The Lori hills from Kobayr. I can't put you through another picture of Nikol.

This is a brief follow-up to my pre-election piece which you can read here.

Election posters are more prominent here than the capital, continuing to stare down in the days after the vote. Particularly prominent is runner-up Samvel Karapetyan, a position he was unable to play in the campaign, being under house arrest. In Wagner's Götterdämmerung, the gods are absent, save in the memory of the humans in ritual and invocation. Armenia has been through its democratic ritual, though there is still mopping up to be done.

Nikol Pashinyan declared himself victorious in the early hours of Monday morning when the count had barely begun. Western leaders sent their congratulations. Amid irregularities, recounts and controversies, the final makeup of parliament is still to be decided, but Pashinyan retains power.

The principal controversy is over disappearing ballots for the fourth-placed opposition party, Gagik Tsarukyan’s Prosperous Armenia. A party needs 4% support to enter parliament; results have him just below this level. A few dozen votes are the difference between whether or not he gets in.

Pashinyan secured a majority on just under half of the votes - enough for a comfortable majority but just short of the 60% of MPs which would allow him a certain constitutional leeway - if Prosperous Armenia make it in. Either way, he will remain short of the two-thirds ‘supermajority’ which he was seeking, in order to amend the constitution to drop recognition of Artsakh - demanded by Azerbaijan in its ‘peace’ negotiations.

All three principal opposition parties are demanding recounts, although the electoral commission (controlled by Pashinyan allies) will allow only a handful. Politicians will grumble over late voting, missing ballots and a large increase in rejected votes.

But the big picture is: Pashinyan retains power, that is de facto near absolute, if not de jure. And the problem of democracy remains: one which constitutionally and practically favours the incumbent, and with it the interests of the West, so markedly displayed in the campaign.

Few seem to be asking: is it even believable to think that Pashinyan got 50% of the vote at all? One opinion poll is particularly revealing. The pollsters Breavis (pro-Western, conducted for the American International Republican Institute) presented a poll giving Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party a 65% share - by excluding an astonishing 51% don't knows/non-voters! Second place Strong Armenia were put at 12%, well short of the 23% of the preliminary results.

Peter Hitchens’ dictum that polling is meant to lead, rather than reflect public opinion has never been more true. The dishonest presentation was surely meant to normalise Civil Contract’s narrative of needing a supermajority for peace - and settling for a solid Nikol victory.

In reality, in an environment where opposition politicians continued to be arrested up to election day, it is not surprising that so many refused to answer a pro-Pash pollster if they supported the opposition. But it's a useful guide to an upper bound for his actual support - surely sub 40s rather than nearing half.

Which is not to say that the difference is entirely fraudulent. In rural Armenia, voting on a ‘client’ basis extends to families, and pressure brought to bear by government employees will have had an effect. And some will have held their noses and voted for the evil dwarf they know.

The problem is democracy itself, particularly given the circumstances of this election. This was exacerbated by the large number of parties which had no realistic chance of reaching the 4% threshold, effectively throwing away opposition votes and consolidating Pashinyan's hold. Their candidates were foolish at best, deliberate distraction at worst.

Given this, it would be wise for the opposition parties to focus on the big picture, rather than the messy details of democracy. Pashinyan has already packed the judiciary and other public appointments - the opposition won't be able to reverse this with or without him achieving 60%. Focus on the issues key to the country - geopolitical, economic, security above all.

It is better to discredit democracy than compromise with it.

Of all the Western leaders offering their premature congratulations to Pashinyan, one has been notably absent. Trump has not thundered from Washington, caught up in the resumption of the war on Iran.

At least he's honest - for the West, the election was never about Armenia.

But those that are this honeyed plant, the Lotos
never cared to report, nor to return: 
they longed to stay forever, browsing on...

The Odyssey, Book IX1

On The Idiocy of UK Trumpians

We have lived under the unpleasant shadow of Donald Trump for a decade now; a decade in which substantial parts of the UK ‘right’ have to various extents absorbed his rhetoric and cheered on his actions. Trump and Israel's war on Iran is (as I write this) in something of a phoney war stage: the initial atrocities have largely abated, without any pretence at war aims beyond war itself. Having failed militarily, the Trump administration is resorting to economic warfare - on the world, rather than on its stated enemies. Yet still, some elements of the ‘right’ refuse to denounce the barbarian emperor.

What does it even mean to be ‘Trump supporter’ outside the US?

I believe this is a manifestation of the trend of taking politics as entertainment - ‘content’ for ‘creators’ to be ‘consumed’. The over-identification with American politics takes this to a new level of vicarious distraction, and it’s a trend that has got much worse over the last decade. But it is also a political technology, with twin effects of reinforcing both the passive acceptance of ‘participatory democracy’ and US hegemony itself.

Of course, the internal politics of foreign states can impact us here, and none more so than the world’s still superpower. It is reasonable to have preferences as to the outcomes of foreign elections; it was even reasonable to hold the view that a Trump victory over Hilary Clinton in 2016 was the lesser of two evils and a welcome defeat of a dangerous neocon. We can’t run alternative histories, but whilst Trump boasted that he didn’t start any new wars in his first term, four events loom large today: the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, the (effective) veto over Nord Stream 2, the US cancellation of the JCPOA with Iran, and the assassination of Qasem Soleimani. It’s not as if Trump has reversed policy in his second incarnation, rather he’s been given free rein.

And in this, of course, apart from the direct targets, the countries most at risk from the fallout of Trump’s genocidal lunacy are the US’s ‘allies’ - the Gulf States, Europe, and the East Asians (South Korea, Japan and the Philippines in particular). One ally, as ever, is excepted.

The political response of the ‘right’ in the UK has been anaemic, even though early calls from Farage and Badenoch to provide direct military support were quickly backtracked to ‘no boots on the ground’. Silence has been the order of the day since, even from Rupert Lowe. This was the moment for at least part of the ‘right’ to call out the direct damage that Trump is inflicting on the country and the world - let alone the moral case.

A telling moment was Restore Britain coming out in favour of proscribing the IRGC. Whatever Lowe’s strengths, foreign policy is not one of them. It was both meaningless (Restore has no power) and also a signal against any form of negotiation with what is effectively an arm of the Iranian state - and therefore an implicit backing of continued hostilities. It is an illustration of why the pretence of Restore acting as a political force is wrong-headed: the need for a ‘party’ to have a position on everything, and thereby falling into the rut of the mainstream. It’s an unfortunate fact that a party seeking electoral clout must deal with the reality of our increasingly uncomfortable alliance with the US; if Restore had retained its position as a pressure group for actual British interests, it would have had a freer rein in condemning the war on Iran as against our interests.

The wider ‘right’ has been more divided, although I find it remarkable that any nationalist could take a position of anything other than full-throated opposition to the US/Israeli outrages. Whatever one’s view on the wider situation of the conflict, its consequences are directly damaging to our interests. Before considering why, let’s take a detour into a new(ish) book.

The Imperial Theory Industry

Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism: The Intellectual Cold War2 is a recent publication by Gabriel Rockhill which seeks to extend Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper (his title is a tribute). Saunders’ book concentrated on the role of the CIA in promoting its received opinions through cultural sphere through propaganda and ‘cultural warfare’3; Rockhill’s book (the first of a trilogy) expands into the wider realm of the intelligentsia and academia.

Whereas Saunders’ book is a ‘straight’ history, Rockhill is himself a committed communist - of the ‘Eastern’ (Marxist-Leninist) variety rather than the ‘Western’ (or cultural) sort. This is interesting, as his position is that of the ‘wrong side’ of the leftist line, the very sort his targets were tasked with gatekeeping out. The principal targets in this opening volume are the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse. Subsequent volumes will cover French theory and contemporary thinkers.

One of the benefits of old-school Marxists is something contemporary leftists too often forget: what is often shortened to ‘follow the money’, but should more properly be taken to include power as a whole. What Rockhill calls the Imperial Theory Industry is situated in what the world that he sees through the lens of bourgeois class relations. We don’t have to accept the framing - the fact that Adorno’s father was a bourgeois wine merchant is not the most important thing about his background! A sentence such as: ‘Bourgeois culture seeks to domesticate, and use for its own purposes, whatever dangerous ideas it cannot destroy or control outright’4 is generalisable if ‘bourgeois culture’ is replaced with ‘power’. Rockhill would exclude communism, but we don’t have to share this view to get the more important point, and his prose is sufficiently jargon-free to do this. Or simply put: ‘The Empire does not promote work that is a real threat to its existence.’5

Intelligentsia is an industry like any other, and at its apex are the Big Beasts, the ‘intellectual labour aristocracy’. Rockhill posits a ‘military-industrial-academic complex’. The revolving door of between academia and government is apparent in the US - as in the cases of Kissinger and Brzezinski, Huntington and Fukuyama, an academic mirror to the defence industry is clear enough. Things are more abstract when it comes to Theory.

Rockhill stresses the role of the ‘brands’ of the major thinkers, supported by the wider network of academia, always ready to reference, quote, review and develop the ideas of the master. Rather than a marketplace, it is a ‘command economy of ideas’ - one that is set from above rather than emerging from below, let alone approaching truth or value, except to the system producing it. But like any market, it seeks its own expansion. And for the minor members of the system, ‘It is imperative to “get one’s name out there” by constantly sharing new and innovative work, or simply hot takes and blurbs.’6 The resonance with contemporary online culture cannot be missed.

The rewards for the Big Beasts go far beyond reputation: Judith Butler is quoted as being on $340,000 at Berkeley, with visiting professors taking home $50,000 for ‘mini-courses’. The Grand Theory buffs may have reduced themselves to cultural irrelevancy beyond the academy by now, but their neocon IR/history equivalents are still prominent - as Niall Ferguson’s departure for the States demonstrates (the extra cash must have come in handy to help out with an expensive divorce).

Rockhill does not break new ground in the archives in the way that Saunders does, and the links of the Frankfurt School with the US intelligence network are well known; but the book is a useful collation of sources. Horkheimer had been the head of the Institute for Social Research (the official ‘home’ of the Frankfurt School) since 1930. When the leading members relocated to the US - based at Columbia University - in 1935, Horkheimer ensured that the Institute’s language changed, removing overt references to Marxism or revolution, and then reducing the simple focus on class. ‘Everything we used to see from the point of view of the proletariat has been concentrated today with frightful force upon the Jews.’ (Adorno to Horkheimer, 1940)7 The ISR brought its bespectacled legions behind the war effort before the US was in it.

By 1941, the ISR (now the International Institute) was mobilised, particularly by the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS, the forerunner of the CIA); amongst others, Adorno jointly with the (Rockefeller funded) Princeton Radio Research Project, Marcuse with the Office of War Information, and then at as senior analyst at the OSS. The Research and Analysis branch of the OSS has been described as the ‘biggest American research institution [for which read intelligence agency] in the first half of the twentieth century’, with an ‘unlimited budget’; with up to 12,000 employees.8 An sideline of this project was the sponsoring of ‘official’ history, modelled on the British model of documenting the war effort, directed by Arnold Toynbee (then employed by the Foreign Office and subsequently also financed by Rockefeller). The OSS was even nicknamed the ‘Oh So Socialist’ - though not, crucially, Communist.

The OSS bridged the Old Money of America - the Vanderbilts, Mellons and Morgans - with the leftist intelligentsia of Mitteleuropa.

The ISR’s position under Horkheimer was to abstain ‘from every activity which was even remotely political, but also from any collective or organized effort to publicize the situation in Germany or to support emigres’.9

In addition to - separate from - the particular role of the Frankfurt School stars in direct connection with the intelligence world is their role in pushing ‘Imperial’ propaganda, and their function of promoting a non-Communist left. The first is pretty damning. Both Adorno and Horkheimer supported the (limited) re-militarisation of West Germany with the creation of the Bundeswehr. Horkheimer supported Israel’s ‘military actions’ and defended the Vietnam war in defence of ‘the homeland… the Constitution… the rights of man’.10 More complex is the Suez war of 1956, where Horkheimer and Adorno co-authored an article in support of the British-French-Israeli action; Marcuse later supported Israel’s 1967 war as ‘preventative’. and a final example: Adorno wrote that ‘whoever fails to resist [the threat of the USSR] is literally guilty of repeating Chamberlain’s appeasement’.11

As far as the Frankfurt School’s role as ‘containment’ goes, we will need to be a bit more critical of Rockhill’s Marxist analysis.

What is To Be Done? Nothing

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle (Lenin)

Nothing but despair can save us (Adorno)12

Rockhill’s worldview is a dialectical materialist version of the post hoc fallacy: the Frankfurt thinkers emerged from, and associated with the bourgeois-imperial order and are therefore a product of those material conditions.

We don’t need to take this literally. My way of looking at the matter is more of a spectrum approach:

1. Those that participate in the system are at least complicit in it

2. Those that are promoted by the system are at the least not a threat to the system

3. Those that are promoted by the system are helpful to the system, even if as a pretence at a ‘debate’

4. Those that are promoted by the system are an asset of the system, knowingly or unknowingly

5. Functionally, Everyone is a ‘fed’13

It is in some cases interesting to question where on this spectrum individual cases may sit, but it’s a side issue. What matters more is who is allowed, who is promoted and what is the direction of travel. To the extent that we can get ‘receipts’ from sources, so much the better; but we should accept that it is more likely this will be about the direction of travel than direct promotion. The further back in the record, the more likely it is that direct evidence will be available. The closer we get to contemporary events, the more we should accept the ‘spectrum’ model without feeling the need to be pinned to a particular position on it.

[Two asides: this means we need to rely on judgement - intuition - not falsifiable ‘proof’. Proof is great when it’s there, but it won’t always be. This is not the place for discussion of epistemology; either you’ll get my point or you won’t.

The more important aside is: Mainstream discourse will seek to trap you into one or other manufactured positions on a spectrum. This in itself is a tactic of mainstream discourse. It was perfectly encapsulated in the early Covid years by the authorised dissent debates of Toby Young versus James Delingpole (both retained Spectator writers): the cock-up versus conspiracy positions set up, to funnel people into one channel or the other. At some point they ‘fell out’, and their supporters were either normalised in one case or drawn into debates about whether dinosaurs existed.

End of asides.]

Fortunately, at this distance, Rockhill has much supporting evidence of the active support of the intelligence world for the support of the anti-Communist left. The ISR relocated back to Germany in the early days of the Cold War (1949-50) supported by direct US funding, and projects sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation. Horkheimer acted as a gatekeeper against the (further leftist) Habermas, refusing to publish articles by the latter critical of liberal democracy as a vehicle to advance socialist ideas.

I honestly don’t know whether Rockhill is deliberate in drawing analogies from his history of Western Marxism with the present day, but I’ll round off with a passage towards the end of the book (on Marcuse):

Since subjective thoughts and feelings are the real drivers of history, and the intelligentsia has time to indulge in them, intellectuals constitute the veritable vanguard of social change…

He sought to replace class struggle with populism… Lenin, it is worth recalling, had trenchantly criticized populism as an ideological position that celebrates the moral excellence of those who are oppressed and bereft of power without scientifically identifying imper the means to effectively struggle against this oppression…

They eschew the disciplined forms of hierarchical organization and strategic planning identified with communism. This helps guarantee that their defeatist convictions will be confirmed: you will never be able to change the world if you think this only requires a new-fangled theory or you are waiting on divine intervention, nor will you ever succeed politically if you assume that an unorganized popular revolt can magically win against extremely well-funded, highly organized, and militarized imperialist states with extensive expertise in counter-insurgency, as well as the most powerful propaganda network in the history of humanity to back them up.14

The Pipers and the Pipeline Today

Rockhill's ‘propaganda network’ has evolved, and technology has made it more powerful than in the Cold War. Whilst it undoubtedly operates on both the radical left and containment right; I look here at the latter but it would be fascinating to know of an analysis of the left.

Revisiting Saunders’ book, it is worth noting the influence and funding mechanisms used. The archetypal case (for the British) is that of the cultural magazine Encounter. Set up by the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (sic), and edited initially by Stephen Spender and Irving Kristol (father of neocon Bill), Encounter was designed to be a left-leaning alternative to the New Statesman, but with a pro-Atlantic bent. From its first issue in 1953 its pro-US, anti-Communist stance was apparent, with an article critical of Communist support for the Rosenbergs (executed for spying on behalf of the USSR earlier that year). T.S. Eliot refused a request for an article, as the magazine was ‘obviously published under American auspices’.15

It is interesting to note that three mechanisms were utilised for channelling funds to Encounter: direct (through the CCF), via proxy funds (charitable trusts ‘independent’ of the state), and through funding subscriptions to the magazine. All three have their analogies today - and the latter is particularly interesting.

Direct funding is the least interesting in our current environment, because of its visibility in the modern world; it’s simply too unsubtle. Perhaps the clearest example is the state literally buying newspaper advertising space to run the same messaging during Covid. Mainstream media is a ‘follower’ of the news cycle these days.

We don’t have the approaching the clout of something like the Ford Foundation in the UK, but it is apparent that the Paul Marshall empire16 has taken a near-total hold of the populist mainstream right, from the Spectator to GB News to UnHerd, and (unsubtly) establishing a glossy high-spec podcast for Marshall’s son. He also founded ARC (Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) with (amongst others) Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson. It leans into the pro-transatlantic, evangelical Christian right, strongly aligned with Reform. The leading light of Marshallism is Danny ‘hug-a-hoodie’ Kruger17.

It’s hard to know the extent to which American cash is involved directly in any British networks; despite rumours of Thiel-funded networks. (Interestingly, this article from July last year seems to be set up as a ‘prebunking’ argument against Thiel and Israeli links.) It seems to me that the UK sphere is small enough to be ‘managed’ through the twin means of algorithm and subscription, but that’s just a hunch. Suffice to say that a glitzy podcast which appears from nowhere, attracts surprisingly heavyweight guests, and shoots up the algorithm is being pushed from somewhere.

The UK scene faces a particular danger in the pull of the US: the one sense in which we have a ‘special relationship’ is in the form of audience capture. It’s an obvious point, but if the British ‘right’ is dependent (to a greater or lesser extent) on an American audience, it will cater to that audience and in doing so, entrench a mindset that there is such a thing as the Transatlantic alliance and that we should back it, regardless of the negative consequences.

A related point is the role of Christianity on the ‘right’. It is undoubtedly a feature of the American scene, but its importation into our own culture is worrying. We do not have a culture of religion in politics, and to the extent that we have, it has been notably progressive, from the Methodist and Quaker dissenters, to expanding the franchise. The classic Anglican position is ‘We shall not make windows into mens’ souls’. And besides, we exported our religious radicals across an ocean.

The rising rhetoric of Christianity on the ‘right’, running through the Marshall organisations, Reform (particularly with Kruger and James Orr) and even Restore ties the UK scene uncomfortably to the States. And, of course, in most cases it identifies as Judeo-Christian.

A stark case was the reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk and the fallout it caused to the presidency of the Oxford Union. President-elect George Abaraonye was forced out in a no-confidence vote for what were some unsubtle remarks in a private forum, but in no way untypical for a middle-class mixed-race student playing the part of a Rasta-leftist. The ‘right’ cheered on his downfall, notwithstanding the fact that it was a petty private revenge campaign orchestrated by an actual foreigner - the son of Pakistan’s Minister for Defence Production, no less!

The ‘right’ supported the takeover of the OU by direct foreign interests. A clearer case of blinkered stupidity would be hard to muster.

The Children’s Roundabout

All of this brings us back to the main issue facing the British ‘right’: the rise of Restore as a party committed to electoral politics, rather than a pressure group (aided by Lowe’s parliamentary privilege).

It has been remarkably effective in bringing (some) democratic sceptics back into the political conversation. Accompanied by a myth that is an example of political technology - that this is the last chance to save the country. We are always voting in the Last Chance Booth.

Allied to this is another political technology: the cycle of incessant polling (it appears to be daily at this point, from some pollster or another). Constant democracy is another Americanism: the mid-term cycle whereby an incoming President is presented as having a few scarce months before popularity is an issue is nothing like local elections here. But it provides constant rolling content for political podcasts. ‘How can Starmer survive these polls?’ distracts from the reality of power.

More bodies are added to pushing the children's roundabout of Democracy, keeping it spinning. The myth continues, and fuels the next cycle of despair.

Just as in the cultural cold war, participants in the propaganda sphere may or may not know they are part of it. Spender himself claimed to be shocked when he learned of the CIA cash which backed his magazine; it's not as if Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh were knowingly promoting American post-war dominance whilst debating U and non-U. The machine doesn’t render all arguments invalid, serious or not.

But some people should have known better, and should now. We're all in the system; use your judgement. And let us find out inner Eliot.

Pashinyan has about him something of Mime, the malevolent Nibelung dwarf in the third opera of Wagner’s Ring. Mime has brought up the orphaned eponymous ‘hero’ Siegfried. His wheedling tones and saccharine language are cover for the fact that he is only interested in the boy as a tool to kill Fafner (a giant-turned-dragon) and capture his hoard of Rhinegold. Underneath is ambition and threat.

Pashinyan’s campaign uniform features his unctuous golden ‘heart-hands’ symbol on his white shirt and cap; the latter also has a map of the country (his ‘real Armenia’, shorn of Artsakh). To his credit, he is taking to the streets with his microphone, but his manner is more Gordon Brown than John Major. Even Brown kept his views on ‘that bigoted woman’ to the privacy (so he thought) of a car. But in the most striking moment of the campaign, Pashinyan descended into a shouting match with a woman (a doctor who had lost a brother in the 2020 war), the confrontation near to turning physical. It hasn’t been the only incident.

The Artsakh war, its aftermath and the threat of further aggression from Azerbaijan remain the defining issue for Armenia, and the election campaign. Azerbaijan conducted a textbook ethnic cleansing on the disputed Nagorno-Karabagh, from the 44 day war of 2020 to the nine-month siege three years later. The entire 120,000 Armenian population fled from the breakaway republic, de facto independent since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Most remain in Armenia, with only around a third eligible to vote. Pashinyan portays them, and the memory of Artsakh itself, as a fifth column, undermining his fantasy of a just peace between former enemies. His message is simple: elect me, or there will be another war.

Aliyev agrees, and has said as much.

‘War is when enemies collude’ is a good maxim1; equally, peace is when enemies collaborate.

The Gods of geopolitics are looking over Armenia’s Wagnerian situation, and (like Wagner’s) cannot resist meddling. The show-peace deal agreed in Washington between Pashinyan and Aliyev last year has dragged along slowly. Central to it is the corridor linking Azerbaijan with its exclave Nakhichevan along Armenia’s southern border with Iran. The Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity is proposed to be run by American interests for a term of 99 years, but if details have been negotiated between the parties, they certainly haven’t been released. Aliyev has said that he wants transit without seeing an Armenian. Pashinyan presents it as a commercial ‘corridor of peace’; his opponents as a Turkic ‘Zangezur Corridor’, annexing Armenia’s southern Syunik region and severing the land link with Iran.

Behind is the threat that if it doesn't happen politically, it will happen by force.

The diplomatic visits, economic bungs and political endorsements have swelled, as the West seeks to pull Armenia away from Russia and Iran. Trump himself bellowed from his White House Valhalla: ‘Nikol has my COMPLETE and TOTAL endorsement for Re-Election on June 7, 2026… Make (Armenia) Great Again - MAGA!’ A visit from Vance earlier this year was followed by one from Rubio in the middle of the campaign, a forty-minute refuelling stop to sign some sign strategic partnership agreements, pose for photographs and ram home the message.

The Europeans have been quieter but no less involved. A meeting of the European Political Community - an implicitly anti-Russian grouping formed in 2022 - was held in Yerevan in May, displaying Pashinyan alongside leaders such as Starmer and Macron who manage to be even less popular than him. Macron stayed on for an official visit, jogging the streets in the morning to children greeting him in French, and receiving accolades at Gyumri (Armenia’s second city and home to the Russian army base). Margaret Thatcher visited Gyumri shortly after resigning (the UK had been one of the earliest to supply aid following the Gorbachev-era earthquake) and promptly was sent to Baku to help seal BP’s ‘Deal of the Century’ which has provided so much cash for the Aliyev regime. Georgia Meloni flew to Baku after the EPC, securing more Azeri gas for Europe and Azeri cash for Italy.

But the principal European meddling is not the endorsement of shallow bronzed politicos; it's the hard old way of ensuring Democracy is maintained by suppressing it. America is bought - and buys - with hard currency and public lobbying. Democracy, European-style, is a subtler beast, by now well-honed through the salients of Moldova and Romania, and the home fronts of Hungary and Poland. Russian ‘hybrid warfare’ is matched by hybrid Democratic Resilience, whether that be disenfranchising voters (Transnistria) or overturning elections (Romania) until the ‘right’ result is reached. EU funds are conditional (as Hungary and Poland have demonstrated), but propaganda is universal. Armenia's Democratic Resilience is being backed to the tune of €270 million: money spent to ensure that Outside Influence (read: Russia) does not win the day, which would resort in Democratic Backsliding. And of course the encroachment of ‘civil society’ means ever-increasing clients for the Euro regime, and its inelegant word salads.

Much effort is being made by Brussels - and echoed by Pashinyan - of Armenia’s European Future. Visa free travel is promised in two years, and the carrot of EU membership is dangled. It’s like the last two decades of politics north of the border in Georgian politics have never happened. As Moldova has shown, visa liberation is a population pump for the candidate country, whilst tying it the permanently to a European future which never quite arrives.

Meanwhile, Russia remains not only Armenia’s largest export market, but its principal source of energy. Russia is reacting to Pashinyan’s realignment by restricting imports; the fruit, mineral water, and brandies the which the country is known. Armenia's Soviet-era nuclear reactor still supplies more than a third of the country’s electricity; Russia’s Rosatom has extended its operating life to 2031, but may not look favourably on a further five-year extension should Armenia continue to drift westward. New nuclear facilities need to be agreed, and quick; the US is pitching untested small modular reactors. And the favourable price at which Russia supplies gas through Armenia’s membership of the Eurasian Economic Union would add billions to energy costs if Armenia were to pursue EU ties.

The reality of Armenia’s ‘European Future’, willed on by the Transatlantic Gods, is anything but. It would leave Armenia as little more than the vilayet2 of Hayastan, absorbed into, dependent upon, and subject to the growing Turkic Middle Corridor, stretching from the Bosporus to the Caspian and to Central Asia. While Aliyev promotes his rhetoric of the right of ‘return’ to ‘Western Azerbaijan’ (Armenia), Immigration Minister Arsen Totoyan recently said:

We need to organize immigration. Tens of thousands of people need to immigrate here. We also need to change this mono-ethnic mindset in our heads. Because there is no other way to survive in this region… Armenia needs to stop being a monoethnic country.

More Armenians live in the diaspora than the Republic, many in Russia. but they are the wrong sort of immigrants for Pashinyan. Demographic replacement is usually quieter than this.

The remarkable fact is that Pashinyan and his Civil Contract party remain in place to be the leading force after the elections, albeit probably without a majority. The opposition is divided and attacked. Altogether, the poor Armenian electorate faces a choice of 18 parties (itself a mockery of Democratic Choice), though few of these will gain enough votes to receive seats.

Leading the charge is a new force, the Strong Armenia party, backed by billionaire businessman Samvel Karapetyan, an outsider to politics before the last year. Who is under house arrest, for daring to speak our in favour of the Armenian Apostolic Church. But then, four archbishops are detained too3. And his electricity distribution business has been ‘nationalised’. Never mind, say observers, Democracy is maintained because he has interests in Russia, and (as a dual citizen) can't stand himself anyway; the party’s front man is his nephew Narek, who won (or bought) an interview with Tucker Carlson.

Next is former president Robert Kocharyan, who is messing up the campaign narrative by acting with a modicum of dignity. But he is Pro-Russian.

As is the third force likely to win parliamentary representation: the Prosperous Armenia party backed by another Russian-linked tycoon, Gagik Tsarukyan. A mini-me Trump with the street-’style’ of Ali G, he has something of Wagner’s giants, who build Valhalla to order. And he does own Armenia’s largest cement works, a hoard of gold that Pashinyan has also threatened to nationalise (no marks for spotting a pattern.) He's building the world's biggest statue of Christ on a mountain outside Yerevan; he should be prosecuted for that rather than his political activities.

With the exception of organised street rallies (which, like Wagner operas, tend to be lengthy to all but the connoisseur) the mood in Yerevan is more one of resignation than engagement. Pashinyan has used the benefit of incumbency to ship teachers and civil servants to pro-Government rallies. Pashinyan’s heart-hands leitmotif scrolls by on advertising hoardings between cosmetics and gizmos.

In Wagner’s Siegfried, the young hero forges his father's sword and slaughters the dragon; its blood enables him to understand birdsong and read Mime’s meanings behind his saccharine words. He kills the dwarf.

But the battle between Wotan and Mime’s brother Niebelung Alberich continues. At one point of the libretto, with the insight of myth, Wagner identifies them as ‘schwarz-Alberich’ and ‘licht-Alberich’ - the dark and light manifestations of the same will to power.

Pashinyan’s intentions are plain enough without the need for magical intervention. Will enough of the electorate heed them? And if they do, what will be the response?

Most interviews are with Blair’s inner circle, including Alastair Campbell, Jonathan Powell, Peter Mandelson as well as Cherie, and his children. Critics are limited in number and length (Corbyn, Clare Short and most seriously, a British diplomat who experienced the aftermath of Iraq); more interesting would have been to get the real thoughts of his nemesis Gordon Brown or a disillusioned loyalist like Charles Clarke.

But Waldman’s ace is his access to the man himself. Here, his editing technique reveals something; Blair’s words are not neatly clipped at the end of each ‘answer’, but held for a few seconds, in which the mask drops and micro-movements register - eyes are cast down and aside, tiny twitches flicker across the face. Blair often seems like a man without an inner life, who does not allow doubt, questioning; but something slips in despite himself. Human, or something like it.

The three part structure develops clearly. The first approaches hagiography: his early life up to Iraq contains his most personal side. He is moved recollecting his mother’s death and the suicide of a university friend. Luck intervenes in his 1983 last-chance selection meeting at the Sedgefield working men’s club as a football match runs late, keeping the drinks flowing (Blair is pictured with a half), the mood high and the questions short. Iraq is his disaster, and one he refuses refuses to recognise; it haunts his late years in power. But then - which is all too briefly covered - his years as an aspiring international statesman, never congealing until the Tony Blair Institute really gets going, and starts to make its influence felt in the Covid years.

It suggested to me an analogy, even something of a mirror - with that other most significant Prime Minister since the start of the twentieth century, Churchill. Like all analogies, I don’t mean to take it too far. Blair, of course, reached Number 10 young, without having been in government; Churchill only at the age of Blair was in 2020. But there are rhymes.

Blair: The Covid Years

Phase 1 - Liberal reformers brought down by military blunders

Churchill’s early career is all too often subsumed into his (second) war legacy, so I’ll sketch some brief details. In sum, he was always a liberal, one of the arch-liberals of the Chamberlain school. Resolute imperialists in their time, there is continuity of attitude expressed by the Atlanticists of the Forties, and the Neocon cheerleaders of our times.

By the time Churchill entered cabinet at the unusually early age of 33, he had already defected from the Conservatives to Liberal. Blair was the youngest PM for nearly two centuries; and though he has not wavered from Labour, both are liquid in political loyalty: party was a vehicle for pushing a reforming, ‘modernising’ agenda. Michael Howard could not work out why Blair had not become a Tory MP; it is probably true that the answer lies more with Cherie’s political loyalties than her husband’s.

Churchill succeeded Lloyd George’s as President of the Board of Trade, and was his right hand man in pushing through the People’s Budget in 1909-10. (Asquith as PM was ‘a chairman rather than a leader… an arbiter of ideas rather than an originator’.1) The stand-off with the Lords, followed by the Parliament Act 1911 which effectively removed the veto of the Upper House (over Money Bills), instituted a constitutional revolution which endured until the Blair reforms.2

Promoted to Home Secretary, Churchill was a proponent of a proto-Third Way. A key moment came with the Tonypandy Riots of 1910, where Churchill sent in troops to suppress Welsh miners agitating for better working conditions. The Liberal government was the most progressive in history, and the organised Left would not stand in the way. The political furore was greater than the incident itself; one striker miner (out of 12,000) was killed, but the event was mythologised as a suppression of the working classes. (In a neat parallel, the retiring Speaker of the Commons at Blair’s election in 1993, George Thomas, took the title of Viscount Tonypandy.) Josephine Tay used the incident to illustrate how an incident can be falsely mythologised:

Churchill was so horrified at the possibility of the troops coming face to face with a crowd of rioters and having to fire on them, that he stopped the movement of troops and sent instead a body of plain, solid Metropolitan Police, armed with nothing but their rolled-up mackintoshes. The only bloodshed in the whole affair was a bloody nose or two. The Home Secretary was severely criticised in the House of Commons incidentally for his "unprecedented intervention". That was Tonypandy. That is the shooting-down by troops that Wales will never forget.3

To the Progressives, he was a Tory; to the Tories he was a Progressive. Also in 1911, Churchill and Lloyd-George collaborated on the National Insurance Act, the first compulsory system of health and unemployment insurance: the foundation of the Welfare State. As he had written in 1909, he envisaged a ‘comprehensive, interdependent scheme of social organisation’4 modelled on Bismarck’s reforms, and social protections funded by National Insurance. Churchill kick-started Beveridge’s political career, appointing him to the Board of Trade in 1908. The illusion that the post-1945 welfare state was a creation of Labour against the wishes of Churchill is just that: a mythologised Tonypandy. A Conservative victory would have instituted a programme that differed in details, not direction.

The Conservative manifesto of 1945 even proposed: ‘Movement of men and women within the Empire must be made easier. A two-way traffic should grow.’ Windrush was enabled by Churchill, a pre-echo of Blair opening the doors to immigration from the newly expanded European Union.

If Churchill can be seen to be the most effective progressive force in British politics prior to Blair, it must also be said that the disaster that brought about his (temporary) downfall - the campaign in the Dardanelles - can’t entirely be laid at his door. Ever the militarist, he was thrilled to be appointed as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. Churchill had loved playing with toy soldiers as a boy, dreaming of his lineage. (I wish Waldman had asked the question of Blair.) Churchill was gung-ho for the assault on the Dardanelles, but Kitchener - Secretary of State for War and an experienced soldier - must be held at least equally responsible. Kitchener’s reputation was saved by his death and earlier heroics, but by then Churchill had already resigned. Unlike Blair, his response was to quit politics and enlist, at least for a while.

The Progressive Architects

Phase 2 - Wilderness Years

Churchill’s career as a minister continued after the war, rising to Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1924 to 1929. His ‘Wilderness Years’ were the decade after 1929, when the Conservatives were thrown out of office, and (when they returned), Churchill was not in favour.

The echoes between Churchill and Blair fade here, but still can be found. The careers of both continued after their military disasters, but weakened: Churchill because he moved party (again), Blair because the internal frictions of New Labour moved towards Brown, as he lost (or let down) allies. Churchill’s progressive slant was handicapped by his move; Blair’s focus on the international stage after the 2001 and the Iraq war handed more and more of the domestic agenda to Brown. No more so than on economics, where the Blairite formula of fiscal responsibility matched with Euro-enthusiasm (in both senses) were stymied by his Chancellor.

There are also parallels in the decade of their true wilderness years: from 1929 and 2007 respectively. Most obviously, both were short of the ready5. Churchill wrote books, and filled his boots with lecture tours of the States, and was supported by ‘generous’ loans and gifts to clear his debts. Blair’s tactics were different: his first major gig with J.P. Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon was orchestrated through Powell: ‘Tony needs a job.’ Blair demanded $5m a year (quite an advance on ex-Secretary of State George Schultz’ $100k), and got it.

On leaving office, Blair transformed himself into an expert on ‘leadership’, and somehow pulled it off. Early clients included such bastions of ‘Freedom and Democracy as Kazakhstan (Nurbayev) and Rwanda (Kagame) - in association with his old colleagues Powell and Campbell - which in the early days amounted to more of a Blairwashing of their regimes than anything of particular strategic value. The Blairs, neither born into money, also had an eye on opportunities such as property deals, in office and after it, that an aristocrat would miss.

And both, in their Wilderness Years, saw their foreign goals suffer. Churchill mooched and spluttered through appeasement (overwhelmingly popular in the country), and the hesitant but inexorable movement towards independence in India. The grant of Dominion status to the subcontinent saw his resignation from the Tory shadow cabinet.

Blair’s decade in the desert (sometimes literally) was more absent from domestic politics than Churchill. He sat through the unravelling of the neocon project in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most of all, the rising tide of Euroscepticism which culminated in 2016’s referendum undermined his dream of Britain leading, not following, the EU; preferably under his guiding hand. For three years, his voice returned to the domestic scene, desperate to reverse the vote, until he flipped after the 2019 election and publicly ‘accepted’ the result. In the meantime, New Labour appeared to have been killed under Corbyn.

Churchill’s Wilderness Years ended with the declaration of the second war, although he remained an unpopular and divisive figure in the Cabinet and amongst the British elite more generally. His control over the Conservatives even in wartime was sketchy until he managed to get rid of Lord Halifax as ambassador to Washington.

Blair’s return is less sharply marked. The Brexit vote of 2016 brought him back into politics at home, and his international interests changed focus, and business model. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) was founded in 2016. By 2020 and Covid, Blair was back.

Phase 3 - Apotheosis?

Little needs to be said about Churchill’s final years: as I have indicated above, although the country may have been shocked his removal in 1945, the Atlee government’s welfare state was the completion of the Churchill programme of more than three decades. Foreign policy under Bevin remained as Atlanticist and ever. He had even reconciled himself to the loss of India - partially compensated by the creation of Pakistan. His swansong premiership was that of an fragile old man with his legend largely written at the time, the memories of the Dardanelles and Tonypandy minimised.

The TBI switched Blair’s focus from rewarding himself to installing a legacy. Its early pronouncement was both anodyne and accurate: ‘[Blair] has established the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change to work on some of the most difficult challenges in the world today, including how the centre ground of politics renews itself with practical policy solutions.’

The TBI’s model moved Blair from self-enrichment to policy, and now employs a staff of over 1,000. Funding has flipped from strongmen and sheikhs to Ellison and Gates. It’s questionable how much Blair is directly involved in the details of its policy papers, beyond the broad sense of a policy direction which looks to continue his drive towards consolidating globalisation, containing nationalism, and pushing techno-optimism to its limits. His role is as a funder and a frontman, but the legwork of the TBI team is no less influential because of that.

The Covid years could have been designed for the Blair and the off-the-shelf solutions prepared by his institute. He was back in public prominence for the first time since 2007. Who can forget the unkempt Blair at the forefront of calls for mass testing and mass vaccination? Or Nigel Farage’s support for him to be made the UK’s vaccine tsar?

Analogies should not be pressed too far: I don’t believe that the Blair redemption arc will ever approach that of the Churchill myth, and more than Churchill himself will be dethroned from his postwar pinnacle of Greatest Brit. Blair’s legacy won’t be finalised in his lifetime, but even a sympathetic portrait (and Waldman’s is, by and large) are the simplistic one of a potentially great, popular and uniquely successful PM let down by his own hubris. I doubt Trump’s

In the end, Churchill and Blair are similar characters, with similar strengths and flaws, at the core a manic belief in their own destiny. Chance could have flipped them. Perhaps Churchill was lucky to have faced a real Hitler, not a conjured one.

US Vice President Vance, fresh from being welcomed at the Winter Olympics, is currently in the South Caucasus, where the ‘peace’ deal outlined between Armenia and Azerbaijan was outlined in the last year’s White House visit. Vance - the most senior US official to visit Armenia since independence - paid the customary respects of visiting dignitaries at the Armenian Genocide Memorial.

Whoever was running his official X account did not get the diplomatic briefing. An initial post, referring to the Second Couple 'honor[ing] the victims of the 1915 Genocide’ was rapidly removed. The remembrance book was signed with an anodyne reference to the ‘lives lost’. Turkish sensibilities matter.

The Second Couple at Tsitsernakaberd

America, of course, does not officially recognise the Genocide, and diplomatic faux pas happen; but the response says much about the US’s interests in the peace deal. Ostensibly, the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) is a deal to facilitate transport connections with Azerbaijan’s exclave of Nakhichevan, along Armenia’s southern Syunik province along the border with Iran. The idea is that the corridor will be run by an American company, for 50 years, with only a minority stake (26%) held by Armenia. Much detail remains to be negotiated as to how this will work in practice.

Even though the ‘peace’ deal is far from finalised, Western interests are taking advantage. Vance’s trip has seen an agreement to replace Armenia’s Soviet-era nuclear plant Metsamor (which supplies more than a third of its electricity) with an American solution. Whatever the technical or geostrategic arguments, the cost to Armenia will be vast - estimated at $9 billion. And Russian gas (like all former Soviet states, sold at a generously discounted price) is in the early stages of being replaced by Azeri supplies. Armenian Prime Minister Pashinyan is negotiating a Carthaginian peace.

Vance was full of praise for Pashinyan in his public statements, ‘a guy who can build a the long-term partnership, to make this kind of a thing stick’. Quite some words, given that elections are due in June.

He went on: ‘As a devout Christian myself, I know the meaning of this country to the entire world’. What he didn't mention is that Pashinyan is undertaking an unprecedented attack on the Armenian church. Four Archbishops have been arrested, three under rolling ‘pre-trial detention’, the other convicted in what amounts to a show trial. Pashinyan is seeking to overthrow the Catholicos himself. In an embarrassing episode last year, Pashinyan even threatened to expose his intact foreskin on camera in front of the Catholicos, to prove his faith (for which read: not Muslim).

Neither did Vance mention the 120,00 Armenians driven out of Artsakh after Azerbaijan’s nine-month blockade of the territory in 2023. Or the risk the region’s Christian heritage - including Amaras monastery, founded in in 4th century and where Mesrop Mashtots created the Armenian alphabet. Armenians rightly fear that they will meet the same fate as the Christian heritage of Nakhichevan.

This year’s election will take place in a country where the Pashinyan regime is consolidating power through non-democratic means. Prominent businessman and supporter of the Church, Samvel Karapetyan, is also under pre-trial detention, and the country’s electricity distribution network (owned by his Tashir Group) is being ‘nationalised’. From the mayor of the second city Gyumri (arrested on bribery charges) to minor podcasters, opposition figures are persecuted.

Yerevan is one of the safest cities in the world, but Pashinyan’s security state crackdown will only be increased by the adoption of facial recognition technology.

Like Kaja Kallas before him, Vance (despite his overt Christian pronouncements) has been silent. One man’s Democracy Shield is another man’s Democratic Backsliding. Realism is the only game in town.

Vance now heads to Baku, where he has undertaken to raise the issue of Armenian prisoners held after the war ended. Conveniently, Azerbaijan sentenced most to life imprisonment in time for the VP’s helicopter to land.

Azerbaijan still occupies nearly 250 sq km of Armenian territory, mostly taken since the 2020 war. And Aliyev himself promotes the narrative of ‘Western Azerbaijan’ - the current Republic of Armenia, not the actual province of Iran of that name - as Azeri land, and pressing a ‘right of return’ of ‘displaced’ Azeris.

Like all of Trump's claimed peace deals, that in the South Caucasus is far from it. Vance’s swift retraction of a direct reference to the Genocide is more than a diplomatic nicety; it is a sign that his Christian rhetoric is for his domestic audience.

First things first: I am not for a moment claiming that the US is not (and will not continue to be) the principal backer of Israel in a existential way, and I’m not denying the pervasive influence of the Israel lobby in US politics more generally. That much, I hope, we all take for granted. And I’m no defender of US hegemony or the ongoing designs of Israel and Turkey to rewrite the geopolitical map of Western Asia. My purpose here is to show that the US is playing a wider game than most commentators admit, even to the point of restraining the worse impulses of Netanyahu - whilst (for the avoidance of doubt) indulging Israel’s ‘internal’ affairs in the Gaza war.

We’ll look briefly here at three cases which are still ‘live’ as I write: Syria, Iran and the Gulf of Aden conflicts.

A terrorist in the White House

The Monkey in a Suit

A brief reminder of the events surrounding the fall of Assad’s regime and the installation of Abu Mohammad al-Jolani and his rebirth as Ahmed al-Sharaa. I’ll continue to call him Jolani - a monkey in a suit is still a monkey.

Turkish-backed Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces advanced from their base in Idlib in the north of Syria on 27 November 2004. Aleppo fell with little resistance two days later, and HTS advanced south down the main M5 road, taking Hama (30th), Homs (7th December) and Damascus itself the next day. Apart from some resistance of the Syrian Arab Army (Assad’s forces) before Homs, their vastly superior forces (170,000 to HTS’s estimated 20-25,000) largely melted away.

Israel agreed a truce with Hezbollah in Lebanon on the same day as the HTS campaign began. It advanced from the (occupied) Golan Heights to Mount Hermon, but their major contribution was a massive campaign of destruction of the SAA’s assets - first the air defences and air force, then the naval fleet.

Russia conducted a couple of strikes against Idlib, but by 2 December started sailing its navy from the port at Tartus into the Mediterranean. Iran did nothing, beyond evacuating its military and diplomatic advisers.

Assad himself had flown to Moscow shortly before the HTS offensive to meet Putin. He was reported to have flown back to Damascus (understandably); but although although statements from the capital were issued in his name, he did not appear in person. He was reported to be given asylum in Russia and flown out on 8 December; his close family were in Moscow before the short campaign. He is reputed to be living in a Moscow apartment and enjoying playing computer games. He has not been seen.

The only reasonable explanation for the swift fall of Assad is that it was a joint operation between Turkey and Israel, and a deliberate strategic withdrawal by Russia. Iran’s bewildering lack of action supports this - unlike Russia, Iran’s interests in Syria were existential, as part of its ‘forward defences’ against Israel. My supposition is that they were informed it was a ‘done deal’, and possibly squared by Russia with an improved defence pact (signed in January 2025). Whether Assad is alive must be questionable, but the story of him returning to Syria is not credible.

Regime change had, of course, long been a goal of the West, with US forces supporting the Kurds in the north-east. It has emerged since that British intelligence has also played a key role:

Richard Moore, the former head of MI6, said in September that the UK government “forged a relationship with HTS a year or two before they toppled Bashar” which he said had allowed the UK government to “return to the country within weeks” of Mr Sharaa taking power.

It is also telling that Moore chose to deliver his outgoing speech as head of MI6 in Turkey - the start delivered in his fluent Turkish: ‘On almost all of the issues that I have grappled with as Chief of MI6, Turkey has been a key player.’

In addition, Jolani had been courted for years by none other than current National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell (Blair’s old financial fixer and right-hand man). Through his organisation Inter/Mediate, Powell first met the HTS leader in 2015. Inter/Mediate had two ‘charity consultants’ inside the presidential palace in Damascus as soon as Jolani took charge.

Fast forward to the current year: Jolani has concentrated power, with high-profile visits to world leaders - up to the White House - in his smartly-tailored suits and trimmed beard. Repression against minorities has been brutal at times, particularly for the Christian, Alawite and Druze communities, but the country has not seen the sort of break-up (formal or informal) that many were predicting, and was widely assumed to be the goal of ‘Greater Israel’. Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich was quoted last year:

With God’s help and the valor of your comrades-in-arms who continue to fight even now, we will end this campaign when Syria is dismantled, Hezbollah is severely beaten, Iran is stripped of its nuclear threat, Gaza is cleansed of Hamas and hundreds of thousands of Gazans are on their way out of it to other countries, our hostages are returned, some to their homes and some to the graves of Israel, and the State of Israel is stronger and more prosperous.

Syria has not been dismantled. The Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (previously backed by the US) have seemingly come an agreement with the government after Jolani’s forces retook Aleppo in January, and advanced into SDF territory. The US has, it appears, chosen to back a united Syria - and therefore Turkey - over Balkanisation and control. ‘The Syrian government received a separate message from Turkey that Washington would approve an operation against the SDF if Kurdish civilians were protected’, claims a source. This gives Damascus territorial integrity in the north east, and also access to Syria’s oil. And Turkey neutralises the prospect of an quasi-independent Kurdish ‘state’, whilst increasing the possibility for economic and political influence.

Israel is not happy about this. It has used the pretext of ‘protecting the Druze’ to build its own sphere of influence (at least) in the South, and bridge towards what was previously SDF held territory across the Euphrates. ‘Today, Israel also fears al-Sharaa government will reach a similar agreement with the Druze in the province of Sweida, south of the country’ claims this source. Israel responded with increased IDF patrols into the Druze areas.

It is striking that the initial campaign against Assad was undertaken under the Biden ‘presidency’, but the thwarting of Israeli interests has happened under Trump. At the time of writing, it is unclear whether Jolani’s forces will consolidate Druze control in a similar fashion to the Kurds, and how Israel will respond. But, ‘Sources said Netanyahu is angered by the outcome in northeastern Syria and considers US Special Envoy to Syria Tom Barrack biased toward Ankara. The Israeli circles see Turkey as the ‘biggest winner’ from the collapse of the SDF.’

Syria is looking increasingly like a Turkish proxy rather than a carve-up under the pretense of federalisation - Israel’s preferred option. What regime change did do was allow Israel to destroy all serious Syrian military capability (Jolani was not to be allowed that), giving it unimpeded airspace to strike Iran.

The Twelve-Day Kayfabe

2025’s Twelve-Day War even seems named as a posture: twice as good a six days! The Trump/Netanyahu double act did leverage distinct tactical advantages in timing, twice luring Iran into false confidence. One strongly pro-Israel US source1 described is as ‘the greatest political deception since Project Overlord’ (where the allies led to Germans to believe the Normandy landings would take place near Calais). Trump’s talk of giving the Iranians two weeks, and a publicised meeting with MAGA hawk Steve Bannon2, lured Iran into laxity, easing the passage for the early assassinations (thirty generals in the opening strikes, in the grimly names ‘Operation Red Wedding’). Then, a temporary ceasefire together with further overtures of negotiations preceded the US direct strikes on 22 June - at minimal risk to the US, after Israel had first secured aerial dominance in the opening phase.

It appeared to be a well-executed and co-ordinated plan, yet the simplistic claims of success did not stack up. Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear facilities had been destroyed, an unbelievable statement that was contradicted even at the time by published US intelligence. It is even unclear how much the US strikes damaged the best defended site, buried in the mountains at Fordow. And Iran likely relocated part of all of its enriched uranium in advance of the attacks anyway, leading to some suspicion that they had been forewarned.

Iran’s response was calculated. Early missile (cheap drone) launches were designed to soak up Israeli defences; as the war went on, faster and better missiles were then able to get through. Five IDF bases were hit. And Iran’s response appeared to be ‘deliberately calibrated’:

Following an Israeli drone strike targeting an Iranian oil refinery in the South Pars gas field, Iran responded by targeting a refinery in Haifa. After Israeli airstrikes targeted Iranian research centers suspected of involvement in nuclear activities, Iran retaliated by striking the Weizmann Institute of Science near Tel Aviv—a facility long suspected of playing a role in Israel’s own nuclear research. Through these reciprocal attacks, Iran aimed to signal its capacity for measured retaliation and to reinforce its deterrence posture. Notably, both sides refrained from targeting energy infrastructure after the initial exchange.

Even Iran’s response to the US bombing - the attack on the US Al Udeid air base in Qatar - was ‘telegraphed and limited in impact’.

Some costs were real enough. Over 1,000 Iranians were killed over the twelve days - many indiscriminately, such as the attack on Evin prison, described by Human Rights Watch as a war crime. The twelve day war is estimated to have cost Israel $40 billion in direct and indirect costs - or 7.4% of GDP. Iran demonstrated that it could inflict significant damage to Israel. A ceasefire was announced in time for Israel to replenish its stocks of defensive missiles.

As for Israel’s principal goal of regime change in Iran, if not full on civil war, the war did little directly. This year’s protests are undoubtedly fuelled to some extent externally, but the economic and infrastructure concerns of Iranians are real enough. They aren’t helped by the fantasies of Pahlavists protesting in the West, their pre-revolutionary flags joined with the Israel’s, calling from afar for their homeland to be bombed.

US policy does not seem so short-sighted; Trump has gone public with doubts over a Reza Pahlavi ‘restoration’. Despite Trump’s words, nothing tangible was done to stop January’s protests while they were taking place. Western media still pumps expat Iranian opposition figures of 36,500 killed in the protests, whist Iran has taken the step of publishing the names of those killed (just over 3,000) making it a falsifiable claim. If the USS Abraham Lincoln strike fleet (currently sheltered off Oman) is there for anything more than show, it won’t be because of the protests.

The New Aden Emergency

The third area of strategic interest for Israel spans both sides of the Gulf of Aden - the Yemen civil war, and Somaliland. In both cases, Israel is less directly involved than Syria or Iran, but its close ally the UAE is.

Somaliland (prior to independence the British protectorate of Somaliland) has been de facto independent from Somalia (previously Italian Somaliland) since 1991. The two had formed an uneasy union on independence in 1960, in a state of civil war from the start. Israel became the first country officially to recognise its independence on Boxing Day 2025 (you can be forgiven for missing it). Landlocked Ethiopia signed a memorandum that it would recognise Somaliland in return for a lease of port facilities. One of our own high profile supporters of independence is Nigel Farage.

When asked if the US would follow suit, Trump’s reaction was interesting:

‘Just say, ‘No, not at this —,'” Trump told The [New York] Post in a phone interview, before modifying his answer on recognizing Somaliland to: “Just say, ‘No.'“… “Does anyone know what Somaliland is, really?” Trump asked aloud from his golf course in West Palm Beach.

At the UN, the US deputy ambassador ‘clarified’: ‘On the matter of Somaliland, we have no announcement to make regarding U.S. recognition of Somaliland. And there has been no change in American policy.’ This falls some way short of the UK’s statement that it ‘reaffirms its support for the sovereignty, territorial integrity, political independence, and unity of Somalia.’ But the recognition of Somaliland is certainly on the neocon agenda: it was recommended in Project 2025 as a counter to China’s influence in Djibouti.

Israel’s diplomatic recognition of Somaliland prompted a flurry of claims that it was going to resettle the population of Gaza there, but the reality is more about the geopolitical chessboard. Somaliland authorities rushed to deny Somali claims of the resettlement of Gazans, or that there were plans for an Israeli military base. At the least, UAE investment and Israeli recognition draw the fledgling territory tight to their camp.

Turkey, meanwhile, has strengthened ties with Somalia, signing a defence a co-operation pact and investing. Mogadishu is home to Turkey's largest overseas military base, and beginning construction of a ‘space port’ for testing long-range ballistic missiles.

Recognition was also prompted by matters across the Gulf of Aden. The Yemeni civil war is multi-sided. The Houthis have control of what used to be North Yemen, but non-Houthi areas were until December last split between the ‘official’ government forces, the Presidential Leadership Council (backed by Saudi) and the Southern Transitional Council (backed by the UAE); as well as some more minor militia. Let’s take a look at the map:

Yemen at the start of December: Houthis (green), PLC (pink) and STC (yellow)

From the 2nd to the 26th December, STC forces swept through almost all of the PLC territories. The Saudis amassed forces by the border and then struck back, launching air strikes on the 26th. On the 30th, the Saudis hit two UAE ships in Mukalla said to be delivering a large shipment of arms to the STC. By 7th January, Saudi/PLC forces had taken Aden and routed all of the STC, whose leaders fled. Marco Rubio met his satisfied-looking Saudi equivalent the same day. The UAE announced that it had ‘ended its mission’ (of a decade) in Yemen. It was a stunning reversal.

The US seems to have acquiesced in this; long-standing policy has been to recognise the valid security concerns of Saudi Arabia on its southern border, to the point of accepting a degree of rapprochement between the Saudis and the Houthis. Saudi interests appear to have trumped the possibility of using Aden as a base against Houthi activities in the Red Sea (traffic through the Suez Canal is still running at around half that of two years ago in terms of number of ships, and a third in tonnage)3.

It is reported that the Mossad had been courting Somaliland for years, but Netanyahu announced his support for independence on the very day the Yemen conflict turned. It establishes the possibility of a base for operations against the Houthis a possibility explicitly recognised by Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. And unlike in Yemen, it is a ‘win’ for Israel which does not come with any direct costs to the US.

The Israel-First Presidency?

Putting things together, we see a picture that doesn’t entirely support the notion of an Israel-First Presidency. Syria appears to be undergoing a consolidation under Jolani and the influence of Turkey, rather than the fragmentation that Israel was looking to exploit. The twelve day war breached a significant threshold with a direct attack by America on Iran, but had many elements of appearing choregraphed, and did not achieve any of Israel’s strategic goals of a denuclearised Iran under a different regime. The US appears to be relaxed about increasing recognition of a Somaliland under Israeli-UAE domination to counter Saudi gains in Yemen.

In rough terms, whilst Israel has seen some benefit from all three areas over the last year-and-a-bit, its maximalist aims have seen a loss in Syria, a draw in Iran (for now) and a win in the Gulf of Aden.

In contrast, Turkey has improved its position considerably; not just in Syria but also with the Turkish-Azeri ‘TRIPP’ plan subjecting Armenia to Turkic interests. I have written before about the ability of Middle Powers to leverage all sides in the developing geopolitical environment, and none is exploiting this as well as Turkey. Israel, by contrast, is in a strange position: existentially backed by the US (and of course its own potentially suicidal Samson doctrine), but with limited ability to leverage other powers.

I’m not foolish enough to make any firm predictions in such a fluid situation, particularly whether another Iran attack will happen, which is all too possible. But my point is that there is evidence that the US is acting as a restraining hand on the worst desires of Israel. If only Nixon could go to China, perhaps only Trump can control Netanyahu. I, for one, hope so.

It is a tale of the union of the two most powerful dynasties of the Muslim world in the first half of the twentieth century - and of their demise. The last Caliph of the Ottoman Empire, Abdulmejid II married his daughter to the son of the ‘richest man in the world’, the Nizam of Hyderabad in 1931. The book opens with the tale of Abdulmejid, presented as an attractive but tragic figure, both a devout Muslim and a western-facing moderniser (although Mulla’s epithet ‘The Democrat Prince’ is a stretch).

Charminar, Hyderabad

Abdulmejid had spent much of his adult life under something approaching house arrest under the rule the ‘Red Sultan’ Abdulhamid II, who reigned from 1876 until his deposition in 1909. (Imprisoning rival family was something of an Ottoman tradition, less brutal than the previous practice of murdering them.) He comes across as a cultivated figure - a musician, and painter of Orientalist canvasses of harem life ranging from the mildly erotic, to sophisticated salonnières depicted reading Goethe and playing Beethoven trios.

Mulla glosses over the bloodshed of Abdulhamid’s reign, mourning the territorial losses of the Ottomans in Europe during the Balkan Wars, and the resulting ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Muslims, rather than the atrocities committed by Turks, which so enraged Gladstone. And whilst he does refer to the massacres of the Armenians from 1915 (‘the word “genocide” was not yet in usage’1), he does not mention the Hamidian massacres of 1894-6, estimated at up to 300,000 in peacetime, or the slaughter of 20,000 in Adana over four days in 1909. Fearing the potential for Russian inference, Talaat Pasha (as Minister of the Interior) had in fact begun to plan ‘extraordinary measures’ for the removal of Armenians from the six eastern vilayets (provinces) even before the war.

Abdulhamid was deposed as Sultan after the Young Turk revolution brought the Three Pashas to power (Enver, Talaat and Cemal), who took the empire into the Great War on the side of the Central Powers. The Caliph - literally ‘successor’ of the Prophet - was now the titular head of Islam at war with the largest population of Muslims in the world, in British India. The Caliphate had long been little more than a notional title for the Muslim rulers of India, from the Delhi Sultanates to the Mughals (culturally, descendants of the Persian world than orthodox Sunni Islam); now it mattered. The Constantinople ulema authorised jihad in the name of the Caliph against the British Empire.

Aside from the charming, though incidental details of life in the world of Islamic courts of the twentieth century, the most valuable angle that Mulla brings to his history is just how important it was for the Brits to keep Indian Islam on side. In British India, a simplistic reading is that there always was a natural balance to ally with the minority Muslim population to balance the Hindu majority; on-the-ground reality was always more complex. The key princely states were mostly ruled by Muslim dynasties (albeit with a minority Muslim population), and their rulers staunch Imperial allies. (Kashmir inverted this dynamic, though its ruler was just as loyal.) And although Hinduism was certainly not confined to the subcontinent, there was no drive towards pan-Hinduism to influence British policy in the way that Islam could be weaponised for or against the Empire.

London - more than Calcutta - was conscious of the pull of the ummah. Mulla quotes Wilfred Scawen Blunt - poet, Arabist and adviser to Churchill - advocating for the English Crown to ‘make itself in some sort the political head of Islam’2. The current holder appears to have taken note. And Lloyd George declared that ‘We are the greatest Mahomedan power in the world and one fourth of the population of the British Empire is Mahomedan.’3 Fears in London were opportunities in Berlin: the Orientalist banker Baron Max von Oppenheim had the ear of the Kaiser, attempting to sow division through a ‘jihad bureau’ practising Islampolitik.

In practice, external threats to India bound Britain’s Muslim allies closer to the empire - and London to them. It was as pattern to be repeated in 1939. The quasi-independent Princely States were always the most loyal elements of British India; amongst others, the Nizam of Hyderabad supported the war. There was no significant uprising of the Muslims of the subcontinent in support of the Ottoman side, although Mulla does note instances of prisoners captured by the Turks throwing their lot in with their fellow confessionals - a precursor of INA support for the Japanese in the second war4.

Mulla skips over the grim details of the post-Armistice Greek invasion (a Lloyd George project) and the reconquest by the Kemalist forces, now aided by Bolshevik Russia. Abdulhamid had been the last Sultan with any political clout. Abdulmejid’s cousin Mehmed VI Vahideddin was deposed as Sultan in November 1922, after Kemal’s victorious campaign against both the Greeks on the Aegean coast (culminating in the burning of Smyrna) and the denuded Armenian highlands in the east. Kemal abolished the Sultanate, but not the Caliphate; Abdulmejid was ‘elected’ (by the nationalist Ankara parliament and at Kemal’s instigation) a few days later. It didn’t last. The Young Turks had been happy utilise Islam, but Kemal was a secularist as well as a moderniser, and by then in total control of the government of the new Republic. One hoca (scholar) is recorded as saying ‘Pasha, if it your intention to do away with the Holy Book, say so, and we’ll find a way to do it.’5 Abdulmejid was exiled in 1924, taking his family on the Orient Express to glamorous penury in Nice. Kemal’s government cancelled the Caliphate, and in one of the more absurd attempts at modernisation, introduced the Hat Law, banning the traditional fez in favour of Western styles the following year. Fez-wearing holdouts were hanged; Turkey retains the law to this day.

In post-war British India, the convulsions of the Ottomans and the risk to the Caliphate prompted a popular movement against British policy, and even British rule itself. Mulla makes much of the Khilafat movement, as it was known. From 1918, with civil war in the Ottoman heartlands, the aim was to pressure Britain into bringing the Empire's weight to the retention of the role. Agitation was whipped up by the brothers Shaukat Ali and Mohamed Ali, and backed by the Aga Khan and Gandhi. It's possible to represent the Khilafat movement as the early stirrings of independence, and it suits Mulla’s narrative to stress its cross-communal character.

It was, in his words ‘spectacular mass politics on action’ - an ambitious description for a crowd of 10,000. He appears surprised that a Khilafat delegation to London met with ‘virulent anti-Ottoman sentiment’, barely more than a year after the war’s end. Mulla berates Arnold Toynbee for ‘condemn[ing] the Empire'; he doesn't mention that the historian had co-authored the first report on the Armenian Genocide as early as 1916. The Khilafat movement, disorganised and directionless, descended to communal violence, and the authorities soon cracked down on when a police station was burnt (killing 21). Kemal (by then President) used the potential for British interference (and the possibility of sponsoring the Aga Khan in the role) as justification for abolishing the Caliphate. The movement failed, in India and abroad.

Abdulmejid and Durrushehvar

The seventh Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Osman Ali Khan, was reputed to be the richest man in the world, and one of the most parsimonious. But he had supported the exiled Abdulmejid and his family since the 1920s. Shaukat Ali (of Khilafat fame) brokered a marriage between the Abdulmejid’s daughter Durrushehvar, and the Nizam’s eldest son Azam Jah, uniting the (abolished) Caliphal Ottoman dynasty with the leading Muslim princely house, the Asaf Jahis of Hyderabad. Azam’s younger brother, Moazzam, also received an Ottoman bride, Niloufer. Neither brother inherited their father’s frugal tastes: Azam had a fondness for polo and sports cars, whilst Moazzam was considered ‘the best dressed man in Europe’, travelling with 250 suits. A dual wedding was held in Nice in November 1931.

It is perhaps remarkable that, with since Caliphate has been in abeyance, no claim had been established - not even by the House of Saud (now protector of Islam's Holy Places). Mulla’s exploration of his ‘Indian Caliphate' emerged from uncovering a ‘deed’ from Abdulmajid transferring the Caliphate to Nizam, in trust for the offspring of the marriage of their houses. (Mulla had previously published articles on this6.) Turkish experts (even in Erdogan’s renewed Nationalist-Islamic Turkey) have questioned its authenticity.

The question is: does any of this matter? Dreams of resurrecting the Caliphate in Hyderabad may have been current in the 1930s, and its attraction to both of the royal Muslim houses is obvious. But realpolitik at the end of British India did not allow for the concept of an independent Hyderabad, or (Mulla’s unrealistic dream) a ‘federation’ untainted by Partition. Narendra Singh Sarila has demonstrated that British policy - with the tacit consent of both Nehru and Jinnah - led to the creation of a British-protected Pakistan and an India which did not encompass princely states (a full review is here). India annexed Hyderabad by force in 1948; the British stood down its commanding officers in the Nizam’s army just before, in order to avoid them fighting a fellow Dominion. Mulla simplistically shifts the blame to ‘heavily anti-Muslim’ interior minister Vallabhbhai Patel rather than Nehru (or even the British).

Mulla is worryingly naive for a political journalist. A young Cambridge history graduate (as he tells us more than once), he is a journalist for Middle Eastern Eye, specialising in covering the pro-Palestinian scene in the UK over the two years of war. He has been promoted by Peter Oborne, the Conservative journalist who has journeyed from chief political commentator for the Daily Telegraph to a prominent pro-Islamic voice, redolent of a certain type of establishment Brit familiar from history to the present day.

And there appears to be a strange double-act going on between Mulla and another first-time author, Sam Dalrymple, whose flawed debut Shattered Lands (reviewed here) received much praise. Dalrymple refers to Mulla’s (as yet unpublished) text in his book; Mulla repeats Dalrymple’s fantasies about Britain’s possessions in the Gulf being part of ‘British India’ as being anything more than an administrative fiction, ended as soon as independence came into view and it started to matter. Dalrymple (son of the prolific writer on India, William) has been a frequent promoter of Mulla’s book7.

Mulla shares with Dalrymple a type of revisionism of the Raj, that veers towards a lost vision of cross-communal harmony in something approaching a subcontinental Switzerland. Princes (in this case the Nizam) are opulent but progressive, Muslim but tolerant, and there is nostalgia in their loss. There is a yearning for something like Empire without Colonialism - which starts to look much like imagined Mughals or the Ottomans, but stripped of history or bloody reality.

Mulla has some particularly idealistic views on religion.

The concept of religion first emerged after what are now called the Wars of Religion (1530-1630) in Europe… Increasingly over the next few centuries Christianity became marginalised in society, pushed into a distinct ‘religious’ sphere. Since the process of secularisation in the European context defined what religion was… Islam could only wear the religious label uncomfortably.8

This is a wholly Islamic backwards misreading history, if it hasn’t ceased to be history at all. Meanwhile,

Hindu nationalism with a strong anti-Muslim tenor… emerged from the annals of British colonial discourse, which presented India as a fundamentally Hindu land which had enjoyed a golden age, disrupted by a medieval tragedy in which the natives were crushed by Muslim invaders.9

‘Discourse’ is employed here as a non-word, a stand in for power, with the implication that because the British were in power, they must be liable for anything and everything, including a backlash to a tendency to favour Muslims over Hindus.

Mulla is unhistorical, or downright wrong, on many points in a short book. ‘By early 1914, the Great War was on the horizon’10 (was it?); in 1944 ‘the British expected to pull out of India imminently’11 (they categorically didn’t at that point). ‘Lord Arthur Balfour’ was not ennobled at the time of the 1917 declaration (let alone the elder son of a Duke). Claiming the Khilafat delegation suffered from British ‘Islamophobia’ forces his contemporary agenda onto history. The British Library contains many interesting documents, but this doesn’t make it ‘an enduring product of Empire.’ Most embarrassingly for a book half-about Hyderabad, it was not as he claims the largest of the princely states - that was Jammu & Kashmir.

The Indian Caliphate raises pertinent questions about fall of both the Ottoman Empire and the Raj, but for all the interesting details of princely life, it is too slight as a book. It’s central question - could the Caliphate have been revived in Hyderabad? - is too far removed from historical reality to be anything more than a fantasy: history as magical realism, told with a strong eye on the present. And that present is (inevitably) Palestine. The World Islamic Congress, held in Jerusalem in 1931, was ‘a monumental moment in the history of the Palestinian cause’12, but one that achieved nothing except for words and a call to boycott ‘Zionist goods’.

Mulla is keen to divorce the historical Caliphate from its resonance (to modern ears) of ISIS; whilst refusing to recognise that the Erdogan regime in Istanbul is coming closer to reviving the concept than artistic Ottomans or peaceable Hyderabadis ever could. Turkey’s proxy ISIS fighter Abu Mohammed al-Julani occupies the seat of the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus. Reborn as Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, his suits tailored on Savile Row13 would be fit for the sons of the Nizam, and he is welcomed in Paris and Washington.

The Empty Tomb (Photo Imran Mulla/MEE)

Abdulmejid died in Paris 1944, but requested to be buried in Hyderabad. The Nizam thought best to clear this with the British, who didn’t object, and a tomb was built in the far north-west of the Nizam’s realm. Khuldabad is the site of the mausoleum of that most Islamic of the Mughal Emperors, Aurangzeb; a few miles from the rock-cut eighth-century temples of Ellora. The tomb is empty - the last Caliph was still interred temporarily in France when Hyderabad fell, and his body was finally buried at Medina.

Hyderabad is today a pleasant city, sitting easily between its Muslim monuments and modern role as one of the hubs of India’s IT boom; a city of biryanis by the Charminar and nightclubs in the Banjara hills. Aurangabad is now politically detached from the Nizam’s realms, part of strongly Hindu Maharashtra state; a dusty place, with an air of resentment. It would receive few visitors were it not a base for Ajanta and Ellora. I doubt the empty tomb of the last Caliph will bring many more.

The Small States Club is a 2023 book by Armen Sarkissian. Subtitled How small smart states can save the world, it’s a brief study of ten Small States, nine of which have prospered, one of which (Armenia, sadly) is under existential threat.

Sarkissian was Prime Minister of Armenia at a time when the power was with the Presidency, and President at a time when the role was entirely ceremonial. His tenure as PM, under the first president of Armenia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, lasted only a few months, cut short by a cancer diagnosis and an aggressive treatment programme. Prior to (and after), he had been ambassador to the UK; prior to that, a nuclear physics professor who had invented a version of Tetris (‘Wordtris’) - a version where letters are fitted into words, rather than shapes into gaps. He is an unlikely, and unworldly, politician.

The interview piqued my interest, into what lessons Farage might draw, and the balance of geopolitics more generally. And how received wisdom in the UK is selling us short.

Rachel’s Empty Chessboard

The Small States Club

Sarkissian’s short book is a tour of ten states: Singapore, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Estonia, Switzerland, Ireland, Botswana, Jordan and Armenia itself. On the surface, Sarkissian presents nothing that could fall outside of conventional liberal-global doctrine drafted by the Tony Blair Institute; from a belief in technology, delivered by Public Private Partnerships, to the dangers of ‘toxic’ populism and the benefits of ‘celebrating multi-ethnicity’. Illustrations present Sarkissian glad-handing world statesmen, from Thatcher and (then) Prince Charles, to Macron and Modi; some (ridiculous though it seems) in Covid-era facemasks.

The examples chosen demonstrate one of the author’s points: there is no one formula for success. Only three of his states are resource-rich; most of the successes are demonstrations of economic openness and business-friendly regimes. Ethnically, they range from managed diversity (Singapore and to an extent Switzerland) to homogeneity; three have substantial diasporas. And in terms of external threats, they vary from being at extreme, existential risk, to being fundamentally unthreatened - Ireland is not even a full member of NATO. It is worth noting that four of Sarkissian’s selection - Qatar, Singapore, Israel and the UAE - are in the top 10 defence spenders per capita in the world (and two others of the top 10 - Kuwait and Oman - could also have made his list). The message should be clear: if you're a small state, you will probably need to spend big on defence.

Except for Switzerland, all are creations (as modern nation states) of the dissolution of empires - seven from Britain - and only Ireland through force. Sarkissian prefers to castigate Britain for the Irish potato famine than praise us for the incredibly generous terms on which decolonisation took place (naturally, he inhabits an unquestioned world where colonialism = bad). He does grant that Singapore opted to retain British military protection in the early days of its independence, and we will look further at the creation of the UAE below.

It is noticeable that the majority of states on the list are short on ‘democracy' - Sarkissian may like to praise it, but he is open about valuing competence and technocracy in a very Blairite fashion. Singapore and Botswana are notional democracies in which the same party has ruled since independence; in addition Ireland has traditionally shared power between two parties which have been virtually indistinguishable in orientation (and against which he portrays Sinn Fein as ‘populist’).

Ireland is the prime example of the small state whose ‘success’ should be qualified. The transformation of a socially cohesive, conservative society into a country at the leading edge of hyper-liberalism and aggressive immigration. It is particularly stark when placed against the polar opposite approach of the UAE, which imports workers (intellectual and unskilled), on terms varying from attractive to contract-slavery, without the slightest thought of giving citizenship to any but the fewest and most valuable. Sarkissian’s idolatry of Ireland is somewhat misplaced, particularly given his generally pro-British career and stance: quoting the Economist, he endorses the view of Ireland as being a ‘diplomatic superpower’, which is quite unwarranted in my view, and is far from being a ‘middle power’ as he claims (that would surely be Israel, particularly given its nukes). Ireland has sold its soul to US-globalism, and the best you can say is that it got a decent price for it.

One theme that comes through about Sarkissian’s small states is that of non-alignment. From Switzerland’s legendary neutrality, to Ireland’s formal condolence to Germany on learning of Hitler’s death, the eras of the Cold War and the ‘unipolar moment’ after 1991 have suited this strategy. Even Israel, benefitting from the most unilateral special relationship imaginable, cooperates with China and Russia. Qatar has leveraged its position as the enfant terrible of the Gulf states to its success, from diplomatic isolation to hosting both the largest US base in the region and the leadership of Hamas. I believe this is changing - and this year’s bombing of Doha by Israel may be a sign of this.

Sarkissian’s potted histories of his choices are generally pretty good, particularly in the cases of the autocracies, from whose leaders he has learnt at first hand. There are interesting facts and observations along the way, such as the Jewish concept of bitachon: ‘A term that encompasses notions of security, assurance and guarantees… It encompasses not only a feeling of security but also the absence of potential threats.’1 In general, his message is that success is not generalisable. Being ‘smart’ is a mantra, not a recipe: it reminds me of a friend who wanted ‘to be a tycoon’. But his suggestion that small states form a ‘club’ is not a bad one: not because it will save the world, but as the world becomes less hospitable for them, it may help save themselves.

The British withdrawal from the Trucial States

1968 is one of those hinge years where important events coalesce, so much so that some things are easily missed. One such was the announcement on 16 January by the Wilson government that the British would withdraw its military presence east of Suez. The resulting round of decolonisation led to the creation of two of Sarkissian's examples - Qatar (as well as Bahrain and Oman) and the federation of the Trucial States to form the United Arab Emirates.

Britain’s interest in Arabia was initially strategic: securing the passage to India. Aden had been acquired by the East India Company as a coaling station before the Suez Canal had even opened (Thomas Fletcher Waghorn had established an overland postal route in the 1830s, and steamers sailed from Suez to Calcutta from 1839). British interest in the Gulf was to protect trade between Persia and India from piracy. The emirates of the Trucial States came under British protection from 1820, and more formally from 1853’s Treaty of Perpetual Maritime Truce (hence the British name).

This was Empire at its lightest touch: control over foreign and defence policy without seeking to interfere with internal arrangements. The marginal life of the sheikhdoms, dependent on pearling for currency and dates grown in oases, attracted little interest before the oil boom. The tribes of the the Abu Dhabi desert were described by British Arabist Wilfred Thesiger as ‘among the most authentic of the Bedu, the least affected by the outside world’.2

Post-war decolonisation was the driven by a number of factors: anti-imperial pressure from the US, the financial cost of empire, and a deep-seated liberalism across the British establishment (which dominated both parties). It was the latter which drove the independence of the Trucials. The cost to Britain in defence was estimated at only £12 million per annum3; easily outweighed by the revenues earned from British interests in oil concessions (which subsequently soared). Half of Britain’s oil came from the Gulf. The sheikhs themselves had none of the drive to independence of the Arab revolutionary drive elsewhere, and even offered to cover the costs of keeping a military presence.

For once, the Americans in the dying days of the Johnson administration, and mired in Vietnam, wanted Britain to stay. ‘The U.S. Government continue to believe that the present British position in the Gulf is crucial to the stability of the area’ recorded a Foreign Office official.4 It was ideology, not financial or geopolitical pressure, that led to our exit from the Gulf - ideology which fed into a particular form of defeatism about the Trucials.

Some sense of defeatism was warranted after a three substantial setbacks: the nationalisation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company by the Mossadegh government in 1951, the Suez crisis of 1956, and the embarrassing withdrawal from Aden in 1967. The 1968 independence movement was different. Mossadegh had been replaced in the CIA-backed coup, and the Arab nationalist movements inspired by Nasser which had driven the Aden insurgency were not present of the Gulf shore sheikhdoms, for which aggressive Arabism was a threat.

British encouragement for the Trucials to form what was to become the UAE was central. A wider federation had been contemplated, including Bahrain and Qatar, but the British favoured keeping them apart, for practical reasons rather than anything else - Bahrain being more ‘advanced’ than the others (and being the first to strike oil in 1931). Britain also intervened with Iran in the independence negotiations. Iran had claims over Bahrain, and three islands located in the Straits of Hormuz (Abu Musa and the two Tunbs islands) otherwise recognised as belonging to two of the Arab Emirates. Britain effectively brokered a ‘deal’: Iran ceded claims to Bahrain, but took Abu Musa and the Tunbs islands - the latter by force, in what can only be described as a co-ordinated move by Britain and Iran, the day before the 1971 withdrawal.

The Tunbs islands - right in the middle of the Gulf shipping lanes

Arab righteous anger at the ‘betrayal’ seems a to have been a deliberate attempt to deflect the blame onto Britain, in the last hours when it was still responsible for the Trucials’ defence. And it was costly - not in terms of ‘influence’ but directly, as Libya nationalised BP’s interests in the country in response. The dispute over the Tunbs islands remains (formally) unresolved. It also provided an excuse for the sheikhdom claiming ownership, Ra’s al Khaimah, not to join the Union until the following year - in reality, until oil prospecting in its territory proved unviable.

Labour insisted on the necessity of defence cuts - in order not to introduce prescription chargers to their beloved NHS. Heath’s Conservatives, in 1968, had opposed the withdrawal from the Trucials, not (naturally) for the reasons of British interests, but rather a sense of ‘honour’ in not betraying loyal vassals. In office, the Heath government ignored the rump imperialist wing of the Tory party (it still existed in 1970) and pressed ahead with independence. Heath’s eyes were on Europe, not the Gulf.

The UAE, as constituted, has been remarkably successful, not just in exploiting its natural resources, but also in realising the need for wider economic development. It has been fortunate in the encouragement of Britain, and has remained an unwavering Western ally (in contrast to, say, Qatar). But it is absolutely fanciful to suggest, as does Sam Dalrymple, that the ‘official’ position of the Trucials before 1947 as part of the Indian empire could or should have led to their oil wealth accruing to the Subcontinent.5

The question, from a British perspective, is: as we essentially forced independence on the UAE, could we have got a better deal? Unlike other former concessions, Abu Dhabi (the largest oil producer) did not nationalise its interests wholly, but allowed foreign interests to retain 40%. The UAE has remained resolutely Western aligned, although the new federation within weeks declared its ‘total non-alignment’6. Nevertheless, it is hard not to think that, as ever, the decisions and debates, along with the interests of both major UK political parties, were motivated not by the interest of the British people, but by liberal ideology along with a Victorian hangover of propriety. It is telling that one of the few times that the Trucials were raised in Parliament was to ensure that they were no longer practising slavery.

Small States and Middle Powers

What are the lessons for Farage, the UK or Armenia?

The current geopolitical situation and the rise of the real multipolarity is changing the dynamics between the small and medium states. Simply put, multipolarity is favouring the Middle Powers (if they act wisely), but creating a much riskier world for small states.

The architecture of multipolarity is allowing Middle Powers to play more than once side simultaneously, as the great powers compete for influence, investment and profit. And it's allowing them to take action, up to and including military intervention. The clearest example is Turkey, who have led the way for a long time: re-writing the politics of the south Caucasus, through its 'little brother' Azerbaijan's conquest of Artsakh from 2020 to 2023; and combining with Israel (with the backing of the US) to intervene in Syria.

International relations specialist Sumantra Maitra paints Turkey here as a reviving empire:

Neo-Ottomanism isn’t just an academic debate anymore but a quantifiable policy platform, observable in its aspirations to regional hegemony by acquiring new proxies and protectorates, expanding regional influence, as well as the attempted normalisation of decades-old internal grievances with ethnic and religious minorities, such as Kurds and Armenians, in a style reminiscent of the Ottomans’ imperial cosmopolitanism…. The western realignment with Turkey, much to the dismay of Greeks, Israelis, and Cypriots, therefore, is once again simply a logical reaction to the threat of a revanchist Russian power in the east, and the need to incorporate a newly influential Turkey as a legitimate buffer in the European balance.

He’s right in attaching importance to the rise of neo-Ottomanism, but wrong in the details. There is no attempt to revive anything like ‘normalisation’ with Armenia; the realignment in the South Caucasus is a dripping economic and cultural takeover of a weakened rival (abetted by the western-backed Pashinyan regime in Yerevan) backed by military threats from Azerbaijan. And Erdogan can hardly be called a ‘buffer’ against Russia when he (and Azerbaijan) have consistently worked with Russia when it has suited them. The West has been quite consistent in its support for Turkey, it is rather that Turkey has seen increased opportunities to leverage its position.

It is not specific Russian revanchism which has allowed this; it is a pattern repeated across the Middle Powers. Pakistan is correctly described here as having had a ‘Year of Diplomatic Miracles’: from defence deals with Turkey and Malaysia, up to a full ‘Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement’ with Saudi Arabia (widely seen as a direct result of the Israeli attack on Qatar). US intervention in the brief conflict with India earlier this year leaned towards the weaker nation, whilst Pakistan claimed to have downed five Indian fighter planes with its Chinese-made jets. All while the country continues to be an economic basket case.

Or take Kazakhstan. The world’s largest uranium producer is assuming leadership of the Central Asian countries (the ‘Stans’), and successfully exploiting both the Great Powers and the other Middle Powers. Foreign Direct Investment in the country is heavily western (the largest being the Netherlands and the US, at 23.3% and 19.6% respectively, and the US boasts about deepening its relationship. Kazakhstan this year voted to build its first nuclear power plant, awarding the contract to Russia’s Rosatom, in a decision which was as much political as economic - China’s bid was lower but Russia processes its uranium.

Turkey and Pakistan illustrate how the positioning of a Middle Power has evolved from the Cold War through to multipolarity. Both initially sided closely with the West - Turkey with the US and NATO (becoming a member in 1952, and hosting US nuclear weapons since 1959); Pakistan with Britain and then the US. Turkey’s close relationship with its Great Power sponsors even allowed it to sponsor an effective breakaway Turkish state in northern Cyprus with impunity. Pakistan was ‘allowed’ to develop its own nuclear weapons. Pakistan is China’s biggest arms export market, and China is its largest investor; but the increasing dependence of the early 21st century has been balanced recently by Pakistan pursuing a more multi-track foreign policy. Similarly, Turkey initially sought greater integration with European markets, before both sides retreated to a more realistic policy of engagement at a distance, albeit with Turkish politics influencing Europe, rather than vice versa.

Middle Powers are working with their fellows when it suits, and at other times competing. Turkey and Israel combined at least tacitly in the overthrow of Assad in Syria - Israel signed a ‘ceasefire’ with Hezbollah on the very same day as Turkish-backed HTS forces moved on Aleppo. Israel then undertook a major air campaign to cripple Syria’s military capabilities and advance its position in the Golan Heights. Turkish rhetoric since the Gaza campaign started has been for public consumption: Turkey has kept Israel supplied with oil throughout, and Israeli-Azeri military co-operation has continued throughout. It remains to be seen whether the interests of expanding neo-Ottomanism and Greater Israel will clash in the future (as many, including Dr Maitra, foresee) or whether the co-operation will continue, if uneasily.

Eurasia, from the Middle East to Central Asia, is the home of the Middle Power, and the recent fate of Syria a conformation of how threatening the geopolitical scene is for Small States. Appeals to the ‘International Community’ or the ‘Rules-Based International Order’ have always been hollow covers for power, but this will become clearer. In the absence of the level of military spend afforded by an Israel or a UAE, the safest option would now appear to be for a Small State to get a Big Backer - that it can trust, as far as that is possible.

Armenia’s drive to the West is an attempt to do this, but even then, it is confused: is it looking to the US or the EU to be its principal protector? Will the EU even manage to achieve the Great Power status to which it aspires? And in either case, why would the interests of Armenia outweigh those of Turkey for either of them?

Sarkissian does not touch on these questions, or offer any solutions, beyond blaming previous governments. Having ushered in the Pashinyan government as President in 2018, he did call for the Prime Minister’s resignation after the 2020 war. Frustrated by his ceremonial role, he resigned the presidency in January 2022; but although he states that he ‘felt he could be more helpful as a civilian’, he has been a marginal figure in politics since then. This book is not going to help.

What about Farage, and the position of the UK in the multipolar world? According to my model, we should be well placed to act as a Middle Power. From this point of view, it is less relevant that Brexit has been subverted - independence from Europe would be able to be leveraged anyway. Britain should be in a position to work with all of the Great Powers - and the Middle Powers we choose - on our own terms; including Russia and China.

Of course, this is the direct opposite to the strategy across every part of the political and bureaucratic elites in whose vision the UK is protected by the junior place as the junior party in the Special Relationship, subservient to the EU for trade matters, and subject to polite world opinion. Farage and Reform offer nothing to combat this. And if it seems demeaning to emulate something of the strategy of Turkey, remember that in terms of purchasing power parity, our GDP is only just ahead.

Rachel Reeves Budget-day publicity centered around the embarrassing photo reproduced above. It was an unfortunate metaphor for the country’s finances, but is also one for our geopolitical position. Rather than Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard, we are trapped in Reeves’ Empty Chessboard, where we don’t even set our pieces to play.

Why could not the unity of Punjab, or of India, been saved? There have been three rather different answers on offer. The first blames the Congress leadership for underestimating Jinnah and the Muslims. The second blames Jinnah for pursuing his goal of a separate country regardless of human consequences. The third holds the British responsible, claiming that they promoted a divide between Hindus and Muslims to perpetuate their rule.1

Historian Ramachandra Guha sums up the situation, and concludes: something of all three. An overlooked account from 2005 presents a view that is both bolder and more nuanced: Pakistan was a creation of British strategic interests.

The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of India’s Partition (HarperCollins India, 2005, 2009) is a detailed account by Narendra Singh Sarila. Sarila (1927-2011) was heir to the tiny princely state bearing the same name, a Rajput town of few thousand covering 35 square miles in northern India, but entitling its ruler to a seat in the Chamber of Princes. The young Sarila was an ADC to Mountbatten in his time as Viceroy, and subsequently a career diplomat, rising to be the ambassador to France.

Before looking at Sarila’s claims, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the legacy of Partition as it presented here in Britain. For the immediate period after the end of the Raj, the horrors of Partition were largely ignored; a deferential age saw Mountbatten seen as a war hero who had done his best, and immigrants from the sub-continent were still a rarity. As Andrew Roberts wrote (in 1994): ‘The myth that Britain wound up her Indian Empire in an orderly and honourable way, fulfilling her mission of trusteeship to the letter, has largely endured to this day.’2 Philip Ziegler’s authorised biography of Mountbatten (himself the victim of a communal conflict in 1979) repeats the then ‘official’ estimate of the deaths as a result of Partition at 200,000.

What we would now call decolonialism had been apparent since the 1980s. (Salman Rushdie had criticised in 1984 the run of Empire writing and drama, saving particular ire for the one writer who understood something of Partition, Paul Scott - that presumably was his crime.) But Roberts, in his book Eminent Churchillians, seeks to skewer Mountbatten as practically sole-handedly responsible for 1947. In Roberts’ depiction, Mountbatten’s egotistical recklessness, combined with a bias against the Muslims of India, drove a one-sided deal and a rushed departure that cost at least a million lives. Roberts concludes: ‘Mountbatten deserved to be court-martialled on his return to London.’3

The purpose of this article is not to re-litigate Mountbatten, for we shall see that Sarila’s reading of events presents the Viceroy in a different light. It is always worth questioning how much of Roberts’ motivation is to protect his hero Churchill from any hint of blame, even after being thrown out of office in 1945. I have included an appendix on one argument that he uses which appears to me to be entirely misplaced, in the light of Sarila.

More recent depictions have been more balanced. Alex von Tunzelmann’s Indian Summer (2007) presents Dickie as an ineffectual playboy, and the book is half serious history, half Mills & Boon with Maharajas, with much attention given to Edwina Mountbatten’s ‘close’ relationship with Nehru. It suffers from simplistic over-psychologising, even suggesting at one point that Mountbatten rushed independence to save his marriage! But is also generally even-handed, unsparing on the violence of Partition, and frankly better researched than Roberts. And most recently, Sam Dalrymple’s much-lauded Shattered Lands seeks to frame Partition as just one of five; as I wrote here: ‘The overall effect of the ‘Five Partitions’ framing is to dilute the impact of the central one, the ‘Great Partition’ of 1947.’ We are almost back to Raj nostalgia, albeit viewed through a liberal lens.

The architect and the enabler: Wavell and Mountbatten

Sarila’s claims

Sarila’s thesis is that Pakistan - the creation of an independent Muslim state in (particularly) the strategic north-west of India - was a deliberate plan of Britain. Its initial motive was to retain a military presence in the subcontinent, principally (in the early stages) to protect British presence in the Gulf, supremacy in the Indian Ocean, and generally protect the oilfields of the region. This was intensified towards and at the war’s end, as relations with the Soviet Union were clearly leaning towards what would become the Cold War.

Amongst the side claims are the following:

• Pakistan needed to be viable (and in control of the key borders), but no larger than needed

• Jinnah was actively promoted and consolidated as the sole spokesman for all Muslims by British actions

• The North-West Frontier Province (NWPF) was constitutionally ‘couped’ into Pakistan, controlling the Afghanistan border

• Jammu and Kashmir would go to Pakistan (again because of its external border); when this became at risk, the northern Gilgit region (again the border) was directly ‘couped’ into Pakistan

• The Indian army was prevented from taking back all of Kashmir to protect Pakistani interests

• Aside from the dual partition, the possibility of other independent states were stymied, in order not to weaken India further

Shadows is a thorough history, and well researched - the fruit of many days in dusty record offices tell in the referencing but not the prose style. But there are two key sources he wasn’t able to use: Mountbatten’s personal correspondence, which is still sealed, and (he doesn’t mention this) Wavell himself burned a large number of documents just before handing over.4

Sarila’s re-interpretation of the history of the creation of Pakistan moves through three distinct phases, matching the three Viceroys of the period: Lord Linlithgow (Viceroy from April 1936 to October 1943), Lord Wavell (October 1943 to February 1947) and Lord Mountbatten (February 1947 to the independence of India and Pakistan in August 1947). Wavell, of course, spanned the end of the war and Churchill’s defeat to Atlee.

The three Viceroys also embody three attitudes to Indian independence in Britain: from an imperious denial that India could actually rule herself, or at least, that such a thing could not occur in the short term (conveniently, usually 30 years or so - a generation beyond the protagonists’ life); a realism that independence was inevitable and a desire for Britain to get the best out of it; and an idealistic belief in decolonialism as a good in itself, with a moralistic desire to be on the ‘right side of history’.

Linlithgow and the making of Jinnah

Indian ‘self-determination’ had been policy for a generation, since Edwin Montagu’s declaration in 1917, in the previous war, and his vision of a ‘British Commonwealth of Nations bound together by its very freedom and mutual respect of all partners, acknowledging no difference in race or creed.’5 What this meant in reality was highly contested, and Linlithgow was of the old school. Nehru described him as ‘Slow of mind, solid as a rock, and with almost a rock’s lack of awareness.’6

In the early days of the war, Linlithgow met both Gandhi and Jinnah. Gandhi offered support but wanted a statement that Britain would give India independence at the end of the war. Linlithgow’s refusal to set such an aim (‘It was not a question of fighting for democracy but of beating Hitler’)7 would lead to Congress withdrawing from government. Jinnah, in contrast, offered unqualified support - but informed the Viceroy of his intentions from the start. ‘Muslim areas should be separated from “Hindu India” and run by the Muslims in collaboration with Great Britain’8 (my emphasis).

Similarly, Jinnah briefed Linlithgow 11 days before he went public with his declaration that the Muslims of India must form a separate ‘nation’ (24th March 1940). Jinnah wooed the Viceroy with his view that the British ‘might have to stay here for much longer than anticipated’; music to Linlithgow’s ears. Whilst British policy was to stay non-committal on the post-war future of India, particularly on the subject of Partition, Linlithgow publicly declared what was thereafter considered a guarantee for the India’s minorities:

It goes without saying that [HMG] could not contemplate transfer of their present responsibilities for the peace and welfare of India to any system of Government whose authority is directly denied by large and powerful elements in India’s national life. Nor could they be parties to the coercion of such elements into submission to such a Government.9

Jinnah requested that the Secretary of State repeat the statement in parliament, which he did. Despite the official position of the Government on not negotiating on the future arrangements of India, the seeds of Partition were sown.

This strengthened Jinnah significantly. The idea of an independent Pakistan was by no means accepted by all Muslims: it was opposed by the Muslim premiers of both Punjab and Bengal, and (as we shall see) the NWFP was ruled by Congress despite being overwhelmingly Muslim. Linlithgow stated to London that his policy was ‘to shepherd all the Muslims into the [Muslim League] fold’10 - effectively towards Jinnah and (eventually) Partition.

The initial logic was to combat Congress demands for immediate independence, rather than (at this stage) the breakup of India. Nonetheless, the more the talk of division, the more the logic pushed Muslims towards the Jinnah camp. The first Muslim National Guards were formed, a soft paramilitary. Meanwhile, Gandhi was advocating non-violence and even offered himself as an envoy to Hitler (‘Hitler is not a bad man' he claimed.)

Linlithgow was a palimpsest, not a driver of policy. His Viceroyalty saw two significant shifts: Churchill entering Number 10, and the US entering the war. Roosevelt pushed hard for both Indian independence and unity, fearing a divided India would be more liable to Soviet penetration. Churchill saw him off, for the time being, by over-stressing the contribution of Muslims to the military (he claimed, on more than one occasion, that they made up 75% of the Indian army, when the reality was more like a third), and in authorising the Cripps mission of 1942, which was ‘designed to fail’, and led to the Quit India movement, which further estranged Congress from the British.

Linlithgow handed over with a view that ‘Britain would have to continue responsibility for India for at least thirty years’ and that ‘the country was in pretty good trim’11. It was the height of the Bengal famine.

Wavell and the making of Pakistan

Wavell was a different beast. He was the first military Viceroy since the Mutiny, and dissolution of the East India Company, and not quite the stick-in-the-mud that his poetry anthology (Other Men’s Flowers, compiled in 1943) would suggest: the tum-te-tum Victorio-Georgianism of Browning and Kipling. He presented a copy to the imprisoned Nehru. His early efforts to ease the Bengal famine were in contrast with Linlithgow’s neglect: a million tons of grain were secured in 1944.

With Churchill still Prime Minister, British policy was still officially sceptical towards independence, and against the Pakistan option, although Churchill himself favoured (if it were necessary) a three-pronged solution: Pakistan, Hindustan and ‘Princestan’ (backing the third of India that was under the control of the Princely States). Wavell was no supporter of Congress: as Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army, he resented the damage to the war effort the party had promoted. Nonetheless, it's impossible to conclude he was anything other than an even-handed Viceroy.

Wavell travelled back to Britain in March 1945 to discuss the future of India with Churchill. The government was looking to the post-war settlement. A top-secret military report to the War Cabinet ordered by Churchill had concluded: ‘We must ensure that whatever constitutional changes occur, we retain the right to station military strategic reserves in India’12; and offered the suggestion of Baluchistan (now part of western Pakistan, bordering Iran) being detached as a British ‘base’ in the Indian Ocean.

Wavell himself was working towards a partition plan in 1945. In a note to the Cabinet (31 August 1945) he stated that the (failed) Cripps plan of 1942 had accepted partition as a ‘last resort’, but at the same time noted that the key provinces of Punjab and Bengal could not decide on which dominion to join - Pakistan or India - as the population mix was too close to call. The implication was that Jinnah’s Pakistan needed both to be feasible, but that the division of both would be necessary; in particular, the Sikhs could not be expected to live as a minority in [Pakistani] Punjab, and Calcutta and West Bengal could not be expected to go to east Pakistan [as became Bangladesh].

In a telling note, Sarila reports that the outgoing Churchill - long the ardent imperialist - told Wavell: ‘His final remark, as I closed the door of the lift, was: “keep a bit of India”.’13

The incoming Atlee administration was closer to Congress, committed to independence, and notionally attached to a united India (as was Nehru). Despite the rhetoric, both accepted the realities of the situation. At this stage, and after years of support from the British, it was Jinnah who needed restraint: his ‘maximal Pakistan’ would not only have included all of Punjab and Bengal, he was even seeking a corridor between the two across what is now the north-central provinces of India (Uttar Pradesh and Bihar).

Wavell submitted a ‘Breakdown Plan’ in August 1946, which in essence attempted to force both Congress and the Muslim League’s hand as a fait accompli. This had a number of striking features. First, Wavell stressed that the British would be unable to control events in the subcontinent within eighteen months - setting an effective deadline for independence of February 1948. Second, British Paramountcy (the protection of the Princely States) would be withdrawn unilaterally, for those lying within ‘Hindustan’ - effectively ceding British interests in states such as Hyderabad. Thirdly, Britain would retain the responsibility for the defence NW and NE India - that is, East and West Pakistan.

Wavell’s Viceroyalty ended with Congress and the Muslim League together in government, and much to do. Although the partitions of Punjab and Bengal were not official policy, he had drawn up maps in February 1946 which were followed with only minor alterations the next year. (See below for the Punjab.) Congress, meanwhile, agreed (internally) to accept a divided Punjab. Atlee set an end date for June 1948 for withdrawal.

Wavell was miffed at his swift removal, although he was on good terms with his successor. Atlee had criticised Wavell’s breakdown plan as ‘defeatist’, but proceeded to allow Mountbatten a free hand to accelerate the policy. The casualty was the other half of Wavell's plan: the retention of British troops into the newly created Pakistani zones to minimise disorder.

Churchill had attempted to put the question of Indian independence ‘in cold storage’ for the duration of the war. Wavell, on the ground, kept the question going. Leading Congress politician Maulana Azad put it: ‘To Lord Wavell must belong the credit for opening the closed door’.14

Mountbatten and the making of Partition

The second military Viceroy characterised the third type of attitude: the Progressive. Mountbatten’s instructions - 'to obtain a unitary government for British India and the Indian [Princely] States’ - were simply a facade. And Mountbatten’s accelerated timetable - nearly a year ahead of Atlee’s schedule but bearing in mind Wavell’s advice - would have the effect of concentrating the minds of all parties to get a ‘done deal’.

The first problem was to fix workable boundaries for Pakistan in the sensitive areas bordering Iran, Afghanistan and China. The NWFP province was 95% Muslim but voted continually for Congress, even in 1946. Mostly Pathan, this was a natural balancing mechanism against Muslim League domination, and in addition, many held Jinnah to be a stooge of the British. Mountbatten was pressing for a plebiscite to decide the issue, with the simple choice between India and Pakistan (to take the possibility of independence of the NWFP off the table). But, Sarila claims, Mountbatten had already agreed with Congress to persuade the Princes to opt for either India or Pakistan, rather than independence, and as part of the deal India would let the NWFP (and Baluchistan) go to Pakistan.15 The referendum was held in July, and Congress instructed its supporters to abstain. It therefore carried overwhelmingly, although if Congress had taken part, the vote may have been uncomfortably close - the vote in favour was 50.5% of the potential electorate. Mountbatten had secured one key element of Pakistan - with the support of Congress.

Mountbatten kept his promise, and most of the Princes had fallen in behind India or Pakistan before independence. Kashmir hadn’t. I have looked at the issue of Kashmir and partition before, but Sarila supplies some telling details. Firstly, Britain had expected Kashmir ‘naturally’ to opt for Pakistan, given its majority Muslim population. British interests were to ensure that the sensitive border areas were kept under its influence.

Gilgit and its surrounding areas were formally part of Jammu & Kashmir, but had been leased to the British by the Maharajah. This was rescinded fifteen days before independence. Militarily, the area was under the control of the Gilgit Scouts, run by two British officers, Major William Brown and Captain AS Matheison. When the Maharajah Hari Singh acceded his territory to India, the Scouts, under their British officers, surrounded the residency, fought a short battle, imprisoned the governor, and declared that Gilgit had acceded to Pakistan. Brown himself described it as a coup. Whether or not Brown was acting on British instructions is debatable; in any event he was awarded an OBE the following year. Pakistan gained a border with China and the road to Kashgar.

Over 500 British officers stayed on in the new Pakistani army: many more than the Indian equivalent. But both were commanded by British officers post-independence. Once war broke out, Pakistan rapidly gained the area which is now known as Azad Kashmir (on the Pakistani side of the line-of-control). General Gracey, commander of the Pakistani army, pointed out the strategic importance of this area: its loss would otherwise bring India within 30 miles of the main Peshawar-Lahore railway, and Mirpur (with the Mangla headworks - what would become the Mangla Dam) was important for irrigation of the Punjab.

Twice, over the course of the year, Indian troops had the opportunity to advance, and twice the commander of the Indian army, General Bucher, stymied the position on the ground. In March 1948, he telegraphed to his ‘opposite’ number that ‘he had no wish to pursue an offensive into what is effectively Azad Kashmir-controlled territory, ie to Mirpur and Poonch…’, and even instructed Gracey on the location of Pakistani forces to be deployed to resist!16 Again, in November of the same year, Indian ground forces were braced for another advance on Mirpur and Muzaffarabad, and again, Bucher repeated that he had no wish to advance. He ordered the withdrawal of the Indian air force from the conflict zone, and convinced Nehru that the Indian army was overstretched.

In truth, Nehru had accepted the partition of Kashmir along the lines that remain to today; the ceasefire came into effect on 1 January 1949. The two British commanders (backed by Mountbatten, who remained Governor-General of India after independence) had ensured that Pakistan would retain the territory it saw as vital. Bucher retired two weeks later, to be replaced by the Indian General Cariappa - the man whose advances in Kashmir he had halted.

The Disappeared History

Since its publication in 2005, Shadows has received scant attention in Britain. Philip Ziegler (Mountbatten’s biographer, remember) dismissed it as ‘interesting, if essentially wrong-headed’, without really engaging in the material; he writes that Sarila ‘assumes Atlee was paying far more attention to the issue’ than he was, where it is clear that policy was driven by the Viceroys on the ground, Wavell in particular. The politicians followed, rather than led.

Do Sarila’s claims stack up? ‘Britain’s “Pakistan Strategy” succeeded brilliantly’, he concludes, with Pakistan reliably western-aligned throughout the Cold War, from US U-2 spy planes based at Peshawar to the US supplying the mujahedeen through the Khyber Pass in the Soviet-Afghan war. Yet, calling it Britain’s “Pakistan Strategy” is something of a misnomer, and creates a source of attack. The emphasis on divide-and-delay under Linlithgow was clarified only by Wavell with the end of the war in sight, and the likely realignment of the Cold War. Added to the British interest in keeping oil from the Gulf secure was the impetus to keep at base against the Soviets.

Occasionally, Sarila assumes too much foresight by the British, particularly Linlithgow’s building up of Jinnah and the Muslim League. This is a shame, as it does not affect the tenor of the argument. There’s plenty of detail here, which should fundamentally change our understanding of Partition and the creation of Pakistan.

So, why has it disappeared? Sarila maintains that part of Mountbatten’s ‘mission’ was to create a narrative that the participants - India and Pakistan were the drivers of Partition, not the Brits. (This is one example of his overreach - it is surmised, and fits the facts, but not a matter than can be proven.) Nonetheless, dismissing it as Ziegler does as being ‘not his orders’ is spurious, when every action was contrary to those ‘orders’. And neither can it simply be a case of Britain wishing to wash its hands - injecting agency into the founding history of both nations was surely sensible to help them survive.

Sarila’s book goes against this, and against the settled (if evolving) narrative. ‘Partition’ is seen to be a feature of Mountbatten alone - he certainly explodes that. And Mountbatten himself has evolved from the Ziegler’s hero who did his duty under near-impossible pressures, to Roberts’ reckless villain responsible for a million deaths and tens of millions relocated, to von Tunzelmann’s hapless lightweight. There is truth in all of them, but all miss the point.

The counter-argument to consider is none of these critiques, but a more systemic one. To what extent were the events the playing out of the natural situation? For example, even absent divide-and-rule, the logic that Britain would take the position of Pakistan against the larger India is part of the inevitable dynamic of power, in a Jouvenelian sense. ‘Systems’ have a way of getting the better of ‘plans’.

Whether and to what extent this is true, Sarila provides plenty of evidence (much before unseen) that something approaching a ‘plan’ was devised by Wavell, and executed by Mountbatten. Even in this context, Mountbatten’s speed can be seen as less reckless, than the need for pressure to secure any kind of workable deal - deals are always done at the eleventh hour.

In fact, the strategic logic underlying Wavell’s ‘Breakdown Plan’ may even be seen as supporting Sarila’s thesis, rather than undermining it. Wavell himself appears honestly to have considered his partition plan as a last-resort failure, and worked until the end of his Viceroyalty towards what was the government’s stated aim, an independent united India. However, British interests (as expressed most clearly through the military briefings to Churchill referred to above) inevitably rose to prominence the closer the reality of independence approached.

In truth, the outcome of Partition suited all parties, not just the British. Despite Congress rhetoric of seeking a united independent India, in practice Nehru accepted and colluded with the process in the interests of a swift deal; in particular, letting the NWFP go to Pakistan in ‘exchange’ for the Princely states (particularly Hyderabad), and similarly with the Gilgit frontier for the vale of Kashmir.

Most importantly, we may surmise that the reason that Sarila has been dismissed is to mask the British ‘special relationship’ with Pakistan, including its very creation. I have written before of the long shadow of Mirpur, and the Mangla dam. The terrible legacy Mirpuri immigration wave is all too real in Britain today. It does not appear at any point to be in the interests of the British state to uncover the circumstances of Pakistan’s creation and more than the machinations over the Mangla dam; it is far more convenient to colour Partition through the changing lens of Mountbatten.

Appendix

Roberts’ essay in Eminent Churchillians is more of a diatribe against Mountbatten’s life and character (deserved though that is) than an analysis of the events of 1947. One incident where he does seek to demonstrate Mountbatten’s interference and bias is regarding the award of two districts, Ferozepur (now known as Firozpur) and Zira to Pakistan in an initial draft of Radcliffe’s report, being Muslim majority. According to Roberts, Mountbatten’s private secretary George Abell sent a copy of the draft map to the governor of the Punjab, Sir Evan Jenkins, and got a reply back with the simple words: ELIMINATE SALIENT.

Roberts then repeats the assumption of Sir Francis Mudie (later governor of Pakistani West Punjab) that Ferozepur was the site of an army munitions depot, and that its subsequent award to Pakistan ‘deprived the Pakistani of most of its weapons’17. Further, Roberts claims Ferozepur neighboured the princely state of Bikaner, whose Maharajah was an ‘old friend’ of Mountbatten’s; and that the headwaters of the canal which controlled the irrigation of Bikaner were located at Ferozepur.

Let’s look at the maps (usefully replicated in Sarila’s book) that Wavell and then Radcliffe drew for Partition:

Wavell (1946)

Radcliffe (1947)

You can see that the line is practically identical save for two areas: a section at the very north, sparsely populated and based around the town of Shakar Garh; and a ‘triangular’ section which I’ve roughly estimated on a modern map here:

I believe it is likelier that the ‘salient’ referred to is this one; a significant departure from the Wavell plan, and bringing the border within 20 miles (on a good road) of Lahore. (One - the approach from Amritsar had already been ‘agreed’, but this would presumably had been news to Jenkins.) For whatever reason, Jenkins’ request was denied. Firozpur was not for haggling over.

Firozpur - the disputed town - is 250 miles from Bikaner. This is very close to the point at which the Sutlej passes from India to (very roughly, with many exceptions) form the border between the two countries. Firozpur city was actually majority Hindu/Sikh, not Muslim, and the same is true for Firozpur District (larger than it is now, it extended to the border with Bikaner). In any event it would have been easy to adjust the border here to maintain the source of the Gang Canal. Whatever was going on, the irrigation of Bikaner was a sideshow.

Further, the source of the particular claim of Firozpur and Zira being awarded to Pakistan rests solely on the unpublished claims of one Christopher Beaumont, who worked on the Radcliffe Commission before becoming a judge in England. There’s very little about him, save for this article which refers to boundary-fixing without any specifics; his anti-Mountbatten stance is obvious.

If Firozpur was as important a weapons depot as is claimed (and ‘most of [Pakistan’s] weapons’ is surely an exaggeration) it is unthinkable that Radcliffe would have diverted Wavell’s border without taking that into account - or if he did, it would be a mistake to be reversed without exceptional influence from Mountbatten. Sarila shows that the Radcliffe Commission was itself a work of political theatre in any event. Sarila’s work shows that this is thin gruel on which to convict Mountbatten - there is no shortage of it.

The idea of a shared continental culture shatters conventional distinctions between Christian Europe and the Islamic empires and discloses the profound influence of Muslim life on a continent that has been moulded as much by Islamic civilization as by Latin Christendom.

It’s a claim as bold as the scope of the book, and (she states explicitly) an attempt to counter the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ narrative popularised by Samuel P. Huntington, and in response to the changing ethnic and religious mix of our continent. (Professor Huntington, of course, was addressing geopolitics rather than internal state relations.)

Crucible meanders between popular history of the Sultans and Princes, dates and battles variety; discussion of the interactions between Islam and the Christian West in intellectual and cultural fields; biographical tales of travellers, scholars and slaves; and diversions into cities and architecture. It could easily come across as unfocused, but doesn’t; flipping the reader’s attention frequently keeps the book flowing.

The history of Islam in Europe is that of two pincers from the south-west and the south-east, which (rather helpfully) barely overlap in time. Formal Islamic presence on the Iberian peninsular lasted from the first conquests of 711 to the final capitulation of Granada in 1492. In the Balkans, there had been a limited Ottoman presence in Europe for a century before from the middle of the fourteenth century, (Adrianople was renamed Edirne and made the capital), but it only after the final siege of Constantinople in 1453 that the Ottomans really established themselves as a European polity.

These are helpful in framing the narrative of a ‘continual’ presence of Islam in Europe. But the differences are as noticeable as the similarities. There were many Spanish states, from the initial Berber invasions, to the decampment of the last remnant of the Umayyads from Damascus and the establishment of their rival Caliphate, to the final Nasrid holdout in Granada. There were frequent dynastic changes, a result of both the ongoing battle with the Christian kingdoms, and inter-Muslim rivalries often springing from North Africa.

The Ottomans, in contrast, managed to run a largely coherent, united empire. Though constantly in competition on the European front and elsewhere, the dynasty of Osman proved remarkably stable. The early method of a new Sultan ordering the murder of his brothers was brutal but effective; the later method of keeping rivals ‘caged’ in the harem, away from public life less so. But it was an empire which managed to keep strategic focus on its external rivals.

Given this, one might expect that cultural exchange - Dr Drayson’s ‘crucible’ - would have been more likely in Constantinople than Cordoba. Without trying to run counterfactuals across time, a significant factor must be the millet system. The Ottomans managed their different faith communities as self-governing ‘nations’ running with considerable independence over their own communal affairs, such as schooling and (internal) laws. But social and political advancement could only be made by a Muslim.

It was a system designed to reconcile the needs of the Empire’s different faiths rather than develop the sort of cultural crossover of the ‘Crucible’; and it worked well, until it didn’t.

Drayson highlights the Armenian Genocide, although her statement that it ‘appeared not to be a religious issue’ as Islam prohibits genocide is spurious. Germany did not tempt the Ottoman Empire into the war ‘with gold and state-of-the art ships’; Germany was reluctant to ally with an empire it feared would be a liability, and in fact it was the seizure of two Dreadnoughts being built by Britain for the Ottomans (Churchill’s idea) which tipped the balance1. And repeating the claim the neolithic site of Göbekli Tepe is in any way ‘Turkish’ is repeating Kemalist propaganda - it predates the arrival of the Turks in Anatolia by something like 10,000 years. It’s on a par with the annual claim that ‘St George was Turkish, actually’.

Still, this is not a convincing argument that Europe as a whole was affected by Islam. The Arabs of Iberia were turned back at Poitiers, and the Ottomans from Vienna (finally) in 1683. It’s good to hear of the tale of the Lipka Tatars in Jan Sobieski’s defence of the Hapsburg capital (in fact Lipkas continued to serve in the Polish army up to the Second World War). Dr Drayson’s claim that Sobieski ‘remains the only European ruler to have established a lasting Muslim community in a non-Islamic European country’ is wrong, though; the Lipkas had been part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for centuries, and whilst he did restore their rights and freedoms, hard-headed politics was as likely a reason as tolerant enlightenment.

One part of Europe that has a long history of interaction with Islam is skated over very briefly - Russia. We have a short sketch of Tatarstan, the Russian republic that is half-Muslim, a legacy of the Kazan Khanate. Dr Drayson calls it a ‘land of tolerance’, mirroring the image that Russia itself presents. Russia had its own orientalists, from Lermontov’s love of the Caucasus to Kuznetzov’s idyllic pictures of Central Asia; and an intellectual tradition embracing Islam as an antidote to Western liberalism. The book covers enough ground seriously to contend with Russia own complex history with her Muslim subjects, but an important frontier of Europe’s interaction with Islam is missed.

Much of Europe therefore had little direct contact with Islam at all, particularly as intellectual and economic power moved northwards. And this can’t be cast as Christian prejudice - for example, the Ottoman were invited to the Congress of Vienna, but Sultan Mahmud II declined. We must fall back on the wider context of ‘cultural exchange’ to establish Dr Drayson’s claim.

The transmission of the Classics through Arabic translations is well known - and along with Abbasid Baghdad, Umayyad al-Andalus is central. It is a tale of Avicenna and Averroes, the astrolabe and portolan, that only the most general reader will not be familiar with, but is always worth telling. In an era of mechanistic translation-by-AI, the immediacy and subtlety of real-world cultural exchanges of a Cordoba or Toledo provide a relevance which would not have been apparent even a decade ago.

The scholars of the Islamic Golden Age were great preservers within the tradition, but (to my mind) there is one thinker who blasts aside the trait of conformism: the historian Ibn Khaldun. Originally from North Africa, he moved to the Nasrid court of Granada, where he came into competition with Sultan Mohammad’s vizier al-Khatib (who is mentioned), before settling in Cairo. An wide-ranging and original thinker, he ‘basically invented what we would now call the social sciences’ (Paul Krugman) and was even cited by Ronald Reagan. His great work, the Muqaddimah, is a study of the cyclical nature of history, and introduces his concept of asabbiyah (group collectiveness) as a driver of imperial expansion - and the loss of it presaging collapse. Perhaps this is at odds with the author’s vision of peaceful multiculturalism, but his omission is glaring.

Crucible’s focus on the Iberia and the Ottomans does not allow much in the way of literary exchanges - it is the Persian poets who have influenced the Western canon from Goethe to Bunting. I must stand up for Dante, who is cited for consigning Muhammad to hell as an example of prejudice against Islam. In fact five Muslims appear in the Commedia: Muhammad and Ali do appear in Canto 28 of the Inferno, the sowers of religious and civil strife - the same circle to which troubadour Bertans de Born is consigned (who Dante respected as a poet). Averroes, Avicenna and Saladin make it into Limbo - as high as a ‘virtuous pagan’ can be admitted (including the poet’s guide, Virgil).

Fortunately, Dr Drayson does not support the Edward Said school of Orientalism, viewing every Western engagement with Islam (and other cultures) as either exploitative or patronising. Pushback against Said is always welcome - the West’s long scholarly and artistic engagement with the East has been (mainly at least) an honest and productive one, for both parties.2

A strength of Crucible is the author’s feel for architecture and place, from the Alhambra’s ‘intentional confusion’ to ‘Venice, the Serenissima, created its own mystique, coming out of the water, rootless, undefined…’ Cultural exchange is demonstrated best through architecture, from the Great Mosque of Cordoba to the imperial mosques of Sinan. (I’m with Charles V, who, on seeing the conversion of Cordoba into a cathedral: ‘You have taken something that was unique in the world and turned it into something mundane.’)

There is no greater gift to Dr Drayson’s cultural exchange than Sinan. We will never know if his origins were Armenian or Greek3, but he was certainly a Christian taken in the devşirme, the Ottoman system of ‘recruitment’ of Christians into the imperial slave Janissary corps. Although brutal, it was also an opportunity for social advancement, and it was not unknown for parents to collude. Contact with families would be broken, and conversion required - Sinan, at the time likely just over 20, would have undergone circumcision. Calling him a ‘European Muslim’ (as the author does) is wrong.

Sinan’s genius is everywhere in Istanbul, from the imperial Süleymaniye to the inventive mosques built for princesses and viziers. His impact on the city is better compared to Wren’s London than Michelangelo. The case for Christian/Muslim interactions in the great age of Ottoman architecture are in fact stronger than Crucible portrays. Whatever Sinan’s origins were, many of the masons involved were Armenian, and the accounts of the Süleymaniye are in Armenian4.

The impact of Christian architects in fact stretches both forwards and backwards in time. Drayson refers to the nineteenth century Dolmabahçe Palace by the Armenian Balyan family; a sense of their prolific output can been seen here. Greeks and Armenians are recorded as dominating architecture in the18th century5. Beyazit II’s fifteenth century mosque in Istanbul was built by another Armenian convert, Yakubshah6. And before the Ottomans, the Seljuks utilised local architects after they invaded Anatolia after the battle of Manzikert in 1071. Early tombs are near replicas of the domed rotunda of Armenian churches. Names of most of these architects are lost to time, but there are glimpses; the Sivas Gökmedrese was built by a Kaluyan or Kaluk ibn Abdullah, almost certainly a Greek, and the wonderful Inceminerali Medrese in Konya by Keluk bin Abdullah7, seemingly an Armenian.

The facade of the Inceminerali Medrese

Crucible both understates and overstates the case. Cultural exchange is important, but it is not the same as multiculturalism. Scholars and monarchs may take a real interest in the exotic for deep or fashionable reasons, and the odd traveller or pirate may go rogue. This is not the same thing as different cultures living side-by-side, day-to-day; as the author quotes (from a nineteenth century traveller in Ottoman Albania) ‘in a state of segregated hostility, which manifested itself in petty crimes, revenge, feuds and murder’.

Islam is not monolithic, any more than Christianity, as Crucible itself demonstrates. The historical experiences it relates are of civilisations living alongside each other for centuries (after an initial invasion, at least). The situation we are experiencing in the West now is different. Drayson depicts immigration as people ‘coming to work’, which is not at all clear; the UK’s principal Muslim communities arrived here as part of a relocation arrangement from Pakistan, and following a war of independence (Bangladesh); followed by chain migration. More recent waves have followed from countries with little or no connection to this country, from Somalia to Syria. It is an unprecedented experiment.

Dr Drayson is even-handed in her history, as happy to record Umayyad renegade Abd al Rahman’s packing fellow Muslims’ heads in salt to send as a message back to Baghdad, or Ottoman Sultan Selim I’s instruction to kill every Shi’ite aged between 7 and 70 in his realms; as any Christian outrages. Roger II’s Sicily is held up as a beacon of tolerance as much as Toledo. Drayson leans on the tiller as she sails through her waters; not unreasonably so, but from a implicit position that it is we - the ‘Latin West’ - that must do the toleration.

Crucible ends with Granada as a model for a tolerant future, but as the author admits elsewhere there were no Christians there by the time it fell. Dr Drayson’s own crucible - an amalgam of culture, history, place and people - is a valuable and wide-ranging book with much interest. The tolerance of the Crucible of Light, though, would seem to be the historical exception, not the rule.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: America’s Grand Strategist, Justin Vaïsse (tr Catherine Porter) (Harvard University Press, 2018)

Zbigniew Brzezinski only held formal office for four years: as National Security Adviser to Jimmy Carter (January 1977 to January 1981). He was Carter’s closest adviser (his first and last meetings as President were with Zbig), generally winning the President’s ear in confrontations with the State Department. With the Carter one-term administration widely seen as a foreign policy failure, his reputation has suffered. In addition, in the imputed ‘rivalry’ with his predecessor professor, Henry Kissinger, he is usually seen as being less influential.

Both of these should be reassessed, and these two books provide good support for it. Luce’s is the more conventional biography; not authorised but benefitting from wide access to Brzezinski’s archive and family access. Vaïsse intersperses biography with more reflective, academic passages, and gives more space to Brzezinski’s intellectual development. Luce’s book is of course written in the light of the Russia/Ukraine war. I would recommend both for anyone interested in geopolitics of the Cold War to the present day.

A militant Brzezinski at the Khyber Pass, 1980

Before the White House

Brzezinski came from a family of Polish szlachta nobility, his father a diplomat in France, Germany (when Hitler came to power) and the USSR (Kharkiv). Like most Poles, Brzezinski Senior was fiercely patriotic, his hero Józef Piłsudski, the first president of the Second Polish Republic formed after the Great War; architect of the Miracle on the Vistula and architect of ‘Prometheanism’, the concept of weakening the Russian Empire, and following the revolution, the USSR, through separatist and nationalist movements in an arc ranging from Ukraine, through the Kuban and Don basins, and down to the South Caucasus. It was a strategy central to Brzezinski’s thinking, from his academic work to his time as NSA and beyond.

The Brzezinskis fled to Canada during the war and his parents remained there, in increasing penury after the Polish government fell, for the rest of their lives. Zbig only took US citizenship in 1958 after his academic career took him to Harvard and then Columbia. Two years later he was involved in Kennedy’s election campaign.

Brzezinski’s academic career was as a Sovietologist. His master’s thesis was on the ‘problem of the nationalities’: the USSR had failed to create a Homo Sovieticus, and the USSR was no more than a continuation of the Russian Empire. Early support for Ukrainian nationalism is evident: ‘The Ukrainians have a definite national tradition customs, culture, literature and history’1. It was an early (1950) depiction of Stalin-as-Czar. Nationalism would be the USSR’s Achilles’ heel - both within, and in the countries which would become the Warsaw Pact. As Luce puts it, he ‘laid out a road map for defeating the Soviet Union.’2

Brzezinski’s doctoral thesis was equally bold, and published as The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism. He argues that purges are not illogical, but rather an essential component of a totalitarian system. The purge is a substitute for politics:

Totalitarianism has thus sought to give a meaning to a life which for many had rapidly become mechanistic, isolated, and frightening. And this desperate need of the individual to feel a sense of belonging and purpose provides the base for totalitarian violence.

The purge is an expression of the regime’s power, not an effort to achieve it. a purge is thus the supreme example of totalitarian success.3

Brzezinski’s two most important works before turning to politics full-time were Political Power: USA/USSR (1964, co-authored with Sam Huntington) and Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (1970). The theme that runs through both is central Brzezinski : the decline of the Soviet Union - at a time when much of the West was under the illusion of strategic parity. Political Power may be seen as something of a riposte to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution. The authors attack the concept of convergence between systems of the West and the Communist Bloc: ‘ideological mobilization and political control would win out over the emergence of common features’.4 Between Two Ages (let us be thankful that the ugly neologism in its subtitle didn’t catch on) is something of a technological naval-gazing exercise, but at its heart is an unabashedly simple message that America is winning, and will win, the technological race. Both are intrinsically ‘optimistic’ works, which underlie one key aspect of Brzezinski’s time in office: that the US should negotiate from a position of strength, not submit to détente.

Vaïsse devotes more time to Brzezinski’s pivotal role in setting up the Trilateral Commission; Luce the journalist is probably keen to downplay his role in something that attracts the ‘conspiracy-minded’. In truth, it is little more than one of many talking-shops, originally founded to bring Japan into greater dialogue with the US and Europe (the three ‘sides’). Brzezinski tired of the talking-shop; its real legacy was that it introduced him to Jimmy Carter.

The White House Years

The case against the Carter presidency is that in was ended by a foreign policy disaster: the Iranian revolution of 1979, and the failed hostage crisis which followed. And the two main foreign policy planks - the SALT II nuclear limitation treaty and the Camp David accords between Egypt and Israel - were failures too; the former abandoned after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the latter by Israel’s continued disregard for reaching any settlement with the Palestinians, despite winning recognition from Egypt. I’ll skip over Camp David here, as it was the only foreign policy issue of the White House years on which Brzezinski played a marginal role.

The case is more complex on inspection. Firstly, the Carter presidency remains the only one post-war where the US did not suffer any deaths in combat (although eight died in the failed attempt to rescue the Tehran hostages). It will be interesting to see if Trump II matches this, or whether it just gets others killed.

Losing Iran was a strategic disaster for the US, but it wasn’t a failure of policy, rather of competence. Neither State nor the CIA had picked up on the unrest in Tehran. The ambassador was asleep at the wheel:

William Sullivan, the US ambassador, had just returned to Tehran after having spent an eye-popping three months out of the country on vacation. Before his vanishing act, he had in May sent a note on the Shah's outlook. ‘Iran has now reached the position of a stable and moderate middle-level power,’ he wrote. ‘There are no outstanding issues of such serious magnitude that they need to be identified in this memorandum.’… US intelligence reports about Iran were ‘sheer gobbledegook masquerading as informed judgement’.5

As the ailing Shah dithered, Sullivan went rogue. Brzezinski favoured a strong approach, repeating the 1953 coup if necessary. Sullivan was holding secret talks with Ayatollah Khomeini (against Carter’s orders), under the illusion that he was a Gandhi figure who would usher in democracy. Secretary of State Vance agreed. The Shah fled, and events unfolded in the way that Brzezinski had been predicting.

The failed hostage rescue attempt was certainly the fault of the White House. The plan was absurdly over-optimistic by the military, and in reality it was a political gamble as the 1980 election approached. Brzezinski was an unlikely hawk thereafter, wary of the military’s ability to deliver.

The dovish Carter was certainly keen on nuclear limitation in SALT II, and this was an undoubted failure. This was another pet project of Vance and State (keen to continue détente), against the more hard-line advice of the NSA. But the picture of a weak Carter is too simple: after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the administration flipped to a much tougher position, authorising the commencement of the next-generation MX missiles, which the Reagan administration simply continued (at half the level previously proposed). ‘I rammed the initiative through the NSC myself’, Brzezinski later claimed.6

The other side of the Afghan invasion is the claim that the Soviets had been lured into a trap set by the cunning Brzezinski. This would seem to be half-true; Vaïsse quotes from an interview with the man himself:

We didn't really trap them, but we knew what they were doing, and they knew what we were doing. And what we knew was that they were inject ing themselves into Afghanistan. But anyway, what happened is we knew they were injecting their forces into Afghanistan, already in the summer, we also knew that the Mujahideen were resisting. So we first started to give them money, about six months before the Soviets went in. When we started to give them money, I told Carter that I think they'll go in, and they'll probably use that as an excuse in part, but that they'le going in anyway, because they are taking over the regime. So we didn't suck them in but we knew what we were doing, namely we were in a sense engaging them in a preliminary skirmishing, prior to their more overt intervention.7

It is striking but not surprising that Brzezinski was very happy to see an intervention in Afghanistan, when he would later use to influence to reduce the risk of intervention in Poland. The rise of Solidarność (Solidarity) in 1980 brought the USSR to the verge of military intervention, a twelve-year repeat Hungary in 1956 and the Prague Spring of 1968. The US was aided by one of its finest intelligence assets, Ryszard Kukliński, no less than the Polish general staff’s chief liaison to the Soviet military. Brzezinski’s strategy was a mix of appeasement and threats: recognition of the USSR’s zone of influence combined with hints of consequences in the case of military intervention (including leaks of increased weapon supply to China) and warnings that the Poles would fight. The Pope was deployed (the two Poles had become friends) and Solidarity warned not to push their luck. The invasion didn’t happen.

The last main foreign policy ‘win’ for which the Carter administration receives too little credit was the normalisation of relations with China. Nixon’s 1971 visit was certainly important, but relations had stalled after his resignation. (Opening up China was his idea, and Kissinger was lukewarm on it.) Brzezinski struck up a good relationship with Deng, and led the deal personally (State were largely frozen out). Arrangements included intelligence-sharing and technology transfer - the first step on the path to WTO membership under Clinton. China’s path to growth was secured.

Zbig’s later influence

It is difficult to gauge the level importance of ex-advisers once they leave office; Brzezinski (like Kissinger) became one of the ‘wise men’ formally and informally consulted on policy, and a frequent TV talking head; but that it not the same as direct influence. It is easy to attach too much weight. But what we can say is that US foreign policy consistently moved in a direction with which Brzezinski advocated and agreed - particularly when it comes to Russia and central Europe.

Brzezinski is claimed to have (in some capacity) advised every president from Johnson to Obama - with the sole exception of George W. Bush. Reagan is reputed to have considered offering him the role of NSA twice, although it is questionable whether this would have been politically feasible. He went against party lines to endorse Bush Senior in 1988, and advised on a visit to Poland the vice-president undertook in the run-up to the election. He switched back to supporting the Democrats in the person of Clinton, but was then largely critical, particularly of the administration’s ‘Russia-first’ drive to integrate it within the West. And he was a key early backer of Obama’s campaign - an early endorsement in the primaries gave the incomer a helpful boost over Hilary Clinton, and he was in regular contact over foreign policy.

Poland - and Ukraine - were a central focus of Brzezinski after the break-up of the USSR. The Carter administration had doubled Poland’s credit as an attempt to boost its economy and move it westwards; in 1985 he met with General Jaruselski with an offer of $200 million (backed by David Rockefeller) to invest in the agricultural sector. He was a vociferous lobbyist for NATO enlargement from the start; the Clinton administration was at first lukewarm, although the appointment of Zbig’s old protégée Madeleine Albright (herself of Czech origin) as Clinton’s second Secretary of State helped. Poland (along with the Czech Republic and Hungary) were admitted in 1999.

Brzezinski’s most important book after leaving office was The Grand Chessboard (1997).8 It’s a mixed work; in large part advocacy passing for analysis, and lacks the originality of his earlier thinking. The book is a rendering of Halford Mackinder’s Heartland concept into an extended policy paper with the aim of maximising American influence in Eurasia - Eurasia is a ‘prize’ to be ‘managed’. He identifies five geopolitical ‘pivots’ - Ukraine, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran and South Korea - countries which need to be ‘won’ for the West (or neutralised).

Despite his key role in China normalisation two decades earlier, Brzezinski underestimates the rise of the Middle Kingdom (admittedly, this was before WTO entry, which supercharged growth). India is also downplayed, and Pakistan skipped over. His focus (as ever) is Russia - which he describes as a ‘black hole’. (This being so, it is surprising he doesn’t upgrade Kazakhstan to a ‘pivot’; he rated Uzbekistan as more important, despite the former’s resources, geography and substantial Russian minority.)

But Ukraine is key. As he puts it:

Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chess-board, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.9

He argues for negotiations for Ukraine’s NATO membership as early as 2005-2010. And whilst he does not explicitly seek confrontation with Russia, he wants ‘modernisation’ and more free-markets, seemingly unaware of the US’s role in the disastrous privatisation programme, which immiserated ordinary Russians. He even calls for a ‘loosely confederated Russia - composed of a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic’: a concept which, unwittingly or not, would surely presage the destruction of the Russia itself.

His concept of the ‘democratic bridgehead’ is illustrated in the book here:

Brzezinski’s Ukrainian advocacy was not limited to print. He was a frequent visitor to the new state, and Luce describes him as a ‘mentor’ to the first two presidents, the Leonids Kravchuk and Kuchma. His US-Ukraine advisory group lobbied the Clinton administration continually, and his son Ian even spent three years in the country as a ‘military adviser’. Upcoming senator Joe Biden was a frequent visitor to Brzezinski’s dinners.

Brzezinski was of course not alone in being a Russia hawk, or advocating NATO expansion eastwards - indeed a raft of foreign policy experts have come to the fore with roots from Mitteleuropa, from Madeleine Albright to Victoria Nuland, displacing the WASP elite that dominated US international relations before Kissinger and Brzezinski broke through. But it is certain than Brzezinski’s stance has won the day.

The Rivals

It is impossible not to like the portrait of Brzezinski the man, his chainsaw-wielding artist wife Muska, and their feral pony Strawberry, whose lower lip would ‘quiver in cartoonish appreciation’ when Zbig gave him a shot of vodka.10 It is hard to imagine a greater contrast with the oleaginous Kissinger. Their rivalry was both real and scripted.

Kissinger turned himself into a brand and a business. His primary goal seemed to be to stay as close as he could to power, partly for its own sake and partly to keep access to ‘sell’ to his business clients. As a result he was happy to shift positions with the political tide. Long-serving Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin summed him up well: ‘You could see that he is still an unprincipled politician, and a political chameleon who only cares about staying visible in the US public life and returning to power.’11

Kissinger was the superior scholar, from his early work on Metternich and the Congress of Vienna, to 1994’s magisterial Diplomacy. Much more has been written about him, partly because of the media fascination with the unlikely rotund Jewish playboy since his first appointment as Nixon’s NSA. He believed his own publicity, and cultivated his cult.

Kissinger’s double-dealing limited his impact once he had left office. One example: after the Shah had fled Iran, there was much debate around whether he should be admitted to the US for medical treatment, a move which would undoubtedly endanger the US hostages. Kissinger (with his old patron Nelson Rockefeller) lobbied hard for the US to ‘do the right thing’ for its old client, and promised Carter his support. But once Iranian assets had been frozen, he changed his tune, going public with criticism of the administration’s handling of the crisis, and calling for the Shah to return to Mexico. Rockefeller’s Chase Manhattan bank had been heavily exposed to Iran, and Kissinger had just played long until its position was secured. Secretary of State Vance was instructed to ‘read [Kissinger] the riot act’.12

Brzezinski could be blunt in his Polish way, but there was no hint of manipulativeness about him. He was happy to take unpopular positions, such as endorsing (with caveats) Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby, adding to old accusations of his antisemitism. And he would take a chance on backing an underdog he trusted: as he had done with Carter, and as he would do with Obama. Zbig’s advice was trusted; and hence could carry more weight.

The rivals respected each other, and corresponded as ‘friends’. Luce interviewed the aged Kissinger and asked, were they friends? ‘Actually, no’, he replied13. It is hard to imagine Kissinger having friends.

Shortly after leaving office, Brzezinski was asked why he was unpopular. He replied: ‘It is not a popular thing to remind people that power is important, that it has to be applied, that sometimes decisions which are not fully compatible with what the world ideally ought to be like need to be taken.’14

The Carter administration was defined by foreign policy, and Carter’s foreign policy was defined by Zbig. He steeled Carter’s evangelical idealism and State’s inherent caution, paving the way for the Reagan era. His inherent suspicion of Russia - in both its communist and post-Soviet forms - was a constant. He appears to have been the first to compare Putin to Hitler after the short Russia/Georgia war of 2008, and the occupation of South Ossetia.

Brzezinski would undoubtedly be happy with the position of Poland today - at the vanguard of NATO militarism and economically resurgent. Promethianism is ongoing, from the upcoming elections in Moldova to the realignment of Armenia. Whether this amounts to a grand strategy is another matter; in The Grand Chessboard he warned ‘a coalition allying Russia with both China and Iran can develop only if the United States is shortsighted enough to antagonize China and Iran simultaneously’.

For good or ill, the Polish knight predicted and helped bring about the Eurasian chessboard we live with today. It is a world as chaotic as the seventies, but without the statesmen to match.

The world of the rainbow lanyard. I knew I had saved this picture for a reason.

Some future historian of the BBC will come to a judgement of the last watchable series the Corporation produced. A candidate will be Bodies (2004-6), in two series and a one-off sequel, set in the Obstetrics and Gynaecology ward of a major hospital. It is a window back in time, into what could be presented on public television, and how the NHS itself has changed over two decades. A leitmotiv runs through it - the two-tone buzz of the entry system, to which everyone from consultants to visitors must press to gain access to the ward.

The drama focuses on two rival consultants. As the series begins, Mr Whitman (played by Keith Allan) is senior. He represents the old school; in favour of uncompromising standards, keeping management at bay, and seducing every trainee nurse he can. His younger challenger, Roger Hurley (Patrick Baladi) represents the newer generation: less clinically trained, a ‘management poodle’, a good family man. The trouble is, he’s not very good at his job. Clinical mistakes lead to his colleagues debating whether to ‘blow the whistle’ - report him to management. Much of the drama centres on his new registrar, Rob Lake (something of a cypher character), who is persuaded to do so, against the code of honour of the medics.

The series’ creator, Jed Mercurio, draws the dilemma well. Hurley is defensive and supercilious, but is willing to take on harder cases which Whitman will pass over, to protect his stats. He may not be the best surgeon, but he’s a good researcher, whereas Whitman persuades his registrar to massage results from drug trials. Hurley is in favour of the hospital setting up a high-risk pregnancy unit; Whitman is against the reputational risk. Hurley is not completely unaware of his deficiencies - at one point he stresses to Whitman the difference in training hours the two generations have had; and points out that ‘he is the future’. He’s strangely reminiscent of the contemporary David Cameron.

The old-school ethic of ‘what happens with doctors stays between doctors’ is upheld by the rigour of the monthly M&M (mortality and morbidity) meetings, where the ‘firms’ of the ward consultants are held to account. It is excellence through competition - and account by shaming - that relies on ruthless professionalism rather than routine managerialism. It is a world of results, not time-sheets.

Management is represented by the hospital’s Chief Executive, Paul (later Sir Paul) Tennant. Both consultants, in their different ways, play him, but (to his credit) he does not want to get involved in medical matters, but drive a culture of box-ticked ‘excellence’. Much of plot the first series is the pursuit of a medical negligence claim from a patient of Roger Hurley, which his junior Lake supports; Tennant’s interest is in paying off the victims but without admitting any negligence, and covering up the whistle-blowing. Lake somehow (somewhat unbelievably) survives; the consultant anaesthetist who complains with him is destroyed and placed on indefinite psychiatric leave.

It’s a brutal picture of the NHS, in which transgressions are kept on personnel files for use against staff in the future. The ward’s senior sister is reported to management for calling a mixed-race child a ‘little monkey’ (entirely innocently). Promotion by denunciation is practiced by a Polish nurse. The camera lingers on a poster referring to manual handling: ‘Watch your Back’.

Twenty years ago, the BBC did not feel the need to race-signal in the way in now does. One memorable character, a fat black woman from personnel, recurs in meetings, never saying anything but constantly eating biscuits. There’s a contrasting portrait of two junior doctors: a lazy, entitled British Indian who tries to seduce Hurley, alongside a white earnest young Christian, bullied by Hurley (who deliberately gets him name wrong), but in the end comes good under pressure. And a locum Nigerian anaesthetist spends his time in theatre trying to buy a car on his phone rather than monitoring his patient, while Hurley complains that he can’t understand his thick accent.

Keith Allen and Patrick Baladi

I’m no fan of Angela Rayner, least of all a defender of this government. It’s an embarrassment that such a figure sits in the cabinet, and if we try to console ourselves that she holds the made-up job of Deputy Prime Minister rather than one of the great offices, we only have to remind ourselves of David Lammy. Nonetheless, her stamp duty mishap does to me look like an honest mistake. She appears to have set up a trust for her son with compensation from the NHS, after his premature birth. According to the Telegraph: ‘The payout followed an 11-year legal battle waged between the Rayners and the hospital where her son was born. Sources suggested the NHS had paid compensation following difficulties during his birth and subsequent care in 2008. Final payments can take years to be made because of the lengthy process for assessing long-term damage.’

According to the same article, had she waited a few months until her son reached 18, the tax loophole she found herself in would not have applied. It seems to me to be a grey area - and here, a tax expert comes to her defence, admitting that he would not have known. It seems to me that she was unlucky, not negligent or deliberate.

The bigger issue is NHS negligence. Total liabilities from clinical negligence are currently provided for by NHS Resolution at £60.3 billion, and annual payments now exceed £3 billion (see annual accounts here). Around 60% of the this cost is related to maternity. And it’s getting worse: 65% of maternity units are now graded ‘inadequate’ or ‘requiring improvement’.

Clinical risk is of course always going to be high in maternity, and payouts for negligence will be higher as they seek to provide for a lifetime of care.

But the real scandal is not Rayner’s tax affairs, but the culture of the NHS which allows such negligence. It is a culture of paying phenomenal sums for negligence without admitting it. Bodies represented the culture at the cusp of a final turn from professionalism to managerialism two decades ago. Mercurio has descended from creating a series critical of the NHS to a toadying portrayal of the service during Covid, based on the memoirs of the grifting part-time doctor Rachel Clarke.

One final thing strikes me about Bodies: it was a time before lanyards. At one point, Sir Paul Tennant is impatient when the door buzzer to the O&G ward is not answered immediately, and whips out his management card to swipe himself in. It was a world of human access, imperfect and mistake-filled, but with a vestige of a old-world professionalism. The world of the rainbow lanyard is infinitely worse.

Update:

Somebody kindly shared this interview with Rayner from the height of Covid, where she praises the NHS for her ‘miracle’, whilst in dispute with them over compensation. Hypocrisy is a resigning matter.

At the heart of Armenia’s dilemma is it's geopolitical orientation, and the conflicting transport corridors: East/West connecting with Turkey and Europe Azerbaijan and across the Caspian to Central Asia; or North/South, from India, through Iran and up to Georgia and Russia. Armenia’s Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan is pushing the former, with the enthusiastic backing of Europe, a project he calls the Crossroads of Peace.

Pashinyan’s authoritarian turn predates the recent arrests, and his feud with the Apostolic Church has been going on since he came to power in 2018. Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan’s arrest on 25 June was not unexpected: he was the leading figure in last year’s protests against government policy, in particular the ‘border delimitation’ process which saw the Armenian government cede land in his diocese of Tavush. Meandering Soviet borders (which were, remember, internal) not only cut across roads, but also assigned hamlets as ‘micro-exclaves’ to either side, depending on ethnicity. The Pashinyan government ‘delimited’ land to Azerbaijan, whilst corresponding areas in Azerbaijan were not ‘delimited’ back to Armenia.

Detained Archbishop Bagrat at last year’s protests

The precedent was set: concessions would only go one way. But this was not just about some farmers’ fields falling one side of the border or another: Pashinyan’s concessions cut one of the two roads north to Georgia, put at risk the pipeline from Russia from which Armenia receives its gas, and ceded strategic high territory to Baku. At the same time, Azerbaijan sits in occupation of some 215 sq km of Armenian territory in the south of the country.

These border disputes foreshadow the largest issue facing the prospect of peace. Azerbaijan’s exclave of Nakhichevan, which shares a tiny border (basically one road) with Turkey. A consistent demand of Azerbaijan and Turkey has been the opening of a corridor between Azerbaijan and Nakhichevan (and hence Turkey), which they call the Zangezur Corridor. The Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement of 2020 envisaged that this would be overseen by Russia, but given the deterioration of relations with the Armenian regime over the last five years, this is no longer feasible. The location, administration and legal basis of a corridor are key contentions.

Transit (with normal customs checks) currently passes along the Iranian side of the border. But the Turkic states are demanding that traffic pass freely - whilst Pashinyan (superficially) is maintaining a position that Armenian sovereignty must not be compromised. There are suggestions that the practical transportation through the corridor be controlled by a corporate third party, in particular a US one (a stance promoted by the US Ambassador to Turkey). Azeri President Aliyev’s rhetoric is uncompromising: ‘Our cargo and citizens should not have to see the face of an Armenian border guard every time they pass through there.’ Aside from the legal doubts which must be inherent in such a proposal, it is clear that an external power - particularly the US - controlling the border between Armenia and Iran at the Meghri crossing would only favour the Western powers.

Alongside this is the threat of what the ‘Zangezur Corridor’ actually means. Prominent Azeri politicians promote a Zangezur that includes all of Armenia’s southernmost Syunik province as the ‘corridor’, a threat of territorial annexation that goes back to the days between the collapse of the Russian empire and the establishment of Soviet power in the South Caucasus.

But the aggressive Azeri rhetoric does not stop at Syunik. Aliyev himself promotes the narrative of ‘Western Azerbaijan’ - the current Republic of Armenia, not the actual province of Iran of that name - as Azeri land, and pressing a ‘right of return’ of ‘displaced’ Azeris:

‘The day will come when our compatriots from West Azerbaijan, their relatives, children, and grandchildren will return to our historical land, West Azerbaijan. I am sure that this day will come and I am sure that the West Azerbaijanis will return to their native lands with great enthusiasm’, he said.

He added that Armenia was being ‘depopulated’ because of ‘the intolerable political situation: repressions, virtual dictatorship and economic difficulties.’

It is worrying to note an echo of Aliyev’s threats in Stewart’s article.

Behind this rhetoric is a false equivalence: that ethnic Armenians could return to Artsakh as long as ethnic Azeris can ‘return’ to Armenia. The fact is that Artsakh was always ancient Armenian land, even after being gifted by Stalin to the Azeri SSR. The hard reality for Armenia is that Russia allowed Azeri forces to advance for 44 days in 2020, and then halted the conflict in a position of hopeless weakness for Artsakh: with Azeri troops occupying the high ground above the capital of Stepanakert, and linked to Armenia only by another narrow corridor (Lachin). Russian ‘peacekeeping’ troops, for the first time since Soviet days, were put on the ground.

Azerbaijan waited, cut the Lachin corridor, and starved Artsakh of supplies for nine months before launching a short offensive in September 2023. This was not an opportunistic response Russia’s war in Ukraine: the two countries had signed an enhanced military and strategic treaty of co-operation two days before Putin launched the invasion. (It was signed at 20:20 on 22/2/2022; Aliyev is a superstitious fellow.) Russia did nothing. The Azeri forces allowed the Armenians to leave in a textbook ethnic cleansing; 120,000 fled - proportionately, roughly equivalent to the entire population of Northern Ireland coming to mainland Britain in a week. Now, the only Armenians in Azerbaijan are those in Baku jails.

The loss of Artsakh has made Armenians realistic about Russia. But the reality is that Russia is Armenia’s largest trading partner and export market, and her principal energy supplier (on favourable terms). The rumours of increases in troop numbers at the Gyumri base appear to be just that - and come from Ukrainian sources.

Now, the talk of opening up the border between Armenia and Turkey is dependent on signing a ‘peace treaty’ with an aggressive Azerbaijan claiming rights over Armenian lands. Whilst Turkey under the cover of restoration, proposes to convert Ani Cathedral to the Fethiye (‘Conquest’) mosque - which conquest is being referenced? And the Turkish parliament voted on a plan to name a proposed border crossing after Talaat Pasha - the principal architect of the Armenian Genocide.

Pashinyan’s approval ratings continue to slide: recent polling showing support in the region of 15%. With elections due next year, and his unpopular pro-Turkish agenda to force through, his authoritarian crackdown is unsurprising. But is has taken on a new flavour with the pivot to Europe.

The authoritarianism is simple enough, and is financial, religious, and political. Prominent Russian-Armenian businessman Samvel Karapetyan was detained on 18 June. His Tashir group includes a major pizza chain, and the electricity distribution network in Armenia. Legislation is being rushed through to nationalise the latter; it’s unclear what will happen to the former, although sceptics have pointed out that US fast-food outlet Wendy’s has just announced a new venture. Karapetyan is being held in ‘pre-trial detention’, after having voiced opposition to Pashinyan’s campaign against the Church.

Pashinyan’s feud with the Apostolic Church has reached to the top, with the intent of undermining it altogether. Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan was detained a few days after Bagrat Srbazan, as security forces surrounded the Armenian Holy See of Ejmiatsin. And Pashinyan has called for the replacement of the Catholicos (the head of the Apostolic Church) by a committee of state apparatchiks, breaking the independence of the Church and the apostolic succession dating back two millennia. The PM has accused the Catholicos of fathering a child (senior Armenian clergy are celibate), and after clerical opposition questioning his Christianity (for which read: Muslim), Pashinyan threatened to expose his intact foreskin on camera in front of the Catholicos.

This may be farcical, but it is far from funny. Opposition MPs have been stripped of parliamentary immunity; members of the historic ARF organisation (strongly opposed to the government’s policies) as young as 18 arrested, and Pashinyan’s security state crackdown will only be increased by the adoption of facial recognition technology.

The row with the church came between Pashinyan’s meeting with Erdogan in Turkey, and the visit of Kaja Kallas (the EU’s ‘Foreign Minister’) to Yerevan at the end of June. The repressions were, of course, ignored, with Kallas lauding ‘Armenia's commitment to democracy and freedom… in the face of hybrid threats, disinformation and foreign interference.’ A fortnight later, in Brussels, Ursula von der Leyen announced an ‘investment’ package of €2.5 billion (timescale unclear) - proportionate to the EU’s involvement is Moldova.

One nation’s ‘Democratic Resilience’ is another nation’s ‘Democratic Backsliding’; one man’s ‘Investment’ is another man’s ‘Interference’.

Stewart is at least honest in de-emphasising the role of Europe:

the guarantor of its future prosperity and security lies not in the patronage of Russia, Iran, or even Europe, but in economic and diplomatic cooperation with its two Turkic neighbours.

For Armenia, orienting towards the ‘West’ does not mean cash from Brussels or EU security protection. It means absorption - militarily, economically, and strategically - in the Turkic sphere, one which seeks to destroy the cultural history of the Armenian lands, deny the Armenian genocide, and perpetuate its rhetoric to this day.

In this context, whether or not the ‘coup’ was real is secondary. Pashinyan’s plan would constitute signing a Carthaginian peace. It is hard to believe that a neutral, let alone a sympathetic, observer of Armenian interests could advocate for this.

But Stewart is not a neutral commentator, and he has a history of not disclosing his interests. His oversight in failing to disclose payments from Azeri-linked defence companies (whilst he was a member of the House Defence Committee) prompted robust criticism from the Standards Committee. They noted breaches over ‘a period of fourteen years, show[ing] a blatant disregard for the rules… Nor are minor sums involved in these repeated breaches: payments of £41,385.20 and £32,277.87, for example, went entirely unregistered.’

It is unclear why Stewart was secretive about these arrangements. But it is important to know on what side his bread is buttered - topped by a generous helping of caviar.

Sam is the son of William Dalrymple, popular author on all things Indian, Delhi-resident and the bringer of the Literary Festival to India (Jaipur). He’s a good writer; if of a distinctly leftist bent; I’ve read most of his books. Sam describes himself as ‘writer, film-maker and peace activist.’ He spent some time in Afghanistan with Turquoise Mountain Foundation, the taxpayer-funded NGO run by Mrs Rory Stewart; although it’s not known whether he was involved with the farcical initiative of lecturing bemused Afghan women on Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain.’

Writer, film-maker and peace activist Sam Dalrymple

As an undergraduate at Oxford, Dalrymple (with a couple of associates) set up his Project Dastaan, a ‘peace-building initiative which examines the human impact of global migration through the lens of the largest forced migration in recorded history, the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan.’ Also funded partially by the taxpayer (through the British Council and Arts Council, as well as the National Lottery), this is a modernised, digital (and virtual) ‘oral history’ project which seeks to ‘immortalise the experiences of the Partition generation and create a lasting impact between generations old and young.’ ‘Partition Tourism’ has been raised as an opportunity, as long as it does not have a ‘nationalist narrative that explains what happened in 250 words.’ He is also happy to present himself as a ‘Turkish expert’, guiding tourists around Armenian sites now in Turkey for a high-end travel company. Nice work, if you don’t mind whitewashing genocide.

He seems to have signed the deal to publish ‘Shattered Lands’ five years ago, when he was barely out of university, with HarperCollins, the second-largest publisher in the world. Quite a coup for a fresh-faced Oxford grad, even one well connected; possibly the most significant since Douglas Murray had a book on ‘Bosie’ (Wilde’s homosexual friend) published when still an undergraduate1. It’s a lavish tome, superbly illustrated, and abundant with maps; even if the latter are sometimes badly chosen (I suspect the casual reader would find it more useful to have a detailed map of the borders of the princely states of Junagadh or Hyderabad, rather than tracking Gandhi’s meanderings, which are secondary to the text.)

Dalrymple has a Big Idea, and a Method. The Big Idea is the ‘Five Partitions’ of the subtitle, namely the partitions of what I would call the ‘Legalistic Raj’ extant in the early twentieth century:

• The administrative separation of Burma in 1937

• The administrative separation of Aden from the Raj in 1937, and the subsequent separation of the other Gulf States by 1947

• The partition of India and Pakistan on independence from Britain in 1947 (Dalrymple calls this the Great Partition)

• The fate of the princely states (absorption into India or Pakistan) around 1947

• The war of 1971 in which Bangladesh won independence from Pakistan

The Method is a standard narrative-history heavy on the sort of bottom-up oral history he champions in Project Dastaan; memoirs, published and unpublished, references from other sources, and (for more recent events) his own interviews. The goal is to search for authenticity, and the ‘luminous detail’. The problem is that the author is very hit-and miss in his curation. A first-hand account can, of course, be a wonderful corrective to received history, but this is rare; most people’s voices are just noise, and a liberal ‘everyone’s voice must be heard’ attitude is apparent.

There are gems, of course, such as Sarojini Naidu’s observations - but then, she was a confidante of the key players of independence, Nehru in particular. There’s a wonderful passage when the Burmese independence fighter Bo Maw is sprung from his British gaolers by his wife and a couple of conspirators by the means of demonically strong Naga ghost chillies. ‘Are we cooking something?’ asked Maw. The prison cook roasts the beasts, creating an eye-blinding smoke under the cover of which the prisoner effected his escape.

But the contributions are more often pedestrian, and make the book less serious. An example: several pages are devoted to the Japanese invasion of Burma, and we sit through:

Donald Menezes recalled that ‘after the initial panic, people relaxed and began moving in the streets, as in the usual practice alerts’… ‘People who were standing in the street and watching the planes [were] machine-gunned or blown to bits along with buildings.’

‘The spare bedrooms were allocated’ remembered Eric, ‘and all was cosy with a sense of safety that comes in numbers’… The streets were empty except for howling street dogs and Lady Gorman-Smith, the governor’s wife, who was charging around trying to raise moral.2

I have no idea if the author thinks that passages such as this have any value; but he is someone who is happy to write such trite statements as ‘War on the front line was brutal’, and ‘Donald hid in his trench with his family and servants for what seemed like an eternity.’3

Dalrymple knows his audience, though, and it’s the middle class Brit. At every point where there is an animal story to be brought in, he does so: from the street dogs quoted above, to ducks speaking Arabic and pet mongooses, to quoting at length the legends of the dogs of the Nawab of Junagadh (including the ‘marriage’ of Roshana to British Labrador Bobby, both atop elephants) before debunking it with some sadness.

Associated with this is a revisionism of the princely states more generally, as beacons of culture and syncretism drawn in contrast to the nationalisms of the emergent Pakistan and India. ‘Partition’, in Dalrymple’s terms, is negative, even if presented as ‘complex’, unlike the simplistic evil of ‘nationalism’. His Raj is more of a south Asian idealistic proto-United Nations than a project of power and money; an ‘Imagine’ imagined by George Harrison rather than John Lennon.

If the Method of the book is not ideal, the Big Idea had better hold. I don’t believe it is at all convincing.

Dalrymple is best in my opinion on his ‘first partition’, that of Burma (although this may be simply that this is the topic about which I know least). He makes a convincing case that Burma was economically integrated into the Indian Empire prior to 1937; the Rangoon Boom was real, and that its separation hit the colony hard. It is also undoubtedly true that the border between Burma and what is now the Indian north-east was drawn with scant reference to the tribes on the ground - he makes much of the Nagas and their leader Phizo, split between the two, and their subsequent struggles.

A constantly recurring refrain is the ‘nationalist’ ‘sacred land of Bharat’, presented as a Hindu-centric exclusionary project; and Burma of course is not part of this. (It’s worth noting that neither is the Indian history, trade, culture and diaspora of the rest of south-east Asia. Different fates of conquest and legislation could have included them in the ‘Raj’ just as easily.)

It’s probably true that the administrators of the 1930s, had they known what was to happen a decade later, may have drawn the boundaries differently; but it’s hard to believe that this would have involved more, not fewer ‘partitions’. Ethnically, religiously and linguistically complex mountainous terrain such as the border between modern India and Burma have a tendency to be fractious. Trying to pretend that administrative legalism - the fact that Burma had been ruled as part of the Raj - would trump in-group interests, notwithstanding ethnically Indian economic interests, is woefully hopeful. In fact, Dalrymple directs his reader to the economic realities that led to the Burmese uprising of the 1930s: in the wake of the 1929 crash, the (Tamil, Indian) Chettiar money-lenders had increased their ownership of agricultural land from 6% (in 1930) to a quarter. He notes that Burmese media had praised Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, without drawing the parallel.

The ‘second partition’ - removing the British Arab possessions of Arabia, from Oman to Kuwait, is possibly the weakest. Trade across the Arabian Sea was of course real, but cultural influence from the subcontinent never did head west in the way that it did east (we speak of Indo-China, but never Indo-Arabia). Dalrymple (for a ‘historian’) has a tendency to be trapped in a moment (in this case, the Raj of the early-mid twentieth century) with a strange blindness to the wider history. The defence of the sea routes to India after the construction of the Suez Canal was vital to the Empire, to the point of obsession. And the acquisition of parts of the Ottoman Empire after 1918 brought a different dynamic to the geopolitical map. He indulges a counterfactual fantasy that these parts of the Indian Empire would have ‘likely’ been part of India (or Pakistan) post-1947, and that South Asia could have been the beneficiary of the oil boom of the Gulf; this is wholly unrealistic.

Skipping for a moment the ‘Great Partition’, his ‘fourth partition’, that of the princely states, rivals the Arab emirates for incredulity. Again, he is mired in legalism. The states notionally ‘became independent’ along with the India and Pakistan, although there were only a handful of cases where this was anything other than a mopping-up exercise: Junagadh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Hyderabad. Dalrymple is moon-faced and starry-eyed about the fate of these states as is possible for a liberal westerner to be; the reality is that neither of the successor states to the Raj, nor Britain itself, did anything other than quash the notion that independence was ever an option (certainly beyond J&K - and that was too strategically valuable for either India or Pakistan to let go). I mentioned maps earlier: perhaps it would have been valuable for the reader to be shown a map of Junagadh:

Portraying the absorption of nearly six hundred4 legally independent realms into two successor nations as a partition is just strange. J&K and Hyderabad were both referred to the UN Security Council; ‘In 2010, Hyderabad remained on the ‘list of matters with which the Security Council is seized.’5 Both were settled by force, not legalism. J&K was fought over, with the line of control being agreed between India and Pakistan becoming a de facto border. Hyderabad was unilaterally settled by force in four days, with by India proving that a functional army is more important than wealth or legal fiction. Significantly, the British government ordered British officers to resign from the Hyderabad army immediately before, in order for them not to fight against a Dominion.

Dalrymple has a tendency for preposterous statements, but this one (regarding his ‘fifth partition’) takes some beating: ‘In 1952 Bangladesh was no more inevitable than an independent Telegu-speaking state.’6 What is remarkable is that the idea of 1947-Pakistan could endure - split between East and West with nothing joining them except for their Muslim majorities, least of all land.

The narrative of the 1971 war is good, and unsparing, which makes the ‘fifth partition’ framing even more jarring. In particular, Dalrymple does not shy away from the rape campaign of the (West) Pakistan forces, including quoting a source that, ‘Bengali women were immoral and therefore fair game, because they didn’t wear blouses over their sarees’7, though of course without hinting at parallels with the ‘fair game’ rhetoric on UK shores. The remarkable post-war campaign of Mujib Rahman’s new administration to rehabilitate the victims of rape as Birongongas (War Heroines) is mentioned, but as a sideline. (Did any other state ever do such much for its rape victims, let alone a Muslim one?) More attention is given to Ravi Shankar and George Harrison’s ‘Concert for Bangladesh’, with the explicit message that the Pakistani Army had committed ‘undoubtedly the greatest atrocity since Hitler’s extermination of the Jews’8. Is this the earliest example of explicit Holocaust-mythologising?

The overall effect of the ‘Five Partitions’ framing is to dilute the impact of the central one, the ‘Great Partition’ of 1947. Whether he designs to or not, the tales of communal slaughter, from the Burma insurgency to the Bengali war, serve to mitigate the worst atrocities of them all, conducted mainly in the Punjab (and secondarily in Bengal) in 1947. Large-scale population exchanges in the wake of carving up a defeated empire are not unusual; nor are borders drawn on a map without adequate knowledge of the reality on the ground. Poor old Cyril Radcliffe probably did as good a job as he could have. What was scandalous was the headlong rush-for-the-door, the abandonment of responsibility by Mountbatten, only encouraged by Atlee’s government in London.

Dalrymple has a habit of sixth-form-psychologising the key participants in Partition, framed in caricature thumbnails. A young Jinnah, eloping with his Parsi bride, is shunned by Bombay society, and ‘having once dreamed a modern India would be able to move past divisions of religion and caste, Jinnah became disillusioned.’9 Nehru is ‘changed forever’ by sharing a train berth with General Dyer, days after the Amritsar massacre. Dalrymple updates Churchill, saying Gandhi ‘cos-play[ed] as a sandhu’10. And the intimacies of Edwina Mountbatten with Nehru, alongside her strange relationship with her husband, are not exactly groundbreaking research.

Between the flow of narrative history and the first-hand voices, the author is largely absent; but when he surfaces, his judgement is either specious or plain wrong. I’ve mentioned some earlier, but here is an example. In 1960, Pakistan, under the military dictatorship of Ayub Khan, and supported by Western pressure (and financial interests) had agreed the Indus Waters Treaty with India, which guaranteed a share of the tributaries of the Indus (the ‘five rivers’ that give Punjab its name) to Pakistan. Pakistan was in less favourable position than India, due to flowing through Indian-controlled Kashmir, as India had demonstrated in 1948 by impeding the Sutlej, damaging irrigation in Pakistan. Dalrymple portrays India’s annexation of Goa (a Portuguese colony) in 1961 as the cause of the rupture in seemingly good relations, provoking Pakistani concerns about Indian aggression elsewhere. A more realistic reading is that Khan, with Western protection, played along with rapprochement until the water deal was signed, and subsequently adopted a more aggressive position towards India, including support for insurgency of the Naga hill-tribes.

Dalrymple’s impeccable, if soft, leftism (who could doubt a boyish peace activist?) buys him the freedom to undertake what is essentially a re-framing of Partition as just one of a series of violent conflicts that could have been avoided if the participants had been just a little bit less nationalistic. The counterfactuals run through his narrative: it all could have been different; ignoring whether or not they are at all realistic. Partition (the real one) was so violent not because the wrong lines were drawn on a map, but because the British cut our losses as fast as possible, withdrawing people and troops headlong (by April 1947 there were just 11,400 stationed on a subcontinent turning hot). And the unspoken rule from both sides was: massacres are fine, just don’t involve any Westerners. (Dalrymple documents a rare exception to this: the murders of Catholic missionaries in Baramulla as the Pathan irregulars marauded down Kashmir. He ignores, however, the 20,000 slaughtered and 5,000 raped in one day in Mirpur, which I wrote about here.)

The Five Partitions framing posits unrealistic counterfactuals in the place of more serious questions. Barely mentioned is Ceylon, beyond being the base of Mountbatten during the War; far closer in history, culture, legend and sheer geography than Burma, but never administratively part of the Raj. Why? Would that have changed the dynamics of India post-independence? Could the Sri Lankan civil war have been prevented?

Neither does he consider a further crucial counterfactual from history - in fact, there is no evidence from the text that he is even aware of it. To what extent was first partition of Bengal under Curzon in 1905 (reversed six years later) the seed for the subsequent partition of India and Pakistan? It is a question that is surely central to Dalrymple’s narrative, and a better candidate to be considered a ‘partition’ than some of his others.

The biggest counterfactual of all is: could India have broken up? In many ways, the miracle is that the nation survived, and whilst Dalrymple does not claim to be a political commentator, some recognition of the political deftness of Nehru and Indira Gandhi over four decades is surely warranted. The scale of violence had (say) the Dravidian South sought to separate itself would surely have led to more millions of deaths and ethnic transfers. The author’s running antipathy to the ‘sacred geography of the land of Bharat’ is misplaced; it has played a role in the political formula of modern India, and kept the country remarkably peaceful.

To put it as simply as possible: given the post-independence histories of Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma and Sri Lanka, what would one have predicted for India? The Partition That Didn’t Happen is the most interesting question of all.

This review probably wouldn’t be so critical if every other had not been so fawning; it’s mixed, and I’d rather have someone suggest a Big Idea even if it’s faulty, than have no ideas at all. But the question remains: why has this book been so hyped and so unquestioned? Is there more to see than a nepo-writer land on his young paws like the luckiest of cats?

Before considering that, some stylistic quibbles. For such a lavish publication, the lack of editing is apparent, leaving the text at times slapdash and clichéd. Is this good writing?

At the same time the Arabian Raj was hurtling into a new and unexpected future thanks to the discovery of a putrid, viscous, sticky, liquid: oil… An oil refinery soon dominated both Aden’s landscape and economy, accounting for a staggering 90 per cent of the city’s gross industrial output. It pumped life into Aden’s veins, contributing 10 per cent to its GDP and a staggering 75 per cent to its export earnings.11

‘Staggering’ stuff.

There are some remarkable slips of liberal assumptions and modernisms that the author (being charitable) probably doesn't even notice. ‘Institutional racism was woven into the fabric of life of the Raj', ‘Bose’s INA was a diverse and inclusive organisation’, Nasser ‘fought for social justice while also brutally quashing dissent’. The price of oil ‘skyrockets’, a Bollywood hit ‘goes global’, and things are ‘protested’ in the American usage. Some participants in the tale come with constantly repeated epithets as though the author has no courage that we will remember who they are otherwise: ‘half-paralysed Phizo’, or ‘chain-smoking V.P. Menon’.

The net effect of ‘Shattered Lands’ is something approaching Raj nostalgia. Nostalgia for the ‘undivided’ empire where communal peace was, largely, kept; religious traditions could be syncretic rather than reactionary; and nasty ‘nationalisms’ were held at bay. And nostalgia for the glamourous world of Maharajahs and Nawabs, the conservers of wild lions and patrons of musicians cruelly betrayed by the British.

It is, though, an account where the Brits get off lightly - particularly in the Partition itself. It’s hard not to think that a Dalrymple can get away with things in the liberal world that a Nigel Biggar could not. But more interesting than the nepotism is the question of whether the book’s reception tells us something wider, whether our relation to Empire and its end is changing.

One possibility is that the national self-flagellation over Empire has peaked - at least if you accept the mantra of institutional racism, social justice, anti-nationalism.

Another is that demographic changes in the UK itself are leading to a re-creation of the conditions of the Raj, but this time at home. The premise is of course false, given the uncomfortable inclusion of native Brits in the mix; but it is maybe a priming that the state has some institutional memory of how to manage such a system (recently, in the case of Northern Ireland): what I have called Milletisation elsewhere, although Communalism would be more apt in the context of our Indian legacy

A darker possibility is that tales of violent ethnic conflict which that are unleashed feed the ‘civil war is coming’ narrative, promoted recently by the King’s College Professor of War Studies, David Betz (and amplified by too many on the ‘right’). The book ends:

The last decade has witnessed the decline of globalisation, the strengthening of borders and the resurgence of nationalism across the world. India’s Partitions are a dire warning for what such a future may hold.12

An alternative conclusion would be that mass population transfers are a norm of history, not an exception.

It’s not a biography (there is little about Blair’s early years), still less a psychological portrait. It’s almost impossible to conceive of a traditional ‘biography’ of a man like Blair, who seems to have as little hinterland as the current incumbent of the office. (On one of Blair’s expensive-freebie holidays, Bower records that he didn’t take any books.) At heart, Blair is empty. Blair’s sole interest in life appears to be proximity to power and money; the best that can be said of him is that he has made his hobby his job, and his life.

Blair’s schtick in the years since his 2007 resignation has been to claim that he only got to grips with being Prime Minister towards the end of his term; and wants to pass on the lessons he learnt the hard way to the leaders fortunate enough to listen to his wise counsel. As with many things about Blair, it a Cheshire-Cat grin of a myth: he was wholly unsuited to the role of a statesman, and if anything, wielded power less well as time went on.

Apart from anything else, the Blair years were cheesy, never more than with the Millennium Dome. We are not impressed.

The Incapable Manager

Possessing as he does such a strange, even non-existent internal world, it is not surprising that Blair showed practically no psychological insight when it came to managing his cabinet, despite his 1997 landslide. There were two major problems: his tendency to appoint people to the wrong jobs, often at the last minute, certainly without thinking. And secondly, overshadowing everything, the fractious, appalling relationship with his Chancellor and eventual successor, Gordon Brown.

Blair loyalist Charles Clarke is quoted, summing his faults up well: ‘Blair’s real delinquency was that he wasn’t interested in finding the right people to do the job - civil servants or ministers. He was a bad judge of people.’1 The tendency was there from the first cabinet appointments, as he juggled people from their shadow briefs, sometimes seemingly for no reason. Chris Smith was moved from Health (where he had spent two years developing policy) to Culture to placate Brown, who objected to his reformist ideas. Health went to old-school Labourite Frank Dobson - not a reformer. George Robertson was moved to Defence - unprepared and despite Blair fearing that he ‘talked too much’. (Blair was to take direct charge of defence, but it propelled Robertson to a new career - he left the post to become Secretary-General of NATO, and is currently leading Starmer’s defence review.) And appointing sour-faced anti-nuclear Margaret Beckett to the DTI condemned energy policy from the start (she was an old-fashioned leftist who still championed subsidies for coal.)

It wasn’t as though he learnt from his mistakes. During his first term, the ‘Education, Education, Education’ Secretary was a serious politician, David Blunkett; but after the 2001 election victory he was replaced by the nervous Estelle Morris, who had failed her A-levels. (She lasted barely over a year.) And after another big-hitter, Charles Clarke, he appointed Ruth Kelly:

‘That’s a shocking appointment,’ said Clarke. ‘I can’t believe it.’ He doubted whether Ruth Kelly could lead any department, especially education.2

And into the third term: after loyalist reformer Alan Milburn at health Blair appointed Patricia Hewitt rather than Milburn’s deputy John Hutton (who actually knew the brief): ‘As usual, he had not considered the appointment with any care, and Hewitt would need at least a year to understand her department.’3 After bad results in the 2006 local elections, Blair decided to make Home Secretary Charles Clarke the scapegoat. Clarke (showing some admirable backbone), objected, and refused to accept anything other than Foreign Secretary. Blair doubled down, giving the position to Margaret Beckett, remarkably (she had expected to be dismissed altogether). Even Blair later admitted, ‘I did a reshuffle which was the worst of all worlds.’4

Even at the time, the relationship between the Prime Minister and the Chancellor was referred to as the ‘TGBGs’. Brown comes across as murderously angry from the start, every policy intervention designed principally to undermine the boss he refused to recognise. He is rarely quoted in Bower’s book without expletives, but with limited range and no creativity. A typical example: ‘You asked for a fucking document, so there it is.’5 Before the 2001 election, he ‘raged’ at Blair, ‘You’re a crap Prime Minister, and its time you moved over and let someone better do the job,’ whilst encouraging Ed Balls to speak to Blair ‘like something on a shoe.’6

As well as the foul-mouthed behind-doors rows, there were the briefing wars. Unable to assert his authority, Blair would take to announcing his intended policies in the media in an attempt to trap the Chancellor. It was a crude political equivalent of telling teacher, and drew a similar level of respect. Battles were fought over the lieutenants: in particular, Peter Mandelson’s 1998 resignation, because of an undeclared loan from (Brownite) Paymaster-General Geoffrey Robinson, was directly leaked from Brown’s team.

Blair constantly considered firing Brown, and was encouraged to do so by loyal followers such as Clarke and Milburn, but never had the courage to go through with it. He comes across as entirely impotent against Brown’s tactics and tirades. Worse, he refused to battle with his Chancellor over money, and rather than back up his ministers, he had a tendency to send ministers in to fight with Brown, only then to back down. This even extended to the army: three times in the book, senior military men (Guthrie, Boyce and Walker) are dispatched to plead with the Chancellor to finance Blair’s gung-ho interventions. The last gives the flavour:

‘You’re going to have to see Gordon.’

‘But he’s your man.’

‘Well, there’s nothing I can do.’

‘I wouldn’t put up with my officers behaving like that.’

‘I can’t do any more,’ replied Blair, without noticeable embarrassment.7

Blair’s treatment of his loyalists was not Machiavellian, let alone successful; but rather ensured that there was no feasible challenger when he stepped aside after a decade. Former Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon sums it up: ‘Tony never showed loyalty… He just looked after his enemies and damaged his friends.’8

The Careless Warmonger

The terrible misadventures of Iraq - before the invasion and after - are well known and don’t need to be repeated here. But Blair’s enthusiasm for military intervention was apparent even from his earliest months in office. From July 1997, Bower reports Blair requesting from Guthrie, the chief of defence staff, the feasibility of an SAS mission to Zimbabwe to ‘deal with’ Mugabe. Unrealistic, reports the General. So Blair moves on: what about Angola? (No.) Congo? (No.)

Blair was determined to assert Britain’s role as a military power on the world stage, east of Suez for the first time since Eden. (Without, of course, persuading his Chancellor that such a role would require a higher budget.) But it was in Europe that he got his first chance to put into practice New Labour’s liberal interventionism.

Kosovo, 1998. ‘I must tell you, Prime Minister, that there are new problems in Kosovo.’

‘Right. You’d better give me a full note, starting with: where is it?’9

You can sense Blair’s blood rising: Something Must Be Done; there are Good Guys and Bad Guys (and ‘we’ are undoubtedly on the side of Good.) Others saw it differently: Blair’s European instincts wanted to involve other European countries, but Jacques Chirac (probably the last Western leader actually to see conflict - he had volunteered in Algeria) wouldn’t have it. Blair’s liberal interventionism was based around an unexplored but entirely negative interpretation of the Second War: determined not to be Chamberlain, he began his relentless search for a second Hitler not to appease. He flipped the narrative; and it remains unaltered to this day, always out of reach.

The ‘moral’ Foreign Secretary Robin Cook - later beatified over his principled resignation because the UN refused to sanction the invasion of Iraq - had no qualms when the UN refused to sanction the bombing of Belgrade. At the time, the US was more focused on bombing Baghdad into accepting a new round of weapons-inspection. Blair’s principal problem was ensuring that the UK military would be involved in the US-led bombing campaign. Clinton was dithering, concerned by cigar-related impeachment issues at home; the RAF were included, or not, day to day. When the President finally ordered the aerial campaign, our forces were overlooked. Diplomacy, and the interventions of Guthrie, ‘saved the day’ for Blair: delayed by a couple of days, the RAF was deployed in support of US air power. Blair read the Bible, and watched a film called ‘Air Force One’, starring Harrison Ford.

Back in the Balkans, the ‘coalition of the willing’ was limited to the US and UK. Chirac was impassive; Chancellor Gerhard Schroder was annoyed enough that Blair thought the German would hit him. Belgrade was attacked, with the Harriers missing their intended targets. Civilian casualties amongst the Serbs seemed less of a concern to Blair than the publicity: ‘If we ran our election campaigns the same way NATO does their press we would not have been elected.’10 The Transatlantic alliance considered plans for an invasion to force the Serbs out of Kosovo that would have involved 150,000 men.

Three months of bombing was one thing; the fact that Serbia’s only supporter, Russia, was in no position to back her ally was another. Milosevic agreed to pull out of Kosovo, rendering it de facto independent ever since (so much for the ‘international rules-based order’ and ‘recognised borders.’) Blair learned about it from Alastair Campbell, who picked up the news from Reuters. But British troops could spin a victory: a British colonel gave a speech in Pristina which could have been written by Blair himself: ‘With God on our side, your duty is to protect the Albanian good guys from the murdering Serbs.’ Days later, Serbs were being massacred by Albanians. Weeks later, the Blairs embarked on a triumph; the origin of the somewhat popular Albanian given name of Tonibler.

It was the first justification-by-faith that is so characteristic of Blair; the statement that admits no argument. ‘This is something that we should be doing.’11

It was the prelude to the much more documented horrors of Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Afghanistan, again. And the justification-by-faith damningly recorded in a Downing Street lunch shortly before his resignation:

‘I was right to have gone to war in Iraq,’ Blair said defiantly.

‘But what if you’re proved wrong?’ a journalist asked.

‘I am right,’ Blair replied, and looking upwards continued, ‘but someone else will be my judge.’12

The Energy Destroyer

There are many specific areas of policy from the Blair decade that could be taken apart: from the eternal vacillations over pro- and anti-market reforms in health and education (stymied in many cases by Brown), to the immigration revolution he ushered in, tough on rhetoric for the tabloid headlines, but always essentially pro-immigrant. (‘Bogus asylum seekers’ were the equivalent of today’s ‘small-boat illegals’: the public distraction from the larger, legitimate numbers.) One area which has received little attention is the stagnation of energy planning under his administration.

Blair favoured nuclear (I guess it fitted with his idea of being ‘modern’) but his early mis-appointment of Margaret Beckett at the DTI, then responsible for energy policy, was a bad start. The ‘climate change’ narrative was less settled in the early Blair years: it had been championed by the Conservatives by no less than Margaret Thatcher, always keen to strut her credentials as a scientist; and Old Labour interests still backed traditional energy.

Blair’s lack of fundamental conviction is apparent in the energy policy (sic) of the time: a period of stasis, and impotence, caught between an unconsidered deference to the market, a longing for a global role, and an unwillingness ever to commit to a decision. He was warned about the possibility of future energy disruptions from the start.

New Labour early on merged energy regulation into a single regulator, Ofgem, which ignored long-term supply issues in favour of short-term customer pricing wins. At the same time, the DTI happily pursued a policy of out-Thatchering Thatcher, by nodding through the takeover of the privatised energy companies by overseas suppliers, particularly EdF, who would subsequently reduce UK investment whilst selling cheaper French-produced electricity into the UK market. (EdF is wholly state-owned, and France, sensibly, is about three-quarters powered by nuclear energy.)

The DTI had initially been cursed with Beckett (‘killing off nuclear energy had become her life’s work’13) and had been graced for a few short months by Peter Mandelson, before his resignation; but 2001’s appointment of Patricia Hewitt sealed the anti-nuclear deal. Anti-nuclear, pro-market Hewitt at the DTI joined anti-nuclear, old Labour Margaret Beckett at Environment. Blair promoted a pro-nuclear White Paper entitled ‘Our Energy Future’, but the timing was all wrong; it was in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, and Blair jettisoned a sensible energy strategy to keep rebellious cabinet members on-side. Nuclear was flipped to be danger: the media briefed that Blair was against nuclear power ‘because of the terrorist threat.’ Attention was turned to renewables. Blair traded energy policy for war.

In 1997, Britain had been an exporter of gas; by 2006, 80% had to be imported. Energy prices had rocketed. Blair still favoured nuclear, but had done nothing to drive the possibility forward. But the world had moved on; and now Angela Merkel, new in her position of Chancellor of Germany, was pushing a new, excessive ‘renewables’ agenda: 20% of all energy to be renewable by 2020.

Alasdair Darling said, ‘He won’t be so stupid to agree to it.’

‘I won’t'.’

He did.

‘You’re mad,’ said Darling.

‘Oh, I got confused,’ said Blair. ‘I thought it was 20% of all our electricity, not 20% of all our energy.’14

Blair had moved on. He had shafted British energy interests, and the UK economy more widely, for the glitter and gleam of his post-Downing Street prize, the presidency of Europe.

The Right-Hand Man

One figure accompanied Blair on his Downing Street decade: Jonathan Powell. He’s there, fixing and foxing and generally being at the centre of things, throughout. Now, of course, he has reappeared as Sir Keir’s National Security Adviser.

The two most obvious of Blair’s confidantes - Mandelson and Campbell - are hardly absent from Bower’s book, but at the same time are ghosts of presence; perhaps too much has been written of them elsewhere. Powell, by contrast, is everywhere. He is the gatekeeper-in-chief, despising everyone (which seems to be entirely reciprocated). Nobody (save Cherie) stayed as close to Blair throughout his decade in office.

He was a fixer, a financier, and a firewall to his boss. Immediately after his 1997 victory, Blair sought a ‘reforming’ Cabinet Secretary, whilst trampling the established mechanisms of the Civil Service: ‘The selection of [Richard Wilson] revealed Blair’s indifference to the machinery of government. Whoever had been appointed would be excluded from his den, especially by Powell.’15

The current Powell presentation appears to focus on his role in brokering the Good Friday ‘peace’ agreements in Northern Ireland; Bower’s book is scant on this (and I have no insight), apart from an early, but revealing, aside:

Powell’s gauche judgement was confusing things rather than helping to solve problems. In July 1998, he faced the sack but was then reprieved with a part-time role in Northern Ireland.16

Interesting stuff, which goes nowhere (in itself intriguing.) But Powell went nowhere either, remaining close to power.

Powell is universally portrayed as ‘difficult’: from Civil Servants to Cabinet Ministers, from Generals to Ambassadors, there is a constant language of ‘despising’, ‘regarding with contempt’, being ‘difficult’ and pursuing ‘vendettas’ with (for example) the Foreign Office.

What kept Powell at the centre of the Blair camp appears to have been financial, rather than political. From the heady days of 1997, Blair’s first financial mis-step was orchestrated by Powell: the million-pound donation from Formula 1 magnate Bernie Ecclestone, in return for special consideration of an opt-out on tobacco sponsorship of sports. The donation had to be returned, and led to the early Blair appeal of: ‘I think that most people who have dealt with me think that I’m a pretty straight sort of guy - and I am.’ To me, the last qualification is the killer, which disproves the line before.

Powell’s other contacts appear to have induced a flow of funds to Labour, and to Blair himself. Lakshmi Mittal’s donation to the party helped season the Indian tycoon’s bid for a Romanian steel mill, with the Prime Minister’s endorsement organised by Powell. And at the close of his premiership, Blair’s first major gig with J.P. Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon was orchestrated through Powell: ‘Tony needs a job.’17 Blair demanded $5m a year (quite an advance on ex-Secretary of State George Schultz’ $100k), and got it.

The money flowed both ways. Powell received ‘a substantial proportion’ of a contract with the government of Kuwait, for a Blairite concept of ‘delivery’, and a fee to McKinsey in excess of $20 million.

I’ve no doubt that Powell is back in Number 10 as an exemplar of public service and penurious self-disinterest.

The Venal Couple

This leads us into the most intimate zone of Blair which we can imagine: money. In the political sphere, Blair showed a total disregard for finances, that went beyond the impossible relationship with his Chancellor; a combination of wilful blindness to money, along with a blind faith that all would be ok. It was a disaster for the country: once the Tory spending plans of the first term had been discarded, Brown’s profligacy amplified the global economic trends that led to the financial crisis of 2008 and the nation’s high-debt, quantitively-eased future. But it worked out for Blair personally.

The Blair years featured annual (at least) holidays provided to the couple for free at ‘glamorous’ (boring) locations; from Branson’s Caribbean island to Berlusconi’s ‘bunga bunga’ Sardinian villa; hospitality flowed from French billionaires and ageing, mediocre pop stars. Cherie’s penny-pinching is the stuff of legend: once, she was fined £10 for dodging a fare at Blackfriars days after returning from a freebie holiday with Cliff Richard on the Algarve. She would name-drop in shops in search for discounts, whilst billing the Labour party thousands for hairdressing. The couple brought an unprecedented venality to British politics.

Blair was open enough to recount (in 2005) of sitting next to Bill Gates in Davos and confessing: ‘Coming here reminds me of what a bad career choice I made earlier in my life.’18 Money, in itself, is rarely a motivation for the super-rich, but rather a proxy for power; in this, Blair fitted into his chosen set perfectly, and rather better than his wife.

The Blair’s marriage comes the closest we can to glimpsing Blair’s inner world (or lack of it): what did, and does he see in her? To quote Bower:

Her attraction to Blair was often debated, and the host of explanations was as unsatisfactory to the business of unravelling Blair himself. Among the worst that could be said was that their marriage rested on mutual irritation.19

This, though, seems a little unfair: Blair’s vacuity combined unconsidered self-confidence with a deep level of doubt, as his impotence with Brown illustrates. Cherie’s ambition often seems to bolster his confidence, including a decade of not resigning in the face of the Chancellor’s bullying (Cherie despises him.) Perhaps this is related to Blair’s ‘unworldliness’: once, when faced with an overflowing bath, he tries to deal with it not by turning off the taps or pulling the plug, but trying to decant the water into a nearby sink with a Virgin Radio mug.

There is also a cheesiness that it almost innocent, but not. He is recorded greeting Alastair Campbell in his Downing Street flat, dressed in yellow and green underpants, asking, ‘How many prime ministers have a body like this?’ The couple go on a ‘re-birthing experience’ in Egypt. In his last general election campaign, Cherie boasts to a Sun photographer, that he ‘does it five times a night’; Blair is reported to reply, ‘At least. I can do it more, depending how I feel.’20

The last two years of the Blair premiership, after his third election victory (‘Blair Limps Back’ ran the headlines) were focused on securing the couple’s futures as much as day-to-day politics. Cherie was beginning to eye direct money-making opportunities: £30,000 for an American lecture promoting her book; a fee for opening a shopping mall in Malaysia; irrelevant sums compared to what her husband would gather after leaving office.

Once the departure date had been set, an orchestrated programme was put in place by head of communications Ben Wegg-Prosser to show him in his best light: ‘He needs to go with the crowds wanting more. He should be the star who won’t even play the last encore. In moving towards the end, he must focus on the future.’21 It was successful, at least in the fact that Blair did indeed manage to secure his future. Politically, it was attempting to secure a deal between Israel and Palestine: ‘I’ve solved Ireland, and this is just another problem.’ Financially, the first of many roles was the Powell-arranged job with J.P. Morgan.

Blair was exceptionally fortunate to face so little opposition from the Conservatives throughout his ten years in office. William Hague could never escape his ‘Tory Boy’ image speaking as a schoolboy at the party conference, and wasn’t helped by his embarrassing baseball cap moment. Iain Duncan Smith was just an appalling choice. And Michael Howard went easy on Blair as the heat was turning up on the evasions surrounding the invasion of Iraq; it didn’t help that the Conservatives had supported the war. Howard himself fell under the Blair spell: he had invited the couple around for dinner in 1983 in attempt to find out why Blair hadn’t become a Conservative (his father was nearly a Tory MP.)

Cameron, of course, nominated himself as the Heir to Blair. True to form, when the Labour benches rose to applaud the departing PM after his final PMQs, Cameron led the Tories in copying the unparliamentary gesture. Cameron’s Conservatives failed to secure a majority against Brown, despite the fact that his economic record had been trashed in 2008, and the major incident in the 2010 campaign had been the Labour leader recorded excoriating a voter as ‘racist’. The Cameron/Osborne Tories had failed, by any reasonable measure of politics; but appeared all too comfortable to run a coalition with the LibDems for five years, by which time the rump of right-wing backbenchers had reduced to irrelevance.

The Legacy

We will have to await the definitive guide to Blair after office; the messy details of how a Prime Minister who had, in all practical respects, failed in office whilst succeeding at the ballot box managed to assert such influence on world leaders. Of course, those whom he courted weren’t overly troubled by electoral politics: from Paul Kagame in Rwanda (returned with 99.18% of the vote last year), to post-Soviet Kazakhstan (where Nazarbaeyev retained not only Blair, but Powell and Campbell), or the Caucasian petro-tyranny of Azerbaijan (where BP’s investment since 1991 of over $100 billion has led to the company being nicknamed22 ‘Blair Petroleum’.)

Blair’s eloquence at his greatest mistake in office was reserved not for the carnage of war or the chaos of government, but for…

The Freedom of Information Act:

Three harmless words. I look at these words as I write them and feel like shaking my head till it drops off my shoulders. You idiot. You naive, foolish, irresponsible nincompoop. There really is no description of how vivid, that is adequate.23

What, I hope, is apparent from this review is this:

How did such a lightweight, failed executive come to wield such a reputation?

And even (whisper the heresy) is it even the case that he really does possess such power over policy and governments?

This is not to deny the role that his wealth has been able to maximise - the Tony Blair Institute’s policy papers are weighty enough to influence political debate. Policy is ever-more decided in the forum of democracy (if ever it was) but in the expert-implementation classes (as I have called them, the ‘Think-Tankies’.) But, to my mind at least, there remains a question about whether the man himself is driving any particular agenda, any more than he was as Prime Minister, beyond a generalised faith in modernising everything first, and asking question later (when you are out of office, and responsibility.)

Back in the Blair era, I worked in the City for a bank whose Chief Executive was a Blair-like figure: scheming, ruthless and empty. My closest friend (let’s call him Adam) recounted a meeting with a large client that he’d been in. At one point, weighing up the pros and cons of a deal, the CEO came out with the prize line:

‘Well, it may be a bird in the bush, but is it just pie in the sky?’

Adam winced, and metaphorically put his head in his hands; but then (he told me), looked around the boardroom table, only to see a series of heads nodding, sagely, as if in receipt of Delphic wisdom.

Blair is empty, the source of projection for the willing; particularly (like his billionaire financiers and dictators) those with more to project. Political watchers should be wary of falling into the trap.

I would note that I would not dispute the fact that Erdoğan may well be a ‘Great Man’ in the sense of Thomas Carlyle, in terms of his personal impact on Turkey, which is unquestionably a substantially stronger power in the world in 2025 than it was in 2003. I would indeed go further: Erdoğan’s strategy, whilst at times seeming chaotic, has been calculated and effective. The term ‘Great Man’ does not carry moral weight; Lenin and Mao were ‘Great Men’ by these standards, although certainly not forces for ‘good’, for their people or the world.

Erdoğan has benefitted from the geopolitical trends of the post-Cold War world, firstly the rise of globalisation, and more recently the onset of multipolarity (particularly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the second Trump presidency). It is a counter-factual to question whether any other Turkish leader(s) would have managed the country’s position as a significant regional power as well as him - or better. All that can be said here is that he has consolidated power and maintained his position in a way that rivals Atatürk.

In particular, Erdoğan has utilised an unconventional economic strategy to re-engineer Turkey’s economy to become manufacturing and export-led, a case well set out by the geopolitical analyst Firas Modad here. Under the guise of an ‘Islamic’ anti-usury rhetoric, Turkey’s central bank set interest rates at near-zero, substantially under the natural rate of inflation in the country, leading to constantly high inflation, a weak exchange rate and a healthy export environment. Exports as a proportion of GDP have risen from under 25% to nearly 40%. Whilst Europe has been offshoring manufacturing, Turkey has picked up production. Two decades ago, a British consumer may have bought shirts and trousers made in Turkey; now it more likely to be a Beko fridge or a Ford or Toyota car. At the same time, the high-inflation environment has kept the middle classes down, whilst large business owners have profited and been kept close to the regime. It has proved effective for Turkey, and consolidated Erdoğan’s power base.

As has the purge of the army which took place in the wake of the Gülenist ‘coup’ of 2016. Since Atatürk’s time, the Turkish Army has been the guarantor of his vision of a modernising, moderately secular Turkey. Let us leave aside the debate about whether the ‘coup’ was a real, potential uprising against the Erdoğan regime, or (as Gülen himself claimed, from the safety of the United States) staged by the government. Nearly 3,000 military were dismissed (including 103 senior staff - Generals and Admirals), as well as nearly 3,000 judges and over 100,000 public sector workers in the immediate aftermath. Accusation of being a Gülenist can still get a civil servant dismissed today - the total purged is now estimated at 300,000.

Erdoğan’s Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi or AKP (the Justice and Development Party - ak is also Turkish for white) has presented itself as a moderate, conservative party, but has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Pike claims that, ‘Turkey has not morphed (sic), like Iran, into a backward Islamic state. The shift toward Islamic values has been relatively modest.’ This misreads the situation. Iran is a steadily secularizing society under theocratic leadership; Turkey is a steadily Islamifying society under a gradualist leadership. It is an approach which does not risk a breach with the West, or being labelled as a member of an ‘Axis of Evil’. But where is it safer to be a Christian? The question is, of course, academic, as only a handful remain in Turkey, the result of the Armenian genocide in the Great War, and the Greek population exchanges after it. Christians, Zoroastrians and even Jews are protected in ‘backward’ Iran.

Turkey is, of course, a NATO member, if at best a semi-detached one. In terms of ‘bang for bucks’ it overperforms, managing to maintain the second-largest military in the alliance, and also support a lively defence sector (including the Bayraktar drone programme used against Armenian forces in the Artsakh 44-day war of 2020). And it achieves this without excessive spending: it is slightly under the NATO median of 2.11% of GDP (less, of course, than the UK). The Incirlik air base hosts US tactical nuclear weapons and is also used by the RAF, but it is increasingly seen as a risk rather than an asset to the US in a post-Cold War world. Pro-Palestinian protesters attempted to storm the base in in 2023, and had to be fought back by Turkish police with water cannon. The US is in the process of constructing its largest air base in Romania; it is hard not to see this as a short-to-medium term replacement.

Few visitors to Turkey venture beyond the coastal resorts exemplified by Bodrum, or the (wonderful) sights of Istanbul; even to such historic cities as Bursa or Amasya, which would be tourist honeypots in Italy. The ‘modern Westernised urban life’ fades quickly, before one gets close to the heart of Anatolia, or the highlands of the East. But this is the Turkey of the future: fertility rates are as low in the West in these Westernised areas, and only above replacement levels in the (largely Kurdish) south and east.

The 2023 earthquake hit this Turkey - the Turkey beyond the tourist - hard. Over 50,000 died, with twice as many injured; around a quarter of a million people were forced out of their homes in Matalya province alone. Construction standards over the boom of the Erdoğan years were exposed. Billions of dollars of ‘earthquake taxes’, meant to reinforce (literally and financially) the buildings of a geography obviously at risk of seismic shock had gone to ‘greas[ing] their cronies' palms with earthquake taxes’, rather than mitigating the risk. The recent Istanbul near-miss was lucky: it was off-shore, and brought no buildings down; but many fled their homes in the city, trusting to tents rather than tenements, and concerned that next time they may not be so lucky.

In the aftermath of the earthquake, Erdogan just held on against opposition candidate Kılıçdaroğlu (52% to 48%).

As Erdoğan becomes less secure at home he has sought to project power abroad. First, in Artsakh. The breakaway republic (the former Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Nagorno-Karabagh), ethnically Armenian but grafted onto Soviet Azerbaijan by Stalin, had won de facto independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1994. A lightning strike by Azerbaijan in 2020, backed by Turkey under an ideology of ‘one nation, two states’, had taken much of the mountainous, sparsely-populated regions controlled by Armenian forces. Azerbaijan then proceeded to blockade, restrict and starve the region for nine months. An ancient Christian population of ancient Christian lands was ethnically cleansed in a week. 120,000 people left their homelands for Armenia - roughly equivalent to everyone in Northern Ireland relocating to mainland Britain in a week. Cultural desecration is now underway.

Then: Syria. Turkey as a bulwark against ‘potential jihadist troublemakers such as ISIS in Syria’ cannot be taken seriously, given that Turkey has been a principal enabler of them. Turkey has sought to destabilise Syria for its own ends since the start of the war against Assad. Here, the ‘ISIS Ambassador in Ankara’ sets out the Turkish double- dealing of the West: ‘They wanted all the north, from Kessab (the most northern point of Syria) to Mosul.’ Turkey enabled Islamist fighters from across the world to become a mobile force in Syria and beyond: including fighting in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabagh war. Turkey backed the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) forces in Syria, widely seen as an al-Qaeda offshoot before al-Jolani took Damascus and rebranded himself as finely- tailored Ahmed al-Sharaa. Meanwhile, his forces execute Alawites, and Christians comply through fear.

Erdoğan has to run a fine line, of balancing his de facto support for Israel with the Islamist concerns of his base. He talks sanctions, but keeps Azeri oil flowing; Israel is the principal supplier of arms to Azerbaijan, and is dependent on the Baku for 40% of its oil (piped through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline and then shipped from Turkey). In reality, Turkey has worked with Israel in a carve-up of Syria, covered by rhetoric to appease his base. This is the context within which the decision to (re)convert the Hagia Sophia to a mosque needs to be seen; and it’s not one which I ‘applaud’, any more than the wholly inappropriate (re)conversion of the Chora church, with its exquisite mosaics, into an Islamic site: ‘The decision is seen as geared to consolidate the conservative and religious support of Erdogan's rule as his popularity declined.’ People are always ‘gormless’; preserving these as museums is better than having them subjugated to Islam.

Mosaics in the Chora

Beyond the old Ottoman lands, Erdoğan also seeks to project power in Africa. It has invested heavily in Somalia, and has its own Private Military Company, SADAT - an analogue of Russia’s Wagner Group - active in unstable countries such as Niger, following the French withdrawal and the retrenchment of Russia. Africa represents a market for arms, a resource base, and the potential for Turkey to present itself as a ‘Muslim superpower’ to the region.

In contrast, and excepting Azerbaijan, the vision of a Turkic brotherhood into Central Asia (the dream of Enver Pasha) is struggling. Central Asia is being wooed by the world, as a resource goldmine. The loose Organisation of Turkic States remains a talking shop not a reality; Turkmenistan is not a full member, and Pike somehow misses the state that is centrally important: Kazakhstan. Tony Blair was a long-time adviser to ex-president Nazarbayev; but he also employed Portland Communications, home of key Blair insiders Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell (now advising Starmer). Foreign direct investment in the country since independence has skewed heavily western: more than half from the EU (the Netherlands and France in particular), 15% from the US, and 5% from the UK - the same as China. Recent EU pushes have pledged 12 billion Euros in investment - in contrast to the nascent Turkic Investment Fund, of $1 billion.

Rather than being a strong NATO ally and EU candidate, Turkey, it should be remembered, occupied Northern Cyprus by force in 1974, and maintains support for the de facto independent Turkish Republic there; perfectly happy to ignore UN resolutions (or, rather, proving that ‘international law’ is a just a cover for hard power.) In a small but distinct diplomatic snub to the idea of Turkic unity, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan recently refused to recognise the region, declaring ‘all secessionist actions’ as legally invalid.

Erdoğan, meanwhile, has consistently resorted to interference and downright blackmail with his ‘partners’ in Europe. He has a consistent track record of ‘weaponising migrants’: from 2016, to 2019, when (whilst ramping up operations in Syria) he threatened: ‘We will open the gates and send 3.6 million refugees your way’ if they objected. Europe has consistently paid the Turkgeld. And he has used the 3 million Turkish diaspora in Germany to pressure electoral politics: appealing to Turks to reject the mainstream political parties in 2017, and more recently, backing a Turkish-interest party, the ominous-sounding ‘Democratic Alliance for Diversity and Awakening’.

Pike ends his article:

Just as Turkey spans the divide between east and west, a Christian Europe and an Islamic middle east, so Erdogan is a hybrid between democracy and authoritarianism. It is a difficult balancing act. But if Erdogan can ride this horse until the end of the next presidential term in 2033, by which time he will be 79 and will have been in power for more than 30 years, he may well have earned the epithet ‘Great’.

Erdoğan’s potential for ‘greatness’ lies more with geopolitics than his legacy within Turkey, which is shaky. But the metaphor of ‘riding the horse’ is unfortunate: one of the more infamous clips of Erdoğan being thrown from a horse, here voiced-over with the memorable line ‘Causing a kick to the politician’s… Constituents.’ Ouch.

Great Man or no, Erdoğan is no friend to the West.

View from Nzhdeh’s room, Tatev, Armenia

Dr Maitra begins his article with the Trump administration’s seeming abandonment of the Armenians on 24 April:

In a recent presidential statement, Donald Trump avoided the phrase “Armenian genocide” in what might be considered an olive branch towards a renewed bilateral relationship with a changed Turkey. April 24, Armenian Remembrance Day, often occasions a presidential message, but traditionally avoids incendiary terms.

“Today we commemorate the Meds Yeghern, and honor the memories of those wonderful souls who suffered in one of the worst disasters of the 20th Century,” the statement read…

This is different from President Joe Biden’s statement, which reflected his policy of viewing the world through the binary lens of democracy and autocracy. His statement started, “Today, we pause to remember the lives lost during the Meds Yeghern—the Armenian genocide—and renew our pledge to never forget.”

I’m afraid that this reads as an apologia for democracy and political choice which does not exist. The Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA) refused to endorse either Trump or Harris in the 2024 election, on the basis that both parties had abandoned Armenia: Trump (as President) in the brutal 44-day war in 2020 under which Azerbaijan captured most of the Armenian-held Artsakh (de facto independent of Azerbaijan since 1994); and the Biden administration in the final nine month blockade, evacuation and total ethnic cleansing of the territory in 2023.

The stark reality is that Trump’s wording - omitting reference to genocide - matches that of the incumbent Armenian administration (backed by the West) of Nikol Pashinyan.

In Palmerston’s famous phrase ‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.’ What is true across time is also true across party: it is incredibly rare for democratic politics to break what is seen as the deep interests of the nation state; in the cases where is does, it tends to reflect an honest conflict between opposed factions within the elite, or a true knife-edge judgement. Neither applied to the Artsakh conflict, unfortunately.

All the same, the democratic circus had to send in the clowns. The US has the largest Armenian diaspora community outside Russia, around half of which are in Kamala Harris’ home state (Glendale is infamously Armenian.) Biden recognised the Armenian Genocide in 2021; but at the same time, the State Department was being briefed as far back as February 2023 as to how the Armenian community in the States would react to the expulsion of the Artsakhis, and therefore were complicit in it1. Samantha Power, the chief of USAID, arrived in Armenia shortly thereafter, ‘sealing the deal’, as it were.

Trump, of course, was President when the disaster of 2020 took place, and this is resoundingly Trumpian, full of sound and fury, signifying NOTHING:

So now we have Armenia, look at the Armenians, they are incredible people. They are fighting like hell. And you know what we're going to get something done, thank you, you know the Armenians have had a tough go," Trump said. "But I saw, in fact I was in yesterday in Ohio and we had a tremendous group of Armenians with the flag and the whole thing. The problems they've had, with the death and the fighting, we're going to get that straightened out. That's going to be, I call that an easy one. Go back and tell your people. Go back and tell your people, we'll get that straightened out.2

Nothing happened, of course. But in the 2024 campaign, he was happy to play along with democracy, referring to the (lost) Artsakh rather than the usual western Nagorno-Karabakh, and holding a telephone call with Cilician Katholikos Aram I. ‘Kamala Harris did NOTHING as 120,000 Armenian Christians were horrifically persecuted and forcibly displaced in Artsakh’ he said (in CAPITAL LETTERS.) All performance, of course.

US policy has not shifted because of a change of President; Trump is not embracing Erdoğan because of fellow-feeling amongst strong-men leaders. US policy remains on course, albeit with moderated messaging to calm interest groups in the electorate.

Armenia is in a near-impossible position, in terms of geopolitics; and the US is certainly not an ally, as this shows. But on to Turkey. Dr Maitra claims:

The Turkish question will continue to vex Europe, especially post-American retrenchment. Turkey is too big and too important geographically to keep out of European balance. It shows a growing appetite to provide order, to push for political settlements and new equilibria in the historic lands it ruled for centuries.

In terms of the multipolar order to come, Turkey is certainly rising. In terms of Eurasia - and assuming (for the sake of simplicity) that China is and will remain a Great and antagonistic power, what is the balance of power?

US - A Great Power. In Europe, but looking to retrench.

UK - A mid-power. Floating between US and Europe.

Europe - A mid-to-great power, orientation undecided.

Russia - A Great Power despite weakness, maintained by resources, military experience and sheer scale.

Turkey - A rising and expansionist mid-power.

Iran - A mid-power looking to retain that status in the face of setbacks.

Central Asia - Becoming a mid-power. Being wooed by all, but the EU and UK in particular.

India - Struggling to step into the shoes of being a mid-power.

Pakistan - Barely a power, but for its nuclear weapons and potential for chaos.

Israel - A local power, but chaotic and therefore with influence beyond its status.

Back to Dr Maitra:

The Indian political realist Kautilya, in his Mandala theory, coined the concept of enemy’s enemy, which proposed that immediate neighbors are the enemies of the state, and that any prudent sovereign should therefore consider that the state bordering the other side of a neighboring state can be an ally.

It’s not a bad starting point, as long as we remember that the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. But we also need the element of time to be included: a rising power is generally a threat (although potentially an opportunity if we ally with it at the right moment); a declining one more of an opportunity (although potentially a threat if a sudden collapse elicits chaos).

The great question in Eurasian geopol is: what will happen to Europe? Maitra writes, ‘The chances are that, without the Pax Americana, the EU will split along the standard historic divisions.’ That’s a big assumption, and not entirely warranted. I think the geopolitical logic of multipolarity drives some sort of pan-Europeanism, and has done since the 1990s (I confess I was a moderate Europhile back then for this reason - the introduction of the Euro in 2000 gave me second thoughts.) The question is more likely, what sort of association will it be, rather than whether it will continue. The irony is that the Brussels bureaucracy - centralist and centralising all things - currently in charge is the greatest threat to Europe becoming a real Power. One of my theories (see here) is that one goal of US policy towards Europe is to shake the continent out of this - for the interest of the US (it should go without saying), not the folk of Europe. Part of this strategy has been to form Russia as an existential enemy to Europe, as though 2025 was 1945, not 1995.

If we assume, for the moment and as I think is likely, that Europe does not fracture, in terms of a Kautilyan view, Europe has only two threats: Russia and Turkey. But, Russia is both a threat, and an opportunity. The Ukrainian war has demonstrated that the direct military threat - rolling the tanks westward - is overwhelmingly costly in current military conditions. This is not to diminish the real threat of future incursions by Russia - driving a wedge through the Suwalki gap and linking Kaliningrad to the Russian Federation proper will remain a temptation for any Russian strategist. But there is opportunity with Russia. Any sensible policy on the continent would start by restoring Russian energy links, which would have the direct effect of loosening dependence on Turkey.

Turkey is, of course a NATO ‘ally’ (albeit one which has annexed the territory of a fellow NATO member) and an EU candidate country (albeit one which coined the term ‘weaponising migrants’ against Europe.) It funds explicitly Turkic diaspora politics in Germany. But Turkey does not have anything positive for Europe, beyond access to Azeri energy, cheap labour, and halting migrant chaos.

Turkey’s NATO legacy is the worst hangover of the Cold War: what made sense for the West against the Soviet South Caucasus now just gives Turkey even more influence in that region. The US air base at Incirlik is hopelessly out of date: according to the New Yorker, ‘Although Incirlik probably has more nuclear weapons than any other NATO base, it does not have any American or Turkish aircraft equipped to deliver them. The bombs simply sit at the base, underground, waiting to be used or misused.’ The largest NATO air base is now being built in Romania, on the Black Sea coast close to Constanța. It’s hard not to read this as a prelude to a US withdrawal from Turkey - which would be an eminently sensible move.

If we are going by simplistic Kautilyan reasoning, the key powers that Europe would be wooing would be Iran, the Central Asian republics, and (at one remove) India. Europe (France in particular) has always been relatively dovish on Iran, in the face of US aggressive rhetoric (the Israel lobby is of course central in this). As to Kazakhstan, by far the most important of the Stans, I’ll repeat what I said here:

There have been considerable moves to pull Kazakhstan towards a more Western-facing polity in recent years. It is well known that no less a figure than Tony Blair was a long-time adviser to ex-president Nazarbayev; but he also employed Portland Communications, home of key Blair insiders Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell too. Foreign direct investment in the country since independence has skewed heavily western: more than half from the EU (the Netherlands and France in particular), 15% from the US, and 5% from the UK - the same as China. Russia appears to have been relaxed about this, despite Kazakhstan being a member of both the SCO and CSTO.

The challenge for Europe is not containing Russia - which can be done with economic carrots as well as sticks if and when normal relations are resumed - but by Turkey. Europe has a good start here - in terms of good links with Kazakhstan and a non-Anglosphere bridge to Iran. For the key to containing Turkey beyond its neo-Ottoman ambitions is halting pan-Turanism: the ‘East-West Corridor’ from Istanbul to China, via Azerbaijan and the Caspian though Central Asia. And there is one small knot stopping this: the hard knot of mountains of southern Armenia: Syunik, which the Turk-Azeri Axis want to claim as the Zangezur Corridor. Land secured for Armenia by Garegin Nzhdeh, in 1921. It can, and should, be stymied, as a North-South link from Russia, through Georgia and Armenia, to Iran and then on to India (thus bypassing Azerbaijan).

Finally:

‘Keeping Turkey out of Europe would result in a massive rising enemy just outside the frontiers, and accepting it would only encourage internal tensions and centrifugal forces within the European Union.’

It’s impossible for Turkey to be ‘accepted’. It is already an enemy, not less than Russia. It needs to be kept out of Europe, as it was at the Congress of Vienna (when the Ottomans held vast chunks of the Balkans.) The question is what to do about it. And when.

See, for example here, c. 19m

Photograph of the Connolly family from the Telegraph article: idyllic and out of date

This headline in The Times is striking:

Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages

along with rent-a-quotes from Big Brother Watch and Toby Young of the Free Speech Union:

Sir Keir Starmer emphatically denied there is a free speech crisis in Britain when JD Vance raised this with him at the White House, but this data suggests we have a serious problem.

To be clear up front: the purpose of this short article is not to suggest that there is no problem about living in a country where the police can lock you up for a tweet, still less condone it; and, for the avoidance of doubt, I do not think there should be any punishment for saying something into the aether, even (whisper it) something racist. What I am trying to do here is to provide an example of how the system works to reinforce such suppression, by police and courts and media, and looks for the maximum impact at the lowest cost (widely defined).

The first thing to note is that the substance of the Times piece is at odds with its form: namely the shock headline and obligatory interjections from the free speech warriors. It is by no means hidden, in fact illustrated in two stark graphs. The Times looks at arrests made under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, over time:

compared to sentences received (note the different time axis - it’s a very sloppy article):

Thus, whilst the number of arrests has roughly doubled from the pre-Covid era to 2023, the number of convictions has remained broadly flat. Fewer than one in ten of the number arrested in 2023 were actually sentenced. Not only that, the number of sentences received is substantially (c.45%) below the peak number of the first Cameron government: when (in 2013) Sir Keir Starmer, as Director of Public Prosecutions, revised guidance to the effect that ‘that offensive social media messages should only lead to prosecution in “extreme circumstances.”’

The data presented by The Times ends, of course, before 2024, the year of the Rudakubana Riots and the attentions of the new Trump regime on free speech in our land, up to VP Vance and Musk himself. Unfortunately, data is not forthcoming: my brief search listed only two police forces to have been received FOI requests: West Yorkshire, who declined to provide information on grounds of cost, and Cumbria, whose response is here. This sole example 34 arrests (down from a peak of 49 in 2019) and 4 charged (compared to 13 in 2017).

We can’t tell anything from this, of course, save that there wasn’t a tsunami of jailings in Carlisle. What is more telling is neither the author of the article, nor any journalistic colleagues, nor the free speech advocates, appears to have asked the question.

All this is in sharp contrast to how the narrative is presented. On the same day as the Times article, the Telegraph featured this long piece by Allison Pearson on one of the high profile convicts, Lucy Connolly, sentenced to 31 months’ bird for a tweet. Pearson herself has received much publicity (largely from her employer) for her own arrest for tweeting about the police: “How dare they. Invited to pose for a photo with lovely peaceful British Friends of Israel on Saturday police refused. Look at this lot smiling with the Jew haters.” (Charges were not brought.) Poor Lucy herself, and her family, have been horrendously treated: her tweet was live for four hours in the aftermath of the Southport attack before she deleted it. Pearson quotes:

It was without doubt a horrible, hateful and deeply offensive tweet. “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f---ing hotels full of the b-----ds for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it.”

Let’s leave aside the question of whether the expression of a statement ‘x can happen, for all I care’ is indeed ‘horrible, hateful and deeply offensive’: note that Pearson is actively backing the rationale for the prosecution here. We then elide into the background: the death of Lucy’s son at the hands of the NHS (‘catastrophic failures’ but not ‘gross negligence’), her vulnerability to suffering children and PTSD, and refence to ‘the fifty-one words’ of the tweet that would ‘turn her into the ideal poster girl for Starmer’s pledge to impose heavy sentences on “far-Right thugs”.’1

Thereafter, Pearson goes on to laud Lucy’s non-racist credentials:

Mrs Connolly’s precious charges have included Nigerian, Somalian, Jamaican, Bangladeshi, Lithuanian and Polish, as well as white British, kids. “It’s like the blimmin’ United Nations in here,” the childminder used to joke.

and talks her ‘old-fashioned socialist mother’ who taught her to ‘abhor racism’.

She was refused bail. A ‘senior lawyer’ refers to ‘ informal pressure’ to ‘crack down hard’ in the wake of the riots. The most telling passage is here:

Ray Connolly was convinced by a couple of leading barristers who insisted that his wife should plead not guilty – a jury, they said, was unlikely to convict a patently decent woman like Lucy for one horrible tweet. “If I could have got her round a table with those barristers, I’m sure she would have gone with ‘not guilty’,” Ray says. But Lucy herself was in jail where she was surrounded by women who had waited months for a trial date… A guilty plea looked like the fastest way to put this nightmare behind her. “I don’t give a damn about having a criminal record,” she said to herself. “I want to be at home with Ray and Holly.”

The article, under the cover of highlighting a unjust case, actually serves to illustrate the tactics that the regime appears to employ, which are characterised by:

• An increasing arrest rate, including high-profile cases (such as Allison Pearson and Bernie Spofforth) combined with a reduced rate of prosecution

• ‘Example’ sentences being made of a small number of those that are prosecuted

• A targeting of vulnerable people of those charged who may be persuaded to plead guilty rather than facing a jury

• A worrying absence (at best) of decent legal advice

I would stress that we do not have data for the 2024 across the country; it could be that the particular atmosphere after the Southport massacres will lead to a reversal of these trends. In addition, we do not know what the effect of the Online Safety Act (implemented last month) will have in future.

With these caveats, consider how many cases of being jailed for posting have actually come across your feeds? Lucy Connolly, almost certainly, and Peter Lynch, the Rotherham grandfather also jailed for almost three years who seems to have committed suicide in prison. (Pearson also raises his case - and links it to Lucy Connolly - here.) Our lone example of Cumbria will include these two cases, both receiving sentences of twelve weeks. Another instance2 received a sentence of 46 weeks - although he had accumulated 32 previous convictions in his 41 years, including a sex offence and assaulting a police officer.

The media has also sought to conflate prosecutions for malicious communications with charges brought as part of the riots themselves (which have been treated harshly, not surprisingly.) Sticking to Cumbria, this BBC report from last August relates to one of the cases I linked above, and another woman being granted bail; but note how the report ends:

The woman was granted bail on condition she does not post anything on any social media platform.

Unrest spread across the country after three young girls were stabbed to death in Southport on 29 July.

So far, 927 people have been arrested and 466 charged in relation to the disorder, a spokesman for the National Police Chiefs' Council (NPCC) said.

There is a pattern: scattergun arrests, limited prosecutions and a handful of egregious sentences to be amplified by mainstream media, and thoughtlessly reposted across social media for maximal coverage, until it gets amplified by Musk himself. The randomness of the prosecutions, and the consequent uncertainty, is in many ways more oppressive than outright censorship: self-censorship is more damaging to the individual than simplistic rule-following. And it is being achieved at a low ‘cost’ to the state in terms of jail time. I am fond of saying that the Britain is the most controlled nation in the world, not excluding North Korea, and I’m not entirely joking.

I’m sure my readers are sensible enough to know: if the you get a knock on the door, don’t plead guilty.

Born in Bishop Auckland, Hill’s journey “from the Coal House to the White House” (as she puts it) is an interesting one. She has spent most of her working career in the States, marrying an American and taking US citizenship. But now she is now back: she was appointed Chancellor of Durham University in June 2023; and she is centrally involved in the current defence review, announced by the Starmer government in its first days in office.

Keen watchers of US politics may have come across Dr Hill before: she became something of a media darling (in leftist circles) when testifying in the first Trump impeachment trial in 2019. The Guardian ran with the headline: “Fiona Hill rebukes conspiracy theory – and emerges as a heroine for our times”. “Twitter had fallen into a collective swoon”, it reckoned. Meanwhile, old friend of this stack, Nazir Afzal, posted, “She is testament to benefits of immigration & a terrible loss to U.K.”

The Guardian set the scene:

Hill’s opening message to the two ranks of members of Congress arranged in front and above her was that she had come before them as the very embodiment of the American dream. Because of Britain’s enduring social rigidity, she had to emigrate for her talent and expertise to be valued properly.

“I grew up poor, with a very distinctive working-class accent,” she told the House intelligence committee in that same accent, somewhat softened now by her years in the US. “In England in the 1980s and 1990s, this would have impeded my professional advancement. This background has never set me back in America.”

The “conspiracy theory” in question was that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that had interfered in the 2016 election. As she stated, “I would ask that you please not promote politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests.”

She is an implacable Russia hawk; but before we get onto geopolitics, I’ll take a look at her life.

There Is Nothing For You Here

Dr Hill’s 2021 book is partly an autobiography come childhood misery-memoir; partly a level-headed account of her professional life and time in the White House; partly a plea for government policy based around “creating opportunity”. It was lapped up and lauded by the left, and reading the book belies her claim to be not just non-partisan, but anti-partisan. This strange term (with its echoes of racism) presumably leads us to the conclusion that there is a moral duty actively to work against that handy catch-all evil of “political polarisation”.

For Dr Hill is an extremist in her own way - a partisan for the progressive regime. She’s too subtle for her north-eastern upbringing to turn this into a simplistic anti-Thatcherism; UK coal mining jobs had already declined from over 700,000 in the late 1950s to under 300,000 by 1970. She constantly referring to herself as a “miner’s daughter”, but her father’s pit had closed before she was born. She’s not necessarily being dishonest here: I do believe that her father always thought of himself in the honourable job of being a miner, rather than the hospital porter he became.

It is notable though that for the Hills, the “much-beloved” NHS became “the main source of reliable full-time and part-time work, the locus of opportunity”2. Her “mam”, too, worked in the NHS as a midwife, although of course rarely full-time as the children were growing up. The family’s poverty was relative, partly at least because they owned a house and had a mortgage to pay; others would see this as an investment. And life was tough in County Durham in the eighties, as the pits closed (I was at university there at the time), but there can be no doubt that it would have been better in many ways for a child to grow up in a decent-sized market town, with the Bishop’s Palace set in its substantial park, than her father’s pit village of Roddymore, even if the mine had remained open.

Hill went on to read French and Russian at St Andrews, after feeling “out of place” in an Oxford interview. There is one telling story from her time there as regards her later role. Students had to attend a mandatory Russian summer school at East Anglia, and, being tight up for cash, an uncle suggested applying for grant from the Durham Miners’ Association, which she won (as well as one from the local Rotary Club). Some money from the Miners’ Strike had been put into an educational fund for the children of miners; and this had included cash donated by the Soviet miners of the Donbas! Elsewhere, she reveals that she had read Das Kapital (in the library at night) whilst at St Andrews.

It is not surprising that the text is is littered throughout with strongly liberal views on sex and race issues. The first page of the main text, talking about the Trump impeachment hearings, refers to “congressmen” (italics hers). Even a reactionary heart cannot fail to sympathise with constantly being assumed to be a prostitute in western hotels in the Russia of the nineties, with doormen refusing to let her enter without the required backhander. And this is one area where her adopted country comes in for criticism: the lack of transparency is US pay, along with the constant need to negotiate, even at Harvard or the White House3.

She is very vocal on race issues too. Rather strangely, she divides the British ethnic groups (she is happy to use to term) into five: English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh and Traveller. She claims descent from all. Whether this is an affectation, or an Elizabeth Warren-like American-influenced bid for minority status is an open question. But she is certainly all to happy to disparage the white majority and cheer for diversity:

[In the US:] Some people have found themselves in places with little demographic diversity as well as fewer educational opportunities and jobs. Others live in vibrant, diverse, multicultural communities with plenty of access to opportunity.

London is the UK’s center of educational and employment opportunity. Thanks to immigration, London also has a diverse population that mirrors large cities in the United States but puts it out of step with the rest of the country… [The formerly industrial Midlands and North’s] demographic profile has changed little since I lived in one of those forgotten towns in the 1980s, so the classification “White teenagers”… is something of a diversion, what you could call a white rather than a red herring.4

In Dr Hill’s world, race is the central diversity question in the US in the way that class is in the UK; with sex being prevalent everywhere. She frequently claims (as she did on oath before Congress) that she could not have advanced in the UK with her background; but this is taken as an article of faith, rather than engaged with beyond the anecdotal, let alone proved.

One of her themes is that Russia and the US are on the same trajectory towards authoritarianism, Russia is just more advanced. Covid is referred to as the Populists’ Pandemic. The “plot” to “kidnap” Gretchen Wheeler, the Democrat governor of Michigan in October 2020 is adduced as evidence, and she states: “We were tearing ourselves apart.”5 The only problem is that the by a “far right” group responsible for the plot was nearly half Feds or informers, and the plot itself had been suggested by one of the Feds!6

I won’t consider those aspects of the book that cover her opportunity-based policy suggestions: apart from anything else, they are not worth it. One last quote from the book:

Political polarization is ultimately a national security threat as well as a domestic challenge. It is a barrier to the collective action necessary for combating catastrophes like global pandemics, mitigating the effects of climate change, and, as I saw in my time at the White House, thwarting external threats from adversaries such as Russia.7

A Hawk - but with a dose of realism

If there’s one thing that Dr Hill is insistent on more than the joys of diversity, it is that Russia is our “historic adversary”. And she is adamant that Putin interfered in the 2016 election.

An early lucky break came in her year abroad as an undergraduate in 1997, where she got a gig as a translator-come-fixer for NBC News at the signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty by Reagan and Gorbachev in Moscow. It was on this job that a Columbia professor encouraged her to apply to the States for her masters, and she won a scholarship to Harvard, at a time when they were looking to expand international programmes beyond Oxbridge. From 2000, she worked a leading “non-partisan” Washington think tank, the Brookings Institution; then run (for most of her time there) by Strobe Talbott, a Russia expert who had been Deputy Secretary of State under Clinton (an old friend from the time they were both Rhodes Scholars).

Dr Hill trod the familiar path between academia, think tanks and government, and joined the National Intelligence Council as National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia. She worked under both Bush and Obama, from 2006 to 2009, before returning to Brookings, and co-authoring “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin”, a “psychological portrait” of the Russian President. This led to her most significant role: as a member of the National Security Council in the first Trump presidency.

Perhaps this was a mistake for somebody who had been on the Washington Women’s March the day before being invited for the role. She paints herself as politically naive, and simply wanting to serve her country; although high-profile roles are always hard to resist for the ambitious. We don’t (and wouldn’t expect to) learn anything substantive about policy matters from her formal time in government; what we have are tales of misunderstandings, mishaps, and misogyny, often involving clothing and etiquette faux-pas with the ever-present Ivanka. I am sure she sympathises with Zelensky. Nonetheless, she continued in the role until July 2019.

In order to understand her stance on Russia, therefore, we will have to look at her pronouncements after leaving office; fortunately, she has been vocal. But she has also been vocal about the first Trump administration - I won’t bore you with gossipy criticisms that fill much of that section of her book, in lieu of substance. Here, for example, she presents a case for calling the January 6th protests a coup: “Trump disguised what he was doing by operating in plain sight, talking openly about his intent”, and drawing comparisons with authoritarian regimes around the world, including Erdogan.

In an interview in Politico in October 2022, she identifies Elon Musk as acting as “Putin’s messenger for the war”. Eight months into the Ukraine war, this was the soon after Musk had publicly suggested that a peace deal should be considered (but obviously predating his association with Trump), suggesting that Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts could be negotiated, before Putin announced their annexation. As “evidence” she can only point to Musk’s reference to securing water supplies to Crimea, and stating that he would be unlikely to know of the supply canal from Kherson. Those of us following the war did know of it: water supplies to Crimea had been in the news, let alone admitting the possibility that before going public, Musk may have spoken to somebody who informed him of the fact. We can’t discount the possibility that she has had access to intelligence to back her claim, but her public argument really just comes down to: it’s the sort of thing Putin has done before, and Musk is the type of conduit he would use.

But elsewhere in the interview, she manages to combine a hardline hawkishness with a dose of realism that is rare. She recognises that Putin has no intention of giving up Crimea and the four oblasts, and states:

It’s unlikely this ends in any satisfying way. You need every side willing to compromise, and Putin doesn’t want to compromise his goals…

There is not going to be a happy or satisfying ending for anybody, and it’s also not going to be happy or satisfying for Vladimir Putin either, honestly.

An unusually frank sentiment in 2022.

Similarly, an article co-authored before the war recommended a policy based on a balanced commitment to deterrence and détente, and recognised:

Ultimately, the reality is that Russia, under Vladimir Putin, operates within a strategic framework deeply rooted in nationalist traditions that resonate with elites and the public alike. An eventual successor, even one more democratically inclined, will likely operate within this same framework. Premising U.S. policy on the assumption that we can and must change that framework is misguided.

And more realism is to be found in this 2023 lecture, in which she argues cogently for a strategic approach which recognises the era of multipolarity. She references the regionalisation of security, trade and political alliances, and borrows two interesting terms: “limited liability partnerships” and ““mini-lateralism”. She says: “The Cold War era non-aligned movement has reemerged if it ever went away.” And she recognises that the Manichean “You’re either with us or against us” rhetoric of the US will no longer cut it - even within Europe.

There is even a hint that the West has been too aggressive in its expansion eastwards:

Putin believes that Russia is not just the successor state to, but the “State in Continuum” of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. And indeed, this is how we all recognized Russia after the dissolution of the USSR in December 1991. This fact explains a great deal about the present. Russia is the last continental empire in Europe.

Emphasis mine. But here’s the paradox: she also refers to Russia (the Russian Federation) as being still an “empire”. This is dangerous talk for a scripted speech; the sort of talk that gets foolish extremists on both sides of the Atlantic dreaming of the break-up of Russia into dozens of successor republics.

Understandably, Hill was at her most hawkish in the early days of the war. She warns that Putin may use a nuclear weapon: “The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t?” And, “He’s already used a nuclear weapon in some respects”, referring to polonium and Litvinenko. An ominous note is struck here: “The only way that we are going to be able to engage with Russia down the line is if there’s a reckoning for what has happened in Ukraine.” As to the possibility of World War III:

We’re already in it. We have been for some time.

Back in the UKSSR: Starmer’s Strategic Defence Review

Less than two weeks after his less than resounding election victory8, Sir Keir Starmer launched a new Strategic Defence Review. A few days later, the key three people leading it were announced: it was to be chaired by former NATO Secretary General and Blair-era Defence Secretary Lord (George) Robertson, with former Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff General Sir Richard Barrons bringing the perspective of the armed forces. The striking choice was the third, Dr Fiona Hill, who had been based in the US for three decades.

Nobody would doubt that the military scene is fast-changing, but the fact is that this is the third defence review on four years. The cost of these is a rounding error in the defence budget, but the effect on UK military strategy (or the lack of it) is crippling. We have a new administration, of course, but the Starmer government is not even pretending to differ in policy from previous Conservative ones. If there is any substantive change to be introduced, the new government - and the review itself - will be a cover for it, not the cause.

Lord Robertson is an ageing senior statesman (he’s 78), and if reports are to be believed, the representatives of the forces are being “gagged by the government” and “increasingly exasperated to be relegated to the background”. It is, I believe, Dr Hill who is driving this review, and any changes it seeks to recommend.

The spiralling costs of the UK nuclear programme have gone from being a nasty secret referred to only by Dominic Cummings a year ago (he claims holes in the public accounts in the order of tens of billions), to being admitted in broadsheets as a major problem for Rachel Reeves. For the first time since the 1980s, the fact that the UK’s nuclear deterrent is not actually '“independent” has entered the discourse. And in general, our exposure to the US for much of our defence equipment, dubious in cost-effectiveness and reliant on the US to operate, is being cast as a potential problem rather than a blessing of the legendary Special Relationship:

The year is 2028 and masked Russian “little green men” start crossing the border of an eastern European country.

Nato’s Article 5 is invoked. In London, officials want to quickly deploy Britain’s F-35 stealth jets to the frontier – but there is a problem.

The US, unwilling to clash with Vladimir Putin, says it won’t support the deployment and refuses to provide communications support, logistics, or even spare parts.

Within a matter of weeks, the Royal Air Force’s most advanced aircraft risks being rendered inoperable along with other American platforms operated by the alliance.

This is the grim scenario that experts say Britain must now plan for as it grapples with the increasingly volatile whims of Donald Trump.

Heady stuff, run of course under the banner of Evil Putin and Volatile Trump. But you don’t have to buy into the narrative to read the suggestions.

Hill herself, of course, after her run-ins with Trump in the White House and testimony to Congress, is not the biggest fan of the President. I quoted earlier her insistence that January 6th was an attempted coup. Back in 2021, she claimed that “if he makes a successful return to the presidency in 2024, democracy’s done.” (It is interesting to note that in this interview, she has some positive things to say about J.D. Vance.) But by last year, in another interview shortly before the election, she was more measured about Trump, and focused more on the threat of Elon Musk: “Musk is hoping to actually own the state. He sees Trump, obviously, as a pathway to power… his loyalty is not necessarily to the United States.”

So what is the role of Dr Hill in the latest review? Will the UK/US dual citizen be the figurehead for the continuation of the military arm of the Special Relationship, or will the Trump-sceptic signal a strategic shift? Will she again be cast as simultaneously working for the UK Prime Minister and the American President? We will see soon when the review is published, likely next month. But one thing is clear: the Russia hawks will remain in charge.

Nixon and Trump, 1989

Ferguson is a pre-eminent transatlantic historian-come-commentator, and fellow of the neocon-central Hoover Institution. He’s done some serious work: managing proper analysis combined with a revisionist slant and an ability to deliver a populist crossover. (To those who haven’t read him, I would recommend works such as The Pity of War and The Cash Nexus wholeheartedly.) He is the authorised biographer of Henry Kissinger, with access to his private papers, the first half of which, covering his early life until the pivotal year of 1968, was published a decade ago.

Ferguson, therefore, seems perfectly qualified to compare the worlds of Nixon and Trump. And he’s right to do so, but misses the point far too often. Let’s start with his statement:

You’re trying to get America out of a war you didn’t start and which you regard as a drain on US resources. You’ve just delivered a massive shock to your allies. You really want them to rely less on the US for their security. You also want to counter their competition with US manufacturing. You’re aiming to achieve peace in the Middle East between Israel and everyone else. And you’re seeking to drive a wedge between Russia and China and exploit it to your advantage.

Well, yes and no. The “purpose” (one) of the Nixon presidency was to close the disastrous Vietnam war, as the “purpose” (one) of Trump II is to close Ukraine, but there the similarity ends. Vietnam was a reaction to Chinese ideological expansion in South East Asia; Ukraine is a reaction to US expansion in Central Europe. Vietnam was fought by US troops (with Vietnamese allies); Ukraine is being fought by Ukrainians (without a cost, in casualties, to the NATO powers).

The “Nixon Shock” of 1971 (a 10% surcharge on all imports, and the suspension of the convertibility of the dollar into gold) was, as Ferguson correctly points out, a reaction to world economic conditions as much as proactive US policy. Pressure on US gold reserves had been building for a while: back in 1965, de Gaulle had announced his intention to exchange France’s dollar reserves for gold. In May 1971, West Germany left Bretton Woods (the post-war system of fixed exchange rates, linked to a reserve currency of the dollar, backed by gold.) By August, France’s President Pompidou sent a battleship to New York to remove France’s gold deposits!

The iconic WTF1971 graph

The effect of the turning the dollar into a pure fiat currency is well noted, becoming the meme of WTF1971 and even having its own excellent website devoted to it, charting the huge effect on economics since then (some of which are more humorous than serious). Ferguson again:

The trouble with emulating Nixon is obvious. It didn’t end well. As the system of fixed exchange rates unraveled, the dollar slid. The outbreak of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 was followed by the Arab OPEC countries’ oil price hike — a shock administered to rather than by the US government. By the time Nixon was forced to resign over Watergate on Aug. 8, 1974, the US economy was in recession, with unemployment rising rapidly, and inflation at 11%. The S&P 500 declined 46% from its peak in the aftermath of Nixon’s landslide victory in November 1972 to its nadir in September 1974.

Let’s leave aside the distraction here: devaluation of the dollar was an inevitable outcome of the “Nixon shock”, even one of its objectives. (That’s why countries wanted to get gold out of the States, of course.) And the recession was the result of the oil price shock, not (necessarily) the devaluation/import surcharge, though these will have had an impact on the domestic US economy. But Ferguson is, for whatever reason, taking too narrow a horizon, both in regards time and his target.

As I said above, the pressure on Bretton Woods had long been building. The year of 1971 is well known, but the “Nixon shock” had been set in that other momentous year of 1968. It is easy to miss, amidst the Prague Spring and the May evenements in Paris, the assassinations Martin Luther King and RFK, and the election of Nixon himself; but the last year of the Johnson administration repealed the requirement for the dollar to be backed by gold. Nixon enacted a plan already put in place by his predecessor.

Ferguson, too, is misleading in cutting off the economic effects of the Nixon shocks to his term in office. The dollar-as-reserve under Bretton Woods was replaced by the petrodollar system, as Saudi Arabia agreed in 1973 to price and sell oil exclusively in dollars. By 1975 all OPEC countries were on board. The US entered the era of pure fiat currency, able to print money “for free” in return for real goods.

The WTF1971 site illustrates many of the disastrous effects this has had on the American worker (repeated around the world, particularly in the wider American “empire”). But in terms of geopolitics, it was a master-stroke. In particular, it gave the ability for the US, under Reagan, to increase its defence spending in an unprecedented way outside of a hot war. We can see the effect on the chart here1:

I have plotted post-war for clarity. The massive spike of Korea is evident, as the US not only found itself fighting a major war, but also gearing up for the Cold War world. In contrast, the Vietnam war saw an increase from 6.4% to 7.5% of GDP, or 20% (as a proportion of GDP). The decade from 1968 (that pivotal year) saw defence spending drop markedly. The post-9/11 “wars on terror” took spending from 2.6% to 3.7%, or 42%. In contrast, the Reagan years saw defence spending rise, in a time of peace, from 3.6% to reach 4.8% in 1985 - a full third higher (at a time when the economy was booming). This was unprecedented outside wartime. The USSR’s lack of ability to match this level of spending, along with the talk of programmes such as “Star Wars” which threatened the concept of mutual nuclear deterrence, were important factors in the Gorbachev programme of reforms which eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, and the USSR itself.

It is impossible to know how much of this was “planned” by the US back in 1968, and how much was a lucky reaction to world events. But the cross-party nature of the system is striking. What we call the “deep state” is often just the working out of the situational logic of the geopolitics of the day; outcomes are always likely to follow a similar path, irrespective of the holder of the office of President or control of Congress, unless something, or someone, flips the logic entirely. The latter, in my view, happens rarely.

The element of time is vital to consider when assessing geopolitics. Roughly, I would split the time horizon into three segments: the immediate situation, the short-term of 1-5 years (conveniently, the lifetime of an elected government in the West), and the long-term, anything from a decade upwards to a generation.

Ferguson seeks to limit the horizon to the short-term, which suits his argument, along with the fact that Nixon’s presidency ended in impeachment and resignation. It’s entirely misleading on a longer term view. Twenty years after 1971, the Cold War had ended and the US entered its unipolar Fukuyama moment.

It suits defenders of Democracy such as Ferguson to ignore the longer-term effects of policy and to isolate them in individual administrations - which he has framed perfectly in this article as being Nixon (as look what happened to him!) Stressing the role that the individual President or Prime Minister plays, over the wider forces at work (whether “deep state” or situational) is essential to the myth. And it also suits the myth to play down strategies with a longer horizon, because Your Vote Matters. I think it’s dangerous and misleading to ignore them.

This is not to say that events are (or can be) predictable, or that longer term strategies are unchanging entities, always evolving but sometimes switched. And in domestic politics, away from large-scale international issues, party A or B can make a difference, for example in education policy. It is notable that Dominic Cummings in the UK attached himself to Michael Gove and that department in the Cameron government - perhaps it was not coincidental that he ended up in a department where policy could actually be affected. Whether or not you think academies were a good idea (they brought us Katharine Birbalsingh, after all), education was one of the few areas where reforms did actually take place under the coalition - illustrated by the fact that the Labour incumbent Bridget Phillipson, a capable idealogue, is working at reversing them.

In addition, whether longer term strategies will succeed, or even whether they are a good idea in the first place, is open. Few now would argue that the Anglo-US drive to bring Freedom and Democracy to the most benighted places in the world (beginning with the Blair/Clinton intervention in Bosnia) were anything other than disastrous - particularly for the recipients of our liberal largesse. Or another example: the Nixon/China policy inaugurated in 1971 probably had little effect on the fate of the Soviet Union, but was the seed that developed into Deng’s economic reforms, and eventually the admission of China to the WTO in 2001. A generation later, the position is being reversed.

One of my contentions is that Trump’s second presidency is a feature, not a cause of what we are currently seeing, a significant US geopolitical shift. It’s not as if the main currents are hidden: the rise of the multipolar world, the US desire to get Europe to stump up more for defence, and the Pacific pivot to China have been long signalled and public. The unquestioned Great Powers will be the US and China; the desire for Europe to remain united and step up to the role is being pushed by the US, and Russia will remain because of her size and resources. (This will be maintained as long as the most extreme fantasies of the neocons to break up Russia’s “empire” are not fulfilled - which apart from anything else will not be in the US’s interests in the multipolar world order.) All will look to leverage the local powers - particularly the dangerously resurgent Turkey, Iran, India and Central Asia (particularly Kazakhstan). What the UK’s role will be in this in unclear, although I suspect we will continue to “float” between the US and Europe.

So, the analogy is correct; Trump II is an a similar position as Nixon, and, like 1971, the ground has been prepared in advance. The fact that particular policy shifts are put in place under one party, which the other could not, even borrows from 1971: “Only Nixon could go to China”. Russia too will probably “float” between Europe and China in the medium term, particularly if energy links are re-established after the Ukraine war (as they will need to be to make large-scale industrial production viable.

Ferguson goes on:

To my mind, the probability of a Sino-Russian split must be very low as long as Xi and Putin are calling the shots in Beijing and Moscow.

He is confusing (deliberately?) the time horizons I referred to above here. It is low in the immediate future, but more likely in the medium term; but I think is the US’s goal for the long term. After all, it is Putin who has talked about multipolarity for years, and it is in Russia’s interests; as I have said before, if the world was to split into truly rival camps in a maximalist Cold War II, she would be little more than a subordinate partner to China. Russia will be able to leverage power much better in a truly multipolar world.2 The medium to long term interests of the US and Russia are likely to converge.

Elsewhere, Ferguson writes, “Europeans make the mistake of regarding Trump as an overmighty would-be emperor. In fact, he is actuated by a nagging sense of weakness.” Weakness is going to far, but the US is certainly retrenching, and it is sensible to do so.

I’ve used this quote from Robert D. Kaplan before:

Rome’s real failure in its final phase of grand strategy was that it didn't provide a mechanism for a graceful retreat. But it is precisely—& counterintuitively—by planning for such a deft exit from a hegemony that an empire can actually prolong its position of strength.3

When the war ends, I hope that Professor Ferguson will be freed from cheerleading for Ukraine, and have more time to devote to other matters - in particular finishing his biography of Kissinger.