Sabre-Rattling.

Putin’s Thunderbolts: What message was the devastating arrival of the Russian Federation’s nuclear-defanged MIRVs supposed to send? And how should the government of far-away New Zealand respond?

THE IMAGES BROADCAST ON CNN were terrifying. Out of a glowing circle of dim light, multiple bolts of fire, moving at astonishing speed, burst from the lowering clouds and, in a thundering series of shattering explosions, struck the Ukrainian city of Dnipro.

It was a sight very few people, other than the weapons-scientists of the Cold War superpowers, had ever witnessed. Simply put, the arrival of MIRVs – Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicles – was never intended to leave any witnesses.

How so? Because, at the tip of each independently-targeted re-entry vehicle was a nuclear warhead. Wherever they landed, destruction would be absolute.

Delivered by an ICBM – Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile – MIRVs were the ultimate doomsday device. Travelling at hypersonic speed, impossible to interdict (notwithstanding the claims of President Ronald Reagan’s notorious “Star Wars” programme) the MIRV innovation represented the apotheosis of the MAD – Mutual and Assured Destruction – doctrine. ICBM-delivered MIRVs were never supposed to be deployed, because their deployment signalled the imminent demise of human civilisation.

The man who ordered the strike on Dnipro, President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin, has told the world that what it witnessed was a new weapon: hypersonic, deadly-accurate, and devastating.

He should not be believed.

Russia has been firing its “new” hypersonic ballistic missiles at Ukraine for more than two years. Never before, however, has the launch of such missiles been preceded by a “heads-up” call to NORAD – the North American Aerospace Defence Command. Russia’s notification was necessary because NORAD’s satellite surveillance system is well aware of the difference between the “signature” of a hypersonic missile-launch, and that of an ICBM. Without the heads-up, NORAD would have had to treat the ICBM launch as the commencement of a nuclear attack.

Putin and his military commanders are not yet ready to initiate a countdown to Armageddon. So, what were they doing? What message was the devastating arrival of all those nuclear-defanged MIRVs supposed to send? And how should the government of far-away New Zealand respond?

Part of the answer to that question was supplied in the simultaneous confirmation of the Russian Federation’s latest protocols relating to the use of nuclear weapons. Whereas, in the past, the Federation declared its willingness to use nuclear weapons only in response to an attack using nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction “when the very existence of the state is put under threat.”

The Federation’s new nuclear war-fighting doctrine represents a significant lowering of that threshold. The deployment of nuclear weapons may now be contemplated in circumstances where military aggression by a non-nuclear state, acting “with the participation or support of a nuclear state” (a clear reference to Ukraine) threatens to inflict an unacceptable degree of devastation upon the people and infrastructure of the Russian Federation, and/or that of its close ally, Belarus.

Unsurprisingly, the Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, has expressed his alarm at this latest Russian attempt to pressure the USA and its Nato allies into forcing the Ukrainian government to suspend its recently-sanctioned deployment and use of American and British long-range ballistic missiles against targets hundreds of kilometres inside the Russian Federation’s borders.

On Friday, 22 November 2024, Tusk warned that: “The last few dozen hours have shown that the threat is serious and real when it comes to global conflict.” New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, and its Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, have yet to offer a substantive response to Russia’s terrifying demonstration of the MIRVs’ destructive potential.

New Zealand investors, by contrast, appear to be in exuberant spirits. While bourses across the European Union wobbled uneasily, the NZX50 closed out the trading week with a 2 percent surge to 13,017. Either the prospect of global conflict does not bother Kiwi investors, or they have already filed Russia’s threats under “sabre-rattling”.

Russia’s use of an ICBM equipped with MIRVs is not, however, an excuse for either indifference or exuberance. Taken together, the Dnipro attack and the changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine are nothing more nor less than a direct threat to Ukraine, the USA, Nato, and the rest of the world’s free peoples – including our own.

Narrowly justifiable when issued in retaliation for an unprovoked nuclear attack, the threatened use of nuclear weapons is completely indefensible in the context of Ukraine’s conventional defensive response to the Russian Federation’s illegal invasion of its sovereign territory in February 2022. That Nato declined to offer a more robust response to Putin’s nuclear sabre-rattling of more than 1,000 days ago can only, with the benefit of hindsight, be viewed as a dangerous dereliction of its duty to protect Europe and the wider world.

That New Zealand has been content, ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to take cover behind the broad shoulders of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, is also a kind of dereliction.

Since 1985, New Zealand has proudly declared itself nuclear-free, incurring thereby the profound disapproval – bordering on the wrath – of our traditional Anglophone allies. Internationally, successive New Zealand governments have advocated strongly for both nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament. In doing so, we have acted in accordance with the argument advanced by David Lange during the famous Oxford Union debate of 1 March 1985:

The fact is that Europe and the United States are ringed about with nuclear weapons, and your people have never been more at risk. There is simply only one thing more terrifying than nuclear weapons pointed in your direction and that is nuclear weapons pointed in your enemy’s direction: the outcome of their use would be the same in either case, and that is the annihilation of you and all of us. That is a defence which is no defence; it is a defence which disturbs far more than it reassures. The intention of those who for honourable motives use nuclear weapons to deter is to enhance security. Notwithstanding that intention, they succeed only in enhancing insecurity. Because the machine has perverted the motive.

This country’s obligation to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Ukraine is all the greater because the Ukrainians belong to that tragically small number of peoples who possessed nuclear weapons and gave them up.

In the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the newly independent state of Ukraine was prevailed upon by the US and its allies to surrender its nuclear arsenal. In return, the United States, alongside the newly-minted Russian Federation, undertook to preserve and defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity – by force if necessary.

New Zealand has singularly failed to draw the correct lesson from Ukraine’s fate. We have cosied-up to our Five Eyes partners in the belief that, as a tiny country, we stand in need of large and powerful friends. But where were Ukraine’s large and powerful friends when she needed them? Tragically, they were in the same place they were in when the men and women (especially the women) of Afghanistan needed them.

If the invasion of a strategically-located European nation, a nation the United States had solemnly promised to defend, was not enough to persuade Uncle Sam to lock-and-load, then what possible reason could New Zealand possess for expecting him to lock-and-load on its behalf?

At the very most we might anticipate Uncle Sam being willing to arm us, and then watch us fight to the last New Zealander. Just as he was willing to (under)arm Ukraine and watch it fight to the last Ukrainian.

Putin is rattling his nuclear sabre in its scabbard for the very simple reason that, to date, it has worked.

Having staged aggressive manoeuvres on Ukraine’s borders for weeks prior to the February 2022 invasion, the Russian President had observed no instantaneous and unreserved mobilisation of Nato armies to the borders of Russia and Belarus; heard no announcement from the White House that America intended to honour its guarantee to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and expected the Russian Federation to do the same; and observed no commitment on the part of the smaller members of the United Nations (which New Zealand could have led) to augment, as far as they were able, Ukraine’s right to self-defence.

All those measures, all those declarations, may not have been as terrifying as Putin’s demonstration of what a nuclear attack looks like; but every lesson to be drawn from the Russian bully’s career points to them being terrifying enough.

We can only hope that Donald Trump, soon to inherit America’s sabre – and its scabbard – is learning how to rattle it like mad.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 25 November 2024.

Waiting By The River.

Looking Sideways: To the Peoples Republic of China, and its friends around the world, the United States must remind them of the flailing and failing Chinese Empire of 1900.

WATCHING THE SCREEN in Oamaru’s Majestic picture theatre, I struggled to make sense of Fifty-Five Days At Peking. Yes, it was exciting, but it was also, for a seven year-old, extremely confusing. What war was this? Not the First World War, and certainly not the Second. More to the point, why were the nations I had grown up regarding as enemies – the Germans, the Japanese, and the Russians – all counted among the “goodies” in this movie? Turns out that I was not the only person confused by Fifty-Five Days At Peking. In spite of an all-star cast, including Charlton Heston, Ava Gardner, and David Niven, it was not a box-office success.

In 1963, a well-informed New Zealander in their seventies would not, however, have had anything like as much trouble understanding the plot. The blood-curdling “Boxer Rebellion” of 1899-1901; the consequent 55-day siege (20 June-14 August 1900) of the foreign legations in the Chinese capital; and the Eight Nation Alliance that lifted the siege and then proceeded to humiliate and punish the Chinese Empire; that was not an historical sequence any youngster following it in the newspapers was likely to forget. Certainly, it has never been forgotten by the Chinese, whose irreplaceable cultural treasures were destroyed by the armies of the “imperialists”.

Hardly surprising, when one considers how loudly those imperialists boasted of their victory. The intervention of Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Italy, the United States, and Japan, had demonstrated to the whole world, or at least those few remaining parts of it not under the Eight’s complete control, what lay in store for any people who dared to raise their “harmonious fists” against them. The deliberate destruction of the Chinese emperors’ beautiful Summer Palace constituted a pretty big hint.

As always, the German Emperor, Wilhelm II, offered the most memorable quote:

Just as the Huns under their king Attila created for themselves a thousand years ago a name which men still respect, you should give the name of German such cause to be remembered in China that no Chinaman will dare look a German in the face.

That was the way the world was in 1900. The German Kaiser merely put into words (the “Huns” reference coming back to haunt him in 1914) what all the other leaders of the great imperial powers were thinking. The nations of Europe (and Japan) dominated the globe. Their cultures, and their technologies, were in every way superior.

Lest any reader assume that all such unabashed imperialist notions, following the horrors of World War II, had been set aside by the “international community”, here’s a memory-jogger from 1990-1991 – the Gulf War.

When Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-rich emirate of Kuwait in 1990, the American President, George H.W. Bush, sternly informed him, and the rest of the world, that “this will not stand”.

He was as good as his word. With China still dealing with the fall-out from Tiananmen Square, and the Soviet Union in the process of disintegration, the United States was able to pull together a “coalition” of 42 nation states to intervene on behalf of the Kuwaiti government and drive the Iraqis back across the border. Dominated, overwhelmingly, by the military resources of the United States, the Coalition made short work of Saddam’s army. It was a stunning demonstration of the USA’s uncontested global hegemony.

Savouring his victory, George H.W. Bush made no reference to the Huns, but he did proclaim the arrival of a “New World Order” – one in which any nation bold and/or foolish enough to flout Washington’s rules of international engagement should expect to pay a very heavy price.

How the events of the last thirty years have changed the world’s geopolitical architecture!

When Bush senior’s “New World Order” still meant something, the idea of a rebel regime in Yemen forcing the world’s shipping companies to abandon the Suez Canal would have been dismissed as absurd.

With the Cold War won, and American hegemony an accomplished fact for most of the 1990s, the idea that the Suez Canal could be closed – as it was for seven years in the wake of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973 – would not have stood. The impact on global oil prices, and the disruption of the international supply-chains so vital to the world’s increasingly interconnected economy, would have been regarded as unacceptable. The United States, the nations of Western Europe, and many of the Arab oil-states, would have unleashed upon Yemen the same overwhelming force that pummelled Iraq.

After 11 September 2001, however, the global game changed dramatically. Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States (itself an outgrowth of the USA’s co-option of the Saudi Kingdom in 1991) took place in an international setting very different from that which prevailed at the time of the Gulf War.

For a start, Russia and China were back in the game, stronger and more focused than they had been ten years earlier. Much of that strength was born out of both nations’ burgeoning trade with the European Union. Other states, Brazil, India and Iran in particular, were impatient to claim a more equitable share of the global economy. The USA remained strong – but not as strong as it had been at the end of the Cold War. It was an open question, in 2001, as to how many countries would respond to an American summons.

While joining the United States in a Global War on Terror made perfect sense in a world containing terroristic forces on the scale of Al Qaeda, partnering-up with Uncle Sam for what were obviously little more than punitive expeditions intended to slake the American thirst for vengeance after 9/11 was much less appealing. While the American overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan was given a pass (the regime had, after all, provided a base for Al Qaeda) the invasion of Iraq stepped over a line that most of the rest of the world would, ultimately, refuse to cross.

It would take twenty years for the Americans to comprehend, finally, that they were no longer in a position to issue orders to the rest of the world. Nor could they rely on the sort of racial and religious solidarity that prompted the world’s leading imperial powers to join together for yet another demonstration of White Supremacy on Chinese soil.

After the USA’s disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, the Russians and the Chinese must have exchanged knowing glances, and prepared to up-the-ante. The Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine, while demonstrating the astonishing courage and resilience of the Ukrainians, also revealed the vacillation and disunity of the Nato states and, in the aftermath (and facing the possible return) of Donald Trump, of the USA itself.

In Fifty-Five Days At Peking the Chinese were the baddies, and the white imperialists (alongside their plucky Japanese ally) represented the clear moral and technological superiority of Western Civilisation. If, in American, Australian and, increasingly, in New Zealand eyes, the Chinese are still the baddies, the perspective from Beijing, and a large part of the rest of the world, is rather different.

To the Peoples Republic of China, and its friends, the United States of 2024 must remind them of the flailing and failing Chinese Empire of 1900. In their own estimation, however, the Chinese people, once on their knees, have stood up.

And all those great empires that ravaged China in 1900, where are they now? Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Austria, Japan: all of them have become second-rate powers – at best. Even the United States, the great hegemon, is no longer equal to the task of preserving freedom of navigation along the Suez Canal.

In the words of China’s greatest sage, Confucius: “If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.”

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 7 October 2024.

Picking Sides.

Time To Choose: Like it or not, the Kiwis are either going into AUKUS’s  “Pillar 2” – or they are going to China.

HAD ZHENG HE’S FLEET sailed east, not west, in the early Fifteenth Century, how different our world would be. There is little reason to suppose that the sea-going junks of the Ming Dynasty, among the largest and most sophisticated sailing vessels ever constructed, would have failed to make landfall on the Pacific coast of North America half-a-century before Columbus. The colonisation of the Americas, from West to East, would have consolidated China’s global hegemony irreversibly. The cramped and fratricidal states of the European peninsula would have remained minor players in a Chinese world.

In the worst geopolitical nightmares of the United States and its Pacific allies, a China grown as powerful as the empire which sent forth Zheng He’s mighty fleet, threatens to transform the Pacific into a Chinese lake.

Technologically and militarily superior to the internally-riven United States, this China of the future regularly stations elements of its fleet off the Californian coast – in much the same spirit as the United States Navy currently navigates the waters of the South China Sea.

In a diplomatic reversal of the USA’s “island-hopping” strategy of the Second World War, an expansionist China will already have brought the tiny nations of the Pacific under its sway. The naval and air bases located on the territory of Beijing’s new “friends” will have extended its strategic reach alarmingly.

Completing this American nightmare would be the transformation of New Zealand into China’s unsinkable aircraft carrier and nuclear submarine base. Handily located off Australia’s eastern seaboard, China’s military resources would have strategically neutralised Australia’s eye-wateringly expensive fleet of Virgina-class nuclear submarines.

Beijing’s heavy investment in New Zealand’s failing infrastructure, coupled with her role as the principal consumer of its exports, made Wellington’s detachment from the West a much easier project than would have been the case if Washington’s “Indo-Pacific Strategy” had run to offering the Kiwis a generous free trade deal to replace their economically-critical FTA with China.

*  *  *  *  *

IT IS ONE OF THE KEY DISADVANTAGES of always being on the winning side of history’s great encounters: not being able to grasp the sheer contingency of such victories.

Had America’s carriers not been at sea on Sunday, 7 December 1941, and gone down in Pearl Harbour alongside her battleships; and had Japan’s bombers eliminated the USA’s Hawaiian-based fuel supplies; then an enemy fleet off the Californian coast would not have been the stuff of strategic nightmares; it could, very easily, have been the reality.

Certainly, with America’s fleet either destroyed or out of action, there could have been no Battle of the Coral Sea, no Battle of Midway, to save Australia and New Zealand from Japanese invasion and occupation.

Preventing the Pacific Ocean from becoming a Japanese lake in the 1940s required the expenditure of an awful lot of blood and treasure – and an awful lot of luck. Had things turned out differently, the Americans, desperate to secure their eastern flank, may have been forced to let the Pacific go. And, if J. Robert Oppenheimer had been run over by a Los Alamos bus in January 1942, then they may never have got it back.

What we New Zealanders need to grasp is that America can no more allow the Pacific to be dominated by China in the 2040s than it could allow it to be dominated by Japan in the 1940s. Global hegemony is a zero-sum game. For every step America takes back, its rival/s will take a step forward.

While China was content to remain the world’s factory, all was well. But, the moment Xi Jinping committed his country to building a blue-water navy to rival Zheng He’s great fleet; the moment his Belt & Road project threatened to link the Global South inextricably to Chinese capital and technology; all bets were off.

That brief geopolitical respite, when the Russians were on their knees, and the Chinese were still getting up off theirs, was squandered by Washington in a profoundly compromising series of adventures in the Middle East. Twenty years of “forever war” in Iraq and Afghanistan has left America’s armed forces physically and morally exhausted, and its ruling class dangerously lacking in fortitude. What better symbol of America’s decline could there be than two old men swinging ineffectually at each other for the custody of an angry and divided nation?

The USA’s weakness at the top notwithstanding, the dice of geopolitical hazard cannot remain uncast indefinitely.

*  *  *  *  *

THE NEW CONCEPTUAL STRUCTURE for the rebuilding of the USA’s global strength is its Indo-Pacific Strategy. To understand the theatre-shift, from “Asia” to “Indo”, one has only to study the actual voyages that Admiral Zheng He undertook in the early decades of the Fifteenth Century.

He’s great fleet swept south and west from coastal China, through the Indonesian archipelago, past Sri Lanka, long the coast of India, rounding the Arabian Peninsula, to journey’s end in East Africa – distributing gifts and collecting tribute all along the way. The economic and political logic was as strong for the Chinese then as it is now. Recognising that logic, the Americans have no real choice but to prevent it from unfolding.

There was a time when the USA could have done it all alone, but now it seems that the retention of American hegemony in the Pacific requires the diplomatic mobilisation of the English-speakers who invaded Iraq in 2003 – the US, the UK and Australia. Hence AUKUS – also known as “bringing the old imperialist band back together for one last tour of an ungrateful and increasingly uncooperative world”.

Can New Zealand stay out of AUKUS? Should New Zealand stay out of AUKUS? The answer to the first question, sadly, is: Only if its people are happy to turn their country into a battleground, upon which Beijing and Washington will wage a protracted ideological war for the hearts and minds of the inhabitants of what both superpowers recognise as a critically important piece of strategic real-estate. Which, even more sadly, answers the second question.

Helen Clark may have got away with keeping New Zealand out of the invasion of Iraq, but that was because, in Iraq, only American pride was at stake. In the looming struggle for the Pacific, the option of “sitting this one out” will not be on offer. Washington will insist that blood is thicker than milk, and Beijing will remind us that milk is New Zealand’s life-blood.

Like it or not, the Kiwis are either going into AUKUS’s “Pillar 2” – or they are going to China.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 6 May 2024.

Thinking About The Roman Empire.

Template For Masculine Politics: It is as well, then, that, all over the Western World, young men are thinking about Rome. Because, if ever there was time to “unleash hell” on the decrepit, the corrupt, and the criminally incompetent, then that time is now. For, make no mistake, all across the rest of the world, there is no shortage of young men thinking about the Barbarians.

WHY ARE MEN always thinking about the Roman Empire? Women, baffled by their partner’s quickening heart-rate when confronted with images of disciplined legionaries preparing to “unleash hell”, or worried by the Caesar-like poses they catch them striking in front of the bedroom mirror, have turned to their sisters on Tik-Tok for answers. Predictably, it was men who responded. The conclusion of the male commentariat? Men think about the Roman Empire a lot because the Roman Empire still contributes such a lot to what it means to be a man.

But, Rome retains its relevance for another reason, one only partially bound up with masculinity. Rome provides the template for empire: a template so powerful that we have been surrounded by its symbols for centuries. From the Dark Ages, when Charlemagne received the title of Holy Roman Emperor from the Pope; to the Consuls of the French Republic and, after them, the Emperor Napoleon; to the fasces that can still be seen adorning the United States House of Representatives and Lincoln’s memorial throne; to the classical colonnade of our own Parliament Buildings in Wellington: the legacy of Rome is ubiquitous.

The simple truth about Rome’s persistence of vision is that the ideas, the institutions, and the leaders that nourished it continue to inspire and guide our own. The way we think about politics: our curious bifurcation of means and ends; the way we honour the spirit of the Laws, even as our leaders flout the reality; the way we seek peace by preparing for war; all this is as Roman as “Hail Caesar”.

So, too, the notion that, to a favoured people, God (or, the Gods) might promise “empire without limit”. There are still numerous New Zealanders who recall hearing their parents talk about “the British Empire, upon which the sun never sets”. To this very day, Americans still celebrate in song a continental republic stretching from “sea to shining sea”.

So, Rome lives, and men of all ages still thrill to its unalloyed celebration of power. Ninety years ago, Nazi stormtroopers marched beneath devices self-consciously modelled on the eagle standards of the Roman legions. “Hail Hitler” they cried, as lustily as the men of Rome’s Thirteenth Legion had shouted “Hail Caesar!”, offering their leader the same stiff-armed Roman salute. Certainly, the movie director Ridley Scott had as little difficulty as Joseph Goebbels in mixing valour and violence into a thrilling, if extremely dangerous, recapitulation of Rome’s political imperatives. “Gladiator” is fascism in sandals.

Rome’s shadow is visible even in today’s headlines. It is said that the Roman senator, Cato, ended every speech with the same sentence: Ceterum (autem) censeo Carthaginem esse delendam [Furthermore, I consider that Carthage must be destroyed.] When it came to which great city-state should command the Mediterranean basin –  Carthage or Rome – there could be only one. Clearly, the Israeli state and Hamas have arrived at the same conclusion. Like Cato, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seems hell-bent on destroying his mortal enemies. When Carthage finally fell, the Romans left not one stone standing upon another. The Israeli’s seem determined to leave Gaza in the same state.

Confronted with the imminent demise of his people, the Roman historian Tacitus has the ancient Briton, Calgacus, say of his conquerors: ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant – they make a desert and call it peace. We must earnestly hope that Tacitus’s words do not supply Gaza with its epitaph.

Equally relevant to the headlines of the 2020s is Rome’s bloody transition from republic to empire.

Very few people living today understand that Julius Caesar, the man who made the Roman Republic’s fall inevitable, was what most of us would call a socialist. Though a patrician (aristocrat) by birth, Caesar saw in the Roman Senate little more than a corrupt body of elite oppressors of the plebs (the ordinary people).

Attempting to protect the plebs from the patricians was, however, a risky enterprise. Caesar had before him the fate of the Gracchi brothers (think of the Kennedy brothers in togas) whose lack of a sufficiently large body of armed men to protect their reformist agenda resulted in both of them being assassinated.

Caesar’s success as a political leader was founded squarely on Rome’s legions and the money they allowed him to amass. By the time the patricians became desperate enough to kill him, Caesar had made sure that the corrupt, elite-driven Roman Republic was beyond saving. His adopted heir and protégé, Octavian, would become Rome’s first emperor – Augustus.

It is very difficult to look upon the corruption and dysfunction of the present American Republic without recalling the moral and social disintegration of the Roman Republic. (The constitutional inspiration, incidentally, which guided the USA’s founding fathers.)

Like the young Roman Republic, the young United States would acquire its own version of empire and, by virtue of its military and economic strength, emerge as the master of its world. As is so often the case, however, the vigour and vitality of a young republic fades. Wealth substitutes for glory. Republican virtue becomes a memory. Unity dissolves. The republic falls into the hands of men with too much money and too many years.

The question upon which the fate of the world now turns is whether or not the American Republic, still rich, still immensely powerful, can rise above the rancour and corruption into which it has fallen. Caesar was murdered by men who clung to a Roman republican constitution that no longer worked. It had become a threadbare veil, no longer capable of hiding – let alone restraining – the naked ambition of ruthless political and military leaders eager to replace it with something more rational – and less restrictive.

There are many who would argue that the United States is not that far removed from the circumstances which led to the fall of the Roman Republic. America’s enemies would appear to be better students of history than either the Democratic or Republican parties. Profound challenges to American hegemony in Europe, the Indo-Pacific and the Middle East can hardly be faced down by a nation that cannot even elect a Speaker of the House of Representatives – let alone pass a budget! Not even Rome, in all its long history, was able to produce a cavalcade of clowns to match the current American spectacle.

That the USA is presided over by a man in his 80s speaks eloquently of the USA’s predicament. Every day, it’s sclerotic institutions make it clear that America is no longer a country for young men. America desperately needs what Rome, in extremis, always seemed to find: a vigorous political general, with a plan in his mind – and loyal legions at his back.

It is as well, then, that, all over the Western World, young men are thinking about Rome. Because, if ever there was time to “unleash hell” on the decrepit, the corrupt, and the criminally incompetent, then that time is now. For, make no mistake, all across the rest of the world, there is no shortage of young men thinking about the Barbarians.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 23 October 2023.

Too Big To Punish.

Too Strong For The Law’s Web: But, if the USA is too big to punish, why isn’t the Russian Federation? Russia’s economy may be roughly the size of Italy’s, but it’s nuclear arsenal is more than capable of laying human civilisation to waste. Threatening to arrest Vladimir Putin - especially when the Russian Federation and the rest of the United Nations are recalling George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq twenty years ago – is an astonishingly provocative act.

I AM CONSTANTLY ASTONISHED at how blithely unconscious the West is of its own transgressions. That the International Criminal Court (ICC) could announce its decision to issue a warrant for the arrest of Vladimir Putin a mere three days ahead of the twentieth anniversary of the United States’, the United Kingdom’s, Australia’s and Poland’s illegal invasion of Iraq on 20 March 2003 shows just how morally comatose the West has become.

Twenty years ago, President George Bush, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Prime Minister John Howard and the Polish premier, Leszek Miller, ordered a massive airborne attack and an all-out armoured assault upon a nation that was at peace with its neighbours and, which had made no aggressive moves against any of the nations whose armed forces were pouring across its borders. Unsurprisingly, a large number of the world’s nations condemned the invasion of Iraq as a breach of the UN Charter and international law. Millions of people around the world, with considerable justification, branded Bush, Blair, Howard and Miller war criminals. Certainly, the invasion they authorised led directly to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent human-beings.

So, why didn’t the ICC, which had come into formal existence on the 1 July 2002, issue warrants for the arrest of Bush, Blair, Howard and Miller? Were they not guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity? Had they not involved themselves in what the prosecutors at the Nuremburg Trials called “the crime of crimes” – the planning, preparation and waging of aggressive war? The crime for which the surviving Nazi leaders were hanged in 1946.

From the grim perspective of the world of realpolitik, the reason why the ICC decided not to prosecute the four aggressors is obvious: the United States is simply “too big to punish”. Not only did the USA refuse to recognise the jurisdiction of the ICC over United States citizens, but every diplomat and jurist worthy of the name understood that any attempt to arrest George W. Bush would provoke a reaction of truly biblical proportions.

But, if the USA is too big to punish, why isn’t the Russian Federation? Russia’s economy may be roughly the size of Italy’s, but it’s nuclear arsenal is more than capable of laying human civilisation to waste. Threatening to arrest Putin - especially when the Russian Federation and the rest of the United Nations are recalling the illegal invasion of Iraq twenty years ago – is an astonishingly provocative act.

Now, some of those reading these words will object that they are nothing more than an egregious example of “whataboutism”. If Putin stands accused of illegally deporting thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, then he should be put on trial for his actions – not let off because Bush, Blair, Howard and Miller were not held accountable for theirs. Crying “What about Iraq?!” is an irrelevant question – it has no bearing on the case against Putin.

Except, of course, it does. The application of justice must not only be even-handed, it must be seen to be even-handed. If the public had witnessed the child of a rich and powerful family engaging in clearly dangerous and illegal activity, and then seen the Police refuse to bring charges against him because his family was simply too rich and too powerful, they would be disgusted. And if they then saw the child of a poor and powerless family brought to trial for exactly the same offences, they would be outraged. Prosecuting the poor, but not the rich, child would, quite rightly, be regarded as a travesty of justice. What’s more, the court responsible would be utterly discredited in the eyes of all fair-minded people.

Two-and-a-half thousand years ago, a Scythian prince named Anacharsis had this to say about Ancient Athens’ celebrated legal code: “Written laws are like spiders’ webs; they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor, but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.”

The USA has proved the truth of Anacharsis’ observation by simply overawing the ICC’s timid prosecutors. Twenty years on from its failure to hold the invaders of Iraq to account, however, the ICC clearly believes that the Russian President is too weak to tear its legal web in pieces.

But who would be the person who arrests Putin? Or the country that tries to hold him?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 24 March 2023.

An Act Of National Self-Harm.

A Dangerous Leap Backwards: A United States forced to live by the beliefs and values of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries cannot hope to go on leading the “Free World”, or compete economically with nations focused fearlessly on the future. The revocation of Roe v. Wade represents the American republic’s most serious act of self harm in 165 years.

THE REVOCATION of Row v. Wade, like the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, is an act of national self-harm. Louis XIV’s decision to revoke the royal promise of religious toleration, drove tens-of-thousands of Huguenots (Protestants) out of his realm. Thousands fled to the Netherlands and Great Britain, thousands more to the rising state of Prussia. Economically, culturally and militarily, the triumph of religious bigotry over rational political compromise weakened the French state profoundly, The revocation of Roe v. Wade is certain to have a similar effect on the future of the United States.

Intelligent American capitalists will be swift in their condemnation of the Supreme Court of the United States’ decision to overturn what most Americans believed to be a settled legal/constitutional right. Removing the option of easily available abortion services from a large percentage of the US female population cannot help but result in a serious dislocation of the American workforce.

While US women continued to be able to exercise personal control over their own fertility, their long-term participation in the paid work-force remained assured. The removal of that control in approximately half of the fifty US states raises serious supply and demand issues for American employers. The impact of millions of young women being required to carry their pregnancies to full-term is readily imagined. Such an arbitrary restriction in the supply of available workers can only exacerbate already serious labour shortages and worsen wage inflation.

The revocation of Roe v. Wade is also likely to incentivise the migration of large capitalist enterprises out of radically anti-abortion states like Texas, Missouri, Mississippi and Alabama. Relocating to a more liberal state may prove to be one of the few ways successful corporations can keep their most valuable senior female employees on the payroll. The Supreme Court’s decision has given these employees every incentive to move out of “Pro-Life” states – quite possibly to a new job with one of their former employer’s competitors.

Nor can it be long before the Pro-Choice forces invite “progressive” Americans to boycott the products of corporations which refuse to leave Pro-Life states. Already many corporate leaders are reassuring their female employees that they will pick up the cost of out-of-state terminations. This can only be a short-term fix, however, given the likelihood that Pro-Life legislatures will attempt to deny pregnant women access to FDA-approved abortifacient medication, or, even more controversially, prohibit them from crossing state-lines while pregnant.

Unintended consequences such as these will impose increasingly intractable problems upon those Republican Party-dominated states proclaiming themselves to be simultaneously pro-business and anti-abortion. Should it become obvious that the state’s outlawing of abortion is negatively impacting its ability to attract investment, or, worse still, promoting dis-investment, then the Republican Party is likely to fracture.

The enormous difficulties associated with ideologically-inspired attempts to reverse the tides of social and economic change – Prohibition being the most notorious – are about to be encountered all over again by a new generation of Americans. This time, however, it may require something more radical than the ratification of the Twenty-First Amendment to the US Constitution which brought Prohibition to an end in 1933.

At some point, and the decision of the six conservative Justices of the Supreme Court to revoke Roe v. Wade has undoubtedly brought this point closer, Americans are going to have to come to terms with the fact that their beloved constitution is no longer fit-for-purpose.

A revolutionary document, in its time, the passage of two centuries has exposed the deeply anti-democratic elements deliberately woven into the constitution of the American republic by its founding fathers. So strong are these elements that it required a bloody civil war to expunge the pernicious influence of slavery upon the evolution of American liberty. It is no accident that it is precisely in the constitutional amendments giving effect to the abolition of slavery that the justices responsible for handing down Roe v. Wade in 1973 went looking for the legal principles confirming women in the ownership of their own bodies.

Unsurprisingly, given its dramatic post-war role in expanding the ambit of personal liberty, American liberals have come to regard the Supreme Court as the most effective instrument for securing the social changes they desire. Beginning with Brown v. Topeka Board of Education, which racially-desegregated public schools in 1954, the Court handed down a series of progressive judgements (Row v. Wade being one of the most significant) which were believed by most Americans to have changed their society forever.

Most – but not all. American conservatives were both astounded and outraged by the emergence of a liberal Supreme Court. Their consternation was understandable, because for most of US history the Court had been a bastion of political reaction. It was the infamous Dred Scott Decision of 1857, which declared that no Black person could ever be a US citizen, that made the Civil War inevitable. An equally reactionary Supreme Court struck down much of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s.

In the eyes of conservative Americans, the liberal Supreme Court of the past 70 years has been a dangerously aberrant entity. Consequently, the American Right has spent the past 50 years availing itself of every opportunity to replace liberal justices with legal conservatives. Thanks to Donald Trump, the weight of judicial opinion on the Court has finally been shifted sharply to the right. The revocation of Roe v. Wade may only be the beginning.

The “originalist” doctrine of Justice Samuel Alito, and his five Roe v. Wade concurrers, holds that the US Constitution must be interpreted according to the prevailing legal concepts and moral precepts of the historical period in which it was written. Present-day legal and ethical ideas cannot be grafted retrospectively onto the reasoning and intent of the original authors. While this doctrine holds sway on the Court, the Constitution can only become a reactionary cage in which Americans will remain confined for the next 30 years.

Perhaps the most surprising feature of the political reaction to the revocation of Roe v. Wade is the absence of any significant argument condemning the whole anti-democratic schema of the US Constitution. While there has been bitter condemnation of the Court’s judgement, the wider objection to unelected judges, appointed for life, thwarting the will of a clear majority of the American people, has not yet become a feature of the debate. Nor is there any evidence of a growing political movement in favour of summoning a second Constitutional Convention to draft a new, genuinely democratic, set of rules for Twenty-First Century America.

A United States forced to live by the beliefs and values of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: brutal eras in which slavery was legally sanctioned, women treated as chattels, and LGBTQI persons persecuted and imprisoned; cannot hope to lead the “Free World”, or compete economically with nations focused fearlessly on the future. In order to form “a more perfect union” a second American revolution has become as necessary as the first.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website of Monday, 27 June 2022.

The World’s Rapidly-Changing Strategic Environment.

In Mandarin, Taiwan is spelt U-K-R-A-I-N-E: It is all very well for President Joe Biden to pledge his country’s military intervention should China invade Taiwan, the real trick is making Beijing believe him. Why would it, when Washington has been so careful to ensure that its own forces, and those of other Nato members, do not come into contact with Russian military units. After all, China’s nuclear arsenal is no less apocalyptic in its potential than Russia’s. 

“TIME IS SPEEDING UP”, says Wigram Capital Advisors’ principal Rodney Jones. His reference is to the speed at which the geopolitical situation is being transformed by the actions of Russia and China. Specifically, Jones is alluding to the presence of the Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, in the capitals of the South Pacific and the prospect of at least ten of the region’s micro-states being drawn into a “China-Pacific Island Countries Common Development Vision” by Beijing. As Jones forcefully reminds us, the “generally benign strategic environment” in which Prime Minister Helen Clark blithely located New Zealand more than twenty years ago, is long gone.

The Chinese Government, sensing a measure of disarray in US foreign policy, has not lost any time taking advantage of the global confusion and alarm caused by the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine. Looking past the ardent demonstrations of support for the Ukrainian Government’s resolute defence of its territory, Beijing has calculated that this enthusiasm will fade as the economic consequences of the war begin to be felt by the peoples of Europe and North America – not to mention Australians and New Zealanders.

It is all very well for President Joe Biden to pledge his country’s military intervention should China invade Taiwan, the real trick is making Beijing believe him. Why would they, when Washington has been so careful to ensure that its own forces, and those of other Nato members, do not come into contact with Russian military units. After all, China’s nuclear arsenal is no less apocalyptic in its potential than Russia’s. Biden’s monosyllabic tough-talk could only have been a bluff, and the White House’s immediate walking-back of his bellicose pledge into the relative diplomatic safety of “strategic ambiguity” proved it.

Not only that, but Biden’s resort to bluff can only serve to deepen Beijing’s conviction that the United States no longer feels confident that its military strength is equal to the challenge of the emerging Eurasian duumvirate. In this regard, the meeting in Tokyo of “The Quad” (USA, Japan, Australia, India) may not have delivered the geostrategic warning to Beijing that the Americans intended.

Anthony Albanese is not Scott Morrison, and the stance adopted by the new Labor Government of Australia seems likely to be considerably less belligerent than its predecessor. If the global economy continues to weaken, it is also quite likely that the folly of equipping Australia with eight nuclear-powered submarines will be postponed indefinitely.

The announcement of the trilateral AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom, United States) Pact in September 2021 is unlikely to have impressed China’s military leadership, most particularly since the US’s most powerful Quad allies, Japan and India, were not persuaded to join. To the Communist Party of China, the Anglophone AUKUS will have all the appearance of an absurd imperial anachronism. Once again, the impression conveyed is of a flailing and failing United States.

Of much more interest to the Chinese will be the reaction of the Indian Government to the Russo-Ukrainian War. India’s ties to Russia are strong, making it a less than vehement supporter of the West’s ruinous sanctions regime. Nor can New Delhi be insensible to the potential strategic challenges arising out of the Sino-Russian “entente” of 4 February 2022.

The Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, will be observing with keen interest President Vladimir Putin’s ability to withstand the economic warfare unleashed upon his country by the West. Should the Russian Federation’s military forces begin to gain the upper-hand in Ukraine, and if China’s financial support renders the sanctions regime bearable, then Modi and India’s political class will have some serious thinking to do.

Does it make sense for a non-European nation like India to be perceived as some sort of Western lap-dog? Especially when it could, instead, become a crucial part of the Eurasian superpower fast emerging as the nemesis of the imperialist West?

If India goes, can the oil-rich nations of the Middle East be far behind?

All too aware of the energy vulnerability of the United States – not to mention the acute sensitivity of the American electorate to ‘rising gasoline prices at the pump’ – some US legislators are already attempting to throw their weight around on the question of how much oil the member states of OPEC should be sucking out of the ground. Threats of passing legislation allowing the United States Government to seize the American-based assets of “uncooperative” OPEC states are unlikely to impress the Saudis or their Arab allies. The defection of key oil producers to “Eurasia”, and the end of the US dollar as a fiat currency, would also spell the end of American/Western hegemony.

Even if Eurasia fails to materialise as the new global hegemon, the continued global dominance of the United States still cannot be taken for granted. Beijing will be paying as much attention as Moscow to the outcome of the 2022 mid-term congressional elections. Most political scientists agree that the chances of the Democratic Party retaining control of the House of Representatives and the Senate are close to zero. But, if the Republicans come surging back, then the potential for serious internal disorder breaking out in the United States is very high. Not only can a house divided against itself not hope to stand, but it also cannot possibly bend the rest of the world to its will.

With all of the above potentialities for Western disaster in play, it is not difficult to understand why, all over the world, the Chinese are actively probing for points of weakness. The South Pacific has clearly been identified by the geopoliticians in Beijing as an area ripe for the insertion of Chinese money and influence.

There will be those in the New Zealand foreign affairs community who respond to this probing with all the flatulent bombast of the pith-helmeted imperialists of yesteryear. These are the armchair warriors who are currently urging the Labour Government to tell the Chinese to “Clear orf out of ‘our’ backyard!” As if, like the Russians, we regard nearby, supposedly independent, nation states as falling within our sphere of influence.

Fortunately, however, there are also foreign affairs and trade specialists who understand that ‘national security’ is not simply about military force and the ability to project it aggressively. No nation can call itself secure if its economy is falling apart, and it people falling into poverty. As this country’s largest trading partner and key export market, China is not a country New Zealand should be in any hurry to infuriate and/or alienate. And, there are plenty of Australian politicians and businesspeople who feel the same way.

New Zealand’s “generally benign strategic environment” has not been undermined by the Pacific’s rising superpower. History teaches us that it’s the waning superpowers, edged-off the geopolitical stage by more dynamic rivals, that the world’s small and vulnerable states have most reason to fear.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 30 May 2022.

America’s To Lose: But the Outcome Of The “Great Game” Remains Unclear.

Disputed Territory: By 1991 it looked as though America’s geopoliticians had won the “Great Game”. The Soviet Union had collapsed, Eastern Europe was theirs for the taking, and the People’s Republic of China had allowed itself to be transformed into a giant American factory. No wonder a US State Department analyst, Francis Fukuyama, had jubilantly penned a paper entitled “The End of History”.

THE GREAT GEOPOLITICAL CHALLENGE confronting the United States is that the Americas are separated from Eurasia by two broad oceans. Since the end of the Second World War, from which it emerged as the undisputed global hegemon, this geopolitical challenge has required the American government to transform Western Europe into a military, economic and cultural appendage of the United States.

Had the United States failed to effect this transformation, its own economy would have faltered, and capitalism, as a global system, could very easily have collapsed. Making the nations of Western Europe part and parcel of the American economy – principally as borrowers of American dollars and consumers of American exports – was crucial to preserving the American people’s economic prosperity and, hence, the USA’s political stability.

Had the USA not launched the “Marshall Plan” for European recovery, and intervened aggressively in the domestic politics of France and Italy, it is practically certain that the formidable Communist Parties of those two countries would have come to power, bringing the whole of Europe under the tutelage of the Soviet Union.

And Great Britain?

The United States had taken a majority shareholding in Great Britain Ltd during the darkest days of 1940. In return for the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, keeping his country in the war, Winston Churchill, was forced to set in motion the dissolution of the British Empire.

It is likely Churchill consoled himself for this capitulation to necessity with fairy tales about a “special relationship” between the USA and Great Britain. No doubt he truly believed that in the unfolding history of the English-speaking peoples, Britain would be seen to have played the role of Ancient Greece to America’s Ancient Rome: peacefully blending its old empire into something new and altogether larger and more powerful.

The Americans would not have disagreed with the last bit, but they were never foolish enough to believe in the rest. Since becoming the world’s banker during the First World War, US capitalism had been aching to get its hands on the protected markets and resources of the geographically vast British Empire. The only thing the Americans were willing to share with the British was the English language.

As the Brits found out to their cost during the Suez Crisis of 1956, the sun had well and truly set on the British Empire. It had become an expensive joke. The British lion was stuffed.

Which still left the USA facing the problem of Eurasia. The Soviet Union and China might be broken and destitute after years of oppression and war, but beneath the graves and the rubble lay resources that could make them rich enough to one day compete with the United States for the rest of the world’s allegiance.

The geopolitical planners in Washington understood that American hegemony could only be sustained by making damn sure that neither Russia nor China ever arrived at that strategically critical position. What they were in the process of doing to the British Empire, they were determined, eventually, to do to the Russians and the Chinese: break them into pieces and transfer their markets and resources into the safekeeping of Uncle Sam.

By 1991 it looked as though America’s geopoliticians had done it. The Soviet Union had collapsed, Eastern Europe was theirs for the taking, and the People’s Republic of China had allowed itself to be transformed into a giant American factory. No wonder a US State Department analyst, Francis Fukuyama, had jubilantly penned a paper entitled “The End of History”.

But, the clever boys and girls in the State Department, and their moronic friends in the military and the CIA, had not factored in the extraordinary historical resilience of the Russians and the Chinese. Henry Ford had told his fellow Americans that “history is bunk” – and they had believed him. Drunk on the heady brew of their “unipolar world”, US geopoliticians had called their global victory too soon. Eventually, after twenty years of getting its ass kicked in the Middle East, the United States had to confront the inconvenient truth that Eurasia wasn’t beaten yet – not by a long shot.

Inevitably, Russia and China had produced leaders in possession of the requisite political steel to exploit the Americans’ mistaken assumption that they could command the rest of the world to dance – and it would dance. Only when it was too late did Washington understand that Moscow and Beijing has music of their own, and dance-steps with which America was entirely unfamiliar. In the global edition of Dancing With The Stars, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping made Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden look like flat-footed rubes.

Snapping out of their premature imperial bender, the Americans did their best to re-energise the Drang nach Osten (Drive to the East) that had been set in motion by the Soviet Union’s collapse. The United States’ geopolitical catspaw, Nato, had been expanded all the way to the borders of the Russian Federation. Washington and its surrogates were stirring up trouble in China’s western border province of Xinjiang. Bait the Bear and Poke the Dragon had become the only games in town.

But these were no sand-blasted Middle-eastern dictators they were facing. Russia and China were nuclear powers. Getting rid of Putin and Xi would require something the Americans have never been over-endowed with – guile.

Regardless, they laid a trap for Putin, baited it with Ukraine, and waited. If Russia took the bait, the United States and Nato would unleash, as one pundit put it: “an economic and cultural Barbarossa”. And if Xi was foolish enough to come to Putin’s aid, then they were quite willing to declare full-scale economic war on the People’s Republic as well. A geopolitical twofer!

Except, the imposition of crippling sanctions cuts both ways. The USA is pinning all its hopes of finally subduing Eurasia on both Russia and China succumbing to the impact of the West’s economic warfare before it blows back into Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and, ultimately, and perhaps a lot faster than Washington anticipates, into America itself.

The Russian Federation has released a map of the world showing all those nations who have declared themselves “Enemies of Russia” by joining the economic blockade. The most striking thing about the map is that it identifies not only Putin’s (and potentially Xi’s) enemies, but also those parts of the world inhabited by white people.

If Eurasia survives the sanctions; and if, in the process, it creates a new economic order from which the great American hegemon and its hangers-on are excluded; then it will not be the USA that wins the “Great Game”, it will be Russia and China, the masters of Eurasia.

Because, as the inventor of geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) wrote more than a century ago:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; [Russia] Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; [Eurasia plus Africa] Who rules the World Island commands the World.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 8 April 2022.

Of American Geese And Russian Ganders.

Moral And Diplomatic Failure: Shouldn’t journalists from small nations like New Zealand be reminding the international community of its obligation to not only demand full accountability from those nations that commit crimes against humanity, but also from those that cause them?

SATURDAY NIGHT’S BULLETIN of 1 News featured a very peculiar, and disturbing, item. Put together by journalist Thomas Mead, the item noted with alarm the fact that some New Zealanders were backing Vladimir Putin and Russia against Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine.

Those involved were described by Mead as “conspiracy theorists”, a term he appeared to be using as a synonym for “evil crazies”. This highly tendentious characterisation was not in the least challenged or repudiated by the two academics Mead consulted. Neither the political scientist, Steve Hoadley, nor the University of Auckland’s “Misinformation Project” spokesperson, Snajama Hattotuwa, challenged Mead’s assumptions about Putin’s supporters.

Were New Zealand at war with the Russian Federation, then this degree of overt media propagandising might, just, be excusable. When the youth of one’s country are locked in an existential struggle with its enemies, balance and nuance tend to fall by the wayside. A war being fought on the other side of the world, however, surely requires plenty of both. Demonising one’s fellow citizens for the “sin” of refusing to view a faraway war through the lens of their own government serves neither journalism nor democracy.

Then again, since the New Zealand Parliament has, unanimously, rushed through all the stages of a bill enabling the New Zealand state, independently of the United Nations Security Council, to impose sanctions on Russian businesses and individuals, perhaps New Zealand really is at war with the Russian Federation.

While the imposition of economic sanctions on another country and its citizens falls well short of ordering one’s armed forces into battle against them, it is difficult to characterise the measure as anything other than a declaration of economic warfare.

An effective sanctions regime, by wreaking havoc on the targeted nation’s economy is intended to inflict non-physical harm on its citizens. It is, unquestionably, an act of coercion. A lesser act of coercion, at least in the short term, than firing artillery shells and dropping bombs, but an act of coercion nonetheless.

This is why the imposition of sanctions, a remedy institutionalised by the League of Nations in the years immediately following World War I, was presented as the most effective international response to aggression – short of all-out war. It amounted to a declaration of economic hostilities upon the aggressor state by the whole world. As such, it made it difficult for the aggressor state to retaliate effectively. It also constituted an unanswerable international moral rebuke of the offending nation’s actions.

Re-adopted by the United Nations following the Second World War, the sanctions option was placed in the hands of the UN Security Council. Providing the five permanent members of the Security Council (USA, Russia, UK, France and China) were in agreement, the world would be empowered to squeeze the economy of an aggressor state until the pips squeaked.

There was, however, an inherent weakness in this arrangement. Since only the world’s most powerful states were ever likely to thumb their noses as the United Nation’s Charter, and since those states could veto any intervention by the UN Security Council, then the application of sanctions as a means of coercing delinquent states into demonstrating an acceptable standard of international conduct became something of a dead letter.

New Zealand has long been a critic of the veto power of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – depicting it as a fundamental obstacle to the enforcement of the provisions of the UN Charter. A little reflection, however, makes it perfectly clear why the veto power has always been critical to the maintenance of international peace and stability.

What possible reason for retaining their membership of the United Nations would the great powers have if it was possible for a majority of the five permanent members to “gang-up” on the rest? It is the veto that keeps the planet’s most dangerous nations seated around the multilateral table. If the UN Security Council had possessed the power to impose sanctions on the Bush Administration for its unlawful invasion of Iraq, would the USA still be a member of the UN? Of course not.

The problem which now confronts the world is that the preponderant economic and military power of the United States has persuaded its leaders to evade the limitations associated with the veto by imposing swingeing economic sanctions upon its enemies without Security Council authorisation. It masks this dangerous unilateralism by pressuring those states under its sway (which includes most of the world’s nations) into joining its sanctions regimes. Any reluctance on the part of US “allies” to participate in these brazen acts of economic coercion is overcome by threatening to extend the sanctions to any entity deemed guilty of ignoring them.

In a more rational world, the very fact one of the five nuclear-armed permanent members is contemplating exercising its veto would be enough to convince the other four that a full-scale diplomatic effort is required to identify the most fruitful options for easing the tension. Tragically, the most malign legacy of the Cold War, which froze international relations for forty years, is the way in which its “Free World” allies have opted to remain passengers on the United States’ war chariot, and how many of its erstwhile Warsaw Pact enemies have sought its protection from their former Russian suzerain.

That Russia would eventually demand to know why sauce for the American goose was not also sauce for the Russian gander was inevitable. If the Americans could determine that a nation thousands of miles from its shores, which had made no aggressive move in its direction, could nevertheless be invaded by a coalition led by two of the five permanent members of the Security Council – ostensibly to defend themselves – then Moscow was surely entitled to do the same to a nation located on its western border which had voiced its determination to throw in its lot with Russia’s Nato “enemies”.

That the answer: because two wrongs do not make a right; and that it is no more acceptable for Russian missiles to kill Ukrainian children than it was for American missiles to kill Iraqi children; should have been obvious to Vladimir Putin, is, unfortunately, no help at all. Because the chancelleries of the world looked the other way when the USA tore up the UN Charter in 2003, their powers of moral persuasion in 2022 are not as forceful as they should be.

Rather than replicating the McCarthyism of the Cold War, shouldn’t journalists from small nations like New Zealand be reminding the international community of its obligation to not only demand full accountability from those nations that commit crimes against humanity, but also from those that cause them?

This essay is exclusive to Bowalley Road.

Bear-Baiting.

Unchained: It is certainly fine sport, this high-stakes game of bear-baiting. Ukraine’s dog goes in first, hackles raised, teeth bared. Close behind sidle NATO’s new members – Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic States – jaws slavering, US-supplied fangs gleaming. While all around them, wild and eager, the newshounds of the Western media bark and bark and bark. Only France and Germany hang back. They’ve baited this bear before and know from bitter experience how sharp are its teeth, how dangerous its claws.

THE THING TO REMEMBER about bear-baiting is that, like “reality” television, there is very little about it that is real. This cruel spectacle, enjoyed by English kings and commoners alike for nearly 800 years, always weighted the odds heavily against the bear. Had they not, there would have been no one to bet on but the bear. Mastiffs and Bulldogs are fearsome beasts, but neither of them could last five minutes in a fair fight with an angry bear.

The bear simply had to be handicapped. Accordingly, the baiters took care to chain the bear by the leg, or the neck, to an iron stake driven into the middle of the bear-pit. They were also careful to set more than one dog against the bear. Sometimes, to be absolutely certain that the dogs had a fighting chance, the baiters would pull the bear’s canine teeth and pare-back his lethal claws.

Thus was the uncertainty of the encounter heightened, and the range of outcomes upon which to place a wager multiplied. How many dogs would the bear be able to kill or maim before he was brought low? How long could the chained and defanged creature hold out? One hour? Two?

King Henry VIII enjoyed the sport so much he had a bear-pit constructed at his Whitehall palace. It is not recorded how much the sovereign won or lost betting against the bears.

Sad to say, sovereign powers are still engaged in bear-baiting. The bear in question may be the symbolic representative of Russia, but the principle is the same. De-fang it by stripping away all the territories you can trick or bribe into abandoning their homeland. Pare back its claws by means of economic sabotage and diplomatic chicanery. Chain it unfairly behind indefensible borders. And then send in your dogs.

And were there ever dogs so vicious as the dogs of the West? The dogs of NATO? Poor Mikhail Gorbachev: bedazzled by dreams of a democratic and de-militarised Eastern Europe; intoxicated by the idea of a free and mutually supportive association of nation states stretching all the way from the North Sea to the Pacific Ocean; he foolishly neglected to get in writing President George H. W. Bush’s guarantee that NATO would not advance “one inch” beyond the River Elbe.

How could he have forgotten the old Russian proverb that no less a person than Ronald Reagan had quoted to him (in passable Russian) Doveryay, no proveryay: “Trust, but verify.”

Ah, but those NATO dogs are cunning fellows. Thirty-two years after Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, gave their word to Gorbachev, they snarl at the Russian bear: “Where’s your proof that NATO ever offered such a guarantee? You have no proof. You lie!”

The Western Media, a dog whose teeth are every bit as sharp as NATO’s, gleefully inserts the word “contested” whenever the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, repeats Gorbachev’s claim.

In this baiting game, however, no dog is more gangrel, greedy or vicious than the puppet-regime purporting to represent the people of the Ukraine. Installed by the Americans in 2014, after their armed gangs of self-avowed fascists had driven the elected government from power, Kyiv’s humble servants have kept a very useful small-war smouldering on Russia’s border for 8 years. Their signature on the Minsk Protocol as worthless as all their subsequent protestations of peace and goodwill.

It is certainly fine sport, this high-stakes game of bear-baiting. Ukraine’s dog goes in first, hackles raised, teeth bared. Close behind sidle NATO’s new members – Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Baltic States – jaws slavering, US-supplied fangs gleaming. While all around them, wild and eager, the newshounds of the Western media bark and bark and bark. Only France and Germany hang back. They’ve baited this bear before and know from bitter experience how sharp are its teeth, how dangerous its claws.

But, what is this? What has happened to the chain that the baiters were at such pains to reassure the gamblers remained firmly fastened around the bear’s neck? And surely those claws are much longer than they should be? Dear God! That Ukrainian dog has ventured much too close – can someone not pull him back beyond the reach of those powerful arms?

We have wagered everything on NATO’s dogs. How could we have missed the Russian bear’s nuclear teeth?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 25 February 2022.

Too Much Intellectual Curiosity – Not Enough Fox News.

Bogeyman On Manoeuvres: Not only would a Russian invasion of Ukraine allow the Ardern Government to join “a largely Western chorus of condemnation” and announce (probably reluctantly) New Zealand’s own autonomous sanctions against the Russian Federation, but it would also vindicate the dominant “Bogeyman School” of New Zealand strategic studies.

WHAT WOULD YOU EXPECT from a course devoted to “Strategic Studies”? A reasonable expectation, surely, of a university course devoted to the study of global strategic issues, is that it would be ideologically neutral. After all, the struggle for global advantage: economically, militarily and diplomatically; is driven by a wide variety of international actors. Breaking down the conduct of nation states by passing it through a single ideological lens (of whatever manufacture) could hardly be described as good scholarship. It would risk turning out students who were singularly ill-equipped to identify and interpret the strategic issues at play on the international stage. That can hardly be the goal of a course called “Strategic Studies” – can it?

Which is not to say that powerful nations, the United States in particular, have not in the past actively rewarded, rather than discouraged, a lack of intellectual curiosity, professional competence, and fundamental human empathy. The administration of George W. Bush, for example, was famously suspicious of fluent speakers of Arabic. They feared that such people might “go native” – i.e. demonstrate too much understanding of the nation the United States was planning, in flagrant disregard of international law, to invade. The government of the United Kingdom similarly distinguished itself by requiring it advisors to provide spurious grounds for joining the US in its illegal invasion of Iraq.

If by “Strategic Studies” is meant the training of students to view international events from a single, thoroughly biased, perspective; and to dutifully supply their employers with material based on falsified data and outright lies; then intellectual curiosity, professional competence, and fundamental human empathy might, indeed, prove prejudicial to rapid advancement in their chosen career.

Having read his Newsroom posting entitled “Russian Aggression Exposes Gap In NZ’s Diplomatic Toolkit”, it is very difficult to avoid the suspicion that Professor Robert Ayson subscribes to something disappointingly close to the above definition of Strategic Studies. It will doubtless come as no surprise that the professor’s perspective on New Zealand’s foreign relations locates the United States of America squarely in the centre of the big picture.

Interestingly, the posting begins with what amounts to a huge sigh of relief that the dangerously heterodox Winston Peters is no longer this country’s Foreign Minister.

The good professor wastes no time in reassuring his readers that: “Labour ceased subcontracting foreign policy to New Zealand First after the 2020 election. Peters’ quest to advance free trade discussions with Russia and its Eurasian economic partners, which was written into the 2017 coalition agreement, is now history.”

The notion that New Zealand might derive considerable benefit from distributing its export eggs across several baskets clearly does not fall within Professor Ayson’s definition of strategic studies. Also excluded, presumably, is the idea that the Russian Federation is a strategic player meriting a level of analysis more rigorous than the shrieking of Fox News.

Clearly, the brand of Strategic Studies favoured at Victoria University relies heavily on setting forth the measures best calculated to disrupt and punish the activities of a frightening cast of international bogeymen, the biggest and baddest of which is, of course, Russia – as it has been, off-and-on, since the late-nineteenth century.

Judging by his enthusiasm for the concept, Professor Ayson appears convinced that the most helpful contribution New Zealand can make to discombobulating the Russian bogeyman is to join with the United States and its other sycophants – sorry, “allies” – in imposing “autonomous” (i.e. unauthorised by the United Nations Security Council) economic and diplomatic sanctions.

In other universities, strategic studies professors might encourage their students to calculate how close such unilaterally imposed sanctions come to actual acts of war. In these other universities, strategic studies professors might even invite their classes to consider the consequences of the economic sanctions imposed on Japan in 1940 – most particularly the “embargo” on oil and scrap-metal exports. To what extent were such strategic gestures intended to produce a strategic response? Did the USA’s “autonomous sanctions” make Pearl Harbour inevitable? Was that their purpose?

Certainly, as one reads the professor’s post, it is difficult to rid one’s mind of the image of him bouncing up and down with excitement at the prospect of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Not only would an invasion allow the Ardern Government to join “a largely Western chorus of condemnation” and announce (probably reluctantly) New Zealand’s own autonomous sanctions against the Russian Federation, but it would also vindicate the “Bogeyman School” of strategic studies.

That the current Foreign Minister might be a less than fanatical convert to the Bogeyman School clearly concerns Professor Ayson: “Partway through 2021, Nanaia Mahuta – Labour’s replacement for Peters – publicly expressed concerns about Five Eyes auspices being used to criticise the human rights records of other governments (in this case China).”

As well she might! In the eyes of some strategic scholars (although probably not those at Vic) the “Five Eyes” penchant for throwing their weight around descends in a direct line from the egregious Anglophone imperialism that transformed millions of Chinese citizens into opium addicts – reaping super-profits for the same British drug cartel that seized Hong Kong.

Not anymore! Professor Ayson is certain that: “whatever remains of that sentiment is unlikely to stand in the way of New Zealand joining a Five Eyes statement condemning a Russian invasion. Such an act of military aggression by one sovereign state on another is a good fit with the group’s traditional intelligence and security agenda.”

Is Professor Ayson on record demanding an equivalent statement of condemnation when three of the Five Eyes powers engaged in an act of military aggression against the sovereign state of Iraq in 2003? Or, was he one of the depressing number of New Zealand strategists who appeared to regard the waging of aggressive war (for which politicians were executed at Nuremburg) as a “good fit” for this country’s “traditional intelligence and security agenda.” Fortunately for New Zealand’s excellent international reputation, our prime minister, Helen Clark, did not.

It is always possible, of course, that there is at least one student attending Professor Ayson’s classes with sufficient gumption to ask why the United States does not accord to President Vladimir Putin the same right to defend his nation’s sphere of influence as it claims for itself. For very nearly 200 years the “Monroe Doctrine” has warned-off from the entire Western Hemisphere any and all states with designs to project their power into it. So, that same plucky student might ask his professor why sauce for the American goose is not also sauce for the Russian gander? It would certainly be interesting to hear Professor Ayson’s view on the most likely response of the United States to Russian troops taking up positions alongside their Mexican allies along the Rio Grande.

One shudders to think of the grade an essay advancing these ideas and questions might receive from the head of Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Strategic Studies. One suspects, at the very least, a fusillade of academic criticism would rake its author’s position.

Too much intellectual curiosity – not enough Fox News.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 21 January 2022.

Decisive Action.

2020 Was Just A Rehearsal:  From a purely strategic standpoint, Trump’s, and the new, post-November 2022, Republican dominated Congress’s, best move would be to take Biden and the Democrats completely by surprise. If the attention of Trump’s enemies is focused almost entirely on what he might do in 2024, then the obvious strategy is to move against them as soon as the new Congress convenes. Depose Biden, and install Trump as President, in January 2023.

THE FALL OF AMERICA would unleash hell: economically, diplomatically, militarily, culturally; the whole world would be rocked to its foundations. Like the fall of Rome, the nearest historical equivalent, the collapse of the United States would mark the end of an era.

The musings of a history buff? Not really. The odds of the American Republic collapsing into chaos and civil strife – even civil war – are already better than even.

In the latest issue of the Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Barton Gellman, puts it bluntly: “Against Biden or another Democratic nominee, Donald Trump may be capable of winning a fair election in 2024. He does not intend to take that chance.”

The Washington Post is no less pessimistic. It has just published an opinion piece by three retired Generals urging the military to begin preparing now for the “insurrection of 2024”. As befits senior military officers, their words are not minced:

[T]he Defence Department should war-game the next potential post-election insurrection or coup attempt to identify weak spots. It must then conduct a top-down debrief of its findings and begin putting in place safeguards to prevent breakdowns not just in the military, but also in any agency that works hand in hand with the military […..] The military and lawmakers have been gifted hindsight to prevent another insurrection from happening in 2024 – but they will succeed only if they take decisive action now.

These words should quell immediately any impulse to scoff at the idea that the United States could fall. The Generals’ opinion piece is not so much a straw, as a whole haystack, in the wind. The key question it provokes is daunting. Either, they are writing to warn Trump and his followers that the United States Armed Forces are prepared to stop them. Or, it is an act of desperation from military men who already sense that the armed forces can no longer be considered reliable defenders of the US Constitution.

Alarmingly, at least some of the Generals’ advice suggests that it may be the latter:

In addition, all military branches must undertake more intensive intelligence work at all installations. The goal should be to identify, isolate and remove all potential mutineers; guard against efforts by propagandists who use misinformation to subvert the chain of command; and understand how that and other misinformation spreads across the ranks after it is introduced by propagandists.

The picture painted here could not be clearer. If American democracy falls beneath the blows of Trump and his followers, then the American armed forces will not escape the breakdown of legitimate authority, nor the open recourse to violence, that will sweep across the rest of American society. The Army, itself, will split between Trumpists and Constitutionalists. Civil war will be inevitable.

The most astonishing feature of this looming threat to American society and its democratic institutions is how few members of the Constitutionalist political class can see it. From the President on down, there is not the slightest evidence that anything is being done to hasten the “decisive action” the Generals are demanding. The Democratic Party, in particular, is a rudderless hulk, riven by faction, and incapable of self-discipline. Trump and his followers, with scant regard for the Constitution or even the Rule of Law, are clearly preparing to re-write the political rules of engagement, and the Democrats just look at them, blinking helplessly in the headlights of the Republican Party’s onrushing Mack Truck.

One can only speculate what the Generals are saying to themselves – and any other Constitutionalists still willing to fight for the republic – behind closed doors. The strategic position can only be described as dire.

The mid-term elections are less than twelve months away and, right now, all the smart money says that the Republicans will re-capture both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The key question then, of course, is what will they do with the full powers of Congress at their disposal?

Some will no doubt be clamouring to impeach Joe Biden. But, unless the Republican Party emerges from the mid-term elections with two-thirds of the Senate under its control, Biden’s conviction on the Senate floor is most unlikely. Impeachment also runs the risk of finally concentrating the minds of the Democrats. As Trump, himself, demonstrated, an incumbent president has a lot of resources – military resources in particular – upon which he can call in extremis. In Biden’s case, those resources might even agree to come to the President’s rescue.

From a purely strategic standpoint, Trump’s and the Republican Congress’s best move would be to take Biden and the Democrats completely by surprise. If the attention of Trump’s enemies is focused almost entirely on what he might do in 2024, then the obvious strategy is to move against them as soon as the new Congress convenes. Depose Biden and install Trump as President in January 2023.

But, surely, there is no legal way President Biden can be deposed? If the Republicans lack the numbers to impeach him, then he cannot be removed from office until the General Election of 2024. Obviously, that is correct. But the Republicans may decide that the “legal way” is not their best option. If they can depose Biden quickly and cleanly, without warning, then they can, almost certainly, rely upon their mates in the Supreme Court to bestow an ex post facto blessing on Trump’s fait accompli. (They would no doubt plead that the maintenance of peace and national unity demanded nothing less of them!)

The Republican blitzkrieg would be swift and brutally effective. By a Joint Declaration of the House of Representatives and the Senate, the 2020 Presidential Election would be declared fraudulent and Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory voided. The Joint Resolution would, further, confirm that the Office of President of the United States had again been bestowed upon Donald Trump by a clear majority of the American people on 3 November 2020. This would be acknowledged by correcting the Electoral College vote, and by the Chief Justice administering the Oath of Office to the President-Elect. The proper constitutional order would, thereby, be restored.

Congress would then decree the immediate arrest of the “November 2020 Traitors”, leaving the House and the Senate devoid of Democrats. Trump loyalists in the armed forces would attempt to arrest all senior military officers deemed sympathetic to Biden and the Constitution. Public protest would be met by a declaration of martial law.

American democracy would thus be extinguished in less than a week – and all hell would break loose. The more numerous and much wealthier “Blue States” ( i.e. Democratic Party-controlled) would secede from the Union. A second American civil war would tear the United States apart. The savagery of the conflict would intensify. Ultimately, as Margaret Atwood anticipated in her novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, an uneasy truce would follow the use of tactical nuclear weapons by the armies of both sides.

With America in ruins, and the global economy in free-fall, ethno-nationalism and autarky would be the order of the day. To complete this grim apocalyptic picture, successive global pandemics and runaway climate change would bury what remained of humanity’s hopes. A new Dark Age would descend.

A grim prognosis. Which is why we must all hope that a great many more Americans than “three retired Generals” are, at this very moment, readying themselves for “decisive action”.

A version of this essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 23 December 2021.