Ukraine (International Relations and Defence Committee Report)

Lord Skidelsky Excerpts

Thursday 6th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

My Lords, I will not speak directly to the proposals of the report to improve our military capabilities but will consider the framework in which they are set.

The report’s underlying assumption is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made Europe a much more dangerous place, against which we have to rearm ourselves if we are not to suffer the fate of Ukraine somewhere down the line. The report was published before Trump’s victory in the US election and therefore before the possible defection of the United States, which has been the subject of a great deal of comment this afternoon but I do not think touches the main point that the report wants to make. I reject the report’s line of argument. I am the first person to do so in this debate and have done so fairly consistently over the past two or three years. Therefore, I reject the conclusions which follow from it. I will try to explain why.

In 1989, an American political scientist called Francis Fukuyama published an iconic article in the journal The National Interest called “The End of History?”, and the subsequent two decades have sometimes been called “the Fukuyama moment”. Basically, he argued that the fall of the Soviet Union had brought about the end of history, because the causes of war between the great powers had been removed. There was a lot of initial confirmation of that, such as Gorbachev’s dream of joining the common European home. Out of that optimism came the idea of an exciting peace dividend. Of course, there would be mopping-up operations, especially in those parts of the world lagging in their appreciation of western values, but these would be nothing like the mass industrial warfare that we had experienced in the two world wars and which threatened throughout the Cold War.

The Fukuyama view of history was largely myopic. It presupposed that the world would rapidly become democratic and that science and technology would simply promote international economic co-operation. Neither of these expectations was realised. But out of the disappointed hopes of those two decades it was easy to construct a completely opposite future marked by the clash of civilisations, between the autocratic and the democratic powers, and fierce competition between the major nations of the world for control of artificial intelligence technology.

In a way, far from wanting to join Europe, Russia was depicted as wanting to attack it and even to conquer it if given the chance. In this perspective, the rhetoric of the Cold War was simply repurposed to the perceived dangers of the new situation. That has remained the conventional view; John Healey, the Defence Secretary, has said that Russia is very dangerous and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, has said in this debate that we face a dramatically increased security risk.

It is interesting that all the witnesses who gave oral evidence to the committee came from the defence sector. Therefore, it is not surprising that the report strongly advocated a new or beefed-up defence industrial society and economy. What is wrong with all that? There is confusion running through the report between the nature of modern warfare, of which Ukraine is an example, and the nature of Russia’s intentions to Europe, as revealed by its invasion of Ukraine. Dr Peter Roberts of Exeter University rightly warned the committee of our inability to understand intent, which is a major flaw in our thinking, and that is true of the report. Yes, the Ukrainian war reveals the threatening nature of modern warfare, but not the kind of threats we face from Russia in Europe.

The accepted view is that this invasion reveals the expansionist nature of the Putin regime. There are, however, many knowledgeable and respected analysts in Europe, the United States and the global South who deny that premise and argue with Jack Matlock, a former US ambassador to Russia, that Putin was provoked into invading Ukraine because NATO was trying to draw Ukraine into a hostile alliance and, had it not been so engaged, there would not have been an invasion.

Let me sum up. I am not against the rearmament of Europe. We live in a dangerous world, of course, but military spending is not an end in itself; it is a means to security. There is no special virtue in spending X rather than Y per cent of GDP on defence. The threats to security have to be perceived and analysed accurately—far more accurately than this report does to justify the volume and nature of the proposals that it is making.

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

My Lords, your Lordships can always tell when they are getting to the end of a debate, because the noble Lords, Lord Skidelsky and Lord Balfe, will be speaking. Like the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, I disagree with much of the report, but I thank the noble Lord, Lord De Mauley, and his colleagues for giving it to us, because this is exactly the time to discuss how we are going to handle the new situation.

Fifty-five years ago, Ted Heath, our then Prime Minister, outlined quite clearly why we should move away from the United States and start to look at the interests of Europe when we are defending Europe. In that, he was surprisingly supported by Enoch Powell. They both fell back on the doctrine that states do not do favours for other states. They have foreign policies to maximise their impact. That was always confirmed to me when I was in the European Parliament. For some years, I was on an outfit called the Transatlantic Policy Network and, through that, got to know the late Senator John McCain quite well. He was quite clear with me that there is no special relationship. He once said, probably very accurately, “There is only a special relationship in that we rely on you to keep the sergeants’ mess in control while we look after the officers”. He was right.

To an extent, I welcome President Trump and his disruption because it is long overdue. The invasion of Ukraine was clearly illegal, but it was not unprovoked. There were years of provocation preceding it, which ended by chasing Viktor Yanukovych out of office. From then on, there was little hope that Ukraine would settle down as a NATO ally in the West because Putin, who is in charge of his country and has to do his best for it, is of the view that the borders need redrawing. I have been in Crimea and all over the Donbass region. It is Russian. Let us face that: it is not Ukrainian; it is Russian and that is why there is little objection to a Russian presence there. Your Lordships are not meant to like these facts, but they are the truth.

What we now have to do, in my view, is adjust our policies in Europe so that we can break Russia away from China. We seem to be settling back and saying, “Oh yeah, Russia and China are going to get together”. China is far more of a threat to western values, because it does not rely on a western philosophy in the way that it looks at the world and, if it is allied to Russia, that means it is on the borders of Europe—it will have bases in the Arctic before long. My view is that we need to come to terms with Trump.

One challenge for the Ministry of Defence is that we need to make sure that our nuclear deterrent will actually work. I was assured by John McCain that the Americans held the key to certain aspects of launching the missiles that made them completely under American control. Could we launch an independent missile? France can, and that is why France will be the leader of the new European security dimension.

The people we need to look to are Merz in Germany—the new chancellor—and Giorgia Meloni, who has a very good vision of how Europe should turn out, and we must hope that Macron can be succeeded by someone who has European interests at heart and is not a nationalist. I see that as being our big challenge: we have to get back into Europe as a country and get as close to the Europeans as we possibly can. We will not be able to lead the European defence initiative, for the bad reason that we decided to leave the European Union. We will not get in there, because France will claim the initiative—and, frankly, if I were France, I would claim the initiative—but we do need to get more closely aligned.

My final point is that we have had some mention of the Scandinavian version of security. That is based on a form of national service and on defending the home space. We need to indulge in that. There is no market in Britain for body bags, and there is no market in Britain for foreign adventure beyond that necessary to defend our own country and our close allies in Europe.

[Lord Skidelsky (CB)]

Hear, hear!

[Lord Balfe (Con)]

See, I said I would get no cheer.