I was born in 1937, when, for the next two years I presume (I could hardly be aware) our politicians and diplomats were desperately working to contain the expansionary foreign ambitions of Hitler in and Mussolini. They failed and on the day before my second birthday war was declared on Germany.
This War expanded to involve most of the world, caused between 70 and 85 million deaths, mostly Soviet and Chinese civilians, and was only ended by the dropping of two nuclear bombs by “our side” on two Japanese cities, together causing between 150 000 to 246 000 deaths.
I have yet to hear a rational explanation which justifies the use of the second atomic bomb.
On the conclusion of hostilities the victorious Allies set up a new world order aiming to avoid such a disaster in the future and secure economic prosperity and peace for all.
Although imperfect and subjected to many breaches,(think Palestine, Suez, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine ) that order has endured, battered but intact, until today.
It came nearest to collapsing in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the Soviet Union led by Nikita Khrushchev sent a convoy across the Atlantic to set up nuclear missiles in Cuba, America’s “back yard” and President Kennedy vowed to stop them.
I was living here in Birdsall and teaching in Batley and can’t honestly remember being at all worried about it. We were confident that the “adults” were in charge and no one cold be so stupid as to risk such a devastating conflict again.
And we were right. Mr Khrushchev agreed to lose face and ordered the convoy with the missiles to turn back, and as a quid pro quo President Kennedy agreed (secretly) to remove the missiles pointing at Russia from Turkey, the Soviet Union’s “back yard.”
We need to be considerably more worried now, largely because the key player in today’s crisis may be “adult” by age, but behaves more like an infant during a tantrum or an adolescent suffering an identity crisis. Our sympathies must go out to the West’s political leaders and the officials of the United Nations. What on earth are they to do if the US, having virtually annexed Venezuela, goes ahead and uses military force, as President Trump has repeatedly threatened, to take over Greenland?
Our impotence is partly our own fault. The US has consistently spent between 3% and 5% of its vast GDP on “defense.” Few if any of the other NATO countries have matched this even in percentage terms, and so the US contribution to NATO's defence is double that of all the other members’ combined.
So President Trump has justification for claiming that Europe’s defence has been provided largely at America’s expense, which is a source of genuine grievance.
Be that as it may, it is hard to know, if Trump does decide to take Greenland buy force, what can be done to stop him.
Sir Keir Starmer has clearly decided to tread carefully, walk a tightrope, utter platitudes but not condemn him. It is not an honourable position, but it is understandable.
The effective opposition must come from the American people themselves.
There is considerable hope from this quarter. Although the Democrats, for the moment, seem to lack and effective, still less charismatic, spokesperson, those that the have have been very outspoken, indeed outraged, at the actions taken in America's name. Eventually, the American people will being Trump down and, if we can leap over the probable horrors of a Vance presidency, the world of reason may again prevail.
A start would be a Democrat majority in the Hours of Representatives after the mid-term elections next November.
If we can avert disaster for that long
I have yet to hear a rational explanation which justifies the use of the second atomic bomb.
ReplyDelete'There was no other way to bring about the unconditional surrender of Japan, except for an invasion of the home islands that would have cost more American and Japanese deaths than were lost in the atomic explosions'.
There, now you've heard one.
Now, you may disagree with the invasion casualty estimates and therefore think that that reason is incorrect, but it's clearly not irrational to want to end the war in a way which will mean less death and destruction than the only alternative.
(Personally, I think what's irrational is the fixation on — some might say fetishisation of — the atomic bombs. The firebombing of Tokyo caused a similar number of deaths to the two atomic blasts; so why this focus on the atomic bombs as if they were somehow qualitatively rather than just quantitatively different munitions?)
The effective opposition must come from the American people themselves.
ReplyDeleteNever thought I'd see you come out for Mrs Marjorie Taylor Greene!
On the conclusion of hostilities the victorious Allies set up a new world order aiming to avoid such a disaster in the future and secure economic prosperity and peace for all.
ReplyDeleteI've no doubt that's what some of those involved thought they were doing, but they were idiots. And not just idiots, but the worst, most dangerous kind of idiot: naïve, utopian idiots who thought that they could make the world a better place.
Those who weren't idiots knew what was really going on: that the relative peace of the second half of the twentieth century (and it was a relative peace, because as you note there were plenty of regional and proxy conflicts) wasn't maintained by 'international laws' or a 'rules-based order' but by the fear of what would be the consequences of an all-out conflict, and by mutually assured destruction.
The United Nations, for example, was deliberately set up to be nothing more than a talking-shop, incapable of any real action. What else was the reason for giving the three mortal enemies, the USSR, the USA and China veto power? It was to make sure that nothing really effective could ever be agreed because one or two of the three would always block it. That's not to say it was useless; it was a talking-shop, but jaw-jaw is better than war-war right up until it isn't, and being able to storm out of the UN gave dictators something they could do instead of launching missiles, which helped in moments of tension.
Or take NATO. It was never about American generosity. The USA didn't underwrite European security out of the goodness of its heart. It was always about American self-interest first and foremost. The Americans knew that they couldn't hope to win a war against a USSR which had expanded to engulf all of Western Europe. So they came up with Article 5, which would mean that any attempt by the USSR to expand past the iron curtain would trigger a pre-emptive response that would destroy both sides, and so the Cold War stalemate was maintained.
(Now, of course, Russia is no longer the global power that the USSR was, and is no longer a threat to America — its entire conventional forces can barely take mere yards of its poor, corrupt neighbour — so the Yanks have, quite reasonably, said that Europe and Britain should defend themselves against what remains of the Russian threat, which frankly isn't all that much).
All of which is to say, yes, we do need to 'be considerably more worried now', but not because the illusion of the 'rules-based order' has been shattered. That's actually a good thing, because a comforting illusion is all it ever was and being forced to face reality is more healthy than living in illusion.
What we need to be worried about is that we face a new threat which is more insidious that the USSR ever was; because for all the Soviet military might, it wasn't as deeply embedded in global supply chains in the way China is. The USSR's only way to fight us was militarily, a conflict that we all knew neither side could win. But China can, and does, fight economically, and technologically, spreading its tentacles throughout the very systems we use to exchange information, to travel, and to power our homes and cities.
Mr Trump's erratic behaviour is sometimes unhelpful, yes. But Mr Xi is the actual threat, and we mustn't let Mr Trump's habit of shooting his mouth off distract us from that reality.
Re your third intervention, yours is a "glass half emptty" interpretation, mine is a "glass half full." There's probably something in both.
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