NATO Summit 2018

Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as listed in the register.

Seventy years ago next month, in the stifling heat of a Washington summer, a group of seven western nations set about crafting a treaty which, nine months later, in April 1949, created what is possibly the most successful politico-military alliance in history, NATO, with 12 original members.

The compelling motive power was provided by a shared perception of an existing conventional threat from the Soviet Union and the certainty that, before long, Stalin would create an atomic capability, which he duly did—18 months sooner than western intelligence had anticipated—in August 1949.

As Professor Joe Nye of Harvard University once put it, the Cold War was the first great power confrontation ever in which everyone knew what the final outcome would be if it went all the way—atomic and, from the mid-1950s, thermonuclear destruction, on an unimaginable scale.

The Russians actually knew of the shaping of the Atlantic agreement from the outset. When the ambassadors of the United Kingdom and Canada drove in great secrecy into the underground car park of the State Department in March 1948 to begin exploratory talks, the British team included Donald Maclean, who worked during the day in the embassy for King George VI and moonlighted for Stalin by night. No doubt the early intelligence provided by Maclean fed Russia’s perpetual fear of encirclement, but it probably exerted something of a deterrent effect as well.

I hope that, during what might be the more fractious moments of the coming NATO summit in Brussels, respectful thought could be given to the founding fathers, who were, in Dean Acheson’s words, “present at the creation”. Thank heavens that it was Harry Truman in the Oval Office and Clem Attlee in No. 10, both veterans of the Great War and measured, realistic, careful men, as the Berlin crisis and the near-miraculous airlift unfolded from June 1948, when the Russians cut off the land and water links from the western zones of occupied Germany through the corridors across the Russian zone to Berlin. It is hard to imagine Truman, Attlee or Ernest Bevin resorting to twitter diplomacy, even if the technology had been available to them. I imagine that the tweets of Clem Attlee would have been the slimmest of slim volumes. As his one-time economic assistant at No. 10, Douglas Jay, put it, Clem Attlee,

“would never use one syllable where none would do”.

The most remarkable strand of DNA in NATO from April 1949 to this very day is, as all noble Lords appreciate, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. It is the greatest amount of sovereignty that we have ever given away to anybody—far more than we have ever given to the EU. However, as another noble Lord said, this is not a day for Brexit mania, so I shall say no more about that. Let us savour the crucial words of Article 5, so well known but always worth underscoring, that an,

“attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”,

and that assistance will be given to those attacked,

“individually and in concert … including the use of armed force”.

We forget now that NATO was originally established to last for just 10 years, until 1959. In fact it has endured to this day, now with 28 members, and, crucially, with Article 5 intact, although it is surrounded by an element of worry, as noble Lords have alluded to this afternoon.

It is useful to contrast and compare some of the threats in the context of which Article 5 currently operates—the second Cold War through which we are living and which started with the annexation of Crimea in 2014—with the perils of the first Cold War. Certain elements of the first Cold War never went away. The Russian intelligence attack on the West was sustained, and even enhanced, by new technical means, cyber especially, while their belief in human intelligence remained as strong as it ever was. Russian nuclear weapons capacity remained the backbone of the state and the guarantor, as they saw it, of their national survival. The modernisation of their triad of nuclear forces continues apace. The deep cold war abated in the early 1990s north of the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap, although it never went away. There has been a tenfold surge of Russian naval activity since 2010, leading NATO to designate once more the north Atlantic as an operational area and the US Administration to revive the Second Fleet in north Atlantic waters. The latest Russian submarines, both attack and ballistic, have reduced very substantially the technical edge once possessed by the US Navy and the Royal Navy.

Naturally, there are significant differences in the nature of today’s threats compared to the great, 40-plus-year East-West confrontation of the Soviet era. For example, President Putin’s motive power is ideology-light and nationalism-heavy, compared to his communist predecessors. As other noble Lords have noted, it is fuelled by his desire to ease the hurt of the sudden and dramatic loss of Russian superpowerdom in 1989-91 and a desire to restore a measure of equality with the United States in the floating exchange rate of today’s great power calculations.

Those tasked by NATO and their own Governments to run what are now called crisis management exercises—some noble Lords who have worked in Whitehall may remember them as the Wintexes, biennial exercises which NATO conducted with the British always alongside it—are faced by a different set of possible contingencies. The old Wintexes gamed their way through a period of worsening international tension, through a precautionary stage and right on to nuclear release: R-hour. The now declassified Wintex files in the National Archives make for the most extraordinarily chilling reading.

Today, the planners are faced more with what one of them has called a “pop-up” cold war which is less predictable and harder to read and which can take a multiplicity of forms, many of which are deniable by the instigators. Hybridity is the threat of our times in a way that was not imaginable even in 1989-91. Unintended escalations that run out of control are the shared fears of Cold War I and Cold War II. Those of us who recall the Cuban missile crisis will never forget what it felt like. We now know that the world was even closer to the brink than we appreciated in October 1962. Today’s “spikes of escalation”, as a Whitehall friend describes them, are mercifully unlikely to be as menacing and perilous as Cuba, but this Cold War II will probably be a long haul, requiring organising minds in the West of the quality of the great American diplomat, George Kennan, who developed the “containment” model for coping with Soviet power in 1946-47. We need, as well, philosophers of the open society of the quality of the incomparable Sir Karl Popper to remind us of the crucial ingredients of open societies which enable them in the end to prevail against closed or authoritarian ones.

Next month, today’s NATO leaders must rise to the level of events as their forebears did in 1948-1949. It is a time for cool heads, careful assessments and a sustained investment in our collective needs of defence. The founders of the late 1940s did successive generations proud with their insights and their foresight. I hope, admittedly against all expectations, that the same will come to be said of the men and women who gathered in Brussels in July 2018.