Category: USA

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.

Making Things: Jony Ive and Elon Musk

Compare the worlds of Jony Ive, designer (with Steve Jobs) of the iPhone and iMac, and Elon Musk.

Both Ive and Musk are makers. Ive spends much of his time in his own mind, he tells us*, and he shows a remarkable contentment. It’s an inheritance from his father, a passionate and pioneering maker in his own right. He has always operated at a personal level. Musk’s aspiration from early on was to scale-up. Apple magic is small-scale, intimate, the hand and fingers. Musk it seems can only operate at mega-scale.

While Ive is always part of a team Musk has totalitarian instincts. Indeed, a totalitarian practice, as DOGE, his ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, has demonstrated.

Human history is the history of making things. ‘Making maketh man.’ Back in the mid-sixteenth century even Michelangelo, dominant in his own sphere, relied on patronage, as artists before and since. Musk by contrast has no need of patronage. He has turned that old order on its head. He now patronises power. He is a would-be prince. If he’d been alive in sixteenth-century Rome and Florence he’d have pushed both Popes and Grand Duke Cosimo de’ Medici aside, as I imagine he’d quite like to do with Donald Trump.  

(The Doge of Venice back in the same era had limited authority but maximum glamour. Musk’s very different DOGE has maximum authority and nil glamour.)

He wants to get directly to the result. By the shortest possible route. Compare Boeing’s Starliner, so long in the making, and Musk’s Space X, already there. You focus only on what is important to efficient functioning. And you deal ruthlessly with any obstruction. (You also have to have luck on your side.)

If you apply that to people who work in government service, they can be dismissed as readily as Tesla employees. Processes can be engineered. Automated. Re-engineered. But can the efficient operation of a state with its very different objectives be compared to running a business?

We’ve not touched on methodology, in this case the callow youngsters that Musk is using at DOGE. A 25-year-old investigating Internal Revenue Service files. The clueless looking for clues. 340 million people. They are not spare parts, they have individual realities.

The result – the ‘baby’ of a caring and compassionate society gets thrown out with the bathwater. And compassion is somehow seen as criminal. Any gain is efficiency is unlikely. A wrecking ball produces – a wreck. To support this, a culture of dishonesty, and ‘accidental’ lies, is permitted, and more, encouraged, with Musk leading the way. And, to date, vilification is more than OK with the Republican base.  They’re used to it. It’s part of government. And if you lie to win power then you will lie to hold on to it.

Think back to Jony Ive. He speaks with a deep integrity, he evinces calm. How the world appeals in the hand and to the eye, to the user, is what drives him. His world and Musk’s didn’t have to be incompatible. But Musk wants to rule the world and if a Musk-style world implodes, then he will always have Mars to retreat to.  The rest of us will probably miss out.

*To hear Jony Ive talk about his life, check out a recent edition of the BBC programme, Desert Island Discs.

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.

Beware the extremes

As the Tories lurch ever further right we have reason in the UK to worry. But they are as weak, absurdly so, as they have ever been. But if, after the forthcoming election, they absorb the far-right Reform Party and travel further to the extremes themselves, and the right-wing media head off further in the direction of conspiracy and talk of a deep state, then we may need to pay closer attention to what is happen in other countries.

In Hungary under Orban, and until recently Poland under the Law and Justice party (PiS), the takeover of the media has been blatant. The aim has been to take over all the key institutions of state, usually in the interests of a socially-conservative and nationalist agenda. The government takes over the media, the judiciary, the universities, and as Donald Tusk is finding in Poland it’s hard to claw back the power of the state once it’s entrenched, especially when you have to use that same power of the state – to return authority to independent institutions – to do so.

Over in the USA the Republicans have effectively captured the Supreme Court. Conspiracy theories are rife. Taylor Swift is part of a Democrat conspiracy. That’s tame compared to QAnon. Conspiracy theory has a long history in the USA, going back to Nativist parties with anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic agendas in the 1830 and 40s. Trump is in there, playing an age-old game.

The Deep State, a nefarious coalition of the various forces running the liberal (socially and economically) state, is a Trump obsession. Conspiracists gravitate to such notions. Liz Truss on a US tour talked about a British ‘Deep State’. In a recent podcast Ed Balls and George Osborne wondered where that Deep State might lie. What or who did Truss mean? The Civil Service? The Financial Times? They landed, for want of better, on The Economist. I will be searching there for signs when I next read it, wary of how I might be influenced in covert ways…

Just a few days ago I was listening on a car journey to a podcast where the subject was the possible takeover of the Daily Telegraph by Paul Marshall, a vastly wealthy hedge fund owner and co-owner GB News. (Al Jazeera is far more informative.) I was high in the Pennines, the M62 snaking beneath me, and that sense of a vast empty space stays in my mind.

Marshall (as reported by the charity ‘Hope Not Hate’) has liked on his X/Twitter account posts (all now deleted) that refer not just to ‘losing patience with fake refugee invaders’ but also to the survival of European civilisation requiring mass expulsions. (The ‘Great Replacement Theory’ assumes a vast plot to replace our existing Christian with an Islamic population and culture.) Let’s assume they aren’t his real opinions. But if so, why the ‘likes’? Marshall is a practising Christian of a very born-again and conservative (and, arguably, very un-Christian) persuasion.

The Telegraph may or may not be safe from Marshall. For now it looks as if we will safe from the Telegraph, assuming Labour gets elected. But longer term – the old sane Toryism of the Telegraph under its long-time editor Bill Deedes (‘Dear Bill’) may be lost forever.

The old post-war centre of gravity is shifting right. Obama and an enlightened middle ground seems light years away. But it was only 2009…

Wiping the slate clean

Finding answers was always hard but it’s now in a different league of difficulty.

I began this blog a few years back wanting to write about how we could make liberal democracy function better. Now the issue is how liberal democracy can survive in the face of China, illiberal democracies in Hungary and Turkey, the Republican right in the USA, and, just recently, the ideas promoted by the recent National Conservatism Conference here in the UK.

The issue for many is a sense of lost power. Ideas of ‘nation’ muddled with social conservatism, as if this could be the way we Brits might claw back lost influence. Language and the Premier League mislead us.

Many on the other side of the spectrum would like to renounce power altogether, renounce capitalism, renounce politics, head for utopia.

What if we could go back in time. Start again. Wipe the slate clean.

Gillian Tett, writing in the Financial Times, refers to what she describes as ‘the ancient Mesopotamian idea of a wiping the slate clean’ – a wiping out of debts to allow a society to reboot. McKinsey estimates it would ‘wipe out $48trn of household wealth in the coming years’. That I assume is just the USA.

That takes me to another theme, growth, or the absence of it, the post-growth advocates and as the Economist describes them, ‘the actual de-growers’. We stop caring about growth targets and GDP. Or we go further and actively ‘shrink the pie’.

Only, it won’t happen, can’t happen. For one we’d have to rein in population growth. And if we take that too far we’ll have a massively reduced younger generation to fund the lifestyles of a vastly increasing older generation. The answer – we voluntarily cut back on our lifestyles. Which isn’t going to happen. More likely, the world economy would implode.

Tett quotes a biologist Peter Turchin, ‘a biologist and complexity scientist who employs Big Data to study ecosystems’. Studying reams of data over thousands of years he identifies a fundamental pattern whereby an elite grabs power and ‘tries to protect itself by grabbing more and more resources’. This leaves poor people even poorer and an ’over-production of the elite’. It’s a recipe for a social explosion. Is this what we’re currently seeing in the USA?

Tett suggests the only way ‘to shift this trajectory is to re-play the New Deal policies of the 1930s and the immediate post-war years in the USA, using redistribution to reduce inequality’. She’s not saying that Turchin is right, but that the symptoms he describes are indeed deep-rooted in modern American society.

There are many other parts to this jigsaw. Climate change, generative AI, China, Ukraine. Regarding China it’s been interesting to listen to what Henry Kissinger, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, has to say. Lowering the temperature is key, contrary to what the new breed of American hawks, and a good few British, are arguing. That requires building confidence step by step. Establishing and maintaining a conversation, however deep the divide.

There is in all this one constant – our liberal democracy. Hold to that and we can still find answers.

‘Avoid anyone with ideas’

Isabel Allende in her wonderful novel, A Long Petal of the Sea, highlights the extraordinary achievement of Pablo Neruda in arranging the transportation to Chile of two thousand refugees from the Spanish Civil War on an old cargo ship, the Winnipeg, in August 1939. The decision on who or who not should be accepted lay with Neruda. He cast his net wide to include ‘fishermen, farm and factory workers, manual labourers, and intellectuals as well, despite instructions from his government to avoid anyone with ideas.’

A cross-section of working populations would today look very different, but there is one category which governments feared, now as then, and that is ‘anyone with ideas’.

The market as understood by neoliberalism, epitomised probably better than anywhere else by Pinochet’s Chile, after the 1973 coup, but still pervading so much of Western, and especially American, society, has little time for ideas. Chile is a classic case where ideas, and freedom of expression, were pitched against market forces, and market forces won.

Tom Clark focuses on neo-liberalism in an excellent book review* in the current edition of Prospect. One point (of many) that caught my attention: ‘….a lot of the neoliberal agenda can be thought of … as akin to the historic enclosures of common land, excluding some in order to strengthen the property rights of others’. Readers of my blog will remember my review of Nick Hayes’ ‘The Book of Trespass’. Tom Clark goes on to remind us of ‘the American intellectual property regime that (prior to a 2013 court ruling) developed to allow 4,300 genes to be patented as if they were inventions’.

At an everyday level we have ‘other audacious enclosures’ which ‘have blocked most Britons from watching live football of TV and obliterated awareness of cricket from the young’. (Recent England internationals on free-to-air channels have been so bad that watching is best seen as an act of penance. Cricket on the other hand has been superb – and should have been out there on free-to air TV.)

Isabel Allende in ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’ sums up the situation in Pinochet’s Chile succinctly. ‘The government had decided public services should be in private hands. Health was not a right but a consumer good, to be bought and sold.’

This ties in neatly with Clark’s conclusion: ‘Only with a “property first” rather than a “freedom first” reading of neoliberalism can we …. grasp how [Friedrich] Hayek would defend the 1970s coup against an elected socialist government in Chile, which brought Pinochet’s murderous regime to power.’

The irony is that ‘ideas played an important part in the neoliberal story’. Its great proselytisers, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, thrived in that environment. But in Chile the coup closed off debate, closed out ideas, put an end to freedom of expression. Property (traditional landowners and American-owned mining companies) usurped freedom, when ultimately, in a democracy, the balance has always to be toward freedom.

The ‘audacious enclosures’ referred to above may seem small beer by comparison but as we’ve seen they are part of the same debate. Market forces are part of our lives, they drive our economies, but when they’re allied too closely with wealth, to property in the form of land and investments, as opposed to the incomes each of us earns, on our merits, in each generation, they over-reach – and the challenge lies in containing that over-reach. And for that we need, more than ever, an open market in ideas.

* ‘How the rich ate us’, reviewing books by Francis Fukuyama and Gary Gerstle

The world de-mystified

We, the people on this crazy planet, seek at one pole to identify, and work with, the world perceived as gaia, the mother of life, and at the other to command it: nature as enemy, to be tamed in what William James described more than a hundred years ago as ‘the moral equivalent of war’. The latter has indeed been the direction of travel for in the Western world for several hundred years, but we were, until even as late as the mid-20th century (if we exclude the USA and Europe), still getting no further than the edges.

Central Asia and Tibet were lands of mystics and Buddhists. There lay ancient paths to wisdom. Now those paths have been wiped by Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative. Britain may have governed India but its impact on Hindu and Muslim culture was minimal. A piece is a recent Economist highlighted how Indian cinema, Bollywood, while as popular as ever is now accessed in rural communities not by showings at the traditional communal fairs known as mela but in the privacy of private homes, which may be no more than shacks, via mobile phone.

The Economist also recently ran pieces on the railways which had opened up the Middle East in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. East briefly met West in conditions of harmony, even if old attitudes to the Orient hardly budged. Tracks now run as far as borders, or have been torn up. Out of connection we brought division. And another piece describes and evokes the last kampong, or village, in Singapore, where the long-established Land Acquisition Act allows unrestricted development, the commercial maximisation of limited space.

The world has been thoroughly demystified.

Now we have Elon Musk seeking to re-make the world, and the solar system, in his own image. Tesla is green. He is scornful of climate change deniers. But he’s also loading the atmosphere with thousands of miniature satellites as part of his Starlink communication programme. From the distance in space where he or his satellites look back in the earth individual citizens are invisible.

Time Magazine made him their Man of the Year. ‘This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.’

This is close to worship. You lose one deity, you create another…

Another aspirant deity out in California is libertarian Peter Thiel. Thiel, David Runciman writes in the London Review of Books, ‘rails against the use of public money for the betterment of people’s lives, especially the poor. Who are politicians to decide how we should live? The state only exists to protect the lives we build for ourselves, including the wealth we acquire along the way.’ Monopoly is the logical aim of any good capitalist.

A favourite book of Thiel’s is The Sovereign Individual (published 1997), co-authored by Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father, William. The authors predict ‘the demise of the nation-state and the emergence of low or no tax libertarian communities in which the rich can finally emancipate themselves from ‘the exploitation of the capitalists by workers’.

Thiel ‘helped to bankroll the Seasteading Institute, which aims to create independent, ocean-based communities free from all government control.’ He was ‘an early vocal champion of Donald Trump’s presidential bid’. (All quotes are from David Runciman’s article.)

So where does that leave the still small voice of Zen, so optimistic in 2009. Where does the ordinary guy fit in? Likewise, run-of-the-mill limited-term democracy? And the big issues of migration, the armaments race, land use, species survival?

Thiel we can shunt off into one of his Seasteading communities. The state could build it for him.

And let’s have Musk focused literally down to earth, where he’s doing some real good, and could do so much more. But his mindset… he is a commander. He doesn’t do humility. We have messed up the environment and using the same machismo approach that landed in this mess he thinks he can put it right. I don’t share his premise. But we could use his ideas and energy. He could use our humility, but, well, let’s face it – that won’t happen!

Decline of an empire?

Almost three weeks on. The USA is out of Afghanistan. Recriminations continue, and pundits have their say. Tony Blair called it imbecilic, and argued the West should stay to protect its gains. Niall Ferguson looked to historical analogies, and specifically Britain’s experience after 1918, focusing on the idea of decline of empire. He quoted Winston Churchill bitterly recalling a ‘refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the state.’ He quotes this against Biden, when it could be quoted in his favour. Biden has always been consistent on Afghanistan – see my last blog.

Ferguson as always gets to the heart of the matter but I’m not convinced by analogies. My experience as an historian tells me to enter caveats at every stage. Ferguson raised the spectre of American economic weakness, and the size of American debt.  But with a strong internal economy in no way is its economic situation comparable to Britain’s in the 1920s.

And what are the ‘gains’ the West has achieved in Afghanistan? We established a thriving outpost, with less than friendly counties on all sides. Abandoning it is a calamity, and it was massively mismanaged, but it had an inevitability about it. The Afghan army without the all-important bond and commitment of a national (as opposed to tribal) identity was always an artificial construct, and unlikely to hold together under duress, as the Taliban proved.  

It sounds as if I’m writing with the advantage of hindsight – which I am, of course. But the military reality should have been perfectly clear to the Americans. To Biden it may only have been the sheer speed of the collapse that took him by surprise.

The Economist was forthright: ‘America’s power to deter its enemies and re-assure its friends has diminished.’  ‘Its withdrawal is likely to embolden jihadists everywhere.’

Is that right? The Taliban will have no truck with terrorists. To have their success seen as a rallying call for Al-Shabaab, or any branch of IS, is in no way in their interest.  They made that mistake back in 2001. Their leaders know a little of life in Qatar.

It’s in the West’s interests to engage with the Taliban, to release (subject to conditions) the World Bank funding that is currently suspended, and to allow food programmes, specifically the World Food Programme, to continue, without conditions.

The first condition must be to show that the Taliban can assert its authority over all the whole country, and hold it together where all previous attempts have failed. The second is humanitarian – above all women’s rights, with regard to education and employment.

The Taliban may go part way, testing Western resolve. Our approach has to be pragmatic.

Biden, and Trump, and Obama, were all right: the USA has to focus on the Pacific, and China, while Europe and NATO ups its game in Europe. The oil imperative is not what it was. The Middle East and by extension Islam and Afghanistan no longer need to be theatres of Western operation. And we now know that the wider world doesn’t look upon Western-style democracy as some universal panacea.

Impose values (however sure we may be that they are right) and resentment, and then outright opposition, are likely to follow. We need to remind ourselves that we lead best by example.

And that, turning the focus back on ourselves, is a hard hard road.

Why?

Kabul has fallen. What can I say that doesn’t sound trite. Listen to the ex-solder Tom Tugendhat, who served in Afghanistan, speaking in the House of Commons, and I’m minded to hold back.

But there is one question I keep on asking myself, the big question, the ‘why’ question. Why did Joe Biden allow it to happen?

I thought I’d check what Barack Obama has to say (in ‘A Promised Land’) about the discussions they had within his newly-elected administration in 2009. The USA, he writes, already had 30,000 troops there, plus 10,000 troops from other countries, and the military were pressing for the deployment of another 30,000. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates warned of unintended consequences that could follow from rash actions.

In Obama’s words: ‘Unless we established limited and realistic objectives, he [Gates] told me, “we set ourselves up for failure”.’

Obama continues, ‘Among the principals only Joe Biden expressed his misgivings. He had travelled to Afghanistan on my behalf during the transition and what he saw and heard on the trip – particularly a contentious meeting with Karzai – had convinced him that we need to rethink our whole approach to Afghanistan…he saw Afghanistan as a dangerous quagmire and urged me to delay deployment, suggesting it would be easier to put troops in once we had a clear strategy as opposed to pulling troops out after we’d made a mess with a bad one.’

Biden has been by his lights entirely consistent. American strategy over the twelve years since he became Obama’s vice-president has been focused on nation-building, and putting that new nation on a secure basis, and guaranteeing that security. That simply hasn’t happened. The Taliban never went away. Warlords guarded their patches. Bribery remained endemic. Kabul, with many of the trappings of a big Western city, was the exception. And why should we have ever supposed that an Afghan government army drawn largely (I’m assuming) from outside Kabul would ever stand and fight against a single-minded and often brutal Taliban insurgency?

China and the ex-Soviet republics lie to the north. Taliban-sympathising Pakistan to the east, Iran to the west. What chance was there of guaranteeing Kabul, let alone Afghanistan, a Western-style democratic future?

Only if the US retained a big military presence – and the American public, 70% in one poll I’ve seen, wanted out.

Jon Sopel on the BBC website suggests the Americans could have delayed their withdrawal to the winter season, when no-one fights in Afghanistan. But that wouldn’t have made much difference in the end. Kabul would have fallen.

But not in such a catastrophic fashion.

Did Biden really believe the Afghan army would put up strong resistance? Was he just badly advised? Is this just another, and terrible, example, of that American insensitivity, that lack of awareness, which has so bedevilled its foreign policy ventures since World War Two?

This one matters. Women in Afghanistan face an uncertain future. It may be a terrible future. Kabul is far more than another political catastrophe. It could be a humanitarian catastrophe of an extreme kind.

Big decisions need fallback positions. Halting the withdrawal, or maintaining full air cover for the Afghan army, at the very least. All or nothing is no strategy.