This is my first blog of a year in which huge decisions are due to be taken - whether Britain remains a member of the EU and replaces Trident with a new nuclear ballistic missile weapons system.
It may also tell us whether the threat from extreme violent Islamist terrorism has peaked.
One way or another all these are linked.
“I am in no doubt that for Britain the European question is not just a matter of economic security, but of national security too”, David Cameron stated in a major speech in November. The UK’s membership of the EU “does matter for our national security and for the security of our allies”, he said.
The government’s Strategic Defence and Security Review emphasised the importance of cooperation within the EU.
The new Polish government has made an explicit link between Cameron’s pre-referendum EU reform demands, offering to trade UK welfare rights for UK support for a Nato base in Poland.
Barack Obama has said Britain should remain in the EU. So has China’s president, Xi Jingping.
Now, the former Labour foreign secretary, David (Lord) Owen, says the debate triggered by the EU referendum must include security policy. A key point in his newly-published essay is that the Eurozone countries should not be allowed to dominate EU foreign and security policy. He rightly criticises the EU’s clumsy and incoherent attitude towards Russia and eastern Europe.
He praises comments by that wise US diplomat, George Kennan, for saying in a 1998 interview: “Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime”.
Owen says the EU must also adopt a much more open approach towards Turkey, Serbia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, offering them membership of the EEA (European Economic Area) which includes Norway and Iceland, as well as the EU, perhaps as a first step towards full EU membership.
Owen is concerned that EU will compete with Nato. Given the dire straits of most European armed forces, this is an unlikely prospect. Indeed, the US wants the Europeans to take on a much bigger military and security role, and invest in much more relevant armed forces, as Washington concentrates on China, the Pacific, and Far East.
Meanwhile, Britain’s security and intelligence agencies are pressing for more, not less, cooperation with their EU partners.
And so to Trident. “As foreign secretary, I am opposed, and still oppose, Trident as an expensive financial inroad into our conventional defence effort”, Owen writes. (Instead, he says, conventionally-armed cruise missiles should be capable of carrying nuclear weapons.)
Stopping all Trident patrols is certainly open to Labour if they win the 2020 general election , says Owen, and senior military officers could resign or comply. “A wiser course”, he adds, “would be for Labour to focus on taking significant steps down the scale towards phasing out all nuclear weapons, while retaining a “minimum deterrent”.
Yet Owen suggests the British people are probably more ready, after the Iraq war debacle, to accept “someone as prime minister who openly declares the nuclear decision as a matter of conscience”.
With Cameron prepared to abandon the principle of collective cabinet responsibility over Brexit, a Corbyn shadow cabinet including some pro-Trident members should not appear so strange.
