Category Archives: United States

Arts, Films, United States

Film Review: Vice (15)

REVIEW

VICE, appropriately named, tells the life story of Dick Cheney, who was Vice President of the United States throughout the eight-year tenure of George W. Bush.

The film, which is written by Adam McKay, makes no secret of his own motivational objective. It stems from a Liberal Agenda, which deserves capitalising given his bias which runs from the first minute of this film to the last.

Whether you buy into McKay’s thesis that Cheney is one of the most manipulative and sinister men on the planet is another question entirely. For pure malignancy, Vice makes the present incumbent of the White House look like Forrest Gump. But it must be said he presents it very entertainingly.

Film critics would have noted that McKay deploys a similar set of idiosyncrasies to those he brought to his examination of the 2008 global financial crisis, The Big Short. He delivers jump-cuts, slow-mo, speed-ups, addresses to the camera, faux-closing credits, and whimsical narration from a character whose intimate link with Cheney is held back, only to be revealed in a late here-I-am kind of flourish.

It’s almost as if the director, and his editor, Hank Corwin, cannot shrug off a cinematic form of attention deficit disorder. It would be wholly wrong to categorise them as one-trick ponies; they have dozens of production tricks.

If the viewer can embrace all that, and its Leftie politics, then Vice is a hoot. It is also quite brilliantly acted. Christian Bale is deservedly the clear favourite to win an Academy Award for his remarkable lead performances. He renders himself almost unrecognisable and nails Cheney’s every mannerism and tic.

Gary Oldman won the Academy Award last year for his role as Winston Churchill, but he didn’t transform himself into Churchill like Bale does Cheney (both physically and temperamentally).

As Cheney’s wife, the terrifyingly ambitious Lynne, Amy Adams also richly deserves her Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress.

In the years since her breakthrough movie in 2002, Catch Me If You Can, Adams has acquired the acting adroitness in playing Lynne Cheney who is a relentless schemer. Indeed, McKay has said that when he spoke to local folk back in Casper, Wyoming, where Lynne and Dick started out, they told him that whoever she married would have ended up as the most powerful man in the land.

How he became such a powerful man, in the process confounding the famous assertion of one of his predecessors, John Nance Garner, that “the vice presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm spit”, is the film’s narrative.

 

IT BEGINS in Casper, where young Dick is a drunken driver and general wastrel until his intended, Lynne, gives him a furious pep talk.

They marry and make their way to Washington, where Cheney finds himself in thrall to another upwardly-mobile politician, Donald Rumsfeld (the suddenly ubiquitous Steve Carell). One of the fascinations of this film is the dynamic between Cheney and Rumsfeld. Gradually, the apprentice becomes the master.

After serving in the Nixon and Ford administrations, both men continue to climb the slippery pole, but it is Cheney, the more shrewder and Machiavellian of the pair, who climbs the highest – with Lynne pushing hard from below. There is a rather ludicrous – if not hilarious – scene in which she almost literally slips into the guise of Lady Macbeth.

Cheney’s appetite for power is gluttonous, yet he is clever and astute enough never to look or give the image of being greedy. When a dim-witted George W. Bush (played by Sam Rockwell, also Oscar-nominated) invites him to become his running mate – “a nothing job,” snorts Lynne – he plays hard to get. He insists he’s happy running an oil company.

Eventually, he says he’ll do it on the proviso that he takes some of the more “mundane” jobs such as running the military. Oh, and foreign policy. McKay’s only concession to Cheney’s humanity is his devotion to his wife and daughters; it causes him genuine angst when his two girls fall out over the sexuality of one of them.

Otherwise, his moral scruples are conspicuous only by their absence. He even has the pretence to turn the 9/11 attacks to his own advantage, and his vested oil interests are not incidental in the subsequent decision to invade Iraq.

McKay’ political bias is adept enough to remind his audience over and over that all this comes from a Leftist standpoint, perhaps as a pre-emptive strike to say: “I know it’s biased, but it’s also true.”

I doubt it will come as no surprise to see liberal Hollywood rise to Vice when the Oscar nominees gather in Hollywood, just as it has been no surprise, since its U.S. release in December, to see the film flop pretty much everywhere but on the East and West coasts.

The question of whether a film will appeal to mainstream America has long been defined by a simple question: will it play in Peoria, Illinois? In this case, the answer is an emphatic no.

Verdict: Left-leaning political bias, but well delivered.

★★★★

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Arts, Books, Britain, History, United States

Book Review: Lords Of The Desert

REVIEW

Traditional and conventional wisdom has it that after 1945 Soviet Russia swiftly became Britain’s most deadly foe, while our great ally was the United States.

But this orthodox version of history is now in urgent need of reassessment according to James Barr’s magnificently researched new book. He demonstrates that the U.S. was just as determined, if not more so, to destroy Britain’s global power and influence as Joseph Stalin’s Russia.

The United States wanted to establish itself as the new global hegemon. According to Barr, this meant subverting Britain at every turn and, as the author shows, was prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to do so. He infers that, while Britain had an official enemy in the shape of Russia, it had, too, a much more insidious and unofficial enemy in the U.S.

This process culminated in Britain’s total humiliation when the United States pulled the plug on Britain’s failed attempt to seize back the Suez Canal in 1956.

Some five years earlier the U.S. had sabotaged a carefully-planned attempt by MI6 to take control of Iranian oil production – a move which sent a message round the Arab world that British influence was severely dented if not doomed.

American contempt for Britain started even before World War II was over, with a disastrous visit to Egypt in 1942 by Wendell L Wilkie, the Republican opponent to Franklin D Roosevelt for the Presidency two years earlier.

Wilkie arrived in Cairo full of vim and admiration for the British. Then he had dinner with a senior British official and was filled with horror: “What I got was Rudyard Kipling, untainted even with the liberalism of Cecil Rhodes,” he recorded.

These men, executing policies made in London, had no idea the world was changing. And Wilkie had no doubt that Winston Churchill was to blame.

His hostility was increased further by a disastrous mix-up when Churchill paid a brief visit to Washington after the United States joined the war in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.

Wilkie wanted to meet Churchill to establish his credentials as an international statesman, ahead of the 1944 presidential elections.

Churchill, in turn, was eager to meet Wilkie, then the favourite for the Presidency. He tried to phone Wilkie to arrange a clandestine meeting.

Unfortunately, though, the switchboard operator put him through to the wrong extension number. Barr records:

“I am glad to speak to you,” gushed Churchill.

“Whom do you think you are speaking to?” came the reply.

“To Wendell Wilkie, am I not?”

“No,” came the answer. “You are speaking to the President . . . Franklin Roosevelt.”

The President then banned Churchill from meeting Wilkie, who was mortally offended when the event was cancelled.

This was just one of a series of mishaps and misunderstandings which set the tone for Britain’s post-war relationship with the U.S.

At bottom, both countries were determined to gain access to oil, already known to exist in abundance on the Arabian Peninsula.

In an underhand move, the U.S. tried to hire Wilfred Thesiger, the famous British explorer, to guide them in finding oil reserves. Thesiger stayed loyal to the British: he was in fact hard at work on their behalf, at one stage carrying out oil exploration under fake cover for an organisation called the Anti-Locust unit.

 

THIS is a splendidly written book. It demonstrates the early perspicuity of a young Tory researcher called Enoch Powell who sought out Anthony Eden (then a highly regarded former foreign secretary) shortly after the war to give him advice.

“I want to tell you that in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans,” the young Powell told the elder statesman.

Eden looked at him as if he was mad. But Powell had the last laugh. Eden was later to reflect: “I had no idea what he meant. I do now.”

– Lords Of The Desert by James Barr is published by Simon & Schuster for £20, 416pp

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Britain, Europe, NATO, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, United States

The nuclear détente withdrawal makes the world far more dangerous

ARMS CONTROL TREATY

TENSIONS between the world’s two nuclear superpowers have reached a level not seen since the early 1980s.

During an election rally in Nevada, President Trump said that Russia was cheating on the 1987 arms control treaty. The treaty banned land-based cruise missiles in Europe.

An agreement had been made back in 1987 between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev – leaders who trusted each other enough to take a decisive step in ending the arms race which had been a key feature of the Cold War for the previous four decades.

Now Trump, in response to Putin’s cheating, is saying he will pull out of the treaty altogether. And the world is back to the hair-trigger situation faced before détente introduced arms control between East and West.

The fact is that the new highly-mobile missiles which Russia have developed undoubtedly make the world a far more dangerous place. And Donald Trump’s aggressive chest-beating response risks making an already fraught situation worse.

To understand why, we must look at how Putin has broken his treaty obligations.

The Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty banned Russia from having any land-based intermediate nuclear missiles with a range of more than 300 miles. Sea-launched missiles were allowed, however – the theory being that they were more difficult for Russia to hide because the submarines and warships from which they were launched could be tracked and monitored by the West.

As a result, instead of the lumbering land-based SS20 missiles which worried the West so much in the 1980s, Russia has concentrated over the decades on developing much smaller missiles that can be launched from the sea. Such missiles, albeit without nuclear warheads, were used to devastating effect against rebels in Aleppo in Syria.

What Putin’s technicians have now done is to adapt these Kalibr sea-launched systems to make land-based cruise missiles capable of being transported by small trucks. They can be moved across country at 50mph and it would be impossible to track every one of them – making a surprise attack technically possible.

And the missiles, which fly under the radar, have been fitted with supersonic boosters which makes them practically impossible to intercept. This puts a vast swathe of NATO countries, including Britain, theoretically in the firing line.

 

WHY this is so disturbing is that it fits into Putin’s tactical strategy. Today’s Kremlin chief is ruthless, but worse he runs a Russia much less moribund than the wheezing Communist colossus of the 1980s. Putin’s armed forces are much leaner and meaner than in those days.

War in the 21st century has been practised already from Syria to Ukraine and in cyberspace. Putin knows he doesn’t need two million badly trained soldiers to be sacrificed in the trenches.

If it comes to war, he’ll need the best cyber-sabotage, the most effective special forces and, crucially, unstoppable medium-range nuclear missiles. Which he now seems to have acquired, despite the treaty.

This is why Trump has reacted so vigorously. Playing the tough guy also plays well to his core supporters, and he faces mid-term elections in two weeks’ times.

The trouble is that by dropping the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty now might suit Russia better in the coming years than the US. While for America the INF treaty has been a useful bulwark against nuclear escalation and proliferation, Putin’s strategists have chafed at the restrictions INF imposed on them.

By ripping it up, Trump will be criticised by European leaders – Germany was the first US ally to do so, with foreign minister Heiko Maas urging Washington to consider the consequences both for Europe and for future disarmament efforts.

All of this will delight Putin because it plays into his divide-and-rule approach to Europe.

More worryingly, if Trump does dump the INF agreement, there will be nothing to stop Putin’s generals from building and refining as many of these new faster-than-sound land-based nuclear missiles as possible.

Other nuclear powers, especially China and probably India and Pakistan, will want to buy them if they can’t build their own.

This technology is so easy to hide, swift to deploy and difficult to stop that it steeply increases the chances of a successful surprise nuclear attack. Worse still, without the trust between the US and Russian leaders that existed in Reagan and Gorbachev’s day, diplomacy is on a hair trigger – as in the worst days of the Cold War.

President Trump has declared he wants to make America safer, but we should fear he has made the world an even more dangerous and tense place. According to Mikhail Gorbachev, pulling out of the historic US-Russia arms treaty now “endangers life on Earth”.

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