While working on Exercise ARRCADE Fusion 2008, I was told that NATO is like Noah’s Ark – they always order two of everything. It was funnier when everybody was a bit drunk and there were bagpipes and an oompah band playing in the background (don’t blame me – it was Germany). Hence the title of this blog post, even though that’s not what I wanted to write about. Strike two for coherent blogging.
The special guest for this simulation exercise was the Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon Paddy Ashdown, former UN High Representative to Bosnia and probably the only man to be crossed off Hamid Karzai’s christmas card list (which is pretty hard to do – even Mullah Omar is back on it, for pity’s sake). Now personally I don’t think that Ashdown’s experience is necessarily a useful guide to anything much, but that experience has been hard-won and his book will be a staple on many university courses for years to come.
Naturally I took the opportunity to hear Lord Ashdown’s evening talk in a draughty and badly-lit metal shack, but I was equally interested to see the reaction of the 150-odd other people who were attending. Apart from about 10 of us, everybody in the room was a uniform, and nearly all officers, and mainly British. These are not people with a necessarily nuanced views of the world, although they do have a broader range than most people would expect (certainly wider than I expected when I first started working alongside the military in 1999).
Ashdown’s an excellent speaker, but I’m not going to go into the detail of the talk. It’s probably NATO-classified anyway. He started out by telling us that he was going to say some contentious things, but frankly they’d only have been contentious if you hadn’t picked up a copy of The Economist in the last 5 years. Although he delivered a nice synthesis of how global trends are likely to impact on the international community, the UK and the military, with a clear focus on war and peace operations, this was fairly routine stuff.
About halfway through the talk, however, I was struck by how much of a challenge the future presents for somebody like Paddy Ashdown. When he talks about the rise of Asia, I see the white scared of the rising tide of colour. When he talks about the lawlessness of the new cities, I see the rich running from the poor mob. When he talks about the loss of national identities and borders, I see the politicians watching their natural habitat being worn away. When he talks about how we might preserve western liberal values in a world where the west no longer gets to make the rules, I see the powerful watching power slip through their fingers.
I freely admit that I could be wrong about this, and I’m fairly certain that Ashdown himself would deny it (although somehow I doubt he’ll be posting a comment on this blog). Yet it remainsl the case that everywhere you look, fear is palpable, fear based on uncertainty – which is also why so much hope is being vested in President-elect Obama (most of this hope is misplaced, but that’s another post for another time). Listening to Ashdown, I realised that what we’re missing right now are people who can think outside the traditional parameters of left and right, black and white, church and state, yet still present a coherent vision of what’s to come.
There are some who think they’re doing that sort of thinking, but generally they’re only reacting to these existing concepts, not moving beyond them; and writing from a position from which power is slipping away, rather than a position to which power is moving. We need to acknowledge that the ascendancy of Ashdown Man was not pre-ordained. Nation states aren’t the natural order of things; the white west doesn’t have any cast-iron claims to superiority; the current distribution of wealth was nice while it lasted, but was never going to last that long; and so on. Once we can get those blinkers off, we might be able to generate the visionary thinkers that we need to navigate this new world in which we find ourselves.
Unlike ARRCADE Fusion, this isn’t an exercise.