Troop contributions to the Afghan imbroglio help define what is meant by the ‘West’:-

• The core group are those countries which have 1,000 or more troops in the country (UK, Germany, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, France, Poland, Australia – all in order of contribution) led by the US providing a full 55% of the troops.
• A secondary group are those providing between 100 and 999 who might be regarded as fellow travellers – in no particular order: Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Portugal, Macedonia, Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Norway, Romania, Sweden, Lithuania, Spain, Estonia, the Czech Republic, New Zealand and Turkey.
• There is a tertiary group of those just making a gesture under UN auspices with 99 or less – Austria, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iceland, Ireland, Jordan, Luxembourg, Singapore, Slovakia, Ukraine, Slovenia.

What is noticeable about this list is not the dominance of the US (which may be taken for granted) nor the presence of the big NATO and ‘white’ Commonwealth players.

These latter have long helped to define the West as a support system for US leadership because of their Cold War and imperial histories.

Similarly, the fellow traveller role of all the small nations of Europe, but most noticeably Turkey and those entering the EU orbit in the Balkans, is also no surprise. 

Nor is the tentative presence of three former Soviet Republics who together may bring NATO to the very border of the new Russian Empire. What is most noticeable now are the absences and anomalies.

The West Defined By Its Absences

Considering this is a fully UN-sanctioned Mission backed by the most powerful military nation on earth, involvement in the Afghan Project is, in fact, limited to just one network of nations that descends from one ethnic community (the British) and from the anti-Soviet European project.

Outside this zone, which now brings the ‘West’ right up to very edge of the Moscovite sphere of influence and no further, the lack of engagement by former imperial possessions that are not ethnically British in origin is very noticeable.

This does not mean that such states are anti-Western. And, of course, some of the world's oldest independent entities (Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Japan) are well embedded in Western strategic planning. Yet none of these are prepared to engage directly in this West Asian flagship project.

There is no involvement by Latin America, from the Muslim World (other than Turkey and Jordan, the latter a de facto Western subsidiary) or Asia (other than the tiny city-state of Singapore). Japan is supportive but dare not show it too openly for domestic political reasons.

Even within the West, there are nuances – Spain in terms of scale should be working at the same level as the other major European nations and yet, under its socialist government, it remains resistant to doing so.

Despite broadly centre-right governments in the UK, Germany, Italy and France and centre-right political cultures, in global relations terms, in Poland, the Netherlands, Canada and Australia, there is still a large minority of Europeans who are unenthused by American policies.

Such dissent is associated with the real rather than with the ‘ersatz’ centre-left. Similarly, the very quiescence of governments allied to the US but outside the core group indicates a concern that their peoples do not fully share the enthusiasms and analyses of their elites.

A cynic might say that the arrival of true democracy across the world at this time would shrink rather than increase liberal and Western strategic influence and that all we are seeing is a new form of imperial management.

Is the democratic West working the global system through undemocratic viceregal allies? Yes, although that would be a gross oversimplification.

The realist-liberal tension in Western foreign policy lies partly in the recognition that this post-imperial system of management does exist and that it does undercut the West's universalist claims by even accepting that there is a centre and a periphery.

Tensions Within The System

The relative lack of enthusiasm of Austria, Ireland, Iceland, Luxembourg, Slovakia and Slovenia for an Afghan engagement also suggests that some very small states are inclined to maintain their neutralism and to free ride off the others in 'global security' terms.

Perhaps it would be kinder to say that many states within the West have not necessarily bought into the idea that their prosperity and security depends on sustaining the creaky post-Soviet Western quasi-imperial structures that seems to oblige Europeans to fight in Asia and Africa.

These are nuances that might be hidden if the EU developed its own independent defence force much as liberal California might be less likely to send troops to Iraq than, say, Colorado or South Carolina if the US had remained a truly State-driven polity.

Of course, Israel is not providing troops for obvious political reasons. It might reasonably be included as a troublesome outpost but one that is definitely of and in the West – not quite the Crusader State of the Islamists but also not so very different in the long run of history.

If you were to translate all this into map terms and colour it, say, blue – whilst noting that other forms of assistance are given by Japan (and by others such as Pakistan) – then the US zone of 'hard' influence is quite definitely not extending itself much beyond its heartlands.

The West is North America, Australasia and Europe and that’s about it.

Liberals may whinge about the lack of Western values underpinning regimes such as those in Zimbabwe and Burma or of China ‘oppressing’ Tibet but there is no reason why these targets of Western outrage should care too much.

Pivotal states like Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, India, Indonesia and China (and, of course Russia which would be a tactless intervention in any case) are noticeable by their absence in Afghanistan.

Such states only very reluctantly support Western universalism if at all when 'failed states' pop up near their borders. The West claims ‘universalism’ with less and less cause to do so in reality rather than ideology.

The ‘West’ is now what remains from the colonial settlement strategies of the three previous centuries and from the detritus of historic resistance (in Europe) to the encroachments of Islam and of the stubbornly irrepressible Russian Empire.

To non-Westerners, the West is either made up of the same old colonialists and imperialists (aka hypocrites) or it is concerned with defences of territory or of economic and cultural dominance that are of no fundamental interest to their twenty-first century developmental targets.

On Universalism

It is commonly accepted that, outside the core zone, many elite groups remain attached to the West for reasons of collective security and economic interest without accepting its ‘universal’ values.

They may even provide very substantial resources for the ‘West’ in its struggles against insurgency – but domestic conditions make it extremely difficult for them to offer the overt help that their security patrons demand.

Frustrations with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (and others) have often disrupted regional diplomacy in recent years for just this reason.

There are now severe limitations to US influence. These are only going to get more difficult to remove as global inflation cuts into the ‘understandings’ that keep governments from having to deal with mass discontent and uprisings.

A test case recently was the attempt by the US to send an envoy, associated with the Guantanamo operation in the past, to Pakistan. Perhaps this was an attempt to test the boundaries of the acceptable.

The choice seemed crass for a Muslim country with an ambiguous attitude to both the US and the insurgency. The Pakistan Government pointed this out – diplomatically.

The Next President and American Power

How is the next US President is going to handle this situation? The US as an effective force is now restricted to a ‘civilisation’ with boundaries in the Huntington sense. It is Orwell’s Oceania.

The US and its most natural allies are reaching the limits of their expansion as they pacify the Balkans and extend NATO into the Ukraine and Caucasus (if they can). 

Or rather, geostrategically, they can extend power only into zones similar to Afghanistan, reproducing the model of the national socialists whereby the expectation was of permanent guerrilla war to keep the barbarians at bay beyond Europe's 'natural' frontiers.

The West is moving forward because it is on the defensive. It has to halt any rise of the 'real' centre-left within itself, defend boundaries as they settle [Ukraine, Caucasus, Levant] and smash or reform the heartlands of insurgency [effectively, the Muslim poorer classes in Asia and Africa].

It also has to hold allied non-Western elites to the Western economic way to stop them slipping under the protection of others - and, above all, keep the flow of energy and food resources heading in the right direction securely and safely.

These are massive tasks. Placing Hilary Clinton to one side for the moment, Obama and McCain offer radically different potential solutions.

McCain

We might call McCain’s position ‘deep conservatism’. For him and for his western conservative supporters, the answer is not internationalist but Huntingtonian – to strengthen and deepen what holds the West together as a distinctive liberal democratic culture.

From this point, it can then go on the offensive in defence of its values and powers. In short, he would make it in the interest of allies to cleave fast to America through self interest and, if necessary, fear. And yes, this is the precursor to a new Cold War.

It is directed at Russian influence in the context of Europe and Chinese influence in the context of global resource access.

It is also directed at Iran in the context of the defence of those Western frontiers formally and informally set in the Levant, in Iraq and in the palaces of the dictators and dynasts of the Arab world.

It will mean soft power moves against the European and Democrat centre-left, yet more resources poured into counter-insurgent operations. more diplomatic brinkmanship and more chances of direct military clashes between proxies and even principals.

However, it could also mean that the US returns to its position as respected Great Power in precisely the sense understood in the Nixon-Kissinger years. By definition, this means that we might see McCain in Tehran talking turkey with Khatami (not Ahmedinejad) one day.

Obama

We are waiting for Obama to articulate his alternative. Part of his problem is that this alternative is likely to be one that might lose him the US Election if articulated too clearly.

Another paradox of democracy is that the wisdom of crowds is all very well but not when the crowds are getting their information from half-educated journalists and manipulative editors.

Conservatives can, as in China, Iran and Russia or Italy, always rely on national-populism and simplicities to drive less educated or informed centre-ground voters into their camp.

Obama’s team have to talk in generalities and then accept that, in office, they will be faced by brutal reality and depress their more idealistic supporters – much as Kennedy proved to be far less progressive in foreign policy practice than we like to remember.

Some truths remain – the US has to struggle for resources, is the main target of insurgency (often for good reason from an historical perspective), will not abandon Europe to Russia or let Israel be pushed into the sea.

It also has a powerful military and corporate interest committed to the free global market and Obama is no socialist. He is also a lot less radical than we are being led to believe. All these truths limit the ‘change’ we can expect from an Obama Presidency.

However, there is a hard and a soft way of achieving national ends. An Obama Presidency is likely to look at the current state of Oceania and ask why it has to be a fortress instead of a base and why everything has to be done through the threat of blood and mayhem.

And so, while we will still see a lot of blood and mayhem and great power competition, the Obama way may seek to draw a line under the perceived hypocrisies of American democracy operating overseas that have undercut its ability to build support amongst global liberals. 

Extraordinary rendition, the Guantanamo system, the use of torture, the air attacks on civilians and so on are not just 'crimes', they are blunders. A statement that we suspect McCain would agree with even if he drew different conclusions on the balance of hard and soft power.

Obama may try tactics designed to bring the European centre-left into the American tent and negotiate boundaries with other empires so that political competition does not result in military confrontation.

He may drive allies to pay more for their security and economic arrangements with liberal if not democratic reforms.

The Hindsight of History

To historians, the Bush-Cheney administration is going to look like an anomaly but one that sped up an adjustment to changed post-Soviet conditions that might otherwise have taken twenty or thirty rather than six to eight years to effect.

A lot of the pain of an inevitable correction is being suffered in a short sharp burst.

The next President may either be the last gasp of the old ways or the President who sets America on an adjustment to a new phase in its Great Power status, one that might well keep it as ‘top dog’ for at least the first half of this century.

So, two big choices for the American electorate ... assuming Hilary Clinton is eventually knocked out of the race. We have neglected her because we see a Clinton II Administration as representing the triumph of the machine over revitalisation and just more of the same.

A woman who has acted ambiguously over the Iraq engagement, who twists and turns and places the acquisition of power wholly ahead of any fixed sense of principle, is less credible in international relations than the two men who oppose her.

It is nothing to do with gender - it is sad that people still will vote along gender or colour lines without asking whether the person is fit for the office.

America does not need an opportunist. America could certainly do without another four to eight years of drift amongst a squabbling bunch of Washington insiders. But that is a matter for Americans and the rest of us will just have to adjust to their final decision.

Most of the world is probably just happy that the Bush-Cheney Administration is finally exiting after eight years of getting everything wrong that could possibly have been done wrong – whether looked at from a liberal or a conservative realist perspective.

There are political markets within the West and even beyond its boundaries who are ready to support either Obama (from the centre-left but also from the centre-right) or McCain (from the right). All we outside America want is clarity and competence.

www.tppr.co.uk

I make no apologies for the length of this posting. Politically, the Vatican should never ever be under-estimated. It covers one sixth of the global population.

Thrice, at least, it has recovered, ostensibly, from moral low points – under the reforming Popes of the High Middle Ages, at the Counter-Reformation and now (arguably) under the current Pope and his predecessor. Hitler contained it, Stalin misjudged it.

The Crusades and the Thirty Years’ War were fruits of its new reforming discipline on the first two occasions. Its new ideological reincarnation as exponent of a conservative universalism mindful of the poor and the excluded may seem unlikely to have similar consequences, but we are not so sure.

The Pope at the United Nations

As a political force, despite some appalling ethical failings in the interim, it has survived. Since 1945, it has reversed its own brief experimentation with liberalism to develop into a unique force in global politics.

It is time to ask – how important is the Vatican in international affairs today? Our answer is – considerably so. Is it a force for good. Our answer is – beware of Latins bearing gifts.

In his Speech at the UN on 18 April, the Pope openly adopted the liberal interventionist stance of Blair, Bush, Sarkozy and the rest of the ‘moral’ liberal Western right.

The UN, in his view, must intervene in cases of human rights violations and deal with the impact of humanitarian disasters. So far, so ethical – though ends are not the muddy matter of means as the Crusaders and Hapsburgs found out.

This Speech now places the Catholic Church firmly in the camp of opposition not only to socialism and communism but also to national sovereignty and nationalism (and so anti-imperialism, Russia, China and their networks).

This positioning is worth looking at in more detail because it is perfectly consistent with the Church's mission since the days of Constantine, indeed Peter and Paul.

The Pope’s authority, decisive in the unraveling of the old Soviet Union and pushing it back to its Eastern Orthodox boundaries (noting that the Ukraine is a flash point because its pro-Western and pro-Russian halves are precisely those of Uniate (Catholic) and Orthodox belief), has now placed itself at the disposal of the more ideological and expansionist wing of the Atlantic West.

If a country is Christian in orientation and that Christianity is older than the Protestant Reformation, no matter if slightly off centre to the mainstream Catholicism of Rome, its tendency is towards seeking the protection of the political West. 

Such enclaves in faraway lands become flashpoints or pivotal states in the conflict between culture zones – we think of much of Sub-Saharan Africa where it pushes up against Islam in the Sahel or Soudan, of Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa, of the Maronites in Lebanon or of Georgia in the Caucasus.

Any speech by the Pope that criticizes the West (as he has done over Iraq or AIDS policy) or in support of it can have immense effects on global affairs, given its massive global reach and the fears of these enclaves.

What He Seems To Mean

In some ways, the Papal commitment to liberal interventionism is no surprise (after all the Church has never been shy of expansion of values through force since Augustine first justified the use of repression in the case of the Donatists) but it has immense meaning at this point in history.

The Pope, following on from his ‘workerist’ populist Polish predecessor, is merging a Catholic or faith-based morality with progressivism in an unprecedented way, beaching both secular liberalism and socialism on the Left and shifting ‘ethical’ politics sharply to the Right where Blair (now openly a Catholic but opaquely secretive about his beliefs when in office) acts as the key transitional figure in the West.

The resistance points within the West are ‘nationalist’ socialism or secular social democracy where it can survive, European Protestantisms and those secularist liberalisms resistant to the influence of all faith-based groups.

These are all being subtly undermined by the populist appeal of such figures as the Dalai Lama, theocrats whose benignity hides the fact that their legitimacy comes from something numinous that half of the population globally is convinced does not exist or does not care if it exists or not because of the way their brains are wired up.

So the Pope is not only challenging other faiths (notably the Eastern Orthodox and Islam) but trying simultaneously to pull them in with him against the atheists, humanists, ‘pragmatists’, secularists and downright existentialists who used to dominate the Left (until Tony Blair came along) and progressive thought.

The Catholic Church is, in effect, attempting a global ideological coup.

The question in all this for liberals is, if autocracy and theocracy become liberal (except in matters of sexuality) and progressive, then what is the role of democracy?

Not the democracy of Christian Democracy or the new Islamic Democracy in which the constitutional forms of democracy are managed by closed networks but the sort of democracy that Jefferson or Thomas Paine envisaged - where free open discussion takes place. 

Progressive or Democrat?

This has been the time for liberals and progressives, especially the technocrats, who despise democracy to come out into the open. The ‘wisdom of crowds’, especially traditionalist crowds in emerging countries and consumerist crowds in the developed world, comes up too often with the wrong decision from the perspective of such people.

This negative democracy is the democracy that elects President Ahmedinejad or might elect Al-Sadr in Iraq. It is the democracy that permits supermarkets to give the people what they want at the expense of the 'planet' (whatever that means). It does not like individualism, it does not like collectivism - there is only universalism.

So Democracy must be managed and the lesson of Ahmedinejad and Al-Sadr is increasingly understood – that faith is, indeed, a tool in the management of empire much as it was in the days of Constantine and requires use against those who use it against 'us'.

This is the new ‘brokered deal’ in global politics – an inter-faith consensus led (in its own eyes) from Rome to sustain the ‘new’ secular Roman Empire based on Washington. If the Fourth Rome (Russia considers itself the Third Rome) can operate according to the broad moral direction of shared faith, order can be restored.

This is an old vision that rises on human ambition and crumbles on human failings if we look at the long wave of history. Today’s proponents of it think that we are at the start of a tsunami of universalism.

Progressive policy and liberal values are now being detached from democracy on the assumption that democracy is no longer liberal and progressive but nationalist and populist – and there is some justification for this.

Democracy works at its best when it is small (like Iceland) and worst when it is big. The creation of mega-states like the EU is creating conditions which require either the rigid constitutionalist solutions of the US or an informal centralization in which power is removed by stealth from the people.

The most dangerously wrong idea implicit in this should be that technocrats know enough to make wise judgements (the Soviet error) but, in fact, it is that there are ‘wise, natural leaders’ like the Pope and perhaps Tony Blair (in his own mind) to which progressives should turn.

There is, in short, a need for Popes and Emperors, albeit democratically elected Emperors.

This is a world in which ‘great men’ meet in counsel at places like Davos and send Envoys to trouble spots – much like the conduct of European affairs before the Treaty of Westphalia created a Europe of dynastic nation states.

A Lesson in History

The reference to the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 is not an absurd interpolation. Tony Blair himself referred to this Treaty in Chicago in his own great foreign policy speech before 9/11, even if that speech’s proposals for a new world order have turned to dust in the wake of Iraq and Darfur.

His theory was that the day when nation states had fixed boundaries and Governments could do what they liked within them – a settlement designed to stop the atrocious bloodletting of the Thirty Years’ War – was now over.

But, of course, the Treaty of Westphalia was a classic political defeat for the Catholic Church and the Habsburg Empire and created the conditions for the Enlightenment, the rise of science, the liberation of the Jews, Voltaire and atheism - no wonder some don't like it.

Churches have long memories (like the Chinese). Much of the Vatican’s political history since 1648 has been the story of holding on to what states and territory it could and then expanding globally with their empires. On balance, nationalism did not serve it as well as universalism.

First, its imperial spread was restricted to the first wave of empire-building – that of Spain and Portugal – and this meant that it was associated with extermination, poverty and the sort of conservatism that was really just land-grabbing by gangsters.

With some heroic exceptions like Bartolome de Las Casas, it developed no voice for the ‘damned of the earth’ until liberation theology and then it promptly crushed that as far too communistic.

The expansion was both moderated in its brutality by the Church but it was also justified by it – much as the Crusades before it were justified (scarcely moderated) by an ideological drive to capture Jerusalem, not dissimilar to the drive for Eretz Israel from Zionists.

Second, its national engagement was unenthusiastic so that it became associated with the family businesses called dynasties rather than with the middle classes.

It was certainly not associated with the interests of the new urban or even rural poor (except in terms of a desultory welfarism that, after the Reformation, was far less effective than the current Muslim commitment to zakat).

This meant that middle class urban resentment and then working class resentment rapidly became anti-clerical and secularist.

This fuelled a wave of republican revolt after 1789, exemplified by the murderous Napoleon even more than Robespierre, and ended in the bloodbath in Spain in the 1930s.

Such resentments also fuelled the Church’s greatest foe after Islam and Protestantism, Communism, and the one that it has dedicated its politics to extirpating in the twentieth century to the extent of getting into bed with some very bad people indeed.

Catholic Populism As Anti-Communist Tool

A third factor has its effects even now. On the basis that my enemies’ enemy is my friend, the Church became a populist voice only where ‘bourgeois’ Protestants or non-Catholic dynasts (British Empire or Tsar) oppressed peasants and nationalists on their own account. There are few heroes in history when the long view is taken – we are a rum lot, we humans.

The Irish and the Polish have consequently emerged as the Church’s secret weapon to undermine their enemies with a political knife directed at their soft parts – as the Soviets discovered with Solidarnosc and the British with the persistence of anti-British feeling in the US.

When Gordon Brown decided to give his foreign policy address in Boston and when Tony Blair used New Labour to promote the faith-based Right, both were paying ritual obeisance to the role of Irish Catholic resistance to the Establishment within parties of the ostensible centre-left in the Anglo-Saxon world, whether Democrat, New Labour or Australian Labour Party.

The link between the Truman Doctrine, the ideology of liberal interventionism and the Vatican is loose but it is there. It was constructed as a virtuous circle of anti-communists, trades unions and intellectuals that was designed to fight the Soviet Union and Leftist existentialist thinking.

Such thinking was influential within the State Department and was always a faction fighting the traditional British Establishment within British politics until its recent triumph. And the Vatican is a necessary partner.

The Dark Side

There is a fourth factor. The policy of using nationalism against its secular internal enemies across Europe worked against the Vatican in the long run.

It was not only its implicit support for Spanish and Italian fascism in the 1920s and 1930s and its apparent tolerance of the Nazi experiment in Germany, but the fact that matters had degenerated by the early 1940s into cases where priests were actually leading small fascist states in Europe (Slovakia) or even complicit in mass murder directly (in the Croatian Ustase).

The moral base to the Church collapsed to worse than medieval levels, certainly only complicity in the slaughter of innocents during the Cathar Crusade is comparable, as some of its senior members (admittedly a very small group that should not be exaggerated in size by any means) actually assisted in the escape of war criminals.

Mind you, few on any side, including ‘ours’, acted with decency in Europe by the time total war was in operation after 1941. Why should a human institution like the Church be any different. Its record is still better than many if not most.

But none of these brutal facts, whether they be the murderous use of state power against donatists, Cathars and other dissidents, the justification of aggressive war against Muslims or native Amerindians (though the Aztecs were the Nazis of their day), the indulgences racket, the cover up of child abuse and corruption within a centralized monolithic structure or complicity through turning a blind eye to horrendous war crimes, none of these can change the faith of millions in 2,000 years of revelation.

We know this from our own left-wing Irish-origin side of the family which sees such matters as incidents or irrelevant to the much wider and broader message summarized in the word ‘culture’ more than that of 'faith' as understood by a Protestant.

Of course, since 1945, a subdued Church learnt its lessons, although only after a failed attempt at ‘real’ liberalism, and started to regain its self-confidence and ethical compass.

Through its connections with the Atlantic Establishment, it engaged in the subversion of the Polish communist state that resulted ultimately, along with the intrinsic failures of communist administration and the defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan, in the end of one of its arch enemies as global super power.

This placed it back in the mainstream of history under the previous Pontiff, who not accidentally came from one of the countries in which populist nationalism had taken a Catholic turn without (unless you count some local pogroms against Jews after the Nazis had departed) being implicated in fascistic crimes.

The Neo-Conservatism of the Vatican

Equally important, the Church repositioned itself as deeply conservative in terms of its core values but also as Judaeo-Christian rather than as just Catholic.

This did not necessarily mean as much inter-faith tolerance as appears to be the case if you read the media. The concept 'Judaeo-Christian' excludes Islam (which came after the Crucifixion, the mysterium tremendum at the heart of the Christian experience).

Protestants and Orthodox were still the ‘other’ and would only cease to be the ‘other’ when they recognized Rome. It is no accident that the Vatican is now considering the canonization of Anglican-turned-Catholic Cardinal Newman.

It wants to send a very political message about God’s Will, a call heard by our previous Prime Minister. Britain is a primary target for recovery. Anglicanism is the faith most easily detached in whole or in part from the Protestant to the Catholic side of the equation. A Catholic monarch could 'crack' it.

And, some religions, such as Buddhism, one step from the Churches’ real philosophical fear which is twentieth century existentialism, were directly attacked by the last Pope in his writings as nihilist.

This attack on Buddhism is, of course, muted nowadays in a common distaste for materialist communism and perhaps for more cynical reasons – my enemies’ enemy is my friend.

But the new compact was with the primary target of historic Catholic snobbery and resentment – the Jews. Jews were often at the heart of secular republican and even communist development in a counter-resentment at their exclusion.

Jewish sentiment was rightly highly suspicious of the Churches’ slow development of an acceptance that the conduct of catholics (often the Church itself) towards the Jews had been unacceptable and that it may have unintentionally contributed to the Holocaust, albeit through a sin of omission and not commission.

Jewish inter-faith reformers and Catholic reconcilers have worked on Holocaust issues assiduously over many years (with the conflict over the meaning of Auschwitz as ‘holy’ site becoming pivotal). This was extended to reconciliation in Eastern Europe as the Soviet Empire receded.

The policy has been a triumph. There were no pogroms as Soviet authority collapsed.

Governments of the Right were discouraged from playing the anti-semitic card because it would lose them the respect of the West, especially an equally subdued Germany. East Europeans saw the future in terms of the Atlantic-Catholic model developed since 1945 rather than pre-war fascism.

From this point on, two wings of the Atlantic position that dealt with each other with justifiable mutual suspicion became integrated.

The Jewish interest (which cannot be disentangled from either the interest of Israel or the interest of Israel as seen through the American Congress) and the Vatican interest could now both cohere around a wider radical liberal agenda that we now know as various versions of what is popularly called neo-conservatism.

The Alliance Settles Into Place

Israel, the Anglo-Saxon Atlantic alliance and the Vatican have cohered on a value system (albeit with differences of emphasis). Faith has been integrated into politics.

Universal values could again be represented as not only superior to national and even democratic values but they required participating nations to use whatever force was necessary to defend and extend them.

We are back to Church Militant, only as part of an alliance with secular interests. This is Constantine and the Church, this is Charles V and the Church – this is the Church seeking out the dominant power of the day and making its interests the Church’s interest so that the Church’s interest might be its interest.

This was also part of the background to Blair’s Speech before 9/11 which introduced liberal interventionism (in relation to Kosovo and coincidentally directed at an Orthodox nation) to a reluctant and very liberal-secular US administration.

The arrival of Bush gave Blair his chance – a right-wing faith-based President and a centre-left (at least ostensibly) faith-based (albeit without telling his people) Prime Minister could get out there and kick-ass for the most ‘moral’ of reasons.

Shame that the Church was not quite so enthusiastic about the route chosen for this use of new-found power in the American national interest revenge attack on Saddam Hussein.

9/11 also changed attitudes to Islam but only by making a very complicated situation more complicated. The Vatican has a problem with Islam precisely because it claims later revelation than Christ’s and because it has no negotiating centre.

Judaism is relatively simple to deal with. It can be presented as the noble precursor to the Truth and, if it has no negotiating centre as such, it is smaller and largely embedded within the West rather than operating with sovereign power outside it.

This means that the Vatican is left to negotiate with faith-based sovereign equals such as Saudi Arabia who have only limited command of the faith-based agenda.

It also means that disruption and increased nationalism associated with Islam, from Pakistan through to Algeria, is directly damaging Christians who are increasingly seen as agents of the West.

What is happening to Christian enclaves is the same as happened to post-war Jews in the Middle East who were, just as unjustly, seen as agents of Israel and chased out of their homelands to the benefit of Zionism far more than the Arab and Persian nations that excluded them.

The Vatican’s Foreign Policy – Let My People Be!

Imperial manouevring and resistance in the Middle East are constantly moving people around into increasingly exclusive laagers – much as politics and war did in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War in Europe.

Ancient communities living as minorities are suffering great fear and anxiety and often calculating that emigration is the better option.

This is reducing the Christian patrimony by the month or at least concentrating it in zones that need defence, perhaps humanitarian intervention.

Ah, now it becomes clearer. The Church really does have a direct interest in creating a Western-led capability for defence because it needs legionaries and tercios to protect its own. A very reasonable special interest.

Where there is not an ‘understanding’ with the authorities as in Morocco, a combination of nationalism and revived sectarian nationalism is placing Christians under threat or in conflict in Algeria, Egypt (Copts), Palestine, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Pakistan as well as in the Sahel/Sudan and Western and North-Eastern Africa.

The Vatican now has cause for a strong UN looking at humanitarian and human rights issues – to protect what it sees as its own.

Of course, this entire ideology of forward pre-emptive action is still not generally accepted in the West and the Vatican itself opposed the War in Iraq – as did many others who otherwise see States as instruments of a higher policy rather than as ‘things-in-themselves’.

But what has happened is that the breakdown of the state system has meant that the United Nations, originally intended to be an improvement on the League of Nations but essentially a means of resolving inter-state dispute, is increasingly being promoted as a substitute for the state system.

From there it is a small step to it being seen as an instrument for the implementation of universal values.

What This New Ideology IS

Of course, our view is now well known – that the restoration of the UN as expression of a revived and collaborative state system to avert war and a secondary League of Nations of democratic states to sustain Western values is the best ‘pragmatic’ solution to the problem of global anarchy.

Of course, such a project is not only incompatible with radical universalism but it also accepts some limitation (in terms of slowing down rather than the termination) of globalization.

But so many economic interests are now bound up in globalization that, like Macbeth, the West is so deep in blood that it may as well go forward as back.

The arrival of ideologies of universal values (perhaps as 'justification' but also as a means to moderate excesses) thus become as important to the current system as universal Catholicism became to Habsburg dynastic power and its hold over the gold imports from the Americas.

The Judaeo- element is much less important here – it remains (insofar as it concentrates on Israel) a nationalist anomaly as does the American belief in itself as the shining city, the ultimate instrument for the promotion of universal values.

However, the internal value system of the new universalism, like that of the US, is a similar amalgam of secular politics and quasi-faith-based national identity that fits well within the Vatican model.

Indeed, a separate Jewish state is perfectly reasonable for the Vatican as it is for Washington.

What is important is that the driving document of Anglo-Saxon liberal interventionism (the Atlantic Charter) is being modified by three balancing pressures that are producing a formidable ideology that is at the heart of more nationally based liberal, progressive and socialist (and conservative) fears for peace:

• the creation of a notion of the West and of Western values in which a Judaeo-Christian value system is taken as a ‘given’ 
• the introduction of faith-based morality to an otherwise universalist system of values
• an attempt at the introduction by progressives of issues like poverty, economic management and climate change into the heady mix.

The Dilemma of Africa

This naturally bring us back to what the Vatican wants within this new Western alliance.

We have noted the concern for minority Christian groups within the Middle East – and there may be longer term concerns about attitudes in East Asia – but the core of Vatican concern is the same as that of all liberal progressives.

This is all about the one Continent where they can still (they believe) safely intervene without bringing down upon their heads a faith-based insurgency or the resistance of a major regional power – Africa.

Of course, many Africans, actually very supportive of the West because of the aid and trade coming from the US in particular (they are less enamoured of Europeans), are not so impressed.

The West appears to be interfering far too much in African affairs. They know that the curious obsession of the British Government with Zimbabwe is because it is a case study in getting the more stable African states (notably South Africa) to intervene themselves - much as Ethiopia was driven to intervene in Somalia.

This is ultimately a prescription for proxy wars. African states are quite rightly drawing back from the brink just as Western pressure to create a militarised African Union is at its peak.

We are seeing a complex and somewhat frightening attempt to create a coalition of pro-Western states and Western money and expertise, backed up by the little international law that we have in the United Nations, to find some way to transform the Continent.

This is apparently to be done through a combination of targeted reconstruction aid (and threats of withdrawal of such aid), sanctions and military action, all designed to create some proof that liberal intervention works - and to frighten others, the less hard cases, into compliance with Western values.

What is happening in Africa is a massive investment in the theory of liberal intervention.

Unfortunately, it is all going just a little haywire. Threats to withdraw aid to some countries if they do not fit in with Western plans look like the worst sort of neo-imperialism.

The record on reconstruction aid in Afghanistan as political tool is terrifyingly bad and it would seem that peace in Kenya to ensure that the pro-Western side gets its slice of the action has merely radically increased the number of Ministries and the expectation that the non-Western side of the equation will gets its share of reconstruction funds as a bribe for complying.

Sanctions are now routinely ignored.

The Iranian case shows that traditional capitalism has ways and means of working the system. Less efficient such traditionalism may be, but Iranians are not short of anything except the petrol that they need and Western hopes that shortages would bring reformers into the Iranian Parliament in May were misplaced.

And as for energy investment, there is a mid-June deadline on Western engagement with the South Pars gas field. Then Iran will simply go East to Asians hungry for the largest gas field in the world. The Chinese, in particular, owe the West nothing.

The African Union is scarcely in a shape to intervene in any country and face a truly vicious insurgency. It has no will to do so.

The Ethiopians are stuck in Somalia in an expensive stalemate. Western countries are about to go into a minor recession with little political will domestically to waste lives and scarce funds on any other adventure analogous to those in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The UN is over-stretched, limited in what it can do except in the most extreme circumstances, logistically weak (it was surprisingly easy for the Eritreans to move the UN from its border by just denying it oil) and only available when some sort of bodged up ‘reconciliation’ is on the cards.

Months after the worst of the terror, nothing is or can be done for Darfur and the Sudanese know it. It is said that the Americans are getting ready to ‘negotiate’.

The Church’s Dangerous Attack on Pragmatism

So, when the Vatican expresses its support for the Canadian-inspired, dreamy and idealistic recent collective doctrine Responsibility to Protect, it is making a statement, similar to that of Canadian progressives and Facebook activists, that “it is indifference or failure to intervene that do the real damage”.

This is an important statement because it means Western resources (that is, its taxpayers' resources) should be redirected to well-meaning gestures in the universal interest. This is not going to go down well with those whose homes may be repossessed,

It is also very reminiscent of the thought processes that led to the wasting of American and Spanish resources on European Wars in the sixteenth century that only ended up with the economic dominance of their enemies.

The Pope’s intervention now is an attempt to mobilize a sentiment, derived from watching horrors on globalised TV, into political action.

But it is an idealistic and emotional appeal without any understanding of the practical material and organizational issues that are probably far beyond the current capability of any country in the West.

The collaborative approach that the Vatican desires can only be delivered if a) the West coheres around what will, in fact, be a divisive programme domestically and b) the rest of the UN agrees. The UN could not even agree to put Zimbabwe on its agenda last week.

In this context, democracy is very inconvenient within the West ...

The Pope’s actual reference to Africa captures the essence of the problem.

He said, “I am thinking especially of those countries in Africa and other parts of the world which remain on the margins of authentic integral development and are therefore at risk of experiencing only the negative effects of globalization.”

This is taken straight from the dominant ideology of the security-driven elements in the West and in the Academy in which primary concern is being given to dealing with the ‘negative effects of globalisation’ without critiquing the driving motors of globalization. But this is not the point to be made here.

The key phrase is actually “authentic integral development” because the Western development theory on which the Vatican relies appears not to take account of other forms of integral development that may be equally authentic but not based on Western values.

The obvious issue here is the emergence of China as a different sort of neo-imperial power working, without Western 'ethics' to guide it, to trade resources for expertise.

Max Hastings in the Sunday Times cleverly called this a cynical cash-and-carry policy by China but the truth is that the West has no right to preach ethics after what it did to Africa in the first place.

The Chinese form of imperialism is no worse. Through using the agency of local nation states, it might help to develop this basket case more effectively than righteous military intervention and inadequate and corrupted reconstruction funds.

On Pragmatism

The pragmatic point (the Pope is highly critical of pragmatism in his speech) is that, regrettably, Chinese-backed authentic development strategies whether in Zimbabwe, Tibet or Burma, in deliberate defiance of faith-based alliances and Western liberal criticism, are going to be a fact of life from now on.

The West is in the unenviable position of having to ask whether the massive deployment of resources required to turn back this tide of Asian economic imperialism is a wise one.

Pragmatically, the funds could be used so much more effectively in ensuring our Western leadership in technology and innovation and social cohesion. In the end, our lifestyle will improve and their empire will overstretch and we can pick up the pieces.

As for the humanitarian argument, the truly moral action is to give without expecting return and a global zakat, removed from faith-based conditions, for welfare and humanitarian relief, regardless of politics, sounds a better bet than arming troops to do God’s work.

Nor should the Papacy be seen as truly universal (except through revelation) or without offering its own unwitting dangers to global peace.

The Responsibility to Protect doctrine and other initiatives apparently position the Vatican as a moral force but one that, looked at more realistically, serves not only the very specific interests of the Church and Christians (which is reasonable enough) but gives unwitting cover to the more malign aspects of Western domination. 

The drive to preserve the economic and political dominance of the West against the rising Eastern Powers is being strengthened by a doctrine that is, in fact, faux-universalist, an apparent attempt to control great forces within the system of which the Church is a part.

Of course, Vatican policy helps to mobilize redistribution from the wealthier national components of the Western alliance to the poorer elements at its margins.

In this sense, it has definitely joined with the progressive wing of the internationalist Left (if you remove the social and personal libertarian aspects of Western culture) but, in doing so, it may now be working against democracy and social cohesion within the West.

It may also be creating the conditions for increased confrontation and the treatment of people in the third world as pawns at those points where West and East meet and struggle in the third world.

This is not good. It may mean dead people - and, if the Church is for anything, it is not for speeding souls to heaven before their time.

Ideology and Conflict

The intervention of the Vatican on the side of the most universalist vision of the United Nations currently available and against state sovereignty is (with Tony Blair’s speech in Chicago and the Bush doctrine of pre-emption) an event of major significance.

It is a direct assault on the Treaty of Westphalia and so possibly the beginning of an era of the very type of horrors that Westphalia was designed to settle - and broadly did so until the French Revolution of 1789.

This is the essence of the problem of the Catholic Church in the history of the world since the ‘mysterium tremendum’. It is a human institution, subject to whatever laws of history there may be.

It is a highly political institution with interests. It is manned by persons with limited information (even Cardinals do not claim that God speaks directly to them) and all the weaknesses of being minds in material bodies.

Despite faith, it cannot, unless it claims the direct guidance of God (and Blair is definitely, even in his most delusional moments, an agent of God), entirely break away from its institutional history - indeed, we have indicated here patterns that suggest a certain ethical dysfunctionality built into the institution regardless of its other noble attributes.

And so, whenever the Church has influence in international affairs, we all swing from one extreme to another.

From a Westphalian system in which horrors are perpetrated within nations to its breakdown when horrors are perpetrated in a conflict of ideologies that have grabbed control of the resources of nations.

When things break down and become bloody between nations, there is usually some universalist or extreme nationalist cause that goes far beyond Westphalia to impose its values or grab resources, sometimes both.

It is not pragmatism but a higher form of idealism to seek the Golden Mean, to find a basically Westphalian system of powers that can still collaborate not only to avoid conflict between themselves but to resist universalist ideologies of all sorts.

At this time in history, the new universalism – analogous to the alliances of the Catholic Church after the Council of Trent or the Communism of the Third International – is coming from the coalescence of Western liberal and faith-based groups whose self-righteousness brooks no ‘pragmatism’, no sense of the existential complexity of the human condition.

On the other side, new powers are now making their own land grabs for resources – much as rice exporters are holding on to their stocks and rice importers are competing to gain what is available in the market. The third world is at the centre of this maelstrom of greed and fear.

A Thirty Years’ Global War based on the malign clash between rising powers and a universalist West will only end up with another Treaty of Westphalia, possibly on the ruins of Africa.

It might be best to stop and think now before we believe that we can act without a proportionate reaction from those we affect. Theocratic interventions in politics are, at this point in history, unhelpful. These matters always need to be considered pragmatically.

[This posting is under no circumstances to be considered disrespectful of Catholic faith in particular and faith in general.  The critique is of a human institution's current decision-making and no more.]

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Prime Minister Brown has promised to keep British troops in Iraq until the situation in Basra has stabilized – see our latest report on Iraq to guess just how long that presence may last.

His visit to the US this week permits some consideration of the ‘cooling’ in the ‘special relationship’ since Blair left office.

The omens are not good. The State Department gave him a slot that ensured he would get minimal media coverage – the Pope is in town and is fascinating a population whose hold on faith is far stronger than that of Europe.

Domestic considerations and the reality of a new President appearing in January 2009 mean that the PM, a thorough-going Atlanticist, is hedging his bets, hoping to renew and reinvent the relationship after this year has passed.

The White House, equally, knows that Brown is such a thorough-going Atlanticist that it can, as far as big picture American interests go, take him for granted – they don’t have to be particularly nice about it either.

So don’t expect anything new from Brown. He made his obeisance to anti-American feeling in the late summer with his publicised intent to draw-down troops from Iraq (which events are now forcing him to back down from) and he is not under pressure to do more.

His domestic unpopularity is now thoroughly disconnected from foreign policy – he has far bigger problems with the economy. Although this particular posting is about foreign policy, in fact much of the real business this week will be directed at economic issues.

The Anglo-Saxons are jointly vulnerable in this essentially banking-led crisis. This is an area where intelligent discussion and debate can take place between officials.

In foreign affairs, Brown represents continuity with his predecessor far, far more than any new departure. This week has seen him trot out the hoary old image of the UK as bridge between America and Europe and as partners in dealing with climate change and economic management.

The obvious problem for him is that, since Blair’s departure, France and Germany might equally play the role of ‘bridge’ and the current White House is not very interested in anyone who is not as subservient as the previous incumbent in Number Ten, almost an American national hero.

As far as dealing with the Presidential candidates is concerned, all will be treated equally but the Brown Government really wants Clinton. She promises to restore the broadly liberal progressive multilateralist approach which is core to the New Labour view of the world.

Obama might be just a bit too radical, with a potential for exerting a bad influence on a sclerotic New Labour back home and encouraging 'change' in the direction of the liberal Mr. Cameron - while McCain would be a nightmare.

A national interest quasi-militarist President ordering the UK around like the subservient tool that it is would be worse even than the occasionally progressive-talking Bush.

There are also specific issues to discuss: Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran. The Government is caught between US expectations and public doubt – the British public sees no reason to be in Iraq, is pessimistic about Afghanistan and certainly sees no justification for direct confrontation with Iran except insofar as Iran might directly and provenly attack British troops in Basra.

Brown appears to have drawn back to a more realist position but his intentions remain to support the US far more than his public are inclined.

The US wants the UK to take command of the NATO operation in Southern Afghanistan, a potentially very expensive and bloody business, involving a significant commitment that will be hard to justify to the British people if the economy really does begin to turn down.

The fine judgement is whether military and nationalist rhetoric will carry the Government through. 

Sure enough, we have seen propaganda efforts in recent weeks and months to get the public to ‘support its boys’ and not ask too many questions about the policies behind their presence in faraway deserts and mountains.

The US also remains highly critical of the British method of ‘factional management’ (which they see as part of the problem underpinning the recent increase in violence in Iraq) but only now are they beginning to understand that the British are straining to maintain the commitments that they have already made.

The US is going to have to prop up the UK in some way much as it might prop up the Pakistani or Indonesian military. How to do this without making our troops look like mercenaries fighting an American imperial war will be the trick.

Our betting is that the British pitch will be for more reconstruction and development aid to pour down the black holes of Shia and Pathan local politics. The Americans pick up the bill and the British the credit so that the British can continue to police Basra and Southern Afghanistan.

This really is a very dangerous game. There are many risks to this. The British public may bridle at UK troops acting as mercenaries but the Government would be even more humiliated by a direct American military intervention to pull their under-resourced irons out of the fire.

The Ministry of Defence budget is also being squeezed dry, military recruits are drying up, an economic crisis implies defence cuts and the current political crisis almost demands diversion of funds into redistributive measures to deal with the effects of economic crisis.

The Financial Times of 15 April editorialized that “British defence policy is coming apart at the seams … grand visions … are being undone by the reality of a public spending squeeze.”

There are not only the financial sink-pits of Iraq and Afghanistan to consider but the maintenance of the absurdly unnecessary replacement of the Trident nuclear deterrent and a £4bn aircraft carrier programme which, it has to be said, at least has some logic for a nation wholly dependent on its sea lanes.

The FT captures the problem succinctly – Labour governments want to project power without paying for it. This is the essential internal contradiction within New Labour and probably the one that will eventually break it apart.

Its leadership is idealistic and progressive (in fact, closer to the liberal reformers of a hundred or more years ago than anything remotely socialist), but it also needs to keep together a coalition based on the presumption of continued domestic prosperity – a mundane matter of jobs, low inflation and decent wages and working conditions.

That is absolutely fine if jobs can be made to depend on guns – as for many Amicus workers – or the economy is growing so fast that any increased defence expenditure may not be noticed.

But the UK is a global services economy and not some interwar fascist machine for global conquest while the global down turn is just a fact of life now.

As Empire has shrunk, the British have got into the habit of taking two steps back and one forward in a shuddery sort of retreat from global leadership.

They fly the flag and then have to withdraw again as the pretensions of the Crown [not the Monarch but the Executive] come up against the same problem that the over-extended Habsburgs and Stuarts once faced, lack of hard cash.

The revolt over the loss of the 10% band for low income single workers is a sign that the Party Whip may be able to will the intent in foreign policy but it cannot will the means if the means are going to result in serious pain to the wider population.

Militarists are now going to have to place their hope in a Tory Government that does not mind ‘screwing the workers’ to get taxes low and spend some of what remains on soldiers.

When the history of New Labour is written, its foreign policy will always be at the centre of any account of its fall from grace and Tony Blair will be seen as the 'trickster god' of British politics, a winner of elections at the cost of his party and his nation.

Those are our views and others remain sure of 'British leadership' but the Financial Times itself also concludes that a decision has to be made between spending more and doing less.

And yet, as we have seen, Brown’s Government is about to get inveigled into more rather than less commitment within the US imperium

Something simple and almost animal in emotion is blocking the acceptance by Government and public of a truth – that it is not a case of Britain becoming a second rate power, it is a second rate power and its attempts to prove otherwise mean that it is now ready to crack under the strain.

There are more specific risks arising out of the battles it has chosen to fight.

The struggle between Al-Maliki and Al-Sadr in Iraq may come to have a peaceful conclusion but it may equally result in a civil war and a civil war might bring the US and Iran into direct confrontation – and not only in Iraq.

The few troops in Basra could be faced with an uprising that they cannot control without complicity in the sort of brutal tactics that alienates any modern public.

It is one thing to firebomb retreating conscripts in a turkey shoot and to accept occasional civilian deaths from occasional air raids. It would be another to use air power Guernica-style on Shia cities where the militia are embedded within the population.

The US and UK is virtually cornered now into relying on air power because there is no political will to increase its military presence on the ground. What does that mean? 

It means not using it in a full uprising and watch a weak Iraqi Government be fought to a standstill, using it and enraging the Shia against the ground troops or using it against Iran and setting the conditions for regional conflagration.

As for Afghanistan, the problems are probably not those of defeat per se – no one really ever wins or loses in Afghanistan until the Treasury runs out of cash for a bottomless pit – but of how long the British, like the Russians before them, can take the financial strain.

There is a sense that the British believe that ‘something will turn up’ – above all, that all they have to do is just hang on in there and the ‘international community’ will rally round to invest in reconstruction and hearts and minds will follow. 

Eventually, apart from outbreaks of banditry, all will be well. There may be some truth in this, especially now that Pakistan has been ‘settled’ and with the prospect of Hilary Clinton following the ‘plan’. Similarly, even Obama is committed to seeing Afghanistan through.

The question is not whether such a plan would work but the extent of non-Anglo-Saxon enthusiasm for the effort (very limited) and how long the British defence and development budget can hold out. Trusting in luck can only take you so far.

But what do Iraq, Afghanistan and Trident all have in common? The sin of pride. Think about it.

There is the humiliation of American troops moving in to Southern Iraq because our presence is next to useless in a crisis. There is the investment in a hearts and minds liberal strategy in Afghanistan. There is the continued believe that the country needs a 'big willy' to deter invaders when there are no invaders out there.

All these represent concerns about status, a misplaced idealism and a failure to match dreams with reality. It could be an aristocratic ideal, a knightly fantasy.

Whatever way we look at it, the psychology of the British State has scarcely changed from that of a medieval monarch worried about what his peers would think of him and taxing the peasants to make a land grab with a title attached.

It just so happens that 'progressives' have captured the British State but they are still using it as tool for the extension of their own particular vision of the world, wearing it out and failing to keep it clean and oiled for the purpose that it should be used for - the interests of the people.

'Gloire', prestige, 'la grande illusion' - all admittedly in a noble dream of a better world - but, ultimately, hubris. Our State has become Don Quixote.

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