What the Anglo-Gaullists get wrong We can’t rearm in an industrial void

Sir John Bagot Glubb was a sturdy Lancastrian by birth — but, unsurprisingly for a soldier named “Glubb Pasha” by his men, you sensed his heart was in the desert. Leading the Arab Legion against Axis forces in Iraq, he then fought the Israelis in 1948. From there, he faced accusations that he was, in fact, the de facto ruler of the newly independent Kingdom of Jordan, leading to his dismissal by King Hussein, the latter forced to prove his seniority before the British imposter. By the late Forties, as the postwar order settled around new spheres of influence, Glubb put away his saber and took up his pen, arguing that since the US “hasn’t invited us to share her influence in Panama”, it would only be right to promote a British version of the “Monroe Doctrine in the Arab countries” — without any interference from Washington.

Such was the pre-Suez balance of power that these ideas were seriously entertained: not as idle reveries but as genuine strategic debates, with the outcomes backed up by the hard power of Britain’s military-industrial strength. Nor was this thinking the preserve of public-school soldiers and jingo adventurers; it was common in the Labour movement. Clement Attlee himself remarked that “we ought not to give the Americans the impression that we cannot get on without them”, while Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin called the Middle East a “lifeline” for the Commonwealth.

Today, such confidence has passed into history. The idea of a mighty Albion projecting her influence in the Gulf is laughable — whatever Donald Trump might now demand. Such is the state of our armed forces, indeed, that we are unable even to play the supplicant role afforded to us two decades ago during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Instead, Britain looks on in horror as Trump adds his own forever war to America’s growing list. Meanwhile, our prime minister makes a virtue of necessity. For once, his anti-interventionist position chimes with the public mood, even if it has been forced upon him by the ascendancy of Labour’s soft Left and the impotence of a mostly ship-free Royal Navy.

Common to many national disgraces, these embarrassments become an opportunity for a kind of military palingenesis: a rebirth of national prowess like a phoenix from the ashes. From the humiliations of the last decades, and with Britain confined to a spectator role as the “rules-based order” burns, a new political tendency is gaining popularity in the more intellectual corners of the Labour Party. A substratum of “Anglo-Gaullism” is now concentrated among the Left’s self-proclaimed realists, hawking a message of salvation-through-defense spending, with rearmament presented as a catalyst for national renewal.

Already last year, the government’s Defense Industrial Strategy promised military spending would become an “engine for growth”, creating a “strong industrial base” and a “defense dividend” for “every nation and region”. Starmerism’s media outriders have demanded a “new political economy of defense” that integrates “Labour’s goals of economic, social and climate justice”. A defense-industrial “securonomics” will, they claim, reindustrialize Britain’s left-behind regions. If Glubb Pasha’s British Monroe Doctrine is no longer available, at least the hardware of defense-industrial capability can be restored, not least as it offers the kind of secure manufacturing work that makes nostalgic Labourites dewy-eyed.

The Iran War has turbocharged this new thinking, which sees war-like preparedness as the panacea for a policy trilemma: the solution to low growth, persistent regional inequality, and our newfound irrelevance on the global stage. Learned essays in the house journal of Labourism have lamented the unsustainability of the welfare bill, while bemoaning a Treasury orthodoxy for which “reindustrialization through defense spending will never meet a value-for-money test”. The argument has found fertile ground among Blue Labour types, with Maurice Glasman declaring upon the invasion of Ukraine that the return of war to Europe’s periphery “has given us the possibility of an industrial strategy”.

As far as it goes, this argument is appealingly simple. As the transatlantic alliance falters, now is the time to reallocate capital away from the benefits bill — and towards gleaming new arms factories, cyber war labs, drone swarms, frigates and the new domain of space. The New Jerusalem, in short, will be built with a bomb factory in every drab provincial town.

But the new military Keynesianism is based on a delusion. It refuses to confront the fact that defense spending is, in strictly economic terms, one of the very worst ways to promote broad industrial rejuvenation. The growth multipliers are weak and the long-term productivity gains are non-existent. Unlike, say, investment in large-scale capital projects, building things, creating new fixed assets in energy, transport or digital infrastructure, there’s little diffusion of defense spending through the wider economy. While the construction of new roads, power stations or tram networks might provide decades of cheaper inputs, rearmament has a severe opportunity cost. An arms factory might create demand for steel and provide jobs for workers in much the same way as a high-speed rail link — but the former produces few positive spillovers, while the latter can regenerate whole regions. Rather than building the lifeblood of work, jobs and economic activity for the next century, in short, this khaki-clad Keynesianism sacrifices domestic prosperity for a real or perceived threat from without, or else because of an illusory attachment to the idea of Britain as a “global player”.

In truth, building and maintaining a world-class military exists downstream of a serious level of industrial capacity that Britain now sorely lacks. In the days of Bevin and Glubb, Britain built over half the world’s exported cars. Today it’s around 4%. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the UK was second only to the US in its steel production. Today, it manufactures less than Iran and Brazil, not enough to satisfy even half our own national demand. For all Labour’s rhetoric about a manufacturing renaissance, we simply don’t have the basic foundations of a durable industrial ecosystem: steel production; petrochemicals; plastics and advanced materials; energy independence and abundance; and a self-reliant productive base that isn’t subject to the whims of international oil shocks or geopolitical wrangling.

Each, in turn, has been allowed to atrophy. Against this backdrop, the notion that Britain can will itself back into great-power status through defense investment alone is incoherent at best and fanciful at worst. You simply can’t build a credible military in an industrial void, and military spending is a terrible option for closing our yawning productivity gaps. If the opposite had been true, the Soviet Union would have been buoyed by the Politburo’s excessive commitment to the Cold War arms race — rather than brought low by system-wide sclerosis.

Bevin’s Britain was able to take a seat at the Potsdam conference as a global military superpower because postwar Britain was a great industrial exporter, not vice versa. Today, by contrast, we are a country disastrously unsuited to a deglobalizing, dog-eat-dog, protectionist age of competitive national production; a poor country by OECD standards, with Eastern European levels of GDP in some regions, but with a rich capital city that distorts our more dismal averages. If resilience is the watchword of our age, it is surely economic, not military, resilience that should take priority. This is a country facing its second major energy shock in less than a decade, and without any significant per-capita growth in the last two.

Then arises the question of which war we are preparing for: a counter-insurgency; a neo-imperial intervention in the Gulf; a standoff with China in Taiwan; or a continental land war with Russia? Given the parlous state of procurement at the Ministry of Defense, are we to spend billions building yet more faulty hardware? Will we make the common mistake of every general, fighting the last war, building old-fashioned ships that can be destroyed by a naval drone costing a few thousand dollars in an age of asymmetric warfare?

If the principal threat today comes from Putin’s revanchist nationalism, it will be up to the new military Keynesians to explain why Britain must stomach yet more years of belt-tightening to prepare for war with a country that has failed to occupy even the Russian-speaking territories of a poor, dysfunctional, non-Nato country in which many voters habitually plumped for Russophile oligarchs. Having turned its nation into a pariah, and almost suffering a palace coup after attacking perhaps the most propitious place on Earth for a Russian invasion, is the Kremlin really about to attack Nato? That uncertainty is shadowed by the societal challenge here at home. In the dilapidated high streets of Britain’s regions, it is doubtful whether a beleaguered public see our capacity for military deployment, let alone the protection of some far-off military base, as an urgent daily concern.

Rather than busying ourselves with the dead end of Gaullist posturing, in short, perhaps we should start thinking of ourselves as the developing country that, in many ways, we so obviously are. Certainly, financial analysts have already begun tempering their investments in Britain, a country now displaying the dysfunctional features of an “emerging market”. Rather than Anglo-Gaullism, then, surely a far better model is Anglo-Dengism. Echoing the Chinese example, Britain today should look inwards, focus on problems closer to home, build, develop, reform, innovate, and Make Britain Rich Again, before finally concerning ourselves with the global status games beloved of men-of-a-certain-age who played too much Risk as a child.

As the pro-market reformers of the Chinese Communist Party understood, following the privations of three decades of peasant communism, to project yourself abroad, you must “hide your strength, bide your time”. Before sending aircraft carriers to reopen faraway straits or threatening regimes abroad, we must first become a country capable of raising real wages and living standards at home.

Ernest Bevin once demanded a nuclear bomb “with a bloody Union Jack on top of it!”. The Anglo-Gaullists fancy themselves his heirs. But Bevin — and Glubb before him — knew that power had to be consistently built at home before it could be brandished abroad. Today, we are attempting a reverse Bevin: indulging in a fantasy of power without the necessary foundations, painting the flag onto imaginary weapons we no longer have the means to sustain.

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