Let us pause, for a moment, to admire the sheer, breathtaking incompetence on display. The United States, that great colossus of the postwar order, has decided to block the renewal of the North American trade deal. Why? Because of some petty squabble over dairy quotas or steel tariffs, no doubt. The details are as dreary as they are predictable. What matters is the fallout: supply chains, already groaning under the weight of a pandemic and a land war in Europe, are now threatened with a new, entirely self-inflicted wound.
And what does His Majesty's Government do? It urges calm. Of course it does. The British establishment, ever the loyal poodle, trots out the same tired platitudes about 'dialogue' and 'shared values'. But let us be honest: this is not a hiccup. This is a symptom. The liberal international order, that grand project of the 1990s, is rotting from within. America, its guarantor, has become a capricious and insular power. Europe is a museum. And Britain? Britain is a sad, confused ghost, trying to find its place in a world that no longer needs it.
We have seen this before. The late Roman Empire, stumbling from crisis to crisis, its frontiers violated by barbarians while its praetorians squabbled over the spoils. The Victorians, too, had their moment of decadence: the Boer War exposed the rot, the inefficiency, the sheer arrogance of a power that had forgotten how to rule. Now we are living through the same cycle, but at an accelerated pace. Globalisation was the new Pax Romana. And like Rome, it is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions.
The North American trade deal was not perfect. It was a bureaucratic monstrosity, full of corporate loopholes and regulatory nightmares. But it was a symbol of something: of a world where nations, however grudgingly, worked together. Now that symbol is broken. And what replaces it? A chaos of bilateral deals, tariff wars, and economic nationalism. The very forces that globalisation was supposed to tame.
Do not expect the UK to offer a solution. Our government is busy with its own obsessions: the Rwanda plan, the culture wars, the endless post-Brexit navel-gazing. We are a footnote in this drama, a minor player trying to look important. 'Urging calm' is the best we can do. It is pathetic. It is quintessentially British.
But perhaps that is the point. Perhaps the era of grand alliances and global governance is over. Perhaps we are entering a new age of fragmentation, where every nation looks after its own. The Victorians would have called it 'realism'. I call it intellectual and moral decay. We have lost the vision, the ambition, the sheer audacity that built the modern world. Now we bicker over trade deals while the planet burns.
So by all means, urge calm. But prepare for the storm. It is coming, and it will not be gentle.
