POLITICS
Defence policy: the blind spot leading the blind
NOEL MALCOLM
The Tory Party has always done well out of the defence issue — better, perhaps, than it deserved to. Defence is an issue which the British public seems to care little about for four years at a time. The whole issue disappears, like a nuclear submarine, into distant waters, not even bothering to surface. Then, come the general election, it raises its periscope and fires off a few destructive torpedoes into the opposition parties.
Nuclear disarmament was one of the issues which blew apart the Alliance at the 1987 election; and who can forget the damage done to Labour by Mr Healey's plans to defend the West with a slurry- filled trench, or Mr Kinnock's apparent desire to conduct guerrilla warfare in the Welsh mountains against occupying Soviet troops, or indeed the shamelessly over-the- top Tory poster which showed a British soldier with his hands up, and the caption, 'Labour's Policy on Arms'?
With posters as uncompromising as that, people hesitated to ask what exactly the Conservatives' policy on arms might be. The Tories were in favour of arms and that was sufficient. Most of the arguments about defence were conducted at a level of strategic generality where it was reason- ably clear what kind of status quo the Conservatives wanted to conserve: caution in the face of the Soviet Union, the preservation of nuclear deterrence in Europe, and the cohesion of Nato. Any more detailed arguments about how to spend the billions of pounds (currently £20 billion) in the defence budget were assumed to be matters for management or accountancy. After one major attempt at cost-cutting by a banker (John Nott's defence review in 1981) and some minor attempts at commercial-style management and cost-accountancy by a businessman (Michael Heseltine), the Government seems to have decided that full-scale de- fence reviews were more trouble than they were worth.
Now, at long last, . the whole issue of defence spending is back in the headlines. The impulse comes partly from the exam- ple of Nato allies such as Belgium (who have already started talking openly about withdrawing all their troops from West Germany) and the United States (who, for reasons more budgetary than strategic, are now contemplating withdrawing up to 10 per cent of their forces from Europe). But the impulse comes also from the Treasury, which, for the first time for ages, is beginning to think of the MoD as the soft underbelly of government spending. And in the internal wrangling which has already started, the Chancellor will receive some support from Conservative Central Office, which does not want the idea of a 'peace dividend' to end up as part of the Labour Party's exclusive political capital.
A government which thinks seriously about its defence spending is better than one which does not; but at the moment this Government is not thinking seriously enough. There is an element of cart before the horse here: the vague idea that we can all start saving money on defence has overtaken the strategic thinking which ought to determine how we spend our money and why. To put the counter- argument in an extreme form: if we thought, for example, that the United States now intended to withdraw all its forced from Europe and thereby save a lot of 'money, this would not be a reason for European countries such as Britain tO save money too. On the contrary, we viiould have to spend more money on defence to achieve even a lower level of protection.
For years the cart of British defence spending had trundled along quite happily behind the horse of Nato strategy. The British Government, as I have suggested, was content to have the responsibility for major new thinking more or less taken out of its hands. If Nato agreed, as it did in 1977, that member countries should in- crease real spending on defence by 3 per cent each year, then that was that — the job of the MoD was merely to work out the details. Now, however, major new thinking is needed about Nato itself: not just about what Nato should do in future, but about what Nato should be. And until we have some sensible and more or less widely agreed answers to those questions, there is little point in busying ourselves with the details of how we could cut 10 per cent here or 15 per cent there.
There may be several reasons for the Government's hesitancy in this matter, some of them genuinely prudent ones. But there is one sticking-point in particular, a blind spot or a black hole, which does the Government great harm; and that is Mrs Thatcher's reluctance even to contemplate the reunification of Germany. She cannot stop it from happening; all she can do is
stop herself from thinking about it. And this is a pity, because other people's thinking is thereby enabled to win by default. On the question of the EEC and Eastern Europe, for example, her general view that the changes in the East are a reason for slowing down• political integra- tion in the EEC is patently more sensible than the opposite view held by Messrs Mitterrand and Delors. But if she has nothing to say about German reunifica- tion,, she will lose the initiative to Delors- style schemes (I am tempted to call them Delorean', the political equivalent of gull- winged) for the so-called 'binding' of Ger- many.
And the future of Germany is the key to the future of Nato. There are, roughly speaking, three possible policies. One is the continuation of Nato, with a united Germany enjoying a special status within it — perhaps free of other Nato troops on its soil, but still a co-operating member of the alliance. This is not as impossible as it sounds, but if the Government wants it to happen it should start preparing the ground for it now. A different policy would be a sort of Euro-Gaullism, with 'Europe' (in practice, the EEC) developing as a third force, independent ' of both super- powers. Mrs Thatcher's political objections to this are understandable (even though the one country which seems incapable of understanding them is the United States). And the third position is a sort of national Gaullism, with Nato or its European suc- cessor operating as a much looser alliance of individual states. If the European Com- munity extends eventually to traditionally neutral countries such as Austria and Sweden, or newly neutral ones such as Czechoslovakia, or Hungary, or Germany, this may be the de facto solution.
So rickety has Nato become, that we are now told that any attempt to change some of its preconceptions will cause it to fall apart. Such an assertion is powerful testimony that change is inevitable; and that Britain had better be in the forefront of adapting to such change.
Those words were written four years ago by the most out-and-out Gaullist of them all, Mr Alan Clark. The Government's failure to take its place in the forefront has not yet changed; but one thing which has changed is that Mr Clark is now a Minister for Defence. Perhaps this Government may yet surprise us with some real policies.
Previous page
