The bubble has burst. We find ourselves in a post-rules-based order where the ‘might is right’ principle is being actively promoted. How the United Kingdom responds to this challenge will establish its relevance and reach on the world stage in the next century – previously its impact has been of vital importance since the Second World War in moderating conflict in general and in particular curbing excesses.
The current US President enjoys being a disruptor ([he] ‘…. has finally dialled down his insane rhetoric on Greenland’, which was reportedly caused by concerns over strategic access to the Arctic and that country in particular), but he seems to care little for the law of unintended but entirely predictable consequences. The United States is now viewed under his watch as an unpredictable and potentially dangerous actor, as well as an unreliable arms seller and ally. Having previously made an entirely reasonable set of demands on NATO allies to reduce their reliance on US defence spending, he now seems intent on taking the point entirely too far, which overturns and contradicts the US previous position as the world’s policeman.
This may seem innocuous, but with a superpower like the US behaving more as a rogue actor or at the very least as an apologist for tyrants, this forces European NATO members in particular to embrace some pertinent truths: they must have their own substantive defence industrial base with complementary strategic manufacturing industries; they must have a defence capability that scales collectively but is capable of meeting each country’s own defence needs; defence spending must not be on a percentage basis, it must be according to meet each country’s foreseeable needs, deployable to meet any foreseeable threat.
It underlines the fact, also, that one thing potentially worse than an enemy is an unreliable or unpredictable friend. This may not play well for the US in the long term, with European countries building their own defence capabilities and often needing what are currently US bases on the continent, while also being wary of procuring US manufactured weaponry. The ‘kill switch’ rumour and the US reluctance to allow Ukraine to use long range weapons at scale to deter the invader has only increased the nervousness of erstwhile allies. The US may find itself displaced from key strategic bases in the UK, Europe and Türkiye on which it depends for its global reach.
Having previously embraced by apparent necessity the marginally acceptable but clear built-in asymmetry of power at the United Nations, articulated brilliantly by Mark Carney at Davos; in his words, the ‘Middle Powers’ need to build their capabilities independent of reliance on the US and aware of different defence needs and therefore nuance their alliances to meet those needs independently or with a much greater degree of independence. Will this give rise to ‘NATO 2.0’, which may not include the US as a full-time member but could embrace Ukraine? It certainly seems so – it is demonstrably the case that the EU hierarchy is not fit to meet defence challenges, its bureaucratic and self-satisfied structure is too slow and too partisan – it also creates another unhealthy dependency where realistically countries need a variety of different, overlapping and interconnected alliances to avoid such dependencies.
This is not as bad as it may seem, the UK in particular already has many such diverse alliances, not least global economic ones, which are of vital importance for meeting defence needs and reduces unhealthy dependencies. Such defence alliances include AUKUS (US, UK and Australia’s nuclear-powered submarine programme), ‘5 Eyes’ signals intelligence alliance (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), a major international alliance with Italy and Japan to develop a sixth-generation stealth fighter, known as Tempest. Potential 2.0 members may include the G7 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan) as well as democratic Commonwealth and European countries, which all share similar values.
These symbioses must be healthier than a subservient dependency on the US; although a knottier issue may be the very high-cost deterrents, like the Trident II replacement (a joint, US-led programme) and big-ticket military equipment procurement like aircraft carriers. The HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Queen Elizabeth have for most of their active service relied on US naval aviation and have underlined the UK’s deficiency in independent global power projection without such partners, no doubt much to the glee of our adversaries.
It should be noted that until very recently, only the UK had extended its ICBM nuclear umbrella over Europe, until France’s independently developed airborne deterrent programme was extended to do so as well. It seems inconceivable that Russia would have attacked Ukraine if the latter was still in possession of an operating nuclear deterrent. Security undertakings in the Budapest Memorandum have been shown to be hollow and ultimately the ‘protections’ offered non-existent, a cautionary note indeed on the power of ‘commitments’. The fact, though, that France developed and deployed its deterrent in isolation may offer a more cost-effective route to achieve strategic equivalence than following a cold war model. The Ukraine war has demonstrated a revolution in military technological hardware; but only if learnings are put in the context of the appropriate relevance and application. Fixed-wing air power, so important in previous conflicts, has been relatively insignificant factor in that encounter which would skew the picture to a substantial extent.
Apparently without challenge, President Trump moved the narrative so that Europe was relieved to hear that he would not invade Greenland, for another no doubt asymmetric ‘deal’ which ignores the reality of the crisis that would have occurred if he had attempted to play that hand. Meanwhile, for all the sound and light created by this crisis of confidence, Russia continues its unprovoked attack on a sovereign Ukraine, enabled and empowered by the ‘might is right’ schtick endorsed daily by Trump. President Xi and Vladimir Putin must be delighted.
This wake-up call recollects Murphy’s Law: ‘The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet’.