Policy papers and Journal Articles
My policy papers for think tanks and academic journals.
Defence and Security
A European Way of War
A European Way of War: Towards Doctrine to Defend Against Russia, Without the US. European View, 25(1), 2025.
Recent changes in US foreign policy and strategic posture have forced Europe to think about meeting its security needs without US support. One issue that requires a particular focus is the question of how to deter and defend against Russia in a conventional war. This article attempts a high-level assessment of European military capability, and considers whether existing military doctrine is adequate. It argues that Europe should maintain its focus on NATO’s manoeuvrist mode of war fighting and identifies key capability gaps that need to be filled for (a) a coalition of the willing and (b) Europe as a whole to be able to fight in this way. It cautions against an unduly defensive, attritional method of fighting, based on conscript armies, as playing to Russia’s strengths instead of our own.
Related Podcast
The Beowulf Group
The Beowulf Group: Taking the Lead to Defend Europe, European View 24(2), 2024.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has exposed divisions in European strategic culture andthreat perception. The search for a lowest-common-denominator response to the threat has hampered the European reply to the Russian aggression, often forcing the EU to move at the speed of its slowest member, whether in supplying ammunition and equipment to Ukraine or setting up the defence industry needed to accelerate such a supply in the future. Notwithstanding the importance of keeping a broad coalition together, this article argues that it is now time to create a vanguard of like-minded European nations, led by France, Poland and, though not an EU member, the UK, but open to other states, which can force the creation of a new strategic culture able to meet the Russian threat. This ‘Beowulf Group’, named after the Danish hero from the Anglo-Saxon epic who stood up to the marauding monster Grendel, could establish a Strategic College for Europe, a joint Elite European Reserve Legion and a strategic communications centre,to move European policy in a more active direction.
Related Podcast
Freedom must be better armed than Tyranny
Freedom Must be Better Armed Than Tyranny: Boosting Research and Industrial Capacity for European Defence. Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies. 2023.
The Russian state is a threat to freedom in Europe and the integrity of the EU. Since 1945 we have relied on the United States to protect freedom on our continent. While it is to be hoped the US will be able to stay involved in the most successful democratic alliance in history, the risk of conflict in Asia, a return to isolationism, or the re-election of Donald Trump is too high for the EU not to develop a defence industrial and technological base (DITB) able to supply Europe’s defence on its own.
Recommendations
Create a single market in defence equipment and ammunition to allow the automatic re-export of equipment and ammunition by all EU member states as long as it is in line with the CFSP.
Increase the size of the EDF and focus it on R&T. Seek to integrate it better with Horizon funding for dual-use research.
Use elements of the existing Cohesion, Resilience and Values fund to stimulate technological convergence with defence applications, thereby supporting R&D, particularly in the CEE region. Adopted in the REARM Europe package.
Include a specific instrument to facilitate convergence in technologies between defence applications in the next MFF or in the review of the current MFF. A relatively small fund of, €2-€3 billion per year (€14-€21 billion over the MFF cycle) would be able to close important regional disparities.
Use Article 122 TFEU to extend a financial guarantee to member states under threat from Russia to allow them to borrow at Union rates to re-quip their armed forces. Adopted through the SAFE programme.
Replace the European Peace Facility with a ‘European Strategic Defence Fund’ that would expand the EPF’s mission of current procurement support to include development of strategic enablers that would be shared between EU member states (and possibly third country allies). This could provide for air defence, airlift and refuelling, deep strike equipment, C4ISR and other shared capability.
Keep Calm and Defend Europe
Keep Calm and Defend Europe, Conservative European Forum, 2022.
The invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces has underscored the necessity of cooperation and coordination among European allies. It would be wise, therefore, for the UK understand how it is to engage with a European defence policy that is gradually becoming more “communautaire”, and to seek out ways it can cooperate with this process.
Recommendations
Joining PESCO projects that benefit UK security (including the military mobility project, which would improve the UK’s ability to deploy forces in Eastern Europe in the event to of a conflict)
Concluding an “administrative agreement” with the European Defence Agency
Engagement to ensure that ownership requirements related to the disbursal of EDF funds are do not
Time to Use European Power Again
Time to Use European Power Again
Time to Use European Power Again, European View, 19(2), 2020.
The decline of Russia and rise of China have shifted the security focus of the US towards China, leaving a security vacuum in Europe’s neighbourhood that the EU has so far been unwilling to fill. The vacuum has been exploited by hostile external powers, and nationalist anti-Europeans within, threatening the survival of the EU itself. A stronger European security role, anchored in a unified strategic culture, could turn the EU into a producer of regional security, and provide a new conservative narrative for European integration. While this will eventually need a treaty change, the centre–right should not wait until then to relegitimise the use of European power in Europe’s own neighbourhood.
European Parliament AFCO study on Brexit
‘Foreign, Security and Defence Cooperation’, chapter in The impact of the UK’s withdrawal on EU integration, study for European Parliament’s AFCO (edited by Garvan Walshe and Tim Oliver), 2018.
Democracy and the Rule of Law
Strategic Corruption and Democratic Decline
Globalisation has opened Western economies to influence and investment by authoritarian states like Russia and China. States with strong legal and democratic institutions are able to defend against them by applying the rule of law, investigating corruption, and limiting the extent to which elected and appointed officials can work for authoritarian governments after they leave office. However, countries that have begun to weaken or dismantle democratic institutions also undermine checks and balances against this foreign-authoritarian, or ‘strategic’ corruption opening up a new vector for authoritarian influence in the EU. This paper suggests ways EU institutions can be strengthened to mitigate this risk and argues these should be organised specifically as measures against authoritarian influence rather than foreign influence per se.
Political Antitrust
‘Political Antitrust’, New Tools to Fight Illiberal Democracy, Hungarian Europe Society, 2022.
Fake democrats can be found ruling from all parts of the political spectrum, whether national religious, as in Erdogan’s Turkey, far-left in Morales’s Bolivia, or economically liberal, as in Singapore, but some of the most successful in recent times have come from the national populist right. Law and Justice in Poland, the Lega under Matteo Salvini in Italy, Donald Trump in the United States and, of course, Fidesz in Hungary have all governed against the institutions of liberal democracy in their societies. They share a common critique of liberal democracy that liberals have so far found it difficult to refute and use it to accumulate a monopoly of political power behind a facade of democratic public participation.
Political Monopoly
Europe’s new autocrats aren’t conventional authoritarians. They allow opposition to exist but tilt the playing field to keep it away from power. They act as “political monopolists” to stifle political competition and keep themselves in power.
They implement a strategy in eight steps, by seizing control of information, and then institutions. They troll to get attention and degrade public discourse, build their own media and propaganda machine, automate by exploiting bots and social media algorithms to dominate political discourse, capture private media with the help of sympathetic businesspeople. In power, they capture public media too, muzzle judges and independent government agencies, politicise the civil service, and manipulate elections themselves.
Other Topics
Green Libertarianism
Green Libertarianism, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 17(5), 2014
People evolved as part of an ecosystem, making use of the Earth’s bounty without reflection. Only when our ancestors developed the capacity for moral agency could we begin to reflect on whether we had taken in excess of our due. This outlines a ‘green libertarianism’ in which our property rights are grounded in fundamental ecological facts. It further argues that it is immune from two objections levelled at right- and left- libertarian theories of acquisition: that Robert Nozick, without justification, divided people into those who were able to acquire unowned resources, and those would could not; and, that left-libertarian attempts, such as Hillel Steiner’s, to separate choice from circumstance cannot account for the fact that not only people’s decisions to have children, but even their decisions to continue living, affect people’s entitlements to use the natural world.
Brexit
Making A More European Britain: The Political, Economic and Societal impacts of Brexit 2020.
This paper sets out how Brexit is pushing the UK towards aligning more closely with the rest of Europe in its politics, society, economics and international position. This is the result of long-running trends coupled with the political tumult created by the 2016 referendum and the effects of the negotiations that followed. The emergence of pro-Europeanism as a political force is one of the most important and obvious changes. Brexit has also confronted the British with several realities about the UK’s economy, society and place in the world that show it to be more European than many will have recognised. In addition, the process of withdrawal has exposed the decentralisation and fragmentation of the formerly exceptionally unitary UK state that began in the 1990s, with tensions emerging from Scotland and Northern Ireland voting to remain while England (with the exception of London) and Wales voted to leave. However, none of this should be taken to mean that divergence from Europe will not happen or be sought, or that the British people will eventually vote to rejoin.