MAGA? Don’t you mean MACA?

It was touching, wasn’t it? Literally as well as metaphorically. You know, the joyous handclasps. Holding each other’s hands. All with smiles to underline the intimacy and good fellowship.

The scene was Tianjin in China. Present were the host, Xi Jinping, Chinese leader and the world’s most powerful autocrat. With him was Vladimir Putin, Russian leader and the world’s most brutal autocrat. Joining them was Narendra Modi, Indian leader as Prime Minister of the world’s biggest democracy and its second most powerful would-be autocrat.

Modi’s presence was the most remarkable. Less than three years ago, in December 2022, Chinese and Indian troops were attacking each other with, of all things, nail-studded clubs across their common border. Now, though, it’s all friendship and good cheer between the two nations.

Putin, Modi and Xi Jinping

Best of buddies. All thanks to Trump

In theory, this ought to please the world’s top would-be autocrat. Donald Trump’s always quick to trumpet – Trump-et? – his role as peacemaker. The man who’s going to bring peace to Ukraine or Gaza in a single day hasn’t yet found the right day on which to make that happen. To compensate, he might take some satisfaction from having promoted peace between those two Asian giants.

Sadly, though, it’s not clear to me that he brought them together intentionally. There may be people who regard Trump as a champion of subtle strategic thought. I’m afraid that I’m not one of them. He slapped tariffs of 25% on Indian exports to the US and then, when India persisted in buying Russian oil, doubled them to 50%. That drove Modi towards Xi Jinping, to see whether China could become a sufficiently significant trading partner to make up for some of the lost business with the US.

Was Trump motivated by an altruistic desire to improve Sino-Indian ties even at the cost of US relations with the subcontinent? As I say, some may believe he’s capable of such ingenuity. They may be right, but I can only say that I find it hard to believe.

To be honest, even the pretext for increasing the Indian tariffs is hard to swallow. I mean, Trump is always proclaiming his admiration for Russia and for Putin. I reckon he envies Putin and would like to imitate him in the US. Putin, of course, has no intention of imitating Trump. Still, given Trump’s apparent deference towards Putin – Trump regularly talks tough about his Russian opposite number, but Putin only has to meet him to twist him around his little finger again – it’s odd that Trump reckons his tariffs on India are about Modi buying Russian oil.  

The journalist John Sopel, now co-hosting the podcasts The News Agents and The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis, has a different explanation of Trump’s behaviour. India and Pakistan had their own border conflict between 7 and 10 May. It involved missile firing and air raids, so it was a tad more serious than the 2022 clash between Indian and Chinese border troops armed with clubs.

The incident eventually ran out of steam, with both sides apparently feeling they’d done enough damage and killed enough people to satisfy that strange beast, national honour. Trump though had rung the two sides and that, he has convinced himself, made him the engineer of peace between the two nations.

Pakistan, apparently keener than India on being obsequious towards Trump, nominated him for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. India, instead, argued that peace happened independently of Trump’s minimal efforts. Modi refused to back him for the Peace Prize.

Sopel’s suggestion? The different attitudes of the nations over the Nobel prize cost India its penalising tariffs, far higher than Pakistan’s. It seems hard to credit, doesn’t it? But should anything surprise us anymore when it comes to Trump?

Let’s not stop at India, though. Another nation that has had punitive tariffs inflicted on it is Brazil, the second biggest democracy in the Americas, and the nation that is making its previous would-be autocratic president answer for his illegal attempts to hold onto power. Trump has imposed 50% tariffs on it. Which is curious, since his general justification for tariffs is to hit back at nations with which the Americans are running a trade deficit. That is, nations so devious that they produce goods Americans are keener to buy than their own people are to buy US products.

Curiously, Brazil is one of the minority of nations with which the US has a trade surplus – it sells Brazil more than it buys from it.

Still, it doesn’t take long to find the real reason for the tariffs on Brazil. It’s precisely because it’s holding its ex-President to account. He tried to raise an insurrection to prevent his opponent, who’d beaten him in the election, driving him from office. Having tried the same trick himself, Trump clearly opposes any move to make the author of an attempted coup face retribution for his action. 

Hence the tariffs.

So where is Brazil turning for help? Why, to China.

Funnily enough, South Africa is doing the same. Trump has swallowed the entirely fictitious story of an anti-white genocide in that country (evidence isn’t a Trump requirement for anything he has chosen to believe). Ironically, while Trump is deporting as many migrants from the US as he can, he’s opened the door to one category of refugees – white South Africans. And he’s imposed 50% tariffs on South Africa too, driving them into Chinese arms alongside the others.

The original five members of the group of nations known as the BRICS were Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Isn’t that curious? Precisely China and the four nations now turning to it for help in the face of Trump’s aggression. What help China can provide is far from certain. But even if the help is limited, the realignment of the nations is clear and no doubt lasting.

In other words, Trump’s actions are powerfully assisting the Chinese playbook for world leadership. And that’s on top of moves to cut investment in such technologies as Electric Vehicles, leaving the field open to China to dominate.

So should MAGA continue to call itself MAGA at all or produce its nice red baseball caps proclaiming that ‘Trump was right about everything’?

Since he’s clearly not making America great again, maybe it’s time to change the movement’s name to MACA. That’s ‘Make America China’s Agent’. The caps could be marked ‘Xi Jinping’s getting it right’. 

At least that would be a lot more accurate.

New Sandman

“Karla is not fireproof because he’s a fanatic. And one day, if I have anything to do with it, that lack of moderation will be his downfall.”

John le Carré had a way with words. And he was the great chronicler of the skulduggery of the Cold War. I know that he wrote novels not histories, but I would say to him what the French philosopher Denis Diderot wrote to the English novelist Samuel Richardson, “history is often a bad novel, and the novel, as you write it, is a good history”. 

Though Karla is a woman’s name, behind that code stands a man. In the world of George Smiley, le Carré’s extraordinary creation of an outstanding British spy, Karla is the shadowy, dangerous, effective senior figure in the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB, where he heads Directorate XIII, also known as the Karla Directorate. He’s Smiley’s antithesis in the series of novels that have come to be known as The Quest for Karla, and it’s Smiley who swore to take him down if he could.

Alec Guiness as Smiley, Patrick Stewart as Karla
A chance meeting before the Quest for the KGB man had even started

We never learn Karla’s real name. But we do learn a nickname, given him, it seems, by General Vladimir, the courageous Russian defector to the British who, even in old age, continues his battle against the KGB chief. The nickname is ‘the Sandman’. You may know the fairy tale, rather a sinister one, in which the Sandman arrives to scatter sand in your eyes so that you fall asleep.

The story behind the nickname is told in Smiley’s People.

“Why did Vladimir call him the Sandman?” Smiley asked, knowing the answer already. 

“It was his joke. A German fairy tale Vladi picked up in Estonia from one of his Kraut forebears. ‘Karla is our Sandman. Anyone who comes too close to him has a way of falling asleep.’”

A way with words, as I said. Gently, almost by implication, le Carré gives us the portrait of a sinister figure. Because this Sandman, of course, puts you into a sleep from which there’s no waking up. 

It seems the KGB was good at producing Karlas. 

One of them, as deadly as le Carré’s creation, has risen to the top of the country he once served. Vladimir Putin is far from being a perfect copy of the original Karla. But he certainly shares some notable characteristics with him.

He has the same deviousness as Karla, so you never know what he’s doing or planning. The difference though, is that when you finally find out what he’s up to, you’re not always left feeling wry admiration for his ingenuity. On the contrary, you’re often left wondering what on earth he was thinking of, since far from improving circumstances he complains about, so many of his decisions make them far worse.

He was terribly upset about the possibility of NATO stationing US missiles on Ukrainian territory, at a time when there were none, and no plans to send any. After invading the country, however, he now faces a Ukraine bristling with such missiles.

He also reacted furiously to NATO expansion that brought the alliance’s borders far too close to his own. But the invasion of Ukraine ensured that Finland joined. As a result, NATO has added 1340 km to its joint border with Russian territory. 

Most self-destructive of all, he complained about NATO when the organisation was at a low ebb, with numerous European countries losing their enthusiasm and the then US President, Donald Trump, publicly declaring it obsolete. The Ukraine invasion has reawakened the alliance and given it a new dynamism. Why, even Trump now says it isn’t obsolete any more.

Putin lacks Karla’s intelligence. Equally he lacks his subtlety. His subtlety is that of an armoured division crossing your border, a gunman standing on your doorstep, or a missile slamming into a crowded theatre.

What he certainly shares with his fictional counterpart, though, is his Sandman qualities. People getting too close to him tend to fall asleep. And their sleep isn’t the kind you wake up from.

Boris Nemtsov had been Deputy Prime Minister of Russia and an early supporter of Putin as President. But, as he saw civil rights being rolled back and the state returning to its old authoritarian ways, he spoke out against him. In February 2015, hours after calling for people to join a march against Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine, into Crimea, he was shot four times in the back. Putin announced that he would take personal control of the investigation into the killing, but no one has ever been brought to justice for it.

Alexander Litvinenko was a former agent of the Russian Federal Security Service, the successor of the KGB. Living in London, he believed for his safety, in 1999 he denounced the service, then run by Putin, for a series of bombings in Russia that prepared the ground for military action against Chechnya later that year. That action was the springboard for Putin’s rise to the presidency. In 2006, Litvinenko was poisoned with radioactive polonium by visitors from Russia and died three weeks later. The UK authorities have identified two agents from the security service as suspects for the murder, but Russia refuses to extradite them. Putin even decorated one of them for services to the motherland.

Anna Politkovskaya was an outstanding investigative journalist working for one of the few truly independent newspapers in Russia, Novaya Gazeta. She became increasingly convinced that Putin was turning Russia into a police state, and said so in her book Putin’s Russia. She wrote extensively about the abuse of Chechens during the particularly brutal and dirty war the Russian authorities waged against them. In 2006, she was shot dead in a lift in her apartment building. Five men were later convicted of the murder, but the judge said it was a contract killing and at least $150,000 of the fee was paid by someone whose identity remains undiscovered to this day.

This is just a partial list of the people who’ve been put to sleep when they got too close to the Sandman. And now, of course, we can add one more.

A latter day incarnation of Karla
Putin, the new Sandman (l), and Prigozhin, the latest to fall asleep

If Putin is none too subtle, Yevgeny Prigozhin showed what it is to part company with subtlety altogether. His Wagner group has mercenaries in various African nations, where they’ve been accused of murder and torture. In Ukraine too, Wagner soldiers are believed to have taken part in the murder of civilians though, there, it sadly seems that regular Russian soldiers were engaged in the war crimes with them. Not a lot of subtlety among any of this sorry crew, to be honest.

Well, Prigozhin also got too close to the Sandman. And now a plane crash has closed his eyes. He mounted an aborted coup against Putin, which he should never have started unless he was going to see it through: a frightened cobra is even more dangerous than a resting one. A surprising length of time has passed since that bizarre uprising, but it’s possible that the two-month gap was just what it took to lull Prigozhin into an entirely unjustified sense of security.

Putin may not be as clever as le Carré’s Karla. But he’s certainly as dangerous. And, sadly, he too often gets his way.

Like Karla, Putin’s a fanatic, even if he’s only a fanatical Putinist. Let’s hope that Smiley’s view of Karla applies to him too, and his lack of moderation will lead to his downfall. And that we can find a Smiley to make it happen.

Words that echo

It’s such a pleasure to be visited by friends you haven’t seen for years. 

We’ve known Christiane and Jean, French friends who live near Marseille, for twenty years or so, though we hadn’t seen them for ages. With good friends like these, though, when you meet up again, it’s as though you’d never been apart. The conversation virtually picks up where you’d left it off.

One of the subjects that came up during this visit was the novelist and philosopher Albert Camus. You know, the man best known for his short but powerful novel, The Outsider. I recently re-read one of his books, The Plague, but after listening to Jean’s tribute to his remarkable compatriot, I felt it was time to go back to another I’d liked while I was studying French literature, oh, way back there in prehistory. 

That novel was The Fall. The Outsider and The Plague are set in Camus’s native Algeria, with the Mediterranean lapping at its shores. Sea bathing is one of the central symbols of the novels, whether you stay out – refusing communion with nature – or go in – communing with nature and other people (in The Plague, a night swim by the two protagonists is a key moment).

The Fall is different. It’s set in Amsterdam and the sea is grey and cold. Far from being an inviting place for communion, it’s alien, unattractive, awash with “the bitter water of my baptism”. The book is unusual, as it’s a second person narrative: all those references to ‘you’ can feel like a direct reference to us, the readers. And it’s about how we create barriers between ourselves and the rest of mankind, about cold alienation from other people, about a deliberate indifference or even hostility towards the possibility of communion.

But then, while I was re-reading the novel, or rather listening to the audible version, one passage struck me particularly hard.

The truth is that every intelligent man, as you well know, dreams of being a gangster and ruling over society by violence alone. Since that isn’t as easy as reading specialist novels might lead you to believe, one generally turns to politics and runs towards the cruellest of the parties. 

Orwell (left) and Camus
Outstanding writers with more than that in common

The words rang a bell. I got hold of George Orwell’s 1984 and went hunting through it until I found the following exchange from the interrogation of the central character, Winston Smith:

‘How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?’ 

Winston thought. 

‘By making him suffer,’ he said.

‘Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain… 

Later, the interrogator concludes:

There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. … But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’

Not a feel-good vision of the future, but then as anyone knows who’s read 1984, it’s nobody’s idea of a feel-good book.

What struck me most, however, was the way that it presents, in a more extensive form, the same vision of the world that the speaker in Camus’ The Fall describes. There is a certain kind of man who seeks power through violence, who wants to plant a boot on a human face. It’s a pretty bleak view of power and how it’s likely to be used, and it seems to be shared by these two novelists.

That’s not surprising in writers who’d not that long before emerged from the stress of particularly vicious wars.

Orwell had served for a time in the Spanish Civil War, an experience he chronicles compellingly in Homage to Catalonia. Then he’d lived through the Second World War in Britain.

Camus had lived through the Nazi occupation of France. He edited, at huge danger to himself, the resistance newspaper Combat. Despite Gestapo oppression, at its height the paper was printing nearly 200,000 copies daily.

1984 was published in 1949. The Fall came out just seven years later. 

Both authors were tubercular. Both died depressingly young, coincidentally both at 46 years of age. In Orwell’s case, it was the TB that killed him; Camus died in a still more senseless way, in a car accident.

War, tuberculosis, the totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union (which was continuing) and in Germany (only recently defeated) might seem like the source of the shared bleakness of the books. That’s a conclusion too far, since there is a far more optimistic tone in Camus’s work overall: he does see an alternative attitude to life that can counteract the inclination to stamp a boot on a human face. The Fall is a denunciation of a man who represents the antithesis of the pursuit of communion Camus promotes in the other novels.

In any case, I’m not sure that the negativity both books portray merely reflects the times in which they were written. I mean, have the overthrow of Nazi Germany and the collapse of Soviet Russia, really dealt a massive, potentially fatal, blow to the regimes that want to crush through violence?

Vladimir Putin seems to embody the attitudes of the interrogator in Orwell’s 1984. What can Putin hope for in his war on Ukraine? He can’t be after money. He’s spent years corruptly amassing a huge personal fortune, but that’s surely just a safety net, in case he ever has to get out, isn’t it? While he stays in power, he can have anything he would otherwise have to buy, simply by announcing his desire. Not just his needs but his wants are fully catered for. The cruelty of his regime is surely just the naked exercise of power. He can’t think it’s good for anyone inside or outside Russia.

And what about Donald Trump? When he talked recently about the need to suspend items of the US constitution to enable him to continue to exercise power, what was he expressing but the would-be autocrat’s resentment at being denied the right to rule as his will dictates?

Camus and Orwell were superb authors. That’s a good enough reason to read these books. We should, however, avoid thinking that they’re addressed only to their contemporaries. 

They express warnings we’d do well to heed today.

Better to correct your course than keep steering wrong

It takes courage to admit an error. After all, it’s likely to attract scorn from others. Especially others who start out ill-disposed towards you.

Not admitting an error, however, only leaves you open to repeating it. That’s why I find it particularly admirable when a political leader holds up his hand to accept a criticism and changes tack. Admirable and rare: have you ever seen Donald Trump admit he got anything wrong? Vladimir Putin? Boris Johnson?

Salvador Illa, Spanish Minister of Health
His second thoughts were good

Do you know the play What Every Woman Knows? It’s by J.M. Barrie, the same man who wrote Peter Pan. It’s a bit of a pseudo-feminist work, in that it seems to be extolling the greater intelligence of women, but only by having her engage in some devious and highly skilled manipulation of her husband to forward his career. He takes the limelight and the credit; she does the work he needs to puncture his arrogance and teach him a little self-awareness. At all times, she remains in the background.

Still, it’s an amusing and curious play, worth seeing or reading. One of the characters is a senior politician, who says:

I have always found that the man whose second thoughts are good is worth watching.

It’s an excellent notion. Anyone who thinks that a politician will be right every time and, in particular, right first time every time, is only setting themselves up for disappointment. Worse still, the fear of ridicule means that most politicians suffer from a terrible reluctance to accept that they can get things wrong, which forces them to stick with a mistaken policy long after it has already failed.

Here in Spain, we have perhaps the strictest Coronavirus lockdown in the world. The hidden victims are the younger children. Anyone over the age of 14 enjoyed the same privilege as adults, though it’s not much of a privilege: they can visit shops or a bank from time to time, or even, funnily enough, a newsagent to buy a paper. At the last, that way they can get out of doors from time to time, though infrequently and not far.

But from birth to age 14, there was no release, unless they had only a single carer: a lone mother, for instance, was allowed to take her children with her to do the shopping, so that she would not be obliged to leave them home alone. Most kids aren’t Macaulay Culkin, after all, though I suspect most parents wouldn’t want a child who was.

So the vast majority of kids have been drifting deeper and deeper into cabin fever as the lockdown persists, now into its sixth week.

The numbers of cases and deaths in Spain have been falling for ten days now. The government has already begun to relax the restrictions a little, allowing non-essential work to start again, after a two-week interruption. But now, Ministers have decided, it’s time to do something for the kids.

The proposal they came up with was – how can I put this delicately? – not perhaps the one most likely to enhance their reputation for competence. Or, frankly, sanity.

They announced that kids up to the age of 14 would be allowed to accompany their carers on the kind of trips adults were already allowed to take. In other words to the bank. Or the supermarket. Or the newsagent.

The outcry was immediate and loud. What, kids weren’t able to do what the relaxation was intended to achieve – get some air and some exercise? Instead of doing something healthy, they were to be permitted to engage in highly risky activity, going to enclosed places that are visited by more people than any others?

It wasn’t just the political opposition. It was doctors, in particular paediatricians and paediatric psychiatrists. It was public health experts. It was journalists. And above all, it was parents. 

So it was encouraging to see Salvador Illa, the Health Minister, come on TV with a modification to announce. He pointed out that his was a government that listened. And then he told us that from next Sunday, children will be able to go out, up to a kilometre from home and up to an hour, anytime from 9:00 in the morning to 9:00 at night, with up to three kids per adult. They’ll be allowed to do that simply for the sake of exercise and fresh air, taking toys or scooters or even bikes, without having to combine the outing with going to any specific place.

That’s in addition to being permitted to accompany an adult going to the bank, newsagent or supermarket, as originally proposed.

The government didn’t actually say, “we got it wrong”. But they changed their position and admitted they’d done so in response to the objections. 

That takes guts. They will, of course, be ridiculed by their opponents. But I hope enough people will see that what they did was the right thing to do.

After all, there’s a lot to be said for a politician, or a government, whose second thoughts are good.

Be careful what you wish for...

Do you remember FBI Director James Comey announcing, just eleven days before the US presidential election, that he was once more investigating Hillary Ciinton over allegations about her time as Secretary of State? Only once the damage was done did he let it be known that no charges were going to be brought. Many believe his intervention may have cost her the election.

It’s particularly galling that it has now come out that Comey was investigating Trump at the same time, for the contacts between his team and known or suspected Russian agents. Comey said nothing about that. Imagine the impact on Trump’s campaign if it had come out before the election that his campaign had clandestine contact with a foreign, and not particularly friendly, intelligence service.

Comey may have been instrumental in putting Trump into the White House, but that hasn’t stopped the President he helped create rounding on him. Trump now claims that Comey “saved Hillary Clinton's life” by not recommending charges against her. Comey may have given Trump the shove he needed to get in, but he has no control over him now.

James Comey: is Trump biting a hand that once fed him?

And what about Comey’s other investigation? Whether or not it ultimately discovers any wrongdoing by the Trump people, it’s fairly clear Putin was keen on a Trump victory and prepared to do what he could to facilitate one. Like Comey, he may be wondering now how wise that attitude was. Though candidate Trump was more than complimentary about Russia and Putin, during his visit to Moscow on 12 April, Secreatry of State Rex Tillerson described US-Russian relations being “at a low point”. In that, he was echoing Trump’s own views.

Meanwhile, Trump is finding it hard to deliver on his domestic pledges. Like so many other inept and authoritarian leaders, he’s resorted instead to military action. It’s so much easier to fire missiles at Syria or drop a massive bomb on Afghanistan, than to make deals with Congress (the “great deal-maker” Trump is proving he doesn’t deserve even that title), far less to improve incomes or extend employment opportunities at home.

Like Comey and Putin, many of those who believed Trump’s pledges to help them out of their difficulties, may soon be wondering whether they were as smart as they might have been in backing an amateur’s bid for the White House.

Meanwhile, back in Britain, it’s becoming increasingly clear that leaving the EU won’t increase opportunities or improve trade. On the contrary, the country is likely to find it hard to sign trade deals that would be as beneficial as the arrangements it currently enjoys with its European partners. Nor does it seem that Brexit will even lead to any decrease in immigration – Britain needs the foreign manpower – even though that was the principal aim of many Brexit supporters.

Comey and Putin may just be the tip of the great wave of disappointment likely to sweep the US and UK in the coming years. It would be gratifying if that disappointment would drive people back towards more sensible positions than backing Trump or Brexit. Sadly, disappointed people aren’t always the most rational. The reaction may be a switch to even more extreme positions.

We’re going through difficult times. They may become a great deal more difficult still. But we need to get through them if there’s to be any hope of resuming progress once this retroactive period is over.

In the meantime, it’ll do none of us any harm to be a little more careful what we wish for.

Vladimir Put in his place by Eurovision

So let me get this right.

The Eurovision song contest, one of the frothiest and least significant of competitions around the world, has actually got the Russians riled? Even though everyone knows the result is politically fiddled, with the Russians among the main manipulators? Are they perhaps upset because the Ukrainians outmanoeuvred them?

It seems the issue is that the winning Ukrainian song was about the deportation of the Tatars from Crimea in 1944. Crimea was part of Ukraine until two years ago, when the Russians moved in with armed force. Invited, they naturally assured the world, by locals, but then, how many invaders claim to be invited by the invaded?

That difficult moment back in 2014 has left what I suppose one can only call bad blood between Ukraine and Russia. So one can imagine that getting up Russian noses might well have been a pretty significant motivation for Ukrainians to sing that particular song.

As it happens, however, at the time to which the song refers, Crimea wasn’t part of Ukraine at all. It was Russian territory, as it had been for a long time. Russian claims to the Crimea are, to be honest, quite difficult to deny; it’s the use of saboteurs and tanks to enforce them that’s harder to swallow.

What’s more, back then, in 1944, Russia wasn’t even under the control of the present allegedly democratic regime. The Soviet Union was at the summit of its power, still led by its iconic dictator, Stalin. His regime in Russia, alongside Hitler’s in Germany, had been one of the two great totalitarian powers in Europe for a dozen years, and World War II, then raging, had been largely caused by their antagonism.

Tatars loaded into cattle trucks for their deportation
Ah, so reminiscent of scenes from Germany at the same time...

In driving the Tatars out of Crimea, Stalin was merely engaging in yet another act of totalitarian brutality. Totalitarianism flows from a sense of belonging to a movement powered by some force far greater than mere men: history itself for the Soviet Union, the destiny of a people for Nazi Germany, but it can equally be some religious or other faith in different places at different times.

If you represent the force of history, you can’t be doing wrong. So treating an entire ethnic group like the Tatars as disposable is perfectly justifiable, and driving them out made perfect sense to Stalin, whatever their suffering and their losses. This particular act of ethnic cleansing affected 230,000 people, of whom probably about 100,000 died.

Most of us these days take a dim view of such behaviour. It’s not generally regarded as compatible with the highest standards of democratic values. And the present Russian leadership likes to claim it wholly conforms to values of that kind.

So here’s the question: why on earth would they be offended by a song that denounces a regime under which Russia too suffered abominably for several decades? After all, Stalin wreaked more killing on the Soviet Union than Hitler did on Germany, partly no doubt because he had longer.

Unless, of course, there’s real hankering to get back to that kind of regime again. Might Putin be not quite so committed to democratic principle as he likes to maintain? Does he perhaps long nostalgically for a state in which he was, after all, a leading functionary of its most repressive institution, the KGB?

Ah, perish the unworthy thought.

The Interview, Spycatcher and freedom of speech

Sony has decided to release its reportedly rather tedious film, The Interview. 

An excellent move, a great victory for principle against threat. The attempt by, allegedly, North Korea to blackmail the company into not showing the film has been resisted. It’s a triumph for freedom of speech over one of the world’s most oppressive regimes. A salutary and uplifting restatement of some of the most important principles on which we base our lives in the West.

Kim Jong Un: satirised in the film he tried to block

Of course, it has to be said that the controversy hasn’t done the film much harm. An apparently inferior film, which perhaps deserved no better than limited exposure before fading into untroubled obscurity, has now been given the kind of publicity no money could buy. Why, you could almost feel it a democratic duty to watch the dreary thing.

It reminds me of the fuss that was made over Peter Wright’s book, Spycatcher. Wright claimed that he’d been given the task of unmasking a mole inside MI5, and found that it was the Director General, Roger Hollis.

Maggie Thatcher, then Prime Minister, displayed all the keen judgement and commitment to democratic values for which she’s famed, by deciding that no one should read this book. She banned it in the UK. Well, not actually in the UK. Since the ban was decreed under English and Welsh law, it didn’t apply in Scotland, where the book was available.

It was published in Australia in 1987. This meant that Thatcher’s ban, based on the need to protect national security, prevented only readers in England and Wales from reading the book. It’s possible, I suppose, that no one in the Russian security apparatus – famed for its commitment to high standards of ethics and honour, epitomised by men like Vladimir Putin, a KGB apparatchik – ever read it, on the basis that it would be unfair to gain an unfair advantage that Thatcher wanted to deny them. Frankly, I’m inclined to doubt it.

So we were in the fabulous position of being protected by a government that could find no better way to assure our safety than to prevent our finding out information that was already in the possession of any enemy that might use it against us.

I was so irritated by this high-handed behaviour by the sainted Margaret that I contacted a friend in the US and asked him to get a copy for me and send it over. Which he did.

Having had that assistance, I felt duty bound to reach the book. And I did. With enormous difficulty. Over a very long time. It was one of the most turgid, uninspiring books I’d ever come across. If anything could persuade me of the innocence of Hollis, it was having to read such dismal material arguing the opposite. I’d cite examples of it, but quarter of a century on, all I can remember about it was the relief at finishing it and having no more to read.

That, frankly, makes me feel that I’ve done my bit in the way of consuming dullness in the name of protecting freedom of speech. It may indeed be my duty to watch The Interview, but I feel I’ve already given. Still, I’m glad to know that I have the choice.

That’s at least one oppressive act that neither Maggie Thatcher nor Kim Jong Un got away with.

Ukraine: a moment of truth at Easter. On Hitler's birthday

Easter Sunday. For Christians at least, a good day, pretty much the best. 

On the other hand, this year it also happens to be Hitler’s birthday, which is not quite such a cause for celebration.

And both are relevant. The Ukrainian government – if ‘government’ isn’t too strong a word for a body whose writ is so little followed – has declared an Easter truce in its fight with pro-Russian rebels in the East of the country. This may be a generous and open-hearted gesture, or it may reflect a lack of confidence in its own forces, even to the point of not being sure that any armour it sends against rebels won’t be immediately taken over and turned back the other way.

As happened last time.

As for Hitler’s birthday, well I’ve already commented on the similarities between Putin’s behaviour and Hitler’s. In fact, more than once. I fully accept that not everyone agrees with me: I’ve had it pointed out to me that Putin’s behaviour in Crimea is no different from Thatcher’s over the Falklands.

That strikes me as a false analogy. The Falklands – the Malvinas – ought certainly to be Argentinian and will, I’m sure, be handed over some day. The objection back in 1982 was that President Galtieri sent armed forces to seize them. British possession of the Falklands may well be wrong, but Galtieri’s actions was illegal.

Such breaches of international law damage us all. Not just in the Falklands but anywhere they occur, most notably in Iraq: the West, far from being innocent, is the most frequent and flagrant perpetrator. That, however, doesn’t justify Putin who also has form in these matters: even before Ukraine, he used military force in Moldova and Georgia.

So how about the parallels between him and Hitler?

The most striking similarity is escalation.

Hitler’s first (illegal) military action was to reoccupy the Rhineland. Well, it was German territory, after all. You could argue that the Versailles Treaty, in stipulating that the Rhineland had to be left demilitarised, was unjustly limiting Germany’s legitimate rights.

Then came the annexation of Austria. Well, Austria having lost its Hungarian and Slavic populations, was a massively German nation and there was certainly huge enthusiasm for union with Germany.

Next it was the turn of Czechoslovakia. It had large pockets of German population who, rightly or wrongly, claimed their rights were being trampled on by the Czech authorities. They appealed to Germany to assist them, an entirely disingenuous appeal since they were already heavily dependent on the Nazi regime. That was the crisis that led to the Munich Agreement, in which Chamberlain for Britain and Daladier for France thought they had guaranteed “peace in our time” by agreeing to the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, through Hitler’s annexation of the areas of majority German population.

The following spring, Hitler had occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.

That autumn, he invaded Poland and Europe found itself sucked into the Second World War.

Now history doesn’t repeat exactly. The steps are different. But Putin is ramping things up just as Hitler did.

First it was Crimea. Well, a bit like Austria and the Germans, the population is mostly Russian-speaking and closer to Russia than to Ukraine. In fact, it only became Ukrainian through a high-handed act of Kruschev’s in 1954.

Now it’s the Russian-speaking populations of the Eastern Ukraine. Well, rather like the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia, they feel aggrieved about being regarded as Ukrainians (at least, quite a lot of them do). Perhaps they feel that Russia is their mother country. And, again rather like the Sudetens, it looks as though they’re getting a lot of foreign encouragement (some of it in the form of armaments and possibly even troops without insignia) for their rebellion.

Comforting that we can count on him as a champion of freedom

Yesterday, despite the truce, there was fighting in the port of Mariupol, which left three people dead. The Russian authorities have expressed outrage. Well, I believe any citizen of the world should see this kind of killing over political matters as outrageous, but Russia clearly feels that it has a specific interest in these incidents because one side of the conflict is Russian-speaking. Which is rather like the United States feeling it has a right to speak for British citizens in trouble with the law, merely on the grounds that they speak the same language (well, pretty much the same language).

What’s next? That’s not difficult to imagine. If Eastern Ukraine is allowed to secede and join the Russian Federation, like Crimea, will Putin next annex the area of Moldova, immediately to the West of Ukraine, where he has already stationed troops in an ostensibly independent nation? From Moldova, he threatens Ukraine’s third city and most important remaining port after the loss of Crimea, Odessa.

None of this is identically analogous to Hitler’s actions, but it’s the same kind of salami-slice approach to foreign policy with the aim of gradually extending its territory. The end result would be a Ukraine so emasculated that it would barely be viable as an independent nation, leaving it liable to absorption wholesale into the Russian Federation. Rather like the rump of Czechoslovakia was taken over by the Reich.

What’s Putin’s objective in doing all this? Again, he’s made no secret of his nostalgia for the Soviet Union. It seems difficult to deny that he’s working to reconstitute it.

It wasn’t much fun last time the world was dominated by a United States glaring at a Soviet Union each in its forest of nuclear weapons. And it wasn’t fun for rather a lot of Europe. No wonder the Baltic States and Poland are concerned – they can see where this may be heading.

It doesn’t have to go there. On Thursday, Russia, Ukraine, the US and the EU met and agreed a way out of the crisis. It involved rebels giving up their occupation of public buildings, in return for an amnesty for protesters who have not committed capital offences. Clearly, it depends above all on Russia reining in its supporters in Eastern Ukraine, and them agreeing to go along with the arrangement.

Will it stick? If it does, something remarkable will have happened. Russia, on the road to aggrandisement by military means, will have drawn a line and said “no, we go no further down this road.” Putin will have pulled back from policies that seem set to push the world back towards a state of affairs that was ugly then and could be a lot uglier now.

He will have diverged fundamentally from the route that Hitler took. We might look back to this 125th anniversary of Hitler’s birth and congratulate Putin on his extraordinarily judicious behaviour.

But three died in Mariupol yesterday. And the pro-Russian protesters aren’t vacating government buildings. The omens aren’t good.

Still, it’s Easter Sunday and I mustn’t spoil it. Have a good one, whether you believe in it or not. At least enjoy the chocolate.

Happy Easter

Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Czechoslovakia: an exciting historico-geographical-political quiz. With a lot riding on it.

A first! A quiz for my readers! Is that thrilling, or what?

Below are two extracts from major British dailies. One is from yesterday’s Independent, the other from the Guardian of 30 July 1938. I’ve disguised both to make it a little less obvious what circumstances each article is talking about.

One of them is an account of the way the Russians of 2014 or the Germans of 1938 are preparing to use military force to come to the aid of their “compatriots”, i.e. speakers of the same language, across the border in Czechoslovakia – or do I mean Ukraine? 

Yep, that’s how gripping this gets...

The other extract quotes a speech from a nationalist leader, of the ethnic Russians of Eastern Ukraine in 2014, or possibly of the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Moving against Ukrainian troops still nominally in control, 
Russian troops deploy in Crimea
with strong civilian support

And here’s question 1: which is the 1938 piece, which the one from 2014?

Extract 1

And yet, the latest protests in [the Sudetenland/Eastern Ukraine] show far more organisation and determination compared with those of just a few weeks ago. They sing the same verses from the hymn sheet in [the main cities]; they call for a [referendum/plebiscite] and a plea for [Russian/German] “peacekeepers” to defend them. This strikes a chord with the repeated demands from [Berlin/Moscow] that [Ukraine/Czechoslovakia] should give a voice to the [regions/minorities] and adopt a federal structure and pledges that ethnic [Germans/Russians] will not be abandoned: the [Kiev/Prague] government does not need reminding that [President Putin/Chancellor Hitler] [has been authorised] to deploy troops not just for [Austria/Crimea], but [Ukraine/Czechoslovakia].

Extract 2

“On behalf of the largest group of [German/Russian] people ... outside [Russia/Germany], also in the name of all other [Russians/Germans] living abroad, I declare that we are all inseparable parts of the great [German race/Russian nation]. Efforts to make national boundaries and spiritual boundaries between members of one people have collapsed.

“[Germans/Russians] living abroad render unto the nation what is the nation’s, and to the people what is the people’s. As true [Russians/Germans] we are accustomed to fulfil the duties we have shouldered. So we take seriously our duties towards the country to which we belong, but as members of different nations we remain members of the [German/Russian] people.”

German troops move into the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia
with strong civilian support

Question 2, on the other hand, is “does it matter which text is which? aren’t they pretty much interchangeable?”

Which leads to Question 3: ”given that the 1938 problems led to Hitler occupying the Sudeten areas of Czechoslovakia in one of the major steps towards World War 2, isn’t it time we got a little more worked up about what’s happening in Ukraine?”

Simply comparing a political opponent to Hitler is a terribly cheap ploy. It’s generally horribly unfair, not to say misleading. However, the reason we dislike such comparisons is that when we think of Hitler, we think of extermination camps, the Holocaust, the millions of murdered civilians guilty of no crime.

But there’s much more to Hitler than his murderous behaviour. There are other aspects of his time in power with which comparisons are well worth making. Especially when they can teach us lessons about today.

Not just a mass-murderer.
He had plenty of other faults

In 1938, a party close in sympathy to the German Nazis, was campaigning actively for the rights of the German minority in Czechoslovakia for redress of their alleged grievances against the majority. Hitler took up their cause. Leaders of the other Great Powers of Europe, Neville Chamberlain in Britain and Edouard Daladier in France, consulted with Hitler (though not with the Czechs...) and agreed to allow him to occupy the German-speaking areas, the so-called Sudetenland.

That agreement, signed on 30 September 1938, was to guarantee ‘peace in our time’. Hitler wanted the Sudetenland but no other part of Czechoslovakia, he assured the other statesmen. Granted his wish to occupy just those parts of the country, he would leave the rest alone and Europe need not fear war.

On 16 March 1939, German forces occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia. Britain and France took no action. 

Less than six months later, the German army rolled over the border into Poland. Though bound to defend Poland by Treaty, it took two more days of heart-searching and indecision, before Britain and France at last declared war on Germany, and the European theatre of World War II got fully under way.

Now roll forward three-quarters of a century. 

Vladimir Putin feels himself honour bound to come to the defence of his compatriots, the Russian-speakers of Ukraine. ‘Self-defence’ forces, that look extraordinarily like Russian troops without their insignia, have seized control of Crimea. Optimists may believe that Russia can be persuaded to hand the region back to Ukraine; realists, and that includes the main governments of the West, know that there’s no prospect of that happening. It was, after all, a traditionally Russian area, and there’s overwhelming local support for a return to the motherland, undoing a unilateral decision of Nikita Kruschev sixty years ago.

Will Putin stop there? Maybe. And if he does, we can no doubt learn to live with that. Perhaps Ukraine, too, can lick its wounds and come to terms with its loss.

This is where the comparison with Hitler becomes illuminating. Making concessions to Hitler meant feeding his appetite. Handing him territory only made him push his luck further and try to get still more.

There are Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine too, including its second biggest city, Kharkiv, and the great industrial centre at Donetsk. Will Putin feel the same obligation to ‘defend’ them as he has ‘defended’ Russian speakers in Crimea? And Hitler ‘defended’ the German speakers in Czechoslovakia?

There’s also another lesson. When we did stand up to Hitler, it cost us a bloody war – the bloodiest the world has seen. War with Russia today, however, would probably put the war against Hitler into the shade. It might, indeed, threaten the very existence of humanity.

The fact that no one seems keen on the idea of military intervention against Putin strikes me as thoroughly welcome. On the other hand, appeasement doesn’t work either, if we can learn anything from the experience of Hitler.

But between war and appeasement there are surely a great many other possibilities. What is much less edifying about the behaviour of Western governments today, is the rapidity with which they seem to be ruling out any kind of economic action, even though such measure might actually get Putin’s attention: imagine if he and his oligarch friends found themselves hurting in their wallets.

Instead, the message from Western capitals seems to be that we’re prepared to do whatever it takes, as long as it doesn’t cost us anything.

The only worry? If we’re not prepared to pay any cost today, the cost we may face later might be far higher.

That’s another lesson to learn from our experiences with Hitler.

Putin may not be a mass murderer
but he still needs to be stopped

Protecting citizens against the threats of feckless Liberals

‘The Guardian has handed a gift to terrorists,’ proclaimed the Daily Mail this week.

The Mail gets the knife into the Guardian

I read recently that it’s deeply unfair – lazy history, in fact – to point out that the Mail was the paper that supported the Nazis in the thirties, so I shan’t mention it here. Let me instead say that the Mail tends not to be on the side of the little man, but prefers to throw its lot in with the great, the powerful and the wealthy, all three usually much the same thing.

The Guardian, on the other hand, tends towards a kind of wet liberalism with which I also like to identify. So the Mail wasn’t so much turning on one of its own, as pursuing its long vendetta with a publication it anathematises.

In this instance, it was referring to comments made by Andrew Parker, head of the British security service MI5, about publication of Edward Snowden’s revelations of the way the NSA in the States and GCHQ in Britain snoop on pretty much the whole population.

‘Such information hands the advantage to the terrorists,’ Parker intoned. ‘It is the gift they need to evade us and strike at will.’

The controversy keeps rumbling on. David Cameron, for instance, has come out in support of the Mail and castigated the Guardian. And the accusation is serious, suggesting that the revelations lay us open to attack by some of the most fearsome, and hateful, people out there.

Not everyone agrees with Parker, though. As the Guardian informed us, Nigel Inkster, former director of operations and intelligence at the counter-intelligence agency MI6, believes that ‘those most interested in the activities of the NSA and GCHQ have not been told much they didn’t already know or could have inferred.’

Well, quite. It’s emerged that Osama bin Laden simply had no telephone or internet connection in the house where he lived, and was eventually killed, in Abbotabad in Pakistan. Serious terrorists know they need to keep well away from phones and e-mail if they want to stay safe.

Not that it kept Bin Laden safe.

It seems it’s the rest of us that the spooks want to keep in the dark about the extent of their spying. Perhaps because they feel a little embarrassed to admit how much they’ve been sneaking into the private affairs of the very citizens they’re charged with protecting. Perhaps because they know just how dangerous that kind of behaviour is.

Why is it dangerous? Well, I don’t believe the current British government, however vile it is, really wants to use intelligence obtained by clandestine means to crush opposition or hang on to office. Nor do I think that the current intelligence chiefs are motivated by anything other than the sincere commitment they proclaim, to defeat terrorists and any other enemies that threaten us.

But what if we found ourselves with a different government and a different set of espiocrats running the spy establishment?

After all, there’s been a lot of talk recently about the winter olympics in Sochi, in Russia. It looks as though they are going to be the most heavily monitored games in history. Russian intelligence organisations will be reading e-mails, listening to phone calls, checking on internet traffic, of competitors, spectators and journalists alike.

Putin’s Russia has recently taken a further lurch into homophobia. A tightening set of restrictions are being placed on its gay community. It’s a safe bet that one use of all this surveillance is going to be against anyone trying to resist this shameful trend. 

That’s when this level of spying becomes extremely disagreeable. But, some will say, it couldn’t happen in the West. Could it?

We’ve recently seen a big upsurge of support in Britain for the so-called United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP. It’s one of those classic protest movements which is defined above all by being anti: anti-immigrant, anti-liberal, anti-European Union. And, in particular, anti-gay: it has opposed government moves to legalise same-sex marriage, for instance. It is hardly inconceivable that, despite the resistance many of us will put up, UKIP might find itself in the not very distant future at least able to influence power, perhaps even as a coalition partner in government.

Now imagine a UKIP minister – and still worse a UKIP Home Secretary – turning to an intelligence service under his authority and asking it for information about gay activists. The spooks might refuse, but they could be replaced. And with the lack of legal oversight revealed by Snowden, how would we even know whether they’d refused or not?

Besides which, in an atmosphere in which certain people had come to regard gays as a threat, as they apparently have in Russia, wouldn’t the spies feel it was their duty to report on them?

And here’s another scenario which is at least as insidious.

Britain is a country run by wealthy people who know and support each other. Imagine a minister about to be exposed for abusing his office by a journalist who is, perhaps, not entirely without blemish himself – maybe he’s having an adulterous affair. The minister picks up the phone to his old friend, perhaps someone he was at school with, in the upper reaches of one of the intelligence organisations.

Without oversight or proper legal control, who can say with certainty that the friend won’t get the information the politician wants and leak it? Perhaps not to the Minister, but to a pliant organ of the press. Then the journalist is discredited, his career perhaps wrecked, over a matter irrelevant to his work, while a bent Minister is spared the exposure he so richly deserves – and which we so badly needed for our protection.

A gift to terrorists? By publishing the Snowden material, the Guardian has made a gift to ordinary citizens, increasingly vulnerable to bad behaviour by government supported by the spooks.

If the Mail‘s so upset, that only shows how quickly the establishment closes ranks against any move that champions the citizen against the powerful.

Syria: not ashamed to be naïve

Isn’t it heartwarming that US Secretary of State John Kerry, in full agreement with his Russian opposite number Sergey Lavrov, can describe himself as ‘very pleased’ with the initial work on chemical weapon disarmament now under way in Syria?

Lavrov and Kerry: best of friends these days...

That contrasts with his position less than a month ago. Asked on 9 September whether there was anything Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad could do to avoid being targeted by US cruise missiles, Kerry replied:

‘Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.’

Now I’ve been told it only demonstrates how hopelessly naïve I am that I failed to spot the clever bluff that Kerry was playing. He never had any intention of actually using the missiles, he just wanted Assad (and the Russians) to believe that he might. All the time, what he was really after was putting enough pressure on the regime in Damascus to force it to the negotiating table.

Well, perhaps. But I remember the run up to the Iraq war, when the State Department was using the same kind of language, claiming that their intention was to set the bar so high Saddam Hussein simply couldn’t clear it. In other words, they’d made up their mind to go to war, come what may.

It felt to me as though the US administration was going down that route again. They didn’t want to give Assad any way of wriggling away from a missile attack, and no one was as committed to aggressive action than Kerry.

Which was strange, as he’d never seemed a real hawk before. But then it wouldn’t be the first time I’d been disappointed by a politician’s second thoughts.

So, in my naïve way, I’m over the moon that Kerry’s now ‘pleased’ with the progress achieved by diplomacy, without a shot being fired, without a single civilian killed by ‘collateral damage’ (at least, not inflicted by the West: the warring factions in Syria are causing tragic levels of casualties daily).

What changed over the last month? Time was bought for diplomacy. 

There’s no doubt the US threat was effective. Moscow took it sufficiently seriously to bring pressure to bear on Assad; friendless and isolated, Assad gave way and decided to meet UN requirements on his chemical weapons; the international community agreed to give this initiative time to prove itself a failure or a success; and so far it seems to be going well.

As important as the US threat of force was the time for negotiation to work. And that was made available by US allies refusing to support its unilateral action. In turn, that gave Obama and Kerry pause, and Putin the opportunity to act.

Now, wouldn’t it be major step forward if this experience marked a new trend for Western nations to moderate each other’s aggression, rather than forever working themselves up to new military adventures?

But that’s just more naïvety on my part, no doubt.

When the bad cops get the good cop to back off a little

So Bashar al-Assad may put his chemical weapons under international control.

It was Churchill who said that ‘to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war’. As a wartime Prime Minister who certainly didn’t shirk from conflict, he was well placed to judge. In that spirit, it’s good to see an initiative that might just give diplomacy a chance, before a resort to missiles.

If he could express a preference for peace...

Assad’s made clear, on Russian television, that his decision had nothing to do with the threat of US force, but merely in response to the urging of his good friend Vladimir Putin. 

That’s what what you do for your mate, right? Help out when asked. If you can.

My scepticism about the value of just raining down a few missiles on Syria is second to no one’s, not least the Russian president’s. But I don’t like being taken for a fool, and anyone who thinks that the threat of US force had nothing to do with focusing Assad’s mind, to say nothing of Putin’s, isn’t living on our planet.

Similarly, Putin’s assertion in his New York Times article that it’s possible the chemical weapons at Ghouta were released by rebels, is the stuff of satire. It undermines the credibility of his other quite good observations: the need to respect international law and to avoid too quick a resort to violence for fear of making the Middle East still more unstable. Putin’s never struck me as a particularly nice piece of work, but nor have I ever considered him dumb; by taking a position so insincere all he does is prove just how unappealing he really is.

This isn’t to say that it’s entirely impossible that the rebels were to blame, even if they’re not known to have any chemical weapons, while Assad has huge stocks of them. It just seems extremely unlikely.

But it isn’t the change in Putin’s position or Assad’s that’s truly breathtaking. It’s the change in Obama’s.

... why did he need such pushing? And by such people?

John Kerry had always struck me as rather an admirable figure. But these last few weeks he’s been jingoistic to quite Dubya-like levels. It terrified me when he was asked what Assad had to do to avoid a missile strike. Kerry replied that Assad had to hand over his entire chemical weapons stock within a week, and added ‘he isn’t about to do that.’ This was worryingly like the runup to the Iraq war, when US spokesmen talked about setting the bar so high Saddam Hussein couldn’t jump it: they wanted war at any price.

Obama, however, has been little better than Kerry. Banging the drum for war as though only if he used weapons would he be making his point. He seemed to have fallen for temptation to belive that if you control the most powerful military force on earth, you really have to use it if only to justify your existence. All that’s needed is a pretext and Assad had provided one.

But now suddenly even Obama has changed his tune. He remains sceptical of Assad’s motives, and even of Putin’s, and keeping your pinch of salt large strikes me as highly advisable with those two (one ought also take a long spoon to dine with them). However, Obama’s prepared to give this diplomatic initiative a chance to prove itself or fail before he opens fire.

Don’t get me wrong. I think if anyone deserves a missile on his head it’s Assad. Probably Putin too, if only on behalf of Pussy Riot. But we don’t fire on Putin because the repercussions would be far too terrible. No one on the hawk’s side seems to be putting any effort into showing that the consequences of an attack on Assad would be wholly good either. In any case, it’s most unlikely that Assad’s head would be caught by a cruise missile, though a great many innocent civilians probably would be. His capacity to wage war on his people would probably not be greatly reduced. Meanwhile some very nasty elements on the rebel side would be massively strengthened.

It’s true that by not helping the more amenable rebels we may be weakening them with respect to the extremists. There are always difficult judgement calls to make in situations this complex. But don’t you have to be pretty sure things are going to work out before you take a chance on killing a lot of people? A great deal more sure than we are today?

So I’m delighted that Obama is at least prepared to consider a non-military solution. And I love the irony that though he’s someone for whom I retain residual affection, on this occasion it’s two throughly unpleasant individuals, Putin and Assad, who’ve knocked some good sense into him at last.

Though let’s not forget one other, much more decent man, who also played his role: Ed Miliband. As leader of the Labour Party and of the parliamentary opposition in Britain, he played a key role in preventing Britain immediately opting for military action alongside the US. Things unravelled for the hawks from that point on, taking us to our present more rational state.

Not a bad achievement, on the global stage, for a mere leader of the British opposition. It makes you wonder what he could achieve as Prime Minister. And makes me all the more anxious to see him win that job.