Sarah Harte: Race to re-arm means avoiding groupthink has never been more crucial
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, right, with Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrive for an EU Summit in Brussels last week. President Ursula von der Leyen said: 'Our European values — democracy, freedom, and the rule of law — are under threat.' Photo: AP/Omar Havana
We live in a time of turning points. The war in Ukraine and the Russian threat are clear turning points. A disengaged America means a different Europe, but what the new Europe should look like needs discussion.
As citizens, we have the right to question the role of our government, particularly in challenging times. An unthinking deference to the crowd's wisdom about the necessity to re-arm or, in our case, to ‘arm’ is unwise.
On Sunday, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen gave a bleak address in Brussels, saying something fundamental had shifted. “Our European values — democracy, freedom, and the rule of law — are under threat. We see that sovereignty, but also ironclad commitments, are being called into question.”
Meanwhile, An Tánaiste Simon Harris also mentioned sovereignty issues in the context of the Triple Lock. Harris has said we are in a “serious period of reform” regarding defence and security.
Last week, the Cabinet approved draft legislation to change the rules governing military use abroad. On the table is the proposal that we could deploy 50 troops abroad rather than 12 without a vote by the UN Security Council.
On one analysis, it seems reasonable. To echo Harris, why should Russia have a veto on where Irish peacekeeping troops go, which it did in 2009 with regard to Georgia? On another analysis, the Triple Lock was essential to passing the Nice Treaty.
Its modification demands careful debate. What is striking, though, are the dark hints that come thick and fast, telling us that we need to get real about defence.
During the week, Ireland’s EU Commissioner, Michael McGrath, envisaged Russian tanks rolling into other European countries and warned we are not safe due to our geography. Perhaps I’m wrong, but the warning read to me like another step in presenting the case for eroding our neutrality to keep Ireland safe in the choppy new world order.
An Taoiseach recently discussed the Russian agenda and said that while there are no plans to change our neutrality, we must be cognisant “of the changed geopolitical context and wider threat environment in Europe”, which sounds like a qualification.
Irish Examiner columnists are divided, perhaps reflecting a wider plurality of perspectives. Jennifer Horgan cherishes our neutrality and fears that “voices are trying to chip away at Ireland’s commitment to peace.” Fergus Finlay argued we must join the fight, abolish our neutrality and “contribute to the security and defence of Europe” as “a contribution to freedom everywhere now.”
On Saturday, Mick Clifford wrote a thundering article advocating for a mature debate and declaiming virtue-signalling regarding our neutrality. In defending Finlay, he also trenchantly critiqued those who defend our neutrality while claiming the high moral ground. His point was not to assume you are superior because you believe in maintaining our neutrality. He’s right
Last week, Retired Vice Admiral Mark Mellett, a former chief of staff of the Defence Forces, said that Irish neutrality was “a myth”. Our neutrality is undoubtedly ambiguous in several facets, not least because Shannon Airport is used as a stopover for American troops en route to war.
But what is not mythic is our proud record in peacekeeping, including our massive contribution to UN blue beret forces in Lebanon and advocacy for the precepts of international law, most recently in the context of Gaza. Just because something is ambiguous does not mean it’s not worth defending.
Our neutrality is an important question. While we had a belly full of referenda in 2024, this question should be put to the people. If the answer is to keep it, which is likely, given last month's Ireland Thinks poll indicating that up to 75% of Irish people support maintaining it, then let us enshrine neutrality in the Constitution and get behind it meaningfully.
Instinctively, I look at older white men and see warmongers. For instance, last week, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk asked Poland to consider exiting the Dublin and Ottawa Conventions in the context of the use of anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions. He wants access to nuclear weapons and announced military training for all Polish males in the race for security.
The rising militarism is unnerving. However, Russian expansionism poses a clear threat to the Polish, so we are not in a position to judge.
On Friday, a Ukrainian hairdresser living in West Cork told me that, given the USA’s decision to temporarily suspend military aid to Ukraine, she prayed Europe would send them weapons. Her family, including her mother, is in Ukraine. This incident threw into sharp relief how theoretical and, in some ways, indulgent my musings on neutrality and matters of defence are.
Nonetheless, we need to be cognisant of ‘groupthink’. The term was coined by William Whyte in 1952 and developed in the 1970s by psychologist Irving Janis. Janis detected groupthink at the root of many bad foreign policy decisions, including the American invasion of Cuba’s Bay of Pigs.
Pathological international groupthink and an overconfidence about the rightness of their ideas led to the disastrous invasion of Iraq and the inflation of the threat of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Michael Martin said last month that Ireland must significantly increase expenditure on our “defence capability” in line with other European countries. Ursula von der Leyen said that EU member states’ collective spending should increase “from just below 2% [of EU GDP] to above 3%”.
Our defence spending is around 0.2% of GDP, the lowest in the European Union. The Government has pledged to increase defence spending by 50% by 2028. Maybe we need to increase our defence spending. We can remain neutral and have a credible defence force.
One argument is that our neutrality means that we should spend more rather than less on defence. Decades of underinvestment have left our Defence Forces in a total crisis. We have almost zero capability to defend 220 million maritime acres of our seas, which contain vital subsea data cables linking the EU to the US. We cannot patrol our airspace, relying on Britain and sometimes Nato.
Yet, we must also avoid adopting prevailing assumptions that we automatically endorse the idea that EU defence spending should be increased. Or behave like lackeys for elite power structures. The anxiety that Russia might not stop at invading Ukraine feels like a watershed.
We are all feeling the cold chill of Cold War 2.0. That means that more than ever, we should critically engage with what our future might look like and the intricacies of the governmental decision-making processes.
Military spending feels like societal poison, in place of delivering much-needed social benefits. All this comes at a time of already heightened economic uncertainty due to American trade policy. Military investment would inevitably mean diverting much-needed resources from other key areas.
Spending on hard-power assets like fighter jets, naval vessels, and helicopters, when children with special needs do not have school places and our infrastructure is creaking, requires careful consideration.
We can only try to keep our heads and not be bounced into anything we may regret. Ultimately, borrowing a phrase from French president Emmanuel Macron, we should aim to achieve a ‘strategic autonomy’ that promulgates the soft power of peacekeeping at which we have excelled.
Easier said than done.
