Five Anatomies of Power

Alphen, Netherlands. 12 November.  J.K. Galbraith once wrote: “All of the great leaders have one characteristic in common: the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time”.  The markedly different body language of Presidents Obama, Putin and Xi as they strolled together at this week’s Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) meeting in Beijing revealed three vastly different anatomies of power.  Given his concept of ‘greatness’ how would Galbraith have assessed five of today’s world leaders: Xi, Obama, Putin, Merkel and Cameron?

President Xi Jingping: “Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue”.  Xi exudes the authority of a man who believes that all he must do is wait and China will inherit if not the earth, at least the East Asian part of it.  Xi is a man who has struggled and prevailed in the oft lethal internal power machinations of the Chinese Communist Party.  XI is tough, believes he has won at home and is winning abroad.  Xi’s “new model for great power” relations place him and China at the centre of world power and replaces Communism with nationalism as the essential creed of Chinese power and influence.  It is a concept of power revealed in all the majesty of its prejudice in this week’s meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. 

President Barrack Obama: “It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense…”  President Obama is a leader who desperately wants to see the world he would like, not the world as it is.  Consequently, the “Yes We Can!” Super-President has become the “No, We Can’t” lame duck president.  Wounded at home by the mid-terms and in retreat abroad President Obama exudes the weakness of a man who believes his time will soon be up and maybe America’s great age of power with him.  He has lost in Washington and is losing much of his country in an America that respects power but smells weakness.  The smell today is pungent. President Obama is drifting and gives the impression of a leader with no clear idea about either the extent or utility of American power. 

President Vladimir Putin: “War remains the decisive human failure”.  Putin is the gambler.  He leads a Russia that is today a one-shot, wreck of an economy with a too-many-vodka-shots broken society.  Faced with the unpalatable reality of strategic decline Putin has retreated into a Peter the Great myth of Russian power and nationalism.  By conquering parts of Ukraine, embarking on state-bankrupting military modernisation and by intimidating the people of Russia’s most important trading partners Putin has adopted the strategy of weakness masked in the pretence of strength.  Such a strategy may buy Putin time.  It will certainly one day earn him a place in Russian history as yet another heroic failure so beloved of Russians.

Chancellor Angela Merkel: “Meetings are indispensable when you don’t want to do anything”.  Merkel is billed as the “most powerful leader in Europe”.  To mix my metaphors for her such billing is a decidedly poisoned chalice.  Ever the systematic scientist Merkel knows just how little power she really has and how limited her room for manoeuvre trapped as she is between what is best for Germany and what is best for ‘Europe’.  To compensate she exudes that other great quality of a superior intellect to which Galbraith referred – pessimism.  Consequently, she moves from EU meeting to EU meeting with much of Europe looking to her for the decisive leadership she knows she cannot offer.  Such leadership would finish her, possibly Germany and quite probably the EU.  In reality her choice is a dark one; act now to save that bit of the Eurozone that can be saved or do nothing and hope Europe’s eventual demise will not happen on her watch.  She has chosen for the latter and waits hopefully for the miracle of entirely unlikely economic growth to fix her dilemma.

Prime Minister David Cameron: “Politics is the art of the possible.  It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable”.  Britain has ‘achieved’ something quite chilling – none of the leaders of Britain’s three major political parties actually believe in Britain.  Indeed, David Cameron is just about as far away from a Winston Churchill or a Margaret Thatcher as it is possible for a British leader to get.  His only consolation is that Ed Milliband and Nick Clegg are even further distant from greatness.  Surrounded by advisers that tell him daily that Britain is finished and that Little Britain has no future beyond the political wreckage of the the EU Cameron mouths the mantras of leadership but believes none of it. Cameron is quite simply incapable of confronting unequivocally the major anxieties of his people in their time.  Instead, Cameron fiddles around with power substituting politics for strategy and manoeuvre for principle as holding onto power becomes the essence of his political purpose.

The West of which Galbraith wrote is in crisis.  The current crop of Western leaders has failed the challenge of power posed by the twenty-first century.  Consequently, the ‘West’ (such as it is) is in rapid retreat across the world leaving power vacuum after vacuum for the likes of Xi and Putin to fill.  None of them are up to the challenges Galbraith would have understood and which were both implicit and explicit at the APEC meeting.  The real question Galbraith would have posed today is this; is it any longer possible for North Americans or Europeans to produce great leaders?  It is a vital question for the answer to it will decide whether this is to be another American and by extension Western century or a Chinese/Asian century.  The nature of geopolitics means it is unlikely to be both. 

If this is indeed to be another American century new thinking is urgently needed at the very top in both America and indeed Europe.  For as Galbraith once said: “The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking”. 

Julian Lindley-French

Arresting Europe, Taxing Credulity

Alphen, Netherlands. 10 November. Abraham Lincoln once famously said, “The people when rightly and fully-trusted will return the trust”.  Tell that to the EU elite.  Recently, a senior member of the Dutch Senate and a fully paid-up member of the ‘we need more EU for everything’ brigade warned people against me at a public meeting.  He did so apparently because he said I had been “radicalised” in my concerns about the centralisation of distant power in the EU.  First, to equate me with Islamic terrorism is unacceptable.  Second, in a true democracy the job of the citizen-taxpayer is precisely to hold power to account. 

Naturally, I was informed of this attack by a reliable colleague as the individual in question lacked the integrity to tell me himself.  In a sense Mr Senator has made my point for me.  Indeed, it is precisely the growing intolerance of informed criticism by Europe’s elite that has turned me from a strong supporter of the EU into a taxpayer-citizen with profound concerns about reform, accountability and transparency in and of the EU.  This past week has reinforced my concerns.

EU reform: British Finance Minister George Osborne was dancing on the head of a pin when he claimed ‘victory’ in his attempts to reduce and offset the ‘surprise’ EU demand on the British citizen-taxpayer for an additional £1.7bn (€2.1bn).  The bill is in addition to the massive rise in Britain’s annual contribution to the EU from £3.7bn (€4.7bn) in 2009 to £11.3bn (€14.4bn) in 2013.  Moreover, the British citizen-taxpayer will be hit by an additional £655m (€834m) because the famous cut to the EU budget negotiated by David Cameron will be overturned by a European Parliament stock full of people who simply do not care that every penny they spend comes from ordinary citizen-taxpayers. 

Three simple truths are revealed by this latest British EU fiasco: the British taxpayer will indeed pay the £1.7bn; the twenty EU member-states who are ‘net receivers’ are perfectly happy with the current system; and the European Commission can always manipulate that basic divide to expand the EU budget and its own competence.  Indeed, David Cameron is fast becoming the Grand Old Duke of York of EU politics.  He marches the British people up to the top of the hill of promised EU reform only to march them down again when the extent of Britain’s and indeed his own impotence is revealed.  The EU is unreformable.

EU Accountability:  Last week a scandal broke that would once have led to resignations, not any more.  It was revealed that when European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was prime minister of Luxembourg his country permitted 340 major international companies to aggressively avoid tax.  The so-called “Lux-Leaks” document is now under investigation by the same European Commission that Juncker now heads making a mockery of his claims that he will bring some ‘ethics’ to EU tax laws. The bottom-line is that millions of ordinary European taxpayer-citizens were fleeced by this system as we all had to pay the tax Luxembourg helped big corporations avoid.  Mr Juncker should resign but he will of course not.  The EU elite are unaccountable.  

EU Transparency:  The tax surcharge imposed by the European Commission on the taxpayer-citizens of Britain, Cyprus, Italy and the Netherlands breaks all previous conventions on tax.  First, the specific method by which the surcharge was calculated by the European Commission lacks transparency (nothing new there then). Second, the entire principle of imposing back-tax directly or indirectly on ordinary taxpayer-citizens retrospectively is utterly without precedent.  Third and worst of all, the 'value' of crime has been estimated and added to national wealth.  For tax to be imposed the taxpayer-citizen must have benefitted from a service that is legal.  In effect, the European Commission is taxing the victims of crime.  As a precedent this departure is quite simply outrageous and demonstrates all too clearly the lengths to which the EU will now go to transfer wealth.   The EU is insatiable.

Worse, the European taxpayer-citizen is about to be become more vulnerable to unfettered and unaccountable power.  Today in London the House of Commons will debate whether or not Britain opts back into the European Arrest Warrant (EAW).  Implicit in this debate is a fundamental question about where power, accountability and law should reside.  On the face of it the EAW makes sense because it speeds extradition between EU member-states.  However, when taken together the EAW and the new taxation reflect two dangerous precedents that accelerate the drift towards European confederation.  First, those who designed the European Arrest Warrant see the eventual goal as a single EU legal jurisdiction and a single EU legal prosecutor.  In other words, the EAW is yet another example of the drip-by-drip destruction of national sovereignty that is eroding both the European state and European democracy.  Second, a fundamental breach has taken place this past week in the relationship between taxation, benefit and representation.   

Abraham Lincoln believed that as central power grew it inevitably became more corrupt.  He also believed that freedom is best served when power is as close to the taxpayer-citizen as possible reinforced by real checks and balances.  Now, I have no problem with my hard-earned money helping transform lives and places but it must be proportionate, fair, transparent, and used efficiently for the right purposes.  The EU simply does not pass those tests or indeed the Lincoln test.  

This past week had two Europes on offer.  There was the Europe of hope reflected in celebrations to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall and those few heady days in November 1989 when everything seemed possible.  There was also that other, elite EU Europe demonstrating yet again just how far they have moved Europe from hope and idealism towards cynicism in the intervening years.  If such an observation makes me ‘radicalised’ for challenging power then so be it.  In my book the right to question power in a democracy is called freedom, Mr Senator.  But then again I am just a mere citizen-taxpayer and I should really leave politics to you politicians.  Really?

Julian Lindley-French

The Berlin Wall and the Defence of Freedom

Alphen, Netherlands. 6 November.  Winston Churchill said, “All the great things are simple and many can be expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honour, mercy, hope”.  Twenty-five years ago in November 1989 like millions of my fellow Europeans I sat with tears rolling down my cheeks as I witnessed live on television the German people tear down the Berlin Wall.  In so doing Germans joined fellow Europeans from across Central and Eastern Europe to rip down the “Iron Curtain” which Churchill had so famously dubbed back at the outset of the Cold War in 1946.   

That 1989 act, that moment of dynamic unification, also marked the end of the four great European schisms that had so disfigured freedom; the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War, the 1914-1918 Great War, the 1939-1945 Second Great War, and the 1945-1989 Cold War.  For millions of Europeans it was THE moment in Europe when justice, honour, mercy, hope and above all freedom finally came together in a continent-wide anthem of joy.  Whatever happened thereafter (and much of course tragically did) Europe would finally one day be whole and free.

Yesterday, I enacted my inalienable right to freedom in Europe.  It took me over nine hours to drive from the Netherlands to Wiesbaden and back but it was a matter of honour for me to attend the Change of Command ceremony of United States Army Europe (USAREUR).  My purpose was manifold: to say thank you to retiring Lt. General Donald M. Campbell for his service to the defence of Europe’s freedom – my freedom; to congratulate my friend Lt. General Ben Hodges on his new appointment; to pay my respects to the United States and its armed forces for the immeasurable, transformative contribution they and the American people have made to Europe’s freedom; and to pay my respects to the equally amazing post-Cold War contribution Germany has made and continues to make to European freedom, stability and security.  However, above all I made the journey because I could.  Each turn of my car wheels retraced part of the bloody course my own British forebears had forged less than a lifetime ago to free Europe and Germany from the plague of Nazism.

As I made my progress I was utterly aware of the irony that much of the contemporary debate in Europe today concerns the consequences of freedom.  Like many Western Europeans I am ambivalent and at times conflicted about the implications of such freedom, particularly as it concerns mass migration.  And yet I have seen the transformative impact of freedom in many post-Cold War EU and NATO members.  Go to Latvia or Poland, go to Bulgaria or Romania, go to the Czech Republic or Slovakia.  For those of us all too aware of life under the Soviet yoke the transformation (for that is what it has been) these twenty-five years past is quite simply awe-inspiring. 

Controversial though free movement is in contemporary Europe it a consequence not of the EU but rather the West’s victory in the Cold War which culminated in the people power tearing down the Berlin Wall in that fateful, inspirational week.  Put simply something like free movement would be a fact in contemporary Europe EU or no EU because it is free movement the German people were celebrating when they tore that wall down. That is why I for one will always support free movement albeit free movement grounded in common sense controls and fairness.

Nowhere is the impact of the fall of the Wall greater than in Germany.  Indeed, that moment in history still shapes so much of modern Germany and modern Germans.  The Germans lived under the yoke of oppression for many years in different, poisonous forms.  For Germans the twin-ideas of ‘freedom’ and ‘Europe’ are inextricably bound together.  Indeed, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of a massive German contribution to the stabilisation of post-Soviet Central and Eastern Europe that belies the criticism oft-made of Berlin that Germany does not pull its weight on the international stage.  The fall of the Berlin Wall also marked an equally momentous transformation; Germany’s final, irrevocable establishment as the bastion of European liberal democracy.  Germany today is a modern state built on the principle that democracy is best served when power is as close as possible to the people.  

Regular readers of this column will possibly be a bit surprised that I appear to be implying a pro-EU argument.  No, I am making a fundamentally pro-European argument.  When I worked for the EU I believed the Union was the embodiment of the principles enshrined in and by the fall of the Berlin Wall.  Even today my critique of the EU is not an objection to the fundamental freedoms enshrined in the European treaties but rather a Brussels that is behaving ever more like a power-elite.  Indeed, since that glorious 1989 moment the EU and its ever-more distant leaders have begun to show all of the signs of unconstrained supranational elitism towards whom power drifts upwards and inwards irrevocably. This has happened all-too-often in Europe's past and has never ended well.  Ironically, it is modern Germany that is perhaps Europe's greatest defence against the over-mighty, something many outside Germany fail to realise.  This is so even if at times Berlin clearly equivocates between what is best for Germany and what is best for Europe as the Germans try to learn how to handle power justly. 

Germany must learn fast for Europe is once again at a crossroads between power and freedom.  Yesterday in Wiesbaden I saw justice, honour and indeed hope in action.  Americans standing with their German and other allies on the field of freedom was very moving.  For that reason this week’s celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall is not just another of those historical commemorations that lie scattered like smooth, rocky pebbles across the stony beach of Europe’s political landscape.  It is a commemoration of possibly the greatest single act of freedom in Europe’s bloody history made possible by the sacrifice of so many and by the staunch backing of a good friend. 

However, the defence of Europe requires constant vigilance from threats without and indeed within if freedom is to be reinforced by justice, mercy, honour and above all hope.  If not Europe twenty-five years hence will simply see one wall that divided Europeans replaced by another wall that separates power from the people.   It must not happen.  Don’t blow it Europe! 

Julian Lindley-French

American Strategy and the World-wide Western Security Web

Alphen, Netherlands. 3 November.  On 30 January, 1902 faced with global over-stretch the British forged the Anglo-Japanese Treaty with the Empire of Japan.  To conceive of such a treaty London had to a) take a global view; b) recognise its own growing weakness; and c) understand the need for capable allies that could ease pressure on British strategy world-wide.  With cuts planned between 2014 and 2020 greater than Europe’s entire annual defence investment and set against the huge defence investments being made by the illiberal powers America’s claim to be the only military power present in strength in every region of the world looks increasingly threadbare.  In other words, American strategy does not add up and the Americans need a rethink.

Amidst the deep, rich black seams of Summit blah, blah that emerged from the September NATO Summit like so much Welsh coal dust on the west wind one phrase stuck out.  US Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel talked of a “core coalition” to take on Islamic State (IS) comprising the US, UK, France, Australia, Canada, Germany, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark (most notably in that order).  It was nothing less than a reconceptualisation of US strategy in a world in which the West is no longer a place but an idea. 

However, the implications of such a coalition-led US strategy for America’s four cornerstone military allies Australia, Britain, France and Japan are enormous.  Implicit in shifting US strategy is a witting or unwitting assumption that the changing correlation of emerging force will progressively work against Washington and by extension its allies.  Indeed, whilst the US will remain the world’s leading military power the ability of illiberal powers to complicate US strategic calculation will increase.

Therefore, given the importance of allies and partners US strategy must be recast on on four interlocking principles.  1. For Washington to prevail in the multi-dimensional, multi-spectral security environment of the twenty-first century the US must be at the core of a world-wide security web of democracies and states with shared mutual interests. 2.  Much like Churchill’s 1945 vision of British strategy US strategy must leverage three concentric circles of power; NATO, Asia-Pacific allies, and partners across Asia and the Middle-East.  3.  US Strategy must establish force generation and command and control principles built on NATO Standards that forge allies and partners into effective coalitions.  4. Like the British of 1902 US Strategy must encourage its four core allies to generate ‘Mini-Me’ command and control hubs individually and in tandem and/or in partnership with each other.

US European Command (EUCOM) must be the pivot of interlocking core and broad coalitions because it has such experience of working with allies and partners and can act as an effective broker, experimenter and mentor for both allies and partners alike. Indeed, EUCOM’s commander (COMEUCOM) who also doubles up as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), has a vital role to play as the lynch pin between allied and partner forces, on the one hand, and other US Combatant Commands worldwide.  Unfortunately, EUCOM is increasingly the poor sister of its COCOM counterparts, most notably Central Command (CENTCOM) because Washington places capability before strategy.

Critically, a unifying force concept is needed that could promote all-important unity of effort and drive forward both core and broad coalitions.  Specifically, in the context of coalitions the US and its core allies need a Four-Forces-in-One Concept that would make the most out of the little bit of everything not much of anything forces they all possess.     

Take the British Future Force as an example which today reflects neither strategy nor affordability but a strange amalgam of the two.  Coalitions focused on the US are at the very heart of British security and defence strategy.  However, to be central to a US-friendly network of sufficiently-capable modular, adaptable and agile coalitions London will need a Hub Force strong enough to command coalitions, agile and expandable over time and built around and upon command assets across the six domains of conflict.  A Core Force agile enough to work across government with other departments and civilian agencies, adapted and adaptive to lessons from the campaign in Afghanistan.  An Integrated Force to provide planning and to promote ownership of planning for complex contingencies and consequence management both at home and with allies and partners.  Finally, an Effect Force able and geared to take on robust forced entry missions as and when required either in lead or as part of of US-led coalitions.

Whilst the the Americans still possess the only truly strategic force i.e. a force that can do everything, all-of-the-time, everywhere sort of, that force today faces many of the same challenges the British faced in the late nineteenth century.  Still immensely strong on paper like the British a century ago the US faces emerging challenges to its home-base, threats to its world-wide lines of communications and to its key allies and partners from threats that merge security and defence, civilian and military, national and international.  

In a sense history is coming full circle for the Americans.  Like the British a century ago the US will needs allies and partners more not less.  Of late poor American leadership and the lack of any clear US idea of the role and utility of allies has seen its vital alliances and partnerships lose cohesion.  That must stop.  The West needs clear American strategic vision and a clear idea of the vital role of allied and partner armed forces in American strategy in a world that is undoubtedly safer when the US and the World-wide Western Security Web is strong.

Julian Lindley-French

EU Rules, Damned Rules and Statistics

Alphen, Netherlands 30 October.  In 1906 Mark Twain wrote: “Figures often beguile me particularly when I have the arranging of them myself in which sense the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics””.  The same can be applied to EU 'rules' because as this past week has attested everything the EU does is political and nothing the EU ever does is purely ‘technical’.  That is why the European economy is today in a mess and in danger of taking much of the rest of the world down with it.  

Proof of politics and indeed Twain’s truism was all too evident this week in three ‘technical’ rulings by EU institutions: the imposition of a huge retrospective super-tax on Britain and several other EU member-states by the European Commission; the approval by the European Commission of the 2015 French and indeed Italian budgets; and the publication of the so-called “stress tests” on Eurozone banks.  

The imposition of a huge €2.1bn (£1.7bn) retrospective tax on Britain was met with howls of protest in London.  The European Commission insists that the demand was a ‘normal’ adjustment built on an impartial analysis based on figures supplied by London’s own Office for National Statistics.  And yet one week on from the demand the Commission still refuses to reveal the methodology or mechanism by which it arrived at this figure.  Even the finance minister of the normally supine Dutch said that he wanted to know just how the figures were calculated.  My own contacts reveal the sum demanded of Britain is very much a maximalist interpretation of the ‘rules’ for calculating national wealth which were adjusted back in 2010.

This same week the same European Commission ‘approved’ the 2015 French and Italian budgets in spite of the French deficit standing at 4.3% of GDP or 1.3% above the ceiling established under the Eurozone’s European Growth and Stability Pact.  Miraculously Paris said it had found the money to cut the deficit next year and by €50bn by 2017.  Equally miraculously a significant part of that money is due to France getting a rebate under the self-same ‘technical adjustment’ that hammered the British and being asked to pay lower than expected contributions to the EU budget.  Now, there’s a surprise.  Or, to put it another way the Commission has applied to France a minimalist interpretation of the ‘rules’.  

However, it is the third ‘technical’ announcement that is perhaps the most political and most dangerous.  This week in Rome in a lecture I said the greatest threat to NATO was neither Russia nor American disinterest/over-stretch.  It is the risk of Eurozone deflation and the crippling impact it would have on European growth, demand, consumption, taxation, public national debt and eventually public expenditure.  The still insufficiently shock-proofed European banking sector is particularly vulnerable to deflation.

On 27 October the European Central Bank and European Banking Authority announced the results of the so-called “comprehensive assessment” (stress tests) of the strength of Eurozone banks.  Although deflation is already eating away at the Eurozone’s peripheral economies the ‘test’ failed to even consider the impact of possible deflation on Eurozone banks.  And yet the IMF says that deflation in the Eurozone poses one of the greatest threats to the world economy and in public that there is a 30% chance of deflation in Europe.  Privately the IMF puts the likelihood of deflation in Europe much higher.

And yet, in a breathtaking public statement of politics dressed up as technical strategy ECB Vice-President Vitor Constancio said, “The scenario (deflation) is not there because indeed we don’t consider that deflation is going to happen”.  Interestingly and revealingly, whilst Italian banks were particularly hard-hit by the assessment similarly vulnerable French banks were given a very soft ride.  The dangerously vulnerable German Sparkassen savings banks were not even assessed.  Why Italy?  Rome simply lacks the political clout of Berlin and Paris.

Danish Prime Minister Hell Thorning-Schmidt said this week: “I respect that the UK wants to discuss this (the retrospective super-tax) amongst ministers but these are the rules that must be kept.  Countries must follow the rules as they are”.  The problem Mrs Thorning-Schmidt as this week has shown all too clearly is that the European Commission does not even follow its own rules.  Rather, it uses maximalist and minimalist interpretations of the ‘rules’ to reward powerful ‘friends’ and punish ‘enemies’. 

This tendency towards favouritism has nothing to do with the old Commission as some suggest but everything to do with the new.  Indeed, Jean-Claude Juncker’s fingerprints are all over at least two of these ‘rulings’ and reflect four principles to which he has adhered all his political life: get your revenge in first; avoid political transparency at all costs; get someone else to take the blame; and divide and rule by rewarding friends and punishing enemies.  By the very nature of Jean-Claude Juncker’s political appointment as President the European Commission is about to become an awful lot more political.  The past week is just the beginning.

So, why are the British in particular being singled-out (as they are)?  Some months ago Prime Minister Cameron managed to engineer a cut in the EU budget for the first time in its history.  The European Parliament from whence Juncker hails is packed full of Members that simply want the EU to remain a massive wealth redistribution mechanism.  Saving taxpayer's money is anathema to these people.  The Commission also refuses to do little or nothing to combat the huge waste and corruption which year after year sees the EU budget ‘signed off’ by the Court of Auditors only with what it calls deep reservations about “deep errors”.  Consequently, the EU demands ever more taxpayer's money for ever more, ever-less transparent, reasons.  

For the Commission this is a delicate balancing act to perform because the essential need is to soak the taxpayer’s of the formerly-rich EU member-states, both Eurozone and non-Eurozone, so that the day can be delayed when the fundamental structural and potentially catastrophic economic, fiscal and financial contradictions at the core of the Euro must be confronted.  To be fair to the Commission that is because most Eurozone states simply do not want to face this reality and want other people's sound money forever for nothing.  

However, it is a balancing act further complicated by the golden rule of the Commission; under no circumstances confront France or Germany.  That is why in within the EU politics forever trumps strategy and that is why Britain is singled out for ‘special measures’.  It is also why the EU is fast becoming the world’s greatest ever Ponzi scheme.

So, with respect Mrs Thorning-Schmidt don’t be so naïve.  This time Denmark has been marginally rewarded by the Commission precisely to prevent a counter-bloc of non-Eurozone states emerging.  Next time you will be in the firing line precisely because EU ‘rules’ are all about politics and have little or nothing to do with strategy or ‘rules’.  As for statistics - they are all about interpretation.  

Indeed, if Mark Twain were alive today he would have understood this long week of politics all too well; there are EU rules, damned ‘rules’ and EU statistics...and they are political not technical.

Julian Lindley-French

Afghanistan and the Future of Conflict

Rome, Italy. 27 October.  In 1963 when Sir Alec Douglas-Home briefly became British Prime Minister his predecessor Harold Macmillan said: “Let me give you one piece of advice, young man.  As long as you don’t invade Afghanistan you’ll probably do fine”.  Yesterday in Afghanistan in a low-key ceremony the Americans handed Britain’s Camp Bastion over to Afghan forces marking the end of US and UK-led combat operations in Helmand Province the crucible of a thirteen year counterinsurgency campaign.  At the peak of operations Joint Operating Base Bastion supported some 14,000 troops and acted as the hub for over 100 forward operating bases or FOBs.  Bastion still boasts a 2.2 mile (3.5km) long runway and a 20 mile (32kms) long perimeter.  What are the lessons and what indeed does Afghanistan say about the nature of future conflict?

At the political and strategic levels the campaign suffered from a lack of a consistent political strategy worthy of the name.  Indeed, political leaders in Washington, London and across the coalition too often imposed politics on a strategic campaign and simply lacked the strategic patience to get an uncertain and unclear job done.  There was also at times an appallingly low level of strategic unity of effort and purpose between the NATO allies in particular which manifested itself in the form or national caveats with too many European governments trying to do the least possible.  

At the military-strategic and operational levels for much of the campaign American and British military chiefs (in particular) failed to realise the sheer level of investment – political, forces and resources- needed to transform governance, justice, the Afghan economy and society.  Too often “can do” bore no relation to “must do”.  Sadly, it was a military philosophy necessarily reinforced by the incompetence of both the EU and UN missions. 

US forces dubbed their British counterparts “The Borrowers” at one point because British personnel were simply not supplied by London with sufficient kit given the scale of the mission over time, space and distance.  Equally, for all the frustrations the Americans had with their British counterparts the four English-speaking powers – US, UK, Canada and Australia – were the core of operations where it really mattered in southern and eastern Afghanistan. 

This group now forms an operational hub for future coalitions and the basis for an informal Anglosphere.  In no way wishing to disrespect the many very brave men and women of other nations who gave their lives on this campaign with the very partial exception of the French and a couple of others trust in the political reliability of continental European allies to be present at the point of contact with danger is now very low in both Washington and London.

However, the paradox of Afghanistan is precisely that such trust needs to be rebuilt. That is why September’s NATO Wales Summit was indeed important because it implied three forms of future conflict the tackling of which all reinforce the lessons from the Afghanistan campaign.  Specifically, the vital need for strategic unity of effort and purpose as hybrid warfare drives the shape and scope of the future multinational force.

Strategic ambiguous warfare: Russia’s use of ambiguous warfare in Ukraine confirms the need for a twenty-first century NATO concept of collective nuclear and conventional deterrence that includes strategic reassurance and a layered, modernised collective defence that must in turn include advanced deployable forces, missile defence and cyber-defence.  Such a defence would also suggest the need to revisit the old Cold War REFORGER concept whereby US reinforcements are flown in from Continental North America to assist Europeans acting as effective first responders. 

Super-insurgencies: The campaign against Islamic State in the Middle East suggests a new form of super-insurgency that will in and of itself demand forces able to operate at distance as part of a sustained, sustainable super counter-insurgency strategy.  Super-insurgencies will operate in the spaces between the emerging great power blocs in the kind of ungoverned spaces which Islamic State is exploiting.  This is particularly the case in the Middle East where the entire Sykes-Picot state structure is facing collapse and which is contiguous to Europe.  Combating such super-insurgencies in extremely complicated political environments will also require a clear understanding that strategy is designed first and foremost to support the Middle Eastern state in its battle with the anti-state and thereafter to shape the interests and choices of those states. 

Strategic humanitarianism:  As the Ebola crisis has so tragically demonstrated the twenty-first century West acts in pursuit of a complex mix of values and interests which merge desired strategic outcomes with humanitarian imperatives.  That in turn imposes on Western armed forces the need to work effectively not just across government but with civilian branches of foreign governments, international institutions such as the UN and EU.  It also suggests the need for an efficient and effective method of engagement with different and differing non-governmental communities across international civil society if influence and effect is to be generated - the Comprehensive Approach.

US Lt General H.R. McMaster was once asked why the US military won the 2003 Iraq War but lost the peace.  “There was nothing to join up to”, he said.  Therefore, the future force must not only better join up the six domains of twenty-first century warfare: air, sea, land, cyber, space and knowledge.  It must also be better joined up with other like-minded forces and indeed across government and the wider international community.  In short, joining up strategy, purpose, effort, force and resource is NATO’s twenty-first century mission.

As for Afghanistan it is true that the campaign has not achieved the unrealistic goals set for it at the 2001 Bonn Conference.  And, it is certainly true that without the continuing commitment of the US to back-stop Afghan forces out to 2024 Kabul could lose control again of vast swathes of territory, particularly the Pushtu heartlands that bestride the AfPak border.  However, hindsight is a wonderful thing.  Back in November 2001 the US-led coalition was right to deny Al Qaeda the ungoverned space that was Afghanistan from which to launch attacks on the West post-911.  And, lumpy though it undoubtedly is progress in re-building a form of civil society has been made in Afghanistan and continued efforts MUST be supported both in Afghanistan and regionally. 

Therefore, far from turning political backs on Afghanistan which politicians in Europe did some time ago now is the moment to systematically and scientifically consider its many lessons. 

Julian Lindley-French

Imperium: Why Europe Must Re-establish Equilibrium

Alphen, Netherlands. 24 October. Henry Kissinger in his brilliant new book “World Order” writes: “The vitality of an international order is reflected in the balance it strikes between legitimacy and power and the relative emphasis given to each…If the balance between power and legitimacy is properly managed actions will acquire a degree of spontaneity…When that balance is destroyed, restraints disappear, and the field opens to the most expansionist claims and the most implacable actors; chaos follows until a new system of order is established”.  This week newly-confirmed Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker demonstrated just how he sees the role of his European Commission; an Imperium founded on three dangerous principles - false legitimacy, intolerance and implacability. 

This week in Vienna I stood next to the car in which on 28 June 1914 the heir-apparent to the Austro-Hungarian Empire Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo together with his wife Archduchess Sophie.  A small hole still evident in the rear door of the car was the “shot that rang around the world” and triggered the collapse of European order and World War One.  That such a small hole could lead to a Europe engulfed in chaos and destruction reflected a Europe that had lost the essential political equilibrium between power and legitimacy that Kissinger identifies as critical to order. 

The Europe of 2014 is fast losing political equilibrium.  Within the EU this slide is most obviously represented by Britain’s growing estrangement from Brussels.  Often this debate is expressed simplistically as symptoms of politics rather than reflections of structural and strategic change, such as immigration.  Many Britons fail to realise that pan-European migration is as much a consequence of the West’s victory in the Cold War and the downing of the Iron Curtain as it is EU rules that enshrine free movement.  Indeed, something like free movement would be apparent EU or no EU because it was one reason why the Cold War was fought. 

Sadly, the British also fail to see that political disequilibrium across Europe is being driven in part by an EU that is today neither alliance nor federation but a strange amalgam of the two, albeit with only one direction of travel.  Worse, a divided London also fails to understand that the implicit anti-Britishness of the European Commission (see the number of Britons working for the Commission) is in part driven by a desire by Brussels to replace Britain in the traditional role of power balancer. With a properly strategic view Britain could still act as the traditional balancer of implicit power that is the EU.  The strategy is clear; punish Britain for dissent and ‘reward’ Germany and France to signal to Berlin and Paris that the Commission wishes to ‘rule’ Europe in conjunction with a re-invigorated Franco-German axis.

This drift towards Imperium and the Commission’s role as balancer is all-too-apparent in today’s announcement Britain must pay a surprise additional levy of £1.7bn (€2.1bn) to the European Commission, adding a fifth to Britain’s EU bill whilst at the same time France and Germany will be offered rebates.  Britain is of course not alone in being asked to pay more.  Ludicrous though it is Greece too has been asked to cough up.  However, Britain has been hit with by far the biggest bill.  The Commission suggests (as it always does) that this hike in Britain’s payment is a purely technical matter.  In fact the timing and the manner by which the Commission has ‘calculated’ the ‘growth’ in Britain’s wealth since 1995 is entirely spurious and utterly political.   

As equilibrium evaporates within the EU the Commission is instead trying to reinvent itself as a form of Imperium in which it is the sole guardian of the 'rules'.  Imperia are about power and they express power usually in various forms of taxation that are designed to both confirm power and maintain an imbalance of power.  The EU today is fast consolidating around the Eurozone as for Juncker and the federalists the single currency for all its disastrous flaws remains at the centre of the European Project and the move towards “ever closer union” as enshrined in both the 1951 Treaty of Paris and the 1957 Treaty of Rome. 

The idea of the implacable Imperium Commission was reinforced by an absolutist speech by outgoing Commission President Jose Manual Barroso in London this week. Barroso told his audience he wanted a ‘fair’ deal for Britain before telling the British people that resistance is futile.  Specifically, Barroso told the British that there can be no re-visiting of the 1957 Treaty of Rome because the treaty enshrines the four fundamental freedoms; goods, services, capital and people.  This is nonsense.

The founding treaties were drafted in a very different age and a very different world.  However, for an increasingly political Commission power is justified and codified by the Commission’s maximalist interpretation of those self-same founding treaties.  Any treaty amendment now could only mean less power for the Commission.  Therefore, implicit in this week’s raft of Commission actions is not just recognition of the coming power struggle but also the political method of Jean-Claude Juncker; “divide et impera” (“divide and rule”).  A core function of Imperia is to re-distribute wealth from the dissenting margins to the faithful core.  Such actions also demonstrate why David Cameron’s efforts to reform the EU are almost certainly doomed to fail and that the best he can hope for are a few political fig-leaves.  Much will depend on Berlin and which side it takes.

Britain is not alone in expressing concern.  The May 2014 elections to the European Parliament revealed growing popular dissent at the centralisation of power in Europe.  Democratically the elections were a chance for the European Parliament to evolve from a rubber-stamping, cheer-leading puppet of the Commission into a real legislature imposing accountability on power via checks and balances.  Instead, this week Euro-sceptic groups representing up to 30% of the electorate were systematically denied leadership of key parliamentary committees by Juncker’s fellow federalists.  Indeed, there is now a very real danger that the European Parliament will become much like the Roman Senate under imperial rule in first century AD Rome; a political facade for illegitimate action. 

The problem for Juncker and his ilk is that they fail to see that if they implacably try to impose ever-closer union from the top-down they will exacerbate political disequilibrium between Europe’s core and periphery and between the elite and the people.  Implicit in the Juncker Strategy seems to be a political gambit.  Confront those states outside the Eurozone with the consequences of marginalisation by taxing them to the point they conclude that their best interests are served by joining the Euro and thus the Imperium. Certainly, today’s surprise levy moves Britons ever closer to a dangerously simple choice; vassal state or Brexit. 

Imperia do not just exert pressure on their margins.  They also impose order on neighbours in the form of tribute.  Russia’s actions in Ukraine and aggression against Eastern Europe are utterly unforgivable.  However, when I speak to senior Russians they clearly see themselves cast in the role of Sparta to what Moscow sees (and not without irony) as Brussels’s Athens.  In the fifth century BC Thucydides argued that the attack by Sparta (the Peloponnesian League) on Athens was a pre-emptive strike to halt the growth in Athenian power that would sooner or later eclipse Sparta.  

So can equilibrium be restored?  The great adage of the American Revolutionary War “no taxation without representation” is as good a starting place as any.  For that reason now is precisely the moment when the EU treaties SHOULD be revisited.  First, a new balance of obligations and responsibilities must be established between those in the Real EU (the Eurozone) and those not. Such a treaty would tidy up the huge number of inconsistencies and unfairnesses across the Union that is helping to accelerate disequilibrium.  Second, new treaties will be needed with the powerful non-EU peripheral powers such as Russia, Turkey and Ukraine that have a direct interest in the changing nature and reach of the EU and which are reacting more or less competently to Europe’s new disequilibrium.   

For me the greatest tragedy is that I still believe deeply in the ideal of Europe and the idea of sovereign European states working closely together in pursuit of peace and prosperity.  However, the over-concentration of power in a few elite hands ‘legitimised’ by a one-view-fits-all European Parliament 'majority' that marginalises dissent however obnoxious is not the Europe I can believe in.  Indeed, as the gap between power and legitimacy grows and with it Europe’s loss of political equilibrium a very real danger exists is that the EU will take on much the same form as the Roman Republic in the aftermath of Octavian’s coup.  As the Great Henry suggests sooner or later “chaos follows until a new system of order is established”.

Europe must re-establish political equilibrium before it is too late and that means real fairness, proper accountability and the encouragement rather than punishment of political diversity.  

Julian Lindley-French

Ebola: WHO is in Charge?

Alphen, Netherlands. 20 October. As EU foreign ministers finally meet to discuss the Ebola epidemic and Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf makes a desperate open plea to the world to get its act together the disease is taking hold.  According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) more than 4500 people have already died of Ebola in West Africa. Well in excess of 9500 people are infected of whom 70% are expected to die.  WHO estimates there could be as many as 10,000 new cases each week by early December. 

Three actions are desperately needed to stop Ebola spreading and then establishing itself as a perennial disease.  First, the provision of effective preventative and curative healthcare is needed across West Africa and indeed beyond.  Second, a longer-term strategy is needed to properly establish basic but robust healthcare systems.  Third, an end is needed to the brain drain of qualified West African medical practitioners to the West.  Britain’s National Health Service is a major recruiter from the region.

However, the control of pandemics (which Ebola is not as yet) also needs the world to take a new approach. Specifically, a Global Disaster Action Centre is needed for which healthcare would be a major responsibility and which would act in a similar way to the US Centers for Disease Control or CDC (even though the CDC has not covered itself in glory of late).  Such a Centre would be ideally focused on the UN Security Council (UNSC) and supported by military-style structures with a Situation Centre at its core that would assimilate and interpret real time intelligence and analysis to provide support for command decisions.  Logistics would need to be pre-positioned and provided by the five Permanent Members of the UNSC and reinforced by other members of the G20 group of rich and emerging rich states.  Such a centre would act as emergency reinforcement for national health professionals and help properly and better co-ordinate the vital work of the non-governmental community.

All well and good but…Many years ago when I was a callow youth in the salad days of my strategic evolution my boss seconded me to the United Nations to design a ‘strategy’.  This was probably because a) I kept asking awkward questions of the powerful at home; and b) because whilst the UN of the day was huge on “strategy” it viewed the word “action” as a crime against bureaucracy and thus it was probably felt I could no harm.  The good news was that I got to spend time at the UN both in Geneva and New York. 

One of the UN agencies unfortunate enough to ‘benefit’ from my strategic guidance was WHO.  At WHO I found a core of seasoned, brave and dedicated medical field people surrounded by a strange assortment of fellow-travellers.  There were sons and daughters of African and Asian potentates who may or may not turn up for work alongside officials seconded from one Soviet bloc state or another of whom not a few had the title ‘colonel’ or some other such military appellation.  The former knew nothing about anything whilst the latter knew nothing about health the ‘function’ of whom was not at all ‘clear’, if you know what I mean.  With the end of the Cold War I hoped things might have changed, now I wonder.

Last week an internal WHO report was leaked cataloguing the egregious errors made by the UN in first identifying and then containing the West African Ebola plague.  This was not exactly a surprise to me and suggests that within the UN bureaucracy personality and politics still remains more important than strategy and action.  The plain fact is the UN and its agencies are simply not geared for crisis management in spite of the many ‘offices’ that claim to be crisis managers in some form or another.

Blame for the Ebola failure cannot be laid solely at the many marble portals of the UN.  As the predictably tardy EU response demonstrates the somewhat misnomered ‘international community’ has been predictably lamentable, fragmented, tardy and haphazard – too little, too late.  As per usual it is not until the Americans and the wider West take action that anything substantive happens, although it is good to see China taking its international responsibilities ever more seriously.  Some 4000 US military personnel are now engaged in Liberia.  The British are sending additional forces and resources to Sierra Leone and the French likewise to Guinea whilst the EU is providing medevac.

Tragically, in a world ever more connected and interdependent global crisis response is anything but.  So why does something like a Global Disaster Action Centre not already exist?  There are three reasons.  First, the lack of trust in the UN Security Council between P5 members as the world slides back towards echoes of the Cold War and the frictional geopolitics that paralyses effect policy and strategy.  Second, the eternal donor gap in which UN members pledge support but rarely if ever deliver it prevents the systematic application of forces and resources.  Third, the complete lack of pledges from a host of UN members for which Africa in particular remains the Dark Continent little understood and even less cared about.

Over the past decade there have been several immense natural disasters ranging from a 2006 tsunami that is estimated to have killed at least 200,000 people to deadly typhoons and hurricanes and now an outbreak of plague that in some African countries could have the same population-scything effect as Europe’s fourteenth century Black Death.  Each time the world’s inadequate response has turned a crisis into a disaster.

Therefore, the Ebola crisis must be seen as a ‘wet-run’ for future crises – both human and natural.  Prevention, engagement and consequence management are the three pillars of effective crisis management.  However, such structures, strictures and sutures need to be worked up.  This is because effective crisis response requires government to government action, individual governments to function effectively and rapidly from top to bottom and civil society to play a full role through awareness, prudence and if needs be engagement.

Last week the British Government held a best-practice exercise which for the first time in many years involved ministers.  Too often in the past ministers have excused themselves from such efforts and sent officials instead.  Consequently, crisis preparedness was politically decapitated and not just in Britain.  This high-level absence helps explain why crisis response mechanisms have for so long lacked experienced, committed political command and leadership. 

As President Johnson-Sirleaf writes: “The time for talking or theorising is over.  Only concerted action will save my country, and our neighbours, from experiencing another national tragedy.  The words of Henrik Ibsen have never been truer: “A thousand words leave not the same deep impression as does a single deed””. 

For the sake of humanity here are my thousand words.

Julian Lindley-French

Il Sorpasso 2014: Can Europe Balance Defence and Economics?

Rome, Italy. 16 October. Cardinal Richelieu, that great sixteenth century French homme d’état once said, “Rulers are the slaves of their resources”.  In 1979 the Italian economy surpassed that of Britain.  It was a great moment for Italians which they proudly dubbed “Il Sorpasso” - the overtake.  In spite of chaotic government the Italian economy was booming.  Italian satisfaction did not last long. In 1995 the British economy was once again ahead and the gap between the two economies widened rapidly.  Today, the British economy is some 22% bigger than the Italian with the gap still widening.  This week the IMF highlighted a new Sorpasso.  In spite of ‘soft’ world growth Asian economies are surging past European economies underlying the rapid extent to which the balance of world power and wealth is shifting.  Il Sorpasso is not only apparent in the economic sphere.  Europe and its defence is sliding rapidly down the defence league table.  Since 2012 thirteen of the ‘top’ twenty defence cutters are in NATO Europe.  Europe is sacrificing defence for economics. Can a balance between the two be struck?

Yesterday in London General Sir Rupert Smith, Professor Mike Clarke and I discussed hard defence choices with British defence chiefs.  The UK may be in a far healthier economic position than Italy but in spite of David Cameron’s rhetoric to the contrary the British military still faces significant further cuts after the May 2015 general elections.  Consequently, unless new moneys are found the British will no longer be able to afford the ‘little bit of everything, but not much of anything’ high-end force of today.  They will be forced to opt instead for an even smaller force that retains a significant amount of a few significant things but only at the expense of some very important things. That will mean; a) a further loss of British sovereign independence; and b) ever more reliance on allies.

However, a British strategy that is more reliant on allies faces a big problem.  Well, lots of them actually. Italy is of course an important friend and ally of Britain.  However, the Italian public debt crisis could soon devastate public expenditure here. Like France Italy this year will not meet its EU commitment to keep the deficit no bigger than 3% GDP as part of the Eurozone’s Stability and Growth Pact.  Defence expenditure will again no doubt be raided by the Italian Government to maintain other ‘essential’ services such as health and welfare.

Contrast Italy and indeed Europe with the world beyond Europe's borders.  Frederick the Great once captured the ethos of the aggressive geopolitics when he asked to justify the use of force.  “The superiority of our troops, the promptitude with which we can set them in motion, in a word the clear advantage we have over our neighbours”.  President Putin is clearly a disciple of Frederick. Indeed, Russia for all its current economic travails, surpassed the UK some four years ago, now spends 20% of its entire public budget on defence and seems determined to continue to do so.  

The contrast between Asia and Europe is even more worrying.  China will increase its defence expenditure 12.7% this year, the latest double digit increase since 1989.  India and Japan will soon surpass Britain and France to become the fourth and fifth biggest global defence spenders respectively.  

Anyway and anyhow one cuts these figures they mark a massive and dangerous shift of military power away from Europe’s liberal powers and in the cases of China and Russia in favour of illiberal powers. If unchecked or unbalanced the implications for Europe’s future defence (or lack of it) and world security are profound, not least because of the pressure Europe's defence 'abstinence' puts on the Americans, irrespective of the promises Europeans made at last month's NATO Wales Summit.

Last week French IMF Chief Executive Christine Lagarde called on European leaders to do two things; undertake deep structural reforms to Eurozone economies to bring them into the real world and invest in economic stimulus in the form of big infrastructure projects.  Viewed from here in my beloved Italy one sees the urgent need for such reforms.  And yet it is questionable whether Italian society or indeed Italian state institutions are strong enough to cope with the kind of long, hard austerity shock favoured for example by Germany.

Faced by a collapse in tax revenues and living standards many EU leaders have in effect abandoned defence for economics.  Consequently, many European militaries are on the verge of an obsolescence meltdown and are virtually unusable. And yet the defence of Europe and Europeans is a legitimate political and strategic obligation that cannot simply be opted out from.  

Therefore, in parallel with improving Europe’s infrastructure via the proposed European capital investment funds it would also make sense for Europeans to create a capital defence investment fund.  Such a fund would act in tandem with efforts to modernise and harmonise the European Defence and Technological Base (EDTIB).

Montesquieu once said, “…whenever an accidental, that is, a particular cause, has destroyed a state, a general cause also existed which led to the fall of this state...”  If Europe allows defence to be sacrificed for economic ‘security’ Il Sorpasso 2014 could mark the moment when the illiberal triumphed over the liberal in the pursuit of power and influence in the twenty-first century.  Do Europeans really want such a world?  If not Europeans should heed the words of Madame Lagarde this week; “just get on with it!”

Julian Lindley-French