 27 August, 2021 Hello, Whatever you thought of Ronald Reagan, whose presidency I covered for The Sunday Times, he had a talent for hiring clever people. And in early 2003 I was struck by how his three key former aides (George Shultz, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft) all came out vehemently against the proposed Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq. They thought it crazy to pull troops out of Afghanistan to invade a country whose leader, far from collaborating with al-Qaeda, hated the terrorist group. Tony Blair's long, eloquent attack on Joe Biden for his "imbecilic" withdrawal might have been a little more credible had he at least acknowledged the role he played in creating the disaster we now see unfolding in Kabul and beyond. See this week's issue. All good wishes,
Jon Connell Editor-in-chief
Afghanistan  The aftermath of the bomb blasts in Kabul. Wakil Kohsar/AFP/Getty Images Has the West lost its way? "So that's it, then," says Allister Heath in The Daily Telegraph. As British and US troops retreat from Kabul, leaving the Taliban free to terrorise Afghans "back to the stone age", the next stage of the 21st century's great geopolitical and civilisational realignment is beginning. The West's 320-year hegemony, which started when English GDP per capita surpassed China's circa 1700, is over. Soon other civilisations will become richer and more powerful than we are, and they will want their own spheres of influence, and their own values to prevail. The "deluded" belief that capitalism would lead to universal democracy, human rights and secularism turns out be "nonsense". Capitalism is just as effective in the hands of tyrants as liberals, perhaps more so, as the Chinese model is proving. The reckless eco-crusade for net zero is undermining western economic growth and may yet unleash geopolitical chaos. How will President Putin respond to declining demand for his gas? The Gulf is bound to implode, creating more Afghanistan-style messes. And all the while "woke ideology" gains ground, "fragmenting and dividing society", pitting group against group, "better to undermine the West". The whiff of western decline is indeed in the air, says Paul Kingsnorth in UnHerd, "mingling with the smoke of burning forests" across Europe and America, and the scorched tarmac of Kabul airport. But it isn't the Taliban, the Russians or even the Chinese killing off the West. It's the West that's giving up on itself. President Biden's entire foreign policy can be summed up in two words, says Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph: "less America". The horror unfolding in Kabul is a vivid example of what less America looks like, and this is just the start. While the debate in the West is all "dismay and disbelief", there's been a more upbeat conversation in Moscow and Beijing. Take the Global Times newspaper, whose voice "never differs much from the Chinese Communist Party's official line". An "Afghan effect", according to the paper, would see America's allies peel away, creating opportunities for China and Russia to unite and "humiliate the US". At a Sino-Russian summit this year, foreign ministers agreed to build an alternative to the "western-led international order". With American influence waning "so fast, and so visibly", these new allies have a perfect chance. Afghanistan is a tragedy, says Max Hastings in The Times, but US leadership is still "indispensable". We have abandoned, "thank goodness", the hubristic Bush-Blair belief that the Muslim world can be reinvented on a western template. But Islamic terrorism has not gone away. Pinpoint action against terrorist bases abroad is still essential, as is the "measured use of cash incentives and military threats" to dissuade the Taliban, and the Iranians, from attacking the West – including Israel. We cannot always save the peoples of foreign countries from their own monsters. "But nor can we shake the dust of the deserts and mountains from our feet."
Life  Yeonmi Park fled to China aged 13. Jerome Favre/EPA/Shutterstock Escaping from brutal North Korea You can't imagine my North Korean childhood, says Yeonmi Park on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. "It's like trying to imagine life on some different planet across the universe." She was born in 1993, not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Without the USSR's food subsidies, North Korea became "a perpetual state of starvation". She would go out "looking for bugs" to eat, including protein-rich grasshoppers. When she was nine, the regime forced her to watch the execution of a local man who had eaten a cow from a collective farm, as well as a classmate's mother – the mother's sin was owning a South Korean movie. Dead bodies littered the rivers and streets. Not that Park had the vocabulary to describe her experience. "There's no word for stress in North Korea, because you can't be stressed in the socialist paradise". There's no word for trauma, no depression, no love, no "I". You could be sent to a prison camp "for wearing jeans". It was "Orwellian". Aged 13, she escaped to China by pretending to be an adult of marriageable age, then met up with her family and travelled south through Mongolia. When her father died, they had to bury him at 3am to avoid being discovered. Her mother was raped trying to protect her. Park now lives in America as a human-rights activist who has become "the enemy of the woke". I find being told how to think appalling, she says. "I literally crossed the Gobi Desert to be free."
Property  THE TOWNHOUSE William Pitt the Younger lived at this Grade I listed townhouse in Bath in the early 19th century – there's a smart bronze plaque on the façade. It's now a luxurious, modern four-bedroom home with original cornicing, high ceilings, fireplaces and views of the River Avon. The price includes a year's membership of the Gainsborough Bath Spa and gym. £3.4m.
Podcast Ivan the Terrible was the first "tsar of all Russia", says Greg Jenner on Radio 4's You're Dead to Me podcast, featuring historian Peter Frankopan and comedian Olga Koch. Born in 1530, he was an orphan at eight and was crowned tsar aged 16. As a teenager, he liked to throw dogs and cats off tall buildings, and beat up peasants. He was a boy "in need of an Xbox". Over the course of his reign, from 1547 to 1584, he expanded Russia's borders and brought it under centralised control, making numerous enemies in the process. Having nearly died himself in 1553, he lost his first wife, Anastasia Romanova, a few years later. She's thought to have been poisoned; her death left him haunted by paranoia. He went on to have six or seven more wives and formed a black-robed militia called the Oprichnina, armed with brooms "to sweep away injustice". With their help he killed his enemies in "gruesome and horrifying" ways. He sewed one archbishop into a bear suit to be set upon by wild dogs, and scalded a treasury minister with boiling water so his "skin peeled off like an eel". He even killed one of his sons. But Frankopan points out that in a world where violence is "ubiquitous", killing on this scale was often seen as necessary to maintain political control, rather than as a sign of insanity. Listen to the podcast here.
Zeitgeist  Josephine Baker in 1925. Hulton Archive/Getty Images Ernest Hemingway called her "the most sensational woman anybody ever saw. Or ever will." Now the American-born showgirl and singer Josephine Baker is to receive France's highest accolade. President Macron has decreed that she will be commemorated at the Panthéon, in Paris, alongside Victor Hugo and Marie Curie – the first black woman to be so honoured. It's a "politically savvy move that ticks the right boxes of race and gender", says Victor Mallet in the FT. Baker escaped poverty and segregation in Missouri to get her big break in 1920s Paris in La Revue Nègre: "She wore little more than a string around her waist threaded with artificial bananas." Baker joined the French resistance in the war, campaigned for civil rights, married twice, bought a chateau in the Dordogne and adopted 12 children before he death in 1975. "Yes, she danced with bananas, but she didn't give a damn... so in France it started badly but finished well," says French black rights campaigner Love Rinel, who approves of Macron's decision. Or, as one of Baker's adopted sons put it: "She loved France, and France loved her back."
Quoted "Romeo and Juliet isn't the only one of Shakespeare's plays that could offend those of a sensitive disposition. Hamlet may be upsetting to anyone whose late father has reappeared as a ghost to inform them that he was poisoned by their uncle. Julius Caesar may bring back traumatic memories to anyone who has been assassinated by a cabal of Roman senators. And Titus Andronicus is bound to distress anyone who has ever been fed to their mother in a pie." Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph That's it. You're done. Been forwarded this newsletter? Sign up to receive it every day and get free access to up to Subscribe for a free three-month trial with full access to our app and website. Download our app from the App Store or Google Play
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August 27, 2021
Has the West lost its way?
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