Ukraine: UK Policy

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Monday 17th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, I think we should listen quite carefully to some of the points that the noble Lord, Lord Skidelsky, made. I have some agreement with some of them, but I think he is missing one vital dimension that he did not and a lot of people do not mention: that we are living in a digital age, in which the fundamental nature of war has changed and in which the fundamental repository of power and influence and the nature of that influence, throughout the entire planet, have changed. If we had been confined to just two minutes, which I think was the plan at one time, rather than four, I was going to make—and I still will—just two basic points around that proposition.

The first is to plead that we do not overestimate, as we did in the 20th century, the power of the so-called great powers to fix things and to arrange their empires so that the world is fixed to their pleasure, with total disregard for the rest of the world—the smaller countries and so on. That is the language of the 20th century. It is not the language of the 21st century. It completely underestimates the power and influence of a multipolar world and the power and influence of mass hyper-connectivity around it.

My second point is that, just as we should not overestimate the capacity of Russia, one hears President Trump, in some of his more exotic moments, overestimating even the power of America—still a mighty, powerful country but not the automatic leader of the western world, because we no longer deal in automatic leaders; we deal in multi-powers. We do not even deal in a western world, because a great many of the powers that are deeply interested in this belong in the east and south of the planet.

I had a fascinating conversation with a very senior Japanese official last week, and the first thing he said was that if Russia’s unprovoked, or anyway unjustified and atrocious, attack on women and children, killing thousands of civilians—the killing continues, even while we talk of ceasefires—is in any way rewarded, that is the end of the international rule of law. That is the end of safety for nations of the kind that, on the whole, on and off, we have tried to preserve, not always with success, for the last few hundred years.

An equally senior Australian official came to me and said, “Australia is ready to contribute”. This is a world issue, not just a European issue, as Mr Trump seems to think, and some of our leaders here seem to think, although I acknowledge that our present leader and Prime Minister has played the hand very skilfully indeed. This is not just a European issue but an issue that threatens the balance of organisations and power throughout the entire planet.

I can understand the Japanese nervousness. If Xi Jinping gets the wrong signal, which is that having a go—violence of a limited kind—pays off, he will think about the same approach to annexing and suffocating Taiwan. That is the danger. This is a wider world issue. We should not assume that it is just a narrow matter between America and Russia to fix.

I am not a naive, and I do not think Davids will always beat Goliaths. Goliaths are always going to win by size, but the Davids are very powerful. I am told the Ukrainians have 1 million drones in manufacture, processing and deploying. The impact of this on the nature of war, on the nature of bigger and heavier equipment, is enormous. When we realise that the world has changed to that degree, we will have a much clearer vision of which way now to proceed.