Philosophical Apprentice comments.

Note that Janan Ganesh is part of the Silver Fork Tradition of writers, even though that might seem an odd qualification, for a Financial Times ‘expert/technocrat’ on ‘Geopolitics’ ?

Headline: Don’t flatter the west’s enemies as an ‘axis’

Sub-headline: Democracies should tease out the contradictions between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea

https://www.ft.com/content/1a8b3817-931e-45a9-ac34-e466a18b486a

First note the rhetorical diminution of ‘the west’ as if it were not an actual political thing/entity ? The first paragraphs are instructive of that stylistic approach to the Historical/Political questions of moment. For your attempt to parse this essay, think of Ganesh’s attempt, as a pastiche of the Novel, in its variousness of characters, drawn from a ‘western world’ : again the rhetorical diminution is central. I will highlight the characters as they appear – it will come easier, for the reader to catch the cadences of his methodology, eventually? it is ungainly and clumsy.

Whenever a dictator or ruling cleric attacks the honour of the western world, they are conceding a rather important point. There is something there to attack. The west is a coherent entity.

It is made up, for the most part, of Christian or post-Christian societies around the upper Atlantic. Most of them experienced, to various degrees and at different times, the Enlightenment. Each now practices some version of democratic capitalism.

If such abstract values aren’t enough as a binding agent, no matter. The west is held together with treaties and institutions, too, which predate several of the world’s nation states. Nato has been around since 1949, the European project for almost as long. Neither is just a forum for chatter: one commits its members to mutual defence, the other subjects domestic to supranational law. That is, western countries are willing to foot a bill — in membership fees, sovereign freedom and ultimately blood — for their geopolitical team. The west isn’t just broad (and getting broader, as both Nato and the EU process applications to join). It is also deep.

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Note: Character Development, in its inflated and diminutive iterations:

Its rival bloc is the first of these things, without question, but not the second. In fact, doesn’t “bloc”, or “axis”, give too much credit, too soon, to a grouping as loose and putative as Russia, China, Iran and North Korea? Since the present crisis in the Middle East began earlier this month, there has been some despair in democratic capitals about the bonhomie among these four states. So there should be. Better an excess of vigilance than an excess of nonchalance. But the west shouldn’t do its antagonists’ work for them by granting their claim to be an equal and opposite coalition.

What, after all, unites the four? The group includes secular communists and the world’s leading theocracy. The two largest members fell out with each other in the cold war. (Richard Nixon exploited, but did not invent, the Sino-Soviet split.) There are jabber-fests that bring most of the members together, such as the Brics-plus summit, but no Nato– or EU-grade institution that requires tangible sacrifices from those who belong. And what is their shared view of global economic governance? What is the “Moscow consensus”? State sovereignty, at least, used to be the one shibboleth of autocrats. Since the invasion of Ukraine, and the tolerance of it in parts of the world, does even that still hold?

Note: ‘Complacent Liberal’ makes her/his appearance, as the Ganesh antagonist, held aloft by a History Made to Measure, with an over abundance of characters.

“Just wait, complacent liberal,” I’ll be told. It takes a while for states to congeal into an axis. But consider the last two times that democracies were under existential siege from an autocratic grouping. As the years passed, it was the tensions within that camp, not the unities, that stood out. In the second world war, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact didn’t make it to its second anniversary. In the cold war, Mao and Khrushchev started to diverge over Marxist doctrine as soon as the 1950s. What is the most recent historical precedent for autocracies co-operating on a lasting basis? The Concert of Europe, perhaps, which kept the continent more or less at peace in the 19th century. And even that had liberal Britain as a sort of regulating half-member.

Note: has Ganesh’s pastiche of a Novel reached its end point? Ganesh resorts to the analytic, as that pastiche has lost it’s emotive power? He must now resort to actual argument? A selection of the remaining paragraphs .

Treating the west’s adversaries as a coherent bloc is not just analytically wrong. It is dangerous, to the extent that it becomes self-fulfilling.

^…

There is a precedent for this kind of error. A generation has passed since George W Bush set the US against the “Axis of Evil”. At the time, the moral absolutism of the word “evil” aroused most of the liberal derision.

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The mistake was of more than academic consequence. In conflating three such different entities, Bush didn’t consider that invading one might empower another.

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Note: Final paragraph of this essay reminds this Reader of Ganesh’s arrogance, as if he were of the caliber of Walter Lippmann in his prime. As his Novelization has faded from the thought of the Reader, in the blinding political light, of his carefully cadenced notion of ‘the coming years more or less writes itself’, call it Hegelian rubble?

In its broad outlines, the foreign policy of the free world over the coming years more or less writes itself. It has to be a patient game of teasing out the contradictions within the autocratic world: between theologians and commissars, between closed economies and trading ones, between rising powers and fading ones, between states with extensive contact with the west and total outcasts. Instead, we have no less a personage than Mitch McConnell describing Russia, China, Iran and North Korea as the “axis of evil”. All four nations will blush at the flattery.

Philosophical Apprentice