Can even Trump get something right?

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The Western Mail carried a story earlier this week (which I can’t find online, but basically seems to be a fairly minor edit of this story from three weeks ago) about the problem of desertion facing the Ukrainian armed forces. We knew, of course, that the Russian armed forces were suffering from desertion as well as draft avoidance in the light of the serious level of casualties, but the media in ‘the west’ have seemingly been reluctant to report that the same issue is impacting the Ukrainian armed forces. Whilst it’s credible that Russian problems have been greater than those faced by Ukraine, it’s reasonable to suspect that the gap might not be as large as a less-than-entirely-unbiased media might have us believe. And the fact that Ukraine is suffering its own problem with a high level of desertion should come as no surprise.

It raises a much bigger – and more general – question as to whether the sort of large scale ground war for which the generals and some politicians keep telling us we should be preparing will ever be possible in the future in the same way as it was in the past. The report tells us that the US has been urging Ukraine “to draft more troops, and allow for the conscription of those as young as 18”, since the current minimum age for conscription is 25. Leaving to one side the moral issue of whether anyone should be urging a country to send even more of its people, and at an even younger age, into a vicious and bloody war where many of them will be killed or injured, I found myself wondering how realistic it is in the modern world to expect that people, particularly young people, will willingly comply with an order to go out and kill ‘for their country’. We’re not in the first half of the twentieth century when information flows could be easily controlled, and where jingoism was a fairly normal phenomenon. People – even in dictatorships like Russia – have much easier access to information about what’s happening. Pro patria mori has never been particularly dulce or decorum whatever the politicians might tell us, and that was precisely the point which Wilfred Owen was making more than a century ago. Mass conscription for a major war in the twenty-first century is likely to be problematic for any country which attempts it, with resistance running very high.

Trump has said that he will end the war on day 1 of his renewed presidency. I struggle to understand his drivers. He says it is to stop the killing, which would be a noble enough aim; but coming from a man who has no previous record of concern for anyone other than himself, it doesn’t immediately strike me as being likely. After himself, those about whom he most seems to care are other billionaires, but we know that capitalist billionaires are amongst those who most benefit from war through their investments in the arms industry. It might simply be, for Trump, a case of not spending US money to support another country. That would certainly seem to fit with his ‘America First’ outlook, even if it shows a certain ignorance of the relationship between US government spending on armaments and the overall value of shares on the New York Stock Exchange, which seems to be Trump’s only metric of economic success.

However, whatever his rationale is (to the extent that he has one at all) his conclusion that the immediate priority should be to stop the fighting and killing is difficult to disagree with. And since Ukraine does not have – and without a massive injection of military manpower and firepower from friends and allies is unlikely ever to have – sufficient forces to recapture all its lost territory, an end to the fighting necessarily implies a redrawing of boundaries, on at least a temporary basis. Expecting Ukraine to cede vast swathes of territory in order to buy peace is neither fair nor just, but in the absence of any other basis for agreeing a peace deal, it is surely no worse than the current US position of telling Ukraine to simply conscript more young people who can be ‘expended’ in an ongoing war with no obviously better outcome in sight. There aren’t many boundaries in the world which aren’t the result of a war, a treaty following a war, or arbitrary lines drawn on a map by colonial masters. 

‘Might is right’ is a lousy basis on which to run a planet, but unless and until we collectively find a better way, it’s the basis on which almost all of the world’s current boundaries exist. Supporting the idea that a free and independent country should cede territory to one autocratic bully at the behest of another autocratic bully is uncomfortable, to say the least; but encouraging Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian would feel even less comfortable. The devil will, of course, lie in the detail and in the mechanisms for ensuring the integrity of any new boundaries. But on the principle, even Trump might be able to get something right, even if not based entirely on rational analysis or concern for fellow humans.

Nuance is sometimes a way of avoiding hard facts

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When the statue of slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol a few years ago, reactions were mixed, to say the least. In general terms, views fell into two main camps: those who felt that we should not be celebrating the lives of those who were responsible for a cruel and despicable trade and those who felt that, like him or loathe him, he was a part of history which should not be, to use one of their current favourite words, ‘cancelled’. The compromise, ultimately, was to place the statue in a museum with an appropriate explanation of his role in the past. It’s a nuanced response, which attempts to placate both sides in the debate about statues. It does little, however, to resolve the underlying debate about what history is and whether – and to what extent – we should feel ‘proud’ of it.

No such nuance was observed when it came to the toppling of statues of Lenin or Stalin in the former Soviet Union and its satellites, nor in the case of the toppling of statues of Hussain in Iraq or, this week, those of Assad in Syria. I don’t recall any great outpouring of outrage about the rewriting of history or about the attempts at ‘cancelling’ the role of dictators in the history of those countries, only pleasure at their fall.

That underlines the hypocrisy and deceit at the heart of the arguments of those in the UK who oppose the removal of statues and symbols of those whom history no longer treats so kindly as attitudes and values change. It isn’t just about slavery, it’s about imperialism, colonialism and militarism, with all of which slavery was inextricably bound up. Those who opposed the removal of the statue of Colston and other such statues are actually proud (and believe the rest of us should be too) of Britain’s imperial, colonial, and militaristic past, and it is that – rather than the celebration of slavery – which they don’t want to see ‘cancelled’ or revised. Most of them (but I’m not convinced that this is true of all of them) might see slavery as something of a blot on that history, which is why they want to divert attention to Britain’s role in the abolition of slavery rather than dwelling on its role in creating the trade, but they are unable or unwilling to accept or understand that slavery was actually a key element in the accumulation of wealth from colonial activities. What Colston was actually being celebrated for was what he did with the wealth which he brought back to Britain, as though the means by which he acquired that wealth is somehow irrelevant or unimportant.

Syrians cannot change the history of their country; the Assad dictatorship is something which will always be taught in their schools. But knowing history, understanding history, interpreting history – these are not the same as celebrating history. Those who tore down statues implicitly understand that better than most, even if it was not the uppermost thought in their minds at the time. There’s no nuance around the idea that ‘he did some good things as well’. It’s an attitude from which we can learn something ourselves.

The enemy's enemy isn't always a friend

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The UK’s Prime Minister has taken time out of his busy schedule appeasing a brutal dictator who has his opponents killed and chopped up, and whose regime treats women as second class citizens and executes those who protest against his rule, in order to welcome the fall of a brutal dictator in another country in the neighbourhood. It’s almost as though what matters is not how brutal and barbaric a dictator is, but whether or not he has money available to be laundered by being invested in the UK.

In his rush to celebrate the end of one dictatorship (aided and abetted by his deputy back home) in the middle of a visit to another, the question which he doesn’t seem to be asking is whether, and to what extent, whatever replaces Assad will be any better. If their concern is really, as Rayner put it, ‘the protection of civilians’, the signs are not good. Whilst there might be at least some hope of a more enlightened approach from the Kurdish authorities who control a large chunk of Syria, it’s more than probable that the rather more ruthless rebels who have taken over the rest of the country – aided and abetted by NATO member Türkiye – will merely refocus the civil war along the lines of control between the disparate rebel groups, with the Kurds as a particular target. And within the areas that some of those groups control, the outlook for women and minority groups may end up being even more repressive than what went before.

Our enemy’s enemy isn’t always our friend, and the replacement of one brutal regime by another may not look like such a blessing to those who suffer its excesses. Still, if they can find some money to invest in the UK, Starmer and the rest of the UK government may yet end up appeasing them too.

When prevention becomes cause

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The military mind seems quite fond of developing different euphemisms and phrases which do more to obscure what it being said than to elucidate it. ‘Friendly fire’ and ‘collateral damage’ are two of the obvious ones. There was another one this week: ‘expended’. It seems that the military and the defence ministry are a little worried that, in the event of an all-out war, the UK’s entire army would be ‘expended’ in only six months. Whilst the rational response would be to say that, in that case, we’d better make absolutely certain that we don’t ever get into such a war, the military mind seeks instead to explore ways in which the number of people available to be ‘expended’ can be increased rapidly, in order to add a few months to that period. Whether people are going to be as enthusiastic about being ‘expended’ in the twenty-first century as they were at times in the past is another question: the military, as ever, always seem to believe that they’re going to re-fight the last war, and there does seem to be an assumption that attitudes to participating in a war are unchanged.

Their response to the point about avoiding such a war would probably be something along the lines of, ‘Ah yes, but the best way of doing so is to possess such overwhelming military strength that they would never dare attack in the first place’. But here’s a question: if Russia (to choose a putative enemy not-at-all-at-random) were to seek to build up its forces such that they were capable of deploying overwhelming force against ‘the west’, would ‘the west’ see that as a deterrent or a threat? And if the answer is the latter, why would ‘the west’ expect Russia not to see a military build-up by ‘the west’ in the same light? Underpinning the mindset is a belief, on both sides, that ‘the enemy’ is just waiting for a chance to attack ‘us’, in order to seize land and resources, and to subjugate people.

Historically, it’s not an entirely bad assumption. Looking at empires of the past (whether Roman, Mongol, Ottoman, Spanish, Portuguese, French or British, for instance), expansion of territory and control of resources – including the ‘right’ to conscript people from the new territories into the army to further expand the empire’s control – has been a key driving factor. But that was then and this is now: what if that isn’t the main driver any more, and the real danger of war stems from a belief on one side or the other that they are under threat and the best response is to strike first? What is presented as a way to prevent war then becomes the likeliest cause of war. And it isn’t just military personnel who will be ‘expended’ if that happens.

No need for a new gospel

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Some of the people Trump is picking to form his cabinet seem to believe that the US constitution should be reformed to base it firmly on biblical law. Presumably, they mean Old Testament law rather than the snowflake nonsense about loving one’s neighbours (especially if they happen to be Canadian or Mexican) or turning the other cheek (instead of seeking revenge). It’s a proposal which could prove problematic for Trump himself – I’m not sure that there is a single one of the ten commandments that he hasn’t broken, or actively considered breaking. He’s even mused about having a graven image of himself carved into Mount Rushmore.

He does, however, have a potential get-out mechanism, because he who controls the content of the bible also controls the detail of biblical law. One of his more recent ventures has been selling Trump-branded bibles, which, unsurprisingly, contain additional content over and above that found in other bibles. (Autographed copies are available as well.) If it’s possible to add additional content, it is surely also possible to amend the existing content for the next print run. And it would only take a small change. If all those pesky prohibitions (‘thou shalt not’) were simply prefaced by a few additional words, along the lines of ‘Unless thou hast first rigged the Supreme Court to give thyself immunity’. Fixed, without needing to go to the lengths of writing a new gospel according to St Donald. He wouldn’t be the first leader in history to ‘discover’ that sacred religious texts give him favours not available to others.