United Kingdom: Global Position

Lord Kerr of Kinlochard Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Kerr of Kinlochard (CB)]

I welcome the noble Lord, Lord Pitkeathley, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Howell, and I follow in every sense what the noble Lords, Lord Howard and Lord Waldegrave, have just said.

In this crisis we need to hope for the best, prepare for the worst and learn from the past. I hope that Putin buys the ceasefire compromise and comes to accept Ukraine as the legitimate sovereign state it is, but we need to prepare for a future in which his appetite for territorial gain has only been whetted. The analogy, I think, is Munich in 1938: Hitler settled for one-third and nine months later came back for the other two-thirds.

We need to contemplate a future in which America, perhaps in the hope of pulling apart the Beijing-Moscow relationship, finds itself closer to the autocrat in the Kremlin than to the democrats in western Europe. At Munich last month, Vance told us that the real threat to Europe was not Russia but the enemy within—our corrosive liberalism. Musk says that America should quit NATO and America has left planning for some NATO exercises. So far, Trump has said only that America will not defend NATO’s free riders, and for America to follow Musk’s advice would be remarkably quixotic. America is right to resent the free riders, but it is America that drives the bus.

The NATO supreme commanders have always been serving US officers reporting to their commander-in-chief, and Congress accepted the Washington treaty only when that was spelled out to it. The alliance has been, from the start, a very effective means of projecting US power—too effective for de Gaulle’s taste. The American military and the American arms industry would be horrified if Musk got his way, and we should work to see that he does not. We should work to strengthen Europe’s contribution to the alliance, as Peter Carrington and Helmut Schmidt did with their Eurogroup and European defence improvement programme when Congress first got stroppy about the free-rider problem. But we also need to prepare for the worst, as the noble Lords, Lord Howard and Lord Waldegrave, have been saying.

European security is our security and we need a new structure that we should be defining now—but not in a way which might precipitate the very eventuality that concerns us, so not too much of the performative strategic autonomy talk that we hear from Paris. The best analogy may be 1948 and Ernest Bevin’s Western Union treaty. What would Bevin do now? I will make three guesses. First, obviously, we rearm. Obviously, 2.5% of GDP will not be nearly enough; in the 1970s, we were at 5.5%. Secondly, we demonstrate commitment. In the 1970s, we were still honouring Bevin’s WU commitment to keep 55,000 troops forward-based in continental Europe. The Baltic states must feel now rather as the West Germans did then—and they were very glad to have our forces on the ground. Thirdly, we need to strike a security deal with the EU in May. With the continuing cold wind from the east and new blustery winds from the west, we Europeans need to huddle together.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Leong) (Lab)]

May I remind noble Lords that this is a timed debate and we have to finish it by 3.19 pm? I am gently reminding noble Lords that the advisory speaking time it is four minutes.