Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine are the wild cards that may determine the outcome of elections in the US and UK in the coming year. The best-laid plans of political leaders and central bankers are at the mercy of conflicts that they do not control – and may fail to understand.
Who would have predicted six months ago that Gaza would explode and the US would green light an open-ended Israeli assault that has already killed 25,000 people? Who would have guessed that in reaction to this bloodbath, a group in Yemen, the Houthis, would blockade one of the world’s great trade routes passing through the Red Sea?
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel yesterday to prevent any genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza, highlighted the calamitous conditions of those trapped in the enclave, and sought to give them a measure of protection. But Israeli compliance on the ground is dubious and the war has already ballooned into an international crisis that is likely to escalate further.
Nasty surprises
Other nasty surprises may be just around the corner. Gaza is turning out to be a detonator for a much wider crisis. What would happen, for instance, to inflation in the US and UK, if not just the Bab al Mandab at the entrance to Red Sea, but the Strait of Hormuz leading to the Gulf, through which passes a fifth of the world’s oil trade, became unsafe for shipping?
Politicians and economists are traditionally naïve and ill-informed about how wars and crises will upend their carefully modelled expectations. They have only recently noticed that the nature of warfare itself has changed since high-precision missiles and drones are no longer the monopoly of a few military powers.
In the Iraq war in 2003, it was only the US and a few of its allies that possessed such weapons, but now they are commonplace in the arsenals of almost every military force in the world. You no longer need a powerful navy to impose a blockade on your enemies, but can do so with drones and missiles.
Nature of warfare
Modern drone warfare is being presented as something we did not know about until recently, but in reality it came of age almost five years ago when Iran precisely targeted oil facilities in Saudi Arabia in September 2019, briefly cutting Saudi oil production by half. Significantly, the US did nothing to retaliate against Iran which, for all its denials, was certainly behind the attack. Equally significantly, the US failed to defend or retaliate in defence of its Saudi ally, something often blamed on then president Donald Trump, but was a realistic recognition that the nature of warfare had changed.
These military changes help explain why war is becoming an increasingly attractive option for many states and movements and why in the 2020s new wars erupt every few months.
The world order is becoming more fragile, militarily and politically. We have seen this in Gaza and in Yemen, but also in Sudan, where a ferocious civil war is killing tens of thousands of people and has forced more than five million to flee their homes. Nobody is paying much attention to this savage conflict, with its potential to destabilise a large part of Africa, and even fewer noticed last summer when Azerbaijan, well equipped with drones by Turkey, took over the embattled enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh, forcing some 100,000 Armenians to take flight.
Mass migration
I have always been amazed by the way in which Western powers so often underestimate the blowback from wars they initiate. The cliché term for this is “unintended consequences”, but this flatters the perpetrators as the likely consequences are often all too obvious.
France and the UK, backed by the US, overthrew Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 using local proxy forces. Libya collapsed into anarchy, destabilising North Africa – with the result that a great surge of immigrants started to cross the Mediterranean to reach Italy, where their arrival had a profound political impact. Much the same happened in Syria, where the West was happy to see a war without a winner devastate the country, compelling millions of Syrians to flee to Turkey and later Europe in a mass migration that contributed to the UK vote for Brexit and created lasting turmoil over immigration in Germany.
The blindness of Western leaders to the self-destructive impact of foreign wars on their own political careers is also striking. An instinctive sense of racial superiority in the US and UK has led them again and again to underestimate their enemies, be they in the mountains of Afghanistan, the slums of Baghdad – or the ruins of Gaza.
A walkover
Another reason why politicians get mired in wars they cannot win is simply that they underestimate the riskiness of war, where last year’s winner is this year’s loser. President Vladimir Putin committed one of the greatest political errors in history when he invaded Ukraine in 2022, ludicrously expecting a walkover. But last year it was the turn of Ukraine and its Western backers to overplay their hands, launching a counteroffensive that failed with heavy casualties, while Western economic sanctions turned out to be far less effective than had been hoped.
Yet, though there is no credible plan to bring the war to an end, Trump’s promise to do just that is viewed with horror by political and media establishments in the US and Europe.
In some respects, wars today are more dangerous than during the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union. Then the risk of a nuclear exchange was taken seriously as a constant threat and measures taken to avoid it. But today, wishful thinkers downplay the menace posed by nuclear weapons.
Dread of presidential candidates
President Joe Biden has managed to get the US involved in three wars – Ukraine, Gaza, Houthis in Yemen – any of which might blow up in his face and wreck his re-election plans. What he presumably intended as a show of American determination in Gaza has become a demonstration of weakness and indecision. He has managed to identify his presidency with a merciless Israeli war effort whose horrendous impact on two million Palestinians was graphically spelled out by the ICJ in its interim judgement.
For all his embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extreme right-wing government, Biden has found that he has little influence on its actions, though he will be held responsible for them.
If the war does not end soon and spreads further, Biden may well suffer a self-inflicted political and economic “October surprise”, the dread of presidential candidates, which would lead to his defeat in November.
Further Thoughts
Donald Trump and Joe Biden have got what they most want: each other as the opposing candidate come next November. Pundits issue ritual warnings about it being early days yet – and then go on to overinterpret the results from the Iowa caucuses and the primary in New Hampshire, to be followed by the upcoming one South Carolina. Trump and Biden are more or less certain to be the candidates, but otherwise political volatility is even greater than normal: both men are of an age when death or disability many intervene.
Biden is locked into three wars – Ukraine, Gaza and Yemen – any one of which might produce a devastating crisis. I try to keep in mind that three US presidents were seriously damaged by events in the Middle East: Jimmy Carter (Iran hostages), Ronald Reagan (Iran-Contra) and George W Bush (Iraq war). Biden could easily be the fourth.
Biden would like Trump as an opponent because of the significant number of college-educated Republicans who may refuse to vote for him. This could well turn out to be true, as exit polls in New Hampshire found that four out of 10 of those who voted for Nikki Haley said their chief motive was dislike of Trump. Only 64 per cent of Republican primary voters said that they were certain Trump supporters come November, while 87 per cent of Democrat primary voters – many of them unhappy with Biden over immigration and Gaza – say they will still vote for him.
Democrats draw comfort from such figures, but there is an element of wishful thinking in this. Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign believed that distaste for Trump would win the election for her – and this turned out to be calamitously wrong. A legal conviction of Trump before election day might help, but he has so far been expert in using his multiple court appearances to dominate the news agenda and portray himself as the victim of unjust persecution. He may be able to go on milking his legal troubles for publicity and sympathy right up to presidential election day.
Beneath the Radar
The UK Government undermines crucial parts of the British state and then stands back in feigned horror when there is an inevitable collapse. A prime example of this is local government which currently owes an astonishing £97.8bn as councils are increasingly go bankrupt. The Government blames this on reckless expenditure and unwise investments by councils, but the true reason is simply that council expenditure has risen precipitously, while central government grants to councils have gone down and it has limited the ability of councils to raise tax revenues on their own.
As for the unwise investments, it was the Government itself that encouraged them. And there is another ill-advised act of government that was an important ingredient in the crisis which has largely passed unnoticed. This was the abolition by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition government in 2012 of the Audit Commission, the body which appointed local government auditors, oversaw them, and set the standards for what they did.
A government statement a couple of years later boasted that it had saved £400m by abolishing “the Audit Com expensive inspection regime and, in 2012, its audit practice was outsourced to private audit firms”. Except there were far too few private firms capable and willing to do this work. There was talk of “armchair auditors”, concerned citizens who would somehow wade through complex council accounts, though this was obvious nonsense. In other words, in the spurious interests of saving money by reducing red tape, the Government made sure that nobody knew what councils were spending money on.
The debacle which followed is a prime example of the outsourcing madness that has done so much to speed up the de-skilling, not to say disintegration, of the British state. Ben Worthy, senior lecturer at Birkbeck College, lucidly explains what happened and why it was so long concealed from public view in an article in the online publication UK in a Changing Europe.
He concludes: “Most councils get zero inspections, and the most common response to my question ‘how many people asked to inspect since 2019’ was ‘zero’. One cynical reading of local financial crises is that councils can, and do, get into very dire straits simply because they know no one is watching.”
Cockburn’s Picks
Police, mental health workers and courts are invariably blamed when a paranoid schizophrenic like Valdo Calocane murders one or more people and then receives a sentence for manslaughter because of diminished responsibility. Usually, there was nothing much they could have done to prevent the killings for which they are unfairly held responsible.
Unfortunately the rage of the victims’ families seldom takes the form of demanding that there be more beds for mental patients in secure institutions, which is the one action that would help reduce such tragedies.
The best recent piece I have read about the inadequacies of mental health provision is by Anna Gross and Amy Borrett, called “The costly, controversial outsourcing of NHS mental health services“.
