The war on Iran emphasises the need for something better than populism as a response to the failure of the old order Peter Ramsay is Professor of Law at the London School of Economics. He is also one of the founding editors of The Northern Star This article originally appeared at The Northern Star Photo: Screen Grab
Donald Trump’s purposeless war on Iran looks likely to bring global misery in its wake. The consequences for the supply of oil, gas and the raw materials for fertiliser production are already very serious. Energy and food prices are rocketing, fuel shortages are already a reality in poorer countries, and food shortages by next winter are a distinct possibility. A new version of the stagflation experienced in the 1970s is a distinct possibility. If it ends soon the global damage might yet be limited. But of the developed states, Britain with its globalised economy looks set to be particularly badly exposed to the costs of this war. We already have the highest energy costs in the developed world, costs that are strangling the remnants of our industry and the Iran war only makes this worse.
It is therefore an urgent necessity to learn the political lessons that the Trumpian chaos is teaching us. Two of them are lessons that we at TNS have been urging on British politics since we began. The first is one that is now becoming increasingly obvious to many people across the political spectrum: we need to look to our national interest first. Trump has finished off the already decayed rules-based international order of globalisation and he has fatally undermined the ‘Western’ alliance. However hypocritical that order may have been, it was real enough to allow states like Britain to outsource strategic industries such as energy, food, fertiliser, pharmaceuticals to overseas suppliers and to get by with minimal strategic reserve capacity. That world is gone.
Having attacked Iran but then being unable to keep open the Straits of Hormuz, through which 20 per cent of the world’s oil passes, and which Iran has closed as a result of the the US-Israeli attack, Trump taunted the British saying: ‘Go get your own oil’. In these circumstances states are forced to return to basing policy not on what is most profitable for shareholders or on what produces the cheapest consumer goods or what will serve the ends of chimerical globalist utopias, but on the national interest; policies that will maintain the coherence, welfare and security of the limited political community we call the British nation.
The policies that will serve the national interest will not emerge by clever technocratic calculation. While expert knowledge is essential, it will not be sufficient, because the national interest is not a given thing but the outcome of national politics. A successful politics of national interest requires statecraft: that is, a capacity to negotiate internal political tensions and conflicts, and external relations with other states, in a way that maximises the coherence and authority of the nation-state in the face of the very troubled and uncharted geopolitical waters we are entering. Without this, the state will lack the political capacity to implement the required policy shifts, some of which will be painful. Mired in decades of globalist fantasies and culture war, our political class shows very few signs of possessing this statecraft.
The second lesson that Trumpian chaos is teaching is that the populist reaction to the failure of our existing technocratic globalist elite provides no basis for developing the kind of statecraft that is needed, and therefore little prospect for securing a national interest. Trump himself is proof of that. Elected in 2024 on the overriding issue of the cost of living, 18 months later headline inflation is slightly reduced but the cost of essentials continues to rise and most Americans remain pessimistic about any change to this. His tariffs strategy has not so far seen any significant improvement in manufacturing investment and employment in the USA. It is not at all clear that even his theatrically aggressive campaign of deportations of illegal immigrants has in fact increased the rate of deportations carried out under previous presidents.
As we pointed out when he was elected , Trump had no excuses left for failure on his domestic agenda since, unlike during his previous presidency, this time he had control of all three branches of government and of the Republican Party. But as we also pointed out, Trump had long ceased to have any of the insurgent qualities he might have had in 2016. By 2024 he had been embraced by swathes of American big business and it is their interests he is serving. It is the conflict between his populist pitch to ordinary Americans and the big business interests actually running the show that led Trump into the Gulf quagmire. As we warned:
‘The strength of his mandate, on the one hand, combined with the incoherence of his underlying position, on the other, will encourage his vanity and populist instincts at the expense of genuine nation-building. Any setbacks will enhance the appeal of the culture war elements of his programme, and possibly even of diversionary international wars with Iran or China.’
For all the dramatic break with globalisation that Trump has executed, the Iran war draws attention to an element of continuity between his foreign policy and the neoconservatism of the preceding era since the end of the Cold War: compensating for the USA’s relative decline as a manufacturing power by reliance on asserting American military power to maintain its influence and domination over the world economy. That long strategy of militarisation, that became known as ‘forever war’, has now outlived its usefulness and is entering its truly demented phase—imagining that what failed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya might somehow succeed against the plainly more robust Iran. American militarisation is visibly failing to discipline Russia or contain China’s slow rise to dominance in Eurasia. The contempt shown to America’s longstanding European allies has exposed the lack of justification for American global leadership. However, for our purposes in Britain the immediate lesson is that we have further proof that populism cannot address the needs of nation-building at home.
Just as Trump has no real alternative to the old political economy, an alternative that might speak to the needs of ordinary American citizens, so British populists are empty handed. They too can rail against the existing state elite and bemoan ‘Broken Britain’ but they have no more statecraft than Trump. Like Trump they blame foreigners, especially migrants and Muslims, for what are the failings of the British state. If Britain issues too many visas or fails to defend its borders from unauthorised entry that’s on us, not the immigrants. More to the point, simply targeting immigration without an alternative political economy that removes the need for the cheap imported labour and that improves conditions for the existing population, is not a strategy. It is not enough to criticise the suicidal delusions of the globalist left if you do not have a strategy for strengthening the nation.
British populists may not have the capacity to start foreign wars, but, like Trump, Reform with their thin political programme will be unable to tackle the deep-seated problems of the British economy and the British state. Reform advertised their shaky grasp of reality with their quick expressions of support for Trump’s war before backing off quietly as they realised just how damaging it was likely to be to British interests. Should they get into power, the danger is that they will default to the culture war territory they can handle and meanwhile be quietly captured by the longstanding power structures of the sclerotic British state. Only by abandoning their populism and their background Thatcherite assumptions could Reform begin to develop the serious approach to national survival that is needed.
There is no doubt that populism has energised Western politics. It has raised horizons by demonstrating that the old authoritarian liberal order can be checked. But Trump’s own authoritarianism and his failures still seem only likely to benefit the Democrats who show few signs of having learned much from their own earlier failures. The all too likely failure of Reform will similarly help to prop up the fragmented and intellectually exhausted old order of the Uniparty. The worst aspect of populism is its potential to reinforce political cynicism among those citizens whose interests have not had a look in for decades.
We need to get beyond the loudmouth showmen, who are good at articulating popular discontent but have nothing else in the political tank, and who are quite as venal as the old order when it comes down to it. We are urgently in need of a new political paradigm that can break out of this dead end. The politics of national interest require us to get beyond the culture war shouting and to distinguish nation-building from populism by articulating a programme of real investment in the nation.
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