HMS Queen Elizabeth in the pacific and the geopolitics of risk

Yesterday I told my son that the main foreign policy challenge for my parents' generation had been dealing with Russia, but the main such challenge for his generation will be dealing with China. There are no risk-free options in either case.

John Paul Jones, known as the founder of the US navy and a man who had both positive and negative associations with Whitehaven, had a saying about tisk:









There is a great deal of truth in this saying. 

There was certainly a great deal of risk taken by both Mrs Thatcher's government and by her military commanders during the Falklands War and yet history will record that those risks were justified - horrified though I was to see images the Canberra, on which one of my relatives was serving, in San Carlos Water during TV footage of an Argentine air attack. 

It was a very brave and risky decision to put that valuable asset and hundreds of priceless lives in that position yet Admiral Woodward's calculation that his sea harriers, the mobile SAM units deployed and the air defence capabilities of his frigates deployed in the harbour could protect her proved accurate, and getting the troops she carried on the grounds quickly proved critical to the swift recapture of the islands, probably saving many lives in the process.

There were also risks for the government which would probably have fallen if it had not won the war (as the Argentine Junta did) - but there would have been worse risks in letting a fascist regime sieze some of our territory and just under 2,000 of our people. it has been publicised in the last few weeks that a Soviet official told a britian one privately that if Britain had not retaken the Falklands the Russians would never have taken us seriously as a country again. 

Today HMS Queen Elixabeth and her carrier strike group arrived in the Phillipine Sea.










The supercarrier and her escorts, mostly Royal Navy vessels including a nuclear submarine but, making this a carefully orchestrated joint operation with NATO allies, some of her jets and one of the escorting warships are US units and another of the escorts is Dutch - will pass through the pacific including waters which China claims but the West regards as international waters. 

It will not be lost on other powers - including Russia and China - that the presence of the destroyer USS Sullivans and the Dutch frigate HNLMS Evertsen demonstrates that this voyage by the Queen Elizabeth carrier group is not just a British action but also has the support of President Biden's US administration and NATO as a whole.

This is taking a risk as Daniel Johnson explains here.

But if the West is not prepared to take such risks we are sending the signal that powers like China can ignore our concerns and wishes with impunity.

At the end of the day that could be an even more dangerous risk - by increasing the danger that some regime like Putins's in Russia or the People's Republic of China may fatally miscalculate whether the NATO countries are prepared to defend ourselves and our allies.

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