Britain is likely to lose a second Falklands War

THE FOREIGN OFFICE is up to its old tricks, according to reports reaching The First Post. As the great Yogi Berra put it, it's like deja vu all over again. They are telling the coalition government that while they don't want to give the Falklands away exactly, if the Argentines were to try again to take the islands off us, as they did in 1982, they don't think we should fight to regain them.

This has emerged from a position paper for the new Strategic Defence and Security Review, due to be unveiled late next month as part of the programme of massive defence cuts which will cut the defence budget by 30 per cent and the armed forces by 40,000.

The review is being prepared by the new National Security Council (NSC), run by the former head of the Foreign Office Sir Peter Ricketts, and largely staffed by Foreign Office officials.

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The view of the NSC is that Britain should no longer be involved in such adventures as Iraq and Afghanistan, into which New Labour led us under Tony Blair's banner. Instead, Britain should use its forces for containment and 'layered deterrence' in the mantra of Defence Secretary Liam Fox.

Taking the case history of the Falklands, the NSC apparently has outlined the measures of layered response, involving no doubt the despatch of the odd nuclear hunter killer submarine, as David Owen did in 1977, and half a squadron of Typhoon fighter-bombers.

And if that should fail? It seems likely there would be no further physical response.

The MoD and the Foreign Office, ably abetted by the Treasury, look on the armed forces as a hangover from some military antiques roadshow. For them Afghanistan is an embarrassment because UK's core business is with the US and Europe - little realising that unless the UK and its limited but capable military can help in Afghanistan, it is no good at all to Uncle Sam.

It is all eerily reminiscent of where we were in 1981. The Defence Review of that year under John Nott aimed to withdraw the Antarctic patrol ship Endurance and flog the pocket carrier Invincible to Australia, which made it clear there would be little left in the Royal Navy locker to defend the islands.

The interesting debating point is that if the Argentine junta had attacked the islands in August instead of April 1982, the UK might have been incapable of mounting a credible response at all.

In November 1980, the islands had been visited by Nicholas Ridley, a junior minister at the Foreign Office and a Thatcher favourite. His mission was to persuade the islanders to get real and settle for a leaseback arrangement with mainland Argentina, along the lines of the Hong Kong deal of the late 19th century. Reports of this proposal, along with the withdrawal of HMS Endurance, persuaded the last-gasp military junta under Leopoldo Galtieri that if they grabbed the Falklands and South Georgia, Britain wouldn't react.

For both the Argentines and the UK the symbolism of the Falklands is way out of proportion to the prosaic facts on the ground of that bit of windswept bogland and rock in the South Atlantic. It is part of the iconography of the Conservative Party of the the past 50 years, too.

Former defence chiefs and academics who have had a look at the preliminary workings of the Strategic Defence and Security Review, now some six weeks off, are alarmed at the poverty of forward-thinking revealed in it so far. "It's not policy-led," said one, "it's slash and burn in an almost nonsensical way."

With all the scrapping and mothballing, and the P45s for 40,000 fighting servicemen and women, it might be just too tempting for the Buenos Aires regime to try to redeem their honour in the Malvinas. If not next year, why not exercise strategic patience and go for the 30th anniversary of the Falklands War in 2012 - and probably on national independence day, May 25?

Where would this put Thatcher's political grandchildren - Cameron, Hague and Osborne? If they're not careful, they'll be heading for terminal strategic blunder, or as the mild-mannered John Major might say, a very considerable tactical banana skin.