Russia's Novorossiya War

In late July/early August of this year, I tried to get this opinion piece (set out below) on the Russian invasion of Ukraine published, somewhere.  While I failed each time to find a publisher, I think it stands up very well.  As I cannot find a publisher, but have my own blog, here it is below, unchanged ... albeit as the front-line armies of both the Russians and the Ukrainians seem to have been engaging in much reduced activities and, instead, focused on unit reconstitutions and reinforcements over the late summer, with the northern winter approaching, it seems likely, as of today, that this is all a relative calm before an enormous storm is unleashed by both Russia and Ukraine.  As I point out in my piece below, the Russians already have gained/consolidated their hold on significant formerly Ukrainian territories and their agricultural and mineral resources - and yet the fighting is still likely to continue on, and, one fears, may result in an escalated and wider war, with obvious risks. 

That the Russian Stavka is still fighting this war, when it has already made these substantial gains, has suggested to me for some time that the Kremlin does want to realise its historic Novorossiya and Tsarist ambitions.  One of my key contentions with Russia - as with other historically imperial nations - is that if, in Russia's case, you were to remove the Vladimir Putin apparatus from the Russian presidency and its power, then whoever supplants or succeeds Putin would pursue the same, or indeed, more aggressive Russian foreign and military policies.  If, for example, any of the Russian Tsars were restored to rule Russia, tomorrow, they would all pursue policies that are very similar to, if not more expansive than, those of Putin and his advisors.

It will almost always be the case that overriding imperial interests and geographic/political realities will dictate what must be done by a regime to secure its realm - and it is and will be the duty of the Tsar, or Kaiser, or Shah [or President or Prime Minister or Chancellor] to follow these course headings, however rough the weather may be that batters the ship of state.  It is also the case that, once a war is begun, the war, as both a moral and political enterprise, must have conquests and gains in order to justify casualties and expenses to subjects and citizens.  In Russia's case, having refused or been refused a negotiated settlement and launching the war in February, now is the time to realise the Novorossiya ambition. (NB: only in the post-everything West is it permissible, indeed almost praiseworthy, to fight stupid wars for the most esoteric ideological reasons, and for the making of no gains and the incurring of only tragic losses, for 20+ years.)

Viewed from the Kremlin, Russia fighting on to dominate the northern Black Sea makes enormous sense.  Russia has long sought to explore, extract, and exploit, the Black Sea's riches both in and under the sea, continental shelves and seabed.  A Russia that can dominate the north of the Black Sea will also be a Russia that raises obviously dire questions for the West, especially for NATO member, Turkey, with whom Russia already has a significant relationship.  That no one seems to be discussing these obvious consequences of further Russian advances shows the attenuation, if not shriveling, of the Western capacity to think geopolitically and with a view to how easily an already bad situation can become so much worse. Whether Turkey could resist Russian entreaties to divide the Black Sea, leaving, say, Georgia, to Russian mercies, is a scenario so obvious that one must believe that someone in North American and European defence and foreign ministries is thinking of what comes next.  The Russian bear, when repeatedly poked, will create its own more friendly den.  This was always obvious, especially from 2014 onwards, and has now only become more obvious with time.  One day, hopefully, what is and has always been actually obvious will impact on Western policymaking. That day, sadly, seems as yet far off.

Whether the West through NATO can keep the Ukrainian war effort going over a severe coming winter in which Western domestic societies will be under significant costs of living pressure and energy shortfalls, is itself an open question.  There have long been divisions within NATO and the European Union, as I point out below, over how to approach Russia and the threats posed by, and opportunities offered from, Moscow.  It may be that far from the Russian-Ukrainian war being merely one of gradual attrition that slowly exhausts the combatants, forcing them to negotiate over what remains, that, instead, the recent subdued fighting has been a mere prologue to a much more savage war.  It may also be that the worst peace negotiated now may be preferable to whatever fait accompli emerges from the battlefield in the months and years to come.  

It is a rare wish, for me, anyway, but I do hope to be wrong.  GC

RUSSIAN WAR IN UKRAINE – 30 July 2022 
 
The story goes, according to the great American historian Barbara Tuchman, that during the worst of the Great War, the Imperial German chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg was asked by his predecessor, Prince von Bulow, 'How did this war happen?' Bethmann-Hollweg replied, 'Ah, if only one knew.’  War always confounds the grand designs of high commands – and always at great costs to innocents, as the July 1914 crisis that led to global carnage, showed. 
 
Yet, even so, the Russians, in month 5 of their invasion of Ukraine, have sustained a military effort of slow but steady advances, occupying territories that the West had, foolishly, denied could, instead, be the subject of negotiations.   
 
At worst, if Russia declared victory today and stopped its war, the Russians would occupy most of what was eastern and southern Ukraine, the whole of the Azov coast, as well as further expanded Russia’s military presence in Crimea.   
 
True, the Ukrainians have resisted with great ferocity and courage – they, too, share the Cossack lineage – but War is an entirely unsentimental affair.  No people, however brave, could repel the Russian garrison state next door. 
 
For we in the West, there is a stark contrast between Russia’s valuable acquisitions in mere months versus our years of stupid wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan.  The West expended blood and treasure for 20+ years in the perverse belief that we could occupy and remediate Arab and Afghan societies brutalised by centuries of foreign and local tyrannies. The Russians have simply applied force, next door, to gain more ethnic Russians, as well as resource-rich lands and Black Sea coastal areas. 
 
So many Western delusions about the true state of this war result from commentary by our own failed Generals and ex-government officials, whose only successful conquests have been of TV cable news green rooms – and who, in Thucydides’ time, would have been exiled in disgrace.  Absurd tales of ‘ghosts of Kiev’ and ‘martyrs of Snake Island’ were consumed by journalism’s rubes, who clearly learned nothing from the lies told last year when Afghanistan’s regime was obviously collapsing.   
 
Western responses have been chronically chaotic.  A Russian invasion of Ukraine has been an obvious danger since at least 2008, when Russian forces first pushed south against resource rich Georgia.  If NATO’s plan was to support a Ukrainian military resistance to a Russian invasion, then Brussels should long ago have ensured it had its own manufacturers of Soviet bloc munitions of the kind Ukraine uses. Instead, the Ukrainians, bravely resisting Russian advances, have continually awaited shipments of whatever ex-Russian munitions can be bought from global arms bazaars.  It has all been something of a ‘cluster’. 
 
To be fair, the Anglo-American-Polish axis (with which Australia aligns) has supplied arms and munitions to Ukraine. Australia has even sent significant quantities of armoured fighting vehicles across the world to aid Ukraine.  Australia is a loyal ally and giving materiel support to Ukraine – and thus supporting our British, American, and Polish, allies – is certainly in our strategic interest.   
 
At the same time, as a matter of sheer realpolitik, the views of our closest military allies are not shared by most Europeans.  Whatever Germany’s public spin – and most of the EU is fully behind Berlin, if only as a diplomatic shield – it is the British, Americans, and the Poles, who are the real problem, not Russia. 
 
Viewed from Berlin, and by those allied to the EU’s Franco-Teutonic core, the EU had a workable relationship with Russia: the EU purchased cheap and reliably supplied gas from Russia, as well as metals, woods, and fertiliser, and Russia purchased vehicles and machinery from the EU.   
 
Europe’s enriching of Russia would, the Berlin consensus thought, make for peaceful times on either side of the Dnieper River, and no one, especially not Angela Merkel (who grew up in Soviet occupied East Germany!), thought becoming Russia’s energy hostage was unwise.  That so much of Germany’s political class has been the Kremlin’s human resources department is seen as economic integration - not foreign corruption. 
 
To many western Europeans, the compulsive Anglo-American desire over the last 25 years to expand NATO to Russia’s frontier was and is still seen as shackling reluctant Europeans to ex-Soviet security corpses.  It was, after all, Bismarck who said that a successful politics is founded on a good treaty with Russia.  Even Pope Francis, whose Jesuit order was patronised by the Russian Empress Catherine the Great, has said, publicly, that the Russians are an imperial people who cannot have foreign powers on their borders.  
 
These public divisions within NATO and the EU endanger us all.  Europeans living next door to this slugfest cannot, unlike Anglo-American ‘laptop bombardiers’, relish an ongoing proxy war, fighting Russia until the last Ukrainian.  Moreover, for most Europeans, a very cold winter approaches, without any realistic substitutes for Russian gas.   
 
The wiser heads of the allied powers should be trying to negotiate a ceasefire that leads to talks and the arbitration of the grievances of all the belligerents and their sponsors.  As in war, so in peace: ‘If you will the ends, you will the means.’ 
 
The ghosts of July 1914 should be exorcised, not followed. 
 
Gray Connolly is a Sydney barrister and writer. He served previously as a naval intelligence officer in Asia, the Middle East, and Afghanistan. 
 

Grieving Beloved Parents

I am not entirely sure why, but I felt moved by the Coronavirus Pandemic and its death toll, particularly stories of young people facing the reality of unexpected deaths of loved ones, especially parents, to write this long piece on Medium about death, loss, and grief. 

I am, usually, quite a guarded person on life, generally, and family, in particular.  I realise that I periodically appear on radio and television, and in news media, in respect of matters of public controversy.  However, whatever we each may do with our lives, I still believe that all of us should have a private sphere of our own, known only unto God.  For my part, I would never have believed in November 2019 that I would be writing an essay on grief in November 2020 concerning my beloved and deeply missed mother and father. Spared the anxiety of worrying about vulnerable parents during the pandemic in 2020, I thought I would try to help anyone now finding themselves in the position that I was in a decade-plus earlier.

I found writing a reflection on losing my beloved parents to have been the hardest thing that I have ever written. In a sense, yes, of course, this is how it should be. Yet, even so, it was extraordinarily hard. There is nothing I would change about the piece. It is the writing that I would have liked to have read long ago. 

In writing the Medium piece, I learned a good deal about myself, as well as the process of writing.  I have always realised that few people will like all of the writing that you do.  I sent my piece to some close friends for their comment, who told me they found it very hard to read and finish, which was understandable to me, particularly as they all had their parents still in good health.  A very helpful suggestion, that I acted upon, was to digitally record my reading it, so people could treat it like a podcast and listen in stages.

As I tried to get across in my writing, there is nothing particularly special about my story. I am not any sort of victim - other people have lost both parents at even earlier ages, while many others have living parents that they do not get on with. The only reason my story matters to me is that it happened to me – and that it concerns my own parents, who I love and miss, every day.  I was the much youngest child in our family, I was very close to my parents, I looked after them until their passings, and, thus, I feel, whatever else I may know about, I know what it is like to see your beloved parents leave this life.  Our parents teach us everything except how to live without them.

As a Catholic, in common with many people of differing faiths, I do not believe that this life is our end but rather only the beginning of our journey. I suspect some, or, indeed, all, of this comes through in my writing.  Losing our parents is so very hard, but those who we lose, we will see, again.  I certainly believe that about my late mother and my late father.  I have also felt the presence of my mother and my father in my life, at various times since each passed, as a sign from a merciful and loving God that nothing, especially death, can separate us. 

A particular benefit to me in writing this piece, which I did not expect, was the surprisingly large number of people who read it, and who have since made contact with me. I was touched to find people who went through similar losses, and who said how closely they related to my own particular experience, even as we had never met. I also heard from people who never really had anyone to listen to them, or who was thought by their friends to be doing alright in all the circumstances, who was, instead, still in so precarious a state. I was thankful, also, to those who had been spared such pain as yet but who had passed my Medium piece onto a friend or relative who was navigating their own way through the gloomy wilderness of grief and loss. If, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote in his poem Ulysses, we are all a part of those we have met, then, so, too, do our writings form an arch through which we go to meet countless others and learn of their experiences, even when separated by places and times.

For my part, I was glad, so very glad, to have had the opportunity to write of loving parents, of how I learned to live with losing them from this life, and, for me anyway, to reminisce, even if at times with sadness. 

None of us knows what someone else is going through, or what heavy crosses they bear.  We, in particular, do not know who is coping and, more importantly, who is not coping.  All that we can do, especially those of us who have already been through the very worst, is to lend to the grieving a strong, if prematurely hardened, shoulder, and a most sympathetic and kind ear–and to show them that there is a way forward, however monstrously difficult it may seem to them, as, indeed, it seemed to us.  

We are all but pilgrims here, and we must do our best, we must persevere, and we must run our race until its end, knowing that those we love and miss, so much, are watching us, hopefully always proudly, and willing us on. We may only see through a glass, darkly - but then we will see, again, face to face.

The Russian Problem

Almost a month ago, I wrote a piece for the Sydney Morning Herald on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and understanding the Russians, both as an adversarial power, and on their own terms as the historic Russia.  In some ways, it was a follow-on from my longer 2018 post here on the Russians.

As I have found out, partly to my amusement and partly to my disappointment, that one cannot have any perspective on the Russian problem that differs one iota from whatever is the conventional wisdom.  This is less about criticism, per se, than the sheer pride taken by so many in media and punditry in their complete ignorance of the Russians and, particularly, Russian strategic and military culture.  One could spend one's entire life attempting to counter, or even just contrast, so much of the current deluge of quite pathetic analysis of Russia with facts, and yet pass from this life with that task still a boulder that Sisyphus himself would mock you for trying to carry. 

The only ways forward in respect of Russia (as with China and Iran - also 'old countries' with historic claims of security domains) is, as regards the diplomacy:

1. understanding historic and current geography: boundaries past and present, component ethnic and religious groups, trade routes, enduring defence and security interests;  
2. recognising where common interests may lie, in which we can work together; and
3. recognising where our interests conflict - and trying to find ways to minimise those conflicts or, at least, mediate or arbitrate them, or disagree about them short of war.

In pursuing the above, the beginning of wisdom is recognising that Russia (like China and Iran) is an imperial and hegemonic power, with whom we will usually, if not always, have problems.  Russia - again, like China and Iran - will never be a 'normal country'.  Always maintaining a realistic perspective and only very modest expectations would help mitigate the swings and roundabouts of Western relations with the Russians, that seem to, always, be incapable of being anything other than the breathtakingly naïve or the irresponsibly bellicose, resulting in either unwise concessions or fevered hawkishness.

In saying this, yes, ideology does play a role here.  There will be revisionist powers that, ideologically, care only about extending their interests in respect of (1) and who do not care about (2) and (3). There will be, at times, adversaries with contempt for agreements and treaties, and no respect for concepts of legitimacy.  There may even be times for actions short of war.

However, if one's issue is that a revision is being sort by a nation-state, the first order question that is worth asking is, 'What actually is being revised?'  One should bear in mind with old countries, especially those that are great powers, or have been great powers and wish to be so again, is that they have long memories.  I am not usually given to quoting Edmund Burke but one must remember that not only do your adversaries get a vote in what the international order looks like, but their dead and as yet unborn, will, through the living, get a vote, too.  Not everyone lives in the now - and not everyone is historically illiterate - even if the West, too often is, sadly, both.  What if what you consider to be unable to be resolved without war, actually can be by diplomacy?  Where is the shame in discussions and negotiations?  And, if ideological powers during both war and peace could nonetheless still participate in the international order in the 20th century, and be negotiated with - on subjects from nuclear weapons to trade to space - then surely we should try this, also, now, rather than contribute to circumstances that may lead to future wars of unspeakable brutality and human tragedy?

By nature and intellectual inclination, I favour my own country, Australia, and our Western allies, having very large military establishments and enduring defence industrial bases, sufficient to deter aggressors and secure necessary interests - but which are used sparingly.  In other words, I may be a 'militarist' but I am most certainly no warmonger.  Resort to war should be the very last tool of statecraft - and war, once commenced, must be pursued, quickly and ruthlessly, with overwhelming force, to achieve a victory settlement that will ensure a long peace. Unless one is fully prepared to wage war, speedily and relentlessly - and, realistically, your reluctance to do so should almost always be the case - then our practice should be to engage in vigorous diplomacy, including diplomacy to avert wars by engaging in sensible and practical negotiation and compromise, by joining with allies in dialogue with adversaries. The effluxion of time by patient and calm reasoning may also see new generations come to power in adversaries, who may yet see matters differently.  In any event, it seems stupid not to first try such an approach, with a velvet glove overlaying any mailed fist.  

As Thucydides said in his magisterial history of the Peloponnesian War, "Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most."

The Geopolitical Lessons of 2020

At time of writing, the key members of the Western security alliance are still dealing with the consequences of the Coronavirus pandemic. The virus has touched almost every country and has brought death and misery to many, and unemployment, perhaps for a long time, to many more. Governments across the world, literally from Helsinki to Wellington, are facing significant financial challenges as their national economies go into a period of hibernation if not a coma.

This virus is ravenous in its contagiousness, and preys especially where urban density and mobility is greatest, hence why Italy (via Milan), the UK (via London), and the US (via New York City), have been so hard hit, with casualties best compared to those incurred in a war. Analogising these major nations with much smaller polities, of a comically toy-town size, are unserious and best dismissed. While Australians – inhabiting as we do an enormous island continent of our own at the bottom of the world – are blessed, for once, by our geography and remoteness, the sheer density of Sydney and Melbourne pose public health problems comparable to those of London and Milan, and require aggressive mitigation strategies to “stop the spread”. In due course, the best public health response to deter a recurrence may be to cease urban centralisation, and instead encourage suburban and rural living with attendant fast rail and other transportation.

In the case of all Western polities, the issue has become, or will soon become, one of whether the infections curves have been flattened by a societal and economic lockdown (“the Hammer”) so as to subsequently enable a staggered relaxation of social isolation and distancing if and where possible (“the Dance”). Policymakers that must weigh the competing demands of public health and a ruined economy have an unenviable job of determining when to stop the Hammer and begin the Dance.

However, while we are too early for conclusions – and many of these matters are nice questions for health experts to ponder over – we who live in the member-states of the Western security alliance, generally, are not too early for some lessons of the Coronavirus from the point of geopolitics and our shared security interests, especially as regards the People’s Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party that runs China’s affairs.

Firstly, no one should underestimate the damage that the virus has done to China. At the very least, hundreds of thousands of Chinese have died from the virus, with many others infected and (imperfectly) recovered. The death toll in China will never be properly known by us (perhaps, even, by Beijing) but the suffering of the Chinese people at the hands of their both repressive and lying state is something everyone should mourn. We have no idea, moreover, of the suffering of the Uighur Muslims, interned and living in cramped cantonments.

Secondly, the Chinese regime lied and obfuscated about the virus’ origins in Wuhan and, to this date, has never been open and transparent about where and how precisely the virus emerged and was transmitted from animal to human. All of the onus lies on China to explain – to the degree that Beijing refuses to explain, inevitably, other explanations will be proposed, especially in view of the presence in Wuhan of Chinese government laboratories, including those of a dubious provenance. The US media’s detailed reporting on the Wuhan laboratories – via off-the-record briefings and ‘leaks’ and ‘drops’ of information from officials in the US Government – are a not so subtle message from Washington to Beijing that the US is well aware of what happened in Wuhan and, likely, the Chinese regime’s other experiments with esoteric wildlife and viruses. All one can say at this stage is, “Watch This Space”, while also noting that whatever statistics are produced by Beijing are almost certainly lies or without any basis in reality.

As I have done in the past with respect to Russia, I also counsel, now, with respect to China, which is the best course is to take the advice of the great British military historian, Sir Basil Liddell Hart. This was Hart’s sage advice for the nuclear age to his readers, who included the future US President, John F. Kennedy:

"Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience. Never corner an opponent, and always assist him to save face. Put yourself in his shoes - so as to see things through his eyes. Avoid self-righteousness like the devil - nothing is so self-blinding."

This wise advice should guide anyone trying to craft a policy towards China, especially in circumstances where Beijing is facing new challenges at home. President Xi, who so recently became “President for life” now also owns all of this virus disaster. It is one thing to assert paramount authority over a great power in whose ascendancy you have played a key role - quite another to maintain authority in a repressive regime which has been unable to deal with a pandemic of its own creation. One of the major problems with Sinology, historically, but especially since 1949, has been a tendency to see the (Leninist communist) Chinese leadership as practising sophisticated, wisened, 20-dimensional, Sun Tzu, strategy, when, in fact, the PRC's leadership is committed only to its own survival. If that means, for President Xi and his successors/competitors, allowing an entirely false narrative on a deadly virus to go out to the world, or for Uighur Muslims to be brutalised in cantonment camps, or this group to be repressed or that person to be silenced, then so be it. No one in Beijing looks at the dissolution of the Soviet Union and with it the former communist party, as anything other than as a fate to be avoided.

The Coronavirus has caused the most significant damage to popular confidence in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its regime since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacres, if not the 1971 Lin Biao coup attempt, albeit in both those cases, the CCP could, at least for propaganda purposes, posit political enemies as challenging the regime. In the case of the 2019-2020 virus, the challenge posed to the Chinese regime is entirely of Beijing’s own creation, being a challenge to a legitimacy bestowed, in the absence of free elections, by success – what in the Cold War was termed, 'performance legitimacy'. An incompetent communist Chinese regime that cannot deliver for its own people has neither the confidence of a ballot box nor the assurance of PLA bullets. In every sense of the Chinese curse, we do “live in interesting times”.

But all that is for the future. Similarly, so, too, is what effects the virus will have on the “Dragon Bear” project, which is a geopolitical short-hand for the Chinese-Russian accommodation, best reflected by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, which includes not just Russia and China but, also, Iran, as well as India (which the US has long had ambitions of winning over as an ally) and NATO member Turkey as a ‘dialogue partner’. China’s capacity to maintain this gravitational pull of unusual trading and foreign policy partners – as well as a coterie of tributaries and supplicants in the form of the One Belt One Road and String Of Pearls allies – is probably the biggest of these future questions. A China that can deploy coercive power around its periphery - from the Taiwan Strait to the Strait of Hormuz - is a China that must still be reckoned with, virus or no virus.

At the same time, the virus - and its repercussions in terms of trade and China's earning of foreign exchange - pose a direct threat to China's capacity to deploy power. China, like any nation state, needs, first, to be able to feed and power itself – and it must do so in a world in which commodities are traded in the United States Dollar. China has insufficient energy and agricultural resources to provide for itself, let alone any sort of autarky that could survive a war. So how China, in the medium to longer term, will be able to feed and power itself via foreign acquisitions, in the manner to which it had become accustomed, as the United States under President Donald Trump charges tariffs on Chinese-made goods – and American businesses shift supply chains away from China including to Taiwan(!) – is not at all clear. Moreover, a China that cannot feed and power itself, on top of a devastating virus, is a China whose power is diminished and whose regime will be tested and questioned.

For now, as always, the challenge posed to Western statecraft is how, though, now and into the immediate future, the challenge of Russians, Chinese, and Iranians, forming a geopolitical “Dragon Bear” bloc that dominates the Eurasian heartland and rimland, is to be confronted.

It is important to note that the West’s security position is based, as the Anglophone nations have always based their power, on overwhelming seapower and then airpower, to control the 'global commons' that are the world’s oceans and skies. While I doubt, as a military proposition, that there is any straightforward means by which the West could posture military forces to engage in a 'Triple Containment' of Russia, China, and Iran, especially as these are significant land powers, there is a need for a defensive ‘ring of steel’, especially at sea, in the air, and in cyberspace, to defend the Western position and to safeguard trade and commercial routes.

One would add to this, now, a requirement for the Western security alliance to rethink its supply chains and, especially, any dependence on an adversarial China for critical materials. Hopefully that lesson, which has been long looming to be taught to a recalcitrant West, has now been learned.

In this respect, if there is one deserved – and fully welcomed – casualty of the Coronavirus, it is the death of the 'Davos Man'.

It was the 1990s generation – best described as Davos Man – that proposed and propagandised for a post-Cold War world that, on their case, was an ever-more globalised and liberal place of ever freer trade in goods and services, free movements of peoples, and, usually, mindless military interventions in the affairs of states from Baghdad to Belgrade, because this ‘liberalism by blitzkrieg’ was what being ‘on the right side of history’ required to be done. In some respects you had to live through the 1990s (as I did as a university student) to believe that some of this ahistorical nonsense was peddled – and peddled it was by an ascendant Boomer generation who, by the 1990s, had replaced the generation that had fought in and been shaped by the Second World War. According to Davos Man, we were all going to be rugged individuals, market participants, free traders, multi-lateralists, indeed, “globalists” and “citizens of the world”. That all of us – rich or poor, of whatever race or creed – were and are citizens of post-Westphalian nation-states, was neither here nor there.

Indeed, bringing a realistic mind to bear on these matters was, for the past 20 years, an unwelcomed perspective. Anyone raising obvious problems for the globalisation consensus – especially where based on geopolitics, culture, history, and the sheer unlikelihood of consensus being achieved on basic questions of how vastly different societies are ordered – were seen as antiquated, pessimistic, perhaps even various types of ‘phobic’. To borrow from one of the truly appalling books of that age, you buying your own Lexus mattered more than your stewarding your grandfather’s olive tree.

Ironically, nowhere was this delusional, “third way”, liberalism more dominant than in what were nominally social democratic, workers’ parties, such as the Democrats under Bill Clinton and British Labour under Tony Blair, where a veritable ‘new class’ of middle class intellectuals wrested control of political parties from legacy trade union control. One saw basically the same world view carried on into the era of Barack Obama and the liberal “Remainer” David Cameron. Where it was once essential for leadership, apart from war experience, to have worked in the mines, on the wharves, or on the shop, factory, or foundry floor, all that you needed now was an Oxbridge or Ivy League education and the capacity to speak in focus-grouped clichés that would cause a management consultant to be embarrassed.

As it turned out, History had not ended and we were not the change we were waiting for, sadly. Davos Man, rest in peace, who has now died - and died unmourned.

Among the more farcical beliefs held by Davos Man, that also needs to die and be interred with him, was that the People’s Republic of China wanted to become another member of the 'international community'.

Ever since the 1990s, so the theory went, China would, when granted normal trade status and allowed into the World Trade Organisation, and gifted its place in the free trading ‘liberal international order’, be happy with just being another market participant and not a great power, because an expanding number of McDonald’s restaurants will always overcome any Middle Kingdom temptations. That the Chinese regime had no incentive not to exploit a supine and delusional West – many of whose politicians and public servants the Chinese would buy/hire in retirement – was obvious. The United States, in particular, went on to lose via ‘outsourcing’ much of its manufacturing capacity to China and, while mired in Davos Man’s futile wars in the Middle East and its periphery, China engaged in rampant theft of highly valuable intellectual property.

Where the Second World War generation had fought for their nations, and had a very realistic grasp of what the nation-state should and should not do – and what contingencies governments should be prepared for – the Davos Man generation believed we could always ‘leverage’ relationships that could be ‘risk managed’ to produce ‘synergies’ across the ‘liberal international order’. In other words, cometh the world crisis, so cometh would the supply chain. This was a market-based solution in which everyone would win. The Chinese, especially, would see the rational self-interest of supplying the West in its time of need. To which I say, as I so often do, “Whither?”

The sheer unpreparedness of Western nation-states for what actually happened in this pandemic has brought into stark relief just how unwise it was for so much production of basic medical supplies to be based in an adversarial China. It is also a reflection of the sheer lack of understanding by Western Governments – and their Davosite governing classes – that war or like crises, such as a pandemic, require the nation-state to have domestic capacities, even if residual, to design and produce as many of the 'sinews of war' as it possibly can, in this pandemic’s case, medicines, medical technology (such as ventilators), and personal protective equipment (PPE) (masks, gloves, gowns, googles, glasses, visors etc). The sight of many Western governments raiding literal cupboards, begging for supply, and only now improvising manufacturing, is a sight that must never be seen again. What is a national government for – what legitimacy does it ultimately have? – if it cannot provision for and protect its citizens in a crisis?

To his credit, the US President Donald Trump utilised his authority to decree manufacture by industry of these “sinews of war”, including under the Korean War-era Defense Production Act 1950 (USA). The stories of private industry being able to supply, en masse, the materials needed to meet the pandemic crisis have been reassuring that, when push comes to shove, and sufficient pressure is applied (in Trump’s case, in his own ursine way), the national effort can be mustered in quantity and with speed. The spirit of Henry Kaiser lives on.

While Trump will no doubt be assailed (regardless), national governments across Western nations have a panoply of laws and authorities to require industry to cooperate to produce materials. In practice, this crisis simply saw national governments eventually – one suspects too late in some respects – start to engage a vast defence production infrastructure that had been put in place to win two World Wars and the Cold War. The question is what comes next here? My suspicion is most Western allies will now broaden the understanding of the national security edifice – had there ever been any prior doubt – to formally include notionally private businesses and industries, particularly those of relevance to a nation’s struggle in war and against disaster, including pandemics.

For much of the past two decades, discussion has been often held in national security circles of 'Critical Infrastructure' (which is related to the military idea of your supply ‘lines of communication’). Usually this Critical Infrastructure has been taken to mean energy, water, food and the communications nodes, satellites, airports, ports, railways we rely on to communicate and supply goods and services. However, now, the definition of what is critical will expand, in the manner of a veritable Kaisierian Germany, to ensure that a critical producer of war and public health ‘materiel’ is now, more or less, a government sponsored enterprise in the de facto manner of, now, the commercial banks (and these businesses should be specially regulated as with any business ‘too critical to fail’). While some, especially the libertarians, will scream “moral hazard”, there is no greater moral hazard for the nation-state than to be vulnerable if not defenceless, when confronted by war, pandemic, or economic crisis. If we live for the foreseeable future in some form of 'War Socialism', then our Krupps, also, are too critical to fail. In this respect, the idea that any national government prior to 2020 would ever have allowed corporations critical to the supply of military platforms, sensors, weapons, ammunition, and the like, to collapse, was far-fetched – but now it is simply absurd. Indeed, there would be no more perverse outcome for our current crisis than that a virus that originated in China would cause such economic trauma in the West that governments would ever allow their own military-industrial complex – composed of complex supply chains and knowledge networks – to falter.

Indeed, a ‘Beijing bringing down Boeing’ result of 2020, would be a disaster and a senseless victory for the PRC. Similarly, so would the UK persisting in its bizarre desire to include China’s Huawei anywhere in Britain’s telecommunications infrastructure.

Meanwhile, the lesson for strategists of this era, where the pressures of the Dragon Bear threat and now Pandemic forces deep thinking about what really matters, is to look forward while looking back. A good model for the West to consider is the defence of the British Empire and its capacity to, in various colonial and two World Wars - and to act as a combined yet singular alliance and to engage an entire global supply chain and population in a prolonged military struggle.

The British Empire’s capacity to endure and prevail in two world wars – when deserted by mutinous French or revolutionary Russian allies in the first war, and when standing alone against the Nazis in the second war – merits close reading by anyone serious about understanding how a global alliance kept going under the stress of war. Similarly, the capacity of different parts of the British Empire to supply trained personnel and critical war materials according to their specialised capacities is noteable, as is the priority placed on control of the sea and air, so as to, like Pericles prudent and patient strategy for Athens in the Peloponnesian War, ensure supply for its war machine and impose a ‘ring of steel’ blockade on its enemies to force their exhaustion. Geography, finances, natural resources, water, and foodstuffs, military power, healthy populations, universities and industries – these national building-blocks all matter. Indeed, they always mattered – and it was foolish to ever pretend otherwise.

While analogies are imprecise, the lessons are clear. The obvious entity to replicate this planning and direction would be NATO – which links North America with Europe – but the ambitions of a European Union to play a bigger security role has frustrated those seeking more from NATO than another Brussels bureaucracy. Perhaps the virus may, also, kill off the European Union’s federalising instincts, which have been tested and catastrophically failed if you are Italian and/or Spanish? Do you really want to trust your friendship to the tender mercies of Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Frankfurt? Or do you find more family amid the traditional post-war Western alliance? A virus that has damaged the EU but reminded Westerners of the relevance of NATO – and of the broader Western security structures that provide our sinews of war – may be the harsh ‘teachable moment’ that a generation which pretended it could ignore geography and history really needed.

Finally, the lesson of our age is for governments, especially conservative governments, to be prepared to wield the power of the state to protect the body politic, and 'conserve' its people's very existence, and listen to their inner von Bismarck - and ignore any heckles from a von Hayek. Moreover, to borrow from Bismarck's dictum about the worth of the Balkans, the narrowing of budget deficits in the coronavirus era is not worth the bones of anyone, especially our own 'grenadiers in scrubs' - the paramedics, nurses, doctors, teachers, caring staffs, custodians and cleaners - who are bearing the burden of this struggle. Nor is it worth impoverishing the millions of workers, now made unemployed or furloughed without pay, who have been made the innocent casualties of the virus' collapsing of national economies. If political conservatism since the advent of Toryism has been about anything, it has been about the "us" and the "we": preserving the realm, at any cost, and protecting those owed its protection, without heed to liberal pietes and Whiggish econometricism. Moreover, if governments that, over a decade ago, bailed out banks and financiers, especially, that should, in a just world, have been put to work on chain gangs, there should be no objection, if needs be, to the raising of taxes and charges to pay for a temporary provision of adequate incomes and allowances for those made vulnerable by this crisis, for as long as the economy takes to recover. This is not just the morally right thing to do - it is also the realpolitik thing to do, as monies provided to now unemployed workers will help to directly stimulate both national and local economies. Indeed, with global interest rates at record lows, there has never been a better time for Western governments to borrow and build much needed defence, energy, and transportation infrastructure. In simple terms, now is not the time for socialist cloth caps or liberal top hats but for a Bismarckian or Rupprechtian pickelhaube to be donned.

In any case, the world has changed, now, forever, and the virus and its stark geopolitical revelations have brought into stark relief what many previously will claim to have been fuzzy. As Julius Caesar wrote, wisely, “What we wish, we readily believe, and what we ourselves think, we imagine others think also.” History never ended but, instead, has simply reminded us of constant threats (pandemics) and enduring challenges (Dragon Bear). To be forewarned as we have now been is to be forearmed. To be forewarned is also to have no excuse for any future crisis - especially when when a pandemic has already forced you to see the world as it truly is. As the Chinese General, Ho Yen-hsi, a commentator on Sun Tzu, said over a millenia ago: "To rely on rustics and not prepare is the greatest of crimes; to be prepared beforehand for any contingency is the greatest of virtues."

Iran: The Persian Puzzle And its Containment

At the time of writing, the US President, Donald Trump, has cancelled US military plans for strikes on Iran, in response to the Iranian downing of a US drone and attacks on merchant shipping. On any view, the Iranian regime has been behaving badly. There are good arguments for and against striking Iran. There are very few if any good arguments for a policy of passivity. There is even less reason for viewing this as a problem of Trump or Obama, rather than simply as the enduring "Persian Puzzle".

This Iranian challenge has, since the fall of the Shah in February 1979, been a problem for every US President since Jimmy Carter. It was not always so. Prior to 1979, the Shia monarchical and unified Iran and its 'white revolution' had been a model of how a modernising state could also keep its Muslim faith – esp Shiism which in Iran has historically been accommodating of Jews and Christians. The last Shah was not the best of rulers, to be sure, but he was a good ally of the West, and of Israel, and the Shah also had created an Islamic monarchy that was capable of developing into the constitutional monarchy that had been the object of Iranian reformers almost a century prior. The Iran under the Shah was considered the ‘gendarme of the Middle East’. Instead, the Kerenskyite combination of liberals and Islamists protesting from 1977-1979 ensured that the liberals could do enough to bring down the Shah and not enough to prevent the rise of the Mullahs. The downfall of the Shah and his replacement in 1979 by Khomeini’s Islamic republic – and the Mullahs’ rule of Iran - marked more than a regime change but a civilizational turning point. Since 1979, and especially since the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-1981 and the Beirut bombings of 1983, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been a pariah state, deservedly so.

There are, thus, good reasons for the West to take a confrontational policy towards Iran.

Firstly, as a matter of realpolitik, Iran is the adversarial regional hegemon of a crucial part of Eurasia. It is impossible to fully grasp the historical centrality of what is now Iran without understanding Iran is in the heartland of what Sir Halford Mackinder called the ‘world island’.

Iran is approximately 80 million people occupying the most historically vital land routes to and from Europe and Asia, and is a provider (like Russia) of vital air travel corridors. An aggressive Iran pursuing a policy to deny the West access to and influence in this critical part of the world cannot go unresponded to, at least not without the running of grave risk.

Moreover, as I have written elsewhere some years ago, Iran is the natural hegemon of a region that spans from Kabul to Kobane. Iran has a military history and military culture that is at least 3000 years old, and a commensurate antiquity of brain. Iran is, as I am fond of saying, a "real country", and it also has, despite its proliferation of ethnicities and religions, in addition to its Persian Shia core, a strong sense of Iranian nationhood that all Iranians share, and a capacity to mobilise a population for war - and then endure war and struggle for a significant period of time. As enduring strategic cultures go, Iran can be compared to Russia and China, with geography and history determining Iran's responses no less than do seapower realities fashion the responses of the British imperial nations and the United States. The Iranian military infrastructure includes a very large and self-sufficient Iranian armaments industry, built out of necessity after the Shah fell, but which has only gone ahead in leaps and bounds, such that Iran's capacity to sustain itself in war, and respond asymmetrically cannot be taken lightly. During the Iran-Iraq War, Iran had the support of few countries, and its most reliable arms and ammunition suppliers were itself, North Korea, and, when realpolitik demanded, Israel. Iran's own military resources are supplemented by Russian weaponry. Iran's own military posture and its willingness to both support militant proxies and both Shia and Sunni jihadis, as well as use Greater Khorasan to provide strategic depth, is probably one of the most important and yet under-reported stories of our time. Moreover, viewed from Tehran, the Persian Gulf is called thus for very good and well-founded historical reasons.

Secondly, Iran is the world’s major state sponsor of terrorism. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF) are a veritable ‘best practice leader’ in sponsoring terrorism, from the training and ‘mentoring’ of terrorists to their arming and equipping over years. Where some terrorist organisations struggle to effect mass casualty attacks, Iran’s proxies have veritable campaign plans. Iran has not only helped create Hezbollah in Lebanon, which has developed, also, into its own terrorism for export business, but Iran has also assisted Sunni jihadi groups as well, even without exercising operational control, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The ability of senior Al Qaeda fighters to move permissively between Afghanistan and Iraq/Syria, ie through Iran and its near abroad, cannot be by accident. The Iranian regime, also, has had a demonstrated capacity to engage in murder and terrorism, far from home, as former senior officials of the Shah’s regime found out to their peril.

Thirdly, Iran has sought and seeks weapons of mass destruction, especially a nuclear capability, and Iran has been a close ally of North Korea for almost 40 years. It is impossible to discuss North Korea sensibly without any discussion of Iran’s role as a funder, customer, and energy supplier, of North Korea. It is also impossible to discuss the threat posed by an Iranian hunger for a nuclear weapon without discussing Tehran’s use of North Korea as a weapons laboratory, and that any capabilities possessed by North Korea will be readily assimilated by Iran. One does not have to be a neoconservative to appreciate there is a real ‘axis of evil’ between Tehran and Pyongyang. The North Koreans, too, are no strangers to supporting terrorism. On these grounds alone, planning for a strong military response to Iranian misconduct should always be considered, reviewed, and updated.

Fourthly, the Strait of Hormuz is a vital waterway through which approximately 21 million barrels of oil per day is shipped, composing roughly 21% of global petroleum, especially for the benefit of Asia and Europe. To be sure, this raises the questions as to why the Chinese and Europeans less alarmed by Iranian behaviour than the US. There is an assumption that the US (and Allies) will police the Gulf, which, to the degree it means a reluctance to challenge the Persian Gulf as an ‘allied lake’, then this is no bad thing. A more dangerous Strait of Hormuz only guarantees new methods of delivery, including pipelines avoiding the Hormuz strait problem altogether, will be found.

Fifthly, per the above, the West, especially the Anglophone states, have enduring security obligations to their Arab allies, all of whom worry about the hegemonic ambitions of the Iranian regime. Since at least the fall of the Ottomans, there has been a successive as well as complementary understanding that the British and the Americans would help guarantee the security to the Arabian peninsular in return for conferring rights on the British and the Americans in respect of resource extraction and the steady flow of oil from the Persian Gulf. In respect of Jordan and Egypt, this Anglo-American security understanding has included significant local military support in return for Arab support against Saddam’s Iraq and to help secure the State of Israel. The Arab allies have been reliable partners on a range of issues since at least World War II. It is difficult, in particular, to overstate the support provided by Saudi Arabia to the West during the Cold War, not just in the period concerning the Shah’s fall, but also in helping facilitate the sort of diplomacy that is not officially acknowledged. The fear that the Iranian regime’s capabilities and demonstrated expeditionary capacity generate cannot be exaggerated, particularly in an era when Qatar is, also, alienating its former allies. The view from the Gulf Arab states of their security position, with Iran and its proxies forming an arc from Damascus through Baghdad, through the Gulf, south to Yemen, demonstrates a concerted Iranian campaign to encircle, strategically, the West's closest Gulf Arab allies. Moreover, in a very real sense, the West's alliance with the Gulf Arabs is the historic penance due to the sin of letting the Shah fall in 1978-1979. The Shah of Iran was the West's closest ally and was a vital support against the Soviets to the north, and a check on Arab nationalism to the west, and a monitor of events in Afghanistan to the east. When the Shah of Iran fell, so, too, did much of the post-WWII security architecture on which much of Western security relied. Given the importance of the region and of the Gulf itself, it would have been folly of the highest order if Western powers had not more closely engaged and strengthened, as well as militarily fortified, the friendly Gulf Arabs. That the Gulf Arabs may not as yet be 'Scandinavia with camels' is neither here nor there - geopolitics does not care about your feelings.

However, there are also very good reasons for the West, led by the US, to, for now, anyway, step back and not escalate the tense situation.

The primary consideration, which goes entirely unmentioned by the, “Whither the liberal international order?” crowd bloviating from their cable TV green rooms and think-tanks - but which consideration is not missed by anyone with any sort of military intelligence and planning background – is that there are still almost 20,000 Allied troops in neighbouring Afghanistan. Any attack by the US on Iran would, almost certainly, see Iranian-backed attacks on Allied forces in Afghanistan only increase. Afghanistan, especially the once Persian areas of western Afghanistan such as Herat, are not just neighbouring Iran but are seen by Iran, whether under the Shah or under the Mullahs, as security frontiers. There is almost no way that a strike on Iran would not endanger Allied troops in Afghanistan. Moreover, there would be even greater threats to the supply of Allied troops, already positioned at some distance from closely allies’ territories, over the coming Afghan winter, as well as endangerment of any future extraction of the Allied position.

The ongoing vulnerability of the Allied position in Afghanistan makes clear, also, the illogic of not just attacking Iran but, also, poking the adjacent and hyper-aggressive Russian bear, to any serious person trying to appreciate, militarily, the current situation. All that the Afghanistan War has managed in almost 20 years to achieve, at considerable cost in precious lives and national treasures, is to position a permanently exposed Allied expeditionary force close to Iran and Russia, in addition to its regular combat with the Taliban and like enemies. It is hard to conceive of a more strategically reckless misallocation of precious military resources than the Afghan War, as I have argued here.

A secondary, if more sublime, consideration that militates against striking Iran is that a strike sufficient to have any effect on the Iranian regime would likely bond average Iranians to an unpopular Mullahs’ regime. It would provide a ready Western scapegoat for the Iranian Regime’s corruption, brutality, and its inability to supply its citizens’ most basic needs. The Iranian people are a brilliant people and are now often protesting the regime. Their great King, Cyrus, is central to the Biblical story of the Jews’ return to Zion in Ezra and Nehemiah. The ancient history of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, as well as the history of the Ottomans and the Russians, is filled with their wars and diplomacy with the Persians. This history is a testimony not just to the historic geopolitical importance of Iran’s territory but also to the dynamism and will of the Persian and Iranian peoples across millennia. There are ample reasons given by Persian and Iranian history for believing that the Mullahs regime will fall, perhaps by a popular revolt building on the 2009 protests, perhaps by a successful military coup. The West should do its best to contain the Iranian regime’s worst external manifestations, especially that of its sponsorship of terrorism and the threat to both Persian and Omani Gulfs. But, in respect of the internal dynamics of Iran, the West should do as little as it possibly can to make everyday Iranians feel any sort of loyalty to the Mullahs’ regime, of the kind that a military assault on Iran would inevitably provoke. Instead, consistent with the West’s ongoing containment of an aggressive Iran, measures should be taken to aid the Iranian civil society and, especially, those Iranians who seek a future of constitutional government, under the rule of law, and honouring the finest traditions of Iran as a pluralist and prosperous nation.

All in all, there are no really good options in 2019 with respect to Iran. It is an ancient civilisation, it is a hegemonic power, it is a sponsor of terrorism, it is a maker of bad into much worse situations. Iran constitutes a challenge that prudence dictates must be taken very seriously. At the same time, Iran is simply too large for a comprehensive military response short of a full-scale war – and on any view, we are not yet at that juncture.

As I often counsel here, and elsewhere, it is always good to see things as they are and to keep even the gravest of matters in perspective. Iran has been subject to severe sanctions and these will likely get only worse as a result of the regime’s behaviour. The living standards of the average Iranian are poor and getting worse. The regime is already paying a high price for its transgressions in terms of isolation and the impoverishment of its people. For now, to borrow from the great American diplomat George Kennan, in the context of the now defunct Soviet Union, the main element of the West’s policy towards Iran must be that of a “long-term patient but firm and vigilant containment of [Iran’s aggressive] tendencies.” Such a policy has yielded benefits in the past and will do so in the future. Iran is too great a nation to continue, for long, under the rule of such a squalid regime, and the West should do all it can to help promote, peacefully, the possibility of an alternative Iranian future, which builds on its long tradition, especially in Shiism, of the importance of law, and a historic Iranian thirst for constitutional government.

For now, the West should prepare for any eventuality, and rattle the sabre, if necessary and productive, but always be under no illusion that drawing it for the purposes of military action will not see it soon recovered to its scabbard. The wisest course is to keep our powder dry while maintaining the closest watch on the Iranian regime while, also, trusting the Iranian people, and doing all we can to encourage a peaceful and lasting 'regime change'. The Iranians, after all of the suffering of the last 40 years, certainly deserve no less.