Power as defined by military might is a thing of the past but we have inherited mindsets and policies of a bygone age, writes TONY KINSELLA.
TIME WAS the automobile industry didn’t need to know that the Shanghai Motor Show closed last Tuesday.
Time was. Now China has become a bigger car market than the US. Another straw showing how our planet’s winds of power currently blow.
Distressingly few appear capable of processing the implications of such global shifts. Historic precedents of Rome replacing Greece, or the US replacing the British empire, may offer lessons about powers replacing other ones, but have little to say about a diffusion of power, and less about today’s metamorphosis of power itself.
Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Africa and others all qualify for the label of emerging powers. They, as the G20 demonstrates, have joined existing powers such as the US, Russia, and the EU to develop appropriate global mechanisms.
This desire to participate in a partnership is something quite different from an expansionist Prussia replacing the declining Austro-Hungarian empire.
History teaches us to think of power primarily in military terms: who assembled what armies, who won or lost which battles, and, occasionally, why they did so. While that may owe something to how history is taught, it also reflects how power was once defined. Military power, and the ability to organise and project that power into your opponent’s territory, used to be the precondition for recognition as a great power.
Today only a handful of antediluvian militarists, their mirror-image opponents, and others hemmed in by political blinkers, persist in using such obsolete calculations to evaluate power and determine policy.
Our novel, and therefore disconcerting, reality is that the era of major inter-state warfare is over, even if the threat of armed conflicts and other security hazards persists. Tragically, those who remain frozen in the realities of yesteryear impede our collective ability to address today’s challenges, never mind tomorrow’s.
China and India are major powers in the classic military sense with large modern forces and nuclear arsenals. Yet their growing and justified presence on the world stage flows from their economic rather than their military achievements. Their military posture is defensive. While one would have to be seriously deranged to contemplate attacking either state, their forces pose no global threat.
Countries such as Brazil and Indonesia also maintain significant armed forces, and Brazil has the capacity to produce nuclear weapons but has chosen not to do so. Again their growing global presence is based on their economic and political achievements.
We have all inherited mindsets, policies and equipment from an age that has passed. Nowhere is this more blatant, pointless or threatening than when it comes to nuclear weapons. Two of the world’s youngest leaders, Barack Obama (47) and Dmitry Medvedev (43), are quietly revitalising the vital process of nuclear disarmament.
During the Cold War the US and the USSR stood like two nuclear pistoleros threatening each other with cocked weapons. Both pistols carried eight rounds of ammunition, seven in the clip and one in the breech. The slightest squeeze on the trigger and the pistol would fire, but the opponent could simultaneously riposte, and both would fall.
The process of detente and series of treaties led both protagonists to first apply their safety catches, then to uncock their pistols, then to remove the rounds from the breeches. If the seven-round clips represent the 9,000 or so nuclear warheads each once deployed, today’s 2,500 are the equivalent of three rounds.
Washington and Moscow are expected rapidly to agree on mutual reductions to around 1,500 warheads apiece. That would translate, in pistol terms, into each having a holstered pistol with one round of ammunition in its clip. The step beyond 1,500 warheads brings you to unloading the pistol and putting it in a drawer.
If the two nuclear heavyweights can achieve this, the pressure on the smaller nuclear powers will become irresistible. London and Paris both realise this, which goes some way towards explaining their relative coolness towards the Russian-US talks.
Humanity has inherited expensive, lethal nuclear weapons which are, according to the former head of the UK’s armed forces Field Marshall Lord Bramall, “useless as a deterrent to the threats or scale of violence we currently face, or are likely to face”. We also have thousands of supersonic combat aircraft and tens of thousands of sophisticated main battle tanks all designed and built for the conflicts of yesteryear.
Meanwhile, the agreed joint UN-AU Darfur force cannot deploy as it lacks troops, suitable light armoured vehicles, helicopters and funds. The UN assistant secretary general for peacekeeping, Edmund Melet, is reduced to publicly warning of “the risk posed by the lack of military helicopters” to the UN force in Chad. The African Union’s Amisom mission in Somalia is similarly hobbled, despite €35 million of EU funding.
We need to escape antique fantasies to face today’s realities and reconfigure our security tools. Washington is beginning this process, something which Roger Cole missed in his fulminations about “Obama’s decision to approve a US military budget greater than George Bush’s” on April 10th last. The US has decided, in the words of Robert Gates, to “end production of the F-22 fighter” while spending more on taking care of its troops.
UK delusions about spending over £35 billion on a new generation of nukes, two aircraft carriers and their 70 F-35 aircraft can survive neither the explosion of UK government borrowing, nor an honest appraisal of global security realities.
What does neutrality mean in a world without rival alliances? Where is there any evidence to support Cole’s accusation of an “elite’s desire for wars”? Our own non-threatening, peacekeeping-experienced voice needs to be heard in these transitional EU and UN security debates. Time was we could deceive ourselves into believing we could opt out. Time was.