NATO

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Browne of Ladyton]

My Lords, I congratulate warmly the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on securing this timely debate on NATO. However, in my experience, almost any day of the past 10 years would have been appropriate for a debate on NATO and the changing world circumstances in which it operates. I do not think that the noble Lord had any need for the caveat at the beginning of his remarks suggesting that perhaps others in this House have more expertise than he does. He has laid before us a groaning table of opportunity for debate and discussion, and has raised the most important issues in relation to NATO in an appealing way.

It is well known that I came to defence and security with very little background in the subject. I still do not consider myself to be an expert. I believe that part of the frustration that many people feel about the direction of travel of our collective security is a consequence of the fact that not enough politicians are brave enough to stand in this complex environment to express their views if they do not believe that they have the background that qualifies them to do so. There has been collectively across Europe an absence of strong political leadership in security and collective defence for too long. I congratulate again the noble Lord on securing this debate because even in this Parliament we spend too little time discussing these important issues.

Before I make my discriminating choices from what the noble Lord has offered, I want to draw the attention of your Lordships’ House to my entry in the Register of Members’ Interests, particularly my membership of the Euro-Atlantic Security Initiative, which has recently been formed by the Carnegie Institution, and my involvement with the recently incorporated European Leadership Network for Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament and Non-proliferation. In addition, I should like to take the opportunity to express how much I am looking forward with keen anticipation to the maiden speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Flight, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup.

The noble Lord, Lord Flight, is a direct contemporary of mine in terms of membership of the other place. We went in together and left at the same time. On many occasions I have listened from the opposite Benches to his forceful arguments and sometimes his ability to handle issues of controversy with great courtesy. I know that he will be a valuable addition to your Lordships’ House. I look forward to his contribution.

For two years, as Secretary of State for Defence, I benefited from the advice, strategic analysis, leadership and patience of the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, as we served together in the particularly demanding environment of operations as we were withdrawing from Iraq and continuing to face the challenges of our engagement in Afghanistan. I do not think that I have ever shared with him the fact that I lived also with a constant reminder of him at home. On the occasions when we appeared together in public or in series in relation to issues, my wife constantly observed that he explained things far better than me. She said that he used a much more analytical fashion, was a much better public speaker than me and that it was time I took some lessons from him. I shall always be indebted to him for that service and I know that he will be a wise and knowledgeable contributor to the work of your Lordships’ House.

I strongly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that our security demands a strategic partnership in NATO, including the United States and Russia. Indeed, I would argue that for the continent we occupy, that strategic partnership needs to stretch beyond that alliance. As well as including Russia, it needs to include others which share this area with us. I agree with him wholeheartedly that that will not be possible unless we follow the advice of Robert Burns and to a large degree see ourselves as others see us. I spend a lot of my time travelling in Europe, particularly to its extremes, trying to understand countries’ views of their security challenges and of the security blanket and comfort zone in which we live. He is right to suggest that we need to understand the way in which other people’s minds work. Recently, I have been doing that intensively in Turkey. It is deeply instructive, even to someone who has done the jobs that I have done.

My most recent experience comes from listening to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speak very wisely at the Munich Security Conference at the weekend. I am not sure that the noble Lord is right in his fear that the United States is turning its back on Europe, but he is right to suggest that the United States, for the very reasons that he articulates for other countries—that is, their geopolitical environment—is in a much more complex part of the world than us. However, for no reason other than the news this morning of the latest activity of pirates in the Indian Ocean, he and others should realise that we all live in the same world and that what is going on at the borders to which he referred, on the western side of the United States, influences us as well. My sense is that this Administration, those who are advising them, the United States high command and those in the analytical and security environment in Washington and across the United States know and understand this better than do we in this country and that they have no intention of turning their back on Europe. Indeed, their engagement with Europe is a function of our willingness to engage with them. My experience of NATO was that we sometimes sat back too much, waiting for the United States to give us the lead and tell us what we should think rather than our telling it what we wanted—to which it would be responsive.

At their April 2009 summit, NATO heads of state and Governments tasked Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the organisation's Secretary-General, to define the alliance's role and mission for the 21st century in a new strategic concept. In Lisbon, in response, he produced such a concept and the alliance approved it.

However, as the Secretary-General and, indeed, your Lordships' House know, agreement on a form of words is not the same as securing NATO's real relevance to the security challenges that we face in the 21st century. To be a success in practice, the new concept needs to address challenges far different from those faced at the time of the alliance's formation, while protecting the founding ideas of collective defence, the transatlantic link and burden-sharing. Whatever frustrations we may have with this alliance, if we did not have it, we would have to invent it. It is crucial to our security, and we should not talk it out existence because of frustrations which we should try collectively to challenge.

The task which Anders Fogh Rasmussen and the summit have set the alliance is far from easy, but it is vital, and nowhere is it more needed than in the area of NATO nuclear policy. For months now—indeed, for about a year—a debate on the future of US theatre nuclear weapons stationed in Europe has been occurring around, but outside, formal NATO review processes. Stationed in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey as part of the US nuclear umbrella which has extended over Europe, these weapons originally had a specific military purpose. With a short, “tactical” range and the majority unable to reach beyond mainland Europe, they were deployed to deter a physical invasion of western Europe by the then numerically superior conventional forces possessed by the Soviet Union at the time of the Cold War. Now, however, the weapons have declined to the point where I cannot find a military commander who says that they have any military utility. Moreover, the future costs associated with replacing the ageing aircraft that would deliver them are unlikely to be met by Europe’s Governments, who are all in some financial difficulty.

More must be done to promote multilateral nuclear disarmament, and this is an opportunity to do that. Others in the alliance are worried that if one or two countries renounce nuclear weapons unilaterally, not only will the principle of nuclear burden-sharing between the US and Europe be compromised, but so too will the transatlantic link and the overall quality of collective defence commitments within NATO. This is an opportunity for NATO to do exactly what the noble Lord suggested: to have a debate among its members on the utility and purpose of nuclear weapons, and to come to a conclusion that will make a significant difference to the collective security not just of Europe but of the world, by contributing to disarmament and reducing the role of nuclear weapons in it.