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Europe must act as a much-needed adrenalin shot to a weary Uncle Sam
While we all luxuriate in the afterglow of a fabulous summer and await the outcome of the Scottish independence referendum – as well ponder the rise of Ukip and how it will all pan out at the coming General Election – a much more terrible set of conundrums lap at Europe’s borders. Far to its east, the post-war settlement is under threat.
Already an annexation has taken place. On Europe’s southern flank a militia banditry reigns in the land we helped free from Gadhafi. Across the desert sands of the Sahara the black flag of Muslim extremism makes many of the states there close to ungovernable. Sweep east and the heroes of Tahir Square have seen a military dictatorship annul all their efforts and seize power in Egypt to stop that pivotal Arab state falling to the excesses of the Muslim Brotherhood. Go south into the land of the former Queen of Sheba (Yemen) and more turmoil reigns. Across the narrow straits from our former colony of Aden and into Somalia more of the same flourishes, not just on land but at sea, where a scourge which our navy had long ago cleansed the world of has broken out again: piracy. Travel north into the desert fastnesses which Lawrence once traversed and you are upon Gaza and Syria. Again, more chaos. Go east and you have reached Iraq where the most bestial activities of all are currently taking place. Further east and you are upon the hapless land of Afghanistan where we await the outcome of our ten-year effort when we leave next year. The signs are not good. If a new Iraq breaks out there it may very well take down a nuclear armed Pakistan with it.
While all this is going on, we in the West fret about our petty goings on – though certain goings on, such as splitting our country apart and leaving the EU are not, admittedly, petty – and we worry about what our responses should be to these ugly canvasses which are unfolding all around us. It is my concerned belief that we are about to see years, if not decades, of strife before an exhausted Islam settles down to enjoy the sort of order which descended over Europe with the 17th century ‘Peace of Westphalia’ following the terrible bloodletting of the Thirty Years War. That, too, was about religion – the Protestant/Catholic schism which has echoes of the present Sunni/Shia split.
But things could have been different if the US had had a partner as militarily powerful as itself with whom it could have shared the burden. It would have made it possible for us to save our Muslim brothers from themselves and spare them the miseries we endured in that long-ago conflict. That partner should have been us, the Europeans. We have no longer any interest in colonising anybody, but we do have an interest in maintaining stability, especially when it is on our doorstep.
Just as the victorious Western Allies were able to work the miracle of creating and sustaining a democratic and peaceable West Germany after the horrors of Nazism, so we could have rendered the same service to the fractious Muslim world if we in Europe had pulled our weight in world affairs and not left it all to an ever more fed up and weary Uncle Sam.
But even now it is not perhaps too late. First of all we must stop distracting ourselves by fragmentation – starting with ourselves. If Scotland separates, it will send Spain into paroxysms of worry as its most prosperous region, Catalonia, ups the ante for independence. Then the Basques, another – prosperous area – will do the same. Belgium, itself – the heart of the European Union – may very well split in two, with the French-speaking south and Dutch-speaking north going their own ways. There is plenty more potential for further fragmentation in the always volatile Balkans. And who’s to say that Wales and Northern Ireland might not catch the contagion.
Cameron’s job – in which, as far as I can see, he has done mighty little that is visible and hence Douglas Carswell’s defection to Ukip – is to get busy on those re-negotiations with Europe and make them meaningful. Europe needs reform, and most of its members know it. If he can get it into their thick heads that they really are in danger of losing one of their biggest players then I think there is a chance that he may come home with a package that most of us can accept. Meantime, he should go public and tell them (and the country) that unless this is so he will have to recommend our departure.
If Europe can weather this British-made storm which lies ahead and stop attempting to reduce its nation states to regional entities, then it can forge ahead and exert the kind of muscle on the world stage – both diplomatically and militarily – as will act as an adrenalin shot to Uncle Sam. No longer will he feel alone. He and his new partner will dispose of such power as will make all others think twice, including Putin with his old-world adventures in the east. Europe will have come into its own and will have demonstrated to the world that its interests lie not only in enriching itself but in helping an increasingly impotent United Nations maintain a stable and just world.
Oh, for the certainties of the Cold War
Europe has shirked its responsibilities and find itself powerless to intervene with overwhelming force when a bunch of wild jihadists – too wild even for Al Qaeda – set up a terrorist state in the most volatile region of the world, from which we gain most of our energy supplies.
Today we long for the certainties of the Cold War, when the prospect of nuclear Armageddon kept us all in order and expulsions from embassies of so-called ‘trade envoys’ and exchanges of spies at Checkpoint Charlie was pretty much all there was to get excited about. The enemy lay over there, just behind the Iron Curtain and he wore a uniform.
He had got as much of the world as he could persuade to side with him and we did the same. Those who cried ‘a plague on both your houses’ liked to call themselves the non-aligned. Among our cheer leaders, we had some real bastards (outright tyrants like Saddam Hussein during the Iran/Iraq war) but – as one American famously said – they were, at least, our bastards.
In that halcyon, far-off time, an old man like me could pass through airport controls without being ritually humiliated and he had no fear of being blown out of the skies by a Ukrainian nutter or taken on a one way flight into the Shard. These, I am sure, are the thoughts of many people – and some of these same people will even think further back to a time when the whole world was kept in a form of order by the great European empires.
“What fool,” they are now asking themselves, “said at the collapse of Communism that it was the ‘end of history’”? But foolishness was not confined to him. The so called ‘Peace Dividend’ was lauded by almost all and caused developed nations around the world to think that they could safely slash their defence budgets. Now those same nations find themselves powerless to intervene with overwhelming force when a bunch of wild jihadists – too wild even for Al Qaeda – set up a terrorist state in the most volatile region of the world, from which we gain most of our energy supplies. They even taunt us with their social networking and media skills by flashing up images of their barbarities, virtually in real time.
The truth of the matter is that the ‘good guy’ always needed to keep up his guard, As President Theodore (‘Teddy’ of Teddy bear fame) Roosevelt said: “Walk softly but carry a big stick”. My complaint is not that Uncle Sam is not pulling his weight, but that his collectively richer European partners are not pulling theirs. Had they not scrambled to save pennies on their defence budgets – preferring, self-indulgently, to leave it all to him – they would have been in a position to buttress him and not leave him the lone, isolated figure he is today, carrying the burdens of the world. We, more than anyone, know how thankless and onerous a task it is being the world’s policeman. No wonder, after Korea (which he still shoulders), Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan he is now weary of it all and contemplates increasingly withdrawing into isolationism. God helps us all if he does.
My argument is that if you are rich you carry responsibilities. Europe, in my view, shirks its. This is an area where the EU really could do something useful. That something is to get all member states to agree a percentage of their GDP to defence and hold them to it. Furthermore, it could make a portion of that defence capability available to the UN to give it teeth to deploy forces to troubled areas as and when the need arises. Peace keeping may then move forward to peace making so that, eventually, when enough other countries have pledged similar support, the world’s only legitimate superpower will be the UN.
Right now an arc of terror embraces huge swathes of Africa – right on Europe’s doorstep – and extends thousands of miles eastwards to the major oil producing countries of the world. It may soon extend thousands more if Afghanistan, as seems likely, falls once more into terrorism when NATO leaves next year. Adjacent Pakistan – always a perennially unstable country – may quickly follow suit and that is a state with a nuclear armoury which may very well fall into hostile hands.
To say that the unfolding situation is worrying is to put it mildly. The very first step is to give the well organised and heroic Kurds the capability to smash the ten thousand or so ISIS fanatics. If the new government of Iraq can get its act together, so much the batter. It too can help, so long as they don’t run away again and leave more state-of-the-art stockpiles of weapons to their opponents.
After that, Palestine – the kernel of all Middle East problems – must be addressed. Israel, the one shining light of openness and democracy in a darkening region, must shine that light throughout the troubled Middle East. Unlike the Red Indians, the Maoris, the Incas, Aztecs and so many others, Israelis have at least got their ancestral land back. The rest never will, even though they lost them just a few hundred years ago, never mind two thousand. They should be happy for that and we can take some credit for that happening with our 1917 Balfour Declaration.
But Israel should avoid the deadly sin of greed by being thirsty for more land, personified by the never-ending building of fresh settlements on land they acknowledge not to be theirs. They should show pity for the dispossessed as they themselves were so mercilessly dispossessed down the centuries. The price the Palestinians have paid for Israel regaining its historic land which had been Palestinian for two millennia has been a heart-breaking one. Surely Israel, of all countries, can see that.
Only the victor is in a position to show magnanimity and in all the terrible circumstances now prevailing let Israel show just that. It might be surprised at the response such action elicits. Included in any settlement must be the lifting of the awful siege of Gaza. If a settlement can be achieved between Jew and Arab – who are, after all, ethnically the same people and who both through their holy books revere the same prophets – then much of the ground will have been cut from beneath the feet of the Muslim extremists. Gaza has shown what the alternative is: a legacy of bitterness and hatred which will fester into a new generation.
What we’ve seen these last few days has not been pretty. It has been the very antithesis of the bible story in which little Israel in the form of the boyish David took on the monstrous brute, Goliath. Now in the most disheartening of role reversals, Goliath has become the mighty, clanking war machine which is Israel and David, little, smashed-up Gaza. Interestingly, Goliath did actually come from Gaza, then known as Phoenicia.
The Last Foundling 