Tho’ all the world betrays thee

Written by Lachlan Patrick Kelly

Any views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views or positions of any entities they are associated with or represent.

Somewhere, perhaps in a chalet by Lake Geneva or a woodland cabin in Pennsylvania, the wake for the rules-based international order is soon going to be held. There are going to be toasts, speeches, soldier’s accounts of swap lines and arms controls, sagas about vetoes and double vetoes. Then the time will come for last call and final goodbyes, and the guests will slowly file past the open coffin of that infected and half-blind tyrannosaurus that saw off doomsday and devastation, the rules-based international order they served and protected. Ashes will go to ashes, and no one will wait for a resurrection.

Meanwhile, in capital cities the world over, staff are hurriedly revamping for the new dawn of great power ambitions. Gold writing desks, whiskey decanters and some great, big swords. While shots are fired over the old dinosaur’s sinking coffin, the rising generation are trying on their powdered wigs and signing their names with feathered quills. Despite the paraphernalia of Napoleonic imperiums, these masters of the world are by no means expecting to fight it out with mounted cavalry. Their arsenals are brimming with unmanned drones, stocks of critical minerals and fortified centres of ever-precious data. The world will be Clausewitz through missiles, Wellington as algorithms, Waterloo via resource strangleholds.

Where then, does this leave the mini powers of the world? Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney offered his take on what the ‘middle powers’, including Canada, should do to survive the sea change, but where will the runts of the litter end up? How will the so-so nation states earn their place? Where, for example, will the Republic of Ireland be?

Being both the little cousin to America and also a member of the European Union should theoretically double the Republic of Ireland’s survivor points. It has the world’s largest economic and military power guarding its back, while its front is cushioned by French diplomacy and German industry. As if this were not enough, the United Kingdom is right next door, in fact sharing the same island with her Royal Air Force on standby. It could read that the Republic of Ireland is pampered with available guardians, but in reality this blessing makes a dangerous poison.

With three hungry wolves stalking one another, running between them is a sure path to being mistaken for quarry.

Despite leaving behind its original 20th century social architecture, the Republic of Ireland is just as stunted as any point in its history — cognitively and emotionally cloistered as much as those generations of Irish nuns who held themselves in isolated silence. Trusting liberalism as opposed to Roman Catholic convictions, certain in their take on human rights no less than they were once on prayer, the policymakers’ instinct for both self-importance and naivety was rebadged. An awful blend of inexperience with grandstanding.

This is a nation that has never fought a war since its creation and avoided NATO membership even though it is literally part of the North Atlantic.

The Irish Free State, the Commonwealth entity that predated the Republic, not only went for neutrality during the Second World War but carried on as neutral through the entire conflict. Even after it was obvious that the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance would be victorious, the Irish Free State continued to opt for the sidelines. Spring of 1945 saw various countries that had declared war on Germany be counted on the right side of history — Argentina, Finland, Peru and even the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to name just a few. Still though, the Irish were too trapped in their swollen innocence to join in with the future. More unsettling is the knowledge that newsreels and published reports of liberated concentration camps were distributed in America by April 1945, proving the depravity of the Third Reich. All the Irish Free State needed to do was post a telegram to Berlin with a declaration of war, but no such effort was made. It is worth noting that Imperial Germany armed the Irish rebels in the First World War and that the Irish nationalist ideal shared communalities with fascist creeds of ethnonationalism and totalitarianism.

Returning to today’s turning point in technology and geopolitics, we find a Republic that has attained much by being a passionate European during business hours while saving itself for the highly profitable overtime of accommodating America’s wealthiest businesses. As much as Santa Clara and Singapore, the Republic of Ireland has been waxed rich after decades of advancing globalisation matched with advancing computer science. It is one of the most globalised economies there is, and on paper also one of the richest per capita.

As the world powers now reset the clock for an approaching era of multidimensional competition, many of the Republic’s investments might quickly plummet in value. Its relationship with the United Nations, a forum that allowed Ireland wildly exaggerated influence, will be worthless once the hegemons stop taking their seats. International financial institutions like the World Bank Group, where Irishman Pascal Donohue serves as Managing Director and Chief Knowledge Officer, will suffer in the atmosphere of weaponised trade and money channels. Ireland may not have fought for a world with the Bretton Woods structure, but it has certainly reaped the benefits of it.

Resilience therefore becomes the supreme quality. If it cannot be instilled into the supranational liberal order, then each nation will take it upon themselves to see their domestic structures are at least readied. This is where the Republic of Ireland is most in jeopardy, having ventured so much in everything global.

While it is a European Union stakeholder, it is wrong to consider the Republic of Ireland a Westphalian European nation. It has no centuries-old tradition of statehood, having not yet seen its first centennial. In comparison to the French Republic, an administrative state that developed from the Bourbon monarchy, the Republic of Ireland barely exists. Again, the French Republic and her legions of paramilitary gendarmes and invincible national ministries and schoolchildren standing at attention for la Marseillaise — such a pervasive force would provoke havoc in Ireland.

Moreover, even the most benign countries in Western Europe can call upon a martial spirit. Chivalric tales of medieval warriors, grand armies of the 18th century or heroic patriots who sacrificed themselves fighting German occupation — narratives embedded within cultures to be retold as needed. The Republic of Ireland, having shunned the Second World War and never fought a conflict, has a blank page. The ‘War of Independence’ that brought on the Irish Free State was three years of guerrilla banditry, hardly the correct source material.

Most telling is the Republic of Ireland’s relationship with itself. The crudest behaviour in polite Irish society today is nationalism. Unironic flag waving evokes nightmares of masked terrorists with their car bombs, or resentful spirits of Celtic authenticity threatened by immigration. There is an awkward pause when the Irish citizen meets the cold politics of being Irish, except in the harmless cheering on Saint Patrick’s Day.

Many of the missing ingredients in Ireland’s consciousness were substituted by growing wealth and rising importance within the globalised network. Rivers of glitter concealed the spiritual chasms beneath the nation state. The Republic of Ireland is plainly just a fact, a provable and available set of regulations found within a border coupled with an international airport, while the French Republic glows with an inner strength approaching the sacred. Who would sacrifice themselves for a corporate tax regime?

Reinvention is not something every country gets a chance at. Many of those that tried over the past generation have ended up poorer than when they began. Take Iceland for example, after its society toyed with highly-intricate market derivatives. Or Lebanon, where very shaky financing was released so as to serve real estate rackets. For all its vainglory, the Republic of Ireland leveraged its smartphone identity for every cent it was worth. Though as the following of the polished-up Euro-Bermuda was rising, the quality of return within the Republic brazenly fell away. Public investment, through the handful of projects that are undertaken, is pricetagged to make kleptocracies jealous. Bicycle sheds range in cost from €127,000 to €336,000, so long as the sheds are on government property. A children’s hospital, unopened and behind schedule because of 106,500 defects and dust in the air vents, will cost the exchequer a cool €2.24 billion. An economy with these cost burdens cannot outlast years of trade protectionism.

Warning signs are already closing in on golden goose Dublin. Elections and referendums have steadily been bucking the globalist consensus, challenging the rationale of contemporary Irish politics. Rising fuel costs created nationwide protest-blockades that threatened the country’s energy supply for a week. The International Monetary Fund not long ago advised the Republic of Ireland to make ‘sound choices’ for its future after calling it ‘structurally vulnerable’. Worldly Dublin may yet need the sausage-fingered rabble to scaffold its drooping tower of megabucks.

In what is poised to be the closing performance of the golden shamrock, the Republic of Ireland will hold the presidency of the Council of the European Union from July to December. €6.5 million worth of gloss black executive vehicles have been arranged, including €1 million of armoured limousines. These chauffeured saloons will deliver governments and diplomats through the motorways and Georgian roads of Dublin, infamous for gridlock mind you, until they arrive at the brand-new, purpose-built €958,000 meeting room. This amenity, announced to the public in February, will be the sealed off atmosphere in which leaders hold classified deliberations on the future of their European project. It will be resistant to electronic surveillance and espionage, presumably guarded by armed police and sniffed over by dogs. It is a sound addition to the country’s infrastructure and deliverable for the same price as only three bicycle sheds.

The argument for the Republic of Ireland to invest in a concealed, spyproof chamber is unanswerable, as is the accusation that its absence till now was hazardous. Through accident and design, Ireland has been a party to the war in Ukraine, the Trump presidency, Brexit negotiations, seats on the United Nations Security Council and the Good Friday Agreement, not to speak of the most powerful corporations in history. Had all these been discussed in the open air? The potential SIGINT spillage would sink the Titanic. Someplace in South Dublin, a deep cover surveillance team is pretty annoyed at having to do some work for a change.

A facility that could definitely be found in Warsaw, Canberra, Kabul and Vienna — the list is extensive — will be Dublin’s freshest accessory. Guilelessness of this standard is so truly worrying, it could be argued that the country be made a ward of NATO so as to rescue it from itself. Again, the Republic of Ireland lobbied and spent on star power and spotlight without having the basics on hand. Its pacifism and idleness are difficult to separate, but nevertheless create equal embarrassments. By now it surely must have seen enough smoke rising from great cities, shrank at the horns of encircling hunters, to understand that being a chartered member of internationalism will not cut it in tomorrow’s world. Governments long ago could have afforded a suite of classified SCIFs, along with the other essentials of 21st century self-preservation, but stood frozen underneath the confetti.

Financial personalities can evolve much faster than cultural psyches. Governments can be more exaggerated with their spending and income, while countries are left much the same in the characters that will decide their destinies. Even discounting the hanging threats, the Republic of Ireland is an immature and untested nation state. It has never once had to fight for its survival, save the decades of poverty that followed independence, and all sense of a national mission disappeared with the rebellion generation. The most valuable resource the country has is its bond with American technology firms — a nearness that is increasingly difficult to justify to the European Union given how key these firms are becoming to Washington’s military-computing complex. Dublin governments have long depended on participation to define Irish foreign policy, equating having opinions to wielding power.

The Republic of Ireland bought itself a future when computing was innocent. It finally caught up to the world and stopped existing for the sake of its past. But now the future has defied expectation and computing will promise destruction. The country is once again out of place in the world, mismatched with its impulses in the same way diehard Leninists suddenly found themselves in a capitalist Russia. How will it react to once again being outdated? Unlike during the Second World War, the country will not get away with abstaining — not after it has jockeyed so long to be seen amidst the action. Tonight however, it should join in at the tyrannosaurus’ vigil, recite some Gaelic poetry and lead a chorus or two of farewell songs, entertain other guests with remembrances from the good times when they were all young and everything was going to succeed. Nobody brings more to a wake than the Irish.