by 6th of March 2025 My Lords, I will not speak directly to the proposals of the report to improve our military capabilities but will consider the framework in which they are set. The report’s underlying assumption is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made Europe a much more dangerous place, against which we have to rearm ourselves if we are not to suffer the fate of Ukraine somewhere down the line. The report was published before Trump’s victory in the US election and therefore before the possible defection of the United States, which has been the subject of a great deal of comment this afternoon but I do not think touches the main point that the report wants to make. I reject the report’s line of argument. I am the first person to do so in this debate and have done so fairly
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6th of March 2025
My Lords, I will not speak directly to the proposals of the report to improve our military capabilities but will consider the framework in which they are set.
The report’s underlying assumption is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made Europe a much more dangerous place, against which we have to rearm ourselves if we are not to suffer the fate of Ukraine somewhere down the line. The report was published before Trump’s victory in the US election and therefore before the possible defection of the United States, which has been the subject of a great deal of comment this afternoon but I do not think touches the main point that the report wants to make. I reject the report’s line of argument. I am the first person to do so in this debate and have done so fairly consistently over the past two or three years. Therefore, I reject the conclusions which follow from it. I will try to explain why.
In 1989, an American political scientist called Francis Fukuyama published an iconic article in the journal The National Interest called “The End of History?”, and the subsequent two decades have sometimes been called “the Fukuyama moment”. Basically, he argued that the fall of the Soviet Union had brought about the end of history, because the causes of war between the great powers had been removed. There was a lot of initial confirmation of that, such as Gorbachev’s dream of joining the common European home. Out of that optimism came the idea of an exciting peace dividend. Of course, there would be mopping-up operations, especially in those parts of the world lagging in their appreciation of western values, but these would be nothing like the mass industrial warfare that we had experienced in the two world wars and which threatened throughout the Cold War.
The Fukuyama view of history was largely myopic. It presupposed that the world would rapidly become democratic and that science and technology would simply promote international economic co-operation. Neither of these expectations was realised. But out of the disappointed hopes of those two decades it was easy to construct a completely opposite future marked by the clash of civilisations, between the autocratic and the democratic powers, and fierce competition between the major nations of the world for control of artificial intelligence technology.
In a way, far from wanting to join Europe, Russia was depicted as wanting to attack it and even to conquer it if given the chance. In this perspective, the rhetoric of the Cold War was simply repurposed to the perceived dangers of the new situation. That has remained the conventional view; John Healey, the Defence Secretary, has said that Russia is very dangerous and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, has said in this debate that we face a dramatically increased security risk.
It is interesting that all the witnesses who gave oral evidence to the committee came from the defence sector. Therefore, it is not surprising that the report strongly advocated a new or beefed-up defence industrial society and economy. What is wrong with all that? There is confusion running through the report between the nature of modern warfare, of which Ukraine is an example, and the nature of Russia’s intentions to Europe, as revealed by its invasion of Ukraine. Dr Peter Roberts of Exeter University rightly warned the committee of our inability to understand intent, which is a major flaw in our thinking, and that is true of the report. Yes, the Ukrainian war reveals the threatening nature of modern warfare, but not the kind of threats we face from Russia in Europe.
The accepted view is that this invasion reveals the expansionist nature of the Putin regime. There are, however, many knowledgeable and respected analysts in Europe, the United States and the global South who deny that premise and argue with Jack Matlock, a former US ambassador to Russia, that Putin was provoked into invading Ukraine because NATO was trying to draw Ukraine into a hostile alliance and, had it not been so engaged, there would not have been an invasion.
Let me sum up. I am not against the rearmament of Europe. We live in a dangerous world, of course, but military spending is not an end in itself; it is a means to security. There is no special virtue in spending X rather than Y per cent of GDP on defence. The threats to security have to be perceived and analysed accurately—far more accurately than this report does to justify the volume and nature of the proposals that it is making.