Britain’s defence secretary, Ben Wallace, resigned at the weekend. In a farewell interview he predicted, ostensibly based on intelligence, that Britain would be “at war by 2030”. Conflict would be on one of three fronts. If Vladimir Putin loses in Ukraine, says Wallace, “he’s still got an air force and a navy … [he’s] not done with us yet”.
The assumption here is of war between Russia and “us”. Next Wallace predicted “a total breakdown of politics in the Pacific”, where “we are deeply vulnerable”. He nowhere identified this vulnerability or why it meant war, hot or cold. Finally, there was to be “a shooting war in Africa, where al-Qaida and Isis threaten the future of nation states”. This in turn would “trigger us internationally coming to [their] aid”.
None of these scenarios is a plausible threat to national security. They emerge from some vague notion about “Britain’s role in the world”, echoed by Boris Johnson down the mustier corridors of Whitehall. The country may indeed have commercial interests at risk overseas. But that is the result of its idiotic post-Brexit diplomacy and is hardly susceptible to military resolution. Britain’s shores are not remotely threatened by an invader. The wars it has fought in the past 30 years – as against Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – have largely been wars of intervention, waged by Britain against sovereign governments overseas. They were hugely expensive and had nothing to do with national defence.
Clearly, Ukraine is an evolving nightmare, but for Wallace to predict that within seven years it will have spread across continental Europe and produced a Russian threat to the British Isles leaves me wondering what the defence ministry takes in its tea. Nato has struggled – impressively, in my view – not to misinterpret Putin’s intentions in Ukraine and thus escalate the conflict. He wants to conquer Ukraine, not the west. Containing the conflict is an absolute necessity for all sides. But even if it were to spread further along Russia’s borders, it would still not threaten Britain’s national security. Rhetoric is a terrible substitute for strategy.
As for Wallace’s thesis that “global terrorism” poses an existential threat to Britain – as claimed by Tony Blair to justify his Afghanistan and Iraq wars – that surely is defunct. The idea that troops should return to police the politics of African states only shows the neo-imperialism that still lurks beneath the skin of Brexit Britain. Can we imagine any other European politician talking in such terms?
Wallace in his interview was purporting to use privileged information to frighten the public into spending more on defence. If not, he says, we will have “soldiers armed with pitchforks”. But a prediction of war – not just a threat – is the ultimate fear-mongering. Like fear of a pandemic or climate disaster, its intention is to transpose a notional danger into the reality of home and hearth. It wants to jolt us into changing our behaviour.
What effect this has on public psychology remains uncertain. Virtually no media outlet nowadays contains any uplift or joy. If you compare today’s news items with those of, say, 50 years ago, when most news was just publicity, they are overwhelmingly miserable. Whether they make their consumers more fearful as a result, I cannot tell. Hearing Wallace, I imagine most people will just shrug and wonder which arms firm he is about to join.
Rather than spread alarm, the one contribution politicians should make is to advance intelligent debate. Britain already spends ludicrous sums defending itself against Wallace’s massed ranks of enemies on all sides. By exaggerating them, he makes it near impossible to debate what real dangers Britain faces, and how best it can guard against them.
• This article was amended on 18 July 2023 because an earlier version included Sierra Leone among examples of “wars of intervention, waged by Britain against sovereign governments overseas”. To clarify: Britain’s involvement in Sierra Leone was part of a UN operation to restore peace and disarm rebel forces.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
