Everyone has, by now, read about or watched the infantilising of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky by US President Donald Trump during a White House press briefing. This column is
not about the actual events of that day, though only the discontinuous mind might imagine there are never links between crises in international politics and strategic affairs.
This column is an attempt to make sense of what is happening in the West in the hope of a better understanding of the absurdity of Trump, the war in Ukraine, and the place and role of Nato in Europe and the world.
In continuity of suggestions on the role of intellectuals, especially journalists, tasked with making sense of Trump, made in this column early in January, I should touch briefly on patriotic journalism in the US. All of this may help us see the finer textures of the screen onto which Trump’s visions of the world are projected. We can’t be sure it would help, but we have to try.
Let me take a leap back. The minute I walked from the Belgian offices of the Strategic Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe (Shape) on the first day of a teaching and learning tour more than three decades ago, I had a sense that Nato was not going to close its doors, never mind that its actual raison d’être, the Soviet Union, had collapsed into itself.
My understanding at the time was that it was in the interests of the US to cast a greater shadow over that continent from which it could wage “defensive” wars. Recall that it was from Nato territories that the US led wars or bombing campaigns against the people of Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia.
Where Nato has bases it is the rule-maker, not a rule-taker. For example, when the US deployed soldiers into the Syrian civil war in 2012, Turkey (home to two Nato airbases) requested a no-fly zone over northern Syria to protect human security and alleviate humanitarian pressures in its southeastern territories. Nato swatted away the Turks.
Anyway, at the time of my visits to Shape it had come to resemble a (supranational) stratocracy, which brought together political and military objectives. This stratocracy remains dominated by Nato’s command structure and the Shape commanders, all of whom do the transnational work for the US joint chiefs of staff, and in the process champion Nato’s centrality to the transatlantic security architecture.
To this stratocracy — at least in the minds of the military technocrats, where no security dilemma existed — such a dilemma had to be manufactured. This “security dilemma” is the notion in which the interests and security needs of states, regardless of intention, necessarily lead to rising insecurity for others as each interprets its own measures as defensive and measures of others as potentially threatening. In other words, if everything a state does is cast as “defensive”, anything goes.
We are at a stage, now, where Nato has expanded territorially up to the borders of Russia, notwithstanding agreements at the end of the Cold War that the stratocracy would pose no provocative threat to Moscow by including Ukraine, in particular, in the Nato alliance. Everyone has, to be sure, taken a position on Ukraine, Russia, Nato and Europe. Trump has simply made thinking more difficult. He has abandoned precedents or theories on diplomacy and negotiations that have been useful for decades. Such is the intellectual bewilderment that we’re crying out for a unifying theory of everything in global political economic statecraft and strategy.
Imagine, as physicists may, that a truly superior intellect comes along and knows (at any moment) all the forces in motion, like those moments in Trump’s office last week and everything that is going on everywhere in the world (notably in the US, Europe and Russia; those great theatres of wars since at least the Talheim Massacre in 5,000 BCE). To such an intellect, wrote the French mathematician Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace (1749—1827), “nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes”.
Fortunately, politics and economics, war and peace are not like physics. Forget the physics envy of orthodox economists. What we have learnt over days since the shaming of Zelensky is that crude binaries and apparently eternally valid notions of free and unfree remain the staple of public intellectuals in the US.
During a March 1 broadcast on MSNBC Rachel Maddow considered it inappropriate that “the president and vice-president JD Vance screamed at our ally Volodymyr Zelensky... Switching sides in a war now standing against our allies of the past 80 years, now siding with Russia instead, I mean, no longer siding with the free world, now siding with the authoritarian governments of the world”.
In a single sweep, Maddow reminded everyone about the US’s “allies of the past 80 years,” and repeated the mantric myths of “the free world” and “authoritarian governments”. I suppose there are lessons in all of this. One is that patriotic journalism is alive and well, the other that Nato will not go away until the
80-year itch (presumably Russia) goes away. Other than that, everything is only a little less bewildering.
• Lagardien, an external examiner at the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has worked in the office of the chief economist of the World Bank as well as the secretariat of the National Planning Commission.
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