Tom Stevenson

The British defence intelligentsia has an endorheic quality. As a whole it forms a permanent constituency in support of excessive military responses. This is inbuilt in the discipline: there isn’t much point in a defence intellectual without an army. The think tanks will welcome Liz Truss’s policy of drastically raising military spending, with the aim of reaching 3 per cent of GDP by 2030. In the US there is detailed public debate about foreign policy, admittedly within a limited ideological range. In the British media there usually isn’t. The influence of the Royal United Services Institute and other similar institutions in the media and on the professional class as a whole is partly responsible: supposed technocratic expertise is too often accepted on its own terms. The British security establishment experienced the Brexit vote as a mild shock but soon fell back into its old patterns. Lawrence Freedman imagined that leaving the EU might lead to an introspective retirement from international posturing, but there has been no move in that direction.

Sea power isn’t just a matter of building a bigger navy. Nor is it reducible to the skill of admirals. Even the best ships with the ablest captains will struggle without conveniently located ports and the infrastructure they provide. Without secure access to the relevant seas a large navy is just a lot of metal to clean. The best summation of the importance of naval position was given in 1904 by the British admiral John Fisher: ‘Five keys lock up the world! Singapore, the Cape, Alexandria, Gibraltar, Dover. These five keys belong to England.’ But if you leave strategic bases aside, it is often the show of naval force, rather than its application, that has proved most potent. The modern tool of naval power projection is the aircraft carrier. The biggest of them, which belong to the US Navy, are 333 metres end to end (longer than the Shard would be if it were laid horizontal) and displace 100,000 tonnes of water with their bulk.  

National grain supplies are an emotive subject: they are a test of the basic competence of the administrative state. An empty central granary once meant imminent political collapse. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and US sanctions on Russia have severely disrupted grain exports from both countries. Between them, Ukraine and Russia produce about 15 per cent of the world’s wheat. The International Fund for Agricultural Development estimates that the area around the Black Sea is the source of 12 per cent of globally traded caloric intake. In addition, modern industrial farming is heavily reliant on hydrocarbons. As energy prices have risen so has the cost of fertiliser. The result has been a steep rise around the world in the price of all major staples except rice. Suddenly investment bank analysts are consulting soil fertility tables. Political commentators are paying attention to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s food price index. It has been climbing since the summer of 2020, but April saw the third major jump in succession.