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I once used to attend a drinking club in Washington called the Osric Dining Society, set up in 1986 by my friend Christopher Hitchens, which awarded an annual prize to the journalist who produced “the most toadying, fawning piece of writing” that had sucked up to the US administration during the previous year. The society was named after Osric, the obsequious courtier in Hamlet who automatically flatters all in authority.
Attendees at the dinner, which was presided over by Christopher and took place in a restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, had to submit an article by another journalist that “must follow, as nearly as is feasible, the Osrician principle of deference, flattery and self-serving vacuity”.
Journalists meeting this criteria are chock-a-block in Washington at any time, though I do not suppose the city differs much in this respect from any national capital where the media is present in large numbers.
European leaders shamelessly kow-tow
I remembered these inebriated dinners when seeing the sickening depths to which European leaders sink as they fawn over and bow the knee to President Donald Trump.
Were the Osric Dining Club to be born again in Europe and members were free to nominate for a prize the European leader most publicly servile to Washington, the judges would be overwhelmed for choice. This is scarcely surprising as we enter an age of despotism when obeisance to the ruling regime may be the sole guarantee for political and professional survival.
The modern real-life Osric has a more demeaning task than his Shakespearian progenitor because he or she must do their fawning in the face of a stream of abuse from Trump, the object of their forced adulation.
Just as European leaders – Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, Friedrich Merz and Volodymyr Zelensky – were hugging each other before the cameras in a display of unity in London this week, Trump was declaring their countries to be weak and “decaying”.
About leaders in Europe, he patronisingly remarked: “I actually like the current crew… I know the smart ones. I know the stupid ones… But they’re not doing a good job. Europe is not doing a good job in many ways.”
As for the war in Ukraine, Russia had “the upper hand. And they always did. They’re much bigger. They’re much stronger. At some point, size will win.” Of the European role in the conflict, he said “they talk too much, but they don’t produce” and “the war keeps going on and on.”
Failure to assert itself
Insults from Washington and gross American interference in European domestic affairs – to neither of which European leaders dare respond in kind – have become so routine over the last 10 months that they no longer appear extraordinary.
But it is vitally important to ask why the European elites are so craven in their dealings with the US? Why is Europe paralysed at a time when historic changes in the political landscape of the world are under way? Watching Europe’s collective kow-tow, with competition as to who can bow the lowest, it is easy to forget that this obeisance is being carried out by the leaders of rich and powerful nations, most of whom belong to the European Union, the world’s greatest trading bloc.
The cause of this failure of Europe to assert itself effectively in this new fast-changing political universe is a riddle that may baffle future historians. In seeking an explanation, it is essential to ignore furious rants blaming everything on President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, caricatured as an evil Sauron-like figure out of The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, with Trump playing the role of the top wizard Saruman, treacherously complicit in Sauron’s dark designs.
Too much of the debate in Europe about Ukraine and other conflicts is conducted at this infantile level in which every battle is portrayed as being between the forces of light and darkness – and not between hostile nations, who may do evil things, but whose interests must be balanced and accommodated if we are to end forever wars.
Nato is no instrument of strength
The reason for Europe’s abdication from its past role as international power broker may be simply the result of its elites became so accustomed to taking their strategic direction from Washington since 1945 that they cannot kick the habit of obedience, like pack animals who have lost their leader. Furthermore, outwardly impressive organisations like the European Union and Nato now include so many nation states with divergent interests that they can never agree on common action and so become instruments of strategic weakness rather than strength.
A consequence of fearing and deriding Trump at the same time is that what he and his weird lieutenants believe is going on in Europe is ignored. Yet the National Security Strategy (NSS), whose publication caused such a furore, is revealing on this. When published, angry European fingers pointed at objectionable passages in it such as Europe facing “the stark prospect of civilisational erasure”. A running theme of the document is an openly racist claim that “within a few decades at the latest, certain Nato members will become majority non-European”. The US will seek to stop this by “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.
The authors of the NSS are, however, correct in identifying the failure of European elites – political, bureaucratic and intellectual – to cope as opening the door to a collapse in European self-belief.
They believe that “this lack of self-confidence is most evident in Europe’s relationship with Russia. European allies enjoy a significant hard power advantage over Russia by almost every measure, save nuclear weapons.”
Nevertheless, many Europeans regard Russia “as an existential threat” and the US needs to do all it can “to mitigate the risk of conflict between Russia and the European states”. That this is an escalating danger was confirmed this week by the Nato secretary-general, Mark Rutte, asserting on Thursday in a speech in Berlin that “we are Russia’s next target”. Evidence is rife of war fever in the European establishment.
Ukraine’s future
Ironically, this exaggerated view of Russian military strength, contradicted by the debacle of its original invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and its failure to advance ever since, has played into Trump’s hands since. If the Russian threat is so huge, then the Europeans dare not offend the US as their chief arms supplier.
Impotently though privately enraged European leaders may be at Trump excluding them from peace talks with Russia about Ukraine, they have only themselves to blame. There is no reason they should not have produced their own peace plan, other than their crippling disunity, and talked directly to Moscow – even if their message was one of total defiance.
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In practice, the moment of peak Russian weakness in 2022-23 has passed. and the war will be decided on a battlefield where Trump and Putin both believe Russia now has the upper hand.
Osric is remembered as a contemptible figure of fun, but in the play he is luring Hamlet to his death. All the phoney flattery of Trump by European leaders is a sign of a terrifying inadequacy on their part in failing to end the slaughter.
Further Thoughts
A foreign diplomat in Washington, reflecting on the American character, once told me that “the Americans are a cruel but sentimental people”. I am not sure about the sentimentality, but it is depressingly clear that he was right about the cruelty. Moreover, it is cruelty which is often deliberate, with those inflicting or observing it appearing to relish the brutality.
Reports on the 87 people killed in US strikes on boats crossing the Caribbean reveal that the victims were for the most part very poor people living in shacks. In those cases where the boats were really carrying drugs, the smugglers were paid $500 a trip by drug organisations. In 21 per cent of cases where US customs stopped 200 boats last year, they found that there were no drugs on board. In one strike, a fisherman, whose engine had broken down, was accidentally caught in US crosshairs and killed.
Denounced by many as illegal or as war crimes, which they may well be, such strikes are evil at a deeper level because what we are seeing is “performative cruelty”. This is cruelty that is enjoyed by the audience – just as Roman audiences in the Colosseum 2,000 years ago enjoyed gladiators hacking each other to death or condemned prisoners torn apart by the wild beasts.
A fine essay by the novelist Phil Klay makes this point in The New York Times where he writes: “I suspect the question the [US] administration cares about is not ‘is this legal’, ‘is this a war crime’, ‘is this murder’ or even ‘is this good for America’, but rather, ‘isn’t this violence delightful?'”
He quotes Megyn Kelly, the conservative podcaster, as saying: “I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and [Defence Secretary Pete] Hegseth to make it last a long time so they lose a limb and bleed out.”
Klay cites other examples of “performative cruelty” posted by US officials such as “post snuff films of alleged drug boats blowing up, of a weeping migrant handcuffed by immigration officers or of themselves in front of inmates at a brutal El Salvadoran prison”. This descent into moral depravity will be the legacy of the Trump years in power.
Beneath the Radar
Despite the torrent of reporting and analysis of what is happening in the Ukraine war, it is difficult – as it is in any war – to find credible evidence-based information about what is happening on the battlefield.
Both Trump and Putin now speak of Ukraine being on the verge of military defeat, something that Ukrainians volubly deny and produce visual evidence to the contrary.
But all armies concoct information exaggerating or fabricating their successes and denying or downplaying their defeats. Journalists visiting the front line will be carefully monitored and shown a sanitised version of the fighting. Political leaders themselves are often baffled as to what is really going on.
This makes rigorous journalistic investigations into the war so valuable. They are sparse but one excellent example appeared in the “Insight” slot of Reuters news agency, entitled “Band of Brothers: how the war crushed a cohort of young Ukrainians”.
The report does not prove that the Ukrainian army is going to break, but it does bring home the horrendous casualties it is suffering and the desperate measures taken to find more recruits.
It is behind a paywall, so I will give a short synopsis of the reportage, which begins with a description of how Pavlo Broshkov joined the Ukrainian army in March as a 20-year-old recruit to earn a bumper bonus in order to buy a home for his wife and baby daughter. Three months later he was shot in the legs and only just survived a Russian drone hovering over him, which was shot down at the last minute by a comrade.
Reuters tracked the fortunes of Broshkov and 10 of his comrades who were among a few dozen raw recruits receiving a crash course in warfare at a military training camp in the spring before being sent to the front. Its reporters discovered that “none of the 11 are still fighting. Four have been wounded, three are missing in action, two are absent without leave, one fell sick and another recruit has killed himself”. It is unclear how far this casualty level is replicated all along the line.
Cockburn’s Picks
A good piece by the lawyer Philippe Sands about the bid by the UK Government to silence the novelist Sally Rooney in her courageous campaign to protect the right to protest that has been criminalised under anti-terrorism legislation.
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