This Really Is Happening

From The Needlefish, August 7, 2021:

This is a moment of high peril for the United States, and a moment in which those of us in the other Western liberal democracies must begin to think about what, if anything, we can do to push history in the right direction, and how we’re going to react if, as an increasing number of liberal pundits fear, 2020 was nothing but a dry run for what bids fair to be a far more sophisticated, and far less farcically ham-fisted, attempt to put an end to American democracy…We may, in just a few short years, be dealing with an America not just riven by internal conflict, but authoritarian, aggressive, and unfriendly to its neighbours and (former?) allies, jealous of their resources, resentful of their trade policies, hostile to their liberal stances on matters such as immigration, suspicious, spiteful, and altogether dangerous. What then?

Trumpism Looks to Budapest

Don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.

Here’s the thing about refusing to jump up and down in print every time Burnt Umber Voldemort commits another in his endless series of atrocities: they still drive you right ’round the bend, every one of them. I don’t write anything, because nobody wants to read it, and anyway I usually don’t have anything useful to say, but for the record, sitting here being quiet isn’t doing a damned thing for my peace of mind. Most days I’m just gritting my teeth, fretting over what just happened and waiting for the next bomb to drop, and most days Donald obliges by scrawling his ridiculous, infantile, oversized signature on the bottom of another unconstitutional Executive Order designed to terrorize immigrants, disenfranchise the downtrodden, suspend the rule of law, or exact revenge upon anybody who’s ever crossed him. Most days, too, just to maximize the misery, Elon Musk will be up to something equal parts idiotic and nefarious, as he and his crew of twenty-something DOGE incels purport to slash spending and eliminate whole governmental departments, despite lacking any legal authority to undo what Congress has passed into law. RFK Jr. pops in from time to time to gut the CDC, NIH, et al., the better to ensure the earliest possible onset of the next pandemic, likely to be even more lethal in the absence of U.S. leadership on vaccines and therapies. Donald’s various dimbulb cabinet appointees do what they can to fill any temporary lulls in the clown show pyrotechnics, and the latest Press Secretary, walking dumb-blonde joke and professional hairdo Karoline Leavitt, provides running commentary so far removed from objective reality that it’s enough to make you pine for Sarah Huckabee-Sanders. Meanwhile, day after day, the GOP-dominated Congress sits on its hands, voluntarily powerless, no longer part of America’s constitutional machinery. They could march in tomorrow and put a stop to all of this, they have more than ample constitutional power to bring Donald to heel, hell, even kick his big diapered ass out of office, but of course they won’t. In fact, they won’t do anything, their jobs least of all. They just sit there, not passing legislation, spectators to the downfall of the Republic.

I’m on blood pressure meds and anti-depressants, have I ever mentioned that?

Yet here I sit. Mute. Did I perform the prose equivalent of chucking an embolism when this happened?

No! (Well OK, I did react to this one, but the tone, atypically, was sad and subdued, rather than borderline hysterical).

Did I publish a frothing-at-the-mouth screed in response to this?

Not a peep outta this guy!

Did you see anything from me when Trump and his insufferable bitch-boy J.D. Vance slapped poor Zelensky senseless in front of the press, treating him like a misbehaving schoolboy and yelling at him to say thank-you? You did not. Did I scream and shout when masked ICE operatives started abducting innocents off the street and deporting them to an El Salvadoran gulag, absent any due process and contrary, even, to court orders? Nope. Unh-uh. Was that me jumping up and down, waving my arms, when Donald imposed his punitive tariffs? It was not. Did I scream bloody murder when Dear Leader bullied powerful law firms into bending the knee? Not a bit. Why, I didn’t even stir from my torpor to make hay over the frankly hilarious (if horrifying) security breach involved in planning an air campaign against a foreign adversary over a goddam group chat to which the bonehead National Security Advisor had accidentally invited the Editor-in-Chief of the Atlantic. It just came out that the cretins have likewise been discussing high level national security matters over Gmail, using their own phones, upon which the spooks from Russia, Iran, China, and the rest of the Axis of Evil are probably sitting, 24/7. Oh well! No sense getting all worked up about it, right? Not in print, anyway.

But this. This is big. About this, yeah, I have something to say.

You’ll have noted, doubtless, the recent visit of insufferable bitch-boy J.D. Vance to Greenland. No? Not watching the news so much any more? Well, get a load of this:

There he was, the squinting, rat-faced little pile of pig droppings, mouthing the Trumpian bullshit and sounding for all the world like Vladimir Putin bloviating about Ukraine in 2022. Standing right there on Greenland soil, threatening to annex by whatever means necessary, including, yes, by military force, what wasn’t just somebody else’s sovereign territory, but the sovereign territory of a military ally, a Western European liberal democracy, a loyal friend and NATO member that has sent its own soldiers to die alongside Americans in those interminable Middle Eastern wars Bush the Younger convinced America to fight. All of a sudden the US has to have it. Denmark hasn’t done enough to protect it. If America doesn’t act the Chinese or the Russians will grab it. See? Denmark hasn’t left them any choice! It’s a geopolitical imperative.

Jesus wept, this is straight-up 19th Century imperialism at its most vulgar and mendacious. It’s beyond infuriating. It’s f’ing-well evil. Moreover, it’s stupid. And the lies, the absolute shite coming out of this little mutt’s mouth – hey J.D., asshole, your guts are moving the wrong way – God grant me strength. Denmark hasn’t done enough to fortify Greenland? Really? Well I dunno there, bitch-boy, seems to me that being part of history’s most powerful defensive alliance, anchored by a nuclear superpower obliged by treaty to come to its defence, which superpower has basing rights on the island and can have more if it likes (why, you were within the perimeter of one such base when you gave this vile little speech, isn’t that right?), is reasonably proximate to making sufficient arrangements for Greenland’s security, wouldn’t you think? As if, by the way, either Russia, bled white by its misadventure in Ukraine, or China, half a world away and pre-occupied with the massive effort to build a capability to invade Taiwan, has the wherewithal to launch an amphibious invasion of an arctic island nestled in the heart of NATO’s defensive envelope, already garrisoned by American forces. It’s such utter, idiotic horse shit!

Yet Trump and his mindless mouthpieces can’t stop talking about it. They seem deadly serious, and that makes me worry that all their “Canada as 51st State” talk is serious too. What to do? What can we do?

Well, we could all sit tight, hope the wind changes in America after the mid-terms, pray that Trump isn’t really contemplating near-term military action against NATO, and try to ride this out until sanity reasserts itself, but I’m worried that just isn’t an option. I think Donald means what he says, and in that case it can happen any time, long before we’ve had a chance to wait him out, supposing that’s even a possibility, and he doesn’t figure out a way to become President-for-life à la Idi Amin Dada (you think he won’t try? Really?). We have to start thinking the unthinkable. We have to wrap our minds around the establishment of a whole new world geopolitical order, one in which the U.S. has not merely withdrawn as the guarantor of stability, but has morphed into a mortal threat to all of us.

To begin with, NATO is effectively dead. Permanently. I’m not saying that sanity will never return to American foreign policy (though honestly it might not, in our lifetimes anyway), but it doesn’t matter. Any nation that’s proven itself capable not merely of electing, but then re-electing, a monster such as Trump, after he attempted a violent coup and then became a convicted felon, can never be relied upon again. They’re deranged. They’re letting their Mad King tear up treaties right left and center, including one of the two most significant economic pacts ever signed, the USMCA, née NAFTA, which the idiot negotiated himself to a great deal of his own fanfare, but now decries as a bum deal foisted on America by somebody else. Manifestly, American commitments aren’t worth jack shit any more. It seems necessary to emphasize that the crazed orange moron is rattling the sabre at staunch NATO allies, for the love of God. So that’s it. From now on, even a sane America, should the Americans ever regain their sanity, can only be viewed as sane for the time being. Long term security planning has to exclude the United States.

That means a new global alliance system will have to be forged by the remaining liberal democracies, effecting the replacement of NATO with a new treaty organization that includes all of its current non-U.S. members, and should probably wrap in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and Japan. It means new trading blocs; a few months ago, the Economist floated the idea of Canada joining the E.U., which may not be technically possible under the Masstricht Treaty as it stands, but sounds to me like a fabulous idea, and one that ought to be pursued. If formal E.U. membership is off the table, then surely something can be arranged that amounts to a de facto admittance of Canada into the fold. Maybe something should be worked out with Mexico, too. It’s going to be extremely painful, but the intimate interconnections between North American economic systems and supply chains are going to have to be unwound, a herculean task requiring the undoing of decades-worth of integration. It’s going to be miserable. But Trump has torn up the arrangements we thought had force of law, and that’s all there is to it.

This is all longer term stuff, though. We need to make some urgent moves right now. If Trump sends the Marines to grab Greenland, he’ll put the rest of NATO in the extremely awkward, not to mention downright insane, position of being compelled, under Article 5 of the NATO treaty, to rush to the defence of one of its smallest members against the naked aggression of its most powerful, which the rest of us are by no means equipped to do just now. We have to deter the Americans from even trying, and that means Greenland has to be be brought under the Anglo-French nuclear umbrella, ASAP, which only sounds like madness if you’re not keeping up with current events (gee, the obstinate maintenance of powerful independent nuclear forces by Britain and France doesn’t seem so pig-headedly European now, does it?). In fact, that same protection needs to be extended to Canada, pending, I’m sad to say, our own acquisition of nuclear weapons.

You know, Canada once possessed a sizeable tactical nuclear weapons stockpile, back at the height of the Cold War (it’s a fascinating story of inadvertently backing into the nuclear club as a result of weapons procurement decisions for continental air defence, which you can read about here: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/canada-and-nuclear-weapons). They weren’t weapons of mass destruction, but they sure were atomic warheads. Like Ukraine after us, we gave the nukes up, signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and forswore the possession of such armaments. I suspect the Ukrainians regret their decision now, buttressed as it was by empty security guarantees that the Americans have seen fit to ignore. There’s a lesson there for us. Now Trump is threatening our annexation. Just like Putin threatened Ukraine. We can’t make the same mistake the poor Ukrainians did.

Longer term, we’ve all got to re-arm, which will take years even if we hurry. The special difficulty here is that we have to build up our militaries without buying American weapons (which is why Canada and European countries are reassessing their commitment to purchase F-35s), and while Europeans do produce excellent weapons, the industrial base isn’t large enough for the sort of numbers we’re going to need. It’s going to take years and untold billions to get there. In concert with this, the new alliance that replaces NATO will have to revoke American basing access in all member nations. No bombers in Lakenheath, no airlift wing in Rammstein, no fighters and storage of nuclear weapons in Incirlik, no aircraft carriers home-ported in Yokosuka – and no air base in Greenland, either – it all has to go. Given their growing isolationism, the Americans may be fine with this, in many cases, and may even withdraw on their own; it’s hard to say where they’ll want to maintain a foreign presence outside of what they seem to conceive of as their new, 19th Century-style sphere of influence (so they’ll likely want to remain in Greenland, while happily leaving Germany). Will they want to retain their presence on Diego Garcia, a British possession? Will they want to remain in Turkey, owing to its proximity to the Middle East? It could get ugly. Side deals for certain bases might need to be made. In general, though, they have to go. I see no logical alternative. Similarly, Canada’s continued participation in NORAD, and the presence of ballistic missile warning facilities in Greenland and the U.K., will have to be rethought. These are vital to U.S. security – the thought of trying to undo these arrangements gives me the chills, actually – but maybe something can be worked out to let them keep their radars, and maybe our new alliance can guarantee the security of Northern air space, entailing the stationing of European fighter forces in Canada, which, come to think of it, isn’t a bad idea anyway.

One other thorny problem: if Trump and Vlad the Impaler over there agree to throw Ukraine under the bus, perhaps by carving it up the way Molotov and Ribbentrop once carved up Poland, we cannot – simply cannot – stand for it. Putin can’t be allowed to win this war. Full stop. The time is fast approaching when the rest of us are going to have to get into the fight, and by that I don’t mean by offering more money and supplies. I’m talking about boots on the ground. This was a move I once warned against in the strongest possible terms, but the world in which I voiced my objections doesn’t exist anymore. With the Americans now siding with Russia, everything’s changed, and it may soon become obvious that the only alternative to Russian tanks sitting back on the borders of the Baltic Republics while gearing up for Round Two is to take it to the bastards in the Donbas. Are we ready for this? Well, arguably, no. I did a little research lately, and found, to my horror, that the post-Cold War drawdown in once powerful European militaries has been far more precipitous than I imagined. Example: France, Germany and the U.K. together, all three of them, can field a grand total of about 800 tanks. Eight Hundred. Pathetic. The Russians have already lost at least five times that many – some think ten times that many – in their miserable campaign of unprovoked aggression. The entire Royal Air Force – the mighty RAF, for chrissakes – can now muster just 130 odd fighter aircraft. The Royal Navy can pitch in about 20 more (though these are F-35s, exquisitely vulnerable to the denial of vital American support systems). My God, during the Cold War, RAF Strike Command boasted over 800 highly potent tactical fighters that were going to be NATO’s tip of the spear if the Warsaw Pact ever rolled massed armour into the Fulda Gap. By the hundred, Jaguars and Tornadoes would have been screaming, undaunted, into the jaws of death at 200 feet and 600 MPH, loaded for bear, meting out horrendous punishment and taking the inevitable losses. No such capability exists any more, and so it goes, in every category, for every player, with the notable exception of the Poles, for whom the memory of squirming under the Russian boot is still uncomfortably fresh. It might seem, then, that the remaining democracies don’t even have the means to intervene in Ukraine, but I don’t think that’s right. The weapons that the Europeans do still field are state-of-the-art and extremely powerful, easily superior to the equivalent Russian equipment, and Russia’s military is very close to the breaking point. The EU nations could tip the balance. I’m thinking they may have to, and soon.

While they’re at it, The U.K. should reverse Brexit, as soon as politically feasible. This is a time for standing together, and there’s nobody else to stand with any more. It’s time for them to rejoin the E.U.

The mind boggles, doesn’t it? I can’t frigging believe we’re being compelled to think along these lines. I can’t bear that I’m forced to witness, as I approach my final years, the unravelling of everything that made the world a better place than it had ever before been for liberal democracies to thrive, operating within a rules-based system of international relations, buttressed by overwhelming American military and economic power, both hard and soft. Eighty years of unparalleled geopolitical success, flushed down the crapper. I could weep. You can’t help but think that this can’t be happening. But it is. It really is.

And look, I’m trying, but I can barely begin a cogent analysis of all the challenges that loom ahead; even as I write this, I’m thinking this is just baloney, Graeme, you can’t possibly imagine all the complexities and risks involved in creating a new world order, with all the infinite knock-on effects in trying to free ourselves from our myriad entanglements with America, let alone in confronting such a powerful nation as a potential adversary. It’s beyond me. I suspect that those now tasked with thinking about these matters in the various policy communities across the Western World are feeling the same way. God willing, they’ll be better at this than I am.

You can begin to spiral into a sort of intellectual wormhole when you start thinking about all the ways that cooperation with the Americans, across hundreds, heck thousands of subject areas, has become central to our peaceful and orderly way of life on this continent, and what it would mean if it all went south. I was, for example, taken aback by a question posed on a recent episode of Jeopardy, which dealt with a naval victory won by the Americans on Lake Erie. Huh? We used to have naval battles on the Great Lakes? Yes, we did (remember the War of 1812?), until the possibility was eliminated in 1817 by the Rush-Bagot Treaty, one of history’s oldest and most successful examples of international arms control, which codified the demilitarization of the Great Lakes. To this day, if some American or Canadian warship wants to make a courtesy visit to Buffalo or Toronto, notice is duly sent to the proper officials on the other side, informing them of the foray of one military vessel, and one only, into Lake Ontario for a limited time in conformity with the treaty. Does all that go by the boards now? Will I one day find myself standing on the lakeshore, looking balefully at the menacing grey hulls of American destroyers patrolling on the horizon? What else might we look forward to? We have bilateral agreements dealing with the management of pollution and general ecology in the Great Lakes too. Good lord, we have bilateral arrangements on almost everything, quite apart from the free trade agreement now being abrogated by Donald, dealing with subjects as varied as taxation, extradition and criminal law enforcement, trans-border energy grids, just about anything you can think about; a serious chill in Canada-U.S. relations could be disruptive to matters as diverse as air traffic control, protection of fisheries, control of air pollution, wildlife management, financial transfers and international money laundering, you name it. If Donald or others like him want to get bloody-minded about it, our lives could end up being disrupted in ways too numerous to count, to the detriment of all concerned.

It’s all so utterly senseless and completely unnecessary. It is, in fact, madness, and minds greater than mine are going to have to do a lot more than I can within my sad little blog space to think our way through this, and plot a safe path forward. This is really happening. Nothing, going forward, can ever be quite the same, not for a long while, anyway. We’re going to have to deal with the miserable new facts on the ground.

As an aside, you can assume, whether I bother to write it down or not, that everything I compose on these topics going forward begins and concludes with this: God damn the American people for foisting this mess upon us, and God damn every one of them who voted for Trump. Never forget, they chose this, freely and democratically. This is on them. There can be no excuse for the American people. None. God damn them.