How long could you survive without your mobile phone? Not just for idle scrolling to fill a boring commute, but for the life you carry precariously around on it without even thinking. For managing your bank account, navigating an unfamiliar neighbourhood, connecting to the outside world; for a torch in the dark, for checking in with friends, and potentially also in the worst-case scenario for frantically trading information about the safest place to run.
If the old rule of thumb is that any society is only four missed meals from anarchy, then what would be the equivalent in hours of telecommunications blackout caused by a cyber-attack on mobile networks, a sudden catastrophic power outage, or even – given Taiwan is the world’s leading supplier of the tiny computer chips on which your smartphone possibly relies – a Chinese invasion of Taiwan? How thin, exactly, is the veneer of a civilised life?
Such questions might sound ridiculously overdramatic. But they are one way of thinking about resilience in the kind of barely imaginable crisis that startled citizens across Europe are suddenly being asked to prepare for, and not just by stocking up on battery-operated radios and torches. The Swedish government, which is about to join Nato, has just reintroduced a form of national service. Last week, the Dutch head of Nato’s military committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, warned of the possibility of a war with Russia within the next 20 years where “it is the whole of society which will get involved whether we like it or not”.
Later, Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, suggested it might be sooner: maybe five to eight years. By comparison, this week’s call from army chief Gen Sir Patrick Sanders, for “preparatory steps to enable placing our societies on a war footing” sounded positively modest. Although he warned civilians would have to volunteer for the frontline if Russia began invading Nato countries, at least he stopped short of calling for the reintroduction of conscription.
Perhaps some will hear in his words just another attempt to squeeze cash from the Treasury, or even some shadowy deep state plot to rescue flagging western economies with a war. But Sanders is a man with little to lose from speaking candidly, given his term as chief of the general staff is almost up, and the fact that his call to build a significantly bigger regular army clearly irritated Downing Street is all the more reason to take it seriously. He may be mistaken in raising the alarm about a war that might never happen but if so, he’s not alone.
What happened this week looks like a pan-European conversation until now held mainly behind closed doors spilling into the open, with consequences worth exploring not just for defence spending but potentially for everything from the green energy transition to manufacturing, food production and the regulation of social media platforms through which Russia has repeatedly tried to whip up extremist political sentiment and manipulate democratic elections.
But it is also, more broadly, about how Britons see themselves. Sanders has been quietly arguing for months that we are no longer a postwar country – one for which world wars are the stuff of history lessons and nostalgic Hollywood blockbusters – but a prewar one that should be braced for trouble ahead. What is pushing these fears to the fore across Europe now is the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House and pulling the plug on US military support for Ukraine, effectively handing victory to Vladimir Putin.
Can’t take Sanders seriously? Then listen to former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, telling ITV’s Peston show this week that his base “does not want one more penny” going to Kyiv’s war effort – no empty threat when Republicans last month blocked President Biden’s latest military aid package. Bannon suggested his old boss could cut a deal with Putin in 48 hours, abandoning eastern Ukraine to its grisly fate. And if that happened, no Baltic state could feel safe from Putin’s dreams of a resurrected Russian empire.
As the former Downing Street national security adviser Kim Darroch points out, a Putin victory in Ukraine would not necessarily mean tanks rolling immediately into neighbouring Nato countries. But it might start with the systematic destabilisation of countries such as Latvia and Estonia, which have sizeable Russian-minority populations, with Moscow funding and fuelling separatist movements to create a fake pretext for invading and “rescuing” them.
Nobody is really sure whether a politician as chaotic as Donald Trump would stand by the US’s commitments to its Nato allies, if a show of force were needed to deter a full invasion, or not. But would you bet lives on him doing the right thing? Or would you plan for a scenario everyone hopes can still be avoided, sending a public message both to Moscow and to potentially hostile powers from China to Iran that might want to take advantage of a newly fragile world order, that Europe is prepared to stand up for itself with precious little help from across the Atlantic? For anyone used to seeing the US as an aggressive imperial power, forever trying to drag a reluctant Britain into its ill-advised wars, it’s a big mental leap to see US withdrawal from the battlefield as anything but a relief. But the chaos and betrayal of the 2021 retreat from Kabul was an early warning sign of the suffering an abruptly retreating superpower can leave in its wake.
Adopting a prewar mindset in this context almost certainly means spending more on defence than a Labour government inheriting crippled public finances would find comfortable. But it also strengthens the case for things Britain frankly should be doing anyway, from putting rocket boosters under the transition to renewable energy – why be any more vulnerable to oil price shocks than necessary? – to cleaning up social media platforms riddled with bad actors and systematic political disinformation. A prewar mindset wouldn’t let the British steel industry die, given steel’s critical role in defence manufacturing, or indulge the kind of pointless political infighting and kneejerk anti-European sentiment to which this government is prone.
What Sanders describes may seem an implausibly big ask of a squabbling country that currently seems incapable of facing down some light resistance to housebuilding in Surrey, never mind mobilising for war in Europe. But if nothing else, we should take from his words a warning not to get complacent, and the more comforting message that preparing for the worst can be a means of ensuring it doesn’t happen. For what might a nation that suddenly sensed danger start to work for, more than anything else? Not war, but the peace we have too long taken for granted.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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