Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, Britain, History

Book Review: ‘The History Thieves’…

BOOK REVIEW

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In this important new book, Ian Cobain offers a fresh appraisal of some of the key moments in British history since the end of WWII.

THIS carefully written and well-researched book takes deadly aim at the official version of modern British history. During our school years, we are taught that we are a decent and tolerant nation, and that the state does not assassinate its opponents, use torture or commit atrocities. Ian Cobain argues that this picture is both complacent and untrue, and he provides chilling evidence and testimony that the British state has routinely committed appalling crimes. Many of them, he argues, have been fought in wars well away from the public eye.

How many people know, for instance, that it was Britain – not the French or Americans – who launched the Vietnam conflict, airlifting the entire 20th Infantry Division of the British Indian Army to Indo-China in 1945 with orders to suppress a Vietnamese attempt to form their own government?

Who knows, too, about the four-year-long war fought by the British in Indonesia in the Sixties, or the decade-long counter-insurgency campaign in Oman on the Arabian Peninsula?

Cobain methodically calculates that British forces have been engaged somewhere in the world every year since at least 1914. Between 1949 and 1970, Britain initiated 34 foreign interventions. No other country, not even Russia or the United States, has such a record.

Yet, for the most part, British people are blithely unaware of any of this. Cobain argues that the reason for their ignorance is a culture of national secrecy more thoroughgoing than that of France or the U.S. He shows that the brutal Oman war went unreported for many years. And when wars did get reported, it was by tame journalists passing on doctored version of events.

Many of these events and wars also remain a mystery to historians. Cobain proves the British authorities have arranged the suppression – or destruction – of documents that portray Britain in a bad light. Thousands of incriminating files have been incinerated or dumped at sea, while others remain hidden in secret archives.

Cobain calls this “an extraordinary ambitious act of history theft”. He maintains “the British state of the late 20th and early 21st century was attempting to protect the reputation of the British state of generations earlier, concealing and manipulating history – sculpting an official narrative – in a manner more associated with a dictatorship than a mature and confident democracy”.

The author explains that the problem is getting worse because of recent legislation pushed through by the Coalition enabling suspects to be tried in secret courts, meaning that defendants do not even know the charges being made against them. The real reason for much of this secrecy, suggests Cobain, is not to ensure justice, but rather to protect the reputation of intelligence officers complicit in crimes such as torture and rendition.

Cobain is an honest and accurate reporter, but there is one serious criticism of the book. It does not give enough voice to the Whitehall figures whose job it is to fight terrorism and make sensitive decisions about British foreign policy.

They have the grave and very difficult task of ensuring atrocities are not carried out on the streets of Britain – and, in recent years, they have been successful in this vital and largely thankless task. Their need to work in secret is all too understandable.

Whilst we have nothing in our recent history comparable to the appalling atrocities committed by the French in Algeria, or the Belgians in the Congo – let alone the mass murders of Stalin, Mao or Hitler – most Britons should continue to believe that we live in a fair and honest country.

Nevertheless, Ian Cobain has written an important book which deserves to change the way we see our recent past. It warns us against complacency, and exposes why we should challenge what we have been taught from a young age.

–     The History Thieves by Ian Cobain is published by Portobello for £20.

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Arts, Asia, Books, China, Economic, Government, Politics, Society, United States

Book Review – Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century

THE EMERGING NEW SUPERPOWERS

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Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century by Gideon Rachman is published by Bodley Head (£20)

Intro: As eyes look East, can Gideon Rachman’s new book predict what will happen next? By the year 2025, some two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in Asia.

THIS summer’s Olympic Games in Rio surprised many when the UK pipped China to second place in the overall medal table. That aside, we should be under no illusions as to who the big players are when it comes to global affairs. The British Government’s decision under prime minister Theresa May to review its plans for the Hinckley Point C nuclear power plant suggests that Mrs May has erred more on the side of caution when it comes to dealing with China than David Cameron and George Osborne. Mrs May’s initial prevarication was met by a warning from the Chinese state news agency that her apparent ‘suspicion towards Chinese investment’ threatened the arrival of the ‘China-UK golden era’ that President Xi Jinping declared on his trip to London last year. On her first trip to China as Prime Minister earlier this month, our American friends would have been watching closely. The U.S. was left frustrated last year when the UK announced it was to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.

In 2014, the IMF announced that China had become the world’s largest economy in terms of purchasing power. There are, though, many indices by which the United States remains way out in front: mineral wealth, oil and other energy sources, and its geopolitical neighbourhood is far more secure and stable.

At the end of this insightful book which focusses largely on the ‘Asian century’ that lies ahead, Gideon Rachman makes the point that the current position of the West is supported by certain inbuilt advantages, such as its representative institutions and open (albeit increasingly fractious) societies.

The reader is enlightened to the well-grounded assertions that the tectonic plates of global influence is changing. By 2025, some two-thirds of the world’s population will be living in Asia, with 5 per cent in the United States and 7 per cent in Europe. Even the US National Intelligence Council warns that the era of Pax Americana is ‘fast winding down’. Despite Barack Obama’s announcement in 2011 of America’s ‘pivot’ towards Asia, however, such policies are yet to assume a tangible form. Washington’s approaches to Asia remain torn, ranging from ‘primacy’ to ‘offshore balancing’ and from ‘containment’ to ‘accommodation’. Better political fluidity is needed rather than a bumper-sticker approach.

For the UK, the rise of China is likely to trigger a harbinger of dilemmas. Hinkley Point and the collapse of the British steel industry are just the mere tip of an economic revolution that will become far reaching. For example, to what extent will Britain seek to synchronise its approach with the next US administration (especially given its stated position of seeking a bespoke trade deal and strong defensive alliance with Washington)? The irreconcilable should not be overlooked. Instructive in the argument here is the experience of Australia, which also lives under the US security umbrella but is umbilically tied to Asian markets. In July of this year, when an international tribunal at The Hague ruled against China’s territorial claims to sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, Australia joined the U.S. and the Japanese in calling for the Chinese to respect the verdict. Australia has now become a source of major Western irritation for Beijing. Like many other countries, Australia has become increasingly wary of Chinese investment in its energy infrastructure.

Earlier this year in Washington, the Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnball, gave a speech and expressed concern about the ‘Thucydides Trap’. Named after the classical Greek historian, this notional concept is a creation of the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison. He determined that in 12 of the 16 cases in which a rising power has confronted a status quo power over the last 500 years, war has always prevailed. Former and past iterations of Chinese strategy under Xi’s predecessors, Deng Xiaoping and Hu Jintao, spoke in terms of China’s “peaceful rise”, its amenability to international rules and its apparent willingness to fit in with the existing order. But the period of “hide and bide” may now have passed. Fu Ying, a former Chinese ambassador to the UK, has said that the US-led world order is a suit that no longer fits for China and the emerging Asian markets. Close observers and analysts of Chinese reform even suggest that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is exerting a growing influence on decision-making, and that the Communist Party has sought to shore up its legitimacy by riding on the back of nationalist sentiment.

Politically, both Washington and Beijing have very long-term and all-encompassing definitions of what their peripheries and first line of defences are. War games, for example, often scope out a series of alarming scenarios. The Pentagon views Chinese defensive strategy as “anti-access and area denial” and has developed its own “air-sea battle” doctrine in response. And, concurrently, China’s “belt and road” strategy, by which it aims to reconstitute a Silk Road through the Eurasian landmass, can be explained partly by historical fears of Western blockades of Chinese ports or incursions into its territorial waters.

The historical enmities and divisions in Asia are marred with flashpoints that could ignite a larger conflagration on land or sea. There are territorial disputes in the South China Sea over a series of uninhabited islands – those such as the aptly named Fiery Cross and Mischief Reefs – which, according to Beijing, fall within the “nine-dash line” by which China’s territorial waters are defined. There are large numbers of ethnic Chinese in places such as Malaysia and Indonesia for whom Beijing feels some responsibility. Meanwhile, however, Japan, under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has assumed a much more offensive posture in response to Chinese claims to the uninhabited Senkaku Islands (as the Japanese call them) in the East China Sea. South Korea has endeavoured to reach an understanding with Beijing but Vietnam has looked to the US for protection as relations with China have soured.

 

In Easternisation, Rachman calls for a rapid improvement in the West’s situational awareness. The book is a welcome rebuttal of the tendency to view Asia through the prism of the markets alone. Although it has become fashionable and customary to speak of the “Pacific century”, the author suggests that an “Indo-Pacific” lens might be a more helpful way of viewing Asian geopolitics from the West. For instance, the development of the relationship between China and India – which share a contested land border and are highly suspicious of each other – is worthy of focus and attention.

India has already emerged as a global powerhouse in its own right. It has a similar size population to China, but a much healthier demographic balance and more established and experienced military.

Whilst still something of a geopolitical outsider, with India having no seat on the UN Security Council, there is gathering consensus that it could become a “swing state” and be harnessed to form part of a newly constituted democratic alliance. For the new superpowers in the East, the learning curve for tilting global powers in its favour might still be steep and perilous, though the West does appear to have tacitly accepted that the certainties of the past are passing. The US “pivot” towards Asia is a clear acknowledgement of this shift.

 

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Books, Foreign Affairs, Government, Politics, United States

Book Review: The Long Game

AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY UNDER BARACK OBAMA

The Long Game

The Long Game is an apologia by Derek Chollet: a vindication of Mr Obama’s distinctive approach to grand strategy.

WHEN Barack Obama demits presidential office and comes to write his political memoirs they will no doubt be an elegantly persuasive account of the ideas that guided his presidency. But until then “The Long Game”, an apologia by Derek Chollet, is a vindication of Mr Obama’s distinctive approach to grand strategy and is likely to be the closest that anyone will come to understanding the thinking behind U.S. foreign policy that has many critics.

Mr Chollet is qualified and well placed in delivering such a resounding defence of the Obama leadership. He has served in senior positions in the State Department, the National Security Council and the Pentagon and has been close to the action during Mr Obama’s tenure of the White House. His contention is that the foreign-policy establishment in Washington has underestimated the extent of the president’s achievement. Policymakers at home lambast Mr Obama for having overlearned the lessons of Iraq, for his extreme caution and aversion to the use of America’s hard power in support of global order and for a reluctance and unwillingness to shoulder the burdens of leadership. This, say some, has dismayed allies and emboldened foes.

Detractors on the left have been horrified by his cold-bloodied use of drones to kill America’s enemies, his determination to commit to a costly nuclear modernisation programme and his bombing of more countries than George W. Bush. So which is he, asks the author: a woolly-headed liberal idealist or an unsentimental realist?

The answer, as it happens, is neither. Chollet argues that Mr Obama is misunderstood because he likes to play what the writer calls the “long game”. The book portrays the analogy of a president trying to be Warren Buffett in a foreign-policy debate that is dominated and driven by day traders. He has an unwavering view of what is in America’s long-term interests and refuses to be forced by impatient demands for action to intervene in ways that may be temporarily satisfying but have little prospect of success at acceptable cost.

To this end, Chollet asserts with reasonable conviction that Mr Obama has formulated what amounts to a long-game checklist, a series of principles that should be applied to managing American power and making strategic choices. The first of these is balance: balance between interests and values, between priorities at home and abroad, between declared goals in different parts of the world, and between how much America should take on and how much should be borne by allies. And balance, too, in the use of the whole toolbox – military power, diplomacy, economic leverage, and development. Mr Chollet openly contrasts this with the lack of balance Barack Obama inherited from George W. Bush: a tanking economy, more than 150,000 troops deployed in two wars and sagging American prestige.

The other key principles of the Obama checklist drawn upon are: sustainability (avoiding commitments that cost too much to stick with); restraint (asking not what American can do but what it should do); precision (wielding a scalpel rather than a hammer); patience (by giving policies the time and effort to work); fallibility (the modesty of what can be achieved); scepticism (a caution of being wary of those peddling easy answers to difficult questions); and, exceptionalism (the recognition that because of its enormous power and attachment to universal values America has a unique responsibility in the world that cannot be ducked).

For the author this mix of cautious pragmatism and realism finds an echo in the approach of two Republican predecessors, Dwight Eisenhower and the first George Bush, whose reputations have grown considerably since their departure from office. Mr Chollet believes that this president’s foreign policy will look pretty good too once hindsight kicks in.

Perhaps. Eminently sensible, however, the checklist appears to be, rather than setting the appropriate conditions for action, it might also be used as a way to do too little, too late. By and large, and it is worth acknowledging, Mr Obama did manage to get right his policies towards China (the ‘rebalancing’ towards Asia was timely and has been quite effective) and Russia (the ‘reset’ of the first term delivered some benefits; when Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and opted for confrontation with the West, Barack Obama responded accordingly). But in Afghanistan, Iraq and, significantly, in Syria, the Obama doctrine has had terrible consequences.

In Afghanistan, Mr Obama’s long-debated troop surge was fatally undermined when he announced that U.S. forces would start to come home in 18 months. He repeated the error in May 2014, announcing that the residual American force in Afghanistan would be fully withdrawn by the end of 2016. He has had to reverse that false promise. By setting timetables for forced reductions unconnected to conditions on the ground, Mr Obama has given encouragement to the Taliban and left Afghan security forces wilfully exposed.

President Obama’s decision to pull all American forces out of Iraq at the end of 2011 was even more disastrous. He used the excuse of the difficulty of negotiating a new status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqis to do what he wanted to do all along. Had a few thousand American troops been left in Baghdad, Mr Obama and his administration would have known much more about the Maliki government’s subversion of the US-trained and US-equipped Iraqi security forces, as well as having had some leverage to prevent it. Some might argue that the emergence of Islamic State in 2014, an organisation that has been able to take and hold Iraqi cities, is a direct result of Mr Obama’s insouciance. Right wing elements in America certainly think so.

The catalogue of errors in Syria is far too long to itemise. Mr Obama’s extreme reluctance to do anything to help the moderate rebels, as well as his failure to punish the regime for crossing his previously declared ‘red lines’ on the use of chemical weapons were turning points that has contributed to the scale of the catastrophe which has since unfurled in the country. While Mr Chollet is reluctant to blame Mr Obama, he was among those arguing for the president to take a different course of action.

Undoubtedly, though, the one clear unambiguous policy success that Mr Obama’s long game can claim is the nuclear accord and deal with Iran. Patient and tactful diplomacy, along with the building of international support for a crippling sanctions regime, combined with a credible threat of military action if all else failed, resulted in an agreement that has effectively dealt with concerns about Iran acquiring a nuclear bomb over the next decade or so. If the deal holds, it will be the defining achievement of the Obama presidency. Not every problem facing American resolve can be approached in the same painstaking, deliberative way.

The president is far from being the inept wuss portrayed by his critics. But nor is he the master of grand strategy that Mr Chollet makes him out to be. His loathing and contempt of the interventionist excesses exploited by his predecessor, his wariness of arguments of “doing more”, a disdain for military advice and his ingrained pessimism about the utility of hard power have had the effect of reducing America’s capacity to do good in a brutally torn world. If Mr Obama is succeeded by Hillary Clinton, she is likely to provide a modest and welcome corrective. If Donald Trump is the next president, the long game that has underpinned most of the Obama doctrine, whatever its defects, will be sorely missed.

– The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington and Redefined America’s Role in the World. By Derek Chollet. $26.99 and £17.99.

 

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