NATO

Debate between Lord Bilimoria and Lord Judd

Tuesday 2nd April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, on 4 April we will be celebrating the 70th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so let us remember some of its history. President Eisenhower, its first supreme commander, hoped that NATO would not outlast the 1950s:

“If in ten years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defence purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed”.


He then said:

“We cannot be a modern Rome, guarding the frontiers with our legions”.


This was further reinforced by Paul Hoffman, the US administrator of the Marshall Plan, who said the aim was,

“to get Europe on its feet and off our backs”—

as the noble Lord, Lord West, I think, mentioned earlier. It all began with a treaty and not an alliance. We forget that it was the Korean War that was the trigger to make it into an alliance; in fact, it was Harriman who said that the Korean crisis put the “O” into NATO, turning it from a pact into a military alliance.

Then you have the whole European perspective, the idea of a European Defence Community. That was, as early as 1954, seen as a step too far. Does this not ring true now, when we have all this talk about an EU army? Of course, Lord Ismay, who has been referred to earlier, the first Secretary-General, again stated NATO’s objective as,

“to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down”.

The 1950s debate on European integration was yes to Europe in terms of the European Community but no to a European Defence Community because that would not work, and that is exactly the debate we are having all these decades later. To this day, I do not think the EU has ever developed a seriously credible foreign or security policy.

Then of course we have the nuclear question, which has been at the heart of NATO as well. In February, Harvard University released a report that noted the failure of European allies to spend more on defence or pull their weight. That is, again, at the heart of this debate. The report goes on to reaffirm the value of collective security:

“On its own, the United States is a powerful nation. But America’s European and Canadian allies expand and amplify American power in ways that Russia and China—with few allies of their own—can never match … The United States is substantially stronger in NATO than it would be on its own”.


That is crucial yet—here is the contradiction—for the first time in NATO’s history, we have an American President who questions all sorts of international partnerships, including NATO. Then we have President Macron and Angela Merkel talking about a European army as a complement to NATO. This is never going to happen. The biggest challenge looking ahead for NATO in its eighth decade is possibly not about keeping the Russians out but keeping the Americans in, as David Reynolds said in a recent article.

For the 29 member countries, NATO’s mission is to,

“safeguard the freedom and security of all its members by political and military means”.

On the minimum spending level, the UK is one of five members—arguably, the latest figures show that it is one of seven members—to increase its spending to 2%. I will come to that later. The Secretary-General, Jens Stoltenberg, has said that modern forms of warfare mean that, although the Cold War has finished, for NATO challenges remain. The challenges are Russia, international terrorism and cyberwarfare. Yet Donald Trump has described NATO as obsolete. He has continually criticised members—and rightly so—for not contributing enough to the budget.

I am sure the Minister will confirm that NATO is a cornerstone of our national security. NATO has 20,000 troops deployed in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq and the Mediterranean and in policing the airspace of eastern Europe following Crimea. Since 2017, there has been a NATO enhanced forward presence operation in the Baltic states surrounding Russia.

As has been referred to, the summit of last year was, quite frankly, a disaster. As one description put it,

“NATO’s European leaders were left reeling after one of the most divisive summits in the organisation’s 69-year history”.


There was a declaration about 2% spending and a response to the ever more unpredictable security environment.

This is why I continually say to our Government that, even if we are experiencing a period of peace, the uncertainty is always there. Things come out of the blue—no one predicted 9/11; it happened without any warning. That is why SDSR 2010 was a disaster, which wrecked our Armed Forces. Fortunately, we are now recovering from that. We are no longer a superpower and we do not have an Empire, but we are very much a global power and being at the heart of NATO gives us that strength to be a global power. It is estimated that the UK provided 12% to 14% of NATO’s total capability in 2017. That is not bad for a country that has just 1% of the world’s population. SDSR 2015, which was far better than SDSR 2010, confirmed that NATO is at the heart of our defence policy and our unconditional commitment to collective defence and security. That is the position we are in today.

On the other hand, the Labour Party has criticised this situation. The shadow Defence Secretary Nia Griffith said:

“The UK’s ability to play our role on the international stage has been completely undermined by eight years of Tory defence cuts. The Conservatives have slashed the defence budget by over £9bn in real terms since 2010 and they are cutting Armed Forces numbers year after year. Instead of simply engaging in yet more sabre-rattling, Gavin Williamson should get to grips with the crisis in defence funding that is happening on his watch”.


Will the Minister respond to that criticism?

Does the Minister also agree that SDSR 2010 was all about means before ends and we have suffered ever since? It is now a decade since we have had aircraft carrier capability. Our Nimrods were destroyed. We are now getting back our surveillance capabilities. Numbers were cut in all the services, and now that we have to recruit we are struggling to do so. We have shortages in all our services and we possibly need to recruit from Commonwealth countries. It is all very well spending the 2%, but we need to make sure that our Armed Forces are properly resourced.

An important point is that, of the 29 NATO members, 22 are EU members. NATO has said clearly that the EU is a “unique and essential partner”. The two organisations share strategic common interests and values. NATO has co-operated with the EU in its common security and defence policy; the EU’s Operation Althea in Bosnia and Herzegovina is commanded by the NATO deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, and NATO operations in the Mediterranean are conducted in collaboration with the EU’s Mediterranean anti-people smuggling mission Operation Sophia.

[Lord Judd (Lab)]

As usual, the noble Lord is making an interesting and challenging speech, to which I relate in many respects. Perhaps he could underline the point he made about the immediate situation, and how important it is to hear from the Minister in his reply, regarding the current doubt as to whether several of our battalions could fight effectively because of the lack of manpower.

[Lord Bilimoria]

I thank the noble Lord for his intervention and for reinforcing what I have been saying. I hope that the Minister will respond.

Mark Lancaster, Minister of State for the Armed Forces, has said:

“The Government’s objectives will be to underscore the position of NATO at the cornerstone of UK and Euro-Atlantic defence and security, and to support NATO’s continuing adaptation to meet the complicated and evolving threat environment”.


So there is no question that our commitment is there. London was the first seat for the NATO headquarters and a meeting is taking place here in December because of the worry about holding it in America now because of President Trump’s attitudes.

The Second World War led to NATO. Again, we must remember history. Harry Truman—in his Truman doctrine —was to make US foreign policy more interventionist by providing political, military and economic assistance to countries under threat from authoritarian forces, in particular Russia. That doctrine led to what is now NATO and to the treaty’s most important article, Article 5, which is NATO’s commitment to collective defence among its signatories, whereby,

“an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all”.

It has been invoked only once, and that was after 9/11. What says it all is that the Warsaw Pact did not survive, whereas NATO has not just survived but is expanding—its 29 members will now go up to 30, with Macedonia becoming the 30th member.

The US ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, threatened to cut back on intelligence sharing with some NATO allies if they bought equipment from China’s Huawei Technologies for new 5G telecom networks. The US says the equipment could be used by the Government in Beijing to spy on the West. That is another problem; the threat is from not just Russia but China. America is pushing to stiffen fellow members’ resolve in confronting one of their own, Turkey, which has committed to buying a Russian missile defence system. That situation is tricky, and I should be interested to hear the Minister’s response on how to deal with it. We have also heard from others about Germany only now committing to spending 1.5%—nowhere near the 2% target.

The bottom line is: has NATO worked? I would say, without a doubt, NATO has worked. Russia has never attacked a NATO member. The Crimea and Ukraine attacks have put NATO on guard and we are now there in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania because we feel threatened. Article 5 has never really been put to the test where Russia is concerned.

The NATO Secretary-General is continually trying to play down the differences with America and President Trump. He has said:

“The strength of NATO is that despite these differences we have always been able to unite around our core task … and defend each other”.


Let us not forget that, at the 50th anniversary, Bill Clinton cited Theodore Roosevelt saying that there was no doubt that the US would continue to play a,

“great part in the world … The only question is whether we will play it well or ill”.

So the challenge of America’s commitment and the question for the European countries that dominate NATO is the trans-Atlantic distancing and the decline in post-war military spending that has taken place for a while. It is not just Trump; in 2011, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense in President Obama’s Administration, issued a warning about those who,

“enjoy the benefits of Nato membership … but don’t want to share the risks and the costs … apparently willing and eager for American taxpayers to assume the growing security burden left by reductions in European defense budgets”.

There is an impression that people are not paying their way, and that is absolutely valid.

Finally, looking ahead, there are four challenges for NATO. The first is burden sharing, which I have spoken about; the second is Russia; the third is partnerships; and the fourth is the open door—does NATO keep expanding? It now has 30 members. Are we to continue to have more and more?

The noble Lord, Lord Touhig, asked whether our 2% spending is enough and whether it is spent on the right things. My view is that we should spend 3% of our GDP on defence. The suggestion of a European army was one of the biggest scare tactics during the referendum, and it was one that people fell for. People denied that the peace in Europe has existed not just because of NATO but because of NATO and the existence of the European Union. I would pay the £8 billion a year that we pay to the EU just for the peace alone.

As the noble Lord, Lord Robertson, said in his fabulous speech, NATO must do three things: it must evolve and transform; it must maintain its deterrence; and, most importantly, NATO is about values. As the noble Lord, Lord Ricketts, said, the secret of NATO’s longevity is not just its military pact but the fact that it is an alliance of shared values, of which we should be proud.