NATO and After

Patrick Wintour in the Guardian thinks that NATO was founded on the defence of shared values and that a parting of the ways with the US may now be inevitable because of the American turn towards a populism that shows more sympathy for Russia than Europe. But NATO was never about the defence of democracy or nebulous freedom, as should be clear from the authoritarian dictatorships than it happily accommodated at various times (Portugal, Greece and Turkey). It was about the restraint of the USSR and (covertly) a mutual defence pact against communist success in domestic Western European politics. The Ukraine War has shown Russia to be a paper tiger that offers a negligible military threat to Europe and none whatsoever to the US. Everybody knows this and security arrangements will adjust accordingly. For all the urgent talk about increasing defence spending, the secular trend of a decline will continue once the war has ended. Wintour's emphasis on a "firewall" against populism indicates that the political dimension will remain uppermost in the minds of the European political establishment, but you can be sure that this won't be limited to excluding the far-right. If anything, absorption of the far-right is on the cards.

Trump's intervention has called into question the rules-based order, but this ignores that the USA has always refused to accept that the rules applied to it as the hegemon, and has done so regardless of who was in the White House. The ultimate rule has always been that might makes right. As Wintour continued later: "Sir Alex Younger, a former head of M16, argued Trump had ushered in a rules-free amoral world order in which the only commodity that mattered was raw power. “We have moved from a world of rules and multilateral institutions to strongmen making deals over the heads of weaker, and smaller countries,” he said. “This is our new world. This is Donald Trump’s world. The key psychological pivot we have to make is to that world. We are not operating in a systems world any longer, but an incentives world.”" While liberal commentators fulminate about appeasement and the 1930s, the more useful historical analogy for the slow erosion of NATO is the gradual dismantling of the Concert of Europe across the nineteenth century. We are moving from the age of Metternich to that of Bismarck, as realists have been insisting since the fall of the Berlin Wall, contradicting the many liberals proclaiming a perpetual peace.

But the value of the parallel is less to do with the notion of great power rivalries or "carve-ups" after 1848 than in the idea of a looming "policeman" guarding against disruptive tendencies which persisted beyond the end of the Concert. Then the threats were republicanism, national self-determination and socialism; now they are mass immigration, DEI and socialism (the one consistent spectre). Vladimir Putin's foreign policy has always aimed to revive the idea of Russia as a civilisational bulwark against the decadent West, an idea that owed as much to Tsar Nicholas I as Comrade Stalin, and he has found common cause now not just with J D Vance and other authoritarian conservatives but with native movements against le wokisme and immigration. If nothing else, it is amusing to see the confusion of groups such as Blue Labour as they simultaneously advocate the staunch defence of Ukraine and hob-nob with American reactionaries. This highlights the extent to which European politics over the last 30 years has been a "vacation from history", complacent in the face of geostrategic shifts - the decline of Russia and the rise of China - and obsessed with the parochial reconciliation of liberal economics and social conservatism. The early signs are not promising that the Trumpian disjuncture will lead to much more than regular meetings and portentous communiques.

If the United States believes that the greatest threat to its global hegemony is China, and if it also believes that its interests in the Middle East are best served by the regional defeat of Iran, then Russia would be a far more useful geostrategic ally than Europe, despite its relative decline. There is an obvious congruence of interests. Putin's is to weaken US support for Europe and to fragment the interests of the European states in order to give Russia more latitude in its "near abroad". But that is a strategy born of weakness, a weakness made all too apparent in Ukraine. The expansion of NATO and the EU to include Eastern Europe and the Baltics means that Russia has already lost the geostrategic battle over spheres of influence. It also means that while the US will ignore Russia intimidating Ukraine, it holds the monopoly on intimidating NATO members, as Romania is finding out. The likely failure of Europe to offer Ukraine any meaningful "security guarantees" simply reinforces the fact that the country was never seriously considered for membership of the EU and its dismemberment is not seen as an existential threat to the European order. The withdrawal of the US is a threat to Europe, but this should be seen more in terms of the reconfiguration of capital relations than in the disappearance of a security guarantee. 

One of the more useful comments on the last few days came from Yanis Varoufakis in his "leftist jester at the court of liberalism" role. Amid the tearful hyperbole and wild prescriptions in the Guardian, he focused on Trump's economic-cum-geostrategic plan: "His tariffs are a negotiating tool to get foreigners to revalue their currencies, to swap their holdings of short-term for long-term US debt, and to magnetise European chemical and mechanical engineering conglomerates (eg BASF and Volkswagen) from a stagnating Europe to a boisterous United States." This is a view implicitly shared in the more considered capitalist press, which has been concerned by European industrial and technological stagnation for over a decade. As Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times put it: "Europeans need to start preparing fast for the day when the US security guarantee to Europe is definitively removed. That must involve building up autonomous defence industries. It should also mean a European mutual defence pact, outside Nato, that extends beyond the EU — to include Britain, Norway and others" (but not Ukraine, you'll notice).

The US demand for European states to increase defence spending is self-interested, but not in the simplistic sense of "burden-sharing": there is no appetite in Washington to reduce American defence spending, as the priorities of Elon Musk (a major recipient of Pentagon money) make clear. Rather Washington expects much of that increased European spending to be directed to American arms manufacturers. Trump's executive order to suspend enforcement of the Foreign and Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), which was passed in 1977 in the wake of the Lockheed arms scandal, is a signal that every means will be used to boost the interests of American capital. Europe is not so much a geostrategic theatre as a developing market in this perspective. The approach that the US will take will be informed by the standard operating practices of its multinationals, particularly those in the energy and mining sectors: coercive extraction of natural assets (already the price being asked of Ukraine), the demand for impunity from local laws and regulations (Vance's attack on Europe's legal integrity was pretty transparent), and the completely unfettered mobility of capital. No wonder Amazon, Meta and the like are on board with the administration.

The strategic issue for the UK is not the percentage of GDP that is devoted to defence - the mooted rise to 2.5% - but the use it is put to. An aircraft carrier in the South China Sea isn't much use for the defence of Europe, let alone Ukraine, and it wouldn't make that much difference to the US strategy in East Asia and the Pacific either. What does matter in Washington is Airstrip One and its forward operating bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia. If the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan achieved anything, it was to convince the Pentagon that the British military is at best of marginal use and at worst a positive burden, but it has some nice real estate. Integrating them more closely operationally would best be achieved by buying American arms, rather than trying to maintain an independent arms sector that is obliged to sell to American clients like Saudi Arabia to keep afloat. The challenge then is not simply to the Treasury to find more money, but to the coherence of British Atlanticism, hence the attempt by Paul Mason to reimagine NATO as a British-led coalition that can reassure the US that the European flank is well-guarded, and incidentally to recast Keir Starmer as a modern Ernest Bevin (the parallels made with Harold Wilson as recently as 6 months ago now appear laughable, but drawing a line to Bevin seems much more risky given Ernie's well-known anti-Zionism).

Everyone agrees that Europe needs a major economic stimulus, and many have noted how the Russian economy has adapted to sanctions (an extreme form of tariff) and being put on a "war footing". Some thought that the green transition would provide this stimulus, but the decision of the centre-right to opportunistically oppose much of it (largely at the prompting of the reactionary press) has made that politically problematic. Likewise, there is no consensus on large-scale investment in public infrastructure, particularly public housing, even if specific business-friendly projects, like a third runway at Heathrow, will get state backing. In this climate, "building up autonomous defence industries", as Rachman suggests, makes sense. This doesn't necessarily herald a return to what David Edgerton, in the British context, referred to as the Warfare State, let alone to Paul Mason's daydreams, but it does provide a programme, likely to be acceptable across most of the political spectrum (e.g. including the German Greens), for a major domestic industrial stimulus whose costs can be funded by a combination of collective EU bonds (the same mechanism that many on the left proposed for the green transition), public spending cuts and higher taxes, but without jeopardising the dominance of capital markets or property prices. That Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves immediately spotted the political opportunity this presents explains the alacrity with which the PM announced "our" readiness to once more put boots on the ground.

What's Up?

Katy Balls, the Spectator's resident Tory-whisperer, might seem an odd choice to present the Guardian's commentary on the latest Labour WhatsApp scandal, but the paper has long outsourced topics that might compromise its own political desk (there are plenty of Labour right factional chat groups that include both politicans and journalists). An added advantage is that it allows for an ecumenical approach, hence Balls can set the brouhaha in the context of a Westmister-wide addiction to chatting shit. What was notable by its absence in Balls' brief survey of the history was the infamous leak of the WhatsApp messages of the Labour Party HQ group that plotted against Jeremy Corbyn when he was leader. Balls does mention Corbyn, but only in the context of a separate group that provided an early outing for the clown troupe that would become known as Change UK. Given that the HQ group leak prompted an independent inquiry by Martin Forde, you might have thought it worth highlighting, not least because the personal attacks on the likes of Diane Abbott in the "Trigger Me Timbers" group clearly continued a theme. 

One explanation for the omission is that this latest example had no strategic or policy substance to it, allowing Balls to characterise such communications as an example of poor impulse control and the sort of backbiting that constitutes the chaff of daily political journalism. What the Forde Report revealed was, among other things, evidence of a conspiracy to pervert the conduct of the 2017 general election campaign for factional ends. If there is one thing that has characterised the Starmer regime it is the absolute determination to avoid having the party's factional disputes aired so publicly again, hence the alacrity with which the whip is withdrawn the moment an MP steps out of line. Andrew Gwynne will no doubt look suitably contrite while he sits in the sin bin but he can expect to be welcomed back into the fold once he has served his time and displayed good behaviour. After all, Starmer has made it clear that even lefties can be rehabilitated if they keep their noses clean, though some of them can also expect to be squeezed out before the next general election through deselection, something Gwynne will probably be spared.

If the substantive arguments that characterised previous Labour governments - from incomes policy to membership of the euro - are notable by their absence today, this doesn't mean that factional spite and jockeying for position have taken a back seat. This week's revelations about Rachel Reeves's questionable expenses when working for HBOS and her sexed-up CV are actually old news but they've been revived both because Starmer looks increasingly like a one-term Prime Minister and because others in the cabinet don't fancy Reeves taking over from him either before or after the next election. The implicit charge against her is that she isn't as competent a manager as she claims, rather than that she is drifting towards the left or has questionable judgement on how how high to jump when Washington barks. It's politics reduced to office politics, which is arguably a summation of this government with its vapid mantra of "Growth" and its insistence that greater process efficiency, from the Competition and Markets Authority to local planning decisions, can deliver it.

The dynamic behind all of this is the publication of Patrick Maguire and Gabriel Pogrund's Get In, a follow-up to their Left Out.  While the earlier book portrayed the 2019 general election defeat as a "betrayal" of Labour's constituency by the naive left, their latest gossipy offering revels in the skill by which the party right, and in particular Morgan McSweeney, won power first in the party and then at the 2024 general election. This obviously elides the contingent luck of facing a shattered Tory administration and a split on the right occasioned by the rise of Reform, but it also ignores the extent to which that same Labour constituency was cynically betrayed through a series of pledges made by Starmer to win the party leadership that were then steadily binned, resulting in fewer votes at the 2024 general election and a share of only 34%. That opinion polls now have Labour on around 25% simply emphasises the point that while journalists may be in awe of McSweeney the public have steadily turned against Labour and are perhaps disillusioned with representative politics more generally (turnout has fallen from 69% in 2017 to only 60% last year.)

What Maguire and Pogrund's book makes clear is that Starmer is despised by many in the PLP and in particular by the Blairites who think that he has served his purpose: the clean-skin with few moral scruples who was needed to finally seal the left's tomb. With the old right, represented by Rachel Reeves and Yvette Cooper, deemed too stupid to govern and the soft left little more than a punchline, the Blairites feel that their time has come again. The memory of Liz Kendall's dire performance as their flagbearer in 2015, garnering only 5% of the membership vote in the leadership election, has been washed away, and the woman herself given free rein as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions to tell us that too many people on benefits are "taking the mickey". This is ironic not only in the sense that forcing the disabled to take crap jobs does not constitute a credible strategy for growth but also in the sense that, as Maguire and Pogrund make clear, the Labour Party has been taking the piss since 2019, something the electorate appears to have clocked long before the media.

The name in the frame as Starmer's most likely successor is the Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who is in many ways similar to the Prime Minister, particularly in his opportunism and eagerness to please business interests, but who at least doesn't need the help of a voice coach to humanise him. But while the lad with the colourful East End family background may seduce the media with what passes for emotional intelligence in their circles, he does not offer a departure in terms of his politics from either New Labour (directing NHS funds towards the private health sector) or the current shift towards a Reform-adjacent Blue Labour (criticising the NHS for pulling the "immigration lever" to recruit foreign doctors). If the latest WhatsApp nonsense tells us anything, it isn't that the Labour right is made up of horrible people - we already knew that - but that their factionalism was always a substitute for a meaningful politics. Being an arsehole is an end in itself, hence Trigger Me Timbers' performative arseholery.

Just as getting Brexit "done" served to obscure the lack of a meaningful Conservative Party programme after a decade of self-defeating austerity, but quickly evaporated as the reality of a pointless government became all too plain after the Covid pandemic, so the insider revelations of Labour Party politics since 2015 are now being promoted way beyond their intrinsic value as a distraction from the lack of a meaningful programme of government. But arseholes being arseholes can only take up so much newsprint and airtime, hence the Guardian finds itself once more legitimising the far-right by its obsessive focus on populist incivility and poring over the receipts for donations to Reform, as if rich men funding reactionary politics was newsworthy. We are cursed in the UK with a dumb government and an anti-intellectual and bitchy political class, and the chief reason for that is our awful media, most of which is owned by other rich men keen to advance reactionary politics. As the nominally liberal opposition to this, the Guardian has played its part by offering an insipid centrism that celebrates the political void and now presents the political class as addled teenagers, glued to their phones: victims of social media who deserve our pity.

Waiting for the Barbarians

According to Jon Henley, the Guardian's Europe Correspondent, centre-right parties across the continent are being cannibalised by the far-right, in particular over the issue of immigration: "For decades, mainstream European parties on the right and left united behind a barrier – the Brandmauer (firewall) in Germany, the cordon sanitaire in France – against accommodating far-right ideas or cooperating with far-right parties. More recently, however, centre-right parties in particular have increasingly adopted far-right policies and, in several countries, formed coalitions with far-right parties. Despite evidence showing this only boosts the radical right, the process is accelerating." This makes it sound like centre-right parties are simply stupid: repeatedly pursuing an electoral strategy that demonstrably does not work. But they are clearly doing this with their eyes wide open. In fact, the normalisation of rightwing policies is less a push from the fringe and more of a pull from the centre, reflecting that it is the nominal middle that is choosing to shift rightwards. It isn't being dragged there against its will. 

Henley's suggestion that the centre-right are making a tactical error by trying to accommodate the far-right's policies on immigration ignores that the policies in question have long been promoted by the centre-right. In the UK, the Tories have been openly hostile to immigration since Margaret Thatcher's "swamped" remarks and regularly accused Labour of overseeing an intolerable rise in both net migration and asylum-seeking during the Blair and Brown years. That they subsequently proved incapable of delivering the promised reductions in net flows reflects the contradictions of their politics: support for capital's appetite for cheap labour and the tacit indulgence of the bigotry and xenophobia of their electoral base. In reporting the prediction that "Europe’s centre-right parties could be subsumed by the far right within 10 to 15 years", Henley misidentifies the dynamic: it is absorption, not subsumption. We've already seen this in the UK with the inroads that first UKIP and then the Brexit Party made into Tory support, its evaporation in 2019 as these voters "returned home", and now its re-emergence as Reform. This electoral promiscuity obscures the steady march to the right by the parties of the centre.

The European and American far-right remain ideologically chaotic and organisationally incompetent. The parallels with the 1930s are misleading because these groups do not in the main aspire to reorder society. As we are witnessing in real-time in the US, in power these people are focused on vandalising the state, not reinforcing it as a tool of totalitarian repression. Some voices on the far-right are programmatic reactionaries, or even sincere Fascists, but most are just pro-capital conservatives who want to deregulate markets and lower taxes on the rich. It's worth emphasising that the party leaders who have come to prominence on the far-right in Europe - Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Georgia Meloni, Alice Weidel - are electoral pragmatists, concerned with relative positioning and alliance-building, rather than visionaries set on revolution. They face towards the centre and are unsurprisingly cut from the same bourgeois cloth as the cartel party leaders. That latter group includes the nominal centre-left as much as the centre-right. For example, the UK Labour government has shown its centre-right nature in office by consciously pursuing policies that it thinks will find favour with Reform voters as much as with Conservative ones, and you can't simply blame this on panicked MPs in marginal seats.

The far-right's strength is down to its promotion by the media. Long before Steve Bannon talked of "flooding the zone with shit" (ironically his claimed tactic for subverting mainstream media), rightwing newspapers were churning out propaganda that placed the locus of politics significantly to the right of centre. The rightwing policy entrpreneur Joseph Lehman claimed that "The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it." That claim itself was false, not only in its supposition that changes in policy preferences were purely organic but in its implication that political parties ("lawmakers") simply responded to public opinion rather than seeking to craft it. The relationship between press barons and politicians is often presented as asymmetric, the latter obliged to pay homage to the former (think of Tony Blair's relations with Rupert Murdoch), but they are actually symbiotic. Just as the EU was regularly blamed for policies that originated in Whitehall, so the press (presented as a reflection of popular opinion) can be blamed for a party shifting its policy rightwards.

This shift is often justified by reference to a minority of voters whose concerns and interests are given outsized importance on the grounds that they have hitherto been ignored by the political establishment. This is usually little more than puppetry. The political cartel has been convinced since the 1970s of the rightness (sic) of the neoliberal analysis: the primacy of private property, the need to marketise public services and the priority of tax cuts. To this end, the parties have worked with pollsters and the media to construct a number of character types seen to embody the same preferences and associated virtues (independence, hard-work etc), from Basildon Man through Worcester Woman. Initially these were presented as new formations in society, representing the zeitgeist, and were characterised by a transactional attitude towards both the state and each other. As neoliberalism has curdled, a new character group has come to the fore: the left behind. In contrast to the progressive and pragmatic types of the 1980s and 90s, these voters are conservative and nostalgic, motivated by "values" that have been supposedly undermined by globalisation and "identity politics" .

The psephology of the second half of the twentieth century centred on the construct of the median voter who was not only to be found in the middle of the political spectrum but also at the midpoint of other demographic dimensions such as age, education and income. In contrast, the politics of the era that commenced with the bankruptcy of neoliberalism in 2008 - what liberal commentators have taken to referring to as "populism" - have been characterised by the idea of the neglected conservative: older, less educated and poorer. In reality, far-right voters tend to be richer than the median and predominantly middle-aged. If far-right parties are gaining greater support, that will be down to what were once described as median voters. In other words, the median voter has been recast as more conservative than the demographic reality, and thus they have acquired the traditional characteristics associated with conservatism. The one dimension of the populist cliché that does appear to be true is educational attainment: voters for far-right parties tend to be less educated than the median, however that appears to be largely a product of the relatively recent expansion of higher education, i.e. it correlates with age, and is therefore likely to dissipate over time.

This "left behind" character is deemed by political scientists to combine a more leftwing view of economics (e.g. pro-nationalisation) with a social conservatism, and thus to be potentially attracted to the policies of the far-right, or at least to the faux nostalgia of a mythical hybrid such as Blue Labour. This ignores that actual far-right parties are typically economically liberal: in favour of rolling back the state and cutting taxes. It also ignores that in the character's political articulation in the media the leftwing economics are barely mentioned, just as they are equally marginal among MPs trying to revive Blue Labourism. And that's the clue that this is a character constructed in the interests of the cartel to justify a rightwards shift in social policy without jeopardising neoliberal hegemony. This is why "anti-green" and "anti-woke" impulses features so prominently. Genuine Fascists tend to be pro-environmental, to the point of blood-and-soil mysticism, and obsessive about identity and group rights. The push against net-zero and DEI in the US clearly serves the interests of particular fractions of capital, not neo-Nazis. 

The biggest shifts in policy on the right in recent years across Europe have been on the far-right and have invariably seen a move towards the centre. This has coincided with the nominal centre-left moving to the right, so squeezing the traditional parties of the centre-right. Thus the Rassemblement National in France has dropped its plan to quit the EU while Marine Le Pen continues her strategy of de-demonisation and seeks de facto alliances with the centre-right now represented by Emmanuel Macron. The Brothers of Italy have toned down their support for protectionism and shifted towards Atlanticism as they have joined the centre-right in a government coalition. The AfD in Germany is split between a centripetal Alternative Mitte and a more radical-right Der Flügel, with the former clearly in the ascendancy and keen to ally with the CDU/CSU. Across Europe, the far-right is being house-trained by the cartel as part of a process that seeks to embed neoliberal economics and governance within a "populist" framework of social reaction. All that has changed since 2008 is the abandoment of the progressive narrative of the centre-left.