Author Archives: Tom Arms

One of my barometers for the health of the Special Relationship is a weekly broadcast I do for American talk stations. The host is Trumptonian Lockwood Phillips who also happens to be an old schoolmate. I am referred to as the Looney London Liberal by the vast majority of my 500,000 listeners who are staunch Trump supporters. They are just the sort of people I want to reach.

The purpose of the hour-long show is to provide a European assessment of American politics and to analyse events in Europe that should be of interest to American audiences. Normally the discussion between Lockwood and myself is reasonably civilised, although it occasionally slips into the gutter. Not so this week. It went straight to the gutter and stayed there. We were both shouting: “you’re wrong” or “you don’t know what you are talking about”several times, possibly more by me than Lockwood.

The cause of this plunge in civility was Ambassador Kim Darroch’s leaked confidential emails in which he described the Trump Administration as “inept” and “dysfunctional”. Actually the real cause of my anger was President Trump’s reaction in branding Ambassador Darroch as “pompous” and “widely disliked” and said that the White House would refuse to work with him during the six months before the ambassador’s retirement.

I know Kim Darroch. He is not pompous and he is widely liked and respected. So chalk that part of the tweet up as another presidential lie. But more importantly, why can’t the president keep his mouth shut? Why does he feel obligated to respond to every criticism? What drives him to escalate every political conflict into a personal attack?  Why can’t he perform the statesman’s role of taking it on the chin and uttering the words: “No comment?” Or at least avoid personal insults.

The Beatles sang: “All you need is love”, and young girls delicately placed flowers in the barrels of the guns of National Guardsmen. For a brief period in the 1960’s and 1970s we thought that love would emerge as the world’s overpowering human emotion.  That the words of Franklin Roosevelt—“all we have to fear is fear itself”– would pass into historical redundancy. And that Senator McCarthy’s commies under the bed witch hunt was an uncharacteristic historical blip.

Sorry, it was not to be. Fear is once again the overriding political emotion which is driving the thinking of the electorate and being ruthlessly exploited by the politicians.  In Britain, fear of immigrants, sovereignty and a loss of national identity drove people to vote for Brexit. Conversely, it is a fear of financial loss and political influence which is driving the Remain camp to continue opposing Brexit.  The country is hopelessly divided because both sides are terrified of the consequences of losing the argument.

In the United States Trump supporters are frightened of “invading” Mexicans who will take their jobs, destroy their identity, rape their women, force them to smoke, swallow and inject drugs and murder them in their beds.  The “invaders” from Mexico and Central America are frightened because they are being murdered in their beds, and on the streets, by gangs fighting each other for control of the lucrative drug trade into America.

Trump supporters are also scared of the Chinese, globalism, socialism, liberalism and the growing power of their own government. Opponents of Donald Trump are frightened of Trump. Almost everyone except Trump is frightened of climate change.

Once upon a time there was a venerated institution in the not so distant land of Great Britain called parliament. In fact, it was called “The Mother of Parliaments” as countries around the world emulated its structures and system of representative democratic government.

Parliament became the legal and political platform on which the largest empire in the history of the world was built. Its members were respected and their opinions were sought in world councils.

But times change. The empire sank below the waves.  If Britain was going to continue to prosper and retain political power than it needed to increase its voice by joining it with others—the European Union.

This made sense to many Brits, but not all.  Some thought in terms of pragmatic economies of scale. Others felt with hearts which yearned for an imperial past and bridled at the thought of being told the size of their beer mugs by Brussels Eurocrats.

In a 1975 referendum “the metropolitan elite” (as they were later called) won the argument and Britain joined the Common Market.  Thus began one of the most prosperous and stable phases of British history. Then Europe began to change. Other members wanted political as well as economic union and the Common Market morphed into the European Union with the reluctant agreement of successive British governments.

ou can just make it out. It is still dim and indistinct in the swirling political mists. But there appears to be a light at the end of the long Brexit tunnel.

Hopefully, it is not the oncoming No-deal train, but rather a Remain engine pulling a long line of carriages waiting to be boarded.

If it is the latter than a great deal more work still needs to be done before a People’s Vote is agreed. Then more work to secure a Remain result  and then, finally, an ongoing effort—to win  continued support in Britain—and other countries—for the European Union.

So first of all, how to reach the initial goal of the People’s Vote and what to put on the ballot paper. Rule number one: Don’t trust Corbyn. He is still fighting the class wars of the seventies and is hoping for a chaotic political vacuum which he can fill with his Marxist-Leninist platform.  Brexit train crash spells opportunity for the Labour leader.

The ballot paper should duplicate the binary choice of the 2016 referendum. Voters should be given a choice to revoke Article 50 and remain in the European Union or to accept whatever deal the government has negotiated at the time of the People’s Vote. A third option with an alternative vote system would take too long to negotiate and confuse the voters.

The campaign will be tough—for both camps. Over the past two and a half years positions have become increasingly entrenched. The pool of floating voters that canvassers normally target has shrunk as voters have fallen off the fence into one camp or the other.  A person’s stand on Brexit has become an identity badge and to swap it for another involves huge loss of face.

Donald Trump takes a reverse scientific approach to issues. He searches for the voters greatest fears; enunciates them in the most dramatic and divisive language possible; and then twists and invents facts and re-invents history to support his claims.

Some might say, so what? Isn’t that what every politician does?  Yes, but the President of the United States has taken the practice to an entirely new level, and in doing so has undermined a political class which was already standing on crumbling foundations.  The Washington Post, which keeps a tally of presidential lies, reported in his first 601 days of his presidency, Donald Trump lied or made misleading statements 5,000 times.

You would have thought that the Donald could have temporarily broken himself of this nasty habit when addressing the nation from behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.  Wrong.  Instead, his televised speech justifying the government shutdown and a demand for a southern border wall was possibly the best example yet of Donald Trump’s inability to speak the truth.

First off, there was no justification to use the tool of a televised address to the nation. There is no crisis. America is not being invaded. Terrorists are not flooding across US-Mexico border. These fears were manufactured by Donald Trump to insure his election to the White House and they are now being exaggerated to keep him there.

Trump is using the oldest political trick in the world. When in trouble create a crisis. Create an enemy. Offer a solution, the more expensive and grander the better. Trump’s crisis is the “invasion” from the south. The enemies are the Democrats, Hispanics and anyone who has a wish to live and work in the United States. The solution is a visible wall which Trump can point to and say: “See, look, there it is, the wall, I did something that no other president would.”.

It’s time to move the Brexit spotlight. Its focus on Theresa May’s deal has thoroughly exposed the bankruptcy of the British Prime Minister’s proposal and left the government frantically planning to minimise the chaos of a no-deal Brexit.

But Opposition Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn is so wedded to his revolutionary socialist ideology that he is making as big a contribution to the national crisis as the conservative government.

The British House of Commons is divided—and in the strangest of ways. The vast majority of its members voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum.  And, if the truth be known, would probably vote the same again. But in both parties there are powerful minorities in favour of Brexit, and they are determining their respective  party’s actions.

The Labour Party’s Brexiteer wing is much smaller than that of the conservatives. But it is led by party leader Corbyn.  He is a lifelong Eurosceptic. He voted against Britain joining the European Economic Community in 1973 and campaigned to leave it in the 1975 referendum. And since then Corbyn has voted against every European treaty, law and regulation that has come before the British parliament.

In the 2016 referendum he was faced with a dilemma. He was leader of a party whose clearly stated policy was to remain in the EU but he was personally opposed to membership of what he regarded as a neo-liberal capitalist club. So Corbyn did the dishonest thing.  He paid lip service to party policy but conducted a campaign that was so ineffectual that he might as well have been sharing a platform with staunch Brexiteers Boris Johnson and Michael Gove.

Since the Labour Party’s autumn conference it has been overwhelming official party policy to push for a second referendum on EU membership. Corbyn has ignored every opportunity to fulfil this policy decision and focused instead on the impossible task of forcing a general election.

Jeremy Corbyn knows full well that a second referendum could very easily lead to a Brexit reversal. That is the last thing he wants. He could have secured a second referendum this week by tabling a vote of no confidence in the government.  But instead he tabled an ineffectual no confidence vote in the prime minister.

Sherlock Holmes offered the solution to the current Brexit conundrum admirably when he told Dr Watson in the Beryl Coronet: “when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

At the moment the two possibilities before parliament are the deal negotiated by Prime Minister Theresa May and crashing out with no deal whatsoever. The latter would be the result of the rejection of the first if no plan B, C or D appears on the political horizon.

The first possibility will be rejected by parliament because it turns what used to be imperial Britain into a colony of a Europe dominated by historic enemies France and Germany.  The United Kingdom would be indefinitely tied to the EU and yet left without any say in the rules that govern it. Its ability to strike trade deals with other countries would be severely hampered and Northern Ireland would be effectively hived off. In return, the UK would regain control of its immigration policies.

We will call this deal Option One and, using the Holmes formula, rule it out as it is impossible that parliament will approve it.  So we move to Option Two, a no deal Brexit. First the plus side: Immigration is controlled. Trade deals can be negotiated. Payments to the EU are stopped. The European courts cease to have jurisdiction in Britain. Now the negatives: The economy will shrink by up to nine percent overnight. Hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost as foreign companies move operations to EU countries. The pound will collapse. Inflation will rise. Troubles could restart in Northern Ireland and tariff barriers would go up between Britain and its main trading partners on the continent.  MPs would, in effect, be voting to make every single one of their constituents substantially poorer.

The only members of the House of Commons likely to consider Option Two are the members of the European Research Group. They total 62 out of 650 MPs. In fact, an overwhelming majority of the House of Commons—450—voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum. So Option Two can be placed firmly into the impossible box.

JTheresa May is a frightened woman.

She is not frightened by the pile of Conservative MPs’ letters demanding her departure. They are still a long way from the 48 required. And even if it reaches the magic number, the bookies are betting on Mrs May retaining the leadership in any consequent vote.

Even if she loses, Theresa May can take solace from Enoch Powell’s truism that all political careers end in failure and that her successor will be faced with the same brick wall of insoluble Brexit problems as she was.

Neither is Mrs May worried about Spain’s latest sabre rattling over Gibraltar. She is confident that Brussels can pull Madrid into line with a sidebar letter or a slight tweaking of the Brexit agreement.

The unravelling of the prime minister’s de facto coalition with the Democratic Unionist Party is a concern. But it was never more than an inconvenient marriage of convenience based on a foundation of contradictions.  Northern Ireland voted to remain. The majority want the benefits of Europe which include good relations with Dublin and peace on their island. The DUP exists for one purpose only:  the perpetuation of the Protestant Ascendancy in Northern Ireland. This puts it in complete opposition to the majority Northern Irish vote in the Brexit referendum.

Mrs May can deal with the above. Or if she can’t the results of failure would not be so catastrophic that her legacy would be tarnished beyond repair.

Theresa May is frightened of two other outcomes: No deal or a second referendum. Unfortunately for her, it is looking increasingly likely that the final choice will be between those two options.

Britain is a United Kingdom again. After more than two years of divisive vitriolic debate it has emerged upon the sunny upland plain of total agreement.

Soon the British public will be treated to the sight of former bitter enemies Boris Johnson, Vince Cable and Jacob Rees-Mogg joining hands to skip gaily into the Commons division lobby. Nigel Farage and Bob Geldof may soon embrace on the banks of the Thames.

Fathers and sons who have scowled at each other for two years will again smile across the breakfast table. Mothers and daughters will cheerfully gossip over a steaming cuppa and the pubs will enjoy a booming trade as stalled friendships are renewed over a pint—or two.

Prime Minister Theresa May has succeeded in uniting the British people against the common enemy—Herself.

Brexiteers and Remainers who only yesterday were at each other’s throats have turned as one to sink the political axe firmly into the back of their prime minister and her draft Brexit deal with the EU.

 It took less than 24 hours for Dominic Raab– the man Mrs May placed in charge of Brexit negotiations—to resign. He refused to allow his name to be associated with the agreement. He was preceded by the junior minister for Northern Ireland, Shailesh Vara. At least nine other cabinet ministers are known to oppose the deal and it is quite possible that there could be more resignations before I finish this piece.

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi is not an isolated incident. It is part of a worldwide concerted effort by criminals threatened by exposure; power-hungry politicians frightened of truth and criticism and ideologues seeking to manipulate public opinion.

Khashoggi hit the headlines because he was murdered by agents of one of the world’s most oppressive regimes which is also supported by countries who claim freedom of speech as a bedrock of their system of government.

A total of 46 journalists around the world were killed in 2017. Two thirds were murder victims. More than 2,500 have been killed since 1990. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 262 journalists languished in the world’s prisons at the end of 2017. Turkey—whose president is taking the lead in condemning Saudi Arabia—leads the pack with 73 journalists behind bars.

We tend to think of freedom of speech as a product of the Age of Enlightenment. Yes and no.  It was a key element in The Golden Age of Athens and was enshrined in Roman law. In common with most laws and freedoms, freedom of speech dwindled to the point of extinction in the Middle Ages. It was revived in the 17^th century. Leading the way was English poet, philosopher and statesman John Milton who passionately argued for the right to seek information and ideas, receive information and ideas and impart information and ideas.

By 1689 Freedom of Speech was enshrined in the English Bill of Rights. It was the First Amendment in the US constitution along with freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and the freedom to petition the government. Freedom of Speech was declared an inalienable right in the French Revolution’s Rights of Man. The protection of free speech can be found in almost every written constitution as well as in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and EU Law.

The extremely likely interrogation, torture and murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi  inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul is set to have far-reaching consequences.

The position of Iran, the civil war in Yemen, the Arab-Israeli conflict, reform in Saudi Arabia, the tenure of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the economic development of Saudi Arabia, US foreign policy and the credibility of President Trump will all be affected.

I should add the caveat that as of this broadcast/writing there is no body and the Saudis continue to deny, deny, deny. But so far they have failed to explain why Mr Khashoggi went into the consulate to keep a 1.15pm appointment on 2nd October and has never been seen since. Neither have they offered an explanation as to why he was preceded and followed by Saudi agents, some of whom carried what are believed to be bone cutting tools. Finally, the Saudi officials have failed to explain an audio recording which strongly indicates the interrogation and torture of Mr Khashoggi.

The onus is on the autocratic ruler of Saudi Arabia— Mohammed bin Salman (aka MBS) to either produce a live Jamal Khashoggi or a credible explanation for his disappearance. So far he has only shrugged his shoulders, arched his eyebrows and replied: “I dunno.  Nothing to do with me.”

The argy bargy over North Korea is part of a much bigger geopolitical battle.
That is not to say that the denuclearisation of an authoritarian and unstable rogue state such as North Korea is unimportant. It is vitally so.
But the prize at stake is huge– control of the Pacific East Rim. And what a prize it is. Excluding contender China, the combined GDP of the region is $12.9 trillion dollars and growing fast. The size of the market is one billion consumers.

For centuries the Pacific Rim was a Chinese lake and primary source of wealth for the Middle Kingdom. Then at the end of the 15th century , Europe simultaneously discovered America and the sea routes to Asia. The power axis shifted to the other end of the Eurasian land mass.

By the start of the 20th century China had slipped from producing an estimated 30 percent of the world’s wealth to a mere nine percent in 1913. After the World War I an exhausted Europe faltered and a rising Japan and America competed to fill the vacuum. The Second World War and two atomic bombs settled that row.
Since 1945 the US has been the undisputed political, economic and military master of both sides of the Pacific. There was a blip called the Vietnam War, but the United States’ solid links elsewhere in the region remained intact and the US and Vietnam now enjoy good relations. America’s annual trade with the Eastern rim is worth nearly $900 billion a year. America’s next biggest trading partner is the EU at $720 billion a year.

In military terms, America’s position is protected by its Pacific Fleet with 200 ships, 2,000 aircraft and a quarter of a million naval and marine personnel. On the ground it has 39,000 soldiers in Japan and 23,500 in South Korea. Then there is the nuclear umbrella with 1,800 deployed warheads.

The Chinese are catching up fast on all fronts. But just how fast and how and how successful they are depends on their economic success. They need cash to compete, which is why they are starting to worry about Donald Trump’s tariffs and the resultant trade war.

The Trump Administration likes to portray its imposition of tariffs as protecting American industry from unfair Chinese trading practices. The reality is that that a more fundamental geopolitical view of the world lies at the root of the Trump tariffs. It is that the real estate tycoon turned president believes in winner-takes-all zero sum competition rather than win/win cooperation.

Cold War Memory Lane is being resurfaced with a fresh alphabet soup of nuclear weapons, treaty breaches, renewed bellicosity, cyber attacks and even assassination.

Putin’s Russia has been branded a “pariah state” by British defence Secretary Jeremy Hunt and Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Washington’s Permanent Representative to NATO has threatened to “take out” the latest generation of Russian intermediate-range nuclear weapons.

Of course, we are not back in 1945.Then a prostrate Western Europe was in danger of being overrun by a Soviet war machine whose authoritarian government made no secret of its aim of overthrowing capitalism and the democratic structures that supported it.

The political and economic collapse of the Soviet Union pushed the frontline between the West and Russia right up against the Russian border. Europe is now an economic powerhouse, although it remains a stunted midget in military terms.  It continues to need American protection as much as America needs European markets and political support which is why NATO remains relevant.

The initial American reaction to Soviet aggression in the Cold War was to deploy troops and nuclear capable aircraft in Western Europe as a counter to superior Soviet conventional forces. The message was clear: Attack Western Europe and you will be delayed by conventional forces long enough for atomic bombs to wipe out your cities a la Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Then the Soviets developed their own atomic/nuclear weapons and the starting pistol for the arms race was fired. In an atmosphere of mutual paranoia and distrust, both sides developed a frightening array of nuclear weapons that could be delivered by aircraft, fired from ships and submarines or mobile land launchers or fixed missile siloes.  Both sides refused to slow their pace until they came within sight of the finishing line and saw the terrifying prospect of a nuclear wasteland beyond.

Every now and then you have to blow your own horn. This is one of those occasions when I am going to do just that.

Last week I won a commendation from the award committee of Britain’s Ashdown Prize for Radical Thought. It would have been nice to win first prize and the cash that went with it, but the commendation provides me with a modicum of credibility and the hook to promote it.

The commendation was for my proposal for “Development Bonds.”  What, you may ask are Development Bonds? Well, I think they are a multi-level win/win solution for a transfer of capital from the developed to the developing world.

It works like this: Developing World governments  propose projects for consideration. Developed World governments approve or disapprove the projects using an agreed criteria. Financial institutions raise the capital through bond issues. Developed countries encourage investment in the bonds  by offering taxpayers relief on the repayments.

The template for the development bonds are America’s municipal bonds.  Contrary, to public opinion, municipal bonds did not originate in the US. They were common during the Renaissance when the Italian city states regularly used them to raise money for public building projects. But they came of age in the US in 1812 with a New York City bond issue to build the 327-mile Erie Canal which linked the nascent potential of the American West to the port of New York and through it the markets of the world.

Thousands of cities and local authorities around the globe raise money through bond issues. But America’s municipal bonds stand out by offering income tax relief on the repayments. This means that they attract not only institutional investors but also high-wealth private individuals. American municipal bonds are one of the chief financial instruments that have transformed the United States from a resource-rich, backward, often corrupt, virgin territory—not unlike Sub-Saharan Africa today—into the world’s only super power.

Development Bonds would achieve the following:

Some call it the Chinese Marshall Plan. Others call it a dastardly plot for world domination.

The Chinese – with their easy facility for metaphorical phraseology—call it the “Belt, Road Initiative.” The term is a reference to the old Silk Road which stretched from East to West and dominated trade between the Orient and Occident from before Rome up until the 16th century when the Portuguese and Spanish discovered sea routes to America and the Far East. Those were the days when China was the fabled  world economic power house with whom everyone wanted to trade.

It was the land where an ancient civilisation had invented and developed essentials such as paper, compasses, silk, porcelain, gunpowder, moveable type, mechanical clocks, tea, iron smelting, bronze, rockets, the seed drill, and even pasta and the toothbrush.  There were no economists around to keep GDP records, but bean counting historians believe that in the early 16thcentury China produced 40 percent of the world’s wealth. This is roughly equivalent to that of Britain at the height of its empire or the US in the 20 years after the Second World War.

The Chinese see no reason why that trade—and their position in the world—cannot be revived by emulating the example of the silk road with an omnidirectional series of trade links and infrastructure projects using land and sea routes. The term belt in fact, refers to the land routes, either by rail or road. The term road refers to sea routes.  The project involves building political links in 71 countries, infrastructure projects to move goods and massive injections of aid and loans to primarily African countries to insure access to essential raw materials. The estimated cost is $1 trillion.

Critics say that trade routes need to be secured by military means which leads to military dominance. As proof of the danger, they cite the example of Beijing’s military build-up in the South China Sea. They also worry about China using its massive domestic market of 1.4 billion consumers to produce cheap goods that can be dumped on Western markets. Another concern is that easy Chinese loans are creating a debt trap which is damaging the world economy and, finally, its no-questions-asked aid and investment in authoritarian Asian and African countries is undermining the rule of law and governance in developing countries.

Supporters ask: Why can’t the Chinese pursue their national interests through the pursuit of peaceful trade?  And, can we stop them short of a disastrous military conflict? The 16h century was the Spanish century. The 17^th century belonged to the French. The 18^th and 19^th centuries were dominated by the British Empire and the 20^th has become known as the American century. Most people believe that our own 21^st 100 year period since the birth of Christ will be the Chinese century and nothing can be done to prevent it. Finally, the supporters of the Belt, Road Initiative point out that roads and sea routes run two ways and the internet goes all over the place.

How do you defeat an idea, especially an idea wrapped in the cloak of religious infallibility?

Now add the complications of long-held justifiable grievances against Western society; unbalanced personalities and a communications network which can transmit hate messages to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

This is the problem The West is facing in its battle against Islamic Jihadists.

Following this week’s incident outside the British parliament it was revealed that British intelligence agencies had 10,000 “persons of interest” that they were monitoring in the UK. In the past year they had stopped 13 terrorist attacks from Islamic terrorists and 4 from far right groups.

Almost simultaneously both the Pentagon and the UN issued reports saying that ISIS is far from defeated, despite the claims of Donald Trump and the Iraqi government.

The physical territory controlled by ISIS has shrunk to a pinpoint of its former self which—at its height—was the size of France. But ISIS is still there. The UN and Pentagon estimate that up to 30,000 committed Jihadists remain in Syria and Iraq. Another 5,000 are in Libya. A thousand are in the Sinai and up to 8,000 are active in Afghanistan.

Their tactics have switched from the creation of an expanding geographic base to the more traditional terrorist structure of loosely-tied individuals and small groups united by radical ideas—with differences.  The biggest difference is that the link between the central authority and the terrorist on the ground is increasingly forged through cyber space rather than physical contact.

Computer-based Jihadist recruiters surf the internet in search of vulnerable personalities looking for a cause through which to channel their grievances. These can be anything from prejudice to mental illness. One of the suicide bombers in the 7/7 London bombings is believed to have been spurred into action by a broken love affair.

Once hooked, the would-be terrorist is carefully flattered and cultivated by his digital mentor. He is made to feel a key component in a structure that needs him to don a bomb-packed suicide vest or drive a car into a crowd of innocent bystanders.

Other wannabe Jihadists find their way to the battlefields of Middle East and Central Asia. When defeated many of them return to their European homes and are thrown into prison, or possibly sent to Guantanamo Bay where they brutalized by Western captors seeking an understandable vengeance and further radicalised by Islamic inmates.

The dusty pages of history offer possible solution to this downward spiral.  During World War Two, hundreds of thousands of German Prisoners of War were sent to camps in Britain, the US and Canada.  Their treatment is credited with helping to lay the foundations for today’s successful liberal Germany.

In the United States there were 371,000 German POWs spread across 650 camps. Initially they were treated in the traditional manner. There was a camp commandant who was responsible for keeping them behind barbed wire. Day-to-day activities were controlled by German officers who were by and large, hardened Nazis. The result was that the brutal regime and fascist ideology of Adolf Hitler was mirrored in the camps.