Geo-politics, The Threat to The West, and The European Dilemma
Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, Senior Advisor in geopolitics at Audley, Associate Fellow at RUSI, and former Commander of the SAS, offers his ‘reflections from the side-lines’ on the precarious state of geopolitics.
Regardless of who takes the White House in November, the age of American internationalism is fading fast. The bi-partisan consensus that underpinned the willingness of the United States to intervene in upholding the rules-based order for eight decades is all but gone, banished by the extreme polarisation of American domestic politics. This will not be remedied by the election of a new president. The tide of battle turning against a Ukraine starved of the ammunition and weaponry it needs – a direct result of recent filibustering over US internal policy – serves stark warning to The West: America can no longer be relied upon to shepherd us through world wars, hot and cold, or the comet tail of that now-defunct period laughingly called ‘the end of history.’
What would this shift in paradigm mean for The West, specifically for the ‘rest’ of The West – we who have grown complacent knowing that America has always been there to protect us? How could we fill a security void created by even partial American withdrawal? It would not be straightforward (British understatement). It would require rapid reversal of near-endemic social trends, resuscitation of military capability, and above all the rediscovery of the dynamism within our democracies needed to instil purpose and belief into our thinking and doing.
This essay presents a personal, non-academic view from the side-lines. Through a series of observations and impressions it seeks first to understand how just a generation after the collapse of the Soviet Union, The West once again comes to be confronted by an aggressive autocratic coalition, which intends to supplant the liberal rules-based order with its own totalitarian variants. Finally, it offers thoughts on how the democracies of The West must change their approach and act to meet this threat.
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The autocracies smell blood. They judge The West not merely to be in decline but teetering on the edge of collapse, with its leader scurrying back into an isolationist shell. Through a relentless asymmetry of malign influencing and subversion, Russia and China have attacked our structures, weakened our alliances and, perhaps most critically of all, chipped away at our self-belief and our faith in liberal democracy. Through a lost understanding of what ‘liberalism’ actually means, our willingness to defend its values has eroded. This preparation of the battlefield has been going on for many years, decades even, but it is only now – with interference in our elections, the long-term theft of intellectual property from our universities and industry, the realities of supply chain vulnerability showcased by the pandemic, and all-out war in eastern Europe – that we begin to recognise it for what it is: war by other means. Despite some centre-ground Western politicians declaring that we are in a ‘pre-war’ period, popular awareness of this truth remains far off. And, of course, it is a reality wilfully derided by the autocracies and their supplicants on the hard left and extreme right of Western politics and activism, who squeeze the ‘centre’ ever more tightly with a runaway woke agenda and an increasingly extreme reaction to it.
Some of the autocracies’ work we have done for them. The strategic defeats of Afghanistan and Iraq can only have encouraged the view that we in the West no longer have the staying power or, for that matter, the right sort of hard and soft power to confound our enemies and protect our values. How much the Saigon-like abandonment of Kabul in August 2021 affirmed Putin in his belief that Ukraine was there for the taking we cannot know, but it will have played its part. The resolve initially shown by the US and Europe not to let Ukraine fall serves to prove the obverse too. It points to a glimmer of hope that we may not be done yet – though the glimmer has dimmed recently with ‘Ukraine fatigue’ and the distraction of the crises in the Middle East.
So, what would new-age American isolationism look like, and what are its implications for Europe and The West in general? During previous periods of US withdrawal, going right back to the formulation of the Monroe Doctrine in the early nineteenth century, it was never the case that America abandoned the world stage entirely. Rather, it narrowed its focus onto issues and regions – particularly, but not always, those on its doorstep – which were adjudged directly to affect American interests. Today we see a similar shift of emphasis in Washington, not an abandonment of all global responsibility. It is a tilt, and this time it is to the east.
Facing down the superpower challenge of China, with its designs on Taiwan, the Pacific rim, and monopolising global resources, will stretch the United States as never before. The prevailing assumption, at least on The Hill and at the Pentagon, is that America does not have the capacity to meet all its burgeoning global commitments. Therefore, its leaders are faced with a decision of epoch-defining significance. Do they continue to underwrite the defence of Europe from a belligerent, expansionist Russia – but a Russia that has shown itself in Ukraine to be something of a Potemkin village? Or do they seek instead to contain China, retain an American military and economic lead over it, and shore-up the rules-based order – and with it, the security of the US and The West as a whole? Judging by the messages emanating from both sides of the political chasm in Washington, backed by American public opinion, which increasingly views China as the real ‘enemy,’ the path has already been chosen, and a while ago.
It is a simplistic view that sees the world divided into two competing ideologies, backdropped by an amorphous, non-aligned hinterland disparagingly referred to as the ‘Global South’. In contrast to the Western alliance, which is predicated on shared, hitherto fast-held principles, the so-called ‘Axis of Evil’ – currently the autocracies of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea – has little homogenous ideology. They share just one unifying grand strategic goal: to bring The West to its knees. They seek this because each autocracy intends to force its own system and values onto its people and to export it to others. A malign intent that up to now has been managed if not contained by The West, under the leadership of the United States.
Beyond the autocracies sharing this singular aim, their ideologies are in fact disparate and contradictory. China may provide the Iranian theocracy with a sanctions-busting outlet for its oil, but China also persecutes those of religious faith, notably Muslims. A staple of Russia’s arsenal in Ukraine is the Shaheed attack drone and, in exchange, Iran benefits from Russian nuclear expertise; but Russia is also threatened by grave and destabilising Islamist violence of the kind – if not the precise strain – propagated by Iran. Russia’s dependence on China to sustain its war in Ukraine threatens to reduce it to a satrapy, economically and strategically in thrall to its mightier neighbour. This state of affairs is likely to prove unpalatable for a proud, traditionally Euro-centric nation like Russia, with its history of rivalry with China and deeply ingrained racial prejudice and hostility toward the Chinese.
Shared hatred and fear of democratic freedoms render our opponents formidable, nonetheless. Recent history points to the strength and durability of alliances that have but one common denominator. The victory of the ‘marriage of convenience’ between the Soviet Union and the Western Democracies over Nazi Germany is the obvious example – also one that highlights the fragility of the marriage once the unifying element is gone. The same could be said of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that saw the dismemberment of Poland in 1939 by two ideological opposites who, once the deed was done, were soon at each other’s throats. Perhaps therein lies a further glimmer of hope – except, of course, that ‘once the deed is done’ could be too late for the survival of our way of life.
The US removing itself, even partially, from the European theatre will be seen by many as abnegating its responsibilities as leader of the free world in a dangerous and naïve way. The counterargument is straightforward and strong. It is the only way if the US is to focus its finite resources on the area of greatest threat to the rules-based order. The move forces European members of NATO to take greater responsibility for their own defence against Putin’s Russia, whose whole society is now geared to waging war and is more than capable, underwritten by China, of rapid military regeneration in the medium term. This is a point US Presidents and their officials have been hammering away at for over a decade. But we are witnessing the dawn of a new commitment to defence among European states – or certain groupings of states. Defence spending has risen by an average of 60% among Continental NATO partners since 2014, most of it since 2022. Britain’s contribution has remained largely stagnant.
America retains for now the economic lead over China and has a defence budget three times larger. But as the see-saw tilts The West’s slide becomes ever more inexorable, perhaps even unrecoverable. This is the perception of the autocracies, who believe their time has come. The defining characteristic of an autocracy is control, total and rigid. Control of the media, the ballot box (if a ballot box is even bothered with), of people’s lives… where they live, what they do, how many children they have, what they say in public and in private and, with the advent of new technologies, even what they think and what they believe in. This gives autocracy a distinct advantage over democracy, which must reflect the constantly changing politics and mores of its free citizens. So, autocrats can plan long; democrats, in peacetime, are lucky to be afforded more than a five-year horizon.
There are other traits within democracies, which, if unleashed, can compensate for the sluggishness and chaos that so often marks their early efforts at meeting challenge and responding to emergency. The first of these is that they possess an inherent flexibility, born of having to react to the vicissitudes of their electorates. In crisis, this malleability allows a democracy to react to the unforeseen and to grasp opportunity more swiftly than a rigid, monolithic autocracy. Then there is the harnessing of the whole state. Once the penny finally drops, the full entrepreneurial, economic, technological, scientific, and industrial potential within society is dramatically and suddenly focussed on the singular aim of achieving victory. This is an avenue not open to anything like the same extent for a closed and controlled autocratic state that has expunged individualism and private innovation. It is the dynamic that saw America move from being a highly diversified and prosperous peacetime economy in 1941 to a society singularly geared for war; one which produced a new aircraft carrier and tens of thousands of aircraft and armoured vehicles every month by early 1944. It is the dynamic we see at work in Zelensky’s Ukraine.
Therefore, to succeed, the autocracies must strike fast and decisively before The West can rouse itself from three decades of ‘peace dividend’. Conversely and immediately, therefore, The West must open its eyes wide and gird itself for what is upon us. There are parallels to be drawn here with Britain’s awakening at the eleventh hour in the late 1930s. It was too late by then to resurrect the British army, which had sunk from being the war-winning force that demolished the German army in the Hundred Days Campaign of autumn 1918 to an ill-equipped gendarmerie configured almost exclusively for imperial policing. Instead – and this preserved us long enough for America to come to the rescue – there occurred a ruthless prioritisation of resources, which focussed on the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force (with an emphasis on specific aircraft types), and new technologies, notably radar and signals intelligence. A combination of these bought us time. European nations – whether as NATO or as a coalition of the willing - may now have to do the same, prioritising and dividing up responsibility for individual capabilities between member states. This would mean countries abandoning the unattainable goal of retaining ‘national’ capability across the entire spectrum of defence, which is just a chimera of duplication of effort and tokenism.
But how to comprehend the enormity of it all, let alone how to achieve it in the time left to us?
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It is pre-requisite before being able to restore effective deterrence that the electorates of the democracies are made aware of the true and immediate nature of the threat. Without popular consent, Western leaders will not feel that they have the mandate to divert the very significant percentage of public spending required to re-build military capability and invigorate their defence-industrial base. The picture on this is mixed. In the Baltics, eastern Europe and Scandinavia – those closest to the threat, many of whose citizens have personal experience of being under Soviet subjugation – public awareness is already well advanced. The Baltic States and other frontline countries such as Poland are now on a war footing, the latter fast becoming the pre-eminent conventional military power in Europe. Sweden and Finland’s accession to NATO was only achieved by having the backing of their populations. Even Germany, with its historical wariness of re-entering the military arena, is now hitting 2% of GDP, which will soon make it the second largest contributor to NATO after America. There is similar upsurge among more distant partners of the Western coalition. South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the Philippines, reacting to increased threat and taking their lead from growing US engagement in east Asia, are markedly increasing defence spending – Japan, like Germany, throwing off many decades of reticence to do so.
In western and southern Europe, the threat appears far less intimate and immediate. Greater geographical distance from Russia plays its part, as does a far more abstract, largely historical memory of living under imposed autocracy during the Second World War. In these countries Ukraine has slipped down the news agenda, supplanted by the situation in Gaza. Though appalling and dangerous in so many ways, the crises in the Middle East are not of the same magnitude of threat to the rules-based order – save that Western society’s fractured reaction to Gaza presents the autocracies with further opportunity to sow discord. For populations in these regions the focus remains elsewhere. Climate change, an often wilful aversion to what America and the democratic tradition truly represents (nothing less than the preservation of freedom), a fixation on identity politics, and a more understandable day-to-day focus on cost-of-living and other domestic concerns all trump a ‘quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.’
Awareness of threat comes to democracies either proactively or reactively. Proactivity permits preparation, which deters. Proactivity retains the initiative. Having to react cedes the initiative and in the mind of a would-be aggressor fosters a belief that the gamble is worth taking – whether that turns out to be true or not. It also leads to hardship and defeat in the opening rounds, and possibly to defeat overall if there is no ‘America’ to ride to the rescue. The course of the twentieth century provides graphic illustration of both. However, it opens with the exception that proves the rule.
In the years leading up to 1914, proactive planning and preparedness was taken to extremes by the future combatants on both sides. In the event, the slide to war came not so much because one of the parties sensed weakness and risked all to win all, but through a relatively minor occurrence triggering a complex, pre-ordained sequence of escalation that rendered them all powerless to draw back. Over-preparedness with insufficient shared checks and balances in place had created a situation of extreme combustibility. The example of 1914 fuelled similar and legitimate concerns over the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, which came to underpin deterrence during the Cold War, but it also ensured channels of communication between the protagonists were established and kept open, which in turn created a perverse stability absent today. In the face of Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling, and the absence of effective back-channels, both these previous episodes contribute to The West’s on-going hesitancy to provide the long-range weaponry Ukraine requires. So, the lesson for our ‘pre-war’ period from the pre-war/pre-Cold War periods of 1914/1945 is to be proactive in deterrence but stringent in maintaining open channels.
To journey from where western European democracies are now to where they need to be in order to create effective deterrence can only begin by gaining the acquiescence of electorates who understand and accept the reality and requirement for it. This will take statesman – not mere politicians – who lead governments with strong enough mandates to plan long and not be blown off course by fluctuating polls, social media and 24/7 news. No western European leader, except for President Macron of France, has shown any statesmanlike grasp so far – and he has only recently. For all Macron’s political vulnerability at home and perceptions of him abroad, the French are listening. A major survey last month by Le Parisien revealed that half of the young Frenchmen polled said they would fight in Ukraine to defend France. If the same poll were to be conducted in the United Kingdom the results would be very different – not because British youth are any less willing to defend their country, but because the political leadership of Britain has failed entirely to communicate to them the reality of the situation. Compare that to what the true statesmen and women of eastern Europe and Scandinavia have achieved.
All this will take time, which is something Europe may not have. Whether Donald Trump wins the election or not, the tilt east is happening. If he does win in November then things could accelerate and Europe might soon find itself if not on its own, then with most of its safety blanket pulled away. Despite Trump’s rhetoric, it is unlikely that the US would withdraw from NATO completely. The US will need a coalition to face down a coalition and, besides, historically America tends not to fight wars on its own. Instead, it could opt for a series of looser defence alliances with different partners according to region, whilst still maintaining defence bilaterals with European nations and established groupings that already serve a useful purpose globally; the Five Eyes anglosphere intelligence alliance, the ‘club’ of Western nuclear powers and – with a lesser US commitment – NATO itself could be three such groups.
There remains, though, a distinct possibility that the US will pull its forces out of Europe, either for redeployment to the Pacific rim or back to homeland United States to act as a global reserve. In this scenario – an early indicator of which would be the US offering up the post of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) to a European – America would almost certainly maintain a commitment to reinforce Europe through NATO in the event of war with Russia. But it would be a reduced commitment – far less reactive – and may not include the continued assurance of nuclear cover for the Europeans if US nuclear forces form part of the tilt east. This would leave France and Britain having to work out a formula under NATO to take over responsibility for Europe’s nuclear deterrent.
What of the Global South – that misnomer for non-aligned or neutral countries from all points of the compass? First, the terms ‘non-aligned’ and ‘neutral’ are redundant, or soon will be. The idea of a nation, great or small, anywhere in the world, in this era of technological connectedness and dependency being able to hold such a position as confrontation intensifies is beyond wishful thinking. It will not be sustainable. China and Russia have long since realised this and have stolen a march on The West. Nations throughout Africa, the Far East, and the Caribbean now come under the sway of the autocracies through focussed application of power – both soft (the Belt and Road initiative) and hard (Wagner etc). It is vital that Western governments slough off post-imperial guilt, rebuild networks and re-engage economically, diplomatically and, if necessary, with focussed hard power, including the applied use of properly ‘registered’ private military companies. The emerging superpower of India and independent actors such as South Africa, Brazil, or Mexico could hold the key to the balance of power in their regions or even globally. They need to see that The West still believes in the liberal rules-based order and is resolved to defend it. We need them as our friends, as they will need us.
To buy time for this great awakening, The West must abandon its position of passivity in response to hybrid assault by China and Russia, whose cyber warriors run amok undermining Western democratic foundations, disrupting its capacity, and stealing its technology to use against it. It is not something that can go unanswered any longer. The West must enter the ring, harness the power and innovation of its technology sector – the untapped ‘superpower’ in its midst – and take the hybrid war to the enemy. What is currently a great vulnerability can become a significant opportunity, signalling resolve and intent, and protecting its resources and intellectual property in the race for mastery of AI and quantum.
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The implications are clear: with American focus on east Asia, Europe will have to take lion’s share responsibility for its own defence. So, best to prepare, and soon. How Europe resuscitates and progresses a military identity of its own, either within NATO or through some alternative structure or series of groupings, is not for discussion – or conjecture – here. But to beat the drum one more time, survival of the rules-based order in Europe hinges in the first instance upon finding leaders who can communicate to their populations the reality of what faces us. Only then can we proceed, backed by popular mandate and re-energised democracy, to prevent ‘hot’ war with Russia and the autocratic coalition through credible deterrence. In the US and in eastern Europe and Scandinavia this process is already far advanced. In western and southern Europe, the crucible of democracy and the Western Enlightenment, it has hardly begun.
By Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, Senior Advisor at Audley and former Commander of the SAS