Let's All Feel Good

No, we Kant.

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When I was young, I carried a guitar. Alone or with others, I sang for my supper, and sometimes more than my supper, in church halls and community centres, in schools and universities, in folk clubs and semi-professional venues.

In those days—roughly the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s—there was a corpus of acoustic songs that most people more or less knew, If you could strum three chords (OK, four at a pinch) and manage to hold a tune, then you could probably sing most of them, and your audience would join in the chorus. Even if I was already a purist in those days, more interested in the modal music of the English tradition, these were songs that I somehow assimilated, and could probably sing if asked to do so. If you ever had a vinyl LP of Joan Baez or Peter, Paul and Mary, or have seen one since, you’ll know the kind of thing I mean. And of course there was a lot of early Dylan and ersatz Dylan mixed in with it.

Much of this music was, well, lyrically and musically not very sophisticated, but that was part of the point, because most of it was protest music of one kind or another, linked to current popular political causes and intended to be sung with gusto by large groups, in the hope of changing the world. (Tom Lehrer, who memorably eviscerated the whole movement in The Folk Song Army, remarked that “the thing about a protest song is it makes you feel so good.”) But OK, people always want to feel good, and that was an age when it almost seemed like a human right.

Most of these songs were about conflict and war in some sense, and their lyrics generally said that war, violence, repression, hatred and discrimination were bad, and peace, tolerance and justice were good. Hard to argue with any of that I suppose, especially when you are eighteen or nineteen years old. Most of all, and importantly for this essay, they encouraged the belief that beneficial changes in the world could be brought about by moral force and mass movements of ordinary people. Thus, in Lehrer’s words you could “feel good” by singing Where have all the flowers gone? but you could also feel that in some sense you, personally, were helping to bring peace to the world. And this was not altogether unfair: the Civil Rights movement in the US, which was the inspiration for many of the songs, had been about largely peaceful mass political action, and the songs about trades unions and the rights of workers did reflect genuine popular struggles. (Even rock music got in on the act: the recent death of Mr Ozzy Osbourne reminds me of friends of mine banging their heads against the wall, while listening to War Pigs at full volume.)

But the wider message of the popular culture of the time, of which I’m discussing only one manifestation here, was an Idealist one: that the world could be changed by moral force alone, and that once the battle of ideas was won, war, conflict and poverty would necessarily fade away. Thus, for example, the New Age guru Werner Erhard founded the Hunger Project in 1977, with the aim of abolishing world hunger in twenty years. He gained the support of many celebrities, including the singer John Denver, for “an idea whose time has come,”and a program that concentrated on advocacy and changing minds, rather than actually feeding people.

So it did seem almost as though war and conflict could be laughed and mocked into oblivion, and in certain circles an interest in a military career was treated as a kind of mental illness. Thus, Monty Python’s Flying Circus mocked the military mercilessly. The popular BBC TV series Dr Who in those days featured a UN military force intended to keep the world safe from aliens, commanded by a typically stupid Brigadier, whose men always had to be rescued by the Doctor’s superior skills. It was the era of Joan Littlewood’s (and Richard Attenborough’s) Oh What a Lovely War!, of Richard Lester’s How I Won the War with John Lennon, and of course Altman’s M*A*S*H, and many other films. For many young men, wearing Army surplus uniforms bought in Carnaby Street in London was a gesture against something or other. At a somewhat different intellectual level, it was the era when revisionist writing about the Second World began to gain momentum, leading ultimately to today’s fashionable assertions of moral equivalence between the Western Allies and Nazi Germany.

Or maybe War was perhaps just something that would fade away as humanity evolved. Arthur Koestler, in one of his last books, tried to give scientific cover to the idea that wars were the result of individual human aggressiveness, and proposed adding calming psychiatric medicines to urban water supplies. On a more popular level, the 1967 film Quatermass and the Pit, based on a BBC TV series, postulated that wars and aggression were caused by unseen Martians who had colonised the planet at some time in the past. At the end of the film, with the Martians defeated, a new era of world peace seemed possible. The underlying conspiratorial idea of the film was the latest incarnation of the meme of shadowy manipulators of the world (Templars, Freemasons, Jews, Bankers, Communists) and of course is alive and kicking today in endless accusations of shadowy groups behind contemporary wars and revolutions. Dylan’s Masters of War gave a new lease of life to the “arms dealers cause wars” trope, which I see still has its adherents. But the key point was that any such monocausal theory made the causes of war and conflict easy to understand, and the solution correspondingly simple. And above all, it made it very easy to strike poses of moral purity and superiority, without actually needing to know anything about anything.

This was the Indian Summer of the post-war world, when 1939-45 had become history, and there was a cautious belief that, as my parents’ generation said, “at least you won’t have to fight in a war like we did.” It’s always dangerous to romanticise the past, but I think it’s unarguable that in much of the western world people actually felt safer then, than they do now. In my youth, for example, you could wander into public buildings freely, watch debates in Parliament by standing in a queue, and have your photograph taken outside 10 Downing Street next to the long-suffering policeman guarding the door. There were wars but they were a long way away, and, as in the Six-Day War of 1967, they seemed romantic adventures more than anything serious. Pundits assured those interested that once the last few colonial states had become independent, wars would start to become meaningless because there would be nothing to fight about. We did not realise that autumn was almost there.

Now in some ways this complacency may seem strange. After all, the world was divided into antagonistic blocs, armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. In theory, we could all wake up radioactive crisps the next morning, and there were occasional moments when it looked as though we might. But it was also an age of détente. The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 did not start a war. The SALT 1 and the ABM treaties were signed, the US finally recognised Beijing as the capital of China, and at the very end of the period the Helsinki Final Acts were signed as well. It did seem as though the Great Powers were finally getting something of a grip on the course of world history.

Of course, during the same period there was a massive war taking place in Vietnam, but in a sense this was assimilated into the same general picture. There was a lot of opposition to that war, but in Europe at least, it was performative. It was about songs, marches, “demos,” petitions, student union motions and angry editorials in small-circulation newspapers. The International Union of Students, based in Prague, thoughtfully provided as many posters declaring solidarity with the anti-imperialist struggle of the Vietnamese people as anyone might need.

But this behaviour was of a piece with the overall thinking of the period. In what was evidently a watered-down and banalised interpretation of Liberal International Relations theory, war and conflict were considered fundamentally mistakes, that could be rectified if national leaders only behaved sensibly, and heeded the moral teachings of young people with guitars. In the words of one especially facile song, of the time nations could just “agree to put an end to war.” They could sign peace treaties and bring universal peace tomorrow, if only they would get their acts together. I have a vague memory of being shown a Superman comic of the era in which the eponymous hero brought peace to the world by carrying off and destroying the weapons of all the nations. This was, roughly, the level of analysis current at the time.

In essence, war and conflict were problems that could be solved by abolishing them, just as laws were being passed at the time to abolish discrimination on the basis of race and sex. The idea that wars might have causes, that peace treaties might not bring peace, or that people might have genuine reasons for violent resistance, were too difficult to assimilate, except in one case that I’ll return to.

Essentially, this is how Vietnam was viewed. For understandable reasons, the conflict was reported in the newspapers and the evening news as an almost entirely American affair, whatever the sympathies of the journalists. The Vietnamese themselves seldom appeared, except as targets or victims according to political sympathies. For many guitar-strummers and their audiences, though, the issue was even simpler: the US was attacking and occupying Vietnam, and once its troops left, the fighting would be over and peace would break out. The then-popular singer and songwriter Tom Paxton, whose lyrical and musical gifts were not matched by his political acumen, would tell his audience that the Viet Cong were actually just the government of South Vietnam, fighting the US invaders in disguise. When the war continued after 1972, the country was unified by force in 1975, and subsequently the “boat people” began to flee the country, the result was a kind of numb silence. It didn’t compute. Nor did the revelations of the horrors perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, who some, especially in France, had supported because they were fighting the “American imperialists,” nor indeed the violent overthrow of that regime by the Vietnamese. It was difficult to write songs about all that.

Now to be fair, the wild over-simplifications of the guitar-strumming community were no more extreme than, and in a sense the mirror-image of, all the anti-Communist propaganda of the day. For that school of thought, every questionable development in the world, from the Beatles and long hair, to the wars in the Middle East to, well, the war in Vietnam, was blamed unhesitatingly on the machinations of the Soviet Union and its attempts to build and maintain a global empire. Although this discourse didn’t go unchallenged, it was popular with the kind of people who clung to monocausal explanations because the reality was too complicated. To get an idea of its popularity if you weren’t around then, imagine the writings of your favourite Internet site today, but with all the references to “America” changed to “Soviet Union” and “CIA” to “KGB.” In many cases, literally the same people moved at the end of the Cold War from seeing the source of all evil in Moscow to seeing the source of all evil in Washington, because complexity was simply beyond them. Some, you will have noticed, have now moved back again.

The competing monocausal explanations of Left and Right were obviously superficial, as indeed was all of the thinking of the time about conflict and peace. There was no interest in complex explanations and historical causes, rather, it was important to identify guilty individuals who were promoting war and needed to be stopped. (Thus, several generations later, the obsession with “Putin” as the source of all evil.) Both Left and Right, though, accepted the Liberal dogma that everything, in the end, could be settled by negotiation, and that fighting was pointless because ultimately conflict was not really “about” anything, and in many cases was just caused by the other side’s meddling. In some cases, public pressure, including demonstrations, might be required to force governments to realise this, but the opening of negotiations and the signing of treaties were regarded as inherently desirable objectives, and achievements in themselves.

On what was then reasonably called “The Left,” the dominant mood is best described as a superficial and largely frivolous anti-militarism. (OK, the Left in France was different: it always had been.) To be more precise, it was a dislike and distrust of western militaries and their activities, because they seemed to represent the detested western “establishment” in its purest form, they spent lots of money, and some of them had been associated with colonial wars. The Left in most of Europe was utterly uninterested in defence issues anyway, and wore this ignorance as a badge of pride: it didn’t know much, but it knew what it didn’t like. However, this dislike didn’t necessarily extend to other militaries, so long as they were fighting the West. The classic case of course was Vietnam, where the Viet Cong and the regular NVA were somehow conflated into a single, glorious, unconquerable fighting force. (The incorrigible Ewan McColl even wrote a song in praise of them which I am not linking to because it’s too awful.) On some parts of the Left, at least, there was also sympathy for the Israeli Army, as well as tolerance, if not admiration, for the fighting qualities of “anti-colonialist” fighters everywhere. Thus, Lindsay Anderson’s 1969 film If, set in an English public school, fiercely mocks the British military, and was asserted to have a pacifist message, even while the main character played by Malcolm McDowell gushes over a photograph of an African guerrilla fighter. And a decade later left-wing western intellectuals went gooey-eyed over the Afghan Mujahideen fighting the Russians. It all depends who’s holding the gun, I suppose.

Although such people described themselves as pacifists, in my experience they weren’t: they just disliked and despised the armed forces of their own country and its allies, and transferred their need to admire courage and virility to other more deserving organisations, as I explained some essays ago. The end of the Cold War thus discombobulated them as much as it did the Right, although for different reasons. After the initial shock, many of these movements found themselves ideologically stranded. The Cold War had ended, but not in the way they expected, and, whilst disarmament agreements had been negotiated, there would still be plenty of weapons around. And with sickening rapidity, it emerged that the unfreezing of the Cold War had simply allowed past conflicts to resurface. All the purveyors of monocausal explanations of Right and Left were stunned to see that new conflicts did not obey the assumptions about conflict they had grown up with.

Some, at least, were rescued by the fighting in the former Yugoslavia, and especially in Bosnia. It wasn’t obvious that such extreme passions would be aroused by the fate of a country scarcely known in the West except as a holiday destination, and indeed even the fiercest partisans of “intervention” had never visited the country, nor took the trouble to learn anything about it. (Those who did know the country were, in my experience, the most sceptical about the value of any kind of intervention.) But just as with the Iraq War for the Right, so for parts of the Left Bosnia was a useful receptacle for the surplus moral energy slopping around after 1989. Bosnia became a Cause because a Cause had to be found. Unsurprisingly, many supporters of the Iraq War opposed deployments to Bosnia, just as many enthusiasts for invading Bosnia opposed the Iraq War. It was the same western military: it all depended on who the enemy was.

Because Bosnia was a Cause, it was not subject to the usual rules of logic and reality. The “duty” to intervene, as it was put, was independent of practical considerations. Its proponents were the same groups who had sniffily refused to learn anything about military issues earlier, and in 1992 they did not see why they should be expected to know anything about such boring questions as force generation, logistics or operational military planning. To the question “what do you want us to do then?” the answer was “stop the violence!” To the question “how do we stop the violence?” the only coherent answer, apart from “that’s your department,” was “with more violence.” Moral force would ensure victory, after all, even if this time with guns rather than guitars.

Unfortunately, the crisis erupted just as western nations were beginning to transition away from Cold War structures. European countries had overwhelmingly conscript armies with limited training, and were often legally prevented from deploying conscripts outside the country. The US was not interested in participating, and the British and French, the only nations with sizeable professional forces, were not keen on deploying their soldiers to be targets. There was a consensus at the time that even to bring an temporary halt to the fighting would require a force of 100,000 troops deployed throughout the country (if you’ve ever flown over it in a helicopter you’ll understand why), to be followed by another 100,000 troops six months later, and so on until the Force eventually left, when the fighting would no doubt resume. Such resources did not remotely exist in Europe (and indeed don’t now) even if a coherent military plan with an objective could somehow have been scraped together.

Although it wasn’t my professional responsibility, thankfully, to deal with these sorts of issues directly, I did make a few attempts to educate people I came across about some of these realities. I soon gave up, because the response was always snarling contempt and lessons in morality (“you’re all cowards: you could if you wanted to.”) Western governments had a moral duty and they were failing in it: some female critics were clearly the granddaughters of the women who in 1914 had handed white feathers to British men reluctant to enlist in the War. An overwhelming moral duty to go off and kill people could not, by definition, tolerate any dissent or even questioning, and practical problems could not be allowed to become an obstacle.

Even in those days, scarcely anyone studied philosophy in Britain, but it’s not hard to see in these sorts of inflamed attitudes a pale echo of that most destructive of philosophical concepts: the Kantian Categorical Imperative, picked up from some lecture somewhere. The great thing about the Categorical Imperative is precisely its very universality and automaticity: if I can impose one on you, you have no choice but to act as I suggest, and no counter-argument is acceptable. As Alasdair MacIntyre (to be fair, no fan of Kant) describes it, for Kant the rules of morality are rational, like arithmetic, and not derived from religion or other systems of thought? They are thus binding on everyone, just as the rules of arithmetic are. Experience is by definition irrelevant if such rules are pre-emptively universal. Thus: ”the contingent ability … to carry them out must be unimportant—what is important is (the) will to carry them out. The project of discovering a rational justification of morality therefore simply is the project of discovering a rational test which will discriminate those maxims with are a genuine expression of the moral law from those maxims which are not …”

Kant was quite sure in his own mind what these rules of morality were (happily, they were precisely those that his parents had inculcated in him) and he thought that ordinary people, after a little rational reflection, would arrive at the same list. The problem, of course, is that anyone can use such a line of (let’s be generous) reasoning to reach any maxim they like. No doubt Kant would have been disturbed to discover a maxim such as “kill all those who are violating the human rights of Muslims in Bosnia,” but it meets his criterion of a moral maxim that can be universalised.

The similarities between the crude moral posturing of “interventionists”, from Bosnia to Rwanda to Kosovo to Darfur to Libya to Syria, and Kant’s specious logic are too exact to be a coincidence. That doesn’t mean that the interventionists all read and reflected on Kant (though some may have done so) but rather that, conversely, Kant’s doctrine represents a systematised, intellectual-sounding rationalisation of something we all instinctively feel and would like to be true. Wouldn’t it be nice, after all, if we could identify moral obligations and force others to carry them out? It would enable us to feel morally superior to those others, morally intolerant of their failings, and yet would absolve us from the need to argue any logical case, or even know anything about the subject. And if it all goes wrong it’s not our fault.

Thus, the self-styled pacifists of the 1970s and 1980s put away their guitars and were converted into the raving militarists of the 1990s by a very simple adaptation of universal moral laws. After all, there’s no real difference between “violence is wrong when I disapprove of it,” and “violence is right when I approve of it.” The development of Humanitarian Interventionism (or as I prefer to call it Humanitarian Fascism) up to the present day can therefore be seen as a logical development of a long-standing absolutist mindset that knows it’s right, and consequently seeks to impose duties on others, to whom it feels morally superior. (For decades the British government had received moral lectures from anti-nuclear groups who didn’t know much about nuclear weapons, but knew what they didn’t like.) Ironically, the West is now on the receiving end of a very similar absolutist mindset, but we’ll get to that later.

It’s this, I think, that helps to explain the incoherence and the lack of even basic understanding so evident in the “debate” about Ukraine. It applies to the “rights and wrongs” of the conflict, since support for one side or the other is a moral duty, not a question of the interpretation of facts and history. It’s easy enough to devise competing Categorical Imperatives capable of universalisation: “support all western-friendly countries when in conflict with others,” versus “support all countries the West dislikes when in conflict with others.” (Ironically, those who quite correctly decry “my country right or wrong,” are often prepared to support somebody else’s country right or wrong.) There’s no need to know anything about anything, because you are evoking a universal moral principle (even if in practice some of us feel awkward if we don’t at least make an attempt to learn a little bit about the situation.)

Much the same applies to all the endless reams of commentary on the military situation, on weapons technologies, on military plans and operations and on diplomatic and political strategy, which infest the Internet. Occasionally, you can find people who know what they are talking about, but the sad fact is that most people don’t actually want to read articles or watch videos by people who know what they are talking about, in case they hear things that must be morally wrong. Throughout the Internet and in the comments sections of any number of sites, you can find confident pronouncements about Russian strategy or western weaponry by people who once saw a war film. This becomes understandable when you realise that the judgements they are making are not technical, or even political, but are based purely on moral imperatives. “We must believe everything Moscow says,” versus “we must believe nothing Moscow says,” for example.

Since the end of the Cold War, with its endless moral compromises and its need to placate the Soviet Union to some degree, the West has been free to practice this way of thinking as much as it likes, and its leaders and their servants have been able to persuade themselves of the most extraordinary things. For all that popular culture likes to seek out moustache-twirling villains, in my experience most people working in government like to feel comfortable with themselves, and consider that they are working for what they, at least, see as a worthy cause. So in 1991, I saw lots of intelligent western government officials wearing badges that said FREE KUWAIT (I made myself unpopular by asking if I could have some.) The War itself was an orgy of moral luxury, when political leaders and their advisers could revel in the sense of acting virtuously, in pursuit of the moral axiom that “internationally recognised borders should be inviolate.” For all the persistent, tedious, clever arguments about financial and resource motivations affecting government actions in crises, the fact is that, at least in my experience, decision-makers like to think of themselves as moral actors: the world would be a considerably safer place if they didn’t. (If your personal experience is different, do let me know in comments.)

In many ways all this is not surprising. Kant’s belief that moral imperatives can be rationally deduced out of nothing fits entirely with the Liberal mode of reasoning that I have so often criticised. Liberalism has no origin, no foundation other than abstract rationalism and its precepts such as they are, are essentially to be accepted a priori. By definition, Liberalism cannot persuade, it can only assert and bully. It’s natural then, that uncontrolled Liberalism such as we have known over the last generation or so would adopt Kantian-style arguments of moral blackmail, even if its practitioners had only the remotest idea who Kant was. Liberalism’s only argument is Because I Say So, and that includes trying to load moral duties onto the shoulders of others.

Experience in life, as Kant emphasised, counts for nothing, and practicability is beside the point. When you read stories of the “failure” of western policies in the Balkans or Rwanda in the 1990s, therefore, it’s important to understand that this is not failure as you and I understand it. It doesn’t mean that things were tried and didn’t work or that they turned out in the end to be impossible, it means that the West failed in its moral duty, as defined by those whose self-elected role is to define moral duties for others. Likewise today, the West is proudly “carrying out” its moral duty to Ukraine, which explains in large part the puffed-up preening of its leaders and the their cheerleaders in the media. It’s doing the Right Thing, no matter how much destruction is caused. Anyway, as Kant said, you’re obliged to do things even if you can’t actually carry the obligation out. So everybody’s happy.

Well, not altogether. Everything goes in cycles, and traditional political factors of national advantage, economic benefit and just plain common sense are starting to muscle their way back into the argument, from which they should never have been excluded. After all, can there be a a greater Categorical Imperative for political leaders than “look after the interests of your nation and its people?” What else would you suggest? Yet western leaders think nothing of lecturing their people that their interests must be subordinated to foreign policy adventures and the care and maintenance of trafficked immigrants. But it does look as though among the least-regretted casualties of Ukraine will be the popularity of Humanitarian Intervention, especially as no-one has been able to explain why a similar moral obligation to intervene does not apply in Gaza. (The reasons for that are complicated, contradictory and counter-intuitive and I’ll come back to that subject in a week or two.) In the meantime, there are signs that the dead hand of the assumptions of Liberal International Relations Theory is losing its grip and is starting to slip away.

And not before time. After all, one of the basic assumptions of the last generation was that the West could and should intervene everywhere, and that there would be no costs associated with doing so: the costs, if any, would be borne by others. As I noted last week, after Ukraine that’s not true any longer. But one of its consequences is that the world is coming to us, in ways that we cannot control. Already, we have seen how the Liberal international order has facilitated Transnational Organised Crime, and even turned some European countries (Belgium and the Netherlands for example) into incipient narco-states, as foreign organised crime groups take hold.

But sometimes the threat is more direct and murderous, as with militant Islamist groups. Now recall that both Kant and modern Liberalism sought to replace traditional ethics based on religion with new forms of ethics based on logic and reason. Unfortunately, in attempting the first, they failed at the second. But other cultures have not followed ours. Political Islam is not new in itself: it dates back a century to the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, which started as a reaction against the modernising and liberalising tendencies introduced by the British and French colonial powers. But it remained a political movement until the 1980s, when the first networks for sending jihadist fighters to Afghanistan were established, with funding from the Gulf States. The same thing happened in Bosnia a little later, in the formation of the 7th Muslim Brigade of the Sarajevo Army, again with Gulf financing. But in both cases, the militants involved could claim that they were defending fellow-muslims from persecution. The idea that the fight should be taken to the unbelievers, and that this was a moral obligation, was new and highly controversial. (But of course the original Categorical Imperatives were those issued by God, so there.)

The neoconservative/neoliberal fantasy of creating a solid arc of democratic, liberal, western-oriented states in the Middle East has failed more completely and more disastrously than any comparable project in history: even the Third Reich was better planned. But the consequence of the destruction of Iraq, and then of plunging gleefully into the civil war in Syria, was to revive a tendency that was almost dead by 2003, but in a newer, more populist and much more violent guise than the old Al-Qaida. We won’t go into the history once more here, but it’s enough to say that the Islamic State operates on impeccably Kantian principles. True, it draws its theoretical inspiration from the Koran and the Hadiths, but in reality most jihadists have a very limited understanding of Islam, and the rulings by modern Imams that justify their murderous rampages are often a result of Imam-shopping until they find the opinion they want.

Just as with Kant, any number can play at Categorical Imperatives, and a Hadith not just permitting, but requiring the killing of all Shia can be had for the asking. As with the Liberal concept of law (and Islam is highly legalistic) you can find a justification for anything if you look hard enough. So western states find themselves confronted, not just abroad but now at home, with combatants who want to die, who will blow themselves up rather than surrender, and for whom young unmarried couples enjoying rock music or football matches are sinners worthy of immediate execution. As with Kant, all exterior considerations of contingency, practicability or even ethics are excluded. There’s a Categorical Imperative for you.

Typically, Liberalism finds itself completely lost here, and copes with something it doesn’t understand, as usual, by ignoring it and hoping it will go away. Liberalism’s main preoccupation at the moment is with ensuring that Muslim communities in the West are not “stigmatised” by association with groups who actually want to wipe them out because they are committing the sin of living in a non-Muslim state. No, I don’t understand that either. And we begin to understand that not all Categorical Imperatives are equal. Maybe we feel obliged morally to employ people to fight their way into other countries and kill their inhabitants until they do what we want, but there’s nothing in the small print about them hitting us back, and us having to be prepared to fight for what we believe in, assuming we know that is. Nobody is going to die for Ursula von den Leyen, or the Eurovision Song Contest or the right to use this or that toilet. But lots of people are prepared to die to do what they see as the will of Allah, and at the moment we have no idea how to stop them.

Western foreign policy is now ideologically exhausted and bankrupt, and no foreign policy is possible without some underlying ideology, no matter how crude or materialistic. Having left religion-based ethics definitively behind, modern Liberalism has stumbled through shifting mixtures of anti-communism, western exceptionalism, soft liberalism, détente, aggressive liberalism and humanitarian fascism, to the point where now it hardly knows what it’s doing any more, or why, and its political representatives are reduced to mumbling meaningless platitudes at each other. Give War a Chance turns out to be no more of a considered programme than Give Peace a Chance was. It’s a good thing the international environment is so stable, or we might be in real trouble.