Britain and Military Strategy¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter, drawn from writings of 1916-1922, dissects British military strategy as a historically specific expression of bourgeois imperialist interests, not a timeless doctrine of statecraft. Trotsky opens with a caustic summary of the historian Adam’s account of Anglo-Spanish relations, using the War of Spanish Succession as a paradigmatic case. Britain’s method, he argues, was classic international banditry: it led a coalition against the unified Bourbon powers, suffered least and gained most, seizing Gibraltar and extracting trading privileges, then promptly betrayed its Austrian ally by recognising Philippe Bourbon as king once France-Spain was sufficiently weakened. The polemic is directed squarely at social-patriotic philosophers who moralise about aggression and defence; the point is that British strategy was always predatory, cloaked in legalism and alliance rhetoric.
The chapter then turns to the question of military doctrine proper. Trotsky identifies the traditional British doctrine as stable and definitive: naval hegemony (a fleet stronger than any two combined), a small volunteer land army, and maintenance of a European balance of power to prevent any single continental state from dominating. This stability, he insists, was not a product of genius but of prolonged, uninterrupted growth in British power in a world where Europe was the world. The First World War shattered this. Britain was forced into conscription, the European equilibrium was destroyed, and the rise of the United States made automatic naval supremacy impossible. The Washington Conference of 1921-22, which fixed a 5:5:3 capital ship ratio between the US, Britain and Japan, is the institutional marker of this collapse. Trotsky’s core theoretical claim is that military doctrine presupposes relative stability in domestic and foreign situations; in an epoch of convulsions and radical regroupment, such doctrine becomes worthless.
The final sections project this analysis into revolutionary strategy. Trotsky argues that the British Navy, though still a powerful organism, faces an inevitable crisis that will paralyse it, while the weak Red Navy has already passed its deepest crisis. He then sketches a possible scenario for civil war in Britain: the proletariat, overwhelming in numbers but conservative and hard to budge, might seize the islands, only to find the bourgeoisie retaining the navy and using it, along with colonial and allied forces, to impose a blockade and launch invasion raids. Proletarian Britain would become a beleaguered naval fortress with no retreat, forced into positional defence—trenches, barbed wire, coastal fortifications. This is a direct polemic against those who deduce manoeuvrability from the revolutionary nature of the proletariat; Trotsky insists that strategy must be derived from concrete geographical and military realities, not abstract revolutionary optimism.