If anyone needed a reminder of how closely the US, France and Britain co-ordinate on deterrence, submarines from the three allies were spotted last month berthing together in Scotland as war rages in Ukraine.
George Allison, editor of UK Defence Journal, noted the arrival of US Virginia-class and French Rubis submarines at the Faslane base on the Clyde. Faslane is the nuclear facility the SNP wants to close down if it manages to persuade sufficient nunbers of Scots to break up the United Kingdom. For decades, even during the Cold War, campaigners marched to protest against the existence of the base.
The SNP is still anti-nuclear weapons and sceptical about all military deployments that go beyond minor peacekeeping and soldiers cleaning canals. Until recently, and for most of its history, it was opposed to Nato. During the Second World War, when the party was a fringe movement, prominent Scottish Nationalists even wanted to see Britain beaten by the Nazis.
Things have moved on and the party has spent recent years trying to prove that it is no longer anti-military. This week Nicola Sturgeon, who joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as a youngster, even before she joined the SNP, used a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington to say that the war in Ukraine vindicates independence and her new pro-Nato position.
The problem is that no amount of waffle in Washington can cover up reality. If the first minister gets what she wants on Scottish independence, Britain would face years of diversion and disruption before ending up weaker, thus undermining the West. The SNP taking Scotland out of the UK would mean Scotland leaving the British Army, the RAF and the Royal Navy, thereby damaging a key contributor to the Nato alliance at a time when Vladimir Putin presents potentially its gravest threat. Scottish separatism in such a climate would be geopolitical vandalism.
Having broken up Britain, the SNP says that it would then, no doubt with a cheeky wee smile, apply to join Nato. Having presumably removed Britain’s nuclear weapons from Scotland, it would apply to shelter under the nuclear umbrella provided by others.
You might think that, in the context of an actual war in Europe, this is not a credible position for the first minister to hold if she ever gets a referendum rerun. But it is further evidence that Sturgeon is so obsessed with independence that she sees everything through the prism of separation from England and is too parochial and ill-equipped to process the scale of what has happened in Ukraine and the implications for collective European security.
Sturgeon is often presented, south of the border, as some kind of grand strategic mastermind, always one move ahead of her bumbling English opponents. The truth is that on foreign affairs she is naive.
She demonstrated this in the substance of her remarks in Washington. After saying that Scotland stands with the EU and the UK on Russia, as though Scotland is separate already from the United Kingdom rather than an integral part of it, she posed as a hawk on Putin.
We’ll draw a veil over her predecessor, Alex Salmond, who famously condemned Nato during the Kosovo war and for several years even had a talk show on Russia Today, the Kremlin-supported channel. With the invasion of Ukraine, Salmond suspended the show and says that he will not return to the channel.
Sturgeon explained that in 2012, under the leadership of her one-time hero Salmond, the party ditched its opposition to Nato membership.
“There is no doubt that the events of the last three months have strengthened my conviction that this position is absolutely the right and essential one,” she said. “Coupled with a strong relationship with the United Kingdom, membership of the European Union and membership of Nato will be cornerstones of an independent Scotland’s security policy.”
What the first minister didn’t mention, before going on to talk about climate change, is that the Nationalists are still divided on the question of defence, so a Nato application would be far from guaranteed after independence.
While elements of the SNP continue to dislike the idea of joining a defensive alliance, the party’s coalition partner, the Greens, go further, wanting an independent Scotland to be neutral. They envisage a de-facto pacifist state.
The debate conducted on this question by Scotland’s two governing parties has a childlike quality. Patrick Harvie, the perennially ridiculous co-leader of the Scottish Greens and a minister in the devolved administration, has said that the EU is more important than Nato in aiding Ukraine, because it has implemented sanctions, putting pressure on Russia without weapons.
No need for heavy weapons then? It’s a view. But it’s a stupid view that overlooks how vital the weaponry and training provided by the US, Britain and Canada were early on in helping the Ukrainians to fight back.
Perhaps the Scots may decide eventually that this stuff is no barrier to separation and will choose sovereignty above all else, as the Brexiteers did when opting to leave the EU. But this is clearly different, for an obvious reason. Brexit was many things but it did not break up a 300-year-old sovereign state, a key defence and intelligence power at the heart of the western alliance against Russia and China. That’s what the SNP proposes to do.
I suspect it will be a difficult sell. On defence, Sturgeon is assuming that my fellow Scots are fools, and they’re not.
