Category: Foreign policy

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?

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.

Where are we now??

I abandoned my blog a few months ago. ‘Abandon’ feels like the right word. The liberal world was already in crisis and that was before the profoundly illiberal Trump was re-elected. So much has happened since. It’s more than I could do to resist the temptation to put down a few thoughts on where the world is now.

What kept me awake last night were jail sentences. An American resident illegally deported and now imprisoned in a brutal Salvadorian jail. No, he won’t be returned to the USA, said the Salvadorian president, Bukele. Trump standing alongside smirked a complicit smirk. Does Trump care that Ekrem Imamoglu, Mayor of Istanbul, and main rival to Erdogan in Turkey, has been locked up on absurd corruption and terrorism charges? Would Trump look to stymie some future presidential challenger if he had the chance? There’s no certainty he wouldn’t. You could argue that nepotism and the accumulation off family wealth are Erdogan’s stock in trade. Looking no further than the role of Trump’s own family, and their financial transactions, and to bitcoin, might one not say the same about Trump?

Imamoglu would have known the risks and yet he stayed the course. There can be no certainty that he will ever be released. Think of the Kurdish leader, Abdullah Ocalan. It’s now 26 years in jail. The title of Ahmet Altan’s book was ‘I will never see the world again’? He did. He was released. Arrested on a whim. Released on a whim.

Courts in Russia hand out long prison sentences for any kind of anti-government expression. Five years for associates of Navalny. Sixteen years for a social media post.

The four freedoms of the European Union, allowing the free movement of goods, services, capital and people, allied to freedom of expression, now stand out ever more clearly. Giorgio Meloni in Italy has surprised many by holding true to them, albeit while pursuing a socially conservative agenda. Where might a National Rally government take France if elected next year? What of Orban and Hungary? He’s taken over both the press and courts. Will that be enough to ensure his re-election next year? Might we have another Poland, where the populist Law and Justice government was voted out in 2023?

Law and Justice in Poland, and Meloni’s party, Brothers of Italy, are both opposed to abortion and wider gender rights. The National Rally in France claims to be an ardent supporter of women’s rights. It supports abortion. But many in its ranks disagree.

On the subject of gender, here in the UK we have had today had a Supreme Court ruling stating that the legal definition of a woman has to be based on biological sex, which is not what supporters of transgender rights had been hoping for. The decision was, I think, inevitable. The safe spaces argument has cogency. But the issue won’t go away.

Staying in the UK. We have Reform still polling 25%. How will that convert into votes come next month’s local elections? Any support for Trump’s tariff agenda will surely be a vote loser, but his attitudes to gender and race, his scorn for academia, his taking down of ‘elites’ and bureaucracy, may well appeal. And that puts Farage on strong ground, even if he hasn’t through his political life ever propounded a sane, considered and politically workable policy. A focus on investment and social mobility has to be the way to handle social division. Not disruption for its own sake

We should be focusing on Ukraine and Gaza, and, as David Lammy as Foreign Secretary has bravely tried to do, on Sudan. Helping Ukraine produce the weapons it needs, as well as supplying from our own stocks. Holding Putin to account for the incredible number of his own Russian soldiers killed in pursuit of a very personal vision he has of restoring the old Soviet hegemony. (Yes, we were at fault for being far too slow to recognise this was his intent. And for our Western arrogance. But that story is not for here.)

Also, holding Netanyahu to account, as we should the RSF (Rapid Support Forces) and government forces in Sudan for the appalling loss of life they’ve inflicted. There is also Taiwan, and what China might yet do. We’re now in the crazy position of taking sides with China in a trade war against Trump’s USA, when Xi Jinping’s China is the most illiberal society of all.

Even truces or cease-fires can be hard to imagine. In Sudan, Arab versus non-Arab divisions in Darfur have been intractable for decades. In Israel/Palestine divisions go back a hundred years. For Ukraine/Russia it’s many hundreds of years. The UK and the EU working together on defence, and the UK and France, Starmer and Macron. That at least has to be positive.

Tacking another tack, what of Starmer’s benefits policy? His return to the old Blairite and especially Cameronian agenda of reducing benefits. There’s been a massive increase since 2019 but it’s argued that we’re only now approaching the level of benefits enjoyed in some other Europeans countries. At the same time, there has to be a reason for this surge in the take-up of benefits. Are we genuinely less healthy, physically and mentally? I can see both sides but there are good reasons why a financially straitened government has to take the action it’s taking.

Tariffs are our current obsession. It seems we might, in the UK, escape the worst of them. We shall see. But such minor straws of good fortune in the current whirlwind are no more than straws. As I said many times in this blog we must deep-anchor our liberal values, personal, social and economic. I think we have currently a government with as good a chance of handling our current crises as we’re likely to have. That is a small mercy.

Next year in America

I posted a blog after the 2019 UK election which I intended as a marker to check, over the longer term, the outcome of the promises made by Boris Johnson. He failed on all counts. I’d like to do something similar for Donald Trump. I’m not, however, on such sure ground, expecting failure, as I was then. Trump has been through the hoops once and knows the route and can anticipate the snares, and he has his accomplices already in mind, if not yet in place.

I intend in a year’s time to check back with this post and see how it’s all working out. I’m not into predicting. Over the last ten, maybe fifteen years, we have seen the world turned on its head. I can’t see any kind of stability coming any time soon.

I’ll make the deep state my starting-point. Agencies such as the FBI and CIA and Federal departments have to function within government and cannot normally be held accountable in the public space. Under Trump they’ve been labelled the deep state and turned into a conspiracy against the American people which can only be rooted out by turning traditional merit-based appointments into political appointments. That includes appointments to the Supreme Court and Federal courts.

His appointment as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will ‘ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions’. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ in his mantra. ‘Government bureaucracy, excess regulations and wasteful expenditures’ are all in the firing line. Elon Musk will be a key figure.

He will continue to play games. Might he in a few cases row back on hard-line policies? His apparently amiable meeting with Joe Biden yesterday, and the orderly handover which now appears likely, took me by surprise. But, also yesterday, he’s put forward an ultra hardliner, Matt Gaetz, as the new Attorney General. He would end ‘the partisan weaponisation of our Justice System‘.

How will conspiracy theories, which thrive in this kind of environment, play out in the coming months and years? And will Trump continue to demonise opponents? He has made wild threats against journalists. Musk has helped enormously by turning Twitter into a right-wing promotional agency. Will the January 6th protesters be pardoned?

Fox News will have a free rein. The Washington Post and LA Times hedged their bets ahead of the election. Don’t alienate Trump has been the mantra. How much will free speech will be impaired? LGBTQ+ rights and critical race theory will be, more than ever, in the Trump media cross-wires.

What will be the effect on university campuses and by extension on anyone with a liberal arts education and a belief in an open, liberal democracy? The difference in voting preferences in last week’s election between locations which have high levels of college education and those that don’t were stark.

Are the old right/left dividing lines gone forever? A working class with socially conservative instincts is now firmly Republican. But might that change if Trump Republicans turn out to have feet of clay? Will Democrats realise how important it is to be a broad church on social issues?  Could the party re-discover its working-class roots? Might turncoat Latino voters turn back?

Disillusion with the Federal government in Washington has played into Trump’s hands. He has the blue Republican states very much onside and will use it to his advantage. One example may the abortion issue which he will probably leave to the legislatures of the individual states.

Trump will build his wall. His credibility depends on it. Deporting up to 12 million immigrants is a challenge at a whole other level, both logistically and in terms of the resistance and violent response it will engender. And heedless of the damage it will do to the American economy.

To what extent will tariffs, 60% on Chinese goods, 10% or more the rest of the world, impact the American economy and industry and patterns of consumption? Mercantilism, maximising exports, minimising imports, is a throwback to another age. The other side of American exceptionalism is and has always been America-behind-closed-doors. Leave it to the merchants, the industrialists and the money men to look abroad.

Taxes will fall (or, in the case the 2018 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, be renewed) and regulations cut back, with the aim of streamlining business. If high interest rates result might Trump intervene to keep then low? Might the Federal Reserve lose its independence? Can short-term stock market gains be sustained?

Related this is the rise of the plutocrats, the new libertarians, with Musk their primary example, and their likely role in a future administration, and their belief on a slimmed-down government. Michael Lewis points out that the gap between the billionaires who know how to manipulate finance and ordinary guy is getting ever wider. Financial markets will become ever more opaque.

With an avowed ‘America First ‘ and non-interventionist approach to foreign policy Trump could as easily be friends with autocratic regimes as democratic governments. We could lose any sense of American democracy as a role model for free societies worldwide

How will relations with Russia, Ukraine, China, Israel, Gaza, Iran work out? And North Korea. Might Trump have a better chance of influence because his government wouldn’t be trying to tell governments how to improve their human rights records? And what of the ‘friends’ of America and the West: the EU, the UK, India, Japan, South Korea, also Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. Will they be kept onside?

The ultimate test will be 2026 mid-terms and 2028. Will Americans go into those contests with the same open debate (however fractious) and open and accountable elections as they’ve done in 2024? Trump, we know, has plans to suborn the courts. To what extent might he suborn the media, both social and imprint? Hungary’s Viktor Orban has pointed the way.

Trump the day after

Trump has won. The end of innocence, and maybe the end of this blog? (Or maybe not!) I began it in the early Obama days, on a note of huge optimism. Obama gave us Obamacare but he didn’t sort out the malaise in the American blue-collar economy and in the end he, and Biden after him, had no answer to a Southern Baptist-style resistance to any kind of deep social change. The open economy will become as far as Trump can take it a closed economy, operating behind tariff barriers.

I’ve been as guilty as anyone of denigrating Trump. I say ‘guilty’. Yes, he does remind me of the Antichrist of the Left Behind novels. He has Messianic tendencies. He’s happiest dealing with autocrats. He aspires to be one himself. Power rather than leadership is his game. And yet… he read the runes, he caught the mood and he’s been remarkably consistent. He made the economy the one big decisive issue, which it always is. Yes, it’s performed well compared to the rest of the  world over the last three years but it hasn’t brought jobs back where it matters in the Rust Belt, and inflation, however much it can be tied to the response to Covid, is a real big issue.

(I am, however, reminded of a comment by an Austrian ex-Nazi I came across yesterday. He argued in 1946 that he’d only supported the Anschluss in 1938 because he thought it would solve his country’s economic problems. Prioritising the economy can take us down perilous routes.)

How quickly tariffs, by reducing imports, can open up new jobs and a new prosperity for American workers is a very open question. Will they have the opposite effect? We may soon be back with higher levels of inflation, underpinned by low interest rates, if Trump can somehow override the opposition of the Federal Reserve.

The other big and decisive issue has of course been immigration. If a pushback in the other direction stops the northward movement in its tracks then the immigration tide might just be turned. If there no promised land you’ve nothing to head toward. How he plans to send back illegals in their millions is an open question. Is it feasible? And who will receive them? And what impact could it have on an American economy which needs immigration?

Putin will be happy this morning. Xi Jinping has reasons to be worried. If tariffs hit home then he’ll have to find new markets, not least by injecting demand into his own economy. Narendra Modi will be smiling: he will once again have a like-minded president to deal with. Israel – Trump could bear down on Netanyahu in a way Biden couldn’t and Harris wouldn’t have been able to. Netanyahu won’t have much pushback if Trump wants to be assertive. Trump is of course strongly pro-Israel but he will also want to show that he has a magic power to bring wars to an end.

Ukraine. It should have been the first of my list of foreign policy issues. The conflict has become normalised. We can get used to war. Boundaries will be as they are now on the battlefield. The Donbas will be lost to Ukraine, maybe forever. Ukraine won’t get NATO membership. What guarantees will it get? An end to war on terms which allow for their country’s survival may be acceptable to most Ukrainians.

As for NATO, it will survive but in how much of an emasculated form? And the EU: Trump won’t give its concerns and welfare a second thought. It might be different if there was a big European figure with Trump-like tendencies he could sit down with. Hungary’s Viktor Orban writ large. Nor will he have reason to give the UK much attention, save insofar as it can provide him with more golf courses.

We have to hold our breath, to hope he doesn’t take on his domestic ‘enemies’ as he has threatened to do. That he doesn’t attack institutions as the Heritage Foundation have suggested he should, and impose new conditions of loyalty on Federal officials. That the next midterm election will be free and fair.

As I write I don’t know if the Democrats will regain control of the House of Representatives. If the Republicans control both sides of Congress then Trump will have untrammelled power.

Welcome to the uncertainty. We just don’t know how it will all play out.

Leave God, leave Allah, out of it

Book festivals are a feature of our times. The two big festivals at Hay and Cheltenham bring in big crowds. Over the last two days in Cheltenham the subjects of events I’ve been to have included trade routes centred on ancient and medieval India, the American election, and Palestine and Gaza. They are apparently disparate but there is a link I’d like to explore.

Speaking during a panel discussion on the subject, ‘Trump: The Sequel’, Tim Montgomerie, founder of the Conservative Home website, referred to his belief in the superiority of Judeo-Christian civilisation.  That set me thinking. It’s not a notion to which an Indian would subscribe. 2000 years ago, and more, India traded west, to Rome and Europe, and east, as far as China. Both Hinduism and Buddhism had their origins in India. It is a necessary humility on our part, in our modern world, that we recognise India as having a status equal with our own.

A little closer to home there is an alternative and wider appellation than Judeo-Christian and that is ‘people of the book’. It’s an ancient Islamic term that refers to religions which had a shared scripture with Islam, and that included Christianity. ‘People of the book’ were protected in Islamic countries by a legal status known as ‘dhimma’.’ There is of course a wider, non-legal status – our common humanity.

We have 1400 years of divisions between Christian and Muslim. It is helpful to be reminded of that common heritage, as I was when we listened intently to two Palestinian novelists talking about their books, and about their life stories. One growing up away from her home country, the other growing up in Israel, near Jaffa, from which her parents had been forced to move.

I am English, and a Christian. My instinct is indeed that my heritage is somehow special, focused on notions of democracy and liberty, and freedom of speech, which struggled to find acceptance anywhere in the world down the millennia. Including our own, until relatively recently. I will always argue passionately for liberal democracy and a superior form of government, but to argue beyond that, for some kind of special status, and more than that, for superiority, we are on dangerous ground. (Is Christianity inherently democratic? That would be an interesting discussion.)

Other civilisations have their own sense of their uniqueness, as places apart from others, offering a world-view no others can. The consequences can be pernicious. China defines itself against the West in terms of its four-thousand-year history, and boundaries defined as the furthest point of its past imperial expansion, which has had terrible consequences for Tibet and the Uyghurs.

There’s also a deep significance in the combining of ‘Judea’ and ‘Christian’. Christian history has until recent times treated Jews as outsiders in their midst, never escaping guilt for the death of Jesus, tolerated and too often terrorised and murdered.

Now all is changed. The Jewish people have a home, and Western and specifically Christian support. ‘Judeo’ now combines easily with ‘Christian’ and Palestine is viewed by the American and most European governments from an Israeli and not an Arab standpoint. Atrocities can be justified.

The best teachers and some of the best friends of my life were Jewish. I am a passionate supporter of the Jewish people, of co-existence of Palestinian and Jew, and I am a Zionist if Zionism had recognised the constraints that sharing territory with another people, who had occupied that land for many centuries, involved.

‘Judeo-Christian’ is at risk of being associated with a right-wing and intolerant agenda, and with a form of populism that at its extremes becomes the ‘great replacement theory’, whereby an Islamist (not Islamic) conspiracy aspires by means of higher birthrates and migration to become the dominant force in Western cultures. It is the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, used so perniciously from the 1920s onwards by Hitler and others against the Jewish people, refashioned.

The testimonies of the two Palestinian novelists, talking about the lives and reading from their novels, will stay with me forever. They have lost their country, and those who choose to fight on their behalf are terrorists. Terrorists, as the Irgun were considered, fighting after World War Two for a Jewish state against the British.

Beyond October 7th, and the retribution that followed, and continues, lies a Palestinian state, and a radical cessation of Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. And an end to the notion that there is anything biblical, Jewish or Christian, about the process.

Leave God, leave Allah, out of it.

We’ve been here before

We think our own times unique – but we’ve been here before.

I’ve been reading Leonard (husband of Virginia) Woolf’s autobiography. He has memories, almost fond memories, of the world before 1914.

In the decade before the 1914 war there was a political and social movement in the world, and particularly in Europe and Britain, which seemed at the time wonderfully hopeful and exciting. It seemed as though human beings might really be on the brink of becoming civilised. The forces of reaction and barbarism were still there, but they were in retreat… it looked as if militarism, imperialism and anti-Semitism were on the run.

We were of course mistaken in thinking that the world really might become civilised but the fact that it didn’t does not prove that our optimism was foolish or credulous… It was, I still believe, touch and go whether the movement towards liberty and equality – political and social – and toward civilisation which was strong in the first decade of the 20th century, would become so strong as to carry everything before it. Its enemies saw the risk and the result was the war of 1914. They postponed the danger of our becoming civilised for at least 100 years.

There is a terrible irony in that last line. Where they were before 1914 is not so far from where we thought we were either side of 2000.

The columnist ‘Charlemagne’ in an article in The Economist fastens on 1999 as ‘peak Europe’, when 300 of the world’s top listed companies were European, and and it looked as if China and Russia could be part of a Western-inspired economic and liberal order which could be ‘the end of history’.

We also had a sense that the forces of barbarism were still there but in Woolf’s words were ‘on the run’. We hoped, even thought, that the ‘movement towards liberty and equality – political and social’ was so strong that ‘it would carry everything before it’.

And yet … 2014, a century on from 1914, was just a year after Xi Jinping had come to power. Putin was confronting the Maidan uprising in Ukraine. The enemies of the liberal order ‘had seen the risk’. Ukraine and Hong Kong exemplify the threat today. Might other countries follow the example of Hungary, and indeed of Donald Trump, as might be? Where might Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella take France if their party, Rassemblement National, is victorious in the French election in three weeks time?

Woolf, in his seventies, was looking back from the late 1960s. There’s an almost elegiac tone. Yes, the Cold War was at its height and the nuclear threat had a stark reality. But we knew what we stood for. Do we now?

We do need certainties. And, indeed, defiance. ‘Charlemagne’ ends his piece by striking exactly the wrong note. ‘Perhaps Europe peaked in 1999. Or maybe it failed to see it was already in decline.’

The wind is blowing

Did Israel bomb the Al Ahli Hospital last night, or was it a misfiring Hamas rocket? If it is proved to be the latter, the Israelis are almost vindicated, in their eyes, and maybe many Americans. Also yesterday, an Israeli bomb hit a UNRWA school and at least six people were killed. Whatever the actual figure, the numbers killed by Israelis bombs in Gaza are appalling.

I won’t rehearse recent events here. We’ve all read about them. For Israelis, for all of us, the events of last Saturday week are reminders of the Holocaust. But I am also reminded of many wartime situations where the aggrieved party wreaks terrible vengeance on civilians. Whatever they say, that is what the Israelis are doing. It should be uppermost in Israeli minds. And it isn’t.

How can you have the open spaces and relative affluence of southern Israel and, across a fence, two million people living in poverty? Hamas and militant Islam have little or nil regard for human life. But Israel by its actions has given them a cause, a casus belli, and a location.

Israel and Palestine as two separate states working together, with no illegal settlements and Jerusalem a shared city. It is conceivable. Tragically, the current Israeli government continues to fall into the trap Hamas has laid for it. And the wider world takes side, and distrust between nations grows deeper.

How would I feel if I were Jewish, as so many wonderful people in my life (not least my best and wisest teachers) have been and are? Or an Israeli? And…. how would I feel as a Palestinian? As an Arab? As a Muslim?

Borders are the great curse of humanity. Our urge to possess. Or it could be our urge to reclaim. Behind and across too many borders are leaders, usually of an autocratic mindset, for whom violence is always an option, stored away, but excusable, they imagine, in certain circumstances, and of their choosing. And they are persuasive. Populist is not an unreasonable word to use.

I recalled Leonard Cohen’s song ‘Partisan’ last evening, listening to reports from Gaza.

When they poured across the border
I was cautioned to surrender
This I could not do
I took my gun and vanished

An old woman gives him shelter, but the soldiers came and ‘she died without a whisper’. Then three verses in French, and final one in English:

Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing
Through the graves the wind is blowing
Freedom soon will come
Then we’ll come from the shadows.

I was also, yesterday evening, watching a movie, Walk With Me, about the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist and peace campaigner, Thich Phat Hanh. He wasn’t allowed back into Vietnam after 1973 by the Communist regime and he set up his Plum Village community in the Dordogne in France.

The movie is about individuals funding truth, finding their own peace. About landscape and community. But also about a battle with self, running, all the time, and arriving home. There is tacit and expressive and wonderful mutual support. You watch the seasons pass.

Isolationist? Remember that Thich Phat Hanh was an active peace campaigner, who risked his life. He died last year. He was, finally, back in Vietnam. He knew all about borders.

Bird migrations and BRICS machinations

House martins on telegraph wires. Resting awhile, then rising and joining forces, with a flock appearing out of nowhere. They’re darting and swooping and sharp-turning in pursuit of insects we can’t see, on a humid and cloudy late August day. She’s seen nothing like it, a lady who has known our patch for ninety years tells us. But we’re talking about house martins. Their numbers are radically reduced. Why now, we wonder. And it is something of a wonder, just watching them.

Over in Russia a plane has fallen out of the sky and Wagner leader Prigozhin was on the passenger list. (His death is now confirmed.) He was a flawed man, Putin tells us. Just one man. Or ten with the crew. Life is cheap.

The contrast plays on my mind. The one so stark a contrast with the other. The house martins we think are heading south, ahead of colder early-autumn weather we know is on its way. Next month or October, they’re off to Africa. Over the Sahel, where Prigozhin’s Wagner Group are in league with the rulers of Mali and the Central African Republic, and stirring crises in Sudan and Niger.

We know swallows head for South Africa, and house martins head south of the Sahel, though there’s some uncertainty as to quite where they winter.

It is South Africa where the five nations of the BRICS are meeting. With the economic heft of China and India and Brazil, and the drag weight of Russia, and the aspirations of South Africa itself, they are looking to chart the way to an alternative economic order. Reducing the power of the dollar (‘de-dollarisation’), and of the financial institutions developed in the post-war world which work, by their nature, in the West’s interests. That is the perception, and as we Western nations have been slow to realise, the reality.

And as of this weekend, applications to joint from Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Argentina and Ethiopia have been approved. Statements of intent. Countries either side of the Red Sea, and Ethiopia a short hop to the south, and Argentina the outlier. Whether or not a country operates as a democracy is an entirely secondary consideration.

The focus will move on from South Africa. And for a time it may from the BRICS. Maybe it is all aspiration, and with the Chinese economy stuttering, and the dollar on an upswing, the balance of economic power will remain broadly as it is.

In the meantime the house martins and swallows (and swifts as well) will follow their time-honoured routes, and if we don’t destroy their climate, and ours, which we might yet do, will continue to do so long after we are all gone.

A few recent disasters

Let me run through the list of recent disasters.

The Northern Ireland Protocol: this was meant to be a solution but became, predictably, a disaster when the DUP derailed the Northern Ireland assembly. The Tory right wing have further stirred the waters. The DUP continue to deliberate. Sunak, patching an agreement with the EU, is doing his best.

Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp messages. Handing them over to a known anti-lockdown campaigner like Isabel Oakeshott is hardly credible. Her publishing them, an act of betrayal, dishonesty – she should be scorned, not welcomed. Oakeshott is one of those unfortunate breed of libertarians who would look out for themselves at the expense of others. Claiming public interest. On the other hand… we have a sense of how government works. It gets personal. Everything does. (And in this case unpleasant.) But keep it out of WhatsApp messages.

Sunak heads to France, he and Macron embrace, and we are, the Brits and the French, the friends we always should have been if Brexit hadn’t got in the way. But that’s drowned out by ….

Braverman’s refugee bill, which is nasty in its objectives, in effect denying refugees the right to claim refugee status, and in its language. And then we have…

Gary Lineker’s comments comparing Braverman’s language to that used in Germany in the 1930s. We’re not talking about the Holocaust. We’re talking about inflammatory language, and that Braverman is guilty of, and by association all her acolytes in government, including Sunak.

So much stems from this deep-rooted fear of outsiders. By closing our nearby borders we, by some marvellous sleight of hand, open them again to a more distant world, who, because the world long ago moved on from Empire, hardly cares if we exist.

Patriots – pater, father – so supporters of the fatherland. Make that motherland as well. Children retain their family loyalties, but they grow up. Nationalists – holding on to an unchanging idea of nation. And never growing up. And in our case nation gets muddled with Empire, and we have a breed of writers and historians, including Jeremy Black, Robert Tombs and Nigel Biggar, who find it hard to move on, and do themselves and the rest of us a massive disservice.

Lineker: we have to support him. He’s someone who is living in the present, not the past. And he has the right understanding of the BBC. He can speak out. So should others be able to do, in a private capacity. Anyone who remembers the Blair years will remember the hostility shown by left-wingers to the BBC. That’s how it’s always been. Let everyone speak, and chart a middle course. The BBC will sometimes get it wrong, but leave it alone.

Let everyone speak, give opportunities to everyone seeking refuge to find that refuge … but at the same time, hold to the middle ground. If we’re not centred, we fall apart.