This week, the world exploded, but what really shocked me wasn't Trump.
Trump was predictable. The chaos was published in advance. Project 2025 made the method and the objective plain: disruption as strategy, empire as the goal.
What has truly appalled me is this: despite vast defence budgets and vast intelligence capabilities, Western leaders have appeared totally unprepared. They clung to the “rules-based order” as if rules might still have meaning to a man who rejects legality.
So, in this video, I argue something many will find uncomfortable:
Defence isn't fundamentally about armaments. It's about legitimacy.
If people do not believe a society is worth defending, then no quantity of weapons will save it. And neoliberalism, which is designed to reward the few, cannot now demand sacrifice from the many.
That is why I think the only credible defence policy now is a politics of care: a society that values everyone, delivers for everyone, and earns loyalty by legitimacy.
This demands pragmatism, compromise, and coalition. The world we must create will be messy, but that will be its strength, and not its weakness.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
After a week where the world exploded, we need to rethink everything.
Let's be honest. I'm tired of Trump. I'm tired of his confusion. I'm tired of the chaos. I'm tired of his threats. But the truth is this: Trump isn't what has really got to me. What has got to me is that our supposed leaders were not prepared for this chaos, and they still don't grasp what is happening. NATO has been asleep, and it needs to be wide awake to rise to the challenges that we are facing.
This feels like a moment of crisis because it is. This year already feels like a rollercoaster that cannot guarantee it will get us back to the start safely. That matters because exhausted societies don't resist the threats that they face. They retreat, they comply, they accept the unacceptable, and none of this was a surprise.
Trump was predictable. I called him out long before his return. I said he was a fascist. I took the Greenland and Canada threats seriously before most people did. I realised what he was going to do because Project 2025 told us what was coming. It was all published in advance. It was around 900 pages; you just had to look at it, and you knew as a result that chaos was not going to be a byproduct of what was coming; it was the method, and the aim is empire. The so-called 'Western Hemisphere' is to be turned by Trump into a white male Christian theocracy led by a president who wants to be a king.
So, what shocks me isn't Trump. We knew that this was on its way. What shocks me is this: despite vast defence budgets and vast intelligence spending, our leaders apparently appear to have been totally blindsided by what Trump has done. They had warnings, they had evidence, and they still didn't prepare for what he's doing.
They believed instead in what they called the 'rules-based order'.
They assumed that those rules would hold despite Trump returning to office, saying that he was going to ignore them all.
They assumed that someone like Trump wouldn't have the nerve to break them, and that belief has now been shattered. He very clearly has no respect for their rules-based order.
That takes me to my core point of this video. If defence is important, and it is, it is not just about having armaments in the right place at the right time. That is always the last resort when it comes to defence, the thing that you rely upon when everything else has failed. Defence is, in fact, not about armaments; it is about legitimacy.
Defence begins with a commitment to something worth defending. People defend a system when they believe in it so strongly that they will sacrifice their material well-being, and sometimes even their lives, to protect it.
That system that they're willing to defend has to integrate ethics and political vision.
It has to be capable of delivery.
It has to be accountable.
It has to be based upon sound economics.
And above all else, it has to work for everyone and not just a few.
Without legitimacy, in other words, defence will always collapse. People don't man the barricades for a system that never cared about them, and that is what has been cruelly exposed in NATO.
Rules and orders were never enough. Our leader's belief in them was false. And neoliberalism was never going to work either. It was designed to reward a few and not to protect the many, so it cannot now demand loyalty and sacrifice from those from whom it is demanded. If we need a new defence system, we must begin with the definition of what is worth defending.
And my answer is simple; it is a politics of care; a society where everyone is treated as having value, and everyone can take part. Why else would people want to defend something? What would be their purpose in doing so?
But I'm worried because I can already see the retreat into rules and order happening again. I see purity politics at work, people defending labels instead of outcomes, and, for example, I've been told this week that I'm wrong to treat MMT flexibly, and this might be a microcosm, but it's an indication of what is important at this moment.
I'm not wrong to be flexible about how I interpret MMT. MMT is like a spade; it's useful because of what it can do. It's not an ideology to defend. It is literally a tool to use, but the purists don't see that. The purists are, as a result, a threat right now in all spheres. They are becoming the enemy of the good by doing what the left always does, which is to pick on enemies within rather than counter the threat from without, and in this moment, pragmatism is not betrayal. Pragmatism is all about survival.
I've also been told this week that they should not have welcomed Mark Carney's speech at Davos, but it was courageous. It was also right to some degree, and if he can see that neoliberalism is ruptured and that a replacement is required, then he's on the same journey as me. That makes him a fellow traveller, even if we do not agree on everything.
My point is, right now, we will need to compromise. Creating a new world will be messy. It will require working with people with whom we do not always agree.
Perfection is the guarantee of paralysis at this moment.
Progress is made this way.
Change happens this way.
Strength is created not through purity, but through the creation of common ground.
So, I am as fatigued by pointless opposition as I am by Trump, and it fuels my tiredness because I fear the need for compromise is not understood at this critical moment, and that incomprehension is just as dangerous right now as our leaders' incomprehension of Trump.
If you expect purity from me, then you are mistaken. This is a messy world. Almost 68 years of living on it has taught me that, and accommodation is now vital for success. The world we need will be built on recognising ourselves in others, even when disagreement exists, because what we have in common is far greater than what divides us.
So here is my conclusion. If you want rules and order, this channel is not for you. That system has failed. I'm not here to perpetuate it. But if you want progress towards what is good, then we have work to do. The politics of care is not a soft option; it is the only credible defence policy we have left. The new world we need is going to be messy, but that will be its foundation, and that will be its strength. That's what we need, a world where all our messiness can be combined to create something bigger than all of us.
What do you think? There's a poll down below.
Poll
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This is an exciting area of inquiry – you should keep at this. Yes – I know you have enough to do, but your input prompted this.
(Self) defence for a nation has to be about weapons and a means to repel external threats; it can also be about trade and financial regulation.
But what about internal threats? I agree with Hannah Arendt in that the ever present threat in our society of those who are attracted to authoritarianism poses a threat; those with latent racist views pose a threat as do those who will not accept rules and those who work toward monopoly power.
The only answer to the internal threat is surely the politics of care; a domestic politics of care is like the home guard – a form of (self) defence, nipping the surge to authoritarianism in the bud. This is the lesson of Nazism which I think even Europe – more concerned with expansion than consolidation of late – has forgotten and needs to grasp right quick.
On the purely economic front, the ‘social’ has to be put back into markets – it has to be about win/wins, not win -lose – that too is a defensive measure as Neo-liberalism comes to its chaotic conclusion because the loser are losing big and that is causing harm and is exploitable by bad actors. Only a courageous state can implement these changes.
Thank you. Much to agree with and an appropriate angle.
I voted for rebuilding political legitimacy at home but if there had been the option I would also have voted for building coalitions. Both are essential. But when building coalitions there is a need for realism about others in the coalition. Canada would be a desirable coalition party but let’s not assume their leader has abandoned neoliberalism without clear evidence. A coalition still involves competition for a dominant narrative and it is important when making compromises to understand the strategic implications. Don’t compromise for its own sake. This is part of the messiness.
It seems that our politicians are still thinking of defence in terms of military hardware. They are fast asleep when it comes to the true modern battleground — social media.
I’m not advocating censorship, I just want to see the good guys putting as much effort into flooding the Internet with good information as the bad guys put into spreading disinformation. I also think it’s high time that any platform that inserts unrequested content into users’ feeds should be held as responsible for that content as is any other publisher.
On a related note, I would love to see a law criminalising ‘deliberately or recklessly misleading the public’. We have such laws dealing with slurs against people, it’s high time they applied equally to lies about climate change, vaccinations, and all other click-bait.
Interesting
And I agree, we need to flood the place.
“our supposed leaders” – faces that fit into the existing neo-lib “order” that assumed Russia would be “like them”. Trump, part of the neo-lib order but able to use/channel the unhappiness of those “left-behind” in the USA (not that he has any interest in doing anything about it).
There are various YouTube channels that show the war in Ukraine – the poor devils dying by drone, alone in the snow, for what? The comment applies as much to Ukrainians as to Russians (they are people as well). Trump and Putin think might is right, ditto the group of dictators etc that Trump has assembled for war (it’s nowt to do with peace). Why are these people allowed to stay in power? A half wit knows that they are unfit to run anything. “Our supposed leaders” thus need to adopted “new approaches” to dealing with this bunch of mobsters. I will leave readers to speculate what these “approaches” might be, “pretty please” ain’t one of them & the idea of defense needs to broaden.
What’s never been clear to me is the input Trump had into Project 2025. Of course he knew about it, despite his denials on the campaign trail, but is it like Murdoch and his editors: He doesn’t have to tell them anything specific about what he wants in his papers or on Fox because they know what he likes. I think it’s an important question because the threat of someone succeeding Trump, like Marco Rubio for example, who thinks more profoundly, if that’s the right word, is still huge.
He recruited Steve Miller as his deputy cheif of staff and he was behind it. Trump may not do detail, but he recruited those who did the detail of Project 2025.
Absolutely spot on Richard. Like you I was shocked ..not at trump..he is totally predictable…ducks and swerves …threatens and then says ..nah only kidding..then off on another tack..what got to me was the total inability of the european leaders to deal with the mind games trump was playing…except Carney..who stood firm and for his trouble had more tariffs thrown at him.
The last piece of advice I got from Dad before I lost him was..if someone tries to kill you…kill them right back…works for me.
Rest and watch the birdies. I saw a swift hopping along the pavement in front of me this morning..busy busy..then saw a tiny starling land on top of a big fat pigeon at the feeding station…it’s not always size that matters….
The thing is that vast defence budgets and vast intelligence spending assume an external enemy; for NATO, the U.S. is the enemy within. Additionally, within defence and intelligence, there are baselines which have to be taken for granted; one being that your allies, particularly those who sign up to the same defensive military treaty, will stand by you. It is impossible to plan for all the variables without assumptions.
Yes – anyone paying attention would have seen this coming, BUT unscrambling a massive alliance based on what until recently were seen as the whims of one man is a risky business. I’m absolutely not saying that it shouldn’t have been planned for. It should – and if there are no contingency plans in place by now, that is scandalous. But those plans would have had to be made whilst excluding the U.S. from all relevant intelligence and all discussions, and that is nigh on impossible.
Certainly the leaders of European countries should have condemned Trump the minute he stepped out of line, including during his first term, in EVERY area, not just defence/NATO. They did not. That is their failure, and the reason we have reached this point within NATO.
I happen to be generally in favour of an international rules based order. It is when countries select which of those rules they abide by that major fault lines appear. Trump ignores them all, relying instead on his “own morality” to guide him. I have nothing further to add to that at this time…
It isn’t so much that our leaders were blindsided. It is that they refused to believe the evidence freely available, and that’s different. In my view, it’s also a great deal more culpable.