hms iron duke

hms iron duke

Sunday 10 December 2017

Can the German-US Relationship ever be Special?

“There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America”.
Otto von Bismarck

Alphen, Netherlands. 10 December.  Can the German-US relationship ever be special?  That was the question that this interloping, Brexit-escaping Brit saw hanging in the crisp Alpine air like new snow on a mountain fir in Germany’s beautiful Garmisch-Partenkirchen.  My purpose for being in Germany was to attend a meeting of the Loisach Group. Set up this year, the Group is ‘co-hosted’ by the excellent George C. Marshall Center and the Munich Security Conference. The aim of this high-level working group is to explore those areas of grand (and not-so-grand) strategy where Germany and the United States should co-operate more fully in pursuit of peace and stability.  It is a timely and much needed initiative.

Now, I suppose my first port of call should be to define the meaning of ‘special relationship’. President Trump, in the way that President Trump does, put the UK-US special relationship this way, “The special relationship between America and the UK has been one of the great forces in history for justice and for peace, and by the way, my mother was born in Scotland, Stornoway, which is serious Scotland”.  His essential point is that for the past seventy or so years the US and UK working together have been one of the “…great forces in history”.

The contemporary West certainly needs a strong German-US strategic relationship and for it to be a new force in history. Sadly, with the UK in a mess, and the British political elite seemingly incapable of rising the challenges of the twenty-first century, the two anchor states of the West are undoubtedly Germany and the United States.  Nor, as a Brit, am I particularly concerned about the strategic eclipsing of Britain by Germany, were it the case. My German friends can irritate the hell out of me, primarily because they have a tendency to believe they are always right about everything all of the time, even when they are plain wrong. Americans? Their collective and complete refusal to properly understand the causes of Brexit being a case-in-point.
 
Equally, I am equally irritated by those, particularly in my own country, who seek to equate contemporary liberal democratic Germany with Nazi Germany simply because they resent powerful Germany.  As L.P. Hartley once wrote, “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”.  In other words, the need for America and Germany to lead, and preferably lead together, is just plain power-sense.

It is at that point the complexities in the German-US relationship become apparent. Donald Trump’s other point was that kinship does indeed play a role in the US-UK special relationship.  It is changing, and over time will change, but whilst the US and UK are very different countries, with the latter very much a European country, there are still powerful cultural ties between the two that do not exist between Germany and the US.

Moreover, the ‘special’ bit in the special relationship has hitherto been founded on a level of mutual trust and respect of such import that the most sensitive of material and information continues to be shared between the US and UK (although whether that trust survive a Jeremy Corbyn government in London is a moot point).  It is this ‘automaticity’ of trust that is missing in the German-US relationship.  Indeed, I would go as far as to say that the US and German establishments are profoundly ambivalent about each other, and that such ambivalence goes far deeper than the implicit animosity that characterises the Merkel-Trump non-relationship.

This is a shame because as America’s over-stretched, world-wide reach grows relatively weaker over time as China and other ‘super-regional powers’ rise to challenge Washington’s writ the US will rely ever more on powerful allies and partners such as Germany. And, with Britain leaving the EU (if one reads the small-print of this week’s deal Britain really is leaving the EU) and with Berlin leading the way to deeper European integration, Germany will inevitably become relatively more powerful, and thus more vital to the US.

There is, however, a very large caveat with my thesis – Germany and its attitude to the utility and use of military power.  As the Loisach Group debated with Germans occupying the 'high' ground of theory, whilst Americans seeking joint policy action, a few hundred kilometres to the West a ceremony was taking place of profound strategic and political significance.  Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II was commissioning the first of Britain’s new 70,000 ton aircraft carrier’s HMS Queen Elizabeth into the Royal Navy. 

Now, being rude about my country is a European habit these days because Brexit has dared pose a question the Euro-Aristocracy regard as heretical and would rather not have asked; who governs us? And, yes, one can nit-pick over the number of aircraft Big Lizzie will operate etc. etc.  However, the simple truth is that Britain will soon have two such ships that will greatly assist the United States to maintain global military reach.  Germany does not have, nor will it have anything like such military power. 

You see, for all the bluster about the ‘special relationship’ over the decades, culture, shared values, kinship et al, it was only ever REALLY special when Britain brought significant additional military heft to America’s super-heft (are you listening Mr Hammond?). Or, to put it another way, for all their challenges the British face they are investing in the kind of military force projection the Americans see as power vital to maintaining a special relationship, whilst the Germans, who continue to see ‘power’ in very different and mainly civilian and institutional ways, are not.
 
The subject for the Group’s discussion was, Harmonizing German and US Engagement with Russia.  As I sat through the various presentations I became ever more convinced the title of the meeting should have been, Harmonizing German and US Engagement with Each Other.  This is a vital mission because the German-US strategic partnership really matters. However, the Americans see the centre of gravity of the relationship as primarily helping them by better sharing burdens to offset their increasing military-strategic over-stretch, whilst the Germans see it as part of a non-military grand bargain that would constrain, as much as reinforce American might. As long as that fundamental fissure exists the best that will be said of the German-US strategic relationship is that is essential, rather than special. 

Still, the Loisach Group has a vital role to play to strengthen what is for all my caveats a, if not the vital strategic transatlantic relationship of the twenty-first century. For, to re-phrase Bismarck, in the twenty-first century there is no longer a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children, Germans, or even Americans.

Julian Lindley-French 

Monday 4 December 2017

The Future of European Militaries

“European militaries will need (at the very least) to undertake three security and defence roles, possibly simultaneously. First, to deter Russia and if needs be defend NATO and the EU from an armed Russian incursion. Second, to help stabilise states and regions in chaos, which in turn threatens European security. Third, to ensure and assure interoperability with the US future force”.
Report on the high-level conference The Future of European Militaries, Wilton Park, 25-27 September, 2017

Download my conference report at:

Alphen, Netherlands. 4 December.  My reports are rather liked the ill-famed urban legend about London busses of old. You wait for ages for one and then four come along at the same time.  For those of us schooled many years ago by waiting in the bloody rain for the dreaded ‘216’ non-bus service this story is more than legend. It is where soggy characters were formed and drenched backbones stiffened. Indeed, there were times after a particularly long wait I wondered if the bloody bus itself was mere legend.

A month ago you had my paper co-written with Allen, Breedlove and Zambellas on Future War NATO (https://www.globsec.org/publications/future-war-nato-hybrid-war-hyper-war-via-cyber-war/). Three weeks ago you had my report for the Canadian Global Affairs Institute on Brexit and the Shifting Pillars of NATO (http://www.cgai.ca/brexit_and_the_shifting_pillars_of_nato). Last week you had the entire opus of the GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Initiative Final Report plus all supporting papers (https://www.globsec.org/publications/one-alliance-future-tasks-adapted-alliance/). Of course, they are all brilliant and particularly reasonably-priced – they cost nowt!  Today, for your delight and delectation, I offer you my latest scribbling my Wilton Park report entitled The Future of European Militaries. You lucky, lucky people. And you thought Christmas was still weeks away?  

First, my thanks.  The report emerges from a great conference held at the Foreign and Commonwealth Agency Wilton Park deep in the beautiful Sussex countryside between 25th and 27th September.  My dear friend, Wilton Park Programme Director Dr Robert Grant and I had the pleasure of co-chairing the conference with me acting as Scribbler-in-Chief or Rapporteur. My thanks go also to the staff at Wilton Park who do such a fantastic job looking after the conference delegates. My good friend Dr Holger Mey at Airbus, and Cdr Jeroen de Jonge at the Dutch scientific research company TNO stumped up much of the sponsorship for the conference, along with the UK Ministry of Defence (thank you chaps!), and my old friend Dr Jeff Larsen at the NATO Defence College in Rome.

So, what, after all the necessary formalities, did we actually conclude about the future of European militaries, other than it would be a very good idea if they had a future, and that said future was a together future?  The conference focused on six themes: force structure, threat and response, the implications of Brexit for European security and defence, technology and future war, institutional and command relationships, and the future of European militaries.

The conference also endeavoured to answer pivotal questions that the leaders of European states need to answer right now. What will be the centre of gravity of European forces in the twenty-first century? Should a European future force be focused on the warfighting high-end of the conflict spectrum, or the medium to low end? What balance between force mass and force manoeuvre should European militaries aspire to? Is there sufficient consensus among, and between Europeans to fashion what would look like a European force credible across the conflict spectrum?

The conference concluded that if those questions are to be answered positively then European militaries will need to “embrace broad spectrum innovation” that combines technologies, skills and knowledge into an affordable, but necessarily radical future force concept”.

Key findings (inter alia) from the conference were:
·       European defence planning must be able to satisfy national requirements, enable pan-European cooperation, and ensure interoperability with US, Canadian and other forces.
·       Credible deterrence and defence rest on the twin pillars of military capabilities and capacity.
·       The European command and control (C2) structure needs to be sufficiently robust to enable Europeans to be force providers, command European operations, and organise European militaries into a far more coherent and consistent force.
·       No single European country can any longer afford complete strategic autonomy.
·       Smaller European states should be organised into EU and NATO compatible groupings. PESCO can help with the development of such groupings.
·       The NATO Defence Planning Process (NDPP) should act as the “interoperability pivot” by promoting “enhanced transatlantic interoperability”.
·       Procurement and acquisition must be re-established on new, common and shared requirements that underpin national, EU and NATO defence industrial policy.
·       Acquisition and innovation cycles must be accelerated.
·       NATO and the European Defence Agency (EDA) must harmonise their respective efforts to operationalise innovation and to ensure security of supply and re-supply.
·       NATO and the EU must be far better able to talk to each other at all levels, and during all stages of a crisis.
·       The US needs to be clearer about the future strategic partnership it seeks with its European allies.
·       Europeans must better understand the role of force across the conflict spectrum from hybrid war to cyber war to hyper war.
·       NATO needs more forces throughout the command structure.
·       Speed of recognition during a crisis is vital to understand when an attack is an attack.
·       The Allies should create an A2/AD bubble over the Baltic States.

To conclude, future war will demand a smart mass of forces able to exert influence and effect across great distance very quickly, particularly as new technologies such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing massively and irrevocably speed up the command pace of war. Therefore, given the threat array Europe’s armed forces need to be bigger, stronger, and more agile, smarter and with far more capability and capacity than they enjoy today. They will also need to be allied more deeply to sharper intelligence-led indicators that are better able to warn of pending danger.

Or, in other words, Europeans will need a combined future force able to undertake at least one major joint operation and three smaller joint operations. And, to create such a force in the current strategic, political, financial and economic environment Europeans together need to act now.

Britain?  Brexit or no the British must be at the core of such efforts as the UK provides 30% of Europe’s high-end military capability. The message? United we stand, or divided we fall. One final thing – the conference concluded that there was a vital missing ingredient in the goulash of European militaries: political leadership! Ho hum…

Julian Lindley-French

Friday 1 December 2017

One Alliance: Adaptation and Deterrence

“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity to take things for granted”.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

Download ALL the new GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Initiative main reports and supporting papers at:

Alphen, Netherlands. 1 December. What a week! On Monday I had the honour of being part of a delegation presenting the new GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Report to NATO Deputy Secretary-General Goettemoeller in Brussels. The next day I flew to Rome to attend a high-level conference on NATO and nuclear deterrence at the NATO Defence College, and which was organised by my friend Dr Jeff Larsen. Now? I am knackered.

First, NATO adaptation. Fifty years on from the last great attempt to ‘adapt’ NATO with the 1967 Harmel Report, and the Alliance adoption of the then new doctrine of Flexible Response (to replace Massive Retaliation) the new report considers the future of the Alliance in the round.  To that end, and for for some fifteen months past, I have had the pleasure of being a member of, and lead writer for a steering committee which included a former NATO Deputy Secretary-General, a former minister of defence and chairman of the NATO Military Committee, a former ambassador to the North Atlantic Council and former senior NATO commanders.  Led by General John R. Allen of the US, the Steering Committee comprised Admiral Giampaolo di Paola of Italy, General Wolf Langheld of Germany, Ambassador Alexander Vershbow of the US, Ambassador Tomas Valasek of Slovakia…and me of Sheffield, Yorkshire, ardent Sheffield United fan, but apart from that no other claim to fame whatsoever.

This massive project was also reinforced with some truly excellent supporting papers by leading practitioners and thinkers such as General Knud Bartels (Denmark), General Philip M. Breedlove (US), Ian Brzezinski (US), Professor Paul Cornish (UK), Professor Karl-Heinz Kamp (Germany), Professor Michael O’Hanlon, Ambassador Stefano Stefanini (Italy), Jim Townsend (US), Admiral George Zambellas (UK) and organised by the excellent Slovak think-tank GLOBSEC and their brilliant young leaders Robert Vass and Alena Kudzko.

The main report One Alliance: The Future Tasks of the Adapted Alliance has over fifty considered recommendations across thirteen main domains that can be thus summarised: embrace new geostrategic and transatlantic realities; further strengthen NATO’s deterrence and defence posture; re-establish a high-level of NATO military ambition; strengthen NATO’s role in counter-terrorism; engage with Russia and Ukraine on the basis of principle, promote a broad NATO security agenda; craft a smarter NATO; create an ambitious and comprehensive NATO-EU Strategic Partnership; foster wider strategic partnerships; better equip and afford NATO; deepen relations with established defence industries; forge deep partnerships with new defence sectors with leading companies in the field of artificial intelligence such as SparkCognition; and purposively equip NATO for the future of war.  

How will the Alliance adapt? NATO faces the same problem as the poor American traveller in that corny, but nevertheless telling Irish joke about if one wants to get to Dublin one would not start here.  NATO will need to do something for which it is politically, constitutionally and institutionally ill-suited; be radical.  Indeed, as the Executive Summary of the report states: “To lay the basis for long-term adaptation, NATO leaders should commission a strategy review at the July 2018 Summit that could be completed by the seventieth anniversary summit in 2019, and which might be embodied in a new Strategic Concept.  NATO needs a forward-looking strategy that sets out how NATO will meet the challenges of an unpredictable and fast-changing world”.

Second, Rome, the Alliance and the future of nuclear deterrence.  NATO is a defensive alliance, but it is also unashamedly a nuclear alliance. Now, I know such language horrifies many people but nuclear weapons are a vital part of the “appropriate mix” of defensive and deterrent weapons the Alliance needs to maintain a credible Deterrence and Defence Posture (DDPR).  Back in 1967 when Pierre Harmel and his team completed his seminal report The Future Tasks of the Alliance ‘deterrence’ was maintained by a sufficiency of conventional and nuclear forces.  Today, new technology has rendered conceivable the rapid destruction by an adversary of the critical functioning of an Alliance state or states via a mix of disabling disinformation, crippling ‘de-organisation’, critical infrastructure collapse and mass disruption, even before mass destruction is unleashed.  Holistic dismantling is clearly the mix of offensive strategies Russia has adopted.

By way of credible deterrent response the Alliance will need new ways to protect its people and its societies (resiliency) and ‘project’ deterrence. Indeed, deterrence without resiliency is impossible. That will, in turn, need a new way of thinking about deterrence to enable it to reach across the new coercion/escalation spectrum from hybrid war to hyper war via cyber war, further underpinned by new critical relationships between civilian and military expertise. Nuclear deterrence? Nuclear weapons exist to check-mate nuclear weapons until the political conditions exist to enable their verifiable eradication.  

The message from both Brussels and Rome? If NATO does not adapt to the dangerous but very changed and rapidly changing strategic environment of the twenty-first century NATO could fail. Unless as part of adaptation nuclear deterrence is modernised in line with a new concept of deterrence that stretches across a resiliency, conventional, unconventional, nuclear deterrence paradigm then the Alliance itself could unwittingly lower the threshold for nuclear use as through our collective weakness we inadvertently return to an implicit doctrine of Massive Retaliation.

One final thing. At the start of my 2014 Oxford Handbook of War (which is brilliant and very reasonably-priced) I quote Plato. “Only the dead have seen the end of war”.  Sadly, I fear the great man was right then and is right today. You see NOTHING can be taken for granted in this brave new world by NATO, our countries or even you and me. NATO is there to prevent war, but only a properly adapted NATO can do that.

Julian Lindley-French

Friday 24 November 2017

Brexit: The Geopolitical Price for Humiliating Britain

Alphen, Netherlands. 24 November. In January 2016 I stood in the snow near Trakai, Lithuania and made an important decision.  In spite of my profound concerns about the EU and the future direction of travel towards an over-centralised ‘Europe’, as the Commission endeavoured to build its ‘tower’ ever closer to Euro-heaven, and the danger it poses to substantive democracy on the Continent I would reject Brexit.  My decision came after listening to H.E. Linas Linkevicius, the Lithuanian Foreign Minister, at the famous Snowmeeting.  At that moment I became a ‘Big Picture Remainer’ and decided geopolitics, particularly the threat posed by Russia to my friends in the Baltic States, Poland and elsewhere trumped my concerns about who governs me.  I have not changed my position. However, I now fear for the Brexit humiliation of Britain and the geopolitical consequences that will ensue.

Yesterday, I read carefully the 20 November Brexit speech Chief EU Negotiator Michel Barnier made to a Brussels conference organised by Charles Grant’s Centre for European Reform. Now, I know that M. Barnier is at the negotiating schwerpunkt of Brexit and that he has ambitions to become the next President of the European Commission.  And, for much of the speech he merely stated the obvious – “Brexit must mean Brexit” and the “orderly withdrawal” of Britain from the EU must see solutions found for the divorce bill, citizens’ rights, the inner-Irish border, and so-called ‘pass-porting rights’ for banks based in the City of London post-Brexit.

However, by far the most unconvincing part of his speech was when he said his objective was not to punish Britain. Yes, it is. As former Minister and TV pundit Michael Portillo said last night, Barnier’s aim is to discourage others from making “a break for the prison walls”. Now, I might use different language but Barnier and his colleagues of course need to be seen to punish Britain if for no other reason…pour encourager les autres. Indeed, to the EU Britain has become a latter day Admiral Byng.

This morning Prime Minister May is in Brussels to discuss with European Council President Donald Tusk upping the Brexit divorce bill to some £40bn in return for a written commitment that the EU will begin trade talks.  Good luck with that.  She is also there to attend the EU’s Eastern Partnership Summit (I wonder if in future there will be EU Western Partnership summits) with six states, as the name suggests, to the east of the EU.  May will not only confirm, and rightly so, that Britain will maintain its commitment to the security and defence of Eastern Europe post-Brexit, she will also offer some £100m of British taxpayer’s money to counter disinformation in the region.

So, all well and good? No. First, beyond the liberal chattering classes one finds in London, British think-tanks, and politically mono-cultural EUtopian British universities there is growing public anger at what is perceived as the Brexit humiliation of Britain by the EU. Mine is not a scientific survey but the more ‘ordinary’ Brits to whom I speak, both erstwhile Brexiteers and Remainers, I detect growing anger as what many see now as an attack on Britain. Whatever May and the Establishment say it could well become very hard to convince British citizens to risk geld and lives for what one called those, “bastards trying to damage us”. They thought democracy meant they had a legitimate choice.

Second, if one examines ‘planned’ cuts to the British armed forces under the forthcoming National Security Capability Review that National Security Adviser Mark Sedwill is conducting, much of the axe will (again) fall on those very high-end expeditionary forces needed to defend allies in an emergency, such as the Royal Marines.  Given the cuts it is hard to escape the impression that Britain is retreating behind its nuclear deterrent.  After all, Britain is a nuclear island power.

Third, will Britain’s expeditionary spirit survive Brexit and Trump? In an email exchange this week with a very close friend, who happens also to be a former US Ambassador to NATO, he warned me to get used to the end of the ‘special relationship’ with the Americans and recognise that henceforth London can expect no more than a “transactional relationship” with Washington.  By way of return, Washington had better get used to the British being 'non-actional'. The only thing that has been keeping Britain’s expeditionary spirit alive these past decades is history and the demand by the Americans for British support. If the Americans don’t give a damn about Britain, and Europeans simply want to damn Britain, and a significant part of the population does not believe in British military power anyway then beyond the inevitably rhetorical we could be witnessing the beginning of the end, if not the very end, of British expeditionary internationalism.

On Monday I will launch the massive GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Report at NATO HQ.  As a member of a high-level Steering Committee I am proud of the work we have done looking to the future of NATO and the many papers that have been produced under the orb of the project by some of the West’s best strategists.  And yet, I cannot but feel a sense of foreboding, particularly concerning four of the central assumptions that underpin the Alliance.  Firstly, that the Americans will really remain committed to NATO and the defence of Europe in the future.  Secondly, that Europeans really will spend enough on defence, and organise sufficiently well, to justify the American taxpayer continuing to guarantee European security and defence.  Thirdly, that NATO and the EU really will forge an effective partnership that will ensure sound security across the conflict spectrum. Fourthly, that in spite of Britain’s Brexit humiliation, a country which remains for the moment a leading economic and military power, will also remain not only committed to the defence of Europe, but able to play its full and appropriate role in defending Europe.  Much of that role will also rely on a continuing close strategic relationship between London and Paris. However, as my well-placed sources tell me, Paris under President Macron is in the vanguard of those EU countries wanting to punish/damage Britain for Brexit. Pas bon, mes amis!

To conclude, I remain a ‘Big Picture Remainer’. However, the simple geopolitical truth is it is impossible to separate Brexit from the EU from European defence from NATO. Let’s hope a Brexit breakthrough is made this December, even though with Germany in such a political shambles it is hard to see how such a leap forward can take place. If the current tensions pertain for too long then not only will the EU lose Britain, but also I fear the US will lose Britain, and possibly even NATO in all but name. In which case, Britain would become like any other European – talking about defence, investing little in it, and able to do little for it.  PESCO?

As for my country being humiliated, that is certainly how I feel right now. Sadly, as our Irish friends revealed this week, such humiliation is in no small part due to the incompetence of the people who lead it, and the profound divisions between them over Brexit. 

Europe must see the Big Picture of Brexit and sort it out quickly, before it becomes any more toxic.


Julian Lindley-French 

Tuesday 21 November 2017

Brexit and the Shifting Pillars of the Alliance

Alphen, Netherlands. 21 November.  It is my honour to announce the publication by the Canadian Global Affairs Institute of my latest paper Brexit and the Shifting Pillars of the Alliance. The paper can be downloaded at:


Will Britain’s departure from the EU lead to the creation of an Anglosphere and a Eurosphere within NATO? Unfortunately, there are a range of challenges to such a formulation. First, if the EU continues to drive a hard post-Brexit relationship with the British, it may be increasingly difficult for any government in London to convince the British people that other Europeans are worth defending. Second, would the United States, Canada and others entertain such an idea? Third, France is not going to abandon its strategic relationship with Britain – Brexit or no Brexit. Fourth, there will be a Brexit deal and Britain will remain a key factor in European defence. Fifth, “events, dear boy, events!” However, Brexit or no Brexit, NATO’s pillars are shifting. The United States will demand more of its allies if Washington is to maintain a credible security and defence guarantee for Europe. The changing nature of conflict will tend to emphasise intelligence and power projection, both of which play to Britain’s residual strengths. 

Canada? It is hard for an outsider to discern Canadian defence policy, other than bumbling along in strategic suburbia with the desire to be seen as the good neighbour. This is a mistake. NATO’s shifting pillars will have profound implications for Canadian security and defence policy. A formal Anglosphere and Eurosphere within NATO? Most likely not. A U.S.-sphere and German-sphere? Quite possibly, but don’t mention it in polite company. Canada? Who knows?

Julian Lindley-French

Friday 17 November 2017

PESCO, Collective Pretence and the 2% Scam

“The difference between a republic and an empire is the loyalty of one’s army”.
Gauis Julius Caesar

Alphen, Netherlands. 17 November. Here we go again! Another EU defence initiative that promises a roaring lion, but delivers a squeaking mouse.  PESCO, or permanent structured co-operation, was launched amidst the usual political fanfare, as have so many such initiatives over the years.  With its ‘voluntary’ projects across the operational and defence-industrial landscape for those EU member-states willing to co-operate PESCO is meant to pave the way to an eventual European Defence Union or EDU, even though the €5bn ($6.5bn) on offer to realise such a goal is by defence standards not even paltry. Rather, PESCO echoes the failed 1952-1954 European Defence Community (see my Oxford Chronology of European Security and Defence, which is brilliant and very reasonably-priced). Is PESCO any different from its failed predecessors? Europe certainly needs to address its appalling defence deficit.

Let me put PESCO in its very hard strategic context. In the forthcoming new and massive GLOBSEC NATO Adaptation Report, for which I am lead writer and which will be published later this month, the facts are clear.  The United States provides 75% of Alliance forces and pays some 68% of the cost. The 70:30 Alliance defence investment split between the US and its allies is simply unsustainable.  If NATO is to survive sooner rather than later Europeans must shoulder at least 50% of Europe’s defence burden.  That means, at the very least, all NATO Europeans (and others) meeting the solemn pledge they all made at the 2014 NATO Wales Summit to spend by 2024 2% GDP on defence, of which 20% each year would be spent on new equipment. If Europeans honoured the Defence Investment Pledge or DIP they would release an extra $100bn into the European defence effort each year. That is the order of magnitude of defence investment needed to make PESCO more than yet another political alibi for collective defence pretence.

For the record, I am not one of those Brits who is implacably opposed to a strong NATO-friendly EU defence role.  And, whether more and better European defence spending is EU or NATO-focused I am pretty much beyond caring, if at last it leads to a strategically-responsible Europe. I am also an expert. My PhD in Florence was on this precise topic, and I was one of the many architects of the ‘breakthrough’ November 1998 St Malo Declaration (if you do not believe me read my piece in the June 1998 edition of New Statesman entitled Time to Bite the Eurobullet).  Back in the day (I think that is the fashionable way of saying some time ago) I was also lead writer for the famous, if slightly unfortunately named Venusberg Group and its many reports on EU security and defence. To top all that I worked for the EU on this very issue.

Furthermore, if PESCO did indeed lead to an enhanced and more autonomous European pillar of a revamped post-Brexit NATO, and helped to make European defence industries more than the scam on taxpayers too many of them are, then all well and good.  However, this PESCO will not realise that aim. Or, to put it another way, PESCO is yet another one of those unfunded aspirations, politics dressed up as strategy, political pretence masquerading as European defence démarches that the EU often resorts to when facing a crisis  - in this case Brexit.

It is only by reading between PESCO’s lines do the real political objectives become apparent.  At the risk of scrambling my acronyms, far from a decisive move towards an EDU PESCO has been created to avoid the DIP and thus offer a way out for those many NATO Europeans now reneging on the Wales pledge. PESCO does that by implying that deeper European defence integration could in time lead to the same ‘Wales’ defence outcomes albeit at lower levels of investment via better spending.

PESCO, as with all such EU initiatives, is also all things to all 23 signatories, all of which want something different from it, and none of whom are prepared to spend the money needed to close the gap between lofty language and Europe’s failing defence.  Indeed, the suggestion by German Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen that PESCO is somehow Europeans taking responsibility for their own defence in the face of a capricious American president is simply nonsense, defence pretence at its worst.

The main PESCO players also want different things. Berlin wants to avoid defence leadership at all costs for fear of history and the EU looking even more like a putative German Empire. Germany is also acutely aware that if Berlin honours its DIP commitment to spend 2% on defence that would mean a Bundeswehr with a budget of some $70bn per annum, dwarfing the British and French defence budgets.  It would not only be the German people who would be uncomfortable with that.  PESCO is for the Germans a defence alibi and, frankly, one that is understandable.

France, on the other hand, sees PESCO very differently. With echoes of its Gaullist traditions Paris wants an autonomous European military core group that would support France and its expeditionary missions. However, for all President Macron’s talk of a European Defence Union, France will never permit its armed forces to be submerged into some kind of European Army. The most important defence-strategic relationship for France is with the non-PESCO pesky Brits, Europe’s other nuclear and power projection power – Brexit or no Brexit. The rest?  They are all either broke, have no strategic tradition to speak of, or suffer strategically-illiterate political leaders who would simply like nasty things like defence to go away. Only those on the front-lines of European defence, such as the Baltic States and Poland, really understand or believe that credible European military force matters any more.

PESCO will also fail. There is a fatal tension between the stated strategic objectives of PESCO and its proposed political and military structures.  If a group of countries begin to move towards a more common defence by creating a more integrated military force, its timely use at a time of crisis can only be ensured by a more integration command structure.  To be credible either as a deterrent or a defence such a force would also need integration to go to the very top of supreme political authority. In other words, PESCO, and by extension EDU, would need a European government. If not, 23 separate states are unlikely ever to agree to their people being sent into harm’s way unless it is for a very ‘permissive operation’, i.e. not dangerous at all, or World War Three, in which case Europeans would turn desperately to NATO and America. The same problem bedevilled the once much-heralded, but now forgotten EU Battlegroups, which one French military friend of mine calls “EU lunch groups”.

One of the perks of my job is I get to go places. On Wednesday I sat on a bench above Rome’s Circus Maximus, where once chariots raced to the death, gazing up at the mighty remains on the Colis Palatinus where in quick historical succession Caesar Augustus, Tiberius, Nero and Domitian built their enormous imperial palace.  And yet it lies in ruin. Rotten from within self-obsessed Rome eventually fell because it had lost the will to defend either its interests or its values, unable to afford the means for its own defence in a world no longer in awe of Roman power. Europe?  Europe is already a continent of self-willed decliners. And, as Caesar implied, for the use of force to be credible the people on whose behalf it is used must believe it to be legitimate. Like it or not, and as of yet, not enough Europeans want the EU to defend them.  Consequently, like so many ghosts of EU defence past PESCO will vanish down the PLUG-OLE of history.

If PESCO would help Europeans begin to close the yawning gap between what they need to spend on their own defence, and what they are willing or able to spend then OK.  It is European weakness as much as Russian ‘strength’ that is helping to de-stabilise Europe’s eastern flank. However, even a cursory analysis suggests that PESCO is simply another a bit of re-heated old EU freezer fodder bought from the defence equivalent of LIDL. You see the real problem of PESCO is that EU leaders do not mean what they say. If they did they would vote the means to realise their vision, not simply talk endlessly about the ends and the ways of it, like some scene in some ghastly arty European sequel to Bill Murray’s film Groundhog Day.  

Still, at least PESCO has EUtopian fantasists excited. For them PESCO is nothing to do with the defence of Europe (it never is). It is all about who or what governs Europe. Plus ça change…

Julian Lindley-French

Monday 13 November 2017

What is wrong with Trump Foreign Policy?

“Who do I call if I want to call America?”
Dr Henry Kissinger re-imagined.

Alphen, Netherlands. 13 November. What is wrong with Trump foreign policy? There was an audible hissing sound as President Trump gave his ill-judged America First speech to the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit in Da Nang, Vietnam this past Thursday.  It was the sound of hot air escaping from the balloon marked “American influence in Asia”.  As he spoke another balloon, a big red one, was inflating. It read, “Chinese influence in Asia”. Something that President Xi rammed home in his speech the same day.  The sight of an American president calling essentially for protectionism, and a Chinese president championing free trade (albeit pretend free trade) added yet another perceived twist to America’s topsy-turvy foreign policy.
 
It was not without a certain tragic historical irony that the Trump speech took place in Da Nang, Vietnam’s third largest city.  Da Nang is in many ways the poster city for post-war American foreign policy failure.  It was in Da Nang that US combat operations in the Vietnam War ended on 13 August, 1972. It was also Da Nang that was the last city that Communist forces ‘liberated’ on 30 March, 1975.

Now (to mix my metaphors), I am not a member of those seemingly countless ‘headless chicken’ Europeans who a year ago met the elevation of Donald J. Trump to the White House by running around doing passible impressions of Edvard Monck’s The Scream.  Many of those same Europeans, by the way, expect Americans to pay for their defence whilst they feel free to insult America and its president.  My respect for the United States, the Office of President and the American people is too great for me to join that coterie of clowns.  There are also friends of mine in the Administration whom I both respect and like.
 
Still, what happened in Da Nang this past week revealed something that is now inescapable; by equating foreign policy with the art of the deal President Trump fundamentally fails to grasp the nature of foreign policy.  The core assumption upon which he bases his interpretation of foreign policy is also wrong: that America is so powerful that it alone gets to choose the nature of geopolitics.  Rather, President Trump’s take on foreign policy is the ‘shining megapolis on a mountain’ view of such policy, in which constraining institutions such as APEC, EU, even NATO, and most definitely the UN are for lesser states whilst mighty America stands above and beyond like some latter day Hobbesian Leviathan.

China begs to differ, and now has the power that differing no longer requires China to beg.  Beijing skilfully used APEC to reinforce the mechanisms it is constructing to exert growing power and influence, which for all the warm words of President Xi, China sees coming at America’s zero sum expense. America? In making that America First speech in Da Nang President Trump walked into a carefully constructed Chinese trap.

And yet the problem with contemporary US foreign policy goes deeper than the wiles of a capricious president.  There are simply not enough people making US foreign policy and doing ‘it’. One of the most revealing facts about nature of the Administration is the number of posts at Assistant Secretary of State (and equivalent) level in Washington that remain vacant.  ‘ASSes’ are in the boiler-room of American foreign policy and where much of the grunt work is done to maintain existing relationships and build new ones in pursuit of the national interest – the essence of the conduct of foreign policy.  The Administration undertook a wholesale clear-out when it came into office, but has yet to show any signs of a wholesale clear-in.

It is thus very hard to know to whom one must talk to in Washington these days.  For the past year the Administration has been locked in an ideological struggle with itself for the soul of American foreign policy.  With Steve Bannon now gone from the White House it appeared that the radical America First/America Isolated school of thought had been banished, and that the more establishment American internationalist/realist school had prevailed. Indeed, foreign and security policy professionals such as Secretary of Defense Mattis and National Security Advisor McMaster seemed to have gained the upper hand.

Not last week! President Trump was in full America Alone mode.  Yes, he is right that too many of America’s trade partners engage in dodgy trade practices.  And yes, such rhetoric plays well to his dwindling political base back home.  However, it is unlikely that such an approach will make the lives of his followers better, other than providing them with the short-term pleasure of pissing off pesky foreigners.

The implications for the wider West are dramatic, and all involve relative decline.  With Europeans engaged in the seemingly never-ending Battle of Ant Hill over Brexit, also refusing to see that the EU is fast becoming a temporary alibi for a continent of decliners, and having abandoned any pretence to global role beyond endlessly aspiring to it, the Americans are left to ‘lead’ in isolation. Indeed, European critics of Trump should look closer to home. Euro-isolationism is a major cause of the West’s precipitous decline, which is often overlooked masked, as it is, in so many layers of Euro-bullxit.
 
Back to that hissing sound. Taken together President Trump’s decidedly lukewarm attitude towards NATO and its European allies (rightly or wrongly), the abandonment of the Paris Climate Change Accord, the weakening of NAFTA, and the rejection of the Trans-Pacific Partnership all suggest to us pesky foreigners that far from America First, America is in retreat. 

An America in retreat simply creates a power vacuum. That was the other hissing sound at APEC; China filling it! President Trump fails to understand that foreign policy is the art of engagement, not the art of the deal. He also fails to understand that America is not powerful enough, if it ever was, to lead without the support of allies and partners the world-over.  However, it is hard for allies to support a divided Administration.

Henry Kissinger once complained that he did not know who to call if he wanted to call ‘Europe’.  Today, it is hard to know who to call if one wants to call America.  This is a disaster not just for America, but the West and the wider world.  You see, for all the poise and confidence displayed by China’s President Xi, China is no America. Chinese internationalism is very different to American internationalism, for all its faults of commission and omission.  Why? Chinese internationalism is about Chinese power red in tooth and claw, with not a value in sight.  The world will be far more dangerous for it.

Give me a call sometime, America.


Julian Lindley-French