Atlantic Future Forum: War, Peace, and Pretence

“When eleven o’clock came, all was silent: not a gun to be heard, nor any other sign of war. It seemed almost uncanny. The war – that long and bloody and ghastly war – was over! Not only over, but it had been won – decisively won – by us and our Allies”.

Lieutenant Edward Allfree, 111^th Siege Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, British Army

The fog of peace?

Alphen, Netherlands. 11^th day of the 11^th month. What did the Armistice of 11 November 1918 really teach Europeans about war and peace? When the guns on the Western Front finally and suddenly fell silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 the shrapnel of Europe lay strewn across the Continental battlefield and far beyond.  The war to end all wars was over. Of the ‘main’ power players of World War One on that November day a century ago Britain and France appeared triumphant and restored, whilst the dark, grand ambitions of Imperial Germany lay in shards of hot, angry denial strewn across a battlefield and a country that stretched from Belgium to Berlin.  In fact, all was not as it seemed. Broke Britain and broken France were just beginning a precipitous fall from the pinnacle of power, whilst for the Germans the ‘war’ would continue via Versailles, Weimar, Hitler, and the Nazis until 1945 and again engulf Europe in another cataclysm of violence.  Only relatively untouched America, America the Banker, really gained the prize of strategic power for which the Kaiser had fought the war. But Woodrow Wilson’s America neither wanted nor accepted a particularly European idea of power as a prize. For over twenty years thereafter America turned its isolationist back on the ‘prize’ it had won and in so doing helped condemn itself and others to a repeat of rapaciousness. Today?

War and peace are the most strategic of choices and Europeans are once again facing that darkest of futures. We must work hard now together never to have to make that choice again. The commemoration of war is itself telling in Europe as it has helped to make Europeans distrustful of the very idea of power. Rather, Europeans have re-invented ‘power’ as ‘non-power’, defanging it, imprisoning it within rigid, set in stone EU ‘laws’, containing and constraining it in grand institutions that many believe might prevent Europeans doing ghastly things to each other.  The problem is that such a worldview does not prevent others from the ghastly doing things unto them, such as Putin in Ukraine. 

The Atlantic Future Forum

Today, the Atlantic Future Forum will begin in Oslo on board HMS Prince of Wales, the very epitome of a floating, hollowed out Maginot Line.   Talking is not the same as doing.  Chaired by that consummate insider, Lord Mark Sedwill, the former National Security Advisor, the ‘AFF’ will sadly be a masterclass in British defence pretence. At the centre of the debate will be the Joint Expeditionary Force or JEF, a British-led multinational multi-domain force invented by my dear friend, Field Marshal Lord Richards.  My Norwegian friends have told me that whilst they will sit in respectful silence listening to London’s propaganda, they know extremely well that until London backs up words with money this Britain cannot be trusted to defend Norway.    

London’s appalling defence weakness and lamentably hollowed-out armed forces are not simply about British indebtedness. Too many in Whitehall believe that military power corrupts the political soul like some latter-day Faustus. However, deterrence, the real business of democracies, can only be credible if the military power of the defence is relative to that of the threat. One has only to look at the bonsai militaries of contemporary Britain, France and Germany to see that Western Europe’s weak leaders fear they cannot trust their own people with the very thing they need right now – capable and relative military power.  For all the talk, and it is only talk, Western Europeans are not really preparing to fight and thus prevent any war at all, which will be all too apparent between the lines of the many speeches today at the ‘AFF’.

The eleventh hour…

Me? At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, I will be commemorating the millions who lost their lives in World War One and World War Two, including members of my own family. It is why I do what I do. Their sacrifice was not futile, nor were they lions led by donkeys, even though at times they were, as we are today. No, they were ordinary men and at times women who found themselves in extraordinary circumstances facing unimaginable fear in the moments before their lives were snuffed out. A citizen army without whose sacrifice the freedoms which are today taken for granted would have been lost.

With the Americans on another Trumpian planet, Western European democracies find themselves once again back in 1935 building imaginary Maginot Lines in the virtual sky. If a major war were to break out in Europe over the next decade these democracies would again be unable to fight it – NATO or not. Wars are stopped by democracies that can demonstrate they understand the dark art and science of war armed with the resolve and the means to preserve peace. That is the true lesson of this mournful day. Have Europeans learnt it? Will they ever learn it? Britain’s leaders clearly have not.

Requiescat in Pace. Lest we forget.     

Julian Lindley-French