S6E22: Delivering National Security Strategies

Welcome to Season 6 of Talking Strategy. My name is Paul O'Neill from the Royal United Services Institute in London. And in this series, my friend Professor Beatrice Hussand and I talked to experts about strategy, strategic leadership and the strategic challenges facing nations today. In this season, we'll be taking the ideas identified in many Western security defense strategies and subjecting them to analysis through historic and contemporary lenses. This podcast is once again brought to you thanks to our long-term partnership with Cornfering. As a leading global consulting firm dealing in strategy and unlocking performance across defense and commercial sectors, their focus on organizational and individual potential means their ideal partners for this podcast series. I should also mention that the views expressed in this interview are the speakers alone and do not represent those of Roosie or any other institution. This is our final episode in Season 6. Our focus so far has been on the content of current defense reviews, but his Churchill is alleged to have cautioned no matter how beautiful the strategy you should occasionally look at the results, so how you deliver a strategy is vital and often the hardest part. To discuss the challenges of delivering these strategies, we are joined by Sir Mark Lara Grant. A career diplomat, he was the British permanent representative to United Nations between 2009 and 2015, holding the Office of President of the Security Council four times. He then returned to the United Kingdom as the National Security Advisor, first for Prime Minister David Cameron and then Prime Minister Theresa May. Today, he's a highly respected commentator on global issues and security strategy. So Mark, welcome. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you very much for the invitation. A lot of security strategies today appear to be based on assumptions of societal security at home and mutual security abroad. How much of a risk is that? Well, I find it helpful to distinguish between national security and personal security, because the public concerns really in any country, let's take the United Kingdom, isn't about nuclear war with Russia or cybertax on critical national infrastructure. It's probably around local crime, it's around terrorism, it's around cyber scams, it's around misinformation perhaps. And what is interesting to me is that those last three, the state cannot really guarantee the security of its citizens on its own. And everyone of course says that the state's greatest duty is to keep its citizens safe, but the reality which many governments are very reluctant to say publicly is that the government is no longer in a position to do that. If we take, for instance, lone wolf terrorism, which is perhaps the most worrying form of terrorism for most people, the government really can't prevent an individual picking up a knife and attacking people in the streets or hiring a car and driving it into a crowd at the bus stop. And we see that in things like if you travel on the London Underground, you're inundated by this irritating slogan about see it say it's salty. That is essentially asking the public to be vigilant and help the state with its task of identifying terrorism. And then if you look at cyber, private companies spend tens of millions of dollars to protect the integrity of their IT systems, and individuals are under their own responsibility to keep their passwords safe and protect themselves from cyber scams in that way. The government cannot do that for the individuals. They rely on the individuals. So the government needs the public's help with personal security at home. In the same way, overseeing is the government needs other countries' help to ensure their security. People say, "Well, we'd be very vulnerable if we were attacked by Russia." Well, the British government is never going to be set up to defeat Russia one-on-one. We rely on allies, whether that's the United States or alliances like NATO as part of some form of collective defense. So is that a risk that you're dependent on the public at home and you're dependent on allies overseas? I mean, yes, you could argue that that is a potential vulnerability or potential risk, but I think that is the inevitable outcome of where we are in today's world. So Mark, you pronounced in 2022 that the world orders in crisis. And I wonder, to what extent the other countries in the world on whom you just said we also depended actually agree with us, one of the most important rules that underpin the world order is that you should not attack another country. To what extent can we say that other countries are still upholding this rule when they are standing by looking away when such attacks are occurring on the world stage? We tend to forget how recent multilateralism is and the sort of rules based international order. It really only started with the League of Nations and then the United Nations. And for the first 40 of those 80 years, essentially the international system was paralyzed by the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. We've only had about 25 years of what I would call a golden age of the world international order. And that started with the fall of the Berlin War and the freedom for Eastern Europe in around 1990 and lasted until about 2015. And since 2015, we've seen a progressive pushback against that order for a whole variety of reasons. So we shouldn't pretend that a global rules based order that everyone follows is the norm. It's very much the exception in terms of history and even in relatively recent history, it is the exception. So there will always be the opportunity for countries that have the most power to act outside of those rules. But we've now got a situation where it's breaking down in a very systematic way. And that is, of course, of consequence to us in the UK as an open global trading nation, which is dependent on a secure trading environment and global prosperity and security in order to thrive as a nation. And that is true of most European countries. It's less true, though, of countries like the United States and perhaps China. And one of the big changes we've seen in recent years is the leader of the United States no longer believes in that order himself and has taken steps that actively undermining. So I think most of our allies would share our concern about the breakdown of that order, but not obviously the United States. I would have assumed that practically all countries of the world bar the most mighty powers would be on our side to say we want a world in which our can't not attack thy neighbor with impunity. So why do we see so much hedging so much and the size of us on the part of the smaller countries in the world? You're right that you might have expected the smaller countries to be the biggest supporters of a rules based order. And to some extent they are, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that over half, well over a hundred of the world's countries are designated as small countries, less than ten million population. And there are the ones most likely to suffer if we return to a complete law of the jungle where they have to choose between competing sides. But and this perhaps comes back to the point of our values is that one of the reasons why there is this pushback and a more concerted pushback than just say Russia is that during this golden era all the initiatives that went forward whether treaty initiatives like the open skies treaty or the conventional arms treaty or institutional changes like the International Criminal Court, the Human Rights Council, women's rights, LGBT rights, responsibility to protect, humanitarian intervention came from the West and every single one went in a right-space direction. Now of course there was pushback even in the golden era form Russia, some of the conservative Muslim countries, but in general most developing countries supported that approach. But things changed when I was lucky enough to be the ambassador of the UN during the golden age but also the breakdown of the golden age. And my analysis is that there are three things that led to this one was there was a view quite widespread in the developing world that the West had abused some of these concepts particularly responsibility to protect and humanitarian intervention because of what happened in Iraq or happened in Libya in order to impose democracy on unwilling developing countries and even regime change on those countries. Secondly you had the financial crisis of 2008-2009 which undermined some of those countries' confidence in the ability of the ruling elite to manage global capitalism and other you have the geopolitical shifts with the rise of China and others and interestingly enough from my perspective at the United Nations the sharp edge of the spear was LGBT rights. Because we, as part of the European Union at the time, we pushed the language on LGBT rights every year in the General Assembly and other bodies of the United Nations. And by doing so, we upset some of the countries that were broad supporters on some of the other agenda that I mentioned, but not on LGBT rights. And what I saw was the pushback there leaked then into women's rights and political and civil rights more generally. And it got to the stage that by about 2015, 2016, Vladimir Putin was able to say, I am the defender of family values and not be taken with the ridicule that we should have been taken. So that was the danger that we have pushed aside some of our natural allies, including some of the smaller countries, with some of the issues that we tackled in the name of our values. But they weren't shared values by possibly a majority of countries around the world. You said developing countries thought we were using humanitarian intervention to impose democracy does not the covenant on civil and political rights. It has been ratified by just about everybody except China and the United States with lots and lots of reservations. It actually implied democratic procedures that everybody signed up to. Well, you're right. And you can certainly argue that. But they would say that doesn't override the ability of each country to decide its own political system. And I just give you one example of how the shift happened during this period. Because in 2015, we wanted to celebrate in New York the 20th anniversary of the Beijing platform of action. Now the Beijing platform of action was a basic document of women's rights that had been agreed in China 20 years earlier. And in 2015, not only was it clear that it wasn't possible to really celebrate universally that 20th anniversary, it wouldn't have been possible even to agree that document 20 years after it had been signed by consensus. Now you can argue why was it agreed by consensus when you have countries that don't believe in equal women's rights, like Iran, Afghanistan and others, they all signed up to it. But the mood had moved in such a way that it was no longer possible to celebrate that. Many of our strategies assume the existence of what you've described as the golden age. If we're building strategies which assume something that is no longer in existence, how do we re-platform our security strategies to cope with the world as it is, not the world we would wish it to be? I think the erosion of the rules-based order doesn't invalidate the need for alliances to protect our security overseas. Alliances go back for millennia. There've always been alliances between empires, between city states, between sovereign countries, as in when they emerged. But there were shifting alliances. What we've seen since the Second World War is an attempt to set up more stable longer-term alliances, like the European Union, like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO. What we're finding now, as this global order erodes, that those alliances may not be quite as stable as we would like. Those two that I mentioned are still very valid and are continuing, although we're not part of the European Union, of course. But they are coming under some strain. But a lot depends on how you think the world order will evolve, because my best guess at what will happen, and it won't happen in an orderly way, it will be a disorderly transition, to a three-tier international structure. There'll be a G2 at the top, the United States and China. There will be a middle tier, which is essentially shifting alliances on specific issues, a variable geometry, coalitions of the willing, if you like, and then you have the bottom third tier, which will be the residual universal platform of the United Nations, which will continue, as is, and every single sovereign country will be a member of the UN, and it is the only body where that is the case. Now, for the United Kingdom, of course, we can have some influence on one of the G2 members in particular, the United States, we always hope, and it is the second tier where we are gained to have to plan most of our activity and most of our strategies. In terms of building alliances, whether that's with the French and the Germans, or whether it's with Gulf States, or it's with Australia and New Zealand, there will be quite a range of possibilities for us not only to participate in those coalitions of the willing, but actually lead some of them. Because even after Brexit, the United Kingdom is a member of more international organizations than any other country in the world. So there's a lot of opportunities there, but it does require a slightly different mindset from saying we put all our eggs in the United States basket, or all our eggs in the NATO basket. If we're back to Palmerston and no permanent allies, only permanent interests, do we not run the risk of becoming perfidious Albion again? And if all of our alliances are at hawks, then we play people off against each other and we seem to be unreliable as an ally. Well, not if we do alliances on specific issues. And I saw this at the United Nations worked rather well, where we built alliances around the world in order to push forward the conventional arms trade treaty. We built alliances on LGBT issues of different countries around the world, and you could operate like that. You're not pretending that you share all of their interests or all of their values, but on specific issues, whether that's governance of artificial intelligence, or it's combating climate change, you know, two obvious relevant examples. There is an opportunity for the United Kingdom to play a role and potentially even a leadership role with different countries. So I don't think that risks the sort of perfidious Albion where you've sworn fealty to one particular country and then break that. But it probably requires a degree of honesty and also self-awareness of where the country actually is and what it brings to those allies. Absolutely, and it will also require some compromise going back to the question of values. When we're looking at national security in this country, all the big strategic decisions are essentially a balance between three, what I call policy pillars, security, prosperity and values. And those pillars are almost always in tension with each other and often directly conflicting each other. You've only got to think of some of the big strategic questions like our relationship with China, or should we be selling weapons to Saudi Arabia to see where those challenges are. And if we are to be successful in building coalitions and alliances in this second tier, there are certain values that we're going to have to be prepared to not abandon ourselves, but not continue to proselytize if we are successfully to find allies. That I'm afraid is the reality of operating in today's world. While simultaneously, blame ourselves wide open to the criticism of other allies that we are abandoning our values by cooperating with certain pillars. As Foreign Secretary was quite willing to cooperate with anybody who was willing to cooperate with the United Kingdom on an international platform, regardless of what the internal regime was. But it does go against the grain of saying we want to have value-based alliances. But it doesn't make us harp as vulnerable as if we can't form any alliances because we're too prissy about insisting that they show our values. We discussed earlier the domestic component of this and the challenges that the state has got in providing security against some of the new threats that are being faced. A lot of the reviews today talk about whole of national responses to the threats. What does that require in terms of the machinery of government to make it happen? Well, you're absolutely right that it does require a degree of cooperation between what you might call traditional security-minded outward-facing departments of state and those are in-term. A good example of that is the Prevent Programme, which is the anti-extremism, leading to terrorism, domestic program that's been in operation in the UK for about 15 years now. Because what Prevent Programme requires is for doctors, teachers, etc. to be prepared to report to public authorities, individuals who they feel are vulnerable or at risk of extremism. And this is a very new task for those sorts of professions who never saw themselves as being involved in the security space. And of course, there's been quite a lot of pushback, including in an earlier time by many Labour MPs, although it's been accepted by the Labour government. So it is a difficult issue and it does involve individuals who perhaps never thought of themselves as being involved. involved in state security, and you can look at the energy suppliers and the tech companies etc. All of those are now part of our critical national infrastructure, if you like, and therefore vulnerable to security threats and need to be brought into the security tend to ensure overall national and personal security. And for me, what that requires is a new level of public engagement about the security threats, which of course, the security and defense reviews are designed to do to some extent, so that people do buy into the fact that everyone has to be involved in the overall security discussion. And also to persuade them that the increase in expenditure is somehow justified. As the former national security adviser, you worked with the National Security Council, which still seems a very heavily political body. When we think about some of the conversations we've had with countries like Finland, they have quite a different structural mechanism for ensuring the delivery of whole of society approaches. How do you think future national security coordination needs to happen to actually deliver the co-opting of society more broadly into the security agenda? I don't think it necessarily requires a machinery of government change, which can take time and delays things, because although the National Security Council is a purely political body, if you look at its former membership, in reality, it can invite anyone to participate in those discussions that they think is relevant. So the Chief Scientific Officer would come to the National Security Council if there was a more technical issue that was being discussed. Academics have been invited to brief if some foreign policy crisis has blown up about which the political class doesn't know a great deal, for instance. So I think you can use both the National Security Council itself and the subcommittees in order to meet that threat or that risk that you're excluding the country. Because in the National Risk Register, if you look at the sort of tier one risk traditionally, you've got things like pandemics. You've got things like climate. You've got things like cyber security, which goes much wider than just government. You can waste a lot of time changing government structures. It's the way those structures are used that make the difference. I always used to say, will you stop saying that the National Security Council took this decision? It's the members of the National Security Council that took the decision. The National Security Council is just a tool like any other committee, and it's the people who participated in that meeting who actually take the decision. When we spoke to Lord Peter Ricketts in the first season, he was talking about the need for training of these people in order to make the best decisions in part because we seem to be much better at dealing with crises than chronic problems. And the whole of society approach seems to be about bringing in actors who haven't traditionally seen themselves as security actors, who may need to think about what that means for how they perform within their core business, if it's contextualized within that broader security framework. How do you see some of these changes happening in order to provide a more robust society, but one that remains democratic and not overly militarized? If you have a stable government, you do have the time and space to do that form of training. If you change your prime minister and your foreign secretary and your offence secretary at regular intervals, it's very difficult to say that they can be trained by some of the experts around. And then the risk is that the civil servants and the military start saying, well, we better take the decisions ourselves as much as possible because there's too much chopping and changing at the political level. But our political system has not performed very well. I think it's fair to say over the last 10 years. And that is a challenge. But not only in terms of making coherent long term policy, because the political class, of course, I generalize, has been much too focused on the very short term crisis management and political management and not looking at these longer term issues, which was precisely why the National Security Council was set up in the first place. Also, your influence oversees an ability to form alliances depends extremely heavily on both stability and strength at home. No one can pretend that any of our last seven prime ministers have had either stability or strength at home that they can project overseas. That is a major problem when many of our allies and even more of our adversaries are in post for a very long time. Jack Watling in his book Statecraft thinks there's too much centralized decision-making going on. Too many decisions are always referred upwards and that there would be a great case to be made for delegating much more responsibility to the civil servants that you just mentioned, and to the military commanders who you said were sort of in danger of taking over if there wasn't enough guidance coming from the center. Was that actually a good thing when the experts who have been working on the subject for a while take more of the decisions? Well, in theory, it might be a good idea, but it's simply impractical in the British political system. The centralization that you refer to is actually worse than that, because what we're finding is that as we get a greater Americanization of the British political system, we are essentially a presidential system masquerading as a parliamentary democracy, and that means that decisions not only get escalated to the Secretary of State for Defence, but get escalated to the Prime Minister on absolutely everything, and then things get bogged down at the centre. Everyone recognizes that as a problem, but for a whole variety of reasons including social media and the hostile press, et cetera, it makes it virtually impossible for the Prime Minister to say, "I will leave this decision to my Defence Secretary, let alone I shall leave it to the Chief of Defence staff or to the permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Defence. It's just not a tenable political position for the Prime Minister to take." Every Prime Minister for Margaret Thatcher, who is in power when I first joined the Foreign Service, right up to when I left, comes in saying, "It's the economy stupid and I'm going to trust my senior ministers, and they will take the lead on various different issues." And then over time, two things happen. One is that there is some crisis in transport or the national health or energy or whatever, and the so-called teenage scribblers at number ten, then take over the policy and it gets sucked out of the departments, and they get de-responsibleized, and secondly, Prime Minister is getting increasingly frustrated by the domestic scene and increasingly experience and knowledgeable on the overseas scene and go to more and more summits, and rather enjoy the fact that they begin to acquire a certain amount of status and authority overseas, which maybe they're losing a bit at home, and I saw that with Margaret Thatcher. I saw it with Tony Blair. I saw it with David Cameron. So that is, I think, a natural order of events, in my experience, and it is made worse by this greater centralization, Americanization, as I've put it, of the British political system. That's the truth is about the European countries. I'm sure, but some other European countries have some advantages over us. You've only got to look at France. It's a very good example of a political system much more attuned to an effective foreign and security and defence policy than the United Kingdoms is. Britain has more members of parliament than any country in the world except for China. It has more ministers than any other country in the world, bar none. And they're essentially all serving a domestic purpose, which distracts from overseas engagements. So it's easy to say, well, the foreign office has six, seven ministers. But the reality is that they're not doing what they might be able to do, which is travel around the world and make the connections and the contacts that would be useful to the UK, because they're busy doing parliamentary business or constituency business and having to come back to vote, etc. in the UK. So how does this compare to others? Perhaps France has assimilately minded and similarly scaled nation. The president of France has to go to the Assembly National once a year. The Prime Minister has to go at least once a week and normally more times than that and has to report back after every overseas summit that he goes to, let alone Prime Minister's questions and big announcements, etc. And obviously that limits the ability to focus on some of those overseas issues. And it's not a coincidence that the president of France visited Africa eight times between visits by British Prime Ministers. There's other issues where I think we can learn a bit from them without disturbing our political structures. How come that France spends less money on defense, both in real and percentage terms than the UK, but has a multi-vector independent nuclear deterrent, has an army 50% more than the size of the United Kingdoms, is able to deploy more than twice as many troops overseas at any one time, has more fighter aircraft, has more fighting ships than the UK. So when we talk about needing to spend more money, yes, absolutely, but it needs to be spent in the right way and our military establishment has not always been very good at spending the money that it's given in the right way. Sir Mark, what you have described there is a political system that seems misaligned with a strategy that talks about a whole of society approach as a generational activity about operating at the second tier to build alliances, being very adept at doing so, and it seems to be almost impossible to understand how that could deliver the kind of strategy that it's purporting through the published documents. What needs to change to make these strategies deliverable, or does a strategy need to change to be more practically based on where we are, which seems like a pretty difficult place? Well, that is very much a sort of chicken and egg situation. The strategy is written by the people with a longer term vision, but has to be implemented by the politicians, whether or the shorter term horizon, and that is a mismatch, but I don't think it would be right to completely change the strategy to fit in with our very fragile political system, because hopefully our system won't always have the degree of fragility we've seen over the last ten years. We have had stable periods for very long periods of our history, including quite recent history, so I don't think we should assume that that is the status quo. There probably needs to be a greater degree of engagement by opposition parties in the creation of the strategy in the first place. Now, again, that is extremely difficult under our adversarial political system, but nonetheless, the idea of trying to future-proof some of the key strategies shouldn't be completely impossible. After all, traditionally, foreign and security policy has been a bipartisan policy. To some extent, if we look at Britain's approach to supporting Ukraine against Russia, we look at the question of where the threats are coming from in terms of China and Russia. I think that is broadly bipartisan, even in today's fractures political environment, but when we are devising the national security strategy, we don't often bring in opposition politicians in order to check that that is not something that's going to be overturned if there is a change of government in the near future. Is the word bipartisan very appropriate in this context, given how many political parties are now quite strong in the UK? No, fair point. Of course, you've got to draw the line in somewhere, and we still do have a loyal opposition. It is a constitutional role, which it isn't in some countries, so there is a designated opposition leader. And when I was national security adviser, quite often I would be briefing members of the opposition on a particular policy in confidence through mechanisms like the privy council without the risk of leakage. So that was an understood, that is part of our constitution, but we haven't really used it when devising the longer term strategies that tends to be in response to short-term crisis decision making. Where do you see the public in this? Our conversation so far has been about the mechanisms of government, the structures of government. What needs to change in the population for us to get out of this difficult situation? There needs to be an attempt to engage more people. At the moment, what you tend to get when you're talking about security and defence is an engagement between government figures and maybe retired government figures like myself or retired generals, and there'll be some academics that will chip in with their views. But there's no real concerted attempt to have broader focus groups to go out and spread the word in other parts of the country. Now I know how difficult this is because in a different era and in a different guys, I was part of the EU roadshow that went around the United Kingdom trying to explain the benefits of membership of the European Union. And that was a noble aim by the government of the day to try and engage the public directly in issues where there was a massive amount of misinformation. But I'm under no illusions how realistic it is to make significant shifts in public perception given the overwhelming presence of social media and other forms of misinformation. And the government is ill-equipped to really deal with that level of misinformation. And yet the government owns many of the levers over education. And what we have seen from many of the Scandinavian countries is the role that education plays in creating the populations awareness of security issues rather than it being merely about focus groups and high level communication through those interested in participating. Yes, fair point. Education is an important part of that. And it's easier when there is a history that people relate to. If you're in Finland and you have your gun under the bed or you're in Switzerland, everyone knows why that is the case. Why there is this mobilization of public opinion because of the threat is so clear and obvious and close. I'm just not sure that the general public in the UK understands the different types of threat that Whitcombe is under, despite the fact that there has been a lot of effort by the government to explain that. So I think there's more to be done, but your right education is important in this respect too, because generations pass and people forget our recent major conflict in which we involved was. So Mark, thank you very much for a really fascinating conversation, which has been so wide-ranging, covering the changes to the international order, the challenges of domestic politics, and the difficulties of enacting very well-constructed, very well-conceived strategies for countries such as the UK but others in Europe. So we're very grateful to you for taking the time to talk to us today. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much. That was the final episode of this season, but we hope to return soon with more episodes. This time exploring key strategic security questions such as Great Power Competition and key strategies such as deterrents and containment to make about a few. We'll be placing these ideas in historical context and subjecting them to contemporary analysis. To find out when these episodes become available, you can always set up series alerts on your usual stream platform or follow RECI on social media. We very much hope that you'll be able to join us in the autumn, but in the meantime, thank you to our partners Corn Furry for making this possible, to Beatrice as my long-standing partner and crime on this podcast series, to our wonderful guests for giving so generously of their expertise, and of course to you for choosing to spend some of your valuable time in our company. Thank you, and we very much look forward to joining you again for season 7. Goodbye.