Hearing Wallace, I imagine most people will just shrug and wonder which arms firm he is about to join. Whether they make their consumers more fearful as a result, I cannot tell. If you compare today’s news items with those of, say, 50 years ago, when most news was just publicity, they are overwhelmingly miserable. Virtually no media outlet nowadays contains any uplift or joy. What effect this has on public psychology remains uncertain. ![]() It wants to jolt us into changing our behaviour. Like fear of a pandemic or climate disaster, its intention is to transpose a notional danger into the reality of home and hearth. But a prediction of war – not just a threat – is the ultimate fear-mongering. If not, he says, we will have “soldiers armed with pitchforks”. Wallace in his interview was purporting to use privileged information to frighten the public into spending more on defence. Can we imagine any other European politician talking in such terms? The idea that troops should return to police the politics of African states only shows the neo-imperialism that still lurks beneath the skin of Brexit Britain. Rhetoric is a terrible substitute for strategy.Īs for Wallace’s thesis that “global terrorism” poses an existential threat to Britain – as claimed by Tony Blair to justify his Afghanistan and Iraq wars – that surely is defunct. But even if it were to spread further along Russia’s borders, it would still not threaten Britain’s national security. ![]() Containing the conflict is an absolute necessity for all sides. ![]() He wants to conquer Ukraine, not the west. Nato has struggled – impressively, in my view – not to misinterpret Putin’s intentions in Ukraine and thus escalate the conflict. Clearly, Ukraine is an evolving nightmare, but for Wallace to predict that within seven years it will have spread across continental Europe and produced a Russian threat to the British Isles leaves me wondering what the defence ministry takes in its tea.
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