Starmer is playing with fire

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The new submarines announced by Sir Starmer yesterday are obviously a new form of stealth weapon, since no-one will be able to see them for a decade or two. Although the announcement covered 12, it turns out that seven of those are replacements for existing obsolete boats, so only five are additional. They will start rolling off the production line in the late 2030s (let’s say 2038 for the sake of argument), and will be launched at the rate of one every eighteen months. So, by about 2056, the Royal Navy will have a whole five additional submarines, built to a 30 year old specification, in its fleet.

Sir Starmer says this will ‘send a message’ to Putin. Leaving aside the huge cost of that ‘message’, the thing about messages is that the ones received may not precisely match the ones sent. In this case, telling Putin we’ll be just about ready to come for him in 30 years’ time, assuming that the schedule doesn’t get delayed and that the boats actually work when delivered (two caveats which past military procurement exercises suggest might be ‘challenging’) is more likely to lead to laughing-into-cornflakes than quaking-in-boots.

The submarines were only part of the announcement, of course. There were also the announcements about wanting to fit nuclear weapons to aircraft and resurrecting some sort of citizen’s army. But the theme running through seemed to have two main elements: how much the UK is going to strengthen its armed forces, and how slowly it’s all actually going to happen. And that matters in terms of Putin’s potential motivation (for it is surely only Putin and Russia who are the targets of all this). If one imagines Putin as some sort of Bond villain, sitting in the Kremlin stroking his cat, then all bets are off. No-one can plan to deal with insanity on that scale, although fiction might suggest that all it takes is one man with a licence to kill. If, however, we treat Putin as being a rational actor – and even if the premises of his rationality don’t always match our own, they can still be identified and planned for – then there is one, and only one, plausible reason for his wanting to start an all-out war with NATO. At its simplest, that reason is a belief (whether right or wrong doesn’t matter: he only needs to believe it) that NATO is gearing up to attack Russia, and that his best chance is to attack first, before NATO has reached full readiness.

All the talk among UK politicians and military types about being in a ‘pre-war’ stage, and needing to be ready to fight an all-out European war within the next few years might be intended to send a message of deterrence, but it’s easy to see how, from a different perspective, it might look like preparing the population and economies of ‘the west’ for an invasion of Russia. And the closer any army is to a state of readiness to fight a war, the more likely it is that that war can start by accident, or by a simple misjudgement. Reducing the time available to make a rational assessment by positioning troops and weapons close to a border increases the probability of a ‘use it or lose it’ mentality taking hold. We might indeed be in dangerous times, but Sir Starmer seems intent on increasing, rather than decreasing, the level of danger.

Perhaps I misjudge Sir Starmer. Maybe his announcement really has nothing to do with war at all, but is really about trying to sound strong, play the patriotic card for reasons of internal UK politics, and impose his own militaristic definition of Britishness on the population. After all, everything else he does is calculated and calibrated in terms of its expected impact on voting behaviour. But expecting Putin to read between the lines and understand that Sir Starmer doesn’t really mean what he’s saying at all is a big ask of someone who is more than a little paranoid to start with. Sir Starmer is playing a very dangerous game, either way.