Instead it's just negative waves all the time.
We are at that moment in Animal Farm when the gentle carthorse Clover looks through the window to see the pigs playing cards and drinking a toast with men.
The pigs are all perfectly at ease and sitting back in chairs around a table, no doubt a rougher surface than the luxurious polished table used to host America’s Marco Rubio and Russia’s Sergei Lavrov in Saudi Arabia this week. The Russian press reports that the meeting was a love-fest of jokes and bonhomie, with a “very tasty lunch”.
George Orwell’s scene was an allegory of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, when Europe’s great power alignment suddenly and violently shifted. The liberal democracies woke up on Aug 23 1939 to discover that the Soviet Union had reached a non-aggression deal with Nazi Germany. Days later, Hitler and Stalin carved up Eastern Europe between them. The Nazis could then turn their concentrated fury on France and Britain without having to worry about a second front.
Britain had started to re-arm as early as 1935. Neville Chamberlain hurled money at the Royal Air Force in the late 1930s, with Spitfire squadrons arriving just in time. Defence spending had risen to 9pc of GDP by 1939.
This time, Europe’s democracies have indulged the same pacifist illusions as they did in the run up to 1939 but have milked the peace dividend even longer. Military spending by EU states was 1.9pc of GDP in 2024, a full 17 years after Vladimir Putin declared political war on liberal civilisation and all its works at the Munich Security Conference in 2007 – “a good speech” said one Angela Merkel, audibly, in the front row.
He then set about restoring the tsarist empire to the borders of Catherine the Great with an unswerving consistency. Austria is not even part of Nato and behaves accordingly.
Some are rising to the challenge. Denmark has given its stock of munitions to Ukraine and even the trade unions back a war tax to raise defence spending to 4pc of GDP. “We are in a very, very critical period in world history,” said Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish foreign minister.
Poland’s military budget is already up to 4.7pc. “We’re that afraid,” said his Polish counterpart Radosław Sikorski at last week’s Munich forum.
Lithuania aims for 5pc to 6pc of GDP by next year, alarmed by intelligence warnings that Putin may seize the Suwalki Gap, which runs through its territory from Belarus to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
They all know that Putin has a narrow window of time to attack if the Ukraine war is quickly settled on Russian terms. His advantage is temporary: a greatly enlarged army heading for 1.5m by 2026 and an industrial war economy firing on all cylinders but untenable for much longer.
Fears are growing that Donald Trump will order the US military to pull its Nato tripwire forces out of the Baltics in order to seal the “deal of the century” with the Kremlin. Will he swallow the bait as the smooth McKinsey-trained head of Russia’s investment fund, Kirill Dmitriev, dangles the offer of hydrocarbon riches – real or imagined – in Russian Arctic waters?
The issue runs deeper in any case. Maga America has a greater natural affinity for Putin’s Right-wing cultural Weltanschauung than it does for the liberal democracies. After the battering of the last two weeks, some of us are forced to conclude that Britain and Europe are now the real enemies for this new Washington and, furthermore, that the US is anything but isolationist under Donald Trump.
He will not let us carry on being different. He will force-feed us his Maga ideology. His oil-fracking energy secretary was in London this week describing our renewables as “sinister”. Will we face sanctions for trying to do something about CO2 emissions? Perhaps, yes. Particularly for that.
I do not wish to dissect every post by Trump on Truth Social, or dwell on the speech by JD Vance. I think Britain should repeal all its hate legislation and stop misusing police resources on thought crimes. It should stop dividing us into categories and return to colour-blind liberalism. But one can agree with elements of Vance’s anti-woke critique while entirely rejecting the larger message behind it.
We are told repeatedly by Trump’s circle that he does not really mean what he says, or that we should not overreact to what he is very clearly doing. Let us hope they are right, but it is becoming harder by the day to have confidence in such assurances, or to believe that either Republicans or plutocrats will lift a finger to stop him – and I say this as a defender of Pax Americana for half a century.
Sir Keir Starmer is right to stay calm and try to defuse this terrifying inter-allied crisis on his visit to the White House. But we of The Telegraph parish, readers and writers alike, will all have to look into our souls if, as now seems painfully plausible, Britain is singled out for tariff warfare along with Europe on the pretext of our VAT taxes.
Worse yet if Trump does this while reaching a cosy commodity deal with Putin along with a grand bargain with Xi Jinping to protect Elon Musk’s interests in China. That would test one’s pro-American sympathies to breaking point.
Europe shares much of the blame for the disintegration of the Western alliance system. It failed to re-arm after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014. Germany rewarded Putin months later by launching the Nord Stream 2 project, which had no purpose other than depriving Kyiv of strategic leverage by re-routing Siberian gas through Baltic pipelines. In return, Germany enjoyed a sweetheart gas deal at sub-market prices.
Britain could have rebuilt its military hardware at ultra-low borrowing costs during the secular stagnation of the 2010s, when it had ample spare capacity. It could have rebuilt its decaying infrastructure and revived its economy at the same time. The multiplier effect would have let us do these things without pushing the debt ratio any faster. Britain pursued austerity instead. Now it faces a greater task, in a hostile bond market.
Europe was even more destructive. Germany cut public investment and military spending to the bone for 15 years. It relied on mercantilist export surpluses of 8pc of GDP to drive growth, a policy that has left Germany in the cross-hairs of Trump’s trade warriors.
The eurozone debt crisis – self-inflicted because the European Central Bank did not then have political approval to back-stop debts – turned into a wider depression because Brussels over-egged austerity and used bailouts to impose drastic spending cuts. There was no exemption for military spending.
Defence as a share of GDP in 2015 was Hungary 0.5pc, Belgium 0.8pc, Germany 1.0pc, Spain 1.0pc, Italy 1.2pc, France 1.8pc –and that was after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Military budgets crept up slowly thereafter but not enough to prevent further disarmament.
Europe thought it could keep free-riding on Uncle Sucker forever, despite warnings that this would end badly. There was much talk along the way of a European army and endless euro-speak meetings about procedures, modalities and the architecture of EU defence, but never anything real. That is why Europe today finds itself utterly naked.
But nobody expected it to end this badly and this suddenly. To watch an ally of 80 years turn on us with ferocity and blithely team up with our declared enemy really is the end of days.
Because average annual real GDP growth rates are so low.
Between 1929 and 1945, average annual real GDP grew at a compound annual rate of 4.74%.
Between 2007 and 2023, average annual real GDP grew at a compound annual rate of 1.82%, which is under-performing the sixteen year Great Depression and WWII era rate by almost 62%.
Up until 2007, the country averaged 3.44% from 1929.
Something remains rotten in Denmark.
From the story here:
The events surrounding the Maersk Hangzhou represented the 23rd illegal attack by the Houthis on international shipping since Nov. 19, the Central Command said. It was the first time the U.S. Navy said its personnel had killed Houthi fighters since the Red Sea attacks started. ...
Since the Pentagon announced Operation Prosperity Guardian to counter the attacks just over 10 days ago, 1,200 merchant ships have traveled through the Red Sea region, and none had been hit by drone or missile strikes, Vice Adm. Brad Cooper told The Associated Press in an interview on Saturday.
Orsted said the order applied to “unit 3 at Esbjerg Power Station and unit 4 at Studstrup Power Station, which both use coal as their primary source of fuel, and unit 21 at Kyndby Peak Load Plant, which uses oil as fuel.” ...
A few days before Orsted’s announcement, another big European energy firm, Germany’s RWE, said three of its lignite, or brown coal, units would “temporarily return to [the] electricity market to strengthen security of supply and save gas in power generation.”
Søren Brostrøm admitted on Wednesday that we "in retrospect did not get much out of the expansion of the vaccination program for children - at least not when it comes to epidemic control, which was otherwise the purpose of doing so. We have become wiser and we would not do the same today". ...
In June 2021, the National Board of Health chose to recommend corona vaccines for children aged 12-15 years. In November, a recommendation followed to also vaccinate children aged 5-11 years. ...
Søren Brostrøm admits to TV 2 that it all "went very fast" when the vaccine program was rolled out in Denmark. ...
"I understand well that there are some who think: 'Okay, here is an authority that now admits that they have made a mistake or that they would have done something else'. I understand that. But I would like to ask people to consider whether they would rather have had an authority that does not admit its mistakes?"
The whole thing in Danish is here.
Too bad we don't have a health authority in the United States which admits its mistakes.
Currency in Circulation (CURRCIR) under Arthur F. Burns rose at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.64% from Feb 1970 to March 1978. The Consumer Price Index (CPIAUCSL) rose at a compound annual growth rate of 6.49%.
After four years of Jerome Powell, Feb 2018 to Feb 2022, Currency in Circulation rose at a similar 8.41% CAGR but the CPI only at 3.31% CAGR, almost 50% less than under Burns.
Milton Friedman famously said, “Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”
Something is rotten in CPI Denmark.
74% of the Danish population was fully vaxxed on September 19, 2021, rising to 80% by January 6, 2022.
They still got creamed.
Almost 3,500 people have died of COVID-19 in Denmark since September 19th, 57% of the total COVID-19 deaths in Denmark to date.
This is a MASSIVE failure.
The liars in Denmark and in the news, however, sweep all that under the rug and report this instead:
... many people have been infected since the omicron variant became the dominant strain of the virus, [the Danish health authority] said, meaning immunity levels among the population are high.
“We are in a good place,” Bolette Soborg, unit manager at the National Board of Health, commented.
“We have good control of the epidemic, which seems to be subsiding. Admission rates [to hospitals] are stable and we also expect them to fall soon. Therefore, we are rounding up the mass vaccination program against Covid-19.”
... the shots authorized for use in the West remain effective at preventing serious infection, hospitalization and death from Covid-19.
KC Star:
The first Omicron infection in Denmark was detected in a sample from Nov 22. Since then, 1,280 cases have been recorded, and Omicron represented 4.5-5 per cent of all Covid-19 infections in the country in the beginning of this week. ... almost 75 per cent of those infected by Omicron had received 2 doses of Covid-19 vaccine. ... the Danish data shows more than 100 Omicron cases were discovered among the 19.3 per cent of Danes who have received booster shots.
Denmark was 70% fully-vaccinated by August 24th.
COVID-19 hospitalizations have actually fallen slightly in Denmark since November 22.
The case fatality rate in the world to date is 3.6 times higher than it is in Denmark, in the USA to date almost 3 times higher than it is in Denmark.
Sweden has suspended the use of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine for under 30s following reports of rare side effects, while Denmark has said it will no longer offer the shot to under 18s. ...
Denmark’s health agency also blamed concerns over myocarditis for its decision to suspend the use of the Moderna vaccine for people under 18 years.
In April it became the first European country to cease using the AstraZeneca vaccine over concerns about rare cases of blood clots.
More.
The latest case is Slovenia.
Denmark was the first country to ban it, in early May.
Belgium followed suit shortly thereafter because of a vaccine related death.
I've just spent an hour trying to find a decent list of all the countries banning J&J but cannot. That's surely by design.
