Notes & Queries II

Sanctions as Failed Policy, India as Beloved and Self-Defeating Technocracy

While most current news attention is centred on the emerging possibility of a lasting peace in Gaza, what is far more important to Europeans is the status of the Ukraine War. We have to get past the nonsense of drone flaps and propaganda to understand that we are in for a long haul. NATO’s concern is only secondarily Russia. Its primary concern is to try and mobilise a distracted, discontented and (outside Poland and the Nordic-Baltic region) disinterested voting population to accept a major shift of resources from welfare to militarisation without current prospect of the level of economic growth to fund it adequately. Worse, Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan is not alone in expecting a major US market correction in the next six months to two years. The longer that takes to happen, the more likely it is to be a ‘crash’. We cannot know the future. The new Trumpian crypto economics may allow us to say ‘and with one bound the global economy was free’ but the likelihood is that such a crisis would affect the European economy badly. German deindustrialisation and fiscal crises in France (and the UK) are already unfolding with unforeseen political effects - the pressure is even on to unravel Net Zero in order to help maintain a crumbling auto industry. A European drift to tariffs has already started (most notably with steel).

The Forever War

As to the Ukraine War, all talks have run into the ground. This is pretty well what Ukraine and European NATO had wanted a month or so ago. They may regret this soon enough. The Russians have simply accepted the fact and moved on. The issue is now less one of equipment and more one of morale. The tendency in the West was to think that the Russian population would behave like contemporary (though not past) Western populations and take to the streets under privation from (say) high petrol prices or a lack of supply triggered by a combination of sanctions and targeted Ukrainian missile strikes. When they do not, this is to be put down to ‘tyranny’ and control. There is no doubt a theoretical point when this revolt might happen but the difference is in the plausibility to Western and Russian populations of the war representing an existential risk and the willingness to accept restriction and privation in relation to that risk.

Meanwhile sanctions have not worked because what degrades a mid-sized country over a long period of time does not work with a larger resource-rich country which can build new networks and ‘rewire’. Iraq and Syria collapsed less into the Western camp and more into a defeated weakness that ceased to be a ‘threat’ to Western policy but these processes took a decade or more to unfold. They required either war or (in the case of Syria) carefully planned insurgent military action to effect and neither was a nuclear power. In a decade, the Russian economy will have transitioned into the Chinese sphere of influence while the only candidates for insurgent invasion are dodgy militia too obviously funded by the West and who could not even reach Belgorod when they were sent into action.

It is probable that the Nordic-Baltic zone (possibly Poland) is developing a sense of potential existential risk within the West but this is not shared further west or south within the EU (and certainly not in the populations of the Anglo-Saxon world) at least until Russia does something decisive that is actually and provenly existentially risky (which it has not done)¹. Russians, in general, even if they are cynical about Putin, still live within a form of democracy² and do seem to believe that there is something existential at stake, at least if they are not part of the liberal middle class minorities in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Russia is still a large country of villages, small towns, industrial cities with broadly traditionalist values.

Ukraine, of course, has developed a similar ‘existential’ model but with more internal division because there is a genuine difference of outlook between pro-European and pro-Russian social groups. This probably means that things will continue as they have done with or without Western ‘wunderwaffe’ like Tomahawks. Indeed, there is an added risk that strikes by ‘wunderwaffe’ simply have the same effect on the Russian population that V-2s once had on the British population - that is, heightened fear but also heightened determination to ‘finish the job’ and more grim refusal to compromise.

There is a long game where Western strategists still think they can degrade Russia into defeat or compliance or regime change. Russia will, under all reasonable current scenarios, still need to bear a long transitional period where the risk is of deliberate Western destabilisation (which is why the tough purge of ‘Navalny’-ism has taken place). However, once past that transition, it will be integrated into a Chinese-dominated bloc and broadly follow the trajectory of that bloc. Whether propaganda or not, it is already being claimed that the Russians are training a PLA airborne division³ that might be used against Taiwan. This ‘news’ comes as the US urges Taiwan to spend a staggering 10% of GDP on defence in yet another attempt to ease the burden of ‘imperial defence’ on the US economy. The claim about the airborne division, true or not, adds to the sense of blocs forming as economic and strategic units yet the time when the US might hope to destabilise China in order to destabilise Russia may be long past. If any polity appears to be at risk of civil war this month, it is the US.

India as the Great Game

The West’s problem is that components of the Western alliance may soon start to have doubts about the national interest value of being in the US’ rather than the BRICS’ network as time passes. Dissent on this is already present at the margins of the West. The current struggle is over India - a rising power with nuclear capacity run by nationalists who clearly resented the somewhat colonialist aspects of Trump’s initial position on tariffs. In response India rather obviously shifted out of the Quad community and into dialogue with China and a stronger position in favour of BRICS. There are some interesting manouevres going on as mid-sized countries combine into new sub-blocs - the Saudi-Pakistani-Malay relationship is one and the inclusion of Singapore in the Australian-led Indo-Pacific one is another - but India is the key player which is as concerned with strategic encirclement as China has been.

Another minor indicator of how the game is being played out is suggested by the vote on joining BRICS in Serbia. It was rejected but not necessarily to position Serbia as pro-European but rather to suggest that Serbia (which will not be alone in this) might be wise to hedge its bets and not prematurely be drawn into either the West or the opposition to the West. Eventually choices may need to be made but eventually is in the future. Out of 160 deputies, only 10 voted in favor, 27 voted against—mainly pro-Western parties—while 139 members of the ruling coalition refused to vote.

We can put aside any attempt to analyse this four-dimensional chess game and just concentrate on India for the moment. Washington has already begun to back track, realising its strategic error, with the added incentive that Indian-Americans are a powerful special interest group in America politics with special significance in high technology and so the defence sector. California was the third state to recognise Diwali as state holiday in a competitive struggle between Democrats and Republicans for this vote and its funds. Now (reported only today) Starmer has taken up the cause of India having a permanent seat on the UN Security Council which is something New Delhi dearly wants - Russia and China will merely shrug. Why not?

The Weakening of the Idea of the West

The abstract idea of the ‘West’ as the ‘Good’ has already taken a severe knock, at least globally and on the Western Left, from the claim that Israel is part of it (we do not have to go into the reasons for that here). Many populists also have serious issues with the liberal ideology associated with the idea of the West. Populists and traditionalists differ amongst themselves on this with an enormous range of ideological positions on what the word ‘West’ means and whether it is a good or bad thing. This is where we end up back at the problem of existential commitment to war or civilisational confrontation. You ned to know what you are fighting for and believe in it. The West is atomised and fragmented after half a century of neo-liberalism. What is clear is that the situation is indeed becoming ‘existential’ to Western liberal elites who face a ‘war on two fronts’ (redistributive left-populism and national interest populism).

Votes of censure against European Commission President Von Der Leyen collapsed this week because the Left would not vote for the Right motion and the Right would not vote for the Left motion but the political situation is one where European centrism is increasingly depending on the animosity of the two challenger ideologies. These are both radicalising and both are beginning to cut into its base. Centrism is surviving in part because competing radicals think the tide of history is moving in their direction. Another nation was lost to the liberal centrists with the election results in Czechia recently.

This instability, in turn, means a rapid increase in elite attempts at information control and surveillance as well as manipulation, all of which feeds resentments that helps build up the two challenger groups. Freedom is a central ideological component of right populism which is probably gaining more than the Left (whose track record in this respect is dubious to say the least) from liberal illiberalism. Future political syntheses of this almighty mess might be a rediscovery of social democracy on the centre-left and Meloni-style national interest conservatism masquerading as populism on the Right but there is a bit of a race against time here. Both Trump and Russia destabilise the situation simply by existing (although, with luck, the destabilising effect of Israel will be removed from the board by Trump in the coming days).

Risky Attempts at Information Control

As an example of the risks of technocratic centrism, we might look at the possibility of Signal and Telegram no longer being made available to Europeans if EU legislation giving surveillance access to them is passed⁴. Signal has threatened to withdraw from Europe. Telegram’s position is less clear. Whatsapp may well comply unless Washington steps in to advise Meta not to but a lot of users will be very unhappy at untrusted authorities ‘perving’ into their private opinions and lives. Of course, any forced departure of Messenger services might excite liberal elites who think that this will kill off a major tool of populist and leftist revolt but it probably underestimates the effect on younger generations in particular.

This brings us to the peculiar phenomenon of the Gen Z revolt which has now appeared in locations as distant (yet similar in terms of socio-economic development) as Morocco, Nepal and Madagascar. This does not appear to be a coincidence. It is hard not to see some ultimate actor behind this - whether as NGO or as State-directed funder of infrastructures for revolt and whether prior to the emergence of Trump and only now coming to fruition, independent of Trump or operating through parallel populist or libertarian networks (it is striking how overtly non-socialist the revolt has been in Morocco). We can leave analysis of this for another time since we are back in the same world of smoke and mirrors that raised questions about the origins of the drone flap two weeks ago.

What we need to understand is that dabbling with internet freedoms is now a dangerous manouevre for any Government that thinks it can control the information and communications agenda within a democracy of competing interests. Even Putin is much more cautious than we might expect in restricting free debate. Fiddling with the digital aspects of freedom has proved a significant factor in collapsing approval ratings for Labour in the UK so this may be another case where controlling technocrats may come to be seen as cutting their own political throats.

Challenger political parties and movements largely rely on online capacity and so will kick back hard but they always have other means of organising. The internet itself is, by its very nature, a place of work arounds. Dedicated activists can deploy VPN and more determined resistance can go underground where the authorities may lose all control of its activities and be forced into ever more authoritarian measures that alienate increasing numbers of people who see their freedoms more likely to be defended by the extremes. European technocracy increasingly seems to demonstrate the axiom that intelligence and education are not necessarily the same thing.

1. Russian propaganda plays up the risk of Ukrainian or even NATO false flags to create a sense of existential threat amongst European populations - a false flag might trigger a war or at least political support for further costly militarisation. It is a genuine fear on their side - that some fake ‘casus belli’ might allow at least weapons escalation. This is certainly a world of smoke and mirrors. Unfortunately for the West, two factors strengthen the wariness of a significant section of the Western voting population about the meaning of ‘incidents’. The first is that, after the blowing up of Nordstream, the credibility of the Ukrainians and indeed the West has taken a knock as the story has unfolded. The second is that social platforms like X, Signal and Telegram have an unfortunate tendency to expose often clumsy psychological operations by all sides in the game. The consequent interest in targeting Signal and Telegram (X is untouchable) noted above adds to the sense of a system of manipulation that operates on the home side as much as on that of the Russians. Given that Russian accounts of its own battle field activity have tended (in retrospect) to be more accurate than claims coming out of Ukraine or NATO psy-ops, then we have a significant minority in the West highly sensitised to the idea of false flags and capable of raising questions that unravel any attempt to use them (on any side) to manipulate policy. In short, levels of distrust of authority are sufficient to weaken the capacity of any authority to mythologise itself into war. The many cynical responses to the recent Baltic drone flap are now typical.

2. This will be a contentious statement but, if Russia can be characterised as a ‘guided’ democracy, probably a little more democratic than the ‘guided democracy’ of Iran and even more compared to the ‘party democracy’ (which does in fact have some democratic aspects through ‘transmission belts’ that are sensitive to public opinion) of China, Western democracies also have aspects of the ‘guided’ on a similar continuum of more or less democratic. The essence of Western democracy is the party system and the structures of power inherent in special interests taking control of the political process as ‘civil society’. Democracy exists less in the voters being heard than in coalitions of shifting special interests building policy platforms. Party ‘transmission belts’ are supposed to link to ‘public opinion’ based on living communities (although public opinion had long since degenerated, before social media changed the game, into what journalists and urban intellectuals thought). The US always maintained a more radical model of democracy which stands up to scrutiny for all its flaws but the UK (for example) has always had aspects of a guided democracy (it has famously and accurately been termed an ‘elective dictatorship’) with competing party coalitions prepared to use executive power to repress or suppress activist and eventually popular democracy where it could. The Europeans fall between these two positions - multiple competing coalitions yet with the will and partial capacity to manipulate the game as often noted by J D Vance in his concerns about freedom of expression. The point is the degree to which mass opinion can effect regime change in an orderly and timely manner. The UK is a good example of a guided democracy where FPTP has resulted in a deeply unpopular government of dubious competence being able to hold on to power because a relatively small clique controls a party that seized control of a legislature that controls an executive on barely a third of the actual vote and what transpires to be at least a partially false prospectus. It can, of course, be removed when elections happen after a number of years (only to be replaced by a similar operation with differing views) or be forced to change policy if sufficient of its own hacks shift position. The latter will do this perhaps out of fear of losing their seats as an elections draws near (the democratic aspect of the case) but a healthy democracy is not a few hundred people fixing the system on a cycle. American criticisms of attempts to control free expression are not without foundation even if they too have a politics of coalitional interest.

3. The source for the claim is the generally Russophobic Royal United Services Institute in London - https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/how-russia-helping-china-prepare-seize-taiwan Our own material experience of the run-up to the Iraq War makes us suspicious of all documentation making such claims. To be fair to RUSI, it does say that “the approximately 800 pages of contracts and collateral materials appear genuine and details from within the documents have been independently verified. However, there is also the possibility that parts of the documents have been altered or omitted”. It then, of course, goes on to assume it is wholly genuine in its analysis. It probably is but it should not be automatically assumed to be so.

4. Signal’s position (and the threat) are summarised at https://aboutsignal.com/news/the-end-of-private-conversations-signal-threatens-to-leave-the-eu-if-chat-control-becomes-mandatory Despite Pavel Durov’s apparently defiant attitude towards previous attempts at techno-manipulation, it looks probable that Telegram will choose to cave in and wait to see what the European security apparat decides to do with the information it has to provide - https://alliance4europe.eu/telegram-blocking-russian-media-channels Durov’s tactic appears to be to give the European security apparat enough rope to hang itself with - https://www.ainvest.com/news/durov-france-exploited-trial-push-censorship-telegram-2509 We would expect to see it swinging from the rafters eventually.