Welfare or warfare: Western nations warned to prepare for tough defence spending choices

Western nations will need to face difficult choices between strengthening social welfare systems or boosting defence budgets to counter rising global strategic threats, the UK’s former national security adviser Lord Mark Sedwill has warned.

“In most Western countries, is it going to be possible to continue to pursue the social welfare model at the same time as increasing our investment in defence?” he asked at an event hosted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra on Wednesday.

The “language of sacrifice” was no longer a part of the political discourse in the way it had been in former US President John F Kennedy’s inauguration speech when he uttered “ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country”, he said.

“That kind of sentiment is absent in modern politics, but I think it’s going to have to come back.”

Lord Sedwill, one of the UK’s most acclaimed former officials, served as ambassador to Afghanistan from 2009 to 2010 and national security adviser and cabinet secretary from 2017 to 2020 under Prime Ministers Theresa May and Boris Johnson.

He made his remarks in a wide-ranging public discussion with ASPI chief Justin Bassi about the need for Western democracies to forge economic resilience strategies, hike defence spending and conduct more frank conversations with the public about the strategic challenges posed by Russia and China.

On the sensitive question of defence spending, he predicted Pacific nations could not avoid US demands to boost their military budgets in the way that NATO allies had eventually bowed to pressure to commit to investing 5 per cent of GDP annually on core defence requirements and security-related spending by 2035.

President Donald Trump, in his “vivid” manner, had been the catalyst for European nations to do the “right thing” and spend more, he said.

“It’s very early in the second Trump term. Europe has so far managed to address the substance of what he is demanding, and other American presidents have demanded. Japan, Korea, Australia, India . . . let’s see where it settles,” he said.

“But undoubtedly they will have to demonstrate that they are willing to do enough for their own defence, enough to share the burden with the United States and to align with the United States in a manner that he sees that it is in America’s interest to continue to provide the assurance that it provides them.”

Part of the NATO 5 per cent pledge in the June Hague Summit Declaration includes exponentially improving national resilience alongside more traditional war-fighting capabilities.

As a top public servant, Lord Sedwill led the development of the UK’s so-called “fusion doctrine”, designed to better integrate national security capabilities across diplomatic and trade policies, throughout government ministries and in the private and civil society sectors.

He spoke at length about the UK’s own experience of sensitising the public to the national security debate and fostering awareness and a more resilient mindset towards tackling geopolitical threats to the UK’s way of life, particularly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Engaging with the public about global problems as they struggled with cost-of-living burdens was a tough task, he told The Nightly in exclusive comments post-event.

“When you talk to members of the public, they recognise it isn’t on people’s minds and that’s why it’s never present in election campaigns,” he said.

“It took the acute threat of the invasion of Ukraine and, of course, in our case, the Salisbury attack had an effect, to really get this into people’s minds.”

Lord Sedwill was referring to the botched 2018 assassination attempt on former Russian military official Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the British town of Salisbury, which the UK pinned on the Russian state.

“It is just really challenging when people are facing issues around job security, cost of living, to get them to focus on something that feels abstract and seems to them to be someone else’s problems,” he said.

“I get that, but it’s government’s job to solve that problem.”

During the event, Lord Sedwill urged Governments to become more creative in national security messaging and to better harness social media to reach younger generations.

“It isn’t simply the old-fashioned way of having retired generals and ambassadors going on the TV and sounding like their grandfathers lecturing them,” he said.

In the UK and among European nations, there was a rising recognition of the breadth of preparedness needed to weather global shocks, said Lord Sedwill.

The “fusion doctrine” had identified the need for the national security community to embrace economic issues as part of the job, and for economic government departments and the private sector to take responsibility for improving resilience, he said.

“One of the questions we had to address on the resilience side was, in the modern era, you’ve got to think of national security quite broadly” beyond just threats from states, terrorists and criminal groups, he said.

“You’ve got to think about economic security and, of course, we’ve also understood we have to think about democratic security, how we protect our democratic system against malign attempts to undermine it.”

Asked to expand on private sector involvement, Lord Sedwill argued that countries had to consider critical national infrastructure that lay outside of the core functions of the state, defence and intelligence sectors.

“We have to realise in a modern, highly-connected economy, critical national infrastructure involves mobile phone networks” operated by private companies, he said as one example.

If an adversary wanted to disrupt food security, they would likely target the mobile phone network to disrupt supermarket deliveries.

In Denmark, a new ministry of resilience and preparedness was talking about plans to store food supplies in a way that it hadn’t since periods of the Cold War, he said.

Lord Sedwill did not specifically address defence investment or national preparedness in the Australian context.

However, Alex Bristow, a senior analyst at ASPI, said that while the message of resilience was in the rhetoric of ministers and keystone documents, the Government had to do more to educate the public.

One opportunity would be in next year’s update to the national defence strategy.

“This concept of a nation which can take a punch, a nation that is resilient, I think will be coming to the fore in the national defence strategy,” he said.

The defence community was alive to the strategic risks posed by China, but the Government should be more direct about the threats with Australia’s population to stoke understanding about why more defence spending and economic resilience was needed, said Dr Bristow.

“All these sorts of things which go against the grain of growth are going to need to be explained to the Australian people, and I just don’t think you can get them to understand why we’re doing it, unless they know what the threat is and the threat is China.”