Preparing for the last war
A Letter From The Future
Grace Butler, 30 December 2029
Grace Butler served as Foreign Secretary from 2026-2029.
As the 2020s end and we shift into the 2030s, I’m reminded of the man who led this country through the last decadal transition, Boris Johnson. We often joke about his reign of calamity now the details have been somewhat forgotten. But learning from his catastrophic stay in Number 10 is as important as ever. In 1948, his idol, Winston Churchill, famously said that "those that fail to learn from history, are doomed to repeat it." That Johnson failed to head Churchill's advice goes some way to explaining how we got to where we are today.
2020, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, fundamentally altered the course of the last decade. We had a chance to change the way we view security. To create preventative solutions to address challenges that threatened humanity’s very existence. But this never came. Instead, just like the response to the 9/11 attacks in New York, we dealt with the crisis through the narrow prism of national security. And as with 9/11, we made things worse.
Looking back, Boris Johnson’s declaration of a ‘war on viruses’ was a watershed moment that allowed hawks within our security establishment to seize the machinery of government.
With our government increasingly discredited as it struggled to contain the pandemic and its repercussions, they sought to regain the confidence of the public with a move straight out of Trump’s playbook. Defence figures were appointed to prominent roles in our government. Welcomed because they were seen as apolitical, these figures soon repackaged tried and tested (and failed) security agendas marked by their emphasis on military spending and aggressive expansions of the state’s extraordinary powers.
Methods which Britain had exported to conflict hotspots came home and were strengthened by new technologies.
‘Pandemic prevention’ became the new ‘counter-terrorism’. And as with counter-terrorism, no one was able to question whether this was the ‘number one threat’ and our approach to dealing with it.’ Legislative assaults curtailed our rights, new apps and devices have made privacy non-existent, and public funds have been funneled towards leading ‘pandemic prevention’ corporations - the post 9/11 playbook to a tee.
We have made some important progress in our self-declared ‘war’ on viruses - no-one dies from novel coronaviruses any more and outbreaks of Ebola have been neutralised swiftly. But looking back, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the price of this has been too high.
Today in 2030 we are at the milestone when the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals were supposed to have been achieved. Instead the UN is defunct as the UK sided with US belligerence towards China and instrengence against multilateral efforts. The disastrous Saudi civil war that has further destabilised a deeply troubled region. And the spread of technotalitarianism directly off the back of pandemic control.
How did we let ourselves get here? Here at home, our opposition parties crumbed. Stuck in a perpetual dilemma, unable to decide whether to push the government on their many failings or to back misguided policies for the sake of national unity. Ultimately, their indecision rendered them irrelevant at home and across many former liberal democracies. By the time we entered government in 2026, much of the damage was done. Just like those who entered government in the United States in 2008 who found a state with a myopic focus on counter-terrorism, we struggled to dismantle the systems that were in place.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, US Senator Ben Rhodes wrote ‘it isn’t September 12th anymore’ arguing that the pandemic presented a moment to move beyond the counter-terror imperative that had shaped the 19 years between 2001 and 2020.
He was wrong. It is still September 12th. And it has got a whole lot worse.
Instead of a green transformation and a much safer world, we now enter a new phase of human existence that is as uncertain as it's ever been. 2020 set us on course for a bad decade, but now we see many worse ones to come. Decisions made in the very first year of this decade set us on the course that has seen the world fail to escape the crisis.
We lacked ambition: we set a direction of travel that was reactive. This time, we need to learn from history. We must learn from the mistakes of this decade if we are to have many more future decades on this planet. Let’s keep this in the back of our minds for decisions made in the year 2030.