Saunders tells the story of one of the more fascinating — and troubling — patronage networks ever developed. From 1947 until 1967 when it was exposed by the muckraking journalists at Ramparts, the Central Intelligence Agency acted as the United States’ unofficial Ministry of Culture, covertly organizing and financing conferences, musical performances, art shows, plays, films, books, magazines, and academic journals as a part of an extensive propaganda campaign Saunders calls the “cultural Cold War”. Originally focused on Western Europe, the cultural Cold War spread to Latin America, Asia, and Africa, and came to include domestic operations in violation of the Agency’s charter.

At the center of these operations was the Congress for Cultural Freedom. A front organization based in Paris, it was directed by a taciturn Estonian former salesman named Michael Josselson and a flamboyant Belarusian composer named Nicolas Nabokov, the first cousin of the novelist. This odd couple met in White Russian émigré circles in Weimar Berlin, found their way to US military intelligence during the war, and receive top billing in Saunders’ cast of hundreds. Who Paid the Piper? is as gripping as a spy novel, all the more so for being true.

According to Saunders, the CIA’s main objectives in waging the cultural Cold War were twofold. The first was to counter the Soviet narrative, widely held among intellectuals in Western Europe, that the United States was a soulless consumer society whose way of life was bereft of cultural achievement. The second was to foster and cultivate what became known at the Agency and State Department as the “Non-Communist Left”, a group of former communists disillusioned with the Soviet Union under Stalin, and who could be relied on to rally on behalf of values such as freedom of expression and democracy whenever criticism of US race relations and military adventures abroad was voiced. For these ends, the Agency decided, avant-garde art — atonal music, jazz, modernist literature, and, above all, abstract expressionist painting — would be particularly useful. “High culture,” Saunders writes, “was not only important as an anti-Communist line of defense, but also a bastion against a homogenized mass society.” It was what would allow the United States to lay claim to the mantle of “Western civilization” inherited from Europe after the devastation of the war.

During its first two decades, the CIA was probably the most culturally sophisticated workplace in the country. For its personnel it drew heavily on the brain drain from Europe and from graduates of the Ivy League, especially the aristocrats of Yale; by the mid-Sixties, half of its employees held advanced degrees, and almost a third held doctorates. Nicolas Nabokov was a friend of Diaghilev and Stravinsky; James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s chief of counter-intelligence, studied New Criticism and published Pound, William Carlos Williams, and E. E. Cummings in Yale’s literary magazine; British art critic Philip Dodd was not exaggerating when he said that in the Fifties the most perceptive critics of modern painting were to be found in Foggy Bottom. Many who worked at the agency took to their roles as cultural patrons with genuine relish: Tom Braden, assistant to Truman’s Director of Intelligence Allen Dulles, compared his colleagues to the Medici and Renaissance popes.

Initially, the main obstacle to the cultural Cold War were the paranoiacs and philistines in Congress, who, to this day, prefer kitsch to high culture, and for whom the Non-Communist and Communist Left was a distinction without a difference. In 1947, George Dondero, a Republican from Michigan, put the kibosh on “Advancing American Art”, a traveling exhibition supported by the State Department, whose budget was public. “Modern art is communistic,” Dondero said, “because it is distorted and ugly, because it does not glorify our beautiful country, our cheerful and smiling people, and our material progress.” Meanwhile, another Republican in his caucus claimed that, “If you know how to read them, modern paintings will disclose the weak spots in US fortifications, and such crucial constructions as the Boulder Dam.” To circumvent such embarrassments, which contributed to the perception the CIA was trying to combat, the Agency came up with an ingenious solution: using a small portion of Marshall Plan funds as an off-the-books slush fund to distribute “candy” without Congressional oversight.

The CIA had more tricks up its sleeve. Recognizing that cultural programs suspected of being astroturfed by the US state would be less effective as propaganda, the CIA laundered the money through a consortium of private foundations — including the Ford, Rockefeller, and Mellon Foundations, whose board of directors all maintained close personal and professional ties to the foreign policy establishment. These, alongside lesser-known foundations, spent the money directly, or funneled it through the Congress for Cultural Freedom.

It was, by all measures, a tremendous success. George Kennan, the architect of America’s containment policy, told the curators at MoMA, without a doubt the CIA’s most significant asset in the cultural Cold War, that he “would willingly trade the entire remaining inventory of political propaganda for the results that could be achieved” by institutions like the museum’s International Program. For America’s “cultural mandarins”, painters like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning were ideal vehicles for the worldview they were trying to promote. Their art “spoke to a specifically anti-Communist ideology, the ideology of freedom, of free enterprise. Non-figurative and politically silent, it was the very antithesis of socialist realism.”

When it came to literature, it is estimated that the CIA was responsible, in whole or in part, for the publication of at least 1,000 books, including translations of T.S. Eliot, Chekhov, and Pasternak. It sponsored the staging of a play by Gertrude Stein and film adaptations of George Orwell; it was responsible for the compendium The God That Failed, whose arguments about the Soviet Union are unknowingly regurgitated by Right-wing podcasters today. When the poet Robert Lowell had a manic episode that saw him strip naked and mount an equestrian statue in downtown Buenos Aires, he was straitjacketed and repatriated with the help of the Congress’ man in Latin America, who was acting as the CIA’s “leash”.

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One comes away from Who Paid the Piper? with the impression that there was hardly any important mid-century artist or intellectual who didn’t get a taste of the CIA’s candy. The Beats and the Black Arts Movement seem to have come away clean, but following Saunders’ methods, I looked into the career of my favorite poet of the period, Frank O’Hara, who worked at MoMA’s International Division. I discovered that the “New Spanish Painting and Sculpture” show he set up was financed with a grant from the CBS Foundation, which was headed by the cigar mogul William Paley, a personal friend of Allen Dulles. O’Hara’s itinerary in Spain — which is listed in the first two lines of his beloved poem “Having a Coke With You” — was made possible by a CIA front.

Magazines too, including The New Yorker, were beneficiaries. Dwight Macdonald’s Partisan Review — the great magazine of its era — could thank the intelligence community not only for secret payments, but also for tax-exempt status, improved circulation, and the platforming of its articles in midcult organs like Time, whose VP was then moonlighting as a psychological warfare specialist. No story of the cultural Cold War could exclude the London-based Encounter (the Congress for Cultural Freedom’s flagship journal) co-founded by the New York intellectual Irving Kristol and the British poet Stephen Spender, who comes off as a pathetic, self-deluding ignoramus in Saunders’ account. To name only a few, W.H. Auden, Isaiah Berlin, Jorge Luis Borges, Nancy Mitford, and Bertrand Russell all appeared in its pages.

I finished Who Paid the Piper? with mixed emotions. On the one hand, if we’re going to have a ruling class, it’s better for it to have good taste. There have always been patrons, but what is historically unique about today’s moguls, oligarchs, and financiers is that they show no interest whatsoever in high culture; indeed, things have got so bad that taste is no longer thought necessary to legitimize wealth, or even to distinguish the ultra-rich from competitors. In its long, sordid history as an instrument of that class, the CIA has wasted money on worse things than non-objective art, little magazines, and 12-tone compositions.

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Today, what are politely called the intelligence and defense communities seem perfectly content to dispense with such niceties as cultural legitimation, and to rely instead on brute force and flooding the zone of everyone’s attention with shit.

On the other hand, in the name of democracy, market competition, and freedom of expression the American state pursued a program insulated from public scrutiny, damaged the careers of artists who were unwilling to play ball, and grafted the thorn of propaganda onto the flower of 20 years of cultural production. In her concluding assessment of the cultural Cold War, Saunders does not mince words:

Behind the ‘unexamined nostalgia for the “Golden Days” of American intelligence’ lay a much more devastating truth: the same people who read Dante and went to Yale and were educated in civic virtue recruited Nazis, manipulated the outcome of democratic elections, gave LSD to unwitting subjects, opened the mail of thousands of American citizens, overthrew governments, supported dictatorships, plotted assassinations, and engineered the Bay of Pigs disaster. ‘In the name of what?’ asked one critic. ‘Not civic virtue, but empire.’

I had a similar feeling of ambivalence when, shortly after, I read that the Trump administration would be zeroing out the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. State funding is a way for society to show what is valuable to it: the amount of money distributed by the NEA could be found in the cushions of the couches at the Pentagon, and the administration is not getting out of the culture game altogether. Instead it is proposing to shower cash on reactionary kitsch: to take but one example, in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, $40 million was appropriated to build a National Garden of American Heroes, which would feature 250 statues of such worthies as the gun-manufacturer Samuel Colt, the mouse-manufacturer Walt Disney, William “Wild Bill” Donovan (the founder of the CIA) and Sam Walton (the founder of Walmart). Why? According to the text of the 2021 Executive Order 13978 in which the idea was originally proposed, “The National Garden is America’s answer to [a] reckless attempt to erase our heroes, values, and entire way of life. On its grounds, the devastation and discord of the moment will be overcome with abiding love of country and lasting patriotism. This is the American way.” George Dondero couldn’t have said it better himself.

Yet I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed to learn how many imprints, magazines, and artists whose work I admired, in no small part because of their willingness to oppose state policy, had applied for grants in the first place. Although the NEA, founded in 1965, is — or was — an independent federal agency, it is still, like the infinitely more consequential USAID, an arm of US soft power. So often we are blackmailed into supporting dubious institutions because the short-term consequences of dismantling them for the people who are dependent on their funding would be disastrous. Money, as I was saying, is dirty, whether it comes from inheritance, private foundations, or the state; at the end of the day, it is hard to begrudge artists who are doing something more interesting than the market is willing to reward from getting it however they can. A world in which there is both hard and soft power may be preferable to a world in which there is only hard power, but it is important to remember that he who pays the piper sometimes calls a discordant tune.

Yet the deal also provides Ukraine with a security guarantee modeled after NATO’s Article 5. It doesn’t recognize Moscow’s territorial claims as a legal matter. And it stipulates Russian withdrawal from several territories that it claims to control. Under the plan, some $100 billion in expropriated Russian assets will be used to fund Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction. President Trump has given Ukraine a week to accept this deal; it is unclear which of its 28 points can be negotiated, if any.

Capitals in Western and Northern Europe are irate, feeling cut out of the process and confused by an apparently dovish turn in Washington’s approach after a few weeks during which Trump had ratcheted up pressure on the Kremlin. They shouldn’t be surprised: The Ukraine settlement is part of Trump’s broader effort to free America from its strategic entanglements in Europe (and the Middle East) to focus on more strategically crucial — and politically rewarding — regions.

The hawks and Atlanticists still operate on the assumption that America’s and Europe’s strategic interests are deeply aligned. Trump, like many ordinary Americans and Europeans, understands that the age of alignment is over, and that a fundamental break with the 20th-century arrangements was long overdue.

Since the end of World War II, the pursuit of three core interests has defined American grand strategy. First was the security of postwar Western Europe. Through military alliances like NATO and economic programs such as the Marshall Plan, Washington provided an effective bulwark against both the forward expansion of the Soviet Union and the threat of revolution within the war-shattered European societies. 

Second, the United States has maintained a considerable presence in the Persian Gulf region, assuming Britain’s former role as the principal outside power to ensure continued Western access to the region’s oil. Third, America has viewed the East Asia-Pacific region as a core strategic interest, ever since the seizure of the Philippines by President William McKinley during the Spanish-American War in 1898, which protected US commercial entry into Asia and signaled Washington’s ambitions as a global power.

The three regions of interests formed a hierarchy of sorts: Europe first, the Middle East second, and Asia third. And despite runaway globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of China, this hierarchy of priorities has largely remained consistent. The past several US administrations doubled down on toppling regimes in the Middle East while acting as though Western Europe requires the same amount of US assistance that was needed to remedy the destruction of WWII and fend off Communism.

Despite President Barack Obama’s promises to “pivot to Asia” in response to China’s rise, Washington launched interventions in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, while expanding military aid to support the actions of other states in Mozambique, Ukraine, and Gaza, among others. President Joe Biden likewise maintained the priority of Europe and the Middle East, notwithstanding his withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Now, a quarter century into the new century and an additional decade since the end of the Cold War, the second Trump administration is finally giving shape to a new, post-Cold War framework of American grand strategy.

This Trump Doctrine appears to be a reorientation of American strategic interests for the 21st century. While media critics initially framed Trump as an “isolationist,” his record has unambiguously disproved that allegation. This doctrine is best understood not through universal principles, but by examining how Trump is diverging from America’s traditional priorities and interests. 

At the heart of the president’s vision is a desire to devolve European security back to European states and to disengage from the sands of the Middle East. Reducing American commitments in those two regions is paired with an activist approach to the Western Hemisphere, while playing hardball economic statecraft with Beijing. While the execution of this reorientation has been mixed and, in several cases, dangerously flawed, the Trump Doctrine is a much needed update to last century’s strategic status quo.

Start with Europe. American presence in Europe has been consistent since World War I. After assisting the European allies in two world wars, Washington turned its attention to the long-term containment, and later “rollback,” of Soviet Communism. The United States stationed troops throughout Europe, and granted institutionalized security guarantees to NATO allies, all under the shadow of nuclear war.  

America paired this projection of military power with the largest foreign-aid program in global history: the Marshall Plan. Between 1948 and 1952, the United States supplied more than $13 billion in economic assistance to Western Europe, equivalent to approximately $160 billion today. The Marshall Plan acted as a mass subsidy for postwar social and Christian democracy, thus staving off revolution and realignment with the Communist sphere.

While the Soviet threat is no more, and the Continent has long since recovered from the destruction of World War II, Europe has continued to stay at the forefront of American foreign policy. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration sounded Cold War-era civilizational rhetoric. “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine,” Biden claimed in his 2024 State of the Union Address, “I assure you he will not.” 

Vladimir Putin’s Russia came to serve as a substitute for Stalin’s USSR in the minds of hawks in Brussels, London, and Washington. This, despite contemporary Russia’s weakness relative to a Soviet Union that had just defeated the Nazi war machine, occupied most of Central Europe, and installed puppet governments in multiple states. While Soviets steamrolled through half the Continent, today’s Russia has gotten stuck in an embarrassing war of attrition with one of the poorest countries in Europe, experiencing casualties that dwarf those of the Soviet-Afghan War. Despite Cold Warrior fantasies to the contrary, the conquest of Europe is not on the agenda for a country that can’t manage the conquest of eastern Ukraine.

That said, Russia’s resolve in Ukraine shouldn’t be underestimated, either. Putin has stated that he considers Ukrainian accession to be an existential threat to Russia: whether or not you believe him, it is clear that the Russians are not about to retreat empty-handed. Despite a massive Western sanctions regime, considerable aid to Ukraine, and a coup attempt, there has been little evidence that Russian military efforts are on the brink of collapse.

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Having borne high costs, Putin’s behavior reveals his belief that the costs of surrender are still higher. The last three and a half years have shown that Putin is committed to this conflict for the long haul, and that Moscow will continue expending the resources necessary to pursue its objectives in Donbas. Biden’s strategy was to lean into that resolve, running down Russian resources in the hopes that Putin would withdraw from Ukraine or lose domestic support at home. Neither outcome came to pass, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives were destroyed in the bargain.

Trump, by contrast, has long disdained — and now explicitly broken with — the postwar status quo in Europe. Yet rather than abandoning Ukraine, his approach has involved consistent efforts to pressure both Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin to the bargaining table, while passing responsibility for European security to the likes of Germany, France, and Poland.  

Trump hasn’t been soft on Russia — he has continued to provide considerable aid to Ukraine, granted permission to use Western weapons on targets within Russian territory, and imposed a new set of extremely harsh sanctions on Russian oil following the cancellation of peace talks in Budapest this autumn. However, these actions aren’t instruments of attrition, but rather intended to pressure Putin to negotiate. Biden’s policies were intended to extend the war by keeping Ukraine in the fight. Trump’s approach, in contrast, has been focused on ending the conflict altogether.

The new 28-point peace plan comes at a moment when the United States has started deporting Ukrainian refugees so that they can be drafted into the Ukrainian military, with Zelensky saying of the deportees, “We’ll find good use for them.” If this is what Ukraine’s defense now relies on, a deal is best approved sooner rather than later. The plan’s core features are consistent with what smarter analysts have been saying for multiple years now. Ukraine is denied NATO accession but is granted a non-NATO security guarantee and a pathway to EU membership, while Russia keeps the territory it has held behind a line of conflict that continues to creep westward. While it remains to be seen if the proposal will be adopted, it offers the opportunity to stop Ukraine’s continued bleeding. Zelensky would be wise to accept it and focus on his country’s recovery and opportunities as a member of the European Union.

In the meantime, the administration has maintained a consistent message that the days of European “dependency” on Washington are coming to a close. While this initially sparked a panic that Trump was about to withdraw from NATO, this has not happened. Instead, European leaders have now agreed to a new distribution of burden-sharing by committing to invest 5% of GDP annually on their own security by 2035. Eighty years after the end of World War II, the responsibility for European security is being handed back to Europe in a fraught but measured transition.

Which brings us to the Middle East. American strategy in that region has also largely been determined by the postwar status quo, with a considerably more imperial bent than in Europe.  US involvement began with treaties ensuring American access to oil in 1928 and 1944, coinciding with the handoff of Western hegemony from the declining British Empire to the rising American imperium. 

The struggle to control access to the region’s natural resources persisted throughout the Cold War, with ambiguous CIA involvement in the 1949 Syrian coup d’état followed by the CIA-led operation to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran after he nationalized Iranian oil. Efforts to prevent Soviet capture of the Persian Gulf region led to numerous interventions, proxy wars, and covert operations, a habit that wasn’t broken when the Soviet Union fell.

Here, too, Trump has departed from the status quo. Beginning in the 2016 Republican primary, when he described the Iraq War as a “big fat mistake,” Trump has consistently expressed a desire to get the United States out of the Middle East. The result has been a significant shift in both policy and public discourse. While Trump received some criticism for negotiating with the Taliban, his goal of ending the American occupation of Afghanistan after 20 years of continuous and counterproductive military presence has been one of his chief achievements — even if it was Biden who pulled the final Bandaid.

Trump’s second term has involved new challenges, above all the war in Gaza. While Trump has followed an approach similar to the policy pursued in Ukraine — supplying significant aid to Israel while pressuring both sides to reach a negotiated settlement — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently derailed American attempts at diplomacy. The Israeli attack on Iran scuttled US efforts to negotiate a new treaty governing the Iranian nuclear program and ultimately pulled America into military action, albeit in a manner designed to limit escalation.

The Jewish state’s strike on Iran — and similar attacks on targets within the sovereign borders of Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Qatar, and Yemen — severely undermine the strategic interests of the United States, both in the region and globally. At a moment when Trump is attempting to turn the ship of American policy around, Israel continues to sow chaos among its neighbors. While “mowing the lawn” in the region may (or may not) be in the best interests of Israel’s security, it is destabilizing, and impels Washington to deploy back to a region Americans across the political spectrum are resolved to leave behind.

Furthermore, Israel’s incommensurate response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack has been a disaster for American legitimacy abroad in increasingly multipolar times. Israeli impunity has fueled claims of Western hypocrisy, pushing states out of reach of American influence as its material supremacy is increasingly eroded. The peace plan currently in place for Gaza — potentially the crowning achievement of Trump’s presidency and recently adopted by the United Nations — rests on an extremely fragile ceasefire which has already been violated a number of times.  

If Trump wants to pacify and deprioritize the Gulf region, he will need to ensure that Netanyahu does not derail his strategy to extricate America from the Middle East. He has, so far, failed on that count.

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Then there is the Asia-Pacific region.  Here, Trump has maintained the greatest strategic continuity with his predecessors. Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, advocated for what he called “a foreign policy for the middle class,” focusing on industrial renewal at home and measured economic competition with China, undergirded by stable security commitments to allies in the Indo-Pacific. 

At the macro level, Trump’s approach to Asia has emphasized the same points: self-sufficiency in the tech domain, coercive economic statecraft, and secure trans-Pacific commerce, while attempting to revive American industry. While avoiding the previous administration’s direct provocations of China and apocalyptic rhetoric concerning global democracy, Trump has again made some missteps in execution that have undermined America’s position in the Pacific.

Trump’s affinity for tariffs has been the distinguishing characteristic of his foreign policy. As an instrument of statecraft, tariffs have a few different logics. First, a regime of broad, long-term tariffs on imports are designed to protect domestic industry from being undercut by foreign producers, a key concern among Trump’s base. 

Second, tariffs can be used in a way similar to sanctions, as an instrument of economic coercion, imposing costs on a specific state until it cedes to American demands. This use of tariffs involves sanctions targeted at a specific country, with clear conditions for their removal. Finally, tariffs have historically been used as a revenue source, requiring a broad, continuous application while maintaining significant trade relationships to keep the revenue flowing.

The issue is that the Trump administration has claimed all three of these logics at one time or another, despite that they are mutually exclusive. Protectionist policies would not involve the on-again, off-again application of coercive tariffs, which should not be broadly applied to loyal trading partners; and tariffs as a source of revenue boost consumer prices in the long run, without the revitalization of domestic industry. For tariffs to be an effective instrument of policy, there needs to be a clear strategic objective guiding their use. Trump’s tariff policy has been strategically incoherent.

While the tariffs levied against stalwart American allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Thailand have allowed Trump to extract some marginal concessions on trade policy, raising trade barriers against these countries is deleterious to American interests for two reasons. First, it renders trade with the United States more difficult, costly, and unpredictable, goading allies to find more dependable trading partners (hint: like China). If these policies are meant to help America compete economically with Beijing through cutting better deals, they have been counterproductive. The long-run effects of playing economic hardball will be a decreased reliance on trade with America.

Second, tariffs on military allies undercut their ability to invest in their own security. Trump’s demands of Asian allies have been similar to the demands he has made of Europe — America will help those who help themselves. Encouraging allies to raise their own defense spending has been a core component of Trump’s approach to foreign relations. Such demands are difficult to fulfill, however, when facing a punitive tariff regime imposed by the global hegemon. 

Antagonizing allies in the Pacific undermines the American security architecture, drives Asian states into closer economic ties with China, and places the costs of these missteps on American consumers. While macro-level strategy in the Pacific has been conventional, its execution requires a reevaluation.

Finally, there is Latin America. The true revisionism in Trump’s strategic orientation is taking place here, much closer to home. American engagement in the Western Hemisphere has historically oscillated between neglect and heavy-handed intervention. From the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary, which endorsed US intervention into unstable or uncooperative South American countries, successive administrations justified US dominance over Latin America as a means to protect its own backyard. 

Today, Trump’s foreign policy marks a return to that logic after decades of relative neglect during the post-Cold War focus on the Middle East. Trump, it seems, is staging something of a sequel to the Roosevelt Corollary. His administration has revived a muscular and interventionist approach to the Americas — justified in the language of law enforcement and border control, rather than the old rhetoric of hemispheric solidarity. 

Washington has used coercive diplomacy, sanctions, and military threats, including moving an aircraft carrier group to waters just off Venezuela’s shores, under the pretext of deterring narco-traffickers. Trump’s turn to South America suggests an updated form of gunboat diplomacy aimed at maintaining dominance of the hemisphere and curbing the influence of rivals like China.

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Yet the pursuit of regime change and coercive diplomacy in Latin America risks deepening the very crises it purports to solve. In countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, US pressure has hardened authoritarian resolve, without producing stable alternatives. Interventions framed as humanitarian or anti-narcotics operations will create disorder in Latin America, destabilize local economies, empower non-state armed groups (primarily the established cartels), and push displaced populations northward, fueling the very migration surges that Trump has pledged to stop.  

The expansion of US involvement in regional politics has also provided new openings for Chinese influence. As Washington relies on sanctions and pressure, Beijing offers a menu of loans, infrastructure, and trade that pulls Latin American states further into its economic orbit. The outcome is a paradoxical weakening of US influence in its own hemisphere.

Trump’s Western Hemisphere strategy, then, reflects both regression and innovation: a reassertion of American primacy through coercion, but couched in the language of sovereignty and border control. Whether this revived “gunboat diplomacy” can secure American interests without repeating the errors of past interventions remains an open question. What is clear is that the Western Hemisphere, once peripheral to US grand strategy, has again become a central concern of foreign policy.

Taken together, these regional realignments suggest not a retreat of American power, but its reorganization. The Trump Doctrine doesn’t mark an abdication of global leadership so much as a recalibration of it — an attempt to convert sprawling, open-ended commitments into a more contained and transactional system of influence. Europe and the Middle East are being nudged toward self-sufficiency, the Pacific remains the primary arena of great-power competition, and the Western Hemisphere has reemerged as a laboratory for coercive diplomacy and border-focused security politics. 

The underlying logic is one of consolidation: a recognition that America’s resources, attention, and legitimacy are finite, and that sustaining primacy requires pruning rather than perpetual expansion.

Trump’s style has suggested a desire to cut America’s losses in peripheral regions and an experimental exercise of alternative modes of power in Asia and South America. For all its inconsistencies and failures of execution, the Trump Doctrine represents an effort to realign America’s commitments with its interests. The resulting strategy is untidy, often improvised, and occasionally self-defeating, yet it gestures toward a long-delayed reckoning with the limits of American reach.  

After decades spent expanding a liberal order now fraying at its edges, Washington is beginning to ask what can — and what should — be preserved. The answer, imperfect as it may be, is the outline of a humbler but more deliberate kind of primacy: a United States that still seeks to shape the world, but finally on terms it can sustain.

I don’t mean the world wars should be forgotten as historical events. The three-decade conflict of 1914 to 1945, best thought of as a single conflict in two phases, was the greatest catastrophe in human history to date, causing 100 million deaths, all told. The war ended with cities and factories in Europe and Asia in ruins, millions of displaced people, the rapid decolonization of the bankrupt European empires, the emergence of the United States as the preeminent power amid the wreckage, and the half-century Soviet-American Cold War. As long as civilization exists, that three-decade cataclysm will never be forgotten.

But when it comes to thinking about and making foreign policy, the world wars provide few if any “lessons of history” that are of value in today’s world. On the contrary, parallels with the events of 1914-1945 — whether drawn by historians, pundits, or policymakers — are likely to be harmful, by trying to impose anachronistic patterns on the realities of our time. 

The peddling of these false parallels — by media outlets in search of audiences, politicians striking heroic poses, and academics who want to be celebrities — has made the public think that today’s world is far more dangerous and unstable than it actually is. According to a recent YouGov poll, 22% of Americans think it is very likely that there will be another world war in the next 10 years, and another 39% think it is somewhat likely. 

Many of the alleged parallels that are cited are so abstract that they are also parallels between our age and many other periods in history as well — say, the Crimean War, or the age of the French Revolution, or the wars of the Reformation in Europe.

For example, Lord David Alton of Liverpool published an essay in February arguing that conflicts in the Middle East; tensions over Taiwan; the race to secure rare-earth minerals; and the growing alliance between China, Iran, and Russia — all suggest “parallels between the world wars and today’s circumstances.” Last year in Foreign Affairs, Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins published an essay headlined: “The Next Global War: How Today’s Regional Conflicts Resemble the Ones That Produced World War II.” He followed it up with an essay in Bloomberg headlined: “It’s Looking a Lot Like World War II Out There.”

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“Our world resembles the 1930s more than we might think,” Brands wrote, “Now, as then, the balance of power is shifting ominously. Violent autocracies are seeking expansive empires. Ties between authoritarian states are growing stronger; regional conflicts are becoming interwoven.” Then he added: “To be sure, the parallels are inexact.”

Indeed, they are so inexact as to be virtually nonexistent.

In the 1930s, outside of the Americas, most of the world was dominated by the British empire and other European colonial empires, with Germany, Italy, and Japan seeking to conquer other countries in order to establish their own regional empires. Where are the “violent autocracies” that “are seeking expansive empires” today? 

Putin’s Russia might fit the bill. It has invaded Ukraine to annex Crimea and eastern Ukraine. Post-Soviet Russia, which to date has not won its proxy war with the United States and Europe in Ukraine, can threaten other weak neighbors like the Baltic States. But it lacks the capacity to conquer much of Eastern and Western Europe as both Imperial Germany and Nazi Germany did.

Nor is China a suitable candidate. Chinese troops have engaged in limited border conflicts with India and harassed other maritime nations in the South China Sea. But those limited acts of aggression cannot be compared to Japan’s invasion and occupation of much of East and Southeast Asia before and during World War II. 

Compare this to 1914, when a German secret program envisioned not only an authoritarian German-ruled Central European economic bloc, but also the annexation by force of chunks of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg.  Much of this was brought to fruition in 1918, when the treaty of Brest-Litovsk ceded Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic States to Imperial Germany. The treaty’s other signatory was the new Communist regime of Vladimir Lenin, who had been transported to Tsarist Russia with the help of the German government.

Hitler’s territorial program was even more radical, involving the use of mass murder and deliberate starvation to depopulate Eastern Europe and Russia and make room for German colonists. No great power today, not even Putin’s revanchist Russia, has anything remotely resembling the grandiose plans of Imperial and Nazi Germany or Japan’s design for an autarkic Asian empire.

In the early 21st century, the equivalents of empires are competitive trade blocs that are established by diplomacy, not military conquest. In today’s multipolar world order, contemporary great powers use trade blocs to magnify their home markets. The goal is to promote national champions in large-scale industrial sectors, those characterized by increasing returns to scale — there’s a reason we don’t have mom-and-pop tire factories — or network effects — it’s better to have two rail lines linking 200 towns than 100 individual lines. The United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the successor to NAFTA, has created a market of more than 500 million people, augmenting America’s home market of 340 million inhabitants. The European Union has more than 450 million people.

For its part, China, in addition to seeking bilateral economic agreements with countries around the world, has persuaded 14 other Asia-Pacific nations to join its Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership — without invading and occupying a single one of them. With its global Belt and Road Initiative, combining its overland “Silk Road Economic Belt” with its “Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road,” China has sent bankers, development specialists, and infrastructure experts to countries, not soldiers. Beijing’s only acknowledged overseas military base is one in Djibouti, established in 2016.

Russia, with a mere 143 million people, has collaborated with Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan to form the Eurasian Economic Union, boasting more than 180 million people. The estimated 3 million inhabitants of the Ukrainian territories conquered by Russia add little to the population and home market of Russia’s Eurasian bloc, whatever the strategic value of the conquered territories might be to the Putin regime.

When it comes to military technologies and strategies, the differences between our time and the age of the world wars are also profound. Sudden cyberattacks on enemy infrastructure and telecommunications might be possible, but surprise attacks like Japan’s assault on Pearl Harbor or Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union will not be repeated in our age of global satellite surveillance.

The age of mass conscription of citizens as cannon fodder in colossal wars is a thing of the past, too. As wars come to be fought by conventional missiles and drones and autonomous forces, along with technicians and special forces, mass armies with millions of conscripts are as obsolete as the cavalry. 

Moreover, as Edward Luttwak has pointed out, the individualistic citizens of one-child or two-child families, in “post-heroic” autocracies like China and Russia as well as in democracies, would be reluctant to serve in campaigns outside of their nation’s borders. In World War II, 40% percent of Americans who served were volunteers; 4 out of 10 American soldiers were volunteers in World War I, as well.

But according to YouGov, 60% of Americans who were recently polled say that in the event of a new world war, they would be unable to serve because of age or disability; 13% say they would refuse to serve if drafted; 9% say they would serve if drafted but would not volunteer; only 6% say they would volunteer for service.

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Another source of confusion arises from describing all great-power rivalries, even indirect and limited ones, as “world wars.” In April, Fiona Hill, a former Trump national-security official, told Britain’s Channel Four, “We’re already in a situation where you could describe this as World War II structurally. We’ve got a hot war in Europe at the moment that’s had around a million casualties in terms of people either killed or severely wounded, millions of refugees, and all kinds of knock-on effects. That’s very similar to what happened in World War I and World War II.” 

It is more accurate to describe today’s geopolitical pattern as Cold War II, not World War III. In Cold War II, as in Cold War I between 1946 and 1990, there are two blocs — Washington and its European and East Asian allies and its Arab and Israeli allies in the Middle East against a loose coalition of China, Russia, and Iran. The grinding attrition of the war in Ukraine may bring to mind the trenches in World War I, but the war itself is similar to the proxy wars among America, the Soviet Union, and China that were fought in Korea, Indochina, and Afghanistan in the first cold war. In Cold War II, as in Cold War I, the leaders of each bloc engage not only in limited proxy warfare, but also in arms races, space races, competition to win the favor of nonaligned nations, and various forms of subversion and sabotage, without bombing or invading each other’s homelands. And at some point, Cold War II is likely to end in a détente or what Boris Yeltsin called “a cold peace,” not in anything like the devastation, occupation, and reconstruction of defeated Germany and Japan eighty years ago. 

In addition to the example of the first Cold War, a historical comparison that might be useful is provided by the mercantilist rivalries of the 17th century through the 19th, when European powers like Britain, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal fought limited wars outside of Europe with the goal of promoting their own commercial and industrial interests. The citizens of European countries often were little affected by these low-level skirmishes to control sea lanes or sugar islands or foreign markets outside of Europe.

But even these historical parallels, though more plausible than analogies with the world wars, should be handled with care. Unlike today’s Hollywood movies, today’s global conflicts are not an endless series of remakes of earlier stories. Rummaging through historical archives for specious precedents is a distraction from the necessary effort to understand what is genuinely new — and newly dangerous — in our own time. 

A lavish Soviet-Italian co-production featuring a mostly British and American cast, Waterloo was a pronounced flop at the time, its box office failure putting paid to Kubrick’s chances of making his own Napoleon film.  Yet Waterloo has since won a devoted audience for its unreplicable scope, unlike anything else in English-language cinema. “You just couldn’t afford to get that many people together in Hollywood or anywhere else,” Bondarchuk boasted at the time. He was right: 15,000 Soviet infantry conscripts march across the screen and then die — the film ends with the entire cast of extras sprawled dead across the battlefield — in what is surely the only English-language work of socialist realism. Any small boy fighting battles on the living-room floor — or any adult wargamer — will recognize the joy and loving attention to detail with which Bondarchuk assembles and then destroys his vast armies.

The peacock brilliance of the era’s uniforms lend themselves to such reveries, yet the bloody business of war is not evaded. Ranks of cannon belch smoke and flame; sabers glitter in five separate, lovingly-filmed cavalry charges; entire hillsides flicker with campfire light on the eve of battle; and thousands of troops ford rivers and trudge through the mud: the dazzling scale is the film’s entire point. Ostensibly an anti-war movie, the effect is instead of a kind of boyish war pornography: for all the pointless deaths, in a film in which all deaths are inglorious, the film’s message is subverted by the sheer spectacle of it all.

Flitting between the perspectives of the great generals, whose unruffled exteriors mask inner doubt, voiced by interior monologues, and the sheer terror of the ordinary soldiers, the film has a marked Tolstoyan quality. The effect is entirely intentional: its genesis was in Bondarchuk’s earlier adaptation of War and Peace, a state-mandated prestige project explicitly calculated to cow the decadent West with its sheer scale and grandeur, the filmic equivalent of the contemporary space race.

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Born in the southern Ukrainian village of Bilozerka, Bondarchuk was conscripted into the Soviet Army in 1942, serving in the Caucasus front south of Stalingrad. At one point in Grozny, according to the Mosfilm studio, Bondarchuk sheltered from an artillery barrage “in a trench that could become his grave at any moment… It seemed as if the earth was burning and iron was melting. The eerie smell of charred human flesh permeated the air.” Pressing himself into the dirt, he locked eyes with a stray dog, its fur scorched by flame, which had approached his foxhole: “Sergei Fyodorovich remembered the dog’s gaze, filled with terror, for the rest of his life. Later, in a scene from War and Peace, he filmed the eyes of a wolf who also looked at people as monsters.” As Bondarchuk later remarked in his treatise on acting, “I belong to the generation that the war found in the prime of life, which took part in it and repaid with their lives for the joy of a peaceful life. The war still leaves a wound in the soul.”

Yet the war’s horror and suffering was also for the Soviet Union a kind of apotheosis: victory over the Nazi invader elevated the USSR into a great imperial state, the master of half of Europe and a great power as never before or since in Russia’s history. Having won the war, the Soviet Union now contested the contours of an uneasy peace in which open conflict was, for the most part, too terrible to contemplate. And so, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis broke, Bondarchuk was for the second time in his life conscripted for a great state-directed battle of prestige: for only his second directorial feature, he was chosen by the Soviet Ministry of Culture to direct War and Peace, a riposte to Hollywood’s recent adaptation of Tolstoy’s epic. As the historian Denise Youngblood observes, Bondarchuk’s War and Peace “was a tribute to the might and righteousness of the Russian people, which fit well with the Russocentrism of the USSR in the late Sixties under Brezhnev. A Russian victory was a Soviet victory.” Still the most expensive film ever made — around $700 million in today’s money — Bondarchuk’s seven-hour epic (watchable for free on Mosfilm’s YouTube account) succeeds more than anything through sheer scale.

War and Peace was planned like a military campaign, deploying thousands of Red Army troops to recreate the great battles of Austerlitz and Borodino. And like Russian military campaigns before and since, the production typified not only the wasteful planning failures but also the vast resources, as well as the sheer dogged determination, which only Mother Russia could bring to bear in executing the will of its leaders. A scale replica of Moscow was built and burned to the ground as a backdrop, against which his actors had only one chance to deliver their lines perfectly or wreck the entire production. Banned from using Western film stock, Bondarchuk struggled with the poor quality reels available to him, with mosquitoes embedded in the emulsion, often having to reshoot entire scenes with his cast of thousands when the film failed. His staff cowered before him, as he became an increasingly dictatorial presence on set. “The director has studied all the material for the film; he alone knows everything,” Bondarchuk wrote at the time. “He is tsar and god.”

Such was the stress of the film’s production, and the unreasonable schedule forced on him by the Kremlin, that Bondarchuk died twice making it. Resuscitated from both heart attacks, the second time after four minutes of clinical death in which his experience of blinding white light later inspired Prince Bolkonsky’s death scene, a near-broken Bondarchuk still delivered his epic on time. The effect was as dazzling as intended. Bondarchuk’s innovation of the “cannonball-eye view”, where the camera hurtles towards the ground and its doomed human targets, achieved everything the Kremlin had desired of him. “English filmmakers, seeing the footage shot with a “flying camera,” asked… in amazement: “How was this filmed?!”, Mosfilm’s website still boasts: “That’s how it was filmed — Russian ingenuity and military technology.” In 1969, the same year War and Peace won the first ever Soviet Oscar for best foreign-language film, Bondarchuk began filming Waterloo.

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For its own obscure reasons, the Soviet state had decreed that filming should take place in Uzhgorod, then on the Soviet Union’s far-western border, and today that of Ukraine. The region was a closed military zone, to the frustration of the Western publicity department struggling to bring journalists to the set. Only the year before, soldiers from the Transcarpathian Military District had crossed the border to crush the Prague Spring. The grizzled extras portraying Napoleon’s Old Guard had taken part in the campaign, a swift and forceful decapitation of a wavering client state Putin would later try, and fail, to replicate in Ukraine. Eleven of the 128th Guards Motor Rifle Division, one of the units drafted to make the film, had been killed in Czechoslovakia: today a Mountain Assault Division fighting for independent Ukraine against Russia, its modern successors suffer far higher casualties grappling with the Kremlin’s current wasteful prestige project.

The region’s sloping vineyards, in the foothills of the Carpathians, make a poor visual match for Belgium: instead of filming somewhere flatter, the Soviet Army Corps of Engineers leveled two hillsides in a vast geoengineering project simply, one assumes, because they could. Five thousand trees were planted to create a forest for Napoleon’s infantry to fight through, and six miles of irrigation pipes laid to recreate the muddy conditions of the battlefield. Amputee veterans of the Great Patriotic War were rounded up from surrounding villages to add a touch of body horror (later excised by the film’s Western editors). Horses requisitioned from nearby collective farms were injected with vodka to play dead: most then died as a result. An unknown number of horses were also killed in stunt scenes only filmed when the “sentimental English” cast were away from set, and since excised from broadcast. One trooper was trampled to death in the film’s great cavalry charge sequence, the Italian cameraman Daniele Nannuzzi would later reveal: “He goes down and the horses all ran over on his body. One Russian soldier in Russia — the life of one man was not so important at this time.”

Many of the film’s most distinctive sequences — the general soberly riding off a battlefield littered with corpses at the end, the aerial shots of Ney’s doomed cavalry sweeping and breaking against infantry squares — were directly lifted from Bondarchuk’s 35-minute long depiction of the Battle of Borodino in War and Peace. Yet the effect is even more dazzling. With Waterloo, Bondarchuk was granted the opportunity to reduce War and Peace to its most spectacular essence: stripping away the tortured love affairs, high-society gossip and philosophical discursions to present two hours of pure, lovingly filmed combat. Few films can ever have blurred the line more effectively between entertainment and generalship: the film’s senior military consultant, the Hero of the Soviet Union Lt Gen Alexander Luchinsky, had commanded the 28th Army in Operation Bagration, the largest and most successful Allied action of the entire war.

The result is overpowering: war has simply never been filmed like this, before or since. And if there is one thing that Waterloo brings to the screen that is beyond all comparison, it is the film’s depiction of cavalry. The scene depicting the charge of the Scots Greys — filmed, in part, in dreamlike slow motion, channeling Lady Butler’s “Scotland Forever!” — and the counter-charge of Napoleon’s Polish Lancers is rightly celebrated as one of the great spectacles of cinema. So expressive is the scene of the vanished chivalry of war, so alien to the grim, drone-haunted battlefields of today’s Ukraine, that it comes as a shock to realize that the Soviet Union had only stood down its last cavalry division 14 years before filming began. Indeed, contrary to popular modern narratives, the Soviet Army had massively expanded its cavalry forces during the Second World War, and utilized them profitably across a landscape which, today as then, horses can negotiate more easily than armored vehicles. In making War and Peace, Bondarchuk and his cavalry consultant, Lt Gen Nikolai Oslikovsky, who had successfully commanded the 3rd Guard Cavalry Corps across the Eastern Front all the way to the Elbe — it was Oslikovsky’s cavalry scouts who famously linked up with advancing American troops — proposed that the Red Army form a cavalry unit purely for film purposes. The proposal was accepted by the Kremlin: Oslikovsky, who had finished his soldiering career as the commandant of the Higher Red Banner Cavalry Officer School, requisitioned mounts and riders from the Transcaucasian and Turkestan Military Districts, where horse-drawn mountain artillery was still in use, and re-activated recently retired cavalry officers and NCOs to train a new generation of horsemen.

Just as did War and Peace, Waterloo spectacularly employed the 1,500 troopers of Bondarchuk’s new creation, the 11th Separate Cavalry Regiment now attached to Mosfilm Studios, supplemented by the Arabian horses and riders of the Moscow Militia. When we watch the cavalry charges in Waterloo, what we are witnessing is not merely thrilling filmmaking but an unbroken link in Russia’s cavalry history, stretching back long beyond the Soviet Union to the cossack units of Tsarist Russia, and beyond them to the furthest historical horizon of the Eurasian Steppe: these few glorious minutes are built on thousands of years of tradition. In making War and Peace, and then Waterloo, Bondarchuk saved this historical link to Russia’s military past: it is no accident, perhaps, that the 11th Separate Cavalry Regiment has since been repurposed as a prominent component of Putin’s Presidential Guard, responsible for the Kremlin’s defense as well as glittering ceremony.

After all this effort and expense, Waterloo’s box office failure came as a heavy blow to Bondarchuk, bitterly echoing Napoleon’s line in the film that “They will chain you like Prometheus to a rock where the memory of your own greatness will gnaw you.” The Soviet film journals long refused to review it. While War and Peace is now rapturously received among Western film enthusiasts, Waterloo’s reassessment as a masterpiece has been slower in coming: its reputation is greater amongst military history enthusiasts than cinephiles, yet it is, perhaps, the better film.

Freed from the constrictions of fidelity to a beloved classic, its pacing is tighter and its character portraits more expressionistic. Flitting between the interiority of self-doubt and the compulsion to impose a mark on the world, worn down by the tyranny of schedules and constraints of logistics, the line between great general and director is hard to parse. The Napoleon of Waterloo, physically broken but still imbued with greatness, is a more sympathetic one than of War and Peace, or indeed that of Christopher Plummer’s Wellington, who Le Monde’s critic remarked had been unfairly traduced by presenting him “in his most British aspect.” As Bondarchuk declared, “From the Russian point of view, even though Napoleon was our enemy at one point, he was also the representative of revolutionary principles. Wellington was the representative of reactionary principles.” So too, in time, was Bondarchuk, marginalized during Glasnost as a “Right-wing” figure.

Yet if Bondarchuk’s career provides an ambiguous portrait of a Soviet life, it is the great and terrible potential of Russia, so coldly wasteful and crushingly impressive, that shines through his work. As the film historian David Gillespie remarks, “Bondarchuk’s War and Peace contains some of the most thrilling and large scale battle scenes ever filmed, but it remains a paean to Russian military might and the strength of the Russian soul.” Much the same can be said of Waterloo, a film which contains not a single Russian character: the effect is, at times, disquieting. Only Russia could bring to bear such a dizzying quantity of resources and sheer willpower to a prestige project that makes no rational sense to Western eyes: contemporary parallels are not hard to reach for.

Bondarchuk’s birthplace of Bilozerka is today a frontline position ravaged by Russian artillery and FPV drones, an innovation of the Ukraine war whose terrifying, hawk-like perspective was uncannily prefigured by the director’s invention of the “cannon-ball eye” view; his son Fyodor, a Putin loyalist, is best known for his modern war epic 9th Company, and for his public advocacy of conquest against Ukraine. “Next to a battle lost, the saddest thing is a battle won,” remarks Wellington at the film’s conclusion: yet the film’s scale and grandeur subverts its own anti-war message, just as the human cost fails to dent Napoleon’s inhumane glory. As Ukraine’s countryside once again provides a stage for the Kremlin to overawe the West, and as the Russian army fighting there once again stands up cavalry forces, returning to the timeless tradition of the Steppe to counteract technology, Bondarchuk’s masterpiece has acquired a discomfiting new resonance.

The Manual spooked Western intelligence agencies. Did this mean that terrorists were being trained to operate like MI6 agents? And if so, how could they be defeated? It’s a paranoia that has only grown in the past two decades. From terrorist groups to semiconductor companies, non-state actors increasingly have access to highly sensitive information of national importance. Espionage is now anyone’s game; the need for security everywhere. Only this week, two men in the UK — including a former parliamentary aide — were charged under the Official Secrets Act with spying on behalf of China. And while this might seem a throwback to a Le Carré world of inter-state espionage, the reality is that any modern spy worth their salt would be as interested in Britain’s private sector as it is in our government.

The British state has begun to realise this. In 2022, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum and FBI Director Christopher Wray gave a joint address to business and academic leaders. When it came to the threat of Chinese espionage and cyberattacks, they said: “most of what is at risk from the Chinese Communist Party aggression is not, so to speak, my stuff. It’s yours.” Nowadays, private companies developing products in areas such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and biotech have access to such sensitive information that, if it got into the wrong hands, it would be a national security issue.

Far from the Cold War era of stealing nuclear secrets — think Aldrich Ames and the Rosenbergs — spies today are more likely to want to nick your PowerPoint. In January last year, a Chinese spy named Zheng Xiaoqing stole a data file from General Electric Power, which related to the design and manufacturing of gas and steam turbines. The IP was thought to be worth several million. He attempted to hide the file within the code of another file — a picture of a sunset — using a technique called steganography. The choice of target is instructive: it is increasingly the Nvidias and ASMLs of the world (both semiconductor companies), and not the CIA or MI5, which have access to secret information of national importance.

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This diffusion of knowledge and power away from the state and intelligence agencies, and towards private companies, marks a stark shift from the Cold War era. Back then, there was no confusion: the British and American intelligence communities had a monopoly over secrets. In fact, the Cold War was in many ways a war of intelligence, and its Manichean nature — an existential competition between the US and the Soviet Union — was far more stable than our current multipolar system. As Tom King, chair of the UK’s Intelligence and Security Committee in the Nineties, lamented in 1998: “Was not the Cold War, in its awful way, a form of rigid security system that has now collapsed?”

Ironically, globalisation was initially seen as the panacea for Cold War tension. The Marshall Plan of 1948 was President Truman’s attempt to induce Europe not to turn red with a large injection of cash. And four decades later, it was the desire for American blue jeans which helped bring down the Berlin Wall. It was only after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of terrorism, that the West figured out that globalisation and interdependency was a threat, not a cure. Today, in an interconnected world where we rely upon one Taiwanese company (TSMC) for all of our smartphones, economic and national security have become one and the same.

Well-aware that it cannot afford to turn a blind eye, the UK Government has overseen an influx of national security legislation in the past few years all designed to tighten scrutiny. The National Security & Investment Act, introduced in 2022, is designed to protect the UK’s critical infrastructure — from telecommunications to AI — against foreign acquisition. More recently the new National Security Bill, introduced in December 2023, is the most significant espionage law since the Official Secrets Act of 1911. And a new arm of MI5 — the National Protective Security Authority — was established in 2023 to advise private UK companies on how to combat cybersecurity. “Economic security” has also become a significant issue. In a speech last week Oliver Dowden laid out plans for export controls and tighter regulation of sensitive research projects in British academic institutions, arguing that “our economic and security interests are intertwined as never before”.

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What this wave of legislation suggests is that national security has become so all-encompassing and diverse that it can no longer be separated from the rest of government. Legislation, not secret agents, is being used to counter security threats. In a globalised world, the politician’s pen is replacing the agent’s pistol.

Some fear that the government’s increasing role in dealing with national security may lead to its politicisation. Just last month, the UK banned foreign state ownership of newspapers, responding to the attempted acquisition of the Telegraph by the UAE conglomerate RedBird. Prior to the ban itself, the acquisition was seen to “represent a very real potential national security threat” by a group of 18 Tory MPs. The problem is that, although the concerns over the Telegraph instance were well-founded, the broader notion of “national security” remains undefined and ambiguous — even in a major piece of legislation like the National Security & Investment Act. The risk is that, with the ever-widening scope of “national security”, it becomes a political issue, defined and redefined by politicians at any given moment.

Across the Atlantic, earlier this week Congress approved a bill to ban TikTok unless the the Chinese company ByteDance sells the US platform. The concerns stem from two issues. The first is the fact that for many people TikTok acts as a de facto source of news: its ownership by a Chinese company therefore essentially translates into a foreign-held media company. Second, there is the issue of TikTok’s vast pool of data — and fears that the CCP has access to it. The danger is that TikTok could be used for surveillance, Chinese-sanctioned propaganda, and ultimately to undermine American democracy. In the run-up to an already potentially toxic presidential election, those worries are not unfounded. Nonetheless, the forced sale of TikTok is yet another example of Western governments feeling compelled to use a blunt instrument (legislation) to tackle issues of national and economic security.

Pressure has mounted on the UK to follow suit. And the UK has in general very much followed (or been lent on by) the US to toughen its national security legislation in recent years. Just think back to Trump’s row with Johnson over Huawei in 2020, when Britain was on the cusp of allowing a Chinese company to dominate the UK’s 5G network. But we also have less weight to throw around in the global economy than America. The US can easily absorb the shock of any unintended consequences inflicted by heavy-handed legislation. The UK, on the other hand, has to walk a finer line between national security and staying open for business. There can be no such thing today, economically speaking, of an isolationist Britain.

This collaboration (and, in some cases, confrontation) between the state and private companies who hold IP and technology of national importance is not necessarily a bad thing. But as the lines between economic and national security blur, the trade-off may well be a politicisation (and bureaucratisation) of national security by those in Whitehall. And this does represent a fundamental break with the past. As the intelligence academics Antonio Díaz Fernández and Ruben Arcos put it, the days of the Cold War “secret state” are giving way to the 21st-century “protecting state”, in which national security seeps into everyday life.

Since the Cold War “national security” has expanded from the narrow realm of military power and deterrence to include terrorism, environmental security, migration, cybersecurity and now economic security. Of course, parliamentary bills will never replace the world of James Bond entirely. But, as Bond’s own Chief of Intelligence put it a little over a decade ago: “Our enemies are no longer known to us. They do not exist on a map, they aren’t nations… It’s in the shadows — that’s where we must do battle.”

There might, though, be some ways in which a Trump comeback would be salutary for Europe — and, especially, for the United Kingdom.

Our relationship with the United States has, in the last few decades, become an unhealthy one. We are like adult children who live with their parents, sulking and complaining but assuming that someone else will do the laundry. If Trump wins it will feel as if Dad has had a sex change and Mum has shacked up with a member of the Hell’s Angels. Perhaps we will finally decide it is time to get a flat of our own.

After all, it is high time to remind ourselves that American hegemony is a recent phenomenon. The United States has been the richest country in the world since the late 19th century, but at first its wealth had little effect on the politics and society of Europe, except in so far as the daughters of American tycoons brought generous dowries and a healthy dose of red blood into a few declining ducal families. The United States fought briefly in the First World War but retreated into isolationism afterwards. And though the Second World War turned American into a global power, it was not obvious even in 1945 that this new role would be sustained. At first, American military commitments were wound down and there were those — especially the southern Dixiecrats — who would have liked to withdraw from world affairs again. What prevented it was the Cold War.

This period, in which America’s special relation with Western Europe was established, was a peculiar one. First, the United States had a significant economic advantage. It had boomed during the war while many European countries had been destroyed: these are the conditions that gave us the Marshall Plan. Second, the United States faced an exceptional political threat. The Soviet Union was not just another great power; it was a state with ambitions to exercise influence in every corner of the globe, and one that attracted idealistic loyalty from people around the world (even if its own leaders were cynical). And so, Nato was born.

Conditions are changed now and the phrase “second Cold War” obscures more than it reveals. Russia is smaller than the Soviet Union. Countries that were allied with the USSR in the Warsaw Pact — indeed, countries that were once part of the Soviet Union itself — are now members of Nato. Russia seeks to exercise power not to export an ideology. And the nation is, of course, not popular in the West. The historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie reckoned that a quarter of his fellow students at the École Normale Supérieure in the late Forties were card-carrying members of the Communist Party, breathless in their admiration for Stalin. I should imagine that these days the number of normaliens who are, say, Zoroastrians is probably higher than the number who admire Vladimir Putin.

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All of this means that Trump is perfectly reasonable in saying that the United States bears a disproportionate share of Nato’s military burden. It is hard to imagine the circumstances in which Putin’s military adventures could pose a direct threat to America. By contrast, it is easy to imagine how they might threaten Poland or Lithuania, and easy too to imagine how threats to those countries would destabilise Britain and France — if only by pushing vast numbers of refugees west. So, it would not necessarily be a bad thing if the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were to be replaced by some purely European body. That alliance could focus on containing Russia — no longer a priority for the US. It would also mean that Europe would not be caught up in American military adventures. It’s worth remembering that the only Nato member to have invoked Article 5 of the organisation’s constitution — which says that an attack on one will be treated as an attack on all — was the USA itself, after 9/11.

It is also worth remembering that America became a global power in order to fight communism rather than to defend democracy. In Western Europe, the two pursuits went hand-in-hand, but in Latin America or Asia, fighting communism often meant allying with brutally undemocratic regimes. And while the US gave plenty of aid to countries with Left-wing governments in Europe, at home, in the Fifties, democratic Leftists were often treated as though they were communists. Far from intervening abroad in the name of democracy, the United States often became more democratic as a result of its foreign interventions. Civil rights for African Americans were partly a product of the Cold War. The racial integration of the army, during and after the Korean War, was arguably more important than the Brown v. Board of Education judgement; subsequently, America’s desire to be recognised as a racially just society owed much to the need to command global support against the Soviet Union.

This has implications for how Europe should treat Trump. There is no natural reason why America should be, as Biden recently put it, a “beacon of democracy”. We should recognise that the United States, like any nation, may simply be guided by its interests. Trump’s America First rhetoric should remind us that it is high time to start dealing with the US in the same way that we deal with China or Russia, working with them when it suits us and defending our own interests when necessary. Europeans need to regain some of the hard-headedness that used to define our attitudes to America.

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For the first 30 years after the Second World War, our political leaders recognised that the United States was a necessary ally, but they felt little emotional attachment to the country. Harold Macmillan told Richard Crossman that the British should be to the Americans what the Greeks had been to the Romans: both classicists, each regarded the Greece of Homer and Thucydides as a much greater civilisation than the Rome of Julius Caesar. Macmillan did not bother to visit his mother’s birthplace, in Indiana, until it suited British foreign policy to do so, in 1956. He would have cringed with embarrassment had he seen the gushing excitement with which Blair or Cameron treated each visit to Camp David, as though they were schoolgirls with a crush rather than prime ministers of an independent country.

It’s as if we forget, sometimes, that in the Special Relationship-era America owed as much to us as we do to them — if not more. To a remarkably large extent, post-war American foreign policy was made by Europeans. Influential figures such as Zbigniew Brzezinski (National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981) and Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001) were born in, respectively, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Henry Kissinger did not come to the United States until he was a teenager and never lost his thick German accent. I cannot help suspecting that the late Dr Kissinger never actually liked America much — he even preferred soccer to the game that Americans call football. He rarely moved much outside the narrow band on the east coast that stretched from Cambridge, Massachusetts in the north to Washington DC in the south; Texas or the Midwest probably seemed as foreign to him as China. He never stood for election and seems to have regarded the vulgarity of American politics with distaste — though, significantly, this did not prevent him from talking to Trump.

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What is the point of Nato?

By Yanis Varoufakis

Kissinger perhaps embodied the attitude we should now adopt towards the United States, in that he did not consider it to be a representative of a higher morality. Kissinger knew that, at least for the foreseeable future, the United States would be the most powerful country in the world. He knew that, in at least some respects, its role in the world was a benign one. But the place that he cared about most was Europe. He was fascinated by men such as Bismarck who served monarchs and could, therefore, plan their diplomatic policy over long periods — undisturbed by the convulsions of electoral politics. The 20th-century leader whom he most admired was Charles de Gaulle, the man who took France out of Nato’s combined command structures in 1966.

Of course, De Gaulle was not really the naïve souverainiste that he pretended to be: he knew that there were times when France had depended on American support — his ostentatious bad manners were designed to conceal this, and to promote a strong French self-image. He also understood, however regretfully, that a degree of European integration was inevitable. Today’s European politicians should therefore make him their model. They should regard the United States — however terrible its leaders or political system — with a wary respect. But they should also look to one another for the defence of their own continent, regardless of the results of this year’s elections.

The Chinese understand the bewitching power of the panda, using them as tools for soft power outreach and diplomatic communication. When, for example, all those animals on loan to the US and UK were recalled  earlier this year, experts in “panda diplomacy” warned that this tracked steadily worsening relations between China and the West.

But following Xi Jinping’s recent visit to the United States, we’ve seen a further exchange of panda platitudes. First, Chinese officials hinted that panda loans to America might once again resume. Then, White House mandarins responded with enthusiasm. The geopolitical subtext is clear: US-China rapprochement may be in the offing.

The first modern instance of panda diplomacy was in 1941, when Soong Mei-ling, wife of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, presented “a chubby pair of comical black and white furry pandas” to an American zoo. At that point China had only been a republic for three decades, and these creatures made an ideal choice of Year Zero symbol: though widely distributed in the Pleistocene era, today they’re found only in a small region of central China, making them distinctively Chinese. Meanwhile, in a culture ancestrally rich with animal emblems, pandas came with neither astrological connotations nor — unlike the mythical dragons — symbolic links with the imperial rulers so recently deposed.

Following the Kuomintang’s exile to Taiwan in 1949, the early uncertainty of the Chinese Communist successor regime’s relationship with the West is exemplified by the story of the WWF’s first poster-panda. Chi Chi was born in the wild in Sichuan in 1955, and kept in Beijing Zoo for two years, before being loaned to Moscow Zoo along with another panda at the request of Soviet diplomat Kliment Voroshilov in 1957.

At the time, most panda gifts were bestowed on other Communist states, including several sent to North Korea, all of which died due to poor treatment. Chi Chi was more fortunate: sent back to Beijing after Russian scientists mistook her for a male and requested a female instead, she was sold to Heini Demmer, an animal broker, who sought expressions of interest from American zoos. But the US Government, who still recognised only the exiled Kuomintang administration in Taiwan, refused to allow her entry, asserting that the US embargo on goods from China extended to pandas.

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Demmer took Chi Chi on a tour of European zoos instead, including a 1958 stop at London Zoo. It was originally intended as a short visit. But she proved so popular that the zoo purchased her, and she remained a star attraction in London for the rest of her life. Three years later, she inspired the naturalist and painter Sir Peter Scott to design WWF’s first logo, when the charity was founded in 1961.

Between Chi Chi’s arrival in London, until shortly after the WWF’s foundation, the postwar People’s Republic of China focused less on international relations than its own internal transformation. Over this short, brutal period, China embraced a regime-imposed version of the industrialisation that, in the West, had taken a century or more. Acclaimed by Mao as the Great Leap Forward, this five-year plan focused on boosting steelmaking and agricultural output, with little regard for side-effects.

The side-effects were numerous nonetheless. The most notorious was famine: an estimated 20 to 30 million Chinese citizens starved to death during the Great Leap Forward. But as the historian Elena Songster notes, another was ecological devastation. This was both due to new farming incursions into former wilderness, and also to a rise in hunting, as desperate people killed and ate anything they could catch. In turn, this prompted a shift in government policy from research to nature preservation, with Beijing mandating the creation of nature reserves, and new regulations to control hunting.

So the Great Leap Forward impelled a rapid shift in the Chinese state’s approach to the natural world — one that echoed shifts also under way in the West. Even as the WWF was founded, in the hope of protecting wildlife from Western depredations, new Chinese regulations both acknowledged the value of their natural resources, and also sought to preserve them from exhaustion.

As Songster recounts, a pivotal 1959 policy paper argued further that “rare and precious” species were valuable not just on commercial but also symbolic grounds. These national “monuments” showcased China’s uniqueness — especially the giant panda. Between 1957 and 1982, a total of 23 giant pandas were presented to foreign countries.

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China has continued to industrialise and grow — and the relative balance of geopolitical power has shifted accordingly. Perhaps nothing is more emblematic of once-imperial Britain’s relative decline in that balance, than the 1984 agreement by Margaret Thatcher to hand Hong Kong back to Beijing. But another CCP policy change the same year also reflected China’s growing confidence: the decision that panda diplomacy would henceforth be conducted not via panda gifts but panda leases.

As of 1984, all pandas are the property of the Chinese government. They are sometimes leased to foreign states in exchange for annual fees, but may be recalled at any time. Any baby pandas born to leased pandas are also the property of China. And panda leases serve not just as a vector for overseas diplomacy but also, within Chinese domestic discourse, as proxy for public sentiment concerning international relations. Ya Ya, one of the pandas whose US lease expired this year, occasioned outrage on Chinese social media when images showing her in apparently poor condition were published.

But these gentle creatures have also acquired other, less officially-sanctioned resonance. Pandas are notoriously reluctant to mate in captivity, and the birth in captivity of live panda cubs is a cause for global news headlines. Researchers have offered many explanations for this, including that simply being horny and in proximity to a panda of the opposite sex isn’t enough: pandas have to fancy each other too.

When shipped to Moscow to mate with An An, one of the other panda cubs originally shipped there from China, the WWF poster panda Chi Chi showed no interest in her prospective panda suitor. Instead, she expressed sexual interest in her human male keeper, suggesting that a lifetime in captivity had left her radically confused as to what desire is for.

And it appears that pandas are far from the only species reluctant to mate in captivity. The panda was an effective logo choice for the WWF not just for visual impact, but also because their distinct ecological niche is so obviously vulnerable to habitat destruction as a consequence of modernity. And as has become apparent in several decades of conservation effort, outside that wilderness niche pandas simply do not thrive.

It’s growing increasingly apparent that the extractive, resource-consuming aspect of modernity has a recursive effect on humans too. Over the century of panda diplomacy, rising economic and technological development has been paralleled by falling global fertility rates. Research suggests these phenomena are closely linked. Last year, China’s population began shrinking, too. The reasons for China’s now very low birth rate are complex, but suggested factors broadly resemble those in the developed West, and include expensive housing, social atomisation, and mutually exclusive demands on women to achieve both maternally and professionally.

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Perhaps we could say of high-tech modernity across both East and West that, whereas we have been trying for decades now to protect elements of the natural world from the depredations of modernity, we have been less assiduous about extending similar protection to our own nature. The right to follow in Chi Chi’s footsteps and unmoor sexual desire from reproduction is enshrined as a moral and political desideratum, even as that reproductive end has itself variously been problematised and technologised. Much as with female pandas in captivity, who submit to all manner of invasive fertility-related procedures, human women in low-fertility countries are also now presented with (or exploited by) an ever more invasive battery of scans, studies, and procedures, framed by activists as normal — and with about as much of an impact on overall species fertility as scientists’ efforts with pandas.

It is far from clear whether China will ever resort to the Western strategy of kicking the demographic can down the road, by inviting inward immigration. In the meantime, once-meteoric Chinese growth is likely to level off, making China a less likely future threat to the United States — even as flattening domestic consumption makes wealthy, friendly overseas trade partners ever more appealing. As East and West confront their respective population-related challenges, then, we might read the brief halt and sudden revival of panda diplomacy as mutual acknowledgement that the superpowers probably need one another more than they need a new Cold War.

But if the central demographic challenge is the same for both, it’s far from clear that either has much idea of how to address it.

Back at the very germination of the modern age, in 1440, Thomas à Kempis pointed out that: “Wherever you go, there you are.” We owe most of what we call “civilisation” today to industrial and post-industrial modernity; but we now face the effects of that modernity on our own ability to self-replicate. We cannot, after all, create nature reserves for ourselves.

On 9/11, we learned that trillions of dollars of American defence spending could be overwhelmed by $5 boxcutters for sale in any hardware store. On Israel’s 9/11, we learned that a $60 toy drone, a $600 rocket and a $6,000 paramotor could overwhelm the world’s most formidable defences, including Israel’s billion-dollar Iron Dome. Hamas managed to evade detection by Israel’s multibillion dollar intelligence capability simply by turning its electronics off and by not deviating from its daily routine. Going dark beat going high-tech; analogue beat digital.

As Israel’s tanks mass on Gaza’s border, the world awaits the start of a chain reaction to the massacre of Israeli civilians. This is like witnessing a Jujitsu match where leverage matters more than size. Hamas wanted to provoke Israel into deploying old-fashioned, highly symbolic weapons, such as tanks. Are tanks the best tech for rescuing the many Israeli hostages? For imposing the greatest damage on the perpetrators? No. But Israel will use them because it wants to create a visual show of force. Hamas is betting on this, knowing that in an Instagram world, Israel’s tanks will generate endless images appearing to show Israel’s brute force, which Hamas believes will increase support for the relatively defenceless occupants of Gaza.

Hamas, however, is far from defenceless: it has 3D printers, laser-sintering devices, and manufacturing facilities in their tunnels, which churn out guns, bullets and more. Perhaps this is why Israel’s surveillance systems didn’t pick up on the drones, ammunition and paramotors that Hamas used to transport humans across the border: they weren’t imported, but were manufactured underground in Gaza. Their essential components, after all, are not hard to come by. As Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib has observed, Hamas uses unexploded ordnance, rubble, and discarded or damaged metal and wiring to recycle materials and parts into new weapons. “The irony here,” he wrote, “is that the IDF’s operation indirectly provided Hamas with materials that are otherwise strictly monitored or forbidden altogether in Gaza.” Hamas, it seems, has brought new meaning to the term “circular economy”.

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For the West and Israel, the deeper problem here is that we cannot unlearn our faith in technological prowess. We still believe that having nuclear weapons is always the answer, even though we’ve already discovered that it is impossible to use them in response to Putin’s old-fashioned ground war in Ukraine, or even to his direct nuclear threats. The game is not worth the candle.

At the heart of our cognitive dissonance is the fact that an old mathematical formula has been disrupted by modern technology. Harald led the first study on Anti-Ballistic Missiles for the Joint Chiefs under President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. This project was later popularised by President Ronald Reagan as the Star Wars Initiative. When Harald began his study, his task was to determine what it would cost to build an Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system that could counter an incoming Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) from the Soviet Union before it reached American airspace. The question was this: would an ABM system alter how the Soviets calculated the cost of Mutual Assured Destruction? In other words, could it make it too expensive for the Soviets to keep up? Drawing on the ideas of his associate, Tom Schelling — who later won the Nobel Prize for his idea of game theory — Harald concluded that for each dollar spent on a hypothetical ABM system, it would cost the adversary roughly seven dollars to penetrate it.

Of course, it would not matter whether the ABM system actually worked. It is incredibly mathematically difficult to successfully target and hit a super-fast moving inbound ICBM mid-air. The leverage math was easy, though. The Russians understood the 7:1 calculation. When Reagan announced the Star Wars Initiative, the Soviets understood that they’d be forced to spend far more than the country could possibly afford. The overwhelming cost played no small part in bankrupting the Soviet Union, though its demise came from the fear of running out of the cash needed to keep up with Star Wars, not from the damage inflicted by Star Wars itself. This brought the Cold War and the Soviet Union to an end, and left a lasting impression on America’s leading military thinkers including Richard Perle, Caspar Weinberger, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney, who deployed the ratio everywhere from their various powerful roles in American defence policy.

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Today, Harald’s ratio has inverted. It’s at least 1:7 now, and probably much more. This is evident not only from 9/11, but also from the events in Israel. Hamas deployed absurdly cheap rockets against the Iron Dome. It did the maths: by one estimate, the Hamas missiles are 100 times less expensive than the $50,000 Tamir receptors in the Iron Dome, which can defend Israel against 96% of the projectiles thrown at them. So Hamas simply launched many more rockets — and they got through the 4% window because many more were fired. Simple.

None of this means we can rule out that Hamas didn’t have the support of advanced technology. Days before the massacre in Israel, on 27 September, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard successfully placed a third Noor satellite into orbit. Was this a total coincidence? The Noor-3, with vastly better cameras than Noor-1 and Noor-2, gave Iran the ability to monitor events on the ground in Israel and Gaza with much greater accuracy and coverage than before. It allowed Iran 24/7 coverage. What if that camera footage was made available to Hamas? And if facial recognition technology was used on that live feed or video? The aim of that tech is not so much to recognise a particular person but to determine the emotional state of groups of people. Could this have been used to determine that the Israelis on the ground were relaxed and obviously not expecting a problem? Such tech is certainly capable of this — and while it isn’t cheap, it’s a lot cheaper than it used to be.

Nor are its uses simply defensive. Over the past year, the Ukrainians have been forced to become experts in drone warfare. On the one hand, they have learned that holding a $5 yoga mat over your head blinds satellites to the human heat signature, allowing them to sneak up on Russian assets and destroy them. On the other, they have also developed their offensive capacity, making not just drones but underwater drones. In the Black Sea, for instance, the Russians had to move their fleet after Ukrainian “experimental” and unmanned “Sea Baby” drones wreaked havoc, damaging subs and the undersides of sizeable superpower vessels.

If Ukraine can operate this kind of technology, Hamas probably can too. This week, the US moved two aircraft carriers into range of Israel. This raises the risk of another USS Cole situation. In 2000, two suicide pilots in a cheap rubber Zodiac-type boat ripped a 40-foot-wide hole in the Cole, killing 17 American naval personnel and injuring another 40.

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For now, though, Hamas’s use of drones will continue to be associated with its recent reliance on paramotors with parafoils. These are usually found at beach resorts and so appear perfectly innocent. No doubt Israel has every airport and landing strip around under observation, but modern drone tech no longer requires such assets. In 2014, The Jerusalem Post reported that Israel’s Intelligence Service, Shin Bet, had discovered that Hamas was receiving paragliding training in Malaysia. But it never seemed to have occurred to anyone that paramotors and parafoils could be used to transport an armed human over the heavily surveilled Gaza border.

Elsewhere, cheap toy drones played a large part in disabling and destroying Israel’s expensive surveillance system on the Gaza border. Hamas used them to dazzle, damage or destroy the expensive optical sensors that Israel relied upon to detect inbound threats. The Israelis should have understood this technology. After all, Israeli-made drones helped Azerbaijan retake Nagorno-Karabakh just last month, while Turkish drones have profoundly shifted the balance of power in the ongoing war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. People are clearly understanding the tech but are yet to realise the inversion of the leverage ratio.

Closer to home, we can see this in the US’s continued enforcement of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) regime, in the mistaken belief that all or most valuable tech originates in America and must not fall into the hands of opponents. Awkwardly, it seems that many of the guns Hamas used in the siege had been lifted from the piles of weaponry the US left behind in Afghanistan and Iraq. Failing to consider their intellectual property value, the US ditched them because they were too expensive to destroy and too old to bother returning home. The US saw old broken guns without enough usable ammo. Did Hamas see an opportunity to create CAD (Computer Aided Design) models, which would let them 3D print or laser-sinter parts to repair and even replicate these weapons? Perhaps.

Meanwhile, those who want to change or damage the balance of power in the world at an already fragile moment will continue to deploy technologies that we ignore or laugh at. And this dangerous form of complacency is not just a problem for Israel. Once those tanks drive into Gaza and the conflict metastasises further afield, it will be a threat to the entire West.

How did these two movements succeed in tearing up the fabric of Western society? Neoliberalism envisioned governance for the sake of individual and corporate enterprise, rolling back redistributive and regulatory policy in the name of “freedom”. Neoconservatism, meanwhile, though later more famous as a foreign-policy doctrine, was initially rooted in a scepticism towards domestic class and racial justice. Under the auspices of both schools of thought, the state was reconceived and morality was “restored” to the private sphere of “family values”.

No intellectual better embodied this peculiar fusion of neoliberalism and neoconservatism than the late historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, who died in 2019. Indeed, she was one of the most important and forgotten ideological pioneers of our times: an intellectual who did as much as her better-known husband, Irving Kristol, to invent the neoliberal-neoconservative complex.

Himmelfarb’s origin story is revelatory for two reasons. First, thanks to the central role Christianity played in her analysis (despite her Jewish background), her work serves as a challenge to those Christians belatedly joining the Left in attacking neoliberalism, and who do not appreciate how Christianity helped to cement neoliberalism’s position in the Republican Party in the first place. Second, even more importantly, Himmelfarb’s emphasis on religion forces secular liberals to re-examine their own participation in the Reagan revolution and its aftermath — the “Age of Reagan” has been one that later Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have been pleased to inhabit. For the unholy combination of neoliberalism and neoconservatism goes much further back than the Sixties, and into the era of Cold War liberalism in the Forties — since that is when Himmelfarb got her start.

Born in New York 1922 to Jewish immigrant parents, Himmelfarb studied at Brooklyn College before enrolling at the University of Chicago as a graduate student, having met Irving in 1940 at a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League, a Trotskyist militant group they both frequented for a time in Brooklyn, where both hailed from. At Chicago, alone after her husband departed for service in Western Europe as an infantryman, Himmelfarb was drawn to the work of the 19th-century Anglo-German Catholic liberal Lord Acton — and ended up writing what became her first book on him, published in 1952. Her aim was to push back against the emergence of an optimistic and progressive liberalism that, she feared, shaded too easily into Leftism.

Acton, born in 1834, was a strange kind of liberal in his own lifetime, and only became a canonical figure in the middle of the 20th century. He was a Roman Catholic who resisted papal infallibility, his mind fixed on eternal moral certainties in an age that placed an emphasis on the evolving nature of liberal civilisation; he was suspicious of the nation state at a time when liberals treated it as their main instrument of progress; he even became sympathetic to socialism, at a time when liberalism so often took the form of economic libertarianism.

Amid the consolidation of the Cold War in the late Forties, as the world reckoned with a rising tide of totalitarianism, Acton’s adage about the corrupting power of absolute power assumed a new currency. No less than Friedrich Hayek, the godfather of neoliberalism, suggested to Himmelfarb, on a research trip in 1946 to England, that he was starting an Actonian club to resist the “totalitarianism” of the new planning state  (which ultimately became the neoliberal Mont Pèlerin Society). For Himmelfarb, however, Acton’s revival initially served a very different purpose: to immunise liberals from dreaming big and instead recognise that politics is a scene of transgression rather than a forum of opportunity. By emphasising this, Himmelfarb helped define what later Cold War liberal Judith Shklar immortally dubbed “the liberalism of fear”, a replacement of the ambitious and optimistic liberalism of the 19th century with a more cautious, disabused and threat-oriented creed.

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Like many other Cold War liberals, Himmelfarb had a particular (and mistaken) diagnosis of how liberalism could easily self-destruct. If liberals called for too much emancipation and progress, she thought, they would connive with evil forces to bring them about. They would, in other words, easily fall for the communist promise to achieve good things through immoral means. And if they neglected Christianity’s insight into the endurance of original sin, liberals would treat the state as a workable device of liberation and progress, rather than regarding it as a malignant expression of eternal depravity. The consequences, she warned, would be devastating, giving people who are tarnished by original sin the capacity to use state power to kill millions.

Though a Jew concerned about the abuse of minorities, Himmelfarb laid extraordinary emphasis on this point, in turn making Christianity integral to Cold War liberalism. While liberals had spent the prior century often viewing religious forces as an enemy, she called for a new liberalism based on Acton’s Christian vision of sin. Acton, who had rejected “integralist” forms of Christian Right-wing politics that longed for a return to medieval theocracy, was principally important for reforming secular liberals who sought to secure freedom against secular totalitarianisms such as Nazi and Soviet tyranny. He recognised, Himmelfarb wrote, “the presence of eternal and absolute” morality, in contrast to liberals who “had no sense of the religious sanctity of those principles” and compromised away freedom.

Indeed, it was liberal Christianity, Himmelfarb wrote, that might turn out to be essential in a Cold War world that knew the threat of religious authoritarianism even as secular revolution could bring even worse oppression. “Clerics are not alone in carrying the banner of religion,” she wrote. “They have been joined by a multitude of those who, in Acton’s own time, would almost certainly have been in the camp of the opposition.” Liberals needed to get over their anticlericalism, was the message, and use religion to save themselves.

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It had to be the right kind of Christianity, of course. Acton was an Augustinian, and his vision of sin forbade excessive optimism. Humanity couldn’t save itself; man’s fallen nature made power a permanent threat. Instead, the Christianity useful for Cold War liberals saw God as the external judge on history, where the notion of secular progress supposedly leading to human emancipation was little more than an alibi for crime. For Acton, Himmelfarb explained, “history did not have a meaning or purpose in itself; it acquired meaning only by comparison with a fixed moral standard outside it, and purpose by fulfilling a moral end imposed upon it”.

This Augustinian core of Cold War liberalism is often conveniently forgotten. In an otherwise excellent recent book, for example, Louis Menand paints a portrait of Cold War liberalism as a utopia of innovative modernism, rather than one rooted in the religiosity that suffused the Forties and Fifties. One Cold War liberal icon, Oxford don Isaiah Berlin, divulged once in a letter to another such icon, American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., that he “had never read a line” of Lord Acton’s. Yet that did not stop Irving Kristol from crediting Berlin for “assuming the role of Lord Acton” as “conscience and critic” of believers in secular progress. And in spite of his own private reservations about a faith-based liberalism, Berlin understood that it defined the age of Cold War liberalism, writing in 1952 that “one of the most notable characteristics of the literary and artistic scenes” was “the revival of religion”, whatever its “pulverisation of… all the older forms of liberalism [and] secularism”.

Here is where Himmelfarb becomes representative of broader trends. Of all the Cold War liberals of this era — including Lionel Trilling, the Columbia English professor whom she and her husband lionised — Himmelfarb knew most about Judaism, though that was not saying much. For these Jews, ancestral preservation was hardly a powerful driving force — though there was a little more in Himmelfarb’s case because of her family’s observance of custom and ritual, and she took classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary while an undergraduate. For the most part, however, the identity politics of staying true to Judaism was not a significant motivation, compared to their very explicit appeal to Christian values to serve political goals. For Himmelfarb, Augustinian Christianity was a kind of ideological training ground for the intellectualism she conceived.

During the same period, Irving Kristol, schooled by his wife, also pursued a new religious orthodoxy, including a kind of neo-Actonian Judaism that rejected the optimism towards progress so prevalent among earlier liberals. Indeed, Kristol’s engagements with Christianity, with its emphasis on the permanence of sin, fed his epic denunciation, in January 1948, of modernising accounts of Judaism that presented it as a progressive social ethics rather than an acceptance of the strict limits that evil places on human possibility. This wasn’t because either Himmelfarb or her husband ever embraced observant Judaism, let alone converted to the Christian faith. It was because they believed Acton’s neo-orthodoxy was politically useful.

Both, in other words, fit well with Hannah Arendt’s quip that Orthodox Judaism was the Judaism that she didn’t practice. We can broaden her serious joke to the observation that, for a striking number of Cold War liberals like Himmelfarb and Kristol, Augustinian neo-orthodoxy was the Christianity they wanted everyone else to adopt. It would save them from the enthusiasm and naiveté of trust in the state.

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Himmelfarb’s dalliance with Acton, and her Christianisation of liberalism, was fateful in the long run. It morphed, after all, into the successor views Himmelfarb soon adopted, neoconservatism and neoliberalism, with an emphasis on “family values” as the crucible of morality and the state as dangerous or fickle. Yet this wasn’t an immediate journey.

That Himmelfarb wasn’t immediately a neoconservative or neoliberal prepared to indict the welfare state in the name of Hayek’s market fundamentalism is made clear by two facts. First, in her early studies, she saw Acton as the great alternative to Edmund Burke, whereas Hayek saw them as equally inspirational. “When Liberals finally came to admit that Conservatism might be a store-house of political wisdom,” Himmelfarb complained as late as 1953, “they settled upon Burke as the arbiter of politics and morality. But the insights of Conservatism might have been more readily found in… an Acton, who set absolute morality against history.” Second, she registered that Acton’s liberalism could support social reform. Acton had come to insist that property was not absolutely sacrosanct even in a liberal state, and even repudiated — at his “most radical”, Himmelfarb said — the affection for laissez-faire economics of his youth. For a time, she outright rejected Hayek’s competing appropriation of their common sage.

Clearly, then, it would require a step beyond Cold War liberalism in a Christian key for Himmelfarb to reach her mature neoconservatism. While continuing to appeal to morality, she gave up her insistence on Acton’s liberal Christianity, even as she emphasised Christianity as a cultural force (and a source of many evangelical voters). By the Eighties, she was a crucial contributor to the intellectual destruction of the welfare ideals that were actually triumphing after the Second World War, while she was rifling through Acton’s writings. An activist state, she insisted, “consigns” the poor “to a culture of dependency and degrades those it professes to help”.

But everything — including the political movements Himmelfarb helped to rationalise, and which continue to warp the world — has to start somewhere. Easily the most consequential move in Himmelfarb’s evolution was her redefinition of liberalism in a Christian key, because it was only a short step from there to her mature views. If the trial of neoconservatism and neoliberalism continues in future years, Himmelfarb’s case suggests that the inquest will have to reach Cold War liberalism too.

Denis Johnson’s novel The Stars at Noon (1986) is the great American example of this form, a wet, hallucinatory junket through the jaws of hell that foreign interventions can become — in this case, 1984 Nicaragua, as CIA-backed Contras wage war on the Sandinista government. One of Johnson’s lesser-known works, the novel takes the form of an anti-travelogue narrated by an unnamed young American woman who will definitely not be documenting this unaesthetic excursion for Instagram.

The book begins with submachine guns in a grimy Managua McDonald’s, an American outpost patronised by horny officials and soldiers of the junta. It is here that we learn that our narrator may or may not be some kind of journalist, or at least aspires to be one, but for now is selling sex in an effort to acquire enough hard currency to purchase a flight out of Nicaragua.

This has led to her being sexually extorted by local officials, who are gratuitously taking advantage of her fallen position while promising to help. And she has fallen very far. Before this, we learn that she worked as a human rights observer with an organisation called Eyes for Peace. After bearing witness to the suffering of others, she quickly became disillusioned with this line of work — in her world, the word “humanitarian” has acquired a sinister meaning. Other exalted concepts — “justice”, “liberty”, “equality” — are equally scorned. “I’ll show you liberty and some of that other bullshit,” she tells one character.

We follow our young American to the bar at the InterContinental Hotel, where the assembled international press corps is drinking heavily and complaining about the lack of “bang bang”. It is better in Beirut, they all concur. But our narrator is similarly unimpressed with them: “As the cabdriver had understood they would be, several journalists were drinking here tonight, the usual bunch, every one the sort of person who really ought to be shot dead right away.”

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It is in this sad hotel bar, among these war tourists, that our narrator first meets her love interest. He is a bland British consultant (“pudding-like and ghostly”), who works for an oil company. “Consultant” is another opaque, sinister-sounding vocation in these parts, and she implores him “not to go into detail” about his dealings. “The Englishman”, as she calls him, is remarkable only for his total lack of remarkability (elsewhere, she notes that he reminds her of a cloud, with a vaporous, forgettable face and white skin). And this is a central point of the book: the title comes from a line from an W.S. Merwin poem, “what we are looking for / in each other / is each other / the stars at noon / while the light worships its blind god”. This is a love story rooted in narcissistic idealisation and self-delusion, with the libidinous political tumult and tropical locale lending the affair a frisson it would not otherwise have. Back in London or New York, we imagine, these two might never give each other a second look.

The political drama is as nebulous as “the Englishman” himself. We eventually learn that he has engaged in industrial espionage. His oil company, along with the Costa Ricans, knew of some possible oil deposits beneath Lake Nicaragua, and in the interest of “fairness” — and perhaps vague political sympathies with enemy states, though like the rest of him, these remain gestural — he passed them on to the Nicaraguans. But the Nicaraguans informed the Costa Ricans of this duplicity, and soon the lovers are pursued by the security services of several state agencies at once, including the omnipresent CIA. Under increasingly unbearable surveillance, the pair make a long, dramatic dash for the border. It is significant that it is the Englishman’s ostensibly “humanitarian” act that triggers this panicked chase. In proxy wars, the road to hell is often paved with good intentions.

Read some 40 years after the counter-revolutionary war in Nicaragua, The Stars at Noon feels exhilarating, even liberatory. In more ways than one, Johnson’s novel is an escape, unencumbered by tedious contemporary puritanism. No one is mythologised in Johnson’s world, and we are invited to mock and revile both the dull revolutionaries and “the stupid CIA”.

This kind of cynicism in war is not new in literature, but it almost feels that way filtered through a female narrator. Johnson gives us a young woman in excruciating circumstances who is nonetheless not the traumatised female subject of so much millennial women’s writing, reflexively narrativising her experiences through the lens of victimisation. As Caitlín Doherty has written: “MeToo’s impact is detectable not in any political transformation among the professional women who comprised its constituency, but rather in the desiccated dregs of a ‘feminist’ linguistic mode: a speaker who narrates in the first-person, invokes the literary and wants you to know of her pain.” Though our narrator is mistreated by men, she always has something that they don’t: the knowledge that these men, however powerful in the present circumstances, are pathetic, even pitiful.

“Not that the pleasure and comfort of an incompetent small-time official in a floundering greasy banana regime surmounts my every concern, but all men tend to grow innocent, wouldn’t you agree, at the breast,” she muses during one unfortunate encounter. “You can’t help but feeling a little something, if only a small, sharp pity, as if you’d just stepped on a baby bird.”

Young women in the contemporary West have not lived under the top-down institutionalised patriarchy found elsewhere in the world, but this is precisely how women who do have to navigate it: by viewing powerful men not as totems of unearned privilege, but as pathetic prisoners of their own desire and therefore riddled with weaknesses to exploit. That Johnson was able to understand this as a man suggests that “lived experience” is not the only kind that illuminates: in this novel, he gives his female narrator a more powerful, eviscerating voice than most contemporary women would grant themselves. For that, he would undoubtedly be indicted by certain literary puritans today — for failing to make his female narrator sufficiently disempowered, or for writing in the voice of a woman at all.

Yet Johnson’s female narrator is also self-evidently him. The Stars at Noon was written after his own trip to Nicaragua, where he had hoped to produce an article on the revolution for a magazine. Instead, it was during this trip that he realised that he could never be a journalist. He reportedly flew home, fell into a depression and wrote this book. Certain details — the professional journalists in Managua restaurants observed with a mixture of envy and disgust — are clearly lifted from his own experience. At one point early on, Johnson’s narrator calls the editor of a magazine in the US with a desperate pitch; he laughs before hanging up on her. Among other things, this is a book about failure. And this, too, is refreshing in an era in which writers are more invested in constructing the identity of a writer on social media than they are in writing.

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Last year, the French director Claire Denis released a film based on the book. It is a fine enough adaptation, capturing something of the sensual yet sickly atmosphere of the novel, though Denis opted to lift the story from its original Cold War context and resituate it in present day, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the film, the run-down InterContinental Hotel has been partly transformed into a grimy Covid hospital, with a menacing biomedical security regimen and unsmiling guards carrying submachine guns. The story loses something essential set in the present, as the voluptuous and ideological Cold War setting is swapped for our vacuous, post-ideological Cold War 2.0, wherein dictatorship and democracy alike are drifting towards a tech-facilitated authoritarianism. If the movie feels less substantive than the book, then it’s partly because our times are hollower, too.

But how would the contemporary commentator, trained to reflexively pincer apart each piece of media for hidden loci of oppression, react to the novel it is based on? For one, it’s a story that “centres” the experiences of two white Westerners in Nicaragua. Further, our narrator is not interested in signalling awareness of her “positionality”, her “privilege” and her “Westernness”. But, at a time when the CIA would probably employ the language of decolonisation to justify arming the Contras, it is invigorating to read outsiders who are allowed to be simple outsiders. The narrator of The Stars at Noon belongs to the American pantheon of drifters, losers, outsiders, drunks and dreamers. These are not figures that “speak over” local voices, to use the bloodless academic-activist parlance, but from beneath them, as they come from below.

Other people’s beliefs are ideological in the sense of being rigid, doctrinaire, immune to argument and detached from the practical world, whereas one’s own convictions are flexible, pragmatic and eminently reasonable. Capping child allowance so that more families are plunged into poverty is pretty much common sense in an economic crisis, while heavily taxing the oil companies springs from socialist dogma. There’s nothing ideological about revering the monarchy — like scratching your nose or gambling for eight hours a day, it’s a natural human inclination — but claiming that it provides circuses for the people to distract them from a shortage of bread is simply the talk of disaffected intellectuals.

To be post-truth, then, is to be post-ideological. Long ago, when the middle class were revolutionaries storming the strongholds of the aristocracy, ideas like God, liberty, progress, patriotism and equality mattered to them a lot. They were vital weapons in the struggle for hearts and minds. Once they settled down to the humdrum task of accumulating capital, however, these grandiose notions weren’t so essential. Besides, by secularising and rationalising the world, capitalism created a climate in which such high-minded stuff sounded increasingly implausible. In doing so, it undercut some of its own rationales.

It’s mostly American politicians these days who talk about God, freedom, “this great country of ours” and “our brave men and women in uniform”, the United States being on account of its Puritan heritage one of the most metaphysical nations in the world, as well as one of the most materialistic. One can’t imagine Jeremy Hunt waxing eloquent about the country’s eternal debt to the Almighty, as opposed to its debt to its international creditors. As capitalist society evolves, its everyday practice comes loose from its rhetorical self-justification, which is to say that the gap between what it does, and what it says it does, looms incongruously large. This is what philosophers know as a performative contradiction. Better, then, to ditch as much of its metaphysical baggage as you decently can — in which case truth, at least with a large T, becomes increasingly redundant.

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Truth is what compels our belief, but belief isn’t what binds late capitalist societies together. According to the ruling ideology of liberalism, you can believe whatever you like as long as it doesn’t stymie other people’s freedom to do the same, or pose a serious threat to their wellbeing. The state doesn’t give a toss about what you believe, a situation which would have been unintelligible to John Calvin or Oliver Cromwell, and is still unintelligible to a host of contemporary autocrats. Besides, in a relativist world, the word “conviction” comes to have a dogmatic ring to it.

This is odd, given that having convictions of some sort is constitutive of being human. To be a person is to have a point of view on the world. The convictions in question don’t need to be obsessive. You can believe that childbirth should be abolished without standing with a megaphone outside maternity hospitals. The historian A.J.P. Taylor once told a committee interviewing him for an Oxford fellowship that he had extreme political opinions but held them moderately.

Rather as religious belief was privatised some centuries ago with the birth of Protestantism, as a transaction between you and God alone, so belief in general becomes a kind of private hobby, as harmlessly idiosyncratic as Morris dancing or pigeon-fancying. What holds such societies together — consumerism, material interests, the rule of law — doesn’t really have to pass through the human mind, as it most certainly does in Islamist set-ups. This is one way in which the West’s latest bogeyman — terrorism rather than Communism — puts it at a severe political disadvantage. Solidarity in such nations goes all the way down, whereas in Britain it is largely confined to football. The word “fan” is short for “fanatic”.

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It was unfortunate for the West that just when Islamism began to blow up innocent civilians, its own culture was becoming increasingly sceptical and relativist. Conviction was falling in value at just the point when it was politically necessary. Truth became subservient to material interests. In the age of Plato, truth was thought to be independent of such mundane matters. It was an absolute affair, sublimely transcendent of the everyday world of ignorance and delusion. Later, however, thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche argued that what we held to be true was largely determined by our perspective on the world, which was merely one among many such standpoints, and which was shaped among other things by our struggle for material survival. This argument didn’t deny that truth existed, but it placed it within a social and historical framework.

In our own time, this case has been reduced to a cruder version of itself: truth is simply an instrument of power. You describe the world in whatever way best promotes your interests. And since there are many conflicting interests, there are many conflicting truths. Enter Donald Trump and the Big Lie, along with those postmodernists who maintain that truth is just what’s true for me. Truth had finally been either abolished or privatised. What matters is what works — and for that purpose a blatant falsehood may do just as well. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “to trump up” as “to invent a false accusation or excuse”.

All this suits a society which is continually in flux. Truth and facts seem to be static, and thus incapable of surviving in a world whose only permanent feature is changeability. In the world of postmodern capitalism, everything is fluid, unstable, groundless and provisional. Change is good, but staying the same isn’t. This may be true for the CEOs of Tesco and Google, but as a general proposition it’s clearly absurd: if permanence and consistency are uncool, why not abolish the ban on child labour and send children of five into workplaces? But there’s also something absolute about historical truth that sticks in the craw of the Trumps and Hannitys of this world. If it’s true that the emperor Tiberius died on the island of Capri in 37 CE, it was true in 37 CE, true today and will no doubt also be true in the year 3000. Of course, it may not be true at all. But that is another question.

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There are other reasons why truth is being discredited. For Plato, truth was something deep, lurking beneath the surface appearances of everyday reality. Postmodernism is uneasy with this surface/depth model, for a number of reasons, one of them concerning what Lenin called the reality of appearances. In a culture of the image, star, brand, momentary sensation and instant gratification, everything seems on the surface; but if there are no depths, then there are no surfaces either, and the whole model collapses. The image is the reality, as in the term “Reality TV”. What you see is what you get. One is asked for one’s “take” on a topic, a verb borrowed from film and television. All this is convenient enough for the political Right, who also dislike the surface/depth model because it suggests that there are powerful but invisible forces which dominate our lives, not least those of the marketplace. “All the important processes,” Marx wrote, “go on behind the backs of individuals”. What we see and what we get aren’t at all the same thing. This belief lingers on in the post-truth era, but now it’s known as conspiracy theories.

Conspiracy theorists have got at least two things right: that the truth can differ dramatically from what we’re officially told, and that it is usually unpleasant. There aren’t many conspiracy fantasists who claim that the world is run by a benevolent secret society which will one day deposit a fortune in all our bank accounts. There is, however, a more attractive aspect to the concept of truth. The word itself comes from the Old English “triewth”, which means faith or constancy. There’s a related word, “troth”, which means trust or loyalty. So truth is originally a moral concept. Speaking in a way which is true to the way things are is closely bound up with being faithful to others. In fact, we couldn’t do the latter without the former. Without mutual trust there couldn’t be any social existence. It’s not surprising, then, that Donald Trump’s cavalier way with the facts is linked with a foul-mouthed contempt for most of his fellow human beings.

In The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Christopher Hitchens famously called for his prosecution “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offences against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap, and torture”. For him, the Kissinger Doctrine was dangerously straightforward: the US reserved the right to intervene anywhere in the world in defence of its interest, including by conspiring against democratically elected governments.

This manifested itself in a number of ways: in Kissinger’s support for Pinochet’s violent overthrow of Allende’s socialist government in Chile and for the 17-year-long dictatorship that followed; in his approval of the equally brutal Argentinian military junta of Jorge Videla; in his enabling of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor and the campaign of state-sponsored terror that followed; in his secret support for Pakistan as it committed shocking atrocities in Bangladesh; and in his encouragement of Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against neutral Cambodia and Laos, which killed an estimated 150,000 civilians. So wide-ranging was US interventionism under Kissinger that, in 1976, a 33-year-old Joe Biden accused him of trying to promulgate “a global Monroe Doctrine”.

Of all the offences committed by Kissinger, the Indochina bombing campaign is perhaps the most damning. In Kissinger’s Shadow, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Greg Grandin chronicled the scope of the destruction. The United States, Grandin wrote, dropped “a trillion pieces of shrapnel — either ball bearings or razor-sharp barbed darts” on Indochina. In Laos, American pilots deployed “a ton of explosives for each and every” citizen, which continue to maim and kill Laotian men, women and children to this day. As a portrait of Kissinger’s “grand strategy”, it is hard to disagree with Hitchens’s conclusion that his actions reveal a “a callous indifference to human life and human rights” — and to democracy, one may add.

With his reputation largely (and questionably) untainted by Watergate, Kissinger went on to found, in 1982, his own lucrative geopolitical consulting firm, Kissinger Associates, which he continues to run. We know relatively little of the work it carries out. Several attempts have been made, at the congressional level, to get the company to hand over its secretive “client list” — but all have failed. In 1989, Senator Jesse Helms unsuccessfully demanded to be shown it before he would consider confirming Lawrence Eagleburger (a Kissinger protégé and an employee of Kissinger Associates) as Deputy Secretary of State. In 2002, Kissinger chose to quit as chair of the 9/11 Commission rather than hand over the list for public review.

It is no secret, however, that Kissinger has used his extensive knowledge of and close relationship with foreign governments — including, one must assume, the several dictatorships he helped come to power — to advance the interests of some of the world’s largest corporations, including American Express, Coca-Cola, Daewoo, Heinz, Ericsson, Fiat and Volvo. As Grandin writes: “Kissinger Associates was an early player in the wave of privatisations that took place after the end of the Cold War — in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Latin America — helping to create a new international oligarchic class.”

Yet for every historian professing Kissinger’s alleged evil, there is another extolling his diplomatic genius. Perhaps the most illustrious representative of this second grouping is Niall Ferguson, who has published the first half of his authorised two-volume biography. For those such as Ferguson, Kissinger’s crimes were justified in the name of the Holy War against communism — which the United States, after all, won. As he wrote in his first volume: “Arguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries — and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor — must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected US relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers?”. The burden of proof, Ferguson suggested, is on critics to show how different policies “would have produced better results”.

More convincingly, Kissinger’s defenders focus on his diplomatic achievements, which are hard to dispute. America’s détente with the Soviet Union; the normalisation of US-China relations; an Arab-Israeli truce following the 1973 Yom Kippur War; the Paris Peace Accords to end the Vietnam War — all brought more peace to the world, and all were masterminded by Henry Alfred Kissinger.

So, was Kissinger an arch-imperialist or an arch-peacemaker? In a sense, he was neither. Both sides of the Kissinger wars tend to overemphasise his influence on US foreign policy during the Seventies, ignoring the deeper systemic trends at play. Insofar as Kissinger’s aggressive interventionism is concerned, this should be situated within the grander picture of the “structural” violence that has characterised the American Empire — both before and after he was in office. On some level, then, Kissinger simply did what he knew was expected of him. After all, virtually every post-1945 American statesman could be accused of crimes against humanity — which is, of course, the very reason such accusations largely don’t stick.

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Similarly, Kissinger’s diplomatic efforts also need to be situated within the wider “realist” consensus that dominated US policymaking during the Cold War. This framework took for granted that the US should pursue its interests, even ruthlessly so, but was also aware that the “multipolar” reality of the Cold War meant striking some kind of balance between America and other established (the Soviet Union) or ascending (China) powers, especially in the age of nuclear weapons.

From a different perspective, however, one could also argue that both camps are right: Kissinger was both an imperialist and a realist — an “imperealist”, one might say. Indeed, throughout his career, Kissinger has consistently warned against the dangers of America’s tendency to view itself as a unique nation endowed with a quasi-religious “manifest destiny” to spread its values — first and foremost democracy — to the rest of the world. Instead, he argued for an approach based on a hard-headed assessment of balancing the US’s national interests with those of other powers.

This, from Kissinger’s perspective, was even truer in the post-Cold War world. In his 1994 memoir, Diplomacy, he argued that in an international system characterised by five or six major powers, order could only emerge from a reconciliation of different national interests, with an acceptance of the legitimacy of opposing values. However, he recognised that America’s emergence as the single, most powerful global power made this unlikely; rather, it risked empowering those factions in the US establishment who aspired to unilaterally dictate the global agenda under the pretence of remodelling the world in America’s image.

This, of course, is exactly what happened. Since the Nineties, American foreign policy has been characterised by a perverse mix of aggressive imperialism, predicated on the view that the rise of any alternative power represents a vital threat to US supremacy, and moralistic democracy-versus-authoritarianism Manicheism. Particularly worrying is the fact that this zero-sum paradigm continues to dominate US foreign policy despite the emergence of two civilisational super-states — China and Russia — which openly challenge “Western values” and the US-led global order. This inevitably sets the world on a path of global conflict. Biden’s foreign policy, in this sense, is neoconservative through and through.

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It is therefore no surprise that Kissinger has grown increasingly at odds with the consensus in Washington. In recent years, he has repeatedly railed against America’s confrontational approach towards Russia and China, warning against the risk of a new Cold War — one that is now all but underway. In 2016, for example, he advised Donald Trump to accept Crimea as part of Russia as part of a negotiated settlement, and last year he suggested that incautious policies on the part of the US and Nato were partly responsible for sparking the invasion of Ukraine (though he also recently argued that, at this point, it would be in Russia’s interest for Ukraine to join Nato). Meanwhile, in a recent interview with The Economist, he called on America to rethink its policy vis-à-vis Taiwan and repair its relations with China. “We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to,” he explained last August.

The fact that even the words of a heavyweight such as Kissinger today go unheeded in Washington simply confirms the fact that he was much more a product than an architect of modern America. For better or for worse, Henry Kissinger’s century was the American century — and they are both coming to a close. Yet here, too, the US establishment would do well to meditate on Kissinger’s final warning: that America’s increasingly desperate attempts to preserve its dying hegemony won’t save the country. Rather, they will only accelerate its decline — and plunge the world into chaos.

“I hated the pointless discipline,” he tells me 60 years later. But in hindsight, he sees the value of spending 18 months in the Bundeswehr against his will. “Working with people from very different backgrounds helped me manage all sorts of people” — a useful skill for later in life, during his career in business. It also made him a more organised person. “We had a drill called ‘Nato alarm’. We had to get out of bed and be ready to go within 10 minutes. That was only possible if you had all your things in order.” To this day, he’s by far the tidiest person I know.

It was a very different time. Europe was constantly on edge. The 1961 stand-off in Berlin and the Cuban Missile Crisis were recent memories, and the prospect of a hot war between the Eastern Bloc and the West was not out of the realm of possibility. West Germany and Nato trained for what was considered a likely scenario: Soviet tanks pouring in from communist East Germany through the Fulda Gap towards Frankfurt. At the height of the Cold War, the Bundeswehr counted 495,000 soldiers in its ranks.

Now, Nato’s eastern flank is more than a 1,000km to the east and Germany has just 180,000 troops. But, having suspended mandatory military service in 2011, Germany is talking about reinstating it. After the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, Chancellor Scholz gave his now-famous Zeitenwende speech, which supposedly heralded a new era of defence readiness. Last month, the new, gung-ho defence minister Boris Pistorius said it was a mistake to end conscription. Inspector of the Navy, Vice-Admiral Jan Christian Kaack agrees, arguing that it’s good for society in uncertain times: “I believe that a nation that needs to become more resilient in these times will have a better understanding if we have intermingling with the soldiers.” It seems that the public is on board. A recent survey found that 61% of Germans believe it was a mistake to suspend conscription.

Despite the conflict raging to Germany’s east, most advocates for conscription’s revival don’t focus on the military benefits. Last summer, when German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier proposed reviving national service in the form of Dienstpflicht, compulsory military or civil service, he used an old argument: that serving your country is a way to integrate young people. “Especially now, at a time when understanding for other ways of life and opinions is waning, compulsory social service can be particularly valuable. You get out of your own bubble, meet completely different people, help citizens in distress.”

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In post-war Germany, Wehrpflicht, or military duty, always allowed for conscientious objectors to opt for civil service. By the Nineties, half of the selected young men chose non-military work. A friend of mine drove an ambulance in Munich — an intense, life-changing experience, which included rescuing a man who was romantically entangled with a Hoover. Others wiped bums in care homes or kindergartens. Like my father, most ultimately benefited from serving in their different ways, even if it seemed hard and senseless at the time, an obstacle on their path towards university and a career.

But does it really make sense, in 2023, to reinstate mass conscription? In the decades following the catastrophe of Hitler and World War II, the army was tightly controlled by parliament, and soldiers were meant to be “citizens in uniform”. If all men participated in the armed forces and then went back to normal life, the military could not be a powerful “state within a state”, which is how my dad describes the Wehrmacht during the Second World War. Interestingly, after conscription was halted in 2011, Germany’s all-volunteer army attracted proportionally more unsavoury, far-Right crackpots; some former professional soldiers have even cooked up unrealistic but potentially dangerous plans to overthrow the government or trigger a civil war. Conscription, one could argue, could not just integrate young men into society, it also could help to better integrate the military in the nation.

Compulsory service doesn’t necessarily make military sense, though, even in light of the threat presented by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Carlo Masala, professor at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich, imagines two scenarios in which the German army would be deployed: either a Russian attack on an eastern Nato country, most likely one of the Baltics, or a force directly invading Germany’s borders. A large army of conscripts only makes sense in the latter scenario; when your nation is directly under siege, a mass of troops is crucial. But the former scenario is far more likely — in the next two decades at least — and would require Germany contributing a small force of highly trained professionals armed with complex, high-tech kit.

Besides, Germany can’t afford a return to conscription. Masala says it would take five to ten years to build the barracks, purchase training equipment, and hire teaching staff. Annual costs would run in the double-digit billions. It would be much wiser to spend that money on attracting better volunteers by paying them higher wages — and buying them modern weaponry that works.

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Because the Bundeswehr has a lot of problems that an influx of new soldiers won’t fix. In the three decades after 1989, German defence fell into complacency, but from around 2015, the dismal state of the military became impossible to ignore. Angela Merkel’s last defence minister tried to boost appreciation for the troops with perks like free train tickets if they travelled in uniform — which wouldn’t be a big deal in most countries, but was controversial in Germany, where pacifism is deeply entrenched. By that point, defence was out of sight and out of mind: something rather distasteful that the Americans conveniently took care of from their huge base at Ramstein. Ironically, it was Donald Trump, a deeply unpopular figure in Germany, who prodded the country to change, with his insistence that Nato members spend 2% of GDP on defence. The Germans, and many other nations, are now aiming to do just that.

The conscription debate has flared up elsewhere in Europe. Latvia reintroduced it in January — hardly a surprising move, given the nation’s proximity to Russia. But Western European leaders are also dusting off the old-fashioned idea that shared military experience is a glue that keeps society from fragmenting. In 2019, Macron introduced a new four-week programme of national service, which will become compulsory. (He has said: “Military experience not only leads you to develop experiences but also behavioural qualities.”) In Italy, Right-wingers like Matteo Salvini have long advocated conscription’s revival: “I believe that a year of teaching the rules, good manners and duties would make good citizens.”

As for Scandinavia, Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea reawakened fears of Russian aggression. Sweden reintroduced conscription in 2017, as the number of volunteers was steadily falling. The move was backed by parties on the Right and Left. There is a broad consensus that national service is good for democracy. Every year, the nation selects about 6,000 male and female recruits based on an online survey, with questions about their physical condition and their attitude towards military service. Attitudes are similar in Norway, where 15% of 19-year-old men and women serve. Here, a shared border with Russia adds to the sense that conscription and a large number of citizens with some military training are necessary.

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But where I live, in Denmark, the hottest debate about conscription is very different from the one happening in either Germany or nations that share a border with Russia. At the moment, a small number of men are selected each year via a lottery, while women can sign up as volunteers. The government, led by social democrat Mette Frederiksen, is putting together legislation that will make service compulsory for women, too. It’s backed by feminist organisations such as Kvinfo, whose director Henriette Laursen writes: “If women and men are to be included in the Armed Forces on equal terms, military service should be the same for women and men. Therefore, Kvinfo recommends that military service be either extended to women or abolished altogether.”

Of course, forcing women to join the military might not be in their best interests; it can be a dangerous environment for them. Female veterans complain about sexual harassment and tell stories of women sleeping with knives under their pillows to ward off advances. But Laursen thinks the presence of more women will help, saying that the military needs to be cleansed of “macho culture”. Indeed, a Swedish official recently said that the main change since female conscription has been better hygiene among the men.

Equality sounds great on paper. But prominent voices object to the move. Anna Libak, a journalist and veteran, writes: “All women who have served in the armed forces — like myself — must admit that, all other things being equal, men are better soldiers because they are physically stronger than women.” There is, she argues, a fundamental reason why only 8.9% of uniformed soldiers in Denmark are female, and it’s not sexism. Her conclusion might provoke some feminists: having children is necessary for the survival of Denmark and women continue to bear the physical and financial burden of reproduction, so they shouldn’t be forced to carry arms on top. “There are many ways to defend the nation. For example, by giving birth to the conscripts of the future.”

Still, 55% of Danes favour the draft for both sexes — perhaps because most of the young people who serve these days appear to have a blast. The #værnepligt tag on Instagram reveals women in full camo floating in a lake, or a troop marching along a pristine beach at sunset, with captions like, “Hard, fun, challenging, educational, exhausting, adventurous, breaking down, building up, comradely, meaningless, meaningful, memorable! Would love to do it again!”. A far cry from the grim drudgery my father went through in Cold War Germany. In peaceful, prosperous Scandinavia, conscription really is an opportunity to make friends and learn something, just as it would be in Germany. But, in 2023, the image of the army as an Instagrammable adventure clashes violently with the horrors being broadcast from the trenches of Bakhmut.

On the brutal, 1,000-mile front that has divided Europe, the true cost of conscription is revealed: men of fighting age, and it is still largely men, being fed to the meat grinder, whether they like it or not. If, God forbid, war were to spread to Western Europe, having six months’ experience in the army wouldn’t save our young people. As peace continues to reign here, we still have the luxury of debating whether conscription will integrate disaffected young men into society, or whether mandatory military service for women will boost diversity and inclusion. But when push comes to shove, that’s not what the military’s about.

But there were signs of an alternative timeline if you looked closely, one marked by fragmentation as much as unity. Cultural events rippled in the consciousness; there were traces of the possibility that the apparent age of integration might actually be one of fracture.

The two Germanys unified in 1991 but the Soviet Union dissolved the same year. Mikhail Gorbachev was dubbed a “hero of deconstruction”. Yugoslavia began its disintegration shortly afterwards. In late 1991, the Somali state descended into a civil war and would have no central state for over a decade. The Swiss People’s Party racked up supporters as it drafted people against membership in the UN. The Freedom Party in Austria sought to revive nationalism along with the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, and the National Front in France. In Italy, the Northern League called for the secession of Lombardy. Many of the mainstream press’s post-2016 “populist” villains appeared on the stage in the early Nineties.

Pundits were hard on the trail of this alternative plot. In The Atlantic in 1994, Robert D. Kaplan warned of “the coming anarchy”. “Most people believe that the political earth since 1989 has undergone immense change,” he wrote, “but it is minor compared with what is yet to come. The breaking apart and remaking of the atlas is only now beginning.” Kaplan foresaw “an epoch of themeless juxtapositions, in which the classificatory grid of nation-states is going to be replaced by a jagged glass pattern of city-states, shanty states, nebulous and anarchic regionalisms”.

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By Helen Thompson

How to envision this world? Francis Fukuyama had borrowed “the Last Man” from Friedrich Nietzsche. Kaplan proposed a “Last Map”, three-dimensional and holographic:

“In this hologram would be the overlapping sediments of group and other identities atop the merely two-dimensional colour markings of city-states and the remaining nations, themselves confused in places by shadowy tentacles, hovering overhead, indicating the power of drug cartels, mafias, and private security agencies. Instead of borders, there would be moving ‘centres’ of power, as in the Middle Ages.”

“This future map,” he concluded, “will be an ever-mutating representation of chaos.” Of course, the goal of Kaplan’s map, appearing in the house journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, was to contain and control the chaos. It recalled the oversized maps of Cold War thrillers from Dr. Strangelove (1964) to WarGames (1983). Bruce Sterling’s novel Islands in the Net (1988) also featured a global simulation called Worldrun, used “as a forecasting tool for development agencies” and also as a game. In the interface, “long strips of the Earth’s surface peeled by in a simulated satellite view. Cities glowed green with health or red with social disruption.”

The Last Map’s vision of anarchy was dystopian — a future to be avoided at any cost. This is the dominant perspective one gets from the airport bookshelves and magazine racks: the anxieties of those who perceive themselves to have access to the levers of power, the mapmakers, those who need to figure out how the dials can be tweaked to return order from disorder. Implicitly and often explicitly, this is a story about the reassertion of American overseas power. In a phrase he would repeat variations of for decades, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1988 that “the only alternative to America is anarchy”.

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Should America be more like Ukraine?

By Mark Lilla

But there were others who saw the crack-up coming and cheered it on. After the Cold War’s end, they surveyed the globe and thought: now that capitalism had won, why not go all the way? Fragmentation, they believed, was the new frontier of liberty. Paleo-libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe and conservatives like Charles Murray and Paul Craig Roberts opposed the moves to greater integration that marked the Nineties, cheered the hardening of borders and called for the revision of immigration laws to discriminate against people from blacker and browner countries, revived race science to support their claims. Some dug deep into medieval history to claim that segregation was good and small collectives should protect their own. They promoted, in other words, many of the principles associated now with the far-Right.

Yet they all had something in common: they were market liberals and libertarians. How did people from the supposed camp of open borders become champions of higher and thicker walls? How did adherents of an ideology supposedly built around the universal figure of homo economicus embrace hoary theories of genetically determined intelligence and ignorance? When did zealous advocates of global markets turn against what one called “the beast” of the “New World Order”?

When people think about the direction of global capitalism over the last century, they usually look upwards and outwards: to the supranational and the international level. After the Second World War, America assumed the role of conductor in the world financial orchestra it had declined after the First World War. National economies were layered over with private circuits of trade and inter-state agreements in the form of treaties, regional compacts, and shared membership in international organisations. After the Seventies, when the term “globalisation” was coined, the volume of cross-border flows of goods and money increased steadily before being turbocharged in the Nineties. The graph of global exports shows a steep climb up to the eventual slump of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and later the Coronavirus Crisis of 2020.

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The American experiment has just begun

By Anton Jäger

The term people often use for the period from the late Seventies to the early 21st century is “neoliberalism”. Conservative leaders such as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the Eighties were followed by centre-Left leaders such as Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Gerhard Schröder in the Nineties, who consecrated free trade and deindustrialisation as natural, inevitable, and, despite increasing inequality, ultimately a net win for all. Today, it is common to hear all the policies of the Nineties and 2000s — from the transformation of welfare benefits and the move to precarious employment to the privatisation of state-owned assets and the enforcement of austerity — as “neoliberal”.

To some, neoliberalism means a kind of hyper-capitalism and the commodification of every last aspect of existence. To others, it is a package of policies that involves deep scepticism of states but is still committed to using states to safeguard capitalism against threats — often from democracy itself.

The term neoliberalism itself was coined as self-description by a group of intellectuals in the Thirties who reconvened after the Second World War in the Mont Pelerin Society established by Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others. “A voluntary community of individuals who share a dedication to the principles of a free society,” according to the Encyclopaedia of Libertarianism, the MPS meets regularly for the exchange of papers-in-progress and response to current events. Its membership includes eight winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics including Hayek and Friedman alongside George Stigler, Gary Becker, James M. Buchanan, Maurice Allais, Ronald Coase, and Vernon Smith.

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America is showing its age

By Adam Smith

What is fascinating to observe is that even as many commentators saw neoliberalism as triumphant, neoliberals themselves sang a different tune. On paper, it appeared that battles had been won. At first, free-market intellectuals responded to the fall of the Berlin Wall by putting up busts of Mises and Hayek in libraries and public squares across Eastern Europe, as the region bathed in what the National Review called a “neoliberal zeitgeist” in 1990. But victory proved illusory.

Very quickly, neoliberals concluded that the supranational institutions which had once looked promising were socialist Trojan Horses. “Socialism was dead but Leviathan lived on,” as MPS president James Buchanan put it in 1990. Communism had changed shades from red to green. “It is fitting that the MPS, the world’s leading group of free market scholars, was meeting the week that communism collapsed in the Soviet Union,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 1991. But those gathered saw that as “Communism exits history’s stage, the main threat to liberty may come from a utopian environmental movement that, like socialism, views the welfare of human beings as subordinate to ‘higher’ values”.

Interviewed by Peter Brimelow in 1992, Milton Friedman expressed a similar sentiment. Asked about the Cold War’s end, he responded:

“Look at the reaction in the US to the collapse of the Berlin Wall… There weren’t any summit meetings in Washington about how to cut down the size of government. What was there a summit meeting about? How to increase government spending. What was the supposedly Right-wing President, Mr Bush, doing? Presiding over enormous increases in paternalism — the Clean Air Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act, the so-called Civil Rights quota bill.”

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Larkin's lesson for Northern Ireland

By Tom McTague

At the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society after the wall’s fall, the president, Italian economist Antonio Martino, hit similar notes when he announced: “While socialism is dead, statism is not.” The three biggest threats he saw were environmentalism, continued demands for state spending, and the European Community. The comedown was intense. At a meeting of the Cato Institute in Moscow in 1990, ice sculptures of hammers and sickles dissolved into puddles as Paul Craig Roberts, the author of a book on the end of communism called Meltdown, beamed for the camera. Just a few years later, Roberts warned of an “alien future” in which “whites are turning over their country to Third World immigrants” and will soon have to worry about being targets of “ethnic genocide”. Crack-up capitalists fed on fear of what they saw as the “mutated” socialism of environmentalism and “alienism”.

In the Nineties and beyond, neoliberals began to focus ever more on the vision of decentralisation, dissolution, and even disintegration. Polities must become smaller. Fragmentation was the new frontier of liberty. When the map shattered with the end of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, they thought: let it shatter more. In 1990, MPS president Becker wrote that “small fry nations” were entirely viable and perhaps even preferable as they were more dependent on the world market and thus driven to more adjustment. The immediate context he was responding to was campaigns for secession in Quebec from Canada, provinces from Spain and Ethiopia and Lithuania from the Soviet Union.

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Are you an extremist?

By Terry Eagleton

This post-Cold War period was a historically sublime moment: capitalism had won but what capitalism meant was still undecided. Libertarians were among the most active in this process of re-imagination, with solutions from designing boutique polities and bespoke states to rehabbing existing zones, colonies, and city-states. For these thinkers states should dissolve into platform polities and “start-up societies” offering customised services to customers instead of securing rights for citizens.

For decades, these capitalist radicals surveyed the world for experiments in anarchocapitalism comparable to existing favourites, such as the Wild West or medieval Iceland. They started their own experiments in “micro-ordering” and sparked wide-ranging discussions about the basic requirements for building collective life and the foundational facts of human nature. When Silicon Valley prophets such as Peter Thiel said in 2009 that “if we want to increase freedom, we want to increase the number of countries”, he was speaking out of this alternative zeitgeist. Anyone who thinks globalism is the only way that capitalist radicalism manifests itself should acquaint themselves with those less interested in scaling up than scaling down and opting out.

His words echo those of Germany’s minister of state for eastern Germany, who had just been to visit. Joining Burnham at the Conference of the North, Carsten Schneider said: “The goal of creating equal living conditions everywhere in Germany can even be found in our constitution. There are good reasons for it. If regions are drifting apart, it is bad for everyone. If a variety of regions flourish, the whole country will prosper.”

“When you visit Germany,” Burnham wrote, “you can see and feel the success of this policy wherever you go in the high standards of transport infrastructure and the public realm.” Obviously, Burnham has never taken Deutsche Bahn. Thanks to ageing infrastructure and a huge investment backlog, Germany’s railways just are no longer very punctual. An investigation by ARD in September, found the rail network was on the “brink of collapse”. And, as in the UK, it is a symbol of Germany’s failure to invest equally in all its regions.

The policy lionised by centre-Left politicians like Schneider and Burnham is the mammoth project known as Aufbau Ost, the rebuilding of the former communist East over the last 30 years. When the two were reunified, the West’s GDP was 50% higher than the East’s; visiting the latter when I was a teenager felt like travelling back in time to a vaguely dystopian past with tiny, sputtering plastic cars, the ubiquitous whiff of coal smoke, and a vast shortage of house paint and non-scratchy toilet paper. Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised “blossoming landscapes” in the East when the Berlin Wall fell. The opposite happened. Industrial production fell by 70%. A third of eastern factories were shuttered; many were sold for a pittance to westerners. Joblessness exploded. The investment flowing in couldn’t stem the haemorrhage. By 1995, the alarmed Kohl government had forged a plan to properly fund the Aufbau, which he named the Solidarpakt: the “solidarity pact”. The plan was designed to honour the constitutional clause vaunted by Burnham, which makes the federal government responsible for the “creation of equivalent living conditions” across the land.

What constitutes equivalent conditions is, of course, open to interpretation. Conservatives usually understand it to mean equality of public infrastructure — roads, railways, telecommunications. But the Left often stress that it should also mean similar wage and pension levels. Periodically, the state governments bicker over the details of the formulas, with suggestions of tweaks that would work in their favour. Nonetheless, the principle of federal redistribution has remained robust.

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It wasn't the Berlin Wall that divided Germany

By James Hawes

After all, the Solidarpakt turbocharged a system that had actually been in place since 1949, when the Federal Republic was created under the watchful eyes of the occupying Allies. That system is known as the Länderfinanzausgleich (literally: “State Financial Equalisation”), and grew out of another article in the constitution, which states that “it shall be ensured by law… that the different financial strength of the Länder is adequately compensated for”. Essentially, it regulates the transfer of tax revenue from richer Länder (states) to poorer ones.

But in the Nineties, the Länderfinanzausgleich didn’t provide nearly enough money to prevent total economic meltdown in the East. For this, hundreds of billions were needed. A new temporary “solidarity surcharge” to fund the East appeared on wage slips as 7.5% of Germans’ income tax. Petrol taxes were raised. In addition, large special funds were set up to finance culture, police and infrastructure in Berlin, commensurate with the city’s status as the new-old capital of the reunified country. Additional hundreds of billions of euros flowed into the East, in the form of state pensions that recognised the working lives of easterners, even if they’d been working in a system that had collapsed and whose currency was almost worthless.

Nobody knows exactly how much reunification “cost”, because there are so many different ways of calculating it, but it’s certainly well over a trillion euros. Aufbau Ost was a huge burden on the economy, but it meant that the “new federal states” soon received smooth autobahns and glittering train stations. Town centres and castles from the Baltic to the Czech border were impeccably renovated. Gradually, the solidarity tax was lowered. Today, only high earners pay the surcharge.

Would the English ever accept such a burden? Despite complaints in the press, West Germans generally saw it as a duty towards their brethren who suffered under communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall gave the project an unprecedented historical urgency. There simply was no alternative. Can one really imagine London and the Home Countries taking one for the North? For as long as it really takes to make a difference?

And how inspired should we be by Germany anyway? Länderfinanzausgleich is complicated in a way that only Germany can do complicated: Sueddeutsche Zeitung once wrote that only a few dozen people actually understand how it works — which shouldn’t be the case in a democracy.

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The media's Manchester snobbery

By Joshi Herrmann

And though the work of “levelling up” Germany has come a very long way, it is by no means finished. Many cities in the East — Leipzig, Dresden, Berlin — are more prosperous than some of their western equivalents. The country’s unemployment deadbeat is no longer the capital, but Bremen, in the North-West. But income levels in the East remain stubbornly lower: in 2020, the average gross salary, at €36,499, was still €7,440 lower than in the West.

Other vectors point to inequality as well. According to a study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, a think tank linked to the centre-Left SPD, most rural areas in the East are in a “lasting structural crisis” — thanks to depopulation, low wages and not enough broadband. Many smaller Western cities also struggle with deindustrialisation and rising poverty — not unlike the North of England. Levelling up hasn’t prevented their decline. Nevertheless, most of the net recipients of Länderfinanzausgleich are still in the East.

Then there is the capital — that strange spawn of East and West — which, although it now displays above-average growth, still receives the largest helping out of the pot: €3.6 billion from a total of €17 billion in 2021. It receives additional billions, too, from a separate federal fund for troubled regions, because otherwise the city wouldn’t be able to service its €60 billion in debt. This has been met with grumbling in certain parts of the nation. Though Berlin has rebounded, it is still considered run-down, decrepit and lawless by the rest of the country. When, on New Year’s Eve, youths attacked and injured police and first responders with fireworks in war-like scenes on the streets of Berlin, Bavarian leaders railed against the “chaotic” capital. Once a poor rural kingdom populated by Lederhosen-wearing yokels, Bavaria was a net recipient of financial transfers until the late Eighties. Now, it leads Germany in everything from tourism to tech to education.

Why, Bavarians asked, should they fund the “failed state” of Berlin, which can’t even maintain order — and has to re-do a local election next month because of rampant irregularities?

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Has East Germany given up on the West?

By Maurice Frank

Likewise, when Berlin decided to become the first and only German state to offer free day-care a few years ago, the protest coming out of Munich was loud: why should we pay for something those loser Berliners, with their €60 billion in debt, can scarcely afford? On such occasions, politicians from richer states inevitably demand reform: a kind of anti-levelling-up. Last week Bavarian finance minister Albert Füracker said he no longer wanted to fund Berlin’s “feel-good programmes” and  announced Bavaria would challenge the Länderfinanzausgleich in the constitutional court. Should someone tell Andy Burnham?

Just like in Britain, Germany’s capital indubitably gets more than its fair share. Can we, then, really be holding the nation up as a model for levelling up? And, perhaps more to the point: is the Herculean challenge of grafting a bankrupt former communist country onto a modern capitalist economy in any way comparable to the task of tackling industrial decline and a lack of investment in regions like North Eastern England or Wales? Can Britain learn from Germany, or is the German solution too, well, German?

To fully answer this question, we need to look beyond the birth of the Länderfinanzausgleich to the history the policy grew out of. That history is radically different from England’s. Until Prussia bundled together most of the German-speaking lands into an empire (the Second Reich) in 1871, the place we call Germany comprised dozens of kingdoms and dukedoms. No single metropolis lorded over the rest. England, on the other hand, became a country in the year 927. The monarch’s government has been collecting tax from its perch in London for more than a millennium. Only with the Third Reich did Germany truly centralise power (and finances) in Berlin. We know how that went.

After the war, the country was purposefully re-crafted to have no strong centre. Although Berlin is beginning to flourish economically again — it attracts more start-up capital than any other German city — it will never be a London, generating the bulk of the nation’s wealth then distributing it like a whimsical king. To disrupt structures so deep-rooted takes a catastrophe, or else decades of slow change. German “devolution” was originally imposed by the force of a few words in a constitution, dictated by occupying powers, the country having been at the stage of some of the 20th century’s most harrowing dramas. The collapse of two dictatorships demanded drastic measures. England has not seen such severe upheavals in modern times.

An awareness of history and a deep desire for stability means the German state has been willing to take on huge tasks — and throw real money at them — in a way that might seem foreign and exaggerated to some in Westminster. I’m not sure Andy Burnham realises the scale of change required to transform England’s system into something like Germany’s. One might dream of transforming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland into a federation. Maybe that’s what it really takes to achieve more equality. But would London ever agree to such a radical move? Muddling through, having the provinces beg for crumbs, probably suits the capital just fine.

A slew of essays had been commissioned on the trials and tribulations of the former East. Topics ranged from the crystal meth crisis in the city of Chemnitz to the widespread feeling among Easterners of being “second-class” citizens. One of my jobs was to translate this writing for an English audience.

It was fascinating work, but while it helped me better understand the predicament of those “socialised in the East”, as the Germans say, it also triggered in me some typical Besser-Wessi (know-it-all-Westerner) eye-rolling. When will these East Germans stop complaining? When will they admit that reunification has vastly improved their lives? It’s a bit of a generalisation but no matter how many billions are ploughed into their part of the country, they always seem to have something to complain about.

Since September or so, the Besser-Wessi’s counterpart, the Jammer-Ossi (Eastern whiner), has been back in the news. Every Monday, in cities and towns across Saxony, Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg, citizens have gathered to protest the government’s energy policy, the cost-of-living crisis and its support for Ukraine. Their demands include an end to the sanctions against Russia, a return to using the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, and immediate talks with Russia to end the war.

Placards at these gatherings are straightforward. They read “No poverty for Biden’s war” or “Immediate Nato withdrawal from Ukraine” or, in English, “They got money for war but can’t feed the poor”. What’s striking is how the words “Putin” or “Russia” are nowhere to be seen — as if the war were entirely the doing of imperialist Uncle Sam. As if Ukraine had no right to defend itself. As if Poland, the Baltics and other eastern European nations were just puppets of an American masterplan to control the region — and had no legitimate security concerns of their own.

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Germany: Europe's bordello

By Julie Bindel

The protesters aren’t your traditional peaceniks. No flowers nor Birkenstocks here. Instead, they represent the far-Left and far-Right fringes, with both the Ring-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and far-Left Die Linke trying to light a fire under a new rebellion on the streets.

Some Right-wing organisers hope growing anger about the war will bring together unlikely bedfellows from Left and Right under the banner of anti-Americanism. Jörg Elsässer, the publisher of far-Right German magazine Compact promoted a demonstration outside the US Consulate in Leipzig last weekend with the hashtag #Amigohome (Yank go home). Meanwhile, veteran Left-wing politician Oskar LaFontaine (a Wessi who became disillusioned by the Social Democrats) published a book titled Ami it’s time to go home: A plea for the self-assertion of Europe. For LaFontaine, Germany supplying weapons to Ukraine makes it a vassal of the United Sates. Compact, not to be outdone, has just put out a special edition titled “USA vs Germany: The 100-year war”. The previous week its cover featured LaFontaine’s wife, the popular Die Linke politician Sahra Wagenknecht, with the headline “The best chancellor for Left and Right”.

Stoking anti-Americanism probably isn’t even necessary. A more effective rallying call is the feeling that the East is suffering disproportionately from the severing of economic ties with Russia. One flashpoint is the city of Schwedt on the Polish border, where the Russian-owned PCK refinery employs 1,200 people. Sanctions on Russian oil kick in on January 1, meaning the pipeline supplying the plant has to shut down, creating a direct link between Western sanctions and potential mass layoffs. Unsurprisingly, economy Minister Robert Habeck was heckled when he visited Schwedt to talk to workers over the summer.

The workers’ concerns are obviously justified, but it’s not as if they aren’t being heard: Olaf Scholz’s coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Liberals has been working overtime to make sure PCK is supplied with non-Russian oil, delivered via German and Polish ports once Russian oil stops flowing. All jobs at the refinery have been guaranteed to the end of 2023. Yet despite the rescue plans, Habeck and his Green party remain objects of hate in the East. He’s blamed for allowing energy prices to soar to new heights, while the Greens are decried as hypocritical warmongers, former pacifists who have to toe the American line on supplying arms to Ukraine.

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How war radicalised Germany

By Maurice Frank

Elsewhere, anti-war sentiments have come from unexpected quarters: associations representing East German craftspeople have published open letters warning that war-driven inflation meant ordinary people could no longer afford their services. They demand an end to sanctions and a diplomatic solution to the war. Interestingly, trade associations in the West of the country — where SMEs have been equally impacted or even been bankrupted by high energy prices — have said exactly the opposite: Germany must support Ukraine until Russia is defeated.

In fact, it’s hard to pin down an economic cause for the current wave of protests. In Saxony, where the “resistance” is strongest, the jobless rate is at a near-record low of 5%. And despite the gathering clouds, the German economy is still growing. This is reflected in the Government’s new measures. In October, for instance, the minimum wage rose to €12 an hour, up from €9.82 at the beginning of 2022. Next year, jobless benefits rise by €50 per month, alongside higher housing and child benefits. Hundreds of billions are being mobilised to cap energy costs for consumers and small businesses. So claims that nothing’s being done for the little guy seem unfounded.

Rather, what really seems to be driving East-German discontent is a sense of victimhood, helplessness and anger rooted in the traumatic experiences of the Nineties, when Easterners’ fates lay entirely in the hands of Western officials, politicians and businessmen who had descended, in their view, like a pack of vultures, shutting down factories, and stripping assets, sacking teachers, professors, judges and officials with a communist past. It’s as if they woke up in a new country that devalued everything about them: their past, their identity, their work.

The “blossoming landscapes” promised by Helmut Kohl took far too long to materialise — and in many rural areas never really took root. Many no longer trust Western liberal narratives propagated by a uniform media that, in their view, dismisses concerns about immigration as racist or economic anxiety about Covid lockdowns as crazy. Perhaps that’s why conspiracy theories that go well beyond comprehensible dissatisfaction find fertile ground here. A speech by Christian Klar, an extreme Right-winger and convicted felon who organised a demo in the small city of Gera on October 3, spells out a simple, grand explanation for East Germans’ problems: “Whether it’s mass migration, climate change, corona, vaccination or the Ukraine war: everything serves a grand plan. In the wet dreams of the globalists, the cabal, we are all the bottom of the food chain.”

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But will enough East Germans rebel to the point of no return, delivering extremists into positions of power? I’m sceptical. Enough voters still realise that, despite the problems, there is no alternative to an economy wedded to Western Europe and the US, or to a foreign policy in lockstep with the West. Russia might have delivered cheap fuel for Germany’s industrial economy but that can be replaced in the long run. The US accounted for €122 billion in German exports last year. Exports to Russia were a fifth of that. And American companies are investing like mad in eastern Germany. Tesla’s plant in Brandenburg, as well as a massive new Intel semiconductor factory being built in Magdeburg, will provide thousands, if not tens of thousands, of well-paid jobs.

So, call me naive, but I believe most East Germans have it better than ever. Just like the old readers of the Berliner Zeitung, the numbers of diehard Ossis are dwindling. For now, these demonstrations have remained small. Most younger people just see themselves as “German” and, for the most part, haven’t inherited the trauma caused by the collapse of East Germany. For them, closer ties to Russia make no sense. At least for the foreseeable future, the West is their only home.

***

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That was the first lesson of the war: Putin collided head-on with the paradoxical logic of strategy. Military alliances need a shared enemy. Once the Cold War ended, Nato became weaker and weaker, because diverse interests — including the desire to spend less — naturally arose once there was no enemy to threaten all. Nato became so weak that in Europe there was talk of a military alliance without the US. Only irrelevant Leftists said this straight out, but many mainstream politicians across Europe kept hinting that the time had come for Nato to be replaced by a European Union alliance.

By February 2022, Nato was evidently no longer strong enough to deter Russia, so Russia attacked Ukraine. Because Russia attacked Ukraine, Nato suddenly had a threatening enemy, and the alliance quickly became strong once more. Many Nato countries sent military aid to Ukraine rapidly, which was essential materially, and very encouraging morally. Some of it was for show, but much was useful and some was just smart. Norway, for example, immediately sent 5,000 LAW hand-launched anti-tank rockets. Old, cheap and limited in range but the perfect weapons for the first days of this war, because anybody could use them even without training. Just point and shoot at an armoured vehicle.

Not only did Nato wake up, but it also grew. Within days of the invasion, the alliance started expanding. Australia, not a Nato member but an official “partner”, sent military aid (including Bushmaster armoured cars by airlift over 19,600 kilometres). Japan, not a Nato member, sent important financial aid. Even before they applied for Nato membership, Sweden and Finland also sent military aid.

The second lesson of the war concerned the silent role of seapower. In April, the sinking of the Russian flagship Moskva 80 nautical miles south of Odessa attracted much attention. Videos of the burning ship were everywhere. But there are no videos of aero-naval battles in the North Atlantic: even though Russia has effective attack submarines, both nuclear-powered and diesel-electric in Atlantic waters, the US and Canada have been able to support Ukraine by shipping aid entirely unmolested. Because Russian naval forces are totally deterred, Western Europe has its safe material and strategic depth in the Atlantic.

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Russia's 18th-century war

By Edward Luttwak

The third lesson of the war was a demonstration of the levels of strategy. Strategy operates at different levels: the tactical level, the operational level, the theatre-of-war-level, and finally, the level of Grand Strategy. It is possible to lose a war at any of those levels, but to be successful it is necessary to be at least adequate at each and every one.

The Tactical Level

In this war, the first fight took place at the Antonov aviation company’s airfield just outside Kyiv, a face-to-face tactical battle for the landing strip. It was to be used for Russian troop transports to fly in the assault force that aimed to swiftly seize the capital.

The Russian troops who arrived were elements of the 11th Guards Air Assault Brigade and the 31st Guards Air Assault Brigade — Russia’s elite troops. The Ukrainians had no such force to oppose them, only whoever happened to be at or near the airfield: some members of the so-called “National Guard” — just gendarmes with small arms — and then whoever could arrive right away from Kyiv: some scattered Ukrainian troops, civilian volunteers with whatever weapons they could find, a few elite soldiers attached to headquarters, even some exiled Georgian Legion volunteers…

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It was a recipe for a massacre: the cohesive, elite Russian units should quickly have killed them all. But because they had expected no resistance at all (as both Russian Intelligence and the always-wrong CIA had forecast), they were shocked by the ferocious resistance, and soon had to flee into the nearby woods. A Russian tactical victory would not have won the war, but the tactical defeat at the Antonov field was catastrophic, because the entire Russian war plan was based on a fast Coup de Main to seize central Kyiv in a matter of hours.

The Operational Level

When armoured columns invade a country, they should advance on multiple vectors. That way, if one vector is stopped by the enemy (a tactical defeat), other vectors can continue to advance, forcing the enemy to retreat or be captured, turning tactical failure into an operational-level victory.

But in the Russian plan, there was only one vector: all the available forces were to drive to Kyiv. But when the Antonov seizure failed, and thousands of airborne troops could not be flown in, Russia’s only advancing vector had to stop. Recall that double column of armoured vehicles and supply trucks in those satellite pictures: it could neither advance nor retreat without entangling itself in thousands of cumbersome U-turns. With tanks and other heavy vehicles, stop-and-go uses up vast amounts of fuel, and with many vehicles stranded, the double column was exposed to an increasing number of bold attacks.

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The material losses were great, and the moral defeat greater because the Russians could not redeem the catastrophic operational-level failure that followed their tactical defeat at the Antonov field, because of a yet more fundamental error at a higher level of strategy.

The Level of Theatre Strategy

Geography enters the picture at the level of theatre strategy. Ukraine is much smaller than the Russian Federation, the largest country in the world. But Ukraine is not small — it is Europe’s largest country.

In August 1968, when the Soviet Union decided to invade Czechoslovakia (one fifth the size of modern Ukraine), it sent some 800,000 troops to invade from East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and westward from Ukraine. By the first night of the invasion, there were occupation troops everywhere, ready to stifle any Czech resistance.

But Putin, until 2022 a careful poker player who won territories without any fighting at all, became a reckless gambler. He invaded Europe’s largest country with a very small army of some 130,000 (including field dentists), hence he had no powerful combat forces ready to intervene when the Kyiv air assault gambit failed.

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The level of Grand Strategy

What counts at the level of Grand Strategy are two sets of fundamentals. First is Mass: population, economy, technology. Then Mass x Cohesion = power. With no cohesion, there is no strength at all, even with a lot of Mass. Second is what a country has abroad: allies, neutrals, enemies.

As for its economy, Russia, though not a rich country, is entirely self-sufficient in food and energy. This is not true of most countries. The same G-7 sanctions that could not stop Russia could stop Xi Jinping’s China, which must choose between fighting wars and eating protein. Yes, more than a year of rice reserves and some months of frozen pork can be stored, but not the immense amounts of soya beans China imports to feed animals for milk, eggs and meat.

We all saw that Russia is weak in allies, because instead of attracting neutrals to its side, it frightened them into joining Nato or at least to remain neutral. Russia is also weak in allies because, even though it has a navy, it is not a maritime power. Only the nearby Central Asian countries and Mongolia — facing an expansionist China — still need the counter-weight of Russian power, and duly fear its waning in Ukraine. But to succeed at the level of grand strategy, it would need something else: the willing cooperation of insular, peninsular countries and coastal countries that only a maritime power can have.

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But Russia still has sheer magnitude on its side. With many more people than any other European country, unless Putin changes his mind or loses power, he can keep trying and failing in Ukraine until he gets it right. Of its two million reservists, only 300,000 have been recalled to serve, of which 200,000 might reach the front. But 200,000 are enough to double the forces now fighting at the front, and once they catch up in combat experience, they could stop Ukraine’s victories. In other words, Russia’s mass means that it can lose many battles and yet still keep fighting.

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.

Since the start of the Russian invasion, more than one Ukrainian official has described his nation’s struggle with reference to The Lord of the Rings.

It is perhaps peculiar that Tolkien’s trilogy resonates in this part of the world, given its troubled publication history in the Soviet Union. The first (unsuccessful) attempt saw it rewritten as a sci-fi book, in which the ring is a scientific instrument. Subsequent attempts were marginally more successful, but still only abridged versions. A full, authorised Russian translation appeared only in 1992, after the Soviet Union had collapsed. A Ukrainian one followed in 1993.

Why was the USSR so suspicious of Tolkien? From a Western perspective, his fantasy seems innocuous. But to Soviet eyes, it seemed dangerously close to a Cold War allegory: the good, individualistic, “free peoples” of the West versus the evil, industrial totalitarianism of the East. Tolkien certainly didn’t intend his novels to be interpreted this way, famously denouncing allegory “in all its manifestations”. But as those Ukrainian officials are showing today, finding allegories in familiar material can be used to powerful effect.

And they are not the only ones. In the late Nineties, years after the Soviet Union had collapsed, a Russian palaeontologist called Kirill Yeskov self-published a book that enshrines the Soviet interpretation of The Lord of the Rings. The Last Ringbearer assumes that Tolkien’s story is indeed a Cold War allegory, but tells it from the other side. “Lord of the Rings is the historiography of the victors,” Yeskov’s narrator reminds us towards the book’s end. He offers the Kremlin’s version of events.

In the face of a looming climate catastrophe, the peaceful eastern realm of Mordor, under His Majesty Sauron VIII, harnesses modern technology to embark upon an industrial revolution, aided by its elite class of scientists, the Nazgûl. A universal literacy law is passed, and thanks to an experienced diplomatic corps and powerful intelligence apparatus, the standing army is drastically reduced.

But the “bone-headed aggressive West”, led by the war-mongering imperialist Gandalf, feels threatened by Mordor’s achievements. Gandalf concocts a “final solution to the Mordorian problem”, in collusion with the racist elves from across the Western ocean. Using the puppet Aragorn, the elves have dominated the men of Middle Earth, leaving only Mordor a free country. But then Mordor is conquered, and in its place a “bad copy” of the West is erected.

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In sum: a great civilisation attempting to build a rational society based on science and technology (the Soviet Union) is met with irrational hatred from the so-called “free peoples” (the West) led by elves from across the sea (Americans). These elves conspire to destroy Mordor and divide the race of men (Europeans), who constantly push their influence eastwards (Nato expansion). It is left to heroic spies (Putin?) to save Mordor.

Yeskov’s retelling is unauthorised by the Tolkien estate and not considered a masterpiece. But it is popular with Tolkien fans — especially in Russia. The Last Ringbearer is more than just a simple Cold War allegory, however. It is also a window into the mind of the Soviet baby boomer generation (to which both Putin and Yeskov belong) — and how the end of the Cold War informs their view of international relations. The best example is the fate of the Elven ally, the nation of Umbar.

Umbar, a republic to the south of Middle Earth, used to balance relations between Mordor and the elves. But when it decided to abandon Mordor and team up with the West, disaster struck. “A fad for all things Elvish swept the Umbrian youth. The simpler ones made do with Elven music and symbols, whereas the more sophisticated were offered a comprehensive ideology” — a “concoction” of what sounds like Zen Buddhism, “anarchism” and environmentalism. Aimless Western individualism, in other words.

It gets worse. “It transpired that not sharing those views was unseemly and even dangerous, all persons who had the ill grace of expressing anything other than admiration and support for them were ostracised and persecuted.” Umbar’s folly was its naivete. The nation allowed itself to be turned into a “bad copy” of the West. It failed to notice that the elves’ interest in an alliance sprang from nothing more than cold national interest.

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When the USSR collapsed and Russia, under Yeltsin, embarked on a Westernising, capitalist course, the old Soviet certainties were thrown out. A fashion for all things Western swept the nation. For the older generation, this was difficult to come to terms with. Putin’s reign has seen a revival of Soviet nostalgia and neo-Soviet aesthetics for this very reason: Russian baby boomers have a deep and residing respect for the USSR, and a suspicion of all things Western.

Yeskov’s novel subverts the incredibly simplistic Western notion of the Cold War as a struggle between good and evil, by upending Tolkien’s tale of incredibly clear-cut morality and purely unsympathetic villains. In his version of Middle Earth, ideas such as “good” and “evil” are just ideological cloaks for the pursuit of national interests; they are the invention of the victors, like Tolkien, who chronicle events. Yeskov is not suggesting that Mordor and the orcs of Lord of the Rings are the good guys; he is suggesting that there are no good guys. Incidentally, the fact that we in the West can’t seem to understand this — that we apparently parrot idealism, while acting on realism — is one of Putin’s biggest gripes.

Yeskov’s playful reinterpretation of Tolkien’s work is not, however, the result of a nefarious Russian desire to identify with Mordor, as some commentators seem to suggest, and the Cold War parallels shouldn’t be stretched beyond their limits. Like The Lord of the Rings, The Last Ringbearer was not written as a straightforward allegory. Ultimately, it is a meditation on the nature of history written by the victors, and how it feels to be on the other side.

The question that drove Yeskov’s book is: what if Tolkien’s trilogy really were a historical chronicle? “One has to note that the public’s knowledge of these events is mostly derived from the adapted Western epos, The Lord of the Rings,” Yeskov’s narrator reminds us. It would make sense to wonder if the account is an exaggerated, romantic, simplified tale.

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That Yeskov’s retelling gives us some insight into Putin’s perspective on international relations is incidental rather than intentional. But it is nonetheless an important insight. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the fears and desires that drove it, and the justifications claimed by the Russian side, all bear the hallmarks of an intergenerational conflict as much as a national one. The Russian attempt to portray the war in Ukraine as a war with the US and Nato — a war defending the memory of the Soviet victory in Second World War — is an attempt, by a Soviet baby boomer, to avenge the defeat of the Cold War.

“After all, that’s what memoirs are for: to let veterans recast their losses as victories after the fact,” Yeskov’s narrator pointedly tells us at the end of The Last Ringbearer. In a sense, this is Putin’s ultimate goal in Ukraine: to recast the confrontation of East and West as a victory for the East, not the West. For Mordor to persist as its own civilisation, free of elven values. For most Ukrainians, Tolkien’s original provides a preferable framework. It’s not yet clear which history will turn out to be that of the victors.

Three thousand faces, hidden by black, woollen ski masks, bore the distinctive features of the Mayan Indians of Central America: a people outgunned, outcompeted, pillaged, slaughtered or simply passed over since the Spanish conquistadors first arrived on their shores in the 16th century. Now, half a millennium later, here in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest and southernmost state, “the ones without faces, the ones without voices” had come to make the world listen.

The people of San Cristobal de las Casas, the old conquistador capital of Chiapas, were still groggy from their New Year celebrations when their town came alive with the sound of marching boots. They heard orders barked in Tzotzil, a local Mayan language, by the black-haired major, carbine in her hands, pistol strapped to her chest, who commanded this uninvited army. And from the picturesque central square, the Plaza 31 de Marzo, its ancient yellow cathedral and colonial government buildings framed by a clear white moon, they heard the sound of gunshots.

Those citizens brave or curious enough to venture out into the square were met with a sight they were unlikely to forget: dozens of masked guerrillas were swarming around the Plaza. Some were standing guard with their battered rifles, others were surrounding the police headquarters, while others, armed with sledgehammers, were pounding on the great wooden doors of the Municipal Palace. There could be little doubt in the minds of the people of San Cristobal about what they were witnessing. It was the first act of a revolution.

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A small group of guerrillas raised a flag in the middle of the elegant square — a black flag, printed with four red letters: EZLN. As they did so, on to the balcony of the Municipal Palace emerged a masked figure. In his hand he held a piece of paper. It was a declaration of war against the Mexican government: one which, on that same morning, would be read aloud to the people of six other towns in Chiapas which this “EZLN” had also claimed as its own.

“We are the product of 500 years of struggle,” he read as, in the background, more gunfire and palls of smoke indicated that a rebel column was storming the police headquarters. “We are the inheritors of the true builders of this nation … denied the most elemental preparation so they can use us as cannon fodder and pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have nothing, absolutely nothing … There is no peace or justice for ourselves and our children … But today we say: Ya basta! Enough is enough!”

Five hundred miles away, Mexico’s president, Carlos Salinas, and his anointed heir, Luis Donaldo Colosio, were celebrating the New Year in an exclusive holiday resort on the Pacific coast. As the bells rang, Salinas and Colosio raised glasses of champagne and toasted the official arrival of NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — which, at the stroke of midnight, officially came into operation. With the sound of those bells, NAFTA had created, for the first time in history, one great borderless free market between Mexico, Canada and the USA. Mexico had officially entered the modern world, and Salinas was celebrating his legacy.

Two hours later he was on the telephone, listening to news of a development that would shatter not only that legacy, but his successor’s presidency and his party’s age-old iron grip on Mexican politics; and which, later — much later — would begin to shake the legitimacy of the global free trade project itself. The Secretary of Defence was calling from Mexico City, and he had bad news. Very bad news. An armed insurgent force, calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation — EZLN — had seized control of seven towns in Chiapas state and declared war on the army, the government — and NAFTA itself.

“Are you sure?” croaked the president.

***

It’s been a long time since I wrote those paragraphs. That is the opening of my very first book, One No, Many Yeses, an account of the first wave of anti-globalisation protests, which was published 19 years ago. Back then, excitable young anti-capitalist that I was, I believed that I was part of a worldwide “mass movement” which was rising up against the colonisation of the world’s economies and cultures by an unaccountable corporate elite.

Since at least the end of the Cold War, the declared aim of the Western powers has been the spread of a global market economy, combined with a liberal politics and culture, to every benighted corner of the Earth. Since a globalised market can’t function without globalised tastes (you can’t sell your cheap burgers to Asia until you’ve convinced Asians that they’re lovin’ it), and since liberalism also needs an appropriate soil to seed in, the momentum of this ideological crusade is towards the creation of one global culture, whether the world wants it or not.

This threefold rollout — global economy, global culture and global political system, all of them based on the American model — has long been referred to with the bland moniker “globalisation”; or globalism, if you prefer. In reality, it is a form of soft colonialism — the latest iteration of Western empire — and a hugely successful one.

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Back in the late Nineties, the “anti-globalisation” movement that rose up in opposition to this process was a political melting-pot of anarchism, localism, indigenous perspectives, radical environmentalism, liberal commitments to democracy and various other strands, all of it uncoordinated and fervently anti-hierarchical. It was a mess, but it was an exciting mess. And though a lot of people involved, including me, were allergic to labels and boxes, there was no doubt that this was a movement of the Left.

Though wrong about plenty of things, the Left has traditionally been correct about the negative impacts of global capitalism, while the Right has floundered about denying its impacts on the poor, on democracy and on nature, generally valorising greed and rapine, and then wondering where the “traditional values” they love so much have gone. You wouldn’t have found any conservatives on the barricades at the anti-WTO protests. Most of them were either inside hymning the virtues of “free” trade, or back in Washington or London ginning up the next Middle East war.

How times have changed. Here in the 2020s, the Left anti-globalism that I once thought was the movement of the future is barely in evidence anywhere. The most incisive opponents of corporate globalisation today are often to be found on the Right; or at least, not from any identifiable sector of the Left. Conservative, traditionalist and “post-liberal” critiques of the impact of globalisation on local communities, nation states, social cohesion, family formation, working class prospects, culture and even (though not often enough) the natural world are pouring out daily. The post-working class Left, meanwhile, has veered into an identity politics cul-de-sac, dictated largely by its commitment to an elite class war and an obsessive pursuit of cultural inversion.

The worldview that the academic Eric Kaufmann calls Left-modernism is now the outlook of the professional managerial classes, the top 10% or so of society, and — not coincidentally — the beneficiary class of globalisation. Via transnational corporations, the academic and cultural sectors, NGOs, global and regional bodies and other collectives of usually unaccountable power, this class is rolling out the threefold ideology of globalism within their own nations and beyond. Meanwhile, a national populist movement built largely around a working- and lower-middle-class reaction to this ideology is coalescing around calls for national self-determination, some degree of cultural conservatism, economic protection and democratic accountability.

On the face of it, this is confusing. Why would transnational capital be parroting slogans drawn from a leftist framework which claims to be anti-capitalist? Why would the middle classes be further to the “Left” than the workers? If the Left was what it claims to be — a bottom-up movement for popular justice — this would not be the case. If capitalism was what it is assumed to be — a rapacious, non-ideological engine of profit-maximisation — then this would not be the case either.

But what if both of them were something else? What if the ideology of the corporate world and the ideology of the “progressive” Left had not forged an inexplicable marriage of convenience, but had grown all along from the same rootstock? What if the Left and global capitalism are, at base, the same thing: engines for destroying customary ways of living and replacing them with the globalised, universalist, technological matrix that is currently rising around us?

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We are living through a time of radical flattening, as this emerging global system, which I like to call the Machine, rapidly replaces previous ways of being with a new and novel global civilisation. Emerging from the industrial revolution and the dislocations of modernity’s revolutions, this Machine is now engaged in a project of deconstructing both human nature and wild nature, replacing them with a borderless world of etiolated, rational individuals, each of them equal participants in a global marketplace governed by algorithms, profit and dreams of universal oneness.

With the possible exception of the bit about the marketplace, this is also a good description of the project of the political Left. The very notion of a “Left” was birthed with modernity: the term comes from the seating arrangement of the anti-monarchy faction of the French assembly after the revolution. Despite much self-mythologising, leftist ideology has always been primarily a product of urban intellectuals and middle-class radicals pursuing a project of theoretical levelling. This levelling always begins with the destruction of previous lifeways — Mao’s four olds, the Bolshevik project to eliminate the “bourgeois family” (currently being resurrected by some on the contemporary Left), French revolutionary attempts to rationalise the landscape, the current progressive push to “transition” children — but what it ends up doing is clearing the ground for the Machine.

Progressive leftism and global capitalism, far from being antagonistic as some of us once thought, have turned out to be a usefully snug fit. Both are totalising, utopian projects. Both are suspicious of the past, impatient with borders and boundaries, and hostile to religion, “superstition” and the limits on the human individual imposed by nature or culture. Both are in pursuit of a global utopia where, in the dreams of both Lenin and Lennon, the world will live as one.

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If the past 40 years have taught us anything, it’s that dreams of universal equality can segue very easily into dreams of universal market access. There’s a reason that both progressives and The Economist champion open borders. There’s a reason so many hippies ended up as tech billionaires. If you have ever asked yourself what kind of “revolution” would be sponsored by Nike, promoted by BP, propagandised for by Hollywood and Netflix and policed by Facebook and YouTube, then the answer is here.

In the roiling breakdown of the 2020s, progressive leftism and corporate capitalism have not so much merged as been exposed for what they always were: variants of the same modern ideal, built around the pursuit of boundless self-creation in a post-natural world. The Canadian “red Tory” philosopher George Grant once observed that: “The directors of General Motors and the followers of Professor Marcuse sail down the same river in different boats.” These days, they have abandoned their separate vessels and are sailing downstream in a superyacht together, while the rest of us gawp or throw rocks from the banks.

Perhaps we could say that the levelling instinct is the West’s gift to the world. It’s a complicated offering, to be sure, but at its noblest it is one to be proud of. Without some levellers around, a culture is in danger of becoming ossified, abusive and top-heavy. Power always needs to be kept on its toes. Leaders and systems should always be prepared to justify their existence.

But what happens when levelling is the only instinct left? When the culture is so empty, so purposeless, so uprooted, that it has forgotten how to do anything but deconstruct itself? More to the point: what happens when levelling is the instinct not of the poor, but of power? What happens when the destruction of borders, limits and boundaries benefits big tech, big money and those who drink from their spigot, rather than the small voices left thirsting in the fields? And what happens when big money uses the language of the small voices — the language of levelling — to tie up its work in pretty bows?

This is where we are. The post-modern Left, which has seized the heights of so much of Western culture, is not some radical threat to the establishment: it is the establishment. Progressive leftism is market liberalism by other means. The Left and corporate capitalism now function like a pincer: one attacks the culture, deconstructing everything from history to “heteronormativity” to national identities; the other moves in to monetise the resulting fragments.

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Where, then, to stand? Could there be a Left without progress? Could there be a Right without capitalism? Perhaps, but we first need to come to terms with the radicalism of the times we are living through. This is a time in which the pertinent questions are not “who should own the means of production?” or “should we privatise the health service?” They are “what is a woman?”, “where should we implant the microchips?”, “how quickly can we get this digital ID system up and running?”, and “what do you think of my new killer robot?” The creation of designer babies, the abolition of the sexed body, the growing of brains in labs: whatever you want, the Machine can provide it, technology can fashion it, and progressive ideology can redefine it as justice.

When people ask me where I stand, I say these days that it’s with an older tradition: the same one I was writing about in that first book, although I didn’t know it then. It’s a tradition I saw represented in what the Zapatistas did back in the 1990s and I have heard its echo in historical uprisings in my own country, from the Luddites to the fen tigers. It’s a tradition which takes its stand not according to ideological positioning, but according to actual positioning: on Earth, under the sky, surrounded by people who know where the sun rises in the morning, where they come from and who they are.

It’s a tradition we could call reactionary radicalism: resisting the Machine’s totalising force from a perspective rooted in the Three Ps: people, place and prayer. Neither Left nor Right nor anywhere else, it’s a tradition that crosses all the modern divides, because it is older than all of them. It digs down, literally, to the root of the matter. It is the dream of a localised, populist opposition to gigantist, destructive modernity in all its forms.

Maybe this is a pipe-dream: but sometimes we see it carry the day. The Zapatistas are still there, after all, and still fighting. NAFTA is gone, too — though it wasn’t the EZLN, in the end, that did for it. The treaty that drew their ire as a symbol of all that was wrong with the imperial project of corporate globalisation was eventually torn up, not by indigenous guerrilleros or a socialist Mexican government, but by a reality TV star-turned Republican US president, who believed that globalisation was a con-job which empowered transnational capital at the expense of nations and their people. Whatever else he may have been wrong about, he was right about that. Unfortunately, most of the Left were too busy calling him a Nazi to notice the irony.

The most controversial aspect of the new sanctions regime is without a doubt the freezing of Russia’s offshore gold and foreign-exchange reserves — about half of its overall reserves — but even this is not unprecedented: last year, the US froze foreign reserves held by Afghanistan’s central bank in order to prevent the Taliban from accessing its funds; the US has also previously frozen the foreign-exchange reserves of Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.

So, taken individually, these measures are not as exceptional as they’ve been portrayed. However, never before have so many sanctions been deployed at once: there are already 6,000 various Western sanctions imposed on Russia, which is more than those in existence against Iran, Syria and North Korea put together. Even more importantly, none of the previous targets of sanctions were remotely as powerful as Russia — a member of the G20, and the world’s largest nuclear power.

Likewise, none of the 63 central banks that are members of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel — known as the central bank of central banks — has ever been the target of financial sanctions. The BIS itself has even joined in on the sanctions in order to prevent Russia’s access to its offshore reserves. This really is unprecedented: since its establishment in 1931, the BIS had never taken such a measure, not even during World War II.

So what should we expect from the sanctions? Western pundits and commentators have little doubt: the sanctions will hamstring the Russian economy, sow discontent among the Russian people and elites alike, and possibly even cause the downfall of the Putin regime. At the very least, we’re told, they will hinder Russia’s war efforts. But history suggests otherwise: see Iraq, or more recently Iran. Far more likely is that this turns out to be the latest Western strategic miscalculation in a long list of strategic blunders, of which the United States’ inglorious withdrawal from Afghanistan is just the most recent example.

After all, Russia has been preparing for this moment for quite some time. Following the first wave of Western sanctions, in 2014, and partly in retaliation against them, Putin embarked on what analysts have dubbed a “Fortress Russia” strategy, building up the country’s international reserves and diversifying them away from US dollars and British pounds, reducing its foreign exposure, boosting its economic cooperation with China, and pursuing import substitution strategies in several industries, including food, medicine and technology, in an effort to insulate Russia as much as possible from external shocks.

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By Chris Miller

True, Putin made the mistake of leaving around half of those reserves parked in foreign central banks, resulting in these now being confiscated. But nonetheless Russia still has access to more than $300 billion in gold and foreign-exchange reserves — more than most countries in the world and more than enough to cushion any short-term fall in exports, or prop up the rouble (for a while).

Moreover, the Russian central bank reacted to the sanctions by stopping capital flows out of Russia and nationalising the foreign exchange earnings of major exporters, requiring Russian firms to convert 80% of their dollar and euro earnings into roubles. It also raised interest rates to 20% in an effort to attract foreign capital. These measures are aimed at bolstering the rouble’s value and providing a flow of foreign exchange into the country. They appear to be working: while the rouble is around 40% of its value since the start of the conflict, the Russian currency’s free-fall seems to have come to a halt for now, even registering an uptick over the past two weeks. For the time being, Russia’s financial account — the difference between the money flowing in and out of the country — is far from disastrous.

Let’s not forget that the main source of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves — oil and gas exports — has been excluded from the sanctions, for obvious reasons: for most European countries, Russia accounts for a huge part of their oil and gas imports (and other staple commodities), and there’s simply no way of replacing those energy sources from one day to the next.

In short, Russia runs no risk, in the short term, of running out of reserves and not being able to pay for its imports. But even assuming that the West decided to put a stop to all its imports from Russia overnight, there’s no reason to believe that this would bring the Russian military machine to a halt. The notion that “we are financing Russia’s war by purchasing gas and oil”, as the Finnish prime minister recently stated, is fundamentally misplaced.

As the economist Dirk Ehnts has observed, the Russian military machine, for the most part, doesn’t rely on imports (if anything, Russia is an arms exporter). It is sourced domestically and, like the salaries of its soldiers, is paid for in roubles, which the Russian central bank can create in an unlimited quantity, just as the Bank of England does when it comes to pounds.

Equally unfounded are rumours of an impending Russian default. In recent years, the Russian government has taken steps to reduce its foreign liabilities: its foreign currency-denominated debt amounts today to about $40 billion — a tiny amount compared with the size of Russia’s yearly exports of more than $200 billion in oil and gas. Any decision to default would be entirely political. We mustn’t forget that the very creditors expecting to be paid back in dollars are the same that have just confiscated a good part of Russia’s dollars — if the latter were to default on their payments, it would be an even bigger problem for their Western creditors. As with Russia’s oil exports, hurting Russia inevitably means hurting ourselves as well.

Moreover, thanks to the Russian government’s successful efforts at boosting domestic agricultural production, domestic food production now accounts for more than 80% of retail sales, up from 60% in 2014. This means Russia is largely self-sufficient food-wise. So even if its export revenues were to plummet (which is unlikely), the country wouldn’t go hungry — unlike the rest of the world — and would most likely be able to continue to finance its war efforts.

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You can't cancel Putin

By Kat Rosenfield

Might a selective ban on exports of specific high-tech Western components, some of which are bound to be used in Russia’s defence industry, prove more effective? Possibly. But Russia has been reducing the dependence of its military-industrial apparatus on foreign components and technologies for years. More importantly, both hypotheses — that Russia’s economy and military can be brought to their knees through export and/or import bans — rest on the flawed assumption that the whole world is on board with the sanctions. But that is far from the case.

While most of the world’s nations — 143 out of 193 — voted for a resolution in the UN’s General Assembly condemning Russia, the 35 countries that abstained include China, India, Pakistan and South Africa, as well as several African and Latin American states. These and many more countries — including several that voted in favour of the resolution, such as Brazil — have strongly criticised the sanctions against Russia and can be expected to continue trading with Putin. It’s frankly very hard to call Russia isolated when some of the world’s largest economies have refused to support the West’s sanctions regime.

China, in particular, has been very vocal in its support of Russia. Beijing is already the Kremlin’s main trading partner, and it alone can absorb huge quantities of Russian energy and commodities, as well as provide Russia with basically any industrial and consumer goods that the latter currently imports from the West. China also operates an alternative to the Western-managed SWIFT system called CIPS to manage cross-border transactions in yuan, which could allow Russia to partially circumvent the West’s financial blockade. Even though the yuan still makes up a small percentage of international transactions, its role is bound to grow rapidly in the coming years (consider the news that Saudi Arabia may start pricing its oil sales to China in the latter’s currency). All this helps explain why even Western financial analysts, such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, predict a year-on-year contraction for the Russian economy of about 7% — bad, but hardly catastrophic (Covid caused a much larger drop in GDP for most countries).

However, much will depend on the policy response of the Russian government. Obviously, the withdrawal of many foreign firms and decline in foreign investments will increase unemployment. But the Russian government can cushion the blow by resorting to a “Keynesian” expansionary fiscal policy aimed at boosting domestic investment and supporting incomes. If ever there were a time for Russia to abandon its historically ultra-tight fiscal policy, as several Russian economists have been arguing for some time, it is now.

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America has won Europe's war

By Thomas Fazi

Two weeks ago, I suggested that, in the short term at least, the US will benefit from the conflict in Ukraine. In the long term, however, it is slowly becoming clear that US-led global Western order will suffer. The West’s imposition of sanctions — involving not only governments, but also private companies and even allegedly apolitical organisations such as central banks — has sent a clear message to the countries of the world: the West will stop at nothing to punish countries that step out of line. If this can happen to Russia, a major power, it can happen to anyone. “We will [never again] be under the slightest illusion that the West could be a reliable partner,” the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said. “We will do everything so as never, in any way, to be dependent on the West in those areas of our life which have a decisive significance for our people.”

Those words are bound to reverberate across the world, with dramatic implications for the West. As Wolfgang Münchau has warned: “For a central bank to freeze the accounts of another central bank is a really big deal… As a direct result of these decisions, we have turned the dollar and the euro, and everything that is denominated in those currencies, into de facto risky assets”. At the very least, it will inevitably push countries to diversify their reserves and increase their yuan holdings, in order to loosen the West’s grip on their economies and bolster their economic resilience and self-sufficiency. Even if it doesn’t push countries straight into Beijing’s arms, as is already happening with Russia, it will likely lead to the emergence of two increasingly insulated blocs: a US-dominated Western bloc and a China-dominated East-Eurasian one.

In this new pseudo-Cold War, “non-aligned” countries could find that they are in a better position to assert their sovereignty than they were under the American global empire. Forget “the collapse of the Russian economy” — this could be the result of the West’s new economic war.

But I suppose I had some idea what he was up to. Aged 17, studying for my A-levels at boarding school, and more interested in the female company of Munich than in the politics going on around me, my father’s work was off-limits. The Cold War was my adolescent playground.

There is one disturbing thing I do remember very vividly. My father was a member of the American PX in a little town 20 miles or so north of Munich. There was a cheap, tax-free supermarket there, and a recreational facility for its military members, including a golf course. There my father taught me to swing a club at a little white ball, to take pleasure in the satisfying sound of a well-struck shot. I still have the bug. But the name of the town was Dachau. And right next door to the club was the former concentration camp.

I still have disturbing dreams about that course, 40 year later, given how inappropriately it was situated. In some I slice a ball out of bounds and into the place where men, women and children were shot and burned — my fun-filled summer holidays coming into direct emotional contact with the horror of the Holocaust. The dreams interweave my father’s mysterious job, his Jewishness, the ovens of the camp, Hitler’s face on a violently defaced poster in the exhibition at Dachau, images of emaciated men being tortured in ice baths — all jumbled up with my own summer holiday recreation, barbecues down on the banks of the River Isar, the nudist colony in the Englischer Garten, of course, and my own teenage fumblings. Lots here for my shrink to unravel.

Of course, I felt guilty at having so much fun. Sex and golf were my peace dividend. My girlfriend was a pacifist; all of the people I met my age were pacifists. We sang 99 Luftballons by Nena. And in the year I arrived in Germany, 1981, a peace demonstration was held in Bonn, a protest both at the existence of nuclear weapons and at the presence of American and British bases on German soil. Around 300,000 people turned up that day: Christians, union members, students. I didn’t tell my new friends what my father did.

I also remember the graffiti. Munich was a seriously tidy and ordered town, but hate-filled graffiti was still puked up on the walls under flyovers, mostly about Turkish Gastarbeiters — immigrant workers. “What is the difference between a Turk and a Jew? Forty years”, was the one I cannot forget. The tidiness of the place wasn’t able to hide the fact that this was Hitler’s home patch.

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Putin is perverting Jewish history

By Giles Fraser

How different Germany today is from the Eighties. At Berlin’s train stations — yes, trains too are inevitably a part of the nightmares — tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees are now being welcomed by generous open-hearted German volunteers, providing shell-shocked families with hot drinks and food, advising them where to find permanent shelters. In 2015-16 Germany took in over a million refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. During my lifetime at least, the Germans have been the conscience of Europe, responding to their defeat in the war and their national shame with a reinvention of their national consciousness.

This process — Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “overcoming the past” — was the only way Germany could come to terms with Nazism and the Holocaust. Nobody wants to look at the darkest parts of their history. It is the equivalent of discovering that your parents were killers. After decades of post-war denial, a new German generation, coming of age in the Sixties, insisted on digging up the past. They were called Nestbeschmutzer (“nest-foulers”) and were derided. But what they began set in motion the process that created modern Germany.

Today, the country pauses to engage in what the historian Susan Neiman calls “public rites of repentance” around events such as Kristallnacht, and the liberation of Auschwitz. There are the “stumbling stones” — plaques placed throughout Berlin to mark where Jews lived before the Nazis deported them. And, where it cannot be missed, at the centre of the capital: the Holocaust Memorial.

Of course, there was (and is) some barely hidden recidivism — especially in the East. But I never really encountered it, apart from dark messages scrawled under flyovers. I lived in Germany before the wall came down. For me, Germany was a place of peace and love. But also a place of hidden secrets. They only met in sleep, when a golf ball was sliced from one psychic realm to another.

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By Maurice Frank

Two weeks ago, the new German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced a massive €100 billion rise in German defence spending. This includes the purchase of F-35 fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The rational side of my brain thinks this is a good thing, the Germans rising to the challenge of this new era of Russian aggression. For too long, the Germans have not contributed their fair share to Nato — something Nato has calculated as 2% of GDP — or to the defence of the vulnerable globally. Some might say that they have freeloaded on the defence spending of other countries, and kept their own hands clean by relying on others to make the impossible moral decisions that keep down dictators like Assad and Putin. But my emotional side mourns the final end of that 1981 summer of love in Germany and fears the sight of what looks to me like an Iron Cross on the side of the aeroplanes that my father helped to develop.

Putin’s war against Ukraine has destroyed the long taboo about Germany and the military. After the war, the Germans were allowed to maintain a small army, looking East across the wall, towards the Soviet Union. Out of the ruins of the Forties, a kind of default pacifism was established as the norm.

As recently as 2019, the German government refused to even consider an American request to send ground troops into Syria. One year previously, 72% of the population were against committing the German military against Assad, even if he was using chemical weapons against his own people.

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By Wolfgang Streeck

On the 70^th anniversary of the Allied landing in Normandy, the head of the German Evangelical church, Margot Käßmann , refused to countenance the idea that the defeat of the Nazis could constitute a just war: “There can be no just war,” she said. “That was even true of the Second World War”. No one pushed back against this. “German pacifism is here to stay,” wrote the political editor of Die Zeit in 2019, “and there is no use asking the country to be what it isn’t.”

All of which makes the events of recent weeks so much more extraordinary. German pacifism is no more. Germany is about to have the third largest defence budget in the world, behind only the US and China. Some will feel that this is as it should be. For others it will bring back dark and disturbing memories. For me, it is both.

Truman was nobody’s idea of a great man of history. A small, trim man with neatly parted grey hair, his hazel eyes framed behind thick spectacles, he had a flat, Midwestern twang and a complete lack of stage presence. When Harry Truman walked into a room, nobody looked up. Even if you did notice him, you might mistake him for the man he had once been — not the President of the United States, but a Kansas City haberdasher whose store had gone bust after just two years. A little man, then. A modest man, with much to be modest about. As everybody knew, the S. literally stood for nothing.

What was Truman doing there? The short answer is that he had been extraordinarily lucky. After serving as a captain in the First World War, he had gone into politics, a Democratic party hack working for the corrupt Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast. But when, in the last year of the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt ran out of potential vice presidents, he was persuaded to consider Truman as a compromise candidate. Roosevelt barely knew him — who did? — but he picked him anyway. Truman could barely believe it. He, Harry S. Truman, the farmer’s son from Independence, Missouri, Vice President of the United States!

Then fate took another twist. On 12 April 1945, with his forces fighting their way into Nazi Germany, Roosevelt dropped dead of a massive stroke. Suddenly, unbelievably, Truman was President. When he got the news — he was, naturally, having a drink with his old Senate pals — the colour drained from his cheeks. Immediately he went to see Roosevelt’s widow Eleanor and asked if there was anything he could do to help. Her response spoke volumes. “Is there anything we can do for you?” she said. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

That was two years ago. Now it was 12 March 1947, and the American political elite were looking up at him, and Truman was peering through his glasses at his typewritten text. His voice was as flat and characterless as ever, and as he launched into a detailed description of the political situation in divided, bleeding Greece, the soaring oratory of his charismatic predecessor seemed like ancient history. The haberdasher was in the house, and it was only a matter of time before people started snoring.

But they didn’t. For what Truman said that day was so electric, so momentous, that it arguably had more impact on history than almost any other speech by any other president since Abraham Lincoln. The United States, he told his listeners, was in a new world war — an undeclared war, not of armies but of ideologies. “At the present moment in world history”, he said, “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life”. One was based on individual liberty, free speech and democratic elections. The other, Communism, relied upon “terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms”.

They all knew that. But what followed was the real surprise.

Truman wanted Congress to give $400 million immediately in aid to Greece and Turkey. It was essential, he said, that neither fell to Communism, and the United States must ensure that they didn’t. And he went further. This would not be a one-off; it must be a general rule. “I believe”, Truman said, “that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid”.

It would be expensive, he admitted. But it was an “investment in world freedom and world peace” — the kind of investment that only the United States could afford. That was their historic challenge, and Harry Truman was not afraid to meet it.

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Kyiv will rise again

By Dominic Sandbrook

Today that speech is remembered as the genesis of the Truman Doctrine, when the United States committed itself to the defence of democracy against the advance of Communism. The usual word for this campaign, which never appears in the speech, is “containment”, and that sums it up pretty well. Truman had no intention of going to war against Stalin’s Soviet Union, and was careful to avoid any overtly military provocations. But he was in absolutely no doubt that there were such things as right and wrong; that Soviet Communism was wrong; and that it was his patriotic and moral duty to contain it.

You can probably guess where I’m heading with this. First, though, an illuminating historical side-note. The man who coined the word “containment” was an American diplomat called George F. Kennan, who had studied Russia’s language and history as a young man. In February 1946, Kennan, then deputy head of mission in Moscow, had sent a long telegram to Washington urging his bosses to ditch any idealistic assumptions about reaching a modus vivendi with Stalin.

“At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs”, he argued, was a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity”. And though Kennan took Stalin’s Marxism seriously, he thought it was mixed up with something else, something older, perhaps even darker. For in some ways, he wrote, Marxism was simply the “justification for the Soviet Union’s instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand”.

What Kennan also recognised, though, was that for all Stalin’s purges and persecutions, even his imposition of puppet governments in the brutalised capitals of central and eastern Europe, the Americans could not just fight him. Even with their nuclear monopoly, they would probably incur hundreds of thousands of casualties as they tuned their guns on the Red Army. Europe would be utterly devastated; the total death toll would probably run into millions. There was right, and there was wrong; but doing the right thing was complicated.

So as Kennan argued in a subsequent article, the West really only had two options. They could sit back and let Stalin get away with it, playing the part of appeasers once again, and allowing him to erode democratic freedoms in one European country after another. Or they could draw a line and say: “This far, and no further”, and do all in their power to undermine those regimes that flew the red flag. Their strategy, wrote Kennan, “must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies”. They would corral the Eastern monster and defend Western freedom by “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world”.

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Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

As Kennan and Truman both knew, containment would take time. Not months, not years, but decades. There was nothing very romantic about it, nothing swashbuckling. It condemned millions of people to continue living under totalitarian rule. If you were 17 in 1947, and living in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia or East Germany, you would be very close to retirement when the Berlin Wall came down. You would have spent almost your entire adult working life under a system you probably despised, with Russian troops occupying your country. All that potential wasted; all those chances for travel and self-expression denied you; all those lies, all those betrayals. But you would still be alive — and with luck, you would see your grandchildren grow up in freedom. Those were the upsides.

So let’s turn to the present. With the headlines full of the atrocity at the Mariupol maternity hospital, the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians and the looming siege of Kyiv, as well as Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rousing Churchillian rhetoric, it’s easy to dismiss containment as a kind of appeasement, an acceptance of defeat. Most of us would love to see Russia defeated, its troops streaming back home to launch a revolution and Vladimir Putin on trial in the Hague — just as most decent people in the late 1940s and early 1950s dreamed of seeing Stalin toppled and Communism overthrown from Trieste to the Baltic.

But in truth this feels depressingly unlikely. For the time being, the Putin regime seems entrenched. And of course Putin has something Stalin didn’t in the spring of 1947 — nuclear weapons. That’s why most Western politicians have ruled out a no-fly zone over western Ukraine. It’s entirely understandable that people think we should “do something”. But there’s no point in doing something if the firestorm kills the very people you were hoping to save.

Containment was precisely the kind of policy you would expect from a man who had run a gentlemen’s outfitters in Kansas City. But you can tell that story in two different ways. Yes, it was unglamorous, gradualist, boringly undramatic. Yes, there was nothing obviously heroic about it.

Yet at the same time it reflected a very Middle American confidence in the Western way of life. Like his British counterpart, Clement Attlee, Truman was a modest man, the incarnation of patriotic ordinariness. He believed, without the slightest shadow of doubt, that one day democratic capitalism would beat Communist repression. But he also knew it would take years of effort, and he had no intention of blowing up the world in the meantime.

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There’s part of me, I admit, that feels wretched in urging a policy of Cold War containment on the leaders of the Western world. Against the background of so much Ukrainian suffering, the thought of Vladimir Putin’s regime enduring for years — and not just surviving but glorying in slaughter — seems almost intolerable. But what are the alternatives? Appeasement, as recommended by certain so-called realist professors of international relations, strikes me as not merely morally contemptible but stupidly self-defeating. As for NATO intervention, how many Ukrainians would die in even the most limited nuclear exchange? Millions? Tens of millions?

Truman didn’t live to see the success of his policy. In very basic terms, though, containment underpinned the Western world for the next 40 years. The Cold War was a hard slog, involving a lot of false steps as well as some dreadful mistakes. But it worked. That was the important thing. I sometimes read that we should never return to the Cold War. But why not? It was the right thing to do, and the right side won.

And remember: Soviet Communism was a much more formidable adversary than Putinism. The latter offers nothing but a nihilistic celebration of warmongering nationalism, but Communism held out the promise of a better world, illusory as that was. Containment beat it, all the same.

I think it will beat Putin, too, given time. It may take years of unrelenting political, economic and cultural pressure, but we should have no doubt about the outcome. The little man from Missouri has already beaten Lenin and Stalin. Even in death, he can wipe the floor with Vladimir Putin.

I was 18 years old, interrailing around Europe with a friend to see what the world looked like beyond our provincial English town, and I had accidentally wandered into a pivot point in history. In the divided German capital, less than a year before, World War Two had finally come to an end, with no shots fired.

The joy was palpable everywhere. By the time my friend and I got to the Brandenburg Gate, half of the wall had already been chipped into bite-sized pieces, which were being sold to tourists by enterprising locals, along with suddenly useless Soviet army uniforms, military passbooks and the helmets of East German border guards. Marxism hadn’t been dead a year, and the market economy was already booming. The world, or the little part of it that I knew, had suddenly changed shape entirely.

Everyone of my generation grew up with the Cold War hanging over them. The possibility of nuclear armageddon was as ever-present for teenagers then as climate change is today: we didn’t think about it much, but it was the background hum of our lives. Nobody thought the Russians would invade, really, but there didn’t seem much chance of them going away either. There was always a chance of their tanks rolling across some border somewhere, or so the Americans kept telling us. Plus ça change.

This was just the way the world was: the free West and the unfree East. If you didn’t believe that story, then one look at the wall, the barbed wire, the machine gun towers and the fate of those who tried to cross the “death strip” from East to West would make you think again.

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

And then, just like that, communism fell. This system that was supposed to free the people from exploitation and oppression, but had quickly become a monster itself. We didn’t know what was coming next. But from today’s perspective we can see that the fall of the East ushered in a new era.

After the wall would come a unipolar world, dominated by finance capital, overseen by the United States of America, the last empire standing. Its architects told us we were entering a long age of benign “globalisation”, in which “free markets”, human rights and democracy would spread around the world as naturally as the sun rose in the morning. The future would be free, open, liberal, prosperous and, well, American.

30 years later, we live in a world in which most Russians have a positive view of Stalin, and their current leader is mustering the biggest army since Soviet times on the border of a neighbouring state. The once-free-ish West is boiling in a stew of hate speech laws, vaccine mandates and ever-accelerating censorship and intolerance. “Populists” continue to barrack and harass its leaders, who still have no idea what to do about it: witness Justin Trudeau running away from the big scary men in their lorries. The last global empire is led by a confused octogenarian, and within a few years the biggest economy in the world will be a communist dictatorship. We didn’t see that one coming back in 1990.

Remembering the rubble strewn across Potsdamer Platz, it’s hard not to miss the End of History. In those halcyon days, I thought I lived in something called “the free world”. The liberal West was supposed to be the point on which the arc of history converged. We wanted it to be true, that story, but history has a habit of rolling on, and people don’t change, not really. I’m just grateful to have been there.

Looking back, we can see that what happened when the wall fell was not the triumph of freedom over oppression so much as the defeat of one Western ideology by another. The one that came through was the oldest, subtlest and longest-lasting, one which disguised itself so well that we didn’t know it was an ideology at all: liberalism.

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By Ruth Davidson

This was the thesis of Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed, written before the populist wave of 2016, and perhaps the most reliable guide to the world we live in now. In his telling, liberalism was one of three ideologies that dominated the world over the last three centuries. The other two — communism and fascism — were shorter lived, and died in the West in the twentieth century. Liberalism — the elder brother — is only dying now. One reason for its comparatively long life is that it piggybacked on older stories, presenting itself as the inheritor of established traditions of liberty when in fact it was something quite different.

The ideology of liberalism has, since it emerged from the Enlightenment, claimed to liberate the individual from oppression. In practice it has manifested as the process of breaking all borders, limits and structures: of bringing down walls. The societies we have built around this way of seeing claim freedom for the individual from society itself, and proffer a radical notion of human nature. Rather than seeing humans as hefted creatures, rooted in time and place, liberalism offered a new conception: detached, sovereign personhood. Humans were now “rights-bearing individuals who could fashion and pursue for themselves their own version of the good life.”

What is crucial to understand — and this is what makes liberalism an ideology — is that in order for the liberal world to come into being, it needed to be created. Just as Marxist regimes attempted to destroy the traditional family, the church and private land ownership so that communism could materialise, so liberalism did not naturally “evolve” from previously existing arrangements. It needed to artificially create the “sovereign individual” from new cloth.

After the trauma of the Reformation, the Western nation-state took over the functions of the ailing Church, colonising for itself the sense of sacredness and obedience once demanded by religion. In this “migration of the holy” our religious sensibility was redirected from its proper focus towards worldly political constructions, and this in turn laid the ground for the revolutions of the modern age.

Each of these upheavals, whether in Jacobin France, Marxist Russia or Nazi Germany, failed to create the promised utopias. But they did have the effect of clearing away the traditional structures of the pre-modern era. And into the void rushed industrial capitalism — the system which G. K. Chesterton called the “monster that grows in deserts” — with its sensibility of control, measurement, utility and profit. Liberalism was, and remains, its nursemaid and press officer.

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Liberalism, like its competitor ideologies, is in this way totalitarian: ruthless and all-encompassing. But it outlasted its rivals because it promised not tyranny and order, but the messiness of a certain kind of freedom. At the height of the liberal age, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, individual human freedom was indeed possible in the West as it had never been before. Humans, or some of them, could detach themselves from their backgrounds and origins and seek something new, and plenty of us did. Openly tyrannical government became harder to sustain, oligarchies were required to subject themselves to regular plebiscites to sustain their power, previously ignored groups in society clamoured for access to its heartlands, the rule of law protected the poor as well as the rich, and capitalism’s Luciferic power created previously unheard of levels of wealth, as well as grinding poverty.

But in liberalism’s very success lay the seeds of its failure. The project of liberating the individual from his or her networks of loyalty, locality, family and culture, and the unleashing of the vast destabilising engine of capitalism, created a social instability which could only be controlled or directed by the last institution standing: the State.

An ideology premised on protecting and promoting the freedom of the individual led to the era of unprecedented state power we live in today. Governments now claim the right to direct our speech patterns, regulate our lives and businesses to increasingly radical degrees, shut down whole societies in the name of “public health”, and even legislate for acceptable and unacceptable attitudes and opinions.

The cultural ructions of today’s West — the cancellations and contradictions, the screaming matches over race, gender, history and identity — all of this is the manifestation not of liberalism’s failure but of its success. The “progressives” who are aggressively cramming identity politics into every crevice of society have met with resistance from many self-professed liberals. These woke radicals, they cry, are destroying our culture with their fanaticism! We need to return to “classical liberalism”! But culture wars happen when no real culture remains; and 200 years of “classical liberalism”, manifested in the economic and the cultural spheres, have seen to that.

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Thank God for liberalism

By Tomiwa Owolade

This is the legacy of an ideology which has been championed for centuries by both “Left” and “Right”. We have all become islands of self-definition, and we see now where that leads. A society premised on freedom becomes daily more fearful and closed. A society which boasts of its “diversity” becomes daily more homogenous. We can invent our own gender at will, and yet genuine individuals are in short supply, old-fashioned eccentricity is positively persecuted and originality has become career-ending. The Internet has enabled self-expression on a previously unimagined scale, and the result has been violent groupthink. The self, it turns out, mostly doesn’t have much to say.

But there’s more. Liberal ideology, as well as redesigning culture, must also redesign nature. In all the discussions of liberalism and its discontents that we’ve seen in the last few years, few seriously consider the power source that allowed the liberal age to conquer all before it: fossil fuels.

Without steamships, cars, planes, factories, supermarkets, modern roads, the Internet, the smartphone, the project of liberation would have been much less far-reaching. Fossil-fuelled liberalism allowed people to abandon place-based community, and to create for themselves an individual identity in an isolated but free kingdom of the self. But as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty puts it, “the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use”. Everything from mass democracy to feminism to multiculturalism to human rights floats on a vast bubble of fossil energy: . Nothing about the modern West could exist at all without vast concentrations of fossil energy: a fact of which Mr Putin is well aware.

Liberalism, like modernity itself, requires a war against nature; but it is a war that can never be won. As the climate shifts in response, the excesses of liberalism, and the project of self-creation it enabled, will not be possible. We will no longer be able to outsource our muscles or our minds to technology. We will need each other again — whether we like it or not.

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The West has lost its roots

By Paul Kingsnorth

So what comes after liberalism? The question has filled plenty of column inches in recent years, but the Covid years have brought into sharp relief the likely future we face. In Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen predicts that two post-liberal worlds are on offer: “a future of self-limitation”, in which people choose to practice “self-governance in local communities”, or “a future in which extreme licence coexists with extreme oppression”.

I know which I’d prefer, but I also know which looks most likely. As extreme individualism deepens, and an all-powerful state intervenes ever more deeply and widely to manage the resulting fragmentation, Western democracies show every sign of transforming openly into authoritarian oligarchies in which dissent — especially dissent aimed at liberalism itself — is ruthlessly suppressed by politicians who claim to represent “the people”. The vast bulks of those stationary Canadian trucks are currently the perfect symbol of this process.

The immediate future looks to me like the grinding down of what previous norms remain, and the parallel expansion of the State-corporate leviathan to both mop up the resulting mess and profit from it. That in turn will generate more “populist” (i.e. anti-liberal) reaction from both “Left” and “Right” and neither, and a consequent deepening of repression and propaganda from the besieged minority defending the remains of the liberal order. All of this will take place in the context of a planet with nearly ten billion people on it, hitting economic and ecological limits on all sides.

It seems likely to me that the liberal era will end much as the communist one did: flailing and corrupt, hiding behind walls of its own making, its leaders in denial but its people increasingly open-eyed. Perhaps the Russians won’t roll into Ukraine and spell the end of the vaunted “liberal order”, but its end seems to have been baked in from the beginning. All ideologies are based on a view of human nature that looks better on paper than in the confusing mess of the world, and the one we grew up with was no exception. No man, as John Donne had it, is an island. Now we see how right he was.

A version of this essay was first published at The Abbey of Misrule.

On paper, his piece had all the hallmarks of an inspiring call to arms: it was illustrated with a photo gallery of smiling workers; it took a swipe at Amazon and Starbucks; it celebrated how the “movement retains pockets of strength”. It was inspiring, that is, until we remind ourselves that the NYT is one of the most aggressively anti-union newspapers in the media — an attitude that trickles all the way down from the dynasty that still controls the paper to this day.

Just this month, it emerged that senior NYT executives are heavily leaning on 600 tech staffers hoping to unionise. In response, Times management has implemented a full-court-press campaign to defeat the effort. “This is an unproven experiment with permanent consequences,” New York Times Company CEO Meredith Kopit Levin wrote to staff in a leaked memo. “We encourage you to vote no,” the NYT informed staff in leaflets it distributed. Indeed, the NYT has been so strident in its approach to the tech union that a group of investors wrote a letter to the company’s management, urging them to “cease and refrain from actions that may violate federal labor law”.

Yet such behaviour is nothing new. Only weeks before, the paper had extinguished the flames of another labour confrontation, this time with the union of the paper’s product review site, the Wirecutter, which culminated in a walk-out by Wirecutter staff. In response to the union’s demands for better pay and terms, the NYT slow-walked negotiations for two years in an apparent effort to derail the negotiations — despite retaining strong revenue and cash reserves. “Hey Gray Lady, time to pay me! What’s appalling? Bosses stalling!” members of the three Times unions chanted in a rally outside the NYT building.

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In his essay, Applebaum singled out Amazon, Walmart and Google as hotbeds for union strife — but the battle for workers’ rights at the NYT is of a very different magnitude: it has been raging for almost a century. Almost immediately after the country’s premier news union, American Newspaper Guild (now the NewsGuild), was founded in 1933, the NYT took a harsh anti-union stance, not only refusing to allow its employees to organise but going so far as to deploy a network of spies to track employees engaging in union activities. When a pro-union communist flier was found in the newsroom amid early efforts to unionise, NYT Managing Editor Edwin James wrote to publisher Arthurs Hays Sulzberger: “The spies report that some of the auditing people are back of this. Maybe it will amuse [NYT corporate auditor] Mr. Weinstock to try to find out who.”

The revelation about a spy network at the NYT followed an investigation into the paper by the National Labor Relations Board, brought by the American Newspaper Guild. The Guild had charged that the NYT violated the Wagner Act by intimidating and discriminating against pro-union employees. Though James retorted that the term “spies” was used jokingly and that “voluntary informant” was a more accurate term, the paper’s general manager, Julius Ochs Adler, testified that the paper indeed had run an “espionage system” (though Adler claimed it had been mothballed). Sulzberger, however, defended the paper’s espionage against its employees, testifying that it used the tactic “to avoid raising issues with the Guild”.

The National Labor Relations Board trial erupted after a group of NYT reporters agitating for unionisation were either transferred to different departments or summarily fired. One of the most important cases involved the paper’s informal spy-catcher, Harry Weinstock, who had repeatedly questioned a newly hired assistant named Grace Porter about her communist sympathies and affiliations (she denied being a communist) after Weinstock discovered she was involved in meetings to unionise. After Weinstock reassured her that the NYT, as a liberal paper, had no issue employing communists, Porter was transferred, put on half time (slashing her salary by 40%) and, shortly thereafter, fired. (Note that the NYT was using insinuations about communism to silence union-related dissent a decade before Joseph McCarthy began his communist witch hunts.)

At least two other similar cases were examined by the National Labor Relations Board, including that of Fred Jaegar, a reporter and one of the organisers of a smaller guild at the paper, who was accused by the NYT of not working hard enough and showing up late multiple times a month, despite his frequently staying late at the office. Jaegar was subject to extreme scrutiny before being transferred to “a job at which he could not possibly succeed”, according to the National Labor Relations Board investigation. He was then fired.

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While we might look to figures like Weinstock as lone crusaders, the reality is the most pernicious argument against unionising the newsroom came from Arthur Hays Sulzberger himself. On this question, Sulzberger took a position that made organised labour and good journalism completely incompatible, arguing that a Guild shop (one that would require all employees to be members of the union) covering editorial roles would cause bias in the NYT news reporting as, in Sulzberger’s view, allowing unions in news organisations risked “polluting the well-spring of editorial objectivity”. This was quite a claim: not merely that unionising was bad for business, but that it was antithetical to journalism itself.

Sulzberger would pass this sentiment onto his son Arthur Ochs Sulzberger (grandfather to today’s publisher) whose attitude towards unions, the NYT noted in Sulzberger’s obituary, “ranged from annoyance to hostility”. This attitude would have significant consequences for the company, in particular on one occasion that inadvertently shifted the balance of power towards disempowered workers.

In 1972, Betsy Wade, the first female news editor at the NYT, began working with arts columnist Grace Glueck to force the NYT to change its practices towards female employees. Despite Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibiting discrimination based on sex, the NYT had no women on its masthead or among its ten business-side vice presidents. Women were also paid on average $59 a week (about $400 in today’s money) less than the paper’s male employees.

Glueck and Wade formed the Women’s Caucus at the NYT, seeking to use the influence of the Times Guild to drive change. Perhaps not to their surprise, the NYT refused to engage. After two years of NYT stalling, the Women’s Caucus filed a lawsuit, which the paper quickly settled, setting a major precedent for women’s rights at news organisations.

How does the NYT reconcile such chequered past — and present — on organised labour with its own editorial positions? The answer is simple. Although we refer to the New York Times as if it’s a single thing, in fact there are two entities that get conflated: the New York Times newsroom and the New York Times Company. As a Times software engineer elegantly put it in last year: “The newsroom is responsible for the primary product of the Times, but there’s an entirely separate business side to the organisation. That’s the side making these decisions. It’s not the newsroom calling the shots. When we think of the NYT’s leadership, it’s not a writer or editor making that decision — it’s the chief executive officer.”

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In the case of the NYT’s most recent labour flap, the current publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, along with the company’s CEO, decided that the NYT would not voluntarily recognise the Tech Guild and called for union elections to be conducted by the National Labor Relations Board — the same body Sulzberger’s ancestor testified before nearly a century ago. As the NewsGuild has pointed out, the Times had previously thrown its editorial weight behind laws designed to allow majority sign-up to a union as legally binding, writing in a 2007 editorial that employers who reject the majority’s signatures often leverage “the time before the vote to pressure employees to rethink their decision to unionise”.

Yet this is exactly what the NYT is accused of doing with the Tech Guild. In one of the more hardline tactics, the NYT has since pressed employees into captive audience meetings, where management representatives spend an hour or more explaining to staff why unionising will be bad for them.

But as efforts to unionise heat up, the question now is how long the NYT can play this double role. It’s been doing for almost a century. But at some point soon, the practice of preaching labour virtue while practising capitalist vice will no longer be tenable.

But for the people of Russia and Ukraine, Poltava is a place of legend. For it was here, on 8 July 1709, that the armies of the Swedish and Russian Empires clashed in the climactic battle of the Great Northern War.

“Soldiers! The hour has struck when the fate of the whole motherland lies in your hands! Either Russia will perish or she will be reborn!” So ran the proclamation of Peter the Great, Tsar of All the Russias, the day before the decisive showdown. For almost a decade he had led a coalition against the Swedish Empire of his rival Charles XII. This was his chance to overturn the balance of power in the Baltic and confirm Russia’s emergence as the new colossus of Northern Europe.

The fighting started before dawn, and for a time the result hung in the balance. Three times Peter was hit by Swedish fire: one musket ball knocked off his hat, another lodged in his saddle, a third was deflected by a silver icon he wore around his neck. But by lunchtime it was all over. Perhaps 10,000 Swedish troops had been killed or wounded, Charles was in flight and the Scandinavians’ power had been broken forever.

“In a single morning,” writes Peter’s biographer Robert K. Massie, the battle had “permanently shifted the political axis of Europe … Poltava was the first thunderous announcement to the world that a new Russia was being born.”

There’s a grim geopolitical symmetry in the fact that today Poltava stands directly in the path of Vladimir Putin’s potential invasion of Ukraine. (It’s closer to the Russian border than it is to Kyiv, and just two hours from Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv, a probable early target for the Russian army.) For the battle at Poltava wasn’t just a foundational moment in Russia’s ascent to empire. It was a colossal moment in Ukrainian history, too.

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Since the mid-seventeenth century, the Cossacks of the Zaporizhian Host, in what is now central Ukraine, had been vassals of their Russian neighbours to the north. But only months before the clash at Poltava, the Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa had decided to switch sides, abandoning Peter and throwing in his lot with the Swedes. He was fighting, he said, “for the common good of our mother, my fatherland, poor Ukraine”. His gamble backfired horribly, though. Defeat at Poltava destroyed his dream of Cossack independence and shattered his health; he fled across the border into Ottoman Moldavia and died that autumn.

In the years that followed, with central and eastern Ukraine becoming part of the Russian Empire, Mazepa was cast as an anti-Russian traitor. Every year, on the first Sunday of Lent, he was ritually cursed in Orthodox churches. Even in the Soviet Union he was condemned as a “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist”. But now many Ukrainians see him as a national hero. Just six years ago the last president, Petro Poroshenko, unveiled a statue of Mazepa in the centre of Poltava. Today his face adorns Ukraine’s 10 hryvnia note.

Fixated on their own modernity, obsessed with the here and now, many Western politicians seem unable to grasp that at the eastern edge of Europe, history really matters. Go to Putin’s official government website, and you can read his 5,000-word essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, published last summer. Did he really write it himself? It hardly matters. The important thing is that he clearly believes it.

Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, Putin says, are one people, “descendants of Ancient Rus”. He admits that they later became fragmented, but insists that “Moscow became the centre of reunification, continuing the tradition of ancient Russian statehood”. The idea of the “Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians”, he says, has “no historical basis”. And as evidence, he points to the Great Northern War. “Only a small portion of the Cossacks supported Mazepa’s rebellion,” Putin insists. “People of all orders and degrees considered themselves Russian and Orthodox.”

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There’s plenty to disagree with in Putin’s essay. Britain’s Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, has even published a long historical rebuttal of his own, pointing out that “Ukraine has been separate from Russia for far longer in its history than it was ever united”. But the revealing thing is that the Kremlin’s top man bothered publishing it at all.

Analysts have spilled oceans of ink speculating about the motives of this most elusive of world leaders. An opportunistic gambler or a supreme strategist? A nationalist or an imperialist? A moderniser or a reactionary? But it’s surely when you see Putin as a historian — that is to say, as somebody shaped by and aware of Russia’s long history, and conscious of his own role as an actor in a vast historical drama — that you see him most clearly.

Today it’s very common to regard Putin as a kind of anomaly. We think of the Western-dominated, rules-based international system as the norm. The West represents order, and Putin represents disorder. We stand for continuity; he represents change and chaos.

But as unpalatable as it might be to admit it, a very long view suggests that it’s Putin who looks normal, and we who look peculiar. After all, if you walk around most European cities you can see plenty of statues of people who were very like Vladimir Putin — pragmatic, ruthless, authoritarian rulers who governed with an iron hand at home and believed might made right abroad. The emperors who sat in Rome, Constantinople or indeed St Petersburg, the kings and commanders who shaped so much European history, would have scoffed at our belief in progress, our disapproval of violence, our idealistic faith in human nature and disdain for our own ancestors.

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To take an obvious example, Peter the Great, often seen in the West as a beacon of enlightened leadership, ruled with a savagery that would horrify us today. When the Streltsy army units mutinied in Moscow in 1698, he had some of them whipped to death, others stretched until their limbs snapped, still others roasted alive or torn apart with red-hot pincers. The victor of Poltava fought war after war after war, against the Swedes, the Poles, the Turks, the Kazakhs, the Persians. And it worked. He won. When Peter died in 1725, he ruled the strongest, richest, largest and most stable regime the Russian people had ever known.

In a way, you can tell the story of the last four centuries as an attempt to cope with Peter’s legacy. In the West we’ve become accustomed to seeing Germany as the great “problem” of European history, to quote A. J. P. Taylor. But for most of the last 400 years, it was Russia that was the real problem. It was Russia, not France or Germany, that haunted the nightmares of Victorian Britain’s politicians and generals — Russia, expanding every year into Central Asia, coming ever closer to India, too dynamic to hold back, too big to hold down. It was fear of Russia, the fastest industrialising country in the world, building factories and railways at a breakneck pace, that pushed Germany into the First World War. Fear of Russia lay at the heart of Nazism; it was fear of Russia, too, that persuaded Harry Truman and Clement Attlee to set up NATO and commit so many American and British troops to the defence of Europe.

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You can, of course, see the Russian threat to Ukraine in a moral light. The embattled underdog and the overbearing bully; the youthful, stumbling democracy and the cold, ruthless autocrat — it’s not just a good story, it contains a considerable element of truth. But one reason the West’s response has been so pitifully weak is that we refuse to see the world clearly.

Nations have competing interests; we can’t all be friends, and it’s sheer naivety to pretend otherwise. We didn’t “lose” Russia in the Nineties, because Russia was never ours to win. The Russians are an intensely proud and patriotic people, with their own ambitions. They were never going to join NATO any more than they were ever going to line up to become meek, dutiful members of the democratic West.

And although Vladimir Putin is undoubtedly haunted by memories of what happened in the dying days of the Cold War, it’s too crude to see him simply as a Soviet revivalist. As repressive and autocratic as he is, he’s the product of centuries of history. And when he denies that Ukraine is really a country — as he infamously told George W. Bush in 2008 — the plain fact is that millions of Russians agree with him.

None of this, by the way, means we should abandon Ukraine. Quite the reverse. But perhaps it might make us think a bit more carefully about the kind of world we live in — competitive, dangerous, potentially very violent — and the kind of people we choose to lead us through it. For whatever we might have told ourselves after 1989, history didn’t end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. We still live in a world of great powers, competing interests, gnawing anxieties and strategic ambitions. Perhaps above all, we still live in a world of war.

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In polite society, people frown awkwardly when you point that out; but as the historian Margaret MacMillan observed in 2018, “war is an integral part of human experience”. Peter the Great would have agreed with her, and almost certainly Vladimir Putin does too. After all, he established himself in power with Russia’s crushing victory in the Second Chechen War (which rather punctures Liz Truss’s ill-judged warning that a Russian attack on Ukraine would be a new Chechnya, since the Russians see that second war as a triumph). Faced with a Georgian bid to join NATO in 2008, he sent in his tanks and won that war too. Then, six years later, his “little green men” went into Crimea. Another war. Another victory. And all the time we in the West stayed at home, and congratulated ourselves on our principles.

So the pages of history turn. Putin’s tanks stream towards the Ukrainian border. In the Kremlin, their canny, cynical, supremely unsentimental master weighs up the odds. If he gets it wrong, he risks humiliation in the eyes of his people. If he gets it right, he has a chance of rebuilding the empire of the Tsars, splintering the Western alliance and leaving Russia in a stronger strategic position than at any time, arguably, since 1945.

He mulls over his options. He reads that the Germans have offered to send the Ukrainians 5,000 helmets, that the British Prime Minister may be toppled by a birthday cake, that the US President wouldn’t be too upset about a “minor incursion” into Ukrainian territory. Then he makes up his mind.

What does he do? Well, ask yourself this: against that background, faced with such opposition, what would you do?

Over the past year, the question of whether or not the United States will defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion has shifted from abstract speculation to an almost existential question for America’s foreign policy elite. For decades, the US has pursued a policy of “strategic ambiguity” on this question — an ambiguity arguably heightened by Biden’s recent claims that it will defend Taiwan, swiftly followed by the State Department’s corrections that US policy on the matter has not changed (whether or not Biden’s personal ambiguity is intentional is of course another matter). 

In a new book, The Strategy of Denial, the American strategist Elbridge Colby aims to resolve this ambiguity once and for all: not only should the US defend Taiwan, it must — for the crucial reason that the integrity of the American empire depends on its winning or preventing this looming conflict. As one of the writers of the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which reset America’s defence posture away from the greater Middle East and towards strategic competition with China, Colby is an influential voice: and if followed, the policy prescriptions within this book will affect Europe perhaps more than European policymakers realise.

A foreign policy Realist, Colby aims to bury the atmosphere of triumphalist liberal imperialism which has served America so badly since the fall of the Soviet Union. “The generation of post–Cold War primacy unmoored some Americans, or at least some of their leaders and eminent thinkers, from underlying realities, giving them a highly exaggerated sense of what the United States could and should accomplish in the international arena,” he notes at the beginning. But “that world is gone. The fundamental reality is that there are now structural limitations on what the United States can do — it cannot do everything at once. Thus it must make hard choices.”

Stripping away all the accretions of “defending liberalism” or “promoting democracy” with which American politicians are accustomed to shroud their defence of empire, Colby breaks down the raw facts of power to their essentials. Asia is the most important economic sphere in the world, and thus, to maintain its global preeminence, America must maintain hegemony in Asia. 

Europe is of secondary importance, and with no realistic hegemonic challenger to American dominance, can be relegated to a second-order priority. The rest of the world is of very limited importance: there is no challenge in the Western Hemisphere, and Africa, if of interest at all, will likely be dominated by whoever wins hegemony in Asia. 

To prevent China dislodging America from hegemony in Asia is, therefore, the central task of US foreign policy: but it is not an easy task. As Colby notes: “Restoring military dominance over China is infeasible, given its size and growth trajectory.” China’s economic growth has been of such historic, transformative proportions that “in purchasing power parity terms it is already larger than America’s, and China has been vigorously turning this economic strength into military power”.

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As Colby notes, the result is that a simple Cold War arms race to maintain military dominance is out of the question: China currently spends far less of its GDP than the US on defence, and can potentially vastly outspend any American increase. Moreover, he adds, “given the enormous demands of attempting to attain dominance against a power like China, the economic costs could be crippling, seriously stressing the US economy, the ultimate source of America’s military strength”.

Instead, the US must pursue a role as “cornerstone balancer” in International Relations terminology, the central linchpin of a vast multinational alliance which, when combined, will outweigh China’s military might. Rattling through the list of potential allies, Colby observes that Japan is central, and India, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia highly desirable, along with the militarily insignificant but geographically useful island nations of the Pacific. Other countries, such as Vietnam, Malaysia and Thailand, should be armed so that they can mount a solid defence of their own territory, without the US extending them a security guarantee it will find itself unable to fulfil. 

But for Colby everything centres on Taiwan: exploring all the potential rationales and options for China, Colby settles on a military fait accompli by China — an invasion — as the most likely course of action. Taiwan, internationally recognised as part of China even by the US, is politically the most obvious target, as the ratcheting up of bellicose Chinese rhetoric makes clear. Strategically, not taking Taiwan will prevent Chinese expansion in the wider Pacific, and taking it will offer China greater ability to project its power in the region. And invasion it must be: strategic “Greyzone” tactics short of war like a blockade, or “punishment” tactics like bombardment, are unlikely to succeed, he argues, as they would firm up Taiwanese and international resolve against China without delivering victory to Beijing. 

Having focused on the most likely Chinese course of action, Colby war-games how to defeat it. Allowing China to invade Taiwan is highly undesirable: to wrest back control of the island once the Chinese have gained a foothold and erected defences would place the US at a great structural disadvantage, forcing it to escalate the conflict into something akin to the great amphibious campaigns of the World War Two Pacific. This would, Colby notes, be “a highly costly, risky, and arduous venture for the United States,” in which America and its allies “would need to redirect their economies to develop and sustain the forces needed for such a conflict, which would likely involve high rates of attrition,” and in a situation, unlike World War Two, where “the United States would not enjoy a decisive advantage in industrial capacity”— indeed, where industrial advantage has already passed to China.

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With recapture out of the question, the American focus must be one of denial: denying China the ability to seize Taiwan, and preferably, dissuading it from even attempting it. Colby suggests that the US and its allies “seek to disable or destroy Chinese transport ships and aircraft before they left Chinese ports or airstrips,” to “try to obstruct key ports; neutralize key elements of Chinese command and control and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance networks; or attack other critical enablers, including other targets on the Chinese mainland, so that surviving assets were more vulnerable to interdiction when they entered the Taiwan Strait” — and then disabling or destroying any ships that made it through.

Yet here we enter the most contentious aspect of Colby’s strategising. As he himself observes repeatedly, once the shooting starts, it will be very difficult to prevent a Taiwan conflict between the American-led alliance and China escalating into a broader war. Colby is bullish at the prospect of avoiding a nuclear exchange, reasoning that the consequences would be as catastrophic for China as they would for the US. Instead, he argues, America should make clear that it is interested only in fighting a limited campaign centred on the defence of Taiwan. 

But such a campaign would not be limited to the Taiwan Straits, with Colby observing that “if the United States forswore the ability to attack targets on the Chinese mainland that were materially involved in the war, it would gravely weaken its ability to defend Taiwan. After all, treating mainland China as off-limits would raise questions about American resolve.” And yet the consequence of such an approach would surely be retaliation, which “would likely include at least some air and naval bases in the United States as well as cyber and space assets. The defenders should therefore propose and seek acceptance only of rule sets, Colby argues, “whose implications they can live with”. How much bombardment of the American mainland the American public can live with for Taiwan’s sake is, of course, an open question.

The essential thrust of Colby’s argument is that America is unlikely to win an all-out war with China: the costs for America will be too high, and China’s geographic and industrial advantages are too great. In his words, “The plain reality is that China is too powerful for the United States simply to make it cease fighting; the United States and any engaged allies and partners would therefore need to persuade it to do so.” Ultimately then, it is on America’s diplomatic and military powers of persuasion that his strategy stands or falls. Firstly, he proposes to “bind” American partners and allies into a web of Pacific alliances, through treaties and joint military basing and operations in the region (we think here of AUKUS). Even if, for European allies like ourselves, our military contribution will be marginal to any Pacific campaign, the moral shock of being targeted by the Chinese in a pre-emptive strike might “bind” us further into the American-led system, Colby argues, as the outraged public demands a response to Chinese aggression.

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Indeed, such political considerations are essential to maintaining the great, if loose, alliance system to maintain American hegemony in Asia. China must be provoked into initiating any escalation of the conflict, so that it will always appear the aggressor; it must be permitted to strike as indiscriminately as possible (Colby urges the US not to provide potential civilian targets with air defences, reasoning that collateral damage will whip up the public anger against China necessary to winning a war); at every stage, China must be manoeuvred into situations where it is forced to escalate the conflict and so lose world sympathy, or back down. Over time, he reasons, the Chinese leadership will realise that the costs of seizing Taiwan will outweigh the benefits, and will be reassured enough by American pledges that the US will not aim to launch a wider war or dismantle their state that they will sue for peace.

Perhaps. It is a strategy that involves a great deal of careful, narrowly applied violence, which depends on what is ultimately the hope that China agrees to fight a war on America’s terms, playing to America’s advantages and negating its own. His hope is that by forcing Beijing to escalate the conflict beyond Taiwan, the American public, along with the publics of its allied nations, will fling themselves into support for a war to deny an aggressive China mastery of Asia; and that by forcing China to escalate, the war is, paradoxically, kept limited to the narrow bounds in which American victory is, though far from certain, at least possible.

This is a difficult balance, as Colby himself makes clear, “it is hard to overstate the scale and sophistication of the resources Beijing can bring to bear to subordinate Taiwan,” and even fighting a war against China on America’s chosen terms “would be exceptionally challenging”. And yet, Colby argues, it is necessary. Will the American public agree? It is difficult, from where we stand, to see that they agree on anything much. As Colby himself observes, “Americans may not be convinced that taking a leading role in denying another state hegemony over a distant region, however key, is worth the sacrifice and risk entailed”. Colby argues his case well, but there are a lot of ifs to think about here, not least for modestly capable allies like Britain plunging headlong into an Indo-Pacific tilt.

Colby himself argues that European countries such Britain would serve the American war effort more effectively by taking a greater role in the defence of Europe itself. Unlike British and German defence analysts who, for their own different reasons, are aghast at the prospect of American diminution of its commitment to Nato, Colby stresses that America’s interests in Europe are by a long way secondary to its interests in Asia, and that European countries — particularly Germany — should be obliged to take up the slack.

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A foreign policy Realist, Colby rightly urges America to give up its draining Middle Eastern commitments, to force Europeans to defend themselves, to extricate itself from the web of defence guarantees it has given to nations of no meaningful strategic importance and to focus all its efforts towards maintaining its global dominance through the defence of Taiwan against a rising China.  Colby’s strategy rightly roots itself firmly in a clear-eyed understanding of America’s diminished global reach following its unchallenged period of post-Cold War dominance, and indeed, Biden’s foreign policy so far has followed Trump’s (and Colby’s) Realist lead. Yet even after its pragmatic listing of all the ways it could fail and the great odds stacked against victory, Colby’s analysis seems to glide over what is surely America’s greatest weakness. 

Which actual or potential ally can be certain that an internally-divided America, whose chaotic politics is beamed daily across the world, has the solidarity and wherewithal to maintain even a limited shooting war at the other end of the world against the most powerful rival it has ever faced? How well-placed is 2021 America to walk such a narrow political, diplomatic and military tightrope, where the prospect of success is so slender, and where the risks of escalation are so great? Colby places great emphasis on the difficulties the US will find in holding together a fractious alliance in East Asia: yet whether it can hold itself together long enough to fight and win a costly major war is surely the greatest question challenging the empire’s survival.

These groups can’t influence policies at Amazon and the Pentagon, or other undemocratic bodies at America’s commanding heights. But locally they still have the power to refuse orders from the managerial janissaries who carry out the oligarchy’s bidding.

Pretensions of democracy aside, this is the real political landscape in the US, argued the American scholar of statecraft Angelo Codevilla. The oligarchy demands complete submission, the locals refuse, each party grants itself greater licence in what is permitted to defeat the other and the country spirals toward revolutionary violence. Codevilla, who last month died aged 78 near his vineyards in California, termed it a “cold civil war”.

For Codevilla, America’s founding tradition of republican self-government has been replaced by a ruling class of both Democrats and Republicans that is steeped in progressive ideology and hides its power in the operations of a vast administrative Leviathan. These views, as well as Codevilla’s affiliation with the Claremont Institute, considered the intellectual home of Trumpism, earned him a place in what one critic recently called “The Anti-American Right”.

According to America’s liberal intelligentsia, the open collaboration between corporations and state organs monopolised by the Democratic Party is unimportant compared to the fascist threat coming from “anti-American” conservatives. They believe that fear of demographic and cultural change has marginalised these anti-American jingoists, and led to their embrace of strongmen like Donald Trump who promise to restore their honour.

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But that critique, when applied to Codevilla, reduces an historical and structural analysis of power to mere reactionary resentment. It also misinterprets and seriously underplays the radicalism of his ideas. Far from being radicalised by the election of a black president in Barack Obama, or a white restorer in Trump, Codevilla was radicalised by seeing the inner workings of the US government in the 1970s.

It is Codevilla’s background as a classicist, not a culture warrior, that best explains his harsh criticisms of the “War on Terror” policies of a Republican president, George W. Bush. His counsel to Americans who fear the rise of an oligarchic ruling class was not to storm the Capitol or elect a Caesar, but to get out and start something new. He saw an answer to the revolutionary spiral not in violence but federalism achieved through exodus. “Were the deplorables to struggle for the partisan power to oppress the others, they would guarantee dysfunction at best, war at worst,” he wrote in March this year. “That is why it makes most sense for them to assert their own freedom.”

Codevilla was born in 1943 in Voghera, a Northern Italian town near Milan. His father died before his birth. In 1955, he moved to America with his mother, arriving in New Jersey. After a stint in the Foreign Service he made his formal introduction to the American power elite in 1977, when he joined the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In 1978, he helped draft the original foreign intelligence surveillance court law that, after 9/11, provided the pretence of legal authority — in the notorious FISA warrants — for carte blanche spying by the U.S. intelligence agencies. Finished with government work by the mid-1980s, he went on to take a number of university teaching positions and pursued a prolific writing career, over which he published 14 books and countless articles and essays, mostly for conservative publications.

When I had the chance to interview Codevilla in 2017, his generosity left an impression, as did his voice. For someone who came to America as an early adolescent, he had no discernible accent save a highly articulated diction and crisp, mid-Atlantic consonants. It was the voice of someone obviously learned, slightly mischievous, direct and lacking pretension.

It was the same voice in which he wrote, and reflected something of Codevilla’s character and unique background. He was a government insider who internalised the vision of America’s founders and an unsparing critic of the intelligence agencies who failed to make the country safer while hijacking its politics. You could disagree with his conclusions, as many did when he defended first the Tea Party and later the political movement around Donald Trump. But it was clear he was a man who lived partly outside his own time, translating Machiavelli into English and consulting Thucydides to diagnose the causes and effects of a growing administrative state.

Codevilla was best known for his writing on the American ruling class. Indeed, the idea that America is no longer ruled by a collection of individuals selected on their merits — and its popularity on the American Right — is largely Codevilla’s legacy. His 2010 essay on the subject for The American Spectator became a sensation after the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh was moved to read aloud from it to his more than 15 million listeners. The essay became a book and elevated Codevilla’s reputation from respected authority on military and intelligence matters to a general Right-wing eminence of the American political scene.

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Codevilla interpreted what has often been described as “polarisation” as a conflict between two distinct classes, each with competing visions of America. There is a “court” or “ruling” class, made up of highly educated urbanites whose group identity was forged in the American Progressive movement founded over a century ago, and a “country class” of those excluded from the court, who preserve the older assumptions of America’s founders.

The US has always had an upper class. But for most of American history, it was regional and varied. Because these people came from different places with their own local customs and made money in different ways, they were “not predictably of one mind on any given matter”. The internal tensions and disputes that naturally arose among them served as a check on their consolidation of power.

But now those regional elites have been replaced by a monolith. “Today’s ruling class,” Codevilla wrote, “was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits”. From Washington to Silicon Valley, progressive elites share a “social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints”. While the test for entry into this class is moral and aesthetic, it exercises power through offices of the administrative state, whose authority rests on secrecy.

Codevilla’s most original and striking contribution was to argue that secrecy, rather than expertise, is the foundation of ruling class power. As a strategy of rule, it provides the connective tissue between the ruling class’s domestic social engineering projects and the foreign wars it fights without clear goals or prospect of victory. As Codevilla wrote in his 2014 book, To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations:

“The bipartisan ruling class that grew in the Cold War, who imagined themselves and who managed to be regarded as entitled by expertise to conduct America’s business of war and peace, protected its status against a public from which it continued to diverge by translating the commonsense business of war and peace into a private, pseudo-technical language impenetrable to the uninitiated.”

As used by American spy agencies, “secrecy” can mean hiding information or obtaining it surreptitiously. But it might equally refer to the deployment of academic and scientific obscurantism to justify unpopular policies such as the forced masking of school children or the imposition of racial mysticism in school curricula and corporate boardrooms. The logic of such policies is never straightforwardly presented to the public, where it can be refuted on its own terms, because the logic of this or that policy is beside the point. In the end, the secular utopianism of early twentieth century progressive ideology combined with a secrecy-powered security state built to win the cold war and produced a strange offspring: our new America.

Socialised into the belief that they alone have the skill and moral sensitivity required to govern, America’s elites regard their countrymen not as fellow citizens to be reasoned with but as subjects to be ruled, no different in principle from the Afghans and Iraqis designated for liberation.

For Codevilla, such an outcome was always implicit in the premises of the War on Terror. Shortly after the attacks on September 11, at a time when many of his fellow conservatives regarded deference to the national security state as synonymous with patriotism, he offered this counsel in an essay for the Claremont Review of Books:

“Common sense says that victory means living without worry that some foreigners might kill us on behalf of their causes, but also without having to bow to domestic bureaucrats and cops, especially useless ones. It means not changing the tradition by which the government of the United States treats citizens as its masters rather than as potential enemies.”

No one in power took his advice, of course. Arguing that “some foreigners” might want to kill us, and that victory meant stopping this from happening rather than converting them to our way of life, could be easily written off as xenophobic and antiquated. For the next 15 years, the Bush and Obama administrations appealed to the nobility of Islam and dignity of Muslims as US wars killed hundreds of thousands of actual Muslims while achieving no lasting peace for Americans.

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Codevilla was not always right in his five decades of writing about America’s wars and political struggles at home, but he was often uncommonly wise and never lacking in common sense. He understood that while some people live above their means, the members of the American ruling class live above their mistakes.

No senior US military official faced any serious consequences over the war in Vietnam. Five decades later, the same is true of Afghanistan. The generals who oversaw the US defeat and lied to the public about the progress of the war have moved on to jobs in the White House and defence industry. President Biden, to his credit, manoeuvred around the machinations of the security establishment to finally end the war. But he did so in a shambolic way that was careless with allies and pushed America’s strategic adversaries into closer cooperation.

What’s more, Biden shows no interest at all in dismantling the massive and immensely powerful war on terror security apparatus that, left intact, will always find new enemies to justify its existence. In fact, part of Biden’s motivation to get out of Afghanistan was to rely more on “over-the-horizon” capabilities — meaning jets, missiles and drone attacks — to fight our enemies abroad so that he could refocus the surveillance and policing power of the national security state on political enemies at home.

The plan, outlined in June, deems white supremacist and anti-government militia groups the “most persistent and lethal threat” to the US out of all “domestic terrorist” ideologies. To combat this, the National Security Council strategy calls for increased government spying powers combined with efforts at reeducation. It is “the first document,” writes the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “to directly tie US counterterrorism efforts to broader social issues such as systemic racism, police reform and gun control”.

All of this is as Codevilla predicted. Many have criticised US military policy in Afghanistan and the opaque and divisive racial theories being imposed in American schools. Codevilla recognised that they are structurally indivisible, two sides of an American ruling-class ideology that defines itself in opposition to the values and preferences of most American citizens.

This ideology generates endless cycles of failure because it reflects not particular policies but the gross inadequacies of those who have a monopoly on institutional power. It “guarantees,” as Codevilla wrote in 2014, “unending conflict with all nations and strife among ourselves”.

Driving this increasingly confrontational approach is a view of China as a monolithic, authoritarian state embarked on a long-term strategy to overthrow US hegemony. Compared to Western states — riven by factional strife, paralysed by democratic deadlock, flailing about in the Middle East and seemingly unable to plan beyond next Tuesday — China certainly seems a fearsome challenger. Its plans cover everything from domestic Artificial Intelligence development to global infrastructure, while the top-down China Communist Party (CCP) regime ensures strict implementation and compliance. Some analysts have even suggested the existence of a 100-year strategy to displace the United States, implying an incredible capacity for long-term strategic planning.

The trouble is: this isn’t true. The Chinese party-state does not work like this. As I explain in a new book, Fractured China, the party-state is much more fragmented than many Westerners believe. Indeed, central policymaking is often loose and vague, with many competing interests shaping what actually happens on the ground.

Under Mao, the Chinese party-state was highly centralised, with top-down “command and control” systems that allowed central agencies to micromanage China’s economy and society. However, in Deng Xiaoping’s post-1978 “reform and opening up” era, these institutions were dismantled to facilitate the turn to capitalism.

Power and control over resources was extensively decentralised to provincial and local governments, as well as the emergent private sector. Privatisation and corporatisation turned former government ministries into free-wheeling, profit-seeking enterprises whose overseas activities are often beyond the ability of Chinese regulators to control. And as party cadres moved into business, and business tycoons joined the party, competing cadre-capitalist networks emerged across the party-state.

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Over the past decade, policymaking has been fragmented across a host of national and subnational agencies, often with competing interests and agendas. Some previously domestic agencies have acquired an international role, with even provincial governments having their own foreign and commercial offices.

Provincial governments have, for example, signed a number of trade and investment deals with governments in Asia and Africa. China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then, is not in control of Chinese foreign policy, and often does not even know what other agencies are up to — until some crisis erupts, such as that in Ghana when the local government of Shangli county in Guangxi province deliberately “exported” tens of thousands of artisanal gold miners to offset local unemployment, sparking a populist anti-Chinese backlash and a government crackdown.

Of course, central leaders do still retain some powerful mechanisms for coordinating the fractured party-state. And these all have some effect on how the system works. But they do not add up to strategic, top-down control of every aspect of Chinese behaviour. Top leaders may convene “leading small groups”, committees bringing together different agencies in a given policy area, to try to cohere them around common purposes. But these purposes are often left vague to accommodate competing interests and agendas.

Equally vague are CCP elites’ speeches and slogans, which set an overall “tone” and direction for policy. Subordinates must orient themselves to these slogans to win policy support, funding and promotion. But they are so general that they usually require extensive interpretation to work out what they mean in practice.

Central agencies’ policies are likewise frequently loose “opinions” that local governments must adapt to local conditions. This all creates enormous scope for subordinates to interpret central “directives” in ways that actually advance their own sectional interests, rather than any geostrategic grand strategy. Indeed, the system actively encourages experimentation within loose guidelines — what former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping called “crossing the river by feeling for the stones”.

The most important cohering mechanisms are the CCP’s powers of appointment, appraisal and discipline, which leaders can use to encourage loyalty and punish wayward cadres. Xi Jinping is making particularly strong use of these powers — having, for example, prosecuted over two million cadres for corruption. That such purges seem necessary reflects the epochal transformations in China’s party-state, which, while spurring rapid economic growth, have also weakened central control, undermined the regime’s authority, and enabled massive local corruption.

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Such dynamics have, for instance, played out in the current strife over Xi’s drive for “common prosperity”. Everyone must orient themselves to this agenda, but no one — probably including Xi himself — really knows what it actually means, and everyone tries to wrap it around their own personal preferences. Hard-line leftists in China have interpreted “common prosperity” as unleashing a long overdue attack on the rich, terrorising many business tycoons, who have quickly donated billions to state-linked good causes. But others insist that “common prosperity is not egalitarianism,” and will not involve “robbing the rich to help the poor”, bashing the Left for “triggering ideological confusion and panic”.

Or take Xi’s call for a “toilet revolution” in 2015, in a speech lamenting the often-dreadful state of China’s public lavatories. Local governments seized on this vague utterance to justify splurging a staggering $3bn on toilet upgrades over the next 18 months, doubtless enriching many state-linked construction companies, before the horrified State Council reined them in.

Indeed, Chinese local governments are especially adept at exploiting their autonomy to further their own interests, leading to highly irrational outcomes, which are often misinterpreted as some kind of cunning strategy.

For example, Labour’s Stephen Kinnock, the shadow Asia minister, recently accused China of “deliberately overproducing steel” to dump on Western markets. In reality, overcapacity has been endemic across most basic Chinese industries since the 1990s — reaching 20 to 30% by the early 2010s — as local governments competed against one another to develop local industries and infrastructure through debt-fuelled over-investment. This is why China now has more airports per square kilometre than the US, and is awash with “ghost towns” and loss-making roads and railways, and why many local governments and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are effectively bankrupt.

But it is China’s BRI that provides the best example of how these dynamics play out internationally. Western commentary tends to depict the BRI as Xi’s cunning grand strategy, designed to undermine US leadership and ensnare developing countries through “debt-trap diplomacy”. Detailed maps give the impression of a strategic blueprint being faithfully rolled out by officials and companies.

The reality is very different. “One belt, one road” emerged as a slogan in 2013 following two speeches by Xi, which largely just described what China was already doing: investing and building infrastructure in developing countries. But quickly, everyone piled in. Over the next two years, provincial governments and state-owned enterprises lobbied ferociously to get their pet projects incorporated into the BRI. Consequently, the project’s guidelines are remarkably vague and capacious, involving no clear objectives, no timeline, no dedicated resource commitments, and no real prioritisation. Practically every party-state activity has been squashed in.

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Even today, there is no official Chinese map of the BRI, and unofficial ones were banned in 2017. There is not even a clear definition of what constitutes a BRI country or project: different agencies use different metrics to suit themselves. BRI projects are not devised in Beijing, according to a strategic blueprint. They normally originate with foreign governments, seeking funds to accelerate infrastructure development, which may also be useful for securing electoral support or fuelling patronage networks through dodgy construction contracts. And they are often egged-on by Chinese SOEs — not because they want to advance China’s geostrategic interests, but because they want to win lucrative tied aid contracts. Consequently, projects are as likely to occur outside of the six broad “corridors” sketched in the BRI guidelines as inside them.

Indeed, oversight over the BRI is remarkably weak. Chinese policy banks and regulators have very little capacity to evaluate projects’ feasibility, and consequently approve many “white elephants”, such as the notorious Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka. Half of China’s overseas projects are loss-making. Regulators also have no real capacity to scrutinise projects’ implementation, relying instead on host countries to supervise them. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is barely involved in decision-making, and is typically only brought in when these problems spark major diplomatic incidents. China is still crossing the river while feeling for the stones, but it is stubbing its toes as it goes along.

And so responding to the behaviour of every Chinese entity as though it were intentionally planned and sanctioned by the top Chinese leadership is clearly misguided. The Chinese party-state is not monolithic — it is fractured, even when it comes to Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy initiative.

Rather than confronting an imaginary strategic monolith, then, Western analysts and policymakers should develop a much more nuanced understanding of China and the internal struggles animating the party-state. In some policy areas, the interests involved do make cooperation difficult or even impossible. But elsewhere, there are forces and agencies that want to work constructively with foreign partners, creating scope for collaboration and mutual learning.

The UK’s decision to join and shape China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), for example — rather than boycotting it, as Washington demanded — is a good case in point. The AIIB has adopted similar standards to existing multilateral development banks, while also trying to drive up the standards of China’s overseas projects.

A new Cold War will only isolate and immobilise these groups, empowering nationalist and paranoid factions who are convinced the West cannot tolerate China’s rise. Unless we tread carefully, and develop a more realistic understanding of China, we risk provoking a confrontation that we might not be able to win.

“Who is society?” asked Thatcher in 1987, in an interview for Woman’s Own magazine. “There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families.”

The unravelling of both state provision and large-scale political organisations was fertile ground for new forms of politics. Thatcher cannot have been pleased when one of these sprouted at Greenham Common RAF Base in Berkshire. The Greenham Women’s Peace Camp was an embodiment of women taking their lives into their own hands, taking responsibility for themselves and their actions, and not being held back by the fact of being women. Like a muddy, plural, mirror image of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, it reflected the new individualism in an emerging form of political dissent.

There has always a danger in reading history backwards from where we are now, of finding in it the seeds of how we understand the world today precisely because we’re looking for them. Out of the Darkness — a new book of stories about Greenham — is told by women who were there 40 years ago. It explicitly eschews any claim to be an official history, but the claim that the Women’s Peace Camp had a lasting influence on politics still deserves to be taken seriously.

Begun by a handful of peace campaigners who walked from Cardiff to the gates of an air base chosen to house American nuclear Cruise Missiles, the camp grew organically after a few people decided to stay on. It wasn’t initially women-only, but after several discussions, a vote was taken and the few men were asked to leave the camp.

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The initial decision seems to have been pragmatic. “They didn’t do the washing up, help with the food, look after the kids,” said Jill ‘Ray’ Raymond, “they get drunk, they are violent and they won’t do the washing up.”

Bear in mind that 1981 was only six years after the Sex Discrimination Act was passed, seven years after contraception became available on the NHS, and eleven years after the first Women’s Liberation Movement conference in Oxford. Social expectations that women would do the housework and childcare, and defer to men, were still strong.

Some of the women also felt that non-violent direct action would be easier without men around, as situations were less likely to escalate. “Some of the squaddies wouldn’t want to hit a woman so they were more careful about violence,” said Fenja Hill. “It was probably less violent because there were no men.”

As the camp grew, though, its existence as a women’s peace camp became more important. Josetta Malcolm, who has since identified as non-binary, described their experience of a women-only camp as being “like therapy, it was like a political awakening…. to just see how things linked up about patriarchy, and nuclear arms, and war. Actually to be in a women-only space and then have your voice heard as a woman is so empowering.”

We can see in this a shift of emphasis from a shared external aim — getting nuclear weapons off the site — to more nebulous goals based on what we would today call identity. Certainly, it was an early example of who you are being as important as what you want to change. But in fact, the focus of the camp was never solely on a shared political aim. There was no plan, no organisation, no strategy and no leaders. These were seen as virtues, not failings.

The method of Non-Violent Direct Action, NVDA, rests heavily on each person taking personal responsibility for what they decide to do. There is no top-down discipline, just “affinity groups” that decide together what action to take. That makes it hard to predict, control or counter. Actions like blockading gates when the mobile cruise missile launchers were trying to leave the base, or cutting through the fence to dance on top of missile silos, disrupted military operations and in some cases embarrassed the government.

Without elected leaders, nobody is accountable to anybody else, except directly and informally. This was seen as in itself revolutionary, modelling an alternative form of society, one without hierarchies. Even the different camps at different gates were not identified by military names or numbers, but by non-hierarchical colours. Each camp developed its own character. Green Gate was spiritual, healing, close to nature. Turquoise Gate was vegan and Violet a refuge for carnivores. Orange Gate was home to families and had the best cake. “Main Gate” became Yellow Gate.

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This diversity of the different camps was also seen as symbolic of a wider cause. Feminism was supposed to have room for all sorts of women, who might disagree politically or tactically, but nevertheless be united by the fact of being women. Shared life experiences bound them together, but it was assumed that simply being a woman was enough to outweigh differences.

Even deciding who was, or was not, a Greenham Woman was seen as needlessly divisive. “A Greenham woman is any damn woman who wishes to call herself a Greenham woman,” said Lorna Richardson. “I think it’s antithetical to both the spirit and the practicality of Greenham to divide women into camp women who lived there, and visitors who did not.”

The absence of structure and organisation came with limitations, however. Penny Gulliver recalled occasions when Blue Gate was asked to create a diversion for a big action planned by Yellow Gate. After she and her Blue Gate companions broke into the base and got arrested, “then you’d find out they’d had a row at Yellow Gate about who was going to take the pictures and then they called it off, but nobody came and told Blue Gate!”

Visual and symbolic protests were important. The Greenham veterans talk about reclaiming myths and symbols, witches and spiders’ webs, Moon Goddesses and the hand symbol, forefingers and thumb tips touching, that portrays the vulva. This idea of protest as performance or work of art today typifies a new kind of politics, less concerned with taking power and more with provoking an emotional response, both in those witnessing and in those taking part.

“I think Greenham gave me the confidence to be a woman — to be who I was.” said Sue Say, “and recognise that’s not always going to be the same as someone else.”

It’s not new for individuals to gain a sense of their own capabilities, their independence and agency, through taking part in political action. What is relatively new, though, is seeing such internal change as an end in itself. Asked about the lasting impact of Greenham Women’s Peace Camp, many of those involved talk about changes in themselves. Some of them became therapists, including Sue Bolton, for whom “it was about going right back into yourself and realising the whole thing starts from you… And then you change the whole world, just by being yourself and finding out who you are.”

Slogans like “Greenham Women Everywhere” and “Carry Greenham Home” evoke a sense of the camp, not as a tactical campaign to change UK defence policy, but as a state of mind. The mantra “The Personal Is Political” comes up again and again.

That phrase was first used by 1970s feminists, drawing attention to the fact that their home lives, who raised their children and even their intimate relationships were connected with the public world of politics. Laws governing access to abortion and contraception, or the legality of sexual relationships, had a direct effect on private lives. Many women went on from Greenham to work in women’s refuges, in social work or feminist campaigns.

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But while women at Greenham were discussing what they should eat, how to share out the domestic work and what it meant to sleep with women instead of men, the meaning of the phrase evolved. Instead of somebody’s personal life reflecting political changes that needed to be made in the public realm, that personal life could itself embody change. Egalitarian cooking arrangements, lesbian sex or cutting off your long hair could be political acts in themselves.

Some aspects of life as a Greenham Woman are familiar from more recent political campaigns. A loose, non-hierarchical structure with no clear goals or strategies was adopted by the Occupy movements. Self-organisation on the basis of an identity, or shared lived experience, rather than around an external political goal, is now a permanent state of affairs. The Extinction Rebellion protests use aspects of Non-Violent Direct Action, though the movement does have leaders and centralised planning.

What has become a central feature of extra-Parliamentary politics, though, is the focus on self-expression. “I want my name on the list of people that says, ‘I do not think nuclear weapons is the right way to go,’” said Margaret McNeill. “It’s putting my name to this invisible charter that says ‘I was there, I witnessed this’.’” Today, the motto “Not In My Name’ has become a familiar sight on demonstrations; it is usually less of a threat to remove from power an elected government, more a disavowal of some policy or action that will go ahead anyway.

The struggle between the National Union of Mineworkers and Thatcher’s Conservative government was not about coal. It was about who had power in the country. The Greenham Women wanted to erode, if not the physical power of guns and missiles, the legitimacy of holding that power. They wanted to change the policies of those in government, but not to take that power for themselves. They explicitly rejected systems that centralised power, but they wanted to be visible, and to render visible aspects of themselves and their lives that they felt had been ignored or devalued.

Thousands of women spent time at Greenham, from a few hours to several years, and later said it changed their sense of themselves and what they could achieve. But did the camp succeed?

The last cruise missiles were removed from Greenham Common in 1991 — but most would say that the end of the Cold War did more to bring that about than the constant presence of women at the camp. Some of the women stayed on until the land was finally returned to being a Common in 2000, after almost 60 years of military use. It is now home to arts and business projects, nature reserves and open space.

You could interpret these two changes as victories for decentralised, women-led, non-violent campaigning. Or you could say that change happened when those inside the fence, those with the political, legal and military power, laid down their arms, took down the fence and crept away. But whichever you think is true, Greenham still became a prototype for the shape of political protest today.