My Temporary Enemy's Temporary Enemy...

Can be my temporary friend.

I had a message from Substack the other day saying that this site was “No 6 and rising in International.” I’m not totally sure what that means, but it must be positive. I’m also getting increasing numbers of likes, shares and messages about translations of these essays into other languages, many of course carried out by the untiring group of translators listed below. So thank you all!

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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.