In his big interview, Mandelson demonstrated how he is useful to the powers that be. Just like the Speccie piece, he laid out his understanding of the Trump doctrine. That the world is a messy place, too many nations are flouting the rules, and the moment requires decisive action by a decisive leader. Venezuela being a case in point, and last year's joint US-Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities another. What about the bellicose threats over Greenland, repeated this last week? More theatre. Mandelson argues this is Trump's effort to stop Europe free-riding on US military supremacy. He's trying to force Europeans to spend more on guns, not butter mountains. So, in this case, you might say more Danish and non-American NATO troops in the Arctic suits the White House as it boosts the strength of their far northern perimeter. Of course, what Mandelson doesn't mention is the so-called scramble for the North Pole as the ice disappears is a fantasy for a new great game, the appearance of big power rivalry between the US-led West, and Russia - which can't even defeat Ukraine after four years of bloody war - and a China that has no assets or territory in the region. And Mandelson overlooks how the biggest violator of international rules is the United States itself. No surprises there - this is less a Trump-explainer, and more his condensing the slavishness of the dominant section of British capital. If this is to continue, he's saying, we've got to toady some more and get cranking out those weapons.
On his close friendship with Epstein, we got the hand-wringing. "I never saw anything", "Never noticed young women", "Perhaps because I'm gay he kept me out of the sexual side". On the support he offered after the sex offences conviction, Mandelson said he genuinely believed Epstein's protestations of innocence and what his lawyer was saying. To Kuenssberg, he threw down a challenge: "Do you think I would have stayed friends with him had I known?" Mandelson was canny enough to try and make it about the women who survived Epstein's abuse, but he refused to apologise for continuing the friendship when all facts were out in the open. Obviously, like everyone else we don't know what Mandelson did and didn't see/knew, but because of his character and fondness for prostrating himself before billionaires, I don't for one minute believe he would have let knowledge of Epstein's offences get in the way of warm relations. This is why Mandelson did not say sorry. It's not just that he doesn't feel particularly apologetic, something reinforced by the trained inauthenticity common to Blairite figures he affected, but it signals a willingness to debase himself, and to take a fall if serving the powerful requires it.
Between the article and the interview, Mandelson's laid it all out. He can be sacked, humiliated, live (temporarily) in disgrace. But it doesn't matter. If the wealthy or the powerful need him, he'll still be their best pal.
Image Credit
5 comments:
Well, that's two peas in a pod there, isn't it?
The day that the odious LK finally makes a serious slip up can't come soon enough. As another diligent servant of the regional powers, she can look forward to a similar rehabilitation program, but at least we'd briefly see the last of her.
Abject sliminess aside, he's got a solid stopped-clock point: we do need to start cranking out the weapons... But to protect ourselves from the USA, far more than from China or even Russia. Not in direct hot confrontations, of course! It's simply that if we hadn't made ourselves so dependent upon Yankee military might, then our leaders wouldn't have to publicly kiss the puckered ring of a nascent Yankee dictatorship, and that's the situation which needs remedying.
Well, since a bit of genocide or a few massacres of civiians is not enough to have a man expelled from a gentleman's club or cold shouldered by erstwhile friends then being the pal of a paedophile or fiddling a mortgage or selling citizenship are hardly likely to. After all 'Mandy' is a bit of a card.
Not the point of your article, I know, but to say that Russia "can't even beat" Ukraine misses the reality of what's happening there. Russia are defacto fighting NATO, but using only Ukrainian bodies. To date upwards of $300 billion in military support from the west has sustained the Ukrainian effort.
Not missing the point at all. NATO are not de facto fighting - they might be assisting, or helping arm, but they are hardly 'fighting' de facto or de jure. Russia is pumped up as this major military power that threatens the entire Western world, but they find themselves struggling to defeat a much smaller country with far fewer resources. The only reason to worry about Russia is that they have a very large number of nuclear weapons. The idea that they could burst through Ukraine and sweep across Europe is fanciful. A story boosted by all those people that make vast sums from corrupt or incompetent weapons procurement which diverts rivers of funding into their pockets.
On the one hand we have stories like yours that NATO are the reason that Russia is stuck in this attritional war. On the other we hear, NATO is incapable of defending itself without America, and Russia could just walk in. Does it not strike you that there is something of a contradiction here? Either NATO is as useful as soggy cardboard, or it's able to hold Russia at arms length with a few missiles and some second-hand tanks and planes.
Post a Comment