The Daily T: As Trump approves Iran attack plan, is Britain fit for battle?

In a period of more global conflict than any time in the last 80 years, can the UK regain its military might to safeguard democracies and demonstrate power to those who threaten it? Jeremy Hunt joins Camilla to put his pitch to General Sir Nick Carter, former Chief of the Defence staff, and Con Coughlin, Defence and Foreign Affairs Editor at The Telegraph.
In their roundtable discussion, the former chancellor and foreign secretary compares the current defence environment to Donald Trump 's first term, when the president threatened to pull the US out of Nato at an alliance summit in Brussels.
'It was a moment of very, very high peril,' Mr Hunt, who was the newly-minted foreign secretary at the time, says.
'And I would be looking at this summit that's coming up in 10 days' time as a moment of maximum peril,' he adds, referring to the Nato meeting in Brussels at the end of this month.
Mr Hunt calls on Keir Starmer to boost defence spending to 3.4 per cent of GDP: 'If he does it now, France and Germany will feel at the summit that they have to do it.'
'What we do really does count, and we can't do this on our own, but we have tremendous influence across Europe.'
On President Trump, Mr Hunt says: 'He questions the Western alliance. He questions Article Five, but deep down he would rather be leader of the Western alliance than just leader of America because for him that is something that feels good and looks good.'
'But he needs to know that there isn't this unfairness in the way defence spending is done.'
Later, General Sir Nick Carter considers what went wrong with the West's involvement in Afghanistan.
'We managed to create, at the encouragement of Donald Rumsfeld, an exclusive government that excluded all the people who've been insurgents in the past. And of course, once you do that, you're bringing on an insurgency.'
The former military chief described the operation as 'an utter misalignment of a political strategy with a military strategy'.
This is the first episode of a special Daily T series with Jeremy Hunt inspired by his new book, which sees the MP pitch his optimism and ideas to leading experts on how the UK can change the world for the better. From mass migration to leading the AI revolution, we ask, can we be great again?
Watch episodes of the Daily T here. You can also listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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