It started on a stage in Munich in February 2025, when JD Vance gave a speech denouncing Europe, and ended the following January when Denmark flew soldiers, explosives, and blood supplies to Greenland in preparation for the previously unthinkable: a possible armed confrontation with America. In the space of 11 months, the United States tested, frayed, and then shattered the bonds of trust that have underpinned the transatlantic alliance for 80 years.
The shift that took place within that short window will reshape the world for years to come. The ramifications for Europe and for Britain are only just starting to play out: the retreat of the rules-based international order, the end of benign interdependence, and the destabilisation of the NATO alliance.
Within the Labour Party, old certainties are beginning to crumble and space is emerging for a new conversation about security. The strong Atlanticist tradition in our party is being challenged by US unreliability, making Atlanticists more open to arguments about pragmatic de-risking from the special relationship. This overlaps somewhat with an emerging Anglo-Gaullist tendency and with the Blue Labour tradition, which both prioritise sovereignty, albeit from different starting points. The soft left, meanwhile, have long been wary of excessive alignment with US foreign policy and are drawn to a more holistic idea of security, while security traditionalists argue that US ambivalence about its alliance obligations makes increased defence spending more important than ever.
The danger is that we all talk past each other, missing the opportunity to establish a new consensus and allowing the old one an undeserved extension of life.
The concept that can bridge these traditions is autonomy. I don’t mean a crude sort of self-sufficiency, but rather the ability to exert control, both strategically as a country and as individuals over our own lives. Autonomy is a broader concept than defence, encompassing energy security, technological sovereignty, biosecurity, and climate resilience, but defence is central to it.
The Brexit slogan, ‘take back control’, was so effective because it spoke to something visceral that got lost in the world of hyper-globalisation: the ability to shape our own lives. From energy price spikes and financial crashes to climate breakdown, pandemics, and overdependence on American finance, tech, and military power, we are continuously buffeted – both as individuals and as a country – by forces that are out of our control.
Autonomy is the essential precondition for security in this age of weaponised interdependence and external shocks. It means investing in nuclear power and renewable energy so that we’re no longer dependent on international oil and gas markets. It means nurturing British tech innovation and creating the financial infrastructure to allow it to scale. It means preparing properly for future pandemics, rather than relying purely on reactive measures. It means leaning into decarbonisation, as well as climate adaptation. And it means a strong defence focused on protecting our country, our vital interests, and our close allies.
For Atlanticists, autonomy provides a pathway for pragmatically de-risking from the US while making us a more capable ally in the long run. It naturally overlaps with the Anglo-Gaullist vision of a more independent, forward-looking Britain and places sovereignty at the heart of the conversation, which is a priority for Blue Labour. For the soft left, it allows for a less dependent relationship with Washington and creates space to bring more than just conventional defence into our security framework, while for security traditionalists, it ensures defence remains central within a broader approach.
There are many within our movement, including here in Mainstream, who might welcome the idea of expanding our framework for security to things like climate resilience and pandemic preparedness while still feeling uncomfortable with conventional defence sitting at the heart of it. It’s particularly difficult to accept the idea of increasing defence spending when that spending has historically been used in foreign interventions like Iraq and Afghanistan with damaging consequences, not least for our own security.
What’s different about defence spending in the autonomy framework is that it disentangles our use of hard power from the transatlantic alliance, in service of which it has too often been used for questionable or counterproductive ends, and situates it cleanly within the context of home defence, extending to protection of our vital interests and close allies only defensively. We don’t have to surrender well-earned scepticism about foreign intervention or discomfort with militarism in order to recognise the necessity of a credible home defence.
Nor does autonomy mean isolationism. It would see us move away from the kind of overdependence that increasingly characterises our security relationship with the US and towards more horizontal forms of cooperation that strengthen resilience while preserving sovereignty. In practice, that could mean deeper collaboration with Europe and other partners on defence-industrial capacity, strategic technology, and critical infrastructure without creating new relationships of dependency.
If autonomy is to be useful, it has to be more than just a shared language. It has to be operationalised in service of building strategic state capacity so that people in this country are no longer at the mercy of forces beyond their control. I’ve argued recently for a British Autonomy Bond, a new national investment vehicle designed to direct long-term capital investment into strategic sectors, including defence and defence-industrial capacity, nuclear and renewable energy, strategic infrastructure, AI and advanced computing, biosecurity, and other areas vital to national resilience. This idea shares some common ground with the proposals put forward recently by Louise Haigh in Renewal for re-aligning our fiscal framework with the need to rebuild long-term state capacity.
None of this will resolve every tension within the Labour movement. But autonomy offers something increasingly rare in our politics: a framework capable of bringing together traditions that have too often spoken past one another in service of a common project of democratic resilience and national renewal.
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Andrew Noakes is the founder of Future Statecraft, a project focused on rethinking statecraft after the rules-based order. He is the former chair and founder of the Labour Campaign for Human Rights.
All blog posts represent the views of the author alone and not necessarily those of Mainstream.
