NATO: All SHAPE and No Arms?

Wilton Park, England.  5 October.  In the 1950s the Americans used to have a NATO joke (they have about one per decade).  NATO, they said, was like the Venus de Milo, all SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) and no arms.  You are meant to laugh now.  The essential point was that NATO was fast becoming lots of military headquarters with no military forces.  At the time it was but a dream but some sixty years on NATO is indeed lots of military headquarters with few military forces.  Whoever said we Europeans no longer take the long view.  I have just written the report for a big conference on the Alliance entitled “NATO Partnerships in a Shifting Strategic Landscape” and I could not but recall that joke.  In a sense the joke captures NATO’s essential dilemma – as the world gets bigger NATO seems to be making itself smaller.  

It is a contradiction we need to resolve and fast.  Only yesterday a NATO member Turkey shelled Syria.  One of the many problems is that today’s distinction between NATO members and partners is entirely artificial.  Indeed, it is hard to imagine any sizeable NATO operation ever again taking place without partners.  During Operation Unified Protector over Libya there were on occasions as many partner states taking part as members.  And yet, in principle at least, non-participating members had more influence over critical NATO decisions than fully-participating partners.  That is the strategic equivalent of defying political gravity and if it continues poses a greater threat to the future credibility and viability of the Alliance than any perceived failure in Afghanistan. 

Quite simply NATO’s place and utility in a changing world will be defined as much by the strategic partnerships it forges as any internal strategy, however grand sounding its title.  Hitherto, the Alliance’s internal balance has been guaranteed by the essential equation of NATO strategy – the more grand sounding a document the less its actual use.  But that was then and this is now.  Within a decade all strategic relationships will have been transformed by the rise of Asia.  Be it NATO membership and and its now plethora of partnerships they must all be seen in that context, i.e. part of a world-wide web of security partnerships.

Why?  Because NATO’s true utility can only be defined once its place in American grand strategy has been established and that is a-changing.  Especially so as the more the Europeans cut defence the more reliant they are on the US.  Unfortunately, implicit in the ‘pivot’, the ‘rebalancing’, the ‘global Yank’ (shiver) or whatever one wants to call Washington’s potential zweifrontenskreig, a new strategic contract beckons between NATO and its erstwhile member America.  That contract is essentially simple; NATO must take care of security for both members and partners in and around Europe to ease pressure on the US elsewhere. If not the American security guarantee will over time fade.  Of course, the Americans will stay for the big stiff - Iran, but much else will fall to the Europeans.

Given the parlous state of Europe’s armed forces lessening risk will thus mean shifting the balance from collective defence and crisis management to co-operative security and that means partners and partnerships much more tailored to the needs of the individual states critical to Alliance security.  The needs of Finland and Sweden as partners are a world away from the needs of say Egypt, Libya or Saudi Arabia.  

The trouble is that it is bureaucracy and resource-constraint that is driving NATO’s partnership policy, not strategy.  Last year to make things simpler for the NATO-crats a new Partnership Co-operation Menu was offered.  The aim was to centralise the various partnerships into something far more ‘efficient’. In fact, all it did was to paralyse partnership as certain member-states were given yet another opportunity to block Alliance development so that they could pursue their own narrow agendas.  

At the military level such grandstanding is becoming dangerous.  NATO could become a military interoperability school, critical to doing military things together and better and thus supporting the flexible coalitions of both members and partners that are the future for all Alliance military operations.  However, until the essential divide with the Alliance is resolved between NATO globalists and NATO’s little Europeans it is difficult to see the Alliance being anything other than a school for defence scoundrels, who find themselves forever in detention for not having made sufficient effort.  Still, enough about my school days.

Of course NATO has no ambition to be a global Alliance but it still has a critical role to play as a cornerstone institution in the world-wide security web.  For that reason the Alliance must act now to forge the twenty-first century partnerships central to its future credibility. 

If not then NATO will simply become the Venus de Milo’s fat sister – no shape and no arms.

Julian Lindley-French

Poles Apart

Alphen, Netherlands, 28 September.

Dear Mr Sikorski,

I have waited a few days to comment on the speech you made to the Oxford Analytica Global Horizons Conference on 23 September at Blenheim Palace and on your recent piece in The Times about Britain and the EU.  Some would see such comments by a Polish Foreign Minister as gross interference in Britain’s internal affairs, but then we are a tolerant people.  That said I am not so sure you Poles would have appreciated such comments from a British Foreign Secretary.  

Your remarks were clearly less for our benefit and more to do with relations with your President and your Prime Minister, who too often feel the Sikorski foreign policy is not Poland’s foreign policy.  Indeed, my sources tell me that after your recent Berlin speech your Prime Minister took up to three days to approve and the President criticised you for not having consulted more widely before the speech.  Moreover, given your call last year for German leadership I felt I could have been reading a lecture by the German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle about how we British have no alternative.  Maybe that was the point.  

However, out of respect to you as a fellow Oxford man I will limit my comments to your Little Britain speech.  You set out to blind your audience with facts.  You said that British membership of the EU cost a trifling £15 ($24) per British head per year against some £1500 ($2435)-£3500 ($5680) (clearly a scientific figure) of benefits. And, that only one-sixteenth of UK primary legislation stems from EU decisions.  

Let me immediately correct those figures for you.  According to the Office for National Statistics in 2011 the net cost of EU membership for the UK was £10.8bn ($17.5bn).  Some outlier estimates put the gross cost at £65bn ($106bn) per year or £1000 ($1620) per head if one includes the cost of all regulation and transfers plus the £15bn ($24bn) paid annually into the EU budget.   The cost is probably between £400($650) and £440($715) per British household.  The only year the UK was a net beneficiary was in 1977 when a referendum was held on UK membership.  You say that half of Britain’s exports go to the EU.  In fact, the latest figures show that trade with the EU is somewhat less than 50% with a £50bn ($81bn) trade deficit.  

You cited the usual Polish nonsense about ‘betrayal’ in 1939 and in 1945 at Yalta (Britain went to war in 1939 for Poland and if you were betrayed at Yalta it was by mighty Washington and Moscow not by exhausted and marginal London).  And then you went for what you thought was our jugular – the EU single market. You said that the single market was a “British idea”.  Indeed, Britain has been remarkably consistent about this ‘vision’ for Europe.  The British people never signed up for the kind of German-led European super-state you seem to be espousing, although it is hard to understand from your remarks whether you seek an empire or a union as you imply a European balance of power. You might wish to clarify your thinking about just exactly it is that you seek.  You also overlooked the fact that the single market is not, well, single.   Euro-virtuous Germany has consistently and repeatedly blocked the Commission’s Services Directive, where Britain is of course strong.  

Your venture into foreign and security policy was at the very least misplaced.  You say a British commissioner runs “our” diplomatic service.  However, no-one in Britain had ever heard of her before she was appointed and we know even less about her now, but that is hardly your fault.  As for your suggestion that Britain “could, if you only wished, lead Europe’s defence policy” it is, I am sure you will admit, very hard to lead nothing.  And whilst I grant you Poland has marginally increased its defence expenditure to bring at least something to your famed Weimar/Bermuda Triangle, the rest of the EU thinks military power far too messy.  

Quite simply, Mr Sikorski, you have missed the point.  The EUrosphere you are about to take Poland into is a political trap that Britain will never fall into.  We would of course wish you well and we respect Poland’s right to decide its destiny.  Indeed, that is why we fought both World War Two and the Cold War.  However, you of all people should uphold our right to choose our destiny. This may not be what you and Germany clearly want for us, but then we are not you.  There is certainly no reason at all why we could not still be friends, in spite of your thinly-veiled threats to future trade relations.  

Our objection to the Europe you espouse is not because we have delusions of grandeur, even though we have one of the world’s biggest economies, hugely-experienced armed forces and an excellent diplomatic machine, although I grant you our political leadership is not up to much. Rather, the simple EU truth is that on matters of economic and political culture Britain will always be in a minority and forced to accept the ‘diktat’ of what Tocqueville (did you read history at Oxford?) called the tyranny of the majority.  Majorities are not always right.

I hope you find your Brussels job. Perhaps you see yourself as a kid of super-commissioner combining foreign, neighbourhood and aid portfolios.  That is after all what your friend Guido Westerwelle has called for.

Sorry, but we are poles apart.

Yours sincerely,

Julian Lindley-French   

Europe's Naked Emperors

Vienna, Austria.  26 September.  Gazing across the vertiginous topography of my Viennese cappuccino as I sit on the terrace of the Palmengarten palaces stretch before me in this most beautiful of cities which adorns the very heart of Europe.  With a loose heritage that dates back to Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire Vienna is the quintessential post-imperial European city.  Now the capital of a small but rich and modern European state it was once the epicentre of a vast multicultural, multi-ethnic empire that collapsed in 1918 under the weight of its own political hollowness.  As a metaphor for modern Europe there can be no better.

Sad though this may be much of my weekend was spent reading and contemplating the Future of Euro-Aristocracy (sorry Future of Europe) Group report compiled by the foreign ministers of Austria, Belgium, Denmark (traitors), France, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Spain.  If this was a football/soccer tournament this would be known as the Group of Death because it would be almost impossible to get out of. 

The report establishes the battle-lines between a Europe built around its nation-states and national parliaments, for all its inevitable inefficiencies, and a Europe that replaces rump nation-states with a putative European super-state, for all its inevitable inequities.  The Group choose decisively for the latter.

A not inconsiderable bit of the report I sort of agree with.  That, “the European Union has reached a decisive juncture” cannot be contested.  Their central contention that a Europe of “28 or more” member-states renders the EU less than the sum of its parts, is equally compelling, but only because they are moving the goalposts between structure, power and ambition.  However, thereafter I part company with the ministers because for all their talk of democracy and accountability for them more Europe, means less democracy.  This report is in effect the founding document of the coming Eurosphere and they see themselves as its founding fathers, like Schumann, De Spaak et al before them.

They call for “treaty changes” if needs be to deepen Economic and Monetary Union, ever deeper policy co-ordination between member-states, an effective single ECB supervisory mechanism to oversee the banks and more power for the European Commission with a directly-elected European Commission President (what German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle last week called a European Government).  All this together with a strengthened European (Pretend) Parliament to “ensure full democratic legitimacy and accountability”.  They also call on the EU “to strengthen its act on the world stage” by creating in effect a real EU foreign and security policy, taking the veto (i.e. Britain) out of EU foreign and security policy decision-making and for a new European defence policy, which “could eventually involve a European Army”.   

In short, the Euro-Aristocracy are creating is a political Frankenstein, something Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski rather forgot in an anti-British speech he made in Oxford last week.  We, the citizens?  Last week I was told by a fully paid-up member of the Euro-Aristocracy to shut up. What he painted for me was a picture of my European future.  I was warned for standing in the way of the powerful.  “Yes”, I replied, “because what is happening is so important that we citizens must be heard whether you like it or not”.  He snorted dismissively. Across Europe the same pattern is being repeated.  Civil society is slowly being strangled by the elite as critics are either co-opted, intimidated or both. 

Over coffee I fell into conversation with a Viennese gentleman.  He did not like the idea of a big Europe because he said it reminded Austrians of a very painful past but like millions of his fellow Austrians he felt utterly powerless.  He told me he detested politicians acting in his name when he had no say. He said he also felt grateful to Britain for again standing up to the grand illusion of a European super-state.  Sadly, I did not have the heart to tell him that PR-Meister Cameron and his Lilliputian London Government lack both the vision and the political backbone to stand up for British interests, let alone those of small countries far way about which they know little.   

This report should not be under-estimated.  It is the beginning of a determined campaign by the Euro-core Euro-Aristocracy to drive through the most profound change in political Europe since World War Two.  They will use hook and crook, demanding formal treaty change here bypassing the recalcitrant there, be they concerned citizens such as me, or the soon to be EU-exiting British (or both).  

Given all that Vienna seems an appropriate place to remember the parable of the naked emperor.  Conned into believing he had been given a magic cloak of the finest cloth, the emperor was in fact naked and only he was blind to the fact.  This time it is the emperors who are conning the people.

Julian Lindley-French

BAE Systems: A Deal Too Far

Alphen, Netherlands.  21 September.  Sixty-eight years ago just up the road from here the British 1^st Airborne Division was fighting to the death at Arnhem Bridge – A Bridge Too Far.  Four days before British paratroopers had been dropped behind German lines to capture the bridge over the Rhine which would have opened the door to Germany.  Brilliantly conceived it was an operation that was tragically beyond the capability of the forces asked to carry it out and reflective more of Allied politics than sound strategy.  Much the same can be said of the proposed takeover of British defence contractor BAE Systems by the Franco-German giant EADS – flawed strategy at far too high a price.  

Since last week’s blog I have been digging and it is becoming ever clearer that the British Government is up to its neck in this decision.  Sadly, it is a decision that reveals yet again the complete inability of London to understand let alone craft sound strategy.  London simply does not understand that this takeover will leave the British having to reconcile a defence–strategy embedded in the American-led Anglosphere with a defence-industrial strategy firmly embedded in the coming Eurosphere.  It is at best irresponsibility and at worst strategic negligence that will see Britain and its armed forces paying far too high a price.

Yes, the British defence budget is clearly too small these days to support BAE Systems.  However, why hitch BAE Systems to a European defence market that has fallen some 30% since 2008 and is still falling.  If BAE Systems is looking for increased volumes it should project partner an Asian company where there is double-digit year-on-year defence investment growth.  Or, if it is seeking to be a technology leader it should tie-up with one of the big American contractors as the US is determined maintain its defence-technology lead.  All the British will get from this deal are low volumes and questionable technology at high cost.  All the proposed new company’s shareholders will get are low returns on investment if any at all.

EADS wants BAE Systems because of its reasonably successful American business, but even this strategy is flawed.  The US business exists partly because BAE Systems is seen as a British company.  The moment BAE Systems becomes EADS (in whatever guise the new company adopts) then Washington will downgrade the company’s access to sensitive US defence contracts and technology.

Furthermore, the impact on British technology, industry and of course jobs will be profound to say the least. This Franco-German dominated giant would close down any British facilities which compete with French and German production, no doubt after assurances to the contrary.  In future Britain’s warships, nuclear submarines and warplanes will be designed and built in France, with some metal-bashing sub-assembly plants left in Britain for the sake of political politesse. This is not a rebalancing of Britain’s defence economy this is the eradication of it.  

Having been taken over the board members of both BAE Systems and EADS would make a lot of money, which is clearly helping to drive this deal.  BAE Systems has long got used to hidden subsidies and gross over-payment at the British taxpayer's expense and may see a takeover by EADS as an opportunity to get a kind of European ‘bail out’.   

Sadly, this whole deal reveals yet again the two contending diseases at the heart of government in Britain – short-termism and the enemy within.  There is the sheer strategic incompetence of a government that simply does not understand the difference between value and cost and which now subjects everything (even the defence of the realm) to its endemic short-termism in an increasingly desperate effort to get re-elected.  Second, too many senior civil servants and their political fellow-travellers no longer believe that Britain should have a national interest.  Rather these soft power warriors seek an end to a strong British military because it leads to too many foreign adventures and gets in the way of their 'successful'(not) management of Britain’s decline.  

This is by and large the same Whitehall group that wants to ‘integrate’ Britain into Europe at almost any price – the surrender lobby.  Last Monday the so-called Future of Europe group of foreign ministers met and called not only for an integrated European foreign policy, but also a European Army, supported by an integrated European defence industry.  Coincidence?   

It is time the sovereign power in the land, Parliament, got a grip.  The BAE Systems takeover must be stopped.  Parliament must examine properly the defence-procurement fiasco that has led to this desperate, defence-destroying move, the murky motives and individuals behind it and once and for all hold to proper account an increasingly apathetic British Government.  What hope the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review?

BAE Systems; a deal too far.

Julian Lindley-French