Britain
faces profound strategic choices all of which will demand the generation of
real diplomatic and military power and influence and its intelligent
application in Washington, Europe and the world beyond. Britain’s armed forces will necessarily be at
the core of strategy but will need a sufficiency of high-end military
capabilities to establish Britain’s soft power influence on a hard power
foundation. That is the essential
message of this book.
In
August 2013 General Sir Nick Houghton, the Chief of the British Defence Staff
warned that because of defence cuts Britain needed to “re-calibrate our
expectations” of the global role and capacity of British armed forces. He might well have suggested that Britain as
a whole needed to recalibrate its expectations.
It would be almost comforting to think that any such ‘recalibration’
would simply be a short-term reflection of the financial challenges of this
age. Certainly, for the foreseeable
future British governments will have precious little money to spend.
However,
attend any meeting in Whitehall or Westminster and a profound divide becomes
apparent. The bureaucratic elite
believes its task is to manage inevitable decline and a political elite that
seems to revel in a false strategic consciousness that Britain is far more
powerful than it actually is. There is
even a term invented to offer a chimera of strategic respectability – managing
decline. In fact, ‘managing decline’ too
often simply masks a lack of imagination of a political class and a
bureaucratic elite who have for so long seen strategy made elsewhere that they
now take decline for granted. In short,
British strategy has for too long been the fruitless search for common ground
between the American world-view, the French and German European view and the
search thereafter for a political and bureaucratic consensus about which bits
of both to support.
The
retreat from big thinking at the top of Britain’s government is reinforced by
an inability by Britain’s civil service to implement big thinking. Three failures are apparent: an inability of
the civil service to manage big, complex projects successfully; a refusal by
ministers to permit the civil service to think long-term or about big policy issues;
and the politicisation of the civil service.
All three contribute to a culture of denial and a refusal to tell
ministers hard facts even when giving guidance.
Such
failings are apparent across government.
A September 2013 report by the National Audit Office (NAO) highlighted
the failure of management for an IT programme to support the new system of
so-called Universal Credit. The report highlighted a recurring theme of failure
in the civil service. Problems are
suppressed or denied by a culture that always seeks to protect ministers from
hard truths. When a problem is finally
too great to suppress both ministers and the civil service claim the problem
has been solved only for failure to be admitted long after those responsible
have moved on. Be it IT programmes or
building aircraft carriers a culture of incompetence exists at the heart of
government that has also helped to cripple British national strategy. For a long time Britain’s relative power in
the world could mask such failure but no longer. Indeed, as Britain declines strategy will
become more important not less, but as yet government – both political and
bureaucratic – has proved itself incapable.
The
motivation for writing this book emerged from the cold realisation that the two
essential ‘truisms’ upon which post-war British national strategy is
established are in fact myth. The first
myth concerns the so-called special relationship with the United States. After over ten years of painful sacrifice in
Afghanistan and Iraq my many visits to Washington have demonstrated to me
all-too-clearly that Britain’s relationship with the American is ‘special’ only
in the minds of fifty per cent of London’s elite Establishment, mainly those
responsible for Britain’s defence. One
senior American said to me recently that the relationship is only special if
Britain does not test it. The August
2013 decision by Parliament to block Prime Minister Cameron’s use of British
military forces to punish Syria’s President Assad over the use of chemical
weapons demonstrates this new reality; the special relationship is not what it
used to be.
The
second myth adhered to by the other half of the London elite Establishment is
that Britain can be a leader of what European federalists dub the European
Project. The Eurozone and the
existential crisis it has created, demonstrates once and for all the utter
impracticality and impossibility of Britain playing such a role. Indeed, to do so would in effect mean the
abandonment of Britain’s vital and enduring role in Europe – to balance
power. Not only will neither Germany nor
France ever allow Britain to play such a role as the EU and the Eurozone become
one, over time Britain will be further marginalised. Britain is today in the worst of all
Euro-worlds – paying an exorbitant cost for little or no influence.
Julian Lindley-French
