16
Examination of witnesses
Lord Peach and Lord Sedwill.
Q61 The Chair: Welcome to our evidence session at the European Affairs Committee in the Lords in our inquiry into the EU-UK reset. Today we will focus very much on the security and defence aspects of it. I am delighted that we have two very experienced securocrat practitioners, if I can put it like that. I will declare an interest that I have worked closely with both over my career: Air Chief Marshal Lord Peach, who was Chief of Defence Staff and former chairman of the Military Committee of NATO, and Lord Mark Sedwill, former National Security Adviser, former diplomat, and former Cabinet Secretary. A very warm welcome to you both.
We need to do this in an hour, please, because we then have a second session following on from it. You do not both need to answer every question if you do not want to. We will try to keep questions and answers reasonably brief. As I have said, I am happy that members should chip in if they want to as we develop the questioning.
Let me start with a very broad-brush question to both of you. What do you think, in your view, this UK-EU reset should achieve in the defence and security area? What would be a successful outcome from it? Mark, do you want to start?
Lord Sedwill: Thank you, Lord Ricketts, for inviting us both here today. I will take half a step back from that because, as we have seen over recent days, what really matters is the European set of relationships, not just the UK-EU relationship, European NATO, the European Political Community. What we must not allow, as we have so often allowed in the past, is for those relationships to get hung up on institutional questions. Institutional questions matter, of course, but fundamentally what we now need to do is focus on how most effectively the European pillar of NATO and the European nations as a whole can contribute to each other’s collective security. Who knows whether by the end of this session there will be more news from Washington. Like everyone else, I suspect, I find that certainly before I do anything public, I am checking my news feed about every minute beforehand.
Crucially—and this goes to the point of your question, Lord Ricketts, about UK-EU—we need to remember within the NATO context that Article 5 is not an American security guarantee to Europe. It is a collective security guarantee by all nations to each other, and particularly the two nuclear weapon states in Europe should be reiterating that point and the strength of our guarantee to all our European allies.
In terms of the UK-EU relationship, what we should be trying to do is to look at how these different institutional arrangements—the political community, European NATO, UK-EU—can most effectively be used. There are specific elements to the UK-EU relationship that go beyond defence—for example, domestic security, law enforcement, data exchanges, et cetera, which was a preoccupation of mine when I was at the Home Office. There was a harder end of the justice and home affairs brief. All that is important to security as well and can be done on a sovereign basis respecting the Brexit agreements, but also defence industrial co-operation. That is crucially an area where clearly the EU, at least in terms of continental Europe, has the resources and the opportunity to lead.
The Chair: We will certainly come back to that. I entirely agree that the recent weeks have transformed the whole context for UK-European security and defence relations, as well as the EU. Lord Peach?
Lord Peach: Thank you, Lord Ricketts, for the opportunity. When I was proud and privileged to serve as the chair of the Military Committee in NATO, the simple words we used were, “We are stronger together”. That explained the organic growth of NATO as a defensive alliance, but it also is very pertinent in answer to your question. Of course, there were many times in Brussels where others tried to get us into the debate about competing organisations, which was code for the European Union and NATO. We refused to enter that debate. Instead, we talked about organisations that complement each other, which was, of course, EU and NATO. That answer, I think, stands and has stood the test of recent times. If we are to complement each other, then it absolutely makes sense for the UK and EU reset to happen, so we play to our collective strengths and share our understanding of both the threats and the response to those threats.
The Chair: Very good. Thank you. We will develop all those things as we go through.
Q62 Lord Stirrup: I will touch on the issue of the transatlantic relationship in all this. I take Lord Sedwill’s point that trying to predict what the American Administration might do at any point in the future is extraordinarily difficult, but I will ask you to give it your best try. The Government, in response to questions about this, have specifically said that it is not a choice between Europe or the EU and America—it can do both. However, it is quite clear that there is, shall we say, a certain animosity towards the EU in the American Administration.
The question is, in an attempt to reset the UK-EU relationship, particularly in defence activities, will there be a conflict of interest there between that and our security relationship with the Americans? Lord Sedwill, you mentioned in particular the defence industry, which, of course, will be extremely important. That brings into question issues of trade and then issues of tariffs, which could well impact that particular area as well as others. Do you think we are likely to run into problems there?
Lord Sedwill: It would be complacent to think that we might not, just because of the sheer volatility of all the sets of relationships. During the first Trump Administration, Lord Ricketts mentioned I was National Security Adviser. What I am now having to remind people is I was National Security Adviser for virtually the whole of that Administration. I took over a few weeks after the inauguration and left a few weeks before the election. I find myself drawing upon those experiences.
What we found during the first Trump Administration, for example, on tariffs was that steel tariffs, which were notionally aimed at steel dumping by China, were applied universally, including to the UK and including to some grades of steel that would have been straightforward to exempt from those tariffs, and on which the Pentagon actually relies for some of its defence industrial production. We made that argument in Washington at the time with the Department of Commerce, the Treasury, the White House, everyone. It fell on deaf ears. The tariffs were applied.
We have to expect there will be some challenges in the relationship. I do not think we should necessarily see, though, that there is a zero-sum game between our relationship with the EU and the relationship with the US. There will be elements where we have to make choices, particularly if we are seeking to improve trade arrangements, but not necessarily in the defence and security area. In that area, the key issue—and this is not just true of the Trump Administration, it would be true of any US Administration, and you and I have talked about this many times offline before—is European defence capability.
In a sense, anything that improves that significantly enables the Europeans to take a greater share of the burden for our own security, which has to be backed with the supply chains and industry, preferably ones that are integrated with the US and gives them a stake, but obviously which do not make us overdependent. That should be the big issue that we are focused on. What are we doing to raise, essentially, the capabilities—including in this country—of European defence? What the institutional arrangements are should essentially be a secondary issue, if we can possibly make it that.
Lord Stirrup: If I can just follow up on that, it seems to me that one of the key imperatives that we will see within the EU is an expansion of the EU defence industrial base, which could lead to direct friction with the Americans. It does seem to me it will be a very complex and complicating factor in taking through the EU-UK reset on the defence side. Was that a fair assessment?
Lord Sedwill: Yes, I think it is. If we have an entirely mercantilist approach in the United States, a zero-sum approach in the United States, then that will prove challenging. I used to serve on the BAE board and dealt with them. I do not any more, so I do not have to declare a formal interest, but I have an insight from that. BAE Systems is a big defence player in the United States as well, a supplier of very sophisticated systems. It also has alliances with Italy, Japan, and other EU countries, in developing other systems. I do not think, with the way that defence industrial co-operation works, we would be wise to allow ourselves to make an entirely binary choice between the two.
In the short term, there is no alternative, given our dependence on the Americans, but to continue to depend upon the Americans. In the long term, including through some of the innovative ideas you might want to come on to such as a European defence investment bank or some other facility—
The Chair: We will.
Lord Sedwill: —those should be investing in collective European defence capability, and there may be a transition over time. We have to try to avoid this becoming a zero-sum choice if we possibly can, because we would lose operationally, not just politically, from doing that.
Lord Peach: I will add that we also have to be aware that we are not coming into this discussion as if nothing is happening. We have to learn the lessons from the battlefield in Ukraine as they apply to this conversation and make sure we invest wisely and well. One of the lessons, again, I particularly learned in NATO was that interoperability is often talked about but actually has to be delivered. It is wrong to have so many different supply chains, so many different types of ammunition and so on. We can drive that forward through different structures, including through the way in which defence and security and resilience is funded.
I will emphasise resilience. Again, a lesson from Ukraine is the need to remain resilient in terms of both increasing supplies and increasing resilience in the supply chain when needed, and reducing the time it takes to innovate. The time it takes to innovate should be a lesson that the Ukrainian battlefield has taught us, and taught us well, and we now need to apply it.
Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: From the enormous strength that the USA has in defence and security today, is it realistic to think of reducing our dependence on them? Would it not be better to think of strengthening that dependence plus other elements around it with others in the EU, for example?
Lord Sedwill: On the strengthening of EU capability, and in particular to pick up Lord Peach’s point about ensuring that European capability is much better integrated from the very front line all the way back into the defence industrial base, the simple truth is the Europeans—whether that is EU or European NATO—get much less bang for every buck they spend on defence than the Americans. It is because the systems are fragmented, and Lord Peach has just illustrated that. There is a great deal we can do long before we get into a position whereby European defence industrial capability is so competitive with American defence industrial capability that it becomes a genuine choice. We will continue to depend on the Americans, but we should also build up European defence capability, not least because that is part of building up European defence.
Q63 Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town: I know it is difficult asking these questions at this time, but procurement aside, on the assumption that there will now be much greater UK engagement with the EU in security and defence, my prejudice is that that would strengthen NATO. Is that also yours, or do you think it would have other impacts on NATO?
Lord Peach: Interestingly, as NATO has expanded organically as a defensive alliance, I think that it is very important for the committee to note and recognise the importance of Finland and Sweden joining the alliance. With Finland and Sweden come defence capabilities that are real, defence in military-industrial complex that is real, and the ability to research, develop and innovate. Therefore, my answer to your question is that we should grab that opportunity, speed up research and development, and then turn it more quickly into capability that is relevant, and therefore allows our own alliance for our continent—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—to provide effective and credible deterrence, which is at the heart of the question.
Lord Sedwill: I am pleased that Lord Peach mentioned Finland and Sweden because that is important. It is important in terms of European collective defence capability. I was in Norway a few weeks ago with the UK Commando Force, seeing exactly that in practice at the sharp end. It also brings institutionally a different perspective in that nearly every EU nation, and certainly every EU nation with a significant defence capability, is now also a member of NATO. Lady Ashton will be very familiar with this. That will change the dynamic of the conversation in Brussels.
On the point about the institutional frictions, Lord Peach worked hard on this when he was chair of the Military Committee to make sure those two ends of town were not in friction. Given the external pressures—we have traditionally thought of the external pressures from the East, but now the different external stress is on the alliance from the United States—it is the job of diplomats, fundamentally, to figure out some of the institutional questions to enable NATO and the EU institutionally to work more effectively together. There is a natural division of labour. The EU has the tools to focus particularly on the defence industrial base, and if one broadens security out into the domestic security questions, which are not NATO’s business fundamentally, NATO has the tools to focus on the military alliance and the collective defence.
I am not trivialising the issues. Institutional issues are complex, but we have in the leadership of those two organisations—actually the last two leaderships of those organisations—people who are willing to work together. It is far from impossible and should not be that difficult to work through those issues and ensure that we are getting the best out of both.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town: It is very hard to say this, present circumstances apart, but are you saying that NATO will end up being stronger because of this increased EU role?
Lord Sedwill: It would be difficult to say NATO has been strengthened over the past few weeks. President Trump is not the first president, nor the first American, to be deeply frustrated at Europeans talking the talk but not walking the walk on defence. It is also the case that the United States, whether through choice, President Trump, or through circumstances, potentially a crisis in the Pacific, will turn its attention elsewhere. President Obama talked of essentially reorienting to the Pacific and Asia. There is a strong isolationist tendency in American politics, which goes well beyond President Trump himself.
As a matter of responsibility for our own security, we will have to do more. The smart way to try to do that is to do so in a way that maintains American investment. Paradoxically, maintaining American investment also means doing more; it also means sharing the burden. NATO could be strengthened if we can navigate our way through the choppy waters, but it would sound pretty complacent to suggest it has been strengthened in the present circumstances.
Q64 The Duke of Wellington: A number of us had, an hour ago, a meeting with a Finnish parliamentary delegation. It was a very interesting meeting. One of the matters we discussed was, indeed, the enormous advantage to NATO of Finland and Sweden having joined. They are clearly very sensitive to the fact that Finland has a 1,300-kilometre border with Russia. When we asked them about their ability to join the coalition of the willing, they are clearly a bit nervous about that, particularly as the Russians have expressed a reluctance to agree to European troops in Ukraine. Do you have any thoughts on how one could persuade other European countries in NATO to join, physically, by soldiers on the ground, the coalition of the willing?
Lord Sedwill: It very much depends on where they are. Lord Peach will have an insight on this from his time at the Military Committee. We should keep in mind that by having substantial NATO forces in the Nordic countries—not only Finland, Sweden, Norway, but the British Commando Force and other forces that we apply there—we are defending our northern flank, but from Putin’s perspective we are holding significant Russian forces at risk. We think of ourselves as an entirely defensive alliance, but he does not see it that way. If we can force him to hold significant forces at risk on his northern flank, then we are diverting his capabilities away from, say, the central front of NATO and not allowing them to concentrate their forces as well. We should not see everything in terms of where the immediate threat is.
There are roles that other countries can play, and Lord Peach is concluding his tour as the UK’s envoy for the Balkans, which is another perspective on this. There are ways that NATO nations can play an important part in maintaining our security and forcing the Russians to divert resources away from where they would like to put them, without necessarily having to put troops on the ground in Ukraine. Now, some nations should. That will not apply to some. We should not assume that every single nation is necessarily best supporting the overall campaign by being part of that particular coalition of the willing, because there are other willing coalitions that we need to ensure are in place to put pressure on the Russians.
Lord Peach: It is a very interesting question. Both the Chair and other members of the Committee have been involved with coalition discussions. They evolve, they are organic, and they will change over time. As both nations perceive their interests in the Finnish case, of course, they have to preserve their own border security, along with their international commitment to their own national security interests. So they are not tautological—they are linked. How that evolves is often through the leadership of one nation, sometimes called a framework nation, among other phrases. One of such frameworks that the UK has developed and led is the Joint Expeditionary Force, which brings 10 nations together.
Along with the earlier comments on improving interoperability and strengthening supply chains, I can see that through the smoke of the current situation—and it is difficult to fully predict how it will evolve—we will need those conversations quite quickly. We have done it before and we can do it again. The important point is a shared understanding of the threats, the risks, and then an agreement on how to resolve them. In terms of generating working forces together to common standards, that is exactly what NATO does. Lord Sedwill is right to raise the point that how Russia sees things is often different to how we see them.
Q65 Lord Jackson of Peterborough: I will ask a question that touches on the earlier question from Lord Stirrup and, to an extent, my colleague Baroness Hayter about the impact on NATO of moving from a defence and security agreement into a solid military capability between the UK and the EU. You will have seen in the Times today, the leader, which was headed, “Starmer’s ‘coalition of the willing’ needs US muscle to be credible”. You will also, no doubt, have seen Senator Mike Lee, who is a very senior Republican and a committee chair in the Senate, actually campaigning to leave NATO.
My question is: does this policy of moving forward with a non-NATO military capacity not play into the hands of the US isolationists, who will then undermine and reduce the role of NATO and eventually push and potentially succeed in the US disengaging? Is that not a real risk of this unless we get the timing right and we are clear that we remain committed to our role in NATO?
Lord Sedwill: You are right to point to the risk, Lord Jackson. The greater risk, however, is of the Americans believing we are free-riding, that the Europeans are simply not doing enough for our own defence—and therefore why should they put American forces at risk? I can think of the most NATO-phile and most Atlanticist Americans who have said, in terms, that it is untenable for the American taxpayer to subsidise a European welfare model that they do not enjoy themselves. That is the equation they are making. They are saying that we are making choices around spending between the welfare state versus defence, and they are making a different choice, and they are subsidising our choice because they are putting their force at risk. That is the greater risk.
You are absolutely right, of course. If the rhetoric and politics of it on this side of the Atlantic becomes anti-American, then exactly the risk you point to plays out. What we have to do is be smart about it and play it in the way, in a sense, both of us are driving at. That is strengthening the European pillar of NATO. It is sharing the burden. It is reminding the Americans that the only time we have declared Article 5 was in support of the Americans after 9/11, and we would be ready to support them in the future. The Europeans must remain committed to the whole Atlantic relationship, including US security, and not find ourselves trying to define ourselves against the Americans, because that will play into exactly the isolationist narrative.
Lord Peach: If you look at the map projection, Lord Jackson, from an Arctic perspective, the world looks quite different. You can easily see, in maritime security, how US interests and European interests are best served by maritime security to enable trade on the right international terms. I know very well how sensitive this used to be, but now it is much more openly discussed that we must also pay attention to preserving what is under the sea in terms of cables that enable our international economy to work, and therefore that is in our mutual interest, regardless of the current situation and the opinions expressed.
There are lots of reasons for transatlantic security to survive, even with the difficult times we are in. There are also lots of reasons to continue to look at ways of co-operating with other partners around the world. I could think perhaps of the arrangements we have in place—AUKUS with Australia, United Kingdom and the US, and many of the other initiatives that either NATO or the UK is running with other countries such as Japan. In other words, it is like-minded values based, potentially. In that, we will see how things develop. At the moment, one of the things I am not hearing in that absolutist position is the sense that Russia has stopped being a risk or a threat to all forms of our national interest.
Q66 Baroness Ashton of Upholland: I could talk for a long time about NATO-EU relations, as I was responsible for them for five years, and the reality is that it is not either/or, it is both/and, which is important not to lose sight of. I know both of you would agree with that. As well as the interoperability of missions, we did a lot of work on, for example, mid-air refuelling, because a lot of EU countries did not have that ability, or the nozzles did not fit into the holes because they were the wrong shape and size. Those are very practical things that Europe should be doing for the European pillar of NATO as well.
I want to turn to this thinking now about the lead role of European states that they will be playing in a post-conflict security arrangement with Ukraine, whatever that looks like, how we get there, and so on. These are very difficult questions. What prospects do you see that what we will eventually end up with is the emergence of a group of countries that will effectively be this coalition of the willing, or PESCO, or whatever words we want to use to describe them, that will be operating outside of the EU frameworks—outside of the NATO frameworks—because they will be operating in a sense between the two, and whether that can affect the reset? I suppose we have already touched on the mechanisms that go with that, whether it will be about how we fund it, how we arm it, and so on. What are your thoughts on what that means for the future of defence and security in the reset context?
Lord Peach: In the reset context, many of these thoughts were happening anyway. They are coming together—at speed, I would say. It is a real focus to reduce the different equipment and bringing that equipment together so it can operate.
The simplest and shortest way to answer your question is through command and control. NATO has standing command and control capability, and it has also demonstrated over many years that it does not have to be always in the same place and format, provided you can communicate in a secure manner—the Ukrainians, again, have shown us the way on that—and provided you can adopt modern forms of warfare while commanding and controlling. That is the answer to your question, which is groups of nations that are willing to come together for a specific mission in a time and place with command and control—organising themselves; that is a better way of putting it. That is needed more than ever.
To do that, we need to speed up procurement. Again, committee, Lord Chair, that is not new. We have probably been talking about it in this building for decades. On how we do it, there is not one answer. There are a number of answers, and President von der Leyen has made a speech on that today. We must work with our European friends and maybe other partners across the globe, as I have indicated, on ideas they have and ways they have and how quickly they can turn things around. We must not lose sight of how quickly that is happening in Ukraine. It is about speed now and about accepting that we need to do things differently, while at the same time moving from within our structures, particularly the NATO structures that we know work.
During Covid, for example, NATO was not a humanitarian organisation, but that does not mean the NATO command structure was not used. It was used to move through thousands of flights, oxygen, ventilators and equipment that was needed around the NATO alliance. In other words, once you have the ability to organise through command and control, with a secure network and like-minded and willing nations that want to do this as a mission, then you can achieve a lot of the things that people like to portray as being very difficult.
Lord Sedwill: Lady Ashton, may I supplement that very briefly? There is a connection between that and one of Lord Jackson’s points, which is our continuing dependence upon the Americans. Except in extreme circumstances, we could not do everything that we might wish without the Americans. Lord Ricketts will remember the 2011 campaign in Libya, where although it was European forces that were engaged, we still required American systems, NATO enablers, and so on, in order to enable us to pursue that campaign, and the same is true now. That is the conversation we need to have with the Trump Administration about Ukraine, which is we will put European forces into the vanguard of this. We do not necessarily need American forces on the ground, but we will need America to be supportive and providing some of its capability behind it. I am not personally very keen on the word “backstop” in this context, but I think the Americans are essentially underwriting such a mission by being involved even if they do not have people right on the front line. That is the conversation we should be pursuing in mind.
Q67 The Chair: Could we explore briefly the issue of a rearmament bank or other off-budget funds that might be a quick way of getting defence capability without getting enmeshed in all the complexities of EU third-country rules and so on?
Lord Peach: “Defence security resilience” would be the term I would offer. We can accept that we have to improve our resilience. One of the ways of doing that is making sure that we drive innovation, we look at supply chains, and we do that with like-minded nations and partners. We have already covered that. I am working with others who have worked in NATO and others in Brussels on this at the moment to try to look at where we might pull this together. Again, President von der Leyen has made a speech about that today.
How we do it is still a discussion, and how quickly we can do it is relevant to this discussion today. I think that we can do it relatively quickly. We can do it with financial institutions that have understood that the need is there, and then we can do it with partners. It is not exclusive. One of the dangers in this discussion could be to make something that is for an exclusive European group. If we go back to Baroness Ashton’s time, that was perhaps something that was around in Brussels at the time. That is how, in some ways, we could see the “compete” rather than “co-operate” group.
I would say the opposite. We now need to have international co-operation at the heart of it, use the strength of financial institutions wherever they are located, working with our US friends whenever and wherever we can, and bring as many people in with all the right checks and balances and due diligence, so that the financial institutions support it.
Lord Sedwill: The short answer is yes. There are quite a number of ideas around. They are all worth exploring. I have been providing some advice to one or two of the groups thinking of these things. One is developing an idea essentially based on the EBRD model for funding European rearmament, where essentially Governments would pledge €X billion, that would be AAA-rated and it would be possible to borrow on the market at very low rates to get €10X billion of funding available. The Chancellor has been talking about allowing the National Wealth Fund to invest in defence.
Views differ on this. I am sceptical of using exotic financial vehicles of this kind to try to replace current defence expenditure, current procurement of munitions and other supplies, because that is essentially using financial engineering to deal with current expenditure, which we have tried before and usually ends up costing the taxpayer—whether the British, the European or whoever—more in the long run. Using some of these vehicles to invest in developing capability of the kind we were discussing earlier, genuine defence industrial capability, innovation, and so on—which is, of course, entirely appropriate to use debt financing of different kinds for, whether it is public or private sector—feels to me like it is very well worth exploring. Fundamentally, we should be pursuing all these ideas. What we should not think is that it lets Governments off the hook of investing more current expenditure in defence in order to make sure that our armed forces are more effective and better equipped.
Lord Peach: We need to make it more efficient. We need to pull through from ideas through innovation to capability more quickly. We have been talking about that for years. Now is the time to do it.
Q68 Baroness Anelay of St Johns: To build on that, I will ask a question about how we deliver on the reset as a whole. I have always had hang-ups about Government and how it works. Lord Sedwill, you have seen it inside out and upside down and tried to make it work even better than politicians can, shall we say, sometimes. Lord Peach spoke about command and control and how that can deliver. What is your assessment of the changes the Government have made to create a centralised EU relations function in the Cabinet Office under a Minister? Can that deliver or is there something else you would like to add to it?
Lord Sedwill: The answer is yes, of course, it can deliver, and as always with Government it does not really matter. The structures are less important than the culture and whether there is a culture of collaboration across Government and there is coherent political leadership behind a clear agenda. If you have those things, then, frankly, people doing my old job, or indeed a range of my old jobs, can make the institutional structures work.
I have always been wary of thinking that anything that is collaborative has to be led out of the Cabinet Office. I do not think that is necessarily the case, but it is perfectly viable to do so. It does require bringing together the professional and the political leadership. It is a good idea to have a Minister thinking about this and dedicated to it, because that brings additional impetus. Fundamentally, what you need in government, behind any effort of this kind, is the direct authority from the Prime Minister to whoever the Prime Minister has put in charge of it, to tell the rest of Government that the institutional culture—the collaborative culture—needs to get behind it and make it work effectively. Then, frankly, you can make the institutional structures work. It is a good model. It is not the only model, but it is not the key question. The key question is essentially the political wasta from the Prime Minister behind this.
Q69 Baroness Winterton of Doncaster: This is another machinery of government question in a way. I think what you are saying is that your advice to the Government on managing the cross-departmental process, but also including the devolved areas, is that it would need clear political leadership from the Prime Minister. The follow-on question therefore would be: do you think that there are any lessons to be learned from the UK’s experience of the post-Brexit international negotiations so far and, if so, do you think that the Government are taking them on board?
As a very quick follow-on from what you were saying earlier, I am on the OSCE. That is managed by the Foreign Office and we have been talking a lot about defence. Do you think that there is the ability to make an organisation like that more effective in terms of describing the alliances that we are trying to build, because it brings in other countries—Canada, the US, and so on? Is that working as effectively as it could do, and would it be better managed if there was greater integration between the departments?
Lord Sedwill: Lord Peach probably has more direct experience, including recently, of the OSCE relationship than I do. Lord Ricketts was the first National Security Adviser, and I was the fourth. He created the institutions of co-ordination at central and national security, or actually, to be fair, I think that you say evolved them from where they were before. I sought to develop them further with the capability review and the whole fusion approach and so on.
Fundamentally, what we were both trying to do is to ensure that we had a coherent effort across government on all these matters. I do not think that you can say that the only way to do it, as I said a moment ago, is to bring everything into the centre, because that disempowers departments and often creates real antibodies within the system. The key thing is that there is strong political leadership that gives professionals a clear agenda to pursue, that we then put in place the co-ordination mechanisms to ensure that everyone is essentially facing in the same direction, and that implementation is done in the expert departments, because that is where the expertise lies.
I was always struck when I was National Security Adviser that the National Security Secretariat was too big, and I never managed to slim it down as much as I wanted to. Kissinger’s national security secretariat was less than half the size of the British one, and Kissinger was at the peak of the Cold War running some of the biggest issues in the world, because they had a system by which that central co-ordination and execution of the departments worked most effectively. That is the balance that one has to try to get right. I would not favour bringing OSCE responsibility into the centre. What I would favour is making sure it is part of a coherent national security approach.
Lord Peach: The OSCE, as it is currently configured in Vienna, is a complex set of relationships that is managing—
The Chair: A very diplomatic response.
Lord Peach: It is managing everything from people regularly storming out to regularly not showing up. It requires a lot of flexibility. Therefore, going back to what Lord Sedwill said very eloquently, it should have an all-informed approach rather than just a single input. Something I learned in NATO is that the more informed approach—not all forms of intelligence are very classified, a lot of it is about information at the right time—is the key. I keep coming back to the principle of command and control. The OSCE is still there and has survived, despite everything that has been thrown at it.
The final thing I would like to say to the committee is that we need to be very careful, given the mood in the world at the moment, that we do not break something by accident and throw something away that we deeply regret.
The Chair: That is a very powerful point. It may not be quite the last thing you say. Because everyone has been so concise we have a little bit of extra time, and I know that Lord Stirrup is particularly keen to have one follow-up question, and maybe other members, and Lord Whitty.
Q70 Lord Stirrup: I would like to go back to something that Lord Sedwill said at the outset, which is that we should not get hung up on institutions. It is clear that the urgent requirement is to build up the European dimension of NATO as far and as quickly as possible. There is a considerable overlap between European NATO and the EU, but they are not congruent. The EU defence and security processes and arrangements tend to be fairly restricted for obvious reasons. If you are in the club, you are a member; if you are not, you are not. There are alternative mechanisms, for example, such as OCHA.
My question is: to what extent should we be hung up on a UK-EU reset in terms of defence and security? Should it be a much more flexible approach, taking whatever is available and whatever works, to get the job done as quickly and as effectively as possible? It is a bit of a leading question.
Lord Sedwill: Yes, I was trying to think of an even politer way of putting that. The answer to your question is in two things you said. The way to get to the second point—which is for us essentially to use whatever mechanism is the most appropriate to achieve the goals set, so function following the objectives of the form, if you like—is for us to demonstrate to the EU that we are willing to have a genuine reset of the UK-EU relationship. In other words, we are not the ones hung up on the institutional issues.
Now, of course, we have to respect the Brexit result, but we will be doing so on a sovereign basis. We have learned from the pressures that we in Europe now face that fundamentally, despite all the frictions of the past decade, we are all European nations, we all share largely the same values, and our security interests are very closely aligned. We should be able to find a way of working through the various institutional questions to enable us to do that. What the EU needs to hear from the UK is that we are not hung up on those things either—that we will be pragmatic about it. That is how we arrive at the à la carte approach of what is most suitable for the requirements of the time that you suggest.
Think of President Macron, for example. The French were the hardest to negotiate with during the Brexit negotiations. They were very hard over on ensuring the UK was not perceived to have benefited from this. With the development of the European Political Community, he is trying to show a pragmatic approach that brings people together. We should operate in the same spirit.
The Chair: It is true as well that our inquiry is changing with every day as the context changes around it. The reset looks different now to what it looked like a few weeks ago. Let us hear from Lord Peach, and then have a couple of other interventions.
Lord Peach: I have a very brief point in answer to Lord Stirrup’s very interesting question. The command and the management cultures evolve depending on what is on the agenda. For many years in the EU, they were looking at relatively small-scale training missions, often around Africa and elsewhere. In NATO, they were very much focused on expeditionary operations a long way from NATO’s core area. In the case of NATO, as that has consolidated into collective defence once more through the NATO command structure, that has led to a reinvigoration of thinking and discussions on deterrence, a reinvigoration of many of the perhaps less prominent committees and the nuclear planning group rather than the time of the expeditionary operations, in other words demonstrating that even within a framework of NATO the command culture within the organisation can change, and we are living through one of those periods of changes.
The Chair: Yes. I want to give the floor to two members who have not yet been able to speak, Lord Whitty and Baroness Ludford.
Q71 Lord Whitty: My question is probably a bit broader, but since we have two eminent witnesses of long experience of European and international affairs we should ask them what their assessment of two things is. First, one of you rightly referred to the long history of American isolationism, and my assessment of America is partly that this is being revived and that Trump is not an aberration, except in his personality perhaps. In fact, it reflects a lot of what the American public and American history have felt for a long time. What is your assessment of the American willingness to become re-involved in this whole process? That is my first question.
My second question is: is the concept of coalition of the willing one that we should endorse, or is it actually splitting both NATO and the EU? There are some nations in both organisations that will not go along with it.
The Chair: I will ask for fairly concise responses, please, because I am keeping an eye on time.
Lord Sedwill: On your first point, you are right. Isolationism is a long-standing trend in American politics. We heard President Trump essentially echo some of the language of a century ago by saying we have the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. As Lord Peach pointed out, if you look at the globe from a different projection, the North Pacific and the North Atlantic connect at the top. Isolationists in America find that they may want to pull up the drawbridge and turn back the clock, but unfortunately the rest of the world does come calling and they will find that events catch up with them. We have to recognise that as a political trend. You are quite right: President Trump is riding a political trend in America. He is not the creator of it, although he is clearly an amplifier and accelerator of it. It cannot last because, for the superpower in particular, events will catch up with them.
As I said earlier in answer to the exchange with Lord Jackson, the best way for us all—including America’s Pacific allies, who felt this most acutely during the first Trump term when he made very similar threats to withdraw support from them as well, notwithstanding the focus on China—to keep America engaged is to show them that we are willing to share the burden ourselves.
Just briefly on the second point—Lord Peach may want to say more about it—the key point about the coalition of the willing is that you do not have to go at the pace of the slowest. There is flexibility within both the NATO and the EU structures for this. If we insisted that we could only pursue any operation if every single member state were engaged, then we would not get much done. They have to accept it, but they do not necessarily have to be directly involved in it. As I was suggesting, that might even be the case with the United States, as we found with the Libya operation in 2011. It might be that there is a mixed model here whereby we say that we will go forward and take the greatest risk but we still need the Americans involved. We will need the consent of other NATO or European nations to be able to do that, but they do not have to be involved themselves.
Lord Peach: The shared awareness of the threat and therefore the conclusion on risks in the coalition of the willing is a perfectly reasonable phrase for that. We need real quality time spent on understanding the mission, and that sometimes is elusive, but that needs to be done. We need to have an appropriate mandate so you are not constantly referring back every few minutes. Therefore, in those circumstances, coalitions have been entirely successful. It is when either the mandate or the mission are ambiguous or there is not an agreed understanding of the threat—and I have been there personally—that coalitions can be very difficult and burdensome, and then, as they used to say, the mules eat more than they carry.
Q72 Baroness Ludford: I will try to be concise. Lord Sedwill referred to the fact that we do not get adequate bang for our bucks, which is precisely the phrase I used with our Finnish parliamentary colleagues earlier. It is a well-known problem, but we have proliferation of different types of ammunition or whatever because every country wants its national champion. Indeed, I was struck by Sir Keir Starmer and this loan to Ukraine. He naturally applauded the fact that it meant that Thales in Belfast will get a contract creating X thousand jobs. One understands all that. How do we overcome that problem? How will we get a standardisation and a distribution of the tasks so that we are not wasting and duplicating?
Lord Peach: Work share is the brutal answer. We did it with big aerospace programmes, where you negotiate the work share and share that work around the factories. You settle on technologies that you know work and/or are being developed and you know will work. You get a future model and a current model, and that is where these new funding arrangements could be very successful very quickly. I am sure our Finnish friends would recognise that, and they do get a lot of bangs for their Finnish buck because they do focus on ammunition. There is a lesson from Finland.
The Chair: The very last word—briefly, please—goes to Baroness Nicholson.
Q73 Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne: Colleagues, since we have known from 2000 at least that the Russians wish to recreate their former territory as owned by them, and since our colleagues in Brussels have preferred a carte blanche approach—or amuse-gueule—do they have the guts to do anything at all, or will it be always France, Britain and the USA with a sprinkling of Poland in between?
Lord Sedwill: People rise to the occasion and countries rise to the occasion when the threat becomes more acute. We have seen that. We saw that after 9/11. We have seen it in other circumstances as well. The Poles in particular demonstrate, and have throughout their history, plenty of guts. Those nations on the front line are clearly very focused on this. What we must not do is what has happened in the past, when the immediate impetus for collaboration eases because, let us say, there is a deal around Ukraine or there is a ceasefire or whatever, and then the traditions of turf wars or frictions re-emerge. We have to maintain focus and momentum on the agenda that this committee has been discussing today.
Lord Peach: Briefly, and to be brutal since you raised the year 2000, I think that we have to accept the world as it reveals itself, not the world as we wish for. Similar to my previous answer, we need to be very realistic about the threat. I have recently done three and a half years as the UK special envoy to the western Balkans, and there are a lot of issues in the Balkans that have not been resolved. If we take our eye off those right now, as we perhaps did initially with Russia more than 10 years ago, then we may regret that. We do need to be vigilant, regardless of where problems reveal themselves because that is the real world, and then be prepared—coalition of the willing, whatever format we are in—to create a mandate, deliver a mission, and get on with it.
The Chair: Thank you very much. We need staying power, essentially, do we not? In terms of small allies, I think that the ally that lost the largest number of soldiers per capita of population in Afghanistan was Denmark. Small allies can sometimes be tremendously helpful as well.
Thank you very much indeed. That was an excellent hour with a great deal of ground covered. Thank you for your time. I will briefly suspend the session and then we will ask our next two witnesses to take the floor.
