Time To Question NATO in the UK?

Where We Are At ... Heading Downhill At An Accelerating Pace?

Four months into the Russo-Ukrainian War and it is looking like a disaster but not necessarily for the Russians. The latter plod away with munitions with their BTGs incrementally increasing the territory they want ... and successfully and equally incrementally making it expensive for the Ukrainians to recapture the territory the Russians want less. The Western 'wonder weapons' may turn the tide but on the current trajectory it is probable that, by the time they arrive, the Ukrainian economy will be close to collapse. The Russian economy is proving far more resilient than the Western 'hawks' expected. Inflation resulting in large part from an ill-thought-out economic war on Russia will soon be destabilising European and, in due course, American politics and food security problems will create the seeds of a new generation of security problems in the developing world.

Eventually everything will settle down into new power blocs. Both will be spending money they don't have. At its most debt-ridden point in history, the West will be spending more on 'defence' and embedding economic 'green' inefficiencies while finding itself throwing good money after bad to buy off voter discontent at stagflation and worsening real wages. Just one example of absurdity. In order to sanction Russian coal, the Europeans are in a race to get inefficiently produced and transported South African coal at excessively high prices while the Chinese walk away from South Africa to acquire bargain basement Russian coal instead. Never has the moral posturing of the West quite cost it so dear as it is doing in this badly handled crisis. There is a very real risk now of economic blunders imploding the politics of the most highly indebted economies of Europe. As to the US, the incumbent President now has an approval rating of a mere 39% and a majority disapproval rating, not a little due to rampant petrol inflation. British inflation is now worse still.

It is inept to undertake policies without adequate prior intelligence, without scenario planning all reasonable possible effects in advance, without ensuring proportionate action and mitigating bad effects in advance. You also need a route out of a policy, a Plan B in waiting. If the West crows (rightly) about the Kremlin's failure of intelligence in expecting pro-Russian political movements to act effectively in response to a column of military moving towards Kiev, then we should be concerned that Western intelligence wholly underestimated Russian economic and regime resilience in response to an economic warfare operation that has achieved nothing to date except undermine the livelihoods and life chances of the most vulnerable in Western society and in the developing world.

As we write, the Federal Reserve and ECB are engaged in the impossible task of squaring the management of levels of inflation not seen since the 1970s. This inflation is heading upwards and will only peak with recession as economies (riddled with longstanding cheap money debt) are forced to put up interest rates. A good dose of that inflation can be tracked to the idiocy of removing refining capacity too quickly from an economy that required years more to effect the Green Transition and then being far too quick to remove supply of the cheapest, nearest and most reliable sources of energy in favour of a scramble for uncertain, expensive and distant energy. And all to meet what turns out to be a far more morally dubious foreign policy imperative than we have been told. Once again, high-minded liberal moralism - as it did in 1914 and in Iraq and Afghanistan - has wreaked more damage than weak-minded liberal moralists can ever seem to understand.

So Where Does NATO Fit In?

That long preamble brings us to NATO. This essay is very much restricted to the British national interest. The proposition I put forward is that the British national interest is not that of the dynastically-originated British State or the network of special interests that have captured it but that of the British people. They are the ones who have to lay down their lives and livelihoods for the dynastic State's mistakes although it is true that, in general, their State also manages to lay down the lives and livelihoods of people in the Middle East and Central Asia far more frequently. Nor am I 'against' NATO nor, though morally repugnant, against the nuclear deterrent nor necessary defence spending which might reasonably be quite high if a threat reasonably requires it to be high. NATO may be intrinsically flawed from a sovereignty point of view but one can see the argument for a defensive arrangement based on collective security against any reasonable threats where none of its members can draw the other members into a war designed to meet their own national objectives.

The reasonable British arguments for collective security are strategic - to ensure the ability to keep the North Atlantic and key seaways open (because the UK cannot survive without imports), to deter aggression from the Northern Approaches (which will always make Norway central to strategic calculations), to ensure no one can exploit Ireland (perhaps Scotland one day) for a 'stab in the back' and to make sure no major military power with aggressive intent is in control of the Western portion of the North European Plain from Britanny to the Rhine, perhaps to the Skaggerak. To these we can add a reasonable concern to deter attack from the air whether by bomber, missile and, now, space, and to control foreign espionage and subversion, terrorism and cyber warfare. NATO was created historically to deal with the key strategic threats, partly because the chief threat was once quite near the Rhine as well as just beyond the Northern approaches. It was rational for the UK to be a founder of NATO/ None of the allies involved in NATO represented a military threat in themselves in the late 1940s other than theoretically the US (otherwise essential to protect the free use of the North Atlantic and supplies in the event of conflict).

The collapse of the Soviet threat should really have resulted in a national re-evaluation of strategic risk and new forms of collective security that took account of that re-evaluation. The Russian Federation was not a direct threat to the UK once it had retreated across Europe and was soon only a theoretical threat to a line of States on its own border. The squabble with Ukraine and the preservation of hegemony in Belarus, let alone the maintenance of influence in Serbia, Bulgaria or Moldova, are not threats to the Baltics, Poland, Hungary, Romania or Slovakia but merely defensive measures by an empire steadily being diminished by its rival. Yet if the alliance still remained strictly defensive by its treaty, this expansion soon meant nevertheless that the UK could be drawn into a global conflagration in any dispute over ethnic issues between Moscow on the one hand and Tallin, Riga, Vilnius and points south on the other. The quite separate European framework (which the Kremlin recognises as wholly separate) did an excellent job in defusing these conflicts in the wake of the Soviet collapse, helped by Russian weakness, so we perhaps became too complacent about the danger we, the British people, might have been placed in by old disputes in the Eastern bloodlands. But NATO had started, without serious national debate, to move from being wholly defensive to becoming increasingly expansionist in a form of institutional mission creep, eventually finding itself dabbling in operations in Central Asia.

We became complacent. Collective security could be re-envisaged not as a defensive alliance of mature or recently reconfigured Western European democracies but as a globalised system of defence of all democracies in the American and European model, forgetting that, in each country, the choice of democracy was often part of a power struggle between local interests. American and European political interests picked their sides (as the Russians tried to do), funded them, nurtured them and even encouraged revolutions along ideological lines. Maidan was one of the few successful Western coups in this regard. This is important - instead of mature democracies coming to a rational view of collective security as nation states, we saw immature and potentially unstable new democracies emerge as 'allies' where the nation was often incompletely formed, with minorities to cater for and boundary disputes still not resolved the further East we went. This was no longer an association of equals but a system of satrapies of an empire based on a specific ideology and served by interlocking elites with clientage relationships to Washington and, to a lesser degree, Brussels.

What Ukraine Teaches Us

This brings us to Ukraine which has been romanticised in a wholly inappropriate way as if it was a mature democracy operating with the full consent of its people. It may have been on the way there but, on the date of the Russian invasion, it was far from that. It was a contested borderland between empires with irresponsible outside players dabbling in domestic politics. Roughly 40% of the population belonged to a culture that was not the dominant nationalist one and was subject to periodic persecution. Suddenly NATO moved into a new phase again with complacent Western populations tagging along behind the agenda of foreign policy, diplomatic and security professionals.

The blunt truth is that there were no Treaty obligations that demanded that NATO and certainly not the UK place at risk their economies and peace for the sake of the regime in Kiev. The decision to take Ukraine's side was ideological and emotional, the product of effective psychological warfare and the willing suspension of disbelief in the Western media who have long since lost any vestige of objectivity. It was also the culmination of a process that had seen the seizure of moral positions from those that properly belonged to the United Nations. Under increasingly weak and second-rate Secretaries-Generral, the UN has proved incapable of dealing with difficult issues and one power bloc has stepped into the breach, ensuring along the way that its crimes are ignored and the rules structured to criminalise all rivals. That ideological position-taking was cover for imperial expansion where motives included the containment of Russia and the eventual overthrow of its regime - by any definition, an aggressive intent far from that of the Atlantic Charter.

Whatever the Russians are, they are not idiots. They are from angels but their initial demands were reasonable. That Ukraine not join NATO and so not have nuclear or significant weapons or air power bases within striking distance of Moscow. It was not saying incidentally, once Sevastopol was under their control, that it wanted Russian bases on the border of Poland or Romania. That the self-determination of Russians be respected where they were dominant. Again, this meant just Lugansk and Donetsk at the time, both of which were being shelled with civilian deaths from Ukrainian soil but now, out of cynicism and because it has nothing to lose, it may mean very much more. Beyond this was a hope for a comprehensive denuclearisation West of the Urals or at least on either side of the current NATO-Russian border which strikes me as a very decent negotiating position. Medvedev only yesterday indicated that negotiations with the US over nuclear arms limitation were now off the agenda and that is a tragedy. This last aspiration is, the one probably of most life and death strategic value to the British people, now is dead in the water for a decade or at least a change of administration in Washington.

The Western response to this is also reasonable up to a point. It is, indeed, up to Ukrainians to decide their own security arrangements and that the problems with minority groups (actually a very large minority) are matters of sovereign not international deliberation (despite the fact that the West dabbles at the drop of a hat to protect the rights of minority groups when it is convenient to them - and ignores them, such as those of the Kurds or Palestinians, when that is convenient also. It might be more puzzling that the West did not at least debate denuclearisation if only to reject it later on rational strategic or tactical grounds. But I am not trying to take sides on who is right or wrong and I am not being an 'apologist for Putin' (the slur used to silence all disent). I merely want to point out that the squabble between Ukraine and Russia was intrinsically not a matter with which we should have become concerned other than to show our distaste for an invasion (if we so wished) with sanctions that harmed Russia rather than ourselves.

What The UK Should Think About Now

Certainly there was no cause to treat Ukraine as if it was part of NATO when it was not, supply weaponry that would only prolong the war and the misery, not use our offices to do what Turkey and Israel tried to do and broker a deal to avoid war that met Russia's reasonable existential concerns and help create a path way for Ukrainian membership of the European Union. After all, the Kremlin has been specific that it has no objection to Ukraine being a member of the European Union precisely because it is not a military alliance. We can still do all this and still remain adamant that any attack on a NATO member would result in a declaration of war on our part, self-destructive though that may be when our allies are unstable actors in a complex game. In other words, the attitude to Ukraine should not have been that it was a candidate member of NATO until it had stabilised itself into a mature democracy like NATO's founders but only that it was a work-in-progress that should be encouraged to come to terms with its anxious 'elder brother' in anticipation of economic and political integration into the European Project. As the European Project moves East, there really is an argument for its North West Atlantic margins to consider why they are allowing themselves to be drawn so far from home - so perhaps it does come a case, to paraphrase Brecht, of "Erst?kommt Brexit,?dann kommt NATO”

Of course the reaction to all this is the usual armchair huffing and puffing over appeasement, Munich, tyrants etcet, without understanding that it was NATO that was expanding outwards like Hitler, not Russia, and that the issue of self-determination of peoples that underpinned the Versailles Settlement was as much on the Russian as on the Ukrainian side. This was a war that need never have happened if special interests locked into a militarist and expansionary NATO model had not decided on a course of events that has led to tragedy for millions and destabilised the West far more than it has done its ostensible opponent. For all the psychological operations involved, the manipulation of the narrative, the conduct of the West has been untterably inept.

It does, however, open up to scrutiny the dangerous trajectory of liberal imperialism (fresh from its blunders in the Middle East and Central Asia) and it raises a question that has not been raised since the cruise missile introduction in the 1980s and more seriously since the 1940s - what on earth are we doing in this Alliance that has placed us at (admittedly brief) risk of nuclear conflagration and now is at the heart of an extremely serious economic meltdown. The nuclear risk has not gone away. Washington is responsible. Irritated by the adolescent sub-Churchillian posturing of lightweights like Johnson and Truss, it has restrained Warsaw and other East European radicals but the land blockade by Lithuania of Kaliningrad and reports of 'Western' support for internal guerrilla operations against Lukashenko in Belarus as well as reports (now proven to be premature) of Polish police displacing Ukrainian militia on the Belarussian border, all suggest that the lunatics have taken over the asylum and that the British people are at serious threat from the fanaticisms of neo-nationalist Balts and Slavs.

I suggest that the UK should now consider leaving NATO as it recently left the European Union unless NATO can be brought back into line as a membership organisation, no longer dominated by Washington, concerned solely with the collective defence of its own members and where its members are only fully matured democracies with no existing potential disputes with non-NATO members and in full control of their own neo-nationalist political forces. Above all, it should abandon the 'liberal values agenda' and leave that to other organisations, largely the foreign offices of member nations or of member nations' federations. 'Values' should be political and national or federal or bounced up to a reformed global United Nations while NATO should restrict itself to the professional task of strategic and tactical military defence of its members under all reasonable (not Russophobic-paranoid) scenarios. While Russia might reasonably be regarded as a potential threat, one would hope that it would not be (as it has been) exaggerated as a threat. Indeed, if there are no threats at all, one would hope we would have the courage to demilitarise rather than militarise ourselves further.

What Are Our Options?

If we follow this line of thinking there are probably three options that might work for the UK that would minimise the chances of it being dragged into trouble under the banner of liberal militarist interventionism or because some unstable member starts to tweak the nose of some foreign power just to see what it might do. The first option is sovereign military independence on the Brexit model although this has three major disadvantages - it loses the vital American connection, it allows the emergence of a European strategic capability that could one day be more of a threat than Russia ever was and it would be very expensive since modern armament becomes cost-effective when the costs are shared and supply chains are secure because you can trust your allies. The fact that some East European nations are still using old Soviet or Russian replacement hardware indicates that they have not been taking NATO seriously enough!

A second option is to retain the American connection but revert to the more direct Anglo-American strategic relationship that allowed independence of action separate from East Cost militarism along the lines that the Wilson Government took over Vietnam. The UK would detach from American-led global initiatives (as in East Asia where Taiwan represents an issue of no intrinsic interest to the British people) and concentrate on restoring NATO back to its more passive and defensive role in Europe. This cuts both ways - after all, the US did not back the UK over Suez and was quite right not to do so.

A third option is to use NATO to create a joint command structure for Europe (and discourage the European Federal Army as insufficiently inclusive) that is wholly defensive of mature democracies and where the UK co-operates, entirely separate from the EU political and economic structures, in a programme designed to create a self-sufficient European defence capability that can liberate the continent from American over-involvement.

In fact, a variant of Options 2 and 3 would have the UK as hinge - the 'aircraft carrier' to enable future US intervention while assisting the US to do what it really wants to do, cut the huge costs of its commitment to Europe. This would be a re-balancing allowing the US to continue its global hegemonic mission. It would also allow NATO member nations to act as they will outside NATO in their national interest so long as they did not trigger an attack that derived from their own adventurism. The UK can gear back down to the servicing of its essential home-based strategic interests, assuming it abandons its own failed strategies of adventurism overseas, and help create a strong and better co-ordinated European defensive capability with no serious offensive capacity required. The European Union might indeed have the forces it may want to intervene in (say) Libya to secure energy supplies or do what it will and which would obviously be available to defend the Continent but NATO itself would remain limited, powerful but defensive.

Advocating A New Realism

What we need to do is abandon wholly both the 'imperial' mind-set and the universalist mind-set except where there really is a cogent reason to collaborate globally - freely chosen trade rules, disease control, mass migration, information gathering and analysis, scientific research, financial infrastructures, climate issues, space - and then do so through reformed and empowered national, federal and UN bodies. We have to be realists about 'interest' and that we cannot impose our values outside the area in which mature nation states have decided to share those values by choice and have sorted out their own problems before being brought into the club. By all means assist nations become mature but not by making excessive promises that make them feel they can tweak the noses of their more powerful neighbours and that we will then pick up the pieces. Our ambition, in the current crisis, should have been to work towards including Russia within NATO one day in the future as it matured rather than using NATO as a vehicle to destroy Russia or its 'regime' and force it into a particular ideological model prematurely.

'Values imperialism' (which is little more than an intellectual neurosis) simply fails in the end as all imperialisms do. People discover for themselves over time things like the market, rock 'n' roll, toleration and other good ideas but they do so by failing on their own time scale as they try the alternatives. They watch others with the good ideas prosper and succeed better than they do. The old guard implodes and the population chooses to be free. They free themselves instead of being the passive objects of external liberation. Liberal ineptitude in the West is now doing the exact opposite - it is showing an apparently wealthy culture collapse into political fragmentation, cultural anarchy, resentment, excitable militarism and economic distress. It no longer likes something to emulate but rather a path to avoid as insecurity increases.

The West now has to turn inwards and get its own house in order, get rid of the malign influence of its increasingly parasitical intellectual class, democratise more effectively, redistribute wealth, create an accountable technocracy linked to the people it serves and show more respect to cultures struggling to find their own path to prosperity and freedom ion their own terms. All the aggression directed at Russia, Iran, Syria, Venezuela or China by the second-rate minds in our activist and media classes have precisely the opposite effect to the one that we should want - they harden their hearts out of often justifiable fear and anxiety. Once they do this, they become the threat that they never were. Russia was never a serious threat to us (the slow progress of its military in Ukraine indicates that we are not dealing with the mass ranks of the Red Army any more) but it may now have become so because we failed to listen to it in the past. Syria is a miserable basket case because we decided that it was our duty to intervene and encourage others to intervene, fuelling a forever war much as we are about to fuel a similar forever war in Ukraine through our arms provision.

Let us look at the exercise of power in our own society. Exactly who is it who has insisted on constant threats from outside and what is their interest in doing so - financial, economic, political or psychological? Exactly how real are these threats or are these threats manufactured, much like the Millennium Bug panic, to drive business models or institutional budget allocations? That there are threats is true enough yet we keep seem to be missing the ones we should be dealing with (such as globally transmissible pathogens or mass migration) in order to panic about ones that get headlines but actually pose little risk to most individuals or the structure of society (terrorism or 'disinformation' spring to mind). NATO has long since become part of the problem and not part of the solution with its network of bureaucrats, ideologues, military technocrats and arms producers buttressed by an unquestioning policy wonk, political and media class who become terribly excitable about invented threats and ingnorant extrapolations from reading popular history books and half-remembered university lectures.

Can Foreign And Defence Policy Be Democratised?

Perhaps a great deal of the solution to this problem lies in the democratisation of foreign and defence policy - not at the technical level since soldiers and civil servants are at their best in implementing action without politicians or the ignorant on their backs - but in terms of aims, general policy and engagement. The State carefully keeps the public from getting too involved in either area and yet there is no real reason for this. If we are attacked, we act - that is simple. But our declarations of war when we are not attacked directly - as in 1914 and 1939 - and, above all, when we operate without clear treaty obligations as in the supply of weapons to Ukraine or intervention in Iraq or Afghanistan, require a great deal more scrutiny beyond the excitability of the manipulable butterfly minds of the British media. Essentially foreign and defence policy are either considered in near-secret by specialist wonks or they are thrown open to the public without adequate and honest information, guided by psychological operations under political control and with no discussion of consequences, usually cast in simplistic moral terms that rely on emotions.

In short, we need stronger intermediary organisations that question the State on its use not only of hard power against other populations but of soft power against its own population, that educate the public, that are accountable to the public and that can also look into the conduct of the 'secret state', its surveillance operations and its links to special interests. It is this intermediation process that should begin the questioning of relationship to NATO as it is currently constructed. It is staggering that a beleagured and rather disreputable Prime Minister could give blanket British State hard power guarantees to three non-NATO states (Ukraine, Sweden and Finland) without even a debate in Parliament, let alone a vote or a popular referendum. On paper, he is cavalierly throwing away our lives and property without any significant consent.

We also need to consider the 'poodle problem' - the excessively close junior relationship to Washington - not because the relationship is not valuable in terms of strategic protection, intelligence-sharing and some common values but because the 'desire to please', the increasingly ridiculous desire of a relatively small nation to strut on the world stage, the opportunities to share in or even guide Washington into adventurism (against its own interests), is self-destructive and even humiliating. It is widely known that Washington is irritated by London's tub-thumping uncritical support for Kiev because it reduces the room for manouevre of the hegemon. We look immature and silly. We need to be able to say 'no' as the French sometimes do and the Germans, under a weak Chancellor, increasingly seem unable to do. When the Japanese go pro-US the strategic necessity is pretty clear in relation to North Korea. We know why they are doing so but when we British do it, it looks like a potentially naughty child wanting to be noticed. This adolescent approach to national foreign policy started with Blair and it seems to have been turned into a tantrum in the last four months by Johnson.

Our interests lie in something closer to a pro-Western neutralism rather than junior bit player in a global strategy we can no longer afford or be any good at. What the heck are British warships doing off the coast of China? If anything we should have been building a positive and a pragmatic relationship with Russia over the last two decades as a hedge against a militarised European Union in the longer run. And we should be more concerned with getting access to China's huge potential export markets than allowing activists to drive us into political confrontations over 'values'. Our economy is going downhill fast and we need trade badly.

The UK, Not The 'West'

The primary interest of the UK should not to be to encourage the formation of a 'West' that is an ideologically restrictive concept that overrides democratic sovereignty but to weaken the ability of the continent of Europe to create a strong militarised formation (EDF) under Franco-German leadership that could pose a long term theoretical threat to these islands. It should, instead, encourage a 'Europe des Patries' of free mations with mutually binding purely defensive alliances. If NATO can be returned solely to that role and cut the psychological operations crap, the problem is solved.

Strong national defence for all reasonable eventualities (the UK is not intrinsically reasonably at risk in itself from Russia or China) is, of course, essential. It is recognised that the cost of armament may require alliances to cover logistics and production but the amount of funding committed to radical ‘values-driven’ militarisation is a drain on limited resources in a country in desperate need of dealing with problems of infrastructure, social cohesion and poverty. The military-industrial lobby needs curbing and not expanding.

Inclusion in the theoretical concept of the 'West' places the people of these islands automatically into the category of enemies to those defined as enemies by the ‘West’. In fact, the 'West' is no more than a closed political and ideological caste at the centre of a very few States). By becoming part of the ‘West’, the UK is now enforcedly not only the enemy of Russia but of China, Iran and anyone else neo-conservatives or liberals disapprove of. If one day a strategic nuclear power like China, one with hypersonic weapons, gets into a quarrel with Washington and the quarrel becomes a war, the Government that uses NATO aonly s the bridge to the ‘West’ makes the UK a nuclear target of that faraway 'enemy' while that closed political and ideological caste sits happy in its bunker moving its toy soldiers around on the war table. Personally I have no quarrel with the Chinese, certainly not to the extent of being turned into radioactive ash on some insane issue of principle promoted by some nutters in a think-tank.

In essence, the military-industrial operations and ideological mania that underpins post-Soviet NATO exaggerates threats, seeks to acquire ever more resources, increases insecurity, diverts funds from more important national tasks and is not in the national (that is the people's) interest. However, I do not have the power and the ideological maniacs do have the power so I have to put up with the possibility that the maniacs will trigger an unnecessary third world war that finally does for my poor old country. In the intervening hours, days, weeks, months or years before the final holocaust, I hope more people might avert that possibility by questioning NATO. That is down to you, dear reader.