Glyn Ford puts a case for ending the special relationship and embracing the EU Security Alliance
[Original print publication Sep 2024]
Britain is embedded in an increasingly dangerous world. The shadows of our imperial past continue to darken yesterday’s tomorrows. We punch well below our weight as the white elephant of our quasi-independent Trident nuclear deterrent bleeds resources away from conventional army, navy and airforce. Despite the fact we spend significantly above NATO’s recommended 2% of GDP per year, this sterile and vain nuclear spend leaves our conventional forces under-resourced and under-equipped. All abetted by the bizarre twin trophy aircraft carriers Queen Elizabeth II and Prince of Wales demonstrating the old adage that states prepare to fight the last war, not the next. UK perceptions trail far behind today’s reality that there are only two types of military vessel, submarines and targets.
We continue to prepare to fight the wrong wars. Tomorrow’s conflicts will either be tackling the likes of the Taliban – a new Al-Qaeda or ISIS – or the modern day version of trench warfare fought under the eyes of swarming drones as in eastern Ukraine and Russian borderlands. The first’s choice of weapon is the assassin’s bullet or the terrorist bomb, while the second is conducted with the baton of incremental orthodoxy, not radical innovation. These fights of necessity require either the delicate stiletto of Special Forces or production line precision-guided munitions.
The UK needs to be capable of intervening in our own near-abroad. President Bush argued a quarter of a century ago that he would not have intervened in Kosovo and the interlocking civil wars in former Yugoslavia. Yet in the absence of the US, the EU was incapable of intervening to stop atrocities and war crimes that killed tens of thousands and the mass production of refugees in their hundreds of thousands. The same was largely true of Syria. Labour threatening to spend 2.5% or even 3% on defence is never going to bridge the credibility gap between past empire and pedestrian present. The very notion of the UK standing alone was a fantasy even for the Tories. The question then is, who do we stand with? We either look to the continent or across the Atlantic. They aren’t mutually exclusive, yet decisions today write tomorrow’s future; direction of travel is the signal key.
Politically, even absent Trump, Washington has habitually taken Britain to places it never should have gone. The Iraq War was justified by a toxic mix of lies, disinformation and misdirection. Washington was drilling for oil and power, while their creaky cause for war left a Labour government forlornly seeking weapons of mass destruction that were never there and a Saddam Hussein Osama bin Laden link that never was, and never could have been. The intervention in Afghanistan was soundly reasoned, but woefully managed up to the point were the world watched a mercenary reprise of the US flight and evacuation from Saigon in the skies above Kabul, with the UK playing a macabre comedic walk-on part as it prejudiced people for pets.
The war in Gaza has a Labour government second-guessing Washington. No ban on weapons exports to Israel and no recognition of the Palestinian State to avoid offending the next former President, Joe Biden, as he ekes out a hapless end of term. As Laurel and Hardy said, Another Fine Mess (1930) you’ve got us into. In recent years, at the behest of current US adventurism, the RAF has been undertaking joint military exercises in the Indo-Pacific in Hawai’i, Japan and South Korea. Save us from our allies!
The past was a travesty, the future a tragedy. A possible Trump-Vance victory makes the bad worse. The US and Trump – that both bear responsibility for creating the situation leading to the war in Ukraine – threatens to abandon Kyiv and its people to Putin as it pulls the purchasing from its own military-industrial complex to supply the Ukrainian front, expecting the EU to obediently pick up the tab and spend vastly increased European money in American arms factories. Forcing a Russian withdrawal from Ukraine was never going to be easy, but Washington is now closer to colluding in defeat. That message to Moscow threatens us all. It’s not just parsimony, it’s personal. Second, there is no guarantee that a Trump US commanded NATO will continue to have our backs.
After all, Trump during his first term threatened to leave NATO and in this long campaign for his second term wished Russian retribution on those countries not prepared to pay Washington’s tithe to fund self-serving US interests. The trust has gone and the object hijacked. NATO’s US determined future is being re-purposed and re-targeted to the Indo-Pacific to serve as a putative armed wing to US forces as their new Cold War with Beijing threatens to turn hot, leaving Europe complicit in its own marginalisation. The next big US push is to amend Article 6 of the NATO Treaty to include Hawai’i in the North Atlantic.
In contrast Europe has frequently applied the brake in the last long quarter century to US overreach. The probable election in November of Harris-Walz will be a pause for celebration, a time gifted to prepare as the world awaits the arrival of the Republican’s next Trump homunculus with the Republicans winning control of Congress in 2026. It doesn’t change direction, only duration.
Labour is conducting a Strategic Defence Review over the next six months with the laudable desire to create jobs and added value. The answers are clear. For the next generation fighter aircraft do we go with the concept of Tempest with Tokyo, Rome and promised sales to Saudi Arabia or the Future Combat Air System with France, Germany and Spain with the involvement of Airbus? For the new medium helicopter is it Lockheed Martin or Europe with a UK element?
Currently Europe’s armies are static and stuck. Almost 80% of Europe’s soldiers are incapable of being transported to an emerging conflict before it is likely to be over, with a lack of heavy lift capacity. Even transported there, they would struggle to fight efficiently alongside European allies because of the lack of inter-operability. Addressing these failings is work in progress. Ukraine was the starting gun. The new European Commission in December will include a Defence Commissioner and a serious drive to create a single market for defence procurement and EU-wide military R&D. European countries are upping their military spending. The danger is new money will disappear down the same black holes as the old. The easy options are the wrong options, either to just buy more of the same from the US, or think it’s clever to switch to cheap American by design South Korean “knock-offs”. Building and buying European will cost more in the beginning, but save us all in the end.
Europe needs to build its arms industries for mass production rather than the batch production of the past to supply an indigenous demand whose scale is such that it ends any imperative to export to the countries of the Middle East. Britain needs, in next year’s revisit of the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement, to enthusiastically embrace the EU Security Alliance being pushed by Berlin in promoting continent over a tired ”special relationship” closer in reality to grooming rather than bonding. Look to self-interest rather than self-subordination. This will make us – and the world – safer than if we recycle the mistakes of the last Cold War in the west to the manifest US pursuit of a second Cold War in the east. Freedom to choose is the way forward.
Overlong and inconclusive but does seem to lead to the obvious statement; European countries must be able, collectivley, to see-off Russia.
Until Putin or his like-minded successors cease to threaten, the first and most insistent question is “how can we ensure the Baltic states, Finland and Poland won’t suffer the fate of Ukraine”? Looks as though the minimum requirement is the ability to “heavy lift” forces to wherever they are needed and make sure they have enough ammunition.
Then there’s “How do we make this happen even when various EU countries are electing less than desirable governments?”
Next up – “What do we do about Hungary?”
The barely veiled bellicose national chauvinism of Glyn Ford’s article has echoes of the 1914 Social Democratic parties of Europe voting the war credits in their national parliaments to carry out the slaughter of a generation. The answer to a safer, peaceful world is not about shuffling alliance deck chairs in order to staunch our military capability. Rather it lies in curbing the wasteful expenditure on the military, withdrawing from imperialist alliances such as Nato or some European imitation of it, and most urgently of all stop arming Ukraine and recognise Russia’s reasonable security concerns vis a vis the aggressive Nato military alliance on its borders. That would go a long way to reducing the sort of paranoid mindset Ford is seeking to promote.
Ford makes a cogent case certainly for a greater interoperable European defence approach and on the need to fight a new often asymmetrical style of warfare which includes a civil and political instability as the first prong of attack. The false choice however maybe is for Europe to pursue some kind of large scale industrial independence for its military hardware and potentially lose out on improved technological capability from the US a still vital ally. Putin’s Russia is aggressive and expansionist on lines not seen since the 1930’s in Europe. Now is the time to consolidate and expand what nationally EU member states have done well in partnership with NATO allies in a systematic manner, there are good best practice examples of how this has worked before. Moreover, NATO has been remarkably successful and does not need to be replaced but the new focus from the European Commission on common defence manufacture and interoperability is useful and needs to be expanded alongside inter-governmental structural support and within NATO.