Is Britain's Military Still Fit For Purpose? (Your Radical Questions with Brendan Simms)

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1:24Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where we put your questions to one of our guests. This is your chance to engage directly with the radical people we have on this podcast and ask them about ideas on the forces shaping the world. I'm joined again by Brendan Sims, Professor of the History of European International Relations at the University of Cambridge and author of the new book, Return of the Great Powers. We covered a lot of ground in our previous conversation where we discussed Brendan's argument that the UK remains a great power, touching on military strength, our economy, soft power and international security services.

2:04But now, Brendan is here to answer the radical questions that you've sent in. Brendan, thank you again for being here. Thank you for having me. Our first question is from Tom Garrett-Bush. He sent us this voice note. I've read some of Brendan's work, which I have found compelling in as much as I do think it's important that we're prepared to discuss Britain's strengths and assets if we're to avoid a long-term spiral of managed decline. however many of the pillars of british greatness if we can use that word that he cited are essentially relics of the past systems and infrastructure that have carried over from past eras of prosperity and investment my feeling is that we're lacking a coherent plan for the future and that britain has become so politically socially religiously ideologically and even generationally splintered that we can't seem to forge ahead in an agreed direction The polar diversity of some of the radical solutions outlined on this podcast could be said to attest to this.

3:08So is the mere word Britain itself enough for us to rally round, enough to provide the political will to succeed in the future that Brendan has alluded to, or do we need some clearer unifying principles to get behind? Relics of the past. What do you make of Tom's contribution there? Well, I would actually see the past as a strength. You know, the reputation and the resilience to a considerable extent are historically derived. The standing in the world comes out of the history. Now, Tom is correct in saying that if you simply rest on those laurels or you depend on what becomes obsolete, then, of course, one's position becomes challenged.

3:50And I think, you know, you see historically that there were times when that happened. most obviously in the late 60s, early 70s, where many of the same criticisms that have been made today were circulating. And yet the country found, admittedly in a disputed way, but did find a new path under Margaret Thatcher, an economic transformation which then powered a revival of British power in the world. So to my mind, it's not difficult to imagine that happening in the future. But for it to happen here, I agree with Tom, there would have to be some fundamental change in terms of the economy, in terms of the generational distribution, some way of rallying the country more plausibly than is the case today.

4:42I also think Tom was alluding to much of our past in which we have not behaved perfectly. How can you convince people that this is different or more democratic, not, for example, simply imperial nostalgia? Because I don't think the UK's role today is simply deriving from the lost empire. I think that England was, before the empire, England was a hugely important factor in European politics. and after the end of empire in its extended form in the 50s and 60s, the UK remained a very important factor. It is still, as I said earlier, the fifth or sixth largest economy and we might dispute the defence spending but certainly one of the biggest defence spenders in the world still and the power of the UK today is real.

5:41It's not something that is just imagined or confected coming out of the history But I see the history as a forcing it rather than the history simply as a substitution of it. And at the end, Tom asked whether almost is being British enough. Is that enough to unite and unify behind? Or do there need to be some principles that are clearer? Well, I think being British is probably a good start. If you have a general view of, you know, that the country should be a country, That's not completely uncontested, as you know, certainly in Scotland or Northern Ireland and even now in Wales. But I think maintaining the union is an important part of maintaining the UK's position in the world.

6:28But of course, Britishness itself is not enough, no. The UK needs to stand for something in the world and needs to do something in the world, defending the alliances, deterring Russia, supporting international law. so the Britishness is sort of part I would say is part of that position to be British historically has been to support those positions in the world and I would argue still is. Thank you Tom for your excellent question. Our next one is from Lisa who has sent us this voice note. Hi Sophia and Brendan. Much of our hard and soft power reputation relies on what we are able to deliver militarily in a time of crisis.

7:12And yet we have no roadmap for increasing defence spending to 3 % by 2030 and a threadbare navy. So how is Britain meant to continue to project strength in the world when our defences are so chronically underfunded and our allies and adversaries know this? Thank you. If you listen to the main episodes that we have in this podcast with Brendan, you'll hear a response from the MOD on the investment that they're making to the points that Lisa just made. How would you answer her? She asked, how is Britain meant to continue to project strength? Well, as you've just said, Lisa's point on the investment is addressed to a certain extent by the MOD statement.

7:56But as I also said, that investment, and here I completely agree with Lisa, is not yet sufficient. I think it will increase in due course. But I think we also need to perhaps look at the competition, which itself is suffering from various challenges. So the competition at the moment in Europe is Russia. And Russia is both a dangerous power, but also a power with limitations. So it's not so much a question of whether the Royal Navy is threadbare. It's obviously suffering from underfunding. The question is, are the competitors within Europe in particular any stronger? And I would say if you look at the Royal Navy, even today, compared to its likely challengers, it still is the strongest European force.

8:43Thank you, Lisa. Our next question is from Christopher Andrews. Successive British governments have emphasised maintenance and growth of public social goods, be that the pension triple lock, the NHS, winter heating payments and myriad other benefits. More and more of the nation's tax take is going to serve this rapidly growing expenditure with the deficit funded by budget deficits, which bring a growing interest bill to be funded by even more debt, never mind even repaying any principal. Financing the BBC, a true soft international power, is in question. The military is behind its manpower targets, etc.

9:23All this from decades of underinvestment, which shows no signs of abating. So how can Britain claim to be a great power in the future when it can barely manage to fund its current domestic needs? How can that change be made? That goes back to a question I asked you in the main episode, which is all of this spending needs to be done. And certainly from the perspective of the average resident of the UK, you do just perceive all of these cuts here, there and everywhere. And now you're saying you've got to increase defence spending. Where's all this money going to come from? I agree with the questioner, or at least his implicit argument, that the social expenditure is just simply too large in relation to the size of the economy, in relation to the demands of defense.

10:11And I think just as was the case under Thatcherism, there will have to be some quite radical rebalancing of the social spending contract around the triple lock, around personal independence payments, whatever you name it. I think that bill is no longer sustainable in a situation where we're so fundamentally threatened from outside. So something is going to have to give and in my opinion it will have to be social spending. I could easily predict there would be a lot of people who would much rather money being spent on something like the NHS and that social expenditure being present. Well, no doubt they would, but they would like even less a world in which the United Kingdom had stepped back and possibly the United States has also stepped back.

11:02And the Russia of Vladimir Putin has advanced because that would force them to spend even more on defence to make up the lost ground. So it seems to me a false choice. Is it an inevitability in being or wanting to become a great power that enormous trade-offs are made? That's what this sounds like. If you cannot have both defence expenditure and social expenditure. Well, in our current situation and in the situation of many other powers, historically, that has been the case. There's been a choice made, famously. It's described as a choice between guns and butter. There will often have to be a trade-off.

11:42This, of course, is the argument made by Trump, who says that, you know, the European welfare states were bought on the back of money spent by the American working class on the American armed forces, which were used to defend Europe. So I think this is a very old argument. Thank you, Chris. Our next question is from Jacob. Hi there, Radical Podcast team. My question for Brendan would be, I think he's right about the fact that we are returning to great power politics and that Britain still remains a great power. But my question would be, in a world in which US and China look like they're going to be superpowers or super hyper mega powers within the next 10 years, how does Britain even maintain relevance?

12:32You know, Britain might be a great power now, but it seems unlikely it's going to be a great power in the next decade. Well, of course, the United States has been a hyperpower for a very long time. It was actually in many ways uncontested as a hegemon in the 1990s and the early 2000s. And yet the United Kingdom's role, even at that time, was quite important. The UK was the most important partner. You could argue with whether this is a good thing or not. but the most important partner in the war against Saddam Hussein, for example, at a time when US power was absolutely uncontested. So I don't think that the increase of US power as such is going to nullify the great powerness of the UK.

13:18It's made me think of the discussion around billionaires and how many people believe that there should be no billionaires, billionaires, that there is no such thing as a good billionaire. Is it also the case that in theory, perhaps, should there be no great powers? If there were no great powers at all in the world, then we would not need to worry about the great powers. The only reason why you need to be concerned about not being a great power is that if you're living in a great power world, and you're not one, or there aren't other great powers that will do your work for you. In some ways, it didn't really matter in the 1990s as much if one opted out of the great power world because there was a kind of an American hegemony which everybody could rub along with.

14:10But in this very different world where you've got the revival of Russian revanchism, you've got the PRC's ambition, you've got at least the possibility of an American retreat, although I think that is exaggerated from Europe and the world, then indeed it is important to be a great power or at least to be close to one. I wonder as well if the hegemony has also shifted permanently or temporarily because you now have companies, I'm thinking of tech companies especially, who are so enormous, they basically are nation states, as we've understood nation states to be historically. So is it even accurate anymore to conceive of great powers as only countries?

14:56Actually, I think the trend is really countervailing to what you suggest. In many ways, the argument you're making, I think, was stronger 10 years ago when, you know, you had the Zuckerberg figures who were being described as tech titans. And you even had, you know, Denmark, for example, sent separate diplomatic representation to Silicon Valley. And people really were talking about the tech leaders as independent states. Well, and Elon Musk has just become a trillionaire. So that's not 10 years old. That's very current. So he's extremely rich. But the point I was about to make is that actually what we've seen more recently is the way in which the tech figures actually rally around the governments.

15:38Look at the way in which they were all courting Donald Trump at the second inauguration. They are subordinate to the government. And the same, by the way, is true of the PRC tech titans, some of which were essentially neutralized or gelded by Xi Jinping. So we should see, I think, the tech titans as kind of semi-state, if you like, but bound in with the government, but not independent actors. And I think that's actually a bit different from their role maybe 10, 15 years ago, where you could envisage a world that was becoming increasingly transnational, integrated and globalized, and where perhaps the new leaders were the tech titans.

16:19In some ways, I think they've actually lost ground politically. Is it possible to be a great power and be the good guys and not be extractive? from your retelling of how other places get to be great powers, it sounds like it's through not maintaining or courting alliances. It sounds like being incredibly extractive of their own population and other people's populations invading sovereignty, etc. Can you be a great power around the good guys? That's a really interesting question. It's more, if you like, philosophical question, it's a moral question. I would say that it's impossible to be a great power without having some form of moral ambivalence.

17:03Every great power in the past and the present has acted, is acting and will act in ways that are morally questionable, I'm afraid. But of course that is also true of almost any other actor and almost any action. These actions always have morally complicated consequences. So people die. There's the opportunity cost of spending money on armaments that could go into other activities like health care or education. You can wage the wrong war. You can make errors of judgment. All of that will happen. If you want to be completely morally pure, then I think you shouldn't try to become a great power. But I'm not sure if you want to be completely morally pure what you would become because almost anything you do is likely to be complicated in some way.

17:59Thank you, Jacob. Our next question is from Thomas. Good morning, Radical Team. This is a question coming to you from Thomas in Berlin. There are hard power areas like defence and foreign aid which I presume you will discuss in the main programme. But my question is about soft power. One area where the UK really does, quote, punch above its weight is in areas like higher education, science and the arts. It seems to me that I am always reading about universities, museums and cultural institutions that are struggling for lack of funds, when these are among the things that make Britain a globally recognised brand and make a big difference.

18:37It may seem unfashionable when we have big health and social security bills to pay, but funding science and the arts is what successful countries do. So here is my question. Do you agree that governments don't seem to make decisions that support the UK's soft power? And if so, why is this not more of a priority? Well, I agree it should be more of a priority. Particularly the elite universities are very much showcases of British soft power. But they're also supporters of hard power, of the military, of diplomacy. the expertise that comes out of them is very important. And I think one of the things that I've been most worried about over the last 10, 15 years has been the atrophying of area expertise, knowledge of particular regions, and especially language expertise.

19:29And it also appears to be less valued in organizations like the Foreign Office, where they seem to have gone more over to having generalists. So I think there's a lot there that needs to be done to secure Britain's position as a great power. And modern languages I would put right up at the top. But you've spoken about the difficult choices and trade-offs that need to be made. Can you increase defence expenditure and also make sure that we've got enough people doing languages degrees? Yes, because education, in particular modern languages, is not a particularly large line item. The really expensive programmes within government are, you know, NHS, social security.

20:16So I think you can make cuts there, increase expenditure on modern languages, increase expenditure on defence, and even for the sake of argument, foreign aid. Our next and final question is from Robert Smythe. He's written to us and says, Does Britain retain sufficient respect in the world to lead the way in restoring a rules-based world order? I think for Britain to lead that project on its own, that might be asking a bit much. But I think Britain can play a very important role in mobilising what I would call the rest of the West. I think of the West divided into essentially three groups. You've got the United States, you've got the European Union, and then you've got the rest of the West, which is the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada, Australia, maybe South Korea, a number of other actors, Switzerland, Norway.

21:10I think the UK can certainly lead that latter group, which make up hundreds of millions of people, huge economy, quite considerable military potential. And I think, yes, I think it could play a very, very important role in defending international law. Rules-based, I like that word. Whose rules? Essentially, the principles of international law, which have informed the Western view and increasingly large parts of the world since 1945. These are rules that we haven't always obeyed ourselves. And as I said earlier, you know, the world is a morally complicated place. But by and large, the West, and in particular the United Kingdom, has been an upholder of those principles.

22:01And on the really big issues like deterring Russia, the United Kingdom has been on the side of upholding international law. Do some of our traditionally fiercest allies, thinking of the US, are they retreating from a rules-based order or are they on side? I think the Trump administration is definitely querying the usefulness of that concept. And whatever you think of the administration of President Maduro in Venezuela, his removal was not really compatible the way in which it was done with the principles of international law. So I think from that point of view, the UK at the moment is a more coherent and a more plausible defender of the international principle in the world.

22:47Having said that, without US support through NATO and Europe, without continuing US intelligence support to Ukraine, defending international law would be even harder. So we need to be clear about the extent to which we still need the United States. It sounds like that's incredibly challenging, given the backdrop of moral ambivalence that you described, which is that in order for places to be great, one of the common criteria is that they are morally ambivalent and yet you're arguing the world would be a lot better if it was a little more respectful of international law. But it would be a lot worse if the United Kingdom were not a great power.

23:32I think our listeners will agree that sticking to international law is probably a good idea based on this episode and the last one as well. Thank you so much for joining us on Radical. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you for all your questions and thank you for answering them, Brendan. Radical will be back with another episode on Thursday. But from me, it's goodbye.

23:55In summer 2005, I blagged my way into a job editing a new British gangster film. And I'd unknowingly been employed by two of London's most notorious gang leaders. You cross us, you get sorted out. We're serious people. I was stepping into a world where the lines between fact and fiction barely existed because the film they'd written was the story of their lives and they were using it to change their future. But would it be possible to really leave criminality behind them? It was all good a week ago. I'm Lewis Albro from BBC Radio 4 and Shadow World. This is Breaking the Cycle. Subscribe to Shadow World Breaking the Cycle on BBC Sounds.

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