FIVE EYES; Four Friends

In the summer of 2016 I watched a version of Britain that no longer exists vote, by the narrowest of margins, to leave the European Union. Ten years on, the argument that swallowed us whole back then feels almost quaint. We thought we were settling the terms of our relationship with Europe. We should have been asking a far harder question about our relationship with everyone else.

Because the world we were arguing about has gone.

And after much to-ing and fro-ing, look at what actually arrived: A land war grinding into its fifth year in Ukraine — and, this year, an American decision to halt direct military aid to Kyiv. A new war in the Persian Gulf in which Washington and Israel struck Iran, killed its Supreme Leader and left the region holding its breath over the Strait of Hormuz -- a war that it's now clear had NO strategic plan (all while plunging the world into economic turmoil). Gaza. Southern Lebanon. A pandemic we (at least in the UK) have still not properly climbed out of. And running underneath all of it, a trans-Atlantic relationship that has been reduced to transactional — tariffs, sanctions, grievance, leverage. The "special relationship" my generation of intelligence officers treated as a fundamental law of physics is, for any practical purpose, over.

The world that actually arrived

This is the new normal. As Mark Carney says: the world as it was is over. The multilateral institutions we built to absorb shocks like these — the UN chief among them — have been de-funded, eroded, and degraded to the point where they are great at spotting a crisis but can do very little to actually stop one. What we are left with is instability, ambiguity and, increasingly, chaos.

You can manage instability. You can plan around ambiguity. Chaos is what happens when you keep pretending the old certainties still hold.

Grey is the normal now

None of this looks like the geopolitics we trained for. It is deliberately ambiguous; something I have come to think of as Russian strategic relativism. Moscow is not trying to match Europe economically, strategically or even militarily. It cannot, and it knows it. Russia's leaders know that it cannot be "strong" in comparison to NATO. Instead, it is trying to divide us and make the constituent parts weaker relative to itself: cheaply, deniably, and always just below the threshold that would force a real response. That is the only way they can compete.

The frightening part is the method. The GRU rarely needs to send its own officers any more. It recruits petty criminals and bored young men over the internet, pays them in cryptocurrency to start a fire or photograph a fence line, and keeps a comfortable layer of deniability between Moscow the person throwing the match. Russia has always been good at this game of smoke and mirrors, and we're now seeing the outcomes of that expertise.

And the targets have stopped being abstract. Since 2022, more than seventy acts of sabotage across Europe have been attributed to Russia, and the tempo is climbing — recorded arson and explosives plots jumped from a single case in 2023 to twenty-six in 2024.

Run through just a sample. A warehouse in east London holding supplies bound for Ukraine, burned out in early 2024; the men who lit it were later convicted of working for Russian intelligence. Incendiary devices dressed up as ordinary parcels, catching fire in courier depots in Birmingham and Leipzig — investigators believe they were a dry run for bringing down a cargo aircraft in flight. An IKEA store torched in Vilnius. A rail line sabotaged in Poland last November that a Polish minister said plainly was meant to kill. And out at sea, a steady procession of ageing tankers from Russia's "shadow fleet" dragging their anchors across the bed of the Baltic, shearing through the power and data cables that hold northern Europe together.

The cyber strand I know best runs straight through all of it: outfits like NoName057 and the wider pro-Russian hacktivist scene, marshalling online volunteers to hurl denial-of-service traffic at whoever crossed the Kremlin that week. What unsettles me most is the drift away from defacing websites and towards operational technology (OT) — the unsexy kit that keeps water clean, trains moving and the lights on. Whether the tool is a piece of malware, an anchor, or a petrol can with a match, the logic is identical: stay cheap, stay deniable, and create chaos and sow division.

And look at who shares the pain of these attack; every one of those countries backs Ukraine. Our adversaries draw no lines between Britain and the continent it sits beside. Neither, any longer, can we.

The most successful intelligence alliance in history

To combat the foes of democracy, we have always held one extraordinary asset: the Five Eyes. The Quinquepartite relationship. This relationship is arguably the most successful intelligence-sharing relationship ever built. With English as the glue that joins them together, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, traded some of the most sensitive material a state possesses, for the better part of eighty years.

But there was an unspoken bedrock that this relationship was founded on: that a common vision for a global future based on freedom, rules, and liberal democracy would be a constant shared vision amongst the five. That vision no longer seems to be shared amongst all five nations. As a result, the largest and most well-funded participant in that group is being run by an administration that seems more interested in tearing up historical norms and agreements and moving to a more transactional "what have you done for me lately" approach to geopolitics. We can no longer afford to be in a relationship when one member of that relationship will use the characteristics of our integration and collaboration as tool to gain leverage against us.

Four of those five eyes are exactly who they have always been. One of them, right now, is not. I am not saying that party is an adversary — it plainly is not. What I am saying is that an intelligence relationship runs on stability, a shared vision, and common intent, and on these counts one partner has become a question mark where it used to be a constant. We cannot build the next eighty years on a question mark. The world is too dangerous a place right now.

A new approach

The good news is that the answer is already sitting in our own vocabulary. We do not need to invent anything. We know that shared values, ethics and a common vision can be an incredibly powerful driver for collaboration and cooperation. The past 80 years of the Five Eyes have provided the testimony to prove that. So I would argue that we undertake to re-assess which nations share these characteristics with us, and build new a new intelligence sharing relationship between Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and the EU.

Why the EU? Because conflict is regional, and geography does not negotiate. Yes, the UK left the European Union (an act that I view as one of the single greatest "own goals" in politics ever). We did not, and could not, leave Europe. To every threat actor that matters — in Moscow, in the grey space, in the cables under the North Sea — there is no meaningful line between the security of Britain and the security of the continent it sits on.

For eighty years we told ourselves the magic of the Five Eyes was the shared language — the ease of an analyst in Cheltenham reading the work of an analyst in Maryland or Ottawa without a translator in the room. It was a nice story, but it was never the real one. The bond was never language. It was values: the rule of law, democratic accountability, and restraint in how hard power gets used. Where those hold, trust holds. Where they wobble, no amount of shared language will save you.

Let's build the next alliance on values rather than language and it will outlast any single election, any single administration, on either side of the Atlantic. And it has to be built, because the one thing no middle power can afford in a world this volatile is to stand in it alone.

Nostalgia is not a strategy

In January, standing at Davos, Mark Carney told a room full of the powerful that the old order is not coming back, that we should not mourn it, and that — in the line that stuck — "nostalgia is not a strategy". The work of the middle powers, he argued, is to stop pretending, to name reality plainly, and to act together.

He is right. Nostalgia for the special relationship has quietly become one of the most expensive habits in Western security. It costs us clarity. It keeps us waiting on a phone call that may not come, from a partner whose number has changed.

The countries that come through the next decade in one piece will be the ones honest enough to face who they can still trust — and bold enough to build something new with them. Four reliable partners and a continent that shares our values is not a consolation prize. It is a better hand than the one we have been clinging to.

It is time we played it.