LAST week two events coincided, one of profound geopolitical significance, and one that wasn’t. The important one on Saturday was the brilliant US operation which in a matter of some 35 minutes captured the Venezuelan dictator President Nicolás Maduro. He has been transferred to New York to face multiple charges involving crimes such as drug trafficking.
The insignificant event whch preceded it was what proved to be a somewhat mistimed hyperbolic explosion of despair at Trump from veteran journalist Andrew Neil, who shared his negative thoughts on Donald Trump in the Daily Mail last Tuesday. This, followed by his subsequent (derogatory) reaction to Trump’s Venezuela coup, might best be described as an unwitting summary of the thought processes which have made the Establishment right so utterly irrelevant to modern events.
I will let Neil express his view himself by quoting enough to give you the flavour of the whole. In the first article, under a denunciatory headline accusing Trump of having destroyed the ‘old’ international rules based order, Neil said: ‘This was the year the old world order ended. The order that had defeated Nazi Germany, the greatest evil the modern world has known, then went on to see off Soviet communism – the other great evil of the age.
‘The order that, for all its many lapses in living up to its principles, placed liberal democracy, human rights and the prosperity of the people at the core of its purpose, leading to the greatest rise in global living standards the world has ever known.
‘The order in which Britain played a pivotal and honourable role, which we’ve now forgotten. But in which America was always the essential ally for all involved . . .
‘I dwell on such matters to emphasise not just the significance of the historical watershed we’re now living through but the scale of our loss.
‘The old order was no doubt in need of a reboot for the 21st century. Instead, it is being swept away, for no good reason, by an American president with no knowledge of history, little grasp of geopolitics and scant regard for the principles of democracy and freedom which made the world a safer place the more they were adopted across the globe.
‘A president who thinks it is no part of US foreign policy to make the world a better place, whose only concern is furthering the narrow, short-term interest of an isolationist America and what he regards as its surrounding satrapies.
‘If that means supping with tyrants and dictators with the shortest of spoons, while turning on loyal, democratic allies of long standing, then so be it. If it also facilitates lining the pockets of Washington’s ruling family, then so much the better.’
What Neil is doing here is somewhat in line with the frequent pathos and instincts of conservatism in that he is lamenting the passing of a lost world. And in one way at least his piece has accuracy: it is perfectly true to say that the old world is dead.
We are living in a new paradigm. This applies domestically and in global politics too. Many of the assumptions of the post-war liberal democracies have been shattered, and classifications of left and right have faltered with so many socially left-wing positions becoming culturally dominant in the attitudes of the rich, influential and connected, while similarly the parties of the left have moved from being representatives of the working class to often being the parties of a middle class contemptuous of less affluent people with less ‘progressive’ and globalist views but more populist-nationalist ones.
At the same time the broader picture has also been in flux, with rich nations less rich than they were, China rising to the status of a superpower, and the BRICS nations offering a challenge to US hegemony. Some say we are already living in a multi-polar reality, distinct from the days when US power backed a global system of rules and transnational bodies (like the UN, Nato and the EU) supposedly designed to prevent a Third World War or the kind of militaristic expansionism shown by Nazi Germany.
Yet Neil’s analysis is pitifully weak in where he lays the blame for these changes. He’s contemptuous of Trump’s pursuit of peace with Russia and an end of the Ukraine War (‘supping with tyrants and dictators with the shortest of spoons’ must surely refer to these efforts or to the first-term Trump attempt at peace measures with North Korea). Yet he’s equally appalled by the decisive independence of action we saw with the Maduro seizure.
It signals unimaginative conformist emotional disturbance when confronted with a new paradigm. Neil, the alleged curmudgeonly right-winger famed for a hard-nosed interviewing style and a supposed common sense disdain for modern woke fripperies, is actually aping the outrage of leftists who object to a US President acting in American interests.
Trump offends Establishment consensus on things like patriotism, race, gender, identity, free speech and the narrative on borders, immigration and culture. All these areas had been conceded to radical leftism by every mainstream party before Trump came along saying the impolite things that even conservatives were too craven to utter.
Quite frequently, and rather astonishingly given the importance of the policies involved, this distaste has centred on presentation and language, as if the crude expression of a truth is a thousand times more damaging than the smooth expression of a lie. Such superficial pearl-clutching is especially ironic when it comes from supposedly hard-bitten no-nonsense hacks like Neil.
His article drips with condescension and a refusal to treat Trump as a serious figure. It exhibits a sense of intellectual superiority over Trump in its assertion that Trump is ‘an American president with no knowledge of history, little grasp of geopolitics . . .’
Neil is offended by what he perceives as Trump’s rudeness to ‘established allies’, as if geopolitical cleverness is just a matter of being polite to the right people and ostracising the ‘baddies’. It’s almost a childish formulation in which the club in which nations must act like a gaggle of teenage mean girls (you’re not welcome, Russia) enforcing rules that turn out to be purely emotional and social.
What offends Neil is the Trump administration ‘bad-mouthing’ European nations and institutions like Nato while speaking softly to Vladimir Putin. That is really something. It’s as if Neil and others like him have developed the habit of examining US statements and actions solely through a prism of whom they offend. The appearance of amity is more important than the substance of liberty.
The offended reaction to the Maduro seizure in many ways shows a similar Establishment right blindness. A South American Communist dictator was starving his people while shipping oil to Russia and China and allowing Venezuela to host various Middle Eastern terrorist groups, including representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah. He was supplying free or massively discounted oil to Cuba, propping up the Communist regime there. He lost an election but refused to relinquish power and he is accused of supplying fentanyl to the US, a drug which kills 70,000 Americans a year.
American special forces seized Maduro with minimal casualties and the US as a result has now:
• reasserted the Monroe Doctrine and re-established US hemispheric dominance;
• removed a key part of the oil chain supplying China and Russia;
• stymied Chinese imperialism and expansion of influence in South America;
• removed terrorist training bases and a terrorist safe haven;
• given a global indication of US competence and authority;
• liberated the people of Venezuela from an unpopular dictator ruining their nation.
The Americans have ensured that the vast Venezuelan oil reserves can start being managed properly again, lowering oil prices which is good for Western consumers and companies and bad for Russian oil sales.
In other words, it’s a far more effective lesson to Russia and China and a far more competent geopolitical move than we have seen in decades, all so far delivered without the kind of vast cost in lives and treasure with which globalists have burdened the West in the last 30 years.
This is what Neil derides as Trump having ‘little grasp of geopolitics’. In reality, Trump keeps delivering triumphs no Western leader has matched since the era of Thatcher and Reagan.
In his first term Trump destroyed ISIS with no US lives lost. In the first term too he delivered the Abraham Accords. In this term he’s wisely let the Israelis dismantle Iran’s terror network, reaffirmed the Abraham Accords with a very successful Middle Eastern tour, ended eight wars and major conflicts in just over a year, wisely pursued peace in Ukraine while the whole of Europe’s leadership (except Hungary) has been consumed by a mass thirst for a pointless and terrifying direct war with Russia, and with Israeli assistance curtailed Iran’s nuclear threat. Now he’s cut the head off a Communist regime in 35 minutes.
Of course it’s possible that it goes wrong, and no plan survives action. But so far it’s been flawless . . . yet Neil, who condemns Trump for inaction against dictators, is apparently horrified. Why? Because it wasn’t done the polite way. It wasn’t stamped with the approval of other nations. Again, just as with leftist critics of Maduro’s capture, ‘not following the rules’ matters more than the success.
People like Neil didn’t notice or care that the ‘rules based system’ wasn’t following its own rules. They haven’t noticed how much less democratic Western Europe has become with increasing censorship and application of thought and speech crimes. Nor did they get outraged by supposedly legitimate wars, stamped with the approval of the UN, that were disastrous. Neil, just like leftists, never said that Obama, who dropped more than 92,000 bombs on seven different nations, had broken the old order. He never said Biden had when the 2020 election was stolen (Neil, just like the left, lied about that too).
The truth is that for the last 30 years international law has delivered anarcho-tyranny at home and incompetent wars abroad, told us that distant foreign borders are sacred while our own are opened to Third World invaders, and now says we want you to die fighting Russia but you can’t wave your own national flag and will be arrested if you offend anyone.
The old order broke the old order, while Neil didn’t notice because everyone was still being politely dishonest about it. Trump’s hard truths – that this order doesn’t serve Western national interests any more, that if the US (or any other nation) wants to prosper it can’t wait for UN permission to do so and that countries don’t need a permission slip to defend themselves – are simply the reality that comes from that prior betrayal, and not the disaster Neil thinks.
There’s an easy answer for other Western nations here. Be as sensible, bold and as focused on your own national interests as Trump’s America is. We are far better off with that than with the old order that delivered 30 years of failure and false priorities and hasn’t been the moral force Neil imagines for even longer than that.
It’s not a crime to be successful, it’s not immoral to defeat your enemies and it’s not wrong to act alone. Nations have the right to do all of these things, a right the US is reclaiming. Any ‘order’ that tells you these things are wrong is one that doesn’t have your interests at heart.
What has international law been in recent years save something that keeps telling Western nations to act against the interests of their own citizens, be weak towards their enemies, or waste themselves in wars that do no good while condemning much briefer military engagements that bring far more real rewards?
Trump has done more to assert Western leadership in a year than globalism has ever done. He’s not betrayed us, he’s shown us the way.
