Escape from the country

Also from politics!

Some days stay silent in the memory, other days won’t let go. I’d planned a day visiting galleries in London, and last Wednesday didn’t disappoint.

I began with the 17th century Spanish painter, Zurbaran, at the National Gallery in London. You head down a vast flight of stairs for special exhibitions. It can be a little gloomy down there, which added to the impact of the crucified Jesus in the very first room, Jesus brilliantly lit, against a black background. There’s also St Peter, crucified upside down. Objects of veneration, commissioned by Carthusian (and other) monks who had no doubts, valued immediacy not elaboration, they knew their God.

Other commissions didn’t quite match that opening room for impact. But there is magic in a small still life, lemons, oranges and a rose, with a small cup, almost real, touchable, against a stark black background. And finally, ‘Agnus Dei’, a lamb, its legs bound, as brilliantly lit as the crucified Christ, and again, a black background.  

An hour later, the magic colours and serenity of a Virgin and Child, by the Dutch artist, Gerard David. Painted in 1515, two years before Martin Luther turned the world upside down and reduced the virgin to an ordinary mother: no more had she her role as a pathway to paradise.

Three centuries of turmoil pass and I’m still in the National Gallery, in the Salzkammergut. (A special exhibition which also includes Sicily.) Mountains, woods and lakes painted by the 19th century Austrian artist, Waldmüller, have a Pre-Raphaelite clarity.

I’d been reading a review on the way to town and I marked a short passage. A poet, a reviewer suggests, ‘wants to know what it sounds like when meaning gives way to the malignant jabber of history, or when it is overcome by its own futility and sinks into silence’.

I loved that phrase ‘the malignant jabber of history’. It has resonance. And dissonance. I half-believed it. And here I was several hours later enjoying paintings by artists who had time and certainty and belief on their side. Artists who were sure of their place.

‘Beware the Jabberwock, my son!/ The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!’

From the National Gallery to the Tate Modern. Two exhibitions by women artists. The morning had of course been all male. First, Tracey Emin, an exhibition by a living artist opening her life to the public gaze. I wanted to see it, but as a man I simply didn’t and don’t feel competent to comment. Better I leave to a review in the Guardian: ‘Tracey symbolises the height of the 90s, its sex, drugs and booze, successes and excesses, but this show isn’t about that. It’s about how she has put her life out there, laid herself bare – and pushed us all to come to terms with our own emotions in the process.’

It’s that level of engagement, whether or not her paintings and bronze sculptures measure up, that is extraordinary and unprecedented.

A short hop across the Tate Modern’s third floor took me to the Frida Kahlo exhibition. Again, so much hype. Another woman artist who has become iconic, but in her case, long after her death. Her self-portraits are like no others, and her clothes: I now know what rebozos (shawls) and huipiles (sleeveless blouses) – the tehuana dress that she adopted – look like. Her honesty about her disabilities is unflinching.

She lived, like Emin, exactly the way she was, totally honest, but by contrast she had all the advantages of stable family and a marriage to Diego Rivera which is a story in itself. We watched Salma Hayek as Frida in a 2002 movie a month or two ago. In truth, I learnt more from the movie than the exhibition about Frida.

What the exhibition also focuses on, maybe to excess, is her legacy, as a champion of ‘Mexicanidad’, that is, being Mexican; as an icon for feminists and the LBGTQ community; and as the subject of a quite amazing breadth of Frida-celebrating merchandise.

‘Jabber’ would be too harsh a word. But media and merchandise can fragment a legacy, take out meaning and substituting display. A sign of our times.

What no-one is trying to do, as far as I am aware, is produce Tracey Emin merchandise. The real Tracey is simply too powerful, too immediate for that.

Getting along with the neighbours

There’s a big difference between love thy neighbour and love thy neighbours. Just how far should that love for our neighbours extend? To the next street – to fellow citizens – why not the whole wide world?

I heard a few days ago about a local church helping Iranian Christians, refugees living in a local hotel, who’d escaped from persecution in Iran. This is in stark contrast with the much-publicised demonstrations, elsewhere in England, against immigrants housed in local hotels, with the likes of Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk pulling the strings.

I read later about a mother and daughters in South Africa, refugees from the Congo Republic, being hounded out of their home, and the door locked against them – left in the street.

I was in Calderdale last week. It’s an area of the West Riding of Yorkshire where I’ve a family connection. The towns and villages of the hill country voted Green and Labour in the council elections back in May. The conurbations voted uniformly for Reform. Reform has some pretty unpalatable things to say about refugees, and immigrants more broadly, and brutal policies toward boat people.

At the other extreme is a poem I read last week from the Cold War era, by Wendell Berry. He bridged the gap between himself and Russia by imagining a conversation with a Siberian woodsman (OK, not quite your ordinary Russian!):

‘Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you,/ or laugh with you, or visit your house and go to work with you in the forest?…’

I felt a connection with the poem. But he was imagining himself as a visitor. What if they were living side by side? When two peoples with different nations, beliefs, lifestyles find themselves in close proximity they look to put up boundaries, to create exclusion zones. And if they can’t, and divisions become politicised, tolerance and co-habitation morphs into division and hatred. 

The key word is ‘politicised’. There is always a leader or leaders who draws up battle lines, metaphorical or literal, usually arguing a case based on a very partial interpretation of history. Once they are drawn, people have to take sides.

Putin has etched out the battle lines in brutal fashion in eastern Europe. Given their history is there any basis for Ukrainians to trust Russians, or vice versa? We may have our own outsiders’ views of that conflict, but that’s not a relevant consideration.

Likewise Palestinian and Israeli. Many early Zionists imagined Jews and Palestinians living side by side. But so much hatred has been screamed and blood spilt since then. Today we’ve reports of West Bank settlers attacking Palestinian Arab villages, and burning mosques.

Remove a central authority, which could be, as with Austro-Hungary in 1918, an empire (the one-time Habsburg empire) of many centuries standing, and you may just reap a whirlwind. Languages and cultures long interwoven are too easily polarised. Think Ethiopia and the bitter battle between ethnic groups. Migrations following on from population expansions wreck cultures as they have in the Darfur region of Sudan, pitching agricultural against pastoral, villager against nomad.

In there, somewhere, always, a charismatic leader.

Or impose a central authority: I’m thinking of Han domination in China, and the brutal suppression of Tibetans and Uyghers. Above all, we have religion. ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,’ was a famous Monty Python line. We can laugh now. The reality was brutal, as with so much religious persecution down the centuries. Missionary zeal too often tipped over into violence.

I remember minarets and churches side by side when travelling through Yugoslavia in 1969 and how in the early 90s they somehow forged enmities not ploughshares and fought each other. I remember hot sleepy days, and people rubbing along.

It was too easy for Wendell Berry, looking at photographs. The face-to-face reality is something very different.  We may imagine a warm relationship but if we’ve disputed borders, disputed territories, disputed histories, we may find we have to take sides. We are locked in, like it or not.

Immigration also sets up pressures and, again, we have to take sides. We may simply not be safe sitting in the fence. ‘Which side are you in’ is title of a famous American trade union song from the 1930s, also recorded by Billy Bragg.

I should on this argument be going face-to-face with Reform voters in Calderdale. But I can’t easily gainsay their responses if they feel threatened by new arrivals. But they should beware their self-appointed leaders.

The World Awaiting Andy Burnham

It’s a pretty unforgiving world out there awaiting our Prime Minister to be. If it was bad after the 2008 financial crisis it’s a damn sight worse now.

To start in apocalyptic mode.

A quote caught my eye recently – let’s take it as a sense of direction rather than an achieved reality – the objective of the very rich is to shift our gaze away from the imbalance of wealth and power toward everything else, not least issues relating to law and order, public services, immigration and gender. To turn disaffection into crises. And, I’d add as a rider, to minimise, to vilify, government action taken in response. We have in essence the aspiring libertarian state.  The state is denied, not just a role in helping direct funding to projects of benefit to wider society, but to any form of socially beneficial expenditure. Think Elon Musk, or Peter Thiel, portraying Greta Thunberg as Antichrist, or JD Vance finding justification in St Augustine for a notion of compassion that begins at home and doesn’t go much further.

They are a vast and malign distraction. The old issues are the ones that matter. How to achieve a balance between an entrepreneurial state on the one hand and a caring state on the other. How might the one best finance the other. How might a caring state best help create the social capital which underpins the invention and rising productivity of a thriving society. That is a characterisation I think Andy Burnham might recognise. And the countervailing presence of Trump and Musk and Farage notwithstanding, it is a mighty task in itself.

How to … achieve radically improved childcare, social care, health care and education. Reduce the rapid rise in health-related benefits and the numbers of young people un-  or under-employed. Recognising all the while that we can’t afford anything other than reductions in expenditure if we’re going to boost our defence expenditure and have a Defence Investment Plan which actually delivers a fortress nation, and a fortress continent.

To achieve his ends Burnham has to deliver on prosperity and productivity, where everyone else has failed. How can he, how can we all, generate those animal spirits that Keynes talked about in the 1930s? Where we look for opportunities as the default, rather than spend our lives grumbling?  It might have seemed that Thatcher or Clinton or Blair succeeded, or were they sowing the seeds of the problems, not to say disasters, we’re faced with?

As Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue in their book ‘Abundance’,  we’ve created societies where services have declined while prices have risen, and where those who can have prospered, while those who can’t find themselves without jobs, or chasing services they can barely afford, leading to societies which can easily tip into rage, and leave themselves open, at worst, to Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk-style (weird bedfellows) demagogues. There is a neat circular logic to the actions of Musk and Thiel and the anything but holy innocent JD Vance. Appeal to the so-called masses, undermine existing authority, and they are left unchallenged.

Back down to earth. Maybe the one place in the UK that has a positive vibe is Manchester. It’s lifted Andy Burnham almost to Prime Minister. Unlike the new Conservative Party convert Matthew Syed (and multiple other doubters) I rather like the Manchesterism that Burnham and his council leader predecessors, Graham Stringer and Richard Leese, have promoted, not least in working with local businesses to redevelop wide areas of the city, part of wider feel-good sense the city now enjoys. As a Mancunian born and bred I like what I see.

Manchester led the world on the 1840 because it was ruthless and only learnt how to be forgiving the hard way. Government could only stand by and watch and wonder. Now the role of government has to be about how it can ensure the structures are in place to allow business to be ruthless – to ensure we have the energy we need (will issuing further North Sea exploration licences materially influence availability beyond the short term), that the necessary talent is available (including from overseas), that homes are built (Burnham is a strong advocate of social housing), that tax is as fair as we can make it, and that long-term capital is available – arguably the most important of all.

We need talent and capital and that sense of optimism that gets and keeps you a step ahead. And making as much as possible home-grown, while rebuilding markets across Europe. All this, while enhancing our natural environment and limiting climate change.

All this… and the challenges of AI. We’re back to Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, to their tech-over-the-world over-exercised egos, and the Trump-pacifying social media moguls, Bezos and the like, and their billionaire fellow-travellers. I’m reading Karen Hao’s ‘The Empire of AI’, about Open AI, how altruism has no place when you sense you have at your fingertips a technology which will change the universe and leave you as one of the masters of it. How can we here in the UK, where we had in Deep Mind in the early 2010s a world leader, keep pace with – catch up with – the endlessly developing new generations and new frontiers of AI, turn it to the advantage of everyone and not the glorification of a few?

We’re also facing the reality that the USA is turning inward. The ‘abundance’ agenda has a very strong built-in-the-USA focus. Trump is denying Anthropic the right to sell its latest models outside the USA. What if the development of the internet had had similar restrictions imposed?

That said, talk of AI won’t inspire the nation. That for the moment is for the geeks. For Burnham the immediate reality is to convey a vision which we share and buy into and build on. Can he demonstrate that there is still life in social democracy? We have to hope so.

Heaven and earth

Reading Alexei Navalny’s book ‘Patriot’ has been a sobering experience. It is a conventional biography until his return to Russia after poisoning in 2021. From then on it’s the imposition of evermore stringent limitations on movement, not least the tiny cell, and on freedom of expression: his journal which takes up the second half of the book includes over 100 pages from 2022 and just 20 in 2023. He was murdered in February 2024. The sheer guts of Navalny and utter, indeed vile, vindictiveness of Putin mirror in extreme form the battle lines of our time.

At the other extreme has been the Artemis mission to and around the moon. Physical space constrained but limitless space beyond the capsule. Navalny didn’t have to go back to Russia, but he calculated that, if not in his lifetime, should they take his life from him, but in the lives of those that follow him, a world of limitless possibilities would be opened up in Russia. People might see this as a wild aspiration, when we’re always falling short, but to have aspirations is where freedom lies.

I’ve also been reading the remarkable, ‘Orbital’, the Booker-prize winning novel in 2024. We’re aboard the space station, four men, two women, two of the men being Russian. The Russians have separate quarters, Again, space constrained, but without gravity they have freedom of movement. Every ninety minutes they complete a circuit of the earth, and it is a thing of wonder, of colour and light, where human habitation only becomes visible when cities and roads light up as earth and spacecraft turn their backs on the sun.

‘This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home. An unbounded place, a suspended jewel so shockingly bright. Can humans not find peace with one another?  With the earth? Can we stop…’

Constraints of space are also a focus of the 2025 Booker-prize winning novel, ‘Flesh’, when a Hungarian boy in a Budapest high-rise escapes via the army to England, to a security job and marriage to his boss’s widow, to the greatest riches, and then … I’ll let the ending take you by surprise. Where ‘Orbital’ is about wonder, and imagination, ‘Flesh’ is pared down, contained in a world where sex is the stepping-off point. The two novels, ‘Orbital’ and ‘Flesh’, exist at different poles. Wonder is open-ended, reaches the stars. Escaping privation on the other hand is a roller-coaster, you claw up, you’re cast down, upward mobility with the threat of downward always present.

Hungary is also in the news because of the recent election, and the ousting of the kleptocratic populist and aspiring autocrat, Viktor Orban. I don’t want to push parallels too far – or maybe I do. We’ve seen twelve years of a government encroaching on everyday freedoms. But not to the extent that an election could be fixed, though Orban tried his best. It was just this kind of attack on political and personal liberty that could possibly have been stopped in its tracks maybe twenty and more years ago in Russia.

Hungary can now be open again to Europe and the EU, and enjoy ordinary freedoms. We can parallel their absence for Navalny with the freedoms now opening for Hungary. And the freedom to wonder, whether you’re bound to the ground or circling in space, at all the earth has to offer.

Before I sign off I’ll also put in a word for Pope Leo, new to the job, but taking on Trump, Trump as aspirant Jesus (as he depicted himself in Truth Social)), and Trump as tyrant. For Pope Leo it is simply a case of speaking truth. He of course can speak from the elevation of a papal chair. But given his opponent, it takes courage.

Navalny was speaking from prison. That took courage to a whole other level. As he wrote from prison in 2022, ‘I knew from the outset I would be imprisoned for life – either for the rest of my life or until the end of the life of the regime.’

The old democratic certainties are gone, maybe forever, but we can still aspire to them, always, if we can, keeping one step ahead of the bad guys.

The distant roar of a B1 Lancer

One minute I’m listening to the repeating call of a nuthatch. A few minutes later, the distant roar of a B1 Lancer bomber heading for Iran. I’m in the Cotswolds, about ten miles from RAF Fairford. Iran, and as Trump would have it, Iranian civilization, is under immediate threat. (They are as I write gathering in Islamabad for ceasefire talks.)

I’m wondering how the world got into such a mess. How conservative America having elected Trump hasn’t drawn a line when it came to his excesses in the Near East. (Or his pandering to Putin, and disdain for Ukraine. Though the likes of Tucker Carlson are challenging his support for Israel.) Or how they came to elect a charlatan in the first place. This is my attempt, and it is only an attempt (and written, at a distance, by a Brit), at an explanation. Apologies for its length. But if you’re interested in such things, do give it a read.

I’ve always advocated for liberal democracy in this blog, for parliamentary democracy and freedom of speech and association. At the same time, I’m a traditionalist, a lover of country, our institutions, our way of life. I’m sure of my ground on issues of climate change and immigration, race and gender. But in an open, non-ideological society my views may not carry the day.

We’ve always found consensus but now, in the USA, the very idea of consensus is under threat. For decades the far left were seen as a potentially subversive force, and for many on the right social agendas and immigration were seen in the same light. But the actual processes of democracy were only questioned on the fringes. No more.  

I’ve found it useful, especially in the American context, to explore the roles of neo-conservatives and neo-liberals as precursors to the current debates, and current events.

Neo-liberals focussed on free markets, de-regulation and limited government. Individuals were left to help themselves, with minimal support from the state. Neo-conservatives, on the other hand, while economically liberal, and more interventionist when it came to foreign engagements, advocated an explicitly socially conservative agenda.

Early neo-cons such as Irving Kristol had intriguing backgrounds as Trotskyites in the 1930s and 40s: their opposition to the straitjackets of Soviet Communism morphed in the post-war years into an advocacy of unfettered free markets. The counter-culture of the 1960s was anathema to them. Also anathema were Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reforms. Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s had left the existing dispensation regarding race in place. Not so the Johnson reforms.

To liberals back in the 1970s and 80s neo-conservative ideas constituted a separate world. In a sense they triumphed with Reagan but any social conservative agenda never really took hold. Nor did it, as you’d expect, under Clinton, but in the House of Representatives in the 1990s Newt Gingrich did draw up battle lines. You didn’t communicate with the other side. Universities and the radicalism of both faculty and students, and policies of positive discrimination became, the more so as decades passed, anathema to many. Identity politics on the left as they impacted race and gender became defining issues. So too a government which attempted to dictate on education and welfare.

Both sides dug in their heels, both sides demonised the other. Men who worked across the floor of the Senate like Edward Kennedy and John McCain are remembered as relics from another age. The Obama years, aided by Trumpian malice, only served to harden these battle lines. Issues were weaponized. Conspiracies, not least the birthing conspiracy invented around Obama, became common currency. When conspiracies take hold in a society, they are hard to counter, so much more with the growth of social media.  

Many of the left demonized the right on issues of race and gender and immigration. Climate change was drawn into the argument. Changes allowing electoral funding by third parties exacerbated the divide. What had seemed to the political centre-left to be a debate they would win, all in good time, as they’d seen every debate won over the post-war years, was of a sudden very much open to question. What could be seen as arrogance on the left would only have riled the right further.

Battle lines were hardened during the first Trump administration. Battle was joined, and it became brutally one-sided, in January 2025 when Trump returned. Just how much should we pin on Trump? The MAGA movement which he’s help crystallize is small state and conservative and, compared to the hardened neo-liberals, naïve. Trump’s deal-making philosophy gave an opening to others with a far more thought-through agenda, above all the radical neo-conservative agenda of the Heritage Foundation. What the likes of Irving Kristol back in the 1970 and 80s could surely never have envisaged is the venom of the attacks on government institutions and the universities.

It’s given space to outright opponents of democracy such as the libertarian tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel. Where might unconstrained free markets take us? Democracy could only be an impediment. Just where might AI in the hands of the likes of Thiel and Musk take us?  And Thiel is now giving lectures on the Antichrist, venturing as far as Rome. Whether the Christian nationalism of the likes of Pete Hegseth goes that far, I don’t know. Hegseth of course has the weaponry.

If we are liberals by inclination and belief, especially if we’re watching all this fury from the relatively safe remove of the UK and the even further remove of the Cotswolds, must we wait on the mid-terms and see how much the Iran fiasco has damaged Trump?

An early indicator might be the Hungarian election next week. Can this new breed of autocrats, hiding behind a democratic veneer, so subvert the democratic process that there is for some countries, Hungary, and, in that terminal scenario, the USA, no way back?

Stepping lightly on the earth

I talked about Iranian* civilization in a recent post. Two days ago Donald Trump threatened that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight’ if Iran did not accede to his demands. Last night he relented. But the arrogance and idiocy of the threat, and of the man who issued it, are embedded in our minds and will be in our histories forever.

One of the greatest of poets, from the fourteenth century, of the civilisation he would destroy had the measure of the man. Below are two stanzas from Hafez’s poem ‘Life’s Mighty Flood’. It carries a message beyond the comprehension of the dictators and would-be dictators of this world.

The span of thy life is as five little days,/ Brief hours and swift in this halting-place;/ Rest softly, ah rest! while the Shadow delays,/ For Time’s self is nought and the dial’s face./ On the lip of Oblivion we linger, and short/ Is the way from the Lip to the Mouth where we pass/ While the moment is thine, fill, oh Saki, the glass/ Ere all is nought!

Consider the rose that breaks into flower,/ Neither repines though she fade and die–/ The powers of the world endure for an hour,/ But nought shall remain of their majesty./ Be not too sure of your crown, you who thought/ That virtue was easy and recompense yours;/ From the monastery to the wine-tavern doors/ The way is nought

To bring him further down to earth I can offer a few words from what seem an unlikely source (but it rings true), the last chapter of Chloe Dalton’s wonderful book ‘Raising Hare’:

‘As we jostle for space on this planet, about missteps and paths lost, and feel the fragility of all our hopes and all that we hold dear. I think of the hare. Stepping lightly on the earth, taking cover if the wind blows. We are not so dissimilar. If we do not achieve all upon which we have set our hearts, or are beaten back by headwinds stronger than our desires, we too can lay up for a while, catch the glitter on the grass, and renew our strength.’

The American president’s sanity is fragile. So too the world he threatens. He looks to the skies and armament and the ruin of others. The grass may never, will never, glitter for him. But it will cover him.

*We in the West had always (until 1935) called Iran ‘Persia’, even though it refers to only to one province of the ancient land of Iran.

Easter messages

It’s Easter Morning. The Archbishop of Canterbury has called for peace in the Middle East. No doubt Pope Leo will do too. (See later!) Donald Trump will not listen. But the main headline today is the rescue of an American pilot shot down in Iran. What might have been the other big news story is the first sighting by the Artemis astronauts of the other side of the moon. My sense – our collective sense – of wonder is tempered by the sense that we’re in a space race with China, more serious than the old Russian one, that space could be militarised, that Musk wants to get us to Mars.

Violence where it isn’t explicit is an undercurrent. Trump is part of a long tradition, where violence is visited on civilians. It is as if Netanyahu’s disregard for life in Gaza and the Lebanon and the West Bank has opened a door in Trump’s mind. He will bomb Iran, in his words, ‘back to the Stone Age’.

It is a little realised truth that when the USA has gone beyond its own continental borders and attacked another much older civilisation it has always come off worse. Vietnam looked to be a forever warning. It wasn’t. The Second Iraq War took on a country which occupies the territory, Mesopotamia, of arguably the oldest civilisation on earth. Moving into tribal Afghanistan, America in the end proved no match for old loyalties. And now Iran. Iran – ancient Persia – is one of the world’s great civilisations, of a depth and indeed humanity (in its broadest sense) which the USA has never achieved. The current government of Iran is, in the long history of Persia, an abomination.

I’ll quote here from an article by Pankaj Mishra. ‘Indeed, if Persian nationalism has maintained a profound sense of historical continuity transcending many different political regimes it is because of its roots in the achievements of an expansive and long-lasting Persia civilisation. The poetry of Rumi and Hafez [and others] assumed a canonical authority across Asia. Rulers everywhere, whether Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist, adopted Persian ideologies of statecraft that privileged the notion of justice and connecting economy, morality and politics’.*

It’s worth remembering here that for almost fifteen hundred years since the rise of Islam Christianity remained a tolerated, albeit subordinated, faith under the rule of multiple Islamic states.

Bombing ‘back to the Stone Age’ has an irony all its own when asserted by Trump. It should hardly go without saying that Obama and the Europeans’ approach to containing the nuclear aspirations of a brutal regime in Iran was the better approach. Contain the regime, allow the country to function, and wait on a time when some measure of individual freedom can be restored.

There is a long and terrible tradition of violence against civilians in war. Cities stormed could be obliterated, as was Carthage, citizens murdered, raped, enslaved. There is by contrast a nobility in defence, as we saw in the two World Wars. But even then… think of the destruction of Hamburg in 1943 and Dresden in 1945. Also of Tokyo in the firestorm of April 1945, when clusters of bombs ‘blew open two thousand feet above the ground, scattering six-pound canisters of napalm’. The raid ‘destroyed 15.8 square miles of Tokyo, including 267,171 homes, shops and businesses, and killed 105,000 people, more than twice the number of deaths in Hamburg the two years earlier’. Curtis LeMay, the man behind the Japanese raids, won later notoriety ‘ for remarking that the USA should bomb North Vietnam ‘back to the Stone Age’.*

This is the language and level of malevolence practised by Donald Trump. The Stone Age should be Iran’s destination too. It is a convenience of war to elide an enemy’s military and its people. It would behove Trump and Netanyahu and Pete Hegseth to imagine themselves under the bombs their air forces rain down on Gaza and Iran and the Lebanon. As we ordinary folk can. Imagine themselves working with the doctors and nurses who tend the dying and wounded. The Geneva Convention of 1949, ratified by all members of the United Nations, outlaws the ‘wilful killing of persons not involved in conflict, as well as ‘wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health’, and ‘extensive destruction and appropriation of property not justified by military necessity’. 

We’ve had Pete Hegseth leading prayers at the White House. He is a proponent of a new-wave ‘Christian nationalism’, which by some extraordinary sleight of hand weaponises Christ. He argues for ‘overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy’. Iranians are religious fanatics? All Iranians? Can that be any greater a fanaticism than his own? I won’t labour this further now, but whatever we had in World War Two, or in Vietnam, or in the Gulf or Afghanistan, was an attempt to establish, or restore, and embed the ‘old’ rules-based order. Where nations traded and cooperated and we in the West hoped that in time that commercial contact would bring all of us closer together. Now we have the main proponent of that world order taken over by men of violence.

Just how many of us in the UK have registered this agenda, how many who understand when we are enjoined to join the fight just what that fight, that battle, might be? A holy war propagated and proselytised by … let’s leave as ‘men of violence’.

Christian nationalism is the USA has evolved out of more traditional right-wing policies. Just how that has evolved out of small-state and family values American conservatism is a subject for another time. At what point did it become specifically illiberal?

I will sign off with words from Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican this Easter Sunday morning. ‘On this day of celebration, let us abandon every desire for conflict, domination, and power…’ He has a battle on his hands against those, amongst them a good few American Catholics (and Protestants), who see their faith as an ‘onward march of Christian soldiers’.  

* Quotations from two articles in New York Review of Books, dated 9th April, by Pankaj Mishra (‘A Bitter Education’) and Joshua Hammer (‘A Man-Made Disaster’)

Is this the ‘evening’ of America’s empire?

“Though I know that evening’s empire has returned into sand, / Vanished from my hand…’ (Bob Dylan, Mr Tambourine Man)

Empire is a great besetting evil. Power accrued at a local level, political, economic, cultural, extends beyond boundaries and borders, and puts its own interests first whatever its justification after the fact. And when that power weakens, disaster follows. Reading Margaret Macmillan’s fine history of the 1919 Versailles peace conference we see various ethnic identities trying to reclaim their identities after subjugation under the Ottomans, the Habsburgs, the Romanovs – and indeed further afield.

At Versailles they squabbled but at least they talked. Woodrow Wilson argued passionately for the League of Nations. That failed with the rise of the fascist powers. My generation had greater hopes for the United Nations. And until the last year it was at least financially viable. We’re now seeing, with US funding withdrawn, its impotence as a player in world politics. What the Americans achieved by the establishment of the UN, with its HQ in New York, they will now bring down with another president.

Britain exemplified the economic origins of empire, with its tentative trading posts on the Indian coast. The USA has tested the military option, and failed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now again in the Gulf.  But its economic suzerainty remains, tainted now with a lunatic mercantilism.

We in Britain are now challenged as never before. Are we Atlanticists or Europeans? There’s long been an amicable divide, linked to attitudes to free markets and social democracy, with, of course, a cultural component. But now that divide has been literally weaponised. To Europe or the USA, to which do we instinctively turn?

I’ve always turned both ways. Liberal democracy and a free press, and a bicameral electoral system both sides trusted, bound us together. And underpinned the UN. No longer. We now have a cultural divide. And it’s taken us by surprise. Trump mark one we thought was an aberration. Trump mark two imagines a population of 350 million unfettered by rules and regulations, and freed from considerations of conscience or the rights of individuals other than their own. Freedom is no longer defined as the freedom to do what you will but at the same time recognise the freedoms of others. Freedom is – do what you will. Who knows what the consequences will be. And this restricted and restrictive freedom is enforced: institutions and newspapers which take a dissentient line are threatened, or in the case of the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, emasculated.

That notion of an unrestricted freedom now extends to Iran. It’s a war which exemplifies the short-termism of the deal-maker, and the willingness to risk, and the absence of interest in longer-term outcomes.

Whatever the outcome, Trump has played into a mood, enhanced that mood, and given his cohorts, led by JD Vance and the likes of Egon Musk and Peter Thiel (who is currently lecturing in Rome on the Antichrist) free rein. We have divisions in Europe over free speech. Both sides push boundaries. We should continue to do so. We argue, and we listen, and ultimately we accommodate. But there is an ever-more-vocal opposing persuasion that scorns the very notion of accommodation. Identity and woke once appeared to be in the driving seat, now it’s anti-woke, and the loud and aggressive combatants on the far right.

I remember back in the early 80s pressure on American publishers to publish more right-wing books. They simply weren’t getting written, and they didn’t have a market. Barry Goldwater and Pat Buchanan conservatism was out of line. By the 90s the big publishers had their own right-wing lists, and the 2000s saw the emergence of Fox News. Newt Gingrich decreed in the 1990s that his Republican congressmen and women shouldn’t talk to the other side. John McCain was the last of a noble breed of Republicans who worked across the aisles.

The message we should take from this – always stay in touch with, talk to, the other side. Stay connected.

The Republicans have rendered themselves powerless. Fooled into thinking they had an America First, stay-within-borders president, they now discovered they have a deal-maker whose instincts are playing out on a world stage to which they are massively unsuited. The MAGA movement may have weaponised debate but they hoped to curb American imperialist pretensions. Now they find they’ve been rekindled.

‘Come you masters of war’

Remembering Bob Dylan’s song from 1962, Masters of War

So much has been spoken and written in recent days about the American and Israeli actions against Iran, and so much has been foolish. Too often we forget that violence as instrument of state always has vast unintended consequences, and even more so when there is little evidence of any planned outcome or endgame.

Palestine and Gaza are issues of long standing. Wisdom could have brought resolutions, recognising rights and interests on all sides. But any hope of that ended with the rise of Netanyahu. Iran is a vile, repressive, ideology-driven state. Israel not least as an American proxy gave it an external focus. Obama and the EU had an agreement (the JCPOA) to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions: Trump scrapped it. We moved quickly from a world of attempted conciliation, which is always a long, hard road, to a world where threat is the modus operandi.

Trump in 2016 was a novice, and after 2020 he could have been written off as an aberration. There have been other populists aspiring to power in US history, but they’ve always been seen off. Not this time.

The notion of American exceptionalism is deep-rooted. Obama bought into it. But he saw it as bringing responsibility, not fist-waving, gun-toting belligerence. Seeing yourself as in some way ‘great’ is always a bad idea. Translated to a nation it’s dangerous. Allied to ‘again’ and we’re into wild misreadings of history. Was America greatest in the era of the robber barons, in the late nineteenth century? Or was it the 1920s, before the Wall Street Crash. Or the late 1940s and 1950s, when American beneficence brought restoration after the devastation of world war? Or the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall?

‘Greatness’ as currently manifested (in its MAGA and Heritage Foundation guise) lies in the freedoms of markets and expression. But both are heavily compromised. The US market is anything but free. And power is ever more concentrated. We have the big seven (Apple, Meta, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla) and a stock market racing ahead fuelled by their AI investments, not least in vast power-hungry datacentres. Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jensen Huang, enjoy their closeness to power. And their extreme wealth. Power has devolved upwards, and ends with Trump, in whose hands it has an increasingly deranged quality.

Where lies the future? The rules-based order the USA once espoused and help police has had remarkable success. But at the same time it has built up a vast deficit. Chinese investment in Treasury Bonds and elsewhere has funded vast levels of debt. But you could blame the vast appetites of the American consumer for Chinese imports for that. Not an attribution of blame Donald Trump would accept. (So also the extraordinary levels of drug consumption. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel is only a symptom, not the cause. But that’s a subject for another time.)

The USA as it is now is epitomised by the rantings of Trump, but also by Peter Hegseth, who has come from nowhere and now heads the newly-anointed ‘Department of War’. There is for him, for Trump, for the Israeli government, no sense of the value of human life for any nation other than their own. Thousands of deaths are necessary collateral damage. The destruction of a city, of Gaza, and now vast swathes of Iran, is of secondary concern.

Along with nuclear disarmament, now it seems dismissed as a fool’s game, we should be arguing for the banning of all aerial bombardment, other than that of specific military targets. And the routine taking out of heads of state is an appalling idea: once established as a practice government becomes impossible.

That brings is back to the UK and Starmer, limiting the American use of the Diego Garcia bases to defensive operations. That had to be right. But, as the Iranian regime in its death-throe madness aims its missiles and drones at Gulf State targets, the definition of ‘defensive’ has had to expand, maybe to the point of being meaningless – where international law as we’ve understood it becomes irrelevant.

Trump is a pip-squeak in the long sweep of history, just another emperor who would cast off his imperial clothes but found they fit too snugly. The only history Trump connects to is of the shortest – one deal at a time – variety. Short history is also the Heritage Foundation, which is itself a rejection of the notion of progress in human affairs, also in the MAGA movement, but for them at least American responsibility ends at its borders. Trump disavowed external involvement, he was in his eyes a peace-maker, but as we see now it was and is peace guaranteed by war. Aggressors may want peace – but on their own terms.

Short history also exists in a fabled space: it has embedded in it the notion of recurrence. We can, we must, go back to a fabled era. ‘Judaeo-Christian civilisation’ is under threat: we hear this argued on both sides of the Atlantic. And we do indeed need to define that culture, and its freedoms and wide responsibilities, and in its finest forms its embedded compassion and rejection of violence, against other cultures, and not least Islam. But by defacing our own culture, by being violent or abusive in its supposed protection, we only do damage.

The world by arrogance and by sheer foolishness has found itself in the last few days in a terrible place, with outcomes uncertain, and hatred deeper embedded, thousands of lives lost, swathes of territory obliterated, with no possibility of any simple transfer of power to the good guys – not least because, these days, just who are the good guys?

Just how far right (and how far wrong) can we go?

I put articles that I’ve read that interest me to one side. It’s the New Year. Time to review them. And it’s as if they are no longer connected to the world. So much is in flux.

I’m attempting here to describe the situation as it is at this moment. In a few months the world may, it almost certainly will, look very different.

So many starting points. How the focus on identity has, in Yascha Mounk’s words, become a trap, race and gender, pushed too far, and the backlash has empowered the right, and with a more than equal intolerance, and extraordinary gall and vanity, they’ve taken over the driving seat. The climate crisis has got caught up in the tailwind. And they have the media and money behind them, and a truculence and intolerance which has caught the mood of the moment. Free speech has been redefined, with an anti-intellectual and anti-academic bias. Don’t think too hard, don’t try for a balanced argument, follow instinct.

Where now history? For the far right it is at most a matter of a few years, and it can only be interpreted one way. Where will my kind of balanced, investigative history be in ten or twenty years’ time, the way things are going?

Where would we be now without Trump? Thinking South America, Javier Milei in Argentina has been re-elected, bolstered by American emergency guarantees, and now Jose Antonio Kast, far right by most definitions, has been elected the new president of Chile. Kast has signed up to the Madrid Charter, put forward by Spain’s far-right challenger party, Vox.

One of the Kast’s strongest pitches in the recent election was on immigration. Refugees from Venezuela have flooded across the Bolivian border into northern Chile. Kast is threatening to dig a trench to match Trump’s wall. Immigration, some kind of racial purity, is at the heart of the new conservatism.  Walls and trenches may yet impose some kind of control in the Americas.

For Europe, with open waters between it and Africa it’s not so easy. We’ve a notion of ‘Judaeo-Christian civilisation’ under threat. What’s more – it’s an Arab/Muslim takeover plot. Immigration is an extraordinary problem, manna from heaven for the far right, and with massive increases in African populations forecast, it won’t easily go away.

Capitalism has embraced social conservatism. Think back to the open arms of the early years of the Schuman Plan and the Common Market, and the post-war rules-based order. Oil and financial crises have blown it apart. Enterprise and business are as much a part of a social democracy as an out-and-out capitalist state. But it’s the latter, in the Trump mould, ruthless, deal-making, always a winner, and a loser, that’s won out.

Brute capitalism seen from this perspective is the American way, and it’s never been better expressed than Trump seizing Maduro and claiming that he’s running Venezuela. Labelling Maduro as a narco-terrorist is a diversion: what the USA wants is Venezuelan oil. The same line of argument applies in the Middle East: Israel will sooner or later take over Palestine, rename it, and leave the Palestinians as a subjugated people, in their own land, or exiled, the 1948 nakba (displacement) re-run in an even more terrible way.

The Americas, under an extended Monroe Doctrine (let’s avoid talk of a Donroe Doctrine), are lined up by Trump as the American sphere of influence. Where next for Mexico and Canada? He’s threatening Colombia, a country it could be argued currently more open and democratic than the USA. (The real narco problem lies of course with the American consumer.) And what next for Greenland which is, as I write, directly in Trump’s sights.

In the Middle East, Trump’s USA has Israel as a proxy, with the Saudi and Gulf States brought onside by way of arms deals, and Iran being primed for regime change, with further Israeli bombing threatened if street demonstrations are repressed.

Europe is in every sense the old world, with no dominant power. It used to be Spain, then France, then UK. Germany, of course, had aspirations. Post-war and within NATO Europe has been within the USA’s sphere of influence, but for how much longer? The Trump administration is curiously indifferent to Europe’s fate. It’s as if the idea of power divided 27 ways, between 27 countries, is anathema. Let there be one strong state, strong leader, socially conservative, a good (but malleable) trading partner, and let it look after itself. And if it can’t do so, and part of Europe comes under Russian sway, so be it. NATO is dispensable.

We’ll battle of course over tariffs. No more a rules-based order. No more rules. Just the dictates of a brute capitalism. Get your production, your prices, your margins right – you’ll rule the world.

Autocracy is the new American mindset. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, how will he respond come the mid-terms terms in November, and how will he, or Vance, or another acolyte, respond if they lose the 2028 election? Europe under Russian sway wouldn’t, one suspects, upset Trump’s America too much. They’d shrug. It was Europe’s own fault. See where liberal democracy will get you, notions of individual rights, and equality. Fraternity and compassion are for losers. God is on the side of the winners.  There will be winners and losers. Accept it.

Where next for Ukraine with the USA all but indifferent to its fate? Trump will act to help only insofar as he needs to in order to save face and to garnish his reputation as a peace-maker. He’s clearly so much more at home with Putin than with any European leader. And what next for Taiwan? If Trump could engineer some kind of economic and face-saving deal (with Trump cast, if in his eyes only, as a hero) with China, then he would. He wouldn’t be too worried about Taiwanese democracy, or their human rights. But he would want Foxconn and chip manufacturer TSMC to continue exactly as they are now.

As for China, Trump and Xi Jinping are of one mind. Let there be three (Russia qualifies as a nuclear power), maybe four, if we include India, big players in the world, let them each decide their own form of government, and agree not to dictate to each other. South Korea and Japan will have to sooner or later come to terms with their proximity to China, and accede to its influence. Myanmar has already. For Malaysia and Thailand, give it time. That leaves Africa (where the Sahel is an almost forgotten battleground), and China already has a strong investment-driven presence there.

This is an intentionally pessimistic overview. Trump and Trumpism may implode. Europe, the EU and Ukraine may hold their own. The Arabs will only play along with Trump so far. Attempts to intervene in Mexico or Colombia could implode for Trump. Any takeover of Greenland would be reversed by a future Democratic administration.

It may be that liberal values, human rights, minority rights, are just too firmly rooted. Trump is simply too much a shouter, his base too shallow when the veneer or power is shattered.

 But we are in a crazy would, far crazier than any of us could have imagined.