For Trump, there is no such thing as an 'ally'

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As part of his justification for gaining total control over Greenland, the Guardian reports that Trump “has insisted that Denmark cannot be relied upon to protect Greenland in the case of a confrontation with China or Russia”. He’s right, of course: there is no way that Denmark acting alone can mobilise sufficient resources to defend Greenland against an all-out assault by Russia or China (although the idea of an all-out assault by China seems even more far-fetched than an assault by Russia). I’d go further: there is no way that Denmark could mobilise sufficient resources to defend the territory of Denmark itself from an all-out assault by Russia or China – or even the US. And Denmark is far from being the only country in that position. The Danes might foolishly have thought that that was precisely why they joined the NATO alliance – so that they would not be left alone to face such a threat, never really expecting that it would come from their supposed ally rather than their supposed enemy.

Some of Trump’s acolytes have taken the analogy even further by arguing, in effect, that any country unable to defend itself, acting alone, from an assault by one of the big powers has no right to exist – and that any power which is able to overcome another country by dint of superior force has the right to do exactly that. But when the mightiest military power the world has ever seen is run by people who believe that they have the right to take whatever they can take, it is time for the rest of the world to recognise that the US can no longer be regarded as any sort of ally, let alone a reliable one. No agreement can be taken as being worth anything from the day it is signed; the bully is always likely to come back for more. Trump himself seems to see the world as divided into three great powers each with its own sphere of influence, with all other countries being either supplicants or enemies. There is no other status in between supplicant and enemy. Pretending that the UK somehow has some special influence or relationship with this version of the US is turning a blind eye to reality. Yet that is where Starmer has placed the UK.

Options are limited, and not instant. If we assume that we want to avoid getting into a shooting war with the US – a reasonable, not to say wise, assumption – then any defence against the fascist state into which the US is descending has to be primarily economic, and it has to involve collective action. Part of Starmer’s reluctance to go down that route is probably that agreeing collective action takes time, and economic action is in any event slow-acting: sanctions against Iran, North Korea, Russia etc. aren’t exactly notable for their success. Needing the agreement of no-one, and protected from any restraining action from Congress or the courts, Trumpism is, on the other hand, fast-acting, as well as arbitrary, capricious, and unpredictable. I rather suspect that part of the calculus of Starmer and others is that Trump will be gone in three years, and the US will return to ‘normal’: still the world’s bully, but a little less blunt and obvious about it. That, though, depends on some key assumptions: that Trump will not carry on past the end of his term; that any successor won’t be as bad or even worse; and that elections will actually take place at all. None of these seem to be worth betting the farm on, yet that’s where Europe, and especially the UK, seem to be.

Will the nuclear decommissioning model actually work?

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The story this week about funding the reclamation work at Ffos y Fran has wider implications than are immediately obvious. Whether the company actually has the money available to carry out the promised reclamation work is still to be determined, although some thorough forensic financial investigation suggests that it has. Whether that money has been deliberately moved around in an attempt to shelter it for the company’s shareholders is unclear, but goes to the heart of the dispute. Court proceedings will answer those questions in due course.

The underlying question, though, is how realistic it is for any company to be expected to set aside large amounts of profit during the operational years of a facility in order to pay for restoration work on completion. Clearly, the suggestion that it is a reasonable expectation was key to the consent for the site in the first place; it is the enforceability of that which is now in doubt. It doesn’t really fit the capitalist model of enterprise which involves initial capital expenditure to get a project operational and then maximum extraction of profit during the operational phase. Committing to several years of heavy expenditure requiring the time and attention of the company’s owners and managers for no return at all really doesn’t fit the model. It should be no surprise at all if any company in that position attempted to avoid – or reduce – its liabilities.

It’s a model, though, in which government seems to be placing blind faith when it effectively allows private companies to build and run major projects. In yesterday’s post, I referred to the long-term implications for an independent Welsh government of allowing Wylfa Newydd to go ahead. The assumptions around the Hinkley Point C project include that EDF will be picking up the full costs of decommissioning through a Funded Decommissioning Programme, and the agreed strike price for electricity provided by the plant includes an allowance for those costs. The problem, though, is that no-one really knows what those costs will be – and the decommissioning work will continue for decades, not just years, during which the company will no longer be receiving any income for the electricity produced. The probability of that actually happening seems to me to be vanishingly small, with the likelihood being that some or all of the cost will ultimately fall back on public funds. The same will be true for Wylfa Newydd, meaning a large potential liability for a future Welsh government. Ffos y Fran is an interesting case study, but nuclear decommissioning is on an enormously larger scale – billions rather than tens of millions. Is that being understood?

There's more to coalitions than mathematics

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For those of us who favour independence for Wales, yesterday’s opinion poll showing increased support for both Plaid and the Green Party is clearly good news. The fact that the larger of those parties has declared that independence is not on the agenda for the next Senedd term, even if there is a majority in favour amongst Senedd members, takes a little of the sheen off; although, in practical terms, getting to that point as a result of the sheer difficulties of persuading London to allow a referendum is little different from getting to that point by not trying. Nevertheless the apparent willingness of a full 50% of the population to vote for independence-supporting parties is a dramatic turnaround in Welsh politics. It’s a huge step forward, which would have been hard to believe just a few years ago.

It is, of course, just one poll, and things could change between now and May. I’ll admit that, after having spent the 40 years from 1971 heavily involved in Welsh politics, the idea that the Labour Party could really be relegated to equal fourth place on 10% of the vote is still a little hard to believe, no matter how many polls suggest it, and no matter how attractive it might be as an outcome. Previous polls had suggested that a Plaid-led government was the likeliest result in the new Senedd, as long as Labour either participated in some way or at least acquiesced, but this latest poll suggests the possibility of a Plaid/Green coalition without Labour’s involvement – a much more significant break with the past.

Certainly, there is a strong policy crossover between those two parties, probably stronger than that between Labour and Plaid, if policy statements can be taken at face value. That crossover is not total, however, and there is a danger in performing simplistic mathematics to predict a government without considering the differences as well as the similarities. One of the most obvious areas of potential difficulty, it seems to me, is over energy policy. A pragmatic approach to politics has sometimes led Plaid politicians to oppose new nuclear power stations only in the places that no-one wants to build them, whilst supporting wind and solar projects only in the places that no-one wants to build them.

The stand-out question in this context is whether a Plaid/Green government would be for or against Wylfa Newydd? Energy policy itself is not a devolved matter; to the probable relief of both parties, the next Welsh Government won’t have to take the yes/no decision on the project, so perhaps the parties would be able to come up with some sort of fudge. That might be more difficult if the First Minister himself takes a clear view in favour, and there are a host of other ancillary decisions which could either facilitate or frustrate the project where Welsh ministers might well need to take a position. The implications of new nuclear power for a future independent government are significant either way. I’m sure that I’m not the only voter who will be wondering, when it comes to putting the cross on that paper in May, whether I’m voting for or against expansion of nuclear power in Wales – and at the moment, we don’t have that certainty.

Which is the best way of dealing with Trump - bombs or tariffs?

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Two of the big stories in August 1968 were the Russian invasion of what was then Czechoslovakia, and the ongoing ‘troubles’ in the north of Ireland. It may be apocryphal – I’ve failed to trace the report directly – but there has long been a story about a newspaper publishing a picture of a youth throwing stones at a tank, which attracted a response from one reader asking whether the youth was a Czech patriot or an Irish hooligan. Fact or fiction, the story underlines that what we observe sometimes owes as much to our own prejudices as to objective fact.

Two stories from Trumpland yesterday underline the same phenomenon. Firstly, there was this one, with Trump officials in the wake of the apparent murder of Renee Good warning potential protesters that they will deal severely with anyone protesting against the repressive actions of the masked snatch squads which Trump has despatched to roam the streets of US cities. Then there was this one, in which Trump urged Iranians to keep protesting against the repressive actions of the Iranian authorities, threatening violence against the regime if they continue to kill protesters. Whether protest is good or bad depends on who’s doing the protesting and against what – nothing new there, it’s exactly the approach he adopted to the assault on Congress in January 2021.

He seems to have only two solutions to any problem, both of which are under consideration in relation to Iran. The first is violence: there must be somebody he can bomb. And the second is tariffs – in Trumpland, increasing the cost of goods or services for Americal consumers is axiomatically a way of seeking compliance from foreign governments. If those are the only things he understands, it gives the rest of the world a question about how we should respond to the growing lawlessness of the US authorities: should we bomb Washington, or impose tariffs on all US products? It's not a serious question, of course - but it's hard to think of anything else that he might even begin to understand.

Who is really being subsidised?

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The hospitality sector is up in arms about changes to business rates which, they say, will make their businesses unsustainable, and are asking for changes which will reduce the amount of tax that they need to pay. They are saying, in effect, that they are unable to charge a price for their products which is sufficient to cover all their costs plus returning a reasonable profit. Looked at in hard market capitalism terms, as discussed here, that means that many of those businesses are simply not viable. Left to its own devices (which is what many capitalists claim to want), a capitalist market would force a reduction in capacity (some businesses would fail) such as to achieve a new balance between supply and demand at a (higher) price which makes the remaining businesses viable.

Now I’m not a huge fan of unfettered capitalism, and whilst markets are, in general, an efficient way of allocating resources, the idea that they are or should be completely unregulated is not a sensible way of determining social priorities. Governments have always interfered, in various ways, to moderate the impact of markets in pursuit of wider goals. And the government may well be right in thinking – for reasons of employment retention, or for reasons of social cohesion, that maintaining a higher level of provision of restaurants, pubs and hotels than the market can profitably sustain is a good thing, and thus decide to offer some sort of assistance. Those in the sector want to see that assistance in the form of reduced taxation, but it isn’t the only way of achieving the aim. Tax breaks are a form of subsidy. They don’t always look like that, because it involves taking less from the business rather than giving them a handout, but a tax regime which adjusts rates for some categories of businesses in order to keep otherwise unviable businesses in existence cannot be other than a selective subsidy.

It isn’t the only way of providing a subsidy. The government could, instead, decide to take the same amount of money and issue vouchers to each household, enabling them to enjoy a discount off the bill for food and drink – subsidising the pints not the pub. It looks very different, of course, but the effect is the same: people would be able to go out and enjoy a meal or a drink which they couldn’t otherwise afford, and the businesses would be receiving an income sufficient to make them viable. Better yet – for those who are greater fans of markets than I – it would enable the consumers to choose which pubs and restaurants received the extra custom and therefore money, rather than being a blanket subsidy for all.

For a number of reasons, I wouldn’t actually propose that, but it’s interesting to note that many of those demanding tax breaks would be furious at the idea of ‘giving’ people money to eat out. It’s a universal benefit which they are getting without working for it, they would argue. Yet, in economic terms, it’s exactly the same thing: the same amount of money produces the same effect in terms of people being able to afford food and drink and businesses remaining viable. It raises an interesting and more general economic question: when the government gives a subsidy, who is it actually subsidising? Is it the business, the owners of the capital involved, the consumers, the suppliers, or the employees? In practice, all of those people benefit in some way or another, regardless of the form in which the subsidy is paid or to whom it is paid. So why is a ‘tax break’ deemed an entirely valid approach, whilst a handout to customers is some sort of undeserved freebie? The answer, of course, lies in who sets the agenda and boundaries of debate. And it isn’t the customers.

Divide and conquer is working as well as ever

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During his 2016 election campaign, Trump famously claimed that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue in New York and shoot someone and it would not affect his poll numbers. Whether it was true or not at the time is open to debate, but he certainly seemed to believe it, and all the indications are that he still does. At times, it even seems as though he is trying to test the claim empirically, even if it isn’t himself who actually pulls the trigger. The insouciance and lies with which he dismisses any criticism of the armed gangs of masked men which he has sent out to seize people off the street, or at their place of work, or even in schools and colleges, isn’t really surprising. It is entirely consistent with his character.

What is rather more depressing is the ease with which armed government employees have fallen into a culture where they regularly exceed any lawful authority and are willing to shoot first and ask questions later. And that applies as much to the individual soldiers and airmen involved in sinking boats as it does to the ICE teams roaming the streets of major cities. We know that ‘following orders’ is no defence, and that individual officers have a legal duty to question patently illegal orders rather than follow them, but some of what has been happening goes beyond mere obedience to superiors and into the realm of ‘using their own initiative’, secure in the knowledge that, even if they weren’t specifically ordered to do something, it’s what the head honcho wanted them to do. And if you can be persuaded that the Reich, or the Trumpate, will last a thousand years, the possibility of being held accountable will always look low.

We shouldn’t really be surprised: history tells us that it has happened before and contains plenty of examples of people who do what they think their bosses want them to do. It goes back at least as far as Henry II and his turbulent priest. With the greater availability of alternative (rather than solely official) news sources, it might have been hoped that a more aware population would be more resistant, but some reports suggest that the US is, probably deliberately, recruiting people who are barely literate to carry out their programme of detention and deportation. For any tyrant or despot, a poorly-educated populace always has advantages (and lest we think that we in the UK might be immune from such attitudes, think about those politicians railing against the number of people educated to degree level who they consider to be ‘over-qualified’ for their allotted station in life).

Looked at rationally, in an economy run by and for billionaires it ought to be strange that so many people who have little or nothing to gain by facilitating a kleptocracy in which wealth trickles ever more quickly upwards are so willing to act as agents of the kleptocrats. But sowing hatred and division and blaming ‘others’ for all the problems has shown itself to have extraordinary staying power as a means of cementing authority and wealth in the hands of the few. There's no sign of its power waning.

When is an agreement not an agreement?

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It was revealed today that Trump is unilaterally withdrawing the US from 66 international organisations and agencies on the basis that they are “contrary to the interests of the United States”. Whether that is actually true or not is an interesting question to which there is no absolute answer: it really depends on how one defines the ‘interests of the United States’ and over what timescale. The point, though, is that US membership of every one of those bodies will have been underpinned by a formal international agreement signed by the President of the day, and in some cases ratified by Congress. Other participating countries will have made assumptions about US sincerity and intentions in deciding the shape and nature of their own participation. Trump would probably argue that they were all signed by previous presidents, all of whom (in his eyes) were losers, incompetents, traitors or worse, but the bottom line is that he is simply reneging on agreements, often long-standing, to which others have assumed that the US would adhere.

It’s not the only example. Having signed an agreement with Keir Starmer just a few months ago, Trump has paused all work on the deal, demanding concessions in other areas first. It seems to be fairly typical of his approach to business as well as politics – if people give him everything he wants, he assumes that he didn’t ask for enough, banks what he’s got and then withdraws from the agreement until he gets more. All agreements are conditional and temporary until he decides he no longer likes them.

It’s a point which the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’ needs to bear in mind. In tiptoeing around the easily-bruised Trump ego in order to keep him engaged and signed up to a peace plan for Ukraine, they are making an implicit assumption that he will consider himself bound by whatever document he signs. It’s a foolish assumption to be making – any security guarantees to Ukraine based on commitments made by Trump are likely to be worthless. If Putin could be persuaded to believe that Trump might honour his word, the ‘guarantees’ might have some sort of deterrent effect, but all the signs are that Putin has a much better understanding of Trump than do Starmer or Macron.

Given his past statements, it seems unlikely that Putin will sign up to any peace proposal involving the stationing of troops from NATO countries in Ukraine anyway (even if Trump gives him a nod and a wink to say he’s not serious, a scenario which is far from unlikely) so perhaps it will never be tested in practice. If he does agree, it could well end up meaning that Starmer and Macron are leading their countries into a shooting war with Russia without the essential intelligence and back up from the US. It underlines again how foolish it is, under the current US administration, to regard the US as an ally rather than a hostile power.

Is NATO nailed to the perch?

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Whether NATO is merely slumbering while it waits for the end of Trumpism in the US, or whether it has been nailed to its perch to give a misleading impression of life is an academic question, since in neither case can it be relied on (in the short term at least) to meet its stated objective of providing a collective system of defence. The Prime Minister of Denmark told us this week that it would be dead if the US launched a military attempt to take over Greenland. That sounds logical, although NATO ‘allies’ behaving aggressively towards each other isn’t exactly new. Think of the Cod Wars between NATO members Iceland and the UK in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, or the recurrent near-wars between Greece and Türkiye, occasionally involving the firing of real bullets. Threats by right-wing UK politicians against France or Spain were perhaps never really a practical proposition, but the mere fact that they were expressed shows that not everyone takes the alliance very seriously.

Invading and seizing part of the internationally-recognised territory of a fellow member state is on a different level, though. And when the invading force belongs to the largest and most powerful member of the alliance – the one which has been seen as the ultimate backstop since the founding of the alliance – that puts a more serious perspective on the question. Perhaps Trump will hold back from the military option. There are other approaches to getting what he wants (which seems – just like in Venezuela – to be more about oil and natural resources than about national security) although his love of macho action suggests he’d sooner deploy the military whether he needs to or not. Whether bullying, intimidation, and threats are any less of a danger to the NATO alliance than an actual military intervention is an interesting question; but one rather suspects that most of the members would prefer to keep their mouths shut and put the alliance on some sort of life support than pronounce it dead in such circumstances.

The wider question, though, is whether the alliance is already dead, de facto if not de jure. Trump has already made it clear that he will not come to the aid of any European country which hasn’t spent as much money as he declares necessary on buying US military hardware defence, and it's not at all clear that he would aid even those that do. In fairness to Trump – not a phrase which trips easily off the keyboard – I’ve long held doubts about the reliability of the US as a backstop under previous administrations, as well as about the role of the alliance itself. The difference between Trump and his predecessors is that he can’t help blurting things out where others preferred to maintain a more ambiguous silence. The bottom line is that an alliance dominated by one member and unable to operate effectively without that member ceases to be of any value if that one member goes rogue. Waiting for Trump to invade a fellow NATO member before declaring the organisation dead is pretending that the decaying corpse in front of us still shows signs of life. The question which European leaders should be debating is about building a new international order, starting in Europe, which does not depend on the dubious commitment of the military might of the US, and which is oriented towards avoiding wars rather than fighting them.

Farage is the consequence of limited ambition

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The owner and proprietor of Reform Ltd seems rather pleased that so many people are referring to him as a racist based on the overt racism he allegedly displayed as a schoolboy half a century ago. His argument is that it increases the probability that racist voters (or, to use the term which he seems to prefer, “our core support”) will vote for his company in a future election. It should be no surprise either that overt expressions of racism or non-denial denials thereof would motivate racists to vote for a racist, nor that so many of those most likely to vote for Reform fall into that category. He might choose his words ever so slightly more carefully these days, but no-one who listens to what he says can be in much doubt about his distaste for foreigners, particularly those of a different hue or religion or who dare to speak a language other than English.

The question is about how to respond. If calling him out as a racist solidifies his core support, does that mean we should all cease calling out his racism? Part of the answer to that is that, outside what he calls his ‘core support’, there are many people who are not racist: contrary to what some seem to believe, voting for Farage doesn’t necessarily make someone a racist. There must be at least some in that category who will be deterred by a better understanding of the nature of what it is that they are planning to vote for. But more widely than that, failure to address expressions of racism tends to normalise those views, and that, in turn, shifts the mainstream of political discourse towards, rather than away from, Farageism.

In effect, normalising Farage’s political views is exactly what the leadership of Labour (to say nothing of the Tories) has been doing for some time. Building a tolerant society depends, ultimately, not on what politicians do or say, but on building a wider consensus in society. But building consensus around the type of society which we might wish to see is a project which politicians, and especially Labour ones, have long since abandoned in favour of building a coalition of voters, whatever their views, which is large enough to secure power. Providing politicians with careers who can then exercise the power of the state is a much narrower project, and will change little. That does, though, seem to be the limit of their ambition.

Pragmatism, Law, and Justice aren't the same thing

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Some managers are good at running things, but hopeless in a crisis; others are good in a crisis, but hopeless at running things when there is no crisis. However, for life’s ‘firefighters’ to be seen to be doing well, there need to be fires, and if there aren’t any, then they will generally find ways to start some. There are other managers who are good at neither, but somehow manage to convince others (or at least themselves) of their efficacy. Trump is clearly in that third category, but fondly imagines that he is actually one of the world's greatest firefighters.

When you run out of wars to resolve (even if some of them were never wars in the first place, and others have not really been resolved at all), the only thing a man determined to win the Nobel Peace Prize can reasonably do is to start a few himself. Give it a week or two and he’ll be adding Venezuela to the list of wars that he has personally ended. Shortly to be followed by his ending of the wars in Cuba, Colombia, Mexico and Greenland. He probably thinks that will actually impress the committee awarding the prize.

Here in the UK, meanwhile, the PM is still waiting to be advised as to whether one country bombing another country, sending troops in, capturing the leader and taking him abroad, and reallocating that country’s natural resources to foreign companies, might possibly constitute some sort of crime or not. In fairness, it’s hardly as if he’s a highly trained and experienced lawyer with specific expertise in human rights issues who might be expected to be able to come to an opinion of his own on the matter, is it?

There are, of course, times and circumstances when adopting a pragmatic approach to events which are out of the UK’s control and about which we can do nothing (we’re hardly going to support either a retaliatory strike or even a few limited sanctions) makes sense, but it increasingly appears that the ‘expert legal mind’ currently running the UK actually doesn’t understand the differences between pragmatism, law, and justice. It’s not a first offence, either – we’ve seen much the same thing with his repeated description of a possible pragmatic end to the war in Ukraine involving the ceding of territory as a ‘just’ settlement.

Maduro has hardly been an angel in his approach to governing Venezuela (although his regime has achieved more in terms of reducing poverty and extending education than it is usually given credit for) – and the fact that there are worse leaders around the globe is not much of an excuse for supporting him. His last re-election may well have been rigged (although hard evidence, rather than anecdotal evidence from a sore loser, to justify that assertion is not exactly easy to come by).

But failing to call out a blatant breach of established international law purely in order to placate His Orangeness in the White House does us no favours in the long term, and merely helps to cement a new international order in which the powerful are allowed to do whatever they wish, and the rest are there to be exploited. Those not sitting at the table are likely to be on the menu, as the saying goes. Starmer’s assertion that he has “been a lifelong advocate of international law and the importance of compliance with international law” is just a joke. And not a very good one.