A World of Bullies

On the day this is written we learn that Trump threatens to impose 200% tariffs on European wine and that Putin will accept a ceasefire only if Ukraine agrees (among other things) to receive no more deliveries of weapons during the period of the ceasefire, and to surrender its forces in Kursk to Russian troops. Wine and blood are very different liquids, but the spilling of both in these cases share a motivation. One producer of champagne in France who exports to the US said that such a massive tariff would kill his business stone dead, while as for Russia’s ‘conditions’ for a ceasefire, blocking Ukraine’s resupply of weaponry while itself being able to resupply and reorganise in preparation for the inevitable resumption of hostilities – for who could trust Putin for a nanosecond? – they are designed either to make a ceasefire impossible or (equally likely) to increase Trump’s bullying of Ukraine to accept defeat at Russia’s hands.

Both are examples of stark naked bullying. This is the world of Trump and Putin – and of Xi, of authoritarians, tyrants, psychopathic politicians in all the currently burgeoning tyrannies. Like a volcano bursting its caldera and vomiting its lava over everything, bullying is the geopolitics de nos jours.

The school playground provides the lesson that has to be applied. Bullies have to be stood up to. Yielding encourages more and worse bullying. Russia’s behaviour in Chechnya, Georgia, the Crimea and elsewhere went unanswered by the rest of the world, reprising the mistakes made with Japan and Hitler in the 1930s and the Soviet Union’s invasions of Hungary in November 1956 and Czechoslovakia in August 1968 respectively. Likewise with China in Hong Kong, the Spratly Islands annexations in the South China Sea and its perpetual war-games around Taiwan; likewise the EU-disruptive behaviour of Orbán’s Hungary over the last decade – inaction in all these cases has encouraged the bullies to more and more bullying. Trump’s coercive and destabilising trade bullying towards Canada and the EU and assertions about Panama and Greenland are of a piece with the bullies’ confidence that the international response to bullying will always be weak and therefore they can get away with it.

The Wayside Pulpit told us ‘Don’t put your wishbone where your backbone ought to be’. The endeavour to maintain peace from Neville Chamberlain to today, an endeavour in itself noble and principled, faces the ignoble and unprincipled methodology of bullying, and alas the cruel logic is that the contest is so asymmetrical as to be pointless. The truth in the saying ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’ is probably the harshest condemnation of human nature and society, of the disgusting, pathetic, stupid side of human affairs that accepts murdering people in large numbers as the way to achieve goals. The good side of human nature struggles to arrange matters so that the wicked side cannot dominate, as today it is doing; Frederick Douglass said, ‘We ought to have our government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man we shall be safe’, and the slow and very imperfect effort to achieve such a state of affairs has had its successes and prompted hopes. But it only takes a Putin, a Trump, or – more cleverly by far than either, a Xi and his predecessors – to smash a coach and horses through the frail fabric of structures, treaties and relationships in which the teetering balance of international affairs consists.

The League of Nations, the United Nations, the EU as a more local expression of sharing and cooperating for peace and progress, are not just hopeful models, but the right ones. The vulnerability of such models to bullies was tragically displayed by the League of Nations, and the United Nations concept represents an attempt to do the same thing better – though only somewhat less unsuccessfully. The fact that the EU is having to rearm and position itself for war contrary to its great aim to be a peace project predicated on the idea – championed by Thomas Paine in the eighteenth century and Cobden and Bright in the nineteenth century, among others – that intimate borderless relations of trade and exchange would make war impossible, has received a contemptuous slap in the face from Trump and Putin. China has combined bullying in some cases with a more subtle and incremental strategy, highly successful, of creating an imperium by adopting for its own ends the same Paine-esque idea, a kind of Chinese ‘EU’ in which economic dependency on it in the Asia-Pacific region and Africa gives it the same sort of ‘informal empire’ that Britain ran in the nineteenth century over those parts of the world it did not formally colonise.

But the long and short of it is that in the face of bullies, one has to accept the bitter necessity to face them down, because nothing else will stop them. To make Trump’s coercions backfire and blow up in his own face, the EU should subsidise those parts of its wine and other industries affected by US tariffs for as long as it takes for the backfiring to happen. With regard to Putin, the only thing he recognises is the fist: Poland is leading the way in raising both its own fists, and though it is a wretched thing to have to say, the rest of Europe is well-advised in following suit.

I’ve written a lot about war and the necessity to expunge it from human affairs entirely – see Among the Dead Cities (2006), War: An Enquiry (2017) and a number of essays in collections, and find it an anger-making necessity to have to concede that, in the face of bullies, thorough preparation for war - trade war or (alas!) fighting war both - is the only answer left. What a dismal, disappointing conclusion, yet it is ineluctable. It is the penultimate step that the cry to Resist!involves. The ultimate step is when one has accepted what is one prepared to sacrifice to stop the bullies. Eventually – almost too late – that happened with Hitler and Japan in the 1940s. The bullies are to blame; they are the poison in the system; the unequivocal judgment of history on them will be harsh and contemptuous, as it fully deserves to be. By the same token, history’s judgment on the bullied will depend on the relative locations of their wishbones and backbones. When every peaceful, constructive wish has been spat on by the Trumps and Putins, the backbone has to steel itself and make the whole body stand up tall.

With Trump it is a matter of calling his bluff. He threatens tariffs and withdraws them a couple of days later, he struts and pouts, a veritable Mussolini figure but somewhat less comical because he wields a far bigger wrecking-ball. There is nothing comic about Putin, despite the shirtless posing on horseback and so forth; malevolence (the perfect term: consider its etymology) towards anything that opposes his dream of restoring Russia to greatness, in both geopolitical standing and geographical extent, merits destruction in his eyes. Whether or not Trump and Xi will follow his example in actual military adventures, and that cannot be ruled out, the bullying commonality is the same.

All this is said in full consciousness that Britain and France in their days of empire were, and the US in its empire since 1945 remains, bullies. Bullying is a datum of history. When Genghis Khan invaded western Asia and the Middle East in the early thirteenth century CE, he slaughtered entire populations of cities and piled the skulls of the dead into huge pyramids as a warning to places on his forward path. But these facts of history do not legitimise bullying; very much the contrary, obviously; they are what should make us emphatically opposed to its continuation. Those who try the tu quoque argument today are therefore missing the point. If our bullying was bad, and it was, the very fact that we recognise this imposes a duty to stop it whenever and wherever it happens, now and in future. And it is happening on our watch right now, in the most egregious way. The unfortunate – tragic – fact that it might have to be countered on its terms rather than on those we would prefer, requires that we accept the call to that duty. And that’s where backbone comes in.