America’s imperial fights are not necessarily ours

In this shattered peace, we can no longer rely on the illusions of the old world order

Almost every period of violent, reshaping conflict produces an aftermath of illusion. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 was supposed to create a Europe of balance, calm and religious tolerance in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War. At Vienna in 1815, with Napoleon down, there was to be a new conservative-Christian order. After the First World War, we had Versailles, Germany’s pacification, new countries such as Czechoslovakia, and the League of Nations.

The illusion was that underlying national imbalances, unresolved hatreds and the burning ambitions of would-be leaders can be perpetually anaesthetised by a new international order. This would stand above and cancel the previous dangerous feuding. Siege-cannon, hussars, machine guns and air forces were over; harmony had dawned. In our world, the illusion was the postwar order of international law symbolised by the United Nations. It too offered a new world of peace. After Ukraine, and now after Venezuela, and perhaps Greenland next, that illusion is shattered. It’s gone the way of the League and the Habsburgs.

We can no longer allow ourselves to close our eyes. All the vast, wordy brocade of urbane international jurisprudence, which means so much to our current Prime Minister; all the desperate goldfish-gabbing at the UN; all the pretence that small, weak, new nations are sovereign in just the same way that the US or Russia are; the almost religious assumption that there’s a shadowy universal order, like God the Father attended by angels in blue helmets… gone, all gone.

We are back in a world where missiles and attack helicopters trump law – and where national borders from Sudan to eastern Europe, and perhaps now the Americas too, can be altered by force.

Nothing new there, you might say. As the New Statesman has been arguing for some time, this is a world dominated by three rival emperors. Over the New Year one of them, Donald Trump, re-emphasised that his backyard, his subservient fringe, belonged to nobody but his imperial America. It must feel scary in Cuba, Colombia and even, perhaps, in Greenland too. Less so in Russia and China. For all the legalistic cant and pious protests we may hear from them, both Putin and Xi (the latter moving fast into South America) will be secretly delighted. For they have backyards too.

But with the Treaty of Westphalia gone, what does this mean for everybody else? How should we draw the accounts for countries without the firepower to call themselves empires?

Hiding below the camouflage of a global “order”, the elites in many places long took their chances to behave appallingly. Across Africa, swathes of Asia and parts of the former Soviet Union, this took the form of grotesque corruption. Millions were impoverished and had their hopes crushed. And as Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc eloquently demonstrated, corruption was also an essential component of autocratic regimes that took comfort in their UN seats.

In Iran (which may yet prove a bigger story than Venezuela) and in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Israel – and up to a point in India – the elites used toxic religious fundamentalism to protect themselves. And, under the shared fiction of a universal order, irreconcilable confrontations built up – rather as European nationalisms eventually upended the pieties of the Congress of Vienna.

Speaking of which, in Europe the elites pretended war had been abolished and consumerism was an appropriate universal philosophy. They created very bourgeois networks of welfare and bureaucracy which had the drawback only of checking growth.

That was less damaging than choosing corruption or fanaticism, but it also grew under what proved to be illusory beliefs. It wasn’t the case that after the fall of the USSR, Russia would become Europe-friendly. It wasn’t the case that the Nato pledge from America was unconditional. But even if Donald Trump had chosen to spend his life in New York real estate, Europe’s ruling class would have had to confront dilemmas of nationalism, demography and migration which would eventually become existential for them.

Venezuela already looks hard for the White House to control and there may be horrors ahead – as they were in Iraq. Still, it’s difficult to imagine anyone running the country worse than the unlamented Nicolás Maduro. Trump’s gamble may be good for US oil – though US oil companies are unsure – but it is not popular in America.

So, here we are. On the fringes of the empires not all the news is bad. Ukraine is holding on, European countries are rearming and Russian nuclear sabre-rattling has won the Kremlin precisely nothing.

If the Iranian regime really does fall, a sophisticated network of Islamist propaganda and subversion inside Britain will fall with it. A world economy which the creative, hard-working Iranian middle class was able to re-enter would be a richer one.

But in Britain the most important lesson is the old one: we cannot rely on anyone else and must look after ourselves. The former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt told me this week he thought if Trump went for Greenland, that would be the end of Nato: privately many in government agree. We are again at a massive hinge moment for Britain.

That means protecting our democracy aggressively against outsiders, from US tech moguls to Russian troll farms, who want to subvert it. It means rearming, even if that implies cuts in other budgets. But although it is prudent to defend ourselves against Russia, it also means a radical recasting of our attitude to Washington. As Keir Starmer discovered when forced to choose over Greenland, we are Europeans first.

We should not be sending our only functioning aircraft carrier into the South China Sea to swim alongside the Americans. That’s their imperial fight. It’s not necessarily ours.

[Further reading: America kidnapped a president. Keir Starmer said nothing]