Category Archives: Politics

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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Britain, Europe, Government, Politics, Russia, Society, Ukraine, United States

Europe must awaken or face great insecurity in 2026

EUROPE

THE great Victorian jurist, Sir Henry Maine, wrote: “War appears to be as old as mankind… but peace is a modern invention”. Events in the early part of 2026 will doubtless prove his wisdom by showing the awful fragility of that particular invention.

Even if they had never heard of Maine, the most complacent Europeans should have learnt from Vladimir Putin’s relentless onslaught against Ukraine that peace is neither a natural state nor the default setting of advanced countries, but rather a historical aberration that can only be preserved through strength and vigilance.

Yet, in 2025, we discovered how Europe remains divided between nations that grasp this lesson – or never forgot it – and those that cling with obstinance to old delusions. Leading the former category are Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Having broken free of the Kremlin within living memory, these countries know exactly what it means to be invaded by Russia: they will do anything to prevent this from happening again.

And what of Britain? Despite Sir Keir Starmer’s grandiose rhetoric (“a battle-ready armour-clad nation”), Britain remains firmly imprisoned in the camp of the deluded. The PM revealed his priorities in the Budget when he preferred social policies over defence, such as appeasing Labour backbenchers by abolishing the two-child benefit cap. This Government will allocate another £17bn to welfare by 2030, the exact sum that would have allowed Britain to increase defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP. This looks as if Sir Keir has decided to place his own political survival – and the prejudices of his party – before the national security of his country, and for that there is bound to be a reckoning.

The outcome of those decisions is that Britain will enter 2026 at greater risk than was necessary. The perils ahead could scarcely be greater. The first and most immediate danger is that Donald Trump could collaborate with Putin to impose Russia’s peace terms on Ukraine. The guns along the frozen 800-mile front might then fall silent, but any respite would almost certainly be temporary while Russia rearms and regroups. If Putin achieves what he believes to be victory in Ukraine, he would be emboldened to come back for more. We should remember that today’s tragedy in Ukraine is Putin’s third war of attrition and conquest since the assault on Georgia in 2008. Like all aggressors, his appetite remains insatiable.

If there is a flawed peace in 2026, Putin’s next move could be a renewed attack on Ukraine, to achieve his original goal of subjugating the entire country. He might consider still more dangerous options. If he concludes that Mr Trump no longer cares about defending America’s allies, Putin could risk attacking a NATO member and the signs are ominous. If so, Britain would be obliged to stand with our allies and go to war with Russia, the world’s biggest nuclear power. Do we in Britain have any idea of what this would entail, or where such a crisis might lead?

There are still ways of ensuring that we never have to find out. We can rally our European allies to deliver more support to Ukraine, protecting Volodymyr Zelensky from being muscled into a false peace that rewards aggression. And we must do whatever is necessary to secure America’s commitment to NATO. Both imperatives require Britain and the rest of Europe to emulate Poland and its neighbours and spend far more on defence.

The second danger and the threat is rising is that China’s colossal military build-up might culminate in a confrontation with the United States and its allies in the Pacific. In 2025 alone, China commissioned 14 frigates and destroyers into its fleet; the Royal Navy, by contrast, has only 13 of these warships. 2026 has begun with China conducting intensive exercises in the waters around Taiwan, apparently simulating a blockade of that democratic island.

A full-scale invasion of Taiwan remains unlikely, this year, though Xi Jinping is believed to have ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready in 2027. But no possibility can be excluded and China’s lightning military expansion will heighten the danger. That threat is likely to reach its peak later in this decade.

Elsewhere, Mr Trump is going to have to decide whether to go to war in Venezuela to overthrow Nicolas Maduro’s autocracy. The biggest deployment of US forces in the Caribbean for nearly 40 years cannot be sustained indefinitely. If the president orders US forces into action, the first new conflict of 2026 would be a regime change operation in Caracas, probably combining air strikes with covert action on the ground.

Another authoritarian anti-Western leader who may be fearing for his regime’s future is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of Iran. The new year is opening with mass protests in Tehran and other cities.

The Ayatollah’s authority was severely weakened by the successful Israeli-US strike on Iran’s nuclear plants last June. As Khamenei approaches a point of maximum weakness, there must be a chance that 2026 could see the downfall of Iran’s regime, though no-one knows who will take over.

Above all, this has to be the year when Europe finally awakens to the threats and relearns the art of defending itself against aggression. If not, it may be too late to save the modern invention of peace.

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Environment, Government, Politics, Science

Labour is urged to crack down on farmers spreading sludge

ENVIRONMENT

MINISTERS are coming under increasing pressure to stop farmers spreading byproducts of human sewage on fields over fears of “forever chemicals” getting into the food system.

Campaigners have urged Labour to clamp down on the use of sludge to fertilise agricultural land.

Also known as biosolids, sludge is produced by dewatering treated sewage. It is nutrient-rich and is spread across agricultural land, amounting to 3.6 million tonnes annually, says the Chartered Institute of Water and Environmental Management.

While the practice is regulated, academics and campaigners argue that rules governing the use of sludge have not kept pace with the science. Regulations have been unchanged since 1989.

Sludge can contain toxic waste from homes, including pharmaceuticals, flame retardants, and microplastics. Each gram of biosolid can hold up to 24 microplastic particles, representing 1pc of its weight, according to research from Cardiff University.

It is widely accepted in academic circles that sludge spreading is a major problem. Water companies profit from processing industrial waste containing “forever chemicals” that end up on farmland.

Forever chemicals, officially known as PFAS, do not break down in the human body or on the land. They are found in everything from carpet cleaners to corrosion-protecting products and have been widely used since the 1950s. They can cause cancer, harm the immune system, and damage the liver.

It is indicative, then, that water companies must take responsibility. And, if they will not act, the Government must legislate and ensure the upcoming White Paper tackles agricultural pollution. This is urgent because our soil and waterways are being contaminated with toxic, persistent chemicals, threatening food and water security.

The Government’s long-awaited White Paper on water industry reform is expected to be published in January. Despite repeated calls for a crackdown on sludge, the report cannot be allowed to ignore the issue.

It comes despite the Cunliffe Review calling for action. The report, to which the White Paper is a response, says: “There should be tighter regulation of sludge spreading on farmland, recognising that sludge may contain PFAS, pharmaceuticals and toxic metals, which have public health impacts.”

Alistair Boxall, professor of environmental science at the University of York, said he is increasingly concerned about long-term, low-level exposure to contaminants in sludge. He said: “We’re potentially exposed to these things our whole lifetime. The UK is not protecting its soils and its crops from this stuff.”

Research from the University of Plymouth has demonstrated that “nanoplastics” – particles so small they can penetrate cell membranes – are absorbed into the edible sections of crops. The study found that a single radish can eventually accumulate millions of these nanoplastics in its roots before they spread through the plant.

Sludge is an attractive option for farmers. While synthetic fertiliser costs £60 per tonne, sludge can be purchased for £1.50 per tonne. Water companies rely on farmers to take the substance, which is an unavoidable byproduct of wastewater management.

There is always the matter of liability in any looming scandal, and this needs addressed. Public health is a serious issue. Neither the water companies who supply the product, or farmers who use it, be exonerated from blame.

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