Too little, too late

Why a big war is looming which will bust Nato

(My speech last night to a security wonks’ dinner in London)

I’m lucky enough to remember the cold war. It had its horrifying moments. But we were part of a strong alliance. We were bigger, stronger and richer than our adversaries. Our system worked. Theirs didn’t. We had ideas that we believed in. And we had fought a proper war against a peer adversary within living memory.

None of that is true now. Our alliance is divided and distracted. We have already witnessed the capricious unreliability of past US administrations. This one will probably be worse. Other economic and political models seem to work better than ours. And our armed forces are not prepared for the war that is heading towards us.

I’ve spent my life warning about this. In the 1980s I campaigned against communism and covered its collapse of communism. I was arrested, beaten up, interrogated and deported by communist secret police forces. After 1991, living in the Baltic states, it was completely clear to me that Russia was not the promising emerging market and reliable security partner depicted by the conventional wisdom. It was run by crooks and spooks, with an ingrained imperialist attitude, most dangerously to its neighbours. The cocktail of dirty tricks deployed in the Baltic states and elsewhere included propaganda, bribery, physical intimidation, subversion, sabotage and psychological warfare. Sound familiar? Russia also weaponised history, accusing other countries, falsely, of Nazism, while ignoring the fact that its own empire really does rest on foundations of mass murder compounded by lies.

They warned us. People like the former Estonian president Lennart Meri, in a speech in 1994 in Hamburg. His prescient warning of the danger, that Soviet nostalgia was the foundation of a new Kremlin imperialism, so infuriated the Russian delegation leader that he led a walkout, slamming the door behind him.

I wonder if anyone can guess who he was? Here’s a hint. He ran the foreign economic relations committee of the City of St Petersburg. Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

In this ahistorical age, it can be hard for us to understand that a politicized interpretation of the past is now the battering ram of Putinist ideology, most notably in arguing that Ukraine is not really a proper country. Future historians may wonder why Putin’s history-led war in Ukraine was not foreseen and forestalled.

For at every stage it would have been cheaper and easier to stand up to Putin, just as we could have avoided our reckless dependence on China.

But we have failed.

This country and its allies now face the gravest defence and security crisis in the lifetime of everyone in this room. It is going to inflict horrible, perhaps catastrophic costs. But the price so far has not been paid by us, or the other countries of what I call the comfortable West. It’s been paid by millions of Ukrainians. Dead, maimed, traumatised, bereaved and exiled, their life chances blighted.

Ukrainians’ sacrifice bought us time. We wasted it. We did not help them when our help would have been most effective. If we had been decisive rather than dithering, Ukraine would not be in the plight it is now, its frontline crumbling, its people exhausted, its heating and energy infrastructure devasted, and with far worse to come as winter bites.

Our sanctions on Russia have failed. We got fantastic headlines – freezing the central bank reserves, stopping the natural gas flows, capping the oil price, shaming Western companies into pulling out of Russia, even forcing Abramovich to sell Chelsea.

But those headlines were misleading. We have failed to enforce those sanctions and Russia has dodged them. Our government agencies were too flat-footed. Our political will was lacking. We were not willing to accept pain or risk.

It hasn’t worked even for our own security. We are already under attack from Russia, with what in the old days were called aktivnye meropriyatiya [active measures]. We have new more fashionable jargon now , such as “hybrid warfare”, gray-zone aggression or sub-threshold warfare. But whatever we call it, it’s happening right now. We see bombings and beatings, poisonings and arson, attacks on our critical infrastructure –pipelines, cables, databases and computer systems.

These are attacks on NATO members, for which NATO has no answer. What do we do if Russia cripples British Airways? Do we sue? Issue a cross press release? Expel a Russian diplomat? Launch a missile strike? Or cover it up. The fact is, we lack the means to respond to these attacks, and Russia knows it.

And here’s the thing. Nato is configured for a war we’re not going to fight. It doesn’t even do that well — it’s almost totally dependent on the Americans for everything from munition stockpiles to mid-air refuelling. But it’s not configured for the war we’re fighting right now. Russia knows that. We don’t. We still live in the comfortable world of thirty years ago. Russia believes it can escalate its active measures with impunity.

And now we face three terrifying compounding consequences.

The first is the failure of Ukraine. I don’t know how this war ends, but the grave and growing danger is that Ukraine is forced, through a mixture of carelessness and cynicism, to sacrifice land and security for a temporary truce. The result will be a giant Bosnia on Europe’s eastern border. A failed or failing state, filled with furiously angry traumatised people, uninvestable, unsustainable, easy prey for mischief and meddling, and the source of millions of refugees—five million this winter if the energy system fails, 25 million next year if Ukraine is forced to capitulate.

The second great danger is nuclear proliferation. Putin has proved that nuclear blackmail works. If Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons, Russia would not have dared attack it. If the West had not been scared of Russia’s nuclear sabre rattling, we would have given Ukraine what it needed, when it needed it. The security guarantees we gave Ukraine are worthless. Why should Japan, South Korea, Taiwan or—for that matter Poland—believe in the American nuclear guarantee now.

The third and most pressing danger is to Nato. What happens if Russia launches a devastating sub-threshold attack on one of our allies. Imagine mercenaries, or irregular soldiers, crossing the border in the Baltic states or Poland or Finland, combined with electronic warfare that grounds planes and cripples critical infrastructure. Imagine bombs going off in Riga, Tallinn and Vilnius, in the name of shadowy “liberation fronts”.  Imagine the assassination of these political and business leaders by hired goons. These countries will rightly see that as an existential threat, requiring an armed response.

And what will Russia do? It will rattle its nuclear sabre. It will say that any Nato response will meet a swift and merciless response.

So as things stand, Nato will say no.

Can you imagine Germany as it is right now agreeing to missile strikes on Kaliningrad? I doubt it. Would the White House agree that Nato warships mount a naval blockade of St Petersburg? I doubt it. Would we in Britain agree to deploy our offensive cyber-weapons against Russia’s power grid or air-defence systems? I doubt that too.

And at that moment Nato is over.

We are far closer to this than we realise.

To any isolationists in the audience I would also add that our own defences in this country are pitifully weak. Finland’s defence doctrine assumes that the country must be able to fight alone and unaided for three to four months. Britain cannot fight alone for four days. By the end of the first week of war, and probably earlier, our air defences would be completely exhausted. Russian bombs and missiles would be raining down on our cities, just as they do every night in Ukraine. And we would only our nuclear deterrent as a last-ditch response.

And here’s the rub. Those weapons work only with the consent of the Americans. Do you really believe that Joe Biden or Donald Trump would allow us to risk a nuclear apocalypse in a war where the United States itself was not threatened?

We have been the victims again and again of magical thinking. We believe that the weapons system that we dribble into Ukraine will be gamechangers. We believe that our sanctions will cripple the Russian economy. We believe that the Russian people will rise up in revolt agains the war, that the regime will split, that Xi Jinping will make Putin stop.

What we fail to realise is that Putin has already won the most important battle. He has tested the West and found it wanting. He wants to overturn the post-1991 security settlement in Europe. He wants NATO broken and the Americans out. And he’s well on the way to getting it.

So what do we do?

The first thing is to stop obsessing about Donald Trump. I am no fan. I am perhaps the only person in this room who actually went doorknocking to try to stop him. My experience in Pennsylvania a few weeks ago left me in no doubt about the weakness of the Harris campaign. But we should bear in mind that the Biden presidency was disastrous. Ever since George W Bush launched the global war on terror, it’s been clear that our security here in Europe is a secondary priority for the United States.

But we have failed to act on that. For decades we have skimped on defence spending, and elevated wishful thinking to an art form. Now we are reaping the consequences.

So instead of lamenting the end of the transatlantic relationship, we should build something else. Let’s accept that Nato is too big, too slow, too diverse and too divided. Instead, let’s build coalitions, coalitions of the willing, the capable, and the threat-aware. That’s what Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk is calling for. And remember, Poland is now in conventional terms increasingly a far more capable military power than Britain.  The core of this could be the Joint Expeditionary Force, the UK-led ten-country alliance of Nordic and Baltic countries plus the Netherlands. We should make that into JEF-Plus, bringing in countries such as Poland, Czechia and Romania.

Whoever ends up in it, the coalition faces five urgent tasks.

First Arm Ukraine to Win. That means providing weapons from our own stocks, buying them on the open market, and most of all investging in Ukraine’s own defence industry. Ukraine needs core basics like artillery shells, anti-air, anti-ship and anti-tank systems and munitions. It needs long-range, uncaveated precision strikes, electronic warfare, command and control, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. That will not just turn the tide on the battlefield and boost Ukraine’s flagging morale. It sends the message to Putin that we are serious. Remember, Russia’s economy is the size of Italy’s. We are many times bigger and stronger—if we choose to combine and exercise our strength and size.    

Second, seize the frozen Russian assets. This is feasible and legal. The $300 billion in frozen central bank assets is more than enough for Ukraine to win the war and to start financing reconstruction. It’s four times US military aid to Ukraine since 2022 and roughly three-quarters of total Western assistance to date. Again, that would hit Russian morale and boost Ukraine’s.

Third extend air defence over Western Ukraine and use it to cover coalition troops on the ground: A shield over western Ukraine will allow Ukrainian air defence assets to concentrate on protecting targets further west. It is absurd that Russian missiles and drones are flying toward our borders—and in some cases into our airspace and onto our territory— and we are too scared to do anything. Under that shield, we should put our coalition troops on the ground, as suggested by President Macron, to help train Ukrainian forces, provide logistical and de-mining support and demonstrate our commitment to Ukraine’s victory and security.

Fourth, reboot our defence and deterrence. This is not just about more military spending. Personally, until we fix our broken procurement system I’m deeply sceptical about buying big-ticket items. The overwhelming need is not for new toys but more munitions and better logistics. Anything left over should go on air defence. We also need to make those sanctions work. But by far the most important missing piece is resilience to those sub-threshold attacks. We need to join the dots, both in this country and with our allies, to make them less effective, and to punish the perpetrators.

Fifth, help the United States over China. We cannot do much militarily in the indo-pacific region. Indeed I would argue that we should stop trying to do anything. But what we can do is help the US on supply chain resilience, regaining our technological edge, countering Chinese penetration of the diaspora, and standing up for Taiwan.

The great thing about this approach is that it actually makes it more likely that the US will stay in Europe. The more of the burden of alliance security we share, the more plausible it becomes for the Americans to take the allies seriously.

It’s not too late. But it soon will be.