Tag Archives: Donald Trump

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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Iran, Israel, Middle East, Politics, United States

Israel’s attack on Iran: A perilous situation

MIDDLE EAST

Intro: The recklessness of the Israeli government and the incoherence of US foreign policy deepens the crisis in the Middle East

American presidents who believed they could easily restrain Benjamin Netanyahu have quickly learned their lesson. Bill Clinton’s expletive fuelled language after his first meeting with the Israeli prime minister warned the world that even America’s might as a superpower was no restraint against Netanyahu’s aims.

It increasingly looks as if Donald Trump, too, has succumbed to Israeli wishes. The US State Department quickly declared that the devastating Israeli attacks on Iran – which killed key military commanders and nuclear scientists, as well as striking its missile capacity and a nuclear enrichment site – was unilateral. President Trump had urged Mr Netanyahu to hold off, pending imminent US talks with Iran over its nuclear programme. The suspicion is that Israel feared that a deal might be reached and wanted to strike first. Israeli officials, however, have briefed that they had a secret green light from the US, with Mr Trump the only one to oppose it.

Iran, raging with anger from the attack but afraid of looking too weak to retaliate, is unlikely to believe that the US did not acquiesce to the offensive. It might suit it better to pretend otherwise – in the short-term, it is not clear what ability it has to hit back at Israel, never mind taking on the US. Mr Trump has made that harder still by threatening “even more brutal attacks” ahead, urging Iran to “make a deal, before there’s nothing left” and claiming that “we knew everything”. Whether Israel had convinced Mr Trump that this was the way to cut a deal, or he is offering a post-hoc justification after being outflanked by Mr Netanyahu, may no longer matter.

Israel has become dangerously confident of its ability to reshape the Middle East without pushing it over the brink. It believes that its recent pummelling of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s air defences have created an opportunity to destroy the existential threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme before it is too late. Russia is not about to ride to Tehran’s rescue, and while Gulf States don’t want instability, they are not distraught to see an old adversary weakened.

But not least in the reckoning is surely that Mr Netanyahu, who survives politically through military action, has only just narrowly survived a parliamentary vote in the Knesset. The Israeli government also faces mounting international condemnation over its war crimes in Gaza – though the US and others have allowed those crimes to continue. It is destroying the nation’s international reputation, yet may bolster domestic support through this campaign.

The obvious question now is the future of a key Iranian enrichment site deep underground at Fordo, which many believe Israel could not destroy without US “bunker busters”. If Israel believes that taking out key personnel and some infrastructure is sufficient to preclude Iran’s nuclear threat, that is a huge and perilous gamble. This attack may well trigger a rush to a full nuclear-armed status by Iran – and ultimately others – and risks spurring more desperate measures in the meantime. The implicit and more likely danger is that Israel will hope to draw in Washington, by persuading it that Iran is a paper tiger or baiting Tehran into attacking US targets.

At his inaugural speech before becoming president, Mr Trump claimed: “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier.” Yet, reportedly, he now seems unconcerned about a regional war breaking out due to Israel’s strikes. Few around the world will feel so sanguine. The current incoherence and incomprehensibility of US foreign policy fuels instability and risks drawing others towards fateful miscalculations.

ISRAEL has been warning the United Nations for more than a decade that Iran’s hardline Islamic regime was on the brink of developing a nuclear warhead.

The doom-laden rhetoric of the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has become almost part of the global background noise. Like the attention-seeking shepherd-boy in Aesop’s fairytale, he has cried, “Wolf!” so many times that the reaction of most world leaders has been to ignore his false alarms.

The ancient fable, though, ends with a dark twist, when a real wolf attacks the sheep. And within the last few days the UN’s nuclear watchdog has finally sat up and taken notice, approving a resolution that accuses Iran of breaking its pledges not to develop nuclear weapons.

The country’s Islamic fundamentalist government has always claimed that its nuclear programme is simply about “clean energy”. But that is an obvious lie. Iran could always have simply purchased nuclear reactors from Russia and generated ample electricity – but without the plutonium fuel vital to the production of nuclear weapons being under Tehran’s control.

Not only would that have been a far cheaper option, but it could also have led to the lifting of Western sanctions. This would, of course, have been a big win for most of the country, but not its supreme leader, 86-year-old Ayatollah Khamenei.

He has proved more than willing to sacrifice the wellbeing of his subjects, the people who suffer most from the deprivation resulting from sanctions, by choosing instead to pour billions into nuclear laboratories buried a mile or more underground.

And if the mullahs do succeed in developing nuclear weapons, they will unleash devastation on a neighbour they have long wanted to bomb back to the Stone Age.

Nothing less than a complete abandonment of uranium enrichment in Iran is acceptable to Washington and that is what the US will continue to seek to achieve of the Iranian regime.

The Americans have started calling the Ayatollah’s bluff by suggesting that they could facilitate the enrichment of uranium to the level required for electricity production, but not to a weapons-grade level, outside Iran under strict US control through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The IAEA, however, believes Iran could already have enough enriched uranium for as many as ten warheads, an estimate based on the copious traces of radioactive heavy metal detected at unofficial bomb-making facilities, deep underground in remote regions. The Ayatollah has made a pretence of condemning nuclear weapons research for more than 20 years. In 2003 he issued a fatwa (religious edict), declaring that Islam forbids the development, production, stockpiling, or use of such bombs. But the fatwa means nothing – because Shia Muslim law also permits believers to lie in self-defence, especially when they feel they are facing persecution.

And the real truth is revealed in a joint statement by Iran’s foreign ministry and its own Atomic Energy Organisation, announcing it will replace its current centrifuges, crucial for enriching uranium, with state-of-the-art equipment at Fordow, one of its main nuclear sites.

The IAEA’s resolution marks the first time in more than 20 years that it has accused Iran of breaching its promises. This time, they too believe the wolf is preparing to attack. The obvious target is Israel, which Tehran has repeatedly threatened to destroy. In 2005, the then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared “the occupying Zionist regime must be wiped off the map” – an explicit call repeated by many others over the years in Iran’s theocratic regime.

Ten warheads of a similar destructive power to the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945 would be far more than the number required to obliterate Israel. Just three might be enough to wipe it off the map – one on Tel Aviv, one on Haifa, and one on West Jerusalem.

Those three cities contain about 10 per cent of the nation’s total population. But Israel is a tiny country, and radiation fall-out from three bombs could make the entire country uninhabitable.

Israel’s famous Iron Dome missile shield, as well as its David’s Sling, Arrow and Thaad air defence systems, are not impenetrable. Last month, Houthi rebels in Yemen hit Ben Gurion airport between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with what they described as a “hypersonic” missile – manufactured and supplied by Iran.

Until just recently, many observers thought Iran’s uranium facilities were less of a real threat than they seemed, because warheads and missiles are useless without a third component: the detonator.

Now, it appears scientists at the Parchin facility south of Tehran have successfully manufactured a trigger powerful enough to set off a nuclear explosion.

All the pieces are in place. For those praying for a negotiated solution to the crisis, and not a military one, is that Iran’s launching pads are out in the open. That will at least give Western politicians some hope.

Unlike China and Russia, which can covertly prepare their nuclear missiles for launch inside concrete bunkers, the Iranians have to position and fuel their weapons on the surface – a process that can take 40 minutes. In theory, that gives the West an opportunity to launch a retaliatory strike first, using conventional or nuclear weapons. The Israelis’ strikeback missiles are kept on permanent readiness, capable of launch within three minutes.

To wait until Iran is less than an hour away from hitting Israel is high-risk policy. Until now, the West has always baulked at the alternative – to approve a knock-out strike against Fordow and Iran’s other subterranean facility, Natanz, both in inaccessible mountainous regions.

Some protagonists in Israel believe a unilateral atomic strike is justified: using a nuke to stop the nukes. But this approach is likely to fail for two reasons. Firstly, most of the energy in a nuclear blast is confined to the surface. Whole cities can be vapourised but bunkers deep underground might well survive undamaged. Secondly, a worldwide escalation in hostilities sparked by such an attack would probably be unstoppable. Russia could feel emboldened to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, for example.

More likely, and more effective, would be a series of bunker-busting bombs – blasting an ever-deeper crater until the enrichment facilities are destroyed, even if they are protected by concrete a mile thick.

Tactically, could this work? There are two problems. One is logistical: how does Israel get the bombs to the target? Iran’s air defences have scarcely been tested and might easily be capable of picking missiles or warplanes out of the sky. To launch a mega-attack and fail to damage the nuclear facilities would risk conflagration and all-out war.

The other difficulty is a moral one. Crucial segments of the Iranian programme are based in or near Tehran. The entire ten million population of the capital city is being used as a human shield. Could Britain and the US stomach civilian casualties, especially if it provoked a wave of terrorist reprisals?

Without US help, Israel would not be able to obtain the bunker-busters nor the heavy bomber aircraft required to strike Iran’s nuclear boltholes. These bombers could fly from British bases in Cyprus or the Chagos Islands. This raises the danger of terrorist blowback to “very high”, but backing off means giving in to terrorism and nuclear blackmail.

Israel may well have a brilliant undercover attack planned. Ukraine’s great success smuggling drones under Operation Spider’s Web for mass attacks, deep inside Russia, might be a model. Pinpoint bombing of the entrances and ventilation shafts at Fordow or Natanz, for example, could put a uranium facility out of action for months, trapping the scientists inside to suffocate or starve.

The nature of a nuclear war is horrible and grim. Every possible outcome is terrifying as the threat of full-scale war increases.

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