Let us pause, reader, and consider a scene of such perfect, theatrical absurdity that even Gilbert and Sullivan might have balked at it. A Russian warship, bristling with the kind of hardware that makes NATO planners reach for a second sherry, menaces a humble yacht off the coast of Kent. The yacht’s owner, a British gentleman of a certain age and apparently of considerable nerve, responds with the finest tradition of plucky defiance: he refuses to heave to. The warship, thwarted by a fibreglass hull and a stiff upper lip, slinks back to its grey corner of the North Sea. The Foreign Office, ever eager to appear stern, announces an investigation. And the nation, for a moment, wonders if we have stumbled into an episode of “Yes, Minister” written by Tom Clancy on a bad day.
Let us be clear about what this incident represents. It is not, as some excitable commentators would have it, a ‘new Cuban Missile Crisis’ adrift in the Thames Estuary. Nor is it merely a case of Russian high spirits gone awry. It is, instead, a perfect microcosm of the intellectual and strategic decadence that has gripped the West since the fall of the Berlin Wall. We have, in our comfortable delusion, convinced ourselves that the great game of nations is over, that history has ended in a sort of neoliberal shopping mall where the only threats are climate change and the occasional tweet. Meanwhile, the Kremlin, which never forgot that states are predatory animals, has been quietly rebuilding its capacity for surgical intimidation. This warship was not lost. It was not on a training exercise. It was a signal. And the signal was this: your sovereignty is a courtesy we may choose to withdraw.
The choice of target is instructive. A pleasure yacht, unarmed and unescorted, is the softest of soft targets. It is the maritime equivalent of the pensioner whose walking stick you knock from his hand to remind him who runs the street. The Russian captain likely expected a panicked radio call, a hurried retreat, and a satisfying sense of dominance. Instead, he got a man who said ‘no’. And in that ‘no’ lies a lesson that our political class, with its endless committees and impact assessments, would do well to learn. There is a difference between strength and belligerence. There is a difference between prudence and cowardice. We have, for too long, confused the latter pair. Our naval budgets have been slashed, our shipyards are idle, and the men and women who serve are asked to do more with less until they break. We have, in short, outsourced our security to the United States and our common sense to Brussels.
This is not to argue for a return to the jingoistic posturing of the Victorian era, when a gunboat could start a war and a flag could claim a continent. But we might usefully recall that the Victorians understood something we have forgotten: that a nation which cannot patrol its own waters is a nation that has ceased to be a nation in any meaningful sense. The Russian Federation has a fleet. The People’s Republic of China has a fleet. Even the French, bless them, still manage to launch an aircraft carrier now and again. The Royal Navy, by contrast, is a shadow of its former self, a collection of fine vessels and finer officers forced to operate as if the age of sail had returned and all the wind had died. We have become a nation of yacht owners who cannot rely on the protection of the Admiralty. That is a scandal not of the Kremlin’s making.
Let us also consider the moral dimension. The yacht owner, in his stubborn refusal to be intimidated, acted as a citizen of a free country should. He did not wait for a government statement. He did not form a working group. He simply said, ‘This is my water, and you shall not pass.’ That instinct, that ancient and irrational love of one’s own soil and sea, is what built this island nation. It is what sent Drake around the world and Nelson to Trafalgar. It is what Churchill summoned in 1940. And it is what we have allowed to atrophy in the comfortable years of peace. We have traded glory for comfort, and now we are startled to find that others are willing to take what we will not defend.
The government’s investigation is welcome, but it is not enough. We need a reckoning. We need to ask ourselves whether we still wish to be a nation that commands respect, or whether we are content to be a museum of liberal values that anyone with a functioning gun can visit at will. The yacht owner has done his part. Now it is time for the rest of us to do ours.
Arthur Penhaligon
