https://thealphengroup.home.blog/
Elephants and Swans
8 January, 2021
Abstract:
This TAG Annual Report is my personal take on the Group’s activity in 2020 and my reflection on the outstanding analysis offered by its members over the past year. Perhaps the dominant theme in both our PREMIUM blogs and the virtual ZOOM conferences we held was the search for priorities in uncertainty and the urgent need to better understand the balance of risk faced by Americans, Canadians and Europeans. COVID-19 dominated news and lives in 2020 but the pandemic also accelerated systemic change with China possibly a clear ‘winner’ with all the profound strategic implications such a ‘victory’ would entail. However, China is not quite yet and enemy and some hope still possibly a partner. Given that the nature of the threat China poses, and indeed the opportunities it could afford COVID-19 ravaged economies remains unclear and it is that uncertainty over China that is doing as much to divide the West as any overt act of coercion by Beijing. What price are Europeans in particular willing to pay for partnership with China what price would the transatlantic relationship pay for it? What of the West itself? During the final tumultuous months of the Trump administration some Europeans even seemed to be playing with the prospect of diminished Atlanticism with calls for European ‘strategic autonomy’ one moment offering to strengthen the transatlantic community, the next moment threatening to replace it. Implicit in all these debates was the search for a renewed sense of strategic purpose. This raised another question: will Germany ever be able to lead Europe?
2020 was also a year of expansion for the TAG and I had the honour to welcome to our fold Professor Yves Boyer (France), General (Retd) Sir James Everard (United Kingdom), Admiral (Retd) Giampaolo di Paola (Italy), Professor Zaneta Ozolina (Latvia), General (Retd) the Lord Richards of Hurstmonceux (United Kingdom), Professor Ste Rynning (Denmark), Paul Schulte (United Kingdom) and Colin Robertson (Canada) and Ambassador Alexander Vershbow (United States). It is great to have you all on board.
Swans and elephants
During one of our virtual
ZOOM conferences one TAGGER suggested that, “The real threat to NATO and its cohesion are Black Elephants;
risks that are widely acknowledged and familiar (the ‘elephant in the room’) -
but ignored. When the elephant can no longer be ignored it is passed off as an
unpredictable surprise (a ‘black swan’) by those who were slow to address it.
NATO’s biggest Black Elephant is the reluctance of its member countries to
spend on defence.” I agree. Black Elephants are indeed a major risk to the
Euro-Atlantic community and the wider security and defence of Europe. However,
it is black swans which could prove the most deadly.
Judy
Dempsey in her TAG blog “Multilateralism Buckles under Corona” spelt out the
consequences of both elephants and swans. The post-1945 order was in bad shape,
she said, even before the Coronavirus swept across the globe. “In the midst of
the pandemic, it is barely surviving with few prospects of being revived”. Holger Mey in his TAG blog “Dealing with Risks” offered
an insight as to why. Those
who were surprised by the outbreak and world-wide spread of COVID-19, Holger
suggested, had either no understanding of biology or history or both. Everything that happened was foreseeable and
foreseen as well as predictable and, indeed, had been predicted. In
April, another TAG v-Conference went further. “COVID-19 should have been
predicted. The response to it will dominate the political and strategic agenda
on both sides of Atlantic for the foreseeable future”.
It
was striking the extent to which TAGGERS also believed that the pandemic has
accelerated strategic trends already in play.
The TAG believes not only that strategic competition with China will
increase in 2021 but that distracted Western policymakers will remain too
reactive and too slow to respond. The Group was scathing in its assessment: “The
West has naively connived in its own vulnerability and must now seek a more
balanced relationship with China”. The sense was that lazy assumptions about
the benefits of globalisation far from promoting mutually beneficial
interdependence could lead to a distinctly unhealthy form of dependence on Xi’s
Middle Kingdom. And, whilst “Globalisation will not end but rather slow down a
process of re-regionalisation is also likely to ensue”. The TAG also called for
“a full and dispassionate assessment of COVID-19 crisis management”. This is
because the response and responsiveness of the machinery of government on both
sides of the Atlantic appeared at times to be confused and sluggish. Moreover, far from being a crisis of
globalism, COVID 19 could well prove to be the first global crisis of
twenty-first century nationalism”. Only a properly considered “functionalist
response will counter nationalism”.
Strategy, action and leadership
The TAG also considered
the crisis of leadership. Events in Washington in early January revealed the
dangers to complex democracies of irresponsible leadership. The problem in
Europe leans more towards the risks of irresolute leadership. In many respects Germany
epitomises and exemplifies the difficulties Europeans have not only in dealing
with and confronting risk and establishing and implementing the necessary
strategies for prevention and effective response and management. These dilemmas
beg a further and seemingly interminable European question the answer to which
the wider world is unlikely to await: who leads?
Anna Wieslander of the
Atlantic Council in Stockholm suggested Germany should lead the way towards a truly European
Pillar in NATO. Anna called the “European pillar” an old idea whose time has
come. Indeed, rather than pursue yet more confusing debates on “strategic
autonomy”, a “European Army” and/or an eventual “European Defense Union”, all
of which not only make little sense to many but positively repel others
(post-Brexit Britain?), the 21 states that are both members of NATO and the EU
should focus on defining, developing and strengthening the European pillar of
NATO. Is Sweden finally abandoning non-alignment? It should. It is not. Why Germany? “The responsibility falls on Germany, who is well suited as the traditional
unifier in the EU and with a defense which is mostly integrated into NATO”. If
only Germans shared Anna’s vision and confidence.
German TAGGER Alexandra Schwarzkopf by and large agreed with Anna but had
no illusions about the domestic political challenges any strengthened German
leadership role would need to overcome. In her TAG blog “Making Security a “Kitchen
Table Topic” in Germany” Alex was clear: “Seventy-five
years after the end of World War Two, Germany is a major economic and
democratic power. I think it is time for us to assume more responsibility
worldwide. And especially given our
past, we should vigorously contribute to the defense of our allies and the
democratic world order to which post-War Germany owes so much”. However, “To do
this we need a societal debate – a kind of citizens’ forums - about German
foreign and security policy as part of a broader debate about its strategic
role in the world of the 21st century. The most populous and biggest economic power in the EU cannot be a
bigger version of Switzerland. Germany’s “strategic beauty sleep” must end”.
Most TAGGERS would echo such sentiment but I am reminded of a piece I published
many years ago in The International Herald Tribune in which I suggested that
for many years Germany’s friends and allies had used World War Two to impose
modesty on Berlin, too often Berlin now uses World War Two to imposed excessive
modesty on itself. Europe and the wider transatlantic relationship needs
modern, democratic, decent Germany to lead alongside a United States that needs
more capable allies more urgently by the day.
Let me be clear: neither Europe nor Germany can any longer pretend to be
elephants or swans. This world does not permit bystanders to history as this coming
decade will make all too clear.
Risk, change
and strategy
The effective management
of risk pre-supposes not only a firm grip of such risk and the policy
priorities which flow thereafter, but sufficient public support for the costs
and constraints that flow thereafter. Public diplomacy and strategic
communications (they are not the same things) but the reputation of democratic
government for competence is being sorely tested by the use of fake news. Canadian
TAGGER Colin Robertson highlighted the extent to which black swans and black elephants
feed on fake news (flying elephants?) to sow confusion and discord. Colin was
clear: “Disinformation is a clear
and present danger to liberty and representative government. Technology,
especially artificial intelligence, have amplified its threat. The liberal democracies need to get their
acts together. This means investing in science, restoring civics to the
curriculum, teaching critical thinking, relentlessly exposing and penalizing
the sources of disinformation. Having failed the test of self-regulation,
social media must be held accountable through government regulations and
enforcement. Governments need to be more forthcoming with the public.
Transparency is the best disinfectant for disinformation”.
Liberty, security, free speech and freedom. Just what is the balance
between rights and responsibilities in the twenty-first century? Does ‘freedom’
mean the right to implicitly endanger others through irresponsibility? Who
decides? Who or what is the new Leviathan and how much freedom must the
individual surrender to avoid anarchy? What about the autocracies who foster
such anarchy for their own ends in a world in which ‘warfare’ now seems a
permanent feature across the mosaic of information and digital warfare in which
neat ideas of identity and sovereignty seem increasingly quaint.
Power, structure and crystal
balls
Such profound change has,
of course, equally profound consequences for order and structure. An enduring
TAG theme throughout 2020 was the impact of such change on institutions and
their respective members. This was most
apparent in the debate over the crises of ends, ways and means with which the EU,
NATO and their respective nations are grappling. It is a crisis that was evident in the two
formal submissions of evidence the TAG was called upon to offer.
The TAG
submission to the NATO Reflection Group did not pull its punches about the need
for a new NATO Strategic Concept and for Europeans to do far more for their own
security and defence. As the submission stated: “NATO is ultimately
a European institution for the benefit of Europeans. The NATO Reflection Group
can do the Alliance a great service if, like Harmel, it confronts NATO’s hard
realities. If not, it is simply another exercise in political self-deception in
which political cohesion is given more importance than credible defence and
deterrence. The hardest of those
realities is thus: for the transatlantic relationship to continue to function,
and NATO with it, Europeans will need to do far more for their own defence, and
become better able to support the Americans when they so choose. Given the investments such an outcome will
entail European leaders will also need to better protect and inform their
people and make both them and the critical systems that support them far more
resilient in the face of Russian coercion and terrorism”.
Such firmness and clarity
over strategy was also apparent in the TAG submission to the UK Integrated
Review. In spite of budgetary pressures from Brexit
and COVID-19 Britain, the TAG stated, must maintain its highly-skilled,
high-end armed forces and seek to reinforce the security and defence of
Northern Europe, the Arctic and the Eastern Atlantic. The TAG called on IR 2020
to strike a better balance between cost and threat and afford a vision of
Britain’s future role in Europe’s defence out to 2030. The reason for such a
call was simple because in in the months preceding the December 2020 EU-UK
trade deal the world’s fifth largest economy and defence spender appeared to
steadily retreating from the defence of Europe. Thankfully, in November 2020
Prime Minister Johnson also announced a 10% increase in the British defence
budget which added fuel to the TAG’s call for more innovative thinking about
what sound security and defence should look like in 2021 and where best to
invest. As the TAG stated, “The pooling of several departmental budgets could
promote greater efficiency and effectiveness in pursuit of National Strategic
Objectives, but only if the ends, ways and means crisis from which UK Armed
Forces (UKAF) suffer is also addressed”.
TAGGER Paul Cornish took up the theme of strategy in his TAG blog, “Tanks for
the Memory”. As Paul rightly said, “The fate of the MBT [main battle tank], and
any other military capability, should be decided neither by quasi-historical
projections, nor techno-fetishism, nor cost – but by strategy. Strategy is an
attempt to engage with a future that is not merely uncertain, but fundamentally
unknowable. But it must nevertheless be engaged with – decisions must be made
in the present for the strategic posture of the future. It’s at this point that
cash-conscious governments like to tell themselves (and the rest of us) that
perhaps the future is less unknowable than is supposed, that they have the singular
skill of peering into the future and finding, when they do, that the future is,
uncannily, not too worrying and can, most conveniently, be managed on an even
more limited budget or with some technological ‘fix’. Fine – but I’d prefer a
MBT to a crystal ball any day”.
Resilience and the unintended
unexpected
Naturally, one does not
craft strategy in a vacuum and others make strategy too – that is the essence
of strategic competition. Moreover, the consequences of such competition are
not always linear as it generates both the intended and the unintended. The
capacity to cope with the unintended and the unexpected is the sine qua non flip side of strategy.
Indeed, strategy without resilience is simply oxymoronic, with the emphasis on
moronic.
Talking of the unexpected
TAGGER Kate Hansen Bundt in her blog “Biden and the High North” highlighted the
growing importance of China as an Arctic power. She called on President-elect
Joe Biden and his team not to take their eye off the Arctic ball (should that
not read ‘puck). China. Kate said, is not just challenging the US in the Deep
South (of the world) and the Far East, but also in the High North. She cited the increased threat posed
by China’s icebreakers and Russia’s nuclear submarines in Norwegian waters, some
seven times larger than Norway’s territory. Implicit in Kate’s warning was
another tendency apparent in Europe’s response to geopolitics: the tendency
towards denial, particularly for those smaller European powers which lack what
some call a ‘strategic culture’. For
this reason Kate also reminded us all of the importance of
multilateralism to small Nordic powers, such as her native Norway. To my mind,
such multilateralism is the very DNA of Europe’s strategic culture. However,
that begs a further question: why does the pooling of European sovereignty
seemingly and routinely lose Europeans influence over events? Deus ex Machina or the nature of the
‘Machina’ itself?
The unexpected also has
geopolitical consequences. That was the essential message from a TAG debate on
the geopolitical and defence-strategic implications of the 2020 war in
Nagorno-Karabakh. In 2021 there would appear to be no small countries in faraway
places about which we can afford to know nothing a la Neville. This brief but
brutal European between Armenia and Azerbaijan war saw identity, religion,
nationalism, geopolitics and military technology combine with Machtpolitik and Realpolitik. It also suggested a future in which the West no longer
makes the rules whilst others routinely flout the ‘rules’ that so exist. The war also challenged the hitherto neat
policy and strategy prescriptions with which Western policymakers have become
so comfortable. Wars amongst the people and wars between peoples suggest the
escalation from one to the other could become far faster than expected, or
indeed, intended.
The war should also
remind Europeans if Crimea had not already that strategy is about far more than
words on paper. It is about power, cause and effect. As such strategy calls for
indicators that can properly warn us of threat, understanding of the nature of
threat, and far quicker responsiveness, both political and military, to deal
with threat. Above all, it demands the proportionate means of power and
capability in sufficient capacity to enable the means and the ways to maintain
the peace as a legitimate end, and if needs be restore it. Power means risk.
That begs a further question of Europeans we enter 2021: can we compete if we
are not also willing to take considered risk?
The Chinese elephant
and the American swan?
China was ever-present
in TAG debates during 2020. In many
respects the fault-lines in the TAG over China reflect those within the wider
West. Some TAGGERS believe the West should seek what one
called “managed reciprocity via robust engagement with China”, whilst others
were committed to active more containment and overt strategic competition. I was not at all sure any of us have a clue
what to do with China and its power. TAGGERS, like so many others in the West, are simply
unsure what to do about or with the Chinese elephant. Can it be tamed or is it set to rampage
through the china shop that is Europe (I like a good mixed metaphor)? Or will
China simply buy the shop and the contents therein?
For that reason, renewed
and reinvigorated American leadership will remain vital given that the “mother
of all challenges” will remain geopolitics. TAGGERS hope that under President Biden the transatlantic
relationship will become more predictable, more of a partnership again and thus
better able to exert “shaping power” on the world beyond. However, business as before in the
transatlantic relationship is not an option for Americans, Canadians or
Europeans. Moreover, COVID-19 will continue
to emphasise matters domestic with the available political bandwidth for
foreign and security policy likely to be decidedly limited, not least in the US.
And yes, whilst the Biden administration could well be more “decent” and better
aligned with European values and the ideology of multilateralism than the
quixotic Trump administration, Washington will still demand Europeans do far more
for their own defence. It simply has no choice. China’s rise is stretching US
forces and resources thin the world over and as events of late have simply
confirmed America’s many internal divisions will be Washington’s main
preoccupation. Therefore, like European mariners of old maybe it really is time
for Europe to finally set a strategic course with a new Strategic Compass for a
new strategic future. Just a word of warning: words do not float.
Talking of words, perhaps
the final one should go to TAGGER Stan Sloan. In his TAG blog “(Some Worrying)
Transatlantic Security Options” Stan suggested, or rather implied, an implicit
choice was afoot between substantial continuity, positive radical change and
negative radical change. My bet is that
all three will happen. Still, Stan reminded me of what was said of the French
fashion designer Pierre Cardin, who died in 2020. Cardin, it was said, was always
one step ahead of tomorrow. The danger is that Europe in particular is not one
but two steps behind tomorrow. The task of The Alphen Group is thus to show how
all of us can quicken our strategic pace. We will need to! The first step? As
one TAGGER memorably put it, “The European pillow must become the European
pillar”. Amen to that!
Julian
Lindley-French,
TAG
Chair,
January 2021
Great analysis as always.
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