Mike Robinson, the editor of UKColumn in Plymouth, England, told today’s The LaRouche Organization weekly Manhattan Dialogue webcast entitled “The LaRouche Solution for Afghanistan, Not ‘Global Britain,’ Will Restore East-West Relations” that the Australia-United Kingdom-United States agreement (AUKUS) announced this past week, is the latest in a web of defense-related bilateral and multilateral agreements that the U.K. has spun since the 2010 Lancaster House agreement with France based on “interdependence,” that is, no nation will have the military power to act on its own but must always act with others, with the U.K. as the command-and-control for any operations. The Integrated Defense Review presented by Boris Johnson’s government in March of 2016 defined the government’s vision for the role of the U.K. in the world for the next decade. It was preceded by a RAND Corporation report entitled “The Utility of Military Force and Public Understanding In Today’s Britain.” (See complete TLO Manhattan Dialogue transcript in Documentation.)
The RAND report, commissioned by the U.K. Ministry of Defense’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre and published in 2020 declares at the outset that “The presence of a communication gap between the government and the public on matters of defence policy can undermine the development of strategy and potential for the coherent use of military force.” It makes three points: “Hybrid war” targets the role of popular opinion in shaping national strategy; Social resilience is receiving increasing attention in relation to national security; and “The effect of ignoring domestic resilience is to undermine deterrence.”
Its first recommendation, in response to these “implications,” is to stress the shared responsibility of resilience. “In the context of domestic security, the responsibility for resilience is a shared one. Future strategic reviews must make this point explicit.” Another one of its recommendations is to create “coherence” in communications. “The decision to use military force is inherently risky and morally fraught but it can be the right decision: the public needs to understand the issues.” Robinson explained that then-Prime Minister Theresa May, during a G7 meeting in 2017, announced the Rapid Response Mechanism, where the G7 would agree on common narratives for whatever was happening.
