Oslo Security Conference Speech, February 3, 2025

 

February 7^th, 2025. I have just got back from the superb Oslo Security Conference. So refreshing compared with the bloated and self-important Munich Security Conference at which too often performative politics dressed up as grand strategy. Real people who know about real things dealing with real issues. Not a parade of subject lightweights with over-mighty egos talking nonsense about things they really do not understand or really care.   Here is my speech to the formal dinner of the Oslo Security Conference.

“Kate, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you. My theme is the one that Prime Minister Gahr Store gave to us, “a Europe able to cope”.  That begs a question: cope with what?

My takeaway is this: there is no crisis of leadership on security in Europe. There is simply no leadership. Western Europe has become a black hole of strategic pretence with leaders who talk of defence but never walk the walk, as you will see in Munich (again) next week. They still really believe defence is discretionary expenditure and that they need only recognise as much threat as they believe they can afford.  Nowhere is this utter stupidity worse than in Britain, France and Germany – Europe’s Plastic Powers.

NATO likes to talk of an eastern flank and a southern flank.  In fact, it has a northern flank as you here in the Nordic states know only too well and with the election of President Trump a western flank.  You see, Trump or no Trump, the Americans are ever busier and Europeans have no right to make Americans weaker simply because our strategically illiterate leaders cannot be bothered to defend we the citizens.

Take my own country, Britain. It is engaged in yet another exercise of pretend strategy (the fourth such exercise in as many years) – the Strategic Defence Review.  Don’t get me wrong it is led by a good man, one of my political heroes, George Robertson.  And yet for all of George’s efforts it will be yet another exercise in British defence pretence.  Worse, the Starmer government, which wants little to do with defence, will very quickly distance itself from the ‘SDR’ and it will soon become known as the “Robertson Review”.  

My latest book, The Retreat from Strategy, co-written with my friend General Lord Richards, charts the decline into deceit of British foreign, security and defence policy and the appeasement of dangerous reality that has gone with it. Flying in the face of hard facts has become the Whitehall Way when faced with uncomfortable political and strategic reality.

The hard fact is that we Europeans are today faced by a relentless Russia led by people who are not only at war with us but are imposing war on their own people as well as Ukrainians. The Kremlin elite have so betrayed their own people that all they can offer is the lie of ultra-nationalism and the despair of decay.

The threat is made worse because Russia is China’s useful idiot. It thus matters not the ultimate price Russia will pay for Putin’s historical and imperial fantasy, because China will underwrite it so long as the war makes America’s strategic life more complicated.

Sadly, China’s strategy is being enabled by angry Americans too many of whom have watched too much Hollywood and believe making America great again can only be done by making America alone again.  The US needs allies, but it has a right to capable allies.

This takes me to the very crux of the crisis in Atlanticism. The paradox of the Alliance is that President Trump sees the world very much likes Putin and President Xi: a game of power poker, hard power poker! Why, because China and the US have the power to play such poker, and so long as China backs it so does Russia. Western Europeans, who should be at the very core of strong European defence still believe they can play soft power chess and that they are an example to the world.  They are fools, living in a fool’s paradise. One only has to look to London for the virtue imperialism of soft power and the ridiculous offer to pay Mauritius, a Chinese puppet, to take Diego Garcia off British hands. This is despite Diego Garcia hosting a vital UK-US base, Mauritius having no legal claim over the Chagos Archipelago, and what legal imperative there is only advisory.  If economists do not understand the value of defence, lawyers do not understand power.

From the High North to the warm south, from the high frontier of space to the gutter that is social media Europe and Europeans are daily under attack – misinformation, cyber, sabotage and threat.  And yet, Western Europe’s foolish leaders somehow believe they are still in a kind of 1990s Groundhog Day.  They are not. We are not.  Russia believes it is at war with free Europe, a serial strategic predator who espies naïve prey. What could possibly go wrong?

Worse, Europeans may take comfort in being able to complain about Trump, but he is essentially correct. Our leaders do lack strategic ambition, and they do take the Americans for granted. It is a situation made worse by Europe’s lack of leadership, or rather confusion about who actually is in charge. In the past thirty years we have seen the eclipse of the European political class by the bureaucratic class. Brexit failed because whilst it was a revolt against distant power laden bureaucracy the same bureaucrats are still in charge. What is happening in Britain is little short of a civil war between the political class and the bureaucratic class who got used to holding the reins of power when the British were still in the EU. Bureaucracies do not lead, they organise, and they organise to their own advantage.  Wherever you are in Europe, it is a struggle that is coming to a country near you.

Nor do bureaucrats do strategy because their focus is inexorably upon the internal not the external. What they do is triangulation, a term taken from mapping, which seeks out a route of least resistance to any issue.  The objective is to maintain and expand their power. Their focus is also inevitably on the short-term and the longer-term. It is why Europe is the mess it is today, and it is a mess. The strategically necessary is sacrificed for the politically convenient.

We got away with such nonsense in the 1990s because we could.  It is not only the unforgiving and inexorable shift of the global balance of power that is to blame. It is the changing character of war.  Today war is conducted across the broad vulnerabilities-scape with every one of our many vulnerabilities mapped and exploited across the hybrid, cyber and high-end war spectrum.  The speed of effects war seeks to impose is also accelerating exponentially, and yet most of our leaders are asleep at the wheel of their chugging analogue establishments.

The consequences for NATO? First, the US and its armed forces are ever more stretched across an ever broader and digital space. Second, NATO now has more multi-domain frontiers than capacity, capability or creativity to defend them.  Third, NATO’s real strategic reserve is not the US, which remains the world’s strategic reserve, it is the ‘Big 3’ Europeans Britain, France and Germany…and all three are strategically AWOL.     

Europe’s leaders like to point to increases in defence expenditure but it is nothing like enough.  Most European armed forces are horribly hollowed out, dependent on the busy Americans for undertaking anything but the most permissive of operations and in desperate need of re-capitalising if they are to close the only gap that matters – the ability to deter a future aggressive Russia if the Americans are forced to be elsewhere.  We Europeans are thus facing a catastrophic failure for which our politicians must and will take the blame if they do not up markedly their security and defence game. 

Let me conclude with the speech of Leo Amery MP to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain during the disastrous 1940 (appropriately) Norwegian campaign:
“Somehow or other we must get into government men (and women) who can match our enemies in fighting spirit, in daring, in resolution and in thirst for victory. We are fighting for our life, for our liberty, for our all.  We cannot go on being led as we are…This is what Cromwell said to the Long Parliament when he thought it no longer fit to conduct the affairs of the nation. ‘You have sat here too long for any good you have done, depart I say and let us be done with you. In the name of God go!’”

That will be the fate of Western Europe’s political class if it does not step up now, here, there and everywhere in defence of Europeans.  Yes, we really are stronger together, but what I can promise you is coming at us in the years to come, only if together we do what is required to preserve a just peace.

If not, the retreat from strategy will become the retreat from sanity.

Julian Lindley-French