Written evidence submitted by Dr David Blagden and Professor Patrick Porter

1.                  Since 1941, close alliance with the United States has been the bedrock of UK security. Having worried about the rise of US global power projection capabilities prior to World War II, Britain’s concern after 1945 was how to keep Washington committed to Europe’s defence. NATO, as a deeply integrated alliance directed at a common external threat, thereby served – to paraphrase Hastings Ismay – to keep the Germans down, the Russians out, and crucially, the Americans in (i.e. committed to serving as Europe’s decisive ‘balancer’).

2.                  Much of post-1945 UK foreign and defence policy can be explained by this desire to bind the United States into European defence. There have been bitter divergences, to be sure – over Suez, Vietnam, Grenada, the Falklands, Iraq, and most recently Syria, to name a few – but London has generally concluded over this period that ‘bandwagoning’ with US policy makes Britain an especially valuable ally, thereby committing Washington to underwriting UK security.

3.                  This relationship is now under serious strain, however. During the Cold War, the US commitment to NATO was robust because, if the Soviet Union had ever come to dominate Western Europe’s centres of industrial production, the balance of power would have shifted decisively against the United States. Today, by contrast, America’s principal peer competitor – a rival great power, the economy of which is already bigger vis-à-vis its US counterpart than the USSR’s ever was – lies not in Europe, but in Asia. Washington is therefore becoming increasingly unwilling – and may eventually become unable – to shoulder Western Europe’s defence burden, as it focuses on containing China. This leaves European NATO in the counter-intuitive situation whereby dealing with an openly hostile Moscow may be more challenging in the future than it was during the Cold War, despite contemporary Russia never looking likely to again reach Soviet levels of US-rivalling power potential.[1]

4.                  The US administration of President Donald Trump, with his willingness to question the relevance of NATO to American security needs and suggestions of abandoning the alliance if its European members do not spend more on defence, thus reflects a set of pre-existing US strategic concerns. There are early signs that senior ministers and the foreign policy establishment are constraining the administration on the question of the European commitment, and that the US ultimately will choose to remain a European power. That said, the very fact that Trump was willing to question the commitment, his seeming contempt for expertise, and lack of regard for the strategic ramifications of ill-thought-out utterances – particularly regarding NATO’s deterrent assurances – makes this a doubly challenging time for the British government to be attempting to sustain and deepen its US alliance.

5.                  The evolution of US geopolitical priorities leaves the UK in a paradoxical and potentially dangerous position. On the one hand, Britain is Western Europe’s most capable military power, with an economic, technological, and operational base that is more than a match for any conceivable regional adversary. Yet on the other hand, British strategy has rested for so long on being a useful component of American strategy and deriving the security goods that come from the US alliance that an array of material and intellectual dependencies have developed.[2] Our concern is that these are no longer acknowledged as prudent, reasonable strategic trade-offs, but have instead been internalised by UK security policymakers as immutable ‘common senses’ of the international system that therefore go uncontemplated in contemporary UK risk modelling.[3] Concrete illustrations include the following examples.

• The nuclear deterrent. Britain retains a robust, survivable nuclear arsenal that provides a secure second-strike retaliatory capability against even the most capable possible adversaries. Since the 1958 Mutual Defence Agreement and subsequent 1963 Polaris Sales Agreement, the UK arsenal has also benefitted from extensive US support, allowing Britain to achieve an operationally independent deterrent for a fraction of what France pays for a comparable capability. We do not buy the charge that this operational independence is totally at America’s mercy: if Washington chose to withhold logistical assistance, Britain could likely make-up sufficient gaps in technical support to keep the Trident system looking credibly threatening. But more tellingly, even while operating a substantial SSBN fleet, the UK has slashed the anti-submarine forces necessary to defend those SSBNs (SSNs, MPAs, frigates, etc) since the 1998 SDR, belying a troubling assumption of US-supplied ‘command of the maritime commons’: an ‘independent’ capability, the other requisites of which London has forgotten.
• The Navy and the carriers. Britain is on the cusp of once again operating an independent aircraft carrier fleet, with sufficient hulls (two) to deliver close-to-permanent operational availability. Such vessels deliver both benefits and drawbacks, and resolving this debate is not our focus here. Crucially, however, the Royal Navy’s frigate, destroyer, and SSN fleets that will protect the carriers – and discharge a litany of other naval tasks in places where the carriers are not – have been halved since these carriers were promised (the 1998 SDR). Again, this belies an assumption that they will only be used for power projection against ‘rogue’ states within the confines of an American-led global maritime order, rather than being part of a navy that might one day have to provide sea control and/or regional naval defence for itself. Similarly, in opting for a STOVL configuration, which renders the carriers wholly dependent on the success of the US F-35B aircraft programme, another element of a key UK capability is actually shot-through with implicit assumptions about enduring American support.
• Army size/configuration. The British Army is Europe’s foremost in terms of operational experience, tactical proficiency, and doctrinal development. Yet following fifteen years of total commitment to the US-led ‘War on Terror’, it is disproportionately configured for counterinsurgency and ‘stabilisation’ operations, at the expense of capabilities for deterring/defeating similarly advanced armies. Equally tellingly, the 2015 NSS/SDSR lifted the target for maximum ‘surge’ Army deployment to 50,000 from the 30,000 proposed in NSS/SDSR 2010 – but without any increase in the size of the regular base force (82,000). Again, therefore, a key pillar of UK conventional capability is premised on the embedded assumption of enduring subordination to US-led operations. And worryingly, this leaves Britain in a situation of offering deterrent assurances to eastern NATO members, but with few intermediate stages on the escalatory ladder short of strategic nuclear threats.
• Strength, depth, and resilience. As a more general point, UK forces have been getting ‘shallower’ – in terms of logistical support, basing infrastructure, facilities hardening, munitions/fuel stockpiles, specialist personnel numbers, etc – since the Cold War. The assumption of US-supplied systemic peace has enabled the continuing pursuit of financial efficiency, which privileges ‘just-in-time’ resupply, private contracting, and infrastructural consolidation at the expense of resilience. Were Britain suddenly called upon to take the lead in providing its own national and/or NATO security, this consolidation would likely prove a key node of vulnerability.
• Foreign policy towards other major powers and regions. A slightly different variety of example of Britain’s inability to think beyond the strictures of US-supplied security goods is observable in London’s contradictory foreign policy towards other major powers and regions. Following the government of David Cameron and George Osborne – and continued by that of Theresa May – Britain is pursuing deep economic engagement with China, in the hope that emerging-market investment will revitalise UK infrastructure. Yet at the same time, by increasing UK military presence in the Gulf in a way that enables US forces to rebalance to East Asia (e.g. via the opening of HMS Juffair), Britain is also directly supporting US containment of that same commercial partner. If this level of commitment serves to re-bind the United States into UK/NATO defence, then this may prove to be a prudent policy choice – and Britain has other reasons to seek an enhanced military presence in the Gulf, particularly if US commitment to the region wanes in the face of American oil independence. Nonetheless, this contradiction in UK policy – an attempt at simultaneous bandwagoning with two increasingly hostile direct strategic competitors – is symptomatic of a state that has lost the ability to weigh its own strategic priorities, and instead mistaken the security provided by an ally for a permanent transformation of the world. 

6.                  None of this is to suggest that the US-UK relationship is suddenly set to fracture, notwithstanding the risk of a moment of petulance and/or incompetence by either government. In domains such as intelligence and nuclear technology, the relationship is not one of mere UK dependence, but rather of interdependence – the United States derives tangible capabilities from its British allies. UK forces, with their combination of willingness and competence to deploy in high-intensity combat missions via their own logistical lift capabilities, represent interoperable US burden-sharers unmatched in the rest of NATO. Indeed, to the extent that UK strategy has been premised around binding the United States into European defence by being a useful ally to Washington, it has – thus far – largely succeeded, not least due to the US-alignment of key British capabilities/assumptions. Nonetheless, realism is merited over just how high UK concerns rank among American priorities: dewy-eyed invocations of a “Special Relationship” or an “Anglosphere”, favoured tropes of some British Atlanticists, do little to move Washington foreign policymakers away from a hard-headed rank-ordering of increasingly Asian-centric US national interests.

7.                  Finally, it is important to note that evolution in US-UK-NATO relations is occurring not in a bubble, but rather against a backdrop of change in other aspects of Euro-Atlantic security. Due to its forthcoming withdrawal from the EU – the wider merits or otherwise of which are not our focus here – Britain approaches the Trump administration with a greater-than-usual imbalance of negotiating power, in stark need of a trade deal and other political-economic ties. Washington may decide to treat London gently, as part of a broader set of policy priorities (possibly including leverage against the EU), but again, realism is required about the current state of the power relationship. Further change is also possible in European regional security. Deeper European politico-military federalisation or the complete unravelling of the EU could both be possible consequences of ‘Brexit’ – and either could have positive or negative consequences for NATO, Britain’s most prized priority.[4] Anything that causes the military ‘normalisation’ of Germany – long a bugbear of those who castigate European states for not spending enough on defence – could also have major implications, meanwhile, of either kind. Broader questions exist about the newness (or otherwise) of Russia’s so-called ‘hybrid’ warfare, and NATO’s relative strengths and weaknesses in combating it. In short, this is a time when all of Britain’s embedded assumptions about its sources of security merit careful reappraisal. We would be happy to clarify our points further for you, if required.

Dr David Blagden and Professor Patrick Porter, Strategy and Security Institute, University of Exeter

6 March 2017