Labour’s new Strategic Defence Review was finally announced this week after numerous leaks. Keir Starmer was keen to present it as new thinking in facing up to new threats, but the message was hardly radical.
Britain must be ready for war and rebuild its armed forces accordingly, the prime minister said, echoing Tory prime ministers and ministers before him. The review was not only rehashed and uninspired, it also completely overlooked by far the biggest threat to UK security.
Until a few months ago, the aim was for the UK to be a truly global military power, with two hugely expensive aircraft carriers able to deploy anywhere in the world, especially the Indo-Pacific where China was the coming threat. Elements of that plan remain in the review, but it makes clear that the primary challenge is now Russia, with subsidiary threats from the likes of Iran and North Korea. China, meanwhile, lurks somewhere in the background, and non-state actors get minimal attention in the paper.
As historian David Edgerton pointed out in the Guardian, Labour may have boasted of having a very different approach to security, but there is little indication of this being true in the review. The emphasis remains, as it has done in recent decades, on having more attack submarines, expanded nuclear forces, drones and the rest.
The review also does not suggest any willingness for the UK to adopt an alternative outlook focused more on human security. That has instead been promoted elsewhere, with some innovative thinking by the Rethinking Security think tank, with its focus on human security, as well as the just-published Alternative Defence Review from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which has a remit that usefully goes well beyond the nuclear issue.
Neither of these initiatives got much mainstream media coverage during a week in which the emphasis has been firmly on preparing for war, not avoiding it. The old dark-humoured quip, ‘If war is the answer, it’s a very stupid question’, has been pointedly overlooked.
What makes that thoroughly odd is the way that the review avoids two fundamental issues: Britain’s actual recent experience of wars and the real game-changer facing us, global climate breakdown.
On the first of these, the uncomfortable reality is that the UK is currently involved in its fourth disastrous war of the past 24 years. It, along with the US, is supporting Israel’s catastrophic assault on the Palestinian population in Gaza.
Keir Starmer may describe the violent Israeli actions as “appalling and intolerable”, but his government will not take even the preliminary actions of recognising a State of Palestine and appointing an ambassador, nor ceasing all British arms sales to and military links with Israel, including stopping the Israeli Defence Force from using the RAF’s Akrotiri base in Cyprus.
This latest war comes after three others that have been unsuccessful and hugely costly, both financially and in terms of lives lost.
In late 2001, the UK fully supported the US in its war against al-Qaida and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Within three months, the US-UK coalition seemed to be having great success, but the war would ultimately continue for the next 20 years, until the Taliban gained full control of the entire country and the coalition withdrew in disarray. Al-Qaida then went on to inspire offshoots across the Middle East, Africa and southern Asia.
Then came Iraq. For eight long years from March 2003, the UK joined the US as its closest ally in destroying the Saddam Hussein regime. Even when that seemed to ease in 2011, it was followed by the rise of ISIS in Iraq and Syria and a further bitter four-year conflict from 2014. Even now, ISIS retains a presence in both countries and, like the original al-Qaida, has its offshoots, especially across the Saharan Sahel.
The third failure was Libya in 2011, leading to a deeply insecure country that remains a focus for the movement of Islamist paramilitaries into northern and eastern Africa.
The human cost of these failed wars has been colossal. Close to a million people have been directly killed by war violence, and four times that number have been indirectly killed, according to The Costs of War project by the Watson Institute at Brown University in the US. Close to forty million people have also been displaced.
To put it bluntly, the UK’s recent experience of fighting wars has been a woeful mess, yet these wars are barely referenced in the Strategic Defence Review. It is as though they never happened.
But what is even more surprising is the lack of attention to the greatest security challenge: climate breakdown.
Just days before the review was published, a long-established Swiss village was obliterated by an avalanche as a glacier collapsed. The melting of glaciers is a cause of great concern in Switzerland and other mountainous states, as the loss of the binding impact of permafrost means protracted and accelerating warming starts to take effect.
Days later, more than 700 people were killed in flash floods in Nigeria. These are just a couple of examples of the many growing threats of climate breakdown. The majority are having their impacts among the world’s poorest and most marginalised people, yet they are indicators of what will increasingly affect the whole world.
The climate crisis will negatively affect global supplies of food, water, and energy security, increasing competition for resources and leading to mass migration and displacement. It will exacerbate existing tensions and create new ones, potentially leading to conflicts and instability.
A proper international security review would recognie that, and put the need to tackle climate breakdown centre stage. This review conspicuously fails to do so – and so it is not worth the paper it is written on.
In the aftermath of last July’s general election, the new Labour government repeated its pre-election promise of a green industrial revolution, with the UK pioneering the way to radical decarbonisation and a more sustainable world. That pledge was quietly dropped earlier this year and replaced by the mantra of increased military spending at the forefront of a singularly off-green revolution. In the process, it is fair to say that the corporate capture of the Labour government had been completed.
