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.

The great Bill Gates conspiracy. A bit of context

In my previous post about the strange case of the Bill Gates conspiracy theory, I talked about those curious aspects of it that are, when all’s said and done, common to all such theories.

They’re impervious to lack of evidence. The fact that there’s nothing at all to prove that Gates is engaging in some sinister plot against the whole of humanity only shows how clever he is at covering his tracks.

Equally, no contrary evidence has any value. Any story showing that it simply isn’t true that Gates is doing any of these things, or even that they’re actually impossible in the present state of technology, are obviously wicked inventions by his acolytes, insidiously fed out to the gullible individuals who believe his protestations of innocence.

Well, as I said, this is the stock in trade of any conspiracy theory. But there is another specific aspect of the Gates story that’s worth looking at. That’s the global context in which it has emerged. Which is almost enough to make me want to launch a conspiracy theory of my own.

Look around the world today.

In China, we have Xi Jinping. He has had the constitution of his country changed so that he can remain in power more or less indefinitely. He’s been in the news recently for the way he has, at a legislative stroke backed by violent police power, wiped out the partial liberties that Hong Kong had enjoyed before.

More sickening still, around a million Uighur people, Muslims from Western China, are being held in what the regime calls re-education camps, and anyone else calls concentration camps. The figure of a million is a bit of a guess and the real figure may be much higher: the regime isn’t particularly forthcoming with the statistics.

Meanwhile, in the United States we have a Donald Trump for whom nothing matters other than his own advancement. He works to divide people, he advances racism, and he incites violence from some of the most despicable individuals in the country. And all the time, he has presided over the worst economic collapse the nation has known at least since 1929, and the deaths by Coronavirus of over twice as many Americans as were killed in the whole of the Vietnam war.

His own incompetence contributed to both those disasters.

Turning to a less significant country (but don’t tell its conservative voters – they like to think otherwise), we have Boris Johnson in Britain. He has in recent weeks defended, and ultimately failed to take any action over, Coronavirus lockdown breaches by his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, and one of his Ministers, Robert Jenrick. Again, the mortality due to the virus in the UK is far higher than in might have been, entirely down to the incompetence with which Johnson has addressed it.

Top right: Mark Zuckerberg, the enabler
Then, clockwise: Trump, Putin, Bolosonaro, Xi, Johnson

And the list goes on. Brazil has Jair Bolsonaro, a man presiding over the devastation of his country by Coronavirus, and who, after months of denying there was a problem, and refusing to wear a mask, has now tested positive himself. Or Vladimir Putin in Russia who has gone down the Chinese road, of a constitutional amendment to keep him in power for a lot longer, and who is almost certainly involved in a real conspiracy, to try to influence the US Presidential election through dirty tricks on social media.

Talking about social media takes us, of course, to the dominant figure in that world. Mark Zuckerberg continues to refuse to act against hate speech and incitement to violence on Facebook. There are allegations that the massacre of the Rohingya in Burma was promoted through Facebook. And Zuckerberg can play his role, unaccountable to anybody, and free from any kind of control, regulation or sanction. He is one man, elected by no one, and running on his own authority a communications system that feeds information, or disinformation, to 2.6 billion people around the world.

So we we see these characters at work across the globe. Some of them are preparing conspiracies. That’s likely to be true of Putin, and his people will use the means provided by Zuckerberg. But others aren’t even trying to work conspiratorially. We know what Trump’s up to, we have a pretty good idea what Xi Jinping’s doing too.

And in this world, we pick on Bill Gates? Because he correctly predicted that pandemics might be more serious than war? And contributed money to combating the present one?

Why, it’s almost as though someone were trying to deflect attention from some real villains. Distracting us because they’re working to a hidden agenda we know nothing about. Spreading disinformation, perhaps through Facebook, so we don’t look at the people who really deserve our suspicion and distrust.

Curious, isn’t it? Is it just a coincidence that Gates conspiracy theorists are putting this kind of stuff out right now? Or is it something more sinister?

Born to lead, apt to fawn

Hasn’t it been demeaning, the spectacle of David Cameron and George Osborne down on their bellies before Xi Jinping, the Chinese President, begging him to buy up bits of Britain?

Please, sir, do help yourself. It's all for sale...
Cameron, born to lead, is in his element fawning on the powerful

The thing about Cameron and Osborne is that they come out of what people like them like to think of as “the top drawer” of British society. Cameron inherited money; he was educated at Eton, the very top of the British public school system, and Oxford University; George Osborne is in line to inherit a baronetcy and become the eighteenth holder of the title; he was educated at St Paul’s School, only marginally less prestigious than Eton, and of course Oxford.

Both young men distinguished themselves there as members of the Bullingdon Club. With the future Conservative Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, they left a trail of havoc through repeated evenings of drunkenness and vandalism. The damage, for instance to restaurants they trashed, was paid for by one Daddy or another. Johnson even put a flowerpot through the window of an Indian restaurant, an offence for which a poorer perpetrator would probably have served time, or at least probation, and would have found distantly career-limiting.

This background classifies such people as members of the old English ruling class. You understand that you don’t actually have to be good at anything, or particularly competent, or even particularly hardworking – you just have to be what you were born. There are enough voters prepared to give you their preference simply on that basis – “you’re in the ruling class, so you should rule over us.”

This, you might think, would make them imperious and arrogant. As indeed it does, but only to people below them in the social scale. George Osborne, for instance, is overseeing the introduction of massive cuts in the system of tax credits which allows the working poor to pay survive on low incomes. The policy was the subject of a high-profile attack on live television recently, in which a woman who'd voted Conservative wept as she accused the Party she’d supported of breaking its explicit word not to make these cuts – “Shame on you,” she called out.

But Osborne feels no such shame. He’s described himself as “comfortable” with the policy. Well, why wouldn’t he be? He’s been comfortable since birth. By birth, indeed.

Where all trace of arrogance disappears, and indeed all pride, to be replaced by the most obsequious subservience is when such people meet others wealthier or more powerful than they are. And that is the sight we’ve enjoyed with the Chinese leader.

No other country in Europe, and certainly not the United States, is prepared to open up its nuclear industry to the Chinese. Simple security considerations rules such a notion out – the Chinese are trading partners, but they are also formidable adversaries of the West.

One might imagine the British Conservatives would feel the same way. After all, they criticise the views of the opposition Labour Party as inimical to national security. You might therefore expect them to be highly touchy on the subject of Chinese control on matters so sensitive.

Indeed, it’s interesting that Germany, the most successful economy in Europe, has not only not allowed foreigners to control its nuclear industry, it is moving rapidly towards eliminating any nuclear power stations at all. Far from suffering by this policy, Germany has become more prosperous and more powerful still by taking a dominant position in renewable energy technology.

Cameron and Osborne, on the other hand, have been pleading with the Chinese to make serious investments in British nuclear technology. The main business of the visit by Xi Jinping has been to tie up that deal. So not only do we remain dependent on dangerous technology, we’ve made it still more risky by giving a measure of control over it to a nation with little in common with Western values. And all this has been done in response to the supplication of our leaders-by-birth.

There were also other deals, of course. One involved an agreement not to carry out cyber attacks. Since many of the cyber attacks around the world originate in China, this sounds terribly like the kind of deal that’s struck with someone in a long overcoat and a fedora hat: “give us a piece of your nuclear industry, and nothing nasty will happen to your computer systems. Just remember: we know where you live, and some of my associates are far less scrupulous than I am.”

Meanwhile, there are other issues that need dealing with. Cameron has spent so much time wining and dining Xi Jinping that he has found it difficult to turn his attention to them.

For instance, the NHS is under pressure to generate savings of £20 billion. It spends some £5.1 billion annually on treating the effects of obesity. In an intelligent move, Public Health England was asked to investigate the problem and come up with suggestions. It has produced a report one of whose principal recommendations is a tax on high-sugar food and drinks. The researchers found that consumption of such products is sensitive to tax levels.

Cameron’s response? To rule out such an option. And, as he admits himself, without even reading the report.

He has, no doubt, been too busy doing what he does best – hanging around with the rich and powerful, flattering them and enjoying sumptuous banquets. Actual work has had to be rather sidelined.

You see? You don’t have to be particularly able. You don’t have to be particularly assiduous. All you need to rise to the top in Tory Britain is to have been born and brought up in the right circles.

And know how to fawn on wealthy autocrats.