Ends, Ways and Has-Beens?

“The model is known as ‘ends, ways and means’, where ENDS=WAYS + MEANS. Ends are defined as the strategic outcomes or end-states desired. Ways are defined as the methods, tactics, and procedures, practices, and strategies to achieve the ends. Means are defined as the resources required to achieve the ends, such as troops, weapons systems, money, political will, and time. The model is really an equation that balances what you want with what you are willing and able to pay for it, or what you can get for what you are willing and able to pay”.

Brigadier-General (Ret.d) Denis Laich

Another bloody British defence review?

Alphen, Netherlands. March 5, 2020. They’re off! Another British defence review feeding frenzy is underway. The 2020 Integrated Review is nothing less than an attempt to consider in the round Britain’s entire foreign, security, defence and development approach. Nominally led by civil servant Sir Alex Ellis, but greatly influenced by Dominic Cummings, the eminence grise of the Johnson administration, it is also charged with considering Britain’s future security and defence in the wake of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU, far better value-for-money defence procurement, as well as how to best afford the new defence technologies that are entering the multi-domain battlespace. Implicit in the review is the re-positing of British strategic ambition not just to realign the ends, ways and means central to effective defence policy, but also to make a clear statement about the place of contemporary Britain in the world.

Having just this week completed a major new book for Oxford on Future War and the Defence of Europe, which I have co-written with two US generals John Allen and Ben Hodges, it is clear that the ambition implicit in the review (and correctly so) will be no mean feat if the Government successfully pulls it off.  Sir Max Hastings, writing in The Times, expressed some cynicism about the entire process. It is cynicism I share.  First, if the Integrated Review is simply a rerun of Strategic Defence and Security Review 2010, which was a defence cull presented as strategic efficiency, or Strategic Defence and Security Review 2015, which was an unfunded set of aspirations that made worse the already dangerous imbalance between ends, ways and means from which Britain’s armed forces suffer, then it will be yet another exercise in defence-strategic pretence. Second, and no disrespect intended to anyone, for all Downing Street’s talk of a radical approach there is little or no evidence thereof in the method of the review.  Critically, there are no ‘red teams’ of acknowledged experts to challenge Establishment thinking. Indeed, I would be much more reassured if real experts, such as Professor Malcolm Chalmers, Professor Paul Cornish, and Professor Andrew Dorman had a formal role in support of the review.

The most important question the review must answer is clear: what is Britain’s place in the world?  The answer to that question will underpin all the assumptions about Britain’s relative power upon which any such review must draw. It is also relatively easy to measure. According to the International Monetary Fund Britain in 2019 enjoyed the seventh biggest economy in the world by nominal GDP, but only the ninth biggest economy by power purchasing parity. According to Globalfirepower.com Britain has nominally the fifth biggest defence budget in the world, but only the eighth largest when one considers military power purchasing parity.  In other words, Britain remains a very significant regional-strategic European power, and a power of some weight in the wider world. However, Britain is no longer a world power, let alone a ‘pocket superpower’, a phrase I rather mischievously invented years ago in a piece I wrote for the International Herald Tribune.

Britain’s defence-strategic assumptions

Given Britain’s relative weight of power what are the defence strategic assumptions that should underpin the review? 

First, whilst the United States will remain Britain’s closest security and defence ally, the Americans might, in extremis, no longer be able to defend either Britain or the Europe of which it is firmly a part without the British doing far more for their own defence and Europe through an adapted NATO. This is not because the Americans are withdrawing from Europe but rather the worsening global over-stretch from which US Armed Forces suffer.

Second, Britain will need to rely more on European allies, even as it leaves the EU, albeit through NATO. At the very least, and to demonstrate Britain is seriously committed to equitable transatlantic burden-sharing, London must be seen to be defence serious.  For example, Britain could seek to co-pioneer with France and Germany a high-end, twenty-first century ‘heavy’ fast, first responder European force able to deter and defend in and around the European theatre and across multiple domains.

Third, only Britain and France retain any globally-relevant defence-strategic weight in Europe. Therefore, Britain should join with France in promoting greater European defence-strategic responsibility, partly by buying into autonomous European strategic enablers. Much will depend on the strength of the Franco-British alliance ten years on from the 2010 Lancaster House Agreement. However, whilst Paris seems to keen shore up its defence-strategic relationship with Britain, it is also seeking to inflict real damage on the British economy as punishment for Brexit. In other words, Paris cannot both secure a good defence relationship with Britain without a good trade relationship because for London both are equally strategic.

Fourth, Britain will face both peer strategic competitors and sophisticated non-state actors employing complex strategic coercion against Britain and its people.  Therefore, Britain must balance both credible defence and deterrence with effective engagement. The mosaic of new threats Britain must confront in an information-digital age will range across 5Ds of disinformation, deception, destabilisation, disruption, and implied and actual destruction. It will also be a form of warfare in peacetime. Confronting, scaling and adapting to meet such threats will also require a much more nuanced understanding of the relationship between civilian-led security and military-led defence, as well as a far more profound, efficient and intimate partnership between them.

Fifth, for a power such as Britain defence has at least two strategic roles to play: defence and deterrence as a public good per se, and defence as a lever of influence over allies.  Britain might be able to generate the high-end capabilities to undertake such roles, but it is unlikely to ever have the capacity to sustain them over time and distance.  Such tension could well be further exacerbated given the balance Britain might well have to strike between deterring/fighting a short, high-intensity conflict (possibly in mega-urban environments) and engaging in a long, low-intensity conflict.   

Sixth, in the third decade of the twenty-first century credible deterrence will demand of Britain’s armed forces the proven capacity to operate simultaneously across the multi-domain battlespace of air, sea, land, cyber and space.  British forces will also need to far better exploit information and knowledge to strategic advantage. This pre-supposes not only a deeply joint/integrated force (something the new UK Strategic Command at least implies), but also a British ability to influence combined forces, either in a NATO context or via coalitions of the willing. Specifically, Britain will need the command resources and structures to enable it to act as an alternative command hub if the Americans are busy elsewhere.  Such unity of effort and purpose will only be fashioned if the Service Chiefs of the Navy, Army and RAF speak with one voice to ministers. Sadly, all the signs are that even with the modest increase in UK defence expenditure that is being signalled, the Service Chiefs are again fighting each other over where those resources should be invested. That must stop!

Seventh, technology will drive defence strategy to an unprecedented extent over the next defence planning cycle.  Defence futurists tend to exaggerate the speed with which new technologies are entering the battlespace.  For example, whilst super-computing is playing an ever more influential role in warfighting it will be a decade and more before the kind of quantum-computing able to drive really artificially intelligent swarms of drones is likely to be realised. However, such technologies (and many more) are coming and must be factored in, alongside the increasingly ‘kinetic’ impact of offensive cyber. Hypersonic weaponry is already a fact.

Eighth, where one stands depends on where one sits. Britain is an island off the coast of northwest Europe. Therefore, it makes little or no sense for Britain to make a huge investment in a continental land strategy. That is the job for the Germans, French, Poles and others. Rather, Britain can add real value in pioneering multi-domain power projection relevant to high-end European defence and transatlantic burden-sharing, particularly for maritime, amphibious, air operations. Such a concept would necessarily be centred on a new and much broader concept of Air Power that would also include information power, cyber power, space power, as well as strike and air defence. Much of Britain’s future power projection, upon which almost all forms of future defence will rely, will also require a very tight technical relationship between the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force.  Such a vision in no way downplays the vital role of the future British Army. Edward Grey (not Lord Fisher), Britain’s Foreign Secretary at the outbreak of World War One, once suggested the British Army should be a projectile fired by the Royal Navy. It should be very rapidly power-projectable alongside the Royal Marines. Indeed, Britain has an opportunity to lead the way to show how mid-sized powers can project military force. Ironically, with two new British heavy aircraft carriers just commissioned, and if they are properly protected, the Royal Navy is on track to develop into just such a force.

The true cost of defence-strategic pretence

Of course, there is always an alternative.  Britain could continue to do what it has been doing for more than a decade: muddle along in a defence-strategic fog, continue to draw down what is left of its small force in continental Europe, engage in a bit of strategic dabbling in places like Libya or Syria, but do nothing like enough to make any real difference, and possibly make things worse, and/or simply hide behind its nuclear deterrent.  Time after time I have heard leaders of other countries complain about Britain’s creeping propensity for strategic and defence pretence. Too often, British prime ministers, with David Cameron to the fore, have been obsessed with giving the impression Britain does more than it actually does, which has not only really annoyed Washington at times, but is unfair to the superb British servicemen and women too often asked to closed the yawning gulf between strategic and political reality. 

The greatest danger is that Britain’s leaders come themselves to believe this nonsense.  One only has to read q February 2020 National Audit Office report to realise there is a very real danger of this happening.  Entitled, “The Equipment Plan 2019-2029” the report is blunt: “We…consider that aspects of the Department’s [Ministry of Defence] affordability assessment continue to be over-optimistic”.  Worse, the funding shortfall for new equipment quite probably far higher than the £13 billion worst-case estimate of the MoD. Is this the real price of defence strategic pretence?  For that to change London will finally have to recognise that far from being a cost, effective defence of the realm has a very high value, both politically and strategically.

Ends, ways and has-beens?

In conclusion, the real choice implicit in the Integrated Review is essentially simple: given Britain’s relative weight in the world are the British willing and able to play a serious role with allies and partners commensurate with such power? Or, is the Integrated Review going to be yet another British exercise in dressing short-term parochial politics up as long-term defence strategy? If the latter then the real victims will be the ‘new few’; that ever smaller band of brave British and Commonwealth brothers and sisters in British uniform who again find themselves on the front-line of danger on our behalf, ill-protected, under-equipped and even more under-funded, and forced to act as a political and strategic fig-leaf for free-riding British politicians cynically masking their strategic illiteracy by routinely calling them the ‘best forces in the world’, even as they deny them the resources they need to do the jobs they must do.

One final thing: the Integrated Review will also reveal the extent to which the London Establishment actually believes in Britain, as a strategic brand, as a power, even as a country.  If the Integrated Review is, indeed, to be another monumental exercise in defence-strategic pretence then it will simply reveal to the rest of us that they don’t, in which case why the hell should the rest of us? There can be no place for nostalgia or sentimentality in Britain’s Integrated Review, not in this world. Equally, there can be no place for self-delusion or London’s continued appeasement of an increasingly dangerous reality.  The people of Britain, and the people who serve her, deserve better than that, Mr Johnson and Mr Cummings.

Ends, ways and has-beens? Only if London do deems it. You see, Britain is not simply a power, with its experience, Britain is an expert power, but only if London has the intelligence to use it! Critically, such intelligence will also demand of London the one thing that has been lacking for far too long – sound strategic judgement.

Julian Lindley-French

Idlib

“They have created a kill box in Idlib, and no-one cares about that!

Unnamed diplomat, February 2020

27 February, 2020

Situation Report

Some 250 kilometres from the EU’s eastern border people are dying in large numbers. Under the pretext of destroying Salafist Jihadi extremists the Damascus regime and its Moscow overlord are seeking to crush one of the last major city redoubts of the patchwork of loosely-affiliated opposition forces. 

The strategic significance of Idlib cannot be over-stated.  A city some 30 km/20 miles south-west of the Syrian-Turkish border, prior to the outbreak of the civil war in 2011 Idlib had a population of some 165,000 people comprised mainly of Sunni Muslims, together with a significant Christian minority. The population grew markedly during the civil war, particularly after Moscow’s September 2015 intervention pushed opposition forces ever further away from Damascus. A Russo-Syrian attack on Idlib was inevitable following the fall of Aleppo in late 2016.

The humanitarian situation is grave. According to the United Nations there are between 800,000 and 1,000,000 people caught up in the fighting, with the UN estimating that some 692,000 people have fled towns south of Idlib in recent weeks. The UN also estimates that some 390,000 people are seeking to enter Turkey, which already shelters some 4 million Syrian refugees.

The military offensive also threatens conflict between NATO member Turkey and Russia. During the night of 2-3 February Ankara sent a Turkish military convoy into Idlib. This led to a firefight between the Turkish and Syrian Armies that saw 5 Turks and at least 13 Syrians killed.  President Erdogan of Turkey has warned his erstwhile partner, Russia’s President Putin, that if Moscow fails to control Damascus Ankara will act.  In fact, the evidence suggests Russia is leading the offensive using its air power to blast a path forward for the Syrian Army on the ground. To suggest the situation is dangerous is a marked understatement, made even more dangerous by Russia’s blocking of any United Nations Security Council sanctioned ceasefire.

Assessment

Moscow and Damascus stand on the verge of crushing the non-Salafist opposition in Syria.  Such a victory would bring Russian forces into contact with the Turkish border, and also create a new potential flash-point with NATO. In the wake of the 2019 Russo-Syrian offensive in Northeast Syria there was also a marked increase in the presence of Daesh and other such groupings.  There is no reason to believe a similar resurgence would not take place in Northwest Syria, irrespective of the relatively small number of US and Allied Special Forces still operating in the region. 

Furthermore, there seems little or no relationship between what Western powers claim as their objective and the extent and scope of their collective effort in Syria.  A decisive Russo-Syrian victory will make it far harder for the Global Coalition Against Daesh, certainly in Syria. Indeed, whilst the wider efforts of the Coalition to counter Daesh will continue, the loss of Syria would represent a major setback.  Moreover, in spite of efforts to de-conflict US and Russian military operations there would be a greater chance of a renewed clash in Syria between Russian ‘mercenary’ forces of The Wagner Group, and possibly FSB and GRU forces, and US Special Forces as Damascus deems all non-regime forces as ‘extremists’.  Kurdish forces and the Kurdish people would be trapped between Russian, Syrian and Turkish forces facing at best a very uncertain future and with a profound sense of having been betrayed by the US and its European partners.

The humanitarian situation would be even direr than it is today. Whilst an end to the offensive might in the short-term ease the immediate suffering of the population.  Past experience suggests the Assad regime would seek to exact revenge on peoples and groups it deemed as disloyal.  Efforts by the UN and the NGO community to afford people relief could well be blocked, with the regime seeking to expel large numbers and force them into Turkey.

Implications

At the geopolitical level a Russo-Syrian victory would mark the effective end of the Syrian civil war with a decisive victory for Moscow, and afford Russia a major strategic prize. Not only would the West (such as there is a ‘West’ in Syria) be humiliated, but Russia’s military air base at Latakia, some 55km from Idlib, will be secure, together with its naval base at Tartus.  The two bases would enable Russian forces to exert strategic influence far out into the Mediterranean. 

In that context President Trump’s January 2020 Middle Eastern Peace Plan looks like little more than an attempt to deflect criticism for the lack of US leadership in and over Syria.  His call for NATO to do more in the Middle East looks little more than an effort to highlight Europe’s almost complete lack of influence over a conflict on its own strategic doorstep.  The Russians would thus reveal the deep schism that exists between Americans and Europeans and not just over Syria, with possibly profound implications for Europe’s security and defence. 

The implications for European cohesion are also profound.  Whilst President Macron of France and Chancellor Merkel of Germany have called for a Four Power meeting with Presidents Erdogan and Putin to be held on 5 March, the role and effectiveness of European in the Syrian fiasco has been lamentable.  There is simply no unity of effort or purpose. Britain, one of the major European powers that signed the now defunct nuclear deal with Iran, is completely absent from the Franco-German demarche, although this has more to do with London than either Berlin or Paris. Throughout the war London has been obsessed with giving the political impression that it was doing far more than has been the case.  This is reflective of a deep strategic malaise at the very highest levels of government in London and one of the many reasons for Europe’s failure in Syria.  The EU? Too often European leaders talk up values with little idea how to defend them. It is a failure for which Europeans will pay a high price, particularly if France and Germany are only engaged in strategic face-saving.

With millions of refugees likely barred from returning home to Syria expect many more to seek sanctuary in Europe.  If Daesh is indeed emboldened (and possibly instrumentalised by hostile regimes) Europeans will become even more vulnerable to acts of terrorism. Finally, with US and European policy towards the Middle East and North Africa in disarray partners across the region and beyond will no doubt make greater efforts to seek an accommodation with Moscow.  Tehran will also be emboldened, making it more likely it will again miscalculate.

Courses of action

The loss of Idlib makes a wider Middle Eastern war even more likely than it was prior to the Russo-Syrian attack. It is probably too late to countenance sustained Western military pressure, even if that were an option, which it is not. The immediate focus must be on the alleviation of humanitarian suffering. Over the medium to longer term it is in the interests of both Americans and Europeans to work together to mitigate the strategic and political damage done by this defeat, or that is what it is, to their influence in the region, to NATO, and to European security. For that to happen politics on both sides of the Atlantic will have to become far more closely aligned with strategy.

For Europeans what is happening in Idlib is also symptomatic of a strategic withdrawal from world events.  In the space of a century Europeans have moved from being colonial over-interference in the Middle East and North Africa, which proved disastrous for the people therein, to partial or pretend engagement in a region vital to Europe’s own security, and which could prove disastrous for Europe.  

Julian Lindley-French

Dresden 75: Is Europe Making America Weak?

“There were sounds like giant footsteps above. Those were sticks of high-explosive bombs. The giants walked and walked…There was a fire-storm out there. Dresden was one big flame.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Dresden

Alphen, Netherlands. 17 February. Seventy-five years ago, on the night of 13-14^th February, 1945, seven hundred and sixty-nine Royal Air Force (RAF) Lancaster bombers of 5 Group, Bomber Command attacked the ancient German city of Dresden, escorted by some three hundred and fifty P-51 Mustang fighters. Codenamed ‘Plate Rack’ the main bomber force was led into the attack by nine Mosquito ‘Pathfinder’ aircraft who ‘painted’ the historic centre of the city with marker flares. The next day, five hundred and twenty-seven B-17 bombers of the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) continued the attack, escorted by some four hundred P-51s.  Dresden was devastated with estimates of those killed ranging from between 22,700 to 25,000, the massive majority of whom were civilians.  The RAF lost six Lancaster bombers, whilst one US B-17 was destroyed. Dresden was the culmination of the Allied strategic bombing campaign and was controversial even in 1945.  The origins of ‘Dresden’ were manifold, not least the need to send a message to the Soviets about the firepower of Allied air power as war’s end approached.  However, Dresden was also the culmination of a descent into calamity that began with the rise to power of Hitler in the early 1930s, and the irresolute response of Allied democracies to the threat Nazism posed to European peace.

As the commemoration of this truly epic European tragedy were being solemnly enacted I was also in Germany at a side-event of the Munich Security Conference.  The Loisach Group is a high-level US-German team, co-organised by the George C. Marshall Center and the Munich Security Conference.  The aim of the Group is to promote something in which I believe deeply; a close, twenty-first century US-German strategic partnership itself deeply embedded in an adapted and modernised NATO. An Alliance which remains the central, credible pillar of legitimate Allied defence and deterrence.

Munich 2020

To be honest, I thought twice about attending the meeting as I am in the last throes of completing a book, which consumes most of my energy and attention.  There were other reasons.  First, I am tired of attending meetings at which Europeans brilliantly and eloquently describe the challenges of European security, then do very little about them.  Britons and Germans have become particularly effective at this particular skein of defence pretence.  For example, news that the Royal Navy’s new class of frigates will be delayed simply compounds the farce that Britain remains a Tier One military power.  Just look at what the Americans and Chinese are building. Second, it is hard for me to see any real progress in the US-German strategic relationship until the political relationship improves.  With the US facing presidential elections in November, and Berlin engaged in a seemingly endless bout of political navel-gazing, the best that can be said is that the relationship is on hold. Third, I am also tired of listening to pious speeches about shared transatlantic values and Europe’s strategic ambitions from people who have little or no willingness to defend the former and do even less to realise the latter. Finally, I see little evidence that elite Germany is making any effort to understand the American strategic challenge or its implications for the future security and defence of Europe.

Indeed, Germans seem unable or unwilling to recognise America’s changing and deteriorating strategic reality.  It is as though President Trump has become an alibi for the refusal of Germans to face up to their strategic responsibilities as Europe’s leading democratic power.  Even if they agree in private about the nature of emerging threats German leaders too often talk as though German power must remain a secret from the German people for fear the reality of the strategic responsibility such power would bring might prove too brutal an awakening. Worse, every opportunity is taken to criticise the US even though the evidence clearly shows a Washington still willing to commit huge resources to the defence of Europe. Take the European Deterrence Initiative.  There was some mildly hysterical coverage in the German press last week that ‘EDI’ was being cut. As one very senior American pointed out at the meeting as each EDI project reaches fruition the investment naturally reduces.

Time is pressing. This week, IISS published their latest Military Balance report in which they noted global defence expenditure had risen by 4% in 2019. Much of that hike is driven by increases of almost 7% in both the US and Chinese defence budgets, with a particular focus on the development of new technologies for the twenty-first century battlespace.  The US increased its defence budget by $53.4 billion, which is about the same amount as the entire British defence budget.  Part of the US rationale is to offset China’s better military purchasing power by which Beijing gets more firepower per yuan invested than the US per dollar.  It is also an attempt to solve America’s critical strategic dilemma: whilst China can focus its military effort the US has to cover threats the world over. It is a dilemma that is only going to become more acute.  IISS described China’s military modernisation as, “…striking for its scale, speed and ambition”.  Europe?  Europeans did increase defence expenditure by 4.2% in 2019, but that only brought defence investment back to 2008 levels. That begs a further question. Is Europe burden-sharing, or is it just a plain burden on the Americans?

Europe Defender 20

Words and actions? As the Munich meeting got underway the Americans were bringing in an entire armoured division from the US as part of Exercise Europe Defender 20.  Whilst not on the scale of REFORGER (Return of Forces to Germany) exercises of the Cold War, Defender 20 is the largest such exercise since its end. Designed to bolster high-end Allied defence and deterrence Defender 20 will see some twenty thousand US troops arrive via five ports in Northwest Europe, as well as thirteen thousand pieces of heavy equipment, to engage across eight separate locations alongside eighteen allies. As an aside, a British battlegroup was also disembarking in Antwerp in support of their allies.  

The fact that the Americans are having to make such an effort is indicative of the malaise deep in the German heart of European defence. Impressive though the American force is in an emergency it could well be needed elsewhere, most likely in what Washington now calls the Indo-Pacific.  If NATO Europe was truly capable such a force would not be American at all, but European, with a powerful German armoured division at its core.  A German armoured division? One can almost hear history weeping at such a thought.  And yet, that is precisely the kind of high-end, heavy, fast, twenty-first century first responder European/German force that NATO needs if DETERRENCE, the business the Alliance is really collectively in, is to be credibly maintained. And yet, modern, free, democratic Germany seems to be lost in denial about its responsibilities as leader.  What could the Bundeswehr really deliver in the event of another European emergency? Minor additions to the German defence effort do little to solve the essential dysfunctionality of the Bundeswehr which will not be resolved until there is a profound change in Berlin’s strategic posture and mindset.  

European weakness makes America weaker

Forcing over-stretched America to send forces to offset the choice European democracies have made to decouple their own defence efforts from threat and changing reality is not a sign of Allied strength. It is a mark of the dangerous complacency and tendency towards comforting self-delusion to which Germans are particularly prone. There seems to be a strange belief that if threats are talked about long enough by people high enough in the political pecking order that somehow such danger will evaporate. It is nonsense; a wilful European act of weakness that threatens to make America weaker where it matters.

Dresden was the tragic culmination of failed deterrence and the tragic cost of such failure. It was a product of irresolution and the consequent disproportionate proportionality caused by democracies preferring to see the world as they wanted it to be, not as it was.  For the sake of all those who lost their lives in the Dresden firebombing, on all sides of the conflict, let’s not go there again.

Julian Lindley-French  

Leangkollen 2020: Europe’s China Challenge

“I think both sides [China and the United States] should work hard to build a new kind of relationship between big powers. The two sides should co-operate with each other for a win-win result in order to benefit people from the two countries and around the world”.

President Xi Jingping

The view from on high

Leangkollen, Norway. 7 February. Is Europe rising to the China challenge? No. Is the first truly global cold war underway? Not quite yet.  Is an era of cold, contested globalisation underway?  Most definitely.

The Leangkollen Conference is a gem of a security conference. Sitting high above the Oslo Fjord the gathering is perfectly placed to think big about big issues.  This year was no exception. My dear friend, Kate Hansen Bundt, and her outstanding young team at the Norwegian Atlantic Committee (DNAK), once again set the bar high for an as ever distinguished group to consider the challenge of China’s burgeoning power. However, what I heard also concerned me. There seemed to be a blind willingness on the part of some to not just accept the fact of Chinese power, but also the nature of it. There was also a dangerous equivalency expressed at times between the US and China in the mind of some of those Europeans present. Whatever one might think of President Trump there is a vast difference between the nature, the values, and above all the hope implicit in American power compared with that of contemporary China. 

What this dangerous slide towards equivalency also shows is how far Europeans have moved away from the hard years of strategic reality in which hard choices must be made and, at times, even harder choices. Europeans must take sides in what will be the great strategic contest of this age, and it is very clear which side Europeans must be on.  Sadly, too many Europeans leaders and commentators find it hard to accept that China’s rise is actually happening, the scale of the challenge China poses for the liberal world order, or that Beijing is anything but benign.  Indeed, a prevailing theme throughout the conference was that China’s power is over-stated, and that China is, at best, a regional power with bits of global outreach. This view strikes me as complacent in the extreme. The scale of China’s global-reach ambitions are reflected in Beijing’s suggestion that it is a ‘near Arctic’ power.

Furthermore, there are many power levers in Beijing’s growing grand strategic tool-kit. Whilst much of the focus is on China’s growing military might and reach, China’s use of debt and diplomatic coercion is far more effective on a daily basis than any supposed military threat.  And, Beijing has already demonstrated its willingness and ability to apply such coercion to force compliance and acceptance of its increasingly assertive global foreign and security policy. Take Djibouti. China secured a port with a loan to Djibouti it cannot possibly hope to repay.  How long before France and the US who also have facilities therein are asked to leave? Norway has also experience of such coercion. In December 2010, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was scheduled to receive the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo. Not only was Xiaobo prevented from attending, Beijing put China-Norwegian relations into the diplomatic deep freeze for six years thereafter.

Nudging China

The ‘West’ is transforming from regional place into global idea and it is the idea of openness that China is contesting, or rather exploiting because Beijing is perfectly willing to use the West’s openness against it.  At stake is the very nature of globalisation and the kind of world that will emerge. If the West is to successfully ‘nudge’ China towards a more open society and market, Europeans will need to play their collective part.  Are they up to it?  The goal of a more open China would be a worthy one, for such a China would still be immensely powerful and compete with the West, most notably the United States. However, the dark side of China, and it can be very dark, epitomises also the dark, cold side of globalisation implicit in much of China’s contemporary challenge to the West.

If China succeeds in exploiting Europe’s need for money to maintain an illusion of prosperity even as its competitiveness declines dramatically, there is a very distinct danger that Europe would in time become a ‘debt colony’ of Beijing and subject to its bidding.

Make no mistake, Europe is on the front-line of this struggle, with the growing debt dependency of Europeans already distorting the cohesion of both the EU and NATO far more than a capricious President Trump. Worse, it is not just Europe’s smaller and poorer states that are vulnerable to the coercion implicit in China’s strategic outreach and assertive statecraft.  Britain’s decision last week to permit Huawei to construct ‘non-core’ parts of its future 5G network is both nonsensical and dangerous. Given the nature of 5G technology, and the myriad ‘internet of things’ it will power, there is every danger that service denial would cripple Britain’s critical infrastructure at a critical security juncture, whatever ‘safeguards’ are built-in.  China is an authoritarian state driven by the need to control, and at times coerce. Provide such a state with the means to exert control and it will, and at a moment it deems most appropriate to meeting its strategic ends.   

The essential point about power is that unless infused with values it is inherently amoral. It is power. If ever this China was to have a twenty-first century unipolar moment then rest assured China’s statecraft would take on all the aspects of a Chinese state willing to go to great lengths to force compliance.  Such coercion is already being applied across the civil-military spectrum via debt, to espionage and the implied threat of the use of force. A senior British official told me last week that China has more spies in the UK than any other state.

Europe and China

For all the friction there is some hope that China can be nudged towards the role of responsible global citizen. Unlike the Cold War there is nothing irreconcilable about the US-Chinese relationship.  Deals can be done with China, accommodations made. And, Europeans, together with the other democracies that make up the Global West, can act as interested friends to both the Americans and Chinese by helping to mitigate any drift towards ‘irreconcilability’ in the US-China relationship, not least by nudging both back towards multilateralism and the trust it builds. For Europeans to play such a role they will need to collectively convince Beijing that partnership with China does not imply submission to it. For Americans to play their allotted role will require that Washington re-learn the arts of complex coalition leadership.

Is Europe rising to the China challenge? Not yet, but collectively Europeans will need to. Is the first truly global cold war underway? No, but cold, contested, dark globalisation is a new form of a new ‘arms race’ in China’s quest for global dominance. Like it or not, Europeans will need to take part in that race, if for no other reason than it is China that is increasingly making the rules, including the future shape of conflict. 

‘Respect’ should be the mantra Europeans should adopt in dealing with China. Respect for China, respect for its power and, of course, respect for its people and potential.  Equally, Europeans must also ‘respect’ the nature of the Chinese state, the dark sides of its growing influence and power, and the threat it could pose, and develop the resilience needed to resist Chinese coercion, both implied and actual, overt and covert.

Cold globalisation and the bipolar US-China contest for global power is a fact.  The outcome will decide not only the nature of the twenty-first century, but which values and ideas will dominate. In that sense there IS an ideological edge to the challenge China poses to the West, even if it is nothing like the contest that suffused the Cold War. For Europeans, the China challenge will also decide if they have the collective will and power to be strategic partners and, at times, critical friends of China, or simply yet more strategic prey.

In other words, no more China wishful thinking, Europe.  Realism, respect and resiliency.



Julian Lindley-French

Permanent Putin Power

“Autocracy is a superannuated form of government that may suit the needs of a Central African tribe, but not those of the Russian people, who are increasingly assimilating the culture of the rest of the world. That is why it is impossible to maintain this form of government except by violence”.

Nikolai Tolstoy

Alphen, Netherlands. 22 January.  The Russian Federation is a relatively small state that governs the world’s single biggest political land mass, governed by President Putin who has been in power for twenty years and who, under the existing constitution must finally step down in 2024. However, President Putin also believes he is indispensable to Russia. Therefore, Russia is about to witness what passes for political reform. As so often in Russia history it is the wrong reform by the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Central to Putin’s ambitions is a desire to ensure the health and wealth of him and his family during any future succession. In his annual State of Russia address President Vladimir Putin proposed a series of constitutional changes that would effectively make him Russia ‘power for life’, even if he is not actually the President of the Russian Federation. Why does Permanent Putin matter? What are the proposed changes? Who will benefit? What are the strategic implications, what to expect now and, finally, what to do?

Why does Permanent Putin matter? Last week, at a high-level meeting in Switzerland, I was asked by a senior figure why Russia posed a threat. It is to do with the nature of autocracies, their fear of political reform, and a tendency towards military adventurism when their own contradictions catch up with them, I responded. Moscow is unable to carry out the vital social, economic and political reforms that would benefit the Russian people for fear that those very reforms would topple the regime from power.  Unwilling to carry out such reforms autocracies historically have turned to oppression at home and aggression abroad and constructed a security state to that end.  Putin’s Russia is no different. Incapable of reform Moscow is locked in its own eventual demise and because of that more military adventurism is likely as the regime lurches from one engineered crisis to another.

   

What are the proposed changes? Putin called for a referendum on constitutional amendments that would nominally increase the power of both the parliament (Duma) and the State Council, hitherto an advisory tool for the Kremlin.  As President Putin announced the proposed reforms former Russian president, and erstwhile Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, immediately stepped down. To maintain his complete authority President Putin will either return to the post prime minister or become the chair of a strengthened State Council. Indeed, it is not entirely inconceivable that Putin could change the Russian constitution from a presidential to a parliamentary system so as to ensure the prime minister’s office becomes the real power in the land.

Who will benefit? Apart from Putin himself there are several close allies who would seem to benefit from such changes, mainly because their very mediocrity means they pose no threat to Vladimir Vladimirovich, to whom they all owe their power and allegiance.  The ‘stars’ of Duma Speaker Vyacyheslav Volodin and Kremlin Chief-of-Staff Anton Vaino both seem to be in the ascendant, and either could be named at some point as a puppet successor to Putin.  The new Prime Minister, Mikhail Mishustin, who will ensure the changes Putin proposes are carried out, is also a possible candidate, although he has been given the poisoned chalice that is constitutional reform.  For obvious reasons, the so-called Siloviki, Putin’s apparatchik base in the ‘power ministries’ that deal with foreign affairs, security, defence and intelligence will be untouched by the proposed reforms. Critically, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, remain in office, although the former is closer to Putin than the latter.

What are the strategic implications and what to expect? Unable or unwilling to risk the thoroughgoing reforms Russia needs it is likely Moscow will redouble its efforts to convince the Russian people they are under threat from an insidious West to justify the regime’s hold on power.  The central paradox of Putin’s foreign policy has always that it bites the European hand that by and large feeds it. Whilst Russia relies for much of its income of the export of hydrocarbons to its European neighbours, it also routinely paints those same neighbours as part of a ‘fascist’ western conspiracy to force Russia into strategic tutelage. Expect such fabrications and provocations to continue.

Permanent Putin will also make much of his ‘friendship’ with that other President-for-Life, China’s Xi Jingping. Both China and Russia are likely to make common grand strategic cause against an increasingly global West, more idea than place, as and when it suits them.  One of many paradoxes in Putin’s position is that not only is Russia’s relationship with China today a bit like contemporary Britain’s relationship with the United States, or ancient Athens to ancient Rome, the greatest threat to the Russian Far East is posed not by Washington, but Beijing. What binds them is that both Putin and Xi are latter day ‘tsars’ who see themselves in strategic competition with the world’s democracies.

It is also hard to deny that the intensity of that competition, the economic pressure being exercised by Beijing on many states, as well as pace and scale of the arms race underway between the US and China (about which Europeans are in denial).  Some form of Second Cold War is now clearly underway, although Frigid Peace may be a better description.  A war that is already taking place across the ‘grey zones’ of hybrid and cyber war, and which could, heaven forfend, one day break out into a true hyperwar in which a whole host of exotically devastating technologies are unleashed.

What to expect now? Expect more Russian defections from the norms of international relations. This is because many of Russia’s paradoxes and contradictions are policy intractable. Whilst Permanent Putin will make some efforts to improve the lives of Russian citizens at the margins, nothing will be done that could threaten the regime’s grip on power.  Russian foreign policy towards Europe will thus be a distraction strategy designed to give the impression Moscow is out-foxing Western powers. This will involve a series of defections from international instruments, such as the INF Treaty and international norms, such as the seizure of Crimea by force. Increased interference can be expected in a host of European states from the North Cape to the Arctic, as well as the Middle East and North Africa, all of which will be designed to give the impression of a clever, nimble Moscow that hints at Soviet power of the past, routinely confounding a lumpen West. In fact, over time the strategy cost Russia and its people dearly.

What to do? To preserve peace and limit Russia’s strategic opportunism the United States must first remember it is the leader of the West, global or otherwise. Second, Washington must also realise it no longer has the power alone to prevail across the conflict spectrum against the Chinese-Russian partnership from jawfare to warfare. Third, Europeans, and other allies and partners of the US, need to realise that only by the sharing of America’s growing strategic burdens can they assure their own peace.  For Europeans that means, first and foremost, becoming united enough diplomatically, and strong enough militarily, to ensure peace in and around Europe. And, in so doing, help keep America strong where she needs to be strong.

Sooner or later Russia will have to stop biting the European hand that feeds it and realign its strategic and economic interests.  In what could be a lengthy interim that means the sustained application of sound defence and credible deterrence in the face of Russian opportunism, allied to a willingness to consistently and constantly talk to Russia. Such a dual-track approach offers the best hope of giving Russia the soft landing both Russians and Europeans need as Moscow inevitably falls from the heady heights of its own manifold contradictions.

In other words, Europeans speak with Russia, both softly and firmly, but also carry a sufficiently big stick to ensure Moscow strategic opportunism does not become grand delinquency.  For, as Vladimir Vladimirovich will one day discover, time waits for no man, not even him.

Julian Lindley-French

Analysis: The Strategic Implications of the Soleimani Crisis

January 9, 2020

Abstract: The purpose of this analysis is to consider the strategic implications of the Soleimani Crisis and its impact on US and European policy at the start of the 2020s. Whilst a major war is unlikely to break out as a consequence of this crisis, a major war could be triggered at some point during the next decade, given the political and strategic tinderbox that is the Middle East. Given the region’s importance to Europe why do Europeans have so little influence over world affairs at the start of what looks like a potentially tumultuous decade?  

"Nobody could say that from any one moment war was an impossibility for the next ten years ... we could not rest in a state of unpreparedness on such an assumption by anybody. To suggest that we could be nine and a half years away from preparedness would be a most dangerous suggestion”.

Arthur Balfour, former British Prime Minister, 1919.

Assessment

Headline: In a perhaps chilling taster of the coming decade of power and fracture, President Trump last Friday ordered the killing of Iran’s most influential military officer and second most important political figure, Major-General Qasem Soleimani. Iran responded by launching twenty-two medium-range ballistic missiles at US forces based at Iraq’s Al-Asad base and Arbil in Northern Iraq. Is war imminent? Unlikely. Iran does not appear to wish to confront US armed forces head on, probably because Tehran has an informed appreciation of the power the Americans could unleash if so moved. The immediate strategic choice both Americans and Iranians face is whether the greater threat to them is posed by Daesh, or each other.

 

Implications: The crisis is by no means over and the Middle East is extremely volatile. Soleimani might have been the very essence of Iran’s regional-strategic imperialism and Tehran’s strategy of destabilising its neighbours through a host of proxy wars, but he was only the architect of the strategy. Soleimani successfully blurred state and non-state action, which is at the heart of this crisis and the changing character of war in the region and beyond.  His importance to the Tehran regime should not be under-estimated, nor the symbol of Iranian power he represented, and Iran greatly feels his loss. Soleimani was Commander of Iran’s Quds Force, the central pillar of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corp (IRGC), and the de facto Iranian Chief of the Defence Staff, much to the discomfort of the Iranian Army and parts of the regime led by President Rouhani.

 

In the wake of the missile retaliation it is highly likely Iran will intensify its proxy war in Iraq against US and allied forces, with potentially profound regional-strategic implications, because it believes it is succeeding in dismembering Iraq and forcing what is left into its sphere of influence. If that happens the further implications would be far-reaching both for the region, Europe and the world beyond. Iran clearly thinks the West might be entering what could be the final phase of a military withdrawal from the region, much to the benefit of Tehran, Damascus and Moscow. The Kurds are close to seceding from Iraq, which would almost certainly see Turkey move in force into the north of the country.  Western efforts to counter Daesh and strengthen the Iraqi state would end.  The NATO Training Mission-Iraq has already been suspended, although the Alliance has promised to up its counter-terror activities. Iran has also suspended its participation in the admittedly moribund Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal, from which the US withdrew in 2018. Tehran has also promised to again begin refining uranium, albeit at a level below weapons grade. The danger to Iran is Daesh, which is reconstituting, albeit in a more fragmented and digital form than hitherto.

For all Tehran’s bullishness the Iranians are right to be cautious about triggering a large-scale force-on-force clash with the Americans, something Moscow has no doubt emphasised to Tehran. Iran has gained much from being seen to tweak the American tiger’s tail, which has helped the Persian state galvanise anti-US forces across much of an Arab world with which Tehran has traditionally had a complex and difficult relationship.  For Tehran to put its head in the tiger’s mouth would invite the Americans to bite it off. Moreover, by skilfully making itself a pivotal power in the Middle East, Tehran has also built powerful alliances beyond the region, most notably with President Putin’s Russia, although Iran’s relationship with Turkey has worsened since President Erdogan’s 2019 decision to launch a military offensive against the Kurds in northern Syria.

China could also now play a critical role in a region where Beijing’s influence is growing. In 2019, Iran signed up to China’s One Belt, One Road plan, with Beijing now assisting the Iranian armed forces with training and the development of advanced military systems. China, a major market for Iranian oil, has also said it could even go to war to protect Iran, although there is little sign of Beijing wishing to do so in this instance. It is likely Beijing is also urging caution on Tehran.

Strategic implications I: lawfare versus warfare

What do the events of the past week say about Western cohesion and European influence? Neither the US nor Europe writ large have a strategic plan, let alone a shared plan, to help move the Middle East beyond the matrix of unstable balances that constitute the cold peace therein: sectarian, regional-strategic and geopolitical.

Europeans have adopted an essentially legalistic response to this crisis. The specific point at issue for them concerns the right of a state to act pre-preemptively in self-defence.  In 1837, British forces chased American and Canadian rebels up the River Niagara on board a boat named the Caroline into US territory, and then destroyed it. The British claimed they were acting in self-defence. The ensuing 1838 Webster-Ashburton Treaty set a precedent in international relations that has hitherto acted as a benchmark.  The so-called Caroline Test for self-defence deems an action must be “…instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation”.

The principle is important for Europeans given the damage Realpolitik has done to Europe in the past. There is a profound sense in many European capitals that the world is slipping back to ‘might is right’, and that if the world’s most powerful democracy is seen to disregard such prescripts it establishes a precedent that autocracies, such as China, Russia and, of course, Iran, will exploit.  Interestingly, the US has traditionally taken a slightly different ‘shining city on the hill’ view of international law and its right to act unilaterally. Many American leaders have believed the essential purpose of such law is to constrain Europeans from taking extreme action against each other.  In other words, the US has always seen itself as a form of Leviathan in international affairs. At critical moments Washington reserves the right act in what it deems to be the common public good and the maintenance of order in international affairs.   

Strategic implications 2: Europe and the cauldron of geopolitics

With the emergence of the EU as an international actor, complete with its own legal identity as an actor, Europeans have retreated steadily from power politics. This is even as their power to influence events and people has been further eclipsed by the return of said power politics. However, there are several other reasons why European influence over the Middle East is weak. First, historic European interventions in the region by the British, French and Italians are blamed by many therein for much of the contemporary fissions of the Middle East. For example, the Iranians tend to see a British plot round every Tehran corner. Second, many Europeans believe the Middle East is simply too complicated and too difficult to engage to effect. Establishing an effective European policy and strategy for the region would be hard. Where to start? To what end? With what means and over how long?  Third, the Middle East is seen by many Europeans to be the responsibility of the United States, albeit an America that wobbles uncertainly between strategic engagement, punishment and withdrawal. Washington’s not-at-all clear policy-planning process exaggerates Iran’s power and influence.  The Trump administration’s desire to both ‘bring the boys home’, avoid complex foreign entanglements, and defeat Iran are not compatible.

And yet, many whilst Europeans disagree with the Americans over how to resolve the many regional tensions which abound in the Middle East, particularly the critical regional-strategic conflict between Israel and the Palestinians that Iran manipulates to effect across the Levant, they are also content to hide behind the US. As with so many difficult strategic issues Europeans complain about the Americans, but are only too happy to cede leadership to them.

Strategic implications 3: Europe’s real crisis management challenge

There is a wider concern that Europeans need collectively to address. Moments of dangerous confrontation, such as the Soleimani Crisis, reveal the extent to which Europeans have become locked into a seemingly interminable exercise of strategic and political navel-gazing that is the European Union, Many Europeans now routinely absent themselves from external danger by explicitly pleading the need to focus on institution-building, and implicitly the ‘enduring’ need to protect themselves from each other.  Consequently, decision-making in action is now so complicated that inaction has become the European strategic method, an alibi to justify doing nothing.

The most egregious example of this is the failed experiment in common inaction that is the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, and the lamentable Common Security and Defence Policy. For too many Europeans, Brussels to the fore, geopolitics has become a game of living Stratego, in which inaction has few or no consequences, and in which appearance rather than substance is what passes for statecraft – the art of pretending to conduct state affairs in strategic complexity.

The 2020s will surely disabuse Europeans of such complacency, the only question is when and to what extent the shock when it comes.  The US-Iranian stand-off, for that is what it is, must remind Europeans that if they fail to engage more fully and more effectively in world affairs they will surely become victims of them. Therefore, Europeans must urgently re-engage threats rather than export that responsibility to others, and by so doing impose difficult choices and actions on them, and then complain when the manner and nature of any such action is not to their liking. 

The Soleimani Crisis also reinforces the need for Europeans to exert greater influence over the choices made by an America ever more in need of capable, able and willing allies. Allies that are also able and willing to share risk with Americans, and thus earn the right not just to speak truth to American power, but be heard by it.  A Europe that no longer bleats from the strategic side-lines in the vain hope that the toxic power of adversaries and enemies will somehow leave it alone in a world increasingly characterised by strategic predators and prey. A Europe that no longer seeks a free ride from anyone and which no longer goes strategic AWOL when it matters.  A Europe that finally ends the strategic vacation upon which, for too long, too many of its leaders, have slumbered.

Course of action: the E3 must lead

Common European inaction is dead, long live collective European action. Such leadership can only come from the so-called ‘E3’, Britain, France and Germany, working in concert.  The Joint Declaration on the crisis by Prime Minister Johnson, President Macron, and Chancellor Merkel, clearly points to such a future. Europe’s two permanent members of the UN Security Council, Britain and France, in conjunction with powerful Germany, must lead Europeans back to strategic seriousness.  Such a proposal may seem counter-intuitive given Britain will this month formally leave the EU. However, far from drifting apart the three powers must make strenuous efforts to realign their foreign and security policies.

The EU? For all its failings as a tool of statecraft the EU still has an important role to play in securing Europe’s external border and promoting coherence. However, only the E3 have any chance of corralling Europeans to effect in the face of the dangerous geopolitics of the 2020s, and afford the US allies of real substance who can both support and constrain Washington, as and when required. For that to happen Berlin, London and Paris must themselves rescue their own respective strategic cultures from the defeatism, short-termism, declinism and strategic introspection which has for too long afflicted all their respective elites to some extent or another.   In other words, they must again learn to think big and act big together!

The specific focus of E3 efforts in the immediate aftermath of this crisis should be the rehabilitation of the JCPOA.  The specific outcome Europeans should seek is the return of the US to the Accord, in return for the lifting of some sanctions on Iran and, critically, the opening of discussions to include limits on ballistic missile arsenals in some form of protocol. It will not be at all easy for Europeans to achieve this, but as Churchill once said, ‘jaw-jaw is better than war-war”. In any case, effective statecraft is not the practice of the easy.

Conclusion: Europe now end its virtual Ten Year Rule

The Soleimani Crisis is simply another marker on the descending road towards a Middle Eastern war. It is the absence of strategy and statecraft that makes the Middle East so dangerous, to itself and the wider world. Just as there are never silver bullet solutions in Europe, there are certainly none in the Middle East. Europe’s very experience of conflict mitigation at home could at least help prevent the worst effects of a Middle East sliding steadily towards another major war. However, for Europeans to collectively play such a role they will need to generate a level of strategic ambition, responsibility and cohesion they have hitherto only pretended to aspire to. Europeans must thus stop talking the talk of power and values, and finally walk its walk.

In August 1919, at the behest of the then Secretary of State for War and Air Winston Churchill, Britain adopted the so-called Ten Year Rule. Under the Rule Britain assumed that it would not be engaged in a major war for at least a decade, and thus could cut defence spending accordingly.  In March 1932, shortly before the rise of Hitler in Germany, Britain scrapped the Ten Year Rule. In 1934, following the collapse of the Geneva-based World Disarmament Conference, and the effective defenestration of the League of Nations, Britain embarked on a massive military rearmament programme which helped it narrowly avert defeat in 1940.  Too many European leaders are trapped into a kind of virtual Ten Year Rule that affords them the comforting blanket of delusional false security. Europeans cannot be safe, nor will they make its own region or the wider world safe, if they continue to hide in the virtual world they have created and continue to justify their choice to be weak.

This is because sooner or later the dangerous world on Europe’s doorstep will engulf it.  The Middle East is but a symptom of a wider geopolitical malaise, in which balances of power and spheres of influence are magnified through the lens of many hatreds. The world’s two superpowers, plus a host of other powers, some in the Middle East, are once again engaged in an arms race.  In that light, more than ever, the world needs an engaged Europe, a Europe credibly able to exert influence in all its forms, a contemporary Europe that can credibly and collectively uphold the values it claims to espouse.  A Europe willing to exert the one thing that has been sadly missing for so long – leadership.  Peace will need defending, as will democracy and freedom, and Europeans will be needed to defend them.

Julian Lindley-French