As the Guardian reports this morning:
Russia is at war with Britain, the US is no longer a reliable ally and the UK has to respond by becoming more cohesive and more resilient, according to one of the three authors of the strategic defence review.
Fiona Hill, from County Durham, became the White House's chief Russia adviser during Donald Trump's first term and contributed to the British government's strategy. She made the remarks in an interview with the Guardian.
Very politely, why are we listening to this person who is deeply aligned to the far-right and the military-industrial complex?
I can only presume she grew up reading those booklets about the threat from nuclear attack and diligently built her shelter under the stairs, as people were instructed to do, and has since never got over the emotional scars that she suffered as a result.
It's a basis of her judgment that we are, apparently, to have more missiles aimed at Russia but not tackle poverty in the UK.
I despair.
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How utterly incredible- I’d just read that piece you quoted, and fulminating, turned to my partner, saying “oh crikey, let’s get some sanity and see what Richard has to say this morning”.
The piece also lists Lord Robertson (LR) who, whilst chair of the most powerful military alliance the planet had ever seen, if memory serves, said he’d felt bullied by John Humphry’s whilst being interviewed on the BBC’s Today programme… really unpleasant people… LR was also formely a Labour MP, I think.
Yuk.
He was….
Russia IS at war with the West, but it’s not a war that is being fought with armed forces, it is a war of words and ideas, and we are losing. Badly.
They say that generals always plan to fight the previous war, and never has this been more true. We don’t need more guns, we definitely don’t need more nuclear submarines. Instead we need to remove the discontent that is being leveraged to tear at the fabric of our society. That means investment. Investment in the NHS. Investment in public transport. Investment in good homes. Investment in tackling the climate emergency. Investment in the justice system, with a focus on rehabilitation. Investment in education. And so on.
People need a vision of the future which excites them. One they can believe in. One they are willing to help to bring about. They need leadership!
Agreed
So true…. and if all those things were achieved here then that knowledge would bleed into places like Russia and bring about internal pressure for change….by far a better way to fight a war.
Ah yes, Kim SJ, but you failed the ask the question from Reform’s unquestionably brilliant Richard Tice, is it “genuinely their choice”.
So when people say they want government to invest in health, education and public transport, as you highlight, the equally brilliant Keir Starmer understood immediately that what people genuinely choose is really armaments, nuclear submarines and a pillbox on every corner!
For Labour, read Reform, read Tory – the Conclave of the Cloth-eared.
That’s extreme centrism for you.
I did wonder where this obsession with spending insane amounts of money on nuclear weapons came from. And like you am horrified that apparently we can’t afford to tackle child poverty, but we can afford billions on pointless nuclear weapons that are surely in violation of non proliferation agreements.
So we have a serious cost of living crisis that is getting worse for those at the bottom who are largely working families not pensioners and a climate emergency, but a Labour government chooses to spend on defence and largely ignore our main problems. I’m glad I didn’t vote for them but I despair at their priorities and what this country has become.
The nuclear Viagra is a central pillar of the British state’s geopolitical self-image. Hungry children and cold pensioners be damned, as long as Johnny Foreigner knows Britannia can summon hellfire.
Sadly true, particularly I think among the older generation who are generally having a better time of it and still think of us as some big imperial power, not (especially post Brexit) the small rather insignificant island we have become.
How we can be a great country when we treat our poor and disabled so badly is beyond me.
Agreed
Love of nuclear weapons comes from love of deterrence theory. Deterrence theory relies upon game theory. Welfare deterrence and immigration deterrence all stem from the same argument. It think it is really rare that someone only supports 1 of these things.
So, the UK has to become more “cohesive” and more “resilient”?
I have a feeling that the author of those words is not thinking about them in the same way that I do.
She is thinking about resilience in terms of arms expenditure, weapons posession, size of the army, military and economic alliances,
and
cohesion in terms of damping down dissent, and enforcing a more uniform vision of society on a compliant cowed economically precarious population.
I think of resilience in terms of determination to do the right thing even if it is difficult, of strength being found even in weakness, because the cause is just.
I think of cohesion as a diverse society held together by some shared values, a shared humanity, and a determination to care for their neighbour, especially the more vulnerable, and even global neighbour.
I think Fiona Hill and I see the world (and the English language) differently, and that difference is fundamentally a moral one.
Indeed.
It seems to me that the headline is pretty accurate even if the solutions offered are not.
Worth making the point that during the ‘Cold War’ western nations aspired to offer their populations improved standards of living precisely so that they did not support communism. With its collapse well the results are all around us.
Perhaps if Governments were to see the importance of keeping their citizens ‘on side’ it would be no bad thing
Let’s not confuse Russia with communism, whatever that supposedly was. It is fascist now, and killing a lot of it’s own population.
Agreed.
What disturbed me most in the article was Fiona Hill’s suggestion of schools having “cadet forces” (I have visions of morning drills like the RSS in India which is linked to Modi’s BJP!). Very, very chilling.
(Though I have for a long time thought first aid in schools is a good thing, simply so that people have greater knowledge of how to help in an accident at home or anywhere else).
(I read more on George Robertson’s background this week, and his central motivation in his life seems to be hatred for Scottish nationalism – and a projection of British unionism – all his statements around the 2014 indyref were about a fear (widely shared) of indy leading to Britain being no longer a “great power”. It is pathetic, and it must be exhausting for Robertson to maintain such an aversion to Scottishness and cling to unionism.)
David Edgerton has a brilliant critique of the defence review here, that is well worth a read:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/04/labour-strategic-defence-review-uk-dividend
A great deal to agree with.
“ it must be exhausting for Robertson to maintain such an aversion to Scottishness and cling to unionism”
And he was born a Scot. Not sure what he is now.
The obvious problem with ‘defence experts’, and military leaders, is that they tend to have a vested interest in bigging up military threats.
Agreed
Fiona Hill has lived in the US for the past 30 years and was White House’s chief Russia adviser during Donald Trump’s first term. And last night on BBC Any Questions we had Sarah Elliot on the panel – a spokesperson for Republicans. She does apparently live in London now but spent many years in America working for the Republicans and is now part of what is laughingly called the Prosperity Institute- previously Legatum – aiming to heavily influence UK politics.
Seems we are being softened up to the announcement that we are the 51st state.
You mean, we aren’t already?
Sarah Elliott
Wife of TaxPayers’ Alliance founder and Leave leader Matthew Elliott, who himself worked with Dominic Cummings (think Tufton Street).
Ties with Robert Mercer and the Koch brothers.
For sickening details:
https://www.desmog.com/2018/11/18/matthew-sarah-elliott-uk-power-couple-linking-us-libertarians-and-fossil-fuel-lobbyists-brexit/
[Richard, I may have written this slightly earlier and clicked the wrong part of my screen, if it appears to be moderated, please delete it.]
Thanks
Airstrip One.
A dirty post 1963 UK state truth save for Northern Ireland ? Back in the late 1990s my mom was living in Cork. An old family friend visited us there. He had long before been outed as working for the US NSA but we maintained civil relations by never mentioning it. I had recently moved to Northern Ireland with my Northern Irish partner. He let slip that he was not allowed to cross the border under any circumstances. Perhaps yet another reason, to add to the panoply, why Starmer will not even discuss any terms for his Secretary of State to call a border poll and why, after pre election promising to entirely ditch the heinous UK Legacy Act, he has rolled back on this and delivered watered down window dressing reforms that still do not allow survivors and victims full judicial disclosure of UK state crimes here so deny any access to due justice. If the UK were given special dispensation to do as they pleased militarily in N.I. within its 1960s Cold War, what I call the James Bond era, special’ US military relationship, now, yet again, Northern Ireland becomes the inconvenient Frankenstein child who will not go away.
Unfortunately, it’s looking increasingly likely that you, and others, are going to have to start making the case for tackling poverty while at the same time watching Defence expenditure rise. But don’t despair. Because I think you, with others, can do just that.
We can.
There are a number of reasons to listen to her.
She is saying Russia is engaged in hybrid warfare of a sort we have seen over recent decades. She wrote about it in 2015 before she was an advisor to the NSA. Her warnings have been proven correct.
She speaks Russia, and has a Ph. D in Russian history, has lived briefly in Russia, has met Putin and written on the state of Russia and its problems. She has seen the world from the perspective of the American security services without becoming a Neo-Con. Like Tim Snyder, she is speaking from a close study of the evidence.
She is no Neo-liberal, having seen the devastation of it upon the UK and and the US. Her father, a former coal miner, told her ‘there is nothing for you here’ -the title of her book. To quote her from the interview “deindustrialisation and a rise of inequality in Russia and the US had contributed to the rise in national populism in both countries. Politicians in Britain, or elsewhere, “have to be much more creative and engage people”. The Guardian interview mentions ‘greater internal cohesion’ and she is also talking about a rejection of Farage-ism and populist policies. She doesn’t go into economics but I doubt she would object to the sort of ideas we discuss here.
We DO need the things Kim SJ mentions but there is still an external threat to Europe of which we are a part. If we had a more equal society it would lessen the appeal of parties like Reform, AfD, National Rally, Fratelli de italia, etc. In the longer run it might encourage reform and change in Russia. Sweden and Finland are probably nearer to a fairer sort of society than we are but have reversed post war foreign policy to join NATO. The Baltics and Poland have ramped up defence spending and even Germany has started to repair her run down forces. People there probably find her ideas useful. But there remains a threat which needs to be analysed and not, as she says, necessarily in “traditional conceptions of war”.
In her latest Youtube she discusses how the US under Trump is becoming more like Russia. He is also not a reliable ally. I think most of Europe agrees. That is also an issue.
We need a wider discussion of the nature of the threat. It is not 1939 but it is not 1989 either.
Sorry, but someone can appraise the evidence and still come to all the wrong conclusions. She is. Of course we are engaged in different forms of warfare. So how can she conclude we need more nuclear subs? That’s just bizarre.
Of course we can draw different conclusions about the nature and extent of the threat. I see a lot to back her analysis. As does much of Eastern Europe.
We need, as she says, a lot of further discussion about how to meet it. She is not advocating defence by nuclear weapons alone.
As for nuclear deterrent submarines, the existing ones are coming to the end of their lives. She, as far as I aware, has not commented on that except she is one of the three authors the Defence Review and that section 71 sees the deterrent force as essential. The polls tell us about 40% support it, a third are neither for or against and about a quarter against it. The only people threatening the use of nuclear weapons are not in NATO.
The other nuclear submarines are very effective naval warships. It is unlikely that we would fight a serious naval war by ourselves but it would be very unwise to think that someone else would supply those vessels. The US could but as she says, it is currently at least, an unreliable ally. Almost half our food is imported, the majority from Europe but much of it sea borne. Much else is imported by sea.
I would say we can afford to provide better health, housing, climate change measures and education and strengthen defence forces, together with Europe, to have a force capable of defending the continent. Working out the detail of that is better than wishful thinking that it will all go away.
Remind me what would happen if we ever fought a naval war.
Who with?
What for?
Would there be any survivors on the planet?
What is this all about then?
Why would anyone start a nuclear war? Well, they might be mad, in which case it’s not clear that a threat of retaliation would deter them. In almost all other scenarios, using nukes makes no sense, because you will scorch-earth all potential gains you might be hoping to make, or at least create such universal condemnation that you will become an international pariah.
The only other credible scenario is that a country feels so threatened that they decide that a nuclear strike is their only option for survival. It seems to me that our ownership of a nuclear capability is by far the most likely reason that our enemies would make that call. Which means that having nuclear weapons makes us far *less* safe, not safer.
Warships can be operational for 20-30 years, Things change in that time. Wars can be unexpected and warships can’t be built in a year. Submarines are primarily designed to counter warships though they can be used in other ways as recently firing cruise missiles in the Middle East.
A navy can be used in support of other nations or UN operations like the Kuwait war. Few foresaw that. They can also be used for blockade or escort merchant ships as they did in the Gulf or the Red Sea as last year. They are flexible weapons. It is not impossible in the future that shipping bound for the UK or Europe could be attacked by a hostile state and without a viable navy it would be vulnerable. Thus we need to be part of a European/ North Atlantic defence alliance. I am not talking about nuclear exchanges.
We will have to agree to differ.
I have to agree with much that Ian says about Dr Fiona Hill, Richard. And while I might not agree with all her conclusions (as you say, the idea of fighting a naval war in this day and age is fanciful – a Russia’s (largely ex) Black Sea Fleet would testify) in the Guardian article, I’ve no doubt she knows more about Russia than me and you will ever do. ,
Furthermore, Ian forgot to mention one of the most important aspect of Dr Hill’s career so far: she was one of the few people in Trump’s first administration to have the courage to testify against Trump in the first impeachment (the one about Russian interference in the election). And, like Alexander Vindman, paid the price.
But if she reaches the wrong conclusions, and I think she has, so what? That is my question, amd my concern abput her. Knowledge without judgement is not wisdom.
Thanks, Ivan. I didn’t mention her brave stand at the impeachment because of space. I don’t see the evidence when Richard writes she is “aligned to the Far Right” . What she says is anti- that stance. Rachel Meadow would not have endorsed her book if was.
The question Richard posed is why do we listen to her? I would suggest it’s because she is an experienced analyst of Russia with a proven track record. It is easier, I think, to agree a strategy, than to assess the hardware to implement that strategy. People have commented on the fate of the Black Sea fleet but if one examines the detail almost all of the losses were landing ships, patrol craft or the 1980s vintage Moskva. Many were in port. Not modern warships at sea.
Naval warfare is not implausible when one looks at the vulnerability of the internet links, although It might not be like previous conflicts. It is has been recognised by a number of defence commentators.
As I said, we’re going to have to disagree.
As I said to Ivan, none of that suppoosed knowledge aligns with the Defence Review. I can’t relate her supposed actions and words: that is the incoherence I am drawing attention to, nand it seems decidely friendly to the limkiray indsutrial estabishment to me, hemnce my suggestion.
I knew of her career and claims made for her and by her: I chose to say that I cannot find the sense in her actions. If I could fgind that coherence I would have to revise my opinion. It happens.
All Hill is, is an opportunist – the international version of Morgan McSweeney – we should call this phenomenon ‘Mcsweeneyism’ or Mandelsonism or something like that, denoting worm-tongue like behaviour and trouble causing.
All I see is Putin’s revenge, Hill or no Hill. He’s a devilishly clever bastard for sure.
Diverting money – that we pretend in the West is scarce – from a socially beneficial area of society to pay to defend ourselves from Putin is hugely redolent of the way in which the West ground down the Soviet Union with the arms and space race and led to the unravelling of Soviet Russia – so it is told. And it will unravel the West into fascism unless it gets its head out of its Neo-liberal arse.
The message to the West is ‘what goes around comes around’. Congratulations. You must all be very proud.
All because of your hard line christian attitude to assimilate by conversion, not accommodation.
I’ve had just about enough of these Neo-liberal Jesuits.
Your comparison of Putin’s tactics with the way the West won the Cold War against the USSR is spot on. Now we are the ones whose standard of living is being eroded, and just as with the USSR it is failures of leadership that is leading to our downfall.
Some of the stuff the G quoted seemed fair enough:
“We can’t rely exclusively on anyone anymore,” …. Britain needed a different mindset” based as much on traditional defence as on social resilience”. And….”Hill said she saw that deindustrialisation and a rise of inequality in Russia and the US had contributed to the rise in national populism in both countries. Politicians in Britain, or elsewhere, “have to be much more creative and engage people where they are at” I thought this was a very fair comment.
I did like this: “People keep saying the British army has the smallest number of troops since the Napoleonic era. Why is the Napoleonic era relevant? ….The Ukrainians are fighting with drones. Even though they have no navy, they sank a third of the Russian Black Sea fleet”
I recently saw pictures of 4 “aircraft carriers” – one was a Ukrainian truck. The threat might be military (Russia nuking the UK? Why?)– but it looks more like a socioeconomic threat which Hill seems to ack’ (national populism). Problem is, the current crop of politicos tend to reach for cheque books before proper reflection and, the picture of “future war” (lets face short of genetic re-engineering humans will always fight wars) is changing very fast (think 1930s). My concern is that the defence review had a narrow input – if the politico/military/socioeconomic scene is in turmoil – perhaps reviews need broad inputs?.
My point is the total disconnect between this reasoning and the piece she put her name on. If she really understood she should have issued a minority report. But, she didn’t. So what is she really about? The inconsistency is incoherent.
Did not President Eisenhower in a valedictory speech warn about the power of the industrial/military complex? Having read books like Catherine Belton’s “Putin’s People” I have no doubt that Putin has declared war (of sorts) against the West but, like the rest of us, he is mortal. By the time that any of these proposals in the Defence Review come to fruition Putin is likely to have been long in his grave. Will anyone following him as leader in Russia be as unstable and delusional as him? May be, may be not. But, as we are seeing already this conflict is being fought using new 21st century warfare – drones, cyber attacks etc. How are 12 new nuclear subs and nuclear missiles going to be of much use against these new tactics? So we must spend hundreds of billions on weapons that, in all likelihood, will never be used whilst there will be no money for hospitals, schools and transport etc? If you “follow the money” it appears that Eisenhower’s warning has been deliberately ignored. As I have said before, when did you last see and impoverished weapons manufacturer or a hard-up arms dealer? They are the only ones who stand to gain from this Review. And all the time, the world burns.
Unless there is something people believe in to defend there is no point having defence.
Agreed. On a related point, I have heard a lot of criticism that the young are not interested in fighting a war and that somehow is a failing on their part. But if I were young today why would I risk my life for a society that has robbed my generation of affordable homes, job security and saddled me with student debt etc?
That is the reasonable question they ask.
Yes – very left field that she was one third of the ‘review’ team. Of course Starmer’s Labour was not going to really want a long term dispassionate perspective as to ‘how did we get here?’, or ‘does Russian always have to be our enemy’?
All the stuff about ‘this are different’ – cyber warfare, drones, sabotage etc etc – but still hijacked by BAE systems and Rolls Royce – the ‘strategy’ is still overwhelmingly the same old useless non-functioning massive hardware , the nuclear fetish that no UK govt will ever reject, – and breaking non proliferation treaties – how is that going to increase our security?
There are other ways of engaging with Russia – including diplomacy, trade, soft power, economic sanctions or non sanctions etc etc.
Agreed
If you want to understand Russia from the perspective of someone with lived experience, I highly recommend Elvira Bary’s YouTube channel — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zloxmro41Bo&t=350s
Thanks for that. I can recommend:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gyMho1c0ig
War in Ukraine: What Russia’s Elite Really Want
The heart of the matter is reached @ 11.46 – & it’s not pretty but does have the ring of truth about it.
Catherin Belton & her books come to +/- the same view – mafia state/mafia mentality
It does have a ring of truth
But it doesn’t create a defence threat of the sort Hill says we will face.
Is the UK defending only the UK?
If no, then who? Ukraine? Poland? The Baltics? The Scandics? Germany?
How? With What?
Against what Russian threat? (assuming Russians)
Why? (why defend others?)
The why is perhaps the most important, given flying pigs are more likely than a land invasion of Uk by Russia.
Partial answers are provided in some of the Youtube links. As per, fiction provides a more nuanced perspective – Iain M Banks Consider Phlebas – the appendicies.
& all is predicated on the UK body politic doing something about the sad state of the UK & its population (at the same time). Weighty matters, deserving more than Starmer managerialism.
Agreed
one of my former students worked in Belarus for some years. he says the ‘Moscowvites’ see themselves as superior and first in line for promotion.
Having a Belarus flag ( white over red over white) not the red and Green soviet era flag, can get you arrested.
Unpalatable though it is, it’s probably time to start thinking about Guns and Butter. So, dual-use funding, NHS improvements, green energy resilience, spending in deprived areas. That sort of thing.
I disagree
Without butter there is no reason for defence.
I didn’t explain myself properly. What I mean is that some of the increase in Defence spending can be spent on meeting a Defence need while at the same time improving peacetime infrastructure. So for example, spending on the NHS to enable it to deal with a surge in casualties could, if done wisely, also improve peacetime provision for civilians.
Accepted
Although war, and preparing for war, is an expensive business, it does also have benefits because it tends to speed up technological developments that later generations take for granted and forget how they came about. Take for example, antibiotics. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. It took 12 years before Florey and Chain isolated the purified compound and it was first used to treat one patient in 1942. By D-day Churchill was worrying about whether we would have enough penicillin to treat injured troops. How long would we have had to wait for antibiotics if World War 2 had not happened? Probably decades, and how many people would have died from bacterial infections in the meantime. Or take digital computers, first developed in World War 2 for code-breaking and creating gunnery tables. Or take the internet itself, developed initially by DARPA in the USA to provide a robust communications network in the event of a nuclear war.
Maybe…
Diggering deeper (direction Auzzie) & falling into the class of making friends & selling weapons:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO3gpKLDdjk
Kazakhstan and the UK approved a plan of military cooperation for 2025-2026 (aka weapons sales – I say Carruthers open the Bolly will you).
(consultant to the Kazakhs a certain Mr A.B.Liar).
Begs the question why? After all the Kazaks have an “easily defended” 4000km border with Russia. What could possibly go wrong?
How can Hill say “Russia has hardened as an adversary in ways that we probably hadn’t fully anticipated”?
Putin said the following in his 2007 Munich speech:
“I think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”
You don’t have to agree with what Putin said but you can’t ignore it. He gave years of warning that Russia would never accept NATO expansion into Ukraine and the US with its loyal UK sidekick went along with the policy anyway. So the idea that Russia’s more adversarial position could not have been anticipated is simply nonsense. Hill is either an amnesiac or a liar. God help us with people like this advising the UK government on Russia policy.
She was chosen because she thought this way, by a government (which got rid of the differently-thinking Mr Corbyn) which knows it must think this way if it is to keep on the right side of the USA.
Whatever their views on defence strategy, anyone (publicly) wedded to the “household finances analogy” and “cast iron fiscal rules” will have to pretend to redo their sums when prioritising expenditure.
It’s That Pensions Thing Again!
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jun/07/pensions-report-cuts-rachel-reeves-planned-growth-funds-from-160bn-to-11bn
Oh dear!
How many such public humiliations can a Chancellor take?
What is left of her oh so unarguable insistence that she would be an “iron chancellor”?
This starry eyed assessment is from July last year…
https://moneyweek.com/economy/people/rachel-reeves-britains-new-iron-chancellor
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, the “fiscal event” has to be rewritten AGAIN.
I think your TWR2024 may yet have its day, and acknowledging MMT truths may prove to have fewer political consequences than giving up this constant reset of the “balanced budget” abacus.
Wakey wakey Labour MPs. You’ve got 4 more years of this before you face oblivion.
Instead of the “how do we pay for it?” question (and these fortnightly “resets”), someone other McSweeney or Trevor Chinn (perhaps the PLP or even, dare we say it, the membership?) needs to ask the REALLY important question, “What do we WANT to do?” and then start working out (about 5 years too late), how to actually DO it.
The pension thing was always a myth…
When I hear and read the drums of war being played in the media… I always think back to a quote that am not sure if I imagined, as I have not been able to find it.
The quote itself was from John Major, in late 1990. When asked about a possible war in Iraq and Iraq having nuclear weapons, he said something along the lines of ‘even if Iraq had nuclear weapons and could launch, we have a very reliable deterrent, so I am not concerned.’
What was this deterrent? My only thought at the time was, whatever happened to SDI? Did they covertly develop that and it operational?
What we have been hearing this week is the pounding of the war drums to close down the austerity argument.
Its all fear and oppression in the UK and a lot of people have had enough.
There MUST be a better way.
Ian Stevenson says the “only countries threatening to use nuclear weapons are not in NATO.” This is manifest nonsense! The cornerstone of NATO’s strategic posture is nuclear “deterrence “. This is based on the idea that under certain circumstances NATO would use the nuclear WMDs allocated by member states to the NATO Supreme Commander, always an American. Nuclear deterrence works based on a threat to use nuclear WMDs.
David
all the nuclear powers say their ownership of nuclear weapons is to deter.
I haven’t seen -unless you know otherwise- of any of the NATO nuclear powers threatening to use them in the last few years.
Perhaps I should have been clearer
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/sep/25/vladimir-putin-warns-west-nuclear-weapons
The trouble is that while the UK has 10% of the planet’s aircraft carriers (without aircraft), we have almost no ability to actually defend the UK. Russia (for example) attacks the North Sea oil platforms. What are we going to do? The RN only has about 22 ships of which a third are under repair and another third are serving imperial delusions around the globe. My cousin works in data centres and says that 5 strategically placed car bombs around London (outside our Internet data nodes) would disconnect the UK from the Internet for at least a week. What are we doing about that? The National Grid last year did a study that said a ‘black restart’ of the Grid (as happened in Spain recently) could take 10 days (because you need large baseload power and we have closed most of that). What are we doing about grid security? Just imagine what would happen in London if there was a 10 day power outage!
I don’t buy the Russia is the Enemy stuff. It was the US (or partners) that blew up Nordstream. It was the US /NATO that provoked the Ukraine war (2014 or earlier). Russia is such a powerful foe that they have struggled for nearly 3 years to subdue Europe’s poorest country. However, we have now poked and prodded the Russian Bear to the point that probably in five years they will be a threat.
It remains true, though, that Nukes are no defence. How have they stopped all the wars since 1945? India and Pakistan both have nukes and did that stop war? These are just p**is extenders and virility symbols for the elite.
I think Fiona Hill’s warning regarding Russian aggression is well worth taking heed of. However, I can not agree with her defense strategy being put forward to the British political ruling class. The dangers to national security for the UK, EU and the US, as I perceive them, lie much closer to home in potential civil conflicts. Social injustice flashpoints that are easily leveraged by hostile agents. Societal weaknesses that have been and continue to be excacerbated by decades of socially destructive political ideology and incompetence. This article makes a convincing argument for our near futures bring marred not by big wars far from home but by civil wars erupting in response to unaddressed social iniquities:https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west/
Agreed
Being an expert in Russia makes you think Russie is the big issue
And I dont think it is
It is an old canard that nation states initially mimic their last war when a new one breaks out. So the UK’s ruling class and military leadership recent actions fixation upon Russia fits that description. My more cynical self wonders if their bombastic words fuelling fear and justifying a new profitable arms race is a false flag operation designed to terrorise an increasingly righteously raging put upon by neoliberal social cruelties population into a Blitz spirit conformity to siphon off any potential civil unrest.
[…] gathered from reactions to my comments on what Fiona Hill had to say about the UK defence review, which I posted here yesterday, that not everybody agreed with my […]
Fiona comes from my part of the world, and grew up in a poverty-stricken Bishop Auckland post miners strike. She was a bright girl whose memoir identifies the struggles that most people with her background face with social mobility, shows a deep sense of solidarity with her background and a capacity to identify the systems and processes that worked there against people in other parts of the world. She also speaks of the strokes of good luck that enabled her to move on and up. She is no right-winger, in my view. She may have worked in the Trump administration (seconded from the Brookings Institute) but she was effectively forced out because, despite speaking Russian fluently and having lived there, Trump preferred to listen to one of his business mates on Russia and not her. Her view of what is needed defensively for the UK in military terms is not mine, but she also spoke of the necessity to rebuild social capital amongst our communities and resilience in our food production and distribution. She is the only person I know to have watched Putin very closely for a couple of decades and even sat beside him once for dinner. She might know more about his likely interests and public games than we do.
Then she should not have lent her name to the Defence Review.
I hear what you say, and see what she has done, and cannot reconcile the two.
Even without the USA, NATO countries would still have a 3 to 1 advantage over Russia in a conventional war on all counts.
And the likelihood of Russia trying to invade the UK is vanishingly small.
https://quincyinst.org/research/right-sizing-the-russian-threat-to-europe/