Yet there is at least one significant difference between Cold Wars 1.0 and 2.0. In Cold War 1.0, ideological dispute between Left and Right mapped directly onto geopolitical conflict. The First Cold War was a trial of state strength, measured in terms of military might and the extent of a country’s diplomatic influence. But it was also a competition between social systems, political visions and rival ideologies: the capitalist markets of the West versus the socialist command economies of the East. It was a trial of whether competitive, multi-party liberalism could extract more political legitimacy from its citizens when compared to communist single-party states. The trial, then, was about more than innovation in weapons systems; it also involved questions of individual rights and state legitimacy.

By contrast, the ideological fissures of today’s cold war do not clearly map onto these international rivalries. Instead, they yield a much more complex picture of political tension and geopolitical rivalry. It is true that China is still ruled by a Communist Party that won power back in 1948, but China is not the champion of Leftism in the way the USSR was. There is now a stock market in Beijing — China’s third stock market, after Shanghai and Shenzhen — and, by some reckonings, China has more billionaires than the US itself. Many of these billionaires made their fortunes after China began to enmesh its economy with the world’s. The USSR was part of Comecon, the autarkic trading regime of the Eastern bloc that kept its members sequestered from the wider world economy, but the Chinese and US economies are deeply intertwined. This much is evident from the complexity of the tariff negotiations currently underway between the two countries’ trade negotiators. 

At the same time, the two powers’ navies menace each other in the Pacific. The tensions between the countries are real, but so is their inter-dependence. Each side represents one of the two wings of global capitalism, with industrial capital concentrated in China and finance capital in the US. While Donald Trump has been vocal in accusing China of stealing American jobs and exporting poisonous fentanyl to US consumers, he and his administration have been relatively muted in their political criticism of the Chinese regime. This makes sense when one considers that China, like the US, is capitalist, and that China, by the same token, offers little ideological challenge to US global leadership. Ironically, as China’s industrial might has grown, its ideological influence has diminished. Red China was never ideologically more powerful than in the heyday of Maoism, when China was much weaker. Back then, Red China sought to inspire a global guerrilla war among the Third World’s legions of poor peasants, also claiming the allegiance of student radicals on Western campuses. (Impressed by China, the Black Panthers notoriously sold copies of Mao’s Little Red Book in order to raise money for guns.)

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The Afghan cover-up will haunt the UK

By Philip Cunliffe

Today, China’s infrastructural investments are helping those countries of the Global South convert their poor rural folk into urban city-dwellers. But former Western Maoists such as Bernard-Henri Lévy have become neo-conservatives, obsessed with bloody crusades to spread democracy to the Middle East, while China quietly consolidated its rise. 

In Cold War 1.0, Maoist ideological excess compensated for China’s relative weakness when compared to the military might of Soviet Russia. Today the roles are reversed: it is Russia that now occupies the relatively weaker position in the new Sino-Russian alliance. Predictably enough, it is Russian leader Vladimir Putin, more than Chinese leader Xi Jinping who has put most effort in trying to cultivate his own state as an alternative ideological pole in the international system. Putin rails against Western hegemony and has tried to style himself as a champion of global conservatism and family values against the spread of transnational Western liberalism. Yet Putin’s ideological reach is even more limited than that of Chairman Mao. His posture is fundamentally reactive and defensive, and his cultural defence of the Orthodox Church and “Russian world” will, by its very nature, have limited reach beyond Russia itself. While Trump is slowly tightening the noose of anti-Russian sanctions in an effort to induce a ceasefire in Ukraine, it is unsurprising that the White House has expended so little effort in criticising Putin’s vision of the crabbed, distempered Russian bailiwick. 

So where, if not between China and the US, or the US and Russia, can we find the key ideological battle line of Cold War 2.0? The line does not run so much between East and West as within the West itself: between the US and Europe. That the US is fighting an ideological cold war with Europe is most obvious in the diplomacy of Trump’s vice-president, J.D. Vance. Vance unleashed the opening volley in this ideological attack in his extraordinary speech delivered at the Munich Security Conference in February, when he calmly and methodically took apart the dismal record of European states on individual liberty and democratic rights. He criticized EU interference in the Romanian presidential elections of the previous year and even named the British anti-abortion activist Adam Smith-Connor, arrested in 2024 for silently praying outside an abortion clinic. In doing so, Vance adopted the same manner and tone that American leaders adopted when speaking out about the squashing of popular opposition in the Eastern bloc and the maltreatment of Soviet dissidents such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov or writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Following his speech, Vance met with Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) leader Alice Weidel — a figure of obloquy for the European liberal orthodoxy. On his current holiday in the Cotswolds, Vance has not only once-again criticized the British record on free speech, he is also meeting Robert Jenrick — the dissident rival to the current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.

When was the last time that a Chinese or Russian dissenter achieved the renown of Smith-Connor, by virtue of being cited in a speech by a major US political figure? The barbs do not come from Vance alone. Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State, has criticized the German state’s suppression of the national-populist AfD party as “tyranny in disguise”. EU leaders rallied together against Vance’s assault, with former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz defending continental restrictions on free speech. The German foreign office even took to X to criticize Rubio for interfering in Germany’s internal affairs. This is to say nothing of the years of bitter invective that have been hurled by European politicians and commentators against Trump ever since 2016. They have denounced him as a pro-Russian stooge, a demagogue and a fascist — only to downplay such remarks years later. Even Trump, who has mostly left the international ideological battles to Vance, embarrassed UK prime minister Keir Starmer on his recent private visit to Scotland. The mere mention of free speech by Trump was enough to induce gurning, tortured denials from Starmer.

There are some important differences between the former cold war and its new pan-Atlantic counterpart. When Western leaders denounced communism in the first cold war, they did so by arguing that the Soviets’ centralized economy, and appropriation of private property, was necessarily a totalitarian enterprise. Vance, by contrast, takes the Europeans to task for falling foul of their own ideals rather than realizing some larger sinister purpose. More recently, he has also accused Europe of engaging in civilizational suicide through its unwillingness to halt mass migration. The historically unprecedented inflows represent not only a divergence from the legacy of the Western civilization shared by the US and Europe, but a flouting of the elites’ democratic compact with their people. Repeatedly, voters have indicated their exasperation with the scale of mass migration; repeatedly, they have been ignored.

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The Afghan cover-up will haunt the UK

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Vance’s ideological confidence, as he suggested in his speech in Munich, rests on the democratic mandate won by Trump. Barracked by Vance and his colleagues, European leaders react defensively, for they are more used to bureaucratic haggling in the committee rooms of Brussels than dealing with European voters. As with any cold war, both sides recoil from full-frontal assaults: they beat hasty retreats, seek to patch up relations and make assurances of enduring alliances. But there is no mistaking the underlying political drift.

This Euro-American ideological cold war reflects the underlying political and even economic divergence between the US and Europe. Not only does the EU cling to its outdated political model — that of a supranational trade bloc designed for the technocratic regulation of globalization — it also remains ideologically and strategically committed to the economic policies of that bygone era, too. At the top of the EU’s agenda remain multilateral free trade deals, deindustrialization and expensive renewables. By contrast, the Trump administration is wielding a strong democratic mandate in its effort to re-industrialize North America behind tariff barriers that penalize Europe. It is expanding its use of fossil fuels and reducing its reliance on renewable energy.

Ideological crusades abroad, including Vance’s, always reflect domestic needs. In this case, MAGA’s desire is to assert national interests over the liberal globalism championed by the Democrats. That Vance can afford to launch an ideological cold war on Europe reflects a hard material reality: Europe simply matters much less to the US in Cold War 2.0 than it did in the first cold war. Vance can afford to be so pointed in his criticisms of the liberal, globalist EU because he knows that Europe needs America more than America needs Europe. The EU is dependent on the US for both its security and its energy, but offers little to the US in its struggle with China.

Whereas the first cold war fused ideological and geopolitical rivalry into one great bipolar stand-off, Cold War 2.0 seems like it will be characterized by financial multipolarity (as the primacy of the dollar is gradually eroded), geopolitical bipolarity (between China and the US), and ideological tripolarity, between the populist-democratic US, the liberal-technocratic EU and a conservative Russia. As an island nation formally independent of the EU, Britain — like other middle powers — might find that this new world order is rich in opportunities. It also benefits from lower tariffs than those imposed on the EU. But seizing such opportunities also requires a willingness to duck and weave in pursuit of our national interest, and, so far, our stubbornly globalist uniparty has been unwilling to show much political dexterity. For Britain, as for many other states, seizing the national interest will require internal political renewal.

It is difficult to comprehend the true scale of the cover-up. Many of the facts are still disputed, making the whole affair murky, especially with regard to the precise numbers of people and sums involved. But what we know so far is this: the year after the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021, an Afghan refugee threatened to publicize on Facebook an unencrypted spreadsheet containing personal data of thousands of Afghans associated with the NATO occupation of the country. The refugee had gained access to the confidential data because it had been accidentally distributed by an unknown UK official. The official had been trying to establish who was eligible for the Afghan relocation and assistance (Arap) scheme, which was established for Afghans who had worked with the UK military and were fleeing possible reprisals by the Taliban. Once UK state officials were alerted to the data breach, the government launched Operation Rubific, Britain’s largest covert peacetime evacuation — all under cover of a superinjunction that would muzzle the national press on an unprecedented scale.

Given that family members are eligible for both the Arap and ARR schemes, it is unclear how many Afghans have been and may eventually be relocated to the UK. Equally unclear is the full scale of the costs involved. At minimum, the scheme involves tens of thousands of people, and its costs run from hundreds of millions to possibly billions of pounds. It comes to light at a time when Number 10 has had great difficulty trimming the welfare bill by a comparable amount, and is apparently endeavoring to drastically cut immigration.

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Despite the uncertainty of the cost and headcount, plenty of facts are clear enough. Firstly, despite our elites’ routine and staggering incompetence, the UK state is evidently still capable of significant and costly logistical and infrastructural exertions when it comes to causes it deems worthy. Extensive state capacity is evident in the effort made to extract thousands of foreigners from one of the most unstable parts of the world, transport them thousands of miles, and provide them and their families with shelter, resources and security at significant financial cost — all while the UK itself is caught in the vice of economic stagnation, spiraling borrowing costs, and tremendous pressure on public spending. The state capacity that is so visibly lacking in the UK evidently exists; it is simply not put to the service of British citizens.

Secondly, it’s apparent that the UK state will go to extraordinary lengths to hide its activities from its own people. The superinjunction granted by the courts at the behest of the defense minister at the time, Ben Wallace, was the first of its kind in legal history in that it barred anyone, anywhere, from talking about the ARR scheme — and it was repeatedly shielded from press challenges. Since the scheme was uncovered, Wallace has publicly defended it, claiming that it is right that the UK helped its allies, whose lives were at risk from vengeful and cruel Islamist fanatics. But why didn’t he make this case at the time, justifying the decision to the British public in the same terms? Why take such repressive and extreme legal measures to cover up the mistake of an unknown civil servant? In the chaotic aftermath of the fall of Kabul, could the UK government not have made the case to the British public that further Afghan allies had to be evacuated, without needing to draw the Taliban’s attention to a data breach?

The fact that the UK state went to such lengths to hide its decision can only invite suspicion. Of the Afghans resettled thus far, there are reportedly 16,156 who were on the spreadsheet in question. This is the equivalent of nearly a tenth of the Afghan National Army, which evaporated in the face of the Taliban’s summer offensive in 2021; it is nearly twice the total number of British forces ever deployed to Afghanistan at any one point; and it constitutes over a fifth of the current British regular army. Even discounting extended family members, the UK has resettled more Afghans than there were Afghan special forces or interpreters who worked with British units. How many of these individuals played a role in the war on terror in the Hindu Kush, which was rife with war crimes and corruption? Why does the UK state feel beholden to so many Afghans that it will risk the public fury of its own citizens to defend them? 

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Even more significantly, the covert character of the ARR undermines its only meaningful justification. The best conceivable rationale for it is that aiding allies should help maintain the UK’s international reputation as a credible partner that will support its collaborators in any future military operation. Yet such a promise is only meaningful if it is publicly proclaimed and defended by political leaders. This week’s scandal will have the result that the UK state will have little if any credibility when making commitments to allies in future, as prospective collaborators will know that the history of the botched ARR will have left the British public suspicious, and less willing to support future such operations. This means that, from a strategic viewpoint, Operation Rubific is entirely self-defeating. It also prompts an unsettling question: why would the UK state feel the need to do such a thing unless it expected to be involved in nation-building endeavors on the scale of Afghanistan in the future?  

No less striking is the fact that no parliamentarian was willing to break with the government and bring a matter of vital national interest to the awareness of the electorate. This is despite the fact that the Tory government of the day was briefing members of the Labour opposition about the data breach. Even with the protection of parliamentary privilege — the right of MPs to publicly discuss matters in Parliament without fear of legal repercussions — nobody dared speak out. Leading opposition figures of the day, such as Suella Braverman and Robert Jenrick, have defended themselves by arguing that parliamentary privilege is not limitless. Jenrick has also argued that parliamentarians are bound by the Official Secrets Act.

In making such a claim, the two MPs have called into question the compact between rulers and ruled. For if parliamentary privilege does not apply to such an extraordinary case, what is the point of it? Both Braverman and Jenrick resigned from their government over its mishandling of migration, but nonetheless failed to raise the scope of the covert ARR from the backbenches. The whole point of parliamentary privilege is nullified if it is exercised only at the behest of government and the civil service. Not only are the constitutional and legal rules surrounding parliamentary privilege less clear-cut than Jenrick suggests, it also stretches credulity to imagine that a government would invoke the Official Secrets Act to arrest sitting members of its own party for bringing a matter of public import to public attention.

It seems that there was not a single MP who thought it in the national interest to draw attention to the rank incompetence of officials in the Ministry of Defense, or to question the scope of a limitless superinjunction, or to ask what measures were being taken to vet tens of thousands of veterans of a two-decade long war before they were allowed to settle in Britain. The odds are against the immediate cultural compatibility of this wave of Afghan immigration; Afghans are significantly over-represented in UK convictions for sexual offenses. In all, this suggests that we have few public representatives worthy of the name. What it suggests instead is that the UK is ruled by an elite state class, in which parliamentarians can hardly be distinguished from civil servants. Instead of having political representatives who imprint the will and interests of voters on the machinery of state, we have politicians who collaborate with the civil service against the interests of the public.

The fact that the UK state proceeded with this resettlement scheme on such a large and costly scale, despite Home Office officials fearing the possibility of riots once the scheme became publicly known, suggests pathologies that go deeper than the inability to encrypt spreadsheets or store confidential data securely. It indicates a globalist state that routinely prioritizes its international allies and commitments — extending even to defunct Nato puppet states — over any obligation to its own people. And it demonstrates that the globalist commitment to open borders extends far beyond human rights NGOs, decolonialist academics and business leaders, reaching deep into Britain’s civil service and political elite. How much longer can the UK state maintain its opposition to the national interest? What is certain is that this week’s scandal has accelerated the forthcoming clash between a globalist UK elite and a seething British nation.

In embarking on open conflict with Iran, Israel has effectively aligned itself with the Sunni monarchies of the Arabian Gulf, foremost among them Saudi Arabia. These are countries that have long been engaged in schismatic conflict with both republican and revolutionary Iran, for the fear among the Sunnis has been that Shia Iran would spread its revolutionary creed to the oil-rich and Shia-dominated Arab littoral of the Arabian Gulf.

Thus the 20th-century cycle of wars between Jewish and Arab nationalism has finally been replaced by the 21st-century conflict between an increasingly religiously-infused Zionism on the one side and Shia Islamism on the other. In this conflict Israel is de facto allied with conservative Sunni Muslim states. Over all these convolutions of regional geopolitics looms a larger strategic question: whether Netanyahu has also succeeded in torpedoing Trump’s foreign policy doctrine of “America First”.

The America First doctrine posed a more significant strategic challenge to Israel’s geopolitical position than did any military effort from bungling Islamist militias, decayed Arab nationalist regimes or Iranian clerics. For as long as the US was committed to globalist doctrines of policing international order and defending human rights everywhere, Israel could exercise a powerful grip on US foreign policy on both the ideological and strategic levels.

To put this in ideological terms: as long as the US was committed to defending the victims of human rights abuses against genocide, it had to commit to defending Israel as the state founded by the survivors of genocide. Ever since it held the trial of the Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Israel has based its political legitimacy on the claim that its national existence is Jews’ self-defense against existential threat. This claim is buttressed by the ultimate human rights crime of the past century, the Holocaust. On the strategic level, as long as the US was committed to global policing, Israel could also act as a loyal regional deputy. In this role, Israel punishes terrorists and rogue states on behalf of Washington, thereby ensuring itself a steady supply of US arms and diplomatic support against its regional rivals.

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The US has tired of fighting the forever wars, an outcome that is the natural consequence of policing global order. Both the Israeli roles, that of victim-state and regional deputy, are now of less importance to the White House. One of the few consistent themes of Trumpian politics has been its efforts to extricate the US from the Middle East in order to focus on the confrontation with the much greater geopolitical rival of China. But Israel needed the so-called US bunker-busters to reach the deeply-buried Iranian nuclear site at Fordow, and Netanyahu therefore succeeded in luring Trump back into the Middle East with the promise of a quick military raid that would not risk ground troops.

Unsurprisingly, the prospect of return to the Middle East provoked consternation in the ranks of the MAGA coalition. Since the declaration of the US-Iranian cease-fire, Trump has sternly warned Israel — with full caps and profanity in a post on his Truth media platform — not to retaliate against alleged Iranian violation of the cease-fire. Given how much blood and treasure the US has squandered in the Middle East over the last thirty years — to say nothing of the terrifying costs of the forever wars to the peoples of the region itself — it is clear that embroiling itself in another regime-change operation in Iran would be terrible for the US. Less obvious but no less true is the fact that such an outcome would expose Netanyahu’s weakness.

All this effort to keep the US embroiled in the Middle East begs the question of why Israel, with its spectacular feats of arms and almost unbroken string of military victories, needs US protection at all. The Fordow situation was an unusual one. Israel, in general, holds the regional aces. It is widely believed to already possess the ultimate guarantee of security — a nuclear second-strike capability — meaning that the country could threaten any enemy with total destruction were its survival actually in question. In a world of nuclear weapons, there is no greater guarantee of political independence than second-strike capability — the capacity to mount a second nuclear strike against an enemy, even if that enemy were to launch a successful surprise attack against you first. Nuclear deterrence held the peace between the Soviet Communists and capitalist Americans during the first Cold War, and now between mortal strategic enemies India and Pakistan as well as between capitalist China and capitalist America. Why should it now be an insufficient guarantor of Israeli security in the face of an Iranian nuclear bomb?

One might argue that the ayatollahs that rule Iran are too irrational to be successfully deterred by the threat of nuclear annihilation, so consumed are they with their religious fanaticism and millenarian anti-imperialism. Similar arguments were made about Russian and Chinese communists, also assumed, by dint of the ideological contortions of Marxism, to be beyond reason. Are the ayatollahs less rational, less interested in preserving their own power, than are Maoists and Stalinists? Nor are the theocrats all-powerful. The Iranian state also encompasses its bureaucracy and security apparatus. If the wider Iranian state could not be entrusted to restrain the use of nuclear weapons by mad clerics, what hope is there for nation-building in Iran once the clerics are gone? In any case Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is yet further proof of the necessity of having nuclear weapons. Notwithstanding Tehran’s alliance with Russia, Iranians will have noted that any country without nuclear weapons cannot ultimately guarantee its independence or defend itself against rolling air attacks.

It is for that reason that the Iranian emperor Reza Pahlavi, who was overthrown by the Islamic revolution in 1979, was himself keen on securing nuclear weapons. We can be confident that even if a secular regime were to emerge from the rubble of the Islamic Republic it, too, would see its ultimate security guarantee in having nuclear weapons. Paradoxically, then, Israel’s campaign to supposedly destroy the risk of an Iranian bomb will hasten the spread of nuclear weapons — both in the region and further afield. We can be assured that nuclear proliferation will be one outcome of this new war. This means in turn that all of us, including the Israelis, must learn to live with nuclear deterrence across a variety of states and political regimes.

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The greatest paradox of all this is that, in seeking to draw the US back into the region, Israel is undercutting the rationale for its own existence. Before the Holocaust became central to Israel’s political identity, the original purpose of Zionism, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was to secure self-determination and security for the Jews. Netanyahu’s forever wars are clearly failing to create that security: one war simply runs into another. The effort to break up Trump’s America First doctrine suggests that Netanyahu is also fumbling the cause of Jewish self-determination. For if Israel cannot find security in nuclear deterrence and overwhelming military might — the means that suffice for other states — but only in being permanently protected by the US, what hope is there for Jewish independence and self-determination? Israel’s effort to recreate its strategic dependence on the US suggests a state that cannot stand alone — the opposite of the original aspirations of Zionism.

Israel must now confront a new geopolitical reality in which it will ultimately matter less to the US. If the country cannot carve out a new political role independent of the US, then no amount of crushing military victories and spectacular bombing raids will ever be enough to guarantee its independence.

It is a striking departure for parliamentarians who are more used to posting and voting about climate change, Trump, Gaza, Ukraine, Pakistani airports — anything and anywhere but Britain. It is also a remarkable about-face for British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, a lawyer whose entire career, up to the age of 50, was defined by applying supra-national human rights conventions to national law. And that is to say nothing of his campaigning on behalf of the European Union after he became a parliamentarian in 2015. What happened to prompt this sudden embrace of Britain’s best interests?

Closing the furnaces in Scunthorpe would have meant the end of steel production in the country that birthed the Industrial Revolution. In a world of snapped supply chains and growing geopolitical instability, Britain’s national interest in maintaining domestic steel production is self-evident. The problem is that the more that Labour ministers and parliamentarians refer to the “national interest”, the more hollow it sounds. After all, if Keir Starmer is only now turning to defend Britain’s national interests, what on earth was he doing before? If the whole point of being a national leader is to defend the national interest, why would you even need to say it?

Then we turn to the steelworks. How is it in the British national interest to keep the Scunthorpe furnaces running, if it wasn’t in the national interest to save the steel works at Port Talbot? How is it in the national interest to manufacture steel without maintaining the concomitant domestic capacity to produce the coking coal that is needed to make the steel, itself made from the filthy pollutants that our new green gospel commands us to leave buried in the ground? How was it in the national interest that British Steel was privatized and sold to foreign capitalists of an authoritarian superpower?

The national interest has been conspicuous by its absence from British politics for years if not decades. The past 30 years have been the era not of Britain’s national interests but rather of Britain’s international leadership. Britain stepped into conflicts in Libya, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Sierra Leone; it sought also to be a leader in global efforts to tackle climate change, child poverty, the financial crisis, and terrorism. With so much leadership, so much winning, who needed the national interest? There was, to be sure, plenty of chatter across these years in think tanks and Foreign Office seminars about “our interests and values”. But it was taken for granted that our interests and values were happily conjoined in deepening Britain’s trading relationships, strengthening our global alliances, redoubling our international commitments and tackling global problems in Africa, India, wherever.

Blathering about interests and values while letting foreigners asset-strip British utilities and industries was possible for the past 30 years because we lived in a world of unipolar globalization. In this world, US military underpinned the global security regime, and economic globalization allowed for widespread economic growth. It was true that the mercantilist trading strategies behind Chinese industrialization never quite lived up to the doctrine of comparative advantage on which the case for free trade is usually built. But unipolar globalization nonetheless allowed for a fair degree of economic specialization to develop across a global division of labor. China produced the steel, we produced slide decks on how to ensure your supply chains were gender compliant.

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A few “rogue states” aside, in this old world order no one had to bother articulating a distinctive national interest. The US military underwrote national security, and everyone’s economic interests were essentially the same — enhancing global growth, deepening global trade and expanding global business. In this looking-glass world, industrializing China was in our interests because it powered global growth, letting us live by re-mortgaging our decrepit Victorian housing stock over and over again. This global compact came with the added bonus that it allowed us to substitute dirty blue-collar jobs (and people) with nice white-collar jobs (and people) and cheap foreign labor. This is a state of affairs that was foreseeable, foreseen and welcomed by both the Tories and Labour. Both parties abetted the expansion of the universities, not least in cities where industries had been gutted.

Britain had a precocious role to play in building this global world, starting with the Labour government’s soliciting of an IMF bail-out in 1976 in preference to installing capital controls. Later, in the Eighties, Margaret Thatcher endeavored to crush organized labor — the “enemy within” — and build Britain into the European Single Market. Globalization would never have worked had it not been a bipartisan affair. The business class wanted to restore profitability by crushing uppity unions and reaching beyond the nation-state, while the Left was less interested in representing workers’ material demands at the national level than it was in indulging in middle-class activism and virtue-signaling at the global level. For their own reasons, both Left and Right thus conspired to evade the democratic fetters of the nation-state, whether by shredding its civic representation, selling off national assets such as British Steel to foreign capitalists, and fleeing abroad on gap years to solve global problems.

Yet globalization could work only by gouging the nation-state. You could strip it back through privatization and transnational integration, but a shriveled remnant remained intact. By now its only remaining purpose was to act as a footstool for ambitious elites to step on. In this way they boosted themselves into a world where they could rub shoulders with Brussels regulators, New York bankers, Californian entrepreneurs, Russian oligarchs, Saudi royalty and Chinese communist billionaires.

Not only was the national interest an anachronism, but so too was the nation itself. In this world, it was little more than a dreary hinterland of provincial towns and rustbelt communities left behind by the exuberant cosmopolitanism of a wealthy London. The capital, straining to shed its provinces, hoped to establish itself as a de facto city-state plugged into global governance networks. Its mayor seems more concerned with tackling climate change and the war in Gaza than the prosaic problems of ordinary Londoners.

If Britain had played an important early role in building this new world order, it also played a precocious role in undercutting it with the popular vote to leave the European Union in 2016 — a democratic victory that would be a point of patriotic pride for any British government genuinely concerned with meaningful British leadership in world affairs. Starmer, of course, devoted the years after the referendum to trying to overturn it, straining to keep us embedded in the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union. This entanglement would have hindered this week’s national effort to rescue British Steel.

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Despite this record, the Labor government’s belated rediscovery of the national interest should be welcomed. This is because it indicates that, however weak our politicians may be, they are now being forced to turn inwards and justify their policies in reference to the American people rather than looking to solve global problems. What this means is that we now have the possibility of holding our elected representatives to account. By its very nature, the national interest is a representative claim made on behalf of a people who share the same territory and live under the same sovereign authority — the nation.

The problem for the people of Britain is that they do not — yet — exist as a nation. After all, what does it mean to speak of the national interest in a country in which the nation itself now figures so rarely? Public and municipal buildings — even the Foreign Office itself — are as likely to carry the trans pride and Ukrainian flags as they are the Union flag. Spontaneous popular patriotism would seem to be equally absent: walk around the center of any British city and you are more likely to see Palestinian flags hanging in windows, stickered onto lamp posts, in shops, more than the Union flag or the flags of any of its constituent nations. Eurosceptic populists like the leader of the Reform party, Nigel Farage, imagined that withdrawing from the EU back in 2016 would be sufficient for the British nation to stir back into life once all the suffocating Brussels red tape had been stripped off.

But the British nation had not only been mummified but buried under the garish monuments of Global Britain. This was not the apotheosis of the British nation, but rather the British nation turned inside out — a Britain whose success was measured by how many migrants and how much foreign investment it could attract rather than how far it defended the lives of its citizens. Whatever folk memories of British nationhood may stir the masses, the fact is that the nation is long gone, like most of British industry and national assets, to privatization, globalization and neglect. Just as it will take more than state ownership to revive British Steel, so it will take more than selfies and nationalizing failing companies to rebuild a British nation.

The greatest theorist of modern sovereignty, Thomas Hobbes, made clear that national unity can only meaningfully exist in the form of sovereign political representation. “It is the unity of the representer,” he wrote, “not the unity of the represented, that maketh the [sovereign] one.” This means that if there is to be a new British nation, it will also need a new state to represent it. The fact that the Westminster state is being forced to resume thinking in terms of national interest gives this project of national renewal greater urgency. This is because none of the established parties in parliament can be entrusted as custodians of the national interest. Already government ministers are refusing to confirm whether we can actually keep the Scunthorpe furnaces running. Once again Tory and Labor conspire against the British people: the Tories decry the Labor Party’s Net Zero commitments that make British industrial energy so expensive, yet it is they who privatized British Steel to begin with.

If there is to be a new British nation forged with new British steel — both real and metaphorical — it will require the British multitude to start thinking about what we share in common and how we can impose those collective priorities on our elected representatives. In short, we will need to start thinking like a nation. This means we will all need to make sure that we are thinking about the national interest whenever we consider any question of public life — whether it be our energy supply, educational reforms, academic freedom, individual liberty or national defense. The national interest is much too important to be left to the politicians.

The talk in the UK is now of rearmament and conscription, as Kyiv’s future is contested from afar. Britain is being drawn into plans for a post-American Europe, with suggestions floated of an Anglo-French “reassurance force” to oversee any armistice line in Ukraine. There are whispers, too, that Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves will impose austerity and tax rises in order to boost the country’s defense spending. The British public is largely supportive, for now, of sending troops to prop up the Ukrainian war effort, with 58% agreeing with the need for sending peacekeeping forces when polled last month. But such attitudes are invariably challenged when the reality of the measure — and the state of our depleted army — comes into focus.

Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, support for Ukraine has been a bipartisan affair in Britain. Boris Johnson, the former Tory prime minister who oversaw the withdrawal from the EU, abandoned a party meeting to visit Kyiv in July 2022. Starmer, a fierce opponent of Brexit, has been no less vociferous in his backing of Kyiv. With enduring folk memories of the Cold War fed by a steady stream of villainous Russian gangsters on television, a surge of popular support for Ukraine helped to plaster over the single greatest fault line in modern British politics: Brexit.

As both sides of the Brexit divide were able to meet in the middle, neither had to confront the real question for policy: what was Britain’s national interest in the conflict? What interest was served by supporting Ukraine? If nothing else, Brexit thrust questions of Britain’s future and priorities to the forefront of our political life. Yet neither side was able to give a convincing national answer to why Britain should support Ukraine. As this question remained unresolved, Britain is now contemplating sending troops it can hardly spare from its severely under-equipped army to man frozen ditches in the Donbas and patrol the Black Sea.

To this day, Britain’s liberals have continued to use the Ukraine war as a way of aggressively rolling back Brexit. By claiming that Trump is appeasing the Russian dictator in seeking a negotiated end to the war, the very same people who sought to overturn the single largest democratic vote in British history are now posing as champions of democracy. Liberal Democrats leader Ed Davey yesterday harried Nigel Farage for “explain[ing] away” Trump’s dismissal of Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator”, after the Reform leader said the remarks should “not be taken literally”. Labour Parliamentarians have also joined the online fray, their attempts to dragoon populist voters into a new cold war demonstrating that their foreign policy is not really about Russia or Ukraine, but rather about suppressing dissent in Britain itself.

Farage’s own base is more likely than Tory or Labour-voting counterparts to favor a reduction in support for Kyiv. A third of Reform voters think Britain should cut its assistance to Ukraine’s war effort if Trump winds down US contributions, compared to 19% of Conservatives and 15% of Labour voters. Party MP Rupert Lowe yesterday chimed with his leader in suggesting that Zelensky is not, in fact, a dictator, but added that “Trump’s right. The war cannot go on forever. We need a long-term settlement tolerable to all involved.” Reform Deputy Leader Richard Tice, for his part, encouraged European nations to “step up” their defense spending.

A dilemma thus presents itself to Reform: to maintain ties with Trump and demonstrate a tangible difference from the “uniparty” position on Ukraine is also to risk going against what remains a popular view among the British public. While voters’ openness to a negotiated peace has risen as Kyiv’s campaign has faltered, a plurality still want aid to be provided until Ukrainian victory can be achieved following a withdrawal by Putin.

It’s worth remembering that the Russian threat to Europe — let alone Britain — is essentially negligible. Assuming the negotiations to end the war proceed, Russia has won at best a Pyrrhic victory in Ukraine. Conservative estimates of Russian casualties run to many tens of thousands of dead young men, in a country that was already teetering on the edge of demographic collapse before the conflict. Putin’s initial war aim of installing a friendly regime in Kyiv was already abandoned in 2022, when Ukrainian militias successfully fended off an elite Russian special forces assault on the Antonov Airport at Hostomel outside Kyiv.

Putin’s forces have very clearly struggled to occupy the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine; the notion that they will now overrun Europe is scarcely believable. Only in the fantasies of retired British colonels writing for the Telegraph, vicariously dreaming of Leopard tanks sweeping across the steppe to the gates of Moscow, could one picture a negotiated end to this war as some great victory for Russia. What’s worse, in portraying a negotiated end to a bloody three-year war as capitulation to the Kremlin, Britain’s laptop bombardiers are doing Putin’s work for him, allowing him to portray a bungled and costly war as a great and grueling victory for the Russian people.

And while a defense spending hike will doubtless be better for British industry than pursuing Net Zero, it is worth recalling that defense involves more than churning out armor and shells: you also need the people to fight — and potentially die — with those weapons. And who will fight once the war ends in Ukraine? As recent polling shows, Generation Z — prime military-age voters — have no wish to fight for Britain. Given that national identity and patriotism have been actively disdained for decades as politically toxic to the cause of globalized Britain, and with ethnic polarization from mass migration growing, it should hardly come as a surprise that this country’s multiethnic, multicultural youth have little desire to take up arms.

British and European politicians have taken Vance’s Munich address as the signal to rearm. Yet in all the hue and cry of being forced to take responsibility for their own security, these very same politicians missed the crucial element of his speech — that national strength lay not in restarting the assembly lines in weapons factories, but instead in democratic renewal.

It is admittedly hard not to enjoy the spectacle. Whether Trump is humiliating the Canadian or Danish governments, the EU or Lord Peter Mandelson, he is forcing through the end of global technocracy. Yet while there are plenty of Western leaders cheering this, as evident in the delight of Right-wingers such as Nigel Farage and Giorgia Meloni in being invited to Trump’s inauguration, the fact that they’re happy to be pulled along by Trump’s coattails suggests that they, too, are still thinking in globalist rather than national terms.

The fact, moreover, that these populists assume Trump’s victory is their victory too tells us that their political calculations are cast in terms of the ebb and flow of global culture wars, rather than the progress of their own countries. The national interest is, by definition, a national affair, not a matter of narrowly partisan politics. That so many on the Right are thrilled by the new President reveals a mentality still trapped in the bygone era of the first Cold War, in which the success of one’s politics was measured in terms of the strength of one’s international alliances and ideological devotion to a foreign superpower.

This struggle to articulate or defend national interests is not just a matter of the age of the populist leaders, or folk memories of global ideological rivalries. It also reflects the political structure of populism, and how much it remains defined by its opponent: globalist liberalism. Ultimately, both sides represent two sides of the same coin: the absence of institutionalized representation and legitimate mass parties that once comprised the substance of national political life.

The populist shuns representative institutions because it undercuts his efforts to rule directly through personal charisma and connection with the people; the technocrat, for his part, despises representation because it gets in the way of rule by experts. Both share hostility to party-political representation. Yet without it, there can be no means for the nation to imprint its demands on the state. The national interest remains to be served.

Britain, at least, should be in a better position to carve out its own position in this new world order. This is not only because, by Trump’s reckoning, the UK has a trade deficit with the US and is thus less likely to be subject to tariffs — for now. More important is the fact that Britain is in a stronger position because it was among the first to make a lasting break with globalism with the Brexit in 2016. It also has a long, if buried, history of non-alignment and independence as seen in the era of “splendid isolation” that ruled British foreign policy across most of the 19th century. These are deep resources to draw on in a new era of national interest politics.

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Belatedly, even some mainstream politicians are now realizing this. In a sharp denunciation of wars of intervention and neo-conservative regime change, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick concluded that Britain should adopt a Palmerstonian foreign policy, ruthlessly focused on self-interest. Jenrick was name-checking Henry John Temple (1784-1865), the Viscount Palmerston, the Victorian-era statesman most widely remembered for his famous dictum that Britain has no eternal allies or enemies, only eternal interests. In his study of dissent over British foreign policy, AJP Taylor recounts that the famous phrase was delivered “to a thin house” in 1848 and deployed to defend Palmerston’s record against one of his most determined and maniacal opponents, the cranky Tory aristocrat David Urquhart, who was convinced Palmerston was a Russian agent.

While the same smears of being in the pay of Moscow still meet any criticisms of intervention or British expression of national interest today, our circumstances are otherwise greatly changed. The policy of splendid isolation — itself a retrospective label — was improvised after Britain’s withdrawal in 1822 from the Congress system, the global policing regime established in 1815 by the victors of the Napoleonic Wars. Following this early Brexit from a precocious effort at global governance, Britain sought to avoid entangling alliances with continental powers while maintaining her international naval supremacy.

Today, however, Britain’s policy is almost exactly the reverse across every register. That’s clear from our obsession with strengthening global governance, to our hopeless preoccupation with the so-called Special Relationship. Both Tory and Labour governments have pursued the redoubling of commitments to the UN and NATO as a means to mitigate the risks to national independence that came with the Brexit vote.

We seem, in short, to have plenty of permanent friends — yet no permanent interests. Our naval power, it goes without saying, is not only reduced in material terms, but also built around our allies rather than British strength. We rename attack submarines to avoid offending our allies, while the nuclear warheads carried by our ballistic missile submarines are dependent on US technology and support to function.

What would a Palmerstonian foreign policy mean in such a context? In the first place, it would require a lucid reckoning with change. Rather than serving the national interest, the cost of protecting global sea lanes by maintaining British naval power on a world scale today would be an act of national self-sacrifice, or even self-annihilation. Whatever we might seek to achieve with naval power today would necessarily have to be in coalition. In light of even America’s inability to stamp out threats to global trade such as the Houthi chokehold on the Red Sea, the diminished utility of global naval power combined with the fact Britain is an island would have to be offset by greater economic self-sufficiency as opposed to free trade liberalism.

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Europe's techno-populist nightmare

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Although Britain will always be a trading nation — not least by virtue of being an island — plenty could be done to enhance our self-sufficiency. Restoring control over Britain’s borders would be a vital step not only in strengthening security but also forcing business to cultivate a skilled national labor force. Rebuilding industry, reshoring critical supply chains, building new nuclear power stations and expanding fossil fuel production in the North Sea would all be good starts. With this groundwork in place, Britain could then start reestablishing permanent interests — rather than cultivating reliance on permanent friends. As these interests will be dictated in part both by geography and history, they will be significant continuities in British foreign policy. But maintaining friendly relations with our neighbors need not mean tying ourselves up in the entangling alliances that Palmerston sought to avoid.

None of this will be easy. Time and again, British leaders have shown themselves unable to think independently. Battered by catastrophic unpopularity so early in his premiership, many in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party clearly hope that crawling back to Brussels will make up for his domestic weakness. At the same time, Starmer is under fire from Trump, who has said the UK is “out of line” but can be managed without the need for punitive tariffs. At any rate, Starmer’s opponents should resist the urge to cheer Trump on: to do so would be to accept Trump’s humiliating designation of the UK as a vassal state that can be easily wrangled. There would be little point in ending a permanent friendship with Brussels, only to cling more tightly to another with Washington.

Britain’s post-war policy of seeking to be the trans-Atlantic bridge between Europe and the US has unsurprisingly resulted only in Europe and the US trampling all over British interests as they cross the bridge. Britain should be thinking more in terms of balancing between the two, carefully maintaining ties with both while seizing advantage wherever it presents itself, whether in trade or security – including pursuing connections with more distant powers such as China if need be.

It goes without saying, of course, that if there is to be a new age of Palmerstonian foreign policy, it will require more than simply repeating the cliches of a dead prime minister’s speeches, owning the libs and hoping foreign leaders will humiliate your domestic opponents. It will require brave and vigorous national leadership, willing to pursue the kind of disruption that Trump is enacting in US foreign policy. For 30 years, if not longer, our foreign policy has been dedicated to globalist ends — solving climate change, global poverty, human rights. It is time to make foreign policy serve national needs, and in the context of Britain today this would mean in service of the pursuit of national renewal.

For now, however, Britain’s permanent interests are buried beneath the rubble of our permanent friendships. If we are to excavate those interests, it will require a willingness to cast aside the debris of Cold War-era alliances and membership of crumbling 20^th-century organizations. If we are to have a new Palmerstonian foreign policy, we must be willing to endure the risks that will come with an exhilarating new era of splendid isolation.

With Macron floundering, and Scholz despised, von der Leyen’s continued tenure breaks with a global pattern of incumbency failure. Unlike mere politicians, though, von der Leyen doesn’t need to worry about what the voters think. To be sure, the President of the EU Commission must secure the support of the EU Parliament, but only after having been nominated by the government of each member state. In theory, that should reflect the outcome of European elections. In practice, however, the EU Parliament is a castrated legislature, constitutionally incapable of initiating law.

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America First leaves Europe last

By Philip Cunliffe

Von der Leyen is less the executive of an open democracy and more the chief officer of a Soviet politburo. That’s clear, certainly, if you glance at the titles of the President’s commissars. From the executive vice president for clean, just and competition transition, to the executive vice president for cohesion and reforms, her underlings preside over departments that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Seventies Moscow. And during her first term in office, from 2019 to 2024, she relentlessly consolidated authority, slowly tilting the EU’s balance of power towards supranational institutions like the Commission — and away from the Council of Ministers representing member states.

This state-building project looks set to ramp up during her second term; as she makes clear in her political guidelines for the next commission, her vision is infused with existential discourse, insisting that Europe has no future unless it continues to grind its way towards unity. With von der Leyen’s determination to pursue the proxy war in Ukraine at the expense of European economic wellbeing, and her reliance on Baltic politicians such as Kaja Kallas as High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, she seems to be following the historic pattern of state-making through crisis.

Yet if Ursula is a modern Charlemagne in her vanity and ambition, the fact that her efforts are so remote from the popular will means they’ll inevitably founder. Though centralisation at the top will doubtless enhance her personal sway, that means little without bolstering the wider EU system. In fact, concentrating power in this non-sovereign model is likely to make it even more lopsided, with a top-heavy superstructure perched over a continent seething with popular discontent. No matter how many Russophobes von der Leyen stuffs into her bureaucracy, after all, the Ukraine war will ultimately be decided not in Brussels but Washington, when Donald Trump shortly re-enters the White House in January.

Thus the paradox of von der Leyen’s second term is that as the power of the EU centre grows, Europe itself becomes weaker. Nothing that von der Leyen does seems likely to reverse this decline. In fact, her plan to completely end the flow of Russian gas into Europe, in favour of expensive liquified natural gas from the US, speaks to her congenital inability to act in her continent’s best interests. That, in turn, reflects the fact that the EU is not a nation-state, and by design can’t have a national self-interest. While von der Leyen has therefore been promising to slash the regulation that supposedly stifles European business — plenty of which were brought in under her last term — the fact is that industry from Rioja to the Ruhr will continue to suffer without cheap energy.

How will this historic decline be disguised? This takes us to the second of von der Leyen’s transformations: appointing Raffaele Fitto, a minister from the Brothers of Italy party, as her executive vice president for cohesion and reforms. In so doing, von der Leyen has broken the liberal cordon sanitaire whereby the continent’s technocratic establishment sought to contain the electoral insurgencies of EU populists. Fitto’s new job has cost von der Leyen the support of certain natural allies, notably the Socialists and Democrats grouping in the EU Parliament. Yet Empress Ursula is cunning enough to realise that by appearing to be responsive to public demands, and drawing in electorally successful populists, she can easily recoup any losses sustained among squabbling centrists.

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The nominal basis for this new political friendship is, of course, a shared commitment to pursuing the proxy war in Eastern Europe. Yet the basis for the Fitto alliance runs deeper than Ukraine. Rather, the alliance indicates that the continent’s hard-Right national populists are being carefully, and willingly, drawn into the court of the imperial centre. The reason? To help re-legitimise von der Leyen’s faltering clique of technocrats.

Certainly, Fitto’s appointment puts paid to the idea that populists defend national sovereignty against incursions from Brussels. It also suggests that the radicals are more than happy to collaborate with the technocrats to disguise the latter’s lack of real legitimacy. In many ways, then, Fitto represents a natural alliance, proving the point that both technocrats and populists ultimately despise national representative institutions. The technocrats dislike democracy because interest groups get in the way of the unfettered rule of experts. Populists, for their part, dislike it because, by their nature, institutionalised interests gnaw away at the demagogic charisma they so rely on.

In this way, then, both technocrats and populists are creatures from the void where national democracy should be. The fact that people such as Fitto have rushed to hide von der Leyen’s nakedness suggests that the age of European decline will be dominated by techno-populism, with both camps cooperating to accommodate each other’s weakness — even as they jointly rule over a deindustrialising continent. At any rate, that leaves space for Europe’s remaining democrats: what happens when voters realise the populists have betrayed them?

Yet if there is one thing that unites Trump sycophants and sceptics in Europe, it’s the desire to boost European defence spending and security cooperation. In a nervy display of Franco-German solidarity, the leaders of France and Germany announced that they would work to build “a more united, stronger, more sovereign Europe in this context”, with an emphasis on enhancing European defence. In Britain, there have been calls for Prime Minister Keir Starmer to draw closer to Europe on security, deepening a Brexit betrayal initiated by Boris Johnson.

For liberals, strengthening the EU and Nato will insure against Trump either withdrawing from the defence alignment — whose European members he views as parasitical free-riders — or giving up on the Ukraine war effort. For populists, greater defence spending is an act of fealty, symbolising their devotion to Trump’s new world order.

Either way, Europeans would be mistaken to respond to Trump 2.0 by doubling down either on the transatlantic alliance or European integration. What Trump’s victory shows is that the globalist strategy of pursuing transnational integration against the wishes of voters has failed. With his America First agenda, the President-elect has now bet twice on America’s voters over its globalist elites — and won both times. In light of this, Europe’s leaders would commit a grave error in choosing Nato over their own people.

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China is not the answer to Nato

By Philip Cunliffe

There was once a time when European economic and security integration may have had a strategic rationale: in the post-Cold War unipolar world, globalisation was underpinned by American hegemony and economic strength. Back then, American globalism provided the cover for European integration, allowing Europe’s elites to detach themselves from their voters. Workers were promised all the glories of globalisation in return for retreating from politics into lives of cosy consumption. This process opened up the void between citizens and political elites that has bedevilled European states ever since.

That world is now long gone. The high-tide of economic globalisation has receded, and political globalism is ebbing with it. Today, China is the industrial workshop of the world, and America is no longer its hegemon. This means that further European or transatlantic integration through Nato has become a losing strategy. Rather than uniting against Trump or sucking up to him, Europe should seek to replicate his domestic political model. As Trump did in the US, European nations should build electoral coalitions for national renewal, and use this as a basis to forge new international relationships in place of the old transnational ones.

There are plenty of reasons to avoid further European integration, whether it’s via the EU or Nato, but several stand out. First, Trump’s foreign policy focus will be on China and the Asia-Pacific more than Europe, which will increasingly take second place in Washington’s political calculations. No amount of Trump-whispering from Giorgia Meloni or Viktor Orbán will change that. Second, a push to further European integration in response to US strategic retreat from Europe will not strengthen the Continent. Quite the opposite: it will bolster the transnational structures that weaken the nations of Europe. The EU functions by leaching power from the nation-state without suborning it to any greater political authority. With no institutional core, the EU functions as a political pinball machine, ricocheting responsibility from one supranational agency to another, from one country to another.

This structure admittedly worked for a time, but only with the US hovering in the background. Throughout the era of unipolar globalisation, Washington was ready to come to the aid of European states when necessary: America offered leadership during European military campaigns against Yugoslavia in the Nineties and Libya in 2010, for instance, and oversaw the European financial crisis in the 2010s through the International Monetary Fund. Today, with Trump looking east, America will be less willing to lend a hand.

Nor will strengthening Nato be of much use in Trump World, as this will ​​only reinforce Europe’s geopolitical divide — from which the US ultimately profits. Just consider the war in Ukraine. As long as the EU and Russia are at odds, the EU will remain dependent on importing more expensive US liquid natural gas, which will act as a drag on European industry and growth. Meanwhile, Russia will remain focused on supplying energy markets outside of Europe, relying ever more heavily on Chinese imports to supply its industrial equipment. That is a world that favours Chinese and American firms over European ones.

If Trump’s foreign policy follows the direction of his first administration, then we can expect a renewed focus on building a more transactional international order. Bilateral bargaining and regional orders are more likely than starry-eyed globalist compacts. To bargain effectively in such a world, European nations must develop a clear sense of their own national interests. And identifying those national interests means looking inward, not outward. This means turning away from the faded promises of globalism.

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For this reason, renewed calls for transnational integration — whether of the European or Atlantic variety — miss the mark. The alarmed response of European liberals to Trump’s victory reveals a fear not only of Trump, but of their own voters. The reason they fear Trump is because they know that he has something they lack: national democratic legitimacy, built on the wishes of the marginalised and the politically excluded. Europe’s liberal elite feel trapped between a mercurial Trump and their own left-behind “deplorables”.

By contrast, Europe’s populists have embraced Trump as the leader of their global movement. Yet this is also ill-advised. Rather than turning to Washington for leadership, populist leaders would be better off learning from the Trump playbook: appealing to their fellow citizens rather than parading around with Nato banners or jockeying for international position. This is the paradox of Trump World: the only way to build a new era of international cooperation is to start from within, through a project of national renewal.

To tell the tale of how a modern, multinational European country could slide from normalcy into the terrible vortex of civil war, the drama drew on the personal experience of BBC correspondents during the Balkan Wars of the Nineties. Broadcast in 2019, at the height of the Brexit crisis, when the atmosphere in the UK was indeed that of a cold civil war, the BBC dramatists succeeded in showing not only how little they understood Brexit but also how little their correspondents had learned about the collapse of Yugoslavia and the ensuing Balkan Wars.

The history of Yugoslavia still provides fodder for fictional accounts of a second British civil war because it offers a convenient moral fable. There is the dangerous allure of nationalism, the pernicious role of charismatic demagogues, and the collapse of multicultural harmony. It is the smug conceit of a liberal West that thought it had escaped history through globalisation and European integration across the Nineties. But now that the story of both Britain’s national decline and Yugoslavia’s collapse looks very different, what — if anything — can the 21st-century British public learn from the collapse of Yugoslavia?

Unsurprisingly, the standard fable bears little correspondence to the historic reality of Yugoslavia’s collapse. While the nationalist passions created during the war were real enough, they were modern rather than deeply historical and were weaponised by the hackish nationalist leaders. More scheming bureaucrat than inspired orator, Serbian strongman Slobodan Milošević dredged up Serbia’s defeat in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo Polje to reignite Serbian nationalism 600 years later. Seen as the point at which the Serbs martyred themselves before the invading Turks, that tale of rekindled historic grievance was clearly insufficient as an explanation of national collapse. If an independent Scotland ever did go to war against a Rump England, we can be confident that The New York Times would soon be carrying sombre stories about Edward Longshanks and Robert the Bruce, accompanied by chin-stroking editorials about ancient rivalries stretching back to the 1314 Battle of Bannockburn, adorned with quotes from Mel Gibson. But it would not serve as a useful explanation.

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The reality is always more prosaic. Yugoslav ethnic grievances were bound up with centrifugal political dynamics between core and periphery. In 1974, the Yugoslav communist leader Marshal Tito sought to dilute Serbia’s preponderance as the largest constituent republic of the Yugoslav federation by imposing devolved provincial administrations within Serbia itself. This inter-ethnic asymmetry would play out in the collapse of Yugoslavia across the Nineties, as the secession of the smaller republics of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina were all afforded international recognition, while the secession of minority Serbs within Croatia and Bosnia was denied. To this day, the EU protectorate over Bosnia-Herzegovina expends much of its political energy in keeping Bosnia’s Serb population bound up in that rickety mini-federation, despite the Serbs’ hostility to the central state in Sarajevo.

Thus there is a lesson in Tito’s efforts at constitutional rebalancing. The attempt to boost peripheral smaller nations at the expense of the largest constituent nation risks precipitating a vicious cycle. The rights extended to smaller nations in order to placate and bind them more tightly to the central state can never be extended to the largest nation without disproportionately strengthening it, thereby risking the integrity of the central state. At the same time, the failure to extend the same rights equally across the constituent peoples of the state undermines the reciprocity and equality that is supposed to bind the state together.

We see this dynamic at play in the toing and froing over English representation in the union. Should we establish an English parliament? And what about the constitutional anomaly of the so-called West Lothian question, whereby Scottish and Welsh MPs have a right to legislate on English matters while English MPs do not with respect to Wales and Scotland? Devolution is indeed a nationalist cause, but, unlike in the narrative of First World Problems, not one of a “greater England”. It is the cause of Scottish and Welsh separatism, propped up by English metropolitan liberals who nurture Celtic separatism as a way of checking the despised voters of the English heartland outside of London.

In the Yugoslav situation, there was a critical catalyst which contributed to the process of decentralisation. According to Croatian political scientist Dejan Jović, the Yugoslav Communists’ political commitment to the Marxist “withering away of the state” propelled Yugoslav decentralisation further than mere administrative reforms. It was the Yugoslav federal state that bore the brunt of this forced degeneration, while leaving the constituent republics of the federation intact. Whatever the whining of former prime minister Liz Truss about socialist Britain, there is no Communist Party seeking to shrivel the British state. But there has been a parallel process of state shrivelling in Britain — which ironically was part of the very same neoliberal programme that Truss herself strove to revive.

The neoliberalism espoused by successive Tory leaders from Thatcher through to David Cameron’s tinpot version with the “big society” programme shares with Marxism a commitment to the vanishing state. The difference lies in the timing, function and ultimate end-state. Unlike the Marxian vision, in which under socialism the state is gradually absorbed by civil society itself, the neoliberal version seeks to defeat socialism by stripping back public power, especially state oversight of the national economy. This is done not by working-class revolution, but via state-led privatisation of state-owned industry, integration into the supranational EU, and the devolution of state authority to independent regulatory agencies such as an independent Bank of England or Office of Budget Responsibility (OBR). In the neoliberal vision, this shrunken state remains in place to enforce social order — and private property.

In practice, the neoliberals never succeeded in repressing state spending as a proportion of GDP. They did, however, succeed in gouging state capacity and stripping back public authority far beyond their original intent. We can see the results of the neoliberal effort to wither away the British state all around us: in the closure of national industries, dingy high streets with boarded-up shops, pot-holed roads, a crumbling public health service, the disgorging of convicts from prison, and police forces incapable of policing. Instead of a vigorous civil society emerging to supplant the central state, the neoliberal decimation of the state only weakened civil society further — look at how George Osborne’s programme of austerity cascaded state failure across the nation as a whole. Today, a central state still strives to divest itself of its sovereign power. As Rachel Reeves empowers the OBR, Keir Starmer’s localist agenda intends to drive devolution further, all while sidling up to the EU and Nato, the better to outsource Britain’s foreign and defence policies.

Despite enduring a parallel process of state degeneration, Britain enjoys a geopolitical advantage that Yugoslavia did not. As a Nonaligned power perched between East and West, Yugoslavia was left exposed to geopolitical realignment with the end of the Cold War in 1992, and in particular to the hubris of a newly reunified Germany. Chancellor Helmut Kohl decided he would signal Germany’s return as a great power by flouting US Secretary of State James Baker’s instruction that no one was to recognise any of the break-away Yugoslav republics. Germany’s recognition of Slovenian and Croatian independence in 1991 lit the kindling that would send Yugoslavia up in flames. In the end, Yugoslavia burned for nothing as Kohl’s bid for European leadership floundered. The US re-established hegemony over its European allies by leading the Nato bombing campaigns first against the Bosnian Serbs in the Nineties, and then Serbia itself in 1999. Today, Germany lets its own energy infrastructure be bombed.

Here Britain is fortunate. It was our withdrawal from the EU in 2020 that has allowed us to swerve the dystopian scenario of a future civil war. By enforcing the principle of loser’s consent on those who wanted to rejoin the EU, and by undercutting the appeal of Scottish separatism, our withdrawal from the EU preserved the authority of the central British state and, with it, British democracy. If we are to make good on this historic fortune, then we must reverse the process that led us here by an energetic programme of centralised nation-building that will necessarily involve strengthening the state. This does not mean strengthening the state’s already bloated bureaucracy, but rather boosting the state as an authoritative and representative public power. If we can do this, not only can we reap the political blessings of independence, but we might also be spared any more BBC fables about the former Yugoslavia.

Given the Nato campaign was justified by the need to halt what was described as a Serbian “genocide” against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, the circumstances surrounding the bombing, which left three Chinese journalists dead, remain murky. While Nato insists the attack was accidental, Beijing’s claim that it was deliberate was bolstered by a subsequent investigation in The Observer, which suggested the building was targeted by the US in order to foil Chinese intelligence-gathering efforts on American tactics and weaponry — allegations denied by Washington.

Yet if the circumstances of the bombing remain contested, the international consequences of Nato’s campaign against Serbia are clearer, as indeed is the difference between the China of 1999 and the China of today. There is, in short, no doubting the symbolism of Xi’s visit to the Balkan back-yard of the European Union.

A quarter of a century ago, although China was already the world’s second largest economy, measured by purchasing power parity (PPP) terms, its options for retaliation against the US bombing of its sovereign territory were limited. Today, not only is China the largest economy in the world — it is orders of magnitude more powerful in military terms, with significantly more means of exerting strategic, diplomatic and military pressure on the US and its allies, ranging across Africa to the South China Sea to the Taiwan Straits. On the site of the embassy now stands a new complex, incorporating a Confucius Institute as well as offices, workshops and a hotel. It is a symbol of China’s wealth and soft power as much as its world position. Perhaps even more significant than enhanced Chinese power, however, are the changes in the wider international order.

The Nato bombing over Kosovo was both the moment of peak liberal international hubris, and the moment the so-called “rules-based order” began to crumble. On the one hand, the campaign was justified by the need to defend the human rights of Kosovo’s majority Albanian population from a counter-insurgency campaign against Albanian separatists waged by Belgrade. On the other, the Nato bombing was also in explicit violation of the UN Charter, whose articles protected member-states’ sovereign rights to be free from external interference.

Unlike previous humanitarian military operations during the Nineties, in this case the circle was not squared by the UN granting authorisation for the Nato military intervention. The UN could not offer its imprimatur because of the threatened use of veto by Russia and China, permanent members on the UN Security Council. Both countries were suspicious of Western states’ growing proclivity to use force in defence of human rights, and both had good reason to want to discourage their own restive peripheral minorities from seeking outside military support.

Despite the lack of UN legitimacy, the pressure of the Nato bombing campaign, as well as behind-the-scenes Russian diplomacy, eventually forced the Serbian state to withdraw its forces from Kosovo, allowing Nato to occupy the province and establish an international protectorate in the territory, where NATO has remained ever since. Kosovo would eventually unilaterally declare independence from Serbia in 2008 — a claim to independence still denied by Belgrade. Serbia still enjoys the support of Russia and China in its efforts to stymie international recognition of Kosovo’s independence, while independent Kosovo now enjoys the recognition of most of the world’s states.

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By Matt Broomfield

The 1999 bombing campaign was, therefore, both a moment of Western triumph and Western overreach. Defended at the time in the most grandiloquent terms as a cosmic battle between good and evil, the Nato campaign showed the West at the peak of its power, able to intervene militarily wherever it wanted on humanitarian grounds, unrestrained by international law or convention and without UN support. But it also amounted to the sabotage by Western states of the very same rules-based order enshrined in the UN, whose liberal maxims — including non-intervention in internal matters — were extended as the guarantee for non-Western states to accept Western leadership. Although the civilian casualties cited by Western states to justify the bombing quickly began to unravel, the precedent had already been established.

After Kosovo, humanitarianism became fused with every Western war-effort — whether the need to defend Afghan women from the Taliban, Iraqis from Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, or Libyans from Colonel Gaddafi’s vengeance. From an international order based around sovereign states and citizens’ rights, Nato ushered in a cosmopolitan order based around global states on the one hand, whose political and legal claims have limitless jurisdiction, and a morass of deracinated humanity on the other, which no longer enjoyed any national protections except for the prospect of a humanitarian intervention in their favour.

Today, this humanitarianism is still regarded as the basis of the West’s global right — as seen in America’s efforts to build a “floating pier” to distribute humanitarian aid to besieged Palestinians in Gaza; in effect, the US is shoring up its legitimacy in the Gaza war by ministering to the Palestinians’ humanitarian needs in the midst of an Israeli bombardment by US-supplied arms. What has changed is more on the other side of the geopolitical divide. Across the Nineties and early 2000s, Russia championed the rights of sovereign states against the humanitarianism of Western states. Since the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, however, Vladimir Putin has deployed the Nato model to justify Russian expansionism. It begins with military intervention to defend embattled separatist minorities (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Donbass) against genocidal central government forces (Tbilisi, Kyiv), followed by the establishment of protectorates (the former People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk). The Kremlin twist to the Nato model is then to annex the protectorates.

Between Nato and Vladimir Putin, there is now no longer anyone in the international order today willing to defend the principle of non-intervention and state sovereignty. Two obvious European successors to claim the mantle of defending national sovereignty — Brexit Britain and embattled Ukraine — have both rejected pursuing a politics of national independence in favour of plumping for Nato, the single transnational organisation that has done the most to destroy not only individual states (Libya, Yugoslavia), but state sovereignty as such, which Nato expressly jettisoned in favour of fighting for the humanitarian responsibility to protect.

And what of Serbia? For all the diplomatic support it has received from Russia in its efforts to stymie Kosovo’s independence, Serbia’s international position is much closer to Ukraine’s than that of any other country in Europe. As with the Nato intervention, occupation and eventual dismemberment of Serbian territory with Kosovar independence, so Russia has done to Ukraine in Crimea and Donbass. If any two European countries have a joint interest in maintaining their sovereignty and territorial integrity from the predations of more powerful neighbours, it is Ukraine and Serbia.

This is partly why Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić has exported Serbian weapons to Ukraine, while also managing to avoid joining the EU sanctions on Russia that have blown back against Western economies. Here, Vučić is trying to perpetuate the diplomatic tradition of neutralism and non-alignment that Serbia inherited from the former Yugoslavia, which sought to balance between East and West during the Cold War.

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Yet while he is no less autocratic than the Yugoslav Communist leader Marshal Tito, Vučić nonetheless lacks Tito’s toughness. Not only did Tito allegedly threaten to assassinate Stalin when Yugoslavia broke with the USSR in 1948, but he also went on to establish an independent geopolitical bloc — the Non-Aligned Movement — alongside Indian independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru, Indonesian independence leader Sukarno and Egyptian nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser. By contrast, although Vučić assiduously courts outside patronage, he does not have the vision to establish an independent bloc, even though the circumstances for doing so are so much more propitious than in Tito’s day — one need only look at economic growth figures for India and Indonesia to see that. Nonetheless, even Vučić’s limited and unimaginative efforts to balance between Brussels, Moscow, Beijing and Washington D.C. indicate that there are more political options available for those canny enough to pursue them.

After all, long before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the international rules-based order was buried beneath the rubble of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. While Xi’s China may offer countries around the world more space to exercise political independence from the West, its transactional vision of international relations is no substitute for Western leadership, and its support for Russian revanchism indicates it does not have the vision to lead an international order of sovereign nation-states. Despite many vesting their hopes for liberation from American hegemony in a multipolarity, the truth is Xi’s Chinese nationalism offers no meaningful counter-pole to Nato. Rather, it demonstrates that until there is a state willing to pursue a robust sovereigntist politics of national independence, the international order will continue to be plagued by grandiloquent globalism — with all the strategic overreach and geopolitical rivalry that comes with it.

Other adherents of his thought have not followed him. Writing recently for UnHerd, Thomas Fazi claimed that the arguments of realism actually fit the war in Gaza very well. He argues that just as any realist appraisal of the Russian invasion of Ukraine must acknowledge the role of Nato expansion, so too an explanation of this war needs to be as rooted in the regime imposed by Israel on the Gaza strip as in the horrors of the Hamas atrocities last year.

Yet a realist appraisal of any war has to go further than an inductive analysis of its immediate causes to also consider the political character of its protagonists. One of the basic distinguishing features of realism is its focus on state power and the ruthless means by which states secure themselves, leading to the recurrence of violent conflict. And in this war, there is only one state to speak of — the Israeli one. Prior to October 7, the dependence of the Hamas authorities on the Israeli state was so extreme that the strip could be characterised as a de facto devolved province of Israel itself, with Hamas expanding to fill the vacuum left by the Israeli military and settler withdrawal in 2005. And as is now well-established and increasingly recognised, Israel has propped up Hamas ever since as a deliberate strategy for dividing the Palestinians of Gaza from those in the West Bank under the leadership of the Palestinian Authority.

A realist analysis should recognise this Israeli domination over Gaza, but the weight of its analysis should fall on the permissive cause of Israeli policy: the fact of Palestinian national defeat. For if realism is to carry any meaning whatsoever, it must surely include a lucid registration of historic defeats and victories, both political and military. There is one unavoidable fact in the history of this conflict that matters more than Israel’s crude strategies of divide-and-rule, and that is the fact that the Palestinians’ leaders effectively surrendered to Israel many years ago, at the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993.

Oslo was, in Edward Said’s ruthlessly incisive appraisal at the time, nothing short of a “Palestinian Versailles”. In accepting the two-state solution, Said argued, the Palestinian leadership renounced the entirety of Palestine’s national claims, accepting the substitution of municipal for national aspirations, with the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) reduced to the role of policing Palestinians on behalf of Israel. The defeat of the secular Arab nationalism of the PLO would create the void that groups such as Hamas now occupy. But the rise of Islamist factions in Palestinian politics also traces a wider arc in Arab politics that began with Israel’s victory over all the leading Arab states of the era in the 1967 Six Day War. Since then, Islamic conservatism has come to substitute for Arab nationalism as the dominant force in Middle Eastern politics, whether backed by Iran on the one side (Hezbollah and Hamas) or Saudi Arabia on the other (the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and Isis).

For Hamas as for other Islamists, the ultimate referent object of politics is the overarching transnational community of believers, the ummah. For them, secular nation-states are provisional makeshifts at best, if not simply idolatrous substitutes for righteous rule. This is significant because as long as there is no agency that can legitimately claim to represent the Palestinian nation, their aspiration to independence remains a defunct and meaningless proposition. Over the years, regional experts have made much of the idea of a so-called “hudna”, a religious notion of ceasefire that some academics take as evidence for Hamas’s willingness to subordinate their religious ideals in favour of accepting secular rule and accommodation with Israel (at least in the short term). But given the fact that Hamas only exists in the ruins of Palestinian national independence, it makes little odds for the future of the Palestinian people, whatever term of Islamic jurisprudence one chooses to drape over Hamas’ thuggish theocracy or the iron fist of Israeli oppression.

Since the defeat of Palestinian nationalism in 1993, there has been no meaningful political agency in the conflict or the region except that of the Israeli state. Any political claim in this conflict that does not begin from this reality will inevitably find itself remoulded around the hard fact not only of Israeli military might but also the fact that the Jewish state is the only real political force in the Palestinian territories. And this is why analysts who otherwise draw from realism end up echoing so many of the liberal humanitarian claims around Gaza — whether describing the Israeli assault as a genocide, or boosting the claims of the International Court of Justice in its recent interim ruling.

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Is there a realist case for Palestine?

By Thomas Fazi

As the founding father of British realism E.H. Carr observed, world-history is the real world-court. Any realist who finds themselves resting the weight of their arguments on the feeble claims of international law has forgotten this prior. The reason that both popular and diplomatic opposition to Israel’s reprisals has taken the form of demanding ceasefires in the name of liberal humanitarianism is because there is no agency that can legitimately claim to act on behalf of the Palestinian nation and imprint its demands on the political process. Or, as Edward Said wrote (paraphrasing Karl Marx) in the opening to his 1978 book Orientalism: “they cannot represent themselves, they must be represented”. This is the case for the Palestinians today. The profusion of support for them around the world is in inverse proportion to their political inarticulation and powerlessness. The more hapless and weak they are, the more support they earn.

This is the bitter lesson realism has for this conflict. While a ceasefire may be desirable to relieve the suffering of Gaza’s civilians, it is no diplomatic solution to the conflict. This is not because it is not desirable or because one should never talk to terrorists — there is simply no party to treat with. Israel negotiating with whatever remains of Hamas after the end of the Israeli operations will produce no lasting solution simply because Hamas does not represent the Palestinian nation and does not even aim to. The idea that the two-state solution can be revived is the height of idealist utopianism, as decades of stalled peace talks and ever-worsening violence should have made clear.

But this logic applies to Israel too. As long as it refuses to take responsibility for its victory in 1993, and the Palestinian nation remains dead, any two-state solution will mean Israel devolving its authority to a quisling regime to rule over the prostrate Palestinians. It is hard to see how this is compatible with any definition of genuine Palestinian freedom. And if so, how can there be a lasting settlement to the conflict? Israel is thus in the wrong not for moral reasons but for political ones — it refuses to follow through on the implications of its own victory, opting instead for the dystopian prospect of waging forever war against those it has already defeated many times over.

A genuinely realistic analysis should make clear there is currently only one state across the whole of the historic mandate territory of Palestine, and it is Israel. But if Israel continues to evade the task of exercising sovereignty over its subjects in the Palestinian territories, then the only other option for Gaza is some kind of international protectorate. This will be accepted by Israel in preference to ruling Gaza directly and perhaps policed by international forces provided by Muslim states, likely involving Saudi Arabia, if only to preserve Saudi efforts to normalise relations with the Jewish state. Israel’s sovereignty will be compromised by the intrusion of the international community into its territory, and the Palestinians will certainly not be free in a little Saudi-sponsored colony.

It is doubtful that anyone would march for Palestine in this endgame: the Palestinians safely cosseted under a “permanent ceasefire” policed by foreign forces from the ummah. A protectorate for Gaza will return Palestine to its modern roots as a League of Nations mandate, its independence deferred to some remote feature. Doubtless some Quranic mot juste will be found that can be bandied about sagaciously by Western academics in order to give an authentic “decolonial” legitimacy to the new humanitarian colony. Anti-Israel protestors who have marched in cities around the world to condemn Israeli atrocities will find that they were a stage-army in the service of the global NGO-cracy, which will rapidly assimilate Gaza into another province of their own mini-empire of charitable sinecures.

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Where does this leave realism in this war? In overlooking the reality of Palestinian defeat, its supposed adherents have allowed moralism to creep into their realism (in modern international relations, moralism means the “international community”). That is to say, they end up supporting the exercise of the exact kind of Western power that they so eloquently criticise elsewhere. That said, realism alone will not offer a solution to the conflict. As Aris Roussinos observed in his recent meditation on realism and E.H. Carr, taken to its logical extreme of endless cycles of competition for power, realism is ultimately barren, with no political meaning at its core.

By contrast, it was James Burnham who conjoined realism with freedom through the figure of Niccolò Machiavelli who, despite his reputation as an amoral powerbroker, understood that strife was a necessary condition for the preservation of liberty and independence. As Machiavelli maintained, anyone who is serious about freedom must be serious about political power — not only to understand how to hold it in check but also to understand how it is wielded and deployed. As long as there is no Palestinian nation, there is no political agency that can bear the weight of Palestinian freedom. All arguments that do not start from this premise inevitably devolve into liberal humanitarian arguments which prioritise the Palestinians’ human rights over their national rights. Conversely, as long as Israel refuses to recognise its own domination over the Palestinians, the longer it will be trapped in a forever war against a people who are already entirely in its power.

Yet despite Putin’s hostility to Lenin, the 2013-14 Ukrainian uprising against the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovych was also accompanied by the so-called Leninopad, a mass toppling of Soviet-era statues of Lenin. Meanwhile, in Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, supporters of Yanukovych rallied to defend Lenin’s statues from the iconoclasts.

That Lenin, a man who died a century ago this week, can be held responsible for Ukraine’s break from the Russian orbit and taken as a symbol of Soviet-Russian domination over Ukraine tells us how obscure Lenin’s politics is today. Notwithstanding the fact his embalmed body still lies in Red Square, the real Lenin has been buried by decades of dictatorship and Cold War, the century of sanctification and vilification.

While Putin sees himself as freeing Russia from Lenin’s malign legacy, Putin’s Western critics see him standing in the line of Russian dictators stretching back to Lenin’s overthrow of Russia’s Provisional Government in the October Revolution of 1917. Yet having spent nearly half of his adult life outside of Russia as a political refugee in London, Paris, Munich, Geneva and Zurich, Lenin was as much a figure of the global Belle Époque across 1880-1914 as he was a Russian — a country which he derided as the “prison of nations”, a reference to the Tsar’s oppression of Russia’s many peripheral peoples and minorities.

In addition to the vast cosmopolitan empires of the Tsar, Kaiser and Habsburg emperor, Lenin’s era was also defined by modern progress — of the Cinématographe and airship, of avant-garde artistic experimentation and scientific breakthroughs, of seemingly inexorable economic expansion and industrialisation. Lenin is often cast as the man whose fanatical and authoritarian leadership of the Russian Revolution undid this glorious era of gentle but inexorable progress, and instead ushered in the grim 20th century of one-party governments, sinister deep-state bureaucracies and secret police regimes. Yet the historical record shows that it was Lenin who tried harder than any of his contemporaries to preserve and extend the progress of his time.

He did this by opposing imperialism — not only of the authoritarian monarchies, but also of the liberal-democratic states of the West. With the outbreak of war in 1914, Lenin’s Social Democratic Labour Party was one of the very few political parties that opposed its own country’s entry into the First World War. This was in keeping with the promises of the Basel Manifesto of 1912, an agreement in which the major socialist parties of the world decided through their global organisation, the Second International, to prevent the outbreak of war through coordinated industrial militancy and political opposition — a promise from which many reneged in 1914. Since then, conservatives and liberals alike have bemoaned the disaster of the First World War, while at the same time reserving a special place in hell for one of the very few political leaders in Europe who spoke out against it at the time: Lenin.

It was the Great War that would rip apart the world of the Belle Époque and snuff out the lights across Europe, in the words of the British Foreign Secretary of the time Sir Edward Grey. John Maynard Keynes, another upper-crust figure of this era, concluded that in undoing the “happy age” of European civilisation, the war also revealed the underbelly of that era — what he characterised as the “projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion”, which, he argued, played the “serpent” to the “paradise” of Edwardian-era globalisation.

Unsurprisingly, Lenin thought differently. Rather than rueing the loss of grand bourgeois civilisation or viewing the war as an inevitable fall from grace, he saw the era’s social development as an unstable compound of conflicting forces, which it was potentially possible to steer. As Lenin told the Romanian poet Valeriu Marcu, a fellow wartime exile in Zurich, during a discussion on how best to oppose the war: “One must always be as radical as reality itself.”

In other words, in an era in which the stability of physical reality itself was being undermined by Albert Einstein and Max Planck’s revolutionary overthrow of Newtonian physics, so too the social structures of bourgeois Europe had revealed their own instability. Yet rather than adopting the tragic outlook of Grey and Keynes, for Lenin this meant fighting for the relinquished mantle of 19th-century liberalism — to reclaim its hostility to war and militarism, to overweening state power and empire, to defend the right to self-determination — and extend it, in the form of socialist politics against the disaster of the Great War itself. This included substituting revolution for world war, a prospect which horrified the pacifist Marcu.

On this, however, Lenin was consistent. Less than six months after the revolution of October 1917, Lenin withdrew Russia from the war under the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. His peace with Germany undercut the Kaiser’s justification for war, which was to defend Germany against Russia’s imperial expansion to the west. Ultimately, the war ended when the German navy mutinied and soldiers and workers councils sprung up across the German empire, the prospect of revolution precipitating an armistice. By contrast, Woodrow Wilson, re-elected president in November 1917 on a promise to keep the US out of the conflict, led his country into the war less than six months later. To wish away Lenin’s communists is to wish away those who exerted themselves the most — and were in the short-term the most successful — in their efforts to rescue European civilisation from the self-immolation of the Great War.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is widely seen as marking the end of our own neo-Edwardian epoch, the second era of liberal peak-globalisation that began with the fall of the USSR in 1992. That ours was a far more seedy, more hypocritical, less accomplished and less self-assured era than the first Belle Époque is abundantly evident, not least in the fact that we have no statesmen who, like Grey before them, understand how dangerous their diplomatic machinations are surrounding the crisis in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Nor do we have figures of the stature of Keynes who, despite his fabular understanding of the Great War, understood that a prelapsarian politics was impossible, and saw political innovation in the form of vigorous fiscal policies as a necessity in order to preserve liberalism from further implosion.

Even Putin, with all his militaristic brutishness and authoritarian thuggery, has sufficient historic vision to see himself in the role of undoing Lenin’s legacy to restore Russian greatness. By contrast, most Western liberals today, deranged by conspiracy theories about Russian electoral interference, are consumed by a politics of nostalgia for the Nineties, unable even to reach Keynes’s level of understanding and identify the equivalent serpents in their own historic paradise — an effort that would, after all, require them to identify their own sins.

Likewise, we have no organised working-class politics capable of throwing up any popular tribunes worthy of the name, let alone revolutionary statesmen of Lenin’s perspicacity, to combat the drift to another world war. More than any movement of the Left, the most electorally successful anti-war politics of our times has come from a populist of the Right, Donald Trump — a testimony to the failures of the Left if ever there was one. Trump has even borrowed the tactic of Lenin’s fellow anti-war socialist of the Second International, US presidential candidate Eugene Debs, by campaigning on his mugshot. By contrast, the Left, bewitched by the promises of human rights, have themselves been the serpents in their own paradise of globalisation, consistently arguing for the humanitarian crusades that have undercut sovereignty, international law and institutionalised cooperation.

While Lenin and Debs sought to draw the masses deeper into political life to extend the gains of the 19th century, their political opponents across the spectrum drew the opposite conclusion — the need to keep the masses out, blaming the war itself on the masses’ nationalistic fervour. The promise of democratic containment was that war could be avoided, thereby helping to preserve peace and prosperity. It is this promise that has broken down in the 30 years since the fall of the USSR. The more that politics was dominated by the liberal centrists of peak globalisation, the more militaristic Western foreign policy has become, as seen in the rise of the Forever Wars.

From this, we can draw the conclusion that greater democratic influence in politics is needed as a counterweight to blithe liberals blundering into a new era of great power rivalry and permanent war. Unlike Lenin and Debs, who were riding the crest of the waves of popular enfranchisement and working-class self-assertion, being “as radical as reality” today means drawing the masses back into politics —not as a revolutionary act but nonetheless as a necessary one. For only then might we be able to overcome the disastrous legacy of the 20th century, and emerge from the mire of authoritarian great power politics.

Recounting this story, the historian Peter Wilson argues that, although the Empire could perhaps have survived a few more decades past this point, it is unlikely to have survived the “levelling and homogenising forces unleashed by capitalism and industrialisation [by] 1830”. A month in advance of the Empire’s dissolution, 16 of its members had already seceded to join a rival bloc, the Napoleonic Confederation of the Rhine. Napoleon himself, then at the height of his power, had withdrawn French diplomatic recognition from the Empire in May, following his great victories at the battles of Ulm and Austerlitz in 1805.

In short, by the time the Empire ended it had in fact already corroded from within. Some historians go further, claiming that the Empire had effectively ceased to exist as an independent actor even earlier — at the Treaty of Lunéville in 1801, for instance. Others have held that the Empire had long been a corpse that would crumble to the touch, a decline dating back to its internal political reorganisation at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Whatever precise date one might choose, the point is that by the time the end of the Empire finally came, it was almost an afterthought, the formal recording of a death that had happened years, if not centuries, before.

Comparisons between the European Union and the Holy Roman Empire have been a common trope since the founding of the Coal and Steel Community in 1952, and the comparison remains embedded in modern scholarship on the EU. The analogy is structurally justified: both the EU and the Empire are geographically expansive systems that are nonetheless devolved and multiplex structures, with numerous and sometimes even rivalrous centres of political and legal power, very distinct from the political centralisation embodied in the modern sovereign state. And, although we are still far from hearing the trumpeters deliver the blessed fanfare, with the EU summit in Granada yesterday, we can make the comparative claim that the end of our latter-day Reich has also come into view.

In advance of the summit, France and Germany, the bloc’s two most powerful member-states, have staked out their vision for institutional reform of the EU with a report titled “Sailing on High Seas: Reforming and Enlarging the EU for the 21st Century”. And what has been overlooked in the extensive discussion of the report is that it effectively consigns the EU to the same slow oblivion as the Holy Roman Empire — to be corroded from within by centrifugal dissolution. This is quite different from the end of the EU that had been envisaged in recent years. For a brief period across 2015-2019, it seemed at least possible (if still unlikely) that the EU might have been blown apart by a series of populist explosions en-chaîne across its territory. But the Union survived this sequence of ballot box revolts, with its core structures long since insulated from any popular incursions.

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Keir Starmer will never rejoin the EU

By Philip Cunliffe

Since that abortive period of uncertain and confused national revolt, and with the sole exception of Brexit Britain, national-populists around the continent have all surrendered to Brussels. This began with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s ignominious capitulation to the Troika, in 2015, in defiance of his own voters, and has continued to the present day with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s calm acceptance of the strictures of the eurozone. National-populist leaders continue to bleat about the threat of a federal Europe, but this is only to disguise how much sovereignty they themselves have already surrendered as member-states.

Nonetheless, despite the dismal failure of the populists, the Franco-German report makes clear that it is politically impossible for the Union to survive in its current form. If its recommendations are implemented, their logic will inevitably corrode the Union from within, allowing it to disperse itself into a more diffuse entity. It will gradually lose its coherence and purpose over time, and its eventual demise might well be an afterthought — akin to Francis II’s dissolution of the Reich in 1806.

Of course, the scholarly comparison between the EU and the Empire is generally intended as a benign and flattering one. Perhaps this is because, much like the Empire itself, the convolutions of the EU necessitate a large clerisy of lawyers, bureaucrats and scholars to divine its mysteries to its unfortunate subjects. Not only do such comparisons indicate the comfort that the EU’s supporters have with the Union’s supranational imperialism, they also reflect an enduring hostility to the nation-state, the political unit that came to supplant the Holy Roman Empire on its own territory. But if we are to accept the logic of comparison between the Reich and the Union, it behoves us to consider whether there will be a similar logic of imperial decline for the Union as there was for the Empire.

Although a so-called “multi-speed Europe” has been discussed before, what gives the proposals of the Franco-German report more impact is the geopolitical bind that the EU now finds itself in. The logic of combatting Russia is seen to necessitate granting rapid entry to beleaguered Ukraine and Moldova. And the EU’s commitment to Ukraine was confirmed with an impromptu meeting of foreign ministers in Kyiv on 5 October — the first such meeting outside of the EU itself. Rapid entry for Ukraine however, risks underscoring just how far EU expansion has stalled since the 2010s, with the aspirant member-states of the former Yugoslavia now having to endure the humiliation of seeing Ukraine being sped along the path to membership even as they languish in limbo outside (to say nothing of Turkey’s long purgatory as a candidate nation). It is the difficulty of absorbing the poor and dysfunctional protectorates of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Northern Macedonia, as well as Albania, Montenegro and Serbia that has impeded EU expansion in the region.

Such problems would be multiplied many times over by trying to absorb the part of rump Ukraine that has not been annexed by Russia — a territory which is not only embattled but also significantly more poor and no less corrupt than the Balkan states. To compound these external challenges on its borders, the EU also contains a recalcitrant group of Central and Eastern European countries — Poland, Hungary and Slovakia — who have been so persistently at odds with imperial diktat from Brussels that they were recently even denounced as “rogue states” by the Financial Times. The nominally equal standing that these Eastern rogues share with their Western peers gives them significant spoiling power within the EU’s structures.

It is this geopolitical context that makes the Franco-German report’s proposals so significant. While there are controversial suggestions (such as the call to extend qualified majority voting in order to overcome sovereign vetoes), the most important one is to dilute the ties of membership. This would see membership dispersed across several concentric rings layered around a dense core of “deep integration” comprising the Schengen and eurozones. This would then diffuse into an outermost layer of loosely aligned states in a “European Political Community” (a community which Brexit Britain already joined in October last year).

The proposed new model of tiered membership solves many political problems for the core states of the Union. Most straightforwardly, it allows the Union to absorb Ukraine and the Balkans, without the economic and political costs of granting these potentially troublesome states equivalent rights to current members. Perhaps more significantly, the prospect of tiered membership also gives Paris and Berlin the scope to downgrade the membership of Eastern rivals in future while still keeping them in the Union, thereby allowing for punishment of “rogue states” while avoiding the  awkwardness of actually expelling them from the Union.

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Denounced in the pro-Brexit British press as a “Franco-German plot” to draw Britain back into the Union, the proposal could just as easily be seen as a Franco-German plot to strengthen their bilateral alliance while cutting loose the Union’s awkward squad. If implemented, this new model will not only dilute the appeal of the Union to aspirant states, it will also dilute the benefits of membership for existing member-states. Although the current path of EU accession is both humiliating and tortuous, at least it grants the redemption of full membership at its end. Tiered membership will replicate the logic of the Holy Roman Empire in its long, slow diffusion of power and authority to emergent nation-states across 1648 to 1806.

Where does this leave us? Europe’s populists will have fewer excuses for their obeisance, as the phony threat of an “ever stronger”, centralised, federal Europe recedes ever further into the distance. The question now is whether we can take advantage of this new era of “differentiated integration” to break the Union apart and establish newly sovereign nation-states — and whether we can do this without the despotic expansionism of a Napoleon, or the authoritarianism of a Bismarck.

Certainly, the idea of “associate membership” of the Union is more threatening to its coherence than any populist demagogue. The end of Europe’s postmodern empire is now in sight. The challenge for democrats is: can we speed the Union along to its demise, so that we do not have to wait a further 150 years to restore Europe’s sovereign nations?

With such a record of political opportunism, what are we to make of his promised renegotiation? While Eutopian liberals such as The Guardian’s Rafael Behr are hailing the promised renegotiation as a historical inevitability, smarter commentators such as Wolfgang Münchau have pointed out that, whatever Starmer might want, the EU has little incentive to re-open negotiations. And in any case, it is impossible to secure a better deal for Britain without re-entering the Customs Union and Single Market, both of which Starmer has ruled out.

With this in mind, Münchau considers the possibility that Eutopian liberals might be sufficiently emboldened — and perhaps boosted by diplomatic pressure from Brussels — to manoeuvre a future Starmer government into holding another referendum. This is despite the fact that a campaign to Rejoin the EU would have no more chance of winning than Remain did in 2016.

As sound as this reasoning is, it gives Starmer too much credit. He is no more serious about rejoining the EU than he was about Labour’s Green New Deal or boosting house-building. Both of these were supposedly flagship policies, and yet his party rapidly retreated from them at the slightest hint of contention or opportunity. In the first instance, Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves pulled back from her much-vaunted programme of “Securonomics” and a “green prosperity plan” when it was pointed out that it would cost money. Then, more recently, Starmer helped to torpedo the efforts of Levelling Up minister Michael Gove, who was hoping to lift environmental restrictions on house-building.

But if Starmer’s pledge for a new Brexit deal is equally insincere, what is really going on here? In truth, his promises are less about Brussels than they are about managing his own party and manipulating the hopes of voters. There is a huge subsection of the British middle class, many of them supporters of Labour and the Liberal Democrats, who have never recovered from the trauma of losing the EU referendum. For these people, Brexit has become the default explanation for everything that has gone wrong with the country and in their own lives — from energy costs and food inflation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and long airport queues. Recognising this psychic pain, Starmer is dangling the prospect of an existential salve; he is, in short, virtue-signalling.

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How the elites squandered Brexit

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However as with most virtue-signalling policies, it will have no effect on the status quo. But the status quo is, in fact, a drift back towards the EU. And this drift, much like other policies associated with the liberal Left — from Net Zero targets to pro-trans social policy — has taken place under Tory rule. It was, after all, the Tories’ support for Nato’s war in Ukraine that has kept Britain entwined in the geopolitics of Brussels. Nothing symbolised this better than Boris Johnson flying to Kyiv rather than attend a party meeting in the Red Wall constituency of Doncaster in June 2022 — the same Red Wall constituencies that are now likely to swing back to Labour at the next general election.

And it was the current Tory Prime Minister who signed off on the Windsor Framework that has helped shore up the Northern Ireland Protocol. By ensuring that Northern Ireland’s economic integration into the Single Market is not compromised, Sunak is again undercutting the prospect of regulatory divergence from the EU. It was also Sunak who, in in October 2022, joined Emmanuel Macron’s so-called European Political Community (EPC) initiative — which is envisaged, in the new Franco-German report on restructuring EU membership, as the outermost tier of EU membership. Starmer’s declaration in Montreal at the weekend that he has no intention of diverging from the EU is not radical; after all, neither do the Tories.

A sovereign British foreign and economic policy in the medium term seems unlikely, then. Nonetheless, there are grounds for optimism for those who cherish national independence. Ultimately, the closer Britain draws to the EU, the more the shimmering mirage of Rejoin will fade, and the more difficult it will be to portray the EU as a cure for all our ills. The truth is that, for Rejoiners, no amount of rejoining will atone for our democratic sins. And even if Britain traversed all the tiers and outer layers of “associate EPC membership” to “full membership”, which would include membership of the Schengen Zone and even the eurozone currency union, the EU the Rejoiners know and love will already be long gone. Indeed, that same Franco-German report sees the future of the bloc as a series of concentric rings with multiple tiers of membership rather than a simple club of member-states.

The hard truth is that the EU of Rejoiners’ imagination disappeared in June 2016. It was an artefact of the era of US unipolarity and high globalisation. The very fact that Britain decided to withdraw was not a historical accident that can be rectified; it was a reverberation of deeper structural shifts in the global order, signalling the beginnings of a retreat from globalisation well before the pandemic and Russia’s invasion. This is Starmer’s Brexit mistake: as the EU dissolves into tiers, the politics of nostalgia will become increasingly impotent. 

One does not need to be a psephologist to understand the shift in the public mood. Evidence of Britain’s malaise is all around us, from pot-holed roads to a crumbling public health service, all overseen by an exhausted government desperate to be put out of its misery, as a slew of Tory parliamentarians confirm they will not stand at the next general election.

To blame this all on Brexit, however, would be to adopt the same imperialistic and conceited attitude of many Remainers, convinced that Britain is still the centre of the world. We need only look across the Channel to see that similar problems plague our EU neighbours, too: inflationary energy dependence, deindustrialisation, interest rate rises, house price inflation, regional disparities bound up with peripheral separatist movements. All of this is compounded by deep political uncertainty across the continent. In many ways, despite having formally withdrawn from the EU, Britain still resembles a member-state.

To imagine that rejoining the EU would solve our problems is Eutopian fantasy. None of these polls, nor the media hubbub around “Bregret”, should be taken at face value — no more than we should still be quailing over the absurd predictions of Britain being wiped out by asteroids for the temerity of having voted for Brexit. Indeed, the very fact that the Red Wall is edging back to Labour and away from the Tories indicates at least one absolute gain from Brexit — a growing sense of political independence among the lower-middle and working classes. The fact that traditional working-class constituencies previously under the thumb of Labour are now swing seats, able to decide the outcomes of elections by switching their support from one party to another, is a salutary reminder to Britain’s political elites of the dangers of democratic complacency.

Moreover, one suspects the polls would quickly change if the prospect of rejoining the EU was once again put to the voters. Majorities that appear overwhelming and solid would quickly melt away when people were confronted not with abstract questions, but rather with the prospect of a meaningful political choice over rejoining the Single Market, rejoining the EU without the rebate, or even having to sign up to Tony Blair’s old dream of joining the Eurozone, a commitment required of all new member-states.

Instead of holding another referendum, then, it seems more likely that the pattern of Brexit policies established under prime ministers Johnson and Sunak will continue under future governments — that is, growing rapprochement and strategic realignment with Brussels, as indicated in Britain’s participation at the second summit of the European Political Community last week. Whether this long-term trend is justified by the need to prop up seedy sectarian power-sharing arrangements in Stormont, or by the need to manage the risks created by Nato expansion, the creep back towards Brussels will be soft and gradual, with governments avoiding giving voters anything so stark as a clear choice.

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All this begs the question: why have the opportunities of Brexit been squandered? Thus far, the major victory claimed by Tory Brexiteers is Britain’s joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), a global free-trade bloc incorporating the growing economies of the Asia-Pacific as opposed to the moribund economies of Europe. Yet this supposed achievement only underscores the problem. The very fact that one globalist trade bloc (the CPTPP) is being offered in place of another (the EU’s Single Market and Customs Union) makes clear that part of the problem is that so many leading Brexiteers continue to conceive of Brexit as if it were a vote for cheaper cornflakes through lower tariffs, rather than a vote for national renewal.

In place of efforts to expand public investment, enhance productivity, build infrastructure and renew industrial policy, economic debates over Brexit became mired in questions of trade policy, despite the low contribution of trade to economic growth. This fixation with trade reflects the intrinsic political weakness of the so-called Singaporeans — those Thatcherite Brexiteers who, despite seeming to know nothing about Singapore, hoped to make Brexit Britain a “Singapore-on-Thames” that would enjoy its combination of robust growth rates and cosmopolitan trading relations.

For all their supposed Euroscepticism, the fact that the Thatcherite Brexiteers were so transfixed by the mirage of Singapore-on-Thames indicates how little they understood the politics of national independence. It was, after all, Margaret Thatcher who was the architect of the Single Market, a continent-sized trading zone that inevitably required supranational structures to oversee, regulate and administer it (the very same structures that she recoiled from towards the end of her time in office). Whatever her claims to be “batting for Britain”, it was Thatcher’s own efforts to build up globalist free-trading arrangements that wove the threads that would be used to entangle the British nation. Policy regimes focused on driving globalist trade inevitably legitimate supranationalism — and it is this dynamic that vitiates the Singaporeans’ efforts to re-establish national sovereignty. Substituting one globalist trading bloc for another will not solve the problem.

If Thatcherites are oblivious to the implications of their own political vision, populist Brexiteers were no more clear-sighted. They imagined that formally withdrawing from the EU was in and of itself sufficient to restore British national independence. In misconceiving the EU as a Napoleonic superstate subjugating Britain, the populist vision of Brexit reflected more the limitations of populist politics itself than any of the drab reality of the Brussels bureaucracy, where national ministers met in secret to decide national policy in common.

Far from being an overarching bureaucracy, the EU was instead focused on organising national government through diplomacy, using executive privileges to insulate policy-making from oversight and scrutiny from national legislatures. Propelled by their Spitfire nationalism, the Brexit populists imagined that withdrawing from the EU would allow the old Britain to re-emerge, the one that was supposedly submerged when Britain joined the European Economic Community back in 1972. In this, the populists failed to reckon with what political scientist Peter Mair characterised as the political void at the core of the member-states — that is, the gap between rulers and ruled.

The constitutional illegitimacy so prevalent in modern nations stems from the lack of institutionalised representation that would help ground the state in civil society. The reason our elites appear so haughty and remote is less a subjective question of their attitude, and more an objective question of social structure: our rulers and leading lights simply are not embedded in institutional structures that would give them a meaningful representative function with respect to the rest of society. With 60% of British voters no longer feeling represented by existing parties, breaking up the existing party structure with a new electoral system will be imperative. Until this gap between rulers and ruled is closed, the structures of the member-state will continue to hover above their constituents, suspended in supranational networks of globally interconnected elites, and committed to globalist politics. They busy themselves fighting forever wars in supranational military alliances, nation-building in the Third World, tackling climate change or global poverty — anything except addressing the concerns of left-behind voters in forgotten nations.

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This is not a class war

By Philip Cunliffe

Where does this leave us? If we are to deliver on the promise of Brexit and establish a politics of national sovereignty and control, then we must replace our current member-state with a nation-state. As I argue with my co-authors in our new book, Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit, this means that we must take the politics of the nation seriously. Brexit proved that there can be no return to the past. Whatever might be involved in carving out a new role for Britain in the world requires building a new nation out of the Britain of today.

Brexit was not a project of restoration but a project of renewal. Renewal will not come from new trading arrangements, however many economic gains are promised. It is only a politics of nationhood that would allow us to build up the state authority to transcend the super-charged Nimbyism that plagues the country, ensconced in the quangos, identity politics and devolutionary arrangements that disperse and diffuse all national energy and effort. Who will stand for this new nation? Only when we answer this question will we be able to exit from the shell of the European member-state in which we are still encased.

Despite the warnings flashing up before him, Petrov decided that the incoming missiles were more likely a bug in the newly installed computer system than an actual US nuclear strike. He ignored the protocol that demanded he immediately report any suspected US nuclear attack up the chain of command, thereby avoiding a Soviet retaliation which could have precipitated a full-blown thermonuclear war.

It turned out that the Soviet satellites had mistaken the reflection of sunlight on clouds for the flare of a rocket launch. Petrov retired from the military the following year, and his role in averting nuclear war only became public in 1998, with the publication of the memoirs of General Yuri Votintsev, commander of the Soviet nuclear forces at the time of the incident. As Petrov’s role became more widely known, he was celebrated, being awarded prizes from various Western civil society groups. To this day, his name circulates annually on social media as one of humanity’s overlooked heroes.

Petrov is not the only Russian with the claim to have saved humanity from nuclear war. Vasily Arkhipov was also a Soviet officer, this time in the navy, who made a critical decision that avoided US retaliation. As the deputy commander of a flotilla of Soviet submarines deployed to Cuba during the Missile Crisis of October 1962, Arkhipov vetoed the decision of his two fellow officers to fire a nuclear-tipped torpedo at the US destroyers that were harassing their submarine in the waters around the island. Their sub was too deep underwater to receive radio commands from Moscow, and the submarine’s captain, Valentin Savitsky, believed that a Third World War had already broken out on the surface, necessitating that they strike back. When the submarine eventually managed to surface and radio contact was restored, Arkhipov was vindicated – war had not erupted, and the ship returned to the USSR. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., a senior adviser to the Kennedy administration at the time, later characterised the dispute as “not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War, [but] the most dangerous moment in human history”.

With the Russian front currently crumbling under the Ukrainian counter-attack, and the intimations of Russian president Vladimir Putin that he is willing to use nuclear weapons, as well as the renewed fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan on Russia’s borders, today’s geopolitics bear a striking relation to those of the early Eighties — if not the Cuban Missile Crisis itself. So, given the structure of nuclear arms control agreements has been allowed to decay, eroding the capacity for jointly managing de-escalation between Washington and Moscow, we must ask ourselves an uncomfortable question: are there still Arkhipovs and Petrovs on the Russian side, and would their counsel would once again prevail over that of their superiors and fellow officers?

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A sceptic could legitimately ask why we only seem to expect Russian officers to save the world from nuclear war. Of all the times the world has skirted close to Armageddon since the start of the Atomic Age, Arkhipov and Petrov nonetheless remain as the only two named people who are not political leaders and are commonly identified as having played a specific individual role in blocking the path to nuclear escalation — and certainly the only two with any historic or public notoriety. Doubtless this notoriety is partly an artefact of the collapse of the USSR, which opened up Soviet archives and made available so many hitherto classified Soviet military and state secrets. Perhaps we don’t know the names of the American counterparts to Arkhipov and Petrov because the US state has never been cracked open in a similar way.

However, there is also a distinctively ideological sheen to the stories of Arkhipov and Petrov — one that indicates there is more to their Cold War feats than merely having declassified Soviet files to hand. For the liberal political imagination, the irresistible allure of these two tales is that in both cases we have ordinary, lone and otherwise unknown individuals who are beholden to a totalitarian state, who had to carefully weigh this duty in their own consciences alongside a colossal existential choice for humanity, while simultaneously acting as mere cogs in a vast and complex bureaucratic-military machine. It is the structure of this fable — of individual ethical choice still shining through the murk of a sinister political machine — that fixes Arkhipov and Petrov in Western public memory, more than any deeper understanding of the geopolitics of cold wars or mutually assured destruction. The reverence for Petrov is akin to the deference shown by Western publics for the late Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union who is often cast as the man who saved the world from nuclear apocalypse by ending the Cold War, once again proving the triumph of individual moral decency over a vast, impersonal and monolithic regime.

Perhaps instead of allowing ourselves to be so easily dazzled by this tale of how individual conscience narrowly saved us from nuclear war, we could also reverse this perspective, and ask whether Soviet Communism may have even played a positive role in the decisions of Arkhipov and Petrov. The fact that the Soviet Union claimed to represent the next stage of human civilisation necessarily placed humanity at the core of how the Soviet state conceived of itself. Doubtless this ideological disposition influenced how both Arkhipov and Petrov were raised, socialised, educated and inducted into the military structures of the regime, and perhaps even factored in their willingness to exercise caution and restraint when confronted with the prospect of unleashing nuclear extermination.

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Yet a 44-year-old officer in Russia’s air defence forces today will only have dim childhood memories of Soviet Communism. Their ideological commitments will have been shaped in the post-Soviet era, seeing the near-collapse of the Russian state and its restoration under Putin’s rule. Would an Arkhipov or Petrov educated and trained on the basis of Russian nationalism reach the same decisions as an Arkhipov or Petrov who grew up under Soviet communism? Does an ideological commitment to the Russian nation on the part of Russian nuclear officers today make nuclear war more or less likely than before? And on the side of the US, how much can we put our hope for prudence and restraint in an officer corps and politico-military elite that has been committed to an expansionist vision of liberal globalism for 30 years, with an ideological zeal that would embarrass a Cold War-era Soviet commissar?

Whether liberalism or communism, globalism or nationalism weigh more heavily in the scales of individual decision-making when confronting a nuclear crisis, what we also know about the night of 26 September 1983 was that Petrov had spent weeks de-bugging the computer system, which made him predisposed to suspect its flaws. Moreover, Soviet ground radar failed to corroborate what the satellites were showing, and Petrov knew that a US nuclear strike would be unlikely to be limited to five missiles. Even if he had reported the satellite data up the chain of command as he was required to do, it is perfectly possible that one of his superiors might have reached the same decision. By the same token, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, even if Arkhipov had not prevailed over Savitsky and Maslenikov, and if the B-59’s “Special Weapon” had been launched, it is still possible that the both the Russians and Americans would have realised what had happened, and they could have undertaken de-escalation that would have avoided an all-out nuclear war.

Such counterfactuals point to a more disturbing truth: that perhaps the real reason we are enamoured of the tales of Lt. Col. Petrov and executive officer Arkhipov is that the state machinery worked, the human cogs performed their allotted roles in managing the inevitably deficient technology, and the system of mutually assured destruction worked as intended. Far from heroically subverting the machine of which they were a part, Petrov and Arkhipov’s efforts ensured it functioned well.

The notion that a nuclear balance of terror worked is a harder truth to accept than the comforting tale of heroic individuals defying a malignant and dysfunctional system. Yet as we know, all machines break down. If Petrov and Arkhipov show us how a well-functioning military machine and international system of mutually assured destruction works, what happens when we confront a collapsing military machine and a failed international system? As the Russian military retreats in Ukraine, let us hope that Russian nuclear deterrence today will function in the absence of Soviet ideology, and that the forces of restraint do not rest merely on the forbearance of individual Russian officers.

Yet on almost every level, the notion that we’re seeing a return to the Seventies is fantasy politics. Certainly, by paralysing Britain’s rail transportation network through the withdrawal of their members’ labour, the RMT has demonstrated the latent industrial power of Britain’s workers. But just as one swallow does not make a summer, so three days of national strikes by a single union does not signal a return to 1979, let alone a future blighted by class war. Union membership and labour militancy remain at historic lows across the Western world, including in Britain.

Yes, Britain’s summer of chaos is real enough: energy prices, NHS waiting lists, flight cancellations, and inflation are all spiralling. But none of these ills can be attributed to union power or working-class tumult.

It is not uppity labourers but supply chain shocks stemming from the pandemic and lockdown, as well as the Ukraine war, that are driving inflation, smoothed along by pre-emptive corporate price hikes. It is not union barons but airline companies, which slashed so many jobs during the lockdown, that have shredded Britons’ summer plans. And unlike in the Seventies, today’s economic sclerosis can hardly be blamed on creaking nationalised behemoths, given the fact that the Tories have sold off most of them over the last 40 years.

Under an exhausted Tory government, corporate profits are booming while wages are being eaten up by inflation. We are at the end of the process that began with Thatcher’s election in 1979. In short, however this tale unfolds, it will necessarily have a different ending; a neoliberal fairy godmother isn’t going to come to the rescue.

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Back in Seventies, governments had no choice but to negotiate with pervasive and powerful unions. Then Thatcher came along and pursued a different tack of open confrontation in her bid to break up the power of the organised working class. Today, the Conservative government’s refusal to negotiate with the RMT is no flash of Thatcherite steel, but a sign that they are unwilling to take political responsibility for Britain’s railway grid, which they have already been nationalising through a haphazard, piecemeal process driven by necessity over the last few years. The Tories’ unwillingness to fully reverse the failed disaster of rail privatisation betokens no commitment to free market nostrums, but a simple inability to see anything through at all.

This is not just a process of elite decay but also a direct result of neoliberal government inaugurated by Thatcher: the regulatory state that replaced the command-and-control state had less direct power. And with less direct power at stake in party-political competition, politics itself became less meaningful, with the banks and corporations sucking up the best and brightest that would have once formed the cadre of government and party-political elite. Neoliberalism locked in a vicious cycle in which a diminished public life drew in increasingly mediocre professional politicians, culminating in our hapless parliamentary class of today. Taking back control of Britain’s railways would require a political vision, and that is something our politicians are unable to supply.

All of this indicates that we are not returning to the Seventies, and we are far away from class war. The fact that sub-editors and journalists have no way to frame the railway dispute except by plucking out shibboleths about seasons of discontents only shows that the Right and the Tory middle classes need socialism and class war just as much as the Left needs fascism — which is to say they have no vision to offer. It is ultimately unsurprising that a generation of journalists, editors and pundits whose careers were made in the era of neoliberalism are struggling to adapt; after all, what we are going through is the end of an exhausted neoliberalism.

The exception to this fantasy politics is the RMT itself, which is seeking to defend its members’ wages and jobs. How far this will inaugurate a new confidence in labour organisation and trade unionism remains to be seen. It certainly seems that, with attempts to re-shore various industries and supply chains, and with tightening labour markets, the conditions exist for some form of organised labour to re-emerge from the abyss. Add to that the way Covid lockdowns exposed our collective dependence on a swathe of often poorly paid and menial working-class jobs, and it is hardly surprising that in the aftermath, “key workers” are now claiming more than merely symbolic tokens of our affirmation.

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But who will support them? The fact the broad swathes of the middle-class Left has thus far shown sympathy for a working-class strike is probably more reflective of the Left’s penchant for working from home in the wake of the pandemic than any substantive political solidarity. Were the RMT threatening the middle classes’ capacity for telecommuting, we can be certain we would already have been subjected to a torrent of op-eds and tweets about the “privileges”, racial exclusivity and backwards sexual mores of RMT members. Intersectionalism is designed to disable the formation of collective interests, majoritarian decision-making and solidarity. As long as the Left remains committed to intersectionalism, it will have nothing to offer the reformation of independent working-class politics in Britain. This is plain in Labour leader Keir Starmer’s efforts to distance himself from the industrial action — an attempt to maintain the strategy of triangulation and middle-class support.

Throughout the neoliberal era, it is the unions that were cast in the role of conservative goliaths, standing in the way of the forces of technology, modernisation and globalisation. If it were ever true, that narrative certainly no longer holds: from its insurgent beginnings in the Seventies, British neoliberalism has collapsed into widening inequalities, technocracy, lockdown, indebtedness, stagnant wages and wilting productivity. Can a new working-class politics reverse these trends? For all the media histrionics provoked by the RMT strike, one thing it has exposed is that our entire social and political order rests on labour passivity and working-class quiescence. What happens when this ends?

Despite their distance in time and space, not to mention qualitative differences of magnitude and geopolitical significance, the conflicts in Ukraine and Bosnia nonetheless remain entangled. Fundamental questions that have surfaced over the past month — over European strategic autonomy, Germany’s status as a great power, multipolarity and the role of Nato expansion — all emerged with the war in Bosnia.

The German recognition of the secession of Slovenia and Croatia from Yugoslavia in 1991 — in express defiance of the US secretary of state at the time, James Baker — spurred the collapse of the Yugoslav federation, leading to Bosnia’s bid for secession and its slide into civil war. At the time, German defiance of the US was taken to signal the revival of German power in the wake of the country’s reunification in 1990. Yet its fumbling for foreign policy independence was eventually ended by Washington, which reasserted its strategic domination on the continent with a Nato bombing campaign against Bosnian Serb forces that helped bring the war to an end in 1995. Followed by war in Kosovo in 1999, the wars of Yugoslav secession only ended in 2001 with a Nato deployment to end a conflict brewing in North Macedonia.

Although Western military intervention in another multi-national, multi-ethnic ex-communist federation spurred fears in the Kremlin that the West would reprise such adventures in the ex-Soviet Union during the Nineties, the collapse of the Russian state and the low price of oil meant that there was little Russia could do to stymie Nato expansion in the region. Russian weakness helped foster the mirage of a continent that had transcended great power rivalries, which would in turn smooth the path for Nato’s reckless policy expansion eastwards. Nonetheless, there were occasional portents of future conflict, such as when British Lieutenant-general Sir Mike Jackson refused the orders of his Nato commanding officer to fire on a Russian column attempting to seize Pristina airport in Kosovo.

The war in Bosnia and the brutality that defined it shattered the Long Peace that had prevailed in Europe since the end of the Second World War. Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had a similarly shattering effect on a public that seems to have forgotten the wars in former Yugoslavia. Such collective amnesia — which also omits the bloody Greek Civil War that ended in 1949 — evinces a peculiar Eurocentrism, which treats European territory as if it were holy soil consecrated for perpetual peace by European blood, and as if Europe’s bloody history of internecine war makes war less rather than more likely.

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The Nato-led international intervention that brought the wars of Yugoslav secession to an end were seen as restoring the peace of Europe. In reality, however, the diplomatic, military and humanitarian tools developed in the Balkans would become instruments for extending war outside of Europe. All the elements of the international intervention in the Bosnian war would be globalised in subsequent decades across conflicts in Africa and the Middle East. Arms embargoes, sanctions against “rogue regimes”, No-Fly Zones that escalated into bombing campaigns conducted alongside proxy forces and favoured ethnic militias, the deployments of large and militarised United Nations peacekeeping operations, the establishment of protectorates and international criminal courts — all these became the political and military instruments of a new global humanitarian order. Bosnia remains a de facto protectorate of the European Union to this day, hosting international forces and even sporting a blue and yellow flag expressly modelled on that of the EU.

The implications of humanitarian intervention in the Balkans were understood in Moscow even if not in Brussels or Washington. Vladimir Putin has repeatedly cited the precedent of Nato’s 1999 Kosovo War as a legal and political justification for his dismemberment of Ukraine with the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which was modelled on how Nato oversaw the detachment and independence of the former Serbian province in 2008. So we find ourselves in a situation where Russia claims to be retaliating against Nato encroachment in its sphere of influence in Ukraine, while in the Balkans it is Nato and the EU that decry Russian interference in stoking support for Serb secessionism in Bosnia.

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This geopolitical tangle of imperial hypocrisy shows that we are fully returned to a baleful era of great power spheres of influence, depriving smaller powers in Europe of the political space for their sovereignty and independence. The Balkans have been returned to their nineteenth century status, as what was formerly a single sovereign state has been reduced to a clutch of small, dependent states enmeshed in mutual hostility and rivalry as they jostle for great power patronage.

Given the war in Ukraine and renewed geopolitical rivalries in the Balkans, what are the prospects for Europe’s middle and smaller powers to emerge from tutelage? During the First World War, the British journalist H.H. Munro published The Purple of the Balkan Kings, a short story during the First Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, which had laid the ground for the Great War itself. The story recounts the discomfiture of his absurdly named protagonist Luitpold Wolkenstein, a “financier and diplomat on a small, obtrusive, self-important scale” who, while sitting in his favourite Viennese café, is astounded to read of the military victories of the Balkan League in rolling back the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Munro recounts how vital the subordination of the Balkan states was to Wolkenstein’s mental tranquility:

“His judgment had been one of unsparing contempt for small-scale efforts, of unquestioning respect for the big battalions and full purses. Over the whole scene of the Balkan territories and their troubled histories had loomed the commanding magic of the words ‘the Great Powers’…”

Filled with dread at the prospect that the Balkan states might redraw the map of Europe independently of the Great Powers, and that they might even roll their military victories over into a “project of fiscal unity, extending over the entire Balkan lands, and further of a constitutional union”, Munro has his “plump-bodied café oracle” retire from his café in a depressive mood.

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Today, latter-day Wolkensteins are firmly back in charge in Europe, not only in Vienna but also especially in Brussels, with their own equivalents in Moscow. Social media provides them with a hubbub that would easily outdo an early twentieth century Viennese café for its complacent febrility and bourgeois extremism. Thinking of the two Eastern European wars that now frame the rise and fall of the era of liberal hegemony — Bosnia and Ukraine respectively — will Europe’s smaller states ever be able to assert their independence against imperial domination?

There is a real risk that a peace settlement for Ukraine reproduces the problems that have plagued post-war Bosnia, which has been carved up into separate, ethnically homogenous statelets with no meaningful central government able to exert sovereignty over the territory as a whole. Ukraine would also carry the further risk of being torn between West and East, with the two halves of the country divided between Brussels and Moscow respectively.

Describing Russian war crimes as “genocide” risks overshadowing the political questions at the core of the conflict. If Ukraine is to safeguard the independence it is fighting for, it must not only repel the Russian invasion but also avoid becoming a Western protectorate, dependent on Nato arms and EU aid to survive. Neutrality offers Ukraine the best hope of preserving its sovereignty. In due course, a neutral Ukraine may even offer an example of how smaller and weaker European states may escape Balkanisation in the years to come.

It was a striking reversal. For many of its partisans, Brexit had been cast in terms of restoring freedoms — freedoms that had allegedly been lost to an overbearing European superstate, whose pettifogging bureaucrats had tied the nation up in red tape, and whose arrogant judges trampled over ancient liberties with new-fangled human rights. The winning slogan of the Vote Leave campaign — “Take back control” — spoke to this sense of political disempowerment and drift, and offered the tantalising prospect of granting people more sway over their own lives.

Yet within weeks of leaving the EU, Britain endured the most drastic restrictions on national freedoms seen in peacetime. How was it that the promise of greater freedoms was so quickly dashed? How was it that a democratic bid for greater popular power ended up so powerless? Could the cycle of lockdowns enacted since March 2020 snuff out the gains of Brexit?

Britain was, of course, far from being the only country to enter lockdown. For supporters of the EU, the global pandemic was a salutary reminder of the realities of global interdependence, puncturing the nationalistic conceit that a country could choose its own fate. Yet the cycle of lockdowns since March 2020, as well as the Government’s shambolic response to the pandemic, reveals more about the failures of British politics than it offers moral fables about global interdependence.

It wasn’t Remainer revanchists in the People’s Vote campaign and the Liberal Democrats who put the nation under house arrest, but a British government elected to enact Brexit. It was a Conservative government, widely castigated for its allegedly crude populism, that palmed off its authority on to a technocratic body, the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), to oversee lockdown. What this tells us is that the impulse to curb civil society and to rule through unelected institutions on the basis of technocratic authority is not an imported problem. The authority of Sage revealed that the EU was not a foreign imposition, but that it grew out of problems that were deeply embedded in the relations between British state and society.

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Why Remain lost

By Fintan O'Toole

Three national lockdowns later, it is easy to forget just how exceptional Brexit was. It represented the first secession from the EU, an organisation that had hitherto only ever expanded to absorb more states. It was the first major EU referendum that was neither ignored (as had happened with the French and Dutch referendums of 2005 and Greek referendum of 2015), nor put to another vote (as happened in Ireland in 2008). It was the first sustained democratic revolt against the new free trade blocs that were explicitly designed to make economic policy impervious to popular will. It was the only popular revolt that came in the wake of the great financial crash of 2008 that made any lasting impact.

All the great populist revolts between 2008 and 2020 have variously been defeated at the ballot box, surrendered to their opponents or battered themselves into oblivion: Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain, Donald Trump in the US. Jeremy Corbyn’s electoral insurrection collapsed in less than two years — notably, after Corbyn conceded to the prospect of a second referendum. In France and Italy, the populist Right — Marine Le Pen and Matteo Salvini — have both retreated from talk of quitting the EU or abandoning the euro.

All this makes the fact of Britain’s successful secession from the EU the more remarkable. In Britain, Brexit was repeatedly vindicated at the ballot box over the course of the general election of 2017, the European parliamentary elections of 2019 and the general election of 2019. Yet by March 2020 Britain’s democratic exceptionalism appeared to have evaporated overnight.

Despite these putative democratic gains, the British government’s response to the pandemic clearly revealed a state that was unable to harness popular power or convert democratic legitimacy to effectively overcome the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, Britain tumbled into the authoritarian pattern of lockdowns, the global precedent for which was set by the Chinese Communist Party: individual isolation, social distancing, rigid restrictions on public life and civil liberties.

Deeming itself as inessential as any other middle-class office job, parliament dissolved itself, even as it promulgated draconian legislation against its own citizens. Throughout the pandemic, the British state has consistently treated its citizens as a threat to each other, rather than as agents whose collective capacities could be mobilised against the virus.

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Is the EU about to crumble?

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

The immediate response of civil society early last year, which saw spontaneous neighbourhood and county networks springing up to organise services and food delivery to those who were isolating and vulnerable, indicated strong impulses to collective self-help and social solidarity. Yet the Government was unable to use such unifying impulses to mount a collective response to the pandemic, instead enacting restrictions on collective life more severe than those in wartime. The 600,000-strong NHS volunteer army that rapidly emerged in early 2020 petered out, as the state did not have the wherewithal to deploy it.

This ultimately revealed the incapacity of the Tory government and British state to convert popular will and social solidarity into enhanced state capacity to tackle the pandemic. This enhanced capacity could have been used not only to support the self-isolating and vulnerable with extra social services, but also to expand public health capacity — for instance, expanding support services, deploying extra cleaning staff in hospitals and expanding the administrative capacity of the NHS.

The more recent recruitment of vaccine volunteers this year provides an insight into what an effective mobilisation of the public may have looked like early on in the pandemic. But with furlough, lockdown and stay-at-home orders, national demobilisation and public passivity was the order of the day — and indeed, it turned out to be amenable to many of the middle classes.

Lockdown, then, was ultimately an artefact of a lack of state capacity. It was justified, after all, by the need to protect the NHS from being overwhelmed. This reflected the reality of an underfunded public health system and a state run on “lean” just-in-time principles, as if it were a supermarket serving customers rather than a public body serving its citizens. With the NHS having become dependent on sucking up medical professionals from abroad instead of expanding its training capacity, when the pandemic struck there were fewer medics that could be released from their training early to supplement front-line medical staff, while none could be absorbed. The British state was so market-efficient that it notoriously did not even have a surplus of functioning personal protective equipment.

Yet despite all this, state capacity is not a purely technical affair — to do with the number of public employees, their training, the efficiency of government procedures and institutions — but is also a question of legitimacy and authority. Indeed, without legitimacy and authority, public capacity is meaningless.

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The EU's most shameful betrayal

By Giles Fraser

The EU is designed precisely to create this kind of hollowed-out state — not only as a result of ECJ rulings and its collective treaty commitments to neoliberalism and austerity, but more importantly because it is designed to make states impervious to popular will and democratic choice by embedding them in supranational institutions. The failures of the British state throughout the pandemic show that even as we have formally seceded from the EU, Britain remains to all intents and purposes a member-state.

That is to say, the British state remains not only authoritarian and brittle, it is also incapable of expanding state capacity by converting popular will into government action. The most important limits confronting the British state are not to be found in its borrowing capacity or fiscal rectitude, or its capacity to cut trade deals beyond Brussels, but in its relationship with its own citizens.

Five years since the Brexit referendum, and two years since the end of the transition period, Brexit remains in some fundamental ways, an unrealised vision — a promise of greater self-government, of national renewal, of popular autonomy. As the Government prolongs public restrictions and state technocrats pore over plans to normalise the bio-security state, the promise of taking back control seems as remote a prospect as ever.

Yet despite decades of atomisation, the early popular response to the pandemic — especially visible in the communal self-help networks — indicate that there is a deep impulse for social solidarity and collective empowerment. The only thing that’s lacking? Political vision.