It seems doubtful that the sitting US president will have spent much time with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But I feel confident that several of his lines in the “Song of Myself” might still resonate with Donald Trump. “I know perfectly well”, the poet says, “my own egotism”. Whitman is not alone in this self-consciousness. “I chant the chant of dilation or pride”, he goes on, “I show that size is only development”. A line like that could be the motto of any New York property developer. Whitman then asks, bringing a rare end-rhyme to development: “Have you outstripped the rest? are you the President?” Mr Trump could coolly answer: Yes.

With all this in mind, it is worth noting that Whitman penned a fair number of fraternal lines about China. In a poem of delirious cosmopolitanism, “Salut au monde”, he claimed: “I see the four great rivers of China, the Amour, the Yellow River, the Yiang-tse, and the Pearl.” We would now write Whitman’s “Yiang-tse” as Yangtze and his “Amour” as Amur; but what matters is that China’s rivers were flowing in the Brooklyn poet’s mind in the middle of the 19th century.

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Whitman even went to Qing-dynasty China, in a poetic transport, to see for himself how the common people lived. “I go among them”, he dreamed. “I mix indiscriminately”. And he found the people of China to be, in the blinding light of his ecstasy, no different from him or from the Americans of his day. “Each of us [is] inevitable”, he thrummed, “Each of us [is] limitless.”

We do not know what it is in Whitman’s ultra-democratic poetry that stirred something in a young Xi Jinping. But as China’s paramount leader returns to the US for another state visit, he surely knows that America has long dreamed of his people.

And it is not only in poetic reveries that the West and China have been friendly. Before the full-bore Industrial Revolution; liberal trade policies (and concomitant trade wars); and the high-watermark of Western imperialism in Whitman’s 19th century, the West and China had several hundred years of largely peaceful cultural, commercial, and intellectual contact. From roughly 1500 to 1800, China and the West rather candidly recognized each other as the world’s most advanced civilizations. Leibniz — a baroque savant and China-watcher avant la lettre — did not hesitate to call them “the two most cultivated parts of the world”.

More recently, and no less importantly, the 21st century’s two great powers were ultimately aligned in all three of the 20th’s great contests: the First World War, Second World War, and the Cold War. This is currently better known in Beijing than it is in Washington, London, and Brussels. And, because we rarely hear it in the West, it’s worth taking each conflict in sequence.

A couple of years before Whitman’s poems began to appear in translation in the pages of the New Culture Movement’s Young China magazine, the Chinese republic declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary. The casus belli was a lawless German strike, in February 1917, on a French transport ship sailing in international waters. Hundreds of Chinese nationals aboard the vessel had drowned. In March 1917, the Chinese parliament voted to break diplomatic relations with Germany. But this brought no change to Germany’s scandalous U-boat policy. In August 1917, Beijing then joined London and Paris, Petrograd and Washington in their titanic struggle against the Central Powers.

China’s man in Washington at the time was a formidable diplomat with an evocative name: Vi Kyuin Wellington Koo. In a letter printed a month or so later, in The American Journal of International Law, Wellington Koo notified the US Secretary of State of his government’s grave decision: “I have the honor to inform you that China… declares that a state of war exists with Germany and Austria-Hungary.” Notably, Wellington Koo stressed in this letter that his government would “observe all the stipulations of the conventions signed at the International Peace Conferences at The Hague”. The Republic of China, founded in 1912, would uphold the laws of “civilized warfare” that Imperial Germany had relinquished. In other words, Wellington Koo’s Asian republic was more civilized than one of Europe’s great monarchies.

In the Second World War, meanwhile, the Republic of China staked a similar claim, fighting alongside Washington in defense of civilization. But now, the lawless power China had to resist was Japan: a monarchical Asian ally of a post-monarchical Nazi Germany. On 7 December 1941, Japan struck Pearl Harbor without formally declaring war. This “treacherous” strike was made in violation of the conventional laws of war and later judged to be illegal — which is to say, uncivilized — by a postwar tribunal. The more immediate effect of Pearl Harbor was to forge a momentous link between the US and China.

Why so momentous? Well, on 1 January 1942, a statement titled the “Declaration by United Nations” was drawn up and signed at the Arcadia Conference in Washington, DC. The ur-document of the United Nations, it had four original drafters and signatories: the US, UK, USSR and China. It is no coincidence these four great powers still form the core of the UN Security Council (with France joining later). China belongs to the innermost circle of powers that created the postwar order, and the UN.

Just a couple of days after the Arcadia declaration was signed, Chiang Kai-shek — or “Generalissimo Chiang”, as he was known — accepted the “supreme command over all forces of the United Powers… in the Chinese theater”. The idea for this centralization of “United Nations” forces in Chiang’s hands came from President Roosevelt himself. And there can be no doubt that FDR had a strategic vision for what he called “the gallant people of China”. By May 1942, he was declaring that “in the future a still unconquerable China will play its proper role in maintaining peace and prosperity, not only in eastern Asia but in the whole world”.

China remained “unconquerable” at the close of the Second World War. But its anticolonial struggle had not decided the issue of a decades-long civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists. Of course, Chiang and the Republic of China did not hold the mainland; in the bitter fight for sovereignty, the Maoists prevailed. A successor republic, a “People’s Republic”, was formed in Beijing in October 1949. And with it, a steely party-state was formed which had immense debts to one of America’s other wartime allies: Stalin’s USSR.

The cruelties of China’s civil war and the fantastical complexity of early-Cold War geopolitics cannot be dealt with here. But two brief points can be made. First, China’s postwar settlement in no way cancels out the vast sacrifices made by the “gallant people” of the country during the Second World War. Second, the communist ascendancy in China was not preordained. Indeed, certain actions by the US may have moved the dial in favor of Mao and his Soviet-backed troops. Frank Dikötter has stressed in a recent book that it was FDR’s successor, President Truman, who put an arms embargo in place in 1946: not on Mao and his communist brigades, but on Generalissimo Chiang and his nationalists.

A 1946 New York Times headline tells us why: “Aid to China Hinges on Ending of Strife and Unification of Nation”. Truman confirms this in a personal note he sent to Chiang. In it, the US president made clear that his government’s “generous attitude” towards the Republic of China was highly conditional: Chiang had to demonstrate “genuine progress” towards achieving a “peaceful settlement” with Mao. In hopes of seeing a coalition government formed in Nanjing, Chiang’s capital, Truman leveraged US money and materiel, imposing more than one ceasefire which, in Dikötter’s view, “changed the course of the civil war”.

The early years of the Cold War were therefore treacherous and highly complex. There is much we still do not fully understand. But however we choose to reconstruct that era, it’s clear that a dangerous bloc-formation swiftly formed within the “Big Four” powers that built the UN: the US and UK in the “West”, the USSR and China in the “East”. And no one disputes that China, having aligned with Washington and London in the century’s first two global conflicts, took a hostile posture during the third. This revolutionary, Soviet-backed posture of Mao’s China held up for roughly two decades.

But it is surely worth noting that, for a great power with a 2,000-year history, that’s the blink of an eye. The People’s Republic of China had only been in existence for 22 years when President Nixon touched down in Beijing to make his visionary overtures in February 1972. In the years that followed, Maoist China decided to normalize relations with Washington. And, less than 20 years after that, due in part to the West’s strategic rapprochement with China, the Cold War ended.

This point is especially important. The liberal Nineties narrative of the USSR’s dissolution is highly Eurocentric — but modern China has never been a geopolitical periphery. Any rigorous account of the collapse of the USSR must frankly reckon with the fact that it was not only the Western powers, but the Western powers plus China, which created the conditions that doomed the Soviet system.

Strange to say, the US had a strategic commitment during the Cold War to what we would now call a sort of multipolarity. Cultivating ties with peripheral communist regimes was part of this strategy: Washington’s heavy investment in Tito’s Yugoslavia is a case in point. Nixon’s grand maneuver in 1972 was to invite Mao’s Beijing, a central communist regime, to form a third pole in the bipolar world order of the Seventies. And, indeed, a new pole was formed. “Without abandoning its communist trappings”, as Bruce Mazlish puts it, “China under Deng Xiaoping and his successors has been pursuing its own amalgamation of socialism, Confucianism, and capitalism in a unique blend.” The PRC’s scale is unique, too, and the systemic effects of its late-Cold War opening are often missed in Western discourse.

The triumphalist liberal narrative of the Nineties is also ideologized. Any serious account of China’s reopening to the West must reckon with the fact that it was not instigated or navigated in the early days by Western liberals. Whatever we make of this fact, the breakthrough diplomacy in China was undertaken by Western conservatives: Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, with some fine diplomatic play by Margaret Thatcher. Beijing has not forgotten who conceived its Cold War détente with the West. Nixon is highly respected in 21st-century China, as he seems to be among a growing number of young Americans.

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But China cannot be reduced to a partisan question in the West. It is too massive, too comprehensive, for that. Our ideologies do not capture it. And it cannot be stressed too heavily that it was Western diplomacy in the Seventies — not politics, not ideology — which drew Beijing back towards Washington, London, and Brussels. It was diplomacy which made “unconquerable China” a stabilizing presence in late-20th-century geopolitics.

It’s probably too much to hope for President Xi to be given a first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass during his stay in Washington, DC. But there is, in any case, a pair of words that Whitman brings forward in “Salut au monde” that still speak to the occasion. As he gazes out on the world of the 1850s, Whitman tells us that he sees “barbarisms” and “civilizations”. Not much has changed, perhaps. But this is no time for great-power barbarisms. The stakes are too high.

The task, then, is for China and the West to exemplify their long-related civilizations. Today, we’d be more likely to call them the world’s largest economic zones, and it’s tempting to see these tensions, over AI or rare earths, as insurmountable. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too quick to make the shift to brute economic calculation. For diplomacy is, ultimately, a civilizational legacy. And if diplomacy is what we need in the early 21st century, then surely we can find the strength and calm to engage in it: by returning to the deeper traditions which made several centuries of relatively peaceful trade and intellectual exchange possible between a strong China and a powerful West.

And yet, despite the EU’s best efforts, Trump still derides them, insults them, and threatens them. Most recently, he threatened to raise the tariff on European cars, from 15% to 25%. Most of them are German cars. He is disappointed with Keir Starmer and Giorgia Meloni. But he really hates the Germans. It seems personal.

I am not quite sure why this is the case. Maybe he hasn’t forgiven Angela Merkel for attempting to stand up to him during his first term. Maybe he’s trying to distance himself from his German ancestry. Or maybe it’s just Friedrich Merz. Merz is the Wormtongue of European politics. I wouldn’t trust him either.

After a year of Merz acting as the Trump appeaser-in-chief, the German chancellor suddenly turned on him last week. He said that Iran had humiliated the US, and that the US had entered the war without a strategy. On the substance, Merz was right, of course. I am always saying the same thing myself — along with virtually every other commentator. But Merz is also the head of government of western Europe’s largest country. He speaks for a large part of the EU and Nato too.

It’s hard to work out why he intervened as he did. My hunch is that Merz simply misjudged the situation, not for the first time. He made his comments during a visit to a class of school children in his idyllic Westphalian constituency, far away from the real world — somewhere he felt safe.

Unfortunately for Merz, though, Trump was listening and hit back immediately. It’s not Trump’s tweets I worry about. I have long ago stopped reading them. But what I do take seriously are Trump’s actions. The US Department of War, as it is now called, announced a reduction of troops in Germany by 5,000 — with Trump threatening still more.

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What I also take seriously is his threat to impose a 25% tariff on European cars. The US Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs lacked a sound legal basis. But this has been widely and foolishly misinterpreted in the EU: it does not mean he cannot impose the tariffs; he just has to find a different legal basis. And for the cars, he has one. Cars, as well as steel and aluminum, fall under Section 232 of the 1962 Trade Expansion Act — a provision of national security. If the US-EU trade deal breaks down, the 25% on cars will come into force automatically. In fact, for cars, the actual tariff would actually be 27.5% because of an extant and perfectly legal tariff. And given how badly the German car industry is doing right now — with Porsche’s profits already collapsing by 98% — a 27.5% car tariff would be a major disaster.

Merz was the political driving force behind that Turnberry trade deal last August: the one in which Ursula von der Leyen agreed that the EU would drop all its tariffs against the US, even as America promised a 15% on all goods from the EU – including cars. For the EU as a whole, this was a terrible deal. But it was the best deal the German car industry could have hoped for.

Trump has defended his latest tariff increase on the grounds that the EU did not stick to its side of the bargain. This is not quite true, but the European Parliament did score an own goal when it delayed the ratification of the Turnberry deal after the US Supreme Court ruling. That delay has given Trump the excuse he needed to claim that the EU failed to honor its promises. Similarly, when European leaders declared that Iran “is not our war”, Trump could claim “Nato wasn’t there for us”. Merz’s comment about Trump’s humiliation is even more stupid. Trump hit back that Merz should “spend more time ending the war in Russia/Ukraine”, and that he should focus his attention on his “broken country”. Trump is objectively right on all of these points. The Germans are not involved in any Russia/Ukraine peace-making efforts. And most Germans would agree that their country is broken. It is also an objective fact that Nato clearly wasn’t for Trump when he asked. This is after all “not our war”.

Here, then, is the folly of what we are supposed to call European diplomacy in all its absurdity. Europe keeps provoking the President — and yet still depends on his country. Europeans, despite the nonsense they talk about strategic autonomy, have persistently failed to take the steps needed for Europe to be safe without the help of the US. The most important stumbling block being the lack of agreement between France and Germany on the future of the European defense. France sees itself as the senior partner; the Germans don’t. Nor is there any leadership from Italy, Spain or Poland. Domestic policies are all they care about. And when something happens that exposes their lack of preparedness and fragility, they resort to blame-gaming. They blame Vladimir Putin. They blame Viktor Orbán. Now they blame Trump.

If Europe really was serious about decoupling from the US, it would leave the eurosceptics like Orbán on the sidelines, muster a coalition of the willing, and draw up a multi-annual plan as it did for the euro in the Nineties. In stage zero, you would map out the road ahead. In stage one, you would pool your military procurement. In stage two, you adopt majority voting in the foreign affairs council. And in stage three, you begin to merge your militaries and elect or appoint a European commander-in-chief. As things stand, Europe can’t even manage to limp to stage zero. Contrast this inept alliance with what is happening in America. While I agree that Trump went into Iran without a strategy, he does not suffer from a collection action problem. He can rely on a formidable military apparatus. The Europeans don’t have a joint strategy, nor do they have the capabilities.

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There is absolutely no reason why Trump should care about European economic interests either. Economically, the European have the capacity to look after themselves. But they chose not to. And the war is going to hit Europe hard — the UK and Germany will suffer the worst effects with several decimal points knocked off economic growth. The car tariffs will be an additional hit on the German economy, costing it an estimated 0.3 points of growth. And neither the UK nor Germany is willing to undertake structural reforms to mitigate their disastrous economic situation.

The Europeans are in dangerous denial: struggling to admit their own powerlessness. And yet not so long ago, Europe was the center of the world’s political universe, the cradle of democracy and western culture. Today, though, the EU is the embarrassing uncle of western alliance, always there, drinking too much, talking too much, telling everybody what to do, and never, ever, buying a round.

Now Trump has called their bluff. No wonder they hate him.

The Saudis, backed by President Donald Trump, have of course denied that the murder was officially sanctioned, claiming that a rogue outfit was responsible after an argument got out of hand. However, the killing and dismemberment by the infamous bone saw were recorded in brutal detail by Turkish intelligence; and credible authorities, including senior intelligence officials such as Agnès Callamard, former UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial killings, have been unequivocal in their verdicts. Callamard’s report into the “execution” is damning: “Evidence points to the 15-person mission to execute Mr Khashoggi requiring significant government coordination, resources and finances… Every expert consulted finds it inconceivable that an operation of this scale could be implemented without the crown prince being aware, at a minimum, that some sort of mission of a criminal nature, directed at Mr Khashoggi, was being launched.” Just in case Prince William is in need of some small talk.

Of course, a visit by a senior member of the Royal Family is never just ceremonial. It is an act of diplomacy, and symbolism too. The moral endorsement of the British crown will be cherished by the Saudi regime, which likes to think of itself as “royal” in the grand tradition of the Western monarchies, despite its parvenu origins. But Prince William’s visit raises uncomfortable questions — not only about Middle Eastern realpolitik in an era of shifting alliances, but about the values that the United Kingdom claims to uphold.

These questions have become especially acute in the wake of a recent High Court judgment against the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It concerned Ghanem al-Masarir, a Saudi dissident living in Britain since 2003. Through his popular YouTube channel, The Ghanem Show, recorded in Wembley, al-Masarir uses satire to expose corruption and human rights abuses within Saudi Arabia. His reach is vast, amassing over 300 million views, primarily from audiences inside Saudi Arabia who seek alternatives to state-controlled narratives and pro-regime bots.

But the authorities are aware of him too. Al-Masarir has been under constant harassment since 2004. He claims that a large check was forged in an effort to break him financially; that his phones were infiltrated with Israeli-manufactured Pegasus spyware; that he was followed and assaulted in broad daylight; and that he received explicit death threats from individuals linked to the Saudi royal court. The most violent incident, al-Masarir says, occurred in August 2018 he was followed from a cafe and assaulted by two men near the Brompton Road entrance of Harrods. Al-Masarir alleged that during the beating, the attackers repeatedly shouted: “Who are you to talk about the family of al-Saud?” and “How dare you curse Prince Salman, we won’t allow it!” They called him a “slave of Qatar” and threatened to “teach him a lesson”. When an English friend who was with al-Masarir told them they were protected by the Queen and British police, the attackers retorted: “Fuck London — their queen is our slave and their police are our dogs.”

In 2010, al-Masarir was befriended by an individual claiming to be a Master’s student in the UK who repeatedly attempted to persuade him to travel to Italy or Egypt. He later discovered this man’s true identity: Rajeh al-Baqmi, the head of Saudi intelligence at the Saudi embassy in London. He also encountered Maher Mutreb, a Saudi intelligence officer at the embassy, who made an explicit warning that he should never leave the UK. This might have been a back-handed threat with a hint of protection, suggesting that unlike their Russian counterparts who were prepared to murder co-nationals in London or Salisbury, Saudi mafiosi are more comfortable conducting their nefarious operations outside the UK, in countries such as Turkey.

Mutreb is clearly not to be messed with. A brigadier general commanding the Saudi hit squad or “Rapid Intervention Force”, it was he who led the team charged with killing and dismembering Khashoggi, assisted by Dr Salah al-Tubaigy, a forensic pathologist who is thought to have wielded the bone saw. In the audio recordings revealed by Turkish intelligence — the Saudis had failed to sweep the consulate for bugs — it is Mutreb’s voice that dominates. “Keep pushing, don’t remove your hand!”, followed by: “It’s over, it’s over, it’s over,” with the sounds of plastic sheets and the whine of an electric saw. While there is no audio directly linking the Crown Prince to the Khashoggi murder, the circumstantial evidence is compelling. In a separate audio, leaked by the CIA, the phrase “tell your boss” occurs in a conversation between Mutreb and the Crown Prince’s de facto chief of staff, Saud al-Qahtani. As Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst, told The New York Times: “A phone call like that… is as close to a smoking gun as you’re going to get.”

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The disclosures implicating MBS in the murder will certainly be ignored in the current White House — whose incumbents include the Crown Prince’s close friend, Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law. But is it really always necessary for the UK to toe the US line? At the very least, the High Court ruling in the Ghanem al-Masarir case should give the Palace — and the Foreign Office — pause for thought. Saudi Arabia initially attempted to claim immunity under the 1978 State Immunity Act. However, the court ruled in 2022 that the Kingdom was not immune to these claims. After the Saudi state failed to pay court costs and its appeal was struck out, the final judgment was delivered on 26 January. Judge Pushpinder Saini found that on the balance of probabilities the Kingdom had been responsible for the physical attack on al-Masarir and for hacking his phone: “The KSA had a clear interest and motivation to shut down the claimant’s public criticism of the Saudi government.”

In its ruling, the court awarded al-Masarir more than £3 million in compensation for the psychiatric harm caused by hacking his phone as well as the physical assault. This marks a significant benchmark in the defense of human rights — though, given its refusal to take part in the legal proceedings, there is no certainty that the Saudi government will actually pay.

Nevertheless, any concerns that the British state has about criminality are outweighed by realpolitik. As David Hearst, an astute Middle East observer, has argued, a profound realignment is underway in the Arab world. It is not driven by palace intrigues, tribal rivalries, or the usual contests between regional proxies. Nor is it about Iran or political Islam — the two habitual anxieties of Sunni Arab rulers. And unlike the Arab Spring, it has not emerged from popular uprisings or mass protests. Yet its consequences could be just as far-reaching.

What has changed, according to Hearst, is that the region’s most populous Arab states — above all Saudi Arabia and Algeria, and potentially Egypt — have begun to recognize the threat of a shared project of Israel and the United Arab Emirates to reshape the Middle East. Their fear is that Tel Aviv and Abu Dhabi intend to fragment Arab-majority or Arab-leaning states. This would enable the Israelis and Emiratis to control key maritime chokepoints, such as the Straits of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb, and entrench military and economic dominance across the Red Sea, the Horn of Africa, and beyond.

This strategy is already explicit in Israel’s actions: in its efforts to create de facto enclaves in Syria protecting the Druzes and Kurds; in its recognition of Somaliland, which gives it a foothold in the Horn of Africa; and in its general efforts to weaken Arab polities where national unity tends to be problematic. For the UAE, fragmentation has been a long-running method of power projection. It’s visible in Libya, where the UAE has provided military support to General Khalifa Haftar against the UN-supported government in Tripoli; in Sudan, where the UAE backs the genocidal Rapid Support Forces against the central government; and in southern Yemen, where the UAE armed and empowered the Southern Transitional Council (STC) in pursuit of a separatist state aligned with Emirati interests and open to ties with Israel.

Indeed, Yemen is the decisive fault line in the plan for regional fragmentation. What began as a campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood-linked al-Islah movement evolved into a broader attempt to carve out an Emirati client state in the south, centered on the port of Aden and extending east into the Hadhramaut valley. The separatists’ attempt to take over the port of al Mukalla in the Hadhramaut region at the end of last year proved a turning point. Saudi Arabia, now encircled on its southern frontier, felt that Emirati ambitions were now threatening its security — and duly responded with force. Backing official Yemeni government troops, it bombed STC positions in Mukalla, reversing much of Abu Dhabi’s decade-long project in a matter of days. Almost simultaneously, Israel’s recognition of the separatist government of Somaliland (it is the only UN state to formally do so) confirmed Saudi fears that these were not isolated moves but elements of a coordinated strategy across both sides of the Bab el-Mandeb.

The rift between Mohammed bin Salman and his former mentor, the Emirati president Mohammed bin Zayed, was now gaping. The pair were once close partners in resisting the Muslim Brotherhood and allied movements. Now, Riyadh has not only confronted Emirati proxies militarily but also publicly reframed Abu Dhabi as a destabilizing actor. The Saudi media attacks on Mohammed bin Zayed have been blistering, depicting the UAE’s president as a disruptive force rather than the trusted ally of yore.

And the break reflects a deeper recalculation. Saudi Arabia understands that its strategic weight — in terms of population, territory, and oil power — far exceeds that of the UAE. Once you remove the expat community living in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, there are barely one million Emirati citizens. Abu Dhabi may specialize in covert action and proxy warfare, but it cannot prevail against Riyadh when vital Saudi interests are at stake.

Meanwhile, Washington under Donald Trump has intensified Saudi unease by treating global energy resources as prizes to be seized and threatening to depress oil prices, undermining the kingdom’s fiscal stability. Riyadh has concluded that US military power does not equate to responsible governance, and that American adventurism routinely generates chaos it cannot manage.

So the Saudi turn is not moral but strategic. By resisting Emirati-Israeli plans for regional fragmentation, Riyadh is positioning itself as an autonomous Arab power, potentially aligning more closely with Turkey, Egypt, Algeria — and perhaps, even long-term, with Iran. What it favors is a regional security order independent of Washington and Tel Aviv.

Given the emerging regional configurations, the British government — and the Palace — would be right in thinking that Britain’s interests align more closely with the Saudi Kingdom which, like it or not, is emerging as a leading player in the region and a potential source of stability rather than with the disruptive UAE. But does all this mean that the heir to the throne must cosy up to his murderous Saudi counterpart?

Prince William has cultivated an image as a thoughtful, socially conscious public figure — engaged with environmental issues, interfaith dialogue, and the responsibilities of leadership. It does not befit that persona for him to associate himself too closely with a regime implicated in surveillance, murderous violence, and repression. If William proceeds with the visit, he will need to find ways of expressing a certain distance from his hosts. He should certainly decline any invitations to inspect MBS’s yacht, Serena. According to the anonymous Saudi activist who goes by the name Mujtahid, Jamal Khashoggi’s fingers are kept on board as a trophy.

This is hardly a surprise. The EU has shown an utter disinterest in hard-nosed diplomacy. If the bloc had really wanted to be a strategic actor during the Russia–Ukraine war, it would be orchestrating the peace talks rather than leaving Trump and his team in charge.

Diplomacy was a state art the Europeans themselves invented. It was the Americans, however, who transported it into the modern age. During the Yom Kippur war in 1973, Henry Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the time, maintained close contact with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the US. The US supported Israel while the Soviet Union sided with Egypt and Syria. According to records later released by the US, Kissinger warned Dobrynin in a telephone conversation that he had received intelligence that Egypt and Syria were about to attack Israel. Then he said: “The President believes that the US and USSR have a special responsibility to restrain our respective friends.” It was the kind of thing that neither he nor Nixon could have said in public. Diplomacy often sounds very undiplomatic. Keeping channels open is not about being polite. It is about preventing accidents and finding solutions.

The Kissinger–Dobrynin exchange is a quintessential example of backchannel diplomacy. Effective diplomacy does not have to happen at the official level. Kissinger and Dobrynin were not even direct counterparts. If Kissinger had insisted on only talking to the Russian foreign minister, he would not have got as far as he did.

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In the first few weeks of the Ukraine war the Europeans tried top-level diplomacy through a series of progressively frustrating meetings. Four days after Russia’s invasion on 24 February, 2022, official delegations from Russia and Ukraine met for talks in Belarus, in a place close to the Ukrainian border. After three rounds of discussions, the talks moved to Antalya, Turkey, where the foreign ministers met on 10 March. The two sides then held talks in Istanbul on 29 March, after which they exchanged draft texts for a few weeks. The Russians insisted that Ukraine become a permanently neutral state and end its plans for EU membership. In exchange, Ukraine would receive security guarantees from a group of countries, including the UN Security Council members. The status of Crimea would be addressed through talks over 10 to 15 years. That was a better deal than what is on the table today.

The process stalled around mid-April and never resumed. Around that time, contact between the Europeans and the Russians also came to a close. Neither the Biden administration, nor the Europeans, maintained a Kissinger–Dobrynin style backchannel.

One of the important questions for historians to address is the extent to which European governments pushed Ukraine towards rejecting a peace deal four years ago. My reading has always been that the Europeans did not want to settle for anything less than a total Russian withdrawal from the occupied Ukrainian territories. They wanted to see Russia defeated — for their own security too — and were happy to let Ukraine fight on their behalf. But they had no strategy for a Ukrainian victory. And since they ended all diplomacy, they had no strategy for peace either. This, in a nutshell, is why Ukraine is losing the war.

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Recently, Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni have suggested that Europe resume diplomacy with Putin. Neither France nor Italy can afford an ongoing war, now that the bloc cannot fund its support for Ukraine by sequestering the frozen Russian assets. Meloni and Macron are right. The Europeans made a monumental error of judgment when they ended the communication that still happened in the early phase of the war. To be fair to Macron, he tried harder than others.

It would, however, be unwise to resume diplomacy at the level of heads of government or even foreign ministers. The stars of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which laid the ground for one of the more peaceful centuries of modern European history, were four diplomats: Klemens von Metternich from Austria, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand from France, Viscount Castlereagh from Britain, and Karl August von Hardenberg from Prussia. With the exception of Russian Tsar Alexander I, Europe’s emperors stayed in the background. Peace is hard, detailed work.

Today, by contrast, Trump’s much-maligned emissary Steve Witkoff is a businessman, with no previous experience in diplomacy. I recall a scene in the Elysee Palace where the German ambassador to Paris laughed at him for comparing the grand ornaments in the Salon des Ambassadeurs to those of the Mar-a-Lago beach club. The President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has played a key role in the peace talks, is much the same. They are the kind of Americans who bring out the worst in Europeans, but the former have ultimately been more successful than the latter. If there is a deal, the Americans will have been the one to have prepared it. When Witkoff went to Moscow, he spent hours in detailed negotiations with Kirill Dmitriev, who heads the Russian sovereign wealth fund. Business can unlock problems that are not solvable through classic diplomacy.

So, who is Europe’s Witkoff? Given that Kissinger was a morally compromised person who was excellent at his job, I would probably pick one of the many morally compromised Germans. Perhaps Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor who knows Putin, but maintains loyalty to his home country. You do not want to give that job to Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat. She loses no moment to tell us that Putin must be defeated but has never given us a convincing plan on how to do this.

A politician who is sometimes mentioned as a potential interlocutor is Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, who is more of a political realist than Kallas. The EU might be a place in which politicians from small countries play important roles, but that doesn’t mean they can suitably represent Europe in geopolitical power battles. Just look at Vivian Motzfeldt, the Greenland foreign minister, who broke down in a live TV interview after meetings with JD Vance and Marco Rubio. The EU sometimes likes to think of itself as a big country, but when it comes to foreign policy, it really is a collection of minions.

The restoration of diplomatic ties would be an opportunity for the UK to offer leadership, but the four prime ministers since the start of the war have shown no interest. Yvette Cooper, the current foreign secretary, has thoroughly rejected the idea of reestablishing talks with Putin. “I think what we need is evidence that Putin actually wants peace and at the moment, I’m still not seeing that,” she recently proclaimed. Is it not the whole point of backchannel diplomacy to get people to create the evidence? Diplomacy is not about sitting back and waiting for things to happen.

War and diplomacy are two sides of the same coin as the German military historian Carl von Clausewitz reminded us. You talk. You fight. Then you talk some more. The Second World War was the exception, not the rule. The Western allies did not maintain backchannel diplomacy with the Nazis. They did, however, have a strategy for victory, and they won. It is unfortunate that the Western commentary continues to draw so many parallels today with a war that could not be more different.

Based on the imperfect information we have today, the best outcome for Ukraine would have been a deal based on the draft that circulated after the meetings in Istanbul. The second best outcome would be a deal based on what Witkoff and Kushner are currently negotiating.

Yet it is possible that the peace process fails. Russia is seeking to gain full control of the Donbas region, including land in the east it does not occupy. Ukraine is unwilling to hand it to them on a platter. We could be looking at some really bad scenarios. Russia may seize more Ukrainian territory than it currently claims. Ukraine may lose its independence or be reduced to a small rump state surrounded by Belarus in the north, Russia in the east and the south, and cut off from the Black Sea. This is not the most likely scenario, but it’s more probable than glorious victory. Without some dirty diplomacy, I don’t see a good outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Remember, though, the Kissinger–Dobrynin channel was arranged within a few weeks of President Nixon’s inauguration. That was almost five years before the Yom-Kippur diplomacy was masterminded. Even if the Europeans started to regrow a diplomatic brain, it would take time. We should not expect miracles. But if they don’t start now, they will forever stay where they are today: out of the reckoning.

How did Europe get in a position where it has no strategic choices left? It is quite a reversal. Machiavelli, an Italian, was one of the early architects of modern strategic thinking. Strategic diplomacy reached a peak with Metternich and Talleyrand, the foreign ministers of Austria and France: each played an instrumental role in the Congress of Vienna. This was the ultimate peace conference, one that provided Europe with stability and security for a century. After the Second World War, the diplomatic giants were mostly Americans such as George Marshall, George Kennan and Henry Kissinger.

Beside the chess-board type diplomatic strategist, there is another kind: the long-term strategic actor. The most successful modern example is China. China’s transformation began with the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in 1978, at which Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms. It took three or four decades until these reforms translated into geopolitical power. During the transformation, uninformed Western opinion held that China was becoming more Western. The genius of the Chinese project was that it led others to underestimate it.

Both types of strategy, chess-playing and long-term scheming, have their place. Modern Europe has neither. We Europeans used to be good at the long-term stuff, like the Chinese today. The early European Economic Community was an example of a focused strategy to defragment Europe’s splintering economies. The single European market in the Eighties and early Nineties was the most important of the EU’s grand strategic projects, but also its last. To devise the single market, around 200,000 experts gathered in 2,300 technical bodies. They spent half a billion to one billion hours on it. That’s strategy. The euro was more ambitious than the single market, but it was not strategic, because the EU never built upon it. The EU could have turned the euro into a challenger to the US dollar, but that would have required different economic policies, like the introduction of a European sovereign bond.

When strategy fades, action turns first into reaction, and eventually into delusion. The Europeans do not have the foggiest idea of how to help Ukraine defeat Putin on the battlefield, and yet they dream of dragging him in front of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Their discourse is about the rule of law. They are prosecutor, jury and judge in their imagined trials. They think of themselves as on the right side of the virtue-signaling spectrum.

I find it personally painful to watch Kaja Kallas, the EU’s high representative for foreign and security policy, make a fool of herself with variably informed war-mongering discourse that lacks any strategic content. But she is not the only one. I have yet to identify a single official in any national capitals, including London, who has a strategy to end the Ukraine war. There is no one who has done the math of the military capabilities Ukraine would need, on the logistics of how to produce or procure it. There is also no strategy whatsoever on how to finance it.

Take the French contribution, or lack thereof. Emmanuel Macron is one of the loudest cheerleaders for Ukraine. And yet the French government is allocating a mere $120 million for Ukraine aid in its 2026 budget. Italy and Spain, another two large European countries, also spend little. The Germans and the UK are not in a position to bankroll this operation.

Do European leaders believe their meager contributions can deliver a Ukrainian victory? A dead giveaway is the overuse of the passive tense. They don’t say: “We will do whatever it takes to defeat Putin.” They do say: “Putin must be defeated”. In other words: We want Ukrainian soldiers to die and American taxpayers to pay. In a rare moment of candor, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, admitted only last week that the European taxpayer is not going to pay for it. Indeed.

When Trump came to power, he demanded that the Europeans increase their defense spending from just under 2% of GDP to 5%. The Europeans agreed immediately. And they are raising the money through debt.

Faced with Trump’ demands, a strategic approach on the part of the Europeans would have been to identify the precise shortcomings of the continent’s defense, like staffing, technology, and military procurement, and compare them to existing capabilities. The second step would have been to devise a strategy to acquire what is needed and start with the development of new technologies. Then you calculate what it costs under different scenarios and make the corresponding budget allocations. At this point we have to remember that ammunition made in Germany costs five times as much as what the Russian army pays for.

Ultimately, defense spending is called spending for a reason. It is not investment. Trying to fund it through debt is self-defeating. Considering that we are talking about a defense strategy, this approach is monumentally stupid. A strategic thinker asks: What sacrifices do we make so we can match Russia’s military capability? A European military planner asks: how do much do we need to borrow to get ahead in the defense spending league tables? Defense spending targets are what you end up with when you have no strategy.

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When people don’t have strategies, they often seek refuge in procedures — to a point where the procedures take on a life on their own. Since the war began, the EU has passed 18 packages of sanctions against Russia. The sanctions have been an abject failure, but Brussels refuses to acknowledge it. The officials did not think this through. They are shocked to see that China supported Russia, that sanctioned goods flow through Kazakhstan. Some EU countries still buy Russian oil and gas because they are dependent on it. Partly as a result, the Russian economy has massively outperformed that of Europe since the start of the war. Whereas Europeans are drowning in debt, Russia is an example of fiscal strength. Unwilling to make cuts to their bloated welfare spending, the Europeans have identified the frozen Russian assets as the only way to finance the war. Even with that money, they do not have a strategy to end the war, either through victory or peace. The simple goal is to keep the show on the road. That’s what non-strategic procedural thinking does to you.

It also makes you dependent. By outsourcing all strategic thinking, the Europeans have become dependent on the US for defense and trade. Now they get angry with Trump for excluding them from meetings.

Trump, like the Europeans, is not a strategic actor of the kind I describe, but this is for different reasons. Trump’s politics are transactional. He likes peace because war is bad for business. Trump could not care less about whether Putin broke international law. To the European diplomats who huddle in the antechambers of the peace process, Trump’s attitude is disturbing and alienating.

The Germans, with their special business relationships with Russia, used to be more like Trump. German politicians had their own private channels with Russian counterparts, just as Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, does today. The Germans used to be the largest crowd in the St Petersburg International Economics Forum, Russia’s answer to Davos. Now I am hearing that the hotels in Moscow and St Petersburg are filled with Americans hoping to strike lucrative deals with Russia. It is an ironic twist of fate, for it was the US that tried to force Germany to abandon the Baltic Sea gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Now there is talk of the Americans injecting themselves as the middleman to sell Russian gas to Germany. You could not make this up.

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I expect the Germans will eventually rejoin the Russia-is-open-for-business club. They are distrustful of the French in military affairs, and they don’t have any ambitions for the EU to develop into a global strategic actor. They may want to reconnect with the only vaguely successful independent economic partnership they had this century — with Russia.

There is a lot of literature on the subject of why nations rise and decline. My own favorite is Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations, published in 1982. It explains that Japan and Germany succeeded in the post-war period because the war destroyed political and elite systems. For Olson, decline is preceded by a slowdown in innovation, a focus on redistribution of wealth, and the power of special interest groups. His method perfectly describes not only the rise of Japan and Germany, but also both countries’ subsequent decline. The socio-political factors that Olson describes as the cause of national decline happen to be exactly the same as those that discourage strategic thought and action. Europeans think they can safeguard their welfare and their influence through regulation, procedure, the rule of law, and international institutions. The Europeans dream of a world in which no one acts strategically. This is also a world in which innovation is rare, a world without disruption and creativity.

Like no US president before him, Trump exposes Europe’s delusions, its lack of a strategic thinking and action. This is why the Europeans hate him so much. And to no avail. It promises to be another bad week for Kallas et al.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump already advertised his extreme dissatisfaction with allies who took advantage of America’s free-trade fanaticism — regardless of huge trade deficits — to deny US exporters access to their own markets even as they flooded the country with cheap imports. Trump was equally unhappy with allies who were “free-riding” US military protection, while spending very little on their own defense: in many cases not even 2% of their GDPs.

Japan was squarely in the line of fire on both accounts. On economics, structural obstacles to US imports had persisted even after years of talks, while on defense Japan was not devoting even 1% of GDP to defense, with 2% a far-off fantasy.

At the time, I was under contract with Japan’s foreign ministry — not to lobby the US government or any such thing, but to help redefine the country’s national strategy. That was Abe’s own personal focus, and therefore I met him every time I went back to work in Tokyo. He himself told me how very worried he was about the possibility of a Trump victory, a worse problem for him than for other leaders.

Obama, after all, had already caused him needless problems, including sending Caroline Kennedy as his ambassador to Tokyo. That empty-headed celebrity degraded a post previously held by eminent ex-speakers of the House or Senate Majority leaders, who Japanese prime ministers could usefully consult. On top of that, Kennedy took it upon herself to publicly criticize Abe for visiting the nationalistic Yasukuni Shrine very dear to his core constituency, an unprecedented impertinence for an ambassador.

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It was in that fraught context that Abe decided to ignore all protocol rules, and brush aside both the foreign ministry’s traditional caution and indeed US law, to try to meet Trump as soon as possible after his surprise election. His aim? To explain — truthfully enough — that his own goal was to make Japan a much stronger ally for the United States: neatly pre-empting anti-Japan policies even before they were formulated by Trump’s “transition team”.

And so it was that, on the afternoon of 17 November 2016, Abe and his interpreter met with the President-elect in his family apartment in Trump Tower. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was present, as was his son-in-law Jared Kushner — but as they all sat comfortably on sofas, there were no officials or note-takers in sight.

That not only ensured a relaxed atmosphere, but also provided legal protection against the US Logan Act which prohibits private US citizens, including Trump before his inauguration, from negotiating with foreign governments.

As it happens, Abe liked Trump, and vice versa, and each believed the other’s assurances that they would step in whenever officials allowed disagreements to get out of hand. In fact, over the years that followed there were no US-Japan quarrels, and more immediately word got back from Tokyo that Abe thought Trump very reasonable — and a better negotiating partner than the studiously reserved Obama.

This feedback persuaded Trump that he could ignore State Department reservations, just as Abe had ignored his famously over-cautious foreign ministry, and bargain face-to-face with foreign counterparts, just as he had countless times before as a real-estate magnate.

In addition to less memorable encounters, Trump’s personal diplomacy in his first time culminated in the unprecedented June 2019 encounter with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. They met right on the DMZ, which Kim actually invited Trump to cross, making him the only US official to ever have stepped on North Korea’s soil. Some televised cordiality ensued while the TV cameramen had a bit of a rugby scuffle.

In the aftermath, in an astonishing display of collective amnesia, Trump’s critics kept saying that the Trump-Kim meeting had achieved nothing, because the DPRK had refused to give up its nuclear weapons. Yet that ignored how things had been before: with an alarming build-up of threats against South Korea, which Trump defused by his meeting with Kim.

Now, Trump is once again traveling in Asia to defuse a rise in mutual threats. But though North Korea remains as quiet as ever — a continued testament to Trump’s adept diplomacy six years ago — the President faces a much bigger crisis: with Xi Jinping’s China.

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After mounting threats against Taiwan, and even a date-specific 2027 invasion plan, over recent months China has launched a broad campaign of geoeconomic escalation. One obvious example is Beijing’s politically deadly import boycott of US soybeans, whose exports to China went from 985-million bushels in 2024 to zero so far in 2025. The US, for its part, has revoked the small-package tariff exemption, once set at $200 but more recently at $600, which allowed a tsunami of Chinese clothing and gadget postal-order imports at extremely low prices, which drove many remaining US small manufacturers out of business.

This escalation culminated in last week’s Chinese attempt to limit the US products that can be made with imported Chinese-refined rare earths. This is an unprecedented intrusion, and one which incidentally exposed years of policy paralysis. The fact is that “rare earths” are not all that rare; they only seem so because unreasonable environmental restrictions virtually prohibit processing in the US.

Either way, ahead of his vital meeting with Xi on Thursday, Trump has prepared in the usual way — buttering up his Chinese counterpart with unreciprocated praise and fulsome compliments. Yet he is also loaded for bear with the tariffs America has already imposed, which really weigh heavily on the Chinese economy, whose years of ultra-rapid growth are but a fading memory.

The Chinese middle classes that invested their savings in apartments for rental — because bank deposits earned virtually nothing, while the stock market mostly lost money for investors — must now rent them for very little — with huge numbers unrented impoverishing their owners. Unfortunately for them, far too many housing blocks were built before the construction companies themselves finally collapsed.

Meanwhile, China’s huge investment in railways and roads has also slowed: too many high-speed trains were traveling empty. That means that the parents of many poorly educated youngsters, who can no longer find construction jobs, must support them instead. As for their well-educated compatriots, they can no longer expect to immediately find a good job in the cities—in huge numbers, they are living in basements on menial gig-economy jobs. In short, China is overbuilt and over-supplied for a rapidly aging and falling population, and needs access to the insatiable American consumer to have any real growth.

Having imposed tariffs unilaterally — simply because he is not paralyzed by free-trade dogma — Trump can now reduce them in exchange for Chinese concessions. That includes a return to soybean imports, with farmers an important pillar of the MAGA coalition, and a toning down of truculent threats to invade Taiwan. On the other hand, Trump knows that he cannot ask the Chinese to stop supporting the Russian war in Ukraine.

As for Japan, Sanae Takaichi, its new prime minister, promises to end the post-Abe decline in US-Japan policy cooperation. Under Abe, a minimum of communications between officials in Tokyo and Washington was quite enough to ensure that both countries coordinated smoothly, for example to sustain the Philippines and other weaker countries threatened by China.

After Trump left office in 2021, and after Abe himself was murdered, everything had to be negotiated point by point. Abe’s successors hesitated to act as decisively as he did, meaning significant initiatives just petered out. Fortunately for Trump, Takaichi, the motorcycle rider, martial artist, and anti-immigration Right-winger, was very much Abe’s disciple.

And, certainly, their meeting seems to have been a success. Takaichi gifted Trump a golf putter that once belonged to Abe, while the pair signed a rare-earth minerals deal and reiterated tariffs agreement negotiated earlier in the year. But for their relationship to thrive over the longer term, Takaichi must herself do what Trump’s Argentine protege just managed to do very successfully: win a parliamentary election to gain more seats for her party, allowing her to rule without frail coalition partners.

So far, at any rate, Trump’s highly personalized diplomacy is again serving him well, though of course his meeting with Xi Jinping will be the biggest test of all. That Xi has just locked up top generals he had himself appointed means that there are cracks in his regime on top of the stalled economy, while Trump faces relentless opposition at home — so both men will try to be tough poker players, in spite of some weak cards.

The greatest diplomats of all time were a Frenchman and an Austrian. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord was a master of political opportunism, rivalled only by his Habsburg counterpart, Klemens von Metternich. Talleyrand and Metternich were the chief diplomats of global powers. After Napoleon’s defeat, France was a much-diminished country with no military leverage. Talleyrand’s masterstroke consisted of carving out a niche for France by playing everyone off against each other — the British against the Prussians, and the Austrians against the Russians. He did not exactly invent the notion of a balance of power, but he exploited it with unrivalled genius.

Today, the one thing that the Iranian government and the Trump administration agree on is that Europeans have no useful role to play in Middle Eastern diplomacy. A German newspaper complained recently that nobody informs the Europeans anymore. Decline is when you see newspaper headlines along those lines.

So what would a modern-day Talleyrand think about China and Donald Trump? I am speculating, of course, but we are in a classic Talleyrand-type situation. The difficulty for him would have been to unite 27 EU member states, plus the UK and Norway, around a common position — as opposed to playing them off against each other, which is what we used to do. It is harder, by an order of magnitude, to unite than to split. When the US threatened tariffs on Europe, Talleyrand probably would have advised the European Council to issue a statement to welcome the new age of transactional economic relations and then take some concrete steps that would have infuriated Trump.

Looking back, we can see a missed opportunity for assertiveness. The Biden administration previously banned the sale of high-performance semiconductors to China, and leaned heavily on the Dutch government to stop the export of machines to China that could produce them. The company in question is ASML, a global monopolist of high-performance lithography machines, which etch tiny three-dimensional pathways into silicon wafers. ASML is to Europe what rare earths are to China. President Xi Jinping leveraged his country’s rare earths monopoly to great effect when he banned their export after Trump imposed his tariffs on China. The Europeans could have done the same with ASML — banning the company from exporting. But they would have needed the lost spirit of a Talleyrand or a Metternich to make such a daring move.

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Europe’s decline is dramatic when looked at over a long period. But it has sped up over the past decade. Ten years ago, almost exactly to the day, European diplomats spearheaded the Iran nuclear deal. Iran agreed to reduce the number of centrifuges by about two thirds. Iran also agreed to keep its stockpile of enriched uranium. The deal came with the usual supervisory and enforcement procedures.

Trump exited the Iran nuclear deal in 2018 — and that was the end of it. Today, the Europeans have no independent role in Middle Eastern diplomacy. After Trump dropped his bombs on Iran, the European leaders called on Iran to return to the negotiating table, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the deal they negotiated constituted the negotiating table — and that it was Trump who tipped it over.

Nor would a modern-day Talleyrand and Metternich have advised their masters to break off all communication channels with Vladimir Putin. They, too, would have been on the side of Ukraine, but they would not have told European leaders to define their strategic goals in terms of an open-ended commitment. They would have advocated strategic ambiguity and, especially, to set down no red lines. Red lines are what people have when they don’t have a strategy. The Talleyrand and Metternich strategy would have been to achieve a position where the war would end without either side being defeated. In terms of their diplomatic approach, theirs would have been closer to Trump’s than that of Europe’s current leaders. When Trump is a better diplomat than you, you are in trouble.

Like Trump, Xi and Putin, they would have understood the importance of natural resources in the 21st century. Europeans have few resources of their own, except for those they banned, like coal or nuclear power, or refused to develop, like gas from fracking or deep-sea extraction. Trump, Putin and Xi are strategic operators in the sense that they have an economic vision that extends beyond their lifetimes. You can criticize their economic policies as much as you like — and I do too — but they differ from every single European leader in that they have an economic strategy in the first place.

Despite the strength of their record, the great European diplomats of the 19th century operated from a position of weakness. They would not have had a problem with Mark Rutte’s flattery of Donald Trump, though their flattery would have been wittier. Flattery was part of the diplomatic toolkit. Talleyrand flattered the British; Metternich flattered the Russians. The purpose of the flattery was to achieve a stable political equilibrium on the European continent. In the end, and with some notable interruptions, the equilibrium lasted for the next 100 years. Rutte’s flattery was designed to keep Trump engaged in European security for a little while longer — but without addressing the underlying problem of European dependence. And that is the ultimate difference between then and now. The policy horizon today rarely extends beyond the next day’s newspaper.

Talleyrand and Metternich were old-fashioned in their diplomacy and their beliefs. Metternich was a reactionary. He detested democracy. Talleyrand started off as a supporter of the French Revolution, but then grew increasingly skeptical. If I had to wager a controversial guess, it would be that they would both have been Euroskeptic, at least in relationship to the great affairs of state, and yet unideologically supportive of institutions useful to the interests of the EU, like the World Trade Organization or the International Criminal Court. They would probably support free-trade coalitions amongst willing multilateralists.

Soft power was not their thing, but they would probably understand its role in modern diplomacy. By cutting the foreign aid budget, the US left strategic opportunities that clever Europeans could have exploited to their advantage. But this is not what happened. The UK followed the US in cutting its aid budget too so that it could meet US-imposed defense spending targets. I never thought that soft power could replace hard power, and I never bought into the naïve soft-power romanticism that underlines the discourse of European integration. But I see a lack of strategic thinking when European governments cut their international radio services, their foreign language programs, and bursaries. Or if they restrict access by foreign students to Western universities.

What modern-day Europeans and their ancestors have in common is a sense of moral and intellectual superiority. But today that case is harder to make. Europeans love huffing and puffing about Trump. Some economists, who should know better, called on the EU to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs: really bad advice, which the European Commission is mercifully ignoring. Reality caught up last week when a panicked Friedrich Merz told the European Commission that they should hurry up and sign whatever trade deal Trump is offering. He did not put it quite like this. He said the EU should not seek the perfect trade deal when a less perfect one will do. But what he was really saying is: we have no other choice. German industry is bleeding. The tariffs are threatening to prolong Germany’s two-year recession. When you don’t have a strategy, you lose against the people who do.

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If Europeans were clever, they could have exploited Trump’s assault on the US university system to their advantage. He is not only at war with the liberal arts colleges of the East Coast. His administration is cutting a lot of high-tech research programs. The reasons why tech people prefer to work in the US is the higher pay, and a more liberal environment for the tech industry. Why can’t Europeans offer attractive pay to disgruntled US scientists, and make them feel welcome?

I am going to stop here with suggestions of what Europe could have or should have done just in those last few months. Don’t even get me started on bigger things like a fiscal union, or capital markets union, or even just a program to remove the barriers from the European single market. The reality is that when Trump acts, Europe reacts. That, too, is an indicator of decline. Decline is when you settle for second-best. You no longer want to lead the work in technology, but you are overjoyed when Google builds a data center in your country, or if Tesla builds a gigafactory.

Europeans invented the motor car. But the world of electric cars is going to be an American and Chinese playing field. The car industry is perhaps the most spectacular example of Europe’s industrial decline, but it is happening in other industries too, such as batteries, solar panels, high-speed railways, and telecommunications equipment. Europe’s industries are falling like dominoes, and will continue to fall unless they are protected. But subsidies and tariffs, via which that protection would take place, are also a sign of decline.

What I am describing here is long-term structural decline. Decline could, in theory, be reversed, but that would require a political will that is totally absent in every single European country I know. I don’t know of a single politician, or a single political party, in any European country, with a clear focus on these issues. Does anybody seriously believe that less immigration would solve the problem? Or higher government spending? Or a debt-financed increase in military spending? Or whatever else people in Europe are discussing right now?

Denial and wishful thinking are another important metric of decline. All my indicators are flashing red.

Wolfgang Münchau will return in September.

Today, a British diplomat being posted to the Middle East will spend almost two years on full pay learning Arabic. That includes close to a year of immersion training in Jordan, with flights and accommodation paid for by the taxpayer. Yet last time I asked the FCDO for data, a full 54% will either fail or not take their exams. To put it crudely, it costs around $300,000 to train one person not to speak Arabic. Around a third of Mandarin and Russian students fail too, wasting millions of pounds even as the department’s budget is slashed.

The problem isn’t new. In 2013, the then-Foreign Secretary William Hague prioritized improving language skills as a tool of diplomatic tradecraft. At a glitzy ceremony, he opened a sparkling new language center, following New Labour’s closure of the Foreign Office Language School in 2007. As Hague put it at the time, diplomacy is the “art of understanding different cultures” — and speaking the local tongue is a crucial first step.

Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, our former man in Riyadh, recalls that half of his 1977 intake of 18 fast streamers was put on hard language training. He chose Arabic, to give him options for future promotion. He practiced his trade in Egypt, and having become a “super-Arabist” would go on to become British ambassador to Saudi Arabia. That followed a refresher course in Arabic with a group of Bedouin on the Iraqi border. While he didn’t need to use Arabic at the Foreign Ministry in Riyadh, he could speak with the late King of Saudi Arabia. That’s a level of intimate access that an ambassador without the language would struggle to muster.

Language skills are equally important when dealing with our rivals. Sir Tony Brenton served in Moscow twice in 1994 and in 2004 as ambassador. Knowing Russian meant he could engage with figures like Sergei Ivanov, a key Putin confidante who believes MI6 ruined his KGB career when they exfiltrated Oleg Gordievsky in 1985, and avoided Brits like the plague. At the same time, Sir Tony’s command of Russian set the tone for the embassy. “All the chancery officers had their operational language exams,” he adds, “and were getting out meeting as many people as they could.”

There is evidence, too, that not knowing the local language can cause problems. David Fall, our former ambassador in Vietnam, struggled in Hanoi: he only learned Vietnamese in his fifties. Sir Sherard found the same when he tried to learn Pashto before starting as ambassador to Afghanistan.

The consequences of monolingualism can sometimes veer towards the embarrassing. I once reduced a Thai audience to laughter when the word I thought meant thief turned out to be pubic hair. Politicians have suffered similar humiliations. Sir Sherard recalls Tony Blair inviting the then-French prime minister to Sedgefield in 1998. After a pub lunch, grinning at the assembled media pack, Blair remarked in French of Lionel Jospin: “I have always lusted after you in every position.”

It’s little wonder Hague’s “diplomatic excellence” campaign continued after he left the Foreign Office in 2014. Tom Fletcher, former British ambassador to Lebanon and now at the UN, wrote his Future FCO report in May 2016, arguing that “the FCO should be more exacting in requiring language exams to be passed and linguistic attainment levels maintained”.

While he was Permanent Under Secretary, Sir Simon, now Lord McDonald, insisted on receiving a regular “name and shame” list of ambassadors who hadn’t passed their exams. For a brief period, 80% of Britain’s ambassadors had the required language skills to do their jobs. Overall Foreign Office attainment rose from a dismal 38% to 73%, just 7% shy of an 80% target set by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

But, in 2020, Dominic Raab merged the FCO and the Department for International Development six months into a global pandemic. The organizational change task facing Sir Philip Barton, the then-Permanent Secretary, would have been easier had Britain not followed the US out of Afghanistan in shambolic fashion. The sudden eruption of war in Ukraine hardly helped. Either way, speaking foreign languages dropped off the priority list.

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The newly-acronymed FCDO embraced what Michael Gove would have called an “everyone wins prizes” culture, though few staff felt like winners. The upward trajectory of improvement in language attainment stalled then fell. I recall that Sir Richard Moore, Britain’s spy chief and himself a Turkish speaker, remained vocal on the need for officers to be held to account for passing their language exams after the merger. But his voice was drowned out by the sucking teeth of corporate indecision.

“There’s no real enforcement,” says Jon Benjamin, former director of the Diplomatic Academy and our ex-ambassador to Chile and Mexico. Officers with no pre-existing skills are awarded an overseas job before they undertake language training, and most will go on to complete their posting even if they fail their exams.

Of course, languages are just one requirement for any diplomat. Officers need networking skills, policy nous and the poise to flip into crisis mode at a moment’s notice. But as David Landsman, former ambassador to Albania and Greece, puts it, “one officer who can speak the language is more useful than two who can’t”.

This equally speaks to broader cultural challenges. Increasing numbers of officers cling to the in-house embassy social scene, seldom venturing beyond. Visiting Moscow, shortly before my posting in 2014, I met a colleague who remarked that her Russian had actually become worse since she’d arrived — and she’d been there for two months.

Today, most British ambassadors don’t have the required C2 (master’s degree) standard of language in the country where they work. And ambassadors who fail themselves encourage failure among their staff. Before Russia’s invasion, an officer on full-time Ukrainian study complained that he didn’t want to do in-country training in Kyiv during the winter. The reason? It would be cold and dark. I encouraged him to buy a coat. His ambassador, who couldn’t speak Ukrainian, thought we were being desperately unkind and insisted we make an exception.

There’s other evidence, too, of this enervated culture. At an induction event for graduate-entry fast-streamers, I asked the group to describe a country they’d most enjoyed visiting. Later, a person from HR suggested I ask a more inclusive question next time: some new entrants might not have had a chance to travel overseas before joining the Foreign Office. But surely awareness of countries and cultures is the most inclusion-friendly attribute a diplomat can possess? And if someone is so easily upset over an innocuous question, how would they cope in Moscow when members of Russian intelligence break into their apartment and leave unflushed turds in the toilet?

Just to be clear, there are still exceptional linguists at the Foreign Office. Dame Caroline Wilson, approaching the end of her time in Beijing, is renowned for her Mandarin skills. Nigel Casey, our ambassador in Moscow, clearly speaks excellent Russian.

But I worry that the bathwater of language mediocrity will become more tepid over time. The Foreign Office’s struggle to create Mandarin, Russian and Arabic speakers reflects a wider drop in demand for British students to study languages, a trend the British Academy often highlights. Universities across the UK are abandoning foreign language degree programs in the face of a funding crisis. For their part, young people can’t see a link between studying a language and using a language for careers, because the government and business doesn’t actively promote careers that require language skills.

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Today, only 20% of the Foreign Office yearly fast-stream intake has any language background. But when I visit universities, I meet students passionate about language study. At the University of St Andrews recently, I met two students called Evie and Thomas, who in addition to studying Russian had taken advantage of a study year in Kazakhstan. Thomas, a working-class lad from the North-East, took a trip to Baikonur Cosmodrome to study the effects of dust on the health of local people. Evie recalls trudging to the train station in -20C° and getting a lift from a stranger.

I’d like to see more intrepid people like Evie and Thomas join the diplomatic service. Given they already possess language skills, it would certainly be cheaper than training people from scratch. Ensuring the HR system doesn’t incentivize failure might also help the situation.

But the problem isn’t limited to the Foreign Office. Everywhere you look across government, departments need staff who can speak foreign languages, whether that’s dealing with asylum seekers, providing health or social care to people for whom English isn’t a first language, or listening to tapped phone conversations. There’s a desperate need to strengthen links between universities and government, to build a supply chain of students who want to turn language skills into careers.

The Civil Service Fast Stream has programs for everything from statistics to operational delivery, yet somehow not for languages. Why not set one up? The Government wants to boost graduate apprenticeships and these would offer a route for students to study languages while gaining work experience in a range of government departments. They would also, incidentally, provide a cheaper and less wasteful option than the Foreign Office’s internal language training model.

I worry that a decade from now our most senior ambassadors will be first-posters with no grounding in the country, flopping from meeting to meeting, smiling inanely as their AI interpretation handsets render messages that their prime minister is trying to convey. Meanwhile, in London, Russian and Chinese diplomats will engage in fluent English.

In 2013, when Lord Hague gave diplomatic languages a much-needed shot of adrenaline, the British Academy produced a vital report called “Lost for Words: the Need for Languages in UK Diplomacy and Security”. It said, “if no action is taken, language skills within government will continue to erode until there are neither the skills within government nor enough new linguists coming through the education system to rebuild its capacity and meet the security, defense, and diplomacy requirements of the UK.”

Most of the recommendations in that report were not implemented. Since then, Russia has invested massively in its diplomatic and military capabilities to the extent that they now far outstrip ours. And if you are not worried about that, you should be.

How often have the Fleet Street sophists cried out that every adversary is the new Hitler and every compromise another Munich? Yet do they really understand what happened there? Chamberlain went to Munich with two objectives, the first necessary and the second noble. He sought to buy time for Britain to rearm and in this he was highly successful: the acceleration of aircraft production in 1938 and 1939 proved crucial to winning the Battle of Britain. At the same time, he gambled to give peace a chance and avoid repeating the carnage of the First World War. He lost that bet, but at the time no one could have been completely certain of Germany’s intentions. Had Hitler proven trustworthy, we would perhaps never have heard of Winston Churchill.

Unlike Chamberlain at Munich, Donald Trump is not trying to rearm for a looming conflict with Russia. He is trying to normalize relations with a nuclear-armed power. While Ukraine is important, so is Russia’s cooperation on many other issues, such as containing Iran’s nuclear program, stabilizing Syria, and shaping global energy markets. Above all, Trump is seeking to reverse the strategic own goal of driving Russia into the arms of China with ceaseless NATO expansion.

Nor is Trump trying to avoid a new war. He is trying to end one by stating obvious facts: Ukraine cannot win back lost territory without massive American assistance; the US is not going to go to war with Russia so that Ukraine can join NATO; and the longer the war goes on, the more territory Ukraine will lose. The terms of a negotiated settlement have been equally obvious for years. These are: a neutral Ukraine, a plebiscite to determine if Russian-speaking regions wish to remain part of Ukraine, and international assistance to rebuild the country. These terms will be easier to accept once Europe recognizes that while Russia started the war, it was provoked by NATO expansion. Just as the US could not tolerate Russian missiles in Cuba or Chinese control of the Panama Canal, Russia could not accept its only warm water naval base at Sevastopol being handed over to NATO and the US navy.

The “stench of appeasement” has not returned to Munich, as former defense minister Ben Wallace claimed in The Telegraph. The situation is better understood as a replay of the 1945 Yalta Conference, where Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Franklin D. Roosevelt determined the political future of Europe and Ukraine’s current borders. In 1919, the victorious allies had transferred the Austrian city of Lemberg to Poland; at Yalta, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to transfer the renamed Polish city of Lvov to the Soviet Union, where it became the Ukrainian city of Lviv. On neither occasion were protests from the Austrians or Poles heeded, because in the real world, one can seldom win back at the conference table what has already been lost on the battlefield. If you wish to draw analogies, at least get them right: the war in Ukraine is probably going to end with Ukrainian borders being redrawn, just as they were at Yalta.

Nor are we watching the death of the transatlantic alliance. Europe is unlikely to choose a world order led by China. And the US is unlikely to abandon the most successful alliance in history. That is why Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called American security cooperation indispensable. And it’s why President Trump wants to quickly reach an Anglo-American trade deal. That does not sound like a dying relationship.

The transatlantic relationship does, however, need to change. The unipolar moment upon which the rules-based order rested is over. The US now faces serious rivals and can no longer play the benevolent global hegemon. In 1945, the US produced 28% of the world’s GDP. Today, it is still the single most powerful nation on earth, but its share of global GDP has fallen to 13%. The world has returned to a situation where several great powers have spheres of influence and compete with each other. Any student of history will acknowledge that this is simply a return to normalcy.

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In this changing world, the most significant threat to the US comes from China, not Russia. This requires America to pivot towards Asia. It means reducing America’s presence in Europe in order to increase deterrence in Asia, and it means building naval rather than land-based forces. America’s Asian allies, including Australia, Japan, and South Korea, understand this and have increased defense cooperation considerably. They appreciate that, far from encouraging China to attack Taiwan, America’s pivot towards Asia makes defending Taiwan more credible.

This shift in relative power will require changes in Europe. For too long the American horse has pulled the European security cart while smiling politicians rode along tossing coins to their voters. Now, they need to get down and start pushing. Russia is essentially a European problem. And given the EU has 10 times Russia’s GDP, there is no reason Europe cannot defend itself in any but a nuclear confrontation.

In this evolving landscape, Britain must choose whether to be a spectator or a participant. Americans recognize that Britain has contributed far more to collective security than other European nations. Vice President JD Vance’s comment about “random” countries that have not fought a war in 30 years was directed very accurately at other nations of the so-called “coalition of the willing”, not at Britain. Nevertheless, the entire British Army could not fill Wembley stadium. The Royal Navy, once the most formidable in the world, now has more admirals than war ships. While recent efforts to increase Britain’s defense budget are a good start, there is a long way to go. A flag and a national anthem will no longer guarantee any nation a place at the negotiating table.

In 1914, the lights went out in Britain in part due to a jingoistic press, which stoked widespread anti-German sentiment and demonized Kaiser William II. It would be a shame to repeat that mistake today, and Keir Starmer is trying not to. While many European leaders are acting like jilted lovers, Starmer grasps that America remains indispensable to European security. He is preparing his nation for greater effort — and in that sense he does resemble Churchill.

What is so striking about this second coming of Trump is not just that the world appears to have accepted his victory this time, but to have actively embraced him as the harbinger of a new age, no longer seeking to protect the old one that has been discredited. The visual proof of this diplomatic embrace was captured in the image of Europe’s leaders in Paris, one after the other, moving to submit themselves at the feet of the new imperator.

Yet it was not the symbolism of the ceremony in Notre-Dame on Saturday which came closest to capturing the revolutionary spirit of Trump’s coming presidency, but the events unfolding at the same time thousands of miles away in Syria. While in one sense the collapse of the Assad regime in Damascus has little to do with Trump, it is impossible to understand the speed and timing of the revolution without considering the impact that his impending presidency is already having on world affairs.

Think about the events that have already happened since Trump’s election victory in November. First, there was the collapse of the German government and the sacking of Israel’s defence secretary, Yoav Gallant, on the day of the American election. Then came Netanyahu’s ceasefire-deal with a dazed and confused Hezbollah, followed by the authorisation of the firing of long-range American missiles into Russia, the publication of Zelensky’s peace plan, the collapse in the value of the Russian rouble under fresh American sanctions and, finally, the sudden implosion of the Syrian regime. The French government also collapsed.

“Everyone has taken his mantra that all is transactional and is positioning themselves to open the way for a bargain with Trump,” explained one French official reflecting on this extraordinary cascade of events. Even before taking power, then, Trump is the catalyst for a new age.

In Syria, he sparked a revolution. Frustrated with a diplomatic impasse as the clock ticked down to Trump’s inauguration and the ambitions of the American-backed Kurdish rebels in Syria’s north east, Turkey’s President Erdogan appears to have authorised the advance of his own client rebels first. Erdogan, it seems, wanted to ensure the Turkish-backed militias were in the strongest possible position to deal with Trump after January 20, only to have triggered the sudden and complete collapse of the Assad regime. Russia, meanwhile, bogged down in Ukraine and already having paid a large price for little reward in Syria, was also caught off guard and now faces the loss of key military bases on the Arab-Mediterranean coast, further entrenching Erdogan’s power in the region.

Across the Middle East, all the major powers are jockeying for position. Already, Benjamin Netanyahu has taken advantage of the vacuum of power in Syria and in Washington to grab new territory in the Golan Heights and try to impose a new political dominance at home. Saudi Arabia, too, sees opportunities under Trump. Even Iran, the great loser in world affairs since October 7 last year, may feel it now has no choice but to sue for peace and reach a deal.

For Ukraine, meanwhile, it is President Biden (or his officials) who is accelerating events by rushing to do all he can before Trump’s inauguration, with new weapons transfers and sanctions that are causing Russia fresh economic pain. Yet, once again, it is Trump who stands to gain as each side plays out their cards in expectation of his attempt to impose a new order on the world once in power.

It is striking how open so many diplomats and officials are to Trump’s approach, telling me that they see in it a degree of brutal honesty if not morality. During his first term there was a hope that his Hobbesian outlook on life would not, in the end, last. Today, there is no such hope — or even desire. Meanwhile, the comprehensive nature of Trump’s victory coupled with European rolling political and economic crises, seems to have robbed the continent’s leaders of any last delusion of superiority. Only Emmanuel Macron’s departing Prime Minister, Michael Barnier, showed any real distaste at Trump’s presence at Notre Dame, which is itself rather telling. If there was a figure who appeared out of touch in this scene, it was not Trump; Barnier’s instinct is that of an older age, revealing his own anachronism. In today’s world, Trump no longer represents good or bad, but simply power. He has it and Europe does not.

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It is for this reason that in many global capitals today Trump is a clarifying presence, forcing leaders to address the fundamentals of their position. Europe is weak — economically and militarily — and made weaker by the leaders it has chosen. In Paris, Macron has destroyed his presidency in his desperate and doomed attempts to save the country from the Le Pennist fate he seems only to succeed in making more likely. In Berlin, Olaf Scholz is drifting towards defeat, a listless chancellor atop a listless Germany at the heart of a listless continent. In London, meanwhile, there is the odd spectacle of an all-powerful government that already feels adrift. Can these three powers really find it in them to step into a void left by Trump in Ukraine? And if they can, at what cost to an electorate already raging against the deteriorating state of their public services?

None of this means Trump’s clarifying presence will be either good, bad or in any sense successful at finding solutions to problems that have defeated his predecessors. In an important sense, in fact, Trump represents the end to all such teleological notions of progress or decline. Power is the point.

In Syria, the fall of Assad cannot be squeezed into any such narrative of progress or decline. It is a story of order and who has the power to impose it. Trump doesn’t want it. Iran has lost it. And Turkey may find it is no more successful in its attempts to control its foreign clients than Pakistan was in controlling the Taliban. And just like Afghanistan, in Syria a gruesome regime has evaporated after being abandoned by its foreign protectors. What comes next may be just as dangerous — and far closer to home.

Syria’s new warlord Abu Mohammad al-Jolani was 20 when he joined the jihad in Iraq. Perhaps he has mellowed and forgiven — but it would be a brave analyst after the past 20 years to believe that Syria has reached its nadir: modernity may yet have some new horrors for it to endure. What comes in its place may be no better or worse than what it replaced, merely a new epoch symbolised not by the beauty of Notre-Dame but the hellish anarchy of America’s Iraq.

We can’t be certain how the world would be different had a different course been chosen, but we can identify turning points and their cascading tumbles of consequences. And we can hypothesise an alternative history that, absent some fateful step, might have unfolded instead. Such “Planet Ifs” are more than thought experiments; if we can uncover what these wrong turns have in common, we can try harder to avoid them in the future. To see how, let’s consider four.

The first is almost as old as America: What if the United States had never permitted slavery? Slavery, after all, was an ethical transgression, while the Civil War that followed ripped the country apart. Today, slavery’s toxic effects still impact the nation — socially, economically, culturally, politically. Nor was this outweighed by any significant benefits, as plantation-style farming was not essential to southern agriculture. A national story free of slavery would thus be indisputably preferable. Case closed.

On to our second Planet If, this time in Europe: What if the Treaty of Versailles had refrained from deliberately humiliating Germany after the First World War? The Treaty placed exceptionally harsh conditions on defeated Germany. The Bundestag was forced to cede territory and portions of its population, to accept burdens that prevented their economic recovery, and to demilitarise and to pay massive reparations. Such a vindictive stance fuelled Germany’s subsequent nationalism, with economic despair rendering its populace vulnerable to the recovery and pride promised by Hitler.

This lesson was learned by the end of the Second World War. In 1945, few would deny that a contemptuous and vindictive attitude towards Germany would have been warranted — but the decision was made to aim for rehabilitation and reintegration into the international system. They were obliged to pay reparations, and there was mandatory public education about the camps and the genocide, but there was also a roadmap for Germany’s return to being a normal and respected nation. Had such an approach been taken in 1918, it is entirely possible that we would not have had the Second World War. It seems unlikely Hitler would have seized power. And projecting forward: no expulsions of Jews, no genocide, and therefore no Israel, no Middle-East conflict, no PLO, no Hezbollah, no Hamas, and no Gaza War.

Third, let’s visit a more recent Planet If: What if Mohammad Mosaddegh, a secular reformer, had been allowed to remain as Iran’s elected Prime Minister?

As Prime Minister, Mosaddegh launched a series of policies targeting the country’s social inequalities. These included land reform, public housing, the abolition of forced and indentured labour, and sick leave for workers. Then he decided to nationalise the country’s oil. Why, he reasoned, should a country so rich in resources be so poor, with its principal source of wealth under the total control of a foreign government, the UK, through its Anglo-Iranian Oil Company?

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Mosaddegh proposed to compensate the British company for its future losses, but that did not assuage Churchill’s rage, who determined to overthrow Mosaddegh and replace him with the compliant Pahlavi dynasty. Unable to manage such an ambitious undertaking alone, the British sought to pull in the Americans. Sensibly, Secretary of State Dean Acheson rejected the plan, terming it “destructive” and criticising the British intention to “rule or ruin” Iran. But the British persisted and, when Eisenhower was elected, they finally had their patsy. Playing on his Cold War paranoia, they persuaded him that Mosaddegh, an outspoken anti-Communist, was going to ally with the Soviet Union. With that, Project Ajax was born — a bold, elaborate and expensive plan to foment unrest, spread disinformation, instigate riots and overthrow the Mosaddegh government. Hundreds of demonstrators were shot, members of the government captured, tortured and executed, and the submissive successor regime was placed on the throne, his first task being the return of the oil wealth to the foreign companies. Mosaddegh was placed in solitary confinement, where he died.

A great triumph: a Pyrrhic victory. Let’s recall where this path went.

Social and economic reforms having been nipped in the bud, the Iranian populace continued to be poor and uneducated. With the secular reformists eliminated, the disgruntled masses turned to firebrand religious scholars who concocted a volatile mix of nationalism and retrograde religion. Eventually, this erupted in an Islamic Revolution whose successors now support terrorist groups across the Middle East. The consolidation of Hezbollah, Hamas and even last year’s horrific attack on Israel can be traced back to the coup against Mosaddegh — a man who, we must recall, was on course to effect reforms, modernise his country and educate the populace. Iran could have been a regional ally, instead of where it is today: partnering with Russia and China to bring us down.

Our final Planet If was formed three decades later: What, it holds, if the US had not backed the radical Islamist mujahideen in Afghanistan?

In 1979, Soviet troops were sent to Afghanistan to defend a beleaguered pro-Soviet Communist government. This being the Cold War, the US saw an opportunity. The theory was that the Soviets as a superpower would inevitably prevail, but we could make it costly for them by backing the craziest, most extreme among their opponents, the ones who would fight most brutally. Some modern-minded, pro-democracy Afghan resistance groups were also opposing the Soviet forces, but they were judged to be too tame. So, we turned to the mujahideen, “those who wage jihad”.

After the Soviets threw in the towel and withdrew, the mujahideen groups became the new Afghan government. The US had brokered a power-sharing rotation agreement among them, which instantly fell by the wayside as each group decided to seize and permanently hold on to power. A bloody civil war ensued; the mujahideen encircled Kabul and blasted away at each other, destroying entire neighbourhoods of their own capital city and killing many civilians. Disgusted by this, the Taliban, made up of Afghan graduates of fundamentalist madrassas in Pakistan, marched forth to end the civil war that was devastating their country. To the initial relief of the population, they brought pacification, but then went on to impose a regime of oppressive ultra-Islam. And they hosted their like-minded partners: al-Qaeda.

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As for what happened next, little speculation is required. To use legal terminology, “but for” our nurturing of the mujahideen, and “but for” our prolongation of the war in order to stretch to the maximum the losses we could inflict on the Soviet military (and the hapless Afghan population) through our proxies, there would have been no Taliban, no al-Qaeda safe haven and no 9/11.

We can project by analogy what would have happened instead: the Soviets would have quashed the uprising against the Communist Afghan government, the country would have endured an unappealing political system — but, alongside that, it would have enjoyed accelerated infrastructure and economic development. Of course, within one or two decades, the Soviet Union would still have collapsed, leaving Afghanistan to now look like any other Central Asian Republic. Women of all social classes would be educated and integrated into all levels of public life, and the country would now be in the process of de-Sovietising, rather than being governed by a rogue regime that is being courted by China and, oh irony, Russia.

What do these examples have in common? In each instance, those formulating the policies and the plots knew that they were violating principles of fairness and their own ethical and ideological values, in the interest of material gain and power; and they also knew that what they were doing was morally wrong and extremely risky. We can imagine them congratulating themselves for being so bold and diabolical, indeed even so brilliantly Machiavellian.

On each occasion, the illusion of success initially appeared to confirm the cleverness of the plotters. The plantation owner elite became rich and powerful. Germany not only lost the First World War; it was crushed. The compliant Reza Shah Pahlavi took his seat on the Peacock Throne, and Western corporations could once more pump Iran’s oil to their heart’s content. And in Afghanistan, our erstwhile proteges-gone-rogue were eliminated and a pro-Western democracy installed in their place — or so it briefly seemed.

But what can we say about each of these episodes? The most obvious commonality is that they all involved leaders and policymakers knowingly violating their country’s ethical code and belief system. After all, the Founding Fathers knew that slavery offended the values of their new nation. They initially planned to emancipate the slaves upon gaining independence. Earlier drafts of the Declaration of Independence blamed King George for polluting the New World with this abominable practice. But the section was deleted.

Why did they override their better knowledge? The simple answer is greed. The Founding Fathers, otherwise endowed with admirable foresight, had to know that this would not end well, that it would undermine the moral integrity of their society, harm the middle and lower classes, and create a minority that inevitably would become free one day and have cause for deep resentment. But for individual — and influential — members of the Southern elite, to be “gentleman farmers” with large landholdings was a matter of prestige and wealth.

As for the experienced statesmen who drafted the Treaty of Versailles, they could have focused on bringing stability and reconciliation to Europe. Instead, they were determined to not just punish Germany, but to prevent it from getting back on its feet for decades to come and perhaps ever. As Keynes observed, the Treaty was “one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom for which our statesmen have ever been responsible”.

In Afghanistan, however, ignorance was no excuse. The US knew full well that the terrorist groups and warlord bands they were arming, funding, training and supporting did not remotely resemble “freedom fighters”. Their goal was to conduct a holy war, a jihad, with the purpose of imposing Islamist rule over the country.

So, what can we glean here? Well, international affairs can seem highly convoluted, but as these examples suggest, one simple maxim can make things easier. First, don’t violate your own beliefs and core values in the interest of being clever — because it won’t end well. Or, in other words, to thine own self be true — because karma’s a bitch.

The Loom of Time is Robert’s Kaplan latest, characteristically magisterial book, and this opening anecdote holds the key to his enduring importance. He goes on to describe how back in the mid-Nineties an editor had described his interest in the Uyghurs as “testing the limits of obscurantism”. But Kaplan knew different — especially since he understood, when he went again in 2015, that the backdrop for this repression was China’s $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative: “a postmodern transportation network of highways, railways, and energy pipelines linking China by land and sea with Europe across the Greater Middle East”.

Kaplan’s thinking is grounded in geography. Whether it is how the state of Iraq is so geographically incoherent that its descent into chaos was almost inevitable or the conservative influence of mountains on society, the truth is always to be found not in textbooks or the corridors of government, but out in the field, traversing the veins and capillaries that comprise our world: the alleyways and the slums and the bogs — the terrain.

His trip to Xinjiang illustrates his process in miniature. One, understand the map; two, get to the places that others won’t go; and three, from there, better understand the human activities (such as the Belt and Road) that act upon it. This is the beginning of political knowledge.

The book is about the Greater Middle East, loosely speaking the Islamic world “stretching from Morocco in the western Mediterranean to East Turkestan, abutting the arable cradle of China”. A region that absolutely cannot be understood without knowledge of its desert and plains and mountains and bazaars, and without its perennial curse: foreign meddling.

Historically, this has taken the form of avowed empires, which in their 19th-century Western form at least, are dead. Kaplan correctly observes that “in a globalised world one culture cannot simply appropriate and subjugate other cultures for its own ends”. Empires are now not only morally wrong but déclassé.

The imperial mindset, though, persists. If the Greater Middle East was once in the sights of the imperial West — whose afterlife continued with “humanitarian interventions” of Afghanistan and Iraq — it is now the fight zone for what Kaplan calls “ghost empires”: China, which seeks to link its budding commercial outposts in Europe with those in East Asia; but also Turkey and Iran, two former empires which also revere their imperial pasts. As Kaplan observes: “Western imperialism may be looked down upon, but not so the record of indigenous empires.”

Where once the British East India Company advanced eastward from Europe across the Middle East to China, China now advances westward, with similar commercial and strategic motives. It has built a large military base in Djibouti at the mouth of the Red Sea, and is contemplating others further north along the Red Sea at Port Sudan and at Jiwani by the Pakistan-Iran border near Gwadar. It is indeed “a great age in history to be a Chinese civil engineer”.

Geography for Kaplan also serves a wider purpose: it both informs and explains a particular view of history — the long view. What Fernand Braudel, the mid-20th-century French geographer and historian of the Mediterranean, calls la longue durée. If geography is, more or less, immutable, its effects on history are most apparent when you consider it not over months or years, as we have a tendency to do, but over centuries and even millennia. Like Braudel, Kaplan is interested in “the slow, imperceptible changes, like the sluggish movements of the ocean at its deepest depths, which invisibly determine the fast-moving, transitory ripples at the surface, upon which the media remain focused”.

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Taking the long view of history frees you from the varying conceptual and ideological preoccupations of differing periods. And being immutable, geography does not yield to ideology. This means you can start to look at monarchy and empire and autocracy and even democracy — which “according to the long arc of time, remains but a bold experiment” in the Greater Middle East — not exclusively in terms of their morality but their efficacy.

It is an unfashionable approach, but unlike the ad hominem polemics of the column or tweet thread, it shows genuine intellectual bravery. Kaplan writes: “Thus, to define the Arab world in particular as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism — as so many people do — is to impose simulated categories upon it, specific to America’s own historical experience, not to the historical experience of the region in question.” This tendency to view the world as an extension of the United States is simple, and simplistic. Go to a region and decide: who are the victims? Who are the oppressors? Who is black, who is white? Often, the categories are not only irrelevant but unhelpful, and even dangerous. And there is a name for this: imperialism, albeit of the cultural kind.

This is also, in the end, a deeply moral approach, because, as we saw in Iraq, what does not work in the Greater Middle East almost always ends in horror. This is a book about the region, but it is also a book about our reaction to it, which has in turn helped to mould it. Kaplan understands how disastrous this reaction has been, not least through the importation of the “fatal idea” of modern nationalism that, among other things, brought genocide to communities of Turks, Greeks and Armenians who had once coexisted under the Ottoman Empire. This is a place where “the assault of the West, from urbanisation to imperialism to modern nationalism to weapons technology, created complex and hybrid cultural orders throughout the developing world, where chaos took on a magnified and deadly quality”.

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This is the binary that has so obsessed Kaplan throughout his career: the dialectic between chaos and order. In February 1994, he wrote a now-famous piece in The Atlantic called “The Coming Anarchy”. While think-tankers and politicians pondered the role democracy would play in the coming years, Kaplan, out in the field, argued that it was tribal and ethnic divides, dwindling resources, and desertification and drought — which is to say climate change — that would shape the future.

He was right. In 2023, it’s not Cold War fears of nuclear Armageddon or industrialised state war that loom but the spectre of anarchy. The conflict in Ukraine wasn’t officially a war when it began, often fought by local “separatists” — Russian proxies — and with mercenaries and organised criminal gangs all seeking a piece of the action. Meanwhile, opposing combatants often share a “nationality” sundered by ethnicity and language, while foreign fighters flow in on both sides. Head south and see conflict washing across the Sahel as Jihadists groups exploit the desperation wrought by dwindling water and exploding populations. We are living in Robert Kaplan’s world, not the value-freighted one that existed only in the imaginations of Tony Blair and Barack Obama.

Towards the end of the book, Kaplan quotes from War and Peace. Count Rostopchin, a general and statesman, “had known for a long time that Moscow would be abandoned, but had known it only with his reason, while with all his soul he had not believed it”. The homily here is a simple one. Rostopchin knew Moscow would fall to Napoleon, but he could not bring himself to believe it so, when it happened, he was helpless to act.

The prerequisite to effective action is to first accept reality as it is — not in the lecture room or government department, but on the ground. This is the leitmotif that runs throughout Kaplan’s work. It is what has kept him at the cutting edge of geopolitical thought for decades, and it is what we must internalise, or else we will continue to act ineffectively, or worse, with great harm.

But the blatant contradiction between disarray at home and increased power abroad has a simple explanation: the greater part of American power does not derive from what the US itself, let alone individual presidents, are able to do, but from the cooperation and support it receives from friendly countries around the world. US power depends on the magnitude and the cohesion of its alliances — and the latter can change very quickly.

This, of course, is key. Years of talk in Europe of replacing the “increasingly outdated” US-directed Nato alliance with an alternative centred in the European Union ended abruptly last February when the Russians attempted to seize Kyiv in a day and Ukraine in a week. Had they succeeded, as both Russian and US intelligence had predicted (it was the always-wrong CIA that prompted Biden’s offer to evacuate Zelenskyy), Nato would have collapsed.

Yet because the Ukrainian guards fought off elite Russian paratroopers at the Antonov airfield, inaugurating fierce resistance across the entire front, and because the US and UK immediately reacted by promising military aid, a seemingly moribund Nato was suddenly resurrected.

Without waiting for discussions or agreements, some countries simply acted: Norway airlifted 2,000 LAW anti-tank weapons, which are point-and-shoot rockets, neither new nor advanced — but just the thing to fire at Russian armour flooding into the country. And its example was followed by Denmark, Canada and then others, while far more advanced missiles arrived very quickly from the US and the UK, inaugurating a flow of weapons from most Nato countries that still continues.

Seeing all this, Sweden’s government abandoned its long-cherished stance of neutrality to apply for Nato membership, while Finland, which shares a very long border with Russia, felt confident enough to sign up as well. Russian threats were met with ridicule: “We already have 50,000 Russians buried in our country from the last war… but we have room for many more.”

The United States thus suddenly found itself leading a thoroughly revived and expanded Western alliance the power of which has reach into North Africa and the Middle East. All of which greatly added to the sum total of American power, even if Biden sometimes stumbles and his Vice President sometimes laughs at the wrong time.

But the war in Ukraine is far from the only boost. In fact, now that Russia is declining in several ways, what has added to global American power is the emergence of a vast, if informal, Indo-Pacific de facto alliance to contain China.

Today, there is no equivalent of the “multilateral” North Atlantic Treaty that formally links the US and Canada to European states; nor is there a second Nato-style structure of multinational commands staffed by thousands of officers. Instead, in response to the threat from China, there are “joint activities”, ranging from constant diplomatic coordination and intelligence exchanges to an entire panoply of air, land and naval exercises that bring together American, Australian, Indian and Japanese forces, with lesser participations by Canada, Chile, France, the Philippines, South Korea, the UK and Vietnam.

Vietnam’s involvement is particularly revealing — and not only because it regularly hosts US and Japanese naval vessels and submarines where it most hurts Beijing: very close to the major Chinese submarine base on the island of Hainan. On paper, Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party has warm, indeed “fraternal”, relations with the Chinese Communist Party. In practice, however, the Chinese are constantly trying to dislodge the Vietnamese from their islands in the Gulf of Tonkin, and neither side forgets for a minute their bloody wars, both ancient and modern, including the 1979 conflict in which some 30,000 Chinese soldiers died. As a result, Vietnam, which started sharing intelligence with Australia many years ago, and has received much help from the Indian navy with its submarines, is now cooperating at sea with the US and Japan, receiving retired naval vessels from both.

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As for India, whose armed forces have been steadily advancing in competence, it was not American diplomacy that overcame its long-standing “non-alignment” — but a very long series of Chinese territorial seizures, from Ladakh in the west to Arunachal in the east, some of which resulted in armed confrontations. For decades, whenever the two countries’ leaders met, Beijing only wanted to discuss the splendid opportunities for profitable economic cooperation and for vast joint infrastructure projects, brushing aside the border disputes as very minor matters that could be resolved by low-ranking officials. Then, in the subsequent months and years, while the grand economic projects were never actually implemented, Chinese border troops would creep forward to seize more territory.

This Chinese gambit worked beautifully until June 2020, when skirmishes at the high-altitude Himalayan border in Ladakh resulted in a number of casualties. When the Chinese stuck to its playbook again this year, India’s Foreign Minister rebuffed them decisively.

Why did the Chinese keep pushing India until it was forced into an informal but powerful alliance with the United States? The only possible explanation is that China’s rulers are too absorbed in invisible but constant intra-party intrigues and too distracted by everyday matters to acquire any serious understanding of the outside world. The result is that foreign nations are reduced to caricatures, with the Indians written off as dirty and weak.

China’s behaviour with India is certainly consistent with its equally irrational territorial claims elsewhere. Japan, for instance, has long been a very close US ally, but for a brief interval in 2010 when a new party came to power that gave in to neutralist temptations. Yet that ended abruptly on 7 September, 2010, when a Chinese fishing trawler with a reportedly drunk skipper collided with two Japanese patrol boats off the coast of the disputed Senkaku islands.

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Instead of apologising, or at least ignoring what happened, China’s foreign ministry issued imperious demands for the immediate return of the captain and furious denunciations that incited mob attacks against Japanese offices and even visiting Japanese tourists — culminating in a series of incidents that seemed perfectly designed to rekindle Tokyo’s loyalty to Washington. Since then, Japan has built up its armed forces and, starting with prime minister Abe from 2012, it has re-emerged as an active ally of the US. Meanwhile, with Australia both now more pro-American and more interested in rebuilding its neglected armed forces, the US has capable allies across the Indo-Pacific that magnify its power — a principle reason why Xi’s threats to invade Taiwan have simmered down.

Neither Biden’s gaffes nor Trump’s tantrums can change the realities created by Putin and Xi’s bellicosity; America’s European and Asian alliances have rarely been so empowered. Indeed, the only consequence of America’s disarray at home is that the US cannot start wars to pursue fanciful aims, such as bringing democracy to Iraq or progress to Afghanistan. And that is just as well.

At this particular party, with guests still reeling from Trump’s victory, a professor at an Ivy League university began expounding on the flaws with American democracy — an outdated “18th-century technology” in our digital present. In a world of Russian Facebook ads and Cambridge Analytica, why put our faith in democratic processes? The winner gets the nuclear codes. Should we really leave it up to the manipulable US public? It’s nice giving everyone a vote, but so what? One individual’s vote among millions has little meaning. We need a better system, not sentimental ideas about the inherent value of voting.

Outdated 18th-century man that I am, I was outraged less by his arguments than by his underlying attitude, the blithe aristocratic assumption that democratic outcomes tell us nothing we need know, or nothing other than the hateful stupidity of American voters. That a better class of people should be in charge, the stakes being too high for such decisions to be left to the sorts of people… well… bringing our food in and our empty plates out of the dining room.

As Gordon Wood has noted, the American Revolution was not simply a matter of political change. It entailed a social revolution as well, emphasising equality as a social principle, undermining long-held hierarchies, and promoting an attitude of greater respect for ordinary men. Such attitudes are not always natural. The siren song of hierarchy, power, and authority captivates us even when we’re not recoiling from the monstrosities of populism. And if one would like to observe such attitudes at their most subtle and seductive, one of the best and most elegantly written books from such a perspective is George Kennan’s celebrated Sketches from a Life.

These are the assembled travel writings and letters written from 1927 to 1989 by George Kennan, diplomat and historian, key architect of Cold War containment and the Marshall Plan, a brilliant analyst and a beautiful writer, and an American patriot who long advocated for a less bellicose, less militarist, less hubristic foreign policy. ‘‘George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history,’’ said Henry Kissinger. It’s a marvellous book, with passages of such elegance and insight I was constantly photographing them and sending them to friends. It also filled me with the same outrage I’d felt at that dinner party.

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Those who have read Around the Cragged Hill, Kennan’s political and philosophical manifesto, will know some of the man’s oddities: his hatred of the automobile, his desire to split up America into 12 constituent republics, his belief that widespread use of domestic servants is essential for cultural health. And those familiar with the more unsavoury bits of his biography will know about his speculations that black and naturalised citizens should not be allowed to vote, about his self-declared “soft spot” for apartheid, about his State Department memo (that Dean Acheson refused to circulate) that partly blamed miscegenation for Latin America’s political troubles.

But it is in Sketches from a Life that we get his vision, most clearly and seductively, at the level of sensibility. And likewise, it is where we get almost unbidden notes of American optimism and egalitarianism occasionally polluting that vision. And so, rather than a sourcebook from “one of the wisest men in America” (as the New York Times put it when reviewing the book in 1989), this is a book best revisited as if it were a novel about a tragically limited, albeit brilliant, man who spent his life in service to a country whose spirit was at odds with his own.

Early on in Sketches, we learn that Kennan, 23 years old but already nostalgic for an imagined past, regrets not having been born 100 years earlier:

“Life is too full in these times to be comprehensible. We know too many cities to be able to grow into any of them, and our arrivals and departures are no longer matters for emotional debauches — they are too common. I should like to have lived in the days when a visit was a matter of months, when political and social problems were regarded from simple standpoints called ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’, when foreign countries were still foreign, when a vast part of the world always bore the glamour of the great unknown, when there were still wars worth fighting and gods worth worshipping.”

“Such beautiful bullshit,” I wrote in the margins. Kennan was born in 1904, so one wonders which wars he was thinking of (America’s Indian Wars? 1824’s First Anglo-Burmese War? The French Conquest of Algeria?), but specificity here isn’t the thing so much as getting wrapped up in the myth-making power of your own prose.

Indeed, the book is haunted by visions of a perfect past where suffering was justified by higher ideals. In St. Petersburg he notes that the Imperial Yacht Club, once the haunt of dukes, diplomats, and dignitaries, had been turned into a state administration building for internal waterways. He laments the loss of an old playground for the rich: did it not “actually add something of colour and variety to the city for the people of that day to know that here, in these premises, there was being prepared, even if they didn’t eat it, some of the finest food eaten anywhere in northern Europe, that here things were being done elegantly, impressively, to the connoisseur’s taste?”

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Monarchy gets a similar justification, since the trappings of monarchy are “the dream, the vision, the ideal of man as he might conceivably be — of man ennobled”, a theatre without which Europe supposedly couldn’t have produced “good taste”. Elsewhere he declares that men require “a moral order drawn up by those who are wiser and more experienced than the great masses of humanity and are capable of channelling into the body of spiritual law the ponderous experience of millennia of human progress”.

These beautiful visions of a refined world propped up by an impoverished populace are contrasted with Kennan’s disgusted reactions to widespread prosperity. In Scandinavia he sees, or thinks he sees, “the intellectual and spiritual vacuum which the European welfare state produces”. This happens when “the sacrifice of an attractive and gracious form of living on the part of a few is rationalised by the same arguments about better conditions for the many”. And in America, he speculates that when man is given “freedom both from political restraint and from want, the effect is to render him childlike”. In one of his more amusing asides, he compares California to “the popular American Protestant concept of heaven” since:

“There is always a reasonable flow of new arrivals; one meets many — not all — of one’s friends; people spend a good deal of their time congratulating each other over the fact that they are there; discontent would be unthinkable; and the newcomer is slightly disconcerted to realise that now — the devil having been banished and virtue being triumphant — nothing terribly interesting can ever happen again.”

There are some poignant moments, especially during and in the wake of Second World War, when he sees the faces of refugees, or the sites of mass slaughter. In the ruins of Hamburg, he’s struck by the conviction that no military calculus “could have justified this stupendous, careless destruction of civilian life and of material values”. On the border of Finland and Russia, he sketches a picture of birch trees growing above “the remains of some boy — be he Russian or Finnish — who gave up on this spot the privilege of leading a life through, like the rest of us, in all its satisfactions and disappointments”. This is the sensibility which spurred Kennan, in 1950, to write a State Department paper calling for an end to the use of nuclear weapons for offensive purposes, since they cannot be “reconciled with a political purpose directed to shaping, rather than destroying” adversaries, and since “they fail to take account of the ultimate responsibility of men for one another”.

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Admirable, indeed. Grand suffering clearly moves him. And yet, here too, I find something disturbing. A true humanism would afford common people dignity in life as well as in death. But in Berlin, “the great awesome ruins” of East Berlin stand in judgment of West Berlin, which seems “toylike and trivial: an officious little busybody of a civilisation, fussy and impermanent”. And he cannot look upon a suffering child, a young French girl on a cart, in a torn and soiled dress, with all the youth gone out of her face, without projecting his own notions onto her: “Just try to tell her of liberalism and democracy, of progress, of ideals, of tradition, of romantic love, see how far you get… Do you think she’s going to come out of it a flaming little patriot? She saw the complete moral breakdown and degradation of her own people…”

There are times, though, where the aristocratic lens cracks, and rather than smug if elegantly written dismissals of human beings we get to witness a fine mind grappling with the gap between his perceptions and his ideas about the world. The earliest comes in Hamburg, in 1927, when he encounters a huge Communist demonstration at the Dammtor Station. “For all my contempt for the falseness and hatefulness and demagoguery of communism,” he writes, “I had a strange desire to cry when I first saw those ranks of people marching along the street — ill-dressed, slouching, brutalised people.” Kennan being Kennan, he finds them “ignorant, unpleasant people,” but can’t deny the truth of their humanity: “They were after centuries of mute despair, for the first time attempting to express and to assert themselves.”

Later, while Ambassador in Moscow, he leads into powerful reflections on the stability of the communist regime with a set of observations about the hundreds of thousands of garden plots on the outskirts of Moscow. These plots open up for ordinary Russians “a veritable world of what you might call ‘miniature private interest’, a world in which people devote themselves to, and think about, everything under the sun except the success of communism.” Political discontent doesn’t breed in these spaces so much as a “spiritual breach between the rulers and the ruled…”

Here, after so much nostalgia for the old European order, we see Kennan’s Americanness inflecting his vision. What he sees is not anti-communism so much as human life, unruly and unreconciled to ideological systems seeking its suppression. “The Party has tried to rule out change.” he writes, “but the Party is hoisted here on the petard of its own lack of a genuine democracy, of the loss of organic connection with the emotional forces of the people themselves.” Nothing dramatic looms on the horizon, no coming revolt, but the excitement of the revolution has exhausted itself. Human beings, never quite as mouldable as elites imagine, move unexpectedly, uncontrollably, dangerously.

I must confess, I have a certain degree of nostalgia for the world Kennan inhabited. Hard-earned expertise, like the expertise Kennan had about Russia, is not to be scoffed at, the gutting of the State Department over the past decades is one of the America’s great self-inflicted wounds, and a less hubristic, less militaristic foreign policy of the sort he advocated is one I heartily endorse. But though experts have valuable, if partial truths we need to hear, they should be haunted by the notion that those “ill-dressed, slouching, brutalised people” might have access to their own partial truths as well.

When an interview with Antonov containing these laments  appeared in Politico this month it became the talk of the diplomatic circuit. At social gatherings, several ambassadors shared that his office had contacted their office, and on their instructions, been rebuffed. And seriously, they wondered, how could he expect anyone to agree to meet him for lunch? To be seen dining with the city’s principal pariah was out of the question. As for taking his calls, who wanted to hear him spout Moscow’s party line at a time like this?

Having spent a decade as a ‘diplomatic spouse’, I find myself strangely fascinated by Antonov’s situation. The average Russian citizen may be inundated with propaganda, but Antonov has access to international news and commentary. He knows exactly what his country is doing and is personally experiencing the revulsion this has engendered. Demonstrators regularly gather in front of his embassy. They beam the Ukrainian flag onto the walls. In a way, having people refuse to see him or take his calls is a kindness and reflection of their good manners, given what most of us would like to say to him.

I can’t claim intimate knowledge of his state of mind or moral compass, but Antonov always struck me as a decent man. I remember him telling me that one of his personal projects when he first came to the US had been the rehabilitation of the historic cemetery in Ft. Ross, a settlement of Russian immigrants in Northern California. It was a moral obligation, he explained, to ensure that the dead could rest with dignity. A few months after that conversation, his army would be torturing and murdering civilians, then shovelling them into mass graves, or just leaving the bodies on the roadside to rot. What do his morals say about that?

Overnight Russia, which was working to regain its position as the serious and sober world power that in so many ways it seemed qualified to be, revealed a different face. Instead of playing a role on the world stage, it has been excluded from multiple economic, diplomatic and institutional affiliations. Even once this ends — as eventually it must — no one will forget that Russia wrecked its neighbour without anything even distantly approaching a proportionate provocation. The consequences of this act of aggression — Sweden and Finland preparing to join Nato, Germany rearming — are far-reaching and will last.

Antonov’s main assignment was to improve relations with the United States. And I believe this was a mission he embraced with sincerity. During a small lunch in December in his elegant residence, he expanded persuasively on that goal. Our two countries had important interests and global concerns in common, he said. But there was mutual distrust to overcome. Perhaps one could organize some youth programs, he suggested. These could bring Russian young people together with their American counterparts, to start building mutual understanding and forge relationships. What he had in mind was organic, gradual and positive.

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And I think he was making headway. Serious voices in the Washington policy world were beginning to conclude that diminishing Russia was counterproductive, that Moscow’s feeling of being boxed in by Nato and treated like a second-rate power should be given consideration, that a Russia possessed of heft and respect could be a partner against an aggressive China, a volatile Central Asia and the resurgence of Islamist terrorism. Wasn’t it time to bury the hatchet, and besides, did Washington really want to shoulder the world’s burdens all by ourselves?

Over time, this view might have prevailed. But instead of playing the judicious long-game envisioned by Antonov, Putin decided to speed things along with tanks, missiles, and genocide, and now his envoy is left holding the fort as representative of a Mongol-era scorched earth barbarian, a country whose neighbour no one wants to be, a leader President Biden has termed a war criminal, and a state that has been ignominiously kicked off the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Ambassadors tend to be well educated, well-traveled and self-possessed. There is an esprit de corps among them, even when they represent hostile states. Everyone shares a lifestyle of transience and understands the obligation that comes with the job: to defend positions whether or not one agrees with them. You see each other constantly in social settings where everything is light and civil and wine is served, and then you clash in a debate or security council vote; it engenders a sense of irony.

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They are comparable to soldiers in that they don’t make policy; they obey directives. A sensible government will consult them, listening to their estimations of the chances for success, heeding their warnings about unanticipated fallout. In the end though, ambassadors must represent whatever decision is made, and with conviction.

But what if they simply can’t? Here is where diplomats, as a rule, are in a better place than soldiers. A soldier or officer who walks away in protest can be prosecuted or, depending on the circumstances, even executed for desertion or treason. For most ambassadors, the stakes are not quite that high.

As with military officers, they are patriots, so it’s unlikely to be an easy decision, especially at the hard-won career level of ambassadorship. But what if they come to feel that they can no longer, in good conscience, defend the actions of their government? They have options: retire, resign, or jump ship altogether and seek asylum. The first two can either be accomplished quietly or be accompanied by statements of dissent. And what happens then? That very much depends on what country they are from.

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Some ambassadors, by resigning, improve their personal circumstances. Diplomats from Afghanistan were famous for abandoning their posts, even before the recent Taliban takeover. Currently — though now at least with some justification — 55 Afghan ambassadors and staff have requested asylum in the U.S. In general, it’s more common for diplomats from volatile, poor, or conflict-ridden countries to resign postings in more prosperous, Western countries. Without doubting the sincerity of their motives, the move has at least as many benefits as costs. They and their families receive asylum, gain residency, and typically receive a comfortable sinecure.

The Trump era was studded with ambassadorial resignations. In 2018 James Melville resigned as U.S. ambassador to Estonia in protest over President Trump’s stance towards the European Union. He moved on to become Associate Dean at the College of Charleston. In the same year, U.S. ambassador to Panama John Feeley went public about his resignation in an op-ed in the Washington Post, titled “Why I Could No Longer Serve This President.” Therein he wrote that Trump had “warped and betrayed” what to him were “the traditional core values of the United States.” He moved to Miami and joined a media company. Everyone remained alive, well, and able to earn a respectable living.

But then there are countries that take a far dimmer view of absconding diplomats. During Communist era Poland, for example, their ambassador to Japan Zdzislaw Rurarz defected to the U.S. to protest his government’s imposition of martial law. He was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. He was stripped of his citizenship, and his property in Poland was confiscated. Information about North Korean diplomats who defect to the South is murky, with rumours of their children being abducted and forcibly repatriated, and their family members back at home being punished or possibly even killed.

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There is one last, less dramatic way ambassadors can exit their posts — they can have their accreditation yanked and be expelled, not for anything they did wrong but as stand-ins for their government. The State Department is not quite ready yet to do this to Antonov; so far they have only expressed their displeasure by withholding visas for his embassy staff’s spouses and family members, and as he laments in the Politico article, sending home his cook. Our U.S. diplomats in Russia have seen worse; they’ve had family pets killed and their young children waylaid and intimidated on the way to school, all to signal Russia’s anger with the administration they represent.

American ambassadors to Russia have resigned in years gone by, but I couldn’t find evidence of the reverse. Given the treatment of dissidents and even of private citizens who are seen to be disobedient, I suspect it’s not extremely advisable for Russian officials or diplomats to express public disagreement, let alone defect. Yet to their immense credit, in light of the horrific actions of their government in Ukraine, some courageous individuals in public roles have done just that.

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Russian climate envoy Anatoly Chubais resigned his position and departed Russia, citing his opposition to Putin’s war in Ukraine as the reason. Ironically, it was Chubais who gave Putin his first Kremlin job in the mid-1990s, remained his strong supporter and held several important posts in various state companies. Arkady Dvorkovich, was the senior economic adviser to Dmitry Medvedev during his presidency, and was deputy Prime Minister until 2018. He stepped down as head of the state-backed Skolkovo technology fund after condemning the invasion.

Andrei Kozyrev, who was Russia’s Foreign Minister and later a Duma member under President Boris Yeltsin, told Newsweek that Russian envoys have the responsibility to oppose the actions of Putin by resigning in protest. But his career ended some years ago and he lives in balmy Florida, so that’s easy advice to give.

What should Antonov the Abandoned do? His choices are not great. Unless the US expels him he can remain in place, but his goal of bridge-building has been blown to smithereens right along with the buildings of Mariupol. Perhaps there will be a thaw again at some future point, but not until Putin is well and truly out of the picture. And any new and different leader will appoint his own people as diplomats. Is walking away a possibility, or does he have family members who would pay a price? Or does he, perhaps, out of loyalty or conviction actually support the unfolding barbarism?

Ukrainians write songs about their beloved Turkish drones. Ankara is feted in Kyiv. Now, not content with helping to kill Russians, Turkey’s President Recep Erdoğan is now trying to negotiate with them. Erdoğan spoke to Putin over the phone on Sunday and stressed the palpable need for a ceasefire on humanitarian grounds, saying Turkey was happy to help. He also — and this is important — made clear that Turkey will not jeopardise its relations with Russia or Ukraine. His ability to speak to both sides was, he said, an asset. They both agreed to hold more talks in Istanbul.

Turkey has offered to mediate between the two sides ever since the Russian army barrelled into Ukraine, following Putin’s hour-long televised meeting in which it became quite clear he was in the grip of despotism’s true curse: an utter detachment from the reality that would, under normal circumstances, restrain him. Thousands have now died in a war that is now over a month old and that Putin told everyone would last three days. Then again, he also told everyone — including Ukraine’s Jewish President — that he was going to “denazify Ukraine”, which his troops chose to do last week by shooting up the Holocaust Memorial in Drobitsky Yar on the outskirts of Kharkiv.

So Putin now finds himself in a tricky spot. His soldiers are getting shredded by Ukrainians buoyed by Western weaponry and the motivation that comes with defending their homeland . My concern has always been that Moscow has never cared about the lives of its soldiers — it’s not like their families can complain or the government is accountable to its citizens. Besides, there are plenty more where they came from and, despite some reports, plenty more Russian hardware to wheel into play.

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But for now, Russia flounders. There is much talk of “off-ramps”, a phrase used in geopolitical circles to mean giving someone a way out of a disastrous situation (usually of their own making). The problem is: how do you do it? Putin cannot talk to the United States or to Britain or even the EU — all of whom are doling out weapons and cash to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia — without looking pathetically weak.

Any Western state is a problem for him, which is a problem for us because we’re not going to trust China to do it. And no country in the non-Western world has the relationships or political clout to do it, apart from maybe India, which is more concerned with keeping things sweet with Moscow and is therefore clearly unacceptable to the Ukrainians. Such is the desperation for mediators that last month saw the yarmulke-wearing Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett jetting off to Moscow to try to make some progress (“see how Putin big-dicked him by making him fly on Shabbat,” observed an Israeli friend to me). It didn’t seem especially serious.

Turkey, though, is different. “Turkey is kind of unique here,” Ziya Meral, a Senior Associate Fellow at RUSI tells me. “It borders Ukraine and Russia in the Black Sea and has made sure to have good relations with both. It has consistently condemned Russian aggression in Ukraine — especially the seizure of Crimea. It is supplying the Ukrainians with drones. But at the same time it has strong relations with Russia, especially around energy, defence and tourism.”

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He continues: “For the Russians, there are obvious advantages. First of all, it allows them to sit down and say they are negotiating. They can claim they are trying to find a solution — but not with the West. That is vital to them: to show they are engaging for peace but on their own terms. They are not bowing to anyone.”

It does seem the Kremlin is exploring this possible off-ramp seriously. The Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, who is personally close to Putin, was on the ground in Turkey over the weekend, acting as an unofficial plenipotentiary for Moscow and will report back to his President personally. To be fair, he is by all accounts now living there anyway after being forced to scuttle out of both London and Israel. It’s not the type of forced exile that millions of Ukrainians are suffering right now, but it’s something.

For Turkey, the war in Ukraine presents both danger and opportunity. Erdoğan wants his country to form part of an energy route across the European continent — something that has become much more likely following the EU energy sanctions on Russia, as well as the fact that no one now wants to rely on Moscow for gas anymore anyway. Erdoğan has also always insisted that Turkey is an important global player that needs to be involved in the world’s major events. And the one now playing out in Ukraine folds all his neuroses into it. For him, Turkey must never be too reliant on Russia and China but he is also perennially mistrustful of Nato. A middle course is the only way. Do this right and that might be possible.

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But as skilful a negotiator he may be and as open to resolution as Putin may be — and I have reservations over the veracity of both of those claims — there is a limit to what can be achieved. Putin is only talking so much because the Ukrainians fought so well. If they hadn’t, he wouldn’t be negotiating. He’d be gloating.

And so it won’t be Turkey, or Erdoğan, that brings about peace in Ukraine. In the coming weeks, it might play a supporting role, but that’s it. As Meral concludes: “It’s not the men in suits but the ones on the battlefield that will ultimately decide what happens — as they always do.”

Since Russian tanks and men swarmed across the border on 24 February, we’ve been wrenched back in time. What is happening on the battlefields of Ukraine is something we haven’t seen for over half a century anywhere the Western media really cares about. This is not the tit-for-tat killings between psychotic paramilitaries that was Yugoslavia. It’s not the cave battle of Tora Bora, and it’s most certainly not the counterinsurgency of Iraq. It is two armies facing off in the field; lines of tanks chewing up the sodden earth; phalanxes of soldiers marching step by step; bawling air raid sirens and, of course, bombed out cities mottled with dead kids.

That is to say, it’s World War II redux. Over the weekend, I spoke to a friend in Ukraine who I would accompany to the battlefields of eastern Ukraine when all this kicked off almost eight years ago. She had just got back from Kyiv. “It was hell,” she said. “The east was child’s play compared to this.” Another friend tells me about a local man who has just returned from the front. “They’re animals,” he says of the Russians, adding that he plans to return after a brief rest because he doesn’t want the Russians “to do to his family what he saw they did there”. When I ask what this means, her response is blunt: “Executing people. He said they catch pro-Ukrainian people in Kherson and shoot them. One by one.”

Almost two weeks ago, I wrote that “of all the conflicts I have engaged with or covered in my life, Ukraine is where I most clearly see the unambiguous resurgence of violent, expansionist fascism. Ukrainians are fighting for us all, remember that.” If it was a touch grandiose, it was also, I think, accurate. I believe that what is being hammered out right now on the battlefields of Ukraine is not just its future and Russia’s, but the West’s, too. If the Ukrainians had folded after 72 hours or however long Putin’s lick-spittles told him the “special police operation” would take, then the Spetsnaz and gangs of Kadyrovite scumbags would be halfway to Georgia and Moldova by now. Half the east would now be gone and a new Iron Curtain, though perhaps this time a gold one embossed with the Versace logo, would be descending from Tbilisi to Minsk.

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As it happens the Ukrainians — pumped full of Western javelins and stingers — fought like hell. And we finally started sanctioning Putin’s bag men. Poor Roman Abramovich has had Chelsea confiscated. A sad day indeed, but we all have to make sacrifices.

Now, after a month, politicians on each side talk peace. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said everything will be up for discussion. He had first agreed to talks with Russia at the end of February but not to the location the Russians wanted: Minsk. You can see why, what with Belarus being one of the launch points for the Kremlin’s invasion and now de facto Russian territory. Indeed, why bother with Minsk, why not just meet in the Kremlin? Or perhaps even cut out the middleman and just hold the talks in a Gulag?

It was an unserious suggestion three days into a war the Kremlin thought would be a cakewalk. As things have gone badly for the Russians since, there have been further rounds of talks. The outlines are already clear: Zelenskyy has hinted he is ready to make compromises over the future of the Crimea and Donbas territories that Russia stole in 2014. I know this bothers some — though an increasingly diminishing number — Ukrainians I know. But it’s sensible. They’ve been gone a long time. A five-year-old in 2014 is now a teenager; and he or she hasn’t grown up in Ukraine. Plus, Ukraine is probably better off without the Donbas. Trust me: I’ve been there.

Also on the table is Ukrainian neutrality, which essentially means a commitment not to join Nato. This is also sensible because Nato membership was never realistic anyway. If it were, Kyiv wouldn’t be in the war it’s in now. All this, Zelenskyy has stressed, would have to be put to the Ukrainian people in a referendum.

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In essence it’s about accepting the reality on the ground. Crimea and the Donbas are gone; Russia will never countenance Ukraine in Nato. As far as what Russia has to accept, the same principle applies. This means acknowledging that Ukrainians are a sovereign people — not, as Putin seems to think, merely confused Russians. If he still doubts this, he can find the evidence for its veracity in the thousands of body bags now crossing the borders back into Russia. This would mean withdrawing his troops from all Ukrainian territory barring Crimea and the Donbas. He must also accept that Ukraine now has a formalised relationship with the West, based around military equipment and cash. This would hopefully be easier for him to comprehend. After all, he created it.

Do this and there is a way out. What bothers me is that Moscow doesn’t want one. Wherever I look I see talk of Russian overreach, of Russian losses and Ukrainian successes. And it’s not just from online blowhards. I speak to the military experts. Everyone from British officers to this amazing chap on Twitter who works out the progress of the Russian offensive from the state of its army’s wheels is clear. The war is going badly for Moscow.

People now talk of a stalemate. And this worries me because, once again, we need to understand that this is not a 21st-century but a 20th century-conflict. What was World War I if not years of stalemate punctuated by periods of intense, incontinent violence? Stalemates can last a long time and claim the lives of millions.

I think Moscow knows this. Generally, it uses peace talks as an excuse to rearm, regroup and better its chances of more effectively murdering its enemies. I think it’s negotiating in bad faith once again. It can afford to have its conscripts chewed up in Ukraine. It’s not like their families can complain. Putin has turned Mariupol into Aleppo. Now he’s deporting thousands to Russia. From Syria to Siberia, from Assad to Stalin.

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Russia’s assault on Ukraine attacks us all. First, it assaults language. It perverts the meaning of human rights and basic decency. “Humanitarian corridors” become “killing fields” and “peace” means only yet more death. And then of course they come for all you have left: your senses. “We have not invaded Ukraine.” “Ukrainians are shelling themselves.” What you saw you did not see.

This is Putin’s Russia, and it is dragging us back to the darkest period in modern history. More war, not peace, will always be his aim.

At dusk on Hungary’s Beregsurány border crossing with western Ukraine, a small, but constant flow of displaced people was making its way across the border. They were mostly women, children and old men: Ukraine has reportedly banned men of fighting age from leaving the country.

Wheeling their luggage, wrapped up against the biting wind, ethnic Hungarians and Hungarian-speaking Roma from Ukraine’s Zakarpattia region waited to be picked up by family members on the Hungarian side of the border, and ethnic Ukrainians from deeper inside the country were asking for lifts to Budapest. 

The Hungarian government has waived visa requirements for Ukrainians fleeing the war, and has indicated it is willing to accept up to 600,000 refugees. But one young couple from Kyiv I spoke to, Olena and Yura, were going the other way. Newly-engaged, they were returning to Ukraine to reassure Olena’s mother in Lviv, after her 50-year-old father had taken up arms with a local defence militia. “My mother was crying,” Olena told me chirpily. “But my father said, ’Who’s going to do it if not us?’”

Four days into the invasion, the Ukrainian armed forces and local volunteers are fighting bravely, defending the capital Kyiv against early Russian infiltration efforts and putting up a dogged defence against Russian pushes from the northeast towards the city of Kharkiv and from the separatist provinces of the Donbas region in the east. But for all the well-meaning excitement on social media from Ukraine’s Western supporters, stoked by video evidence of Ukrainian tactical victories, the strategic odds remain stacked in Russia’s favour.

The air and missile strikes on Ukraine’s defences have, until now, been far below Russia’s potential capabilities, probably indicating that Putin is eager to minimise the destruction and civilian casualties to make a conquered Ukraine easier to dominate, and to limit international condemnation. The Russian push on Kyiv has so far consisted of a high-risk assault by lightly-armed airborne infantry, which established a staging ground for probing movements by elite reconnaissance forces. The Ukrainian defenders have been able to contain their attempted sorties into central Kyiv, inflicting heavy casualties. 

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But the main Russian ground forces have reached the capital in two armoured thrusts from the north, massing either side of the river Dnieper, with another thrust closing in on the capital from the northeast. Another armoured push is spreading out northward and along the Black Sea coast from the Crimean peninsula, rapidly gaining ground and so far meeting limited resistance.

Perhaps the intention is to encircle the bulk of the Ukrainian army in the east: if there was any Russian ambition to shatter Ukrainian morale in the war’s opening hours, that gambit has failed. Yet Russia has, at the time of writing, deployed less than half of its forces assembled at Ukraine’s borders. It is still too early to make confident pronouncements about the war’s final outcome: we are still in its opening phase, and the real battle for Kyiv has not yet begun.

Viewed from neighbouring Hungary, the Russian invasion has come as a terrible shock to a Fidesz government that has long aimed to balance Nato and EU commitments with a pragmatic working relationship with Putin’s Russia. Only a few weeks ago, in his state of the nation address, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán stated that “we are members of Nato and the European Union, and at the same time we have balanced political and economic relations with Russia. The Hungarian example proves that this is possible,” adding that he was “convinced that without economic cooperation with Russia, Europe will remain weak and anaemic”. 

But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upset this delicate calculus. In interviews with UnHerd over the past week, senior Hungarian officials emphasised their horror and condemnation of Putin’s actions, and their commitment to both Ukraine’s territorial integrity and Nato’s defence of Central Europe — while still observing that Hungary has long criticised what they view as the repression of Ukraine’s ethnic Hungarian minority. Unlike other Central European nations, Hungary will not actively support Ukraine with weapons supplies or demand an American military presence, but now supports sanctions against Russia. In unequivocal language the Hungarian president János Áder has stated that Hungary condemns “the aggression decided and then carried out by the Putin regime” and that it sees “the Russian attack as a serious violation and a mockery of Moscow’s international obligations”.

Speaking to UnHerd, Orbán’s communications advisor, Zoltan Kovacs, observed that “in the Ukraine, we have an immediate interest because of the 150,000 ethnic Hungarians living across the borders”. Dismissing early claims that Hungary would not accept displaced persons from Ukraine, he emphasised that “we are practically preparing ourselves for all possible scenarios, like the influx of large numbers of refugees, so we’ve started to make preparations for that. And the Hungarian military is preparing for all kinds of scenarios.”

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Considering the geopolitical implications, Viktor Orbán’s Political Director and strategic advisor, Balasz Orbán (no relation), told me that this is a turning point for Europe as well as Hungary. “We realise that justice and wonderful ideas are not enough. You can be on the good side of history, but still lose wars and lose geopolitical positions: you need to have power,” he said. “Because right now, the problem is that Europe is not capable of defending herself. And we are dependent on the big guys, the United States on one side and Russia on the other side, and they are the decision makers, if we take it honestly. Without a military, Europe is just a voice accepting statements. It’s just nothing.”

When I asked him if Hungary was moving towards Macron’s concept of strategic autonomy, which would enable Europe to defend itself from threats like Russia, Balasz Orbán answered without hesitation: “Exactly. It’s very important,” he told me. “Emmanuel Macron is a very smart politician and what he is talking about, it’s obviously a French context, but we can deal with that. We have the same idea with a Central European context.” 

Certainly, the war in Ukraine has helped Macron make his case for strategic autonomy, with the French president declaring that the Russian invasion “has shown again that we have to accelerate the sovereignty agenda for Europe. Tragic times are back. War is back on our soil. If there was ever any need to prove Europe isn’t just a market for consumers but is a power,” that time is now.

The invasion has also helped diminish the moral and political standing of a Germany that long fought to quash any talk of European strategic autonomy, while waving away warnings that disarmament and reliance on Russian energy have left Europe helpless against any future Russian aggression. In an extraordinary admission, the head of the German Army, Lt. General Alfons Mais, bemoaned on LinkedIn that years of neglect have “left the Bundeswehr more or less powerless”, so that “the Bundeswehr, the army that I am privileged to lead, is more or less bare. The options that we can offer the politicians to support the alliance are extremely limited… This does not feel good! I am pissed off!”

Of course, much the same could be said of Britain’s deep military cuts, though our own military and political leaders are markedly less willing to say it. Indeed, excitable enthusiasts for military intervention such as Tobias Ellwood, chair of the Commons Defence Select Committee, have been trying to drum up enthusiasm for a Nato No-Fly Zone in Ukraine, a euphemism for shooting down Russian aircraft entering Ukrainian territory.

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Not to be outdone, David Davis MP has pushed the idea of providing close air support for Ukrainian forces against Russian ground troops, an idea far beyond the bounds of either British capacity or rational analysis. Shooting down Russian aircraft or bombing Russian tanks means war with Russia, and Nato simply will not go to war with its nuclear rival over Ukraine. These are dangerous times for Britain and for Europe as a whole, and such wild pronouncements do not instil confidence in the capacity of the British political system to manage them sensibly. 

For all of Europe, from Hungary to Britain, the war in Ukraine must come as a wake-up call. The good times are over, and a return to conflict between the great powers on our home continent is now more likely than it has been in a generation. For a small country like Hungary, watching the prospect of a resurgent Russia creeping its way towards its borders with alarm, the danger is clearly apparent. In his state of the nation address, Orbán observed: “whether a Nato member or not, no ally in the world will take our place in defending our homeland. Alongside us, with us, they might; but certainly not instead of us. If we are not strong enough, Hungary cannot be safe. Clint Eastwood taught us this: if there is a gun nearby, it is best if we are holding it.” 

For all the conflict between Brussels and Budapest, it is time for European officials to take this warning to heart. Europe needs to rearm, and to be ready to defend itself alone if necessary. The announcement on Sunday afternoon by Germany’s new Chancellor Olaf Scholz that Germany will double its defence spending is a welcome relief, and hopefully a turning point in European security policy.

The Russian invasion has done much to reinvigorate the Atlantic alliance, but it has also exposed Europe’s utter dependence on US arms at a time when America’s greatest strategic threat is in the Pacific. America cannot, and will not, fight a two-front war in Europe and the Far East: a serious threat to American hegemony in the Pacific will force Europe to shoulder much of the burden for its own defence as Washington’s attention and industrial might focuses on China.

All the earlier appeals to the rules-based order by EU officials have been exposed as dangerously empty rhetoric: in a world of hard power, it is only those capable of imposing order that get to write the rules.

To succeed, sanctions must not only impose economic costs — they must also change the political behaviour of target governments. Neither is at all straightforward.

As the past week has shown, designing sanctions that will harm Russia but not other European economies is fiendishly difficult. So far, only modest measures have been imposed: primarily asset freezes and exclusion from the Swift payments system for some banks; asset seizures and travel bans for some elites and oligarchs; and limits on Aeroflot flights. None of these will cripple Russia’s economy, despite fanciful claims by Western leaders.

The proposed sanctions on Russia’s central bank may cut much deeper. Exactly how far these will go is not yet clear. But freezing Russia’s overseas currency reserves will make it harder for the central bank to defend the value of the rouble, and to supply foreign exchange for commercial banks. This is unlikely to collapse the economy, as some advocates suggest, but it could have significant and far-reaching consequences, including runs on Russian banks and impediments to foreign trade.

However, it’s precisely the threat to trade that will probably lead Western governments to avoid a total freeze — limiting Russia’s access to foreign exchange, but not severing it entirely. The reason is simple: Russia is not a minor economy. Western countries, firms and banks do a lot of business with Russia. Wide-ranging sanctions will naturally have blowback. This is why tougher measures will be difficult, if not impossible, to impose.

The real “nuclear” option would be to embargo Russia’s energy exports, which comprise over half of Russia’s total exports. This would inflict serious damage. But, given that Europe relies on Russia for about a quarter of its oil and over a third of its gas, it would also spur massive inflation and induce economic recession in the West. Prices have already spiked due to the conflict, which will further harm households reeling from record-high energy prices. It’s telling, for example, that Germany has “de-certified” the Nordstream-2 pipeline, but not the pipelines through which it receives existing supplies.

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Likewise, Western governments appear unable to agree on completely blocking Russia from Swift, because this would create difficulties for Russian and Western banks alike. Without Swift, how would Germany pay for Russian gas? And, if it cannot pay, would the gas keep flowing? How would the many other Western businesses working in or dealing with Russia make payments? For the same reason, although some sectors of the Russian economy, such as chemicals and automobiles, rely on imported hi-tech Western components, so far, export restrictions remain limited, for fear of damaging Western firms.

Despite their belligerent rhetoric, Western leaders are wary of creating more problems for economies already struggling to recover from the deep recessions caused by their Covid-19 lockdowns. They are quietly carving out even non-critical economic sectors, such as luxury goods and diamond exports, from the sanction regime. It is hard to avoid the impression that, having blundered into confrontation with Russia, Western governments are now realising they have very limited options, and remain reluctant to put their money where their mouths are.

However, even if the West can find ways to inflict serious economic damage on Russia, that still does not mean sanctions will “work”. To be truly effective, they must also change the Russian government’s behaviour. And this is where the logic of sanctions often breaks down. It is remarkably rare for Western policymakers to explain — or even consider — exactly how “economic pain” is supposed to translate into “political gain”. And the prospects in this particular case do not look promising.

The fundamental problem is that sanctions are based on a dubious understanding of human behaviour. They are a quintessentially liberal instrument, resting on the assumption that every man has his price: if I impose economic costs on you, you will revise the cost-benefit analysis of your course of action, and change your behaviour accordingly.

In the real world, however, many regimes and their supporters are willing to endure colossal economic costs to pursue their political and security goals. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party regime preferred to see Iraq’s economy and society destroyed rather than relinquish power. Fidel Castro’s regime withstood a punishing US embargo for decades. Iran has suffered serious economic harm under Western sanctions without relinquishing its nuclear programme.

What are Putin’s goals in Ukraine? The Russian government has made it clear since the early Noughties that it cannot tolerate the eastward expansion of Nato, considering it a serious threat to Russian security. Its invasion of Georgia in 2008, and its attacks on Ukraine in 2014, long ago demonstrated the Kremlin’s determination to prevent neighbouring countries falling into the Western orbit, even at the cost of international isolation and punitive sanctions. One does not need to sympathise with Putin at all to recognise that Russia’s bank balance is not his primary consideration.

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If Putin will not put economic costs ahead of his security goals, how else might sanctions work? Classically, comprehensive embargoes seemed to be guided by a “naïve theory” of sanctions, whereby economic suffering is expected to compel the population to rise up against their wicked leaders. But this rarely, if ever, happens. If anything, economic immiseration tends to fragment and weaken the population, who become absorbed by the struggle to subsist and more reliant on government help — as seen in Iraq.

Targeted sanctions work on an equally naïve basis, assuming that political leaders and their business cronies are completely autonomous from the people, such that manipulating their personal wealth will convince them to change course. In truth, political leaders always represent some broader set of forces in their regime and wider society. Their policies reflect that underlying coalition. If they change course, they will have to answer to their supporters.

Vladimir Putin is a powerful and quasi-authoritarian leader, but he is not autonomous from Russian society. His rise reflects a broadly-based nationalist backlash against the consequences of neoliberal “shock therapy” practised on Russia by the International Monetary Fund after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under the pro-Western President Yeltsin, the public wealth built up under communism was pillaged by oligarchs, while the Russian people suffered astonishing levels of deprivation. In the decade to 1998, GDP fell by 45%, mortality increased by 50%, government revenues had nearly halved, and crime had doubled.

Putin rose to power by promising to halt and reverse Russia’s national decline. In his first seven years in office, real wages doubled (albeit from a low base). Using soaring oil revenues, Putin stabilised the economy and paid off foreign debt, reasserting Russia’s sovereignty. He brought the oligarchs to heel, jailing or exiling anyone who would not recognise the state’s supremacy. And he restored stability and a measure of national pride to an exhausted and demoralised people. His regime, centred on a network of siloviki (security and military officials) and managers of state-owned enterprises, has proven politically robust and durable — a state within the state.

This is important not to praise or exonerate Putin, but to understand why his popularity has remained high, even under sanctions. Experimental research suggests that Russia’s economic decline since 2014 — mostly caused by declining oil prices, though compounded by sanctions — has cost Putin some support. But it has been more than compensated for by an upsurge in nationalist backing. Putin’s approval rating increased from 65% in January 2014 to 86% in April 2014, following the annexation of Crimea. It remained above 80% for the next two years before returning to the high 60s.

Today, a large majority of Russians blame the West for the crisis in Ukraine, while two-thirds have little or no concern about sanctions. Putin’s regime may have persecuted opposition figures, curbed dissent, and restricted electoral competition — but, despite such authoritarian measures, he retains widespread support. Western leaders could only dream of his approval ratings: support for Biden stands at 42%, for Macron, 40%, and, for Boris Johnson, just 25%.

Nor is there much sign of political fracture within the regime that sanctions could exploit. Putin’s ability to publicly humiliate his spy chief, who bodged his lines at the televised, stage-managed security council meeting prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, suggests he feels secure and confident. The overwhelming vote in the Duma of 400 to zero in favour of recognising the breakaway “republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk suggests either broad elite consensus or an unwillingness to openly defy the Kremlin. Exactly how the (modest) economic pain caused by sanctions is meant to generate political gain is therefore hard to discern.

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All too often, sanctions are a comforting but dangerous illusion: they are alluring because they seem to provide an effective option between war and words. When diplomacy seems to fail, and states are unwilling to risk war, something else is needed — and that something is sanctions. But just because something must be done does not mean that this “something” is going to work. Moreover, it is all too easy to forget that embargoes are a weapon of war, often devastating target populations and escalating conflicts, rather than peacefully resolving them. In response to the latest sanctions, Putin has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. It seems unlikely that he would deploy them in response to banking sanctions. But this is a reminder of that the stakes are incredibly high.

Ultimately, even if sanctions do bite, we need to ask: what is the endgame? Sanctions are at best a means to an end, and surely the desired end is lasting peace in Eastern Europe. And one does not need to have any sympathy whatsoever with the Putin regime to believe that this can only be achieved by reckoning with core Russian interests.

Like it or not, powerful states have the capacity to inflict serious harm on weaker ones — just ask the Serbs, Libyans, Afghans, Iraqis and Syrians on the receiving end of the Nato powers’ tender mercies. If Russia is dissatisfied, it clearly has the power to upset the existing order by force. The only way to prevent this is to compromise with Russia’s concerns, or deploy overwhelming force to deter it from using its military power. The West has done neither, dismissing Putin’s demands to establish a neutral buffer zone between Russia and Nato, while failing to deter him from using force to achieve his objectives.

The only way out of this disaster is a negotiated settlement, which will require Nato to reckon with Russian interests, and preserve Ukrainian democracy and sovereignty within a framework of international neutrality. For the brutal reality is this: sanctions are unlikely to force Russia out of Ukraine, and the West is unwilling to be drawn directly into battle with a nuclear-armed state. Unless a diplomatic solution can be found, sanctions are likely to be merely part of a grinding proxy war along the lines of the brutal and horrific conflict in Syria.

The people of Ukraine have already suffered too much. Sanctions won’t save them — they may only make their misery worse.

But it’s not just the cold that is constant in Ukraine’s east: Russian soldiers have been there for almost eight years — and now the Kremlin looks ready for yet another fight. This latest buildup started early last year when, after a few years of relative quiet, it sent around 110,000 soldiers to the border — the largest military build-up there since 2014. And then: nothing. Until now.

In recent weeks, the Russian forces have been bolstered by naval infantry, heavy weapons, logistical units, and parachute battalions. Startled reservists are arriving on the border, as are units from Russia’s east, having trundled thousands of miles across the country by train to line up and face down their Ukrainian neighbours. Independent Belarusian journalists are reporting that Russian hardware is arriving in Belarus for “snap military drills”, supposedly to be held in February. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Washington has accused Russia looking for an excuse to invade: White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed that US intelligence had “information that indicates Russia’s already prepositioned a group of operatives to conduct a false-flag operation”.

The background to all of this is diplomacy — of sorts. On Sunday evening, US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov met in Geneva in the first of several planned meetings to try to resolve the crisis. The two positions are clear. Washington wants Russia to de-escalate by pulling back its troops and agreeing to respect Ukrainian territorial integrity and sovereignty; Russia insists that the US and Nato accede to its demand not to expands eastwards, and that Ukraine will never become a member.

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The question is: why all this now? Russian fears of Nato encirclement are as old at the organisation itself. According to Vladislav Davidzon, Ukrainian-American author of the original and superb From Odessa with Love, the reason is simple. “High oil prices mean Russia is flush with cash,” he tells me. “After having had a very good 2021, the Kremlin sees this as a decisive moment. They see a weak American president in the White House who has continually talked tough but constantly signalled that he wants a quiet reset of policy.”

He continues: “As soon as Biden took office, the Kremlin started testing him with the initial buildup early last year. Everything since then has confirmed their belief. The Russians think they will never have a better opportunity to reorder things in their favour.”

But still the US tough talk continues. Earlier this month, the Biden administration threatened “decisive” action against Russia if it crossed the border, outlining a series of “punishing” financial, technology and military sanctions against Moscow that it said would go into effect within hours of an invasion of Ukraine.

It’s a depressing moment when, as a political analyst, you realise that one of the most dominant trends in international politics is déjà vu. Almost eight years ago I sat in Kyev’s government offices while politicians chain-smoked their way through military briefings and repeatedly wondered when the much-promised support from the West would come. I squatted in the snow with soldiers who asked me why the West could not just give them a few lousy javelin anti-tank guided missile systems to stop so many of their comrades being blown to bits. Eventually the javelins came, but only after years of painful diplomacy, international pressure and former president Barack Obama had left office. By the time Trump finally gave the green light, hundreds of Ukrainians had died.

What made all of this worse was that — at each stage of the crisis — the Ukrainians had been led to believe that help was coming; that the US or Germany or Britain would finally do what it had long threatened and impose sanctions on Russia that would a make it stop, or provide the type of military help to turn things around.

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Now we are here again: the same questions and the same requests, though the Ukrainians understand the game now. I recently spoke to a Ukrainian national security expert and she told me something that stuck in my mind: “For years the Brits gave us so much support — verbally. But it was only after the Skripal poisoning that we really felt the difference. The Russians poisoning a British agent in their own country got the British mad. After that it became personal for you guys.”

She was right. In the end, talk is talk but the national interest — and its attendant, pride — reigns alone. As Davidzon points out, for all of Biden’s strong rhetoric, he continues to resist the idea of making sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline project part of congressional law.

In this, the US is backing its most important EU partner: Germany, which wants to decouple the pipeline from any EU or Nato-wide sanctions package. Europe sucks on Russian gas like a crackhead on his pipe. And how many junkies can realistically sanction their dealer? Germany is weak here; and the US is made to look weak by proxy.

Now add domestic politics into the mix. The Kremlin has gone too far to back down now. If you govern by fear and control, you can never, ever afford to look weak. Ukraine, meanwhile, has its own problems. Yesterday morning former president Petro Poroshenko landed in Kyev to face charges of “state treason” for having “supported the activity of terrorist organisations”. Simply put: his administration is alleged to have assisted the Russian-backed and commanded separatists in selling coal in the country’s east even as Ukrainian troops were being killed.

So the situation is combustible. Neither side can afford to lose face with their own people. Once more war is likely to come and, when all is said and done, it is largely because of our own weakness.

Why did Putin just walk into Crimea in 2014 and take it? Because he knew the West would talk but not act. Why did Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko feel able to order a Ryanair plane down and take a dissident off it last year? Because he knew the West would talk but not act. Why is Moscow, now via Minsk, continuing to weaponise migrants against the EU? Well, you get the point. Moscow suffers no real consequences for its behaviour, so why should it stop?

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All the while, the West talks endlessly without really doing much. And that only makes things worse: for Ukrainians, for democratic Belarusians and, above all, for our own credibility. The biggest winner is always the Kremlin.

It’s time to put up or shut up. Either we back Kyiv — by giving it full military support and smashing Russia with sanctions, or we have the guts to tell the Ukrainians that we are abandoning the non-Nato east to Russia and start to draw real red lines that we will actually enforce. It’s time to back Ukraine — or, once and for all, just tell these people, who have suffered so much to defend our interests, that they are on their own for good.

Britain, he said, was guilty merely of its “usual opportunism”. Boris Johnson’s government was the “fifth wheel on the cart” in an unfriendly conspiracy against France by the two other English-speaking nations.

This is not normal language between allies – certainly not that of an experienced foreign minister speaking to his nation on live TV. There was a “serious crisis” between Paris, Washington and Canberra, Le Drian said, “a serious breach of trust”.

Three days into the great US-Australian-French Submarine Row, Le Drian made no attempt to lower periscope and dive into calmer waters. He exploded a series of diplomatic depth charges. He warned of further “consequences”, perhaps related to the fact that French officials say that they have documents which prove that President Joe Biden’s government lied to America’s oldest ally, France.

The fallout was caused by the Pacific security pact announced last week — AUKUS — which included a vague plan to build up to eight US-designed nuclear-powered submarines for Australia by an unspecified date. At the same time as detailing this, Canberra announced that it was cancelling a five-years old, Euros 60bn French contract to supply 12 diesel-powered submarines to the Australian navy by 2030.

This was the same 2016 deal that Australian and French ministers met to discuss last month. Although problems were discussed — cost-overruns, delays, design changes — a joint statement was agreed which restated the “importance of the (2016) contract”.

French officials now say they believe that the Australia-US-UK discussions have been going on for at least six months. And they suspect that they may have begun 18 months ago, under the Trump administration, and were then pursued by the Biden White House – which denied their existence in correspondence with France.

Hence the accusations of “lies and duplicity”. And hence France’s highly unusual step of withdrawing ambassadors from its allies Australia and the United States. And, in possibly the first example of a country being snubbed by a decision by another country not to recall its ambassador, Mr Le Drian said that the Johnson government had played only a small, “opportunistic” role in the affair.

Some British commentators have been delighted by France’s anger. This is all, they suggest, the “usual” French sulking and pique. Paris was excluded from the AUKUS partnership and from the new submarine deal, they say, because France is an “unreliable” ally and the French naval-building company, Naval Group, had messed up its “deal of the century” with Australia.

Other senior diplomats and former diplomats say that this is a gross misreading of what may come to be seen as the most serious diplomatic crisis within the western alliance since the second Iraq war in 2003 or the Suez Crisis in 1956.

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What's behind Macron's fury?

By Aris Roussinos

Lord Peter Ricketts, a former British ambassador to Paris and Nato and a former head of the Foreign Office, said: “France sees it as a betrayal by the British and the US, who did this secretly with Australia for the last six months. French diplomats have told me that America lied about what they were doing and they will be releasing documents to show that America lied. They are asking themselves, ‘What is the point of being a Nato ally if this is how the US behaves?’”

Gérard Araud, a former French ambassador to Washington, wrote yesterday: “[The United States] deliberately trampled the important interests of an ally…They might have invited France to join the project or offered some form of compensation. They couldn’t be bothered.”

The great winner in the saga, to date, is China — the intended “target” of the AUKUS pact and the reason why Australia sought upgraded submarine defences, which will now be delayed until the 2040s. Beijing must be looking on in delighted bemusement.

France is by no means free from blame. The Barracuda submarine programme, agreed under President Francois Hollande, has been subject to cost hikes and delays – some, but not all, caused by Australian second-thoughts and the promise that much of the work would be exported to Adelaide.

The suggestion in French media is that President Macron and his government took their eye off the ball: they didn’t monitor the submarine programme properly and failed to pick up on the secret talks with the USA. Where was French diplomacy? Where was the French external intelligence service?

The promised submarines were a nuclear-powered French design, reconfigured for diesel engines at Australia’s request. When France suspected that Canberra had changed its mind, it offered nuclear subs but the Australian government refused (while secretly asking for nuclear subs from the US).

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In Australia, though, the decision by Scott Morrison’s government to throw over the French contract has not been universally well-received. Canberra has been shilly-shallying about better submarines for the Australian navy since 2009. First a Japanese order was cancelled; now a French one. So the Australian tax-payer will once again be landed with billions of dollars for cancellation payments. There is no firm plan for the new US nuclear subs, just a “plan to have a plan” as the Sydney Morning Herald pointed out. Less work and less technology will probably be exported to Australia than under the French deal.

“Australia can now contemplate another decade or two with no new subs,” wrote Peter Hartcher, political editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. “And even if this proposal goes to plan, Australia will not have a full sovereign capability but an increased defence dependency on the US.”

There is an important part of this story which is often missing from British commentary. France is Australia’s neighbour. It is a Pacific nation — even a Pacific power. It is also an Indian Ocean nation.

Australia’s nearest neighbour to the east is New Caledonia, a French overseas territory, which is constitutionally part of France, not a French colony. Going west for a few thousand miles, Australia’s long-distance Indian Ocean neighbour is the island of Réunion, a French overseas département. The torpedoed submarine deal was the cornerstone of a new Pacific and Indian Ocean security partnership between France and Australia — re-asserted this year when Prime Minister Morrisson visited President Emmanuel Macron in the Elysée Palace.  That deal is now also, in effect, dead.

The French had hopes of playing an allied but independent-minded role in the Indo-Pacific region, alongside Australia, the United States and Japan. Macron especially wanted to strengthen France’s role there because he feared that Washington — whichever President might be in power — would stumble into a confrontational approach to China. He wanted Europe to have its own calming voice in western-Chinese relations.

Some commentators in France are suggesting that AUKUS is just a vulgar arms deal dressed up as a security pact. Washington, they say, was under pressure from the US military-industrial lobby to steal the French deal when evidence emerged that it was struggling (as all such big deals do). Senior French sources say that, au contraire, the principal attraction for Washington was to destroy the Franco-Oz pact and putting the French in their place. European and other countries are officially encouraged by the US to join in the policing of the Pacific or the South China Sea – but as junior partners not as thinking heads.

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The former Washington ambassador, Gérard Araud, says: “The United States have identified a single enemy, China and all foreign policy is subordinated to that imperative…They can only conceive of coalitions as under their direction and will only work with countries which accept a secondary role, such as the UK and Australia.”

Other sources suggest that the reality is more muddled. Neither the Trump nor the Biden administrations took the trouble to understand French interests in the Indo-Pacific. Insofar as they did, they were neutral or unsympathetic. American commercial and geo-political interests came first.

The secrecy of the talks — the failure to involve France in some way — does suggest that the US approach was a deliberate hit on Paris and Macron. Hence the extreme fury in the Elysée Palace.

Could Macron be deliberately over-reacting for domestic political reasons? Not exactly. His fury is, I am told, sincere. But Macron also knows that a high-profile assertion of French independence from Washington will do him no harm in the presidential election in April. The alternative — protesting in a more conventional way and playing down the affair — might have been very damaging.

In truth, Macron is in an odd position, both humiliated by what he sees as US treachery and vindicated by it. The French President has been saying for almost four years that Nato is “brain dead” and that Europe should no longer rely on the Atlantic alliance with the United States to defend, or even consider, European interests.

Le Drian said on Saturday that France would now make that point even more forcefully at the Nato summit in Madrid next year. Lord Ricketts predicts that the Pacific submarine saga will cause a “huge rift” within the Atlantic alliance.

As things stand — or as they stood — there are few takers for Macron’s vision of a European Union which plays a much bigger role in defending its own security and prosperity in association with Nato. Few other EU countries want to face the consequences of losing the American guarantee against Russia or having to pay more for their own defence.

That will not be transformed overnight but the tectonic plates might shift. European Nato countries were already badly shaken by America’s failure to consult on its withdrawal from Afghanistan. They must now consider the implications of the AUKUS affair — Washington mendaciously crushing the interests of an ally.

Nato in its present form survived Donald Trump. Can it survive Joe Biden?

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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The West can learn from China

By Marshall Auerback

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.

One man peddles on a cross trainer; one struggles to operate a weights machine; another uses his arms to work a leg press. Then one hops off an exercise bike and scoots gleefully across the room, squealing with delight.

It’s his look that I can’t forget: his eyes twinkle, his mouth explodes into a grin. It’s the same look that I’ve seen a thousand times on the faces of my godchildren and young cousins when they know they’re misbehaving. The video was of fighters triumphing in a captured building, but it was also of a pack of brutal man-children fooling around with expensive toys they will eventually break. There could be no clearer metaphor for what is happening to Afghanistan.

These men — and they are always men — are always the same; adults who revel in their savagery like misbehaving adolescents, child arsonists driven by the same violent impulses — to shoot a woman for wearing the wrong sort of Naqib or none at all; to kill a man for being the wrong religion; or simply to pull the wings off a fly.

It’s no surprise, then, that Britain, the United States and even the UN are evacuating their embassies as well as — to greater and lesser degrees — the Afghans who worked alongside them and now face torture and death. But while most flee, others see opportunity. Not least Russia and China, who are already exploiting the nascent Taliban monster that is emerging while its creators helicopter themselves to safety.

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The man who lost Afghanistan

By Will Lloyd

If you think the Taliban are a mob of disheveled thugs, you’d be right. But they’re also now a political force that two of the world’s most powerful states want cosy up to — even as their foot soldiers beat and murder in the name of an Islam they long ago perverted for their own ends.

Russia is historically an imperial power; so it is unsurprising that, for Moscow, Afghanistan comes freighted with history. Its “graveyard of Empires” tag may be a cliché but only because it retains so much aphoristic value. The 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan War, a cruel and sanguinary conflict that Russia lost, is carved into the historical memory of both countries. Up to 2 million Afghans were killed, while for the Soviets it hastened the end of the USSR. The bearded features and baggy trousers of the Mujahideen fighter loom large in the PTSD of a generation of Soviet soldiers.

Oliver Carroll, The Independent’s Moscow Correspondent, described Russia’s policy toward the Taliban to me as “pure schizophrenia”. On the one hand, according to its ambassador to Afghanistan, they are reasonable guys, and “not crazy terrorists”. Indeed, they have managed to arrange a deal for the security of the embassy, and have announced what appears to be an exclusive deal to evacuate Afghans “without limit or hindrance”. But, he continues, “the official FSB still officially lists the Taliban as a terror organisation — and everything I’ve seen suggests Russia isn’t ready to remove it”.

It’s a tricky situation for Russia. Authorities across the country — from Chechnya to Dagestan — have spent years terrifying their people about the radical Islamic threat, and Muslims generally. Yet Russia is also concerned about its diminishing influence in its former central Asian colonies, three of which — Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan — border Afghanistan. All now fear not only refugee flows but the increased threat of Taliban cross-border attacks and terrorism.

The Kremlin is therefore selling its diplomatic efforts with the Taliban to its people as the pursuit of national interests — nothing more. At any rate, Moscow prides itself on what it calls its “multivector foreign policy” of cosying up to Iran and Israel, Qatar and the Saudis, Azeris and Armenians, and Turkey and the Kurds. Look for logic there and feel your head spin.

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Then there is the question of that classic political obsession: state competition. Carroll’s contacts in the Russian foreign ministry are, he says, obviously happy at the clear defeat for a rival ideology — and what it shows potential US allies in Central Asia. There is, he told me, “lots of glee on the fall of a major pillar of US foreign policy. Russian propaganda is going in for the kill on Joe Biden, presenting him as a hypocrite only interested in the US. TV is showing lots of footage of the poor Afghan in the undercarriages of planes, juxtaposed with Biden declaring that “I wouldn’t do anything different.’”

But there are limits to this reading. First off, Russia knows that, whatever happens, it will sooner or later have to deal with huge migrant flows pressing on its borders. Millions will now start to flee the Taliban’s barbarity — something Moscow has neither the cash nor inclination to deal with. This might give it a reason to return to “police” its former colonies, but it will also be an economic, security and public relations headache.

And the Russians are not stupid. Too close association with what is a variegated mob of Jihadist slaughterers (despite their recent attempts at PR) will no doubt soon backfire. Already videos of Taliban atrocities are unspooling across social media. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s description of the Taliban as “reasonable” was foolish when he said it and will only look worse as time goes on. That’s why many in Russia will remain cautious. After all, an alliance with Moscow might suit the Taliban for now — but how long until they decide that Russians are infidels, too?

For China, meanwhile, the problem is first and foremost one of security. China shares a 57-mile border with Afghanistan. And with the Taliban in control, Beijing fears the jihadists next door might let the Uyghur-militias who have escaped use Afghanistan as a springboard to attack Xinjiang, which lies close to the border. There is form here. In 2020, reports surfaced that foreign fighters showing up in Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan included Uyghurs, who ran their own terror organisations but were happy to collaborate.

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Can the Taliban bring peace?

By Aris Roussinos

Then, as always with China, there is the question of resources. Afghanistan may be famous for violence and war but it is also estimated to have between $1-$3 trillion worth of rare earth materials (used in tech, automotives, clean energy and defence). China has about 35% of global reserves but in 2018 produced 70% of total rare earths. Doing a deal with the Taliban, then, could be tempting.

Indeed, perhaps it’s not surprising that China recognised the Taliban government from the get go, with Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Hua Chunying, announcing last week that she “looks forward to China’s participation in Afghanistan’s reconstruction and development”. In fact, it seems they knew it was coming. Just weeks before the Taliban’s advance to Kabul, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Head of the Afghan Taliban Political Commission, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, to reaffirm friendly cooperation between the two countries and the “just and positive” role of China in Afghanistan’s peace and reconciliation process.

This is all deliberate. Good relations can give China access to a resource bonanza. It would enable Beijing to do what it’s been doing in Africa for years: hoover everything up, and power a final march to global hegemony.

Meanwhile, in terms of PR, Beijing is also more than happy to see two decades of pious American rhetoric about bringing freedom to Afghanistan end in the images of Afghans tumbling to their deaths from the undercarriage of fleeing US planes. Washington looks incompetent, heartless and most of all an unreliable, if not outright dishonest, ally.

And so for now, Russia and China will happily cosy up to Kabul, while pursuing their respective interests, united by common goals of expanding their influence, protecting their borders and seeing the Americans chased out of the region. Both countries have more to win than to lose from cooperation with the Taliban.

But neither should feel assured. This gang of fanatics is only just getting started. The problem with monsters is that they are difficult to control — as every nation who has ever tried to meddle in Afghanistan has learned to their cost.

Chiefly, the F-35 relies on rare earth elements, or REEs, to operate. Its jet engines are coated with yttrium-enhanced ceramic to achieve supersonic speeds, and it requires powerful magnets made from neodymium for its weapons systems to function. Each F-35 jet contains 417kg of rare earth elements, of which between 90% and 95% of the world’s supply is sourced from China. Between 60% and 75% of the world’s supply of finished rare earth magnets is also produced in Chinese factories. 

So fragile is this supply chain, and so dependent on continued free trade with China, that the Pentagon has begun to stockpile a six-month supply of rare earth magnets in case of an emergency, with experts urging the US to invest in domestic manufacturing capacity “so if we go to war with China, we’re not calling them up asking for supply”. America’s new “National Defense Authorization Act” now calls for urgent action from the Pentagon to ensure that the majority of its REEs are sourced from countries other than China within five years.

Rare earth elements are not especially rare — they are more common than gold, for example — but they are present in the earth in microscopic concentrations, making it laborious and costly to extract and refine them. It takes between ten and fifteen years to establish the infrastructure to mine and process them: left to the logic of the free market, there is no case to do so, as it is simply cheaper to import REEs from China. The Chinese government, thinking in strategic rather than narrowly economic terms, has ploughed huge sums into developing the country’s domestic REE production infrastructure, and in doing so has established a system of Western dependency. 

Surveying the global scene just a few years ago, any sensible observer would have noted that there were three potential stumbling blocks to the continued smooth functioning of the globalised economy: a global pandemic, the eruption of great power competition edging into conflict, and catastrophic climate change. The Covid crisis, as a worldwide but not especially lethal pandemic, has raised awareness of the fragility of global supply chains and the strategic necessity for domestic manufacturing capacity in multiple sectors. Yet it is the intersection of the two other risks, climate change and great power conflict, that will shape the world of our near future. 

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By Aris Roussinos

With the great industrialised power blocs now redirecting their economies towards the “green transition”, with some form of Green New Deal now the dominant medium-term economic model for Britain, the United States, China and the EU, the supply of rare earth elements and other minerals strategically vital to the new economy will become a new arena for global competition. Just as the wars of the 20th century saw wrangling for control of oil resources, the conflicts of the 21st century will seek to establish control of the elements necessary for the new technologies to function.

Green politics seems inextricably tied, in the popular imagination, with a form of utopian optimism derived from the unworldly idealism of the parties who promote it. Yet perhaps we are looking at the various Green New Deal proposals the wrong way: there is already a great deal of scepticism about their capacity to meaningfully arrest catastrophic climate change. But if we reinterpret the Green New Deal as primarily a means to restart a sluggish global economy after decades of stagnation, a gigantic form of Keynesian stimulus analogous to the New Deal after which it is named, or to the Trente Glorieuses during which a shattered post-war Europe rebuilt itself, its appeal to global policymakers compared to the alternatives of either degrowth or the status quo makes sense. 

A perception of the various Green New Deals as a collection of industrial policies derived from strategic and economic self-interest, as opposed to wooly-minded idealism, has not yet filtered through to the British commentariat. A Times comment piece last weekend, for example, laments the lack of favour purportedly shown by the Government towards the City, and asserts that “the new-found enthusiasm for industrial strategies, which promoted favoured sectors such as self-driving cars, artificial intelligence and green energy almost at random,” is merely the product of a crude anti-banker populism unique to this country, rather than what it is: a new phase of global capitalism, perhaps as significant as the Industrial Revolution in scope, which will reshape the entire global order.

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By Aris Roussinos

Though it has barely impinged on the popular consciousness, we are already witnessing a new “Great Game” as industrial economies seek to secure their control of elements like lithium, essential to the production of the lithium-ion batteries which are rapidly turning electric vehicles from an expensive toy into the affordable, and soon dominant, mode of transport. China already manufactures 73% of the world’s supply of lithium cell batteries, far ahead of the United States, which comes second with a mere 12%.  Yet China is not content with this vast disparity in its favour, and is buying up controlling stakes in lithium mines from Australia to Bolivia, seeking to control the global supply and establishing yet another structural pattern of Western economic dependence on Chinese manufacturing.  

With cobalt and manganese too, both elements vital to the production of lithium-ion cells, China possesses only 1% of global supply within its borders, but controls 80% of the global production of refined cobalt. Two-thirds of the world’s cobalt supply is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo: China owns eight of the country’s fourteen cobalt mines.

It is striking that while in Western countries, environmental policy has been until now limited to debating whether or not climate change is actually happening, and in the construction of an elaborate and largely meaningless system of carbon trading on the open market, Chinese policymakers have seen the future, and taken concrete steps to ensure that they control it.

It is, then, not far-fetched to imagine the Cold War between China and the United States, the initial stages of which we now live in, manifesting itself in an increased focus on and intervention in the politics of countries like Bolivia or the DRC. Myanmar, for example, mines around half of China’s supply of rare earth elements: its internal politics are therefore a matter of major strategic concern for China, and China’s leadership will aim to ensure a smooth and stable relationship with whoever controls the country, whatever their chosen system of government. This pattern will surely play out across the world, with climate change and the global order being fated to intersect, but what is the political end state? 

One strange and interesting recent book, Climate Leviathan, is a rare attempt to construct a non-utopian vision of the future political order deriving from both climate change and the industrial efforts to mitigate it. Taking their cues from the emphasis on sovereignty driving the political works of both Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, the authors, academics Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright, assert that the logic of the Green New Deal, as of liberalism itself, ultimately leads towards global governance, the “Leviathan” of the title, which was perhaps always the endpoint of liberalism, as “all liberalism secretly anticipates a world government on the horizon of history”.

“A planetary green Keynesianism,” they write, “the only kind that might have a hope of confronting the problem in its scale and magnitude, is thus forced down one of two planetary paths — both of which lead, ultimately, to the same destination”: a form of Kantian perpetual rule under the hegemony of, most probably, the United States. By asserting both the urgent necessity of reordering the world in order to save it, and its own unique capacity to do so, the US will simultaneously assert itself, in Schmittian fashion, as global sovereign. 

“A US-centered Climate Leviathan like this could conceivably last a long time,” they predict, “since any attempt to defeat the United States militarily would also seem to unsettle the very management of life of Earth. Attempts to resist US hegemony would be treated as treasonous ‘terrorism’ of an extreme type, confronted with overwhelming military technology.”

Yet America does not necessarily possess the mandate of heaven: “we could see world war between two spheres of influence, leading to a collapse in the world system, or the consolidation of Climate Leviathan through collaboration between the United States and China [instead of] a US-centric Leviathan.”

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It is very possible to envisage, they observe, Earth being divided into two great spheres of influence in a grand bargain between a declining United States and a rising China, a division of “the world system in a sort of grand compromise that includes shared planetary management, a “G2” concentration of the existing order bilaterally constituted to save life on Earth.”

Whether or not this vision is convincing, the urgency of theorising the politics of the emerging global system ought to be clearly apparent. Concrete action to mitigate climate change does not necessarily herald a new age of global cooperation against a shared threat: the Green transition is just as likely, if not more, to be a new arena of international friction and competition, against a darkening backdrop of ever-accelerating climate doom. 

The competition for the strategic resources of the new global economy, no doubt to be framed as ideological contests between liberal democracy and autocracy or between anarchic barbarism and human rights, will surely shape the world for the rest of our lifetimes. Whatever the merits of the Queen Elizabeth carrier group’s deployment to East Asia, the rare earth elements buried deep within the airframes of its showpiece fighter jets points to an unglamorous, but urgently necessary task for the government: to ensure that Britain secures its access to the minerals vital to the new technologies, and in doing so, safeguards our national security in the dawning age of great power competition.

Two recent Chinese films, Wolf Warrior (2015) and Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) suggest that the Chinese movie industry has no such squeamishness about Official Foreign Villains. With the poster tagline “Anyone who offends China, no matter how remote, must be exterminated”, the films depict a muscular Chinese military hero seeing off drug lords and their American mercenaries, bringing life-saving vaccines to Africa and generally showing off superior Chinese technology, competence and morality. In contrast, America is degenerate, weak — or simply absent. As one character says: “Why are you calling the Americans? Where are they? It is a waste of time.”

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China is not the hero in this darkest hour

By Ian Birrell

Discussions of ‘national populism’ in the UK have tended to focus either on the USA, or on European phenomena such as the Rassemblement National in France, the Brexit vote, or the Orbàn regime in Hungary. We hear lots of parallels anxiously drawn with the 1930s. But a variant of the national-populist political settlement has been the norm in China for decades, and enjoys widespread popular support.

Not long ago, most in the West paid little attention to China except as a source of manufactured goods, or possibly of economic competition. The prospect of ideological competition seemed remote. But the Chinese Communist Party has made economic nationalism a central part of its domestic strategy of legitimation since the days of Chairman Mao. When Deng Xiaoping crushed pro-democracy protests in 1979, he dismissed agitators for political changes as lackeys of hostile foreign power.

Until recently, China’s highly nationalistic domestic debate has not been widely remarked-on in the West, the way identitarian nationalist politics might be in – say – Austria. The Western consensus at the turn of the century was that WTO accession would result in moves toward liberal democracy, interdependence and mutual understanding. More recent popular discussion has focused on China’s growing economic heft as a matter for international concern, while her internal political discourse seemed only of interest to scholars and political wonks.

But in recent months, official Chinese mouthpieces have embarked on a change of tack in communications terms that has become known as ‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomacy. This new approach looks less like the soft-spoken approach typically understood as ‘diplomatic’ than a kind of geopolitical trolling. Often conducted in English, via social media, it involves highly-placed Chinese officials posting provocative challenges to the global liberal order, and particularly to American foreign policy.

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One example that cut through in Britain, well beyond wonk-land, came from Zhao Lijian, the deputy director of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Information Department, who insinuated in March that the US military might be responsible for the outbreak of coronavirus in Wuhan. When asked about Senator Pompeo’s retort that the coronavirus originated in Wuhan, Zhao said: “This US politician has been a lying blabbermouth. It’s a waste of time to comment on his fabrication.”

Zhao regularly takes to Twitter to upbraid the US for offences such as ‘interfering in Chinese interests’, ‘smears’ and ‘talking nonsense’. In terms of reach, Zhao may still be a minnow in the global shitposting stakes, but replies to his tweets attest to the fact that a growing number of patriotic Westerners hate-follow him and respond to his statements with outrage. And Zhao is not a lone wolf (warrior): the newly combative foreign policy tone is increasingly echoed throughout Chinese-influenced media.

South China Morning Post’s chief news editor, Yonden Lhatoo, recently wrote about ‘belligerent’ Mike Pompeo, “neck pouch inflating in self-righteous indignation as he effectively warns China ‘you dare not do this and you dare not say that’ […] because only Washington, apparently, has the authority to decide which parts of China can be subject to national security laws, if at all.” China’s state tabloid, the Global Times, recently mocked Western powers’ “hysterical hooligan style diplomacy”, which they described as a defensive response to waning dignity and reach.

This seemingly methodical effort to destroy some decades’ worth of work building soft power have puzzled many. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that China’s change of tone is deliberate. The Chinese regime exerts tight control over its communications, and Zhao Lijian is close to President Xi. He remains popular with the new generation of foreign policy hawks in Beijing, and appears to be carrying out the instructions given by Xi to show more ‘fighting spirit’ in foreign relations.

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By Maajid Nawaz

Geopolitical commentator Peter Zeihan argues that the new direction aims to whip up a global backlash against China, in order to head off dawning domestic unrest. The Chinese Communist Party’s contract with those it governs has been straightforward: absolute control in return for stratospheric growth and ever-increasing prosperity. But as the global economy teeters on the brink of the most brutal recession in a century, China’s — predicated on bottomless lending to state-backed enterprises in order to drive ever-increasing shipments of consumer products to other countries — may face trouble.

If double-digit Chinese growth ends, so does the current Chinese social contract. Fomenting mass domestic anger toward the West via a kind of state-sponsored accelerationism would create an external enemy, Zeihan argues, and divert resentment that might otherwise be directed at the CCP.

If this is the plan, it’s working. Those who remain committed to the liberal international order were still banging the drum at the beginning of May for engagement with the aim of Westernising Chinese governance. After a few weeks of Wolf Warrior, though, even the most obdurate liberal-internationalist believers in ‘engage, don’t alienate’ are beginning to use words like ‘bullying’ in connection with China.

The favoured news outlets of the identitarian Right now bristle with China stories. The cumulative effect of these is to depict Beijing as a looming, sinister, mendacious dystopian nightmare busy lulling the West into dependency with cheap plastic tat while spreading disease, torturing animals, stealing technological patents and trashing Western industries.

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At the elite level, Beijing and Washington have each recently expelled each others’ journalists, amid an escalating war of words about ‘ideological bias’ and ‘fake news’. Building on last year’s tit-for-tat tariff wars, a US bill is on the way that will allow the US to delist NYSE-listed Chinese firms. In the UK, Boris has U-turned on the decision to include Huawei in British 5G networks. Trump is muttering about resuming nuclear testing.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see this escalating. Tribalism is deep-rooted in humans, and it’s not hard to picture both ‘sides’ in the Western culture war uniting with some relief against a common outgroup. And whether it’s locking up a million Uighur Muslims in ‘re-education camps’ in Xinjiang; increasingly blatant disregard for the Sino-British Joint Declaration; suborning British universities; state-backed industrial espionage; ignoring US sanctions on Iran; the coronavirus cover-up; or — as of this week — sabre-rattling along the border with India — there is plenty about the way a newly self-confident China engages with the world that is frankly unnerving.

For Westerners in search of an Other they can criticise without getting immediately cancelled for racism, China offers plenty to work with. Commentators are getting stuck in, with a growing number of voices now accusing any media outlet that echoes or doesn’t aggressively counter the Chinese line on, well, anything of swallowing Chinese propaganda.

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What I learned about freedom in Xinjiang

By Georgie Stewart

We face a perilous path forward. On the one hand, it’s not unreasonable to be wary of a vocally nationalistic emerging superpower with a totalitarian approach to governance and frequently-expressed ambitions to replace the US as global hegemon. But on the other, if this emerging superpower is intentionally encouraging a global backlash against itself, for internal political purposes, then obliging them by swelling the chorus of reflexive China-haters may not be the best course of action.

First and foremost (and regardless of which ‘side’ is most responsible for driving the rise in tension) we must all do our part to ensure Chinese-heritage people in the West do not become innocent victims of escalating geopolitical divisions. But while we must hold on to our values by resisting emerging forms of anti-Chinese racism, it doesn’t follow that we must also cling to the Clinton-era delusion of a historically inevitable liberal-democratic world order.

On Monday, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi accused the US of risking a new Cold War over coronavirus. But as Maajid Nawaz recently suggested in these pages, that Cold War is already here. Geopolitics is sliding inexorably away from any prospect of a ‘rules-based international order’ toward something more multipolar. The wisest response is not to fan the flames of confrontation but to ignore ‘wolf warrior’ provocations and Trumpian rhetoric alike, while methodically working to decouple from strategic dependency on China in key industries.

A new Cold War is upon us. We must recognise this and act accordingly. But we must also resist the temptation to let it get hotter.

It is only in the most extreme circumstances that people, stripped bare of the veneer of civilisation, show their true natures. A crisis like the present one brings out the best, and the worst of the humanity. We are tested in the fire. In this case, not the purifying fire of war but the ouchy burny fire of staying at home with our spouses and children for ages and having to play boardgames because we feel guilty about too much screen time. And real characters emerge, thus, according to our favoured boardgames.

Risk

Risk is great fun. You get to try to take over the world. You build armies, squash your enemies, and eventually dominion is yours. There’s a bit of strategy in it, a lot of aggression, and more than just a soupçon of chance: if a few dice rolls go against you, your magnificent army is suddenly a lot less magnificent and, oh crap, there goes Russia. It’s a game, really, for people who want to have kind of a lazy and consequence-free shot at taking over the world, have a bash and hope for the best. Steve Bannon, say, or the Prime Minister.

Diplomacy

Another world domination game, Diplomacy is much subtler and better than Risk. With Diplomacy you can’t just hole up in South East Asia and build an impregnable defensive army in some Pacific island bottleneck. And there is no element of chance. Every territory on the board can house only one military unit – so the game’s essence is in strategic horse-trading with other players in secret conferences in, for instance, the spare bedroom. Then, of course, comes the opening of the sealed orders in which it emerges that everybody has betrayed absolutely everybody else. Henry Kissinger is very good at this game. Michael Gove thinks he’s good at it but isn’t. Gavin Williamson knows he is hopeless, but wants to play with the bigger boys anyway. 

Scrabble

Nobody who seriously plays Scrabble nourishes the illusion that it’s a game for people with good vocabularies and imaginative ideas for unusual words: rather, it favours vicious sadists and pedants who have memorised a complete list of the allowable two and three-letter words (most of which look like a fat-thumb error on a QWERTY keyboard) and who are determined to deploy them in the most pinched and obstructive way possible. You’re thinking: “Wouldn’t it be lovely to make ‘BANANA’ with my two blanks!” They’re thinking: “Good. If I play QG sideways that will spoil the triple-word for everyone else.” I have a hunch Priti Patel plays a mean game of Scrabble, pun intended.

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Dominic Cummings is no chicken

By Tom Chivers

Cluedo

It’s a game about logic, really, isn’t it? I mean, what are you doing just drifting from room to room making random guesses? You idiot! Now you’ve got the player to your left showing you Professor Plum again: a totally wasted suggestion! Look, I know it looks like a bit of fun to you but actually I think you’ll find there are any number of optimal strategy guides available in the rationalist blogosphere. Oh — you what? Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the billiard room? Dear me. Well let’s have a look. You fluky BASTARD: I know from my notes that it was a 17-2 chance against you guessing correctly and now you’ve won — which is sad, actually. A senior government source is very good at this game but still always loses.

Monopoly

The attractions of this game to the egotistical, plutocratically minded and unimaginative are obvious enough just from the name. It’s all about money — and about winning by getting all of it. It is also notable for three other features of its gameplay. Once you’ve established a commanding lead, it gets easier and easier, just like real capitalism. Cheats almost always prosper, and people who win at Monopoly almost always cheat, just like real capitalism. And Mayfair is expensive and crap, just like real capitalism. This is the ideal game for the Sir Philip Green in your life.

Trivial Pursuit

This game is a particularly interesting psychological test, not because it attracts pub quiz bores (though it does), but because of the design of the game itself. Ignore the idiotic questions about the litreage of Lake Titicaca or Ginger Spice’s bra: the mechanism is irrelevant. The point is that it is a very long game. It lasts at least twice as long as it takes for everyone around the table to be bored to tears as they make a 65th attempt at getting that orange piece of pie. The team in the lead doesn’t want to stop, though, because they think they’re going to win; and the losing teams can’t give up for fear of looking ungracious. Mind-forg’d manacles, right there: chaining you to the table. It’s the game for god-tier passive-aggressive monsters. Theresa May is the sort of person, I’d suspect, who’d finish a game of Triv. 

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Bridge

“No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe,” wrote John Donne. He was almost certainly thinking about the game of bridge when this insight occurred to him. Here is a game in which partnership and communication are everything. It is a game in which ruthless killer instincts are couched in extreme courtesy, and if you exclaim “Three no trumps are you out of your tiny mind?” at your partner it will be distinctly frowned on by your opponents. Glory is shared in bridge, as is ignominy. Suitable only for happily married couples with an intellectual rapport such as Ant and Dec, Dr Evil and Mini-Me, or Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid.  

Catan

The game for policy nerds. You are encouraged to build a civilisation, gathering and allocating resources, building infrastructure, and basically doing all the stuff that for most of us seems to be rather ruled out by the word “game”. If you’re the sort of person who’d rather muse on the parameters of short-term outlay versus medium-term economic growth implied by HS2, go wild. You are likely to find yourself playing Catan with earnest, slightly thyroidal young men from free-market think tanks or, if you’re specially lucky, George Osborne. 

Cranium

This is the game for your flamboyant uncle and your tipsy mum who misses karaoke. It’s a game for the high-spirited and giggly and creatively inclined and slightly showy-offy. Why master chess when you can measure out the rest of your life in 45 second bursts, trying to hum the Wombles theme tune or make a recognisable three-dimensional image of Ann Widdecombe out of a thumb-sized piece of orange Play-Doh? Davina McCall is undoubtedly excellent at Cranium, as — secretly — is Jeremy Corbyn. 

Snakes and Ladders

It’s entirely random, snakes and ladders. It barely qualifies as a game at all. With poker, say, you’re surfing the waves of chance with on-the-hoof calculations of probabilities, all tempered with psychological acumen. With snakes and ladders it’s more like: yeah, rolled a six. I won. Woo. Or: yeah, rolled a four. Back down the ladder for me. Like, curses. Your turn. Accordingly, it is the preferred game of existentialist philosophers. Also, toddlers.

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By Sam Leith

 

Spare a thought, too, for the Queen. As this is a state visit, the monarch, as head of state, is the host not the PM. I can’t imagine that Her Majesty is looking forward to honouring a man who is likely to bring large numbers of her own subjects out on the streets in protest. 

Still, she’s had worse.

By my count, there have been 111 state visits during her long reign. Some of the visiting heads of state have been constitutional monarchs or ceremonial presidents, but the Queen has also played host to many of the most powerful men and women of the age – some of them proper wrong ‘uns. Here’s a personal top ten:

10. François Mitterrand

Before getting to the actual blood-soaked dictators, let’s ease into it with some less spectacular examples of dodginess.

Politicians don’t get more ambiguous than François Mitterrand, who was the President for 14 years from 1981 to 1995 (his state visit to the UK was in 1984). However, his first job in government was as a mid-ranking functionary in the collaborationist Vichy regime. Mitterrand’s supporters always emphasised his links to the Resistance – though his critics say that his working to undermine the enemy from within was more a case of a foot in both camps.

No modern American President – not even Trump or Nixon – comes close to the twists and turns, smoke and mirrors, of Mitterrand’s career. But because it all happened in another language and with infinitely more finesse, we, in the English-speaking world, barely paid attention.

9. Emperor Hirohito

Despite being awarded the Order of the Francisque for his efforts, Mitterrand did not have a senior position in the Vichy regime. Hirohito, however, was the Japanese head of state during the second World War (and indeed during the Empire of Japan’s invasion of China which began 1931).

Debate still continues as to the extent of his responsibility for Japanese war crimes, but he was more than a puppet of the governments in this period.

While Hideki Tojo, the wartime Prime Minister, was arrested and executed following Japan’s surrender, Hirohito was not only spared, but kept on as Emperor – playing an important role in Japan’s transition to democracy and membership of the ‘western’ alliance.

It was in this capacity that he was welcomed to Britain on a state visit to Britain in 1971. There were protesters – thousands of them, including many former prisoners of war. Despite having suffered so much more than those who turned out to shout at Trump last year, the 1971 protesters were silent – turning their backs on Hirohito as he travelled by horse drawn carriage to Buckingham Palace.

8. The jailbirds

The Palace was where the Obamas stayed during their 2011 visit – the ‘Belgian Suite‘ to be exact. Due to renovations, the Trumps will stay elsewhere, but I expect it won’t be too shabby.

The present accommodations of some of the Queen’s former guests are not so enviable. Looking down the list I see that former President Park Geun-hye of South Korea (visited 2013) is currently serving a 25 year jail sentence, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil (2006) is serving 12 years and former President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (1991) was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2012, but was released in 2017.

Say what you like about the Donald, but at least he hasn’t been jailed yet.

7. The Gulf monarchies

No list of state visits to the United Kingdom would be complete without a mention of the Al Thanis (Qatar), the Al Sabahs (Kuwait), the Al Nahyans (Abu Dhabi), the Al Khalifas (Bahrain), the Al Saids (Oman), and, of course, the Al Sauds (Saudi Arabia). During the Queen’s reign there have been 11 state visits from the rulers of the Gulf states – almost 10% of the total.

It may be that the Windsors like hanging out with their fellow royals. Or it might be something to do with oil. Royal or oil. One or the other.

6. Hasan II

And now a visitor from the other end of the Arab world – King Hassan II of Morocco, who reigned from 1961 to 1999. His rule was harsh, to say the least – but as a pro-western ruler in a difficult region that was overlooked.

Less overlooked was the treatment of Queen Elizabeth II on her state visit to Morocco in 1980. This was the so-called “tour from hell” – a chaotic affair involving the Moroccan monarch being late for various events or not turning up at all. At one point the Queen was left waiting for hours in the desert sun. Not cool.

Still, all was forgiven – and Hasan made his state visit to the UK in 1987 – a mere seven years later.

5. Hastings Banda

From north Africa to southern Africa – and Hastings Banda, officially ‘Life President’ of Malawi. It was a title he took very seriously – clinging on to power from independence in 1960s until well into the 90s and, indeed, his 90s. His regime’s human rights record was as one might expect, but as a firm friend of the West, it wasn’t held against him – hence his state visit in 1985.

4. Mobutu Sese Seko

Part of the problem with mere presidents is that on formal occasions – like a state visit – they can appear quite dull compared to a monarch. A grey suit, no matter how well cut, can’t really compete with a crown.

However, the President of Zaire (or the Democratic Republic of Congo as it is now called) was an exception. Mobutu Sese Seko – who was in power from 1965 to 1997 – was famous for his leopard skin hat. It’s always annoying when someone copies your look, which is why he banned all leopard skin hats apart from his own.

Being on the right side during the Cold War also helped with his image. His 1973 state visit to Britain was a sign of the West’s favour. Whether or not he stayed in the Belgian Suite (see above) I’m not sure. It might have been considered inappropriate given what the Belgians did to his country when King Leopold II owned it as his personal possession.

Mobutu Sese Seko’s rule wasn’t quite as horrific as Leopold’s, but that didn’t stop him from becoming immensely rich.

3. Robert Mugabe

And thus we come to another African tyrant – Robert Mugabe, whose state visit was in 1994. He didn’t just get tea with the Queen, but also an honorary knighthood. It was, however, stripped from him in 2008 – following the slaughter of political opponents. Quite what was different about this slaughter compared to some other slaughters that took place in Zimbabwe before the 1994 visit I couldn’t tell you.

2. Nicolae Ceaușescu

Mugabe wasn’t the first Marxist dictator to get a honorary knighthood. That precedent was set in 1978 when President Nicolae Ceaușescu of Romania came away from his state visit with a K (specifically the Grand Cross Order of the Bath).

To be fair he did reciprocate, awarding the Queen the Star of the Socialist Republic of Romania – first class, no less. They didn’t just hand that out to anyone, you know – other recipients included Nikita Krushchev and Kim Il-sung.

What on earth was the then British government thinking? It’s true that Ceaușescu had turned against Moscow, raising hopes of fractures in the Communist Bloc. But at home his regime was utterly brutal – vying only with Enver Hoxha’s Albania for the extent of its totalitarianism.

Ceaușescu’s knighthood was revoked in 1989, but by that time this was the least of his worries – he was too busy fleeing the capital (to no avail, he and his wife were arrested and executed).

1. Xi Jinping

Speaking of communists, the Queen has put on a right royal show for no less than three Chinese Presidents – Jiang Zemin (1999), Hu Jintao (2005) and, most recently, Xi Jinping in 2015. There were some protests for Xi’s state visit, but a small fraction of those likely to turn out against Trump.

Why is this? Yes, Trump is Trump and unworthy to be President. But compare the noisy disapprobation directed at his travel ban on visitors from some Muslim countries with, say, the muted response to the mass persecution of Muslims in China – where, by some estimates, there are more than a million Muslim Uighurs in detention camps.

This is far from the only issue in which we see such inconsistency in outrage levels. Whether it’s on women’s rights, LGBT rights or environmental issues – the discrepancies are glaring.

Why are western leaders, especially those from English-speaking countries, held to higher standards than other leaders? Is it that more is expected from some parts of the world than others? And, if so, isn’t that a bit racist?

Of course, familiarity breeds contempt – and the faults of one’s closest relations tend to loom larger than those of more distant nations. But if that’s the case and the protesters really are the internationalists they consider themselves to be, then shouldn’t they educate themselves? Or perhaps it’s the other way round – with British activists assuming they have more influence on American politics than on Chinese politics? There’s half a point there, but the other half is that most Americans don’t give a fig for our opinions on their politics.

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that in democratic societies, street protests are largely the preserve of the Left. For some reason, the more conservatively-minded prefer the ballot box to walking down the road shouting things. Therefore, the visiting leaders who get shouted at the most are those who suit some kind of Left-wing agenda. When non-western leaders do attract protest, for instance the Saudis, it tends be those who illustrate the compromises and hypocrisies of our own foreign policy.

Fair enough. One can’t look down the list of state visits and not feel a little bit sick.

Still, this is a country where one can scream insults at powerful men and go home without a broken head – so there’s always that.

Apart from the disgrace of paying women less than men to do the same job, the Gracie Affair raises tricky questions about pay differences, between career reporters and those who have been more highly-paid presenters, like Gracie versus Sopel. Not to mention between those who have learned Mandarin to operate in a police state, vis-a-vis the greater air time expected of those who report from Washington, Brussels or the Middle East compared with reporting from China. That last issue perhaps reflecting how slow the BBC has been to catch up with where global power is tangibly migrating.

No sooner had we absorbed this shocking news about pay inequality at the publicly-funded BBC, than President Trump cancelled his visit to Britain because of the $1 billion cost and “off location” of the new US embassy at Nine Elms, a glass cube we can see a mile away from the back of our house, where I was planning pre-demo sharpeners for friends from out of town.

Trump misleadingly blamed President Obama for this move from Grosvenor Square – where residents have long objected to impossible security – despite the decision being taken under George W Bush. Although Trump regards himself as a hotshot real estate developer, the fact that Vauxhall and Battersea (not to mention Elephant and Castle) are the most dynamic developments happening in central London has escaped his attention – like so much else.

These two overnight media sensations indirectly put the spotlight on how much – or how little – we value diplomats and their embassy operations in the contemporary world.

While most historians could name various ambassadors in the years before 1914 or 1939 – names like Maisky and Ribbentrop come easily to mind –I would be hard pressed to name a single foreign ambassador to the Court of St James’s, excepting H.E. Liu Xiaoming who was kind enough to send a three page critique of my latest book last week. I am vaguely aware that a man called ‘Woody’ (with a fortune from Johnson Baby Oil) is the US ambassador too, but he is eclipsed by each Tweet from Trump. I had to look up the identities of our ambassadors to Beijing and Washington, though I have met some of their august predecessors, together with three former ambassadors to Moscow.

The downgrading of traditional diplomacy is partly technological. It is surely telling, I am reliably told, that our secret intelligence services get 90% of their information on the cheap from sophisticated trawling of online data, before they decide to commit the much more expensive human resources (spies) for the last 10% of what they need to know.

In the past, Foreign Secretaries relied on exquisitely crafted telegrams recording a UK ambassador’s hour long meeting with the French or German foreign minister. Nowadays, the frequency of international and EU summits mean that prime ministers and presidents (and their foreign ministers) commune face to face, or via their own encrypted mobile phones. Ambassadors have ceased to be crucial to these encounters, rather they are just more cogs in a bigger wheel. Like it or not, the EU has also intruded itself into diplomatic relations between nation states. The EU’s External Action Service (created by Baroness Ashton) has a budget of approximately £420 million, with 1,457 staff in Brussels and 1,960 spread around 140 delegations and consulates. One in twelve of the ambassadors are British nationals.

Apart from technology, other factors have led to the downgrading of our ambassadors, leaving aside their universal resentment about representing a boss who is widely regarded as a buffoon and clown. Pity Andrew Patrick the ambassador to Burma who in September had to stop the clown reciting Kipling’s ‘Road to Mandalay’ in a Yangon temple. “Not appropriate,” Patrick hissed. “Great stuff,” replied Johnson.

Modern ambassadors are overburdened;

• A long-term emphasis on selling things has led to diplomats becoming a glorified sales force for UK plc;
• While there has been a surge in having to deal with immigration issues or doped and drugged Brits needing consular assistance in jails.
• Calls from whizz kid diplomats for embassies to become all-tweeting enthusiasts on social media have not gone down well among FCO traditionalists, though it is interesting (having been a minor victim of it) that Moscow’s man in London seems to have gone down this road with great relish, backed up by an army of robotic trolls.

One subject always conspicuously omitted from discussions of diplomacy is also the power of direct foreign lobbying operations which simply by-pass the FCO by directly interfering in government and the legislature. One thing I would ban straight way would be all Conservative or Labour ‘friends of X or Y’ country with their endless possibilities for bribes and freebies.[1]

Nor are embassies fully in the policy loop back in Whitehall. One effect of increased digitalisation has been paranoia about leaks. This means that more business between No10 and the FCO, or between the Cabinet Office and the departments of state is done verbally, so that written information is not automatically circulated between departments or shared with those who toil on our behalf abroad. A foreign government wanting to know about the UK can probably get more accurate information from open source material on the internet than from anything they might glean from a British embassy.

Part of me is still romantic about having distinctive, cultivated personalities as a kind of prism through which our government appraises foreign countries. A beautiful new coffee table book by James Stourton reminds us too of the architectural glories of British missions on the Nile and Seine. People like Rodric Braithwaite, David Hannay, Christopher Mallaby and Robin Rennick are difficult to reproduce as ambassadors of distinction.

The obvious risk is that such elite figures are ill-equipped to pick up the subterranean turmoil which produced a Donald Trump as US president. Indeed, just after his election, an acquaintance joked that the FCO probably had better contacts within Hizbollah than in Team Trump, though to be fair, that probably also reflects the extent to which our foreign policy has become captured/obsessed with the most backward and hopeless of the world’s major regions. This is not solely a British problem since I can recall the incredulity on the face of South Korea’s ambassador to the UK (a former banker of course) when I casually suggested he might like to visit other parts of Britain in order to meet people who were not City financiers. “What would be the point?”, he replied.

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Is America facing its ‘Suez moment’?

By Peter Franklin

Brexit is likely to further accentuate this country’s loss of international standing, if only because Britain was a major Atlanticist influence within the EU and an English-speaking commercial gateway to it. The world is already weary of reading our domestic political ‘quirks’, and with the crass behavior of the present Foreign Secretary (although Chinese intelligence officers are convinced it must be an exceptionally cunning move they cannot yet fathom).

Attempts to revive the prestige of former times, whether by appointing colourful eccentrics in the Johnson mould, or serving English wines in settings blessed with Tracey Emins’ and Damian Hursts’ on the walls and Oasis on TV screens, will be just painful reminders of His Excellency’s decline in status. Maybe, as I have long argued, we should follow the US example in selling off the edifice in King Charles Street to a Gulf hotel chain (or maybe to Donald Trump), relocating the FCO to a new bloc in the Elephant, as part of a more radical rethink about where this country wants to position itself in coming decades, and more importantly perhaps, what face we wish to show to the wider world.

Likewise, a state visit to Britain, with the panoply of a ceremonial welcome on Horse Guards Parade, hospitality at Buckingham Palace and state banquet at Windsor Castle, can woo hesitant partners, renew flagging friendships, and bolster old alliances. The politicians and officials who accompany the Queen, or the head of state in the incoming visit, are obliged to speak with their opposite numbers in an atmosphere of cooperation. Things can happen that would take years to achieve routinely. At the very least, mutual knowledge is increased, especially of key players. One of the last inward state visits – President Xi Jinping of China in October 2015 – was notable for just this.

In diplomacy, people matter

Edmund Burke said “the principles of true politics are those of morality enlarged”[1.  Letter to Dr William Markham, 1772]. The personal interplay of individuals is therefore important. The “Queen of England”, to use the shorthand, is a tangible link with the history that shaped the modern world – history of which statesmen are well aware. Contact with the Queen is therefore good for their own gravitas, and they are well aware of it too. In addition, the Queen’s personal morality – morality in the broadest, Burkean sense –  gives Britain an almost unique standing in the world. She is proof that a country is more than its worst mistakes. Nowhere is this more important than with the Commonwealth.

No wonder Her Britannic Majesty is the government’s ace diplomatic card.

Playing that card, at home or abroad, requires skill. The two hundred or so inward and outward state visits (not including Commonwealth visits) since the coronation in 1953, listed on the official royal website, shows the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s gameplay these past sixty years. Some visits were patently more successful than others. In 1978, at the height of the Cold War, President Ceaucescu of Romania – a communist dictator of Stalinist disposition – made a full state visit. Whatever it achieved, it failed to moderate the excesses of his regime, and ten years later he was ousted in a popular coup and he and his wife summarily executed.

At the time, Ceaucescu’s visit brought barely a protest, though at one stage the Queen reportedly hid in a bush in the grounds of Buckingham Palace to avoid a casual encounter with him, and told the staff to hide the silver. She and the nation understood the concept of raison d’État – that which must be done in the national interest.

O tempora, o mores. President Trump is no Ceaucescu. For a start, he could probably buy most of the palace silver. Yet in the case of a Trump state visit, not raison d’État but virtue signalling reigns. Foremost among the virtue signallers is Mr Speaker Bercow, who is returned to Parliament in a process akin to that of a pre-1832 Reform Act rotten borough. This paragon of modesty, dignity and good taste has arbitrarily decreed that the President of the United States of America, the leader of the free world, an Anglophile and evident ally in the struggle to make a success of Brexit, is unworthy of the honour of addressing the mother of parliaments. An address is one of the privileges of a modern state visit – one which, arguably, most underscores Britain’s claim to the moral high ground.

Taking courage from history

History suggests, however, that the government may be being unduly timid in its concern about discourtesy, protest and abuse. In 1904, a fat, disreputable newcomer to power made a visit to an unfriendly foreign country, with a mission to thaw the ice. He did so without attendant professional advice; indeed, the professionals were anxious about the visit doing further damage. He had one advantage, though (besides his position as titular head of the most powerful nation on earth): he loved the city he was visiting, and he was capable of great personal charm.

The man was King Edward VII, and the city Paris.

The French had long been Britain’s hereditary enemies, though things had improved from time to time after Waterloo. In the 1850s we briefly became allies (or, at least, cobelligerents) in the Crimean War and the Second Opium War (against the Qing Dynasty of China). In August 1855, Napoleon III having visited London in April, Queen Victoria even made a state visit to Paris to cement the new-found friendship, taking with her young Edward, whom she made kneel at the tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte in Les Invalides, ostensibly to pray for his soul (somewhat contrary to Anglican doctrine). However, by the end of the century, enmity had returned through colonial rivalries in Africa.

Then suddenly, with the Entente Cordiale of 1904, everything changed. Britain and France became undeclared allies against expansionist Germany. Diplomatic efforts were behind the entente, of course – notably by the French foreign minister, Théophile Delcassé and his opposite number, Lord Lansdowne, as well as Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador to the Court of St James (who suffered much in the cause of diplomacy, declaring of a meal at Windsor Castle in 1898, “La cuisine était detestable”) – but Edward’s 1903 visit helped create the atmosphere which made the entente possible.

The visit was not without opposition in France. One cartoon which circulated in Paris as a postcard, and reproduced by several newspapers, pilloried the playboy image of Edward when Prince of Wales –  cigar and glass of absinthe in hand, a waiter hovering to pour him more, and a prostitute nearby, too. The French foreign office was beside itself with anxiety that insult would be taken by both the King and London.

They need not have worried. No offence was taken, and Edward’s charm worked magic. “Seldom can such a complete change of attitude have been seen as that which has taken place in this country during the last fortnight towards England and her Sovereign,” a Belgian diplomat reported to Brussels.

Time is not on our side

The excuse for denying President Trump a state visit is that presidents of the United States are usually invited in their second term. This won’t do. Both Presidents George W Bush and Barack Obama made state visits in their first term. They did, however, make earlier informal ones; and here, perhaps, is a useful (temporary) expedient. A visit next year to open the new American embassy south of the river would be an elegant pretext for a so-called working visit, in which the opportunities for gross discourtesy are avoided. But it cannot be allowed to substitute for the honour of a full state visit the following year. The damage a diplomatic snub might do far outweighs the benefits of virtue signalling. Standing by the United States of America in time of tribulation is what a good ally does. Besides, raison d’État requires it.

There is another reason why further procrastination is not an option. The Queen is 91 (and her consort 96); she is already cutting down her public duties. How many more state visits will she be able to host? The Prince of Wales can do much on her behalf, but he cannot sprinkle the same stardust.