UK and Europe will have to supply arms to Kyiv and strengthen our own defences, which will require a radical rethink
William Hague
April 21, 2025
The Times
Former US senator George Mitchell is rightly credited with making a decisive contribution to peace in Northern Ireland, helping to steer for over two years the talks that led to the Good Friday agreement in 1998. Even for him, a man of wisdom and humility, it was often an exasperating process that required exceptional persistence — in his own words “seven hundred days of failure and one day of success”. In what already seems a different age of American leadership, Mitchell brought to the process qualities of trustworthiness, fair-mindedness, leverage and, above all, patience.
In its efforts to end the war in Ukraine, the US is taking the opposite approach. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, has already threatened to give up trying, with President Trump saying he might “take a pass”. Since President Putin is clearly set on continuing the war while dividing the West, with the short-lived Easter truce no more than a public relations tactic, such threats to walk away only incentivise him to carry on. It is a counter-productive approach in defiance of all recent experience of bringing peace talks to a successful conclusion.
Peace does not come on a timetable suited to social media updates and campaign statements. In the case of the Korean War, the peace talks that began in 1951 agreed an agenda that was doggedly followed through dozens of meetings spread over two years before an armistice was finally agreed in July 1953. That armistice is still in force today. But it has only held for 72 years because the United States has stationed forces in South Korea to deter renewed conflict. Peace in Korea thus required both patience and strength, neither of which are on offer from Washington for Ukrainians today.
Other viable peace processes in recent decades have shown a similar pattern. The Oslo Accords that came closest to bringing peace between Israel and Palestinians came together in two stages in 1993 and 1995. The longest running conflict of our lifetimes, the war with Farc rebels in Colombia that lasted for half a century, was ended, at least officially, after four years of negotiation from 2012 to 2016. The main breakthrough in the Bangsamoro peace process, aiming to end a long-running conflict in the Philippines, was accomplished in 2014 after 18 months of intensive talks. Peace is not bought off a shelf. It requires some trust that each side will act in good faith, and a conviction on all sides that they cannot achieve more by fighting on — two beliefs that usually need time and external leverage to build.
It is a tragic missed opportunity that if the US devoted the necessary time and leverage, it probably could end the war in Ukraine. But the leverage would come from giving the Ukrainians a sufficient flow of renewed military assistance that Putin would have to conclude meant he
could not gain further ground. Time would then be needed to make sufficiently detailed agreements on borders, prisoners of war, ceasefire protocols and security and economic assistance for Ukraine, without which war would soon return. Instead, there is a rush to reach a deal in the coming days in the absence of any obvious pressure on Russia but with an intense focus on obtaining for the US the mineral wealth of Ukraine.
The approach of the Trump administration to a peace deal seems therefore, just like its tariff policy, to be entirely uninformed by historical knowledge. Trump clearly believes he needs a personal bond with Putin or already has one. He has accepted the gift of a portrait from him, referred to accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 election as a “phoney witch hunt” they had been through together, and alleged that Ukraine started the war. It is still possible that he could force through a fragile peace deal that leaves Ukraine humiliated and European security at risk. But it is becoming more likely that without quick results, he will take that pass; that the US will walk away.
The consequences of this for Europe, including the UK, would be very serious. So far, the main diplomatic effort launched by Sir Keir Starmer and President Macron has been to assemble the “coalition of the willing” who will join a military force in Ukraine in support of a peace agreement. This is a necessary process, to show the White House that it still needs allies and should listen to them. Yet now a very different scenario is looming, in which the war goes on but with dwindling assistance from America — one that will place greater and more immediate demands on the industries, budgets, militaries and political leadership of Britain and Europe.
In this scenario it will be necessary — if a viable peace agreement is ever to be secured in the future — to increase the supply of arms to Ukraine while simultaneously building up our own defences. It is clear that some steps are already being taken to make this possible. The announcement of a 16-fold increase in explosives production by BAE Systems, without reliance on US components, is an example of what is needed. But planned increases in defence budgets will still be too slow to address what will quickly become an emergency.
British ministers and their European allies will need to make the strategic choice to give more of their existing stock of weapons to Ukraine, even though that will lead to more gaps in our own defences. The cost and risks of Ukrainian defeat would ultimately be much higher. They should also drive closer co-operation with Ukraine’s own defence industries, which are rapidly becoming some of the most advanced in the world. The former defence minister James Cartlidge has recently proposed partnerships with Ukrainian firms, now turning out millions of drones, to allow technology to be more widely shared and production increased outside the war zone.
Other radical steps will be needed to transform industrial capacity. A paper published this month by the Royal United Services Institute identified multiple regulations, accounting rules and procurement procedures that inhibit defence production, citing one example where drones made for Ukraine at £2,500 each would cost up to £16,000 if made for the British military, just to meet all the regulations. One contract to deliver help to Ukraine at a cost of £20 million would have had a price tag of £200 million to bring the same system into service with the British Army.
These are only examples; the point is that a revolution in our military-industrial abilities will be needed, along with a lot of money — for which the confiscation of seized Russian assets, largely held in Europe’s financial system, would be justified. History shows that peace takes patience and strength. Recent days suggest these qualities will be in short supply across the Atlantic. As Trump runs out of patience, Britain and Europe should think radically in order to increase our own strength.
William Hague, Lord Hague of Richmond, is chancellor of the University of Oxford. He was a Conservative MP for 26 years until he stepped down in 2015. He served as leader of the opposition from 1997-2001, and as first secretary of state and foreign secretary from 2010-14. He has written two significant biographies, winning history book of the year at the National Book Awards in 2005, and started writing columns for The Times in April 2021.