Thinking the unthinkable

The rupture

Speaking at Davos in January 2026, Mark Carney described an ongoing rupture in the rules-based international order — an order which, in his words, no longer functions as advertised. The strongest powers increasingly treat transnational institutions as optional: Russia's war on Ukraine, China's artificial islands in the South China Sea, and the United States' posture towards Greenland and Venezuela all point the same way.

Lawrence Wong, Prime Minister of Singapore, has made a similar argument: we are in transition to a post-American, multi-polar world, the old rules no longer apply, and the new ones have not yet been written. His conclusion is the practical one — countries cannot afford to wait. They need to invest in their own economies and their own security now.

A question that would recently have been dismissed as conspiracy is now asked at the top table: can the United States be relied upon as a trusted ally, bilaterally and as the leading NATO member? The US National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy are explicit about an America First doctrine, including the intent to ensure the dominance of US technical standards in AI, biotech, quantum and cloud. The transactional approach that follows has reduced trust, and trust is what alliances run on.

It is tempting to assume that a future US administration restores the old normal. But once the polarisation genie is out of the bottle it is hard to see it going back in. The prudent planning assumption is that the rupture persists.

Technology is not neutral

US dominance of Defence and national security technology is most visible in the data layer — data centres, cloud fabric and services, analytics platforms and AI. It has become increasingly obvious that technology is not neutral. It is subject to laws, politics and sanctions, including the US CLOUD Act and the PATRIOT Act.

In June 2025, in a hearing before the French Senate, Microsoft France's director of public and legal affairs acknowledged under oath that the company cannot guarantee that EU customer data will remain protected from US government access, because the CLOUD Act compels compliance with data requests regardless of where the data is stored. That testimony did more to sharpen the European sovereignty debate than any policy paper.

The consequence is not that nations should decouple from US technology. It is that they should stop assuming access to it is unconditional, and should keep their data crown jewels in capabilities that remain available whatever happens to the relationship.

What this means for the UK

Since the Second World War, successive UK governments have treated the special relationship as something that transcends day-to-day politics, and have integrated UK Defence, intelligence and technology capability tightly with US partners and their supply chains. The geopolitical algebra has shifted. The UK should be conducting serious scenario planning against that shift.

The UK Government has recognised the need for a Defence Industrial Strategy and a Defence Investment Plan to support delivery of the Strategic Defence Review. But the Investment Plan has been repeatedly delayed, and the Review is not fully funded — commentators, including the Chief of the Defence Staff, have put the shortfall at around £28bn, falling mostly in the early years.

That immediate shortage of public money argues for partnership between government, industry and private capital. There is appetite in the City of London for Defence investment in a way there was not a decade ago, and it should be exploited. The UK could also learn from the US by establishing a focused technology investment organisation along the lines of In-Q-Tel — working alongside the Defence Investment Board, but operating like a venture capitalist, with the agility, speed and tolerance of risk that implies.

The calls to action

The world has changed and the old rules-based order is not returning. Doctrine and policy need to catch up. The paper argues for:

• Scenario planning across all eight sovereign focus areas, including their supply chains
• A fully funded Sovereign Capability Programme, mobilised at pace and scoped to cover critical national infrastructure as well as Defence
• A working partnership between government, industry and private capital to address the early-years funding gap
• A UK technology investment organisation on In-Q-Tel lines, operating commercially alongside the Defence Investment Board
• Urgent engagement and onboarding of sovereign suppliers and innovative SMEs, with procurement processes reviewed to remove friction
• Continuous open entry to frameworks such as G-Cloud, rather than the current eighteen to twenty-four month windows that keep SMEs out

This is not an argument for decoupling. It is an argument for a managed, prioritised migration towards a higher proportion of sovereign capability, augmented by bilateral and multilateral arrangements such as Five Eyes and AUKUS where those continue to serve UK interests.

Why this matters to us

Vault Cloud UK exists because of the gap this paper describes. Sovereign cloud is one of the eight areas, and it is the one where the distance between what is claimed and what is actually true is widest. A UK region inside a global hyperscaler is a data centre postcode. It is not a jurisdiction.

The paper's authors set a deliberately high bar: a sovereign alternative has to be high quality, compatible and genuinely independent, even if it is necessarily narrower in scope than the hyperscalers. That is the bar we are building to.

This paper represents the views of its authors. Subsequent papers will examine individual focus areas in more detail.
© Gerald Janes and Mike Stone, January 2026. Published by Vault Cloud UK with the authors' permission.