It Takes More Than A Brown Nose To Be A Successful Foreign Secretary

Lord Cameron's Trip to the United States is delusional and doomed.

It’s only Wednesday and it’s already been a very bad week for our Foreign Secretary, Lord “Call Me Dave” Cameron. He went to the United States to meet ex-and-probable-future President Trump and, separately, intransigent Republican congressmen. The last time he met them one, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, invited him to “kiss her ass” for hectoring them about supporting Ukraine. I do hope that Lord CMD, who brown nosed his way to the top of the Conservative Party and thence to being our Prime Minister, understands that this was an insult, not a seduction.

Undaunted, his message for the United States remains that the UK thinks that the US should write yet another big cheque for Ukraine. Mike Johnson, the most senior Republican in the House of Representatives, has refused to meet Lord CMD. His boondoggle to America is likely to be as successful as his efforts to win meaningful concessions from the EU. Then his efforts caused Brexit – the exact opposite of his intent. In the pre-Brexit discussions he held a much better hand, the UK was a net contributor and the EU didn’t want us to leave. But he came up short. (How did such a proven failure at negotiation get to be Foreign Secretary? Presumably Grant Shapps wasn’t available. A topic for another day.)

Lord CMD’s mission would be challenging even if the British had led in the defence of Ukraine. We didn’t – except in Boris Johnson’s rhetoric. Since the invasion we have sent 14 excellent tanks, a bunch of clapped out howitzers, unneeded infantry vehicles, a few air defence weapons and some long range missiles. We also sent much our stockpile of artillery ammunition and NLAW anti-tank weapons, most of which have been consumed.

The total value is some $10 billion over 2 years or $5 billion a year. The UK’s GDP is about £$3 trillion, the US is about $25 trillion, say eight times as big. Yet Lord CMD is asking them to send almost 12 times as much aid as we do. Why would they do that for a foreign war in a far away place, particularly one that is not going well.

There is a military adage that one should never reinforce failure. With over $280 billion of aid in all forms sent to Ukraine over the past two years it’s reasonable to ask what has been achieved. Can Ukraine win - whatever that looks like, and will the $60 billion currently stalled in the US Congress make a significant difference?

Two years after the Russian invasion the warring parties have found themselves in a war of attrition. Consequently both armies have built extensive, deep and formidable defensive lines. As the First World War showed penetrating such defences requires an abundance of firepower combined with the ability to sustain large numbers of casualties. More recently, before the coalition broke into the less substantial Iraqi positions in the First Gulf War they spent six weeks flying some 116,000 missions dropping about 85,000 tons of bombs. That may have been overkill, but there are more Russians in Ukraine than there were Iraqis in Kuwait. The coalition that ousted them was some 900,000 strong, rather more than the current Ukrainian Army has.

The military odds favour Russia – a much larger country with a significant and expanding military-industrial base and strong, secure leadership. Ukraine has fewer people, is largely reliant upon the West (mostly the USA) for weaponry. Even if the West redoubles its commitments, current NATO ammunition stockpiles proved inadequate for modern warfare and are depleted deeply. Scaling up production is taking time and money.

On the subject of money, despite sanctions and the predictions (or hopes) of Russian economic collapse by many measures the Russian economy is in better shape than the UK’s or the US. It’s consolidated fiscal balance is better. Its national debt is just 17.2% of GDP and falling. The UK and US figures are 97.1% and 121%, both rising. Ukraine’s is 78% and rising fast.

If Russia does not fall apart under the economic pressure of western sanctions and military spending the only way that Ukraine can win is on the battlefield. It hasn’t managed that yet. As Ukraine is running out of soldiers and it’s running out of weaponry it’s hard to see how it can win. While it’s heroic to fight on in such militarily dire circumstances, no sensible person relies on a knife in a gun fight. Unless something fundamental and substantial changes on the battlefield Ukraine will lose. Whether the arrival of a few tens of F16s later this year will tilt the balance is, at best, moot. As President Macron discovered the hard way, there is no NATO or EU appetite for sending their forces to fight Russians alongside Ukraine. So we’re down to supplying money and equipment.

It may be news to Lord CMD, who was Prime Minister when the magic money tree of quantitative easing was invented, but resources are tight. Money spent on arming Ukraine can’t be spent on restoring NATO’s military capability. A NATO pragmatist would consider that the best thing to do would be to arm Ukraine sufficiently to bleed Russian capability, but not to win and not to lose completely. That would buy (or is buying) time to rearm. It may be what we are doing – whether intentional or not depends on your level of cynicism. Those who think that this is a good plan should note that the time bought comes at the cost of a much improved Russian Army.

The UK’s politicians posture as a leading power in NATO, despite 17,000 soldiers being unfit to fight, with the F35 full operating capability slipped until 2025 , no airborne early warning aircraft and a navy that can’t crew the few working ships that it has.

An earlier US President, Teddy Roosevelt, coined the foreign policy of treading softly while carrying a big stick. The UK doesn’t have a big sick - it’s barely got a small twig. Quite how Lord CMD, the FCO or anyone in the Westminster and Whitehall bubble thinks that we have any significant military influence in Washington is a mystery.

I suspect Donald Trump made this abundantly clear to Lord CMD, and I don’t think any other US politicians will disagree. Decades of political weakness have diminished Britain in the eyes of the world; if that’s what our closest ally is telling us perhaps we should listen.