Political commentary

Vig and Zbig

Ferdinand Mount

this delicate juncture in our affairs, the key role of Iceland in the defence of the West is not to be underestimated. It is the chief United States air and sea base in the North Atlantic. It was therefore with keen anticipation that Mrs Thatcher, Lord Carrington and other students of these mat- ters listened to what President Vigdis Finn- bogadottir, the most delectable head of state imaginable, had to say during her visit to Downing Street last week.

What she had to say, as near as I can recall, was: 'My lords, ladies and gen- tlemen, I am so pleased to be here in your castle with its street number which is known ze whole world over. In Iceland, we have an old saga about some gods called Grimthings who quarrel wiz some other not quite so good gods called Grumblings. So come ze dwarfs who say you must stop quarrelling and zey make ze gods spit in a jug — excuse me that I must say spit — and ze spit turns into a man, but zen zey start quarrelling again and zey kill ze man and there is blood everywhere but the dwarfs mix some honey with ze blood, and zat is how zey make ze mead of poetry. But then ze dwarfs drop the jug and some of the mead spills, and that is the bad poetry. But ze mead in ze jug is ze good poetry, which is for you, Mrs Thatcher, and all of you, my friends.'

How the old Norse sagas say it all. Mr Denis Thatcher was notably pensive. Lord Carrington was rapt in contemplation. ,

If only all strategic conversations could be conducted with such gnomic simplicity. True, General Haig in his description of Lord Carrington as a 'duplicitous bastard' does approach the splendour of an Icelan- dic curse. But that was a private frothing. In public, General Haig employs diplomatic slab-talk in which 'frank' is always follow- ed by 'fruitful', and tensions are always there to be relaxed.

Yet unmistakably something is stirring in these long Nordic nights. The jar is full of spit. Every statesman under the age of 80 — Callaghan, Brandt, Kissinger, to name but a few — is having his 1500 words on Whither NATO? Surely after thirty or so years we cannot go on quite like this ad in- finitum. . _

'I have to speak', writes Zbigniew Brzezinksi, who was Carter's National Security Adviser and now, like Dr Kiss- inger, belongs to the wandering minstrelsy of geopolitics, 'in a somewhat oblique and elusive fashion, it is premature to be precise.' Mm. We old Saga hands recognise this as a havering, or not-saying. 'I am not speaking specifically now of such schemes as the Rapacki Plan, nor of some of the ideas advanced at one time or another by General de Gaulle.' No, no, certainly not, Zbig. He merely allows the thought, as it were, to breathe. But no sooner let out of the jug than it must be popped back again. `I speak in elliptical terms deliberately'.

What are they all on about? On the one hand, they all tell us that we could be seeing a 'reigniting of the Cold War'; ice to fire, fire to ice, as the old rune has it. On the other hand, they all tell us that the pro- spects for 'transforming the nature of the East-West relationship' and perhaps even the 'internal nature' of the Communist world have never been better. What is remarkable is how people of such different political views seem nevertheless to agree in being simultaneously optimists and pessimists.

The transformers argue that the Russians are themselves desperately keen to relax their defences. They are finding the strain of total militarisation intolerable. Therefore, it is said, we ought to go into arms limitation talks in an openhanded, positive spirit.

But surely the logic of thearguernent is that all this would retard the process of in- ternal change in the Soviet bloc. For once we remove from the Soviet system those ex- ternal pressures which it is within our power to impose, the Kremlin has the elbow-room to reassert its social control over Poland and the rest.

Some unilateralists argue that Britain should give up her nuclear deterrent because it is superfluous and irrelevant. Others argue that Britain should give it up because this would give a lead to the world. Some people cheerfully argue both at once. But I don't really think that Mr E. P. Thompson can really claim as an ally an op- ponent of Trident like Field-Marshal Lord Carver, former Chief of the Defence Staff, who believes 'the essential feature which links the American nuclear deterrent to Europe is not Britain's independent deter- rent, but the presence of adequate US con- ventional forces in Europe.'

In that case, our little gesture of nuclear renunciation would have no measurable ef- fect on Soviet paranoia. The only gesture therefore that would really reassure the Russians is the withdrawal of some of the other imperialist powers' ground troops from Western Europe. It is US troop reduc- tions and only US troop reductions that could change 'both the internal character of the two alliance systems and the relation- ship between them', as Zbig adumbrates. The rest is warm spittle.

But even if Trident would be, as Mr Nott argues so picturesquely, the jewel in Bri- tain's crown, can we afford it? Curiously, those Keynesians in the Labour, Liberal and Social Democratic parties who argue in favour of spending billions on uneconomic barrages and tunnels are the first to argue that Trident is too expensive — although it would provide plenty of work for the shire yards of Barrow.

In 1957, we were spending 10 per cent of our defence budget on the British nuclear deterrent, then carried in V-bombers. At that time, the defence Budget represented per cent of gross national products, as against 5 per cent today. Even if, as

everyone supposes, Trident turns out to cost double the present estimate, we cannot seriously pretend that it would pose an un- precedented strain on our resources.

The question raised by an increasing number of Tory MPs is whether Trident is the best buy. Within a given level of defence

expenditure, would not the total quantuol of British power be greater if we revamped

Polaris, manned our share of the cruise missiles and spent the remainder on more tanks and troops for BAOR?

The layman — no, let us be honest, the ignoramus — hesitates here. The very ten-

tative guess in this column is that the answer is yes. On TV last Monday, Mr Nott wrote off 'a couple of hundred extra tanks for BAOR' as an insignificant addition. On the contrary, in a world stuffed with nuclear weapons it is the commitment of real live men to the potential battlefront that represents the most serious demonstration of the will to resist.

The truth is that, from the Soviet point of view, the Western allies have already con-

tributed to a vast relaxation of tension --- by simply allowing themselves to be out- numbered: two-to-one in tanks and artillery

weapons, nearly three-to-one in some cases, Does this lowering of our guard in central Europe have anything to do with events the

other side of the Iron Curtain? Does political change in Warsaw or Budapest or even Moscow reflect the reverberations of changes in Western defence policy? In tracing causes, it is hard to distinguish between 'despite' and 'because of'. But one inference can be confidently drawn from

history: the relative inability of nations in Western Europe to exert a predictable and manageable influence upon events inside Russia. The same is true of the United States. These land empires are so vast, so alien and self-centred in their preoccuPa-

tions that it is usually a mistake to put too much faith in this or that manoeuvre as a means of budging them. What we have to worry about is their well attested power to budge us.

Is it possible that it is the high and stable level of conventional forces in Western Europe which provides the unique guar- antee of peace — and that our only real danger is the staleness of stalemate? Boredom is the oldest enemy of peace. The

outcome of World War Two should have taught us to be wary of intoxicating master

plans for liberating Poland, or indeed aril', part of Eastern Europe. Such master plans' can hold water only in the form of cloud vapour. Give me Vig rather than Zbig anY day.