Dealing with Grand Asymmetry

“Were you proposing to shoot these people in cold blood, sergeant?"

"Nossir. Just a warning shot inna head, sir”.

Terry Pratchett, Jingo

Alphen, Netherlands. 18 April. Professor Joseph S. Nye defined for the world Grand Strategy, although the idea has been around for a long time. According to Nye Grand Strategy is the organisation of immense means in pursuit of world-bending ends. Professor Dr J. S. Lindley-French, that’s, err, me, is today giving the world the idea of Grand Asymmetry; a vaguely oxymoronic concept whereby actors with relatively few means also seek world-bending ends. That is, I think I am giving the world the idea of Grand Asymmetry.  I would certainly be mightily peeved if someone else had got there first.

Let me first put Grand Asymmetry in context. On paper at least there is something Gilbert and Sullivan about North Korea threatening the United States. There is definitely something Rudyard Kipling about the threat Al Qaeda and Islamic State poses to the West. Even Russia’s implied threat has something of the Mel Brooks about it. After all, North Korea has an economy that is probably less than that of Columbus, Ohio, whilst the one thing Islamic State is not is a state. As for Russia it threatens the very people whose income it relies upon to feed its own.

It is the ‘on paper’ thing that is the problem for the West. Grand Asymmetry works because we in the West, or rather our leaders, have over the past forty or so years been busy making most of our states far weaker and far more fractured than need be the case. Indeed, we do not so much have nation-states these days, as nations-states full of so-called ‘communities’ who more or less talk to each other. Consequently, Western society is far less cohesive and robust than it was even a generation ago. It is the precisely the many seams of mistrust that now run through our open societies that makes the West so vulnerable these days to Grand Asymmetry.

The strategic implications of Grand Asymmetry are profound. Unable to protect such fractured societies Western states, particularly European states, are finding it ever harder to project power and influence for fear of offending growing constituencies of dissent, some of whom not only disagree with policy and strategy, but now challenge the very founding principles of the societies of which they are now a part. The result is Western states that ‘on paper’ look far stronger than their adversaries and enemies, but which in reality are less so because of the grand vulnerabilities from which they suffer make them prey to Grand Asymmetry.

Grand Asymmetry can come in many forms. There is the hybrid warfare currently being conducted by Moscow, using disinformation, destabilisation, and distortion to keep vulnerable Western states politically off-balance, even the mighty United States. There is the wars of religion being conducted by Al Qaeda and Islamic State aimed at undermining the very concept of national society in Western states, and the nation-state itself across the Middle East and North Africa. An individual Jihadi armed with no more than a truck bomb and the hair-trigger media can cause strategic impact out of all proportion to the act, however tragic that maybe for the individuals caught up in such attacks. And then there is the threat of thermonuclear Armageddon threatened by a political minnow such as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

There is, of course, another way of looking at this. Western societies may have become far more vulnerable, but the ideas the West espouses are stronger than ever. One reason for Grand Asymmetry is that the West is no longer a place, but an idea. It is the World-Wide West that is the true revolutionary force in twenty-first century international politics. Grand Asymmetry is, in fact, the chosen weapon of war of the Grand Reactionaries who are essentially on the decline and the defence. Russia is an Ersatz Superpower that is desperate to mask the reality of its decline for fear the Putin regime collapses. Islamic State wants to return the Middle East, and much of the world around it, back to some form of idealised medieval Caliphate. Pyongyang is a dynasty masquerading as an ideology desperately trying to hold back the change that will in time sweep it away.

How can the West combat Grand Asymmetry? Western leaders must consciously set out to reinforce protection and tailor projection based on a far better understanding of the nature and scope of the threats they face. The sense of uncertainty such threats engender is compounded by a sense of unease about the nature of the threat.  Leaders must also be honest and realistic about just what can be achieved. There will be few clear cut victories. Above all, leaders must be far clearer about the distinction between threats that attack vital Western interests, and thus need to be confronted, and those that offend Western values but do not in and of themselves threaten the West.

The real challenge will be creating more secure societies that feel better protected.  First, leaders must avoid nostalgia and consciously build new societies for a new age. Second, a twenty-first century idea of ‘patriotism’, i.e. love of society, must be built upon the very ‘vulnerability’ that makes the West strong – liberal democracy, tolerance and openness. Above all, a new ‘contract’ is needed between power and people. No longer can elites treat citizens like children as they have done in Europe for far too long. Citizens must become partners in security.

Leaders must also recognise that ‘peace’ is a long game and properly invest in relevant strategy together with the means to prosecute and measure it; good intelligence, more resilient critical infrastructures, targeted aid and development that helps turn potential enemies into friends, and the kind of police and armed forces that can flexibly engage a raft of threats across a broad spectrum of conflict.

And yes, such strategy will also include the use at times of the kind of US Navy battle group that is now steaming towards the Korean Peninsula. This is because however clever one’s use of soft power it rarely works against those who oppose it unless those that have it also possess the relevant ‘if all else fails’ tools of hard power.

Indeed, unless people in Western societies understand and support the use of such hard power, however hard that power may be it can rapidly become soft if not supported, in which case Grand Asymmetry will succeed in deterring, denying, and in time destroying our own capacity to legitimately protect ourselves.

Julian Lindley-French

Brexit: Pour Encourager les Autres?

“In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, in order to encourage the others”.

Voltaire, Candide

Alphen, Netherlands. 11 April. Is it really in the interests of the EU and Germany to destroy the UK? One of the many pleasures of being in the US last week was to have a week off from the partisan lunacy which appears to have descended on the denizens of the political swamp that is Brexit. Even respected commentators are now writing nonsense. One fanatical Remainer, having (of course) said that he respects the vote of the people (NOT!), even went as far as to suggest that because German feelings were hurt by Brexit Britain should be very gentle in its dealings with Berlin. Poor little diddums. This nonsense is either a failure to understand the ‘doings’ of international politics, or more likely simply another stratagem to weaken Britain and its position. From what I have been told Berlin and Brussels have absolutely no desire to be gentle with Britain, ‘pour encourager les autres’.

The EU is meant to be a voluntary association of democracies who voluntarily agree to pool sovereignty in pursuit of their own and some greater good. Given Europe’s violent history that greater good is plain to see. However, implicit in all the treaties (although quite deliberately not explicit – Article 50 or no) is the right of a member-state if its people so wish to leave the EU if a democratic mandate for exit has been established. Equally implicit in the idea of Union is that any such state should not be attacked for so deciding if a vote was held across the length and breadth of the land and a majority confirmed. This is precisely what happened with the June 23^rd Brexit referendum vote.

And yet over the past week key members of the EU have behaved less like fellow members of a voluntary association and more like Imperial Rome. Their weapon of choice is Scotland and their apparent support for the nationalist secessionists led by Nicola Sturgeon. This is at best hypocrisy. Scottish Nationalist Party leader Ms Sturgeon legitimised the UK-wide vote by campaigning in it, but then refused to accept the result. Rather, she sees Brexit as simply yet another opportunity to destroy the UK.

Given that it was galling to say the least to hear senior German MEP Elmar Brok encouraging the secessionists by saying that there would be few obstacles to Scotland joining the EU. This attack on the UK was reinforced by the Spanish Foreign Minister saying that Madrid would not veto a membership application from an independent Scotland. A well-placed source of mine in Brussels told me that Brok was speaking with the support of Berlin and that Spain had been lent on by said Berlin to shift its position, even if that establishes a principle that would permit Catalonia to secede from Spain.

So, let’s pause for a moment and consider the implications for Europe of the destruction of the UK. Even though the Scottish population is only 8.3% of the UK the loss of Scotland would end Britain as a major international player. The result would be yet another weak, broke, small state Germany would have to support (having destroyed my country I would not support it), and an angry, resentful, broken rump UK that would see the EU, Germany in particular, as at best a frenemy, at worst an enemy. For a time rump UK would probably go through the motions of supporting NATO, but our heart (and my heart) would have gone out of it as we all wondered why we should risk lives and spend reduced our geld defending people who had consciously set out to destroy our country. The winner would be Vladimir Putin. The losers would be NATO, the US and, of course, the defence of Europe.

The Americans are fully aware of this. Time and again last week I was told by senior people on both sides of the Washington political divide that maintaining the integrity of the United Kingdom was a fundamental US interest. And, that the loss of the UK would also deal a potential death blow to NATO. Those are indeed the stakes, and Mr Brok and other German politicians need to be aware that they are playing with fire if they are seen to encourage Scotland to secede.  If they persist such a stance could well break already fragile US-German relations.

My preference from the beginning of all this Brexit farago has been to find an equitable solution to that is in the interests of all given the circumstances. As a pro-German Brit who sees little to fear in Germany’s leadership of Europe I am particularly keen to establish a post-Brexit relationship between Britain and Germany built on respect and friendship. Playing the Scotland card will destroy any hope of that.  Of course, some will say this is all pre-negotiation posturing. They would be wrong. Threatening the integrity of the UK is not what friends do, even if it is a pre-Brexit, pre-negotiating posture. Negotiate hard Germany by all means, but do not actively encourage Sturgeon and her fellow secessionists by artificially tipping the political field in their favour by making promises to them you know you cannot keep. 

As for my fellow Remainers my message is clear; a vote was taken, the result was clear, get over it! Given the horrors happening elsewhere around Europe’s borders it is vital, for the sake of Britain, the EU and NATO, that we come to an equitable deal and quickly.  If not I will fight for my country Britain (peacefully of course) and people I had regarded as friends would soon become non-friends.

Given that, is it really in the interests of the EU and Germany to destroy the UK simply ‘pour encourager les autres’? Is it really in your interests Germany to have the rest of us in the UK hate you? Can you really build a democratic Union, Berlin and Brussels, by enforcing membership through fear?

Julian Lindley-French

America First or America Leads?

“Think’st thou that duty shall have dread to speak, when power to flattery bows? To plainness honour’s bound when majesty falls to folly”.

King Lear, William Shakespeare

Cosmos Club, Washington DC. 8 April. What does Trumpworld look like? Five days in and my visit to Washington is drawing to a close. It has been a fascinating visit which has cast a light for me on the febrile state of this most political of towns. The Trump administration is in transition…again. And yet, my sense is that this most enigmatic of presidents, and this most enigmatic of White Houses, is finally beginning to settle on a world view that this week’s events both solidified and represented. Put simply, America First, which for so long has been defined by hard core Trump supporters as ignoring the world, is being re-defined to mean America Leads, albeit quixotically.

President Trump has arrived in the White House just at the moment when the kind of hard-edged, loose alliance, vaguely anarchical world of big business meets a new strategic reality in which power again defines influence, not legalism. The twenty-first century is fast becoming an ultra-Realist epoch in which power and might define strength. President Trump clearly understands that, but in dealing with the world the problem the President will face may well be his own ill-discipline.

Yes, at one level keeping adversaries off-balance can be seen as part of a clever stratagem. However, the President is still too adept at keeping his allies, Washington, his own team, and even himself at times off-balance. If that continues the enunciation of anything approaching a Trump foreign and security doctrine will be hard to realise. This matters because such a failure would in turn make it hard for allies to coalesce around American leadership. The purpose of doctrine is to establish principles and consistency and, as yet, both are lacking, even though it is early days yet,

Perhaps President Trump’s greatest strength is that he is a product of the fractured, uneasy, transactional world that he now surveys. As a political and business bruiser who has clambered his way to power President Trump shares a lot of the same attributes as China’s President Xi and Russia’s President Putin. That is intended as a back-handed compliment in a way, because President Trump is well-equipped to do business with the world’s illiberal Great Powers.

It is the European allies who are going to find it hard to deal with the Trump world-view. Like many Europeans history has led me to have a penchant for legally-based international institutions precisely because they prevent the kind of extreme state behaviour which has rent destruction upon Europe twice in a century. Equally, I know that institutions without power are meaningless. And, it is precisely the cult of meaningless and powerless institutions that have turned Europeans into victims of global change.

The recent visit of German Chancellor Merkel to the White House was the diplomatic equivalent of “The Silence of the Lambs”, with Merkel cast as Jodie Foster. Now, it would be easy to say that the all-too-apparent tension was some kind of personality thing. After all, Chancellor Merkel and President Trump come from different political planets. It is deeper than that. Germany is emerging after some 150 years of struggle to be Europe’s proto-dominant power. And yet it is a Germany that rejects much of the American world-view, let alone the Trump world-view.

Germany will not become a peer competitor to the US in the style of China and Russia, but will no longer accept American leadership of the West as a given. Germany is clearly now also willing to act against US interests. There is some evidence Berlin is quietly orchestrating a campaign to damage the UK by implicitly encouraging Scottish independence, for daring to step out of the EU, and thus Germany’s sphere of influence. It is not in the US interest to see the UK broken up and terminally weakened, and at some point Washington will need to back the UK and face Berlin down.  

The future? The shape of the Trump world-view will depend on the outcome of a power struggle underway within the White House between America First radicals, such as Steve Bannon, and America Leads ‘traditionalists’, such Secretary-of Defense Mattis and National Security Advisor McMaster. Today, the pendulum appears to be swinging towards the America Leaders, possibly because the President’s son-in-law Jared Kushner seems to be an advocate.

However, as I learnt during my visit this week to the White House, and my old friend and Presidential Deputy Assistant Sebastian Gorka, the situation within the Administration is far more nuanced that much of the Press would have you believe. My sense is that the President will aim to forge a more tightly-knit foreign and security policy team around hi, with much of policy led by the so-called Principals Committee of the National Security Council. The true test of a re-empowered NSC will be their collective willingness, and that of the National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, to speak truth unto power…and the President’s willingness and capacity to listen.         

Allies? They will all need to heed that old Washington adage that if a state wants to influence the Administration it is not about what you did last week for America, let alone what you did decades ago, but what you do now and tomorrow.

After all, America First means America Leads.     

Julian Lindley-French

Syria: My View from Washington

“We cannot be any stronger in our foreign policy for all the bombs and guns we may heap up in our arsenals than we are in the spirit which rules inside the country. Foreign policy, like a river, cannot rise above its source”.

Adlai Stevenson

Washington DC, 7 April. What are the strategic implications of President Trump’s decisive but limited missile strike yesterday against a remote desert airstrip in Syria? Ironically, I spent much of yesterday in the White House, and elsewhere in DC, discussing US foreign and security policy, including Syria. There is no question that the loosing of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles by two US warships in the Eastern Mediterranean marks a change from the policy of the Obama administration, but to what extent? Is the strike an emotional response by President Trump to this week’s disgusting footage of children dying in chemically-induced agony, is it an act to deter Assad from further use of toxic weapons, or is it the start of a new phase of US engagement?

My sense of the state of the Administration’s putative foreign and security policy today is that it is again a work in progress.  Talking to senior Americans across a political divide that runs through this city far wider and deeper than the mighty River Potomac is that the Administration is slowly moving towards a some form of concept for global engagement/grand strategy…even if thinks it is not. The primary impulse of President Trump in ordering the strikes was to punish Assad for a blatant use of ‘CW’ against his own people. However, by simply reinstalling some of President Obama’s tattered and faded red-lines, but not defining what or where they are, President Trump has already forced both Damascus and Moscow off-balance.

In Syria itself the implication is that the fight against Assad might now be accorded the same status as the fight against Islamic State (IS). Moscow clearly understands that which is why today Russia has suspended the agreement designed to ‘de-conflict’ air operations by Russia and the US-led coalition. By implicitly raising the level of risk to allied aircraft operating against IS Moscow hopes to relieve the pressure on its client Assad, which overnight the Americans increased.

At the regional-strategic level the strike has clearly reassured some American allies that unlike the Obama administration the new White House will not talk itself constantly and consistently into inaction. The Americans have certainly disturbed Tehran’s composure. Washington seems also to have sufficiently impressed Ankara for Turkey’s President Erdogan to back the strikes, thus suggesting President Putin will need to work far harder to achieve his policy goal of detaching Turkey from NATO. Still, the White House will need to be very clear-headed about what if any policy outcomes it seeks in the regional-strategic chess-cum-rugby match that is the Middle East and North Africa today.

It is at the grand strategic level where perhaps the strikes perhaps resonate most profoundly. One can almost palpably feel the disappointment/disturbance in Moscow that its concerted effort to shape American policy is failing. One has to feel things about Moscow today because the truth died some time ago in Russia. For a few years Moscow has forced Washington on the back foot and forced Washington to answer a simple but profound question; what are you going to do about us?  It is a question Washington has been unable to answer, thus sending the currency of US leadership into a nose dive. This morning at least America is posing the same question; what are you Moscow going to do about us?

Which brings me back to the twin issues of US strategy and leadership. Right now the very uncertainty over the Administration’s position has Putin, Assad and others holding their breath. What will President Trump do next? Will he call the Putin-Assad bluff and escalate further? Or, having returned a remote, secondary airstrip back to the desert will Washington now stop? If it is the former then President Trump is beginning a new era of American engagement and it will become rapidly clear that the target audience of US action is allies and adversaries alike that America means business (and I use that word advisedly). If it is the latter then the aim of the strike will have been little more than to assuage the moral outrage of the ‘something must be done but we are not sure what and why’ lobby in the West. In which case, plus ca change…

Europe? This week the French foreign minister called for the US to do more in Syria. Of course, the language employed by the Quai D’Orsay was wreathed in the mist and mystery of Talleyrand. The British were not far behind offering ‘full support’ to the US short of doing anything. Oh, Britain, what have you become? One point I made in the White House yesterday was that the Administration should be clear to its European allies; if they want the US to act, then they too must act.

For all that after a week here I do sense a profound shift in US policy is underway. First, President Trump IS abandoning the neo-isolationism that marked much of his rhetoric throughout the presidential campaign. That may have something to do with the growing influence of Secretary of State Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Mattis, and National Security Advisor McMaster, who are beginning to hunt like a pack. Second, the over-intellectualised nothingness of US foreign and security policy under President Obama is being replaced by something far more rugged.

Which brings me in conclusion to my core question; is this policy? After all, one missile strike does not a policy make. The paradox of the Trump administration is that when one talks privately to pivotal members of it, as I have done this week, one does get the sense of serious work underway to reset US foreign and security policy and cast it clearly into a series of hard-headed but realistic goals and desired outcomes.

What next? At some point it would be nice for the Allie to hear just what that policy is. For the American people, particularly those that backed President Trump, it will be interesting to see what they think. Putin? Let’s see how he reacts.

Oh, and by the way, President Xi of China has just landed.

Julian Lindley-French         

Allied Command Innovation?

“Two roads diverged in a wood and I – I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference”.

Robert Frost

Norfolk, Virginia. 4 April. Yesterday I had the honour of addressing NATO’s Allied Command Transformation as a guest of the Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, General Denis Mercier. The title of my talk was “The Innovation Game”, whilst the essence of my argument was that NATO must become a security and defence thinking machine if Allied defence and deterrence are to be credible in a non-linear age. How does NATO get from where it is today to where we need it to be? The Alliance must innovate with ‘ACT’ NATO’s great agent of change.

Nor did I pull my punches; if the Alliance is to prevail in its mission it must completely rethink its own role in security and defence and, indeed, the very way we think about security and defence. Through ACT the Alliance must reach out to innovators across many fields if it is to forge innovation and the best practice it fosters in pursuit of comparative strategic advantage. And, there is no question that ACT is doing some excellent work to foster such goals. After all, why bother inviting a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad like me to speak?

The other week, in the wake of a big conference in Budapest, I had roasted the political and diplomatic leadership of the Alliance for talking innovation, but not walking it. Which brings me to the anomaly of ACT. NATO has a command ready-made to think, to experiment, and to take innovative risk. What impressed me was the quality of the people at ACT, the first and most important battle any organisation must win if permanency of innovation is to be built into its DNA.

But there is a ‘but’. There are at least two barriers to ACT acting to effect as NATO’s innovation hub. The first barrier is NATO itself. ACT should be the elite think-tank of the Alliance, the experimenter, the simulator. And yet, the NATO system does not allow SACT to choose the best and the brightest from across the Alliance. Tellingly, one officer said to me that “eighty percent of the work is done by twenty percent of the people”.  

The other barrier was the cynicism of some ACT staff members. The civilians at ACT have no career progression beyond ACT and can become ‘parked’. Military officers come and go and, I suspect, many of them leave little creative turbulence in their wake. Now, having worked in my time at both NATO and the EU I know how easy it is to be crushed by the stultifying preponderance of lowest common denominator bureaucracy. After a time it is simply too easy to say, “oh well, I tried”. THAT is perhaps NATO’s biggest trap right now.

Why does ACT matter? If the Alliance cannot prove it adds value to US security it will fade. As I write this I am on the train from Norfolk to Washington DC for high-level discussions on the future of NATO. This week President Trump and his team are preparing for the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping, and considering what to do with a dangerously predictable North Korea.

NATO faces a crisis of ends, ways, and means. Innovation, with ACT in the lead, would not only demonstrate to an increasingly sceptical Washington that the Allies ‘get it’ and that Canadian and European security is as much about keeping America strong where it needs to be strong, as it is about American troops defending the NATO space. It is that implicit ‘contract’ that is the very essence of the twenty-first century Alliance.

If an ambitious innovation agenda is to be realised the whole command must become an innovator, established on an innovation culture. Innovation would thus become a vital component in NATO’s strategic communications to allies and adversaries alike about the ability of the Alliance to adapt.  However, for that messaging to be generated ACT needs to be systematic in its approach to innovation. That means ACT must build a development programme that can act as a vehicle for innovation, reach out to new partners in innovation, and establish a knowledge-led approach to the understanding of risks, challenges, and opportunities. That also means everyone at ACT buying into the effort. Innovation only ever works if people really believe in it.   

Innovation to what end? The Alliance must adopt what I call an outcomes-based approach to security and defence.  That means big and bold thinking about ends, ways and means, and what tools – both civil and military – the Alliance and its nations will need to generate such outcomes.  At the very least NATO will need to strike a radical new balance between efficiency and effectiveness.

NATO is at a fork in its long road, albeit deep in a dark wood called uncertainty. Innovation is where strategy meets practice to close the gap between ends, ways, and means and thus create clarity. To that end, ACT should be equipped with the tools, but above all the people to think radically about how NATO innovates. In other words, ACT must cut a new path through that dark wood because Allied Command Future Operations (for that is what ACT is) IS the future of NATO.

Allied Command Innovation?

Julian Lindley-French       

    

1957: The Real Story of the Rome Treaties

“Resolved by thus pooling their resources to preserve and strengthen peace and liberty, and calling upon the other peoples of Europe who share their ideal to join in their efforts.”

Preamble to the Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community, 25 March, 1957

Alphen, Netherlands. 28 March. What is the real story behind the 1957 Treaty of Rome? Last Saturday in Rome there was a big EU bash to celebrate sixty years since the signing of the treaty. As to be expected the High Priests of High European Political Integration were out in force, speaking of the ‘Founding Fathers’ who signed as the twelve Olympian Gods. This is hardly surprising given that tomorrow British Prime Minister Theresa May will trigger Article 50 and take one of the EU’s major powers out of it. Indeed, one symmetry between Rome on Saturday and 1957 was the absence of a British prime minister at either event. The reality of Rome was at one and the same time more prosaic and more strategic than the vaguely elegiac Commission narrative.

‘Rome’ was not the first treaty setting Europe on the pot-holed road towards some form of political union/super-state/empire depending on your preference. The 1950 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was the real foundation treaty of the EU forged in the belief that if French coal and German steel were not separated by fifty kilometres and an international order war between the two could be avoided. There was also more than one treaty signed at Rome. The so-called Euratom Treaty, or Treaty to Establish the European Atomic Energy Community, was designed to set the standards for the then burgeoning European atomic industry at a European rather than a national level. Both treaties had six signatories; Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and critically, the Federal Republic or West Germany.

For a proper understanding of the political motivations that led to Rome one must consider the strategic context of the treaties. In 1950 the ECSC was demanded by France, which in the absence of Britain was at the time the leading European power (if one excludes the 352 divisions of the Red Army just over the then inner-German border). This was the price Paris, under intense American pressure at the time, exacted on the Federal Republic to stop dismantling West German industry as a form of war reparation. Washington wanted the three post-war occupation zones, controlled respectively by Britain, the US and France, to return to some form of economic, and in time political normalcy.

In 1991 at the Treaty of Maastricht France demanded a similar price for the reunification of Germany. Paris feared that a united Germany would come to dominate Europe and that the German Bundesbank would be the main architect of that dominance. Therefore, French President Francois Mitterand demanded the Euro as the price for the New Berlin, with a European Central Bank that would both oversee the currency, and ensure it was European, not German.

Mitterand was right to be concerned; Germany IS now the dominant power in Europe, albeit a very different Germany (which sort of makes it OK). And, by placing people in key positions in Brussels Germany now effectively controls the EU. One reason why Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister, is so keen to impose reparations on Britain (now there’s an historical irony) for Brexit, is to prevent Britain emerging for the third time in a century as the leader of a counter-coalition to challenge German dominance of Europe, euphemistically called ‘leadership’ these days.

Back in 1957 the key issue was the rearmament of Germany and its 1955 admittance to both NATO and the Western European Union. Since 1952 the Americans had placed the French under intense pressure to allow Germany to rearm to ease the pressure on US military manpower. With echoes of today all too clear the 1952 Korean War (which is not technically over) saw US forces split between defending its European Allies, and defending a key ally, South Korea, in Asia-Pacific.

Initially France resisted the very idea of German rearmament. After all, in 1952 it was only a dozen years since the Wehrmacht had marched down the Champs Elysée. Then, in 1950, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman came up with the Schuman Plan and called for the creation of a European Defence Community. The ‘EDC’ would have seen all national forces forged into a form of European Army under a command structure that would have looked not unlike today’s European Commission, and probably have been just as popular and effective.

Two implacable opponents killed the EDC. First, the French themselves were very uncomfortable with the idea that the descendants of the ‘Grande Armée’ would have been lost to the EDC. Second, the limits of the alleged Europhilia of the Grand Old Man and Wellingtonian figure of British politics, Sir Winston Churchill, were revealed by the EDC. In May 1953 he famously remarked when asked if Britain would join the EDC, “we are with them, but not of them”.  Little really has changed ever since, apart from Britain is now far weaker as both a power and a polis.

In October 1954 the EDC collapsed, and in one of those moments of British diplomatic fudgery for which London is renowned West Germany was permitted to join both NATO and the Western European Union in return for the permanent stationing of British forces in Germany (British Army of the Rhine).

Lessons for today? The question of a European Germany or a German Europe remains pertinent, particularly so now that Britain the Balancer is leaving the EU. And, for all the EU-babble one hears on such occasions European state interests are still the driving force in European politics on a continent where history never sleeps. With a broke France and a broken Britain it is clear that Germany will decide Europe’s course. German interests WILL come first. Thankfully, it is today’s Germany not some other Germany.

That said, a word of warning from history Germany…

Julian Lindley-French

PS for a full understanding of the history of all this buy my book “A Chronology of European Security and Defence 1945-2007” (Oxford: Oxford University Press) which is, of course, brilliant and very reasonably-priced.

NATO: Strategic Miscommunication

“Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground”.

Dante Alighieri

Alphen, Netherlands. 24 March. Budapest stands likes a sentinel either side of the majestic River Danube as it flows through time on its stately course to the Black Sea. There are two key issues NATO must deal with at present: how to make President Trump if not like NATO, at least recognise its utility; and how to properly prepare NATO for the future shocks coming our way. For the past two days I have been in the Hotel Marriott in beautiful Budapest listening to NATO’s ‘best and brightest’ destroy NATO’s future. It was probably just as well I was barred from speaking on a panel in the main meeting because as a NATO citizen I would have given the assembled, dissembling ‘Permanent Representatives’ (NATO ambassadors) to the North Atlantic Council (NAC) a firm piece of my Yorkshire mind. NATO’s political elite is failing both the Alliance and me the citizen.

President Trump first. Much was made at the conference about the need for effective strategic communications – the use of information to generate influence and effect. Clearly, NATO does not understand its own jargon. In May President Trump will visit Brussels to open the new NATO HQ. Apparently, the President will be invited to cut the ribbon at an empty, over-priced ($1.3bn), long overdue building, for which the American taxpayer has stumped up too much. I can see the Trump Tweets already: “At over-due, empty new NATO HQ listening to empty words from pompous Europeans. Burden-sharing? We Americans paid how much? That’s a lotta guns we trashed for this Euro-butter. #getmeoutahere”.

The Allies must convince President Trump that NATO really is a good thing for America. Here’s my idea. The President is due to make a state visit to Britain in October. Last month Trump made a speech from the hangar of the new 104,000 ton aircraft carrier the USS Gerald R. Ford. Now, before I make my suggestion, I know some pedant somewhere will say the new British ship has not been commissioned yet, and that she is doing sea trials, and there is this fault and that fault. Sod that! The bloody thing floats and looks great! So, in October NATO should hold a meeting of the NAC at Heads of State and Government level in the hangar of the new 75,000 ton, £3bn British aircraft-carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth. President Trump then tweets: “Standing on enormous, new, beautiful, aircraft-carrier. Guess what? No Stars and Stripes. UK’s historic, majestic White Ensign. And Brits have 2 of them. #burdensharinginaction”.      

Future shocks. Yet again, much of NATO’s political leadership seem hell-bent on sacrificing strategy and the medium-to-long term for the sake of politics and the short-term…and doing their eloquent damnedest to pretend otherwise. There was a lot of good sense spoken by a lot of good people over the past two days, together with a lot of crap about ‘eco-systems’ and NATO solving climate-change. Most of the real-thinking came from NATO officials desperately trying to find ways to close a yawning and ever-widening gap between NATO’s ends, ways and means, Europe’s other-planet political class, and the people who speak for them. And, in between I had to listen to a lot of academics who know an awful lot less about NATO than I do, although some friends of mine were thankfully on hand to breathe at least some good sense into proceedings.

Allied Command Transformation (ACT) is really trying very hard to breathe life into the latest political mantras of adaptation, innovation, and transformation. There was some really good stuff presented by senior NATO officials. And yet, when it came to the last session I sat there with my head in my hands. It was clear that apart maybe from the Germans, who are doing some really interesting work on adaptation, most of the rest of ‘Their Excellencies’ were scraping around on the political floor of pretence at the speed of irrelevance.

The bottom-line is this; NATO must not end up trapped in a kind of persistent vegetative approach. The world is getting dangerous out there, and in here, as this week’s tragic events in London attest. Strategic unity of effort and purpose is what NATO is meant for – to turn collective political action into collective defence. And it is here where the Trump challenge and future shock come together. The longer the nations and their diplomatic representatives ‘play NATO’, which is what is happening at present, the more marginal NATO will become to reality and the less able it will be to defend me.

Let me play out a brief scenario; a desperate Russia led by an unstable, quixotic regime in Moscow actually does what it is now threatening to do – attack the Baltic States. In the teeth of such a crisis do ‘Their Excellencies’ really believe that NATO would be in the front-line? Of course not. The West’s first response would be led by the Americans, (assuming the Americans are not busy elsewhere) with strategic command firmly in the White House, and main operational control run from US CENTCOM in Tampa (with US EUCOM in support). The few close allies (UK, France, Germany, Poland, Norway and the Balts, plus possibly Sweden and Finland) who could offer something would be firmly under American command. NATO would only be brought in when things had calmed down. If the Americans are busy elsewhere? Europe is screwed, at least until the Germans have the heavier formations they are developing in place.  However, that will not be until at least 2021 or 2022.

Which brings me to the real paradox of these two days past. NATO is now only a deterrent. It is not a credible warfighting alliance. The problem is that if NATO is not a war-fighting alliance, it is not a credible deterrent.

And, the river flows on… 

Julian Lindley-French