The Categorisation of Threats to Britain: Public Diplomacy.

The government white paper on national strategy should not be taken at face value but as public diplomacy. The tiers of threats it lists down in descending order do not stack up with the maintenance of what is still a huge defense budget proportional to Britain's second rank economy.

In The Guardian, Sir Simon Jenkins clarified the white paper thus,

The first so-called tier one threat is "attacks on cyberspace and cybercrime". The second is "international terrorism". The third is a foreign crisis "drawing in Britain", and the fourth is a natural hazard – "such as severe coastal flooding or an influenza pandemic". None of these constitute a military threat to the security of the realm.

Lesser threats are listed, including attacks from chemical, biological or radiological weapons, "organised crime" and "severe disruption to information … collected by satellites". Only in the lowest risk category, at number nine, do we encounter a "large-scale conventional military attack on Britain". This improbable event is put on a par with yet more terrorism, illegal immigration, and "disruption to fuel supplies or price instability", whatever the last may mean.

To none of the top threats is an army, navy or air force a sensible response. Almost all Britain's defence spending goes on threat number nine, a concerted attack on British soil, yet this is so unlikely these days, or in the foreseeable future, that it must merit some detailed assessment of balancing of risk against cost. It gets none.

None of the threats are mutually exclusive. International Terrorism provides the rationale for being in Afghanistan, though attacks can be planned in Britain and much of Al Qaida is in Pakistan. But ,of course, purported theats can be mere pretexts to carry out foreign policies.

For, the third threat , a foreign crisis "drawing in Britain", could be classified as a threat if it involved a threat to energy security as defined as a potential threat to the USA's and UK's control over diminishing resources, the main driving force behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

That's why the scale of conventional military forces are being maintained on the whole. Britain committed 40,000 troops to Iraq. Yet Germany and France did not. The reason was to preserve the "special relationship" and an anxiety over continuing supplies of oil ( mendaciously listed as a lower threat ).

Iraq was a resource war. It was not solely do to, as Jenkins maintains, with Blair's quest for glory. Blair had expressed concern about fuel supplies after Noth Sea Oil peaked in 1999 and in the wake of the fuel protests of 2000. Two of Blair's closest policy advisors David King and David Manning warned of Peak Oil.

As David Strahan, author of the Last Oil Shock wrote in 2007,

Britain and America’s shared energy fears were secretly formalised during the planning for Iraq. It is widely accepted that Blair’s commitment to support the attack dates back to his summit with Bush at Crawford in April 2002. The Times headline was typical that weekend: Iraq Action Is Delayed But ‘Certain’.

What is less well known is that at the same summit Blair proposed and Bush agreed to set up the US-UK Energy Dialogue, a permanent diplomatic liason dedicated to “energy security and diversity”. No announcement was made, and the Dialogue’s existence was only later exposed through a US Freedom of Information enquiry.

The continuation of the war in Afghanistan is crucially concerned for a successful outcome to getting the TAPI pipeline constructed in order to block off the threat of a rival IPI pipeline from Iran and to diversify supplies away from Russia and maintain a presence in Central Asia.

British foreign policy is essentially US foreign policy and that means the quest for energy security and geopolitical struggles. Many of the main threats outlined by the white paper are anticipated consequences of business as usual: of vying for control over strategically vital regions where pipelines will run.

The scaling down of Britain's defence budget is to make it tie in with the USA's foreign policy: serving that agenda is Britain's national strategy. Dr Liam Fox is a messianic neoconservative and admirer of Bush II. Britain follows the USA for ideological reasons and shares its geopolitical fears over resources.