Hard Choices, Parlous World

A conversation about foreign policy

The Berlin Wall, 1983.

I’ve always enjoyed speaking with Gray Connolly over the years, usually about constitutional law, foreign policy and espionage. But we’ve never spoken before at this length. Gray is a Catholic, a conservative and a barrister who writes often on matters of war, law and faith for the Sydney Morning Herald, amongst other places. Before the law, Gray served as a naval intelligence officer. You might also know him from online, where he’s a pugnacious, prolific but thoughtful tweeter. He was also, before the show’s cancellation last year, a frequent guest on the ABC’s The Drum.

For this Q&A, I wanted to speak with Gray about foreign policy. It was a lengthy discussion, and the transcript ran to over 15,000 words, and so our conversation has been condensed here to about a third of that.

     

I might start in the broadest fashion, Gray, with a personal contention that you may disagree with or consider an exaggeration. But to me, in the US election campaign, there’s been a curious indifference to foreign policy. Its near total absence in the Veep debate, but for an opening question on Israel perhaps attacking Iran. The dock strike had just begun 24 hours before, but was never mentioned. The Harris/Trump debate was largely without reference to foreign policy. I find this curious and a little troubling given how parlous I think these times are. Do you share this contention that there’s a baffling absence of interest in foreign policy?

I do and I do not. Can I say why I do? I obviously share your view that it’s a very dangerous world and that there are lots of things happening that are very concerning, from Russia and Ukraine to Israel and Hamas to the Houthis and the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman and the Suez Canal. Obviously there’s Taiwan and China. And there’s certain reports saying that North Korea are supplying “volunteers” to the Russians. So it is concerning, but it is not surprising.

I think generally speaking the US, like most great powers of history, runs to a certain policy that it can change around the margins, but it doesn’t really change that much. And I think it doesn’t really matter who’s in office – that’s got less to do with anything about “deep states”, but that a lot of what a country does by way of its foreign policy is determined for it by its geography and by its interests.

[But] the American media, certainly in my lifetime, has gotten worse, to the point where I think most of the journalists – and I use “journalists” in a very loose sense – who host these things are not much brighter, if at all brighter, than any of the candidates. I just don’t have a lot of respect for that process. I think those debates are very good for gladiatorial contests, but as an exploration of ideas, I think you would need much smarter people to be hosting them. Most of them are not particularly intelligent. I genuinely think they’re stupid. I think political journalism attracts a certain level of diminished brain that only gets more diminished over time.

This wasn’t something I was planning to ask you, but to what do you attribute that diminishment in the quality of journalism?

I don’t think the public is demanding better, so it will not get better. I also think the concept of what is journalism changed in some way. When I was growing up and going to school in the ‘90s you did have texts about famous journalists like William Shirer, Rebecca West and John Wheeler-Bennett – you had these sorts of brave journalists who lived in amazing times, and they really did want to be the writers of the first draft of history. That got somehow lost along the way to the sort of activist model of journalism, which I think has really done a lot of damage to journalism as a craft. It’s also produced people who just don’t have the basic skills, whatever their political bent, of being able to write in a clear, concise and accurate way. I do also think the sort of veneration of people like Hunter S. Thompson was very bad for journalism.

Yeah, I share that. I can oscillate between sorrow and bitterness when I consider that diminishment of my industry. I too grew up reading Rebecca West and older folk like Mencken and then Murray Kempton, who came along later, and there’s just no-one close now… Gray, I wanted to touch upon some of the hot spots in the world now. I know you think a lot about Russia, and I’m wondering if you could share, before we come to the war on Ukraine, a historic prelude to it. And to prompt you, I’d like to offer my own crude take which you may accept, reject or refine as you see fit. It seemed to me that in the ‘90s, just following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, there was a lot of aggressive Western condescension of Russia and a kind of preening triumphalism. Putin was taking notes, and his indignity was profound. It festered. To wrest a question from that: I’m curious to know what you think of that characterisation, and also what we got wrong or ignored about Russia?

I have some sympathy for that view. I just think the West’s plan for it was never as advanced as, well, certainly the Russians [thought] it was. I think the Cold War ends, and no one’s really expecting it to end when it ends. One of the little tidbits of espionage history I always like to give people is that the irony of the Western security position, when the Soviet Union finally collapses in 1989-’91, is that because of people like the former CIA officer Aldrich Ames or the FBI’s Robert Hanssen, and the like, the West’s actual intelligence penetration of the Soviet hierarchy was at its worst in the late 1980s than at any other time in the history of the Cold War. So many literal traitors had been able to fester in the Western security apparatus and the West lost a huge amount of human intelligence inside of the Soviet Union.

So when the Soviet Union actually finally collapses, it’s a great surprise in the West, because they’ve lost all these people. They know they have a mole. And so, the actual chain of information reaching the West’s decision makers means that they think the Soviet Union is much stronger than it actually is, as the Soviet empire collapses from ‘89 onwards.

I think Bush 41 understood the problem. He tried to keep the Soviet Union together. He certainly did not want to have the Russians humiliated. He goes to Kiev and famously warns Ukraine about suicidal nationalism. A lot of what Bush 41 did actually was really quite prescient. He didn’t want the Soviet nuclear arsenal falling into 50 different hands, he didn’t want Soviet nuclear scientists heading around the world looking for payday.

If you remember the early ‘90s, there was a terrible recession. Bush 41 was perceived by many Americans as too interested in things happening everywhere else but America. Clinton very much campaigned on the idea – not unlike Trump now – that we’ve got to fix America. Clinton comes in, and you have this whole process in the early ‘90s of what to do with NATO. Some people want NATO to be wound up. Some people see the Cold War as an accident of history.

In Europe, they have the same recession and they sort of want to hold on to NATO at least to keep the Americans committed. And at the same time you have the war erupting in the former Yugoslavia. The war in Yugoslavia was kind of the parallel to the sort of globalism everywhere else in Europe. Everywhere else there was talk about the end of history, Fukuyama, the idea that liberal democracy is the only viable way of ordering a state. And parallel with that whole debate is what was happening in the former Yugoslavia, where history, as everyone knows about the Balkans, never ends. Everyone’s got some grievance.

So, you have these parallel things going on. The Russians are obviously kicked out of Central Europe by the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians. The Czechs and the Slovaks go their separate ways. In ’94 or ’95, the last Russian forces depart Germany. And Russia itself is falling apart under Yeltsin. And the Russian view is that we’ve been humiliated. We’ve lost the Soviet Union, and our allies, the Serbs, are being bombed by the West. There’s this sense of not just that we’ve lost the Soviet Union, which a lot of Russians weren’t sad to see go because Communism was never that popular, but because the Soviet empire meant that Russia mattered in the world. So American presidents didn’t feel that they need to have summit meetings with Russian leaders anymore. They’re falling down the totem pole, and for a lot of Russians it was quite humiliating.

And I think the West failed to understand that while we might see liberal democracy as an end in itself, the Russians didn’t see it that way. The Russian mentality is “We are Russian, we are different”. We have a country that occupies 11 time-zones. We have certain land vulnerabilities that you don’t have and are always anxious about. We’ve been invaded every generation. So, I think it was just handled extremely badly. Some, like Robert Gates, the former US Defense Secretary, and William Burns, the current CIA director who was the US ambassador in Moscow in the 2000s, said that everyone in Russia – from knuckle-dragging Kremlin staff to the most effete liberals – saw an independent Ukraine joining NATO as a red line. And I think there was just a failure to understand that for the Russians there are just certain non-negotiables and that however you or I might think as liberally minded Anglophones, the Russians do think in terms of spheres of influence. Whether you or I like that or not, that’s how the Russians think, and they’re not going to change how they think for you or I. So, you still have to work out if that’s something you're wanting to fight about, or something you want to accommodate? And I think that’s the dilemma that we’re in now – the fact that we mishandled that whole relationship for the better part of 20 years.

Prague, 1989.

If I can stay with the historic prelude to today’s war – you mentioned paranoia, which I consider a quality of Russian public life or imagination. And I think probably justifiably, given the long history of invasion and besiegement. Why did we not better consider how provocative that expansion might be?

Well, some did. George Kennan, the great American diplomat, was still alive then and opposed its expansion. You had other realists, like Owen Harries, who opposed it. A lot of people thought it was a dumb idea. Now, I distinguish between two types of expansion: bringing in, say, the Poles, the Czechs, the Hungarians, who are really central Europeans, and who, if I can use a sort of civilisational shorthand: the Poles are Catholic, the Hungarians are Catholic and Calvinists. The Czechs are not particularly religious people, but they’re Western-oriented. The Slovaks are Catholics. They all belong to a different sphere, and I think what the Russians would say is: well, we might be willing to accept that. But when you start to bring in the Baltic states, when you’re trying to bring in, say, Georgia? I mean, the facile part about trying to bring Georgia to NATO is, how would you ever support them? I mean, talk about throwing out a security blank cheque.

The other thing here is a changing of [the Western political] guard that really happens in the early ‘90s. Britain comes in the later ‘90s with Blair. There was just a complete lack of realism based on historical awareness. When you had an older generation, who had played through the Cold War, there was a sense of limits, of what was realistic. And now you have all these people come in who know absolutely nothing about anything. They’re very good at politics, but know nothing about the world. And they sort of take over and say: Why can’t we? Isn’t it important that we include these young, fledgling democracies? We’re going to mentor them, you know, we’re going to teach them about democracy and institution-building and the like. That’s why it’s important to bring them into institutions like the European Union, NATO and things like that. But the problem with that is institution building, if you think about it, is the work of generations.

When they expanded NATO, it was trying to operate as sort of a club that anyone can join. And you can’t run a military alliance like that. But it’s an alliance run by unserious people. The competency crisis that you see everywhere else in the world really does operate at that level as well. You’re not dealing with geniuses. You’re dealing with the people who thought for 20 years that our allying with and subsidising pederasts in Afghanistan was a smart idea.

Men of appetites: Yeltsin & Clinton

Can we talk about the Ukraine war today. I think it’s probably fair to say that historically, wars of attrition eventually resolve themselves in favour of the largest army. Russia’s commitment is going to be infinitely greater than any other participant. How might we think about or talk about the future of that war?

The Russians have been fighting this war at a very, very slow pace because time’s on their side and they’re fighting at home. They don’t need to fight Blitzkrieg. They don’t need a quick result. Last year, the Russians went onto the defensive. The Russians are very good military engineers and they built all these fortifications and dug heavily into their lines for a Ukrainian offensive. And the West was encouraging Ukrainians,, who were already low on manpower, to basically throw the flower of their youth against these very, very well entrenched Russian positions. And the Ukrainians took enormous casualties, to the point where no one’s really sure how many people they’ve lost.

At the end of the day, the war hasn’t changed that much in two-plus years. The Russians have been fighting it on the cheap, and they obviously feel they can wait it out. The Ukrainians have lost a lot of people they can’t replace. I think the Russians are now waiting for the outcome of the US election. And I just think the war ends with a sort of Korean-style settlement – well, a warmer version of that settlement, where the Russians will keep the “banana” they have now (what I call the banana of the territory they’ve currently cut off and which is mainly full of ethnic Russians). There’s already been a “big sort”: people who want to live under Russia went East, those want to live under Ukraine went west. And I think basically, from this stalemate and this big sort, there is an armistice.

Then the real problem, I think, is that we’re all going to have to try and rebuild Ukraine. It’s one of the most corrupt countries on earth, and I just don’t understand how you’re going to possibly rebuild Ukraine without some sort of serious inspector general’s regime to track where all the money [goes]. It’s the great problem of Western statecraft. Something’s a problem, and we go all in for it at 100 miles an hour. And we end up funnelling money to all of these very dubious people who claim to be our allies, like we did in Afghanistan, like we did in Iraq, etc. Like how in Syria the CIA ended up supporting anti-Assad forces who were al-Qaeda-lite. You end up with bad situations because you have ideas that were half-baked. I should add that it is not a conspiracy. We’re just run by not particularly smart people.

Gaza City, October 2023.

Can I ask you about Gaza now. I think Israel’s response to October 7 was utterly predictable to just about everyone, including Hamas. And Hamas must wear responsibility for that. But what do you think is Israel’s end goal? I still can’t quite figure it out.

Well, I have a very Westphalian view of the world and nation states matter and when you go around poking bears, don’t be surprised by what happens to you. That may seem insensitive, but at least I’m very consistent on it. Don’t poke bears. And in the case of Gaza, any nation which had done to it what the Israelis had done to it, particularly to women and girls, then you as the perpetrators are going to get absolutely annihilated by the bear.

In terms of where this all goes? I think the Israelis are almost in a kind of psychological standoff with the moderate Sunni Arabs because I think what they want is the moderate Sunni Arabs to say: Hamas cannot stay in control of Gaza, we’re going to sponsor a new regime that will essentially de-Hamas the new Gaza and, by that, de-Iranise it too. The Israelis are very much in this situation where they’re saying to the Saudis and the Egyptians and others, that ‘We are taking care of Hamas. We’re taking care of a jihadi group that you don’t like either, an off-shoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. But you need to meet us halfway by helping to sponsor the successor state, and the Americans will come in and support that’. And you can turn that into a sort of Emirate on the Mediterranean, effectively.

That’s where I see it going. But my problem is that, having some knowledge of the Israel/Palestine conflict – and I’m biased, I’ve always supported Israel – but even those with the best will in the world towards the Palestinians have to be honest about the fact that every opportunity given to the Palestinians just ends up in disaster. And it’s almost like there is a psychological problem that needs to be addressed there before we can start anew.

I also think there are a lot of Israelis who, prior to October 7, would have just done anything to have peace. After October 7, I think a lot of that is gone. I think a lot of Israelis now are much more hardline, understandably. There can be no peace with Hamas.

I think the other thing that a lot of Westerners don’t appreciate about Israelis is that it is a Jewish state, yes, but it also has substantial Christian, Druze, and Muslim minorities and they have all bought into and fight for the Israeli project. People don’t get this. Christian Israelis really believe in the Israeli state. Druze Israelis believe in the Israeli state. So, when people say this is [purely] Jewish, it’s not. The Israel project is bigger than that. It always has been. And so Israel, I think, sees this as a way of forging a national consensus that they haven’t had for a while. And it’s ironic that it’s under Netanyahu, because usually the consensus about him was most people don’t trust him and don’t like him. A lot of Israelis even now wouldn’t like Netanyahu, but he’s their leader and he’s ruthless enough to do what a lot of Israelis might otherwise balk at doing.

So, I think the Israeli end game at the moment is to destroy as much of Hamas as they can, while waiting for the Saudis, the Emiratis, the Egyptians and others to come forward with their idea for a plan for what Gaza looks like. Because Israelis really can’t put that forward and get local buy-in. You really need the other Arab states to do it.

I’ve thought about how distant Clinton’s attempts to broker sustainable peace with Israel and the PLO seem now, and how radical Israel’s concessions to Arafat were in the late ‘90s – but they were rejected, Clinton’s term ended and then came September 11.  

The era where Israel was led by a lot of people who were either European or descendants of Europeans, that’s gone. The Israelis now are led by Israelis born in Israel, of Israelis who have lived there for a long time. They don’t feel any guilt or neuroses, like many of the Western European emigres coming out from the exodus after World War Two and the Holocaust. This contemporary Israel leadership do not feel this at all. They tend to feel that we’re Jews, we’re living in the land of our forefathers and we’ve always lived here, and we will die, defending our ancestral lands.

I think that’s very much something that Westerners who are trying to broker peace really need to understand as well, is that that era that we grew up in, say the 1990s, where Israeli leaders would be leaned on by the Americans to give up something, to get some sort of signing ceremony with the latest Palestinian leader, who will then go and break it – that’s done. That 1990s era is never coming back.  

How do you see the broader geo-political calculus and the risk of conflagration? The world seems super dicey and delicate to me right now. Am I being hyperbolic?

No, it is. It is very dicey. I think the first, best thing would be to try and bring an end to the Ukraine/Russia war. I think it’s an enormous strain on everyone’s resources, and it’s not going to be solved – or so expensive to solve in human lives and money, that I think freezing that war or cauterising the wound, and moving on to things that really do matter like ship-building, seapower, the security of the Suez Canal and Taiwan Strait. The things that we can do well – we can exert power and influence by sea, we’re not very good at doing it by land. Our last two efforts of doing that were Iraq and Afghanistan.

I’m focused on the things we can fix. I think the Taiwan Strait is much more important than anything to do with Russia/Ukraine. The best results I think will come by being hard and realistic about the things you can change and improve. We can improve the security of shipping through the Red Sea. But there’s not much we can do for Ukraine, other than finding another 15 million people for them.

Which is why the causes of the Russia-Ukraine war should never have gone unaddressed. There was no possibility that anyone in Europe wanted Ukraine to come into NATO. No one in Europe wanted to have a new member who's almost certainly going to have a security guarantee that’s going to have to be honoured. Why could no-one have just said to the Russians that we’re not going to bring Ukraine into NATO, but we might bring it into the European Union. But we’re happy to have Ukraine left as a neutral buffer zone, and we’ll have some agreements about that. But the idea that you can remediate this historic, tectonic-plates-meeting-point, is crazy to me.

The US election is upon us. You said something interesting a few weeks ago to me in an email, which was, and I’m paraphrasing here, but you confessed to not having a huge amount of interest in the US election. Do you remember saying that? And why is that?

Well, I have an interest in as far as I think Americans are going through a realignment. I find that interesting. And it’s an election in circumstances where America is in a bad way. But the realignment interests me.

What Trump had going for him [back in 2016] was that he ran as a very old school Republican. Republicans begin as the anti-slavery party. One of the great fears that people around Lincoln had was that the growth of slavery in America was going to become a situation where, basically free workers, Free Soilers, free people, etc. were going to be locked out, politically, of their own country. The South would have such a hold on the presidency and have such a hold on everything else, that basically the northerners would have no country left for them.

And so insofar as the Republicans had this kind of almost radical aspect to them – about America, and about this sense of we’re holding on to what is free. And they also have this element of being the carriers of the torch of what it is to be an American. Republicans, traditionally, were a protectionist party. They’re not a free-trading party – they’re a party of high tariffs, the strong dollar and so on. If you look at the periods of Republican dominance, particularly after the Civil War, it’s very much based around that idea that we put America first.

So Trump, in a sense, was going back to a sort of pre-Reagan era. Eisenhower was very concerned, for instance, about America’s commitments abroad. He thought [after the Second World War], well, we’d help Europeans get on their feet, but we can’t stay there for a long time because the US dollar is backed by gold. And all that happens when we have large amounts of Americans stationed abroad is that gold will drain out of America. Eisenhower was very concerned about American industry, and European goods flooding America. In the Bush years, they were all free-traders. But Trump is interesting because he’s the most visible symbol of a movement that was happening before Trump anyway to go back to the old GOP. Trump’s not the navigator of it, but he’s certainly the bow wave of it.

And I can see why that would be compelling to people. I think one of the big problems Democrats have got, quite apart from a lot of the sort of weird social issues, is… You know, for every one vote people think that Republicans might lose because you’ve got too many Christians who are interested in abortion, you probably lose at least two because of people who are worried about all the trans stuff. And as someone who has got some Latin ancestry, I think it’s a hard sell in an election to go to a Latin mother and tell her that her son Carlos should consider becoming Carla.

I think also a lot of the American left has just got mad on issues like this that are just plainly crazy, like defund the police. Things that are particularly important for minorities who rely on the [social] structure. If you’re a rich person, you can go along with a lot of really stupid ideas, because in some respects, your wealth will protect you from the consequences. If you’re not rich, and you actually have to live with the consequences of bad social policies, you become very intolerant of that. Because you take the view that I’m playing by the rules, I’m following the rules, I’m doing what’s right, trying to raise children who understand what’s right. But if I’m having to live with all of your stupid ideas, then I get to be resentful about that. I think nothing has helped more for that realignment, particularly of ethnic minorities, than the prospect of chaos. Because deep in the Latino brain, as someone raised on ancestral stories of the 1910 Portuguese revolution, you have some familial memory of why chaos is always to be avoided.

In this new world, you will turn to the strong man. And Trump is the strong man. Trump was not my guy – I preferred Ron DeSantis. But I think Trump probably wins, I’ve long thought that, and I think if he does it’s on the back of that realignment. And that realignment might have happened anyway, but I think certain things the Democrats have done by way of policies have just alienated them. I mean, the depressed turnout among black men. Latinos are voting Republican. And it took Trump to push that old guard of Republicans out.

You mention the Democrats vis a vis this realignment – but what of the old Republicans? The WASPS and the country club folk and the neoconservatives… It seems to me that for conservatives who oppose Trump and find him, as I find him, dangerously unfit, and wish to slow or correct, if you like, that realignment to populism – well, to what extent should their history of mis-adventurism, and I’m thinking particularly of Iraq, be owned or confessed or some contrition expressed?  

That’s an excellent question. First, can I say this about Trump being unfit? It was an office held by Lyndon Johnson and Bill Clinton. It’s been held by animals. It’s been held by people who owned slaves. So, Donald Trump’s not my number one candidate but there you are.

In terms of the Republicans? A lot of the country club WASPS made their peace with Trump. They’re going to stick around, they have nowhere else to go. But I think if Trump does nothing else but send the neo-conservatives back to the Democrats, where they came from, he will have done a signal service to America. But the sort of old guard Republicans, a lot of them made their peace with Trump at the very beginning. Bob Dole was a big supporter of Trump.

What do you think of JD Vance?

Well, I knew JD Vance long before he went into politics, such is the strange sort of social media we have now. If you were on Catholic Twitter at the end of the 2010s, JD would have very interesting insights at the crossroads of politics and faith. I had a some very interesting chats with him. He’s a very deep, very genuine, and very nice person who I have a high regard for. He has an incredibly compelling story, and the way he talks about his parents, and particularly about his mother, and his desire to not see the pathologies that he experienced repeated, I have a lot of regard for.

It’s funny when people point out he hated Trump to begin with. I mean, that’s most people. And, as a Red Tory, I like the fact that he fights for the forgotten people. He’s not scared of being unpopular, which I find deeply refreshing. There’s nothing worse than people who are afraid of being unpopular.