The Western powers cannot ignore Turkey's effective declaration of war today on the Syrian Kurds. Turkey may be an ally, but it is in the wrong.
The reputations of the USA and UK in the Middle East could scarcely be poorer. If we care to have any role in the region, and we clearly do, then we cannot keep treating regional allies as fair-weather friends. Our promises to them cannot be ignored whenever it is expedient, unless we learned nothing from the case of Palestine. The YPG, although not a unified entity, is broadly speaking a key Western ally which has done the bulk of the heavy lifting against the self-styled Islamic State, and on this basis deserves to be treated with the same respect as any other ally. Yet with its threats against both Afrin and Manbij, Turkey has made it clear that it does not significantly distinguish between NATO- and Russian-allied YPG factions. They're all Kurds, right?
Turkey is in the wrong about the Kurds. Ankara has been condemned repeatedly for human rights abuses against them in the European Court of Human Rights. To equate Kurds with terrorists may be popular in Turkey, but it is blatantly racist. It is difficult not to conclude this has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with limiting the chances of the emergence of any form of Kurdish autonomy among Turkey's neighbours, particularly given its history of maltreatment of its own Kurdish minority.
But Turkey has very little right to interfere with the Kurds in Syria, and the indiscriminate manner of the present attempt undermines their excuse. Any alleged ties to armed insurgencies within Turkey should be dealt with by diplomatic means, rather than military force. Otherwise, the Western powers may reasonably assume that Ankara is pursuing a war against Kurdish groups in neighbouring countries for more cynical ends.
Erdogan has presumably made a calculation that Turkey's NATO "allies" will protest a great deal in the UN, but ultimately do nothing - much like what has been going on with his brutal, paranoid crackdown against his political opponents. Perhaps he believes he has his allies' hands tied, thanks to the importance of Turkey's strategic location to the USA and UK, and the pending threat of re-opening the refugee flood-gates if the EU annoys him too much. Doubtless he is also taking into account the personality and numerous distractions facing the US president, and estimating the likelihood that Trump will overly care as quite low. He presumably also calculates, no doubt correctly, that the US will not stick with its Kurdish allies in Manbij over Turkey.
But it should.
If Turkey attacks the ally of several of its fellow NATO members, the burden is on Ankara to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the group in question really was meaningfully threatening it. But more pragmatic geopolitical considerations than what is right or true are likely to have much more sway over the American, British and French responses to his move. Kicking Turkey out of NATO will probably not seem like a viable response - although, given Russian (and pro-Assad Syrian) condemnation of Turkey's attack on Afrin, it might not be the worst time to do it; and Erdogan does make a horrific mockery of whatever values NATO might otherwise generally be supposed to stand for.
But for Erdogan, this would merely be evidence he could use that the US is not Turkey's friend: he would then find it even easier to justify attacking Kurdish groups which are incidentally also US allies, and the US is pretty unlikely to be drawn into another Middle-Eastern war, let alone with Turkey. Turkey could probably expect to be hit by sanctions, but not much else - although it might be hard put to find other allies in its region.
Ankara may have outmanoeuvred his Western "allies" into forcing them to give up any meaningful support for Kurdish groups in Iraq and Syria, now that those groups have more or less served their purpose - I suspect that is the real end-game, as Turkey has been livid about it for years. Of course, the grown-up response would be to start treating their own Kurdish community properly, but Erdogan has long made it abundantly clear he does not care about either his own integrity or the human cost of his own putrid politics.
Sunday, 21 January 2018
Friday, 19 January 2018
UK defence spending in its international context: part 1
US President Trump (who is, not to put too fine a point on the matter, not a figure I admire) is currently seeking to increase US defence spending by 10%. This amounts to about $54bn, or about £39bn sterling.
This 10% increase is comparable to the UK's entire defence budget of around £45bn ($60bn). This has been the approximate annual spend every year since 2011.
Although US military spending makes every other country's look tiny by comparison, as a proportion of its economy it is not quite such an outlier as it is sometimes made to sound. Considering the US economy (nominal GDP) is about eight times the size of the UK's, a defence budget ten or eleven times is a pretty proportional split.
There are only about a dozen countries (such as the US) that spend more than 3% of GDP on defence, and only about another dozen that spend above 2%. Russia spends 5.5%, but its real spending ($70bn) is comparable to the UK's ($60bn); China, like the UK, spends about 2% (but for a much higher total: around $200bn). The UK is still one of the world's top 5 or 10 biggest military spenders overall, close to France, India and Japan - roughly where we'd expect.
Total spend figures are pretty worthless. They give no indication of what the money is spent on and whether it is good value. Russia spends about the same as Saudi Arabia on defence, not much more than 10% of the US figure, but supposedly maintains 350,000 troops - five times Saudi Arabia, about three quarters the US. China spends a third or a quarter what the US does, but maintains three times as many ground troops. Meanwhile, despite its $60bn spend, serious concerns have been raised about Britain's operational capabilities - our ability to fight wars independently any more at all.
All this makes the NATO 2% target - the proportion of GDP that members of the alliance are expected to spend on defence - look pretty silly. Specific operational capability targets for each ally, allowing each state to play a useful role within the NATO framework, tailored not just to the size of its economy but to the state of its public finances and perhaps demographic considerations, would be much more useful. Such targets would have to be negotiated multilaterally, and adhering to them would have to be entirely voluntary - or they would certainly be seen as meddling.
Given how few NATO countries bother to meet the 2% target anyway, it's all a bit academic.
The USA and a few other players will always pull the weight - and they should be happy to: it is a crucial means of maintaining influence, and keeping partners onside from long-term antagonists (i.e. Russia). It is not really in US interests for the EU, or even EU countries, to do the heavy lifting on defence spending themselves: the more powerful the EU becomes, the less it has to care what America thinks - making Trump's original demands for greater European defence spending perversely short-sighted.
NATO has more than enough brute strength to beat off Russia in any fair fight - which would of course never occur in the first place, just as it hasn't since 1945, due to the imminent threat of mutual assured detruction. Boosting defence spending may be a comforting response to a perceived threat, but it is specious. The threats from Russia are propaganda and the weaponisation of ethnic Russian minorities in the old provinces of the Russian Empire, and defence spending has nothing to do with either.
This 10% increase is comparable to the UK's entire defence budget of around £45bn ($60bn). This has been the approximate annual spend every year since 2011.
Although US military spending makes every other country's look tiny by comparison, as a proportion of its economy it is not quite such an outlier as it is sometimes made to sound. Considering the US economy (nominal GDP) is about eight times the size of the UK's, a defence budget ten or eleven times is a pretty proportional split.
There are only about a dozen countries (such as the US) that spend more than 3% of GDP on defence, and only about another dozen that spend above 2%. Russia spends 5.5%, but its real spending ($70bn) is comparable to the UK's ($60bn); China, like the UK, spends about 2% (but for a much higher total: around $200bn). The UK is still one of the world's top 5 or 10 biggest military spenders overall, close to France, India and Japan - roughly where we'd expect.
Total spend figures are pretty worthless. They give no indication of what the money is spent on and whether it is good value. Russia spends about the same as Saudi Arabia on defence, not much more than 10% of the US figure, but supposedly maintains 350,000 troops - five times Saudi Arabia, about three quarters the US. China spends a third or a quarter what the US does, but maintains three times as many ground troops. Meanwhile, despite its $60bn spend, serious concerns have been raised about Britain's operational capabilities - our ability to fight wars independently any more at all.
All this makes the NATO 2% target - the proportion of GDP that members of the alliance are expected to spend on defence - look pretty silly. Specific operational capability targets for each ally, allowing each state to play a useful role within the NATO framework, tailored not just to the size of its economy but to the state of its public finances and perhaps demographic considerations, would be much more useful. Such targets would have to be negotiated multilaterally, and adhering to them would have to be entirely voluntary - or they would certainly be seen as meddling.
Given how few NATO countries bother to meet the 2% target anyway, it's all a bit academic.
The USA and a few other players will always pull the weight - and they should be happy to: it is a crucial means of maintaining influence, and keeping partners onside from long-term antagonists (i.e. Russia). It is not really in US interests for the EU, or even EU countries, to do the heavy lifting on defence spending themselves: the more powerful the EU becomes, the less it has to care what America thinks - making Trump's original demands for greater European defence spending perversely short-sighted.
NATO has more than enough brute strength to beat off Russia in any fair fight - which would of course never occur in the first place, just as it hasn't since 1945, due to the imminent threat of mutual assured detruction. Boosting defence spending may be a comforting response to a perceived threat, but it is specious. The threats from Russia are propaganda and the weaponisation of ethnic Russian minorities in the old provinces of the Russian Empire, and defence spending has nothing to do with either.
Saturday, 6 January 2018
ō tempora, ō morēs
Those who were both particularly privileged in their educational opportunities and/or nerdy in their subject choices might note a bit of a classical theme around this blog: Liternum was a town in Campania, Italy, while Lovernius is the latinised name of a southern Gallic chieftain.
The classical motifs are intended to be merely decorative: the blog deals mostly with politics, geography and economics - current affairs, rather than ancient. The hints of romanitas are just to offer a bit of the flavour of "civilisation". However I came across an opinion piece today in the Financial Times on the utility of studying Latin, and on which, given my own educational background - I loved Latin at school, and read Anglo-Saxon and Celtic at Cambridge - I thought I might venture a brief opinion of my own in the article's comment section. Here I expand and develop it.
The main thesis is utilitarian - the practical sense, rather than the philosophical. "Latin is an essential language for our digital age" because of the civility and civilised use of language it teaches. As I have discussed my views on the matter of civilisation previously, I will not re-iterate the arguments here - "civilised" is not a term Mr Auslin actually employs. I think, however, that the relativist perspective which underlies my earlier discussion on that topic may be usefully extended to Mr Auslin's seemingly rather prescriptivist approach to English. He finds contemporary English usage distasteful, considering that people need to "recover [...] the ability to use our own language" - although I am not sure that the argument that opting to speak a vernacular of some sort instead of a prescribed correct form necessarily implies weak powers of argument or expression. I think that there are arguments in defence of prescriptivism, but this seems like thinly veiled snobbery. Perhaps there are arguments in defence of that too...
My principal point however is not about prescriptivism, but about functionalism. Reducing the study of Latin to its practical usefulness in the form of e.g. transferable skills is, to my mind, a pity, perhaps born of an education system that is increasingly oriented towards preparation for the "world of work", rather than education gratiā education. The functionalist approach is, of course, perfectly understandable, given the competitivity of the contemporary labour market, and the significant constraints on many schools' budgets.
Yet as far as learning critical thinking, powerful expression, how to "assess information critically, articulate ideas and convey them eloquently," or "being able to break down and rebuild sentences" in order "clearly to comprehend or construct a thought" - all of these skills might be acquired from the study of many a modern language and its literature, if the texts to be studied are chosen with these ends in mind. As far as utility is concerned, this would also have the benefit of picking up the modern language. Latin can never win on this basis, because the contemporary language will almost always be seen to be more useful.
I decided long ago that the arguments in favour of Latin's utility are always fundamentally weak. They fail to persuade because they miss the point.
Latinists, and students and lovers of other dead languages, need make no more apology for what they do than an artist. Their sole crime is merely not to be overly preoccupied with the market value of what they do - let us hope there is a place for such people in a civilised society.
Perhaps the primary purpose of learning a dead language should be to read what is written in it, simply because what is written in it is worth reading. This is a pretty solid argument for learning any dead or rare language - access to the literature of an entire culture (or multiple cultures: for example, both classical Rome and medieval Europe), in the original language. The weakness with this argument is, of course, the existence of translations: this is particularly in evidence for all the even moderately well-known classical texts, the meanings of which have often been studied and debated for a few hundred years.
One must turn then to the debate on the value of reading something in the original rather than in translation. In very brief, in my opinion, one is likely to get somewhat closer to the intended meaning by reading in the original - but learning an entire language well enough to do so for only a small number of texts may feel like a poor return-on-investment. What is more, even if one does so, there will still be ambiguity in the original text; then there are questions about the editing of the text by later scribes and scholars, and difficult or variant readings in different surviving manuscripts - one might learn a whole language and still not be sure what a crucial passage of the original text said.
Songs and poetry may be a good example of where learning the original language is likely to be especially valuable: where the form is as important as the content, one really cannot appreciate the original artistry except in the original words. In my experience, it is rare to find a good verse translation that is as accurate as it is beautiful; and often, they do not (sometimes cannot reasonably) employ the poem original metre. I would argue, for example, that the traditional Old English poetic metre is beautiful enough on its own to make learning the language worthwhile. The beauty of the form (as opposed to content) of the original texts is much less persuasive for prose however, at least when good translations exist.
Perhaps, in a way, I am still missing the point. If we are speaking of learning languages, then what of the language itself? One may simply find a particular language aesthetically pleasing; this may be a perfectly subjective judgement, but that should not prevent one from enjoying it. Alternatively, one may simply think or feel that knowing or using the language spoken in a particular period that one is especially attached to makes one feel closer to it.
In my opinion, these are the two most solid reasons for learning a dead language. As a result, dead languages really cannot be forced on anyone, and are likely to remain a niche interest. Is that so bad?
Utilitarian arguments for the study of dead languages are a bonus, not an end in themselves; dead languages and their literatures are legitimate primary objectives. Therefore, let people study them for the mere enjoyment of it. Perhaps this form of indulgence has merely fallen from fashion. In any case, I find it hard to imagine, in the foreseeable future, that Latin will ever actually die.
The classical motifs are intended to be merely decorative: the blog deals mostly with politics, geography and economics - current affairs, rather than ancient. The hints of romanitas are just to offer a bit of the flavour of "civilisation". However I came across an opinion piece today in the Financial Times on the utility of studying Latin, and on which, given my own educational background - I loved Latin at school, and read Anglo-Saxon and Celtic at Cambridge - I thought I might venture a brief opinion of my own in the article's comment section. Here I expand and develop it.
The main thesis is utilitarian - the practical sense, rather than the philosophical. "Latin is an essential language for our digital age" because of the civility and civilised use of language it teaches. As I have discussed my views on the matter of civilisation previously, I will not re-iterate the arguments here - "civilised" is not a term Mr Auslin actually employs. I think, however, that the relativist perspective which underlies my earlier discussion on that topic may be usefully extended to Mr Auslin's seemingly rather prescriptivist approach to English. He finds contemporary English usage distasteful, considering that people need to "recover [...] the ability to use our own language" - although I am not sure that the argument that opting to speak a vernacular of some sort instead of a prescribed correct form necessarily implies weak powers of argument or expression. I think that there are arguments in defence of prescriptivism, but this seems like thinly veiled snobbery. Perhaps there are arguments in defence of that too...
My principal point however is not about prescriptivism, but about functionalism. Reducing the study of Latin to its practical usefulness in the form of e.g. transferable skills is, to my mind, a pity, perhaps born of an education system that is increasingly oriented towards preparation for the "world of work", rather than education gratiā education. The functionalist approach is, of course, perfectly understandable, given the competitivity of the contemporary labour market, and the significant constraints on many schools' budgets.
Yet as far as learning critical thinking, powerful expression, how to "assess information critically, articulate ideas and convey them eloquently," or "being able to break down and rebuild sentences" in order "clearly to comprehend or construct a thought" - all of these skills might be acquired from the study of many a modern language and its literature, if the texts to be studied are chosen with these ends in mind. As far as utility is concerned, this would also have the benefit of picking up the modern language. Latin can never win on this basis, because the contemporary language will almost always be seen to be more useful.
I decided long ago that the arguments in favour of Latin's utility are always fundamentally weak. They fail to persuade because they miss the point.
Latinists, and students and lovers of other dead languages, need make no more apology for what they do than an artist. Their sole crime is merely not to be overly preoccupied with the market value of what they do - let us hope there is a place for such people in a civilised society.
Perhaps the primary purpose of learning a dead language should be to read what is written in it, simply because what is written in it is worth reading. This is a pretty solid argument for learning any dead or rare language - access to the literature of an entire culture (or multiple cultures: for example, both classical Rome and medieval Europe), in the original language. The weakness with this argument is, of course, the existence of translations: this is particularly in evidence for all the even moderately well-known classical texts, the meanings of which have often been studied and debated for a few hundred years.
One must turn then to the debate on the value of reading something in the original rather than in translation. In very brief, in my opinion, one is likely to get somewhat closer to the intended meaning by reading in the original - but learning an entire language well enough to do so for only a small number of texts may feel like a poor return-on-investment. What is more, even if one does so, there will still be ambiguity in the original text; then there are questions about the editing of the text by later scribes and scholars, and difficult or variant readings in different surviving manuscripts - one might learn a whole language and still not be sure what a crucial passage of the original text said.
Songs and poetry may be a good example of where learning the original language is likely to be especially valuable: where the form is as important as the content, one really cannot appreciate the original artistry except in the original words. In my experience, it is rare to find a good verse translation that is as accurate as it is beautiful; and often, they do not (sometimes cannot reasonably) employ the poem original metre. I would argue, for example, that the traditional Old English poetic metre is beautiful enough on its own to make learning the language worthwhile. The beauty of the form (as opposed to content) of the original texts is much less persuasive for prose however, at least when good translations exist.
Perhaps, in a way, I am still missing the point. If we are speaking of learning languages, then what of the language itself? One may simply find a particular language aesthetically pleasing; this may be a perfectly subjective judgement, but that should not prevent one from enjoying it. Alternatively, one may simply think or feel that knowing or using the language spoken in a particular period that one is especially attached to makes one feel closer to it.
In my opinion, these are the two most solid reasons for learning a dead language. As a result, dead languages really cannot be forced on anyone, and are likely to remain a niche interest. Is that so bad?
Utilitarian arguments for the study of dead languages are a bonus, not an end in themselves; dead languages and their literatures are legitimate primary objectives. Therefore, let people study them for the mere enjoyment of it. Perhaps this form of indulgence has merely fallen from fashion. In any case, I find it hard to imagine, in the foreseeable future, that Latin will ever actually die.
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