On a recent, endlessly delayed rail journey to Oxford I passed a military train loaded with jeeps and armoured vehicles—pretty inadequate ones too, to judge by the news from Helmand. It reminded me that Britain will soon have two aircraft carriers of impressive bulk and uncertain purpose, at a cost of £4bn. Their purpose is mystifying. The US doesn't need us to have them; it has far more, and far bigger ones too. If they are to allow Britain to fight independently, then where and against whom? Rumoured scenarios range from the highly unlikely (a military occupation of parts of Nigeria) to the ludicrous (a British war with China). Certainly, the two carriers will not help in Afghanistan—the last time I looked at a map it does not have a coast.
The new ships will be named the Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales. Given that no one seems clear how they will be paid for, or how we can afford the aircraft that sit on them, it might have been better to name them after their predecessor as the Royal Navy's largest ship, HMS Vanguard. First designed at the start of the second world war to fight the Bismarck and Tirpitz, by the time it was finally commissioned the war had ended. It was scrapped ten years later.
Today's carriers come from the same mixture of imperial nostalgia, blind attachment to the US alliance and failure to decide on strategic priorities. None of this mattered much in an era of economic growth, but it does when British funds are in short supply—as demonstrated by the agonised debate over whether to scrap our remaining order for £1bn Eurofighters. And if we do face a depression comparable to the 1930s, its effects are likely to throw up severe security challenges, which in turn means that Britain will have to ruthlessly prioritise its security commitments—or risk becoming irrelevant everywhere, and frittering away effort, money and lives on half-baked operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to which we can make no real contribution, and which stand no serious chance of success.
British military spending should be reduced by some 10 per cent to bring it in line with France (still leaving it far above Germany and other leading European states as a proportion of GDP). Much more importantly, however, it should be refocused away from irrelevant cold war-era projects like the Eurofighter and the Type 45 Destroyer, and from long-range expeditionary operations. Instead, the emphasis should be on the army's ability to fight small wars on Europe's periphery.
If, as we expect, the economic depression is deep and prolonged, democracy and inter-ethnic peace will be severely threatened in parts of eastern Europe and the Balkans. These threats could appear not only in countries that would like to join the EU and Nato, but also in those that are already members, like the Baltic states, with their dissatisfied, Moscow-backed Russian minorities and their steep economic decline (Latvian GDP declined 18 per cent in the first quarter of 2009). In the event of really serious ethnic clashes in Latvia or Estonia it is essential that western European forces be ready to step in, both to protect the local Russians and to prevent any intervention by Russia. Kosovo and Bosnia remain unsettled even though, in the case of Bosnia, the war ended 14 years ago and there has been a strong western presence there ever since. Within the EU, Romania contains a Hungarian minority that has suffered persecution in the past and whose status remains unresolved. If trouble breaks out, there can be no guarantee that the US will step in to help. Failure on its own territory could yet doom the entire EU project, in which Britain has a vital stake. This is why Britain's real priorities lie in Europe, perhaps augmented with occasional small-scale operations in west Africa, like those in Sierra Leone. Beyond these we do not have the resources to make an impact. We simply have to prioritise.
Britain has been befuddled by the belief that the future of democracy will be determined in places like Afghanistan and Iraq—which is a bit like Eisenhower deciding to defeat Germany in 1944 by invading northern Norway. Democracy has been spread in the world in recent decades not by force, but by example, and the success of the EU is central to the appeal of this example. If the EU's image is crippled by an inability to contain wars, ethnic conflicts or even revolutions within its own borders, then we can forget about successfully preaching democracy elsewhere.
And Britain is critical to any European security effort not because it has the largest armed forces but because—together with the French—it has the only ones that will fight if necessary. At present, the EU and its member states are shockingly weak even when it comes to dealing with small states on their own periphery.
The big problem in Britain, however, is that its own security elites simply cannot bear to think of themselves in the same category as Germany or Italy—large European countries, but with a limited role outside of Europe. An increased concentration on Europe would enhance, rather than reduce, our popularity in the outside world; nor would it require abandoning economic aid to countries beyond Europe that are truly important to British security, like Pakistan. We would need, however, to recognise that the west cannot secure Pakistan by military means, and that the western military presence in neighbouring Afghanistan is by far the biggest driver of support for the Taliban.
A British concentration on Europe does not necessarily mean a betrayal of the US either. America, too, will soon have to make hard choices, including recognising the need to pay more attention to its own impoverished and unstable backyard in central America and the Caribbean. And yet at the same time, the security and stability of Europe, America's greatest trading partner and fellow continental democracy, will remain a vital US interest. Britain, then, can choose to act either as the leader of Europe's defence against new wars and upheavals, or to continue following the US in unclear, and often misguided, forays far from Britain's shores. To me, this does not seem a difficult choice.
