hms iron duke

hms iron duke

Friday 5 September 2014

Defence Double Dutch


Alphen, Netherlands.  5 September.  That great Dutch leader Johan de Witt had a simple saying, “if you are going to do something do it well”.  This morning at the NATO Wales Summit Alliance leaders will agree two smoke and mirror commitments.  The first ‘commitment’ will be to a ‘new’ Rapid Reaction Force.  This will add yet another such multinational 'force' to the now great collection of NATO Response Forces and EU Battle Groups that are never actually used because political leaders can never agree on when and how to use them.  The second ‘commitment’ will be to TRY and spend 2% of GDP on defence within TEN YEARS.  This is a commitment’ that was actually made back in 2010 and which all NATO members should already have fulfilled.  Indeed, the host David Cameron has spent much of the Summit banging on about this to his partners.  However, the man who could well be about to lose Scotland will soon have to admit that on current planning even British defence spending will soon fall below the very target he is espousing.  It is pure Cameronism – say one thing, do another...or rather do nothing.

Sadly, the Summit is another pathetic attempt by European politicians to bridge the now unbridgeable gap between strategy and politics.  There is no better example of that than here in the Netherlands.  Yesterday, I had the very distinct honour of giving the ‘keynote’ Johan de Witt lecture to veterans of the Royal Netherlands Navy and the Royal Netherlands Marines Corps in Rotterdam.  Now, I fully admit that my Dutch is not as good as it should be given that I have lived in this country for seven years and my wife is Dutch.  The simple truth is that the massive bulk of my business is elsewhere precisely because Dutch leaders are not really interested in either strategy or defence.

My lecture was a hard-edged, carefully-researched analysis of the nature and pace of dangerous change in the world.  The message was clear:  geopolitics is back and Europeans need to get their defence act together collectively and individually if they are to prevent conflict and to underpin all other forms of influence and soft power vital to world peace in a dangerous twenty-first century.

When I had finished a very senior Dutch politician replied.  Thankfully I could only understand about 50% of what he said and I can only hope the 50% I did not understand was more positive than the nonsense I understood.  The Netherlands Armed Forces are always there during crises, he said.  Thousands of Dutch troops are deployed around the world and they do a great job.
 
The first assertion is not true – Dutch politicians stay out of a lot.  The second assertion is only partially true but at least the third assertion is true.  As I have seen from first-hand experience the truly outstanding qualities of the men and women of the Royal Netherlands Armed Forces as they endeavour often at great risk to offset the strategic myopia of a political class that is simply not serious.

The elite are true Dutch masters of the “we only recognise as much threat as we can afford” school of European decline.  The Netherlands says it spends about 1% of GDP on defence.  However, if one removes the figure-fiddling The Hague routinely deploys actual expenditure is nearer 0.8%.  To justify such free-riding I was given yesterday the usual nonsense about the cost of welfare, health and education being the priority and that defence can only be considered after all of these have been paid for.  It is the mantra of all free-riders who want others to defend their countries for them as though those who spend more on defence do not face similar challenges.
 
As I listened on stage I sat there in mute disbelief at the cultural gap.  Not the gap between me and my Dutch political colleagues but rather the cultural gap between the Dutch political class and strategic reality.  Masking reality is the stuff of Dutch politics these days, not confronting it.  One would have thought with Russian artillery pounding Ukrainian cities as I spoke that the key strategic event for them would be taking place in Eastern Ukraine.  No, the key ‘strategic’ event for them was this week’s meeting of the European Central Bank at which ECB President Mario Draghi announced additional hundreds of billions of my Dutch taxpayer’s money to spend on the purchase of bonds to stimulate the failing Eurozone economy. 

The Eurozone is now in permanent crisis with many of its economies unreformable due to weak national institutions and a lack of political will to make critical structural reforms.  Historians will look back on the entire Eurozone adventure as the ultimate act of elite political irresponsibility.  And yet all Dutch politicians and their Eurozone counterparts do is try and hide the scale of the disaster from their publics by pouring good money after bad in an effort to ‘stabilise’ the benighted currency.
 
That is why it will take TEN YEARS (I might add ‘at least’) before the Netherlands can spend 2% GDP on defence at a time when world events are crying out for an increased European defence effort.  In effect, The Hague is raiding the Dutch defence budget to fund the transfers of billions of my taxpayers Euros to keep failing economies afloat who will not do the necessary to make the Eurozone competitive.   “Please, we want to get off the world so we can NOT fix the Eurozone crisis”, was in effect the message from my Dutch political colleague.  Let me repeat, politicians are NOT actually fixing a Eurozone crisis just keeping the Eurozone afloat in a kind of permanent bad marriage.  The Eurozone is now lost in a no-man's land between integration and irresolution with politicians hoping that world growth will reinject economic growth into a Eurozone steadily being strangled by the inertia of its own contradictions.  Fat chance. 
 
Ten years from now given the dangerous shift in world power that is taking place it will be far too late to increase defence expenditure.  By then real power in the world will be very much less democratic and very much more dangerous.  The irony is that the Netherlands will find itself as a consequence of its strategic myopia and defence denial in a kind of Euro defence zone, a strategic, political and military no-man’s land which will suffer all the same ‘structural’ contractions and weaknesses as the Eurozone and dare I say NATO.

After the lecture had finished one and all boarded a boat to cross the Rhine to visit His Netherlands Majesty’s Ship Karel Doorman.  At 28,000 tons and costing €350m she is not only brand new but a hugely impressive warship.  However, as I was standing on the helicopter deck I could not help conclude that she is in many ways all that is wrong with Europe’s Potemkin defence – a political statement rather than a product of considered defence strategy.  A ‘look what we’ve got’ ship that in fact masks the reality of the sorry state not just of the Royal Netherlands Navy but the Dutch Armed Forces and indeed many such armed forces across Europe.

Be it in Wales or in Rotterdam all I heard or saw yesterday is defence double Dutch.  Johan de Witt must be spinning in his grave.
 

Julian Lindley-French

Wednesday 3 September 2014

Hands across the Border


Alphen, Netherlands.  3 September.  The Great Gretna Auld Acquaintance Cairn of Unity sits on the border between England and Scotland and reaches to the sky, a symbol of popular appeal to and for all of us who love Scotland and love Britain.  It is a monument to the real, ordinary people who built this land together and who believe deeply, passionately in our old, battered, beautiful country - Britain.  It is also a stony monument to political denial for all of us denied a voice in the Great Scottish Question – to stay or to go.  Why?  The Great Scottish Question is in fact the Great British Question.  Together or apart?  Britain or the end of Britain?

On 18 September some three million Scottish voters will have the right of decision over the future of my great country.  It is a decision that will affect not only the five million or so Scots who dwell north of the border, but all sixty-five millions of we British.  And yet I will be denied a say along with the massive majority of Britons including many expat Scots over the most important constitutional decision my country has faced since the Union of Crowns in 1603 and the Act of Union in 1707.  

Like many English people Scottish blood courses through my veins.  My sense of identity with Scotland as a country and and as a people runs deep and true, even as those who would have us separate try to plant the idea that somehow Scotland’s woes are England’s doing.  Ironically, much of the frustration Scots have with incompetent Westminster is shared by English, Welsh and Northern Irish alike.  For too long Westminster has ignored the voice of all the peoples locked as it is into a vicious and ever-decreasing circle of its own pompous out-of-touch, politically-correct irrelevance. 

The Great Cairn is thus a protest on behalf of all against the incompetent political machines that brought us to this moment and this place; a plea - please Scotland do not punish the rest of us for the folly of power that is Westminster.  Do not destroy the great bond that binds us as peoples, for that is what a vote for independence will do make no mistake.  Division will exist where there was none and a price will need to be paid – a big price.

Not that I doubt that an independent Scotland could make a go of it.  The Scots have a tough genius that will prevail against all odds and no amount of Establishment threatening will extinguish the light of Scottish pride.  Indeed, it will more likely pervert it.  Equally, nor should those Scots beguiled by the idea of independence think that they can awake on 19 September having voted to destroy the United Kingdom and that it will be business as usual.  Scotland will have decided to become foreign and by March 2016 when the final break is made the rest of us will ensure and assure that independence means independence for we will be deeply hurt, angry with a profound sense of rejection.  

My only option will be to vote with my feet.  Whilst I will wish the people of Scotland well, I will turn my back on Scotland and never again set foot in the country of my forebears.  I will not be alone.  Millions of us made suddenly unwelcome north of a new iron curtain that would run improbably across our small island will join me for we are tired of being cast as villains in this tragedy just because we are English.  Scotland will be on its own. That is no threat for I would not presume, but it would be Scotland’s new reality.

Denied a voice there is at least one independent-minded and decent politician who is at least trying to give all of the Great Denied a positive say and who is not trying to hide the import of this moment.  Rory Stewart is the MP for Penrith and The Border.  As his name suggests he is a man that bestrides the great but unspoken border that today does not separate England from Scotland.  A political Reiver if ever there was one whose sense of shared identity runs as deep as my own.  Stewart has created a movement called Hands across the Border www.handsacrosstheborder.co.uk with the aim of sending a heartfelt message to the people of Scotland that we all care for and believe in both Scotland and the Union we built together over centuries of sweat, often blood and sometimes occasional tears.

Therefore, all I can do is to add my lone Anglo-Scottish voice to those building the Great Cairn in the hope that decent Scots everywhere will hear our plea.  It is a plea of solidarity, of togetherness, of mutual respect that symbolises all we have been through together as peoples and as a people. 

Seventy-five years ago today Britain declared war on Nazi Germany.  It was not England, Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales that declared war to fight tyranny, oppression and evil – it was Britons together.  Angles, Celts, Normans, Pacts, Scottos, Yorkshire Vikings and all the rest stood together in what was the ultimate statement of the values that have come to define who ‘we’ British are and which carried us all to eventual victory.

Come the morning of 19 September I will be in Riga, Latvia thinking about the defence of free Baltic peoples in the face of new tyrannies.  If I awake to find my country is no more, torn apart by romantic separatism I will be heart-broken, not a little shocked and deeply worried.  Indeed, Britain, for all its many past faults has learnt over the centuries how to make the world a safer and better place.  The end of Britain will make that dangerous world just that bit more dangerous. 

Please, if you too can make your way to Gretna – from both sides of our shared history - add your stone of unity so that the Great Cairn can be seen and heard across all parts of Scotland for we are you and you are indeed we.

To lose Scotland would be to lose a part of myself and I will never forgive that.


Julian Lindley-French

Monday 1 September 2014

BLOG BLAST LEADER SERIES

NATO Future Force: Facing Michael

by 

James G. Stavridis and Julian Lindley-French

“Interoperability with the Alliance is better now than it’s ever been because NATO forces have been training and operating together, non-stop, over the last 10 years in Afghanistan.”
Admiral James G. Stavridis, November 2012

1 September.  The Atlantic Alliance must create a twenty-first century NATO Future Force if NATO is to remain a strategic military hub. This week NATO leaders sit down together in Wales to consider the future of the world’s most powerful democratic military alliance.  As they commence their discussions Russian forces are dismembering Ukraine, Afghanistan’s future is again in doubt, Islamic State fanatics threaten the entire Middle Eastern state structure and rapidly developing cyber, missile and nuclear technology is changing the face of NATO’s two critical spaces – the battle space and the security space.  September 2014 will thus be remembered as a NATO ‘schwerpunkt’, the decisive moment at which NATO decided to be strategically relevant or irrelevant.  If it is to be the former September 2014 must also mark the creation of a truly twenty-first century Alliance framed by a contextually-relevant NATO Strategic Concept with collective defence, crisis management and co-operative security driving the defence and force planning choices of all the Allies.

Alliances are created with two objectives in mind; to prevent wars and if needs be to win wars.  Influence and effect are the two key strategic ‘commodities’ in which alliances ‘trade’.  As such alliances rise and fall on the level of strategic unity of effort and purpose between members and the level of interoperability between their armed forces.  Lose either or both and an alliance is effectively crippled. 

On 21 March 1918 strengthened by the collapse of Tsarist Russia the Imperial German Army launched Operation Michael. It was a desperate attempt by Berlin to break the British and win World War One before the Americans arrived in strength.  In the early days of the battle the Kaiser's Stormtroopers made stunning gains.  The advance was not simply a feat of arms.  Britain and France and indeed the British Cabinet under Lloyd George were dangerously split over strategy.  One side, the ‘westerners’ believed that the war could only be won by defeating the German Army in the fields of Flanders.  However, the so-called ‘easterners’ believed that somehow the Kaiser could be defeated by attacking Germany’s flanks in Turkey and elsewhere.  The lack of strategic unity of effort and purpose denuded the British defences in the critical area around the old Somme battlefield.  Thankfully, in the years since 1914 the British Army had made truly revolutionary advances in military strategy and tactics.  Rather than break the British retreated in reasonably good order and as they did so they steadily reduced the ranks of the elite Stormtroopers until the exhausted Imperial Germany Army could advance no more.
 
On 8 August, 1918 at the Battle of Amiens, on what General Ludendorff called “the black day of the German Army”, British Commonwealth forces with French and American support launched a massive counter-attack.  The British employed an entirely new form of manoeuvre warfare, the All Arms Battle.  Aircraft, tanks, artillery and infantry operated closely together in support of each other to smash through the German forces.  What subsequently became known as the Hundred Days Offensive effectively ended World War One.

Thankfully, the Alliance is today not at war but NATO is certainly facing the political equivalent of Operation Michael. If nothing else Russia's proxy and not-so-proxy invasion of Eastern Ukraine should be a wake-up call.  However, Allied leaders remain strategically uncertain and deeply split about what to do about Russia’s incursions into Ukraine.  This split not only reflects a lack of strategic unity of effort and purpose but a NATO deeply-divided between those who simply seek American protection and those Europeans who see military force as merely an adjunct to soft power.  NATO needs to re-discover a shared level of ambition that has been notably lacking of late, something which Moscow has been all too happy to exploit.  

Only Britain and France make any serious effort to generate the expeditionary military capabilities needed to remain militarily close to an increasingly over-stretched America.  However, after a decade of continuous operations and repeated defence cuts the small British and French armed forces are worn out. Therefore, if the Wales Summit is to be NATO’s twenty-first century schwerpunkt the Alliance must take the first steps to re-establish some semblance of the military credibility upon which influence, deterrence and defence depend. 
 
NATO needs a future force at its military core relevant to the challenges ahead.  Therefore, the Alliance must go back to its military roots and radically reconsider the utility of force in the pursuit of strategy.  To that end, the Wales Summit should take three fundamentally important and essentially military decisions:

·    Collective Defence: Article 5 collective defence must be modernised and re-organised around cyber-defence, missile defence and the advanced deployable forces vital to contemporary defence.  A twenty-first century All Arms Battle must be forged with NATO forces better configured to operate across the global commons and the six contemporary domains of warfare – air, sea, land, cyber, space and knowledge. 
·  Crisis Management:  Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), the NATO Response Force and the High Readiness Forces (HRF) must be radically re-structured into the NATO Future Force. Such a force would be predicated on the principle of Alliance military unity of effort and purpose. This in turn would enable the Alliance to effectively force generate and efficiently command and control complex coalitions across the mission spectrum from high-end warfare to defence against the kind of hybrid/ambiguous warfare that Moscow is employing in Ukraine. 
·     Co-operative Security: The Alliance must be better configured to work with all of its strategic partners the world-over, states and institutions, military and civilians, if it is to remain credible in global security as well as European security.  Indeed, re-connecting European security to world security could be said to be NATO’s Prime Directive

The world-capable NATO Future Force must sit at the heart of a new NATO in which the current planning concepts of NATO 2020, Smart Defence and the Connected Forces Initiative are in effect merged with the NATO Response Force and the HRFs into a twenty-first century All Arms Battle.  Deep or organic jointness between NATO forces will be the vital interoperability mechanism at the heart of the Force enabling nations to strike a necessary balance between capability and affordability.
 
Whilst much has rightly been made of the need for NATO members to spend a minimum of 2% GDP on defence not enough has been made of just what future force such expenditures should seek to generate.  The 2% benchmark will only be politically credible if national leaders are convinced not just by how much to spend on their respect armed forces, but just what force such expenditure will realise and why.  ‘Value for money’ is today’s essential and inescapable defence mantra. 

There will need to be a critical new ingredient in NATO’s post-Wales strategic force posture - knowledge.  For all the talk of military capability NATO’s critical war-fighting component is shared knowledge and the understanding of environments and practice it generates.  Indeed, knowledge is the essential component of interoperability, be it at the directing political level of campaigns or at the military level of operations.  Moreover, shared knowledge is also critical because it reinforces all-important trust between members which is today sorely tried.  The Alliance must act fast because contemporary interoperability is built on the knowledge gained from over a decade of operations and an enhanced mechanism for sharing intelligence. Indeed, such knowledge could be very quickly lost if steps are not taken to systematically capture it and build it into the NATO Future Force via innovative exercising, education and training.

Above all, NATO must remain a credible strategic military hub.  Therefore, the NATO Future Force must be a warfighting force and yet agile and nimble enough to sit at the threshold between US, European and Partner forces and between soft and hard power.  German Chancellor Merkel rightly said at this weekend’s EU Summit that a resolution to the Ukraine Crisis will not be military in nature.  She is right.  Indeed, most crises in what will be a very dangerous century will require first and foremost soft power tools and political solutions.  This reality places ever more importance on an effective EU-NATO partnership and civil-military co-operation.  However, without the hard underpinning of credible hard military power that is NATO’s essence, soft power is as as Thomas Hobbes once wrote, “covenants without the sword” and as such “mere words”.
 
This dangerous twenty-first century will be safer if the West is strong together.  A strong West means a strong and legitimate NATO built on strong and credible armed forces.  Wales is the place and the time to act.  It is also the place and the time for NATO to be radical.

NATO Future Force: facing Michael.

James G. Stavridis & Julian Lindley-French


Admiral James G. Stavridis, US Navy (Retired), is NATO’s former Supreme Allied Commander Europe and Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Massachusetts.  

Thursday 28 August 2014

Time for a New Congress of Vienna?


Oslo, Norway. 28 August.  That great Norwegian author and social realist Henrik Ibsen once wrote that, “The strongest man in the world is he that stands almost alone”.  Back here in Norway’s compact but complete capital Oslo on the edge of ‘Europe’ one gets a different perspective that is beyond the alternative reality that is today’s EU.  September marks the bicentennial of the Congress of Vienna which established a balance of power in Europe that was sustained for almost exactly a century before it collapsed catastrophically in August 1914.  With the balance of power in Europe again in flux is it not time for a new Congress of Vienna? 

As a good Oxford historian I counsel against the use of too much ‘history’ to explain too much ‘present’.  It tends to make for bad history and a depressing present.  This would no doubt have satisfied Metternich the arch-conservative architect of the Congress. He saw his primary duty as the prevention of a new Napoleon and the need to contain the revolutionary/nationalist forces that might have de-stabilised the Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

That was then and this is now.  The Congress worked because Europe in 1815 was open to a Metternich peace and the new balance of power it sought.  France lay defeated, Russia exhausted, Germany did not exist, and the great victor Britain saw its future not as a continental European power but as a global imperial power.  Indeed, with America colonising itself the Congress marked the start of the second British Empire and unquestioned British supremacy for over sixty years.

However, the Congress does strike two far-distant chords.  First, there is similarity between today’s European Union and the balance of power system that Metternich sought to craft.  For all the rhetoric about political union the EU was built on the premise that Europe’s major powers are roughly equal.  With Germany’s rise to pre-eminence that is no longer the case and the balance of power mechanism implicit to the EU sees its law-based approach under ever-increasing pressure from one over-mighty, albeit well-intentioned, subject. 

With Russia launching a new offensive this morning in south-eastern Ukraine (perhaps the Russian forces in question are all lost) President Putin looks ever more like a Russian Sparta to the EU/Germany’s Greece.  For all the incomprehension at Russia’s bad behaviour in Ukraine it certainly reflects Moscow’s unease about the changing balance of power in Europe.  

In 1814 then as now Britain, Russia and Turkey were peripheral powers.  Russia had been a part of the coalition that defeated Napoleon and Moscow initially saw the Congress as a means to extend power and influence westward.  However, Russia very quickly came to see itself as separate from European security and saw the failing Ottoman Empire as an opportunity to extend its writ into the Mediterranean, parts of south-eastern Europe and the Middle East.  Crimea, then as now, was vital to Russia as a warm water port from which to extend its naval influence.  This ambition led to the Crimean War in 1853 and the British and French siege of Sevastopol. 

Today, Britain, Russia and Turkey are the three "almost alone" powers in Europe.  However, unlike in 1814 they stand alone in relative weakness rather than relative strength.  None of them like the current order, not one of them has a clear idea what to do about it, all of them could almost stand alone, but Europe would be much the easier if they did not. 

In a sense 2014 is the completion of a full systemic cycle that started in 1814 and includes 1914.  The question for Europe remains the same – what to do with big power both at Europe’s core and its periphery.  Little but rich Norway grapples daily this question but unencumbered by big power, or at least the appearance of it, Norwegians take a typically pragmatic view. 

But here’s the twist. Were it merely a question of institutional relationships between peripheral states and the EU a political settlement could surely be made.  The problem is that the EU is fast becoming an alibi/metaphor for German power.  Britain cannot fold itself fully into the Eurozone core of the EU because that would be to acquiesce to German power.  The Russian strategic mind is deeply uncomfortable with the idea of German power in whatever form it takes and in spite of endless talk of a special relationship between Moscow and Berlin.  Indeed, Moscow pretends it is countering EU influence rather than German influence in what is fast becoming Europe’s most complicated political relationship.  Ankara has a special but complicated relationship with Germany that is exacerbating a deepening inner struggle over whether it is a European power or Middle Eastern power, a secular or quasi-theocratic state.  It is a struggle further exacerbated by a Germany that pretends to want Turkey in the EU but in fact does not.  

Therefore, maybe it is time to see the current struggle for Eastern Ukraine not as an issue solely between Russians and Ukrainians but rather the reflection of a shift in European power and its consequences.  If so it is time for a new Congress of Vienna to reassure Europe’s marginal powers that the EU and its revolutionary ‘integrationism’ is not some new and unintended form of German-led Bonapartism. 

However, ‘Europe’ had better move quickly.  Metternich’s only true intellectual rival at the Congress of Vienna was the French statesman Charles Maurice de Talleyrand.  He might have been speaking of Europe today when he famously said, “If we go on explaining we shall cease to understand each other”. Europe's simple and eternal truth is that whatever the language or the setting the Old Continent is only secure when power is in balance. The strongest man in the world is he who stands with others.

Julian Lindley-French

Tuesday 26 August 2014

Destructive Ambiguity: Why European Defence Needs a Re-think


Alphen, Netherlands. 26 August.  Last week German TV programme Monitor on Das Erste ran a piece on NATO. Central to the ten minute report was my latest NATO Defence College/Wilton Park report “NATO’s Post-2014 Strategic Narrative”.  Apparently the aim of my report is to turn Russia into an enemy as part of a conscious and aggressive NATO plan to take over Eastern Europe.  That’s certainly news to me. 

Like all bad journalists those responsible for a piece that plastered my name all over German TV never bothered to consult me.  They simply chose selected, out-of-context snippets to make a preconceived case and then implied that my independent report was somehow NATO policy.  On the eve of the NATO Wales Summit that such a respected German TV channel could run such a piece demonstrates the schism at the heart of European Defence and the need to re-think it.

The essential idea of European Defence was and indeed is not so much about the defence of Europe but rather ‘A’ if not ‘THE’ key aspect of European integration and eventual political union.  For the True Believers an integrated European defence organised on and in the EU would and should in time emerge if Europe is to be unified.  European defence would then the European pillar of a re-energised NATO in which legitimacy, affordability, efficiency and efficacy would act as four inter-locked defence cornerstones.

Successive crises, endless empty promises, the growing gulf between the European elite and the people and the rise of strategically-pacifist Germany demonstrate that European Defence is a pipe-dream.  And yet somehow it hangs on the minds of many in the Brussels elite.  The result is a Europe that punches far below its strategic weight. 

As with all things EU the essential way forward for European Defence was and is indirect.  To overcome national sensibilities and the very different strategic cultures still all too apparent in Europe a step-by-step ‘functionalist approach’ was adopted by its political architects called “Constructive Ambiguity”.  Whatever speed a country went the assumption by those at the heart of the “European Project” was that sooner and later EU member-states would end up in the same place - a unified EU-focused European Defence.  The ‘finalité,’ to use the jargon would be an integrated European Defence. This would look not a little unlike the failed 1952-1954 European Defence Community, Europe’s first attempt at an integrated defence.

However, trust or rather the lack of it has destroyed European Defence.  Repeated crisis have demonstrated that Europeans share neither a sufficiency of strategic ambition nor critically strategic culture to put all their defence eggs in one big European basket.  Worse, Afghanistan had a toxic effect on European Defence because with their “red cards” and “national caveats” too many Europeans allowed too many other Europeans to do too much of the dying in what was meant to have been a collective endeavour.

The current crisis in Ukraine could well be the final nail in the coffin of European Defence precisely because it is an exercise not in constructive ambiguity but destructive ambiguity.  Only though destructive ambiguity could the French consider the sale of advanced warships to Russia that the BBC described this morning as “perfect for invading a small country”.  The French, of course, have assurances from Moscow that they would never be used for such a nasty thing.  I wonder if those are the same type of assurances that Paris got from Berlin in the late 1930s.

Therefore, it is time to end the nonsense about European Defence.  There will in future be two Europes.  One Europe will continue to seek an American-led defence via NATO.  To do that this group will seek to share at least some of America’s burdens and willing to do real defence or at least a bit of it.  The other group will comprise those states that seek German-led security.  The latter group will no doubt talk richly about European Defence, the more so as the EU becomes ever more a metaphor for German power.  They will also talk a lot about ‘solidarity’.  However, when a crisis emerges they will either pretend nothing is happening or announce they are too busy gardening or something to do anything – destructive ambiguity.

The piece on German TV that attacked my report was really about the schism that exists in European Defence and the destructive ambiguity that sustains it. At the heart of the piece was a very strange map.  It showed a Europe with the deep-reassuring blue of NATO across the western half but a strange washed-out grey-blue spilt over the rest.  It was as though no-one had told the journos in question, Nikolaus Steiner and Andreas Orth that many of the countries they implied were not really NATO members are in fact full NATO members with the same rights to collective defence as the rest of us.  In other words for Das Erste defending NATO members is in fact NATO aggression. 

Sadly, destructive ambiguity will be the hidden theme next week in Wales.  You can expect much talk of ‘solidarity’.  You will even see the launch of a “Readiness Action Plan” offering “strategic reassurance” to NATO allies in Eastern Europe designed to counter Russia’s future use of its own form of destructive ambiguity - ambiguous warfare. 

To paraphrase Bismarck Europeans are so split that much of the talk in Wales will be not worth the healthy bones of even one Pomeranian grenadier – much like the Das Erste piece.


Julian Lindley-French

Thursday 21 August 2014

Molotov-Ribbentrop: No More European Spheres of Unwelcome Influence


Alphen, Netherlands. August 21st. Seventy-five years ago at 2330 hours on August 23rd, 1939 one of the most dangerous and destructive documents ever drawn up between two European states was signed in Moscow.  Named after the respective Soviet and German Foreign Ministers of the day the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (better known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact) was an exclusive non-aggression agreement that carved Eastern Europe into spheres of unwelcome Nazi and Soviet influence.  In effect the Nazi-Soviet Pact marked the real start of World War Two.  On the one hand, the Pact eased the way for Hitler who no longer faced the prospect of a “zweifrontenskrieg”. On the other hand, the Pact finally forced London and Paris to face reality and give Poland security guarantees that actually meant something. World War Two broke out just over a week later on September 3rd. As an exercise in cynicism the Pact remains unsurpassed.  At its heart was a notorious Secret Protocol which breached all tenets of the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations concerning secret diplomacy and strategy.  The Protocol stated as follows:

 “On the occasion of the signature of the Non-Aggression Pact between the German Reich and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics the undersigned plenipotentiaries of each of the two parties discussed in strictly confidential conversations the question of the boundary of their respective spheres of influence in Eastern Europe. These conversations led to the following conclusions: 
1. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. In this connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party.
2. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narew, Vistula, and San.
The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish state and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments.
In any event both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement.
3. With regard to South-Eastern Europe attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in Bessarabia. The German side declares; its complete political disinterestedness in these areas.
This protocol shall be treated by both parties as strictly secret.
Moscow, August 23, 1939.
For the Government of the German Reich:
V. RIBBENTROP
Plenipotentiary of the Government of the U.S.S.R.:
V. MOLOTOV.

Nazi Germany was eventually cast into the dustbin of history but only as a result of World War Two and at the cost of 53 million lives.  Thankfully, modern Germany has nothing to do with such an obscenity.  Indeed, the very ethos and existence of the Federal Republic of Germany and the European Union in which it plays such a leading and enlightened role reflects modern Germany’s utter rejection of those few ghastly sentences above.
 
Russia is also a modern and civilised country and is not the Soviet Union of old and yet of late it has been behaving as though it was.  In 2014 not only is the Russian War Plan for Eastern Ukraine clear for all to see it is already being enacted.  There has also been a whole raft of secret agreements between Moscow and pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine including the infiltration of significant numbers of Russian personnel and equipment.
 
One such agreement led to the stationing of the Russian SA-11 surface-to-air missile on Ukrainian soil which shot down Malaysian Flight MH-17 on July 17 resulting in the murder of almost 300 innocent people.  Former senior US official and Russian expert Strobe Talbot rightly says that Russia’s invasion of Eastern Ukraine is already under way.  The aim; a new Russian protectorate in Ukraine called the Union of Donetsk and Luhansk Republics established on self-proclaimed borders.
 
The toll is mounting.  As of 15 August 2119 people had been killed in Eastern Ukraine with some 5100 people wounded.  At present some 60 people are being killed or wounded daily with some 156,000 people displaced.  190,000 people have fled to Russia with just over 22,000 people having fled Donetsk and Luhansk last week alone in what is in effect street-to-street fighting.

The planned meeting next week between President Poroshenko and President Putin could make the difference between open war and peace.  Therefore, on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the signing of this criminal document President Putin has a chance to demonstrate to fellow Europeans that he fully understands this is 2014 not 1939.  And, that Russia believes in and is bound by the rule of international law in a Europe the borders of which are also established by law not force.
 
If an agreement can be reached in Moscow between the presidents it must respect Ukraine’s sovereignty, open a new dialogue on the future of Ukraine-Crimea, and establish proper rights for all minorities within Ukraine.  Then Europe as a whole can return to the twenty-first century and Russia return to the family of European nations to which it rightfully belongs.
 
However, for such an accord to be reached other Europeans need to show political backbone – no shady deals.  Seventy-five years ago the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was in part a consequence of Britain’s appeasement of Nazi Germany.  In 2014 Berlin and other European capitals must be careful that they too do not mistake self-interested, short-term appeasement for ‘strategy’.

Indeed, for all Russia’s undoubted historical ties with Ukraine there is a fundamental issue at stake in this struggle; the right of free and independent states to choose their allegiances and alliances freely unhindered by unwelcome spheres of influence.

Julian Lindley-French 

Wednesday 20 August 2014

Is Britain the New Afghanistan?


Alphen, Netherlands.  20 August.  Is Britain the new Afghanistan? What has become of my country?  James Foley, an American photo-journalist is beheaded by a sneering Jihadi who speaks with a British accent.  As per usual the apologists appear on British TV and radio to talk about the need for ‘understanding’ and ‘tolerance’.  And, indeed, it is vital at this moment that the millions of moderate British Muslims are not tarred with the broad brush of hatred these people wield.  It is precisely division and mistrust such people seek to sow in British society.  And yet there is clearly a problem.  

When I look back to my salad days the very idea of a British Jihadi would have been unthinkable.  Indeed, even today it is hard for the bulk of the indigenous population to equate such killers with being British.  Instead, most of we Britons sit in sullen, silent anger at how our traditional tolerance has been corrupted and look-on in tired aghast at the utter incompetence  and inability of politically-correct elites to get to grips with what is fast becoming a dangerous Britain. 

Instead of dealing with such issues by properly controlling who can enter and live in Britain and then seeking to build an integrated society government after government has retreated into failure-masking spin and pretence.  The entire population knows that successive British governments has lost all but nominal control over Britain’s borders and yet Londonistan (as the French continue to call London) continues to trot out the same old tired mantras that immigration is under control and that multiculturalism works. 

It is not just a problem with politicians but the entire London Metropolitan elite.  Last week one of the great over-washed masquerading as that towering Victorian journalist Walter Bagehot wrote a piece in The Economist entitled “The Trials of life in Tilbury”.  It was one of the most arrogant and out-of-touch articles I have ever read about the poor, white working class of Tilbury.  These are people who in little more than one generation have had their country taken away from them, their old-fashioned values of tolerance, mutual respect and patriotism trampled on by a sneering and incompetent elite, and the Britain they once-loved and for which many fought and died torn apart. 

And yet, according to ‘Bagehot’, who reduced the whole complex issue to one of stupid, white people they are the ‘left-behinds’ who do not ‘get’ globalisation, the ill-will of whom is generated by “autochthonuous meaness”.  Now, I have four degrees and a reasonable facility with the English language and yet I had to look up ‘autochthonuous’.  For the on-this-particular-planet people out there ‘autochthonuous’ means ‘indigenous’.  In other words the white population of Tilbury are intrinsically and by implication genetically ‘mean’ for being concerned about the impact of hyper-immigration on their town, their country and their lives. 

In fact, it is the natural tolerance of the English that politicians have too often exploited and then used against decent, ordinary people to silence dissent.  Indeed, as politicians have repeatedly failed to get to grips with the dangerous society Britain is fast becoming politicians have too often tried to use law and intimidation to silence anyone who speaks out about what is now self-evidently a clear and present danger.

Too often the political class have simply tried to wish-away the consequences of their irresponsibility.  Do not get me wrong – I am of course not accusing all nor indeed the massive majority of immigrants of seeking to de-stabilise British, or should I say more particularly English society.  Respect and tolerance goes to the very heart of my DNA.  Equally, no longer can London go on trying to pretend that some aspects of the hyper-immigration of the past twenty or thirty years have not spawned what is now a very real and dangerous problem.  Apart from a very few pathetic people it is not the indigenous population that is being radicalised.

Britain cannot go back and there is nothing to be gained from nostalgia.  British society today is what it is and that must be the starting point.  However, the issues raised by ‘British’ Jihadis are fundamental.  As the 2015 General Election approaches the High Priests of Multiculturalism are already re-appearing and they must for once be resisted.  Indeed, for too long been multiculturalism, i.e. the deliberate fostering of parallel, separate lives of different 'communities' on a small island has been Britain's problem not its solution.  It is multiculturalism that has created the dangerous space that has allowed the extremes of separate-ness to lead to the kind of brutal extremism evident in the slaughter of James Foley.

Therefore, no more the kid gloves of political correctness which is destroying British society.  Government needs to fundamentally re-think how it helps to construct a re-integrated society in which all of its members irrespective of race, religion or orientation believe they have a stake.  If London fails social cohesion will progressively fail, the making of foreign and security policy will become impossible and national life itself will be at risk.

“Policy” means properly re-integrating Muslims and indeed all other minorities properly into British society.  By all means be a hyphenated-Briton but to be ‘British’ and have the right to share the benefits of British society must mean to be a part of that society and to share its core values.  The good news is that there are a whole host of hyphenated-Britons out there who can help lead the way towards the most important of social attitudes - respect.  

Re-integration will take a long time but it must start now. And for once Government must not dodge the issue in the face of the inevitable barrage that will come from self-interested, self-appointed, single-interest groups.  This is because the threat posed by ‘British’ Jihadis to British society and indeed the United Kingdom is far greater than a few Scottish fantasists in skirts.  No more pretence, no more appeasement and no more dangerously self-deluding political correctness.

Sadly, the British people as a whole must be under no illusions; even though they despise “British values” these extremists were bred in Britain, their toxic views were allowed to fester in Britain, and sooner rather than later they will seek to return to Britain to cause mayhem.  Politicians caused the mess that is British society today and it is politicians that must help fix it.  If not then Britain will indeed become the new Afghanistan – a threat to itself and to others.

Enough is enough!

Julian Lindley-French