General Sir Richard Barrons
speaker
110 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 10 Jul
General Sir Richard Barrons’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
For seventy years this has been a keystone of how the UK thinks about its place in Europe.
But the facts today
It's very different.
Today, if you take all 32 NATO nations and you compare what they actually are delivering now against the capability goals they have agreed with NATO, the UK is ranked 31 out of 32, and Iceland, which doesn't have any military forces, is 32, and the British Army is 32 of 32.
And in terms of spending.
the UK is now somewhere around twelfth in the batting order.
And yet the UK is still hugely valued in NATO.
because of the intellectual strength that it brings and its political strength.
But we are now on the cusp where just turning up with opinions and the fumes of a different past is no longer going to secure the influence, whether that's hard influence through positions or soft influence through
just being a major alliance player.
And
The remarkable thing here is the UK is in that position.
As a matter of choice.
When the UK is also saying and the Prime Minister has said this himself, that Russia could attack NATO in twenty thirty.
And so not only is the UK
declining to retain its position of influence in NATO, to the disappointment of allies who clearly expect rather better.
It is
Choosing to do that, knowing that it is possible.
that NATO may be fighting Russia in three years and
This conundrum.
Showing 41–60 of 110 · page 3 of 6
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