Malcolm Chalmers

European NATO countries need to acknowledge that the US government is increasingly focused on the Indo-Pacific region, according to RUSI deputy director general Professor Malcolm Chalmers, who also said the UK needed longer procurement planning. Speaking at a UK’s Defence Committee spending hearing days after the UK budget and amid an ongoing Strategic Defence Review (SDR), Chalmers said that there was a feeling UK forces were “hollowed” out.

Trump’s tariffs are motivated by his conviction that Europe is ripping off the US by running a trade surplus. That coloured his attitudes towards US security for Europe, said Prof Malcolm Chalmers, the deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London. “I think right at the top of the European concern is Ukraine and the future of Nato,” he said. The EU is fearful Washington will stop money and weapon supplies to Ukraine, and force an unjust peace deal on Volodymyr Zelensky, in which territory is ceded to Russia. “That’s part of Donald Trump’s playbook, to use the fear of what he might do in order to extract concessions,” Prof Chalmers said.

Harris, who has decried President Vladimir Putin’s “brutality,” would likely carry on President Joe Biden’s policy of support, albeit within the strict limits on Ukraine’s ability to strike deep inside Russian territory that have frustrated Kyiv’s leaders. “President Biden has made it clear from the beginning of this conflict that his top priority has been to avoid an all-out war with Russia. I think that remains the top American priority,” said Malcom Chalmers, deputy director general at the Royal United Services Institute in London.