Britain must learn the lessons of our new world disorder

Sir Roger Scruton may not be Prime Minister Keir Starmer‘s favorite author. Apparently Starmer prefers Victoria Hislop. But as he prepares to travel to Washington next week, the PM could scarcely spend his time more wisely than burying his nose in The Uses of Pessimism — and the Dangers of False Hope, one of Scruton’s most powerful works.

“Hope untempered by the evidence of history is a dangerous asset,” says Scruton. “And one that threatens not only those who embrace it, but all those within range of their illusions.” That is the correct, pessimistic, cast of mind with which to approach not just the war in Ukraine, and America’s ongoing commitment to Europe, but to international affairs overall.

Donald Trump’s presidency is the harbinger of many things — a vibe-shift in our culture, a dismantling of bureaucratic and therapeutic government, a commitment to what the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Alex Karp calls a “Technological Republic.” But it also marks a return to a bleaker, starker, more pitiless world landscape.

The ideal of a rules-based international order, where multilateral institutions restrain states pursuing their self-interest, has proved to be a false hope. Instead of a world operating according to the dreams of Antonio Guterres or Ursula von der Leyen, we are back to a world closer to that of Thucydides in which the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. It’s not a new world order but a based world outlook.

As a politician, I indulged in as many false hopes as anyone. I hoped regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq might see democracy spread across the Middle East. I imagined that the Arab Spring and the fall of Gaddafi would mark the eclipse of tyranny and terror. I sat around the cabinet table when we vowed with Boris that Putin must lose. So I am a reluctant realist, a chastened idealist not so much red-pilled by MAGA as schooled by unending history.

Which is why I sympathize with the prime minister’s stated strategy for Ukraine but fear it may be another false hope. His wish to commit British troops, alongside Britain’s allies, to keep the peace in Ukraine with an American “backstop” sounds measured and noble. But it’s also willfully blind. The revealed preferences of our European partners is to provide Ukraine with all available assistance short of actual help, and the attitude of America now is to wind down commitments to Europe as fast as feasible, the better to concentrate on the threat from China in the Pacific. How can Britain, with our economy in the mire and our armed forces suffering from long-term neglect, possibly hope to play policeman in eastern Europe?

There is something unattractive in Trump’s recent rhetoric on Ukraine — victim-blaming tinged with conspiracy theorism. His suggestion that Kyiv provoked the conflict is perverse, the shade cast in Zelensky’s direction an ugly echo of the Tucker Carlson view of Ukraine as a Potemkin democracy.

But there is a bigger strategic imperative driving Trump’s agenda. He believes America is overstretched and China is the real danger. He is conscious that China is anxious to do what it can to take over Taiwan before the demographic disaster of the one-child policy decimates its working-age population. He knows that America depends on Taiwan for the chips which assure its technological ascendancy and that denial of access to Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing would be the severing of his country’s carotid artery. So, like an investor seeing that there are only minutes left before the markets close, he wants to exit what he sees as a losing European trade and defend his important Asian equities.

Britain is still better placed than most nations to secure an audience at the Trump court. Ironically for Starmer, that’s partly because of Brexit. The UK is not in the same league as the EU when it comes to inflicting trade deficits on the US. And our independent stance on AI — which led us to join the US in rejecting the European approach to constraining that technology — has won favor in the White House. But winning a hearing is not the same as winning the argument.

British leaders might think that peace with Putin is appeasement that will only encourage Beijing, but Trump believes it is a pivot away from a war the West cannot win to preparation for one it cannot afford to lose. We might think that everyone gains from a rules-based international order. But for President Trump, the deal appears to involve America paying to uphold that order — while the rules on everything from tech regulation to carbon emissions are being set by others in ways which weaken the US.

For a president elected on a platform of America First, that system makes no sense. And for any realist, born-again or otherwise, hard facts have to be faced. No nation can forever be bound to operate against its own self-interest — democracies least of all. Populations will not long endure being taxed beyond their incomes, sending their boys overseas and accepting unequal terms of trade simply so diplomats can have an easier time at cocktail parties.

Britain must accept that if we are to earn the respect of others and the right to determine the future, we need a realist reset. The PM has realists in his circle — Defense Secretary John Healey and the philosopher Jonathan Rutherford — and he is known to admire the work of John Bew, the biographer of Castlereagh and Attlee and author of a brilliant work on realpolitik. Let me tentatively offer some rules for realists in the world we now inhabit — a world where China’s Leninists seek to exploit our weakness economically, Russia’s gangster regime tries to bully us militarily, and Islamist terrorists and their sponsors hope to subvert us internally.

How can we ask people to integrate into a society where the forces of disintegration go unchecked?

Rule 1 There is no substitute for hard power. A nation’s ability to defend its people, its values and its allies, let alone its potential to advance noble causes, depends crucially on military strength. And that is much more than just the percentage of GDP allocated to defense. Size matters when it comes to your security budget, but not as much as how you use it. Europe’s revealed preference over many years has been to invest defense spending in more conferences, more complex command structures, more byzantine procurement regimes and more efforts at European “integration,” rather than more highly trained troops and more effective kit.

Rule 2 We can no longer afford luxury beliefs. It’s not sustainable to have investment funds which shun arms companies on ESG grounds. It’s no good saying you want to save the planet if you can’t stop China and Russia controlling more and more of it. It’s self-harming to apply DEI policies to the military. The services are there to intimidate and, if that fails, kill our enemies, not impress them with how kind we are to people struggling with their gender identity. Laws policed by foreign courts which prevent our security and intelligence services doing what is necessary to keep us safe are weapons we have fashioned to arm the terrorists who wish to harm us. If our agents can’t do their job because of the ECHR, it must be changed until they can. Or junked.

Rule 3 A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand. There is a limit to how long any state can remain resilient if it imports large numbers of people from abroad and not only does not require them fully to integrate but actually apologizes for the history and character of the nation they have chosen to make their home. If we are set upon hand-wringing about our past, decolonizing our curriculum, entertaining the idea of reparations for historic sins, dismantling our privilege and declining to take pride in our culture, then what is it we are actually seeking to defend? How can we ask people to integrate into a society where the forces of disintegration go unchecked? And how can we ask citizens, however long their families have lived here, to bear arms and risk their lives for our nation if we can’t bear to say we’re proud of it?

Rule 4 Unilateral disarmament was bonkers when it came to nukes and it’s no better when it comes to energy. Giving up our nuclear deterrent when Brezhnev was in the Kremlin would not have encouraged him to do the same. Our headlong drive towards net zero doesn’t seem to have given China cause to slow down its consumption of hydrocarbons. It has, however, given them an opportunity to make the West as reliant on their EVs and solar panels as Germany has been dependent (until recently) on Russian gas.

It may be the feeblest of false hopes to imagine that a government with Richard Hermer as attorney-general and Ed Miliband as energy secretary would embrace such flinty realism. So I have to be pessimistic about the prospect of any of these suggestions finding favor.

But what is the alternative? As Bismarck said, “a conquering army at the border will not be stopped by eloquence.” Whichever border we wish to defend — whether a principle that cannot be crossed or a frontier that should not be breached — we need to show a steeliness that has eluded us thus far. If Trump can teach us anything, it is that.

Is the idea of a ‘liberal, international world order’ dead? Michael Gove discusses with Robert Kaplan — author of the new book Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis: audioboom.com/posts/8656749-new-world-disorder-cholesterol-pseudoscience-vs-scepticism-the-magic-of-dickens