Sunak wants to significantly increase British defense spending

Dhe British government wants to increase its defense spending this year and next by a total of around 5.5 billion euros and readjust its security and foreign policy structure. The British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak On the occasion of the release of the updated integrated security overview, said that in addition to assessing Russia, which is classified as a “threat” to the security situation, the foreign policy foundation paper devotes a very “thoughtful and detailed approach” to China. The People’s Republic represents an “epoch-defining challenge” for Great Britain and the rule-based international order. China has shown that it relies on values ​​”that are very different from ours”.

Nonetheless, the basic security policy paper does not repeat Sunak’s assessment of last summer’s candidate competition for the post of prime minister. At the time, he called China “the biggest long-term threat to Britain.” The government announced that Britain’s domestic intelligence service, MI5, would be given a new department to provide British companies and other organizations with direct information and advice on security and counterintelligence measures.

According to the British government, the additional expenditure on defense should, firstly, provide for the replacement of ammunition and equipment transferred to Ukraine from its own armed forces; secondly, they should flow into the further development of nuclear submarines. Sunak traveled to a three-way meeting with the US President on Monday Joe Biden and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to San Diego, California, to finalize the preliminary agreement on an agreement on the delivery of submarines to Australia and on strategic cooperation between the three nations (AUKUS).

Sunak said the defense budget increase is closer to Britain’s goal of bringing defense spending to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product. Almost a decade ago, at a summit meeting in Wales, the NATO countries agreed to increase each partner country’s defense spending to two percent of GDP. Sunak announced that at the next NATO summit in Lithuania this summer he wanted to see two percent as the lower limit for defense budgets in the future. In the past budget year, British defense spending was almost 80 billion euros (71.4 billion pounds) and had thus already exceeded the quota of two percent of domestic product.