The Main Event

Alphen, Netherlands. 29 August.  Many people have inspired me.  Winston Churchill for refusing to compromise with evil, Ed Murrow for taking on corrupt power to protect free speech, Martin Luther King for reminding Americans that all people are born equal and Nelson Mandela for creating a nation out of forgiveness.  But there is one who this week will be rightly celebrated because he not only gave many young men their broken lives back but overcame prejudice and discrimination – Sir Dr Ludwig “Poppa” Guttmann, the founding father of the Paralympics which start today in London.

He was an unlikely British hero.  A German Jew who had been Germany’s top brain surgeon before the Nazis banned him from practising in 1933.  He had been born in what was then eastern Germany when the Kaiser was on the throne and fled with his family to Britain in 1939 to escape Nazi persecution.  What he found in Britain appalled him and he refused to accept the latent prejudice in the British medical establishment of the time that condemned many young British servicemen crippled by war to a life of unjust marginalisation or simply to die of infected bedsores or urinary infections.  Their life expectancy was six months, condemned to die by prejudice as much as injury.  When they arrived from the battlefield his patients were even shipped in coffin-like boxes in seeming anticipation of their pending demise.

Like all such pioneers he was not an easy man, as hard on his patients as the stifling officialdom that simply wanted to wish away his ‘paraplegics’.  He fought for their dignity but also demanded equal commitment from them.  At Stoke Mandeville hospital he slowly created a world-leading centre for the treatment of severe spinal injury suffered in battle.  He was possessed of that special quality that refused to accommodate the ‘old boy network’ that even today blights Britain. He did not come from the right school and he did not speak with the right accent and he had little time for those who spoke the language of integrity and dignity only to shuffle their feet when called upon to act in its name. Something I have seen all too clearly for myself of late.

His genius was to understand that quality of life was as much a battle for the spirit as the body.  And it was that insight that led him to create the Stoke Mandeville Games, which took place on 28 July, 1948 the same day as the 1948 London Olympics opened.  Indeed, he called his event the “Parallel Olympics”.  From modest beginnings the Games have grown into the Paralympics of today in which 4200 athletes from 65 countries will compete in intense completion for much-prized medals.  In so doing Guttmann reminded the world that there is no distinction at all between the able-bodied and the disabled.

His old unit was set up in the wake of the June 1944 allied invasion of France as spinal injuries soared. It survives to this day in the guise of the National Spinal Injuries Centre (surely it should be the Royal National Spinal Injuries Centre) and supports some 5000 patients.

Between 1948 and 1960 the Stoke Mandeville Games grew year on year as ever more war veterans and disabled people from across the world came together to compete.   In 1960, a week after the flame had died on the seventeenth Olympiad the first official Parallel Olympics was held in Rome. It was not just the Games that Guttmann’s genius helped to inspire but the whole treatment of people with disabilities from housing to travel, from work to leisure.What he did was to change the mind-set of official and unofficial Britain alike and in time much of the world beyond.

Guttmann became a naturalised British citizen in 1945 and in 1966 was knighted by Her Majesty the Queen for his services to Britain and disabled people.  He died in 1980.  However, his spirit lives on and there is no doubt he will be looking down from on high at the 2012 Paralympics with much pride. The 2012 London Olympics were simply the warm up.  If you want to see courage and utter determination to overcome adversity watch the main event.  It is called the London Paralympics and it starts today.

Thank you, Sir Ludwig.  You reminded us all that it is what people can do that matters, not what others think they cannot.  It is a lesson that needs to be constantly taught and re-taught, especially to those empty souls who claim to uphold fairness and freedom from discrimination but all too often do not.

Julian Lindley-French

The Syria Bluff

Alphen, Netherlands. 27 August.  It is clearly intelligence-led.  President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron have said that any recourse to chemical weapons by Damascus would be “completely unacceptable” and would lead the US and UK to “revisit their approach” to the crisis.  According to Obama even moving the weapons would cross an American “red line” with “enormous consequences”.  The implication is clear; the US and UK are considering military action.  Is it a credible threat?

 

The threat posed by Syrian chemical weapons is certainly credible.  Damascus is believed to possess some one thousand tons of mustard gas, together with the nerve agent Sarin and possibly VX gas.  It is held in over fifty locations but focused on five main sites relatively close to the Turkish, Lebanese and Israeli borders.  Syria is also capable of producing several hundred tons of mustard gas per year.

 

The political implications of Anglo-American military action would be profound.  The days are now long gone when the West could seemingly act with impunity in the name of humanitarian interventionism.  That is why Cameron in separate talks with French President Hollande agreed to, “work more closely to identify how they could bolster the opposition and help a potential transitional government after the inevitable fall of Assad”. 

 

Moreover, a Western-led strike against Syria’s main chemical weapons sites would almost certainly take place without the support of the UN Security Council and thus further sour relations with China and Russia.  Arab support would be critical, particularly and at the very least that of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, because it is highly unlikely that Arab League support could be secured as an alternative source of political legitimacy.  Iran would inevitably see such an attack as part of a much bigger stratagem aimed at Tehran and there is even the possibility that members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard would be killed or injured. 

 

In Europe the prospect of British and French forces acting alongside the US, much in the way they did over Libya, would no doubt split Europeans (again).  Even at home it is hard to see the American, British or French people happy to see their forces inserted yet again into another political quagmire. 

 

Military action would be complicated to say the least. That is why Obama has suggested that even moving the weapons would cross an American “red line”.  If they are dispersed prior to use then the already limited chances of such a strike succeeding would be reduced to nil.  The strike would need to be overwhelmingly US-led using Special Forces acting on real, real-time intelligence probably operating from bases in Israel and Turkey, which would itself complicate matters.  Jimmy Carter’s botched April 1980 attempt to rescue American diplomats held in Tehran would no doubt gravely exercise Obama’s military and political planners in this election year. 

 

The French might be able to offer some air support, most likely from their aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle.  The British could perhaps offer their Special Forces, which remain amongst the few units in the British armed forces that have not been significantly weakened by London’s savage defence cuts, the impact of which was all too apparent in the skies above Libya.  Indeed, it is becoming increasingly galling to hear Cameron talk big on the world stage as he cuts the very forces with which he needs to act.  ‘Talk big, act small' is rapidly becoming the mantra of this increasingly incompetent British government (and that is saying something).  The rest of Europe?  Forget it.

 

However, the greatest danger is that once again the West will confuse values with interests and use the threat posed by Syria’s chemical weapons to embroil its forces in a Syrian civil war in pursuit of vague humanitarian objectives.  The Syrian opposition is made up of a range of groups and beliefs some of which are implacably anti-Western.  Failure would end at a stroke the new, implicit ‘strike and punish’ strategies of all Western powers and simply lead to another failed intervention at the end of this age of failed interventions.

 

Ultimately, any such mission could offer no guarantee that Syria’s chemical arsenal can be either destroyed or neutralized.   Better instead to carefully identify those members of the opposition with whom the West can work.  And, uncomfortable though it may be establish contact with those with links to the regime who might be able to help form a transitional government in Syria.

 

Richard Schickel once wrote, “The law of unintended consequences pushes us ceaselessly through the years, permitting no pause for perspective”. 

 

It is time for perspective on Syria.  This is no time to bluff.

Julian Lindley-French

 

Steely-Eyed Missile Man

Alphen, Netherlands. 26 August.  0356 hours UK time, 20 July, 1969 I was aged 11 sitting in front of my parent's TV as Neil Armstrong stepped from Lunar Module Eagle at Moon Base Tranquillity onto the lunar surface.  It was the BBC's first all-night live transmission and I had been allowed to stay up because history was in the making.  For the first time since man became sentient he was about to step onto another world. I recall as though yesterday the moment when Astronaut Armstrong said words that came to define a generation, "This is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind".

Neil Armstrong died today aged 82.  For me and my generation he is one of the immortals.

Safe landings, Mr Armstrong.  You are one steely-eyed missile man!

Julian Lindley-French    

Far Away Islands of Which We Know Nothing

Alphen, the Netherlands.  21 August.  It is a worrying vision of a dangerous future.  Last week Chinese ‘activists’ landed on the Japanese-controlled but disputed islands of Senkaku (Diaoyu in Chinese) followed swiftly by Japanese nationalists. On the face of it this dispute seems almost tragi-comic, a plot straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan.  Just one of those momentary summer headlines for a Europe taking breath from the Euro-disaster and a distraction for the eternally electioneering Americans.  And yet, this East China Sea dispute could in time be seen as the true beginning of a contest that will come to define the twenty-first century as much as the coming war between Iran and Israel; the struggle for power dominance in East Asia.

The prize is oil and gas.  China estimates that between one hundred to one hundred and sixty billion barrels of oil can be extracted from the East China Sea, with a possible further twenty-eight billion barrels beneath the South China Sea.  The islands form part of the so-called Xihu/Okinawa trough basin which alone hide an estimated twenty billion barrels of extractable oil beneath the waves.   

However, the conflict goes much deeper (excuse the bad pun) and is about much more than hydrocarbons.  The Chinese have claimed the islands since at least the fourteenth century, whilst Japan asserted control over them in 1895, a stepping stone on the road to Tokyo’s then imperial ambitions which eventually led to Japan’s brutal 1937 invasion of Manchuria (China), the 1940 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, and eventually the 1941 Pacific War  The Americans took control in 1945 with the defeat of imperial Japan but handed them back to Tokyo in 1971 to ease Japanese concerns about the Nixon-Kissinger rapprochement with Mao’s China. 

Today, it is China that is exerting its regional-strategic economic and military muscle and this dispute bears all the hallmarks of a clumsy Beijing attempt to escalate.  In the shadow of its declared foreign policy goal of “strategic harmony” China has established the self-declared Exclusive Economic Zone or EEZ.  The zone is entirely fungible.  Nominally it extends no more than two hundred miles off the Chinese coast, although some Chinese maps have the EEZ extending across both the South and East China Seas, from Vietnam to Japan. 

As such this China-Japan standoff is just one of several in which Beijing is involved and in which all the regional powers are involved.  China and the Philippines are in dispute over the sovereignty of the Spratly Islands, in particular the Reed Bank, on which a British company is currently surveying for oil and which is regularly harassed by the Chinese.  China is also exerting pressure on PetroVietnam as it searches for oil and gas in Hanoi’s own self-declared EEZ off the Vietnamese coast.  In October 2011 China and Vietnam signed an agreement that established principles for resolving maritime issues, but only time will demonstrate its utility.

The strategic picture is further complicated by the rapid expansion and modernization of Chinese naval and naval paramilitary forces.  It is self-evident that if some kind of accommodation is not found soon the potential for conflict grows by the day.  This is especially so as all of these disputes mask the rampant nationalism which holds the entire region in its very partisan grip, reflective itself of long-held and deeply-felt grievances.

For China the stakes could not be higher.  The rise of the People’s Republic has been built on economic nationalism, the feeding of the West’s consumer obesity and the avoidance of direct strategic confrontation.  These small specks on a maritime chart could derail what has been a highly successful strategy.  Beijing often worries publicly about other powers seeking to ‘contain’ China, in much the same way that the US ‘contained’ Soviet Russia.  China’s fear could be self-fulfilling if Beijing continues to press with a heavy hand in the East and South China Seas. 

Indeed, important though oil and gas may be to resource-starved Asian economies in which many regimes are legitimized by economic growth rather than democracy, these disputes are really about the regional-strategic pecking order in East Asia.  Much like the European pecking order did much to shape the nineteenth century world the twenty-first century world order will owe much to the power shape of East Asia.  Nothing is more likely to engender an anti-Chinese regional coalition than a China that makes a mockery of “strategic harmony”.  Any such coalition would inevitably and invariably draw in the Americans.   

And, in this security globalized world what happens ‘over there’ impacts ‘over here’.  One-time British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain once described Czechoslovakia as a “far-away country of whom we know nothing”.  The rest is history. 

Tread carefully China.

Julian Lindley-French

Romney’s Not Obama Doctrine

Alphen, the Netherlands, 10 August.  All American presidents like to establish a doctrine; a coherent set of foreign and security policy goals that underpin US leadership in the world.  What does Mitt Romney’s recent foreign tour say about a future President Romney’s foreign and security policy?  Can the beginnings of a Romney Doctrine be discerned?

 

From a European perspective the visit hardly instilled confidence. Indeed, after his much-heralded gaffe in London when he suggested the city was not ready for the Olympics The Sun, one of Britain’s more populist newspapers ran the headline, “Mitt the Twit”.  And yet the three venues for his visit were carefully chosen – Britain, Israel and Poland – and do suggest the stirrings of a world view. 

Romney was to some extent pushing at an open door.  One of the many and oft unfair criticisms of President Obama has been that his treatment of traditionally faithful allies has been high-handed.  Ten years of sacrifice by the British under American leadership in Afghanistan and Iraq was seemingly dismissed in the early days of the Obama administration as they attempted to build new relationships with Germany and France.  Poland was told rather brusquely to accept the Administration’s 'reset' with Russia, and Obama has yet to visit Israel, although one is planned if he is re-elected.

And yet Romney came across to Europeans as another ill-informed, plastic American politician – all mouth and no trousers as we say in Yorkshire.  Moreover, some of Romney’s foreign policy pronouncements seem ill-advised.  His aggressive comments about Russia seemed to reflect a Cold War view of superpower Moscow, rather than a state in rapid decline.  Moreover, whilst the visit to Israel clearly demonstrates that a Romney administration would be rightly concerned about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it also suggests that attempts to find a new accommodation with political Islam as represented by the new Egyptian government would be a low priority, which would be a mistake.

Equally, the Romney world view matters.  There are those of course who suggest that given America’s huge budget deficit, cuts to US armed forces and the West’s economic turmoil any American president will have far less influence than before.  That is only very partially true.  The Americans can no longer shape the strategic environment as before, if they ever could, but talk of American decline is dangerously premature.  Chinese power is very much over-rated and regional at best with Beijing faced by a host of domestic challenges that will render China’s influence brittle at best.  There are simply no other peer competitors to the Americans and there will not be for at least a decade, probably longer.

In fact, given the need to draw down America’s enormous deficit a Romney presidency may well wish the US had less influence. The flip side of influence is responsibility and as the much-berated Obama ‘pivot’ to Asia suggests an over-stretched post-Afghanistan, post-Iraq America could do with less responsibility, not more.  And yet, the pace and cope of instable change in the world is likely to generate more not less demand for American leadership.  Indeed, whilst the strategic centre of gravity will in time shift to East Asia, many of the flashpoints will be in and around Europe – Iran, Syria, fundamentalism and the search for a new political and economic order in a Middle East for which the West still depends for much of it oil. 

It may be this strategic reality that binds Britain, Israel and Poland in the clearly embryonic Romney strategic mind.  Indeed, implicit in the trip was a reinvestment in allies who have delivered for America.  Therefore, at best the trip represented the early stirrings of a Romney Doctrine and with it a re-orientation of American foreign and security policy towards a new global American worldwide security web – a Republican grand strategy.  This state-centric world-wide web of democratic allies and partners would necessarily need to go beyond traditional institutional alliances, such as NATO, if support for an overstretched America is to be bolstered.   

Indeed, such a doctrine would involve and require real and simultaneous US political investment in two sets of traditional allies.  In the European region that would be Britain, Israel and Poland.  In Asia-Pacific Australia, Japan and South Korea would be vital.  Successful overtures would also be needed to the likes of India and South Africa, and more close to home Brazil.  Where a Romney Doctrine could be different is to link them all together with Washington acting as the hub.  

All of the above would require deft American leadership if lost confidence is to be rebuilt.  In and of itself the trip did nothing to reinforce that.  Indeed, there is no Romney Doctrine as yet, simply a Not Obama Doctrine and that is not enough by far.  Romney will need a big foreign policy idea and soon. 

Julian Lindley-French

Yorkshire Gold

Alphen, The Netherlands. 9 August.  Good news for Australia!  The Aussies have just drawn level with my native Yorkshire in the Olympic's medal table with six whole gold medals.  Team GB by the way have twenty-four golds but who's counting?  Keep trying you Aussies! As we say in Yorkshire, 'na then!  That means pay attention in Australian.    

Vor You Tommy Ze Var Ist Ofer?

Alphen, The Netherlands. 7 August.  Those of you of a certain vintage will remember those flinty, somewhat silly British war movies of the 1950s.  The story line was always roughly the same; a plucky British soldier, invariably called Tommy, armed only with a broken toothbrush, elastic band and a piece of chewing gum would, after suffering much adversity, defeat an entire Wehrmacht division.  At some point in the storyline Tommy would invariably and temporarily be captured by some cartoon-cutout German who would invariably utter the immortal line, “Vor you Tommy ze var ist Ofer”.  As we descend into the Euro abyss reading the German Kommentariat I am tempted to say some are at it again.  Britain, the line goes, has no alternative but to accept the German view of Europe, so why can the silly British not see it? 

Part of it is understandable frustration that in the midst of the Eurozone crisis the age-old issue of Britain and Europe has again come to the fore.  Equally, in spite of my huge respect for modern Germany the Kommentariat also reflect a German tendency to believe that what is good for Germany is good for Europe.  Thus, to the Kommentariat pursuit of the German national interest is known as ‘European integration’, pursuit of the British national interest ‘blackmail’. 

Poor little Britain, the line goes, is lost in a long-dead past, and wallowing in misplaced schadenfraude at the travails of the Eurozone.  However, soon broke Britain will break up and have no alternative but to accept the German idea of ‘Europe’.   The more sophisticated members of the Kommentariat recognise that such views are rather silly but worry that moves towards political union could see Britain step inexorably towards an EU exit.  This could do immeasurable damage, not least to Germany’s leadership of Europe. The less sophisticated simply try to shame the British into acquiescence suggesting the country with the world’s fifth or sixth largest real economy and one of the most capable armed forces has no alternative but to abandon national sovereignty in the name of ‘Europe’.  Some even suggest that Britain is responsible for the Eurozone crisis for not having joined the Euro!
 

The Kommentariat reflect a basic political division between the two countries. The German view of ‘Europe’ is a potent mix of romanticism and realism, whilst the British view (as much as there is one) is entirely pragmatic.  Moreover, whilst the rest of Europe by and large accept the German model of Europe, mainly to get their hands on German taxpayer’s money, the British steadfastly refuse. 

For the British ‘Europe’ simply costs too much and could soon cost a lot more.  Britain ‘enjoys’ a huge trade deficit with the rest of the EU, and transfers £4 ($6) to the rest of Europe for every £1 ($1.5) it gets back.  Indeed, the only year Britain enjoyed a net benefit was 1977, at the time of the last in-out British referendum – now there’s a surprise.

The British, or to be more precise the City of London, also provide a convenient scapegoat for the Kommentariat to avoid a simple truth; the problem is the Euro itself.  By extension London must not only be tamed but the British made to pay for a crisis not of their making if the German taxpayer is to be protected.    

However, the ultimate silliness of the Kommentariat is to pretend Britain has no alternative.  It is simply madness to think that a country the size, capability and creativity of Britain could not make its own way in the world.  If the Kommentariat wants proof of that look no further than the London Olympics.  The Games demonstrate again something the Kommentariat really should have learnt by now; that the British when galvanised can be world-beaters.  If only Britain’s defeatist elite could see what the British people instinctively see.  Indeed, if there is a dangerous British malaise it is the void between Britain’s vacuous leaders and its people.

However, the Kommentariat is right about one thing; Europeans must work together at this most dangerous of moments. Certainly, Britain must do nothing to make this crisis worse than it already is.  It is a shame then that silly talk of political union so blights effective, pragmatic crisis management.  Over time London and Berlin need a new start but the perpetual belittling of Britain by the Kommentariat makes that hard.    

There is nothing that irritates the Kommentariat more than British commentators using World War Two as a political metaphor – so here goes.  During the September 1944 Battle of Arnhem surrounded and vastly out-numbered British paratroopers were offered surrender terms by the Germans.  “I am awfully sorry, old chap”, came the reply. “We simply haven’t the room to take you all.  Is there anything else?” 

Julian Lindley-French

Australia Who?

Alphen, The Netherlands. 6 August.  This is getting too easy.  Whatever happened to the Dame Ednas of world sport?  Each Olympics the Australian and British Sports Ministers have a bet as to which of the two countries will gain the most medals.  This is traditionally preceded by a lot of empty Aussie talk of sporting supremacy. Don't worry, we British are tolerant of little countries with big egos.  The loser, Senator Kate Lundy of Australia, will have to don a Team GB shirt and row the Olympic course, for lost she has...again!  Last year England stuffed Australia at cricket in Australia, and now Team GB is giving the Aussies another hiding.

So, just for the record as of today Great Britain sits 3rd in the Olympic table with 37 medals of which 16 are gold, 11 bronze and 10 bronze.  Australia sits (forgive the titter) 24th in the table with 1 gold, 12 silver and 7 bronze.  A few too many tinnies, eh mate? 

Australia who?

Julian Lindley-French    

Euro-Realism 3: Defending Europe

Alphen, the Netherlands. 3 August.  In one of those deliciously Anglo-French moments this week President Hollande took a swipe at the London Olympics and David Cameron.  Stung by Bradley Wiggin’s Tour de France Champs Elysee victory Hollande said, “The British have rolled out a red carpet for French athletes to win medals. I thank them very much for that”.  It was also a calculated riposte to Cameron’s suggestion that the “red carpet” would be rolled out for French economic refugees seeking to escape Hollande’s tax hikes.  It would be easy to leave the Franco-British relationship at that – a tragi-comic little battle over whose declining influence is the greater.  In fact the London-Paris axis is Europe’s only true strategic defence relationship and thus critical to the future defence of Europe.  As Europe heads inexorably towards the coming Euro mega-crisis cross-channel defence relations will become more not less important and must be preserved at all costs. The political realism inherent to the relationship acts as strategic insurance against the woolly ideology of ‘Europe’ that has fathered the current disaster.

Therefore, the French-inspired decision to open up the 2010 Franco-British Defence and Security Co-operation Treaty to others appears all the more strange and could well mark the beginning of the end of this vital pact. Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said France was not prepared to have a defence relationship with Britain that was separate from other European allies.  Strangely, Philip Hammond his British counterpart, went along with this.  The defence relationship is now at the mercy of Eurozone chaos.  The timing could not have been worse. 

Up to now London and Paris had shown both sense and restraint by keeping the two distinct.  At this most sensitive of moments the move will certainly reinforce suspicions on the British right that the pact was a French plot to weaken NATO and sucker the British into what they see as the French-inspired EU Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP).  Indeed, Hammond’s acquiescence looks to all intents and purposes as a political sleight of hand – give the French what they think they want knowing full well that in time it will destroy it. 

The only possible practical argument for this decision is that most big, complex defence procurement projects are multi-national rather than bi-national, and that Germany and Italy have been pressing to be included.  However, not only is that wrong; Britain and France share several major projects, it also wilfully misses the point of the 2010 pact.  In any case, multilateral structures already exist and they are failing.  Consequently, the pact will now become EU defence-lite…and fail.

This is exactly what happened to the 1998 St Malo Declaration which was meant to herald a new dawn in Europe-centric defence co-operation between Britain and France.  However, St Malo was never given enough time to mature into a trusting strategic partnership.  Rather, the Germans and others sought the early transformation of St Malo into the failed European Security and Defence Policy (ESDP) because inclusivity was judged more important than credible capability.  Subsequently, not only did the Franco-British strategic defence relationship falter (and then crash with the 2003 Iraq War) but European defence became mired in the EU’s political and bureaucratic morasse in which it has been stuck ever since.   

The simple fact is that Britain and France are different and neither can afford any more of the strategic political correctness that has done so much to denude Europe of a sound defence.  Britain and France together represent almost 50% of European defence expenditure.  They are Europe’s only two nuclear powers (excluding Russia).  They have by far Europe’s most experienced and capable militaries and best strategic thinkers. 

The British will now move further towards an American-led defence Anglosphere, whilst the Eurozone and European defence will slowly become one and the same pulling each other into the abyss.  The British will never join the Euro and for that reason the defence of Europe must be kept separate from it.  Indeed, the timing of this move makes it even less likely that London will focus real political energy on CSDP. 

Therefore, London and Paris need to pause and for once think together and think strategically.  With the French about to draft a new White Book on defence (Livre Blanc) and the British moving towards the 2015 Strategic Security and Defence Review the Franco-British defence relationship must be seen by both for what it is; the most strategically-dynamic of its kind in Europe that given time can emerge as the central pillar of Europe’s future defence.  Then and only then should the relationship be opened up to others. 

The Franco-British strategic defence relationship must be seen as a long-term partnership above and beyond local and short-term vicissitudes, however severe.  Only then will European security and defence be re-connected to world security and defence, whatever the downstream institutional arrangements that turn power into structure.

Perhaps President Hollande’s concluding Olympic remark may have spoken truth.  “The competition is not over,” he said.  I suspect it never will be.

It is time for Euro-realism.

Julian Lindley-French

Syria’s Olympian Tragedy and the New Middle East

Alphen, the Netherlands.  30 July.  The struggle for Syria is forging a new Middle East.  Summer Olympics are often used by desperate, repressive, time-expired regimes to act repressively.  The Russians invaded Georgia in the midst of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.  Now, the Assad regime is attacking Syria’s largest city Aleppo.  Some estimates suggest up to 200,000 people have already been killed in the war with the UN estimating another 200,000 internally displaced and some 250,000 having fled abroad.  Certainly, the loss of Syria’s biggest city to the diverse anti-regime coalition could mark the beginning of the end for President Assad and his Alawite-dominated minority government.  Such is the level of outside interference that the simple truth is that none of us know when and how this will end.  The only thing that can be said with any certainty is that the Baathist Syrian state is already dead.  How the corpse is disposed of could well decide the future shape and ‘balance’ of the new Middle East. 

Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al-Muallem flew to Tehran Sunday to seek more Iranian support.  For Tehran Syria is critical in their efforts to construct an anti-Israeli coalition that they hope will surround Israel.  Republican US Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, speaking in Jerusalem on Sunday, as part of a strangely amateurish foreign policy venture, called for the strong US defence of Israel and said that preventing Iran obtaining nuclear bombs would be his “highest national security priority”.

   

The Free Syrian Army is being supported by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and to some extent Turkey.  This not only reflects the split within Islam between Shia and Sunni, it also reflects the uneasy balancing act between Arab, Persian, Kurd and Turk that plays out across the region and the struggle for influence and supremacy over what it now the new Middle East.

The new Muslim Brotherhood government in Cairo will be a key actor.  Indeed, the true litmus test for Egypt’s future foreign policy orientation will be the fate of Cairo’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel.  Any linkage Egypt makes between the struggle of the Palestinians and the struggle in Syria could well decide Cairo’s relationship with Israel.

All of this means that Israel faces layers of uncertainty on its borders unparalleled since 1967 and much of it beyond Tel Aviv’s control.  Lebanon is being daily more destabilised by the Syrian struggle by allegiances for which local borders are meaningless.  With some 1000 Syrian refugees a day now crossing from Syria into Jordan the Hashemite Kingdom is again being destabilised. 

Israel’s nightmare is to be surrounded to the north and east by Iranian-backed proxies with Hezbollah to the fore and to the south by a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority and a hostile regime in Cairo.

In such an event Iran’s nuclear bomb would not be used to directly threaten Israel but rather to guarantee a free hand for Iran to build its anti-Israeli coalition.  As ever the Palestinians are again being used again for the wider designs of others.  It is a role into which they seem forever to have been cast.

And then there is the grand strategic struggle.  Syria is on the new front-line of the new geo-politics.  Yesterday’s decision by Moscow to refuse to permit a search of any ship flying Russia’s flag en route to Syria simply demonstrated the same old-fashioned thinking in Moscow that led to the 2008 invasion of Georgia.  However, the West’s reluctance to intervene on humanitarian grounds is not simply due to Russian and/or Chinese intransigence.  There are profound concerns about the impact and cost of such an intervention and how it would influence a post-Assad government, the wider region and the dangers associated with injecting Western forces into the Middle East cauldron, particularly after such a bruising experience in neighbouring Iraq and over-the-hill Afghanistan.

The simple truth is that the only option available to the world’s real democracies (the conceptual West) is concerted and systematic diplomatic and humanitarian pressure.  Given that the West must focus policy on Syria and Syrians.  Now that the Annan peace plan is dead the concerted aim must be to decouple as much as possible the conflict from the regional and global issues that are so clouding it and put all efforts into finding an early and durable solution for Syrian people.  Only then and only in time might a successor regime emerge in Damascus that is neither a threat to itself or others, but there is no guarantee.    

The simple truth is that this struggle has so many players that anyone offering a clear view can only do so from the perspective of ignorance or bias. 

As the world loses itself in an Olympian dream a nightmare is awakening.  It is time to wake up!

Julian Lindley-French

OIympic London

Alphen, The Netherlands.  27 July.  Nineteenth century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once described London as the modern Babylon.  Today, the Games of the XXX Olympiad begin in London.  Over five weeks both the Olympic Games and the Paralympics will, to employ one of the many Olympic cliches now in the starting blocks, shine the light of the world on Britain’s capital city.  What London will it reveal?

In a sense it was entirely appropriate that London was awarded the Olympics and not Britain.  For a long-time now a settlement founded by the Romans between AD 43 and 50 has been a city-state within a state.  This old, great city now has a population of over 9 million people, which according to the 2011 national census released last week grew by some 800,000 over the past decade and probably many more.  Today, London contains over 20% of the UK’s total population.

London’s economic and corporate stats are simply stunning.  London contributes some 17% of Britain’s total GDP, with an economy roughly the size of Sweden, Belgium and Russia.  It is home to the European headquarters of 35% of the world’s largest companies, many of them Olympic sponsors.  65% of Fortune’s Global 500 companies base their operation centres in London with more foreign banks represented than any other world city.  London is thus the very symbol of globalisation – for good and ill. 

Like many Britons my feelings for London are profoundly ambiguous.  Naturally, I am proud of what this city has come to represent as a beacon of freedom during war and a world power in its own right.  And yet much of its wealth was founded on oppression and its under-regulated banks have done much to tarnish the reputation of London and done much damage to the wider British economy.

And yet this is the paradox of London.  The British Government might pretend it will act to tighten regulation over Mammon, but in reality it is Mammon which runs the British Government.  London’s financial clout is far too important for a government desperate for tax revenues in a depression.  This week it was announced that year-on-year the British economy had shrunk by 0.7% by the end of Q2 2012.  Thus, the benighted banks will receive no more than a slapped wrist for their many manipulations, the LIBOR scandal being but the latest and probably by no means the last.

However, it is London’s over-bearing political influence that is perhaps most profound.  London long ago subjugated England and turned a green and pleasant land into a sometimes quaint, sometimes fractured hinterland.  The little countries on London's periphery have retreated into the fantasies of faux self-government replete with myth and legend.  Indeed, the Scots pretence that they can gain pretend independence if they press the Braveheart button will only reveal further the true power in the land - London.  Scotland the Brave will forever be Scotland the Broke without London.

Having vanquished the rest of Britain a new battle is being fought by London and over London.  On one side of the front-line stand those who see London as the champion of free-market globalisation.  Capitals flows are their weapons of choice, their aim to make London as attractive as possible to as much foreign capital as possible wheresoever its provenance and however ill-gotten a gain.  Leading the assault on the City walls is the European Commission at the head of a medieval assembly of European regulation barons.  At heart this struggle for London is one between Anglo-Saxon-led free-marketeers and continental statists. It is a struggle that has already seen many continental free market refugees arrive in London like latter-day Huguenots.

The struggle even takes a physical form.  The new high-speed rail link through the Channel Tunnel to Paris, Brussels and shortly beyond is a physical manifestation of attempts by continental Europeans to forever tie London’s destiny and that of Britain to their own, which is unlikely to be a happy one.  And yet, even though that great old River Thames which has for two millenia defined London flows to the East it rises in the West.  In this age of electronic capital it is ultimately the West, South and far East where London sees it destiny.  Globalisation will prevail.  Yes, European markets matter but the greater the effort by Brussels to tether London the more likely it will break free.  At this defining point in ‘Europe’s’ destiny one thing is clear, London is with them but not of them, to paraphrase Churchill’s great dictum about Britain and Europe.

So, in a sense, the Olympics and London are made for each other.  For, if the Olympics these days represents the place where global capital meets global sport, the London Olympics represents the global capital that pays for Olympic sport.

Citius, Altius, Fortius!

Julian Lindley-French 

Euro-Realism 2: How Safe is My Money?

Alphen, The Netherlands.  25 July.  Here we go again. Lucullus, in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (spot the irony) warns, “This is no time to lend money, especially upon bare friendship without security”. As a Dutch tax-payer that warning carries little irony as billions of my hard-earned tax Euros and those of my fellow tax-payers have already vanished down the black hole of a failing currency – either in direct transfers or by printing money that I will forever have to underwrite.  No wonder the Dutch political elite have decided to go AWOL and that this is a good time NOT to have a government.  

This week’s statement by rating agency Moody’s, a Dark Lord of the Market Universe, that the AAA borrowing status of Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands is now on notice thus comes as no surprise.  Indeed, in spite of German protests it strikes me as plain common sense as the sums of my money needed to save the benighted Euro become ever more astronomical.  “Even if such an event [a Greek exit from the Euro] is avoided, there is an increasing likelihood that greater collective support for other Euro area sovereigns, most notably Spain and Italy, will be required”.  The statement goes on; “The burden will likely fall most heavily on more highly-rated member-states [i.e. me] if the Euro area is to be preserved in its current form”. 

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaüble thinks Greece now incapable of reform and yet this week the so-called troika; the IMF, European Central Bank (ECB) and European Commission arrived in Athens to assess Greek ‘eligibility’ for another €31.5 billion ($38.1bn) of my money.  This is the 'last' tranche of an €130bn ($157.4bn) bail out that apparently I agreed to last March.  Although the Greeks have managed to trim €17bn ($20.5bn) from their national debt to bring it down from 160% of GDP to 132% it is nothing like enough.  Now, Athens has stalled.  Greece has promised to reduce it budget deficit to below 3% of GDP by the end of 2014.  In 2011 the Greek overspend was the equivalent of 9% of GDP.  Clearly, the 3% target is pure Greek drama as Athens is now behind with its spending cuts as the Greek economy shrinks faster than planned.  More importantly, reports from within the all-mighty German Central Bank (Bundesbank) indicate that Berlin now accepts Greece’s exit from the Eurozone as inevitable which means all my money will be lost.  And yet Athens may demand another €50bn ($60.5bn).

On to Spain.  As the value of Spanish government debt plunges Spanish banks are beginning to crack with some €250bn ($302.7bn) in government bonds in their vaults, some 30% of Spain’s national debt.  The ECB has already told me that I ‘promised’ €100bn ($121.1bn) of my money to pump into Spain’s banks, even as the Spanish take their money out and put it all in German banks – so much for solidarity.  Indeed, Spanish banks have lost 3% of their deposits in recent weeks, leading them to take a further €106bn ($128.3bn) of my money via the ECB or some 9.5% of their total borrowing. 

My money is also being used for similar purposes in Ireland and Portugal and it is fast reaching a point where the indirect transfers of my money via the ECB must be replaced by direct transfers of my money via the Dutch, German and other governments.  And now I hear that Italy, the world’s third biggest debtor, may also need enormous chunks of my money, I must be incredibly rich.

Sadly, I am not rich.  Rather, I am being asked, no forced to bankrupt myself, to risk all for which I have worked so hard for so many years and to end my life a pauper simply to fund permanently failed southern European economies and an absurd piece of political adventurism in the name of a European solidarity that exists only in the minds of the Euro-Aristocracy who have enriched themselves in the name of Europe. 

The simple fact is that whatever the economic and political shape of Europe the state institutions of southern European countries are simply not strong enough to withstand the shock of reform needed to ween them off my money.  There are thus three questions I want the politicians who put me in this mess to answer.  First, how much is saving the Euro worth?  Second, how much would the break up of the Euro cost?  Third, (and most pressing) when is this going to end…and how?

How safe is my money?  The one thing I will never get is an answer.

Julian Lindley-French

NATO: Connected Forces, Connected Minds?

Alphen, The Netherlands.  23 July.  NATO must contend with two competing and contending inner-realities: a schism in Alliance strategic culture and concept, driven by deepening divisions over the world view and the future of the Euro; and the austerity-driven need for shrinking armed forces to work ever more closely together in a world in which the balance of power is tipping against the West.  It will not be an easy balance to strike.  Forever in search of said new balance NATO has launched the Connected Forces Initiative or CFI.  However, like most things NATO whilst the idea is good real questions remain as to the extent the member nations will really grip the challenge.  The bottom-line is this; the only way CFI can succeed is to be radical in both thought and act.  In effect, CFI is seeking what I call ‘organic jointness’; forces that not only act as one, but think as one.    

The Oxford English Dictionary describes “organic” as "an organised structure within a cell". Today that means an entirely new way of thinking about the relationship between the world, armed forces, technology, the societies they serves and. above all, ideas.   The specific challenge concerns how small military 'producers' meet their security and defence obligations in a very large and unstable 'market' in which the defining feature is and will be friction and turbulence and the defining factor cost.

'Connectivity' is the key. Indeed, ‘connectivity’ must become NATO’s driving mantra because the force most connected will be the force most likely to strike a balance between effectiveness and efficiency.  However, this in turn will require a complete change in mind-set amongst political and military leaders, particularly in Europe.  European armed forces can no longer compete on mass and quantity and NATO can thus no longer simply flood the ‘market’.  Rather, the Alliance needs to be able to make intelligent choices and identify critical points in the ‘market’ over which it can and must exert influence given challenges that will range from state failure to state conflict and all that lurks in between. 

In Europe a defence planning Rubicon has been crossed and yet too many military leaders talk as though this is a temporary blip before their return to greatness.  Indeed, given cuts to NATO Europe forces that is on average some 25% since 2008 European armed forces no longer have the size to 'think' as separate countries, let alone act as separate services.  To be properly connected armed forces will need a radical, unified concept of how best to a) exploit the five dimensions of twenty-first military effect - air, land, sea, cyber and space; b) recognise that a new inner-relationship must be sought with the US; and c) inject some real meaning into the woeful non-relationship with the EU.  That will require a NATO that can re-conceive of itself as a critical strategic node or hub at the core of a web of real strategic partnerships the world over with NATO Standards which promote effective ways of working acting as the Alliance’s core ‘product’.   This will be no easy task for an Alliance that still remains too much of a self-licking lollipop.

The connectivity revolution must start within the Alliance.  Critically, new thinking will be needed if the 'corporate memory' that has been built up so painfully over the past decade is to be properly exploited rather than shelved as lessons-learned and then lost. To that end NATO must far better, scientifically and systematically exploit exercising, training and education.  Exercising is a key but woefully ill-exploited change agent.  Too often the testing of concepts, experimentation and the taking of risk it implies is avoided in favour of of the formulaic and disconnected rehashing of the already known.

However, it is the connectedness of minds that will define CFI.  Transformed defence education is pivotal to CFI.  Indeed, for CFI to work there must be a much tighter relationship between the knowledge base, research, defence education and action based on an Alliance-wide defence education concept that both empowers the learner and ends the box-ticking culture that so bedevils defence academies.  In other words, learning must also become outcomes-based, life-long and enduring based on Alliance-wide education standards.  

Organic Jointness is thus at the heart of the Connected Forces Initiative built on the principle of connectivity.  The realisation of such a goal will demand a radical commitment to force quality that goes way beyond the rehearsed rhetoric of past NATO initiatives.  Things really are different now and unless the Alliance actively promotes the rigorous development of comparative advantage in thinking, concepts, technology and, above all, people it really will in time fade into irrelevance.   

NATO: connected forces, connected minds. 

Julian Lindley-French

Euro-Realism: Why We Need a New European Security Strategy

Alphen, the Netherlands. 20 July.  I am a Euro-realist, neither a Euro-sceptic, nor a Euro-fanatic.  My motivation is to drive through the fathoms of political fantasy and folly pouring forth from the current crisis, much of its cascading down from on high as a generation of failed political leaders try to hide behind a rhetorical deluge.  In December 2003 Robert Cooper formerly of the parish of Whitehall but for a long-time now a senior Brussels apparatchik produced a typically elegant and erudite European Security Strategy or ESS.  The aim was to give some common strategic direction to Europeans and their role in the world and inject some energy into the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy, or CFSP, in the citizen-busting jargon of the Euro-Aristocracy.  In spite (indeed because of) my concerns about the EU’s direction of travel I now believe that a new European Security Strategy should be drafted.  Why?

First, the ESS focused on what Europeans could do more effectively together, as such it went back to the principles of Europe’s founding fathers – the EU should only act where unity of state effort and purpose would make the sum greater than the parts. 

Second, whilst much of the ESS, and its 2008 follow-on the catchily-named Report on the Implementation of the European Security Strategy, remains as relevant today as 2003 it is politically tired.  The simple fact is that the past decade has crammed in a whole life-time of politics and even though implementation of the ESS has by and large ranged from the disappointing to the dire something is needed to remind Europeans that their Euro-world is not the only world on this planet.

Third, because the ESS is not the Euro.  Indeed, even if further European integration, driven as it is by the saving of a failed currency rather than loftier, more constructive goals, will sooner rather than later drive Britain out, it is vital that ALL Europeans together take another look at the world beyond their borders. 

Fourth, precisely because Britain is likely to remain over the medium-term Europe’s strongest hard security actor it is vital that a) Europeans consider a future EU security architecture in which Britain could be a partner rather than a member; b) demonstrate to Europeans and others that EU-life is not simply about the Euro and that there is an issue where ALL European member-states can work constructively together; and c) demonstrate that Britain’s commitment to a stable and secure Europe will remain absolute both through NATO and the EU.  One of the great and many failings of the current age is that so much of the good work done by the EU, often led by its three major actors Britain, France and Germany, has been lost in the Euro-scream.

Fifth, not only has there been a revolution in strategic affairs since 2003, there is likely to be a further revolution in strategic affairs by 2023.  That revolution needs to be examined, assessed and responses and ideas considered in a systematic and methodological manner.  Europeans will need to be proactive not just reactive.  What is clear is that whatever the institutional arrangements within Europe, who is in and who is out, such is the world in which European states reside that they are going to have to work together intensively to influence the big, dangerous events coming their way.  Europeans thinking big about big things is a prerequisite for a European Security Strategy, be it formal or informal. 

Sixth, for all its myriad failings and its tendency to be more reflective of crisis management within the EU rather than beyond, both the Common Foreign and Security Policy and its offspring the Common Security and Defence Policy need to be modernised.  Mired both geographically and functionally in complexity Europeans together face risks and threats both near and far ranging from social collapse to catastrophic terrorism on to hyper-competition through to state conflict Europe’s political leaders will need four quintessential commodities; forewarning, capabilities, credibility, but above all options. 

The simple strategic truth of this age is that the flag one puts atop an engagement, be it political and/or military, is as important as the force one sends.  The very fact that the West retains the option to engage and intervene under a political identity that is NEITHER NATO NOR the US is hugely important. 

It will be messy and difficult but ten years on from Robert Cooper’s triumph of Euro-pragmatism it is time Europeans re-drafted the European Security Strategy.  It may after all finally start Europeans thinking about the real question that now confronts them; how much are they going to have to pay for their own security, given that the Americans are about to pay far less?

Time for a dose of Euro-realism because only such realism is likely finally to get to Europeans to get serious about security.    

Julian Lindley-French

Blair and Brown: Jobs for the Boys

Alphen, the Netherlands, 18 July.  There is nothing that proves the essential corruption of modern political life than the sinecures handed out to failed ȕber-elite politicians who did their country grave harm.   The carefully-timed summer announcements that two former failed British prime ministers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, are back is but the latest example of high political contempt for public virtue. Multi-millionaire Tony Blair has been appointed by Labour leader Ed Milliband as an advisor on “Olympic legacy”; for that read political advisor to Milliband in the run up to the 2015 general election.  Meanwhile, Gordon Brown has been appointed as UN Special Envoy for Universal Education, which could only have happened with London’s (and Labour’s) formal blessing.

These two men together conspired to do more damage to my country than any prior political partnership.  They quite simply misled the British people about their aims and their intentions to disastrous effect and like many millions I believed them.  Indeed, until the mid-naughties I had been a life-long Labour Party supporter.  Thanks to these two I will never again trust Labour with my country.

Their failure might best be summed up as the four ‘I’s; Iraq, ‘investment’, Scottish indepdence and immigration. All are testament to political hubris.  Evidence suggests Blair misled the British people over the Iraq War.  The false dossier on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction led to hundreds of British troops being killed in a war fought on the most tenuous of legal grounds, and many tens of thousands of Iraqis.  This week, in a letter to David Cameron, Sir John Chilcott, who heads the Iraq Inquiry talked of a number of “unresolved disputes” triggered by Blair’s testimony, “…including the treatment of discussions in the cabinet and cabinet committees and the UK position in discussions between the prime minister and heads of state or government of other nations”.

Brown disastrously destroyed the public finances of the country, over-spending massively in the name of ‘investment’ and then tried to blame the mess on the world around him.  Had Brown maintained a commitment to sound finance Britain would be one of the strongest economies in Europe rather than being dragged through the deep morass of debt which was Brown’s legacy to Britain. 

With a referendum due in 2014 Blair’s flawed devolution policy has even opened the door to Scottish secessionists and could see the break-up of the United Kingdom. 

However, it was hyper-immigration which was the signature policy of both Blair and Brown and which has been a disaster for the country. This week the Office for National Statistics released the latest census. Since 2001 the population of England and Wales (excluding Scotland) went up a massive 3.7 million, much higher than thought to 56.1 million, and increase of 7%.  This was a deliberate policy choice that ran totally against the wishes of the massive majority of British people with the aim of ramming “diversity down the throats of the right” as one Blair aide put it and gerrymandering the vote.  Such has been the impact of hyper-immigration that English society in particular is still in a state of shock with Westminster having to resort to draconian race laws to suppress dissent and thus prevent an explosion in the powder keg that is contemporary England.  The England I once knew has been destroyed.  England today is a broken place where life is fair neither on Britons nor the many decent immigrants who make a contribution to British life.  A black friend of mine works on the front-line of the social and racial tensions caused by Blair-Brown.  He calls it a war.

What is strange is why the Labour Party is rewarding Blair and Brown whilst trying to pretend to the rest of us they have moved on.  It implies that nothing has in fact changed.  That come the general election in 2015 the same political con-trick will be employed to dupe millions of Britons like me sympathetic to social democracy and social progress.  What I fear is that again behind the no doubt slick social democratic façade will be a hard left agenda that will again lead the country to the very precipice of disaster.

Until the political class in Britain learn there is a real price to pay for failure at the top they will continue to play an all-too-cosy game in which backs are quietly and lucratively scratched and failure rewarded with directorships and fancy EU and UN appointments.  For that to happen there has to be real sanction for failure. However, as all the many faux inquiries have demonstrated into the many disasters these past fifteen years there is little appetite in the British Establishment for proper accounting.  There are endless inquiries into seemingly endless crises but no-one at the top is ever actually responsible let along sanctioned.  No wonder the British people despise politicians, particularly the cosy elite at the very top.

What one-time American President Andrew Jackson once said of a young Washington applies equally to modern day London, “I weep for the liberty of my country when I see…that corruption has been imputed to many members of the House of Representatives, and the rights of the people have been bartered for promises of office”. 

Blair and Brown: jobs for the boys.

Julian Lindley-French