12
Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy
Oral evidence: Deterrence in an age of Russian aggression, HC 338
Monday 13 July 2026
5.15 pm
Members present: Matt Western (The Chair); Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom; Lord Boateng; Liam Byrne; Sarah Champion; Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi; Lord Godson; Lord Hutton of Furness; Lord Jack of Courance; Mike Martin; Lord Sedwill; Baroness Tyler of Enfield; Lord Tunnicliffe; Lord Watts, Sir Gavin Williamson.
Evidence Session No. 5 Heard in Public Questions 48 - 54
Witnesses
Rachel Ellehuus, former US Secretary of Defense Representative in Europe, Defense Adviser, US Mission to NATO; Armida van Rij, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for European Reform, Senior Non-Resident Fellow (European Security and Politics), Chicago Council on Global Affairs; Sir Adam Thomson, former UK Permanent Representative, NATO.
Rachel Ellehuus, Armida van Rij and Sir Adam Thomson.
Q48 The Chair: We now return with our second panel of the day. It is our third session on deterrence in an age of Russian aggression. I invite our witnesses to introduce themselves. Perhaps I could start with Armida.
Armida van Rij: Thank you, chair, and it is an honour to be here. I am a senior research fellow with the Centre for European Reform, based here in London and a non-resident fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. I work on security, transatlantic relations and NATO issues.
Rachel Ellehuus: I am the director-general of the Royal United Services Institute—RUSI—and have been for about a year and a half now. Prior to that, I was at NATO as the Secretary of Defense representative in Europe, and I had a long career in the Pentagon as well.
Sir Adam Thomson: I am a senior associate fellow at the European Leadership Network and a former British ambassador to NATO.
The Chair: Terrific. We are going to start with some questions around our relationship between EU and US NATO allies. Baroness Tyler is going to kick us off.
Q49 Baroness Tyler of Enfield: I wanted to start with a quite general question to get your view on how valuable NATO summits are. Do they actually help with driving change within the alliance? Armida, would you like to start?
Armida van Rij: I can kick off, although I am very conscious that we have got a former UK ambassador to NATO here. Under normal circumstances—I will elaborate in a minute on what I mean by that—NATO summits are hugely valuable. They are an opportunity for leaders to come together, hash out in private any potential issues that there might be and make progress on big decisions. Some of the previous NATO summits we have seen did that. The 2022 summit set the new strategic concept, which was a major turning point for the alliance. The 2023 summit hashed out the regional plans, which, again, was a major turning point. Then, the 2025 summit set out the new defence spending pledge of spending 5% on GDP. Those were all significant summits. We can get into this in more detail later, but the difficulty of doing this in the current moment with a US Administration that tends to flip-flop, putting it mildly, on their stance on European security is that then these summits become about managing President Trump and the transatlantic relationship rather than actually making progress. I will leave it there.
Rachel Ellehuus: I would agree with that. When you look at the summit declaration, it is no accident that it ends with a rather vague statement that says, “We look forward to our next meeting”, but it does not say exactly when that will be. I think that is a quiet attempt to get away from this new habit for the last five or six years of having annual summits. I agree with Armida that under normal circumstances, it can be a useful way to drive progress, because otherwise, NATO is only meeting at the Minister of Defence or Minister of Foreign Affairs level. You really need heads of state and Government to be the ones signing up to things, such as the NATO plans, a new strategic direction on Russia or support for Ukraine, because that is the only way you can be sure that the implementation and the execution of those will happen across national Governments. On the habit of annual summits, Trump Administration aside, it just does not allow for the same type of preparation along the national delegations, and it becomes all about the optics, politics and so-called deliverables, rather than doing the work that it takes to implement what was agreed.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield: Adam, with all your experience, I am sure you have views on this. So, could I turn to you?
Sir Adam Thomson: Yes. It is not just that a summit allows leaders to come together to do business and to put their stamp on NATO decisions. It is also a whole institutional process. The setting of a date for a summit sets the rhythm of work for the alliance across its hundreds of committees for the intervening period. It is a forcing event: allies have to come to conclusions and agree language because their leaders are about to meet. So, summits are extremely important, and if we are not going to have them on a fairly regular basis because of US uncertainties, then we need to find some other mechanism to do that. That is not saying they have to be annual, but I think you need them at least triennial.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield: Thank you for that. You have all made the point about the annual summits. Just to clarify that, do you think NATO would benefit from having fewer, and indeed shorter, summits in future? Adam, can I go back to you?
Sir Adam Thomson: I am not sure they can be much shorter—I think the Ankara business was conducted over no more than three hours, compared with three days in the good times gone by—but I do not think they have to be annual. The focus on President Trump and the uncertainties about his commitment to the alliance are somewhat damaging. It would be perfectly possible to skip it in 2027 and return in 2028.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield: Thank you very much. Rachel and Armida, would you like to come back on that point on frequency and length?
Rachel Ellehuus: Just to agree with that, plenty of work needs to be done on implementation, whether that is on the defence industrial side, carrying forward a real strategy on Russia or laying out a plan to help Ukraine become more integrated into the alliance. All the work behind the scenes that Adam alluded to takes a lot of energy, and if everybody is spending their energy preparing for that next annual summit, that does not allow the real grunt work to go on behind the scenes. The political guidance that is due in the first quarter of 2027 will take a lot of energy and effort, and I would rather have that energy and effort spent there.
Armida van Rij: I just add that there is some concern within NATO that if we were to now shift to biennial summits, or even less frequent ones, that would send a message to Russia that we cannot hold these summits on an annual basis because they are a display of disunity. However, everyone can see the optics of having to manage the political leaders at the moment, so you can ask yourself: which is worse?
Q50 Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom: You are all expressing concerns about the uncertainties arising out of the current US Administration. Is there any role for the UK, with its purported special relationship, to play in trying to heal or mend this? I should have declared my interest, first as chair of the Thales UK advisory panel and secondly as a member of the advisory board of RUSI. Rachel, would you like to go first?
Rachel Ellehuus: Yes, the American will take the pain for the team. I appreciate the traditional role that the United Kingdom has played in trying to manage not just the United States but the European Union, sometimes even playing a bridging role between the two. For better or worse, you have seen President Trump get very fixated on certain ideas, whether it is the fact that Spain is not pulling its weight in the alliance, that the EU is a competitor to the US and taking away jobs, or that he has to have Greenland. Unfortunately, the United Kingdom has been caught up in that at the political level. It started with Iran and has continued with some of the delays around defence spending and technology, where the UK has rightly tried to diversify its relationships, grow closer to Europe and create more domestic and European options to counterbalance the tension in the relationship with the United States.
At a political level, there is certainly not space for the current Prime Minister, and I wonder if there is space for a future Prime Minister or Government. Where the UK can play a very skilful and strong role in managing the US is behind the scenes. You have a lot of leverage and a lot of cards to play, and you bring a lot to the table in terms of defence industrial co-operation, including on the nuclear dimension. The US cannot get those Trident missiles out the door without the co-operation of the UK; the price just goes up, as do the timelines. Similarly, on the intelligence side, you bring a lot to the table that is undervalued.
I would recommend that that influence role is there, but that it happens behind the scenes rather than at the political level, because we have a President who is very focused on certain themes and certain victims to blame when things are not going his way.
Armida van Rij: I add that it is useful to think of the US as not just President Trump and his Administration, with all the different factions within that, but the country as a whole. It is about not just managing the next two or two and a half years, or whatever is left of this Administration, but managing the relationship beyond that. It is clear that the US is on a trajectory of long-term structural change, where Europe is less important to it and the Indo-Pacific is more in favour—although that is perhaps a bit less clear in the actions of this particular Administration.
I suggest that the UK could play a much more significant role in trying to influence the US as a whole, not just going through the political system in DC. Following the mid-terms in November, for example, there will be quite a significant turnover of Congressmen and Congresswomen coming in who will likely be a bit younger and will not necessarily have very good or well-formed views on NATO, the transatlantic relationship or Europe. There is an early opportunity for the UK and other European Governments to get in there early and have those conversations with those new Congressmen and Congresswomen.
As well as going through Congress, the UK could—I think it does this a bit already—engage much more closely at the political level through US states and through the governors. All of this is indirect influencing. I acknowledge that it is not directly speaking into Trump’s ear but, that way, we spread the UK’s web a little more broadly than just going through DC and the Administration.
Sir Adam Thomson: I would like to build on both those comments. I agree that the UK is very unlikely to change President Trump, so Rachel is right that there are roles for the UK behind the scenes, and I agree with Armida that the US is much more than just the President. But I think there is also a role for the UK in the diplomacy of European collective defence. The United States’s national defence strategy has signalled clearly—this was in evidence at Ankara, too—that Europe is expected by the United States to take primary responsibility for at least the conventional defence of Europe. I believe there is a role for the United Kingdom, working with major NATO allies, particularly Germany and France, in shaping what that means and what the future governance of European collective defence should look like. That works with the grain of US concerns, but it is also a really important political requirement for Europe.
Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom: Thank you. For my other question, can I start with you, Sir Adam? Should the UK, and European NATO countries generally, try to ally ourselves more with the United States’s policy goals? If so, how would we do that in light of the absence of consultation and a proposal relating to Greenland that we might find rather difficult?
Sir Adam Thomson: Stepping back for a moment, UK and European policymakers have to assume that the problems they encounter with the United States are not particular to this Administration but are a reflection of a longer-term trend that is unlikely to change. It might get better at intervals, but toxic US political polarisation is now infecting US foreign policy, including security policy, towards Europe for the long term. That says to me that the United Kingdom and other Europeans need to work with the present US aspiration to have Europeans take much greater responsibility for their own collective defence. That cannot safely happen in a rush, as you have heard in previous sessions. Europe will remain very reliant on US critical enablers for quite a long time to come, so any European approach on collective European defence needs to be done transatlantically, as far as possible.
But there is scope for talking not just about greater European burden sharing, higher defence spending, a more coherent European defence industry and procurement, but about the political dimensions of this. Is Europe prepared to embrace the American desire that it should take primary responsibility for conventional defence? The answer is probably yes but, in that case, what are the next steps? What is the road map for that, and is long-term US nuclear commitment to the alliance—the nuclear umbrella—something that European leaders, including British Prime Ministers, believe in their heart of hearts will actually be there in a crisis? Europeans need to be starting a conversation, including with Washington, about a more European nuclear deterrence as well.
Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom: Thank you, that is very helpful.
Armida van Rij: I would like to flip the final question that Adam just posed on its head: is the US comfortable with Europe developing its own defence industrial base? For decades we have received very mixed messages on that, and we continue to receive mixed messages on it from this Administration as well. Part of the reason for that is that the US defence industrial base is dependent on foreign sales. There is a possibility here to meet somewhere in the middle where we build where we can the capabilities that will take a longer term to develop in Europe, where we can already scale up production, but things or systems that are more exquisite that we need on shorter timeframes we can continue to purchase from allies, including the US but also South Korea and others. However, we also need to acknowledge the industrial production challenges within the US itself, where, following the conflict in the Middle East, it will take a very long time to receive a number of key capabilities like Patriot missiles. We need to make an either/or decision but we need to be aware that there are constraints on any decision that we make.
Lord Arbuthnot of Edrom: But having our own strong industrial base is part of our deterrence posture, is it not?
Armida van Rij: Absolutely. I continue to believe that we need to be able to stand on our own two feet, while acknowledging Adam’s point that this will take time. We cannot have a gap in our deterrence because we do not have the right capabilities to be able to deter.
Rachel Ellehuus: I will just say that there is a difference between overdependence and interdependence. Interdependence is actually quite healthy, not least because it builds resilience in our supply chains, in our economic infrastructure and in certain capabilities that might be in short supply. Americans do not think about NATO every day. When you live in Europe, you are just so close to the challenge that you are you are seeing it on the news and really thinking about it. The closer you are to the threat and to the eastern front, you are thinking about it on a daily basis, but there is almost a public relations job to explain to the US public the value of NATO and a strong Europe that takes primary responsibility for its own continent and its own region so that the US can focus elsewhere, whether that is on taking care of some of the problems of political fragmentation and economic inequality that exist there, or whether it is to allow the US to focus more on the Indo-Pacific or, dare I say, the Middle East, which seems to have taken up quite a bit of bandwidth.
What we have to correct is that overdependence where there are no alternatives for Europe, and the minute that Starlink is turned off you are left without any satellite intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability. I was reassured at the NATO summit to see some concrete steps to reduce that overdependence and create more options. The one that is most striking to me is the decision by NATO allies to choose Saab’s GlobalEye surveillance system rather than the Boeing E-3. That is a strong signal that there are good, solid European options, and that NATO as a whole is willing to diversify beyond US options.
Q51 Mike Martin: The NATO treaty was signed a very long time ago. How robust do you think the articles are now, in light of everything that we have seen over the last few years?
Rachel Ellehuus: I have been really impressed by how, when you read that treaty, you can really find what you need. It is like kind of like the US Constitution: there are little nuggets built in there. Everybody focuses on Article 5, the collective security guarantee that an attack on one is an attack on all, but Article 3 talks about the fact that the first line of defence is national defence and making sure that each individual ally is spending adequately and taking care of its own homeland and is ready in any front-line scenario conflict.
Article 3 is very resilient, and there is even flexibility in the way that Article 5 is written so we do not have to have it as a single point of failure where not all 32 allies want to come to the rescue of another ally in a scenario where there is an attack on one of them. We already had one example of that on 11 September, when the US was attacked. Yes, we want the image of political solidarity of all 32 allies saying, “An ally was attacked, that is unacceptable and we stand by them”, but the response was up to each individual ally. In the treaty there is the optionality to provide political support or—with military, political or economic support—to go beyond what NATO can agree at 32. That is important because we talk a lot about the tripwire scenario, where Russia tries to take a small bite out of one of the Baltic states or somewhere else, and then that is the single point of failure for Article 5 and it is the end of the NATO alliance. I completely disagree with that because—to your question—there is a lot of flexibility in the treaty whereby you can maintain the political unity that is needed and then allow for a varied response.
Mike Martin: So you are suggesting that little green men in Tapa in Estonia would be met by political unity at 32, but then only countries A, B, C and D—chief among them America—would respond militarily?
Rachel Ellehuus: In that particular scenario, the correct military response would be a front-line response. Right now there are US forces forward positioned in the Baltic states and Poland, so I think they would be part of that regional response. Any scenario you can imagine starts small but then builds, so, at least initially, if there is an attack on one ally then we do not want all 32 rushing in. You would get that regional response built up by reinforcements further down the line. However, we have to control our messaging. In particular, I see a lot of press stories suggesting that even one boot over a NATO border would cause the entire alliance to collapse, but we have seen that that is not the case.
Mike Martin: We have already had that with drones.
Rachel Ellehuus: We have had that with drones. There is another example of the flexibility in the treaty in Article 4, which allows for allies to consult and determine the nature of their response and whether Article 5 is actually necessary.
Mike Martin: Adam, do you agree with Rachel that the founding fathers of NATO were wise in building in sufficient flexibility to deal with the unprecedented situation that we find ourselves in?
Sir Adam Thomson: Yes. They may not have envisaged it all but they left us with great flexibility, which is tremendously helpful. I want to underline Rachel’s point by comparing the 14 articles on roughly two sides of a piece of paper that are the Atlantic Charter for the North Atlantic Treaty and the Treaty on European Union, where you get to the collective defence clause at Article 42.7. The NATO treaty is a completely different creature and, because it is so short and general, it leaves great flexibility for the alliance.
Mike Martin: One to you, Armida: we have spoken quite a lot about the Europeanisation of NATO as America steps back—which it has been trying to do since Obama’s pivot to Asia, so there is nothing new here—but there are a number of political obstacles, not least between different European allies. Is there a role that Britain can play to help that greater Europeanisation of NATO in overcoming some of those political difficulties?
Armida van Rij: Sure. I also want to comment briefly on the previous two questions, if that is okay. The point that Rachel made about reinforcements coming is key. Currently, the assumption in the NATO plans is that the reinforcements will come predominantly from the US. The question is whether they will actually come—that is a big question mark. I point to Germany, which is in the process of putting a brigade in Lithuania. That relates exactly to the point about essentially putting a tripwire in a front-line state but also therefore directly implicates Germany itself should a “little green man” scenario or something like it happen. That is an important signal to be sending as well as direct military capability.
On the Europeanisation of NATO, the UK’s policy for quite some time has been “NATO first”. That is the entire premise of its defence policy—understandably so, especially since Brexit. The UK, and I say this as a Dutch-Italian national who speaks regularly to European counterparts, is still very much looked to as a military leader within Europe.
We see that also in Starmer’s approach in building the coalition of the willing for Ukraine alongside France. There is a question about how long some of those political leadership initiatives can last with potential political changes in some key European countries like France from 2027 onwards, but there is a challenge around the UK’s spending and actual military heft. You will know this better than I do, I am sure, but by 2030 Germany will have spent more on defence spending than the UK and France combined, which really does shift the equation. Now, spending does not equal strategic culture, nor does it equal readiness and capabilities—
Mike Martin: Willingness to use force.
Armida van Rij: Exactly. The risk taking, the appetite, all the things that I think would still come more from British leadership and French leadership. But we need to acknowledge that things are shifting, so there is a real question for the UK Government: where do they want to be? And, if they want to lead, they need to be able to put money where their mouth is.
Mike Martin: If SACEUR is not American, what country provides SACEUR?
Armida van Rij: That is a great question. Those are the kinds of things that are very much—
Mike Martin: A one-word answer.
Armida van Rij: Okay. Historically, it should be Britain.
Rachel Ellehuus: It will be Britain. If it happened tomorrow, it would be Britain. First, the French are still outside the integrated military structure, and then there is Britain’s coherence with the nuclear side of things. Given the overlap between nuclear and conventional, you cannot have a country that sits outside of the whole package running operations. It will not be Germany, because it lacks the strategic culture and the readiness. It might be spending a lot but, for good historical reasons, it has embedded its entire defence planning system and capability procurement choices in NATO, so it cannot run NATO as it is still trying to build its own strategic culture. So it would be the UK if it happened tomorrow, but let us hope not.
Sir Adam Thomson: I think it might be Britain first, but I think it would rotate. The chairman of the Military Committee at NATO is chosen on merit, and it would be perfectly possible for Europeans to find the best man or woman for the job when the term of its predecessor has come to an end.
Mike Martin: I will make one comment. If it is to rotate, that provides a problem, does it not, because you need a framework nation that other nations are going to plug into?
Q52 Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi: Ms van Rij, if I can come to your good self, given the new US Trump Administration’s considerable shifting of priorities towards homeland defence, the western hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific, there have been greater calls for more European leadership within NATO. What more do you think the UK can do, particularly within the E3, to further advance and encourage European leadership of NATO?
Armida van Rij: The E3 has been a very useful political forum, and it would be good to see it connected much more closely to actual NATO ministerial forums as well. I would also not dismiss the E5, because that brings together the key European defence industrial countries. Doing more with the E5 rather than the E3, and connecting those to political decision-making formats within NATO, is a useful mechanism.
This is a bit sensitive, and it is difficult to see this taking place within NATO at the moment, but within the NATO defence planning process there will need to be a reassessment of which countries take on which capabilities. That process will start from 2027 onwards, I believe. The UK should be leading a conversation that takes a hard look at and makes an honest assessment of what the US will actually provide, perhaps even working—on an assumption that, beyond the critical enablers, the US may not provide anything beyond that—on what the Europeans can be doing. The UK can be leading that conversation within NATO.
Sir Adam Thomson: I have a few thoughts on UK leadership of any Europeanisation in NATO. Something you discussed in the last session, but it is worth repeating, is that the UK is one of only two European nuclear powers, and it is the only one that has committed nuclear weapons to its allies since 1962. It does not make enough of its nuclear role in Europe. As doubts grow about the US nuclear umbrella over European collective defence, the UK should be at least as brave as President Macron in talking in fresh ways about what the UK’s nuclear dimension can do for European allies.
Given our strong relations with Ukraine, there is a space for the UK to provide leadership on the emerging debate inside the alliance about a European way of war and how to keep that interoperable with the United States, while doing things a bit differently from the US. I have spoken previously about the importance of clearer European political leadership on how parliamentarians can look their constituents in the eye and tell them that they still know how to deliver European collective defence when we now have doubts about US commitment.
Q53 Lord Hutton of Furness: I have a couple of questions about Ukraine. Is there anything more the UK should be doing within NATO to put more pressure on Putin to come to the negotiating table over Ukraine?
Rachel Ellehuus: There is not much that NATO can do to put pressure on Putin or Russia. First, there is no longer a NATO-Russia Council, so there are no longer direct communications between the alliance and Russia beyond some last-ditch emergency communications lines at the Secretary-General’s level. Secondly, they do not have the right tools other than deterrence. What deterrence signals to Russia and to Putin is “Do not go any further”, and that is NATO’s job number one. Helping Ukraine to stay in the fight and helping Ukraine to become very integrated into NATO, even short of membership, is something they can do that creates a deterrent effect.
Bringing Putin to the negotiating table needs more of a political and economic lever. We have seen individual allies try to compel Putin to come to the negotiating table through more precise sanctions—I think you had a hearing on that several weeks ago—to try to cut off some of the capabilities and components that allow Russia to stay in the fight militarily.
I think individual allies are giving what they can in terms of both direct military assistance—at the summit we saw a commitment of €70 billion for the next two years, which is not nothing—and the EU’s loan mechanism. That sends a strong message to Putin that the EU and NATO are here to stay by Ukraine’s side for the near future. But that is simply as an alliance. They simply do not have the political levers to create the conditions for a ceasefire and bring everyone to the negotiating table.
Lord Hutton of Furness: Is it more military, diplomatic or economic pressure? I am not quite sure which ones you are saying we should focus on.
The Chair: I ask you to keep your response very brief. Apologies, but we are expecting votes in a few minutes’ time so would like to complete this session before then, otherwise it might get a bit messy.
Rachel Ellehuus: As with most military conflicts, you can only get so much progress on the battlefield and then it is actually diplomatic efforts that will bring it to closure.
Sir Adam Thomson: Yes, it is the diplomacy. We need all the pressure that we can apply to Russia through sanctions and in other ways, but at the moment there are not the incentives for Russia to come to the table, at least as Putin sees it. The war in Ukraine is at least as much about Russia’s relationship with Europe and NATO as it is about Ukraine. There is scope for British diplomacy, probably with the E3, to make this more interesting for Putin.
Armida van Rij: I agree with Rachel that this is perhaps more of an economic discussion than a NATO discussion at this point, but there are things we could be doing. One of them is for European countries to stop buying gas altogether. The other one is that we are heading into tourist season, so we should be taking a look at tourist visas for Russians who are still visiting Europe. In helping Ukraine, we should be doing much more to facilitate joint ventures between the UK and Ukraine—for example, by taking another look at banking regulations, which are currently making it very difficult to get loans in the UK, and it continues to be difficult for Ukrainians to get visas to come to the UK for those business ventures. Those are tangible things that could be done to support Ukraine.
Lord Hutton of Furness: I have a question about peacekeeping forces. As you know, the UK is committed to deploying forces, in the event of a ceasefire, to Ukraine, as are some other countries—the coalition of the willing and so on. How credible do you think that peacekeeping force is going to be without US capabilities like air cover or missile defence?
Rachel Ellehuus: Not very credible. Before I sent any country’s forces into Ukraine, I would want to understand what the rules of engagement were and what exactly were the terms of the agreement. We had a period almost a year ago when there was quite a lot of detail about freezing the conflict along current battle lines, allowing for a buffer zone and then coming to some sort of an agreement with the Russians about exactly what would happen in terms of a consolidated response, including from the United States, if it went past those established rules of engagement and red lines. However, I do not think we are there; all that has fallen by the wayside, so I do not think a peacekeeping force on the ground before we have a ceasefire and a political agreement is where we are.
Lord Hutton of Furness: More work to do there.
Q54 The Chair: I want to ask you what we need to do better in the UK to open up the conversation with the public really about defence expenditure and what is going on in other nations that you would strongly recommend that the UK look to for best practice.
Armida van Rij: To be honest, I think the UK is really behind on that front compared to some other western European countries, quite a bit. There is no public conversation at all.
The Chair: A year, two years or what? What about the Dutch? Give us an example.
Armida van Rij: Yes, the Dutch are very far ahead. Part of the impetus for the Dutch was that they hosted the NATO summit there last year. In the run-up to the summit, the Dutch MFA, together with the now-disbanded public diplomacy division of NATO, hosted a series of events called “NATO through the Netherlands”. Essentially they hosted theatre shows in the equivalent of the Royal Albert Hall—not LSE or King’s, but cultural institutions—with Ministers of Defence and high-profile journalists. Those events were sold out every single time, and they went through the entire country. We could do much better to engage cultural institutions to better tell the story of NATO. We could use popular figures to mobilise some of the support around it. We have got the Royal Family running around who all have a role in the Armed Forces in this country, so we could use them much better. We should be developing curricula in schools, not to scare people but just to make them understand.
The Chair: I would be most grateful if any of our witnesses wish to write to the committee on that topic. That would be greatly appreciated.
That concludes today’s session. I thank the three witnesses for their time. As anticipated, there has been an interruption, but I think we have been through as many of the questions as we needed to. Thank you so much for your time today. That concludes our second panel.