EVER feel like you aren’t being told the whole story? You aren’t alone.
In 2024, politicians and journalists footed a YouGov table of truth-telling occupations: 72% distrusted the media, while 69% and 74% suspected the UK Government and MPs respectively. Even lobbyists were less doubted than our elected representatives.
Many career politicos and their friends in the media respond with matched derision. The public are infected by foreign disinformation or bamboozled by algorithms. The governing element stands in a thin grey line, bumbling perhaps, but sentinel against the morass of public despondency.
Working on the assumption that so many cynics can’t be entirely wrong, let’s take a grand tour of our new era of war. We will see that so much of what we are being told makes no sense.
Britain, we are told, is in the front ranks of states defending Ukraine against Russia. But as a slew of recent revelations have demonstrated, our relationship to the conflict is more complicated. The UK has slipped the sanctions net around Russia to import oil products through third countries. Keir Starmer has also rejected a Nato plan to spend 0.25% of GDP on the defence of Ukraine.
Liberal proponents of the war, the longest and most deadly in Europe since 1945, have long complained of appeasement and half-measures. The Nato states combined are incomparably richer and more heavily armed than their Russian foe. Yet few noting these inconsistencies follow them to their logical conclusion.
The German theorist of war Carl von Clausewitz long ago found that “war is a mere continuation of policy by other means”. We are not fighting the Russians to a finish but trading the bodies of Ukrainians in a protracted negotiation over spheres of influence. This was made explicit when Donald Trump invited Vladimir Putin to US territory for a red-carpet reception, while the Ukrainian leadership languished in the margins.
In this conduct, Trump is no aberration. He is only making explicit the hard logic of power. Pundits flatter their own governments with the pet theory that war is something that happens when international order breaks down.
But war is international order – “policy by other means”. States negotiate with words, with trade, with money and bombs. For the powerful, the difference is tactical, not categorical.
Trump’s recent visit to Beijing led to consternation when he indicated a willingness to listen to Chinese claims on Taiwan. We hear that Trump has a penchant for strongmen like Xi Jinping and Putin. Really, he has an accommodation for his rival great powers.
In Ukraine, Taiwan and Venezuela, the biggest dogs are letting each other mark territory. Every time the bell tolls in Gaza, Yemen or Lebanon, it is heard in the Russian or Chinese spheres as well. Not that the warlike Western cheerleaders for Tibet or Xinjiang have cottoned on.
Cubans are starving, literally, so that the Trump administration can keep up a pressure campaign during talks with their government. As in Venezuela, all the signs suggest the US wants compliance, not some version of liberal democratic good practice. Likewise, Iranian monarchists find themselves sidelined for the inheritors of the Islamic Revolution.
Empires care little whether those they harass call themselves capitalists, communists or Islamists. Obedience is the objective, and the lives of the innocent – those who command neither wealth nor state power – are the bargain price. Few in Western institutions stopped to dwell on the killing of 120 children at the Minab girls’ school, bombed by the US.
The Scottish Government participated in the strong-arming of Venezuela when it allowed Scotland to be used to enforce the blockade, and we’ve scarcely pondered it since. It’s not personal, after all, but strictly business.
With extreme diffidence, we are still encouraged to think that the bombardment of Iran has everything to do with the country’s nuclear ambitions. Never mind that this is a war launched by two actual nuclear-armed powers, the US and Israel, and currently adjudicated in a third nuke-toting state, Pakistan.
Forget that Saudi Arabia, a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, recently stepped under Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella. At least we think so – in this case, the parties had the grace to tell us to our faces it was none of our business.
In all these wars and confrontations, we should assume secret diplomacy. We are getting the little picture and often straightforward lies. We are a world away from silly talk of a rules-based international order, and equally distant from the idea of war as a desperate, no-holds-barred clash of civilisations. Inter-state competition is very real.
Like mafia clans, the rulers of this unhappy world are battling over the real estate. But they are canny enough to know this is a permanent struggle. No-one wins outright, and all the players have an interest in the game continuing.
Which brings us back to our untrusted governing class. Why aren’t they communicating all this to their constituents and audiences? Because any politician or journalist describing the world in the above terms would lose their career.
That’s not to say it’s all cold calculation. Like their Russian and Chinese equivalents, they are ideologues. They live in a world where “the liberal democracies” are, though not perfect, morally apart from the barbarian realm of the autocrats and terrorists. Confrontation with reality would be devastating – professionally and psychologically.
Only we who have a vested interest in peace, since we are the ones who will pay with treasure and blood in the conflagration, can afford to look truth in the face. We should never give room to the childish stories we are sold by those with less to lose.
