relations. The documents cover several areas, including dealing with migrants crossing the English Channel and economic cooperation, but the center pieces are closer coordination of the two countries’ nuclear forces and an expansion of joint military structures.
“We reaffirm our determination to ensure Russia does not prevail in its illegal war of aggression, as well as our commitment to lasting support to Ukraine, including security assurances that safeguard its independence and sovereignty,” they said in a joint declaration. “We have agreed to launch a Counter-Shadow Fleet Partnership to crack down on dangerous Russian-backed vessels in the Channel, reduce Russian oil revenues via these vessels, and safeguard our maritime security. Alongside this, we commit to seeking a lowering of the crude oil price cap, further depriving Russia of the oil revenues it uses to fund its barbaric war. We will strengthen our joint efforts to prevent the supplying of dual-use components and weapons to Russia by third countries’ entities. We reiterate our readiness to step up pressure on Russia as it refuses to commit to peace.”
In a separate joint nuclear statement, they reiterated the supposedly long-held view that Paris and London “do not see situations arising in which the vital interests of either France or the United Kingdom could be threatened without the vital interest of the other also being threatened. France and the United Kingdom agree that there is no extreme threat to Europe that would not prompt a response by our two nations.”
“France and the United Kingdom have therefore decided to deepen their nuclear cooperation and coordination,” the statement says. “A UK-France Nuclear Steering Group will be established to provide political direction for this work. It will be led by the Presidency of the French Republic and the Cabinet Office and will coordinate across nuclear policy, capabilities and operations.” [Box: Does Russia Threaten NATO, or Vice Versa?]
In a third document, entitled “Lancaster House 2.0: Declaration on Modernizing UK-French Defense and Security Cooperation,” Starmer and Macron announced that they “have decided to reboot, modernize and build upon our bilateral defense and security relationship.” This includes further statements on nuclear coordination; expanding the existing Combined Joint Expeditionary Force into a 50,000-strong Combined Joint Force (CJF), which could operate with NATO or bilaterally; “Establish a mechanism to share, coordinate and synchronize military activity and the deployment of UK and French forces globally, ensuring we are providing the most effective deterrence posture;” and, “Use the CJF structures to underpin the Coalition of the Willing for Ukraine. The force will provide the joint planning framework to cohere the Coalition, ensure joint operational and strategic messaging. It will provide Coalition leadership and command and control for the planning and operational deployment of the Coalition covering all five domains, preparing for the operational deployment of the CJF in the event of a ceasefire—which can be supported by allies.”
The UK-German Kensington Treaty
On July 17, Starmer hosted German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in London to sign an Anglo-German accord, which Merz had hinted beforehand would be a document unprecedented in the history of the two countries’ relations. Elements of the agreement, referred to as the Kensington Treaty because they signed it at the Victoria and Albert Museum, include cooperation on the migrant crisis and economic cooperation, but the centerpiece was a mutual defense pact which echoes the Anglo-French treaty signed just a week earlier. “Conscious of the close alignment of their vital interests and convinced that there is no strategic threat to one which would not be a strategic threat to the other, the Parties affirm as close Allies their deep commitment to each other’s defense and shall assist one another, including by military means, in case of an armed attack on the other,” it says.
In the press conference with the two leaders, Merz called it “a historic day for German-British relations” and expressed his wish to bring Germany closer to the British Empire: “We want to work more closely together, particularly after the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union. It is long overdue that we conclude such a treaty with each other. We want to work more closely together in the area of defense, in the area of foreign policy, but also in the area of economic policy and domestic policy. There are so many areas where the UK and we can work closely together, even more closely than in the past.”
The document asserts that the Russian Federation’s brutal war of aggression on the European continent is the most significant and direct threat to their security. It calls for an integration of British and German activity on the matters of intelligence, national security, and on the matter of nuclear weapons, saying, among other points: “The Parties shall pursue deep exchanges on strategic aspects of security policy, including deterrence and defence, nuclear issues, arms control, non-proliferation, chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear threats, space security, counter-terrorism and the broader international security architecture, in order to support the security of Europe and the world. They shall increase cooperation on intelligence and national security capabilities in order to contribute effectively to this goal.” Germany is not a nuclear power, but it is a member of NATO’s nuclear sharing program with U.S. B61-12 bombs stored at the Büchel Air Base in western Germany.
This was underlined in their joint press conference on July 17, after signing the Treaty. Reuters reported: “Merz said the two had discussed Ukraine’s need for long-range strike systems, which he called ‘long range fire.’ ‘And Ukraine will soon receive substantial additional support in this area,’ he told the press conference,” although the treaty extends significantly beyond the issue of Ukraine.
Russia Taking Account of the British War Drive
Moscow has taken a dim view of all this, but Russian officials stress that they are taking all of these developments into account in their own political and military planning. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said as much on July 10, the day Starmer and Macron signed their nuclear agreement. “Now that this type of interaction is being formalized and put on a stable and solid basis, we will take this into account not only politically but also in our military planning,” he said, responding to a corresponding question, reported TASS. Russia cannot ignore the aggregate potential of these two countries as the U.S.’s closest allies in NATO, he stressed. (The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that the two countries have a combined total of slightly over 500 warheads.) “All this fits into the general and, let us say directly, anti-Russian focus of the NATO policy,” the high-ranking diplomat explained.
More broadly, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, during a July 11 press conference in Kuala Lumpur, drew attention to what he described as the militarist policies of German Chancellor Merz and manifestations of Nazism in Europe. “If Europe is heading down this path again, it is regrettable. We will fully take this into account in all spheres of our planning,” Lavrov said.
Gretchen Small and Richard Freeman contributed material to this report.
Does Russia Threaten NATO, or Vice Versa?
Aug. 2—The narrative propagated in the West has been that Russia is inherently expansionist, and represents a clear and present danger to the peace, security and territorial integrity of European nations. Even without examining the threats and rhetoric coming from the British Empire and their co-thinkers, simply looking at recent history tells a different story.
