This past week NATO chief Mark Rutte referred to President Donald Trump as ‘daddy’ as he praised the US president for his role in achieving the Israel-Iran ceasefire.
Speaking at the NATO summit at The Hague, the former Dutch prime minister also thanked the American president for pushing allies to agree to increase their spending contributions to 5% of GDP, saying it “wouldn’t have happened” without Trump.
Drawing comparisons to US atomic bombings during the Second World War, Trump lapped up the praise, saying: “I don’t want to use an example of Hiroshima. I don’t want to use an example of Nagasaki. But that was essentially the same thing. That ended that war.”
Well, we shall see. Unlike the Japanese who, while not suffering a debellation as had Nazi Germany, were on their knees in 1945, the Islamic state still has options.
Trump also used the occasion at the Hague to unleash on “scum” in the media who supposedly leaked Iran bombing intel suggesting his bunker-busting raids on Iran’s nuclear facilities were not as effective as he declared, singling out CNN, MSNBC and The New York Times for special mention.
“The sites that we hit in Iran were totally destroyed, and everyone knows it,” Trump posted on Truth Social last week. “Only the Fake News would say anything different in order to try and demean, as much as possible — And even they say they were ‘pretty well destroyed!’”
“Working especially hard on this falsehood is Allison Cooper of Fake News CNN,” he said, in a swipe at CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. “Dumb Brian L. Roberts, Chairman of ‘Con’cast, Jonny Karl of ABC Fake News, and always, the Losers of, again, Concast’s NBC Fake News. It never ends with the sleazebags in the Media, and that’s why their Ratings are at an ALL TIME LOW — ZERO CREDIBILITY!”
On the face of it Trump has realised his objectives. NATO is going to stump up more money for its own defence, and reduce its dependence on the United States. Israel and Iran have ended their brief war, and a ceasefire seems to be holding.
But it’s premature excitation.
It’s certainly been a bad year for the Islamic Republic. Its allies in Lebanon and Gaza, Hezbollah and Hamas, have been pounded, and a key ally in Bashar al-Assad was booted from power in Syria last December. And now its air defences have been denuded if not rendered impotent. One might want to believe that Iran’s regime will realise the costs, and cut its nuclear losses. But there are many ifs and buts in this assumption.
It is not certain how much damage has been inflicted on the facilities themselves, though it is likely to be severe. But as strategic bombing campaigns elsewhere reminds, these are seldom the slam dunk solution as portrayed.
Monday, 26 April 1937 was market day in Guernica for a population swelled by both farmers plying their produce and refugiados and soldiers fleeing the fighting on the frontline, just ten kilometres away. At around 4:30 in the afternoon, the German bombers came, not the first strategic bombing campaign in history, but at that point the most infamous. A centre of Basque culture and language, Guernica (Gernika-Lumo to the Basque) had become a symbol of defiant nationalism and stubborn resistance as much as it was a speed bump in the race by the Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco to the coast, supported by the German Condor Legion, and the richer industrial pickings of Bilbao and Santander.
A mosaic mural of Pablo Picasso’s painting of the German bombing (the original now in Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia) is close to the Plaza de los Fueros, the site of the traditional Basque assembly. With its contemporary population of 17,000 swelled less today by refugiados than turistas, alongside the Museo de la Paz de Guernica in the Foru Plaza is an outdoor exhibition of photographs of the bombings, broken buildings and bodies. Officially 1,654 people died in a town then of some 6,000 permanent inhabitants, until that point best known for its ‘Tree of Guernica’ (Gernikako Arbola), symbolising the ancient tradition of outdoor assemblies.
A South African, George Steer, reported on the bombing of the city, predicting that Guernica represented a new kind of warfare, and would have international implications. The New York Times editorial published the day after his story broke condemned “wholesale arson and mass murder, committed by rebel airplanes of German type”. It fed a fear that the next war would be able to wipe entire cities off the map. Guernica represented a devastating attack by a force hitherto unskilled in this form of war, in part because the population had never expected anything like it. Since then, however, it has become integral to the staple of warfare, including, ironically, in Germany itself.
In Hamburg, 40,000 lost their lives in a single Allied air raid on Germany in July 1943 and 25,000 died in Dresden’s firestorm in February 1945, while the American strike on Tokyo on 10 March 1945 resulted in 100,000 casualties, greater than even the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima (80,000) and Nagasaki (40,000) that August. In the Korean War (1950-53), the extensive use of B-29 bombers was one of the reasons why nearly 300,000 North Korean civilians died in air raids.
The effects of such ‘strategic’ bombing did not produce their stated effect, at least quickly, if at all.
Hitler’s attempts to bomb London into submission only stiffened the morale of Londoners despite the loss of more than 43,000 lives, energising England’s war effort. Despite improvements in bomber delivery volumes and targeting precision, Germany’s war production steadily increased through 1944 before declining in the face of the catastrophic collapse and shortage of resources. In 1940, for instance, the Soviet Union manufactured 8,300 combat aircraft. By 1944, it was 33,200. Germany produced 6,600 in 1940, 11,600 in 1942, 19,300 in 1943, and 34,100 in 1944.
Five years later, bombing did not drive North Korea to the negotiating table. It is questionable, too, whether American strategic bombing influenced Hanoi to negotiate any more than simply getting the US out of the war, despite three times greater bomb tonnage being dropped on North Vietnam than on Germany.
The efforts of the US air forces were unable to stop the flow of supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail which sustained the insurgent war. Instead by becoming a magnet for attacks, it proved enormously costly to US forces, with the loss of some 900 aircraft and 1,000 American aviators killed, captured, or missing, a high proportion of the 1,737 US aircraft lost to hostile action during the war.
Contrastingly, close air support in the form particularly of B-52 ‘Arc Light’ strikes proved devastating on North Vietnamese troops, inflicting heavy casualties, and reducing Hanoi’s military options, at least until the Americans left following the January 1973 Paris Peace Accords. After this, their South Vietnamese allies quickly folded, offering evidence of little strategic degradation of the North as much as it did the value of tactical air support. The same applied to the Taliban in Afghanistan once international forces had committed to leave in 2021.
Now, it is uncertain the damage caused by the US strikes on Iran’s main enrichment sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. Even if they have been badly damaged, and it looks like they probably are, it is unclear how much enriched material the Iranians were able to move out of the various facilities before they were bombed. The 400kg of uranium enriched at 60% (which the Iranians were said to have achieved) represents about five shoe-boxes plus their protective casings. The facility required to take it to the 90+% mark necessary for building weapons, can supposedly be housed in an area no larger than a small garage.
Certainly, the Iranians have already declared that they will not halt the nuclear programme. Trump may just have spoken too soon, again.
Similarly, with NATO member states’ defence spending, many a slip between lip and cup could occur before this benchmark comes into effect.
The 5% commitment is subject to multiple interpretations: for the UK, for instance, it’s a figure which includes a total package of 3.5% in defence expenditure and 1.5% on wider homeland security and national resilience. Spain has for instance agreed to the 5% target but admits that it lacks a plan to get there.
Its 5% goal is also a ten-year target. A lot can (and will) happen politically in that time. It will most likely be somebody else’s (or some other government’s) problem.
While propaganda has always been important in preparing, justifying and sustaining war, in the digital age, warfare is as much online as on the battlefield. Information warfare has become a crucial component of modern conflict. Russia’s war in Ukraine particularly emphasises the impact of dramatic technological changes on the ‘fighting narrative’. As David Patrikarakos notes, “Whereas in war as it is traditionally understood, information operations support military action on the battlefield, in Ukraine [in 2014] it became clear that military operations on the ground were supporting information operations on TV and in cyberspace.”
In 2006, the city of Guernica unveiled a bust of George Steer in the town square and named a street after him, the inscription reading: “The British war correspondent who told the world about the bombing of Gernika [whose reports] also inspired P. Picasso to paint his great picture Guernica”. Steer, who was born in East London in South Africa in 1909 into a newspaper family (his father Bernard was the managing editor and later chairman of the local Daily Dispatch), is the journalist who broke the story of the German-led bombing, a man of principle swimming against the prevailing propaganda tide. It was his front-page story, based on first-hand fieldwork, published simultaneously in The Times of London and The New York Times, that sent shockwaves around the world. Steer’s reportage had a massive and disturbing impact.
Hardly scum then, though Steer’s refusal to bow before prevailing political wisdom would likely have earned him that moniker today.
“The problem today,” reflects former Israeli prime minister Edud Barak, speaking on these developments at this past weekend’s Chalke Festival, “is that we are in a contest in politics between appearance and reality.” Style relies on constructing narratives for a fast-paced media.
Dr Greg Mills and Ehud Barak at the Chalke Festival [Image: Supplied]
Getting from style to substance demands diplomacy and leadership acting with advice, insight, empathy, humility and conviction.
And this means making difficult choices, a lesson too for South Africa’s leadership.
This is Dr Mills’s last article for the Brenthurst Foundation. His new book – The Essence of Success: Insights on Leadership and Strategy from Sport, Business, War and Politics (Penguin Random House) is out in September.
[Image: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/51399681101]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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