Before I came across Stein’s observation years ago, I occasionally played at trick on people who tried to persuade me that some political or economic system was so well-established there was no chance of ever changing it. I asked them in return whether they thought that the system would endure for the next million years. The response was usually an irritable “obviously not!“ So what about the next thousand years, I asked? Again the response was generally irritable but perhaps less comfortable. Very well then, I said let us assume a period of 100 years instead. Is the system going to survive that long? Now that is a real question, which is to say that if something cannot go on forever, and a hundred years is a plausible maximum, it could stop tomorrow, it could stop in ten years time, or fifty years or a hundred years. In other words, life today is full of systems, beliefs, power structures and other things which have an inherently limited life, but where we have no real idea how long that life is. It is doubtful whether the present economic system will be unchanged in a hundred years time (given how much things have changed in the last fifty) but we do not know whether that system will last, in its essentials, for years, for decades or for generations. Most people don’t like being asked such uncomfortable questions, because it invites them to make judgements about the viability of aspects of our current world, and to engage in that most hazardous of all intellectual occupations: prophecy.

Thinking about it, it becomes fairly obvious that nobody really believes that all aspects of our current system, whether they like them or not, will last for centuries to come. The real issue is when and how they each stop and what the relationship between their end-dates is. This is particularly the case with things that people don’t like, and where they commonly say, often angrily, “this cannot possibly continue!” I want to spend a moment deconstructing that judgement, because I think it actually can refer to three quite different cases, two of which I will spend a fair proportion of the rest of this essay talking about.

In the first case, when people say “this cannot possibly continue,“ they are thinking in essentially moral terms. That is to say that they see the situation they are complaining about as morally unacceptable, and they assume and believe that something will therefore happen to put things right. This can be regarded as a religious attitude, because it is obviously related to theodicy, or the question of why an omnipotent God allows terrible things to happen in the world. But it goes beyond that, because even in a secular society we tend to have clear, often unspoken, assumptions about the moral structure of the world. That is, whether or not we believe that there is a supernatural dimension to life, we nonetheless believe in some kind of implicit moral order, which must ultimately be restored even if it has been disturbed in the short term. As I mentioned last week, popular culture very often features a restoration of order and moral structure at the end of a story, sometimes violently. Most of us would actually find it very difficult to live in a world in which we genuinely believed that there was no underlying moral order at all. Indeed, without a belief in an ideal underlying order of some kind, it is actually impossible to have any coherent moral views. To complain about what is happening in Gaza, for example, we have to have a view of what the moral order of the universe should be, such that these events are a violation of it and should therefore stop. In the absence of such a coherent moral framework, all we can say is “these things upset me personally. Take them away.”

So the first reason why we believe that things that cannot go on forever must stop, is that they offend the basic moral principles of the universe. But there are also severely pragmatic reasons for things to stop, and I will give some examples of those later. One type involves hard limits which will be reached at a point that cannot necessarily be defined in advance, but will be known once we reach it. The most popular example of this is the depletion of fossil fuels, where the supply is not infinite, where usage is continuous and cannot be reduced below a certain level, and thus where at some point we are going to start experiencing real shortages of certain fuels. There are various calculations of when this will be, which vary with the assumptions they are based on, but most of them suggest that this point will arrive in the uncomfortably near future. We’ll look at a few examples from the present day.

Likewise, there are situations which we can see are inherently unstable, such that a structure, a society, an ideology or some other entity is not going to last very much longer. The problem is that we cannot say how long that longer actually is. History is full of examples of situations and systems which lasted far longer than anyone thought they would, or alternatively collapsed at a point where they were felt to be still capable of surviving for a long time. It’s therefore interesting to look at a few historical examples of this tendency also, and to see whether we can learn anything that might be applicable to today. In this essay I will look at some of the principal issues in today’s world, and into which of these latter two categories they most conveniently fit, bearing in mind that many problems have elements of both. Not being a theologian, a moral philosopher or an ethical teacher of some kind, I’m going to leave my first (moral) category largely alone from now on, except for one remark about politics.

“This can’t go on,” is best understood in this (moral) context as an assertive statement that the world should be different than it is, and that it is the fault of the world for not conforming our demands. So to hear someone say ”this can’t go on in Gaza. Trump should be on trial in The Hague,” is actually to hear “the world should be different than it is. The United States should have signed and ratified the Rome Statute, lawyers and military experts should have identified specific events for which he was clearly responsible which breached one or more of the Statute’s list of crimes, and included all the Elements of Crime, attempts should have been made to put Trump on trial in the US, which have failed, and the Prosecutor has presented the Pre-Trial Chamber both with evidence that the US is unable or unwilling to carry out the prosecution itself, and that the alleged crimes are well documented, fall within the ICC’s competence, and that an indictment should be issued, that the US should therefore be asked to extradite Trump and cooperate with the Court, which it does.” Anything else is just hand-waving for effect, recalling the caricatures from my youth of the retired Colonel, reading about the latest scandal involving Young People in the Telegraph, and muttering something about “if there isn’t a law against this there damn well ought to be.” We all want the world to be different, and if there are hard limits preventing us from having what we want, so much the worse for the hard limits.

Time does not reconcile us, and we often want the world to have been different, without these hard limits, even long afterwards. Retrospectively, and indeed almost from 1939, the ‘thirties were reinterpreted as a decade when the rise of fascism could and should have been stopped, and the world not allowed to go on that way any more. Yet much of this thinking is fantasy, assuming a magic ingredient lacking at the time, or some kind of divine intervention that didn’t happen. In 1938, Britain and France threatened Hitler with war if he invaded Czechoslovakia, and a furious Hitler accepted a political solution. No-one has ever explained what else the two countries could have done (threatened war if Hitler didn’t invade Czechoslovakia?) but that isn’t the point. The argument is not historical but essentially theological: the sequence of events that so disfigured the 1930s simply should not have been allowed to occur. Some greater power should have intervened to prevent it. The result is that fantastic amounts of effort have been deployed to explain banal things in complicated ways, and cubic kilometres of books written to expound complex theories about fascism, authoritarianism, populism etc. when in most cases all we can say is that Shit Happens, or as Kurt Vonnegut memorably said, “So it goes.”

To be fair, let us add that sometimes dissatisfaction with the state of the world can lead to idealism, commitment and ultimately to positive change. But more often it can lead instead to a kind of sterile bitterness that actually obstructs change. Unfortunately, impotent anger without a practical outlet, directed against things you can’t influence let alone change, can be surprisingly addictive for some.

Accepting that the world is as it is, we can nonetheless speak of situations where things genuinely “can’t go on,” for very practical reasons, as I have sketched out above. Before plunging into what I hope will be a useful discussion of several such situations, I’d just point out a useful three-part distinction, based predominantly on time. There is often an underlying situation where either a hard limit is being approached, or the situation is so unstable that it can fall apart any time. There is then a trigger event, which transforms the underlying potential problem into a real one, and the theoretical crisis into an actual one. (It may of course be the arrival of the hard limit itself) The uncertain distance in time between these things is why detailed historical prognosis is generally pointless, and anyway, historians will later argue about whether the trigger event came inevitably at that time, or whether it could have come much earlier or later. (I’ve been reading books about the fall of Saudi Arabia since at least the 1980s. It was still there when I last looked.) Finally, and critically, there are personal factors, involvement of individuals, and attempts by actors to shape, or at least benefit from, the results of the trigger events. It is the combination of all of these that makes intelligent speculation about the future difficult, although not altogether impossible if we go about it in a measured and logical fashion.

It’s worth dwelling on that point about personal involvement. We tend to think in extremes: heroes re-making the world or alternatively great historical forces determining everything. But as Marx famously suggested, the relationship between people and their times is a dialectical one: sometimes, it is frankly accidental. Had it not been for the Revolution, Napoleone Buonaparte would have remained a junior officer in the French Army, and indeed had Corsica not become French just before his birth, he would have remained an Italian. The Revolution, in other words, with its sense of “this can’t go on” was a necessary condition for the rise of Napoleon, but it didn’t make him appear from nowhere. So it goes.

There’s also the problem that important historical discontinuities are often assumed to result mechanically from the breakdown of systems, and so historians assume retrospectively that the previous system was exhausted and needed to change. This is not always the case: changes are often the result of accidents, coincidences, pure luck or even sheer stupidity. The coming to power of Margaret Thatcher was presented even at the time, and is now nearly always accepted, to be of epoch-making importance: the final nail in the coffin of a postwar consensus that had outlived its time. Yet in fact the General Election victory of May 1979 was a combination of stupidity (Callaghan, the Labour Party leader, postponing calling an election he might have won) coincidence (an unusually severe winter) and of course the luck that brought Thatcher to the Party leadership by accident in the first place. She would have been thrown out at the next election anyway, had the Labour Party not sportingly decided to destroy its chances of winning by splitting into two separate parties fighting each other. There was, in fact, no epoch-defining change, no massive move in public opinion, no widespread demand to jettison the postwar consensus: that was a rationalisation imposed on a shambolic and incoherent set of circumstances by the official hagiographers who wrote about Thatcher later. Public opinion in Britain in 1979 was broadly centre-left, and became increasingly so through the 1980s. Desperately short of money because of their mismanagement of the economy, Thatcher’s government took refuge in privatisation, not even mentioned in their manifesto, and so started a political trend which eventually spread all over the world, and helped to create the mess we are living in now. But this was only possible at all because of mistakes made by others, as well as sheer chance. So it goes.

History remembers the names of victors and survivors, but sometimes the incompetent or the stupid play a role that is just as important, by clearing the space and establishing the terrain for the ungodly to occupy. And frequently, the triumph of these same dark forces is assumed with hindsight to have been inevitable, the product of a situation that could not go on any longer. That may happen, but as a general rule it’s at best an oversimplification. For example, for a long time, it was habitual to dismiss the Weimar Republic as a sham, as a system imposed on Germany, that perished for lack of popular support and because the social and cultural excesses of the time pushed conservative Germans into voting for Hitler. Yet more recent work disputes this: without the Great Depression, many experts now believe that the Republic would have become generally accepted, and anyway when transexual nightclubs were flourishing in Berlin, the Nazis were still a fringe right-wing nationalist party. If there was a single dominant reason for Hitler’s arrival in power, it was probably stupidity. Heinrich Brüning, who became Chancellor in 1930, chose to combat the Depression with austerity, thus making it worse. As it worsened, he tried to combat it with more austerity. This alienated a great deal of moderate and left-wing opinion, and prevented him forming a coalition with the Social Democrats, while driving his own supporters towards parties of the extreme right, notably the DNVP, the Nazis’ great rival. He took to ruling by decree instead. Brüning did more than anyone else to destroy the Weimar Republic (of which he was a lukewarm supporter), and to bring Hitler (whom he despised) to power. He left Germany before meeting the fate of many that country’s politicians, and lived in obscurity, mostly in the United States, until his death in 1970.

This is a good example of the three-part structure I mentioned above. There was a very difficult underlying situation: the Versailles Treaty, the unresolved rivalry with France, reparations and the instability of the Republic itself, would have been a handful under any circumstances and would have produced crisis and perhaps war, but, without the trigger event of the Depression, might have been manageable. The Depression undermined the legitimacy of the governments that didn’t seem to know how to deal with it, and correspondingly increased support for the extremes, including the Communists and the various right-wing groupuscules, of which the Nazis were one. But without Brüning’s criminally inept handling of the situation, and the clumsy and malign interventions of the “political general” Kurt von Schleicher, the Bavarian corporal at the head of a bankrupt political party, riven by internal disputes and fast losing popular support, would never have had a chance at power. So it goes.

Yet for most of us it’s deeply unsatisfying to look at historical events this way. We seek threads of direct causation. We invoke destiny, Great Men, great cyclic or teleological historical forces, economic determinism, and if all else fails, we invoke conspiracies. We want to believe not merely that some system has exhausted itself and change is inevitable, but also that the results of that change rationally follow from the circumstances of the time, and were therefore at least in part predictable. And if you have ever written a book—or even an article—on a historical subject, you will know that it is almost impossible to exclude a teleological component from the analysis, simply because we know how things actually turned out. Likewise, we often praise those who predicted what actually happened (or something like it) and accuse of blindness those who didn’t, even though the first may have been right, and the second wrong, purely by chance.

This is why I think that the distinctions I made earlier are important, because they enable us to differentiate between different levels of causality and probability. In particular, they mean that we can distinguish elements which truly amount to hard limits from elements where a degree of uncertainty is inevitable. To revert to an earlier example, the French government in 1938 faced a number of hard limits. Its population was only two-thirds of that of Germany, most of its industry had been devastated in the First World War and not entirely rebuilt, much of the political class and much of the financial and industrial classes were adamantly opposed to a war against Germany, and there was no chance of a parliamentary majority for war in a political system which anyway looked like collapsing at any moment, Paris was much closer to the Franco-German frontier than Berlin was, and an aggressive war was simply out of the question. Against that background, successive governments did what they could by way of rearmament, but could only plan for a defensive war. The French General Staff believed that the main German attack would come through Belgium, with a subsidiary thrust through the Ardennes, which was indeed what the Wehrmacht originally intended. But in the end the main attack came through the Ardennes. The French were well-equipped and fought bravely, but they had no answer to new German tactics, and the Germans had all the luck. The attack could easily have failed, especially if the weather had been worse, but it didn’t. So it goes.

So when we look at the impressive array of challenges facing the world at the moment, it is useful, perhaps, to apply some of these distinctions, since there are limitations that cannot be got around, and there are also great uncertainties, depending on how individuals, institutions and governments react.

Let’s start with the most obvious. It is clear that, as well as the longer-term and well-known hard limit on fossil fuel resources, there will very shortly be important hard limits on the availability of a whole range of fuel-derived products, ranging from electrical power to plastics to medicines. Because the system is global and interconnected, because it passes through so many stages, and because parts of the system have been destroyed or damaged already, these new and lower limits, although unclear in detail, can be regarded as already established. Note that these limits do not have to be at catastrophic levels: they may simply mean that there is just not enough to go round to sustain current demand. But even relatively minor shortages (perhaps 10% or so) could have major political consequences, because the world would be in an entirely new type of situation. Countries would compete against each other and no doubt bid up the price of certain products, and there is no way, for example, of ensuring that those counties in the greatest need have access to the food or pharmaceuticals they need. The only rationing system we have today is rationing by price. So it goes.

But neither are governments remotely prepared for such a contingency domestically. It may seem obvious that hospitals have a greater need for electricity than do “AI” data centres, and a greater need for sterile plastic than do fast-food restaurants. But how would you go about ensuring such a priority in practice, or even deciding what it should be? After all, in Europe countries import and export electrical power, and in most of the West we import spoons for fast-food restaurants just like we import sterile bags for storing blood. Governments may not actually have the practical ability to make choices of this kind. And even at the most banal level, how do we ensure that ambulances have enough fuel to operate even if it is at the expense of Amazon deliveries? And again, if petrol is to be limited to essential workers, is the finance director of a hospital catering company an essential worker? Modern western governments have no capacity to understand, let alone deal with, even such relatively minor challenges. The fact of having to live with hard limits, the fact that that there may just not be enough of things, has never crossed their minds, because they just assume that the price mechanism will take care of everything. And to be fair, they aren’t helped by pundits who calculate the price effects of having 20% less oil, without pausing to reflect that you nonetheless have twenty per cent less oil.

But in most western countries the political and social structures in which these problems will be posed are also changing. To an extent greater than most of us imagine, they will be determined by hard limits. In no particular order; broken families create a greater demand for housing for the same size of population, concentrated among the poorer parts of society, and requiring provision of more social services and causing greater difficulties with education. These families already exist and the children are getting older. Children of one-parent families are already born and increasing in number, leading to statistically-probable increases in crime and poor educational outcomes. The ethnic composition of the electorate in most European countries in 2040—radically different from today’s—can be calculated now. The number of lonely, bitter women living alone in retirement in ten years because they valued career, power and money over personal relationships of any kind is already fixed: they are now in their fifties. People who will require decades of treatment for obesity, diabetes or Long Covid and other infectious diseases are already suffering from them. Immigrant family groups already existing contain more and more elderly people who are more likely to be ill, and less likely to speak the language of the host country. And there’s a lot more cheerful news where that came from.

Some of these problems are theoretically manageable. For example, European nations could put enormous resources into recruiting and training teachers to make sure that children of immigrant parents, never mind the parents themselves, spoke the language of the host nation fluently. This would help to address a host of social problems, but there is no sign of any country doing it on a remotely large enough scale, and a lot of political opposition to the idea anyway. But in many other cases, even theoretical solutions are not available, and the best that can be done is to manage the problems. Yet many governments decline to do even that: police, local government and even medical services are just withdrawn from “difficult” areas and the inhabitants left to rot.

This cannot go on forever: the question is when and how it will stop. Yet it’s not necessarily the government that will decide. Our old friends the Muslim Brothers, their tactics honed over the generations in different continents, are already there, established at local level, helping people with day-to-day problems, providing education, of a sort at least, organising communities around Islamic principles. We are already seeing the rise of overtly Islamist political parties at local level, where they can have an influence on schools (segregation of education of boys and girls, girls banned from sports, for example) but they are already thinking ahead to the 2040s, when the electorate of some cities will be substantially Muslim, and could be persuaded to elect Islamist candidates. At that point, they will be able to press for their social agenda—restrictions on homosexuality and abortion for example—as the price of supporting a weak government coalition.

These subjects are not to be spoken of, and it’s very hard to know which trigger event will turn the underlying situation into a crisis and how. The most obvious way in which this could happen is through mass-casualty killings such as those that terrorised Europe in 2015-16, but that requires a level of organisation that Islamist groups currently don’t have. Non-Islamist populations have in general demonstrated an impressive level of restraint and maturity over the last decade, but that could change if there are more incidents like the recent murderous attack on a Gay Pride march in Berlin. It’s striking that politicians of various countries, usually obsessed with the potential threat for revenge from the “extreme Right” in such cases, have found the courage to condemn the perpetrator and his ideology too, on this occasion. But there is little practical that can be done now: rooting out the Muslim Brothers is possible but politically dangerous, and may well fall foul of human rights laws. In any event, the populations being radicalised are already here. It may well be that in years to come, events such as these marches will routinely have to be cancelled on security grounds. So it goes.

It would be easier if we were not up against the hard limits of declining political cultures and declining state capacity, neither of which is, in practical terms, reversible. When the neoliberal age began, both western political systems and western government structures benefited from inherited social capital from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when politics was treated seriously and government and the public service were vocations. For all the complaints about both politicians and bureaucracies at the time of its origin (and some were self-serving in the extreme) the neoliberal revolution has destroyed what remained of the integrity of western political and administrative systems, while ensuring that the minimum conditions for even attempting to rebuild them no longer exist. The old system of taking the best university graduates no longer works. Universities in many western countries are close to breaking down, and cannot be rebuilt, and it is not clear how long they will now last.

Yet whilst these neoliberal policies have increased the power of large private sector companies to make money, they haven’t, of course, provided any substitute for government services except for the rich. And many of the largest companies, depending as they do on ones and zeroes, are looking distinctly shaky at the moment anyway, as the “AI” revolution starts to come to pieces. But the endless weakening of the state and the endless degradation of the political system cannot go on forever: therefore they will stop. But they will stop because effectively they will have terminated, and people will not be able to rely on the state for even basic protection and amenities any more. There will come a trigger event such as the effective withdrawal of the state from a major city or even a region, and here we can be reasonably sure of what will happen. Organised crime, already advancing as the state retreats, will take over, and ensure “protection” and the provision of services. In most cases, as is the case now, these crime gangs with be organised around, and prey upon, immigrant communities. This process cannot be halted, let alone reversed, because the gangs already exist. So it goes.

In theory, a robust political system could survive these challenges. But over the last couple of generations, careerist neoliberal politics has destroyed the traditional major parties of Left and Right, leaving them hollow shells. The result has been the growth of what are essentially new protest parties, often based around individuals, with incoherent aims and little institutional capacity, rising and falling quickly, at a time when the level of the political class has never been so low, and the class itself so despised. Here in France, we are gloomily awaiting the 2027 Presidential election, where there are so many potential candidates, that the first round victors could be decided by half a percentage point, and the “winner” may scarcely make it into double figures. The current nightmare is a second round between Mélenchon and Le Pen, which would probably cause the political system to explode. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that undecided voters would hold their nose and vote for Le Pen, or just not vote at all, but it’s highly unlikely that her party could then form a government. That said, Mr Burnham’s recent success in Britain is interesting, as much for the symbolism (it resembled a coronation or a peaceful coup d’état) as for the encouraging signs of a government that actually intends to do something. All may not be lost therefore.

Since it was in Britain that the neoliberal gang first took power, it is fitting that neoliberalism is coming to an end there first. No policy which is essentially one of asset-stripping can last beyond the hard limits of what can be asset-stripped. No policy of financialisation can continue when there is nothing left to financialise. So, inevitably, we are seeing the beginnings of re-nationalisation, because running public services for profit cannot go on forever, and is therefore now stopping. The irony of this happening to a system to which there was “no alternative,” is almost unbearable. This will be more difficult in Europe because of EU rules, but it will come eventually. The trigger events here are a combination of problems with which only governments can ultimately deal: climate change, fires and floods, fuel shortages, new diseases and incipient state breakdown.

All of this takes place in an international environment that is rapidly becoming unrecognisable. The US has now come up against the hard limits of what its military capacity can accomplish. For a long time these limits were disguised under what I have called Hollywood Hegemony: the PR campaign to claim that the US was some kind of globe-bestriding hegemonic empire. This was apparently genuinely believed by many in Washington, and tolerated with some weariness and exasperation by much of rest of the world. Iran, more than Ukraine, will be seen as the trigger event that disposed of this collective hallucination. The problem is there is no way back: there are hard economic and technical limits on the rebuilding of US military power, and the PR campaign will have to be abandoned, no matter how many think-tanks push out ambitious fairy-tale schemes for recovering a hegemony the US never genuinely had anyway. And whilst the dollar is a powerful instrument, you can’t eat dollars and you can only buy what is for sale. So it goes.

Quite how the consequences of that will play out, I leave to those better informed about US domestic politics to debate. But my impression is that much of political Washington lives in a fantasy world, and will bitterly resist the incursion of reality. I’m not sure that the political system in Washington, nor individual politicians, are actually capable of sensibly managing a situation where the decline in US power is so stark and unmistakeable, and where other and newer players start to arrange the world in their own interests.

To survive the future, we need to be able to distinguish where the hard limits actually are, and therefore what the remaining scope for intelligent manoeuvre might be. It is surprisingly easy to oscillate between foolish optimism and the idea that all hope is lost, and it isn’t always obvious, in a hyper-connected world, where the truth lies, since much depends on obscure detail. The two extremes of denial and nihilism are already popular, and politically they are inevitably intertwined. At some point, governments will have to abandon simple denial as a posture, and start to be more honest with their publics about the hard limits on what can still be done. This will provoke anger of course, but also an increasing sense of helplessness and despair which governments will be as ill-prepared for as they are ill-prepared for most things.

The irony of course, is that under neoliberalism, governments have spent forty years progressively telling their electorates that they can’t have a decent life, good-quality education and healthcare, or security in the streets because “there’s no money” and “the bond markets won’t like it.” (has anyone ever interviewed the bond markets, I wonder?). With Covid, and even more with Ukraine, this rhetoric was abandoned, and so eye-watering sums of money were sent to Ukraine without strings attached, some of which has since been recycled to prop up the housing market in Paris. Suddenly, governments face the sickening realisation that money, as such, doesn’t really matter. It’s only a collection of ones and zeroes after all. What matters is whether the goods and services are physically available, and soon there will be less of them. That’s what a hard limit actually is. But then that’s how it goes.

Now I should say straight away that I don’t include myself in the “we” here. I have never believed in the utility of generic explanations for conflict, and indeed I have unsuccessfully urged people for many years to stop talking about “conflict,” and to look at individual “conflicts”, from which it might be possible to draw some tentative wider conclusions. The problem is that there are many different lobbies with different normative universalising ideas about conflict, working at cross-purposes with each other, and basing themselves on different examples that they may anyway not properly understand. What turns this confusion from just being a waste of money and effort into something much more dangerous at the moment, is that it greatly handicaps our ability to understand what is going on in the Ukraine and Iran conflicts, and especially how, if at all, they may end. We (they) are like scientists trying to take readings with instruments that are out-of-date and in many cases inappropriate , and then arguing about the results. So today I’ll briefly set out the problem, give some examples, and then try to see what history and even poor old common sense can tell us about the way these conflicts may eventually end, assuming that we can even decide what “end” means here.

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There is probably no major conflict in modern history where experts completely agree on the “causes.” In turn, this is because the very structure and definition of such conflicts is often contested. If you believe that there is an organic and causal relationship between the Second Word War in Asia and that in Europe, then you will argue that the War started in the early 1930s, and look for causal connections between the two episodes. If (like me) you regard these as two separate wars with some thematic connections and a degree of influence on each other, then you will prefer different dates, different end-points and different emphases in accounts of the period. Even in the more geographically constricted First World War, there are huge differences in emphasis, and a debate that can never be settled about the ‘“causes,” both immediate and long-term. The causal chain between the assassination of an Austrian Archduke by Serb nationalists in Sarajevo, and fighting between British and German colonial troops in what was then Tanganyika, has about the strength of a cotton thread, and it is questionable in the end if we are even talking about the same conflict.

Likewise, it’s not always obvious when wars “end.” (The fighting did not stop everywhere in November 1918 for example.) How many wars have there been in the Middle East since 1948? Some would argue only one, with long pauses and changes of battlefront. Did any of these wars actually “end?” Was the Lebanese Civil War a separate event whose causes were primarily domestic, even if outside powers like Syria intervened from the start? Was it one war or several, with pauses and reconfigurations? Did that War actually end in 1990, or did exhaustion just produce a long pause where war does not seem attractive? And if there is, in fact, an underlying and insoluble crisis which occasionally takes the form of conflict, should we not be giving more of our attention to the crisis in question, and less to the periodic conflicts?

These questions have no definitive answer, and therefore any attempt to generalise from the proposed answers, or to try to squash historical events into a framework that can be applied elsewhere, is doomed to failure from the start. But the attempts continue, largely because of what is called Cognitive Bias: broadly, we see and give importance to those elements of a situation that we can understand, and have some experience of or special interest in. Notoriously, economists always see economic causes of conflict. Human rights advocates will tell you that neglect of human rights is responsible. Diplomats see a failure of diplomacy. International lawyers blame a disregard for international law, opponents of political extremism and nationalism will blame political extremism and nationalism, and others will blame arms manufacturers, “entrepreneurs of violence” or foreign interference, depending on their political prejudices. Such is the variety of conflicts, that many of these factors have an influence in certain cases. (Ironically the one that certainly doesn’t is the founding myth of the modern international security ideology: the idea that wars are caused by popular hatred between nations, that they are the fault of people like you and me.)

This incoherence means that wildly different theories about causes, and even understandings of, wars are all circulating at the same time, and, whilst believed by their supporters to be generic, are actually highly specific in their origins with certain cases and certain interest groups. Imagine going to a western government, for example, and saying “isn’t Ukraine one of those cases you are always talking about where a military solution isn’t appropriate, and we should be trying to deal with the underlying issues?” Or how about “isn’t it time for ordinary Americans and ordinary Iranians to sit down together to try to resolve their differences peacefully?” Well, you wouldn’t get far, but this is what could happen when you have distinct, self-standing and conflicting discourses milling around in the same conceptual space, supported by different interest groups for different purposes, and frequently colliding with each other.

To this you have to add problems of sheer unfamiliarity with major politico-military crises that actually affect your home country, and thus of recent experience on which to draw, and of any capacity to evaluate all these confident normative theories. A Chief of Defence of a major western nation may perhaps have commanded a battalion during the NATO-led mission in Afghanistan, but that’s about it. He may have served at an international headquarters at a higher level, but will have had no experience of large-scale conventional warfare, simply because there was none to be had. Likewise, there was little point, a decade ago, in teaching military officers about high-intensity combat or missile attack, since their countries did not have the capability to do such things, and they did not expect to fight anyone who had. That was then. And of course, the civilian politicians he advises will know only what they have seen on TV or in cinemas. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are stupid, it just means that they have nothing to draw upon except stereotypes and political and military folklore.

The confusion begins at the most basic of levels. For example, up until 1945 nations could and did “declare war” on each other, and there was a body of law and precedent to govern such situations and the behaviour of nations. But the UN Charter, by reserving this right to actions approved by the Security Council, has created a huge grey area (in which almost all actual conflict now takes place) not properly covered by any international legal framework. We now have “armed conflicts,” a term from International Humanitarian Law and helpfully not properly defined, whose purpose is to identify situations where the type and level of conflict mean that IHL and the so-called “laws of war” apply. But beyond that, such questions as whether one side has the right to sink the other side’s shipping (which was clear before 1945) have become obscure now, and have to be inferred from other treaties with contested interpretations, since the kind of war now taking place between the US and Iran was never supposed to happen.

But this doesn’t stop politicians, and especially pundits, from continuing to use the vocabulary of a century ago, and talking about “acts of war”, “state of war,” “belligerents”, casus belli, “war crimes,” and so on, although strictly speaking none of that applies any more. And on the battlefield, we don’t have anything more than the traditional formulation, most recently reproduced in Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Conventions (1979) which says that “attacks shall be limited strictly to military objectives” which are

“those objects which by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage.”

Other than adding that in case of doubt objects such as houses and schools that might be used for military purposes should be assumed not to be, that’s all there is. As I always say, the Geneva Conventions are quite a good guide to how the First World War should have been fought, but don’t begin to grapple with the complexities of warfare today. So what are these “civilian targets” we are always hearing about, you may ask? Well, they are not defined as such, they are just objects that are not military targets. Thank you.

Classically, Wars began with a formal Declaration and ended with a negotiated Treaty. Modern political culture still clings to the idea that Treaties end wars, as opposed to being signals that they have already ended. From this, comes the obsession with “negotiations,” “agreements” and “deals” that has taken up so much media space over the last few years, as though such documents were a kind of magic spell that could by itself bring an end to the fighting. I’ve written enough about this subject that it’s not worth me going into it further here, but I’ll just observe that there’s no sign that politicians and pundits understand the situation better than they previously did, or that they have taken to heart modern examples of how conflicts do in fact end, irrespective of whether the ending is decorated with pieces of paper or not.

Against this background of ignorance and dubious understanding, it’s not surprising to find a whole range of intellectual sins, of omission and commission, all originating in basic misunderstandings and in inherited mythology based on outdated ideas whose origins go back decades or even generations.This massively complicates western understanding of where we are in these conflicts, and therefore of how close to the end we are. It would be tedious to list them all, but I’ll go through a few, and you will see the common threads that link them.

Slowly, the concept of attrition is starting to make its way back into western strategic consciousness. I say “back” because of course the First World War was essentially an attrition war, where superior numbers, access to raw materials and productive capacity ultimately wore the Central Powers down to the point where they began to fall apart. But the First World War has largely disappeared from popular and even elite memory except as a cartoon parody of pointless butchery, and so we believe there are no lessons to learn from it. (The resources devoted to studying and writing about the First World War are massively smaller than those devoted to the Second, although there was much more combat on the Western Front in 1914-18 than in the later conflict.) Even in studies of the Second World War, issues of war production, access to raw materials and the allied advantage in having substantial colonial manpower reserves are generally left to specialists, in favour of writing about big, exciting battles. Yet that is where the decisive advantage finally lay. (Strategic bombing was a failed attrition strategy because it was not accurate enough to destroy German industrial production.)

We therefore do not understand that a war may effectively “end” when one side is no longer able to field sufficient numbers of human beings and equipment, and no longer has access to the fuel, ammunition and even food to support them, or the means to transport it. But this doesn’t have to mean total annihilation. Even in May 1945, the Wehrmacht could put some five million personnel in the field, but few of them were in the right place. And a few months later, when Japan surrendered, it had a fair number of aircraft left, but no fuel for them. So part of Russian strategy in Ukraine at the moment seems to be to destroy Ukrainian capability to actually deploy the troops and drones they do have, by attacking fuel depots, transport links and infrastructure. If you can’t actually get your forces into contact with the enemy, they are not much use. Likewise, attrition related to certain key capabilities may be enough. The US and Israel are approaching the point where they will no longer have sufficient missiles left to do any damage to Iran. Once that stage is reached, the number of ships of aircraft in the region is irrelevant, because, unless Iran has already collapsed first, they will have lost.

Some have found the fact that the US is running out of missiles shocking, but actually it’s a natural result of doctrine and expectations. During the Cold War, a conflict with the Warsaw Pact was not expected to last long. The air forces of both sides would be largely junk after a fairly short period, and there was no point in buying missiles you would never use. Likewise, in the brief and sometimes violent conflicts after 1990, large stocks of missiles were not needed. After all, larger stocks meant building more storage, employing more people, organising more transport, and anyway assuming that the platforms themselves would last long enough to use the extra weapons. The Russians, with a completely different military tradition, and a historical emphasis on attrition warfare, retained immense stocks of everything, because you never knew.

Although there are moves now to increase stocks of key weapons, the West can never fight an attrition war against Russia successfully, because the necessary industrial and engineering infrastructure does not exist, and cannot be re-created. Indeed, it’s doubtful if it ever even existed on the necessary scale in the first place. This applies irrespective of the technical capability of western equipment, and the (limited) potential for increasing the size of western forces. The political consequences of this are enormous, and do not seem to have been considered at all. And by sending its weapons to Ukraine, the West is simply making the longer-term problem worse. (Drones will not help, since the Russians will always have a manufacturing advantage: and anyway see the next paragraphs.) Moreover, the military market is so internationalised now that western countries typically import at least 50% of their components and sub-assemblies, not to mention raw materials. There are probably half a dozen countries in the world that could bring F-35 production and maintenance to a screaming halt.

One of the most curious western doctrinal blind-spots involves an underestimation of the value of indirect fire, which is having enormous consequences if only people would sit up and take notice. Whilst artillery has always formed part of western force structures (Napoleon was an artillery officer as it happens) it was never given the same primacy as in the Russian and later Soviet traditions. After World War 2 this primacy began to include missiles. The Soviet Union captured thousands of German scientists and engineers, many with experience of working on the V-2 rocket, and set them to work producing a clone, which was first a copy, then a development of the V-2, known in the West as the SCUD. Throughout the Cold War the Soviet Union produced more and better missiles with longer ranges, and the technology was widely exported. But it was never a priority for the West, which preferred manned aircraft, and neglected conventional offensive missiles almost entirely. Whilst the number and quality of Russian missiles came as a shock after 2022 (they had been dismissed until then as just prototypes and technology demonstrators) western reaction has not been to develop similar technologies, which would require a complete rethinking of its strategic posture, and is not going to happen. Rather, the reaction has been to ignore the existence of this capability as far as possible, and then to propose to deal with it by anti-missile systems. The fact that countries as allegedly technically inferior as North Korea and Iran could field such missiles, against which the West has little defence, does not really seem to have percolated yet.

But there’s another problem here, and it’s actually related to the concept of attrition. Until very recently, air attack was difficult and expensive and air defence was cheap. A World War 2 bomber was an expensive and complex machine, carrying a crew that took several years to train. It could be brought down by cheap anti-aircraft rounds, or at the most by a much cheaper night-fighter. Even today, an F-35 is vulnerable to mass-produced missiles costing a fraction of its price. Highly accurate offensive missiles reverse the equation. Defending against such missiles is a costly and laborious process, involving groupings of complex systems, and relatively small numbers of missiles can overwhelm them. Moreover, if radars are destroyed (as in the current war with Iran) or stocks of missiles are simply exhausted, then the system no longer functions. In any conflict with the West, the Russians would be able to flood such missile defences as the West might have with huge numbers of drones and decoys, using up defensive missiles and leaving targets largely defenceless.

It’s hard to convey how foreign this is to western experience and ways of thinking, but let’s try, through a homely analogy: that of cricket. (USians can think of baseball.) Here is the batsman in front of the wicket. While he wants to score runs, his first priority is to protect his wicket. For this, he has situational awareness. He knows who the bowlers are and where the ball is coming from. He knows how the field is placed and thus in which directions it is safe to hit. He knows the type of bowler he is facing and when to expect the ball. Even so, he has only a second or so to decide how to play the ball once it is launched at him. Now imagine a situation like that of missile defence, against an attack that has already destroyed long-range radars. Our batsman does not know which of the opposing players has the ball and how and when they will bowl it. He does not know from which direction the ball will come, or when, or at what speed and height. However, it’s actually worse than that, because many balls may be bowled at him at the same time, and he has to judge which ones are dangerous. And several other opposing players are pretending to bowl balls without actually doing so.

Like all analogies it can’t be taken too far, but I just want to emphasise the extramely short period for decision-making. The faster the ball is bowled, the less time there is. As missiles become faster and faster, and are able to manoeuvre as well, there may come a point where interception is physically impossible in the time available, bearing in mind that the defender has to calculate not where the missile is, but where the missile will be when the defending missile arrives, and the defending missile has to have the time to get get there. (Imagine a batsman facing a ball that comes too fast for him to actually see, and swerves to approach from the other side of the wicket.) A number of nations in the world, not necessarily friendly to the West, now have this kind of technology. Individual missiles can perhaps be countered reliably: salvoes of missiles, as we have already seen, cannot be. Only one ball has to hit the wicket.

Each of these blind-spots is in turn the product of a lack of interest in military affairs and military technology by a ruling class which no longer did military service, or had any family recollections of conflict. (President Chirac served as a paratrooper in Algeria. He was about the last.) The “military culture” of both the ruling class and the punditocracy (let’s be kind and call it that) is made up of vaguely recalled history books from the Tuchman or Shirer era, Hollywood war films, political folk-tales from the past, YouTube documentaries and bits and pieces they have come across on the Internet, all given the same epistemological weight and mixed up with each other. Much is inherited sort-of-wisdom from generations ago. Nothing else, for example, can explain bizarre ideas of “escorting” ships through the Straits of Hormuz. This is a concept which goes back to the wars of the previous century, when the threat to merchant shipping was from German submarines, and so ships were grouped together and protected by escorting vessels, thus sharply reducing losses. Today’s threat is not from individual vessels but from swarms of drones and missiles, which, as we have seen, cannot be defended against at scale. Moreover, the purpose of the attack is not necessarily to sink ships but to discourage them from sailing. In the circumstances, “escorts” provide more targets, but very little protection. But at least people comfort themselves that they know what the words mean.

This is one of the multiple reasons why talk of “rearmament” as opposed to small increases in the strength of forces should not be taken seriously. As I’ve often argued, the real problems the West face today are primarily conceptual and psychological, including an over-dependence on abstract thinking and adherence to a series of norms derived from the past, as with the example just discussed. The West no longer knows what it wants military forces for, or how it would employ them. “Defending against Russia” is a slogan, not a mission, and is itself the result of the uncritical revival of tired old clichés from the political folklore of the 1930s to the 1980s, because that’s all its leaders know. The consequence is that, in spite of the lessons of Ukraine and Iran, the enormous inertia of the system continues to move it in one direction: that which is already known.

Take, for example, the mysterious US F-47 programme, designed to produce the air superiority aircraft of the mid-century. The very existence of the programme, you could argue, shows that no serious attempt has been made to learn the lessons of Ukraine and Iran. An air-superiority aircraft implies an environment where other aircraft are contesting that superiority. If opponents are increasingly moving to the use of missiles to dominate airspace, then it’s questionable whether a programme like the F-47 has much meaning. Of course, defence programmes run for decades and you can’t change everything overnight, but somebody, at least, should be thinking about whether the era of the manned fighter aircraft is finally coming to an end. This is especially important if, as I argue, the “end” of the current Ukraine crisis is very far away and that, after the Russians have succeeded in their immediate goals, they are likely to use technologies they have and we haven’t for political intimidation. (That said, I don’t have that much faith in the ability of western leaderships even to realise they have been intimidated.)

This in turn is an aspect of a larger problem, which is the historical tendency to view the West as the norm. If the Russians and the Iranians are doing something different from us, they must be wrong. If we are, by definition, doing the right thing, then we should win, and so we do not need to change anything substantial. The West follows fashions in military thinking (drones are the latest), but there’s no sign that it is happy with fundamental reviews of its strategy. (Having taken part in a few alleged ones myself it’s strange how often the conclusion is that we are doing basically the right thing anyway.) This is itself part of a massive over-estimate of western norms and western power in the world, which has survived decades of disappointment, and is still very powerful, largely because we know little about strategic issues and concerns outside the West, and cannot be bothered to find out. We make assumptions about western power and influence which are normatively rather than pragmatically based. We assume that people who sound as though they might think like us actually do think like us, because our way of thinking is just superior. We assume that western doctrine, training and equipment is the best, because we have never seriously researched others, and we look for someone to blame when any of these are shown to be inadequate.

It follows that we massively overestimate our capacity to influence how crises evolve, and especially how they end, and we arrogantly claim responsibility for things over which we have in reality had little influence. This is a particular problem in Washington, where the sheer size and complexity of the system, and the relentless personal struggles for control of every issue, mean that the rest of the world has only a walk-on part. I’m sure there genuinely were people in Washington who believed that deliveries of arms and money to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan via Pakistan helped to bring down the Soviet Union, just as there are no doubt people there today who think that a handful of US troops in Northern Syria brought down Assad and installed the current regime in Damascus. It’s career suicide in Washington to suggest that anyone else but the US has agency in such situations, especially the locals. A consensual hallucination of this kind can be very attractive, of course, unless and until it stubs its toe on reality.

More generally, trying to actually get to grips with the fiendish complexity of, say, Middle East or West African politics is a life’s work for specialists, and western capitals are in general simply not interested in that level of detail. For generations now, it has been easier to invoke Great Power arguments than to attend to actual circumstances on the ground, and nothing much changes. From the 1970s, western powers claimed that independence movements in Africa, because they had looked to the Soviet Union for support, were therefore nothing but tools of Moscow. (As late as 1990, the BBC was furiously criticised by some right-wing politicians for its live coverage of the release of the “terrorist” Mandela.) And “interference” by the Soviet Union was seen everywhere: right-wing journalists, prompted by unidentified “intelligence sources” claimed in the 1970s that De Gaulle’s decision to withdraw French forces from the NATO Integrated Military Structure had been masterminded by the KGB. Political folklore being as unimaginative and unoriginal it is, fundamentally the same kinds of ideas circulate today, enabling politicians and pundits to avoid the complexities of real life, and to luxuriate in the idea of a mysterious and glamorous world of “psyops” and “colour revolutions” and “cut-outs” which they know, in reality, almost nothing about. And if we get it wrong, well the consequences don’t affect us.

At least, they didn’t. When Chalmers Johnson coined the term “blowback” he was thinking of wider political disapproval of the US and damage to its interests as a result of its behaviour. But more recently, we have finally begun to understand that countries we have made enemies of, may be developing the ability to demonstrate their displeasure in practical, and even kinetic, terms. Iranian missiles can probably already reach South-East Europe, and North Korea appears to be building at least one nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, theoretically capable of threatening much of the world. The result is the usual mixture of denial and incipient panic. The world isn’t supposed to be like that, and it never occurred to us to imagine what would happen if it did.

The panic arises from the dawning understanding that western actions can have real consequences. For several decades, talking and acting tough against China, Russia or Iran has been essentially playing to a domestic audience, seeking to appear more radical and hard-line than the next actor. What the targets of this behaviour may themselves have thought was irrelevant, and anyway there was nothing they could do about it. That’s changed now, of course, but habits of generations die hard. It’s not that western governments are trying to “provoke a war” with China, it’s that they can’t abandon the habit of threatening and insulting that country, secure in the belief that there will never be any practical consequences. Until now, though, the subtlety with which the Chinese are conducting themselves is obviously more than western political systems can easily understand.

It follows that the West has now largely lost the ability to determine how crises will unfold, and especially when and how they will finish. This does not mean that other states have become all-powerful either, it simply means that permanent western primacy cannot just be assumed. This applies both at the day-to-day level of control of the evolution of the conflict (the so-called Boyd Cycle, about which I have written before) and in the longer-term as well. But there is no sign that the West has realised this, or that its decision-making systems are able to genuinely understand and into account the objectives and capabilities of others. The fixation continues to be on what western political systems can accept, as though this was all that mattered, and on the consequent belief that the West can announce how a crisis will end, and reality will obediently come into line. Let’s conclude by reverting to the two current examples where we’ll see the problems I have described above playing out.

In the case of Ukraine, the West chose to disbelieve warnings from Moscow about possible consequences of their behaviour. This was partly based on an illusion of western strength and Russian weakness, but partly also on the political unacceptability of NATO actually altering its behaviour to take account of the views of others. The West failed to understand the nature of the war from the beginning, opting to interpret it as a war of conquest, when it was first intended as a political shock, and then morphed into an attrition war for which the Russians had prepared. The West couldn’t really be bothered to understand: the war would soon be over anyway. But it wasn’t, and the sheer length of the fighting became a problem in itself, as it revealed important industrial weaknesses in the West. The Russian use of missiles surprised everyone, but for the moment it has been parked in the Too Difficult to Think About category. Most of all, hung up on traditional notions of war and peace, the West still clings to the idea that there will be an End to the crisis, through a peace conference whose terms it can dictate, after which things will rapidly revert to normal and Russia will be begging to be allowed back into the “international system.”

Ludicrous as this is, it represents the most that the Western system is able to envisage for the moment. In reality, it will be the Russians who decide when it stops, and we do not know (and they may not yet have decided) what form the post-war situation will take. But we can look forward to the intimidatory use of military capability, to serial political crises within NATO and between NATO and Russia, and other fun and games. Western options for avoiding this are few and decrease with every day’s bellicose posturing. I’ve seen fantasies of guerrilla warfare and terrorism, but this isn’t the 1950s, and it only shows how firm is the grip of memories of a long-ago, half-understood, past on the problems of the present. There isn’t going to be an endless war against Russia, any more than there was after 2021 in Afghanistan, where pundits were insisting that the US would continue the war from across the border and never withdraw. When was the last time you heard some US decision-maker even mention the country? And the dreaded Military-Industrial Complex: won’t they force the war to continue? Maybe not so dreaded: of the largest US companies listed by revenue in Fortune magazine, none of the military companies are in the top fifty. Much economic power lies elsewhere, and anyway you can’t escalate with things you haven’t got.

Much the same is true of Iran, where the Iranians, whilst by no means the winners yet, have the initiative, and where the US itself cannot win. (That’s why it’s disturbing to see US pundits already trying to map out some kind of future renewed conflict with Iran, as though that were possible.) This failure results from a mixture of arrogance, the inherited military and political folklore mentioned earlier, and a simple disinclination to study Iranian military capability, because in the end who cared? The Iranian political system and the nature of its society did not need to be studied: they could be assumed. And the thought of effective Iranian retaliation, if even entertained, could be dismissed, because it would cast doubt on the ability of the whole enterprise. All of this was predictable, and to some extent predicted in general terms. And now, the future evolution of the crisis depends primarily on Iran, which is an uncomfortable and unfamiliar place for the West to find itself in.

Nothing in our inherited and archaic understanding of war and peace, of the causes of conflict and the reasons conflicts end, is of any use in this situation. In each case, the most likely result will be a long period of low-level tension, which would suit the Russians and Iranians respectively, but would strain, and probably irreparably fracture, western cohesion. It’s not over yet, in other words, and it won’t be the West that decides when it stops.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.

So what’s going on here? Well, there’s a theory that the number of basic plots in world culture is actually very small: anything from five to seven is often suggested. Among these is the plot of the hero’s return home, which is the plot of the Odyssey, but it’s important to understand that “the” plot has, in fact, several distinct elements to it. An individual is stranded far away from home. This individual decides to return, and makes use of his unusual abilities to overcome various dangers and problems on the way. These abilities may include strength and courage, but they often include intelligence and resourcefulness as well. So Odysseus is introduced as polytropos, usually translated as “man of many ways,” and throughout the poem (and in the Iliad as well), his shrewdness and cunning are emphasised, in contrast, for example, to the straightforward courage and ferocity of Achilles. And finally, when the hero arrives home, after many adventures, there is still work to be done to put things in order, and even the promise of further adventures to come.

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In fact, this is not the first time Nolan has told the story: it is the essential plot of his great war film Dunkirk (2017.) This is the story of the homecoming of an entire Army, given up for lost, but it focuses on Tommy (the traditional generic name for a British soldier), the only survivor of his group, who through his ingenuity and the commitment and courage of others, manages to return to the relative safety of England. The film explicitly uses the four Elements to recall Homer: the land represents safety, the sea represents danger, the air is the domain of godlike figures who intervene to threaten or help the hero, and fire is their weapon. (Yes, military historians, that’s why Spitfires appear in the film, not Hurricanes. It’s called symbolism.) And at the end of the film, one of the pilots, obliged to descend from the air, sets fire to his aircraft, on the land, next to the sea, as a sacrificial offering of thanks for the rescue. (For that matter both Inception and Interstellar include some of the same elements of the return home.)

And it’s fundamental to the Odysseus story that the homecoming is not the end of the action: he still has to kill the suitors and clean up the kingdom. Thus in Dunkirk, after the successful return to England Tommy finds himself reading a newspaper with Churchill’s sombre warning that “wars are not won by evacuations,” and his promise of “blood, tears, toil and sweat,” not peace any time soon. And what the viewer knows, and Tommy does not know, is that soon he will be sent off to fight somewhere else, in Greece or North Africa or the Far East, possibly to die, otherwise to fight on until 1945. In the Odysseus myth, it’s not over until it’s over. Which must have been in Tolkien’s mind when he ended The Lord of the Rings not just with a climactic battle, not just with a homecoming, but with the subsequent Scouring of the Shire.

Sometimes, real life obligingly repeats mythical patterns. As it happens, a very long film treatment of Charles de Gaulle’s, well, Odyssey between 1940 and 1944 has just been released in two parts. I hope it makes it to the Anglo-Saxon world intact. What’s really fascinating is how closely his real-world story resembles the Odysseus myth. De Gaulle, stranded in England in 1940, and effectively alone, manages to take on to himself the attributes of a symbolic King, as Odysseus had been King of Ithaca, and by force of personality and diplomacy rather than military power, avoids traps and snares, and makes his way back, via Brazzaville and Algiers, to be received in Paris as the rightful ruler. Indeed, even the story of Penelope makes a fleeting appearance. Just as she resisted the suitors, so La France (always feminine) and Marianne, the (female) symbol of the Republic, fought on through the Resistance and the Free French, against the French State of Pétain, and its collaboration with the Nazis. And finally, of course, there was the reckoning, the Purge, when some of the most egregious collaborators like Laval the Prime Minister were executed, even if for political reasons the carnage was less impressive than it had been on Ithaca.

This could go on for pages, but I’ll just briefly note how deeply the myth of the Hero’s Return insinuated itself into even the most popular of popular culture. In the decades following World War 2, there was an entire sub-genre of film and TV stories about escapes from German prison camps, using guile and deception, travelling across occupied Europe and usually escaping via Spain. The best known of these is probably The Great Escape, but would you believe there is one called The Wooden Horse that relates the true story of a literal wooden (vaulting) horse, used not to get into a city, but out of a prison camp? The idea of the return of the avenging hero is common in popular culture too, from Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider, to Michael Caine in Get Carter, which was itself based on a thriller novel called … Jack’s Return Home. The idea has also been satirised, of course, notably in Joyce’s Ulysses, where Leopold Bloom is very clearly Everyman, and his homecoming, as Joyce makes clear, is the homecoming of all of us, of “Sinbad the Sailor, Tinbad the Tailor, Jinbad the Jailer, Whinbad the Whaler, Ninbad the Nailer, Binbad the Bailer…” and unlike Odysseus, he does nothing. He does not even remonstrate with Molly, his unfaithful wife, who serves as a satirical counterpart to Penelope. And it’s not by chance that Joyce himself never went “home” to Ireland, and that one of his minor works is a play called Exiles. There are also satirical inversions of the same concept, like the character of Tyrone Slothrop in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, lost in a fantastic and surreal postwar Europe, seeing marvels and confronting obstacles, who does not manage to get home, but drifts passively around until he effectively “dissolves.”

So, (and with apologies if I’ve left out a work you’re attached to) we have three essential elements. An individual or group, not necessarily inherently heroic but wanting to return home, the successful overcoming of tests, trials and obstacles, and the rectification of the situation. So where, in today’s events, or in cultural productions set in the present time, do we encounter this tradition? Well we don’t, actually, which is why Nolan’s film is so interesting, and why it will be equally interesting to see how it is received. For the fundamental three-element structure I have described no longer corresponds to anything valued by current western culture or society. We are therefore required to look either backwards a minimum of half a century, or sideways to other cultures for examples. I’ll try to explain in the rest of this essay what we have lost, and why this is important.

The first obvious requirement is a society in which the possibility of doing challenging things exists. I put it that way, because a society may be extremely boring, conventional and unheroic, but there may still be space deliberately left at the edges for the possibility of challenges, and the surrounding world itself might provide them whether you want them or not. In his autobiography Stefan Zweig tries to reconstruct the mentality of the Europe of 1914 and the reasons why the War was initially widely supported. Now Zweig was quite close to being a pacifist, horrified by the approaching conflict, and he wrote his autobiography in exile at the height of the Second World War just before his suicide. But if his historical analysis was a bit shaky, he recognised, as did others, that for large numbers of people the War came as a blessed relief from the unbearable, stifling conformity and predictability of life at the turn of the Century. This was not necessarily because people wanted to fight, let alone kill, even less die, but because the War promised a period of time when the rules would be different, and there would be new opportunities and adventures and challenges. Wartime was a time of freedom from bourgeois constraints, a period when transgressive activity was available for all.

On the other hand, for those unlike Zweig who did serve in the trenches of the First World War, the experience was the defining one of their lives, and their Homecoming, after surviving many ordeals, was often a bitter disappointment. Many combatants saw their own countries ruined, poverty and inflation everywhere and an ungrateful population, whose wealthier elements had not fought themselves but had still done well out of the War. They returned to neglect and unemployment, and unsurprisingly began to feel that Something Needed to be Done. Insofar as it has a single origin, Fascism probably goes back to the sense of anger and disappointment in the Italy of 1919.

Paradoxically, times of great social conformity have in the past provided opportunities for challenges and even adventure. In the period that Zweig was writing about, there were semi-official mechanisms for this, generally involving travelling and working abroad. There were also those who deliberately exiled themselves, those who became involved in radical or even revolutionary politics, those who embraced new philosophies, sometimes from other civilisations, those who embraced new and shocking concepts of art and life. (It’s depressing, in fact, how much of our neurotically transgressive society and culture today is just a pale imitation of the social and cultural ferment of the years after 1919.)

But you could go further. There were many parts of the world that Europeans had never visited, and indeed some that no human being ever had. Explorers (including a number of women) went out to find them, and returned to a reception now associated with footballers or pop stars. Some of the journeys were true epics: Ernest Shackleton and his fellow explorers, attempting to cross Antarctica on foot, lost their main ship, the Endurance, and a group of them set out on a two-week voyage in an open lifeboat to find help in South Georgia, across more than a thousand kilometres of ocean, crossing a mountain-range at the end of the voyage. His men were all rescued safely. But there was nothing obviously extraordinary about Shackleton: he had no great wealth behind him, no influential family, a typical public education of the time until he was fourteen years old, service in the Merchant Navy, and no obvious qualities of leadership or courage until they were tested and revealed in extreme circumstances.

Yet he lived in a time when effort and difficulty were thought to be part of life for most people. Everyday life for both men and women involved far more physical effort than it does today, and often a higher level of difficulty in everyday things Attaining adulthood involved passing through a series of stages where you acquired new responsibilities and learnt to do new things. In most societies, young people began early, with hikes and camps and sports that would now be considered dangerous, and absences lasting days without any contact with their parents. Homesickness, discomfort and isolation were things everybody had to learn to overcome. Even the literature of the day reflected these assumptions: the children of RM Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) are shipwrecked on the eponymous natural feature, survive and prosper and have adventures before safely coming home. A century later, I seem to remember reading an Enid Blyton book about a group of children going off on holiday on their own in a horse-drawn caravan: something that would get their parents arrested today.

I think it’s fair to say that our society no longer expects or encourages people to do original and difficult things. Ironically, the result of mass media, and the Internet in particular, has been to promote not diversity and challenge, but conformity, since everyone can see what everyone else is doing. I’ve talked before about organisations becoming more risk-averse and procedure-intensive, and less tolerant of the kind of person who can be a nuisance when things are fine, but whom you really need when things go wrong. Likewise, the emphasis today is on doing things more easily, and making them intrinsically easier to do. This is fine in some ways (who would want to go back to washing clothes by hand, for example?) but the overall effect has been a massive de-skilling of society, and a corresponding reliance on technology and on (sometimes expensive) substitutes for learning how to do things. We still want the results but are increasingly unwilling to put in the effort, so the system responds by making challenges easier, or ideally getting rid of them entirely. This is why “AI” used for cheating in universities is not a radical departure: it’s just the logical conclusion of decades of belief that everything should be made as easy as possible. Yes, degrees have been devalued and turned into credentials, yes there are too many graduates and not enough jobs, but the most fundamental purpose of any education is surely your own intellectual and cultural development. Use ChatGPT for your college assignments and you are committing a kind of intellectual suicide.

By contrast, I was part of the first generation of children from “ordinary” backgrounds to go to university in Britain, roughly during the period from the late 60s to the late 70s, and before the beginning of the neoliberal destruction of higher education. “Ordinary” scarcely describes most of us: some were working-class, and not a few came from homes where there were no books. To get through the education system of the time, up to and through university, and perhaps beyond, was extremely difficult anyway, and especially so for those who did not come from the educated middle class. Nonetheless, it was recognised by all in those days that you got nowhere without trying, and overcoming obstacles.

Today’s society has very largely disposed of the need for, and thus the expectation of, difficulty and challenge, and no longer understands the inherent importance of developing and maturing through overcoming those obstacles. That’s why, as I have often argued, we live in an essentially adolescent culture, where we want and expect things to be done for us. And we want results instantly, if not sooner, which is why, for example, apprenticeships have largely disappeared in the West, and the average overpraised Tech Lord is celebrated for having dropped out of university: it’s not as though there was anything of value there to learn. This is why I was amused to see Zuckerberg, in whom I have otherwise taken zero interest, flounder so hopelessly when the first moral and ethical issues arose with his Facebook toy. He looked like a kid completely out of his depth, encountering grown-up problems for the first time, as indeed he was.

But the instant tech billionaire fairy story is just a one example of the fantasy that you can have anything you want without putting in the effort. Go to the religion and spirituality section (if there is one) of your local bookshop (if you have one) and you’ll find it stuffed with books telling you how to become rich and successful without any effort, just by really wanting to be. Others will claim to teach you the success secrets of the Chinese Masters in the time it takes to read a couple of hundred pages. And the Internet is full of programs and recordings claiming to reproduce all the positive effects of meditation practice, without the inconvenience of actually practising meditation. Now in their defence, such programs can have a relaxing and calming effect, and there’s some evidence that they can affect brain activity, at least in the short term. But meditation is not about changing your brainwaves, but changing your life, and for that you have to invest time and effort. Lots of it.

All in all, not a very propitious environment for encountering and overcoming obstacles, or even acknowledging that they exist. For Shackleton and his team, it was precisely the difficulty of the expedition, and the understanding that success, and even survival, were not guaranteed, that constituted the attraction. As far as possible, difficulty is abstracted away these days, and challenges become purely formal. When I was a boy, Hilary and Tenzing were heroes for their first ascent of Mount Everest, after many other failures over decades, including some deaths. Today, commercial companies will take you to the top, even if you can scarcely climb a ladder. But the very idea that there might be circumstances where initiative and determination are absolutely required seems too much for our societies to contemplate. Surely, this at least partially explains the passivity about climate change, the dismissal of Covid as something that could be cured with a vaccination, even the economic and political effects of the Iran-US conflict. We simply don’t want to imagine situations where life for ordinary people like us could become difficult, challenging and even dangerous, because we know that we are not mentally equipped to deal with them. This has nothing to do with being “weak” or “decadent,” and people, as people, are much the same as they ever were. It’s just that whatever remains of our moral education and our process of growing up includes no acknowledgement that things can become tough for entire societies, and that What I Want may have to be put on hold for a while.

So by extension, not a very propitious environment for heroes therefore, or even just a recognition that ordinary people can do extraordinary things. For a start, you have to believe that people can actually behave that way, and that words like “heroism” “endurance” “decisiveness” and even “competence” refer to things that actually exist: increasingly, we don’t. One of the strengths of the De Gaulle film is its presentation of the battle of Bir Hakeim in 1942, where a greatly outnumbered French Brigade held its position for two weeks, inflicting massively disproportionate casualties on the attacking Germans and Italians, before withdrawing successfully and meeting up with the British, thus enabling the successful battle of El Alamein. And the Brigade itself was a hastily-improvised collection of units from the French Army and its colonies all over the world, many of whom were volunteers. I wonder what younger people, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, would think of that episode in the film. We sneer at such toxically masculine behaviour now: after all, there wasn’t any real moral difference between the Nazis and the Allies was there? (Hiroshima! Hiroshima!) and in the end it wouldn’t have mattered who won. Except that in reality hardly anyone actually believes this, and that in turn has consequences we’ll come to.

Which is to say you can’t have heroes, whether they are mighty warriors or just ordinary people, whether they do great things or just endure suffering, danger and privation, unless you know and accept what all those terms mean. Now for Odysseus and his age, we can give “hero” a recognised technical meaning: a man of great bravery and power, generally a demigod. But we now live in a society which not only lacks occasions for heroic combat, it tries to avoid challenges and difficulties of every kind, and to stay well away from even the possibility of danger. The practical actions of courageous and resilient individuals of the past, struggling for the rights of citizens and workers, the freedom of their country or a free political system, or simply enduring the unspeakable in sieges and famines, have been dematerialised away into “struggles” against amorphous abstractions like “racism,” “sexism” and even today “fascism,” which have no objective existence or agreed meaning, and so can be “fought” eternally and with no prospect of winning, like some gigantic video-game with endless levels: perhaps the best image I can think of for the activities of today’s Notional Left.

Today we have not heroes but victims, and we live in a world of competitive victimhood. This victimhood is a curious phenomenon, inasmuch as it is largely collective and identitarian. You are automatically a victim if you are a member of a “marginalised” or “historically disadvantaged” community, or one which suffers “structural discrimination.” It is rarely, these days at least, a status gained from identifiable personal experience, except of the kind “I was obviously discriminated against because I was …” Of course, the motives behind such assertions are comprehensible and even banal, if we understand that they are essentially entrepreneurial in nature, and amount to moral claims on others for money, power and influence, and special treatment. The problem arises when victimism becomes the default lens through which we view the world, and where people come to see themselves and others not as actual or potential actors, but just as passive victims.

We can see this in the way that coverage of conflicts and emergencies in the world is increasingly fixated on trying to count alleged victims, at the expense of trying to understand the issues. The classic example is probably the war in the DRC that began in 1996, and by some measures has never really ended. Often described as “Africa’s World War” it involved seven countries at one point, and is supposed to have caused three, or four, or even five million deaths. These deaths are almost all estimated excess deaths calculated by comparison with historical mortality statistics (themselves of unknown and unknowable accuracy): direct violent deaths were quite rare. But you could read many accounts of the war and its aftermath without ever discovering what the war was actually about. Likewise, the current fighting in the Sudan is usually presented in victimist terms (“already claimed X thousand lives according to estimates by humanitarian NGOs”) and the objectives and activities of the factional leaders are dismissed in a line or two, so that we effectively understand nothing. (How about “thousands feared dead in raid on US Naval Base” as a headline in December 1941?)

The result of all this is to reduce human beings to the status of nothing but victims, at every level from the most banal to the mega-strategic, and to encourage a sense of helplessness and passivity and lack of agency. At the individual level, you see it in the comments on any well-known Internet site, where some readers persistently claim that nothing is worth doing, it’s all impossible, “They” will always win, everyone is suborned and corrupt, apparent victories are only disguised defeats, and so on. More seriously, the problem infects political leaderships and their advisers as well. Problems are too big and complex to solve, nations are too powerful to oppose, the solutions are beyond our ability to formulate, let alone implement, so let’s restrict ourselves to hand-waving and performative gestures that will get us good publicity. (We can imagine Telemachus and Odysseus meeting up: “Dad, there’s just too many suitors so there’s no point in trying to fight them. Maybe we should look for a peaceful solution that addresses the underlying causes.”)

But of course identifying yourself as a victim only makes sense as a strategy if you can thereby persuade or coerce some greater power or authority into helping you, or intervening in your favour. It was always a favourite strategy of small countries to get someone else to fight their wars, but it has recently been generalised into a complete world-view, at all levels of domestic and international politics. Yet of course a benevolent and powerful outside actor (clearly substituting for God here) may not actually exist, or may be unwilling or unable to intervene, at which point the strategy breaks down. Domestically, much of the Grievance industry presupposes a state with the resources, will and competence to intervene on behalf of some group or other, with money and favours. But we may be moving towards a world where states no longer have the capability they used to (we are part-way there already) and also where our societies will be confronted with problems which will reduce Grievance politics to the status of background noise. It will no longer be any use demanding that Mummy and Daddy do something. It will no longer be any use asking not, What I can do for my Country, but Why hasn’t my Country done more for Me? No-one will be listening.

This is why the learned helplessness of victimism is so dangerous at all levels. There have been bad times in history before now—worse, I should say—but there has never been a time I can think of when the necessary mental and moral resources to address and try to overcome challenges have been so lacking. To be able to deal with problems competently, you have to understand what competence means, and then you have to be familiar with examples from the past. We have neither of these things. If words like “courage,” “determination,” “leadership” and “solidarity” are unused except on fatuous Powerpoint slides, if “leadership” means giving people lists of unrealisable objectives and “teamwork” means wearing funny hats, then communities will no more understand how to deal with even quite routine disasters than they would know how to mount a production of Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand from scratch, assuming anyone would want to.

We learn from examples and folk-memory: what our parents and grandparents did, what the communities in which we live did when there were communities, and how they coped with wars and emergencies, natural disasters, shortages and crises. None of that exists now. The only way in which it is generally acceptable to see the dead of our wars is as a “useless sacrifice.” Retrospectively, the generation that went through World War 2 has been re-classified exclusively as victims, from whose experiences we can learn nothing useful, although that would never have occurred to them at the time. (Even the cinema has joined in since the 1970s: notice that it’s Saving Private Ryan, not Ryan Saves Himself.) The grammar and vocabulary of mundane resilience and determination, let alone that of resistance and courage, has been deliberately abandoned, and appeals from politicians trying to resurrect it in the face of some Russian “threat,” might as well be in Martian for all that they mean anything today.

Declining societies begin by killing the old. The Oedipal tendency to re-interpret the past and critically examine historical myths, which is natural and healthy in itself, has got out of control in recent decades, and has now become essentially pathological. For many self-hating western societies, the past itself is so dark and questionable that it is better simply to cancel it, and consign great events and great figures to the Memory Hole. Which is fine as part of a political game, until genuinely serious and dangerous events start to happen again, and it turns out that that we have no cultural and political muscle-memory to help us understand how to react to them. Our political class is obviously completely lost: day-to-day management by image replaced competence and vision so long ago that such qualities can now not be recovered. Performative posturing is all they have left, and there is no longer even a genuine vocabulary of competence, cooperation, collective effort and endurance to appeal to. Our leaders sound like CEOs of technology start-ups because that’s all they know, and they treat us like their employees. That’s not going to be good enough.

Yet few of us are actually happy in a society like that. We want heroes and role-models to admire and imitate, and we want the problems of the world to be dealt with by competent and serious people. This is why the reaction to the two-part film about De Gaulle has been so interesting. It shows, especially in the second part, the solidarity and courage of ordinary people, in the Resistance and elsewhere, and the gathering together of a team of competent and determined people to save what could be saved of France’s honour and independence. But it also shows De Gaulle acting with determination and personal charisma to tell Roosevelt and Churchill to get stuffed on several occasions. Most media critics don’t know how to react to something so exotic, and have been taken aback by popular enthusiasm for the films, which, though long and complex, have been playing to packed houses. It will be interesting to see the reaction to the forthcoming film about the Resistance hero and martyr Jean Moulin, about whom I’ve written before.

In most other western countries, making a positive film about its history is a tricky proposition, especially where the military are involved. But the desire to learn about interesting, admirable people and the willingness to be impressed by displays of competence, dedication and courage, is eternal, and part of human nature. So today, we have outsourced hero-worship along with everything else. People who would never dream of cheering for their own countries cheer for Russia, Ukraine or Iran, projecting their own unmet needs on to them, and often reacting violently to any criticism with a kind of transferred patriotism. So Zelensky and a contingent of the Ukrainian Army were furiously applauded by the crowds at the Bastille Day parade in Paris this week. There’s a mordant irony in the fact that Zelensky is not a politician but an actor, playing the kind of heroic figure that western culture would like to have, but cannot bring itself to actually want. He enables those who would really like to admire Churchill or Roosevelt or even De Gaulle, but cannot take the risk of doing so, to find an acceptable replacement, for whom worship is not only permitted, but actively encouraged. And the carefully cultivated media image of the Ukrainian Army enables us to vicariously exult in all the qualities of bravery and determination that we have learned to despise in our own countries

This is not entirely new of course: small groups on the Left and those who considered themselves pacifists always had a tendency to externalise their need for heroes to others: the cult of Stalin had gone into reverse by the time I was at University, but admiration for Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Lumumba, Mao, even Pol Pot (basically anyone who was against the US) was in full flower. However, this affected only a small and unrepresentative part of western society and some enthusiasms (as for Pol Pot) did not last long anyway. What we are seeing these days is much more widespread, across very large parts of the political spectrum, and is unpredictable in terms of its choices of hero and its effects.

As I’ve suggested elsewhere, the fact that the very concept of “home” has been sabotaged and ridiculed, and that the world has been symbolically reduced to a vast hotel ecology across which people move freely, mean that there are no longer identities and homes to build resilience on, nor to demonstrate competence for, let alone to return to, so we have to borrow examples from elsewhere. And if you don’t like a hotel you complain and move to another one. That’s how the elites see nations today, insofar as they see them at all, but it’s not how the people see nations. Something like the reckoning at the end of the Odyssey has been talked about so much for so long that it is starting to seem inevitable. And by carefully exiling all of the issues I’ve discussed to the rubbish bin of the “extreme Right,” the political class has ensured that retribution, when it comes, will most likely originate from that direction. Unfortunately, the probable leaders will not be like Odysseus, calling a halt to the slaughter, or De Gaulle, constructing a necessary myth of salvation, but something altogether nastier. By then, it will be too late.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.

So whilst huge amounts of money are spent, and there are more NGOs and development officials now than there were missionaries and administrators at the time of colonialism, very little of lasting value is achieved. Yet nobody important really seems to mind, so long as budgets are respected and boxes are ticked. Today, I want to look in more detail at how and why this has happened, as a result of changes in the West, socially, politically and even philosophically. I’ll review a number of changes in ways of thinking that have come from all directions, but have collectively reduced the West’s capacity to act sensibly towards the rest of the world. Although my interest is thus primarily on what these changes have done to the reputation and influence of western states overseas, we need to begin by looking at what has happened in the West itself, and why. I’ll also briefly note that, nonetheless, the West continues to have considerable influence in some parts of the world, and that this is less about western strength than the current weakness of competitors. And as before I will try to restrict my specific examples to those I know something about. And again as before, I’m not getting into polemics about the rights and wrongs of colonialism here.

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A good place to start is the apocryphal remark, attributed to a number of African politicians, which runs something like: “when the Chinese come we get an airport; when the West comes we get a sermon.” At first sight this seems strange since, as we noted last week, missionaries built churches, schools and universities, among other things, while the colonial powers built lots of infrastructure. Almost all of Africa was connected by western built railway-lines at one time or another: a few of them are still in service. Further East, the French constructed the Damascus to Beirut railway, over difficult and complex terrain, in just four years. It was opened in 1895, but finally closed during the Civil War (You can still see the station in Beirut.) Now although these railways were built for mercenary reasons to do with trade and strategic positioning, the fact is that they were built, because capabilities existed then that we do not have now. (Chinese motives are unlikely to be any less mercenary, of course, but there it is.)

So all we have left is sermons. But let’s stay with that word for a minute. A “sermon”, from a Latin word meaning “discourse,” is an address on a religious theme, most often taking its subject from a verse of the Bible. (There is a similar process in Islam.) In the days when it was customary to go to Church, “sermon” simply meant an element of a Church service: with the decline in attendance, it has acquired a pejorative significance, and, as used by our apocryphal African, means moral lectures given by people who have no right to be giving them.

But sermons were once an important literary form, and in Shakespeare’s time collections of the sermons of Jean Calvin, for example, were best-sellers. Indeed the famous connection between Print and Protestantism is well exemplified in the case of sermons: those of John Donne were regarded as important literary works from the start, and have been reprinted in modern critical editions. They were also a form of popular entertainment, frequently preached in the open air before large crowds, who did not scruple to heckle the preacher on points of dogma or literary merit. They were often used to convey a political message either for against the established authorities, and preachers who were too controversial could find themselves in trouble with those authorities, or conversely shouted down, or even assaulted, by an angry crowd.

It’s immediately clear that you can only have this kind of discourse at all in a fundamentally homogeneous society. A crowd or congregation would be familiar with Biblical stories and themes (in the towns, by Shakespeare’s death, most of the urban middle class could read, and books on religious themes were the equivalent of political literature more recently.) References to everyday life, to recent historical events, even to popular religious controversies, would resonate with the vast majority of those listening. In turn, successful preachers, like John Wesley, one of the founders of Methodism in the eighteenth century, carefully calculated how to present their reformist, populist teachings in such a way as to convert the largest number of people.

But if we think about it for a moment, it’s clear that classical “sermons” of this type are only one example of a type of in-group discourse. That is to say, they are intended to inform, persuade, and even entertain, a group of people who have broadly common ideas, or who, at a minimum, are open to persuasion based on what they know and believe already. A political orator, for example, might seek to reassure his or her her audience of the fundamentals of their beliefs, while also converting some of the audience to a more radical position than the one they currently hold. Even in that second case, though, there would have to be enough commonality of vocabulary and concepts to make persuasion possible. But just as often such discourses are about solidarity and consensus-building: consider a speaker at a Party Congress in Moscow in the 1980s, for example and, with some limitations, a speech given at the annual congress of a major political party today. Speaker and audience share a whole set of implicit and explicit assumptions, norms and values, which means they understand things that are said, and even not said, and even if those things are puzzling to outsiders.

So the idea of travelling to a far country and spending most of your life there, as a missionary or an administrator, did not come out of nowhere. It was not an appeal to adventure, nor an appeal to those who wanted to become rich overseas: there were plenty of other opportunities for that. It was an appeal to duty and service, in terms with which the target audience of young (mostly) men would have been familiar, because they had been hearing it all their lives. Moreover, the values that were supposed to guide their service did not have to be taught from zero: they were there already in the education systems of the countries concerned. And because they were also values widely accepted in the societies themselves, choices made by individuals were comprehensible to those wider societies. To tell your middle-class relatives that you wanted to become a missionary, or join the Colonial Service, might surprise them, but it would be as understandable as if you said that you intended to join the Army, or for that matter a merchant bank. It was part of an acknowledged range of choices that young people could make.

As I pointed out last week, there was a firm moral basis for most of the actions that these people took. The British case is perhaps more obvious, with its mixture of Protestant Christian and Liberal values, but in some ways the French case is more interesting because, in those days and indeed until relatively recently, there actually was a secular ideology called Republicanism: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the separation of Church and State and political power in the hands of the people. This ideology was no more universally respected than any other, but the important thing was that it provided a clear foundation for making decisions and implementing policies. And since the values of the French Revolution were universal, they applied by definition everywhere and at all times. So since slavery was an offence against equality, it had to be abolished everywhere that French power permitted. Both the British and the French, in their different ways, could thus call on a coherent corpus of thought and writing to support their policies.

Such a consensus-based moral certainty seems unimaginable today, and if our politicians seem unconvincing in their dealings with the rest of the world, it is because they have retained, and even strengthened, the vocabulary of morally superior instruction, without any of the consensus-based and coherent thinking that should underpin it. They continue to hector and lecture, both at home and abroad, but what they say makes little sense, because it is not based on any systematic set of beliefs. Moreover, the consensus a century ago was social as well as intellectual: no religious or political theory has ever been interpreted in the same way by everyone at all times, and indeed popular beliefs and norms tend in practice to be a rather complex mix of inherited and changing attitudes, mixed with changing interpretations of teachings and ideas. Most people, in fact, and whatever their level of education, hold strong opinions on many issues without being able to explain exactly why. This is normal, and in a relatively coherent society it is not necessarily a problem. It is a problem today because we no longer have a relatively coherent society. Let’s briefly look at examples of why.

I mentioned last week the attempts of western powers to put an end to such practices as child marriage in areas of the world they controlled. This in part had to do with changes in the concept of childhood in Europe in the nineteenth century, and progressive social legislation in many countries to prevent the sexual exploitation of children. That’s not a randomly-chosen example, because in a few months time we will be celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of a famous petition, signed by almost every significant French intellectual of the epoch, calling for the legalisation of sex with children. The list included the usual names (Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre), some who now probably regret signing (Jack Lang, Bernard Kouchner) and a whole string of intellectuals including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida of the Deconstructionist Gang, to whom we will return. The petition was in the context of the so-called Versailles Affair , where three men were charged with sexual relations with boys and girls of 13 and 14 years of age. The basic argument was that the rights of children to make choices about their relationships were the only relevant issue. (No children appear to have been consulted in the drafting of the petition.) It was perhaps the first sighting of a modern, secular, normative social argument, entirely theoretically-based and uninterested in any practical consequences.

Among the signatories, unsurprisingly if you know the era, were Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, authors of the Anti-Oedipus published in 1972, which effectively distilled the incoherent demands of the leaders of the 1968 generational rebellion. Now, as often, it’s not so much that Great Books change history, as that they concretise the thought of a period, offer a point of reference, and provide a vocabulary and a set of ideas to make what was previously incoherent more structured and easier to understand. It’s therefore unsurprising that the influence of many Great Books is strongest on those who have never read them, but have absorbed popular interpretations of their main ideas. So I’m not going to flog through the text of the book, which features the wilful obscurity and newly-minted vocabulary obligatory in modern French philosophical writings, but just mention a couple of points associated with the book’s popularity.

The book formed part of the “anti-psychiatry” movement, but extended the condemnation to psychotherapy, also, which was dismissed as ”reactionary,” and as a kind of “police force.” Inspired by Nietzsche’s Will to Power, and by Foucault who wrote the preface, the authors portray the element of Desire as existing above everything else, and in effect producing reality by itself. Human beings are “desiring machines” interacting with each other. But Desire, they argued, is also capable of being perverted by capitalism into the desire for subordination or even to be repressed. Therefore, Desire must be liberated from the family and all the other repressive structures used by capitalism to control it. The schizophrenic is celebrated or at least cited, as the only truly liberated individual, unlike the paranoid and the psychotic, who remain prisoners of the desire-negating system. (No schizophrenics seem have been consulted in the production of the book.) Schizophrenia is not a mental illness, but a higher state of being, therefore.

If that sounds clumsy and needlessly obscure, well that’s certainly how many would characterise the book. After all, as was pointed out from the start, Desire is not necessarily a good thing: mass murderers, sadists, the Waffen SS and others are certainly acting out their desire, even while they transgress social norms that their families and societies tried to inculcate. But criticism is rather beside the point: the book was a sensation when it was first published, and even more so when an English translation appeared. For many who did not get beyond reading the back cover, it represented the sacralising of the do-what-you-want mood of the times, a kind of ”Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” but with a much larger list of references than anything Crowley could manage. It appeared—like some Leftist version of Ayn Rand—to provide intellectual support for our natural urges to selfishness and indifference to the welfare of others, which a repressive society tried to control, and to represent them instead as natural responses to a world consisting only of “desire machines.” Quite what such a world would have looked like, must remain a mystery, since the book was exclusively concerned with the need for rebellion, and not the consequences.

No wonder it was much talked about, if not necessarily read. Now the idea of an appeal to Rights preempting any other type of argument (from duty, from consequences etc) was not of course new. You can find it already in the foundational Human Rights document, the Declaration of 1789. The Preamble, which tends to be neglected these days, says in part, in the official English translation, that because “ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt of the rights of man” are “the only causes of public misfortunes and the corruption of Governments” the National Assembly has “resolved to set forth, in a solemn Declaration, the natural, unalienable and sacred rights of man.” There are a few interesting points here. Rights are everything. Neglect of duties, except by the State is nowhere mentioned. And if they were respected, all of the misfortunes and corruptions of Governments would be cured. Moreover, the text asserts that these Rights are “natural, unalienable and sacred,” so that they are pre-existing in some Platonic sense: they have not been defined or argued over, but exist independently of human debate, though they are capable of being recognised by human Reason. (In fact the list was the product of furious debate.) Moreover, the list of Rights is exclusive: it’s “the Rights” not “some rights:” les droits in French. The list is therefore exclusive, exhaustive and presumptively correct. It is not subject to debate or qualification, and simply needs to be implemented.

This is, as far as I know, the first attempt to produce such an ambitious and far-reaching document without a religious justification, or for that matter reference to traditional Classical authorities. (Quite what the Deist-style phrase “in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being” is doing at the end of the Preamble has never really been clear, but it’s probably an attempt to make the text more palatable —including to the King— without explicitly invoking divine authority.) This style of writing has continued to the present day. There are many lists of Human Rights now, and in general they are presented in the same way, as being non-negotiable and pre-emptive. They do not have to be argued for or justified; they may just be assumed. More recently, however, identity groups have started to claim special additional rights for themselves, although they are seldom specified in any detail. Rather, some initiative or other will be criticised as an “attack on (insert group) rights.” The inevitable conflicts and violent arguments have developed, since it’s effectively impossible to increase the special rights of one group except at the expense of others.

However, the rights listed here, and in subsequent declarations, are what Marxists call “bourgeois” rights: freedom of speech and association, equality before the law, innocence until proven guilty, and of course the right to own property. From the beginning, it was widely recognised that actively exercising such rights was not the same as having them in theory. Governments of the Left did try, honourably, to make access to these rights easier, and to introduce economic rights, such as the right to state pension, as well. But there was another analysis also, which was to suggest that all such assertions about rights were fundamentally meaningless. Every apparent victory just concealed a more subtle defeat, and what looked like advances in the rights of the individuals could be seen rather as just a subtler form of domination.

Here, we enter the world of the Deconstructionists, about which, as I’ve explained before, I have very mixed feelings. In one way, much Deconstructionist theory is unexceptionable and even common sense. Everyone accepts that ideas and ways of expressing them have changed greatly over time, that organisations and institutions tend to have fixed ways of expressing themselves internally and to the outside world, and that what is and is not said depends partly at least on power relations. Likewise, society only exists at all because people agree to follow rules and procedures established by others whereas in theory they could refuse to do so. As a set of broad, pragmatic sociological observations, this is unexceptionable, and would be accepted by pretty much anyone who has worked in an organisation or lived in a society. The problem is that making a stellar academic career out of such mundane sociological truths is not easy. Thus the temptation to go further, and to argue that all knowledge and truth is a production of power, and that all relations of any kind are just expressions of domination and submission.

Whether Foucault himself believed this has been long debated, but some of his imitators, and imitators of imitators, certainly did. As a philosophical principle, of course, the idea of truth as a merely production of power is self-refuting, since that statement itself can only be a production of power. Nonetheless, taking the argument to its logical conclusion, we must live in a world where all relations, even the most intimate, are about domination and submission, and where all truth and all knowledge is relative, as decided by power at any point. As I say, I’m not sure whether Foucault actually shared this nightmare vision, but that’s not the point: generations of people have now absorbed these ideas at second and third hand, and do not scruple to use them in struggles of all kinds. Of course such ideas cannot be applied universally, because of their self-refuting nature. If someone says “the mainstream media is telling lies about Gaza” you can reply that such a comment presupposes an absolute standard of truth that by definition cannot exist, and anyway their own sources of “truth” are themselves just products of power. If a feminist says “you would say that, you are a man,” you can reply that she is just a voice expressing “truths” a feminist power structure has imposed upon her. It’s a very tedious game that leads nowhere, but in its shambling around it has destroyed a lot of things along the way.

In particular, this way of thinking privileges the absolutist, peremptory assertion against which there is no appeal. In 1789, and for quite a while thereafter, there was a body of belief and custom which softened the practical impact of such assertions considerably. Now, there is not. The result is that in politics today it is possible to make virtually any statement about a controversial issue without feeling the need to cite any evidence in favour of it. Indeed, the more heterodox the better, because the more extreme the statement, the more you show yourself to be liberated from the structures of power that determine what truth is. So one of Mr Mélenchon’s lieutenants recently informed us that it was a “myth” that France had ever been a majority white, Christian nation. It’s all truth determined by power, you see. And of course once you fall into the Abyss, there is no stopping.

You fall further and faster if you don’t know, or haven’t been taught, anything about the world, even mediated through some tedious power structure. For reasons we’ll come to in a second, the teaching of history is discouraged these days, not least because of the harmful potential effects of introducing students to ideas from earlier epochs. I was rather startled to read recently that according to various different studies, a significant minority of Americans believe that slavery was invented in America and was never practised anywhere else. Given that this belief was strongest among the better-educated, we may begin to have doubts about the pragmatic benefits of education. But more generally, not only has Presentism invaded the academy, with its single-minded, unchallengeable insistence on the inferiority of all previous societies, but there is an increasing move to adjust syllabuses to avoid students having to encounter unpleasant, um, truths or indeed anything that might challenge their beliefs. This means not simply that students are emerging from university without a proper critical training, which is bad enough. In the context of this discussion, it means that overseas students paying a fortune to study at a prestigious western university are increasingly wasting their money. And that can’t be concealed forever.

All of this would be more manageable if we didn’t have a political class and an acolyte Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) that hated their own countries. I’ve discussed this point often enough that I won’t beat it to death here, but the fact is that, with a few exceptions, we are ruled by globalist internationalists, who feel contempt for their citizens and their history and culture, and are only happy when they are together in some post-national plastic construction of their own devising. For some, this is a twisted version of the argument (itself twisted) that national differences produce wars, for some it is the creation of a teleological transnational utopia, for some it’s just about money and power, but for all of them it means belittling, sneering at or just ignoring, their own history and culture, and dismissing it with absolutist, pre-emptive ideological statements. (Thus Mr Macron’s assertion that “there is no French culture.”)

There are entire schools of revisionist “history” flourishing on the Internet that claim to dispute “received ideas” produced by “power structures.” Sometimes people even manage to get books published expounding them. For a while, in print and occasionally in person, I used to challenge such people, asking if they had read this or that book, or were aware of this or that document. I gave up, eventually, because it was useless. People have their ideas about the past, which they find comforting, and which no amount of power-produced mere “knowledge” is ever going to shift. Perhaps I’m the only one who is concerned about such things, I don’t know.

But of course for a country where the dominant political forces feel contempt for their own history and culture, there’s no reason why other countries should take them or their country seriously. Back when I used to do a lot of this, and I was asked whether I would recommend some aspect of the British system, I would say “we certainly don’t have all the answers, but we have hundreds of years of making mistakes. We have tried to learn from them and perhaps you can too.” I wonder what British (or French or US) advisors would say these days: “I come from the evilest country in recorded history, and I really should get back on the plane” perhaps? I caricature, but only because the reality of the situation lends itself so exquisitely to caricature. Why should foreign governments take political systems and their leaderships that spend all their time hating themselves and apologising for their history, seriously?

Pragmatically, an ignorance of national history is helpful to our ruling class and the PMC, because much of history is about solidarity, collective struggles and the forging of a national identity. We don’t want that today, because every one of the intellectual trends I’m discussing today, including uncontrolled Liberalism, is about the individual and not the group, about the pursuit of individual wealth and power, rather than the common good. National identity and patriotism are threats to today’s political class and PMC. So instead of myths that federate, we have myths that divide. Instead of respecting heroes, who may unite us, we value victims, and victims set us against each other. Sometimes this is explicit (“I am your victim,”) but it can also be implicit (“I’m a bigger victim than you are.”)

If I may be permitted a final example from France, then about a fortnight ago Marc Bloch was received into the Pantheon, which is the large and rather grim building at the top of the rue Soufflot when you stand with your back to the Luxembourg Gardens. For centuries, great figures of French history have been symbolically interred there. Bloch was a genuine hero. A very distinguished historian (co-founder of the Annales school) he fought in the First World War, he volunteered for the Second, although he did not need to, joined the Resistance after the fall of France, was arrested, tortured by the infamous Klaus Barbie, and shot just a couple of weeks after the Normandy landings. He also wrote The Strange Defeat, a historian’s attempt to explain the defeat of 1940, which was published only after his death. He was also a quintessentially French hero: he came from a family of secular and assimilated Jews who lived in Alsace until their region was occupied by the Germans in 1870. Like many others the family then went to live in Paris. Bloch had no strong political convictions: he appears to have been a moderate centrist Republican, and he joined the Resistance out of simple patriotism. In his testament, composed in 1941, he wrote that “I will die, as I have lived, a good Frenchman.” And in The Strange Defeat he pitilessly analysed the hatred of their country by the French elites, and their readiness to countenance defeat if they could achieve political advantage by it, and get rid of the detested Republic. If Bloch is not a genuine hero, I don’t know who would count as one.

This was all horribly embarrassing for the PMC, which idolises victims, preaches division and discourages assimilation because it’s “racist.” Some pundits wondered aloud if Pantheonising Bloch, an unrepentant patriot, would “encourage the extreme Right,” others argued that he was best understood as a Victim (he had been sacked from his university job by the Vichy regime under its anti-semitic legislation) or that anyway he wasn’t really a patriot at all, but a convinced European, almost like von der Leyen. The ceremony itself tried to plant little hints on all of these themes here and there, and Macron was clearly uncomfortable throughout. It struck me watching it, that if there’s one thing worse than the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gilbran’s injunction to “pity the nation that acclaims the bully as a hero,” it must be to pity the nation that has no heroes at all, and seeks to destroy the ones it used to have.

If it’s obvious that all this division is deeply harmful to society, it’s equally obvious how unattractive it must be to foreigners. Both the British and the French, in my personal experience, had a long tradition of spreading influence through personal contacts, places at university, cultural exchanges, language training and many other things. I’ve heard American diplomats reminisce nostalgically about the year they spent at the Sorbonne or Oxford: the elites of many African and Arab nations were trained in the West as well. But you can only do this if you think you have something to offer, and if you put time, effort and money into it. These days, we just want the money. For the British, foreign students have been a matter of financial survival for decades now, and the British have so led the way in rubbishing their own culture and history that I’m increasingly unsure why anyone would want to come there. In France, you can now do a semester or two at a French university without speaking a word of French. Your teaching is in English, normally by French lecturers who spent some time in the US, your teaching materials are in English and reflect Anglo-Saxon values, and your academic and social group will be made up very largely of English speakers. Given the costs involved, Why Bother? is a reasonable question.

In the same poem I cited earlier, Gibran asks us to pity “the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion,” which pretty much describes the West today. A hundred years ago, those who believed in western moral superiority could point to sets of organised beliefs, often based on religion, and to practical experiences that they felt justified this attitude. Today, we have nothing : only the impulse to lecture and hector remains. The answer is no longer, We do it better, come and see. The answer is Because we say so, and don’t argue. This is what you would expect from a fragmented culture, where debate as such has stopped, and has been replaced by competitive sets of pre-emptive norms, wielded as weapons, and against which there is no appeal. Certain types of beliefs still exist, but in isolation and often in conflict each other, essentially random in nature and unsupported by anything except the power to require others to accept them as true. This means there is effectively no organised thought at all, because the minimum requirements for it do not exist. Politicians and pundits contradict themselves not from hypocrisy or ignorance but because they express different conditioned reflexes depending on the situation. The politician who in the morning praises their country for its openness and tolerance of immigrants, and in the evening treats the same country as a suburb of Hell, mired in structural and institutional racism, probably isn’t aware of the contradiction. It’s just that different normative discourses apply in different situations.

All of this is having a slow, unstoppable, undermining effect the ability of the West to continue to influence political systems and cultures abroad, in subtle ways that are ultimately much more effective than any number of weapons. The process has gone too far to stop now, and anyway it’s actually a consequence of the disintegration of identity, nation and culture in western society, about which nothing can now be done.

It will be a slow process, partly because of nostalgia and habit, partly because other obvious competitors (Russia? China?) have their own problems, and are not necessarily attractive models for everyone. Few Africans are going to learn Russian or Mandarin, and neither country has been particularly skilful in the export of its culture and influence. But it’s impossible to mistake the contrast between the firmness of purpose and sense of collective identity shown by these states, and the empty blathering and hectoring of the West, which in the end has only an intellectual and spiritual vacuum behind it. It won’t be long, I suspect, before some nation tells us exactly where we can stick our moral superiority. I wonder what we will do then.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.

It’s also a subject where I have a lot of personal experience. Now, I make it a rule in these essays only to write about things where I have at least some relevant background, because I think it would be presumptuous to give my views on subjects where I have nothing special to contribute. After all, Substack, like the Internet in general, is overflowing with bilious pre-formatted commentary on any subject you like, and for any point of view you may support. For some decades (if rather less these days) I have been involved with foreign governments, NGOs, media, academia and others, as a formal or informal representative of various governments, as a teacher or a trainer, or as an informal adviser. I’ve also taught visitors to Europe from most parts of the world, ranging from university students up to senior government officials. I like to think, therefore, that I know a little of what I speak. (I claim no particular virtue for that: everyone has specialities in their lives, and this has been one of mine.) So this is once again an essay about the world as it actually is, and how it works, and if that makes you feel unsafe, then look away now. But to understand where we are, and what we are losing, we need to understand where we used to be, and why. Let’s start with a little history.

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Rolihlahla Mandela was born into the aristocracy of the isiXhosa-speaking Thembu nation in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. Traditionally, formal education had not existed in such societies, outside the elites. Mandela, however, attended primary and secondary schools founded by missionaries, where his (African) teachers gave him the additional baptismal name of Nelson. Formal western-style education had been brought by missionaries to Africa from the mid-19th century, as the invention of quinine made life possible for them in malarial regions. The principal motive for these initiatives was evangelisation, of course but, as we’ll see, there were wider ethical and philosophical objectives as well. Most of the teachers and administrators at such schools were Africans.

In due course, Mandela wanted to go to university. Now this was the mid-1930s, the period before apartheid, when the more politically-liberal English-speaking elite still ran the country. Even so, access to universities was difficult for non-whites. Except for one particular example: Fort Hare University, founded by missionaries in 1916. Students from all races were admitted, and a number of the lecturers were Africans. Fees were heavily subsidised. Mandela claimed that, for his generation, Fort Hare was “Oxford and Cambridge, Yale and Harvard” rolled into one. Like many of his colleagues, he developed a special sympathy for Britain as a result. And Mandela was far from the only Fort Hare student who went on to greater things. It was a nursery for future leaders of independent African states: Kenneth Kaunda, the first President of Zambia studied there, as did Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Julius Nyerere (Tanzania) and Seretse Khama (Botswana). And many historic leaders of the ANC were also alumni, including Govan Mbeki and Oliver Tambo. The subversive nature of multi-racial education was fully recognised by the (Afrikaner) National Party in its construction of the apartheid state after 1948: Fort Hare became a blacks-only university.

I’ve focused on Mandela first, because most people know of him. But in fact the generation of leaders that came to power in Africa in the 1960s was very largely educated in the West or at western schools and universities, and absorbed western ideas (of which more later.) Ahmed Ben Bella, the first President of Algeria, was educated at a French school and fought with distinction in the French Army in the Second World War: he was personally decorated by De Gaulle. Like the leadership of the FLN generally, he was fluent in French. Among intellectuals, Franz Fanon fought in the French Army also, and a grateful government gave him a bursary to train as a doctor in France. And finally, the MPLA, the Marxist independence movement that fought the Portuguese and eventually won the ensuing Civil War with Cuban assistance, was led by intellectuals from the mestizo coastal elite, who had been educated in Lisbon. Meanwhile, European missionaries were present almost everywhere in Africa from the 1830s, from every major European country, Protestant and Catholic. And if evangelism was a major factor, the documents of the time show that most missionary movements also incorporated a strong, and by the standards of the day progressive, social conscience.

You will notice that I’ve avoided making the lazy equivalence of missionary work with colonialism. Missionaries were on the ground generations before the real beginning of colonialism in Africa in the 1890s, and some of the major missionary nations never had colonies at all: at least a dozen Swedish Protestant denominations had missionary programmes, for example, and German missionaries were present throughout Africa long before the miniature and short-lived German Empire. After colonies were established, the relationships of missionaries to colonial administrations were not always easy. Especially in Protestant countries, missionary societies were politically associated with the pious and industrious middle classes, who distrusted colonies because of the costs involved and the risk of conflict with colonial rivals. They also pushed very hard for social changes such as the abolition of slavery, whereas the colonial administrators, were often nervous about the reactions of local leaders.

The story of the administration of colonial territories is a fascinating one, and one of many that can only be glanced at here. But the two principal colonial powers, Britain and France, took their task very seriously. Ministries were established, and personnel carefully selected. In France a special training school was established, in Britain graduates from good universities were selected by competition. And it was a very important personal commitment. In those days of indifferent communications you signed up for effectively a lifetime in a foreign country, with home leave perhaps four or five times in your career. The result was that such administrators got to know their countries very well. They were not numerous however, (it’s reckoned that the Sudan Political Service had no more than 400 members in the fifty-odd years of its existence) and depended on a large class of locally employed staff for much of their effectiveness.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, it’s natural that we see things differently from the way they were seen a hundred and fifty years ago, and I’m not going to re-litigate colonialism here. What’s much more interesting is the mentality which guided both administrators and missionaries in those days, and how it compares with the careerist, ineffective and frankly often corrupt system we find today, when ironically actual western influence over countries in Africa and the Middle East is if anything greater than it was then.

As I’ve said, the first point is the seriousness with which the individuals and organisations took their tasks. This was an age which thought in terms of duty, and of meaning and purpose in life. For the missionaries, this went without saying. But their duty was not just to evangelise, but also to preach a gospel in which, as St Paul had famously said “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This universality—one of the reasons for the original, rapid, spread of Christianity in its early centuries—made it popular in Africa also, even as its distaste for slavery made it seem subversive to traditional power structures there.

This seriousness took secular forms as well. It was most obvious in Protestant countries, where the traditional idea of vocation (literally “calling”) was still very strong, and where the political influence of the churches, and organisations like the Bible Society and the London Missionary Society was enormous. (Good Works were required of all Christians, after all, so get on with it.) In Britain, the Liberal Party in particular was heavily influenced by the evangelical Protestant Churches, for whom saving souls and spreading the Gospel could not stop at the shoreline. They were prepared to support imperial expansion: not for crude jingoistic reasons, but to bring the benefits of the Gospels and middle-class liberal ideas to the less fortunate overseas. Moreover, this was also the age of Reform in Britain: the extension of the franchise, the introduction of free compulsory education, the expansion of technical education, the creation of the western world’s first professional, apolitical Civil Service. Surely, there was a moral duty to apply these ideas of what we would now call Good Governance elsewhere?

In France, there was of course a strong Catholic missionary movement. But the main motivation came from the young Third Republic, which was just getting settled in at the time of the 1885 Berlin Conference, generally taken to be the real beginning of colonialism in Africa. Whilst the records of the time show there were many other motives for French colonisation (resources and manpower for a future war against Prussia for example), there was also an almost messianic, desire to export the universal principles of the Revolution, now that they were reasonably secure in France. At the same time, the infant Republic was engaged in a vicious struggle with the Church to remove religious influence in schools and politics, something which was not really complete until the 1960s, and is now being undone again. There was no way that the Republic was going to allow the Church to steal a march on it abroad. So from the very beginning Instituteurs, the new, secular teaching arm of the Republic, were sent out to the Colonies to spread not just French civilisation and language, but the universal principles of modernity and secularism also.

The very moral seriousness of this age led it to think and speak in moral absolutes, which often brought its servants into conflict with local traditions. Not just slavery, but social issues such as the status of women were considered as given by missionaries and colonial administrators. Polygamy was not a social-context dependent relativistic ethnically-based social custom, but a bad idea that should be stamped out. And these judgements could be, and were, defended according to the precepts of organised and accepted systems of ethical thought based on mixtures of liberal, republican and Christian principles, whatever we may think of those principles today. (I’ll have more to say about the ethical contrast with the present day next week.)

It was also an age of great optimism about the future, and faith in the idea of Progress. I don’t know exactly when the West effectively abandoned Progress as a popular ideology—perhaps after the end of the Apollo programme—but the generation around the end of century was one of its very high points. Partly it was amazing new inventions—the radio, the telegraph, the motor car, the aeroplane—but partly also massive improvements in the quality of life, through universal education, streets that were safe at night, proper sanitation, better health care and legislation to make work safer. So the watchword was activism, which is why colonial administrators and missionaries were frequently occupied with practical projects: building schools, hospitals, railways etc. (Contrary to what is often supposed, security and justice tended to be left to traditional authorities where possible.) It was the spirit of the time.

Finally, the distribution of spheres of influence at the Berlin Conference (which did not automatically create colonies, of course) meant that there was at least some coherence in the way that countries were administered and social and economic initiatives were put in place, as compared to today’s bedlam when an African government might have projects from a dozen different countries and institutions running on its territory, often at cross-purposes with each other.

The result of all these official and unofficial initiatives was the slow spread of modern political, economic and social ideas. Ironically, even the socially-reactionary Catholic Church had a modernising influence overall. Nor was modernism always imposed from above, since colonial administrators often allied themselves with the more conservative elements of traditional African society. But it slowly permeated nonetheless, through education, visits to Europe and the circulation of books with modern ideas in them. Thus, as Olufemi Taiwo has demonstrated at length, modernism and colonialism are anything but identical: there were many developments before colonialism and there have been many others since the “colonial interlude,” all of which makes much of the tedious “de-colonialisation” discourse rather pointless.

So far I’ve discussed Africa in very summary terms. I’m now going to discuss, even more briefly, parts of the Middle East, since that is another area where the West is very active today with social and political projects, and it’s useful to start by looking at how things were done in the past. Modernism in the Levant, especially, did not begin with the British and French Mandates after 1919. In spite of the conservatism of the Ottoman Empire, foreigners did establish themselves early on in cities like Damascus, Beirut and Alexandria, bringing modern political and social ideas with them. But the language of administration was Turkish, and the language of religion was a dialect of Arabic, and only the wealthy among the indigenous population could afford to learn foreign languages, travel to Europe and read foreign books (where they were not banned) and absorb new ideas. The coming of the Mandate era, when French, in particular, was taught in schools, not only enabled neighbouring communities with different languages to talk to each other, but to share in a flood of fast-developing European political and social ideas, and to organise political and social movements that did not depend on religious or nationalist affiliation. Leftist political ideas arrived almost immediately: the Communist Party of Syria/Lebanon was formed in 1924, the Communist Party of Iraq, then under British Mandate, a decade later. Other left-wing parties also flourished, to the dismay of the Mandate authorities, but they were part of a inescapable tide of modernisation that profoundly affected these societies, and also that of Egypt, which was in practice run by the British at the time. By contrast the role of missionaries was much more limited, given that a large percentage of the populations of these countries was Christian anyway. But they were nonetheless active: the prestigious Université St-Joseph in Beirut was founded by the Jesuits in 1881 (ironically with the support of the anti-clerical French government of the day) and has since trained successive generations of Lebanese elites.

Again, this ad hoc modernisation and the importation of western ideas in everything from politics to fashion, was opposed by indigenous conservative forces. Controversial issues such as the change in the status of women led to the creation of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt in the 1920s, with their long-term and patient strategy of undermining modernism in the family and the school, and promoting a return to “traditional values” based on religion. (By a mordant irony, the Brothers, financed largely by Turkey and Qatar, are now busy radicalising immigrant Muslim populations in Europe.)

The steady flow of western political and social ideas into major Arab capitals created the pre-conditions for the rise of nationalist movements. The outlook of such movements was resolutely secular and modernist, and in many cases inspired by European models of the nation-state. Nasser’s Philosophy of the Revolution presents a teleological picture of the rise of an Egyptian nation free of colonial powers for the first time in millennia, in which many have seen the influence of Hegel. Indeed Nasser originally planned to introduce multi-party democracy in the new state, and fiercely opposed the influence of the Muslim Brothers, who tried to assassinate him in 1954.

The most influential political movement of the Arab world at the time was the Ba’ath (“Resurrection”) Party. It was present throughout the region, though it only came to power in Iraq and Syria. Its ideology, whilst heavily influenced by western Socialist ideas, was not a carbon copy of them, but included pan-Arabism, anti-imperialism and a strong sense of Arab cultural identity. Nor was it sectarian: one of its two main founders was a Christian, the other a Sunni Muslim. So by about 1970, the direction of the Arab world seemed clear, with secular, modernising regimes in place throughout the region (most recently in Libya). The reasons why this changed are beyond he scope of this essay, but I’ll touch on them very briefly later.

Thus, in both Africa and the Middle East there arose a generation of leaders with concepts inspired by, but not limited to, those absorbed from Europe over previous generations. They were not for the most part “anti-western” in an ideological sense (though they could obtain benefits from the Soviet Union by adopting the right vocabulary.) They wanted control over their territory for themselves, to evict foreign powers, and then create western-style nation states. Thus, athough the ANC sought military help from the Soviet Union (since the West was too stupid to offer it) its ideology was inclusive: the Freedom Charter of 1958 defined South Africa as the country of “all who live in it,” and they therefore looked to the West for inspiration and help also. And whilst since the 1970s the de-colonialisation era has been romanticised in the vocabulary of “liberation,” in Africa the transition was generally without violence except in countries where there were significant white populations. Indeed, hard as it may be to believe now, the early independence years were a time of great optimism about Africa. Modernisation Theory suggested that politically Africa would soon resemble Europe, and western governments set up Development Ministries to help with what was seen as the natural process of modernisation and industrialisation of the continent. (When I was young, science-fiction stories reflected the prevailing orthodoxy of a future Africa resembling Europe or the United States.)

Yet it’s worth pointing out that, in both Africa and the Middle East, the main consumers of modernisation were the urban middle-classes, many of whom had social and economic links with the colonial authorities, and benefited personally from modernism and its opportunities. The situation was very different for ordinary people. (As the pioneering African historian JF Ade Ajayi noted wryly, in some colonies the common people had only just become aware of the colonial power when the colonists started to leave.) This, and its analogue in the Arab world, turned out to be substantial problems later.

Newly-created independent states looked to the West for help and advice for purely practical reasons: they saw things there worth learning from and imitating. In this, of course, they followed a long tradition, pioneered by the Japanese during the Meiji Restoration, when Japanese students were sent to Europe to learn technical subjects and to study the operation of government. And it has to be said that there were things to imitate. Europe had rebuilt itself physically and politically, and to some extent morally, after the horrors of 1939-45, and the previous centuries of blood and turmoil. Anyone arriving in western Europe in, say, 1970, would find functional states and bureaucracies, political systems that largely worked, a broad consensus on many important public issues, health services that functioned, and significant degrees of social welfare and protection of rights. In an imperfect world, such a level of relative success seemed worth imitating. In turn, this allowed European states to act with a certain amount of self-confidence and pride in what had been accomplished in the years since 1945.

Partly as a result, western states (and by no means only former colonial powers) began to develop ambitious programmes of aid and technical assistance. To some extent, this came out of post World War 2 idealism, but also out of the pragmatic judgement that growth and stability ultimately benefited everyone, and also the never-ending search for influence in which states have engaged since there were states. I’m aware of course that for some people, the idea of nations pursuing their interests and seeking influence abroad is positively scandalous. There are also people who believe, or affect to, that their own nation is so evil and hateful that it does not deserve to have interests or influence. As I say, I don’t know how much of this is just posturing, but in any event it hardly matters. The game of influence is as old as history, and also for the most part zero-sum: politics doesn’t tolerate vacuums, and in most parts of the world, as one state’s influence declines the influence of other states will increase.

In turn, this is because, although it may be difficult for nationals of large states to understand, most countries look for advantage in relations with larger and richer countries, in everything from technical assistance to trade arrangements to military protection. In many cases, the success of a small country’s foreign policy depends on how deftly it manoeuvres to get what it wants and needs from others, while maintaining as much independence as it can. Most leaders in the Global South are well aware of how to balance public affirmations of sovereignty with private appeals for assistance, and to play large states against each other. And since much of what follows will be extremely critical of what western states and international organisations do today, I should start on a positive note.

For simplicity, I’m going to talk essentially about types of activity, which obviously vary enormously in detail with the donor and the recipient. Much of it revolves around training and education in the widest sense of those terms. Sometimes it’s simply about resources. Most countries can provide basic and intermediate training for their police, military, customs and similar forces (I’ve taught at such establishments) But the kind of person marked out as a potential National Commissioner of Police, Chief of Defence etc. will require better than that, and relatively few nations in the world train such people in substantial numbers. So your prospective candidate is likely to go abroad, which is often mind-expanding anyway, and will meet many colleagues from other nations. (Indeed, and at a slight tangent, even advanced nations send large numbers of military officers abroad for training for wider career and relational purposes: go to a western Staff College and you’ll probably find that half the student body is from overseas.)

Sometimes the training will be technical, in new scientific or medical and health techniques, or in their application to government. Sometimes it will be networking: building links between academic researchers in Africa and researchers on Africa in Europe, for example. Sometimes it will be organisational. A country under pressure to improve its customs and border security will look round for help and advice from countries that already have functioning systems. These will not necessarily be western countries either: so-called “South-South” initiatives involve financing visits from countries or experts, perhaps in the same region, who are further advanced. But there are also initiatives aimed at the non-governmental community. For example, I’ve been involved in training journalists about how to understand and report on sensitive aspects of government in countries where there is no tradition of public discussion of them, or parliamentary researchers in new democracies to enable the new Parliament to do its job. I’ve taught courses for academics on how to understand different sectors of government and how to research them, and how to interview senior decision-makers. And many other things.

But there are also more fundamental initiatives. More and more, senior policemen and soldiers around the world have advanced degrees, including an introduction to international politics and security. Many states don’t have the academic capacity to provide the staff, and so they often come from abroad. I’ve done that too. And finally, countries may find themselves in a completely new political situation, either because of domestic developments or because the international system has changed arid them, and they seek advice and help from others on how to cope.

There’s much more, but this gives a quick indication. Now there have always been a number of structural problems associated with this kind of activity, although they can be intelligently managed to some extent. (There are also some much more serious, non-structural problems which we’ll get to next week) The first, obviously, is dependency. A small state will probably never have the resources to do everything, and will always seek assistance. But larger states, also, may become habituated, simply because it’s easier, and someone else is paying. This leads to absurdities such as engaging foreign consultants to do your Foreign or Security Policy review. The result is a lack of confidence and a kind of pre-emptive cringe in favour of donors. The cure, insofar as there is one, is to develop indigenous intellectual resources, which is something I have personally always tried to encourage. There are various reasons for this learned helplessness which I’ll come to in a second, but it can be frustrating and even irritating. I remember at one conference in francophone Africa many years ago pounding the table (literally or more probably metaphorically, I can’t remember) and saying Vous n’avez pas besoin de moi!: you don’t need me. I can give you information, tell you how things work in other countries, discuss things that seem to generally work well, but you have the brainpower available to decide, you just need the confidence.

Another is that these things cost money, and so the projects that happen are ones that donors are prepared to fund. This happened most famously and catastrophically in the DRC, but it’s pervasive. Unlike the serious, long-term commitment in-country of a hundred years ago, today’s Development official in a national capital or an Embassy is there for three years, and wants something to show at the end of it, and above all to avoid doing anything controversial or difficult. Thus, a “reform” programme in an Interior Ministry may in practice just be a random collection of projects that foreign donors feel comfortable funding. And whereas Missionaries tried to save souls, NGOs deliver moral lectures. Whereas colonial administrators built railways, donors pay for consultants to advise on how to privatise them. And almost all the activities are symbolic and performative: corruption in an unpaid customs service requires a new law, brutality by unpaid and untrained policemen requires a code of conduct. Here’s a translation of the one we use in my country.

A third is that the system becomes self-sustaining, as people make their careers in it, as intermediaries extract rents from it, and as recipient governments get used to it. The amount of genuine international expertise available is, in fact quite limited in many areas, but you wouldn’t know this from the size of the industry, and the number of people and organisations who fight for contracts. Moreover, since foreign voters are paying, projects are subjected to mind-numbing levels of bureaucracy and audit, which means that they are increasingly managed by large specialist consultancies who have cultivated links with foreign governments that some find questionable. As a result, much of the project budget never actually makes it into the country concerned, but is spent at home. And because donors are alive to the need to avoid having teams of exclusively white people, an entire neo-colonial class has emerged, beholden to a variety of different donors rather than working for their own government, as they more productively could.

But all of this, in theory, could be pushed back against. After all, Asian countries, from 19th century Japan onwards, have controlled the process themselves and taken and used only what they thought useful. (They still do so today.) And some African countries in my experience (Algeria, for example, or South Africa) have enough self-confidence to keep intellectual charge of what’s going on. But what about the rest? This is a a huge subject and I can only tiptoe around a corner of it. In the case of Africa, it’s accepted that importing the western state model wholesale and trying to compress centuries of often tumultuous change into decades was always too ambitious. The failure is not a failure of Africans, but of the model, which has far more preconditions for success than were realised by the first generation of African independentists. (The fact that most African and Arab states have artificial borders, some following roughly those of Ottoman provinces, may be unhelpful, but just makes them like nearly every other state in the world.) What Basil Davidson famously referred to as the “curse” of the nation-state in Africa doesn’t have any obvious remedy, but many donor projects actually make the situation worse, by continuing to pretend these problems don’t exist.

Few subjects are more lamented by African intellectuals after a couple of beers than the decline in the African leadership class since Independence, but the reality is they are simply following imperatives for survival. It took centuries for the extractive classes in Europe to be replaced by the productive classes, and now they seem to be on their way back. Why should things be any different in Africa? And the perception of failure, and the disappointment after the high hopes of the 60s and 70s, the chaos wrought by uncontrolled raw material prices and neoliberalism and endemic conflict and corruption feed into a self-sustaining narrative of failure that undermines confidence and encourages dependency.

In the Arab world, by contrast, we are dealing, as the great Egyptian-Lebanese writer Amin Malouf has argued, with the legacy of centuries of highly centralised, immensely distant and completely unaccountable Ottoman rule, which encouraged an enduring feeling of helplessness in the face of mysterious omnipotent powers. After the departure of the Ottomans, and the Mandate interlude, it became attached to foreign states generally. And the defeat and humiliation of 1967 by Israel, more than any other single event, shattered the fragile self-confidence of the secular era.

Western policies today take no account of such problems, and continue to assume conditions and possibilities that simply don’t exist. The result is at once intrusive and ineffective. All over Africa and the Arab world, and in parts of Asia and elsewhere, there are consultants and NGOs beavering away, running “training courses” on irrelevant subjects, producing reports no-one reads, making recommendations that will never be carried out and reorganising things that will never work. Perhaps ten per cent of this work is of any value—I’ve given some examples—and I’ve been fortunate that I’ve never had to depend on it for my income and could always say no. Indeed, I’ve done quite a lot of it for free or as part of my job. But there are plenty of struggling NGOs and consultants, half of whose time is spent competing for contracts on the latest fashionable theme of the day. And because the ethos of donors, whether governments, foundations or institutions, is towards a technocratic, liberal, normative concept of government, such projects, with their deadening vocabulary and stultifyingly amorphous concepts, often seem to serve little purpose other than virtue-signalling. I was going to provide links to some of the more banal and pointless projects for which bids are currently being solicited, but I haven’t the heart. Let’s just say that if you think you have the expertise, you can certainly bid for an independent project to audit the effectiveness of a country’s diversity training initiatives in the Middle East over the last five years, which will put food on your table for some time.

As I’ve suggested, in the never-ending game of influence as old as history, the West, and especially Europe, had certain advantages. Its systems generally worked, it had visibly overcome some of the same problems now found elsewhere, it had a historical, cultural and philosophical richness that many countries admired, and it was the source of modern, and for many liberating, ideas. This had little to do with hard power, or even soft power, really. A diplomat would have fond memories of a year spent at the Sorbonne, a General would recall a British training team that came to his country and brought real expertise to solve a problem. Over the decades, these things add up, even if you mostly can’t see them. (By contrast, the United States with its history of brute-force assertiveness was seldom very effective in this way of working.)

We’ve lost that now. We continue to preach governance although our political systems are collapsing. We continue to try to influence foreign militaries when our own have practically ceased to exist. We offer assistance on combating drug smuggling when parts of Europe have themselves become narco-states. We presume to sort out the political crises of others while in Britain we are about to see the seventh government in ten years, and in France the political system is disintegrating before our eyes. And let’s not even get into the normative side now. You know the rest. We are not listened to out of respect any more, just out of nostalgia and habit, and because, for the time being at least, we still have the money to fund the projects. How long will that last, though?

Next week I’ll look at some of the deeper reasons behind all this.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.

In fact, governments experience surprises all the time, in the sense that things happen which were not expected, or things happen that were thought possible but very unlikely, or things that were thought inevitable don’t happen at all. This is sufficiently common in international politics, and sufficiently serious in its implications, that I thought it might be useful to devote an essay to the question of Why such surprises happen: a subject which hardly anyone takes an interest in, since politically it’s usually enough just to condemn you opponents for being naive, ignorant or stupid, demand an enquiry and the job is done.

So here, I’m first going to discuss what “surprise” means in different contexts, then I’ll look at the mechanics of why international politics is so often so full of “surprises,” and finally at the mechanisms and weaknesses that help surprises to happen.

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But let’s stay with the Iran example for a moment. We’ll see, in fact, that it’s a classic example of surprise-at-failure, which is one of the different types of surprise I will discuss. Here, the actual fact of the outbreak of the conflict was scarcely surprising: US leaders had been threatening to attack Iran for at least a decade. Even the date chosen to begin the attack fell within the window of what was expected, and what could be discerned from troop and air movements. The method employed—air attack—was predictable. And finally, it was no surprise at all that Israel would join in, since their hostile intentions towards Iran had been publicly displayed for a long time. Nobody, least of all the Iranians, was therefore surprised, which was itself not an ideal situation for the US to be in, when attacking someone’s country.

Surprise-at-failure (and I’ll give other examples) occurred because the overall strategic situation was read wrongly by those who made the decisions. Now it seems that not even the most unbalanced actors in Washington thought that the US could mount a massive ground invasion with air support, and fight its way to Tehran across the country. Some, at least, had obviously looked at a map. Rather (and probably because the land option was not feasible) all faith had to be placed in an air campaign, but that campaign could only succeed if the state itself was very fragile, and if the main state targets could be reliably hit, and if the Iranian people, once the state was weakened, would rise up and destroy it. Thus, the wished-for political outcome generated a series of consecutive necessary false assumptions about the likely effectiveness of bombing and the fragility of the Iranian state which had to be true, otherwise the objective would need to be abandoned. Therefore the assumptions were true. Except of course they weren’t.

This kind of backwards logic is typical when “surprises” occur, and surprise-at-failure often also features a poor understanding of one’s own capabilities and those of the enemy, and the relationship between them. Now here, the US appreciation of the weakness of Iran’s conventional defences was broadly correct: its conventional equipment was elderly and not in good shape, and a certain amount of it was indeed destroyed by bombing. But the surprise came because the capability of the Iranian military was not properly understood, and the objectives of the Iranian state were wrongly evaluated. Unlike the US, the Iranians were not surprised, either by the attack itself, or the methods employed. This was what they had expected and, since the objective was survival and then retaliation, they had developed a capability to pursue it. The Americans were surprised at this, although there is no logical reason why they should have been. In turn, and insofar as they could actually define any objectives, they greatly overestimated their ability to achieve them, and so were surprised when they could not.

Surprise-at-failure therefore includes a number of factors, and often doesn’t have much to do with the immediate success or otherwise of military operations. It’s most commonly because the final objectives themselves are unattainable, and the opposition performs better than expected. The classic case is probably Operation Barbarossa in 1941, where the initial military campaign was technically very successful, but where the final objectives were unattainable for essentially logistic reasons, and Soviet troops, though surrounded and cut off, fought sufficiently well to inflict surprisingly high casualties on the attackers. The German planners had simply assumed that the Soviet state would collapse in a matter of months if not weeks, and all that remained would be to drive to Moscow. They were surprised that this did not happen, and also that the Red Army was both larger and better-equipped than they had thought, but it was too late by then, as the logistic problems started to bite. In the case of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the strategic objectives, insofar as they were ever formulated, consisted of little else but handwaving generalities about democracy and freedom. The rapid descent of the country into civil war was a complete surprise, and the subsequent instability, the rise of the Islamic State and now the effective expulsion of the US from the country were all surprises to Washington subsequently.

One fundamental reason for surprise is a lack of interest or capability in finding out what the situation actually is: we can call it surprise-by-indifference, and surprise-by-ignorance where the possibility doesn’t exist in the first place. In the case of Barbarossa, the mighty Wehrmacht staff machine did not even bother to do a proper study of the Red Army: it massively underestimated the number of Divisions it could field, for example. But then if all it takes is a few week’s operations to bring the whole of the Soviet state down, it really doesn’t matter how many Divisions they have, or what their industrial capacity is.

A comparable example is the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982, where it seems clear that the Junta gave no serious thought at all to possible British reaction. They had no firm plans for what to do with the Islands once the political benefits of taking them had worn off, and they seem to have given no thought to what the British themselves might do. As hard-line militarists they were ignorant and contemptuous of civilian politicians, and they did not realise that a British government that failed to at least try to recover the Islands would fall from power (as indeed Thatcher came quite close to doing.) They had not studied the British capacity for power projection, since they did not think it was relevant, nor did they seem to know of the British base at Ascension Island, which was essential to the whole British operation.

The same is true with political judgements. There is little sign that those who planned Iraq 2,0 in 2003 ever really thought that understanding the internal political situation, if only that there was a Sunni-Shia divide, was actually important. The Iraqi people were under the heel of Saddam and they would rise up and greet the occupiers. The idea that various identity groups might use the destruction of the state apparatus for their own purpose, and that this could bring the country down in flames, did not occur to people who were simply not interested in such things, and so could not be bothered to find out. Indeed, whilst in general western governments have been happy to support and encourage where they can the downfall of whoever is the villain du jour (Milosevic, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad …) they have systematically given little-or-no thought to how to handle the resulting political situation, and are invariably surprised as a result by what happens.

A version of this is surprise-by-complacency, when you believe you understand the current situation and the likely developments, and so further research is unnecessary. The longer a situation goes on, the more you get used to it. The classic case, studied to death by now, is the failure of the West, and especially the US, to anticipate the fall of the Shah of Iran and the installation of a theocratic regime in Tehran in 1978/79. Some conclusions are generally accepted: the US and other Embassies had few Farsi speakers and interacted almost exclusively with westernised middle-class groups who supported the Shah, and they seldom if ever met ordinary people. Likewise, for fear of upsetting such an important ally, western nations were nervous about contacting opposition figures, and relied on the Shah’s secret police for most of their information. But there’s more to it than that. The Islamic Revolution took place at a time of high secularism in the West, where religion was largely reduced to a social phenomenon and a curiosity from the past. This situation was assumed to be universally true: the idea of religious movements with political agendas seemed bizarre, and so when western leaders looked around for referents for Khomeini, they thought of Martin Luther King, and even Gandhi. Khomeini was sent back to Tehran to bring peace and reconciliation to the country. No wonder they were surprised at what happened.

There are also genuine surprises that result from ignorance and the practical impossibility of finding out what you need to know. One classic example is Pearl Harbour in 1941, where the US Navy was convinced that the Japanese did not have the technical capacity to mount a surprise attack over such a long distance. They assumed that the Japanese had retained their original plan of a meeting-engagement, Jutland-style, somewhere in the Pacific. One reason for this was that the berths at Pearl Harbour were very shallow, and it was not believed that the Japanese had torpedoes that could arm themselves in just a few metres of water (the US did not.) In fact, it was only a few months before the operation that the Japanese Navy developed a fuse capable of arming itself so quickly. Without torpedoes, the attack on Pearl Harbour would have looked much less promising, and it’s not even clear that, in the complicated military politics of the time, Yamamoto’s Southern Strategy would have been adopted at all. But there was no way for the US to know this. For that reason, the commanders protected the base against what they estimated to be the most likely threat: saboteurs infiltrated by submarines; which is why the aircraft were neatly lined up in rows so they could be guarded more easily.

But the problems of surprise-by-ignorance can justas well arise in the most mundane of situations: in UN operations, for example, it’s surprisingly normal for troop contingents and commanders to arrive in the country with little idea of what they are going to find. It doesn’t greatly matter, because for anyone of importance all that really concerns them is their reporting chain to New York and their national capital, and keeping their bosses happy. So for example, people who had been in the UN Mission in Haiti in the 1990s told me that most of the national contingents had no experience of peacekeeping, and no doctrine for it. But they did have experience of patrols designed to enforce security. So national contingents of troops (the Brazilians were often mentioned) would drive around villages in their armoured vehicles every evening, hoping to convince the residents that their security was being protected. But of course none of them spoke French and the villagers didn’t speak Portuguese, and the villagers could not explain that for them, the appearance of the military meant the threat of violence and arrest, so the effect of these patrols was to scare them and greatly reduce the effectiveness of the UN Mission.

Likewise, in the panic following the decision in 1992 by a number of European countries to contribute to the UNPROFOR mission in Bosnia, it became clear that hardly any of the nations sending troops had the remotest idea of what they would find there, and there was a desperate search for anyone with even the slightest knowledge or experience of the country. The Dutch, for example, simply assumed that Muslims in Bosnia would live in conditions resembling those of the home countries of Muslim immigrants in the Netherlands. So Dutch troops solemnly went through exercises dealing with traditional villages and women in burkhas. On arrival, of course, they found that the Muslims constituted much of the sophisticated urban elite, and you were likely to find a Muslim woman in a mini-skirt but almost certainly not in a burkha.

Finally (although there are other types of surprise) let’s discuss surprise-as-state-change which is where there is a sudden and unexpected discontinuity, often demonstrating that reality has all along been different from what we supposed it was: we just didn’t realise it. A classic example is the end of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989, which folded up like a set of wet paper bags, once it became clear that Moscow was not prepared to underwrite them. This was a complete surprise to western governments, because they had confused the general effectiveness of these regimes against small numbers of internal dissidents with the capability to control their countries without Soviet support. The second turned out to be lacking completely.

Indeed, state-change like this often reflects not the strength of the challenger but the weakness of the existing system, whose capabilities often prove to have been massively over-estimated. This is seen especially in the collapse of armies, often followed by the collapse of regimes. There are a number of fairly spectacular examples. One is the collapse of the FAM in Mali in January 2013 in the face of advances by Tuareg separatists and Jihadists: the deployment of French forces ultimately avoided the fall of Bamako. But its poor performance came as no surprise to experts on the region: it was poorly paid, trained and equipped, and thus poorly motivated to fight. As I have repeatedly pointed out, military power is not an objective standard, it is always relative, and the less-weak side generally wins. In this case, the separatists of Ansar Dine and the jihadist groups, although not objectively that powerful, were still more than a match for the Malian troops, no matter how surprising this was to governments in the region and the West.

The fact was that Mali had been apparently stable for some time (rock concerts in the desert, remember?) and it was only in 2012 that the situation in the North began to deteriorate badly. Hence the surprise. One can say the same about the flight the same year of the Congolese Army in the face of the rebel M23 movement organised by Rwanda. The weaknesses of the FARDC were well known by those on the ground, but in western capitals the defeat came as a surprise, because, after all, considerable amounts of money had been spent on them and significant resources devoted to training. The situation was only restored with the help of the UN.

In fact, the greater the western investment in militaries and regimes, then understandably the greater the surprise when they fall apart, and the greater the willingness to look for scapegoats and excuses. The fall of Raqqa in Syria later in the same year also came as a surprise, because the anti-Assad forces, at that stage mostly Sunni Islamist groups, took the town easily, and with relatively little resistance from the Syrian Army. More serious and even more surprising was the fall of Mosul in Iraq the following year to the newly organised Islamic State. Although the attackers were massively outnumbered (by some accounts 15-1) they captured the city in a few days, surprising the West, as much as the defenders by their tactics of suicide bombings, and wholesale executions by burning and crucifixion, intended to strike fear into the enemy. This was the more surprising after a decade of expensive training and equipping of the Iraqi Army, largely by the US. Ironically, the most important consequence of that programme turned out to be the massive amounts of US equipment captured, and the recruitment of some Sunni soldiers to the IS cause.

Which is to say that these militaries, and thus the control of regimes over their territory, turned out to be much weaker than expected when confronted with a half-way serious enemy. The same happened later in Afghanistan, in spite of the decades-long US and NATO efforts to create and sustain a modern western-style advanced military force. Nobody who had seen the Afghan National Army at first hand, I think, would have been surprised that they collapsed after the US withdrawal, although even the greatest cynics probably didn’t anticipate the actual speed both of the collapse and the end of the regime. I think I’ve made the point sufficiently, but let me just add that the surprise felt in the West at the fall of the Assad regime in Syria 2024 fits completely into this model. The Syrian Army had degenerated substantially after the defeat of the IS in 2018, the Assad regime had made no attempt to reach out to the opposition, the Russians were preoccupied with Ukraine, Hezbollah had withdrawn from Syria … all it took was a minimally organised and motivated opposition and the regime would fall. It was very much a question of when, and should not have been a surprise.

That’s enough surprises for the moment. But the interesting question, since most of these examples (and others I will cite later) were in principle foreseeable, is why they nonetheless came as a surprise. Here, there’s an important conceptual point to consider first. For convenience, we talk, as I have done, of “governments” or “the West” being “surprised.” But we can’t really treat institutions or governments like that. What we mean in most cases is that decision-makers in national capitals, and sometimes Embassy staff, were (mostly) surprised by what happened. As individuals they may have anticipated the possibility or something similar, they may have heard rumours only to discount them, or have them discounted by greater experts, or for that matter they may have hoped (or feared) an entirely different eventuality which did not in fact happen. But this is seldom stressed, because even professional historians, let alone amateurs and pundits, are tempted to find and follow threads in events which led to the consequences we know, even when people at the time thought very differently about things. Indeed, if you can be bothered to look at original sources and books written from them (I know!) the picture that emerges is often very different to that in the history books, because the emphasis at the time was very much elsewhere.

For example, the story of the international dimension of the Spanish Civil War largely excludes some issues that were seen as very important at the time. The British in particular feared that, with German and Italian support for Franco, the crisis could develop into a general European war pitting those two nations against Britain and France. They therefore devoted a lot of time and effort to the cause of “non-intervention” which in the end was wasted, and even counter-productive in that it dissuaded the French from giving open support to the Republicans. But it was what seemed important at the time, even if it isn’t mentioned much today. Likewise, after the fall of the Shah, few western nations considered an Islamic government as the most likely outcome. Worried meetings were held all over the western world about the possibility of a military coup, since military coups were common at the time, or a Communist takeover, since many saw the fall of the Shah as a KGB destabilisation operation. Thus, the surprise at Khomeini’s accession to power was even greater.

This in turn has a lot to do with the reality of how politics and government operate, especially in a crisis. In this sense, politics is a bit like Morris Dancing or Neurosurgery: if you haven’t experienced it, or seen it up close, verbal descriptions won’t get you very far. This is why the reaction of outsiders coming into government, no matter how eminent they may be, is often one of stupefied panic, at the speed, complexity and sometimes sheer apparent irrationality of what they see. Outsiders, seeing apparent chaos, struggle and compete to impose some externally-generated logical pattern on it. But it would actually be unfair to describe politics as chaos: most of the time anyway. Even apparent chaos— like the British government’s Brexit experience—follows a certain twisted logic of its own, if you understand the issues involved, which may not be the ones most talked about. (Brexit was about saving the Conservative Party from disintegration at any price, and stuff the rest of you.)

The biggest problem in understanding how politics works today is that policy-making, let alone policy execution, has been progressively replaced in the last couple of generations by what I call Policy Management. That is to say, that these days virtually all the time and attention goes on procedure, and hardly anything is left for substance. It was always like this to some degree, as you can see from the kind of historical material I mentioned above, but recently, serious thinking about issues, much less attempts to anticipate them, has almost vanished under successive layers of management.

A practical example: imagine that you are the Head of the Russia/Ukraine Department of a medium-sized Foreign Ministry. It might be expected that you and your staff spend your working days thinking about the present and future situation, what might happen and what to do. In fact, such trivia are often overlooked. When you come in in the morning you will be greeted with extracts from the world’s media, reports of statements by foreign governments, and urgent communications from your government and others, as well as international organisations. There may even be something about the military situation on the ground. Skimming through that pile of material, you begin your day: meetings, video-conferences, briefings, preparation of meetings at NATO and the EU, bilateral tomorrow with Germany, lunch with the Political Counsellor of a close ally wonder what he wants, messages to agree and send to half a dozen destinations. The Minister wants advice on this and that, can you come to the G7 meeting in Washington next week, there’s an informal meeting of close allies in Paris in two days time, there’s a debate in Parliament at the end of the week and a lot of preparation is required, the Minister is making several media appearances in the next few days, there are several bilateral visits you need to prepare for, of course the Council of Ministers discusses the subject every week, and there’s a real challenge building up from the Finance Ministry about how much this is all costing. And naturally, many other parts of the Ministry, and other Ministries, have an interest in the problem and need to be kept in the picture.

With luck, at the end of the day, when things start to calm down slightly, you may have a chance to look through the non-critical material: routine messages from Posts, intelligence assessments, records of international meetings, correspondence that doesn’t involve you personally, even a selection of articles from the online media if you have the time. You need to draft a record of the lunchtime conversation, because it suggested a worrying political crisis in that country’s government. With luck you manage some of this, unless there’s an urgent telephone call from Washington. Perhaps on the train home, half-asleep reading a particularly inane and uninformed article, you find yourself thinking How did we get here? And how can we get out of it?

One of the many things you didn’t have time to read is a tweet from a famously excitable journalist claiming to have been told that a group of nationalist militants has got hold of anti-aircraft missiles and they are intending to shoot down Zelensky’s plane. Anyway, nothing comes of it until a month later when rifle shots are fired at the plane from the airport perimeter, though nothing is hit. The journalist writes a major article about how his warnings were ignored and wonders why your government seems to have done nothing. Were they really taken by surprise, or were they they part of a conspiracy? Telling people that a dozen such rumours circulate every day seems to have no effect.

Procedural issues take priority because they are immediate, and everybody can understand them. Everybody can therefore have an opinion. So I sat in many stuffy rooms in 1991-92 at meetings debating what, if anything Europe should be doing about the crisis in the Former Yugoslavia. Yet the debate, you may be surprised to hear, hardly touched on the situation in the country at all. It was mostly an outgrowth of the negotiations on the Political Union treaty, as well as the future of NATO and greater cooperation on European defence. The situation in the country was irrelevant, except for the way in which it was viewed by the media and European politicians: what mattered was that Europe should be seen to be “doing something,” even if no-one could identify a plausible military task with the forces we had available. For months, we went round and round the same dilemma: We must do Something/Like what?/Never mind, Something. When a UN mission was agreed for Bosnia there was enormous pressure on European nations to send forces. The French, from Mitterrand downwards, were worried they might lose the 1992 referendum on the Political Union if European forces were not sent. More generally, governments worried about the whole Union idea being discredited if Europe couldn’t deal with a crisis on its own doorstep. The actual underlying situation, as well as what to do in the future, were not discussed at all, and Europe spent much time reacting to surprising developments. In the end, European forces were sent to Bosnia, even by the sceptical British, and around a hundred died there, effectively for nothing.

It follows that “surprise” is almost always not total, in the sense that, of all the conceivable possibilities, someone, somewhere will probably have identified a scenario reasonably close to what actually happens. But in the blizzard of official and unofficial data that governments receive all the time, it is often a matter of luck whether something resembling the future is actually identified, and, as we shall see, there is often not much you can do about it. The only way to deal with the problem of information saturation is by structured analysis of each piece of information, but this takes far more time than most government people have. What’s the source? Is it reliable? Has it been reliable in the past? Is there collateral for it? Does it sound logical and reasonable? Is it what I want to hear, rather than what is necessarily true? And so on. These sorts of questions—part of the training of intelligence analysts and for related disciplines— are just not feasible at scale. (If you read a news site with lots of links every day you have some idea of the problem.)

There are lots of reasons why “governments” (as discussed above) are “surprised,” in the senses discussed above. Sometimes, the reasons for this “surprise” are banal in the extreme. Thus, in 1982 the initial British response to reports of an Argentinian invasion of the Falklands was incredulity. What on earth could have led the junta in Buenos Aires to undertake such a lunatic adventure? The better informed knew, indeed, that for some time the British had been trying to organise a negotiated handover of the Islands to Argentina, but this was problematic because of the unpleasant nature of the Argentine government. (Many of those who opposed the war also fiercely opposed the Argentinian junta, which left them in a somewhat awkward position.)

Iran, once again, is an interesting example of several of the intellectual weaknesses that cause “surprises.” Essentially, the desire to destroy the country and punish it for surviving since the humiliations of 1979 has been so strong in Washington, that it has blinded everyone to the reality. So much has hostility to Iran and the need for its consequent destruction become an article of faith, that no case, however rational and well-founded, could have been mounted against it. Unquestioned hostility to Iran, and an unquestioned faith in the capacity of the US military, meant that on the one hand there was no need to waste time and effort collecting and analysing information, and on the other that the outcome of a conflict could be predicted in advance. No dissident information—the closing of Hormuz, the protection of Iranian military assets—could be taken seriously because it would undermine the conclusions that had already been reached.

There are also structural explanations. Information about a potential “surprise” does not arrive with a note attached saying how reliable it is. Indeed, what’s striking in history is not how many disruptive pieces of new information have been ignored, but how may have been taken seriously, and later proved to be wrong. (Most of what western governments thought about the Russian Revolution, for example.) How would you evaluate rumours that a military coup was being planned in Israel to remove Netanyahu? This could have enormous consequences if true, but could also lead to catastrophic problems if it were treated as true and shown to be false. But all you have is a diplomatic source reporting essentially gossip. Even if you are convinced, can you convince your boss, and your boss’s boss? Can you ask the Political Director, already dealing with half-a-dozen massively complex subjects, to put aside time to think about this? Why is this rumour more credible than a dozen others, also circulating? How could you convince other nations? And what, in practical terms, could you do? If the rumour turns out to be true then the warnings will be resuscitated, and you will be blamed for “doing nothing.” If you do something and the rumours turn out to be false, you will be presented as the victims of a Russian disinformation operation. Indeed, here is the basic distinction between actually doing politics and analysing, commenting on, criticising, making policy recommendations and so forth. Real decisions have to be taken with real consequences, in the knowledge that they may well be wrong, which encourages a certain conservatism not found elsewhere. (“We must abandon a military response to the problems in the Sahel and deal with the underlying problems.” “OK, give me three measures that can be implemented by the end of the year that will resolve these problems.” “Er, that’s not our job. We’re only here to criticise.”)

Among many other causes of “surprises,” the conceptual blindness which has been mentioned throughout this essay is perhaps the most important. In order to anticipate something, you must believe it is possible. Forty years ago, the end of Communism was literally unthinkable for most people, and even those who thought differently were generally right for the wrong reasons. Foreseeing an Islamist takeover in Iran required an understanding of Political Islam and the role of religion in politics which few people had or wanted to develop. Indeed, our plodding, materialist, reductive conception of politics has turned out to be basically useless at anticipating real events in the world, ranging from the barbarities of the Islamic State and their mass-casualty attacks in Europe, to the move towards “nationalism” in parts of Eastern Europe, and even to how countries like China, Russia and Iran actually think. (The opposite is also true: the imminent end of the House of Saud has been confidently predicted for fifty years now.) More think-tanks and Ph D programmes won’t help if they just produce a punditocracy which understands everything except that which is actually important.

All that said, we also need to remember that almost nothing in history is deterministic. Almost every episode discussed this week could have turned out differently, certainly in detail, and quite possibly in its main lines. History, as I’ve pointed out many times, is terrifyingly contingent, and what seems obvious now was not always obvious then: nor, indeed, was it inevitable. In some cases, it’s perhaps excusable to be surprised.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.

I don’t say that lightly, and I’m quite aware that, all my life at least, critics have been making such accusations, reacting aggressively to contemporary ideas or events they don’t like. I have something more profound in mind though, which is not an ideological or even an ethical judgement, but almost like an engineering judgement. The bits no longer fit together, processes no longer work, manuals are inaccurate or missing, inputs no longer correspond to outputs, things seem to happen randomly, and without a cause. So this week I want to take up a passing reference last week to Apophenia—perceiving relationships between things that are not really there—and expand it considerably. Apophenia, we noted, is often a symptom of schizophrenia. It occurred to me that there might be value in using schizophrenia more widely as a metaphor for what’s gone wrong with our western society, and what has infected the political class and the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC), who claim to be running it.

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Let’s first quickly review what this essay is not about. It’s not primarily about the anomie described by Durkheim: a mismatch between personal values and those of society, and a consequent inability to adapt to social and economic change, where the facts of everyday life no longer correspond to the values that are presented. As we’ll see, this is part of it, but there is much more. Nor, whilst I suggest that today’s society itself shows many of the characteristics of schizophrenia, do I want to get into the treacherous waters of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which is far too complex and internally contradictory to deal with here. Let’s just recognise in passing that of course psychological problems (and how they are described and treated) vary with the nature of the society in question, and that experience of bad things tends to make people unhappy.

So, then, schizophrenia. In spite of etymology, and of popular cultural ideas, a schizophrenic does not have a “split personality,” nor are they in principle more dangerous and more violent than other people. There are many good discussions of schizophrenia online, but because it is a collection of symptoms rather than a simple illness, it’s easiest to characterise it briefly as a difficulty in distinguishing one’s own internal thoughts and ideas from reality. It can take the form of hallucinations, delusions, fears that one is being controlled or listened to by others, disorganised speech and behaviour which often harms the individual, and social withdrawal. (There are a number of typical symptoms and they sometimes overlap: this is an illustrative list.)

In what sense could it be useful to show that western society is suffering from something analogous to schizophrenia? We need first to distinguish between the behaviour of institutions, of individuals and of society as a whole, accepting that the barriers between them are fluid. So let’s begin with the simplest case I can think of, concerning individuals, and riffing partly off Durkheim. Simply put, in most western societies today there is a fundamental difference between the picture of society generally presented, and the way that people experience that same society themselves in their daily lives. Now, if we were talking about one individual, it might be that person was suffering from delusions about society (believing that they were the victim of a conspiracy, for example.) But here—and this is why I think that schizophrenia is a good metaphor—the issue is the other way round. The individual correctly sees what is true in their own life and their own experience, but the power structure of society is promoting what you might reasonably describe as delusions about it. And in most cases, this structure—the PMC if you like—has internalised, and shares these delusions itself. The problem thus lies with society, or parts of it, not the individual.

The political difficulty is that these delusions are only partially effective. There’s a tendency, following a certain reading of Marcuse, to see ordinary people as helpless victims of political and consumerist manipulation. Now it’s true that there are those with power who would like that to be the case, but observably it is not always so. Yes, Edward Bernays was Freud’s nephew, and he founded modern public relations, and was associated with various episodes where his client was successful, but it’s hard to know how far, if at all, he played a determining role. Advertising as a whole is a notoriously inexact art, hence the lament attributed to various business leaders: “half of my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half.” With politics as well, the fortunes spent on some political campaigns, are often not effective. (Brexit is perhaps the classic modern example.) A lot of the time people just switch off, assuming, not unreasonably, that everything in official and commercial discourses is just a lie. In certain cases, as with Ukraine, the ability of governments and the PMC to dominate the interpretation of events can affect perceptions, at least temporarily, although even in that case there is no flood of volunteers reporting to military recruiting centres. But this widens the gulf between elites and ordinary people even further, because ordinary people are not as stupid as the PMC likes to believe.

Now of course it’s doubtful that there has ever been a society where the dominant official discourse and the popular perception of everyday life and world events were essentially identical. But here, I’m not talking about ideology or ethical value-judgements, but rather the mundane “stuff” of which everyday life is made. A generation or two ago, politicians and pundits might have had different opinions about wealth and power, about political and economic systems, about religion and ethics. But there was general agreement about the nature of the world they were discussing, and what the key issues were. Here are two examples from opposite ends of the spectrum.

When I was young, for example, one of the major public debates was between those who thought that what remained of the Empire was a source of strength and Great Power status, and so should be retained, and those who thought it was an unaffordable cost and a political burden, and that the country should concentrate on Atlantic and European ties. In this case, the argument was essentially over by the end of the 1960s, with a tacit agreement to seek membership of the then EEC, but while it was on, the two sides were arguing on common ground, and for and against the relative importance of agreed factors—trade, employment, agriculture—so the interested citizen could follow along. By contrast the dominant discourse during the Brexit referendum period consisted of sneering at ordinary people and threatening them.

Likewise, great moral debates of the era—on abortion, on the decriminalisation of homosexuality, on the death penalty—could be extremely agitated, but the issues were nonetheless presented in a way that most people felt they could understand, irrespective of what side they were on. But these days, many of the social, political and economic questions which obsess our elites and our media seem to exist only in some kind of alternative, fantasy world, which ordinary people have absolutely no interest in, or understanding of. When elites do actually deign to talk to ordinary people about things that genuinely affect their lives, the disconnect is often almost total.

For example, people read, or see in the media, that the economy of their country is apparently doing well, that inflation is under control, economic growth is steady etc. But they know that the price of feeding their families goes up all the time, that shops in their town are closing and unemployment is rising, that public services are getting worse, and that every time they go shopping, someone is collecting food for the hungry. Now it’s true that there are technical definitional distinctions here, but in a way that’s part of the problem. Over the last generation or so, unemployment and inflation have both been redefined endlessly (almost always downwards) so that they no longer reflect reality as it is experienced by ordinary people. We are in the world of Facsimile rather than Reality, as I explained a couple of weeks ago.

It would be easier if this was just a cynical ploy by our rulers (and one should never wholly ignore cynicism in politics) but it goes well beyond that. The view of the economy held by the political class and the PMC is not reality-based; it’s a delusion, based on complete dissociation from reality, and a belief that the truth lies in numbers, not in human experience. And like many delusions, it is supported by carefully worked-out arguments made by intelligent people. But the fact remains that to tell ordinary people that prices are not going up, albeit using “prices” and “up” in a very special sense, is delusional. In turn, and to return to a theme of last week, this behaviour also contributes to the almost impenetrable barrier of understanding and distrust that exists between elites and ordinary people, and in effect demands that people doubt the evidence of their own experience, and instead believe voices they hear on the radio telling them that everything is in fact fine.

Or take a subject like immigration. For the political class and the PMC, whose overlapping immigration-related objectives include feeling good about themselves and finding a source of cheap labour, being asked to justify current policies is considered almost an insult. But there is a group of typical related arguments, or at least justifications, sometimes advanced. It is said that we need immigrants, especially young immigrants, because there are too few young people to do the work. Now if you pause there, you might reasonably expect the next step in the argument to be a list of areas and sectors where large numbers of job vacancies exist. There is no such list. Indeed, there is actually a significant labour surplus, especially among young people. A recent report counted almost a million British people between the ages of 16 and 24 not in education employment or training. You could start by offering them jobs. About one in five young people in France between the ages of 18 and 25 are economically inactive, including students hanging on at university because the only alternative is unemployment. And would you believe that young people from immigrant families are disproportionately represented among the economically inactive? That’s unsurprising, since many don’t speak the language of their new country properly, and have had educational problems, or may even be illiterate.

But surely, I hear the PMC say, we need more young people because we have an aging population, so that means we must have immigrants. Fine, except that your economically-active young male (since females from many of these cultures are forbidden to work) will be part of a larger family unit, whose total effect is to actually increase the proportion of older and economically inactive people in the economy. And so on. And it’s especially curious that western politicians have continued to make these arguments, in spite of the fact that they are wildly politically unpopular. The idea that there should be a national policy on immigration with rules and controls, which would have seemed obvious to everyone a generation ago, and which is supported by overwhelming majorities of western populations including most of the immigrant community, has now been officially consigned to the dustbin of the “extreme Right,” Indeed, in many countries, the subject may not even be mentioned. This is just bad politics, among other things.

Immigration policy today reposes essentially on a faith-based delusion: if something is morally Right, then the actual facts are secondary. In spite of what’s often said, anti-immigrant sentiment in itself is quite rare, and probably no stronger than in the past. All societies are prejudiced to some extent, after all. Rather, people object to a delusional policy which asserts that in principle infinite numbers of immigrants can be absorbed without any costs, any problems of schooling, social services, housing or culture. When your two eldest children have left school and cannot find a job, you will be unconvinced by stories of labour shortages. When your youngest child has difficulties at school because a third of the class cannot speak the national language well enough to follow the lessons and some are disturbed orphans from war zones, you will not be impressed by being told that, in raising such concerns you are “benefiting the extreme Right.”

But by definition, you can’t argue with those who are delusional, and here we shouldn’t be intimidated by having figures waved at us, especially by economists. In a whole range of areas, delusional policy frameworks are supported by elaborate-looking calculations, much in the way that Internet sites and books claim to show by complex mathematical proofs that Apollo 11 could not have gone to the Moon, or that the attacks on New York in 2001 could not possibly have led to the Twin Towers collapsing as they did. If in doubt, the delusional will resort to using any numbers they can find, even imaginary ones. I’ve mentioned before that studies have shown how figures in such sensitive areas as human trafficking and deaths in conflict are often not just exaggerated, but literally made up. It’s likely that many of the numbers for deaths in the Ukraine war will be shown to be invented as well. (Indeed, western policy towards Ukraine as whole seems to be based almost entirely on clinical delusions.) Similarly, most of the claims made by Grievance entrepreneurs are based on alleged facts and figures whose relationship with the real world is, shall we say, tenuous, and of course people notice this when they compare various grievance industry demands with their own lived experiences. (Interestingly, schizophrenics often report symptoms identical those who claim to be suffering from micro-aggressions.)

In politics, when you see politicians behaving in ways that are actually bad for their careers and their party, it’s normal to suspect that something strange is happening. Now yes, in certain circumstances people fail upwards, in certain other cases politicians give way to external pressures. But in the case of immigration, for example, there is nothing to stop major political parties from reverting to the consensus of a generation or so ago, which would be politically popular and help them win elections, as well as banishing this nightmare of the “extreme Right,” that so preoccupies them. Nothing, in fact, except the inability to escape from their own delusions.

In fact, self-damaging behaviour is one of the characteristics of schizophrenia. Sufferers typically withdraw from contacts with friends and family, and have difficulty with their professional lives or their education. They become less successful in all areas of life as a result, but they do not draw any obvious conclusions: rather, they have a tendency to dig deeper into delusions and hallucinations. And interestingly enough, in view of all the above, schizophrenics communicate badly to others, they can give unrelated answers to questions, and speak in word-salads. (By common consent, we have never before had a political class so poor at communication, or so poor at understanding what ordinary people think, or what ordinary life is like. Consider the example of your least-favourite politician …) I’ve talked in the last few weeks about some of the factors that explain the developing political suicide of the western political class. But as well as the Ego Death which they would incur by acknowledging reality, there is the simple fact that many of them are in the grip of profound delusions. They forget things that have happened, even things that they themselves have said, and they live in a delusionary world where Russian casualties in Ukraine are enormous, for example, and the country will collapse Any Day Now, and they will be justified, just as others believe that they will be justified when the “truth” about the Kennedy assassination or UFOs or Apollo 11 is revealed Any Day Now. (And recall in this context that schizophrenics have a much higher tendency to suicide than average.)

Nor is the problem limited to politics: in fact, it’s probably worse in the private sector. It’s curious, to say the least, that both defenders and critics of our current economic system assume that it is basically rational, and that its actors thus pursue rational objectives. Since Marx, there has been a tendency to personify Capital, and treat it almost as having a mind of its own, as it wanders the world looking for the most productive investment. This is quite unrelated, of course, to the way in which large private-sector companies now work. Indeed, if there is a single characteristic that defines a modern world-famous mega-entrepreneur, written about in stunned admiration by a deluded media, it is probably irrationality. And it’s enough to glance at informed writing about the economy to make you wonder whether the Titans of Technology who want to rule us are entirely sane, so little does their behaviour follow any rational pattern.

After all, the stereotypical image of capitalism is of the search for ever greater profits. Yet many of the most talked-about companies in the world today have no profits, and some never will have. They have only debts, funded by various clever schemes to extract money from people who buy virtual pieces of paper that they hope to sell on to bigger fools for more money later. Some of them, it is true, eventually obtain a smidgeon of profitability through the clever manipulation of accounting rules, but that’s about it. (I have long believed that you could get funding for a perpetual motion machine if the funders believed that they could subsequently sell their interest in it at a profit.) The idea that this should be a major field of economic activity, and that people should be paid real money for engaging in it, must seem like insanity to your local greengrocer. Would they necessarily be wrong?

In any event, companies care less about profitability these days than they do about the share price, and virtually any mechanism that raises it, no matter how insane or even how close to criminal activity, is thought acceptable and is fervently applauded. And of course we need to remind ourselves that share prices are seldom connected to any underlying reality: they are effectively related to the collective opinion of not-very-bright people about how much money they can make from selling them again. Likewise, the much-quoted “prices” for oil at the moment reflect nothing so mundane as prices paid by buyers to sellers today, but rather subjective guesses about prices in a few months’ time, and therefore at what price you should sign a contract to make a profit at that point. It’s well known that share valuations as a whole are essentially irrational and even emotional, and are often the product of organised delusions and simple ignorance. There’s therefore innocent fun to be had in reading the tortured justifications of financial journalists trying to make it look as though movements in share prices actually have some connection to reality.

Anything that appeals emotionally to those who buy and sell shares is fair game, most of all the argument that you can shrink your way to growth. Announce that you are sacking ten per cent of your workforce and your shares will go up, because … well, some clever financial journalist can no doubt explain why. Indeed, for some time now, cutting workforces and closing sites has been seen as a good macho thing to do, and good for a short-term boost to share prices, in spite of the fact that the results are often poor even for profits, and for share prices in the longer term. But in this self-harming, self-obsessed world of institutional schizophrenia, destroying the company in the hope of temporarily increasing the share price counts as normal behaviour. (Many years ago, I was at a presentation given by a British company to a prospective Korean commercial partner. The British company was proudly showing charts of how it was progressively reducing its workforce, and I could see the Koreans frantically trying to calculate at which date the company would finally cease to exist.)

A certain type of delusional personality, mistaking numbers for real things, might indeed help to run a company into the ground through a series of damaging short-term initiatives that temporarily increase the share price, and so the notional “wealth” of that individual. But it’s clear that once you go beyond a certain point, wealth is no longer related to any real, or even hypothetical, needs, and its pursuit has become merely pathological. After all, even pirates and highway robbers stole amounts of money they could actually spend. But then dissociation from others and the world itself, and difficulty in following social norms of behaviour, are also symptoms of schizophrenia.

There have been various models of the Capitalist in popular culture: the thrifty self-denying bourgeois, the cigar-chomping union-busting factory-owner, the cold, calculating banker, even the charismatic showman who usually went bankrupt in the end. But in recent years, we’ve seen the emergence of the capitalist—or CEO anyway—who is essentially a trickster, if not actually a fraudster, and whose only real competence is getting people to part with money. Of course, successful businessmen have often been good at self-promotion, but they have usually had other skills as well. The modern CEO on the other hand, likes to present themself as a philosopher, a seer able to anticipate the future, a visionary who has identified a human need, and preferably invented something that will save the human race. In almost all cases this is garbage, but it’s clear that for most of these people earning money is not the main motivation beyond a certain point. Rather, they are seeking status, fame, justification and ultimately just being taken seriously, and at their own valuation as a heroic visionary. And of course an uncritical and amateurish media rewards their egos with mindless hagiographic saturation coverage. They have dreams and visions of transhumanist futures, but then so has the man who has designed the perpetual motion machine mentioned above, whose genius will never be recognised because the oil companies have bribed governments to make sure that his invention is never funded. Now if he’d only been a bit better at public relations …

Which brings us naturally, I suppose, to what I refuse to call “Artificial Intelligence.” A simple glance at the headlines, at the almost incomprehensible sums of money being “spent” (if that’s really the word) on Large Language Models against the reasonably possible returns, should dispel any lingering belief that the technology industry is run by rational people. If you are familiar with the work of commentators like Ed Zitron and Gary Marcus, then you won’t need convincing that the alleged economics and financing of LLMs at scale come from an alternate universe, and that those who are investing sums of money so large as to be just about meaningless in LLMs are caught up in a fantasy existence, and unable to distinguish between reality and their own obsessions. Promising to spend the equivalent of the GDP of a small nation (if you can borrow it) on technology you don’t fully understand, to provide results you can’t describe in any worthwhile detail, with no obvious way of making money, could be characterised as one of a number of things, but “rational” would probably not be among them.

It’s striking, I think, that when LLMs produce stupid answers, those answers are referred to as “hallucinations.” In many ways, their “behaviour,” if we want to humanise them to that extent, resembles that of someone with severe schizophrenia. They do not interact with the “world” at all, they refuse to admit they are wrong, they invent things and tell lies. And because they will be increasingly trained on a database that they have themselves helped to create, they will be driven further and further into shared delusions. All in all, they are an excellent distillation of everything that is characteristic of our society, and its progress from the Divine Comedy and Notre Dame through Shakespeare to Chat GPT. It’s therefore fitting that one of the epitaphs for modern western culture should be collective hallucinations about the value and benefits of collective hallucinations.

I said at the beginning that this was really an engineering problem. Every enduring society, or even organisation, has to have an adequate degree of internal coherence and function with a minimum degree of rationality, or it will break down. Moreover, the necessary coherence is not only practical, it is also intellectual in the widest sense. Imagine that you buy a piece of complex technology, only to realise that the instruction manual provided refers to a different article, that no manual for your purchase actually exists, and that the Chatbot tells you it’s your fault for buying the wrong article in the first place. But extend that to society as a whole, and you begin to understand the mess we are in. It’s essential that the realities of society, and life as experienced by ordinary people, should somehow be reflected in the discourse and priorities of the political class and the PMC, even if their own private opinions are very different from those of the masses. As the legendary Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus is supposed to have said: “That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.”

There have, of course, been ruling classes in the past hopelessly out of touch with the people, and unable to understand social and economic changes. They have generally suffered as a result. But I can’t think of a ruling class in history which has lived, in effect, in a different and parallel universe to that of ordinary people, and has also tried to impose its deluded view of reality on its subjects. Today’s political class and PMC has its own view of what the world is actually like, of what subjects are important, of what are the correct views on any subject you care to name. Through the incestuous process I described last week, this network has become so homogeneous, and has taken up so much of the political space, that for most ordinary people it produces the only picture of the world they can easily find. They may not like its obsessions and delusions—many don’t—but it’s not clear where else they can go that isn’t just as bad. After all, you may not be convinced by the authorised version of the Ukraine crisis, but take an unwary step into the sewers of the Internet, and you can find websites explaining that it’s all the doing of the British Royal Family, who of course control the international heroin trade. (Yes, I’ve seen that.) And for most of us, unfortunately “I read different opinions and make my own mind up,” is no more than a comforting delusion. Few of us have sufficient expertise to do this outside certain narrow areas (I know I don’t) with the result that we select those opinions and those alleged facts that we find congenial and satisfying, and we slowly construct our own delusional bubble and our own little dissociated world. (Which is why the comments sections in some Internet sites are becoming unreadable.)

This process is happening more and more, I think, and is one of the many unanticipated pieces of Internet collateral damage. But it is also a natural consequence of a power structure which is itself mentally disturbed, and moreover seems bent on trying to drive its own populations insane. Those Above inhabit a normative, delusional dream-world, resembling Hegel as performed by Monty Python, in which only Ideas are real, and only ideological struggles matter. The issue with Immigration, for example, is not what practical things to do about it, but rather to decide which discourse about it is acceptable, and then take steps to enforce that discourse on everybody. After which the problem, um, goes away. All problems can ultimately be solved by performative gestures; nothing ever has negative real-life implications. Those Below, meanwhile, are obliged to contort our speech, our behaviour and even our understanding of the world to avoid being penalised in some fashion.

And yet down Below, the society that we live in is coming apart. “Nothing works” as you hear daily in most western societies. You press buttons and nothing happens. Letters are unanswered or lost, messages unread, telephone calls never answered or returned, and attempts to get anywhere, much less contact a human being, fall into a Hell of schizoid chatbots. The simplest things now seem impossible for our society to perform, in part because those Above no longer care. What does it matter if children can’t read and write properly when we have “Artificial Intelligence?” Or something.

As I’ve suggested, you can’t argue with people who have delusions and hallucinations: it simply drives them deeper and deeper. I rather fear the same is true of institutions and political classes. It would be nice to think that the cumulative shock of Ukraine, Iran and climate change would somehow shock our political class and our PMC into some kind of improved acquaintance with reality, but I suspect it will simply force them deeper and deeper into delusion, until they suffer a kind of collective nervous breakdown. (Some would say that Mr Trump, confronted with a choice between two impossible courses of action over Iran, may be going that way already.) Psychiatrists tell us that there is no known cure for schizophrenia in individuals: the best that can be done is to manage it. But who is going to manage the psychological implosion of our ruling classes? Fifty-odd years ago, King Crimson’s vision of the future seemed a bit over the top. Now, I’m not so sure.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.

I didn’t have time to explore two related questions. First, why is there this enormous disparity, not just of opinion, but of belief and ethos, between those in power and their acolytes, and the rest of us? Second, and something I want to focus on especially today, since it is seldom discussed, is why elites persist in these weird ideas and beliefs even when it’s clear that they are not just faulty, but also bad for the reputations and careers, and even power and money, of those involved. I suggest that something went very wrong at the end of the Cold War, and this led to a whole series of blunders and misunderstandings, of which those involving Ukraine and Iran are only the most recent. I suggest also that some of the explanations are procedural and structural, but that some are psychological, and that in general, we need to pay much more attention to the way in which psychological factors influence behaviour in international politics.

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But let’s start with the nuts and bolts. Our current political class and their advisers, but also the media wing of the PMC, which is probably more influential in determining how ordinary people see the world, have grown up and made their career in the post-Cold War world. A Political Director of a Foreign Ministry today, for example, would have been at school or university when the Berlin Wall came down. A political journalist, a tank-thinker, or a government policy-maker might well have been in nappies. Moreover, the overproduction of graduates, the proliferation of NGOs and more recently Internet sites, the end of any politics in politics, the abandonment of any real ideological distinction between major parties and the interconnections and even intermarriages within a PMC now almost completely homogeneous, mean that there is now an almost total overlap between formally separate and theoretically independent structures like government, politics, NGOs, intelligence organisations, the military, the media, and the Courts. There are correspondingly grave penalties for individuals among them who stray from the party line. And those who do so stray, in practice tend to cling together for protection in structures like the alt-media, which develop their own party lines and tend to enforce their own conformity just as fiercely.

Whilst there are, as always, differences within and between such groups, these tend to be within quite narrow limits. A journalist, an NGO advocate, a diplomat and an intelligence officer may have read the same subject at the same university, and then spent twenty years in a an environment where most people, quite genuinely, shared broadly the same opinions. They may disagree about detail in a case like that of, say Iran, but their intellectual approaches will be surprisingly similar. Everyone they meet, everyone they work with, everyone they socialise with, probably operates within the same limited intellectual perimeter, and there is increasingly a trans-national PMC as well, speaking a kind of globalised English and often educated at each other’s universities.

Which partly explains, if you like, why there tends to be a homogeneous view of the world. But it doesn’t explain why that view is almost always wrong, or at least incomplete, and at best a caricature. One mechanistic explanation is the increasing tendency towards generalist university training in subjects—such as International Humanitarian Law—which are essentially normative and theoretical, rather than descriptive and analytical, and don’t actually prepare anyone for anything intellectually, let alone practically. But let me suggest a more historically-based explanation which is also part of the answer.

The Cold War (and we’ll come back to that term) ended far more quickly than most people could process. It was not obvious why it ended when it did, or even when exactly it did end. All that was clear was that something changed violently, and almost overnight. German unification, a vague aspiration in 1988, was an accomplished fact two years later. But in any case, the period from the late 1940s to the late 1980s was never a “war” of any kind, and in fact the term was unhelpful then, and is unhelpful now Apart from anything else, there was nothing really to fight about, which meant, for example, that NATO exercises to test procedures and decision-making were forced to scrabble around for any old scenario, just to kick the exercise off. A popular one was a Soviet invasion of Yugoslavia following KGB destabilisation operations. (Ironically, I was told by a former Warsaw Pact planner that their usual scenario began with a NATO invasion of Yugoslavia.) The result was two massive and well-prepared armed camps glowering at each other, but with no obvious reason for fighting. However, the generation of political leaders in power then, like their advisers, had effectively known nothing else, and one of the major conceptual problems in 1989-91was trying to work out what it was that had actually come to an end, and what that meant. Understandably, there was a strong desire in many western capitals to change as little as possible, and to cling to what was known and trusted, especially since the future seemed to be so obscure. There were, however, two points that most decision-makers and pundits in the West were agreed on, and in both cases they were wrong.

The first was that the “Cold War,” whatever that had been exactly, was the source of the periodic crises the world had known over forty years. Soviet aggression and interference, or more neutrally superpower rivalry, explained why there had been so many wars and crises. With the fall of the Soviet Union, that tension had disappeared. It followed that the world could now look forward to a new era of greater peace and security. It’s worth pointing out that critics of NATO, and western policy generally, shared this delusion, albeit coming from the opposite end. They believed that, with the end of the Cold War, there would be no further need for military alliances, or even armies. What all this ignored, of course, was that many of the security problems in the world were not the product of rivalry between the two blocs, but rather that the blocs opportunistically exploited them. There was an unreal moment between roughly the end of 1989 and the middle of 1991 when it really did seem as though the world might be entering a new era. Part of the confusion and anger in Europe over the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, therefore, resulted from the bucket of cold water this represented upon all these naive hopes and reductionist analyses, as it turned out that conflicts around the world actually had causes that owed little to Washington or Moscow. In many ways, as we’ll see, the western security elites never really managed to catch up with with the continually changing nature of conflict and in many cases didn’t, and still don’t, understand what was going on.

The second was that the West had “won,” this conflict, if only because the Soviet Union and its ideology had disappeared. This had not been expected, and it stunned western policymakers, but in politics you don’t refuse something freely offered, so the West began to construct a narrative of victory: not a military victory, of course, but a political one, based on the superiority of its “system.” And importantly, 1989-90 was just at the end of the period when Reagan and Thatcher had been in power, all sorts of weirdo economic ideas had yet to be fully discredited, and the generation of 1968 was coming into positions of power. Strengthened by those who had heard of, if never actually read, that thing about the End of History, western leaders thought that they had found the one true doctrine, and that all that remained was to apply it. And applied it was, as successive generations cycled through universities and into government positions, and then into the field. The results are well enough known not to need rehearsing here. After all, if the Liberal/libertarian ideas current at the end of the 1980s really were some Hegelian final chapter in a process of ideological development (or that’s what you remembered reading anyway) then by definition, all other ideas were wrong and outmoded, including those of non-western origin.

There was no particular coherence to this ideology, except vague gestures in the direction of “freedom.” It’s ironic, therefore, that it was always inflexible and doctrinaire, and has only become more so with the passage of time. We tend to be most conscious of its economic and political dimensions (“free” markets, privatisation, western-style parliamentary democracy) but it also had a massive normative social and ideological component. Although it was the fighting in Afghanistan that got the coverage, in reality the majority of the international effort and budget was elsewhere: the country was a kind of free-fire zone for every normative social and ethical crusade that some government or organisation somewhere was prepared to fund. Needless to say, just about everything that was tried came to grief there, and wherever else in the world it was attempted.

As you might expect, the ideology and its associated activities were essentially performative, because that was the tradition of politics (“demos”, sit-ins) the new masters came from, and because they knew little about life, and, with the passage of time, were reinforced by those who knew even less. Thus, they believed corrupt political systems could be reformed by normative training courses conducted by westerners, military regimes could be reformed by creating parliamentary Defence Committees, and people could be lectured into being good, or at least being like us. It was enough to create structures, draft documents and pronounce words, and reality itself would change. Serial disappointments, for reasons we will explore, did not not invalidate the ideas (they could not, since the ideas were Right) and simply led to demands for more resources and “better coordination.”

As I’ve suggested on a number of occasions, the ideology of the modern PMC is a kind of rag-bag of different ideas, contributed by different interest groups and mutually tolerated, much as monkeys groom each other. In activities overseas, from attempts at the management of major crises down to routine “governance” or “human rights” interventions, there was a remarkable coherence between the policies and activities of governments notionally on the “Left” and those notionally on the “Right.” For example, the Conservative government of David Cameron directed that all UK-funded training courses abroad had to include a compulsory module on dealing with Sexual and Gender-based Violence, whether or not that had any relevance to the subject-matter. (I was told that this approach was approved by Cameron himself.) But it was just as true of the luxurious fauna that flourished around such programmes: media, consultancies, parliamentary committees, think-tanks, NGOs, lobby-groups and others all demanded more action, more money and personnel, and more ambitious objectives. The fact that perhaps ninety percent of that effort was completely wasted, and that this undermined the limited amount of valuable work that was done, was rarely acknowledged. The critical literature discussing such interventions, both in individual countries and more generally, is still quite small.

Broadly speaking, the ideology maintained that, with the end of the Cold War, there was no reason for conflict any more. Conflicts were no longer “about” anything, and were either the result of misunderstanding, or the machinations of “entrepreneurs of violence,” who incited and profited from conflicts, and thus needed to be removed, preferably by being put on trial somewhere, for something. Peace and reconciliation were the natural outcomes of international intervention, and were the natural inclination of the populations anyway. The vast majority of those caught up in conflicts were victims (though some were bigger victims than others, which produced, for example, vicious disagreements between feuding NGOs about how to handle child soldiers involved in atrocities.)

If all this sounds a bit dismissive, then perhaps it should be. This ideology was the product of a highly normative middle-class western education, which emphasised thinking about how the world should be as opposed to how it actually was, and thus encouraged symbolic, rather than actual activities. This leads to something that I think is simply not understood properly (or perhaps even at all) in thinking and writing about international politics. The dominance of broadly Realist thinking is such that relations between states are typically interpreted through analysis of brute economic, political and military force, yet all experience teaches that this is highly misleading and incomplete.

In everyday life, we all recognise the importance of psychological factors in determining how we function, how we feel, our strengths and weaknesses, how we relate to each other, and not least how organisations and institutions work. We all feel the difference between a sympathetic callcentre operator and one who just wants to go home, or between an institution that does seem to have a concept of service and one that just wants your money, and we adjust our own behaviour accordingly. Much of our life consists of interactions with people moderated by how well we know them, what we think of them, what we hope to gain from dealing with them, and an awareness that our own personality, and our own past experiences and our attitudes, will affect how others see us.

Yet when we get to really important things—economics, politics, institutions, power—our society’s dominant ideology assumes that people act with perfect rationality, pursuing their greater advantage as they see it, almost like calculating machines. The idea of people as rational economic actors, never more than a “simplifying assumption” that got out of control, has been laughed almost into extinction (lotteries anybody?) although it still retains a cobra-like grip on the minds of the elite. Nonetheless, there is still a belief among international relations scholars, and pundits who vulgarise their theories, that nations themselves behave with absolute rationality. Of course, a moment’s thought reminds us that “nations” have no agency here. Everything is done by people. The merest history book will tell you about the influence that personalities, emotions and ambitions have on history, and of course all international dealings of any kind are actually carried out by individuals with their own histories, prejudices, ambitions, jealousies, and often complex relations with each other.

Consider the simplest example: that of a routine international negotiation. As you sit behind your national flag or nameplate, you are not thinking, or you should not be, about using your nation’s power to crush your negotiating partners. Your thoughts are much more mundane. What latitude do I have? How do I interpret my instructions? How indulgent will my boss be if I give way to this country on that issue? Then, you look around the table. A over there comes from a powerful country, but has a weak and unpopular Minister who doesn’t want arguments. B comes from a smaller country but is popular for their helpful attitude and often has good ideas. C likes to be cooperative but sometimes tries too hard to please and gets out ahead of what his Capital will tolerate. Meanwhile, X is someone I like and get on with, and we can often sort out problems over coffee. Y is from an influential country, talks a lot and likes the sound of their own voice but finds it hard to produce constructive ideas. Perhaps I need to pass them a note that they can later represent as their own proposal. Z is hopeless and often aggressive, and needs to be worked around somehow. And that’s just sizing up the room: obviously, the real work comes later.

All this is because within governments, decisions on important issues are made by people who may be clever or dense, experienced or completely new to the game, well-informed or hopelessly ignorant (or just not interested in knowing), cynical pragmatists or ruthless ideologues, with strong personal agendas or uninterested in anything except their own survival. And this is in times of relative normality, where you are working no more than sixteen hours a day, six or seven days a week. In a crisis, people behave in unpredictable and often irrational ways. Moreover, not all crises have the same dynamic: a crisis which you have to manage but where you are broadly in control has one dynamic. A crisis where you have to struggle to retain the initiative has a different dynamic, and a crisis where you have lost the initiative has yet a third. The last often produces extreme mental strain even on robust individuals, and can lead to governments and their leaders floating away from reality entirely, living in comforting fantasy worlds and only accepting information they want to hear. I strongly suspect something like that is happening in Washington at the moment, and that Mr Trump, in particular, may be quite close to a nervous breakdown of some kind.

What makes a crisis really bad is when you don’t understand what is going on, and why the things that are happening are happening. This is profoundly destabilising, and never more so than when you are part of a large and homogenous group that sees the world in much the same way, and thus everyone is confused together. Politics has largely lost the old ideological and conceptual divisions it once had, and entire political classes, not to mention their advisers, media commentators, pundits and the rest, now have a stultifying commonality of thought which makes intelligent discussion (let alone constructive criticism) essentially impossible. Moreover, their normative and performative upbringing and experience means that the ideas they do have in common are seldom more than banalities. If two European Ministers were to meet to discuss Ukraine, then virtually the whole of the conversation would amount to agreement that (1) we must keep up the pressure on Putin and (2) we must do more to help Ukraine. Their conceptual repertoire does not extend any further than that.

I’m not going to get involved here in the complex issue of the relationship between language and thought. But I’ll just observe that in practice it’s very hard for people to step out of discourses they are familiar with, and to understand and formally acknowledge that certain things are happening, and happening for reasons that are not to be found in their familiar standard repertoire. That repertoire consists very largely of pre-formatted normative expectations and written and verbal reactions, and a list of acceptable performative actions. Much effort therefore has to go into trying to manhandle unexpected and puzzling developments into an understood pattern, or at the very least pretending that they aren’t actually happening. This is the basic reason why the West has handled crises so badly since the end of the Cold War, and why its performance is actually getting worse, as its political class and advisers become more ingrown and incestuous with the passage of time, and sink ever deeper into their limited library of things they can understand and articulate.

Take nationalism, for example. In its wider sense, including tradition, history, language and culture, these constitute the Enemy, and are still seen as the source of many of the evils of the world. The idea that attachment to tradition, history, language and culture could actually be important to many people, and that they will struggle and even fight to defend them, is more than the current internationalist, post-national, transnational ideology can actually grasp. It follows, as I have suggested before, that such attachments are consigned on a wholesale basis to the “extreme Right,” and political or intellectual figures who articulate them are treated as pariahs. We therefore comprehensively fail to understand the behaviour of cultures that have not followed the West into transnational cultural agnosticism, still less into the West’s current auto-flagellation and denial of its own civilisation, which shows no signs of abating yet. But this isn’t just an intellectual problem, it’s also a political one. We associate “nationalism” in this wider sense, with aggression and conflict, and so we believe we have identified potential conflicts, good guys and bad guys, and most of all People like Us, and People not like Us. This tells us which political figures to cultivate, which to ignore, which organisations to fund, and which future leaders to cultivate. Meanwhile, the locals, who are often cleverer than we are, know what to say and how to behave in order to get our support. And their domestic opponents know that our position on “nationalism” is deeply conflicted: broadly, it’s OK when non-westerners do it, provided it’s directed against the West, and not against any obvious groups the West supports.

So the fact that people may actually care about some of these issues leads not just to errors of policy when dealing with the rest of the world, but to something more important: an inability to wrap our minds around the true nature of problems, still less talk about them, because we do not have the necessary concepts and vocabulary. Again, this is not ethnocentrism, which is a constant of any culture, but something much more worrying. Effectively, our political class and its parasites have a series of normative conditioned reflexes such that when a word or a concept is introduced, they immediately respond in one of a small number ways. (We’ve all known people who behave like that: it’s disturbing to see an entire political class doing so.)

For example, the West did not understand, and doesn’t really understand now, the series of events leading from the 2001 attacks on the US, to the campaign in Afghanistan, Iraq 2,0, the Arab Spring of 2011, the Islamic State, the terrorist attacks in Europe in 2015-16, up to the fall of the Assad regime. We can only act (or talk about acting) on the basis of things we can conceptualise. The theses and the functioning of Political Islam, for all that they have now been exhaustively studied and documented, still have not penetrated the minds of western elites, because they cannot be contained within the limited discourse and the terminology that the West has available. Muslims either live in countries with repressive regimes to be overthrown after which they will joyfully and spontaneously embrace our values, or if they live in the West they are the subject of institutional racist discrimination. Any other possible case is either ignored, or explained away as a result of tyrants, the activities of a few conservative thinkers, or, as a last result and if all else fails, the result of direct or indirect western involvement. The idea of giving such people themselves agency, acting according to principles they have themselves developed and believe to be true, just cannot be accommodated within the set of norms than dominates our thinking.

This is one reason why the West forgets everything and learns nothing: there are some things that cannot be learned and genuinely assimilated without sustaining psychological damage. The problem with any scheme of normative thinking is that it is essentially proof against the disruptive effects of all learning and all experience. Indeed, because we are talking about norms, rather than objective judgements or pragmatic opinions, or even facts, modification is almost impossible. It amounts to a change, and in practice the falsification, of a personal philosophy about the world. It’s a very different thing from changing your mind, and is often resisted aggressively (“I suppose you don’t think human rights are important then, and Pol Pot is one of your personal heroes!”)

Disappointments and failures, if they are acknowledged, are perceived as attacks on the Ego. After all, imagine that you are a political hack who after twenty years finally has a Ministerial position, and have been dealing for the last few months with Ukraine. Imagine that you soberly decide that the game is up, and you say so. What will happen? Well, it will be a question first of whether you resign before you are sacked, but then you will be cast into the outer darkness, lose any chance of a decent career, perhaps lose your parliamentary seat, and be thoroughly worked over by every pundit, media and Internet outlet and political rival. But that’s not the worst, because your whole life has been built around success in politics, and everyone you know, personally and professionally, will now reject you, and you will become an unperson. In practice, this amounts to something like Ego Death, so closely is your Ego bound up with your professional and institutional status, as was once the case with the Communist Party or certain religious sects. If there is a single dominant explanation for the persistent unreality of the western political class’s approach to Ukraine and Iran it probably that. How nice it would be to see headlines like FEAR OF EGO DAMAGE, DEATH, PREVENTS REALISM ON UKRAINE, EXPERTS SAY. But we may have to wait a while for that.

A consequence of a habit of normative thinking is that belief that if the world should be like that, and it isn’t, then there must be a diabolical effort to make it not so. If bad things happen, this cannot be because the world is like that (since by definition it isn’t), nor because of chance or bad luck, but because of the subversion of ideals by organised evil machinations. It’s a paradox of our culture that our bookstores are overflowing with books on personal problems and self-improvement, whilst popular accounts of the world tend to be materially reductive in the extreme. It’s true, of course, that if you are looking for the causes of some crisis or war, then it’s just easier to speculate about the malevolent role of oil companies than to consider the psychological make-up of those taking the big decisions, but history suggests it’s precisely personal factors that matter most.

For example, I’ve mentioned Apophenia several times in other essays, which is the tendency to see patterns in data that aren’t really there. This doesn’t seem to be an illness as such (though schizophrenics tend to demonstrate it to a high degree) but rather an exaggeration to pathological extremes of the natural need to identify patterns in the world that help us survive. For many people, it’s more comforting to have any pattern to events, even a threatening one, than no pattern at all, as a classic Defence Mechanism against a world that is too complex to deal with. And of course the need to find the pattern (or avoid chaos) comes first: the actual “proof” is secondary, which is why apophenics very rarely give up in the face of negative or non-existent evidence. The proof is being hidden. If the files on alien contacts aren’t there, it’s obviously because they have been destroyed. And research shows that people involved in politics tend to suffer more from Apophenia than average, which is not reassuring.

Apophenic explanations can be very attractive. There’s the fascinating case of Anatoly Golitsyn, a KGB defector who managed to persuade many important people in the West that the Soviet Union was engaged in a vast deception operation, facilitated by agents at all levels in western governments, and that the Sino-Soviet split was a myth, the East German and Hungarian risings were false flag operations and the 1968 Prague crisis was a KGB deception operation. He warned publicly that the Soviet Union would pretend to be weaker and weaker, only to spring a trap at the last moment. Thus, everything that happened in Moscow, and just about anywhere else in the world, could be fitted into the assumed conspiracy somehow, and every indication that the Soviet system was starting to break down in the 1980s just meant that the trap was about to be sprung. Golitsyn lived long enough to feel vindicated, with the arrival in power in the new Russia of Vladimir Putin, former KGB officer. But his allegations (supported by others, more or less well-informed) helped to cripple the US intelligence agencies and other western governments with witch-hunts and loyalty investigations, to the point that some wondered ironically if Golitsyn wasn’t himself part of a deception operation.

But it’s characteristic of this way of seeing the world that, once an all-encompassing explanation has been found, people will cling to it whatever the objections. There’s a mordant amusement to be taken for example, from seeing how, at each stage of the unravelling of the tragic farce of US attempts over the last 25 years to remake the Middle East, then with each defeat and each failure, believers nonetheless find new ways of insisting that “this was the plan all along,” because there has to be a master-plan of course: an apophenic mindset absolutely requires one. And there are many other examples.

Our emotional attitudes to the world, which in turn shape our political opinions and ultimately what we believe about the world today, are of course the products of our youth. I’ve discussed many times the fundamentally adolescent nature of out current political class, which is becoming more serious as middle-class parents and universities seek to accommodate adolescent growing-pains by indulging them effectively forever. Adolescent behaviour is almost by definition performative, and is intended to shock. As a teenager you might wear a ghastly tee-shirt or listen to music with offensive lyrics. As a student, you might go on demonstrations against alleged events in foreign countries about which you can do nothing. As a young diplomat you enthusiastically introduce sanctions packages which look good but achieve nothing practical at all. But we shouldn’t forget either that adolescence is when we start to realise that our parents are not the all-powerful divine beings we once thought they were, but rather fallible and relatively powerless ordinary people. In some cases, the desire for parent substitutes, passing through gurus, or these days Influencers, lands on the shoulders of governments, who are also credited with the supernatural powers that we once thought our parents had. Anyone who’s worked in government is familiar with the furious attacks by the media and ordinary citizens against governments for “doing nothing” in the face of some insoluble problem or other.

But it goes back beyond adolescence. And here I want to insist on the importance of the role of mediation in the popular understanding of the world. Few people now listen diligently to the speeches or press-conferences of world leaders, or read transcripts. At best, they may read a news story, with its inevitable bias and selectivity. More normally they read something on X, or perhaps on Substack or a site devoted to political commentary which is basically an opinion piece, telling them what to think with perhaps a few citations. And so low are the barriers to entry that today, there is an almost infinite range of prepackaged opinions to choose from. Like will tend to attract like.

One of Sigmund Freud’s greatest insights (confirmed by modern neurology) was that there are memories hidden so deeply in our minds that we do not even know they are there, and so cannot even talk about them (thus, they are called “non-declarative” memories.) All of the memories of the first few years of our lives are like this, and we only know about them at all by the indirect consequences: the sense of unmet needs, for example, and how we grapple with them. More generally, when we are young we absorb a view of what the world is like which is done largely or completely unconsciously, and which is generally proof against any amount of experience or contrary evidence. So it’s easy to see, for example, that growing up in a family with a domineering parent or parents will predispose you to see the world in terms of stern and hostile forces that you can’t control, and you will naturally be attracted, as an author or reader, to arguments featuring Hegemony and Empire. Similarly, growing up in an atmosphere of repression and tension where some things are never said and there are secrets that cannot be discussed, will incline you to a belief in hidden powers and secret conspiracies. (I say “incline” because of course there’s nothing deterministic here: we’re talking about tendencies.)

That much is straightforward enough, and most people would agree with it after a moment’s thought. The problem is that it isn’t possible to construct a general theory on such a basis, because, bluntly, people are different and react differently to different situations. The calm intellectual self-confidence of the Marxist or the Islamic or Christian fundamentalist may be misplaced and superficial, but at least it produces an internally coherent view of the world. But if we can do nothing else, we can try to shake off our addiction to reductive materialist explanations, and accept that in politics, perhaps more even than elsewhere, people are strange.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.

British morale in the War has been massively studied, and the conclusions have followed the usual Oedipal dialectical pattern of historical writing. First, wartime and postwar studies lauding the British spirit, then a short-lived “revisionist” school of younger historians sneering at ordinary people, and now, something of a consensus that the original picture—of a society which managed to endure a great deal of stress without actually cracking—is broadly accurate. I’m not going to go into this subject in any detail here, fascinating though it is, but rather use a couple of its features to address a larger and now quite urgent question: how well will western societies be able to cope with the enormous social, economic and even security stresses that they can expect over the next five years or so? Can they expect to do it successfully, not least burdened with governments who fear and distrust their own populations, and political parties whose only business model is division? Can we learn anything from successes and failures in crisis situations of the past, in Britain and elsewhere?

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It was not as though life in pre-war Britain had been idyllic. Poverty, malnutrition and unemployment were widespread, but above all, there was a mood of gloom and fear about the War that pretty much everyone assumed was coming. It would be like the War of 1914-18 but much worse: bombing attacks on cities, probably using poison gas, would cause millions of deaths within the first few weeks. Society would break down, with or without a physical invasion from Germany. This was the apocalyptic near-future described by Orwell himself, through the nightmares of George Bowling in Coming Up for Air (1939), but it was also a commonplace ingredient of the popular and political culture of the time. Paradoxically, therefore, the first year of the War, at least, came almost as a kind of relief. It could have been so much worse.

It’s important to stress that the British experience was essentially unique, as the only European country fully involved in the War not to be occupied. This distinguishes its experience fundamentally from say France or Italy, where the historiography of the domestic side the War is still bitterly controversial, and families and communities still bear its scars. Taking France as the counter-example, we can ask whether it is possible to identify factors that help, or hinder the maintenance of some kind of national solidarity and unity when faced with a sense of impending disaster. In the case of France, that unity came apart.

Recall what that led to. After the stunning initial defeat of the French and British Armies in May 1940 and the evacuation at Dunkirk, the Army, led by its new chief Weygand, refused to fight on, fearing domestic collapse and even civil war and a Communist revolution. The government was intimidated into asking for an armistice, and parliament dissolved itself and handed full powers to the ageing Philippe Pétain, the hero of Verdun, who was thought to be an apolitical figure possibly capable of saving France in its darkest hour. The regime established in the spa town of Vichy, however, reflected the interests and ambitions of the anti-Republican Right: the Army, the Church, many members of the public service, as well as many politicians, journalists, intellectuals and businessmen. These were people who had never accepted the idea of a secular Republic in the first place, and who viewed defeat, and even occupation for a few years, as a reasonable price for establishing an elite conservative dictatorship, similar to Franco’s Spain.

These people saw themselves acting in the best interests of France: preserving what could be preserved such that France could take its place among major powers again when the Germans left. (Explicit supporters of Germany and Nazism did exist but they were few in number.) But many others saw Vichy as the only sensible option, the Marshal as the only figure capable of unifying France, and almost any political system as preferably to the terminally dysfunctional Third Republic, which in the end nobody could be bothered to try to save. Vichy’s policy of active collaboration—essentially trying to secure as much influence over Berlin as possible—was much less widely popular, and recent studies show that the French people were (understandably) very hostile to German occupation, and resisted to the maximum extent possible in a complex and difficult situation. .

Finally, Resistance itself was a very controversial concept, both during and after the war, and indeed still is. For all their undoubted heroism, groups were divided in their loyalties and objectives, and it didn’t help that the Communists moved essentially overnight from being de facto allies of the Germans to claiming the major role in the Resistance. (And to be fair many ordinary Communists had ignored the instructions from Moscow and fought the Germans anyway.) For many on the Right the Resistance were simply terrorists, risking bringing the country down in civil war and staging a reign of terror when the war was over.

Yet although the events following the French defeat had very particular origins, the fact is that the whole period from say 1936-1945 (on which a new book seems to come out every month) is and always will be deeply divisive. De Gaulle when in power saw clearly that, unless a narrative could be developed and accepted, the country risked simply coming apart. His imposed narrative of “forty million resistants)” was an exaggeration, but contained enough truth to be grudgingly accepted by almost everyone, and so helped to keep the country together. The majority of the scholarship of the last couple of generations has been devoted to undermining that narrative in detail, but without replacing it with anything very substantial. And at a more popular level, the Resistance still serves as an ideological and patriotic touchstone: a new film will be released in October about the life of the Resistance hero and martyr Jean Moulin.

Whilst the history of the two countries indeed diverged sharply after 1940, their experience in the first 6-9 months of the war is nonetheless useful to compare, partly to understand what followed, and partly because it illustrates broader lessons. The first and most obvious distinction between the two countries in 1939 was that in Britain the political system more-or-less worked, whereas in France it didn’t. Chamberlain’s fall from power in 1940 was partly the result of the (probably inevitable) failure of his policy of rearmament combined with negotiations, but partly also his health (he was already suffering from bowel cancer) and a general sense of political exhaustion. His replacement by Churchill was unproblematic and generally welcomed, and there were no substantial differences among British political parties about the War. In France, the situation was utterly different. Although some efforts were made to reform the dying Third Republic, political life in France was already fractured beyond repair, to the point that there was never a formal vote in the Chamber of Deputies to declare War: it was too controversial. This was a reflection of the instability of the political system itself (some administrations lasted only a few weeks) but also of the bitter divisions within the country Divisions between Left and Right, Republicans and their traditionalist opponents, were bad enough, but the Left itself was divided because of Stalin’s insistence that the Communists treat Socialists as their principal enemies (“social fascists”) until the Popular Front of 1936, and then as enemies once more following the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Even before the fighting started, therefore, there were multiple deep and fundamental political cleavages in the country, extending even to whether it should be a Republic or not.

What made it worse was that the French government system itself functioned very poorly. Its members were often men of ability—by today’s standards, certainly—but there was no real central organisation for decision-making at all. The President of the Council of Ministers was more like the chairman of a committee than a British Prime Minister, without any personal staff of his own. Records of important decisions were not necessarily kept. And even capable figures were open to influence and to outside pressures, and could only do so much. For example, Paul Reynaud, the PCM at the time of the German attack in 1940 was a capable politician and keen to defend the country, but completely under the spell of his mistress Hélène de Portes, who invited herself to important political meetings, and whose rabid anti-British and pro-German prejudices and unauthorised personal diplomacy shaped a lot of government policies.

The result was a political system that was despised by the vast majority of the French of all persuasions, and its passing was scarcely regretted. Yet if the government and the elites failed the people, the people did not fail the country. A new generation of men left the Gare de l’Est for a war on the frontiers, as their fathers and grandfathers had done, because that was the tradition, and in those days that was what men did. The sabotage and desertions demanded by Stalin and feared by the government did not happen: Communists were as motivated to fight as anyone else, perhaps more so. And when the fighting actually began, those French units in contact with the Germans fought extremely well, inflicting casualties on the Germans as proportionately heavy as they later suffered at the hands of the Red Army.

Because the soldiers of 1940 were not fighting for a decrepit political system or an ideology, or to keep a bunch of elderly politicians in power. They were fighting, as they had been brought up to do, to defend their families and communities, in the days when there were families and communities. The schoolbooks and the instructional system taught them pride in their country and its achievements, and an admiration for the beauty and variety of its terrain, the strength of its culture and the pageantry of its history. And after the defeat, the Resistance was born from essentially the same set of motives: patriotism, the need to restore some degree of national pride and honour, and to play at least a part in the liberation of their own country. From extreme Right to extreme Left, there was surprisingly little difference in the attitudes and rhetoric of ordinary résistants.

The situation in Britain was easier in 1939-40 because the political system was more stable. There was no equivalent of the organised anti-democratic Right, and neither the Church nor the Army were political actors as they were in France. After the defeat of Dunkirk, there were certainly voices advocating an armistice with Germany just for reasons of national self-preservation, but there was no equivalent at all of the lobby in France that gleefully anticipated defeat as a way of settling political debts and introducing a new form of authoritarian government. Nor was the domestic political system anything like as fragmented and contorted, and it proved easy enough to set up a National Unity government when the war began. The contingency plans that had been made since the mid-1930s generally worked satisfactorily.

The result was a country which went to war soberly and sombrely, with a sense of dread but also a recognition that there were things that could not be avoided. There was no sudden outburst of patriotism or flag-waving, but a pervasive sense, recorded in a thousand memoirs, broadcasts and family memories, that this was something that just had to be done. “Let’s get it over with,” was the most common way of expressing it. Nor was there any jingoism or manufactured anti-German hatred. Unlike in 1914 there was no need to sell the War. Everyone had seen the newsreels and knew what Hitler and the Nazis were capable of, and indeed had already done. The conviction that this was an evil to be eradicated only grew with the progress of the war, and by the time British troops liberated Belsen in April 1945, it was more or less absolute. Even in 1939, there were relatively few determined pacifists, while the intellectual Left, dominated by the Communist Party at the time, through publications like the New Statesman, and which clung in some cases to the Moscow line that this was a bourgeois civil war and British workers should stay out of it, had no practical influence on the Labour Party in or out of Parliament.

In Britain, therefore, there was a broadly accepted narrative about the War in 1939. It was not hegemonic—no narrative ever is—but it was very widely shared. It was also highly defensive in tone, rather than being based on aggression or hatred of foreigners. For all its imperfections, Britain and its population, history and culture were generally considered worth defending, and, crucially, worth making personal sacrifices for. The result was that whilst there was a lot of grumbling—the British loved to grumble—there was also a high degree of acquiescence in things like food rationing, transport restrictions and black-outs, which substantially disrupted ordinary life. Moreover, almost from the start of the War it was recognised that things could not go back to normal afterwards, and the groundwork quickly started to be laid for the successful post-1945 economic and social model, which only started to be abandoned in the 1980s. There was a feeling in other words that the War was also being fought for something.

France did not have this accepted narrative, or rather, being France, it had several competing ones. For many on the Right, a war with Germany would destroy France, and this was assumed to be the aim of the financiers of the City of London who were pulling the strings, so that they could take over France’s Empire: naturally, the British destruction of the French fleet at Oran simply confirmed this theory. Such conspiracy-theorising was nothing new in France: only the identity of the villains varied with the situation. As well as the British (pervasively), there was a rich domestic tradition of blaming Freemasons for everything from the French Revolution (a régime-change operation carefully prepared over decades, just look at the evidence!) to the Dreyfus Affair. The latter was widely interpreted as a German-sponsored plot involving Jews and Freemasons to destroy the morale of the French Army, and the fact that Dreyfus was Jewish and that the government was led by the (moderate) Radical Socialists, many of whom were Freemasons, was as much proof as anyone could want. These theories were abundantly circulated in magazines and even respectable newspapers of the time, by authors who today would have YouTube channels explaining the “reality” of the Iran war, for example.

But the greatest narrative fracture of all was over the Communist Party. Although the Party itself was hopelessly disorganised by the whiplash effect of the Nazi-Soviet pact and its leadership had fled to Moscow, it was still viewed with terror by much of the French political establishment. It was widely believed that a secret underground army was ready to take power in Paris, in conjunction with a German invasion. When the invasion was in progress, and the government had fled to Bordeaux, one of the arguments used by Weygand in favour of an armistice was that the threatened revolution had already taken place, and Maurice Thorez, leader of the PCF, had been bought back by the Germans and was now installed the Elysée. A simple telephone call established that this was quite untrue.

De Gaulle was very aware that the tensions in French society that had produced this nonsense were fundamental, and that France in 1944-45 was quite close to civil war. He managed them as best he could, taking former Vichy commanders into his Army for example, and doing everything possible to promote unity consistent with the need for an acceptable level of house-cleaning, and ensuring that he retained the support of the Resistance and his fellow exiles. But De Gaulle soon left power, and the country staggered through the traumas of Indochina and Algeria, with an effective military coup in 1958 returning De Gaulle to power. It was only then, surviving another attempted military coup in 1961, as well as various attempts to assassinate him, that he felt strong enough to use the broadcast media and the education system to develop a healing myth, a discourse of unity that glossed over a lot of inconvenient facts but which among other things eventually reduced the traditional reactionary Catholic Right to a shadow of what it had been. (It’s staging a bit of a comeback now because of the stupidity of recent French governments.)

This is a breathless and highly selective canter through two very complex episodes, but I suggest that they illustrate two basic truths that you won’t find in political science textbooks. One is that people will put up with hardships, privation and even danger if they believe that they have something in common which is worth preserving. This thing, or these things, are not generally dictated by external powers and structures (although they may be shared by them) but come rather from common inheritances and common understandings that people would rather preserve than lose. The British did not endure hardship, scarcity and danger for five years because the government told them to, or because they loved their country’s class system, and indeed studies have shown that attempts to influence popular morale in Britain during the War were no more effective than they were anywhere else. Likewise, the French soldiers of 1940 and the Resistance fighters of later years were not fighting for a discredited political system, nor for the “two hundred families” popularly supposed to control France, but for the country itself, its self-respect and honour, and in the latter case also for a better future, as set out in the programme of the National Resistance Council, which formed the basis of the successful post-1945 French economic and social model, until it was abandoned from the 1980s.

Second, when a common discourse is either absent or breaks down, it is seldom replaced by another common discourse. Rather, a struggle begins to impose discourses, generally pre-existing ones, which emerge from the shadows to do combat with each other. In general, these discourses reflect ideological positions that their authors have long held, and represent an attempt to wrestle the reality of current events into a pattern they are happy with, and think they can explain to others. Yet even so, we shouldn’t assume that ordinary people are stupid, and simply accept powerful discourses, or mechanically choose between them as between brands of shower-gel. There’s a very important distinction between a supposedly “hegemonic” discourse, and how people individually think and feel, and even more how they behave. In practice, no discourse is ever entirely hegemonic except at the most formal level, nor is a discourse simply generated by material conditions and class interests, or at least nobody has ever managed to explain exactly how that could happen. For example, the current discourse of “open borders” and “unrestricted immigration,” could be regarded as morally hegemonic in that western power structures, medias, pundits and NGOs all regard it as a theoretically essential objective, including its logical corollary, that the interests of migrants should if necessary come before the interests of the indigenous inhabitants. But in practice no government actually behaves that way consistently, and no electorate supports such views by even the tiniest majority. It’s just that you risk your career by publicly questioning the discourse.

Two important conclusions follow from this, I suggest. One is that discourses do not need to be “true” (whatever that is) to be valuable. De Gaulle’s myth of “forty million résistants” was widely accepted because it was an exaggeration, rather than an invention, because it unified the country behind a positive message, and because it closed down a controversy which could have torn the country apart. Likewise, the post-1994 discourse of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, and its associated Commission, did not find The Truth (impossible anyway) and did not achieve Reconciliation, but that was never the point. The point was to establish an accepted discourse which would avoid catastrophe and enable the construction of a fragile national unity, which is indeed what happened. The wider population, in my experience, was not greatly interested in the process, but the discourse was effective in what it set out to do.

These are examples of elite discourses, and all governments, all the time, attempt to impose such discourses on their populations, with more or less success. But in the end, they do not have much practical effect unless they are at least consistent with the feelings of ordinary people. In both Britain and France in 1939 there was a reservoir of community feeling, social solidarity and shared culture and history, as well as the desire to preserve all of these, which reinforced the official discourse in Britain, and helped to make up for its deficiencies in France. It will become more apparent from the foregoing, I think, why I have insisted on so many occasions that any form of return to compulsory military service in the West is impossible and indeed unthinkable. The rhetoric and discourse of governments, even the amount of money they are prepared to spend, doesn’t and cannot make any difference. On what conceivable basis could a western government launch such an initiative? What collective feelings of solidarity could it appeal to? What are these “values” that our political class loves to invoke? They have no idea. And in the end you cannot motivate people entirely by hatred and fear, which is pretty much all they have left. The old days are gone, and it is our elites who banished them, with their “post-national” concept of countries as gigantic hotels in which random groups of people happen to live for a period of time. Who’s going to die for a hotel?

But the challenge won’t necessarily be as dramatic as that. I began this essay by talking about the probable stresses of the next few years, which are more likely to be economic and social than military, and I made the point that we cannot expect any useful lead from governments that despise their own populations. The question, then, is whether there will remain enough of sense of solidarity and community among ordinary people to make up for the uselessness and negativity of governments. I fear not, and in that spirit let’s remind ourselves of just how much damage neoliberal governments have actually done to the kind of solidarity I described earlier. The aim of neoliberalism, after all, is to reduce human beings to the unique status of interchangeable consumers, with no bonds of family, community, history, culture or language that might undermine their homogeneity, and make the markets that constitute their entire existence less efficient than they might be. And the western elite likes to congratulate itself that wherever it goes, history and national cultures have largely been suppressed, national identities have been scrambled, you find the same shops, hotels and restaurants everywhere, everyone watches the same TV and cinema, and everybody speaks English. If the West is not yet a perfectly featureless and obstacle-free social and cultural terrain, it is approaching that status. And for forty years now, the gospel of radical individualism and “freedom” has triumphed everywhere.

Which is fine until something goes wrong. And things do go wrong, and suddenly economic efficiency turns out not to be the only important criterion, and you realise that society still has to actually function as well. I’ll take the example of Covid, because it’s recent and also very straightforward. Now I’m not going to get mired in questions of the efficiency of the vaccines or the origin of the virus, I’m just going to point out that, as western governments went through the standard political crisis progression from denial to panic, they asked their citizens to do a number of banal and often sensible things. Because the disease was spread through the air, and once infected, people breathed it out, governments asked people to wear masks to prevent them from contaminating others. This kind of thing is standard public health procedure for transmissible diseases, and is very common in Asian countries during flu epidemics for example. The message was straightforward enough for a six-year-old to understand: please perform a simple task before going into a crowded space to avoid infecting others, and others will perform the same simple task to protect you. Everyone will be safer and the epidemic will be over more quickly.

In most western countries the reaction was at best qualified support, and was often violently negative. You mean I should put myself to a small inconvenience to help others? What’s in it for me? After all, if I’m not infectious and I don’t wear a mask I lose nothing. Governments found that they no longer knew how to appeal to the wider collective interest: indeed, their speechwriters were not even really sure quite what it was. And whilst simple selfishness and egoism explain a lot of the resistance, this was the point—aided by a lot of government incompetence—where previously marginal discourses started to creep out of their holes. Today wearing masks, tomorrow concentration camps. It’s all a big conspiracy to increase profits, all these masks contain micro-chip tracking devices (I heard that one), but most simply and brutally, My Freedom includes the freedom to infect others with a dangerous and potentially deadly disease and if you don’t like that, tough. In some countries, at least, the right to infect others was offered as the ultimate demonstration of rugged individualism.

In idle moments, I wonder whether Covid wasn’t some kind of simple test imposed upon us by a Galactic Authority see whether western governments were still capable of handling a health emergency as calmly and competently as they would have done fifty years before, and if they would learn lessons about the risks of globalisation and a hyper-fragile and tightly-coupled world economy. And the depressing answer is “No” in both cases. Which doesn’t suggest that we are well-placed for the uncertain but serious consequences of a combination of Ukraine, Iran and climate change. In none of those cases have governments shown the ability to talk, or even think, in anything more than clichés. And there is no sign that western societies themselves now have anything like the capability for collective action they once possessed, even if there is something defined to do.

Consider rationing, for example. On the whole people prefer not to, and even oil industry experts, obsessed with prices, talk of “demand destruction” as the preferred “solution” to just not having enough oil. When you think about it, “demand destruction” means people going hungry, hospitals and schools forced to close, trains not running, airlines going bankrupt, and many more things, some of which are quite unpredictable now. It’s hard to see that as a “solution.” Now we are used to the idea of rationing by price. Some people cannot afford to feed themselves, others cannot afford to house themselves, and that’s just the way the world is. But the idea of deliberate rationing, of the setting of quotas by government, is almost literally unthinkable politically, and it’s not even clear that modern western governments have retained the capacity, or even the will, to do it any more. And what about the popular mood? How can a society brutalised for decades by ruthless individualism be expected to move overnight to a sense of solidarity and sharing?

And the way to political power these days is precisely through the denial of the very existence of an integrated society, and by splitting a nation into warring identities isolated from each other and holding different truths. In France, Mr Macron (the first President to actively hate his own country) has claimed that “there is no French culture.” Mr Mélenchon, not to be outdone, has sought to cultivate the “New France,” of immigrants, sexual minorities, Islamic fundamentalists and urban progressives, leaving everybody else as the Other, the old, tedious France of mere history. And one of his lieutenants has recently assured the French people that the idea that France was ever a “White Christian nation” is a myth. The same can be found in many other western countries, reproduced by a media which is ever watchful for any manifestation of national unity, or genuine collective identity, as opposed to loose coalitions of Grievance Industry start-ups. It struck me the other day that, for example, the contents of the French Communist Party’s 1944 manifesto would probably now be coded as “extreme Right.” And the most dangerous consequence of this deliberately inculcated division, extending now back over decades, is that it has undermined the popular solidarity which alone can make up for the failures of government, as much at the level of discourse as at the level of organisation.

This suggests that we are about to experience a particularly nasty three-part crunch. First, governments lack the capability or even the understanding to deal with some of the foreseeable crises of the next few years, let alone the unforeseeable ones. Second, a huge gap has opened between the official discourses of governments and the way that most people see the world, and third, forty years of neoliberalism have destroyed the social structures and informal organisations that might have made up for the two earlier failings, at least in part.

If that doesn’t depress you enough, come back next week and we’ll take the argument a stage further.

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.

Now I’m not going to offer you yet another diatribe on the hypocrisy of a political system which claims to believe that democracy can be saved only if people are prevented from voting in particular ways. I don’t do diatribes very well, anyway. Rather, and faithful to this site’s basic premise of treating politics as engineering and looking at forces, stresses and processes, I want to try to set out how I think we have got into this Ubuesque mess. But since the kind of confused and often aggressive rhetoric we are seeing about “defending Democracy” comes out of somewhere—it always does—it’s worth first of all trying to see where that somewhere is, and then going on to look at some of the deeper underlying forces which have brought us to where we are.

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There is no agreed definition of “Democracy,” you will be astonished to hear, just as there are few countries in the world which explicitly claim not to be democracies. Proudly proclaiming your nation not to be a democracy has gone out of fashion, if not necessarily entirely out of use. Let’s just remark here in passing that, like a lot of Liberal political ideas, Democracy can mean basically anything you want it to mean, depending the power and influence you can exert, and different and even conflicting interpretations of it can co-exist quite happily in the mind of the modern politician or pundit, to be called forward variously when the situation demands.

And in many ways, this is the root of the problem. “Democracy” is a slogan, a value-judgement more than it is a description, and a term of praise and abuse in political debates more than a defined programme. To be “democratic” is to be good: to be “anti-democratic” is to be perceived as the Other, Agamben’s Outlaw (literally outside the protection of the law) against whom all kinds of normally unacceptable measures can legitimately be taken. Because “Democracy” is very largely a content-free term therefore, its meaning in a given context is naturally determined by the balance of political forces surrounding it. No Court, for example, could rule on whether a given initiative or personality or party was “democratic,” except by reference to laws which are themselves a product of the balance of political forces. The result is total confusion about ideas, and when you have that, total confusion of discourse and argument inevitably follows.

If they were asked, most people would repeat what they have heard or learnt about Democracy. For some, it’s about “rule by the people,” literally translating the Greek. For others, it’s “having elections.” Two things are immediately obvious. One is that there is no obvious connection between the two ideas (the Soviet Union had elections, whereas the Greeks didn’t, in our sense) and it’s not even clear whether the second is supposed to be a special case of the first. The other is that each has a host of hidden assumptions, preconditions and unresolvable problems hidden in it. Some of the questions are very fundamental. How do the people rule? Does the term in fact even mean anything? Aren’t the people divided on most issues anyway? Who gets to decide what the people think? Does everything work by referendum or even sortition? What happens when mistakes are made? What happens when the people can’t make up their mind? And what about elections? Any old elections? Well, what about “free and fair” elections? In which case how do you judge and who judges? Are “free elections” where anyone can stand? Or are certain people—let’s say the “extreme Right”— precluded from standing, and if so who decides and what does that do to the concept of “freedom?” And what is a “fair” election? Who gets to judge? Indeed, what would a “fair” election actually look like? What happens if a party wins the popular vote but not a majority of seats? Is that fair? Should the losing party always accept defeat? What happens if there has been obvious and transparent electoral fraud? Or fairly obvious fraud? Or indications of fraud but nobody is sure? Or allegations of fraud fiercely denied?

Now, whilst all of this is good stuff for Political Science seminars, and has generated a massive literature there isn’t time to go into here, it’s actually a lot more serious than that. The reality is, that most people don’t think of themselves as living in “a Democracy.” They think of themselves living in a country where the State is responsive or not responsive to their needs, where the State itself functions well or badly, behaves well or badly to them, where it does or does not provide the services they need, where it does or does not protect them, where the political system is more honest or less honest, and where it is ultimately responsive or not to public opinion. Abstract considerations of the theory of “Democracy” don’t enter into ordinary peoples’ discourse, which in turn is why blood-curdling warnings about the “End of Democracy” seldom have any effect. “If this is Democracy, then you can keep it,” is thus a common reaction among those who are on the receiving end of such threats.

The problem, of course, is that “Democracy” is the prototypical Liberal subject. It is pre-emptively and normatively a Good Thing, which means arguments against it, or even about it, are automatically foreclosed, and those who stray from the permitted narrow normative line of expression (which wanders all over the place of course, as circumstances change) can be safely excommunicated. In addition, it’s highly technical, full of rules and regulations, and a source of endless professional opportunities for lawyers, journalists, academics, psephologists, opinion-formers, and lots of people who can’t do anything else. And finally, it both allows the struggle for power, arbitrated and managed by such people, to be largely non-ideological (by ruling out awkward ideas from the beginning) and also permits its practitioners to look down with moral superiority at the rest of us, as they tell us what to do and who not to vote for. Since none of the words they use mean anything precise, those who control the discourse have no need to argue rationally for or against the acceptability or otherwise of ideas, candidates or parties. Assertion will do. So this party or candidate is Extremist, this one is Moderate, this election was fair, this one wasn’t, this candidate actually won although they were supposed to have lost and this candidate really won because the opposition cheated. Since there is no obligation to provide any evidence, there is no way of checking, let alone opposing, such normative claims. We are just supposed to accept them.

The fact that there is an enormous gap between what people want of their governments, and what the system is prepared to provide these days, also leads to the related question of Legitimacy. As with “Democracy”, “Legitimacy” is an unhelpfully vague concept. The word is derived of course from the Latin word lex, meaning “law,” which also gives us “legal,” “legislation,” and other related terms. So the one-sentence definition of a legitimate government is one that has been legally elected. Thank you. Well, we might recall at this point that much depends on who makes the rules: the Soviet government was legally elected after all. (It also depends on what the rules are.) Modern Liberal thinking sees a legitimate government as one that has been elected according to fussy and complicated electoral rules, and acts, in theory anyway, according to a series of formal legal constraints. The content of what it does is assumed to be mostly irrelevant as long as the correct procedures are followed. Moreover, in the true Liberal spirit of making complicated things even more complicated, political systems also have to have “checks and balances,” “oversight,” and “countervailing powers:” vague and contested concepts that may or may not actually be different from each other, but in any case provide gainful employment for members of the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) who are not currently in government, or perhaps seek power in other ways. And if you are a Professor of Public Law, you can thus write learned articles for the masses explaining how formidably complex actually quite simple issues of legitimacy are.

But I suggested that there were political engineering problems behind all this confusion about “Democracy,” so let’s look at the main one, which can be easily summarised: who takes the decisions, on what basis do they claim the legitimacy to do so, and how do they get that legitimacy accepted? The last point actually comes before the others, because, whilst sheer power and the use of violence can enable individuals and groups to take and enforce decisions up to a point, you can’t build a functioning society that way. The really interesting question, first articulated in our day by Michel Foucault, but not originated by him, was not so much why people rebel, but why people obey. And the answer, in all its manifestations, is a lot more complex than you might think.

For most of human history, people have not consciously thought about such questions. Had you stopped an Assyrian or an Egyptian of an early dynasty to ask them why they obeyed their ruler, they would have looked puzzled, and said something like “it’s like that.” And it was like that. We in the modern West are the first civilisation in which its elements—including power, but many other things—are disconnected from each other. Within very broad cultural boundaries, our society, our family system, our education systems, our political systems, our philosophies, our religions, our cosmologies, our ethics, our customs, our laws, our economies, our concept of history, our concept of science, our concept of the arts and just about everything else, have their own specific origins, their own divergences, follow their own rules and power structures, and have their own objectives, often in competition with each other, or at best ignoring each other.

To most of our ancestors, and to many societies in the world today, this would have seemed beyond belief. The world was (and in some cases still partly is) conceived as an organised, magical whole, where everything was connected to everything else, and the entire world was like a book in which every animal, tree, stone and natural phenomenon was a sign from the Creator. We are so very far away now from such a mentality that it’s hard to get people even to accept that it ever existed. That’s why in desperation pundits and even historians now often seek materialist explanations for things that, at the time, people did or thought for well-understood and accepted non-material reasons, even if we now find those reasons incomprehensible. And integral to them was a sense of inherent Order. After all, no matter how symbolically you take the Creation Myth of your civilisation, Creation implies structure, and structure implies order. Surely, no Creator is just going to throw the bits down and say “get on with it.”

Thus, ultimate decision-taking power followed a structure determined by the creation of the world in which you lived. Of course many day-to-day decisions were taken by the traditional social structures: the sowing of the harvest might require a ritual sacrifice, but the detail would be worked out by the elders of the village who had done it fifty times before. Nonetheless, and not the least in pre-modern Europe, human beings lived inside a divinely constructed and ordained universe, in which things were as they were, because they were. The pre-modern universe was hierarchical, at least as much in its cosmology as in its political organisation and social structure. Above all, its view of reality was symbolic and metaphorical, not a matter of literal interpretation of texts: maps often showed Jerusalem as the centre of the world, not because it was geographically literally so, but because it was the world’s symbolic centre. The Bible was not meant to be interpreted literally, but according to four layers of increasing symbolism. Kings and Emperors were demigods (in some societies of course they were actual gods) whose touch could heal, whose health was reflected in the health of the country, and who were appointed by God, with severe sanctions against anyone who tried to depose them, all of which was part of the natural order of things.

We cannot even in principle imagine what it must have been like to live in such a society, where the Sun and the Moon were living beings, where animals had souls (where do you think the word “animal” comes from?) and the Earth and the human race and its relationship with its creator God was at the literal and symbolic centre of everything. It’s not really worth trying, which is perhaps why historians have, rather desperately, scoured the records of those days to find the tiniest economic and political precursors of modernism, which usually amount to little if anything in practice. (Attempts to argue that we still live in an “enchanted” universe today because people read astrology columns in the media are frankly fatuous in this context.)

This way of thinking didn’t die overnight with the “new philosophy” that, as John Donne complained, “calls all in doubt.” The concept of a divinely ordered and structured world, and therefore society, and therefore a legitimate political system, lasted well into the eighteenth century, and in popular culture much longer. As children used to sing in Church before the verse was censored:

 The rich man in his castle/The poor man at his gate, 
God made them, high or lowly/And ordered their estate.

Ordinary people of the day were not necessarily seething wth proto-democratic revolutionary ideas either, even if they complained. Most of the complaints—as in the famous French Cahiers de doléances were actually reactionary, not revolutionary, in nature, demanding the restoration of traditional privileges, the dismissal of corrupt officials and the like. What Liberals saw as progress, ordinary people often distrusted and feared; partly, it’s true, out of innate conservatism, but partly also because it was destroying the world they had once known, without providing any coherent structure to replace it. The violent resistance in the West of France to the acts of the new Revolutionary regimes in Paris was directed against a group of middle-class intellectuals who seemed bent on destroying everything that gave any meaning to the world, and often pointlessly so. What was the point of closing churches, for example, only to then create the cult of the Supreme Being and demand that people worship it?

It’s probably true that a political philosophy like Liberalism, based on the pursuit of radical individualism, is logically incapable of developing an agreed overarching structure. Ironically, such a potential structure would have some resemblance to fascism: my rights and your rights inevitably come into conflict and the stronger wins, either by brute force or through having the most expensive lawyer. But once you move away from a coherent traditional theory of power and responsibilities, underpinned by religious belief in a structured order, you find yourself in the political equivalent of the ethical confusion identified by Alasdair MacIntyre. Purely human attempts to develop and implement theories of government simply cannot cope with the complexities of modern civilisations, and pretty much always degenerate into a series of slogans, embodying vague concepts that are then enforced by fussy but imperfect rules. This doesn’t mean that we should go back to the Divine Right of Kings, of course, but it does mean that we should accept that political systems created by humans will be imperfect, and stop uncritically worshiping ambiguous concepts such as “Democracy,” much as our ancestors worshipped divinely-instituted systems in their day.

Ironically, the very ambitions of democratic reformers—for all that they were praiseworthy—have created a large part of the problem. For example, it’s argued that in a Democracy, government should be “accountable” to “the people:” the image, as often with Liberalism, is drawn from commerce, and so government is like a company submitting its accounts to an independent body for scrutiny. Yet attempts to operationalise this idea have gone nowhere. Other than elections (which have their own problems) and referenda (which might produce the wrong answer) there is really no practical way for this to happen, nor any useful definition of what “the people” is supposed to mean in this context. So the answer is a purely performative, symbolic one, with various members of the PMC acting in different roles in different structures, claiming to represent the interests of “the people,” or these days more likely some defined part of it.

This creates a problem that did not exist in the past, and in some places still doesn’t. When you have a government that doesn’t claim to be “accountable,” such as a one-party state, a religious dictatorship or a military regime, peoples’ expectations are correspondingly limited. So far as we can tell, people living under such regimes generally accept them as “legitimate” in the most mundane of senses, since they are based on power, and so they try to stay out of trouble with the authorities. Indeed, in the case of many regimes—the former Soviet Union, for example—the regime was just “there:” legitimacy as such was not really the issue. In many other countries, “accountability” means something much more definite and concrete: you vote for your local politician and your local politician looks after your interests. Political theory is seldom involved.

As a general rule, the more you praise “Democracy,” the more you assert that it has to be defended, the more you vilify those who are “threatening” it, then the better you had make it work, if you are to retain public sympathy and support. But the reality is that in most western countries today, the alleged benefits of “Democracy” are seldom obvious, and yet people are being asked to give up their freedom of voting choice, notionally in order to protect a system in which they have largely lost faith. That is the fundamental fundamental political problem of western political systems today. But then why should the people have lost faith so completely in their political system?

We should begin by recognising that the present situation is abnormal. Democracy as a concept has never been entirely clear, nor always easy to implement, but people have nonetheless tried. The concept of popular sovereignty was extracted, like teeth, from the ruling class during the nineteenth century, with blood, suffering, industrial confrontation and even mass violence. In particular, as middle-class liberals began to accede to power, they turned out to be just as violent and ruthless in defending their new privileges as the old royalist systems had been, not least because their power was based not on custom, religion and tradition, but on wealth and access to repressive force. And of course traditional social and financial power structures were still present, the media was a major distorting factor, and so forth. Nonetheless, for a period of several generations, you could vote for one of a range of parties with distinct ideologies, in a political system where ideology was debated, in the confidence that if your party was elected it would behave differently from the other parties. We have become so used now to the rule of The Party since the 1990s that we have forgotten—if we ever knew—that this was possible, at least to a degree.

Now when I say “ideology” here, I mean it in the sense of arguments about issues that affect the lives of ordinary people, not questions like homosexual marriage. Traditionally, parties differed over things like taxation, control of the economy, education, transport, healthcare, the sharing of power between local and national levels and a dozen other things. In most countries, different parties still have different views on some of these issues, but it makes little practical difference. In general, governments have now given away the tools they used to have that enabled them to influence how the economy functioned, and are thus unable, unwilling or both, to do very much to address the problems of ordinary people. Ordinary people, not being stupid, have noticed this.

Unable to address these problems, then, the political class has opted instead to blame the victims. In recent years, it has been somewhat hallucinatory to watch all those subjects which used to be the bread-and-butter of democratic politics unceremoniously dumped in a rubbish-bin labelled “extreme Right.” I used to keep a mental list of some of the most absurd “extreme Right” things people were charged with in France (an interest in the traditions of their native region, perhaps, organising community festivals, expressing concern about the falling birthrate?) In effect, every subject that the Party doesn’t know how to deal with, or has no solution for, or which would risk bits of the Party fighting each other, is simply treated as though it didn’t exist, and even talking about the subject is believed to somehow strengthen the “extreme Right.” The result is that the Party quite deliberately refuses to discuss the issues which people believe are the most important, and vilifies anyone who tries to do so.

What I call the Party here—the majority of the modern western political class—is not absolutely united, of course, but it is united on the things that matter. It saves its vicious disputes for other subjects. This produces a bizarre situation of ideological rigidity and sterility. On the one hand, there is only one correct view on issues such as taxation, open borders, trade and investment etc. and dissenters will be expelled from the Party. On the other hand, there are violent internal divisions on many social issues: not necessarily just for or against, but on the importance of one lobby compared to another. I have long argued that political Liberalism was bound to wind up here. By taking the politics out of politics, by creating a “professional” political class which was ignorant of anything else and lacked any relevant experience of life, and by reducing political life itself to a struggle for popularity and status within the Party, it was virtually inevitable that the Party would not only lose touch with the electorate, but also come to despise them, and, lacking any sense of solidarity, to despise each other.

Which is where we come back to the question of legitimacy. It has been tackled in a number of different ways, since the idea of a system incorporating, or at least designed by, religious powers was abandoned. To the question, Why should I obey the State? there have been a number of answers, and for most of the secular era in the West the answer was a confused mixture of inherited deference, pragmatism, deference to more educated and intelligent people, custom and habit, identification with political doctrines, the belief that the State was working in their favour, and the need for protection. In countries where the Church was strong, where the Army was influential, or both, large sections of the population also saw the State as preserver and defender of their way of life.

Beyond this, of course, revolutionary regimes claimed legitimacy from the very fact of revolution. The classic example is the Soviet Union, whose government claimed at various points to represent the interests not only of the working class of its own country, but other countries as well. Governments of “national liberation” frequently made the same claims: the Mugabe regime in Zimbabwe lived off this argument for decades, and such legitimacy as the shadowy power structure in Algeria still enjoys comes from ruthless repeated playing of the Independence card, although the vast majority of the population was born after 1962, and most younger people just want to emigrate. Alternatively, governments in a number of Islamic countries proclaim their legitimacy in following the teachings of Islam, not in public consent. At the other end of the spectrum, right-wing governments, like those of Franco in Spain or Pinochet in Chile have asserted legitimacy because of their supposed role in “saving the nation” from chaos and Communism.

For its part, then until the last generation or so, the governing class of most western nations had at least some claims to the kind of legitimacy that comes from competence, experience and having already done things in life. Indeed, many politicians had already been successful in other careers outside, or had been through epic experiences like the Second World War or other political crises. Not far from where I once worked in Paris, there was a plaque on an apartment building recording the name of someone who had lived there wth the laconic description Résistant, Déporté, Ministre. I can’t remember who it was now, but it doesn’t really matter: such plaques are everywhere, recording an entire generation of politicians, once resistance fighters, deported to camps like Buchenwald, returning to help rebuild their countries. (What would the equivalent be today, I wonder: Consultant, Politician, Millionaire perhaps?)

But today’s political class and its PMC scavengers can’t make any such claims. University, NGO, Political “Adviser,” party functionary, elected politician …. For the most part, there is nothing to them. But there’s nothing holding them all together either, in any collective political identity. Consider: fifty years ago you might be a local businessman living in a small country town. Your natural inclinations were conservative without being ideological, you read a right-wing newspaper, you were a member of the local branch of your main right-wing political party, although you treated it more as a social club and a way of meeting clients. So when a local party official asked whether you’d considered turning to politics, the context, the ideology, such as it was, the organisation and the contacts were all there. Or maybe you were a trades union official, once a skilled craftsman, with a great deal of experience in negotiation, in public speaking and in life more generally. You are close to the local branch of the main left-wing party, and when somebody asks you if you had ever thought of politics, then, once more, the choices seem natural ones.

These days, fledgling members of the PMC treat political parties as they might treat prospective employers. If a group of them wind up working in the same party, it’s out of shared ambition. Nothing unites them except the urge to power, and they have nothing to offer any electorate apart from tired clichés, and an aggressive pose of vacuous moral superiority. They agree with their notional opponents on most major issues, they are prepared to abandon any remaining principles if the need arises, and they generally despise the electorate anyway. The few skills they have, are not the traditional ones of politics, but those of climbing the greasy pole, finding and sucking up to patrons, knifing rivals and learning the skills needed to progress in the party. In fact, these skills are very close to those found in a one-party state, where all that counts for the ambitious is climbing up the Party hierarchy.,

In practice, therefore speeches, tweets, publications such as they are, are not meant to help win elections, or even necessarily make the politician concerned better known to the public: they are in general part of the internal political struggle to accede to the highest positions. Thus, it is common, even normal, for a successful machine politician to appear on the national stage and be immediately overwhelmed by one of the standard crises of political life. If you want a simple encapsulation of why our current political class has made such a disaster of Covid, Ukraine and Iran, well there it is.

This produces a crisis of legitimacy that our current western political systems have no answer to. Yet they have to win elections somehow, and most are uneasily aware that consigning all political movements other than theirs, as well as all traditional political concerns, to the basket of the “extreme Right” isn’t working very well. On the other hand, actually addressing the concerns of ordinary people is beyond their competence, and even arguing about how to do so would bring internal political bloodshed on a massive scale. This is hardly surprising, since they are, after all, politicians who live overwhelmingly in a symbolic, performative world: almost a Platonic, Idealist one, where only abstract ideas have power. Arguments about the practical consequences of their normative ideas (No Borders! for example) are simply not allowed, and those who ask practical questions are either of the “extreme Right” or have been duped into “playing their game.” Ultimate reality is symbolic, not, um, real.

Insofar as our current political class and its PMC parasites have an ideology, this is it. It has no coherence, but is a mishmash of normative special pleading by interest groups, and operations mounted by grievance entrepreneurs who have spotted a gap in the market. To succeed, aspiring Party politicians have to respect the sensitivities of all these groups, even when they contradict each other. Rather than compromise and a collective effort to win power, this system encourages fissionary competitive radicalism, since the way to the top of your group is to be more extreme than anybody else, and then to demand that your Party leaders respect you, rather than someone less radical. Making a fool of yourself or being shown to be wrong doesn’t matter: there is no bad publicity.

In general terms, and beyond a bit of appropriated rhetoric, there is nothing behind these ideas, and that is why the Party does not seriously try to defend its position, but to abuse its critics. It has no argument for its ever-changing list of imperatives than Because We Say So. The Party and its PMC servants know, without examination, that their opinions are Right. (They must be by definition, because they are the opinions they hold.) The opinions of the rest of us are Not Right, when they differ from theirs. Knowledge, experience, even education are less important than having the Right thoughts. And because their arguments are Right, public opinion and even brute facts are irrelevant. Ukraine will win because that is Right. Uncontrolled immigration is Good because it is.

I don’t think we have ever been in the position before of a ruling political class with a void in its skull where its brain ought to be. Even the Nazis had an ideology of some sort. But the belief that all important political actions are performative, and that the only real political questions are symbolic ones, reduces the Party to a crowd of bickering symbol manipulators, united only by their collective hatred of those who insist that life has real problems to be solved.

The inability of the Party to understand Real Life , and to abuse those who want them to address it, is obvious at all levels, and results logically enough from an incapacity to understand anything except symbols and performance. Nothing is ultimately real, everything is manageable with a Powerpoint presentation. The most powerful example is the challenge of Political Islam, now making considerable inroads into immigrant communities in Europe especially among the young. The idea that people could believe a religion is literally true, that they would act violently on that belief, that they want to see religious law replacing civil law, and that they see secular states as abominations to be destroyed, represent too many impossible things to believe before breakfast. Reality, surely, cannot actually be like that. My brain hurts. The PMC’s only frameworks of analysis are symbolic and performative. To suggest that these people believe what they say is Islamophobic: the role of immigrants is to be patronised as symbolic victims and then to vote the right way. Ironically, one of the few actual ideologies denying democratic ideas is misunderstood, and downplayed because Racism.

Like Political Islam, like Immigration, there’s a whole raft of everyday subjects which must Not Be Discussed, because even mentioning them could somehow benefit the “extreme Right.” Issues such as education, healthcare, unemployment, and everyday security are full of traps which the “extreme Right” could spring, so they are better not discussed. And if the Party actually had to discuss any of these issues at more than a symbolic level, the utter emptiness and vapidity of their thought and of their alleged moral superiority would become cruelly apparent.

They hate us but they need us to vote for them, to stop the “extreme Right” winning. So they try to harangue us and insult us into supporting them, but this is working less and less well with each passing year. Maybe the “Strong Gods” will actually return, and demand something practical be done about traditional human concerns. And guess who will ultimately benefit? Why, the “extreme Right.”

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.

To be fair, there is much to be puzzled about. In Ukraine, the conflict is being kept alive only by massive transfusions of money, and apparently unlimited help with Intelligence and targeting to Ukraine from the West, which is also discouraging moves towards peace. Yet, in spite of many rumours and accusations, there is no evidence of formed western military units taking part in the war, or even providing direct lethal assistance in combat. The US, in spite of its deep implication, still presents itself as an honest broker, while the motives and behaviour of China and North Korea are not entirely clear. Negotiations, or at least “talks,” may or may not be going to happen, although Russia and the West have conflicting strategic objectives that don’t even seem to be on the same planet as each other. Israel sees itself at war with both Hamas to the South and Hezbollah to the North, but in neither case is this a conventional war with conventional objectives, and the current operations by Hezbollah are anyway in support of Iran, which was attacked by the US and Israel, but without either the anticipated rapid overwhelming victory, nor disintegration of the Iranian regime, and the war seems stuck for the moment in first gear, with much loose talk, once more, about “negotiations,” but no progress.

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You’ll be relieved to hear that I am not going to produce yet one more analysis of all these events and their possible outcomes, particularly since there are areas where I have no special expertise (though that hasn’t stopped others, I accept.) Rather, this essay is about western attempts to use models to understand recent conflicts, why these attempts are generally unsuccessful, and how to understand conflicts better. I will focus in the first part of the essay on theories about Escalation, and then go on to talk more widely about the dangers of trying to use mechanistic understandings of the development of crises, often ethnocentric in origin, for the understanding and management of actual real-life problems.

As someone for whom the fall of the Berlin Wall is a relatively recent professional memory, it’s perhaps hard for me to appreciate that an entire generation of strategists and pundits was at university then, and spent all of its professional career until 2022 becoming more and more eminent in a world which has suddenly become more obviously complicated recently. I say “obviously” because the world always has been more complicated that most pundits and strategists were willing to accept, or able to comprehend: recently though, that increased complexity has become undeniable. Broadly, such people spent their career in a world where the discourse of crisis and conflict came in three flavours. One was the use of overwhelming force by the West (and especially the US) without much resistance, as in Kosovo or Iraq 2,0. The second was long and inconclusive counter-insurgency operations, notably in Afghanistan, but for the more adventurous there were also examples from the Sahel. The third was various theoretical conflicts, usually between the US and Russia or China, generally analysed by comparing the technical capabilities of the equipment used by the two possible belligerents. Of course there were many other conflicts in the world, including some (like Syria and Libya) where the West tried to involve itself, but these were complex and difficult to understand, and anyway not believed to hold any important strategic lessons of general application.

Clearly, none of these models of conflict is of much help in understanding what has been happening since 2022, but I want to insist nonetheless on the political weight and significance that those models have retained. It is very difficult, and in practice often impossible, for human beings to study complex situations and come to entirely inductive and evidence-based conclusions about what is happening. Almost always, as I’ve argued before, the hunt is on for some model which has been sighted elsewhere, is therefore known and believed to be understood, and can consequently be applied to a new situation. It’s important that in the last few years, the only alternative models available have been the progeny of those first generated during the Cold War, and utilised more recently in debates about how best to “deal with” or “contain” China. (It’s striking that before 2022 there was no serious public debate about how to deal with Russia. It was assumed that Russia was a declining power which would have little option but to accept what the West wanted, and if, for example, Moscow was not keen on Ukrainian membership of NATO, they would just have to put up with it.)

Summarising furiously, the ultimate intellectual origins of much that is now being written about the conflicts I’ve mentioned above are in Game Theory, first developed in the 1940s, and within that Escalation Theory or the Escalation Ladder, generally attributed to Herman Kahn in his 1965 book On Escalation, but drawing on earlier work. Kahn identified no less than 44 steps on this “ladder,” from peaceful coexistence to outright strategic nuclear war, and he and others proposed this as a model for understanding, and dealing with, the then Soviet Union. Many variants and alternative theories of escalation have been proposed since then (several dozen at least are known), but I’m not going to provide a taxonomy of them, because they all have essentially the same origins and characteristics, and they are all open to the same objections.

The origin of all these theories is in mathematical economics. The earliest work on Game Theory by John van Neumann, a mathematician, and Oskar Morgenstern, an economist, was specifically intended to apply to the field of economics various insights gleaned from research into how competitive games were played, where the actions of one player take account of, and try to anticipate, the actions of the other(s). This, it was argued, was a good way of understanding economic behaviour, whether between two different companies or two different nations. Game Theory has been and still is widely applied in all sorts of areas from economics to politics in an attempt to discover “winning strategies.” The famous Prisoner’s Dilemma is one example of such a search.

The temptation to apply Game Theory to international relations and conflict was hard to resist, and not long resisted. In the US (where virtually all the main players were based) it was part of the increasingly technocratic approach to defence which brought, for example, Robert McNamara to the Pentagon. It appeared to offer a “modern” and mathematically and scientifically based mechanism for understanding and perhaps preventing conflict. At this point, the two main superpowers had nuclear forces large enough to destroy each other, and there was an obvious interest in preventing that from happening, whilst still managing conflicts in a way that would resolve them to Washington’s advantage.

Many of those who elaborated these ideas into complex theories of conflict and proposals for strategies were economists like Thomas Schelling, who was particularly associated with “signalling” by potential adversaries and how that could be organised. Most of the rest were mathematicians, and the growing field was specifically intended to produce something like the “laws” of economics: a context-independent set of rules for managing potential conflicts and passing messages, as well as interpreting messages passed by a potential adversary. None of those involved had any foreign policy or military experience, or any experience of international politics but, just as McNamara the businessman from General Motors was regarded as qualified to run the Pentagon, so this group considered themselves competent to pronounce on issues of war, peace and security generally. It is probably not a coincidence that the main dissident among the group, Anatol Rapoport, had a background in psychology and biology as well as mathematics, and was born in what is now Ukraine and lived for some years in Vienna. His 1964 book Strategy and Conscience was, and remains, a classic dismantling of many of the political and strategic pretensions of Game Theory.

The essence of economic theory is, of course, the assumption of rational behaviour, and this group attempted to apply the same basic assumptions to the messy business of international relations. In reality, much economic behaviour is not necessarily rational, and the only way to construct mathematical models of it is to abstract much real-world behaviour away by assuming; for example, perfect knowledge, homogeneity of products and the various other radical simplifications of real life that are necessary if mathematicians are to be allowed to play. This can be defended in economics as the use of “simplifying assumptions.” In international politics, “simplifying assumptions” can at best be misleading and at worst are extremely dangerous, as history voluminously attests.

To be fair, many of these early theorists saw themselves as helping to design systems which would reduce the risk of conflict, and enable the resolution of problems. They also used Game Theory to show how apparently rational escalatory behaviour could get out of control. Thus, aggressive price-cutting by rival companies could, if unchecked, lead to both going out of business, just as threats and counter-threats and deterrent mobilisations of forces could actually lead to war. (Arguably this is what happened in 1914.) This is reasonable enough, but much of it is actually common sense based on experience, and it is not clear that complex mathematical theories are needed to describe it.

As I’ve indicated, much of this work in the strategic area was focused on problems of Escalation, and on trying to devise a system that would enable the careful, incremental management of conflicts and, with luck their resolution in ways short of actual fighting. But the term escaped into the wilds of the media jungle and punditland, and is now used in many different and conflicting senses, almost all negative. So let’s first of all look at the origin of the term. For a start, “Escalation” has a common derivation with the French word escalier, which means “staircase”, or “flight of steps.” An “escalation ladder” is therefore very close to being a tautology. My indispensable Dictionnaire historique de la Langue française, which takes both hands to lift, finds the origins of the term (originally from Italian) in the escale, once a kind of stairway for boarding ships, later by extension a stopover or waypoint on a journey: a sense still found in modern French. The word remains (just) in English, in the verb “scale” meaning to climb a rock, for example. But the fundamental meaning is of a way of progressing up and down a defined route in a series of steps.

These days, “Escalation” tends to be just a term applied to any allegedly hostile or threatening move by a nation or group. But if we are to use the term sensibly, in the cases of Ukraine or Iran, then I would argue that it has to have two essential components:

• First, it has to have a defined purpose, normally to achieve something that has not so far been possible at a lower level of escalation, whether this is political, economic, or military. Typically, this will be to force a course of action on an enemy, or conversely to oblige them to abandon a course of action they have already started. Likewise, its opposite—“De-escalation,” also has to have a purpose and an intended outcome.

• Second, it has to be either an action, or the announcement of a plausible action, which is both within the power of the state concerned to do, and which has a logical connection with the end-state that the country wants to achieve. This does not mean it will achieve the objective in one go, but it must at least bring that objective closer. The same logic obviously applies to de-escalationary statements and activities.

From this, we can see that much behaviour characterised as “Escalation” is just thrashing around aggressively, and making threats that may or may not be realistic. There is a particular tendency to confuse aggressive statements with escalation, and this has been especially true of Ukraine. For western leaders to say that they will “never accept” this or that outcome, or that they will make more money available one day, or will open arms factories in Ukraine, is not Escalation, it’s just empty posturing. The test of Escalation is whether it makes any short-term practical difference to the situation. Likewise, if by the time you read this the US has made another attack on Iran, that would not be Escalation. Indeed, since any attack must by definition be weaker and less successful than the first, it could be argued to be de-escalatory in effect, if not in intent, since by exhausting the US arsenal further, it beings the end of the conflict on Iranian terms closer.

This is not just a quibble about the meaning of words, it’s an attempt to look through the verbal fog that seems to surround commentary on both of these conflicts, often by people who don’t have much experience of how governments work in a crisis. (I’ll return to that point at the end.) So if we take the two crises discussed so far, then almost since the beginning the West, and more particularly the US, has lacked the ability to escalate in a serious fashion, as opposed to cranking the volume up further and further until they eventually reach 11. In the case of Ukraine, the West began with sanctions and then moved to delivering arms and training Ukrainian soldiers. This was genuinely escalatory, at least in theory, insofar as it was believed that both initiatives would be substantively effective, and that between them they would force Russia to sue for peace or even, in the minds of some, collapse into anarchy. Once it became clear that neither of these consequences were going to happen under any foreseeable circumstances, then the West lost the ability to escalate in any useful sense.

Providing targeting information and even assisting with missile launches represented a deeper involvement of the West in the conflict, but cannot change its outcome. Indeed much of what is called “Escalation” including seizing ships and talking about sending troops to Ukraine when the war is over, is essentially theatre, to convince western publics, and even perhaps governments themselves, that all hope is not lost, and that there must be some chance, however remote, that if only the war can continue long enough, then something, anything, will happen that will bring Moscow down. Actually deploying western combat forces to Ukraine would probably count as an act of Escalation, because it could theoretically change the political calculus in Moscow to make the Russian government act differently, if it sought to avoid an overt conflict with NATO. But whilst there are indeed signs that Moscow does not want such an overt conflict, there is no doubt that in practice, western forces in Ukraine would be targeted and quickly destroyed. Ironically, the effect of such deployments might actually be de-escalatory, because the West, having lost troops and equipment, would be obliged to be more accommodating to Russia.

Much the same is true in the case of Iran. It’s clear that the attacks at the end of February represented the maximum effort that the US and Israel could make. Since then, important military installations have been destroyed, aircraft lost, and stocks of missiles substantially exhausted. As this attrition starts to have an impact, and the (really) hot season arrives, it is clear that neither the US nor Israel has any new or extra conventional capability that could be used to force Iran to change its current policy, nor are there any new commercial or political levers available. Since the basic qualifications for Escalation are that you have something to escalate with, and somewhere to escalate to, and since neither the US nor Israel has either, it’s hard to see how Escalation could take place. A ground attack, for example, would be a pointless publicity stunt which, because it could not be expected to change the course of the war, could not really count as Escalation anyway.

The only possible exception, of course, would be the use of nuclear weapons. But here, it’s doubtful whether we are really in the area of Escalation as such, as opposed to unreasoning violence when all else has been tried. During the Cold War, NATO, with smaller conventional forces, had a policy of the early use of tactical nuclear weapons against targets such as airbases, hoping, according to Deterrence and Escalation theory, to force an end to the fighting by showing that it was serious about defending. But it’s never been clear what the use of nuclear weapons might actually achieve in an Iran-style situation, where they are used by the attacker. Assuming that the attacks were with nuclear-tipped Tomahawk missiles, and aimed at hard targets and thus were ground-bursts, then, whilst much of the region would be polluted with radioactive fallout, it’s likely that a large part of Iran’s military potential would remain intact, and some of it at least would be launched in an annihilating counter-strike on regional targets. (There are a host of other practical issues we won’t go into here.) Whilst we can’t absolutely rule out the use of nuclear weapons by the US, and especially by Israel, as some kind of blind, apocalyptic outburst of fury and hatred, born of frustration and defeat, almost by definition that doesn’t really correspond to any worthwhile definition of Escalation.

However, as I’ve indicated, Escalation is only one specific example of a powerful and influential tendency in strategic thinking since the 1950s. This substitutes the use of abstract, often highly complex, models, for any detailed knowledge of a given situation. The advantages are obvious: any number can join in, and only the most fleeting acquaintance with individual cases, or indeed with history, is needed. Where support from real-life examples is required, the same folktales are trotted out (if anyone mentions the Maginot Line or the Munich Accords once more I swear I shall scream) not to illuminate, but because the popular understanding of them, flawed as it is, enables you to start from the conclusion you want, and work backwards.

The greatest danger of these models is that they are seen as predictive and mechanical. Because something happened before, and because this new example can be argued to be similar, therefore the same or similar consequences will result. This deterministic method of thinking (Munich, as misunderstood, is perhaps the classic example) has probably done more harm to the actual management of crises in the modern era than any other single factor, especially because it leads to facile arguments about what should be done to avoid a “repetition.” Until President Xi mentioned it a few days ago, I’d actually forgotten that there was a book which claimed that the “Thucydides Trap” was a real thing and a potential guide to understanding future relations between China and the US. (I can’t remember the author’s name and I’m not going to waste time looking it up.) It is particularly dangerous when such abstract models are used to predict conflicts, and to qualify them as “inevitable.” There is no earthly reason why there should be a war between China and the US—one of the messages that President Xi was surely subliminally conveying—and misunderstood accounts of wars between Greek city-states are neither here nor there. Likewise, the idea that Escalation will get “out of control” has turned up frequently in discussions of Ukraine, where we have been told every few months since 2022 that “nuclear war is now inevitable,” because apparently some process more powerful than human beings is in charge. By contrast, as I’ve indicated, Escalation in the case of Iran has essentially stopped: the Iranians don’t want or need to escalate further for the moment, and the US can’t, anyway.

Part of this way of thinking is the dangerous belief that very different episodes in very different countries are mysteriously connected, and what happens here will influence what later happens there, in inexplicable ways. Thus, one of the many reasons for continuing the Vietnam War as explained at the time, was that withdrawal would “encourage” the Soviet Union to act aggressively in Europe and “worry” the Europeans, although there’s no evidence that either of those reactions actually occurred. Similarly, it was argued in 2022 that failure to “support Ukraine” would somehow “embolden China” to attack Taiwan, though no serious argument was offered for this.

As I’ll recount in a moment, some of these ideas are genuine attempts to explain poorly understood aspects of how crises actually unfold, but I want first to go a little further into the background. This way of thinking, all of its originators and most of its practitioners, come from the US. Most of the pioneers were mathematicians and economists of Central European origin, and it’s tempting to wonder whether there is somehow a parallel with the Vienna School’s development of analytic philosophy, by Rudolph Carnap and his colleagues, itself likewise based on the abstraction away of historical and cultural differences, as well as the entire history of philosophy to that date.

In the 1950s, the US was just coming to terms with its growth into a military superpower as a result of the Second World War. Many people were worried about the power that this might give the military and defence contractors. This concern was reflected in the popularity of films like Seven Days in May and Dr Strangelove, and had become so much of a popular cliché that Eisenhower’s speechwriter felt obliged to refer to it in the President’s farewell address. The theme was taken up by a new class of “civil-military relations” specialists, who studied the relationship between Civis (the state) and the military, especially in Latin America and Africa, where military coups were frequent. Many feared that the United States itself might fall victim to the military. In his distressingly influential book The Soldier and the State, the political theorist Samuel Huntington depicted a world of endless, bitter struggle for control between the military and the representatives of the State. (He had no experience of either, however.) This gave birth to an entire ideology, applied first to the US and then to everywhere else, which portrayed the military as power-hungry, eager to start wars and ready to overthrow governments unless kept rigidly under control. This control was to be exercised by specially-recruited civilian officials who would keep the military in check. Although it’s only a coincidence of wording, Huntington seems to have begun the confusion between the control and direction of the military by Civis, the State, and control by “civilians.” One is a feature of a democracy, the other is effectively rubbish. (As I used to point out to students, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein were all “civilians.”)

There were two effects of these fears, both largely exclusive to the US. One was a deliberate fragmentation of the military, to make them weaker: as it is the four services, all the combatant commanders and all the separate agencies report to the Secretary for War directly, and there is effectively no central coordination, thus helping to explain the enormous waste and duplication in the US system. But the other, again largely confined to the US, was the growth not only of a civilian cadre to dispute power with and “control” the military, but a luxuriant forest of Institutes, think-tanks and Foundations, often funded directly or indirectly by the government. Now, only the naive imagine that reports by outsiders are ever directly translated into government Policy, but there’s no doubt that, especially with the interchange of staff between government, academia and research organisations, some of these mechanistic and frankly reductivist ideas found their way into the dominant mentality of strategic policy-making in Washington, as indeed did Realist International Relations theory in parallel.

The problem with these ideas was less that they sought to generalise US experience (though they did) so much as that they assumed the existence of context-independent strategic principles, which were the same everywhere, and which would be understood by, for example, the Soviet Union, in the spirit they were intended. Similarly, many in Washington today appear to believe that the messages they are trying to convey to Moscow and Tehran are obvious and will be clearly understood and acted on. And the most important assumption, clearly, is that governments work in at least roughly the same way, and understand the same things by each other’s actions.

In the Cold War, we now know that this was not so. (It wasn’t actually a secret at the time.) But Strategy, and especially Nuclear Strategy during the Cold War, was essentially generic and theoretical. There was little awareness among the strategic community of how the Russians thought, and frankly not a lot of interest. (Nobody ever asked the Russians if they shared the Mutual Assured Destruction concept for example: there are indications they didn’t.) The published (and so far as I know unpublished) work on Strategy seldom if ever took the insights of experts on the Soviet Union into account. In turn, this reflected the fact that the theoretical strategic community in Washington was so large that its members concentrated mainly on advancing their careers and acquiring influence with respect to each other. They had no need to learn Russian or visit the country.

Of course the situation in Russia was totally different. There was no equivalent of the civilian strategic community, and so the kinds of ideas that circulated there, and the policy options that resulted, were necessarily quite different. It wasn’t clear then (and it still isn’t, really) quite what the relationship between the Communist Party and the military was, on strategic issues. On the one hand, the Party had the final say on major strategic issues, as well as its network of Political Officers in all units at Company level or above. On the other hand, the Party was entirely dependent on the military for technical advice of all kinds, including issues which in Anglo-Saxon countries would be handled by technical specialists. In any event, the result was a system which functioned completely differently from that of the United States, and it is clear in retrospect that the two systems comprehensively misunderstood each other. The Soviet Union was an extreme example of what might be called the Continental Tendency of security organisation. In Anglo-Saxon countries generally, and by extension in the United States, security policy was largely a subset of foreign policy: wars took place “over there,” and loss might be embarrassing but seldom disastrous” It seemed logical, therefore, for diplomats and civilian career specialists to play a major role in policy-making, finance, procurement and any other issues.

By contrast, the Continental tendency is about defence of the national territory in land warfare, and the consequences of a defeat could be (and have been) disastrous. In such systems, the military often plays a much greater role, and dominates security and defence decision-making. This was even true in Western Europe: it was only after the Cold War, for example that the French began to develop a capacity for non-military inputs into the day-to-day running of defence. The Prussian tradition (copied largely by the Russians) is alive and well, with the departments of the German Armed Forces Staff playing a policy-making and implementation role. (I still remember thinking it curious, sitting behind one of our Ministers at a European meeting at the end of the Cold War, and seeing his German opposite number arrive with his Political Advisor: a General.)

Thus, the Soviet Defence Minister was not a “Minister” in the western sense: rather he was the military’s representative to the Politburo, of which he was almost always a member. This led not just to military domination of routine defence business, but to also a rigidly structured and highly technical approach. Soviet officer training put a great deal of emphasis on mathematics and engineering, and Soviet doctrine was highly prescriptive and inflexible. I remember looking at some Soviet officers’ training manuals in the Cold War: if you had to make an opposed river crossing, this was how you did it, always, complete with procedures and calculations of forces required. This produced an approach where force structures, for example were mathematically determined and so self-evidently unchallengeable. It also resulted in an inability to properly understand how political and military factors work together and against each other in a crisis, something that certain pundits from the former Soviet Union have still to grasp. So at the end of the Cold War, and in the context of an arms control treaty, data from the Soviet side showed they had hidden some of the main battle tanks they were supposed to destroy by re-subordinating two divisions to the Navy. (Maritime forces were not involved.) Oh yes, said the General Staff cheerfully, well the diplomats made a mistake and gave too much away, we checked the calculations and found we needed more tanks. It’s not a political issue, just a military-technical correction. It’s not clear, even with a civilian Defence Minister, how far things have changed in Moscow.

But in any event, the question is not which system is better, but that all systems are different. It’s bad enough to think that everybody is like you: it’s even worse to think that everybody is like everybody else. To expect to manage a potential crisis by sending political and military signals you are sure will be correctly interpreted and acted upon by the other side is a very ambitious objective, and one that depends for its practical effectiveness on the capacity of the other side to do what you want, even if it decides to do so. Thus, it was impossible for NATO not to have picked up the political signals from Moscow against Ukrainian membership of NATO, and impossible for them not to realise that Moscow had begun an escalatory process. But western arrogance and egotism made it just as impossible for these signals to be understood and acted upon: it was unthinkable that NATO would let someone else decide who could be a member, and anyway, what were the Russians going to do about it?

This pattern of theoretical hopes and practical disappointment is very common in modern history. Back in 1941, the Western imposition of sanctions against Japan for its invasion and occupation of Manchuria was logical enough, and indeed largely successful in damaging the Japanese economy. But the logical result—withdraw from Manchuria—was ruled out from the start by the configuration of politics in Tokyo, and the power of the military. Roosevelt’s decision to move the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Hawaii in 1940 was intended as classic deterrence, and not thought risky since it was believed that the Japanese lacked the capability to strike the Fleet, which at that time they did. The British had long had their own plans to send a deterrent force to confront a possible invasion of Malaya, but lack of money and the threat from Germany and Italy, as well as the last-minute unavailability of an aircraft carrier, reduced the force to just two battleships, both of which were found and sunk by the Japanese.

Such examples of non-receipt of deterrent efforts are found everywhere. Another, from the Cold War, was the deployment of US Intermediate Range nuclear weapons in Europe in the 1980s. European leaders had always been worried that in the event of a crisis between Europe and the Soviet Union the US would decline to get involved, and do a deal over the Europeans’ heads. Keeping US forces in Europe and therefore vulnerable to attack, was one way round that. But in the 1970s, the Soviet Union began to deploy missiles capable of hitting Europe: NATO had no similar missiles, so the Soviet ability to intimidate Europe could lead to the nightmare of the US doing a deal in its own interests and just walking away, unwilling to swap Boston for Barcelona. So the US was persuaded to deploy intermediate range missiles in Europe, notionally as a deterrent. But the Soviet Union saw these moves not as defensive but aggressive, and NATO-Soviet relations lurched to a low that was only rescued by the INF Treaty.

And so on and so on. The world seldom behaves as we expect, which is why clever deterministic patterns of Escalation and crisis management always come unstuck in practice. Obviously nobody is going to approach a crisis in a totally random or irrational fashion, but the one thing common to virtually all crises is that, sooner or later, you lose control of the crisis and it starts managing you. I watched this is real time in Kosovo in 1998/99, where NATO went less than a year from We really ought to do something about Milosevic, to We ought to issue stern warnings, to We ought to issue really stern warnings, to We ought to start making threats, to Well we might have to make these threats really serious, to Oh dear we’re going to have to drop a few token bombs to, My God this is serious, to Oh Shit, how do we get out of this war without destroying NATO? By the end, after a whole series of sideways shuffles, NATO, to its consternation, ended up more-or-less where those of us in the cheap seats doing the work always thought it would.

Which is to say that you almost never wind up where you expect to, and quite often you can’t even work out how you got there. So in a context where the current war goal of the US seems to be just the restoration of the situation before the war started, there must be quite a few people in Washington scratching their heads, and asking “how did we get here from there?”

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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I’m pleased to add that versions of these essays in Czech will now be appearing regularly in translation on the site czstrat.cz. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ Thanks to all of those who have recently contributed.

And as always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. And now:

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I can’t remember a time when I was unable to read. Before I went to school I already knew that c-a-t spelt “cat,” and since, like most of her contemporaries, my mother stayed at home when the children were young, I imagine it was she that taught me. Soon, though, I was at school, devouring everything printed that I could find. By today’s standards, the books were primitive, with their bright primary colours and simple illustrations without microchips or sound effects, but they were effective. In my grubby working-class area with indifferent schools, virtually everybody learned to read and write.

Yet what I recall most clearly from the books I read as a small child was the solid and almost tactile nature of the world they portrayed. Of course, that world was stylised, and probably a little out of date even in my early childhood. But it was a world that accorded with the solidity and connectedness of everyday life, even in its humblest manifestations. And of course such books, and later television and the cinema, necessarily exemplify a culture’s concepts of what is important, and how society functions. So this week I want to reflect a little on how these ideas have changed over the generations, and how we have arrived at the world we have today, where fame, importance and success are defined and exemplified very differently from how they were then. I will argue that these differences could be about to have severe consequences quite soon.

Children’s books of those days portrayed a very physical, tactile world. Almost nothing was abstracted, virtualised or dematerialised, and the link between everyday life and the work of individuals was very clear. Society functioned because people did practical things that could easily be observed. So every day the postman or -woman, the milkman and the paper-boy would come by. Every week, someone from the Council would come to collect the rent and mark it in a book with a pencil as received. (In cash, few people in the area had ever seen a cheque.) Every month or two, someone would come from the Gas Board or the Electricity Board to read the meter. In the winter, men with large sacks on their back would come to deliver the coal for the fire in the front room, which was the only room that was usually heated. The labour that went into all this was very evident: the postman would be up at four in the morning in all weathers, the coal would be dug out of the ground by men working in filthy, dangerous conditions, and the fish sold in the local fish-and-chip shop was caught by men from Hull and Grimsby spending two weeks at a time on the freezing waters of the North Sea. And all of this was faithfully set out in books, that also showed the butcher, the baker, the greengrocer and the ironmonger at work in their shops. It was just how life was, and these were the ordinary people who kept the world moving.

A little later, we learned about manufacturing, which still existed in those days. Cars, washing machines (new and exciting at the time) televisions (ditto) and radios and hi-fis were then made in Britain, if not always very well. Entire towns and cities were organised around manufacturing, as they were organised around coal and steel. As I began to read newspapers, I understood that the prosperity of the country depended on Making Things, and the news was full of imports and exports, and something called the Balance-of-Payments problem, which was thought important at the time, but is now no longer discussed. Currency exchange rates were fixed (though the Pound would occasionally come under speculative attack) as were most raw material prices, and much of the economy was in public hands, so there was relatively little to speculate on. The City was where the less-intelligent sons of the ruling class were sent to work, and the Stock Market was primarily about raising finance for investment, and buying shares to give you an income. Even when I was studying Economics later, our textbooks talked about factors of production, trade balances and prices. It was all very practical and down-to-earth, with scarcely an equation in sight.

The Wealthy, as such, had generally inherited their money, and owned land and shares. They looked down on those who had made money more recently, but popular culture itself also showed, if anything, a certain distrust for those who were merely Rich, especially through such schemes as property speculation, which was just taking off. Even senior managers in private companies were not exceptionally well paid in those days, and in general private-sector management had a bad reputation, as something you went into if you didn’t have the brains to be a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher. (Even now, in a very different world, you need a British passport application countersigned by someone of standing in the community: the founder of an Internet startup probably wouldn’t do.)

All these things were signals about what society at the time considered important. Even if the ruling class aspired to a life of Leisure, living off rents and dividends, and if it was considered shameful in the upper-middle class if a husband couldn’t support his wife and family from his own earnings, there was strong social pressure for otherwise inactive people of those classes to do something to justify their existence, often in the form of voluntary or charitable work. The middle class expected their children to get “good” jobs, with a degree of social prestige. Among my contemporaries at University, there were future lawyers, teachers, doctors, scientists and engineers, people going into the public service, into academia, publishing and perhaps advertising, and, like me, not quite sure what they wanted to do. But I don’t remember anyone who wanted to “make lots of money,” or just “become successful.” It was anyway assumed that a decent middle-class career would give you a reasonable standard of living, the opportunity to buy a house and the respect of your community. And for working-class boys, there were exciting jobs like firemen, merchant seamen, policemen and operators of complex and powerful machinery

One career seen as prestigious was science, for all that it seems hard to believe now. This was partly a response to the massive mobilisation of science during the War, and to the effects on the post-war world. It wasn’t that science was seen as creating a technological utopia: flying cars and so on were essentially as mythical as the Shield of Achilles, and served a similar purpose. Rather, applied science had done a great deal, and continued to do more, to make ordinary life safer, healthier and easier. Science meant antibiotics, DNA, radio telescopes, computers and of course space travel. (Although the 1960s are remembered today for the Apollo programme, at the time the Soviet space programme was more visible: I can still remember the shock I felt when my mother showed me the front page of a newspaper with the photograph of Yuri Gagarin.) And all of this was not really about weekends on the Moon, which remained a journalistic fantasy, but the sense that Science, under some kind of publicly accountable government control, would continue to make the lives of ordinary people better, as it already had.

The BBC screened serious science documentaries and popular science programmes, as well as Jacob Bronowski’s epic Ascent of Man. An actual scientist, David Attenborough, was put in charge of BBC 2 when it began: he was responsible, among other things, for Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Popular culture treated scientists with respect, if sometimes with a degree of amused condescension. (Scientists like the original Dr Who solved problems with their brains rather than their fists.) I was never particularly a fan of Enid Blyton, but her books of children’s adventures, depicting a generation of children with far more autonomy and freedom than would be acceptable today, had among their few adult characters a father who was some kind of research scientist, working on a project that must have been based on the idea of nuclear power. Meanwhile, popular TV programmes starring explorers like Hans Haas and Jacques Cousteau showed the unseen marvels of the bottom of the sea.

If all these were ordinary role models, then there were also famous people to emulate, and they were not as far from ordinary life then as they would be today. Sportsmen and women tended to be ordinary people, frequently amateurs, seldom earning huge amounts of money. The nearest serious football team to where I lived was West Ham, whose Captain, Bobby Moore, was also the Captain of the England team that won the 1966 World Cup. I didn’t follow football, but apparently you could see Moore doing his shopping at the local supermarket on a Saturday: like most professional sportsmen and women, footballers were paid a decent working wage, with a bonus for winning. The idea that a footballer could be paid millions a year, and would become just a mobile advertising stand, would have seemed incomprehensible then. Sports I did follow, like cricket and athletics, tended to be even worse paid, if they were paid at all. But their most prominent figures were household names nonetheless.

Then there were the truly exceptional individuals: test pilots, astronauts, mountaineers, explorers, deep-sea divers, people (like Attenborough himself) who disappeared into the jungles of Borneo and brought back pictures of animals no-one in Britain had ever seen. There were also genuine media Stars—normally female—who seemed to have come from another planet: the likes of Bardot, Loren, Monroe and others. There was a lower level of celebrities, also including male figures like Burton and Sinatra, who were written about by the media, if not in the obsessively prurient way we have become used too today.

But most entertainers were ordinary people, making a decent living from selling concert tickets and records. Even the Beatles, when they started, were “four lads from Liverpool,” and Beatlemania was a surprise to everyone, not least to them. But if they were escorted around for their own protection, they were not hermetically sealed away. They had no private jets, and were met at the bottom of the aircraft steps (as then was possible) by the Press, eager to take their photographs. They didn’t have an extensive road crew with 747 freighters and massive lorries either: in concert footage, you can see them setting up and shifting around their own equipment, as they had been doing since Hamburg. The Beatles were an act, not a merchandising opportunity: that only happened, and at enormous scale, after they broke up. But for most of their brief existence they were infinitely closer to ordinary people than most of today’s best-selling acts ever were. And behind the Beatles, there were any number of, mostly transient, four or five-piece groups inspired by the realisation that with three guitars, three chords and a drum kit, you could make a decent living for a year or two.

Ultimately, even politicians were closer to ordinary people than they are now. Many of them were ordinary people, after all: trades union officers, journalists, local solicitors, tradesmen and women, former mayors of small towns mixed with the lawyers and the landowners, and most knew their constituencies well. The fortress-like security that now covers the lives of British politicians, whatever its subsequent security justification, didn’t exist then: famously, you could have your photograph taken outside No 10 Downing Street, next to the long-suffering policeman on duty, and shake hands with visiting political dignitaries.

Now then, you may react to this by saying either or both of (1) “nostalgia” or (2) “change is inevitable.” But I’m not writing a normative essay here. On the one hand, though, if there’s anything wrong with nostalgia for a time of full employment and great social mobility, I should like to know what it is, and on the other, societies necessarily change, but change can take good paths or bad directions. My real point here is a simple but very basic one. We get the kind of society we prepare for and we get the kind of citizens we form. The priorities we set are subsequently played back to us. As we sow, even do we reap. What we tell young people, deliberately or inadvertently, is what they play back to us later. Critically, this influence does not even have to be deliberately intended. So when Robert Baden-Powell returned from the Boer War and wrote several books about Scouting, he was surprised to discover enormous enthusiasm amongst both boys and girls for his programme of simple outdoor skills. The Scouts and Guides were essentially a creation of the children themselves, the adults following after. Today, well, I don’t know what the equivalent would be…

So to understand society today, we must understand what messages its citizens received when they were younger. To understand what society will be like tomorrow, we must understand the messages that are being passed today. The character of these messages, as you might anticipate from the earlier discussion, is increasingly abstract and theoretical, and increasingly removed from the experiences of everyday life. In many cases, the passers of these messages are talking about possible developments in the economy and society, things that haven’t happened yet, and might not, and in any case things that they themselves don’t necessarily understand. Moreover, the messages are increasingly confused, incoherent and contradictory, and very often part of some commercial campaign. On the other hand, some of the most powerful are completely inadvertent: the drug-trafficker driving an expensive car through their own former neighbourhood is sending a clear message about what success means, even if that’s not their conscious intention.

What I mean by “abstract” in this context, is that the messages about the present and the future that are passed to young people have no necessary contact with practical reality as they will ever experience it, and are without any serious attempt to pretend it has, beyond the rhetorical level. Indeed, pronouncements by governments and the new brand of “leaders” that has arisen, mostly from the tech world, are not only aimed at young people, but also at their parents, who vote, and who require a degree of assurance about their children’s future, or for that matter can be frightened and coerced into encouraging them and supporting them financially in a direction that may be profitable for others.

To give an idea of how much this has changed, consider that careers advice to my generation, useful or not, informed or not, welcome or not, was usually based on some kind of pragmatic everyday judgement. Look, my contemporaries were told, so-and-so has a good standard of living, a nice house and a nice car, and is liked and respected in the community. They do the legal work for house purchases, and there will always be houses. They are doctors or dentists and we will always need those. They are teachers and we’ll always need those. There will always be a need for people to work in banks. The increase in access to higher education in the 1960s and 1970s produced a whole generation of children encouraged into degree-qualified jobs like these, because their parents wanted them to have “a better life than we had.” (How quaint that sounds now.) And many people—I knew lots of them—were actually quite happy, getting qualifications, marrying, setting up in one of the Professions, and doing jobs that were actually socially useful: yes, even banking could be useful in those days.

Now such views were never universal of course, because nothing is. There were people who sincerely wanted to be rich by any means, and indeed people who had become wealthy through property and share speculation. But their influence was limited, because opportunities themselves were limited, partly by a much more egalitarian tax regime, and partly because of the structure of the economy itself. Such people often had the phrase “get rich quick” attached to them, and not in a complimentary sense. For the most part, if you wanted to become wealthy, you had to do something definite, with a tangible outcome. Richard Branson, for example, something of a popular hero of the era, started with a small record shop in Oxford Street (I went there) and expanded through providing a good and informed service in different areas, ultimately even getting into airline travel in the 1980s (Virgin Atlantic was excellent when I flew it regularly.) I don’t think anyone begrudged him his success and his wealth, at least not in those days.

It may seem parochial to say so, but I think that the dystopic reign of Margaret Thatcher had a lot to do with our current western decline. In many ways she was a typical product of the era: a greengrocer’s daughter who went on to study science and worked in food technology. But then she went through what was to become a typical moment of financial revelation: I am clever, I want to be rich. So she retrained as a lawyer, went into politics, and became the darling of a certain type of voter and parliamentarian who wanted to be rich as well, and without this tedious business of studying stuff and acquiring experience and qualifications. She profited from, and contributed to, the takeover of the Tory Party by a new generation of estate-agents and second-hand car salesmen, whose wealth was based not on the traditional family and land, still less on education and training, but on an eye for the quick opportunity, and the use of a glib tongue. Her accidental coming to power unleashed a period of financial deregulation in Britain (imitated elsewhere) and coincided with wider international pressures to deregulate currencies and raw material prices.

In theory, this was all about optimisation of investment and putting resources where they would be most useful. But outside a few financial journalists, nobody really believed this. It was really just an opportunity to manipulate money, sometimes blatantly so. For example, British Gas was sold off, but the price investors paid for shares was deliberately kept low, so they would be able to sell their shares at a profit, and the more they bought (or borrowed the money to buy) the more money they would make. The money raised from the sale was then recycled back to those who had bought the shares, as tax cuts. At the time, even some politicians of the Right thought this was scandalous, but it soon became the accepted norm. (Apparently, the story that one of the first decisions of the newly privatised management of British Gas was to cancel the traditional pensioners’ Christmas party is actually true.)

Moral judgements aside, a new paradigm of acceptable behaviour was in the process of being created and disseminated. Newspapers were full of stories telling their readers how to become rich without doing any actual work. After all, why have a boring job when you could borrow the money to buy several houses, and re-sell them a year later for a tidy profit, taking account of the vertiginous rise in house prices at the time? Banking itself started its long descent into a specialised manifestation of the Casino industry, and “finance,” which had originally meant finding money to enable actual projects to happen, became a term meaning the extraction of profit from manipulating money, or expectations or rumours about money. In Martin Amis’s 1981 novel Money (sic) one of the characters is mocked for having a job “buying and selling money.” A decade or more later, and that would have seemed too elementary to be worth mentioning, in a world of derivatives, and derivatives of derivatives of derivatives, when people were getting rich (at least theoretically) in ways that hardly anyone could understand, and which were in many cases probably illegal.

So of course people went into finance to make themselves rich, because they responded to the signals they were sent, both about finance and about acceptable ways of becoming wealthy. After all, if you had a degree in Economics, what was the point in becoming a teacher or a lecturer, when you could make a fortune in finance? Come to that, even many professional economists quickly understood that the investing pubic was mostly stupid, and would pay them huge amounts of money as consultants. People with PhDs in mathematics who might have gone into Astronomy went into Wall Street or its analogues instead. And it soon became clear that the way to become really, really rich was to break away and set up your own hedge fund, taking account of the fact that human gullibility seems to be without limit. So ambitious students who had wanted to be lawyers, because that’s where the money had been, turned to finance, because that’s where the money seemed to be now. Some made it, some didn’t, some were victims of sundry financial crashes, some wound up at thirty years-old burnt out and cocained to death, most, it appears, actively hated their jobs. But the media environment in which they lived became more and more supportive, as glossy supplements told the newly-rich what to spend their money on, in the little leisure time they apparently had, and this encouraged yet further recruits. None of this had anything to do with finance in the traditional sense, or even “work” as it was once understood, and ironically the previous, limited social utility of Banks largely disappeared, as they closed branches and retreated into call-centres at the other end of the world. Banking and finance, helped of course by the Internet, became almost entirely virtual, insubstantial activities.

This happened at roughly the same time as the Great Offshoring: the destruction of manufacturing industry and the arrival of the belief that everything you wanted could be ordered from abroad frictionlessly, and paid for … well, by all these highly-paid and more important jobs that were going to be kept in western countries. So people were discouraged from going into industry, and technical training and engineering education were run down. And these high-value, high-wage jobs that were left after the dross had been exported to countries with little non-white people, would be what, precisely? Well, those who were painting the future in such glowing colours never actually said, mostly because they had no real idea themselves. But it turned out that junior management jobs held by people who’d been persuaded to read Business Studies instead of History or Mathematics, quickly became cheaper to outsource to the place where the production was taking place. And with remorseless logic, senior management posts, financial posts and even technical design posts followed relatively quickly. It turned out that making arbitrary distinctions between what could be sent abroad and what couldn’t was not actually possible. This caused some surprise. At the time of Covid it caused utter consternation. Then it was technical support posts and call-centres and, well, you know the rest. Progressively, therefore, western societies became more and more distanced from the actual production and even support of those things on which everyday life depended, and any sense of a geographical or even causal link with everyday life was lost. Meanwhile, ironically, someone who had done a traditional training as a gas engineer would have more work than he could handle.

One of the many delusions promoted by elites at that time was that computers and computer software were the way of the future, and it was in those areas that the good jobs would be retained, while the dross was exported. A political class which was generally completely ignorant of such things decided that teaching children to code in BASIC was going to relaunch the economies of whole countries. Yet these were the days (and they lasted well into the 90s) when just getting a computer to actually work, let alone talk to a printer, required hours of messing around, and the resources did not exist to teach such skills widely. Moreover, with the arrival first of the Macintosh computer, and then of various painful iterations of Windows, and followed by the unanticipated advent of the Internet, it turned out that a nation of BASIC programmers was not, in fact, needed. The “computer skills” which were going to save whole nations degenerated ultimately into the ability to do simple tasks in Office, and calling the system help desk when you had a problem. What resulted was not computer-literate nations, but mere facsimiles of them.

It was at this point that we began to see the messages passed to young people less as promises than as threats: it wasn’t necessarily the case that you would become rich if you did something, but it was very likely you’d be thrown on the scrap heap if you didn’t. So the massive expansion in university-level education a generation or so ago generated a new argument: without an expensive university education, you would never find a decent job. Now until this point, university education had conformed to one of two types. It was vocational (science, law, medicine, even theology) and was the first step in a professional qualification, or it was a general degree, often in the humanities, which gave you the intellectual basis and training for a more general type of work. (Famously, the British government sector recruited people with the most extraordinary range of degrees, and on the whole it worked well.) But the new obsession with university education (which to be honest resembled a protection racket as much as an academic enterprise) was dangerous for two reasons. First, it brought into university many who would have been happier elsewhere, and second, it changed the objective from having the benefits of the intellectual training at a university, to just leaving a degree course with a piece of paper. Once more, the shadow took the place of the substance, the spectacle was sold to the young in place of the reality. Students pretended to have acquired university-level skills, and society pretended to believe them.

The practical implications of this were obvious and not long in arriving. Recruiters asked for university degrees not because that level of education was needed for the job, necessarily, but just as a way of reducing the number of applicants to a manageable number. Universities expanded student numbers (and in some countries income) without a proportionate increase in teaching staff, or even necessarily facilities. They also had to accommodate less academic students, who in earlier times would have taken other paths, at the same time as western universities moved increasingly away from final examinations and more and more towards continuous assessment, which was much more demanding for both students and teachers. Above all, the requirement became to get as many graduates out of the door clutching certificates as possible, since it was these pieces of paper, not the intellectual content of the course, that mattered. This meant a move towards less rigorous subjects, an increasing opportunity for students to construct a degree from bits and pieces that appealed to them, and most of all a fixation with getting students through degrees by making allowances and by tweaking the results.

It’s hard to argue that this has benefited anyone: certainly not the students, who have found that a nondescript degree may get them into the queue for a job, but has taught them nothing of any lasting intellectual value. No wonder some countries are having second thoughts. Meanwhile, in many of those same countries there is a desperate shortage of trained technicians.

This could have been, and in some cases was, predicted from what had happened in schools in most western countries. The argument that Education is essentially a good thing is hard to dispute, but its simple-minded exaltation as a government priority from the 1990s onwards coincided with the abandonment of the traditional concept of education as imparting life-skills and preparing citizens, in favour of “child-centred” education, which made school students (and in practice their parents) customers of the system, requiring satisfaction. The same worship of credentials, of the form and not the content, was visible in many countries, as innovations to the curriculum and teaching methods, and purely formal increases in pass-rates, were given priority over actual learning. France has always had a national education system with national exams, so it’s easy to track standards objectively across the decades. In both the prestigious Baccalauréat, and the Brevet taken at 16, standards have been progressively lowered to enable success-rates to be maintained or improved, for political reasons. This is now starting to be a real problem: around one in four French 16-year old school-leavers now lacks the basic skills in literacy and numeracy for all but the most stunningly mundane of jobs. (Even a pizza-deliverer needs to be able to read addresses.)

Nothing could more clearly demonstrate the lack of interest of elites in actual education, as opposed to its facsimile. For that matter, few hagiographic portraits of wealthy technology heroes these days fail to point out that they had an undistinguished education and dropped out of university. Education is for the riff-raff who will never make the one percent. Real success these days is about persuading people to invest in a company with no business and no prospects, so that they can sell their interests to even bigger fools later.

From what I see, from what I hear from people I trust, and from the increasing sounds of despair coming from inside the system, I think the education systems of the West are breaking down. But this is not surprising, because students are simply following the cues they have been given. They now understand that learning, as such, does not matter any more. What matters is to pass out with the right piece of paper. So why attend lectures? Why read books? Why do any more than the absolute minimum? On the other hand, why not cheat? Why not plagiarise? Why not, these days, have AI write all of your essays for you? It has been made clear to you since you were at school that knowledge, as such, is not important. What matters, Wizard of Oz-style, is just the facsimile. And so we are entering into a period of crisis where notional university graduates find themselves with the right piece of paper, but without the actual skills needed to get a job. But blaming them alone is too simple. Likewise, cheating and plagiarism among academics—rare until the last generation—is a simple question of responding to incentives: the more papers you publish and the more they are cited, the more your career benefits. There isn’t time to worry about the students, or actual valuable research.

For several generations now, western society has indulged the delusion—call it Rousseauist perhaps—that providing overt incentives, guidance and models to young people is wrong, and that they should be left to “follow their passion,” and “express themselves.” It’s fair to say that the origin of these ideas was political: they took, and still take, no account of how children actually develop. But if you were ever an adolescent, you know that it is a time of restless searching for role models and principles and ideologies to live your life by, and you try on different ideas and styles of life as you try on clothes or change your preferences in music. But modern society has not only declined to give young people models to follow, it has deliberately ignored, undermined and destroyed traditional models of the past. Yet this has not led to young people being “liberated,” and “being themselves,” but rather to an unmet thirst for some models, any models, to follow, and to the appearance of a series of actors, some with commercial motives, some with ideological ones, who are more than happy to tell young people what to think, how to behave, and what to buy. We cannot blame young people if they follow guidance that we do not like, when we ourselves offer them nothing positive, but only exalt their theoretical freedom whilst imposing content-free normative indoctrination that just makes them miserable. So to condemn teenagers in poor areas of major cities for adopting role-models drawn from drug-gang leaders, and ethics drawn from Influencers and the lyrics of rap artists, may be understandable, but it misses the point. Where else are they going to turn?

We now offer young people only a facsimile of life, in which they are not valued as people but only as consumers. Ironically, when so much has been abstracted into smartphones, all that remains of the immediate and the tangible for many young people is crime, poverty, violence, drugs and gangs. And it isn’t only the children of the poor. The children of the middle class increasingly live a virtual life, sheltered from immediate experience and even genuine personal relationships by terrified parents and nervous institutions.

Now situations like this can, in theory, last for a long time, and when they decay, they can in theory decay gradually. But I don’t think anyone would describe what is happening around us now as “gradual.” The combination of Ukraine, Iran, climate change and the infectious virus du jour will lead to consequences that will develop anything but gradually. I’ve written before about how ill-prepared western elites are for the consequences of these things, but it will be clear, I think, that the process of virtualisation and abstraction that I have been describing adds a whole extra layer of difficulty and complication.

It was already clear in their reactions to Ukraine that the western ruling class had completely forgotten that money cannot buy what is not available. “Rearmament” cannot be done virtually: it requires actual raw materials, actual factories and actual workforces, all of which have long been abstracted away. The accompanying delusion, that total GDP including the finance sector is some sort of weapon against nations that have retained manufacturing industry and hold raw materials would be tragic if it were not so funny. And even now, the media and the ruling class are reacting to the shortages and supply-chain ruptures of the Iran crisis at one remove, through computer screens, as though abstract financial movements were all that mattered. We are so far distant from the days when coal was dug from the ground and used to make the iron and steel to make real things, that I think our current generation of leaders simply can’t grasp intellectually what is likely to happen. And having carefully destroyed real economies, real social relations and institutions and replaced everything with facsimiles, they have also ensured that an angry population, perhaps cold and hungry, is going to demand furiously that they do something. Really, this time.

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And as always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. And now:

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One of the biggest difficulties for politicians and pundits trying make sense of changes in the world is what I call the Problem of Classification. Most apparently sudden and violent changes have three common characteristics. The first is that they are not, in fact, sudden, but have been building up for a long time, often unnoticed and so not understood. The second is that some event, often unexpected, has intervened to suddenly make these changes which were previously hidden now obvious. The third is that in almost all cases, the changes obey simple rules which have been in force for millennia, but are not usually discussed in textbooks of politics and international relations.

So those with little time, and often little understanding either, are completely surprised, and find themselves asking not What is Going on Here? but rather Which Past Event or Model does This One most resemble out of Things that I Know About or Have Heard Of? Quite quickly, pundits and politicians come to intellectual blows about whether this is the new X or the new Y, or whether it is the latest example of process Z, which they were reading about yesterday. In our modern world, unanticipated events may be all over the international media in hours, with Post-It commentaries ranging from the hopefully useful through the hopelessly confused to the wilfully mendacious, and governments have to react, although there isn’t the time, and often there aren’t the resources, to really understand what’s going on. So there is a competition in the political and media world is to fit events—as they appear, anyway—into some kind of already experienced and thus familiar pattern. The situation is made worse by the fact that that, almost from the first few minutes, governments and others are harassed by the media for a response to situations or developments that may be completely unclear and even fictional (“If these unconfirmed reports turn out to be true …”)

This applies at many levels, and is the result not only of the sheer speed and uncertainty of developments, but also the the existence of these hoary old models, both of institutions and of behaviour, which pundits are familiar with, and which seem to them to be natural and inevitable. The past, or at least our interpretation of it, structures our way of thinking about the present and the future, and limits to a large extent the interpretations that we can accept and the options we can draw on for possible solutions. In the case of solutions and institutions, this imitation can even be deliberately sought, in an attempt to rival wealthier and more developed countries. The African Union for example, was explicitly modelled after the EU (which provides much of its funding) and the worries that a number of us had at the time that the result would be unreasonably ambitious have, I think, been at least partly justified. Similarly, I’ve been asked many times whether some kind of EU model could be introduced to solve the problems of the Middle East, not because people have necessarily thought the idea through (look at the brief and unhappy history of the UAR) but because the model is well-known, and is associated with wealthy and generally stable states. (Enthusiasm tends to cool when I remind people how many generations of terrible violence were needed to produce the political consensus that made the EU possible.)

Yet, sticking with institutions for a second, the interesting thing is how contingent most of them actually are, and how much they are products of specific places and times. By definition, therefore, this limits their wider applicability: a “new Institution X” only makes sense as a resolution to a crisis if the underlying situations are at least broadly comparable. Similarly, many apparently universal rules or commonplaces of behaviour in international relations are in fact just as highly specific, and are in many cases the product of theoretical models produced in particular political climates, uncontaminated by the intrusion of mundane experience. No wonder we often have difficulty in understanding what is going on, because we are asking the wrong question. To ask, for example, Does this resemble event X that happened last year? Is Great Power Y behind all this or alternatively is it Great Power Z? Is this all about (insert commodity)? or Is this an attempt to create a new (insert organisation)? is most unlikely to get you anywhere in terms of understanding what’s happening, let alone predicting the future, but does have the advantage of neatly classifying disagreements under headings that you know. Hence the effects of the Problem of Classification.

And to be fair, we have to recognise that any serious attempt to engage with the complexities of even small-scale events in distant parts of the world, can produce overwhelming complexities. When the first signs of the Thailand-Cambodia border conflict became visible last year, how many people could honestly say that they understood the background and could give a coherent account of why the fighting had started? But governments have to to say something about such issues, and the business models of many Internet pundits depend on instant commentary on the main story of the day, so people fall back on stereotypes or clichés that at least enable them to say something, and push for solutions (the UN? ASEAN?) which at least they and their audience will have heard of.

The dreamlike, almost catatonic reaction of the West to the totality of the probable consequences of both the Ukraine and the Iran crises, is in part explained by this inability to fit today’s ever-more-complex events into pre-existing structures and models. (I’m reminded of the US diplomat in 1990 who said in my presence that “history is going off in directions it has no right to.”) The result can be a kind of intellectual semi-paralysis, resulting in a purely reflexive attempt to fit apparently anarchic and unexpected events into some paradigm, any paradigm, which gives us the comforting impression that we have actually understood them. In reality, paradigms and the use of historical precedents are much more often the problem than the solution, and the tendency to over-generalisation produces far more confusion than it does illumination.

The first major difficulty is the assumption that the politics of international institutions works the way we think it does, based on a very small selection of approved models, and that this selection of models constitutes the totality of the possible options. It’s for this reason that the West seems incapable of correctly understanding BRICS, for example, which is popularly envisaged as something vaguely between the EU and NATO, whereas it is clearly similar to neither. Thus, pundits affect to be puzzled about why Russia and China have not sent troops to defend Iran, since the only models they know about imply that such a thing should happen. (Thus, Russia has “stabbed Iran in the back” by not opening hostilities with the US.) Ignoring for the moment that most people misunderstand what Article V of the Washington Treaty actually says, the fact is that the two national groupings have effectively nothing in common in terms of their origins and objectives, so why should we expect them to behave similarly? What has actually happened, so far as we know, is that both countries have given indirect assistance to Iran through technology and Intelligence cooperation, because by so doing they weaken the military power of the US both generally and in the region, and more widely they undermine the economic and political strength of the West as a whole. That suits them both for the moment, without prejudice to their longer-term rivalries or even conflicts in other parts of the world. That’s not so hard to understand, is it? But the idea that BRICS, never mind all sorts of other ad hoc arrangements between states, doesn’t conform to the NATO or EU models still disorients people. What can these foreigners be up to?

We are back to what the functions and purposes of international organisations are, especially those that are not publicly discussed. Thus, NATO and the (now) EU were very special products of their time and circumstance: a Europe devastated by a second war within a generation, economically and politically exhausted, and frightened of yet another conflict or crisis, involving either the unresolved Franco-German animosity or the overwhelming intimidatory effect of Soviet military power, or conceivably both. So the proposed solutions—some kind of involvement of the US as a counterweight to Soviet power on one hand, and some kind of supranational European structures on the other—were the products of very specific circumstances. And the militarisation of NATO because of fears that the Korean War was a prelude to an imminent Soviet attack on Western Europe, was the product of even more exceptional circumstances: never before had a permanent military alliance existed in peacetime.

So why should any of this be relevant today? Why, for example, should the Founding Document of the AU contain a mutual defence clause when probably no African country can defend its own borders against an attack, let alone someone else’s? I’ve never had a satisfactory answer to this question, except, well, Because. Yet in fact we only have to go back a short distance in history to find many examples of much looser and more contingent bilateral and multilateral arrangements, short treaties without elaborate structures for implementation, which are a better guide to how the world very largely works, even today. As I’ve suggested before, and as can’t be emphasised enough, the international scene is not anarchic. It only works at all because of a massive apparatus of international organisation, technical norms, formal and informal modes of political and economic cooperation, and ad hoc coordination on areas of common interest. Far from nations blindly struggling to increase their power and influence, most look for opportunities for cooperation with larger or smaller partners, but primarily in unspectacular structures with modest objectives, and sometimes short timescales.

Thus, these opportunities do not necessarily have to form part of some larger and more ambitious programme, publicly acknowledged and codified, let alone one which is exclusive to the nations concerned. For example, countries otherwise at odds with each other may cooperate on subjects like the struggle against organised crime. A case in point is the triangular cocaine trade between Colombia, several poor West African states and Europe, which is easiest to interdict at sea, when the cargo is in bulk. African states that loudly protest against neo-imperialism in other contexts are happy to cooperate with the West, there. The context is different and the benefit is mutual.

Thus, “relations” even between major states are not homogeneous, but rather a mosaic of micro-relations in different areas, some of which may be easier and more productive than others, some of which may benefit one side, some the other, and not a few bring mutual advantage: something that International Relations specialists, in my experience, find it difficult or impossible to understand. The latter often live (or at least seem to) on a world where brute physical power is the only reality, and where large powerful states tell smaller states what to do, and that’s it. (This assumption is especially common in the alt-media, which, as often, uncritically accepts the analyses of the traditional media, but complains about the consequences.) So you’ll find playground insults like “poodle” and “lackey” used as a substitute for actual thought and analysis when talking about the position of smaller nations.

Yet few smaller nations would see things that way. For example, alliances with larger states can be turned to practical advantage politically and financially, can give you an enhanced status compared to neighbours and competitors, and can enhance your security by associating a larger power with preserving your independence. A few supportive words or a vote in the UN General Assembly are a small price to pay in exchange. And of course since time immemorial, smaller states have deftly played large states off against each other to secure benefits and protection. (There’s nothing as valuable as convincing a large state that it’s in their interest to guarantee your security.) This should not really surprise anybody, but I insist on it now because, post-Ukraine and post-Iran, I expect that we will start to see this logic develop and expand in a rather different fashion.

The Ukraine crisis was not foreordained, but it was a good example of a subject allowed to drift, and which was managed according to the various and often conflicting short-term pressures through which the international system actually works, especially in the West. NATO continued after 1990 because its members felt that there was no good reason to abolish it, because there were Treaties that necessitated its continued existence and, above all, for lack of an obvious alternative. Literally nobody wanted a return to 1930s-style anarchy and ever-changing alliances in central Europe. Whilst NATO was not a major priority for western powers, apart from the Bosnia and Kosovo conflicts and the deployment to Afghanistan, there was the feeling that it brought a bit of coherence and logic to relations between countries that had fought more wars between them than you could count, and also both gave the US a voice in European security issues and provided Europe with a useful transatlantic counterweight in the event of a crisis with Russia, unlikely as that might seem. Like a leaky pipe that we’ll get round to fixing one day, it finally all came apart.

But what is interesting is that, since the concentration had been elsewhere, nobody had much appreciated the fact that underlying realities had already greatly changed since the Cold War, until it was too late. The US was obsessed with Iraq and Afghanistan, the Europeans were obsessed with the consequences of Brexit, immigration and trying to construct a coherent collective foreign policy. For the latter, especially, Russia was not much of a priority, apart from ritual condemnations after Crimea in 2014, and the use of sanctions to show the EU as an actor on the world stage. Europe in 2022 did not see Russia as a genuine threat: had it done so it would have taken at least some concrete steps to deal with it. But Europe was trapped in a time-warp: Russia was a petroleum-based economy with a laughable military, and was a declining power that could be kicked around. Western forces, equipment and training were so much superior to anything the Russians had that any conflict would be short and victorious.

Yet if all these assumptions were rapidly and thoroughly falsified, the biggest shock was the essential irrelevance of the United States. Clearly, the Russians were not deterred by the inevitable involvement of the US in the crisis. European leaders had not really paid attention to the fact that US forces in Europe had dwindled to almost nothing, and those mainly for mounting operations in the Middle East, and that much US equipment was outdated, and ill-suited for combat in Ukraine, nor that its stocks were limited and could not be replaced quickly. Come to that, they hadn’t taken enough interest in defence issues to realise that their on forces had dwindled to almost nothing either.

Moreover, the hope in the past had always been that the US would see Europe as such a significant area of interest that it would never disengage and become isolationist once more. Even during the Cold War, the fear of some kind of resolution of a crisis in Europe between the US and the Soviet Union over the heads of the Europeans was a constant fear, since no-one was confident that the US would stand by its Treaty commitments. Stationing of US forces in Europe as effective hostages was one way of ensuring that the US couldn’t just cut and run in the event of a new crisis. Yet this is effectively what we are now seeing. Relations with Russia are not, and never again will be, as important for the US as for the Europeans, and defeat in Ukraine, whilst humiliating, will be much easier for the US to swallow. It is the Europeans who will have to deal with the debris left behind, and US involvement will if anything make that task more difficult. On the other hand, the US will probably have little practical alternative to disengaging from Europe anyway, and ceding strategic primacy there to Russia.

It’s doubtful whether, in spite of bleatings from Brussels, “Europe” will be able to act as a coherent entity towards Russia, and of course Moscow will do its best to inhibit such a unified approach (though it won’t want simple anarchy, either.) The fact is that, whilst the whole of Europe will live under the shadow of the projection of Russian military power, and will have to deal with the political consequences of that. It will affect different countries in very different ways, and the most likely outcome is a series of loose and informal groupings which collectively have the same broad idea of how to deal with Russia, but which also act independently or in combination with countries from other groupings. This isn’t actually that hard to understand, if you ignore all the theory and look at how nations actually deal with each other in practice. There are times when the interests of nations coincide and times when they don’t. Even if nations like to keep at least some coherence in their overall foreign policy dealings with each other, there are lots of cases where, for example, they may support different political or military factions, have different economic interests, or actively seek cooperation or not, all with the same country.

So you can forget the nonsense about “pro-Russian” governments coming to power. The whole “pro-X or Y” discourse is a residue of the binary, dualist thinking of the Cold War, and it wasn’t even very useful then. Today it’s essentially irrelevant. What we will have is a number of states that see their best interests lying in a closer and less confrontational relationship with Russia: after all, what is a confrontational relationship in five years’ time actually going to achieve? It’s doubtful whether it will even help in terms of domestic policies. We can expect neighbours to try to coordinate policies towards Russia, and different groups trying to influence NATO and EU policy towards that country. But the harsh reality is that there are too many different interests involved to ever achieve much coordination beyond the purely verbal level.

Institutionally, though, we are unlikely to see either NATO or the EU close their doors. There are too many pragmatic small-scale advantages, too many ways of playing the system for your benefit, too many problems in trying to reproduce even a small part of their functions, and no chance of any agreement on what might replace them. NATO is in any event a shadow of its former self, a military pygmy in terms of deployable forces, whose remaining strengths are in consultation and the resolution of differences which otherwise could fester and create real problems. But nobody would set up an organisation like NATO from scratch today. As regards the EU, its history, and what diplomats call the acquis, which is to say everything that has been agreed and implemented since the 1950s, obviously won’t go away, and the Commission, for example, is not going to give up its laboriously-acquired powers easily. But in fact, open institutional warfare is highly unlikely. What we’ll see is a slow decline in the perceived importance of Brussels, together with an increasing tendency for issues of importance to be settled by ad hoc groups with a common interest, varying in their membership according to subject—the same tendency I mentioned earlier

The foregoing has been mainly, but not exclusively, about the wider consequences of Ukraine, but obviously the wider consequences of Iran will be even more profound, though we cannot yet be sure what they will be: they depend in part, after all, on things that haven’t happened yet. But there are a couple of supplementary points worth making. One is the widespread recognition, at last, of the importance of strategic resilience and strategic assets as political and even military levers. Of course there’s nothing actually new here, it’s just that the fixation with crude numerical military power, and “economic” power in the sense of the widespread use of the dollar, has obscured certain eternal verities. One of these is that you can only fight wars if you have the resources to do so, and the “resources” in question have mutated over the centuries, from manpower, money to pay troops, and supplies to keep them fed, up to productive capacity and access to mining and processing raw materials and components and semifinished goods. The West has believed for some decades that wars will be short and cheap, and that the underpinnings of military capability can in the end be bought on the open market if the price is right. But the age of finance-based warfare, inasmuch as it ever existed, has given way to the eternal verities of resource-based warfare.

Sometimes, the results are almost comically banal. The thousands of US Navy sailors stationed off the Gulf, unable to call at any port, have to be fed and watered somehow, or they will become an ineffective fighting force. (And imagine what a serious outbreak of influenza would do to the crew of an aircraft carrier.) The “embargo” on Iranian oil exports will thus endure only for as long as the US can keep ships in position to enforce it. I’ve long argued that power-projection is becoming an outdated concept for purely military reasons anyway, but to those we can now add the iron constraints of logistics. Power projection has in the past relied on secure mounting bases such as Cyprus or Djibouti (even little Ascension Island turned out to be invaluable in 1982.) In the Middle East and Asia these don’t really exist any more, and the sheer expense and complexity of keeping sizeable forces deployed for months at a time thousands of kilometres from home, as well as the wear and tear on equipment, are prohibitive beyond a certain point. Not the least of the associated problems is the consequences of the past assumptions of a short victorious war, which have led to the running down of logistic support vessels and the stocks they are supposed to transport.

But of course it’s one thing to recognise the importance of these issues: it’s quite another do anything about it. Dollars are only useful if you can buy things that people agree to sell to you.You can’t fuel ships, make missiles or even deploy radar equipment using dollar notes. Since the West is limited in the raw materials it possesses, since much of the world supply of these materials is under the control of countries that are not on good terms with the West, and since many staple components of military equipment and its associated logistics are produced far away in states who are aware of the leverage this might give them, then we can look forward to all sorts of interesting political configurations developing, often on an ad hoc basis and disconnected from each other.

In some ways it is this, rather than the shape of future wars, which is of primary interest. After all, silicon chips are only incidentally used in military equipment: they also enable me to write these words and you to read them. The idea that “Europe,” let alone “NATO” can have organised relationships with Taiwan, say, let alone China, on such issues seems to me to be laughable. States who have things the West wants will play western nations off against each other, for financial and political reasons, and may demand military and other concessions in exchange. Indeed, the West may need to re-learn, nation by nation, what the old trading nations knew: the best source of stability is good relations with the providers of the things you need, not threatening them.

The second is a forcible and unwelcome education for the West in the complexities of real strategic situations, and notably the role and importance of local actors, singly and collectively, and their complex relations with larger states. For over a century, the popular western cultural model of world crises has been of a Great Game, played out between major powers, with locals as suffering, but otherwise mostly non-playing, characters. The term itself comes from the new mass popular literature of the late nineteenth century, although the reality was somewhat less spectacular than writers like Kipling liked to portray. In fact, Empires had been coming into conflict on their borders for thousands of years: here, it was simply that the expanding Romanov Empire was starting to threaten British trade routes to India, so both sides did what they could to strengthen their own position and weaken that of the enemy, without resorting to war, which would have been horribly expensive and very difficult.

But with the influence of popular writers like John Buchan, drawing on old tropes of Judaeo-Masonic conspiracies and adding new ones related to the activities of financiers and arms manufacturers, the popular culture of the last century found ways of explaining (or at least accounting for) events which were otherwise difficult to interpret, in the bright primary colours of great power machinations. And governments often followed suit. This was already evident in 1917, when the British and French governments dismissed the Bolsheviks as “German-Jewish mercenaries” employed by Berlin to take Russia out of the war and ensure German victory. And since the Bolsheviks did negotiate a separate peace, that was as much proof as anyone needed that it had been a conspiracy all along.

This reductivist manner of understanding the world probably reached its nadir in the Cold War, where entire complex conflicts were reduced to “pro-western” and “pro-Soviet” factions, as though that explained something. (I remember once playing a tabletop war-game about the Ethiopian-Somalian conflict in the Ogaden. In the delay between the design of the game and its appearance, “pro-western” Ethiopia had undergone a revolution, and was now “pro-Soviet.”) But sometimes this had important real-life ramifications. Thus, the Soviet Union supported the African National Congress in South Africa, as part of its wider African policy, and the ANC took the support because it had no other sources of help. But whilst it was true that many ANC cadres were trained in Moscow (I met a fair number) and the ANC had a superstructure of Marxist vocabulary and thinking little adapted to its region, nonetheless by the early 1990s, most of the leadership were happy to drop the Soviet Union for increasing support from the West. Indeed, Moscow got little or nothing out of its years of support: a typical story, in fact, of great power involvement.

Nonetheless, excitable popular interpretations and accusations of “interference” and “destabilisation” were easy to understand in those days and difficult to disprove, and, on a small-scale map, could have a certain fallacious verisimilitude. (Those of a certain age will recall “pro-Soviet” India and “pro-western” Pakistan.) One of the big intellectual problems of the end of the Cold War, therefore, was the abrupt end of superpower rivalry, and so a shortage of obvious enemies to blame. When Yugoslavia started to fall apart, the inherited western explanation was that it would be a prelude to a Soviet invasion (which to be fair the Soviets did have contingency plans for.) But what was going on now? I took part in a number of European meetings in 1991/92 which were almost embarrassing in their revelations of the West’s wholesale ignorance of the country and its history, when Yugoslavia was essentially just a cheap holiday destination. Inevitably we wound up mostly talking about ourselves, and what “Europe” could do. One look into the bottomless pit of history, and governments recoiled and tried to take refuge in normative moralising, which succeeded as well as you would expect.

The sudden absence of Russia as a global manipulator, and the very slow arrival of China, created the conditions for the proclamation of what I call the Hollywood Hegemon: the attempt to persuade the American public, and gullible foreigners, that the US after the turn of the century was not a failing industrial power with an ageing military, but a world-bestriding imperial colossus. Iran has confirmed what Ukraine should already have demonstrated: not that this isn’t so now, but that it never was so. It was essentially all a marketing exercise. Now of course the US has a great deal of military power, even now, but as I’ve pointed out many times, power is not something that exists in the abstract. After all, the word is cognate with the French pouvoir which as a verb means “able to do something.” You can have all the theoretical military power in the world, but if you can’t do what you want to do with it, it’s irrelevant. Currently, the US is not able to intervene successfully in the Middle East against Iran, in Asia against China or in Europe against Russia, and that’s what counts.

There’s a lot to say about the strategic consequences of that, on another occasion. Here I just want to make the point that we will have to get used, intellectually, to a world where the actions and objectives of locals predominate, and there will be at least a need to attempt to grasp local dynamics. We can no longer abstract little non-white people as non-playing characters. So in the Gulf, we can anticipate some extremely strange, often temporary, strategic patterns emerging, as nations take short-term measures with short-term allies, with whom they may be in conflict in other areas. Only the West will be surprised. It’s highly improbable that in five years’ time we shall be able to line up a team of “pro-Iranian” states in the Gulf against a team of “pro-US” ones. It’s never really worked like that in the past, beneath the surface, and it certainly won’t be like that in the future. The Gulf monarchies judged in the past that the presence of US and other foreign bases, personnel and contractors effectively as hostages, was a stabilising factor and would discourage aggression by states not wanting to tangle with the West as well. But this deterrent model clearly doesn’t work any more and may actually be dangerous. States in the region have therefore concluded (as have their equivalents in Europe) that the US is simply not a useful political counterweight to local threats, and they will have to look for other, more flexible, solutions.

We will have to get used to taking the complexities of regional conflicts seriously, and not dismissing local actors as “CIA stooges” or the opposite equivalent. We must recognise that groups can fight each other one day and cooperate the next, and have converging but not identical short-term interests. In Mali, we have just seen an improbable alliance of circumstance between the FLA Tuareg separatists from the North, the JNIM, an offshoot of Al Qaida, and the local franchise of the Islamic State. The first two cooperated to seize the regional capital of Kidal, while the two Islamist groups, though bitter rivals, carried out a widespread series of attacks which killed various government leaders and badly shook the junta’s hold on power in Bamako. Bizarre as this may seem to western analysts, it makes sense from the point of view of the players: both the FLA and the JNIM want to destroy the power of the junta in the North, and JNIM and the IS want to establish an Islamic regime, even if their ultimate goals are different. They will cooperate until their interests diverge once more, when they will fight each other again.

This kind of situation—there’s an analogous one in Syria along the border with Lebanon—is going to be the shape of the future, and we shall be challenged to understand it. To add to the fun, there are also regional powers involved in these questions (Algeria, Turkey) who have their own agendas and will cooperate with others or fight them depending on how they see their interests for the time being. And we have to stop thinking of nations as inevitable and unchanging unities with fixed boundaries: it’s important to keep reminding ourselves, for example, that Hezbollah is not Lebanon, any more than Ansar Allah is Yemen.

This, to put it mildly, will be a challenge, and politicians and pundits will try to ignore it as much as possible, clinging to outdated notions of great power dominance and hegemony, legacy institutions and the nations of the world arrayed in neat lines like opposing football teams. (I have just received an invitation to come and hear a top UN official talk about the UN’s potential role in solving the Hormuz crisis. No thanks.) In fact, for the West, it’s a pretty bad moment for the world to become radically more complicated. The capacity and quality of most western governments is in severe decline, and few now have the regional expertise they had even a generation ago.

With the media and the punditocracy it’s much worse. The old foreign correspondents are largely gone, and the interns who have succeeded them know little about anything. And among pundits who want to be influential, as opposed to respected, the furious competition to produce something that might be read, let alone be influential with decision-makers, is such that they will produce what decision-makers want to hear. Thus the paradox that most “Iran” experts in Washington actually spend their time writing about what the US should do, not about the situation in the country, of which they often know little. (No-one, after all, will bother to read an article which says “it’s all a total shambles and we should stay out of it.”) For the alt-media it’s even worse: they are not numerous, and few have the time or the breadth of knowledge to move suddenly from the situation in Ukraine to the complexities of relations between the Gulf monarchies, which is what their business model requires. It’s likely they will just wind up telling their audiences what they want to hear, as many do now anyway.

So all in all, the West will be confronted, less with a new model of the world than a revelation and a development of what always underlay the old one. Unfortunately, understanding how the world works now, making sensible suggestions and carrying them out require exactly those skills and competencies which western governments and western societies have sent the last generation or more carefully destroying. Shame, that.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ Thanks to all of those who have recently contributed.

And as always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. And now:

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In 1943, Jorge Semprùn, a Spanish exile in France, was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp for his Resistance activities. Semprùn, scarcely twenty at the time, would have been executed immediately, but his life was saved because he had joined the (illegal) Spanish Communist Party the year before, and subsequently the FTP-MOI, the clandestine Resistance organisation largely recruited from foreigners, and organised by the French Communist Party. The concentration camp, like many in Germany, was effectively administered by an elite group of inmates, in this case members of the German Communist Party many of whom had spent the best part of a decade there. They recognised Semprùn as one of their own, and falsified his personal documents to show that he had skills which were worth keeping him alive for. He spent the next traumatic year in the Camp working in an administrative job. He survived the war, becoming a senior official of the exiled Spanish Communist Party, before breaking with them, and developing a career as a writer of books and screenplays, finishing as Culture Minister after the death of Franco. Quite a life to be saved by the stroke of a pen.

His experience is a microcosm of the way in which the subject populations of the Nazis survived, some in extreme circumstances as here (one could add Primo Levi, another resistance worker whose life was spared in Auschwitz because he was a chemical engineer), others in a more everyday fashion. I will say a few words in this essay about both physical and mental survival and resistance, starting deliberately with some exceptional cases, because I think we are now moving into very difficult times, where the kind of psychological strength needed for personal survival, and the kind of physical and organisational capabilities needed just to keep society going, will not be those that out society currently values, or for that matter is even able to generate. I’ll make a number of references to the Second World War as we go, because what happened then and afterwards is an extreme exemplification of the wider argument I want to make.

Let’s start from the worst of the worst, then. I’ve said before that the easiest way to understand the Nazis is as a group of psychopathic management consultants. Here, the question was simply: who was going to survive? Europe in 1942 was starving, and some form of priority was necessary for rationing food. In the absence of a McKinsey-type organisation, the Nazis set about establishing priorities of their own to decide who would be fed. First, of course, the Germans. Within that, front-line soldiers and industrial workers were the most important. After the Germans, foreigners supporting the war effort in some way. Right at the end of a long list came prisoners of war and inmates of concentration camps, as well as the civilian populations of the conquered territories in the East. Since not everybody could be fed, the solution was to concentrate the food where it was needed, and, um, dispose of the rest. Thus the two million Polish Jews murdered in 1942. Until recently, we would have assumed that such brutal questions of survival and priority were safely in the distant past. But what happens when there’s not enough food to go round in Europe in 2027? Which leaders will be capable of understanding, let alone dealing with, the ethical and practical problems that will certainly follow?

Zooming out, we should be familiar with the commonplace observation that some people survive in situations where others don’t, and some are useful when others aren’t. Take your average disaster movie from the 1970s, or any story about a small group of survivors from a plane crash and you’ll have an idea of what I mean. Survival doesn’t only mean physical survival, either. Evidence suggests that mental survival is actually more important. In the concentration camps (as with the prison camps in in the Soviet Union) those who fared worst came from the respectable middle class, who had long been used to the deference and obedience of the State and of men in uniform. Bankers, lawyers, or for that matter Party officials in the Gulags, often broke down psychologically because they could not understand by what process they had become suddenly the lowest of the low. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, was a pastor and theologian finally executed by the Nazis just before the end of the war. But almost until the end, his letters suggest that he believed a mistake had been made. He shouldn’t be in a concentration camp, and if he could find a good lawyer he could surely get himself released. The psychoanalyst Victor Frankl, himself an inmate in Auschwitz, recounts how he and others set up a rudimentary counselling service to help new arrivals better adapt to the hell into which they had been sent. (Counselling tends to mean something a bit different these days.) By contrast, working-class inmates, habitual criminals, trades unionists and groups such as homosexuals often survived psychologically because they had always lived with the idea of the State as an enemy. How by contrast, will today’s comfortable and entitled middle-class react to such mild constraints as compulsory petrol rationing, or the widespread cancellation of holiday flights, and extended waiting times and triage in hospitals?

Widening the focus again, war and crisis are not just, as I have suggested, a form of price discovery, they are a brutal way of sorting people with psychological strength and practical skills from the rest. Semprùn joined the Resistance, and survived the camps in large part because of the solidarity of the Communist movement, and its long experience (apart from the unfortunate hiatus in 1939-41) of fighting against the Nazis: it seemed natural, which is why a sizeable part of the Resistance came from the Communist Party which had been a semi-clandestine organisation anyway, and many others came from marginalised and dissident political or social groups. The sociology of Resistance in Occupied Europe is a fascinating subject in itself, because its members also included convinced Catholics, right-wing nationalists and just plain angry patriots, as well as groups of the Left. (Indeed, the forces of the State also rebelled on occasions: the liberation of Paris was led by the city’s Police force, partly because they had access to weapons.) But there was always an ideology, a faith, a pride in the nation: all things that we’ve carefully done away with. In France, the myth of universal resistance, damaged by such works as the 1968 film The Sorrow and the Pity has been at least partly rehabilitated through the work of recent historians with access to the files of the German occupiers, with their endless complaints about how a recalcitrant French population tried to make life difficult for an over-stretched occupation force. As usual, it’s also a question of context: the dilemmas of an Army officer or a government official stationed in Paris would be different from those of a solicitor in a small town in the Unoccupied Zone. But maybe dilemmas don’t change that much: in a couple of years’ time, will a doctor feel justified in buying petrol on the black market to help look after their patients?

But there’ also the more positive question of finding those with the right skills for exceptional times, for example in the chaos of 1944-45 when newly liberated territories had to be administered. Such people existed then in sufficient numbers: it’s not clear they do now. This had already been made obvious in the military, where the skills needed of a peacetime manager were not identical to those needed by an operational commander: indeed, it was normal for peacetime commanders to be shunted aside when the shooting started. But even in wartime, it’s horses for courses and the skills needed by a very high-level commander may be as much diplomatic and political as military. Thus Eisenhower, who had never commanded troops in battle, was the right man to exercise overall command in 1944-45, whereas Montgomery was not.

More generally, it’s interesting to study the wartime mobilisation of talent at that era, especially in Britain, where men and women with all sorts of weird and wonderful skills and experiences found themselves pressed into service for the war effort, and doing things they could never have expected. Likewise, and this continued even in peacetime, military organisations found out they needed people capable of carrying out non-standard, often highly specialised and covert activities. In many cases, they had the reputation of being “bad soldiers” (hair too long, insubordinate) or officers too independent to reach the highest ranks. It’s this willingness to work in unorthodox situations, by the way, to deal with the resulting stresses and demonstrate great independence, that tends to distinguish genuine Special Forces personnel; not being eight feet tall or able to kill you with the side of a matchbox.

All this in turn is an aspect of a more generic and more perennial issue. Any organisation of any size has an inbuilt tension between those who do, and who always will do, routine jobs, and those whose capabilities also qualify them for non-standard situations. This is essentially what structural redundancy is about: the ability of an organisation to develop and retain the resources needed to deploy in untypical situations, and to manage them successfully. This means attention to people, not just procedures and facilities. You may have an elaborate written plan for dealing with emergencies, and the right equipment available with compulsory training, but none of that is any good if people panic, or faint because they can’t stand the sight of blood. (Yes, I’ve seen it happen.) A good organisation also needs a register of reliable people it can send out into the field, into non-standard situations to manage non-standard problems, with a good chance of success.

Redundancy does not have to be dramatic, but lack of redundancy can have unexpected and quite serious consequences. You can tell a good organisation by the redundancy it has built in, and the degree of competence it shows in managing unexpected emergencies. In one celebrated case in 2009, no less than five Eurostar trains were trapped in the Channel Tunnel at the same time, stranding thousands of passengers for extended periods. (As Oscar Wilde might have put it, one could be accounted a misfortune, but five sounds remarkably like total incompetence.) The proximate cause (snow melting onto electric circuits) was less important than the fact that the organisation as a whole had no plans or capability to cope with such situations, and the personnel were untrained in how to handle thousands of angry and in some cases desperate passengers.

But all this costs money, you see, which could better be spent on executive jets and share buy-backs. After all, the worst is never certain, and it might never happen. Until it does. Yet what is curious is that the same disease has increasingly affected the public sector as well, where the financial incentives are not so brutal. Indeed, behind the endless “efficiency” drives that have characterised the public sector around the world over the last generation or two, there is, in reality, no genuine rationality at all. All one can say is that political folklore has always branded the public sector “wasteful,” without explaining exactly why that should be. (Though I recall the case of a distinguished figure from the private sector some years ago who demanded that a government building should be redecorated before he would deign to work there: “I can’t bring people from industry into this pigsty” he is reported to have said.) The result is that virtually any initiative to cut staff or spending is greeted with rapturous acclamation, and is correspondingly difficult to argue convincingly against, for ideological reasons. After all, as long as the system still works, more or less, then if less money is spent it must by definition have become more “efficient.” And even if we are cutting corners and have no spare capacity, we can always trust to luck, talk pompously about risk management and intelligent planning, and assume that the worst will never happen. Until it does.

To a far greater degree that most people appreciate, we live in a just-in-time society, whereas we used to live in a just-in-case one. Organisations today are structured and run for normal circumstances only, where everything just about works, and people and resources are just about adequate if everything functions correctly and things happen just in time. The old habit of building in staff redundancy to cover people away sick or on holiday would seem laughably profligate now: the question “who’s dealing with the subject in their absence?” would be meaningless in many organisations today. After all, things will work out, won’t they? Until they don’t. But if this is irritating and frustrating in daily life, it is potentially very serious when it involves major public issues. Covid revealed that most governments had run down emergency stocks, failed to develop any useful contingency plans, and didn’t have the surge capacity in their health services to cope with an emergency of such proportions. But in many ways this wasn’t surprising: it was already clear (for example from the Brexit saga in the UK) that governments in general had run down their reserve capacity to the point where they simply couldn’t handle anything that wasn’t absolutely routine and predictable.

It’s not just about organisation, either, but about the people who work there. Now this isn’t yet another diatribe about Young (or not so young) People Today. The fact is that people respond to the cues given to them by their parents, their society, the institutions for which they work, and increasingly their governments. I think it’s fair to say that the incentives that have been provided to those growing up over the last fifty years have served to create a population at all levels less prepared than ever before to meet the practical and psychological demands of significant new challenges. And since “significant” is a massive understatement to describe what’s coming over the next few years, this is really quite serious.

Take one simple change that affects all levels: the move from broadly defined areas of work in institutions to fussy lists of detailed objectives. This began in the 1990s, and generated a whole culture of boxes to tick, percentages to reach and, most of all, objectives that could be quantified in some way. Objectives that could not be quantified tended to get left to one side. When I first joined the government service, I would arrive at a new job with a list of four or five broad areas to look after, followed by a phrase like “other duties as directed.” This was pretty much the spirit of the times, and the first attempts to replace it with lists of rigid and exclusive objectives were met with the criticism that if you didn’t already know what you were supposed to be doing, then there must be something wrong with you and your organisation.

Over time, this has produced a working culture in which initiative is in practice discouraged, in spite of the drivel about “self-starters” in recruitment advertisements. People limit themselves to what they have been specifically told to do, often measured against quantitative targets, and neglect those things that, however useful and sensible they may be, don’t figure in the printed list. This means that there is effectively no intellectual or practical capability to respond to the unexpected, let alone to serious crises. And when the blame game begins, it’s seen as a perfectly reasonable defence to argue that such and such a crisis “wasn’t my responsibility.” As long as you have ticked your boxes and met your targets, no-one can blame you if a disaster occurs elsewhere. We can see this mentality at work in the reactions (or to be more precise lack of reactions) of western governments to the crises over Ukraine, and even more Iran. People attempt to deal with a crisis by doing what they have always done, only more so. Things that are not their responsibility are no doubt the responsibility of someone else, except that no-one, at any level, seems to have realised that the problem with politics is, as Harold Macmillan famously said, “events,” and so no-one is actually responsible or prepared for events that are not anticipated.

The bureaucratic, managerial style of modern politics, exemplified best perhaps by the unfortunate Mr Starmer, cannot by definition deal with the unexpected or with a genuine crisis effectively. Fifty years ago, government bureaucracies were in general, and for all the ignorant invective directed against them, large enough and flexible enough to cope with the unexpected. Now they drown under a tidal wave of management-consultant type administration, which, combined with radical cuts in their size, and thus the level of their inbuilt redundancy, has destroyed any real capacity to respond to the unexpected, and anyway encourages the best people to leave.

Organisations send signals about who they want to recruit and who they want to keep, not just (or even principally) by their public image, but by the way they treat their staff: who they promote and who they leave by the wayside. Any organisation that proudly announces job cuts sends a message that financial objectives are more important that the welfare of the staff, or even doing the job properly. Many years ago, when I first encountered the British Treasury’s never-ending attempts to reduce the size of the public sector, I noticed that the continual references to jobs “saved.” Thinking that this didn’t sound like the Treasury at all, I investigated further, to discover that here, “saved” was used in the unusual sense of “lost”: ie the destruction of the jobs of their colleagues in other Ministries was regarded as a morally praiseworthy activity. (But then I have always believed that Finance Ministry officials are not born naturally like you and me, but manufactured in underground facilities, like Sauron’s Orcs.)

With ever-shrinking workforces and ever more competition for top jobs, the ambitious try to read the signals their institution sends, while the rest just try to do the best job they can. Most institutions today reward the cautious and the conventional, those who are unlikely to make mistakes and can be relied upon to follow even the dumbest political instructions. The days when institutions were large and varied enough to accommodate the unconventional, non-standard kind of person whom you might need in an emergency, have long gone. The result is that organisations have become risk-averse, because the people in charge of them have floated upwards by not making mistakes, and by not taking controversial initiatives. This doesn’t mean that the decisions they took have worked out well, just that by taking decisions which are fashionable, or which emulate decisions taken elsewhere, they could insulate themselves from criticism when things go wrong. (“We followed standard practice.”)

This even applies to the military, which may seem surreal: how can you have a risk-averse military? Well, wars and hostilities of any kind are relatively rare, but in peacetime “events” happen every day. Some years ago, I was talking to a Naval Officer, who remarked that commanding your own ship—once the height of any officer’s ambition— was no longer what it had been. Too many things could go wrong. “The only advice I give” he said “is don’t **** up. Try to get to the end of your command without the ship breaking down or running aground, without accusations of sexual harassment, or bad behaviour by the crew ashore. Otherwise, your career’s finished.” Much the same is true of Armies, which have been deployed in recent decades into completely impossible situations, where the established laws of war are simply irrelevant, and junior soldiers are left to take life and death decisions in moments. Senior commanders know that if anything goes wrong, the political leadership will disown them. So it makes a grotesque kind of sense to prefer the possibility that a suicide bomber may kill some of your troops to the possibility that one of your troops will shoot a suspected suicide bomber, only to find he’s not. The first will not damage your career: the second may well end it.

The result is that western militaries are now headed by careful, conformist officers, more managers than leaders, with no capacity to think differently or radically, or even understand the enormous changes that are taking place in warfare and the consequences they will have. They realise vaguely that drones have changed everything, but not how, and why, still less what to do. They make speeches and attend committee meetings where everybody says the same things, but nobody really has any creative ideas. There might be a superficial comparison with the Generals of the First World War, save that the latter had generally commanded forces on operations, and they proved themselves far more open to innovations when the War began. The day-to-day work of today’s commanders, on the other hand, is financial management, personnel reductions, diversity initiatives, procurement decisions, public relations and dealing with a political class that is more uninformed about strategic issues than ever before in history. And their success in dealing with such issues largely determines their career path. After all, we don’t really need competent military commanders, do we? Until we do.

Senior military and police commanders, like heads of government departments and Ambassadors, react to the political agenda as it is set by their political leadership and the media: they cannot do otherwise. And that agenda is very much concerned with mundane daily issues of personnel and financial management, of endless detailed reporting, of evanescent scandals and lurid, if generally unsourced, accounts of misbehaviour: in short, of non-technical issues that the average journalist or politician can understand. If there is no pressure for long-term and innovative thinking, there will be none. If the rewards are entirely for dealing with the banal problems of the day, the capability to respond to the unexpected will atrophy, or just never develop.

This would be less of a problem if there were influential outside forces calling for a recognition of the need for change, as there have been for most of modern history. But whilst there are a number of dissident writers and podcasters on such subjects as Ukraine and Iran, they represent a tiny fringe of the punditocracy, and they have little influence. For every retired officer on YouTube telling us that Ukraine will lose, there are twenty or thirty confidently foretelling a Ukrainian victory. The same is true of think-tanks and the media, of international organisations, and almost the whole of the political class and its lackeys. It is tempting to imagine that this is all some vast conspiracy, but in fact the truth is more depressing than that.

The reality is that all these people resemble each other to a frightening extent. They go to the same universities and study the same subjects, they read the same media, they reinforce each other’s views when they socialise together, they marry each other and seek recognition and promotion through displays of conformity, thus obeying a central commandment of the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) of which they are part. The days when relations between diplomats, politicians and the military were more difficult and often conflictual, because their backgrounds and education were different, have long gone. These days you can easily mistake one for the other. And journalists used to start young and develop their own expertise, and with it a healthy scepticism about the political process. Now they go to Journalism School. Finally, the sheer difficulty of getting a worthwhile job these days tends to encourage conformity: advertise a research post on East-West relations at a think-tank, and you might get fifty credentialed candidates. Why take a risk with someone whose views are a little outside the mainstream? You recruit somebody safe and conventional, who is just as wrong about Russia as everybody else. But being wrong about Russia is just one of those things. It’s not a problem, until it is.

Thus, perverse incentives have created a political class, with its advisers and heads of institutions, which thinks alike, which is focused primarily on procedure and the avoidance of risk, and which is reluctant to think differently or accept the idea that radical change may be forced upon them. If you had to design a ruling class and its acolytes particularly ill-prepared for the likely consequences of the Ukraine and Iran crises, you could not have done better. This accounts, I think, for the surreal complacency that our ruling class displays at the moment. When people encounter a truly new and disorienting idea for the first time—like the possible end of an economy based on mass petroleum usage—the brain goes into a kind of catatonic mode typical of how people often react in life-threatening emergencies: not with panic or violence but a kind of numb stupor. That, I suspect is the way that western elites are starting to react now.

But of course ordinary people are also subject to signals from society about what success is, and what they should strive for. We may not regret the passing of a historical ethos of service, patriotism, good conduct etc. or the elevation of great sportsmen, war heroes or explorers to a pantheon for imitation, but we have to recognise that what has taken their place is a simple ethos of real or apparent financial success. Our society tells people today that what matters is how much money they have, and young people take their examples from the financial success of their elders. (In Marseille recently there have been a large number of gangland killings carried out by 14 and 15-year olds: when interrogated by the Police they justify their conduct by the amount of money they were paid.) More generally, it’s a long time since I remember a major public figure being generally condemned for the way in which they have become rich. Even those disgusted by Jeffrey Epstein’s personal life seemed to have no problem with how he made his money.

This begins from the top, and society tells us very quickly how the ruling class of tomorrow will be selected, and how we should behave if we want to join it. It’s largely, we learn, a question of credentials, and having the right opinions. Education in the traditional sense is not really important: we can outsource literacy and numeracy to machines. History is, on balance, dangerous to teach. What matters is to have the right attitudes, so schools and teachers follow the incentives they are given, and pupils emerge functionally illiterate, which doesn’t matter until it does. Universities in many western countries exist to provide credentials, not education. They select students, including for higher degrees, as much on “personal narratives,” and ethnic or social background as on academic ability, and teachers are expected (I’ve done it), to help them to scramble over the minimum pass-mark, if necessary. There are real concerns in some countries about a lowering of standards in scientific and technical subjects, including medicine, but this won’t matter, until it does. After all, universities are just responding to the incentives they are given, to get as many people out of the door with certificates as possible, not necessarily to provide an education. Indeed, if you look at a programme of forthcoming events at a major university (I have one here) it’s mostly performative virtue-signalling: inviting the right speakers, addressing the right themes, supporting the right campaigns. As a preparation for life in the PMC, it’s admirable. Meanwhile, we can get doctors and nurses from abroad, and outsource technical needs to India and China, or at least until we can’t.

The combination of these two factors is producing a PMC that is less and less well educated, but also one that rushes towards whichever jobs are currently believed to pay best or have the most glamour attached to them. As well as those who go into fashionable careers like finance, internet startups or public relations, there is now a huge new class of aspiring politicians, “advisers,” media figures and pundits, not really qualified for anything, and without any real experience, with their eyes riveted on a lucrative career. The result is a ruling class that is boring, poorly educated, lacking any real experience, and above all conformist, nervously checking that they have not gone beyond the bounds of accepted speech, and so might have put that coveted next job in jeopardy. Just the kind of people you want to be running things when the tsunami hits.

But it isn’t just a matter of intellectual qualities or the robustness of organisations. It’s also about personal strength as well. I’ve been in a few dodgy places and situations in my life, but I’ve never been in a war (directly anyway) or in a prison, let alone a concentration camp. Much of my generation was born and grew up when times were difficult, but that was still after the War, and, in western Europe at least, we didn’t have to worry about the knock on the door at three in the morning, or political violence in the streets. Western society as a whole has led a sheltered existence over the last couple of generations, and the ruling class particularly so. It’s not just that the ruling class has been insulated from poverty and insecurity, as ruling classes always have been, but rather that they have grown up with a sense of entitlement; less to material wealth than to happiness, and getting what they want. The approved method of accessing rewards, power and influence these days, carefully inculcated at university, is through demonstrating your vulnerability or your marginalised status. “Neurodiversity,” learning difficulties, membership of “historically marginalised” groups will help you get on in life and move into better jobs with more power and influence. (It’s a bit like sights you see in parts of Africa, where the sick and mutilated compete to show you their wounds, hoping for charity.) This isn’t going to work any more, when it comes to food rationing, for example. Their sense of entitlement, whether financial or political, is going to take an almighty hit, and governments themselves, unused to having to make such decisions, are likely to be overwhelmed.

A couple of generations ago, societies knew what hunger, mass poverty and political insecurity were like. This didn’t necessarily make them “stronger,” nor are we necessarily “weaker” today. It’s a question of what you are used to. The PMC, far from all this, floats in a little bubble of contentment where such problems mostly happen elsewhere, and even then are only occasions for performative gestures. Then you discover that your local hypermarket is closed because the delivery lorries couldn’t get the diesel, that your local garage has no petrol, and that the pharmacy has run out of cough medicines for your child. All your life, you have been used to receiving things without effort and with the smallest disagreement possible. Others necessarily do your bidding. What happens when a group of youths armed with knives comes to drain the petrol tank of your car, and asks for money to “protect” your house?” What happens when you encounter an improvised roadblock that you have to pay cash to pass, or when drug dealers demand proof of where you live before they will let you into your road? These things happen elsewhere in the world all the time, of course, but they also happen in some areas of western cities, including areas a few kilometres away from where I’m writing. Just not to the PMC: yet.

But won’t “community leaders,” step into the breach as they always have? Well, there are large parts of western cities now where there are no “communities” in the first place. You can’t buy, or even rent, an apartment in Paris on anything resembling an ordinary salary. Those apartments that are inhabited are bought by people from finance, the media, public relations or internet start-ups, usually on two salaries. When your apartment building is occupied by accountants, currency traders, PR consultants, TV journalists, YouTube influencers and celebrity plastic surgeons, where is your community? And who are the natural leaders? Who is going to competently take charge when the power goes off?

In the end, I’m less worried about ordinary people—though we ourselves will objectively suffer more—than about the PMC, which will probably have some kind of collective nervous breakdown. We shouldn’t idealise the past, but it remains true that the kind of men and women who fought World War 2 and rebuilt Europe don’t exist any more. But the uncomfortable thing is that it’s not they who were exceptional, but our current ruling class. Intellectually and morally pampered, feeling entitled to everything, only able to cope with routine, incurious about the future, they will suddenly find themselves confronted in their own jobs with things they never thought possible. Utterly incomprehensible media reports, economic crises, bankruptcies, large-scale outbreaks of looting, political crises, no Internet … and then it may start to get really serious. How will a political system of this sort ever bring itself to make friends with Russia again, so that at least we have some petrol?

Forty years of Liberal-neoliberal vandalism of society and the economy have brought us to a position where our just-in-time society itself can only really survive if nothing serious goes wrong. And if it does, we have a political class and a PMC which could have been purposed-designed to panic, to run away and generally react as incompetently as possible. For decades we have been told not to worry, the worst will never happen and anyway it doesn’t matter. It does now.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ Thanks to all of those who have recently contributed.

And as always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. And now:

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I’ve written on several occasions in the past about negotiations, especially in the context of Ukraine, and I have tried to explain what they actually are, what the rather loose vocabulary of “talks”, “meetings,” “discussions,” “negotiations” and the like actually amounts to in practical terms, and tried also to discourage people from thinking that either negotiations, or some document that comes out of them, are a sort of of magic which will resolve all problems. Whatever minimal influence I may enjoy doesn’t seem to have had any effect in clarifying things, and writers with much larger readerships and more status don’t seem interested in the subject. So let’s have another go, at the risk of perhaps repeating myself a little. (For the above reasons I’ll keep this a little shorter than usual.)

Negotiations, then, happen when there is a problem that two or more sides want to resolve, or an objective that they share, at least partly. Negotiations are a structured process of refining that shared objective, narrowing or preferably eliminating differences, and if possible producing an agreement, followed by a text that both sides are happy with. Negotiations often take place in rounds, where the partners discuss a problem or an objective and progressively approach a solution. There will be bargaining, lots of informal work in what diplomats call the “margins,” possibly some histrionics and threats to the outcome of the negotiations, and, with luck, a final agreement which may be in the form of an actual treaty, or a politically binding accord, or just a communiqué. As I have explained, documents produced in this way are not magic: they are simply texts that apply until they don’t. In turn, this is because the texts themselves have to concretise an underlying level of agreement between the parties. If that agreement no longer exists, then the text becomes useless operationally. By contrast, informal arrangements that are never written down may persist for a long time, because they suit the interests of the parties involved.

But you wouldn’t think this from the media and pundit coverage of the two rounds of discussions (not “negotiations,” please) in Islamabad, and a possible third round being discussed as I write. We’ve seen headlines like NEW WAR FEARS AS PEACE TALKS FAIL or PEACE HOPES DASHED AS US WALKS OUT, or even LAST CHANCE FOR PEACE AS NEW TALKS PROPOSED. Now its a commonplace of journalism that headlines are written by sub-editors, not the authors of the story themselves, and in this kind of case it’s clear that the different sets of interns haven’t been communicating with each other vey well. But let’s just take a moment to set out what the objectives of the parties in this crisis actually are, and then see how they relate to this discourse of alleged desperate attempts to avoid a resumption of hostilities.

The US (present) and Israel (present by proxy) want to damage and if possible destroy Iran as a functioning state. For the US this is revenge for nearly fifty years of humiliation, dating from the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran and the disastrous failure of the subsequent rescue mission, as well as Iranian attempts to frustrate US policies in the Levant. For Israel the objective is to destroy the only country standing between them and their domination of the region. (The US also represents this objective vicariously.) The Iranians obviously want to prevent all this, but they also want an end to sanctions and isolation, and they want to establish themselves as the unquestioned dominant local power, through the eviction of the US from the region. (Yes, I know it’s more complicated than that, but it will do for now.)

Now by any standards, the two (or three) countries have positions that are about as distant from each other as you can imagine. If you were the Pakistanis, skilful diplomats as they are, how would you even begin to construct an agenda, or organise proximity talks, to somehow accommodate these differences? In reality, all that can be discussed is short-term, limited measures that might temporarily suit the US and Iran, and might possibly be acceptable to Israel. In reality, though, the problem is worse than that, because the two/three sides are not even approaching these “negotiations,” with any common view of what they are, or should be. The fundamental distinction is that Iran does not need to negotiate but is content to do so because time is on its side. The US desperately needs a way out, and negotiations would be the normal mechanism for this. But negotiations in the traditional sense would lead effectively to a US surrender and neither the US Senate nor Israel would tolerate that. Therefore all that the US can do is pretend to negotiate, posing demands it knows to be unrealistic in the hope of gaining time. Thus the announcement by the US of an indefinite cease-fire as we go to press. What the US would do with such time gained is not clear, but at least it delays the inevitable.

It follows that negotiations, or for that matter a ceasefire, are not a trick or a trap while the US prepares a new attack, because a new attack cannot improve their situation. In reality, their military capability is now substantially less than it was a couple of months ago and a new attack would achieve no more than previous ones did, as well as risking further damage to US interests in the region. Moreover, the US is running out of weapons and thus every attack makes it weaker in the short to medium term, but by the same token, US domestic politics make an abandonment of the military campaign effectively impossible. As a number of people have pointed out, declaring victory and walking away is simply not an option, because Iran can make is own declarations too, not to mention closing Hormuz any time it feels like it. And Israel seems to have an effective veto over any US attempts to stop the fighting; believing, apparently, that it can coerce Washington into destroying Iran on its behalf. The result is a strategic situation which is effectively blocked, but where delay works against the interests of the US, and probably Israel, whilst it strengthens Iran. But the balance of political forces precludes the US from doing anything sensible to get out of this mess.

All of which gives a decidedly odd twist to the concept of “negotiations.” How do we even understand what is actually happening? The first point to register is that these are not “negotiations” in any normal sense, and should never have been called that. There is no agreed agenda, no agreed objective, no common view even about what sort of output can be anticipated, and of the three parties involved, one is not even present. Moreover, unless all the parties change their objectives fundamentally, there is no chance of an agreed outcome anyway. Diplomats are good at producing “results” in terms of positive-sounding communiqués, agreements on small points of detail and assurances that “we’re still talking.” That’s their job. But it’s striking that so far, there has not even been the most basic agreement on what the talks are supposed to be about, still less what they are expected to achieve, and little effort to produce results on either.

So what is this all about? It isn’t even really talks about talks, because there is no sign of interest in really talking. The US and Iran have tabled allegedly non-negotiable demands which, if accepted, would entail the effective surrender of the other. Israel seems uninterested in negotiations at all. The process simply amounts to a ritual recital of prepared positions, with offers that the other side will under no circumstances accept anyway. Put simply, without radical changes in the political picture, which at the moment we can’t foresee, negotiations serve no practical purpose.

In theory of course, the situation could be rescued. It’s normal for states to hold publicly to maximalist conditions, so that they have something to trade when negotiations actually start. (Sometimes called “negotiating fat” by diplomats.) The problem is that the two sets of demands —albeit the Iranian ones have circulated in several versions—are not just far apart: in most cases there is no point of contact between them at all. In theory, each side could drop a number of its demands, but the remainder would still be just as unacceptable, and of course the ultimate objectives of the two (or three) sides would remain irreconcilable.

If the will existed, you could probably contrive some kind of short, agreed text with a few anodyne measures in, splitting the difference on some issues. This could then be represented as “progress.” But the will doesn’t exist, because what we have here is not a problem to be solved, or an agreed objective to be reached, but two (and a half) sides each seeking the total defeat of the other. Indeed, if there were to be such a limited text, it would arguably just delay the final resolution of the crisis on the ground.

Let’s remind ourselves again that documents of all kinds in international relations are only of value insofar as they set out what the parties have decided, or what they will accept, in language all parties can live with. They do not create agreement, but they rather demonstrate that agreement already exists. Even full-dress treaties designed to be signed by Heads of State and ratified by parliaments, generally allow—if only through silence—for parties to withdraw from them, and many treaties contain explicit withdrawal procedures. Which is why I said that treaties apply until they don’t. Lower forms of diplomatic life, such as exchanges of letters and joint statements, still have political weight, and denouncing them carries a cost, but a state may well decide the cost is a reasonable sacrifice.

Likewise, in politically-charged situations, it’s normal for states to accuse each other of negotiating in bad faith, and subsequently violating agreements: among other things, the complexity of major agreements these days is such that a determined signatory can always find some misdeed to accuse another signatory of, as we have seen regularly since the days of the Cold War. If the will to make an agreement work exists, then the problems will be smoothed over. If it doesn’t exist, then the agreement will simply fall at the first obstacle. By the same token, unspoken or unofficial agreements can hold for considerable periods of time if that suits the partners.

In any event, consider the mechanics of negotiating and ratifying a theoretically binding agreement. First, there’s the politics. One common development as wars go on is that positions tend to harden, and power moves increasingly into the hands of those with more extreme views. This is normal: it’s a variant of the sunk-costs argument: as the amount of sacrifice increases, so more has to be demanded from the other side to make that sacrifice seem as though it was worth it. Thus, a feature of both World Wars was that public opinion in the West became more and more hawkish and intolerant, and more radical voices in governments increased their influence. By 1943, for example, there was little practical alternative to a policy of unconditional surrender: negotiating with Hitler was simply out of the question, and even the opposition in Germany, like the July 1944 plotters, wanted things that no western government could give.

Whilst the Iran War has only lasted weeks, not years, so far, the intensity of operations and the pace of developments, as well as the tidal wave of media and Internet comment that has been disgorged, have enormously accelerated the timescale. Moreover not only is the US running out of weapons, the number of key targets remaining for the Iranians to hit in the Gulf States and Israel is also relatively limited. In turn, this reflects the precision of modern weapons and the ability to saturate targets with low-cost offensive weapons: the British tried for years to damage German war production with night bombing: they could have accomplished far more in a week if technology with today’s range and accuracy had existed in those days.

So we are probably quite close to the end of the kinetic phase of the conflict, or at least the phase where kinetics dominates. It’s clear that, in spite of all the bluster, there will be no “land war,” and aerial bombardment cannot achieve anything better than the very limited results to date. So the real question is not “stopping the war,” since it is in its terminal phase, nor “finding a peaceful solution,” since, as I have indicated, that is ruled out by the political situation itself. It is therefore probable that we will soon move into a phase where the political process comes to dominate, and where the concentration is on the future shape of the region and future relations between the parties. The War will be over, but, as is often the case, that will be the easy bit.

It’s not obvious to me that any formal agreement between the parties is actually possible on these issues. (Whether such an agreement is legally “binding” or not is not the point, as I hope I’ve explained.) As I’ve suggested, conflict tends to strengthen the hands of more hardline groups, and if those who follow Iran are to be believed, power to decide events is moving increasingly into the hands of the IRGC. This would be typical: an obvious analogue would be the increasing dominance of the military in Prussia as World War 1 approached its end. Moreover (and unlike in the Prussian example) the IRGC can reasonably claim to have won the War, or at least prevented the US from doing so, so its political influence will necessarily be increased. What this will mean in practical terms is anyone’s guess, but two things are fairly obvious. One is that Iranian policy will have a more military and less diplomatic character, and is likely to prefer creation of facts on the ground to agreements of any kind. The other is that any kind of agreement, even implicit and unspoken, will be more difficult than it would have been, say, a couple of months ago.

Of course, it is theoretically possible that the US will undergo a transformation and realise that its interests are best served by unilaterally withdrawing from the region and ending its hostile attitude to Iran. But here we have to look not only at the half-century of anger and hatred directed against that country, which has now inflicted a defeat on the US, but on the very structure of politics within the US itself, and how that relates to the structure of politics in Iran in turn. There are situations—like this one, I suspect—where the very mechanics of the political system do not allow for any real resolution, or even any facing up to reality. Now it is normal towards the end of a crisis like this to have a spectrum of opinions, even in the most rigidly-disciplined government. Even a tacit agreement without anything signed will still require an essential consensus among all those with influence. But there will always be a group of irreconcilables, often divided among themselves in turn, who cannot accept anything less than victory, and will stick it out to the bitter end. (Ireland since 1916 is good example from the Anglo-Saxon world.) Such people may be in government, but they may also be influential in other ways. This situation inevitably happens, and the only questions are (1) how big is this constituency and (2) how much trouble can it cause? In many cases, the bitter-enders, and the no-surrender lobby are sufficiently small that they can be neutered in some way. In certain situations a level of disruption and violence will have to be accepted for a while as the price of a solution: a good example is the terrorist attacks by the OAS after the French agreed to Algerian independence, and the related attempts to assassinate De Gaulle. This kind of situation can’t really be avoided, but it’s very much a question of the extent to which it’s containable, and how it plays out in Washington and Tehran.

In the case of Iran, there are clearly going to be divisions over the question of how far the US can be pushed. I don’t know enough about internal Iranian politics to be sure, but it would be typical if the IRGC, which after all has suffered casualties and done the lion’s share of the fighting, were to hold out for more concessions than are feasible. I say “feasible” not just in the sense of what can be technically negotiated, but more what the US political system will actually be able to deliver. History suggests that trying to force your opponent to give you things that are not within their power to give is seldom a good idea. At the best it’s a waste of time and at worst it can lead to disaster. If war, as Clausewitz said, is an act of force to get our enemy to do what we want, then it is wise to be sure that our enemy actually can do what we want before we make demands. We can easily imagine, for example, a situation where the US would refuse to sign a non-aggression pact because of political opposition, but would nonetheless abide by the terms of an informal understanding which would not necessarily be made explicit, even in Washington. After all, the US is not going to be anxious to attack Iran again under currently imaginable circumstances. It would be wise for the Iranians to understand and accept such a situation.

In the case of the US, the situation is more complicated, because of the number and variety of players inside and outside Washington who will have an influence. Whilst it’s always easy for Washington to announce something, seasoned observers realise that the carrying-through of any given initiative can never be relied upon. Washington, after all, is a place where it’s difficult to get things done, but easy to stop them happening, simply because of the size and complexity of the labyrinthine bureaucracy, and the number of people and institutions who can stop or delay things they don’t like. This is why the US often finds it difficult to translate its size and potential power into actual hard achievements, and indeed even to formulate an agreed position on some issues. It’s not uncommon for US negotiators to plead that they can’t accept such-and-such a proposition, no matter how reasonable, because Congress won’t like it. Often, this amounts in practice to the opposition of a couple of influential Senators, who are thus able to cripple the US position. (“They should just ask Congress to come and bloody negotiate then,” muttered a disillusioned diplomatic colleague after one such aria.)

The reality, therefore, is that there will be somebody, or a number of somebodies, capable of stopping virtually any formal agreement between the US and Iran on any security-related issue. That said, it’s not clear how far the Iranians, and in particular the IRGC, themselves actually understand all these complex dynamics: after all, many people in the West don’t. Nearly half-a-century of isolation from Washington is likely to have bred not just suspicion and distrust, but a model of how things work in Washington, and in US policy, which is wildly at odds with reality. How, after all, could it be otherwise? The risk is that the harder-liners in Tehran will be asking for things that the fractured and divided US system is simply incapable of delivering. And of course, with or without Mr Trump sitting in the front seat of the bus, no US politician will actually be able to acknowledge in public the weakness and disorganisation of the US government and its military.

So as things stand, it seems unlikely that there will be any formal agreements as such. On the other hand, we can imagine, for example, that the US government decides privately not to try to re-open bases in the region, the Gulf States quietly decide not to ask the US to return, and the Iranians make it clear to both sides informally that only a token US presence will be tolerated. Many things will be generally understood, but nothing will be written down.

But there are a couple of subjects that can’t be fudged as easily. One is the “nuclear” issue, which is not only complex politically, but enormously complex technically, and one where different people have quite different understandings even of what the question is. Briefly, there are important distinctions between a nuclear enrichment programme, a nuclear weapons programme, a theoretically usable warhead of some kind, a warhead that has been tested, a delivery system for the warhead, an integration of the missile and the payload, a reliable guidance system, and a test of the whole system itself. Any of those stages could be called a “nuclear capability,” by some standards. Mr Trump, who is clearly no expert in these matters, has several times said that “Iran will not have nuclear weapons,” which could clearly cover some but not all of these possibilities.

But nobody really knows how advanced the Iranian nuclear “programme” is: some believe that it effectively doesn’t exist as a discrete entity. The problem is that countries with advanced technologies and access to nuclear materials can have not so much a nuclear “programme,” as a nuclear “option,” with the ability to move quickly if the situation makes that necessary. (Countries such as Germany, Japan and South Korea are often cited in this context.) Iran may already be in this category: a bit like having the construction kit but waiting for political approval to start putting it together. So to some extent it’s a question of definitions, and also a question of what might be technically feasible. I’m not going to venture into an area where experts differ and where almost no hard information is available. I would just note here that this war has still left us with an insoluble political problem. Iran has the technical capability to develop nuclear weapons if it wants to, and, after this war, important parts of the political system may feel that it has no option but to do so. There is no practicable method of preventing this, and even an intrusive inspection regime would not necessarily discover an “option,” as opposed to a “capability.” That is a problem the world is going to just have to live with.

Another is Lebanon. Now here Iranian interests—as they have made quite clear—essentially involve Hezbollah. They no doubt feel some responsibility for the Shiite community there, but their main priorities are to use Hezbollah as a force multiplier against Israel, and as a way of reacquiring a dominant position in the country. Iran does not wish to destroy Lebanon, but rather to ensure the state is sufficiently weak that Hezbollah, and through them Iran, has a major influence in the country. Until the end of 2024, that was effectively the situation: it was the hammering that Hezbollah took in 2024, combined with the loss of the friendly Assad regime, that eventually obliged Hezbollah to drop its opposition to the formation of a government and the election of a President. So when the Iranians talk of a ceasefire in “Lebanon” they have made clear that they refer to the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. This is a separate issue from Israeli territorial ambitions in Lebanon, so understandably, Hezbollah (and Iran) are opposed to direct talks between Lebanon and Israel, since these would get in the way. I haven’t even attempted to add Israeli objectives into all this, because I simply don’t know the country well enough to say anything sensible, or indeed if there is anything sensible one can say about Israel at the moment.

It should be clear by now that much of the media, and a large percentage of the punditocracy, is not so much mistaken about the fighting in Iran as it is a prisoner of an outdated way of thinking. In the abstract, only the seriously disturbed would actually prefer an outcome of war to one of peace (yes, there are some of those around.) But we have become so used to the Liberal internationalist way of thinking, where all problems have a reasonable solution and compromise is only a negotiation away, that we cannot recognise and understand a situation where a negotiated solution cannot actually address the fundamental issues that divide parties from each other. But that is the case here. The obsession of the US and Israel with the destruction of Iran, and the Iranian desire to preserve itself and to come to dominate the region, can simply never be reconciled, even by the most brilliant negotiators in history. This one, I’m afraid, will have to be fought out to a conclusion, whatever that might be.

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The first time I crossed a land border in Europe was as teenager, on a train from a place in Belgium whose name I have forgotten, on the way to Amsterdam. During the journey, a couple of Dutch frontier police came through the train, checking that everyone had a passport or an identity card. We were, after all, crossing a national border and going into another country.

Not that it was difficult in those days. Because I didn’t know how soon I would travel abroad again, I had been to the local Post Office with a photograph, and bought a British Visitor’s Passport valid for one year. It cost me ten shillings, and enabled me to travel basically anywhere in Western Europe. The whole process took about fifteen minutes as I recall. A few years later, friends of mine at University with more money spent the summer hitch-hiking to Greece and back and sleeping on the beach, which was quite possible even under the Colonels. Some went as far as Afghanistan, with little difficulty.

The attraction of such journeys in the days before the advent of mass hyper-tourism was that you were going somewhere different. It was necessary to learn a few words of the language, though, to understand a little about the country, and make allowances for very different ways of doing things. Above all, it was necessary to be prepared for the incredible depth and complexity of European societies and their history, and to realise that this was a fine-grained business where details and tiny differences mattered a lot. You quickly learned, for example, that there were actually two Belgiums, with parallel sets of political parties and institutions, and this makes complete sense when you consider the circumstances of the establishment of Belgium, which of course hardly anybody does. So I shouldn’t have been surprised that when I went into a shop in Brussels forty years ago and asked for something in French, the proprietor replied in English. Brussels is in Flanders of course: what did I expect?

For me, and for a lot of people, this is fascinating and different, and I’ve been very sad to see it progressively hidden (though happily not destroyed) under layers of plastic homogeneity. To take one example, there’s no doubt that the current currency situation in Europe is more economically “efficient” in banal bookkeeping terms. It’s true that I can draw Euros out of a machine close to where I live and spend them in Portugal or Italy. It’s also true that when I first travelled abroad, there were limitations on how much money you could take out of the country, and you had to order it in advance. But. There is always a But. In the old days, money was a tangible symbol of collective identity, and governments would put a lot of effort into designing spectacular-looking banknotes representing it. This is the background to one of the best recent French films, L’Affaire Bojarski, which recounts the story of how its eponymous hero fooled the French authorities for over a decade with beautiful hand-made copies of French banknotes, themselves works of art in the original. It was that which made me remember how physical and tactile money once was, and how specific to places and times. Inconvenient to carry different currencies in your wallet, certainly, but it did remind you that you were somewhere different.

By contrast, I have difficulty in remembering even what a ten-Euro banknote actually looks like, so I went to have a look. I can report that it’s a dirty brownish-pink and white, with an abstract design on one side and a kind of entrance on the other. I must have handled a massive number of them over the last twenty-five years, but they, and other Euro notes, have left literally no impression on me. This is deliberate of course. During the run-up to the Euro, there were various proposals for a more interesting name and for designs that at least nodded to the enormous depth and variety of European culture and history. All were rejected in favour of a bland, anonymous name, and designs that look as if they portray somewhere on Mars. The whole idea was precisely to design something without an identity, something out of Nowhere, as part of the creation of a bloodless, anonymous, economically efficient and post-national Europe. But why should anybody want to do that?

I’ve touched on the history before, and since the history isn’t my main concern here, I’ll pass over it lightly. But let’s just say that what we see today is the cumulative results of several centuries of glorification of the Individual, and the associated change from seeing the individual as a member of society, to seeing society itself as having no particular characteristics, just like the Euro notes, but only a collection of individuals happening to coincide temporarily in time and place. There is thus no collective identity or history for banknotes, for example, to express. We are now in what you could call the decadent phase of this process, and we are beginning to see more and more of the disadvantages and dangers of it. There will be more to come.

If you think about it, it must surely be true that the “Individual” only became possible, once societies had reached a certain stage of complexity. If you were a yak-herder, or farmer’s wife or hunter on the steppes, then your life would be pretty similar to the lives of generations before you, and of generations to come. You might be A, son of B, son of C, from the village of D, and that was it. The individual, insofar as he or she existed, was disaggregated from the whole. (We can see the heritage of this even today, in societies fewer generations removed from the land, and where people still identify with a larger group. A Japanese businessman would introduce themselves (in Japanese, anyway) with the formula such as Company name/Department/ Rank/ Family Name, which is helpful to the other person, who then understands the status and points of reference of the person introducing themselves.) In theory, royalty, priestly castes or even merchants and traders could have more of a personal identity in those days, but at least in early societies there’s a lot of evidence that their lives were largely governed just as much, if not more, by ritual and tradition. Even when towns developed, the apprenticeship system and family traditions meant that you would pursue very much the life of your father, if you were a man, and even more your mother for women. “Individuals” were generally marginally figures: think François Villon.

Only when urban life became sufficiently complex was there any point in most people even trying to live individual lives. With a world of more “choices” than just farming, religious orders or a tradesman of some kind, we see the beginning of the growth of an urban middle class with its own individualistic outlook on life and its own theories. The key text, of course is Hobbes’s Leviathan, whose famous frontispiece shows, critically, not a stable society organised in some hierarchy, but an anarchic collection of Individuals, needing their containing body —the Leviathan—to control them by force, to prevent the disintegration of society.

We can consider, certainly, that greater emphasis on the Individual over the last few centuries was both inevitable and right. The liberties that were being sought such as freedom of belief and speech were not negligible, even if they were essentially for elites. But the final result, as I’ve discussed on a number of occasions, was the alienation of the freshly-minted Individual from their society, their community, their history and their identity, and their eviction from a world that made sense where everything was connected, to a world where official doctrine said that nothing was connected, and the Individual was just a microscopic speck, lost somewhere in a meaningless universe. Yet we are told that we are free as never before. After all, we can change sex just by a declaration! And they wonder why so many people are unhappy today.

So in this decadent stage of the dogma of Individualism, people are being re-imagined as theoretically sovereign individuals, but who lack the power to actually determine anything important in their lives. The corollary of this, of course, is that if anything goes wrong, it’s the fault of the Individual. We create our own reality, it appears. If we can be anything we want to be, just by wishing, then it’s obvious that the poverty and unemployment we suffer are our own creations. Consequently, the days when the State was actually expected to make the lives of its citizens easier and better, and look after them, have long gone. These days, your teacher is an electronic tablet, if you can afford one, and your doctor is an AI Chatbot.

For individuals, in the traditional sense, there used to be a process called “growing up,” but it’s many years since I heard the term used of children in the West. The idea was that you gained maturity through testing yourself against the limits imposed by your family and your society, and you learned to distinguish between what you could change or influence and what you couldn’t. You would emerge, at least in theory, as a more rounded person, having become an Individual in something like the Jungian sense: a member of society but still yourself. In turn, the creation of your own identity would involve selective allegiance to, or identification with, larger groups, ranging from the Church and the Scouts to political parties, hobbyist circles and even football clubs.

Officially, at least, the world has changed completely. The Child, for example, is at the centre of a non-hierarchical education system, and everything must be done to benignly promote and defend their independence and individuality. Children are encouraged to “be themselves” and “express themselves,” in defiance of the recognised truth that children of school-age don’t have selves to express, and that we actually continue to develop our personalities until the mid-twenties. Indeed, growing up is, or used to be, a process of trying on ideas and personalities for size, until you found your way, with a bit of luck, to some kind of individual self. Yet paradoxically, children these days have less freedom, and so less chance to develop their individuality, than their parents, and much less than their grandparents. The corollary of hyper-individualism is distrust and suspicion of others, so children must be protected, monitored, only exposed to the right influences and taught from an early age to respect a series of incoherent Liberal norms about society. Except of course, that they also have access to the Internet, which, respecting the gospel of Individualism and the freedom of creative choice as well as the freedom to make lots of money, has turned into an intellectual and moral sewer from which literally anything can be dug up.

The story of how we got here has been told many times by me and others, but I think that the most important point is one that is seldom mentioned. A gospel of Individualism doesn’t have to lead to the collapse of a society, and doesn’t necessarily do so, except for the presence of two other factors. The first is the lack of external controls and countervailing forces. In modern times, we have seen not only the decline of organised religion, in favour of Me-based individualistic, vaguely spiritual practices, but the parallel decline of political ideologies of all kinds, generally based either on the belief that society must be defended as it is, or that it can and should be made better. This has gone hand-in-hand with the decline of voluntary and collective organisations of all sorts, and even of causes that people can practically identify with. Buying something from a company that asks you to add an optional one per cent to aid a charity, or signing an online petition against global warming leave the average person unsatisfied. And the type of collective organisation that does attract members, unfortunately, seems to be disproportionately interested in pitting groups within society against each other. (More on that later.) As Yeats foresaw, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. To which we can add the destruction of traditional legal and political controls, especially the ghastly “deregulation” disease, such that locks were removed from doors, and the foxes were provided with an official illustrated guide telling them how to get into the hen-house.

The second factor was an incredible naivety, and lack of any real awareness, or even interest, about the likely consequences of the obsession with the Individual and their Choices. Whatever the objection made, the answer was always that It Wouldn’t Matter. Hands were waved and jawbreaking terms invented, to disguise the fact that the proponents of hard-line economic individualism, for example, hadn’t thought about the consequences, and anyway didn’t care. Now, of course, it’s too late. Because the first and most obvious criticism is the one made a century ago by the great British Socialist RH Tawney: freedom for the pike, he said is death to the minnow. More generally, the fewer the rules, the greater the advantage to the rich and powerful. But that’s OK, said the economists at the time. Our models show that it will be All Right. Of course, we have to make the simplifying assumption that all products are identical and all consumers have equal spending power, but those are details.

Take free trade, for example. Surely its better if trade flows freely across frontiers, then everything will even out, and the societies which can produce this or that best will specialise in those things, and everybody will wind up producing what they are best at, and we’ll all be happy. Because commodities and bargaining power are both identical in all cases, everything will be All Right. (If you think you recognise the ghost of Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage, well you do.) In real life of course, this breaks down immediately. So in my local supermarket I can buy a bag of organic oranges from France for €4, or a similar one from Spain for €3. The oranges seem to be identical, so the ghost of Ricardo tugs me by the sleeve and says “buy the cheaper one!” Hang on a minute, though, why should oranges transported from farther away be significantly cheaper? Well, it turns out, surprisingly, that people cheat. Orange-growers in Spain often use illegal temporary immigrant labour. Whereas in France the organisation that inspects companies to check on such things is very effective, in Spain the equivalent is much weaker. The result is that permanent jobs are lost in France, but permanent jobs are lost in Spain as well, and illegal immigrants are trafficked across the Mediterranean to work for a pittance, often in appalling conditions. And of course there is then pressure on French producers to themselves use illegal workers, simply to compete. (There were prosecutions last year, after a Champagne producer was found using illegal workers, several of whom died of heatstroke in the fields.) Ah, it wasn’t supposed to be like that, was it?

But surely with cheaper imports, the prices go down, so people have more money to spend on other things? Surely, the individual benefits; and society, after all is just a set of individuals? Well, no. For example, I used to buy tee-shirts, socks and such from a French company called DIM, which makes such things for both men and women. Then I noticed that, whilst the quality went right down, the prices remained the same. They had of course externalised the manufacture, to the Indian sub-continent I believe, and pocketed the difference. So the unemployed workers lose, the customer loses and the company and the shareholders gain. And that puts pressure on competitors to do the same, and so on. Oh dear, it wasn’t supposed to be like that.

But it is like that. What may be good for me on a personal level (cheap oranges) and good for individual producers (bigger profits) has all sorts of unexpected and usually negative consequences when real life takes over, and real people with real motives start making real decisions. Human beings are not, in the end, fungible. Many towns and cities were built around factories and the production of raw materials, and their populations cannot simply turn to other trades or just go elsewhere. There are public housing estates not far from where I’m writing this, built by left-wing municipalities to house factory workers, where there is literally no work apart from mini-supermarkets, tattoo shops, food delivery and crime. That could not have been foreseen, of course, when the factories were closed. And it just occurred to me, walking past a dry-cleaners that had closed down, that against all expectation, the fetish for franchising has meant that economic units have become smaller and smaller and therefore more and more vulnerable.

And of course the same argument applies at the macro level. People are people, workers are workers, bring them in from anywhere, it’s all the same. After all, it’s a basic human right to live anywhere in the world, isn’t it? And who can blame migrants for rationally pursuing their economic interests, and going to places where social payments are most generous? What this has produced in France (and it seems to be broadly typical) is a new underclass of economic migrants dumped in poor areas where the education and health services are already overstretched, often not speaking French, without skills or much education, and with more health problems than average. Classes where a third of the children don’t speak French properly and where a substantial number come from conflict zones and have psychological problems are to be found everywhere. And it turns out that the younger immigrants brought over to compensate for a declining population actually grow older, and in turn become part of the problem. Because most of these societies forbid women to work, there is now a shortage in some areas of care assistants, domestic help and even traditional entry-level jobs for female workers such as cleaners. This could not have been anticipated of course.

I’m harping on these points because it’s essential to understand that the process has now gone beyond anyone’s control, or even understanding. It was designed, insofar as it ever was, by idiots who could not see beyond the end of their noses. If it were actually designed by evil geniuses, it would be less of a problem. Oh, there’s no shortage of evil people, or of people who fancied themselves as geniuses once upon a time, but nobody is really in control, as you can see from the dazed and incoherent responses of national leaders and so-called titans of industry. As a result, we just have to trust to luck. The system that has arisen (no-one can really say it was “built”), has done so through an interaction between radical individualism, and a tightly-coupled economic and social system that cannot cope with the unexpected. As a result, when something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, the system cannot cope, and nobody has any idea what to do.

The idea that humans should be fungible, that they could be treated as abstract interchangeable units capable of being moved anywhere and doing anything, was dangerous even when it was defended as a mere simplifying assumption, because there was always the possibility that someone would mistake it for reality. But in fact the whole tendency of neoliberal economics has been precisely to try to create that reality, not only in the economy but also in society. De-skilling has reduced the variety within the workforce, and the different trades and types of expertise that once made societies interesting. The move from a qualified to a credentialed society, from actual expertise to a certificate of finishing, has created a featureless and broadly interchangeable workforce dealing mostly with abstract data on a screen. If somebody with a degree in Cultural Studies leaves a job as a call-centre answerer on Friday, they can be replaced by someone with a degree in International Relations on Monday. A degree is just a broad guarantee that you can read and write. Likewise, every effort has been made to obscure the differences—in clothing, for example—between, children and adults and men and women, and to fill jobs with men or women interchangeably, all in the name of economic efficiency.

It is important that we ourselves should be brought to regard employees and citizens, including ourselves, as interchangeable. We must be prepared to go where we are sent, work with whoever we are told to, and, as managers, treat everyone as interchangeable, except for the many cases when we are told not to. We must be “CEOs of our lives,” and we are responsible for our own welfare and well-being. If we lose our job, it’s somehow our fault. Because we live as Individuals, alienated from each other, we must regard everyone else as a competitor and a rival. Our relations with each other thus become more and more mercenary and transactional.

Much the same is true internationally. I mentioned banknotes, but in fact many other symbols of Belonging are being suppressed at the same time. The language of the European elite, for example, is a type of strangled, lifeless English with French influences, sometimes called Globisch. (Paradoxically, the working language of Brussels is thus derived from a language that almost nobody speaks natively.) Great efforts continue to be made to create a flat, featureless, monotonous European space in which everywhere and everything is the same, and nothing different or interesting happens. This is a political system that disavows its own history and its incomprehensibly rich cultural heritage, and whose highest cultural expression is the Eurovision Song Contest. The citizens of Europe (and here I include the UK) are themselves fungible, transferable, and interchangeable. They move (or are moved) from country to country, and indeed “country” in this sense just means the legal and geographical space in which you happen to be living. You are no more attached to the country in which you live than a shareholder is attached to the company in which they have shares. A nation is just a temporary collection of people who don’t live anywhere else.

This is, of course, fantastically removed from the kind of life that ordinary people actually want to lead. Maybe a tiny proportion of the population, speaking three languages, married to somebody speaking three more, moving in a whirl of interchangeable international hotels and business-class air travel, eating in indistinguishable restaurants in easily-confused countries, just occasionally waking in the morning and wondering Where am I? actually enjoy this kind of thing, or regard it as natural. I can’t imagine why.

But the most damaging aspect of our current situation is that the same radical individualistic impulse that has destroyed societies and communities has also led to the creation and strengthening of other questionable group identities. The replacement of universalist societies by those of unfettered individualism has paradoxically led to more conformity and less freedom than was the case in the past. Fifty years ago, the main divisions among western populations were economic and social. There were manual workers and white-collar workers, graduates and non-graduates, employers and the employed, those who owned property and those who rented it, those who lived on dividends and those who borrowed money, and professionals on one hand and artisans on the other, both qualified by years of study and apprenticeship. Political parties would try to represent, and also seek support among, some of these groups. Parties of the Left would build public housing, while parties of the Right would encourage home ownership. All that seems from another planet now.

The assumption in those days therefore, was that people were naturally organised in objective socioeconomic groups (you objectively owned a house or you didn’t) and could be appealed to on that basis. But the draining of any real substance and ideology out of politics from the 1980s onwards, and the replacement of traditional mass parties by boutique elitist constructs which you could move freely between, like a professional footballer, created obvious problems when it came to tedious things like gaining support and winning elections. Fortunately, Liberalism was doing a good job of breaking down these traditional groupings anyway, and undermining their traditional correlations (both professionals and graduates generally owned their own houses, for example.) These groups have been progressively decomposed into Individuals: unemployed graduates, speculators owning many houses, “self-employed “gig workers, former employees made “independent contractors” overnight, academics on six-month contracts without benefits, Youtube influencers … the list is endless. And there are no structures any more, especially not those that reward talent, study and application. Is it even possible to suggest to a teenager today that they do this or that in the hope of one day finding a “good job?” This has all sorts of practical consequences which or course were unforeseeable: extended families broken up, couples unable to afford a house or a family, longer and longer journeys to work, isolation and depression, the end of most societies and social organisations.

Yet in theory this should not be a problem. We are, after all, Individuals. We pursue our own personal interests, financially and personally. We seek nothing more than economic advantage and the greatest possible extension of our Rights. We owe nobody else anything, and cooperate with each other only for mutual advantage, according to carefully worked-out preconditions. We all demand special treatment or priority for any number of reasons, and complain when we do not get it. Yet we are unhappy and becoming unhappier.

Because it turns out in the end that most of us do not want to be alienated individuals, fighting others for scraps. Most of us never see the benefits of this “Individualism” which is incessantly marketed to us. Those benefits, ironically, go disproportionately to those with family or professional networks or money on which they can rely, not to alienated individuals. Why do you think people go on LinkedIn, if not to create artificial support groups and networks to replace the real ones that have been lost?

It’s accepted, I think, that the rise of the Comfortable Class in the 1960s—university educated, largely debt-free, with new openings in the universities, in politics and the media, as well as access to the traditional professions—created a new social dynamic in politics. Rather than promote the interests of the class they had left behind, the Comfortable turned to internecine warfare among themselves for power and wealth, making use among other things of half-understood fashionable philosophical ideas making the rounds of university bars. With enough ingenuity, any group could claim to be oppressed, disadvantaged, marginalised etc. and organise to try to take wealth, power, positions and jobs away from the others. The members of such groups did not need to agree on everything—they might violently detest each other—but they could cooperate in the wider objective of increasing their power. As with all aspirant ruling classes, they constructed self-serving and self-justifying ideologies to support their ambitions, and over the decades these solidified into what we now call Identity Politics, or IdiotPol for short.

Although IdiotPol damaged many institutions, some irretrievably, as groups fought each other violently and tried to establish competing police states, the real problem arose when the structure of national politics itself started to be infected also. Political groupings aiming to construct or take over political parties have to be built around some kind of common interest, and in the absence of economic interests, identitarian ones were all that were available. The result, skipping ahead to the present day, is a political culture in which all mobilisation is negative. The world is not going to become a better place, nor is there any chance of reverting to the situation in the past, so the historical dynamic of modern politics is basically absent. In its place are resentment, demands for priority treatment and attempts to secure the largest slice of a cake that is getting smaller. The vocabulary of collective interest and effort has been suppressed, and utterly disparate groups of people, with nothing in common, find themselves yoked together in some ascriptive category and instructed to vote for this or that party that will allegedly represent them. Because these groups are only ascriptive, and not organic as political groupings traditionally were, they are riven with disputes and feuds, and with vicious combats to achieve preferred victim status.

As before, the consequences of these ideas are now outside anyone’s control. Virtually the whole of traditional politics, with its concerns, its objectives, its means of organisation, has now been banished to the dungeons of the “extreme Right.” This is necessary, because if politicians actually tried to respond to the needs and demands of the people, the political system we have today would collapse. It is thus necessary to retain the iron grip of ascriptive politics, in case people from different ascriptive groups start to realise they have interests in common, and to act accordingly. This reaches absurd levels, as when the head of the Socialist Party in France claims that the idea that different parts of the country have different problems and need to be treated differently is an argument of the “extreme Right.” Everybody knows that the whole country basically resembles the 6th arrondissement of Paris. Moreover, you can’t try to impose ascriptive, divisive politics on a society without the risk of losing control of the process, as has indeed happened in various countries. After all, Men and White People, not to mention religious fundamentalists and even “minor-attracted persons” are ascriptive groups as well. Any number can play at that game, as is clear from a startling opinion survey carried out in France recently, that showed that around half of French people thought they had been victims of racialism. Pundits and the media are still struggling to find an acceptable way of interpreting that figure.

The weirdest thing here is that the mainstream Right, far from opposing this rubbish, has embraced it as well, if not always so enthusiastically. Partly this is because modern political parties have no real principles anyway, and so grab onto whatever is fashionable that week, but mainly because it is an extremely useful stick with which to beat their enemies all over the political spectrum. After all, who is going to argue that society, or some institution, should be less diverse or should deliberately exclude people? And what better defence against such accusations coming from your opponents than to promote unwhite or unmale or unheterosexual politicians to positions of power? This enables traditional criteria of competence to be neatly sidestepped, because of course we don’t really need competence, do we?

The trouble is, of course, that, like just-in-time logistics and sub-sub-contracting and uncontrolled economic migration and the rest of this miserable assemblage of half-thought-out ideas, the replacement of real community by ascriptive group, and the suppression of genuine identities in favour of artificial ones, depends for its survival on nothing going wrong. Suppose, just as a thought-experiment, that over the next few months, something does go wrong. Perhaps ships with oil will not arrive. Perhaps there will not be enough food to go round. Perhaps medicines will be in short supply, perhaps there will be power cuts and shortages of petrol.

Now an organic society, however imperfect, does actually both have a discourse and an organisation for facing up to such problems. It has a discourse of national community, shared history and culture, and the idea that people live together because they want to. We may recall Ernest Renan’s famous formulation that a nation is not a question of race or of language, but something positive: a “never-ending referendum” showing that people actively want to live together. Such a discourse would not be understood by our leaders today: you might just as well ask residents of a European country to act out of solidarity with each other as you might ask shareholders not to sell their shares When you have annihilated common points of reference, when you have brought into your country people who are there for financial reasons, have no wish to integrate, and may indeed identify more with the interests of another country, then even if you could disinter the old discourse of community solidarity, nobody would understand what you were talking about.

And the mechanisms for invoking and using that solidarity no longer exist anyway. Governments today cannot actually organise very much, as Covid showed. They have given up the capabilities they used to have, and even where they have theoretical powers they don’t have the ability to implement them. Moreover, our entire political system, from national level downwards, is about identifying, stoking and exploiting differences, like passengers on the Titanic arguing about who had the right to the best seats. Oh, and the Titanic didn’t carry lifeboats for everybody because no-one thought it was necessary.

Is that an iceberg I see before me?

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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve set out two-thirds of an argument, which I hope to complete today. Briefly, I suggest that the nature of conflict in all its aspects (military and technological, but also economic and political) has changed and is changing further, and generally to the disadvantage of the West. The military battle-space is no longer ruled by high-technology and extremely expensive weapons platforms, whose effectiveness is increasingly disputed by drones and missiles. These new systems can make attacks prohibitively expensive, but they can also be used offensively, and defence against them is difficult. Moreover, the resources and technologies needed to construct and use them are relatively modest, and within the capabilities of far more nations that can afford a fifth-generation jet aircraft. Likewise, economic levers not previously exploited become weapons with the new capabilities these systems provide.

These developments would be less of a problem if western states had more intellectual flexibility, and better-operating government systems. But stranded between cloudy aspirational pronouncements and actual implementation on the ground, they have lost the ability to make operational-level plans and carry them through. This suggests that as the indirect consequences of the continuing Iran crisis start to bite, western governments will be increasingly less capable of coping with them as they affect their economies and their societies, and indeed will lack the ability to plan, and even to understand what is happening.

All this suggests that there will be a considerable rebalancing of strategic and political power in the world in the next few years. The purely military dimension is important, of course, but it’s not the only one, because economic power, the use of control over commodities, processing and manufacturing, and even the internal stability of countries are also parts of the equation. So what can we say about how these tendencies may evolve and combine in the years to come?

Well, not much actually, at least if we want to go beyond idle speculation: predicting the future is a game where you generally only get it right by accident. I’m not going to cover the current “ceasefire,” since anything I say here could be out-of-date tomorrow. Come to that, even trying to predict the broad outline of the state of the world in five years’ time is essentially a waste of effort, since so much will depend on decisions by people who may be unknown at the moment, about things that haven’t even happened yet. (Think back five years to the Spring of 2021 if you doubt me.) But it is often possible to do one or both of two connected things. On the one hand, you can identify aspects that are not going to change, except marginally, because the factors determining them are essentially fixed. On the other you can identify a series of reasonable possibilities arising from the present situation: how things are now, in other words, determines how far things can change at the highest level. To this we might add an adaptation of the old Soviet ideological concept of “permanently operating factors” in strategy: geography doesn’t change, climate and changes to climate are inevitable, the Atlantic isn’t going to get any smaller, and factors like population, natural resources and cultural specificities change only very slowly.

A useful example of what I mean, and how we may proceed, is the famous statement by Marshal Foch in June 1919 at the Versailles Treaty negotiations: “this is not peace, it is an armistice for twenty years.” Now whilst in practice Foch did “predict” the outbreak of World War 2 with some precision, that is not what he was trying to do. He was talking about the situation as it was in 1919, and the text of the Treaty that had been negotiated. He observed, quite correctly, that nothing fundamental had been done to resolve the underlying problem: the rivalry between France and Germany for military domination of Europe. The war had ended in unconditional German surrender, but German territory had not been fought over, its industry was intact and its population was significantly greater than that of France. None of these factors was going to change. Nothing could prevent a new generation of German politicians, twenty years on, from turning to threats of war again to modify or overturn the Treaty. Even so, a decade after, a time of peace in Europe, strong economic growth and successive governments in Berlin committed to a peaceful resolution of the reparations problem and of Versailles, there was grounds for limited optimism.

To anticipate a stock market crash in the US leading to a worldwide depression, a Right-wing government under the incompetent Chancellor Bruning imposing successive austerity packages to make the situation worse, rising support for fringe political parties including the Communists and the Nazis, a needless election which reduced Bruning’s strength in Parliament to almost nothing, a cunning plan by the evil genius General Kurt von Schleicher to rescue Bruning’s government by inviting the Nazis, who had enjoyed a moment of glory but whose support was now declining, to join the coalition, an approach to Gregor Strasser, an “acceptable” Nazi, to join the government which he refused, a decision that in that case they would have to make use of this Austrian corporal who would quickly be eaten alive by the system … well, I don’t really need to go on. Which is to say that, whilst it’s useful and important to try to identify large-scale trends that are already underway, it’s pointless to try to go into levels of detail, and I do not intend to do so here, in spite of current excitement over the Iran “ceasefire.” Let’s stay at the Foch level.

Wars involve a process akin to price discovery in finance: they make clear what the underlying realities actually are. The Crimean War, for example, simply demonstrated that the British Army and state were not modern and not fit for purpose. The regimental system as it then was, where commissions could be purchased, the life of an officer was primarily social, and there was little training and no doctrine, could be and was defended before the War: Wellington, Waterloo, aristocracy as the backbone of the nation etc. After the War, such defences were simply not possible. And much the same was true of Ukraine. It suddenly became obvious to all that the US already had little military power in Europe and was no longer a major player in the region, that much western weaponry was poorly adapted to modern war, that western ammunition stocks were inadequate and that the quality and quantity of Russian military power had been greatly underestimated. And in some ways the most worrying realisation was that there was nothing practical the West could do about any of these problems in the short or medium term. This could be denied before 2022: it could not be denied afterwards.

In other words, the military power of the West, and especially that of the United States, is what it has been shown to be, not what it was claimed to be. (By contrast, the full extent of Iranian military power remains unclear, since not all of it has been displayed.) And the first substantive point I want to discuss is that this capability is not going to get any better. That may seem surprising at first sight, but it’s actually quite logical. It’s not to deny that new equipment will be delivered (though see below) but we are talking here, yet again, of capability, which means the ability to actually carry out missions, and goes well beyond equipment, however new and however shiny. As I never tire of repeating, military power cannot be thought of in the abstract. It is not existential, it has to produce military capability to perform some assigned task, or it is irrelevant.

But let’s begin with equipment. As I previously suggested, much US equipment is now elderly and, whilst it continues to function adequately for the most part, it is increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain. Some of the older airframes have components and mechanical systems that are no longer produced, and involve technical skills that no longer exist, even if other aircraft can be cannibalised. Damage done to older aircraft such as the KC-135 and the E-3 AWACS may be such that they simply cannot be repaired. In addition, intensive operational usage of aircraft, with long mission transit times, imposes stress and eats up airframe life quickly. Some aircraft may already be at the end of their fatigue life, and even relatively modern ones will be aging towards replacement far faster than anticipated. This has already happened and will not change, even if the Iran “ceasefire” lasts. Precisely where most US aircraft are based in the region remains unclear, but there are limits to the depth of maintenance you can carry out in, or adjacent to, a war-zone.

The most obvious related problem is consumables. Like much of the detail of this conflict, the amount of ordnance expended by the US is uncertain, but the fact that US aircraft have been shot down over Iranian territory suggests that they have stopped using longer-range stand-off missiles, probably because stocks are running low. If estimates of 800-1000 Tomahawk missiles so far used are correct, and if current deliveries are running at about 100 per year, then the US will be obliged to choose between either running stocks dangerously low, and taking years to rebuild them, or using more in an attempt to finally win, if the conflict is renewed. Each has its disadvantages, but the least one can say is that the US will finish this conflict with a greatly reduced land attack capability around the world. The same applies broadly to other types of ordnance as well.

But it’s not just a question of going on to the Internet and ordering more. Manufacturers don’t like surge production, which requires investment and recruitment for just a short period with no long-term guarantees. Nor is it obvious that components and sub-assemblies from all around the world will necessarily be available in the quantities required. It’s normal these days for 50% of the value of an advanced military system to come from abroad, even without considering the materials (such as aluminium) that are needed to fabricate it. Equipment which is unusable or destroyed after the conflict will probably never be replaced, except in some hypothetical future by programmes which don’t yet exist or are in their earliest stages. Overall, the US will be substantially worse off for both platforms and weapons than it is now.

But of course to attack another country you need to get near to it. As far as we can tell, US bases in the region are all within range of Iranian missiles: most have been attacked and some, at least, are effectively abandoned. Historically, the US has not used Hardened Aircraft Shelters in the region, believing that the threat did not justify it: indeed so far as I can see, US facilities there are generally not hardened at all. Large aircraft generally have to be stored in the open anyway, but even a crash programme of building HASs for the smaller aircraft and hardening the critical parts of the bases would be an immense and costly undertaking. (Some installations, like radars, are effectively impossible to harden anyway.) In any event, the Iranians would retain that most powerful of weapons: the ability to destroy something at any time if they wanted to. And this assumes, for example, that states in the region would agree to continue to host these bases in the long term, that locals would continue to work there, and that something like normal life could continue in the region, with the permanent threat of missile attack.

Naturally, the US will be trying to defend any bases it does re-open. We still have very little objective information about the success of interceptor missiles against Iranian drones and missiles, but there are indications that we are approaching a point where extremely high-velocity missiles capable of manoeuvring can simply not be engaged in the time available, unless the laws of physics are repealed. If this situation does not exist now, then it soon will do, and unless some form of area defence capable of protecting large areas of ground is magically developed (lasers, who knows?) we may arrive at a point where there is simply no defence against such an attack, even in principle.

Attacks can be launched from ships, as the US seems to be doing now, but this carries its own risks. Even smaller combatants like destroyers are extremely expensive and difficult to replace, and would take years to build. It’s hard to see by what calculus a given number of Tomahawks on targets in Iran would be worth the loss of even one destroyer, let alone a larger ship. On the other hand, using long-range missiles to attack a surface ship, which is a moving target capable of violent manoeuvres, is not easy, and it’s not clear whether Iran yet has this capability. But they will obviously try to develop it, and if they can threaten US ships such that those ships cannot come within missile launching range, and then threaten airbases as well, they have effectively won for the foreseeable future. That is presumably what they are now aiming at.

Thus, the US will be evicted militarily from the Middle East, and potentially from the Eastern Mediterranean as well. It is already tacitly acknowledged that the US is not capable of challenging China in Asia, and it has been obvious at least since 2022 that the US is not a major player in Europe any more, faced with Russia. Now of course this will be difficult to acknowledge, and the political class and the pundit community will not give in easily, so long as they have their keyboards and that Twitter thingy. Even now, Very Serious People will be drafting very serious think pieces about how the US can recover its previously assumed dominance in the Middle East or still manage to kneecap China after all. The naive may believe them, or even be hypnotised into imagining they are describing an actually existing strategy, but in fact, like the hilarious 2001 video starring General Wesley Clarke (what was it, “five countries in seven years?”) they are best seen as letters sent by small boys to Father Christmas, asking for a train-set. Even if the US retains a limited presence in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, it is unlikely to be able to operate seriously there, even as its arsenal slides inexorably in the direction of unilateral structural disarmament. But in Washington, adjusting to the new reality will be complicated and difficult, and may even be impossible without the system coming apart.

It’s not really possible to say what new strategic configuration will replace the current one, now that it has been shown to be largely a mirage anyway. However, it’s worth pointing out that the three major beneficiaries of the current conflicts—Iran, Russia and China—are all continental/littoral states, and they seem to have broadly similar strategic objectives: keeping potential threats as far away as possible, and dominating their immediate region. Unlike the West, which has retained essentially Cold War and expeditionary force structures, their own are relatively well configured for these objectives, and they are improving them all the time. Ukraine and Iran have shown that western forces are largely impotent against such a military system, unless you measure achievement just in terms of bombs dropped. But cannot the West imitate this military posture, and reclaim at least some of its power and influence abroad? Not really, for two reasons.

One is that, as I’ve indicated, you need platforms to transport drones and missiles to the place where you want to use them, whereas the defender is by definition already there. Even if you could build large, powerful missile and drone carrying ships to send against one of these countries, the ship itself would be a high-value target which you could not afford to lose. Moreover, ever since the 1960s, the West has tried to field sophisticated, multi-capable systems, prizing quality and versatility over quantity. It has tried not just to be more technically advanced than the opposition, but also to anticipate and counter things that haven’t happened yet. A good example is the (happily) aborted British MBT-80 project, originally designed to defeat not just the Soviet tanks of the rest of the century, but the next generation as well. The plug was pulled when it was recognised that the tank would probably never be finished, let alone deployed.

As a result, western weapons systems often choke on their own complexity. Aircraft are the worst case, and are probably the classic example of trying to do too much and ultimately doing too little. From the Tornado aircraft of the 1970s to the F-35 today, designers and military staffs have pursued the hallucination of a Swiss Army Knife aeroplane that could do anything, often in sharply different variants. In every case I know of, apart perhaps from the French Rafale, the result is aircraft which cost more and performed less well than several cheaper, more specialised aircraft would have done. And the idea of involving other nations to spread the costs (again originating with the Tornado) has produced delays, complexity, arguments over specifications and a unit cost which is in many cases higher than a national development would have been. Even if the problem of the vulnerability of platforms could somehow be resolved, therefore, western defence industries and military staffs don’t think in that way, and it’s doubtful if the equipment itself could be constructed in any useful timescale.

The other is cultural. States whose orientation is landward/littoral tend naturally to prioritise defensive technologies and force structures, and concentrate, as I have suggested, on keeping potential threats at a distance, and controlling their immediate region. They have typically invested heavily in air defence by aircraft and missiles, and in the capacity to deter and defeat attempted seaborne invasions. Since the Cold War, western powers have adopted a very different set of strategies. For a long time, their forces were configured for mass mobilisation to fight a defensive battle on their own territory. Because of that, air superiority over the battlefield was assumed, and to be fair, this assumption made some sense, given that Soviet fixed-wing aircraft would have had to cross NATO airspace. After 1990, as the prospect of war faded, and western troops were increasingly deployed far from home on peacekeeping or coalition operations, the force structures were essentially preserved.

In the present series of crises, the West therefore finds itself stuck between two sets of doctrines. One is the distant memory of Cold War heavy-metal warfare with air superiority, the other is counter-insurgency warfare using small, highly-trained and mobile forces, again with total command of the air. Doctrine is what tells you how to fight, and perhaps as importantly, enables you to understand what the enemy is doing. We can see the dead weight of such outdated doctrine when we consider the joyful statements that were made in Washington about “destroying” the Iranian Air Force and Navy, under the assumption that the Iranians would use a doctrine that the US could understand. The actual doctrine employed by the Iranians surprised and disoriented the US, not because their commanders were stupid, but because they were prisoners of their own doctrine to the point that they even disregarded what the Iranians had said. They simply were not equipped to understand that the Iranians might fight as they did, let alone how to respond. It follows that western governments could not hope to integrate drone and missile warfare into their existing doctrine, and it might take decades to rethink and implement not only their doctrine, but their entire force structure and equipment priorities.

This leads to two consequences, one of which is less obvious than the other. The more obvious is that western, and particularly US, forces will be pulled back, and are unlikely to be used any more in distant operations. (Indeed, I predicted the end of expeditionary warfare several years ago.) The fact is that the ability of the defender to damage and destroy very expensive weapons platforms is already prohibitive, and can only increase. The other is that western ability to even sustain, let alone operate, its armed forces, requires a constant supply of strategic commodities. One of the things that has been “discovered” over the last few years is that modern western “just in time” militaries are optimised for peacetime, not for fighting. Such problems as limited quantities of equipment and even more limited spares and ordnance are not accidents, but the product of a system which prioritised “management,” in the commercial sense of keeping the minimum inventory to save money. It was assumed that any conflicts would be sufficiently short and low-intensity that this would not matter. But even if by some miracle western forces could be expanded and defence industries relaunched, globalisation has ensured that components for western defence equipment and materials for manufacture are now sourced from all over the world. In the past this has not been a problem, but I expect that more than one nation is watching the Iranians use the economic weapon with interest. We are going to see a substantial change in the terms of political trade, as component suppliers and producers of primary products start to realise the power that they could potentially wield over Western governments, and by extension on their military capabilities. But that’s how it is.

A large part of the political relations between states is governed by inertia: for example, links between nations and their militaries and security forces often go back a very long time, and continue as much out of habit and convenience as anything else. Whilst this has been disparaged by decolonialists, the fact is that since the nineteenth century states outside the West have seen western states as models and inspirations. The Japanese were first: they sent students to study engineering at British universities, but they also carefully observed the developing bureaucratic states of countries such as France, Britain and Germany. And until the nineteen-nineties, at least, states wanting to set up effective and honest bureaucracies would come to Britain for ideas: I was involved in this occasionally myself, and the interest was considerable. (I fear that’s not the case now.) Likewise, foreign students continue to go to western universities in large numbers, mainly because courses are available in English or sometimes French, and because non-western universities don’t have the same advantages of historical links and language, nor the same experience of teaching foreigners.

As I say, much of this is inertia, and will survive the revelation of the inadequacy of western hard power to some extent. But the further you go from the fuzzy end of the spectrum, the more difficult it will become. Forty years ago, if you wanted advice on high-speed trains you would come to France. Now you go to China. This obviously has political implications. Especially questionable, and very important, are the wider effects on security relationships. This is a complicated subject, difficult to explain if you haven’t been part of it, and full of spoken and unspoken traditions, habits and assumptions. The range of relationships and interactions is enormous, although in most cases, the reasons for the relationships are very practical. Western states and institutions are often more technically and organisationally advanced, and for a whole range of subjects from counternarcotics to computer security to electronic warfare, small countries will generally come to the West or receive western training at home. And after the end of the Cold War, states in the former Warsaw Pact found themselves suddenly having to create new security structures in multi-party political systems from scratch, with such innovations as a politician as Defence Minister and the need to make their own defence policies instead of having them dictated from Moscow. Naturally, they turned to their western neighbours (though not usually the US) for advice and ideas. Countries in Africa moving towards multi-party regimes after the Cold War often did the same.

Sometimes the reasons are economic and technical. If you have two squadrons of supersonic fighters in your air force, then setting up a special training facility is a waste of money. It makes sense to go to a collective training facility with other nations: the oldest and best-known is a NATO-run school in Texas, where the weather can be relied up. And there is a whole range of specialised military and technical skills that smaller nations can’t provide training for. Traditionally, the West has provided these skills, and reaped the political benefits that go with it. It’s less clear that this will be the case in the future, although inertia is still a fact. Most countries will still ask for training in English or French, for example.

Beyond this are wider political issues. Western Staff Colleges have always trained large numbers of non-western students. Such places are highly-prized and governments send their best students, who often go on to important posts. Some western countries find this easier to do than others, again often for linguistic and cultural reasons. Britain, France and the US have the advantage of using languages spoken around the world, whereas not everyone will want to spend a year in Hamburg learning German before attending the Bundeswehr Staff College. The same applies with more force to Russia and China, although both have a tradition of providing foreign training from the days of the Cold War. Even so, neither is likely to take control of the field quickly, for very practical reasons.

These sorts of contacts amount to a kind of parallel and supplementary diplomacy, and enable western powers (though not exclusively, it should be said) to project themselves and their ideas and influence abroad. And again, inertia is a major factor. A country reorganising its military or its police will want expert advice and training from a country which is a recognised leader. Countries like Britain and France benefited for a long time from the recognition that their militaries actually fought wars, and knew what it was like to be in combat. It wasn’t an accident that the British played a leading role in advising the South Africans on the creation of their new Defence Force after 1994: that Force was, after all, overwhelmingly made up of people who had just finished fighting each other. But for the British, certainly, those days have largely gone, and I suspect that recent events in Iran will have done no good to the international military reputation of the US either. Of course, students won’t immediately go flocking to Beijing or Moscow, inertia being what it is, but there’s no doubt that the reputation, and therefore the influence, of the US military has taken a huge hit.

That hit is going to be all the larger because of the massive, orchestrated PR campaign that has been going on for more than a generation, presenting the US as the Empire and the Hegemon, its military the unstoppable colossus trampling small countries underfoot. But the test of a hegemon is not how loudly you shout, but whether you can in fact do what you claim. In spite of defeats in Iraq and in Afghanistan, and the ignominious scuttle from the Red Sea, both boosters and critics of the US have been prepared to believe the US had that much power until the last month or so. But now we have price discovery, and it turns out that the US has large and quite capable forces, but it’s not the unstoppable giant ogre that it claimed to be, and never was. The whole “hegemon” thesis, people are beginning to realise, was smoke and mirrors all along: it’s just that now it’s obvious. It’s not just how it is now, it’s how it always was: a traditional result of wars, after all, is to reveal the truth about militaries. No doubt even as I write, pundits are busy composing apologias along the lines of “well, of course by hegemony we just meant Quite a Powerful Nation with a Large Military, actually.” But overselling and underperforming will have their usual political consequences.

There’s an interesting comparison to be made with the “Artificial Intelligence” racket, which was similarly hyped, and also expected to somehow guarantee world-dominating status for the US. But in quiet corners away from the hysteria, people who know what they are talking about have been pointing out for several years now that “AI” is a scam, that as an industry it will never be profitable, and that the money, and even more the power and the infrastructure needed, will never be available. And just in the last few weeks, the media are discovering that that’s how it is, and indeed that’s how it always was, if you had bothered to do a few sums. We can add the interesting rider, however, that in a world where generating power is going to have to be rationed, and silicon chips may be scarce, the “AI” scam may come to a swifter and more brutal end than even its worst critics supposed. Exactly what that will do to the US economy I’m not qualified to say, but I imagine it won’t be pretty.

And the damage will not just be financial. Most of the big names of international business, the Musks, the Zuckerbergs, the Altmans and the rest of that lot, treated with fawning reverence by the media and governments of the world, and who have persuaded us that what they think is actually important, will turn out to have empires built on not very much. How badly the poisonous mixture of world depression, financial crisis, and shortage of power and chips will hit them I don’t think anybody knows, but if they survive, their image, and that of the US as a technological leader, will have suffered as badly as the image of its military.

Just as with “AI” there have been groups of experts for a while with a more sober view of the limitations of the US as a military power. Ukraine revealed that the US could no longer hope to influence crises in Europe very much. And when the Iran fantasy was first mooted, the same experts quietly pointed out that the US did not have the capability to sustain a long-distance attrition war fought largely by airpower, against a nation of 90 million people, where patriotism was still a word in the dictionary, fighting a defensive war and seeking just to outlast the enemy. It doesn’t matter what you think about the regime in Iran: wish-fulfilment can’t alter the facts of geography, technology, numbers, and in general how it is.

The wider political consequences of all this for western countries could be severe in several ways, and at some point I will probably write more on the subject. For the US, as I’ve indicated, the shock is likely to be existential: Americans have been so misled for so long by their governments and media about their economic and military strength that the sudden discovery of its limits will be brutal and de-stabilising. Above all, a political culture of entitlement, which is used to issuing demands and threats to try to get what it wants, will suddenly have to cope with the US becoming the demandeur, as it is over the current “ceasefire,” obliged to make compromises and sacrifices to get what it needs to keep the country going, and seeing others expand into the strategic space it has vacated. Whether the current political system will survive the shock, and whether it will be capable of actually making the concessions necessary for survival, are very open questions.

The Europeans have relied on money and the imposition of normative frameworks to secure their own place in the world. But even if the European economy survives intact, and even if soft power money continues to be spent at something like the current level, it will be increasingly irrelevant. Programmes to establish gender training in municipal police forces aren’t much use when starvation and even famine start to hit some of the world’s poorest countries. And these days the Europeans increasingly lack the practical skills and the organisation that would be helpful, always assuming they could spare effort from their own problems. Meanwhile, whilst we won’t necessarily see actors like China and Russia moving in straight away, the fact that they have retained capabilities that the Europeans have squandered away will become increasingly obvious to all.

The problem with norms is that you can’t eat them. The European media is currently consumed with the threat from the “extreme Right” in various countries, which in practice just means lecturing citizens on who they should vote against, and it mentions Iran only incidentally. No European government seems to have a genuinely thought-out programme for tackling even the existing economic and social problems of their countries: the only priority is that the Other Team shouldn’t win. We are now approaching a test to destruction of the Liberal/Neoliberal ideology which has been forced on Europeans over the last generation or two, and it will rapidly be seen that both it has nothing to offer to explain, let alone address, the situation in which Europe will find itself, and that the hollowing-out of the European state and the decline of the political class means there’s no real capability to do anything serious any more. Maybe the Iranians can send us some technical experts.

And I expect that much of the Liberal/neoliberal ideology will disappear like an ice-cream melting in the sun, as people and governments are required to think about issues such as having enough to eat. But what will replace it? The Brussels ideology has carefully destroyed any sense of national identity, history and culture, and left nothing in its place except vague and contradictory norms which will vanish like dew in the morning. Nobody’s going to die for that, but more importantly no-one’s going to make sacrifices for it either. Well, there’s always organised crime, as I mentioned last time, which is at least organised.

The Iran crisis is the moment the lights come on, and we can see things clearly at last. We have become “enlightened,” and like mystics, we have seen things “as they really are.” Accordingly, nothing has particularly “changed” recently: much of what we can see before us in the harsh light has existed for some time, but we didn’t want to acknowledge it. Now we can’t avoid it. But that’s how it is.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ Thanks to all of those who have recently contributed.

And as always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. And now:

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I don’t normally write essays that follow on directly from previous ones but, given the situation we are currently in, I thought it would be useful this week to develop some of the ideas in my last essay a little further, especially as they refer to problems of understanding and decision-making in government. As before, I am not going to indulge in prophecy or try to talk about the details of military operations, although I will comment on some things that should have been obvious, but to which the media have only just begun to awaken.

I have argued previously that the defeat the West has been suffering in Ukraine is above all an intellectual one: not being able to understand what we are seeing means it’s impossible to respond effectively to it. But the problem goes beyond the fighting on the battlefield, to the nature of that War itself, and in particular its economic and political dimensions. This is even more the case with Iran, where not only is there no overall US strategy (as opposed to half-formulated fantasies and wish-lists) but where in addition Washington appears to be incapable of understanding that the other side does have a strategy with economic and political components, and is implementing it. As a result, all the media concentration recently has been on the movement of US troops to the region and their possible uses, as though that in itself was going to decide something. Yet in fact, the real issue is the development and deployment by the Iranians of a new concept of warfare, based on missiles, drones and defensive preparations, and the inability of the West, with its platform-centric mentality, to understand and process these developments.

So first of all, I’m going to explain more about how and why this intellectual problem has arisen and how it manifests itself, and then talk about some of the consequences of having a political culture that is incapable not only of seeing the big picture, but also of making the big picture and the numerous small pictures fit together, and so is incapable in turn of a strategy that can actually be implemented, or for that matter of recognising a strategy that is being implemented by others.

Western (and especially US) political culture is known for its short-term thinking, and its obsession with trivia. Even if there are political forces who have longer-term ambitions and aspirations, these are not, as I pointed out last week, the same thing as strategies. But why should this be so? Some of it is endemic in the nature of politics itself, where the most elaborate plans can be derailed by something completely unexpected, and where just dealing with the events of the day can easily consume all of your time. And it’s true that the 24-hour news economy is doing to politics what the permanently online world is doing to ordinary people: destroying attention spans and making it difficult or impossible to think about anything more complex. But I think there are also some deeper and longer-term forces at work.

I’ve referred several times in previous essays to theories about changes in human consciousness over the millennia, and what this might imply. Iain McGilchrist has famously written about the increasing role of the left side of the brain (the Emissary) at the expense of the right side (the Master.) In his conception the left brain, which is concerned with precision and detail, should be the servant of the right brain, which deals in the “big picture” and is capable of setting objectives. He argues that the left-brain with its technocratic orientation has become increasingly and dangerously powerful in recent times. I would add that this increase in power is not necessarily experienced in the same way in all cultures, and that in the West it is very far advanced indeed. Why is this?

Well, one reason is the changing nature of society, and with it the nature of politics itself. There has been a huge movement away from traditional manual and practical jobs towards jobs that are essentially symbolic, and where contact with the real world, or even the ostensible product or service, is at several removes. If you work in the online sales department of a large company, you may have never even seen the product you are selling, or had any direct contact with the customer at all. And of course if you buy something online just before midnight, from a supplier whose site is full of third-party sellers importing from China, and delivered to a pick-up point near you, few human beings are actually involved, and probably none see the product as a physical object, as opposed to a cardboard box with a bar-code, or just lines on a screen. Likewise, very few of those who work for banks these days ever see a human customer. The world of finance, indeed, is probably the ultimate left-brain activity: obsessing over numbers as complete abstractions unconnected to reality, and attributing significance to them for all the world like some latter-day degenerate version of Pythagoras. It’s not so much that numbers can be confused with reality, as that reality in the end is nothing but numbers, and decisions are made and workers rewarded without any kind of real-world check. Everything is possible, therefore, because ultimately everything is numbers.

The modern political class, increasingly dominated by those who have worked in finance, or its close relative management consultancy, therefore largely consist of people with little experience of the real world. Over the last forty years, unsurprisingly, this way of thinking and working, combining symbolic manipulation of numbers and the ticking of symbolic boxes, has become the default in government, and even the military and diplomacy. So the emphasis now is not on the capability to do things and achieve actual objectives, but on the skills of making the numbers look right, and proving that you have carried out the correct steps in the correct order. That is all the system knows how to do

That’s not to say that the left brain is useless or dangerous in itself, of course, just that ultimately the right brain needs to be in control. The left brain is process-driven and has no sense of duration, so it will continue doing the same thing in principle forever. If it encounters an obstacle, its instinct is to keep battering away rather than to try something new. (Cognitive bias, which is where we interpret all problems in the light of our special interests or competencies, is a very left-brain phenomenon.) Moreover, it tends to hyper-specialisation, and rejects information that it does not recognise and is not equipped to evaluate. On the other hand, the left brain is also indispensable if you actually want to get anything done. McGilchrist, like the great Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser, actually thought that the two hemispheres were capable of working together productively: indeed Gebser believed that such an age was already beginning, as human, consciousness moved to an “integral” or “aperspectival” stage.

It will be obvious, I hope, that this left-brain-right-brain dichotomy is important for international politics and for understanding how conflicts arise and play out. It is the nature of a crisis that most attention is focused on transitory daily issues, such that the big picture, if there ever was one, disappears from view. I know from personal experience that in a crisis every long and exhausting day is overwhelmed with meetings, telephone calls, video-conferences, unexpected news or initiatives, requests for interviews, media statements, questions in parliament … the list goes on and on. For those like me who had the temerity to ask what the point of all this was, and about longer-term objectives and plans, the response was typically “we’ll worry about that later.” And quite soon, of course, it’s later, and the system realises that it has no idea how it got to where it is, especially because it actually wanted to be somewhere else. But by then it’s too late.

So the real problem is not so much that the left brain dominates, as that the two modes of thinking are never brought together. This means that quite a lot of left-brain work can go on effectively on auto-pilot, because it develops a life of its own. Thus, ideas for using US ground troops in Iran can rapidly be developed at a technical level, with force composition and generation, potential targets, entry points, logistic resupply, ISR etc, all without the questions of “why are we doing this?” or “what do we hope to achieve?” ever being posed. But of course the output of such activities can be easily expressed in whizzo graphics and AI generated simulations, and it provides the planners with something to do.

History suggests that most serious defeats are the result of the strategic objective and the tactical implementation being treated separately: if you like, by the left brain and the right brain not talking to each other. Since the example of Gallipoli has become topical, let’s glance at that. David Fromkin is right, I think, to argue that the idea of the operation (right brain) as conceived by Churchill, was perfectly sensible, but that its execution by the military (left brain) was unimaginative and almost bound to fail. A small personal gloss on that: some decades ago I was reading through the operational orders given to British Brigade Commanders for the assault itself. They included highly detailed requirements for quantities of weapons and ammunition, instructions for dealing with horses, indeed, everything you might expect of a proper staff instruction. Except that nowhere did it say what the purpose of the operation actually was. The result was that the one Brigade that actually achieved its tactical objective promptly about-turned and went back to the ships again.

If the left-brain running by itself is inadequate, the same is even more true of the right brain operating alone, without the reality check its partner should be providing. Actually researching information, reading the views of experts, thinking about the practicalities of a proposal—these are left brain activities, and they require organisation, thought and application. That is why, I think, we have seen so many wild, even ludicrous, statements about the wars of the last few years by politicians and pundits. These people are prisoners of right-brain thinking, utterly divorced from any mechanism for assessing reality. After all, traditional right-brain thinking was mythical, symbolic and metaphorical. As Pierre Hadot pointed out, a question like “did the Greeks believe their myths,” says much more about us, and our understanding of “belief” than it does about the Greeks, for whom myth and symbolism were fundamental ways of understanding the world. Similarly, we can’t really expect an answer to the question “did people in medieval Europe believe that the Moon went around the Earth in a crystal sphere?” because the type of “belief” they understood then is one that we have essentially abandoned over recent centuries. And finally, the more recent triumph of the photograph and the rise of representative art has obscured the fact that for millennia art was essentially symbolic in its representation of the world: Raphael’s School of Athens, for example, was never meant to be a realistic depiction of an actual meeting of philosophers, but a symbolic presentation of them and the relationship between their ideas.

Thus, statements of faith in an ultimate Ukrainian victory, or of a future “Free Palestine,” or of the inevitable defeat of Iran, have to be seen, even more than most political statements, as symbolic and metaphorical. They are not deduced from the facts of the situation, nor do there have to be actual processes capable of making them happen. They are battle-cries, slogans for chanting, descriptions of fantasies and in certain cases nightmares. The problem arises when the extreme right-brain thinking that has always characterised politics, exacerbated by the ignorance of modern politicians about real life, collides with the extreme left-brain culture of our modern world as exemplified in government systems, without any transmission mechanism to enable them to work together.

We can see this in everyday politics. When a really major problem arises, such as Covid, then the political class reaches for what it knows and what it can do, because the left brain has very little imagination. So the easiest thing at the beginning is to pretend it’s not happening. Then OK, it’s happening but we don’t know what to do, so anyone who says that we should close our frontiers can be dismissed a racist. Once governments were eventually driven out of their confidence zones, they were completely lost. I remember watching President Macron thumping the table in front of him and somewhat desperately intoning “We are at war!” to the French people, before asking them to do their patriotic duty by only going shopping if they needed to, as you do in the middle of a war. I suspect we shall see something similar, but worse, as the fallout from the Iran crisis starts to have a real impact, and as political leaders react confusedly and almost randomly, searching around for things that they understand and can do, whether or not they are of any value or even any relevance. And the tendency to assume that it’s only necessary to make money available and things will happen automatically is so deeply ingrained these days that only an earthquake will shift it. And unfortunately, an earthquake may be what we are about to get.

Left-brain thinking is extremely rigid and cannot cope with unexpected events or with failure. When confronted with an obstacle it can’t cross, it often practises denial, and goes into a kind of fugue, repeating the same thing, like an old BASIC program stuck in a loop. You may remember that at the time of the Brexit negotiations, the British Prime Minister Theresa May, could not get a majority in Parliament for various proposals intended to be negotiated with the EU. When taxed with this, both by the media and by EU leaders, she had no answer except to mechanically repeat “there will be a majority,” to all questions. (There wasn’t, of course.) This is typical left-brain thinking, encouraged amongst other things by the way in which politics has degenerated in recent years into the shortest of short-term games, where there’s often no incentive, and there’s even some danger, in looking beyond the next move and the next few days or even hours.

Right-brain thinking in politics is equally dangerous when taken to extremes. Recall that the right brain draws no hard and fast distinctions between reality and imagination, or even dreams. There is a New Age quality to some of the behaviour of political figures under its spell: the truth is what we want it to be, the truth is what makes us comfortable, we believe the myth rather than the reality, and anyway what’s the difference? It was much remarked how parts of the political spectrum constructed a Fantasy Bosnia in the 1990s for themselves, full of cartoon-like Good Guys and Bad Guys. This would have mattered less if some governments had not let such fantasies affect their political decisions. The trend has continued up to the present day, and there’s little doubt that many of the originators and supporters of the Iran War, and for that matter some of their critics, are living in fantasy worlds of their own, dominated by excessive right-brain thinking.

Such thinking cannot be challenged by facts, because it is not based on deduction from facts, but on their selection to support a mythological or symbolic narrative that appeals to the thinker. When you hear people say things like “it’s obvious that this was the plan all along,” or “now at last the truth has been revealed,” while perhaps waving some obscure piece of paper at you, you are seeing the right brain at work in its traditional function of finding any old explanation for things that otherwise would have none. Such thinking is impervious to rational enquiry: try saying “if your theory that Covid was a hoax is true, how do you think the governments of North Korea, Nicaragua and Nigeria managed to coordinate their actions and their propaganda so well, along with a hundred and fifty other countries?” and you will get a blank stare, quite possibly followed by threats of violence. But because it is the right brain in action, these theories don’t have to be literally true: like the idea that—let’s say—the US created Al Qaida, they only have to be symbolically and metaphorically true. Recall that the origins of most religious pantheons are supposed to be in attempts to find explanations for puzzling natural phenomena such as the apparent movement of the sky or the changing seasons, and the explanations were symbolic and metaphorical, because those were the only modes of thought that were then available.

A healthy human consciousness, such as Gebser envisaged, would be one where the two brains worked in concert, with the right brain supplying the big picture and the left brain checking practicality and filling in the detail. But we don’t have that: instead, we have a culture which is half myth-making and half obsession with process and detail, with no connection between them. We know from brain research that the two halves of the brain are connected by a bundle of nerve fibres called the Corpus Collosum, which enable the two halves of the brain to work together. When this is damaged, or has to be severed for therapeutic reasons, the so-called “split-brain” syndrome results, with symptoms including difficulty in communication, uncontrolled hand movements and motor coordination problems.

It’s not fanciful, I think, to suggest that something very serious of this kind has happened with our society. Rather than constructively engage the two sides of the brain, political leaders and pundits give the impression of ricocheting between them; one moment expressing dreams, fantasies or nightmares about Iran, the next fussing over the details of missile payloads the intricacies of sanctions regimes and who said what to whom when. It’s the bit in the middle that’s missing. But then, If you think about it, a politician or pundit in their early fifties, at university perhaps in the 1990s, would anyway have been brought up in a kind of split-brained world reflecting the paradoxes of neoliberal society. On the one hand, told that they can be anything they want to be and that individual freedom is all, on the other hemmed in by an increasing number of written and unwritten laws and rules seeking to control every aspect of their behaviour. The strain of trying to live in two different worlds may itself be one reason why political leaders often seem so detached from reality, unable to comfortably inhabit either.

That is inevitably speculation, but what is clear is that there is a huge missing area in western thinking these days between airy concepts and practical implementation. There is an assumption that promising something will be done, or that money will be put aside at some stage in the future, means the problem is solved. After that, I presume, things are supposed to happen automatically. What might be described, using a military analogy, as the Operational level, where ideas get turned into coherent plans, is basically absent. This also reflects the downsizing and de-skilling of the state apparatus in most western countries, and the resulting situation where the capacity to plan and carry out large-scale operational activities doesn’t exist any more. During World War 2, and for several years afterwards, Britain had a Ministry of Food which planned and oversaw food distribution at a time of scarcity. (Ironically, the health of the British people as a whole improved during that time.) No such organisation could be constructed now in Britain, nor in most western countries: the skills and knowledge, and even the trained administrators no longer exist. I suppose we could always ask McKinsey to prepare an action plan, though.

But the lack of such a capability itself is partly because we no longer think in connected terms: politics is about wild promises and vague concepts, accompanied by the smallest possible practical initiatives, and often none at all. So in the recent French Municipal elections, centrist and leftist candidates in areas with high immigrant populations (among others) began to talk of the need for “security.” Previously, this was dismissed as a code word for the “extreme Right” but it turned out that many immigrant parents were worried about the safety of their children in the streets, so the concept was hurriedly added to the manifestos. But, with some honourable exceptions, few of the successful candidates could actually say what they are going to do, apart from banalities. Anyway, the point is to win the election by adjusting your language. What do you mean we have to do practical things as well?

All of which does not bode well for the West’s ability to identify, much less handle, the kinds of problems that the Iran War is going to bring us, and I want to move on now to giving a few examples in different areas of what they may be and, more importantly how difficult it will be to address them. There have been plenty of sobering articles on things like supply chains by people who know much more than I do: here, I’m going to limit myself to the political and strategic side and the everyday business of government, which are already bad enough.

The greatest challenge, as often, is intellectual. Our masters will have to recognise that chains of consequence and causality do actually exist, that Father Christmas is a right-brain myth, and that there are hard limits on what can actually be done, and hard requirements about what needs to be done, and neither can be circumvented with words. In particular, they need to abandon the delusion that only finance matters, and that numbers on paper represent the underlying reality of the world. (Not even Pythagoras would have suggested that you can eat numbers.) This is most obvious in the endless, earnest discussion of what the Iran War will do to “the price of oil.” In a few cases, pundits even realise that “the price of oil” might affect the prices of other things as well. But from their point of view, “price” and “oil” are two different concepts. The idea that there might just not be enough oil, and that that lack may have practical consequences other than price doesn’t get much of an airing. After all, surely if the price goes up, new suppliers will come forward? That’s how the market works, isn’t it? Isn’t it? The idea that the world will soon lose some of its supply of oil-based products, and that this is a hard limit that cannot be got round, has only just begun to register, and, to the extent that it has, pundits appear to believe that we can substitute, say, solar power for oil, and all will be well. Can you use solar power to make fertiliser? Indeed, can you make solar panels at all without oil-based products? Enquiring minds are waiting for an answer.

Far more likely, I’m afraid, is that the West will be hit by consequences one after another, in no particular rational order, and find itself responding to each in panic, through disconnected and sometimes competing initiatives. In each case it will be a surprise, and in each case pundits will have to spend time with Wikipedia to relearn the kind of thing that people just knew in earlier generations. The very reliability of much modern technology is itself a kind of trap. If you lived in the days of occasional food shortages and power cuts, if you grew vegetables in your garden as a hangover from the war, if many small things that went wrong around the house could be repaired, if cars were made not that far from where you lived and could be repaired by anyone with basic mechanical and electrical skills, if clothes could be home-made and mended, and so on … then you were, ironically, much more conscious of the complexity of society and the economy, because you saw it first-hand every day. Ordering groceries online isn’t quite the same thing. Indeed, the modern family with its two wage-earners, existing off instant meals and take-aways and working long and sometimes irregular hours, is going to find itself hopelessly lost if it is not careful.

I doubt if any western country is now equipped, organisationally or even intellectually, to handle problems caused by scarcity of food. Western states now enjoy little absolute food security—a problem I discussed in some detail last year—but our governments are far from even beginning to grasp the nature of the problem, let alone its implications. Ah well, it will be said, people eat too much and anyway too much food is thrown away. Indeed, but that’s not the answer. It may well be that there is enough food taken in the round, but that it’s in the wrong places, and some of it is prohibitively expensive. Hunger is already a problem is certain parts of cities in Britain, and probably elsewhere as well. In wartime, nations have historically introduced rationing, and most countries had contingency plans to do so as late as the end of the Cold War. But rationing implies an informed awareness of nutrition, a large and efficient state apparatus and a public ready to make sacrifices, none of which exists today.

How would you even get past the first stage, which would be registration? Most countries these days have little idea who is within their borders legally, let alone illegally. How would you determine the rules? Do people have to give proof of their address? How do you discover how many people there are in a household? What do you do with foreign students and workers? Those unable to return home because of transport problems? Illegal immigrants? What about allergies and religious objections to certain foods? How many languages would the average ration-card have to be printed in? And how quickly could that be done and issued? Or is everything to be done virtually? What happens to those who don’t have a phone? If your phone is stolen will you then starve? How will you deal with theft, fraud and the black market that will immediately arise? How most of all will you cope with a bewildered public obliged to deal with absolute, rather than relative shortages for the first time in their lives?

The temptation is to wave hands, and say “we”ll sort it out.” But we won’t, and nothing in the way that western governments have behaved recently suggests they will be able to cope. Can’t charities help? Maybe, but unless you can magic up more food from somewhere then all you’re doing is passing the parcel. As it happens, there is a lot of experience of what happens in situations of severe shortage, and the answer is that the rich buy what they want, the poor buy what they can, and organised crime steps in to put those with money in touch with those with things to sell. The capacity of western states has been radically reduced over the last couple of generations, even as the power of organised crime has grown. We can imagine what shortages of basic medicines would do, and who might wind up controlling their retail sale. In reality, attempts by government to control the availability of everyday necessities will lead nowhere and arouse public opposition. The Internet will have a field day: it will be worse than Covid. This shortage of food doesn’t really exist you see, it’s just the Davos brigade trying to kill off as many people as it can, this time by hunger.

Perhaps it won’t be that bad? I certainly hope not. But for it not to be that bad, then in our hyper-coupled and highly complex society, everything has to continue to work flawlessly all the time. In most western cities these days, there is a maximum of three days’ supply of food and basic necessities in the shops. Most of the disruption will be localised and temporary, but it will also add up. A ship that cannot sail or arrives late here, a haulage company out of business because it cannot afford the petrol there, a power cut making the contents of a frozen goods emporium useless in a third place. In our modern society, it doesn’t need much to go wrong, but it needs an awful lot to go right. And if it goes very wrong the political effects will likely be beyond what we can imagine.

Even basics like petrol and power will be a problem, if there just isn’t enough. Who gets priority? How would you enforce it? Let’s say you decide to keep ambulances on the road. But then paramedics will have to have the petrol to get to work. But what about administrative staff? But what about the managers? But what about the private company that provides the hospital catering? What about the senior management of that company? What about the directors of the private equity company that owns the company that owns the company that cleans the floors?

If you’ve ever worked in government, you don’t need me to tell you that these kinds of practical questions have no real answer, and that there are layers and layers of other practical problems beneath them. But there are also larger-scale problems that are even worse. We may finally see an end to the refrain I’ve heard all my life: “it will all be done by computers!” From taking up a room to sliding into my pocket, that’s been true since the 1960s. But now it turns out that there are problems with plastic, problems with silicon chips and most of all problems with sheer power.

Those “AI” data centres? Not looking so good now are they? What happens to economies when the “AI” boom folds up even quicker than anticipated? What happens to all those companies who sacked half their workforce because “AI”? What happens to students in year or two, graduating from university but unable to write connected prose, only to find that “AI” isn’t there any more? But what about existing data centres on which the world largely depends. They aren’t, in spite of propaganda, in “the Cloud,” they’re in certain countries, some of which are vulnerable, others of which might suddenly find they have a strategic asset. And the modern heroes of Industry, your Gates, your Musk, your Bezos and their little friends, where will they be? And why should we listen to them any more?

And there will be any number of totally unexpected and indeed unforeseeable minor consequences, as you would expect from a world which is so deeply connected and tightly coiled. So, as a random example, what about Gulf investments in Europe, where they have been big in the property market for years now. Will Qatar have to sell Paris Saint-Germain? And if so, who’ll buy it?

I think we are about to experience the Crunch Event that has worried me for some time: a head-on collision between really serious economic and social problems and the ever-diminishing capability of governments to deal with them. I fear that what we call Complex Emergencies when they happen to others are about to come and visit us, and we no longer have the tools, institutions or even societies capable of dealing with them. Given their record over the last decade or so, it’s not hard to see some governments, at least, just buckling under the strain.

Dire as that situation would be, it is obviously only part of the problem, as the entire international economic, political and military balance is upended, and governments are going to find themselves in a frightening new world, unlike anything they have ever known, and where neither Powerpoint nor mythical and symbolic politics can help them. Unless something even more catastrophic intervenes, I’ll talk about that next week.

That said, these essays will always be free, but you can continue to support my work by liking and commenting, and most of all by passing the essays on to others, and passing the links to other sites that you frequent. If you would like to take out a paid subscription, then of course I won’t stand in your way, (I’d be very honoured in fact) but I can’t promise you anything in return except a warm feeling of virtue.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ Thanks to all of those who have recently contributed.

And as always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. And now:

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Now that the Weekend War That Wasn’t is in its fourth week, it’s becoming clear that just about everything to do with its progress, as well as its origins and its potential consequences, is covered in hopeless confusion. Confusion about exactly how the conflict started and why, confusion about what kind of conflict it is, confusion about what its originators were trying to achieve, confusion about what those who claimed to be, or have been identified as, the originators thought they were trying to achieve, confusion about what has actually happened, confusion about the meaning of what has apparently happened, insofar as it is known, confusion over what “victory” means for various actors, confusion over whether some of the parties even have a concept of victory, let alone if it’s a feasible one and how it can be evaluated, confusion about how the fighting can be stopped, if it can be, and confusion about all of the manifold interacting political, economic and military consequences. Not bad for something that was supposed to be finished before the markets opened on the Monday.

Some of this confusion is inevitable in any major politico-military crisis, and I’ll explain why in a minute, and what the consequences of that might be. More of the confusion is the result of pundits competing with each other to protect their business models by trying to convince you that they alone know What This is All About, and that the explanation for all of the above confusion just happens to be based on one of their pet obsessions. I’ll start by trying to dissipate some of this confusion, and look at what this implies for an “end” to the conflict. I then want to talk about the difference between Aspirations, Consensus and Plans, and how that helps us understand what appears to be happening and may follow. I finally want to talk about some of the more likely practical results of the conflict, which is important in the sense that I don’t think we have been in a more dangerous moment since 1914, and the consequences of this conflict could be equally far-reaching. But we have to be realistic: in spite of all the furious controversy, no single “cause” will be found for the War, no concept of victory will ever be universally shared, and it may not even be clear when the conflict “stops.”

As I say, some of the confusion about aims, objectives and process is to be expected: it’s a feature of complex crises like this one. However, there is one area, surprisingly, where there really isn’t any inherent confusion at all with the principle. There is a surreal debate in some quarters about whether the US and Israeli attacks could be “justified,” especially if they “prevented” something, and about whether this or that state is “at war,” or whether such and such is an “act of war,” among other things. The actual situation is simple enough in principle, although unfortunately it’s not the principle that is the problem. But let’s start by recalling what the principle actually is. Under Article II (4) of the UN Charter, it is agreed that “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.” Military measures to “restore international peace and security” are reserved to the Security Council alone, with the obvious common sense exception that a state retains “the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs … until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.” And that’s it.

The result is that War, with its associated discourse of “declarations of war,” “casus belli,” “acts of war,” “belligerents” etc. has been superseded and no longer exists. Instead of “war” we now have something called an “armed conflict,” which is not a legal state but pragmatic one, determined by the level of violence in a particular area. Thus, there is an armed conflict in the East of the DRC but not in the West. Thus also, it’s an anachronism to ask whether two countries are “at war” with each other. The problem is that “armed conflict” is a term dreamed up by International Humanitarian Lawyers to mark out a field to which the Law of Armed Conflict could be applied, but they forgot actually to define what it was, and it wasn’t until the ad hoc Tribunals of the 1990s that that question even had to be addressed. So there’s an armed conflict in parts of Ukraine where Russian and Ukrainian forces are in contact. But what about elsewhere? Is there an armed conflict in the Moscow region because drones have fallen there? So was the US sinking of an Iranian destroyer legitimate? Was the Iranian bombardment of oil facilities in the Gulf States legitimate? I have no idea and, whilst there are plenty of opinions, nobody else has either. (And note, for the umpteenth time, that morality and the law are two different modes of argument.)

But not much else is clear. Some of the confusion is because of censorship, fakery, mistakes, misunderstandings and faulty analysis, and this has been a trend in all recent conflicts. But quite a lot of it is inherent in the way that political systems work and in the interactions between them, so let’s look at that next. I’ve covered some of this ground before, but it’s clear that not everybody is quite on the same page, so I’ll put it in the simplest and most generic terms first.

We’ll begin with the commonplace observation that all major political decisions contain elements of consensus and compromise. This is most trivially true in countries with coalition governments, with weak governments depending on others for their support, or with governments that are divided within themselves for personality or political reasons. But it’s actually universally true, because even the strongest and cleverest leader can’t do everything. Even Stalin was forced to delegate things, and Hitler was notorious for not reading written documents. (The Fuhrer Directives were generally negotiated between interested parties in the light of Hitler’s known opinions, and then presented to him for approval or modification.) But in more normal situations, all important government decisions result from negotiation and bargaining. Sometimes this is overt, sometimes it goes on behind the scenes: much depends on the political culture. Sometimes a Ministry, a Department or a group or individual may decide not to make a fight of something because it’s not worth it. On other occasions, very important issues may be fought out in public or semi-public.

The main reason for this is that most major political decisions have acceptable arguments on both sides, as well as different aspects that mean different things to different people. It’s quite natural, therefore, that actors will take different positions. The Foreign Ministry may want to participate in a peacekeeping operation for political reasons, the Defence Ministry may be worried about open-ended and potentially dangerous commitments, the Finance Ministry just wants to stop people spending money. There is no “right” answer: it depends on which factors you think are most important. But it does mean that a policy that emerges on a major, and especially on a controversial, issue will be strongly supported by some, supported with reservations by others, very grudgingly supported by a third group, and a matter of indifference to still others. Likewise, in order to ensure that the policy is accepted, the detail of the policy, and especially the way it is presented, may have to give a little bit of ground to opponents or sceptics. If the policy is successful, however, its original opponents will “remember” that they were always more supportive than they might have appeared at the time, and of course if it fails, the reverse is true. The same applies to unintended consequences, and events which were unexpected at the time. (I can’t count, for example, the number of people in 1990/91 who had “always thought” that the Cold War was about to come to an end, though they had said nothing earlier.) And when an unwelcome conclusion or development seems inevitable, people will comfort themselves by finding virtues in the situation that they hadn’t appreciated before.

All this is familiar enough to anyone who has worked in a political environment for any length of time. Yet for several reasons, some people still find it hard to grasp. One major problem is the intellectual grip that Realist-style thinking has in many western countries. (I say “style” because people often tell me that this or that proclaimed Realist is in practice more subtle in their thinking.) But basically, states and governments are seen as having unitary interests, and competing with each other for power and prestige. Within governments, political groupings and institutions battle rationally against each other to secure resources and advance their agendas. There is no room, in other words, for a lot of the factors that have actually entered into decision-making historically and still do today. This kind of mechanistic, materialist approach, often in its crudest form, is sometimes defended as a useful simplification, but in reality it obscures much more than it informs. It’s true of course that battles for budgets and influence take place inside governments all the time (although the US system should not be seen as typical) and that there are disputes between even the closest of allies. It’s also true that nations will typically pursue what they see as their best interests, but these interests are by no means always inimical to the interests of others. Politics is not a zero-sum struggle for power, at any level, and policies are often adopted because they suit the broader interests of groups or nations for different, and even incompatible, reasons.

So in the case of Iran, a lot of unnecessary confusion has been caused by tiresome arguments for example about whether it is Israel which is controlling the US, or the US which is controlling Israel, and about the “real” reason for the attack on Iran. (The two are evidently linked.) The reality is, and it is hardly news, that the relationship between the US and Israel is highly complex, and that the US has historically sought to make use of Israel and Israel has historically tried to manipulate the US. What the case really does is to provide an example of how complex the relationships between large and small powers often are, and how large powers do not necessarily dominate small ones. Likewise, asking what the war is “about,” is pointless: it’s not “about” any one thing. It’s a war with many different origins, where some of the main figures felt forced into the decision, others embraced it joyfully, others with reservations, still others went along with it for career or political reasons, and probably no major actor in Washington had exactly the same mix of motives. And of course as I suggested a couple of weeks ago, crises like this acquire a momentum of their own beyond a certain point, and it is easier to go forward, no matter how dangerous, than it is to go back.

This interpretation clearly has major implications for a resolution of the crisis, because it means that it will be very difficult—indeed it may actually be impossible—to arrive at a consensus in Washington that the fight is over, the US has lost and must act accordingly. Different groups will behave in different ways. For example, if the fighting continues much longer, senior military figures will start to worry about the wear-and-tear and destruction of expensive weapons systems with long and uncertain replacement schedules, and what this will do to the capability of the military for the future. (I return to that point later.) Meanwhile, someone who thought that the destruction of Iran would bring about the Second Coming of Jesus won’t have these concerns. (I imagine there are similar divides in Israel and quite possibly in Iran, but I don’t have enough knowledge of these countries to do more than speculate.)

A corollary of this leads to the second point. Because there are so many interests involved, because individuals come and go, because institutions become more or less influential, circumstances change, other factors limit your choices at any given point and allies and opponents themselves go through political evolutions, it’s difficult for countries to have “strategies” in any but the most trivial sense, and the more complex and divided the political system, the more difficult it is. That is to say, the political class of some countries (or parts of it anyway) often have long-term aspirations, and when they are in power or otherwise have influence, they will try to nudge things in the direction they want. So in the 1960s there was a strong current of elite opinion in Britain in favour of joining the (then) Common Market. The fact that Britain did join in 1973, though, was not the result of a particular strategy but of circumstances: the unexpected victory of the strongly pro-Europe Conservatives in 1970, and the disappearance of De Gaulle from the political scene. Likewise, other parts of the British political class aspired almost immediately to leave again, and campaigned relentlessly for decades to do so, but it was only because of David Cameron’s stupid decision to hold a referendum on the subject in 2016 that they accidentally got their wish. This is, in fact, how most major domestic and international political changes happen: if power is not always found “lying in the street” in Lenin’s phrase, then power, or the ability to decisively influence events, tends to be the result of an opportunistic approach and a good sense of timing.

There were certainly those in the US and Israel who, for various combinations of reasons, pressed for decades for this conflict, and to the extent that they ever had power or influence, they may have made it more likely. But the real issue is power and access to power at a certain moment, and it’s an elementary error made by pundits (and even some serious historians) to suppose that speeches or articles or even government documents over long periods of time can somehow be crushed together to make an ascriptive strategy that those concerned were not conscious of having. Indeed, there’s even a technical name for it in psychology, apophenia, or the tendency to make patterns out of unconnected things, originating in the fear of a random and disorderly universe. Apparently, it is unusually common in those involved in various aspects of politics. The reality is that the volume of potential “evidence” now available is so enormous that you can find any set of connections that you want to. It resembles Borges’s Library of Babel, in the sense that every conceivable thesis, refutation of that thesis and refutation of the refutation is available somewhere, and can be traced back through the decades in various documents. All this is important, because the lack of a strategy for Iran—as opposed to a generalised aspiration to do harm when the opportunity presented itself—meant that the US was not really prepared for this war, and that the effects on US power and on its economy and its political and military system, will accordingly be a lot more severe than they might otherwise have been.

Now of course nations and government don’t act randomly. Even for something as rushed and hurried as the US assault on Iran, some planning certainly would have taken place. Indeed, competent governments do what is called “contingency planning” all the time, and it’s highly likely that some American government at some point asked for a contingency plan for a war with Iran to be prepared. (The existence of contingency plans, of course, is another incitement to apophenia.) But the US operation, at least, has an improvised and jury-rigged quality to it that suggests a lack of anything beyond technical military planning without a political context. (It’s hard to judge for Israel.) Iran, with a stable, ideologically-based political system which has endured over decades, does seem to have a coherent long-term politico-military plan, and to be implementing it, which is why it has the initiative, and will likely retain it. Moreover, because any strategy requires a strategic objective (“end-state” in the jargon of the trade), and the US has none, or if you like has a number of competing, ill-defined ones, then it is by definition impossible for the US to succeed except by accident. “Destroy Iran” is not an end-state.) More importantly, perhaps, the lack of an agreed end-state in Washington means that judgements about success and failure are meaningless, because there is no agreed objective to relate them to. In turn, this will lead in due course to complete uncertainty, and violent disagreement about how to “end” the war, because with different ends in mind, different lobbies will be arguing that the war should be continued, paused or for that matter stopped, because their criteria have been met, or alternatively can now never be.

Plans are not a strategy, of course, although in my experience some nations and institutions seem to think that enough detailed plans can somehow be made to add up to one. But it is possible to do longer-term planning under one of two conditions, recalling that in politics five years is a long time and ten years is an eternity, as governments change, personalities wax and wane and different sorts of pressure are brought to bear. The first is where there is a single figure or group with very clear ideas about what they want in a specific area. A good example is the revision of France’s security strategy under De Gaulle. He had a clear vision of what he wanted: France as a member of NATO but with an independent capability for decisions and action and an independent nuclear force, and a partner of the US but not a subordinate. It helped that he had a great deal of support in political and military circles for going this way. This involved getting out of Algeria—inevitable anyway—to enable the French military to be modernised, pursuing the nuclear programme that had been secretly started under the Fourth Republic to operational status, building a national command system outside NATO and promoting investment in an independent defence industry. It also required a political component, including attempts at NATO reform and discussions with the US, before a progressive withdrawal from the Integrated Military Structure. By contrast, with the decline of the Gaullists over the last generation, and the triumph of the Globalists and neoliberals, French security policy has become short-term and completely incoherent.

The second is a broad elite consensus and the willingness to think in decades, but in very general terms. The classic example is the re-industrialisation of Japan after World War 2, and its move towards an export-oriented economy, a path subsequently copied by others. There was no grand, detailed Strategic Plan, but rather a long-term consensus on starting small, and moving steadily into more and more ambitious levels of technology. We could add the rebuilding of Russia under Putin and moves by the Chinese to dominate certain sectors and capabilities of the world economic system. But even in the Chinese case, I doubt that there was a highly-detailed blueprint: in any event if everyone knows which general direction to go in, you don’t need one.

This all makes the situation of the United States very uncomfortable. Its political culture is extremely short-termist and largely focused on a domestic audience. It has little idea about long-term strategies (as I have pointed out several times, a document is not a strategy) and its decision-making system is personalised, fragmented and labyrinthine. It may not be an exaggeration to say we have arrived at the point where its administration is no longer cable of taking critical decisions. The corollary is that, as the conflict continues, the system will progressively just stop working and will eventually come to a halt. Nothing will happen and nothing can be decided. Mr Trump may well announce some decision or some new policy, but the means to implement it will probably not exist, and any of a number of players will be able to sabotage it. For this reason, as for others I’ll touch on, it seems highly unlikely that there will be a “deal,” with Iran, let alone a detailed agreement. If you can’t even decide what you want, it’s hard to persuade someone to give it to you.

So a United States which was not prepared for this war and had no agreed objectives for it, finds itself with its fingers caught in the wringer. What could it do? Well, for the first time perhaps in its modern history, Washington cannot just “declare victory” or silently acknowledge defeat, and go home. The VietCong could not pursue the Americans back to Washington, the Taliban were happy for the US to leave Afghanistan. But the regime in Tehran has a vote here, and they also have a policy. (Recall that the Persian Empire stretched from India to Libya at one point.) As a minimum objective, Tehran will want to evict all foreign forces from the Gulf, and become the undisputed regional superpower. In the past, Israel was the main threat to these ambitions, but it’s not clear how far that that country will be in any shape to resist them in a few months time. If that is indeed one of Iran’s ambitions, then there are two reasons why the US, and the West in general, is not going to be able to frustrate it. The first is to do with the developments of new technologies.

By now you’re probably tired of reading about how Drones have Changed Everything, and I wouldn’t blame you, especially since much of the coverage on the subject has been hopelessly sensationalist. But in fact we are at a certain stage (perhaps half-way?) in another revolution in military technology and tactics which will have all sorts of consequences we can’t yet foresee. Recall that up to one hundred and fifty years ago, trained manpower was the metric for assessing military power on land, as it had always been. Although technology became a dominating factor in World War 1, the actual level of that technology was quite low. Even as late as the start of World War 2, tanks and aircraft were still rudimentary, and not that expensive or complex to manufacture and maintain. In most cases their expected combat life was short anyway. It was only in the Cold War that the Weapons Platform—an expensive, sophisticated independent piece of equipment requiring skilled operation and maintenance—came to be the norm, and even then it was more common in the West than elsewhere. Thus, western nations came to rely on small numbers of platforms which were increasingly powerful and versatile, but which also epically more expensive, and required increasingly sophisticated training, support and maintenance just to function.

That period is now coming to an end, but not necessarily in obvious ways. For example, it’s often argued that drones benefit the defence more than the offence, by reference to Ukraine, where it is probably true. But the last few weeks have shown that drones are also powerful offensive weapons. Consider: you want to destroy a command and control facility or a military camp. Until recently, there were only two ways. If there was no resistance, you could fly a frighteningly expensive aircraft over the target, with a pilot it takes a minimum of two years to train, drop a bomb, and go home to a sophisticated airbase probably hundreds of kilometres from the target and capable of at least first-line maintenance, where a single flying hour would require perhaps 5-10 man-hours of work by highly-trained technicians . If resistance was expected, the same aircraft, perhaps after attempts had been made to suppress enemy air defences, would launch a missile from a safe distance, hoping that the targeting information was accurate and up-to-date, before going to the same airbase.

With such a model (and effectively the same is true of missiles launched from ships), there is a great deal of investment in the success of the individual attack. An aeroplane may drop one or two bombs or fire one or two missiles before going home. With drones and (relatively) low-cost missiles, you can afford to use much larger numbers. If some get lost, shot down or miss their target, the loss is proportionately much smaller. As guidance systems continue to improve, (and it seems that Iran has been able to do precision targeting in at least some cases), it is going to become massively easier and cheaper to bring a given destructive capability against a target. At the end of the day, after all, a fabulously expensive strike aircraft is just a complicated and resource-hungry way of getting a small amount of destructive power on the target. The comparison of drones and interceptors or missiles is often made in cost terms, but, as I’ve argued, this is only relevant if you are cash-constrained. The more important comparison is of the resources involved to produce the same effect. A missile launched from an aircraft requires the development and production of the missile as well as the aircraft, and its maintenance and support costs and the training of the pilot and the ground crew. When you can achieve the same result with, say twenty drones, as with a squadron’s worth of expensive aircraft, their pilots and support personnel and some expensive missiles, the economics of warfare start to change. And you expect to “lose” the drones anyway.

What is currently going on in the Gulf is therefore a conflict between two different types of warfare, that we might call Platform Warfare and Projectile Warfare. At the moment, the latter appears to have advantages in terms of area denial and precision attacks in well-defended areas.

But obviously such weapons and such a style of warfare have their limitations: they cannot take and hold ground, for example, and they cannot project power beyond a certain point. They also require a doctrine and command and control systems if they are to be used above the tactical level. Nor are they necessarily the Poor Man’s weapon: they can be used by advanced military powers (Russia is the obvious example) and in any case they also require a degree of training and technical expertise. However, Projectile Warfare does have a number of practical advantages, especially for nations whose orientation is essentially defensive and those who cannot or do not wish to acquire expensive platforms. Indeed, if its use becomes generalised, nations may increasingly hesitate before they acquire too many expensive platforms anyway.

It does seem the Iranians have made broadly the right choice, then, in their war with the US and Israel. The question is whether the same military posture will help them with what is assumed, from their statements, to be their larger purpose of dominating the Gulf. I don’t think its realistic to try to anticipate internal political developments in Iran—it’s well above my pay grade anyway—but we can still talk a little bit about capabilities and how they might be used. The first point to make is that “domination” in this sense does not need to be assertive and flag-waving, along the US model. That model—primarily for domestic US consumption—turns out in practice to be the facade we always thought it was, and the war has revealed US “domination” of the region to be largely theatrical. Beyond the rhetoric of “Empire,” useful to US politicians and equally useful to critics of the country, lay the reality of a declining economic and industrial power trying to make up with violent rhetoric for an increasing lack of solid military capability: a point to which I return.

In practice, it’s likely that “domination” will amount essentially to deterring states in the region from doing things that Tehran doesn’t want, without the need for public threats and bluster. That would include hosting US bases, or developing too close a relationship with western countries. In turn, the West would realise that attempting to challenge Iran militarily would be pointless, and would therefore keep away. This is analogous to Iran’s policy in Lebanon (where of course there were also other regional players) which was based on its ability, through Hezbollah, to stop the Lebanese political system dead at any point. A few token assassinations and the odd drone strike would probably convey the right message to any hesitating Gulf state leadership. And of course the Straits can be closed at will, at any time. It isn’t even necessary to say any of this out loud, because, in that region as elsewhere, much is not said and still less is written down, but lots of things are just known. For that reason, a de facto recognition of Iran’s status would probably be enough, particularly since writing it down would involve a level of political humiliation which neither the Gulf States nor the US political systems could easily tolerate. I don’t know whether Iran will do this, and what they do precisely will depend on things that haven’t happened yet, but such a policy would be technically feasible. It would depend to some extent on continued intelligence support from China and Russia, but both countries are likely to think this is a reasonable investment, as well as a way of retaining influence in Tehran.

The second point has to do with the design of western equipment. The last decade of the Cold War saw the West field a new generation of much more complex, sophisticated and costly conventional weapons, which it was hoped would give them qualitative superiority over the Warsaw Pact. They were designed for a short defensive war in Europe, before the point where tactical nuclear weapons had to be used. Tanks such as the American M 1, the British Challenger 2 and the French Leclerc were an order of magnitude more capable than their predecessors, and derivatives, developments and even some of the original hulls are still in service today, although they have proved completely unsuited to the very different type of combat in Ukraine. The problem is that, other than fiddling with the basic designs, there are really no new ideas for the next generation, and all that can be said is that a successor system will take decades to design and produce, and cost unbelievable amounts of money.

The same is broadly true in other areas as well. Although the media focus has been on new weapon systems such as the F-35 (which first flew twenty years ago, remember), much of the US arsenal is elderly and some is obsolescent. Again, this is because attempts to replace existing systems with advanced technology such as the ill-fated Zumwalt-class destroyer, came to grief, and replacements are still on the distant horizon, and will be fabulously expensive when they do arrive. In addition, western destroyers and frigates were intended primarily to counter aircraft and submarine threats, which reflects the circumstances of their design and construction. Defence against drone swarms and hypersonic missiles is another issue entirely. Such ships now carry no real protective armour, and a hit from a sub-munition in a sensitive area could do a lot of damage.

Not only is some US equipment elderly, and in some cases obsolescent, but even the newer equipment is being used at high intensity, consuming stocks of spares and wearing out the platforms. (The expected fatigue life of an aircraft, for obvious reasons, is based on peacetime usage.) For example, the majority of US tanker aircraft are KC-135s, a design dating from the early 1950s. The fleet is slowly being modernised, but the existing older aircraft will have to continue flying for some while. The strain of constant refuelling missions on old airframes could mean that many will become unusable quite quickly.

Such programmes will also have to compete for funds with the need to modernise the increasingly-obsolescent land and sea components of the US strategic nuclear system. But even infinite amounts of money can only buy what there is to buy, and what can be produced. Industrial capacity in the US has sharply declined in recent years, and in shipbuilding; for example, only 1-2 hulls can be produced every year. But the problem (which is not confined to the US) is in many ways even more basic. Although there are programmes, designs and studies, it’s not obvious how much of the present generation of post-Cold War equipment is actually going to be replaced, or indeed whether it can be replaced in any reasonable timescale at any reasonable cost.

In other words, the platform-centric West may be about to hit a hard limit of capability. Even in principle, it isn’t possible to build platforms that can counter the sheer numbers, simplicity of manufacture and relatively low cost of projectile-based defences, or to resist such projectile technologies being used aggressively. In the short term this is going to benefit Iran, both in defeating the US and Israel and in its regional ambitions. In the longer term, it is going to have a massive effect on the strategic balance in the world and, as usual, nobody is thinking seriously about it.

I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here.☕️ Thanks to all of those who have recently contributed.

And as always, thanks to others who tirelessly supply translation in their languages. Maria José Tormo is posting Spanish translations on her site here, and Marco Zeloni is also posting Italian translations on a site here, and Italia e il Mondo is posting them here. I am always grateful to those who post occasional translations and summaries into other languages just as long as you credit the original and let me know. And now:

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When I become despondent about the state of the world, which is quite often these days, I leave the RSS feeds about politics and wars to one side, and spend some time with reviews of new books and music, blogs devoted to expensive stationery, philosophy, esotericism, art and culture, until I feel a bit better. It was during one such period of recuperation recently that I happened across a review of a scathing new biography of The Piss-Artist Formerly Known as Prince Andrew. In rather old-fashioned English, a biography described as “warts and all” was one where the unflattering parts of someone’s life were included as well. So far as I can see, Mr Lownie’s new book, sardonically entitled Entitled, isn’t just warts and all: it’s pustules, boils, scabs, running sores, acne and toenail fungus too.

I’ve no intention of reading the book—which I understand is quite good—because the review itself was enough to make me feel ill, with its portrait of a deeply unpleasant, stupid and unfeeling individual. (I’ll come back to that third trait a little later.) Like a lot of people I had vaguely felt that there was something very wrong with Andrew, but not being greatly interested in the Royals anyway, and living in another country at the moment, much of it had passed me by. But then it struck me that if I had reacted so negatively to a précis of the life of this unpleasant buffoon, there must be some definable reason for that. After all, Andrew probably hadn’t committed any crime as such: the most he could be done for is probably misuse of his office as Trade Supremo for personal gain. So why did I, and the many who have read Mr Lownie’s book, and the many others who have pored, incredulous and glassy-eyed over stories of Andrew’s epic misbehaviour, react so negatively? And why did I, and many other people here in France, react just as negatively to the grisly stories of the unpleasant personal behaviour of the former Socialist Minister Jack Lang, which I recounted a few weeks ago, and which have continued to pile up since? On what basis?

There’s a fundamental distinction at work here. It’s one thing to read biographies of tyrants and really evil people who have done objectively terrible things, even if few tyrants and evil people are interesting in themselves. But by the time you’ve slogged your way, for example, through the two volumes of Stephen Kotkin’s massive biography of Stalin published so far, you’ve absorbed the sense of Stalin as a high-functioning paranoid psychopath, the ultimate Evil Bureaucrat and office politician, who read everything, memorised everything but understood little of importance. That is at least interesting and different.

It’s another thing to read biographies of tricksters, fraudsters, geniuses with self-destructive tendencies, artists who drank themselves to death, rockstars who died in their bath or painters who amputated parts of their anatomy. Or for that matter, biographies of people who suffered imprisonment, torture and exile, displayed heroism and persistence, or contributed something exceptional to the world in the arts, science, philosophy or even politics.

And finally, of course, when we read biographies of great historical figures, we expect them to have a mixture of virtues and flaws, some personal qualities that are admirable and others that are less so, to have made good judgements and catastrophic errors; all of which in the end simply makes them human beings.

All these accounts relate stories and describe behaviour towards which we can have relatively coherent reactions. We may disagree amongst ourselves, of course. We may find the actions of this or that political figure evil and indefensible, or conversely we may argue that they were in a situation where they had no choice but to act as they did. We may argue that this or that General was the greatest of a particular War. We may argue that this or that great artist ruthlessly exploited and betrayed others, but remains, nonetheless a great artist. There’s room for an assortment of views in such cases, but the rules of interpretation, if you like, are reasonably well accepted, and it’s possible to discuss them against a framework that most people accept.

Now it could be argued that Andrew is a special case, and I’ll come back to that. But I think he’s actually better seen as just a high-profile and not very interesting case of the tendency these days for public figures to be overwhelmingly boring, vacuous, greedy and generally unpleasant. He doesn’t even seem to be interestingly bad. Indeed, I’m struggling to think of any pubic figure at the moment, in business, in politics, in entertainment or just someone who’s well-known for being well-known, in whose sense of morality and ethics you could have the remotest confidence, and whom you might consider, even for an instant, taking as a model. This is, to put it mildly, unusual in history. I don’t think you’d find many people to defend Andrew, except, of course, within his own morally-challenged circle. (There is probably a series of books in preparation at the moment with a title something like Not Very Great Lives At All).

Ah, did I just say morality? There’s interesting paradox here. For an age supposedly marinated in relativism, we never cease to have strong moral opinions and make sweeping moral judgements about others (if seldom about ourselves) and to express these judgements loudly and aggressively. The whispering among suburban neighbours of my youth has turned into a never-ending carnival of moral outrage about everyone and anything, visible all the time to everybody. Yet very few people stop to think what is actually behind this knee-jerk shotgun moralism. So this week I want to look at morality as a practical, essentially political and social question, and examine some of the consequences of living in a society characterised by deeply immoral elites, full of confused and aggressive moralists, but without a coherent moral scheme to make judgements. Now let’s first be clear what I mean when I talk about morality, and how it differs from other types of judgement about behaviour: “morality” comes, after all, from the Latin mores, meaning “customs,” “rules” etc. Crucially, it is about how we decide to behave to others when we have an element of personal choice, and how we see their own behaviour.

We can think about the behaviour of others using a number of different criteria. We can say, for example, that what they have done is legal or illegal, that it obeyed explicit rules or it didn’t, that it was clever or stupid, that it was successful or unsuccessful. We can also say that it was Right (in the moral sense) or Wrong, which is where the difficulties start. And we can judge others, or maker our own choices in the same way. In a Liberal society, as I have often pointed out, the first of these criteria is all that really matters, although in some specialised cases following the rules of a particular institution might also be important. But Liberalism has replaced the old question “how should I behave?” with the new question “what can I get away with?” just as it has replaced “how should I live my life?” with “how can I be as successful as possible?” The result is perhaps the most amoral or immoral ruling class in the history of the West, for whom anything not explicitly illegal is fair game, and anything explicitly illegal is just a challenge to find your way around. On the one hand this evokes justified anger, but on the other hand it holds out the temptation to emulation.

In reality, we have to continually make everyday judgements on some moral basis where Laws or a Book of Rules aren’t going to help us. Since it’s topical at the moment, let’s consider the case of the appointment of Peter Mandelson as Ambassador to Washington, and what followed. Reading through what’s been released so far, the average thoughtful person would very probably decide that Mandelson should never have been considered for such a post under any circumstances, and it’s astonishing that he ever was. His business interests alone, and the way he would subsequently benefit financially from his Ambassadorship, should have disqualified him. His party colleagues at least would have been aware of his deserved reputation for greed, backstabbing and ruthless ambition. And of course his relations with Epstein were common knowledge.

Any ordinary government servant in almost any country would have been refused an advanced security clearance in such a situation, let alone clearance to view Intelligence material, without debate and without appeal. The question was not, Is this person qualified to be an Ambassador in spite of some awkward personal contacts? it was, Is this the kind of person we want to send as Ambassador to Washington, especially since he apparently wanted to spend half his time being Chancellor of Oxford University as well? And then when told he had to resign, he managed to negotiate a severance payment, presumably by threatening legal proceedings against the government, although his contract provided for him to be dismissed without compensation at any moment. In other words, the popular judgement about Mandelson is on all the evidence an essentially moral one, not a matter of box-ticking, and most ordinary British people, I’m sure, would give a resounding “No” to the question. He’s not a fit person to send as an Ambassador and representative of the King and the nation, they would say.

Yet that’s not the way the British Government decided to handle it. I was looking through some of the material released recently, and it’s striking how little of Mandelson’s evident moral weakness is actually reflected in the correspondence, or in statements by Starmer. Yes says the latter, well, he didn’t know, and if he had known he might have acted differently, and he apologises to all the underage girls harmed by Epstein. Yes, really, as though somehow these two things were connected. I have here to join the long queue of people who are unable to understand why Starmer didn’t know Mandelson was not morally fit to be an Ambassador anyway, but I’d argue beyond that, that things have really gone downhill when the government doesn’t even seem to realise that that the man should never have been allowed within radioactive detection distance of the Diplomatic Service in the first place. They really don’t get it, after forty years of “what can I get away with before I’m found out and then how can I wriggle out of the consequences if I am?” being the moral standard increasingly used by elites.

So we face the curious situation that politicians and other members of the ruling class around the world are detested as never before, and partly because they are incompetent, yes, partly because they are crooked, but mostly because they are overwhelmingly unpleasant and ethically-challenged people. (And for that matter, many important public figures among the Famous are just as unpopular for the same reason.) Now it’s true that there are countries such as the United States, and parts of Africa, where public expectations of their politicians are already about as low and despairing as its possible to get, but that doesn’t mean that people are reconciled to this situation; quite the contrary. So in general, and in spite of forty years of Liberal indoctrination, we still find that popular criticism of politicians is not so much legalistic and procedural, as based on a disappointed sense of morality. The anger aroused by allegations that Mrs von der Leyen has personally made money, directly, or indirectly, from both the Covid and the Ukraine crises, will not go away if a report eventually clears her of doing anything technically illegal. Most people would simply reply that a person in a position of public trust shouldn’t behave like that, whether it’s technically legal or not.

As it happens, and for reasons quite unconnected with these essays, I’ve been preparing to write something about George Orwell, whom I have always admired greatly as a person and writer, and I was struck once more by the way in which Orwell’s moral vocabulary, and even universe, now seem so utterly removed from ours. For Orwell, the greatest virtues were honesty and authenticity, and his philosophy could be described in one word as “decency.” He didn’t really care what people thought about what he thought, and what he wrote, which is why he was a relatively unsuccessful journalist until the end of his life, attacked from all sides. Likewise, Socialism, I think, was for Orwell primarily a question of the creation of a decent society, where people didn’t have to starve or live in unhealthy conditions. (He was always very critical of Utopianists of all persuasions: as he said, the point of Socialism was not to make things perfect, but at least to make them better.) Winston Smith’s famous observation 1984 that “if there was hope it lay in the proles,” was not a fantasy of some future revolution, but a pragmatic judgement that for any kind of society to survive at all, it was necessary to rely on the decency found among ordinary people, which the Party had abandoned as thoroughly as our current ruling class has.

It’s hard to imagine such a vocabulary being employed today by our elites, or even at all. Orwell thought not simply that a decent society should be a political objective, but also that people should behave in their private lives and to each other with what he called “common decency.” That didn’t exclude some pretty sharp exchanges between Orwell and his opponents on literary and political issues, but all of his contemporaries agreed that he was never spiteful or personal. That sounds hilarious now, if you ever stumble accidentally into the slime-pits of contemporary social media, but it was much more the case in his day than now.

“Decency” has been made into an Unword now, along I suppose with “honour,” “honesty,” “courage,” “shame” and other expressions which now form part of the glossary handed out to students obliged to read literature published before about 1980. (Can you imagine a politician being asked today, as Joseph McCarthy was asked, “Sir, have you no sense of decency?” The very idea seems ridiculous.) It would be an easy response to say that, well, moral standards have changed, we have moved on, more things are now accepted and so forth. But that’s not really the point. We’re not talking about the details of private behaviour here, but about how we see others, and therefore how we behave towards them. The exaltation of the Individual inevitably produces a solipsistic world-view in which everything I experience is just a facet of Me, and things are only good or bad insofar as they benefit Me or not. Other people are there to be manipulated or profited from, or at worst are just Non-Playing Characters.

In personal relations, we are encouraged to express our wants in the form of a shopping list (I want someone who is …) rather than asking ourselves what qualities we ourselves have to offer that might attract others. Our relationships, even intimate ones, are becoming increasingly transactional. After all, when our existing relationship no longer provides sufficient of the required benefits we had earlier listed, it’s time to go, isn’t it? Responsibility? You must be joking. Likewise, most organisations now resemble a battlefield, or a free-fire zone, in which those in charge try to exploit those they lead, as those they lead try to get everything they can out of the system, and to exploit each other.

But it’s not all like that, and therein lies the interesting point. People may be obliged to respond to the shopping-lists of others to find a partner but they don’t really enjoy it. They may have to backstab their colleagues to keep their job, but they would prefer not to. Most ordinary people, like Orwell’s proles, have retained a sense of right and wrong, of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, a sense that our elites have clearly lost, and which applies at every level from the most mundane to the most fundamental. What’s the most mundane example I can think of? Well, how about the person who plays music very loudly on their mobile phone in a bus or a train, without consideration for others? If questioned, they would presumably reply that it’s a free country and they are doing what they want to do, and who are you to tell them they shouldn’t? (“Good manners? What the hell is that?”) There is, in fact, a direct if lengthly connection between that sort of antisocial behaviour and Mr Mandelson effectively blackmailing the British Government into giving him some money by threatening unpleasant publicity. (“Integrity? What the hell is that? Anyway, it’s not illegal.”) Yet it’s not immediately obvious how we provide a convincing answer to these sorts of objections about individual “rights,” and I’ll have more to say about that later.

All societies have recognised that that there are huge areas of human interaction that cannot be governed by written laws for well-remunerated lawyers to quibble about. Indeed, in Egypt, in Greece and in Rome, the distinction between “custom” and “law” did not really exist. There are societies I’m familiar with today in Asia and Africa where that is still essentially the case: you follow customs and “what we do,” rather than what some distant written code of law may say. Indeed, in some Asian societies it’s common to write laws in such a way that they can be interpreted, let’s say, flexibly. Modern western society is the first example in human history of an attempt to set down not merely traditional-style laws, but permissible and non-permissible everyday conduct in the form of explicit rules, governing in principle our entire lives. These may be actual laws, or subordinate legislation such as decrees, but they may also be internal rules and regulations, or even just amorphous “codes of conduct.” Their common weaknesses is the scope of their ambition in trying to impose rigid rules on human behaviour, and their failure to do this successfully leads, not to their abandonment, but to their multiplication, as ever more rules are introduced to try to compensate for the weaknesses and omissions of the current ones.

Perhaps you work in an organisation that has a “Code of Conduct” for, let’s say, potential discrimination against the “ableness-challenged.” It’s not technically enforceable, but in practice it is, and it’s usually written in such a vague fashion that almost anyone can violate it if they are not careful, which in turn could be grounds for dismissal. But the problem is that historically trying to bludgeon and frighten people into behaving in allegedly virtuous ways never works. (Ask any organised religion.) If you have an organisation that does not treat, let’s call them, disabled people fairly, then you have a bad organisation, run by ineffective people who don’t give a lead. Threatening your workforce about their behaviour won’t get you anywhere: we are back to the need for common decency again. If people in general don’t understand about treating others with consideration, then there’s a problem with society. It’s like having a written Vision or Mission Statement. If you have to write one, there’s something lacking in the management of the organisation in the first place. Moreover, the opposite is also true. If an employee, armed with an expensive legal team, manages to persuade a judge that technically no violation of some fatuous Code of Conduct can actually be proved, and that no law has been broken, then the individual might get damages and be reinstated, even if their actual conduct has been morally unacceptable.

All of this comes down to the the individual of course but in a rather different fashion from the frantic worship of individual rights which is such a feature of our times. The fact is that, as we go through life, we are continually confronted with small or less small moral decisions about what to do, and how to behave to others. Insisting on “my rights” at the expense of every other consideration doesn’t work, because others will obviously insist on “my rights” as well, and society as a whole will start to come apart, as is observably happening in some western countries. We’ll go into this point in a little more detail in a moment. But irrespective of “rights,” it’s important to recognise that any decision about how to behave in a given case is still an individual moral judgement.

The notion of the individual as a moral actor seems to have developed about 2500 years ago in various different civilisations, possibly connected with increasing social and economic complexity. Biblical scholars, for example, point to Deuteronomy XXIV, 16, which concedes that “The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” At the time, this was a considerable step forward. Yet long afterwards, and indeed until very recently, the individual was nonetheless embedded in social structures which in turn expressed and to some extent enforced norms of conduct. Andrew’s behaviour is probably no worse than that of many royal princes or aristocrats in European history, but in the past there were officially-sanctioned and widely supported norms against which this behaviour could be judged, and which we have largely lost. For example, both the Protestant Church and popular satirists railed against the conspicuous consumption of the aristocracy, their arrogance and their love of fine clothes and jewellery, and in this they seem to have reflected popular feeling as a whole. (It’s not an accident, after all, that the rising middle class very publicly cultivated sobriety and virtuous behaviour instead). But we have moved today to a stage of ultra-liberalism, where I have a right to do Anything I Can Get Away With, and where the rich and powerful acknowledge no restraining moral imperatives at all, setting in the process trends that others may copy.

Understandably, people have never liked being morally restrained, and have resorted to various tricks to try to get round it. The idea of being not really responsible for your conduct endures in western culture in remarks like “I don’t know what came over me,’ reflecting a time where supernatural forces were thought capable of seizing control of people. More recently various forms of determinism have seen personal behaviour as entirely the product of one’s environment, thus removing individual moral responsibility altogether. Some theorists have tried to argue that the “oppressed” have no choice in their behaviour, or that it was the logical result of capitalist society or something. (And in an increasingly repressive and conformist western society, more and more people are turning to self-diagnoses of divergent mental conditions, as an absolute protection against being accused of this week’s favourite moral weakness.) More sophisticated defences of morally questionable behaviour have tried to “deconstruct” virtue and charity to reveal sordid motives beneath. Thus, if I give some money to a homeless person this is not an act of charity on my part, but rather an expression of the hierarchy of power that exists between us. My local supermarket hosts charity collections a few times a year, where people donate things they have just bought like tinned food, toilet paper and school stationary, for transfer to those who cannot afford to buy them. But of course, argue some, it’s better to keep your money, because all you are doing is enabling an unjust system to survive and prosper. I feel sorry for people like that.

There is also the fashionable idea that individual moral responsibility is anyway meaningless as a concept, because all individuals are simply members of groups that exist in objective states of dominance and submission to each other, and share the same characteristics. All allegedly good acts are just subtler exercises of power by dominant groups therefore, and so if one member of a group is guilty of something, they merely represent the essential nature of the whole group, and that whole group can be readily condemned and dismissed. (If this sounds reminiscent of nineteenth century essentialist racialism, well then it is.) Entire groups like White People and Men can harbour moral prejudices and desires of which they do not even have to be conscious, but of which they are all automatically guilty. You may have come across the appalling story of Gisèle Pelicot, who was the victim of mass rapes organised by her husband over a period of ten years, and has both waved her right to anonymity and written a well-received and dignified book on her experiences. Yet feminists were outraged that she made it clear that she did not believe that the men who had violated her were typical, and failed to condemn all men as equally guilty. Feminists maintained that male compassion for Gisèle was actually hypocritical, because all men would have done the same, given the chance. I feel sorry for people like that as well.

The problem of the need for something solid to base individual moral judgements on will not go away. Most people think that there is good behaviour and bad behaviour, and that this applies separately from, and in addition to, or even instead, of purely legal questions. Yet our modern society is increasingly set up to produce the opposite effect: amoral or even immoral behaviour is tolerated, and even featured indulgently in the media, thus potentially providing an example to others. Liberal theory has never really managed to sort this out. The first Liberals believed, or affected to, that human beings were rational, or could be made so with enough effort, and that collectively, rational behaviour would rebound to the benefit of society as a whole. Robespierre, in his famous speech of 15 February 1794 argued explicitly that only personal virtue would save the Revolution, and that to “purify morals,” a policy of Terror should be introduced. Although that was an extreme example, right up to the present day Liberals have never shirked their duty to tell the rest of us how we should live our lives, even if the “how” has changed a lot over the generations.

Because of course the rational pursuit of individual self-interest, which is what Liberalism is, does not necessarily lead to personal happiness, and by definition even less to a moral society. (That’s not a value judgement, by the way, we could also say “a society with a coherent moral system, whatever that may be.”) Logically, if we all pursue our rational self-interest, we will collide with others pursuing theirs, and our own rational self-interest will lead us in the direction of doing whatever we need to do to succeed, irrespective of moral considerations. Socrates had argued a very long time ago that only a virtuous life can make us happy, and so logically a life of pure rational self-interest would make us unhappy. Not everyone accepted this argument, even at the time.

Liberalism arose at a point when Christianity was the major moral force in society, and when the precepts of the Ancients about morality were also taught to all educated people. The assumption therefore was that the world had been designed optimally by God, who would intervene if really necessary, through Adam Smith’s famous invisible hand, to transform the consequences of individual greed and selfishness into something positive for society as a whole. Not everyone accepted that even at the time, either. But more widely, the mitigating effects of both Christianity and the Classical tradition, as well as the common decency of ordinary people, were mistaken by Liberals for universally-applicable and eternal rules which would always determine conduct. Take those away, as has increasingly become the case, and you have nothing left but selfishness red in tooth and claw.

Even today, we may live institutionally in a post-Christian world, but the structure of such personal moral standards as we retain comes directly from our religious past. Where else would we look anyway? There is a long history of failed attempts. And even today, a Church is the one place that will not turn you away whatever your condition (the same is true for other religions, yes). I was recently in the cleaned and restored Notre Dame (an experience not to be missed by the way) and I was told that one of the unexpected results of its closure was that lonely and unhappy people, who would spend most or all of their days in the Cathedral, treating it as a kind of surrogate home and knowing that they wouldn’t be moved on as in a shopping mall, were put out on the street. But absent any religious and social tradition of compassion and good works, why would anybody put themselves out to look after such people? What’s in it for them? Indeed, why would anyone behave well, when advantage could come from behaving badly? As I asked some time ago, what personal advantage is there in honesty?

Smith thought he had the answer to the wider question in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Essentially, he argued, we default towards that kind of behaviour which is generally approved of, and that therefore we wish to copy. Rather than there being a pre-existing “general rule” about how to behave “The general rule … is formed, by finding from experience, that all actions of a certain kind, or circumstanced in a certain manner, are approved or disapproved of.” But this makes enormous assumptions about the kind of society in question, and also fails to deal with the problem of moral defection.

What I mean by that last phrase is that Liberal society has no answer to the following Prisoners’ Dilemma kind of conundrum: if everybody including me behaves well, I receive no special benefit, but if everybody else behaves well and I behave badly I do receive a special benefit. So then why should I behave well? Arguments about the common good are not receivable, because in Liberal thought either there is no common good, distinct from the sum total of individual goods, or if there is it takes second place to the personal good of the individual. The conundrum is actually insoluble in the terms in which it is posed. It will always be advantageous for me to be dishonest if everyone else is honest, and nothing can be done about that.

The problem is made a lot worse by imbalances of power and wealth. The richer and more powerful you are, the greater damage your own selfishness will cause to society as a whole, but also the fewer restraints there are on your actions. This is why ordinary people know instinctively that selfish behaviour ultimately hurts everybody, and that the wealthier and more powerful you are the more damage you can do. Conversely, decent and altruistic behaviour, such as showing kindness to strangers, ultimately benefits everyone if it is done at scale. One obvious problem is that, whilst most people accept this view, it cannot be rationally proved. No matter how sophisticated the presentation, the argument boils down to the assertion that you should behave well because you should behave well, not expecting any personal benefit.

The other problem is that those in positions of power and wealth, those who infest the Internet and the airwaves, those whose influence and example are most easily visible, see no reason why they should behave morally just to benefit society, when it might mean sacrificing something they want to do or have. In this way, a dangerous gap with important practical consequences is opening up between the selfish, egoistic desires of the rich and influential, and the sense of common decency of ordinary people. It is not new, of course, but its extent is already unprecedented. And forty years of turbo-liberalism and the official abolition of Society as a concept suggest that the balance of power is moving increasingly in their direction.

Which is why Andrew’s unlovely behaviour is important. If it were just one thick, dull Royal it wouldn’t matter. But in fact his behaviour is typical of a new class with money but no morals, all entitlement, no example. Andrew’s ancestors were at least aware that they were expected to set a “good” example, and would be open to criticism, if they didn’t. Our current international ruling class, unencumbered by intelligence, education or even common sense, could not even understand such constraints, much less respect them.