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Washington Post
6 days ago
- Politics
- Washington Post
I hate the war in Gaza. But I still love Israel.
For lifelong supporters of Israel like me, its war in Gaza is a gut-check moment. Like many American Jews, I was brought up believing that Israel was a light onto the nations, that the United States should always support Israel, and that, indeed, support for Israel was inseparable from the Jewish faith. As I grew older, I lost my religious faith but maintained my love of the Jewish state, a vibrant, Western-style democracy in the heart of the Middle East.
Telegraph
05-07-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Labour's colossal failure shows Britain is heading for disaster
Few events are as powerfully symbolic of Britain's paralysing inability to get anything done than the failure last week of Labour's welfare reform bill. If a government with an overwhelming majority cannot even get a relatively minor adjustment to a plainly unsustainable welfare budget through its backbenches, what hope for anything more substantive? Dysfunctional and powerless before the growing mass of discontents, the country seems to be slipping into a state of abject anarchy in which meaningful change and progress becomes virtually impossible to achieve. Backbench MPs have come riding to the rescue of Britain's love affair with welfarism, but they'll get no thanks for it from an ever more angry and disenchanted electorate. That the country is going to the dogs is now taken as read. The roots of this malaise are deep, many faceted and by no means restricted to Britain. Many of the same observations can be directed at Western democracy as a whole, from Europe to the United States. After more than a decade of near stagnation in living standards, Western governments are failing to deliver as rarely before. In Britain, it was hoped that Brexit would provide answers by galvanising change and national rebirth. But in practice it has had the reverse effect: more red tape, more taxes, less growth, higher levels of immigration, and still greater loss of self-esteem. It is hard to recall a time of greater pessimism, or indeed a wider sense of despair among Western democracies in general. Small wonder, given the litany of broken promises. For precedents, one might cite the 1970s, but politically and socially turbulent though that decade was, it did at least witness substantial growth in real incomes. We see none of that today, with meaningful economic progress ground to a halt. For more exact parallels, we perhaps need to go further back in history to the interwar years, when similar levels of collective pessimism gripped Europe and America. There's nothing new under the sun, and all those books and treatises we see today about the decline of the West are mere echoes of the great outpouring of similar thinking we saw back then. The most prominent example is perhaps that of Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes, literally translated as 'The Going-Under of the Evening Lands', but generally known as simply The Decline of the West. Published shortly after the devastation of the First World War, there was a particular reason for Spengler's declinism – Germany's humiliating defeat. Some of his theories about the rise and fall of civilisations are moreover pretty suspect, and largely irrelevant in today's world. None the less, he was prophetic in foreseeing the collapse of money in Weimar Germany and the subsequent rise of fascism, the latter of which he viewed as a solution to the decay and moral decrepitude of democracy. That the rise of what he called 'Caesarism' didn't work out so well either, and was later eclipsed by the rebirth of democracy, is another matter. At the time, he tapped into a deep vein of collective pessimism, the supposed solutions to which in nationalism and utopian thinking were later brilliantly chronicled by the historian Fritz Stern in The Politics of Cultural Despair. The backdrop to today's pessimism is admittedly different, but what the interwar years and other precedents do tell us is that disillusionment with democratic norms are cyclical and strongly rooted in political and economic failure. For a thought-provoking dive into these issues it is hard to do better than a recently published book by Lord Howell of Guildford, one of the last surviving members of Margaret Thatcher's first cabinet, and now in his ninth decade still going strong. Avoiding the Coming Anarchy: A Short Book for Optimists in Dangerous Times is, as its name implies, intended as an antidote to today's overpowering sense of decline, but it is hard to avoid the impression that Howell thinks the battle is already essentially lost. Amid the gloom, there are always optimists, and in the long run it is generally their view that prevails. One of the most striking from the interwar years was the economist John Maynard Keynes. In an essay published in 1930, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, he dismissed the prevailing mood of economic pessimism as wildly mistaken. 'It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterised the 19th century is over,' he wrote; 'that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down ... that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in the decade which lies ahead of us'. Instead, he suggested that economies were suffering not from the rheumatics of old age, 'but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another. The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption'. It is testament to the timeless quality of much of his writing that Keynes might have been talking about our own age. In any case, he was substantially right, and his long-run forecast that technological advancement would lead to vastly increased wealth and living standards, if anything, somewhat underestimated the extent of the progress subsequently made. But he could not have been more wrong about the immediate future, where a decade of economic depression and political turmoil was to culminate in the calamity of the Second World War. The prevailing pessimism of 1930 proved wholly justified. No one knows the future, and it is by no means written in stone that today's paralysis will similarly end in some kind of apocalypse. But the risks are obvious. It is no accident that some of the world's richest tech tycoons are preparing for Armageddon, oblivious to – or perhaps in recognition of – the key role their own technologies are playing in the atomisation of politics and society that might bring it about. Economic pessimism tends ironically to go hand in hand with the disruption of rapid technological change, with established forms of employment trashed and much of the wealth it creates initially concentrated in relatively few hands. It's only later that the benefits are more widely diffused. Sadly, we are still in the very early stages of today's so-called 'fourth industrial revolution'. The moment of maximum danger still lies ahead. Democracy was reborn after the Second World War in new and reinvigorated form, supported by a rules-based order enforced through strong international organisations. But it has been wasting away for the best part of three decades now, and its institutions have become decadent, paralysed and despised. Labour's inability to carry out even the most basic of fiscal reforms points to a broken system heading ever more unavoidably towards disaster. When the rioting starts, a penny to a pound the state will be woefully unprepared for it. The failure is colossal, and they don't even know it.
Telegraph
26-06-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
The world is drowning in blood – Westerners, wake up
It is almost four decades since the collapse of the Iron Curtain was meant to herald a new era, one in which the prospect of nuclear-armed states threatening to destroy the planet would be consigned to the past. As the former subject states of the USSR embraced their liberty and freedom, prominent scholars such as America's Francis Fukayama predicted that, with the end of the Cold War, everyone would move forward to a new Western-led world order: peace and prosperity, not superpower rivalries, would be the motivating forces. Witness Fukayama's famous essay, 'The End of History?', published in November 1989, on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall: What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. Today, it would be hard to find anyone in Western political circles who subscribed to this Panglossian view of modern history. The latest generation of politicians are more likely to argue that the world has never faced greater peril. For them, instead of enjoying the prosperity of the post-Cold War 'peace dividend', we should be rebuilding our defensive capabilities after decades of abject neglect. Such was the main talking point at the recent Nato summit in The Hague. A study conducted at Uppsala University in Sweden found that 2024 saw the largest number of conflicts across the globe since the Second World War. In such circumstances, it's vital that our leaders have an understanding of how conflicts develop, as well as the most effective means of resolving them. Such issues are examined in exhaustive detail by David Kilcullen and Greg Mills in their well-researched new book, The Art of War and Peace. The pair have decades of experience as policy advisers in conflicts as far apart as Afghanistan, Iraq and Colombia; as such, they're well-placed to provide a detailed analysis of the nature of modern war, from large-scale, high-intensity, state-on-state conflicts to irregular, low-intensity, smaller wars. One of their central concerns is to show how the world has evolved from the 'end of history' mindset, and come to its present calamitous state, in which the failure of deterrence has led to the collapse of the international rules-based order. In the 1930s, Kilcullen and Mills argue, the terrible costs of war were fresh in everyone's memory, and the prospect of another war could thus spur rapid industrialisation and rearmament. By contrast, for most Westerners in 2025, the notion is a distant one. War, too many of us believe, is something conducted by others in faraway places. As a result, Western leaders have often found themselves singularly ill-prepared to the challenges they suddenly face, whether it's the more aggressive military posture adopted by Russia under Vladimir Putin or China's emergence as a major power to rival the US. Kilcullen and Mills lament the failure of our politicians to acknowledge this rapidly changing global landscape, and suggest that it has resulted, at the grand-strategic level, in the erosion of credible deterrence on the part of the United States and its allies – and that this, in turn, has led to a decline in the Western powers' global influence. For example, a significant portion of The Art of War and Peace focuses on how the Biden administration handled the US-led coalition's withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, a chaotic process that, the authors argue, led Putin to believe that he would encounter no serious opposition from the West if he proceeded with his plan to invade Ukraine in February 2022. They write: The abject performance in Afghanistan led the Russians, the Iranians, the Chinese and every terrorist group on the planet to believe the Western alliance was weak. Chinese officials and state media outlets, for instance, repeatedly condemned the withdrawal, citing this action as evidence that the United States was an undependable partner and a declining power. Kilcullen and Mills don't disagree with that assessment. 'The US,' they say, 'has repeatedly engaged in military interventions abroad, rallied coalitions and allies to support it, then blithely walked away when policymakers or the public became bored or distracted.' They conclude that 'Washington's unreliability remains an omnipresent danger for America's allies.' On the other hand, the authors accept that ending wars in the modern age is more difficult than it was in previous eras. In the Second World War, the overwhelming military defeats suffered by Nazi Germany and Japan meant that they had no option to allow the Allies to declare total victory. This permitted the West to dictate peace terms. Conflicts these days are a great deal more messy, especially when other actors are involved, whether it's Western nations supporting Ukraine against Russia or Iran's continued backing for Hamas. By far the most important conclusion to be drawn from this excellent study, then, is a broad and philosophical one: that the West can no longer afford to ignore the challenges presented by the changing nature of modern warfare. We must instead prepare – just as we did during the Cold War – to defend our liberty. ★★★★☆
