The British Foreign Secretary made a speech this week reinforcing the centrality of the EU to British foreign policy. The Government appears to be drifting from nonchalance about Europe to a new engagement. 

The Exhausted British Turn To Europe

It is a shift of emphasis that has to be seen in the context of NATO's Bucharest Summit this week. Of all the many directions that NATO could have gone this week, it took the one that the exhausted Anglo-Saxons most wanted - the inveigling of Europe into the Anglo-Saxon world-view. 

The British position is simple - the 'West' cannot be managed without European resources being engaged in the struggle against 'threats' and this European engagement must follow the line from Washington as tempered by the still small voice of London.

Foreign Secretary Miliband, from a prominent Marxist intellectual family and a probable future Leader of the Labour Party (or at least what is left of it after its possible defeat at the next General Election), has always been strongly pro-European but this is more than an expression of a personal prejudice.

The pro-Europeans captured control of the British State a long time ago and now they have truly captured control of the higher reaches of the ruling party as well. 

Domestically, Europe is likely to be sustained as the political dividing line between the official centre-left and conservatism - although the rising resistance to New Labour from within its ranks is far from sold on the European dream.

The Bucharest NATO Summit

As for the Summit, before it had even started, the Germans neatly pre-empted the problem of a confrontation over Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO by stating that the ‘time was not right’. Germany would, it said, veto the former Soviet Republics' attempts to join the Membership Action Plan.

How convenient! There are genuine differences of opinion between Germany (worried about human rights, over-extension of NATO's remit and public support [in the Ukraine] for such a move) and ‘containment’ thinking in Washington but many US officials will be privately relieved that a confrontational issue with Russia is being deferred.

As we will see, taking this troublesome issue off the agenda enabled the US to triumph on every other front even if the shenanigans over what is this thing called NATO continued until the final communiques.

The French delivered on their promise to provide troops for the effort in Afghanistan and the US started signaling that it would cease its opposition to a stronger EU defence capability.

Apparently, we Europeans should spend more on defence – although try selling that proposition to those Europeans who are seeing their much treasured public services and perks being whittled away. But let us move on.

French engagement in the increasingly lack-lustre Anglo-Saxon ‘War on Terror' was a mere tool. What we really saw in Bucharest was a staging point towards the eventual conclusion of long term Franco-German aspirations for Europe as, at the least, a quasi-independent sub-super power in its own right - albeit almost entirely on Anglo-Saxon terms.

Outcomes

The outcome of the Summit can be summarized as a series of simple bullet points …

1. Afghanistan is no longer seen as anything other than a basket case but it is also a pawn in a bigger game. The original purpose for intervention, the recovery of a failed state, has long since been lost in favour of the far more important American interest in re-unifying the free market West. This West must operate within clearly defined imperial borders directed at Russian containment. The Cold War, in short, is back.

2.  France is America’s new best friend (or so President Sarkozy would like to believe), delivering headline troops for Afghanistan, but, more importantly, swinging things in Europe for Washington on missile defence in another containment operation. The Russians feel this to be offensive in intent even if it is presented as defensive in Western rhetoric.

3.  NATO has been reaffirmed as the sole military voice of a resurgent West with, again, one purpose, the containment of Russia. This was made even more obvious by NATO’s decision to support the extension of the missile defence system to the Balkans and Turkey (which really does mean that only Iran stands in the way of full containment).

4.  NATO has had to adopt the increasingly ridiculous myth that little Iran is a ‘potential’ threat to Europe in order to square the circle for European support for the missile defence system.

Everyone knows that this whole project is about containing Russia but the fiction has to be maintained that it is, in fact, about warding off an aggressive Iran. It is also about finding a way to enliven NATO as a defensive organization.

Pottering about in West Asia and elsewhere will get nowhere if NATO cannot argue at home that it is defending Europe. The demonization of Russia and Iran becomes critical to NATO’s survival and its transformation into a more equal US/EU defence operation. This is an extended process of changing the product while keeping the brand intact.

What the US and its protectorate in London do not want is an independent European defence capability - it must be locked into the Atlantic West.

Will European electorates be fooled by all this self-interested posturing? Well, mostly they do not care - security and foreign policy usually passes most people by and everyone is dreadfully careful not to put conscripts into any firing lines. This is all going to get through by default.

Confronting Russia Kindly

But is this what some fear - the beginning of the next cycle of wars which Westerners, with their characteristic competitive blood lust, feel it necessary to indulge in periodically? In fact, not all is gloom about this inherent tendency to confrontation

The signal being sent to Russia is that NATO may seek to extend itself to include Ukraine and Georgia but, once this is done, borders can be fixed and Russia need not fear any daft latter-day pro-democracy Napoleon, Kaiser or Hitler marching across its snowy wastes.

A truncated contained Russia is even to be offered missile defence capability against the mad mullahs of Tehran and other future centres of Islamic revolution as well as mutual reduction of the expensive and largely useless stockpiles of nuclear warheads in both the US and Russia.

Bush's administration will be presenting something that already seems to be part of thinking in the McCain camp so that a Republican Administration could reasonably be trusted to carry it through.

However, it does assume that President Medvedev will want to abandon all thoughts of ‘expansion of influence’ and geo-strategic competition and just trade energy at reasonable prices for access to capital and technology. This is a rather subservient position and may not appeal to the new Russian nationalism.

What Is In It For The UK

But what is in it for the UK. We are seeing a deal cut between the US and a Franco-German Europe to deal with Russia in which the price for American support in European engagement is a commitmentto collaborative global policing.

Study the close body language of Bush and Kouchner at the Summit in photographs and you get an inkling of what we mean. If you are a ‘progressive’ or an atlanticist Briton, this has been a triumph. It means that Continental Europe has been fully and willingly inveigled into the Washington-London liberal interventionist axis.

But now look at it from a traditional British realist position. This is yet another ‘own goal’. Weak support for US policies has opened the door to that nightmare of British foreign policy since Napoleon, a continent-wide military power on its doorstep.

If so, it would seem that a lot of British soldiers have died for nothing over many centuries. The Americans have 'stabbed' the Brits in the back unless the Brits actually are deep inside the new capability, undermining Franco-German pretensions from day one.

But this means that British troops will be committed to defending some tin pot marginal state and it is too easily forgotten that tens of thousands of Britons died because someone took a pot shot at first Belgium (1914) and then Poland (1939),  Being incinerated to defend Moldova will not strike many as in the national interest.

Perhaps the British are fighting a rearguard action against the inevitable – it is usually called ‘scepticism’ in diplomatic circles when the British express their concerns about European defence aspirations.

This scepticism was fully expressed in Bucharest and the fact that it was expressed suggests, pace Mr. Miliband's enthusasm for Europe, that British policy is about containing Europe as much as it is about containing Russia - and that London has lost the will to do little more than keep postponing the inevitable.

France has set its mission to persuade the UK to accept the ‘inevitable’ within its six months EU Presidency. Hence, the charm offensive involving the strategic application of Bruni power to London directly before Bucharest.

This New Labour Government is so demoralized and so infiltrated with pro-Europeans that this charm offensive may actually work, eventually handing a nationalist gift to the rising Tories - that they will then be unable to make use of!

Churchill's legacy means that the Tories are as supine to America as New Labour while the Liberal Democrats are supine to a Europe that is now increasingly supine to Washington. There is no one outside the fringes of the BNP and the Left who holds to a genuine realist position in the sovereign interest as classically defined. The rush to 'multilateralism' is a general political class disease.

The British Position

The British always give primacy to NATO (partly to keep the Americans on side). Unfortunately, the dance of diplomatic death between the US, the EU proper and NATO means that many weaselly words can be used to hide real changes that may mean that what NATO was two decades ago and what NATO will be in two decades may be very different indeed.

The US has been weakened and over-stretched. The Franco-German offer is to ‘gift’ America with support in return for ‘freedom’ to be European.

From this perspective, though they do not seem to have realised it, the British are about to get sold out – or rather to have to accept that they are now a mere province of the EU wing of the Western Empire rather than just the Atlantic outpost of an American-dominated West. British room for manouevre and political will died somewhere between Suez and the financial crisis of the 1970s.

In any case, unthreatened by any direct enemies and with its ‘East of Suez’ and ‘South of the Sahara’ policies looking increasingly unsustainable, the UK has two choices:

• to withdraw from being a major military power altogether and play only a minor part in the collaborative collective security arrangements of NATO (whatever NATO actually emerges);

• to merge its military capability into a European force whose primary purpose is to stabilize frontiers with the Russian bloc and Islam (and capture the anarchic Balkans for the West).

The national interest may dictate the first but 'gloire' and 'amour propre' draw the State, which is really only the democratic heir to a feudal business empire, towards the second. 

British military history makes London believe that it has rights to lead or at least co-lead with France the European defensive capability. Its expensive and otherwise useless nuclear toy and its unnecessary aircraft carriers become bargaining chips.

Anxieties

Despite all the talking up of the Russian threat and the instinctive distrust of the Russians amongst the British masses, no one in the UK is going to follow Europe or America blindly into a confrontation with the Bear, short of Russian troops crossing a border in force – and, even then, not if the Russians are reacting to an obvious provocation.

This makes a very good reason for intelligent Britons, Frenchman and Germans to resist the acquisition of Georgia and the Ukraine by NATO and to be very wary of bear-tweaking by the little states on Europe’s Eastern frontier.

Western foreign policy is at sea. It cannot decide what being 'the West' really means. It is making reluctant enemies of others only to help define what it is in terms of its own ideology and borders.

Is the current border settlement process in the Balkans merely a means of ordering frontiers to enable a more effective future collaboration between neighbouring sovereign states? From this perspective, Kosovo is vastly more important than Afghanistan.

But what borders are appropriate for reasonable defence and when does defence become aggressive containment of others (Kennan-style), cold war, proxy war and then finally hot war?

If border delineation is the current name of the game, is it really in the European public interest to operate in the Levant (possibly), let alone East of Suez and South of the Sahara (probably not, unless you are a driven progressive like Kouchner)?

Would Europe go to war to protect Israel or intervene militarily in a Ukrainian Civil War (they have happened before)? The EU's ambition to be a state, originally designed to avert war, is on the edge of becoming one of the causes of the next one.

Conclusion

This Summit has been a triumph for the US. Even the concessions to Merkel on the Ukraine and Georgia (with all the little EU states looking like minions around her) are actually only an argument for delay while things are as squared as they can be with the old Russian bear.

When ‘senior advisers’ to Brown said that the discussions on Georgia had ‘largely gone Washington’s way’, they could have been talking about the Summit as a whole.

Meanwhile, the pig’s breakfast that is Afghanistan continues with a multinational force of everyone and the ship’s cat still requiring organization and discipline. But does Afghanistan matter as much as we like to think? Maybe, like Somalia, the game is not to win but to stop the other side from winning.

The actual numbers of troops looked at by nationality suggest that, while the US and an exhausted UK still rule the roost, with Australian and Canadian enthusiasm waning, thousands of miles away in the heart of the West the EU, still dominated by France and Germany, has come to a historic deal to share power, as junior partner to Washington, in the Old World.

But one last fact – 68% of the French population oppose France sending more troops and so do the French Socialists as a Party. There is similar opposition from Die Linke in Germany while half the British Labour Party is seriously troubled by its Leaders' foreign policies.

The US, the EU, NATO and UN may be in cahoots on Afghanistan but European public opinion is not universally sold on what they are doing. This is very fertile soil for Russian dabbling.

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