Ireland sits on de-fence!
“I do not believe that Putin’s ambitions will stop at Ukraine. This is our war too and it’s not just happening on Ukraine’s territory. It’s happening all around us, in our seas, and in the form of physical and cyber attacks.”
These were the opening sentence to an opinion piece by Pat Leahy in The Irish Times of 9 March[i] under the headline:
As the EU prepares for war, Ireland sticks its head in the sand
Mr. Leahy was quoting from remarks by the then Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, at the convention of the European People’s Party (to which Fine Gael is affiliated) in Bucharest the same week. Mr. Leahy also quoted EU Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, speaking at the same event.
We need to move fast,” she said. “The threat of war may not be imminent, but it is not impossible. The risks of war should not be overblown, but they should be prepared for … That means turbocharging our defence industrial capacity in the next five years.
Mr. Leahy noted:
This week, the Commission unveiled its plan to shift the European defence industry on to what is essentially a war footing, producing armaments for the EU’s — and Ukraine’s — defence quicker and more efficiently. It will take time, but the political will, and the budget, are there.
He cited an update from Derek Scally, the newspaper’s correspondent in Germany, about what is happening there.
…the government has completely revised its defence posture and is now overtly preparing for war — in order to deter it. Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister, has a term for it: “kriegstüchtig”. “It’s about being able to go to war so we don’t have to go to war,” Pistorius said.
In Mr. Leahy’s view, if Putin does not lose in Ukraine, “there is a real and justified fear” that he will test NATO’s mutual defence pact with an attack on an Eastern European country. The threat will increase if the NATO-sceptic Donald Trump wins the US presidential election in November.
Meanwhile, when it comes to defence, Ireland continues to fiddle while Europe is at risk of burning.
We “plan” to increase defence spending to €1.5 billion annually by 2028, representing less than 0.3% of current GDP compared to a recommended NATO benchmark of 2% (which only some NATO member States reach). A long way from the Russian border we may be. But our airspace, territorial waters, undersea cables are all within Mr. Putin’s reach and defended only implicitly by NATO rather than explicitly by ourselves.
Mr. Leahy concludes witheringly:
Meanwhile, the Government this week decided to nominate the Defence Forces chief of staff Lieut Gen Seán Clancy to head the EU’s Military Committee, its highest military body. In fairness to us, we really have some neck. There is literally no end to our chutzpah on this stuff.
I turned for a riposte to one of my favourite Irish left-wing blogs The Cedar Lounge Revolution[ii]. On the go since 2006 and still using the comparatively antique blog format of Wordpress, it describes itself as a forum “for lefties too stubborn to quit”. The contributions are more in the volume and tone of George Orwell than Richard Boyd Barrett, considered and courteous, more reflection than rant even if I find plenty of reason to disagree agreeably with most of them.
The blog’s main contributor, who posts under the pseudonym, WorldbyStorm, addressed Mr. Leahy’s piece on 3 April, quoting extensively from it before critiquing from several angles which constitute a good if not exhaustive buffet of the kinds of arguments adduced from the opposite side of the argument to Mr. Leahy.
WBS asks first:
Is it in the slightest bit likely that — even factoring a Trump presidency into this, that an attack on the Baltic states or Finland or Poland is going to occur, that Putin would attempt to take on a nuclear alliance?
Roll the clock back decades and note that the fundamental underpinning of NATO was the idea that the Soviets would do no such thing precisely because it was a nuclear alliance. Either the deterrent effect is real or it’s not.
You must judge for yourselves the precise likelihood of a Russian attack on a Baltic state.
But the notion that it is not “in the slightest bit likely” has force only if predicated on the presumption that NATO would retaliate with nuclear weapons to any incursion into any of its member States, however narrow or limited.
For example, if Russia were simply to invade Lithuania using only conventional weapons, it is surely possible that a nuclear response might not be top of the NATO agenda at all. NATO is a mutual defence alliance first but one with a nuclear capability second. There must surely be more than zero possibility that Russia might be tempted to bifurcate between those two considerations.
WBS introduces an artificial binarism or fork in the road with his contention that the deterrent effect is either real or it it’s not(hing). Of course, it would be great if there was a deterrent that could eliminate the possibility of being attacked altogether, but there is no such animal. Deterrence is engaged in to reduce rather than eliminate the risk of being attacked by increasing the risk the attacker will suffer severely as a result.
WBS then makes several separate but related points about Ireland’s situation.
First, he points out fairly, that there is not much Ireland can do to alter the balance of forces between Russia and the rest of Europe. Increasing our defence spending to well above 2% of GDP would probably not even register with Mr. Putin let alone contribute to deterring him — with the unspoken implication that increasing defence spending would therefore be only a gesture or performative politics.
Well, it may be true that no conceivable increase in defence expenditure by Ireland would disturb Mr. Putin’s sleep one iota. But one could say the same of measures to combat climate change. In the global scheme of things, our emissions don’t move the dial either. But does that mean we can blithely ignore the issue? Of course not. Likewise. Ireland’s not being able to do very much to alter the global military balance does not end the debate on whether it should do more than it is doing.
Second, he notes that Ireland already “has a de facto security guarantee from the UK” with the implication that we do not therefore need to increase defence spending.
WBS doesn’t specify what he believes the nature of this security guarantee to be. And, to the best of my knowledge, if there is such an agreement, the details remain confidential to the two governments. But I would be very surprised if it is a “blanket” guarantee in the sense that Britain would see itself as obliged to rush to Ireland’s defence from aggression of any kind or scale — even if Britain itself were not under direct threat.
More likely, I would expect Britain would be vaguely committed to action only if it perceived its interests as being infringed as well as Ireland’s. While that is better than nothing, it is a thin enough reed for Ireland to rely on for its own security.
Third, he asserts that if we are bent on increasing defence spending, better to do so in a way that prioritises our local needs (e.g., coastguard and radar capacity) ahead of the wider European context especially, as he reminds us, when we are not actually members of NATO anyway.
To this, the obvious response is that it is not a case of “either/or”. Local needs might matter most but the wider context matters too and our co-participation in the EU is a relevant consideration in favour of doing so, not negated by our non-membership of NATO.
Fourth, against all that background, WBS wonders why Mr. Leahy and some of our political leaders are fussing so much about this.
Is it simply to spare our blushes? It would seem so given his [Mr. Leahy’s] concluding paragraph. But embarrassment, real or imagined, is no good motivator in foreign relations, it’s actually about the worst one can think of.
Here WBS is misrepresenting “embarrassment” as an entirely abstract and independent emotion detached from any underlying cause. Embarrassment arises not spontaneously, but from our finger prints being attached to circumstances and events which might not reflect well on us, in this case the potential perception of us as “freeloaders”.
And finally, rather than fuss about the stuff we are not doing, WBS argues that we should take a positive view of the role we are already playing in the world.
Many of us would consider, despite the UK’s de facto security guarantee, there is a role for this state in terms of engagement, an ability to stand apart or with others in Europe (as with Gaza) and further afield to strike a different tone and note on a range of issues. All this can be comfortably within a solidarity with states such as Ukraine (and Palestine) while eschewing military alliances.
This is the grandest and most self-serving defence of our being unwilling to spend money on our own defence. We are already doing so much good in the world in our role as a high wattage moral beacon encouraging and promoting peace and non-belligerence as to obviate any obligation on us to be too bothered about beefing up our defence capability as a contribution to European stability.
It is a bit like the suggestion of a few decades ago that Ireland could contribute to the reduction of the threat of nuclear obliteration worldwide and of ourselves in particular by declaring the country a nuclear-free zone. The high wattage of our moral integrity constitutes a sort of metaphorical Iron Dome shield against attack. Who would be brazen enough to attack us?
Yes, we do broadly play a positive role and promote the right principles and objectives in our engagements in world affairs. And we are a better country for the absence of any gung-ho, jingoistic, tin-hatted enthusiasm for military adventures abroad (other than the noble one of UN mandated peace missions).
But we should remember too that our showing repugnance for the notion of going to war provides only a limited and unreliable defence against the possibility of war coming to us.
In the continuing struggle between good and evil, the Devil supposedly has all the good tunes. In this debate, neither the peaceniks nor the warmongers have a monopoly of the good music.
[i] As the EU prepares for war, Ireland sticks its head in the sand — The Irish Times
[ii] War, war and more war | The Cedar Lounge Revolution (wordpress.com)
