The Saturday Read Conversation: #3

Breaking down Ukraine, Taiwan, education and more with Sam & Lawrence Freedman.

Good afternoon. Welcome to the latest Saturday Read Conversation, our periodic Q&A with leading writers and thinkers. If you missed the first two, we interviewed Helen Lewis and Matthew Yglesias. This week we spoke to Sam and Lawrence Freedman, who write Comment is Freed here on Substack.

Lawrence, emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London, has long been an essential guide to foreign and defence policy, both in the UK and globally. (You can read him regularly in the NS.) Sam, his son, has become a vital domestic policy guide on all manner of issues, both on here and on Twitter. This conversation has been edited for clarity. We hope you enjoy it. HL

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Will

Lawrence, you are known for “writing” Blair’s Chicago speech in April 1999 which, as you have put it, is widely seen as foreshadowing his later decision to support the invasion of Iraq. How do you look back on it now?

Lawrence

I thought I was sending Jonathan Powell [Blair’s then chief of staff] some ideas for a speech. It only got through because they never showed it to the Foreign Office, who would have stopped it immediately. I wandered around the garden trying to think of something to say and put it down. My intent was to show why [the 1999 NATO intervention in] Kosovo should not be seen as carte blanche for the future, which was the point of the tests [he set out in the speech], which Blair turned into considerations. But I mean, I wasn’t a speech writer.

Will

Did you say to Jonathan, this wasn’t for mass consumption and also the history books?

Lawrence

I was quite happy. I listened to the radio report of the speech, and I thought “that’s familiar”. I left it at that. The Foreign Office was cross because their lawyers hadn’t had a chance to look at it, and it didn’t mention the United Nations. I did mention the United Nations, but not as an essential, decisive factor. It got leaked that I’d been responsible. One thing led to another. And I’m now known as the author of the Chicago speech. As it happened, it became a doctrine.

Harry

Can I bring you over to Ukraine. I wondered what you thought of John Mearsheimer’s recent piece on what he describes as a counteroffensive that was bound to lose.

Lawrence

John Mearsheimer should be in disgrace. I’ve known John for years. He’s a clever guy and a contrarian. He was the one arguing that after Ukraine got independence that it should keep hold of its nuclear weapons. And he’s now relying on Big Serge, who is a Russian-supporting blogger, as a source of military advice and dissing perfectly good people who are explaining what’s going on. Actually his conclusion is not that far from where many people are at the moment – that this is a long war and there’s no early prospect of negotiations, which is slightly different from him saying the Russians were bound to win, which is what he’d been saying before. My last Substack was about realists – and the one I chose, Elbridge Colby, seems to me a serious fellow who acknowledges that there may be trade-offs here. John doesn’t.

Harry

Mearsheimer’s point in that piece really was that there has never really been – apart from D-Day – a successful blitzkrieg against an evenly matched force, as he says Russia and Ukraine are.

Lawrence

The problem was all of these [pre-counteroffensive] analyses were expecting Ukraine to do something that’s very difficult. But all of these analyses miss the point that, after not very long, the Ukrainians switched tactics – to one based on attrition, knocking out Russian artillery, and using dismounted artillery. They’ve been making more progress, but it’s a much slower way of proceeding. One of the consequences of this is that the Ukrainians haven’t actually used a lot of the stuff that they’ve been given. They put a lot of people into the fight, but a lot of their equipment hasn’t yet been used.

Harry

But you have disgruntled officials, or disappointed ones, saying to the Wall Street Journal that “we built up this mountain of steel for the counteroffensive, and we can’t do that again. It doesn’t exist.”

Lawrence

That’s one person speaking, I think in the [US] Defence Intelligence Agency. British officials then said that’s not the case. The Ukrainians won’t do that again, in that way. They’ve learned things about the battlefield, about the role of drones. Nor can the Russians lay minefields like that [to that extent] in the future. The problem was that, from a year ago, the Russians were building elaborate defences in the area where everybody knew the Ukrainians would have to attack. The Ukrainians have suffered a lot. There’s no point in pretending otherwise, but you have to be very careful. I didn’t agree with the piece you [the New Statesman] published by Lily Lynch, which seemed to be “this is one in the eye for the liberal internationalists, and one up for realism”, as if this was a good thing, without anything at the end about what she proposes should happen.

There was also that recent profile of [the Rand Corporation political scientist] Samuel Charap in the New Yorker. In the end, the thing that everybody noticed is that he was at a loss for an answer when trying to explain to a Ukrainian why – given what is happening in the occupied areas – Ukraine should cede more territory to the Russians. Putin isn’t offering anything. The whole situation would change if Putin said to the Chinese or the Saudis, or any would-be interlocutor, “we’d like a way out of this”. The Ukrainians would then be on the diplomatic backfoot but the Russians have shown absolutely no interest in negotiation, other than one that confirms that they have more territory. The realist problem is they don’t have an alternative way out of this, other than helping Ukraine fight.

Harry

Who has the long-term advantage here: Russia or Ukraine?

Lawrence

Clearly the Russians can keep on finding people to throw into the void. But over the longer term, I think what you’re seeing now is US and European production stepping up. I think that’s the most important issue. It’s artillery, artillery, artillery, and air defences.

Harry

And planes?

Lawrence

F-16s will be helpful. I’m not sure they’re going to be a game-changer. And drones, which are being produced in mass numbers. I think the Ukrainians can now see a way through into continuing the fight next year. Part of the problem earlier in the year was a belief that this was a one-shot thing. I don’t think that’s the view now. It’s just a much more gruelling, difficult fight than a blitzkrieg – I think that was always overdone. A lot of it depended on assumptions about the Russian army. You don’t have to know much about the Russian army to know it has an in-built stoicism. The loyalty of individual Russians to the state is very high. You do what you’re asked to do. But I would say that at the end of all this – the past few months of fighting – the Russians are not in a better state than the Ukrainians.

Will

Sam can we bring you in, and go from foreign to domestic. I was wondering how you now feel about your time as one of Michael Gove’s special advisers in the Department for Education from 2010 to early 2013.

Sam

On the academic side, I think we did some good things. I think the curriculum in England has worked much better than the curriculum in Scotland, which was introduced at the same time. I think you can see that in international comparative studies like Pisa [the Programme for International Student Assessment]. I think the changes to assessment were broadly good ones, although all of this could have been implemented better, like most things in government. There’s been a push on phonics, and we’ve seen better results for reading. I think the weakness of Gove’s strategy – which I was signed up to at the time – was focusing too much on the academic side and forgetting the importance of the pastoral and the social.

In the 2000s Ed Balls [who was secretary of state for children, schools and families from 2007-10] had created this Every Child Matters agenda, and spent a huge amount of time creating these complex New Labour structures for all the different school-related services within councils, with statutory duties. Schools didn’t like it. And our reaction was: let’s just get rid of it. Let’s focus on what schools are supposed to be for, which is education. That was too simplistic. And I think shifting to academies, again, probably helped a bit on the education side, but we cut the links to other services. Then combine this with cuts – not particularly to schools themselves, which have been relatively protected, but to all the services that sit around schools – and it has created a situation where if you go to a school now, they won’t say, “Oh, we’re worried about the curriculum, we’re worried about exams.” But they have a huge problem with mental health. They’ve got huge problems with children in poverty. We have too many kids who just aren’t able to learn because there are so many other issues going on.

Harry

Right. Gove has also said he regrets cutting the Building Schools for the Future programme.

Sam

Everybody knew that it was not going to be affordable in the form that it was in. The question was how do we end it? We jumped too quickly to that. The question should have been – OK, the Treasury is not going to give us £10bn a year, can we focus more on need? Can we simplify it? But this was the first decision we made. We were all completely new to government. It was a very steep learning curve. And I agree with Michael, it was a big mistake.

Harry

We just ran a cover on crumbling Britain. It’s a widely felt theme. Looking back now, a lot of Britain’s problems seem to date from austerity. You were part of a reforming government that wanted to do new things. But in hindsight it feels like a government that’s been quite devastating for the country. [As the New Statesman argued of austerity at the time.] How do you view the coalition?

Sam

I think education is probably the one thing that hasn’t gotten worse, right? It’s the one that you can look at the graphs and say, at the very least, the outcomes are as good as they were in 2010, probably a bit better. Whereas everything else – the NHS, the criminal justice system – it’s carnage at the moment. Austerity’s not the only reason for that. It’s also bad governance. Since 2016 there has been a total collapse of central government in trying to do anything sensible. Three years were spent on Brexit, then we had Johnson, then we had Truss, etc. But certainly those austerity budgets have proved to be a historical error. I realised that by about 2012. I remember getting an impact analysis on the latest round of welfare cuts. It might have been the benefits cap. And the impact assessment was clear. The effects were going to be dire. And they just carried on doing it anyway. It wasn’t the department I was working in – and I was a civil servant – but I just thought I can’t be connected with this government anymore.

Will

You talk about schools as a kind of all-purpose Swiss Army Knife provider of social services. Is that connected with the struggle of secondary schools to retain teachers? What could Labour do to fix that?

Sam

We’ve got a big teacher-recruitment problem. There are several things going on. It’s partly pay. It’s partly not being able to work from home, like a lot of other graduate jobs now. But especially if you’re in a school in a lower-income area, you’re doing a lot of helping to run the food bank and knocking on people’s doors to try and get absent kids to come into school. You’re dealing with huge numbers of social services cases, and abuse cases. And that is so draining if what you wanted to do is be a teacher. So I wouldn’t say it’s the number of hours worked. It’s the type of work.

Harry

With all of the issues you’ve written about – education, the criminal justice backlog, immigration, the NHS waiting list – are these fundamentally money questions? We seem to have given up on the idea that you can improve something without money.

Sam

I think money is part of it in every case. It is very difficult to reform without money. Labour shadow ministers keep presenting them as opposites, but reforms work better when you spend money. But it is also bad governance, with immigration being a good example of where the cost of immigration has simply gone up. We’re spending more on immigration because ministers have let the backlog go to two years. So they [the government] are spending [billions] a year on hotels and accommodation for asylum seekers because they let the system get that bad. If they hadn’t been so distracted by Rwanda and all the other gimmicks they’ve done to satisfy the Mail and so on over the years, they could have kept that to six months, and the cost would be much lower. But if you look at the justice system, and the NHS particularly, it’s very difficult to see how you fix those systems without more money.

Harry 

But how is Labour going to fix any of these problems without any new cash? It seems like it’s going to be governing in chains at this rate.

Sam

They’re going to be in a position where every department is asking for more money, and they’ll have a good case for most of that money. Labour have said they won’t do wealth taxes, they’re not going to raise income taxes – so they will have to raise National Insurance, because that’s the only one left to raise. [Or VAT.] But that’s only going to fill a tiny bit of the pot. Unless, to the piece you did Harry, they seriously look at wealth taxes, I just don’t see how you make the numbers add up in a way that’s going to satisfy their own MPs or supporters when it comes to doing anything on the NHS, or justice, and so forth.

Harry

Well, they expect to grow, right? But growth is hard to come by.

Sam

It’s hard to come by. And the projection is already building some growth, right? The OBR [Office for Budget Responsibility] is assuming we are going to grow at 1.5-2 per cent a year, which is [already] better than we’ve done the last few years. So even if you do all of the things that Labour is saying it will do to generate growth – such as planning reform, which will be difficult in itself and take time – you might only get to where the OBR is projecting anyway. So you can’t rely on that. You’ve got to have a plan B somewhere.

Harry

Lawrence, you mentioned Elbridge Colby, whose ideas I’ll be covering in the NS soon. Do you think his fundamental analysis – that Europe needs to pick up the bill in Ukraine, so that America can focus on Taiwan – has merit?

Lawrence

I think if you make a foreign policy commitment, which the US government did, you can’t just walk away from it. Also, a lot of the stuff on China and Taiwan [Colby fears a near-term invasion] is speculative. We don’t know what’s going to happen, and it’s certainly not going to get any easier if the US abandons Ukraine. Europeans also really are doing more and more in Ukraine. So I think it’s wrong in a number of ways. I fully understand that this is a real debate in the US. But you can’t just walk away. It’s not like a venture capitalist who backs a promising start-up and decides it’s not a good rate of return and moves on to something else. You can’t do that in international affairs. It’s also not a lost cause. There’s a long way to go with Ukraine.

Will

Do you think Trump backs away from funding Ukraine if he wins in 2024?

Lawrence

He will be campaigning from a jail cell we hope. But I wouldn’t want to assume anything about what he would do. What Trump is going to do will depend on how he thinks it reflects on him personally. The Republicans are split on the issue. A lot of Republicans don’t think Biden’s doing enough. Before that there’s going to be a big test this winter, if Russians try to take out the electricity system again. I think Ukraine is far better prepared than they were a year ago. But that came quite close to success last December.

Harry

Where does British foreign policy fit in all this? We spoke to [the former head of the Foreign Office] Simon McDonald not so long ago, and he said the game was up for Britain. But you have people like John Bew [a New Statesman contributing writer from 2013-19] who has been working in No 10 for four years, and who believes the UK has shown it can be an influential player.

Lawrence

I have great admiration for John. We were colleagues at King’s. And I think British foreign policy hasn’t looked too bad, despite it all, over the last few years. And that’s down to him. I was quite surprised by Simon. I think he was far too fatalistic, and we have played a leading role in Ukraine. Tony Radakin, chief of the defence staff, has been playing quite an influential role. The Ukrainians do talk to us a lot. I think it’s wrong to get all fatalistic and gloomy and say the game is up. Clearly, Brexit hangs over everything. There are a lot of discussions in the past we would have been directly involved with, and now we’re on the side lines. But I think people over-interpret the tilt to the Indo-Pacific. The UK has played a limited hand quite well. The interesting thing is how little difference there is between the two parties.

Sam

I think it shows that we are still capable of doing something right: on Ukraine and other foreign issues. Foreign policy has gone much better since 2019 than domestic policy – apart from Brexit – and the question is: why has there been such a difference in technical competence between one area and the other?

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Thanks for reading. If this interview was of interest, you can sign up for more Saturday Read Conversations below. Have a good week, and catch you on Saturday for the main email. Thank you.

— Harry & Will

Thanks to Barney Horner.