It is a pleasure to congratulate the hon. Member for Ogmore (Chris Elmore) on taking his seat, and to endorse the tribute he paid to his predecessor. Huw Irranca-Davies is living proof of the fact that one can be a genuinely nice guy and still succeed in politics, and we will miss him.
Members of Select Committees are as divided as any other groups on the question of membership of the European Union, and so it should go without saying that in my remarks on this subject today I am speaking solely for myself. My concern is that the fixation of the European Union on creating a single European defence and foreign policy may make future conflict more likely rather than less. So why has NATO proved to be the most successful military alliance in history? The answer is clear: it is the deterrent effect of United States membership. Taken together with article 5 of the NATO charter, according to which an attack on any member country will be considered an attack on them all, this means that any would-be aggressor must face the prospect of war with the world’s most powerful state, the United States, right from the outset. If Germany had faced that prospect in 1914, not 1917, or in 1939, not late 1941, who knows but that those wars might not have begun, and all that suffering might have been avoided?
In order reliably to deter, collective security must combine adequate power with the virtual certainty that it will be brought into action if triggered by an act of
aggression. On both grounds, NATO succeeds, and the European Union fails, as a collective security organisation. Since the US does not belong to the EU, the latter can muster only a fraction of NATO’s deterrent military power. Nor can there be any certainty that the US will respond to an attack involving EU member states outside the north Atlantic alliance. By trying to create its own foreign policy and its own military forces—which on typical European levels of defence investment will remain modest indefinitely—the EU risks reverting to the uncertainties of the pre-NATO era. The NATO guarantee is a solemn commitment to be willing to start world war three on behalf of a member country facing attack or invasion. NATO membership must not be proffered lightly nor extended to countries on behalf of which article 5 of its charter is simply not credible. Where security is concerned, it is dangerous folly to give promises and guarantees that we are in no position to fulfil, and the EU needs to be particularly careful in pursuing a foreign policy that gives promises of that sort.
In terms of deterring an external threat, the EU adds nothing to the exemplary role discharged by NATO. As for the threat of EU members attacking each other, there is certainly no risk of their going to war once again with each other as long as they remain free, democratic and constitutional. That is because constitutional democracies do not attack one another; instead, wars break out between dictatorships and other dictatorships, or between dictatorships and democracies.