NATO Summit 2018

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Government for initiating this debate and to the Minister for stepping forward and addressing the key issues of foreign and defence and security policy with such clarity. I thank her very much for that. At the NATO summit in a few days’ time some vital issues will surface, both for NATO as a whole and for Britain. Your Lordships have been presented with a short report from the International Relations Committee on some of these issues. I am very grateful to my colleagues on the committee and to our excellent clerks and advisers for assisting with our contribution.

First, there is the fundamental issue of American engagement and whether it has changed in any way. Secondly, there is the key issue of burden sharing, as the Minister has reminded us, as well as the nature of the burdens in the new threat environment. These are the sorts of questions of new types of warfare that General Carleton-Smith, the new head of the Army, raised the other day. Thirdly, there is the interesting matter of our own British contribution to NATO as a key player, as the Minister reminded us. Can we still be a top-level military power? Does Brexit affect our role in NATO? The noble Lord, Lord West, had a go at these things before the debate. I am sorry that he has not been able to stay with us and pursue those matters. Fourthly, there are issues of NATO management. I know that my noble friend Lord Jopling will raise these in our debate. We covered other matters in our report, including the very important consideration of the direction of Turkey in the new milieu. Which way will Turkey turn now, with President Erdoğan re-elected? It sometimes seems that it wants to play both sides at once, but this is a vital issue for the future of NATO, of which Turkey has been a key member.

The first issue—the Trump factor—is critical. Will President Trump disrupt the NATO meeting as he did the G7 meeting in Quebec the other day? Disturbingly, when members of the Lords International Relations Committee visited Washington a week ago we found almost no one, even at the higher levels of the Administration, prepared to predict what Donald Trump would say or do when he arrives. Views were deeply divided, not just on this but on a whole range of policy issues, from the Iran nuclear deal and the President’s scattershot trade war, which is aimed at China but hitting all his allies, to whether it was a smart idea to insult Prime Minister Trudeau and rubbish the G7 communiqué, or to withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Paris climate accord and much else. Washington is truly an utterly divided city.

On the second issue—burden sharing and the 2%—President Trump has of course spoken out about that loudly. Here in London, as the Minister confirmed, we tend to agree with him, being good two-percenters. I hope that the Secretary-General, Mr Jens Stoltenberg, is right when he says that European countries are now reversing their defence spending cuts. All one can say is that it is about time.

Of course, there are much deeper issues behind the target figure, quite aside from what it is meant to be composed of. Security and defence—the central task of keeping our citizens safe on the streets and in their homes—nowadays goes far deeper than troop numbers, tanks and missiles or other military equipment. It is not just that we are up against a newly aggressive Russia that uses new—or, some would say, very old—forms of hybrid and undercover maskirovka warfare, as well as disruptive cyberweapons. That is not the limit of the new challenge. Nowadays, in the digital age, the battle is no longer necessarily won at all on the battlefield. Intelligence; very advanced weapons research; internal police and security operations, open and undercover, against terrorism, homegrown and imported; our own Foreign and Commonwealth Office-based overseas conflict resolution work, and even our large aid programme; our border policing at airports and ports—all these form part of the modern security and defence package. This is the new military paradox: countries that are clever enough to focus on smart, subtle and co-ordinated use of softer means of persuasion, influence and internal security, whether to maintain trade access, help build stability, uphold human rights or stamp out vicious violence and terrorism, might be more successful in their aim of protecting their interests than the purely massive military spenders.

Then there is the issue of cyber and electronic warfare. What kind of cyberattack constitutes an Article 5 “attack on one is an attack on all”? Hacking can be just a nuisance, but massive disruption of vital utilities can cost lives–a lot of lives. Where is the response threshold, and how can responsibility be attributed for an attack in the first place? This is not at all easy to determine, and is getting more difficult all the time.

The third issue for us is our own UK contribution. We are the second biggest in NATO, as we have been reminded. The media are running these stories about our tier 1 role and whether we can still field a world-class force, but I believe—as one had the opportunity to say a moment ago—that the Prime Minister is entirely right to ask what this really takes nowadays, and whether an ultra-modern Army, Navy and Air Force is just a question of new, and ever newer and ever more costly, weaponry, or whether it requires a broader approach.

I hope that we now have a defence strategic equipment planning team at the Ministry of Defence that takes a rather new approach itself. If we have the same old team as the one that gave us the two budget-draining carrier behemoths without aircraft I would, frankly, be a bit hesitant about giving it a few more millions.

Effective protection of our nation may well require a far wider commitment of unconventional kinds and a far bigger national resource commitment than just the bare figure of 2%. Perhaps we should be thinking of total security budgets which add up to 3%, which is where we were 10 years ago, or 4% or even 5%. There is also the issue of whether Brexit impacts upon our security or could do so. Could we lose out on vital intelligence co-operation with neighbours after Brexit, or was Sir Richard Dearlove right when he said that the Brussels-based security agencies are “of little consequence”? And does our pledge to maintain a security partnership with the EU of “unprecedented depth and breadth”, as the Prime Minister has set out, in any way get in the way of our NATO role, or can it indeed be, as the Minister has suggested, entirely complementary?

A still deeper question is whether NATO, which has been our bedrock of defence for 70 years, adequately serves all our national security needs when the threat now is clearly global, not just regional. NATO, of course, operates out of the European theatre—in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example—but it is very good that the UK is also a strong part of the south-east Asia Five Power Defence Agreement with Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US, the so-called Five Eyes agreement. I am also glad that we are getting into much closer defence co-operation with Japan, and have signed a new declaration to that effect. It was signed by the Prime Minister when she visited Japan the other day. Closer defence and security co-operation with India is also a priority—that is, if our good relations with India and our excellent work during UK-India Week are not undermined or wrecked by the Home Office.

Finally, there is China, the new world power with its increasing outward policy of involvement right across central Asia with the belt and road initiative, up into the Arctic, in the South Seas, and in every continent on a growing and intrusive scale. Our ally Australia is increasingly concerned about Chinese penetration into every walk of life—business, property, universities—as well as heavy project investment in Pacific islands such as Vanuatu and the Solomons. On a brief visit to Beijing in the Whitsun Recess, I found the Chinese security experts putting a major emphasis on what they call “non-traditional security issues” and talking about,

“a new period of interaction between the great powers in facing common threats”—

although I am not quite sure how those words fitted in with their dotting the South China Sea with artificial islands loaded with missiles and combat aircraft. When I put that question to them, they became rather vague. This may take us well beyond NATO, I know, but that is where we have to be alert and focus if we want to stay safe and protect our nation and our people.

Victories are secured nowadays not just by force deployment but by winning the narrative, by using so-called soft as well as hard-power methods to safeguard and gain grass-roots support for our values and to reject and defeat nihilism and anarchy. For deploying Britain’s undeniably immense, but still underused, soft-power assets, my own view is that the Commonwealth network, with its ready-made trust system, is the ideal forum and platform. Even though it has some backsliders, it could bring us great benefits.

To see things through this lens demands a changed mindset among policymakers and those in all branches of government, civil and military, who are charged with safeguarding Britain’s security, its global business, its brand and its reputation. I hope that this will be fully understood by those involved in the new review of national security capabilities, which was being led until today by the excellent Sir Mark Sedwill and will now be taken over by John Manzoni.

I am told that deep down in the various ministries, in the MoD, in DfID, in the FCO, in the Cabinet Office and in the other departments of state, younger officials are striving to bring this entirely new pattern together, to break out of the old siloes and to combine military skills, development skills, diplomatic skills, intelligence and technological innovation as never before in our governmental system. If so, it is time that this new tapestry of co-operation was brought out into the daylight and shared with our NATO allies as well. That is what we should do at this forthcoming summit.