But all the intelligence suggests that, even with an extended military campaign, the US cannot force one of its suggested aims: regime change in Iran. The Washington Post cited a classified report suggesting as much and I am hearing exactly the same thing from governments across Europe.

A long war would be disastrous for the global economy, with oil prices jumping to well over $100 a barrel, followed by higher inflation, higher interest rates and lower growth. Some European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and now the UK, are already suffering low gas storage volumes. A short war would be just as bad: Trump loses his nerve, abandons the operation and leaves the antagonism in the Middle East to escalate. Even in this scenario it is far from clear that the flows of oil and gas would return to normal quickly.

The high oil price has already led the US to drop its oil sanctions against Russia. That would be headline news most days, but not today. Vladimir Putin has resumed oil deliveries to India, but this time not at a discount, but a premium. The Russians are back in business. Putin threatened last week that he is considering cutting all the remaining supplies to Europe. So a week into the US war against Iran and we are already looking at very different endgame scenarios for the Ukraine war. Wasn’t Russia supposed to go bankrupt?

Meanwhile, the West’s scenarios get progressively worse; the battlefield question has become an industrial one.

The West is currently facing a supply-chain crisis for military procurement. Even the world’s most powerful army cannot assume victory if the war lasts more than a few weeks. It may simply run out of key materiel. And the US is already running into bottlenecks. Contrary to Trump’s recent claims that the US has “a virtually unlimited supply” of munitions, Foreign Policy magazine reports that the war is already burning through the US/Israeli arsenal at such an alarming rate that the retaliatory destruction caused by Iran could take years to fix — and only then if the defense-critical minerals can be sourced. Tracing the military supply chains all the way back to their original sources, the journalists discovered that it is all but impossible to “instantly reverse decades of consolidated construction lines and atrophied mineral processing capacity”.

The decline set in decades ago. Back at the turn of this millennium, outsourcing was the cool thing to do, especially in the US. The service economy was the future then. And during this golden age of globalization, all the metal bashers wandered off to China, leaving the economies of the West to focus on higher value-added services such as finance. Coming from Germany, a country with a strong industrial tradition, I noted a good deal of contempt for industry among the elites of London or New York. I have argued myself that Germany overspecialized in some of the old-tech industries, such as cars. But getting rid of base industrial services, such as steel and chemical plants, is not smart for purely strategic reasons.

Metals, minerals and chemicals sit at the top of every supply chain, and most have to be extracted. These raw materials are then processed to produce those essential base materials like steel, aluminum, or magnets. The material goes through a number of further processing stages and if the final product is complex, like a military radar, or even a car, there will be many additional nodes in your supply chains. Small wonder the German car industry regularly breaks into sweat whenever China restricts the supply of any single piece of equipment — such as an essential mid-range semiconductor. Without it, their engines are useless.

But the specific advantage that both Russia and China have over the West is not simply their wealth of metals and minerals — it’s the fact that they can also process them. China’s expertise in processing its raw material is unparalleled: there is a lot of know-how in producing rare earth magnets from neodymium. And we are currently paying a heavy price for a service industry fetish. I blame the macroeconomists. There are no supply chains in standard macroeconomic models. The stuff just arrived at our door. These models worked in the fair-weather environment of a globalized, multilateral trading system, but not in our world today.

Were the Prussian military historian Carl von Clausewitz alive today, he would be taking an interest in supply chains. Back when he was in action, the key powers had plenty of blacksmiths and sweatshops to produce weapons, cannons and ammunition. Their bottleneck was money and soldiers. But he did understand that strategy was dependent on the “hard math of supply”. Today, you cannot claim to have a military strategy without a clear idea of your supply chains.

And if Putin and Xi Jinping understand one thing, it is industrial supply chains. Putin wrote his thesis on Russia’s mineral resources with a call for them to be nationalized. Western commentators obsessed over whether he plagiarized the thesis. But a far more important question is why he chose that particular sector as a theme to hone his plagiarizing skills, rather than finance.

Xi formed his economic views as a young man when he observed the decline of the Soviet Union, a country known for its smokestack industries. Xi became a champion of modern industry. He disproved the lazy thesis that governments can’t pick industrial winners. China is doing this all the time. The difference is that they are picking industries, not companies. They picked rare earths, magnets, car batteries, electric cars, solar panels, robotics, among others.

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Can any of us name any western leader with an interest in mining? Or a knowledge of downstream industrial processes? That’s for people in anoraks, isn’t it? Trump was a developer of prime property before he entered politics. Emmanuel Macron was an investment banker. Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz were lawyers. Meanwhile, successive governments in America have chosen to transform industrial heartlands into a rust belt which has ultimately constrained its military-strategic options. It can choose to become protectionist, as it has done under Trump. Or it can pursue regime change in distant lands as it did under George W. Bush. But it cannot pursue both at the same time.

Imagine, then, the nightmare scenario for the West: the simultaneous invasion by China of Taiwan, by Russia of the Baltic Republics, and by North Korea of South Korea. I don’t think this is particularly likely because each has its own tactical and strategic timelines. For as long as Russia fights in Ukraine, it is not in a position to fight another land war.

But the West would not even be prepared for one of them. If China were to go for Taiwan now, the US might try to stop it — especially if China were to restrict supplies of semiconductors. But it is far from clear that Trump would be ready for a long fight with another nuclear superpower. If you are running out of missiles after a week of fighting against Iran, then how could you possibly take on another enemy?

I have to admit that I found Trump’s pacifism during the election campaign one of his more appealing characteristics. He appeared to have broken with the failed policies of some of his predecessors. The US war record is dismal. The country hasn’t had a successful conflict since Korea. They totally messed up the Middle East. I don’t want to speculate what, or who, got him into this one — he certainly doesn’t seem to know. But it will become the defining moment of his entire presidency.

Perhaps some of these scenarios can be mitigated. Certainly, the oil price could come down, as shipping in the Strait of Hormuz returns to normal. But what I cannot see is a scenario that brings peace and stability to the Middle East and which preserves economic stability in the rest of the world at the same time.

I can, however, see a scenario that delivers neither.

For neoliberal ideologues such as Milton Friedman, who used the pencil fable to argue for opaque world-spanning supply chains, the beauty of such complex systems is not only that the consumer obtains his product at the lowest price possible, and that the producer can maximise his profits, “but even more to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world”. As the historian Quinn Slobodian noted in Globalists, his recent study of the first neoliberal theorists, such idealistic motivations were evident from the very start. Ignoring the fact that the globalised world of the late 19th century failed to prevent World War One, they believed that creating a giant interconnected market would make a repeat of such a cataclysm impossible.

They were wrong. Instead, the restructuring of the global economy into a large web vastly increases the risk of a total system collapse. Instead of one economy failing, a shock in one corner of the world can place great and sudden stress on economic and political systems thousands of miles away. A war in distant Taiwan can mean you’re no longer able to buy a new car; a drought on the other end of the world means empty shelves at home. 

As archaeologists and historians have increasingly begun to stress, our globalised world has seen two antecedents in the past: in the interconnected, hyper-specialised trading systems of the Bronze Age, and those of the Roman Empire at its height. When both buckled under a wave of unexpected shocks, the result was not decline or recession but total collapse, a process defined by the great theorist Joseph Tainter as “fundamentally a sudden, pronounced loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity”. 

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This is, as Tainter observes, “a suddenly smaller, simpler, less stratified, and less socially differentiated” society, where “the flow of information drops, people trade and interact less” and “specialization decreases and there is less centralized control”.  This is not a Spenglerian moral fable of societal decline, but an inexorable process whereby growing complexity and sophistication bring with them a growing fragility: when a combination of shocks arrive, the entire society is suddenly forced to reorganise itself. It is not an extinction event or the end of the world: life goes on, just in a poorer, simpler fashion.

The great trading civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean present just such an example. As the archaeologist Eric H. Cline notes in his recently reissued book 1177 BC, for more than two thousand years the great civilisations of Egypt, Western Asia and the Aegean had formed a single interconnected trading system, dependent on complex trading networks that “were open to instability the minute there was a change in one of the integral parts”.

When crisis struck, shortly after 1200 BC, it took down all the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean simultaneously. As Cline notes, “perhaps the inhabitants could have survived one disaster, such as an earthquake or a drought, but they could not survive the combined effects of earthquake, drought, and invaders all occurring in rapid succession”. A “domino effect” followed, in which, thanks to the globalised nature of their world,  “the disintegration of one civilisation led to the fall of the others”.

The collapse of Roman civilisation, a product of an overextended, underfinanced empire weakened by internal feuding among its political elites, presents another apposite example. As the archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins emphasised in his 2005 book The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilisation, the most remarkable aspect of Roman civilisation, archaeologically speaking, was the ability of even the poorest members of society to afford cheap and high-quality consumer goods, enabled by immense specialisation in production and an interconnected trading network that spanned the entire empire.  

Yet after Rome collapsed, such goods were only available for the very richest members of society. In the production of ceramics, the use of coinage and the construction of stone buildings, the Western half of the empire suddenly sank back to a level of societal complexity lower than in Iron Age prehistory, not returning to a Roman level of sophistication until the later Middle Ages. And indeed, as Ward-Perkins warns, the Roman economy’s complexity was the precise reason its collapse was so total: “economic complexity made mass-produced goods available, but it also made people dependent on specialists or semi-specialists — sometimes working hundreds of miles away — for many of their material needs.” While this worked well in times of stability, it precipitated collapse when trade routes were disrupted.

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Crisis is the new normal

By Aris Roussinos

Like Friedman, or Biden, Ward-Perkins observes that today “we are wholly dependent for our needs on thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, of other people spread around the globe, each doing their own little thing”. Yet he draws a very different conclusion about the desirability of this situation, noting that now “we would be quite incapable of meeting our needs locally, even in an emergency”. 

Yet of course, even as they were living through its early stages, the Romans were unaware their society was collapsing. Yes, goods were harder to come by, infrastructure was increasingly degraded, urban life was increasingly unsettled, economic growth was only a memory, and new religions boomed as people tried to make sense of their declining prospects. But even still, the military failures on the empire’s eastern fringes barely impacted life in the imperial centre. For some people, great profits could still be made: for most, things went on much as before, though with a lower standard of living with each passing year. No doubt, things will improve soon, Romans told themselves: this is only a temporary blip.

The theorist of collapse John Michael Greer dates the beginning of the collapse of our own society in the economic crisis of the mid-1970s, which drove deindustrialisation in both the United States and Britain and initiated the erosion of state capacity in search of ever-harder to accumulate profits, hoarded by oligarchs even as it destroyed the tax base. This is the process of what Greer terms “catabolic collapse” — “the stairstep sequence of decline” where decades of crisis are followed by decades of seeming improvement, though the underlying society is left weaker and less resilient before the next crisis hits: “rinse and repeat, and you’ve got the process that turned the Forum of imperial Rome into an early medieval sheep pasture.” 

This gloomy view accords well with the Marxist theorist Wolfgang Streeck’s 2016 analysis that the post-1970s crisis of capitalism, accelerated by the 2008 financial crash, has led us into a period of civilisational entropy and decay. For him, we experience “life in the shadow of uncertainty, always at risk of being upset by surprise events and unpredictable disturbances and dependent on individuals’ resourcefulness, skillful improvisation, and good luck”. It is a period where the state can no longer guarantee its citizens order or security, where “deep changes will occur” in an unpredictable fashion, and where every last effort to squeeze profit out of a collapsing system further undermines the social structure.

For Streeck, this interregnum is a time when personal wealth dwindles and financial insecurity becomes the norm. Indeed, as Streeck observes, it is a period where “as growth declines and risks increase, the struggle for survival will become more intense”. It offers “rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age”. It is not a vision of hell, or of the kind of apocalypse fantasised by Hollywood, but simply of a degraded version of the present: a world closer to the modern Global South than our recent past. It is not necessarily a sudden cataclysm, but a process that will take decades, perhaps even centuries, to fully reveal itself.

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Crisis is the new normal

By John Michael Greer

Neither Rome nor the civilisations of the Bronze Age Mediterranean were brought down by one single cause. It took the combination of climate change, elite rivalry, military disaster and migratory pressures, combined with the extreme fragility engendered by economic specialisation and tightly-knit international trading networks, to ensure that when collapse came, it was total. As Ward-Perkins warns, Rome’s system of complex supply chains “worked very well in stable times, but it rendered consumers extremely vulnerable if for any reason the networks of production and distribution were disrupted”.

The belated efforts of governments across the world to secure fragile supply chains and enhance food security are the refutation, in action, of the fable of the pencil. As Tainter notes, “the whole concern with collapse and self-sufficiency may itself be a significant social indicator” of decline. A focused effort on domestic resilience is, after all, in itself evidence of reduced civilisational complexity: as trade routes wither and consumption begins to drop, we should strive to ensure that we are heading towards a controlled descent and not a sudden, cataclysmic crash. The imperial centre may not hold, but our lives must go on.

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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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.

A BBC article from 2001 notes that opponents of globalisation believe “it leads to exploitation of the world’s poor, workers, and the environment; “makes it easier for rich companies to act with less accountability: and “that countries’ individual cultures are becoming overpowered by Americanisation.” On the other hand, “those in favour of globalisation claim it “should make everyone richer… [while] trade links can encourage countries to respect human rights”.

Twenty years on, it is clear that the opponents of globalisation were entirely correct, and the supporters were utterly wrong. And yet, their brains broken by Brexit, Britain’s liberal commentariat continue to advocate globalised food supply chains purely as a result of Remainer tribalism.

The BBC’s neutral tone at the turn of the millennium is almost unimaginable in today’s hysterical discourse, where opposition to globalisation has been re-coded as a political signifier, entirely randomly, from a reasoned Left-wing argument to an irrational prejudice of reactionary and probably racist deplorables. Likewise, the Left has seemingly abandoned its commitment to localisation and the preservation of unionised, national labour in favour of cosmopolitan dreams of unfettered globalisation.

In Britain this bizarre polar inversion is manifest in the political discourse over the current supply chain crisis. The fundamental problem causing empty shelves in Britain today is not Brexit itself, but the over-complexity of supply chains maximised for efficiency in good times, but which are dangerously fragile whenever the system meets a shock. By over attenuating supply chains on a global scale, and centralising food production for the benefit of the supermarkets, the system was unable to cope with the pandemic’s cascading aftershocks, from energy crises to labour shortages, still working themselves through the global economy. 

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This is a global supply chain crisis caused by a worldwide slow-motion, but accelerating collapse of globalisation. As the American economist Matt Stoller underlines, globalisation “has left us uniquely unprepared to manage a supply shock. Our hyper-efficient globalized supply chain, once romanticized by men like Tom Friedman in The World Is Flat, is the problem. Like the financial system before the 2008 crash, this kind of economic order hides its fragility. It seems to work quite well, until it doesn’t.” Now, we’re beginning to see what it looks like when it doesn’t. 

Take meat processing as an example. For decades, in search of efficiency, supermarkets have centralised the processing of meat in gigantic mega-abattoirs, forcing small regional abattoirs to close and crowding out local farmers. The working environment in these places is so appalling and exploitative, and the pay so low, that they can only be staffed by immigrants from poorer regions of the world. As a result, more than two thirds of Britain’s meat processing labour force is made up of migrants, making the nation’s food supply dependent on the free flow of foreign labour, and on the nationwide distribution of live animals and processed meat to a tiny number of centralised hubs.

This is an entirely unsustainable as well as immoral state of affairs. As the commentator Richard North, an expert on the meat industry, observes, the number of abattoirs in Britain has shrunk “from 3,326 units in the 1960s to a mere 156 in 2020”, with the result that “the meat industry structure in the UK is already so concentrated as to be unsustainable”. As soon as the system meets a shock, as it has now, it is unable to cope..

Yet even before the current shock, the centralisation of meat production was eroding the resilience of Britain’s food supply. In 2018, 34 separate organisations, from the National Trust to the Women’s Institute and the RSPCA, lobbied the Government to halt the collapse of Britain’s network of small regional abattoirs, “a huge national asset” closing “at an alarming rate”. As Christopher Price of the Rare Breed Survival Trust observes has noted, “large scale abattoirs require workers to carry out highly specific, often highly mechanised, procedures as part of the slaughtering process and employ relatively large numbers of narrower skilled, lower paid people in one location”. Instead, the Government should support the creation of more local and smaller abattoirs, “where each worker is required to be more highly and multi-skilled, with the flexibility for part-time work”. This would benefit rural areas where local employment is rare and “facilitate the creation of new premium markets for distinctive meat products from local breeds and the expansion of related businesses such as butchers and farm shops”.

But instead, this vital opportunity to reform the sector into one dependent on high-skilled, high-paid labour working in significantly better conditions is being squandered. Instead, cheered on by their useful idiots in Britain’s commentator class, the corporate food lobby has leaned on the Government to re-open the floodgates to low-paid migrant labour, keeping a broken and exploitative system on artificial life support. 

The current system is simply unsustainable and exploitative to agricultural workers. As the radical Left farming union the Landworkers’ Alliance noted in their 2016 manifesto, “the rural economy… is vulnerable to competition from global markets and to aggressive price bargaining from cartels of processors and distributors (supermarkets)” with the result that “less than ten per cent of earnings from the UK food industry go to UK farmers and fishermen”. 

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Already, the labour shortage is allowing farm workers to demand higher wages, a process which should be allowed to continue, not just because it’s fair but also because it builds resilience into the system. A Britain where the farming sector is forced into decline by global competition is a Britain highly vulnerable to global shocks of the kind we are experiencing now. And yet, as the Landworkers’ Alliance warned back in 2017, the corporate farming lobby is addicted to the current system, with organisations that have the Governments’ ear like the National Farmers Union “more focussed on developing super-efficient mega-farms capable of competing in a cut-throat global market, than in producing the bulk of the UK’s food supply through a network of secure family farms”. 

The globalisation of supply lines according to the logic of the free market is also a disaster for the environment. As a Greenpeace investigation revealed last week, the growing consolidation of Britain’s dairy industry into a handful of American-style megadairies is allowing global food corporations to feed cows soybeans sourced from Brazil’s endangered Cerrado ecoregion. The impact has been profound: it has accelerated deforestation and global warming, forced cows to live in miserable and unnatural indoors conditions in giant sheds and driven small dairy farmers here in Britain out of business. 

Yet aside from moral questions, the supply chain of soybeans is also extremely liable to disruption in times of crisis, such as the drought — the worst in over a century — currently devastating Brazil’s farming sector. Shortages of soybeans caused by environmental collapse in Brazil or by blockages in the global shipping system will mean future shortages of milk and cheese, an absurd situation in a country like Britain blessed with abundant rainfall and lush grass. 

Such built-in vulnerabilities are dangerous as we head into an era of permanent crisis. Indeed, as the Left-wing economist James Meadway warns, though Brexit has exacerbated Britain’s exposure to supply chain disruption, “it is a parochial mistake to single out Britain’s leaving the EU as the primary cause of the crisis”. Rather, what we are experiencing “is the first tremors of the generalised environmental collapse of this century. Gas prices are not going to come down any time soon, and the supply chain crisis will not be resolved this year — or even next.” 

Crisis is the new normal: and to sustain the very basic good of food security, Britain will have to become more self-reliant, decentralising supply chains in pursuit of resilience rather than efficiency and reshoring food production as far as is possible. This isn’t a leap back to the Middle Ages, as online critics howl: Britain was 78% self-sufficient in food as late as the 1980s, and returning to localised production and supply chains should be considered a vital strategic goal.

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And yet, in a stunning example of cognitive dissonance, we see liberal commentators who warn of the looming catastrophe of climate collapse simultaneously arguing that fragile globalised supply chains are somehow both desirable and permanent. Like the famous quote that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it seems it’s easier for these people to imagine total civilisational collapse than not being able to eat Kenyan strawberries in midwinter. 

The Left-wing anti-globalisation protestors of twenty years ago were right then, and their newly localist conservative successors are right now. Instead of mocking the Government’s tentative steps towards re-localisation of the nation’s food supply as the backwards fantasies of nostalgic Brexiteers, our stubbornly parochial Remainer comment class should for once step back and observe the changing world around them. 

The global supply chain crisis is forcing the Conservatives to abandon their free-trading dreams as neoliberal ideology gets crushed by stark reality. This is an unalloyed good, and should be supported and encouraged as far as possible. The Government is correct to say that today’s supply chain meltdown is “a failure of the free market and not of the state” and that businesses “have become drunk on cheap labour”. The current crisis is an opportunity to rebalance Britain’s food system into a fairer and more resilient model, and the Government, finally being forced towards good policy by events outside its control, needs to hold its nerve. 

Fuelled by our desire for ever cheaper goods, the world has collectively sleepwalked into a supply-side dependency on the People’s Republic.

The gamble had been pitched as a trade-off. China was expected to evolve democratic norms and embrace relations with the international community, while we got richer from globalisation. But we have been played.

Whether it’s clothing and factory-fashion, personal protective equipment or hardware parts, too many of our manufactured goods today rely on a ‘Made in China’ supply-chain. At the same time as it was busy taking control over our manufacturing, China was busy cloning western software, via her lackadaisical respect for international copyright rules.

And while the world relies on China for hardware, China avoids software dependency on outsiders by creating substitutes: TikTok to replace snapchat, Weibo instead of Twitter, WeChat & RenRen for Facebook. Indeed, there is an alternative Chinese version for almost any platform.

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We've cosied up to China for too long

By Nick Timothy

With manufactured goods and hardware ‘Made in China’, and software increasingly ‘Cloned in China’, what of natural resources? Through the ‘Belt & Road’ initiative — a ‘21st century Silk Road’ connecting China to Europe over a network of land and sea trade routes, the People’s Republic has embarked on huge infrastructure projects in 60 countries, including loans and construction projects that secure key ports and mines as collateral to China for payment.

Look to Pakistan, African or southeast Asian nations to see China’s rapid expansion in ownership of mines and ports. Look to the UK and China’s attempts to secure our telecoms industry via the Huawei deal, her recent purchase of British Steel, and her quest to secure the nuclear power industry. Beijing even secured a deal to develop British nuclear station Hinckley point C in Somerset, thus paving the way globally for China to enter the global market to dominate nuclear power.

Over decades, we have naively outsourced or lost manufacturing, software, natural resources and critical infrastructure to China. The economic benefits of globalisation are well trodden, yet as Covid-19 has shown, it has left our society vulnerable during a major crisis, unable to manufacture the most basic of necessities such as PPE. Meanwhile, China has achieved self-sufficiency.

While pursuing economic dominance abroad, China’s communist one-party state has centralised political power at home, gained unprecedented command over her own population via wide ranging and well-documented spy-tech, and placed anything between 1 to 2 million Uigur Muslims in gulags.

Considering what we know of colonial history, there is little room for doubt that China is at a pre-colonial stage. States at this stage attempt to centralise domestic power under a strong leader, dominate global supply chains and monopolise industry, all the while expanding abroad to secure natural resources. China is aggressively pursuing total national self-sufficiency, and the question arises as to why.

Further reading

China is not the hero in this darkest hour

By Ian Birrell

My conclusion is that China is preparing for war: total, not limited war. The kind that seeks to rebalance the world order, tipping it in her favour by replacing the US as the dominant global power. Historically, major conflicts have arisen when the leading global power is challenged by a rival, a problem known as the Thucydides trap — and China is expected (by some metrics) to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy this decade.

Also, and crucially unlike us, China is preparing for the next type of war. The People’s Republic knows that she cannot beat the US militarily — and she knows that type of ground war is almost over.

Instead, by securing global supply chains, maintaining IT independence, and having a cast-iron grip over her own population, China can focus on building her cyber and biological war capabilities while remaining relatively safeguarded against the same herself. Considering all of this, from steel to nuclear to telecoms, our policy towards China until 2020 can best be described as one of miserably failed economic appeasement. From China’s perspective, she has successfully gifted us a Trojan Horse.

So what is the solution? Do we take that bait and prepare for war too? No. We must first understand what happened, and grasp how it came that we so willingly handed China the very tools by which to defeat us.

For too long, China has had a strategy for dealing with us, while we have had no strategy for dealing with China. We must urgently pivot our strategic relationship, one that entails assuming that China is in a Cold War with us already, and ends our current naivety.

We must minimise our total global supply-chain dependency on China, or any one nation for that matter. Trade with China, yes, but we must ringfence critical infrastructure: nuclear, telecoms and natural resources such as steel.

As recent politicisation of the WHO highlights, the post-war international community — supposedly governed by the UN — is no longer serving its purpose, and perhaps more than ever the UN faces a crisis in moral authority. Instead, NATO-style, we must reorder our strategic and military alliances around the Pacific and build an international consensus against the broader expansionist desire of the Chinese Communist Party.

Further reading

Covid-19 has exposed our financial fragility

By Jonathan Tepper

Just like with nuclear non-proliferation, there must be newly-developed global consequences for negligence in cyber and bio hazard safety. Post-Covid, we would be wise to build a new global consensus on which punitive measures are suited to states that violate our cyber or biological safety.

Whatever happens in China does not stay in China. Whereas our Orientalist based ‘othering’ of China created this blind spot, only our hubris and naivety would allow for us to continue thus blind. We have been outmaneuvered, but this pandemic has magnified our failures and brought them to the fore. We would only be deserving of loss if we did not learn the lessons now.

That might be an easy one for you to answer. But what about dinner four days from now, or six? The fact that many people would find that second question hard or even impossible might just tell us something about the way Britain will be changed by Covid-19.

When I started reporting on politics almost 20 years ago, Tesco and the people who shopped there every Saturday were pretty much the centre of the electoral universe. Tony Blair was almost supernaturally attuned to Tesco shoppers, their concerns about petrol prices and the rest. Tesco, driven by its big-box edge-of-town stores (which also sold petrol), was the company of the moment; even political journalists knew that one pound in every seven spent on British retail went to Tesco.

Then the financial crisis and competition in the market changed British grocers and the way we shop. People suddenly short of cash, or just worried about cash, become reluctant or unable to spend a big slice of their weekly disposable on one big shop on one day. Lidl and Aldi arrived, mostly in the centre of towns in small- and medium-sized stores, not in big boxes. Incumbent supermarkets, too, chased shoppers who wanted to shop more often, to spend smaller sums more frequently.

By the same author

The future of inequality

By James Kirkup

Tesco tried to keep pace with consumers, with Tesco Metro, a shift that meant many things, including a reduction in staff numbers.

Essentially, Britain became a nation of just-in-time shoppers, making regular and even daily trips to the shops for that night’s dinner. A few years back, the Co-op found that 27% of us chose our evening meal on the day; only 9% of people in its survey planned their meals a week ahead.

Waitrose has also noted the death of the weekly shop​, observing that a staple of the high street is shrinking and maybe even disappearing:

“Just a few years ago, an average Waitrose would open with around 200 big trolleys and 150 shallow ‘daily shopper’ trolleys lined up outside. These days the tables have turned, with 250 shallow ‘daily shoppers’ and just 70 big trolleys needed.”

More recently, the aversion to the weekly shop and to preparing to feed ourselves has sparked a new trend in food retail: recipe boxes, where someone else plans and weighs and measures the components you need to prepare your evening meal — Hello Fresh, Gousto, Mindful Chef.

Suggested reading

Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates

By MAry Harrington

Not only do we no longer want to fill our cupboards with food, we can’t be bothered to measure and weigh the stuff either.

This shift surely informs Britain’s response to the coronavirus emergency, and will shape the way that emergency changes us. When the crisis really hit, how many people didn’t have enough food in the fridge or cans in the cupboard to last out the 14-day isolation period Boris Johnson asked of any household with a symptomatic resident?

To anyone — and yes, the younger you are, the more likely this is to be true — who relies on that daily trip to the shop, perhaps on the way home from work, the idea of spending two weeks cut off and relying on the kindness of friends is almost inevitably daunting, even frightening.

Some might shrug and assume that online-ordered supermarket fare will arrive from a truck as ever. But the reality of two-week-long waits for a delivery slot will come as another reminder of the simple and, at times like this, terrifying fragility of modern lives predicated on just-in-time and on-demand services.

Suggested reading

Who are you calling a snowflake?

By Tom Chivers

This isn’t (just) about brittle urban millennials who won’t cope if Amazon Prime can’t get them their plant-based dinner in the next three hours. In the past week, I’ve heard two friends, middle-aged London professionals, announce that they’re buying cars for the first time. Having relied on shops walking distance away and public transport, both have abruptly decided they need the ability to drive themselves and their families to, well, anywhere else if they needed to. Maybe all that stuff that Marie Kondo persuaded us to get rid of had uses — psychological and practical — after all.

The coronovirus has reminded such people of that fragility, the feeling of security that some of us have traded away for a convenience lifestyle. How else to explain panic-buying toilet paper and dry pasta? Narrowly speaking, such actions can be rational, but a better question to ask is more fundamental: why are they necessary?

Relying on just-in-time delivery along global supply-chains to feed and clothe and support us by buying little and often is a little bit like flying. It’s a huge source of freedom and progress, but also a risk to which we deliberately blind ourselves. For many people, the only way to be comfortable with sitting in a metal box full of highly-flammable fuel 30,000 feet above the earth is not to think about the incredible number of things that have to go exactly right to make it possible — and so about the things that could go wrong.

Suggested reading

Farewell free trade, and good riddance

By David Goodhart

This, of course, is speculation, but I think the psychological impact of our empty cupboards at a time of national trauma could just be a counterweight to the widely-observed idea that the virus will renew faith in the state. I think we may well emerge from this horror with a newfound tendency towards household resilience, to the minor but important feeling of self-sufficiency, of security, that comes with a cupboard full of food. Do not be surprised if the coronavirus eventually brings the shopping trolley trundling back into the heart of our national life.

Meanwhile, when (if) we ever get back to talking seriously about Britain’s post-EU political economy, I wonder if British farmers will find it just a little bit easier to see off the “Singapore” Brexiteers who wonder if we couldn’t do without them and just import more of what we eat. Of course we could, but could we ever feel comfortable doing so? I’d bet on shorter, stronger supply chains coming into fashion on the other side of the emergency.

And for Ms Kondo, perhaps a well-stocked house does not always spark joy but it does come in handy at times like these. Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are no minimalists in a time of plague.