The Irish have always produced more trouble than they can consume. This may be why so many of them are so eloquent on the subject. Yeats on Ireland, equally applicable to Israel/Palestine: ‘Great hatred, little room’. More Yeats: ‘Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart’. There are a lot of stone-hearted people in today’s conflict zones.
Then a line from Sean O’Casey: ‘the whole worl’s in a terrible state o’ chassis [chaos]’. In peacetime, that has never been more true.
We face at least four related problems. In the West, the quality of political leadership has never been lower, which is why the prestige of democracy has not been lower since the 1930s. Meanwhile our enemies seem strident and confident, and in large areas of the world, especially Africa, failing states are often terror-genic.
So what is to be done? In America, there are few grounds for short-term optimism. Even so, assuming that Mr Trump wins – and Kamala Harris would be a weak opponent – he did initially display a few flickers of generosity and statesmanship since the assassination attempt. They were short-lived, but could there be some hope that his future behaviour might not be wholly undignified?
Perhaps not. But there is another glimmer of consolation. Richard Nixon once said of himself that his reputation for unpredictability could give pause to America’s enemies. The same might be true of Donald Trump, though the comparison is unfair. Nixon had a first-class geopolitical intellect. But does Donald Trump? We can but hope. If he won, what would he actually do about Ukraine? Does he himself know? Again, more hope is required, but it is at least clear that he would not want to seem weak.
Yet if he does prevail in November, there is a further flicker of hope. He would not be able to run again for the Presidency. But democracies are only stable if the losers more or less accept the result and wish themselves a better outcome next time while greeting the winners with a grumbling acquiescence. Whatever the outcome, that will not be the mood in America this time. Half the country will regard the other half as deplorables.
That is unhealthy, indeed dangerous. There is even talk of the risks of civil war among people not normally prone to hysteria. Over the next four years, we will have to believe in the truth of the old adage, that there is a lot of ruin in a nation. This goes with having faith in America. Its political system can indeed throw up deplorable candidates, but also unexpected successes. Abraham Lincoln is an example and so was Harry Truman. In 2028, America will need a unifier who will be respected at home and strong in the wider world. Surely that is not too much to ask?
At present, however, there is no reason why the West’s enemies should despair. In the early Nineties, remember all the enthusiasm for a new world order plus talk about the end of history? Well, history had other ideas. There did seem a time just post-Yeltsin when Mr Putin seemed as if he might be seducible. It was said that he was aware of the Soviet system’s defects: during his KGB days, he realised that affairs in the West were vastly more efficient. Although he was neither a democrat nor a free-marketeer by temperament, he wanted something that worked. Alas, he took another path, to the dark side and revanchism.
Equally, there was a moment when it seemed worthwhile to cultivate Xi Jinping. David Cameron has been teased for his Oxfordshire pub diplomacy, but if there was any hope of encouraging in the direction of international agreements and peaceful trade links, that was well worth the price of a pint. It may have failed. It was still worth trying.
Yet it could be that at the highest level, Chinese politics is suffering from PTSD. Many Chinese are devout racists. They believe that they are the most favoured nation. Yet for 150 years, they were knocked around, by the Americans, the British, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Japanese – and by themselves. They had one of the worst historical experiences of any Asian country. Does this not lead to a conviction that history owes them reparations, and that their former oppressors have no right to be respected?
Certainly, there seems no easy route to an entente with China: no early prospect of Nixon in China revisited. More hope needed: more chassis to be endured.
Matters are not much better on the mainland of Western Europe. The EU had twin foundations: free trade and political psychotherapy. The French always conceived it as a French jockey on a German horse. The Germans would pay the bills: the French would give the orders. This would enable France to pretend to be a superpower: much more dignified than the Rosbifs clinging to the Americans’ coat-tails.
The assumption was that France could gradually forget about past weaknesses and humiliations: a state founded on regicide, military defeats, Vichy. The Germans could overcome war guilt. Once the Spaniards joined, they could look firmly to the future, forgetting the Civil War. As for the Italians, I once tried to get a rise out of an Italian ambassador. ‘You are keen Europeans because you want a man to get off a plane in Rome and tell you what to do, knowing that Italian domestic politics cannot generate enough consent’. ‘My dear fellow,’ came the reply, ‘is it really necessary to state the obvious?’
These days, Signora Meloni is the strongest mainland leader among the pre-Iron Curtain nations. Who would have thought it?
Spain is deeply divided. Germany and France face an endemic political crisis. In Brussels, they still want more Europe and warn of the dangers of populism. The populace are listening, and are not deterred by the prospect of political forces which are democratic and responsive to public needs.
We do not know what Keir Starmer thinks about all this. It is worth remembering that in 1979, Margaret Thatcher was not expecting to be a foreign affairs PM and in his early days, George Bush Junior was suspicious of foreign entanglements. Both ended up in a different direction: she with rather more success. It will be interesting to see where Starmer ends up.
To conclude, let us return to Ireland and Yeats. ‘The best lack all conviction. The worst are full of passionate intensity’. When is that going to change?
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