For a 35,000 word document, it is markedly thin on detail, which will, we assume, be released in dribs and drabs over the coming months. Its funding commitments are vague and aspirational, and are already subject to the perennial Whitehall dispute over whether Britain’s defense spending is an adequate proportion of the country’s GDP. Yet as a realistic appraisal of a dangerous world, and of Britain’s role within it, it is not a bad document. Through the “collapse of the post-Second World War consensus”, it observes (meaning, in reality, the post-Cold War consensus) “the certainties of the international order we have accepted for so long are now being questioned — and not only by authoritarians” — a nod to Britain’s mercurial imperial patron, whose dubious commitment to Europe’s security is a prospect too alarming to be addressed frankly. “More broadly,” it cautions, “the West’s long-held military advantage is being eroded as other countries modernize and expand their armed forces at speed, while the United States’ (US) security priorities are changing.”  

In advance of the document’s publication, I expressed concern that its convenor, former Nato Secretary-General Lord Robertson’s fanciful declarations that the Ukraine War had proved America’s unshakeable commitment to the Atlantic alliance boded ill for the SDR’s correspondence with reality. As it transpires, the document is more subtle than we may have expected. Declaring, once again, Britain’s Nato first strategic worldview (and politically, it can hardly declare otherwise), the SDR is more notable for its observation that “‘NATO First’ does not mean ‘NATO only’.” The UK, it says, should build stronger bilateral and minilateral partnerships, particularly with France, but also Germany, Poland, and Norway creating what it describes as “strategic depth, strengthening the Alliance and stability in the Euro-Atlantic”. As such, these partnerships are to be a supplement rather than a replacement for Nato structures. Yet such an approach can also be read as vindication of the influential (within the Trump administration) defense analyst Sumantra Maitra’s prediction of de facto “mini-ententes” developing within Nato, even as the alliance remains in existence de jure. 

The Indo-Pacific Tilt, long a source of ecstatic fantasizing within the British defense commentariat, has, rightly, been demoted to an afterthought, without being formally dropped. The ongoing war in Europe has returned Pacific affairs to its rightful subordinate role in British defense, and a commitment to be shared with European allies (notably, not pledging interoperability with the United States), as and when the occasion demands — it is a long way from the underfunded, over-promised boosterism of the Johnsonian Tilt. As the SDR notes, “Military deployments beyond the Euro-Atlantic should be used to retain deeper and broader ‘match fitness’ of the Armed Forces” with caution being taken to ensure these deployments do not prevent it from returning at speed to the Euro-Atlantic if necessary — its core function. 

The SDR’s firm refocusing of British defense to “the Euro-Atlantic” region is to be welcomed, particularly its emphasis on Britain’s maritime responsibilities to the NATO alliance. Indeed, tucked away in a section on climate change, comes the important observation that the Arctic and High North are likely to be ‘ice-free each summer by 2040. This, then, will create a new site for competition within our “wider neighborhood”. It has long been a critique leveled by the security circle around Trump (though something of a minority view in British defense commentary,) that Britain has neglected its core NATO role of defending the seas around our home islands in favor of scattershot and distracting deployments elsewhere. This SDR firmly and sensibly recenters our near abroad as the primary focus of British defense. With a defense press, reflecting inter-service rivalries, inclined to view such documents as creating winners and losers among the services, it is fair to say that the Royal Navy is thus the “winner” of the SDR. The sections on the Navy possess the most fleshed-out proposals on modernization, with a strong emphasis on Atlantic Bastion: “the Royal Navy’s plan to secure the North Atlantic for the UK and NATO against the persistent and growing underwater threat from a modernizing Russian submarine force.”

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Rearmament is a noble lie

By Aris Roussinos

The sections on the Army are, by contrast, relatively vague, reflecting the land service’s functional non-existence as a serious warfighting entity. “Last recapitalized in the 1990s,” the SDR notes, “much of the Army’s capabilities—including Challenger 2 tanks, AS90 artillery, and ammunition—have rightly been gifted to Ukraine.” As we are told, “The Army must modernize the two divisions and the Corps HQ that it provides to NATO as one of the Alliance’s two Strategic Reserves Corps”. But at the moment this is just a vague aspiration rather than a fleshed-out commitment. It is not hard to detect a note of frustration in its observations that investment must be paired with drastic changes to how it is organized and equipped, and that “it should be bolder in its ambition, seeking to increase lethality ten-fold”. It is a classic “must do better” teacher’s comment in a school report.

As for the RAF, which garnered breathless weekend coverage over its alleged procurement of a tactical nuclear weapons capability, no such commitment was to be found in the document itself, save for perhaps the comment that Britain should “increase options for retaliation in response to an attack—or the threat of attack— on the UK and its allies”, and the suggestion that the service may, or may not, at some point in the future acquire the F-35A (which would enable such a capability). Overall, the section on British airpower is dominated by its focus on platforms still in development, and has rightly been characterized as “jam tomorrow” by defense analysts.

Effectively, the SDR is a clear-eyed assessment that Britain is, currently, in no position to fight a major war, while stating an ambition to move to a position of “readiness”. As it observes, the most plausible conflict now facing the country would be “high-intensity, protracted, and costly” — though it is hard to see how the Ukraine war’s lavish burning through of men and materiel justifies the assertion that “simple metrics such as the number of people and platforms deployed are outdated and inadequate”. After all, Russia’s strong negotiating position against Ukraine derives precisely from its superiority in both people and platforms. Indeed, as the SDR later notes, there has been “a hollowing out of capability due to a focus on ‘exquisite’ capabilities” and “Stockpiles are inadequate, further reduced by the important and necessary transfer of materiel to Ukraine”. Capacity and resilience, meanwhile, are lacking following years of underinvestment. Later on, though, the SDR recognizes the importance of mass, pledging to reorient service personnel from back-office roles to the core business of warfighting, and indeed, to build mass through lowering medical standards for recruitment. There may be more to modern warfare than mere mass then, but it retains a quality of its own.

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The fantasy of British defence

By Aris Roussinos

On materiel, similarly, the SDR introduces a strong and sustained emphasis on rebuilding industrial capacity, stating that a new Defense Readiness Bill should allow the Government powers to mobilize Reserves and industry should conflict necessitate it. Britain is not ready for war in the immediate future: yet the SDR lays out a concrete and urgent industrial roadmap to war-readiness which is, unfortunately, necessary, and this is to be unequivocally praised. As it observes, “Russia’s war economy, if sustained, will enable it to rebuild its land capabilities more quickly in the event of a ceasefire in Ukraine.” The cessation of the Ukraine war thus holds threats as well as promises for Britain, and time is of the essence.

Ignore the excited pre-publication commentary and interservice bickering, and the SDR presents a solid portrait of Britain’s current unreadiness for war and of the vital, if unglamorous work needed to amend this. There is a strong and necessary emphasis on home defense, hardening and resilience; on rebuilding industrial capacity; and a certain cutting of Britain’s defense coat to its under-equipped cloth through a recentring of Britain’s Atlantic front as its core area of responsibility.

This is fundamentally a defensive document which recognizes that previous decades of misallocation and squandering of resources have left Britain on the back-foot in relation to its strategic rivals. For all that one may disagree with the current government in other matters, it is a sober and serious work: it is not too little, but we must hope that it is not too late.

Tory Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is concerned. But fear not! He has a solution. After reading all the Left-wing think pieces, in which the cure for crime is always — yes — more youth clubs, he has decided this doesn’t go nearly far enough. What we need is, in fact, youth clubs but on steroids: “a bold new model of National Service for 18-year-olds”.

Are the young enthused? As the kids say: lol. The general sentiment is outrage: the Tories locked them in their homes for two years, stunting education and proliferating psychiatric distress. They mortgaged young people’s futures to pay for a fleeting (and, in the end, largely illusory) sense of safety for their elders, leaving behind a legacy of zero growth, crippled businesses, and swingeing taxes to service stratospheric borrowing. They hectored young people about duty, while breaking out the cake and champagne for birthday parties. And now, they propose to impose yet another obligation to Pride and Duty and Cohesion on the young.

Among younger Right-leaning individuals of my acquaintance, the talk is less of voting Tory than of annihilating them. The more vengeful call for “Zero Seats”: a coordinated plan of tactical voting, with the aim of ensuring victory for whichever candidate is most likely to defeat the Tory one. Others, from anons to mainstream journalists, wonder if Sunak has chosen so rebarbative a proposal in a deliberate attempt to throw the election. But I don’t think this is quite right. Rather, it’s a logical consequence of the Tories’ electoral bind, whose nature we can discern in the location he chose to announce the policy: the Mail on Sunday.

There, he told us cheerily that National Service would become a “rite of passage”. It would, he insists, “create a shared sense of purpose among our young people and a renewed sense of pride in our country”. We might, should we be so inclined, snort at Sunak’s delusional effort to reverse engineer a sense of national belonging, by reheating a policy that was only politically palatable in the aftermath of Second World War because that sense of national belonging already existed. We might gesture at the gulf it highlights between the majority-white and broadly patriotic Middle England retirees at which this dead cat — let’s not call it a policy — is addressed, and the increasingly multi-ethnic and post-colonial British Zoomer cohort now reaching maturity.

But what would be the point? Given the current state of polling, no one seriously imagines Sunak is ever going to have to implement this. It’s a fantasy proposal, launched in a newspaper whose average reader is 60, owns their own home, and lives in the South East. It’s addressed, with bleak cynicism, at an electorate whose likelihood of voting Conservative more or less rises in a straight line by age, with the 18-24 group least likely to do so. In other words: this policy is proof positive that Sunak has simply written off younger voters, and opted to speak over their heads to their boomer elders — the Conservatives’ steadily dwindling electoral base — as though the young were simply not there.

Nor, we’ve since learned, does this even represent peak Tory gerontification. Yesterday gifted us the “Quadruple Lock”: yet another guarantee for the state pension, clawed from the stagnant wages of Britain’s shrinking corpus of working-age adults. But if the Quadruple Lock is bare-faced clientelism, National Service is a wholly fake policy whose principal objective is to distract those boomers still solipsistic enough to vote Tory from the fact that, just as before Brexit, there’s little to distinguish the Conservative Party from the rest of the uniparty.

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After the election, everything is unknown

By Richard Vinen

This uniparty, which comprises every mainstream political representative of the zombie-liberal consensus, views the British nation-state as effectively obsolete. It’s content-free. It has no culture, no people, nothing to offer other than tourist tat, a flaccid trading zone, and some services that may be obtained on a gym-membership basis by just showing up.

Our foreign policy has long been set by the United States. Our immigration policy is set internationally too, by a mix of corporate interests and international regulations. As for economic policy, the brief and lettuce-like reign of Liz Truss demonstrated (no matter how bonkers you thought her proposals) that any deviation from the City’s preferred approach results in prompt defenestration. Even environmental policy has mostly become a smoke-and-mirrors mix of Davocratic posturing and corporate subsidies, as evidenced by the simultaneous moves to reduce aviation emissions through complicated regulatory mechanisms, while also nodding through expansions to every major UK airport.

Perhaps, in time, we’ll look back on the older nation-state system and shake our heads at its insularity and instability. Meanwhile, though, the emerging system (let’s call it Our Democracy) still has some teething problems. For one thing, it affords no obvious feedback mechanism for managing popular disapproval of truly hated policies. Nor does it offer any basis for larger-scale solidarity, other than identitarian special pleading by “communities”: in practice, an engine for accelerating sectarianism, whose benefits are (to say the least) unevenly distributed.

As such, whenever these shortcomings become too obvious, Our Democracy has a tendency to fall back on invocations of solidarity in the older nation-state style. Here you’ll find the phantoms of “solidarity” or “patriotism”, usually invoked to stifle objections or to wring a few more drops of tax from what’s left of the faltering middle class. The first and starkest case in point was the international decision, after the Global Financial Crash, to use Quantitative Easing to nationalise the unsurvivable losses of “too-big-to-fail” banks that had spent the previous decade privatising the upside of their casino-finance practices. There have been many more since, of which the most recent and egregious is surely nationalising the costs of Human Quantitative Easing, in the form of crumbling infrastructure, GP appointment scarcity, escalating rents and ill-tempered public spaces, all while privatising the increasingly negligible gains in GDP growth.

Are we a nation, or are we not? We aren’t a nation, when there’s any question of preferential treatment based on shared history, heritage, culture or ancestry. We are, though, when it’s a question of coughing up to bankroll whichever set of client-group subsidies this iteration of the uniparty would like to prioritise. Perhaps you think I’m being cynical here, and perhaps I am a little. But the point is a serious one. Were Sunak’s National Service proposal a serious policy, designed to be implemented rather than simply fulminated over in the press, it would be crippled from the word go by a profound structural problem. That is: you can’t de facto abolish the nation state and then demand the yoof all do National Service.

National Service both presumes a nation and also a sense of belonging and futurity, such that “service” feels like paying it forward. But it’s being proposed by a government which recently locked young people in a cupboard for two years, then deflated the value of their degrees and increased the price, then capered about making nativist gestures while starving public services and stoking a housing crisis via mass migration. Given this, young voters might be forgiven for thinking that they have neither a nation nor much future to speak of, and react with derision to the proposed inculcation in their breasts of “renewed pride in our country”.

But what is Sunak to do? He cannot escape the electoral death trap that is the Tories’ ageing base of Middle England homeowners: the Mail readers who will nod at the prospect of making all those scruffy bus-shelter loiterers with their pronouns and weird little videos stand up straight and contribute to society through some gratifyingly coercive state intervention. And given everyone knows the Tories are going to lose, and that it’s really just a question of how badly, nuking an already written-off youth vote for a few more boomer X’s is — albeit in a short-termist way — grimly pragmatic.

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So I doubt Sunak is trying to throw the election. This policy is less deliberate self-sabotage than a tragedy in slow motion: yet another sign, lest we needed one, that the Party of House Prices is circling the drain. And with each orbit of the abyss, his party grows more resigned to the death spiral. With each orbit, the young, bellicose, underground Right turns ever more bitterly away. What, after all, would be the point of trying to reform a party that doesn’t even seem to be aware of your existence, save as a fantasy bloc of doomscrolling skivers in need of improvement via Mental Elf, bans on TikTok and tobacco, and maybe a government-mandated stint wiping bottoms?

Meanwhile, beyond the event horizon of Tory annihilation, a new world beckons. It’s one in which One Nation Tories are no longer the gatekeepers of the Right. One in which the 30% of the youthful electorate who no longer believe in liberal democracy are old enough to wield real power. One in which, perhaps, we’ve stopped pretending that a now comprehensively post-national Britain is in any meaningful sense continuous with the pre-war entity of that name. And one in which we’ve resigned ourselves to a public life whose basic components are NGOcratic hectoring, trading-bloc standoffs, and multipolar post-liberal ethno-narcissism.

What politics will look like at that point is anybody’s guess. But somehow I doubt it will be as preoccupied with nostalgic clickbait.

During the Nineties, there was much excitement about computer technology opening the way to a new kind of warfare. Information, we were told, would flow from the battlefield to headquarters and back, giving commanders total control over hypercomplex, hugely expensive militaries that would overwhelm more poorly equipped forces with ease. That has, however, not come to pass.

On the battlefields of eastern Ukraine, the single most effective force the Ukrainian army has consisted of little independent units huddled in bunkers just behind the lines, equipped with cheap drones. Right now, Russia has the upper hand by every conventional measure; it has more troops, more tanks, more artillery, more ammunition and other expendables, and a vastly superior air force. Its missiles pound Ukrainian targets hundreds of miles behind the lines — and yet, it is also restricted to slow, gruelling, trench-by-trench advances, because any attempt at a general assault in open country gets chopped to pieces by drones.

The same thing mediated by a different set of technologies is also taking place in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli military is so much larger and better armed than Hamas that, in a conventional struggle, there would be no contest at all. But the Hamas commanders aren’t stupid enough to meet the Israelis in a conventional struggle. Instead, their network of tunnels allows Hamas forces to pop up, ambush Israeli detachments, and vanish again. It’s the same strategy Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon used against the Israeli army in 2006, and it’s proving just as effective this time around.

Then there’s the Ansarullah militia in Yemen, drawn mostly from the Houthi ethnic group. Their approach to messing with the industrial West is just as cheap and effective. You don’t need a permanent installation to launch a drone against a ship passing through the Red Sea — the back of a truck is quite adequate — and so the US and British forces on the scene have nothing useful to bomb. Yes, some Ansarullah drones get shot down. But so what? It takes a missile costing $2 million to down a drone that only costs $2,000.

The Ansarullah strategy is particularly clever because they don’t have to defeat the US and British navies. All they have to do is make the Red Sea too costly for commercial shipping to Israel and its allies, and they can do that by adding the risk of a drone strike (and the insurance premiums that follow from that risk) to the other costs and dangers shipping companies have to face. If Israel and its allies produced most of their goods and services at home, that wouldn’t be any kind of problem. But it turns out that one of the many downsides to economic globalisation is that it holds every nation’s economy hostage to shipping disruptions in the major sea lanes.

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Will Britain lose World War Three?

By Aris Roussinos

In all three cases, then, what has happened can be described very simply: the spectacularly overpriced armed services of the industrial world have passed their expiry date. They no longer yield military power commensurate with their overwhelming expense: quite the contrary, cheaper ways of fighting wars can now overwhelm them. And as history shows, this is something that happens routinely in the declining years of a civilisation.

The example I have in mind is the battle of Adrianople in 378, when seven Roman legions led by Valens, emperor of the eastern half of the Roman Empire, faced a somewhat smaller force of barbarians led by the Gothic king Fritigern. The Romans lost catastrophically — two-thirds of the Roman force was slaughtered on the battlefield and the rest fled. Valens was among the dead. Before Adrianople, there was still some hope that the Empire could recover from its 4th-century crisis; afterwards, the barbarians had the upper hand and kept it.

There has been a vast amount of speculation about what happened at Adrianople. None of it matters for our present purpose, however. The point that’s relevant is the crucial difference between the two armies that defined the consequences once one of them lost. The difference in question? The cost of fielding an army.

The late Roman military was a sprawling, top-heavy bureaucratic structure divided into many specialised units. Training, equipping, supplying and commanding the ordinary Roman legionary was a complex process demanding huge amounts of money and resources. Much of that cost came from the pervasive corruption and bureaucratisation of late Roman society, in which all economic activity was loaded to breaking point with fees and regulations, and a vast amount of graft also bled every economic sector white. But there was also the simple fact that a complex, specialised, and hierarchically structured army is always going to cost a lot.

The barbarian force, by contrast, wasn’t even an army. Instead, it comprised all the able-bodied men of a couple of Gothic tribes and a few other allied barbarian peoples. Every “soldier” provided his own weapons and armour, and had learned how to use them as a child. They were flexible and resilient precisely because it was unspecialised.

The Roman army was appallingly brittle by contrast. Until Adrianople, the tremendous costs of maintaining the military had been met by raising taxes to sky-high levels, But by 378, the tax burden in the empire was so crushing that economic activity was breaking down under the strain. Thus the destruction of two-thirds of Valens’s army, and an even larger fraction of its officers and staff, was a financial blow from which Rome never really recovered. The barbarians didn’t have that problem, because Fritigern didn’t have to raise money to train, equip, pay and manage his force — he just had to lead it to plunder and be reasonably successful as a general. This was well within his abilities, and equally within the reach of later barbarian kings. The fall of Rome followed in just under a century.

We haven’t yet had an equivalent of the battle of Adrianople. The fighting in Ukraine and the Middle East echoes the struggles of the decades before Adrianople, when Roman politicians and military officers could still convince themselves that the military machine they had inherited from their ancestors was still the most powerful in the world. The US military is in that condition now, lumbering around the planet with its aircraft carriers and high-tech weapons systems, flailing helplessly at drone strikes and trying to pretend that the carnage in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip hasn’t just shown that the entire American way of war is hopelessly obsolete.

There is, of course, an alternative to Adrianople. The United States could withdraw its troops from the 100-odd foreign countries where it has military bases, focus on defending its own borders, and retool its military to adapt to the ongoing revolution in military affairs. That would, among other things, save billions of dollars a year. Yet given the billions would no longer be flowing into the pockets of defence corporations, with a good bit sticking to various fingers on the way, such a change would sure be unpopular with a number of powerful individuals, and probably won’t get put into place until some ghastly military debacle or other forces it. Still, the option’s worth mentioning.

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One way or another, however, over the next half century, the massive military forces and hugely expensive defence technologies that have ruled the world’s battlefields since 1939 will be replaced by leaner, less expensive, and less centralised forces. Then that process will go further — propelled forward by two principal compulsions.

The first of those forces is the economic impact of resource depletion. Today’s high-tech weapons systems require fantastically complex and precise inputs of energy and materials, many of which have to be sourced from abroad and then processed in extraordinarily complex ways. Consider the microprocessors that make an ordinary drone capable of doing its job. Silicon is one of the most common elements in the earth’s crust, but silicon pure enough to make into computer chips has to be refined at considerable cost, and then doped with monoatomic layers of rare-earth elements and etched in almost unimaginably fine patterns. Huge factories full of expensive gear, using gargantuan amounts of energy and an equally huge list of raw materials have to be built, powered and maintained so that microprocessors can be produced.

So complex a system won’t be sustainable indefinitely. More to the point, so complex a system won’t be affordable indefinitely. As easily accessible deposits of the raw materials get used up, the price of chips will rise. Rising energy costs will have the same effect, and as microprocessors get more expensive, the economies of scale that briefly made them cheap will work in reverse, and simpler technologies will outcompete them. If it costs less to hire a file clerk than it does to buy and operate a computer, most businesses will hire the file clerk — and as this same equation works through society as a whole, the economic basis for computer industries will shrivel away.

That’s one factor. The other, closely related to it, is the economic impact of population decline. Today, every continent but Africa is producing children at a rate too slow to sustain its current population, and African population curves are moving in the same direction. There’s still a little population increase in the pipeline, in the form of young people who haven’t yet reached reproductive age, but sometime in the next decade or two, the earth will reach its peak human population and begin to see sustained demographic contraction.

Next to nobody seems to have thought through what this implies. Economic growth depends ultimately on population growth; it’s because nobody alive today has ever experienced sustained demographic contraction that we all assume as a matter of course that businesses will increase their sales, real estate prices will go up, and investments will earn profits. In an era of population contraction, none of this is true. Once demographic decline sets in, each business will on average have fewer customers than the year before, each property will have fewer people to bid on it, each investment vehicle will have fewer people investing in it. Thus, the average business, the average asset, and the average investment vehicle will all lose money.

This is one of the unnoticed factors driving the decline of civilisations. If businesses, assets, and investments yield losses rather than profits, few people will be interested in owning them, and economic activity will contract even faster than the population. You can see this dynamic play out in the history of every falling civilisation. A radical simplification of the economy sets in. Market-based economies collapse and are replaced by customary economies, in which money drops out of use and the basis for economic activity is a handful of productive assets that meet real human needs: above all else, farmland capable of raising food crops.

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All this makes a convoluted military establishment impossible to sustain. That’s why feudalism is the default setting for human society after the collapse of complex societies. In a feudal system, productive farmland is parcelled out among local warlords, who pass it on to their vassals in exchange for military service. It’s the same system Fritigern knew, adapted to the needs of a settled population: every able-bodied man in a feudal society is a warrior, and can expect to be called out to defend his village from the warriors of rival communities at any moment. It’s only when a feudal system becomes decadent that peasants no longer fight in the infantry.

Some similar system is likely to play a significant role in the deindustrial age. It won’t be identical to the feudal systems of the last 3,000 years, though, for a simple reason: those systems were all shaped profoundly by the revolution in military affairs that followed the domestication of the horse by Indo-European tribes on the sweeping plains where Russian and Ukrainian troops are currently doing battle. From that point on, the feudal aristocrat was a master of horses — on a chariot early on, before horses had been bred large enough to carry riders in battle, and mounted on horseback thereafter. That gave warlords immense advantages over the people they ruled, resulting in a deep schism dividing society into noble and peasant classes.

That age is over, because a different revolution in military affairs swept the planet in the 16th century. During this period, gunpowder became as overwhelming a force in military affairs as horses were, not least because an armoured warrior on horseback is dead meat in a pitched battle involving firearms; a spray of bullets fired by half-trained peasants can easily kill his horse and punch holes in his armour. That’s why cavalry after the 16th century ended up repurposed as a force for scouting and raiding, while infantry took over the hard work of winning pitched battles. It’s also why aristocrats turned into a disposable commodity in most societies.

Yes, archery can also limit the effectiveness of cavalry — the French found that out the hard way at Crecy and Agincourt — but it takes many years of practice to master the longbow, and even so, it’s not as lethal as a gun. An untrained recruit can learn to use a firearm effectively in a matter of weeks. Firearms are also no great challenge to make with hand tools; the famous Kentucky rifle of the early American frontier was made by hand. Doubtless famous gunsmiths in the deindustrial future will be just as legendary as famous swordsmiths in the past, but most guns in the future will be turned out by ordinary craftspeople, just as most swords were back in the day.

With this in mind, it’s not hard to glimpse the warriors of the deindustrial dark ages 400 years from now. They’ll be armed with guns, probably semiautomatic rifles like the ones carried in the two World Wars — and if they have any armour, it’ll be steel helmets. Some of them will ride horses, but most won’t, for the reasons just described. They’ll be a good deal less subservient to the local warlord than their equivalents 1,000 years previously, because of the equalising effect of firearms. But they’ll doubtless have some version of the classic feudal ethic of loyalty and courage to guide them in the rough-and-tumble of an age of chaos.

They may have some unexpected technologies to help them out. Shortwave radios aren’t hard to make by hand — there’s a whole subculture of amateur radio enthusiasts these days who make their own vacuum tubes from mason jars and the like — and having the ability to communicate at a distance is worth an extra army in wartime. It’s also far from impossible that ultralight aircraft made of wood and fabric, powered by alcohol-burning engines will be available in at least a few of the more prosperous areas for aerial scouting. (Larger and more complex aircraft will probably be off-limits for centuries due to hard limits on resources.)

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Thus, I imagine an army on the march somewhere in the Ohio valley in 2400 or so, a long column of infantry with little detachments of cavalry scouting ahead and on the flanks, using bulky but functional radios to keep in touch with their commanders, while a couple of ultralights circle overhead to scout at a greater distance. There will doubtless be cannon drawn by horses in the column, too, and just possibly a few simple machine guns as well, but most of the fighting power will consist of young men shouldering rifles. Aside from a few bits of technology, it’s not that different from the armies that marched through that same region six centuries earlier.

That’s the army of a relatively large and stable dark age state, of course. Far more common will be smaller and poorer communities, in which warfare is carried out by relatively small groups of young men without the benefit of cavalry, canon or ultralight planes. In mountainous areas they’ll be all but unconquerable — firearms make guerrilla warfare far more powerful than other weapons systems — so we can expect the political structures of the deindustrial dark ages to feature relatively large states in the lowland river basins and small, defiantly independent communities up in the hills. It’s an old song, given new verses by gunpowder.

Naval power, however, is another matter. Wooden ships became instantly obsolete once explosive shells replaced solid shot in naval cannon, but steel armour in any quantity is only an option if you’ve got ample supplies of cheap coal to turn into coke; our descendants won’t have that. (For the same reason, they won’t have railroads, since you can’t make steel in sufficient volume for rails without coke, and we’re burning the last scraps of the necessary coal reserves right now.) Since shells aren’t difficult to make, and rockets with explosive warheads are even easier, naval flteets of any size may be a thing of the past until some other form of naval armour becomes possible. Piracy will doubtless flourish on the high seas of the deindustrial future, and it will be very hard for maritime nations to control it the way the British navy did.

And beyond the deindustrial dark ages? That’s impossible to predict, because the successor cultures that build on our ruins will have their own ideals, goals, and dreams, which will not be ours. They will favour some technologies and reject others for reasons we can’t anticipate and probably can’t even understand. Our civilisation invented clockwork and steam power and used them to reshape the planet, while the Roman world also invented both these things and did essentially nothing with them. Why? Because there is no one route to the future. Every civilisation follows its own path, and what we call “progress” is simply the temporary trajectory that our civilisation took in pursuit of its dreams.

That trajectory is winding up around us right now, having gone as far as it can. It’s a safe bet that future civilisations will choose their own paths instead. What goals they will seek, and how those will shape their ways of making war, we cannot know.

The Oliver is Cromwell: the man who founded what became the modern British army, as well as playing a notoriously brutal role in the 1649-1653 conquest of Ireland. And while the song is a long way from either nerdy military history or tub-thumping patriotism, it does take for granted the permanence of the military: “Oliver’s army is here to stay.”

But is it? Recruitment to Oliver’s Army, and related naval and air forces, is at crisis levels. The Tories are reportedly retiring two amphibious assault vessels, in a move critics have called “the end of the Royal Marines”, due to a shortage of sailors to operate them. Recruitment and retention are so poor that recently the Navy was reduced to advertising on LinkedIn for a rear-admiral. And the Army had to move hundreds of troops from the front line to recruitment because people aren’t joining.

According to Ben Wallace, a former defence secretary, this shortage is because Gen Z is not signing up. But why? Conservatives sometimes suggest that the culprit is some combination of wokeness, or women, or sexual minorities attenuating the Forces’ warlike masculinity. The real driving force, though, may be deeper and harder to reverse: the long, slow demise of the modern nation-state as a basic unit of geopolitics.

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The history of Europe’s armed forces is inseparable from the development and reach of the states that command them. The reason for this is obvious: an independent state unable to plausibly threaten retaliation if attacked is unlikely to remain independent for very long. But such forces have not always been patriotic in character. In premodern times, peasant soldiers fought out of obligation to a feudal lord, or mercenaries for money.

The idea of fighting for an ideal “King and country” is, by contrast, relatively modern — and coincides with the 17th-century birth of the modern nation-state, as a by-product of religious conflict after the Reformation. In England, Oliver’s Army was founded in 1645 to fight for the Parliamentarian cause in the English Civil War: a series of religiously inflected political convulsions that would culminate, in 1688, with the adoption of constitutional monarchy and the inauguration of modern Britain. Roughly concurrently, in 1648, the Treaty of Westphalia ended the unimaginably brutal Thirty Years’ War, with a settlement that broadly established the modern European community of sovereign states.

Such states were implicitly, if not exclusively, conceived of as ethnic — in the sense of providing a political vehicle for a “people”. Indeed, such “imagined communities” were, paradoxically, sometimes at least in part conjured into being by the “nation-state” that emerged to represent them. But the question of what came first, the “peoples” or the nation-states, is arguably secondary to the reality of the political entities themselves: competing powers, complete with armed forces whose size grew rapidly even as their tactics and weapons became more sophisticated.

Modern European history is the story of these standing armies, nation-states and national “imagined communities”. The history of the one military division that survives from Cromwell’s original force — the Coldstream Guards — captures this in a nutshell. It was an age of imperial expansion, national fervour and great-power rivalries; it reached a cataclysmic crisis in the two 20th-century World Wars, where the Coldstream served in Europe and the Middle East.

Popular history today, especially in America, often recounts the two World Wars as a defence of abstractions such as “freedom” or “democracy”. But many in Europe at the time understood the wars in the more prosaic terms of rivalry between Europe’s post-Westphalia states and their sprawling global empires. For A.J.P. Taylor, for example, the First World War was a consequence of Great Power competition, with the aim of determining “how Europe was to be remade”. The Second, far from being an epic confrontation between good (the Allies) and evil (the Nazis), was more accurately “a repeat performance of the First”.

Compared with the First, Taylor views the Second World War as having changed very little. But with seven decades’ additional hindsight, it is clear that, even if Taylor was right to see both World Wars as in essence the same conflict, taken together the wars changed everything. For they ended the age of European nation-states and empires. And the real winner of both wars was America: the empire that has dominated since 1945, and whose defence spending and military priorities have, under the guise of the “rules-based international order”, governed Europe ever since.

Britain’s military atrophy, then, is less an effect of wokeness or of female soldiers than of this colonisation of Europe by the United States — in the course of which, under the banner of “national self-determination”, the battered European empires were dismantled, to America’s benefit. This became clear in the 1956 Suez crisis, when Elvis Costello was just a toddler. Here, Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt to recover control of the Suez Canal, only to be pressured into backing down by the United States. Now widely understood as a pivotal moment in which hard-power supremacy very clearly shifted to the United States, it was a shattering blow to the British self-conception, revealing the state of its military enfeeblement.

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It had consequences for Oliver’s Army, too. Thomas Fabyanic recounts how, immediately after the Second World War, Britain was spending some 10% of British GDP on defence, and allocating a huge proportion of public effort and material resources to the military. Six months after Suez, a White Paper was presented to Parliament calling for scrapping conscription, and moving to an all-volunteer armed forces.

The post-conscription British Army has suffered recruitment shortfalls ever since. And as Britain’s relative economic and military standing has continued to decline, so our armies have shrunk too: a slow withering again epitomised by the Coldstream Guards, now down to a single battalion and serving mostly ceremonial functions in London and at Windsor Castle. And why would European defence not atrophy, when peace continues to be underwritten by the Pax Americana?

We might, perhaps, argue that military recruitment has only lagged behind the loss of Empire because the memory of a political order takes longer to die than the order itself. The Forces continued running on patriotic fumes, long after after Suez and the subsequent quiet decision to abandon the nation-state. What’s replaced the older Europe of patriotic, implicitly ethnic “imagined communities” is — at least in aspiration — a dream of post-national rules, post-ethnic harmony, and maximal economic growth.

This is usually presented as simply “modern” and self-evidently positive. In reality, though, it’s an ideology that extends as far as, and no further than, the American empire. This entity is no less real for governing via rules and “international courts” rather than colonial administrations, and has had much to recommend it: the period of peace in Europe since 1945 is matched, for instance, only by the period of peak British imperial dominance, from 1815 to 1914. But at the very point where the defeat of the nation-state seems complete, in favour of post-national Pax Americana, things appear, once again, to be changing.

For one thing, the 20th-century war America waged on European empires, in the name of “decolonisation”, has now rebounded, in the form of a challenge to the American founding itself as “settler colonialism”. By extension the American project itself is no longer self-evidently morally good; the result of this turn is a youthful American elite increasingly hostile to many of the founding presumptions of American hard power, and reluctant to enforce American borders, join American forces, or support American military adventures overseas.

Thus we find the hegemon facing both internal and external challenges — even as financial pressures see some on the American Right suggest mothballing support for European security altogether. If this happened, what would it mean for European security and, by extension, European sovereignty? Having embraced American-style civic nationalism, itself now under attack, it’s far from clear that we could still rely on our youth to defend our nations voluntarily. Would the crowds of often very young people who gather in London every weekend to protest the conflict in Gaza accept conscription into the British armed forces on the grounds of patriotism?

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It’s hard to say. But it seems unlikely that a country can dissolve Westphalia-style European sovereignty and European peoples in a bath of international treaties, while denouncing national identity and history as shameful, and simultaneously ask what Costello called the “boys from the Mersey and the Thames and the Tyne” to continue signing up to fight for their country in extremis. After a while, even the most unobservant will notice that “country” is growing increasingly difficult to define, let alone who might claim such an entity is “theirs”.

So, then, governed by uncertain, porous and habitually post-national elites, and absent the noble promises of patriotic common identity, what would happen if conflict returned to Europe? Well, even if the nation-state model is dead, and unlikely to be re-animated except in the conservative imagination, it’s hardly as though there were no wars or armies prior to the nation-state era. These were simply recruited and justified differently: the mercenaries who fought in Machiavelli’s Italy, for example, or the feudal peasants obliged to arm at their own expense and turn out for their landowner when required.

I suspect a breakdown of European security would, in practice, look like a mix of existing armed forces, conscription, and ancient forms of militarism updated for the present: private armies, neo-feudal military obligations, perhaps armed activists or religious groups. Indeed, perhaps we’re already there: the role of the Wagner Group, for example, has been much-discussed in Ukraine, as have relations between its leadership and the Russian government.

Assailed from one direction by the legacy of Flower Power pacifism and from another by a consensus in favour of diversifying citizens’ ethnic heritage, demoted in political importance by Pax Americana, European nations’ “imagined communities” have been under fire for some time. Now, we find ourselves contemplating at least the possibility of retrenchment in the Pax Americana that succeeded it. In the wake of such shifts, the question of who will fight, and for whom, is not far behind — even in currently peaceful Europe. But an important corollary of the post-national ideal we embraced is that you can’t then appeal to national identity if you need to raise an army.

In that vacuum, the question of who in Europe, in an emergency, could be induced to lay down their lives — and for what cause — is an open and profoundly troubling one. We can only hope we continue to avoid the need to answer it.

The Wagner Group has always been cloaked in mystery. In the first days of the war, reports emphasised the secretive nature of its military operations, including a plot to assassinate Zelenskyy and his cabinet. Until recently, it was unclear whether a company registered under the name “Wagner” even existed.

That all changed in September 2022, when Yevgeny Prigozhin, a close ally of Putin, published a statement claiming that he founded the group in 2014 to “protect the Russians” when “the genocide of the Russian population of Donbas began”. Then, in January this year, he decided to make it official, registering Wagner as a business and opening its “PMC Wagner Center” headquarters in St Petersburg. He didn’t make any secret of its activities: as the company’s name, which also appears on the group’s logo, makes clear, the Wagner Group is a PMC: a private military company, also known as a mercenary group. The Russian government was forced to acknowledge its existence. The Wagner Group’s clandestine status was officially discarded.

In many ways, Wagner’s emergence from the shadows symbolises the changing nature of modern warfare, in which the traditional Clausewitzian paradigm — based on a clear distinction between public and private, friend and enemy, civil and military, combatant and non-combatant — has given way to a much messier reality, in which state armies now regularly fight alongside private and/or corporate paramilitary and mercenary groups. Today’s conflicts, even when violent in nature, often occur in a “grey zone” below the threshold of conventional military action; adversarial states increasingly confront each other through proxies or surrogates — including private armies — rather than through their own armed forces. And this is not just a Russian issue: the increasingly central role of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in modern warfare is a global phenomenon.

Private armies have existed for centuries. In recent decades, the use of mercenaries was particularly widespread during the Cold War, especially in Africa, in the context of decolonisation and the ensuing civil wars. In particular, they were widely used between the Sixties and early Eighties by the West to prevent colonies attaining independence or to destabilise or overthrow newly independent governments, such as in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Benin and the Republic of Seychelles.

At the time, there was virtually no international legal framework regarding mercenarism. It was only in 1977 that the Geneva Conventions incorporated an international legal definition of it. A mercenary, it held, is any person who is recruited to fight in an armed conflict, who actively takes a direct part in the hostilities, and who is neither a national of a party to the conflict nor a resident of territory controlled by one. It was a very narrow definition — but one which, at the behest of the newly independent nations, was specifically tailored to address the use of mercenaries by the West against the post-colonial governments.

This led to the appointment, in 1987, of a Special Rapporteur on the use of mercenaries; and then, in 1989, to the International Convention against the Recruitment, Use, Financing and Training of Mercenaries, which entered into force in 2001 and added language specifying that mercenaries were people undermining legitimate governments — another clause that implicitly reflected the concerns of post-colonial countries. To this day, the Convention — which essentially copies the wording of the 1977 definition — represents the international legal definition of mercenarism.

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As a result, during the Nineties, there was a significant rise in the number of private military and security companies, who sought to distance their activities from the legal definition of mercenarism by presenting themselves as official business entities offering “legitimate” security and defence services allegedly distinguished from that of rogue mercenary groups. And, by and large, they did so successfully. In that decade alone, PMSCs reportedly trained the militaries of 42 nations and took part in more than 700 conflicts.

There was a broader backdrop to this growth, too. The growing influence of the neoliberal logic of economic rationalisation and deregulation during the Nineties also pushed states to privatise and outsource many government functions and services — including warfare. Security came to be perceived as a commodity, a service like any other that could be sold and bought in the marketplace. This was also part of a broader push towards the transfer of national prerogatives to suprastate or, as in this case, non-state actors as a way to shift the decision-making process away from democratic institutions. This trend was compounded by the global downsizing of national military forces, which also expanded the recruiting pool for PMSCs.

Even though PMSCs started out by mainly selling their services to developing countries and so-called failed states facing political crises, by the mid-Nineties Western governments, particularly the US, started to use them as well. By contracting them to support, train and equip the military and security forces of friendly governments — most notably in former Yugoslavia — Western powers were able to promote their interests and foreign policy agendas, while avoiding becoming embroiled in unpopular conflicts, and even circumventing national or international constraints on troop deployment. By the end of the decade, NGOs (such as Oxfam) and even the United Nations had also come to rely heavily on PMSCs for their own security and even for peacekeeping missions.

In this sense, PMSCs did not replace the role of states as much as integrate into them. In some cases, they even bolstered state military power, by allowing governments to engage in forms of warfare that they might otherwise have been prevented from undertaking for fear of provoking a conventional military response by more powerful states, while also escaping public scrutiny. The Wagner Group’s activities in several African and the Middle Eastern countries — such as Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic and Mali — are a good illustration, insofar as they granted Moscow a degree of plausible deniability concerning its foreign interventions and the alleged human rights abuses committed by Wagner.

Over the years, various efforts have been made to regulate this new phenomenon at the international level, eventually leading to the establishment of a UN Working Group on the use of mercenaries in 2005. But these bodies have, by and large, failed. Today, the sector remains largely unregulated and operates in a de facto legal vacuum. PMSCs can’t be considered soldiers or supporting militias under international humanitarian law, since they are not part of the army or in the chain of command — but nor can they usually be considered to be mercenaries under the narrow legal definition adopted by the UN. In the current conflict in Ukraine, for instance, the Wagner Group can’t be considered a mercenary group by legal standards for the simple fact that its members are nationals of one of the parties to the conflict.

These private military companies remain largely unaccountable, characterised by a “fundamental lack of transparency around, and oversight over [their operations]”, as the UN Working Group noted in 2021. Indeed, it suggested that this is sometimes “done precisely with the ominous objective of providing ‘plausible deniability’ of direct involvement in a conflict”. Greater regulation would be welcome, of course, but it wouldn’t change the fact that corporate armies intrinsically undermine democratic accountability — arguably one of the reasons that makes them attractive to states in the first place.

More fundamentally, what we are dealing with here is the legalisation and normalisation of mercenarism. The only real difference between traditional guns-for-hire and PMSCs is that the latter are often legally constituted businesses with corporate organisational structures. This lends them legitimacy and, theoretically, makes the monitoring of their actions and prosecution easier. But ultimately they remain, to all intents and purposes, “new modalities of mercenaries”, as even the UN General Assembly argued some years back.

Crucially, the UN report acknowledges that the private security and military industry is a global and growing phenomenon. While today’s focus is on Wagner, the real mercenary boom occurred during the US-led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. In both cases, the US relied heavily on PMSCs such as DynCorp and Blackwater (now known as Constellis). Indeed, at points, the number of contractors on the ground actually outnumbered American troops. By 2006, there were estimated to be at least 100,000 PMSC employees in Iraq working directly for the US Department of Defense.

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And like Wagner today, these were involved in several human rights abuses in the country. Blackwater, for example, the most high-profile PMSC in Iraq, was involved in the massacre of 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007 (which led to the conviction of four Blackwater employees), while other PMSCs were involved in the Iraq Abu Ghraib prison scandal (though none faced prosecution) and were alleged to have participated in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programme — the kidnapping and forced removal of individuals to places known to torture. Despite these obvious failures, by the summer of 2020, the US had more than 20,000 contractor personnel in Afghanistan — roughly twice the number of American troops. Before that, in 2017, Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, had proposed to fully privatise the war effort there.

What could possibly inspire such chutzpah? Well, although the Iraqi and Afghan conflicts are generally considered to have been a strategic blunder for the US, not to mention a humanitarian tragedy, they were a boon for the PMSC sector: up until 2016, the US State Department spent $196 billion on PMSC contracts for the Iraq war, and $108 billion for the Afghan war. And business hasn’t slowed: in 2022, the PMSC sector — whose largest businesses are now American or British — was valued at $260 billion and is projected to reach a value of around $450 billion by 2030. The largest PMSC in the world, UK-based G4S, alone employs more than 500,000 people and is present in more than 90 countries.

Should we be surprised? Ultimately, the growth of the PMSC sector is just another example of how economic transformations in recent decades have blurred the boundary between the public and private-corporate sphere to the point of making it indistinguishable. The result has been the rise of a state-corporate Leviathan which has gobbled up every sector of the economy — healthcare, banks, energy, tech — and has now taken over the field of warfare as well, at the expense of democratic control and oversight. This applies to Russia just as much as it applies to Western countries. If the conflict in Ukraine has taught us anything, it’s that war today is a bigger business than it’s ever been. No wonder peace — in Ukraine or elsewhere — seems constantly out of reach.

Several experts have tried to answer this question — many of whom are featured in a new three-part Netflix documentary, MH370: The Plane That Disappeared. According to the official narrative, outlined by Malaysian and Western authorities, around 40 minutes after take-off, 90 miles off the east coast of Malaysia, someone on the plane — most likely the captain — turned off its electronic communication signals, causing it to disappear from Air Traffic Control (ATC) radars. The plane, they say, then made a U-turn, flew back across the Malay Peninsula, veered north up the Malacca Strait, rounded the Indonesian island of Sumatra, eventually turned south and then flew in a straight path for around six hours — at which point it ran out of fuel and crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean off the west coast of Australia. If this is really what happened, we are talking about one of the slowest, most bizarre mass murder-suicides in history.

There are, however, several problems with this narrative, as the French journalist Florence de Changy, who has been covering the Asia-Pacific for the past 30 years for Le Monde and RFI, explains in the documentary, and in much greater detail in her 2021 book The Disappearing Act: The Impossible Case of MH370, the result of a seven-year investigation.

The official account hinges on two pieces of evidence: Malaysian military radar data, which tracked the plane deviating westward, and analysis of the automatic communication “pings” between the aircraft and a satellite operated by a British company called Inmarsat, which provides satellite communication services to a wide range of private and institutional clients, including the US government and military. Inmarsat concluded that the plane subsequently flew south until around the time of its last ping (though it couldn’t provide the exact location of the last communication, because the data didn’t have GPS-tracking capabilities).

Both pieces of evidence, however, have been called into question. Firstly, as the Malaysian authorities’ final investigation report acknowledged, the data behind its military radar sighting is inconsistent with the capability of a B777 in terms of speed, altitude and height variations. Moreover, the radar images supposedly showing MH370 flying back over Malaysia were never made public. Likewise, none of the countries that MH370 is claimed to have flown over or close to — Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore and Australia — have provided radar evidence of the plane in their airspace. As de Changy writes: “Not a single raw radar image has been shown to support the route taken by MH370 according to the official version” (this piece of information was missing in the documentary).

One may also ask why the Malaysian military didn’t scramble jets at the sight of a rogue plane flying over national airspace, especially considering that MH370 is said to have passed right over the Butterworth Air Force Base in Penang, the headquarters for the Integrated Air Defence system of the Five Power Defence Agreement (FPDA), which includes the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. There was also a massive presence of the US Seventh Fleet — which is based in Japan and has 50-70 ships and submarines, 150 aircraft and 20,000 sailors — in the region at the time of the plane’s disappearance. According to a senior member of the intelligence services de Changy spoke to, there were two US “AWACS” in the area that night: planes mounted with long-range radar systems capable of constantly monitoring the airspace within a radius of more than 250 miles. Yet the Americans weren’t able to provide any evidence of the plane’s alleged U-turn either.

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There’s another problem with the “deliberate act” narrative. As de Changy notes, if someone had turned off the transponder, all flight data related to MH370 would have disappeared from ATC screens at the same time. But it took 37 seconds for it all to go dark. “This sequence of events in itself should have been sufficient to dismiss the ‘someone turned off the transponder’ part of the official narrative,” she writes (this was also missing in the documentary).

As for Inmarsat’s satellites, their data also appears to raise more questions than it answers. When, two weeks after the disappearance, the company concluded that the MH370 had turned south and crashed somewhere in the Indian Ocean, the world was expected to just take their word for it — even though Inmarsat’s findings were based on a complex analysis of ping data which had never been attempted before. In fact, right from the start, experts and family members raised doubts about the reliability of the ping-based calculations and asked the company to provide the raw data for independent analysis. For three months, Inmarsat refused, and when they finally did release some of it, several critical details necessary to understand how they did their calculations were missing. Since then, Inmarsat has refused to share its complete set of data with the families and the media.

But the biggest hole in Inmarsat’s story is also the most obvious: the fact that, despite the world’s largest search in history, covering almost two million square miles in the southern Indian Ocean, no remains of the plane have been found in the supposed crash area near Australia — despite the fact that, when a plane crashes into the sea, there is almost always debris. The only debris considered by investigators “almost certainly” or “highly likely” to be linked to MH370 has been discovered around the coast of Africa, thousands of miles away.

Finally, it remains unclear why the plane’s captain — the prime suspect in the “deliberate act” narrative — would have committed such a horrendous act. Over the years, the Western press has questioned Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s mental health, political orientation and even his sexual preferences — all in an attempt to paint him as someone potentially capable of such a crime. However, from extensive interviews with his friends and family, and analysis of the police reports about him, de Changy concludes that Zaharie was unlikely to be suffering from mental health issues. “My research convinced me that Zaharie was of sound mind and a genuinely good man,” she told me last week. “He was also one of the airline’s most experienced pilots.”

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Amid such uncertainty, it’s no wonder that MH370 has become the subject of all sorts of conspiratorial conjecture, involving black holes, insurance scams, North Korea, a meteorite, remote hijacking and even aliens. Most of these theories are so outlandish that they have tended to make all non-official explanations for the disappearance of MH370 seem crazy by association. The Netflix documentary suffers from the same contamination. After covering the official theory in the first episode, the series then explores two alternatives. The first is presented by American journalist and aviation expert Jeff Wise, who suggested in 2015 that a group of Russian hijackers — there were three ethnic Russians on the flight (two held Ukrainian passports) — could have lowered themselves into the plane’s electronics bay and taken control of the aircraft in order to divert it north, possibly to Kazakhstan, while somehow altering the Inmarsat data so it looked like the plane had gone south.

It is such an absurd theory — as Wise himself acknowledges in the documentary — that one cannot help but wonder why the decision was made to dedicate an entire episode to it. It also has the effect of casting its tinfoil hat-shaped shadow over the second alternative theory proposed by Florence de Changy in the third and final episode. She suggests that MH370 didn’t disappear from the screens of ATC  because someone turned off its transponder, but because the plane’s communications system was jammed — possibly by the two US AWACS planes mentioned by the aforementioned intelligence source. De Changy suggests the aim might have been to force the plane to land in order to seize a highly sensitive cargo which the US didn’t want to fall into Chinese hands (she points to a 2.5-ton consignment that was delivered to the airport under escort and was not X-rayed). However, something went wrong and MH370 met its fate somewhere above the South China Sea, possibly as a result of a mid-air collision or a missile strike.

It’s obviously a highly controversial claim, but unlike Wise, de Changy at least has some evidence to back it up, most of which isn’t mentioned in the documentary but is presented in her book. In it, she highlights that there was large US military presence in the South China Sea that day; that progressive loss of signal on the ATC screens is consistent with jamming; that MH370 activated the emergency Tango code, which would indicate the pilots knew something abnormal was going on; that another plane that was flying nearby managed to get a radio contact with MH370 at around 1:30am (10 minutes after the plane disappeared from the radar) but it was brief and muddled (also consistent with progressive jamming); and that MH370 was seen on the primary radar (meaning a target is observed but no identification is received) of Vietnam’s ATC 37 miles after the point at which it is supposed to have made the U-turn.

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Most notably, as de Changy notes, there were initial but unverified reports of a distress signal from MH370 being picked up at 2:43am by a US unit based in Thailand. Finally, we have the dozens of “nodders” (people scanning satellite images on Tomnod, a website that used crowdsourcing to identify objects and places in satellite images) who insist they saw extensive plane debris in the South China Sea; the oil slicks spotted off the coast of Vietnam; the Cathay Pacific pilots flying the next day above the Vietnam coast who reported sighting a “large amount of debris” to the Hong Kong ATC; and the employee working on a rig off the coast of Vietnam who claimed to have seen a fire the night of the disappearance.

I had initially contacted de Changy to ask what it feels like for a respected journalist to be presented as a fringe conspiracist — the conclusion many will reach after watching the film. “Actually, I started with an anti-conspiracy theory approach,” she explains. “I looked very closely at the evidence backing all the theories and scenarios out there including the official narrative. Eventually, I discovered a cluster of corroborating conclusions that point to something incredibly consistent and that did indeed point towards a massive international conspiracy scenario. It’s for the readers to decide whether it’s credible or not.”

De Changy is aware that her theory is mostly speculative, but remains confident that MH370 met its fate in the South China Sea, not in the Indian Ocean. “It’s still more credible than the idea that the plane flew halfway around the world completely undetected,” she told me. “If you think it’s impossible for a plane to disappear into thin air, that is because it is.”

Perhaps it is not strange that Putin, himself a former FSB officer, did not question this reckless optimism. He knew that the CIA fully agreed with the FSB estimate, as did the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BDN) and the French Direction du Renseignement Militaire (DRM).

The latter induced President Emmanuel Macron to rush to Moscow and Kyiv to avert Ukraine’s imminent downfall by offering last-minute concessions to Putin. But the BND’s error had far graver consequences: told that it was impossible to stop Russia’s swift conquest, German chancellor Olaf Scholz refused to send weapons to Ukraine, refused to allow Estonia to send 122mm howitzers originally received from Germany, refused to rule out restricting its use of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, and refused to allocate funds to rehabilitate Germany’s sadly diminished armed forces. Since Putin is especially attentive to German politics, this served as a strong green light for his war.

As for the CIA’s totally wrong assessment, it had still more serious consequences. Acting under the impression that the Russians would swiftly conquer Ukraine, the White House chose to evacuate the US Embassy in Kyiv instead of rushing in weapons that would only become Russia’s booty. The demoralising effect was amplified as other Western diplomats followed suit and fled.

The failure to dissuade Putin, then, was an intelligence failure — but this is something that only requires the resolve of 51 Senators and one President to fix. By contrast, Russia’s war-making capacity has failed at every level: in the quality of individual and unit tactical combat, in operational capacity, and, most egregiously, at the level of theatre strategy (the deployment of forces over the territory). The attempt to conquer Kyiv with an endless double column of armoured vehicles advancing on a single vector meant that every act of Ukrainian resistance generated cascading stop-and-go delays that emptied out fuel tanks.

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The most important tactical failure came right at the start. In the pre-dawn hours of the war on February 24, elite “air assault” infantry proved incapable of executing the key mission of the entire invasion. This was the Coup de Main that was to secure the Antonov airfield in Kyiv’s Hostomel exurb and open the way to the heart of the city, from where Zelenskyy was expected to flee in panic, leaving Ukraine’s forces leaderless and exposed. Arriving in a fleet of helicopters, the Russians duly seized the little-used airfield. Ilyushin Il-76 heavy transports were then expected to bring in many more troops to secure it, pending the arrival of mechanised units from nearby Belarus. But Zelenskyy and his ministers, who had gathered for war instead of fleeing, immediately ordered an all-out effort to counterattack the Russians with any and all forces that could reach the scene quickly.

In any normal scenario, to send odd lots of soldiers against cohesive elite units would be a sure recipe for disaster — but the ferociously determined Ukrainians overcame the Russians, who were disconcerted by having to fight hard just to survive, instead of advancing triumphantly to Kyiv’s central square, the Maidan. The IL-76 transports could not land amid the fighting, so the surviving airborne troopers had to be relieved by troops from Belarus. By that point, Ukraine’s forces were mobilised nationwide and the rapid capture of central Kyiv was out of the question.

Having blocked the Russians in Hostomel, the Ukrainians were unable to gather larger forces to crush them rapidly because they needed to send units across the country — from Kyiv and Kharkiv all the way round to Mikolaiv and Odessa. But by then the crucial fact had been established: the Russian airborne troopers in Hostomel were not tactically superior as professional elite troops should have been. The subsequent weeks of war have shown that the same was true of Russia’s tank crews, mechanised infantry and the artillery units that pounded towns and cities. Whether it was down to inattentive officers, perhaps distracted by business opportunities on the side, or because of inadequate supplies of fuel and ammunition, almost all Russia’s troops were badly undertrained, and therefore tactically inept.

Russian tactical incapacity also magnified the consequences of another surprise of this war: the emergence of super-empowered infantry that can destroy main battle tanks and knock helicopters out of the sky with shoulder-launched missiles, thereby regaining its long-lost role as the Queen of the battlefield. By 1943, the rocket-launcher M1A1 — nicknamed the “bazooka” — allowed heroic and very lucky infantrymen to occasionally destroy tanks; by 1955, the French produced wire-guided missiles that could destroy tanks if shielded from artillery, smokescreens or gunners on the hunt for them. But neither weapon could seriously impede armoured operations given normal artillery covering fires.

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Now it is different. With today’s missiles, soldiers can reliably destroy tanks and low-flying helicopters with shoulder-launched missiles that need only be pointed at the target once — while still retaining the infantry’s ancient advantages of economy, of abundance, and its ability to find cover far more easily than mechanised forces.

Russian army chiefs must have missed this tactical shift — not because they are still focused on re-fighting the last war, but because, just like their American counterparts, they were hypnotised by the trendy next war. This was meant to be fought with “post-modern information warfare”, or hybrid warfare, or “4^th Generation warfare ”— all so much more sophisticated, more advanced, and more high-tech than the old-fashioned “kinetic” warfare fought by blokes shooting at each other. It must have come as a big shock to Russia’s generals when Ukrainian soldiers could not be persuaded to surrender by sending menacing messages to their smartphones.

But now that the Ukrainians have gone on the offensive, they have lost their key advantage of remaining under cover while firing at exposed advancing enemies. They need armoured vehicles to avoid being held up by Russian fire, but so far they have received only a handful from the Czechs and Germans. What happens next in this war will very largely depend on the quantity and quality of the armoured vehicles friendly countries are willing to hand over to the Ukrainians. There is certainly no shortage of them in Europe, where shrunken armies have placed thousands of armoured vehicles in storage, ranging from thinly protected ten-ton M.113 troops carriers that are still better than nothing, to full-weight battle tanks with guns that can still be formidable if supplied with up-to-date rounds.

And this is just one more challenge in a war that will continue until Putin is willing to cut his losses and accept the one thing that Zelenskyy can give him: a promise that he will not apply for Nato membership. As to why the stalwart Zelenskyy has indicated he will do this, declaring that Ukraine’s model will instead be self-sufficient Israel, the answer is obvious: instead of strengthening its members, in recent times Nato has provided an alibi for their unilateral disarmament, which persisted even after Russia’s annexation of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Crimea. Not only have armies shrunk, but their training is more ceremonial than functional, as became painfully evident when supposedly well-trained units were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan.

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In the years since Putin ended the post-1945 peace by seizing Crimea, only two European countries have acted to strengthen their armed forces: Finland in diverse ways, and Sweden whose government promptly reintroduced conscription to rebuild a strong army — neither of which are Nato members. Poland, which is a Nato member, contrives to have an army of 60,000 with its 37 million inhabitants, as opposed to Finland’s 280,000 on mobilisation with one sixth of the population.

As it happens, I was in Warsaw in November 2021, admittedly long ago, before the war. Upon asking the Presidential adviser whom I met for dinner why it was that Poland did not have a remotely commensurate army to defend itself given that it was next to Russia, he cited Nato’s security guarantee, which allowed Poland to spend its defence funds on what really mattered: a frigate in the Baltic (admittedly an excellent target for torpedoes or missiles), fancy helicopters for Polish units sent on peace-keeping missions, and the elaborate peaked hats of Polish officers. No wonder Zelenskyy gave up on Nato membership so easily.

The very great problem we all face — Americans, Europeans, Ukrainians and even Russians — is how to end this new European civil war. Now we are all stuck: Putin cannot leave the roulette table without the Donetsk and Luhansk regions as his prize, but Zelenskyy does not have the authority to give away Ukrainian territory even if he wanted to.

So here is my modest proposal: a referendum in each of the regions that requires a total ceasefire and which itself implies the renunciation of any further claims on Ukraine. Putin’s invasion failed within hours of being launched. Almost 50 days later, it is time for it to end.

It’s unsurprising. Dmitry lived through the entirety of the month-long Battle of Bucha. Russian forces entered the area in late February and captured the city on 12 March, occupying it until the Ukrainian army forced them to retreat almost three weeks later. Dmitry remembers the day the Russians rolled in. He had gone to a family apartment in the city that had been shelled. It now had a huge crater where the living room wall once stood, and looking down into the surrounding streets, he saw two Ukrainian men running from Russian soldiers who were shooting at them. Dmitry had served with the Kyiv territorial defence at Irpin just 5km away and guessed that the men were soldiers: they were in civilian clothes but running in the irregular patterns the military teaches people to avoid gunfire. It made no difference. The Russians shot them down.

They were the first people Dmitry saw killed in Bucha, but not the last. “They were,” he tells me, “the only people I ever saw the Russians kill who weren’t unquestionably civilians.”

Dmitry describes the invasion without a hint of emotion. One morning, he woke up to find a Russian armoured column of roughly 250 vehicles trundling through the city. Most of the territorial defence had retreated to Kyiv because they had nothing but hand grenades left — certainly not the javelins or British NLAWs needed to fight tanks. But he decided to stay in his hometown: he thought he could be of more use there.

And so began life under occupation. Using his phone, he was able to talk to the outside world, which was crucial given food supplies were perilously low. One woman who had fled the city told him to go to her chicken coops where he would find fresh eggs. Another called him to say where she had stored sugar, and so on.

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During these daily trips, Dmitry had to cross a number of Russian checkpoints. A garrulous and energetic man, he made sure to always chat to the Russian soldiers at each crossing (the officers, on the other hand, just looked at him like he was dirt). It was nothing major, just small talk. But it all helped to create a bond so he could move freely about the city. He also always took his dog with him to make sure he was recognisable even from a distance.

During these trips, Dmitry was able to get up close to the Russian army — and he was shocked by what he saw. “They were desperate,” he told me. “They’d been given enough food and cigarettes to last two weeks when they entered Ukraine and then been basically abandoned. They had to find everything themselves. They had nothing.”

Dmitry thinks the army may even have entered the city solely because they were so desperate for supplies. When they rolled in, he watched tanks break down garden fences and drive right up to houses and apartments. The soldiers would then just get out and go inside, emerging shortly after with what they needed. “They just went in and took whatever they wanted,” he told me.

The war crimes began almost immediately. One of the first things the Russians did was to find Ukrainian soldiers who had fought against separatist forces in the Donbas in 2014. There were eight of them. The Russians rounded them up and executed them by the glass factory in the suburb of Stekolka.

When it became clear that the Russians didn’t intend to bury their victims, Dimitry stepped in, digging graves in nearby fields as the Russians wouldn’t let them use the cemeteries. But alongside Ukrainians, Russians were also being killed — indeed, the more this happened the more brutal the soldiers became. “I offered to bury them as well,” he tells me. “‘We will bury them – they smell bad,’ I said. But they refused. They just put them in piles. They didn’t even take them when they left.”

Speaking to Dmitry, what shines through is the overwhelming sense of impunity. Norms of society and decency were not suspended or ignored — they were willingly trampled upon. In the first days of the occupation, Dmitry saw Russian soldiers approach apartments and toss grenades into them. They murdered civilians without any care, or for any reason. They shelled buildings and shot up cars for fun. They did all this every morning — these boy soldiers, many of whom were not more than 20. It was Lord of Flies, but with heavy artillery.

***

Arkadiy Koval, a 64-year journalism professor who spent five years at the Ukrainian Humanities Institute in Bucha, almost broke down when he saw the columns of Russians invade the city. From his 20th-floor apartment, he filmed the vehicles snaking through the city centre. He, too, saw the desperate state of the invaders: he saw them throwing grenades to destroy the casing around the electricity generators they needed.

The serious shortages of food, electricity and medicine swiftly became a problem as his 22-year-old daughter Darina was eight-months pregnant and recovering from an operation last year to remove a brain tumour. It was terrifying. The first week was simply a question of survival; they were under constant bombardment, and they hid in the basement of the building when they weren’t scavenging for supplies. Later on, though, a neighbour told them that the Russians had come in and killed one of the people hiding there, leaving the body there to rot. So they avoided it: choosing to cower in their apartment instead.

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“Every day my son-in-law and I would go looking for food,” he tells me. “We would drive onto the Warshavske highway and each day we saw cars that had been destroyed by shells — we saw several that had white flags on them. Every day there were more and more destroyed cars — many contained dead people.”

The Russians ordered civilians to wear a piece of white fabric on their shoulder — people would generally turn their Covid masks inside out — to signal they were residents. Failure to do so would mean being shot in the knee or the foot, though one day a few soldiers shot at Andriy, Arkadiy’s son-in-law, just for the hell of it. The family needed Lamictal for Danera and fed the request along to some volunteers but heard nothing. Later, they found out the volunteers had been killed.

***

Things were getting worse for Dmitry, too. Stekolka, especially the glass factory, had gained a reputation as a place where evil things happen. One day, he went with a friend to pick up some wooden pallets to turn into firewood — and ran straight into a bunch of Russian soldiers. With them stood 25 shiny, brand-new vehicles, clearly something they were not supposed to see. The soldiers grabbed the two of them and shut them in the cupboard that houses the factory fire extinguishers. They were held there for 16 hours, within earshot of the soldiers who were radioing their commanders to ask what should be done with their two prisoners. “Do whatever you want,” they were told.

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In the end, the soldiers let them out and told them to run, but not before a soldier asked Dmitry: “When are you Ukrainians going to overthrow your government? Ukraine started this war.”

“It’s amazing,” he told me. “They thought that if we can only overthrow our president the war will end.” He continued: “These soldiers looked about 20 years old. This means they were 12 when the war in Donbas started. They’ve grown up listening to Russian propaganda. They’re totally brainwashed.”

For now, though, the Russians have gone. Ukrainian soldiers walk through the streets of Bucha once more. The city is liberated, but the fear remains. “Don’t use my real name for the article,” Dmitry tells me as he says goodbye. “Just in case the Russians come back.”

But despite this bleak picture, one man has stood firm in his support for the invasion, both financially and with man-power: Ramzan Kadyrov.

Kadyrov is the governor of Chechnya, the small region in the North Caucasus that has repeatedly fought for its independence against Russian rule. Putin reintegrated the region in the early 2000s with the help of Kadyrov’s father, Akhmad. Following the assassination of Akhmad in 2004 by Chechen Islamists, Kadyrov developed a close relationship with Putin, frequently likened to that of father and son. He eventually took over as the head of Chechnya in 2007, receiving the Russian president’s full backing.

The personalist nature of this relationship is crucial: Kadyrov’s loyalty does not extend to the government or Russia, it is only to Putin himself. This has meant that Kadyrov has grown bolder throughout his rule, clashing with security services and even flouting federal policies. Suffice it to say, support for Kadyrov in the Kremlin does not reach much further than the president’s office. This history is important for evaluating the size of the gamble Kadyrov is taking in his support for the invasion, and what he has already gained.

In Chechnya itself, Kadyrov’s rule is characterised by brutal, indiscriminate violence. His campaign to purge the republic of its LGBTQ community, part of a policy of extrajudicial executions, is well-documented. At the start of this year, he embarked on his anti-dissident war with renewed vigour, conducting mass kidnappings of critics’ relatives. This included violently abducting Zarema Musaeva, the mother of a Chechen human rights lawyer, from Nizhny Novgorod in January; she is still held by police.

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This violence has been carried out by the Chechen security services, known as the kadyrovtsy, which operate as Kadyrov’s personal army. These units rarely leave Chechnya, and even then, only for training exercises. Kadyrov mobilised his top commanders and units at the beginning of February, sending them to the staging areas near the Belarusian-Ukrainian border. Moving as one large group, the units known to be involved in the invasion are the “Sever” and “Yug” Battalions (“North” and “South,” respectively), the “Akhmat-Grozny” riot (OMON) police unit, and the “Akhmat” rapid-response (SOBR) police unit.

Allegedly deployed on March 22nd is the Akhmat Kadyrov Police Regiment, the most notorious in Chechnya, and possibly in Russia. This is the unit largely responsible for the extrajudicial executions and the anti-LGBTQ purges. While Kadyrov claims they are now in Ukraine, he has faked their deployment before, and they just returned from a SWAT competition in the UAE.

The most important leader within these units is Magomed Tushaev, commander of “Sever” Battalion. While his counterpart in the “Yug” Battalion, Khusein Mezhidov, has appeared more prominently in propaganda clips, Tushaev played a more significant role in the psychological warfare during the military buildup and the initial days of the invasion, stemming from the brutal reputation developed by Tushaev’s unit during counterterrorism operations in Chechnya.

Tushaev was rumoured to have been killed on February 26th, the kadyrovtsy’s worst day of casualties. It soon transpired that he was, in fact, alive, yet many of Kadyrov’s opponents abroad keep repeating it, allowing Tushaev’s presence to continuously make them look foolish.

In addition to these units’ leaders, Kadyrov sent in his cousins: brothers Sharip Delimkhanov, commander of Rosgvardia in Chechnya, and Alibek Delimkhanov, deputy commander of Rosgvardia’s North Caucasus forces. Their final brother, Adam, is a Duma parliamentarian from Chechnya who is now overseeing the kadyrovtsy’s operations in Mariupol. These units were engaged near Kyiv but could not take sufficient ground to carry out their objective: assassinating President Zelenskyy. Accordingly, Kadyrov pulled them back to Chechnya, deploying new, unidentified units near Mariupol under the leadership of Adam Delimkhanov. These reinforcements also failed the crucial task of taking the Azovstal metallurgy plant, which instead had to be bombed.

Kadyrov’s financial backing for the invasion has come from the Akhmat Kadyrov Fund (AKF), his family’s private slush fund. It was primarily created by embezzling federal subsidies to the republic and racketeering businesses and state employees. As part of the war effort, the AKF has supplied food and equipment to his troops on the frontlines, as well as military vehicles to the authorities of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. He has also used his corrupt slush-fund to provide humanitarian aid to the residents of Melitopol, which is under Russian occupation.

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The invasion may still be in its infancy, but a number of consequences of Kadyrov’s gamble are already visible. Most obviously, his information war has proved a success. He continuously makes his critics look foolish about the fact that Tushaev is alive, and he has been able to stage rallies in support of the invasion far beyond Chechnya. Kadyrov’s simultaneous campaign to court the Arabic-speaking world has also helped keep Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from siding against Russia in the pitched economic battle. For Putin, at least, this is enough to justify his decision to make Kadyrov Russia’s chief diplomatic emissary to the Muslim world — even if it does backfire when he prioritises Muslim issues over Kremlin policy, such as with his support for the Ronhingya.

In elite politics, Kadyrov is also coming out ahead. His strong support for Putin, when others were more hesitant, is a clear win. The domestic turmoil in both the FSB and Rosgvardia — exacerbated by American and Ukrainian intelligence disclosures pointing to leaks from the security services — plays to his advantage. Kadyrov’s long-running feud with federal security service leadership means that, the more endangered their futures become, the more secured his is.

Yet not everything is going to plan. For all his propaganda victories, Kadyrov’s biggest loss is that the kadyrovtsy’s reputational bubble has burst. Almost everyone, except the Chechen propaganda circus, has noted that his army has not engaged in fighting, but has still sustained significant casualties. This is likely to embolden his opponents among the Russian political elite, who may fear him a little less, making increased confrontation possible.

In Chechnya, too, his position will be weakened. There currently are and will be fewer kadyrovtsy, as many are engaged, while others have been killed, in Ukraine. It is also important to remember that not all of the kadyrovtsy are devout members of the Kadyrov cult of personality. Forced recruitment into their ranks has long been used as a tactic for containing societal discontent, but failure will only exacerbate it.

For the time being, however, Kadyrov is performing adequately. He is not doing as well as he would hope, but he is certainly not faring poorly, and is generally proving his value to Putin. The elite conflict among security elites could flip on him, but his propaganda victories should keep that at bay.

None of this is to say his safety is guaranteed. In the coming weeks, several trends should be closely watched to see how Kadyrov’s luck holds — the clearest of which is the continued invasion. For now, continued war means continued opportunities for propaganda, one of his favorite activities. This is representative of his regime, prioritising flash over substance. But while Tushaev may not have been killed, the abundance of Kadyrov’s trusted advisors in the field increases the odds of this happening to his allies. Were a number of them to perish, he could quickly find himself isolated.

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Then there are the worsening socioeconomic conditions in Chechnya. According to the region’s authorities, there is “no deficit of sugar”, one of the key economic benchmarks; according to reports, the AKF is now handing out sugar to some families. No doubt Kadyrov will keeping a close eye on this: socioeconomic concerns have proved to be the only mobilising grievance for the Chechen public in the current repressive atmosphere. This previous expression of dissent was led by women, who may also now have sons fighting and dying in Ukraine. Women have already led protests elsewhere in the North Caucasus, making this a distinct possibility in Chechnya.

Added to this is the fact that the entire North Caucasus region now faces mass economic disruptions from the new sanctions regime. While experts have noted the region’s potential resilience to the sanctions’ effects, their repercussions on the federal budget are not yet clear. The fate of the federal subsidies, upon which the North Caucasus relies, is still undecided.

The final threat to Kadyrov is the reshuffling of the elite hierarchy. While Kadyrov is currently edging out federal security officials, his advantage may not hold in the long run. Anticipating this, he is trying to earn federal recognition as the North Caucasus’s most important leader. Yet the Kremlin has worked to establish Sergei Melikov, head of neighbouring Dagestan, as a regional counterweight to Kadyrov — as most non-Putin officials in the Kremlin are wary of his influence in this corner of Russia. Whether he poses a significant threat to Kadyrov is still unclear: at a recent national security meeting, Kadyrov took the opportunity to, quite literally, shunt Melikov to the side. Elite jockeying is, after all, an art of longevity.

It was proof that, for now at least, Kadyrov remains in a strong position. But the consequences of Russia’s latest incursion into Ukraine are still coming into focus. The fate of the war has yet to be decided and the full effects of sanctions have not been felt. When the dust finally settles, Kadyrov may not be standing where he thought he was.

A week after it launched its attempted blitz across Ukraine, finally the Russian army has taken its first major city: Kherson, a key port city in the south of the country. But the defenders of Kyiv and Kharkiv have held out; elsewhere, Ukrainians have succeeded in repelling the invasion.

Vladimir Putin gambled everything on swiftly dismantling the Ukrainian state — and on that front, he has failed. That the vastly outnumbered Ukrainian air force has yet to be knocked out of the sky is in itself a surreal expression of how terribly Putin underestimated the capacity of the Ukrainian army and population. Simply put: those in Putin’s circle who believe that Ukraine doesn’t exist, that Ukrainians are simply exiled or confused Russians just waiting to be invited back home, have categorically been proved wrong.

Many more innocent people will likely die before this is all over; many more houses will be bombed. Bridges will be demolished by retreating Ukrainian forces. Already, several thousand civilians are reported to have been killed, while millions of others have been forced to flee into neighbouring countries. And yet the country has so far survived a massive assault by a numerically and technologically superior foe. Across Ukraine, the Russian army has failed to achieve any of its strategic or tactical goals.

President Zelenskyy has not yet fled or been executed, and it is now obvious that Russia’s troops will not be able to hold onto Kyiv if they capture it. It remains unclear why the electricity, heating, water and internet have not been knocked out in any part of the country (with the partial exception of Mariupol)  — though the answer must surely lie in the incompetence, logistical failures and lack of preparation that have underscored the Kremlin’s offensive.

While it is possible that the Ukrainian government could still capitulate, this does not seem likely, and would require a drastic escalation of force from the Russian army, up to and including leveling Kyiv to the ground. Whether Moscow can countenance such a level of violence is another question: it is unlikely to support such drastic measures if it wants to integrate Ukraine into a wider project, rather than simply massacre its citizens and plant a flag in the ruins of their capital.

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The Kremlin may not have committed enough manpower to conquer a country the size of Ukraine when much of the population is willing to resist so valiantly. However, a week into the war, we do have an idea of what Putin had intended if his troops were successful. According to a recent article in the Russian-state tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, he intended to conquer the country and split it into four regions: Crimea, New Russia, Little Russia, and West Ukraine.

While the Russian/Ukraine expert community has spent the past week debating what a post-war settlement might look like, it now seems that the partitioning of the Ukrainian state was always Putin’s intended strategy. After all, the alternative — imposing a Moscow-controlled proxy puppet government — was always going to be impossible. Blowing up Ukrainian cities is not a constructive way to entice Ukrainians to your political cause. Even among the most rabidly pro-Kremlin politicians and media figures in Ukraine, the Russian attack has elicited tremendous disgust and embarrassment.

As for the pro-Russian political proxies within the Ukrainian parliament — who make up roughly 10% of its representatives — most fled the country in the days leading up to the invasion. There are, as a result, quite simply not enough serious pro-Kremlin politicians left in the country to form a puppet government. Meanwhile, those who had fled will now look tarnished if they return to a ruined Ukrainian capital to be established as quislings.

The idea of a symbolic restoration of Yanukovych/Azarov cabinet, which had been quietly floated by the Kremlin, is also a non-starter. Even the most pro-Yanukovych sympathisers in the Donbas now view him as a cowardly weakling, after he fled for Russia at the end of the Maidan revolution. Eight years later, there is simply no appetite for a restoration of his people or regime.

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In the lead up to the war, when the Americans and the British tried to dissuade Moscow from invading by leaking both real intelligence and what may have been unverified information, the Western allies identified various local proxies as potential leaders of a puppet regime. The UK Foreign Office in particular suggested that Yevheniy Murayev, the leader of an insignificant pro-Russian faction in the Ukrainian parliament, would lead the new government.

Of course, Murayev denied the entire plot and swiftly went underground. But the names of other minor politicians were soon circulated, and then ridiculed — by both local and Western analysts — for being trial balloons, misinformation, or proof that the Kremlin has zero understanding of the nuances of Ukrainian power dynamics. Either the people concocting these plans in the Russian Defence ministry were fools, or this was all a bad joke. Oleg Voloshin, for instance, one of the more marginal names offered, has ranted at me over lunch that gay marriage was merely a cover for demon-worshipping paedophilia. You wouldn’t trust these people to run a local council, let alone the second-largest country in Europe.

Yet not every nominee was a joke. Viktor Medvedchuk, who picked Putin to be godfather to his daughter, was always the most likely candidate. But in what can only be described as an act of total incompetence, the Ukrainians allowed Medvedchuk — the main proxy of Russian power within Ukrainian politics — to escape the country over the weekend. This may very well prove to be a terminal mistake by the Ukrainians, who should have kept him as a hostage to ensure that Zelenskyy would not be assassinated. Medvedchuk is perhaps the only pro-Russian leader within Ukraine with the gravitas to fill the leadership role.

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It is doubtful, however, that even if he were to return to rule Ukraine, he would succeed as Putin’s puppet. One of the reasons Putin decided to proceed with a fundamentally foolhardy and unlikely plan of invasion was his correct sense that the window of opportunity was closing. Indeed, the absence of an organised group of proxies waiting to form a quisling government is, if anything, an apt demonstration of how far Ukraine has already floated outside of the realm of Russian control.

This is the dilemma Putin faces: even if his army finds a way to repress the so-far irrepressible Ukrainian resistance, what next? A Russian occupation is off the cards. A puppet government will swiftly fall. When the bombing finally stops, Putin will look around at a defiant country — and find that he has already lost.

After weeks of looking like Russia was going to invade, Putin now seems to be backing down. Why?

Firstly, we can’t get too complacent — that “some” in the BBC headline is doing a lot of work. Russia is not going home completely; rather, what it has done is given a major signal that it is de-escalating.

And this shouldn’t come as a surprise. From the beginning, the talk of Russian invasion that has filled the Western media has been irrational. Technically, any incursion into Ukrainian territory by Russian forces is an “invasion” — and Russia is already occupying the Donbas region in the east of the country. But between that and “marching to Kyiv” lies a geopolitical and military gulf.

Throughout the past month, Russia only ever had around 100,000 troops on the border. That may seem like a lot, but as the former British soldier and military analyst Mike Martin has pointed out, it is nowhere near enough to take all of Ukraine, let alone hold it. Then there’s the international backlash that would follow — as well as the fact that there’s no appetite among Russians for conquering Ukraine, as there was for thieving Crimea.

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But while the press coverage has been a touch hysterical, for once you can’t blame the media. They’ve taken their lead from the politicians — and none more so than Joe Biden, who for weeks has been telling the world that Russia would invade. So adamant (many would say feverish) was the US President on this point that his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky had to plead with him to “calm down the messaging” in a recent call between the two.

And it wasn’t just the talk. The US began evacuating its embassy staff, which soon created a domino effect of scuttling diplomats across Ukraine’s capital Kyiv. Even the Israelis started getting diplomats’ families out — something they almost never do short of full war. I confess this is when I began to entertain some doubts. Washington had kept its diplomatic staff in Kyiv during the height of the fighting when Russia first invaded in 2014. I should know: I met with its then-US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in his office just after Russia launched a major offensive.

But contacts in DC put this down to the scars of the recent Afghanistan evacuation; according to one source, Jake Sullivan, Biden’s National Security Adviser, almost collapsed with the stress during the calamitous withdrawal. Never again would the US allow itself to evacuate its people in total panic at the last minute with enemy forces closing in all around and the entire world watching.

Frankly, I found it all a touch embarrassing. And this, I think, is the point. It is impossible to know what calculations factor into Putin’s thinking, but there is a long record of what he has said — and nothing is more instructive than his comments in his 2005 State of the Nation address to the Russian people, when he called the collapse of the Soviet empire “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.

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Now Putin is not stupid. He knows the USSR is never coming back. What he intended, I think, was to lament the loss of his country’s superpowers status, prestige, and respect. But here’s the thing: it is tough to be a superpower when your GDP is half of Britain’s; when you can’t fight the US in a conventional war because you know you’d be hammered; and when you live in perennial fear of China stealing the eastern part of your state.

So if you can’t actually be a superpower that can match the US, then what’s the next best thing? Well, you can act like one — especially if you sense weakness in your enemy. Putin began amassing troops on the Ukrainian border soon after Biden — a man the Kremlin thinks is old and weak — took office. Once that happened, he got Biden’s attention and it has never wavered since. Biden asks for meetings and calls. He expresses his willingness to talk to Putin any time and any place. That’s the most powerful politician in the world — and a traditional modern enemy — pretty much at your beck and call. That’s Russia being a world actor. That’s prestige; that’s status.

And while you’re there, why not remind the Europeans — especially the German government — who heats their voters’ houses? Get the new Chancellor of Germany in and make sure he knows the score. Get Emmanuel Macron to come round and plead with you, while you make him sit at the other end of a long table like a supplicant. Get one of your underlings to insult the British Foreign Secretary. And perhaps most importantly, get Ukrainian officials to say the country will never join Nato — which is of course what you fear more than anything else — and do it all without firing a shot, without marching to Kyiv, and without the inevitable sanctions and diplomatic isolation that would follow.

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Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

Don’t think this is the end, though. Far from it. BBC News headlines now squawk Nato’s warnings that there is no sign of Russia de-escalation. The Sun shrieks that a huge dawn invasion is set for today. The Kremlin, meanwhile, says troops that have been on “exercises” are returning to base. Back and forth and up and down the troops go, and with them the heart rate of the watching world.

You can be sure of this: the troops won’t all go home. A force will stay on the Ukrainian border so that Putin can raise or lower tensions whenever he needs— as well as use other means: reports are now coming in that Ukraine has suffered Cyber attack, almost certainly from Russia.

In this sense, Russia uses its presence similar to the way that Iran uses its nuclear programme: as a means of extracting concessions. So it threatens but it never fully acts — because to do so would mean to exchange leverage for punishment.

Putin has always been pretty rational, even cautious. It appears this is still the case. It may well be that after 20 years of acting like a Tsar, he has gone mad, like so many before him, and something crazy is coming. But for a moment it seems that this whole affair has been another big Russian victory. Putin has won this round — and we let him get away with it.

On the night of the 20th, a special guest from the European Parliament got up on stage: Guy Verhofstadt, the arch-federalist and former Prime Minister of Belgium. Addressing the cheering throng he was full of praise: “you are defending European values and European principles.” 

Two days later, the pro-Moscow Yanukovych government was forced from office. The protesters had won — and so, it seemed, had the European Union. Who needs an army and a navy when you’ve got “values” and “principles”?

Fast forward to the present day and the Russian military is massed on Ukraine’s borders, poised to complete a conquest that began with the annexation of Crimea. I suppose Mr Verhofstadt could be deployed to stand in Moscow’s way, but on this occasion I doubt it would do much good.

However, Brussels could focus on something else he said back in 2014: “we as the European Union have one obligation… that’s to stay behind your cause.” In that regard, the EU might not have any military power of its own — but it does have diplomatic power. 

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Indeed, the EU has a fully-fledged foreign policy apparatus. It has a High Representative (currently Josep Borrell) to act as the EU’s foreign minister; it has embassies and consulates around the world; and it has direct representation on powerful bodies like the G7 and G20. Its diplomacy is also backed with the clout that comes from being the world’s biggest trade block.

So given that capacity, one might expect the EU to be leading the effort to save Ukraine. But instead its diplomats are on the sidelines — much to the frustration of Emmanuel Macron, among others. Instead, the future of Ukraine — and by extension Europe — is being hammered out between Washington and Moscow. Even Britain, supposedly isolated by Brexit, has made a bigger impact than Brussels. 

The Russians, meanwhile, are laughing. Commenting on the EU’s lack of involvement, Sergei Lavrov — the country’s Foreign Minister — expressed mock sympathy: “We can see that the European Union feels somewhat disadvantaged.” As to the possibility of a separate EU-Russia dialogue Lavrov observed that “the US needs to be asked if it is willing to let [the EU] take any independent action.”

He was making mischief, of course. It’s not the US stopping the EU from taking a leading role — but the EU itself. The Ukraine crisis is the greatest test that the Common Foreign and Security Policy has ever faced, and so far the failure is comprehensive. Beyond the usual empty words and token gestures, the 27 member states of the European Union have been unable to present a united front. 

There’s no doubt as to which of the 27 is most to blame. As I have argued before, Germany was warned years ago that its collaboration with Russia on energy supplies would undermine the security of Russia’s neighbours. Now that these fears have been realised, the new German government has a chance to make amends. But far from showing leadership, the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has weakened Europe’s resolve — for instance by blocking defence exports to Ukraine. 

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The EU is Russia’s biggest trading partner — accounting for more than a third of its imports and exports. Comprehensive economic sanctions could therefore act as a serious deterrent to war. However, the threat has to be credible. There was fighting talk this week from the Danish foreign minister, who said the EU is ready to impose “never seen before” sanctions. However, that doesn’t match Scholz’s less-than-resolute language: “no one should harbour the illusion that there is any step that has no consequences for us.”

It also didn’t help when Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, the German naval chief, had to resign after some unguarded comments about the current crisis. “What [Putin] really wants is respect,” he was reported as saying, “and, my God, giving someone respect is low cost, even no cost… It is easy to give him the respect he really demands — and probably also deserves.” No doubt Putin was left wiping away the tears.

So is the EU’s problem actually a German problem? Up to a point, but the blame must be shared by other member states for tolerating it. If they won’t stand up to German flakiness on foreign and defence policy, then what chance do they have against Russian aggression?

Unfortunately, EU governments are under very little pressure from their voters to take the continent’s defence seriously. Consider the core principle of NATO — the Article 5 obligation that every member of the organisation should come to the military aid of any member that is attacked. In other words, one for all and all for one. According to this 2020 Pew report, there was majority support for this principle in some EU countries, but not others. Asked whether their own country should respond militarily to a Russian attack on a fellow NATO member, 64% of those asked said yes in the Netherlands, but only 41% in France and Spain, 34% in Germany and just 25% in Italy. This compares to 60% in the US and 55% in Britain. 

Somewhat hypocritically, much higher percentages expect that the United States would respond to a Russian attack: 75% of Italians thought so as did 63% of Germans. Clearly, many Europeans assume that they will be defended — even if they aren’t prepared to contribute to the defence of their neighbours. 

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By Marshall Auerback

Ukraine, of course, is not a NATO member. And perhaps that’s why the EU isn’t doing all it can to deter Russia. The assumption is that Kyiv represents an endpoint for Moscow’s ambitions — not a pit stop on the way to Vilnius or Warsaw or Berlin. Let’s hope that theory is never tested. 

What makes the EU’s irresponsibility harder to take is the very nature of the “European project”. On the 1st January, 1999 the euro came into being — and changed the character of the European Union forever. From that moment, it became a fundamentally inward-looking enterprise devoted to the survival of the single currency at any cost. The alternative path that the EU could have taken: a looser association of nations — but one that doesn’t stop halfway across the continent — was forever closed off. 

Well, so be it. Every empire has to have a frontier. But when the line is drawn, one has to be ready to guard it. One cannot exclude unless one is prepared to defend. The EU seems oblivious to this — and that is its greatest failure.

But rather than go out of business, Nato has ramped up its operations. And as a result, what was once a major contributor to global security has increasingly become an instrument of global instability.

Nato’s mission creep started almost immediately in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union with its decision to expand into the newly configured Russian Federation’s borders in the early Nineties. This was followed by repeated bombing campaigns in the former Federation of Yugoslavia (a Russian ally), and the 2011 military intervention in Libya. It is worth noting that, with Libya, Putin’s stance was not one of unremitting hostility to the West. Russia did not exercise its UN Security Council veto, despite opposing the bombing. Moscow also initially supported the United States’ War on Terror, going as far as providing logistic support for the US forces in Afghanistan.

Yet Nato’s activities have become increasingly adversarial. Largely through Washington’s control, Nato has heightened tensions on Russia’s doorstep in Ukraine, a slowly percolating war threat that could well lead to destruction of Nato itself in the process.

To read Western commentary, one would be led to believe that the root cause of today’s current tension in Ukraine comes from Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Ominously, there appears to be a mounting bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill on how we must defend Ukraine, rather than tamping down the inexorable march to war. As one would expect from the New York Times and Washington Post, the prevailing consensus is that only the political, economic, and military strength of the United States can facilitate a diplomatic solution to a crisis engineered by an increasingly corrupt and autocratic Putin regime.

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But as is so typical of most American commentary on Russia, the charges against Moscow lack historic context and continue to mix up cause and effect. As the Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov recently indicated to Russia’s TV Channel One in advance of last week’s video meeting between Presidents Putin and Biden: “The Augean stables in our bilateral relations can hardly be cleaned out over several hours of negotiations”.

The reference to the labours of Hercules should not be dismissed as Moscow’s fanciful indulgence in Greek mythology. Rather, it reflects legitimate longstanding Russian grievances pertaining to Nato’s broken promises about not expanding eastwardly. These assertions have been vigorously contested by various American government officials, who firmly denied that the topic of extending Nato membership to former Warsaw Pact countries was raised during the negotiations with Moscow on German reunification, much less that the United States made a “pledge” not to pursue eastward expansion.

Declassified US, Soviet, German, British and French documents from the national security archives, however, provide conclusive evidence of breached promises made to President Mikhail Gorbachev by President George H. W. Bush, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, President Francois Mitterrand, Chancellor Helmut Kohl and their foreign ministers in 1990: not to expand NATO eastward, and not to extend membership in the Nato alliance to former member states of the Warsaw Pact. As Professor Melvin Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, recently argued, absent these pledges, the reunification of Germany could well have marked a dangerous new escalation of the Cold War between the West and Moscow, rather than bringing about its cessation.

The end of the Cold War could well have ushered in a new partnership between Washington, the EU and Moscow. Instead, the expansion of activities into areas where the West has had no compelling strategic interest has brought forth renewed conflict. Of particular note was the mooted promise to extend Nato membership to Ukraine in 2013, along with the European Union’s offer of a formal economic association to then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych hesitated to sign when he saw that the exorbitant terms resembled less a partnership, more an attempt at economic colonisation. In the wake of Yanukovych’s prevarication, protests erupted in Kyiv, centered on Maidan Square, which in turn led to the overthrow of the Ukraine government. The Ukrainian president was then replaced by a pro-Western coalition government made up of his political opponents.

Supporters of the uprising argue that the protests, and the corresponding offer of associate membership in the EU, offered a way out of the corruption and kleptocracy allegedly brought about by the Yanukovych administration. Of course, this version of events conveniently ignores the role played by US government officials in shaping the ultimate outcome, as well as ignoring the fact that Viktor Yanukovych himself had become Ukraine’s democratically elected president in response to the corruption of previous administrations (even if he did little himself to alleviate the same problem, sadly a longstanding feature of post-independence Ukrainian politics). In any event, what has since been termed the “Maidan coup” almost certainly induced Putin to annex Crimea, which in turn has led to today’s low intensity civil war between Russian and Ukrainian nationalists, backed by Moscow and Washington respectively.

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The Western media has rendered judgment: their accounts warn that Putin is laying the groundwork for an imminent Russian military invasion. The tabloid-like reporting of the Sunday Times  confidently asserts that Putin’s ultimate goal is no less than the reclamation of the old Soviet empire, conveniently ignoring Nato’s ongoing attempts to expand its own force projection to Russia’s borders. Meanwhile in the US press, there has been much approving commentary for the Biden administration’s tough talk with Moscow last Tuesday, even from his traditional media opponents.

In response, Putin has demanded explicit guarantees that Nato will not continue to expand further eastward or put missiles in Ukraine that could target Russia. The Western press seems shocked that Moscow isn’t simply passively accepting what it perceives to be existential threats to its own national security. Given the conflicting claims surrounding previous Nato pledges, Putin understandably wishes to avoid any future ambiguity regarding the West’s future intentions toward Russia and the Ukraine, which seems like a reasonable means of de-escalating the conflict, as well as addressing Moscow’s legitimate security concerns.

The counterargument to Putin’s demand is that a genuinely sovereign and independent Ukraine should be able to establish its own defence and national security arrangements; in any case, goes the argument, responding in the affirmative to such a request in the face of a major troop build-up on Ukraine’s borders would be tantamount to acquiescing to extortion, thereby encouraging further aggression on the part of Moscow.

But these arguments are somewhat undermined by the actions of the Biden Administration, which has reportedly told the Ukrainian government that a Nato membership is unlikely to be approved within the next decade. This concession implicitly concedes legitimacy to Putin’s demands, but does beget the question: why restrict the pledge to ten years, given that this encroachment represents an ongoing existential threat to Russia? Do we seriously believe that Washington would have accepted a time-limited constraint by Moscow on putting offensive missiles in Cuba to resolve the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962?

Looming over all these considerations stands one crucial fact: that Nato is a collective defence pact, and membership carries with it reciprocal obligations that go well beyond the aspirations of the Ukrainian government. Being drawn into a Russo-Ukrainian conflict has implications for all Nato members. This is not merely a decision for Kyiv to make on its own.

Article 5 of Nato’s founding treaty states that an attack against one ally is considered as an attack against all its members. Is the US (or Nato’s European members) seriously prepared to risk thousands of lives to defend Ukraine as a newly enshrined member of this club? If the answer is no, then why perpetuate this unnecessarily provocative situation with Moscow?

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It is also worth noting that Ukraine is far more profoundly divided than any of its Nato counterparts. It has a substantial Russian population, especially in the east, many of whom wish to retain close ties to Russia. Accession to Nato, therefore, could well create the conditions for civil war, as the recent conflict in the Donetsk Region of eastern Ukraine has illustrated.

And then there’s the problem of Crimea. According to every Nato member, as well as the current government of Ukraine, Crimea is still part of Ukraine. Therefore, if Ukraine joins Nato, one of three possibilities must follow: Nato goes to war with Russia over Crimea; or Nato recognises the Russian annexation of Crimea; or  Article 5 is a dead letter.

Which will it be? No other alternatives exist. Given that an activation of all-out warfare versus Russia would certainly create the conditions for World War Three (featuring several nuclear armed powers), it is most probably that Article 5 would not be invoked. In which case, Nato as a collective defence treaty would be dead. In effect, those who are arguing to bring Ukraine into Nato are arguing for its destruction.

Senator Lugar’s old observation about Nato has never seemed so prescient. For Nato to remain true to its goal of promoting peace and international security, it is time to put it out of business once and for all.

I owe my life, no doubt, to an American pilot I’ve never met, who dropped a bomb a couple of years ago on ISIS fighters in the garden of the surrounded farmhouse in rural Deir Ezzor where I and SDF fighters huddled, waiting to be overrun. In these modern wars, the bombs that come hurtling out of the sky, rending the air like a bolt of lightning, land with pinpoint accuracy, transforming the course of a battle in an instant, like the judgment of an angry and invisible god.

Over the years, in battles across northeastern Syria, I watched the US Air Force rain down death on ISIS fighters, and then wandered, hours or days later, through the carnage that ensued: mangled bodies in their dozens, grey with cement dust or black with putrefaction, hurled by the explosion into all manner of strange and inhuman shapes.

In Raqqa five years ago, I embedded with Arab fighters of the SDF as they called in airstrikes against ISIS militants, which would level entire apartment blocks to dislodge one sniper. A year later, I followed local volunteers as they dragged the shrivelled, stinking bodies of airstrike victims from the city’s rubble: ISIS wives or local civilians, identifiable only by the detritus of a life suddenly cut short — passport photos, purses, makeup bags and soft toys. 

The devastation of Raqqa after the battle, its apartment blocks crushed by the pinpoint precision of American military technology, looked hardly less total than that of rebel-held Eastern Aleppo, levelled by the wantonly imprecise barrel bombing of the Syrian regime, whose helicopters hovered unbearably over the city like flies over a dining table, disgorging their bombs at random. Yet even if the effect, in destroyed buildings, seemed much the same, surely the morality of the two approaches was different? 

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By emphasising precision and at least making a concerted effort to avoid civilian casualties, surely the American way of bombing is an act morally distinct from the indiscriminate punishment dealt out by the Syrian regime? If the intentions are good, can the results be evil?

It is, in part, to answer this question that the Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn has written the new book Humane, an exploration of how the West’s effort to conduct wars while minimising harm has had the unintended consequence of creating a world of forever war. He takes his cue from a speech Tolstoy puts into the mouth of his character Prince Andrei in War and Peace, in which the Russian aristocrat notes that war should be kept as brutal as possible, otherwise the temptation to keep waging it will become too great. As Moyn notes, “humanitarianism led advocates to compromise in pursuit of humane war and publics to feel good enough about themselves in the bargain to permit it to go on and on”, with the result that “endless war has become part of the way Americans live now”.

Rattling through the twin strands of the initially European effort to impose humanitarian rules on war, and the parallel American effort to abolish war altogether, Moyn assembles the evidence for his thesis: that from the Clinton era onwards, the mantra of Never Again has led the United States into an endless mission to bomb more and more of the earth in pursuit of global harmony. As he observes, “of all the peoples in the annals of warfare, Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane, and one tolerated by audiences for that very reason”.

A non-interventionist of a strain once dominant in American politics and only now slowly becoming the hegemonic worldview once again, Moyn is a critic of the process by which the postwar American empire legitimated itself through war for humanitarian ends. After World War Two, as he notes, “self-styled internationalists… insisted that America had to commit to a globalised peace ‘scheme’”, yet “it would only emerge slowly that this option meant committing the country to global war”. 

Victory in World War Two and then in the Cold War both stood for Moyn as roads not taken, as American leaders refused to give up the prospect of global domination. Following the Vietnam War, as American military elites committed themselves to eliminating its indiscriminate bombing and targeted war crimes, the new discipline of International Humanitarian Law fused with the fact of America’s sudden global preeminence to create the logic for liberal interventionism.

As Moyn notes, in the decades following Vietnam, the Western popular memory recentred the Holocaust into the war’s retrospective justification: “Peripheral in moral consciousness before, ‘ethnic cleansing’, culminating in genocide, became the defining evil of war past and present.” Coupled with unchallenged American hegemony, “the new Holocaust memory coincided with the aftermath of decolonisation, and a skepticism along with it that others were up to the challenge of ruling themselves. The result was not a demand for peace but for interventionist justice.” 

With the postwar taboo on initiating wars obscured, America was now morally entitled — encouraged, even — to launch its own wars in contravention of international law, as long as it could be argued that they prevented genocides: yet “no-one asked at the time whether that implied that war itself — especially if it could be purged of its cruelty — was not that bad”. For Moyn as for Realist scholars, the two notionally distinct strands of interventionist thought, “foreign policy neoconservatism and liberal internationalism”, found themselves “closer to each other than their followers liked to admit”.

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From the Clinton era, which “did the most to drive the drift into militarism, no matter the legality of the wars involved”, through to the advice of scholars like John Yoo, who famously provided legal cover for the Bush administration’s use of torture against captives in the War on Terror, Moyn traces the humanitarian and legal steps by which the American empire committed itself to endless, global war. Yet it was the Obama administration which really committed America to constant war, in a process by which the President elected on a peace platform became “a permanent if humane war president”, the architect of a massive expansion of drone strikes — a means to avoid the moral cloud of torture, by instead simply assassinating perceived wrongdoers — and of special forces operations on the ground. 

Moyn’s central thesis is that the well-intentioned humanisation of war functioned “as a spoonful of sugar intended to help the medicine of endless war go down”; and that the push to forever war was driven by the liberal interventionist pressures of human rights activists, who demanded “even more humane war than the good guys were willing to offer”. It is a neat argument, but surely an incomplete one.

It is primarily the vast disparity of power, and the almost total absence of risk to American pilots and drone operators that allows these wars to rumble on forever, not the minimising of harm to foreign civilians. It is only if American casualties were higher, and not civilian ones, that we would sooner see an end to America’s wars of choice. The pinpoint accuracy with which a missile can be sent to its chosen target does not mean that, in the fog of war, the target was well chosen in the first place. 

The recent extermination by drone of a blameless family in central Kabul only hit the headlines because it happened in the capital: if it had happened in the countryside, as has happened thousands of times in the past two decades, it is doubtful that anyone would know about it; and fundamentally, even in such a high profile case, few people in America cared much even then.

As for the push Moyn discerns by liberal interventionist commentators to drag American power into distant wars, a more cynical interpretation would be that moral causes only initiate American wars when the potential targets are already American foes. There was no clamour in Washington for a campaign against Saudi Arabia for its bombing of Yemen, for example, or against Bahrain for its lethal suppression of demonstrations, or against Turkey for its scorched earth suppression of armed revolts in the Kurdish east and invasions of northeastern Syria, or against Azerbaijan for its aggression against Armenia and beheading of captives. When the human rights oppressor is a US ally, advocates and journalists either tend not to make the case for intervention, or it is ignored.

Ultimately, for all his focus on the humanitisation of war, it is empire that Moyn is against: if America were militarily incapable of intervening in tangled squabbles at the other end of the world, it would feel no moral compulsion to do so. That compulsion may be the moral justification for empire, but fundamentally it is its product. Where there is no capacity to act, there is no moral compulsion. There will be no American war for the Uighurs, because it is not in America’s power to launch or win one; human rights abuses like Xinjiang are deployed as a diplomatic tool to delegitimise China in the international sphere rather than as a call to arms.

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Could we win a war in China?

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Civilians will always die in wars, and Moyn does observe that it is better on the whole that fewer die, even if he is against wars in general, and American wars in particular. But did unipolarity foist on America the moral obligation to intervene in distant wars for humanitarian ends? Slightly unsatisfyingly, Moyn evades answering this question, but then it is perhaps an unresolvable one. He observes that the initial humanitarian cause in Libya morphed into “an illegal regime change, with deplorable consequences for that country”. Yet the later intervention against ISIS improved the lives of many Syrian and Iraqi civilians, even if it extinguished the lives of many others. 

But at this point, balancing this difficult central dilemma may already be a historical question. The 2015 Russian intervention in Syria marked the end of the unipolar moment by showing that a rival power, by committing itself to a cause peripheral to the United States’s core concerns, can call the fading superpower’s bluff. And contrary to Moyn’s assertion that we may be entering an era of total US global policing, the rise of China has vastly accelerated the end of unchallenged unipolarity.

A war with China where the US may lose tens of thousands of personnel in the first day is a qualitatively different prospect from vaporising a defenceless presumed enemy at the push of a button, and the Biden administration does not seem in a hurry to enter into it. America’s responsibility to protect was only ever a function of its capacity to do so. Now that capacity appears in doubt, the question is already moot.

We are back to a world of wars of necessity, for naked geopolitical advantage, and not wars of choice, driven by moral compulsion. The results, over the coming decades, may yet answer Moyn’s unanswered question of whether America’s attempted humanisation of war was really so bad after all.

Yet when, towards the end of Trump’s presidency, a radical friend of mine told me that he thought America was headed for civil war, I dismissed the argument out of hand. Why? How? It takes a unique confluence of mistakes and crises for civil war to appear possible, and an even longer list of mistakes, crises and elite screw-ups for them to happen.

But 2021 is a different world to 2015. Talk of insurrection, secession, civil conflict and civil war is no longer the chatter of the gullible and the mentally ill. It’s entering the fringes of polite society. Some support this ‘national divorce’; others are opposed to it. Others claim they would actually prefer to declare war on their recalcitrant countrymen rather than let them go their own way unmolested.

None of this morbid interest in civil conflict is irrational, given the times. The year 2021 has thus far been a spectacular year for signs of political decline: the US has now seen all the notable “horsemen of the apocalypse” that historically herald strife and revolution appear, one after another. Political division among its elites, increasing loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the population, military defeat abroad, and a new and very ominous crisis in the real economy, with no end date in sight.

Any one of these crises would be bad enough on their own; taken together, they represent a truly serious threat to the stability of the current order. Still, the question to be answered at the end of the day is quite simple: how likely is civil war, or national divorce, or a ‘troubles scenario’ really? To answer this question accurately, a few misconceptions about it being impossible have to be dealt with.

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One of the most worrisome aspects of contemporary American political discussion is the sense one often gets that many participants are possessed by a thinly-veiled bloodlust. Sometimes, that bloodlust is not even thinly-veiled; after the unarmed USAF veteran Ashley Babbit was fatally shot through a locked door in the Capitol building, many anonymous (and some less anonymous) commentators intimated that perhaps the problem with police violence in America wasn’t that officers were shooting and killing too many unarmed people — but rather that maybe they just weren’t killing enough of them. Following a wave of destructive riots that tore through many cities in the United States last year, this turn toward open celebration of equally useless violence when it is visited on the enemy team speaks to a dangerous sort of polarisation.

From this sort of bloodlust flows another very common assertion: that a civil war, if waged on American soil, would be over quickly, and lead to a fairly effortless massacre of any insurrectionists in flyover America. The idea here is that the US military is so advanced, and has so many tanks, gunships, fuel air bombs, and drones, that the federal government is simply assured of victory. As such, a civil war is an unlikely or impossible scenario, given the dramatic imbalance of power between the state and even a numerically large, dissatisfied internal population.

But this is a dangerous misconception. While the US military is indeed powerful and lavishly funded, it is a military designed to fight other states. Warfare between states is bound by rules and regulations; it is based on consent. This might seem a strange assertion to make, given that a country cannot just decline a war declaration from an enemy, but it holds true. There’s a formal or informal understanding of who is an actual combatant and who is not.

In contrast, warfare in primitive or tribal societies does not make any distinction between a civilian and a soldier. There are just enemies; ambushing and killing a 12-year-old girl drawing water at the creek is seen as normal as killing an adult warrior. This is where the European habit of calling uncivilised peoples “savages” comes from; rather than merely being an expression of racist chauvinism, Europeans were in fact oftentimes shocked by the habit of Native Americans and other peoples to ‘not play by the rules’.

But playing by the rules is a mug’s game. An insurgency in America has about as much reason as the Native Americans once did to follow the rules of their enemies; they are under no compulsion to wear blinking strobe lights to make themselves easier for the drones to target. And that simple fact means that a counterinsurgency effort in the US is almost certainly doomed to fail.

In counterinsurgency warfare, everything that makes the US armed forces great — high-tech weapon platforms with immense destructive power — are not just useless, but counterproductive. A tank parked outside a shopping mall in Idaho will either spend its time shooting at nothing, or be at a very high risk of killing innocent American civilians for the high crime of ‘looking suspicious’. Droning American weddings, like Afghan ones, does very little to advance the goals of a counterinsurgency. If anything, it only makes the relatives of the dead more likely to fight.

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The US armed forces are also at least an order of magnitude too small to do the job effectively. During Operation Banner, the British military deployed at most 20,000 soldiers in Northern Ireland to keep a lid on that wayward province. The US armed forces consist of about 1.3 million active duty personnel, but this is spread out over five branches (Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard), and only a small minority of military personnel are actually combat troops. It is thus very unlikely that the armed forces could scramble more than 100,000 regulars willing to do the job of holding an M4 carbine and patrolling down the main street of Anytown, Texas. To put that into perspective, Northern Ireland is about 2% the size of Texas.

Then there’s the fact that the most significant political split in America is between rural areas and coastal metropoles, and the armed forces are reliant on the very areas it would be tasked with policing as far as recruiting soldiers goes. Red America is overrepresented within the armed forces, and this won’t change. As such, the US doesn’t just have too few soldiers, it has potentially unreliable ones, and the more brutality is used against recalcitrant red states, the more these soldiers will be ordered to fight and kill their own friends and family — a recipe for serious mutiny and disobedience.

Finally, there is an even greater elephant in the room. In the case of an American drone pilot accidentally blowing up a wedding in Afghanistan, the Afghan relatives of the slain have very little recourse. If an American drone pilot blows up an American wedding, however, that drone pilot and his or her family lives in the United States. Given the likely unreliability of some significant parts of the armed forces, the names and addresses of the most hated butchers are unlikely to stay a secret for long.

In Northern Ireland, for example, the provisional IRA not only attacked soldiers; they made a habit of assassinating the officers, commanders and politicians both for revenge and as a display of might. From Lord Mountbatten to a near-miss against Margaret Thatcher herself, to a score of less well-known targets, the IRA illustrates just how difficult it is to protect against an enemy that can simply choose to not wear a uniform before their enemies visit.

Now, with that all that said, how likely is it that there will be some sort of civil conflict in the near or mid future for the United States?

Unfortunately, the correct answer here may very well be that it is not terribly unlikely. What is significant about America today is not that it’s nearing its 250^th birthday, but rather the clear and advanced signs of sickness in the body politic. The ranks of America’s military are now sullen and battered after 20 years of failed nation-building, while its higher officer corps is increasingly alienated from the world of its grunts, mirroring that same cultural, economic and social divide that is currently poisoning civilian life in the US.

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By Aris Roussinos

The legitimacy of its elite has been shaken repeatedly, and faith in the electoral process itself is now rapidly declining among large segments of the electorate. America is currently a malarial swamp of strange new faiths, creeds, soothsayers and itinerant prophets; from Q to vaccine scientism to various forms of psuedo-gnosticism centered around trans people. To a student of history, this should also be a familiar — and quite ominous — sign: France in the 1780s had its own scientism and mesmerism, and Russia in the 1910s and 1980s was rife with soothsayers and itinerant preachers of new strange faiths.

Most ominously of all, however, looms the growing supply crisis. This crisis would be tolerable if it merely implied a lack of variety at the grocery store. In such a case, 2020s America might just have ushered in a new golden age of Soviet-style political jokes. But it is also creating havoc in the productive economy itself, denying farmers the spare parts to run their harvesters and car manufacturers the metals they need to make cars. The longer the crisis goes on, the more broken the economy will become, and the more painful the necessary reforms will be, once America’s elites truly wake up to the danger.

If there is one time throughout history where civil wars are actually likely to occur, it is precisely when a delegitimated elite undertakes necessary reforms after letting underlying problems fester for decades. That is when states are at their weakest, and when they are vulnerable to the worst forms of internal disasters. Sadly, that might just be where America is headed today.

It is difficult to square this perception with the Army’s shambolic and wasteful recent record in procurement. And yet a sense lingers, whether true or not, that the armed forces remain a refuge area for a type of stoic effectiveness lost to the rest of the country, an ability to get the job done, without complaint, against intimidating odds.

This may say as much about Britain as a whole as it does of the armed forces itself. Consider the wave of affectionate sentimentality about the Army, perhaps a working-class analogue of middle-class sentimentality about the NHS, which swept the country in the late 2000s. The popular mood at the time, manifest in the Help for Heroes campaign (est. 2007) and the Sun’s Military Awards (est. 2008), was immediately inflamed by the sense that troops in the field were being put in harm’s way by the Government’s budget cuts, and by dissatisfaction with heckling and burning of poppies  by jihadist sympathisers as troops paraded home from Afghanistan. Then the Army was a potent symbol of a pure, betrayed institution around which the British people could explore its wider anxieties, a metaphor for growing unease with the direction of the British state itself.

Yet even the Army’s most devoted supporter would be forced to admit that the past two decades have not enhanced its reputation. Both the Labour government’s two wars of choice were painful strategic and tactical failures, entered into with little popular enthusiasm and abandoned with little fanfare. In both wars, units and individual soldiers fought bravely on a tactical level, in pursuit of misguided and ultimately fruitless strategic aims. 

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Crisis is the new normal

By Aris Roussinos

It is within this context that two recent books aim to dissect the Army’s failings in Iraq and Afghanistan to make sense of this lacklustre performance. In The Changing of the Guard, Simon Akam, a former gap-year officer, chronicles the Army like a disappointed lover, twisting the knife into the institution’s sorest wounds. In Blood, Metal and Dust, Brigadier Ben Barry, a former director of the British Army Staff, chooses a higher target. Yes, the successes of the small interventions of the Nineties had led military chiefs to rest on their laurels, so that “operational success had become the mother of complacency.” But for Barry, whose book draws from his still-classified official postmortem of the post-9/11 wars, the ultimate cause of failure can be placed at the hands of the Labour politicians managing the war. 

Both retell the bare, painful facts of the Army’s two most recent defeats. In Iraq, the initial capture and occupation of Basra, entered into with soft hats and the self-congratulatory confidence of an Army that believed it led the world in peacekeeping and counterinsurgency, ended in a humiliating negotiated withdrawal of British forces to the edge of the city, where, pinned down by constant bombardment by the Shia militias who now ran the city, they lost all capacity to exert their influence. 

The Americans, distinctly unimpressed at the failure of the British officers, were forced to help Iraqi forces retake the city in 2008’s Charge of the Knights operation, a humiliation for Britain. “This damaged the reputation of British forces with the US and the Iraqis and inflicted major dents in British military self-confidence,” Barry notes. Akam is less stoic, describing it as ”an acute and lasting humiliation to the British Army”, which “will linger and follow the troops halfway around the world to Afghanistan”.

Indeed, to exorcise this ghost Britain’s political and military leaders recklessly volunteered for a campaign in a Helmand landscape of walled farms and thick vegetation which the Soviets had struggled to pacify, even while the Army struggled with Iraq. In Afghanistan, they believed, the Army would regain its reputation, leaving the difficulties of Iraq behind.

They were wrong. Thinly spread out in isolated rural compounds, or “platoon houses”, British troops were besieged by waves of Taliban fighters, and only avoided being overrun through devastating use of air power, which in turn alienated the civilians whose homes it destroyed. Along with a desperate need to avoid casualties, the reliance on short-ranged patrols, magnets for Taliban ambushes and bogged down by IEDs, meant that the Army could never retain tactical dominance in the countryside, let alone gain the strategic initiative.

As in Basra, force protection became the dominant goal and so initiative passed to the local enemy. Attempts to upend the balance of power, through bold but misconceived operations like Operation Panther’s Claw or through grandiose hearts-and-minds schemes like the transporting of a gigantic turbine through Taliban territory to the dam where it would remain unused for years, all failed. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the rich tribute of blood and treasure Britain poured into the dust was entirely in vain.

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The Tories can save Blue Labour

By Aris Roussinos

Where does the blame lie? Barry lambasts Labour politicians such as Clare Short, whose intransigent refusal to provide the British troops who found themselves suddenly governing Basra, a city of 1.5 million people, with even basic DFID support due to her opposition to the war, did much to incite local anger in the first vital weeks and months of occupation. He takes aim at Gordon Brown, who as Chancellor forced through defence cuts that reduced the Army’s helicopter fleet, and then lied about it as Prime Minister when soldiers died in Helmand as a direct result. 

But he reserves his greatest ire for the architect of Britain’s entry into these needless wars: Tony Blair. Yet as Barry makes clear, military chiefs also failed to impress upon politicians the need to reassess their strategy in light of their failing mission. The plain-speaking and sober appreciation of hard facts for which the Army is renowned were here tragically absent.

For Akam, much of the blame can be laid at the Army itself. He draws an ethnographic portrait of an institution struggling to make sense of a changing world, whose cherished regimental ethos, the wellspring of individual pride and striving for excellence, also reduces it to “an awkwardly organised collection of warring tribes, inadequately co-ordinated and often fighting each other”. Fearful of future cuts, Generals volunteer the Army for the underestimated Helmand mission even as Iraq is failing: “It’s use them or lose them,” Akam quotes General Sir Richard Dannett on the ill-fated decision. Generals tell politicians what they want to hear, instead of the difficult truths that would blight promotion: “the British Army’s determination to ‘crack on’ got the army into a terrible mess.” 

For Akam, the absence of accountability for such failure is corrosive to the Army’s capability. Junior ranks are hauled before the courts for individual war crimes — rightly, he feels — while generals are rewarded for strategic failure with titles and sinecures. Unlike in Israel, where the failure of the 2006 Lebanon War led to a purge of failed senior officers, “no British general was fired or resigned over Iraq and Afghanistan”. The result, for Akam, is institutional rot: “that hypocrisy had trickled down into the institution below them and was souring it.” 

Moreover, Akam asserts, defence think tanks such as RUSI “can seem more like comfy clubs funded partly by arms manufacturers — friendly forces, in the forces’ jargon — than rigorous external overseers”, inhibiting them from guiding the Army through painful reform. 

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How bin Laden won

By Aris Roussinos

The American presence looms large over both books like a Victorian father, whose approval is yearned for, yet who emanates instead only cold disappointment. The tragic irony, as both Akam and Barry note, was that both the Basra and Helmand campaigns were entered into entirely to win Blair cachet in American eyes, yet the result of the Army’s disappointing performance was only American disdain. As Akam notes of his soldier informants on the eve of the Iraq invasion, “many appreciate that the real reason they are here is to maintain British military standing in American eyes”. 

Yet even during the invasion itself, before the humiliating retreat, the winnowing capacity of the British state had already lowered the Army’s reputation in American eyes. Basra, just over the border from Kuwait, was chosen as Britain’s target, in Akam’s telling, because the Army’s recent adoption of just-in-time logistics had left it with insufficient spare parts to travel any further. Lack of armoured vehicles, of body armour, helicopters, even ammunition left the Army scrounging what it could from unimpressed Americans and almost entirely equipping itself through emergency Treasury funds. 

Citing long-ago Malaya and more-recent Northern Ireland (as if that were an unqualified military success) in its favour, the Army deflected its sense of insecurity at its vastly reduced capacity compared to the US with an arrogant and ultimately mistaken belief that population-centric counterinsurgency was its unequalled métier. American officers quoted by Barry rolled their eyes at “‘more British tripe’” as events proved otherwise.

But even the Americans, whose resources were limitless in comparison, ultimately lost both wars. As Barry observes: “The US government’s decision to invade Iraq must stand as the worst military decision of the 21st century. It was a military strategic folly on a level equal to that of Napoleon’s 1812 attack on Russia and Hitler’s 1941 attack on the Soviet Union.” The failure, then, was ultimately a political one, of British politicians blindly following their American patrons into unwinnable wars: the Army’s essential sin was only one of trying to do the best of a bad job, a not ignoble character flaw. 

It is difficult to avoid the painful conclusion that the British Army functions for the Americans as the Gurkhas do for the British Army: a highly motivated, loyal auxiliary force, incapable of prosecuting a campaign on its own, whose colourful traditions still carry the romance of an earlier, more glorious era. 

Today, however, even this limited role is now in doubt: with the Government’s new focus on naval capacity and the much-vaunted Pacific Tilt forming the basis of Britain’s defence vision, the incoming Chief of Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radikin, is allegedly poised to oversee a dramatic cut in the Army’s already-dangerously pared-down numbers, cutting infantry ranks by more than one third of its current numbers. 

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America's forgotten Powell Doctrine

By Edward Luttwak

The “Best Little Army in the World” may be getting littler, but it is not for the better. As the defence analyst Francis Tusa warns, the result of its decades-long and self-inflicted procurement woes is that it is now more or less “combat incapable against high-end threats”. Two decades of fighting poorly-equipped insurgents has distracted the Army from its primary mission of defending the country against a competent and well-equipped adversary like Russia or China.

Perhaps this is less a disaster than it may at first seem. The danger is not so much the Army’s incapacity as our politicians’ inability to match their ambitions to its resources, or the moral courage of its generals to gently dissuade them. For all that we mock Germany its military weakness, it is not abundantly clear that Britain has gained much for the decade or so of warfare that the Germans managed to avoid. After Blair’s promiscuous use of the Army to assuage his lust for glory, perhaps a period of enforced abstinence might do the institution some good, if it is to re-equip itself for the graver, and unchosen challenges of the coming century. 

The Army’s focus on the new Ranger battalions, tasked with training and directing local partner forces, in place of line infantry hints at a world of conflict where the business of fighting is increasingly left to expendable proxies. Yet a shrunken, more tightly-focussed Army also presents a challenge for a denuded British state, which has increasingly come to rely on soldiers to make up for its own lost capacity.

Its willingness to take on tasks outside its core role may fend off cutbacks, for a time, but is not necessarily in its own or the state’s best interests; it distracts from its urgent task of modernisation and reorganisation, and gives British governments cover to further winnow away state capacity, confident that soldiers will always be there to pick up the slack. 

As the Chilcot Report on Iraq observed, “a ‘can do’ attitude is laudably ingrained in the UK armed forces, a determination to get on with the job, however difficult the circumstances — but this can prevent ground truth from reaching senior ears.” Perhaps the Army’s capacity to win the next war, like the British state’s to weather the next crisis, would be better served by generals finding the courage, when necessary, to tell politicians that some things simply can’t, or shouldn’t be done.

For Indian nationalists, there are two reasons for this. Firstly, the subcontinent was tainted by an Islam that has subsequently exported itself to Pakistan and Bangladesh. And secondly, it was part of the Raj, and thus tainted by Britain. It is politically unbecoming, then, to equate a sense of Indian-hood with what Marxist historians in the West and Hindu nationalists in India tell us was India’s slave status.

As a British historian researching India’s role in the Second World War, I’ve encountered this view repeatedly. And not just in India; to be fair, it is equally rampant in the UK, especially in parts of academia. But it is hardly logical. In fact, it is deeply unhelpful.

The problem is that the post-colonial interpretation makes slaves of Indians. It argues that they had no personal control of their destiny because their government was in the hands of others. When the British declared war, India became an unwilling participant. This argument, simply stated, is that the colonial government, together with its systems, structures, cultures and attitudes, were deeply and inherently exploitative, such that it cannot properly be argued that colonial intentions were anything other than unfair and abusive.

In this view, Indian men fought and strived against their will, even though they weren’t fully aware of it, as cultural coercion blinded them to the reality that they were fighting a British war against Britain’s enemies. The absurdity of this argument suggests, to give but one example, that the efforts of Claude Auchinleck, the Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, to raise the pay of Indian Commissioned Officers to the levels of their British colleagues in 1943 and 1944 were for the purpose of buying their loyalty rather than of giving them equality with their peers.

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British imperialism didn't destroy India

By Razib Khan

It is also seriously suggested in some quarters that the offer of money likewise persuaded millions of otherwise impoverished Indians to sign up for war work during the industrial expansion of India. According to this narrative, illiterate peasants knew no better than to take the financial bribes offered in exchange for their labour. It is argued that others were forced by convention and the belief that family and personal honour depended on a military career. Millions of men thus became mercenaries of the British, subject to intense and relentless propaganda which bound their minds and wills in an unprecedented and highly successful, coercive, manipulation.

Rather than being taken as fact, these assertions must be recognised for what they are: exaggerations and political point-scoring, with the purpose of proving that the Raj was evil and that the Indians who willingly fought against fascism and totalitarianism weren’t doing so for India, but because they were forced against their conscious will to do so.

It needn’t matter that there is no evidence that 2.5 million men joined the Indian Army between 1939-45 as the result of what one leading historian described as a “propaganda offensive” by the British government which “secured the partial allegiance or at least acquiescence of part of the population”. This argument fails to explain why the men thus recruited were prepared to die for this compulsion, and why Indian soldiers went on to win 22 of the 34 Victoria and George Crosses awarded, for example, during the Burma Campaign.

Instead, it seems rational to conclude that most Indians who joined the armed forces did so because they had weighed up the options and assessed the nature of the sacrifice they were willing to make for the sake of the government in India, regardless of its political colour. In this sense, their decision was made on the basis of a conception of India much larger than the framework of politics as it existed within Indian polity at the time. Even before 1947, the threat to their conception of what India was and could be therefore far outweighed the rights and wrongs in their minds of colonialism, if the issue or argument ever surfaced at all.

The truth is that reality trumped ideology in the face of the imminent and existential danger to the Indian state by the Japanese. Most Indians accepted that the Raj was, rightly or wrongly, or for the time being, the legally constituted Government of India. Like all governments, it had supporters and opponents. Few who opposed it on nationalistic or self-governance grounds questioned its legitimacy, as that would have invalidated their own claim to be its successor in due course. Likewise, the Indian Army was India’s army, not Britain’s.

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How the culture wars came for history

By Dominic Sandbrook

As Professor Roger Beaumont has observed, “it is most interesting to weigh the charges that the Raj built its army in India as an oppressive instrument against what one sees in how lovingly and energetically the Indians have retained the model”. Rather, the evidence suggests that the theory of “prosaic oppression” and its common language of “unconscious bias and systemic structures of power” is a fabricated political construct that does not relate to everyday human experience in colonial India. The facts are being squeezed to fit within a fixed and unbending theoretical, political and ideological model.

It was true that India did not have political independence, but in every other sense the freedom to make social, economic and political choices within this environment cannot be said to have been constrained by such oppression that human agency was so deviously manipulated to suit ruling British interests. Young Indian men and young Britons both joined the Indian Army for the same purpose in times of peace; for adventure, employment, the lure of military glory, the age-old attraction of the sword.

Indians were no more victims of their polity than were Britons, both of whom were, of course, victims of the fascist militarism that dragged the world into a second great slaughter of world war. The tyranny to which some refer, if it relates to anything, can only do so to the prosaic constraints of ordinary civic society — such as obeying the law, as can be seen during the Quit India protests in 1942 — rather than that of an unbending and devious oppression.

Looking back at the imperial period through the lens of victimhood is therefore deeply problematic both historically and philosophically. It ensures that we never see the 350 million Indians of the time as they saw themselves, collectively or individually: as a people with acute political agency (as evidenced by the burgeoning nationalist movement), on a journey to self-rule. Likewise, it treats every Briton in India at the time, every level of power exercised and every action undertaken in response to a decision by London or Delhi, as oppressive. It also forgets that agency in imperial power relationships is never one-sided; for instance, it ignores the importance of Indian political, social and economic agency in the Twenties and Thirties (combined with Japan’s pricking of the imperial bubble) in enabling India to achieve independence in 1947.

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How liberals made the British Empire

By Aris Roussinos

Our sense today of the size of the nationalist protest against colonial rule has almost certainly exaggerated its impact on ordinary people. This is not to underestimate its ultimate importance, rather the influence it had on the behaviour of men considering joining the armed forces, and the impact it had on those who had already enlisted. History remembers the noisy minority, whose views tend to be over-represented in any analysis of the past, while generally neglecting those without a voice.

Fortunately, nationalism and respect for the Government’s legitimate role in defending India (even a colonial one) were not mutually exclusive in 1942, or the ranks of the Armed Forces might have remained empty, and India’s door opened for the Japanese to march in. Perhaps it is precisely because the ranks of the army were so large between 1942 and 1945 that so much effort is generated today in post-colonial studies in explaining away why these men joined in such numbers and with such alacrity.

India, therefore, has every right to recover the history of the pre-1947 period, for it was then that the foundations of modern India were established. The Japanese in Assam and Manipur in 1944 and in Burma in 1945 were defeated by an Army that was 87% Indian. Victory in Asia could never have taken place without Indians coming forward in large numbers, and of their own volition, to serve their country. And that is surely something in which India can take great pride.

Predictably, it all started with a letter. Published in Valeurs Actuelles last month and signed by around 1,000 servicemen and women, including 20 retired Generals, it warned President Macron that Islamist extremists, and the existence of the banlieue ghettos, have the potential to tip France into civil war.

The contents of the letter were disturbing. But so was the timing, coming as it did on the 60^th anniversary of the failed generals’ putsch of 1961, when generals of the French Army attempted to topple President Charles de Gaulle. Indeed, it’s hardly surprising that it sparked an extraordinary scandal, with government ministers threatening to punish all the letter’s signatories.

Undaunted by these threats, the warning was repeated this week in a second letter, this time signed by 130,000 members of the French public. Once again the French government condemned it. Elsewhere, their reception has fallen along predictable political lines: mainstream politicians of the Left and Right have criticised the letters, while Marine le Pen has been careful to express support for the signatories.

This is, of course, to be expected. Le Pen will seize on whatever embarrasses the rest of the political mainstream, while the rest of that mainstream will continue to resist anything which could be seen to provide ammunition for Le Pen.

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Sweden's migrant rape crisis

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

But it is really the longer-term effect of interventions like these that are of most interest. Because what is striking about the debate on immigration, integration and security in France in recent years is not that the same lines keep getting drawn. The interesting thing is that, while this has gone on, French politics has experienced a silent revolution. Indeed, things are today said in France on immigration that would normally end a political career in most English-speaking countries.

The most high-profile demonstration in recent weeks came in the form of Michel Barnier. The Frenchman turned 70 in January, a milestone which precludes him from taking up another job in the European Commission. And perhaps as a result, he is now eyeing up a run for the French Presidency.

How do we know this? Because in an interview on Sunday, Barnier dropped this bombshell:

“There are links between [immigration flows] and terrorist networks which try to infiltrate them… There is a risk of an explosion, particularly on the topic of immigration. We need to introduce a moratorium on immigration. We need to take time to evaluate, check and if necessary, change our immigration policies.”

In this and later interviews the same day, he speculated that France should consider a total suspension of immigration for between three and five years, as well as a reassessment of free movement within the Schengen area. In other words, it is time for France to take back control. Suddenly, external migration and internal movement in the EU are now up for debate in the political centre.

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Europe's guilty conscience

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

There are several interesting things to note about this. The first is the way in which the events of the last year have already shifted the debate on immigration and border control more than anyone might have expected. For more than a generation, governments in the developed West have argued that high levels of immigration into Western countries are a fact of life; migration cannot be stopped altogether even if the governments of the developed countries wanted to do so.

But the events of the last year have shown this to be a lie. In an extreme event — on this occasion a global pandemic — countries around the world have shown that they are able to close their borders. Even Justin Trudeau’s Canada and Angela Merkel’s Germany, which have made a great show in recent years of being open to migration from around the world, did something that nobody could ever (before the pandemic) have expected them to do: they shut the borders and kept them shut.

The public and some wilier politicians will have noticed something here. If it is possible to close the borders to prevent a pandemic, then it should be possible to close the borders to prevent excessive migration. Whether you agree with the policy or not, it has suddenly become a viable option.

The only discussion, then, is whether a particular set of circumstances is serious enough for a pandemic border response to be enacted. Clearly there are many in France who think they are at this point. And that raises an important question over what is a more serious challenge to the long-term security of France: the Covid pandemic or the ongoing divisions and security concerns brought on by high levels of immigration?

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The EU always fails

By Douglas Murray

If you go to parts of Paris — even in the city centre — there are migrant tent communities set up that resemble somewhere in the third world, or California. As long as they exist, it is surely understandable for Parisians to wonder why this problem can’t be fixed.

Their Government has shown that it can mandate everyone to stay in their homes, lock the borders and force everyone to wear masks. Why can it not deal with the issue of mass migration? Clearly the thought is out there. Otherwise Mr Barnier would not have taken — utterly cynically, no doubt — up the cause.

And yet it is not just Covid that has changed things. Rather, as I described in The Strange Death of Europe, public opinion in France on immigration has long been shifting in this direction. Very few people, year on year, say that they are less concerned about integration; and very few believe that multicultural France has a happy future if migration continues at the rate of recent years.

Politicians of the Left as well as the Right have long been facing up to this. But the Barnier intervention — like that of the generals — is a demonstration that the political reality, as well as the political rhetoric, in France is changing. Things that were once unthinkable are now being proposed as national policy. No doubt that will all come as a shock to Mr Barnier’s former colleagues, but they would be unwise to ignore it.

The reality is that recruiting into the public sector is a ceaseless slog. Have you ever wondered why there are always so many adverts for life in the army? For teacher training? For the police? It’s not because recruiters like spending money. It’s because they are always in desperate need of talented new people, and such people are hard to find. These public services have to have high standards, whether that’s good qualifications, good fitness, or a clean criminal record. Pay isn’t great. Working hours are tough. Scrutiny is endless. And the UK has more people already in work than at any point since the early 70s.

No wonder the NHS has more than 100,000 vacancies. Social care has more than 110,000 vacancies. The police, the army and the fire service tend to get plenty of applicants, but they end up turning thousands away because they don’t measure up. The army met its recruitment target last year, but only after five years of failure — and after launching a new boot camp to help the unfit get up to standard before taking their entry tests.

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Could national service save higher education?

By Mary Harrington

Half the staffing battle isn’t recruitment at all: it’s stopping people from leaving. 15% of teachers leave in their first year; 30% within their first five years. In 2010 I helped plan for a coalition policy to recruit 4,200 extra health visitors. By the end of our first meeting, the plan had transformed: we had to recruit about 9,000 health visitors, because so many were planning to retire in the coming years. The recruitment drive was then ditched by the 2015 government — and as soon as it was, numbers slumped back, falling by more than 3,000 over three years.

It’s like trying to fill a bath with no plug in it. There are alarm bells ringing about how crappy it is to work in so many of these frontline jobs, and instead of fixing those problems, we’re exhausting all our energy desperately trying to recruit people who aren’t that fussed. The difficulty of finding good people for the public sector doesn’t mean we should give up trying. But it does mean we should try something different.

Instead of panicking about the high turnover rates in the public sector, we should see them as inspiration. It probably is too much to expect people to work in a front line public service job for the fifty years that will soon comprise the average working life. So let’s stop pretending these are vocations, or jobs that should take you from pimples to wrinkles. Soon the majority of us will live for a century: everyone could expect to have two or three careers in that time. So a spell in public service should be a part of every citizen’s life.

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Our shameful social care crisis

By James Bloodworth

Initiatives like Teach First and Now Teach have got the right idea: make it clear that public service is a great way to start out in the workplace; a great way to return to work after having children; a great way to find purpose later on in life; a great way to spend your last years before retirement. Dogs may be for life, but jobs are not any more.

It’s not good for our society to have one group of people who work exclusively in the private sector making the money, and another group spending it. It breeds resentment and misunderstanding. I’ve lost track of the number of senior business people who bleat that everyone in the public sector is a lazy and inefficient jobsworth. They imagine they’re the only ones who work hard, because they’ve no idea what it’s like to hold the hand of a dying patient, or coax ambition from a struggling teenager, or wrestle an attacker from their victim.

I’d like to make it compulsory: everyone should spend a minimum of five years working somewhere in public service. You wouldn’t be able to claim your state pension unless you’d done it. The days of conscripting all our young people into the army have passed, and I’m glad of it. We don’t need armed national service. But we do need a culture of civic service, a recognition that you need to do more than just pay your taxes to be part of a society. You have to be involved.

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By Tom Chivers

The pathway should go both ways of course. Plenty of public servants have a toxic view of what life is like in business. They imagine rapacious greed and profit to be the only topics of conversation at the watercooler, and have an unhealthy contempt for words like “efficiency”. The civil service is slowly getting better at sending people out on secondment to businesses for a couple of years at a time, but there’s often still suspicion of anyone who does it. Rules set up to prevent grift end up acting as a huge barrier to anyone leaving, building up expertise about life outside government, and returning to make public services better.

By insisting everyone spend part of their career in public service, and part in the private sector, we could transform both. We could inject the values of purpose and service into our businesses. We could bring ideas and innovation into the heart of the public sector — and perhaps even make those jobs easier and more fulfilling to do. And we could build a culture of compassion and understanding between private and public sector workers, who might stop complaining about each others’ excessive pay or cushy conditions, and instead value the contributions each make.

So let’s stop with half measures — trying to recruit just enough people to fill the vacancies and then panicking five minutes later because someone retired. We should double, or treble, our ambition when it comes to recruiting teachers, nurses, doctors, soldiers and police officers. Let’s train everyone we can get our hands on. We have to make it normal for everyone to serve their country, whether it’s for five years or fifty.