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Defence in the World

I think that there are a lot of reasons for that. I suspect that one of the reasons is that western Governments are not spending enough on defence, so they do not know what else they could do. They do not know whether they could back up any words about Russia with actions. That is a serious worry about our western allies as a whole, but it is also a serious worry about this country, although I will come to that in just a moment. Next door to Russia is China, which has its pressures of population and an urban-rural divide. Incidentally, if we are looking ahead to problems of defence in the world, a real cause of instability in the future may be the vast empty lands of eastern Russia right next door to the heavily over-populated areas of China, particularly given that those areas of eastern Russia have such huge natural resources. I suspect that Russia is looking ahead with apprehension to what might happen there. We should begin to form a view on what effect that sort of issue might have on the western world. China is growing strongly. It owns a huge amount of United States debt. The Chinese are investing in education in a way that will be very effective for their country. They take a long-term view—perhaps a longer-term view than the western world takes—and we cannot ignore their phenomenal rise, because it will have defence implications. All those things are things that we can look at in deciding what we ought to be thinking about in respect of defence in the world.