War and Peace

The diary's last instalment

I’ve been writing this daily diary for longer than was originally intended. The Ukraine war was the catalyst and we all hoped it would be over by now. All wars do end but all last too long. It is time to bring it to an end. My thanks to Powerscourt, the company that paid me to write a daily blog for their clients.

This week’s diary begins, uniquely, on the last day, for fairly obvious reasons. Thanks for reading!

Friday 19 July

Today is the last edition of the ‘War and Peace’ wrap. Perhaps, therefore, a few personal reflections can be allowed, even a little self-indulgence.

It was, on the face of it, an odd thing for Rory Godson to start up. It was at the start of the Ukraine war, and he thought that his clients needed a slightly different take on potentially significant daily events. Odd, because why would a PR firm do something like this? The answer, I suspect, is to be found in the various ways Rory built Powerscourt into the firm it is today. You have, on occasion, to be both different and to spot client needs early. And even a PR firm needs all kinds of PR.

Two and a bit years of scanning the world’s media - official and unofficial - taught me a lot. It’s quite clear that mainstream media is resource starved: there is less well-sourced original reporting than ever, plenty of ill-informed opinion and far too many writers creating second or third-hand copy. But there are superb exceptions to this. Hundreds - or perhaps thousands - of hours of practice helps to distinguish the insights from the dross. ‘Don’t believe everything you read in the newspapers’ is a well-worn cliché, but apposite nonetheless. 

Europe is at war. Most obviously in Ukraine, but also in many other ways. Cyber attacks, infrastructure sabotage, disinformation campaigns and murder attempts are regular occurrences. In many ways Germany hold the key to what happens next: if it doesn’t wake up to the fact that war, of a most modern kind, has already started, Ukraine’s land battles are coming West and the war will turn into something all too familiar and all too close.

In one narrow, but vitally important, sense, it really doesn’t matter very much who wins the US election. The US has to withdraw its total protective umbrella over Europe because it can’t fight both Russia and China at the same time. America has to prepare for one or the other. Even the US doesn’t have the resources for both. So America will disengage from Europe. Germany and the rest of us have to realise that. America’s strategic choices are limited and they have decided to deter China. The US’ message to Europe is quite clear: we are not coming to your rescue for a third time. How much protection the US offers Europe will be determined by the American election, but, either way, it’s going to be a lot less than we are used to.

William Goldman famously said ‘nobody knows anything’.  Any proper economist will tell you that precise forecasting of anything is a mugs game. Weather forecasters are fond of saying they can’t accurately predict the weather but they can tell us what the climate will be. It’s about broad brush strokes rather than spurious precision. 

Conspiracy theories and outright lies spread faster than Covid, thanks to modern technology. Try reading all the bots and bloggers out there who, in one way or another, claim to be on the front line of the conflict and you will gain an understanding of how vast is Russia’s (and China’s) disinformation war. And how much better resourced it is than Western media. 

Resist the siren voices of certainty, and the madness of those who believe the World Economic Forum is running everything. The very obvious chaos out there stands in stark rebuke to those who believe anyone, anyone at all, is in charge.

We really don’t know much, especially about the future. We don’t even know who coined that famous aphorism (it was either Nobel-Prizewinning physicist Niels Bohr or American baseball hero Yogi Berra). But we can make good guesses about which way the wind will blow. 

The best (in my view at least) military analysts out there say that on a 5 year (ish) timescale Putin is determined to test NATO’s commitment to Article 5. The one that says if one is attacked, all are attacked. Another cliché: hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Putin’s future actions are unknown - and contingent. Europe must convince him that testing NATO would be ill-advised in the extreme. The US will be preoccupied with persuading Xi Jinping of the same thing. 

Thursday 18 July

Germany has long been criticised for failing to meeting the NATO target for defence spending of 2% of GDP. Reuters has got hold of a draft copy of the country’s latest budget proposals. Berlin ‘hopes’ to achieve the target in 2025. It also plans to halve its aid to Ukraine next year, claiming that Kyiv will get all of its financing needs from elsewhere. Germany is once again a big problem for Europe.

Russia has denied that its ground offensive in the Kharkiv region has failed. Officials also announced that several Russian border villages in the region would be sealed off to protect them from persistent Ukrainian shelling.

Moscow continues to soften its citizens up for the idea of a long war. Russia Security Council member and ex-President Dmitry Medvedev said yesterday that Ukraine would cease to exist by 2034. The idea appears to be that it will take 10 years to eradicate all traces of Ukrainian statehood. Medvedev has taken to referring to Ukraine as ‘country 404’, a pejorative term taken from the well-known computer error code.

Russia and India continue to strengthen ties. India is reported, for example, to be upping its weapons imports from Russia. Ukraine’s ambassador was recently summoned to India’s foreign ministry to be given a dressing down for President Zelensky’s critical remarks of Narendra Modi’s visit to Moscow.

‘America First’ is the headline today in the wake of Vice_presidential nominee J. D Vance’s speech to the Republican Convention. It’s a term dating back to the nativist American Party of the 1850s but gained widespread use after Woodrow Wilson used the slogan at the outbreak of the first world war - a promise to keep the US out of that war. During the 1920s it was the favourite term of the Ku Klux Klan. It was taken up by the America First Committee in the 1930s, a group dedicated to keeping the US out of world war 2. If history is any guide, therefore, the US will enter the next war about 3 years after it starts.

Wednesday 17 July

Former Russian President Medvedev has been sounding off again. The leading member of Russia’s Security Council said that should Ukraine join NATO, that would amount to a declaration of war against Moscow. Not entirely coincidentally, Viktor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister, wrote to leaders of the EU, saying Donald Trump is ready to act as a peace-broker ‘immediately, should he become President. Charles Michel, President of the European Council, responded to Orban, telling him that he had no authority to speak or negotiate for peace on behalf of the EU. Orban’s assertion that the EU had pursued a ‘pro-war policy’ was rejected by Michel.

Russia’s disinformation machine is vast and well-resourced. Efforts by Western social media platforms to take down bots and other malevolent actors are by exception rather than the rule. The Russian communications regulator has demanded Google reinstate more than 200 YouTube channels that have been blocked for sprucing propaganda. There are thousands more where they came from.

A different kind of war is likely to ratchet up should Trump-Vance take the White House in November. Trump initiated a low-level trade war with China during his first Presidency and his nomination of Vance increases the chances of a full-scale war starting next year. The promise is 60% tariffs on all Chinese imports and 10% for the rest of us.

Many people could be forgiven for thinking that economists don’t agree about anything but they would be surprised by the extent of unanimity about what those tariffs would mean. Vance, in particular, believe they would raise lots of tax revenues for Trump to spend. In fact, the biggest immediate consequence will be higher prices for American consumers - higher inflation, which could mean higher interest rates. After that, a lot depends on how the world, China especially, reacts to those tariffs. 

Tuesday 16 July

‘The Fog of War’ is an overused cliché, mostly attributed to the 19th Century Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz. But like most clichés, it can capture things pretty accurately. The New York Times carries a long piece today with the headline ‘Ukraine Battles to Contain Russian Advances Across the Front’.  It’s a story mostly about Russia reclaiming Urozhaine, a village in the south, one of the few places recaptured by Ukraine in last Summer’s largely failed counteroffensive. The NYT describes Ukrainian forces ‘battling along a 600-mile front’ to contain Russian advances. Chasiv Yar, in the east, also gets a prominent mention, a town which Russian troops seem on the verge of capturing. In general, all of Ukraine’s (limited) gains of last Summer are gradually falling to the Russians. The NYT acknowledges the success of Ukrainian forces in stopping the Russian advance on Kharkiv but strikes a gloomy tone about the outlook for Kyiv’s forces.

Alternatively, we can look at CNN and observe their most recent headline: ‘The West finally allowed Ukraine to strike back at Russia - and it seems to be working. ‘After many months on the back foot because of manpower shortages, Kyiv is finally able to take full advantage of Western military aid that started to flow into the country last month, after months of delay’. CNN’s journalists concentrate on the point also included (but only in passing) by the NYT: successfully averting Russia’s advance on Kharkiv.

Attritional, trench-style warfare like the frontline in Ukraine is often like this, rightly compared to the near-static lines of the First World War. Your correspondent just watched a 16-minute propaganda video shot from the body-cams of Azov-batallion forces clearing formidably constructed Russian trench lines in the Kreminna forest - it’s grim stuff. We can never be sure about the veracity, location or timing or such recordings but they always make for unpleasant viewing. We don’t have any body cam video from the first World War but the only real difference seems to be the absence of bayonets in 21st Century combat.

Those trench lines in northern France were more-or-less static for years. Many of the most famous battles of those times resulted in stalemate or ground captured and subsequently recaptured. It is al so familiar. But it is worth remembering that those trench lines over a century ago were static until, all of a sudden, they were not.

Monday 15 July

Around 40% of US households live in households with a gun, while one third of the population say, in response to surveys, that they personally own one. Registered republicans and Republican-leaning voters have told the Pew Research Centre that 45% of them own a gun. That share has oscillated around a broadly unchanged average since the 1970s. The equivalent figure for Democrats is 20%. 

45% of men have a gun compared to 25% of women. 38% of white Americans posses a gun compared to 24% of African-Americans, 20% of Hispanics and 10% of Asian-Americans. 58% of Americans favour stricter gun laws, something that is never going to happen. Texas has the most guns, over a million, followed by Florida and Virginia.

Aggregate data on gun ownership is tricky to pin down. The US makes a lot of guns every year but many are exported, so it’s not simply a question of adding up all past gun output. Estimates do vary but tend to cluster around 370 - 390 million firearms. The most famous stat is that there are more guns than people in the US.

The number of gun murders in the US has been steadily increasing over the past decade, currently running at around 15,000 per year. For comparison, the latest data says 22 people died in the last year in the UK from guns.

The latest CDC data on the total numbers of deaths involving firearms in the latest year is 48,204. Suicides and accidental deaths are the hidden, appalling, side of gun-related morbidity. More people die by the gun than in road traffic accidents, although both causes of death are dwarfed by drug overdose/poisoning fatalities. For comparison, the comparative per capita (per 100000 citizens)  road deaths statistics in the US, UK and Ireland are 12.9, 2.9 and 2.9 respectively. 

There is an awful lot of avoidable death and injury in the US.