The World Needs the West Robert Clark
The world keeps getting more dangerous. It is now grappling with war in Ukraine; China’s increasingly bellicose actions in the South China Sea and its little-talked-about nuclear proliferation; and Iranian aggression that threatens the existence of Israel, the lives of U.S. forces and their allies in the Middle East, and the security of global shipping lanes. All of this is happening against the background of a project long held by authoritarian regimes, including Russia and China, to undermine the liberal order that has guaranteed peace in most of the West since World War II. The West needs to take seriously the threat. In response, it should double down on its investments in alliances, national-defense bases, and military institutions. Otherwise, it will learn the hard way how a steady erosion of military funding can break down deterrence and cause problems that ramify throughout the world, undermining security.
The liberal peace project was conceived after the horrors of the First World War but didn’t reach maturity until a quarter of a century later, in post–World War II Europe and North America. This resulting geopolitical order has largely held intact for the last 80 years, but now these revisionist powers are attempting to supplant it and develop an international regime more beneficial to their own interests. As they attempt to navigate these challenges, liberal democracies are struggling to reinforce military deterrence where prudent.
One large reason for that struggle is the prolonged “peace dividend” after the Cold War, which led many European nations to reduce national-defense spending by inordinate amounts. No longer did the specter of the Soviet Union threaten transatlantic security, and welfare states were established almost overnight, their budgets outstripping defense spending many times over. This led over the last 20 to 30 years to a military-capability erosion among many Western democracies, and thereby to the lack of a credible deterrent. Authoritarian states have sensed this decline and adjusted their force postures to exploit it. Russia’s invasions of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022 are examples, as is China’s increasingly aggressive behavior throughout the Indo-Pacific and its illegitimate territorial expansionism in the South China Sea.
There are strong historical parallels in the last century to modern-day Ukraine and the South China Sea. A rejuvenated and expansionist Germany sought to sweep across much of central and western Europe in the 1930s. It was allowed to do so in part because leaders in London and Washington were at first naïve about its intentions. Today’s authoritarian dictatorships are similarly taking advantage of what is at best a perceived Western indifference to global affairs and turn toward isolationist foreign policy, and at worst a perceived Western military and diplomatic weakness. Whatever their exact assessment of the West at present, Moscow and Beijing are trying to rewrite historical borders much as last century’s fascist dictators did.
Given the rise in the political influence and military power and readiness of authoritarian regimes, how should liberal democracies respond? What options remain to countries that still believe in human rights, democratic processes, respect for international law, and the civil liberties of their citizens — the very principles that regimes in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and Pyongyang are terrified of?
To answer those questions, we must first understand how the West adopted liberal values in the ashes of previous great-power wars and reached the stage at which alliances and military deterrence could effectively safeguard those values. Only then can we see how deterrence has been eroded over the last 30 years of the so-called peace dividend and consider the options that remain to policy-makers in Washington, London, and Brussels.
The Second World War was not entirely unpredictable. It was preceded by the rise of politically violent regimes intent on rewriting their nations’ histories, along with a mass arms race throughout much of the industrialized world. The political upheavals caused by the Great War two decades earlier had caused inordinate instability, culminating in the political success of fascist ideologies across a continent already plagued by Marxism-Leninism. Inherent in fascism is a nostalgia for the nation’s perceived former glory, which can be restored only through military conquest or political violence.
This was, of course, a time before the ideas of liberal peace took hold. Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations concept lasted only 20 years. By the late 1930s, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, along with the Stalinist Soviet Union, had dashed all hopes of an enduring and liberal European peace. The peace project failed in inter-war Europe because it was not yet politically mature enough to defeat the interests of individual nations, let alone to stop fascism.
That would have to wait until, after the horrors of the Second World War, liberal institutions were founded in Europe to ensure that nations would seek cooperation over conflict. Those institutions bound countries together through market economics and set up a security architecture that emphasized collective responsibility and the aggregation of capabilities against a single great-power adversary, preventing war in Europe on the scale previously seen. That order has remained largely intact ever since. Some critics have tried to argue that civil wars, inter-state conflict, counterinsurgencies, and even genocides demonstrate that the liberal peace project has failed. But on the whole it has seen tremendous success, particularly among democracies that preferred shared prosperity to territorial conflict.
When considering that liberal democracies have historically been the political exception rather than the norm, however, one might think that the liberal order was always doomed to fail and that recent decades of peace were an aberration. A nation-state is predisposed to act in its own interest, and when that interest causes contention with other states, war remains a legitimate and often-used means of dispute resolution. Israel is a liberal democracy, yet when its national security was severely threatened by the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, it declared an immediate war against the terrorist group.
That declaration of war was a just response to a potentially existential terror threat, but one can see elsewhere how readily state agency clashes with liberal values and collective security. While the regimes in Moscow and Beijing try at times to portray themselves as nonthreatening to the West, their actions repeatedly demonstrate otherwise. Similar to the fascists of the 1930s, they respect only force, make economic cooperation a lower priority than hard power, and use violent means to advance their interests.
Ukraine’s defense of itself has been nothing short of heroic and deeply impressive militarily, but the sheer scale of Russian resources and capital have made it hard for Ukraine to repulse Putin’s bid for national conquest. Arguably, Western deterrence failed against Russia, first in 2014 and even more spectacularly leading up to the events of February 2022.
And in Beijing, paramount leader Xi Jinping has made it clear time and again that the Chinese-rejuvenation project he personally oversees is to include the incorporation — by military force if necessary — of the so-called breakaway province of Taiwan, a regional economic power, an advanced-technology superpower, and a democratic ally of the liberal West that has never been part of the post-imperial Chinese state. No one, we must assume, has watched the West’s collective response to the Ukraine war more closely than Xi. China also regularly harasses U.S. treaty allies Japan and the Philippines in their airspace and naval lanes. Its military buildup — the largest in over 50 years — has led some analysts and policy-makers to predict the end of U.S. hegemony in Asia. The liberal order can ill afford to remain as complacent with China in this century’s third decade as it did in the second with Russia.
Completing this authoritarian threat to the liberal peace, the extremist mullahs who plague the people of Iran are once again threatening the security of the U.S., the U.K., and their regional partners, most prominently Israel. On October 7, Iran’s proxy Hamas carried out — likely with some form of Iranian control or oversight — the deadliest attack on Israel in its history and the largest-scale killing of Jews since the Holocaust. Since then, Iran has launched a massive drone and missile attack on Israel in retaliation for its bombing of an Iranian compound in Syria. Iran’s proxies have also attacked American and British bases, as well as naval and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.
There is, in sum, a strong case that the world is more volatile and less predictable than at any time since the 1930s. Perhaps the comparison should even go back to 1914, when the Concert of Europe was shattered, ending 99 years of relative peace. The period leading up to the First World War was characterized by fractured alliances and increasingly hostile and belligerent adversaries that pursued their national interests single-mindedly. We should remember the lessons of 1914 — in particular, the importance of alliances and the need for both deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment. Deterrence by denial seeks to make an action infeasible or unlikely to succeed, for instance by deploying sufficient military force to defeat an invasion. Deterrence by punishment threatens penalties, such as nuclear escalation or economic sanctions, if an attack occurs. The two in conjunction are a currency that authoritarian threats to global security clearly recognize.
Unfortunately, political naivety and military weakness are all too common in liberal democracies, whose politicians often fail to see beyond four- or five-year election cycles and to craft longer-term strategies. To deal with the myriad national-security threats facing the transatlantic order, the liberal West must learn to think further ahead and craft foreign policy in a proactive manner.
NATO pursues a strategy of military deterrence against a Russia that is now largely excluded from the lucrative energy and financial markets of Europe, but this approach is starkly at odds with the preference of the liberal West (Europe, North America, Australasia, and Japan) to deter China economically and technologically rather than militarily. The contradiction is partly explained by the fact that China’s increasingly sophisticated (though little-tested and unproven) military is harder to deter against than Russia’s. But that is all the more reason to boost Western military capabilities and alliances in Asia. One welcome exception is the expansion of stationing and basing rights afforded to U.S. military assets by the Australian government, and in particular the deployment of nuclear-capable B-52 bombers in Australia’s Northern Territory.
Waste and budgetary rot are beginning to reduce the military capabilities of the United Kingdom, traditionally one of the few NATO members to meet the target of spending 2 percent of GDP on the armed forces. While maintaining a world-leading capability in intelligence-gathering and special-forces operations, the budget of Britain’s ministry of defense has consistently fallen far behind an independent government regulator’s assessment of its needs, often resulting in years of delay and cost overruns in various procurement programs. Equally alarming in the U.K. is the stark decline in available personnel, with the government seeking to reduce costs by cutting troop numbers even as recruitment efforts fall short. The British army is now at its smallest since the Napoleonic Wars and is set to shrink further still. Royal Navy recruitment is also failing to deliver the numbers needed, while the size of the fleet is down by 74 percent since the U.K. last fought a maritime campaign, more than 40 years ago against Argentina.
The three previous British prime ministers and the two previous chancellors of the Exchequer all publicly committed to boosting defense spending. But only Boris Johnson did so, with a “one time” cash injection of 16 billion pounds over four years. The current government has committed to raising the level of spending once the nation’s finances are more secure, but this falls well short of being a reliable promise.
Similar naivety can be seen across the Atlantic: U.S. business leaders and corporate elites recently gave a standing ovation to Xi, the premier of an authoritarian regime committing a genocide and actively undermining U.S. values around the globe in a way that makes military conflict ever more likely should deterrence fail.
And deterrence is already failing. It was no coincidence that Putin amassed the largest army that Europe had seen in 80 years on a democratic ally’s borders only four months after the West beat an inglorious retreat from Kabul in August 2021. This almost certainly had an effect on Xi, too, and on the “wolf warriors” directing Beijing’s foreign policy.
Political will must underwrite any military deterrence of Chinese military aggression against Taipei. Indecision and military weakness only encourage Xi to act with increasing aggression. In response to bellicose air and naval behavior by China, Washington has at least signaled its support for the Philippines and Taiwan. The U.K. maintains an active Indo-Pacific maritime strategy, but it is at risk of falling behind for the reasons discussed above. No other European nation save France has the capability even to deploy meaningfully to the region, much less to sustain a force outside Europe.
Western deterrence by punishment has been impressive to witness in Ukraine, but it has lasted just two years. War fatigue, energy costs, and competing political interests are already prompting calls in some quarters, particularly Berlin and parts of Washington, for Kyiv to negotiate terms with Moscow. Such a concession this early in a major conflict is the worst of all options, for Ukraine and for the rest of Europe. Putin would cast it as a Russian and a personal victory, gaining time and legitimacy to rearm and threaten other European allies. The West should instead revise its time horizon and have patience in its expectations of Ukrainian victory. And it should meanwhile press its deterrence-by-punishment advantage in Ukraine with the aim of bringing the rogue Putin and his terror state to its knees. The alternative would be an increasingly aggressive Russia seeking a return to former glory as it set its sights on the Baltic states and northern-European energy security.
As for alliances, NATO has recently accepted Finland and Sweden into its ranks, meaning that all Arctic states but Russia are now part of the organization. Reinforcing NATO’s vulnerable northern flank has been a priority of the alliance and will remain crucial in the years ahead as Russia and China increasingly seek to militarize the Arctic.
Alliances are improving security in Europe in other ways. A northern-European international expeditionary force, largely air and maritime, has been strengthened. It complements NATO air-policing missions and maritime-security patrols at a time when the Kremlin wants to damage undersea cables and threaten Europe’s energy security. In addition, the U.K., Poland, and Ukraine formed a trilateral pact in 2022, seeking to enhance their security and improve military interoperability. The three countries are some of Europe’s largest spenders on defense. The U.K. maintains one of Europe’s only two nuclear deterrents (France has the other, but a long-standing French policy prohibits the arsenal, unlike the U.K.’s, from falling under NATO command); Poland’s vast defense-spending increases are set to make Warsaw one of the strongest military powers on the continent this decade; and, although suffering losses and setbacks currently, Ukraine will likely have a formidable military, trained and financed by partners, at the end of the war.
Alliances in the Indo-Pacific are somewhat stalled, though not indefinitely. The Five Power Defence Arrangements between the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, and Singapore allows the Royal Navy to use ports and docking facilities in each partnered country. Such relationships should be reinforced with permanent basing rights, particularly in Singapore and Malaysia, which are located at the strategic fulcrum of the South China Sea. Such relationships should be beneficial to all parties and should not rely on U.K. capabilities alone. To that end, the West should support Malaysia in its ongoing territorial disputes with China while attempting to increase Kuala Lumpur’s force posture and readiness — efforts that the U.K. and Australia are well suited to lead.
The U.K. armed forces’ relationship with Japan’s self-defense forces is going from strength to strength, but the wider security framework of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, or Quad, has somewhat stalled in recent years. Its members — India, Japan, Australia, and the U.S. — are all firm allies of the U.K. British participation in the annual Exercise Malabar, a joint effort of the four countries’ navies, would help lead to eventual British membership in a more defined and active Quad — which could, for example, provide naval escorts to deter Chinese belligerence and ensure freedom of navigation for all. The U.K. should also consider partnering more frequently with the U.S. Navy in the Taiwan Strait. Future joint deployments would further boost deterrence and — crucially if conflict cannot be avoided — improve interoperability.
Finally, in the Middle East, both the U.S. and the U.K. are providing military reassurance and political support to Israel in its war against Hamas. And both the U.S. and the U.K. are attempting to deter Iran from becoming more involved in the Levant than it already has been through its regional proxies. But the effort is failing, as the recent attacks on Western interests by Iran and its proxies demonstrate. The U.K. has dispatched an additional frigate to the region, but it is troubling that the Royal Navy, heavily committed across the world, can spare only one vessel for such an important cause.
As authoritarian states in Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific work to undermine the liberal order and replace it with their own, they are waiting patiently, thinking about the long term, and investing in their militaries. It is estimated that Russia will spend up to 30 percent of its GDP on its military in 2024, China around 5 percent, and Iran the same. It is urgent that the days of European nations’ spending 1 percent be immediately put in the past. They are a relic of the 1990s peace dividend and cannot be reconciled with the wars raging in Europe and the Middle East. Britain especially must move away from being a welfare state and back toward being a wartime one.
Only by investing in alliances and partnerships, stockpiles and platforms, research and development, and our most crucial asset — our people — can the West deter its adversaries, who are often able to think much further ahead; decline to be bound by the same political and moral constraints that Western nations accept on the use of military force; and aren’t held to election-campaign promises over short political cycles. The liberal-democratic practice of patching an authoritarian-inflicted wound with a soft-power Band-Aid must be consigned to history. Otherwise we will risk repeating the catastrophic mistakes of the 1920s: not investing in military capability, deployability, and sustainment-in-theater.
Comments are closed.
