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Collingwood 🇬🇧

@admcollingwood

Oct 25

Some plants, when attacked by insects that eat their leaves, secret a scent that attracts the predators of the attacking insects. I can't help but think that something similar has happened in politics over the last 25 years. In the 20th Century, politics in the Anglo...

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...world was ultimately a dance between capital and labour. The outcome was various messy compromises, continuously shifting in favour of one side and then the other. The parties and organisations that backed the workers would take bites out of the interests of the...

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...capital owning class (such as redistributive taxes, unionised pay and conditions negotiations, and the provision of social programmes like healthcare and education). Those who owned capital and businesses, and the libertarian/Thatcher/Reagan/paleoliberal political...

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Read 11 tweets

Collingwood 🇬🇧

@admcollingwood

Oct 23

A bombshell report, by renowned investigative reporter @mtaibbi and former US Senate investigator @thackerpd, could have serious political and diplomatic ramifications for the UK. This thread explains why, and lists the questions that must be asked of the government.

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Messrs Taibbi and Thacker allege that a whistleblower has provided them with documents which show that a charity closely linked to Sir Keir Starmer's election svengali and current Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, has written plans to "kill Elon Musk's Twitter," "trigger... 2/n

...EU and UK regulatory action," and build closer links with the Biden-Harris Administration. The charity, called Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), was co-founded by Mr McSweeney, who also founded 'Labour Together', which became known as a 'party within a party'...

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Read 29 tweets

Collingwood 🇬🇧

@admcollingwood

Oct 14

Some thoughts on slavery and reparations.

The saddest thing, I think, about the return of the question of whether Britain should pay reparations for the practice of slavery, now centred on the foreign secretary David Lammy, is the way that such a heinous and sickening...

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...practice has been politicised. It is, when one thinks for even a moment about what went on in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the scale of suffering involved, hugely affecting and a stain on our national story. Yet the tone of the debate somehow inures us to the...

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...details of this horror. Nevertheless, it is understandable that Britons are angered by the tone and form of the demands. It is implied that Britain should pay reparations absent of any broadly accepted legal framework, or even international norms, to deal with such...

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Read 18 tweets

Collingwood 🇬🇧

@admcollingwood

Sep 23

Has anybody tried using X to post fiction? Here's an attempt: a geopolitical future history. Let's see how much engagement/reposts it gets. I've named it after based on a recent panel discussion led by @DavidSacks (see authors note).

2049: Mearsheimer's American Nightmare

It was a hot and humid day in June when the Doomsday Clock hit one minute to twenty four hundred. We are undoubtedly even closer to midnight now, but the Institute of Atomic Energy in Beijing has not yet announced an update, and it is that day in June which sticks in the memory – when the Communist Party Central Committee released a statement which made it clear that humanity was on the eve of destruction again, just 23 years since the near miss in Ukraine.

The media here in Britain have largely regurgitated the Beijing view that a revanchist United States is fomenting the crisis in an effort to recapture its lost empire. Perhaps so, but by removing context and history from Washington’s actions, we are left with nothing but a story of a warmongering imperialist American President leading a propagandised people toward war. Such morality tales are seldom good explanations for great power relations.

As is often the case, the seeds of the present crisis were sowed by the last. With hindsight, it would have been wise to have listened to Henry Kissinger. On 24 May 2022, the ancient former US Secretary of State told the Davos World Economic Forum that negotiations between the West and Russia over Ukraine needed "to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome.”

Yet nobody then was close to ready for concessions, and the geopolitical consequences are now well known. First, Russia was driven into the arms of China. While previously the Kremlin had pursued a policy of cautious interaction with Beijing, it was now forced into a much closer relationship.

In effect, Beijing got the deal of the century. It instantly solved its Malacca problem, gaining overland access to almost limitless energy, natural resources and food. It also got its hands on Russian military technology in areas such as jet engines, air defence and submarines. Meanwhile, Russia gained a route through sanctions, geared its economy to a region with far more rapid growth than Europe, and linked itself to a country fast moving up the technology and value added manufacturing ladder.

Perhaps as importantly, China now benefited from a Russia implacably opposed to the US-led Western Bloc. In the decade after the Ukraine Crisis, Moscow was hugely active in expanding and strengthening BRICS and the SCO into counterweights to the G7, currying favour with the Global South, and generally making mischief in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, the broader MENA region, Pakistan, Africa and Latin America, all of which tied down small parcels of US resources and focus that might have been directed at China.

Secondly, Europe was hard hit by the war. Cutting itself off from the most economically rational source of energy, Russian pipeline gas, had led to grinding, slow-motion deindustrialisation and falling living standards. Strikes, protests and rising support for ever more extremist parties destabilised European politics and further worsened the investment outlook.

The American economy was doing better, but socially and politically it was even worse. The 2024 presidential election, between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, was somehow even more fractious than the 2020 campaign. Lawyers were more important than stump speeches and debates. The election did not finish on 5 November 2024; instead, it switched from vote gathering to lawfare, and thence to constitutional crisis.

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First, the two teams attempted to disqualify the other side’s mail-in ballots, including efforts to have the already strained US Postal Service disrupted to prevent them arriving on time. In the first sign that social order was breaking down, key individuals in various segments of the vote counting apparatus required police protection.

Secondly, on 8 December, both sides appointed their own rival Electoral College electors in key swing states, refusing to accept the legitimacy of the other side’s. On 14 December, the electoral college met without any sense of which set of electors could transmit the legitimate votes to Congress.

On 6 January, amid protests, counter protests, riots, looting and the presence of the National Guard, Kamala Harris, the President of the Senate, started the count of electoral college votes before a joint session of Congress. She quickly disqualified Arizona, where Mr. Trump had won by only a few thousand votes, on the basis that there was no agreement on which set of electors were valid. In a dramatic scene that is now one of the most viewed political events ever on WeChat, Speaker Mike Johnson immediately expelled all lawmakers from the House, preventing the count from proceeding. Without a declared winner, Speaker Johnson himself would be inaugurated as President.

One week later, with protests swelling and becoming increasingly violent, President Biden, looking frail and unwell, addressed the nation to invoke the Insurrection Act in a shambling live announcement that inspired no unity and provided no sense that anybody was in control. As three people – Trump, Harris and Johnson – prepared to be inaugurated on 20 January, rumours swirled that the police, intelligence community and military had started taking sides. With civil order having broken down, the US stock markets, which had lost some 45% since the New Year, were closed.

Meanwhile, China quietly completed mobilisation.

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Read 7 tweets

Collingwood 🇬🇧

@admcollingwood

Sep 13

For all those not worried about this, I want to help you to think as your opponent -- an important part of diplomacy. Imagine that during the Iraq War 2003-11, China or Russia had provided Iraqi militias with advanced weaponry, plus intelligence, plus targeting...

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...information to attack and kill our troops. How would we have responded? What would the media and political pressure on our leaders to respond have been? Now imagine Russia and China decide that they'll give the Iraqi militias the weapons and targeting to strike Britain...

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...itself. Britain says that this would constitute an act of war (especially since nobody believes the Iraqi militias are doing the intel and targeting needed to fire the weapons themselves), and Moscow or Beijing responded that the invasion of Iraq was illegal, that the...

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Read 11 tweets

Collingwood 🇬🇧

@admcollingwood

Aug 15

https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1823898586922295622

As many of you will have read, the @WSJ has published what it claims to be the story of how #Nordstream was destroyed. I'm not sure I buy it, but if I did, it raises extremely important and concerning questions about our intelligence communities, governments and media.

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https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1823898586922295622

First, the story--that the operation was conducted by Valeriy Zaluzhniy, then Ukraine's most senior military officer, despite the fact the CIA got wind of the operation (from Dutch intelligence), and told President Zelensky to stop it, which he ordered Zaluzhniy to...

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...to do--is far too convenient. It is well known that Gen Zaluzhniy, now Ambassador to the UK, does not always see eye to eye with President Zelensky, who dismissed Zaluzhniy from his position as CinC of the AFU and, rumour has it, sees the general as a potential...

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Read 17 tweets

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