Greetings,
And many thanks as always to everyone who signed-up last week. Subscriptions are now way over 10,000. I am grateful to all of you and, in particular, to paying subscribers, who have access to all posts. (Apologies for the hard sell but you can upgrade your subscription by clicking on the button below.)
Earlier this year, Grant Shapps, the UK defence secretary gave a description of the state we are in that will be remembered long after his party is out of power.
“We find ourselves at the dawn of this new era – the Berlin Wall a distant memory – and we’ve come full circle, moving from a post-war to pre-war world.”
A “pre-war world” what an ominously resonant phrase.
It’s 1913 or 1938 and, as so often in the past, there is a strong element of denial in our political culture.
Here in the UK, for instance, Shapps’ Conservative government offered a juicy pre-election bribe when it cut payroll taxes. Nowhere in the debate afterwards did the BBC and other opinion leaders ask ministers whether there was an urgent need to direct that money to national defence instead.
Few worried that the UK, like the rest of Europe, had grown so used to free-riding on US military spending, our armed forces were not fit to meet a military crisis on their own.
One of the many weird features of the long Conservative rule is that the party has not cared about what we once assumed were its core concerns: law and order and defence.
A report by the defence select committee said
“With the prospect of UK involvement in a major war on the European continent closer than it has been for decades, there are serious questions as to whether the UK's reduced combat air fleet still provides a sufficient deterrent and whether its limited numbers of admittedly highly capable aircraft could overcome a peer adversary in a warfighting context.”
Most politicians do not like having to think about defence. Most of the time defence spending brings few benefits. You only truly need it in a war, and naturally most want to block out that awful possibility.
Labour says it will spend more, but you can guess how the party’s MPs will react to money going on guns rather than poverty relief.
The fear of war tearing up the old order has yet to grip most minds in the West. Yet it cannot be denied much longer.
Boiled down the fear is that the contest between the US and China has now created a global anti-western alliance of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Thus, when Russia invades Ukraine, Iran and North Korea supply it with weapons, while China provides economic support. The Ukraine war becomes a proxy war for much of the globe. The U.S. and Europe are helping Ukraine defend itself, albeit inadequately, in order to keep Russia bogged down, while China, Iran and North Korea help Putin to hurt the West.
Equally when Iran’s ally Hamas attacks Israel. Putin, who until recently had reasonably good relations with Israel, turns towards supporting Hamas, as does China.
You are not being a doomster if you fear China attacking Taiwan, or Russia testing NATO resolve in the Baltic states, or North Korea invading South Korea and a global crisis following.
Indeed, the real risk now lies in an innocent and parochial a failure to realise how easily we could move into a global conflict.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Writing from London to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.