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Why Clegg Can’t Be Trusted on Defence

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Nick Clegg has been especially vocal about Russia’s actions in the Ukraine as of late. In his spring conference speech he talked about ‘Vladimir Putin’s Cold War aggression in the Ukraine’. He also said earlier in the week that: ‘I think Putin’s reaction is very revealing. It’s as if he’s been in a sort of deep freeze since the cold war and hasn’t moved with the times. He gives every appearance of applying a KGB mentality rooted in the Cold War to new realities in 21st-century Europe’.

Now these are sound comments. But let us not forget that this is the same man who said the following back in 2010:

‘Gordon Brown should be standing shoulder to shoulder with President Obama and his campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Instead, we hear on the day of the summit that Brown has secretly rowed back on his modest commitment to reduce the number of Trident submarines. President Obama is absolutely right. The nuclear threats of the future are proliferation and terrorism, not a Cold War stand-off. Yet Labour and the Tories won’t even consider Trident as part of the defence review. They are stuck in a Cold War time warp. They remain totally wedded to replacing Trident with a like-for-like system, originally designed to wipe out Moscow at the touch of a button. Labour and the Tories may attack each other for taking this country back to the 1980s – but the truth is that neither of them seem to have noticed that the Cold War is over’.

It appears that those of us who were stuck in a ‘Cold War time warp’ were right all along. The Cold War may have been over to Nick Clegg, but to those ruling Russia it was not. If people like me were living in a Cold War time warp, Clegg was living in a completely different universe altogether. Let us not forget that if Clegg had its way, Britain would eventually have a part-time nuclear deterrent. And if we were living under such a scenario, we would now be facing the dilemma as to whether we should be deploying our deterrent, risking further escalation of an already tense situation.

Clegg’s words proves why he is not a serious politician. He speaks in terms of cliches and soundbites, rather than hard analysis. His concerns are always short-term. He is completely incapable of long term, strategic thinking. Until now, he naively believed that most world rulers, including Putin, had the same mindset of liberal westerners, and would behave in the same way a liberal European politician would. Thank God nobody listened to him, and thank goodness there are no Liberal Democrats in the Ministry of Defence now.

But this backtracking is not confined to Clegg. Most of the political class are guilty of this short-term, lazy thinking, including inside the Conservative Party. Within the political and media establishments, there was widespread mocking of people like me when we suggested that the world was unpredictable, and that the UK needed to increase its defence spending and maintain the full range of capabilities. Even many defence experts fell for it. During the SDSR, we were told that the wars of the future would be about counter-insurgency operations and that we need not worry about great power rivalries or maintaining our ‘conventional capabilities’. I was saying something rather different. I suggested that a post-8/8 world order was unfolding, in which its main feature would involve confrontations between democracies and pragmatic autocracies.

The reason why we’re in the mess in the Crimea is that nobody took any notice of analysis like that or prepared themselves for the new post-8/8 order. Instead, the British political class opted to continue its shallow and insular ways and forget about discussing or studying serious issues such as defence policy. The British political elite opted for defence cuts and increasing international aid spending without fully understanding what this money would be spent on. The political elite failed to appreciate that defence cuts would send out dangerous signals about our resolve and whether we take our role on the world seriously. Putin sensed our weakness as well as the weakness of Barack Obama, and acted accordingly. We were caught napping, and people like Clegg haven’t even begun to catch up.

So given Clegg’s realisation that the Russians do not necessarily have our best interests at heart; will he know accept that he got his strategic analysis completely wrong and review his defence policy, and especially his part-time nuclear deterrent policy?



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