Since the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, the West has sought to isolate Russia through sanctions and diplomatic pressure. And yet Kazan will be welcoming heads of state or high-ranking officials from 32 countries, including the bloc’s four new entrants — Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates — as well as numerous other countries interested in membership, including Turkey, the first ever Nato country to consider joining. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will also be present.

The event testifies to the growing influence of the Global South — or the Global Majority, as the Russians call it — and its search for an alternative to the US-led system. Some 40 nations are reportedly on the waiting list to join, with Saudi Arabia and Indonesia expressing serious interest, further illustrating the growing attractiveness of this “non-Western club”. Membership is seductive to those nations seeking alternatives to Western-dominated economic and financial structures which are often accused of jeopardising the economic development, social stability and national sovereignty of weaker countries.

It’s particularly telling of the West’s tone-deaf approach to the rest of the world that, to the former’s surprise, so many countries expressed an interest in joining the Brics after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war. Ironically, the West’s sanctions regime — and especially the freezing of $300 billion of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves, an unprecedent act of economic warfare — is what motivated many countries to look for alternatives to the dollar-denominated Western financial infrastructure.

The expansion of the Brics, coupled with the growing interest from the Global South, underscores the geopolitical power shift underway — from the West to Rest. Indeed, the Brics bloc already wields considerable economic clout. The group’s combined GDP, when adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), accounts for 35.6% of the global economy, surpassing the G7’s share of just over 30%. In terms of population, the disparity is even more striking: Brics nations are home to 45% of the world’s population, while the G7 accounts for less than 10%. With India, China, and Russia’s GDP expected to grow by approximately 4% this year, compared with 2% for Western economies, and with more countries set to join, the Brics have the wind of history in their sails. No wonder this summit is being described as a “Bretton Woods for the Global South”.

Nonetheless, Western countries have often dismissed the institutional relevance of the Brics, pointing out that the bloc is little more than a loose association of countries with often diverging economic and geopolitical interests. Furthermore, it has failed to offer a concrete alternative to the Western systems. While it is true that the Brics have privileged economic and infrastructural mutual cooperation, and the wider concept of “connectivity”, over formalised governance structure, this might be about to change.

Russia has played a driving role in the Brics’ evolution, instrumental in the initial formation of the group, the hosting of its first summit, the admission of South Africa, and the subsequent push for expansion. Positioned as a mediator between China and India, Russia has managed to maintain a key role within the organisation, making it a vital player in any institutional leap forward.

Now Russia has set the bloc a new strategic goal: de-dollarisation. The sanctions against Russia and the freezing of its assets by Western powers have underscored the need for financial independence, making the de-dollarisation agenda not just aspirational but a necessity — not just for Russia but for other countries as well. The main response so far from the rest of the Brics has been to increasingly settle their international trade in national currencies rather than the dollar, with remarkable outcomes: the volume of trade settled in the currencies of member nations has already surpassed that of dollar-based transactions.

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The axis of evil is a fantasy

By Ian Garner

But aside from the creation of the New Development Bank (NDB), which operates as an alternative to Western financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank, little has been done so far in terms of creating a valid alternative to the Western international financial-monetary infrastructure — a new Bretton Woods, so to speak. Could Kazan mark the beginning of a new era in this respect? So far details have been sparse, but in recent months speculation has been rife about the Brics’ plan to launch, possibly during the summit, a full-blown new global monetary ecosystem.

This would include a much-touted “Brics currency” — a unit of account used to settle international transactions and manage balance-of-payment problems, not to be confused with an actual supranational currency à la euro — as well as a groundbreaking blockchain-based international payment system aimed at providing an alternative to existing global financial systems, such as Swift, and the dollar-based financial infrastructure. The system would use blockchain technology to enable secure, transparent and immutable payment transactions across Brics member countries. Blockchain’s decentralised nature would eliminate the need for a central intermediary, making cross-border payments more efficient and less susceptible to censorship or interference from external entities.

The proposed payment system would not only support the de-dollarisation agenda but also provide a much-needed financial safety net for countries facing Western sanctions. If successful, this initiative could become the cornerstone of a new, decentralised global financial order that relies on digital technologies to challenge the dominance of the dollar. As Oleg Barabanov, programme director of the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think tank, explains, this “could be the first step towards truly strengthening de-dollarisation within the Brics and broader non-Western world”. At the same time, countries “will retain full sovereign control over the traditional currencies of the Brics countries”.

Of course, this programme presents political as well as technical challenges. It’s important to note that not all the member states are on the same page on this issue. While Russia and China (also) want to use the Brics as a means to challenge the global dominance of the US — hence Russia’s insistence on the need for the new payment system to be completely decoupled from the dollar — not all members agree with this adversarial approach. Countries such as India, Saudi Arabia or Turkey are arguably more interested in rearranging the seats around the global table rather than building a new dining room altogether. But at a time of growing power bloc rivalry — and as the West leans more and more towards an “either you’re with us or against us” zero-sum mentality — how long will they be able to keep a foot in both shoes?

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The dawn of the Brics World Order

By Thomas Fazi

The 2024 Brics summit in Kazan couldn’t come at a more pivotal time for global geopolitics and economics. With significant economic and demographic weight, the Brics have the potential to reshape global governance, especially if they succeed in creating an alternative global financial architecture. Challenges remain, as noted, particularly in terms of managing the group’s non-hierarchical structure and accommodating the various positions of existing and aspiring members, but the Kazan summit may very well lay the groundwork for a new era in global economic relations.

How should the West react to these momentous changes? Given there’s little it can do to stop the ineluctable shift towards multipolarity, threatening countries that move away from the dollar, as Trump recently did, will only achieve the opposite effect; indeed, Western countries, especially in Europe, are already paying a high price for the West-Rest decoupling. They could choose, instead, to engage with the rest of the world on an equal footing, in the knowledge that a smaller share of global GDP doesn’t necessarily mean a lower standard of living — a lesson the Americans could learn from many European countries.

But the current geopolitical confrontation is about much than just economics. It’s about the end of five centuries of Western global dominance. And if history is anything to go by, we know that established powers rarely, if ever, accommodate the rise of other powers. No wonder, then, that the current global clashes are increasingly framed in civilisational terms. As Russia, Iran and China gather in Kazan to posit their new world order, it is quite possible that rather than auguring a new era, the meeting will be remembered as just another step on the road to conflagration — something which, arguably, is already playing out on the European eastern front as much as across the Middle East.

From the start, the investigation was a textbook cover-up. The Swedish government rushed to secure evidence, citing their putative rights under international law, consciously boxing out any sort of independent, UN-backed inspection. Of course, after gathering all the evidence, the Swedish authorities studiously did exactly nothing, only to then belatedly admit that it actually had no legal right to monopolise the information in the first place.

The Germans, for their part, were also supremely uninterested in figuring out who pulled off the worst act of industrial sabotage in living memory against their country. In fact, over the course of a year-long non-investigation, we’ve mostly been treated to leaks and off-the-record statements indicating that nobody really wants to know who blew up the pipeline. The rationale here is bluntly obvious: it would be awfully inconvenient if Germany, and the West, learned the true answer.

Thus, the recent revelation that the true mastermind behind the ongoing deindustrialisation of Germany was none other than a Ukrainian by the name of “Volodymyr Z.” must have come as an unwelcome surprise. For not only is the idea that the authorities have suddenly cracked open the Nord Stream case not credible in the slightest, but the sloppy way in which the entire country of Ukraine is now being fingered is likely not an accident. Indeed, at the same time as the ghost of Nord Stream has risen from the grave, the German government announced its plans to halve its budget for Ukraine aid: whatever is already in the pipeline will be sent over, but no new grants of equipment are forthcoming. The German government is hunkering down for increased austerity, and so it is cutting Ukraine loose.

Germany, of course, is hardly alone. Even if there were enough money to go around, Europe is increasingly not just deindustrialising but demilitarising. Its stores of ammunition and vehicles are increasingly empty, and the idea of military rearmament — that is, creating entirely new military factories and supply chains — at a time when factories are closing down across the continent due to energy shortages and lack of funding is a non-starter. Neither France, the United Kingdom nor even the United States are in a position to maintain the flow of arms to Ukraine. This is a particular concern inside Washington DC, where planners are now trying to juggle the prospect of managing three theatres of war at the same time — in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Pacific — even though US military production is arguably insufficient to comfortably handle one.

And so, in an effort to save face in this impossible situation, Ukraine is now being held solely responsible for doing something it either did not do at all, or only did with the permission, knowledge, and/or support of the broader West. This speaks to the adolescent dynamic that now governs Western foreign policy in a multipolar world: when our impotence is revealed, find someone to blame.

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How will the Ukraine war end?

By Aris Roussinos

The war in Ukraine, after all, was already supposed to be won, and Russia was supposed to be a rickety gas station incapable of matching the West either economically or militarily. Yet here we are: our own economies are deindustrialising, our military factories have proven completely incapable of handling the strain of a real conflict, and the Americans themselves are now openly admitting that the Russian military remains in a significantly stronger position. Meanwhile, Germany’s economic model is broken, and as its economy falls, it will drag many countries such as Sweden with it, given how dependent they are on exporting to German industrial firms.

10 years ago, during the 2014 Maidan protests, the realist John Mearsheimer caused a lot of controversy when he began warning that the collective West was leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and that our actions would lead to the destruction of the country. Well, here we are. At present, our only saving grace is the continuing offensive in Kursk — a bold offensive that will surely be remembered as a symptom of Ukraine’s increasing desperation.

Indeed, a far better guide of things to come can be found in the fingering of “Volodymyr Z.” as the true culprit behind the Nord Stream sabotage. Here, rather than accept responsibility for the fact that Ukraine was goaded into a war it could not win — mainly because the West vastly overestimated its own ability to fight a real war over the long haul — European geopolitical discourse will take a sharp turn towards a peculiar sort of victim-blaming. No doubt it will be “discovered” that parts of Ukraine’s military consisted of very unsavoury characters waving around Nazi Germany-style emblems, just as it will be “discovered” that journalists have been persecuted by oligarchs and criminals in Kyiv, or that money given by the West has been stolen, and that arms sent have been sold for profit to criminal cartels around the world.

All of these developments will duly be “discovered” by a Western political class that will completely refuse to accept any responsibility for them. Far easier, it seems, to calm one’s nerves with a distorting myth: it’s the Ukrainians’ fault that their country is destroyed; our choices had nothing to do with it; and besides, they were bad people who tricked us!

***

Now watch UnHerd‘s interview with the journalist behind this month’s revelations:

In Beijing, President Xi Jinping has ramped up his appeals for the creation of a “new form of human civilisation” based on a fusion of communist ideology with his own country’s ancient traditions. Meanwhile, Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei has for at least five years been urging compatriots to develop a “new Islamic-Iranian civilisation” that would integrate at a higher level the Muslim revelation and the older traditions of Persia.

What unites all these projects is a message that is at once defensive and breezily assertive. All aspire to be counterweights to the horrible hegemony of a cynical, mercantilist West, whose masters allegedly seek to iron out all forms of distinctiveness, everything that gives meaning to human life. And all exude confidence that tomorrow belongs to them.

So what, if anything, does Western civilisation have to say in its own defence? Until recently, discussions about such broad ideological questions have been rather introverted. If people argued over the usefulness, or the virtue, of “the West” as a cultural signifier, it was often in the context of narrow debates over the curriculum — or how the past should be presented through museums and monuments. Douglas Murray’s bestselling The War on the West refers more to domestic culture wars than to any global ideological contest — though he does elaborate the argument that the transgressions of the West, including colonialism and racism, have never been Western monopolies.

Given the hitherto confined nature of this debate, perhaps we should welcome an astonishing new contribution — How the World made the West — by Josephine Quinn, who has just been appointed to an ancient history chair at Cambridge. Amid an ocean of fascinating detail about little-known trading links and technological breakthroughs, she makes the impertinent argument that there is really no such thing as a civilisation, or even a distinct culture, and so there cannot be such a thing as a Western one. In her view of history, all the categories by which people have tried to organise the past melt away; there are no transmissions between cultures, but rather endless micro-transactions between individual traders, raiders and people struggling randomly to survive.

Paradoxically, her argument would be read in Beijing, Tehran or Moscow as an expression of a characteristically Western, capitalist pathology. It would be denounced as a typically arrogant effort to steamroller all difference, all the religions, traditions, proud collective memories that give sense to human communities, and to reduce humanity to an amorphous mass of pliant consumers. (To those of us who lived in Russia in the Nineties, it now feels as though the wackiest forms of anti-Western nativism and Russian Messianism — incubated, ironically, by the rollicking free speech of the Yeltsin years — have become the Muscovite mainstream.)

The author’s keenest interest is in material culture and trade, as evidenced by archaeology. She is interested in the written word not as an expression of the human spirit but as evidence for what crops were grown, what metals were smelted and what goods were traded. In the final third of the book, the emphasis switches to the transmission of ideas and inventions — stressing the contribution of brainy Muslim and Asian thinkers and mathematicians to Western Europe’s development. All good stuff.

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Why the West will refuse to fight

By Malcom Kyeyune

She reserves, however, a disproportionate opprobrium for romantic British philhellenism, for example the claim of John Stuart Mill that the battle of Marathon, in which democratic Athens triumphed over the Persians, mattered more to the story of England than did the clash at Hastings. In truth, she provocatively argues, that Greek battle could be regarded as a minor skirmish in a punitive expedition by the Persians in which many Greeks took the Persian side. And modern readers, she suggests, should find as much to admire in Persian society as among the slave-owning, sexist Athenians.

The book is presented, in part, as a critique of the “reception” of Hellenism by the post-enlightenment world. It argues that the facts of east Mediterranean history were cynically distorted by imperial Britain. Part of the distortion, she insists, lay in isolating Greece and its golden age from all the cultures with which the Greeks interacted, like the Egyptians and the Phoenicians. Or indeed from the Persians, with whom the Greek relationship — as she notes — was ambivalent not unremittingly hostile.

She is right to say that Western ideologues of the imperial and Cold-War eras reread Greek history and literature in ways that suited them. So did every other consumer of that brilliant canon. Yet over and above her provocative generalisations, there is a real question. Once you remove the liberal-imperialist lens through which Victorian Britain, and indeed Cold-War America, viewed ancient Athens, what remains of the idea of a Greek-influenced West?

Perhaps the first point to make is that golden-age Hellenism is not a monolithic phenomenon. It is a vast range of superbly expressed feelings and opinions. The elitist idealism of Plato differs from the empirical rationalism of Aristotle. The formal Athenian patriotism of Aeschylus (which does not exclude a human empathy for the Persian dead) is different from the mischievous scepticism of fellow dramatist Euripides. The variety of worldviews is enormous.

Professor Quinn writes with compelling passion about the way in which coastal communities — for example on Crete — “picked and chose” from the products and technology, and the religious and cultural practices, offered by trading partners across the sea. It is equally the case that modern Westerners — like everybody else — have picked and chosen from the cultural and metaphysical resources offered by the classical world, and Greece in particular. But the availability of that treasure-chest mattered; it was not trivial.

Nor, it should be said, did the Anglo-Saxon reception of Greek history begin or end with Mill. It was in 1628 that Thomas Hobbes translated Thucydides, delivering a landmark in English prose and political thought. In the 20th century, the Irish-born leftist E.R. Dodds offered a counterblast to conservative philhellenism in The Greeks and the Irrational. Elsewhere in Western Europe, leading interpreters of ancient Athens have included French Marxists who adored Plato.

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The West has a deviancy problem

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Distilling all this, there is surely one feature of ancient Athens whose influence on the modern West remains palpable and worth defending against its many enemies, including those who counter-propose one or other form of authoritarianism. That feature is the ability of a highly sophisticated society to question and laugh at itself; to subject powerful individuals to public scrutiny, accountability and ridicule; to engage in robust public debate in the hope that good information will drive out bad. The British Victorians only partly understood this; they read the comedies of Aristophanes with the naughtier bits excised.

The collective West is of course guilty of many historic sins, but it differs from totalitarian societies and resembles democratic Athens in the way it still (just about) retains the capacity for self-scrutiny, self-correction and no-holds-barred discussion. It is unlikely that a history professor in Russia, China or Iran would remain in place long after publishing a book arguing that their country’s civilisation was actually an illusion. Perhaps there is something magnificent about the fact that a book so wildly iconoclastic as Quinn’s can be published, and taken seriously: a perverse proof that the Periclean West is alive, so much so that people can deny its existence with cheerful impunity.

Still, the book’s relatively uncritical reception, hailing its boldest claims as well as its incontestable virtues, risks persuading some of the world’s authoritarians that the defence of liberal democracy is now a spent force. The Guardian’s reviewer, for example, hails the book as a “brilliant and learned challenge to modern western chauvinism”. Brilliant and learned some of its insights assuredly are, but is “western chauvinism” still such a terrible, untamed beast that it needs to be attacked in long and learned polemics? That need was more evident in 1969, when Kenneth Clark launched his purring televised perorations on art history from the banks of the Seine. Or even in 1990, when the Cold War’s outcome triggered an unhealthy hubris, as the Greeks would have said. Now, maybe not so much.

So what then will be the reaction to the book and its reception from the geopolitical enemies of Western civilisation, who think it exists and want to destroy it — not just intellectually but physically?

To them, it may now seem as though today’s Western commentariat resembles the late Roman community so vividly described by the poet Cavafy: people jaded with cultural and political sophistication who are waiting, rather eagerly, for barbarians who offer “some kind of a solution” to life’s tedium.

The more important question, however, is this: what will the West itself do now?

Launched from land, sea and air, the attack was unprecedented in both scale and barbarity. It was a display of Isis-like savagery. But it was also the culmination of a sophisticated military operation, probably months in the planning and aided by at least one foreign power. As a result, more than 800 Israelis have been slaughtered, and no doubt more will follow in the days and weeks to come. Again: how could Israel, with its vast intelligence apparatus and decades of experience, let this happen?

The obvious answer — at least the one doing the rounds of the think tanks in Europe and America — is that Israel was distracted. And when facing such determined enemies as Hamas and Iran, who are always on the lookout for the perfect moment to strike, distraction amounts to suicide.

There is certainly some truth to this. As Abraham Lincoln put it, “a house divided against itself cannot stand”. Israel, riven by internal discord over Netanyahu’s attempted reform of its supreme court, has been hamstrung for months. Instead of looking outwards to the existential threats on and within its borders, politicians have been infighting over judicial reform. And when the leadership of a civilian-led democracy becomes obsessed with such a complex issue, who leads the military? What good can tomorrow’s justices do for today’s victims of terrorism?

Yet the danger of distraction is not merely an Israeli one. It is just as prevalent, if not more so, in the US-led Western world. In recent years, old fronts have opened in the clash of civilisations (Samuel Huntington is proved more correct by the day). America is now involved indirectly in battles against Putin’s Russia and Iran-backed Hamas, while China is watching closely, perhaps eyeing up Taiwan. Between Khamenei, Putin and Xi, the new anti-Western Axis looks increasingly threatening. And how do we respond?

We can be partly grateful that both the UK and US have pledged to support Israel, as they pledged support for Ukraine against Putin. But these are not difficult decisions to make. A few words here; a press conference there. This is no substitute for strategy which, at present, is sorely missing.

In the UK, the two major political parties are busying themselves with the circus that is conference season, doing their best to emerge with some semblance of respectability. (Judging by the pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the Labour Conference yesterday, Keir Starmer has his work cut out.) In the US, the situation inspires even less confidence. While the Democrats see the return of Trump to the White House as a threat to democracy itself and the Republicans view 2024 as a test of election integrity, America’s enemies continue to circle, looking for an opening. The House of Representatives lacks a Speaker. A government shutdown seems inevitable. We are distracted, and they know it. In my view, it was as much the distraction of the West as the distraction of Israel’s politicians that emboldened Hamas and its backers to launch their war of terror.

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Israel and the rise of a new world order

By David Patrikarakos

None of this is to say that the issues that dominate the media cycle and political discourse are not important: immigration, crime, the climate. But are they existential? Certainly not when compared with the threat posed to Israel by its malevolent neighbours; and certainly not when compared with the threat of an emboldened Middle East to a West that has grown complacent about the threat of terrorism. In a well-functioning democracy, there would be clarity about the need to support Israel with more than fine words. We would not ramp up the rhetoric to the apocalyptic; we would not distract ourselves with internecine infighting.

Just look at how the West has attempted — and failed — to process the carnage in Israel. Caught in a Manichean trap that prioritises moral certainty over reality, anti-Israel activists have succeeded in distracting us further. They distort reality by pretending Israel is simply paying the price for its aggression; that it must, as former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn put it, end its “occupation” of Gaza. (Ironically, these very same people tend to be the ones warning Israel not to launch an invasion of Gaza — is it occupied or not?) Further distraction follows: in the form of protests outside Israeli embassies, in those contortions that enable activists to justify attacks on Jewish shops and restaurants.

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Is Israel prepared for war?

By Gregg Calstrom

As a result, many people are unable to agree on the few facts in this interminable conflict that are clear: that Hamas is driven more by its hatred of Jewish people than its love for the Palestinians; that Hamas routinely kills, tortures and persecutes Palestinians who seek peace with Israel; that, well before Hamas paraded the dead bodies of Israeli women down its streets, it used Palestinian children as human shields.

And now, there is the fact that Iran, Russia and China are looking on with glee. They see anarchy in Israel and a weeping wound in the Western alliance. The palaces of Tehran, Moscow and Beijing are all looking West, and what do they see? Activists in Time Square calling another intifada, Jewish schoolchildren being told not to wear their uniform, national broadcasters giving airtime to Hamas apologists. Our weakness is plain for the world to see.

So the West must decide. Do we degenerate into quarrelling factions or do we reassert our enduring values and highest ideals on the global stage? Do we stand with Israel in action as in word or do we fall into a chasm of distraction and division? This might just be the most important choice our generation makes.

At its most extreme, this focus descends into a postmodern oblivion: a world where everything is narrative and there is no difference between Newton’s Principia Mathematica and Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Yet this does not mean that narrative analysis is useless. Quite the opposite, in fact.

For more than a decade, our ability to form a coherent narrative about ourselves has been degrading. By “our”, I mean the West, which emerged in its current form in 1945 after three decades of war, desolation, and economic upheaval. The narrative that it told itself was crystalised during the Cold War: that the West would stand for liberty and freedom against the very live totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.

But this framework crumbled together with the Berlin Wall and the fall of communism. Overnight, a new narrative was needed, and it didn’t take long for one to emerge. The post-Cold War narrative formed in response to the Gulf War in 1990, when Saddam Hussein’s Iraq aggressively attacked Kuwait, principally with an eye to seizing its oil reserves. The United States and a 42-country coalition intervened, the Iraqis were soon pushed back, and Kuwait was allowed to govern itself. Here was the seed of the new narrative: the West, having won the Cold War, would keep the peace in the new status quo.

This updated founding myth required a domestic component — something tangible at home — and it found it in the ideology of the New Economy, which emphasised the transition of Western developed nations from highly industrialised economies to more technologically driven ones. This idea grew organically with the computer revolution, a loosening of financial and trade regulations, and the feelgood vibes of the Nineties’ economic boom. This was a world where Bill Clinton played the saxophone as the stock market rocketed.

By the early 2000s, however, this post-Cold War narrative started to fracture. The first blow was the collapse of the New Economy ideology as a massive bubble in the stock market unwound at the turn of the millennium. And then, three years later, came the invasion of Iraq. This intervention was very unlike the first Gulf War in which Hussein had clearly acted as the aggressor. This time, the conflict was instigated by Britain and the United States, opposed by many European countries, and was justified based on false, made-to-order intelligence — the now infamous “dodgy dossier”.

Still, even with these tremors, our narrative broadly held together: economic growth continued apace, and the war gave rise to an anti-war movement that would eventually produce future President Barack Obama. But then came the next hit — a real hammer blow. In 2008, as housing markets collapsed across the world, much of the growth of the 2000s turned out to be fake, fuelled as it was by housing debt. More debilitatingly, the impressive financial architecture that had sprung up as the sector was liberalised turned out to be rotten.

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Niger and the collapse of France's empire

By Thomas Fazi

But all was not yet lost, as two movements emerged out of the ashes of the 2008 collapse: the Right-wing populist movement and the Left-wing populist movement. The former, associated mostly with the Tea Party movement in the United States, saw the government and corporations as corrupt interlopers. Its Left-wing cousin, associated with the rise of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, saw things the same way. The two movements only differed on preferred solutions, with the Left wanting a more interventionist approach and the Right wanting to cut down on the state and promote market competition.

In the subsequent years, its Left-wing incarnation has mostly disappeared. In the US, it was absorbed back into the mainstream of the Democratic Party, won over with promises of radical social and cultural agendas that did not interfere with the economic bottom line. In the UK, the Corbyn movement collapsed in a wave of scandal, and a slightly confused group of Blairites seized the reins.

Meanwhile, the Right-populist movement mutated. Driven largely by the Brexit movement and the rise of Donald Trump, it dropped many of its more libertarian-leaning firebrands and became more pragmatic. It no longer wanted, say, tax cuts for the sake of tax cuts. Rather, it wanted cultural and economic rejuvenation. Taking place against a backdrop of severe and ever-increasing social and economic problems, this evolution was far from a surprise.

Today, however, there is reason to believe that the Right-populist movement has also failed. Donald Trump won the presidency, but he did not produce much in the way of constructive change. What happened instead is that the American political system became highly unstable, and many of the previously existing norms that held it together started to dissolve. This reached its crescendo in recent weeks with the arrest and indictment of Trump, an anarchic blip from which the country is unlikely to ever recover.

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Stormtrooper Syndrome has seduced the West

By John Michael Greer

In Britain, the Brexit movement got its way and, after years of bickering, the Conservative Party eventually managed to pull the country out of the European Union. Once again, though, nothing changed. The economy did not take off like a rocket. Mass immigration increased rather than decreased. Right-populist cultural and institutional concerns remain as they had before Brexit. At the same time, nothing catastrophic happened either. The Remainers who promised economic collapse and a sharp fall in trade with Europe were wrong. None of this happened. Indeed, nothing happened.

In both the UK and US, then, there is reason to think that we have no real coherent narrative. No one is sure where to go next or what to believe. And as three recent events have demonstrated, this noxious position is already causing serious dysfunction in our political culture.

The first was the Covid-19 outbreak and the responses in the form of the lockdowns and the vaccines. Compare this traumatic incident with, say, the Iraq War. Today, most people in the West agree that the Iraq War was a mistake; it was tragic and produced a terrible aftermath, and we have managed to come to terms with it. If you were to sit down at a dinner table full of strangers, you would all broadly know what the narrative is on the Iraq War — and so you can discuss it. Yet this is not the case with Covid-19 and the government’s response to it. There is no accepted narrative. Did we beat the virus with our prudent and rational response? Or did we overreact and create havoc? There is no settled answer, so it festers.

The second of these events was the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline last year. Once again, we have no official or widely accepted narrative of what happened. Most people appreciate that it was an enormous development that will have tremendous economic and geopolitical ramifications in the coming years. Yet we do not have a coherent narrative of why the pipeline was destroyed, who destroyed it, and what this means. Instead, conspiratorial thinking permeates and, as with Covid-19, it festers.

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Why Ukraine's offensive has stalled

By Edward Luttwak

Then, at the start of summer, there was the march of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Russia’s Wagner private military company, on Moscow. As it happened, the media went into overdrive. We were told that a world-changing coup was unfolding; a major historic event, possibly of the magnitude of the collapse of the Soviet Union, was taking place before our eyes. But then, once again, nothing happened. Prigozhin stopped, apologised, and went to Belarus with some of his troops. The conclusion was inconclusive; there is no coherent narrative about what happened. We cannot digest it, and so it festers.

In turn, each of these world-changing moments confirmed that narrative breaks are becoming more frequent as time marches forward. The recent coup in Niger demonstrates this once again, exposing uncomfortable truths about French-African relations that we would prefer to ignore. And yet, as we try to ignore it, our global influence ebbs. Increasingly, major events — or pseudo-events — are taking place in the world and provoking impassioned reactions, but then seem to lead into a ditch of unmeaning.

And then what happens? After the initial passion or even hysteria, people are forced to move on without processing what has just happened. In other words, we, as a society, advance without forming a coherent, broadly accepted narrative. We drift on, allowing doubt to fester, paralysed by a sneaking suspicion that the West is losing the plot.

Both responses were entirely predictable; and both suffer from a similar misapprehension about the emerging paradigm of international relations today and the structural shifts on the horizon.

From the Euro-Atlantic standpoint, the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a galvanising event. The war reforged a long-dormant Manichaean framing of existential conflict between Russia and the “West”. What is, for Ukraine, a physical and territorial conflict thus assumed ontological, apocalyptic dimensions. In the spiritual fires of the war, the myth of the “West” was rebaptised. For a Nato that was seeking a mission ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, here was an opportunity to renew its institutional and ideological rationale, as well as to project solidarity in an the face of an emergency crisis.

From the perspective of America’s elites, meanwhile, the Ukraine war has underscored Europe’s profound military dependence on Washington and further reinforced the US-centric basis of transatlantic relations. Not only did it ostensibly justify their long-held position that Europe must pay a much larger share for the privileges of a US security guarantee, but the debate over the strategic worth of Nato and its enlargement was effectively silenced. Since the invasion, the alliance has already expanded to Finland, while Sweden remains in the process of accession. All of this was cause for celebration, if not triumphalism, in liberal internationalist circles: America, along with the Western order it sponsors against great power challengers such as China, appeared to be vindicated.

It was not surprising, then, that Macron’s remarks drew the ire of the Atlanticist foreign policy establishment, who not only falsely conflate the transatlantic relationship with Nato and measure its health in terms of Nato’s strength and durability but, crucially, have also internalised America’s Wilsonian and “Nato-centric” approach to European security. For them, the endurance of Nato as a permanent alliance serves as an effective hedge to the formation of a European defence force independent of Washington. Yet, the alliance is also an instrument for continued American influence over European policy. As Ronald Steel presciently wrote in the Sixties: “There is more than one kind of empire, more than one way of exerting control over others, and more than one justification for doing so.”

In his war memoirs, former French general and president Charles de Gaulle certainly agreed, calling Nato a “false pretence” designed to “disguise America’s chokehold over Europe”. The Americans, he argued, “should recognise that the United States’ best ally is not the one who grovels before them, but the one who knows how to say no to them”. Yet, de Gaulle, a proud European aristocrat who had had to deal with an imperious Franklin Roosevelt during the Second World War, was also more pessimistic about the future direction of US policy, fearing Americans had developed “that taste for intervention in which the instinct for domination cloaked itself”.

Across the Atlantic, de Gaulle’s views found parallels with those of America’s original cold warriors, such as George Kennan and Dwight D. Eisenhower. “If in 10 years”, observed then-Presidential-candidate Eisenhower in 1951, “all American troops stationed in Europe for national defence purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole [Nato] project will have failed”. Recognising the strategic value of the Europeans as equal and sovereign partners, Eisenhower understood that US policy should aim to foster a separate transnational defence force in Western Europe with the capacity to eventually become fully self-reliant.

Some seven decades later, it appears we have gone full circle. More than a year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the sense of consensus produced by the tragic war is slowly dissipating. As French President Emmanuel Macron noted, with America shifting its strategic focus to Asia, the question of European strategic autonomy is no longer academic but vital if Europe wants to be one of the “poles” in the emerging multipolar world, rather than a vassal of Washington.

Yet there is also a different, more complex story here, too. Notwithstanding their questionable practicality, recent calls for a collective defence initiative premised on European unity and its claims to shared identity paradoxically suffer from a globalist and Caesarist predisposition: not only are they wedded to the project of European integration designed to keep Franco-German elites in a position of primacy, but their cast of mind seems entranced by the notion of great power competition on a global scale.

Indeed, Macron has internalised the epistemological basis of modern international relations theory and its stubborn fixation on global realpolitik. This reflects the far-too-common modern bias towards the world as the spatial setting of choice for both life and strife. “The fundamental event of modernity”, as Heidegger wrote, “is the conquest of the world as picture.” Within this distortive vision, to stay relevant, an entity — whether individual, national, or organisational — must develop the capacity to influence the global, because one draws existential meaning from the hope of mastering the world as such.

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However, the return of geopolitics and militarisation to Europe has also exposed the reality of internal competition between the different blocs of states over the contours of any collective agenda — a reality that will inevitably force a more inward reckoning about what it means to be European. While Macron is focused on the projection or exteriorisation of European power to compete on a world scale, the interiorisation of Europe is more likely — a process forming new axes and blocs in response to the new regional and geopolitical realities in the continent.

In fact, for all the talk of Western unity inspired by the war in Ukraine, we are beginning to see cracks in the ranks within the Nato alliance. There are two main reasons for this. First, the American push for Nato expansion since 1991 has enlarged the alliance by adding a host of faultline states or “regional balancers” from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The strategy, which began with the Clinton administration but was fully championed by the George W. Bush administration, was to create a decidedly pro-American pillar on the continent centred on Warsaw, which would force an eastward shift in the alliance’s centre of gravity away from the traditional Franco-German axis.

By using Nato enlargement to weaken the old power centres in Europe that might have occasionally stood up to it (such as in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq), Washington ensured a more compliant Europe in the short-term. The upshot, however, was the formation of a 31-member behemoth made up of three distinct categories of states with deep asymmetries of power and low compatibility of interests. As I recently argued with Zachary Paikin:

“The alliance now essentially consists of three tiers: a globe-spanning and maritime great power, the United States (with its closely-aligned Anglo partners in Canada and the UK); a number of continental ‘middle powers‘ with different views on the desirability or viability of the US-led postwar international order including France, Germany, and Turkey; and a collection of states in and around the post-Soviet space led by Poland, which serve as ‘regional balancers’ against both historical European powers and Russia.”

Nato, as a consequence, has become a highly heterogeneous alliance, in which members have different security priorities and threat perceptions, increasing the likelihood of irreconcilable rifts between Western European states and their CEE counterparts, especially as the United States pivots to the Pacific. In other words, Nato’s very expansion could likely be the cause of its ultimate breakdown into at least two different alliance structures, ententes, or minilateral regional arrangements.

Meanwhile, the nominally North Atlantic military alliance is no longer confined to the European theatre, let alone its original basis in Western Europe and the Atlantic region. By adopting US policy priorities since the Cold War, the alliance has metastasised into a global collective military conglomerate that not only extends to Eastern Europe but stretches across Eurasia and into the Pacific, with its latest outpost just opening in Japan.

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Although CEE leaders such as Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki continue to double down on the United States as “the absolute foundation” of security in “our part of Europe”, most European nations still choose to placate Washington, even if they have little interest in stepping up the escalation ladder in places such as Taiwan. Predictably, the imperative one feels to project solidarity with Washington lessens the further West one goes in Europe and the further away one gets from the ontological presence of the Russian threat.

While Macron espouses a pan-European, EU-centric model of security through which he hopes to leverage France as a major power on the world stage, the reality is that the EU’s institutional sovereignty cuts against the geopolitical interests and national sovereignty of smaller member states — and more acutely so given that a similar “Easternisation” has also occurred in relation to the EU with Ukraine, Moldova and even Georgia slated to become future member states. While they are much more likely to fear abandonment by Washington, these post-Soviet states are, ironically, far more sovereigntist, conservative, and nationalistic, tending to resist the liberal institutionalist and integrationist agenda of their Western European counterparts. Indeed, the frenzied backlash to Macron’s warnings about European entanglement in Taiwan suggests that a power struggle may already be underway in the EU. As such, the entrenched disagreements over a shared EU strategy toward China could well become the catalyst for a future split in Europe along a West-East axis.

Ultimately, the return of geopolitics catapulted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has meant that the proper expanse of “Europe” as well as its security identity is once again in doubt. This is a tale of divergent strategic interests among competing “allies” seeking to secure one another’s conformity: each side looking to impose their interests and ontological vision as the sine qua non of the Western alliance.

And, over the medium to long term, this new reality informs European states’ relations both toward external actors and among themselves. On the one hand, continental Europe must determine the proper scope of its relationship with the United States (and the Atlanticist Anglosphere). On the other, it must increasingly contend with the divergent approaches toward Moscow by Eastern and Western factions which will likely also affect their future postures toward Beijing (the former seeking the complete expulsion of Russia from European affairs, the latter hoping for an eventual normalisation of relations).

As it struggles to resolve the Russia question, Europe thus finds itself having to re-examine its identity as a distinct cultural and geopolitical realm, recalibrate its proper boundaries, and discover its strategic orientation (and voice) vis-à-vis a “collective West” premised on US-led Atlanticism. It is here that the continent’s long history might serve as a guide.

As it expanded, the Roman Empire simply became too large, finding it difficult to reconcile the increasingly incompatible priorities of its different regions. Overextension has always been the mother of entropy, and the declining Roman Empire lacked the resources and military capacity to respond in a unified way to the disparate security concerns of its eastern and western quadrants. This was perhaps the primary reason why Emperor Theodosius formalised an already-growing division between the two halves of the Roman world, so that each could better respond to its immediate security challenges. While the West remained preoccupied with ongoing economic problems and barbarian incursions along the Germanic frontier, the East organised itself to confront the persistent challenge of its peer-competitor, the Sassanian Empire. Simply put, the Romans had to split into two Romes in order to more effectively meet a plethora of systemic challenges.

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The Roman example is certainly not a perfect analogy for today’s Europe, but it is instructive. Present-day Europe is much more stable and formidable compared to the late Roman era, with neither bloc facing the prospect of imminent collapse. Nevertheless, as with the late Rome, today a split along the Franco-German and Polish axes would reflect the differing strategic priorities of the two sides. Over time, this might mean the expiration of Nato as a project and its replacement by two alternate minilateral security ententes — one in Western Europe centred on Germany and France and the other in Northeast Europe anchored in Poland and the Baltic states sympathetic to it.

In any such future realignment, the German question remains the key conundrum. There, the rise of the Green Party, personified by the über-hawk and Americanist foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, is outrightly undermining Germany’s concrete national interest and industrial sector. Under the cover of “Europeanism”, such German liberal internationalists are engaged in a sort of a Faustian bargain with the United States and its key CEE allies in which Berlin acquiesces to Nato’s eastward shift in Europe for the sake of greater control over the defence and economic imperatives of the alliance. This is unsustainable in the long term, not only because it is wholly dependent on America’s continuing presence in Europe but also as it contradicts the interests of Western Europeans, who would have to bankroll and sustain the military austerities which the East needs to confront a Russian threat that Western populations do not feel nearly as acutely.

Since the Second World War, partly as a result of the Cold War’s legacy and partly due to unrelenting Anglo-American interference, Europe is no longer the primary mover of world affairs. Instead, it has devolved into a regional theatre akin to the Middle East, in which competition among other great powers — for many decades Washington and Moscow — takes centre stage.

If this is to change — if Europe is to recover its geopolitical distinctiveness — its political leaders must first recognise that it is not a monolith, but a mosaic composed of different blocs. The idea of the “West” might be ontologically alluring or comforting in times of chaos and tragedy, but it is an illusion that weaponises collective paranoia for ideological unity, designed to decentre Europe and disenfranchise its various elements from pursuing their particular interests that may or may not oppose America’s crusades for global primacy.

At the same time, Washington, too, must adapt to the structural shifts and the increasing regionalisation that are shaping a polycentric world based around civilisational middle powers. Just as “Nato unity” is a mirage that is meant to rhetorically mask the shaky foundations of Western universalism as underwritten by US power, “European identity” is an equally ambiguous and problematic notion because, geopolitically speaking, there are at least two Europes with diverging security interests, value systems, and cultural pedigree. Choosing to ignore this division amounts to nothing more than kicking the can down the road — and risks breaking apart the Western alliance itself.

Despite the West’s attempts to “globalise” the conflict, only 33 nations — representing just over one-eighth of the global population — have imposed sanctions on Russia and sent military aid to Ukraine: the UK, US, Canada, Australia, South Korea, Japan and the EU — in other words, those countries that are directly under the US sphere of influence, which in many cases involves a significant US military presence. The remaining nations, comprising close to 90% of the world’s population, have refused to follow suit. If anything, the war has actually strengthened Russian relations with a number of major non-Western countries, including China and India, and accelerated the rise of a new international order in which it is the West that looks increasingly isolated, not Russia.

Since the invasion, China has hugely increased its purchases of Russian oil, gas and coal, while exporting far more machinery, manufactured products and high-end electronics in the other direction; they have boosted their bilateral trade by more than 30%. The two countries have also committed to significant investment and infrastructure projects through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the world’s largest regional grouping in terms of geographic scope and population, which also includes India, Pakistan, Iran and all the major Central Asian republics. Moreover, as a result of Western sanctions, they have been forced to rely on rouble-yuan trade instead of using the dollar, which has enhanced the yuan’s reserve currency status.

On last month’s anniversary of the Russian invasion, Wang Yi, Beijing’s most senior diplomat, said that China was committed to “strengthen[ing] and deepen[ing] the Sino-Russian friendship” and “promot[ing] mutually beneficial cooperation in all areas”. Even more significantly, the two countries have increasingly been speaking with one voice about the need for a more balanced international order, explicitly framing their collaboration as one aimed at weakening the West’s dominance in global affairs. China, in particular, has implicitly embraced Russia’s view, espoused by foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, that “this is not about Ukraine at all… It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like”. In this context, it should come as no surprise that Beijing and Moscow have maintained the steady pace of their joint military exercises, nor that Xi is due to meet Putin in Moscow today.

America’s increasingly aggressive posture towards China has only fuelled the perception, among Beijing’s elites, that they are united with Russia against the West in an existential fight for survival. Xi recently issued an unusually blunt rebuke of US policy, in which he accused Washington of being engaged in a campaign to suppress China: “Western countries — led by the US — have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development,” he was quoted as saying by state media. This represents a significant departure from China’s traditionally measured approach. It followed the publication, by China’s foreign ministry, of an unusually critical document titled US Hegemony and Its Perils, which claimed that America has “acted… to interfere in the internal affairs of other countries, pursue, maintain and abuse hegemony, advance subversion and infiltration, and willfully wage wars, bringing harm to the international community”.

The problem for the US, and for the West, is that this message is starting to resonate around the world. Many non-Westerners feel that the US is in no position to lecture other countries about the sanctity of sovereignty, territorial integrity, international law and the so-called rules-based order. They recognise that the US has violated these principles before — most recently with the disastrous invasions and bombing campaigns against Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. This is why the West’s attempt to frame the conflict in Ukraine as a moral struggle of “good versus evil” elicits unease among many non-Westerners, especially in those countries that have been on the receiving end of Western colonial endeavours.

For instance, The Washington Post marked last month’s anniversary by publishing a series of interviews with people in South Africa, India and Kenya; it concluded that they hold “a deeply ambivalent view of the conflict, informed less by the question of whether Russia was wrong to invade than by current and historical grievances against the West”. It is one of several African countries that have refused to side with Kyiv.

For several countries, it’s not just that they’re unwilling to sacrifice their own interests for Ukraine; it’s partly about taking a stand against the West. As Clement Manyathela, a popular South African radio host, explained: “When America went into Iraq, when America went into Libya, they had their own justifications that we didn’t believe, and now they’re trying to turn the world against Russia…. I still don’t see any justification for invading a country, but we cannot be dictated to about the Russian moves on Ukraine. I honestly feel the US was trying to bully us.”

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that South Africa is among those countries which have chosen to strengthen ties with Russia. During a visit by Lavrov in January, the South African foreign minister Naledi Pandor referred to the two nations as “friends” and hailed their “growing economic bilateral relationship”, along with their “political, economic, social, defence and security cooperation”. Most conspicuously, South Africa joined last month’s military exercises with Russia and China.

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India has also openly defied the West on Ukraine. It recently announced that its trade with Russia had grown 400% since the invasion, mostly due to a 700% increase in its import of petroleum-related products — a result of its refusal to abide by the Western-imposed Russian oil price cap. Russia also remains India’s largest arms supplier. In an effort to justify these decisions, India’s government has assumed an explicit narrative about the historic significance of its break with Western foreign policy diktats. As Venkatesh Varma, India’s former ambassador to Russia, wrote last month: “In not accepting the Western framing of the Ukraine conflict… India stood its ground and that ground raised India’s global stature.”

How long will this last? Recent developments certainly aren’t tipping the global balance in favour of the West. On the one hand, it is becoming increasingly apparent that Nato’s strategy in Ukraine isn’t working: not only is Ukraine facing heavy losses, while the West unable to keep up with Ukrainian demands for ammunition and equipment, but the sanctions have hurt Western countries, as well as developing ones. On the other, the financial crisis triggered by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is yet another reminder of the intrinsic instability of the West’s hyper-financialised brand of capitalism.

Only last week, America’s global standing took another hit with the signing of a historic agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia brokered by China (while, it should be noted, the Saudi foreign minister was in Moscow). As part of the deal, Iran has agreed to stop arming Houthis in Yemen, potentially paving the way to a resolution to the nine-year-long Yemeni war. Writing in Newsweek, David H. Rundell, a former chief of mission at the American Embassy in Saudi Arabia explained that the deal will be seen as “a watershed moment for Chinese influence in the Middle East”, while further eroding America’s already poor reputation in the region.

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All these developments suggest a radical geopolitical realignment is underway which is hastening the demise of American global supremacy. This is confirmed in a recent global study carried out by the EU-funded European Council on Foreign Relations — tellingly titled “United West, divided from the rest”. It found that, while the US and Europe are growing closer, they are increasingly politically alienated from the rest of the world. The proxy war in Ukraine “marks both the consolidation of the West and the emergence of the long-heralded post-Western international order”, characterised by a strong desire for a more even distribution of global power among multiple countries — namely, multipolarity. It concludes that, even if Ukraine somehow managed to win the war, “it is highly unlikely” that a US-led liberal world order will be restored. Instead, “the West will have to live as one pole of a multipolar world”.

It confirmed the findings of a second study, carried out by the University of Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy last October which was based on data from 137 countries that represent 97% of world population. While some upper-income countries in South America, the Asia-Pacific and Eastern Europe have become more pro-American, it concluded that “across a vast span of countries stretching from continental Eurasia to the north and west of Africa, we find the opposite —  societies that have moved closer to China and Russia over the course of the last decade”. For the first time, China and Russia are now narrowly ahead of the US in their popularity among developing countries — that is, among the overwhelming majority of the world’s population.

Today, as Xi and Putin sit down to discuss the future of Ukraine, the implication of this is clear. China and Russia are not decoupling from the West; rather, the West is decoupling from the rest of the world.

The Western way of life that flowed out of Texas came to take oil for granted. At any time when supply was abundant, few stopped to think about its production. For consumers, oil life was a practically easy life. It was as if, as the Italian novelist Italo Calvino wrote in his short story ‘The Petrol Pump’, energy was “unconditionally and endlessly at your service”. But that notion rested on a colossal illusion given that producing oil took place in a world of destructive chaos. It was no easy thing to extract the sun’s energy from finite organic matter trapped on the seabed for millions of years before there was any form of human life.

Wildcatters like Higgins understood this reality. For them, oil invoked dreads far removed from the chimerical promise of modernity. Since it bent cosmic time, oil could not be trusted. As one witness to a later gusher mused: “Whenever you punch a hole so deep into the ground that oil pops out, Hades come with it. And the more oil, the more Hades.” This equation of oil with Hades contained multiple meanings. At its simplest, it mythically rendered the origins of oil in the underworld of the dead. In blowing away the river that separates the world of the living from the world of the dead, oil accelerated the temporal vanity of all mortal aspiration.

In Pennsylvania and Texas, long-standing rural settlements became fleetingly rich oil towns and then, when the oil fields were depleted, wastelands. Oil encouraged the wildcatters to speculate with borrowed capital against the arbitrary whims of geology and the market power of Standard Oil, inevitably risking their own financial and moral ruin. Since oil wells were highly combustible, drilling for oil also summoned Hades conceived as the Christian inferno of Hell. For many of the wildcatters, to bring Hades into play was to invite the End Times both as the Day of Judgement and the final consummation of the world in fire. To take a verse from Proverbs 27, it constituted a world where: “Hell and destruction are never full; so the eyes are men are never satisfied.”

The wildcatters’ treks westward with this kind of consciousness became part of a potent cultural American imaginary around the temporal instability of oil and its elemental power to poison the earth and corrupt human beings. Three stories told over the course of 20th-century America are particularly revealing: Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!, the 1956 film Giant, and CBS’s original Dallas show which began in 1978. Each mediates on oil’s demonic power. Linked as they are by the initials JR for a protagonist, they build on each other to form a saga about the afterlife of Spindletop.

The never-ending search for oil and the risk of fire when it is found constantly always encroaches on the sanctity of the land. In Oil!, wildcatter J. Arnold Ross lies to acquire a goat-ranch on which to drill for oil in a place called Paradise in California. He wants to pass on the oil empire he builds to his son Bunny; at the novel’s end the Paradise wells have gone up in flames. In Giant, the old-moneyed Bick Benedict initially renounces the wealth drilling on his ranch would bring. After he surrenders, he insists, that “all this oil around here hasn’t made a lot of difference. We live pretty much the way we always have.” But he speaks lounging in a new swimming pool and behind him the once pristine terrain has been transformed by hundreds of oil derricks. Dallas, meanwhile, persistently returns to the tension between Ewing Oil, the family business, and Southfork, the cattle ranch where the warring Ewings live. The patriarch, Jock Ewing, owns Ewing Oil. His wife, Miss Ellie, owns Southfork. In one of the show’s finest episodes, a heartbroken Miss Ellie chooses to end her father’s prohibition on drilling for oil on Southfork in order to save Ewing Oil from bankruptcy.

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For individuals to touch oil in these stories is to live in spiritual danger. In Oil! those ranchers offered leases for drilling on their lands find “their frail human nature … subjected to a strain greater than it was made for”. J. Arnold Ross dies in exile in Europe when the real-world Teapot dome scandal — in which President Warren Harding’s Interior Secretary handed out leases on land that had been naval oil reserves to two oil companies for bribes — catches up with him.

In Giant, wildcatter Jett Rink is played by James Dean over the last months of his life with a doomed, unearthly beauty. An oil-saturated Jett declaims after his gusher goes up: “You all thought old Spindletop… was all the oil there was didn’t you. But I’m here to tell you it ain’t. … I’m a rich un.” He becomes the richest man in Texas. But he is last seen fallen to the ground drunk in an empty hall where there was supposed to be a banquet to celebrate the dedication of the Jett Rink airport.

Under the guise of a soap opera, Dallas created the darkest mythology about oil’s ruinous power. All the principal characters live with the demon of Ewing Oil and one way or another they are all destroyed by it. On the surface, there is a duality between two brothers, the elder — JR — who is evil, and the younger — Bobby — who is good. But while Bobby is a much better family man than JR, the closer Bobby gets to oil the more the fraternal polarity falls away. In what was Dallas’s best season, the competition between the brothers for control of the company after Jock’s death simultaneously corrupts Bobby’s character and reveals the ambition behind his righteousness, costing him his marriage.

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Oil ultimately destroys the Ewings as a family and eventually it consumes Ewing Oil itself. The Ewing men go to the brink and pull back only for the cycle to start again more hopelessly. The oil past always has more pull for the Ewings than the oil present. As the show constantly reminds the viewer, Jock Ewing founded Ewing Oil as a wildcatter in the Thirties. When the show starts, Jock is newly retired, and JR is running the company after, as JR once puts it, “the sudden devaluation of the Ewing dollar”: the world where the US must import huge quantities of oil. Jock is glorified as a symbol of a lost past, “the kind of man who made Texas great”. JR is a charismatic anti-hero, constantly improvising as much abroad as at home. JR’s eyes always want more. His ways court disaster for Ewing Oil. But for a while they just as regularly rescue it.

The tide decisively turns against the Ewings in the tenth season, set against the backdrop of the 1986 oil price crash, which devastated the Texas oil industry. JR manoeuvres to blow up Saudi fields to force up prices. When the blowback endangers all the Ewings, Miss Ellie tells her sons that Ewing Oil should have died with their father. Not for the first time, Bobby tries to get out. His wife Pam is proud he has put his “whole house in order”. But oil time has accelerated well beyond Bobby’s belated moral epiphanies. Before Bobby can sell his Ewing Oil shares, the Justice Department announces an investigation into JR’s Middle Eastern ventures. In the ‘Fall of the House of Ewing’, the Justice Department closes down Ewing Oil, and the assets of the once wildcatting company are bought by the show’s fictional oil major, whose CEO has long plotted to bring the Ewings to heel.

This storyline should have served as an endpoint (late Dallas became an unwatchable mess). In symbolic terms, Dallas turned the legacy of Spindletop to dust at the hands of hubris, power, and contingent circumstances in a style recognisable from any Greek tragedy. The fact it was an oil story made for a global audience of energy-unaware oil consumers who scarcely noticed the undercurrents to what they were watching is perhaps its own commentary on western consumers’ relationship to the material basis of their way of life.

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But whatever the force of destruction at work, there is no suggestion in any of these stories of 20th-century Americana that oil can simply be renounced. In Oil! the idealistic Bunny never repudiates his father nor doubts that “this is an oil age”. The novel ends in a cemetery in Paradise. Sinclair allows himself the hope that “men can find some way to chain the black and cruel demon” that “roams the earth”, but he has just described the new derricks that are being built to replace the burnt-out ones.

Dallas goes further, suggesting that JR’s ways are a necessary evil for the age of affluence it portrays. In the show’s final episode, a drunken JR wanders around an empty Southfork. An It’s-a-Wonderful-Life-style figure appears to show him a world where he was not born: Ewing Oil has collapsed a few years after Jock’s retirement, leading Jock to suicide and then Miss Ellie to her grave. Yet this does not redeem JR: in the show’s last scene, JR appears to have turned Jock’s old gun on himself, rendering him the final casualty of all the grief Ewing Oil has caused.

Westerners living lives far removed from the realities of the oil industry are now much more used to the idea of the commodity as a destructive force than those watching Dallas in its prime. Today, climate change and the last decades of geopolitical turbulence around energy have given an urgent charge to the idea that oil is a force from Hades threatening the End Times. Yet Sinclair’s vision of resealing the boundary between Earth and Hades by bringing oil to heel requires sacrifices that many of us living the life oil allows don’t want to contemplate. Indeed, to wish Spindletop away as a wrong turn would be to wish ourselves away: it is the rise of oil as an energy source that has made it possible for there to be so many of us alive in the world today.

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These paradoxes are at work in the American novelist Cormac McCarthy’s work. In his masterpiece Blood Meridian — published in 1985 — McCarthy told a story about scalp hunting across the Texas-Mexico border in the mid-19th century, making Texas a site of cyclical cosmic time. The first wildcatters easily fit into McCarthy’s mythology. Indeed, one could perhaps read the novel’s epilogue, where a man is “progressing over the plains” making holes in the ground “striking the fire out of the rock which God has put there”, as the start of a wildcatting quest.

But in his post-apocalyptic novel The Road­ — published in 2006 — cyclical time has ended: everything is sinking into oblivion. The cause of the ecological cataclysm is unspecified. But a story of oil in its last twilight is palpable. In the opening, a father awakens from a dream where he and his son have been lost in the depths of a cave until they reach “a black and ancient lake”. On their journey south, the man and the boy use an “oil company roadmap” as a guide. The man has them search for gasoline to light their lamp. At one early stop, they first find “the odour of gas only a rumour” and then, desperate, return to decanter dregs from plastic oil bottles. Later, what they find is “years old. But it was gasoline and it would burn”. It is their oil-lit lamp that allows them to discover the largest store of food they encounter.

In The Road, it is as if all oil time is compressed from oil’s origins to its first use to its necessity to its reconstruction of the American landscape to its depletion and ecological hazard. Before his demise, the man sees the boy “looking back at him from some unimaginable future”. That place appears to be an oilless world. During the man’s last night, the light comes not from the lamp but a candle borne by the boy. To the man, “old dreams encroached upon the waking world”. With his death, oil and its stories might be said to pass into the silence “of things ceasing to be”.

In the last paragraph, the authorial voice changes. We are transported to an organically alive world. Here, the maps are the “patterns” on the back of trout swimming in mountain streams, and they are “maps of the world in its becoming”. But something old still has its purchase. The patterns are also “Maps and Mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again”. It’s an ending that appears unwilling to privilege either optimism or pessimism: an ending perhaps from a place where the cosmic stakes of the age of oil can’t quite be contemplated.

The makeshift labels these people give themselves often have an implicit note of self-satisfaction: “4Runner Environmentalists”, “Green-necks” or “literary Westerners”. The terms denote a mix of cultural and political tendencies that cut across some of America’s great divides. They tend to be pro-gun but pro-environmental regulation, to have deep faith in the American experiment but a deep awareness of its flaws, to be suspicious of both big government and big corporations, and, above all, to hate the twinned power of government and business, which is the force that mostly shapes the West as we know it.

DeVoto is the high priest of this sect. Born in 1897 in Ogden, Utah, he spent most of his adulthood in the East, writing for Harper’s, teaching at Harvard, and occupying a tenuous middle ground in the political wars of his time: he was called a fascist in the pages of The Nation and the Daily Worker, and a communist by the Wyoming Cattlemen’s Association. He was a hunter and an outdoorsman, but he was also urbane and unabashedly sophisticated. His monumental 1947 Harper’s essay, “The West Against Itself”, may be the single most significant piece of periodical writing in the history of the American conservation movement. It exposed and almost singlehandedly blocked a vast scheme to sell off hundreds of millions of acres of public land. It also elaborated DeVoto’s thesis of the West as a “plundered province”, a story retold in Nate Schweber’s recent This America of Ours, a long-overdue first biography of DeVoto.

“He described how the wealth of the West’s natural resources had been systematically siphoned to the East,” Schweber writes, about DeVoto’s first use of this term. “And how — contrary to popular myth — it was Western settlers who learned to work together who halted the liquidation.”

This is the difficult and illuminating thing about reading DeVoto today, because in all of his writings he is resistant to the idea that settlers and small-time workers of the West were the engines of the genocide and despoliation that came to the region in their wake. In DeVoto’s telling, these people were complicated moral agents and often victims themselves, caught up in a churning machine of capital and government that, by the 20th century, had created a Western system defined by “laissez-faire capitalism with socialism, ownership rights without responsibility, investment but not regulation”. It was a picture of the corporatism that now colours every single part of American life, and DeVoto saw it as emerging in its first clear form in the government protection of powerful extractive industries in the Mountain West.

DeVoto’s most disturbing, poignant, and rich account of how we got to this point can be found in Across the Wide Missouri, his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1947 history of the Rocky Mountain fur trade. It took me several tries to actually finish the book. It is long, frustrating, and at times confusing, both hard to follow and hard to put down once you get into its flow.

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This is not how civil wars start

By James Pogue

It is easy to see why the book is largely forgotten today. It reads like a history in the old American tradition of Francis Parkman or William H. Prescott, with dense, high-diction prose, and an implicit expectation that the reader is familiar with a set of characters — John Jacob Astor, Jim Bridger — who might have been familiar to Americans in 1947 but are much less so today. It also unfolds in a confusing set of braided personal narratives, telling the story of everyone from a wayward Scottish noble who found his calling in the West to the legendarily beautiful missionary Narcissa Whitman, one of the first two white women known to have crossed the Rocky Mountains, and who ended up living such a brutal and tragic life that it’s shocking no one has made a movie of it yet.

Across the Wide Missouri is so complex and iterative that attempting to describe its “plot” is a fools’ errand. But the book takes shape around a conflict between Astor’s American Fur Company and Bridger’s Rocky Mountain Fur Company, over the wealth of pelts that was beginning to flow from the mountain streams and valleys of the Interior West. This trade was the American West’s first great extractive industry, and it was what drove the exploration of the region. And in this story, you can see the whole blighted future of the region, and to some degree, that of America.

The fur trappers on whose labor the industry relied lived some of the most difficult lives anyone has ever lived, and almost none of them made much money. They were always hard men, often cruel. But they were also joyous, and the best parts of the book involve a series of retellings of the annual summer rendezvous, when trappers and native tribes gathered in drunken comity to trade, party, have sex and marry (intermarriage between whites and natives was the defining social structure of the mountain trade), and load up supplies for the winter.

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The last American aristocrat

By Phil Klay

The picture here is very different from the one we get about Western history today, one that focuses on whites as the agents of genocide and “settler-colonialism”. DeVoto is interested instead in the brief period when the whites who came into the West did so without an eye to conquest or even settlement. “May we assume that enough has been said about release and debauch at the summer rendezvous?” he writes about one of the last such gatherings. “The trappers drank as many pints of alcohol as ever at five dollars a pint, sang as many songs, held as many horse races, bought as many squaws…. Rendezvous was the mountain man’s Christmas, county fair, harvest festival, and crowned-slave carnival of Saturn — this year as always.”

But it was not to last. The rabid competition between the fur companies kept the trappers in debt and wrecked the supply of beaver pelts. And it brought the tribes they lived and traded among into a system of dependence on the manufactured goods and alcohol that the companies proffered in exchange for the furs. The smallpox epidemic of 1837 was carried up the Missouri River on an American Fur Company supply boat, and the ensuing epidemic killed 90% of some of the tribes the trappers were most intimate and friendly with, like the Mandans, and almost as many among tribes they feared and fought, like the Blackfeet. It destroyed the market structure that the freewheeling trapper culture depended on, and by destroying native populations it laid the ground for the settler conquest and extractive pillage of the West that was to come.

The enduring power of DeVoto, one that makes him vital and not a little subversive today, is in his ability to tell the story of the birth of the extractive Western machine that doesn’t admit for easy culprits: “This narrative will not be suspected of admiring the business ethics of the Company,” he writes, “but it must protest the tendency of 20th-century historians to hold the 1830s in American history to ideas which the 1830s had never heard of, which they would not have understood, and which produce confusion or nonsense when imposed on them today.”

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America will always fear Caesar

By Ross Douthat

For anyone who has the tenacity and time to finish it, Across the Wide Missouri ends up being almost inexpressibly rewarding and inexpressibly dark — a portrait of a moment in a part of America that only a few hundred or so Americans ever experienced and that very few Americans today know much about, but that did more than any other to shape our idea of a freewheeling Western frontier. It understands both the trappers and Natives who participated in the Western fur trade in the context of a system which “converted property, manipulated credit, and stripped the plundered province to the sole end of canalising eastward whatever wealth the West might produce”.

DeVoto’s purpose was not to absolve the trappers of their complicity in a system that ended up destroying the free West they inhabited and loved, but to show how the engines of capital and commerce coopted them into that destruction, against their own desires and interests. DeVoto acknowledged and even emphasised the violence between trappers and Native tribes during the fur-trading era. But he understood this violence, which caused many personal and bloody feuds but little wholesale carnage, as something different than what was to come — “the less murderous [and more state-directed] violence that was a condition of white society in the West”.

This was the state-engineered extractive regime that DeVoto spent his career railing against, and it is the force that has lead so many Americans in recent years to conclude that the settlement of the West is a single history of evil acts committed by evil men. But there is another story — one of the strange middle-ground reality that fur-trading era represented — that has hardly had any retelling since DeVoto’s difficult, annoying, brilliant magnum opus.

“This narrative calls attention to the fact that historical judgements must be peripheral or inane,” he wrote, uncannily anticipating the politico-historical debates of our current time, “until the preliminaries of historical statement have been made. And now feels free to return to its job.” We can only hope that more historians of this stripe will emerge today.

Bombs are not raining down on our cities; instead, what we are experiencing is the psychological weaponisation of war — and its exploitation as a tool of indoctrination and statecraft in the hands of the establishment.

The Ukraine crisis is undoubtedly a tragedy, but it is merely the latest in a series of geopolitical events stretching back at least 20 years in which the media coverage has been biased, one-sided, and ideological. All of these instances — Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the Afghanistan Withdrawal — were riddled with “structural information traps” that we ignored at our peril.

With each of these conflicts, the coverage gets worse, and the traps become ever more luring and incendiary. In each case, a narrative is constructed and transposed over the reporting, reinforced by sensationalist imagery that could rationalise an intervention and perhaps military action. But none compares to Ukraine. Here, we have witnessed the media of the Free World disseminating dishonest or otherwise uncritical coverage, fake news, Ukrainian disinformation, and propaganda aimed at conditioning the public to internalise the establishment’s Manichean narrative of a deranged madman’s random war of aggression.

Not only has the Ukraine coverage been highly charged, morally self-righteous, and plainly political, it actively demands a collective suspension of disbelief as it cultivates and redirects a natural reaction of sympathy felt by all into a moral outrage that insists on certain retaliation. Some, such as the former US ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, have irresponsibly vilified the entire Russian population. Others, such as The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, have begun to senselessly demonise prescient realist American academics for daring to shed light on Russia’s basic national security interests and the possibility of a confrontation if they go unrecognised.

So far as the Western legacy media is concerned, we really do live in the post-historical age Francis Fukuyama triumphantly proclaimed in 1989, with liberal internationalism the only acceptable paradigm through which to understand the world. Alternative views are now tantamount to championing tyranny. In each instance, the dictator comes to personify internationally Hegel’s thymotic, if savage, primitive man — the inhumane antithesis of the “last man” —  fighting maniacally against liberal democracy, the march of modernity, and progress itself. Assad, Ghaddafi, the Taliban, and Vladimir Putin all fit this archetype as reactionary actors par excellence necessitating a holy alliance to confront and civilise.

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A Putin puppet government will fail

By Vladislav Davidzon

Such a melioristic framing of international politics justifies and indeed privileges a Manichean narrative of good and evil. In this context, rationality itself is bound to the good, defined as effective conformity with liberal hegemony.

This is how the permanent members of the ruling class view the world. The former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, has made the enlightening observation that the years-brewing war in Ukraine was a result of Putin simply becoming “unhinged”, suggesting he might be suffering from neurological problems. Not to be outdone, Condoleezza Rice, one of the architects of the Iraq War and the ill-advised 2008 Bucharest declaration (which affirmed Nato’s “open door” towards Ukraine and therefore helped to spark this most recent conflict), bemoaned Putin’s “delusional rendering of history” and “erratic” behaviour.

Perhaps, given the profound crisis of meaning in the West and the gap in solidarity and social cohesion, we should not be surprised. Living under the conditions of rootlessness, spiritual emptiness, and angst, every crisis is an opportunity for mythopoesis. Tragedy is reborn, and we are easily enthralled by the periodic cycles of worship and hero-making. Our faith in the cult of expertise, meanwhile, blinds and lulls us to the potential dangers of such black and white thinking.

As good Straussians, American neoconservatives were among the first to intuit this fact: that owing to disenchantment and the dissolution of our “sacred canopy”, the myth — or the Platonic “noble lie” — can be used to strengthen the Regime. Through their co-option, they would ensure the inherent power of the “noble lie” would be harnessed to regularly generate casus belli for global liberal imperialism. After all, what better unifying force than the “grand American project” of war to energise one’s desire for national greatness and the need for the regimentation of life in a disordered, chaotic Zeitgeist. Led by America, the grand mission of the Anglosphere would therefore have to be “to advance civilisation itself”. Not to mention, heroes also need villains, and it does help that in the Ukrainian archetype, ‘evil’ is not an intangible virus but can be personified onto an ‘other’ — in this case, Vladimir Putin.

This is the fake, performative, and internationalist nationalism of the American elite class: they use emotional triggers to rally the people behind the flag of the state in the name of lofty humanitarian causes which mask their own self-importance and narcissistic greatness. In fact, the systematic and periodic milking of tragedy to sow mass hysteria and manufacture support for the liberal imperium and its rulers has become the modus operandi in Washington. The consequence is not only further empowerment of the martial state, but also the enabling and even the ennobling of America’s war machine.

But so what? So what if our information ecosystem in the West is substantively flawed and prejudiced? Is this kind of systemic information bias, unbalanced coverage, and outright favouritism not endemic to all culture-complexes, prevalent also across state-run media in China, Iran, and Russia? The answer is certainly yes, but with an important qualification: the latter are not liberal democracies.

Some might say the foreign policy hawks have not learned from their catastrophic regime-change wars in the Middle East. But they have. They learned the importance of narrative control and information warfare targeting domestic audiences: consolidating the media, tightening their hold on information, marginalising the few investigative journalists that remain, and nullifying scepticism as examples of appeasement or Putinism. Undoubtedly, the situation seriously endangers civil liberties and freedom of thought in the Anglosphere, undermining the very foundation of Western democracy.

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By Will Lloyd

But wedded to a disturbing, yet ascendant, neo-McCarthyism, the homogenisation of the Western media environment could ultimately prove more ominous than simple government censorship à la North Korea or Iran. At its core, the phenomenon aims to condition public opinion into “correct” acceptable speech patterns in the service of the “noble lie” — using the good heart of most ordinary citizens and their repulsion at human suffering as bait.

This noxious development, unless fully defanged and neutralised, could yet tear the very fabric of Western society, unleashing the dystopia of internalised totalitarianism, wherein the public-private boundaries disappear and citizens — even informed ones — can hardly distinguish between planted or socially-reinforced information and their own views. In such a world, the only choice is to virtue signal and self-censor.

Gone unchecked, it could amount to mass indoctrination around key national security questions and spell the end of democracy — in spirit if not procedurally. This is the ultimate fog of war.

Despite their litany of failures, the lesson drawn by the foreign policy establishment from their calamitous interventionism under the banner of democracy and freedom (“democratism“) was not to abandon their evangelical crusades for empire and to affirm restraint, moderation, and prudence. It was, instead, a desire not to be caught in the lie, as they were with their patently false claim about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). To achieve this, the military-industrial-congressional complex and the professional-managerial class that runs it had to dominate a new battlespace: information. Not for foreign audiences, in which Western intelligence has had a long track record, but to domesticate, intellectually sterilise, and effectively neutralise their own citizens.

To guarantee the continuation of its globalist misadventurism, the establishment had to control and limit the political discourse at home. It has done so largely in two ways. The first was to claim monopoly over ‘truth’, and to discredit anyone who might not go along with the endorsed narrative by doubting their patriotism and brandishing them as appeasers, apologists, and/or outright traitors. The second was to ensure a total consolidation of national security narratives — so that even when instances of falsehood and misinformation are discovered, this would not receive much exposure but be shunned to the darkest corners of the internet.

Any war is a tragedy. We should work to de-escalate and see it end in Ukraine. But there are always at least two sides to a conflict: two agendas, not counting the designs of external actors. War does not occur in a vacuum. It often betrays (and is the culmination of) a long history of grievances and distrust.

Having claimed over 14,000 lives since 2014, the conflict in Ukraine is not about Vladimir Putin and his character but realpolitik, national interest, and great power rivalry. Countries have genuine security interests, some of them existential. They have real red lines.

“No Russian leader could stand idly by,” Putin told William Burns, now the director of the CIA, and accept Nato membership for Ukraine, Georgia, or Belarus, or allow Western weapons systems into these countries. As one of American greatest strategists and the architect of “containment” against the Soviet Union, George Kennan’s reaction to the Clinton administration’s insistence on Nato’s enlargement is particularly telling: “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves.”

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Almost 25 years on, such sober-minded analysis is increasingly rare. And this sidelining of neutral, dispassionate scrutiny in the Russo-Ukrainian War is particularly alarming because this is not America’s war. The North Atlantic has little vital geostrategic interest in Ukraine other than in trying to avoid a refugee or energy crisis. Yet many in Washington, London, or Brussels have goaded and encouraged, and are now revelling in, the conflict — convinced as they are that an extended quagmire there could become the kind of vulnerability for Russia that Afghanistan was for the Soviet Union, a malignant tumour metastasising to the whole of the Russian body politic and instigating regime change.

While diehards may desire a West-East clash packaged under the tired rubric of Democracy versus Autocracy to prove their machismo, the situation in Ukraine is boiling over — and it is still early days. Things are about to get far more dreadful. Ukraine is a small state neighbouring a great power, a historical buffer and bridge between Russia and the West. “To Russia, Ukraine can never be just a foreign country,” wrote Henry Kissinger in 2014. “Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus,”. The sooner we heed and accept this fact, the sooner we can sensibly gauge the situation as is and review our commitment critically.

Statesmanship is the art of not letting emotions drive policy. Sentimentality is the enemy of reason, all sense of proportion, and limits: in short, it kills realism and breeds wishful thinking. Such utopianism is senseless and dangerous: it will prolong the conflict and get lots of innocent civilians needlessly killed. Meanwhile, fomenting false hope in the public domain could further fan the flames of war, entangling Europe and the US in a confrontation with nuclear Russia — an Armageddon the tale of which we will likely not live to tell.

War is not sports-betting, where one can feel good about siding with the underdog from the comfort of a couch or a bar. It is geopolitics in its most visceral, existential form: wagers have real costs involving human lives, and they are settled only with power and political will.

The point is that this tragedy was entirely predictable and avoidable. We invited (if not compelled) conflict with our politics of intrigue and meddling in Eastern Europe, our disregard for Moscow’s security interests, and our moral grandstanding over items like Nato’s eastward expansion, Ukrainian neutrality, and demilitarisation. Any seasoned diplomat of the Cold War would be left utterly mystified. This was and remains political and strategic malpractice.

The question now is whether we want to put millions of Ukrainian lives in jeopardy simply to keep it as a Western Bulwark on Russia’s frontier and a dagger at Moscow’s throat. The Russo-Ukrainian War must be condemned and brought to an end using diplomacy, but the West must accept a degree of culpability for leading the Ukrainians “down the primrose path” and egging on their showdown with their giant neighbour to the east. Any attempt to escalate and prolong this conflict by giving false hope to the Ukrainian people with tough rhetoric, moralistic bluster, lethal arms, and economic sanctions, the brunt of which will be felt by civilians on both sides, is irresponsible and callous. It would only ensure more death and suffering.

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Ukraine is winning the online war

By David Patrikarakos

As former US Army Colonel Douglas Macgregor contended in a recent television interview: “I see no reason why we should fight with the Russians over something that they have been talking about for years, [and] we simply chose to ignore… We will not send our forces to fight, but we are urging Ukrainians to die pointlessly in a fight they can’t win. We’re going to create a far greater humanitarian crisis than anything you’ve ever seen if it doesn’t stop.” Only this time, our liberal conceit and messianic delusion could potentially spiral a regional conflict into a global maelstrom that would exterminate humanity in a nuclear apocalypse.

The road to hell, as the wise aphorism has it, is paved with good intentions. Unless we course-correct now, we could soon find ourselves in a Huxleyan Brave New World that exploits the illusion of freedom while normalising the sophistic manipulation of public discourse to manufacture consent around the establishment’s liberal internationalist foreign policy.

When all roads lead to interventionism and war, pause, think, and consider how we got to where we are. Ask yourself who designed this dystopian city of lies and to what purpose — before it is too late.

The four newest headstones, decorated with plastic flowers, gave evidence of more recent arrivals — the graves of migrants from Yemen and Syria who died trying to cross the nearby border from Belarus, after the country’s strongman Alexander Lukashenko deployed illegal migration as a weapon against Poland and the EU last autumn.

The Tatars of Bohoniki prepare and deliver food to their co-religionist migrants who make it through the closed border, hiding in the forests, as well as to the Polish troops and border guards whose role it is to hunt them down and return them across the barbed wire border fence. Outside the village’s small wooden mosque, a banner spread against the railings declares: “Thank you for your service and for protecting our border #PolishMilitaryWall.” For centuries, the Tatar minority distinguished itself through loyal military service to Poland’s rulers, serving as cavalry in the contested steppes of Ukraine, against the Ottomans at Vienna, and conducting one of the last Polish cavalry charges against the invading Germans in 1939.

This bleak stretch of borderland, an extension of the great Eurasian steppe with no defensible natural frontiers, has always witnessed the movement of peoples and the sudden extinction of nations following the ebb and flow of imperial borders. The golden onion domes of Orthodox churches rise up from the wooden cottages of villages which seem to have spilled over the natural border: though of course it was the borders which came after the peoples, washing back and forth in bloody waves.

An ethnic map of the province in the late 19th century reveals a Pollock painting of peoples, two of whom — the Jews and the Germans — have been entirely expunged from the region within living memory. Twice in the past 300 years, Poland has vanished entirely, carved up by hungry neighbours. Twice in the twentieth century, these borderlands were drenched in blood as great empires rose and fell. Now, once again, Europe’s eastern marches are witnessing the massing of armies and the threat of a sudden, violent reordering of borders as a great empire wanes.

At its moment of greatest strength in the Nineties, the American empire expanded to encompass these borderlands, taking the former satellite states of the Soviet Union under the Nato umbrella. Now that the great empire is itself weakened by political turbulence at home and an existential challenge in East Asia, a resurgent Russia feels emboldened to renegotiate this settlement by the threat of force, demanding that not just that Nato advances no further eastward, but also that it withdraws from the region.

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What the West gets wrong about Putin

By Harald Malmgren

No-one can predict with certainty what will happen next: but as troops and materiel flood westwards in vast numbers across Russia to the eastern marches of America’s European empire, it seems clear our continent is at a great inflection point, like 1914 or 1939, 1945 or 1989. The generation-long slumber of the post-Cold War era has ended: Europe is awakening to history once again.

With every day, it becomes more likely that a great hammer blow is about to descend on Ukraine. More than 100,000 Russian troops have been deployed to Ukraine’s frontiers, in a great arc from Belarus to the north to the Black Sea in the southeast. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its parallel detachment of two predominantly Russian-speaking portions of eastern Ukraine did not bring about the great reordering Putin sought in Eastern Europe. The Minsk agreement that sought to end the war did not bear fruit; Ukraine’s armed forces are stronger than they were eight years ago, and the Ukrainian purchase of Turkish Bayraktar attack drones threatens to overturn the fragile stalemate in the country’s east.

For Russia, there is therefore no better time to attack than now, while Europe is weak and divided and the Americans are distracted. The sheer size and strength of the Russian armed forces, which have rapidly modernised since 2014, will likely overwhelm any Ukrainian opposition. What happens next will be Putin’s choice, and perhaps he has not yet decided.

Yet the military toolkit he has assembled in recent weeks gives him a wealth of options: he could destroy the Ukrainian armed forces from afar with stand-off weapons without any new border incursions; he could formally annex the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk; he could even attack along Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, deploying the naval infantry and amphibious armoured vehicles recently moved to the border from the Russian Far East, capable of seizing territory from Mariupol in the east as far west as Odessa and the border with Romania; finally, Russia could move on Kyiv itself, striking both south from Belarus and westward across the flat plains in a display of armoured warfare of a type Europe has not seen since 1945.

Ukraine’s options in all this are limited in the extreme. The claims by Western thinktankers that Russia will have no stomach for the guerrilla warfare that will ensue seem doubtful: Putin is unlikely to send his troops to the Ukrainian nationalist heartlands of the west, where the topography lends itself to armed resistance.

The flat plains of the country’s east, though useless for an insurgency, are ideal for a quick armoured blitzkrieg all the way to Kyiv and the Dnieper river. Russia will control the airspace above the battlefields, and a Ukrainian repeat of the successful deployment of Bayraktar drones by Azerbaijan against a degraded Armenian army therefore seems impossible. Ukraine’s greatest chance of avoiding military defeat and perhaps dismemberment at Putin’s hands lies in Western diplomacy: and this is surely now the country’s greatest curse.

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Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

The simple fact is, Nato will not go to war with Russia for Ukraine. As it stands, Ukraine is about to suffer a historic defeat to defend the illusion that it may one day join the Nato alliance, a point of principle that everyone involved knows to be fantasy. By sending Ukraine munitions and non-lethal aid, Nato powers like the US and Britain, as well as the Baltic states, have already approached the utmost limits of their response to Russia. The threat of sanctions will count for less than our leaders claim against a Russia that has successfully reordered its economy to cope with the Western sanctions deployed since 2014, and which is increasingly reorienting itself towards America’s great rival China. Indeed, it is now Russia that has the upper hand in threatening Europe by withholding its own vital resources.

It is midwinter after all, and Europe is dependent on Russian gas to keep European voters warm in their homes. Almost half of Germany and Poland’s gas supply comes from Russia; countries like Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia and Finland are almost 100% dependent. No wonder that Germany’s government is doing all that it can to avoid becoming embroiled in this confrontation, refusing to supply Ukraine with munitions, and with Germany’s new SPD chancellor Olaf Scholz refusing even to take Biden’s calls on the crisis. Europe has had since at least 2014 to wean itself off its dependence on Russia, and chose not to, with Germany instead deepening its energy dependency by shuttering its nuclear power plants and constructing the Nordstream 2 pipeline despite American pressure to cancel it.

Instead, it is France, energy secure through its network of nuclear power stations, that is playing the greatest EU role in defending Nato’s eastern borders, pushing for a forward presence in Romania and sending warships to the Black Sea. There is a great irony here: the scepticism of Poland and the Baltic states over French proposals for greater European capacity to defend itself from external threats was used by the German security establishment to dampen any enthusiasm for strategic autonomy, with German politicians and analysts making great rhetorical play of the sacred Nato bond. But now that Nato’s integrity is threatened by Russia’s demands that the alliance “pull back” from Romania and Bulgaria, which joined in 1997, Germany recuses itself from involvement. Through its dependency on Putin’s goodwill, it is ironically Germany that has distanced itself from Nato, a negative form of strategic autonomy from the US, if not from Russia. That great weakness at the heart of Europe, Merkel’s parting shot, now threatens the security of the continent’s eastern fringes.

One way or another, Nato’s newer Eastern members will now learn the value of America’s security guarantee compared to that of a strong Europe capable of defending itself. Biden’s initial remark that the United States would not severely punish a “minor incursion” into Ukraine’s territory did not inspire confidence; his administration is now briefing that America is considering deploying thousands of troops to the eastern Nato countries.

The limited deployment of US forces in Poland and the Baltic states after 2014 was a purely symbolic exercise: the decision to deploy tens of thousands of American troops, if it actually occurs, is a signal to Russia that America is prepared to defend the European half of its core empire if necessary, despite the greater need to concentrate its attention and resources on the looming showdown in the Pacific’s other half. Rather than being a force multiplier for the US, Nato obligations now weaken America’s overall position: Europe’s weakness has now become America’s burden.

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By David Patrakarakos

For Britain, the options for involvement are limited. We are perhaps fortunate that decades of neglect have left the Army unable to deploy anything but a token force to the region. Even if it had a better record of success in recent conflicts, the British Army is now simply too small and weak to play any role in a major European war. The Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s border are already larger than the entire British Army, and their numbers grow every day.

Yet British politicians always display an appetite for getting involved in distant conflicts greater than their capabilities allow: it would surely be better for our political opposition to now focus their attention on what, if anything, Britain’s response should be to the looming war in our home continent than to drag on their weeks-long exegesis of civil servants’ illicit cheese and wine parties.

There is not much time to waste: a Russian armoured push will need to take place while the ground is still hard and frozen, before the spring thaws settle in and the soil turns to mush. This year’s late snows have likely delayed the hammer blow: Russia’s announcement of joint military exercises with Belarus between the 10th and 20th of February indicate the probable starting date. The deployment of Russian troops in large numbers to southern Belarus, whose border is less than 60 miles from Kyiv, is a major threat to Ukrainian planners: even if Putin does not decide to take the capital, the need to guard against a sudden push will force Ukrainian generals to spread their forces thinly, weakening their response to an assault elsewhere.

Principled though it may have been, the vocal support Poland and the Baltic states gave to Belarus’s opposition after last year’s disputed election may not have been wise. By driving Lukashenko further into Putin’s embrace just to survive, they have allowed Russian forces to deploy closer to the European Union’s borders than was previously the case, and enraged a mercurial neighbour. The recent migrant crisis with Poland, at the border post at Kuznica, just a few minute’s drive from the Tatar village of Bohoniki, was the immediate result, and perhaps history will record it as the opening incident of a great and terrible conflagration.

With European nations from Sweden in the Baltic to Romania in the Black Sea now deploying their limited troops and equipment in a defensive crouch, a great confrontation is developing across the continent’s east. All the states involved — apart from Britain — are acting according to the rational motives of self-interest.

It was natural for Nato’s eastern nations to seek America’s defence guarantees against their historic master, just as it is natural for Russia to resent the alliance’s expansion to its own borders. It was natural and rational for the United States to expand Nato eastward at the moment of its greatest strength and Russia’s greatest weakness, just as it is natural and rational for Russia to seek to renegotiate Nato presence now that her own forces are stronger than they have been since the fall of the Soviet Union, and now that the American empire seems to have entered its own period of decline.

In the coming days, the likelihood is that a shock and awe campaign analogous in scale to that of America in Iraq will take place in Ukraine; its chances of success seem far greater. The demands Russia has made of the United States — over the head of a Europe kept weak and powerless by its own leaders — cannot be met without America ceding its imperial role and prestige. Perhaps they are not intended to be met, and perhaps by enhancing the Nato presence on its borders, they will turn out to be counterproductive.

Yet once again, these flat and snowy borderlands seem destined to play their allotted role as arena for the contest of great empires, and the cockpit of Europe’s bloody history.

First published on 31 January 2022

For the political and academic clerisy, the energy “reset” is like manna from heaven. It gives them a licence to impose the kind of “technocratic social engineering” that makes poor people poorer while stripping away working-class aspirations, as we already see in places like California and Germany. In Spain, 10% of all households cannot adequately heat their homes during the winter months; and in Italy, electricity bills jumped by 55% by January 2022. In the United Kingdom the number of homes that cannot pay their energy bills is set to triple by April 2022.

The new regime of expensive, often intermittent energy also threatens to make permanent the poverty of the developing world, which already suffers from a lack of cheap and reliable energy. The fossil fuels now being targeted by Western policymakers and financial firms like Blackrock are critical for industrialisation, and it is unlikely they can be replaced by wind and solar alone: fossil fuels still account for 81% of all energy supplies, and even if every country meets their climate promises, they will still account for roughly three quarters in 2040.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that in Africa there is a growing scepticism toward Western policies of “sustainability” — even though these policies, draped in the language of socially conscious “stakeholder capitalism”, pledge to address “systemic racism”. Already in 2015, for example, the president of the African Developmental Bank stated that “Africa cannot function because we have no power” and affirmed the continent’s need for “renewable and conventional” energy, including “natural gas and coal”.

Similarly, in the lead-up to the UN Climate Change Conference last year, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari warned that the climate policies favoured by Western governments investors and aid agencies could lead to an Africa-wide energy crisis. Just last month, the president of Senegal made it clear ahead of the EU-African Union summit that Africans are not prepared to pay for Europe’s carbon levy. South Africa’s Energy Minister, meanwhile, criticised NGOs and universities that promote “climate-driven solutions” with money from European think tanks.

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And African leaders have every reason to be concerned about the dangers of expensive energy. Fuel riots have occurred in the recent past in Senegal, Malawi, South Africa, and Nigeria, while energy costs were a catalyst for the Arab Spring, when a spike in oil prices drove up the price of grain. Earlier this year in Kazakhstan, soaring energy prices nearly sparked a revolution.

Given that more than half of all Africans live in energy poverty, perhaps their politicians have every right to be worried. Even relatively advanced South Africa no longer produces adequate and reliable electricity and now faces opposition to developing its own fossil fuel and nuclear capacity. The resulting crisis — the country’s manufacturers are closing shop in the face of high electricity prices, leaving two-thirds of young adults are out of work — is threatening the stability of South Africa’s democracy.

In the rest of Africa, meanwhile, in population centres such as Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, energy supplies are woefully inadequate to meet daily needs. Without more reliable energy supplies, the continent will remain mired in poverty — and civil strife is bound to follow.

No doubt aware of this, some governments, such as those in Senegal and Ethiopia, have set ambitious targets for full electrification by 2025. Similar plans are underway across the continent, with the African Developmental Bank promising to help finance electrification by 2030. How likely that is to work remain unclear. It’s striking, though, that while Africa cripples itself in pursuit of eco-friendly energy, Western-backed environmental activists are protesting offshore gas exploration in South Africa’s poverty stricken Wild Coast region.

Contrast what is being recommended for the developing world with the behaviour of the United States and a tale of hypocrisy slowly comes into focus. Thanks in part to the rise of fracking, the US is slated to become the world’s largest producer of liquified natural gas. This growth in the American energy supply has coincided with falling greenhouse gas emissions, largely driven not by environmental regulations but by the replacement of coal with natural gas.

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The natural gas boom has been particularly important for those who have suffered from the loss of manufacturing, driving an industrial renaissance in economically hard-hit regions such as the Midwest as well as historically poor parts of the South. Low natural gas prices, notes the Cleveland Fed, have been critical to the manufacturing job growth now transforming large parts of the nation’s heartland. By contrast, green policies have driven high prices in states like California, harming the once thriving industrial economy and driving up the cost of basic necessities like electricity.

It seems odd, then, that President Joe Biden and most Democrats are insistent on ignoring these lessons. Biden and most of his party favour utilising the Federal Reserve and other executive departments to enforce “net zero” policies. Everything from gas pipelines to new leases for offshore oil are being cancelled, while new regulations are making it harder to build new fossil fuel plants. The green-dominated media, meanwhile, is trying to blame energy shortages on climate change and the hated fossil fuel companies.

These policies, both in the US and the rest of the world, are the product of the view that anthropogenic global warming is as an existential threat to life on Earth rather than a long-term nuisance that will have to be managed gradually via adaptation, particularly in light of China and India’s continued fossil fuel growth. To the extent the apocalyptic as opposed to pragmatic view is adopted, the policy agenda moves towards “de-growth”,  which seeks to reduce consumption, effectively lowering the living standards of the masses to “save the planet”. This may seem a small price to pay for affluent people in Europe and America, but one doubts that the governments of the developing world will be willing to tell their poor that environmental piety matters more than basic survival.

Does this mean that we’re doomed to an eco-apocalypse? Not necessarily; it is possible to gradually decarbonise the developing world without hamstringing its economies. On the nuclear front, for instance, there is currently talk of Small Modular Reactors (SMR), which are theoretically smaller and easier to build than existing reactors. But even proponents admit these technologies will take significant investments and a few decades to mature. Some suggest that lithium batteries will allow us to make renewables more viable by vastly improving grid storage technology, but these batteries require enormous amounts of rare earth minerals.

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Perhaps the most promising technology is geothermal energy. Thanks to the advances in deep drilling technology from hydraulic fracking, two pilot projects are in progress in Serbia and Canada that might allow for the heat of the deep hot biosphere to be exploited at an affordable cost.

But as the Africans recognise, in the short run we are left with a choice between a net-zero regime based on expensive solar and wind power and one relying on the only energy sources we know are cheap and reliable — fossil fuels. Coal, nuclear power and especially natural gas are here to stay; the imperatives of Greta Thunberg won’t be adopted by people in the slums of Africa’s cities or rural Chinese looking to share in their country’s prosperity. Outside of the talking shops, in the real world, net zero remains a distant prospect. But the mounting energy crisis is already here — and sacrificing the world’s poorest countries, and many in the West as well, in pursuit of a green agenda won’t make it disappear.

Today, China has something different, and more sinister, in mind under President Xi Jinping. In speeches Xi and other party officials have repeatedly emphasised the need to “tell China’s story well.” That responsibility — until very recently — has been outsourced beyond the parties propaganda agencies.

The Communist nation sees film not as a weapon, but as the ultimate in soft power. A way to assure citizens and woo skeptics alike that China’s way of life is superior. Obey the state. Never think for yourself. Silence dissent. Is it any wonder it needs glamorous stars to spin those bleak messages?

But which stars? The answer for most of the 2010s was: Hollywood’s. The studios are only too happy to play along with China, assuming all those checks keep clearing. Erich Schwartzel’s Red Carpet: Hollywood, China and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy is a terrifying portrait of a slugfest for hearts and minds around the world. It’s one the West is losing. Badly.

Casual observers know how Hollywood genuflects to the Chinese film market. They chuckled over John Cena’s apology, in Mandarin, for suggesting Taiwan was a nation. Others noted that the upcoming Top Gun sequel removed a patch from Tom Cruise’s iconic jacket for the same reason. Those with longer memories will recall Paramount changing 2013’s World War Z to ensure China wasn’t the source of the zombie outbreak, like it was in Max Brooks’ novel of the same name.

These humiliations only hint at the geopolitics in play, and the long game enacted by China. Schwartzel fleshes out the bigger picture, revealing a nation keen on weaponising pop culture’s ability to impact thought on a global scale. It’s also the world’s biggest bully, using its fiscal might — and enormous market of movie watchers — to turn capitalism against itself. “Propaganda” doesn’t do justice to the thought control aimed at by Chinese policymakers.

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They first opened their borders to U.S. films in the 1990s, without ever losing sight of the prime directive: Chinese supremacy. China’s cinematic market exploded in the 21^st century, pulling U.S. film studios towards them in the process. Think of all the money you’ll make from our film-frantic citizens. Stateside flops became hits after opening in China — remember the World of Warcraft movie? It sank in every market other than China’s, where it banked nearly half a billion dollars for Universal Pictures.

How much extra coin did Disney earn by opening Avengers: Endgame in China? Try $629 million. Stars have sold their souls for far less.

Except not just any film is allowed into Chinese theatres. Gay themes are quickly excised, as is any excessive violence and nudity. Puritanical censors are one of the many hurdles American films have to jump before they are screened in China. Films defying authority or suggesting the CCP is incompetent are verboten. It’s a miracle anyone suggested a Red Dawn remake where China is the villain, as MGM did in 2008. So China became North Korea before the film was released in 2012 — one of many examples of China’s ability to warp storytelling that  criticises the party.

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China is by no means the first country to put pressure on Hollywood. A fascinating chapter in Red Carpet looks back at 1930’s All Quiet on the Western Front. The German government cajoled Universal to restructure Front to make it less critical of their efforts in the war. Universal did as it was told in order to access German theatres.

Decades later, Hollywood is once again ceding to a foreign power’s requests, but on a far larger scale than in the past. No US studio could ignore the fact that, before the pandemic, at one point China was building around 25 movie screens every day. So they censored their products. And it wasn’t just the studios. A-listers will lecture the American public on any topic that comes to mind — recall Robert De Niro’s splenetic interventions during the Trump era — except China.

It adds up to a chilling indictment of Western capitalism. When uncoupled from moral scruples, it plugs smoothly into China’s mainframe.

Authoritarians are usually afraid of their own citizens. If their leadership was so good, and so effective, they wouldn’t need to fiddle with every film that enters the country. But it goes further than censorship. The saga of Chinese actress Fan Bingbing’s fall from grace is deeply unsettling. This rising star had it all … until she incorrectly reported her film income, and the story went viral. The government erased her face from movie posters and placed her under house arrest, going so far as to observe her around the clock — even in the bathroom.

Her appearance this year in The 355, a girl-power actioner with Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz and Diane Kruger, came via digital trickery. Bingbing wasn’t allowed to be on-set during the shooting due to her banishment, so she was summoned on screen via green screen technology. You either play by the party’s rules, or your career is vaporised.

This authoritarian approach to cinema — a blend of puritanical censorship and pro-state cheerleading — is spreading. “If you want to change a nation, change it through stories,” the head of Kenya’s Film Classification Board tells the author in another segment of Red Carpet. Since 2006, China has loaned Kenya the best part of $10 billion for infrastructure projects — but Chinese influence is now more than roads and bridges. It’s culture, too.

In moviemaking, as in diplomacy, China is increasingly striking out on its own. Hollywood’s slavishness is no longer as effective as it once was. Some US movies now don’t get a Chinese debut despite endless diplomacy and backpedaling. And China is accepting fewer Hollywood imports than it has for years. Last year it blocked all four of Disney’s Marvel movies from release in its theatres.

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American fare that does get past the censors is regularly rejected by Chinese audiences who a decade ago lapped it up. Blockbusters like Wonder Woman 1984 now generate a fraction of the cash they once did in China. (2017’s Wonder Woman generated $90 million compared to $25 million for its 2020 sequel.) The recent Matrix Resurrections belly-flopped in China with an $11 million haul to date.

Instead Chinese audiences are turning to more blatantly nationalistic movies. Take The Battle of Lake Changjin, made in co-operation with the CCP’s propaganda department, and the most expensive film ever made in China. It tells the bloody story of Chinese soldiers thwarting American forces during the Korean War, with a cast of China’s biggest stars.

Luo Changping, a journalist famous for his corruption investigations, critiqued the film’s historical accuracy on Weibo as it stormed the box office. He vanished after was detained by police in October last year. In the end, this patriotic gore fest made over $900 million, making it the second largest global release of 2021, behind Spider-Man: No Way Home. Never has party propaganda been so effective, and so frightening.

Such brash patriotism is no longer the American style. We are a long way from the days of Capra and Ford. Hollywood stars routinely apologise for perceived sins, past and present. The wrong joke, the wrong political statement or just sharing the wrong virtue signal can spark an apology tour. When can we expect some mea culpas for an entire industry doing China’s bidding, while ignoring the country’s authoritarianism, militarism, and human rights abuses? Don’t hold your breath.

Red Carpet ought to be parachuted into the mansions and villas of Beverly Hills. Stars ought to emulate the courage of Richard Gere, who abandoned his mainstream movie career to speak up for Tibet. “Hollywood, once America’s most persuasive evangelist, remains beholden to another country,” Schwartzel writes late in the book. Ironically, that country is less and less interested in Hollywood. Gone are the days when American imports dominated China’s box office charts.

It’s a disturbing picture for US studios. Did Hollywood sell its artistic soul for nothing?

But don’t despair. Instead of the annual jamboree that you probably couldn’t afford and wouldn’t be invited to, there’s an online event called The Davos Agenda. This opened on Monday with a “special address” by Xi Jinping.

What could be more Davos than China’s communist dictator telling a bunch of virtual capitalists that we should “remove barriers, not erect walls”? Inspirational stuff — and I’m sure a great comfort to the people of Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Tibet.

For Davos-sceptics, however, this will only confirm suspicions that something has gone very wrong with global capitalism — with the World Economic Forum at the centre of it all. The fact that we’ve exported so much of our productive capacity to China and other countries is one concern. But the bigger worry is about what we’re getting back from the globalised economy. 

For Westerners, capitalism is first and foremost a consumer experience. In the 20th century, the system triumphed over its socialist rival because it delivered the goods. After the long, dark centuries of scarcity, we suddenly found ourselves in a time of plenty. We were grateful — but not, let it be noted, pathetically grateful. Indeed, the real clincher for consumer capitalism is that it made us feel strong. 

Motorised transport — above all the car — gave us the ability to go where we wanted, when we wanted. Combined with modern construction methods, our newfound mobility also massively expanded the supply of new housing. Space and privacy, previously reserved for the rich became available to the masses.

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Then there was the food. Today, we romanticise the kitchen table as the heart of traditional family life. But in most homes it was also a traditional — and very necessary — instrument of rationing. Consumer capitalism transformed the situation. Above all, there was the miracle of meat every day, not just on special occasions; the modern world is defined as much by beef and pork as it is by steel and silicon. 

Of course, abundance comes at a cost. There are the obvious downsides of excess; but also our growing distance from the old ways: the rhythms of nature, the bonds of community, the dignity of craftsmanship. Yet we didn’t sacrifice these deep connections in return for mere comfort. Rather, we were offered an alternative form of vitality: the freedom of the road; the mastery of owning one’s home; the visceral satisfaction of unrestricted carnivory. It might seem strange to describe these things as cultural goods, but within a certain set of consumerist values, that’s exactly what they are.  

Beyond its merely material comforts, the consumer society — especially the American version — offered an empowered, independent and, dare I say it, manly way of life. Whether or not one approves, the fact is that it gave birth to a distinctive culture — one to which most of us remain attached.

Nonetheless, it’s now under threat. While the global economy produces more than ever, there’s a growing anxiety that the associated sense of empowerment — what could be called the red meat of capitalism — is about to be snatched away from us. 

That’s literally the case when it comes to food. One only has to look at the effort being made to promote meat-substitutes. Most distastefully, there’s the argument that we should feed the world on insect protein. A quick search of the World Economic Forum website reveals an obsession with the idea. Here’s a small selection of articles from the last few years: “Worms for dinner? Europe backs insect based food”; “Good grub: why we might be eating insects soon”; and “Fancy a bug burger?”

The house journals of global capitalism, the Financial Times and The Economist, take a similar line. Both publications advocate for entomophagy beneath perky headlines such as “Eating bugs: a culinary idea with legs” and “Why eating insects makes sense”.

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Yet a backlash is underway. “I will not eat the bugs!” has become a rallying cry on the alt — and not-so-alt — Right. The golden age of capitalism gave us affordable meat, and there’s a slice of public opinion that’s in no mood to accept substitutes.

We’re not just talking food here, but a whole way of life. Consider the second part of the anti-Davos mantra: “I will not live in the pod!” This refers to the proposition that we should radically rethink how we allocate living space in crowded, unaffordable cities. And by “rethink”, I mean “reduce” — both in terms of floor area and privacy. In place of apartments and houses, a WEF report invites us to consider “tiny homes” (i.e. boxes) and experiments in “shared living” (i.e. dormitories).  

Then there is mobility. Never mind the “war on the motorist”, vehicle automation threatens to abolish the motorist. In the golden age of capitalism, people drove cars; but Davos looks forward to a future in which cars drive people.  

It’s not difficult to see all this as a process of disempowerment — indeed of emasculation. I’m not surprised to see Right-wingers, especially in the US, leading the backlash. It’s as if some alien force has taken control of capitalism, pulling it in a new and unAmerican direction. I’m also not surprised to see the WEF — with its rhetoric around “The Great Reset” — become a symbol of this apparent change of course. 

Yet, as much as I hate to admit it, Davos isn’t to blame. All of the trends that the Right-wingers see as threatening their kind of capitalism are in fact a consequence of it. 

It’s a paradox of productivity. The greater the abundance of goods and services we produce, the greater the number of people who get to enjoy them. Unfortunately, it also means we use up more of the enabling resources that can’t be as easily multiplied. The most obvious example is the car, or rather the space required for cars. There was a time when the freedom of the road really meant something. But as roads fill up, there’s no choice but to impose speed limits, one-way systems, road charging and other measures required to save lives and keep cities moving. Self-driving cars, if and when we get them, are just the next step — a means of reducing driver error and thus making the most of limited road capacity. After all, that’s what free markets are supposed to do: maximise resource efficiency.

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The same applies to living space. That too is limited, especially in city centres — and, therefore, we can expect the laws of supply and demand to have their inevitable impact. You may not want to live in a pod, but if that’s all you can afford, then you have a choice: either take the deal or move somewhere less expensive. 

Eating the bugs is a yet another response to market forces. Meat is delicious, which is why demand for it is going up as more of the world’s people get rich enough to afford it. Supply responds to demand, but also pushes harder against natural limits — like the availability of land for feed crops. There are ethical concerns too — and so producers and consumers look for alternatives. If you see supermarkets filling their shelves with an ever wider range of meatless meat products, it’s not because someone at Davos told them to. 

What the malcontents see as a conspiracy is just the market doing its thing. And Davos, when it comes down to it, is just a fancy trade fair for a global economy selling whatever it can at a competitive price. 

Of course, that still leaves a lot of good reasons for rejecting the “Davos agenda” — but if you do, then you’re going to have to contemplate a rather more radical break with consumer capitalism. I don’t expect many takers. If the choice is between eating the bugs or eating only carrots, then most people will eat the bugs. 

But it’s not just the cold that is constant in Ukraine’s east: Russian soldiers have been there for almost eight years — and now the Kremlin looks ready for yet another fight. This latest buildup started early last year when, after a few years of relative quiet, it sent around 110,000 soldiers to the border — the largest military build-up there since 2014. And then: nothing. Until now.

In recent weeks, the Russian forces have been bolstered by naval infantry, heavy weapons, logistical units, and parachute battalions. Startled reservists are arriving on the border, as are units from Russia’s east, having trundled thousands of miles across the country by train to line up and face down their Ukrainian neighbours. Independent Belarusian journalists are reporting that Russian hardware is arriving in Belarus for “snap military drills”, supposedly to be held in February. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Washington has accused Russia looking for an excuse to invade: White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed that US intelligence had “information that indicates Russia’s already prepositioned a group of operatives to conduct a false-flag operation”.

The background to all of this is diplomacy — of sorts. On Sunday evening, US Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman and Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov met in Geneva in the first of several planned meetings to try to resolve the crisis. The two positions are clear. Washington wants Russia to de-escalate by pulling back its troops and agreeing to respect Ukrainian territorial integrity and sovereignty; Russia insists that the US and Nato accede to its demand not to expands eastwards, and that Ukraine will never become a member.

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The question is: why all this now? Russian fears of Nato encirclement are as old at the organisation itself. According to Vladislav Davidzon, Ukrainian-American author of the original and superb From Odessa with Love, the reason is simple. “High oil prices mean Russia is flush with cash,” he tells me. “After having had a very good 2021, the Kremlin sees this as a decisive moment. They see a weak American president in the White House who has continually talked tough but constantly signalled that he wants a quiet reset of policy.”

He continues: “As soon as Biden took office, the Kremlin started testing him with the initial buildup early last year. Everything since then has confirmed their belief. The Russians think they will never have a better opportunity to reorder things in their favour.”

But still the US tough talk continues. Earlier this month, the Biden administration threatened “decisive” action against Russia if it crossed the border, outlining a series of “punishing” financial, technology and military sanctions against Moscow that it said would go into effect within hours of an invasion of Ukraine.

It’s a depressing moment when, as a political analyst, you realise that one of the most dominant trends in international politics is déjà vu. Almost eight years ago I sat in Kyev’s government offices while politicians chain-smoked their way through military briefings and repeatedly wondered when the much-promised support from the West would come. I squatted in the snow with soldiers who asked me why the West could not just give them a few lousy javelin anti-tank guided missile systems to stop so many of their comrades being blown to bits. Eventually the javelins came, but only after years of painful diplomacy, international pressure and former president Barack Obama had left office. By the time Trump finally gave the green light, hundreds of Ukrainians had died.

What made all of this worse was that — at each stage of the crisis — the Ukrainians had been led to believe that help was coming; that the US or Germany or Britain would finally do what it had long threatened and impose sanctions on Russia that would a make it stop, or provide the type of military help to turn things around.

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Now we are here again: the same questions and the same requests, though the Ukrainians understand the game now. I recently spoke to a Ukrainian national security expert and she told me something that stuck in my mind: “For years the Brits gave us so much support — verbally. But it was only after the Skripal poisoning that we really felt the difference. The Russians poisoning a British agent in their own country got the British mad. After that it became personal for you guys.”

She was right. In the end, talk is talk but the national interest — and its attendant, pride — reigns alone. As Davidzon points out, for all of Biden’s strong rhetoric, he continues to resist the idea of making sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline project part of congressional law.

In this, the US is backing its most important EU partner: Germany, which wants to decouple the pipeline from any EU or Nato-wide sanctions package. Europe sucks on Russian gas like a crackhead on his pipe. And how many junkies can realistically sanction their dealer? Germany is weak here; and the US is made to look weak by proxy.

Now add domestic politics into the mix. The Kremlin has gone too far to back down now. If you govern by fear and control, you can never, ever afford to look weak. Ukraine, meanwhile, has its own problems. Yesterday morning former president Petro Poroshenko landed in Kyev to face charges of “state treason” for having “supported the activity of terrorist organisations”. Simply put: his administration is alleged to have assisted the Russian-backed and commanded separatists in selling coal in the country’s east even as Ukrainian troops were being killed.

So the situation is combustible. Neither side can afford to lose face with their own people. Once more war is likely to come and, when all is said and done, it is largely because of our own weakness.

Why did Putin just walk into Crimea in 2014 and take it? Because he knew the West would talk but not act. Why did Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko feel able to order a Ryanair plane down and take a dissident off it last year? Because he knew the West would talk but not act. Why is Moscow, now via Minsk, continuing to weaponise migrants against the EU? Well, you get the point. Moscow suffers no real consequences for its behaviour, so why should it stop?

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All the while, the West talks endlessly without really doing much. And that only makes things worse: for Ukrainians, for democratic Belarusians and, above all, for our own credibility. The biggest winner is always the Kremlin.

It’s time to put up or shut up. Either we back Kyiv — by giving it full military support and smashing Russia with sanctions, or we have the guts to tell the Ukrainians that we are abandoning the non-Nato east to Russia and start to draw real red lines that we will actually enforce. It’s time to back Ukraine — or, once and for all, just tell these people, who have suffered so much to defend our interests, that they are on their own for good.

This use of far-Right tropes — in particular, the Chad vs Wojak dichotomy — is telling of the two groups’ mutual mourning over modern ‘degeneracy’ and the ‘decline of the West’. But this alliance also throws a spoke in the wheel for the conventional narrative surrounding Islam and the Right.

After all, in both fringe and mainstream conservative discourses, Islam is loathed as a prime culprit driving societal decline. Whether it takes the form of European white nationalist groups such as Generation Identity blaming Muslim immigration for the ‘great replacement’ or Right-wing newspaper columnists deeming it a ‘threat to our liberal values’, hostility towards Islam seems to be a defining feature on the modern Right. No less ambiguous is Islamists’ own hostility towards the Right as the vanguard of the Western culture that they oppose; for both parties, a convergence with one another would seem paradoxical.

Islamism and the Left, on the other hand, appear to make far more intuitive allies. Most recently, it has been suggested that some Islamists may be actively co-opting ‘wokeness’ and camouflaging their agenda in the language of diversity and inclusion. But well outside the sphere of extremism, the so-called Islamo-Leftist alliance is a well-established source of analysis. A number of mainstream trends reveal the extent of a relationship between Islam and the Left, from the crossover of Muslim and Leftist causes among student activists to the fact that Western Muslims statistically tend to vote for Left-wing parties.

Yet this alliance is not without its own tensions: the modern Left has an uneasy relationship with traditional religion, and struggles to incorporate moral absolutism, spiritual hierarchies, and the submission to a Divine order that is integral to Islam. In other words, while the modern Left seeks to break down ‘grand narratives’, Islam is a grand narrative, and one imbued with a profound metaphysical potency at that.

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This is not to overlook the fact that there have been numerous attempts to systematically converge Islamic and Leftist political philosophy. Most prominently in the 20^th century, movements such as the Islamic socialism of the Iranian Revolution or the Somali Revolutionary Socialist Party sought to achieve their political aims through means which were, or at least strived to be, theologically sincere. It is also notable that this kind of Leftism, which was closer to orthodox Marxism, was more sympathetic to grand narratives than its contemporary forms where postmodern currents prevail (leaving aside the overtly anti-religious sentiments of Marx himself, that is).

Today, attempts by Western Leftists to form alliances with Muslims often overlook religious narratives: unsurprisingly, Islamic theological and intellectual traditions do not take centre stage in secular activism. Though modern Leftists — committed to showing solidarity with minority groups — may represent the identities of Muslims, they struggle to represent the values of Muslims. Incorporating their traditional beliefs would involve revising their own secular (and ironically, modern Western) biases, which, despite efforts to ‘decolonise the mind’, they are often reluctant to do.

In effect, the modern Left’s concern with religion boils down to identity politics; an impetus, perhaps, for practising Muslims to gravitate to the other side of the ideological spectrum. But religion is also relegated to identity politics on the modern Right, where the term ‘culturally Christian’ is commonplace. Self-styled ‘anti-woke’ commentators may invoke Christianity in their paeans for a return to tradition, but this often gives precedence to the cultural and aesthetic residues of the religion over its metaphysical and moral precepts. As far as ideology is concerned, more faith is placed in the axioms of the European Enlightenment — individual liberty, free speech and, ironically, secularism — than those of traditional Christianity, now reduced to little more than a signifier of Western heritage.

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

It follows that the Right’s contempt towards Islam does not come so much from a theological defence of Christianity, but a cultural one. Likewise, the Left’s representation of Muslims, owing to its own secular biases, also ends up reducing Islam to a cultural entity. In effect, theological and metaphysical considerations have been rendered obsolete on both the Left and the Right when it comes to religion.

This points, among other things, to a major shift within the Right: traditionally, it was the Right that served to uphold religious principles, including moral absolutism, spiritual hierarchies and, in a way, submission to a Divine order. But fixated as it now is on individual liberty, free speech and secularism, the modern Right overlooks this. And in relocating its origins to the European Enlightenment, it forgets that the conservative tradition was itself born out of a hesitation towards the Enlightenment.

Roger Scruton — one of the last philosophers to defend conservatism as a counterweight to the Enlightenment, rather than a full embrace of it — saw it necessary for politics to have a metaphysical dimension. Following Edmund Burke, Michael Oakeshott and Matthew Arnold, he remained true to the origins of British conservatism as a reaction against the excesses of liberalism and secularism. This conservatism was, he wrote, “a defence of tradition against calls for popular religion and high culture against the materialist doctrine of progress”.

With this in mind, the notion of an alliance between Islam and the Right begins to make sense. Islam poses many of the same challenges to Enlightenment liberalism as the English conservative tradition once did, with both traditions recognising the social and spiritual dangers of modern materialism. Islam, in a sense, fulfils Scruton’s definition of ‘metaphysical conservatism’ as a defence of sacred things against desecration. But today, the modern Right is more concerned with defending free speech against ‘wokeness’, individual liberties against collectivism, and freedom against censorship than sacred things against desecration.

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What does this tell us about the alleged alliance between Islam and the far-Right? Since the mainstream Right has become indifferent towards traditional values, their ideological debris has drifted downstream to be claimed by fringe subcultures. But these fragments, severed from their original contexts, have been misappropriated to suit hateful ideologies that are just as unmoored from religious virtues. Defences of gender roles, the family and community, for example, are often articulated through crude biological reductionism rather than spiritual concerns. Whether it’s the blood and soil paganism of Neo-Nazis or the New Atheism of hardline rationalists, much of today’s far-Right is just as materialistic and hostile towards traditional religion.

The fact that many look for or encounter traditional ideas in these extremist subcultures is telling of the fact that these ideas are severely underrepresented in political discourse. This was once a role fulfilled by the Right. Yet modern conservatism’s embrace of liberalism and secularism, despite originating as a counterweight to these Enlightenment ideolo­gies, excludes those wishing to defend the sacred. Without representation of such concerns, ‘dissidents’ will continue to drift to extremes — even if it means promoting a group as nefarious as the Taliban.

Decline is in the air, mingling with the smoke of burning forests in Greece and the shocking footage coming out of Afghanistan. Much of what Spengler wrote about the West’s dissolution — which he predicted would make itself fully known in the 21st century — has proven prescient, and he hadn’t even heard of climate change or the Taliban. You would have to have a strong will — the kind which old Oswald admired — to deny, as nations angrily fragment, the gulf stream stutters, the supply chains choke up, that he might have been onto something.

But what is “the West”? It depends which tribe you ask. For a liberal, the West is the “Enlightenment” and everything that followed — democracy, human rights, individualism, and that dynamic duo, “science and reason”. For a conservative, it might signal a set of cultural values: traditional attitudes to family life and national identity, and probably broad support for free-market capitalism. And for the kind of post-modern leftist who currently dominates the culture, the West — assuming they concede it even exists — is largely a front for colonialism, empire, racism and all the other horrors we hear about daily through the official channels.

All of these things could be true at the same time, but each is also a fairly recent development. The West is a lot older than liberalism, leftism, conservatism or empire. It is at the same time a simpler, more ancient and immensely more complex concoction than any of these could offer. It is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a particular religious story.

“There has never been any unitary organisation of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church,” explained the medieval historian Christopher Dawson in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, written shortly after World War Two. “Behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture there was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community, in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.”

“The West”, in other words, was born from the telling of one sacred story — a garden, an apple, a fall, a redemption — which shaped every aspect of life: the organisation of the working week; the cycle of annual feast and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the attitude to neighbours and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe — its structure and meaning, and our place within it.

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The end of secularism is nigh

By Tom Holland

The West, in short, was Christendom. But Christendom died. If you live in the West now, you are living among its ruins. Many of them are still beautiful — intact cathedrals, Bach concertos — but they are ruins nonetheless. And when an old culture built around a sacred order dies, there will be lasting upheaval at every level of society, from the level of politics to the level of the soul. The shape of everything — family, work, moral attitudes, the very existence of morals at all, notions of good and evil, sexual mores, perspectives on everything from money to rest to work to nature to the body to kin to duty — all of it will be up for grabs. Welcome to 2021.

Forty years ago this year, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued in his classic work After Virtue that the notion of virtue itself would eventually become inconceivable once the source it sprung from was removed. If human life is regarded as having no higher meaning, he said, it will ultimately be impossible to agree on what “virtue” means, or why it should mean anything.

Macintyre’s favoured teacher at the time was Aristotle, not Jesus, but his critique of the Enlightenment and prediction of its ultimate failure was based on a clearsighted understanding of the mythic vision of medieval Christendom — and of the partial, empty and over-rational humanism with which Enlightenment philosophers attempted to replace it. Macintyre believed that this failure was already clearly evident, but that society did not see it, because the monuments to the old sacred order were still standing, like Roman statues after the legions had departed.

To illustrate his thesis, Macintyre used the example of the taboo. This word was first recorded by Europeans in the journals of Captain Cook, in which he recorded his visits to Polynesia. Macintyre explains:

“The English seamen had been astonished at what they took to be the lax sexual habits of the Polynesians and were even more astonished to discover the sharp contrast with the rigorous prohibition placed on such conduct as men and women eating together. When they enquired why men and women were prohibited from eating together, they were told that the practice was taboo. But when they enquired further what taboo meant, they could get little further information.”

Further research suggested that the Polynesian islanders themselves were not really sure why these prohibitions existed either; indeed, when taboos were abolished entirely in parts of Polynesia a few decades later, there were few immediately obvious consequences. So, were such prohibitions meaningless all along?

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Not quite. Macintyre reminds us that, at first, taboos “are embedded in a context which confers intelligibility upon them”. But if they are deprived of that context, “they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions,” especially “when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten”. Once a society reaches the stage where the reason for its taboos has been forgotten, one shove is all it takes to start a domino effect that will knock them all down. Macintyre believed that this stage had already been reached in the West.

When such an order is broken, what replaces it? When the taboos were abolished in Polynesia, reported Macintyre, an unexpected “moral vacuum” was created, which came to be filled by “the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries”. In this case, a certain colour of Christianity had stepped into the breach created by the death of a previously sacred story. The end of the taboos had not brought about some abstract “freedom”; rather, it had stripped the culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but now that the formal architecture was gone too, there was an empty space waiting to be filled — and nature abhors a vacuum.

It seems to me that we are now at this point in much of the West. Since at least the 1960s, our empty taboos have been crumbling away, and in just the last few years many of the remaining monuments have been — often literally — torn down. Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. No hostile army swept into Europe and forcibly converted us to a rival faith. Instead we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all.

In After Virtue, Macintyre explains what happened next. The Enlightenment project of the 18th century was an attempt to build a “morality” (a word that had not existed in this sense before that time) loosed from theology. It was the project of constructing a wholly new human being After God, in which a new, personal moral sense — no longer eternal in nature, or accountable to any higher force — would form the basis of the culture and the individual.

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Did it work? In a word: no. Post-Enlightenment “morality”, said Macintyre, was no substitute for a higher purpose or meta-human sense of meaning. If the correct path for society or the individual was based on nothing more than an individual’s personal judgement, then who or what was to be the final arbiter?

Ultimately, without that higher purpose to bind it, society would fall — as it has — into “emotivism”, relativism and ultimately disintegration. If every culture is cored around a sacred order — whether Christian, Islamic or Hindu, the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin — then the collapse of that order will lead inevitably to the collapse of the culture it supported. There is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force we take our instruction from. The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representative of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions — “the people” or “liberty” or “democracy” or “progress.”

I’m all for democracy (the real thing, please, not the corporate simulacra that currently squats in its place), but the dethroning of the sovereign — Christ — who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order did not lead to universal equality and justice. It led — via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler — to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

The vacuum created by the collapse of our old taboos was filled by the poison gas of consumer capitalism. It has now infiltrated every aspect of our lives in the way that the Christian story once did, so much so that we barely even notice as it colonises everything — from the way we eat to the values we teach our children. Cut loose in a post-modern present — with no centre, no truth and no direction — we have not become independent-minded, responsible, democratic citizens in a human republic. We have become slaves to the self and to the power of money; broken worshippers before the monstrous idol of Progress. “In the ethics of the West,” wrote Spengler, “everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant.”

After Virtue ends with its author declaring that the task we face today is similar to that set for those living through the collapse of Rome: not to “shore up the imperium” but to start building anew. Macintyre famously concluded that the West was waiting for “a new — and doubtless very different — St Benedict.” That was forty years ago, and we are still waiting, but it’s not a bad way to see the challenge we face. Despite the tragedy unfolding in Afghanistan, the post-Christian West is not at all short on ideas, arguments, insults, ideologies, stratagems, conflicts or world-saving machines. But it is very short on saints; and how we need their love, wisdom, discipline and stillness amidst the chaos of the times. Maybe we had better start looking at how to embody a little of these qualities ourselves.

This piece was originally published in August.

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.

How else are we to explain the two most disturbing causes trumpeted by modern progressives: of paedophilia and of polygamy? To some extent, they can’t be compared. Polygamy remains legal in a number of countries — from South Africa and Malaysia to Iran and Morocco. Paedophilia, on the other hand, has long been considered beyond the pale, and is effectively banned across the world. Most countries have an age of consent — and those that don’t, such as Sudan and Afghanistan, require a couple to be married before sex is legally allowed.

And yet, in America of all places, activists are now campaigning for the destigmatisation of paedophilic desires. To remain horrified is bigoted; we need to feel empathy for the “suffering” that paedophiles face. What makes this movement even more disturbing is that its advocates are not confined to some progressive fringe: even those whose jobs it is to end child sexual abuse now support it.

Only last week, Elizabeth Letourneau, Director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse at John Hopkins’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, tweeted: “Many adults with sexual attraction to children want help to control it, hate the feeling, don’t want to act on it. Helping them prevents #childsexualabuse. Stigmatizing the conversation puts kids at risk. #prevention.”

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American education needs a revolution

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

She was responding to the debate sparked at Old Dominion University earlier this month, after word spread around campus that one of its professors, Allyn Walker, had released a book over the summer titled A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity. The book, according to its blurb, “offers a crucial account of the lived experiences of this hidden population”. In reality, all it offers is a disconcerting defence of paedophilia.

Walker, whose preferred pronouns are they/them, is concerned for the well-being of ‘minor-attracted people’ or MAPs, the new preferred term for individuals attracted to children. When asked about the use of MAPs in a recent interview, Walker responded: “I think it is important to use terminology for groups that members of that group want others to use for them. It is less stigmatising than other words like paedophile.” In other words: let’s not hurt the paedophiles’ feelings.

Throughout the interview, Walker deploys terms taken straight from the social justice playbook — as if paedophilia were just another sexual preference in need of its own Pride. Activists talk of “lowering stigma”; of a minority that is “at-risk” and “universally maligned”. As far back as 2017, in a PhD thesis titled Understanding Resilience Strategies among Minor-Attracted Individuals, Walker notes how “child pornography as a harm reduction technique has previously been theorised to be a potential strategy for MAPs to maintain abstinence from sexual contact with children”.

Although A Long, Dark Shadow was published in June, Old Dominion did not place Walker on leave until November 16^th, after students began to protest. A petition was launched, making clear that paedophilia “should not be considered a sexual preference” and Walker should be fired. It has received more than 14,000 signatures.

Yet despite such overwhelming condemnation from the student body, the university’s statement regarding the situation was short, vague, and inadequately critical of Walker’s views. For Walker, however, the university’s action reflected the “gravity of the threats to me and other people on campus”. Walker’s critics’ disapproval was part of a “coordinated effort” against the LGBTQ community and academic freedom.

I am a firm defender of academic freedom. And I believe the problem of paedophilia needs to be studied. But that does not mean that we can ignore the danger destigmatising paedophilia poses to children. We should not be normalising the idea that it is tolerable to fantasise about sex with children. A university and a university press should not be pushing this kind of harmful material.

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And yet this dangerous tendency to tolerate every and any proclivity, no matter how wicked, has become widespread: along with paedophilia, polygamy — a practice which should have ended centuries ago — is making a comeback as an acceptable form of relationship. Last year, Utah enacted Senate Bill 102, which lowers the penalty for polygamy from a felony to an offence on par with a traffic summons, as long as the new spouse consents to the marriage. Even pop culture is embracing the trend. Just this week, millennial influencer Lauryn Bosstick posted her thoughts on polygamy to her 1 million Instagram followers: “i am in to freedom of choice. i don’t waste my energy worried about what people’s relationship choices are – everyone’s different. if not hurting anyone & it works for you, go for it.”

But polygamy is harmful — to women, in particular, but also to society in general. Earlier this year, I interviewed Dr Dan Seligson on my podcast about its harms and dangers. He explained that polygamy actually breeds poverty in societies. It turns the human female into a commodity, destroys trust in society, and produces unhappiness in families. Growing up in Somalia, I have seen this all first-hand: my father had four wives. Not one of them was happy; not one of them thought their union was empowering.

And yet proponents of polygamy in the US today model their movement on the successful (and legitimate) campaign for same-sex marriage, pretending it is a similar form of liberation. Two practising polygamists summed up this tactic in a peculiarly supportive recent New Yorker profile: “I wish people would be as accepting with us as we try to be of everyone else.”

Here is where the slippery slope becomes a terrifying cliff face. Ingeniously, ‘minor-attracted people’ and polygamists are seeking the protection of the progressive umbrella. They want recognition as ‘maligned’ minorities who have been marginalised and overlooked by society. They want the freedom to love whomever they want, regardless of a person’s age or number of other partners. And it is working. The social justice movement is heeding their calls.

At the core of what we are seeing today is an assault on Western civilisation. In the West, we have a general moral framework. We share a broad understanding of right and wrong. But our norms and values are under attack. We have abdicated our responsibility to make moral judgements — and evil has started to seep in.

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There will be some who claim that I am overreacting; that those arguing in favour of destigmatising paedophilia and polygamy are small groups who live in the dark corners of Twitter and will never have any real staying power. But the first steps have been taken. The path ahead is clear. As activists like Allyn Walker insinuate themselves into the social justice fold, the ranks of their warped campaigns will swell.

I have been a vocal advocate for women, children, homosexuals, apostates, and religious minorities for the past two decades. I believe in giving the voiceless a voice. I have also been a free-speech fundamentalist. But there must be a red line. No matter the context, there will never be anything progressive about paedophilia or polygamy.

During this year’s 200th anniversary celebrations, I thought about my ancestor a lot, particularly when I read Mark Mazower’s sublime new book, The Greek Revolution. Mazower describes him as “one of the most powerful magnates in the west of the Peloponnese” — but he was also a complicated man. Probably brilliant, he was a patriot and integral to the war effort. But he was also, essentially, a warlord.

This matters. Mazower is at pains to underscore the relationship between myth and reality and the importance of the latter to Greece’s 1821 revolution from Ottoman rule. In particular, he understands that the “national-togetherness” (ethniki omopsychia) so important to the Greek national story was in many ways just that: a story. In fact, what existed were clusters of people like Sisinis and his followers: local clans and chieftains who often fought each other, occasionally allied with the Ottoman Empire, and frequently had entirely different visions of how to build a nation-state and what that state should in fact be.

Even the idea of the “Greeks” of an Ottoman province was wrong. “The peoples of the peninsula included not only Greeks but also Serbs and Albanians, Bosnians and Romanians, an assortment of Orthodox, Catholics, Muslims and Jews,” Mazower notes. How could this mob be turned toward a single national goal? Mazower’s answer is: imagination, or what we might call myth. The portrayal of chieftains like Sisinis as what Mazower calls “heroes” was and is vital because “heroes have their uses too and in the Greeks’ struggle with a far mightier foe, heroism had been at the heart of revolutionary thinking”.

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The goal was simple: to homogenise a variegated population into a nation, which emphatically it was not. But it worked and “the fiction bolstered what otherwise seemed a hopeless cause”. It was genuinely a tremendous achievement for Greeks; and an important one for the West. Greece was the first country to break free of empire and become a nation state in the modern age. It began the age of modern nationalism that in turn created the Europe — and indeed the West – that we know today.

If Greeks began the first modern nationalist movement then, perhaps fittingly enough, Greece was also the first example of what the historian Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community”. For Anderson, all nations are “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”.

This is doubly true for Greece, which more than any other country, except perhaps the United States, is not just a state but an idea. The relationship between myth and reality is the nation’s dialectic — fitting for the land of the myths that underpin much of Western civilisation. 200 years ago, these myths drove Lord Byron to travel to Greece to join the battle for independence. He never actually got to fight any Ottomans because he died from a fever at age 36 in the Greek town of Missolonghi. His body was embalmed and sent back to England while his heart was supposedly kept in Missolonghi and placed in a cenotaph that remains a tourist attraction to this day.

But he made his mark. He raised much-needed cash for the revolutionaries and his death was yet one more global event that implanted the Greek struggle firmly into the Western consciousness. Byron had vowed that if Greece should fall, “I will bury myself in the ruins”. But why? What makes a Cambridge-educated aristocrat die for a small Balkan province of the Ottoman Empire on the edge of Europe? The answer, of course, is the idea or the myth of Greece, which for a man of Byron’s class and time was pretty much second nature. As Mazower observes, “travellers to the region took with them not a modern guidebook (there were none), but a fake ancient one, a bizarre eighteenth-century travelogue that purported to describe the journeyings of a young Scythian in the fourth century BC”.

The Greeks were savvy enough to understand this. Delegations were dispatched to Western countries to ham all this up; newspapers trumpeted the struggle of Plato and Aristotle to break free of the Sultan. Greek independence cannot be understood without the mass of volunteers, intellectuals and journalists — as well as the intervention of the Great Powers — who served as geopolitical alchemists transmuting ancient myths into contemporary reality; doing what the Greeks could not do themselves.

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The importance of all this cannot be overstated. The rebels were set to lose the war until the 1827 Battle of Navarino, during which the British and French navies, along with Russia, smashed the Ottoman and Egyptian forces and made independence pretty much a certainty. Mazower tells us that “the country that tourists visit today was born to a large extent out of the revolution of 1821” — and the West made it possible.

Yet from the beginning, the relationship between Greece and the West was both co-dependent and dysfunctional. If the modern state was born in 1821, then so were many of the trends that have defined it throughout its modern history: the familiar idea of Greeks biting off more than they can chew and then getting bailed out by the major — predominantly Western — powers; foreign aid provided to refugees fleeing the fighting in Chios; the Greek nation-state’s entanglement with foreign loans; and above all, the ability of this small patch of land to affect Western history.

When I pitched up in Greece in 2015, what was supposed to be a relaxed six-week family break turned into a frenzied six months dashing around the country covering the financial crisis. It was during this time, as I spoke to those made homeless by the credit crunch and interviewed Syrian refugees flopping down on the shores of Lesbos, something dawned on me. Greece today is a small, not especially rich, not especially powerful state at the eastern edge of the European continent. But it is also the epicentre of three of the great crises of the West: EU, financial, and migration. (And with the recent fires that destroyed over 10% of the country’s forest you can probably add a fourth: climate change.)

2500 years ago, Greek society created the philosophical and political underpinnings of what we call the West. 200 years ago, it birthed modern nationalism. In 2021 Greek society has become the locus of the West’s biggest threats: and therefore, part of a potential solution to them. If you want to tackle migration in Europe, you need Greece; and if you want to at least try to fix some of the disequilibrium between the continent’s north and south, as well as the pervasive financial dysfunction that still exists, then you must internalise at least some of its lessons.

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Whether it’s independent or subjugated, rich or poor (usually the latter) influential or not (almost invariably the latter), Greece has always mattered deeply to the West. Far beyond its importance as a political entity or its power as a national actor.

I try to stroll through Athens each evening, and as I do I pass streets whose names — Alexandros, Themistocleous, Achilleos — have been with me my whole life. But I first heard them not because I am of Greek origin, but because I was an English schoolboy. And they mean so much not because they are a part of my Greek identity but because they are a part of my Western heritage. That is why Greece has always mattered, why it continues to do so today and why, for all its many flaws and endless frustrations, the West will never give it up.

How so? Because she has saved her one true love: the West. The real, European West, that is, not the “West” of wild, freebooting Ayn Rand-style fantasies which burst out when Communism fell (remember those “Ulster Scots” values which Anglosphere scribes so adored in the early 1990s? Remember Steve Bannon and his “we are all Leninists” ravings?). She understood what the West really means.

How could she not, with her life story? Unlike almost everyone else in East Germany, she was there not because of bad luck and barbed wire. Her father, a pastor, moved of his own free will from Hamburg to the East shortly after her birth in 1954, becoming a senior figure in the Lutheran Church there. This is less surprising than it sounds because the Lutherans, with their strict demarcation of worldly and spiritual realms (meaning that in practice they never seriously criticise the state) have been welcome helpmeets to rulers in eastern Germany ever since the Teutonic Knights embraced Luther, broke with Rome and founded their very own new state: Prussia.

The Wall went up when she was seven. She must have grown up knowing that she could have been a West German. As a distinctly talented young scientist working within the insane ideological bounds of Marxism-Leninism, she must have felt every day, directly, the effects of Papa Merkel’s deluded utopianism. At 35, she lived the triumph of the West not only as simple, literal freedom but also as mental freedom, at last, from the structural mendacity into which millennial ideas inevitably descend.

She swiftly embraced the CDU, that quintessentially western German party, directly descended from the Catholic Centre Party which had been founded specifically to oppose Bismarck’s Prussianisation of the West. It understands, and she understood, that the historical uniqueness of “the West” is not untrammelled, individual “freedom” but the principle that deals are cut and power shared between great institutions, neither of which will ever yield total domination to the other. This paradigm — the ultimate guarantee of freedom — goes back to 754AD, when Europe was rebooted from the Dark Ages in the great bargain of St Denis: the Frankish dynasty got the sanction of Rome, while the Church got worldly lands and Germanic muscle to defend it. Ever since, call it what you will — Church and State, King and Parliament, Checks and Balances — the principle stands against every heady fantasy, Left or Right, of some perfect society.

This is the key to Merkel’s instinct for seeking out the centre ground. She realised fast and early what all sane people eventually learn: that noisy idealism is not a virtue, but a curse, and that quiet, deal-making realism is not the absence of conviction, but its pure expression. No political lesson could be more different from the dire mix of grandstanding in the moment and backstabbing in the dark which our own Big Beasts learn in the gilded testosterone snake-pits of Eton and the Oxford Union.

Yes, she has been very lucky. It is almost comical now to recall the way that under Helmut Kohl, Germany was regularly written off by triumphant Anglosphere pundits as a dead weight on the European economy and even (declared The Economist in June 1999), “the sick man of Europe”. All that was changed by the Social Democratic/Green governments of 1998-2005, who modernised things in a thoroughly Blairite way (they even called their new, and far less generous, social security offices “Job Centres”, in English, by way of blatant homage).

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And yes, she made breathtaking mistakes. Her 2011 decision to close all of Germany’s nuclear power stations in the wake of Fukushima was either a kneejerk reaction, or a cunning plan to win over Germany’s Green voters. The need to replace nuclear led her to keep filthy brown coal power stations open and to support the Nordstrom gas pipeline which feeds German industry’s maw directly from Russia. As a result, Germany is incredibly vulnerable to energy blackmail from Moscow, Putin’s regime has been mightily succoured, and the average German citizen now produces getting on for twice as much atmospheric carbon as the average Frenchman or Brit.

When she unilaterally decided in autumn 2015 to open Germany (and thereby, in practice, Europe) to mass immigration from the Middle East and elsewhere, one can only imagine that she was trying to recapture the moral high ground from the likes of Yanis Varoufakis, who had been telling the world that in the wake of the financial crash she was acting like some kind of economic Nazi (images of Merkel sporting a Hitler moustache were seen all over southern Europe and even in Ireland).

As the rest of Europe predictably failed to follow her high-minded, high-handed lead, Germany seemed for a while to be tottering on the edge of serious public discontent: just think back to 2016 and 2017, when gloomy liberals and delighted Trump-and-Brexit boosters were both intoning that the AfD was going to break out from its base in the old East Germany and tear into the CDU. Some in Merkel’s party itself were proclaiming that the only way to survive was to “close off the right flank” (die rechte Flanke schliessen) — i.e., adopt the AfD’s policies.

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History must have been in the mood to make things pretty obvious for once, since it has given us the most perfect mathematical example of how, and how not, to deal with loud-mouthed populism. In 2017, the AfD won 12.6% of the national vote. That is, of course, exactly the same as Ukip won here in 2015. And look now at the tale of these two conservative parties.

The spineless David Cameron felt besieged by the people who eminent Tory predecessors had called “bastards” (John Major) and like “some demented Marxist sect” (Douglas Hurd) — and who he himself allegedly called “swivel-eyed loons”. So he rolled over and gave them the referendum he didn’t want himself, and which was the only way they would ever be able to enact their anti-EU, Anglosphere fantasies. He was blithely sure he would win, and hence become unchallengeable.

The stout Angela Merkel thought otherwise: I have twice been told by a German insider (I can’t name him, but he is undoubtedly of the status to have been the eyewitness he says he was) that at the 2015 G7 meeting at Schloss Elmau, Merkel, Cameron’s best friend in Europe, personally begged him not to hold his utterly needless referendum and “throw away 800 years of parliamentary rule”. But what? Have patience? See things quietly through? Make a rational, cross-party deal for what the vast majority of MPs on both sides agreed was the good of the country? Not he. If Angela Merkel had been Germany’s David Cameron, God alone knows where we would now be.

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Instead, she stuck to her guns. She toughed it out. She refused point blank to trim her course in order to pick up AfD voters, or ever to countenance any form of coalition with the populist Right, even when siren voices urged it. The result is that the AfD, far from making any further advances into the old German West, is retreating even in its eastern fastnesses.

She may have made her mistakes, but when the healing sleep of time (as Goethe called it in Faust) has washed away her quotidian errors, she will be remembered as the leader who carried the CDU, not the other way around, and who saved the West in its hour of trial. And as she leaves the stage, irrespective of which coalition Germany ends up with, she will be able to say, like a German Mr Chips, “I thought I heard you — one of you — saying it was a pity Mutti never had any children … eh? … But I have, you know … I have … look, thousands of them – and all of them decent Western Centrists!”

Ave et vale, Angela Merkel, and thank God you were there when we needed you.

We did the wrong thing, perhaps for the right reason. We wanted to develop that country and rescue Afghan women. Their lives were hellish, girls banned from school, women forbidden to leave their homes except in the company of a male guardian, vigilantes beating them with sticks if their burqa was too short. We wanted them to enjoy the pleasures of modernity and live full, happy lives.

Along with the rest of that failed nation-building venture, we got this part wrong too. And now, instead of recalibrating, we are full speed ahead compounding the harm.

Our mantra now is: “We can’t abandon the Afghan women.” And what we mean by that is visas and evacuations. But obviously, we can’t fly out all Afghan women. As for the others, we’re handing them off to confront a medieval regime all on their own, having skimmed away anyone who is educated, affluent, articulate, connected and savvy. We’re leaving them in poverty and on the brink of famine, after whisking away those who staffed the food programmes and the clinics. The US embassy is shuttered. That, folks, is what abandonment looks like.

The sad secret underlying our Great Afghan Liberation Project is this: when we set out to rescue Afghan women, we had no idea of who, how or why. We worked with those we could readily find and interact with, the urban and urbane, the ones who figured us out and gratified our need for photogenic success. We never got to the ones in the slums and the villages.

Even now, we seem unaware that there is no such entity as “Afghan women”. Yet the circumstances of their lives, their mindsets and the forces to which they are subject, make them as distinct from each other as different species.

So I propose: A Field Guide To Afghan Women.

Let us start with the group that no one ever starts with: the ordinary, average, downtrodden, ignored and unloved women who make up the great majority of their country’s female population. They are Afghanistan’s nightingales, peering out shyly from behind the mud walls of their compounds, shapeless silhouettes in drab clothing, accustomed to being ignored and secluded. And possessed, I believe, of a uniquely beautiful voice, if circumstance would ever allow.

Type One: The Invisible Real Women of Afghanistan

The largest segment of Afghan women are the urban poor, the rural population and the internally displaced living in camps. Their lives have barely changed over the past two centuries — never mind the past twenty years. The Communists tried, launching the only true effort to reform an entrenched system of deeply patriarchal, tribal, feudal oppression. The stakeholders of that system resisted, and in our zeal to beat the Soviets on this proxy battleground, we made sure they prevailed.

The lives of these women are sad and difficult. Their birth is regretted, their mothers scorned or even punished for having failed to produce a son. Their childhood consists of training for servitude, starting with their brothers, who are encouraged to order them about. Too soon, it is time for marriage, often to a relative or to a much older man the family wishes to please. Love is not present to soften the lot of these women, and given the segregated lives that reduce contact between husband and wife to a crude minimum, it has little chance to develop over time. A woman’s standing does not improve until she has adult sons; that gains her the right to lord it over her daughters-in-law, who instead of female solidarity, can expect one more tyrant.

What did America’s two trillion-dollar investment buy for this group of Afghan women, in terms of an improved standard of living? Spoiler alert: not much.

According to UNICEF, half of all deaths of Afghan women between the ages of 15 and 49 were attributable to untreated complications of pregnancy and childbirth — statistics straight out of the Middle Ages. In 2017, Doctors Without Borders declared Afghanistan “one of the most dangerous places on earth to have a baby.” This is the result of 15-plus years of Western projects and funding.

What about everyone’s pet project, education? No public speech about Afghanistan failed to tout this as the great triumph: “3.5 million girls back in school, four-fifths of primary school girls enrolled in class.” Wonderful. Applause. The only problem? It’s not true.

Human Rights Watch in 2017 reported that: “Sixteen years after the US-led military intervention that ousted the Taliban government, an estimated two-thirds of Afghan girls do not go to school.”

These are the things we failed to do. Here is what we did instead:

1. We created and coddled a tiny, entitled urban elite of professional feminists who were great on the Western lecture circuit but were disconnected from — and I venture to say, uninterested in — the actual lives of Afghan women, and who rarely used their privileges to benefit their poorer sisters.
2. We loved to build girls’ schools. It was fashionable, and we ignored early signs that the mantra “build it and they will come” wasn’t true for Afghanistan. There weren’t enough teachers, and the unending violence made it unsafe to undertake anything but a very short journey. It surely would have been better to build clinics instead, and trained traveling nurses and midwives, and focused on nutrition projects and water projects and basic public education on hygiene and first aid.
3. Then came 2021 and suddenly the Taliban were in Kabul, and we reacted with hysteria. A Plan B would have been judicious, a ready visa process in the event of imminent danger to educated people or high-profile activists. Instead, we preemptively grabbed as many male and female professionals as we could possibly shove onto airplanes — all the people with useful talents: doctors and nurses, journalists, women with artisanal skills, teachers, IT experts. Anyone who could have kept civil society, economic relations, social services and moderate values alive was hustled onto a plane and flown as far away as possible. Not an evacuation, more like a reverse cultural revolution that erased in the space of days what we had nourished over two decades.

How did we go so far off the rails? We had a goal: liberation and empowerment. And we had a theory. We had to educate Afghan women, make them economically independent and get them involved in politics.

I first glimpsed the missing piece of that formula in 2002. I was in my office at the RAND Corporation with a pile of reports and statistics about Afghanistan. What jumped out at me was a problem no one seemed to be seriously considering: the basic physical condition of the average Afghan woman.

Almost everywhere in the world, women slightly outnumber men and have a longer life expectancy. This is particularly the case in countries at war, because while the entire population suffers, the fighting is primarily done by men. But in Afghanistan, there was a clear overhang of males.

The reasons were no mystery. Good food and medical care were given first to boys and men. This made girls far more prone to illness and malnourishment, which led to stunted growth and immature bodies. Couple this with child marriage, and you have 12 and 13-year-old girls being impregnated, losing the baby, being berated for their failure and made to try again. Girls and women were dying disproportionately, of neglect, rough treatment, deprivation, withholding of care and physical abuse.

I also remember when I first began to question my deeply hostile attitude towards the Taliban. It was 2018. Russia had hosted a meeting about the peace process, and the Taliban had issued a “Moscow Declaration” explaining their platform. One section addressed the issue of women. As expected, I found the usual prevarication: women would have “all the rights guaranteed to them in Islam”, whatever that would mean in the interpretation of Taliban men.

But then came this:

“Women are faced with a lot of disasters. The so-called women rights activists stayed in Afghanistan for 17 years; in this period billions of dollars came to Afghanistan, but still Afghanistan is at the top of the countries where many women die during delivery due to lack of health facilities. Afghanistan is still among the top countries of the world where the average life expectancy rate of women is only 45. It is among the top countries of the world where there are more than one million widows. Due to corruption, the expenses brought and spent under the title of women rights have gone to the pockets of those who raise slogans of women rights…”

This was surprisingly empathetic. Nor could I disagree. Afghan feminists and their international supporters had not seemed to care about the bulk of the country’s women, had made no real attempt to address their most pressing “disasters”: lack of food, lack of health care and basic physical safety.

Personally, I had long since lost respect for the self-promoting feminists of Kabul, who knew exactly which Western buttons to push but deployed that skill almost exclusively for their own benefit. They loved attending conferences abroad, were expert at obtaining lucrative contracts to “train” each other in such skills as public speaking, leadership and “advocacy,” and enjoyed being celebrated for their “courage” in foreign news media. You wouldn’t find them in the provinces, trying to uplift rural women. And when leadership and their much-vaunted courage were urgently required, they decamped for the West. Like their country’s national army, they were a colossal disappointment.

Afghan Woman Type Two: The Living Success story

Afghan girls playing soccer. An Afghan woman street artist. An Afghan girls’ robotics team.

What else but extreme condescension explains the delighted surprise with which we received such stories? Why is it so amazing that Afghan girls can learn how to play a musical instrument or kick a ball? Why shouldn’t they be like any other girl in any other country, if given the chance? Given the dire situation of the average Afghan girl, were these really the activities that deserved our attention?

The American University of Afghanistan has an annual budget of 28 million dollars, with which it educates 1700 students, almost all on full scholarships, around half of them girls. The campus is beautiful, the infrastructure state of the art. Surely these students comprehended their great good fortune and were determined to give back to their countrymen and women.

But when the moment of truth arrived, they performed as spokespersons only for themselves. They wanted to be flown to the US — and who can blame them? These are the spoiled children of our bad parenting, the products of an education that taught entitlement over idealism. In the past, groups of them used to be brought to Washington DC and trotted out at gala fundraisers in five-star hotels. At the end of the evening, they’d be brought back on stage to press for additional donations.

To support some programme for the underserved, literacy tutoring for village girls, perhaps? No, they were prompted to ask for money for new sports jerseys, and everyone applauded and got out their check books. Wonderful! Afghan girls shooting hoops.

The adult members of the Living Success Story typically hail from affluent families or clans. Many have dual nationality or family overseas. They are well-travelled and have passports and visas. Most of them were well away even before the airlift.

Afghan Woman Type Three: The Bold Activist

But, you say, some educated women obviously stayed; we can see pictures of them demonstrating and joining in marches.

Let’s take a closer look. The activists’ debut took place in front of the Presidential Palace, eight women holding up signs demanding their rights, followed by slightly larger groups on subsequent days representing the same message before various public buildings. The photos show them angrily yelling and raising determined fists.

Will their demands be met? Am I confident that the Taliban intend to create an atmosphere of respect and safety for women? Not at all.

But let’s not fool ourselves. For most of that country’s women, an Islamic system would represent a step up, because the worst problems they confront come not from religion but from tribal traditions. Islam does not allow forced marriage and does not require women to cover anything more than what modesty demands; it does not ban them from public spaces, and it energetically prohibits Afghan customs such as settling disputes by giving a girl to the enemy clan as a slave.

The real worry is that the Taliban, not exactly a group of sophisticated theologians, will interpret their religion in the same eccentric way as last time. Last time they forbade the keeping of songbirds, which I promise you is a rule found nowhere in the Quran. Any outside help now can best come from other, more advanced Muslim societies and their religious scholars, and from educated women across the Islamic world who have dealt with, and surmounted, comparable challenges. Even last time around, though, they seemed to have some scraps of pity for women. It was a well-known embarrassment during the years of the Western-backed government that a Taliban court in one of the areas under their control would affirm a widow’s ownership of her land, while a government court was likely to accept a bribe from her greedy neighbour.

Afghan Woman Type Four: Madrassa Teacher’s Pet

The Taliban, goaded, had a response to “our” women’s demonstrations. They bused in hundreds of Taliban-supporting, slogan-shouting women in the most extreme form of all-black full-cover dress — the kind that Iranian feminist poets used to say made women look like crows — to march through the streets of Kabul and other cities in support of strict Islamic rule.

These women didn’t suddenly materialise out of the ether. They were educated in madrassas right under our noses, and in significant numbers, during the supposed years of enlightenment and freedom during the secular era we were so proud of. Yet we had no idea they were there.

This pitting of one set of women against another is a very unfortunate development, and it’s entirely our fault. “We don’t need women who left Afghanistan telling us what to do,” their banners read. A fair point.

I’m truly not sure where we go from here. Our twenty-year liberation experiment failed, to the tune of dizzying amounts of dollars. We invested in exotic frivolities and threw money at those who needed it least, and who have since proved all too ready to bite the hand that wrote the cheques. And so — as heartless as it sounds — it is probably best if we resist the “last temptation” and stay well away. And hope that one fine day, in her own time, in her own ecosystem, the nightingale will sing.

The most infamous incident of the war was the retreat from Kabul, which began on the 6th January 1842. An entire army — 18,500 men — left the British cantonment, only to be annihilated by scantly-equipped tribesmen. In the myth of the war, only one British citizen, the surgeon Dr Brydon, made it through to Jalalabad six days later.

Brydon’s desperate escape on a collapsing nag became one of the era’s most famous images, in Lady Butler’s oil Remnants of an Army. Likewise, William Barnes Wollen’s celebrated painting of the Last Stand of the 44th Foot — a group of ragged but doggedly determined soldiers on the hilltop of Gandamak standing encircled behind a thin line of bayonets, as the Pashtun tribesmen close in — drummed home the terrible truth of the war. The world’s premier military nation had been brought low, it’s armies massacred or enslaved.

Defeat cast a long shadow. Perhaps it was that image of a desperate Brydon, half-alive outside the gates of Jalalabad, that deterred British policy-makers from further adventures.

Writing just before Britain blundered into the Second Anglo-Afghan War 30 years later, George Lawrence, a veteran of the first conflict wrote, “a new generation has arisen which, instead of profiting from the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country . . . Although military disasters may be avoided, an advance now, however successful in a military point of view, would not fail to turn out to be as politically useless . . . The disaster of the Retreat from Kabul should stand forever as a warning to the Statesmen of the future not to repeat the policies that bore such bitter fruit in 1839–42.”

Lawrence’s warning was still echoing when Harold Macmillan told his successor Alec Douglas-Home “as long as you don’t invade Afghanistan you’ll be absolutely fine.” Sadly, by the time John Major was handing over 10 Downing Street to Tony Blair, Afghanistan was a distant memory. In 2001, soon after the catastrophe of 9/11 Blair signed up with Bush to invade Afghanistan yet again. What followed was a textbook case of Aldous Huxley’s adage that the only thing you learn from history is that no one learns from history.

Britain’s Fourth Afghan War was to an extraordinary, near-absurd extent, a replay of the first. The parallels between the two invasions were not just anecdotal, they were substantive. The same group rivalries and the same battles were fought out in the same places 170 years later under the guise of new banners, new beliefs and new political orchestrators. The same cities were occupied by troops speaking the same languages, and they were attacked again from the same high passes. In both cases, the invaders thought they could walk in, perform regime change, and be out in a couple of years. Ultimately, in both cases they were unable to prevent themselves being pulled into a much wider, bloodier conflict.

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The First Afghan War was waged on the basis of doctored intelligence about a virtually non-existent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul was exaggerated and manipulated by a group of ambitious and ideologically-driven hawks to create a scare — in this case, about a phantom Russian invasion. As John MacNeill, the Russophobe British ambassador wrote from Tehran: “we should declare that he who is not with us is against us… We must secure Afghanistan.” Thus was brought about an avoidable war with all its astonishing resonances with our situation today.

Take the puppet ruler — Shah Shuja ul-Mulk — the British tried to install in 1839. He was from the same Popalzai sub-tribe as Hamid Karzai. His bitterest opponents? The Ghilzais, who today are the mainstay of the Taliban’s forces. Taliban leader Mullah Omar was the chief of the Hotaki Ghilzai, just like Mohammad Shah Khan, the warrior who supervised the destruction of the British army in 1841. These parallels were largely invisible to Westerners, but frequently pointed out by the Taliban: “Everyone knows how Karzai was brought to Kabul and how he was seated on the defenceless throne of Shah Shuja” they announced in a press release soon after he came to power.

We in the West may have forgotten the details of this history that did so much to mould the Afghans’ hatred of foreign rule, but Afghans never did. In particular Shah Shuja remains a symbol of quisling treachery in Afghanistan: in 2001, the Taliban asked their young men, ‘Do you want to be remembered as a son of Shah Shuja or as a son of Dost Mohammad?’ As he rose to power, Mullah Omar deliberately modelled himself on the deposed Emir, Dost Mohammad, and like him removed the Holy Cloak of the Prophet Mohammad from its shrine in Kandahar and wrapped himself in it, declaring himself like his model Amir al-Muminin, the Leader of the Faithful, a deliberate and direct re-enactment of the events of First Afghan War, whose resonance was immediately understood by all Afghans.

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Hamid Karzai was particularly sensitive to these parallels. When I first published my book the First Anglo-Afghan War, Return of a King, in 2012, he called me to Kabul. Karzai quizzed me on the details over several dinners at his palace about the lessons this history can teach us. His view was that the US were doing to him what the British had done to Shah Shuja 170 years ago: “The lies Lord Auckland told Dost Mohammad Khan, that we don’t want to interfere with your country, that’s exactly what they tell us today, the Americans and all the others,” he told me. “Our so-called current allies behave to us just as the British did to Shah Shuja. They have squandered the opportunity given to them by the Afghan people. They tried to do exactly as they did in the 19th century.”

Karzai made it clear that he thought Shah Shuja didn’t stress his independence enough, and said he was never going to allow himself to be remembered as anyone’s puppet. After reading Return of a King, he substantially altered his policies to make sure he never repeated his forbear Shah Shuja’s mistakes. Hilary Clinton blamed his reading of my book for a chilling of relations between Kabul and the White House during the Obama years — according to a leaked email published in the New York Times after Wikileaks.

Ashraf Ghani, Karzai’s successor, was a noted academic anthropologist and economist. He’d stood on the TED stage in Berkeley, California and co-authored a well-received book on fixing “failed states”. Sadly he learned nothing from the lessons of history. Karzai was a skilful diplomat and an operator; Ghani was rude, lofty, impatient and arrogant. He pushed away tribal leaders with his lack of charm and politeness. He would tell clan elders who had trekked across Afghanistan to see him that they had “ten minutes” and he would take off his shoes, put his feet up on a stool and point them at petitioners — an act of huge rudeness in Indian and Afghan society. As we have seen, in the end, few were willing to die to keep Ghani in power.

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For the Afghans, the First Afghan War changed their state forever: on his return in 1842, Emir Dost Mohammad inherited the reforms made by the British and these helped him consolidate an Afghanistan that was much more clearly defined than it was before the war. Indeed Shuja and most of his contemporaries never used the word “Afghanistan” — for him, there was a Kingdom of Kabul which was the last surviving fragment of the Durrani Empire and which lay on the edge of a geographical space he described as Khurasan. Yet within a generation the phrase Afghanistan existed widely on maps both in and outside the country and the people within that space were beginning to describe themselves as Afghans. The return of Shah Shuja and the failed colonial expedition which was mounted to reinstate him finally destroyed the power of the Sadozai dynasty and ended the last memories of the Durrani Empire that they had founded. In this way the war did much to define the modern boundaries of the Afghan state, and consolidated once and for all the idea of a country called Afghanistan.

If the First Afghan War helped consolidate the Afghan State, the question now is whether our current failed Western intervention will contribute to its demise. Afghanistan has changed beyond all recognition in the last twenty years. The cities have grown, people travel much more widely, thousands of women have been educated. Television, the internet and an ebullient media have opened many minds. It is impossible in such circumstances to predict the fate of the divided state of Afghanistan under renewed Taliban rule, even as the resistance begins to organise itself in the Panjshir Valley under the leadership of my old friend Amrullah Saleh, formerly the head of the NSD. But what the Afghan historian Mirza ‘Ata wrote after 1842 remains equally true today: ‘It is certainly no easy thing to invade or govern the Kingdom of Khurasan.’

For the truth is that in the last millennia there had been only very brief moments of strong central control when the different Afghan tribes have acknowledged the authority of a single ruler, and still briefer moments of anything approaching a unified political system. Afghanistan has always been less a state than a kaleidoscope of competing tribal principalities governed through maliks or vakils, in each of which allegiance was entirely personal, to be negotiated and won over rather than taken for granted.

The tribes’ traditions have always been egalitarian and independent, and they have only ever submitted to authority on their own terms. Financial rewards might bring about cooperation, but rarely ensured loyalty: the individual Afghan soldier owed his allegiance first to the local chieftain who raised and paid him, not to the shahs or Kings or Presidents in faraway Kabul. Yet even the tribal leaders had frequently been unable to guarantee obedience, for tribal authority was itself so elusive and diffuse. As the saying went: Behind every hillock there sits an emperor — pusht-e har teppe, yek padishah neshast (or alternatively: Every man is a khan — har saray khan deh). In such a world, the state never had a monopoly on power, but was just one among a number of competing claimants on allegiance. “An Afghan Amir sleeps upon an ant heap,” went the proverb.

The first British historian of Afghanistan, Mountstuart Elphinstone, grasped this as he watched Shah Shuja’s rule disintegrate around him. “The internal government of the tribes answers its ends so well”, he wrote, “that the utmost disorders of the royal government never derange its operations, nor disturb the lives of its people.” No wonder that Afghans proudly thought of their mountains as Yaghistan — the Land of Rebellion.

This is now the problem facing the Taliban. As the Taliban transforms its military command into a government for Afghanistan, alliances and tribal configurations that kept two rival Taliban factions together in recent years are already being tested. Factional divisions began to emerge between the Quetta Shura and militant commanders farther east on the ground after the death of Mullah Omar in 2013. The result was a far-reaching realignment among Taliban factions — particularly between hard-line groups like the Haqqani network that wanted to escalate fighting and more moderate Taliban leaders who sought accommodation with Kabul and Islamabad.

Suggested reading

Can the Taliban bring peace?

By Aris Roussinos

It is too early to see if, and how, the different Taliban commanders from East and West Afghanistan, the Quetta shura and the Taliban political wing manage in Doha manage to settle their differences and succeed in control Afghanistan’s naturally centrifugal polity — certainly the recent campaign appears to have had far more disciplined and coherent coordination than any of us expected. Only time will tell if the movement remains united or splinters into regional Taliban fiefdoms.

What is the longer-term strategic picture now? Few will now trust American or NATO promises and we have handed a major propaganda victory to our enemies everywhere. India has lost a leading regional ally and Pakistan’s ISI believe they have won a major victory — Imran Khan went as far as saying that the Taliban victory meant the freeing of the Afghans from the “shackles of slavery”. Meanwhile China has announced it will do business with the Taliban regime, and reopen the Mes Aynak copper mine which lies beneath a major Buddhist Silk Road archaeological site. The direction the winds are blowing in is clear.

Britain’s Fourth Afghan War has ended, like the First, in ignominy and defeat. There is no Lady Butler or William Barnes Wollen around today to paint the explosions outside Kabul airport, or the desperate crush around American C-130 transport planes inside its perimeter. A Butler or a Wollen is not needed — images of both have already travelled halfway around the world on social media. The words of the First Afghan War’s first historian, Rev. G.R. Glieg, are as hauntingly apt in 2021 as they were in 1843: “Not one benefit, political or military, has been acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated.”

In India, and among the Indian diaspora, marriage is mostly treated with unashamed high seriousness, something that often makes it a source of fascination for non-Indian communities in the West. Although light in its approach — which made the most of the fascination across all cultures with an individual’s search for lasting love — Indian Matchmaking also touched upon the more painful side of a heavily marriage-oriented society: the sometimes uncomfortable intensity of family pressure to find a spouse, the anxiety about being older and unmarried, particularly among women, and the stigma of divorce.

The programme met with a mixed response from critics – particularly from writers of South Asian heritage, some of whom had felt the pressure of an arranged-marriage culture themselves. It sparked a fierce debate over the matter-of-fact way in which Taparia’s tick-list evaluation of any given client aired not only prejudices around looks, height, weight, affluence and education, but also of ‘colourism’ (with a preference for fair-skinned matches) and conformity to caste — prejudices which infuse Indian society in complex ways.

It seemed that the programme was caught up in the modern argument on what a television show is meant to do – whether it is enough simply to reveal a situation to the public gaze, and allow viewers to draw their own conclusions, or whether it is imperative also to steer the viewer’s judgements in an approved direction. The zeitgeist has shifted towards the latter.

What did become clear, when watching it with my mother-in-law, was that the full complexity and range of situations covered by the term ‘arranged marriage,’ were not touched on. For Taparia’s educated, upper and middle-class clientele, the modern ‘matchmaking’ service was akin to a hand-picked dating opportunity, in which they were free to refuse the proposed matches, and often did.

A large number of my mother-in-law’s contemporaries had a more traditional form of ‘arranged marriage’, in which their spouse was chosen by their parents, with very little input from the bride and groom themselves — a scenario which is reliably met with Western fascination or horror. My mother-in-law herself had a ‘love marriage’ which took her across both religion and caste, since she is Sikh and my late father-in-law was Hindu. Yet many ‘arranged marriages’ among her close friends – some of whom met on their wedding day — appear to have been notably long and happy ones.

Part of the reason that such marriages succeeded was because they were rooted in a different era and set of expectations from those in contemporary white Western culture. They were — and are — seen as not just the union of individuals, but of families, in which specific roles, duties and wider relationships are implicitly understood. Love was expected to deepen over time, rather than follow the initial ‘thunderbolt of attraction’ narrative now beloved by the West.

To observe this – and to note that for many couples, it has worked well — is not to ignore those for whom it has done the opposite. Some arranged marriages turned out to be terrible mismatches, from which extrication was difficult. And a culture which places a very high value upon marriage per se can bring a blessed sense of security and wider support to a happy couple, and their children.

But it can also function as a trap for the unhappy, whereby women in particular who abandon a marriage for any reason – including a spouse’s domestic abuse, addiction or infidelity — are at risk of being stigmatised. So, too are those who are deemed undesirable in the heterosexual marriage market, or who actively choose to reject it because it asks too high a sacrifice of their career ambitions, sexual orientation or personal freedom.

In its most negative form, a society that places too much weight on the institutional, structural or financial importance of marriage can obliterate the rights and wishes of the individual almost entirely. In India, that finishes up in instances of child marriage or the demand for heavy dowries (both now illegal, but still prevalent).

Elsewhere, the institution of marriage — beneficial in so many ways — has nonetheless often been bolstered by shunning those who fell outside it, and sometimes silencing those within. In Ireland, for example — until the late 20^th century — young women who had a baby out of wedlock were deemed ‘fallen’ and could be incarcerated in institutions such as the Magdalene Laundries. So too could girls deemed too troublesome or flirtatious, or who spoke out about abuse. For women in bad marriages, divorce was only legalised in the Republic of Ireland after a referendum in 1995, when it was passed by a wafer-thin majority.

The template of ‘the good girl’ sits at the centre of a heavily traditional vision of marriage and family, in which a woman’s role as wife and mother is understood to supersede all other possible ambitions. The good girl is demure, stoic, hard-working, loving, domesticated, faithful and uncomplaining. She unquestioningly sacrifices her own desires and ambitions for the care and advancement of others. Her education is useful only until her ambitions appear to get in the way of her fulfilling the immediate needs of the family, at which point it is dispensable.

Some of this, of course, overlaps with the notion of simply being a good person: it would be a highly selfish individual, male or female, who always insisted that their own concerns and wishes should take precedence over everyone else’s. But the notion of ‘the good girl’ is slightly different, in that the expectation of domestic virtue and self-denial automatically falls upon the woman.

In its most rigid incarnations, any woman who walks away from a marriage — for whatever reason — is held to have broken a priceless social pact. If a girl in the family is subjected to sexual abuse by a male relative, it is tacitly understood that she should protect the family’s honour with her silence: in such circumstances, the only way she can remain a ‘good girl’ is to say nothing. While such codes still persist in many parts of the world, the battles to break down this aspect of culture in the West were hard-won and relatively recent.

It may seem self-evident to most young women in the UK and Ireland now that a woman should be able to leave an abusive marriage without blame or economic ruin. But feminism in the West had to engage forcefully with such attitudes, and publicly challenge them. Girls in both the UK and Ireland who spoke about sexual abuse in families or communities were often chastised, disbelieved or dubbed a disgrace for even raising the topic.

Those of us who came of age in the UK in the late 1980s were the beneficiaries of arguments won by feminists in the 1960s and 70s on issues such as equal pay, sex discrimination and domestic violence legislation. A broader set of negotiations within marriage became possible. Many women of my generation have navigated a way pragmatically — and often erratically — through the career path that feminism opened up and the demands of relationships and children (if we have them). Life has often become a series of messy compromises between work and family, particularly for women with children, as we try to balance security and freedom, ambition and duty.

But, then, life itself is messy, and mined with competing demands for most adults: bills need paying, children need care and meals need cooking, and it is now widely understood, at least, that roles can be shared and men can be expected to compromise too.

In the case of women’s rights, having won many of the big legal battles on equality in the West, one might perhaps have thought that feminism would then concentrate on campaigning for the most vulnerable in our society — such as low-income mothers, female prisoners, at-risk girls or women escaping domestic violence — while also speaking up for fundamental women’s rights worldwide.

Further reading

Pity the women locked in with their abusers

By Joan Smith

All credit is due to those committed grass-roots feminist groups who do work and campaign tirelessly on exactly such issues. But another, more popular and media-friendly strand of feminism seems to have spun off from practical concerns, into the realm of endless ideological debate or personal performative signalling, for which university campuses and social media are the perfect arenas. Meanwhile, just as #MeToo has been ‘calling out’ historic and current incidences of sexism in the workplace, violent misogyny has been given a free pass to plant a worryingly large flag in the bedroom.

Every so often you read a story that makes your brain spin a little in the gap between the gravity of the experience it describes and the relative casualness of the discussion. For me it was the BBC report last year that “more than a third of UK women under the age of 40 have experienced unwanted slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during consensual sex”. A young woman called Anna spoke out about three separate sexual encounters with “ordinary guys” in which this had happened to her without any prior discussion or warning. The first man, she said, began with hair pulling and slapping before he tried to put his hands around her neck to choke her. When she talked to her friends about it, many reported a similar experience.

As Anna observed, “If someone slapped or choked you in the street, it would be assault.” What she experienced was also assault, of course, and arguably more terrifying than a street attack because she was alone with someone in whom she had placed trust. Why is violence now becoming such a common element of young women’s sexual experience, something which the generation before them would have found aberrant?

The explanation that keeps cropping up from women and women’s organisations alike is the unparalleled contemporary reach and content of porn. In recent years, not only has hardcore pornography become normalised and ubiquitous, but sexual violence against women, including strangulation and choking scenes, has risen rapidly to become a very big element of it – so much so that many male consumers, steeped in the repeated imagery, either confusedly assume that’s what all women want in real-life encounters, or simply don’t care enough to ask.

The porn industry constantly seeks out new taboos, and enriches itself by the thrill that comes from busting them. (Gail Dines, a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston, has written of the new mainstreaming of ‘step’ porn with incestuous themes, often using actresses who are over 18 but look much younger.)

But certain taboos — especially those against incest and sexual violence against women — exist for a reason: to protect vulnerable women and children. The behemoth site Pornhub, owned by MindGeek — which has boomed in lockdown and cannily tweets its “solidarity against racism and social injustice” — has been repeatedly accused of hosting and profiting from actual images taken from ‘revenge porn’, rape and child trafficking.

Further reading

Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Sarah Ditum

Along with the mainstreaming of porn, and its staged depictions of incest and violence, a new female role model has arisen: the ‘cool girl,’ who reframes her own experience of male violence as empowerment to general cultural acclaim. The first notable ‘cool girl’ in porn was a young actress called Sasha Grey, an intelligent, articulate 18-year-old brunette who – to hipster delight – referenced existentialism, French New Wave cinema and sexual self-discovery.

Grey quickly became known for something else too. In 2006, on her first day on set with a veteran porn star called Rocco Siffredi, Grey reportedly asked him to punch her in the stomach – something she later instead called “an exercise in improvisational fantasy”. Her willingness to ‘push the envelope’ on combining violence with sex gave her a unique selling point, and she rapidly attained celebrity within the industry, before departing it at 21 to pursue a career in mainstream acting, writing and presenting.

If Grey helped to normalise depictions of violent sex in pornography, the fashionable mainstream — with virtually no self-interrogation — quickly moved to do exactly the same in real life. The Huffington Post called Grey “a role model for sex positivity“. Art Tavana in LA Weekly said “she made self-degradation seem like fine art, and, for that, she appealed to edgy tastemakers like American Apparel and VICE”. Allure magazine did a feature on her make-up, and how in her porn work she had decided to “‘amp up the scenes’ realism” with non-waterproof products.

Vanessa Grigoriadis, who profiled Grey for Rolling Stone, said: “To me, what’s most important about her is her impact on feminism”. She noted that “porn has been one of feminism’s most divisive issues” and that, “Grey says, ‘If you look at me and you think “Here’s a woman who’s intelligent, cognizant and making her own choices”, and you still tell me that what I’m doing is wrong, screw you, because that should end the debate.’”

Further reading

Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Louise Perry

It didn’t end the debate, however, because the argument wasn’t about Grey’s sexual choices – which are indeed her own – but the way a multi-billion pound, international porn industry decided to commodify and popularise those choices, cheered on by much of the women’s magazine industry, without any thought for how that might play out for women in real life. The result has in fact been to sprinkle ‘progressive’ icing sugar on some deeply regressive and dangerous misogyny.

Women’s Health magazine, for example, breezily asked its female readers in 2016, “Choking as a sex move – is it for you?”. The report said, “If blindfolds and sex moves have veered into vanilla territory for you and your partner, there are still plenty of sex moves that are considered extra freaky. Like choking.” In a piece that explored the potential excitements of what it called “breath play” it did have one little moment of warning, “If choking is up there on your sexual bucket list, prepare for a buzz kill. The reality is that it’s crazy dangerous for beginners”. The ‘buzz kill’ — as spelt out by an expert — was a pretty big one: how easy it was to die if things went slightly wrong.

Another potential ‘buzz kill’ – not mentioned in the article – is the increased risk of stroke and brain injuries from non-fatal strangulation, which a recent Bangor University study showed might take days or weeks to manifest themselves. Researchers said that strangulation was now the second most likely cause of a stroke in women under 40. None of this seemingly concerned Cosmo magazine this April, when it promoted ‘breath play’ as a “great place to start” for young female readers who “fancy trying something new” in bed (the magazine subsequently amended the article following complaints).

We are beginning to get some idea how the cultural normalising of violent sex on a vast scale is playing out. A large number of women under 40 (38% in the BBC survey of 2002 women) reported experiencing non-consensual violence at one time or another during consensual sex – in other words, assault of varying degrees.

Further reading

How sexual empowerment screws women

By Mary Harrington

But just as the ‘good girl’ of the 1950s found it hard to name date rape or marital rape – which society often viewed as just a man ‘going too far’ or ‘insisting on his conjugal rights’ – so the ‘cool girl’ of 2020 often can’t quite find the words to protest against violent assault, and not only because a pair of hands is clamped around her throat. The collision, and collusion, of ‘rough sex’ pornography and women’s magazines has inculcated many girls and young women with the idea that affectionate or simply passionately enjoyable non-violent sex is ‘vanilla’ or boring. To react with outrage or anger at violent or contemptuous treatment in bed is to be deemed unfashionably prudish.

In what has become another form of glamorised self-harm, some young women are now openly proud of their ability to absorb damage. The Netflix Polish thriller 365 Days, with a plot in which a woman is abducted and subjected to sexual violence, has sparked a series of memes on TikTok in which girls parade their bruises as a badge of honour. One fresh-faced young woman, Kiara, posted footage of extensive bruising across her body with the perky words “Decided to watch 365 days with my ‘guy friend’”. The bruises were difficult and sad to look at. The post got millions of likes.

Young women today grow up in a world in which increasingly brutal, immersive porn provides sex education to boys, and often to girls too (even back in 2010, a study of 302 popular porn videos found that 88% contained physical aggression such as slapping or gagging, overwhelmingly towards female performers and received with apparent approval). Some girls or women have internalised its codes, to the extent that I have heard of men saying they have been made uncomfortable by requests from younger women to hurt them during sex. Many other women will become the unwary victims of those men who increasingly feel sexualised violence is normal and permissible. Some women will both seek out such violence and be harmed by it.

It’s not the job of society to police choices which people make in their bedrooms, including consensual BDSM within the limits of the law. But nor should it be society’s role to cheerlead for things that potentially cause significant psychological and physical harm to women.

Further reading

Why arranged marriages make sense

By Ed West

Those young women who are understandably horrified at the prospect of being suddenly choked, gagged or punched during otherwise consensual sex, are now compelled to navigate a landscape in which there is a significant likelihood that such a thing might happen to them. Meanwhile such violence is often processed socially — not as the criminal assault which it is — but as a lesser offence, a male lapse in erotic etiquette, a manifestation of permissible ‘kink’ that failed to declare itself with sufficient clarity at the outset. Precisely such ‘mitigations’ used to be applied to cases of rape.

Western society now broadly acknowledges how the historic template of ‘the good girl’ worked to confine and silence women, and still does. It is often vocal in its critique of other, more traditional cultures and the ways in which they can render women voiceless.

But one day perhaps it will also be honest enough to ask itself how easily the West — including a significant section of self-described ‘sex-positive’ Western feminism — allowed sexualised violence to be commercially rebranded, glossily mass-produced and re-enacted in real life on innumerable ordinary girls and women who never consented to it. The consumer construct of the ‘cool girl,’ who drinks up pain like champagne, has sold a generation of women down the river.