Have you ever spent time in any Church of Ireland chapels around the country? Among other things, these isolated and now largely empty rural buildings are the resting place of a military culture that flourished within the Irish Protestant population.
Plaques in these churches commemorate young Irishmen who died in faraway places, many of them building and defending the British empire. Young lads from Laois, Kilkenny, Cork and Cavan were killed in Plassey, Khartoum, Waterloo, Congella, Trafalgar and Kabul, fighting as Britain tried to rule the world.
Again and again on these forlorn headstones you see the name Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula now occupied by Russia but officially still part of Ukraine.
What were Irish soldiers doing in Crimea? The Crimean War between Britain and Russia was part of what was called “the Great Game” in the 19th century. The conflict pitted Moscow and its allies against London and its allies for primacy over the Hindu Kush, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Powers, even those unaffected, were required to take sides.
Essentially, Russia wanted to protect its southern flank from the British, who wanted to protect their overland passage to India, the “jewel in the crown”. This decades-long struggle pitted two superpowers – one naval, the other land-based – against each other. Irish boys, both Protestant and Catholic, signed up to fight on the other side of the world. Thousands died there, ingloriously. The Catholic lads are largely forgotten but the Protestant community remember their fallen in their isolated churches.
[ The fragmented EU will struggle in negotiations with the USOpens in new window ]
The Great Game endured for much of the 1800s. Today, we are seeing another Great Game take shape between the United States and China. When seen through this lens, we can begin to decipher a coherence in Donald Trump’s tariff pandemonium.
The easiest (and possibly laziest) thing to do when faced with the US president is to condemn him and his administration as an unhinged rabble, inchoately making things up on the hoof. But that gets us nowhere. Our job now is to try to interpret where Trump 2 is taking the world. It is becoming obvious that in the new Great Game, the US’s plan is to isolate and impair China by deploying trade, finance and economics.
In the past week, a strategy has begun to take shape: the line of attack is to bully the Europeans into taking the side of the US. Washington wants to conscript Europe into its economic war against China: if we side with the US and stop trading with China, we will be spared the wrath of Trump. However, if we continue to deal openly with China, he promises to punish us.
In line with his mafiosi worldview, Trump has turned the global economy into a hostage situation. European prosperity is the hostage, Trump is the hostage taker, tariffs are the weapon and the ransom to be paid by the European Union is to halt or greatly diminish trade with China in order to squeeze Beijing. The removal of the American military umbrella is part of this stratagem. Washington believes Europe is already at war with China via Russia in Ukraine but we don’t know, haven’t fully appreciated or refuse to acknowledge it yet.
In Trump’s “loyalty first” world, Europe is playing both sides and he wants to force us to make a choice. This is a high-stakes game for Washington because it is by no means clear whether Europe will play ball. For Ireland, the choice between the US and China is easy. But for other countries, it is not so straightforward.
Sometimes you have to leave Ireland and the English-speaking world to gain perspective. This week I was working in Paris. The French have always regarded the world on their own terms and, relentlessly suspicious of the US, France feels vindicated. Now that the US has revealed that it is happy to sacrifice Europe in the new Great Game, Parisians are asking whether Europe can ever trust Washington again.
Might it not be better to play both sides off each other? Might it not be better to play chicken with an erratic Washington, in the knowledge that Beijing will be a more stable partner? Also, there is the not insubstantial fact that France sells expensive brands and experiences – whether it be Hermès bags or expensive trips to the Eiffel Tower – to the Chinese and receives cheaper generic manufactured goods in return. There is also the appeal of betting on the coming power, rather than the diminishing one.
[ Why are Trump and his architects of chaos obsessed with Ireland?Opens in new window ]
The big question is whether Washington’s boorish tactics might misfire and, in its effort to isolate Beijing, drives Europe into China’s arms. For Paris that is still unresolved.
Take, for example, China’s ability to finance other people’s deficits. For the past few decades, China has bankrolled the US, buying US government debt and in the process allowing Americans to live beyond their means. What if it were to switch its preference to European assets, dump US bonds and buy European ones?
For France, this would be an extremely interesting alternative because France is heavily in debt. When you add all French debt – government and private sector – together, it amounts to 319 per cent of GDP, which is the second-highest in the developed world, exceeded only by Japan.
Now a lot of this is the result of being in the euro, where French debts are bought by other Europeans. But what happens if there is a European debt shock? And what if such a crisis emanates from France? The country is increasingly ungovernable, as the latest parliamentary impasse has underscored. With debts at this level, France is vulnerable, unless it can find another creditor.
Who might that “white knight” creditor be? China, of course. If the trade war with the US causes the Chinese to liquidate their US bond holdings, China will have to buy something else with that money. Why not sell the US and buy France in particular and Europe in general?
Suddenly Washington’s gamble doesn’t look too simple. Europe has alternatives and, in a world where the US’s objective might be splendid isolation, why would Europe allow itself to be bullied by the US? An EU deal with China could also involve Chinese pressure on Russia to reach an agreement with Ukraine.
In such a scenario, bullied Europe grabs victory from the jaws of defeat, faces down Maga and comes up trumps.
Another great game is on. The winners have yet to be decided.
