China is misreading the US, the US is misreading Europe

This is Iain Martin’s weekly newsletter, only for Reaction subscribers.

What did leaders think they were doing in the summer of 1914? With hindsight it seems obvious to us that one or more of the principal players should have shouted stop, or instigated a diplomatic initiative to avert the approaching calamity. And yet they did not. Why not?

Francis J. Gavin, in his introduction to latest edition of the Texas National Security Review, says it may be attributable to “unspoken assumptions” — what is left unsaid when leaders and their advisors make consequential decisions, what is not written down at the time but simply held to be true and the basis for action.

“How do we uncover these unspoken assumptions? Historians regularly examine the mentalities of individuals, institutions, communities, and states that shape how decisions are made,” says Gavin. “This demands making sense of the intellectual, social, and cultural dynamics within which the decision-maker operates.”

In 1968 the historian James Joll delivered a lecture at the LSE about the First World War, exploring the way those unspoken assumptions drove decision-making . 

The intellectual and political climate of the time was tough and unyielding. There was going to be a titanic clash at some point so bring it on, was the general tenor of decision-making by the Germans and others in that period. The British could see no way to stop it, and once war was deemed inevitable then leaders had to make the best of it. For this the British drew on jingoism to keep up spirits. The term jingoism (denoting aggressive patriotism and silly songs sung by civilians far from the frontline) comes from the Boer Wars and the London Stock Exchange, where bands of traders demonstrated their loyalty by halting trading and singing.

Gavin writes: “Joll persuasively argued that it was impossible to understand how decisions were made in European capitals during the summer of 1914 without recognizing the pervasive influence of a “doctrine of a perpetual struggle for survival and of a permanent potential war of all against all” that emerged from a witch’s brew of social Darwinism and popularized, if misunderstood, Nietzschean thought. According to Joll, there was a shared feeling in July 1914 that war was inevitable, which, in turn, produced almost a sense of relief when it finally came.”

Just as previous generations operated according to their unspoken assumptions, today’s leaders have their unspoken assumptions and we citizens have ours.

What unspoken assumptions, asks Gavin, inform our contemporary world? Leaders might make better grand strategy now, and perhaps avoid mistakes costing millions of lives, if those unspoken assumptions are interrogated before rather than after the disaster. Especially when the great powers of today – the US and China – stand on the brink of conflict in the Pacific.

Here are four unspoken assumptions I can identify, although there will be others and subscribers to this newsletter will have their own and better ideas.

One: China’s unspoken assumptions about the US are wrong. Its leaders are misreading the US and operating according to a dangerous assumption that the US is simply as cynical as the Chinese Communist Party leadership, or cynical in the same way. China is misreading America because its leaders and intellectuals fail fundamentally to understand the nature of the American project and how genuinely freedom is the driving force. Of course, the US is an empire and like all empires it makes grievous mistakes, such as Iraq (which I supported). It operates cynically to protect trade routes too. The American project is more than the sum of its errors though. When it offers security guarantees to allies they are voluntary in nature and rooted in the concept that we should be free to decide and be free to choose our governments. If you don’t want American troops on your soil – as De Gaulle demanded in the mid-1960s – then they will go, or as LBJ put it they took their hat and went home, or next door to Belgium and Germany.

The current guarantees and support for states menaced by Chinese nationalist expansionism and coercion are rooted in a US belief – genuine and correct – that freedom is worth defending and the alternative is no way to live.

Two: US leaders assume that because the US has aided Ukraine in such exemplary fashion then Europe will stand with the US on China if war breaks out over Taiwan, or by accident. I’m not sure that it is the case, or rather it depends on how war breaks out. What if there is a long Chinese blockade of Taiwan? It is not hard to imagine European governments pleading for de-escalation. There is likely to be a peace movement formed, with large rallies, and pressure from business too. If there is an attack, or perhaps an incident by accident, and American lives are lost, there will be anger and solidarity. The British will row in behind an American response, almost certainly, though I wonder if Labour would be as keen. What would Germany do? Or France, given President Macron’s approach and the way giant French luxury goods giants depend on China for profits. I don’t know, but the US should not make too many assumptions about European support.

Three: An unspoken assumption of hawks (among which I include myself) is that war in the Pacific has become something close to inevitable. It certainly looks as though it is headed that way. China’s defence minister used the IISS platform in Singapore this weekend to present a menacing critique of American meddling. But war in the Pacific looks inevitable? Retain the thought it might not be with clever enough grand strategy. In the spirit of Joll, and his analysis of what drove us off the cliff in 1914, it is worth even hawks keeping an open mind, just 10% of a possibility that this could be locked instead into a Cold War 2.0 style stand off rather than a hot war that it would be much better to avoid if possible.

Four: The unspoken assumption of doves, of which business leaders in Europe are the most determined, is that conflict will be avoided because otherwise trade will be disrupted. That is naive. Too many European business and financial leaders appear to be operating on the basis of unspoken assumptions that no longer apply, that net zero is the defining tale of our times, that last winter was the norm when it was a warm few months at the beginning of a long energy crisis, and that ramping up trade with China is a good idea when the US is likely if provoked to move to tough sanctions against China, which have already started with the US Chips Act. Even if there is not a war, we are living in a war era. We’re not in Cop26 any more, Toto. Yet big business in countries such as Germany appears to be living on a different planet, wanting to keep the China show on the road.

Even so, it’s important for leaders to keep thinking, and not 1914-style or post-9/11 be rushed along by unspoken assumptions. 

Realism required on the green revolution

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer and former Labour leader Ed Miliband are close. They live within walking distance in North London and it was Miliband who helped persuade public prosecutor Starmer to stand for Parliament, according to a profile of the relationship this weekend in the Sunday Times. Starmer then brought Miliband into the shadow cabinet, putting him in charge of developing the party’s energy policy.

How much longer the pair will stay close, and what happens when their alliance is tested, is one of the most intriguing questions about the next Labour government, which the polls suggest is coming.

Miliband is an ultra-hardliner on green policy and is pushing for Labour to make his green revolution the centrepiece of its general election campaign. Last weekend there were reports Labour plans to ban all new oil and gas development in the UK. This is as close to an insane a policy as any devised by a British political party in the last twenty years, and that’s saying something.

Even if one accepts the need to need to move to cleaner energy, we are obviously going to need oil and gas – a lot of it – for the transition lasting decades and perhaps beyond that. Professor Helen Thompson, one of the nation’s leading authorities on energy and where it intersects with politics, has been pointing this out politely.

If we refuse to use the remaining oil and gas in British waters then we will have to import even more of it. We’ll have less security of supply and be poorer, and make not even the smallest of dents in global emissions. All to make politicians feel virtuous. By the time the bill lands they’ll be in the House of Lords.

What is it going to take to get the political class to properly engage its brain on these vital questions? Cleaner energy is coming as technology improves but we need oil and gas, and nuclear too, or we’ll cripple our economy, a British economy that can really do without any more shocks. 

Meanwhile, Labour is taking donations from one of the major funders of Just Stop Oil, the millenarian, upper middle class, anti-human cult that stops the traffic and anything else it doesn’t like. The party says this doesn’t influence policy, which is not a credible denial when ultra-green Milibandism is Labour ploy.

The comedian and actor Rowan Atkinson a few days ago produced a perfect, calm, common sense counter to all such Westminster strutting on this subject. Atkinson is a car enthusiast, an early adopter of electric vehicles, and someone with an academic background in electronic engineering.

The EV has left him feeling duped, he said:

“The problem lies with the lithium-ion batteries that are fitted currently to nearly all electric vehicles: they’re absurdly heavy, many rare-earth metals and huge amounts of energy are required to make them, and they only last about ten years. It seems a perverse choice of hardware with which to lead the automobile’s fight against the climate crisis.”

Technology may produce lighter batteries that consume fewer rare resources. The UK firm JCB has pioneered a hydrogen fuel engine for machinery and trucks that may in time transform logistics and transport.

It will all take time, and cannot be made to fit into the timetable dictated by Miliband and a bunch of overgrown student agitators. It’s complicated. In the interim we should be keeping our existing cars for longer. They are now so well-made they can last for decades with care. 

It took an actor and master communicator (Atkinson’s previous interventions on free speech have been similarly sane) to signpost a sensible way forward.

What I’m watching

Having been in Germany for a few days, with a boatload of leading historians and political scientists going down the Rhine, it was inevitable the TV would go on in the hotel in Mainz. By accident I found the German equivalent of TOTP2, Top of the Pops 2, the BBC programme that runs old music clips for the amusement of viewers. To a non-German this archive programme is an undiscovered alternative pop world, a parallel track universe of pop naffness and unintentional hilarity. German serious music in the 1970s remade rock and sophisticated pop, establishing a new aesthetic and embedding electronica. It’s one of the reasons David Bowie moved to Berlin to reinvent himself in 1976, creating perhaps his finest work, that centres on the albums Low and Heroes.

But the German bubblegum pop of the same period as featured on the archive show is so lightweight and naff it makes Britain’s Brotherhood of Man look deep and sophisticated.

Here’s an uncomfortable looking lady with a flick hair do covering, in German, Cliff Richard’s We Don’t Talk Anymore. Next up, it’s Cindy und Bert, a wholesome duo. But what’s this? It’s 1971 and they’re performing, somewhat unconvincingly, a German language cover of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid, which they or their handlers have renamed Der Hund von Baskerville. 

Rex Gildo appears next, a smooth-faced heartthrob, like David Essex crossed with Coronation Street’s Ken Barlow. He croons in a rose garden. Don’t light a match near Rex. There is so much hair spray deployed that there is a high risk of explosion.

Time for the Les Humphries Singers, with Sing, Sang, Song, their entry to the 1976 Eurovision Song Contest. Les was English, but the group was Germany-based and had its hits there. He recruited up to twenty singers, but for Eurovision they were restricted to six. In the mid-1970s footage one of the six singers sports a highly innovative hair style, or I should say hair styles. He has at least three incompatible hair fashions deployed simultaneously. He has a prototype mullet, of the kind that became popular in mid-1980s Britain. The front is shocked, presumably gel is involved, in the style that became a feature of the new wave. And he’s added in a pony tail too.

We were laughing hysterically by this point, and then I decided to start googling these acts. Within a few minutes German 1970s pop started to look much darker, darker even then the twisted world of American popular entertainment from an era that specialised in chewing up performers and spitting them out.

Crooner Rex Gildo married his cousin, in what was reported by the media to have been a lavender marriage, a sham. They separated. It is said Rex could not deal with being gay in an era when entertainers in Germany, and Britain, were compelled to project a heterosexual image. Despite selling as many as 25 million records he failed to find happiness. He was in the pop industry but his life became like the plot of an opera. Suffering psychological problems poor Rex jumped from an apartment building in 1999 and died a few days later.

Eurovision in 1976 was the beginning of the end for the Les Humphries Singers. They came 15th and the hits dried up. The contest that year was won by Britain’s Brotherhood of Man, singing Save All Your Kisses for Me. Les returned to Britain. When the band reformed to tour in the 1990s, Les did not take part. After suffering a heart attack he died in 2007 in Basingstoke.

Where next?

Off to Italy now for work, taking the direct train from Frankfurt to Milan.

I hope you’re having good weekend.

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