Category Archives: History

History, Military, Politics, Second World War

Chamberlain had courage. Does Starmer?

POLITICAL HISTORY

Intro: Trump’s comparison between the pair misses the point. Despite what the critics say, whilst Chamberlain did make some grave errors he did have courage. What will Starmer’s legacy leave on the pages of history?  

Just a few days ago Donald Trump delighted in comparing our Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, to Neville Chamberlain. Winston Churchill’s predecessor is blamed for the failed policy of trying to appease Hitler rather than confront German expansionism across Europe in the years before the Second World War.

Chamberlain is the most vilified of British prime ministers, “the guilty man” who, it is argued, failed to deter Hitler and left us almost defenceless when he resigned in May 1940.

Had Donald Trump studied history a little more carefully, he would not have made the comparison, however. Far from failing in his duties, Chamberlain was the author of the rearmament policy from the mid-1930s that made it possible for Britain to stand firm in 1940.

To compare our current prime minister to him does a grave disservice to Chamberlain, while some might say it greatly inflates Starmer’s political courage and grasp of strategy, neither of which is in evidence in his policies or speeches. Despite frequent public denigration today, Chamberlain’s reputation among historians is higher than might be expected.

As Chancellor from 1931-1937, and then as Prime Minister, he stuck to a double strategy: try to ease tensions with Germany through diplomacy, while at the same time rearming. Rearmament would not only prepare Britain for any future conflict, but would also deter German aggression by showing that we had the means and commitment to fight.

No one looking at Britain today, with its naval ships and fleet under constant repair, its tanks numbering at only a few dozen, and its Army unable to field anything larger than a brigade – about 5,000 men – for about a month of fighting, would be deterred by the readiness of our Armed Forces.

Chamberlain was the principal author of defence plans from 1936 that committed £1.5bn – then a vast sum – over five years to rearmament. He recognised that Britain’s defence would depend on airpower and set a target of nearly 2,000 front-line planes for the RAF. Were it not for this far-sightedness we would not have had the Spitfire and Hurricane and would likely have been invaded in 1940. New warships were commissioned for the Navy; older ships were modernised.

After Hitler’s invasion of the Czech provinces of Moravia and Bohemia in March 1939, this programme was rapidly accelerated. The Ministry of Supply was established to oversee the production of military equipment, and peacetime conscription began. The Territorial Army was doubled in size. Just as war began in September 1939, the famous chain of radar stations around Britain’s coastline became operational.

Revealingly, Chamberlain had been attacked during the 1935 election campaign by the deputy leader of the Labour Party, Arthur Greenwood, for the “disgraceful” suggestion “that more millions of money needed to be spent on armaments”.

Chamberlain understood something else about war readiness: the need for strong finances. Any war would likely be a long one, and a strong economy with reserves to spend would play a vital part in any struggle. He planned for what is now called headroom, fiscal surpluses that could be used in time of national emergency. In 1937, he put up income tax to 5s in the pound.

Today, our peacetime taxes are at the highest levels since the end of the Second World War and yet we have no headroom at all. Everything points to cuts in expenditure, above all to pay for a ballooning welfare bill. Starmer, though, does not have the courage or political capital to tell his backbenchers, as the former Labour prime minister, Jim Callaghan, told the Labour Party conference during the 1976 International Monetary Fund (IMF) crisis, “the party’s over”: the spending on benefits has to stop.

Chamberlain is rightly blamed and held accountable for giving Germany the Sudetenland, then part of Czechoslovakia, at the 1938 Munich Conference, and for taking Hitler at his word by believing his protestations of peace. These were crucial failures of judgment. Then, when war came and Britain’s position looked increasingly hopeless, Chamberlain lacked the resolve to fight.

It was in this context, in May 1940, that the Conservative MP Leo Amery, speaking in the House of Commons, and using words attributed to Oliver Cromwell, demanded of Chamberlain: “In the name of God, go!”. If the upcoming local elections in May don’t finish off Starmer, it is quite likely that someone will say these words to our current prime minister.

For military campaigners and those on the political right will surely argue it would be excellent if Starmer could behave with Churchillian resilience and bravery by living up to our responsibilities to NATO and the free world. Failing that, it would be enough if he could follow Chamberlain’s example and at least lay a basis for having a stronger military and economy that we now require.

If Starmer really did behave like Chamberlain he would leave a better legacy, and also do something that would save his future reputation among historians. Time is short and running out for Starmer politically, but he still has time to act.

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Denmark, Europe, European Union, Government, Greenland, History, National Security, NATO, Politics, United States

Solutions emerge that could solve the Greenland crisis

GREENLAND

Intro: Turning disused military facilities on Greenland into “sovereign” US bases would hand Donald Trump a territorial prize without him launching a full-scale invasion

High above the Arctic Circle, surrounded by Greenland’s frozen wastes, American scientists conducting a secret research project hit upon a brilliant and remarkable idea.

Suppose nuclear missiles could be hidden inside the polar ice cap? These instruments of Armageddon might be able to survive a Soviet strike and then wreak terrible revenge. Alas, the US military had to abandon this dream after finding that constantly shifting ice fields were never going to provide safe shelter for missile silos.

But the location of this scheme in the 1960s – a once-secret “city under the ice” known as Camp Century – may hold the key to resolving a diplomatic impasse that European governments never believed they would have to contend with. Namely, the prospect of America seizing Greenland from Denmark.

Just days ago, President Trump said: “If we don’t take Greenland, Russia or China will – and I’m not letting that happen… one way or the other, we’re going to have Greenland.”

The dawning realisation that he is deadly serious has triggered a scramble for solutions, intended to avoid the catastrophe of America using force against an ally.

“If the United States chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including our NATO agreement – and thus the security that has been provided since the end of the Second World War,” said Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister. The clock on defusing the crisis is ticking.

US vice-president JD Vance and secretary of state Marco Rubio met with the Danish and Greenlandic foreign ministers in the White House, but President Trump again warned that anything less than American control of Greenland was “unacceptable”.

France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, has said that France would open a consulate in Greenland on February 6, acting on a decision taken last year during President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to the territory.

Plans are also being laid for a new NATO mission to secure Greenland, which will probably involve UK forces. Yet, if that idea is not enough to satisfy Trump, the solution could lie on a small island 4,000 miles away.

Cyprus has hosted British bases throughout its 65-year history as an independent state. Today, RAF Akrotiri on its southern coast serves as Britain’s busiest overseas base, while GCHQ has a vital listening post in the eastern Dhekelia area. What makes these facilities different is that both are located on British sovereign territory. The Union flag flies over Akrotiri and Dhekelia, whose 98 square miles – or 3 per cent of the island of Cyprus – are, legally speaking, just as British as any other town or county in the UK.

Suppose America’s military installations in Greenland were to be converted into “sovereign base areas” on the Cyprus model. Given that this arrangement has worked for nearly seven decades on a small and crowded Mediterranean island, it should be relatively simple to replicate on a vast and largely empty territory like Greenland. Could this be the answer?

Michael Clarke, a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, says it might be a way of giving Trump the sort of victory that he wants, and so it has plausibility.

Any possible solution has to deal with the fact that Trump’s public reasons for taking Greenland make no objective sense: “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security,” he says, apparently unaware that America already has an agreement with Denmark signed in 1951, allowing the US to “construct, install, maintain and operate” any military base on Greenland and to “station and house personnel”.

The US military also enjoys free access to the seas around the island. If Trump is right to claim that Russian and Chinese ships are now prowling these waters, then America can already counter this threat. There is simply no need for Trump to “have” Greenland.

During the Cold War, the US used its rights under the 1951 accord to build at least 17 installations across the island, ranging from airfields to radar stations and weather observatories.

In the high north, more than 1,000 miles from Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, American engineers tunnelled into a glacier to create Camp Century in 1960. Powered by a nuclear reactor, this secret maze of living quarters and research facilities – codenamed “Project Iceworm” – housed 200 specialists studying the possibility of hiding missile silos beneath the snow. When that proved impossible, Camp Century was shut in 1967. Later, as the Cold War came to an end, America dismantled all but one of its military installations in Greenland, withdrawing virtually all of its 6,000 personnel.

Today, the only remaining US facility is Pituffik Space Base on the shores of Baffin Bay, 138 miles west of the carcass of Camp Century. It is here where about 200 personnel watch for incoming ballistic missiles as part of the US Early Warning System. If Pituffik were to become US sovereign territory, then Trump would be able to say that he had planted the Stars and Stripes in the snow and gained new land for the United States. If the same status were to be accorded to the abandoned tunnels and unusable silos of Camp Century – and perhaps the locations of all the other former military sites – then 17 US flags might appear on the map, and a few hundred square miles of Arctic ice cap be added to America. Given that Greenland covers more than 836,000 square miles and has only 56,000 people, this would make little practical difference. No-one’s life would be changed if the Stars and Stripes were to fly over some uninhabited inlets far above the Arctic Circle. Even if the boundaries of any sovereign base areas were to be drawn as expansively as possible, and Trump gained a few thousand square miles, that would only amount to a fraction of Greenland.

“The real issue is that Trump wants to add a big chunk of territory to the United States so that he gets his face on Mount Rushmore,” says Prof Clarke. “He’s not going to get the Nobel Peace Prize, so he wants another sort of prize.”

About 40 per cent of the current territory of the United States was bought, with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Alaska Purchase of 1867 being the most famous examples, and Trump seemingly yearns for something comparable. Granting America sovereign base areas in Greenland may be a way of handing him the prize that he craves – without, in practice, changing very much.

The International Security Programme at the Chatham House think tank certainly agrees that this could be a solution, while adding that any territorial concessions made under US pressure would be a bitter pill for Denmark and Greenland.

Chatham House believes that although this would still be a big concession for Denmark and Greenland to make, it would be a better concession than risking an American attack. It stresses, that for Denmark and Greenland, this is now such a matter of national security that they probably could make far-reaching concessions in bringing this impasse to an end.

There must be a danger that Trump may act unilaterally and simply declare US sovereignty over Pituffik, and perhaps the chain of defunct installations, including Camp Century.

Denmark’s best option could be to pre-empt him by offering to convert these facilities into sovereign base areas as part of an overall settlement.

Some possibilities are infinitely worse. Rubio has said that America wants to buy the entirety of Greenland, reviving Trump’s proposal from his first presidential term. But the Danish government has neither the legal power nor the appetite to sell its territory.

If no solution is possible, Denmark could stand firm and rally its European allies, hoping that Trump’s attention may turn elsewhere. But that option increases the risk of America resorting to military action – and just about anything would be better than that calamity.

Yet, even if the confrontation could be resolved by giving the US sovereign base areas, Prof Clarke believes this outcome would still weaken the West. “NATO will have suffered because of that – the fact that they’ve had to buy him off. And Denmark will have suffered. So NATO would still come out of this weaker,” he said. “But it would not be as destructive as the possible alternative.”

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Economic, Europe, Government, History, Military, Politics, Society, United States

If we are unable to defend Greenland, then Europe is finished

UNITED STATES – EUROPE

Intro: Once you are reliant on foreign forces for safety you must abide by their decisions, like it or not. What is so difficult to understand about that?

IT WAS some two decades ago when Robert Cooper, Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, wrote: “The rest of the world… reacts to America, fears America, lives under American protection, envies, resents, plots against, depends on America. Every other country defines its strategy in relation to the United States”. And, in turn, the United States defines its foreign policy aims as effective “invulnerability”.

Fast forward to today, and Donald Trump is ruthlessly pursuing this same policy. Bombing Iran, deposing Nicolas Maduro, threatening war with Colombia, and now musing on the annexation of Greenland. “We need it for defence”.

Presidents change and domestic policy changes with the incumbent; as with the British Empire before it, however, the interests of the American state are eternal and perpetual. It is the duty of the White House to follow them, and the role of others to respond with envy constrained by their dependence or fear. In this case, the reaction in Europe to an explicit proposal for the annexation of European territory has been muted by both.

Denmark has complained that Trump has failed to show sufficient “respect for international law”, and Keir Starmer has politely asked Trump to stop musing on the prospects of conquering part of an allied nation. Beyond this squawking, however, there has been no response because Europe has no response to offer beyond hoping that Trump forgets about this issue and moves on. We are not going to see US forces conducting midnight raids to capture Danish politicians, or shots fired in anger over the fate of Greenland. Europe is not going to fight America because it can’t, and America is not going to fight Europe because it has no need to: if Trump really wants the territory and isn’t just enjoying the sight of European politicians scrambling to cover their shame, then he could apply deeply painful leverage until he gets his way.

Despite all the rhetoric about the US military and how it intends to be used in the future, the continent’s security is still guaranteed by American boots on European ground, and the outcome of the conflict on its eastern flank by the flow of American weapons and intelligence to Ukraine.

If push comes to shove, no one should be betting against Trump using this leverage to get what he wants in Greenland through some means short of outright annexation: declaring that in the absence of new US installations and treaties that deployments to Europe will need to wind down to preserve forces for the protection of the US homeland.

The diplomatic side will be smoothed over, but the faultlines will still exist. Read the responses from European leaders, and there will always be a hint of rulers who have relied on outsiders to maintain their forces, and have belatedly understood that the interests of those outsiders do not always align with their own. In this, at least, they are in company: the last Western Roman emperor was deposed by foreign allies garrisoned within his territory when their demands for land were denied. The Normans entered southern Italy as mercenaries and ended up ruling over swathes of territory. The Mamluks began as foreign slave-soldiers, and became sultans. The European nations of the present day have spent decades freeloading on US defence spending, paying lip service to the American political obsessions of the day on diversity, migration, democracy, and other cultural issues in exchange for this defence. Geir Lundestad coined the term “empire by invitation” to describe this process: embracing dependence and ever greater American intervention in the life of the Continent.

When American and European interests were aligned, this dependence and intervention was tolerable. The constraints rarely chafed. As American relative power has waned, though, the tasks necessary to secure the homeland and to secure Europe have begun to diverge. As one expert previously said some three years ago, the United States did not “have the military capacity to remain so heavily engaged in Europe while ensuring effective defence in Asia”.

Today, that military expert is at the heart of the administration’s defence policy and is putting this policy into action. Subsequently, Europe is now finding that by having a dependence on a nation with interests different to your own is a deeply uncomfortable position to be in. It is also a deeply difficult one to get out of. For all Europe’s talk of strategic autonomy, at every turn it has baulked at paying the costs that this would entail. It left security to the Americans, comforting itself that they would always be there to pick up the bill.

This dependence reaches beyond the military sphere. America and the EU might enjoy the world’s largest bilateral trading relationship, but it is not an even one. The economic might Brussels hoped to rely on is a partial illusion: US companies provide the payments systems that many European nations rely on, the cloud storage their citizens store their secrets in, the search engines, AI models, and social media platforms which determine the information landscape for the electorate. If a dispute really escalated, the kill switch is in Washington. The EU scramble for alternatives is a result of this realisation.

Yet, the mistake politicians made was a simple one. Ariel Rubinstein’s book Economic Fables makes the point that there is more than one set of rules that the world can operate on. What we think of as immutable features of society are nothing of the sort. Rubenstein was elaborating in the context of how we teach economics to students, but there is no doubt this point can usefully be taken much further.

Underneath the logic of economics and international law the base level of reality still exists. The law of the jungle does not operate in gold and contracts, and it is not tamed by them. It only sleeps, and the market is only in charge until it wakes. Wealth is only power until the men with guns decide that it should be redistributed in their favour, and their agreement to forego this only holds if you can create more wealth than they could otherwise take. Europe’s leaders are now relearning at their cost these lessons their predecessors could have taught them for free. Once you are reliant on a foreign force for safety and a foreign power for prosperity, you are no longer completely sovereign. All the cultural soft power and economic heft in the world won’t do you any good if your outsourced military decides it can insist on more favourable terms than you are willing to provide.

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