First up from the Financial Times, November 24:
Big ReadCan Europe defend itself without America?
The continent will have to spend more as Trump refocuses policy elsewhere. But replacing US military heft will not be easy
John Paul Rathbone, Henry Foy and Ben Hall
Imagine it is 2030. Russia and China are holding their first major military exercises in the Arctic. Called Vostok 2030, the joint drill involves thousands of troops, tanks, aircraft, and most of the Russian and Chinese northern fleets. It is just the latest manifestation of Moscow and Beijing’s “historic partnership”.
Over the past five years, Russia and China have steadily increased their military and economic presence in the Arctic. The 2025 “ceasefire” in the Russo-Ukraine war allowed Moscow to reconstitute its military. Beijing has also come to view Nato as a paper tiger after US President Donald Trump accelerated the shift in Washington’s focus away from Europe and towards China.
Suddenly, Russia announces it has extended its control over the Arctic continental shelf. China says it recognises the claim. Russia, in turn, declares that China’s “historic claim” to the South China Sea is legitimate too. Soon after, Sino-Russian forces invade Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, a strategic group of islands that controls access to the high north. Nato forces mobilise — but lack the US military’s heft and logistical power to take it back.
Europe’s Nato allies now face a terrible strategic dilemma: cede control of Svalbard or invoke the full force of their mutual defence treaty and launch a retaliatory nuclear strike. In London and Paris, the British prime minister and French president, who control Europe’s two separate nuclear arsenals, face an appalling decision.
This doomsday vision is not a prophecy. But nor is it wholly implausible either. Drawn from The Retreat From Strategy, a new book by General Lord David Richards, former head of Britain’s armed forces, and Julian Lindley-French, a professor at the Netherlands Defence Academy, the scenario lays bare the security threats facing Europe, and how they could unfold if unaddressed.
For all the losses it has so far suffered in Ukraine — as many as 700,000 killed or wounded, according to UK military intelligence — General Christopher Cavoli, Nato’s supreme commander, warned last month that the Russian military would emerge from the war “stronger than it is today”....
Folly, fantasy and Britain’s defence crisis
Britain has spent scarce resources in support of the fantasy of “Global Britain”
When asked what he wanted, the veteran American trade union leader Samuel Gompers replied, “More.” The authors of this timely book on Britain’s defence strategy, or lack of one, also want “more … more of everything”. They want more money, for more men, more tanks, more aircraft and more ships. Above all, they want more understanding of what Britain’s strategic aims are and how they can be realised.
Both authors are well qualified to write this book. David Richards is a former Chief of the Defence Staff with a long and distinguished military record. He is well known for his intellectual curiosity; I served (full disclosure) on the strategic advisory panel he set up in 2010. Julian Lindley-French is a well respected professor of defence strategy at the Netherlands Defence Academy.
The book is explicitly written for “the new government” and appears shortly after Labour’s resounding election victory in July. It draws on the authors’ experiences as well as a range of materials, including questionnaires filled in by service personnel and senior politicians such as former prime minister Tony Blair.
Richards and Lindley-French bookend their argument with two scenarios, the first of which sees unprepared UK and allied forces vanquished by a Sino-Russian coalition in the “High North” near the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, in seven years’ time. The second offers an alternative in which a well-resourced British-led NATO task force sees off these two enemies. Unless we change course fast, the authors argue, the former outcome is much more likely than the latter.
The “retreat from strategy” bemoaned by the book is driven by both financial and conceptual factors. UK defence expenditure has steadily fallen in relative terms since the end of the Cold War as the nation cashed in on the “peace dividend”. Aggravating the situation is the fact that the hugely expensive nuclear deterrent, once budgeted for separately, is now paid for out of the general defence pot. In consequence, the army is now the smallest it has been since the end of the Napoleonic Wars, whilst the navy has shrunk beyond recognition, as has the RAF.
To make matters worse, the authors argue, government no longer thinks strategically, and it hasn’t for some time. In their view, the rot set in at the end of the 1990s with the “overreach” of Blair’s demand that Britain should act as a “force for good” in the world. This led to a conflation of “interests and values”, and ultimately — via the interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq — to the disastrous scramble from Kabul airport in August 2021....
....MUCH MORE
