China: Power, Payback and Statecraft

“We are not dealing with the China of the 1990s or even the 2000s, but a completely different animal that represents a clear challenge to our democratic values”.

Francis Fukuyama

One China, One System

One China, Two Systems? No, One China, One system. For President Xi Jingping the 1947-29 Chinese Communist Revolution will not be complete until Hong Kong and Taiwan are brought fully under Beijing’s writ. Xi’s senses the moment might be fast approaching when the ‘correlation of forces’ are sufficiently in his favour for him to forcefully unify China. The imposition of National Security Legislation over Hong Kong by Beijing could well be but the beginning of the forced unification of China. Indeed, Chinese military exercises near the Taipei controlled Paratas/Dongsha islands could also signal stage two of the Plan is coming soon. This would involve the forced unification of Taiwan with Mainland China far earlier than the stated date of 2049, the centennial of the Communist Party’s seizure of power.

Critically, President Xi’s power exploitation of the COVID-19 crisis has shone a light on how Beijing really sees power and its determination to extend its writ across China, East Asia, and much of the rest of the world. There was something tragically quaint about Chris Patten bleating this week about a new dictatorship in Hong Kong.  Britain’s last governor of Hong Kong would have suspected even in 1997 at the time of the Handover that Beijing would at some point move to impose Chinese sovereignty over the Special Administrative Region long before the fifty years agreed. Like so much of British foreign and security policy these days the Handover was merely a device for a Britain in retreat to save face.

Xi’s rise to power

Fukuyama is right; Xi’s China is not the China of his predecessor Hu Jintao. The process of projecting power abroad is changing the very nature of the Communist Party, which now relies for its power base more on Han Chinese nationalism than ideology.

Whilst Hu was never more than primus inter pares, Xi is distinctly primus. In the wake of the Communist Party’s brutal 1989 suppression of the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square Beijing opted to re-build social cohesion by focussing on economic growth.  The policy was overseen by a cautious oligarchy which was focused on China’s domestic stability. Whilst it proved spectacularly successful it also led to a period of relative calm in China’s foreign policy. 

All that changed in November 2012 when Xi Jingping became General Secretary of the Party. For eight years Xi has focussed on three policy goals. First, consolidation of his own power and that of the Party through anti-corruption drives and the establishment of greater censorship.  Second, a more aggressive policy of forced unification and military expansionism, particularly in and around the South China Sea. Third, the development of the People’s Liberation Army into a power projection force. The latter policy was accelerated in March 2018 when this Princeling of the Party became the de facto President-for-Life.

As President-for-Life Xi has far more in common with the Chinese emperors of old or Mao Zedong in his later years, than either Marx or Lenin. Indeed, under Xi the Chinese Communist Party is fast becoming a Chinese Nationalist Party, which is historically ironic given that it was the Communists that in 1949 defeated Chiang Kai Shek and the Chinese Nationalists (Kuomintang) at the end of (Part One?) the Chinese Communist Revolution. Chiang Kai Shek and the Nationalists retreated onto the island of Taiwan and have been there ever since.

Kow-towing to history

How the Han Chinese see the world and China’s place in it is thus central to any understanding of Beijing’s contemporary foreign and security policy. The Han Chinese represent some 92% of the Chinese population and a shared culture and historical narrative that dates back some four thousand years.  They tend to be deeply patriotic, bordering on the nationalistic, with a particular view of Chinese history and the role of foreigners in it. Central to the Han Chinese world view is the idea of the Middle Kingdom or Central Kingdom that goes back to their origins as a series of communities clustered around the Yellow and Yangtse rivers.  For many Han Chinese it is the emergence of Imperial China and the Xia dynasty in the third century BC which fires the imagination.  Thereafter, China was at the forefront of technology, economy and philosophy for centuries.

This glorious (and often glorified) epoch of Chinese history sits in stark contrast to the humiliation the Chinese suffered at the hands of foreigners, mainly the West, from the mid-eighteenth century to the recent past. Indeed, there is a profound shared and collective sense of China having been mistreated and disrespected by European imperialists, Japan and US. Several tragic events stand out for the Chinese. The so-called ‘unequal treaties’ when Imperial Britain forced the Chinese to cede control of Hong Kong in 1842. The 1901 crushing of the anti-imperialist, anti-Christian and anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion which also saw the defeat of the Imperial Army by an eight nation alliance of Austro-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States was deeply humiliating. The rise of Imperial Japan, the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, and the 1937 Japanese Rape of Nanking, in which up to 300,000 Chinese may have been murdered, are further compounded by a continuing sense of outrage over further Japanese atrocities committed during the occupation prior to 1945.  US backing for Chinese nationalists during the Revolution, the 1949 Amethyst Incident and China’s decisive October 1950 intervention in the Korean War against US-led United Nations forces all help to shape the world-view of many millions of Han Chinese.

Pay-back

That same history also informs Xi Jingping and much of China’s contemporary civil, and in particular, powerful military leadership, which is also Xi’s power-base within the Party.  Consequently, a toxic mix of historical nationalism and power hubris is taking hold, reinforcing the sense in Beijing that the twenty-first century will be China’s century and pay-back time for all the many indignations and humiliations China has suffered at the hands of foreign powers. Critically, behind the Grand Overseas Propaganda Campaign, aggressive espionage and massive and routine cyber-attacks China is offering an implicit choice to the democratic world: embrace China’s rise or be crushed by it.   

The paradox is that Xi is fast turning China into a very nineteenth century, twenty-first century imperial power in which balances of power and spheres of influence dominate policy choices and nationalism is routinely instrumentalised as insurance against economic decline and any domestic challenge to the Party’s untrammelled power. There is also little reason to believe Beijing will change course for the simple reason Xi thinks he is winning.  For that reason alone China is likely to remain inherently autocratic, periodically confrontational and routinely coercive when it believes such action will be to its advantage.

Statecraft and the Chinese Dual Track

What to do about Xi’s China? Statecraft is essentially the art of making others believe one’s own interests are their interests whilst avoiding shooting oneself in either the foot or worse the head in the process.  As such, statecraft concerns the constant adaptation of state postures and behaviours. Given Chinese assertiveness both before and during the COVID-19 crisis the relationship between China and many of the world’s democracies is in need of rebalancing, with European states to the fore.  Too many Europeans are too dependent on China for too many vital things and Beijing will not hesitate to use such dependence as leverage as and when it suits. However, talk of hard decoupling is also misguided because it might well precipitate the very outcome everyone should be seeking to avoid: war.  Like Imperial Japan in the face of the ruinous pre-war US oil embargo if Beijing believes there will be no better moment to act than now then military action might seem the only option for fear of Xi’s historic mission being denied.

Therefore, given the stakes and the scale of the challenge a China strategy worthy of the name would need to involve all the world’s major democracies (the Global West?) and balance realism, reason and resolve.  Any such strategy would also need at least ten basic tenets that equally balance defence and dialogue:

Reason:

1.             Unless hard proof emerges of malfeasance agreement that China will not be blamed for COVID-19 and recognition of all and any efforts by the Chinese to assist in combatting the pandemic.

2.             Renewed efforts by European and other US allies to convince China to use the UN to resolve all grievances and conflicts through international law, with arbitration to deal with specific disputes in the South China Sea. .

3.             Acknowledgement that China is a Tier One power and will be accorded the respect that such power commands.

4.             Acceptance that globalisation will continue and that whilst some reshoring will be needed to ensure supply chains are not reliant on one source no purposeful effort will be undertaken to damage the Chinese economy.

5.             Agreement to work with China on the creation of a new arms control architecture relevant to twenty-first century technology.

Realism and Resolve:

6.             A shared understanding of the minimum deterrence needed to challenge the assumptions of hard-liners around President Xi keen to seize a perceived opportunity.

7.             Systematic and aggressive countering of Chinese digital warfare, espionage and cognitive warfare through expanded deterrence across the conventional, digital and nuclear spectrum.

8.             Active and collective support for the US in its efforts to ensure the UN Convention on the Law at Sea (UNCLOS) is upheld, specifically when it concerns freedom of navigation in international waters.

9.             Determination by the US and its allies to respond to Chinese military activity and ambitions in the air, sea, land, cyber and space domains and actively respond to Chinese efforts to exploit new technologies in warfare from hypersonic weaponry to artificially-intelligent tactical and intercontinental systems.

10.         Identification of all strategic technologies from semi-conductors to systems architectures such as 5G and its future developments that must be fully sourced from within the community of global democracies.

The price of failure

Statecraft at times also involves the deliberate combining of obfuscation with consequence. The right of Taiwan and Hong Kong to self-determination will be the most challenging issue for the democracies.  For the moment, the safest course of action for both must be support for the status quo; autonomy short of independence.  Support for any other outcome when it is highly unlikely democratic powers would fight for either would be dangerous.  At the same time, Beijing must also be clear that aggressive action against either would see China be designated an aggressor and trigger a determined reaction from the democratic powers across the political, economic and, indeed, military spectrum. However, clarity is also needed with regard to consequence. Unfortunately, with hard-liners seemingly in control in Beijing it is hard to see how a war to force Taiwan under Beijing’s yoke can be avoided unless Xi’s China dramatically changes course.  The alternative is that Taipei accepts One China, One System, which is extremely unlikely given that the Chinese civil war never really ended. That stark reality begs two further enormous questions. Would the US go to war to defend Taiwan?  What would be the implications for US power and influence across the Indo-Pacific and, indeed, the wider world if it did not?

However, demonization of China would also be self-defeating and thus poor statecraft. The West must neither under-estimate the scope of China’s challenge, nor the extent to which Xi and much of the China he leads sees itself locked in a power or perish struggle. This is particularly the case now that COVID-19 has stripped bare the false politesse of power.

The Great Twenty-First Century Power ‘game’ is afoot. How we play it, and how well we play it, could well decide peace and war. If the ‘game’ is to be played at all it must be based on respect.

Julian Lindley-French

COVID-19 and the Disease of ‘Spinitis’

“In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable”.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Strategy and planning

What is strategy and what is planning? Let me start with a spoiler alert. This is not one of those many commentaries one reads these days in which a writer with no responsibility criticises those doing their utmost to cope with an immense crisis in the face of uncertainty and imperfect knowledge. To them I pay tribute. However, COVID-19 has again revealed the dearth of effective strategy and planning in Europe, as well as a lack of strategic culture and an inability or unwillingness to consider the worst-case and prepare for it. 

Helmut von Moltke’s dictum on planning has passed into history: “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength”. He saw strategy as the practical art of adapting means to ends to ensure a balance between action, resources and environment.  And yet, like Eisenhower, he famously questioned the utility of a plan given that most events are dynamic and conceal and generate a myriad of unknowns. 

'Spinitis'

During the COVID-19 crisis most European governments have been desperate to demonstrate to their respective publics that they have a ‘plan’.  In fact, much of the ‘plan’ is political spin – the appearance of considered, concerted and cohesive action when in fact there is none.  Crisis management has thus become a crisis of governance. For example, whilst the British government has not performed as abjectly as some of its critics claim, the crisis has revealed the extent to which ‘spinitis’ has penetrated government to the point where many policy-makers and practitioners seem unable to distinguish between the two. It has also left millions of Britons, for example, wondering why there often seems little relationship between the stated goals of government and actual reality on the ground. 

There has also been routine high-level confusion over strategy and planning. In essence, strategy in a crisis concerns the pulling of big levers of power in the right sequence and at the right time in pursuit of an overarching goal: in this case a return to a secure, stable and relatively prosperous society.  Strategy thus involves hard policy choices at times between those three end states. Planning should be an adaptive process that constantly fine tunes forces and resources to ensure strategy and the goals it supports can be realised.  However, if ‘strategy’ is in fact a political mechanism for the avoidance of such choices, it is spin.

Spinitis and strategic fragility

For the past twelve years, in the wake the economic and financial crash, most of Europe has been desperately trying to reduce deficits and public debt to restore balance whilst often avoiding hard choices, although the Greeks might beg to differ. This is primarily because politicians have avoided doing what was necessary for fear of being punished. The result is a Europe locked into a form of low-level crisis psychosis in which politicians give the impression of strength and stability where little or none exists.  The masking and protection of fragility has thus been the purpose of strategy.  

Cue COVID-19 and the effective collapse of a fragile edifice.  The coming consequence will be seen in the very hard policy choices European governments will soon be forced to make.  The very kind of choices elected politicians have spent their entire careers trying to avoid. However, the very nature of Europe’s political elite raises a further profound question: are they equipped and able even to make such choices?

Spin, power and strategy

The paradox of strategy is that whilst it is ultimately about power and resource, it is far more important for the weak than the strong. COVID-19 is changing the all-important balance between risk, stability, security and defence.  It will also demand that European leaders are called upon to do far more with far less.  This is because COVID-19 has critically weakened the assumptions upon which traditionally strategy and planning in Europe has been based.  Europe is no longer a region of relatively powerful states.  The problem for Europe’s political leaders is their wish to maintain the appearance of power where little power exists. Spin.

The coming and consequent political crisis will be made more intense by the public clamour to ensure ‘this never happens again’. Such clamour will almost certainly mean much limited resource is wasted giving the impression that government is far better prepared to deal with any such future pandemic.  However, better protection against the past offers little or no protection against an inevitably different future. In other words, spin will be king and real strategy and planning subordinated to it. 

What makes spin so dangerous is the purposeful sacrificing of strategy for politics. Both strategy and planning depend on sound analysis, and such analysis can only be generated by government machinery free to make analyses.  When spin is king such analysis becomes inconvenient and the virus of ‘spinitis’ spreads like a pandemic across all organs of government.  Thereafter, the main purpose of government becomes the maintenance of spin, with governments hoping desperately that all the other risks and threats of which they are also aware remain quiescent, at least on their watch. Specifically, any balance between health security and other critical public investments will probably be abandoned as political leaders embark on the policy equivalent of ambulance chasing.  Standing policy will thus be sacrificed to meet the short-term goal of being seen to deal with COVID-19-type threats, critically undermining national defence and the ability to respond to any and all other threats.   

Future consequences

The appearance of a plan when in fact neither strategy nor planning really exists has profound consequences for Europe’s future. Spin kills strategic analysis and strategic thinking and destroys any hope of a strategic culture.  Paradoxically, Europe does not lack for strategic analysis, thinking or thinkers, it is simply very little such analysis and thinking is close to power. For example, Britain’s inability to see the risks posed by Xi’s China is not simply a consequence of mercantilism and the allure of Chinese investment.  There is simply no strategic thinking in government in London about China or, frankly, much else these days.  If Britain no longer thinks strategically, then there is little chance the rest of Europe will. France retains some vestigial strategic culture, but it lacks the weight to convince the rest of Europe of Paris’s admittedly often parti pris thinking.  Berlin, the natural leader of contemporary Europe, lacks any such culture. This lacuna represents perhaps the greatest danger to the transatlantic relationship. It is not simply that Germans increasingly disagree with the Americans, they are simply unable to understand how and why the Americans think the way they do.  The irony is that Germans in many ways invented the idea of strategy and planning.

Moltke also understood the relationship between strategy, planning and complexity. Specifically, in a complex environment force and resource must be able to act autonomously from each other, even as they act upon each other.  Consequently, absolute control from any one centre is impossible because no commander can be aware of all the factors that are acting upon strategy. Consequently, effective strategy and planning depends on the capacity to generate great means efficiently and apply them both systematically and flexibly, which in turn demands devolution of authority to trusted subordinates. Spin destroys any such trust because the maintenance of a big political lie relies on absolute control.

Ends, ways and means

Moltke saw the ultimate purpose of planning and the application of resources as the reduction of risk to strategy. Ends, ways and means are thus the Holy Trinity of strategy and planning and are themselves dependent on a mix of capability, decentralisation and redundancy and the forging of a robust relationship between strategy and planning, control and desired effect. In the real world European governments would together now consider four lines of planning action in support of a new strategic balance between human security and national defence: a broad post-COVID-19 scan of the threat horizon; proper consideration of the nature and likelihood of risk; prioritisation risk and the apportioning of resources accordingly; adaptation of structure to ensure responsiveness and readiness across a range of contingencies. The Euro-world?

Will Europeans ever learn? More importantly, can Europeans learn in time?

Julian Lindley-French    

Reflecting on NATO 2030

May 13^th, 2020

This Analysis is the guidance I am about to give to the Secretary-General’s NATO Reflection Group concerning my vision of NATO 2030.

“Power is as power does”.

J.K. Galbraith

Ladies and Gentlemen, good afternoon. Let me begin by quoting J.K. Galbraith, “power is as power does”.

This briefing has five elements germane to your mission: 1. a strategic appreciation; 2. the worst defence-strategic consequence of COVID-19 for NATO; 3. NATO’s strategic paradoxes and dilemma; 4, NATO’s critical needs; and 5. (and finally) my vision for NATO 2030. Given the importance of your mission I will choose my words carefully. You have the text of my remarks to assist you and all the arguments herein are much more deeply-developed in my forthcoming Oxford book Future War and the Defence of Europe, co-written with Generals Allen and Hodges.

Core messages

1.      Far from adding more tasks to NATO’s already wide but shallow capabilities and capacities, the Alliance should be ditching tasks that do not conform to its core mission of the defence and deterrence of the Euro-Atlantic area. Indeed, adding new tasks shorn of significantly increased resources would profoundly undermine the credibility of the Alliance. 

2.      Even as NATO re-focuses on its core mission it must also properly consider the changing nature of that mission in the face of the revolution in military technology underway and how the future hybrid, cyber, hyper war mosaic will affect the Alliance’s ability to defend and deter.

3.      If the Alliance adapts together NATO could continue to be organised around a North American and a European political pillar. If not, function and capability will become the new organising Alliance principle, with NATO divided between a high-end, hi-tech, digital future pillar, and a low-tech, analogue, legacy force ‘pillar’.

4.      Or, in an emergency, NATO’s stronger members will simply step outside of the Alliance framework and function as a coalition of the willing and able.

Strategic Appreciation

Europeans are in denial about the nature, scope and speed of strategic change. COVID-19 could be the tipping point towards conflict for an increasingly precarious global balance of military power. However, whilst COVID-19 will doubtless accelerate change, it is unlikely to radically transform the nature of change itself. Indeed, if the strategic consequences of COVID-19 conform to past pandemics far from ending the threat of war, it could well accelerate it.

2030? Europeans are locked in a virtual Ten Year Rule. They do not believe a major war could happen in the next decade. COVID-19 could further detach Europe’s virtual world from strategic reality by creating a profound tension between human (health security) and national defence.

Critically, few Europeans understand the revolution in warfare underway, nor the implications of the growing over-stretch of US forces for the Alliance and European defence. Europeans, I fear, have also lost the political capacity to consider the geopolitical worst case. Specifically, the danger that the Alliance could face a simultaneous multi-theatre crisis in the Indo-Pacific, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as on the Alliance’s Eastern and Northern flanks across the conventional and nuclear, and the analogue and digital spectrum.

At the very least, Europeans must begin to grip the implications of fast-shifting military power purchasing parity. First, by 2030, on current trajectories, the relative military power of China and Russia could have surpassed the Western democracies unless Europeans drastically improve their future war, future defence effort. Second, China and Russia will be able to exert pressure on the US and its allies at the weakest seams of the Alliance. Third, such power could well do what it can. Beijing and Moscow are not European liberal democrats.

Worst defence-strategic consequence of COVID-19 for NATO

If Europeans effectively abandon the modernisation of national defence for health security in the face of a changing military balance of power they will force the Americans into a dangerous choice: defend Europe by offsetting European military weaknesses, and thus make their own armed forces relatively weaker, or effectively abandon Europe for the Indo-Pacific. As COVID-19 has demonstrated: shock happens!

NATO’s Strategic Paradoxes and dilemma

NATO suffers from a series of strategic paradoxes and a strategic dilemma that the NATO Reflection Group should consider:

NATO’s strategic paradoxes:

-   - European defence under-investment will likely deepen post-COVID-19, but the scope of NATO missions will likely expand;

-      -  China’s military rise will exacerbate US military over-stretch, but European military capability and capacity will be unable to meet the challenge of a European worst-case military emergency;

-         -Deterring Future War should be the centre of gravity of Alliance Adaptation, with a specific mandate to consider the impact of new technologies in the battlespace, such as artificial intelligence, machine-learning, super-computing etc and et al. However, too many Europeans either want to fight past campaigns better, or adapt NATO to managing crises for which it is ill-suited (such as terrorism and assistance to civil authorities);

-      - Future war will demand an Alliance deterrence and defence posture that stretches across complex strategic coercion and 5D warfare from deception to disinformation, from disruption to destabilisation, and destruction. That, in turn, will require a deep strategic partnership with the EU and the nations. Such synergy simply does not exist;

-       -  Real Adaptation would see a new and critical balance struck between the digitalised military power projection upon which all credible 2030 Allied defence and deterrence will depend, and far more assured people protection via a more secure home base. There is no such ambition apparent.

NATO’s Strategic Dilemma:

Crises will not come in single packages. The specific dilemma is thus: how to ensure NATO has the tailored mass and high-end manoeuvre to simultaneously defend and deter on its Eastern and Northern Flanks and support Allies on its Southern Flank in the event of chaos across the Middle East and North Africa?

NATO’s Critical Needs

Given the defence and deterrence challenge NATO’s critical needs now are thus: 

-          Drastically improved European force interoperability with their US counterparts;

-          Far faster political consultations over what constitutes an attack;

-          Far faster and more nuanced indicators, better shared analysis, much faster responsiveness, with forces and resources constantly at a higher state of readiness and able to seamlessly rotate during a crisis; and

-          Above all, much greater devolved command authority to SACEUR and SHAPE from the earliest stages of a crisis and throughout the conflict cycle.

My vision for NATO 2030?

1.    A new strategic concept that prioritises future-proofed Allied defence focused on a new system of deterrence across the hybrid-cyber-hyper war mosaic which intelligently adapts existing conventional and nuclear counterforce deterrence with digital counterforce.

2.    A Euro-centric twenty-first century Allied Command Operations heavy mobile force that closes the posture gap from which Alliance forces suffer and which could assure defence and deterrence in an emergency and when US forces are engaged across multiple theatres and multiple domains.

3.    Allied Command Transformation is charged with properly developing such a European high-end, first response digital-centric future force that can also act as a development platform for a future AI, big data, and increasingly robotic-enabled defence, via such programmes as the NATO Unmanned Systems Initiative.

4.    That such a force can also meet the interoperability challenge with the US future force.  The European future force must, therefore, also be able to operate with US forces or autonomously across air, sea, land, cyber, space, information and knowledge, and critically able to gain comparative advantage in contact.

5.    A NATO-EU strategic partnership worthy of the name that can project power and protect people by moving forces and resources quickly in and around Europe in an emergency to underpin deterrence, mount a defence, and respond to consequence.

Conclusion

The tendency since the end of the Cold War, and indeed for much of it, has been to place political compromise before defence and deterrent effect. The 2019 NATO Military Strategy was reflective of such a tradition. However, NATO and its nations will soon face hard choices and it is those choices the NATO Reflection Group should address.

NATO is ultimately strategic insurance against war in an unstable world in which strategy, technology, capability and affordability are combining for allies and adversaries alike.  NATO must thus be a high-end, warfighting military deterrent.  It is NOT a military EU. 

Above all, Europeans must realise that in the coming decade a hard-pressed US will only be able to ‘guarantee’ Europe’s future defence if Europeans do far more for their own defence. COVID-19 or no! For once, the future of NATO really is at stake. If we fail to modernise our Alliance one day power really could do to some of us, what malicious and malevolent power can, indeed, do if not deterred.

Julian Lindley-French

My VE Day

“We kept our faith with ourselves and with one another: we kept faith and unity with our great allies. That faith and unity have carried us to victory…”

His Majesty, King George VI, May 8^th, 1945

May 8^th, 2020. Britain’s two minutes silence has just Fallen. My VE Day is a very personal affair. My extended family served in a variety of capacities during World War Two, but let me focus on two of them, my paternal grandfather Clifford, who survived the war, just, and my great-uncle Walter, who did not. My thanks also to my father who helped me prepare this piece.

My grandfather finished his long and original service in either 1937 or 1938 serving aboard the destroyer HMS Mallard.  However, as he was on the Naval Reserve he was recalled, probably in May 1939 as hostilities became likely after the Nazi occupation of Prague. He served mainly on destroyers doing escort duties in the Channel and during the war he was sunk twice, each time by mines. He was invalided off active service in 1943 due to health problems caused by swallowing fuel oil whilst fighting for his life in the sea. For the rest of the war he was confined to shore duties where he did spells at the Signal Station on Plymouth Sound Breakwater, then at Mount Wise Signal Station overlooking the entrance to the Dockyard.

Interestingly, during a visit to the Royal Marines a couple of years ago I was just below where he ended his many years of RN service. He left the ‘RN’ just before the end of the war in 1944 and we went to live in Dulverton, Somerset, from where my great grand-parents hailed.  My father thinks he may have been at Dunkirk. The only occasion my father was taken to see him depart was at Millbay dock in Plymouth and at the time he was seconded to a merchant ship that was transporting Canadian troops to France to relieve the troops there. When he got back my grandfather looked absolutely shattered, after having picked up as many survivors as he could.

My great-uncle Walter was killed on HMS Quail, which he had joined when she was newly commissioned in Glasgow in January 1943. He had previously served on HMS Kandahar, a K class destroyer that was part of a squadron commanded by Lord Louis Mountbatten aboard HMS Kelly, which was sunk in the Channel. HMS Kandahar was mined in December 1941 escorting a convoy to Malta and eventually scuttled. HMS Quail was mined outside Bari Harbour (my family seemed to attract mines), and may have been involved in a clandestine operation. Nineteen were killed, including Walter, who is buried in a in a military cemetery near Bari.

There is a twist to this tale. During a visit to Dulverton a few years ago an old gentleman kept looking at my father and me because it seemed he saw the family resemblance. We eventually got talking and he told us he had been one of Walter’s closest friends and had spent the night before my great-uncle’s return to Devonport Dockyard in a Dulverton pub. Walter never returned. Today, his name is on the Plymouth Naval Memorial, which I have had the honour to visit on many occasions.

Faith and unity in Great Allies is as important today as it was then. Belief in friends, once enemies.

In Memoriam

Julian Lindley-French

Who will ‘Win’ COVID-19?

“Victory is reserved for those who are willing to pay its price”.

Sun Tzu, The Art of War

April 17, 2020

China and Rome

COVID-19 sounds like some ghastly Roman poetry competition, but who will ‘win’ it? In a piece for Foreign Affairs John Allen, President of Brookings, suggests that history will be written by the victors of the COVID-19 crisis. It is certainly true that all such shocks to the existing order accelerate change. Between 1914 and 1945, some thirty-one years, World War One, Spanish flu, the Great Depression and World War Two completely transformed geopolitics.  However, and critically, such change was already underway.  Many of the commentaries also speak of COVID-19 as though it is a war.  To pass the time, and as an antidote to some of the more extreme conspiracy theories, I am re-reading Caesar’s Gallic Commentaries. It seems appropriate. After all, the West has fuelled China’s rise by allowing Europe to become like Rome at the height of its powers, dependent on Egypt.  Whilst Rome appeared dominant its reliance on the Egyptians for much of the Eternal City’s wheat meant the threat of famine was never far away.

The prevailing mood in much of the European Kommetariat is that China will emerge ‘victorious’ and that the Middle Kingdom will become even more ‘Middle’.  China is certainly doing all it can to foster such a belief. President Xi has even set the goal of China being the dominant global power by 2049. Some even go as far as to suggest COVID-19 is a form of bio attack designed to accelerate Chinese strategic supremacy. Whilst the British Government still adheres to the line (as I do) that COVID-19 was born in an appalling ‘wet’ Wuhan market, it is also considering the possibility that the pathogen may have escaped from one of two laboratories in the Chinese city, the Institute of Virology or the Wuhan Center for Disease Control. It would be tragically ironic if China were to emerge as the ‘winner’ of a COVID-19 pandemic that it accidentally engineered.

The Economic Impact

COVID-19 is first and foremost a human tragedy, but it is also having a profound economic impact. In her opening remarks to the International Monetary Fund Spring Meetings Press Conference, IMF Director Kristalina Georgieva, stated, “We anticipate the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. While there is tremendous uncertainty around the forecast, we project global growth to fall to [minus] 3 percent this year. And we project a partial recovery in 2021, with growth expected at 5.8 per cent”. 

According to the IMF growth in the so-called Advanced Economy Group is projected to contract by 6.1 percent in 2020 with the US contracting by 5.9 percent, Japan 5.2 percent, UK 6.5 percent, Germany 7.0 percent, France 7.2 percent, Italy 9.1 percent, and Spain 8.0 percent.  Asia is projected by the IMF to be the only region with a positive growth rate of 1 percent in 2020, albeit more than 5 percentage points below its average in the previous decade. The IMF continues, “In China, indicators such as industrial production, retail sales, and fixed asset investment suggest that the contraction in economic activity in the first quarter could have been about 8 percent year over year. Even with a sharp rebound in the remainder of the year and sizable fiscal support, the economy is projected to grow at a subdued 1.2 per cent in 2020”.

Jekyll and Hyde China

In spite of that China is ruthlessly and successfully exploiting the crisis.  To the outside world, China is Dr Jekyll using ‘mask diplomacy’, much of which is sub-standard, to present itself as the global saviour, even if it omits to mention several European states, Britain and the Netherlands to the fore, actually sent so-called personal protective equipment (PPE) TO China early in the crisis in a vain attempt to assist Beijing manage the spread of the disease. At home China is ever more Mr Hyde, as the Xi regime becomes even more repressive, and the shift towards autocracy and away from oligarchy evident since President Xi came to power accelerates. 

‘Autocracy is better’, is the essential domestic message of the regime to its people with ‘proof’ a China returning to some form of ‘normalcy’ far earlier than Western democracies.  What the regime fails to admit is that not only was its lockdown draconian to the point of totalitarianism, it has been so tight that the real death toll in China will probably never be known and Beijing may never learn the lessons it needs to about pandemic control and management.  Beijing has also used the crisis to control information even more tightly, as tightly as the Chinese nationalist flag in which the regime has wrapped itself. How long before China’s domestic Mr Hyde begins to travel?

The sun will never set...

Only a few years ago it seemed the sun would never set on American power? How like London in the 1890s contemporary Washington now seems with the Americans certainly appearing to be the big losers of the COVID-19 crisis, a view both Beijing and Moscow are only too keen to encourage.  The Trump administration has shifted daily from bluster to incompetence back to bluster, whilst profound tensions between Washington, states and the cities has left some wondering if the United States of America is any more integrated than the United States of Europe? The carefully calculated image of Chinese and Russian ‘aid’ being sent to the US only reinforced the growing sense of an America in decline, as it was clearly designed to do. 

Washington’s leadership of the free world seems to have been further weakened by China offering loans and debt relief to a raft of countries, not least in Europe, to ‘help’ them emerge from the COVID-19 economic crisis. Washington has also walked willingly into carefully laid PR traps. President Trump is right about the failings of the World Health Organisation.  The refusal of the WHO leadership to heed Taiwan’s early warnings about the crisis suggests China was exerting undue political pressure upon it. Still, the image of an America flouncing out of the WHO by withdrawing funding at the height of a pandemic has simply enabled China to appear statesmanlike.

Europe? COVID-19 is but the latest crisis to reveal the gap between political aspiration and hard reality.  ‘Europe’ is not at all a political union of nation-states tightly bound by a shared mission fused together by solidarity and values.  It is, instead, a Potemkin Europe, a façade behind which for too long European leaders have believed their own rhetoric and failed to deal with any of the strategic fundamentals that change is imposing on them.  Consequently, faced with the pressure of COVID-19 the fragile edifice that is the EU simply collapsed, its member-states retreated behind their own respective and often different emergency measures, hoarded resources that might have been better used elsewhere in Europe, and refused to take collective, let alone common action.  It is for those reasons why last week Mauro Ferrari, the EU’s Chief Scientist, resigned.

Britain and Russia? COVID-19 has revealed Britain to be a hollowed-out, ‘just-in-time’ state in which redundancy and resiliency have been abandoned by successive governments in favour of a hand-to-mouth state that effectively survives from day-to-day. A lack of forward planning and capacity caught the British state off-guard (as it has before in history). Thankfully, a kind of latter day Blitz mentality, allied to an ability to adapt and innovate by those on the front-line of healthcare seems to be having an effect. Russia? It will pretend it has ‘won’ this crisis, when in fact it has again lost.

If China has, indeed, ‘won’ COVID-19 and America ‘lost’ it, Europe seems stuck in no man’s land.

Is history really on China’s side?

But will China win? In November 1956, at a reception at the Polish Embassy in Moscow, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in an address to Western envoys was blunt: “About the capitalist states it does not depend on you whether or not we exist. If you don't like us, don't accept our invitations, and don't invite us to come to see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!"  There are clearly those in the Xi regime who would like to create a similar sense of historic fatalism in the minds of today’s Western ‘bloc’. And yet Khrushchev was wrong and, the rest, as they say, is history. Over time the profound contradictions at the heart of the Soviet state caught up with Moscow and in 1991 the USSR collapsed.

Much of China’s meteoric growth since 1989 came under the leadership of a pragmatic oligarchy.  In 2012 China, or rather the Chinese Communist Party, abandoned the oligarchy for something much more akin to Stalin’s cult of the personality, military-backed, one-strong-man rule. Since then the regime has become progressively more rigid, a rigidity the current crisis seems to have reinforced.  Party officials who have not Kow-Towed to the Party line have been purged, whilst huge numbers of members of the Uighur, Kazakh and Muslim minorities have been sent to ‘re-education’ camps. The Chinese economy has become progressively more centralised, with ever more state-owned ‘enterprises’ doing the bidding of what is today the ultimate control freak state. China may appear to be strong and unified, but like the Soviet Union before it, much of that is probably an illusion.

Consequently, if properly utilised there is every reason to believe the economic dynamism and freer spirit of the US and its allies will again prevail, but only if the West makes it harder for the likes of China and Russia to exploit its riches of knowledge and technology.  The profound mistake of the Trump administration has been to believe America’s leadership of the free world is a burden on the US, driven by an even more historically mistaken belief that international relations are simplistically transactional.  Since the late 1940s when President Harry S. Truman first stepped up to provide such post-war American leadership to the free world key advisers, such as Paul Nitze and George Kennan, knew only too well that such leadership was in the American interest.  What was true then is true today, albeit with a large caveat; now more than ever America needs Europeans to finally take some strategic responsibility. Anna Wieslander points this out in an excellent new piece on the website of The Alphen Group, which I have the honour to chair (https://thealphengroup.home.blog/2020/04/15/premium-tag-blog-germany-should-lead-the-way-towards-natos-new-european-pillar/).

Who will ‘win’ COVID-19?

Power is rarely ethical and almost always amoral. By contemporary European standards China’s behaviour during this crisis has been unacceptable, and yet it is Europe that has made itself uniquely vulnerable to Chinese influence.  There is a certain tragic charm in the way European leaders have embraced a kind of naïve, China-empowering globalism given it was Europe that invented Realpolitik, although Sun Tzu might beg to differ. Therefore, if anything has to change now as a consequence of this crisis it is Europe’s rush towards vulnerability must end. Like pandemics before it COVID-19 will accelerate existing strategic, political, economic, even social change, but it can also act as a wake-up call for Europeans to finally summon up the political courage to face such hard reality. 

Europeans will also need to consider a more comprehensive concept of security. Indeed, as the popular and political clamour grows in Europe’s democracies for more to be spent on ‘human security’ it could well be that in the short to medium term state security and national defence suffer. Russia and China would be happy to help encourage such an outcome. Clearly, the next political cycle in Europe will be devoted to dealing and then coping with the consequences of COVID-19. Europe’s all-too-reactive politicians will need to be careful that they strike a working balance between human security and national defence. 

Above all, if China is to be denied the strategic fruits of its own folly America must learn to lead the free world again! That begs a further question; lead where?  First, a shared understanding that China is the main external strategic challenge to the world’s democracies. Second, a shared Allied recognition that the relationship with China has become dangerously unbalanced with too many Western supply chains now dependent on a country that is as much predator as partner. Third, the future transatlantic relationship and European cohesion need to be seen against the backdrop of such challenges.  Fourth, and perhaps most important of all, Europe’s intergovernmental institutions need to become far more robust in the face of shock.

Where to start? During the Cold War there was a list of prescribed strategic metals that Western powers insisted must remain under their control. One lesson from this crisis must surely be the need for the West, Europe in particular, to regain control over certain ‘strategic’ technologies and core medicines vital to a forward looking concept of comprehensive security across the human security-national defence spectrum. Faced with such a determination China may well decide to be less predator and more partner.

If not, and the relationship becomes even more confrontational, then whilst COVID-19 is not a war, it could well come to be seen as the pivotal battle in a much wider and longer strategic ‘war’ for strategic dominance. God only knows where that might end!

Julian Lindley-French

The Lindley-French Analysis

“If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell”.

Virgil

All change

Alphen, Netherlands. April 8. Henceforth, the Lindley-French Blog Blast will be The Lindley-French Analysis. This blog was born amidst the wreckage of the Great Financial Crash, we are now in the midst of the Great COVID-19 Crash. All major crises accelerate change, this one will be no different. Therefore, it is also time for this blog to change. 

It is some ten years since I posted my first Blog Blast.  My motivation then, as it is today, was to speak strategic truth unto mainly European power which routinely placed parochial, short-term, self-serving politics before sound strategy and policy. Back in 2010, as an experienced analyst who had witnessed power in Brussels at close quarters – both EU and NATO – I was concerned that many of Europe’s leaders lacked the strategic depth to deal with the complex challenges of the age.  The world was in flux and yet European leaders seemed impervious to change, stuck in a 1990s time-mind-set. Europe was also in shock and the EU effectively paralysed by the Eurozone crisis.  The US and its allies were also mired in a series of conflicts from Afghanistan to Iraq, and far beyond. Europeans seemed incapable of gripping the scale of the challenges they faced or their own rapid decline.  My own country, Britain, had become profoundly complacent and overly reliant on one financial sector for its income.  China was on the rise and Russia on manoeuvres.

My early blogs were often quite aggressive.  They needed to be. Europe’s leaders were stuck on default as another phase of Project Europe began and with it ever more ‘Europe’. The Constitutional Treaty had been replaced with the just ratified Lisbon Treaty and yet more significant powers were being transferred from the European nation-state to the EU institutions with profound implications for governance and democracy in Europe.  And yet, citizens were being routinely treated as (at best) children by a ‘we know best’ ever more distant elite many of whom seemed lost in a globalist ideology. For Brussels citizens a ‘problem’ to be circumvented, by-passed, ignored for some ill-defined greater good that saw ever more power in ever fewer hands.  If citizens objected they were castigated as populists and nationalists or asked to vote again in a series of referenda from France to the Netherlands to Ireland to Denmark.  In Britain, Tony Blair had a more elegant solution: he simply reneged on his promise to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty for fear the people might give the ‘wrong’ answer. 

Ten years on Europe’s battle over collective and common inaction still rages, even as the Real World beyond the Euro-World moves on.  Since 2010 the consequences of policy failure have become all too apparent. Fragile Europe is still stuck with the Eurozone a constant accident waiting to happen again and again and again. Europe’s nation-states are in danger of being hollowed-out, Potemkin villages vulnerable to the slightest shocks, as their ability to affect change drains away, with no-one quite sure where power lies. At least there was a strong Germany. Now?

Insights, controversy and education

The blog has had its insights.  In 2011, I was one of the first, if not THE first, to predict Britain would leave the EU.  It was analysis, not genius. To make the Euro work in the wake of the crisis continental Europeans would need to go to a place where Britain simply could not go – real banking, fiscal and political union.  The alternative would be for the British to expend huge sums on a project of which they were not effectively a part. This blog was also the first to suggest the ‘West’ was evolving from a place into a global idea, and that the Atlantic Alliance should be seen as part of a global security network of liberal democracies faced by the growing systemic challenge of the two power autocracies, China (real power) and Russia (pretend power). The idea of a Europe on ‘strategic vacation’ was invented here, and I also made the important distinction between a European Army (which will never happen) and an ‘army of Europeans’ (which really should).

The blog has also necessarily courted controversy. For example, some took my commentary on Brexit as proof I was a Brexiteer. In fact, I was never a Brexiteer and campaigned for Remain. To my mind, Brexit was a denial of Britain’s historic role as Europe’s balancer and I wanted the British to stay in the fight for a reformed EU in which the distance between power and people was not driven ever wider by the dirigiste instincts of a faraway elite. Paradoxically, given my above analysis, the innate contradictions from which the Euro suffers meant Britain would always be able to exert its pragmatic influence, not least because for the most part Berlin agreed.  In any case, politics in Europe is (or at least should) never be about absolutes. 

I have also made mistakes, which I regret. As a student of Soviet history it was a mistake to entitle a piece EUSSR and I was rightly berated for it.  It was a response to a senior Commission official who had suggested my concerns about giving the New Berlaymont ever more power in the name of ‘Europe’ might be the result of my suffering some form psychological malaise. Re-education? These things can happen when one exists in a political pressure cooker for many years. Still, if one cannot take the criticism, don’t write the piece!

Given my education some have asked why I did not become part of that elite. First, said elite did not want me as I am far too uncomfortable for them. Second, I am a product of English political culture, which fought a civil war to deny kings absolute power, the same culture which over a century later informed the American Revolution.  My fear was of democracy diluted to the point of irrelevance in the process.  A Hotel California Europe in which I could vote anyway I liked but I could never leave. Indeed, I was also the first to use the Hotel California metaphor in the context of Brexit: Britain could check-out any time she liked, but she could never leave. However, my challenge to a kind of absolutism in Europe that wrapped itself in the cloak of freedom and democracy and yet promised a form of bureaucratic tyranny was the challenge of a citizen, not a wrecker.

Perhaps my most controversial analysis was at the height of the post-911 conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Given the threat posed by Al Qaeda, Islamic State et al, I asked why there appeared to be a disconnect between immigration policy and security policy in many Western European countries. It seemed strange to be sending Allied forces faraway to keep Salafist Jihadism ‘at strategic distance’, whilst allowing large numbers of people from the very same socially and religiously conservative regions to settle in Europe. Not surprisingly, given the nature of this age and medium, there were misplaced accusations of racism. In fact, my analysis was essentially about strategy and policy. Respect, irrespective of race, gender, creed or orientation, is hard-wired into my DNA. There have been too many good people from all over in my life to think otherwise. What the attacks revealed was also a growing intolerance of analytical nuance and the politicisation of insight, together with a dangerous demand that analysts ‘conform’ to dogma.

Friendships have also been forged and broken by this blog, and I have not always been popular with my peers, most notably in academia and elite think-tanks, particularly in Europe. My Quaker-inspired strap-line, ‘speaking truth unto power’ was the result of a creeping conviction that too many European think-tanks were doing the opposite.  Trapped by the need to raise money, much of it from the very people they needed to analyse, I saw good minds being suborned by power, particularly in Brussels.  Independence of thought and analysis is the sine qua non of contemporary liberal democracy and vital to the holding of distant power to account.

I am also a member of a very pragmatic British school of political Realism, rather than the ideological school one finds elsewhere.  For all the focus on European politics, policy and strategy, it has been big defence that has been the constant that has bound together a decade of informed and experienced reflection, with NATO, European and British defence policy to the fore.  Indeed, my entire approach is that of an historian addressing strategy, as I am first and foremost an Oxford historian with a profound interest in defence strategy. Everything I think and write goes back to the education in modern history I received many years ago at Oxford from the likes of Sir Michael Howard, Leslie Mitchell, Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, and my old and late-lamented mentor, the wonderful David Cox.  It is also my Oxford education that, like Gibbon and Macaulay before me (No, I am not comparing myself to either of them) that informs my firm Realist belief that freedom can never be take for granted.  Realism why defines my staunch support for my friends in Poland and the Baltic States in the face of a revanchist Russia.

Taking a stand

My analysis is not and never will be neutral. Indeed, belief is central to my analysis.  To my mind, the world is a safer place when North Americans and Europeans are in harness. For me, the Atlantic Alliance is THE cornerstone alliance of world security. However, for the Alliance to endure it is vital Europeans finally step up and become strategically responsible actors, something they can only do through the closest of collaborations. 

Finally, I am also a British patriot (no nationalist) who believes Britain still has a major role to play if not as the world power of yore, as an Atlantic and European power, but only if London’s elite Establishment once again learns to believe in Britain and its people.  Critically, if Britain is to return to its Realist tradition it must again align the ends, ways and means of British security and defence policy with the strategic roles and responsibilities expected of a still major regional strategic power. 

So, when the dust of the Great COVID-19 Crisis begins to settle geopolitics will again be cast by Realpolitik and if Britain thinks it can evade the responsibilities of its power then London is deluded. That is why throughout this journey, and whilst I have often attacked elites and establishments, the aim has never been to destroy them, but to make them better so they can serve me, the citizen, more effectively.

The Lindley-French Analysis

Now, my blog is at another crossroads and about to evolve again. The next decade will be tumultuous as power, space and freedom once again become sorely contested on the anvil of the new Global Bipolarism as Pax Americana and Pax Sinica compete for dominance.  In such a world it is as an analyst at the juncture between academia and practice where I can best add value.  Consequently, there will be fewer ‘blogs’ but each blog will be longer and deeper and grounded in evidence.

The journey will be bumpy as I will never compromise with thought ‘fashion’, and I will continue to call it as I see it. The other day a Dutchman took great pride in telling me the Dutch were direct to a fault.  He also castigated the English for never saying what they really think. In fact, and with no disrespect to the Dutch who I (by and large) admire, the Dutch can indeed be direct, but often only about the things that do not matter.  They can also take easy offence when they find an Englishman who really does say what he thinks.

In that light, the one thing I can assure you of, as a Yorkshireman, Englishman, Briton, European and Atlanticist, is that I will continue to say exactly what I think without fear of grace or favour.  Thank you for your support. It has been an honour to serve you all.  Here’s to the next decade of informed citizen engagement with power. Without it freedom will not endure.

Stay safe, everyone!

Julian Lindley-French