By Douglas Carswell
The Telegraph (UK)
The Telegraph (UK)
A car bomb in Qazaz, Syria. (Photo: AP)
A revanchist Russia ships arms to her allies. Iranian revolutionary guards arrive along the eastern Mediterranean seaboard.
The world, it seems, can be a dangerous place.
The escalating conflict in Syria is not merely a reminder of what nasty regimes can do. More ominously, it illustrates what can happen when America – still the world’s great power – sits back.
Tyrants are emboldened. Regional bully boys, hemmed in by the international order, start to push and to probe.
Perhaps it is just Barack Obama. Maybe it is the 44th president who has been sitting back, and his successor will be swifter to respond to local conflagrations. I hope so.
But what if it is not? What if America’s post-Iraq blues, combined with that massive mountain of debt run up by successive White House administrations, make “sitting back” more normal for Washington? Are we ready for a world with less of the Pax Americana?
The week that Tehran starts to move revolutionary guards around the Middle East, Britain contemplates yet more defence cuts.
Our aircraft carriers will be without any aircraft until at least 2018. Our navy has 13 frigates, and six destroyers in service – almost as many vessels as Venice had during the last days of that once-great maritime republic.
Si vis pacem, para bellum, advised the Roman military strategist, Vegetius. If you want peace, prepare for war.
Britain’s problem is not that we lack the resources to defend ourselves. We are the fourth-largest defence spender in the world.
Our trouble is that we are just not very good at converting what financial muscle we do have into military punch. And Whitehall seems to have an over extended idea of where our national interest lies.
Successive governments have deliberately consolidated Britain’s defence industrial supply base, in the belief that it will deliver efficiencies. Yet in any market, when you constrain the supply, the seller sets the terms of trade. So, too, in defence.
For years, defence contractors have been able to run up higher costs in the knowledge that they can simply pass them on to the taxpayer. Even after the latest changes to defence procurement announced last week, contractors will still have guaranteed profit margins.
Despite all that the defence lobbyists tell us, there is nothing patriotic about “sovereignty of supply” if it leaves Britain unable to muster the military kit we need, when we need it.
Too often the defence budget seems to be spent in the interests of a few powerful contractors, rather than in the interests of statecraft.
Before we ask whether Britain should arm Syrian rebels, we need to ask if we are doing everything we should be doing to properly arm ourselves.
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