Rome, Italy. 27
June. The ghost of Diana’s temple stands
hard by. Rome’s Aventine Hill upon which
I sit mocks the remains of Nero’s monstrous Palatine across the now desolate Circo
Massimo. Where racing chariots once
thundered ageing joggers now shuffle. Around
me plump oranges contemplate their final fall as if awaiting some latter day
Newton to measure their worth. If the
West was born in Ancient Greece it came of age here under the Roman azure skies of ‘i
azzurri’. “Ich bin ein Berliner”; fifty
years ago this week President Kennedy made his famous defiant assertion of
Western solidarity at the strategic fault line of the Berlin Wall. What today is the state of the West?
Kennedy’s moment has
passed into strategic folklore. However,
perhaps more enduring was a speech he made the next day in Frankfurt. Responding to threats to the Atlantic Alliance
by then French President de Gaulle in the name of ‘Europe’, Kennedy warned
against those who would split NATO and “give aid and comfort to the enemies of
the West”. This quote came back to me as
I stood last week in the Washington office of George F. Kennan, America’s great
post-war strategic architect.
Kennedy continued, “The
United States will risk its cities to defend yours because we need your freedom
to protect our own”. That was 1963; this
is now.
Fast forward to a
meeting I attended this week here in Rome.
A very senior NATO officer observed that the Alliance no longer does
strategy. Rather, NATO is today bereft
of the ability to look up and out together by the deep, interminable and oft
parochial political fractures at its peak.
Consequently, strategy has been trumped by bureaucracy.
Today, the West needs three
acts of strategic maturity. First, Washington
must overcome its bombastic partisanship and recognise that the rhetoric of
leadership is empty if a state cannot govern itself to effect and by example. Second, Europeans must look out of their
self-dug narrow political trench and have the courage to face the world as it
is, not as they would like it to be.
December’s ‘big chat’ about the almost moribund EU Common Security and
Defence Policy should be about far more than declining defence budgets. Europe’s place in the world and its
collective influence over it is now very much at stake. Third, NATO needs a new vision. The Alliance is a, if not the, cornerstone of
the Western world security order.
A couple of nights ago
I had dinner with General John E. Allen, one of America’s most distinguished
and brilliant soldiers. It was one of
those evenings when conversation flowed freely across time and place in a
restaurant on the Via Antica Appia down which Roman legions once marched. What struck me about our discussion was a strategic
truism that I will hold to my heart to the day I die; the world is a safer
place when the West is strong.
Yes, the West has made
mistakes. Sadly (and eternally) that has
always been the fate of power in complexity. However, error is no excuse for retreat which
is precisely what happens when strategy is superseded by bureaucracy.
Kennedy’s commitment to
Europe cannot and must not be taken for granted. What is needed is a reassertion of Western solidarity
and nothing short of that will now do.
As in 1963 NATO will have a central but not exclusive role to play in a
renovated Western strategic architecture.
The proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) will
be at least as important.
However the new NATO (for
that is what we need) must in turn be built on a new strategic contract between
both members and partners. This will
include recognition that the US commitment to Europe is only as strong as
European willingness to play a full security and defence role. NATO itself must again become the focal point
for the development of efficient and effective military capabilities. Capable partners the world over must be given
real access to Alliance strategy and thinking.
Above all, strategic unity and effort and purpose between four key
European actors must be purposively established however hard; Britain, France,
Germany and Turkey.
It is for that reason I
bang on about British military capabilities.
It is not so we Brits can sing a hearty rendition of Rule Britannia once a year at the Last Night of the Proms and not feel ever-so-slightly absurd. It is rather to underpin the Western
strategic contract with sufficient hard power so as to keep America in, get
Europe up so the West can again look out with confidence and purpose.
Lord Byron once wrote, “While
stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand; when falls the Coliseum Rome shall fall;
And when Rome falls – the World”. The
Alliance is the latter day Coliseum. If
it falls or fades away then the West falls.
And the world will be a much more dangerous place for it.
Ich bin ein
Westerner...and proud of it!
Julian Lindley-French
