Anne-Marie Trevelyan is a former MP, Secretary of State for International Development, and for Business and a former Foreign Office Minister.
Have you watched The Diplomat?
As one of the Foreign Office ministers in post when it came out, I can confirm that it is accurate almost to the last door handle, and certainly a script written either by a fortune teller or a brilliant deep state insider. So why is it so good?
Because it captures the essence of what’s important about diplomacy, about the humans involved in delivering those diplomatic messages, those skilled wordsmiths writing speeches, those harnessing the power of relationships, through unconscious or manipulative means, in order to maximise one’s country’s interests and to do all to protect citizens from threats to our way of life and economic security.
The ships, tanks, planes, bombs and bullets are required only if diplomacy has failed – so the diplomat is a vital part of a nation’s armour. But every nation should be readied for the failure of diplomacy, and to be able to defend with hard power too.
In wartime, the most important asset will always be our human capital, notwithstanding that they cannot fight for long without the hard power equipment and arsenal to keep the enemy at bay. The requirement for the right tools of war never goes away, and innovation and investment to ensure our soldiers, sailors and airmen have kit which will outdo the aggressor is vital.
But without ingenuity, bravery, and adaptability from those delivering the hard power to our enemies, there is a much-reduced chance of winning out. War is a zero sum game – as history has taught us over millennia, the winner takes all.
Lands and resources, the women, the gold and the story-telling bragging rights. Admiral Nelson’s victories over the French, re-told by his fans and sailors after his death demonstrate that only too well. Winner takes all – for every citizen, for centuries to come.
For three generations now we have been blessed in Western Europe to not be under pressure from enemies in a physical sense. We have allowed ourselves to forget how important the need for investment harnessing creativity is to assure our security.
We have allowed ourselves to shrink defence budgets, we have stopped thinking about protecting our critical assets, stopped thinking about what the impacts of disruption to our daily, delightful, undisrupted lives might be. Even now that the world is being shaken on its axis once again and we are marginally affected through disrupted supply chains, we are allowing ourselves to worry a great deal rather than get on and do.
It was a privilege and responsibility to be sitting at the cabinet table when the COVID crisis hit, and it was thanks to the creativity and freedom afforded talented individuals through the COVID task force and across our country, that the UK was able to lead in so many ways to tackle and find a way to beat that invisible attacker.
Perhaps most specifically we can be enormously proud of the UK effort in vaccine discovery, production, and delivery, and to the honest understanding that was brought to the table about the structures of our healthcare systems, their limitations, and how to maximise the resources that we did have. Real people were given authority and investment, and trusted to solve the challenges – and they did.
The challenge we had was that having not adequately prepared for a healthcare crisis by investing relatively small extra amounts each year, we found ourselves having to compensate for that resilience buffer by throwing enormous amounts of taxpayer cash at the challenge in hand and shutting down great swathes of economic activity.
My greatest frustration about the Covid Enquiry is that it is not giving voice to the core challenge for being better prepared for the next crisis – which is that the way the Treasury works is not designed to prepare for Black Swan, or 1 in 100 year events.
Without that mindset change, without embedding a true preparedness perspective throughout government, we will be ill-prepared again, and the consequences could be even more damaging.
Everyone seemed surprised when President Trump declared bluntly at NATO that everyone needed to buck up and start to invest much more in their own defences for their countries. He wasn’t the first US President to be saying so, but perhaps the loudest and least diplomatically delivered. But he is absolutely right.
The uproar which came from many NATO country leaders was bizarre – to suggest that three and a half per cent in hard power defence investment and one and a half per cent in critical national infrastructure investment is an outrageous number, reflects the fact that our political leaders across Europe and Canada, and indeed all of us, don’t feel under threat. What a blessing that is, but it may be a false position to take, because we are these days under constant threat and attack.
Hopefully there are no Shahed drones chugging their way across the channel, as doodlebugs did at the start of World War II, to land randomly on UK soil. But our digital infrastructure is being disrupted and causing real economic harm, now.
All our citizens need to have this pointed out, to understand why preparedness is not only important but necessary, and for government mindsets to change and re-establish what it means when we blithely state that the first responsibility of Governments is the protection of their citizens. If that is to be true, the proportion of taxpayers’ cash spent needs to be redistributed into those defences.
If a crisis does come citizens expect their governments to be prepared.
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz demonstrates what a disrupted supply chain in oil and gas, and indeed fertilizer, can have. This is not news though, because we saw this when Russia invaded mainland Ukraine back in 2022.
The UK was affected by price hikes in the disrupted oil and gas market. But millions of small farmsteads across Africa and Asia found themselves with no fertilizer just as crops were being planted, and grain supplies were massively curtailed for the best part of a year.
Real impact. But not on us in the UK – our Government covered a big chunk of the energy price spike, so we all continued to feel the battleground was far from us.
So why don’t we invest more in defence and preparedness? Because if a future enemy is considering attacking us, and our diplomats aren’t dissuading them, the next line of defence is our deterrence posture – do we look like if attacked, we would fight back and win? The bully only ever picks on the weak looking kid in the playground.
The Treasury hates defence because it feels like a wasted resource. If the deterrent effect works, you never have to use all those bombs and bullets, so why spend the money for that “just in case”? The point is it’s insurance, and without adequate insurance, you have no insurance at all because the enemy will think it’s worth their while having a go.
It’s not a legal requirement to have house insurance, and if your house burns down and you lose everything, that’s your loss. It is however a legal requirement to have car insurance because your car may be responsible for damage to others, and our societal position declares that we must therefore each take responsibility to protect against that risk.
Governments have a responsibility to protect adequately against the risk of attack, of siege, of disruption to our way of life by those that would wish us harm. Across the NATO family, now is the time to listen to those very clear words that President Trump keeps saying – we can all hear him, but now we need to listen and act.