PARIS — Far-left presidential hopeful Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party set out leaving NATO and nationalizing defense companies in its official platform released Friday.

“Immediately withdraw from NATO’s integrated command and then, in stages, from the organization itself. Reject the tribute demanded by the United States of 5% of GDP devoted to defense spending,” read France Unbowed’s 222-page program.

However, France under Mélenchon would still provide assistance to European Union countries under EU treaties, the document added, echoing what the far-left leader previously told POLITICO.

An increasing number of polls place Mélenchon in second place in next year’s high-stakes election to replace President Emmanuel Macron. The top two vote-getters go on to a second round, which could see Mélenchon facing off against far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who also pledges to take France out of NATO’s integrated command.

Unlike Le Pen’s far-right party, France Unbowed does not explicitly say it would stop providing assistance to Ukraine — but it does insist on the need for a diplomatic solution. Any peace agreement would need to lean on “collective security guarantees, between the belligerents and with the rest of Europe.”

France Unbowed wants more arms regulation, including of lethal autonomous weapons systems and nuclear weapons.

The far-left party is also pushing back against the “space arms race,” including by pledging to close NATO’s space center in Toulouse, but says France should have the means to guarantee its sovereignty. Unlike most other political parties, France Unbowed has strong interest in space policy, and argues in its presidential platform that France should acquire a space shuttle.

France Unbowed lawmakers have previously pushed for France to procure Dassault Aviation’s Vortex, a European reusable orbital spaceplane program spearheaded by the French aerospace manufacturer.

Overall, France should invest more in so-called critical enablers, meaning military equipment in areas such as communications, intelligence and logistics that are currently mostly provided by the U.S. via NATO. “They must be produced as a matter of priority,” the party wrote.

It also wants to nationalize some of the country’s main defense companies including ArianeGroup.

A more detailed platform specifically on defense will be released later, a France Unbowed lawmaker told POLITICO.

LONDON — Donald Trump is badly bruised after this week’s U.S. midterm elections trouncing — but Britain’s diplomatic corps needs to avoid looking like it’s going all-in on the jubilant Democrats.

That’s the advice of Ed Roman, the former director of communications at the British Embassy in Washington. He spent five years on the embassy’s senior leadership team, serving during the Biden and second Trump administrations. It gave him a front row seat as diplomats adjusted to a radical change in U.S. political direction — a task they now face again.

In his first podcast interview since leaving the civil service a month ago, Roman tells POLITICO’s Westminster Insider that British diplomats need to show they can cultivate sophisticated ties with Trump’s possible successors — without provoking the ire of the current White House incumbent. Here are his top tips.

1) Don’t be late to the party

“If you’re doing it now, you’re kind of too late,” Roman says of efforts to schmooze key Democrats who have made it into both the Senate and House this week. The British Embassy has, he says, already been doing its homework, tracking potential Democratic Party contenders throughout the year in anticipation of a wave.

But there’s stiff global competition to build those links first. “The French competitors, the German competitors, the Korean competitors — each embassy is trying to build a network that allows them a level of access,” he says.

In addition to the embassy in D.C., Britain uses its eight U.S. consulates — strategically placed across the country — to help it identify rising politicians outside Washington.

As Roman puts it: “Real politics in America happens in America, out in the states, out in the districts. Knowing those Senate hopefuls ahead of time is always the name of the game.”

2) Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

Roman worked under former British Ambassador Karen Pierce, whose team invested considerable effort in cultivating relationships with Trump’s circle during the Biden administration.

Roman believes that work paid “dividends” for Britain in the years that followed, including in landing a U.K.-U.S. trade deal as Trump slapped tariffs on a host of allies.

But he cautions that the next president might not seem as obvious as Trump — who has had an iron grip on his party for years — did back then. “It’s a complete surprise that you always need to watch [out] for,” Roman notes.

It’s vital to build diplomatic relationships with a broad field — including other presidential hopefuls and figures who might end up in a future Cabinet, White House or national security team.

“Yes, you’re looking to identify the front runner, but you’re also looking to get to know the people around them. And very often they’re the people that are useful to you as an embassy,” he says.

3) Hold your ground — but don’t show off

It’s important not to provoke Trump’s ire by making him feel British diplomacy is already moving on. But Roman argues that embassies must also be prepared to defend their right to engage opposition politicians.

“This is perfectly legitimate business, there’s nothing nefarious about this,” he says.

He points to Trump officials openly engaging with British politicians across party lines.

“That is legitimate diplomatic business and there’s a bit of pushback that you sometimes have to do with administrations to be upfront about that,” he says.

There is, however, a big difference between quietly cultivating a future president and publicly advertising the fact.

Roman warns against the temptation to “grandstand a little bit that you’ve just had this brilliant session with [Gavin] Newsom [the Democratic governor of California] or whoever” on social media after meeting a potential successor. “That stuff does irritate the presidency,” he adds.

“Doing it in a discreet way, focusing on the interpersonal rather than the comms bounce that you might get out of it back in London is really key,” he advises.

4) Always big up Britain 

Simply getting a meeting with a rising Democrat isn’t enough. British diplomats need to convince prospective presidents that a strong relationship with Britain will actually be useful to them.

He warns that the next generation of American leaders may have fewer historic connections to Britain, meaning the U.K. cannot assume its traditional “special relationship” status will automatically open doors.

“For each generation politically, you’ve always got to, in effect, restate your offer,” he says.

Roman tells the podcast: “You can’t just tip up and say, you know: Hi, I’m John or James or Karen from the British Embassy, let’s have a chat.

“You’ve really got to dig into what their campaign is about, how are we useful to them? What do they understand about Britain? What do they know about Britain? What is Britain’s offer to them if they are successful and they come into power?”

5) Never assume a return to “normal”

Even if Democrats win the White House in 2028, Roman cautions British diplomats not to assume cultivating ties will automatically produce an easier relationship than it has with Trump.

Each country has its own blunt interests, and Roman recalls that the Biden administration was not an uncomplicated partner for Britain.

“There’s a bit of amnesia going on in the sense that the Biden administration were very challenging to deal with,” he says. “They were not particularly sentimental about Britain.”

And he argues that this week’s midterm results should not be mistaken for a wholesale rejection of Trump’s “America First” worldview.

“It wasn’t an embrace of America as a global policeman,” he says. “It wasn’t an embrace of America’s traditional role presiding over the rules-based international order.”

Economic nationalism and skepticism about America’s global responsibilities could survive Trump, Roman believes — including under a Democratic successor. “We would be, I think, ill-advised to draw the conclusion that any form of normalcy will return,” he says.

Ed Roman was speaking to the Westminster Insider podcast. Listen here.

Data is redefining modern defense operations. The ability to master and manage it is now a decisive factor in military victory or defeat. Few people know that better than Jean Charles Ellermann-Kingombe, assistant secretary general for cyber and digital transformation at NATO.

In a recent interview preceding NATO Edge 26, the Alliance’s annual defense innovation show, Ellermann-Kingombe is very clear on the kind of digital transformation effort it takes to get the right data into the hands of military leaders operating in high-pressure situations, at exactly the time and place they need it.

Data-sharing must be a core design principle, he says: “The bottleneck is often not technology, but permission: classification boundaries, national rules and trust decisions.” Once data is well managed, an even bigger opportunity arises to use AI as “an enabler of military effectiveness,” he says, assisting commanders and operators further.

He adds: “For NATO, the biggest difference AI can make is in decision advantage. Modern operations generate volumes of data that no human organisation can process unaided at the speed required. AI can help fuse information, detect patterns, support planning, prioritise scarce resources and accelerate staff processes, providing commanders with better insight, earlier warnings and more resilient options.”

As powerful as it is, AI can only reliably accelerate defense mission outcomes if it is built on vast, relevant and quality data. Data is the fuel that will power the shift to software-defined defense, an approach that delivers military capability through flexible, modular software rather than rigid, hardware-bound platforms.

THE CHALLENGES OF MASTERING DATA

Software-defined defense, AI and the challenge of mastering the data that powers both, will be hot topics for attendees at NATO Edge 26, due to be held in Izmir, Türkiye, in November and expected to attract over 3,000 participants and more than 270 technology partners, including Elastic.

We will be there because we know that many attendees will be looking to better understand what software-defined defense will demand of them in data management terms.

As powerful as it is, AI can only reliably accelerate defense mission outcomes if it is built on vast, relevant and quality data. Data is the fuel that will power the shift to software-defined defense.

Bringing data together from many intelligent systems and smart devices demands real rigor. After all, in order to make critical operational decisions, military personnel need to be able to see the big picture, quickly searching for information in both structured and unstructured data formats across a vast array of different systems.

Defense data naturally lives wherever operations happen — across land, sea, air, space and cyber domains — and is stored in different formats like images, audio transcripts, documents and geospatial, reaching across thousands of different mission systems.

These can include communications systems that keep troops connected in the field; systems used to manage artillery devices; reconnaissance systems; radar stations; and geographical information systems that support military leaders in tracking assets, planning missions and routes, and analyzing risks and threats, including potential ambush sites and minefields.

In order to make critical operational decisions, military personnel need to be able to see the big picture, quickly searching for information in both structured and unstructured data formats across a vast array of different systems.

On top of all this, organizations like NATO face an additional layer of complexity. Building a common operational picture across the digital environments of 32 member nations requires multi-intelligence fusion of massive volumes of data held in disparate systems, from legacy databases and classified networks to cloud platforms and security tools.

OPERATIONAL ADVANTAGE

Addressing these challenges means turning all this data into operational advantage and mission readiness, accelerating the ability of armed forces to respond to situations by increasing their situational awareness and decision speed.

The answer is a data mesh architecture. Rather than consolidating everything into a traditional data lake, a data mesh approach manages data where it originates and lives, without moving or duplicating it; so it can be searched, queried and analyzed from multiple access points across the entire environment, including allied partners such as NATO member nations. That is what turns scattered data into one unified operational picture with near real-time insights, and context, giving commanders the situational awareness and decision speed that mission-readiness depends on. In my view, it is the most flexible and scalable way to get there.

It also speaks directly to the permission bottleneck Ellermann-Kingombe describes. Because data stays under the control of the nation or system that owns it, access can be governed by policy at the source, with classification boundaries and national rules enforced where the data lives rather than negotiated away in a central repository.

Rather than consolidating everything into a traditional data lake, a data mesh approach manages data where it originates and lives, without moving or duplicating it.

A data mesh approach is sustainable because of its reliance on open standards. They enable defense organizations to connect systems that were never designed to work together, from legacy platforms to dispersed infrastructure, so data stays findable and can be effectively analyzed across the environment. Interoperability stops being a barrier as new partners and data sources join, and new tools can be integrated without rebuilding systems or making major investments. The architecture scales alongside the Alliance’s growth.

Without a unified view, the risk of losing operational advantage to adversaries extends from the battlefield into cyberspace. Zero Trust depends on connecting authentication logs, network traffic and application telemetry where they already sit, so that traditionally separate domains can be visualized and analyzed together. When a user accesses sensitive data, the system must verify not only who they are but also their device status, network path, and the time and location of access. If those checks are slow or impossible, threats can remain undetected and escalate through systems. A data mesh built on open standards connects the pillars of a Zero Trust architecture, allowing organizations to accelerate implementation without replacing the tools they already have.

When the manual efforts of military data analysts struggle to keep pace with the scale and speed of events on the ground, AI can work faster and more accurately.

The same logic is already visible in large government organizations: CISA’s new SIEM-as-a-Service platform uses open standards to give US federal civilian agencies a consistent approach to threat detection and response.

As AI’s value in supporting human decision-making becomes increasingly clear, a data mesh architecture provides the foundation to apply agentic AI capabilities holistically. It enables complex organizations to analyze the vast amounts of data their systems generate, find actionable correlations and separate signals from noise. When the manual efforts of military data analysts struggle to keep pace with the scale and speed of events on the ground, AI can work faster and more accurately. It also lets analysts ask questions across structured and unstructured data and rapidly receive answers grounded in reliable sources.

The numerous tech challenges facing the modern military calls for closer NATO-industry cooperation, and that’s why NATO Edge 26 is such an important event. All 32 sovereign member states that make up the Alliance use different systems, yet they rely on secure, trusted data-sharing with each other as the foundation for cooperating on military operations and sharing intelligence. It’s vital that they can turn to industry innovators to support their operational needs.

At a time of great geopolitical uncertainty, with data increasingly considered a primary defense asset, NATO members face growing pressure to turn it into operational advantage and readiness before adversaries do. We look forward to discussing how at NATO Edge 26.

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Prime Minister Andy Burnham will have an unofficial goal when he meets members of Britain’s former empire next week: Avoid a fight about slavery reparations.

Good luck, as they say, with that.

His predecessor Keir Starmer’s trip to the last Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, at a beach resort on the Pacific island of Samoa in 2024, is still the stuff of rueful mutters in parts of Whitehall.

Lined up in a semi-circle of armchairs — “like an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting,” as one person briefed on the gathering put it — leaders from many of the 56 Commonwealth nations negotiated live over a 16-page communique on laptops and tablets. Starmer, a barrister, found himself personally redrafting a key paragraph about reparations on a screen surrounded by other leaders, said two further people briefed on the meeting.

The unusually intimate format of the leaders’ retreat meant they had no officials with them on the veranda, and Starmer had just one civil servant — No. 10’s private secretary for foreign affairs — stationed in a tent close by. His chief of staff Morgan McSweeney was woken at 4 a.m. London time by a phone call to talk about the strategy for reparations.

That, however, was never clearly resolved. The retreat dragged on hours late; some leaders left before it was even over. Starmer was frustrated and felt he had been “ambushed,” said one U.K. official involved in the 2024 trip. A second said they had blocked the incident from their memory. A third said Starmer was left “furious,” adding: “He went in blind and it was terrible for him.” A fourth said simply: “It was a disaster.” All were granted anonymity to speak frankly.

The eventual communique agreed on a “conversation towards forging a common future based on equity.” This fudge kicked the issue of reparations down the road — where it now lands in Burnham’s lap.

Britain’s new prime minister will touch down at the biennial summit in Antigua and Barbuda next week to find the issue still firmly on some Caribbean and African leaders’ minds.

At the United Nations in May, 123 countries passed a motion calling for “inclusive, good-faith dialogue on reparatory justice.” The U.K. abstained. Barbados PM Mia Mottley announced a manifesto from Caribbean leaders on the “moral, ethical and legal case” for reparations in June. Commonwealth Secretary-General Shirley Botchwey said last week that an apology for Britain’s role in the slave trade “wouldn’t hurt.”

The visit will be a test of how Burnham — who has a reputation for speaking off the cuff, especially on issues of moral justice — maintains a delicate U.K. government line that reparations are not “the answer,” as Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband told POLITICO last month. And Burnham will face that challenge in a unique spotlight: It will be his first overseas visit with King Charles III, who is the head of the Commonwealth.

POLITICO spoke to a dozen U.K. officials or politicians who were involved in the 2024 summit or the planning for Burnham’s upcoming visit. They painted a picture of acute anxiety in the British state over how to deal with calls for reparations from its former colonies; tensions between Downing Street and the Foreign Office over the handling of 2024; and serious questions in Whitehall about whether the summit is even useful for No. 10 — despite the king’s role leaving U.K. prime ministers little choice but to attend.

Burnham will not have to deal with the extreme jetlag and communications hurdles that dogged Starmer’s trip, which involved a 28-hour flight in each direction. But like Starmer, he will fly out at a time when his in-tray is crowded by other issues — not least the U.S. midterms happening at the same time and the domestic aftermath of his first budget, just unveiled this past Wednesday.

The first U.K. official quoted earlier in this story said: “There’s a sense that there can’t be a repeat of [2024] this time around.” The third U.K. official quoted above said: “I don’t understand why they’re making the same mistake. Does the prime minister really have to go?”

A No. 10 official, however, said Burnham made clear soon after taking power on July 20 that he was “very keen” to attend the summit. Miliband has “laid the groundwork so that things hopefully won’t be as tricky as they were in 2024,” this person added.

“Andy’s style is that he is an honest broker with people, and he will give an instinctive response to things,” the official said. “But the government’s position is clear that reparations are not seen as the right route. It’s a careful balancing act, but one that we’re well prepared for.”

Climate resilience fund in the works

One tactic for the current No. 10 will be to try to avoid talking about it public.

Downing Street has broken with recent precedent by deciding not to bring the usual “pack” of political journalists, taking a smaller media “pool” instead. This will limit the scope of questions that Burnham faces. (Political editors from news outlets, including POLITICO, have written to No. 10 to object to the arrangement.)

Timing could also allow the visit to slip under the radar. Burnham and Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband will be there alongside counterparts including Anthony Albanese of Australia and Mark Carney of Canada, creating a rare opportunity for them to discuss the implications of the U.S. midterm results in private. The symbolism, as “middle power” nations deal with a drift in U.S. relations under Donald Trump, would be obvious.

Officially, the agenda is to build an alliance that can boost these middle powers, along with the developing states that global summits usually overlook. 

The Commonwealth Secretariat — the London-based body that co-ordinates the summit — said the aim of next week’s gathering is “partnerships and investment,” including in climate and youth employment, and removing trade barriers.

Likewise, the U.K. Foreign Office has been working on a climate resilience fund for developing nations, two people with knowledge of the talks said. A third said conversations in the U.K. government had focused on mobilizing public and private finance, and improving access to finance for climate-vulnerable countries.

Three people with knowledge of the planning emphasized that this summit would be an opportunity to build on relations with countries that could discuss bilateral trade, though they did not name specific nations and no U.K. trade ministers are due at the event.

“There will obviously be trade and investment discussions with a range of partners,” said one of the three people, a U.K. government official, who also noted that the U.K. will raise the impacts of El Niño. “The bigger picture is that we want to use the Commonwealth network to deepen trade and investment links across its 56 members — that Commonwealth advantage is one of the reasons the grouping matters to the UK.”

‘Playing Scrabble with words’

But leaders at these events, known by the awkward acronym CHOGM, can raise whatever topics they wish — reparations included.

Denis O’Brien, the Irish telecoms billionaire who founded the Repair Campaign calling for financial reparations to the Caribbean in 2022, said: “The conversation has moved radically forward.” He urged Britain and other European nations to “start off with an apology and then have an engagement,” adding: “The Foreign Office and the prime minister’s office are playing Scrabble with words — and unfortunately they’re leaving King Charles, who is so highly respected in the Caribbean, in a very difficult position.”

Paul Boateng, the Labour peer who was Britain’s first Black Cabinet minister and now campaigns on the issue, said Caribbean nations “are going to be pressing it. This issue is not going to go away.” The recent UN resolution reinforced Caribbean and African nations’ argument, argued Boateng: “We can’t be seen to simply ignore it … We cannot hold the Foreign Office line that it changes nothing.”

That position cast a long shadow two years ago.

No. 10 flew to Samoa in 2024 insisting reparations were “not on the agenda,” even though the summit’s free-wheeling format meant the choice was effectively out of Downing Street’s hands. 

This message “went down like a bag of sick” with Caribbean nations who saw it as “colonial” and “arrogant,” recalled one person involved in conversations at the time.

The handling created tension between Downing Street and the Foreign Office, then led by David Lammy, who also attended, according to six other people with knowledge of the 2024 trip. 

One of the six people said No. 10 figures had expected the Foreign Office to better manage expectations among Commonwealth nations ahead of Starmer’s arrival. The person said: “No. 10 did not feel like they were well enough informed, and felt some of this could and should have been handled in advance. There was the feeling that both Lammy and the Foreign Office were institutionally pre-disposed to this sort of stuff and not shutting it down. The PM didn’t know what he was going into.”

A second person said: “​​The FCDO world does forget, sometimes, the politics of what’s going on in the U.K. It’s very institutionalized.”

A third person stressed that senior aides in No. 10 had blamed Foreign Office officials, not Lammy personally. Before Starmer left office this year, No. 10 had been drawing up plans for Starmer to skip this year’s CHOGM — and send Lammy as his representative. By then Lammy had been moved from the foreign office and was Starmer’s deputy prime minister.

Another of the six people countered that it was No. 10 that persisted, ahead of the 2024 summit, with a line that was too binary — reparatory justice, as campaigners prefer to call it, has a wide definition that includes support for climate adaptation and education — and failed to listen to Foreign Office warnings ahead of time about the strength of feeling among Commonwealth nations.

“The audit trail would completely exonerate David and the Foreign Office,” this person said. They argued No. 10 officials — who were keen to hold on to the mantle of fiscal responsibility ahead of Starmer’s first budget — had viewed the row too much through how it would be perceived by the right-wing Daily Mail newspaper.

Two other people with knowledge of the 2024 trip insisted they did not remember any significant friction between No. 10 and the Foreign Office. Lammy’s office did not immediately respond to an invitation to comment.

UK review mooted a scaled-back summit

More significantly, the 2024 summit also led to discussions in Whitehall about the set-up of CHOGM itself.

Lammy commissioned an internal review by Foreign Office officials on the Commonwealth in the wake of the 2024 summit, his former Special Adviser Ben Judah told POLITICO.

Judah said the review suggested reducing the frequency of CHOGMs to “every four or five years,” potentially aligned with the hosting of the Commonwealth Games, and seeking to remove the final communique and leaders’ retreat.

It suggested an investment conference in alternate years modeled on the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, which could keep the Commonwealth branding but with no organizational role for the Secretariat, said Judah.

Judah suggested this would improve attendance at CHOGM, which is often patchy; India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi does not plan to attend next week’s summit, for example, though there will be a delegation led by External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar.  “The Indians think this thing is ridiculous and self-harming and just totally bizarre,” said Judah. “They’d be interested in a real investment conference, not this farce.”

A second former U.K. government official said they knew about the report, which has not been made public, adding that No. 10 figures under Starmer discussed similar concerns about the format of the Commonwealth summit after the Samoa visit.

The Foreign Office declined to respond to questions about the report when contacted by POLITICO, including when it was finalized or whether any of its recommendations were pursued. One Foreign Office official, however, stressed that it was not the U.K. government’s position and that any decisions about future CHOGM arrangements would be for Commonwealth members collectively.

The U.K. government official quoted on trade and investment earlier in this piece said: “The Commonwealth is more important to our geostrategic position now than at any time throughout its 80-year history. In today’s more divided, unpredictable world, the Commonwealth has the potential to be a powerful, values-based force for good in the world.

“This gives us a huge opportunity to drive U.K. interests and priorities — Commonwealth relationships have helped to drive global support for Ukraine, and it is hugely important for our work on climate.”

Funding pulled from reserves

Judah, however, argued that the Commonwealth Secretariat is a “broken institution” and Britain should wind down its involvement to focus on an investment summit instead.

CHOGM has ended up as a “platform for the reparations campaign,” argued Judah: “There’s nothing else on the agenda because it’s not a real international organization, and it’s not a real summit with deliverables.” The Commonwealth and Secretariat, he said, has “essentially been taken over by the only countries that are still really invested in them, which are the Caribbean countries supported by a few African countries, to push the reparations agenda.”

For some, that extends to questions about the way the Secretariat spends its money.

Two people with knowledge of the situation said part of this year’s CHOGM summit is being paid for out of the Secretariat’s reserves. “There is a real sense of concern about the malaise and drift of the organization,” argued one of the two people. “Financially it’s in a dire, dire state.”

A Commonwealth spokesperson responded: “The Commonwealth Secretariat accesses reserve funds for the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and always with member country approval.”

Back in 2024, Starmer’s most senior aides privately raised the question about whether he should attend the Samoa summit at all. “We were overruled,” said another person who worked under him.

Whitehall officials initially assumed that Burnham would not go either, until he said otherwise. “To a lot of the Caribbean countries, the word [from officials] was that he wasn’t going to show,” said O’Brien. “I think people were taken aback by that.”

But despite Starmer’s experience in 2024, Burnham will attend. 

Among all other reasons, there is one very obvious one. “It’s very difficult for a prime minister not to go because the king goes,” said one person who worked under Starmer. “It’s important to him.”

Burnham’s ‘surer touch’

Once Burnham is in the room, campaigners hope he will at least be a listening ear.

Outside the prime minister’s Manchester office No. 10 North is a statue of Abraham Lincoln, commemorating the mill workers who refused to touch raw cotton picked by slaves.

Burnham referred to it in his first speech to the United Nations last month. “In 1862, people with little power used it to help those with none on the other side of the world,” he said. “The best change is change like that, bottom-up change led by people.”

The new prime minister “understands the importance of Manchester as the second great city of empire, and he has a surer touch than his predecessors,” argued Boateng. “We’ve got an opportunity to reset the relationship.”

What reparatory justice would look like is another matter. 

Previous estimates have suggested Britain should owe as much as £18 trillion, but the conversation is far more nuanced than talking about a single big number.

While Boateng argues that no measures should be taken off the table, he would begin with reforming the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to give more Commonwealth countries a meaningful seat at the table, and returning historic artefacts such as the Benin bronzes that are displayed in London’s British Museum. “The British Museum holds loot, literally loot. These are stolen goods,” he said.

Britain is working on debt relief too. Chancellor John Healey plans to make international finance for developing countries a key theme when Britain hosts G20 finance ministers next year. 

NGOs have urged Healey to make debt relief more generous by changing the G20’s common framework and UK domestic law, which sets the terms for 90% of debt that low-income countries owe to private lenders.

Maria Finnerty of Bond, the membership body for NGOs, said Britain “continues to play a role in enabling illicit financial flows through loopholes linked to the City of London and its overseas territories, amounting to the loss of billions from some Commonwealth countries.”

Miliband reflected all this in his POLITICO interview last month at the Labour Party Conference. While condemning the slave trade as “terrible,” he said his focus was on addressing current issues in countries “on the front line of the climate crisis, of the debt burden, of trying to reduce poverty in those countries.”

O’Brien is calling for monetary payments, however. Through the Repair Campaign, he wants to see the EU and U.K. make money available to the 15 Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries — with a special case for Haiti — “each year for the next 75 years” for issues such as education, green energy and storm defenses to deal with climate change. 

O’Brien would not be drawn on a single figure, but suggested payments should supplement the national budget of each affected country by around 10% a year.

Asked if he had had conversations with the Foreign Office, O’Brien replied: “What do you think?

“I mean, we would like to. We’re approaching this in a very friendly way, taking a very, very sensitive period of history and trying to get results. We have the highest respect for the British government, and particularly the King. But it can’t go on forever.”

MONTREAL — Prime Minister Mark Carney is positioning Ottawa’s C$1.6 billion investment in Canadian artificial intelligence company Cohere as a downpayment on his country’s national security. 

“We’re not waiting for the future of AI to be decided somewhere else by those we don’t know or … don’t trust,” Carney said Thursday in Montreal ahead of the start of the Canada-EU summit.

Carney framed the upcoming congress, which includes meetings Friday with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa, as a shared endeavor to build a stronger transatlantic alliance in the face of global disruption.

“Sovereignty now requires secure access to semiconductors, critical minerals, payment systems, clean energy technology, vaccines, space-based communications and artificial intelligence,” Carney said. “Canada is taking a major step forward in artificial intelligence.”

In a pre-summit speech earlier Thursday in Montreal, von der Leyen cited April’s multi-billion dollar merger between Cohere and German counterpart Aleph Alpha as a key piece of the deepening Canada-EU cooperation that is set to unfold at Friday’s talks on AI.

“Both Canada and Europe believe this technology should serve people. So we will work together to tackle head-on the safety and security issues of runaway AI. We will develop together rules and standards and strong global governance,” she said.

Carney said Canada was making a commercial investment alongside private investors including Nvidia, Bell and Germany’s Schwarz Group.

Cohere co-founder and CEO Aidan Gomez announced the initial close of its Series E funding round on Thursday, which is targeting up to C$7 billion at a C$35.7 billion valuation.

Gomez joined Carney at Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, for the Canadian portion of the funding announcement. 

“We believe that artificial intelligence would become one of the defining technologies of this century, and that Canadians should help build it, shape it and benefit from it,” Gomez said, standing next to the Canadian leader. 

The Canada-EU summit is unfolding against the backdrop of economic threats by U.S. President Donald Trump against both transatlantic partners.

Carney dismissed suggestions Thursday that the summit could draw reprisals by Trump against the participants. “This is a process which we’re doing absolutely in the interest of the Canadians, but ultimately the U.S. will see that,” he said.

LONDON — Britain’s intelligence agency GCHQ cannot account for the whereabouts of thousands of storage devices which could contain sensitive material, according to an official watchdog.

A report by the Investigatory Powers Commissioner (IPCO) — which polices how Britain’s intelligence agencies use their spying powers — on Thursday found that a significant number of devices including USB sticks, hard drives and memory cards are unaccounted for.

Brian Leveson, the Investigatory Powers Commissioner, said that GCHQ “still cannot tell me what has happened to removable media that may hold sensitive data, years after I first raised it with them.”

He noted that the devices “may contain IPA-related data” — which has a high level of sensitivity.

IPA-related data refers to information collected or held under the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. That could include intercepted communications such as emails, texts and telephone calls, as well as information extracted from people’s computers or phones.

The report added that GCHQ currently estimates the number of devices “to be in the thousands” and is currently undergoing work so it can report how many of the devices have been confirmed as lost.

“We remain very concerned about this issue and are disappointed with the time it has taken GCHQ to investigate,” the report notes.

Last year IPCO disclosed that GCHQ and fellow intelligence agency MI5 had been unable to locate considerable numbers of storage devices, some of which potentially containing information classified as “TOP SECRET.”

A GCHQ spokesperson said: “As IPCO have reported, our management system for removable media was previously not sufficiently robust to effectively track the items that were registered for use. IPCO are right to note the flaws in the data the system produced, and we have taken action against all their recommendations.

“We recognise the importance of security of removable media in our systems, and have a range of measures to mitigate the risks posed by these items. The findings in the report have been addressed comprehensively and all necessary steps to correct this issue have been taken.”

We live in an era where wars are fought not just on battlefields, but also on our screens, in our minds and through the narratives we are led to believe. Narratives are influencing perception while missiles destroy infrastructure. What happens when the war for truth becomes more dangerous than the actual battle itself? Who’s controlling the narrative?

When wars end, the fighting over what they meant begins: who won, who was to blame and who can be trusted to keep the peace. These questions are settled less on the battlefield than on screens, in feeds and in group chats. For a Middle East emerging from the war that began on February 28, that contest may decide whether any new security order holds.

The region is now asking what comes after deterrence. That question brought policymakers, military leaders and researchers from the United States, Europe, Asia and the Gulf to the TRENDS 6^th Annual Conference, held in Abu Dhabi and organized by TRENDS Global, in collaboration with its global offices. The answer cannot be measured only in missiles and alliances. Information resilience should be treated as security infrastructure, planned and funded like air defense, not managed as public relations.

What happens when the war for truth becomes more dangerous than the actual battle itself?

The struggle over perception can now matter as much as events on the ground. That is no longer hyperbole. In any crisis today, governments, media outlets, political movements and non-state groups compete in real time to define what is happening. Disinformation, coordinated propaganda and now content generated by artificial intelligence (AI) mean a false account can reach millions before an official one is drafted.

As former BBC correspondent Karen Allen put it at the conference, “Now in an instant, I’m able to influence millions of people,” and algorithm manipulation is what we are increasingly seeing.

This year’s war showed how real that is. Within days of the first U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran, an AI-generated video of Dubai’s Burj Khalifa on fire, with crowds fleeing, was viewed tens of millions of times, according to BBC Verify. Fabricated images of damaged U.S. facilities in the Gulf spread just as fast, some posted by Iranian state-linked outlets. UAE Minister of State Noura Al Kaabi later described the attacks on the country as coming “from the sky and behind our screens.” Her government’s answer was to treat “fake news and misinformation as a security threat.”

A more damaging false story was not a single video. It was the idea that the Gulf was a party to the war. The UAE did not want this war and said so. On March 3, Minister of State Reem Al Hashimy said the UAE did not “seek to expand the circle of confrontation,” that it had “repeatedly confirmed” its territory could not be used for any military operation against Iran, and that “returning to the negotiating table is the only rational way forward.” The attacks continued anyway. Reuters reported, citing UAE defense figures, that 186 ballistic missiles and 812 drones were fired at the country in the first days of the conflict.

Information resilience should be treated as security infrastructure, planned and funded like air defense, not managed as public relations.

Tehran sought to blur that record, framing strikes on Gulf cities as retaliation against American aggression. Its foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told NBC News that Iran had “not attacked our neighbors,” only “American bases,” and called the hotels hit in Dubai “collateral damage.” Countering that narrative does not require propaganda of our own. It requires putting the record in front of the world quickly and repeatedly: the UAE’s public calls for restraint before the war, its refusal to let its territory be used against Iran, and the hundreds of missiles and drones fired at it, most of which it shot down. Facts published fast, through verified channels, in Arabic, English and Farsi, are harder to bury than corrections issued too late.

Even after a war ends, the threats do not disappear; they simply take different forms. Ceasefires and reconstruction depend on public trust. If populations come to believe that the peace is a betrayal, or that a neighbor cannot be trusted, no deterrence framework or security pact will survive contact with domestic politics. Spoilers understand this. Their cheapest weapon is a story.

Seen from the Gulf, the lesson of recent years is that speed and credibility beat silence. Crisis communication is not a side function of security. When official channels inform the public quickly, consistently and honestly, rumors have less room to grow. When they hesitate, someone else fills the gap.

None of this is simple. Governments everywhere are still working out where countering disinformation ends and controlling speech begins, and that debate should stay open. But the common ground is wider than it looks: a society cannot be secure if it cannot tell what is true.

The harder test comes now. After a war, influence campaigns shift from shock to slow erosion: relitigating who was to blame, questioning whether Gulf governments can protect their people, and setting neighbors and communities against each other. Young connected audiences are the main target. They are also the best defense.

Protecting our societies from that influence does not mean closing them. It means official channels fast and credible enough that people turn to them first. It means platforms held to clear rules on labeling AI-generated conflict content, as X began to do in March. And it means a generation of young Emiratis and Gulf citizens equipped to verify what they see and able to tell the region’s story themselves rather than leaving it to others.

The harder test comes now. After a war, influence campaigns shift from shock to slow erosion.

This is not only a Gulf problem. The campaigns aimed at audiences in the Gulf also shape how Washington and Brussels understand the region. The UAE and its partners already work closely on defense and intelligence. Detecting and exposing cross-border influence operations belongs on that shared agenda as a joint effort between governments, platforms and researchers.

Diplomacy, investment, and deterrence will rebuild the region’s security. Whether that security holds will depend on something harder to measure: what people across the region believe about each other, and about who protects them. For the UAE, winning that argument with facts is not public relations. It is part of keeping the country safe.

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Najla Al Midfa is an Emirati researcher at TRENDS Research & Advisory, a company under TRENDS Group. Her research focuses on geopolitics, international relations, economic diplomacy and regional security, with a particular interest in the UAE’s foreign policy and strategic partnerships. She holds a master’s degree in Global Affairs and Diplomatic Leadership from the Anwar Gargash Diplomatic Academy, where her thesis examined the UAE’s economic diplomacy through its Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement strategy.

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Sources

• Sixth Annual TRENDS Conference 2026 kicks off on October 12 — WAM (Emirates News Agency), September 2026
• TRENDS 6th Annual Conference 2026 — Sustainable Security: programme and speakers — TRENDS Research & Advisory
• AI-generated Iran war videos surge as creators use new tech to cash in — BBC Verify, March 7, 2026
• Factbox: Iranian missiles and drones fired at Gulf countries — Reuters (republished by Al-Monitor), March 3, 2026
• X suspends revenue sharing for undisclosed AI war videos — AFP, March 3, 2026
• UAE urges the US, Israel and Iran to return to the negotiating table — Euronews, March 4, 2026
• Fake news treated as security threat during Iran war, says UAE minister — The National, September 15, 2026
• NBC News, “Iran’s foreign minister denies seeking war with neighbors,” March 2026. https://www.nbcnews.com/world/iran/irans-foreign-minister-denies-seeking-war-neighbors-rcna261954

BRUSSELS — New powers proposed for the EU’s border police Frontex to monitor social media pose a threat to free speech, European lawmakers and civil society groups have told POLITICO.

The EU Commission’s proposal Tuesday for a major revamp of the coast and border patrol agency included a broad and explicit mandate to monitor social media for information that aids or encourages illegal border crossings into the European Union.

Social democratic Italian lawmaker Brando Benifei told POLITICO it was “legitimate” for authorities to remove online advertisements for human smuggling: “But a broad social media surveillance mandate goes much further, placing online speech under a border agency’s watch.”

After a 2019 monitoring tender with similar powers was revoked over criticism about privacy violations, Benifei said “the Commission now proposes copying ICE’s invasive online tracking,” referencing the much-criticized surveillance tactics of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Under the EU proposal, Frontex would set up an internal structure to monitor social media and report to the platform in question the content it says is facilitating illegal entry to EU countries. This comes as the Commission is seeking to double the agency’s budget for the next seven years and vastly expand its powers to deport people.

The EU already has several structures that facilitate the exchange of information between civil society, social media platforms and authorities when it comes to disinformation campaigns or illegal content. These include a rapid response system on disinformation campaigns under the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s landmark law regulating digital platforms, as well as a recently established democratic resilience center.

Policing content

Brussels must tread a careful balance not to police individual pieces of content, especially given criticism from civil society activists that it is trying to become the arbiter of truth online. The legality of content is set by countries, which assign their authorities or civil society to monitor the platforms for problematic postings to be flagged to the platforms to be taken down.

Frontex would apply for trusted flagger status under the DSA, which gives priority to the content it flags to social media platforms. Entities that apply for this status have to demonstrate expertise and independence to a national authority, which grants them special status.

“The DSA’s trusted flagger program was never conceived for police forces to circumvent due process when assessing the legality of people’s online expression,” said Jan Penfrat, senior policy advisor at civil society group EDRi.

The Commission’s initial communication suggested Frontex “will be acting” as such an entity, which EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen later clarified meant they would apply for it. That application would have to be reviewed by a national authority to check Frontex’s independence and expertise in that area.

Polish right-wing MEP Piotr Müller told POLITICO that the “mandate must be precise” in focusing on criminal networks. “Frontex should go after smugglers and human traffickers, not police opinions about migration.” Müller is among those that criticize the DSA as policing free speech online.

Executive Vice President Virkkunen announced the news at a meeting Tuesday of signatories of the DSA’s code of conduct on disinformation, some of whom are trusted flaggers. Questions around the implications of the measures for freedom of speech and assembly came up in the closed-door meeting. According to two attendees, Renate Nikolay, deputy director general of DG CONNECT, the Commission’s tech department, tried to assuage the free-speech concerns.

Other lawmakers took a positive, yet reserved, stance towards the changes in Frontex’s mandate. The EU’s migration authorities “need the tools to respond to the changing threats at Europe’s borders, including smugglers using social media to spread lies and promote dangerous crossings,” which can include “better monitoring and information-sharing,” Regina Doherty, a center-right MEP from Ireland told POLITICO.

But “the priority now is to get the detail right so authorities can act quickly within a clear legal framework, and platforms take responsibility for illegal content,” she pointed out.

Austrian center-right MEP Andreas Schwab said that “social media clearly is becoming more and more a concern, but we should not have too many tools – let’s make use of the DSA.”

Another MEP who knows the agency well was more blunt. Fabrice Leggeri, a former director of Frontex who hails from the far-right French National Rally party, said that the new powers amounted to an “attempt to censor freedom of speech in Europe” by Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen.

The Commission didn’t respond to POLITICO’s repeated requests for comment on Frontex’s expertise in this domain.

Max Griera contributed to this report.