This is a big week for Britain. It is also a big week for the US and NATO as
Britain’s ugly baby election campaign stumbles towards its UK-busting nadir on
Thursday. Last week Steve Erlanger wrote
an insightful piece in the New York Times that considered Britain’s steady
drift from the world stage. By way of
response to Steve’s piece below is a piece I submitted to the NYT in March that
explains more deeply the causes of Britain’s precipitous decline which looks as
if now it will end in only one possible conclusion – the dismantling of what
was perhaps the most influential state in World history over the last five
hundred years.
The slide in British defence investment has been too-easily
written off as a consequence of the 2008 financial crash and the need to
balance Britain’s books. In fact, Britain’s
defence cuts mask a much deeper existential question; what kind of power should
Britain aspire to be in the twenty-first century. Britain
is locked deep in a strategy crisis which if unchecked threatens to destroy the
transatlantic security relationship and, in time, NATO. Washington has slowly begun to recognise the
threat, or at least its symptoms.
However, the US is doing nothing like enough to help pull its old friend
and ally back from the edge of the strategic precipice over which London now
peers.
In January President Obama warned Prime Minister
Cameron about the continuing decline in British defence spending. In March Britain announced it is joining the
Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Both events are symptoms of a
crisis over the future direction of British national and defence strategy that
is tearing London’s High Establishment apart – both political and bureaucratic.
Indeed, London’s much-politicised High Establishment
is split between those who believe that soft power is the future and that
Britain should accept its place as yet another soft EU power and those that believe
Britain can and should still count as a power – political, economic and military.
The tired idealists believe that American military adventurism has led Britain
to disaster. The frustrated realists
believe that Britain remains a world power, albeit modest in size and ambition,
and as such hard military power should remain the bedrock of all British
influence and strategic effect. It is a
philosophical and political divide worsened by a strategically-illiterate,
inward-looking political class who routinely confuse strategy with politics and
who have abandoned any sense of British patriotism to pursue narrow sectarianism. It is a confusion all-too evident in this
most depressing of general election campaigns.
Britain’s EU-leaning foreign policy is run by a
generation of politicians and diplomats who have built their career making the
little, daily deals that are the stuff of Brussels. As a group the tired idealists are wholly
unprepared for the return of the grand geopolitics implicit in Russian
aggression and Chinese assertion or the super-insurgency ISIL is driving across
swathes of the Middle East. Many in this
group come from a school which also believes and accepts that Britain’s decline
is inevitable and that their job is to manage Britain’s decline ‘successfully’
so that ‘Europe’ can rise in its place. Dream on.
The realists believe that the UK, one of the world’s
top five economies and military powers, remains a power to be reckoned with in
the world. They also believe that the special relationship with the US is not
only Britain’s most important strategic partnership, but the anchor
relationship in the wider transatlantic relationship and thus the strategic
bedrock upon which NATO is established.
As a group they are by and large unromantic about the US and the much-exaggerated
‘Special Relationship’ but recognise that if the US remains central to British security
and defence policy Britain must be able to influence Washington. However, they
also understand that much of that influence will be dependent on the capability
and capacity of Britain’s sorely-pressed armed forces.
Prime Minister Cameron has been the catalyst for Britain’s
strategy crisis but he is not the cause of it.
Equally, Cameron’s determination to join the Asian Infrastructure
Investment Bank is revealing in and of itself because the only ‘national
strategy’ that he seems to understand is mercantilism – his belief that the
only ‘strategy’ in world affairs is trade.
This reflects what Labour leader Ed Miliband’s calls Cameron’s “pessimistic
isolationism”, and not without reason. Certainly,
Cameron’s government at times bears a striking similarity to Stanley Baldwin’s
depression-era appeasement government of the 1930s. Equally, some of Milliband’s pronouncements
reflect the fantasy, unaffordable Utopia into which much of the British political
Left have retreated.
NATO is the big loser from Britain’s strategy
crisis. At the September 2014 NATO Wales
Summit David Cameron committed Britain to spending at least 2% of its GDP on
defence. The statement was pure Cameron;
meant for the moment but nothing more. If
re-elected of Thursday Cameron’s current spending plans suggest that defence
will again be savagely cut. Worse,
Cameron has instructed his eminence grise
Oliver Letwin to find ways to make it appear Britain is spending 2% of GDP on
defence post 2017. Letwin is the architect of Cameron’s retreat from strategy
into politics.
The Obama administration has not helped. The repeated lectures from Washington that
Britain must not consider leaving growth-deficient, regulation-hidebound, equally
strategically-illiterate Brussels and accept its place in an EU that is deeply
ambivalent about its relationship with the U.S. has deepened the divisions in
London’s High Establishment. Clearly, Washington
must make up its mind. The US can either
continue to treat Britain like the 52nd state of the US, insist on a
Little Britain remaining embedded in an uncertain and counter-strategic EU. Or,
the US can move to preserve the ‘Special Relationship’, help rebuild British strategic
self-confidence that the US has helped to crush and again see a Britain that
leads in Europe, rather than scuttling away into a rat-hole of declinism which
is where Britain is today headed, and which would help no-one.
The bottom-line is this; with US forces stretched thin
the world over it is vital that Washington’s NATO allies become effective
first-responders in and around Europe. That
was the message of the big NATO conference for which I acted as Rapporteur last
week in Rome. For the sake of the
Alliance Britain must be in the vanguard of such a NATO-centred effort. If Britain is not in NATO’s military vanguard
London will become simply another other Europeans; all too happy for the US
taxpayer to bear the true cost of Britain’s defence. Why? Over
the next decade the rise of illiberal military power threatens to eclipse
liberal military power. The
Anglo-American special relationship is not what it was. However, the strategic alignment of these two
powers still has within its gift the capacity to stabilise a dangerous world
and if needs be strike and punish.
As a British strategist watching my country being led
down the plug-hole of history by London’s High Establishment the struggle
between tired idealists, frustrated realists and plug-hole politicians is
perhaps the most depressing professional event of my now long career. Those that take a perverse pleasure in seeing
the fall of the country that prevented tyranny in Europe twice this past
century, and there are many such fools, may wish to pause. Britain’s strategy
crisis is not just America’s strategy crisis, it could also mark the end of
NATO and mark the end of political balance within Europe.
High politics, low politicians. It is not just Britain's future that is at stake on Thursday.
Julian Lindley-French
