Restoring Factory Settings: The 2025 UK-EU Summit

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen will today trumpet a largely successful UK-EU political ‘reset’. The first formal summit since the UK officially left the EU in 2020 is a significant moment in post-Brexit relations and establishes formalised cooperation in additional policy areas to those under the 2020 Trade and Cooperation Agreement and consolidates political cooperation.

The summit had to deal with some traditional Brexit contentions – agriculture, migration, fisheries and youth mobility – which reportedly almost derailed the agreements at the eleventh hour, with Keir Starmer using Friday’s meeting of the European Political Community for last-minute lobbying of national leaders. Fisheries remain a particularly sticky topic, despite it only contributing around 0.03% of total UK economic output of the UK. On the EU side, the French, in particular, seem to still harbour a grudge over Brexit, despite having the closest defence and security bilateral relationship with the UK in Europe and working very closely together on creating a coalition of the willing to support Ukraine as the US changes its priorities. The real challenge for both sides is working out how to insulate defence and security from other policy areas where there is less alignment.

This behaviour exposes a contradiction in EU-UK defence relations. If the threat to European security is genuinely grave, and increased UK-EU cooperation is vital to security, then why are both sides holding up progress over relatively minor domestic priorities and legacy disagreements?

As expected, the centrepiece of the summit was the signing of a ‘Security and Defence Partnership’ (SDP). It is unlikely to be a decisive step forward in UK-EU relations, although it establishes mechanisms to work towards that goal, if the political will on both sides continues. However, given the geopolitical gravity of the situation, it is a wasted opportunity.

Where is the Ambition?

The preface depicts a grim and darkening world where European security faces its ‘greatest threat in a generation’. Yet the SDP fails to articulate why enhanced UK-EU cooperation is critical to protecting European security – the UK is already a vital member of NATO and has excellent minilateral and bilateral relationships with Europe. In this context, the SDP fails to live up to the dark vision the preface depicts. It states: ‘The seriousness of the challenges we face calls for ambitious security and defence dialogue and cooperation between the UK and the EU’. However, it fails to match the seriousness with the explicit requirement for enhanced dialogue with the UK.

First, there are no tangible deliverables or milestones, instead relying on vague commitments to talk more. Seven new structures are created including a six-monthly foreign policy dialogue, a security and defence dialogue, and a variety of ad hoc ‘high-level’ meetings as required. Moreover, there are six areas for ‘regular consultations’ on policy and best practice. The reason given for the new governance structure is to ‘monitor implementation’. However, no monitoring is currently needed as there are no deliverables. In short, it is unlikely to deliver ambitious proposals as it is not designed to.

Furthermore, these areas of cooperation geographically span most of the globe – Russia and Ukraine, the Western Balkans, the Black Sea, Middle East, Africa and Indo-Pacific – across eighteen thematic hard and soft security challenges. This agenda is certainly ambitious, but far too broad to develop meaningful deliverables, especially where UK-EU cooperation might be important and unique, outside of a NATO framework. Finally, the UK government already has far more ambitious agreements with a variety of EU member states, including France, Germany, Finland, Norway and Ukraine.

Finally, the agreement reads very much like the 2024 EU-Norway Security and Defence Partnership. Moreover, Norway are extant participants in the European Defence Fund (EDF), the European Defence Agency (EDA) and the military mobility PESCO project (the UK has also applied to join the latter but is still held up by Spain). Norway now also supports the EU’s training mission for the Ukrainian Armed Forces (EUMAM Ukraine) and participates in new EU programmes to ramping up ammunition production capacity (ASAP). The EU also has agreed SDPs with Albania, Japan, Moldova, North Macedonia and South Korea. The UK has been arguing for several years that its defence and security standing should allow it special treatment and the ability to negotiate unique agreements. However, the lack of deliverables suggest that this is an approach that the EU remains wary of and will continue to view the UK as simply another third country.

Operational Controversy

The most significant – and controversial – element of the SDP is the possibility that UK troops could be commanded by the EU on crisis management missions:

‘The UK will consider its participation in the EU CSDP (Common Security and Defence Policy) civilian and military crisis management, in geographical areas of common interest, upon the invitation of the EU. The EU and the UK will explore the arrangements which could enable such participation in line with the respective decision making procedures.’

This article has already been miscommunicated with suggestions that it would amount to UK forces joining a EU Army via the backdoor. The UK has a rich history of operating with Europeans overseas and this cooperation forms the backbone of the UK’s approach to NATO and the genesis of the Joint Expeditionary Force. This will likely become a perennial line of attack, and the government must prepare to defend it.

First, to ‘consider’ participation is not a commitment to deploy, and as such does not compromise government sovereignty in any way. However, it will create subsequent high levels of scrutiny when requests are made. If the UK does not use the mechanism, then it could create frictions with the EU which could hamper other areas of cooperation. Second, the UK and Europe have lost the political will to conduct crisis management operations – the primary task of CSDP missions under the EU Strategic Compass – after failures (alongside the US) in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the Sahel. The reluctance to get stuck into them again will endure. Third, a lack of capacity; as European militaries transition away from post-Cold War expeditionary warfare and back to defence and deterrence against Russia, Europeans are unlikely to have the ability to deploy on any enduring operations. Fourth, the UK has other options to deploy on crisis management operations with Europeans, such as the Joint Expeditionary Force, the Combined Joint Expeditionary Force with France, or developing coalitions of the willing. The JEF is even specifically designed to operate alongside CSDP missions Finally, even when the UK was a member of the EU and a founder of CSDP, it rarely used the mechanism, preferring to operate with the US or NATO. Between 1998 and 2018 the UK’s contribution of personnel to CSDP operations accounted for just 2.3% of total member state contributions.

Missed Opportunities

An agreement on defence industrial cooperation was conspicuous by its absence, when it is by far the most valuable area of cooperation for both sides. The run up to the summit focussed on industrial cooperation and the UK accessing the EU Commission’s planned €150 billion SAFE (Security Action for Europe) loan facility for joint procurement between member states and – with caveats – qualifying third countries. Instead, the only commitment is:

‘Possibilities for signing an Administrative Arrangement between UK and the European Defence Agency (EDA) will also be explored, in line with respective processes.’

That the SDP does not include concrete proposals on defence industrial cooperation – despite the urgent need for Europe to boost mutual defence industrial capacity considering Russian aggression and US unreliability – exposes the disagreements and frustrations still within the relationship. Again, it seems that the French position is blocking greater UK participation, perhaps with the view that the UK is a threat to its own protectionist national industry, favouring a European defence industrial system which excludes the UK.

However, there are other options open to the UK, a nation that is unlikely to accept such a snub for long. The UK is a founding member of the Organisation for Joint Armament Cooperation – a treaty-based agreement with European defence heavyweights, including France, Germany and Italy (which has developed joint European programmes such as the Boxer infantry fighting vehicle and A400M strategic lift platform). Therefore, the UK can cooperate with five European members (and a further seven non-member participants) in a more flexible way than it would with the 27 members of the EDA.

Moreover, the UK is using its network of enhanced bilateral relationships more effectively for capability development, for example, through the UK-German Trinity House Agreement that will jointly produce new ‘Deep Precision Strike Capability’ with a range of 2,000km, following an announcement last week. There are significant economies of scale benefits to closer UK-EU cooperation, and the EU would also benefit from UK research and development heft and specialisations, such as intelligence. But the most significant procurements are happening elsewhere. A failure to agree an industrial agreement in time has exposed the significant disagreements on defence and security that will remain, despite the political line that there is ‘close alignment’ between the two.

Political Groundhog Day

In stark contrast to how Labour talks about NATO and the leading role the party and Ernest Bevin played in its establishment, there is no such romanticism with the EU. In 1998, it was then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac who put in place the foundations of what is now the EU CSDP – a sea change for UK policy at the time. Yet there is no reference to the UK’s previous role within EU security structures.

The product of this is a formulaic agreement which will help reset the relationship but fail to significantly upgrade it. Of course, this has been the UK government objective since coming to power and, considering how bad UK-EU relations have been over the past decade, both sides should be commended for achieving the summit, the SDP and a meaningful reset. While the new structured cooperation will make cooperation closer procedurally, it will do little to narrow the gulf which exists between strategic cultures.

However, there is also a risk that it has oversold the benefits of the SDP in the quest for the wider political reset. Domestically, the summit is unlikely to put the question of Europe to bed and it will continue to be faced with tricky positions to hold. If it does too much then it risks shedding voters towards Reform (who are currently polling 6% above the government nationally). However, if it does not do enough then they could similarly shed votes to pro-EU parties such as the Liberal Democrats, Greens, or Scottish Nationalist Party in Scotland. Ultimately, the Prime Minister will be scorned for any agreement with the EU from some parts of the UK political and media establishment. Therefore, he should have pushes for something genuinely ambitious that was worth the expenditure of political capital. The build up to this summit and its outputs have demonstrated that while the UK and the EU might want to showcase defence and security as a closely aligned partnership, it cannot divorce it from cooperation in other policy areas.

© RUSI, 2025.

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