An undersea cable can be damaged without a shot being fired. A cyberattack can disrupt a railway network without anyone crossing a border. Europe has become increasingly familiar with threats that are serious enough to demand a response, but difficult to actually classify as acts of war. The new security partnership announced by Britain and Germany on 8 October is an attempt to deal with that problem. It also makes us ask how European security is being organised, particularly now that the UK is no longer part of the EU.
At their meeting in Berlin, British Prime Minister Andy Burnham and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz agreed to cooperate more closely on cyberattacks and threats to critical infrastructure. The plan is to share information and coordinate efforts to detect as well as prevent hostile activity. Yet the joint statement offers few details about how this will work in practice. It does not announce a new joint command, a dedicated budget or a timetable for operational measures. For now, the partnership is best understood as a commitment to work together more closely, rather than a fully developed security mechanism.
That distinction matters because the threats it addresses are difficult to handle through traditional defence arrangements. A suspicious fire at a logistics centre might initially look like a criminal matter. A cyberattack against an energy provider may be carried out through intermediaries, making its origin hard to establish. In such cases, governments need information from intelligence services and private companies, often before they can confidently identify who is responsible. London has singled out Russia as a major source of concern, although that does not mean every unexplained disruption can be attributed to Moscow. The challenge is to respond quickly without confusing suspicion with evidence.
This is where a smaller partnership can offer something useful. NATO is responsible for collective defence, but not every act of sabotage is clear enough to trigger a collective military response. NATO’s own guidance on hybrid threats stresses that the country being targeted has primary responsibility for responding, even while the Alliance can provide assistance. The EU, meanwhile, has important tools in areas such as infrastructure regulation and resilience. NATO’s Baltic Sentry response to damaged undersea cables in 2025 also showed that collective action can be swift. Still, coordinating across numerous members, institutions and legal systems is not always the quickest way for two governments to exchange sensitive information or organise a practical response.
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The new agreement is also less of a sudden change than it first appears. In October 2024, Britain and Germany signed the Trinity House Agreement, committing to stronger defence cooperation. The Kensington Treaty, signed in July 2025 and formally ratified at the October 2026 meeting, went further. Its provisions already covered cyber activity, sabotage and foreign interference, while explicitly recognising NATO and the EU. The hybrid-threat partnership therefore looks like an effort to give an existing political commitment a more practical purpose, rather than to create an entirely separate European security system.
Nor is Germany Britain’s only bilateral defence partner. London has been deepening cooperation with Paris too. On 20 and 21 October, British aircraft took part in a French nuclear exercise, reflecting the closer coordination envisaged under the Northwood Declaration. Britain also leads the ten-country Joint Expeditionary Force, which activated a system to monitor risks to undersea infrastructure in January 2025. These arrangements differ in purpose, but they suggest a wider pattern: European countries are developing closer ties in smaller groups around particular capabilities and threats. France, Germany and the UK remain closely linked on major security questions, even though only two of them sit inside EU institutions.
For Britain, this has an obvious post-Brexit significance. Leaving the EU did not remove the UK’s interest in the security of the continent, but it did change the way London participates in European decision-making. The UK-EU Security and Defence Partnership agreed in May 2025 created a framework for renewed dialogue, including on hybrid threats and critical infrastructure. It did not give Britain a seat at the EU’s internal decision-making table. Working closely with Berlin offers another route to influence and cooperation, especially on issues where British intelligence and defence capabilities remain valuable to European partners.
Still, there is a difference between cooperation that complements European institutions and cooperation that starts to bypass them. Germany cannot treat a bilateral understanding with London as a substitute for its obligations as an EU member. The more security decisions are made among a handful of powerful states, the more difficult it may become for smaller countries to follow, influence or benefit from them. That is particularly important for states on NATO’s eastern flank, where the risks associated with sabotage and infrastructure disruption are far from theoretical. Faster coordination between London and Berlin will be useful only if it improves security beyond the two countries themselves.
The discussion of disrupted trade routes at the Berlin meeting also shows how wide the security agenda has become. Burnham and Merz addressed the consequences of instability affecting routes such as the Strait of Hormuz, according to Downing Street’s announcement. That conversation was not presented as a specific operational commitment under the hybrid-threat partnership. But it points to the economic consequences of security crises: a damaged cable, a vulnerable port or an interrupted shipping route can create problems well beyond the place where the incident occurs. Protecting those connections requires cooperation across borders, with private operators as well as governments.
There is also a risk that the language of hybrid threats becomes so broad that almost any hostile incident falls under it. That may make political cooperation easier to announce, but it does not make responsibility easier to establish. Both governments will need to decide what information can actually be shared, which authorities will act on it, and how they will coordinate with NATO and EU mechanisms already in place. The October statement leaves those questions largely open. Without clear procedures, the partnership could amount to another layer of meetings rather than a faster response when something goes wrong.
The UK-Germany pact reflects a wider shift towards smaller, more flexible security partnerships in Europe. For Britain, these agreements offer a way to remain influential in European defence after Brexit. But closer cooperation between London and Berlin will mean little if it creates another layer of diplomacy without improving how governments respond to threats. The question is not whether bilateral partnerships can replace NATO or the EU, but whether they can make Europe’s existing security arrangements work better.
