Britain should increase defence spending to the same level as the US, Jeremy Hunt has proposed, as he declared: “Peace comes from strength, not luck.”

Writing for The Telegraph, the former foreign secretary called the invasion of Ukraine “the biggest failure of Western foreign and security policy in our lifetimes”.

“It happened because we forgot the most fundamental lesson of the Cold War: the power of deterrence,” he said.

By “announcing they would not intervene” if Russia invaded Ukraine, the UK and US undercut their attempted deterrence, he argued.

“Instead of peace through strength we caused war through weakness,” he wrote.

Mr Hunt called for a step-change in UK defence spending and referenced Donald Trump’s past criticism of Nato spending – saying the former US president “was very vocal on that point when I was foreign secretary”.

The Conservative MP added: “He was only saying more robustly what numerous presidents had said before. If we want America to remain the leader of the free world, other democratic powers, especially in Europe, must commit to matching US defence spending as a proportion of GDP.”

For Britain to hit that target would mean a huge defence spending increase. 

The UK spent 2.3 per cent of GDP on defence in 2021, according to Nato figures, compared to the 3.5 per cent by the US.

Given that the UK currently spends more than £40 billion a year on defence, achieving that goal would mean spending tens of billions pounds more on the military over the coming years.