The Allies Get Played - The 'Genius' of American Strategy

Centred on a highly spurious and somewhat paranoid concern with security, Washington is 'playing' its allies. Whether European or East Asian, they are now being drawn into co-dependence on Washington within an increasingly closed bloc instead of being free as independent nations to compete and trade as part of a one world system. That might be fine if each of these nations had a proportionate 'vote' in their own destiny within this bloc but they do not. American nuclear and economic superiority creates an intrinsic subordination to its strategy. As the US prepares to plunder the Ukraine through 'investment' in recompense for the expenditures on its regime, it arranges with local elites that allied populations be terrified with fears of a Russian bear which cannot do much more than hold the territory it has gained to date and the admittedly more formidable Chinese dragon. The eagle can sit back comfortably and watch the profits roll in from the coming age of increased and unnecessary arms sales and demand for its surplus LNG. No wonder the American financial markets are shrugging off inflation and interest rates.

A form of shock treatment (not the invasion but the sanctions) has detached Europe from its cheap and reliable supply of energy and commodities as well as access to a near if not particularly important export market and has made it dependent on more expensive US 'spot' energy. The next stage is to weaken European ability to export to China and Chinese ability to invest in Europe, impoverishing the latter more than the former. Russophobia must now be replaced with Sinophobia. In East Asia, where some concern about China is reasonable but still over-excitable, a slower moving cold war approach is designed to detach these vibrant economies from what will be the largest and nearest consumer and industrial market, certainly at its high tech end. Instead they are to bind their industries into an American-centred industrial strategy and weaken their access to cheap and probably reliable energy and commodities from the Russian Far East.

The con trick is working. Based on narratives of fear and loathing, both wings of the so-called West are now seeing their economies battered by inflation and high interest rates - most notably the basket case that is now the United Kingdom after the depradations of the Member for Kiev Central and the idiot economics of his successor. The prospect of fiscal destabilisation and deindustrialisation now emerges for some key countries as vast sums have to go on more expensive energy and food supplies and on military expenditures at the expense of social cohesion.

This new division of the world into blocs does not do China or Russia too much harm in practice. Both lose some market access only to create new synergies with each other. Both are now circumventing the West to go straight to the emerging world for influence, deals and natural resources. Russia merely pivots East to China as the latter's junior economic partner - a commodity supplier playing a role similar to Australia and Canada within the Western system. Indeed, we now hear that any Chinese restrictions on taking Russian crude oil died in February in frustration at the confrontational approach of Washington. Germany, on the other hand, is threatened with deindustrialisation under its inept left-liberal coalition yet Chinese industry gets cheaper inputs for its industry in a reversal of the traditional cost of energy relationship between it and Europe. Those caught up in 'Western' (aka Washington's) strategy are seeing declining (Russia) and rising (China) nuclear superpowers brought into closer alignment, able to dominate the land mass of Eurasia, This new and strenghened Eurasian bloc can also co-operate in developing a shared approach to the emerging world, notably in the Middle East and Africa, as the 'West' retreats behind its cultural 'limes'. Europe and 'Western' East Asia are now just continental North America's 'front lines' rather than nodal points in a flourishing global economy. The developed world has circled its waggons and abandoned the emerging world to its rivals.

This new Cold War 2.0 does not do the US much harm at all - only its allies. The US may be a political basket case with gun violence and dreadful mortality figures amongst its young males but it is still the most significant economic and military power on the globe. Its constitutional arrangements ensure that systemic internal chaos has no real effect on its structures of military and economic power. We are looking at Rome revisited. The US will probably stay quasi-hegemonic for some time to come because it is largely self-sufficient in a crisis (as is the Sino-Russian bloc). It may be challenging its rivals on at least equal terms but at greater cost to its allies, as it drives those allies to blow huge sums of cash on feeding the maw of its arms sector because of exaggerated security threats.  Those allies (notably those in Europe) are losing the chance to become an independent global player to match at least China and India - and it is quite probable that Washington likes things that way. The US has all the comforts of the old Cold War in the new one. It and the SCO carve up the world between them just like the good old days with the old Soviet bloc. Of course, the first Cold War resulted in the collapse of one side from internal strains - the second one may see a similar outcome in another seventy years. It may not be the Eurasian bloc that crumbles this time. It may be the European Union and UK that need liberating when it happens.

The cover for all this imperial posturing is, of course, a rather spurious 'defence of democracy' argument. Yet, to be frank, democracy has never been at threat within the West from any of its authoritarian rivals. It is threatened from within by the manipulative and authoritarian instincts of its own elites and the countervailing forces of an angry populism. If there is a threat to democracy it almost certainly comes from the greed, lack of strategic thinking and ineptitude of the political classes within the West. Ukraine and Taiwan are merely 'imperial border' issues which have no necessary implications for the security of either NATO or Japan or South Korea any more than Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan proved to have for the West. However, American strategy does have the unfortunate possible consequence of creating the conditions for security threats that did not exist before. Washington might eventually say 'I told you so' to its allies but only because it had prodded its rivals into action. It is now more likely than it was in February 2022 that China will assert its claimed sovereignty over Taiwan. It is more likely than it was in April 2022 that Russia will switch off the gas for Europe and plant tactical nuclear weaponry on the borders of an EU that remains fragmented and weak.

The major threat to Japan and South Korea has actually been North Korea. The new Cold War mentality has increased that threat because Beijing and Moscow have no incentive to collaborate with Washington on containing the country. The North Koreans have proportionately raised the local stakes in the last year. The Russian Pacific Fleet has lodged itself alongside the Kuriles while China mounts ever more provocative exercises around Taiwan. In other words, the break-down in relations between the West and the SCO has created the SCO as general threat out of a very particular and containable situation in Ukraine. Similarly, not only has Russia not had any material interest (quite the contrary) in challenging NATO until now (after all, the flow of energy to the EU and East-West trade argued to the contrary) but everyone's real interest should have been in the de-nuclearisation of Europe. This is what Russia always wanted. The skill for Europe would have been to ensure that price for denuclearisation West of the Urals would actually mean demilitarisation but the military-industrial complexes of the West and Mr. Stoltenberg cannot have that, can they?

It gets worse by the month - two Baltic nations have now been bamboozled into joining NATO quite unnecessarily (adding to their risks if there is a confrontation between blocs) while Europe in general is being bounced into an economic confrontation with China when it has no essential geo-political interest in getting involved in conflict with a superpower on the other side of the world just to buttress the defensive concerns of Washington. It all comes down to the fact that 'democratic' leaders in Europe and East Asia are almost certainly not strategically very bright. They are trapped in ideological formulations derived from experiences seventy years old (three decades in the case of Eastern Europe). They have been 'spun' into policies that work directly against their first duty which is to the lives and livelihoods of their own peoples. Europe and Pacific Rim East Asia have been played by Washington. Their peoples have been played by their elites.

 

Analysis - What Is Wrong with Prime Minister May?

I suspect we all now understand that May is neither particularly a Remainer or a Brexiter. She is an administrator, one whose allegiance is to the State machine and whose recent political training has entirely been within the formal structures of the security apparat as Home Secretary. I write 'within' because it is an eternal truth of British politics that elected representatives are almost invariably captured by the State they are elected to oversee. Sometimes a politician can rise above the machinations of Sir Humphrey. Theresa May is not one of those politicians. 

As a former Home Secretary and now Prime Minister, being 'captured by the security state' is where she is most comfortable. This limited horizon is why she has handed over the economy to a weak Chancellor who is beholden to the City. She cowers whenever Gove, Davis and Johnson show some serious political spine (quite rare but perhaps effective, at the least, in keeping the Brexit show on the road). Even as Tory Party Chair, her instinct was to centralise at the expense of constituencies. Centralising power in a command-and-control system is where her instinct lies and yet this is precisely the approach, suitable for the twentieth century militarised welfare-warfare state, that is no longer possible in the age of the internet.

She certainly lacks the common touch, presents herself as a decent and well-meaning school mistress (that is, indeed, an administrator) and now presides over a situation where an Opposition Party that clearly opposes the will of the majority of the English on Brexit and is led by a man who was a political pariah within the PLP until only a few years ago is riding high on 45% of the national vote while her Party languishes, seen as incompetent and confused.

The problem with administrators is that they lack imagination. It is good that administrators lack imagination. They are there to execute the orders of those who have an imagination. But politicians are generally not good at solving national crises without an imagination. An excess of imagination, of course, gives us loons and tyrants but a complete absence of imagination gives us ... our current Prime Minister. 

And why is imagination so vital at this time in our history? Because the tectonic plates of international economic and political relations are shifting. She now represents an administrative class that has one of its feet so firmly stuck in the deep mud of the past that it cannot get close to planting the other on the dry land of the future. The problem arises because our security apparat, our state machine, is driven by four perceptual models that no longer entirely hold water: 

• a primitive geopolitical fear of Russia and a desire to contain Germany which has been institutionalised from the Imperial era and the last century respectively (the first is paranoid although the second still relevant)
• the realisation that it does not have the tools and can never have the tools to do more than contain violent political fanaticism yet must never admit this to the general public - basically, it is bluffing its way to offering us security as citizens; 
• the fear of the crumbling of the Union, either by Celts pushing their luck (as we see in the nonsense of a nation of just over 4m people trying to dictate terms to one fifteen times its size)) or the English wondering why they are spending so much of their hard-earned cash on stopping the Celts pushing their luck (the English being, here, like sheep led to the budgetary slaughter); and 
• a cynical, manipulative view of Washington where a lumbering giant is supposed to be lead by the nose into serving British interests through a combination of charm and prostitution (i.e. the gleanings of our expensive and barely controllable intelligence apparat).  

These perceptual models, embedded in the group think of our ruling caste, were neatly resolved by the European tyranny since that caste has never really cared about democracy at core (its rhetorical allegiance to the idea hides a deep fear of its reality). They care only about the Crown and preferment. The Crown is a weird ideological concept that means not our Dynasty or Harry and Meghan but the precise functioning of the State: the Crown is the fig-leaf that hides the workings of an unaccountable machine that purports to know what it is doing but clearly does not. The strategy of the Crown towards the European Project has seemed simple enough:  

• the EU was to be manipulated to contain Germany (yeah, right!) and to underpin the push-back of Russia;
• intelligence co-operation and Euro-ideology were supposed to help contain fanaticism even if Islamism was not understood to be truly different from the native subversive threats of communism and fascism; 
• the Celts were to be neatly contained within a Crown sphere of influence within the EU (violence in Northern Ireland wags the tail of the British dog no less than memories of Vietnam wag the American foreign policy tail); 
• access to Europe would increase the Crown's muscle power in Washington. 

Unfortunately, the viability of this total perceptual model has crumbled since the crash of 2008 with which our administrative State has still not come to terms. Its economic 'perceptual models' have also failed consistently to provide either recovery or fairness. This has nothing to do with Brexit - indeed, Brexit is just a reflection of this crumbling, a process that most of the political and media class has still not understood. Most of us may now agree that the analysis provided daily by the second rate minds haunting the corridors of the BBC is laughable. Many of our most prominent commentators provide little more than prejudiced rants with no serious understanding of the political vulcanism of our times. Now, I listen to Spotify in preference to BBC News.

Let us take the first issue - the geo-strategic politics of Europe. Germany has been far from contained by the European Union as we saw in its treatment of Greece. British geld has simply strengthened an institution that is the tool of Berlin, backed by a France that has never ceased to loathe us, certainly since we sank its fleet and chased it out of Syria in the last major war. As for Russia, despite the sustained hysteria of the last Tory country gentlemen left in the FCO and the 'Service', it is not realistically a threat any more to anything West of the Pripyat Marshes. It is simply and defensively struggling to maintain its own ramshackle underpopulated empire, turning back a Western neo-Cold War operation that does not hide its ambition to get ultimately to the very gates of Moscow itself through subversion. 

Someone needs to tell the Cold Warriors that India can now defend itself and British interests do not extend to being dragged into a global conflagration to defend countries on the other side of the Continent. If anything, Russia might now be seen as a point of containment of a rising Franco-German European Union, preferably in association with Washington. NATO (a genuinely defensive operation in its original intention but now the militarised wing of global liberalism) is now threatened by the creation of a European Army in a culture that is not really very afraid of the tyranny of peacetime conscription. We, the people, are constantly being drawn into confrontation with Russia by neo-Cold War 'hawks' at a time when the public wants Islamism, not neo-nationalist post-communism, dealt with as the primary threat.   

As to the second issue (violent extremism), we do not have to belabour the point that its emergence derives from the sustained blundering of our political class over a century or so. We know that much just as we know that the 2008 Crash was the creation of economic blundering over a much shorter period. But that was then and this is now. The question is what to do about it? Is there the imagination to understand causes, remedies and consequences? 

Open borders were at the very centre of the terror problem as far as the public were concerned and there is a wisdom of crowds in this. Germany accentuated the difficulties with a primitive liberal ideological response to what was, in fact, always going to end up an exploitation of weakness by organised crime. It is organised crime that has created the gaps in the system which allow the violent extremist a sea in which to swim. The British State, always under pressure from unhelpful French models of preferring brutality towards dissent over engagement with dissenters, was split between those who saw that borders were part of the process of dealing with the security problem (even if the borders had to be Libya and Turkey) and those who thought security co-operation was more important than borders. 

Perhaps our Prime Minister is instinctively in the latter camp. The balance certainly tipped towards security co-operation when Merkel sold the pass in an excess of ideological insanity to deal with a humanitarian crisis in precisely the wrong way. It would have been much better to have invested in working with Assad to bring a fair peace and in the camps themselves. Migrant pressure, helped by trafficking operations, spread outwards, accentuating an already problematic 'schwerpunkt' in Calais. The truth is illegals with cash have always found a way in, straining our urban infrastructures but knowing that eventually they would be in a state of de facto amnesty, creating a constituency for political opportunists in the urban centres. 

The security apparat pretty well knows where the centres of potential terrorism are in our cities as far as they come from our old imperial connections - what they do not know necessarily is who these new people are. The problem may not be terrorism at all. Most of them contain the seeds of criminal gangs of far more psychopathic brutality than any we have seen to date, perhaps quite capable of undertaking 'terrorist acts' to force a weak state on the defensive and cut a deal. The French terror cases and the history of Al-Qaeda have shown the overlap already between petty criminality and terror acts. 

Ask any native of South East London about the war between the Albanian and Turkish gangs and how they 'came to a deal' and you get a picture of something going on that is clearly being defensively covered up by a mainstream media whose investigative skills now operate at the level of Mickey Mouse. Hours of coverage with the weaselly phrase  'despite Brexit' and virtually none about what is going on in the inner cities - Rotherham and Grenfell Tower are mere tips of icebergs of social dissolution.

And, third, we have the bubble of Celtic posturing. This has been burst (though you would not know it from the flaccidity and weakness of the Government towards the Celts) by a) the Scottish Referendum, b) the rise of a new conservatism in Wales and c) the evident hysteria coming out of an Ireland that has no serious leverage on the UK other than vague threats of a revival of terror when the conditions for terrorism no longer actually exist (except as tactics by criminal gangs). 

On the other hand (though its impetus is studiously held in contempt by our urban liberal administrators and the Opposition who depend on their votes) Brexit has shown the reality of a simmering English country resentment about enforced cultural change and the emergence of a growing new and allegedly 'fascist' threat from the indigenes outside London. In fact, there are fascist elements but the 'threat' is populist and only to the dominant failed ideology. The EU has now become part of a more general cultural problem in which a minority of Celts act with multicultural London, the public sector middle classes and the universities as a standing insult to the aspirations of 'sheep' (classed as 'deplorables' to use the term of Hillary Clinton about the American working class) that are growing the first signs of fangs.

Fourth, there is our American ally which has been turned over (possibly temporarily) by a form of maniacal populism that reflects the revolts amongst the English and many regionalised (Catalonia/Lombardy) and post-communist European middling States (Hungary/Poland/now Austria) where the cultural threat from Islam and the failures of elite liberalism's cultural hegemony are seen as far more important than any putative threat from the old dark native ideologies. Even in major states, populist movements are only manouevred out of formal power by the liberal establishment's control of the commanding heights of narrative and by political sleight of hand, placing a radical centrist cypher in charge of France while still trying to create a coalition of the Centre in Germany. 

Populism may be denied the oxygen of publicity within the elite but it has not been defeated. Populists are, in fact, proving surprisingly resilient against huge cultural onslaughts that seem to do no more than define camps rather than actually push back the tide. Only in the UK has a conservative establishment partially absorbed populism or at least appeared to do so until this week as the potential for a betrayal of Brexit begins to hit home amongst the English. It has only accommodated populism a) because it has had to absorb the vote of 17.4m people, again mostly English, who decided they wanted Brexit and b) it faces a populist socialist threat which does not exist anywhere else.  So, Washington is no longer bulwark of a shared liberal internationalist order but is a tiger to be ridden alongside the domestic wolf of an increasingly bitter and angry native populism. 

May's Government is now sailing very close to the wind in acceding to the rhetoric of its opposition while its deeper substance remains committed to the new order. I am not a Tory but Tory activists are telling me that they are enraged by the way their Leader is conceding ground to the past and not taking the lead in developing a national strategy for the future.
  
The national problem is that we have a weak Government still over-influenced by a security apparat with one foot in the past. This Government is trying to represent new forces but within a national narrative structure that is also embedded in the past and where its defenders (the 'conservatives of the centre') are now getting vicious in defence of a collapsing order. We have a Prime Minister who is part of that failed state apparat and is increasingly at sea and unpopular. The Opposition now scents blood in the water but it can't find a way to oust her under current political conditions ... and so it is becoming increasingly shrill, threatening to alienate the very new forces it needs to ride to power itself. 

The best solution would be a stronger 'new forces' Prime Minister from the Right to see us through the Brexit negotiations and a transformative and intellectually coherent Left to exploit the opportunities yet the dead weight of the old guard in both parties forestalls such outcomes. The country certainly can't cope with much more instability and viciousness. 

So there we are - a second rate Prime Minister trying to cope with new social forces, an opportunistic and hysterical Opposition that does not know what it wants other than power and a changed global condition in which the entity with which we are contesting, the European Union, is beginning to fall apart at the seams for reasons that actually have little to do with Brexit but which Brexit is hastening. She really has to go ... but only if the Tory Right can deliver someone with imagination to deliver national sovereignty, some serious economic growth and greater fairness.