war

The Century of Steel

Imagine a world in which there is no central structure, imagine a world where both the United States and China have fallen from a state of global hegemony to struggling to maintain any internal resemblance of order. This could occur independently of the other nation’s collapse or in tandem with it. What would the world look like? Would another world order emerge or would complete anarchy befall the world writ large? If there isn’t the time or conditions for another unipolar nation to fill this void, in part or in full, we must look for a more divided and unstable world structure. This core concept can be understood as non-polarity, where states cannot order themselves according to any traditional structure. Out of this concept, we could be entering a world of widespread turmoil and interstate violence. This can be understood as the Century of Steel (CoS), a term to help describe and articulate what we could be going through.

In order to understand the CoS, we first must look at Italian politics in the postwar years. The Years of Lead refers to a period of widespread social and political instability and violence in Italy. This period saw terrorism and assassinations become normalised from the 1960s to 1980s, the outcome of which saw government forces triumph and various far-right and far-left organisations disbanded. Notable and symbolic examples of this period include the Bologna Bombing in 1980 and the assassination of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. A lengthy explanation of this period can be found here.

Now, imagine a globalised version of the Italian Years of Lead taking place through a deglobalising world. Widespread interstate turmoil across nearly all regions of the world could occur. Following this, in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic, we have seen the rise of old tensions occur once more from across the Eurasian Steppe and the Middle East. From the ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine to the thinning of the Palestinian herd by Israel. The outcomes of this will look like Russia beating Ukraine, with them annexing half the country, followed by Israel becoming a pariah within the Middle East again, ending decades of peace efforts. With the collapse of the current ‘rules-based’ world order and the potential joint collapse of both major superpowers in the not-so-distant future, another avenue of what could happen needs to be explored. 

One of the most underrated academics currently working is that of Yi Fuxian, who has contributed considerably to the topic of demography, especially within the context of the Asia-Pacific. In a recent Diplomat article, Yi argued that any conflict will only exacerbate the ongoing demographic issues between the aforementioned warring nations. As noted with the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, both nations have seen their respective fertility rates drop substantially. Likewise, if war were to break out between China and Taiwan (both nations are in considerably worse demographic situations), this would have disastrous consequences for both nations, regardless of the outcome of the conflict.

“If a Taiwan war breaks out, it will hasten these trends, leading to global instability and even the collapse of the U.S.-led world order… Time is not on the side of China or Taiwan, nor on the side of the United States. The three parties need to show sufficient wisdom and courage to achieve permanent peace across the Taiwan Strait – and avoid dropping off a demographic cliff.”

-Yi Fuxian, The Demographic Costs of a War Over Taiwan, The Diplomat (10/04/2024)

With most of the world now residing in a ‘post-fertile’ world, being below replacement level, there are fewer ‘new’ people entering into this increasingly conflictual world. What a lot of nations have now in terms of manpower is all they will have for many years to come, and when it goes, it goes. If you choose to spend it on conflict, you must accept the fact you will most likely not have anyone to replace them, creating various problems down the line. Moreover, the potential conflicts will only further perpetuate the conditions that caused states to fall into such a demographic rut in the first place.

If we are indeed becoming truly deglobalised, we could see the emergence of a new epoch. Just as the Cold War defined much of the 20th Century, the CoS may define much of the 21st. A ‘century’ of no centralised control being exerted within the world, incapable of regulating and mediating beyond a very narrow and constricted sphere of influence. This will only compound the ongoing issues being faced across the planet. We are entering very dangerous and complex times ahead for every single individual in the world and more conflicts will most likely arise in the following years as a result.


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Not With a Bang, But a Whimper

This past week, Tucker Carlson travelled to Moscow, Russia to have a sit-down interview with President Vladimir Putin. Before the almost two hour interview was conducted, Tucker Carlson explained his motives for being in Russia – a now pariah state in the Western mind – as trying to get the “other side” of the story.

After all, it has been almost two years since the greater war in Ukraine began, with the invasion of Russian forces in February of 2021. Yet no media outlet in the West has either sought, or been bothered to get a deeper understanding of the Russian motivation, instead painting the conflict with broad strokes as a Marvel-esque “good guys against bad guys” situation.

Credit where credit is due, Carlson is doing the job that most journalists these days refuse to do – report, and let the audience make up their mind. But what became very apparent from the offset of the interview conducted on the evening of 7th of February was just how unexpectedly out of his element Tucker Carlson appeared to be.

After the now infamous 45-minute long history lesson of Russian-Ukrainian relations going back to the eighth century, Tucker Carlson found himself getting overwhelmed with the offload of  (possibly far-too-detailed) background context of the war and its causes.

This, for many, seemed to be shocking revelations.

“We didn’t know a world leader could be so detailed with historical knowledge!”

“He didn’t even need notes, meanwhile our leaders can barely read off of a teleprompter! Shameful!”

But Putin’s narrative and historical tangent shouldn’t come as a surprise, as it is the same reasons he gave in a published essay On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians which justified his reasons for the invasion and interest in bringing Ukraine (or at the very least, parts of Eastern and Southern Ukraine) into the Russian Federation.

Hardly new, shocking, or insightful – it’s the same point he has been making, very publicly, for the last two years – of course always ignored, filtered, or taken out of context by the Western news media.

When pressed to talk about NATO expansion being a possible provocation of Russia’s actions, Putin, once again, stuck to the same story he has been telling the world for the better part of a decade.

Russia is willing to cooperate with the West, and is even willing to allow an independent Ukrainian state partner with the EU and become more friendly with Western Europe and America, as long as Russia’s strategic and security interests are respected and cooperated with.

This was why for decades prior to the Maidan, Russia had not escalated provocations – beyond a few strongly worded statements – with NATO despite NATO expansion beyond Germany into the Baltics and Balkans.

Our leadership – more specifically – the warhawks and ideologues who make up the body of the US State Department and inner-mechanisms of Washington D.C. body-politic who are heavily benefiting from, and invested in the superfluous military contacts and deals, have had no interest in playing ball – even after the Cold War and the fall of the Communism in the Eastern Bloc.

Putin suggested that it wasn’t that he had poor relations with elected leaders, but rather that any time he had approached NATO, American or European leaders with opportunities for cooperation, it was always received enthusiastically, but then quickly shut-down by the “expert” teams that inform Western elected officials.

Perhaps this is just posturing and expert narrative-building that Putin tells himself to sleep better at night, and wants to manipulate the narrative to better suit his own image as a victim of the Western machine.

But speaking as a Westerner, and as someone who has seen the actions of elected governments of both left and right-leaning factions, has anything our governments done in the last thirty years, especially in the realm of foreign policy, actually benefited the world or made it better?

The Iraq War? We manufactured a false narrative about weapons of mass destruction, and Saddam Hussein working with Al-Qaeda in order to invade. We left millions dead, radicalised millions more to become vehemently anti-West, and left the vacuum for ISIS to grow in the wake of our “victory”.

The deposing of Gaddafi in Libya? We left a nation in ruins, which has now become a hotbed for open-air slave-trading, terrorism – and we now have no buffer state between Africa and the Mediterranean Sea, feeding the immigration problems of the last two decades.

The War in Afghanistan? Not only did we have no real long-term objective being there, we helped fuel the opioid crisis by encouraging, and protecting the cultivation of poppy – which would wind its way into the US through the illegal drug trade, leading millions of Americans to be hooked on literal poison. Not only this, once we left, the government we installed collapsed like a warm Easter egg and the Taliban became a regional power by seizing the weapons the U.S. military had left behind.

The Syrian Civil War? We armed “rebel” groups to topple the Assad regime, leaving a country devastated, millions of people displaced, and causing the refugee crisis in the 2010s.

I could go on and on, these are just a few of the glaring examples – but how has any of our “democracy building” fared? Did we build democracy, or did we just ruin perfectly stable countries because Washington policymakers were so convinced of their own excellence and patting themselves on the back for “safeguarding democracy” that they couldn’t see the looming disasters that would result from their insane actions?

When our reasons for going to war and causing untold levels of devastation have been as vague as “protecting/promoting/building democracy” for every single one of these conflicts, I’m not surprised that when a world leader outlines very different, very detailed reasons as to why he wants to conduct military action – analysts and intellectuals are hardly able to pick up their jaws from the floor.

Despite the fact that this has always been the way the world has always worked, it just goes to show how removed Western governments and foreign policy decision makers have become from reality.

Within a century and a half, we went from the brilliance of Bismark to the nonsensical politicking of Nuland. A truly astounding fall from grace.

Coming back to Ukraine, we had peace-talks and negotiations ready to go in Istanbul, which most likely would have resulted in an end to the bloodshed, and perhaps a North Korea type DMZ along the Dnieper that may not have made either country happy but would’ve at least established a firm red-line that neither party could justifiably cross.

But that was stifled by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who I assume was working at the behest of Washington and seeking his own Churchill moment, who instead encouraged Zelensky and the Ukrainian government to “fight on!”.

Almost an entire generation of young Ukrainian men have been wiped out, millions have fled the country as refugees, and it has become a meat-grinding war of attrition – one that the Ukrainians cannot possibly win by their sheer lack of numbers, but instead they will be slowly grinded down into submission, regardless of how many arms and funds are sent by the West.

All of this, because we have been refusing to sit-down, have a little sense of humility in the changing world we live in, and compromise at any level.

We have been force-fed this phoney narrative that Vladimir Putin is this seething maniac, frothing at the mouth rabidly because he needs this war, and he needs to win it otherwise his entire rule is delegitimised, and his iron fist over Russia be brought down – that all we need to do is keep fighting and we will win! The good guys always win, right?

But Putin’s conduct and body-language in the Tucker Carlson interview spoke very differently to the narrative we have been fed.

This is not someone who is on edge about this conflict, nor feeling as if his administration and rule over Russia is under serious threat. His body-language was as if this whole conflict was simply just another day at the office – that he is willing to negotiate to end these hostilities, but if not all he has to do is wait.

And who can blame him for this certain calm confidence that he carries?

At the same time the Carlson interview was being broadcast on X, President Biden held a press conference in the White House to assure the press and general public that his brain hasn’t turned into mashed potatoes – in the same speech he said that President Assisi of Mexico would allow humanitarian aid into Palestine. Reassuring, of course.

While the United States, Great Britain, and the broader Western world are all on-track for domestic disaster – with severe economic inflation, political and social rifts that have turned people against each other and their governments, and self-imposed demographic suicide – why would Putin need to worry at all about what the West does?

All he has to do is wait – and he has the growing world of the East, namely India and China, that will continue to trade and maintain relations with Russia, and not seek to harass or get involved in Russian domestic affairs.

Ukraine is not the “last stand” of the West as it has been made out to be. I think you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone in the Western world who is actually enthusiastic about the idea of dying in the mud and snow-ridden trenches of Donetsk and Luhansk to defend… foreign democracy? If that even is what we are defending, after all, rival parties have been banned in the Rada.

No. Frankly, the United States is on the path to isolation one way or another. It will likely be because the domestic situation would become so bad that it has no other choice but to focus its efforts inwardly to prevent complete national fracture.

If push really comes to shove, even the warhawks in Washington would rather pull out from escalating into larger hostilities with a nation that can match the United States in terms of nuclear firepower. Having already made their billions of dollars in weapons contracts, what is the benefit of further plunging the world into a war which will surely lead to mass devastation, leaving no possible markets to sell their goods.

And when the United States withdraws much of its interest from Europe, where will that leave the EU?

Without American energy, and without American guarantees of protection, Europe will have to find its own ways of maintaining itself – which will be made all the more difficult since the position of the EU in regard to Russia, and the Russian supply of energy has been to sanction it and stop it, with no real viable alternative.

This will only exacerbate the pre-existing issues in Europe – when quality of life is severely lessened, and basic needs like warm homes in cold winters and steady food supplies are no longer guaranteed, the masses will lash out, first at each other, and eventually at the politicians and governments who led to this disastrous eventuality.

This is what the war has become. An international game of chicken, with one side holding a significant home-turf advantage. Sanctions have not worked, but instead pushed Russia to internally change to become less dependent on trading in US dollars and looking for foreign alternatives.

Funding and arming the Ukrainians has meant that a war that could’ve been over in a matter of weeks and months has now grinded into a war that will last for years, until the front lines simply cannot be maintained by lack of numbers. The humanitarian disaster that could’ve been averted almost a decade ago has left one of the largest countries in Europe devastated, decimated, and tens of millions dead and displaced – not just soldiers, but civilians.

Russia has been pushed further to work with other foreign global competitors like China and India, rather than European neighbours – both nations having some of the largest population centres on Earth. Pax Americana is dead and buried, never to return in our lifetimes – it was killed violently by the very people who were put in charge to maintain it. A sort of twisted ironic suicide.

One of the most important points brought up in the Tucker Carlson interview was Putin’s outlook on the changing world. He has seen the winds of influence and importance change from the West to the East, and he has adapted accordingly.

When discussing the opportunity to bring the conflict to an end via negotiating a peace deal with Ukraine (i.e. the United States) he stated that there were avenues to do so with dignity, that will allow the United States to have the PR victory it so desperately craves to save face from ultimately wasted efforts.

The avenue is there, and if I was one of the embedded decision-makers in Washington I would take a mutually beneficial deal as soon as possible – as the alternative will not be escalation into a hot war, but enduring diminishment of both hard and soft power in the continent, as European states begin to understand that they cannot rely on the United States to have their best interests at heart, or make sound policy decisions on their behalf – which is the ultimate function of NATO.

As T.S. Eliot once wrote:

This is the way the world ends – not with a bang, but a whimper”.

The world we once knew is coming to an end, this much is overwhelmingly clear.

It is not our current flock of leaders or decision-makers – but rather it is up to us, the next generation of individuals and standard-bearers whether we will adapt to the changing world and rekindle the fire into something that endures, or whether we will let our civilization fade into obscurity and extinguish, never to return.

While we may not have learned anything all that new or groundbreaking from the Tucker Carlson interview with Vladimir Putin, I think it serves a greater purpose than a simple “gotcha” to Western journalism or the current political class.

It is an insight into how the “other side” thinks of us, of our future, and our decline. We ought to wise up, prepare for the long, difficult road ahead, and ensure that the only thing that actually “declines” is the stupidity of our leadership and the influence of the unelected gaggle of fools that believe they can put a halt to the motions of the changing world we find ourselves in.


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Switzerland-on-Sea: Britain in a Multipolar World

“There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.”

This quote is (dubiously) attributed to Lenin but I like it nonetheless as it appropriately captures the times we live in.

That’s not to say nothing’s happened for decades, far from it. The years following the last financial crisis have seen seismic changes across Western societies and the wider world. The Eurozone crisis, Middle East civil wars, tsunamis of illegal migration, Ukraine torn in two, Brexit, Trump, plummeting birth rates, economic stagnation, and the explosion in political corruption that resulted in the criminal psychological operation that was the pandemic and continues through war and ‘green’ policy. The weeks following Russia’s so-called ‘Special Military Operation’ felt like weeks when decades happened. Yet something about these last few weeks – with a war (even more senseless than the intra-Slavic trench slaughter) threatening to suck in the whole world – feels like we have moved into an accelerated phase of global change.

This is a familiar motif of history. Decades of failed rebellion against the Tsars eventually led to the February and October Revolutions. Newly educated generations in Africa and Asia quickly used their power and influence to kick out their colonial masters. The ticking time bomb of financialisation that started in the 1980s didn’t explode until decades later. Likewise, the absolute failure of decades of collective Western foreign policy, as dictated by the U.S. via NATO and other organisations, has now started to show some of its very worst consequences.

Never in living memory have we as a nation been more ignorant about international relations and had less perspective about our place in the world. The dumbing down of our foreign policy debate (and its incorporation into the ‘culture war’) is a far cry from even the Brexit era, when millions of Brits followed the machinations of our foreign entanglements with interest, engaging in relatively honest debates about what they should be and where our national interest lies.

In 2014, one of Nigel Farage’s major criticisms of Brussels was its ‘militant’, ‘expansionist’ and ‘absolutely stupid’ foreign policy. In a debate with then deputy PM Nick Clegg, he said the Lib Dems represented hatred and extremism by ‘constantly screaming out for us to go to war’, adding he was ‘sick to death of this country getting involved in foreign wars’. Farage said the EU had ‘blood on its hands’ for encouraging the Maidan coup in Ukraine, as well as ‘bombing Libya’ into becoming an ‘ungovernable breeding ground of terrorism’, and arming rebel militias in Syria ‘because they didn’t like Assad, despite being infiltrated by extremists’. How prescient.

Now, this type of critical discourse is almost entirely absent from our political spectrum and media. There has been a chilling uniformity of message on the blood-soaked meatgrinder that is Ukraine – more weapons, more money, Putin is Hitler, Slava Ukrainii. A feeling engineered by the unquestioned, key narrative of an independent democracy facing an unprovoked invasion (a narrative which is demonstrably untrue). With the latest conflict in the Middle East, the right has fallen behind Israel in complete lockstep, calling for deportations and arrests for speech expression, and taking a harder line than many Israelis. The left, barren of a moral compass and mentally ill, has resorted to second-hand asabiyyah and strange attempts to pinkwash Hamas, joined on the streets by the usually out-of-sight 3rd-gen Islamist yoof. It’s an ugly sight.

What is missing from all of this is Britain. What are Britain’s interests in this rapidly deteriorating international system? No one, it seems, has bothered to ask. This is a problem. The points I have made so far often provoke accusations of ‘isolationism’, and not realising that a stable globe is one of our most immediate needs. That is not in any doubt. What is highly questionable is the way we go about promoting that stability, as it clearly hasn’t been working.

In the West we still believe that we make alliances and enemies based on good and evil, or ‘shared values’, and we think this is the same as our interests. Whether ‘humanitarian intervention’ or ‘supporting democracy’, the arguments made against the abuses of certain countries must be applied equally or not applied at all, otherwise it is not a reason for action, but a pretext. The onus should be on those who argue for action, not on those who argue for not getting involved, to make their case. Especially with the mountain of evidence that outside intervention, militarily or otherwise, almost always makes countries worse.

A good case is made for this in A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship, a compilation of Ron Paul’s speeches to Congress over 30 years, each containing dozens of examples of foreign interventions and interference being counterproductive to U.S. interests. Yes, other countries are very often not nice places to live and have disagreeable cultures, but the best way to deal with them is engaging economically and not getting involved in their domestic politics. Our strategy has been to bomb countries and organise armed coups. Importing millions of people from these same countries has also turned out to be a bad idea.

So, if we step back from ‘policing’ the world, how then would we be able to ensure a stable international environment? Like charity, order starts at home. We preach to the world about how to run their societies when we have so many problems of our own. We defend the sanctity of others’ borders and sovereignty while making a mockery of our own. We accuse our selected ‘enemies’ of criminality, propaganda, and deception when we do a pretty good job of all that ourselves. In other words, we don’t speak softly and carry a big stick, we bark and scream. ‘Be change you want to see in the world’ – another made up quote attributed to a world leader – is a motivational meme but it should be an axiom of a ‘moral’ foreign policy if that’s what we want.

The hegemony of the West is coming to an end and there are no two ways about it. According to comedian turned IR expert Konstantin Kisin, ‘Multipolarity requires a decade-long process of the unipolarity disintegrating. And will inevitably result in an eventual return to unipolarity with a different hegemon. This is why this process should be opposed with everything we have’. I hate to break it to him, but that disintegration has been happening for a long time already and is not something that we can now ‘oppose’ with centre-Right politicians. Their neoliberalism is why we are so exposed, having exported our manufacturing and imported the world’s poor, while crippling ourselves with manmade social and economic breakdown.

The second point made by Kisin is interesting to dissect. Is it inevitable that the West ceasing to be the dominating ‘pole’ of international power will result in another power taking its place? No, it’s not. Unipolarity is a freak of human history. The positions of the U.S. and USSR after the Second World War created the bipolar world, and their respective empires. When the Cold War ended, the U.S. subsumed communist remnants becoming the pole of global power by default. It was the end of history, and liberal democracy was the endpoint of all human social evolution and the final form of government. On this basis the position of hegemon was squandered and abused.

The reality is that most of history has been a multipolar world and as we return to that state, it will not be peaceful or pretty. The man who coined the ‘Big stick philosophy’, Teddy Roosevelt, described his style of foreign policy as ‘the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis’. To apply that to Britain today would mean gearing up to be a Switzerland-on-Sea; a discerning, independent, and sovereign nation.

When it comes to defence, Switzerland is (like the UK) blessed with fortunate geography and a long military tradition. Unlike the UK, it is not in NATO, it conscripts its young men, invests in its defence infrastructure, and does not take part in foreign wars. It is also a natural home for mediating and resolving international disputes, trusted by most countries around the world.

This strategic neutrality seems to work quite well for the Swiss and they do this while still aligning with the U.S. They even enjoy a boost in arms sales as other neutral countries prefer to buy Swiss weapons. Would Western civilisation collapse and the world be taken over by an Axis of Evil if the UK also left NATO, rebuilt its army, and took part in peacekeeping missions instead of wars? Probably not (If it collapses it will be for reasons of our own making). It is accepted as fact that we must dominate the world to protect ourselves from it, when in reality our attempts to do so have created the fragile state of affairs that exist today.

The fundamental mistake we make is being so certain that other countries will think and behave exactly like us. China is an ancient civilisation-state that has shown limited expansionist tendencies over many centuries. The last time Iran invaded a country was in the mid-18th century. Russia is psychologically bound by its size, geography, and history to be obsessed with feeling secure. These complicated civilisations have all been UK allies at various points during the 20th century and there is no reason why we can’t deal with them as unpleasant neighbours as opposed to mortal enemies. Unfortunately, our entire discourse ties us to the fate of the dying American empire. By taking on others’ enemies we expose ourselves to becoming targets.

Today in Britain, unchecked thousands of fighting-age purposeless men from the most turbulent, radical and traumatised parts of the world, are entering the country illegally via fleets of boats, the state seemingly powerless to stop it happening. Some would call that an invasion. Meanwhile, Tel Aviv has become the new Kiev as Prime Ministers old and new rush to get involved helping another country. Despite our politicians saying otherwise, the claim is always that they are there to create an outcome and environment that is in the UK’s interests. Well at the very least that would entail calling for a ceasefire, and at most it would mean pushing for a comprehensive political settlement. Trying to avoid a new wave of refugees, an oil price crisis and global recession would also be in our interest. There is no sign of this on Sunak or Johnson’s agenda, but there is a lot of talk about ‘finishing the job’, sticking to the narrative and facing down Iran and its proxies – the stuff of wet dreams for many a lobbyist in Washington DC.

It may be comforting to buy into the expertly packaged narratives being put out about this latest conflict, but some of us have seen this film before, and it doesn’t end well. In fact, it ends up in situations like Syria, where Hezbollah ends up defending the world’s most ancient Christian communities while Israel supports ISIS. It ends with the Jewish President of Ukraine overseeing neo-Nazi brigades fighting against Muslim and Buddhist soldiers over derelict villages. Clearly, the world is a complicated place. We used to know this. When will we give up our simple, black-and-white way of looking at it? When will we stop falling for the simplistic narratives fed to us?

Why should we have to listen to the arguments made about supporting a side in some conflicts, but not others? We are not asked to choose between supporting Azerbaijan or Armenia – because the media hasn’t told us to get angry about that. We are not asked to condemn Pakistan for expelling hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees – a humanitarian catastrophe in the making – because the media hasn’t told us to get angry about that. Have you even heard of the ongoing massacres in West Darfur? Why the hierarchy of atrocities? If the military-industrial complex does not have an interest in these places, you will not hear about them. You will hear about the corrupt oligarchies you are supposed to hate but not about special interests that run Washington DC. In this environment, the way we see the world and our place in it becomes highly distorted.

Instead of harnessing Russia’s vast oil and gas supplies and integrating it into a pan-European powerhouse, we have made it into an enemy and pushed it towards China (our genuine rival). Yes, Russia is a deeply problematic country, scarred by a century of communism. Yet they are people who you can do business with if you respect their interests and treat them equally. Instead of trying to bring Iran and Saudi Arabia together to heal and develop the Middle East (which China successfully started doing), we are now seizing on this opportunity to bang the drum for war with Iran while arming Saudi Arabia to the teeth. Yes, Iran is also a seriously problematic country, but we have meddled in their affairs and waged hybrid war against them for decades. We deposed their first democratic leader replacing him with a decadent monarch who sparked an Islamic revolution. Since then, our aggressive stance in the Middle East encouraged them to develop nuclear weapons. The P5+1 deal was a step in the right direction, and there is no reason we can’t go back to that kind of preventive diplomacy. Their resilience to our sanctions shows they are at least enterprising.We are not as powerful as we were, and the world isn’t as weak as it was – they want to make money and develop. Whereas we don’t even know what we want. So, we can either up our own game and grow together with emerging countries or die trying to maintain unipolar dominance.

The Monroe Doctrine, one of the founding foreign policy doctrines of the United States, holds interference into the affairs of South and Central America as hostile. In other words, it’s their turf. Yet we deny other major powers any legitimate sphere of influence. ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ isn’t cutting the mustard anymore. Just for a moment think of the anger up and down the land over the weekend, as foreign conflicts played out on our streets, at the same time as one of the few remaining events of ancestor worship in Britain. Now imagine how larger this anger would be if China had military bases in the Republic of Ireland, or if Russia was funding a violent Republican overthrow of Stormont. We need a sense of perspective.

At a time of peak ignorance of the rest of the world, our domestic woes in the UK have never been more connected to global goings on. This is the sad paradox we find ourselves in. Our soft power erodes as we dilute our culture and destroy the fabric of traditional, family life. Our hard power is under-resourced and overstretched, leading to no strategic objective, and resulting in a lot of dead or traumatised soldiers and many more people who hate us with a vengeance. Our foreign policy – which is completely dictated by the U.S. – has radicalised parts of the immigrant populations we have brought in and left us exposed to unknown numbers of hostile actors. Sanctions warfare is paid for by the heating and shopping bills of the working class.

Brexit exposed the reality of how deeply controlled the UK is by international organisations. If you thought trying to decouple from the EU was an impossible task, detangling ourselves from NATO and the U.S. intelligence apparatus will be an entirely different ballgame. Brexit also revealed a genuine desire by the British public to be that global, independent, sovereign trading-nation making its own deals with countries across the world, not beholden to outdated policies and the groupthink of corporate-controlled politicians and the technocrats under them. Well, to actually do that we need to embrace a multipolar world and have a bit of confidence in ourselves.

Just as Remainers said we were too small and insignificant to survive outside the EU, so too will people say that we are too small and insignificant to survive outside the NATO/U.S. umbrella. It is doubtful there will be a NATO in a decade from now, so we might not have a choice. It is also likely the U.S. will suffer greatly (along with the whole world) from the eventual collapse of the dollar, finding it hard to avoid some form of civil conflict. Until then the music will still play on the titanic, but will the UK have the sense to get on the nearest lifeboat? As much as a military alliance provides protection from potential enemies, it also forces members to take on enemies that they might not ordinarily have, leaving them more exposed and then in need of protection.

Those imbued with the neoconservative zest for spreading liberal values by the bullet and bombing the world into democracy will no doubt be horrified by the suggestions made here, not being able to conceive of a Britain that doesn’t play the role of shit on the U.S. jackboot. I recall a different Britain, however. One that had the best diplomatic service in the world, staffed by the greatest linguists. A Britain that had state capacity and the ability to execute its will. A country that despite its allegiances was able to identify and pursue its own genuine national interest. To return to this state we ultimately must fix ourselves domestically and as a society. Until then, it would do no harm to pursue a more sophisticated approach to dealing with the rest of the world.By learning the difference between being allies with a country and being stuck in a political-military straitjacket with them, the West has an opportunity to revitalise itself and thrive in a multipolar world.

Deprived of global empire, the U.S. will be able to fight off its leviathan corporate oligarchy and develop to full potential. Europe will be able to pursue its own security and economic interests, not just American ones. Realpolitik will make its triumphant return. The UK, perhaps in the best position of all, will be able to take advantage of not being a subordinate and truly become ‘Global Britain’. I urge readers to reject those who want a war of civilisations and embrace this positive, sensible, and more human way to approach our future and the world.


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