When rogue is a better word than erratic

Tweet

 

‘Erratic’ is an accurate but wholly inadequate word to describe the approach of the current US President to world affairs in general and the war in Ukraine in particular. He’s technically correct to say that Zelensky could easily end the war, although that does rather skip over the fact that the way of doing so would amount to complete surrender. To the extent that Trump has any sort of coherent view of the world, it is that ‘might is right’; the most powerful countries have the absolute right to dominate the rest. It was well put in an article in the Guardian this week about the EU by Rafael Behr, when he said: “It is as obvious to Trump that Moscow has a seigneurial right over Ukraine as it is that he should be allowed to decide who governs Venezuela and who sells its oil”. And while Trump’s ideology beyond that might be non-existent, revolving as it seems to around the goal of self-enrichment, the same doesn’t necessarily follow about some of those around him. As this report suggested, Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, was this week extolling the virtues of ‘Western civilisation’ and effectively arguing that we should rediscover the values of exploration and conquest, and that the powerful have the right to exploit resources and conquer others.

Underpinning the alleged ‘special relationship’, and indeed the whole idea of a US-led alliance of ‘the West’ is the claim that we have a set of ‘shared values’, although it isn’t always clear to me whether the ‘values’ driving UK governments are those precious shared values or some other set of unique and special British values. Or what the difference is. Part of the reason for confusion is that whichever it is, those values are rarely spelled out in words, probably because if they were set out in black-and-white on a page, it would rapidly become obvious that they were not actually the driving force behind anything. A rhetorical appeal to a vague set of shared values turns out to be a great deal easier than defining what those values are. Who’d have thought it?

The bigger question is whether, and to what extent, continuing to pretend that the rest of the western world at some level shares the same values as Trump is helping or hindering world peace. Those who maintain the pretence – assuming that they’re intelligent enough to admit to themselves that it is a pretence – would probably argue that they need to do so in order to try and retain some degree of influence. They assume – or merely hope – that it will all be over in another 2 years or so, and we have to ride the storm in the meantime. Such motives would be honourable, even if misplaced. At what point, though, do we simply admit that the US has gone rogue, and that it is likely to continue to be rogue under Vance, Rubio or another Trump? And having admitted that it has gone rogue, what do we do about it? I don’t have answers to any of that, but I don’t see answers coming from anywhere else either. Worst of all, I don’t see any serious debate about how to develop a response, in the absence of which we are doomed to live in a world where might rules.

What's in a name

Tweet

 

The English bard told us that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Technically, he was correct – changing the name to something like ‘stinking lavatory flower’ would not change its smell one iota. It might, though, change our perception of the smell. Smell, after all, isn’t just the chemicals released by the flower; it is also the brain’s interpretation of those chemicals, and that can be shaped by language. (S)he who controls the words we use does exercise a degree of control over our perceptions as well.

Changing the names of things doesn’t always get taken to the excesses of Saparmurat Niyazov, the former leader of Turkmenistan. He abolished the Turkmen word for bread, replacing it with his mother’s name, and also renamed April after her as well as renaming January after himself, and various cities, airports and schools after members of his family. Trump hasn’t quite gone that far yet, although if he does get round to it, he’s fortunate to have a son called Eric, after whom he could name anything, even a fish such as halibut, in Pythonesque fashion.

Renaming the Gulf of Mexico, or Lake Ontario (or even an ocean or two) isn’t just about the words used; it is about projecting a certain image, or even (as in the case of Denali/Mount Mckinley) a particular view of history. What appears to be only a superficial change can, if maintained for long enough, imprint preconceptions on those who never knew anything different. Closer to home, that long term imprinting of ideas (a much wider question than names or language, of course) is part of what drives sentimental rose-tinted views of ‘the Empire’. It’s doubtful that Trump has given much thought to such considerations – like Niyazov, he just likes exercising his random power to do things and seeing his own name wherever he goes – and, in any event, deep thought and Trump aren’t words that normally fit in a single sentence.

Niyazov was clearly bonkers, but enjoyed a firm enough grip on power to silence any disagreements. Until he died, after which his successor quietly set about reinserting the word bread into the dictionary and reverting place names to their previous form. That’s another two parallels (being bonkers and his successor undoing his excesses) with Trump, I suspect. Provided, that is, that he actually leaves the White House in 2029 in accordance with the constitution, and that his successor is not also called Trump, neither of which are currently looking like entirely safe assumptions. If only the other damage he’s doing were as easily reversible.

A trillion here, a trillion there - pretty soon, you're talking serious money

Tweet

 

Sometimes, politicians’ promises are never intended to be serious, it’s more of a nod and a wink between the promiser and the electorate. Trump’s promise to pay every adult in the US a sum of $5,000 if his party wins the mid-term elections surely fits into that category. There cannot be any serious observer who believes that Trump will be able to fund a pledge which would cost more than a trillion dollars, even if he wanted to. Well, maybe Trump believes it – I suspect that he might actually believe that everything he says is true at the time he says it, but that just reflects how far gone he is.

But supposing, as a thought experiment, that he were to try and implement it, how could it be funded? Trump and the UK government operate under the same arbitrary neoliberal economic constraints so, according to them, it can only be funded by one of three routes: increasing taxes, borrowing more, or cutting other spending. Increasing taxes in order to issue cheques to citizens would be strange, to say the least. And the cuts made to date have been unpopular enough. So, in practice, the money would show in the accounts as having been ‘borrowed’ – and that means selling bonds on the market. Those bonds would be bought by those who have the money to buy them – i.e. the wealthiest, whose taxes Trump has already cut significantly. Trump has said that the richest will be excluded from his ‘dividend’, although without defining who is included in the term ‘the richest’. They are unlikely to worry, whoever they are: they might not get the $5,000, but they’ve already had the tax cuts and they’ll also get interest on the money that they deposit with the US government – together worth far more. And the bonus (for them) is that selling that amount of additional bonds will lead to an increased interest rate. What’s not to like?

For ordinary Americans, already struggling with the cost of living (exacerbated by Trump’s tariffs, wars, and cuts to health care), the promise of $5,000 might look attractive. Increasing spending power on that scale in a short time will probably lead to inflation, and in some corner of their minds they might well be conscious of the improbability of it actually happening anyway (has Trump ever made a promise that he had any attention of keeping?), but when things look hopeless, even a small spark of hope can be worth clinging to. Whether it will keep enough waverers on his side remains to be seen – it may be a reckless and unfulfillable pledge but it isn’t entirely stupid, politically.

There is a lesson for others, though. Hopelessness is a powerful emotion. Debunking an unfulfillable pledge is easy enough to do in rational terms, but even rational acceptance of the nonsensical nature of a pledge isn’t always enough to overcome the faintest of hopes that the snake oil might just work. We should have learnt that from Brexit, but I don’t always see signs that we have. Defeating those who make pledges that can never be fulfilled requires more than rationality and logic – it requires a restoration of hope. And, as Burnham will find out, restoring hope requires a bit more than smoother rhetoric.

Threats work in Trump's mind, even if they really don't

Tweet

 

Reports suggest that Trump is considering using the UK’s possession of the Falklands/Malvinas as a lever to compel the UK government to spend more on armaments. This post isn’t going to get into questions around the legality or morality of the UK’s continued possession of such a remote outpost; that’s a whole other subject. In any event, questions about legality or morality never enter Trump’s mind; everything is about naked power and the ability to apply it. What impact a change of US policy would have is unclear: successive UK governments haven’t exactly demonstrated a willingness to be swayed by international opinion on the question of ownership.

Trump’s end game on the issue seems to be primarily about raising UK spend on armaments, and has little to do with the status of faraway islands about which he knows nothing. Defence spending is already a hot topic in UK politics, although parties are arguing primarily about the timetable for implementing any increase. The concentration on spending as a proportion of GDP is one which I’ve never really understood. Surely, if, or to the extent that, the UK needs to up its defence capacity (another whole other subject), it’s about the nature and scale of that capacity, not about how much it costs in relation to GDP? As the UK has ably(?) demonstrated over many years, increasing defence expenditure is easy – incompetent procurement and project management can add massively to costs for no perceptible increase in capacity.

I do wonder, though, whether Trump really cares whether the relationship between arms spending and GDP makes any sense or not – or even whether he really cares about defence anyway, especially for countries other than the US. I suspect that his real concern is what it’s always been: money and power (mostly his own). He believes (with considerable justification, in the short term at least) that increasing spend on armaments primarily benefits US companies, and that means his billionaire ‘friends’ (whose ‘friendship’, in turn, is more about what they can get out of it than any liking for Trump) and donors. He doesn’t even believe that the Russians (the bogeyman being used in Europe to support preparations for war) are any sort of threat, given what he sees as his own excellent relationship with Putin.

I suspect that the warmongers currently running the UK are going to increase armaments spending anyway, regardless of what Trump says, even if their own blind adherence to wholly arbitrary fiscal rules causes a degree of dithering along the way. And when they do so, even if the Trump threat over the Falklands/Malvinas has had zero impact on the decision, Trump’s simplistic mind will see a cause and effect where there is none, which will reinforce his tendency to resort to threats and blackmail. Trump’s madness and impulsiveness form a vicious circle from which there seems to be no escape.

When will they take away his hammer?

Tweet

 

Last week, a Guardian columnist summarised Trump’s strategy by saying that “his own modus operandi, from his early days as a New York real estate investor onwards, has always been to simply do things that everyone can see are illegal … and hope that the other side will settle out of court or just live with a fait accompli”, adding “This method … of illegality – and hope for impunity – now characterizes almost the entire administration”. It seemed like a reasonable summary. I’ve never read Trump’s Art of the Deal, and can’t imagine any circumstances in which I might want to, but even without doing so, it’s probably safe to conclude that it doesn’t elaborate this particular element of his approach. With him having been a New York property developer prone to ‘unconventional’ approaches to legality, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that he will also have had dealings, consciously or not, with the mob, known for deploying violence, or the threat of violence, in gaining compliance; it’s another feature of his ‘career’ which is unlikely to have received much attention in his book.

Whether it’s an approach which has brought him success or not is a difficult question. He’s certainly had a long string of failures in both businesses and court cases, but like an inveterate gambler, he’s won enough to convince himself that he’s ahead, despite some analyses of his financial situation suggesting that he’d have ended up richer if he’d put his inheritance into a building society and spent his time cheating at golf. Up until his second inauguration, at least – during his second term, he really does seem to have monetised the presidency in ways which are unprecedented, even if not always entirely in accordance with what many others understand the law to be. But whether it’s actually been successful or not isn’t the point: he believes that a combination of illegality and violence has worked, and that belief is enough to encourage him to carry on.

He said recently that force is the only thing that the Iranian regime understands, but – in the sense in which he uses the word ‘understand’ – it simply isn’t true. They haven’t buckled in the face of repeated bombings, and there’s no sign that they’re likely to do so. All of Trump’s history suggests to him that they must inevitably do so eventually; it’s simply a matter of applying enough force. He cannot comprehend why things don’t happen in accordance with his expectations. He’s an extreme example of the old adage that when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. There are some signs that some of those around him are starting to realise the fallacy – but little evidence than anyone is yet recognising that they need to take away his hammer.

Who's checking what the US are doing from UK bases?

Tweet

 

A few hours before Trump’s deadline for Iran to surrender, it was reported that heavily-laden B52 bombers were taking off (or at least attempting to) from RAF Fairford, presumably en route to Iran. Whether they were armed with conventional weapons or nuclear weapons we may never know, but we can only assume that the jets were turned back in flight after Trump agreed, instead, to negotiate the terms of his own surrender, based on an Iranian document which Trump described as “a workable basis on which to negotiate”, and which would require, amongst other things, the payment of reparations to Iran and the removal of US bases from the region. Trump clearly blinked first, although under what pressures from within his own administration remains uncertain.

Whether it’s really a sound basis for a lasting peace is another unknown at this stage, but the use of a UK base for launching those B52s is an issue which shouldn’t be allowed to go away. Starmer has taken what appears to be a very principled and legalistic stance in demanding that UK bases only be used for ‘defensive’ actions to protect British and allied lives in the Persian Gulf, and he has banned their use for offensive bombing campaigns against Iran. But here’s the question: does anyone really believe that those B52’s, whose take-off was timed so that they would arrive over Iran at about the time that Trump said he wanted to destroy an entire civilisation, were in any way involved in a ‘defensive’ mission rather than part of his planned attacks on civilian infrastructure?

When a bomb falls on an Iranian hospital, school, bridge, or power plant, who in the UK government knows whether it came from a plane flying from a UK base or not? Is anyone checking the mission details and flight logs of all US military aircraft departing from the UK to see whether the US is abiding by Starmer’s rules or not? Starmer has banked a certain, albeit limited, quantity of kudos for setting strict rules, but if adherence is not being monitored (even Starmer, surely, couldn’t be stupid enough to take Trump’s word about what he is doing), then those rules are meaningless. Accepting the word of the US president and then turning a blind eye to what happens in practice would not be the principled stance as which it is being presented.

Laser-focused complacency might not help

Tweet

 

In Blazing Saddles, Cleavon Little’s Sheriff holds a gun to his own head and gets out of a sticky situation by telling the townsfolk that “The next man makes a move, the n***** gets it”. In the real world, Trump’s approach to Iran seems to involve telling them that he’s going to bomb them for another two to three weeks, and if they then agree to his terms, he’ll walk away and reserve the right to bomb them again whenever he feels like it, but if they don’t agree to his terms, he’ll walk away anyway and reserve the right to bomb them again whenever he feels like it. He doesn’t quite seem to realise that he isn’t creating as much fear as he thinks, merely telling them that they just have to hold on for another two or three weeks. When Boris Johnson kept threatening to walk away from EU talks unless they gave the UK everything he wanted, the EU’s response was along the lines of “bye!”. That sheriff had no real power to compel anyone to do anything, but it was a comedy, and in fiction, characters will do whatever the scriptwriter tells them to do. While there are undeniable comic aspects to both Trump and Johnson, their lack of control of the script meant that neither could compel their interlocutors to do what they wanted – and those interlocutors weren’t playing it for laughs either. Trump, in business as in politics, has always over-stated the strength of his own hand and depended on bullying, violence and threats to obtain compliance; Johnson was just a typical English exceptionalist.

Talk of English exceptionalists brings us to the current PM, Keir Starmer, who tried to tell us yesterday that the UK is somehow uniquely well-placed to weather the current economic storms resulting from an ill-thought-out war. He has a plan, he told us, although detail on the content of said plan was remarkably short. From what little he did say, it seems to consist mostly of being laser-focused on waiting to see what happens and then being resolutely determined to do as little as he can get away with. The picture of the UK being painted by some others, i.e. as being perhaps more vulnerable than others to some shortages, seems not to have penetrated his laser-focused complacency. Maybe things won’t turn out as bad as some of the doom and gloom merchants are prophesying; maybe Trump's expressed admiration for Charlie Windsor will lead him to moderate his behaviour rather than add a king to the list of those publicly humiliated by him, but neither seem to be the soundest of foundations on which to build any sort of strategy. As a work colleague of mine once observed, ‘if you can keep your head while all around are losing theirs, you probably don’t know what’s going on’. A message intended to reassure, from someone who seems not to know what’s going on, doesn’t exactly hit the target. Even if the target is laser-focused.

Taming the markets

Tweet

 

It is a given that Trump’s statement about talks with Iran is a lie. Working out which part of his rant is the lie is much harder – maybe there are no talks at all; maybe there are some sort of indirect talks taking place through an intermediary; maybe (as Trump himself has hinted) the talks are taking place with someone who has no authority to hold them (and therefore to implement any agreement), and whose life is under threat if the regime currently in power find out he’s talking to Trump; perhaps he’s even talking to the late Shah’s son in the mistaken belief that he can put him back on the throne. With Trump, any or all of these are possibilities: the nearest thing to a certainty is that the statements coming from the regime in Iran are more likely to be true than anything Trump says. Only time will tell which lie he is telling.

Meanwhile, one of the apparent certainties is that the words emanating from Trump’s phone fingers can and do move markets. As a direct result of Trump’s claim about talks, conveniently issued shortly before markets opened, oil prices fell and stock market prices rose – two of the outcomes most highly valued by a man who measures the success or failure of everything in terms of increasing the wealth of himself and his billionaire friends. Superficially, it’s a puzzle as to why this happens. After all, those involved in the markets know as well as I do that the truth is a stranger to Trump’s lips, and that whatever he says now will probably be reversed in days, if not hours. What makes them place such trust in his words?

The answer to that lies not in what any of those involved in speculative buying and selling themselves believe might or might not be true, but in what they think that other speculative traders might or might not believe. If you believe that everyone else is going to be selling oil (pushing the price down) or buying stock (pushing the price up), then it becomes a race to sell or buy before everyone else does so in order to turn a quick profit. (And if you can get hold of some advance information, speculation – or even simple betting – becomes easier. It’s an obvious hazard when dealing with a ‘leader’ who sees personal and family enrichment as an entirely legitimate goal.)

That brings us to the problem with markets. As a mechanism for matching genuine sellers with genuine buyers, markets are an extremely effective process. They have, though, been largely hijacked by people who have no interest whatsoever in the ‘things’ they are buying and selling; it is the process of buying and selling in itself, with the prospect of turning a quick profit, which attracts them. Commentators describe volatile markets as a ‘problem’, but that’s only true for those genuine buyers and sellers. For speculators, volatility equals opportunity. The consequences of that volatility are felt in the ‘real’ economy by all of us, whilst a minority redirect wealth to themselves. For as long as legislatures allow this situation to continue, markets and the economy they support end up controlling us, when they should be serving society as a whole. Where are the politicians willing to tackle this scourge?

Trump can't make all the rules

Tweet

 

When I was a child, the kids from our street used to go into the fields at the end of the road and play commandos. Well, it was the 1950s, and ‘the war’ might not have been a memory for us, but it was still fresh to our parents’ generation. It was a game which would often dissolve into acrimony as debate raged over whether one or other of us was ‘taking his shots’; a debate in essence as to whether the imaginary bullet had hit or missed its target. Even the world’s best ballistics expert would have been unable to answer the question – tracing the trajectory of an imaginary bullet fired from an imaginary gun is no simple matter. And we didn’t have such an expert on hand anyway.

It was a childish debate, of course – but then we were children and children are allowed to be childish. But it seems to me that Trump – a man-child if ever there was one – has got to a similar stage in his war against Iran: the Iranians are just not taking their shots. He believes that he has ‘won’, but the loser is declining to oblige him by meekly accepting defeat. Six decades ago, we children learnt that no matter how determined any one of us might have been to set his or her own rules for the game, it only worked as long as the rest of us agreed to be rule-takers. It's not a lesson that everyone learns.

Trump has lived his entire life believing that he alone sets the rules, and that rules set by others can be ignored. Mostly, he’s had that stance validated by the behaviour of others, even if that behaviour has been the result of threats, bullying and aggressive law suits which many of his targets have chosen to settle rather than drag out at huge cost. And now he’s got himself into the most powerful position on the planet, with huge resources of weaponry at his disposal, and he’s encountering more push-back than he’s ever encountered before. Iran might be the bloodiest and most obvious source at present, but it’s also increasingly coming from other governments, which he sees as vassals, declining to prostrate themselves before him and do his bidding without question.

His instinctive reaction has been to fall back on the learned behaviour which has served him so well in the past – turn up the volume on the threats, insults and bullying. If – when – that doesn’t work, what will he do next? The world’s best hope is that he falls back on his other standard ploy: lie and claim victory. Repeatedly. Whether the other players will let him off the hook so easily remains to be seen. Not taking their shots can be habit-forming.

Dealing with rogue states

Tweet

 

As an approach to winning the Nobel Peace Prize, starting an illegal war is certainly a novel one. Maybe Trump has abandoned all hope of ever winning the prize, or maybe he thinks that by starting a war which he can end at any time he chooses, he will shortly have another war to add to the list of the ones he’s personally ended. He certainly talks and behaves as though he assumes that no-one will remember what he did or said yesterday, never mind last year, so by the time he ends it, no-one – in his mind – will ever believe that he started it.

There is a huge difference between the world views of the late Ayatollah and Trump. On the one hand, the Ayatollah believed that he was god’s servant, doing god’s will by imposing his version of religion on the people of Iran and the wider world whereas, on the other hand, Trump believes that he was sent by (the same) god to impose divine will by the use of whatever force is necessary. The main lesson from that is that people in a position of power who believe that they have a unique ability to interpret god’s will, and a duty to impose that will on others by whatever means necessary, are inherently dangerous to the world. It’s not a particularly new lesson, sadly.

Trump’s actual motives are as clear as mud, and seem to change every time he opens his mouth. Preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapon by destroying facilities which Trump told us had already been completely obliterated last year; revenge for terrorist acts (allegedly) carried out by or at the behest of the Iranian government; pre-empting an attack by Iran for which there was no credible evidence; ‘justice’ for the thousands of protestors killed on the streets of Iran and preventing the regime from carrying out further such killings; revenge for Iran being named in some utterly incredible conspiracy theory as being in cahoots with Venezuela to steal the 2020 election. Take your pick – any, all, or none of the above. But, to consider just one of those: killing hundreds of civilians to stop the Iranian authorities from killing civilians is a strange proposition to many of us, although as Stalin may or may not have said, “a single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic”. As Trump’s rather offhand dismissal of the deaths of US service personnel to date demonstrated, for someone so lacking in human empathy as him even a single death (as long as it isn’t his own) is merely a statistic.

Underlying it all, though, there is a very serious point, which an arbitrary attack on Iran does more to disguise than to reveal. There are regimes in the world which are a danger to their own citizens and the citizens of other (mostly neighbouring) countries, and it is a mark of failure for the international order that humanity has no effective way of dealing with them. Having international laws and rules is the easy part; enforcing them is quite another matter. It’s easy enough to identify Iran, North Korea and Russia as dangerous states, but dealing only with the one which does not currently possess nuclear weapons is about the best incentive I can think of for further nuclear proliferation. And then, there’s the even bigger question – who decides what is or is not a rogue state where regime change is required for the good of humanity? I named three above, because they’re reasonably uncontroversial. But what about Israel, for instance, with its creeping annexation of the West Bank and the tens of thousands of civilians killed in Gaza? What, indeed, about the USA under its current administration? Kidnapping people off the streets, disappearing them, ‘repatriating’ them without due process to places they’ve never visited, interfering in the affairs of other states both politically and militarily, blowing up boats in international waters, threatening to seize territory by force, kidnapping one national leader and assassinating another? Which characteristic of a rogue state has the US failed to meet?

There is no easy or simple solution to the problem; humanity has some way to go before we recognise that we are one species sharing one planet and need to co-operate, share, and live by a common basic set of rules. It’s much easier to say what the solution isn’t than identify what it is – but it definitely isn’t allowing the biggest and most powerful to take whatever arbitrary decisions suit its own selfish interests, or those of its rulers. Trump is taking the world backwards – and the UK’s Labour government now seems set on enabling and supporting him in that endeavour.

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

Tweet

 

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.

Dictatorship is not the answer

Tweet

 

It seems as though Trump’s proposed ‘Peace Board’, initially mooted as part of the ‘peace plan’ for Gaza, is being given a much wider remit by its sole owner and proprietor, one Donald Trump. It looks more like an attempt to replace the UN with a handpicked core membership (to include a chair for life appointed because he’s called Donald Trump, as well as that well-known purveyor of peace, former UK PM Tony Blair, and Trump’s son-in-law, Secretary of State, and special envoy), and a wider membership to be invited to participate by the chair. This wider group includes one Vladimir Putin, a man particularly well-known for his love of peace, and that staunch defender of democracy, Lukashenko of Belarus. Those accepting membership can opt to upgrade to a premium membership in exchange for handing the chair a mere $1 billion (to be spent as decided unilaterally by the chair), whilst anybody who turns down an invitation can expect to be hit with further tariffs (such as the proposed 200% tariff on French wines and champagne which Macron has earned by politely declining. Like any good mafia don, Trump is making people offers that he thinks they can’t refuse.

That there are problems with the UN is undeniable. Reaching a consensus is a difficult and time-consuming task, especially when five permanent members of the Security Council have a veto. It’s not entirely clear exactly how Trump’s proposal overcomes that weakness, although he presumably expects all members to simply accept his ultimate authority on all decisions. Theoretically, that works, but practically it’s problematic even when he’s president of the US; if he remains as chair when (or if) he ceases to be president, by what power exactly does he impose compliance? That problem of seeking and achieving consensus, leading to painfully slow decision-making, isn’t confined to the UN, of course: the EU suffers from the same issue. The question we are faced with is whether we accept that as a cost of seeking consensus and agreement through negotiation, or whether we simply vest all power in an individual – or rather, in Trump’s case, allow an individual to vest all power in himself. For all the frustrations of dealing with a multitude of different parties with different interests and agendas, I’m sure that I’m not alone in rejecting the dictatorship which is what the alternative amounts to.

Here in the UK, another former UK PM has weighed in with his own take on the solution. It’s full of fine words, as in this paragraph: “The democracies of the world should draft a short values statement, echoing the UN charter’s starting point – “We the peoples …” – and this time showing we mean it. Its first section would assert our full support for self-determination and the mutual recognition of nation states*; for the outlawing of war and coercion; and for the primacy of law, civil rights and democratic accountability as the essential means by which human dignity is advanced. A second section would outline the rules that govern the cooperation essential to guarantee food, water and security, economic opportunity and social justice, and climate resilience and health for all, including pandemic prevention”. But it, too, is short on telling us how this can be enforced.

Both Trump and Brown have identified a real problem when it comes to taking international decisions, but only Trump has come up with a ‘solution’ – personal dictatorship by one D. Trump. The reality is that, if we reject the ‘might is right’ approach of Trump, there is no simple solution. Not electing people who are clearly deranged would help a little, but there’s no obvious way of preventing that either.

^* Obviously, Gordon Brown does not intend this to be taken as being in any way support for nations not currently regarded as states – Wales, Scotland, Catalunya etc. – having any right to self-determination. That would never do.

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

Tweet

 

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.

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

Tweet

 

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.

Divide and conquer is working as well as ever

Tweet

 

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?

Tweet

 

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?

Tweet

 

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.

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

Tweet

 

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.

Is there any alternative to spluttering from the sidelines?

Tweet

 

For a while, it looked as though Trump’s designs on Greenland had been placed on a back burner somewhere, but in need of a diversion from other stories, he’s returned to the issue today, and appointed a special envoy to Greenland, who sees his job – presumably briefed to that effect by Trump – as being “to serve you in this volunteer position to make Greenland a part of the US”. Maybe people shouldn’t read too much into it beyond diverting attention from Epstein, and the ‘volunteer’ nature of the post suggests that the governor of Louisiana – almost as far as one can get from Greenland, other than Hawaii, and still be in the US – might not be spending a lot of his time on the issue.

The government of the kingdom of Denmark is upset, or at least pretending to be to the extent that they can do so without angering His Orangeness, and has quite rightly made it clear that the future of Greenland is a matter, first and foremost for Greenlanders. Their argument that “National borders and the sovereignty of states are rooted in international law”, and “You cannot annex another country” is more than a little weak though. After all, hasn’t Putin proved, fairly conclusively, that you can indeed annex another country or part thereof, and if you have so much military might that no-one is prepared to stop you, then you can get away with it. And if you can get the leader of the biggest and most powerful country on side with what you are doing, it’s even easier.

If Trump were to decide that his need for a diversion had become so great that it was time to invade Greenland, then who or what is going to stop him? Not Denmark for sure, and even if Trump is turning against NATO, it doesn’t mean that NATO would use force to resist him. And not Russia, for whom a US annexation of Greenland would echo Putin's own rationale for invading Ukraine. We like to believe that we live in some sort of rules-based international order, but we don’t. Putin and Trump have already ripped up the rules. The question is how the rest of the world reacts to that. Denmark seems determined to join the UK in spluttering helplessly from the sidelines.

Is Russia the only enemy?

Tweet

 

The politicians and generals keep telling us that we must prepare for war with Russia – some are even claiming that we are already at war, in the light of Russia launching a variety of provocations including the use of drones for surveillance and cyber attacks on Western organisations. In order to justify diverting ever more resources into the profits of companies in the defence sector the purchase of armaments, some play up the danger of an actual physical attack, using armour and troops. It is, though, hard to believe that Putin doesn’t realise that such an attack would be certain to lead to a much wider war which, without resorting to nuclear weapons - in which case, everyone else also loses - he would be likely to lose.

That’s not to say that Putin doesn’t have malicious intent; just that the conquest, occupation, and Russification of countries with 500 million inhabitants by a country with only 145 million inhabitants is never going to be achievable, and Putin isn’t stupid enough to believe otherwise. He does, after all, have the experience of years of fighting over a much smaller country and all the losses Russia has incurred. It’s pretty clear, though, what his aims for any conflict would be – the breakup of NATO and the EU, regime change across Europe, replacing what pass for liberal democracies with authoritarian governments, and freedom for Russian oligarchs and kleptocrats to further enrich themselves. He doesn’t need to invade anyone to achieve that; indeed, invasion would destroy a lot of the resources which he and his pals covet. Misinformation, election interference, dirty money, cyber crime – all these are more effective weapons at his disposal. And no amount of expenditure on tanks, guns or conscription of the sort which the politicians and generals are demanding across Europe will prevent that.

By a curious coincidence, Putin isn’t the only one who seeks the destruction of the EU, wholesale European regime change, and more freedom for oligarchs and kleptocrats. The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, published last week, is remarkably explicit in calling for much the same thing, with direct interference in elections in favour of Trumpian policies and Trump-aligned parties now an official and public part of US strategy. Those who think that we are already at war with Russia because of Russian interference in European politics seem incapable of recognising that, applying similar criteria, the US could also be considered to be at war with us. European countries are caught in a pincer movement, with larger neighbours to both the east and the west intent on ripping out liberal, tolerant democracies (or semi-democracies, such as the UK) and replacing them with authoritarian white nationalist regimes which persecute and harass minorities and opponents and pay homage to Moscow / Washington.

That doesn’t mean to suggest that Russia and the US are in cahoots (although they may well be moving that way), merely that their rulers’ perceptions of their own geopolitical interests in Europe increasingly coincide in a way which is much broader than a mutual desire to carve up Ukraine. A response which consists of diverting ever more resources into armaments not only does nothing to address the problem (would we really get into a shooting war with either Russia or the US, let alone both of them at the same time?), it actively makes it worse by holding down living standards in a way which creates the discontent on which politicians pursuing the Putin-Trump agenda feed. Improving the welfare and living standards of the population would be a much better way of demonstrating European values and keeping the barbarians at bay, but our politicians seem keener on facilitating barbarianism than protecting values and civilisation.