I may well lose half of my readers with the next sentence but, whilst many of you were struggling in sub-zero temperatures I spent much of last week in the Caribbean. As the plane passed south over azure sea and white beaches I thought to myself that we were not far from Goldeneye, the Jamaican residence of ‘James Bond’ author Ian Fleming.
Indeed, the character of James Bond has some local Caribbean flavour, Fleming was a keen ornithologist and named his main character after an expert ornithologist and author of ‘Birds of the West Indies’ called James Bond, who subsequently visited Fleming at Goldeneye in 1964 (Goldeneye was the name of a 1941 intelligence operation in Spain that Fleming as involved in).
Early in his career, Fleming struggled to match his more illustrious father and brother (the excellent ‘Geographies, Genders and Geopolitics of James Bond’ by Lisa Funnell and Klaus Dodd underlines how Fleming’s conception of Bond was influenced by both his brother and father), and his military career really only took off when he took up a role in Intelligence (he worked at Room 37 at the Admiralty).
He was given charge of a small but telling operation whose aim was to conceive high impact missions that had little chance of success, but that would confuse the enemy. His playbook of operations was called the Trout Memo – after the fly-fishing technique designed to entrap trout.The conception of these high risk missions formed the basis for the James Bond novels, which from 1953 onwards were very popular, and by 1965 the series had reached thirteen books.
In 1965 the writer Kingsley Amis, well known as a serious critic, poet and author, published the book ‘The James Bond Dossier’, an analysis of Ian Fleming’s Bond novels. The book which contains studied lists of Bond’s victims, lovers (at my count Bond prefers English, American, French and then Swedish ‘friends’) and adversaries (few governments, mostly individuals and warped older male sociopaths at that), helped Amis enter the world of popular culture – he clearly had a sense of the allure and longevity of the Bond brand.
Some of the films based on Fleming’s work have been spot on in identifying threats and trends. On the whole and perhaps reflecting Fleming’s own operations, many of them involve the disruption of supply chains and the resulting profiteering – for instance Goldeneye was based on the deployment of an electromagnetic device to rob the Bank of England (don’t forget that Goldfinger plotted to use a dirty bomb to steal gold from Fort Knox), Tomorrow Never Dies Involved the manipulation of the media, in Die Another Day a satellite is used to manipulate the weather over North Korea and so on.
While the Bond film franchise is struggling to settle on a new actor to take over from Daniel Craig, my sense is that we live in a world that is increasingly Bond like in its geopolitics. Whilst the period of globalizations was relatively calm, we are now in the midst of a number of trends that are Bondesque – a Cold War between the US and China, a grey war between Russia and Europe, NATO re-armament (which featured in Thunderball), the rise of oligarchy and the advent of space as a competitive domain, to mention a few.
Every time I leave Europe, the intensity of the US-China struggle for supremacy strikes me, though I feel that most Europeans are not alive to this. Neither are they alive to the shadow war that Russia (with help from China) is prosecuting on Europe. The Polish government (holder of the EU rotating presidency) unveiled a sabotage campaign by Russia to target freight aircraft across Europe. This comes after a series of assassinations, sabotage attacks and hacking campaigns that Russia has prosecuted in Europe.
Back in the Caribbean, a striking event last week was the disintegration of Elon Musk’s Starship spacecraft, which reminds us of how space is opening up as a new, competitive domain (Bond film Moonraker gave us a taste of this).
In particular the entry of Musk into the operation of military innovation and procurement is a sign of a wave of aerospace and defence innovation, that is being pioneered by firms like Shield AI, Helsing AI and Anduril. As a sample of the thinking behind this innovations, one idea that was put to me recently is to replace fighter jets with hypersonic rockets that carry and deploy drones to the battlefield. Of course the trouble with most of these technologies is that they are unmanned, leaving little room for Bond like characters to distinguish themselves.
A final element worth mentioning is geopolitical power. Britain is a much less consequential player geopolitically than it was in the 1950’s, but it still retains a seat on the UN Security Council for instance. The trouble is that many of the institutional reference points of the Fleming era are losing their lustre, and risk being replaced by an entirely new set of institutions, and we could speculate that in the future we will see the development of a World Cyber Police, an AI led World AI Safety Institute and an authority to police genetic editing and DNA hacking, all of which might feature in future Bond plots.
James Bond may be on hold as a cinematic experience, but I wonder if the next Bond movie should be called ‘No Time for Tariffs’.
