Alphen, Netherlands. 20 September. Last night I returned from Oslo where I had the honour of addressing Major-General Odin Johannessen’s impressive Army Summit 2018. During the visit, I also gave a keynote speech at the Norwegian Atlantic Committee, or DNAK, which is superbly led by my dear friend Kate Hansen Bundt. I cannot share the slides of my speech to the Summit with you but below is the speech I gave at DNAK about the strategic choices Europeans must confront, the need for real leadership, and the terrifying consequences of a lack of it.
The Leadership Hole
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. My thanks to Kate and Andreas, it is always a real pleasure to be back at DNAK and here in beautiful Oslo. My theme this morning is leadership. Or, rather, the consequences of a lack of it.
I am not going to pull my punches this morning. No slides, even less politesse, but a plea to leaders across Europe to get their strategic act together and invest political energy where it is really needed of Europeans are to be safe in an increasingly dangerous century as a new ‘ideological’ struggle takes place between liberalism and cynicism.
Kate asked me to address the following issues:
1. NATO after the Summit – What’s next? I am tempted to ask, summit? At times it was more of a pub brawl;
2. The Consequences of Brexit. Or, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, what to do when the unknown unknowns are decidedly more worrying than the known unknowns in the case of my own country at present;
3. President Trump and the role of Germany – or what do I think of wannabe leader but not too much leadership please Germany and its relationship with the utterly inconsistent and increasingly dysfunctional White House which appears to have abandoned any pretence to the leadership of the West and increasingly America itself.
What, if anything binds these issues? My sense that the post-Cold War ‘not-so belle epoch’ is finally over, but that European leaders refuse to recognise it – which is why I have decided to entitle this little chat – Predators, Prey or Herbivores with Attitude? Europe’s Choice.
If you take nothing else away this morning understand this:
1. NATO is split between high-enders and low-enders, between south, east, north, south and now west.
2. Brexit has revealed a) the incompetence of Britain’s elite; b) the transition of my country from Great Britain to Little Britain; and c) a profound loss of strategic mojo
3. Brexit has also revealed the weak imperial quality of the European Commission, the lack of any real control most member-states have over it, and the lack of real accountability of over-mighty Eurocrats. Want more proof? See this month’s report on the appointment of Martin Selmayr as Secretary-General of the Commission by the European Parliament’s Ombudswoman Emily O’Reilly. It was a blatant and utterly arrogant abuse of power. Sanction? None. It is time to put the Commission back in its box and give power back to the member-states. Europe needs a super-alliance, not a super-state.
4. And then there is Trump’s America. Washington these days reminds me of that old Kissinger jibe about Europe and who to call? Who does one call in DC these days? The passing of John McCain reinforces my sense that a once inspirational America is fast becoming an indifferent America unwilling to bear the costs of free world leadership any more or enjoy the benefits it rightly proffers.
5. Germany? France once had the idea that the future of Europe would be built on French strategic culture and German money. What we seem to have now is German strategic culture, such as it is, and French ‘money’ i.e. none. The great mystery/tragedy for me of ‘Europe’ is that with each passing European treaty – Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon the European nation-state has become less strategically ambitious and more power-emaciated whilst ‘Europe’ has become no stronger. Our influence is waning across the world, with perhaps the possible exceptions of German-led mercantilism and the narrow confines of trade deals. The question Europeans should be asking is not where Britain is going. Britain is going nowhere. Rather, where has all of Europe’s power gone?
So, let me now dive deeper into these issues and how they relate to the paucity of strategic vision in Europe and a dangerous lack of leadership.
NATO after the Summit and ever-decreasing PESCOS
Forget the ‘language’ that came out of Brussels – that was more of the same-ol, same-ol, Wales to Warsaw and beyond conditional adaptation ‘we recognise only as much threat as a) we can afford; and/or b) we think will still get us re-elected stuff. It was the Alliance’s retreat into transactionalism that was striking. It begged question: is American internationalism dead? Too early to tell and we lost one of its great pragmatic champions in John McCain, but President Trump is doing all he can to kill it.
For me, the really important message from Brussels, and Kate and I were close, was how convenient Donald Trump has become for European leaders to blame for their own appallingly dilatory approach to defence.
Look around Europe’s ‘ends’ - Russo-Chinese Vostok 18 at one end, the ongoing tragedy of Ukraine, Russia’s victory in Syria through rivers of blood, the militarization of the Arctic, the attempted murder of the Skripals in Britain, and the (at best) manslaughter of one of my fellow British citizens Dawn Sturgess, the unfolding (again) chaos in Libya, mass migration flows with profound implications for Europe with an already de-stabilised Italy with the Middle East and North Africa a powder keg.
Now look west, ladies and gentlemen. The transatlantic relationship is now conditional and transactional. Why? Trump or no Trump the United States is stretched thin the world over and it will only get more complicated and worse for the Americans. America needs European allies, but it needs real-world European allies who are not locked into ever decreasing PESCOs.
You see NATO only has a future if we Europeans do far more for our own defence. There was a time when NATO was about the Americans providing the real defence of Europe, with Europeans in support. Now, the Alliance MUST be about the Europeans providing far more for their own defence collectively with the Americans in support.
Double Dutch Defence
Here is the crunch question. Are we up to the challenge of contemporary European defence? The Netherlands and Norway would suggest not. The Dutch this week committed to yet another smoke and mirrors increase in the defence budget. On the face of it, a 10% increase looks impressive. Two things. First, the new funding will simply fill the holes in the capability of the Dutch armed forces caused by years of serial underfunding. There will be no new capabilities of note. Second, the growing Dutch economy and defence cost inflation mean that by the early 2020s the Netherlands will actually be spending LESS on defence as a proportion of the national economy. And yet the Dutch signed up to spending 2% GDP on defence by 2024 to meet NATO’s 2014 Defence Investment Pledge. This is strategic illiteracy of the first order if you look at what is happening just across the border between Norway and Russia?
Norway? It simply beggars belief to my mind why a NATO ally with one of the world’s biggest sovereign wealth funds cannot spend 2% GDP on defence. Worse, by spending less than 2% and yet expecting American and British taxpayer’s (and others) to meet the shortfall in Norway’s own defences as a result of political choice treats me with a kind of contempt. Why should I fork out to defend Norway, which I am very willing to do, if Norway will not meet its own commitments to itself? A good start would be for Norway to permit allies to permanently station forces in Norway if needs be. Oslo can hardly expect our forces to die in an emergency for a Norway that apparently does not trust its allies.
As Norwegian NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said, Allies cannot use both a lack of economic growth or too high economic growth to justify failing to invest in what is still a historically low defence investment requirement of 2% GDP. To use the language of Yorkshire diplomacy – it is a bloody ridiculous argument Dutch, Norwegian and other European politicians use to justify their strategic illiteracy.
Put simply, Europeans need to come together and look out of the eternally-bickering ant-hill that is the EU and see the world within which Europe resides for what it is and not what they would like it to be. Then and only then will Europeans, or at least some of them, grow up strategically. They had better do it fast.
Brexit and the Strategic Failure of Britain’s Elite
Which brings me (yawn) to Brexit. Oh, how I lament for thee my once great country. Brexit has revealed Britain today for what it is – the consequence of a series of misguided strategic decisions, the unwillingness of the elite Establishment to be honest with the people about their lack of belief in Britain or their mistakes, and a culture in Whitehall of ‘managing decline’ that is close to policy psychosis.
There is no question in my mind that a state with the inherent strengths and talents of Britain, with an economy that still counts amongst the world’s biggest and a strategic culture that led it to span the world for centuries, could again rule itself. Don’t get me wrong – I campaigned for Remain partly in the belief that for geopolitical reasons Europe needed to hang together not hang apart, and mainly because Britain has never walked away from institutions central to its concept of influence.
There was another reason: as a citizen, I have simply lost faith in Britain’s declinist elite and did not think they are up to the task of Brexit. Critically, for years they deceived the British people by refusing to admit how entwined the UK had become in the ‘European Project’ and just how much sovereignty that had handed over to Brussels on the QT whilst keeping it from the British people.
There are other reasons for Britain’s loss of strategic mojo – the criminal irresponsibility of the bankers who almost bankrupted Britain with their criminal recklessness but for which (surprise, surprise) few have been convicted, the collapse of a once reasonably united society into ‘devolved’ and competing poles of power within the UK under the rubric of ‘modernisation’, the atomisation of society into ‘communities’ and identity-politics, and the retreat of the political class into virtue-signalling at the expense of considered policy, most notably foreign policy where all that matters these days it seems is vacuous statement-making and an obsession with inputs to prove virtue at the expense of hard outcomes.
Sadly, Britain has become just another of those strategy-free, other-worldly European ‘powers’ in which interest groups turn every issue into a crisis, where victimhood has replaced personal responsibility and where Special Advisors undermine what is still, on balance, a very good but horribly under-resourced civil service.
Britain’s leaders have instead retreated into strategic pretence. Proof? Much has been made over the past week that Britain will use its admittedly burgeoning offensive cyber capabilities to retaliate against Russia for the bungling aggression of the GRU on the streets of Salisbury. No chance.
You see the obsession of successive British governments with privatising almost everything, including much of the support for the armed forces, has left Britain and its society dangerously vulnerable to cyber-attack. Why? Because British governments refused to listen to those of us who warned that the need for profit was diametrically opposed to the building of costly redundancy. In any case, most of Russia is too backward to notice any British action. The best that London can do is to kick a few oligarchs out – but not too many.
Where does Britain go next? Look at Britain’s deeds, not its words. Britain is retreating behind its soon-to-be-updated nuclear shield and will use its massive new aircraft carriers to strategically virtue signal. The British Army is far too small these days to properly meet the commitment Britain has made to NATO to provide two real divisions in the event of a real emergency. Worse, I fear, the days of Britain being the Alliance’s European heavyweight are over. Indeed, until and if Britain realigns the ends, ways and means of its foreign and defence policy then the great strategic gap at the heart of British engagement will tell you all you need to know. London could start by simply plugging the £20bn plus funding hole in its own minimum defence requirement. Anything less is again strategic pretence.
To give you a sense of the scale of the declinist diseases and strategic illiteracy at the heart of Britain’s elite Establishment the other day I listened to that doyen of the British Press Sir Simon Jenkins on the BBC seriously suggest that Britain really did not armed forces anymore beyond a kind of Home Guard. Dad’s Army? He even questioned why Britain was defending Latvia. As I said in response on the Riga Conference’s website, if we fail to defend Latvia we fail ourselves.
Put bluntly, Brexit has been an exercise in incompetent political weakness that has exaggerated Britain’s relative decline. A real British leader would reinvest properly in the tools, instruments and strategy of influence. Instead, I and millions of my fellow citizens are faced with a choice between a barely-reconstructed Marxist and someone who seems at times more suited to lead a village council than one of the world’s leading powers.
And yes, I was the one who invented Hotel California Brexit – we can check out anytime we want but we can never leave. Watch this space.
The EU: Empire or Union?
The EU? The appointment of hard-line federalists Michel Barnier and Guy Verhofstadt to lead the Brexit negotiations also revealed the extent of the marginalisation of most EU member-states from real power in and over Brussels. Wrong people, wrong place, wrong job, and the wrong time. You see, Brexit has revealed the EU for what it has become – a bureaucratic empire and a pretty vengeful one at that in which democracy is merely a fig-leaf for a distant elite which is demonstrably incompetent given its inability to confront the big systemic issues of our age beyond rhetoric and yet believes only it knows best when it palpably does not.
Brexit is also the start of a deep existential struggle for the centre of power in Europe between self-aggrandizing power centralisers in Brussels and the European nation-state. It is my firm conviction that a new political settlement for Europe will emerge from its decade of crisis. Given real democracy resides only in the European nation-state it is vital the EU becomes a super-alliance. If it becomes some form of super-state, weak or strong, it will also, inevitably, become some form of tyranny. Intransigent, intolerant and incompetent. Sadly, until this battle over power and institutions is resolved I fear Europeans will look inward not outward.
Europe’s power to which I referred earlier? If one reads the 2004 Lisbon Agenda the EU was to spearhead Europe’s efforts to become economically ultra-competitive in the twenty-first century. In fact, Europe has become increasingly uncompetitive and protectionist in an effort to simply delay the moment when Europeans are unable to compete in a twenty-first-century world that owes Europeans nothing.
Trump, Germany and the Need for a New Transatlantic Relationship
The only real transatlantic strategic relationship between powers of any real weight that matters is between America and Germany. I have the honour to be part of the joint Munich Security Conference-George C Marshall Center Loisach Group which is committed to turning the essential German-US relationship into a special one. Why am I a member? Don’t ask.
It will not be easy. A recent DPA poll suggested 42% of Germans want US forces to leave Germany. The Nordstream 2 gas pipeline also reveals something about how Germany sees power these days – mercantilism. I have noticed something else, not a few Germans seem as ambivalent about its relationship with Putin’s Russia as it is about its strategic partnership with the US.
And yet, look beyond the appalling personal chemistry that exists between Chancellor Merkel and President Trump and it becomes apparent something else is going on: we are finally witnessing the real end of World War Two and a democratic Germany that is emerging from strategic deference to the Americans to err, sort of, not quite, lead.
The result is a vacuum. A vacuum of strategy and a vacuum of power. Berlin may dislike Trump, Germany may be ambivalent about the Americans, but the Federal Republic is offering little by way of replacement. Berlin, it seems, wants the benefits of leadership but is unwilling to get its strategic hands dirty. Rather, it has developed a kind of proxy leadership in which Germany uses ‘Europe’ as an alibi for German power. Just see who Berlin wants to replace Juncker at the Commission next year. Weber and Selmayr together. How very European…or do I mean German? Paradoxically, Berlin’s confusion of ‘order’ with power cedes the European strategic ground, such as it is, to the French and in particular President Macron. Sadly, the tragedy for President Macron is that his ideas are far mightier than his country and quite possibly Europe.
One of my favourite books is L.P. Hartley’s The Go Between. Its opening lines read – “The past is a different country. They do things differently there”. Germany is a model democracy and I am comfortable with German leadership of Europe if a) Germans have a greater sense of solidarity with other Europeans; b) stop simply swapping the ‘German interest’ for the ‘European interest’. To do that Germany will need to be informed by its Nazi past but stop using it as an alibi for doing very little for the greater good. Indeed, Germany’s fear of its own past is paralysing Europe’s ability to deal with the big issues Europeans face, most notably mass irregular migration and helping to push leaderless and frustrated Europeans towards populists of both Left and Right who offer nothing.
Where to start? Germany needs in the first instance to have the political courage to sort out the appalling state of the Bundeswehr. Indeed, Berlin needs to understand that leadership requires the sound and balanced investment in both soft and hard power for leadership cannot exist if softness is insufficiently supported by legitimate hardness. For that is the only way deterrence and defence can be mounted in this new age of new 4D warfare which stretches disinformation, destabilisation, disruption and destruction as it simultaneously climbs a new escalation ladder from hybrid war to hyper war via cyberwar. Protection and projection are two sides of the new defence for all of us. Is Germany up to it? Are any of us up to it?
Herbivores with Attitude?
So, does it matter that America is inconsistent, NATO is divided, Britain is dysfunctional, the EU is weak imperial, European states are power-emaciated and Germany wants order without responsibility? Look around you. Illiberal predators are emerging who threaten us, our values and our interests. They have penetrated our societies, treat our laws and our rules-based international system with contempt, and see Europeans increasingly as prey.
I am not suggesting we Europeans become predators. We have been there, done that, got the imperial T-shirt. However, I am reminded of a short film I watched recently. A lion attacks a Wildebeest calf. For a moment all seems lost as the big cat drags the calf towards lunch. Then, suddenly, a large male wildebeest with huge horns piles into the lion and frees the calf with the herd charging in from behind. It may have been a herbivore but, my God, it was a herbivore with horns…and attitude.
It may be that we Europeans are becoming strategic herbivores, nothing intrinsically wrong with that, but for God’s sake in this world we need to be herbivores with horns and attitude because with the likes of Putin and Xi around being ‘nice’ does not buy peace.
So, what do I as a citizen want?
1. NATO: America you are a truly great country and freedom’s great bastion BUT you need your European allies more than you have ever. Europe, wake up to this world and invest in the forces and resources to make our Great Alliance once again a credible deterrent and defence;
2. Britain: give me some vision leaders, some sense you still believe in my country. That you will again craft pragmatic policy that was once the signature of British power. And, that once again you give the great people who serve me and who are the face of our influence – be it diplomatic, military or whatever, the tools and the funding to do the job – as someone once said once before. End the strategic pretence now.
3. Brussels: remember you are there to foster democracy and support the European state not to replace the latter and kill the former with bureaucracy. You cannot replace democracy with bureaucracy and you must respect votes even if the electorate denies you ever more power in the name of ever more Europe.
4. Germany: we love you, really. But, if you want to lead do the job leadership requires. Above all, take the rest of us along with you. The German interest is not automatically and conveniently synonymous with the European interest.
Why? Because Hotel California stretches the world over and whilst all of us can check out any time, we can never leave.
Predators, prey or herbivores with attitude? It is indeed our choice…so let’s make it.
Thank you.
Julian Lindley-French,
Oslo, September 2018
