Category Archives: United States

Britain, Government, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Middle East, Politics, United States

Israel is on the brink of total cataclysm

MIDDLE EAST

AFTER more than nine months of desperate fighting against Hamas in Gaza, events in the Middle East with Lebanon now being drawn in suggest that Israel may be on the brink of total cataclysm.

Military action against Hezbollah, Iran’s largest and best-trained proxy group, in neighbouring Lebanon, could bring war on a totally different scale, a war which Israel is far from certain to win.

Worryingly, it is a war that might easily involve Britain – not only in supplying arms and air cover for Israel, but potentially hurling the UK into armed conflict with Hezbollah. Such a war would have a seismic effect on our domestic politics, already riven by pro-Palestinian protests.

The unprecedented chaos in America’s presidential election as it currently stands will be upended if Iran openly declares its military support for Hezbollah. That’s one step short away from a war that would engulf the whole of the Middle East.

And in the ultimate nightmare scenario, if Israel determines that its very existence is threatened and deploys its nuclear arsenal, then a global war would almost certainly ensue, with Russia and Pakistan likely to be among the first to react.

This may seem alarmist to those who have followed the Israel Defence Forces’ unrelenting campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, since the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis. The battering of Rafah and other populous areas, which has reduced entire cities to rubble and forced more than 1.5million displaced people into refugee camps, has given the world an illusion of Israel’s invincibility.

But this is far from the reality. Israel is exhausted by the conflict. Previous wars in the nation’s 76-year history have been brief and decisive affairs, and this one is neither.

After nearly 300 days of conflict, not only does prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hardline Government continue to resist international calls for a ceasefire, but the army of Hamas fighters has proved to be robust and resilient. Their failure to wipe out Hamas will be concerning for Israelis. And Hezbollah is no Hamas. It is far larger, with the support and backing of 2.5million Lebanese, almost half the population.

In fact, the group rules the country south of Beirut and its leaders have been preparing for war against Israel for many years. Hezbollah is backed by vast funding and training from Iran.

Their fighters are not a volunteer militia hiding among the civilian population and scurrying through underground tunnels, but a highly organised, well-equipped, disciplined army, dug into heavily fortified positions.

Whether the slaughter of 12 children in a rocket attack in the last few days was intended as the starting gun for a war is not wholly clear. It was, however, an outrageous provocation by Hezbollah.

Israel has already retaliated with air strikes against targets in Lebanon. And there is a danger that if its response to the killings is not sufficiently forceful, then Hezbollah and its Iranian paymasters will feel emboldened.

Yet if Israel pursues further escalation, as seems probable, it couldn’t come at a better time for Hezbollah. This could start a much wider war most Israelis don’t want, undermining Netanyahu. Already, 120,000 people have fled their homes in the north because of Lebanese rocket attacks.

For western politicians, decision-makers are facing a policy crisis. In the United States, Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate to replace President Joe Biden in the White House, will face a dilemma. If she advocates backing Israel, she will alienate Muslim voters, while attracting no Republicans to her side. Donald Trump is 100 per cent pro-Israel.

For Sir Keir Starmer, the crisis could prove even worse. Many Labour MPs, particularly on the left of the party, are furious at his past support for Israel. Protests on Britain’s streets could quickly escalate to rioting, especially in urban areas with large Muslim populations, such as Birmingham and Leeds.

And if the RAF is deployed to protect Israel against missile attacks once again, Hezbollah could strike at British air bases in Cyprus, which is only 60 miles from the Lebanese coast.

The risks now are higher than ever.

Standard
Books, China, Government, Politics, Russia, Society, United States

Book Review: Autocracy, Inc

LITERARY REVIEW

Intro: Standing up to the tyrants in the East

THERE isn’t a more rigorous and engaging analyst of the crimes of the erstwhile Soviet dictatorship than Anne Applebaum, the acclaimed author of the Pulitzer prize-winning history of the Gulag, and also of Red Famine: Stalin’s War On Ukraine.

For her gifts, the historian is also rooted in the present, as a fearsomely active journalist, and the writer’s latest work is an up-to-the moment examination of how modern-day autocracies, not just that of Russia’s President Putin, but also including China, North Korea, and Iran, act as a kind of informal bloc to challenge what they see as the West’s “hegemony”.

It’s unfortunate that the phrase “axis of evil” has already been taken, since that would be a befitting description. Alas, it was inappropriately used by George W. Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to join together Iran, Iraq, and North Korea – which actually had no military or financial links at all.

Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, do, however, connect in this way, accelerated by Moscow’s war on Ukraine.

The only minor criticism of Applebaum’s formidable book is that it never mentions the Iraq War of 2003–2011 or the later Western intervention in Libya. For these were the developments which not only gave fuel to the anti-Western agenda, but also convinced many – including in the West itself – that we had little moral authority to criticise the military escapades launched by the Kremlin.

Applebaum is especially adept, however, in setting out the remarkable success of modern Russian propaganda – beyond the scope that Stalin could ever have dreamed of – using the worldwide web, and of China’s ability both to control its own people through technology and to censor what was thought to be unstoppable.

At the dawn of the millennium the ever-optimistic U.S. President Bill Clinton proclaimed that the internet would liberalise China, by exposing its people to all the possibilities and opportunities the free world had to offer.

When arguing, on similar grounds, for China to be admitted to the World Trade Organisation, he gave an address in which he ridiculed the idea that Beijing could keep a lid on things.

“Now, there’s no question that China’s been trying to crack down on the internet,” he declared. At that point, as Applebaum records, Clinton gave a wry smile, adding: “Good luck!” – and his audience joined in the laughter.

They are not laughing now. The Great Firewall of China, and even more sophisticated tools than that, have allowed Beijing to succeed, keeping billions of its citizens in a form of intellectual slavery.

In a similar vein, the German political establishment had long believed in the doctrine known as Wandel durch Handel – “change through trade” – the idea that making nice with Moscow in terms of market access would inevitably lead to political and cultural liberalisation. This was most notable with pipelines taking Russian gas to Europe. That dream, or self-interest, in terms of the aspirations of German business, has also been shattered. The kleptocracy just got richer and far  more ruthless. 

As the deputy mayor of St Petersburg in 1992, and in his first public role, the former KGB officer Putin argued that “the entrepreneurial class should become the basis for the flourishing of our society as a whole”. That was music to the ears of Western investors, but Putin was then, already, creaming off vast sums for himself and his associates, via his control of local export licences for raw material.

As Applebaum notes, under Putin’s perpetually renewed presidency this ultimately developed into “a full-blown autocratic kleptocracy, a Mafia state built and managed entirely for the purpose of enriching its leadership”. It was for his leading role in exposing this that Alexei Navalny paid with his life.

Despite his apparent personal austerity and regular crackdowns on colossal financial corruption within the Chinese Communist Party – the inescapable consequence of permanent one-party rule – Xi Jinping is only too happy to make common cause with the multibillionaire plutocrat Putin.

Central, this is because they share a primordial terror of a popular uprising against their regimes: in this context, it was striking how in 2022 Xi suddenly abandoned his hitherto iron-cast Covid lockdown measures after a public revolt threatened to spread to the streets of Beijing and Shanghai.

And the “no limits” friendship which Xi entered into with Putin on February 4, 2022, was specifically designed to demonstrate a kind of solidarity among autocracies, against what they both constantly refer to as the West’s “attempts at hegemony”.

Their joint communiqué denounced “the abuse of democratic values and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states”. Weeks later, Putin sent his tanks towards Kyiv.

There was a tantalising glimpse of a possible fracture in the relationship at that moment: it seems likley that Xi was not given a warning by Putin of what was about to happen and, some months later, Beijing made public its grave concern about the Kremlin’s threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Nevertheless, as Anne Applebaum concludes, the challenge to “Autocracy, Inc” must come from within the West itself.

And, yet, if the forecasts are right, the American people seem likely to elect to the White House (again) their own version of Autocracy Inc: Donald J. Trump.

Standard
Britain, Government, NATO, Politics, Russia, Society, Ukraine, United States

Give President Zelensky what he needs to defeat Putin

UKRAINE WAR

EUROPEAN leaders gathered at Blenheim Palace recently in a symposium that was a conduit for European solidarity. They surrounded Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in an image of steadfast support.

For Zelensky, he must be wondering how stalwart those allies really are. Two and a half years into Putin’s bloody and violent war, it must increasingly seem to Zelensky that NATO is offering just enough to keep Ukraine limping on – but not enough, anywhere near enough, in smashing Russian forces completely. What else could explain the West’s ambiguity and indecisiveness over the use of long-range weapons to attack targets inside Russia?

The British prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has rebuffed Zelensky’s plea that he ditch the UK’s veto on Storm Shadow “bunker-buster” weapons, which have a range of up to 190 miles, easily capable of striking targets in Russia.

As it currently stands, the UK and other allies allow Ukraine to fire long-range missiles defensively at targets on Russian soil near the border, but not offensively or deep into Russian territory.

Such a position is, of course, calculated to avoid provoking Putin into wider retaliation. At the heart of that fear is the ultimate and terrifying prospect that the dictator might reach for the nuclear button, but even less apocalyptic concerns help to dictate policy.

Success in armed conflict can only be achieved if all the elements of the battlefield are dominated. In the traditional doctrine of NATO, this means winning “deep, close, and rear” battles – that is long-range strikes and raids on infrastructure (deep), front-line combat (close), and the essential support mechanisms such as logistics and headquarters (rear).

Just as Russia is hitting Ukrainian cities, factories, and infrastructure, any military general knows it is perfectly reasonable for Ukraine to do the same in order to degrade its enemy’s military capability. But with the current restrictions on missile use in place, Ukraine’s fighting forces can’t execute the “deep” battle. Zelensky is being forced to fight with one arm tied behind his back.

That’s why many are now pressing decision-makers in Washington, London, Berlin, and Paris to authorise the use of long-range weapons, such as the UK’s Storm Shadow, to strike targets inside Russia.

That would likely lead to some escalation. But as in the Cold War, many strategists are confident this war, at least, won’t go nuclear, despite the warnings of those concerned about the UK’s deepening involvement in the conflict.

For one thing, Russian tactics would probably use a tactical nuclear weapon only to stop an enemy breakthrough in Ukraine. Such a breakthrough could only occur in one of the four eastern provinces that Putin has decreed to be forever Russian. Where is the logic in irradiating many square miles of your own soil?

Then there is the relationship between China and Russia to consider. President Xi has so far offered only mild support to Putin and is unquestionably the dominant partner in the relationship. China has consistently opposed the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

Of course, matters could seriously escalate long before it reached nuclear proportions.

A cyber attack on the scale of the IT outage chaos caused by CrowdStrike is well within Russia’s capability, as is severing underwater communications or energy pipelines in the North Sea. And if the Houthi rebels in Yemen were capable of striking Tel Aviv, we cannot rule out a long-range conventional missile strike on a target in Western Europe, even potentially one on the UK.

Nevertheless, military strategists and theoreticians often refer to the concept of “limited war” – that is, restricted in its aims and its geography. The war in Ukraine does indeed have limits, but history has demonstrated that Putin’s ambition is not restrained in the same way.

Before Ukraine there was Chechnya and Georgia. Why, after Ukraine, should we not think there might be Latvia, Lithuania, or Estonia, or even all three? Why not Poland? Anxiety levels are already high in the Baltic States, and one has to wonder why at this moment in their history, both Sweden and Finland recently chose to join NATO. The fear of Russian expansion is tangible on Russia’s borders – no wonder the Poles are spending more than 4 per cent of GDP on defence and building the largest army in Europe.

Any discussion of Ukraine’s prospect of achieving military success must also confront the issue of Donald Trump returning to the White House in November. He has made the claim that he could settle the war in a day with one telephone call. If that’s the case, Ukraine must be given every chance to achieve a position of advantage on the battlefield before that call is made.

If this war is to have a successfully negotiated end, Ukraine must be in the strongest possible position at the start of any talks. The reality is that Putin must be stopped, and Ukraine is the place to stop him. The best means of doing so is by giving Kyiv what it needs to finish the job.

The price of stopping Putin now is far better than paying the price of a wider devastating war – as the history of the last century shows.

Standard