21 Jan Getting Serious About Defence? First Get Serious About Foreign Policy

Imagine a student who studies as little as possible, without ever “reading around” the subject, instead spending the afternoons attending demonstrations and running for positions on the student union council. He’s not worried about his grades because he’s smarter than a lot of his peers, the university has said that the exams can be postponed and, anyway, all those extracurricular activities will be taken into account when grades are awarded. But then something goes wrong with the plan. There’s a change of leadership, the exams are back on and the pass mark has been raised with no credits for extracurricular activities. Is it too late to catch up?

This is the situation in which the UK and some of our European NATO Allies now find ourselves. Donald Trump’s inauguration is the crunch moment, with his demand for a sharp increase in European defence spending. Cramming only has limited value if you don’t really understand the subject. In this case, the lesson is that if we are to get serious about defence, we first need to get serious about foreign policy. And on that we’ve been skiving for some time, while pretending that we’re too smart to fail.

If the authors will forgive this analogy, this is the key message in (Lord) David Richards and Julian Lindley-French’s The Retreat from Strategy: Britain’s Dangerous Confusion of Interests with Values, a powerful and important book that brings together the experience and wisdom of one of Britain’s best post-Cold War Defence Chiefs and a leading Oxford academic. A quick skim might suggest that this is just another pitch for an increase in defence spending. It certainly does make a strong case for spending to rise to at least 3% of GDP, with the maths done honestly and, for example, account to be taken of the recent inclusion of the nuclear deterrent in the defence budget at the expense of conventional defence. I am not qualified to comment on the additional forces or technologies they propose, but it is clear even to the non-expert that the size, particularly of the army, is now well below the level at which the UK can be regarded as a first-order European power. The other proposals are carefully calibrated to enable the UK to play a coordinated, sometimes leading, role in NATO.

Any appeal for resources has to be justified and this book’s focus on the strategic underpinning of UK defence is its strongest suit. The authors present a depressing picture of the post Cold-War era that has extracted the maximum “peace dividend” and put affordability above strategy in determining what counts as a threat and what counts as a credible response. But, most tellingly, the authors’ strongest criticism is of the foreign policy establishment – the politicians, their advisers and countless vested interests – who promoted review after review without a clear understanding of UK strategic interests. In particular, they reject a lazy foreign policy that starts from values rather than interests (they call this “virtue imperialism”). Such a policy, they argue persuasively, is doomed to fail because enterprises entered into with moral zeal but a lack of realism are vulnerable to being abandoned when the cost becomes too high and the fashionable rationale has faded from memory. Hence their conclusion that the UK is “not only risk averse, but power averse”. Examples are hardly necessary: since the end of the Cold War there have been plenty, several of which Richards describes from his personal experience of being called on to implement.

Along with moral zeal has come a heady degree of fantasy about the UK’s ability to intervene, at least with the inadequate and poorly-allocated resources made available and a complacent willingness to let (public and private sector) vested interests to continue unchallenged. As a former diplomat, I have sympathy with these criticisms: it often seemed to me that, with different rhetoric, both left and right always seemed more interested in the UK “doing something” than they were in having a coherent rationale for what to do, how to do it and, crucially, what not to do.

With a real threat in Europe, with the United States increasingly preoccupied by China and less inclined to shoulder the burden of defending European Allies, this high-minded but careless approach will no longer do. The authors make a coherent argument, not just for spending more on defence, but for strategically thinking through the UK’s position playing a leading role in European defence, one that will necessarily limit its role in the wider world including in the Pacific through AUKUS. If this is not intellectually (and politically) demanding enough, they also highlight the need for an increasingly fragmented UK to rediscover a coherent national identity on which sound defence must be built. “Values” alone won’t cut it.

Where the book starts with a doomsday scenario of a weakened UK and its allies succumbing (both in theatre and at home) to a combined Russian-Chinese threat, it ends with a more positive scenario of a UK which honestly appraises its capabilities, rediscovers strategy, takes ownership of technological innovation, invests accordingly and, with Allies, is capable of emerging victorious.

If this really is the choice that faces us, it’s hard to be optimistic, except perhaps in the very relative sense that, according to the authors, our fellow Europeans are hardly better off. The book, written before the 2024 election, describes a situation that has developed over several decades and under Governments of all parties. While Richards and Lindley French are not alone in highlighting the scale of the threat, and the return of Donald Trump will undoubtedly have an effect, there are few signs yet that the forthcoming Defence Review will herald the return to strategy called for by the authors. The UK’s poor fiscal position, underpinned by real structural economic weakness, is not in dispute. Recent (presumably well-informed) media reports suggest that today’s defence chiefs are reconciled to little if any real increase in troop numbers. As importantly, the behaviour of the current Government (differing from its recent predecessors only in degree) suggests a preference for values over interests, as though the approval of a fantasy “international community” of commentators will keep us safe. Perhaps the commentators have just become too comfortable to take defence seriously?

And yet…there is a lively debate in the UK about the need to get serious about defence. Provided the debate starts with foreign policy and, indeed, national identity, a radical rediscovery of strategy really can get under way.