GLOBSEC: The Road to Bratislava

GLOBSEC, Bratislava.  14 May.  In his famous book Danube Claudio Magris wrote, “History shows that it is not only senseless and cruel, but it is also difficult to state who is a foreigner”.  As the GLOBSEC security policy conference bustling and bristling around me the high-rollers are rolling up in their Rollers (well - and inevitably - BMWs these days).  Outside the Danube makes its majestic and serene way.  The river runs through Europe defining both the place and the idea as much as the Rhine albeit with a sense of the East, a corridor as ever between peace and struggle  Indeed, in this new and dangerous age of Machopolitik nowhere in contemporary Europe’s history has a place more defined peace and freedom than Bratislava.  Once on the wrong side of a fearsome border between liberty and oppression the Cold War was about ten thousand Bratislavas.  Today Bratislava is a city of peace on a river of hope.  Will it stay that way or will history again judge Europe with harsh cruelty?

Last night I made a remarkable, unremarkable thirty minute journey from Vienna Airport to Bratislava.  As is befitting my lowly station in life I made the trip not in the back of a luxurious limo but in the back of a minibus trying (as ever) to explain why we British are not ‘mad’ to French and German colleagues.

 

When I was a kid back in the strategic ice-age of the Cold War when politics and life seemed ever so sepia-tinted that thirty minute journey would have crossed from one world to another and would probably not have happened at all. Indeed, the Bratislava border crossing was so notorious it was a scene in John Le Carré’s spy masterpiece Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  Back then the Danube was a tangled metal ribbon of mine-laden fear and mistrust; a place where trigger-fingers trip-wired the world for destruction.  It was East glaring at West and the West glaring back.

As Russia seemingly endeavours again to define its ‘greatness’ through the fear and intimidation it can impose on other Europeans perhaps the journey I made last night was more pilgrimage than passage in the hope history really can be changed through partnership and inspired leadership.  Today, Bratislava is a charming capital of a small central European country that has found its own place but it is only because big leaders held to big values in the face of big pressure.  Peace was built it did not simply happen.

This is not just a lesson for Machopolitik Moscow.  Living as I do just down the road from Brussels the smell of cynical self-interest dressed up as ‘Europe’ wafts daily over me.  To discover ‘Europe’ today one has to come here and then move east.  Western Europe has become such a ‘whatever’ place; tired of itself, tired of its leaders and their endless pointless drivel and tired of the false hope and false ideas so many of them peddle. 

‘Europe’ today has become so IKEA.  Instead of confronting change and crisis little people struggle instead with little flat packs of little problems hoping against hope that heat rather than light will lead Europe forward. They spend their time on trying to put together little things that do not fit very well with screws loose and nuts missing. 

Sadly, the ability and the will of political leaders to see the real issues and act on them are rare.  They simply lack the requisite vision and courage to confront crises and instead lose themselves in a welter of self-justifying spin so dense that the distinction between truth and falsehood is lost in a thousand sound-bites. 

Today, the road to Bratislava is no longer blocked by checkpoints of chastising ideological chill but it is still pitted with the potholes of short-term, self-interested pretence.  The current crisis in which a European country is again being dismembered by pitiless power has demonstrated that there can be no IKEA fix.  This is a big moment demanding big leadership.

Therefore, if Europe is to win its new battle with Machopolitik Europeans must again remember the road to Bratislava.  Europeans must instead return to the first principles of freedom that in the end made that journey possible driven the will to defend them.  

History is only senseless and cruel if the politics and strategy that make history are driven by short-term prescriptions in which the easy politics of the moment trumps strategy and security.  In standing up to Greater Russia it is time for all Europeans as Europe to stand tall and resist the precedents of macho power Moscow is seeking to re-establish in Europe.  Fail and it will not simply be the poor people of Ukraine who suffer the consequences.  The very idea of ‘Europe’ will have been demonstrated a hollow, empty lie – a good-time gamble unable and unwilling to stand up for the very values and interests it claims as its heritage.

Then indeed history will be cruel in its judgement everybody will again be a foreigner.

Julian Lindley-French

Machopolitik: Why America Still Needs a Strategic Britain

Alphen, Netherlands. 12 May.  Seventy years ago to the day on 6 June 61,715 British troops landed on the Normandy beaches alongside 57,500 Americans and some 21,500 Canadians. The liberation of Western Europe from Nazism had begun.  On 9 May, as President Putin enjoyed his ‘Triumph’ in annexed Crimea and on what the Russians call Victory Day the 1990 commissioned Ukrainian-built aircraft carrier Kuznetsov together with six escorts sailed provocatively through the English Channel and into the North Sea on her way back from a port visit to Syria.  Whilst this is not the first time the Russians have sailed through the Channel the Russian mission and the timing against the backdrop of the current crisis was clearly designed to send a message about Russia’s new Machopolitik and Moscow’s determination to project twenty-first century military power and influence.  And yet far from trying to rebuild the strategic military relationship with Britain after years of British sacrifice in support of US policy the Obama administration is doing all it can to end the strategic partnership with Britain.  In the new age of Machopolitik it could prove to be a profound strategic mistake.  Why?

The tragedy of Obama’s foreign policy is the extent to which it has been captured by EU sympathisers who see Germany as the only state that matters in Europe.  Quite a few of the people around the White House and in the State Department (who I have known for many years) have long been firm advocates of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP).  This is driven by the misplaced belief that an EU policy would not only lead to the creation of a European strategic culture but also solve the age-old Kissinger riddle; which European to call during a crisis. For these people Britain is just so passé a view the EU is quietly trying to foster in Washington.  What they fail to understand is that for the EU to be an effective security actor at the grand strategic level there would need to be a European Government.  Anything less than a European Government simply renders the EU less than the sum of its national parts.

The Obama administration has always reflected an American ambivalence about Britain.  Indeed, it is an ambivalence that was exploited by EU Commission President Barroso in a recent speech in Washington on receiving an award from the Atlantic Council.  In a deliberate snub to Britain Barroso implied that the only transatlantic relationship that mattered was that between the EU and the US and it was notable that Chancellor Merkel joined the gala dinner by video-link to congratulate Barroso.   The Atlantic Council is always sensitive to the prevailing power in Washington and the implicit message was all too clear; the ‘Special Relationship’ with Britain is dead.

Sadly, what the Administration fails to realise is that by ‘strengthening’ the EU at Britain’s expense Washington is also killing NATO.  Moreover, by adopting such a position the Administration is abandoning sound strategy for political and ideological posturing.  This misplaced emphasis on German leadership in Europe simply fails to understand the nature of modern Germany and its strategic orientation. Do not get me wrong, Germany has made an amazing non-military contribution to post-Cold War European stability but Berlin will never be a reliable American partner.  Indeed, the current crisis has revealed all too clearly the deep ambivalence in the German elite about Berlin’s relationships with both Moscow and Washington.  And, whilst Berlin is at least talking about Germany once again becoming a ‘normal power’ replete with capable military forces the Germans are a very long way from being America’s indispensable strategic partner.  

Equally, London must also take responsibility for Britain’s loss of influence in Washington.  At a recent event in Washington the British Ambassador had to remind his American audience that Britain for the moment at least is still actually an independent country.  And yes some of the overly rapid and at times ill-thought through defence cuts in the 2010 British Strategic Defence and Security Review were rightly condemned by the US.  A mistake that could be compounded by the 2015 ‘Silent’ Defence and Security Review as London again confuses politics with strategy by killing public debate on Britain’s big strategic defence choices.  Sadly, one of the reasons for London killing public debate is that the now age-old argument that Britain needs strong armed forces to be a trusted ally of the United States is being systematically undermined by the very people who need a strategic Britain – the Americans.

Equally, the presence of the Kuznetsov also reveals some other strategic realities to which the ideologues of the Obama administration need to awaken.  First, Britain will be Europe’s strongest economy alongside Germany and one of the world’s top ten for years to come.  Indeed, with the euro-free British economy now growing at over 3% per annum London is next month going to wipe out all the losses suffered as a result of the American-inspired 2008 sub-prime loans banking crisis.  Second, Britain will also strengthen its position as Europe’s strongest military power over the next decade and remain one of the world’s top five.

Furthermore, for all its failings SDSR 2010 also got some things spot on in the search for a balance between military capability and affordability even if the tortuous way Britain got there can only be described as well, er, British.  Implicit in the new Royal Navy is a switch from the twentieth century land-centric forces deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan to a new type of twenty-first century deeply joint core force able to operate successfully at the high end of missions across six global domains – air, sea, land, cyber, space and knowledge.  And, if successful Britain's novel new concept for reserves could see the British create a high-end professional force embedded in British society able to reach across and beyond government to civilian partners.

9 May also demonstrated Britain's re-emerging strategic capability.  Sailing alongside the ageing Russian aircraft-carrier was the 2012 commissioned HMS Dragon one of a series of new Type 45 destroyers with capabilities that impress even the United States Navy.  Indeed, with the first of two fleet aircraft carriers HMS Queen Elizabeth about to be launched in the summer and new Astute-class nuclear attack submarines now joining the fleet by 2025 the British will be America’s strongest military ally anywhere combining unrivalled experience with real capability and knowledge.

Contrast that with continental Europe.  The current geopolitical crisis with Russia is once again revealing the deepest of splits within Europe together with a profound lack of political realism across much of Europe. The enduring lack of any meaningful shared strategic culture has helped to devastate defence spending across the EU.  This is profoundly damaging the ability of Europeans to shape their own region let alone anywhere beyond it.  Worse, the implication that President Obama believes he can build a new soft power West with the EU and Germany by downplaying the importance of Britain is reinforcing Europe's retreat from sound defence.  With the US defence budget falling from its current $640bn to $450bn by 2020 and with US forces likely to be stretched thin the world over the Americans will need strong military allies more not less. 

So Mr President, in this new age of Machopolitik get over your anachronistic dislike of a past Britain.  A strategic Britain remains a vital US interest because only such a power with real capability will be able to help lead Europeans and others to operate effectively in the field alongside hard-pressed US forces.  Just like on D-Day.

America still needs a strategic Britain.

Julian Lindley-French

Nigellus Tiberius Farageus?

Alphen, Netherlands. 8 May.  Last night Nigel Farage and UKIP held their last and purposely multicultural pre-election rally in London.  The British Electoral Survey also confirmed yesterday that 60% of those who intend to vote for UKIP in the elections to European Parliament on 22 May will also vote for the Party in the May 2015 British general election one year hence.  UKIP is clearly a political force to stay in British and indeed European politics.  Farage is essentially engaged in a battle over power and legitimacy in twenty-first century Europe.  It is not the first time this has happened in European history.

Recently I have been re-reading a history of the Roman republic (as I am wont to) and I am struck by the striking similarity between Farage and one of the great, tragic figures of Roman history Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus.  Tiberius took on the Roman patrician establishment between 138 and 133 BC to fight for the right of landless peasants, particularly the veteran legionnaires who were the backbone of Rome’s famed armies.

The struggle of Tiberius was essentially between the rights of the ‘plebeian’ citizenry and what patrician aristocracy regarded as their natural ‘right’ to lead and indeed to benefit from Rome’s then expanding empire.  Like today both groups campaigned publicly under the banner of ‘freedom’ and again like today’s EU elite Roman patricians demanded the ‘freedom’ to govern in the name of the republic and by extension the people.  Indeed, for the patricians that was the implicit meaning of SPQR – Senatus Populus que Romanus. 

Like Farage Tiberius was no man of the people.  Indeed, Tiberius was just about as blue-blooded a Roman aristocrat as one could find.  His mother Cornelia was the daughter of Scipio Africanus who had defeated Hannibal and Carthage in the Second Punic War at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC.  Tiberius was also the cousin of Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus who destroyed Carthage in the Third Punic War which finally confirmed Roman power in the Mediterranean.   

Tiberius was particularly concerned about the growing distance between patrician power and the people and the abuses of power such distance was generating.  This is not unlike Farage’s concerns about the growing distance between the citizen and power in the EU as law-making authority is now routinely transferred to Brussels without popular assent or consent.  Nor, judging from the huge amount of very deliberate dirt (and worse) being flung at Farage and UKIP by establishment politicians and their friends in the establishment Press is today’s response much different from that of Rome’s patricians.  It is a mark of people’s concerns in Britain that Farage’s popularity increases with each smear. Today’s patricians have clearly lost the confidence of huge swathes of the people and rightly so.

It was the issue of broken trust that Tiberius championed and which Farage is successfully exploiting.  The EU is simply not seen as being politically legitimate by huge numbers of British people.  Worse, they feel their ability to influence power is being systematically threatened by the EU.  What is the point in voting for national politicians with no power?  That is little different to how Roman citizens and veteran legionnaires felt about Roman patricians in the second century BC.

Therefore, if the political Establishment, be it in Britain or elsewhere across the EU is going to stave off the growing popular revolt Farage is leading they must for once honour their word. They must openly and publicly stop the ever onward and insidious march of the illegitimate European federalists and return control of the EU’s destiny to the member-states and the people where it belongs.  That means doing not merely talking.

The stakes then and now were and are enormous. Like Farage today the struggle Tiberius engaged in over power and legitimacy was enormous.  By the second century BC the patrician class had successfully eroded the rights of the Roman citizen in much the same way the EU has successfully diluted the ability of the average European citizen to exert influence over Brussels. 

The tragedy for Tiberius was that his struggle far from saving the Republic paved the way for its destruction.  His eventual defeat confirmed the patricians in power and over the following century led to the dictatorships (Roman legal term) of Sulla, Pompey the Great and eventually Julius Caesar and Augustus.  All of whom claimed falsely to be acting in the name of the Republic and betrayed it.  The claims of the current EU patrician elite (and Brussels insiders really are a patrician elite) has a strikingly familiar ring at times when they claim to act on behalf of democracy, Europe and the people.  Indeed, I used to be a great fan of the EU until I worked for it and saw too many of today's self-serving patricians (not all) at close quarters.

And hopefully Nigel Farage will not suffer the same grizzly fate as Tiberius.  In 133 BC he was clubbed to death in the lee of the Capitoline Hill by a mob set on him by his arch-enemy (and cousin) Nasica.  His headless body was then tossed into the Tiber.

It is precisely the distance of distant power that patricians exploit - then and now. 

Nigellus Tiberius Farageus?

Julian Lindley-French

NATO: What Would Europeans Fight For?

Alphen, Netherlands. 6 May.  What would Europeans fight for?  It is a fair question given the Russian-inspired conflict in Ukraine and growing Moscow pressure on EU and NATO allies in the Baltic States.  It is an even fairer question given the provocative piece The Economist ran this week entitled “What would America fight for?”  This followed a tetchy 28 April remark by President Obama when he wondered out loud “why is it that everybody is so eager to use military force”.  The essence of the piece was that Asian and defence under-spending European allies are worried that the US taxpayer will not defend them any more.  It is the wrong question. The real question is this; would Europeans actually go to war to defend Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all three NATO allies and EU member-states?  I would like to say yes, but I am not at all sure any more.h the Obama administration and its views about the utility of force.  

There is undoubtedly a problem with the current Administration's concept of strategy.  Indeed, the current love-in between the Administration and the EU reflects a dangerous alignment of views between some of those around the President and the EU’s High Priests of Soft Power.  The latter believe that soft power is an end in and of itself and that there exists no place for force in geopolitics beyond a kind of armed Red Cross.  An America like the EU does not bear thinking about. 

It is equally true that after a bruising decade in Afghanistan and Iraq (and elsewhere) Americans are less inclined to involve their hard-pressed military in foreign adventures in faraway countries about which they know little.  A recent Pew survey found that 52% of Americans want the United States to become more not less isolationist.

However, the United States remains the world’s cornerstone power and without it the world is more not less likely to see a major war break out.  The problem is that the cornerstone is cracking. Even though the United State remains the world’s biggest defence spender by a factor of two it is no longer strong enough to be strong everywhere all of the time. 

The latest Defence IQ data has the US spending $640bn on defence in 2014, the Chinese second with $188bn and the Russians third on $87.8bn.  Given the Obama Administration wants to reduce US defence expenditure to $450bn by 2020 these figures actually reflect relative decline that will continue.

That is where NATO comes in.  The only true way to deter such regimes is to demonstrate to them both the INTENT and the CAPABILITY to defend Alliance territory by all possible means if needs be.  For such a deterrent to be credible Europeans have to honour the essential and yet implicit contract at the heart of the Alliance.  Small and weak allies benefit from the security of the strong and powerful in return for the equitable sharing of Alliance responsibilities.  It is a contract that has been weakened to the point of failure in recent years.

Russia’s actions against Ukraine have revealed the complete lack of political and strategic will in Europe to stand up to aggression.  It is not that they lack the means.  Britain, France, Germany and Italy all figure in the top eleven of defence spenders world-wide.  Collectively Europeans spend some $220bn per annum on defence, even though Britain, France and Germany account for over 60% of that figure.

The real problem is intent.  That does not mean war over Ukraine.  Indeed, even though Russia has run a tank right over the 1994 Budapest Convention guaranteeing Ukraine’s borders the US and its European allies are right not to seek war with Russia.  Equally, NATO is only credible if it is underpinned by the collective strategic will and military means of its members – all of its members.  To that end forget all the soft and not-so-soft power supporting campaigns and operations of the past decade.  NATO’s real purpose is to fight and win wars that threaten the freedom and independence of its members.

Russia has calculated that almost all Europeans have lost the will to fight.  This is not simply a reflection of the reliance of much of Europe on Russian energy. It is also a reflection of a Europe that has been lulled into a false sense of security by politicians who have misled the people about the nature of geopolitics. Because of that Europeans have collectively retreated from the overt political will upon which effective deterrence of aggression is established and in so doing they have collectively and critically undermined NATO.

Moreover, American and European leaders singularly fail to understand the price Russia is willing to pay to secure what Moscow sees as its long-term strategic and historical interests.  No level of sanctions will deter them or force a change of behaviour if President Putin can be seen to achieve ‘patriotic’ goals at a ‘relatively’ low cost in Russian (not Western) terms.

Therefore, to paraphrase another US president John F. Kennedy; ask not what America can do for you but what you Europeans are willing to do for yourselves and indeed for NATO.

So, would I go to war to defend Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania?  Yes and without question.

Julian Lindley-French

Europe: In the Shadow of Empires

Podella Pisanella. 29 April. Niccolo Machiavelli once said, “Men are so simple and so inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions”.  The Tuscan landscape flows smoothly across the eye like a good bottle of Brunello di Montalcino flows smoothly across the palette.  In the grand distance Cypressi stand erect across the hills and ridges like Roman legionnaires celebrating the status – real or imagined - of the masters who planted them.  This is a refined, man-made landscape born of ages with just the merest glimpse of the ancient Etruscan wildness and medieval mayhem which once did so much to shape this land and its people.  Tuscany in some ways is a metaphor for Europe. Right through its ancient heart run the highways and bye-ways of an empire that still effectively shapes Europe – the Roman Empire.  What does Tuscany’s history say of Europe today?

 

Rome grappled continually with the battle between elite power, the rights of citizenship, discrimination, immigration, insecurity and supranational identity.  Even today the shadow of Rome does so much in the mind to separate the European from the non-European, the ‘them’ from the ‘us’.  It is a tussle that still marks Europe’s many dividing lines and which is daily played out as the EU and its leaders try to turn distinct nations into European empire…again.

For many years now the battle for a European ‘us’ has been fought between politicised Eurocrats and their political fellow-travellers and national democrats dismayed at the assault on their states by the very institution they thought served them.  The EU has become one of those giant computers beloved of Hollywood which is built to serve but learns to dominate.  Sadly, what started out as a wonderful, war-ending idea has become a nightmare as the ‘Europe’ the elite built simply created a new ‘them’ and ‘us’ between the anonymously powerful and secret and the anonymously and yet massed impotent – the people. 

In May almost-elections will take place to the almost European Parliament to elect the mainly unknown at great expense to ‘represent’ the all-too-wittingly unknowing.  Thereafter, the power-justifying, mandate illegitimate European Parliament will be cited by the powerful as a false mandate to build their false ‘Europe’ on false democracy.  Sadly, the EU today is just about as far one can get in democracy from government by the people, for the people and of the people. 

Machiavelli knew that If politics outstrips identity then power becomes autocracy.  And yet so many in the Brussels elite seem to think that by chipping away at the power of the state function can somehow build identity.  The saddest thing of all for the people is that so many European states are willing to go along with this.  Many eastern Europeans after years of subjugation by the Soviet Russians see EU membership as a badge of honour and a source of protection (of sorts) even if it is not quite democratic. Southern European states mired in debt see a loss of democracy and possibly liberty as a price worth paying for access to the money of the few European taxpayers actually paying hard cash to keep the Eurozone afloat.  The French and other members of the original ‘Six’ still somehow think the EU of today is the European Economic Community of old and that somehow they still have the beast under control.  The Germans think that because they control the European Central Bank in Frankfurt they control the EU and that somehow the Union is the answer to the century-plus old German Question; European integration on German terms.

Only the British perhaps with their distinct traditions of law and freedom hewn out over centuries of revolution-free history see the EU for what it is – power for a few at the expense of the many. And yet the British elite have become so entangled in their own spin that they have abandoned the fundamental principles of power and influence.  No-one listens to them anymore – either within or without. 

Just up the road from here in Florence Machiavelli understood power and the arts of its dangerous practice. He would have recognised today’s European nation-states as not dissimilar to the Fifteenth century Italic League that he helped craft and which was eventually crushed by the 1494 French invasion.  The League was too late for Italy’s warring city states had already been stripped of real power. Today’s EU state has been similarly hollowed out by transferring so much of the essence of state power to Brussels that no-one knows where the EU starts and the state ends.  It is a recipe for strategic disaster.

And in steps Vlad. Moscow is re-drawing Europe’s margins in that direct and brutal way in which Russia has so often told its own story.  Ironically, given the case made by those for deeper European integration Russia’s aggression has revealed just how weak Europe has become because of it.  In any case, Comrade Vlad thinks the EU is hypocritical.  The EU’s exercise of power is little different to that of the Kremlin - utterly secretive and lacking in transparency with few if any real checks and balances.

Machiavelli was at his Florentine peak during the 1494 French invasion.  The Master would have understood all too well the Europe of today.  For him there would likely be only two winners – the false democrats of Brussels spinning their paralysing webs of ‘harmonisation’ and ‘efficiency’ and the non-democrats of Moscow driving their tanks of autocracy through sovereignty. 

The only question Machiavelli would have asked is to which of the two to serve.  After all, both Brussels and Moscow are brim full of plotting little princes with whom the Master would have felt entirely comfortable.  My bet is on Brussels for Machiavelli would have understood that with power moving inexorably away from the state it is the little princes of Eurocracy that will soon rule whatever the people say, think or vote.  Power is an end in and of itself for princes.

The new struggle for Europe concerns where democracy happens. The EU elite unlike Comrade Vlad are not averse to democracy they simply want it to happen at the European level.  The rest of us believe that 'democracy' at the European level will simply confirm power that is too far distant from the people.  They very thing that in the end killed Rome.

Julian Lindley-French

An Obama Doctrine...Apparently

Alphen, Netherlands. 24 April.  When asked by a journalist back in the 1960s what worried him most patrician British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan allegedly replied, “Events, my dear boy, events”.  President Obama has clearly been taken aback by Russia’s use of force and insurrection in Ukraine.  Obama’s opponents like to cast the President as a foreign policy naïve who does not really understand nor feel comfortable with the idea of American power.  And yet as President Obama begins a four-nation Asia-Pacific tour in Japan far from lacking grand ambition the ideal of creating a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) built on open trade could be said to be the beginning of a truly grand strategic Obama Doctrine.

 

The problem is that the Obama Doctrine is more appearance than stated ambition which is the hallmark of this Administration.  It would appear to emphasise trade power rather than hard, military power and it would appear to be built on two potentially grand free-trade deals with democracies.  The apparent aim is to help America regain grand strategic pre-eminence via the twelve-state Asia-Pacific-focussed TPP and the thirty-plus state Euro-Atlantic Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). 

The Doctrine also makes some apparent sense. Taken together a TPP/TTIP nexus would represent some 75% of world trade. The message to America’s strategic competitors China and Russia is clear (apparently); continue to rig the trading relationship in your favour and/or use force to resolve territorial disputes and you will be excluded from the partnerships at your cost.

In a sense the Obama Administration is trying to replace the Wild West lawlessness of globalisation which Washington believes permits Beijing and Moscow to flout conventions of state behaviour with an American-centred regime of rules.  This is particularly important given that the UN and other world institutions are now paralysed by a Cold War-style grand strategic power lock.  If the appearance is correct then the Doctrine is the grandest of grand strategies and if successful would wrest back America’s fading leadership of the world.

However, appearances can be deceptive.  The strength of the Obama Doctrine is that America remains for the time-being the world’s biggest economy and leading trading power.  As such Washington can continue to try to condition the behaviour of others through the use of strategic economic levers.  Its weakness is that 2014 is not 1945 and US leadership of the West no longer enjoys the automaticity it once did.  The great financial and economic architectures America established post-1945 to confirm its political primacy such as the Bretton Woods Agreement have become weakened by America’s huge debt burden, the hitherto strategic parochialism of the Administration and the rise of the power challengers.

Furthermore, American leadership is being challenged from within.  The US Congress is notoriously short-termist and parochial with even Democrats unlikely to be comfortable with free-trade deals that would appear to take jobs away from their districts.  Indeed, the only people more parochial are the many Asian and European politicians notoriously schizophrenic in their dealings with the US.  They demand the US taxpayer by and large pays for their defence, insist on their right to tell the Americans what to do and where, and ‘protect’ themselves from American trade when it suits.  As a result both the TPP and TTIP could well fail as short-term, regional tactical bickering and protectionism overcomes long-term American strategic ambition.

However, it is precisely the apparent long-term strategic ambition of the Obama Doctrine where both the TPP and TTIP could have their greatest impact.  Implicit in both is an American attempt to rebrand the ‘West’ as a global idea built on democracy and trade.  As such both partnerships (note they are not formal treaties) could provide the economic underpinnings of a new world-wide security web (WWsW) specifically but implicitly designed to constrain and contain dangerous revisionist powers such as China and Russia.

In that light America’s emphasis on Asia-Pacific is less a pivot and more the rebalancing of twenty-first century American grand strategy away from Europe and and a hitherto exclusive post-911 struggle with Islamism. As an aside Tony Blair’s rather strange intervention in London that the world’s great powers put aside their differences and refocus exclusively on Islamism as a threat was special pleading by yesterday’s man about yesterday’s big issue yesterday.  Of course Islamism remains a threat but it must take now its place in the Pantheon of grand threats America and its allies must grand strategically consider. 

However, what makes President Obama’s Asia-Pacific tour truly grand strategic is the implicit re-positioning of American grand strategy firmly on the Continental United States and the American interest.  Asian, Australasian and European allies and partners need to understand that. 

Of course, it would be nice to think President Obama understands the Obama Doctrine.  Too often he presents American strategy more as theory than practice.  This makes the Obama Administration not only appear unsure of strategic grip but particularly vulnerable to Harold MacMillan’s “events”.   

Apparently…

Julian Lindley-French

Greater Russia and Europe’s New Disequilibrium

Alphen, Netherlands. 22 April.  Joe Biden’s visit to Kiev and the failure of last week’s Geneva Accord should finally force Europeans to face reality; Russia is a competitor not partner.
 

A few years ago in Garmisch-Partenkirschen I sat opposite the Russian Deputy Defence Minister at a NATO-sponsored dinner.  It was one of those classic moments when two Great Powers met face to face – Russia and Yorkshire.  As she was a woman who clearly did not mince her words neither did I.  “Is Russia part of European security or a problem for it?” The Minister smiled as she understood my meaning.  “Russia will always have its own interests”, she replied frostily. 

The greatest shock of the Ukraine crisis to Europe’s High Priests of Soft Power is not per se the unexpected instability in Europe’s east but Russian inability to 'get' Europe.  The fact that after all these years Russia has not accepted the primacy of the EU’s liberal-eurocracy as the defining feature of ‘power’ in contemporary Europe.

American mathematician John Nash pioneered the so-called Nash Equilibrium whereby competitive actors achieve stability only when no actor can gain by changing a system of relationships.  Moscow has today perceived the opportunity for gain through aggression because Europeans have failed to invest in key elements of Europe’s security and thus lack both the intent and capability to preserve the system in stasis.

For too long Brussels and other European capitals (not to mention Obama’s Washington) refused to understand that Moscow sees the relationship with the West as essentially and inherently competitive.  Indeed, for Russia all crises reflect nodal points of decisive competition at two levels – low politics (between peoples) and high politics (between states) – both of which are to be exploited in the Russian interest. 

In the ‘low’ politics of Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine the desperate struggles of desperate people in desperate societies are to Moscow domains for high political competition not merely humanitarian tragedies.  In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War when Russia was reeling at the sudden loss of empire and prestige the West decided that geopolitical competition was at an end.  Henceforth the future strategic creed would simply concern the steady spread of Western liberal values via globalisation and humanitarianism.   Revisionists were simply those states that either could not nor would not see this ‘reality’ and in time would be forced to recant by their own peoples.

However, high politics was not and never will be at an end.  President Putin repeatedly told the West that he was a student of history and saw Russia’s future not in terms of the values espoused by European liberal-eurocrats but by a concept of the Russian national interest that was deliberately differentiated.  At the Munich Security Conference he laid out his vision of Russian Great Power.  He was politely listened to in that appallingly condescending way the Eurocracy deals with all dissent.  The result is Europe’s new disequilibrium.

Historians will see the European complacency and self-indulgence of the nineties and ‘naughties’ as one of those great self-delusions that Europeans are all too wont to suffer.  President Putin calmly went about exploiting the seemingly bottomless well of empty rhetoric that steadily hollowed-out Europe’s security and defence.  Moscow’s method was to keep Europe off-balance by telling European leaders by and large what they wanted to hear, by exploiting the European appetite for ‘cheap’ energy and then quietly doing the very thing European did not want to see. 

Russia’s true intentions are now clear; Greater Russia.  Greater Russia does not necessarily mean a new Cold War but it does mean that Russia will never buy into ‘Europe’.  Putin today sees the world today very much in the light of Mackinder with cores of power and their peripheries.  His power map of the world is and always has been Russia not Europe-centric with Russia the core and Europe Russia’s periphery.  Energy and military power are simply his dynamic agents of change.

President Putin finds nauseating in the extreme the whole concept of European soft power and the idea that stability is a power end in and of itself and therefore that power is in fact weakness.  He utterly rejects the idea that power and influence lies in a world more like the EU than Russia.  Ultimately, for President Putin power and prestige are founded on the military men and machinery that every May again march through Red Square and the energy that lies beneath his feet. 

For the Russian president weakness legitimises Russian intervention for it creates the very lines of advance for pursuit of the Russian interest and with it the creation of a new ‘equilibrium’ built on European dependence on Russia.

Europeans have forgotten the first rule of grand political Realism; don’t get fooled by illusions you have yourself created.  Nineteenth century Russian Prime Minister Gorschakov once described Europe as a peninsula stuck on the end of Russia.  That is President Putin’s twenty-first century aim. 

The Americans seem to understand this but Washington’s ‘understanding’ is not without tragic irony.  Moscow understands that the EU is less than the sum of its parts.  In the midst of the crisis the Obama Administration is driving Europe’s powers to abandon their individual foreign policies to create a new EU ‘power’.  The American obsession with a ‘united’ Europe not only complicates the crisis it undermines NATO and turns Europeans into a non-power; easy for Washington to control but incapable of exerting credible influence. 

The cruncher is this; for the High Priests of European Soft Power to see credibility restored unto their creed they must invest in the military tools of hard power that President Putin has helped restore as a reserve currency of power. They must also wean Europe off Russian energy.

As John Nash said; in competitive relationships there is always a loser.

Julian Lindley-French