An Alternate History of Post-Cold War British Defense Policy?

Amid renewed talk of breakdown of the "trans-Atlantic relationship" and a decline in optimism among the Western commentariat about the likely outcome of the war in Ukraine and its implications, those in Europe eternally banging the drum for bigger defense budgets and what they buy have been more than usually audible and strident. (Rather than the 2.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product so many British politicians have talked about these past few years the Ministry of Defence now claims that at least an extra percentage point beyond that is a necessary minimum in the current security environment.) Exemplary of the way these things tend to run is the piece in the Financial Times by Chatham House director and regular contributor to that paper, Bronwen Maddox.

Smarmily titled "Defence is the Greatest Public Benefit of All" (next to which the author brushes off "sickness benefits, pensions and healthcare" in the tone of a Roman patrician sneering about the bill for panem et circenses) Ms. Maddox pushes the old narrative that voter-fearing governments have been forsaking defense for the sake of goodies for a piggish public in a way no longer tenable. (Citing an unnamed "senior European minister" the way Thomas Friedman cites unnamed cab drivers, she passes on somebody's quip that "'For 30 years, we have been taking money out of defence budgets and putting it into health and welfare . . . Now, we will have to reverse that,'" with Ms. Maddox, speaking in her own voice, clarifying that this means that "politicians will have to persuade voters to surrender some of their benefits to pay for defense . . . the essential public benefit above all" (emphasis added).)

Reading the piece one would never know that European governments, Britain's included, started paring down their defense budgets (certainly in percentage-of-GDP terms) way before the past three decades--precisely because before those past three decades one did not see "normal," peacetime, spending levels, but the quasi-permanent war emergency levels of a near half-century Cold War. Those levels were in fact such as to be increasingly untenable as economies stagnated, debt piled up, and fiscal space began shrinking in the wake of the post-war boom's end, with, one should add, politicians often highly resistant to the process, and indeed consistently refusing to make the full cuts that fiscal, monetary and economic stability demanded, as Britain's case demonstrates. The end of that Cold War so exhausting for the West as well as the Soviets removed whatever justification there had been for Cold War defense levels that only went on getting less supportable given that the economic performance of Britain, Europe, and just about everybody else in the post-Cold War period was so lousy, all as politicians' resistance to such cuts again factored into the matter, along with the taking on of commitments far more costly than they realized. Thus, for example, did the era-defining 1998 review put forth by Tony Blair's government both reflect the (self-deluded?) economic overoptimism of the New Economy-dot-com-bubble-heyday-of-globalization period then just peaking--while the deployments of British troops in the twenty-first century, not least in the invasion of Iraq, showed no conception of the realities of such operations whatsoever on the part of that Prime Minister who promised that his government would be "wise spenders, not big spenders," with all that this meant for what the government got for its defense outlays.

Reading the piece one would also never know that the post-Cold War period, and even the decades before, were not periods of profligacy with domestic spending by vote-chasing politicians, but (however much this may have been occluded by the endurance of large fiscal states) extreme penuriousness with such spending as neoliberal governments privatized basic services and chipped away relentlessly at social safety nets, all as deindustrialization and financialization, and the destruction of labor's position by deregulation and union suppression, left most working harder for less. In Britain, after all, these were the years of Thatcher, and Blair, with the essential trend continuing through the years of austerity. And if perhaps confused by the extreme emergency of a (still ongoing) pandemic in which, whatever a lying buffoon would have us believe about who exactly said what words, the actions that spoke far louder rather than words said "let the bodies pile high in their thousands," what British voters got with the next round of Labour government, certainly by the time of the party Manifesto's release was Tony Blair, Part II, as his government's chancellor made clear that, from the standpoint of the party base, even worse was coming.

Admittedly the cuts might have been worse still were the governments in question more determined to maintain the defense spending levels of an earlier era. But that is a far cry from "taking money out of defence budgets and putting it into health and welfare," while it has also been plenty to leave the British public as a whole in something other than the coddled and pampered condition Ms. Maddox implies. Moreover, as the policymakers in question took that very different course it is worth remembering that, far from cowering before angry voters as they went about it, they implemented their extremely unpopular programs while displaying the kind of open contempt for the voting public that brought on the poll tax riots in Britain.

Indeed, the fundamentals of Ms. Maddox's narrative are so remote from reality as to be describable not as giving us the history of the relation of defense spending to social spending in Europe, and certainly Britain, but an alternate history of events--plain and simple science fiction, if of a low quality to judge by its lack of the quality of verisimilitude. Yet it is passed off and respected as if it were the real thing, endlessly promoted in the "respectable" organs of the press solely because of the functionaries of that press' eternal readiness to platform those desirous of rallying a public round the flag in that way enabling them to gloss over societal problems and divisions with demands for "unity" ("We're all in this together!" they say cynically, in contrast with the misguided but well-intentioned celebrities who caught so much more flak for an ill-timed "Imagine" cover just a few years later) and give them a freer hand against dissenters, the better to let them gut social programs and replace human welfare with the corporate kind, and implement the right-wing social engineering of conscription to the gratification of youth-haters and misandrists eager to see the young brutalized in basic training if not on the battlefield as they supply cannon fodder for elites skilllessly playing their game of Risk with real human lives.