Part 3 – A post about how the UK sees itself
Many people seem to have a polarised view of our position in the world, we are either a small insignificant nation that should retreat from the world stage and others think we are an important world power with a proud history and a deserved place in the top tier.
Recent events have given our world image a serious battering, everything from the Royal Navy hostages to our parlous performance in Iraq to the current economic issues have reduced our status. The gradual sublimation of sovereign power to the EU, the overweening nanny state and obsession with political correctness has also resulted in a sort of national loss of self esteem and inability to take bold, strategic decisions.
We simply muddle along, whilst our politicians and the establishment simply manage decline as if that is the only option whilst strutting around pronouncing how great we are and making grandiose statements.
This bleeds through into the armed forces we seem to be afflicted with the same mixture of haughty arrogance on one hand and fatalism about what we can realistically achieve.
Read any policy papers from the MoD and you will find the words ‘force for good’ liberally sprinkled throughout. This might be a trivial point but it is indicative of the baseless arrogance that has infected the institutions of the UK.
A healthy dose of realism is in order but we also need to recognise that we are not Belgium either.
The UK has a proud history in commerce, engineering, culture, sport, academia, and almost every other sphere of human endeavour.
Membership of the G8, EU, NATO, the Commonwealth and UN Security Council contributes to our influence
These combine to create a significant amount of soft power.
Our military has an incredible reputation (despite recent failures) and most nations know that whilst we may seem a little soft on the outside we are not to be messed with. Trident, a large conventional military force and a capability honed in numerous conflict means that despite recent problems it would be a very brave nation that took us on directly.
The UK, therefore, has a deep well of hard and soft power from which to draw.
Like Turkey is caught between the East and West, the modern UK is caught between the US and EU, unable to commit fully to either. There should be no illusions about either, both will seek to exploit us and both will always put their interests before ours so whilst recognising our limitations we should simply realise that the only nation or grouping of nations that has our interests at heart is the UK.
Therefore, a degree of honesty is needed.
Iraq was not in our national interest because of the threat of Mr Hussein but because of our strategic relationship with the USA. If we spend billions of developmental aid we should be quite clear that it should be linked to the national interest.
In short, we need to behave more like China, only in our national interest and stop trying to be a force for good because, well, we can’t afford it.
Is it in our national interest to stay in NATO or some EU force?
That is a difficult question because both have proven relatively ineffectual in meeting the challenges of recent times. The original threat for which NATO was formed to counter is now largely non-existent and an enlargement actually increases risk of conflict. The recent problems of NATO countries being somewhat less than willing to take part in operations in Afghanistan has also exposed fault lines although they are acting in their national interest and according to the wishes of their people.
Equally, the EU may have pretensions to be a great power but at each difficult decision point national interests have hove into view. Witness the embarrassing EU mission to Darfur (EUFOR) where yet again a set of over ambitious grandstanding aims were simply not matched by resource commitment, a handful soldiers, ill equipped and with a woolly headed set of objectives quietly failed. As a result of this the French set greater EU force integration as a precondition to rejoining NATO, national interests at play yet again.
So in terms of international organisations I think we need to completely withdraw from any EU defence capabilities apart from the normal interoperability activity that exists at a tactical and technical level.
Continuing participation in NATO should be conditional on serious reform and a clarification of its mission. This might mean NATO changes to include nations such as Australia and other Commonwealth nations with a more realistic definition of what it can do.
On a practical level; participation in these groups absorbs a great deal of personnel, academic and planning resource, more chiefs leads to fewer Indians. Pooling resource looks good on paper but the reality is, as stated above, national interests prevent cohesive planning and execution. For operations where the threat is anything less than a direct attack the chances of this happening are, let’s be frank, zero. Wishful thinking is not a sound basis for a strategy.
This might seem like a lukewarm approach to the traditional institutions such as NATO and the EU and it is but is not a lukewarm approach to coalition operations in general. We already recognise in all our defence planning assumptions that large scale all arms operations will only be undertaken in conjunction with others and this is a sensible and realistic position but we should be less tied to the notion of coalition operations conjunction with a predefined list of nations.
Coalitions can be generated dependant on need with whatever nation or group is necessary.
In these coalitions we should ensure we play to our strengths and ensure that we offer a genuinely deep range of capability rather than a thin veneer of everything.
Whilst we should maintain a flexible attitude to coalition the reality means the US plus the UK plus an assorted collection of others.
This has implications for future structures and equipment programmes.
The execution of certain missions in response to existing and emerging threats should remain a sole national responsibility but some we have little option to scale back capabilities in order to reinforce others. Call it a rebalancing of priorities if you like but it is a fundamental reorganisation based on three things; the changing face of emerging risk, political reality and our resources.
To summarise;
Have some pride and recognition that we possess real power but realise we have limitations
Staying in NATO must be dependent on reform and clarity of mission
Withdraw completely from EU defence integration
Continue to be prepared to operate in alliance with others
Reorganise based on likely partnerships and need
Above all, align our defence and security to real national interest and be a little more hard nosed
The next post in this series will examine a possible response to these threats, risks ambitions and realities.
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7 Comments
Thank you for the Excellent post. I very much agree with the points summarised in bold. I’ll lay down some of my own opinions below.
The UK is a currently a ‘Great Power’ but i feel as other nations rise we may become a ‘Middle Power’. The point is we are the 6th largest economy yet we are only the 22nd most populous nation so we do exert power disproportionate to our numbers. This is not a bad thing but limits the manpower we can field compared to larger nations therefore me must make up for numbers with technology.
We are a very capable nation when threatened when we do not appear to be, we also adapt quickly and innovate when needed. A few nations and groups have found out the hard way that we do bite and can bite quite hard. We also underestimate ourselves at times although we sometimes overestimate ourselves in other circumstances. For example the Falklands war was something we should not have won and the Royal Navy had ran a scenario saying no we could not re-take the Falklands. When we had to less than a few years later we proved we could do it although this is down to mistakes made by Argentina and the innovation of the Armed Forces.
I’m against the UK being a member of the EU certainly now the Lisbon treaty is going to be made law. I feel that we should be outside of it’s control but work closely with it’s members (The odd thing is we are an Island physically detached from the mainland, i wonder if geography tells us something). I would rather the UK was independant but with close links to both the EU and USA acting with our own national interest at heart sometimes that would mean the US would be on the same path other times the EU. Furthermore the coming United European Socialist Repbulic will dampen our relations with the US and leave us looking like an odd member of the EU (You may disagree, that is your right). In the sphere of military co-operation there are some EU nations that we work closely with and should continue to do so.
NATO is an area where my opinion is somewhat divided, on one hand there is no threat from a nation state directed at NATO therefore it’s relevance is diminished. On the other there are several asymmetric threats such as Cyber Warfare and terrorism that require trust and close cooperation to counter something which NATO can do. In my eyes currently NATO needs rethought, the idea of collective defense is sound but i think it should be applicable in State on State warfare rather than terrorist attacks. The reason is that a nation state is a solid fixed object whereas terrorism is mostly idealism, it is fluid that cannot so easily be countered and stopped.
To summarise i feel that the United Kingdom should not be part of the EU. The Armed Forces should be equipped to act both in defense of the British Isles and our interests abroad. Therefore it should be well rounded and capable of both asymmetric and traditional warfare while acting alone or in concert with allies.
Thanks for reading and apologies for any errors in the text, Euan.
Interesting amounts of Euro-skepticism in the original posting and Euan’s comments. Unfortunately I don’t see any current UK political party that has a chance of winning the election withdrawing the country from the EU, so that seems like wishful thinking !
Wishful thinking on my part is to get away from this mindset of “Britain is a great power” – we do not have the political will, the public will, nor the budget to be a “great power” – Euan we scratched together enough military power to give what might be considered a third world country a very narrow defeat in 1982. Yes they did not expect us to fight back, and apparently it greatly effected the Soviet opinion of soft western nations, but it hardly returned us to “Great Power” status and it has been downhill ever since.
Would a nation of “Great Power” status be short of a basic commodity like helicopters in a counter-insurgency campaign ?
This links to the other point about where we align ourselves. IF we were a ‘great power’ we would not be tied to the U.S.A.’s political apron strings. Going into Iraq for the sake our strategic alliance was certainly not the right thing to do, but that’s a different discussion.
So, as we can no longer afford to live up to the great power status, why do we hang onto our seat in the Security Council ? Because we have Nukes ? I love the UN, and have even worked on contracts at the Secretariat in NYC, but I think the General Assembly and the Security Council particularly are broken institutions. I think the G8 / G20 carry more diplomatic weight in many situations. However, again, pragmatically I don’t see any UK Govt. acting more like China (wonderful suggestion !) and using our veto selfishly in the national interest. So I would either propose that the UK seat on the SC be morphed into a Commonwealth one, representing UK, Canada, Australia and NZ (if they were interested) or we just give it up.
On NATO – membership is non-negotiable. As political organization it has problems yes, as a unitary military command with its infrastructure and interoperability standards, it is the body that ensures we can easily slip into a coalition with other nations. It is also the reason why the UK could stand back from joint EU formations. Also it has been recently proven that we don’t have the political stomach to fund the armed forces properly for a ‘broad spectrum’ of operations, so if we are to tailor our forces towards certain capabilities, that should be done within the framework of NATO formations (i.e. we have the largest non-US amphibious capability)
On the EU, well I wish people would remember we are off the coast of Europe, not New England ! We are european because we have been invaded by Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Norwegians and Swedes (Vikings), Normans etc and we have the mixed anglo-heritage to prove it. Having said that, in the sake of disclosure, I live in Canada because I think its a better place to bring up my son the UK, but my wife’s family are in the U.S. and there is no way I was bringing him up there either !!
However I would again indulge in some wishful thinking in that I would rather see the UK as the thorn in the EU’s side, fighting for reform from within, rather than removing itself and standing aloof from without. But then I think Euan would probably consider me to be a “Pinko leftist commie subversive” where it comes to my personal politics. However like I said, I agree we should not attempt any “full integration” in a ‘Euro-army / Euro-navy etc.
Unfortunately, when it comes down to it, party politics in the UK has been reduced to the level of pubic opinion watching, middle of the road, “don’t upset anyone” mediocrity. This means that there is no strong political leadership in any direction and so very little of what any of us suggest in this forum will ever be enacted. Prepare for a Navy turned into a Coast Guard and an Army based around Buck House ceremonial, and an Air Force reduced to the Red Arrows…….
Just realised what day it is: Happy Guy Fawkes day :-)
Perhaps a modern gunpowder plot is required to “light a bonfire” under British politics ?
Without straying into wider EU politics which is slightly outside of the remit of this site my skepticism is based on the practical realities of national interest and too many chiefs
NATO is just four letters.
The Treaties are just words on a piece of paper
If our goal is to remain capable of interoperability with American and EU forces, then thats what we should say.
NATO as a defence pact was broken when 11/9 didnt result in a full mobilisation by all its partners and shattered when The US scrapped plans to base its BMD system in Poland.
Had it based its BMD system in Poland it would have had a strategic need to defend Poland, it didnt, so doesnt, so wont.
Dominic your arguements for the failure of NATO are overly simplistic:
9/11 – NATO was / is setup for ‘conventional’ war if we want to use that term, it is was and still is, not structured, at the treaty or organisational level to respond to “non-state actors” – is that right, probably not, did that instantly doom the alliance, no ! Does NATO need some reform, absolutely, but your instant dismissal of it’s continued relevancy smacks of the gun going off half-cocked.
Ref BMD – its “real-politik” – the very large missiles that had been planned to be used upset the Russki’s because of their range and throw-weight, a function of the size of the booster. They could easily be ‘offensive’ weapons. Using ground based SM3 with current or future enhanced boosters does not provide the same issues, while actually probably providing just as good a defense against the MRBM / IRBM threat (well as far as we can tell from open source expertise as espoused on the web), but I really don’t understand how you leap to your conclusion about the U.S. / the rest of NATO not wanting to ‘defend’ Poland. Defend them from who, or what exactly ?
Jed, I do have some opinions on Europe for my own reasons and no I do not think you are a “Pinko leftist commie subversive”. I have my own opinions and you have yours, I cannot judge someone who I do not know and I will not judge them on their personal opinions. You have brought up a point that I have seen before and agree with in part, we could try from the inside to push for change rather than pushing from the outside for change, It may be more successful or it may not. We do have an opportunity to see as the UK has a growing Euro sceptic MEP count within Brussels and this may continue to grow in time.
The political party that is most likely to get elected in the next general election has a very large Euro sceptic core, this could rear its head after the election. Polls on the Question of in or out on the EU show a slight majority for out, I very much want a referendum and I would most likely vote OUT. I do think in the coming election the main political parties will get a beating at the polls and there will be a number of the smaller parties collecting votes, parties such as UKIP, The Greens, SNP and unfortunately the BNP. I hope this will help disperse politics across the spectrum again as I do think every party is too similar and trying to be seen as a ‘nice’ party from all sides.
I think we are a ‘Great Power’ in some sense but not all I agree with that and that is something that needs to be thought about by the people how they want the nation to be seen and then given the choice. We either act on the world stage or sit in the audience occasionally shouting into the crowd what we think. On the Question over the UNSC seat, it is not one of if we should have a seat in my opinion but who else should have one. I am in favour of expanding the number of permanent seats to include nations such as India and Brazil and possibly a member from Africa and the Arab League.