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

WW2 80: A Plea for the New European Realism

“We can describe as Utopian in the right sense (i.e. performing the proper function of a utopia in proclaiming an ideal to be aimed at, though not wholly attainable) the desire to eliminate the element of power and to base the bargaining process of peaceful change on a common feeling of what is just and reasonable.  But shall we also keep in mind the realist view of peaceful change as an adjustment to the changed relations of power; since the party which is able to bring power to bear normally emerges successful from operations of peaceful change, we shall do our best to make ourselves as powerful as we can. In practice, we know that peaceful change can only be achieved through a compromise between the Utopian concept of a common feeling of right and the realist conception of a mechanical adjustment to a changed equilibrium of force. That is why a successful foreign policy must oscillate between the apparently opposite poles of force and appeasement”.

Edward Hallett Carr, “The Twenty Year’s Crisis. 1919-1939”.

Alphen, Netherlands. September 3, 2019. It is time for the new European Realism. At 0445 hours on September 1, 1939 the ancient, pre-Dreadnought German battleship KM Schleswig Holstein fired the opening shots of the Battle of Westerplatte, standing off what is today the Polish port of Gdansk. It was the official start of Nazi Germany’s brutal invasion of Poland and the first shot of World War Two, although the Luftwaffe had earlier attacked Wielun. At 1100 hours, London time, on September 3, 1939, upon the expiry of an ultimatum from London to Berlin for Nazi forces to withdraw from Poland, and under the terms of the August 1939 Anglo-Polish Mutual Defence Pact, Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. It is the latter date I have chosen to post this blog in honour of my family members who served and died fighting the scourge of Hitlerism. This blog is also a plea for a new European Realism in the face of today’s threats and for Europeans to strike a new balance between the “…apparently opposite poles of force and appeasement”.  

On September 3, 1939 Britain, France and Poland enjoyed superior industrial resources, a greater population and and had more military manpower than Germany.  France had ninety divisions in the field, the British ten divisions (Britain was first and foremost a naval power), whilst Poland could field thirty infantry divisions, twelve cavalry brigades and one armoured brigade. Nazi Germany could only field one hundred divisions, of which forty-one faced the Westwall.  Critically, the Wehrmacht also had six armoured divisions, with some two thousand four hundred tanks welded to a new concept of air-land battle - Blitzkrieg. German forces were also more effectively organised, enjoyed superior training, had better equipment and were thus able to generate a critical superiority in fighting power where and when it mattered, reinforced by strong national self-belief. The Wehrmacht may have been a smaller force on paper, but it was also a far more efficient fighting machine.

Where is Europe today? Europeans today are threatened by a form of will complex strategic coercion across the 5Ds of contemporary hybrid warfare – disinformation, disruption, destabilisation, deception and threatened (or actual) destruction. The death of the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, allied to the demise of the Conventional Forces Europe Treaty, marks the end of another era of relative European peace. Perhaps, no less significant than Nazi Germany storming out of the League of Nations in October 1933. And yet, many Europeans meet such events with at best a shrug of the shoulders, even leaders.

Carr stated that “peaceful change”, reflects “…an adjustment to the changed relations of power”. And yet, Europe’s leaders refuse even to recognise the changed relations of power on the ground in Europe that are rendering Europeans ever more vulnerable to dangerous future shock. They also by and large refuse, with Germany now to the fore that the “…the party which is able to bring power to bear normally emerges successful from operations of peaceful change, and that we should do our best to make ourselves as powerful as we can”. It is a retreat from Realism that is being multiplied and magnified by Europe’s creeping atomisation.   

What must Europeans do? This is not a call for the militarisation of Europe, far from it. However, as Robert Schuman said in 1950, it is vital Europeans generate defences that are proportionate to the dangers which threaten them. Important though institutions such as the EU and NATO are to the defence of Europe the critical locus of power and legitimacy rests with the European state. The first duty of the state is to defend its citizens. However, too many European states, particularly in Western Europe, have weak, half-hearted elite Establishments trapped between the extremes of the political Left and Right. To the Left, there is the anti-patriotic, vacuous internationalism and Europeanism of the liberal Left, and its state-eroding dream of a country they call ‘Europe’. To the Right, there is a devil’s choice between a vision-less mercantilist Right, who see the state as nothing more than a balance sheet that exists only to enable business, or the ultra-nostalgic nationalists of the populist Right, who want to return each respective European state to some ‘golden age’ that never existed. Even if such an age briefly did exist, it invariably came at the deadly expense of other Europeans.  That must change.

A new European Realism would mean a return to grounded pragmatism, hard-headed strategic common sense, with Europeans seeing their world as it is; neither fantasy nor folly. Great forces of change are underway, with a lot of those forces on the dark side of history. What Europeans must mine together is a new peace-bearing equilibrium – a mother lode of peace – in which coercion is credibly resisted by assertion. Such an equilibrium will only come from European states together striking a new balance between force and appeasement.  

Europeans have a choice to make that they can no longer avoid. They were once the predators of centuries, are they now to be the prey of this one? In March 1946, in a seminal speech in Fulton, Missouri, entitled The Sinews of Peace, Winston Churchill said, “When American military men approach some serious situation they are wont to write at the head of their directive the words "over-all strategic concept." There is wisdom in this, as it leads to clarity of thought. What then is the over-all strategic concept which we should inscribe today? It is nothing less than the safety and welfare, the freedom and progress, of all the homes and families of all the men and women in all the lands”. If there is one Grand Strategic mission to which all free Europeans must commit Churchill’s call to ‘safety’ is it.

Europeans must abandon the dangerous ‘utopia’ that covenants without a sufficiency of legitimate swords are of any use to any European. It is time that Europe stops appeasing the present for fear of its past. It is time for the new European Realism.

Julian Lindley-French

The Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact

“For many years now we have been pouring buckets of shit on each other’s heads, and our propaganda boys could not do enough in that direction. And now, all of a sudden, are we to make our peoples believe all is forgiven? Things don’t work that fast”.

Josef Stalin, 24 August 1939

The Pact

Alphen, Netherlands, 23 August 2019. Eighty-years ago today the bloody fate of millions of Central and Eastern Europeans was sealed with the stroke of a pen. The signing of the Treaty of non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop and his Soviet counterpart Vyacheslav Molotov, came as a shock to the world. Even Germany’s Axis partner Japan, which had been in conflict with Moscow, was taken completely by surprise by the announcement. A British delegation was at sea en route to Moscow in the vain hope that Britain, France and the Soviet Union could conclude an anti-Hitlerian Tripartite Military Pact. With the signing of what became known as the Nazi-Soviet Pact, war in Europe became inevitable.

The Pact also marked the final and definitive end of the 1919 Versailles Treaty, with its provision that all secret treaties were to be banned. Indeed, Hitler stated, “Poland will never rise again in the form of the Versailles Treaty. That is guaranteed not only by Germany…but also Russia”. The secret protocol was an exercise Machtpolitik at its most cynical and enshrined the idea of great power spheres of influence in Europe. Under the protocol, which was confirmed by the September 1939 German-Soviet Frontier Treaty, the Baltic States were to be fully occupied by Soviet forces, together with parts of Finland. Poland was to be divided between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, whilst Soviet border was extended to include parts of Poland.

Why the Pact?

The Pact emerged in the aftermath of Hitler’s March 1939 occupation of Prague, and in direct contravention of the September 1938 “peace in our time” Munich Agreement with Neville Chamberlain’s Britain. With the collapse of Munich, war between Germany, Britain and France became nigh on inevitable. Britain and France sought to surround Germany and force it to confront the prospect of a renewed zweifrontenskrieg (two-front war) that it had faced in World War One. In spite of London’s profound distaste for the Soviet regime it began putting out diplomatic feelers to Moscow. The Pact destroyed any such hopes. On August 25, 1939 Britain signed a Mutual Defence Pact with Poland. This came as a shock to Hitler, who postponed his planned August 26 invasion.

Perhaps the most significant reason why Stalin supported the Pact was the state of the Red Army. In 1938 he had conducted a bloody purge of the senior ranks of the Red Army and decimated its leadership. The consequences of Stalin's actions were demonstrated by the superb fighting abilities of the Finns during the so-called Winter War of 1939-40. The Finns inflicted what later Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev claimed were up to one million casualties on a poorly-led and equipped Red Army. Stalin knew a future war between Bolshevism and Nazism was inevitable, but in 1939 the Soviet Union was in no fit state to fight it.   

Implementing the Pact

On 1 September 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland and, in spite of heroic Polish resistance, made steady progress. Stalin waited until 17 September to be sure Hitler halted his forces at the agreed demarcation line stipulated by the secret protocol before ordering the Red Army to seize the Baltic States and parts of Poland. On 22 September 1939, the Red Army and the Wehrmacht even held a joint victory parade in the seized Polish fortress town of Brest-Litovsk.

The consequences for Poles and the peoples of the Baltic States was terrifying.  Hitler had secured what he regarded as Lebensraum (living space) and began the forced removal of people he regarded as untermenschen (under-people) and the resettlement of Germans. It also led to the deportation and murder of millions of Jews. After a series of conferences between the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, and their Soviet counterparts, the NKVD, hard interrogations began of some 300,000 Polish prisoners of war. On March 5 1940, at Katyn, the Soviets executed 22,000 Polish military officers and intellectuals in an effort to decapitate any opposition to their rule on the grounds that they were ‘counter-revolutionaries’. It was not until the 1980s that then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev admitted the massacre and apologised. President Putin has called Katyn a ‘necessary evil’.

The Pact today

The Pact still leaves its bloody fingerprint on Europe. Parts of Poland (and even Romania) seized under the terms of the Pact now form parts of Belarus and Ukraine. Moreover, it was not just World War Two that began on 23 August, 1939, it also led to the Soviet occupation of much of Central and Eastern Europe and the Cold War. It was not until 1991 that the ugly blanket of oppression laid down by the Pact was finally thrown off by the heroic actions of Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles and others.    

To hear contemporary Russian leaders talk again of ‘spheres of influence’ and ‘buffer zones’ is to hear the language of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. It is also the language of secret protocols to treaties, of a Europe governed by power, diktat and fear. It was to stop that ever happening again that both the EU and NATO were created. The mission is not yet done.

The Pact collapsed on June 22 1941, with the commencement of Operation Barbarossa and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, which actually took Stalin by surprise. Stalin immediately switched sides and sought the support of the Western Allies. Churchill described the 1941 Anglo-Soviet Agreement as a necessary ‘deal with the devil’. He went on, “If Hitler invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable mention of the devil in the House of Commons”.   

Julian Lindley-French   

    

Boris Tiberius Johnson?

"Then the poor, who had been ejected from their land, no longer showed themselves eager for military service, and neglected the bringing up of children, so that soon all Italy was conscious of a dearth of freemen, and was filled with gangs of foreign slaves, by whose aid the rich cultivated their estates, from which they had driven away the free citizens”.

Plutarch

Alphen, Netherlands. 12 August. Britain stands on the precipice of perhaps its greatest constitutional crisis since the 1688 Glorious Revolution, which is quite an ‘achievement’ for Britain’s appalling political class given Britain does actually have a written constitution.  Its new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is not the idle dolt some suggest he is. As an Oxford historian, anyone who survived an Oxford Classics course has my grudging respect. Still, Prime Minister ‘Boris’, as he seems now to be universally known, may well pause and consider one story from the classics he so loves, that of Tiberius. Like Tiberius, Boris is a patrician siding with the populace against his own class on an issue of utmost gravity for Brexit is not just about Britain’s membership of the EU, it is ultimately about who runs Britain.

In 133 BC, Rome was in tumult as it stood on the verge of bankruptcy due to expensive wars, with its people threatened with starvation. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, son of Gracchus, and grandson of Scipio Africanus, conqueror of Carthage, and an aristocratic tribune of the people, proposed a land bill that attacked Patrician corruption and promised the re-distribution of resources away from the aristocracy in favour of the plebians, particularly those in rural areas. Critically, Tiberius chose to ignore Patrician privilege and convention by seeking the support of the ‘people’ and against his peers in the Senate, which in the Roman Republic had long held the right to approve all proposed legislation before it went before the plebs.

The simple, but dangerous question Tiberius posed was who should the Roman Empire benefit – Patricians or people? To be fair, Tiberius’s bill was not asking for much, simply that the great landowners make the state-owned public land they held on trust available to the plebs.  Tiberius believed such a move would not only improve food production but by enfranchising more plebs re-establish the link between farm ownership and military service which had long been the essential ‘contract’ for service in Rome’s legion.

The Patricians would have none of it and Rome descended into anarchy over Tiberius’s ‘New Deal’. In spite of their undoubted power, as exercised through the Senate, it was nominally the Roman people who were ultimately sovereign – Senatus Populusque Romanus!  And, only the people, or rather their tribunes, could vote on laws in the Assembly. Rome faced the prospect of a New Deal land deal or a no deal, which would have automatically removed large swathes of land long held by the aristocracy.

On the day of the critical vote Tiberius had not reckoned for his erstwhile friend, and fellow tribune, Marcus Octavius. When the presiding magistrate called for voting to begin, Octavius, shouted ‘veto’, effectively halting the vote. Desperate to be seen as one of the aristocracy, and himself a landowner, Octavius’s loyalty had been bought by aristocrats in the Senate. What ensued thereafter was political stalemate as Tiberius repeatedly tried to introduce his bill and Octavius repeatedly vetoed it. Worse, Octavius simply refused to budge, even though Tiberius offered to compensate him for any land lost under the bill. When that failed Tiberius simply blocked all state business from being enacted until Octavius lifted his veto and the land bill was passed.

Matters came to a head at a meeting of the Plebeian Assembly when Tiberius moved to strip Octavius of his office, something which had never before been done in the history of the Republic. Such was the tension that civil strife beckoned, which forced Tiberius to suspend the vote and make one final plea to Octavius to lift his veto. He refused, and only escaped alive from a vengeful mob because of the protection afforded him by Tiberius’s own bodyguard. Octavius was deposed and Tiberius’s New Deal land bill entered into Roman law.

From the outset, the Patricians stymied the law by using the Senate to refuse the necessary funding to enact it. They also mounted a smear campaign against Tiberius, suggesting his only interest was power, not the people. That he was a would-be Dictator, determined to overthrow the Republic and declare himself king. Thereafter, Tiberius tried to remove the Senate’s traditional control over foreign and economic affairs, and directly usurped its authority when he seized a major bequest to Rome to fund the Lex Sempronia Agraria. Tiberius knew he would face a criminal case once his tenure as a tribune expired, so he sought to stand again, which was also unconstitutional, and simply fuelled the rumour that he was power-crazed.

For Tiberius to be re-elected he would need to rely on the rural voters who supported him. He would also have to return to Rome, which he had fled for fear of Patrician assassins. Unfortunately for Tiberius it was harvest time and most of his rural base had returned to tend their crops. Faced with no other option but to return to Rome he approached the Forum and began to climb the Capitol. As he did so Nasica rose in the Senate to denounce Tiberius as a Dictator and declared an emergency, and left with his followers and slaves to ‘save’ the Republic.  Upon finding Tiberius they clubbed him to death. His brother, Gaius, requested the return of Tiberius’s body so he could be buried as befitted his rank. The aristocratic Senate refused and the bloody corpse of Tiberius was, instead, tossed into the Tiber.         

The tragedy of Tiberius revealed the extent of decay within the Roman Republic. The tragedy of Brexit has revealed the decay within Britain. For me, one of the many heart-breaking causes of such decay in my once great country is the nature of the divide that separates its people. Too many of those who believe, as I do, that it is not in the British interest to walk away from institutions vital to Britain’s national interest, also no longer believe in Britain as a power. Too many of those who believe Britain should leave the EU do so because of an entirely misplaced notion of patriotism, allied a complete misunderstanding of the workings of twenty-first century geopolitics works. For me, Britain can both be a major power and remain inside the EU, to leverage greater strategic influence, for the well-being of its people, and to stop the Patricians in Brussels who do seek barely-accountable power in the name of ‘Europe’.

There is, of course, a big ‘if’ to my thinking, which Boris Johnson’s rambunctious premiership has outed, the supine nature of London’s elite establishment.  Too many of those who no longer believe in Britain as a power also hold positions of power and responsibility in London.

Senatus Populusque Britannicus?

Julian Lindley-French  

One Small Step…

“Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has Landed”.

Neil Armstrong

Alphen, Netherlands. 20 July. This is a very personal recollection of the Apollo 11 mission, the first lunar landing fifty years ago today, and the story of my disastrous contribution to it.

Like most Britons of a certain age I can remember precisely where I was at 2117 British Summer Time on Sunday, 20 July 1969. Along with millions of British children I was transfixed by the BBC coverage of Apollo 11’s Lunar Excursion Module, or LEM, successfully landing on the surface of the moon. The tension was such I can still feel it today, fifty years later. With Cliff Michelmore in the lead, ably supported by James Burke and Patrick Moore, and with Michael Charlton at Cape Kennedy in Florida, the BBC covered the entire mission pretty much from launch to ‘splashdown’ eight days later in the Pacific. The BBC coverage was but a part of what was one of the first truly global television events, with some half-a-billion people estimated to have watched world-wide.

The entire US space programme, which a then patriotic BBC told us on a daily basis could not have been possible without British engineers, was an inspiration. In fact, the chief architect of the lunar programme was a German, Werner von Braun, who had designed the V1 and V2 missiles which had rained terror on London in 1944. And, whilst I did not want to be an astronaut like so many of my generation, for me what the Americans achieved that day was nothing short of out-of-this-world.

The moon landing is also a bitter-sweet memory. In the run-up to the Apollo mission our science teacher, Mr Taylor, a war ace who had flown RAF Mosquitoes in World War Two and whom we all revered, commissioned me to build a model moonscape out of papier-maché, complete with balsa wood LEM. It took me weeks to get the model right and I was proud of the outcome. It had to be kept in the store-room at the back of the classroom because it was simply too big to take home. Come the morning of the exhibition we were all asked to present our work. Disaster! As I entered the little room to my horror a big footprint sat staring back from slap bang in the middle of my Sea of Tranquillity.  It would have been some twenty miles long on the real moon. Someone had stepped on my moon!

At least Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did not have the same problems, although in completing a successful landing they overcame a whole host of others, including a computer overload that forced Armstrong to fly the LEM manually. Even before that triumphant moment the National Aeronautic and Space Agency’s (NASA) Gemini and Apollo programmes had overcome a host of other challenges. The sheer cost was a constant problem, even for the mighty United States.  President John F. Kennedy had set out his famous astronomical goal at Rice University, Texas on 12 September 1962 to put an American on the moon before the end of that decade. Almost as soon as the President had made that commitment he began to worry about the cost. He was right to be concerned. At one point, the Apollo programme was consuming some 4% of the entire US GDP. In 1962, Kennedy even asked then Soviet premier Nikita Kruschev if the Soviets would consider pooling their efforts. Kruschev declined.

The space programme also took place against the difficult backdrop of the Cold War.  Indeed, there would probably have been no such programme without the Cold War. On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union had shocked the Americans by placing the Sputnik 1 satellite in low-Earth orbit. This proved to the Americans the Soviets had the capability to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile rendering the continental United States vulnerable to a strike for the first time in its history. The so-called ‘missile gap’ frenzy was further compounded on 12 April 1961, when Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin completed one and half earth orbits. It seemed the Russians were ahead in what became known as the space race, even though much Soviet ‘superiority’ was but an illusion.

The space programme also experienced tragedy. On the 27 January 1967, Virgil ‘Gus’ Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee were burned to death by a flash fire aboard the ground-testing capsule of their Apollo 1 spacecraft. The tapes of their last moments are truly chilling and testify to the enormous risk associated with a programme that tested the boundaries of science, engineering and people, at times to extremes and beyond.        

By the time of Apollo 11’s launch from launchpad 39A on July 16 1969 political and popular enthusiasm was already waning with NASA’s admittedly enormous budget falling.  President Richard M. Nixon lacked the fervour of President Kennedy for space exploration, even if Vice-President Spiro Agnew wanted to press ahead to Mars by the end of the century. America was changing and increasingly-mired in a losing Vietnam War, whilst at home protests against the war and the growing power and influence of the civil rights movement captured many of the headlines. With the 1968 assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King America was not a happy place.  

And yet, come that moment when Neil Armstrong set his foot upon the lunar surface, the first time humans had stepped on a celestial body other than their own, the world was captivated. My model? My Taylor was so angry he made the entire class line up so he could inspect which of us had the guilty signature of wasted paper-maché on our school shoes.  Having inspected the entire class and found no felon Mr Taylor then insisted on inspecting mine. Sure enough, the souls of my shoes were caked in moonscape.

Fifty years on and Apollo 11 continues to amaze and inspire. As for my contribution, it was one small step for me, one giant (beep - profanity deleted) for my kind.

Julian Lindley-French     

S-400: Why Turkey is NOT in Russia's Pocket

Alphen, Netherlands. 17 July. This month’s first delivery to Turkey of the advanced Russian S-400 air defence missile system is to some a sign that Ankara is leaving the Western Alliance. Washington has even threatened sanctions under the Countering American Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). In fact, Turkey is not in Russia’s pocket, as one headline suggested, but Ankara has been alienated from the West. Here is why.

A few years ago I visited Gallipoli as the head of a delegation. It was humbling to see so many Turkish families paying respects to the ancestors who had given their lives defending the peninsula from Allied forces in 1915. On the summit of the ridge that dominates Gallipoli, I stood where Kemal Ataturk had commanded Turkish forces, before he became leader of the Turkish Republic and set his country on a path of reconciliation and alignment with his erstwhile Western enemies. Indeed, as part of that same visit I had the great honour of laying a wreath at the tomb of the great Turk in Ankara. Departing Turkey I came away with a sense of how Turks view their country and their place in the world. It is that view which, I believe, informs contemporary Turkish policy.

Much has been made of Ankara’s decision. Moscow likes to portray the decision to acquire Russian S-400 air defence missiles, and jointly develop the new S-500 system, as evidence that President Erdogan is aligning himself with President Putin. Washington is even threatening to withhold delivery of advanced F35 fighters to Turkey for fear that Moscow may be right. Rather, both Moscow and Washington simply fail to understand either Turkey or President Erdogan.

President Erdogan, like many Turks, has become increasingly frustrated with his Western allies.  The refugee crisis that resulted from the war over Turkey’s border with Syria placed the country under intense pressure with over three million people having arrived seeking shelter.  Ankara’s view is that Turkey’s European allies made little effort to assist, preferring instead to blame the Turks for allowing huge numbers of refugees to illegally enter the European Union via Greece.

The sense of alienation from ‘Europe’ Turks felt over the refugees was compounded by the final realisation by Ankara that Turkey would never be offered full membership of the EU. The accession process began as early as 1987, with negotiations for full EU membership starting in 2005, albeit painfully slowly. In 2016, Chancellor Merkel agreed a new deal with President Erdogan that would have seen control of migrant flows into Europe in return for visa-free travel for Turks across Europe. The Turks believe they have kept their side of the bargain, whilst the EU has not. In February 2019, the European Parliament voted to suspend all accession talks with Turkey, partly in response the draconian wave of arrests that followed the failed July 2016 coup.

There are additional factors that fuel Turkey’s sense of grievance. US support for Kurdish forces in the struggle against Daesh in Syria triggered deep concerns in Ankara that Washington would eventually back the creation of a de facto Kurdish state in northern Syria adjacent to Turkey’s border. The very idea is utterly inimical to Turks. President Erdogan was also offended by what he saw as tacit European support for the coup attempt by ‘liberal’ army officers.

The all-too-evident distaste of Chancellor Merkel and President Macron for President Erdogan is also a factor.  They, like several other liberal Western European leaders, view Erdogan as a reactionary determined to reverse the separation of Mosque and state started by Ataturk.  They also regret that he does not behave like a Western European liberal. The point they seem to forget is precisely that: President Erdogan is NOT a Western European liberal and shares few of the same values.

Which brings me to why Turkey’s purchase of the S-400 does not mean Ankara is now a Russian ally. President Erdogan is a traditional Turkish leader of a country faced with Russia to the north, Iran to the east Syria, Lebanon and Israel to the south, with the Balkans to contend with to the west. Shorn of what he any longer regards as reliable Western allies Erdogan is behaving like a classical Turkish or Ottoman leader of old.  He also understands all too well his country’s strengths and its weaknesses. Turkey’s strength is that it sits at the crossroads between Europe and Asia, the West and the Middle East, and (critically and decisively) between Russia, the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Turkey’s weakness is precisely all of the above.  President Erdogan is thus simply doing what generations of Turkish leaders have done in ages past; focus exclusively on what he regards as Turkey’s vital interests and states in need of Turkish support work for the ‘privilege’. In other words, President Erdogan is a classical Turkish strategic horse-trader willing to deal with anyone who can offer a good deal to Turkey…and him.        

Some months ago, I had dinner in Izmir with a friend of mine, who is also a confidante of President Erdogan. He assured me that Turkey was not withdrawing from the West, but rather taking steps ensure its own security. The purchase of one system, my friend assured me, was not proof that Turkey was ‘defecting’ to the Russian camp, on intent on stymieing NATO. Rather, Turkey lived in a turbulent neighbourhood, the Russian air defence system was value-for-money, and relatively good relations with Moscow made strategic sense given where Turkey sits on the strategic map.

The big strategic question Americans and Europeans should thus ask themselves is not what Turkey can do for them, but how important Turkey is to their security, and what price are they willing to pay to keep Turkey onside? There is a particular urgency about this question for Europeans.  Europe is in headlong retreat from power-realism whilst insisting on a rules-based system in a world where those with real power prefer Realpolitik. Dealing with President Erdogan is thus a test-case for how Europeans maintain a vital partnership with a leader with whom it shares few values.  To succeed, ‘Europe’ will need to stop lecturing Ankara and start dealing with it. There is a deal to be done. The S-400 deployment does not mean Turkey is in Russia’s ‘pocket’. The only ‘pocket’ in which Turkey is ‘in’, under President Erdogan, is decidedly Turkish, and tailored exclusively in Ankara.

Julian Lindley-French  

Spitzenlanden: European Union, Alliance or Empire?

Alphen, Netherlands. 10 July. Last week’s Franco-German coup effectively ended hopes of a real European political union, and set Europe back on the road to a European alliance of states, with a touch of empire thrown in. Having followed much of the commentary over the past week I am surprised how few have realised the enormity of what has just happened. 

A mediocre German defence minister is suddenly parachuted into the post of European Commission President. A member of the French Establishment, and current Head of the International Monetary Fund, is summarily made Head of the European Central Bank. A placeman, lame duck Belgian Prime Minister, the second Belgian out of three, is appointed President of the European Council, whilst a septuagenarian placeman Spanish foreign minister is confirmed as the next High Representative of the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy. Last week’s imposition by Germany and France of Ursula von der Leyen, Christine Lagarde, Charles Michel and Josep Borrell certainly came as a surprise to most Members of the European Parliament.  As an exercise in closed-door Euro-elitism/power-play it is straight from the annals of Richelieu and Bismarck. It was not meant to be like this. What happened and what are the implications for the future of the EU?

What happened? French and German power ‘happened’. There are few things that unite the very disparate ranks of the European Parliament and current Commission President Jean Claude Juncker, but last week’s Franco-German coup did.  The European Parliament had believed that a precedent had been set with the appointment of Juncker.  He had been the ‘spitzenkandidat’, chosen, and thus legitimised, by the largest political grouping in the European Parliament, the EPP.  European federalists had hoped that such a process would deepen political integration by enabling the European Parliament to ensure appointments to the Commission, and the other great offices of the European would-be ‘state, would be in its gift. Some have suggested the appointments came about because the EU 27 could not agree on other candidates. This is not the case. Berlin and Paris simply moved to decisively re-exert their control by exploiting the divisions between the member-states.

What are the implications? Last week was certainly a big step back from European Union. Whilst there have been ‘big’ country Commission presidents in the past, Roy Jenkins and Jacques Delors come to mind, the political balance within the EU has tended to be best served by having those from the smaller states as the respective heads of the European Council and European Commission.  It was assumed that such a ‘balance’ would be maintained, which is why the Dutch Socialist and Commission Vice-President, Frans Timmermans and the Swedish Commissioner, Cecilia Malmstrom, were touted so strongly for the Commission job.  Now, that political balance has been effectively demolished by Berlin and Paris, with a German taking control of ‘power’ within the EU, whilst a Frenchwoman has been put in charge of the money. 

         

Here was Europe’s two power-states, Germany and France (in that order), effectively taking back control  - spitzenklanden? It is not difficult to see why. Efforts to ‘democratise’ power in the EU have left it rudderless and leaderless, adrift in a sea of dangerous change.  Critically, little has really been done of note to solve the underlying structural weaknesses of the Euro, or to prepare for a more secure Europe. Berlin and Paris clearly agree it is time for some leadership to be injected into political and economic union, albeit by stepping back from political and economic union.

Do Germany and France share a vision for the future European Union? No. President Macron appears to want to move faster towards banking and fiscal union than Germany, and wants Germans to pay for the debt mutualisation such integration would entail. Conversely, Germany wants to move towards some form of European Defence Union, with ‘VDL’ an enthusiastic champion, whilst France wants to keep defence a strictly intergovernmental business, not least to maintain links with the British.

Could Britain have stopped the coup if it had not been consumed by the disaster that is Not Brexit?  Probably not. With a few notable exceptions Germany and France have traditionally sought reasons to block the appointment of a Briton to the EU’s two senior positions – the twin presidencies of the Council and the Commission.  The reason offered has usually been that Britain is not ‘European’ enough. It is certainly not ‘European’ enough now.

There is a profound Brexit irony in these Franco-German shenanigans.  The Franco-German coup shifts the EU back to being precisely the kind of super-alliance between states London long championed, and decisively away from the European super-state that London so feared.  In a sense, the coup simply re-confirms the essential paradox at the heart of the European project: more ‘Europe’ means less European state, but few, if any, European states want less of themselves. It is also clear that neither Germany nor France are really willing to countenance any decisive loss of national sovereignty in the name of ‘Europe’, preferring instead to control ‘Europe’ in pursuit of their respective, vital national interests.

 

In other words, when power-push comes to power-shove the Franco-German idea of ‘Europe’, is not that far from the traditional British idea of ‘Europe’. For Germany, ‘Europe’ remains a legitimate institution in which to embed German power, so long as Germany effectively controls it. France, ‘Europe’ still simply a mechanism for a bigger France. Plus ca change…

European Union, Alliance or Empire?

Julian Lindley-French