‘WE want eight and we won’t wait!” So went up the chant from crowds outside the Westminster Parliament in the winter of 1908-9 when a scare over German naval construction was whipped up by a jingoistic press into public hysteria.
The mob were demanding eight Dreadnought battleships – the supreme naval ship design of the day. In the event instead of Britannia ruling the waves unchallenged, it sparked an intense naval arms race with Germany.
Among the disparate figures warning of the inevitable consequence of this destabilising naval arms race were Keir Hardie, Winston Churchill and Andrew Carnegie.
Unable to keep pace on the surface (they were outgunned 29 to 17 in full-scale battleships) the Imperial German navy concentrated much of its firepower below the waves, where the end game was unrestricted submarine warfare. Meanwhile the parallel arms race on land ended in effective stalemate with shell holes of Flanders caked in blood.
READ MORE: Four Corners: Making friends and enemies over the South China Sea
Up until last week only six countries were operators of nuclear powered submarines. Now Australia is set to join the nuclear rat race as number seven. It will probably provoke an eighth. And in the meantime Australia wants eight submarines even if they have to wait.
On September 15, there was a joint television appearance with Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and “that fella down under”, as the leader of the free world struggled to recall the name of Scott Morrison the Australian prime minister.
The trio announced an “enhanced trilateral security partnership”, clumsily acronymed AUKUS. The underwater nuclear collaboration is its first and headline initiative. The pact reflects a joint panic over China’s growing military and economic reach and America’s eagerness to beef up the military capabilities of its Asian partners.
AUKUS will cover diplomatic, security and defence co-operation in the Indo-Pacific. It includes joint work on cyber-capabilities, artificial intelligence, quantum technologies and “additional undersea-capabilities”, such as sensors and drones.
Now all of this is big stuff and so far so bad.
The French have abandoned sangfroid and recalled their ambassadors. They’re just a soupçon miffed that their Nato allies have been negotiating in secret behind their backs to deprive them of a €90 billion conventional submarine deal. Scott Morrison’s revealing observation that they should have known that Australia would break the deal is hardly going to pacify matters. With amies such as these?
The Chinese who are the unnamed target of this security pact were predictably furious. There was much talk of Australian “running dogs” of Western imperialism accompanied by fairly explicit economic threats. If I were running an Australian University I might not base too much of my planning right now on the income from the lucrative Chinese student market. Meanwhile the irony of the UK exporting nuclear technology to Australia, displacing the French in an anti-China gambit, while importing at staggering cost French/Chinese nuclear technology to Hinkley Point C seems lost on the wider UK body politic.
A more informed reaction was the immediate ban on AUKUS submarines from New Zealand territorial waters, some six years before the first one could be floated. Apparently, in common with the Chinese and the French, the first New Zealand knew about the pact was the night before the announcement. As a member of the Five Eyes intelligence operation with the three AUKUS countries, New Zealand may be wondering just what value this one way “intelligence” arrangement is to them.
Perhaps most revealing of all was the stultifying response from the House of Commons. The Prime Minister’s statement was embraced warmly by Messrs Starmer and Blackford. Despite a security briefing the previous evening, both seemed only dimly aware of the potential enormity of the geopolitical implications of the pact.
Not a single honourable member in the Commons even mentioned France, oblivious to the potential fracturing of the Nato alliance. In the House of Commons, of course, there are many who still regard the French as the traditional enemy!
Anyone who retains a flicker of hope of any dissenting voice from the SNP (or Labour) benches would be sorely and grievously disappointed. To his credit Gavin Newlands got halfway there pondering the implications of nuclear proliferation but then his question disappeared into a blether.
There was one single question which stood out from the crowd and to the eternal shame of the opposition it came from Theresa May, Boris Johnson’s predecessor. She asked pointedly did this mean that the United Kingdom was now tied by security treaty to the defence of Taiwan from attack by China. The answer from bumbling Boris left her none the wiser.
It would be surprising if it had, since we are dealing with someone who, as foreign secretary had to be prevented by the British ambassador from reciting Kipling at a public event in Myanmar. Theresa May knows better than most, that her successor is incapable of handling geopolitics.
The realpolitik is this.
America as the dominant world power, whose nuclear submarine arsenal ballistic and hunter-killer is larger than the rest of the world put together, is pivoting towards the Pacific. The ignominious retreat from Kabul may have marked the end of persuading Nato to take on out of theatre operations. It is much easier to just sign up the UK.
READ MORE: French defence chief pulls out of UK talks as submarine row escalates
The UK has lost Europe and is now struggling to find a role. Now Britain is back East of Suez but this time not as the imperial power but as the hapless deputy to the American sheriff. It is a high risk entry fee to facilitate Boris Johnson’s visit to the White House.
Scotland whose land and waters are contaminated by weapons of mass destruction has national representatives who see nothing wrong or sinister with facilitating and participating in the proliferation of nuclear technology at the other end of the planet.
I make no claim that there is an exact analogy between the naval arms race before the Great War and the one in which Britain is now embroiled in the Pacific Basin. However one thing is for sure. Throughout history cold war arms races have a habit of ending in hot wars.
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