Moscow, Washington, Kyiv, Faslane, Coulport

On 5 December 1994, at a ceremony in Budapest, Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in return for security guarantees from Russia, the US, the UK, France and China (Kazakhstan and Belarus did too). The missiles belonged to the USSR and not its new independent states. 

President Bill Clinton was present at the Budapest ceremony, stating ‘the pledges on security assurance (given to these states) underscore our commitment to the independence, the sovereignty and the territorial integrity of these states’.

(Ukraine held a third of the USSR’s nuclear weapons stockpile in 1994.)

So much for geopolitical guarantees.

After the first week of December 2025 during which Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Oireachtas in Dublin, and Vladimir Putin said he was ready to fight a war with Europe – only if they started it, mind – geopolitical uncertainty rapidly increased day by day.

At the end of the week a National Security Strategy 33-page document from the White House came clean about the abandonment of US foreign policy commitments which had been taken for granted for decades. 

Stating that US foreign policy went ‘astray’ over many years, it reframes the US’s interests as considerably narrower than administrations – both Democrat and Republican – have committed to since at least WW2. As well as claiming that Europe faces ‘civilizational erasure in 20 years or less’ (ie through immigration), it also states that certain NATO members will become ‘majority non-European’ within a few decades. 

The internal US motives for this are clear; immigration being the current topic on which Trump seeks support from his MAGA base: this claim about Europe seemingly reinforces the logic of withdrawal from the traditional US role as European peace guarantors, while saving millions of dollars.

(Russian co-authorship of this document wouldn’t be a complete surprise either, given revelations about the initial 28-point ‘peace plan’.)

At the beginning of that week, a Guardian piece by Tom Burgis [All the president’s millions: how the Trumps are turning the presidency into riches] had begun:

‘A crusading prosecutor in the Balkans comes under pressure to drop a big case. Vietnamese villagers learn they are to be evicted. A convicted crypto kingpin in the Gulf receives a pardon. All have one thing in common: they appear to be connected to the Trump family’s campaign to amass riches around the world. Since Donald Trump’s re-election a year ago, warnings that his use of presidential power to advance personal interests is corroding American democracy have grown ever louder. What is less understood – and perhaps even more dangerous – is the damage this is doing everywhere else.’ 

In a week in which political threat from Russia toward Europe, if anyone doubted it (eg Poland’s defence budget having been ramped up by 50% since 2023) became so explicit, this has been accompanied by the USA switching its political persona.

No matter how critical some of us might have been of past aspects of US policy and American intervention in global affairs, nothing could have prepared us for the descent into chronic unreliability and even criminality of the Trump regime. 

It’s difficult to keep track of daily interventions in other countries’ affairs by the regime – the sharp end of its ‘flood the  zone’ strategy. 

Venezuela one day, threats to Colombia the next. Indeed, some of us are still struggling to understand how the Republican Party, despite hardly thinking well of it in the past, isn’t putting the brakes on the Trump regime. When Marjorie Taylor Greene appears as the most rational of Republicans, we know how bad things have got.  

And this is during a land war in Europe which in its acute phase has been continuing for only three months less than four years: and in the midst of a rapid rebalancing of power globally. 

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President Zelensky’s 2 December Dublin address got me imagining what it would be like if he’d also addressed the parliament of an independent Scotland.

(Whether this is in an imagined future or a completely alternative universe, given the Scots’ capacity for talking about independence rather than doing anything about it, is still open to question. This last observation is from a personal perspective: while still at secondary school in the 1960s I leafleted for my mother when she stood as an SNP candidate in local elections in Lanarkshire. The world outside Scotland is unrecognisable from that period. But yes, we’ve got Holyrood.) 

The Ceann Comhairle (head of council), Verona Murphy TD, emphasised Ireland’s EU membership in her welcome to Zelensky, noting ‘together with our EU partners, Ireland will stand firm behind Ukraine to ensure Russia ends its aggression’. President Zelensky was full of praise for Ireland and Ireland’s history of struggle: ‘a country that understands the price of freedom better than many in Europe, better than many in the world’. 

It’s so well understood that Irish and Scottish histories differ in respect of struggles for independence that there’s no need to reprise that here (nor the deeply regrettable history of Scottish involvement in the repression of Ireland). 

But it’s hard not to indulge in comparative speculation in the present tense, and to note the still radical differences in the concepts of independence on either side of the water. It’s a commonplace observation that Scotland was just not oppressed enough by the Union – indeed certain classes of folk benefitting hugely from it – to have reason to struggle very much for independence after 1707. 

And that’s essentially why today a large part of the energy us Scottish people expend on the topic of independence is still devoted to talking about it.

But in the currently fast-shifting state of geopolitics, that’s not the key present difference between the Republic of Ireland and Scotland. 

Verona Murphy in her welcome to President Zelensky emphasized the Republic’s stance on war: ‘as a militarily neutral country, Ireland is not, and will never be, morally neutral in the face of atrocity. Our neutrality is a commitment to peace, not indifference. Together with our EU partners, Ireland will stand firm behind Ukraine to ensure Russia ends its aggression’.

But Scotland, as a consequence of not having done anything about its political impotence since 1707 (unlike the Irish Republic) houses one of Europe’s two independent nuclear deterrents. 

And that’s as far from militarily neutral as it’s possible to get.

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There are two particular issues on which Scots have to be clear about their position, and one is difficult, the other is next to impossible.

There’s possible re-entry to the EU for some future independent Scotland: to which there remains some Scottish opposition (eg as opposed to seeking membership of EFTA or thereby the EEA). 

That there was a substantial majority in Scotland against Brexit should suffice for any argument about an independent Scotland rejoining the EU – the SNP is broadly supportive of rejoining, though sensibly recognizing currency and border problems. 

Geopolitically, in circumstances where the USA is abandoning Europe, and in which if Donald Trump doesn’t succeed in occupying the presidency into his 80s, or inserting one of his sons or his son-in-law Jared into the White House, he’s liable to be succeeded by JD Vance – Europe needs everything it’s got. 

And that should include the UK in the EU. But that’s very unlikely in present political circumstances, given the severe depletion of quality at Westminster and remaining doubts about the wishes of the English electorate, particularly with Reform making the running. 

Polling indicates a welcome in Europe for an independent Scotland, which would additionally be a geopolitically useful addition to Sweden, Denmark and Ireland in the EU.

But to confront another matter – which we don’t much like to talk about when discussing Scottish politics – we house, as is very well-known, the UK’s nuclear submarines at Faslane. The Trident warheads are stored in nearby Coulport. 

That this isn’t a more regular point for discussion is surprising in the age of Putin plus Trump, but also unsurprising given the practical problems of relocation or disposal. (And a conspiracy dimension has been well-rehearsed: even if we knew where to put them, would dark forces of the UK state or the USA permit the conditions under which it was possible?)

Who really knows the importance that the Kremlin attaches to France and the UK’s nuclear deterrent capacity, but it’s safe to say the question seems more important than when it was Mikhail Gorbachev we were dealing with in Moscow (I’ll park for now who ‘we’ is). 

Some of us are still reeling from having to reimagine our assumptions about our transatlantic ally south of the Canadian border, even unto the question of the reality – let alone of any remaining alliance – of any affinity. 

From the SNP website: ‘Nuclear weapons are wrong strategically, morally and financially. Westminster’s irresponsible obsession with nuclear weapons is an immoral and ruinous expense’.

That’s all very much true, of course. But such are the complexities of life, in this case geopolitical life, that something contradictory can be true as well.

Some prominent Ukrainians have expressed the thought that if Ukraine had kept even a fraction of the nuclear weapons it once possessed, Russia would not have invaded.

And many hundreds of thousands of lives, both Russian and Ukranian, would have been spared. 

That’s at the very least cause for a serious debate – a concrete example of the theory of nuclear deterrence: in this instance, of course, of a country abandoning its nuclear deterrent.

Obviously, I have no solution to offer to this quandary. No-one has. And having been referring negatively to the Scottish capacity for talking, rather than doing anything about independence: well, in the spirit of self-contradiction sometimes necessary with complex matters (dialectics, it has a history from the time of Heraclitus) I’m urging even more talking. 

If we’re serious about Scottish independence, we have to start talking seriously about Faslane and Coulport. 

Not to do so in the age of Gorbachev and Reagan/Bush (who both developed good relations with Gorbachev) was relatively ok: but in the age of Trump, Putin and Xi, we just have to.

To be clear, I’m neither – at this moment – advocating retaining Trident nor discarding it. But in the light of the greatly changed geopolitical environment in which Europe, the UK and within it, particularly Scotland (ie with respect to Faslane/Coulport) find themselves, the British nuclear deterrent needs to find a more central place, and in realistic terms, in the Scottish independence debate alongside the economy and membership of the EU.

To state the obvious, in imagining a future independent Scotland without nuclear weapons, we need to imagine a plausible scenario in which this might happen.

That would in turn do its bit for further raising the seriousness of the independence debate as a whole.