Britain’s warlike mindset

During, and before, the general election, rhetoric about these being “pre-war” times and talk of conscription/national service was ramped up. Both Labour and the Tories agreed that 2.5% of GDP is a good target for defence spending, although like St Augustine and chastity, “not yet”. Having risen without trace, this 2.5% figure has become as widely accepted as the equally spurious 2% target for inflation, and is almost universally quoted without attribution or justification. Neither party explains where this figure comes from (spoiler alert: arms industry lobbyists). Foreign Secretary David Lammy said this week, to justify cutting the aid budget to waste more on the military: “Putin’s Russia is a threat not only to Ukraine and its neighbours, but to all of Europe, including the UK”. Similarly vague statements are heard from all politicians. But are military threats to the UK increasing? Do they actually exist at all? Why should military spending be proportional to GDP rather than to the scale of the military threat? The Tory government was pledging to raise defence spending to £87bn by 2030 based on 2.5% of projected GDP. Farage’s Reform party even talked of spending 3% of GDP. More recently, Donald Trump has even suggested 5% of GDP as a suitable level of peacetime military spending. Nobody spends this much. This political arms racing has lost all contact with reality. Based on all this talk of big money, and on our record in recent wars, we might be forgiven for concluding that the primary purpose of the Ministry of Defence is to spend a lot of money, rather than actually protecting the nation from enemies.

The discussion of defence normally revolves around conventional bombing-and-shooting wars involving uniformed armies competing over territory. This is the kind of military threat for which a nation maintains an army, navy, and air force. There are other things which can harm our interests; economic and political coercion, imperialist domination (Trump style), cyber sabotage, terrorism, pollution, diseases, resource shortages and so on. But, those are all dealt with in other ways than fighting; they aren’t covered by “defence” in the normal sense of the word.

It has become highly fashionable to speak vaguely of how dangerous the world is these days, and as we obviously cannot rely on Trump’s America to stand with us against enemies, to propose yet more military spending. Even formely skeptical commentators have “reluctantly” gone along with this line. I feel it’s time to offer another view. I’m not a pacifist: I wouldn’t shut down the armed forces altogether. But I do believe they should be exclusively for defence, and primarily for the defence of Britain. The concept of alliance – of a group of countries all defending each other – is getting out of hand. We should not extend such guarantees too freely, nor should the exchange of support be too one-sided.

Deep breath. The simple fact is that there is no conventional military threat to the UK. It is beyond obvious that there is no foreign army standing by to invade this country. Certainly not the armies of China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, or the other members of the usual list of potential enemies. The country most often touted as a threat today is Russia, but their forces have zero capability to invade Britain. That’s “zero”, not “small”. The idea of the Russian army landing, D-day style, in Britain, is laughable. You only have to imagine such a scenario to find it ridiculous. Where would they start from, for one thing? Clearly, they would have to have conquered mainland Europe first.

Three years since invading its much smaller and poorer neighbour, Russia has taken only a 200km wide strip of land, and that at enormous cost in life and material. Are we seriously supposed to believe that they could invade and conquer Western Europe, occupying and controlling it to the point of launching an invasion of Britain? A typical ratio for occupying a country is 20 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. NATO deployed roughly 50,000 soldiers to occupy Kosovo (pop. 2m), for example. To occupy the EU (pop. 450m), on this ratio, would require 9m soldiers – far more than Russia could possibly raise. This was also the case in the old days of the USSR – the West vastly overestimated Soviet military capability in both quality and quantity. But, we were sold this lie for decades during the Cold War. The mighty Red Army was poised to roll West to the Atlantic coastline, we were told: NATO forces would only be able to fight a rearguard action and would have to go nuclear straight away or we would all be subjugated by the commies.

If you seriously imagine there could be a Russian invasion of Britain, you’d better stop reading here, don’t waste your time. But, please give it some thought, just slightly deeper than the “it’s a dangerous world” level.

Still with me? Good. Given that there is no possibility of a Russian invasion of Britain, what threat to our national security is there to which a large army, navy and air force are the answer? For this we have to turn to the “National Security Risk Assessment”, published by the government (Google it). It lists four “tier one” risks to our national security, which are cyber attacks; natural disasters such as floods and epidemics; terrorism; and “an international military crisis between states, drawing in the UK”. Only one of these threats is military (something you can shoot at), and that is not an attack on Britain, but someone else’s war in which we apparently choose to get involved. As for the tier 2 and 3 risks, they are a repetitive Gish Gallop of nuisances which attempt, by filling the page, to add up to a threat level which justifies being armed to the teeth (price instability? Really?).

Of course, we have relied for years on collective security through the NATO alliance, in which member states regard an attack on one as an attack on all. If Russia invaded Latvia, for example (a far more credible scenario), we and the other 30 allies would be obliged to respond as if they had invaded us. But is this something on which we need to spend £60bn or £70bn? When Latvia itself spends about €1.4bn? Perhaps we should be more picky as to which countries we offer our alliance to. Latvia is a nice place, I wish it no ill. But it’s even further away than Ukraine, and we have absolutely no vital national interest there. Indeed, until 1990, it was part of the Great Enemy, the Soviet Union. No doubt we had missiles aimed at Riga. After 1990, we really didn’t give a monkey’s about it until suddenly, in 2004, we were informed that, without our voters being consulted, we had extended our guarantee to Latvia, and from then on, our sons’ lives would be sacrificed to defend it.

We have not, for example, extended this alliance to cover Ukraine, and rightly so. We have slightly more interest in Ukraine; when Russia invaded it 3 years ago, there was a spike in gas prices. But that’s about it.

It is interesting to compare our fortunes with those of other countries, Ireland for example. Non-aligned Ireland has a defence budget of €1.35bn – 0.23% of their GDP – but they haven’t been invaded (at least, not since the last time we did it). Are we, in some way, safer or better off than the Irish for spending so much more? Is it a national disgrace that Ireland is unwilling to spring to the defence of Latvia? Switzerland spends 0.7% of GDP on defence and hasn’t been at war for centuries. Are these countries free-riding on their more warlike neighbours, or are they doing the more sensible thing?

But, that’s the issue, isn’t it? We are more warlike than most other countries. We are quick to threaten and to use force; quick to bomb or invade, quick to throw our weight around. And how much good does it do? Our recent record is not impressive. We seem to think we can set the world to rights by dropping bombs; experience shows this only makes things worse. As for upholding international law, that died in Iraq and its body lies under the rubble of Gaza.

Britain and the USA are warlike countries: we do not reserve the use of military force exclusively for situations where we have been attacked. In our view, war is “a continuation of politics by other means”. We still regard ourselves as the world’s policemen. Despite our dismal record in recent wars, we see military prowess as a source of prestige and status; all our politicians talk brutishly of “punching above our weight”, as if international relations were like a boxing match. Of course, by this definition, Russia is also warlike, and so are many other countries; but not all. The aforementioned examples of Ireland and Switzerland are not, by a long chalk, the only ones which do not get involved in wars of choice, and do not compete in the spending race. Most countries acknowledge, frankly, that they can’t afford to, even a rich country like Japan. And it is incredibly expensive; we flushed away £60bn in the year just ending, and Starmer has just raided the international aid budget to reach even higher levels (again, it is always presented in those irrelevant percentage terms – the actual number is too disconcerting, as it will be close to £70bn).

Being warlike is not in Britain’s interests. It is, obviously, not the only possible response to the existence of other warlike countries, however distant they are. From the perspective of our national security, it is strongly in our best interests to have something like normal relations with Russia. The war in Ukraine is one of the most pointless, stupid, unnecessary, and avoidable wars of my lifetime, and we (the US-led West) should never have got involved in meddling with Ukrainian politics in the first place. It was unbelievably stupid and provocative to offer (in 2008) to bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. Given that we did, it was malicious and hugely harmful to sponsor and engineer the coup in 2014 which brought down the elected government of Yanukovich. Given that we did that, we should not have encouraged Kiev to mount a civil war against the Russian speaking Ukrainians in the Donbass. Give that we did that, we should have made sure that all parties abided by the Minsk agreements; but we didn’t, because at the heart of being a warlike country, is having a warlike, neocon, foreign policy establishment. Against the background of NATO bases encroaching ever closer to Russia’s borders, all these things may, or may not, have been a deliberate attempt to bring about a war such as the current one. I don’t know. It might just have been stupidity rather than malice. But, I’m sure that, even if they didn’t have the degree of control needed to bring it about by design, the neocon warmongers (the faction led, in the US, by such as Victoria Nuland, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz) certainly pushed it along very eagerly. And this goes to show; to be a warlike country, you need enemies, and will create them. A threatening posture is, to some extent, a self-fulfilling prophecy. A far better way to ensure peace in Eastern Europe is to enable Russia to feel secure. We were OK with Ukraine’s situation before 2008; so was Russia. It’s hard to argue that all our meddling has led to a good outcome there.

Then there is the cost. Spending £70bn on unproductive things is an extraordinary burden for a country with a stagnant economy to carry. This sum, if better spent, would be more than enough to fully fund excellent public services and infrastructure. Alternatively, it would more than halve the government deficit. You might think a rather more solid argument would have to be made for spending such a sum, than the staggeringly feeble National Security Risk Assessment. The fact is, security does not follow from frittering away of such vast sums on cold-war weaponry. We could spend 20%, or 50% of GDP on the military, and would be no more secure than Ireland.

We must also discuss the nuclear question. Britain was the third country to build nuclear weapons, after the USA and USSR. It was motivated, as we know, by national pride and the sense of “being a superpower” left over from the days of empire. Ernest Bevin said, “we’ve got to have this thing, whatever it costs, and have the bloody Union Jack on top of it”. Only one country was ever considered as a potential target for this weapon; the USSR. Despite the fact that the USSR no longer exists, we still have the weapons designed to destroy it. We maintain these weapons, not because it shields us from attack, but as a status symbol. It is often said that it is the basis of our claim to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Aside from being obviously wrong (we had that seat before we had a bomb), it is clear that nuclear weapons make the world less safe. The theory of deterrence is so built into political thinking that we even describe the weapons as “the deterrent”. Yet, nobody can explain a credible scenario in which anyone is deterred from anything. Obviously, possession of the bomb has not deterred our opponents in any of the wars we have fought in since 1952; perhaps because those were not wars of national defence in which we faced possible extinction. Nuclear weapons are a suicide pact; mutually assured destruction. Nobody would use them except in extremis, when facing national extinction. The idea seems to be that we could wreak a terrible revenge from beyond the grave if anyone dropped their own atomic bombs on us. Yet, why would they? Again, Russia is the only conceivable potential opponent in this scenario. Why would they nuke us, unless we had somehow driven them to the verge of national extinction? Once again, a more secure defence is not to have a policy of driving other countries to the verge of national extinction. We don’t have to pretend friendship or admiration for Mr Putin, or any other dictator. We are free to disapprove of the oppression people endure in dictatorships. But, it is not our destiny to liberate them. Ask people in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and so on, what happens when we put on the policeman’s hat and go to war. We should not “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy”.

The Cold War pitted the communist countries against the “free world”. Each flashpoint – Korea, Vietnam – was explained as being the domino which, if we let it fall, would topple all the others. This discredited theory was a sufficiently persuasive narrative that the Americans sent millions of their sons to fight (and many to die) in remote places against enemies which had done nothing to harm America. In the end, the only example of a chain of events resembling the domino theory was the step-by-step absorption of former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO. Now, a new dichotomy is promoted: the democracies vs the autocracies. Once again, the tired old domino theory is wheeled out. If Ukraine loses to Russia, Poland/Latvia/Hungary/wherever, will be next! And who knows how far the ripple of falling dominoes will go! Within a few years, we are told, “experts say” that Russia will be able to roll Westwards along that line of falling dominoes! Just like in the old days! And so we end up spending £70bn on defence against this absurd scenario. Well, it was bollocks then, and it’s bollocks today. The way it actually works now is, we set up a domino on the shakiest of ground (Ukraine, Latvia), and then whip up popular fear that it might topple. Without thinking it through, we dumbly accept that we have to spend £70bn a year and prepare to send our sons to die in Latvia. Politicians make ridiculous statements without the slightest supporting argument (see the Lammy quote above) to justify the frenzy of spending. But in what way is Russia a military threat to the UK? Where would the envisaged battles be fought? Russia is certainly a threat to our interests – through cyber attacks, espionage, political interference (Brexit style), and so on – but these are not military threats demanding a military response.

Conversations about war always return to the Second World War, sooner or later, because it is our founding national myth. The lesson of that history is that European nations learned to stop confronting and fighting each other and to live together in “friendship and honest commerce”. Since 1945, that has prevented another war in Western Europe so effectively that we hardly think it possible that such a thing might happen again. If we hadn’t assumed that this period of peace was permanent, we might not have been so quick to leave the EU, and we might be more concerned about the revival of far-right politics in France and Germany. And if we didn’t swallow the myth that we fight wars for moral reasons, rather than to extend or entrench our power, we might be less willing to support and even celebrate war.

Hitler and Napoleon were conventional military threats to Britain, and while we pat ourselves on the back over beating them, in both cases their heaviest defeats were inflicted by Russia. Be that as it may; Britain’s national security derives firstly in being close and friendly with nearby powers such as France and Germany, along with the smaller countries of Western Europe; and secondly from maintaining non-hostile relations with more distant countries. The near neighbours are countries worth being allied to. Any more distant enemy would have to extend itself to an impractical degree to attack our shores. While we have national interests in more distant places – countries which supply us with vital imports, for example – as with Ukraine and gas, it is ineffective to address that potential vulnerability through aircraft carriers and amphibious landing craft. Our dependence on Taiwanese semiconductors should be addressed through procurement policy, not military muscle.

Other countries are better at seeing this. Most of the global south, and members of the BRICS bloc, understand it. There are some warlike countries among them, but all warlike nations depend (like Israel) on the support of other warlike countries. The peace of the world is best secured by reducing the number of warlike countries: and the best way to reduce the number of warlike countries is to stop being one of them.