Owen Jones, Farage of the left?

[Woodchopper]

Britain should pare back defence spending so it means just that: defence, or protection from invasion, assistance for humanitarian disasters, and international peacekeeping operations. As Richard Reeve, coordinator of the thinktank Rethinking Security, puts it, other “middle powers” – think Japan, Germany, Italy, Canada – don’t have global military pretensions. “Why do we believe we have a right and responsibility to act globally,” he says, “despite our resource constraints and legal norms?”

That doesn’t mean producing only weapons for repelling hypothetical invasions: for example, supporting Ukraine’s defence against Russia’s brutal invasion is a legitimate example of arms exports, whereas the Saudi-led war on Yemen is not. That means producing significantly fewer weapons.

[...]

It is true that Nato membership calls for arms spending of at least 2% of GDP, but in practice most states flout that. The real threats faced by Britain include pandemics – as you’ll probably recall – and cyber-attacks. Helping to stoke an arms race, and resigning ourselves to a future global conflagration, will hardly prove an effective means to protect our national security if it culminates in nuclear extermination. Focusing on actual threats, and ensuring we have a defence sector that can stave off a theoretical invasion, would be a more rational approach. What a tragedy that our political culture makes this almost impossible.

What is missing in the article is consideration of how much Britain should spend in order to support allies such as Estonia or Finland. In between rejecting wars in Africa or Asia and defence of the British Isles lies the large commitment to help Britain's European allies and neighbors. He briefly mentions support for Ukraine and mentions that the NATO 2% goal isn't mandatory, but beyond that there isn't any analysis of how much Britain needs to spend if it is to take seriously its commitments to allies. Those commitments could involve far more spending than at present. If Jones believes that Britain shouldn't prepare to defend them then he should state that explicitly rather than mostly ignoring the issue.

Russia has a substantially larger production of (conventional) arms than all of the rest of Europe put together, despite the latter having something like 10 times the GDP of Russia. If Britain and our allies are to produce arms on a scale to support Ukraine and other nations potentially threatened by Russia, I think we probably need to spend at least 2%.

Spending 2% is a NATO obligation, and the countries that flout it considerably annoy those that don't, especially the US. So I fear that Jones is stoking the collapse of NATO here, perhaps because he is one of those people that hate the US and perversely cuddle up to much nastier places. Biden goes relatively quietly on the flouters, preferring to promote the unity of NATO. But Trump is threatening to make flouting a really big deal.

Jones' idea that spending 2% encourages an arms race is ridiculous - Russia and China are already spending far more regardless of what we spend.

The UK may need to spend a lot more than 2%. Its spending slightly more than that now, with serious gaps in capability. During the Cold War it was a lot higher, at 7% in 1960 and 3.9% in 1992 when the Soviet Union finally dissolved. I doubt that 7% would be necessary now though. Russia will never have the conventional forces of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.
Source https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/MS ... cations=GB