Good evening, dear readers! We hope you enjoyed last week’s post about outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden, a man that Greymantle has admired and despised in equal parts since the late 1980s.
Because we no longer had to focus our commentary on whether Biden would, or could, win the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we felt liberated enough to provide a career retrospective – and a fairly critical one at that – of Biden at the end of his single term in office.
Greymantle believes that much of what ails the U.S. Democratic Party and what ailed Mr. Biden during his time in politics are very much of a piece: a desire to play ‘activist’ rather than ‘leader’. This tendency was part and parcel of what sealed the Dems’ defeat in the 2024 general election. Let’s hope they learn from it.
AN UNEXPECTED LURCH INTO THE DEEPLY PERSONAL
We are going to confound reader expectations with this week’s post by focusing on some personal details and reminiscences of Greymantle’s early life with the aim of giving readers a better understanding of our motivations and longer-term ambitions for this website. For those faithful readers who visit these pages with the aim of getting new insights into geopolitics, we hope you won’t find this off-putting, but rather refreshing.
We are going to give you an insight into how our mind works and how our way of considering events has evolved, along with a brief history of what predictions we made correctly in the days before we began this blog, as well as the calls we muffed. Because we’ve actually been making predictions for a long time privately, before starting to make forecasts publicly in December 2020, when we launched this site.
Here’s the heart of the matter: Greymantle has been obsessed with the art of making predictions since childhood. Prior to launching this blog, Greymantle had a habit of making private predictions to a small circle of intimates, that sometimes came to pass in ways eerily close to how I had forecast them. So, we are going to tell you Why We Write This Blog.
The pattern of knowing things before they happened, because it became a pattern over time, convinced me that I may have a talent in this area. After more time, and more correct calls, I figured: ‘Why not put this strange gift to use?’ After all, there might be other interested parties, and there is always a chance, however remote, that I might do a small amount of good by making a correct call someday.
So here we sit! And I write ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ through most of this missive, given that my small and close circle, and growing group of collaborators, are as much a part of Ivor Greymantle as is the lead author. We’ll allow the rest of them to share in the glory. Or the iniquity.
And you thought our first post after January 20 would be about Donald Trump! Sorry to disappoint you. But we’ll have enough to say on that topic later. For today, let’s take a quick trip down memory lane into…
THE PARANOID MIND OF ‘YOUNG GREYMANTLE’
As a child, Greymantle, it must be said, was a bit of a weirdo. Instead of collecting baseball cards and football jerseys, we enjoyed watching the CBS evening news with Walter Cronkite, and then Dan Rather, to see what the world’s geopolitical ‘teams’, as opposed to sports teams, had done on the previous day. They had a tendency toward mischief, as I soon learned.
In 1979 alone, a year Greymantle remembers well, the Soviet geopolitical team invaded Afghanistan and their Central American proxies, the Sandinistas, overthrew the government of Nicaragua to great acclaim from a broader geopolitical team self-named as ‘the Global Left’. In the same year, a group of ardent revolutionaries overthrew the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and raided the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran’s capital, taking the embassy workers hostage.
Whatever the New York Yankees and Manchester United were up to in 1979, it seemed to pale in comparison to what organized political entities were pursuing across of the world. In contrast to sports events, the blood in the wars and revolutions was twice as real and twice as red, and there was a lot more of it.
The stakes were higher than in sporting events, as well. Greymantle noticed what the Iranian Revolution was doing to the price of gasoline pretty quickly: Greymantle and his sister had to sit on line in a car for two hours with our mother to gas up our family’s Chrysler sedan several times that spring, and let me tell you, mother was not happy about the amount of cash she had to fork over.
To read the newspapers, which I did with religious fervour each day – both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal – it seemed as if something called ‘the Western Order’ was living under a kind of economic siege and the United States and its allies were at risk of losing something called ‘the Cold War’. It was all a bit arcane at first, but as I dutifully read onward during breakfast each morning, a pattern of regional conflicts across the globe was becoming clearer. These conflicts were rooted mainly in cultural and ideological differences, but had multiple economic and military dimensions. The world was fascinating!
The world was also, it turned out, a pretty scary place to young Greymantle. He and his family lived in a very safe neighborhood, but we could tell that plenty of neighborhoods in the U.S. were far less safe, and if he had been a kid living in Brazil, Iran or the USSR, he was certain his personal safety would have been much worse.
A pattern of escalating risks (see: Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), the potential for nuclear war, and economic shocks caused by the oil embargo of 1979 brought home to yours truly the deeply interconnected nature of the late modern world and the realization that things could someday really, truly fall apart.
We quickly became something of a paranoid.
THE IRAN HOSTAGE CRISIS AND U.S. PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1980
The biggest news story in the U.S. in 1980 was the Iran Hostage Crisis, which threw the U.S. presidential election into a tailspin. Incumbent presidents are generally favored to win re-election, and though President Carter was not popular in the latter half of 1979, he possessed a big political machine and enough goodwill from politically powerful labor unions that he stood a good chance of winning reelection in November 1980.
The hostage crisis and a botched attempt to rescue the hostages in April 1980 by the U.S. military blew the doors of the election wide open. Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy had already launched a primary challenge to Carter from the Democratic left, and former California governor Ronald Reagan leaped into the Republican primaries from the right, looking to reshape the GOP from a bland organization run by respectable ‘chamber of commerce’ types into something far more right-leaning and populist.
The question in the summer and autumn of 1980 was: If Carter could get the hostages released before the election, and the economy began to turn around, could he still be reelected despite his liabilities? While Carter was not popular, Reagan was viewed as potentially dangerous. Many voters were on the fence about wanting a loose cannon (as he was perceived in 1980) like Reagan in the Oval Office.
My friends and I were only in the fifth grade, but we literally spoke about this issue all the time over lunch. We debated the question with our teachers. If the hostages were freed and the price of oil fell, was that going to be enough to save Carter? And if the hostages were freed, when would it happen?
My prediction at the time was that the hostages would not be freed until the summer of 1981, six months into the next presidential term. On the price of oil, I thought that prices were going to stay high because of what was going on in Iran and the nearby Soviet war in Afghanistan.
It turned out that I was dead wrong on the question of the hostages – they were released on January 20, 1981, the day that Ronald Reagan took the oath of office as the 40th President – months ahead of my forecast. On the question of the price of oil, I was mostly right, but wrong, I think, on the exact price per barrel.
The personal upshot for me was the feeling that I was not much of a prognosticator and should focus on some other interests. But the fascination with the flow of events and the desire to know the future outcomes of those events didn’t leave me, and I continued to think about and discuss those patterns with my friends.
THE COLLAPSE OF THE EASTERN BLOC THAT PRACTICALLY NO ONE SAW COMING
Fast forwarding into the mid-1980s, Greymantle continued to follow current events closely, and had started subscribing to Omni, Newsweek, National Geographic and a fairly risque publication named National Review. Some of you will remember the last, and perhaps even subscribed to it yourselves.
In the mid 1980s, the Reagan Administration was in the midst of a huge military buildup to counter perceived Soviet military advantages. The U.S. was building nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles at a rapid pace, and President Reagan had jump-started the Strategic Defense Initiative with the goal of building a missile defense system similar to what the Israelis now deploy (i.e. ‘the Iron Dome’) to defend the U.S. from nuclear attack.
There was palpable fear among many informed observers that these developments were sowing greater instability and could only end in a hot war between the superpowers. Many conservatives feared a Soviet victory in the Cold War by political, and then military means – the 1984 action film ‘Red Dawn‘ captures the fears of these conservatives accurately and sympathetically – and only a tiny handful of writers and experts thought that the Soviet Union would collapse internally, in about the year 2005.
The teenage Greymantle was one of those conservative-leaning types who believed that the rallying of the Western Order which President Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were stoking in the 80s was likely to prove a brief surge before a return to 1970s style stagnation and a gradual capitulation to the Soviets by way of a campaign of internal subterfuge and subversion planned by the KGB.
When Eastern European satellite states of the USSR like Hungary and Poland ditched communism and East Germany collapsed in the autumn of 1989, Greymantle, like most people, was taken by surprise. We had not believed that the Soviets would relax control to the extent they did. We did not take Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev at his word when he used terms like ‘perestroika’ and ‘glasnost’ to describe the changes he was making to the USSR. We felt Gorbachev’s stated desire to ‘reinvent socialism’ was a dodge or trick.
But by the end of 1991, the Soviet Union itself had collapsed and the Cold War was history.
In retrospect, the hard work of Eastern European dissidents and building the germ of a new civil society from beneath the communist system, the patient outreach and peacemaking of Pope John Paul II, the toughness mixed with flexibility of Reagan and Thatcher, and the sincere desire of Gorbachev to reform his country yielding something of a collective miracle: the end of the Cold War with barely a shot being fired.
Having missed these signs completely, I once again decided that I should find employment in something other than forecasting and prognostication.
TWO MEN, AND TWO WATERSHED EVENTS IN THE EARLY 2000s
Man #1: George W. Bush
Around the late 1990s, something within me changed. Perhaps it was hitting the magical neurological age of 27, when the synaptic wiring of the forebrain is completed and our fully adult personalities emerge. Perhaps it was the experience of several years of adult life and more time spent watching events unfold, or possibly it was a better schooling in the hard knocks of human nature.
Whatever the reason, my calls about future events began to improve significantly at this time.
To begin with, I started to have significant mental reactions to certain public figures. When George W. Bush was reelected to the Texas governor’s mansion in November 1998, I got a funny feeling at the base of my spine that I could not quite explain. Watching Bush give a portion of his victory speech on CNN, my reaction was, ‘This guy can barely string a sentence together. Why did Texans just elect him governor for a second time, when they have not reelected a sitting governor since John Connolly?’
When Bush announced in January 1999 that he was going to make a run for U.S. president in 2000, starting with the GOP primaries, this funny feeling in my spine got stronger. I had read a NY Times article covering early signals that he might enter into the presidential race, which included an exchange with his brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, and some details about his political maestro, Karl Rove, in late 1998, and the feeling came over me that Bush was going to be the next U.S. president.
There was no rational reason to come to this conclusion. Governor Bush had a famous family name, was governor of a big state, and had more than a passing resemblance to his father, the elder George Bush, but that was not enough to make him a shoo-in to the White House. Americans don’t like the dynastic idea when it comes to the presidency. On top of that, Bush seemed cocky, shallow, and insecure, as well as not very bright. How could he win a race against Al Gore or another formidable Democratic nominee?
No matter how strange it seemed, though, I had a strong feeling George W. Bush would be elected president, and that his presidency would be an historic disaster for the country. My feelings of foreboding in this regard were totally vindicated over the succeeding decade.
Man #2: Ramzi Ahmed Yousef
Where the U.S. and New York City (NYC) itself were concerned, I also began to have another strange feeling of foreboding in late 1999 and early 2000. This feeling strengthened slowly during the course of 2000, and then really took off in early 2001 after Bush was sworn into office.
The nature of my fear concerning NYC was most concrete: a major terrorist attack on Lower Manhattan by allies of the conspirators who had attempted to destroy the World Trade Center with a van bomb detonated in the basement of Tower One on February 26, 1993.
By 1999, New Yorkers’ thoughts were mostly focused on the upcoming celebrations for the century’s end and the new millenium. Though hardly forgotten, the 1993 bombing, which had killed six persons, was at the back of most New Yorkers’ minds. Greymantle, however, had been fixated by the arrest and subsequent trial in 1995 and 1996 of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a young Pakistani engineer, for his role in masterminding the 1993 bomb attack and a subsequent bomb detonation on Philippine Airlines Flight 434, which killed one man.
The coverage of Yousef’s sensational trial contained many details that of the bombings that had not been made public before. These included a plan by Yousef and his associates – never executed – to blow up 11 commercial airlines with bombs and an attempt to use at least one of these airliners to make a second attempt on the World Trade Center. Yousef and his associates also planned to murder the Pope. At his trial, Yousef swore that other terrorists, inspired by his example, would someday ‘finish the mission’ of destroying the World Trade Center and visiting mass destruction on the people of New York.
These threats of Ramzi Yousef were not covered much on television and seemed to have gone over the heads of most New York residents. But they chilled Greymantle, and as the millenium approached I could not shake the lurking fear that a growing network of Islamic terrorists was working somewhere in secret to bring about the result that they had failed to realize in 1993. I shared these fears only with my wife (we were newlywed at the time) and two close friends. It turned out that a young English travel writer had recently written a book about something called Al Qaeda, but I had not even heard about the book’s publication.
LIKE THE INTERSECTION OF TWO DOTTED LINES
My sense of dread deepened after the Bush Administration took office in early 2001, as Bush and his cabinet seemed entirely focused on strong-arming the Democratic opposition in Congress and freeing up oil and gas regulation, but seemed bleary-eyed about foreign threats.
When the first plane crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, my first thought was “Bomb!”. I called my wife to tell her that an airplane had crashed into the North Tower and that I suspected it was a terrorist attack of some kind. “Oh, stop being so paranoid! Some pilot high on cocaine probably crashed a small private jet.” she replied.
I was working only two blocks away from the North Tower that morning.
We all know what happened next.
Photos by Johnson, K.V. 2001
In the days that followed, as was not very happy with myself about having been vindicated in my conviction that a major terrorist attack was going to hit New York. I was too unhappy over the loss of life, the human and physical carnage, and the sorrow that consumed my countrymen. It was not time to pat oneself on the back.
Rather, I was filled with a strange desire to take some kind of action, and I wasn’t thinking of enlisted in the military, because it was not clear to me that there would be a primarily military solution to what had just occurred (though the military was going to get very involved). Thinking about it more than twenty years later, the thought which was filling my mind that autumn was a fear of the what the U.S. response what be to the attacks. Not only the response of the U.S. government, but the response of the American people.
There needed to be a strong reaction, but what I feared was an overreaction that would spread ripples of chaos and fear across the globe and deep into the hearts and minds of my fellow citizens.
TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK
Until then, I remain –
Greymantle
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