NATO Summit 2018

Lord King of Bridgwater Excerpts

Tuesday 26th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord King of Bridgwater (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hannay. I want particularly to pick up the last point that he made so that I can get rid of it. I hope that one thing we will do at this summit is make it clear that whatever is going on with Brexit makes absolutely no difference to our commitment to European defence and our involvement in it.

This House has a tradition of fairly regular debates on defence, but today’s has brought out a real sense of urgency and concern on a scale that we have not seen for some time. It has been marked by some notable contributions by people alive to the serious situation that we face.

There is no doubt that this is a much more dangerous world. As many noble Lords know, I had the privilege of being the Secretary of State for Defence when the Cold War ended. I see that the Secretary-General of the United Nations is now on record as saying that the Cold War is back with a vengeance.

I saw the humiliation of the Soviet Union—Russia was obviously at its heart at that time—and we all know that President Putin’s popularity is very much due to the fact that he is making Russia count again, and making people pay attention to Russia again, as they used to. That may explain the activities he has been involved in, to the extent that he played any part in undermining the European Union, with any encouragement of Brexit, and any involvement he may have had in the United States, making sure that Mrs Clinton was not elected. Russia obviously had some knowledge of President Trump, if not any involvement, and thought he might be a rather useful asset. We know that, having tackled those two undertakings, the next on the target sheet would appear to be NATO.

I am not quite clear—I should know this—whether President Trump will meet President Putin before or after the NATO summit. I am not sure whether that has yet been determined. When he comes to the NATO summit we know with certainty what one item on his agenda will be: he will, without question, demand a substantial contribution from Germany. Whether the United States contributes 3.75% or 4%, Germany contributes 1% of its GDP. I note that the agreement reached at the previous NATO summit in Canada was that countries would come up to 2% and they all agreed to do it by 2024. That does not strike me as the sense of urgency that President Trump might expect and seek to achieve. Against that whole background, when we look at his policy of “America first”, it is very worrying to see how that fits in with a sense of collaboration and involvement in international institutions. Some of us are worried about what his attitude may be to NAFTA, some of us are worried about the WTO and, obviously, some are now worried about NATO.

I was very interested in the remarks of those committee members who have been to Washington. One question of interest is whether they found it possible to meet anybody. My understanding is that the State Department is half empty at the moment and extremely short of people who might provide some back-up for more well thought-through and reliable activities. It is against that background that we have to look at our own situation. I make no secret of the fact that I worry about our defence expenditure and the resources we have available. I am not a great admirer of the GDP ratio analogy, which I think has been used as an excuse, to see how you can fiddle the GDP arrangement rather than asking what we really need for defence. I am also very worried about what the unbalanced nature of our expenditure, which has followed the carriers—the establishment of the carriers and then the extremely expensive aircraft that will fly from them—and the damage that has done to other areas of our defence expenditure.

In the context of the need for more expenditure, I certainly think that one area where Germany will have to contribute significantly is in its infrastructure. As we have withdrawn from Germany—and forces have been withdrawn, as we know—there is a need for transformation and rapid reinforcement. The arrangement, as I understand it, is to have a certain limited front line but then 1 million follow-on troops. We need to address the question of resources and the arrangement for how that could be done with any speed, were there to be a serious emergency situation. We also have to look at the continuing situation, which is emerging rather more clearly now, following the Brexit developments, of our involvement with NATO and NATO’s relationship with EU defence activities and expenditure. That will be another important area.

I want to pick up a point made by the noble Lords, Lord Wallace and Lord Hannay. This is a very serious and dangerous situation, and at the moment we are rather blocked from developing any dialogue. However, we need to see whether we can get a serious dialogue going because this is in no interest of Russia’s. It may be good to re-establish its position in the world but, in the end, it does not want conflict and its people certainly do not. One of the nicer lessons that might come out of the World Cup is that we are all in this together, so there might be more friendship and amity.

It struck me that I had slight sympathy for President Putin and the Russian approach given two of the paragraphs in the speech of Gavin Williamson, the Secretary of State for Defence, on NATO a week ago. The first referred to the extremely active and rather menacing nature of Russian warships, when he said that in 2010, we had one Russian warship approaching our territorial waters but we had 33 last year. He further drew attention to the fact that United Kingdom aircraft were scrambled 38 times last year to shadow Russian military aircraft approaching our airspace. Interestingly enough, the next paragraph went on to the splendid activities of our troops. He paid tribute to the fact that we now have troops in Estonia and Poland, which is getting close to the Russian borders. In respect of Estonia, they are certainly pretty close to St Petersburg, where we have never had troops before. He paid particular tribute to our splendid aircraft and ground troops, who are in Romania to patrol the Black Sea region. I plead guilty to not realising, until I read that, that we were patrolling the Black Sea region. This gives some understanding of why the Russians may feel that they are now slightly encircled, and why they might want to reassert themselves.

In my own experience, I was the first Defence Secretary in NATO to visit the Soviet Union. I made an official visit there and Marshal Yazov, an ex-sergeant from Stalingrad, was a very charming man. He was my host and we had a very successful and worthwhile visit. Not long after, President Yeltsin came through London on his way to visit Washington and I had the pleasure of entertaining Marshal Shaposhnikov, who I think was then the head of the military structure for the CIS—the follow-on state that was the successor when the Soviet Union collapsed. Perhaps I am a bit biased in believing that you can have sensible discussions with the Russians and that many of their interests and challenges are real. Some have been referred to, not least the threat of Islamic terrorism; they obviously have their worries about others as well.

Notwithstanding the events in Crimea, which of course started our blockade, and then events in Ukraine and, of course, Salisbury, which make things very difficult, we really need to see whether we cannot get a more sensible dialogue going. That would be in the interests of the world at this present dangerous and uncertain time. It would be in all our interests, in all the countries of the world, to get dialogue allowing a better prospect than what has been described elsewhere as the downward spiral of international relations at present.