[Robin McAlpine Blog] The coming war against cartoons

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The coming war against cartoons

I have a strong personal rule, one based on professional pride – I never do ‘actually, what I meant to say was…’. You do debates or you have arguments or you do interviews and you make your case and sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and you can’t undo either by writing a blog about it afterwards so you move on.

But god it is frustrating when the subject is war, defence and geopolitics. Because you’re not debating rationally with a position or an argument, you’re wrestling with a load of ghost stories and cartoons. The other side always and forever has some big, petrifying baddy and just shouting ‘baddie!’ is plenty much to justify insane defence spending. It’s like ‘Santa’s naughty list’, there only to keep the children in line.

I did the BBC Scotland Morning Call programme this morning. Again and again I found what I always find on these occasions – someone claiming authority or experience that you don’t have tells you it’s much scarier than you think out there and you must do what they tell you because you don’t understand.

That is easy. The security establishment has so much money, so much propaganda capacity and such relentless access to media and commentators that trying to correct their nonsense is really difficult. It takes them about five seconds to say ‘Putin is Hitler and is going to conquer Europe!’ but it takes half a dozen sentences to explain how ludicrous that is.

And then as you’re doing that they’re back with ‘nukes keep the peace’ or ‘you must listen to defence procurement experts or die’ or ‘nuclear bombs prevent cybercrime’ and then when you’re running around trying to explain that those cartoon characters are not real, they’re off onto the next piece of nonsense.

So just for the sake of my blood pressure let me leave some coherent answers to these silly, childlike talking points so I can get on with some proper work trying to do something actually useful which will not result in me buying an aircraft carrier with no crew to sail it and no airplanes to land on it, or on 12 years of Trident missile test fires which have literally all gone embarrassingly wrong on camera.

Nuclear weapons do not stop wars and conflict or create peace. Go and have a look at the list of armed conflicts from 80 years before the second world war and the 80 years afterwards and see if you can tell me the difference. There has been a new armed conflict of a global or regional scale on average every two years since the second world war.

Meanwhile there wasn’t a war between ‘great powers’ in the nuclear age. But before the First and Second World Wars there were probably only really three in the preceding three centuries (Napoleonic, Seven Years and Crimea wars, with the 30 Years War being a conflict inside a Great Power).

Great powers don’t go to war with each other much. In fact the warnings of the possibility that two great powers might go to war seem to have increased sharply in the nuclear era, not reduced. Forget the propaganda, neither the Soviet Union nor the United States wanted a hot war during the Cold War. Great powers don’t like fighting great powers.

Meanwhile India and Pakistan are both nuclear powers and they’re shooting guns at each other right now. In Europe the thing that prevented war in the second half of the 20^th century was the welfare state and the various continental negotiating bodies (which now means the European Union).

Territorial invasion is vanishingly unlikely and isn’t defended with nuclear weapons anyway

Russia is not a credible territorial threat to Europe. It is a credible threat to some of its smaller neighbours, but Russia has an economy slightly bigger than Spain’s and slightly smaller than Italy’s. The UK is not a long way away from being twice as wealthy. So then they say ‘but there’s lots of them’ (large population). OK, so let’s do GDP per capita.

Russia – £13,800, Britain – £49,500. So Britain has 3.6 times as much wealth on its own to defend each person in Britain than Russia has to defend each person in Russia. By this point in the Ukraine War Russia is spending quite a bit on military but it’s only about half as much again as Britain spends. But we spend half as much more than them per capita.

If you doubt any of this, let’s have a look at how they’re getting on. Ukraine in 2022 was Europe’s poorest country and has a giant land border with Russia. After three years of fighting Russia hasn’t even nearly conquered Ukraine – but they’re ready to subjugate Europe any moment? Really?

Just for completeness, non-Russian Europe as a whole is now spending over £400 billion pounds on defence, more than five times as much as Russia. Our collective population is coming on for four times that of Russia.

Putin has not said he wants to conquer Europe. Putin says a lot of things and you need to piece a lot of tendentious stuff together to turn him into an imperial Hitler character. Russia has invaded two countries in 40 years; we’ve invaded dozens. Trump is much, much more explicit about annexing other sovereign territory than Putin. Russia has localised delusions of power but its ability to follow through on this is not realistic.

Nor has China. China makes Russia look utterly benign if we’re just doing numbers and competence. China has incredible manufacturing and technology capacity, controls most of the world’s crucial rare earth minerals, is increasing military spending and has an enormous population.

All true. It also has a total of one overseas military base compared to the US’s 750. It is a threat to one country militarily (again, that’s virtually pacifism compared to the Western alliance). For the rest of us it is a threat economically, but let’s start weighing that against the current US. And let’s just remember who is threatening who. China doesn’t actually state that doing substantial damage to the US economy is a major national policy goal, yet that’s what the US says about China.

UK defence experts have shown serial incompetence. There is one thing every defence commentator in the world agrees on and that is that the UK’s military leaders demonstrate an almost universal inability to undertake effective military procurement (do a web search). They don’t buy weapons based on threat assessment but on how it makes them look and they make a mess of it either way.

There are a total of 12 countries in the world that have aircraft carriers. The UK has two, ten per cent of them. Not enough planes or personnel to put on them and nowhere legitimate to go with them, but hey, someone has to sail into town to make sure that Israel can bomb Gaza with impunity.

Here is the thing that the experts will tell you if you actually listen to their analysis and not their propaganda. The analysis says that none of the threats to the UK are solved by nukes; cyber attacks, attacks on power and telecommunications infrastructure, organised crime and the impacts that will come from climate change are real. Territorial invasion is vanishingly unlikely and isn’t defended with nuclear weapons anyway.

We lived in peace as the result of 20 years of diplomatic engagement, negotiation and repeated steps towards mutual deescalation – and yet I find myself in a cartoon in which it was actually a Coyote with a giant hammer that saved us all

Virtually the only conceivable territorial threat comes to infrastructure – the cutting of subsea data cables, attacks on off-shore energy. There is no tactical response to any of this (any of it) for which nuclear weapons are in any way useful. What are we really saying – that if our internet is cut in suspicious circumstances we’re going to nuke Moscow? Seriously, time to grow up.

(The Nato chap I was on the radio with suggested that nuclear bombs were a good way to bring down power cables. I mean, I suppose – but then by the same reasoning nukes are a valid solution to limescale, mildew and rising damp. It was so daft I didn’t know what to say.)

We need to spend on defence. Yes, I accept that, but it isn’t weapons we lack but defence infrastructure like autonomous satellite coverage for monitoring threats. Why don’t we have that infrastructure? Because of the long-term incompetence of the people who spend on defence. ‘We’ve spent 40 years pissing away mind-numbing amounts of money and we’ve totally spaced it so give us some more please’ – well, I suppose it’s a stance.

We do need to spend on security – cyber security, drones for territorial protection and surveillance, an effective coastguard (we don’t really have that any more), military intercept ships patrolling our waters, food and energy system resilience strategies. Nukes aren’t about security but about imperial posturing and phenomenal private sector profits. It is cheap drones protecting Ukraine, not nukes.

There was no way on earth Ukraine was keeping its nukes. This is the laziest, craziest argument of them all. Ukraine would have used nukes would it? How? Ukraine never had nuclear weapons, Russia had nuclear weapons. If Scotland becomes independent, do the UK’s nukes come to us? Every time they say that only Ukraine has ever given up nukes, why do they pretend Kazakstan didn’t? Too inconvenient?

The UK is one of the richest countries in Europe and we’ve struggled (basically failed) to maintain a properly functioning nuclear missile system. The idea that Europe’s poorest country could have maintained a working nuclear arsenal (which it never owned in the first place) for 20 years is ludicrous. Literally no-one on the planet wanted them to including Nato. Jeez…

Only deescalation keeps us safe. I need to stop now because, like I say, this is complicated and contains about 20 different significant issues that each demand complex, intelligent, grown-up analysis. I can’t defeat all the cartoon baddies in that space without dropping to the war party’s level. It would take me too long here to even explain that Putin tried to join Nato twice and it was us that chose to isolate, corner and humiliate him.

But I will pick up one point that was made towards the end – our generation grew up with peace, I was told. I was somewhat gobsmacked by the argument that this was a result of military spending. That must be the single most delusional thing I heard all day.

We grew up in peace because of the Malta Summit, the Helsinki Summit, the Camp David Summit, the Paris Summit, the Helsinki Accords, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Outer Space Treaty and many more.

We lived in peace as the result of 20 years of diplomatic engagement, negotiation and repeated steps towards mutual deescalation. And yet I find myself in a cartoon in which it was actually a Coyote with a giant hammer that saved us all and I’m being asked the question ‘should the Coyote get a new hammer or not?’.

Why are humans in such peril just now? Because we are dumb as fuck, easily manipulated and have the memory of a goldfish. So let’s get those bombs built and let’s get ready for the war they’re so desperate to kick off. It’s not like rational argument is going to stop them.

Source: The coming war against cartoons