By Paul Ingram*
3 July 2025
The Green Party of England and Wales will be considering a motion at its conference in October calling for the UK to leave NATO and declare itself a non-aligned country. This may be no surprise to anyone with a long view on Green Politics in the UK, but with today’s Russophobic, jingoistic politics in Britain, it promises to be highly contentious.
No doubt some supporting the motion will rest their case on the June 2025 NATO summit in The Hague. This meeting ditched any pretence at informed discussion on European security in favour of simple devotion to Donald ‘daddy’ Trump and attempts to meet his demand that member states spend 5% of their GDP on their military. This may well be reason enough for members to support the reversal of Party policy, but the opportunities go far deeper and reflect important political and strategic opportunities.
Public support across Europe for NATO went through the roof after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, in a major escalation of the conflict between the two countries which began in 2014. It led directly, of course, to accession by Finland and Sweden. One of many reasons to judge Russia’s invasion to have been a huge strategic error on the part of the Kremlin.
This shift in opinion was reflected within the membership of the England and Wales Green Party. Its conference chose just a year after the invasion a compromise position that watered down its long-standing opposition to NATO membership to one of scepticism from within. It included a list of NATO reforms the Party would seek to promote, including to nuclear posture, greater outreach and dialogue for global peacebuilding, and an end to fixed spending targets. NATO has marched in the opposite direction.
The Party’s policy change came to be described by the leadership, in their statements and within the Party’s 2024 election manifesto, to be ‘pro-NATO’. This was a relief to those who see the Party’s role as winning elections by reflecting existing ‘mainstream’ public opinion rather than actively seeking to lead or shape it. The poverty of this approach can be seen by the flailing electoral support for the two main parties of British politics.
The Green Party has always seen itself as taking a radical position on the critical issues. It has led public opinion on matters such as climate change, the destruction of ecosystems, universal basic income, and peace. It was succeeding in making inroads on that holiest of unquestioned dominant narratives around the pre-eminence of GDP growth as the measure of a government’s success until the established parties closed ranks and put it back at the top of their political agenda.
The Party was always hostile to high military spending and the need to bolster the most powerful military alliance in history, through the Cold War and since. Greens believed that NATO impacted negatively on strategic stability, particularly in relation to Russia. Their opposition to nuclear weapons always put them on a collision course with NATO, and its fundamental attachment to nuclear deterrence.
Following the end of the Cold War, NATO expanded eastward, incorporating many former Warsaw Pact countries (Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia) and even parts of the former Soviet Union (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). From the perspective of the countries of eastern Europe, these three rounds of NATO enlargement—in 1999, 2004 and 2009—were perfectly rationale acts of sovereign choice after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They unequivocally saw their future security and prosperity as part of the European Union and NATO. However, since the mid 1990s Russian leaders have opposed NATO expansion seeing it as a direct threat to its stability and national security, and has led them to be increasingly desperate to reverse these trends.
The 2008 war in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have all been influenced by Moscow's perception of NATO encroachment. This does not mean the invasion of Ukraine was justified, since the Russian state had other options in responding to the perceived provocation of NATO expansion. (On the question of whether the West provoked Russia, see this recent debate in London between four distinguished Russia and Ukraine watchers). However, rather than deterring conflict, NATO’s moves have contributed to the confrontation in Ukraine and stymied efforts to resolve it. In short, there can be no common security in Europe while Russia is out in the cold.
Trump and NATO place considerable pressure on European countries to increase military expenditure. The Spanish Prime Minister resisted and secured an exception to the target, but as a direct result was brazenly threatened by President Trump with additional costly tariffs on trade with the United States. There has been a sustained push since 2014 for NATO members to meet or exceed the benchmark of spending 2% of GDP on defence. This was already a challenge, at a time of tight fiscal headroom and severe cuts to welfare provision in many European states. Commitments now to almost double that target for military spend (and devote an additional 1.5% on security resilience) will contribute to a spiralling arms race and immiseration on an extraordinary scale. To meet that goal NATO spending would have to rise by $912bn to $2,360bn.
The motion to the Green Party’s conference talks of the UK adopting a non-aligned policy, along the lines of Ireland or Austria. This would achieve a more balanced approach that emphasises arms control, common security and diplomacy. As the world faces catastrophic risk on numerous related fronts, the UK could play a leading role in strengthening the multilateral rules-based system that has taken such big hits in recent years, including most recently the United States’ illegal attack on Iran. Rather than condemn this attack, NATO’s recent summit endorsed it as part of an orchestrated grovel at the feet of Donald Trump. The time is right for Greens to offer a more ethical and secure foreign policy.
*Paul Ingram is a member of the Green Party’s Peace, Security and Defence Working Group, former Green Party Defence Spokesperson and Representative on Stop the War Coalition, the proposer of the Green Party Leave NATO policy amendment, and member of East Surrey Green Party.