Entropy: The Four Holes at the Heart of the Old West

Entropy: “…measure of the disintegration and disorganisation of the universe”

Oxford English Dictionary.

Alphen, Netherlands. 9/11.  Whither the West? Like most people I know exactly where I was on September 11, 2001. The middle of Dartmoor is as close to the middle of nowhere it is possible to be in England.  Beautiful, bleak, and in places foreboding, it is a place in which it is all too easy to get lost. ‘Lost’ is a word I associate with the Old West these days. Yes, one hears Western leaders talk much about shared values and interests, usually at NATO summits, and normally when there is precious little shared strategy. Niall Ferguson wrote, “The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity — and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.” It is that combination of pusillanimity and ignorance, albeit in different measures across the Old West, that have created four gaping holes: US foreign and security policy, the old Anglo-American core, the Berlin-Brussels Axis, and the retreat of Europeans into a fantasy Euro-world.

US foreign policy: Since Churchill and Roosevelt founded the Old West in the midst of war in 1941 on board USS Augusta, the Old West has always been organised around what could be called American internationalist doctrine. The sacking of John Bolton by President Trump is indicative of a lack of any such doctrine with a president increasingly ‘winging’ foreign policy. Bolton maybe a hawk, but he has always been a consistent hawk who believed that threats to the United States required the application of persistent American pressure. For Bolton, there were no out-of-the-blue deals to be done with the likes of Iran, North Korea or the Taliban, just pressure to be maintained leading to regime change in America’s favour, even if that involved at times the use of force. To be honest, having met Bolton, I was surprised he was appointed as the 27^th National Security Advisor. His world-view always contrasted markedly with that of President Trump, which seems to oscillate between a kind of ‘bloody foreigner’ neo-isolationism to a sort of deal-making ‘real-estate with nukes’ activism. It is hardly surprising Bolton and Trump finally fell out over President Trumps desire to invite the Taliban leadership (whoever that really is) to Camp David to see if a peace deal could be struck. Without clear American leadership the Old West is reduced to little more than a set of iterative trade-offs. It should be so much more than that.

The old Anglo-American core: The Old West was founded on the back of the Anglo-American alliance of World War Two, what some call the ‘special relationship’ that endured into the Cold War. Even today, Britain does enjoy a ‘special relationship’ endures in such areas as ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence-sharing. However, Britain’s utterly inept political and bureaucratic High Establishment has made Britain anything but ‘special’ and reduced what should be a considerable regional-strategic power to little or no influence. Brexit has been an exercise in utter strategic incompetence reflected in what I see every day on my travels – Britain today neither matters, nor is it respected.  How the once mighty have fallen. Without a serious Britain, able and willing to commit still considerable talents and capacities to the institutions of the Old West, pathetic Britain is helping erode the very institutions critical to its influence. Brexit? The latest consequence of a failed London.

The Berlin-Brussels Axis: It would be somewhat comforting to think that as Britain’s elite retreats into the pathetic irrelevancies of post-power, Berlin and Brussels were stepping up to help construct a New West in which Americans and Europeans would again stand burden-sharing should-to-shoulder as cornerstones of world stability.  Nothing could be further from the truth. Never have two world capitals built on power been so apparently, uneasy, unwilling, or unable to understand the nature of power or its application. Mercantilist Berlin talks endlessly about ‘Europe’, but usually means Germany; a parochial Germany for which foreign policy is about how many cars it can sell, or how much oil and gas it can get on the cheap from Russia. Leadership? Forget it. Brussels is fast becoming a big power run by little people from small countries obsessed with their own status but who either lack a strategic culture are strategically-illiterate, or both. For them, President Trump and Brexit are God given, more interested in criticising the America who defends them, or punishing the British for daring to leave the EU, than actually preparing their Euro-world for the real world. The Brussels elite wallows in its insufferable self-satisfaction, fiddling whilst Europe’s smoulders with unease and slithers into uncompetitive decline. A town locked into self-reinforcing, self-congratulation for the ‘munificent’ and ‘magnificent’, Europe that have built, whilst millions of Europeans who live in the real Europe look on aghast.

Fantasy Euro-world: A mark of Europe’s decline is the retreat of many of its un-led citizens into an equally unworldly fantasy. It is a kind of slavery of the child in which democracy appears to continue, but there is little real relationship between voting and power. Their distant ‘betters’ know better and the really little people should not concern themselves with power, so many do not. This week the admittedly ‘ever more Europe, all the time, for absolutely everything’ European Council on Foreign Relations asked a sample of Europeans what should, “Whose side should your country take in a conflict between the United States and Russia?”  The poll suggested 45% would opt for neutrality. They clearly did not ask Europeans in the Baltic States. Indeed, it is hard to envisage ANY such conflict NOT actually being ABOUT Europe and Europeans. It would have been interesting to see the results if the question had been, “Whose side should your country take in a conflict between the United States and Russia OVER EUROPE?” my suspicion is that the answer may have been inconvenient.

The only conclusion from all of the above is that the prevailing power in both the transatlantic relationship and Europe is entropy. This is not the fault of the people, it is rather the fault of political elites who have consistently refused to treat citizens as partners in power. Opaque elites who treat their fellow citizens as children, keeping them in a state of strategic infancy, unwilling or unable to trust them with hard truths. Imagine a world in which the transatlantic relationship did not exist, in which America and Europe were adversaries rather than partners. Then you imagine a world in which America and a Europe are defeated, and all by themselves.

Maybe the Old West is dead, but Americans and Europeans have never needed each other more. My fear is that the British disease will spread. Britain’s elite have achieved something I once thought impossible and destroyed my belief in my country as a power. How long before this cancer, this entropy, spreads to the rest of Europe and beyond. How long before Americans become so self-doubting about their role in the world that the American dream becomes their and our nightmare?

For all my despair with, and at, leaders I am still not prepared to raise the white flag of surrender just yet. We must fight back against the entropists, the deniers of power, the breakers of relationships, and the ahistorical idiot ‘savants’ who lead on both sides of the Atlantic. The West today is lost in the middle of a dark nowhere. Therefore, at this tipping point in world affairs, it is time to end the entropy of the West, and build in its place a New West in which all the forces of freedom the world over stand together and turn shared values into shared action.

In memory of the many victims from many nations of all races and creeds who perished on September 11, 2001.

Julian Lindley-French