The writer is in Australia.
With President Donald Trump’s re-election and his well-known views, Europe and Ukraine faced an in-tray from hell. Yet, their shock at the implosion in the Oval Office last week is more an indictment of their impuissance than any perfidy by Trump. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s history lessons to Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance reeked of condescension to his moneybag-in-chief. The hunter, not the prey, gets to write the story of the hunt. As Thucydides noted long ago, notions of right and justice only govern relations among equals. For others, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”.
The sight of Zelensky in his battle dress attire even in the most formal settings has also been a regular turn-off. He should always have restricted this performative gesture to when he is in his own country. The insistent demand that all other countries must bend their foreign policy interests to support Ukraine or else they are complicit in Russia’s evil has been no less of an irritant. Maybe the adulation with which he has been showered has led him to believe the myth of his own heroic status. Hopefully the Trump-Vance confrontation will have registered some home truths and help to rid him of the sense of entitlement of indefinite US assistance.
The world will take some time to come to terms with the fallout from the disastrous Oval Office optics. As a student of diplomacy, joint editor of The Oxford Handbook of Modern Diplomacy, and one-time senior UN official, I’ve never known anything like it. But we are neither part of Europe nor an extension of it. Instead we are located below the equator to the southeast off the Asian mainland. Australia’s chief strategic threat is not Russia but China. Yet so much of horrified Australian commentary has echoed European talking points that don’t reflect our strategic vulnerability down under.
Consider just two events from last week in our own immediate neighbourhood. First, Australia and New Zealand (NZ) were blindsided by a number of deals that the Cook Islands signed with China covering deep-sea mineral exploration, infrastructure, ship-building, tourism, agriculture, technology and education. Remember, the tiny Pacific Island country is in a ‘free association’ relationship with New Zealand, its people are NZ citizens and it benefits from NZ assistance in defence and foreign affairs. This was followed by the fiasco of a Chinese naval task force sailing around Australia and conducting live-fire drills without the customary advance notification to Australian authorities.
Put aside the by now typical and bumbling ineptitude and dissembling by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. The more serious import is the signal of China’s intent to become a blue water naval force with the will and ability to project power over long distances. China has historically been a continental and not a maritime power, unlike the US whose navy took over the historical role of the Royal Navy in underwriting the security of the seas worldwide as a global public good. China’s rapidly modernising naval battle force has grown steeply from 255 ships a decade ago to 400 today. By contrast, it seems to take Australia a decade to agree on the need for and terms and composition of a committee to explore a major defence procurement decision, only to then have a successor government overturn that decision. Little wonder that Australia must counter China’s 400-ship fleet with a puny fleet of 16 ships: the smallest and oldest we’ve had in decades.
China’s naval strategy has also undergone a reorientation from area denial to hostile powers to an assertive posture built around an expeditionary strategy utilising new bases and port access rights around the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Australia is exceptionally vulnerable to hostile threats to its sea lanes of communication and embarrassingly ill-prepared with military assets and strategic reserves for a sustained forceful response to threats on the open seas.
We have depended on the US alliance for our security during and since the Second World War. The US has become an overstretched superpower no longer able to police all regions of the world. Unless someone can offer a convincing case to a rightly sceptical American and global audience that Uncle Sam can continue to deal with all threats simultaneously, it makes strategic sense for Trump to try and offload the burden of addressing Ukraine to Europe, or else to end the war on the best terms available and escape the trap of the sunk cost fallacy.
Elbridge Colby, nominee for Undersecretary of Defence for Policy, tweeted on December 16th that the US “needs to face the fact that we can’t do everything in the world. And that we are way behind on the primary issue facing the country from a geopolitical perspective which is China dominating Asia and we are not gaining in Asia by spending in Ukraine”. Would any Australian serious about our strategic dilemma disagree?
To return to the right royal diplomatic dust-up involving Trump, Zelensky and Vance, Ukraine and NATO – meaning the Biden administration in Washington as well as the European powers – have lacked any discernible strategy for either victory or peace. Nor have they articulated an exit strategy from the grinding and mutually hurting stalemate. As Marco Rubio said on a subsequent appearance on ABC News’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, “Wait and see after ‘another year of death’ is not a plan.” Hence Trump’s message to Zelensky on his Truth Social platform after the meeting collapsed into acrimony: “Come back when you’re ready for peace.”
Great powers, including the US, pursue an imperial and not ethical foreign policy. Trump’s art of the deal always has been to ask for everything, judge the point at which the other party has made his final offer and then take what he can get. Mix and match the two sentences, and we can better understand what Trump is doing on Ukraine. It is not for the President of Ukraine to lecture the US President, Vice President and Secretary of State on their burden of a globe-spanning train of interests and values, nor where each one should be ranked in the hierarchy of foreign and defence policy goals. Especially in front of the rolling TV cameras. Given his known volatility, Trump managed to temper his visibly growing irritability for quite some time.
Complaints about Trump upending the international order substitute a fantasy vision for reality. The rules-based liberal international order did not stop the incomprehensibly barbaric and depraved Hamas attack on Israel in 2023, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, China’s creeping militarisation of the South China Sea, US invasion and conquest of Iraq in 2003 and numerous other examples of great powers behaving badly.
Successive US Presidents have demanded burden-sharing by NATO partners but been ignored. A BBC breakdown of military aid to Ukraine from January 2022 to December 2024 inclusive shows the US gave $69 billion worth and the rest of NATO combined – with a greater population and GDP than the US – $57 billion. An analysis from the Kiel Institute looked at the total of military, financial and humanitarian aid and concluded that Europe had provided more than the US, $139 and $120 billion respectively. But Trump is correct in the claim that the US gives considerably more than the Europeans in the form of outright grants.
The astonishing public spat in the White House on Friday and the roll call of European leaders lining up in support of Zelensky demonstrates the reality of donor dependency. Europeans must believe they are entitled to US security subsidies in perpetuity while they indulge their luxury beliefs. As Lord Palmerston famously said, a nation has neither eternal allies nor perpetual enemies, merely eternal and permanent interests.
For Australian interests, prioritising China is the great imperative. The Ukraine war pushed Russia into a de facto ‘no limits’ alliance with China, reversing the singular achievement of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger more than 50 years ago. The Wall Street Journal reported on February 21st that one major calculation behind Trump’s embrace of Putin is “a strategic desire to drive a wedge between Moscow and Beijing”, both of which have long been trying to curb US dominance of the international order.
An apocryphal story has Churchill saying, “You can always rely on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” In point of fact this seems to be a variation of a remark by former Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban affirming his “conviction that men and nations do behave wisely when they have exhausted all other possibilities“. For three years Zelensky and NATO have done everything to resist and repel the Russians from Ukraine but in the process ceded yet more territory. Trump, who in his first term famously became the first President in office in recent memory not to begin a new war, is trying to put a halt to the meat grinder of a war.
Trump made it clear during his unscripted spray at Zelensky that he takes offence at being portrayed as a Putin stooge. He sees himself rather as a peacemaker and dealmaker in the middle of a war that has the potential to trigger a third world war. He took issue with Zelensky’s demands for the US to condemn Putin as the warmongering aggressor with the caustic comment that he couldn’t “say really terrible things about Putin and then say, ‘Hi Vladimir… How are we doing on the deal?'” He noted that Putin is as passionate in his hatred of Zelensky as the other way round. The conflict resolution literature has long noted that mediators should avoid public scoldings of any conflict party in order to retain access to the ears of all.
Similarly, it is easy enough to denounce Trump’s coerced minerals deal as an example of bullyboy neo-colonialism. Yet, half the revenues from developing the mineral resources were to have been paid into a jointly owned fund that would invest in the country’s “safety, security and prosperity”. This would give the US a material stake in a peaceful future with secure borders for Ukraine. Instead of formal US security guarantees to anchor a new peace agreement, a joint US-Ukrainian (and European?) resource development corridor in eastern Ukraine could function as a de facto commercial tripwire should Russian troops cross it.
As always, only history itself can answer whether Trump ends up on the right or wrong side of history.
Ramesh Thakur is a former United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Emeritus Professor in the Crawford School of Public Policy, the Australian National University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.
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Great article.. will most certainly share..
Great piece, Chris.
In other news, Boris cancelled for a few fibs about some birthday cake and outrage from the beer and curry enjoyers.
No big fan of Boris, but compared with 40 years of increasingly deranged climate lies and enormous exaggerations from “The Science”, I doubt that the cause of truthfullness will benefit.
Of course, Bunter was as addicted to GangGreen lies, as is an 80 a day Capstan Full Strength smoker is to Nicotine.
And although he got 14 Million votes in 2019 to “Get Brexit Done” (but only half-got the job done. At best.), I would much rather have seen him go because of just those shortcomings and because he surrendered far too easily to the Covid gangsters; rather than be ousted by Harriet Harperson and Angela Rayner, who by any measure were, are, always will be, far worse than Boris!
Thank you. Well stated. Yes no science to this cult, just ‘$cience’ – and of course they will be telling us that the ‘boiling oceans’ are linked to future scamdemics and scariants.
The below is wonderful as a summary, I call it $cientism, the corruption of real science for metaphysical ends:
And it is pushing it even further to suggest that most oceanic warming is caused by humans adding just 4% to all atmospheric carbon dioxide, a gas that is only measured in trace quantities at around 400 parts per million. It is beneath the water that we can profitably find some answers about changing oceanic temperatures.
Beneath the water means real science. That is beyond the skills of the Klimat-tards.
There is going to be another private jet fuel burning bonanza at the COP 28 event in Dubai later this year. Something tells me Chris will not be one of their guest speakers.
Someone in the Nanny State didn’t get the message about boiling oceans: they were “advising” us to be careful going in the water during the current hot spell (ie normal June weather) because the water is still very cold.
Playing Devil’s Advocate here, so why are sea levels apparently rising so rapidly, and the rate of rise apparently accelerating?
For example, see Fig. 8 in:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01490419.2015.1121175#:~:text=The%20MSL%20at%20Newlyn%2C%20computed,above%20the%20Observatory%20Zero%20Datum.
This paper gives a century’s worth of sea level data, from 1915, at Newlyn in west Cornwall. It implies that from 1993-2014 sea level was rising by a massive 3.8 mm per year. (Incidentally, the isostatic rise accounts for perhaps only 0.7 mm per year at Newlyn.)
Genuine question.
The official statement is;
Due to the measurements from the Newlyn Tidal Observatory, it has been established that between 1915 and 2015 sea level at Newlyn has increased at 1.83mm/year and between 1993 and 2014 at 3.8mm/year, as shown below.
Sea level rise has many causes;
Not sure if that helps at all?
Well yes, that sort of makes my point. If isostatic rise (i.e. the land sinking, in this case) is about 0.7 mm a year, then we are left with an actual sea level rise of 3.1 mm a year – which is massive.
As I understand it, actual sea level rise is closely related to temperature – expansion with increasing temperature and overall mass/volume increase owing to ice melting. Thus, one way or another, the sea level rise presumably points to a great deal of warming.
I’m not saying I’m definitely right or anything, just trying to understand. If Mr Morrison is saying that there isn’t much temperature increase, where is the level rise coming from?
I don’t know if he or any of the editorial team reads these comments, but I would like to hear any alternative views as what is going on.
In short, doesn’t seal level rise point strongly to increase in temperature?
If you imagine 3.1 mm per year (or a foot in a Century) is “massive”, then maybe you’d be happier with three masks on, five times jabbed and hiding behind the sofa.
Or you might wish to rely on actual measurements at tide gauges around the planet, allowing for measured isostatic rises, showing the actual rise for several hundred years has been and continues to be around two thirds of that, so eight inches or around 200mm a century. NO acceleration.
I suggest this is far more likely to be correct that the “computer models” based on satellite and buoy readings in the middle of the oceans, accurate (allegedly) to a tenth of a millimetre. Just think about that.
And interesting to note that no little islands anywhere have been losing their area in the last 50 years, with 80% gaining area. Only a few initially less that 10 Ha have got smaller.
Still panicking about 200mm in 100 years? Or (for the sake of argument) 400mm or 500mm?
Well, I think the Dutch managed pretty well with their dykes and polders. Dug by hand. Land up to 6 metres below high tide. Obviously, after we “Just Stop Oil” (not to mention cement, excavators, lorries, rollers etc.), the problem will seem a bit more urgent. In three hundred years, we might have to stop building solar farms and whirligigs, and build some more sea walls.
… you might wish to rely on actual measurements at tide gauges around the planet, allowing for measured isostatic rises, showing the actual rise for several hundred years has been and continues to be around two thirds of that, so eight inches or around 200mm a century. NO acceleration.
That Newlyn data paper I gave a link to earlier – that is indeed data from a tide gauge, and Fig. 8 does appear to show an acceleration since about 1990. And I’ve allowed for isostatic changes (e.g. 0.7 mm per year out of 3.1mm).
All things are relative. When you consider the sea level changes of say the last 4000 years then a foot a century is indeed very large. As I understand it, sea levels were close to static until the late 19th century, when they started to rise.
See:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1015619108
So I don’t know where you got your information from? Please feel free to provide sources, as I’ll read anything with an open mind. I only want to get at the truth.
And I understand that every extra foot that has to be built into a tidal barrier costs a great deal of money.
But my question wasn’t about that: it was about whether the elevated sea levels we are seeing are indeed the result of warming.
Going off line soon, so apolgies if I don’t get back on this thread anymore.
Off to a place, in the UK, where a foot rise in sea level would be a very important matter indeed.
Btw, never wore a mask, unstabbed, and took no notice of lockdiown rule.
When someone states that the rate of rise is accelerating it is important to clarify against what and what is the scale. For context please see the graphic below showing the sea levels over the last 20,000 years. It should be evident that there is no obvious or ‘ideal’ sea level, and it we think we can decide what the global sea level should be and maintain it then those thinking this are pathologically deluded. The scale of this graphic is in metres and not mm.
I don’t know what the ideal sea level is but I suggest that one that is significantly higher than current levels is far from ideal given that large proportion of humanity living in coastal areas.
Your chart is interesting. It appears to show that sea levels rose about 120 metres since the last ice age when global temperatures were about 6C lower than they are now. Makes you wonder how much they would change if got another 2C.
The Holocene Climate Optimum was hotter than now and perhaps by 2C. The tree line in the UK was much higher than now and the Sahara was green and wet. The Brecon Beacons had trees at the very top. So far tree lines haven’t budged in the last 200 years and if they have it has been localised. Also, as far as what is ideal – humans have populated just about everywhere on this planet and we have figured how to live in just about any of the 30 odd different climates. Humans have learned how to live/survive in -40C as well as +50C, or on the oceans or high up mountains where the atmosphere is thinner. We are supremely adaptable and inventive and it would be a bad idea if we stopped being adaptable and inventive.
There is nothing in the global temperature records that shows the glacial cycles of the last 3 million years have stopped. The last warm interlude ended while CO2 remained elevated so that trace gas is not going to stop the next glacial expansion happening. We have between 100 and 500 years before the next glacial expansion gets under way, and when that does, and judging by all previous cycles, it will be about 100,000 years till the next warm interval. If by some miracle we have stopped the next glacial expansion we will have dodged a massive bullet, but there is no evidence that is the case.
There is no such thing as a global temperature. That’s a mathematically created piece of fiction.
True.
Correct, all temperature is local.
Thanks for this – but it does illustrate how most of the post Ice Age sea water rise was owing to ice melting, and that this process was essentially complete by circa 2000 BC, or before. Clearly, the ending of an ice age would be expected to cause major changes in sea level.
Sea levels appear to have fluctuated over the following centuries and millennia, but there appears to have been a steep rise since the late 19th century which, according to the Newlyn data, appears to have accelerated since the 1990s.
So what is going on?
Incidentally, I haven’t got time to do the calculations right now (or at least remind myself how to do them), but I imagine that a ‘0.03 %’ total ocean heat rise, over the last 125 years – although it doesn’t sound much when put that way – would actually lead to an expansion of the water which itself would lead to a significant rise in sea level.
So are these rises in sea level over the last 125-150 years down to warming??
We are in an inter-glacial. The Ice Age hasn’t ended because there is significant ice at both poles and on the tops of mountains. While it is claimed that CO2. The following graphic shows temp/CO2 over the last 600 million years and it is clear there is no link between the two.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-Temperature-and-CO2-levels-over-600-million-years-Source-MacRae-2008_fig1_280548391
Or
Per a new published study (Martins et al., 2023), during the Mid-Holocene (~7000 to ~4000 years ago), when CO2 was a “safe” ~265 ppm, the sea levels on the coasts of Brazil were 3 to 4 meters higher than they are now. Sea levels have been falling to the present levels for millennia.
From 1993-2015 the sea levels around South America sea have risen (shown in red in the figure) overall by about 1-2 mm/yr, but there are large regions where sea levels have fallen (blue, shown especially in the southeast, west) by -1-2 mm/yr too.
The Brazilian mangrove forest area has increased from 9,564 km² in 1985 to 9,800 km² in 2020, In other words, coastal mangrove forests grew seaward (rather than shrinking inland due to sea level rise) by 2.5%.
Korkai was a port city, capital, and the principal trade center for India’s Pandya Kingdom from the 6th to 9th centuries CE.
While Korkai was situated on the sea coast during the early stages of the Medieval Warm Period, the city center is now approximately 5 or 6 km from the coast. This confirms the sea has substantially receded since then.
Nautical maps from the 1805-1828 period clearly affirm the coast of southern India has continued expanding seaward in the last 200 years, despite the reported rise in relative sea level (Gupta and Bhoolokam Rajani, 2023).
In other words, much more coastal land area is above sea level today than during the Little Ice Age, or when CO2 levels were said to be 280 ppm.
GMO: a belated thanks for your two posts. I really don’t understand this sea-level change business. How can sea levels be rising in one place but falling in another? I thought eustatic change was assumed to be constant everywhere?
As far as eustatic changes are concerned, presumably there are a whole load of mechanisms in play of which CO2 levels play little or no direct part in.
‘boiling oceans’ ?
That means the oceans, or an ocean has to rise in temperature by a minimum of 80C? And this will be achieved by increasing the amounts of a trace gas?
Are there any scientifically literate people in the media or even the sciences?
Back in 1997 the NSF, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, and the Japanese government cooperated in funding a research project called SHEBA (Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic).
One of the conclusion was that “melting sea ice also raises worldwide sea levels, with potentially significant effects for coastal cities and towns.”
The NSF was challenged and to their credit they did correct their error: [Editor’s note: An inaccurate statement about sea ice and rising sea levels has been deleted. We regret the error.]
However, it took 6.5 years for the NSF to eventually make this correction. One wonders what kind of ‘scientific’ education have science grads received, let alone science journalists?
No one is claiming the oceans will actually boil or anything like. That is just a figure of speech.
None of science or any trades are built on figures of speech. The largest voices in pushing the climate catastrophe so as to extort billions do assert such things and they are not scientists, but politicians, actors, pop stars and children. Here is Al Gore hyperventilating and he says “…that’s what’s boiling the oceans…”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ao8uEx0Ftik
For the record I have not received any money or coercion from ‘big oil’ and I am very capable of thinking things through for myself.
Almost everything we hear about the “Climate Crisis” is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency for which no evidence exists. There is nothing unusual about current temperatures or climate. There is no increase in the frequency or intensity of any type of weather event, no increase in the rate of sea level rise etc etc etc, but somehow people believe the opposite. ———How can that be? ——-Progaanda is a very powerful tool which is why government and its compliant media use it everyday.
0.03% of what? I can only think it means 0.03% of the heat that would be required to raise all the water in the oceans from absolute zero to current temperatures? If so, it is an utterly irrelevant figure.
A good article, thank you, a little sense on a Sunday
ITN Wales has a story about places in Wales disappearing under the sea in the near future due to rising sea levels. We are all going to Dai, where ever he is.
And remember that sea to air heat transfer, via the North Atlantic Drift, is something we rely on to a large extent, at UK latitude – especially to the west of Scotland.
Oceans are so vast and deep it takes hundreds to thousands of years for them to heat up and cool down. If there was a slight change in solar output then it would be a thousand years before it was noticed by oceans. So, similarly, any chages we see now are likely being caused by something that happened a thousand years ago, not by a slight rise in CO2 emissions in the last 50 years.
I’m not friend of or supporter of Greta but she did not say “Let’s not forget that according to Greta Thunberg ‘all of humanity’ is going to be wiped out in exactly 10 days time.”.
She said in 2018 that “climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years”.
She did not give a timeline when ‘all of humanity’ would be ‘wiped out’.
The pro-humanity-caused climate change industry/cult is prone to exaggerations, dubious claims and predictions that should be taken with a grain of salt.
Those who believe in natural climate change should not follow their lead and use exaggerations either.
Giving straight-forward facts should be enough.