The rise of machinepolitik

In this era of raw power, Labour must find a new statecraft.

Illustration by Jonathan Mchugh

There is a scene in Gustave Flaubert’s novel Sentimental Education that one cannot read without turning one’s mind to today. Set against the backdrop of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, it tells the story of the romantic and intellectual wanderings of the earnest but capricious young Frédéric Moreau. In the exhilarating world of the newborn Second Republic, Moreau and his Parisian social circle flirt with high idealism about politics and international affairs while jostling for female attention, intellectual fulfilment, sources of stable income and, of course, their inheritance.

Flaubert has some fun with the character of Moreau’s close friend, Deslauriers, a legal clerk and struggling scholar who has strong political views but fails to think things through to the finish. As an ardent republican, he gains notoriety for his passionate but rather blustery “display of virulence [against] those who held conservative views”. At one point, he gets so swept up in his enthusiasm for natural law that he claims to have identified the root of all political injustice in the world in the form of an arcane property right. “Abolish it,” Deslauriers declares, at the end of a passionate but incoherent ramble to some bemused legal seniors, “and the Franks will no longer oppress the Gauls, the English oppress the Irish, the Yankee oppress the Redskins, the Turks oppress the Arabs…” and so on.

Just as Deslauriers’ theories crumble under scrutiny, so the dreams of the Second Republic fell apart due to naiveté, self-deception and vapid high principle – brought to an emphatic end by the coup d’état of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte in 1852.

The collapse of France’s second republican experiment was the subject of one of Karl Marx’s most famous essays, “The Eighteenth Brumaire”, in which he wrestled with the fact that history had not followed the course of successful bourgeois revolutions, as he had predicted. “Men make their own history,” as Marx put it, “but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” Indeed, it was in the opening passage of the same essay that Marx also deployed the famous line, borrowed from Hegel, that all great world-historical facts and people occur twice. Hegel “forgot to add”, Marx wrote, with reference to the arrival of a new and much less impressive Napoleon on the scene, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

It was not just in France where the hopes of dreamers such as Deslauriers were dashed. A similar reckoning happened across Europe, as the liberal constitutional projects of the 1848 revolutions were thwarted. New theories of international law had proliferated in the preceding decade and there was hope that domestic changes could bring about a more civilised intercourse between nations. But the dreams of the republicans and liberal constitutionalists soon fell victim to other forces in politics, such as nationalism, sectarianism, class identity, dynastic politics, the loyalties of the armed forces and the threat of foreign intervention.

What was to be done? In Germany, a young liberal called Ludwig von Rochau coined an entirely new concept to navigate this brave new world – “realpolitik”. Crucially, it was not an abandonment of his principles but a cri de cœur for liberals to get real about the world in which they were trying to bring about change.

From this mid-century turning point, the whole science of politics was adjusted to the dispiriting reality that history was not, after all, on a path towards liberal progress. New theories of political change emerged on the left and right. A realist turn followed in European literature, captured in the writing of figures like Flaubert.

For the new realpolitikers, such as Von Rochau, noble principles need not be abandoned. Yet if liberals were to stand any chance of achieving them, it was by coming to terms with the fact that the political arena was not governed by justice or natural law but by contending forms of power.

One could pick many eras in which a nasty reckoning with reality has collided with the sensibilities of the progressive mind – either splintering it or causing it to undergo reappraisal. Indeed, one could say that we are in such a moment now, hastened by the emphatic defeat of Kamala Harris and with plenty of supporting evidence in much of Europe.

For those coming at this from the perspective of Britain’s Labour Party, history can be instructive. On the left, the tension between the high-minded idealists and the realists has traditionally played out in a competition between a legalistic form of politics based on the conscience, ethics and rights of the individual; and one that emphasises a duty to the societal collective, including – particularly at times of international competition – an unsentimental defence of the interests of the nation state.

One example is Clement Attlee’s falling out with his brother over the latter’s pacificism during the First World War, which Attlee regarded as a form of “anarchic individualism”. For Attlee patriotism was the glue which held society together. Rights were not natural or inalienable; they were dependent on the faithful rendering duties and responsibilities to the commonwealth.

Another example is Ernie Bevin’s barb at George Lansbury, then Labour Party leader, whom he accused in 1935 of “hawking… [his] conscience around” over opposition to rearmament. For Bevin, Lansbury’s mistake was to put his faith in a rickety international architecture set up with great intentions after 1918 but which was crumbling all around them. In an increasingly dangerous world, the best way to defend civilisation was not to seek solace in a personal ethical coda or cling to high legalism. It was to mobilise resources in the search for collective security.

It is interesting that Bevin has featured prominently in Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s idea of “progressive realism”, a concept borrowed from a 2006 essay by the Harvard international relations theorist Joseph Nye (he of “soft power” fame). Bevin’s radicalism on class and economic matters would make modern progressives blush. But unlike many modern progressives, he was tough-minded about adapting to the realities of power and convinced of the merits of Western civilisation. As general secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, minister of labour and national service during the war and then foreign secretary in the Attlee government, he was an advocate of what I would call “machinepolitik”: the harnessing of the modern industrial machine as an instrument of national power. There was no other option as Britain’s adversaries used their planned economies to prepare for war. And the international order that Bevin helped build after 1945 was, in the first instance, a great-power peace in which those on the side of liberty had to maintain a balance of power and a technological and security advantage over their rivals.

The conditions that enabled Bevin to pursue this type of grand strategy – Keynesian economics, mobilisation, state control of industry, and the creation of a huge allied industrial and scientific war machine – are not easily replicable today. So where else can we look to help us navigate a more contested world?

In these pages and elsewhere, the eminent barrister and historian Philippe Sands has written a series of elegant essays in which he argues that the organising goal of the new Labour government’s foreign policy should be to act as the foremost champion of international law and its associated courts and bodies: the European Court of Justice, International Criminal Court and International Court of Justice. For Sands, this would require a great deal of humility. It means coming to terms with our historic double standards and colonial legacy, if we are to achieve greater international influence in places such as the phantasmal Global South.

There is a certain nobility in this argument. Historically, truth be told, there has been a strong element of self-interest in it. It is for very good reasons that Britain has been a champion of a “rules-based international system”. It’s partly because this system was built in our image, designed to benefit our commercial and diplomatic interests, and enforced by our closest ally, the US. Ultimately, however, Britain cannot afford to bet its future on a retrospective sentimentality in which it is, as Sands writes, “to be held to account, for actions present and past, whether they be historic emissions of greenhouse gases, or slavery and other acts of colonial-era wrongdoing”.

Much as we may wish it to be the case, we are not in a rule-of-law era today. Instead, raw power is being asserted everywhere we look.

This expresses itself in three ways that are changing the whole international system. The first is that those who operate on the global stage are wilfully flouting the rules of the post-1945 legal international order.

The most vivid example is Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which is about as flagrant a violation of the fundamental principles of the UN Charter as is possible to imagine. Britain’s comparatively minor historical transgressions on matters such as the British Indian Ocean Territory are highlighted by Sands, but they are negligible in material terms compared to the failure to do anything about Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014.

The second way this new form of power is expressed is in productive force. And here we really need to pay attention. From armaments to energy to technology, it is in the hands of those nations that are able to harness productive force – either independently or with an allied or cooperative effort – that the future of the world will be held.

Third, it is in the furnace of this era of raw power that new rules and norms will be laid down. To take one pressing example, the raw power game is perhaps most pronounced in the field of artificial intelligence. In the recently published Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and the Human Spirit, Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie wrestle with the vast global implications of this transformative new technology. AI can write its own rules-based systems and the battle to decide which humans and what ethical and scientific considerations shape this agenda has potentially immense consequences for our way of life. Genesis is stark in its assertion that the technological race is already happening much faster than the current order can cope with.

In the era of raw power, a seat at the table has to be earned, just as it was in 1945. Nested in the book is a piercing observation from an earlier work by Kissinger over half a century ago: “A nation which does not shape events through its own sense of purpose eventually will be engulfed in events shaped by others.”

These are some of the epochal civilisational and scientific changes that set the backdrop to British foreign policy, just as the UK considers how to adjust to the second Trump administration. Hawking our conscience around, engaging in historical apologia, or merely clinging to our old assumptions will not be a profitable path. Indeed, one is reminded of another memorable Kissinger quote, from 2018, which wondered if Donald Trump was “one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”.

Half a decade ago, when I joined the British government at the back end of the first Trump administration, it was common to speculate on the date when China would overtake the US as the pre-eminent global superpower. Just as we sometimes succumb to backward-looking sentimentality, the trap of teleological thinking in foreign policy is also common. Out with the idea that the end of history meant the steady progression of liberal democracy; and in with the notion that we were in an era of interminable Western decline.

For all the European anxiety about the direction of American politics, the idea of US decline has been quietly parked. Along with it has gone the notion that it is possible for the UK to “navigate US-China competition” by some sort of hedging in which we got rich via the economic relationship with China while depending on the US relationship for our security. The raw reality of American power came surging back into our lives. The fate of Huawei in Britain – ripped out of our telecommunications system to a great extent because of bipartisan American anxiety about China – was a case in point. But there are other examples. For Europe, the war in Ukraine has provided a stark reminder of just how important America is for the security of our continent. Consequently, the great strategic fear gripping European capitals is that the Trump administration will reduce that support.

American choices affect us as much as ever, from trade policy to technological regulation. The US of 2024 has achieved energy independence and is racing ahead in the rudiments of future national power such as quantum computing and AI. That is not to say it has all the cards in its competition with China. There are acute anxieties over the size of its navy, vulnerabilities of its supply chain in advanced chip technology, and its debt. But what we can expect is that – under Trump – its raw power will be asserted with considerable brusqueness and very little respect for the genteel sensibilities of others. Witness the president-elect’s threats to impose crushing tariffs on neighbours who fail to get a grip on border security or the Brics nations who play with the idea they can create an alternative international monetary system to the dollar.

The downside risks are therefore considerable. But opportunities may present themselves too, notably to the UK. The rough and ready reality of American power means we pore over the appointments made by the incoming Trump administration. In the national security space, there are people with whom the UK can and will work very well – such as Michael Waltz as national security adviser and Marco Rubio at the State Department. Officials will be examining the Ukraine policy report written by General Keith Kellogg earlier this year for the America First Policy Institute now that he has been appointed Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine. It is primarily a critique of what he says were the weaknesses of the Obama and Biden administrations in dealing with Russia, combined with a belief that a deal – including one short of Ukraine’s war arms – could be done. But there isn’t yet much detail for how to get to that point, and an opportunity for the UK to play an important role.

Some of the economic appointments are even more pregnant with opportunities – and, in equal measure, some hard dilemmas and trade-offs. Neither Trump’s picks for treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, nor US trade representative, Jamieson Greer, are zero-sum believers in trade wars. They both have expressed an interest in reshaping the international economic order to one in which security and trading relations are more closely linked. They both articulate a critique of full-scale globalisation that is not too dissimilar from that recognised by many British voters (and to which Republicans have spoken far more deftly than Democrats). Amid all this, they have both expressed an interest in forming a bespoke economic relationship with favoured nations, including the UK. Is there a deal to be done, on technology, defence and services, for example? Could that be combined with a smoother arrangement on trade in goods with the EU?

In this era of raw power, one thing is certain: fortune favours the brave. It is an era in which muscles will be flexed but deals may also be made. For that, we need a statecraft that goes beyond the maintenance of a rules-based international system, which has been the main business of our foreign policy for many years. That work remains vital, of course, and it matters deeply to the future of Ukraine and other parts of the world where revisionism risks global instability on a scale that surpasses anything we have yet seen. But we must be able to walk and chew gum with a bit of spaghetti-western swagger. And so the national interest of the UK – which I would define as improving the security, and social and economic life of the British people – requires us to get down to work to seek hard economic and security outcomes, rather than the sentimental education of those whose world-view does not exist in perfect sympathy with our own.

John Bew is professor of history and foreign policy at King’s College London and distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He served as the chief foreign policy adviser in No 10 for more than half a decade

[See also: Who can answer the English Question?]