Category: Ukraine

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.

Summer reading

Are the better angels of our nature winning out? Are we, as we achieve higher levels of civilisation, becoming any less violent? I hadn’t intended it this way but violence has been an undercurrent throughout almost all my summer reading. My blog’s name may be Zenpolitics but there are no easy rides.

I’ve been back, with the wonderful John Stoner and his novel ‘Augustus’, to the life and times of Caesar Augustus and his immediate precursors. (Books by Mary Beard and Tom Holland, serious non-fiction, underline just how bloody life could be in ancient Rome). Moving on 1400 years, to the decades either side of 1400 (a neat symmetry!), Helen Castor’s ‘The Eagle and the Hart’ (not a novel but narrative non-fiction) focuses on Richard II, a lover of peace assailed by violence on his home soil and over the Channel. His successor, Henry IV, copes better. A little more than a century later we’ve Luther nailing his theses on a Wittenberg door and precipitating the Reformation, and its appalling immediate aftermath, the German Peasants’ War, as wonderfully described (in ‘Summer of Fire and Blood’) by Lyndal Roper.

We’re visiting France next month so I read Emile Zola’s novel ‘Debacle’, about the Franco-Prussian War by way (a curious way, I admit – the book happened to be on my shelves) of preparation: the victors of the battle of Sedan in 1870 would return to France less than fifty years later.

I stayed with roughly the same period, moving on to 1874, when I picked up another John Stoner novel, ‘Butcher’s Crossing’. (Now a film.) If I was hoping for respite the title should have warned me. It’s about a journey from Kansas to the Rockies where they hunt buffalo (for their hides) in a high mountain valley, shooting thousands, with a view to leaving none behind. A direct route to extinction.

I found respite in a wonderful book, ‘Left Bank’, by Agnes Poirier about Paris in the 1940s and how its intellectual and cultural and café life survived the Nazi occupation. It’s the world of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus, and fighting is in-fighting, literary and artistic. But there is a looming threat. Their opponents once the Germans are driven out are the hard-core Soviet-aligned, toe-the-socialist-realist-line Communists.

The dangers, as they might have been, to Paris and to France of hardline Soviet Communism are spelt out in a graphic way in Anne Applebaum’s remarkable book, ‘Red Terror’. Its subject is Ukraine in the inter-war years. By 1921 the various attempts to establish independence in the aftermath of World War One had all failed. Soviet power was firmly established. (It’s curious to read how in the years 1921-22 American aid had been enlisted to combat famine.)

Ukrainian language and culture were for a while encouraged as a way the Soviets saw of binding Ukrainians to a new Marxist dispensation. But by 1929 Stalin was in charge and the mood was changing. A trial of that year referred to ‘Ukrainian nationalism, nationalistic parties, their treacherous policies, their unworthy ideas of bourgeois independence, of Ukraine’s independence’. The brutal introduction of land reform, the obliteration of the kulaks as a class, and at the same time the requisitioning of the grain, on which the peasants survived, for the cities and for export, led to the Holodomor, the famine of 1932-33, during which up to five million people died. Stalin’s paranoia was by this time deep-rooted. His purges of the late 1930s all but wiped out Ukraine’s intellectual and cultural life.

There’s so much more I could say. Read the book. For my next book, something that’s maybe an easier read? Maybe, maybe not. Take each book as it comes.