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.

National Security: The case for the Australian Government

Yesterday, the Australian Federal Police executed search warrants against the Sydney headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Australia’s equivalent of the BBC and Canada’s CBC, and, to some degree, the US’ NPR and PBS) in Ultimo, in inner-city Sydney. You can read all about it here and here, and practically anywhere in Australian news.

I am not briefed in or around the matter and, moreover, as I do practice and give opinions in constitutional, public and national security law, and as I teach constitutional law, I can, in the tradition of the independent Bar, offer my own observations on the law and the process, if not the facts of this particular case (the usual presumptions operate etc).

Thus, I herewith endeavour to provide some light on the law at a time when others, who should know better, are providing so much heat, especially in respect of matters that may come before a court.

But, first, I turn to two of the key matters.

Firstly, I note that these search warrants have been executed during the processes of the criminal trial of a Mr David McBride. Mr McBride is, at all times, as is any one of us, entitled to the presumption of innocence and to a fair trial. The Crown/Government bears all of the onuses here.

Secondly, my view is that the ABC and the media, generally, can and should do all it can to legitimately challenge what actions it believes have been and/or are a violation of its rights. Australia is a robust constitutional state and we all benefit from a Government that is scrutinised, relentlessly and, we hope, in an unbiased manner, by a sceptical media. While I think a sense of perspective should be kept on these events, at the same time, we all benefit from a media that is curious and critical. I am not aware of any serious person who would doubt the need for a vibrant and inquisitive media.

As to the search warrants, which are in serial form, it is fair to say they speak for themselves. Clearly, the search is for materials relating to the Australian Defence Force (ADF), and military operations, including special forces’ activities, and related national security information. This is material that is, obviously, of the most extraordinary sensitivity for a national government. It may relate to past, present, or contemplated, wartime and security operations, and thus potentially include identifiers of Australian military, intelligence, and security services, personnel. It may also include materials concerning Defence’s own internal investigations, which may traverse an additional range of issues, including ones that may go to the fairness or otherwise of ongoing ADF probes. The list of endless complications posed by national security information, especially military information, being ‘leaked’ to the media are significant – and this is why ‘leaks’ are a criminal offence with those convicted of ‘leaking’ facing significant penalties.

One of the requirements of any form of search order, especially one for the Police, is that it describes with specificity what is being ‘searched’ for by the authority. One should add that this search was conducted peacefully – the AFP officers and agents even signed in at the ABC’s reception and then engaged in extended discussions with the ABC’s own lawyers. This was hardly the ‘afternoon of the long hard drives’. This was most certainly not any sort of "raid".

To the above, I would add the following by way of enlightening discussions on the matter of how and why the Government has a legitimate interest to defend, especially amid all the criticisms of the AFP that are now being made. In order, they are:

[1] Australia resulted from National Security concerns: The Australian union brought about by the Federation movement, the "one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown" that commenced on 01 January 1901, resulted from the Australian desire for security - not the desire for liberty. One of the primary drivers of Australian Federation in the late 19th century was the need for the six sparsely populated British colonies to secure the enormous Australian continent and its approaches (in the late 19th century, the Australian colonists considered themselves threatened by, inter alia, Russian, German, and French, ambitions in the region). As the High Court, whose Great War courts were populated by that Australian founding generation and whose cases supply much of our law to this day, noted in 1918, “It is a matter of common knowledge that the necessity of a single authority for the defence of Australia was one of the urgent, perhaps the most urgent, of all the needs for the establishment of the Commonwealth.” The Constitution, and the High Court interpreting it, has always given significant deference, especially in time of war and crisis, to the national government and its responsibility for national security and the ‘defence of the realm’. These separate observations by Justice Isaacs – who would in due course leave the High Court to become Governor-General and thus Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces – are worth quoting at length as it gives an idea of how broad the deference to the Government is in Australian law, especially in a time of war and crisis, notwithstanding that 2019 is not 1916:

“Defence includes every act which in the opinion of the proper authority is conducive to the public security. Those who are entrusted with the ultimate power of guarding the national safety are not bound to subordinate that consideration to any other.”

“A war imperilling our very existence, involving not the internal development of progress, but the array of the whole community in mortal combat with the common enemy, is a fact of such transcendent and dominating character as to take precedence of every other fact of life. It is the ultima ratio of the nation. The defence power then has gone beyond the stage of preparation; and passing into action becomes the pivot of the Constitution, because it is the bulwark of the State. Its limits then are bounded only by the requirements of self-preservation. …. The best protection all the rights and powers so jealously, and in ordinary times so justifiably, defended can have, so far as Australia is concerned, is the very Commonwealth power that is now sought to be limited. The Constitution cannot be so construed as to contemplate its own destruction or, what amounts to the same thing, to cripple by checks and balances the ultimate power which is created for the undeniable purpose of preserving at all hazards and by all available means the inviolability of the Commonwealth and of the several States.”

The more recent 2007 case of Thomas v Mowbray affirmed the breadth of the Government applying laws made under the Defence power’s expansive reach, including control orders as against a person suspected – but not convicted – of having, essentially, skills useful to terrorism and sympathies with terrorists. There, the majority of the High Court found the control orders valid. Noteworthy was what Justices Gummow and Crennan said about the effect of the Australian Constitution on ideas of governmental duties to their citizens: “The obverse of that obedience and allegiance was the sovereign's obligation of protection. This notion of a compact sustaining the body politic cannot be weakened and must be strengthened by the system of representative government for which the Constitution provides.” Thus the Australian compact is one focused, primarily, on the Australian Crown and its Government delivering security - and not liberty - to this Australian people. Regardless of whether the Crown should have more or less power by statute made under the Australian Constitution's context, the Crown itself endures and contains by necessity all the royal prerogatives necessary to secure its realm, from making war to making peace, to resisting incursions from afar. The contrast with some republican settlement, with a government constituted by limitations on its powers, could not be starker.

[2] Australia has no First Amendment: For good or ill, Australia has no constitutionally entrenched freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Australia has never had a Pentagon Papers case. The closest approximation to the issue arising was the 1980 Defence Papers’ case, concerning leaks from the Government in respect of Australia foreign relations in respect, inter alia, of the Soviet threat, the Shah of Iran, and the East Timor crisis, in which the High Court found for the Government, albeit on the lowly ground of infringement of copyright. Even so, as Justice Mason noted, in making injunctions against publication: “If, however, it appears that disclosure will be inimical to the public interest because national security, relations with foreign countries or the ordinary business of government will be prejudiced, disclosure will be restrained”. While Justice Mason believed that governmental embarrassment was insufficient a reason to enjoin publication, there is no Australian authority that any materials touching on military operations would not be prima facie barred from disclosure and publication. For those pushing an American-style First Amendment, it should be noted that the United States Government, especially under the liberal Obama presidency and even given the First Amendment, has always conducted vigorous leak probes and prosecutions of leakers (eg Daniel Ellsberg), which has in itself raised issues about press freedoms. It is very unlikely that mere changes in the law per se will change anything about the weighing up of the interests of the Government and of the media. Indeed, the American experience seems to be that little changes except battles over which ideological team’s judges sit on what courts, which is a fate I would reject for Australia and our courts.

[3] The Government has its rights, too: The Australian Government has not just a legal duty but a moral obligation to protect its national security information at all levels of security classification. The leaking of any information that compromises not just the security of the nation but also the personal security of the Government’s personnel – uniformed or civilian – is a grave danger to the Australian body politic. In terms of a “chilling effect”, I can think of nothing more deterring to those who go in harm’s way on Australia’s behalf than to have the Government's information on them and their service, especially in the realm of military operations, find its way via 'leaks' to the media, however responsible and ethical, and there be no effort by the Government to retrieve this national security material and secure it. Similarly, Australia has a very close and very deep military alliance with the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and other allies, and Australia shares military materials and intelligence - and Australia has shared with it military materials and intelligence - of the gravest important. Any inability of Australia to safeguard its military and intelligence materials, and retrieve them if stolen or 'leaked', prejudices not just Australia's own national security but the allied security and diplomatic relationships that the Australian Government has built up and upon for over a century. The Government’s interests and actions, which may ultimately require the purging of any storage devices or computer servers on which the material may have been stored, is, in the circumstances, a reasonable and proportionate response to the risks posed by a national security compromise of this scale.

At the root of much of this and other debates, is a fundamental misunderstanding as to how Australia is to be governed. Australia is, simply, not constituted as a democracy. Instead, constitutionally, Australia is a monarchical, constitutional, and federal nation-state, with democratic forms – but at all times within a territorial not democratic constitution.

As noted above, a key driver of the Australian union and its resulting Constitution was and is to, literally, constitute an Australian nation-state that could defend itself and perpetuate its nationhood. There were few warm American or continental style flourishes and declarations as to the ‘rights of man’ but, rather, the cold reality of an enormous Australian task to hold so large a continental nation together, come what may. The Australian intent was security not liberty.

The Australian Constitution thus vests the executive power in the Crown, ie a government vested in the Monarch, albeit a power exercised by the Governor-General on the advice of the Ministers of the day. That Governor-General also exercises the command-in-chief of the armed forces. The ministers of the Crown are drawn from the membership of the bicameral Parliament: a House of Representatives containing Members of Parliament elected by the people in 151 separate local electorates across Australia, as well as a Senate elected at large by the people of each State to represent them in the Senate as a House of Review. There is no national vote, at all. The upshot was a national government made responsible to an elected Parliament of local and State representatives. You can read more on Australia’s federal system here.

I mention this as the design of the Australian constitutional system is for a strong executive government, that can secure Australia’s interests, but which is also responsible to the Parliament. Much of what is being asked for, now, consciously or otherwise, is for the Government to be made accountable to the media for the perceived excesses or errors of war or national security activities. Our system is, instead, intended for that accounting to occur in the context of the Parliament. To be sure, the media’s role and duty is to inform and scrutinise the Parliament. But it is the Parliament’s duty to make laws that enable it to properly scrutinise and demand accounting from the Government of the day, especially in relation to its wartime and national security activities. And if a law is overly broad and oppressive, then it is for an active citizenry to pressure their representatives in the Parliament to make new laws and/or amend old ones.

We are not made secure – indeed we are made much weaker – by promoting a culture of leaking (either by any official toleration or media encouragement). This is encouraging the commission of crimes and, also, encouraging the risk that national security personnel, as well as national security information, will have their safety and privacy endangered. The Government has the duty to account to the Parliament – and it also has the duty to safeguard the lives and interests of those Australians it sends in harm’s way.

Ultimately, it is unlikely that this current episode will change anyone’s minds, sadly. The media, no doubt, has legitimate grievances as to the opaque nature of governmental activities. At the same time, heads of the armed forces and security services chiefs do play a much more public role than they did pre-2001 and have shown a willingness to explain their roles to an interested media and public. In a time of crisis, the Australian people have to be able to both trust their Government and trust their media’s reporting of what the Government and its armed forces and security agencies are doing. A more measured and open dialogue is probably the best answer, long term, and an acceptance that while the Government will not always get everything right, we are also not in some authoritarian era, either. Indeed, the best means of improvement lies with the tools that our Constitution has always provided: the power of the Parliament to hold the Government to account and the power of the Parliament to make new laws and to amend old laws.

One can only hope that a more open and transparent discussion will lead to fewer outbreaks of ridiculous hyperbole and an acceptance that the Government, too, has its legitimate interests. Australians have had 118 years of nationhood, persevering through wars and depressions, times of plenty and times of hardship, and our national endurance will continue to demand an energetic government that can both protect our constitution and free society, and secure our nation and her people.

Russia, Trump, Mueller, and the 'Wilderness of Mirrors'

On the 9th of May, 2017, the US President, Donald Trump, dismissed the then FBI Director, James Comey. At the time, there were allegations that Trump’s firing of Comey was related to the FBI’s ongoing investigation of the Trump 2016 campaign and allegations of its links with Russian persons and the Russian state. At the same time, there was, also, a memorandum by the US Deputy Attorney General, Rod J. Rosenstein, recommending Comey’s termination. Trump’s own firing of Comey noted that Comey had told Trump privately that he was not under investigation, something that Comey would later admit was correct.

On the 17th of May, 2017, Mr Rosenstein appointed Robert Swan Mueller III, the former FBI Director, to thoroughly investigate the Russian Government’s effort to interfere in the United States’ 2016 election. The record of appointment can be found here.

It is important to note, here, that:

(A) the Mueller probe was, in its origins, a counter-intelligence investigation that contained a mandate for criminal prosecutions, where necessary and appropriate. A counter-intelligence investigation is necessarily protective – it is focused on identifying and assessing threats to national security, not merely investigating those criminal matters that may be prosecutable; and

(B) in the United States, the counter-intelligence and national criminal investigation functions are combined in the one agency: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In other Western countries, in particular in the British imperial/Commonwealth nations, the counter-intelligence and national criminal investigation missions are often discharged by separate agencies (eg in the UK, MI5 and the National Crime Agency, in Australia, ASIO and the Australian Federal Police, and so on.) There is much sense in separating the functions, if only because these agencies have very different cultures and the sorts of people who excel at counter-intelligence work are, very often, the sort of eccentrics and social misfits who would, rightly, never be accepted as agents and officers of any respectable law enforcement body.

Keeping both (A) and (B) in mind, we come to now, late March 2019, and Mr Mueller has submitted his report as Special Counsel to the US Attorney-General, William Barr. The Mueller Report's contents remain undisclosed and, one expects, will require significant declassification and/or redaction before any part of it can properly be released.

On the 24th of March 2019, Mr Barr, as the Attorney General, supplied a synopsis of the Mueller report to Congressional leaders (see here), and its two key findings:

Firstly, Mueller cleared Trump and his campaign of conspiring or coordinating (a distinction without any real difference) with the Russian Government. While the Special Counsel did charge a number of Russian military officers with cyber/computer hacking for the purposes of influencing the US 2016 election, the Mueller investigation did not find that Trump or his campaign were party to the Russian effort – and “despite multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign”. At the same time, while the Mueller probe may not have found evidence that established or supported any conspiracy, it is likely the counter-intelligence aspect of the Mueller probe has commenced or followed leads in respect of Russian and other foreign influences that will probably be run-down over the next few years if not decades. Mueller, as a former FBI director, was uniquely well-suited to oversee such a probe.

Secondly, Mueller left the issue of whether President Trump’s behaviour evidenced “obstruction-of-justice concerns” at large. It is unclear what the alleged obstruction was: was it Trump's intercession for Lieutenant General Michael Flynn? Was it Trump firing former FBI Director James Comey? Or was it Trump attacking the Mueller probe? Or something else? Was it Trump denouncing the probe as a “witch hunt”? (The last of which may be unwise and against legal advice, but is arguably something Trump is as free to do as anyone else). So, the obstruction issue became one for the Attorney General to determine. Thus it came to be that both the Attorney General Barr, and the Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, “....concluded that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel's investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” More than anything else, Rosenstein’s concurrence in this conclusion is critical, here. Rosenstein had both (A) advised Trump to fire the former FBI director James Comey and (B) had initiated and supervised the Mueller probe. Rosenstein would be the one US Government official who would be charged with pursuing, as well as the key government witness to, any allegation of obstruction. While there is no gainsaying the idiocies that any Congress will engage in, the legal question of obstruction was negatived by Rosenstein’s express concurrence. [An interesting question, also, arises here, as to whether Mueller could have formed an independent view on the facts. Mueller was interviewed by Trump for the position of FBI director on 16 May 2017. It seems highly likely that Mueller would, at that interview, have become acquainted with Trump's views on Comey and why Comey was fired. It is also highly likely that Mueller has his own views of Comey, which may well have changed during the Special Counsel probe. Another question for another day.]

As a matter of full disclosure, you can find all my comments on the Mueller probe here and you will note, and I take no satisfaction in saying this, that, as early as the 15th of June 2017, it was clear, on the evidence, that Trump would be cleared. Moreover, as a matter of common sense given the colandar-like US system, does anyone seriously believe that if there was evidence of Trump and his circle conspiring with the Russians, it would not have leaked long ago? Donald Trump could barely coordinate with his own presidential campaign-why would any sentient being think Trump would be able to conspire with the Kremlin and keep it a secret? This is not to say that Trump's campaign was not a magnet for grifters, drifters, people other GOP campaigns would not hire, as well as those with suspicious pasts, including Russian associations - Trump's campaign had all of those sorts of characters. But the idea that Trump, of all people, with his penchant for bombast and inability to keep a secret, would be the Kremlin's idea of a useful dupe, is rather at odds with the history of Russian subversion.

This all said, though, in the best traditions of the “wilderness of mirrors” that is the arena of intelligence and counter-intelligence work, as well as the slow drudge of a criminal investigation and prosecution, the question inevitably arises, ‘what did we learn’? In answer to this question, I say the following.

Firstly - and this did not require anyone of the stature of Robert Mueller to investigate - American politics is open to a degree of corruption and influence by foreign moneyed interests and foreign intelligence services (often the same thing in many countries) on a scale as great as, if not much worse than, any other first world country. The American republic, while it has so much to admire in its design and founding, is, in 2019, possessed of a political class that Russians, like the Chinese, Ukrainians, and a host of others, know is open to corruption, intelligence dangles, and compromise/kompromat. (Even Australia, felt it needed to donate money to the Clinton Foundation.) The Paul Manaforts and Podesta brothers and others are but archetypes of a notorious American cohort of political vagabonds. One hopes that the United States has now learned a valuable if painful lesson on why the swamps of professional politics are best drained permanently. One doubts, however, that anything will be done by a political establishment that is happy to be at least rented, if not bought. One foresees, instead, that the Russians, Chinese, and other malefactors, will simply see the Mueller probe as deterring them from doing nothing but seeking a smarter variety of traitor and useful idiot to now suborn in the future, and, especially, for 2020.

In the Russian case, their historic practice, going back to the Tsarist Okhrana, of spreading disinformation, fake documents, sowing domestic chaos and distrust, means that the Kremlin’s appetite for destruction has only been whetted by the hysteria and insanity of America’s political class and media over the past three years. The clearly desired Russian effect of a divided and suspicious America was achieved beyond Putin's wildest dreams. While I have long counselled a realistic and historically informed approach to the Russian threat, given that the cold war is now long over, anyone thinking the Russians, or the Chinese and Iranians, have not seen here a real vulnerability for exploiting America’s domestic divisions, at very little real cost, is deluding themself. Unless and until the United States takes seriously its duty to its own people, to protect them against foreign influences and the rampant political and lobbying corruption that enables its spread, the future of American domestic politics is what we have seen recently. And every US ally should be extraordinarily concerned by the sight of this great and powerful republic whose political class is seemingly unable to protect America from meddling by malevolent foreign adversaries.

The case of the Steele Dossier and how this tract found its way into the FBI's hands is endlessly fascinating and disturbing. This anti-Trump dossier, full of the most sordid and lurid details of Trump's alleged activities, was compiled by the former British intelligence operative Christopher Steele, relying on local Russian sources, for the benefit of anti-Trump forces in US politics. The fact that Steele had not been in Russia since the 1990s, and Steele had no way to verify his alleged sources and whether any part of the dossier was or was not true, was neither here nor there. For a certain segment of US politics and media, the fact that the Steele Dossier was anti-Trump, even if it was otherwise the stuff of fabulism, was enough-they 'wanted to believe'. The fact that an apparently experienced Western intelligence operative like Steele could be so naive as to not see how ripe a target he was for Russian disinformation is simply bewildering. Even now, the Steele Dossier remains a still unverified product of opposition research yet, as set out below, it found its way into the FBI's hands and was briefed to Trump by Comey in early 2017. The question of whether the (known to be unverified and scandalous) Steele Dossier formed any part of the evidentiary foundation for a surveillance warrant obtained from the US' FISA courts is a matter that remains at large, and, if proved so, would be a matter that would see any lawyer in any other common law jurisdiction, seeking to move the court ex parte on the basis of Steele's dubious chronicle, disbarred or struck off. The Steele Dossier was the recycling of political skulduggery into an allegation of facts that would poison US politics from 2016 on and was a disinformation success beyond the Kremlin's wildest dreams.

Secondly, and further to the above, something clearly went badly wrong with the US Intelligence community in 2015-2016 and, most especially, with the FBI in the Comey era. The conduct of the former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, and the former CIA Director, John Brennan, was nothing short of deplorable and, in Brennan's case, disgraceful in retirement. However, something was badly awry with Comey and the FBI. It is not just that James Comey was weak with respect to baulking at prosecuting Hillary Clinton, and a pathetic presence online. He seems to have been, at best, the FBI’s invisible man. It is not just that so much of the Comey-era FBI leadership has been fired or terminated for cause, or referred for criminal prosecution. If it was well known to the FBI in 2015-2016, such that it then commenced the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, that the Russians were seeking to insert themselves or their agents into the orbit of the Trump campaign (and, given Russian enrichment of the Clintons over the years, one cannot be sure it was only the Trump campaign), the FBI had an undeniable and positive duty to defensively brief Trump and his senior aides. There is, simply, no excuse for the FBI leadership’s failure to warn Trump and his campaign of what the FBI leadership then already knew were destabilising Russian machinations. It is difficult to think of another first world country where the national counter-intelligence agency would not have acted to protect a threat to a national political campaign. It is difficult to think of any serious counter-intelligence professional in history who would have behaved as Comey and his coterie did in 2015-2016. In the UK, for example, the security services are a not uncommon if subtle advisor to political leaders, especially where dubious backbenchers and mainchancers are associating or have associated with the wrong sorts of ‘Johnny Foreigner’. In Australia, ASIO will make public statements to warn of foreign influence, especially the Chinese in recent years. The French, also, are particularly zealous at protecting their domestic politics from foreign intrigues. Somehow the FBI of the Comey era went missing in action as a concerted - if not overly large, expensive, or sophisticated - Russian campaign to sow chaos in an election year went into top gear. The FBI’s handling of the notorious Steele dossier, almost certainly the product of current and former Russian intelligence operatives, where it was taken seriously enough for Comey to brief the US President-elect in January 2017, is a matter for another day but suggests an FBI with major problems.

(One suspects that Clapper and Comey briefed Trump on the Steele Dossier to both inform the incoming president but, also, one infers, as a means of suggesting to Trump this duo had 'one over' on Trump...little did either realise that Trump's careeer spent in property development prepared him unusually well for dealing with stand-over men and how they are best 'fired' when attempting to extort.)

Thirdly, on any view, the US news media has utterly disgraced itself at every step of the Mueller probe. It was clear to anyone who could read plain English that Mueller’s probe was intended as a counter-intelligence probe into Russian activities in the 2016 election, not a mission to remove Trump from office. The all but obsessive belief in the US media, with all too few honourable exceptions, that Mueller was, indeed, the means by which their bête noire Trump would leave office in disgrace if not under actual arrest, has destroyed what little remaining credibility that the US media enjoyed after its embarrassing bias during the Obama years and the Hillary campaign. That Trump won an election that the media overwhelmingly opposed him on was Trump’s unforgiveable sin. That, on balance, even the hyperbolic ‘Don from Queens’ Donald Trump was far closer to the truth as to the veracity of the allegations against him than almost anyone in American journalism was – not to mention a US media whose cable news green rooms were populated by former American security eminences sullied by the Iraq war - should provoke some serious soul-searching. To its credit, many independent and even left of centre journalists (who I would probably disagree with on most things) did ask questions and refuse to join the media herd, with Matthew Taibbi’s brutal but deserved account a 'must read' from this debacle. The lion of the conservative American media establishment, Brit Hume, was right to describe the media coverage as the "worst journalistic debacle of my lifetime". The US media needs its own reckoning. I say this with no relish but, instead, with regard to the vital role that a serious and independent media plays in informing the public and in holding governmental power to account. If the media is now so rotten and agenda driven, then not only will these crucial public duties go unperformed but, when a crisis inevitably occurs, there will be no media in which the public can have any confidence. Finally, hopefully, conservatives who believe in the rule of law will have learned to be sceptical of rushes to judgement based on institutional trust not actual evidence, and will be cautious before joining any future pile on of a Democrat placed in Trump’s position.

Fourthly, for all of the United States’ current travails, it should take enormous pride that it can still produce a public servant of the calibre of Robert Mueller. I have enormous personal regard for Mueller. Yes, he was and is, to borrow the nonsensical terminology of our time, a son of ‘privilege’, a ‘prep’, but he was also that rare member of his cohort who volunteered to serve in the Vietnam War that so many, including future US Presidents, did their best to evade – and Mueller served there with distinction as a Marine officer. Mueller then, also, eschewed a lucrative career in private practice to take prosecutorial positions in the service of the public interest. On any view, Mueller is a heroic figure and only the more so for his willingness to disappoint the baying mobs and political hacks. Hopefully, for the US’ sake, there are other Muellers out there, who will avoid partisan politics, and the temptation to play for applause from the gallery, and instead doggedly follow the evidence where it leads and, if it is insufficient, be satisfied to publicly clear, rather than bring a false prosecution. Robert Mueller is a living reminder of the sort of diligent, quiet, self-effacing, and American “wise men” who created the American century, and who built and led a superpower.

Finally, the full truth of the Mueller probe, especially its counter-intelligence aspects, and its related issues will likely never be known. Moreover, the personages involved have still never been asked questions on what really happened in 2015-2016 in any exhaustive manner. It is as if a narrative took hold that few if any in journalism or academia wanted to question. As a wise Crown Prosecutor once said to me, “Even the greatest of crimes is but a mere chronology”. In March 2019, even with Mueller’s report now submitted, it is still entirely unclear what actually happened – when, where, who, how, etc and why - during the late Obama era. It is hard to make sense of a counter-intelligence probe whose history only gets more confusing - not more clear - over time. None of this invoved Robert Mueller. But further questions only arise from anyone looking back, fairly, at the history of the "Crossfire Hurricane" probe and the bizarre set of circumstances that led to the Obama-era FBI probing the Trump campaign, especially after the truly sham-like decision of the FBI to allow Hillary Clinton to escape prosecution.

My own particular curiosity is the evidence that would be given by Admiral Michael S. Rogers, USN, the former head of the US’ National Security Agency. After the US election, in late November 2016, Admiral Rogers went to meet the then President-elect Trump in New York City. Very unusually, Admiral Rogers went on his own to meet Trump. Usually when intelligence chiefs meet with a senior political figure, let alone a president-elect in the American system, they will attend as a phalanx, not just to provide a comprehensive briefing to the dignitary but, also, to ensure that each has a witness as to what was actually said. Instead, Admiral Rogers went on his own to see Trump, ostensibly about a job in the new administration. If anyone in the US Government at that time would have been very well aware of Russian hacking and kompromat, it would be Admiral Rogers. Yet, Admiral Rogers went to meet Trump, on his own, and to this day, what they discussed has never been leaked. Perhaps it was just a job interview? Perhaps it was just an informal briefing? But, nonetheless, after Admiral Rogers met Trump, there were calls from within the outgoing Obama administration for Rogers to be fired. And, moreover, Admiral Rogers was the only senior intelligence figure of that Obama era to have then been kept on by the incoming Trump administration, and to have retired from government service with all due honour and dignity.

Whatever Admiral Rogers (and those of that circle) knows of this critical 2015-2016 period is a matter for others to question but, until, especially, he and others write their memoirs or are subpoenaed to produce documents and testify, the full history of the late Obama era, the FBI, and the Russian threat, will still elude us all. Until the intelligence and policing heads are probed at length on the chronology of all these matters, from the Russians to the FBI’s conduct, nothing approaching a reliable history of this 2015-2016 descent into Moscow Centre-induced madness can be written. Hopefully, with Mueller now reporting in, that timeline can now start to be assembled, by vigorous, curious, and unbiased, journalism of the kind that has been so woefully absent for the past 4 years. We should all hope this will happen, especially as, after all, if you have spent years stumbling around the ‘wilderness of mirrors’, you can only start to find your way out by first breaking glass.