The idea that all men are created equal... surely cannot be claimed by the same American or British system that sends weapons to Israel for bombing Gaza, and then tries to shush up anyone who dares question the moral rectitude of slaughtering women and children in the name of an expansionist ethno-religious state.
There's no moral argument to be made for the West, I'm sorry. There's an opportunity to compete in bringing material well being to large numbers of people. That's it.
I'm afraid this essay is not for you and if the Israel-Hamas war was really a turning point, and you're not just a leftist who was anti-Western anyway all I can say is that I'm sorry that Qatari propaganda worked on you.
Civilian deaths in war are tragic, and there is legitimate disagreement over Israeli conduct, but there isn't even the ghost of a choice between Israel and its (and our) collective enemies.
And as if bringing material well being to large numbers of people wasn't in itself the most powerful moral argument to make. The natural condition of humanity for thousands of years has been toil and misery. Liberal democratic capitalism is the only thing that has even begun to make a dent in that at home or abroad.
But I assume then, that you do agree that on the basis of supporting slaughter of civilians in Gaza,US policy is clearly incompatible with the idea of all men being created equal. And with that incompatibility, the argument cannot be marshalled vis-a-vis other global relationships. Cheers.
I explained why this claim is false in the preceding comment, not least because you've helped yourself to the ridiculous premise that any civilian death makes a war illegitimate.
The truth is you don't actually believe there was anything good about the West that it lost with this particular war and not with any other war that we fought. That's why I said that this essay is not for you - you'd have been as alright with the Anglosphere losing in 1995, as in 2015, as in 2025.
Strawman. I hope you know what that is? The Israeli conflict vs Gaza is not a case of a few incidental civilian deaths - it is overwhelmingly composed of strikes against large numbers of civilians in the hope of occasionally getting an enemy combatant as a rare side effect.
You're defending the indefensible. I suspect there's a part of you that knows that but maybe you're not ready to work thru it.
The Israel-Hamas war is exactly the opposite of what you describe. The civilian-combatant casualty ratio is lower than all comparable urban wars, according to the Hamas figures. The IDF continue to call ahead, move, and warn civilian populations. They and distribute regular messaging on the location of strikes and dismiss individuals responsible for mistakes. Meanwhile, they fight against an enemy force which casually hides among civilian populations, hijacks hospitals for military use, and continues to keep and torture hostages. The conduct of Israel's enemies is an inconvenient fact for people like you who want to cast the Israelis as the ultimate evil, so you have to ignore it.
You likely know these facts yet don't care, because no evidence would change your belief that America, Britain, and almost everything associated with them for the last several decades is all fundamentally bad. Dollars to doughnuts you had that belief in September of 2023 and it wasn't influenced in any way by what is actually happening in the Levant.
In this essay, you argue something that I’ve been trying to think through for a very long time and you wrote it perfectly: “If the world order demands our system is no longer universalist, our system is no longer our system.” It all makes sense now.
Thanks for your comment. Having given the argument of this essay a little more thought, I think a useful addendum to the claim you highlight would be the following.
It's been the case before that the American system in particular but also that the English system was less universalist. Many realist thinkers yearn for that time. But I think that the time when the Anglo-American system wasn't universalist is beyond living memory. So it's possible that we see a return to a non-universalist political order. But that order would be very foreign to most of us. And seeing our systems change that way as a result of the world order would feel like a serious loss.
A rejoinder to your addendum: I get the sense that underlying both Putinist and CCP ideology is a sort of anti-universalism. Some people in the west see that and react with acceptance, “Democracy is not for everyone, but they respect our system—at a distance.” The problem comes when our system or even factions within it dare to go beyond our borders. Before America was a global superpower, our missionaries ventured into often hostile lands because they believed it was their duty. Who will stop future generations of zealous do-gooders from risking everything to bring hope to the oppressed? The Russian and Chinese states will always be wary of these universalist embers and it will be in their interest to keep those forces at bay, by external pressure or internal manipulation. Ideally, a parochial version of our system ends up evolving into something else entirely and we end where we begin, our system is not longer our system.
I could not possibly disagree more. Liberalism is for the West, the rest of the planet lacks the cultural foundations to even grasp it, and trying to forcibly export liberalism and democracy has been a miserable, expensive failure. The ship sailed decades ago for liberal democracy in China and I don’t believe actual Chinese people care. Our values are frankly NOT universal , and never will be. And that’s fine. We should seek to preserve what’s left of liberalism in the west by strictly limiting immigration, massive deportations of non western migrants, and reinvesting in infrastructure and culture locally.
This is a pat sounding argument but it ignores the multiple East Asian liberal democracies including Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, the Latin American democracies including Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica, the African democracies including Botswana and Kenya, etc. To say nothing of the billion Indians.
I don't know if the populations of all of those countries are amenable right now to specifically right-liberal democracy like the Anglosphere. Many clearly are -- Taiwan, Costa Rica, and South Korea most obviously. Self-government is what we are defending here as against the rule of supposedly enlightened despotism.
Arguments like the one you just made are a perfect example of the shrunken and thin belief in liberalism I spent 1500 words complaining about above. You don't come to praise liberalism, you want to bury it.
I like liberalism plenty, I’m just realistic about its limits, it’s only really for the west, and most of the countries you speak of have or imitate democracy due to US global hegemony, it’s not necessarily organic to their culture. Also, liberalism is much more than democratic government. It’s not our job or prerogative to spread liberalism to the whole world. They don’t want it, and don’t need it. Just stop most of them from coming to the west in significant numbers, and we can continue liberalism in perpetuity without foreign influence and outsiders.
I think the policy you sketch is a policy of intellectual surrender, no less disagreeable when it comes from unevidenced guesses about culture than when it comes from the mouth of a CPC ideologue trying to create breathing space for their ideas. I'm not content to give up our best weapon against our adversaries in the battle of ideas without a fight. The point of this essay is that you shouldn't be either.
I don't know how much of this is down to Chinese propaganda and how much is just people looking around at the sorry old mess that is western liberalism, and wondering how it could possibly be worse? I mean what is our democracy? A two party system where both parties have the same policies? You might as well just have one party that can make long term plans and isn't obsessed with the electoral cycle and news headlines?
I don't think it's the case that in Britain the two parties have similar policies. I do think there is a problem with the wheel not being connected to the car insofar as people vote for something and then it doesn't happen. Which is why it might seem like there are no choices.
By the way, the Party does have its own irrational fixations which impair efficiency all the time.
Yes, the crisis of confidence is real, but it is not just psychological.
If the West wants to feel more confident, it might want to actually learn from things that China does well. Like building infrastructure. How about some more high speed rail? Some modern and efficient ports and transportation system. Some civil servants assessed on key performance metrics?
Right now, sceloris, fear of scandal and bureaucratism are paralysing government and government approvals for projects?
How about reforming government and speeding up material progress, like building houses, high speed rail and factories?
Except... the people for whom those elections really did have consequences weren't the liberal elites.
(I don't live in Britain any more, but I definitely identify with the liberal elites, so if I slip into "we" language, that's who I mean.)
The liberal elites aren't the ones using food banks. The liberal elites didn't get thrown out of the country after Brexit. The liberal elites lost a little bit of money with the economy taking a hit... but our houses continued to appreciate in value.
The people who were hurt by Brexit were Europeans hoping to move to Britain, who have been replaced by immigrants from other parts of the world; and poor people.
I like the analogy "this is what losing feels like" - that does seem like a useful and insightful way to think about how the other side feels. But I don't think the "consequences" line is true in terms of material consequences. Emotional consequences, yes. But material consequences still tend to fall overwhelmingly on the poor.
Thanks, this is an interesting thought. I'm not sure how much I agree with it. It's certainly true that if you're poorer then things in general affect you more because you have less of a cushion. But:
I don't think that elites in Britain have yet really experienced losing (except by proxy given the psychological dominance of the US). I'm mainly talking about the States here and I think that elites there certainly are starting to materially lose, with the evisceration of cultural dominance, harm to their economic portfolios, etc. Trump 47's project is based on the idea that elite cultural and economic dominance has been a disaster. It's to try to rebalance the political settlement away from existing elites and the non-material things they like in a way that Starmer and even Cummings don't seem to have much interest in.
What I'm getting at is that populism isn't wholly self-defeating. Many populist programs legitimately propose redistribution of power away from the status quo, making different trade-offs to what exist now. The current settlement probably does significantly favour elites, even if in general good for all.
The main harm of Brexit was that we wasted 4 years we didn't have to spare trying to contort ourselves to get it done. Because of what I said at the top, that immediately affected the poorest the most. But it also probably affected the elite class a lot. In the end, if the government is able to use freedom from objectively onerous and stupid tech regulation to spark the economy on AI and so forth then Brexit may end up being treated kindly by history.
I dunno, I'm not really seeing it. Remember how Trump 1 was supposed to be about using tariffs to help American manufacturing, but all it did was make manufacturing harder? The people who suffer when manufacturing suffers are not elites. In terms of power, hasn't Trump mainly given power to Elon Musk? That doesn't look like a major shift away from the elites. A lot of government workers have lost their jobs, but I'm not sure if they were quite the elite, were they? And the New York bankers may be sad that the Kennedy Centre has new programming, but Trump's never going to be the guy to tax the rich.
I don't follow the American news that closely, so I may be missing something. But I think my biggest point of disagreement with what you're suggesting here - and with 99% of the commentary that I read - is that you talk about Trump's "project". I just haven't seen any evidence that he in fact has a coherent project, and I think that trying to analyse his actions through that lens leads you to distortions.
I think he loves talking tough and looking tough, and from day to day, minute to minute, his actions are almost exclusively reactive. He is just trying to be the anti-liberal.
(1) I think it's a comforting fantasy that populism is self-defeating. To be sure, results of populism might end up entrenching existing elites further. But in other (cultural) ways it clearly works. Witness the normalisation of anti-elite sentiment, the preference cascade on the tech right, etc.
(2) I'm agnostic on whether Trump has a project although in my opinion he plainly does have strong and remarkably consistent core beliefs (if inconsistent in how those are applied). The people around him -- Miller, Vance, Lutnick, Bessent, the tech right, Elon, all certainly have a Weltanschauung. Some of those worldviews clash (tech right being pro-immigration, Vance/Miller being nativist). But there's something at play.
Fundamentally the theory of Trumpism in particular is that politics is downstream of culture, and the lesson they learned from 45 was that without breaking status quo elite dominance of culture via the universities/movies/courts/etc then you can't do your program. From that comes the muzzle velocity, the power centralisation, the obsession with loyalty. Etc.
Yes, I agree with your (1). Rule of law is not self-sustaining, and it requires those who believe in it to fight for it. I think populism is self-defeating in that it (generally, and in this case) doesn't bring benefits to the populace, but it certainly can disrupt existing institutions, and there's no reason to think that the USA will automatically revert back to a norm of respectful constitutionalism. Perhaps the biggest danger with Trump is that an anti-Trump will appear on the Democratic side, and things will get worse and worse.
As for (2), I don't believe it - but I also think I must be missing something! From my perspective, he seems like such a ridiculous loser... and yet he keeps winning elections. So I'm obviously not understanding something, and it could be that there is a consistent plan behind it all. I dunno.
I was thinking just now about what it must have felt like to be a conservative in 1950s Britain. Imagine if you rejected socialism, and had to watch as your country seemed to embrace many of its core tenets. That must have felt like a horrifying period of losing... Perhaps that's the same feeling as we're experiencing now.
Thanks for that great and wide ranging commentary. This is a very strange moment….and no part of the American shambles has yet even touched on China. You are right that their offer is tempting to autocrats and corrupt elites everywhere but never to principled democrats…We are passing through a time of such unreality at present. In most of the West, people are just refusing to see what is in front of them, hoping that the world they have always known will just magically reappear somehow. Even leaders who know better are to one extent or another immobilized hoping that just the perfect mix of flattery and blandishment combined with just the right enticements might keep Trump from overturning the alliances that have brought eighty years of peace. This week Macron and Starmer are doing their best and everyone is holding their breath. Because Trump is entirely irrational, it seems to them worth trying anything. But crucial time is passing quickly and soon the die will be cast. It’s as if every western power is transfixed, unable to act or look away as if passing a horrible road accident. What will be the event that provides the shock to the system that will cause us all to come to life and act with purpose.
In the first month. Pledging to annex Canada and changing sides in the Ukraine war didn’t do it. If we continue to make no choice and decide no action, then the choice will be made for us. It will be to simply accept whatever trump, musk and Putin have in store for us.
The idea that all men are created equal... surely cannot be claimed by the same American or British system that sends weapons to Israel for bombing Gaza, and then tries to shush up anyone who dares question the moral rectitude of slaughtering women and children in the name of an expansionist ethno-religious state.
There's no moral argument to be made for the West, I'm sorry. There's an opportunity to compete in bringing material well being to large numbers of people. That's it.
I'm afraid this essay is not for you and if the Israel-Hamas war was really a turning point, and you're not just a leftist who was anti-Western anyway all I can say is that I'm sorry that Qatari propaganda worked on you.
Civilian deaths in war are tragic, and there is legitimate disagreement over Israeli conduct, but there isn't even the ghost of a choice between Israel and its (and our) collective enemies.
And as if bringing material well being to large numbers of people wasn't in itself the most powerful moral argument to make. The natural condition of humanity for thousands of years has been toil and misery. Liberal democratic capitalism is the only thing that has even begun to make a dent in that at home or abroad.
But I assume then, that you do agree that on the basis of supporting slaughter of civilians in Gaza,US policy is clearly incompatible with the idea of all men being created equal. And with that incompatibility, the argument cannot be marshalled vis-a-vis other global relationships. Cheers.
I explained why this claim is false in the preceding comment, not least because you've helped yourself to the ridiculous premise that any civilian death makes a war illegitimate.
The truth is you don't actually believe there was anything good about the West that it lost with this particular war and not with any other war that we fought. That's why I said that this essay is not for you - you'd have been as alright with the Anglosphere losing in 1995, as in 2015, as in 2025.
Strawman. I hope you know what that is? The Israeli conflict vs Gaza is not a case of a few incidental civilian deaths - it is overwhelmingly composed of strikes against large numbers of civilians in the hope of occasionally getting an enemy combatant as a rare side effect.
You're defending the indefensible. I suspect there's a part of you that knows that but maybe you're not ready to work thru it.
The Israel-Hamas war is exactly the opposite of what you describe. The civilian-combatant casualty ratio is lower than all comparable urban wars, according to the Hamas figures. The IDF continue to call ahead, move, and warn civilian populations. They and distribute regular messaging on the location of strikes and dismiss individuals responsible for mistakes. Meanwhile, they fight against an enemy force which casually hides among civilian populations, hijacks hospitals for military use, and continues to keep and torture hostages. The conduct of Israel's enemies is an inconvenient fact for people like you who want to cast the Israelis as the ultimate evil, so you have to ignore it.
You likely know these facts yet don't care, because no evidence would change your belief that America, Britain, and almost everything associated with them for the last several decades is all fundamentally bad. Dollars to doughnuts you had that belief in September of 2023 and it wasn't influenced in any way by what is actually happening in the Levant.
You're living in a fictional world of propaganda, my friend
In this essay, you argue something that I’ve been trying to think through for a very long time and you wrote it perfectly: “If the world order demands our system is no longer universalist, our system is no longer our system.” It all makes sense now.
Thanks for your comment. Having given the argument of this essay a little more thought, I think a useful addendum to the claim you highlight would be the following.
It's been the case before that the American system in particular but also that the English system was less universalist. Many realist thinkers yearn for that time. But I think that the time when the Anglo-American system wasn't universalist is beyond living memory. So it's possible that we see a return to a non-universalist political order. But that order would be very foreign to most of us. And seeing our systems change that way as a result of the world order would feel like a serious loss.
A rejoinder to your addendum: I get the sense that underlying both Putinist and CCP ideology is a sort of anti-universalism. Some people in the west see that and react with acceptance, “Democracy is not for everyone, but they respect our system—at a distance.” The problem comes when our system or even factions within it dare to go beyond our borders. Before America was a global superpower, our missionaries ventured into often hostile lands because they believed it was their duty. Who will stop future generations of zealous do-gooders from risking everything to bring hope to the oppressed? The Russian and Chinese states will always be wary of these universalist embers and it will be in their interest to keep those forces at bay, by external pressure or internal manipulation. Ideally, a parochial version of our system ends up evolving into something else entirely and we end where we begin, our system is not longer our system.
I could not possibly disagree more. Liberalism is for the West, the rest of the planet lacks the cultural foundations to even grasp it, and trying to forcibly export liberalism and democracy has been a miserable, expensive failure. The ship sailed decades ago for liberal democracy in China and I don’t believe actual Chinese people care. Our values are frankly NOT universal , and never will be. And that’s fine. We should seek to preserve what’s left of liberalism in the west by strictly limiting immigration, massive deportations of non western migrants, and reinvesting in infrastructure and culture locally.
This is a pat sounding argument but it ignores the multiple East Asian liberal democracies including Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, the Latin American democracies including Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica, the African democracies including Botswana and Kenya, etc. To say nothing of the billion Indians.
I don't know if the populations of all of those countries are amenable right now to specifically right-liberal democracy like the Anglosphere. Many clearly are -- Taiwan, Costa Rica, and South Korea most obviously. Self-government is what we are defending here as against the rule of supposedly enlightened despotism.
Arguments like the one you just made are a perfect example of the shrunken and thin belief in liberalism I spent 1500 words complaining about above. You don't come to praise liberalism, you want to bury it.
I like liberalism plenty, I’m just realistic about its limits, it’s only really for the west, and most of the countries you speak of have or imitate democracy due to US global hegemony, it’s not necessarily organic to their culture. Also, liberalism is much more than democratic government. It’s not our job or prerogative to spread liberalism to the whole world. They don’t want it, and don’t need it. Just stop most of them from coming to the west in significant numbers, and we can continue liberalism in perpetuity without foreign influence and outsiders.
I think the policy you sketch is a policy of intellectual surrender, no less disagreeable when it comes from unevidenced guesses about culture than when it comes from the mouth of a CPC ideologue trying to create breathing space for their ideas. I'm not content to give up our best weapon against our adversaries in the battle of ideas without a fight. The point of this essay is that you shouldn't be either.
Surrender would be letting immigration take over the West, not leaving the rest of the world alone.
Get bent you racialist moonbat
I don't know how much of this is down to Chinese propaganda and how much is just people looking around at the sorry old mess that is western liberalism, and wondering how it could possibly be worse? I mean what is our democracy? A two party system where both parties have the same policies? You might as well just have one party that can make long term plans and isn't obsessed with the electoral cycle and news headlines?
Thanks for your comment - I wrote about something similar here: https://sivispacem.substack.com/p/china-envy.
I don't think it's the case that in Britain the two parties have similar policies. I do think there is a problem with the wheel not being connected to the car insofar as people vote for something and then it doesn't happen. Which is why it might seem like there are no choices.
By the way, the Party does have its own irrational fixations which impair efficiency all the time.
Dude! We have already lost.
Thanks for a thoughtful piece.
Yes, the crisis of confidence is real, but it is not just psychological.
If the West wants to feel more confident, it might want to actually learn from things that China does well. Like building infrastructure. How about some more high speed rail? Some modern and efficient ports and transportation system. Some civil servants assessed on key performance metrics?
Right now, sceloris, fear of scandal and bureaucratism are paralysing government and government approvals for projects?
How about reforming government and speeding up material progress, like building houses, high speed rail and factories?
Then maybe we would get our mojo back.
Yes, I absolutely agree with this and also wrote about this idea in more depth in this piece: https://open.substack.com/pub/sivispacem/p/china-envy
Thank you.
I only came across your work with the article I mentioned. Now I have subscribed and can see your other work.
Keep it up!
Thanks, I appreciate it!
"Elections suddenly have consequences for you."
Except... the people for whom those elections really did have consequences weren't the liberal elites.
(I don't live in Britain any more, but I definitely identify with the liberal elites, so if I slip into "we" language, that's who I mean.)
The liberal elites aren't the ones using food banks. The liberal elites didn't get thrown out of the country after Brexit. The liberal elites lost a little bit of money with the economy taking a hit... but our houses continued to appreciate in value.
The people who were hurt by Brexit were Europeans hoping to move to Britain, who have been replaced by immigrants from other parts of the world; and poor people.
I like the analogy "this is what losing feels like" - that does seem like a useful and insightful way to think about how the other side feels. But I don't think the "consequences" line is true in terms of material consequences. Emotional consequences, yes. But material consequences still tend to fall overwhelmingly on the poor.
Thanks, this is an interesting thought. I'm not sure how much I agree with it. It's certainly true that if you're poorer then things in general affect you more because you have less of a cushion. But:
I don't think that elites in Britain have yet really experienced losing (except by proxy given the psychological dominance of the US). I'm mainly talking about the States here and I think that elites there certainly are starting to materially lose, with the evisceration of cultural dominance, harm to their economic portfolios, etc. Trump 47's project is based on the idea that elite cultural and economic dominance has been a disaster. It's to try to rebalance the political settlement away from existing elites and the non-material things they like in a way that Starmer and even Cummings don't seem to have much interest in.
What I'm getting at is that populism isn't wholly self-defeating. Many populist programs legitimately propose redistribution of power away from the status quo, making different trade-offs to what exist now. The current settlement probably does significantly favour elites, even if in general good for all.
The main harm of Brexit was that we wasted 4 years we didn't have to spare trying to contort ourselves to get it done. Because of what I said at the top, that immediately affected the poorest the most. But it also probably affected the elite class a lot. In the end, if the government is able to use freedom from objectively onerous and stupid tech regulation to spark the economy on AI and so forth then Brexit may end up being treated kindly by history.
I dunno, I'm not really seeing it. Remember how Trump 1 was supposed to be about using tariffs to help American manufacturing, but all it did was make manufacturing harder? The people who suffer when manufacturing suffers are not elites. In terms of power, hasn't Trump mainly given power to Elon Musk? That doesn't look like a major shift away from the elites. A lot of government workers have lost their jobs, but I'm not sure if they were quite the elite, were they? And the New York bankers may be sad that the Kennedy Centre has new programming, but Trump's never going to be the guy to tax the rich.
I don't follow the American news that closely, so I may be missing something. But I think my biggest point of disagreement with what you're suggesting here - and with 99% of the commentary that I read - is that you talk about Trump's "project". I just haven't seen any evidence that he in fact has a coherent project, and I think that trying to analyse his actions through that lens leads you to distortions.
I think he loves talking tough and looking tough, and from day to day, minute to minute, his actions are almost exclusively reactive. He is just trying to be the anti-liberal.
Two thoughts:
(1) I think it's a comforting fantasy that populism is self-defeating. To be sure, results of populism might end up entrenching existing elites further. But in other (cultural) ways it clearly works. Witness the normalisation of anti-elite sentiment, the preference cascade on the tech right, etc.
(2) I'm agnostic on whether Trump has a project although in my opinion he plainly does have strong and remarkably consistent core beliefs (if inconsistent in how those are applied). The people around him -- Miller, Vance, Lutnick, Bessent, the tech right, Elon, all certainly have a Weltanschauung. Some of those worldviews clash (tech right being pro-immigration, Vance/Miller being nativist). But there's something at play.
Fundamentally the theory of Trumpism in particular is that politics is downstream of culture, and the lesson they learned from 45 was that without breaking status quo elite dominance of culture via the universities/movies/courts/etc then you can't do your program. From that comes the muzzle velocity, the power centralisation, the obsession with loyalty. Etc.
Yes, I agree with your (1). Rule of law is not self-sustaining, and it requires those who believe in it to fight for it. I think populism is self-defeating in that it (generally, and in this case) doesn't bring benefits to the populace, but it certainly can disrupt existing institutions, and there's no reason to think that the USA will automatically revert back to a norm of respectful constitutionalism. Perhaps the biggest danger with Trump is that an anti-Trump will appear on the Democratic side, and things will get worse and worse.
As for (2), I don't believe it - but I also think I must be missing something! From my perspective, he seems like such a ridiculous loser... and yet he keeps winning elections. So I'm obviously not understanding something, and it could be that there is a consistent plan behind it all. I dunno.
I was thinking just now about what it must have felt like to be a conservative in 1950s Britain. Imagine if you rejected socialism, and had to watch as your country seemed to embrace many of its core tenets. That must have felt like a horrifying period of losing... Perhaps that's the same feeling as we're experiencing now.
Thanks for that great and wide ranging commentary. This is a very strange moment….and no part of the American shambles has yet even touched on China. You are right that their offer is tempting to autocrats and corrupt elites everywhere but never to principled democrats…We are passing through a time of such unreality at present. In most of the West, people are just refusing to see what is in front of them, hoping that the world they have always known will just magically reappear somehow. Even leaders who know better are to one extent or another immobilized hoping that just the perfect mix of flattery and blandishment combined with just the right enticements might keep Trump from overturning the alliances that have brought eighty years of peace. This week Macron and Starmer are doing their best and everyone is holding their breath. Because Trump is entirely irrational, it seems to them worth trying anything. But crucial time is passing quickly and soon the die will be cast. It’s as if every western power is transfixed, unable to act or look away as if passing a horrible road accident. What will be the event that provides the shock to the system that will cause us all to come to life and act with purpose.
In the first month. Pledging to annex Canada and changing sides in the Ukraine war didn’t do it. If we continue to make no choice and decide no action, then the choice will be made for us. It will be to simply accept whatever trump, musk and Putin have in store for us.