In Oracles, Magic and Witchcraft Among the Azande, one of the seminal texts of British social anthropology, E.E. Evans-Pritchard used the example of a granary which suddenly collapses, killing an unfortunate Zande tribesman, to elucidate the difference between magical and scientific thinking. According to the scientific worldview, the granary’s collapse is attributable to the action of termites, gnawing away at its wooden pillars, and the consequent death is merely meaningless misfortune. Not so, for adherents to the Azande tradition: while the gnawing of termites is the proximate cause of the disaster, why should the granary collapse at this specific moment, to kill this specific person? Rationally, Evans-Pritchard shows, the answer the Azande settle on is the intervention of some malicious wizard.
A similar conflict between rival ways of interpreting the world around us can be seen in the dispute between Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man Theory of History, in which the willed actions of specific individuals shape world events, and the social-scientific emphasis on grand and impersonal economic and social forces as the prime engine of history. Yet like the Azande answer, the latter does not preclude the former, as we are seeing with Ukraine. For Realists such as John J. Mearsheimer, Russia’s opposition to an independent Ukraine on its border, a potential launchpad for invasion from the West, is structural: any Russian leader, once strong enough to do so, would be compelled to remove the threat. Yet who can deny that it took Putin’s individual agency to launch history back into motion? If Ukraine’s strategic location provides the proximate cause, Putin’s personality answers the Why now?, just as Zelensky’s decision to stay and fight, rather than flee the invasion, provides a version of the Great Man Theory of History socially acceptable to otherwise sceptical centrist liberals. The conflict between Russia and Ukraine may be structural, as Realists correctly observe: yet it took the clash of two specific personalities for the war to take its current form, and thus define the future of our continent.
If anyone can be accused of magical thinking, it is those European liberal Atlanticists currently bewailing Trump’s turn to naked imperialism, as though some dark sorcery has suddenly overtaken the empire they eagerly subjected us to. Quoting an Economist piece, the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman mourns on X that “I think it’s often those in Europe who have been most pro-American that are now reacting most strongly to what Trump is doing. Huge sense of betrayal and disgust,” as if neither of the two leading organs of the Atlanticist worldview that brought Britain and Europe to this moment of humiliation had any role to play in the disaster. Those who forged our manacles are now complaining that they chafe. Yet even if it took Trump’s personality to make Europe’s implicit subordination to the American empire explicit, the causes are also structural. The power imbalance between the two is so stark that some Trump or other was destined to come along eventually: the termites gnawing away at Europe from within long made sure of that.
As a result of our rulers’ policy choices, Europe is now so weak that it presents an unguarded feast for the great powers carving up the world between them. The emperor on the Washington throne now seeks to detach Greenland from Denmark and add it with Canada to his vast American domain. When Trump can say of Canada that soon “the artificial line of separation drawn many years ago will finally disappear”, the dynamics are not so different from Putin harking back to Kyivan Rus and the Rurikids to justify his war of imperial expansion. Empires ebb and flow, as they always have: the weaker states between them, whether Ukraine or Europe as a whole, must either accept having their fates determined by great imperialists, or prepare to fight for their own survival.
The talk, then, of European rearmament as a means to save Ukraine from American retreat and Russian dismemberment is best understood as a form of noble lie to prepare European voters to stand alone. When Emmanuel Macron called Nato “brain dead” five years ago, suggesting America’s waning commitment, he was mocked by the very same Atlanticist voices which now, too late, demand a strong and sovereign Europe. These are the very same voices that three years ago, when Russia first invaded, were proclaiming that “Nato is back”, with the relief of born vassals suddenly rescued from the fearful responsibilities of freedom. Had Macron been listened to back in 2020, perhaps matters would be different now; perhaps, indeed, the Ukraine war would never have begun. But Europe’s empty commitments are simply too late: without American support, Ukraine has lost the war. And a Europe capable, with great exertion, of patrolling Ukraine’s eastern frontiers in a decade’s time is simply of no use in determining the outcome of the peace talks taking place now. Once again, it is those most culpable for present failure spurring us to future action: yet whether or not it is also too late for Europe remains an undetermined question. The assumption belatedly dawning on European policymakers is that Nato’s Article 5 is already dead, and with it, the Atlantic Alliance. If Nato still exists in a decade, it will do so only in the sense that Charlemagne was a Roman emperor. The titles may remain the same, perhaps the great ritual gatherings will continue, but the hard facts of power will have changed utterly, and the frontiers to defend will have shrunk.
With Nato moribund, it is difficult to think of a Western state, apart from Canada, worse prepared or politically situated for Trump 2.0 than Britain. In security terms, we are almost uniquely over-exposed, having long settled on a posture of America’s yappiest and least threatening lapdog. Trump’s annexation threats to Canada derive from Canada making itself so interwoven, economically and in security terms, with the US that its independence is essentially fictional. Yet in the security sphere, this is precisely what decades of Atlanticism have done to Britain. A close defence relationship with the US, once an asset to leverage over rivals, now looks a dangerous vulnerability. Just as is the case with Ukraine, whose future will be decided by the interaction of two opposing levers — Russian military force and the supply or withdrawal of American military aid, as imperial diplomacy dictates — so has Britain’s willed dependence on American military power eroded its sovereignty.
Our nuclear deterrent is leased from the United States, drawn from pooled stocks held in Virginia to which access can be denied as Washington sees fit. Our Army can only function as an American auxiliary unit, and our Navy has refashioned itself, at vast expense, as a means to supplement American power projection into the Pacific for American ends, with the two carriers serving as a platform for American jets whose operation and maintenance are subject to Washington’s goodwill. Dependent on a logistics chain we do not control, Britain is no more in control of its destiny than Ukraine, the result of a security establishment whose think tanks and policymaking organs, heavily funded by American largesse, have been explicitly designed to achieve this outcome. And yet the Trump administration seems to have a strangely benign approach to Britain so far. The explanation given by the Westminster lobby is that this is the result of Starmer’s political skill and personal charm: time will reveal if there are other explanations.
Even Starmer’s closest allies, who have likened him to a passenger in the front seat of the DLR pretending to drive the train, accept that he is no great man of history. Yet the moment has arrived for a great exertion of will in the service of seizing Britain’s sovereignty, a moment of grave peril which demands vision and foresight. The great unasked question in all the current flurry of panicked meetings and delusional op-eds is how the new, nakedly imperial American regime actually views its future relationship with Europe. Is our continent to remain an imperial possession, drawn tighter into America’s embrace through increased spending on American arms and munitions that deepens its dependence, or is it a rival power, as Trump’s trade tariffs imply?
The Pentagon’s notorious leaked 1992 planning document observed that through “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests”, the United States “must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO”, as Europe is “a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power”. Europe’s post-Cold War weakness is as much the product of cold American calculation as of European delusion. While the Continent’s inability to defend itself is shameful, Trump’s declared shock at this outcome rings hollow, given the great American efforts, over decades, to enable our present weakness and dependency. A Europe that does not rely on America’s defence umbrella, that develops its own defence-industrial base, its own surveillance and target acquisition capabilities, its own nuclear shield and own reliable sources of energy is also a sovereign Europe, whose interests will of necessity diverge from those of Washington. Vassals or rivals: either path is now fraught with risks.
For Britain and for Europe, everything must be thought through again, from first principles. Strategic autonomy is at least a decade’s work, yet the hurried focus on achieving a tolerable solution to the Ukraine war, now beyond Europe’s power to negotiate or enforce, displays only panicked activity in place of cool decision-making, tactical manoeuvering bereft of a wider strategic vision. The risk for Europe now is that Trump walks away from peace negotiations with Putin leaving European leaders committed to a confrontation with Russia for which they are entirely unprepared. Shorn of a role as America’s most committed European franchisee, Britain’s security elites are suddenly bereft of purpose, the incoming Strategic Defence and Security Review less useful than a blank sheet of paper. The moment requires sober reflection, for the decisions made now will define Britain’s future for years to come. Yet the urgency of the Ukraine crisis, and the commitment to sunk political costs, has outrun any wider reappraisal of Britain’s role in the world, as Starmer bounces from conference to lobby briefing, scrambling to catch up with events beyond his control.
Seeking to fill the gap between rhetoric and capacity, Europe’s leaders have hurriedly settled on Turkey as a force enhancer, without reflecting that Turkey’s rise under Erdogan is that of a cynical, self-interested actor expert in playing great power blocs against each other for advantage, building a domestic industrial base to hedge against dependence on patrons. Surely Turkey’s ruthless and transactional pursuit of its national interest presents a model for a mid-size peripheral power such as Britain? The hour of Europe’s independence has dawned, but there is no Bismarck or Mazzini to meet it, merely Von der Leyen and Kallas, regional HR managers for Washington’s soon-to-be-wound-down European operation. Macron excepted, Europe has no great men waiting in the wings: but the conflict between a truly sovereign Europe and an imperial America presents challenges that have not yet been articulated, let alone planned for. In plotting Britain’s next steps Starmer must set aside Whitehall’s tendency towards magical thinking, and ruthlessly pursue the national interest. Yet even as the international order collapses around him, fate has granted Britain a leader committed to multilateralism and international consensus-seeking at the very moment that will determine the nation’s destiny for decades to come.
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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/
