Maybe we'll never know what Rutte said to Trump...

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Over the years, I’ve attended many meetings in which one attendee or another has set out his or her (usually his) views on whatever the issue is and then simply assumed the agreement of everyone else, sometimes even leaving immediately after speaking. ‘The boss (even if he wasn’t the boss in any formal sense) has spoken’ as an approach to ‘consensus’. Perhaps we’ll never know exactly what happened at the meeting between Trump and Rutte yesterday, but it sounds a lot like the same sort of thing: Trump has expounded his views and assumed agreement – in his mind, ‘sorting out the detail’ is all about agreeing the precise terms of his takeover. Certainly, Rutte cannot have agreed to any handover, or even a framework, or even the concept of an idea for a framework (to use the convoluted language which Trump seems to favour), for any handover; he simply doesn’t have the authority. All the indications are that Rutte has done little more than spell out to Trump the terms and detail of existing treaties, all of which His Orangeness will have forgotten by tomorrow.

The threat of using force and imposing extra tariffs has been removed, a statement greeted by a huge sigh of relief all round, but whether that threat has really been removed remains to be seen. After all, until a few days ago, Trump supported the handover of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. In Trumpland, any statement or agreement is valid only until it isn’t. Maybe it’s true, as some have suggested, that Trump has backed down because of the impact of his actions and statements on the stock market. Stock markets are an extremely poor indicator of the success of any economy, and are generally thought to be over-valued anyway, but to Trump, stock markets seem to be his main, or even only, indicator of success. To billionaires whose wealth is measured by the ‘value’ of their stock holdings, there’s a certain logic in that. Maybe one of the wilder stories I’ve seen – that he had ordered the military to prepare plans for a Greenland takeover only for the order to be refused as illegal – is true, although it seems unlikely to me that he could not find at least one general prepared to act on his instructions.

Or perhaps another basic truth has been demonstrated empirically – bullies back down when faced with strong united push-back. Certainly, one of the few tariff battles on which Trump has caved was that with China, which stood up to him resolutely. It would be nice to believe this version of events, with its corollary that Starmer and others have learned that resistance is better than appeasement. The problem with unpredictability is that it’s unpredictable; even if something ‘worked’ once, that doesn’t mean it will ‘work’ again. The biggest takeaway from Davos was surely the speech by Mark Carney of Canada and its message that countries need to stand together rather than be dominated individually. Whether the sort of international agreement and co-ordination which that requires can be achieved in a suitably rapid timescale is an open question, but signs that Starmer and others recognise the need and are working in that direction are sadly lacking at the moment. Carney was talking primarily about ‘middle-sized’ countries, but for those of us living in smaller countries which may not all yet be independent, the Carney approach offers us more hope for the future than any alternative currently on the table.

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.

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.

Keeping us safe from threats

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Last week, a retired general told us that the UK is 10 years away from being ready for a war with Russia, a war which the political and military leaders of the UK seem increasingly determined to fight. The general’s views were inevitably reported as though it was a bad thing to be so unready for a war which would in the best case destroy much of Europe and in the worst case end human civilization. The military mind always sees an unreadiness to fight a war as being a bad thing, but what if that unreadiness is actually a good thing?

An attempt by Russia to conquer and subdue the entire continent of Europe (which is what a pre-meditated attack on a Nato country implies) would be madness, even if Russia hadn’t already proved how incapable it is of subduing one country right on its borders. It is possible, of course, that Putin really is mad, but his actions to date appear to be due more to miscalculation than insanity. He will surely have learnt something from his misadventures in Ukraine. The only anywhere near rational reason for a decision to attack the whole of NATO would be if he became completely convinced that it was necessary to pre-empt an attack by NATO on Russia. Getting his retaliation in first, in other words.

Now I don’t actually believe that NATO countries want to start a war with Russia (which isn’t the same thing as saying that there are no individual military men or politicians who do), but I’m not sitting in the Kremlin looking at the world through Russian eyes with an intense awareness of Russian history. He might be wrong to conclude that NATO is preparing to attack his country but, listening to the generals and war-mongers, it’s not an entirely unreasonable conclusion for him to reach. So if the biggest danger for us lies in reinforcing his fears, which keeps us safer: stepping up preparedness for war or being so unready that he feels no immediate need to act?

One of the lessons of history is that militarisation and arms races almost invariably lead to war, and can even do so almost by accident. Deliberately choosing not to prepare for all-out war with Russia stands traditional policy on its head, but it also allows us to make policy choices which improve the living standards of people in the UK rather than diverting resources into essentially wasteful weapons of destruction; policy choices which the politicians tell us are impossible. The warmongers tell us that the first duty of any government is to keep its citizens safe, but they don’t encourage debate about the question of ‘safe from what?’ Cutting lives short through war is an obvious danger, but lives are also shortened by poverty, ill health, and poor education. The former is a future danger (the remoteness of which is hard to judge), the latter is happening here and now. There’s a lot more nuance to ‘keeping citizens safe’ than preparing to kill Russians.

There has to be a better way of ensuring peace

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To all intents and purposes, NATO is dead, even if that wasn’t quite what the new German Chancellor said yesterday. It is entirely clear that members can no longer assume that the US will abide by the commitment that ‘an attack on one is an attack on all’. Without the support of the largest and most powerful member, the claimed deterrent effect of NATO is effectively nullified. To be fair to Trump, all he has done is to clarify what some of us have suspected for many years under a succession of US presidents, which is that the US will never commit to all-out war to save a far-away European country from being wholly or partially eaten up by a larger neighbour. The theoretical point of ‘deterrence’, however, was about creating a sufficient degree of uncertainty. Although the supposed adversary, Russia, might have doubted US commitment, they could never be entirely certain. Trump has removed that uncertainty.

Putin took a calculated gamble in Ukraine, mitigated by signalling his intentions well in advance and assessing the reactions, that the country’s friends would not intervene actively on behalf of a country which wasn’t even a member of NATO. His judgement was proved correct on that (even if it was proved dramatically wrong in terms of Ukraine’s ability and willingness to resist, and the extent to which the population was waiting to give a warm greeting to the Russian ‘liberators’). The military types keep telling us that, having got away with taking a big chunk out of Ukraine, he will turn his attention elsewhere – the Baltics are the most-often named target. It would still be a gamble for Putin. Whilst he can now be completely certain that the US would not rush to aid those attacked (indeed, the current president might be more inclined to sit down with Putin and decide how to split the spoils), he cannot be so certain about the European response. Indeed, he would be very unwise to gamble that several other European nations would not respond to any call for help from, say, Lithuania if he tried to create a corridor to Kaliningrad, one of the more commonly posited reasons for starting a war. Scandinavian countries along with Poland would be very likely to engage (albeit not under the umbrella of NATO (if it still exists), even if the response of the larger European military powers, such as France, the UK, and Germany might be less certain. Having already learned, to his cost – or, rather, to the cost of the dead and wounded soldiers and their families – that the Russian army isn’t quite the force he believed it to be, why would he risk such an attack?

That brings us to the crux of the question of future European security. For those of us who’ve never been convinced that security comes through ever-increasing amounts of weaponry, the issue has to be about ensuring that an attack is prevented not by military means but by ensuring that there is no reason to attack in the first place. That doesn’t mean following a policy of appeasement, as the warmongers claim. Of course, if Putin really is the madman as which he is often presented, sitting in the Kremlin stroking his cat like some sort of Bond villain plotting world domination, then there is little scope for rational debate and negotiated common security. (On the other hand, if that is indeed an accurate picture of Putin, then the history of the film franchise would suggest that we don’t need a large army to defeat him, just one man armed with a pistol and a few Martinis.)

If we discount the possibility of simple insanity, the single most frequent cause of conflict, historically, is access to wealth and resources, even if it isn’t always presented that way. The second is a fear of attack unless ‘our side’ attacks first: the ‘use it or lose it’ mindset. Both of those look more likely as causes of the war in Ukraine, for example, than an insane desire for domination at all costs, with the idea that Russia and Ukraine are a single historical identity and nation being more a stated rationalization than an actual reason. Even if the fear of attack is irrational or unjustified, it still acts as a motivation: fear doesn’t have to be reasonable to motivate a response. I don’t believe that NATO ever had any intention of attacking Russia, but it isn’t parroting Putin to suggest that things might not have looked that way from Moscow.

Most Europeans and most Russians probably want the same things: peace and prosperity. Both are being let down by leaders who tell them that those things can only be achieved by war and impoverishment rather than discussion and agreement. There’s never a ‘right’ time to break the cycle – there will always be unresolved disputes and arguments. But the ‘best’ time will always be ‘now’, whenever now is. Where are the politicians able to recognise that?

Time to replace NATO?

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The Trump administration has been roundly criticized for the approach which it is adopting to ending the war in Ukraine. But there are two things which Trump says which are surely uncontroversial in themselves. The first is that the war needs to end, on which most will surely agree. The second is that some boundary adjustments will need to be a part of that, which is much more contentious, but nevertheless a statement of an obvious truth.

Those boundary adjustments, whether permanent or temporary, will inevitably involve Ukraine ceding territory to Russia because, realistically, the only way of returning to 2014 borders is for other countries to commit large numbers of troops and resources to the war alongside Ukraine. A third Europe-wide war doesn’t necessarily have to involve nuclear oblivion, but that’s an obvious risk. And there's surely some doubt about whether the youth of Europe in the twenty-first century are willing to be conscripted and sent to Ukraine to die. Asking, let alone instructing, Ukraine to concede territory is neither fair nor just, and Trump’s rationale – which appears to be that Putin has lost a lot of soldiers to gain the territory so deserves to keep what he’s paid for in blood – is an appalling basis for making a concession to aggression. It’s also very one-sided, ignoring the cost that Ukraine has paid to resist the aggression as though Ukrainian lives don’t matter. It is, though, hardly surprising coming from a man who sees everything in terms of transactions, who believes that the strong should dominate the weak, and who has already made it very clear that he rather likes the idea of emulating Putin’s land grab himself.

Even so, for a man whose self-image is that of a master dealmaker to concede much of what the other party wants in advance of any detailed talks is incongruous, to say the least. He surely realises that any process of negotiation will only involve further concessions, and that far from being a mutual process he has to date extracted precisely nothing from Putin in return. He’s also agreed that Ukraine will not be joining NATO for the foreseeable future. At least that one is within his authority. Since new members can only be accepted by unanimous decision, he can block membership although, again, conceding that publicly in advance of any serious talks doesn’t look like a masterstroke of bargaining. Nor does it suggest that he has thought further ahead than the next news cycle.

Personally, I’ve never been a fan of NATO anyway; the idea that dividing the world into hostile military blocks armed to the teeth is a rational long-term way of preventing war has always struck me as being a curious one. Trump has exposed the essential weakness of the alliance: if the most powerful member goes rogue, the alliance becomes meaningless. By declaring in advance that any peacekeeping forces deployed to Ukraine will not be acting on behalf of NATO, and that no attack on them by Russia will trigger the clause decreeing that an attack on one is an attack on all, he has rendered the alliance in its current form largely pointless and toothless, giving Putin the green light to attack the peacekeepers whenever he wishes. However, in the long term, if we can navigate our way through the period of danger which he has created, he might even be doing us a favour, albeit unintentionally.

The question is about how to respond. Whilst it would have been better to have approached the question in calmer times and with more time to work things through, challenging the whole basis of the alliance is not in itself a bad thing. European nations – including Ukraine – need to think about how best to bring about a secure and peaceful Europe which can co-exist with Russia to the east as well as with the US to the west, rather than simply depending on the military power of the US for the first and subservience to the US for the second. It’s potentially an opportunity to negotiate a mutual downsizing of military forces and to remove actual or perceived threats on both sides by re-establishing a degree of trust and co-operation, alongside a commitment to resolve disputes by negotiation within the framework of international law. It’s unclear whether Russia under Putin (or his successors – he won’t be around for ever, and we’re talking about long term solutions here) is ready to even begin such a process. Maybe it’s naïve to expect it to happen rapidly, but European states are hardly sending positive signals about their own willingness to engage in such a process either. The default position increasingly looks like some sort of attempt to build a replacement for NATO which excludes the US, and continue the armed stand-off, with Starmer's Labour in the vanguard, determined to look tough. That would be a huge missed opportunity to seek to find a long term positive in the short term chaos being unleashed by the madman in the White House.

Talk of shields is misleading

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A good shield is intended and designed to be a defensive tool, not a weapon. The objective is to protect the user against offensive weapons being used by others, not to attack those others. At a pinch, a desperate soldier could probably use a shield to hit an opponent over the head, but it’s poorly designed for that purpose and somewhat unwieldy in use. A similar story applies to umbrellas. Whilst they are good at protecting the user – or the top half anyway – from rain, they are not much use as a weapon. Again, a substantially made one, properly furled, could be pressed into service to hit someone over the head if it’s the first thing that comes to hand, but it’s hardly a weapon of choice.

Both terms are badly misapplied when it comes to nuclear weapons. It’s at least partly deliberate – there’s something mildly reassuring about providing protection through shields and umbrellas in a way which cannot be said about threatening to use weapons of mass destruction, each one intended and designed to kill thousands of people indiscriminately. The ‘protection’ provided by nuclear weapons amounts to a threat to wipe out whole cities in response to any attack. It’s not something that any ‘shield’ or ‘umbrella’ could ever achieve, no matter how well designed. Nevertheless, the ‘friendlier’ terms were both in use this week by German ministers urging some sort of joining up of French and UK nuclear weaponry to provide ‘protection’ for the whole of Europe. Whether nuclear weapons do in fact act as a deterrent is one of those questions which can never be fully answered: the argument that they have prevented full-scale war in Europe since the end of the Second World War depends on an implicit assumption that a war would have occurred had the weapons not existed. It’s an assumption which is essentially impossible to either prove or disprove; an impossibility which only adds to the ferocity of debate on the subject. The clearest direct evidence for their deterrent effect is that the possession of nuclear weapons by Russia has deterred NATO countries from more direct intervention in support of Ukraine, but that makes the weapons look more like an enabler for their possessors than a protection against attack. To say nothing of an encouragement for proliferation.

It is possible that Putin is mad enough to believe that he can restore the old Russian/Soviet empire’s territories by the application of military force (his past words and statements certainly seem to indicate that he would like to do so), but the probability that a madman would be ‘deterred’ by anything is low. The whole concept of deterrence is predicated on the assumption that the actors are all rational, and that’s an assumption around which there must be considerable doubt. The second most probable reason for the outbreak of war would be if Putin believed that ‘the West’ is preparing to strike first and thus decided on pre-emptive action. Talk of establishing a ‘European’ nuclear strike force doesn’t look like the smartest way of convincing him otherwise.

More guns and bombs is no route to peace

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The war in Ukraine is highly challenging for those of us with a long-standing commitment to the belief that disputes between states should always be resolved peacefully; that the phrase ‘war crime’ is tautologous; and that dividing the world into opposing armed blocs is a denial of the essential truth that this planet is all we have and we need to learn to share it effectively. Seeing two countries which have pursued a path of studied and long-term neutrality – albeit not quite as absolute as some might think, given their long-standing joint exercises with NATO – seeking membership of one of those armed blocs has been a particularly depressing development.

Whether Putin was right to claim that the eastward expansion of NATO threatened the security of Russia, and that the stated intention of Ukraine to seek membership of NATO intensified that threat, is something over which historians will argue for generations to come. One of the problems with understanding and interpreting history is that we don’t get to change a parameter or two and then re-run events to see what changes. The result is that there is always scope for alternative narratives, not about events themselves, but about their causes and significance. Perhaps in a century or so historians will have access to classified Russian archives and be able to assess whether this was actually the way Putin saw things, or whether it was a convenient excuse for doing what he always intended to do anyway. Had the Eastern European states formerly part of the Soviet bloc not joined NATO and the EU, would Russia have left them in peace, preferring some form of economic domination, or would it have attacked them all, possibly even sooner, in an attempt to rebuild the Soviet Empire to which Putin seems to be very attached? Put another way, has NATO acted as a deterrent which has delayed war, or a provocation? It's not as easy a question to answer as many seem to think.

There seems to be no justification for Putin’s claim that Ukraine was conducting some sort of genocide in Donbas, although there has been some reluctance in Ukraine to recognise the fact that the majority of the population there were Russian speakers. That doesn’t automatically make them Russians, although we know that there were at least some who considered themselves such and wanted to be part of Russia rather than Ukraine. Whether they were a majority or not is another question. It certainly wasn’t obviously so at the time of the vote for Ukrainian independence, but opinions can change. The only way to find out whether the people of that area would prefer to be in Russia or Ukraine is to ask them, but that’s now a task made impossible by a combination of killing people, driving others out of their homes and deporting others to Russia. A simple majority of those remaining, conducted under the rule of an occupying power, is hardly a basis for any sort of democratic decision.

The first question is how the war can be brought to an end. The demand for complete ‘territorial integrity’ being made by the Ukrainian Government is a recipe for a long, grinding war of attrition during which many more will die. The alternative suggestion of negotiating the cession of some territory to Russia in exchange for peace involves allowing the aggressor to ‘win’ (although what, exactly, they will have won looking at the destruction they have caused is another question), and can provide no certainty that, after a suitable breathing space, Russia won’t simply try again. It’s too easy to tell Ukrainians, as the UK seems to be doing, that they should fight to the last Ukrainian to recover all the lands within what is, like all other boundaries in the world, an arbitrary line on a map. It’s also too easy to tell them that they must give up part of their territory in exchange for a negotiated settlement. Neither response is satisfactory. But if we accept the unlikelihood that Ukraine can defeat Russia comprehensively without massive further casualties and a huge increase in the scale and nature of its weaponry, then there will have to be a negotiation eventually. And lines on maps will inevitably be part of that, as they have been in just about all past peace treaties.

The second – and ultimately bigger – question is how we build a world order which prevents the biggest and best-armed countries from simply imposing their will on others, an issue which applies to other countries, including the US, as well as Russia. Recruiting more countries to NATO and increasing expenditure on armaments isn’t the only possible answer, despite what UK and other politicians would have us believe. Challenging that approach is not doing Putin’s work for him, as those – such as the leader of the Labour Party – demanding absolute loyalty to NATO have suggested; indeed if the current so-called ‘security structure’ in Europe has been shown not to work, blindly doubling down on it is never going to be the best response. A United Nations in which those with the biggest clout can simply veto international action against those transgressing its rules has been shown to be a failure. Many had thought that increasing trade was the answer – in this case, that plugging Russia into an interdependent world economy would prevent aggression. In practice, it just made it harder to impose immediate crippling sanctions on the transgressor. It’s not a simple question, but continuing with a world order based on the idea that ‘might is right’ is not a sustainable future for humanity. There’s nothing cowardly or unpatriotic about seeking a better alternative than more guns and bombs.

Small steps and giant leaps

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During its conference, which starts tomorrow, the SNP is due to debate the issue of Trident and the removal of nuclear weapons from Scotland within three years after independence. There is little doubt that the party will reaffirm its opposition to allowing the weapons to remain on the territory of an independent Scotland. Amongst the ‘solutions’ apparently being considered by London is that if Scotland is ‘granted’ its independence, it will be on condition that part of the country is carved out and remains part of rUK (or Greater England to give it a more appropriate title) as some sort of ‘overseas possession’. The fact that anyone could even consider for a moment that independence is theirs to ‘grant’ or that they have some right to retain any part of Scotland that they choose demonstrates that, deep down, many of those in charge in London really do see Scotland (and by extension, Wales) as a possession rather than a partner.

One of Labour’s senior MSPs at Holyrood has attacked the SNP’s proposals, pointing out that moving weapons from Scotland to England (Wales, thankfully, having now been ruled out) does nothing for nuclear disarmament; the same number of weapons would still exist, just in a different location. She has a point, although it would be reasonable also to point out that her party’s position – leaving the weapons where they are – isn’t exactly a major step towards disarmament either. A more valid criticism of the SNP would be that, having reversed its previous policy on NATO a few years ago and decided that an SNP-led Scotland would join NATO after all, there is a degree of hypocrisy in being part of a nuclear-armed alliance with a collective policy of being ready to use nuclear weapons whilst refusing to have them stationed on its soil. That wouldn’t make Scotland unique, of course; there are plenty of other NATO members who neither possess nuclear weapons nor are willing to host them.

There are some serious questions to be asked about whether NATO really is a nuclear-armed alliance or not. Whilst three member states possess nuclear weapons, the French arsenal is excluded from the NATO command structure, and there have long been doubts as to whether the UK missiles (which are only leased from the US) could ever be launched without US agreement. In theory, ‘NATO’ could launch a nuclear strike, but in practice, any decision would be taken in Washington, not at NATO HQ. And NATO’s whole pretence of being a nuclear-armed alliance, as well as the concept of deterrence in mainland Europe, depends on an assumption that the US would be prepared to engage in all-out nuclear war in the event of an otherwise unstoppable incursion into another NATO member state. That is no more credible under Biden than it was under Trump. Whether such a debunking of NATO’s status as a nuclear alliance is enough ‘cover’ to excuse the SNP’s decision to join NATO is a matter of opinion. I don’t find it so, and remain deeply disappointed by the SNP’s move away from the sort of defence posture followed by the Republic of Ireland, which looks to me a far better model for an independent Scotland (or Wales).

Does that mean that the SNP’s stance on closure of the base at Faslane is little more than gesture politics, at the expense of Scottish jobs, as Labour’s Baillie suggests? I think not. Whilst I’d like to believe that being forced to build a new base in Greater England might encourage a future Greater England government to think again about whether and why it should retain nuclear weapons, I suspect that’s just a pipe dream on my part. There seems little prospect that they will ever abandon their delusions of power and greatness, and the need to wave their missiles around is fundamental to that. But there is nevertheless a sense in which Baillie is wrong. Whilst it’s true that a single decision by one small country like Scotland has little effect overall, disarmament is necessarily a step by step process, and some of those steps will be very small. Labour’s argument that Scotland should do nothing is tantamount to arguing that no country should do anything; it’s a recipe for making no progress at all. And to misquote Neil Armstrong, even if it’s a tiny step for the world, it’s a giant leap for Scotland; it’s the biggest single thing that they can do to promote the idea of ridding the world of the scourge of nuclear weapons. I’m sure that the SNP will get this one right this weekend.

What do we mean by 'defence'?

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One traditional example of the sheer enormity of infinity is that given an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters and enough time, one of them will produce the complete works of Shakespeare, in the correct order.  When it comes to economists with computers making accurate predictions, we don’t even need an infinite number before one of them gets at last one thing right (although we do need a lot of them before that happens).  But when it comes to Presidents of the USA, even one of them, with a single phone and a few stubby fingers over three short months, can produce a dazzling, not to say bewildering, series of alternative policy positions on the same issue.  Who needs infinity when we have Trump?

Yesterday he told us that, regardless of what he had been saying for months, NATO is no longer obsolete.  The change is due, apparently, to the threat of terrorism, although an explanation of how the threat from terrorism suddenly changed in recent days might be something for which we will be kept waiting.  It’s a pity, though; NATO being obsolete was one of the few things on which I agreed with him.  The organisation was set up in and for a very different world than that in which we live today.

One thing on which he is – for the moment at least – remaining consistent in this context is that most members of NATO are not paying their agreed share of the costs.  I’m not convinced that he fully understands the way this works – and his apparent attempt to hand Germany a ‘bill’ for $300 billion due, in his view, to the US supports my interpretation.  The long-standing agreement between NATO states is not that anyone pays the US for anything; it is that they each devote 2% of GDP to ‘defence’.  But, forgetting for a moment at least my own opposition to NATO, I seriously wonder whether this is in any way a sensible way of judging the contribution of different states.

The question, surely, should be about how effective the contribution to common defence is, not about how much it costs.  The UK is, after all, one of the few states which generally achieve the 2%, but the UK is a classic example of how it is possible to spend money without contributing very much to anything.  After all, the country is building aircraft carriers without aircraft, has a fleet of submarines of which none is currently available for deployment, and spent £4bn on surveillance aircraft which were scrapped before ever entering service.  And there are other examples of expenditure which contributes little to military readiness, although they all help to reach the artificial 2% target.

Then there is the other question about what we mean by ‘defence’ expenditure.  The US and UK seem to see it solely in terms of military hardware and personnel, but Germany argues that at least some overseas aid expenditure should be counted, on the basis that it can help to avoid war in the first place.  On that, I’m with Germany.  Sadly, the UK Government seems to be with Trump on this one, preferring to spend more on preparing to kill people than on trying to avoid the situations which lead to the killing.  Even worse, the official ‘opposition’ in the UK, for fear of being perceived as weak on defence, is far closer to the Trump position than the German one.

Having a bigger (or at least more expensive) stick than any and every perceived or conceivable enemy isn’t the only way of avoiding future wars, and given the diversion of resources from more constructive purposes, it’s not the best either.  It isn’t being ‘weak’ to point that out, and we shouldn’t allow debate on the question to be shut down by the militarists and those who have most to gain from building weaponry.

Not all change is good

Tweet Wales has travelled a long way in recent decades, and things haven’t always changed for the better.  There was a heady time thirty-odd years ago when all Wales’ councils came together to sign the nuclear-free Wales declaration.  How different things are today with the Welsh establishment seemingly falling over itself to welcome the heads of government of NATO, a military organisation which continues to argue that the possession of nuclear weapons is an essential part of ‘defence’.

It is partly a result of the insistence on continued possession of its nuclear armoury that the 28 member states of NATO account for around 70% of global military expenditure; yet one of the themes of the two-day extravaganza in Newport is apparently to be that member states aren’t devoting enough resources to the military, and should increase the total.

For what?  A military alliance which was supposed to be defensive has become more interventionist, and is planning to become even more so.  Acting well outside the borders of its member states, it is increasingly taking on the role of supporting US foreign policy on a global basis – it’s a long way from the founding basis that “an armed attack against one … would be considered an attack against all”.  Instead, it’s become the means by which the hegemony of one world view is maintained, and if necessary imposed.

It can be argued that there is a need for a military organisation with global reach to back up decisions taken by the UN, but it’s hard to see how an organisation so tied to the US, and whose membership is open only to “any other European state in a position to further the principles of this Treaty and to contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area” can ever be generally accepted in that rôle.  Indeed, it’s likelier that the existence of such a powerful military alliance will actually militate against the development of a true international police force.

One of my first ever interventions in Plaid Cymru’s policy formulation was to propose a conference motion in 1972 calling for Plaid to reject NATO membership for Wales.  It hit a little opposition from some good friends in London Branch, but was passed overwhelmingly.  As far as I’m aware, it remains Plaid’s policy.  It’s been a disappointment to me that Plaid’s sister party, the SNP, recently changed its policy to support Scottish membership of NATO – I think that was a huge mistake for the party to make.

When that nuclear free declaration was made back in 1982, many of us thought that Wales was on the road to becoming a land of peace; but in 2014, it seems to be a land which actively welcomes the warmongers.  As I said at the outset, not all change has been for the better.

Far away places

Tweet Seventy years ago, Chamberlain could talk meaningfully of Czechoslovakia as a "far away place of which we know little". It is hard to say that about any part of the world these days, given the immediacy of telecommunications. However, even if places seem a lot less far away, that doesn't necessarily mean that we know much more about them; and it doesn't help when the news media 'simplify' the story for us, let alone when coverage is slanted.

Georgia is a classic example. The story seems to be about plucky little Georgia subjected to attack from a brutal Russian neighbour. But the situation is a good deal more complicated than that - and it was, after all, Georgia which started the war, even if it wasn't Russia itself that they attacked.

Politics and ethnicity in the Caucasus are extremely complex, with a long history of rivalries and conflict, and it's not at all easy to decide which side are the 'goodies' and which are the 'baddies'. Unlike the old cowboy films, it's not as easy as looking at the colour of their hats.

It certainly isn't as easy as simply supporting the rights of Georgia against Russian intervention. Georgia has a history of insisting on what it calls its 'territorial integrity', meaning that it regards boundaries which have been set on a pretty arbitrary basis over the centuries – largely as a result of previous conflicts - as being sacrosanct. It has shown itself remarkably unwilling to recognise the rights of small nations contained wholly or partly within its borders – nations with their own languages and history – to exercise their right to self-determination. Georgia has even decreed that Georgian is the official language throughout the whole of what it considers to be its territory.

Nor is it as easy as supporting the rights of the 'secessionist' movements within Georgia (although whether they actually want secession or simply transfer to Russia isn't entirely clear either). And surely no-one can support the ethnic cleansing which has been happening in those areas.

Clearly, the reaction of Russia, in invading Georgia, was contrary to international law, but the US and UK are hardly in a position to start spouting the law books after the illegal adventure in Iraq. The bellicose nature of some Western responses is of enormous concern. David Cameron jumping on a plane to go off and support Georgia might play well in the domestic newspapers, but his solution - getting Georgia into NATO asap – is downright dangerous. Giving a pledge of mutual military support ("an attack on one is an attack on all") to a man who starts an invasion of a client of Moscow seems more than a little reckless to me.

As with all human conflicts, what we need in the Caucasus is dialogue and discussion, not sabre-rattling and invasions. And it would be nice to think that at least some of those trotting off to support Preisdent Saakashvili might, at the same time, drop a few words in his shell-like about the folly of attacking Russia's clients.