Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has brought a European security crisis of a magnitude that has not been seen since the Second World War. Oil prices surged to $110 a barrel and remain volatile. Germany has reversed decades of foreign policy orthodoxy by committing to spend over 2% of GDP on defence spending, challenging the doctrine of Ostpolitik and even reassessing their approach to debt. China has been wracked by a renewed Covid-19 surge. India fired a missile into Pakistan after a ‘technical malfunction’, while a Russian military drone crashed in the Croatian capital of Zagreb. And the US, UK and Australia continue to put meat on the bones of the new AUKUS trilateral security pact and think through any implications for the Indo-Pacific region.
Whether Putin wins or loses or a stalemate ensues, the effect on European order has already been profound, and opens up some extremely consequential questions. Will Russia attempt to cultivate an order of disorder? Will German defence spending maintain the status quo? Will this be a moment for a more equal and multilateral European order to emerge? Or will we see the return of great powers once again in concert in Europe? Further afield, does Europe’s continued difficulty in weaning itself off Russian oil and gas prove the difficulty of being independent in an interdependent world? At the same time, does it increase the salience of calls for a ‘Green New Deal’? Or must economic and business activity be separated from politics? With the onward march of events it can be easy to be swept up in it all. In these moments, however, it is also important to return to first principles and to seek to understand the present in its wider historical context. We look to history not to find parallels, iron laws or evidence of its repetition, but to discover and confront the complexities of our present.
At the Centre for Grand Strategy we intend to investigate some of these pressing questions as we seek to understand the present in its wider historical context. Over the coming months we will particularly attempt to examine the implications of these questions for the UK. As we reach the first anniversary of the UK government Integrated Review, do its assumptions still hold firm? Does an Indo-Pacific tilt, no matter how modest, make sense in an era of European land wars? What is the basis of UK security? Is there some contemporary resonance to Austen Chamberlain’s comment in 1926 that “[w]e have a peculiar interest because the true defence of our country, owing to scientific development, is now no longer the Channel…but upon the Rhine.” Or has the scale of this iteration of globalisation proved the impossibility of prioritising any one region over the other to secure the UK’s security?