It would seem rash to suggest that the most recent shared Anglo-American military operations, in Iraq and Afghanistan, have been an unqualified success. This is not the place to discuss either in detail. But I suspect history will judge that in Afghanistan, having started by doing the right thing in evicting Al Qaeda, we have ended up fighting the wrong war, without much advancing either the struggle against international terrorism, or the vast and intractable challenge of stabilizing Pakistan.
A while ago, I heard a then-defence secretary argue that the Iraq and Afghan interventions have been so unpopular here that they rendered it unlikely a British government could for years reconcile the electorate to another military adventure abroad. Libya suggests that he is wrong, though it is by no means assured that story will be concluded without tears before bedtime.
And whatever happens there, and whatever the personal instincts and inclinations of presidents and prime ministers, it seems overwhelmingly likely the Western powers will again find themselves obliged to deploy forces abroad because, as Charles Guthrie so sensibly observes, ‘something always happens’, and usually of a kind which- like Libya- nobody had previously thought of.
The one certainty in Anglo-American relations is that if we wish to play our traditional role abroad in pursuit of any perceived important Western foreign policy objective, to enjoy America’s confidence and share its secrets, we must own armed forces and intelligence assets capable of earning these things. If the European project had evolved as its founders hoped, long before today’s date a degree of defence integration would have been achieved which would have provided this continent with formidable, flexible and widely-capable armed forces. As it is, not only do such forces not exist, but there seems no likelihood of their doing so in the future.
NATO secretary-general Anders Rasmussen said in an important recent speech that the global order ‘has more stakeholders than ever before, and yet very few guarantors. Europe is still one of them, but for how long ?…Although defence is and must remain the prerogative of sovereign powers, an alliance that brings Europe and North America together requires an equitable sharing of the burden in order to be efficient…At the current pace of cuts, it is hard to see Europe could maintain enough military capabilities to sustain similar operations [to Libya] in the future’. Since the end of the Cold War, while the GDP of the European NATO nations has grown by around 55%, their defence spending has fallen by almost 20%. Meanwhile in Asia, Indian defence spending has risen by 59% and China’s has tripled. In 1991, NATO’s European partners contributed one-third of the alliance’s combined defence spend, while the US and Canada contributed the rest. Today, Europe’s share has fallen to a pathetic 21%.
It is not so much that most European countries have the wrong security policies; rather, they have none at all. They address the issue with the Panglossian hope that if they do not take up arms against anybody else, with luck no one will do so against them. The enfeebled condition of Europe’s defences will be extraordinarily hard to remedy. It takes years, even if political will exists, significantly to expand a nation’s armaments. It is impossible at short notice, and in the face of unexpected crisis, rapidly to reinforce. Every power is obliged to take the field with what men, planes and guns it has on the day. And such strength, in the case of Europe and indeed Britain, is not impressive.
‘Hard power can enable peace’, says Anders Rasmussen. Yet he also acknowledges that in the current economic environment, increased defence spending is unlikely. His own solution to Europe’s resource shortfall is that its nations should co-operate much more closely on procurement, so that through a rational distribution of capabilities, the continent becomes capable of deploying credible forces. Yet for decades this objective has foundered on the rocks of rival domestic interests, and frank absence of will in many European societies.
No responsible British government could today make an agreement whereby its European partners would become responsible for, say, airborne surveillance or unmanned drone combat capability in a future deployment, because the risk is far too great that on the day, and for whatever reason, the others simply would not be there. It must be right to pursue shared procurement and manufacturing wherever possible. But France is the only major European power with which the British can plan jointly for future war-fighting contingencies with a reasonable expectation of commitments being fulfilled. Our two nations are the only ones which might be able to maintain armed forces capable of convincing Washington that Europeans can make a meaningful contribution to our common defence. This may be monstrously unfair to British and French taxpayers, but it is the way things are. If we want the US to sustain a military commitment to Europe, the British together with the French must accept a disproportionate share of the burden, because there is nobody much else and that is that.
‘The British’, growled Henry Kissinger a few years ago, ‘are the last people left in Europe who like to fight’. If this is not quite true, it is certainly the case that, when we put our minds to it and commit the necessary resources, we can fight better than any other modern European nation. That superb US ambassador in London Ray Seitz observed twenty years ago that Britain was very foolish to cut its armed forces, as did the then-Tory government, because these continued to command high respect, and were the one asset which made possible what every prime minister yearns for his country to do- punch above its weight.
Britain always has a choice about whether to be a player on the global stage. It is perfectly possible for us to carry on our national business with the relative passivity on supra-national strategic issues of Germany or Italy. But every British government in modern times has opted for a major role abroad, and Libya suggests that David Cameron intends to continue the tradition. Indeed, he has shown himself determined to exercise a leadership role there which the US declines, and which many American policy-makers, in and out of uniform, regard as an unwelcome diversion from their own national strategic priorities.