BY STEWART SLATER
If the end of the Cold War was a source of joy for most, there was one group for whom it was a decidedly mixed blessing. While the removal of the threat of nuclear annihilation was obviously a good thing, thriller writers, used to churning out stories of dastardly Soviets attempting to subvert the West, suddenly found themselves in a decidedly uncongenial environment, their traditional plots no longer meeting even the minimal standards of plausibility required by the genre.
The one exception to this was the Bond series which, due to its invention of Spectre, had often treated its country’s foe with a gentleness surprising for such openly patriotic or even jingoistic films (think Roger Moore and his Union Jack parachute). Russians were often fair competitors (General Gogol in For Your Eyes Only and A View to a Kill) or rivals turned allies (and sometimes more) (Major Amasova in The Spy Who Loved Me, General Pushkin in The Living Daylights). When they were antagonists (General Koskov in the last-mentioned, General Orlov in Octopussy), it was made clear they had gone rogue.
Despite this, by the late eighties, the rapprochement between West and East meant that geopolitics was no longer fertile ground for thriller writers, so License To Kill, the first Bond movie after the Reagan/Gorbachev arms reduction treaty, saw our hero take on a drug cartel.
The Bond producers were not alone in this approach. Tom Clancy had come to prominence after a series of books in which the Soviets were the enemy, whether launching a deadly new submarine (The Hunt For Red October), invading Europe (Red Storm Rising) or playing a lethal game of espionage with his hero Jack Ryan (The Cardinal of the Kremlin) but his last book of the eighties saw the U.S. President launch a covert (and illegal) war against South American drug dealers.
After a book in which the antagonists were terrorists – another popular replacement for the Soviets, although, in keeping with Clancy’s Reaganism, some of his are former East Germans trying to foment war between Russia and America – the lure of geopolitics proved too much for him, and the canonical “Ryanverse” ended with a trilogy which elevated his hero to the Presidency and forced him to tackle a series of states unwilling to live under his beneficent pax Americana.
He reaches the top job in Debt of Honour when, in the last gasp of a nationalist faction’s failed attempt to throw off the American yoke, a Japanese pilot flies a jumbo into the Capitol just after Ryan’s confirmation as Vice President, his boss becoming his predecessor in the ensuing fire. In Executive Orders he must both rebuild the American government after the strike (in an admirably Reaganite fashion – to the extent he has a domestic policy, it appears to consist solely of junking swathes of the tax code) and face down an aggressive Iran. In The Bear and the Dragon, he executes a diplomatic manoeuvre of Kissingerian proportions, allying with Russia to fend off an invasion from China.
For understandable reasons, the events of 9/11 gave Clancy a reputation as a prophet but it was short-lived. Al-Qaeda was seen to be a spasm rather than the start of a new world order. The long peace of the rules-based order made his notions of inter-state geopolitical competition seem out of their time while, already more popular with consumers than critics, his later works, generally produced under his own name rather his own hand, marked a slide down to the generic world of the airport thriller, in which an implausibly perfect good guy (the later books feature the hero’s son – catchily called Jack Ryan Jr – who shares none of his father’s redeeming flaws) overcomes implausible odds to defeat an implausible baddie. By the time of his death in 2013, the insurance salesman turned best-selling author was a relic, interesting only as a symbol of a lost America.
In one of those little coincidences with which the universe loves to delight us, Film 4 chose the same week to run a season of the Ryan films as the BBC did to start the second series of its documentary, Putin’s War. Timed, no doubt, to coincide with the upcoming anniversary of the invasion of the Ukraine, the first episode took viewers through the early days of the conflict, as the country struggled to defend itself, and the West struggled to work out its response. In one particularly revealing incident, one participant recalls their shock that the Russians had the temerity to attack while the U.N. Security Council was in session, the ambassadors learning the news through their mobile phones rather than in the obviously more acceptable fashion of a telegram delivered by a top-hatted diplomat who had made an appointment at the Foreign Office.
For the overwhelming impression was of a governing class (with some exceptions, to be fair, such as Johnson, B – remember him?) caught completely on the hop having spent so long imbibing the kool-aid it no longer realised it was kool-aid. War had returned to Europe, but to those in charge, war no longer happened in Europe (except in small, peripheral areas of which we are content to know little). An army had attacked another when everyone knew their real purpose was parades and peace-keeping (in far-off climes). One state was attempting to subsume another, something which only happened in history books or map-filled basements frequented by lank-haired geeks. The chancelleries of the West were forced to realise that their entire understanding of the way the world worked had been crushed under a Russian tank tread.
But Clancy would not, I think, have been surprised. For, unlike in the pristine world of the diplomatic corps, in the Ryanverse, history never stopped. That the status quo established by America after its victory in the Cold War worked for America did not mean that it worked for everyone. And those for whom it did not would try to change it. By force if need be.
If some of his predictions were off – Russia is far from being an American ally and Japan has yet to take revenge for Hiroshima and Nagasaki – others were rather better – Iran is a destabilising power in the Middle East, China is a destabilising power in the Far East and India is inscrutable, never openly hostile, but never clearly onside. Beyond the specifics, his conception of geopolitics was right. There was no hallelujah moment after the fall of the Berlin Wall which led sinners to repent. States remained what states always had been, ambitious seekers for their own advantage, continually attempting to alter the facts on the ground to advance their own interests.
Might may not make right, but without might there can be no right. Weakness is an invitation to others to try their luck. In the Ryanverse, India’s Prime Minister – who may, or may not have orchestrated the events of the trilogy; just as today with Russia, China and Iran, the novels leave it unclear whether America faces a conspiracy or merely loosely-linked enemies who decide spontaneously to have a go – sees the new President cry at the funeral of his predecessor and decides he is a push-over. In the real world, America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan is widely held to have emboldened Putin. The West thought that it lived in a world of boxers who would return to their corner when their opponents were on the canvas. Clancy knew it was a world of street fighters who would close in for the kill.
He also knew that the only way to deal with a threat is not to draw a red line, nor to send a message, but to eliminate it. Anything less merely invites further trouble. Challenges in the Ryanverse are confronted head-on – sometimes literally as when the Iranian leader sees footage from the nose-cone of the missile sent to kill him on global TV – for to do anything else is to invite further attack. There are no gestures – Germany’s offer to Ukraine of 5,000 helmets for the country’s forces – or half measures such as periodic aerial attacks for they will be shrugged off, as the Houthis are demonstrating.
If the world today looks far more like that foreseen by a chubby, bespectacled insurance salesman who did a degree in English at his small college because it was easy and failed to pass the physical for the military than that imagined by the highly credentialed, green-juice guzzling joggers who inhabit the West’s think tanks and governments, it is because they thought the world had changed, and he knew it hadn’t.
And now, since he was right, but they were in charge, we face the worst of all worlds. Not only do we have no Jack Ryan but we have run down our militaries to the extent that even Jack Ryan could not be Jack Ryan. As Admiral Painter says in The Hunt for Red October with the Soviet fleet bearing down on him, “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it”.
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.