Arts, Books, History, NATO, Society, United States

Book review: Deterring Armageddon

LITERARY REVIEW: A BIOGRAPHY OF NATO

Intro: NATO’s modus operandi is centred around the pledge that an attack on one member is an attack on all. In a provocative new book, however, the author asks: would any nation today really put itself in the firing line to protect another?

DURING the depths of the Cold War, 40 years ago, there were undoubtedly gullible victims in Britain of Moscow propaganda.

Paradoxically, many of these people have now become warmongering Blairites, keen advocates in bombing distant countries. But back in the 1980s, they detested NATO with every human fibre. Houses were plastered with peacenik posters; many camped out at the U.S. Air Force base at Greenham Common, protesting against the presence of American cruise missiles; others still chained themselves to fences and blocked roads leading into the Naval base at Faslane; the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) was rampant among the militants who were disruptive in their aims and actions.

Many of these people were perceived as being deluded as they actively wanted the former Soviet Union to dominate all of Europe. They failed, yes, but actually, only by a narrow margin.

They failed because NATO held together under very great pressure from the Kremlin and from the European Left. The Communist Empire had exhausted itself in one last failed attempt to destroy the Free West, and the Soviet Union sickened and eventually perished.

Many things contributed to that demise, but many military commentators and analysts believe that the battle over cruise missiles, and the resolve of NATO, were decisive.

The NATO alliance, set up in 1949 specifically to prevent a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, still exists almost 33 years after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Yet, an oddity is at play. The alliance was created to deal with that particular menace, which still exists long after that threat melted away.

Even more surprising, NATO has actually got bigger since its arch enemy vanished. An explanation is more than overdue.

We should therefore be very grateful to Peter Apps, a British Army reservist, and Reuters columnist, for writing a comprehensive and full history of NATO since its inception in 1949 to today.

The workings of this book started life under the rather exalted working title “Sacred Obligation”. But are we looking at an organisation that has become the world’s most successful bluff?

Mr Apps spends a great deal of his time chronicling the endless unresolved tension between the mighty, rich, and powerful U.S., NATO’s backbone and muscle, and Europe, its vulnerable and pitifully weak underbelly. It was of course this tension which the USSR ceaselessly sought to exploit.

NATO’s historic and famous promise, that an attack on one would be an attack on all, was and remains a very precarious gamble. History features sad examples of security pacts being called out and exposed as bluffs.

The normally pugnacious Lord Palmerston wriggled out of Britain’s 1860s pledge to defend Denmark against Prussia – when he realised it would get us into a war we would lose.

Neville Chamberlain’s 1939 guarantee to protect Poland from Germany failed to deter Hitler from invading. Even worse, when the invasion came, Britain did nothing.

And we shouldn’t forget, either, how fiercely determined America was in 1939, and for years afterwards, in staying out of European quarrels. Donald Trump means what he says, too.

Washington only went to war against Berlin after Hitler declared war on America, not the other way round. Any careful and studious reader of this book will begin to wonder whether NATO, far from being an enshrined promise of aid in time of trouble, is in fact a good way of avoiding any real obligation to fight.

The much-touted Article 5 of NATO’s charter is not quite the magnificent guarantee of armed support from the strong to the weak that it appears to be. Members of the alliance pledge to assist an attacked nation “by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force”.

Read carefully. This means that if a NATO member does not “deem” armed force to be necessary, it can send a note of protest instead, or make a fierce and angry speech at the United Nations.

America would never have signed or ratified a treaty which obliged it to go to war, which is why the clause is so weak.

All the small, poor ill-armed countries on NATO’s eastern edge would be well advised to take note of that. During its 40-year life cycle, NATO has shown how cautious, limited, and risk-averse it has been. Its recent reinvention as a kind of mini-United Nations task force has been mainly outside its original operational area, in former Yugoslavia, Libya, and Afghanistan.

Its founding membership was carefully restricted to countries already well outside the Soviet sphere of influence.

It stood aside when Russian tanks crushed the 1953 East Berlin rising, the 1956 Budapest revolt, and the 1968 Prague Spring.

It did precious little when Moscow ordered Poland’s Communist rulers to curtail a democratic and Christian rebellion by imposing brutal martial law there from 1981 to 1983.

Where the West did stand up to Soviet power in Europe, mainly in West Berlin, it tended to be the U.S. which did most of the heavy lifting. We should suspect it is still much the same. In an enlightening passage, Apps describes a recent scene at NATO’s Joint Force Command in the Dutch town of Brunssum.  

He writes: “Officials in its 24-hour operations room described their main role as stopping the Ukraine war spreading to alliance territory”. Well, quite. For who knows what stress would be placed on NATO if, thanks to some rash incursion or off-course missile, it faced a direct war with Russia?

As it happens, the task of avoiding the spread of war into NATO territory would be much easier if NATO had not expanded so far east in the past 30 years. Its leaders had been warned.

In 1997, the greatest and toughest anti-Soviet U.S. diplomat of modern times, George Kennan, said shortly before he died: “Expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.”

Recalling his generation’s successful handling of Soviet power, he sighed: “This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.”

– Deterring Armageddon: A Biography of NATO by Peter Apps is published by Wildfire, 624pp

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Britain, Defence, Government, Politics, Society

Defence is our first priority

BRITAIN

OUR political leaders are always gushing when reverting to how they feel about British troops. Recently, the prime minister said: “In a dangerous world, I’ve seen how you’re working around the clock for the good of us all.”

So much for the gratitude of politicians. While our leaders are quick to become dewy-eyed over the selfless dedication and bravery of our servicemen and women, they are depressingly reluctant to match their words with deeds.

Even Conservative governments – who should know better – have run down the Armed Forces they are so ready to send into battle or on other perilous deployments.

Defence budgets have been plundered to prop up unsustainable levels of funding elsewhere, most strikingly for health.

Those elected to govern make choices, of course. But the choices made are coming back to haunt Britain.

The threats facing us are far more unpredictable and serious than even during the Cold War. Yet the British Army is so short of soldiers, it can’t even field a single 10,000-strong division. The Royal Navy has been reduced to little more than a coastal force.

To make matters worse, the House of Commons’ spending watchdog says Defence faces a £29billion funding black hole, which means further vital equipment could be axed.

With war raging violently in Europe and authoritarian regimes on the rise, it is simply astonishing that not a bean was conjured up in last week’s Spring Budget. Our threadbare defences urgently require to be upgraded. Our political masters are short-sighted and have made a dangerous mistake.

Former defence secretaries, top brass, and war heroes are all calling for increases to Ministry of Defence funding from 2.3 to 4 per cent of GDP within a decade.

With the Budget gone, the perfect time to announce a surge in defence funding would be NATO’s 75th anniversary summit in July.

On the campaign trail in America, Donald Trump has said he would let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to pact members who failed to spend 2 per cent of GDP on defence. His comments may have been puerile for many, but it is hard not to have a grain of sympathy with his sentiments.

For far too long, some European countries have skimped on security, opting instead to ride-off-the-back of America’s military might.  

By pledging to bump up our military budget to realistic operational levels, Britain can show real leadership.

If we are to get serious about defence spending, the MoD’s notorious procurement operation requires radically overhauled and reformed. The department has long set the Whitehall benchmark for incompetence and serial mismanagement of its budget. Taxpayers’ money has been squandered by the billions.

And while we need more troops, battlefield tanks, armoured vehicles, weaponry, and fighter jets, modern warfare involves cyber conflict, the use of unmanned aircraft, drones, and computer-controlled battlefleets. There needs to be proper provision for all of these things.

With a general election looming, Rishi Sunak fears losing votes by slashing other departmental budgets. But none of the other Government’s obligations is more crucial than the defence of the realm. If our security is compromised, all other areas of life are endangered. Only through military strength will we deter our enemies.

Time and again, British Forces have proved their incalculable worth to this country. The very least we can do in return is give them the resources and tools they need to do their job and keep us safe.

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Arts, Britain, Defence, Government, History, Politics, Russia, Society, United Nations, United States

Politicians are comparing Putin to Hitler

BRITAIN

Intro: Putin’s totalitarian regime and its war in Ukraine is synonymous with Hitler and Nazi Germany. As Churchill urged in the 1930s, that’s why we need to spend much more on defence. It’s woefully inadequate

IN May 1953, Sir Winston Churchill told a Coronation lunch being held in Westminster Hall, “Study history. Study history . . . In history lies all the secrets of statecraft.” One of the reasons Churchill was an historian himself was because he profoundly believed that a primary purpose for studying the past was to inform and encourage action in the present.

What are we to make then of Foreign Secretary David Cameron’s recent reference to history – his powerful speech to the United Nations in which he equated Russia’s actions towards Ukraine with the way that Hitler and the Nazis behaved in the 1930s?

Lord Cameron’s speech was precipitated after the Russian ambassador tried to accuse Volodymyr Zelensky of being a Nazi. The Foreign Secretary responded by saying: “The only people behaving like Nazis are Putin and his cronies who thought they could invade a country, take its territory, and ultimately the world would look away.”

There are serious political consequences that follow upon equating Putin to Hitler, and one of them is that you need to put your money where your mouth is. You cannot make such a comparison, and then not spend the necessary money to counter the threat that you have just articulated in front of the whole world.

You cannot act as Churchill did before the Second World War, which was to warn the world of the impending threat, but not then do what Churchill did, which was to call for largescale rearmament to deal with it.

There are absolutely no signs that the UK Government is prepared to do this. In last week’s spring Budget, the Chancellor made no commitment to spending more on defence.

Britain currently pays just 2 per cent of her national income on defence, and that figure can be reached only by adding the costs of such indirect defence expenditures like widows’ pensions and the intelligence services. Strip out the nuclear deterrent costs and Britain pays the equivalent of 1.75% of GDP on defence.

At a time when we are witnessing the worst war in Europe since 1945, the British Army itself cannot even fill its already-depleted ranks, the RAF is mothballing its fighter squadrons, and the Royal Navy can barely put a flotilla together to protect shipping in the Red Sea, while its recent Trident missile test was an embarrassing national failure.

Meanwhile, Moscow is threatening to put nuclear weapons into space.

In the 1930s, Churchill articulated the pressing need for boosting spending on all three services. That was pivotal in deterring the Nazis if at all possible, or to defeat them if not. Churchill started warning of the dangers the Nazis posed within weeks of Hitler becoming Chancellor, telling the House of Commons on April 13, 1933, that, “As Germany acquires full military equality with her neighbours… while she is in the temper which we have unhappily seen, so surely should we see ourselves within a measurable distance of the renewal of European war.”

By November of that year, Churchill was speaking of “the obvious fear which holds all the nations who are neighbours of Germany”. This also has modern parallels with the way that Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland view Putin’s Russia. In a 2021 essay written before the full-scale invasion in which Putin laid claim to Ukraine being Russian territory, he mentioned Lithuania in a similar vein no fewer than 17 times.

Yet the British Army is in danger of becoming merely “a domestically-centred land force” with no capacity for projecting force overseas to defend our allies. That was a view expressed in a leaked letter from the Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders. There is no hyperbole in what he writes.

By early 1934, Churchill was saying the RAF needed far more fighter and bomber aircraft. Following the declaration of war by Germany, Churchill warned: “Within the next few hours the crash of bombs exploding in London and cataracts of masonry and fire and smoke will apprise us of any inadequacy which has been permitted in our aerial defences.” The nation was still mourning the Great War and refused to listen, fearing that rearming might provoke another, or by his own government which thought him an opportunistic warmonger.

Churchill recognised that far from provoking war, heavy Western rearmament might instead deter the man whom David Cameron has now compared to Putin. “I could not see how you could prevent war better,” Churchill said in July 1934, “than by confronting an aggressor with the prospect of such a vast concentration of force, moral and material, that even the most reckless, even the most infuriated leader would not attempt to challenge those great forces.” Instead, however, public apathy won the day, and British rearmament was postponed until it was almost too late.

“Moral and material.” Churchill understood that the demoralisation of the West, in the sense that democracies such as Britain and France were weak and divided, influenced the decision-making of the totalitarians in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. Similarly, moral vigour is desperately needed on the part of the United States, the G7, NATO, and Britian today in order to deter countries such as Russia, China, and Iran from ripping up the rules-based international order.

No message would be stronger, especially in the aftermath of the suspicious death in custody of Alexei Navalny, than if the West were to sequester the $300billion of Russia’s frozen assets presently being held in Brussels and give it to Ukraine for its defence and reconstruction.

That would be the Churchillian approach. But does our present Government have the anti-appeasing moral vigour to do it?

Fervently, we should all hope so. In stark truth, the Government needs to do far more than just this. It must increase defence spending to a minimum of 3.5 per cent of GDP. The Budget would have been an ideal moment to show it plans to do so, but – as we have seen – the Treasury continues to sit on its hands.

It’s not as if an increase to 3.5 per cent would be an earth-shattering break with custom and practice. Historically, defence spending was around 5.5 per cent of GDP during much of the 1970s and reached 6 per cent during the Falklands War in 1982.

Neville Chamberlain’s government finally woke up to the Nazi threat, and it was able to build the Hurricanes and Spitfires that saved Britain. The year of peace bought by the humiliating Munich Agreement was used by the Nazis to build much more weaponry and train many more soldiers than Britain, but nonetheless British air defences were in a much better state in 1940 than in 1938.

Modern defence industries require far longer research and development lead times today than in the 1930s, so if rearmament is to take place using new technologies, there can be no time to waste. Logistically, we currently have only enough 155mm shells – the standard type – in this country for one week of fighting at the rate experienced in Ukraine today. That’s how limited we are.

Churchill would be sickened by the brinkmanship being practised by Britain in the presence of a clearly growing global threat to democracy by evil totalitarian and murderous regimes.

Aldous Huxley, the English writer and philosopher, once wrote: “That men do not learn the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach us.” Lord Cameron may have correctly used the Second World War as the analogy by which to judge our present dangers, but where is the clear counterpart to go with that, namely large-scale rearmament?  

Back in the 1930s, Churchill wrote in his war memoirs how his exhortations were ignored by fellow parliamentarians. “Although the House listened to me with close attention,” he said, “I felt a sensation of despair. To be so entirely convinced and vindicated in a matter of life and death to one’s country, and not to be able to make Parliament and the nation heed the warning, or bow to the proof by taking action, was an experience most painful.”

Are we to undergo something similar now?

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