Anatol Lieven
On a recent, endlessly delayed rail journey to Oxford I passed a military train loaded with jeeps and armoured vehicles—pretty inadequate ones too, to judge by the news from Helmand. It reminded me that Britain will soon have two aircraft carriers of impressive bulk and uncertain purpose, at a cost of £4bn. Their purpose is mystifying. The US doesn’t need us to have them; it has far more, and far bigger ones too. If they are to allow Britain to fight independently, then where and against whom? Rumoured scenarios range from the highly unlikely (a military occupation of parts of Nigeria) to the ludicrous (a British war with China). Certainly, the two carriers will not help in Afghanistan—the last time I looked at a map it does not have a coast.
The new ships will be named the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales. Given that no one seems clear how they will be paid for, or how we can afford the aircraft that sit on them, it might have been better to name them after their predecessor as the Royal Navy’s largest ship, HMS Vanguard. First designed at the start of the second world war to fight the Bismarck and Tirpitz, by the time it was finally commissioned the war had ended. It was scrapped ten years later.
Today’s carriers come from the same mixture of imperial nostalgia, blind attachment to the US alliance and failure to decide on strategic priorities. None of this mattered much in an era of economic growth, but it does when British funds are in short supply—as demonstrated by the agonised debate over whether to scrap our remaining order for £1bn Eurofighters. And if we do face a depression comparable to the 1930s, its effects are likely to throw up severe security challenges, which in turn means that Britain will have to ruthlessly prioritise its security commitments—or risk becoming irrelevant everywhere, and frittering away effort, money and lives on half-baked operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to which we can make no real contribution, and which stand no serious chance of success.
British military spending should be reduced by some 10 per cent to bring it in line with France (still leaving it far above Germany and other leading European states as a proportion of GDP). Much more importantly, however, it should be refocused away from irrelevant cold war-era projects like the Eurofighter and the Type 45 Destroyer, and from long-range expeditionary operations. Instead, the emphasis should be on the army’s ability to fight small wars on Europe’s periphery.
Read more »
Manneken Pis
Will Barroso join the ranks of the jobless?
José Manuel Barroso, the European commission president, often stresses his concern at the rise in Europe’s unemployment rate. But now he is starting to worry that he too could join the ranks of the jobless. Until recently Barroso’s nomination for a second term as president was taken for granted, since he had the backing of the EU’s centre-right bloc, the EPP, plus some non-conservative heads of state like Gordon Brown. But suddenly Barroso is in trouble, thanks to deteriorating relations with French president Nicolas Sarkozy (see Brussels diary, March 2009).
After Barroso’s commission insisted on changes to Sarko’s precious car industry rescue plan, the French president retaliated. At an EU summit press conference, Sarkozy twice refused to endorse Barroso for a second term and suggested that the decision be postponed until after the second Irish referendum on the Lisbon treaty. Leaders agreed in December that the commission president would be chosen in June and the selection of commissioners left until after the Lisbon vote, which will be probably be in October. (The logic is that the Irish result will determine whether each country will continue to nominate a commissioner.) If delayed until the autumn the nomination of president could become part of a package of jobs, which is certain to provoke horse-trading. In such a Dutch auction Barroso might find his future sacrificed in a byzantine series of trade-offs.
Read more »
Anthony King
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
And so, finally, it ends. Six years after the Iraq invasion, British combat troops will be withdrawn by 31st July 2009. Britain’s involvement in Iraq during the first world war is recalled at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery outside Basra. Now, the latest engagement is also marked—by a redbrick memorial beside the airport that records the 178 British dead.
Two positions are clearly identifiable in discussions about what Iraq has meant for Britain. The government, the ministry of defence (MoD) and the armed forces argue that the withdrawal is a vindication of their strategy. In 2003, Britain intervened to depose a dictator and to establish a legitimate democracy for the benefit of all Iraqis. These aims have been achieved—although the cost in lives has been higher than anticipated.
Read more »
MG Zimeta
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
The dust appears to be settling on Guantánamo Bay; by presidential decree, it will be closed within a year. The last British detainee, Binyam Mohamed, was released on 23rd February. The Guantánamo experiment was, say its critics, a comprehensive failure. But this depends on what it was trying to achieve. The strategic victories it won for the Bush administration during the eight years of its existence will last much longer than the camp itself.
“Guantánamo” has become a byword for all that is wrong with America’s war on terror. At first glance, it appears to have been a legal failure too. Its architects’ cynical reinvention of (and disregard for) the law has been widely documented. David Bowker, a lawyer in the department of state’s office of the legal adviser, reported how he and colleagues were asked to “find the legal equivalent of outer space” where detainees would have no legal rights. But in June 2006, the US supreme court ruled that its inmates were entitled to protection under the Geneva convention—despite the administration’s attempts to establish the contrary.
Guantánamo’s guiding philosophy—that being of the wrong religion in the wrong place at the wrong time can make you eligible for inhumane treatment—has also been widely denounced as a moral failure. Binyam Mohamed is a case in point: a 30-year-old cleaner accused of making a nuclear bomb, he was held at Guantánamo for 54 months and tortured. Towards the end of his incarceration there was speculation he was being held purely to conceal the torture he had suffered. “You will be punished,” Samuel Beckett wrote in his novel The Unnameable, “for having been punished.”
Read more »
Manneken Pis
Juncker savages Brown
With the European commission president speculating that Britain might now join the euro, the financial crisis has transformed the continent’s image of Gordon Brown. As chancellor, Brown used to relish his Eurosceptic image and regularly riled his continental colleagues by lecturing them on the superiority of the British economic model. He was, to put it mildly, not that popular in Europe. Now, having played a leading role in efforts to rescue the European economy, Brown’s position is being reassessed and the consensus is that his contribution easily outweighed that, for example, of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel.
But not everyone is convinced. In a little-noticed speech, Luxembourg’s prime minister and finance minister, Jean-Claude Juncker, gave an alternative analysis of the financial crisis in which Gordon’s contribution appears anything but heroic.
Although Luxembourg is the EU’s second smallest nation, Juncker is the president of the Eurogroup (the group of EU member states that use the euro) and has been on the scene even longer than Gordon. For four years, Juncker said, those in charge of the Eurogroup have been warning the US about the risks of its deficit and over-leveraged property market. Two years ago, under the German presidency of the G7, there was a clear push for tougher market regulation. “The American and British governments had all the time they needed to accept the Eurogroup’s proposals for a better regulation of the financial markets but that is something they specifically didn’t want to do.” Now, Juncker argued, it was “not appropriate for them to pretend to lead others.”
Read more »
Christopher de Bellaigue
On 4th November, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s beleaguered president, lost his interior minister. Ali Kordan was impeached after his curriculum vitae was found to be full of lies. Most egregiously, Kordan credited himself with an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, a claim belied by a university statement denying all knowledge of him, his misspelled degree certificate and his apparent belief that Oxford University is in London.
Kordan says he was duped; he received his degree, he claims, from someone who had introduced himself as Oxford’s “Tehran representative.” To Iranians inclined to believe him, this exotic (but non-existent) post conjures up memories of the country’s Shah-era past, when British agents plotted to embarrass and even topple Iranian governments they did not like. To conspiratorially-minded Iranians, all too aware of Britain’s history of meddling in their affairs, the minister’s woes have a familiar ring.
Those who suffer from this syndrome imagine Britain to be fathomlessly powerful and duplicitous, constantly striving to achieve Iran’s collapse—a nation of people capable, in the Persian saying, of “cutting off your head with cotton.” To a remarkable degree, this perception has survived the end of empire and the decline of Britain’s global influence. No country in this age of cramped diplomatic horizons is more comforting to the British ego than Iran.
Read more »
Rodric Braithwaite
The discussion between David Miliband and a number of experts in last month’s Prospect centred on concepts that have formed the core of the British and western view of international affairs for the last two decades: liberal interventionism, universal values, multilateralism, globalisation, and ethical foreign policy. But these ideas have lost plausibility as “the west,” their main champion, continues to suffer a loss of authority, not least as a result of the financial crisis.
The end of the cold war was followed by a brief decade of euphoria. Our politicians talked of our moral duty to intervene in other people’s affairs to force them to behave properly. Foreign office officials were discouraged from using words like “hegemony” and “multipolar,” because they had a whiff of anti-Americanism about them: the clarity of their thinking suffered accordingly. British foreign policy became out of touch with reality, and largely irrelevant in world affairs.
We and our closest allies are now reaping the reward of hubris. Today, history is back with a vengeance, and the instruments of US military and economic power which were at the centre of our worldview have proved unequal to the task. Take as only one example the recent Georgian conflict, which showed that the US could not make good on an implied guarantee to defend a small, far away and badly-led country whose politics they barely understood. We may see a clear distinction between our bombarding Serbia and recognition of Kosovo, and the Russian invasion of Georgia and its recognition of Abkhazia and South Georgia. The distinction is not apparent to others. We are amazed when foreigners accuse us of double standards. But the foreigners are not wrong.
Read more »
Peter Bergen
In the November issue of Prospect, Jason Burke has argued that the west needs to better understand the Afghan origins of the Taliban if it is ever to win the war in Afghanistan. Here, the New America Foundation’s Peter Bergen provides a different perspective on the need for a new strategy in Afghanistan.
Discuss this article at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
Soon after the US invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, Taliban and al Qaeda leaders were on the run. Now they are running free. In Afghanistan’s eastern provinces, attacks are up by 40 per cent in the last several months, and more American soldiers are now dying in Afghanistan than in Iraq. By 2002, the Taliban were little more than a nuisance; today, they are encircling Kabul and ambushing convoys of supplies on their way to the capital, and have appeared in force in the neighbouring Wardak province. They are beginning to convince the population that international forces are losing control of the country.
One western diplomat in Kabul described Nato operations in the south of the country as “mowing the lawn.” Every year, Nato forces go in and clear out Taliban sanctuaries, only to have to go back the following year and cut back the new growth. This deteriorating situation has, finally, grabbed the attention of American politicians. Both presidential candidates have called for a significant increase in the number of US troops in Afghanistan. But simply throwing more soldiers at the problem won’t help unless the next occupant of the White House abandons our current stopgap approach, and initiates a “strategic reset” of the sort that helped the US military dampen the violence in Iraq.
Read more »
James Fergusson
Click here to discuss this piece at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
Until two years ago, when the army’s senior soldier, chief of the general staff Richard Dannatt, popularised the phrase in a now famous interview in the Daily Mail, most people had never heard of the “military covenant.” Considering that the military covenant does not, technically speaking, exist, this is forgivable. The legal definition of a covenant is a sealed, written contract. Yet apart from an oblique reference or two in army doctrine, the military covenant does not exist in writing, and has no basis in law. Despite this, since 2006 an important national debate about the military’s role in society has coalesced around the phrase.
The covenant means different things to different people but its primary meaning is clear enough: the compact of trust, honour and respect between the government, the armed forces and the public whose interests they serve. Dannatt worries that the military covenant is “out of kilter,” and argues that unless balance is restored, the armed forces could eventually “break,” with potentially huge consequences for Britain, Europe and the world. This summer he renewed his attack, with a stinging comparison between the basic salary of a traffic warden (about £20,000) and a private soldier (£16,277). “I think, given the insecurity in the world today and what the armed forces of this country are being asked to do, then probably a slightly increased share of the national wealth going to defence would be appropriate,” he said. He may have a point. Our military haven’t had to fight on two fronts at once—southern Iraq and Helmand—for more than half a century, and they have been continuously engaged in Afghanistan for longer than the whole of the second world war.
Read more »
Dominic Lawson
Click here to discuss this piece at First Drafts, Prospect’s blog
On liberal intervention, great power rivalry and climate change
DAVID GOODHART: Let’s look back at the story of liberal interventionism over the last ten years and the apparent return of great power politics in recent weeks—and how they are linked. The use of violence to solve international problems has not been very successful, and arguably we are now getting the boomerang back in Georgia. If we want a rule-bound world, haven’t we got to stick to the rules?
DAVID MILIBAND: Well, violence rarely solves things and the definition of liberal interventionism is not violence. The origins of liberal intervention is the now-hackneyed view that we have a self-interest—not just a moral interest—in the actions of others because of global interdependence. It’s also about “responsible sovereignty”—the responsibility of states to their own people according to certain universal values, but also the responsibility they have to the international system. That’s where I start the debate about when it’s right for a state or group of states to interfere in another state.
Read more »
Post a comment »
