Factory work is overrated. Here are the jobs of the future
Trumpian types are unanimous: America needs factories. The president describes how workers have 'watched in anguish as foreign leaders have stolen our jobs, foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream'. Peter Navarro, his trade adviser, says that tariffs will 'fill up all of the half-empty factories'. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, offers the most cartoonish pitch of all: 'The army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones—that kind of thing is going to come to America.'
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Spectator
2 hours ago
- Spectator
Who started the Cold War?
Over a few short months after the defeat of Nazism in May 1945, the 'valiant Russians' who had fought alongside Britain and America had 'transformed from gallant allies into barbarians at the gates of western civilisation'. So begins Vladislav Zubok's thorough and timely study of the history of the Cold War – or, as he nearly entitled the book, the first Cold War. For the themes that underpinned and drove that decades-long global conflict – fear, honour and interest, in Thucydides's formulation – are now very contemporary questions. 'The world has become perilous again,' writes Zubok, a Soviet-born historian who has spent three decades in the West: Diplomacy ceases to work; treaties are broken. International institutions, courts and norms cannot prevent conflicts. Technology and internet communication do not automatically promote reason and compromise, but often breed hatred, nationalism and violence. Historians tend to be wary of drawing direct parallels between the present and the past, and Zubok is too wise to arrive at any glib conclusions. The bulk of this concise, pacy book is a narrative history of the postwar world and the great superpower rivalry that defined it. Yet, as we face a new period of strategic realignments, it's inevitably to the dynamics of the Cold War we must look for a mirror of our times. There are many surprises – one being that Joseph Stalin and his entourage had been expecting their wartime alliance with London and Washington to be followed by a period of cooperation. 'It is necessary to stay within certain limits,' recalled the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. '[If you swallow too much] you could choke… We knew our limits.' Stalin, unlike his rival Trotsky, had never been a believer in world revolution and indeed shut down the Communist International during the war. Zubok argues that the Cold War was caused by 'the American decision to build and maintain a global liberal order, not by the Soviet Union's plans to spread communism in Europe'. Yet nearly four years of nuclear imbalance between Hiroshima and the first Soviet A-bomb test fuelled Stalin's paranoia. And a bloody hot war in Korea could very easily have escalated into a third world war had Douglas MacArthur been given his way and dropped nukes on Pyongyang. Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev, revived international communism as a fifth column weapon against the capitalist world as the Cold War got into full swing. The great power rivalry became the wellspring for every post-colonial conflict, from Cuba to Angola, Mozambique, El Salvador and the rest. Zubok argues that the Cold War was caused by 'the American decision to build a global liberal order' But what is surprising is that, despite propagandists' eschatological framing of the conflict as a fight to the death between rival worlds, there were always pragmatists at the pinnacles of power in both Moscow and Washington. Khrushchev and Richard Nixon, vice president at the time, had heated but cordial man-to-man debates in an American show kitchen at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. Even the arch-apparatchik Leonid Brezhnev became 'a sponsor and a crucial convert from hard line to détente' early in his career, writes Zubok. And the great Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan was a surprising champion of jaw-jaw over war-war. Some of Zubok's assertions are puzzling. Rather than the USSR simply 'running out of steam', its collapse was 'triggered by Gorbachev's misguided economic reforms, political liberalisation and loss of control over the Soviet state and finances'. But that formulation suggests that it was Gorbachev's choices that crashed the ship of state – and raises the possibility that had he not embarked on his reform programme the fate of the USSR might have been different. But Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin's economic reformer-in-chief, demonstrated in his classic 2007 study Collapse of an Empire that the implosion followed the iron laws of capitalism. The leaky bucket of the Soviet economy had been kept artificially full by high post-1973 oil prices but began to drain fatally after the Saudis collapsed prices a decade later. The USSR could not feed itself without buying US and Canadian grain for petrodollars. Gorbachev or no Gorbachev, the economy was doomed once the oil money dried up. Where Zubok gives Gorbachev credit is in the relative bloodlessness of the loss of the Soviet empire, a world-historical achievement that has long been ignored by modern Russians. Today, Gorbachev is reviled by his countrymen as a traitor and a fool who allowed himself to be taken in by American lies. Yet it is he who is the truly vital character on which any useful comparison between the first and (possibly) second Cold Wars hinges. The first Cold War was, as the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison has argued, born of the 'Thucydides Trap', whereby war emerged from the fear that a new power could displace the dominant one. But Gorbachev envisioned a world where competition for influence and resources would be replaced by cooperation. Rivalry did not have to mean enmity. Zero sum can be replaced by win-win. Sadly, neither Vladimir Putin (who is merely cosplaying as a superpower leader) nor Xi Jinping (who actually is one) have shown anything like Gorbachev's collaborative wisdom. But we can only live in hope that The World of the Cold War is 'a record of dangerous, but ancient times', as Zubok puts it, rather than a warning for the future. Often seen as an existential battle between capitalist democracy and totalitarian communism, the Cold War has long been misunderstood. Drawing on years of research, and informed by three decades in the USSR followed by three decades in the West, Zubok paints a striking new portrait of a world on the brink.
Spectator
3 hours ago
- Spectator
The BBC's Israel problem
Intrepidly, the BBC dared recently to visit Dover, Delaware – source, it implied, of starvation in Gaza. I listened carefully as its State Department correspondent, Tom Bateman, hunted down the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in the state which, he explained, is 'a corporate haven for those who like privacy'. Brave Tom did not find much, but that only proved to him that 'The main ingredients of this aid are its politics'. The foundation's chairman says he is a Christian Zionist which, for the BBC, is almost as bad as saying you are a neo-Nazi. The portentousness aside, it is reasonable to ask tricky questions of the American/Israeli organisation which claims it can solve aid in Gaza. The BBC's problem is that it would never, ever apply its investigative zeal to the cartel currently responsible for the aid that seems not to get through. When has it ever doorstepped the UNWRA operatives who moonlight for Hamas? When has it ever challenged the political 'ingredients' of UN agencies as they heap abuse on Israel and stay respectfully silent about Hamas? When has it complained that Hamas does not answer its calls? Perhaps Hamas does answer, welcoming the BBC's trusting approach. The Office of Rail and Road has noticed that our railway system comes down too hard on the innocent. Yes. The weekend before last, about to return from Newcastle, I found I had lost my ticket. I went to the ticket office, bearing my complete receipt, which even included my seat reservation. The man was pleasant, but said there was no way I could have a free new ticket or even an eventual refund. So I had to pay £133 (nearly £50 more than I had already paid) to travel. Approaching the train, I noticed that the barrier was open. Boarding, I found the computer seat reservations had all gone down. Alighting at King's Cross, I realised that no guard had checked my ticket on the journey and that the barriers were open and unmanned. So if I had 'cheated', I would have been unmolested but because I had owned up, I was out of pocket. Obviously this all started with my carelessness, but why can rail companies treat one as guilty until proven innocent though English law says the opposite? I spoke twice in Oxford last week to highly intelligent, mainly undergraduate audiences. The atmosphere reminded me of 1980s secret meetings of dissidents behind the Iron Curtain arranged by British intellectuals, such as Roger Scruton, who were smuggled in. One encountered young people who feared discovery but showed a touching belief in the life of the mind as they thirsted for freedom in the desert of enforced conformity. For the sake of their careers, I shall not reveal who my audiences were. From one attendee, I learnt that in Mods, the first half of the Oxford four-year Classics degree, one no longer studies Virgil or Homer. Instead, the only compulsory texts are Terence and Plautus. This is like reading theology without studying the Old or New Testaments (which, come to think of it, is probably now commonplace). Are there any subjects, outside the liberal arts, in which each generation is encouraged to know less than the previous one? Are there physics degrees which drop quantum theory, or maths ones without calculus? We have contrived a culture in which universities grow, yet knowledge shrinks. As a graduate of Cambridge, I am depressed by my university's decision to open up the Chancellorship to all of us. We always felt smug about Oxford's beauty contest between superannuated politicians. Ours was uncontested. Now we have to endure a dingier version of the Oxford rhodomontade. The Chancellor of Cambridge should not strike attitudes or take sides, as a vote compels. He or she should be unspeakably grand/rich/disinterested. For many years, the late Duke of Edinburgh held the post, faction-free, because he was married to the then Queen, had a mind of his own and had never been to a university. After Prince Philip, our Chancellor was Lord Sainsbury of Turville, a blamelessly benevolent prince of commerce. Now there are ten candidates, all with 'statements' staking their claims. Gina Miller, the eurofanatic, wishes to 'affirm Cambridge's commitment to modernity and equality'. Sandi Toksvig, the television personality, says she speaks up for 'equity, inclusion, rewilding, sustainability and tackling online bias'. We don't want someone who speaks up. Why can't we have the present Duke of Edinburgh, alumnus of Jesus College, who gives diligent public service and will therefore remain silent? There are a great many stories about ransomware and the damage it causes. Presumably these attacks happen mainly because the businesses attacked pay the ransom. One never reads about this, or how criminals get away with the money. If a business pays, is it acting legally? If a public limited company pays a ransom, could shareholders sue? If, on the contrary, it is argued that paying the ransom is good for shareholders, could they sue a company that refused to pay? Friends tell me – and I believe them – that Chloe Dalton's new book Raising Hare is excellent. It does not automatically follow that she is right to call for a new law to impose a close season on hare-culling. The patchy shortage of hares (in some places, the fields are teeming with them) is not attributable to shooting but to habitat loss, vermin and European Brown Hare Syndrome. Besides, as is so often the case when people itch to legislate, there is a relevant law already. Under the Hares Preservation Act 1892, it is an offence to sell, or expose for sale, any hare or leveret between the months of March and July inclusive. Hares may only be sold if shot between 1 August and the last day of February. There is therefore no commercial incentive to orphan a hare in the breeding season.
Leader Live
3 hours ago
- Leader Live
Palace co-owner John Textor would sell shares for Europa League chance
The American, whose Eagle Football Group owns 43 per cent of Palace, has imperilled the club's chance of a first-ever European campaign owing to his involvement with Ligue 1 side Lyon, but is ready to offload his stake to his fellow co-owners in order to bring the saga to an end. UEFA does not allow clubs with the same ownership to compete in the same European competitions in a season. As well as his stake in Palace, the 59-year-old has a controlling stake in the French club, also via Eagle Football. However it is also reported that the European governing body does not consider Textor's influence at Selhurst Park to be decisive and is leaning towards allowing the club into the Europa League regardless. The PA news agency understands no formal decision is likely on Palace's fate until the end of June. Textor has previously spoken of his frustration at how little influence his stake entitles him to, over football matters. Victory for Oliver Glasner's side over Manchester City in last month's FA Cup final gave them their first major trophy and with it a first crack at Europe. However, Nottingham Forest have since written to UEFA to challenge Palace's Europa League spot and in the hope of taking their place. Forest's owner Evangelos Marinakis, who also owns Greek side Olympiacos, placed his shares in the club in a blind trust before the governing body's March 1 deadline, anticipating Nuno Espirito Santo's side's European qualification. At present Forest, who finished seventh in last season's Premier League, are set to enter the Conference League but would take Palace's Europa League place, should they be deemed ineligible.
