Tom Driberg was “a journalist, an intellectual, a drinking man, a gossip, a high churchman, a liturgist, a homosexual, a friend of Lord Beaverbrook, an enemy of Lord Beaverbrook, an employee and biographer of Lord Beaverbrook, a politician of the left, a member of Parliament, a member of the Labour Party National Executive, a stylist, an unreliable man of undoubted distinction.”1
Driberg was, his biographer Francis Wheen finds, a wonderfully imperfect important man.
He was a prankster and a poet: He once treated the students and patrons of Oxford University to his Homage to Beethoven. (“If I forget thee Zion, Zion/may all my members lose their skill/For there a modest phallus beckons/in blushing starkness from the hill,” he read in monotone through a megaphone accompanied by a piano, a chorus of clacking typewriters, and the sound of a toilet flushing.) He was a friend of occultist Aleister Crowley and a card-carrying Communist. He became a columnist who covered and lambasted London’s upper classes for the Daily Express.
He took the pen name William Hickey in 1933, writing a regular talk-of-the-town article which would come to define the gossip column for a century to come. But, as the mood in Europe darkened, he became a sharp social and political commentator. Driberg was a fervent booster of the Spanish republican cause, even when his conservative paper preferred Francisco Franco’s fascists.
Driberg’s Hickey column became part of the “underground resistance” at one of Britain’s most influential papers. The Express was convinced by Neville Chamberlain that Czechoslovakia was a distant concern, and that a tepid placation of Nazi Germany would ensure peace. The paper was also taken with the Nazi stylings of Oswald Mosley — whom Driberg went after with gusto. He went to New York to meet the head of the German-American Bund, the obsessively pro-Nazi organization. Driberg wrote of his meeting with Bund leader Fritz Kuhn:
“After all, you, coming from England, should know even better than I do that the Jews are the root of all evil,” [Kuhn said.]
“Why specifically England?” I asked.
“The British Israel Secret Service,” he said, “is the most powerful in the world.”
“The what?” I asked.
“The British Israel Secret Service,” he repeated, with melodramatically guttural emphasis.
“We never hear about that,” I said. “I suppose we are not allowed to?”
“Hah! That is so,” he said, glad that I was finally getting the hang of it.
Driberg was determined to remind the British people that the Nazis could not simply be brushed off or managed, nor did their paranoid politics offer salvation. War, he warned, was a very real possibility. When a reader wrote in to ask Driberg if they ought to board a ship to Canada to avoid possible war, Driberg was curt. “There is no escape,” he wrote. “If ‘disaster’ came, don’t you think you would be involved in Canada, USA, anywhere else? Or if you weren’t, would you feel quite easy about having left your people and friends at home?” That kind of commitment to duty defined Driberg’s work.
War came not long after. “Now I suppose we just have to set to and win,” Driberg wrote. “We’re all in it.”
Driberg put himself into the slightly-upper-classes in 1939, when he put an inheritance towards buying the impressive Bradwell Lodge. He didn’t get to enjoy the manor long, before it was requisition by the Royal Air Force. Driberg stayed on the grounds part-time, and he regularly joined the airmen for a drink before Sunday mess and for the occasional party — where he had a habit for seducing the Canadian and British pilots. Driberg watched those pilots take off from his front lawn. Many never returned.
Driberg continued penning his column, full of jabs at high society and constructive criticism of what the wartime government ought do, but his editors became more and more restrictive about what verbiage made it to paper. The Express’ owner, Lord Beaverbrook, was now a government minister, and his staff feared embarrassing the boss. There can’t be too much opposition during wartime, they believed.
To censor a columnist because he is too critical, Driberg wrote in a letter to his bosses, means “being penalized for the very qualities essential to a columnist of my type.” When he was allowed to publish freely, Driberg sniped at Winston Churchill’s prosecution of the war. The hawks around the prime minister, he warned, were too dead set on total war, they were too tolerant of indiscriminate bombing. In trying to break the Germans’ spirit, Driberg believed, the Allies risked solidifying their resolve.
Driberg was no military strategist, but he had been right about a great many things — and he had great, often intimate, relationships with those actually fighting the war. It was a Canadian soldier, lying naked in front of Driberg’s fireplace, who read aloud the news that the Member of Parliament for Maldon, the riding of his estate, had died.
“You’d never do it,” the Canadian told him. “And if you did, you’d never make it.”2
He decided to do it. He asked Beaverbrook for time off to fight the by-election — his boss let him run, but denied the time off. (He did offer some advice: “The British electors will not vote for a man who doesn’t wear a hat.”)
I find Tom Driberg to be one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century. His homosexuality was an open secret, yet he became an enormously important political figure, a great supporter of discourse and philosophy, and, later, a major advocate for nuclear arms control. After his death, in 1976, it would emerge that he was likely a Soviet spy. Then it emerged that he was probably an agent of MI5. The debate continues today about to what degree he was a double-agent, and in what direction.
But it was his 1942 by-election campaign that intrigues me the most. Because Driberg — a Communist running as an independent — ran as a loyal critic of Winston Churchill.
The last general election had been held in 1935. The United Kingdom should have gone to the polls in 1940, but the war put it off — these by-elections were the only means with which the voting public could exercise their franchise. Even those infrequent votes enormously irked Churchill, who didn’t believe the public should have much of a say in the war. The other coalition parties tended to agree, and opted not to run candidates.
But Driberg believed that critics were now more important than ever. Churchill had “several hundred dummies who will say ‘yes’ to everything,” he told reporters, he didn’t need one more. Rather, Churchill was in need of “men who subordinate all prejudices and all profits to total victory and are in touch with the developing ideas of the younger people who will have to build the peace,” he explained. He wasn’t anti-Churchill — he was simply in favor of Churchill benefiting from the unique insights of a one Tom Driberg.
“A candid friend for Churchill,” his slogan read.
Driberg ran against a particularly reactionary Conservative candidate, and a fellow independent who, like Driberg, trusted Churchill but not the party hacks around him. Both men were told to leave things to Churchill and not disturb the peace. “But people were disturbed,” Driberg wrote later.
The war was going, at that point, fine in some respects. German advances in Europe had stalled. But there was a clear sense that victory remained far off. Then, in June, Erwin Rommel, the famed desert fox, launched an offensive to retake Tobruk, a tactically significant port on the Libyan coast. The Allies had captured the city in 1941, and held it against a brutal 7-month siege. Rommel’s initiative, however, led to a lightening fast Allied defeat. Some 33,000 men, nearly the entire British-India-South African force garrisoned there, were taken prisoner.
Voters went to the polls just a week later. Driberg won a resounding victory in Maldon: Earning twice the votes of Churchill’s preferred candidate.
Weeks later, Driberg stood to deliver his maiden speech in the House of Commons — an intervention in a debate around propaganda. The best kind, he argued, was a positive propaganda based in truth and fact. A kind of information warfare that is earnest and transparent, which seeks to respond to concerns instead of smothering them.
Driberg: It is no good preaching about equality of sacrifice if every housewife and every soldier knows that there is not, yet, really anything approaching equality of sacrifice. It remains true that the best propaganda is a victory, but as we cannot have military victories every day, let us have another kind of victory to proclaim to the world, a victory over the old impulses of private greed and profit, a victory over old prejudices and fears. […] I believe it is only in that way that we can convince all our own people and all our friends in other countries both that we are invincible and that we deserve victory.
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, we consider the loyal opposition.
At a time of tumult and polarization, where divisions are hobbling our ability to be our best, we could use a few more constructive critics.
We could use a few more Tom Dribergs.
Volodymyr Zelensky is the Winston Churchill of the 21st century. Or, at least, he remains the best candidate for the title to date.
I’ve written, recently, about Zelensky’s improbable rise. (Dispatch #159) And, before that, I’ve typed up his biographer’s insight into what makes him tick. (Dispatch #95) But it’s hard to encapsulate just how consequential a figure Zelensky has become.
Become being an operative word, there. For all the bravery, grit, and ambition that Zelensky has shown since the full-scale invasion of 2022, it is easy to forget that he started out as the president who wanted to strike a deal with Putin and who believed that the invasion was patently unlikely.
As author Simon Shuster explained, Zelensky stubbornly refused to believe that the full-scale invasion was coming. His generals were “urging the political leadership, Zelensky first and foremost, to take serious measures to prepare. […] Mobilization of reserves, fortifying the border, putting military equipment into position, and so on.”
Zelensky declined to heed that advice. He worried that racing to prepare for invasion could both spook the public and create a pretext for Putin’s attack. So he put “political parameters” around that preparation, which created tension with the military brass. “When the invasion began,” Shuster said. “Ukraine was, to put it diplomatically, much less prepared than the military leadership in Kyiv would have liked to be.”
That failure to heed advice could have meant Kyiv’s capture. Luckily, Ukraine’s military and civil defenses rallied to beat back the Russian advance. (Putin, it could be said, ignored the warnings of naysaying generals more aggressively than Zelensky did.) And Zelensky learned to put more faith into the man he had appointed as Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces: Valerii Zaluzhnyi.
The young-ish commander had been tapped specifically because he was a different kind of general. He had, unlike most of his gray-haired compatriots, never served in the Soviet military. From his appointment in 2021, Zaluzhnyi raced to modernize Ukraine’s military. His flexible, decentralized, distinctly un-Soviet way of defending proved invaluable — even if he was less prepared than he wanted to be.
“Throughout history, military struggles have been decided less by the balance of material resources than by the creativity and determination with which they have been employed,” David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts write in Conflict.3 Mixing artillery with satellite data, roadside tank traps with FPV drones, Ukraine was blending conventional power with modern intelligence, and it worked.
Zelensky was brilliant for tapping Zaluzhnyi, and Zaluzhnyi was brilliant for trusting those with more experience than he. It was Oleksandr Syrskyi who pitched a brazen 2022 counter-offensive to retake Kharkiv Oblast. If Zaluzhnyi was new school, the Soviet-trained Syrskyi was old school. The pair devised a plan to launch a feint attack south, in Kherson — which Russia was expecting — before launching a more intense attack north, around Kharkiv.
“The Ukrainian offensive was a masterstroke that caught the Russians unawares and off-balance,” Petraeus, the former American general; and Roberts, a Churchill biographer, write. At the time, though, there was ample anxiety that the counter-offensive would mean failure on two fronts — such a flop would be ruinous to Ukrainian morale. But it succeeded, and Zelensky reaped the benefits: Nearly 90% of Ukrainians said they supported their president.
The ability of each man to trust the other, even when they may have preferred a different approach, left room for far more innovation and creativity than was being generated inside Tsar Vladimir Putin’s court. For the Ukrainian people, watching a leader who knows when to listen made for a potent propaganda.
“A country that has persuaded itself that it will eventually win is capable of undergoing unimaginable hardships in order to see that day dawn,” the Conflict authors write.
But Zaluzhnyi, forward-thinking as he was, remained skeptical that Ukraine could innovate its way to victory. When Mykhailo Fedorov, then Minister of Digital Transformation, came asking for a huge investment into his pet project, he was rebuffed.
Fedorov had seen how small, cheap, FPV (first-person view) drones had enabled Ukraine’s decentralized defense. They were capable of providing critical aerial surveillance and hitting enemy positions — and they were cheap and hard to intercept, to boot. While the Ukrainian Armed Forces were making some use of these drones, Fedorov believed they could be central to Ukraine’s military strategy. He proposed nothing less than an “Army of Drones.”
But the actual army chose instead to prioritize conventional, expensive, kit. So Fedorov became something of an internal dissident. He went and raised the money himself. Through United24, a crowdfunding platform he had helped establish; and the Ukrainian World Congress, Fedorov raised millions to start bulk buying drones. He tapped Star Wars actor Mark Hamill to raise the project’s profile and spearheaded private training of drone pilots. He made himself a candid friend to Zaluzhnyi, even if Zaluzhnyi didn’t seem to want it.
His ambition was both out of step with the military leadership and unbridled. As his drones flooded into the battlespace, Zaluzhnyi realized he had made a mistake. Slowly, then all at once, the leadership in Kyiv backed the Army of Drones plan. Two years ago, I toured the network of underground drone factories that were churning out these nimble, cheap, effective platforms. Back then, I heard more brassy optimism about what was to come: Drones made from 100% Ukrainian parts. Drones that could fly hundreds, even thousands of kilometers. A Ukrainian semiconductor factory.
Ambition begat ambition, until it became a liability. Zelensky had no problem firing under-performing officers, nor in ousting officials caught taking kickbacks. But Zaluzhnyi’s growing popularity, his differing views on how the war should be conducted, and his failure to land success in a fizzled 2023 counter-offensive led to his abrupt firing.
Zaluzhnyi had come to believe that the war was “positional,” and he made this point in a paper submitted to The Economist. To Zelensky, this public observation — which sounded too similar to the verboten word “stalemate” — was some unwanted honesty. So he was fired, with Zelensky appointing Syrskyi to the top post.
“Notwithstanding Zelenskyy’s desire for a reinvigorated military leadership in 2024, wanting it and getting it are two very different things,” Mick Ryan wrote of the decision then.
Syrskyi shook things up by turning the clock back. He instilled a stricter, more hierarchical, Soviet approach to his command. He was more inclined to make like his Russian counterparts and throw bodies at tactical problems. While his nickname, “the butcher,” was probably not deserved, it is true that he kept troops in indefensible positions longer than made sense.
After two years of more positional warfare, which Syrskyi was unable to break out of, Zelensky made another big move: He appointed Fedorov as Minister of Defence. The two clashed: Fedorov issuing thinly-veiled challenges to his conservative leadership; Syrskyi blocking his tech-first initiatives behind the scenes. Even still, Fedorov’s Army of Drones was both enabling advances on the frontlines and roiling Russia’s economy. He had been right all along.
There was a clear public winner of this increasingly-public tension. Fedorov came to be a totem of Ukraine’s ability to invent its way out of this mess, a place once held by Zaluzhnyi. And, like Zaluzhnyi, he was fired abruptly, earlier this summer. For good measure, the president ousted Syrskyi, too.
Fedorov’s firing prompted mass protests across Ukraine, lamenting such a self-defeating move. Fedorov, clearly irate at his firing, published a lengthy video which issued a direct challenge to Zelensky. “We cannot allow Russia to define what Ukraine will become,” he said. Ukraine could not exist in a temporary state of governance any longer. “Can Russia effectively be given the right to dictate when Ukrainians can choose their government again? I am convinced that the answer is no. Democracy cannot be held hostage by Russia.”
Fedorov’s call for fresh elections — technically impossible, under Ukrainian law — hasn’t garnered much traction. But Ukrainians do seem to believe that it is time for change. In a poll conducted this August, just 25% of Ukrainians said they would vote for Zelensky if they had the chance. Another 17% named Zaluzhnyi, and 13% said Fedorov.
More than half of Ukrainians say they trust Zelensky, but faith is falling. And it is impossible to ignore why: He has become intolerant of his candid friends and he is lacking creative innovations. And voters, with neither a general election nor by-elections to make their voices heard, can’t force him to hear their concerns.
Things are not entirely dire for Kyiv. The Ukrainian Armed Forces have denied Russian advances virtually everywhere along the frontline, and the Ukrainians have made some limited advances in recent weeks. The drone and missile campaign against Russian energy, military, and logistics hubs is continuing apace. But Russia has, remarkably, managed to continue increasing its production capacity, arming it with a fearsome arsenal of jet-powered drones and missiles. Moscow’s depravity has worsened, and it now attacks civilian infrastructure simply because it can. This winter in Ukraine could be the toughest yet.
It will be a winter made only tougher if Ukrainians come to believe that there is no equality of sacrifice. Ukrainians have put so much faith in Zelensky, in part, because he has shown a willingness to heed criticism and change course. He has promoted based on competence, not loyalty. But if that changes — if soldiers, their families, and those who must dodge airstrikes day-in-and-day-out — come to believe that Zelensky has made good advice subordinate to his own gut instinct, it will dampen the idea that “we are invincible and that we deserve victory.”
If Zelensky has become too impatient and short-tempered at his internal critics, at least his democracy counts an ample assortment of candid friends.
Turn West, to Europe, and things are far more dire. Reactionary populism has made politics a bloodsport. Launching her presidential bid earlier this month, the far-right Marine Le Pen promised a “battle for France, a battle for the French.” Alice Weidel, whose Alternative für Deutschland is hot off two big election wins, accused the German government of using “war propaganda” to dupe the public into fearing Russia. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s xenophobic crusade has helped spur masked thugs taking to the street to attack migrants.
These extremist figures are widening space for the far-right, whilst forcing the rest of the political spectrum into, at best, uncomfortable, impractical alliances of necessity and, at worst, total dysfunction.
In France, the broad center is in disarray, whilst the left-wing New Popular Front — dominated by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his La France Insoumise party — has not managed to effectively challenge Le Pen’s growing popularity. The more-centrist Socialist Party opted, wisely, to launch a primary to select its presidential candidate. But rather than a vibrant jousting, it has thus far been a ho-hum affair, not helped by the fact that the party closed the door to candidates from smaller left-wing parties. “If everyone runs in their own lane, there is no hope of victory,” François Ruffin, who was excluded from the race, lamented. With elections six months away, Le Pen’s challengers seem mostly incapable of figuring out a counter-program.
In Germany, grand coalitions — like the one formed by the centre-right Christian Democrats and centre-left Social Democrats — have managed to make the entire establishment unpopular. The cordon sanitaire around the AfD had succeeded in keeping them out of power, but it has robbed Germany of much of its political pluralism. A government of not the far right leaves voters with one clear alternative: The far right. This is particularly true when the grand government seems incapable of slaying the cost-of-living crises which plague the country.
The United Kingdom offers another useful data point. Labour’s majority government, now helmed by a more popular and less hapless figure, has a mainstream opposition party sitting opposite it. But Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives have abandoned all pretense of being an establishment party — one which cares more about good governance than power for themselves. Badenoch has mused about putting Farage in power to oust Labour, and has spoken fondly of Restore Britain, Reform UK’s further-right challenger.
“I identify with Daenerys Targaryen before she went mad,” Badenoch told The Spectator’s Tim Shipman. “She just kept building an army. Then eventually she rode the dragon and burned the city to the ground.”
In all these countries, and indeed in many others, the populist right is effectively using salami tactics to thrash the existing political order. They style themselves as consummate outsiders, never allowed to hold power. They attack, attack, attack, then stymie. They force the establishment into grand coalitions or into perpetually reacting and responding to crises. In Italy, where the hard-right is in power, further-right parties have sprung up to do much the same thing.
This is a disaster on many fronts, and it’s likely to get worse. Trump, we know, is explicitly and covertly supporting these far-right parties. But one symptom and cause of Europe’s crisis of democracy is a loss of the vibrant pan-ideological fights that make liberalism work.
Reactionary populism is, at its core, anti-statist and anti-social. It turns on the idea that our system of self-governance has been corrupted by an entire class of bad actors, no matter what jersey they wear; and that society has been worsened by foreign elements and our weak countrymen. The far-right has established itself as the de facto vehicle to oppose the failures of neoliberal economics, even though they have no real remedy to any problems. (Some far-left parties have managed to siphon some of this frustration, though to smaller effect.)
When reactionary populism eats up more and more of the discourse, politics becomes less of a fight between ideologies and ideas and more of a fight between the status quo and those who hate the status quo.
In 2022, Duke political science professor Alexander Kirshner tried to untangle the tension around what it means to oppose in politics.
“There is something of the uncanny at work when political actors, individuals whose lives revolve around the pursuit of influence, willingly give up their positions, encourage their supporters to accept a loss, and work with those who have defeated them,” Kirshner writes in Legitimate Opposition.4
It’s not just a moral act, but one that makes democracy and discourse healthier. Competition which is not zero-sum — where losers can still work with the winners — breeds collaboration, and that eventually produces innovation. Positive choice, as opposed to pro-/anti- binaries, gives voters actual agency in their system of governance. Tom Driberg positioning himself as a candid friend to Churchill, a friendly thorn in the prime minister’s side, is that kind of admirable opposition. That kind of legitimate opposition spirit can also be found in Zaluzhnyi and Fedorov, working to deliver hard truths and novel solutions.
Contrast this with the opposition of the far-right and of the populist hordes who criticize pathologically. “They do not seek compromise, behave responsibly, act loyally, pursue the common good, or even accept the prospect that they could be legitimately defeated,” he writes. Reflexive opposition can’t produce innovative ideas, because it only knows how to undo things that have already been done.
Legitimate opposition is falling out of vogue. Populists are winning more seats, and enticing other parties to act more like them.
The work of being in opposition has changed, too. Being a critic of the government now involves less time pointing a finger and raising points in a parliamentary debate, and far more time holding rallies and making performative speeches crafted for social media. The idea that winning is a moral and democratic act unto itself means you can justify all sorts of bad behavior to achieve victory.
All of this has made liberal democracy less liberal. Faced with barbarians at the gates, the serious work of being in opposition has become less important. French President Emmanuel Macron has few effective establishment critics. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s main challenger is also his coalition partner. It is, increasingly, UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham vs. the anti-migrant hooligans.
This decline of a legitimate opposition at the national level has coincided with a lack of dynamic opposition at the European level. Where does the bloc go from here? The debate, as ever, seems to be the establishment pitching the status quo, the far-right advocating for a grand dismantling, while Macron pitches ideas which garner little traction.
Europe needs some innovators.
It has found at least one, in Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. After a year of secret negotiations, Carney and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiled plans to formalize the Ottawa-Brussels relationship, perhaps making Canada an “associate member,” whatever that means. Carney, meanwhile, has not just become the most effective liberal critic of Trump on the world stage but has designs of a broader redesign for the world order.
Carney, it’s worth noting, is also sorely lacking a domestic legitimate opposition. Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre has experimented with a kind of constructive opposition which tried to elucidate a view of trade politics and international affairs that was distinct, but complementary to, Carney’s approach. Then he got bored with it, gave up, and now spends his days parroting Le Pen’s talking points on immigration. (In one missive from earlier this month, Poilievre’s party warned of a Europe drowning in migrants, where “social cohesion is fraying in many member states as divisions have deepened and welfare systems have come under immense strain.” Get off Twitter, Pierre!)
That’s too bad. Though I do believe that the Canadian media — which, hey, includes me — can serve that role pretty well.
But, on the world stage, Carney has made moves to create a new gang of nations that has the potential for some very useful opposition and some interesting, unconventional, ideas on how to shake things up.
In a recent Financial Times op-ed, Carney and three of his fellow statesmen announced the creation of Partners for Multilateralism, a non-exclusive club of those who want to reform international institutions while resisting the sway of rabid superpowers.
This new world order brings together some usual suspects, like Finnish President Alexander Stubb and Brazilian President Lula, but it brings together some other characters, as well, like Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados.
Mottley has long been a critic of how the Global South gets cut out of decision-making. She took to the UN General Assembly this week to underline all the systemic inequities that nobody ever seems to have the time or money to address.
“Climate-vulnerable countries need to mobilise approximately $490 billion each year by 2030, and yet the current inflows are roughly $90 billion,” Mottley said. “As young people in Barbados would say: The math simply ain’t mathing.”
Climate-vulnerable countries, like those in the Caribbean, face higher borrowing costs than rich countries. They are facing dwindling international development aid. Africa and South America continue to be denied a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Mottley launched the Bridgetown Initiative in 2022, an effort to reform global finance rules to unlock more loans and funding to both unlock development and prepare for coming climate catastrophes — in so doing, she was proposing the biggest overhaul of the global financial system since Bretton Woods in 1944. It was a plan to allay conflict, boost development, and create more global prosperity — the kind that should make everyone happier.
Mottley co-sponsored the creation of Partners for Multilateralism, and delivered remarks at its first meeting. As she often has, she castigated the rich world for lofty rhetoric that rarely comes with funding attached. “Some of us will have to carry weight,” she told the meeting. “There is a price to protecting the rules based order.” Those who talk about reform but who won’t commit to it with dollars “really have no intention for us to see change.”
The Western world often shrugs off this kind of criticism, or placates it with empty promises about development aid. (Which they’ve continually cut in recent years.)
But the world order won’t continue to be dictated by North America and Europe. The great power competition playing out between the United States and China has become, to borrow a term, positional. China is modernizing, expanding influence, and preparing — for what, we don’t yet know. America is unwinding the system of institutions and alliances it once helped build, forcing nations into more explicit (and disadvantageous) bilateral relationships. Europe is just trying to hold the line.
If the trend maintains, things end badly. The great powers have conventional might and economic power, meaning Europe and Canada alone can only hope to eke out minor victories through indirect competition. More likely, the bipolar competition continues, and does a lot of damage in the process.
But a middle power alliance that stretches from Ottawa, to Brussels, and runs around the world, through Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and South America means both maximizing economic and political power.
An explicit recognition of the way in which our understanding of the world is changing comes from our new map, which replaces the much-hated Mercator Projection, approved recently by the UN General Assembly.
As Carney, Lula, European Council President António Costa, and Kenyan President William Ruto observed: “We confront a paradox. The global community is more interdependent than ever, even as it becomes more fragmented and polarised.”
The wingding populism of Trump, Le Pen, Weidel, and Farage asks us to imagine a world where everything is a fight, and the loser signs the terms of their surrender. They are fighting globalism, pluralism, and liberalism itself. They want to polarize and fragment.
But the Allies won World War II in the name of liberalism, and set off to remake the world in that image. Ukraine survived the onslaught of its neighbor, in part, because it encouraged innovation, even when it challenged the wisdom of its leader. And now Carney and the gang are trying to recreate space for pluralism, where countries can seek equitable solutions, even when they don’t agree.
A world of legitimate opposition is much better than a world without it.
That’s it for this dispatch.
I’m back from my (much, much needed) vacation and am already cracking on with my next dispatch.
Over at the Star, I’ve got some thoughts about the AI doomsday on the horizon, a pair of columns about the ups and downs of Carney’s rapprochement with Europe, and a study of Canadians’ views of our foreign policy — and what Carney can learn from them.
Until next time!
The Soul of Indiscretion; Tom Driberg: Poet, Philanderer, Legislator and Outlaw, Francis Wheen (2001)
Ruling Passions, Tom Driberg (1977)
Conflict: The Evolution of Warfare from 1945 to Ukraine. David Petraeus and Andrew Roberts. (2023)
Legitimate Opposition, Alexander Kirshner (2023)
Great piece. Thanks. The Western world does seem like a lumbering, and possibly injured, elephant right now. Poilievre is convinced (or is merely trying to convince us) that Carney hasn't achieved anything. That and the Conservative party's relative silence on the sad folly of Alberta separation is very disappointing.
The former is certainly liklier than the latter!