The West

In the final installment of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy, which hit the big screen in 2003, at the climactic battle against the satanic forces of Mordor, Aragorn, leader of the Free Peoples, gives an inspiring speech to his allied forces:

"By all that you hold dear on this good earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!"

This phrase - "Men of the West" - and the rather blatant real-world geopolitical resonance which lies behind it, was not in Tolkien's original 1955 novel. It is very much a product of the culture of "the Western world" of the early '00s, the very heart of that rosy interbellum period: that progressive, capitalist hubris, following the end of the Cold War but before the 2008 shock, when the future was clearly the Third Way and by and most of the world seemed to be on the same page about what was what.

It feels terribly quaint now.

"The West" is over. There is no more Western bloc, no united front. Turkey makes a mockery of NATO by linking a WW1 victory against the UK to Islamophobic terrorism in New Zealand, while Italy cosies up to China and the US threatens trade war with the EU generally. The UK's vote to leave the EU, while doubtless in part symptomatic of the same malaise, pales in contrast: thus far it has by and large been managed in a traditional, broadly amicable manner, despite the deep-seated mistrust, resentment and self-interest on both sides.

Of course, as I write, March 29th is only around the corner and there is still no deal on the table that Parliament is able to support. The EU/UK relationship has already changed dramatically and may do so again. There is no guarantee that my own country will continue to behave like a grown-up once Theresa May is finally forced to step down, and the recession that it would undoubtedly provoke in the eurozone (as well as the UK, most likely) is hardly likely to incline continental leaders to continue extending their patience, never mind hold themselves to a higher standard.

It is very easy to bash Donald Trump in Europe. Unlike in the US, on the more liberal, social-democratic side of the Atlantic, at least in the wealthier countries, support for the current president has always been the preserve of a small minority. Blaming him for the disintegration of the West is unlikely to be a contentious position.

Nevertheless, while Brexit was a noticeable tear in the fabric of the Western bloc's cohesion, the election of Donald Trump slashed open the seam. The rhetoric of friendship and alliance evaporated almost overnight. Trump makes no secret of his disdain for the EU, even recently describing the organisation as an enemy of the US. One senses that European leaders can scarcely hold their tongues when the president simultaneously demands they take his word for it that Huawei cannot be trusted with national infrastructure because China are the baddies, and threatens to close the US market to European automotive industry.

We have all but forgotten, amidst our petty, grasping squabbles, that there remain far more significant threats. Nobody has time any more for the South China Sea, or to prioritise political engagement with rapidly developing powers in the southern hemisphere, notably India and Nigeria. That Assad remains in control of Syria, and Russia continues to illegally occupy the Crimean peninsular, have fallen entirely off the agenda.

At the worst possible moment, just when we least could afford to present such a cacophonous and obvious show of disunity, we have deliberately and ignorantly chosen to forsake our friends, and break all bonds of fellowship. The world of Men will fall, and all will come to darkness - and my city to ruin.

There was a time not so very long ago when the West was the civilisation which everyone else wanted to be. It was synonymous with wealth, prosperity, success. Now we are the gaunt shadow of our former self. A mockery, a pale imitation of our former stature.

That is the measure of our decline.

Not that there is even a "we" any more.

Broken Dreams

In 2011, a cohort of 16-21 year olds were asked what their dream job would be. Six years later, only 1 in 50 of them were in it.

I was 16 years old in 2011. At that age, my careers' advice amounted to: go to university, study what you want, you'll be fine.

That was more or less it.

Curiously enough, it was around that year of my life that I was starting to consider certain practicalities. I knew we had endured three years of recession and austerity was starting to bite. I had been interested in classics, archaeology and Celtic studies for several years, but those weren't the only things I cared about. I was having second thoughts about studying them and directing myself to become an academic; I liked the subjects, but I wasn't sure I was that committed. I wanted to do something more tangibly real, more clearly connected with the pressing concerns of the day. I mentioned to several people that perhaps I ought to do geography instead.

Nobody engaged. It was as though the teachers I spoke to could not comprehend this level of pragmatism -  as if it was totally irrelevant. Everyone just told me - do what you love.

From an early age, I was taught to follow my dreams. This irresponsible, hubristic advice followed me through school and university and I never once worked out what was actually possible in the real world.

Trying to get a grown-up job, whether after finishing school or finishing university, is a brutal awakening for my generation. We were raised to believe it was easy. It is not. In fact there are nowhere near enough interesting - never mind fulfilling - jobs to go around.

This should have been obvious. Someone should have told us before.

But no one could bear to tell their children that they had brought them forth into a world with far less opportunity than the one before. Because they could not bear to admit it to themselves.

Between 1990 and 2007, the UK economy almost tripled in size from $1 to $2.8tn.

By 2018, it still has not climbed over $3tn.

The result was that I was raised by a generation who barely remembered the economic hardships of the 70s, dimly blamed Thatcher for the 80s - and believed all that firmly belonged to the past. They took property-ownership for granted and stumbled into prosperity by accident.

It was a kind of hubris: it was the myth of progress. In the West, we have generally believed that humanity moves ever forwards through time and on to better things: the future is morally superior - and it is flush with cash.

The whimsical, short-sighted, hippie careers advice my generation received is entirely a product of this complacent way of thinking. Our expectations - the aspirations we were told were perfectly realistic - the disgusting lie that you can be anything you want to be if you put your mind to it... we found our beliefs about what we could do and be in our lives in stark opposition to reality.

We are a generation raised to believe we would all be princes, only to find, at the last minute, that only a tiny fraction will ever have the life we thought nearly all of us would; the rest of us are to be slaves, or starve.

Then they wonder why we are all so depressed and anxious. The level of support for Jeremy Corbyn among my generation may be considered another widespread mental health condition brought on by this crisis - of abject disappointment, despair and humiliation.

Causation and grand narratives

"Populism is the true legacy of the global financial crisis", FT.com 30/08/18 < https://www.ft.com/content/687c0184-aaa6-11e8-94bd-cba20d67390c >

This whole narrative is simplistic and under-theorised. The attribution of cause and effect is not necessarily incorrect but it is built on very shaky foundations.

Generally attributing causation is a very dubious historical exercise. This example is a completely processualist model of supra-regional historical change - so its theoretical basis is open to all the criticisms of every other processualist approach.

I suggest Trump and brexit have as much to do with culture wars as with economics. Were those caused by the crash? I rather think there were quite a lot of people who felt that their sincerely-held views were being silenced by political correctness beforehand; I distinctly remember school-friends talking about how Muslim immigrants were stealing people's jobs back in 2006.

In democracies, the percentage shift of opinion does not have to be very big to get a different bunch of people elected - so we might be justified in talking about much less headline-grabbing factors than instantly looking to grand-scale systemic events like the financial crisis.

Try getting someone with a relevant degree to do (or at least review) your sweeping historical narratives before you publish, you'll end up with a more rigorous product. I don't know about the rest of your readership but academic excellence is one of the reasons I take the FT.

Headline: "Trump wants G7 to readmit Russia"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-44409775

If the entire rest of the G7 can't block this idiot, then all of those nations, including mine, are good for nothing on the world stage, and multilateralism is a joke.

If Trump insists, then Germany, France, Canada, Japan and the UK must all make it crystal clear that they will walk out. PM May's optimistic, non-confrontational placating tactics must go: she must side with civilisation, the condemnation of Russia's annexation of another sovereign state's territory, and its continuing flagrant covert attacks on other nations - not least, and extremely recently, her own.

If Trump's insistence would reduce the G7/G8 to a cold-war-hotline-style Russia-US forum - with Italy as a sidekick, as if that mattered - then even if he presses ahead he will have achieved nothing.

Of course, Putin may have no interest in rejoining anyway, in which case the international relations flashpoint will be kicked into the long grass again - for another month or so, perhaps.

Flashpoint

Ten days ago, former Russian intelligence officer and UK double agent Sergei Skripal, along with his daughter Yulia, were poisoned in Salisbury with a "novichok" nerve agent. The British government, initially cautious in ascribing blame, is now confident that this was a state-sanctioned attempted assassination by Russia.

According to the British press, the intended victim(s) remain in a critical condition in hospital. I suspect this may not be the case - one must assume we are dealing with a highly-sensitive intelligence operation - and I have no doubt that that possibility has already occurred to Russia. They may in fact have been dead for some days, but the British government does not want Russia to know it; naturally, the UK would not want Russia to know how much the UK knows about what the intended victims know about the attack. Alternatively, they may have mostly recovered and be on their way into deep cover - one might expect they will shortly be pronounced dead, if that is the case. With any luck, neither we nor Russia will ever know for sure.

At the risk of appearing callous, one must admit the whole story is tremendously exciting. Sixty-odd years since their invention, the phrase "nerve agent" still sounds exhilaratingly sci-fi; more the instrument of a cipher agent of the Old Sith Empire than a real country - if you will excuse the reference. The secrecy, uncertainty and high stakes combine into a thrilling real-life crime drama.

Of course, unlike a computer game or a television episode, here there is a real menace underlying the adrenaline.



Today, the UK announced its response. We will be expelling a couple of dozen diplomats (Russia has already announced a tit-for-tat response), and closing down diplomatic channels. There are also an unknown number of undisclosable, presumably covert measures being taken.

Let us assume that British intelligence's ascription of blame is correct: in other words, we assume they have ruled out the possibility of an elaborate frame-up (they no doubt do have access to additional information which will not and should not be made public for decades); and we also assume that they are not lying to the government or the public for their own ends. For what it is worth, for all her faults I do not believe that it is in the Prime Minister's character to lie to the British people on such a serious matter; nor that local police, counter-terrorism, and MI5 and/or the SIS are all committed to the same conspiracy to frame Russia. On this occasion, on the particular point of who is to blame, I believe that we may place our faith in the security services.

Whatever Britain's additional secret measures may be, it is clear that the PM's package does not go nearly far enough - it is no meaningful response at all. Alexei Navalny, the Russian anti-Putin resistance figurehead, seems to agree, suggesting in a tweet that it would have been better to target London-based Russian oligarchs - a popular suggestion in the UK too, judging from a cursory sample of comments made on social media.

A chemical weapon was used by an openly antagonistic nation on UK soil - the first time this has happened on NATO since its foundation - and all the PM does in response is revoke a few visas, switch off a few phones and pursue additional secret measures. The convening of the UN Security Council is a mildly more serious step, but is also certain to achieve nothing.

We require a much more severe and co-ordinated response, involving the most stringent punitive measures the West has ever delivered. Russia's flagrant disregard for national borders makes China's machinations in the South China Sea look positively respectable.


The truth is that Russia is not nearly as powerful as it likes to pretend. Despite having double Britain's population, its GDP is over 40% lower; it spends negligibly more than the UK on defence, but I think it is unlikely to be getting significantly better value for money. Russia has a lot of big bombs, a lot of natural resources, and it looks very impressive on the map, but our fears of Russia as a great power are vastly overblown: we are so used to thinking of Russia and the USA as global antagonists that we forget that Russia's power has dwindled to that of a major power, rather than a superpower, at best - much more on a par with the UK or France on their own, than with the US. Aside from continental Europe's dependence on Russian gas, Russia's reputation is by and large a conjuring trick, a hangover from the last century.

Co-ordinated international sanctions can be rallied, if we merely articulate to just how serious a violation of our sovereignty this latest is. The US and EU have already indicated their willingness to take this matter with the utmost seriousness; but I do not speak merely of our traditional allies. Donald Trump has demonstrated with North Korea how China can be prised away from its Cold War friends - imagine if we could persuade them, to condemn Russia's action. That would be a serious warning to Putin. Efforts should be invested. We must leverage whatever is left of our soft power to gain condemnation from major regional powers worldwide. At that point, words may start to bite.

If Russia really did try to poison its ex-agent and/or his daughter on British soil, it took a calculated risk. Our response must be sufficiently robust to demonstrate that their arithmetic was in error. The retaliatory measures announced today do not come anywhere near, and they make Britain look frankly pathetic.

A post-colonial strategic error?

The relative decline of the West - its global reputation, influence and share of buying power - is set to be theme of this half of the twenty-first century. If more politicians were amoral, cynical geographers, it might have been avoided.

Part 1: China's debt to the West.

There is one respect in which Donald Trump's view on American trade with China has some reasoned basis: there can be little doubt that China's meteoric economic growth over the last three decades has been primarily fuelled by international trade. In short, a nominally communist, totalitarian, one-party dictatorship has derived an enormous benefit by cunningly channelling the proceeds of globalised capitalism, via its abundance of cheap labour, into the coffers of the state and of state-owned companies.

If China is a rising threat to Western hegemony, the West really only has itself to blame.

Integrating new countries into world trade will inevitably result in them getting richer: in the case of demographic behemoths like China and India, this is bound to eventually affect not just regional but global geopolitics. Where mere capitalism is the cause of that rise, there is no sense of moral debt to the West: companies have merely been acting in their own interests, and certain countries have grown more powerful as a by-product.

In brief, since China's rise is due not to foreign aid from the US and Europe, but merely to corporate self-interest in rich countries, it has been able to decouple the idea of prosperity from the Western political model - democracy based on freedom of expression; having done this, there is really no reason for China to aspire to that model. Freedom - individual freedoms, as distinct from market liberalisation - has lost its biggest selling-point to the developing world.

Part 2: Decolonisation and development: Western policy towards low-income countries 1945-2000.

Bluntly, if (and only if) Western nations wished to retain their global influence, then it was ultimately in their interests for the rest of the world to remain at least relatively poor - or at least, only to get rich in an obviously indebted way.

One would have thought this would have been obvious to post-war policy-makers; if it were, then it is quite remarkable how badly they have managed it since WW2. Perhaps mere arrogance led them to assume that ethnic West Eurasians ran the world by default; that their authority would never really be challenged; that even if or when "the Third World" became more well-off, living standards in the West would always remain so far ahead that Western countries would remain the goal to aspire to. Perhaps the rise of China, for example, only seems predictable with hindsight; the enrichment of low-income countries was not at all apparent during decolonisation. Perhaps corporate interests, the engine of capitalism, carried more weight in twentieth-century policy-making than geopolitical predictions.

In my view, the primary explanation is probably that simple morality made such cynical views of the national interest, if not unthinkable, then at least un-actionable. Corporate interests, lack of geopolitical foresight, and other more pressing agendas, such as demonstrating the superior merits of capitalism over communism, doubtless also played an important role.

Part 3: Geopolitics and emerging powers: 2000-2050.

On the bright side, tensions with rising powers, such as the South China Sea disputes, may be the exception rather than the rule: there are few other areas of the globe where the geopolitical interests of an emerging power conflict so markedly with an established one. India, for example, can expand its regional influence considerably without really touching a Western country's residual sphere of influence (as a capitalist democracy it is, helpfully, ideologically close to the West anyway). The same can probably be said for Nigeria.

It is difficult to know just what China's endgame is in the Western Pacific. If it seeks to expand, it will probably get away with it: when one regional power is so much bigger than its nearest competitor (Japan), it is difficult to see how any balance of power would be maintained - without American involvement. Perhaps, however, the end of US involvement with its old Pacific allies will never come. China's rise will not be meteoric forever; its geopolitical ambitions may, for all we know, be limited to the South China Sea. Compromises may be possible. Perhaps a long-term US/China strategic standoff is the new equilibrium.

Turkish invasion of Afrin

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.