[Robin McAlpine Blog] What now, appeasement or disengagement?

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What now, appeasement or disengagement?

I have been pushing my belief that an independent Scotland should take a non-aligned stance if it becomes independent, choosing which internaitional alliances, coalitions and international actions to engage with and which not on a case-by-case basis. I have also strongly advocated a more self-sufficient economy based on the awfully-titled concept of green import substitution reindustrialisation.

The former is about peace and justice and Scotland’s self interest, the latter about using decarbonisation to strengthen your domestic economy by shortening supply chains. But as I started pushing both (many years ago when both views were very much out of fashion) I also had at the back of my mind that the US was going mad.

That’s clearer than ever – and now the only question is what response the rest of the world takes. Mostly what I can see is a genuinely pathetic rush to appeasement. But how long can we really maintain the fiction of a sane United States?

First, let me just address a couple of things. I’m not desperately interested where on the ‘is he a fascist’ scale Trump really is, because the fact that the US is moving so quickly and relentlessly in that direction is all I need to know. The gap between ‘not fascist’ and ‘fascist’ closes in the blink of an eye.

Second, this isn’t reflexive ‘anti-Western’ stuff nor do I in any way seek to pretend that the non-Western world is better than it is. Realistically, an independent Scotland is, on most things in most instances, clearly going to find itself in the alliance with the Western nations. It’s just that the greater good of the wider world need Western nations to opt out when their Western allies are wrong. The world lacks balance.

Third, I’m not being daft here. Europe’s economy is intricately entwined with the US economy. For example, at a guess I’d imagine that a full British trade embargo on the US (for sake of argument) would mean no tractors in the country able to get spare parts. We can’t go ‘cold turkey’ on the US.

But how much can we build or future around them? Because it’s not just Trump, and that’s my fourth contextual point; in 2016 there was a strategy of ‘hold the line and wait for sanity to return in four years’. This won’t work now because the problem with the US goes well beyond Trump. About three decade of increasingly extreme Republicanism and the way they distorted the nation made a Trump increasingly inevitable.

There is nothing much to cling to to give you any reassurance that this state of affairs is likely to pass in the near future

At the heart of this is what US-watchers know as the Citizens’ United decision in which a right-wing Supreme Court (it’s worse now) argued that spending money to influence elections was a version of the constitutional right to free speech and so could not be regulated in any way. That and the very nature of its constitution makes the US ripe for oligarchy.

That is what it has got. The Democrats thought they could woo the very rich by promising not to do anything very much. The Republicans simply offered to do loads, all things the rich want. And as we know, the rich and powerful have a track record of a commitment to democracy that is flexible once their financial interests are on the table.

Make no mistake; the super-rich are providing the finances for the resurgent global far right. It is networked and professionalised in ways the left can only dream about given the amount of spending it needs to do it professionally. As for the media in the US; well, that simply splits between those who are all out for the far right, and those who are all out for the centre right.

The US has a fundamental ideological and constitutional problem and all the restraints on it have been loosening since Regan. Now the US is returning to what it was – the land of the brave and the home of the free, if by ‘brave’ you mean massively overpowered in comparison to your opponents and if by ‘free’ you mean ‘the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing and genocide rather than its victims’.

There is nothing much to cling to to give you any reassurance that this state of affairs is likely to pass in the near future. Far from it, most of the conditions which created this concerning America are accelerating, not fading. Sure the Democrats could return to power in four years, but how much are we banking on that? How confident are you that we don’t end up with three consecutive far-right terms of office?

In that context, is ‘appease Trump long enough to protect our interests while things return to normal’ a sensible option? What if we try it and in say five years we realise the US is not going to return to normal – can we afford to wait until then to take measures?

Would you be confident in a system of cyber security almost wholly controlled by a Trump character? That might be the reality for anyone buying all its software and components from a US governed by an authoritarian right-wing leader. Frankly, how absolutely certain are you that the US has zero prospects of being one of the nations we need to protect ourselves from?

What happens as their regulation gets more lax? At what point do US social media platforms become so unregulated we have to stop them for the sake of democracy? (Some would argue ‘last year’…) How are we responding to that? Can we respond to that?

If you can’t find the biggest, most stable boat to get on board, make your own little boat as nimble and manoeuvrable as possible

What happens if we face a US which has discovered that disproportionate escalation works. Let’s say for example that we were to ban X (god, I’m going to have to start calling it that, amn’t I?). What do we do if the US then uses its almost total control of the global financial system to punish us? What happens if we get financial sanctions?

Either we accept our punishment or we buckle. And we’d obviously buckle, at which point Trump is writing our domestic policy. But the more we buckle, the less we have any other choice. The US has already put massive pressure on Europe to cut Chinese products out of our public communications infrastructure. Do we really want to be wholly controlled by an unreliable nation?

Right now, it is fairly easy to imagine us being drawn into a war with Iran based on Article 5 of the Nato treaty which forces us to go to war if another Nato member claims it is taking military action in self defence. Certainly Europe has next to no capacity to defend itself without US help.

This is the fundamental policy position of the US to Europe; we must be supplicant and reliant. In the 1990s when communism collapsed the leaders of Europe had a simple vision, shared by the leaders of Russia. Russia would gradually integrate into a pan-European defence network. In fact Putin was really keen on this and tried to join Nato more than once.

It was the US which was 100 per cent adamant that Europe and Russia must remain in a cold war, and the US therefore took aggressive steps to ensure that, mainly by repeatedly pushing Nato (against European objections) closer and closer to Russia’s border. Here is the mad thing; if it wasn’t for the United States, Europe would barely need a defence partnership. We’d face no credible threats.

As it is, come January Donald Trump will control the targetting system for over 200 nuclear weapons stationed in Scotland, a concern you know is acute when the secret service are once again calling on its most reliable Scottish journalist to do his duty and sort them out a whole story about how the obvious thing (get rid of nukes in a world with Trump in power) is wrong and the opposite of the obvious things (keep pretending this is an independent weapons system when it isn’t) is wise,

So yes, with predictable servility, the West is choosing appeasement. Again. I’m sure its telling itself that if that doesn’t work out, there is still time for disengagement. That is an optimistic position. The US empire is in fundamental decline and may well be sowing the seeds of its own internal collapse.

I’d suggest pivoting to Europe but the US has done so much political damage there that half that continent could be Trump-aligned by the time we do. There is no safe haven just now. My suggestion is therefore ‘if you can’t find the biggest, most stable boat to get on board, make your own little boat as nimble and manoeuvrable as possible’.

Which would mean adopting a position of non-alignment, creating greater economic self-sufficiency and staying the hell out of global conflict. I suspect the US will make this choice for us sooner or later. I can’t help but feel that it would be better if we made it for ourselves earlier.

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