Challenging the NATO narrative isn't supporting Putin

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Last week, Labour MP Diane Abbott was described by a Tory MP as “playing the role of Putin’s useful idiot” after saying that “the imminent threat from Russia is a NATO fiction to justify their complete capitulation to Trump's demands for more military spending”, and having previously referred to the war in Ukraine as “a Nato campaign against Russia”. Well, she certainly didn’t choose the most diplomatic of phrases, and there’s a certain lack of nuance in her utterances, but neither of those are exactly something new. But given the danger of an escalation of the conflict into something far worse, there is, surely, some scope for challenging the conventional narrative rather than dividing the world into people wearing white hats and others wearing black hats – good guys and bad guys. Calling anyone who wants to explore alternatives an apologist for Putin isn’t helpful.

That the war in Ukraine was started by Russia, in complete disregard of international law, attacking a neighbouring sovereign state is beyond dispute; it is Putin and Russia who must carry the blame for the ensuing bloodshed and destruction. Whether it was entirely unprovoked is a lot more complex. Certainly, Ukraine was attempting to ‘Ukrainify’ parts of the country which were previously largely Russophone, but the population of those areas voted overwhelmingly for independence in 1991, and there was no objective evidence suggesting that they had changed their minds about that. No excuse there for Putin. Whether there was ‘a NATO campaign against Russia’ playing out over the future status of Ukraine vis-à-vis NATO and the EU is a much harder question to answer. NATO had already expanded further eastwards than Russia had expected (and contrary to assurances which may or may not have been given after the fall of the Soviet Union); feeling threatened is not a wholly unreasonable Russian response, although, again, not enough to justify an invasion.

But where I really part company with the views which are being pushed – and tend to agree with Abbott – is over the idea that Russia poses an imminent military threat to the whole of Europe. If there’s one thing which has been clearly demonstrated by the conflict in Ukraine it is that Russian military might has been over-hyped. The idea that a country which has shown itself incapable of dominating a single smaller neighbour is somehow poised to dominate the whole of Europe is risible. Spending more on armaments as a response to the claimed threat benefits only the arms manufacturers – especially in the US, which underpins Trump’s demands for more spending. Putin does not harbour any illusions about subjugating the entire world, and missiles aren’t about to fall on London.

That’s not to say that there is zero threat of anything. There can be little doubt that Putin would prefer a divided and weakened Europe which presents no potential threat to Russia, nor that he would like to disrupt the flow or weaponry and support to Kyiv. I’m willing to believe, even without detailed hard evidence, that Russia is behind at least some acts of sabotage and cyber attacks. A country at war can easily see some things as legitimate targets (which is to explain, not justify, such actions). But buying more tanks, fighter jets, ships and missiles neither prevents nor deters such actions – that merely increases the perceived threat to Russia. The likeliest causes of a wider war in Europe remain as they have been for a long time – a miscalculation or a belief (rational or otherwise) that ‘the other side’ is about to attack, provoking a ‘use it or lose it’ response. What is needed is dialogue and de-escalation, not more weaponry. On that, Abbott is closer to the mark than those rushing to condemn her words.

What is to be defended - and how?

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It was reported a couple of weeks ago that there is a £28 billion ‘funding shortfall’ for the UK’s military forces. It underlines the way in which a careful choice of words can frame any discussion. The substance of the story is that the military needs a lot more money to do all the things that it wants to do, and is presenting the lack of that money as a ‘shortfall’. It’s not the only word that could be used. The same gap could equally be framed as a deliberately planned overspend: the expenditure plan has been drawn up in a way which requires more money than the budget has allocated. A ‘shortfall’ is the responsibility of government, but an ‘overspend’ is the responsibility of the defence chiefs. It’s all about blame avoidance.

The more substantive underlying question is about what the UK’s military needs are; establishing that is a prerequisite to talking about how the expenditure is funded. It’s not a question on which either the government or the military really wants any sort of debate, because an open discussion on the question must inevitably put the question of the Trident upgrade on the table. This enormously expensive project is a major element of the UK’s planned military spend, yet it is, in essence, a weapons system which could only ever be used as a posthumous act of revenge following a nuclear attack on the UK. Even then, there’s considerable doubt as to whether the UK could really decide to fire any of the missiles without US authorisation. The UK government always claim that it can be so used, but the phrase attributed to Mandy Rice-Davies applies. Scrapping Trident completely would free up enough funding to overcome the alleged shortfall, even if we collectively decided that we still wanted to do everything else on the military shopping list.

Meanwhile the Lib Dems have come up with an alternative funding mechanism – the issue of what they are calling ‘war bonds’, based on what the government did during the two world wars. According to Ed Davey, this could raise an additional £20 billion for military purposes, and it’s clear that he thinks that the target market is individuals across the UK, so it would be giving the public a chance to "support patriotically our defence". I suspect that he’s right in saying that the government could raise that sort of money, although it’s more likely to come from the wealthiest in society rather than the man in the street, and they’re more likely to buy such bonds for the security of the capital and the interest they would attract than out of any great patriotic fervour. Given that the government (and there is no indication that a Lib Dem government would take a different view on this) regards all bond sales as ‘borrowing’, it would blow a massive hole in any fiscal rules. But they are correct in identifying that there is a market for more government bonds, which gives the lie to the idea that bond-holders are demanding that the government redeem existing bonds, aka ‘pay off debt’.

What they are all doing, though, is talking about the issue as though the constraint is a lack of money, when it really isn’t. The constraints on government spending on the military are firstly whether the spare physical resources (labour, materials, etc.) exist, and secondly, if they don’t, to what extent do we wish to prioritise weaponry over wellbeing by redirecting those resources. Treating money as the constraint serves only the few in society, and makes it more or less inevitable that the cost of increasing military expenditure falls, ultimately, on the wellbeing of the many. Destroying that which we wish to defend is no defence at all. It’s easy to see why the purveyors of war all want to avoid that question.

Poverty - a price worth paying?

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The military mind, to the extent to which that phrase is not an oxymoron, is a strange beast. It sees threats on all sides from people who want to invade and conquer, and the solution is always the same – more military hardware and personnel. To dismiss the conclusions of that strange beast is not the same as denying that there is any threat, it’s more that the threats aren’t the ones they want us to believe in. It’s true, of course, that some dictators actually want to expand the territories over which they rule – Russia’s dictator probably has eyes on more of his neighbours, although he’s almost certainly not mad enough to have learnt nothing from his costly behaviour in Ukraine. The USA’s dictator probably is mad enough to learn nothing from anything he does, and he too has designs on neighbouring territories.

There is, though, no serious threat from anywhere to invade the UK, and there is no country in the world which has enough resources to carry out a successful invasion and then to control and rule the territory afterwards. That particular threat is completely illusory – and it’s worth noting that there is little in the UK’s current military posture which is actually geared to prevent or resist a land invasion anyway. The threats are more subtle than that, and more guns and bombs will do little to prevent them. The question we should always be asking is why, exactly, would anyone want to attack the UK, and the only rational answer to that question is that they might be led to believe that the UK might otherwise attack them. Defence, in that context, implies an understanding of what might look to others like a threat and considering how to avoid that perception. As Simon Jenkins put it in the Guardian this morning in relation to China, soft power is more important than military power and “It is therefore absurd that the British government is planning to splurge billions more on defending Britain from a purely notional third world war [while] slashing the budget of its overseas cultural institution”.

There is another question which we should be asking ourselves, which was provoked by, even if it wasn’t quite the intention, the words of a retired general who said this week that we should reduce welfare spending to devote more resources to the military; and that question is very simple – who or what is it we are trying to defend? Reducing the spending power of the poorest in society to spend more on weaponry – clearly the implication of his words – means that he sees keeping some people in poverty as a price worth paying to defend us against his imagined threats. It illustrates clearly a dramatic difference in priorities. The problem we face is that most of our politicians seem to agree with him in principle – it’s guns before butter all over again.

Refighting the past

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It’s an old saying that generals always want to fight the last war, meaning that their tactics and the weaponry that they want is based more on experience of the past than on anticipation of the future.  In some ways, the speech by the head of the army a week or so ago gave the lie to that statement, because he seemed quite clear that the next threat will be most unlike the last one, and will be more to do with cyber warfare than with conventional warfare.  And then he went and spoiled it by appearing to argue that the response should be to spend more on tanks and guns, in a vain attempt to match the military capability of Russia.  Certainly, all the coverage around his speech seemed to concentrate on the amount and quality of the hardware available, without explaining quite how any of that would protect us from a cyber attack.

There was another former military chief on the television a few days ago, complaining about potential cuts to the Royal Marines, and arguing that such cuts would lave them at half the strength that they had a few years ago.  He drew a comparison with hospitals and schools, arguing, essentially, that people would be up in arms if the number of hospitals or schools were to be halved, so why weren’t they doing the same about reductions to the military?  It’s a completely misleading and over-simplistic comparison, of course, because it merely considers the provision, not the demand.  If the number of children needing to be educated halved, or some miracle cures were developed which halved the need for hospital beds, then it would be madness to keep the same number of schools or hospitals, simple because that was the number we had before.  In the same way, the size of the military needs to be related to the requirement; the hard part is working out what that requirement is.

It is, I suppose, in the nature of generals to assume that somebody – perhaps everybody – is just waiting for us to drop our guard so that they can march in and enslave us; they don’t need to ask, let alone answer, the question as to why anyone would want to.  In that sense, the UK’s military posture is, after all, very much rooted in refighting the past, based on an assumption that the ‘enemy’ is hell-bent on world domination, and needs to be ‘deterred’ from acting in pursuit of that aim.  Coupled with an image of the UK as a great world power based firmly in the nineteenth century (or, at a pinch, the first half of the twentieth), it leads to a demand for military spending on a scale, and of a type, which is largely unrelated to any real threat to the UK.

The real problem is not about the size or scale of the military at all; it is about the continuing failure to recognise the place which the UK occupies in the real world, and adapt to it instead of pretending to be something which the UK is not.

Stepping backwards

Tweet One of Cameron’s better decisions as Prime Minister was to protect the budget for overseas aid, and to aim at donating 0.7% of national income.  It wasn’t the most popular of his decisions with many of his party’s core supporters, but it was the right decision.

That doesn’t mean that there are no problems with the way some of the money is used.  It doesn’t always have the effect it should, it sometimes ends up in the wrong hands, it can enable some regimes to divert their ‘own’ resources to armaments, and when it’s used to support the purchase of goods and services from the UK it can look more like a subsidy to UK capitalists than aid to developing nations.

Those things, important though they are, and as much as they need to be acted on, are detail; the headline is that the UK is standing by its promise to aid those underdeveloped countries.  In that context, his announcement this week that money from the aid budget could possibly be used to pay for some of the UK’s military activities overseas was astonishing, and a significant step backwards.

He has a point, of course, when he says that economic development is difficult in strife-torn countries and regions (although those are often the places most in need of aid).  Peace and stability are important determinants of economic success.  But paying for troops and military hardware for use by UK forces doesn’t look a lot like economic aid to me.  And if those forces ever get into killing people, it’s hard to see how that would look a lot like ‘aid’ to those on the wrong end of any military action.

It’s true, of course, that ‘peace-keeping’ doesn’t necessarily lead to actual military action, but if that was never even a remote possibility of the role, it wouldn’t need military personnel to undertake it.  If using military personnel to enforce the peace doesn’t at least include the threat of lethal force, why are they needed?

There isn’t a simple black and white cut-off point between peace-keeping and intervention, however different the words sound.  After all, wasn’t the intervention in Afghanistan supposed to be about bringing peace and stability to that country?  I hardly think that particular intervention could ever be classed as ‘overseas aid for development’, though.

Paying for any part of the UK’s military out of overseas aid would be a travesty; it would make a complete nonsense of what was, at the time it was made, an honorouble and brave decision to maintain the economic aid programme at a time of domestic financial hardship.

Saving Private Jones

Tweet The attitude of nationalists towards the armed forces has long been ambivalent at best.  There are those who see the armed forces as being something very ‘British’ and therefore to be opposed per se; but there’s a much stronger element of anti-militarism as well.

It hasn’t always been as strong as the avowed pacifism of Gwynfor, but pacifism has long been a strong thread in the national movement in Wales.  Opposition to WMD comes naturally to most of us; but it’s stronger than that.  Even amongst those who are not outright pacifists, there has long been an opposition to foreign military adventures, including most recently in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a demand for a reduction in military expenditure.

Until comparatively recently, one of the core arguments put forward by nationalists was that an independent Wales would spend much less on armaments and armed forces as a proportion of GDP, and therefore have more resources available for peaceful purposes.

More recently, however, the apparent support given by MPs from all four parties to the proposed Defence Academy at St Athan, and the support apparently offered by the Welsh Government for both that scheme and the expansion of UAV testing at Aberporth were something of a surprise and a disappointment, as was the argument put forward by some in 2010 that Wales should have its ‘fair share’ of military expenditure.

The ambivalence has come to the fore again over the past couple of weeks with the discussions over cuts to the size of the UK’s Armed Forces.  The outcome seems to have been opposition to any cuts to ‘Welsh’ units.  That seems to me to be mistaken, and a result of some confused thinking.

There is inconsistency here.  If we want to spend less on ‘defence’, then job cuts are inevitable.  Preservation of all historic regiments cannot be reconciled with a reduction in the total number of those regiments.  It’s no use calling for swords to be turned into ploughshares if we then oppose the closure of the sword factory because it will lose jobs.

The challenge is not to protect what is but to build what should be; the demand should be for the savings to be used to create new jobs and industries, not for the preservation of remnants of an imperial past.

Jobs based on a different future, please

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Last week’s news that the Labour Party in Wales would support the move of Trident to Milford Haven if Scotland becomes independent caused a flurry, but was hardly a surprise.  It’s entirely consistent with Labour’s position on nuclear weapons over many years.

But the underlying reasoning behind the move by the First Minister is really nothing to do with the argument about nuclear weapons per se.  It is, rather, based on a much simpler logic which runs something like this:

·        Wales needs jobs

·        ‘This project’ provides jobs

·        Wales should welcome ‘this project’.

One could substitute almost anything for ‘this project’; and in that sense, Carwyn Jones’ position on Trident isn’t that different from the position of many other politicians on other projects – such as Wylfa B or the Severn Barrage for instance.  The logic is exactly the same.

There is scope for debate, of course, about how many real jobs ‘this project’ provides.  The only certainty is that the numbers will be overstated by supporters of the project, and will inevitably include a number of jobs to be filled by those relocating with the project.  And whilst the debate about the number of jobs is far from irrelevant, it has more to do with whether any particular project represents value for money than with the underlying principle.

And it’s the consideration of the principle which is missing from the logic above.  It’s easier to see a principle in relation to Trident than it is for a number of other projects, but that simply underlines the fact that different people draw the line in different places.  Rather then admitting that the real issue is where to draw the line, most politicians seem to fall back on criticising anyone who opposes ‘this project’ as being anti-jobs – and it was notable that that was exactly what Jones did last week, in his side-swipe at Plaid over Trident.

I’m clear that I want to see a demilitarised Wales (and world, come to that, but let’s start with that part for which we bear the most direct responsibility), and that Trident, or any other variety of WMD, doesn’t fit with that view.  (Just as I’m also clear that I want to see an energy policy based on renewables, and that Wylfa B doesn’t fit with that view.)  That means that there are some projects to which I would be opposed, no matter how many jobs they would bring.  Ultimately, I want to see employment in Wales based on creating a new future, not on simply perpetuating the status quo.

To argue that we should ignore such questions – and all the strategies produced by government – in pursuit of jobs, in whatever field, is to avoid taking responsibility for building a different kind of future for our country and the world.  Politicians who argue otherwise are simply reacting to and managing ‘what is’ rather than building ‘what should be’.

But where's the ploughshare factory?

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Many of the jobs being lost as a result of the cutbacks at BAE systems are the sort of skilled engineering jobs which are key to maintaining a manufacturing capacity at a time when so many manufacturing jobs have been exported to the Far East as a result of untrammelled globalisation.  And the job losses will be a heavy blow for the individuals and communities concerned.

The losses are, however, an inevitable result of cutbacks in military expenditure, which underlines two important points.

The first is that cuts in public expenditure don’t only affect jobs in the public sector.  Listening to some members of the government, one would believe that it’s only the ‘bloated’ (one of their favourite words) public sector with its ‘gold-plated’ (another favourite term) pensions and conditions which is being cut, and that cuts to the public sector are entirely necessary to restore the public finances.  In practice, there is a much higher degree of interdependency between the sectors than that.

And the second is that it is not possible to cut back on military spending without there being an impact on jobs and the economy – and I say that as one who has regularly and consistently called for a scaling down of the UK’s military expenditure.  ‘Swords into ploughshares’ is a two-part process; the second part is as important as the first, but is completely missing from government strategy.

I can understand the reaction from trades unionists and politicians, which has been to criticise the cutbacks and seek protection for the jobs, but it’s the wrong reaction.  What we need isn’t protection of jobs producing military hardware, but a planned and managed switch of those jobs into peaceful manufacturing.  Looking only at one side of the equation is short-sighted.

Sharing expenditure around

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This report in yesterday’s Western Mail covered some research carried out by the SNP which suggested that, on a per capita basis, Wales is ‘losing out’ on billions of pounds of military expenditure each year, compared to other areas of the UK.  Military spending is an issue which used to be higher on the nationalist agenda, largely because it was an obvious area where an independent Wales could make sizable cuts, and use the savings either to offset Wales’ deficit, or else spend the money on other things.

In recent years, many nationalists have seemed almost afraid of dealing with the question of armed forces and Independence.  Indeed, one of my anonymous friends left a comment on another post a couple of weeks back, which coupled a suggestion that any discussion of Welsh Independence needed to consider the question of military forces with a hint perhaps that it was a subject which was being avoided.

There’s some truth in that, sadly.  For my part, it’s not so much a wish to avoid the subject as a result of spending more time on issues which are more immediate and which interest me more.  But I am, and always have been, willing to discuss any aspect of the Independence question; it’s the only way of increasing understanding of, and support for, that option.

I’d accept though that many do avoid discussing it at all.  Partly it’s because of a strong pacifist tendency running through nationalist thinking; partly it’s down to the same lack of confidence in the case for independence which leads some to avoid the whole subject, never mind its consequences; and partly it’s a fear of appearing to be in some way anti-British, and/or deterring potential voters.

But any rounded view of the implications of Welsh Independence has to consider what that means for defence.  And given that it has been a long-standing contention amongst nationalists that Wales would spend a great deal less on defence than the UK government spends, it’s also an important element of the economics of independence.

On spending, this table of military expenditure is interesting.  Whilst the UK spends around 2.7% of GDP on military activity (and has the fourth largest military budget in absolute terms worldwide), a small country such as Ireland spends only 0.6% of its GDP.  In parallel with that, of course, Ireland has a much more limited set of objectives (summarised here) for its military.

Every country faces different circumstances, and there will always be objections from some to any comparisons, but it seems to me that an independent Wales would have military objectives much more similar in nature to those of the Republic of Ireland than to those of the UK – and that expenditure levels would tend to follow that approach.  Why would that not be the case?

Debate around ‘defence’ at a UK level seems to broadly accept the status quo as a starting point, with the effect that the UK is trying to behave as though it were still a major power on the world stage.  France, another post-imperial power, has a similar outlook, and spends around 2.5% of its GDP on its military.  The comparison with Germany – at 1.4% - is instructive; and it’s notable that Germany is the large European country with the least pretension to being a world military power.

History (to say nothing of the wars of the past) plays a role in these attitudes of course; but that same history encourages some governments to want to see their role and importance as being greater than it really is.  And they then seek the military muscle to back that up.  It has long seemed to me that the UK Government’s attitude – regardless of party - has never really adapted to the loss of empire.

It was surprising last year to hear some nationalists arguing that Wales should have its ‘fair share’ of military expenditure; it was a complete reversal of positions taken in the past.  The superficial logic of that position is clear, since the GDP of those areas where the money is spent benefits from military expenditure. But I’m glad that that has not been the response to yesterday’s story.  It’s a fair share of total expenditure which we need, not a fair share of each individual budget line, and simply moving military expenditure to Wales in the interests of ‘fairness’ isn’t the best way either of achieving that aim or of preparing Wales to take more responsibility for her own future. 

What we really need is not to divert more military expenditure to Wales, but to be able to take advantage of the 2%+ of GDP which would be freed up for other purposes.  It’s a not insignificant part of the potential Independence dividend.