British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s election announcement on Wednesday last week was such a farce that people could be forgiven for ignoring what he said.
The rain gave the prime minister a soaking? (“Drown and Out,” blared the front page of the Labour Party-supporting Daily Mirror), and his words were indeed frequently drowned out by the sound of Labour’s 1997 election anthem, Things Can Only Get Better, blasted by a member of the public.
Sunak’s insistence that Labour could not be trusted to plan for the future was undercut by his own failure to plan for an umbrella. Yet what he said matters because it prefigures the themes that he would focus on over the next six weeks of campaigning.
One remark was particularly interesting: Sunak said that the election is taking place at a time when “the world is more dangerous than it has been at any point since the end of the Cold War.” Russian President Vladimir Putin is waging war in Ukraine and would not stop there. Islamic extremism is on the rampage across the Middle East. China is looking to dominate the 21st century by stealing a lead in technology.
The electorate has a clear choice between a prime minister who has proved he can take tough decisions, and a leader of the opposition who dodges difficult choices, Sunak said.
Whether he would score any political points by presenting the Labour Party as weak on defense remains to be seen. There is no subject on which Keir Starmer has done more to de-Corbynize his party than on the military. Labour’s defense spokesman, John Healey, is widely respected in the defense establishment.
Sunak likes to boast that the Conservatives are raising defense spending to 2.5 percent of GDP — the “biggest strengthening of our national defense for a generation,” but Healey rightly points out that the figure is an aspiration for the end of the decade rather than a fait accompli — and that the last time defense spending was that high was when Labour was in power in 2010.
Sunak is nevertheless right to inject defense into the heart of the election campaign. The public is understandably focused on National Health Service waiting lists and public-sector scandals (before Sunak’s announcement, the headlines were dominated by infected blood and the Post Office).
However, leaders have an obligation to avoid the hidden iceberg rather than just respond to the passengers’ worries.
Talk to anybody in the West’s military and intelligence establishments and the nervousness is palpable. NATO Military Committee Chair Admiral Rob Bauer recently warned that the alliance could well be at war with Russia within 20 years. Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas puts the figure at three to five years. Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces General Micael Byden tells Swedes simply that they need to “prepare for war.”
In some ways, war has already begun: The Russians and Chinese are stepping up nonconventional assaults on the UK through malicious cybercampaigns and espionage.
Sunak is also right to add that foreign uncertainty has domestic implications. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already raised energy prices. Russia’s and China’s bids to control the global supply of rare minerals threaten to cut us all off from our smart phones. A Chinese invasion of Taiwan might well push the global economy into depression.
As a mid-sized trading kingdom, the UK has more to lose than most from global uncertainty.
Yet Sunak errs when he argues that his promised 2.5 percent of GDP by the end of 2030 would be enough to prepare the military for a new world. The army is smaller than it has been at any time since the Napoleonic Wars. The Royal Navy is decommissioning ships for want of sailors. The war in Ukraine has exposed gaps in the UK’s munitions stockpiles as well as the inadequacy of some of its equipment.
What money it does spend on defense is often badly used. The nonpartisan Public Accounts Committee has accused the British Ministry of Defence’s acquisition system of being “broken” and “repeatedly wasting taxpayer’s money.”
In a sensible world, Sunak and Starmer would be arguing about how to raise defense spending to 3 percent of GDP rather than who is best positioned to hit 2.5 percent. The very least they can do is to explain how they would shake up a lethargic defense establishment so that it delivers better value for money.
This debate Sunak prefigured in his rain-drenched speech is all the more urgent because the world might suddenly get a lot more dangerous in November if former US president Donald Trump wins the US election. The one thing that we know about this otherwise unpredictable figure is that he hates the idea that Americans are being taken for a ride by feckless allies.
At the very least, Trump would expect other NATO countries to stump up more for their defense. At worst, he would take the US out of NATO, emboldening Putin in Eastern Europe and forcing Europe to reconfigure its entire post-World War II defense posture.
So, let us hope that Starmer rises to Sunak’s bait and fights back on security, and let us hope the resulting clash of opinions forces the public to think more seriously about the defense of the realm. The age of the peace dividend and Pax Americana is long over. Foreign policy and defense spending need to be given as much emphasis in the election as the domestic questions that have dominated Western politics since the end of the Cold War.
Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former writer at The Economist, he is author of The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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