Now that the US has ripped up the Atlantic alliance, Europe is more vulnerable now than at any time since the mid-1930s. Apparently, Europe and Ukraine itself will not have a seat at the table in the talks between US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin that will divvy up Ukraine.
Not that Trump and Putin have much to discuss, since Trump – in his familiar role as a Russian asset – has already had US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announce what parts of Ukraine will be handed over, and without any security provisions that these territorial concessions will not become a launching pad for the subsequent takeover of the entire country. The US has given away beforehand any negotiating positions it had or assurances it might have sought. Deals are so easy to make when you’re giving the other side everything they want.
For his part, vice-President J.D. Vance has already told Europe that its social democracies are no longer worth defending. In Germany in particular, both Vance and Elon Musk have done all they can to maximise the vote of the anti-immigrant, neo-fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD). This is despite the fact that the likely winner of the German elections on February 23 (the conservative Christian Democrats) has already pledged to take Germany far further to the right on immigration than any previous German government in the past 20 years. Regardless, American fascism has looked for and found its mirror image in the AfD.
The Vance speech in Munich that cast Europe adrift was the usual mixture of fake news, exaggerations and lies. The sins of wokeness and political correctness of which Europe stands accused – on a scale that allegedly renders European civilisation unworthy of survival – include UK police arresting a man for his repeated breaches, after warnings, of the “safety zone” around abortion clinics. These zones were created so that women can access an abortion without being harassed by “pro-life” bigots.
It hardly comes as a surprise that Vance thinks women have no role in society other than as child bearers, and no right to bodily autonomy. This is the same Vance who has disparaaged childless women, and suggested “as a thought experiment” that people with children should have more votes than people without children.
What is just as grotesque though, is Vance’s claim that wokeness (aka political correctness) poses an existential threat to Western civilisation. What we’re talking about are rules to protect minorities from the abusive language and threatening behaviours of people with power (often, relatively wealthy white males) who have little or no problem otherwise in getting their views heard, and who have their POV affirmed by society on a daily basis.
Political correctness has been an attempt to re-balance the social scales, at an interpersonal level. For Vance to castigate this relatively minor set of attitudes and behaviours in the apocalyptic terms he used in Munich is bizarre.
If Vance was doing anything else than relaying his master’s voice, think about what he could have said about Putin’s Russia. How does Vance rationalise Russia’s violent suppression of political dissent – manifested in the Putin regime’s long track record of murdering journalists, critics and political opponents. To a Trump administration smitten with Putin’s autocratic ways, all of this is less of a crime than asking for people to respect each other’s choice of pronoun.
Footnote: So…it transpires what the US really wants from Ukraine in addition to it gifting Russia with large chunks of its sovereign territory, is the US being assigned a 50% stake in Ukraine’s remaining mineral wealth. In particular, Trump wants access to Ukraine’s rare metals deposits, as payment for the US armaments supplied to them since the invasion. By that logic, New Zealand and other Pacific countries can expect to receive invoices from the Trump White House for the US efforts in the Battle of Midway.
The Next Pandemic
The government’s actions to degrade the public health system not only reduce its ability to meet current needs. They also prevent the health system from being able to prepare for the next pandemic that will (inevitably) come our way.
On that point…one of the odd things about the ongoing evaluation of our Covid-19 response is the fixation on what was done wrong last time around. Sure, we should all learn from our mistakes. But the fixation on what was negative about our Covid reponse risks obscuring the many – and more important – things we got right. New Zealand was a global success story during the last pandemic. Thousands of people alive today would not be under different leadership in 2020/2021.
Surely, the things we did well last time are valid and transferable skills when it comes to enhancing our ability to cope the next time that an infectious threat jumps the species gap – monkeypox, bird flu etc – and threatens humanity.
The two main things we got right last time were to do with (a) reducing transmission by isolation until a vaccine was available and (b) supporting firms in order to minimise the social impact of the pandemic upon jobs and business prosperity. Without question, these subsidies protected communities (as best one could) from mass instances of business failure and unemployment.
What steps would the current government be willing to take to reduce transmission, and to subsidise employment? The risk is not so much that we don’t learn from what we did wrong. The bigger risk is that negativity has become so entrenched that it will make it politically impossible to repeat our success. If fear of downstream inflation means that firms are left to fail and jobs are allowed to vanish then we could be looking at unemployment on a massive scale next time – and believe me, that would be a lot worse than paying inflated prices at the supermarket.
In the absence of a vaccine, the government could also be tempted (for political reasons) to allow transmission to find its own level, no matter how many lives are lost, for fear of infringing on libertarian notions of individual freedom. That would be a social calamity. If we’re going to be equally as successful next time, we need to celebrate and entrench the good practices of 2020/2021, as well as tailoring them as best we can to avoid negative outcomes at the margins. Currently though, those marginal concerns are dominating the discourse about our Covid outcomes.
Footnote: Just wondering…how are our stocks of PPE gear looking these days, and did they reduce or increase during 2024, in the wake of the government cutbacks in public health?
Paintin’ it blue
Offhand, it would be hard to think of a song less likely to be a triggering signal for multiple murders than the Fleetwoods’ ancient hit “Mr Blue”:…but such is the case in the latest Marvel superhero movie Captain America: Brave New World. Repeatedly playing the Eagles has been known to inspire domestic violence…but the Fleetwoods? Here’s their a capella version of the song at issue:
Footnote: Gary Troxel, the male voice in the Fleetwoods later became the losing plaintiff in a Supreme Court case (Troxel v Granville) in 2000. The Supreme Court ended up affirming the right of a responsible custodial parent (Granville) to determine what level of access the grand-parents (theTroxels) should have to their grand-children.