THE WORLD HAS CHANGED FOREVER

I have debated for some time about writing this article, but as the week has passed I feel I have to. We have to understand that we have in the past month, lived through what historians will define in decades to come as a monumental shift in the way the world works; an era has ended, a new one has begun.

From the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 all the way through to 1914 – you can actually pick the 4th August as the date, a specific World Order existed. Sure it changed and flexed and modified itself as time progressed, but everyone knew their place, every nation knew what they wanted, even though some were more disruptive than others. This was the age of Pax Brittanica, where a largely aloof Britain ran commercial rings around everyone else, led the world in industrialization, and who’s navy towered like a colossus over every other. Even as it ended in a war long seen coming, the Empire did not reach its greatest territorial extent until September 23rd 1923. Nobody quite realized that the game was already up, the sun was already setting on what still remains the largest empire ever to have existed on Earth.

The 20 years that elapsed between the Treaty of Versailles that formally ended The Great War, that war ‘to end end all wars’, were largely a mess generated by the failure of America to accept its place in the world. Europe, excluding Russia, unusually had no international war at all from June 28th 1919 through to September 1st 1939. The rest of the world could not say the same.

Russia convulsed in Civil War in the early 1920’s, The Spanish Civil War tore the country to shreds in 1936-39 – a war tightly fought as left against right wing politics. The Italians invaded Ethiopia in 1936, as the League of Nations, that American creation it walked away from before it ever started, sat and did nothing.

Japan raped China, committing barbarous acts of aggression from bombing cities to bacteriological warfare that killed hundreds of thousands, from 1934 until 1945. Again a powerless League of Nations said a good deal but did nothing.

The 1936 Chaco war in South America went almost unheeded.

The Second World War was very much the product of the failures of the First to settle its peace with equity and to genuinely conform to the rules it set itself of National Self Determination. Populations did not have their borders drawn to match their populations but to suit the politics, traditions and demands of the Great Powers. It was all, one way or another, inevitably going to lead to more conflict. French Field Marshall Foch famously said that Versailles was ‘merely an armistice that would last twenty years’, even as his Government (which had been especially vindictive towards Germany, against the inclination of both the US and British leaderships), signed it, forcing the Germans to do so. It would have legendary and catastrophic consequences in Germany, where everyone came to believe they’d been ‘stabbed in the back’ mostly by the Jews, a myth the Nazis used to such devastating effect.

World War 2 offered up a completely clean slate. For the first time in 1945 the two principal aggressors, Germany & Japan, were utterly and completely defeated, conquered, flattened, extinguished. There was no peace treaty, no argument about who had won. American industrial and fiscal power drove an engine of such immense military might, it crushed the Japanese to eventual atomic dust. The allied armies and air forces in Europe carried out a stunning amphibious invasion, taking just 11 months to reach into the heart of Germany, reaching the Russians at Torgau on the Elbe, coming the other way. Days later Germany surrendered.

Russia had occupied half of Europe in the East. Give or take a little it remained there from 1945 until 1990. Despite its efforts to become militarily dominant, in the end its arch enemy, the United States, prevented it. From 1945 The Russians and the Allies accepted there was a way of doing things. There was a ‘rules based order’, you could do very bad things but there was always a price to pay and you always knew, always, that if you went too far, there would be consequences. Both sides knew it and both sides felt the pain. Yet that Order – initially effectively controlled by the United Nations steered by the Allies, did well to protect the stability of the world. Yet slowly over time, it would devolve in to a meaningless talking shop that now achieves little or nothing, its own rules of Veto for ‘the Big Five’ preventing it doing anything meaningful. It doesn’t help that its founder now sees it at useless and has done all of this century, giving it little more than lip service.

From August 1945 through to February 2025, even as it wavered at times towards the end of that 80 years, the United States of America, the land of plenty, the bastion of free speech and democracy, the country that spent trillions of dollars containing the Russians as communists, the Chinese, the N. Koreans, then the new, revived by Putin corrupt Russia, tripped over its own stupid mistakes. The Iraq invasion of 2003 was a terrible miscalculation, nation building in Afghanistan another. Domestic politics began to polarize and with the advent of social media and the science of using it, all brought about by rapid advancing technologies nobody really understood would have such consequences at first, American and democratic nations were overwhelmed. With their enemies using the new social media landscape against them in ways that continuously develop, the challenges went largely unrecognized until it was too late.

Division and polarisation lead to lies and a disturbing rejection of obvious truth by an anti-science, conspiracy laden anti-fact movement, seized on by one of the most appalling characters to ever enter the American political stage. A man of such vanity, conceit and criminality, a sociopath, a narcissist of such bullying venality it should have been impossible for him to even be on the presidential ballot, let alone win it – twice. So twisted has the media and the politics of America become this ill-educated bully who speaks a lie in every second sentence, has reduced America to a state of such hypocrisy and weakness, it actually sided with its enemy of 80 years to condemn the fact of Russian aggression against the free and independent sovereign state of Ukraine. I wish I had been surprised, yet I was not. Appalled, yes, but not shocked, this new low (and it will get worse) was a long time coming.

Let us be clear what happened that day. The Rules Based Order of the past 80 years collapsed, finally and completely. The walls had been shaken, the cracks were everywhere, but that brought the roof down, the whole structure is now a ruin. The President of the United States took a wrecking ball to it and finished the job, while his fans in Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, Tehran and Tel Aviv looked on.

For Israel’s Netanyahu, a man facing corruption charges whose best way of staying in office is through permanent war with Israels neighbors, keeps him out of court, and jail. As he slowly erodes his nation’s democratic system.

The American President, a man who kept out of court and likely jail by becoming President, where he is now thanks to a rigged court system, immune to almost anything he does while in office.

To the ruthless man-murdering Putin of Russia, whose corruption, oppression, war crimes and evil have pervaded the world for the past 25 years.

To Xi Jin Ping, whose legacy he hopes, is the conquest of Taiwan and extinguishing its democracy.

And the sofa-sized boy-monarch of the North Korean prison camp.

Or the Iranian mullahs whose comprehension of Islam is about as un-Islamic as it gets, whose behavior is corrupted and distorted by power, money and fear of their own people coming for them.

There are many more, the Orban’s, the Fico’s whose self importance and vanity is greater than the love of their country. Maduro in Venezuela, the Cuban regime that’s allowed its country to collapse into economic stagnation without basic electricity, the middle eastern despots who use their wealth to bribe their people to stay in power, the military regime in Myanmar, struggling to fend off a popular uprising that’s getting the better of it.

These people are bullies. Every one of them is corrupt and none of them believe in the basic freedoms we expect in Britain and much of Europe. We are not perfect, not by a long way, but compared to this world of self entitled despots and propagandising liars and manipulators we are a relative paragon of virtue.

It is this panoply of bad actors and this world of bullies that we now live in. They have no rules. Whatever they think is acceptable is now just that. They chose to do and demand whatever they want, whenever they want, to see how far they can push things and what they can get out of it. And they will keep doing it every day, all day, for as long as it takes, until somebody says NO.

This is the world that we are now in. A rough, transactional world, not of cooperation but of manipulation, not of ideals, but wants, and if they want what you have you either fight them for it as Ukraine is, or you make sure they don’t pick on you in the first place.

Those who question the need for a British nuclear deterrent, or a French one, who argued it was too much, or worthless, you remain the fools you have always been. There may come a time, possibly more than ever before when it may be all that comes between us and existence. I doubted it would ever get to that in all the years I fought in the Cold War, but I think it more likely now than ever before. Its the only thing we have that might make certain leaders think twice. It may now, in conjunction with France, be essential to a NATO without an American military in Europe.

How do we live in this new world? How do we act?

We live as we always have but more aware, wiser to our own weakness and the threats the far right especially at present, the liars like Farage and Co, or Le Pen, or the AfD or whatever distorted and reality twisting fake is out there, try to tell you is true when its just a lie to persuade you to give them power. We live like we know that nothing these people say can be trusted and we fact check, we don’t simply believe or take anything for granted. These people have no decency or honor. You cannot trust them.

And that goes for the international arena just as much. You keep your friends close and you work with them, those you cannot trust you need for now, you say and do whatever it is to placate them until you can get out from under their shadow.

Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States has been dead for years, even the Obama administration is on record of saying as much, it was words they felt they had to use. You might even hear the words today. But they mean nothing, and both sides know it. Britain’s reliance on the Americans like every one else, has been based on our own weakness and trust. Now our weaknesses like everyone else, have been exposed and we have to do something about it.

As I said before, I see President De Gaulle standing there in 1966 saying what amounted to “you can’t really trust America when the chips are down”, and he was right. What they are doing to Ukraine tells you everything you need to know about the new United States. You see the worst part about all this is, even if the republicans and the current president and his administration vanished never to return in this format ever again – the damage in 4 years time will have been done, the concrete poured, dried and set. There’s no going back from this, no future president will ever have what America once had, trusting, adoring allies who looked to it for leadership.

The American president used to be the leader of the free world. Right now that man is under siege and his country is fighting for its life against tyranny and evil. That man is Volodomyr Zelensky. No American president will easily reclaim that title, not in this century.

The America that was is gone. It’s not coming back. We in the UK, with the other European allies must now work together like we have never done before. The challenge hasn’t be greater since 1939-40. When you’re inside a crisis it’s hard to see what’s happening or understand its potential consequences. This is my time. I know where this can go, I can explain it ad nauseam, but there is only one consistent path. Resist. Prepare, be ready, resist and do not show weakness, ever. Only the resolute will survive the next 25 years geopolitically and economically. If we do not rise to this challenge we will, unquestionably, regret it for decades to come.

The Analyst

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