Category Archives: History

Economic, Europe, Government, History, Military, Politics, Society, United States

If we are unable to defend Greenland, then Europe is finished

UNITED STATES – EUROPE

Intro: Once you are reliant on foreign forces for safety you must abide by their decisions, like it or not. What is so difficult to understand about that?

IT WAS some two decades ago when Robert Cooper, Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, wrote: “The rest of the world… reacts to America, fears America, lives under American protection, envies, resents, plots against, depends on America. Every other country defines its strategy in relation to the United States”. And, in turn, the United States defines its foreign policy aims as effective “invulnerability”.

Fast forward to today, and Donald Trump is ruthlessly pursuing this same policy. Bombing Iran, deposing Nicolas Maduro, threatening war with Colombia, and now musing on the annexation of Greenland. “We need it for defence”.

Presidents change and domestic policy changes with the incumbent; as with the British Empire before it, however, the interests of the American state are eternal and perpetual. It is the duty of the White House to follow them, and the role of others to respond with envy constrained by their dependence or fear. In this case, the reaction in Europe to an explicit proposal for the annexation of European territory has been muted by both.

Denmark has complained that Trump has failed to show sufficient “respect for international law”, and Keir Starmer has politely asked Trump to stop musing on the prospects of conquering part of an allied nation. Beyond this squawking, however, there has been no response because Europe has no response to offer beyond hoping that Trump forgets about this issue and moves on. We are not going to see US forces conducting midnight raids to capture Danish politicians, or shots fired in anger over the fate of Greenland. Europe is not going to fight America because it can’t, and America is not going to fight Europe because it has no need to: if Trump really wants the territory and isn’t just enjoying the sight of European politicians scrambling to cover their shame, then he could apply deeply painful leverage until he gets his way.

Despite all the rhetoric about the US military and how it intends to be used in the future, the continent’s security is still guaranteed by American boots on European ground, and the outcome of the conflict on its eastern flank by the flow of American weapons and intelligence to Ukraine.

If push comes to shove, no one should be betting against Trump using this leverage to get what he wants in Greenland through some means short of outright annexation: declaring that in the absence of new US installations and treaties that deployments to Europe will need to wind down to preserve forces for the protection of the US homeland.

The diplomatic side will be smoothed over, but the faultlines will still exist. Read the responses from European leaders, and there will always be a hint of rulers who have relied on outsiders to maintain their forces, and have belatedly understood that the interests of those outsiders do not always align with their own. In this, at least, they are in company: the last Western Roman emperor was deposed by foreign allies garrisoned within his territory when their demands for land were denied. The Normans entered southern Italy as mercenaries and ended up ruling over swathes of territory. The Mamluks began as foreign slave-soldiers, and became sultans. The European nations of the present day have spent decades freeloading on US defence spending, paying lip service to the American political obsessions of the day on diversity, migration, democracy, and other cultural issues in exchange for this defence. Geir Lundestad coined the term “empire by invitation” to describe this process: embracing dependence and ever greater American intervention in the life of the Continent.

When American and European interests were aligned, this dependence and intervention was tolerable. The constraints rarely chafed. As American relative power has waned, though, the tasks necessary to secure the homeland and to secure Europe have begun to diverge. As one expert previously said some three years ago, the United States did not “have the military capacity to remain so heavily engaged in Europe while ensuring effective defence in Asia”.

Today, that military expert is at the heart of the administration’s defence policy and is putting this policy into action. Subsequently, Europe is now finding that by having a dependence on a nation with interests different to your own is a deeply uncomfortable position to be in. It is also a deeply difficult one to get out of. For all Europe’s talk of strategic autonomy, at every turn it has baulked at paying the costs that this would entail. It left security to the Americans, comforting itself that they would always be there to pick up the bill.

This dependence reaches beyond the military sphere. America and the EU might enjoy the world’s largest bilateral trading relationship, but it is not an even one. The economic might Brussels hoped to rely on is a partial illusion: US companies provide the payments systems that many European nations rely on, the cloud storage their citizens store their secrets in, the search engines, AI models, and social media platforms which determine the information landscape for the electorate. If a dispute really escalated, the kill switch is in Washington. The EU scramble for alternatives is a result of this realisation.

Yet, the mistake politicians made was a simple one. Ariel Rubinstein’s book Economic Fables makes the point that there is more than one set of rules that the world can operate on. What we think of as immutable features of society are nothing of the sort. Rubenstein was elaborating in the context of how we teach economics to students, but there is no doubt this point can usefully be taken much further.

Underneath the logic of economics and international law the base level of reality still exists. The law of the jungle does not operate in gold and contracts, and it is not tamed by them. It only sleeps, and the market is only in charge until it wakes. Wealth is only power until the men with guns decide that it should be redistributed in their favour, and their agreement to forego this only holds if you can create more wealth than they could otherwise take. Europe’s leaders are now relearning at their cost these lessons their predecessors could have taught them for free. Once you are reliant on a foreign force for safety and a foreign power for prosperity, you are no longer completely sovereign. All the cultural soft power and economic heft in the world won’t do you any good if your outsourced military decides it can insist on more favourable terms than you are willing to provide.

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Arts, Books, History, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, Society, United States

Book Review: The Nuclear Age

LITERARY REVIEW

FOLLOWING that day in the summer of 1945 when, on a testing ground in the New Mexico desert – when the first nuclear bomb exploded – many people of that era and generation have lived their entire lives under the threat of universal extermination.

It caused Robert Oppemheiemer, the brilliant scientist heading the US’s Manhattan Project, to proclaim melodramatically (but entirely accurately) an ancient Hindu prophecy: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Just three weeks later, in early August, the bomb was used for real for the first time against an enemy – in a blinding flash, and a shockwave that destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

Pavements melted, skin peeled off faces, more than 60,000 perished immediately, and in the following five months another 60,000 died from injuries and radiation.

Three days later, Nagasaki was given the same treatment. The original target had been a different city but heavy cloud cover saved it, diverting the US B29 bomber 125 miles south. Two square miles of the city centre were pulverised. Some 70,000 people died a horrible death.

And amazingly, those were the last fatalities of nuclear explosions. Eighty years on the world has somehow managed to avoid that apocalyptic and life-threatening tripwire of its own making.

So far.

This history is necessary to understand and should be imprinted on all our brains. It’s a miracle we are still here. Because in an unstable world (and increasingly so) we are all one reckless move, one miscalculation, one technical glitch, one individual’s moment of madness, away from Doomsday.

How the lid has been kept on nuclear Armageddon is plotted by acclaimed historian Serhii Plokhy in this chilling and bewildering book.

Bewildering because all we have ever done is make the threat greater, while posturing about the importance of containing it, claiming nonsensically that massive overkill is making the world a safer place.

In 1962, Soviet Union ships carrying nuclear weapons headed for a clash with an American blockade of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the Cuban Missile Crisis. This was the nuclear confrontation between US President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that came toe to toe.

If no one blinked, it was inevitable that those red buttons would have been pushed, missiles would’ve been fired, and the world would have been a goner. The end of history itself had beckoned.

Other than being flippant towards the world ending, how else could you deal with the apocalypse being hours, minutes, or just seconds away? Because the very idea is impossible to grasp. Do you hide under a desk as a civilisation built up over millennia is blown apart and a world of abundance is reduced to ashes?

With Cuba, the moment passed. The world survived. Plokhy argues that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev was ready to push the button. They both pulled back.

And next time? Can we rely on the same calculated response from today’s leaders, from the likes of Putin, Trump, Kim Jong-un, Xi?

Since that’s the threat we live under, and yet we not only get on with our lives and look the other way, but we up the arsenal – increasing the destructive power to the point of absurdity.

Only recently, Putin boasted of a new Russian super-submarine with “unstoppable” weaponry that can fire nuclear drones at Western coastlines from thousands of miles away. In direct response, Trump ordered the US to restart nuclear testing.

Escalation and proliferation like this are the underlying narratives of the nuclear age: the powerful few believing they can keep the weapons to themselves, but finding all they have done is to provide an incentive to other nations to follow suit as quick as possible for fear of being left behind. The cat- and- mouse of the nuclear age; history is littered with such examples. The US threw its scientists into nuclear research for fear of Hitler getting there first and the Nazis snatching a late victory in the Second World War.

Then Stalin had to have his, Britain, too, then France, China, Israel, India. The club just got bigger; containment became harder and much more problematic. World leaders talked non-proliferation, but that’s easier said than done once the genie is firmly out of the bottle.

That genie is now ubiquitous. Officially there are nine fully fledged nuclear-armed states in the world. Yet, the most worrying assertion of all in this deeply disturbing book is that around 40 more states have access to the requisite technology, raw material and capability to produce nuclear weaponry, in some cases at very short notice.

That’s the size and extent of the timebomb each and every global citizen is sitting on.

Those scientists – the Einsteins, Bohrs, and so on – who first developed the principle and then the practicality of releasing unimaginable amounts of energy through nuclear fission and fusion, begged their political and military leaders to concentrate on the massive peaceful benefits of their discoveries.

Presidents and generals agreed; but first, they said, there is the enemy to defeat, this opponent and adversary to match, this military threat to see off.

Eight decades on, that’s where we still are. Plokhy’s account of the nuclear age hardly inspires optimism for the future.

He concludes that fundamentally it is the fear of annihilation that has kept us from the brink – the general agreement that it is in no one’s interest to perish in a global nuclear apocalypse. That held true in the Cuba crisis. He writes: “We must enhance the instinct of self-preservation shared by friends and foes alike to save the world once again.”

And keep our collective fingers crossed.

– The Nuclear Age by Serhii Plokhy is published by Allen Lane, 432pp

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Arts, Books, History, Nature, Science

Book Review: The Origin of Language

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: According to an evolutionary biologist, it takes a village to raise a child. And that’s why we started talking to each other

THE story of human evolution has undergone a distinct feminisation in recent decades. Or, rather, an equalisation: a much-needed rebalancing after 150 years during which, we were told, everything was driven by strutting and brawling males, with females tagging along for the ride. This reckoning has finally arrived at language.

The origins of our species’ exceptional communication skills constitute one of the more nebulous zones of the larger evolutionary narrative, because many of the bits of the human anatomy that allow us to communicate – notably the brain and the vocal tract – are soft and don’t fossilise. The linguistic societies of Paris and London even banned talk of evolution around 1870, and the subject only made a timid comeback about a century later. Plenty of theories have been thrown into the evidentiary void since then, mainly by men, but now evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman, of the University of Sydney, has turned her female gaze on the problem. Unlike a baby chimp that can cling to its mother, a human infant is entirely helpless for years.

Her theory, which she describes as having been hiding in plain sight, is compelling: language evolved in parallel with caring for our “underbaked” newborns, because looking after and caring for a helpless human baby on the danger-filled plains of the African savannah required more than one pair of hands (and feet). It needed a group among whom the tasks of food-gathering, childcare, and defence could be divided. A group means social life, which means communication. Social bonding meant language evolved to negotiate help, share information about infant safety, and for those bonds to be necessarily strengthened to keep “helpless” infants alive.

The evidence to support Beekman’s theory isn’t entirely lacking, but a lot of it is, as a matter of course, circumstantial. We know that the compromise that natural selection hit upon to balance the competing anatomical demands of bipedalism (walking upright and narrowing pelvises) and an ever-expanding brain was to have babies born early (before that brain and its bony casing were fully formed).

One of the discoveries of the newly feminised wave of evolutionary science has been that alloparents – individuals other than the biological parents who contribute parenting services – played a critical role in ensuring the survival of those half-developed human children. Another is that stone-age women hunted alongside men. In the past it was assumed that hunting bands were exclusively male, and one theory held that language arose to allow them to cooperate. But childcare was another chore that called for cooperation, probably also between genders, and over years, not just hours or days.

Fortuitously, the reconfiguration of the head and neck required to accommodate the ballooning brain had a side-effect of remoulding the throat, giving our ancestors more control and precision over their utterances. With the capacity to generate a large range of sounds came the ability to convey a large range of meanings. To begin with, this was useful for coordinating childcare, but as speech became more complex and sophisticated, alloparents – particularly grandmothers – used it to transmit their accumulated knowledge. This nurtured infants who were even better equipped to survive. The result of this positive feedback loop was Homo sapiens, the sole survivor of a once diverse lineage.

Regrettably, critics are likely to highlight that Beekman takes a very long time to get to this exciting idea. She does spend about half the book laying the groundwork, padding it out with superfluous vignettes as if she is worried the centre won’t hold. Once she gets there, she makes some thought-provoking observations. Full-blown language probably emerged about 100,000 years ago, she says, but only in our line – not in those of our closest relatives. “We may have made babies with Neanderthals and Denisovans,” she writes, “but I don’t think we had much to talk about.”

And whereas others have argued that language must have predated Homo sapiens, because without it the older species Homo erectus couldn’t have crossed the forbidding Wallace Line – the deep-water channel that separates Asia and Australasia – she draws on her deep knowledge of social insects to show that communication as relatively unsophisticated as that of bees or ants could have done the job. Having made a persuasive case for the role of alloparents in the evolution of language, Beekman concludes that we did ourselves a disservice when we shrank our basic unit of organisation down from the extended to the nuclear family. Perhaps, but historians including Peter Laslett have dated this important shift to the middle ages, long before the Industrial Revolution where she places it, and the damage isn’t obvious yet. Language is still being soaked up by young children, and is still a vehicle for intergenerational learning. It may take a village to raise a child, but as Beekman herself hints, a village can be constituted in different ways.

Beekman presents a radical shift in how we understand the birth of human speech. While traditional theories often credit hunting, toolmaking, or warfare as the primary drivers of complex communication, the author argues that the true catalyst was the inescapable need for cooperative childcare.

– The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why by Madeleine Beekman is published by Simon & Schuster, 320pp

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