Almost exactly five years earlier, on 15 August 2021, the Taliban seized this airport. Chaos ensued. The Americans carried out an 18-day operation in which more than 123,000 people were airlifted to safety — the largest non-combatant evacuation in U.S. military history. On 30 August, at 11:59pm local time, the final US military plane departed Kabul, one minute before President Joe Biden’s deadline for withdrawal.

The airlift marked the end of the American-Afghan state that was born in 2001, when the US, aiming to hunt down Osama bin Laden and overthrow his Taliban allies, invaded the country and installed a Western-style government. For 20 years, this US-backed state persisted, but its unraveling took mere weeks. Everything Washington had built in the country, notably a national army, proved to be a mirage that vanished in the face of a resurgent Taliban. The regime now celebrates 31 August as the day of liberation from US occupation. Each year, parades weave through Kabul’s central squares. Celebratory gunfire sounds across the city.

Today, the capital is a mix of urban squalor and state repression. Armed Talibs patrol the streets while beggar children work the traffic, tapping insistently at windows and thrusting out supplicant hands. On Chicken Street in the city center, homeless girls play beneath brightly colored shopfronts selling trinkets and carpets to a small but growing trickle of tourists. “Things are much safer now the Taliban are in control, and there is no war,” says a local who doesn’t wish to be named. “But we have lost a lot of freedoms. That is the bargain we now live under.”

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He’s right. The streets are calm. Taliban are polite – friendly even. But I am aware that this is a state beholden only to itself. People can, and are, regularly disappeared into its prisons and torture chambers without warning or due process.

Still, to understand the Taliban, you must understand where they come from. Kabul may be Afghanistan’s capital, but Kandahar, a city in the country’s south, is the Islamic Emirate’s spiritual and political center. Here its Supreme Leader, Mullah Hibatullah Akhundzada, and his circle of advisers rule, largely hidden from public view. I make my way there down the  300-mile Kabul-Kandahar highway, which cuts through vast stretches of arid plateau and dust-blown steppe. I pass goat-hair tents belonging to Afghanistan’s semi-nomadic Kuchi people and flocks of threadbare sheep. Mud-brick villages whizz past, their flat roofs and earth-colored walls almost indistinguishable from the surrounding landscape.

As I approach the city’s outskirts, three small girls swing incense burners, sending coils of smoke billowing skyward. The ritual is said to keep away evil spirits. In the city center, the heat is intense. Taliban flags fly everywhere. Men swathed in black keffiyehs emerge through clouds of dust kicked up by their motorbikes. Women are begging in full burqas. The poverty of Kandahar, to say nothing of the theocratic intensity, makes Kabul look like San Francisco. I am told that photography is banned.

My first stop is the Ministry of Information and Culture, where I’m seeking permission to report in Kandahar. It’s roasting hot in the carpeted waiting room. In the corner, two men are carving up a huge melon. I am offered a glass jar of pear drops – the Taliban’s love of 1950s British sweets is one of the more surprising discoveries of my trip – and told that I’m in luck. A senior local official, Inamullah Samangani, has decided to grant me a spontaneous interview.

After a few minutes, I am summoned to an air-conditioned office next door. Four Talibs, one of whom is cradling an M16 rifle, are sitting barefoot on sofas. Cold melon and water are served to everyone. Samangani is an ethnic Tajik from the country’s north. He has a smooth, youthful face with a manicured mustache and tufty beard. He beams at me.

I ask him how he feels as the fifth anniversary approaches. “All our people are happy,” he replies. “This is what we wanted. After 20 years of war, this anniversary is very meaningful for us.”

What the Taliban want, he tells me, is peace and prosperity for the nation. “Afghanistan has been at war for more than 40 years. Afghanistan needs a great deal of rebuilding and construction, and we are working on this.”

What are the biggest challenges facing this new Islamic Emirate? “The situation is not normal because of the war and because of Western policies towards Afghanistan. The military war has ended, but an economic war continues. We want peace not only for Afghanistan but for our neighboring countries, the region and the world.”

I ask what he attributes the Taliban’s success to. “Our belief in Allah,” he replies without hesitation. “And our belief from the first day that we were on the right path. After September 11, when America and its allies occupied Afghanistan, we knew that freedom was our first and last choice. After 20 years, we achieved it.”

The interview ends; it’s clear that Samangani is more concerned with painting the Islamic Emirate as a reasonable partner with whom the international community can do business than getting into the realities of life here — and in this, he is like politicians everywhere. I make my way out of the office, passing a small room where a Talib is sitting on the floor, clipping his toenails.

Outside, armed men saunter in groups. Printed on a billboard overlooking a roundabout is a message from the Supreme Leader. “When you return from Hajj, don’t be wasteful by spending money on dinners and celebrations,” it warns.

The following morning, I set off from my guest house to meet Zabihullah Mujahid, chief spokesman for the Taliban government since 25 October 2021. He became a Taliban spokesman, and a senior government official, in January 2007, during the insurgency against the US-backed Afghan government. Even as he claimed responsibility on behalf of the Taliban for attacks on coalition forces, he remained faceless and pseudonymous. But on 17 August 2021, two days after Kabul fell, he revealed himself publicly. Now he is the regime’s international face.

For security reasons, I am not initially told Mujahid’s location. Instead, I am instructed to wait for a call. As I sit in a nearby cafe, my eyes scan the room until they settle on a pair of decorative screens. One depicts two camels, the other a peacock, the faces of all three creatures covered with stickers. I’m confused until I realize why: the defacing accords with the hadith-based injunction against complete representations of dhawāt al-arwāḥ (“beings possessing souls”). If you obscure the head, you render the figure incomplete and therefore permissible. I saw nothing like this in Kabul.

The call comes; the venue is a gated residence just across the road. I walk into a spacious garden, where a flunky is watering a comparatively lush lawn. Inside, I am shown into a large room and asked to wait.

After a few minutes, Mujahid enters and sits down. He is immaculate in a white shalwar kameez with dark blue waistcoat and brown, patterned turban. Five years on, he tells me, the Taliban’s victory has brought what Afghans wanted most. “No war, no fighting, and a unified government in place.”

But victory has also forced the Taliban to govern, not just fight. Its foot soldiers and clerics, formed in the madrassas and mountains, must also now serve as policemen, civil servants and diplomats. They must manage budgets and rebuild infrastructure. For this they need international recognition, and aid money from international organizations and Western countries — above all, the US. “We definitely want good relations with the USA,” Mujahid tells me. “We have tried, but they have to try as well.”

Recognition has not been forthcoming. I ask Mujahid about the first government press conference he gave in 2021, when he promised that women would be able to work and study within the bounds of Islamic law. Girls have since been excluded from secondary schools and women from universities.

“I said that everything would be according to Sharia,” he replies, maintaining a serious demeanor and a quiet, even tone of voice throughout. “I still say that. Human rights, education — everything.”

Women still work in hospitals, schools, banks and government, he says, before adding that the exclusion of girls from secondary education, now approaching its fifth year, is “only a slight disruption in the education system”. The Emirate is working to find a way for women to study “with the necessary segregation, transport and safeguards”.

The matter of women’s rights is a serious problem for the government — even among its supporters.  Mainstream Islamic law does not ban the education of women; even hardline theocracies such as Saudi Arabia have eased the restrictions on women in recent years. Afghans are furious. In Kabul, on my second day in the country, I met a man out walking with his three daughters. “We have seen a lot of improvements in different sectors and in the rebuilding of our country,” he told me. “But there are big limitations for girls. They should be able to go to school. This is a big ambition of every Afghan. We hope the government will listen to the voice of our citizens.”

But the Taliban will not budge. I suspect Mujahid will be giving the same answers to the same questions five years from now.

I ask him about another contentious issue. In Kandahar, fiber-optic internet has been cut off to private homes. Mujahid insists this is not an internet ban, but a means of ensuring internet use stays within Sharia guidelines. “With mobile internet we can [control it] to a degree,” he explains, “but with fiber-optic Wi-Fi it is harder.”

Every Talib I meet echoes what Samangani told me: they defeated the most powerful and technologically advanced army in history because of “Allah” and their faith. But the more time I spend in Afghanistan, especially in Kandahar, the clearer it is to me that the Taliban are not to be regarded simply as quasi-medieval fanatics. To Westerners, they might seem like barbarians — particularly in their treatment of women — but they do not reject technology or modernity. Except where they cannot control them, they have absorbed both.

As a result, I’m witnessing a kind of Taliban “March of Progress”. Talibs still patrol the streets with long hair, matted beards, black turbans and the imprint of the village. But what’s also emerging is a discernibly post-American Talib. At the many checkpoints between Kabul and Kandahar, these men now stand guard in matching uniforms, patches identifying them as Afghan National Police. Some wear black balaclavas like Western special forces. They cradle their weapons with conspicuous discipline: fingers straight along the receiver rather than curled around the trigger. They carry M16s and Kalashnikovs, the most famous weapons of the two superpowers defeated in Afghanistan.

One morning, I awake to the sound of a helicopter flying low overhead. “Taliban air force,” explains a friend — who proceeds to tell me a story. When the Taliban swept to power five years ago, the US-trained Afghan pilots were told to fly the helicopters to the safety of Tajikistan. One of them, already in the air, called his father to ask what he should do. The father hurried to the Taliban in their village and laid out his son’s dilemma. “He’s a son of Afghanistan,” they said. “He must come back. He will be safe.” The father relayed the message; his son switched off his transponder, turned the helicopter around mid-air, and flew home. The Taliban kept their word. Now he works as an instructor, teaching Taliban pilots to fly the helicopters the Americans left behind.

The Taliban have embraced many of the technologies and institutions of the Western order they defeated, all the while rejecting its overarching values. They carry American rifles and use Western smartphones, yet remain unyieldingly beholden to Sharia. To them there is no contradiction. Washington assumed that modernization meant, inexorably, Westernization. But the Taliban learned from America without becoming American. And in so doing they exposed the category error on which America’s war was based.

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The US-led coalition claimed to be in the state-building business, but in truth it extended a narrow Western template of statehood to Afghanistan. The West offered Afghans the liberal franchise, confident they would accept it. Why wouldn’t they? This was 2001. Liberal democracy had won the Cold War, helped bring peace to Yugoslavia and presided over a decade of extraordinary capitalist prosperity. Washington went in, convinced that economic development, education, connectivity and institutions would bring democracy in their wake — and turn Kabul into Copenhagen.

I think about this during my visit to the Khirka Sharif: a compound of buildings smothered in stars and polygons, plants and flowers. Lines of Qur’anic calligraphy thread through the patterns. Turquoise, blue and green mingle with ochre, gold and pink. Kandahar’s streets are sludge and concrete, but here, smooth white stone encircles an explosion of geometry, brilliant in the summer sun.

According to local tradition, Khirka Sharif houses the cloak bestowed upon the Prophet Muhammad during his ascension to heaven (the Mi’raj). The cloak played an important role in the early mythology of the Taliban — literally “students” in Pashto — which emerged in Kandahar in the mid-1990s. On 4 April 1996, the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, took the cloak out of its cloth-covered box and carried it onto the roof of Kandahar’s main mosque. There, he held it aloft before thousands of religious scholars, fighters and supporters. The crowd erupted: men threw their turbans into the air in the hope that they might touch the sacred garment, while some reportedly fainted. The assembled ulema (Islamic scholars) acclaimed Omar Amir al-Mu’minin — “Commander of the Faithful” — and pledged allegiance to him. By associating himself publicly with both the Prophet and Ahmad Shah Durrani, the founder of the Afghan state who had brought the cloak to Kandahar, Omar sanctified his leadership and transformed a sacred relic into a source of political authority.

A few months later, on 27 September, Taliban forces captured Kabul and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It lasted until 2001, when the Americans arrived with historically unprecedented military power and the apparatus of state-building: NGOs and aid agencies, elections and constitutions, Excel spreadsheets, risk assessments and results frameworks. These were the iconography of a different faith, one that rooted its legitimacy in the post-World War II liberal order.

The Taliban’s victory laid bare the error and the arrogance of that project. Modernization and Westernization are not the same thing. A fiber-optic cable is neither autocratic nor liberal. A regime can want modern roads and Western investment while oppressing women and killing homosexuals. After two weeks of reporting in Afghanistan, observing how that what is left of the American occupation has been almost completely appropriated by the Taliban; the attempt to force regime change through military means was always doomed. Today, the West pays lip service to this lesson — but the instinct, judging by Donald Trump’s attempts to topple the Islamist regime in Tehran, remains.

Just before I leave the city, I stop for lunch. I’m sitting cross-legged on the carpet, eating meat and rice, when a Talib in his early twenties comes in and sits down next to me, fascinated by the presence of foreigners. We talk. He joined the Taliban at 12 and fought the Americans and British for years. He likes my Western sunglasses and, ignoring the prohibition on photography, eagerly poses for pictures wearing a pair borrowed from my photographer. Photos and transatlantic fashion clearly delight him. What, I ask him, are his hopes for the future of Afghanistan?

“Taliban,” he says without hesitation, and smiles beatifically.

I journey back, and just under 100 miles south of Kabul, I pass through the city of Ghazni, its entrance dominated by three light-blue domes. Its open-air military museum displays rows of burned-out Soviet tanks, monuments to the Afghan mujahideen’s victory in the 1979–1989 Soviet–Afghan War. A thousand years earlier, Ghazni was the imperial capital of Mahmud of Ghazni, later celebrated as the “idol-breaker” (but-shikan) after his destruction of the Hindu temple at Somnath. When Mullah Omar destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001, he invoked Mahmud, casting himself as a modern-day but-shikan.

The occupying Westerners lacked this sense of history. Shortly after the disastrous 2021 withdrawal, I asked a British soldier who had served in Afghanistan how, after twenty years of war, we had understood the country so poorly. “The thing is,” he told me, “we served one-year tours and left. We weren’t there for twenty years but twenty lots of one.” Western soldiers, diplomats and officials rotated through the war, but the Taliban lived it year after year. And their sense of time and place stretched back centuries — to the cloak of the Prophet and the legend of Mahmud. There was only ever going to be one winner.

Anyone who has spent a career covering Iran understands two things: first, that the Islamic Republic does not fall because X is excited; and second, that these protests must be considered not in isolation but as part of a larger cycle of resistance that, in its modern incarnation, has periodically strafed the regime since 2009’s Green Revolution. 

The latest unrest did not begin with students or political activists but with shopkeepers: mobile phone and electronics traders in Tehran, among those hit hardest by the currency’s latest plunge. In Iran, economic collapse is visceral. It is experienced in shuttered storefronts, disappearing capital, and the drawn-out humiliation of a middle class being slowly crushed. Time and again, economic shock has supplied the initial fuel for unrest. This moment is no different.

From those commercial districts, anger bled outward — first into surrounding streets, then beyond the capital altogether. As has often happened before, material grievances quickly gave way to political denunciation. What is less predictable is whether rage can be converted into sustained pressure. Iran today is battered by inflation, corroded by corruption, and exhausted by a cost-of-living crisis with no obvious end.

Still, though, history counsels caution. Following the contested re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, millions flooded Tehran’s streets. The movement possessed visibility, leadership, and a claim to legitimacy. It mobilized the urban middle class at scale. And it failed.

Its weakness lay not in its numbers but in its reach. The movement never truly broke out of the major cities. It did not sink roots in provincial or working-class Iran. More importantly, it failed to irretrievably split the system’s coercive core. Yes, the movement’s leaders, Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, were from the establishment, but they were dealt with expertly. This was the regime’s genius: it didn’t kill or even imprison them. It just kept them confined to their homes without even a working internet connection. The two men became not martyrs but irrelevant. The movement didn’t collapse; it withered.

This is a regime born of revolution. It absorbed the lesson that protests are most dangerous when mishandled — and that selective restraint can sometimes be as effective as selective brutality.

The demonstrations of winter 2017–2018 lacked the global impact of 2009 but unnerved the authorities in a different way. They were driven by economic anger and ignited far from Tehran, beginning in the conservative city of Mashhad before spreading across regions and social strata. The pattern returned with greater ferocity in November 2019, after a surge in fuel prices. The state’s response was ferocious. It killed hundreds; it locked up thousands. It endured.

The killing of Mahsa Amini in custody in 2022 triggered another eruption — this time cultural as much as political. The “Women, Life, Freedom” protests spread rapidly. Their moral force was undeniable. But once again, the system absorbed the shock. The challenge was serious; the damage was contained.

So where does the present unrest sit within this pattern? Participation has not yet broadened into a genuine cross-class movement. The unrest, while geographically wider than Tehran, is still limited compared with earlier episodes. And most importantly, there is no sign of elite defection or security force disintegration.

Western observers routinely mistake visibility for power. But what matters far more than viral imagery is whether labor action spreads; whether oil, transport, or municipal services are disrupted (striking oil workers played a crucial role in the downfall of the Shah in 1979); whether clerical and military elites begin to wobble. None of this is happening yet.

This does not mean the regime is secure. It means that so far, even after the hammering it took at the hands of Israel last June, it remains structurally intact.

There are, however, two variables that could make all the difference. The first is that Iran is in the grip of a severe and structural water crisis — not a temporary drought but an ecological reckoning born of decades of mismanagement and over-extraction. This is a pressure absent from earlier protest cycles — and one the state cannot simply baton away. Protests linked to water scarcity have already flared in Khuzestan and Isfahan. Unlike financial collapse, water shortages do not discriminate. Farmers, laborers, and urban residents are all exposed. More than this, you can terrorize people demanding civic rights back into their homes; those dying of thirst have nothing to lose.

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The second variable is Washington. When Iranians took to the streets in 2009, Barack Obama, with typical stentorian pomposity, warned the Mullahs: “the world is watching you.” Early this morning, on the Truth Social platform, US President Donald Trump had a different message: “If Iran shots [sic] and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue. We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J.TRUMP”

This is a major, possibly existential, problem for the regime. The Mullahs have long preferred selective executions and torture over mass violence, but if even that option is slipping away, they are in real trouble. If Trump announces that the US is “locked and loaded”, the regime must take it seriously. The remnants of its nuclear program are proof of that.

And it’s a message that every Iranian has heard. If people begin to believe they can protest without fear of sweeping state brutality, the regime’s options are sharply limited.

Early this morning, I spoke with a friend inside Iran. “God bless Donald Trump!” he messaged me, only half-joking. “We have no idea what’s coming next, but the anger is greater and the fear is less,” he added. “We’ve lived like this for decades. We are totally sick of it. It’s time for it to go!”

Is it different this time? I ask him. “We don’t know,” he replies. “But now we have the US president behind us! This has never happened before. The regime can murder us, but it cannot take on America.”

He continues: “These bastards will fall eventually. Now maybe we have the best chance we ever did.”

Whether this latest unrest becomes just another chapter in Iran’s long history of dissent, or is indeed something genuinely transformative, still depends on the same unforgiving factors: geographical reach, social convergence, and elite fractures. But one thing is undeniable: the Iran story now has a new leading man, and it’s not an Iranian general, a mullah, or even a protester. It’s Donald Trump.

By opening The Hour of the Predator with this analogy, Giuliano da Empoli illuminates the forces that he believes are shaping our current moment. On the one hand, there are the figures of the vanishing status quo: the technocrats, and the institutions they created in the aftermath of the Second World War that, for all their flaws, brought eight decades of unparalleled prosperity and peace (in the West at least). Aztecs like Empoli himself, once a senior adviser to the former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi.

Facing them are the conquistadors, or as Empoli calls them, the “predators”: a new class of political leaders and tech oligarchs who thrive on instability, reject institutional constraints, and operate with the ruthlessness of renaissance usurpers. Men like Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, a company that builds data-analysis platforms and supplies the US defense and security establishment. 

Like Empoli, Karp is also an author and in his most recent work, The Technological Republic, published earlier this year, he argues that, we are living in an age where technological power is becoming synonymous with geopolitical power, and that nations which master the latest tech will dominate over those that don’t. Accordingly, Silicon Valley, he believes, has a duty to abandon its obsessive focus on consumer products and to collaborate more closely with government. Yet for Karp — and here’s the crux — the goal is a broader national renewal: this project should focus as much on culture as it does on technology. 

In Empoli and Karp, then, you respectively get the Aztec scribe and the conquistador: Empoli trying to record the end of a world as it slips beneath the waves; Karp sketching out the one destined to replace it.

For Empoli, the obsolescent old order is literalized in the desiccated figure of Joe Biden warbling away at that great post-war institution, the UN. Like the geriatric leaders at the end of the USSR, Biden seems to physically embody the establishment’s exhaustion as the “tired old grandfather” who has survived the Cold War only to see his foreign policy become “a pile of rubble”.

Here Empoli implicitly concedes that the status quo — or, as Dominic Cummings would have it, the “rotting ancien régime” — has been found wanting. The institutions and leaders that defined the post-1945 world were, in the end, unable to save us from a return of history.

What we are living through, Empoli argues, is not an aberration but a return to the historical mean. The temporary guardrails of the late 20th century — the independence of institutions, concern for minorities, fear of international repercussions — are being swept away. The evidence Empoli piles up is not new: we already know that the post-war taboo against using force to change borders was broken in 2014 when Vladimir Putin seized Crimea, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further drove this point home. War is back in fashion. Global military spending has jumped; nuclear arsenals that had been shrinking since the mid-Eighties are growing again. 

To make sense of this, Empoli reaches back to Machiavelli — to his idea of princely virtù (as opposed to “virtue”) as set down in The Prince and embodied by Cesare Borgia. For Machiavelli, Borgia was the usurper who showed how power could be seized and retained amid chaos. Today’s predators, Empoli’s “Borgians”, are those political and corporate actors who operate as if there were no limits at all. Faced with an obstacle, they merely reach for what Kremlin insiders now call the ruchnoe upravlenie: the “manual override”.

Procedures and hierarchies, law and bureaucracy: if they don’t yield the desired result, the Borgian leader simply bypasses them all. These acts constitute secular miracles, in the literal sense, as direct suspensions of the rules by a higher power. 

El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is a case in point of Borgian action without restraint. The self-styled “coolest dictator in the world” was elected at 37 to lead what was then the most violent country on Earth. His response was to effectively replace the penal code with a tattoo manual and order the army to arrest anyone marked with gang symbols. Some 80,000 people were swept into the new Tecoluca mega-prison — mostly gang members, but also the odd unfortunate rock fan with ill-chosen ink. Bukele, a former publicist, turned their humiliation viral: staging photoshoots of prisoners lined up on their knees, heads shaved, naked apart from boxer shorts — a Hunger Games spectacle for a TikTok generation. Human rights groups were appalled, but the homicide rate has now fallen tenfold. El Milagro Bukele (“The Bukele Miracle”) is celebrated across Latin America as a feat of Borgian action — of audacious ideas executed with remorseless speed.

The “predators”, according to Empoli, cannot tolerate any limits to their will to power, and so “lawyers” become their “natural enemies” – “the prey that must be devoured to allow this new world to flourish”. Everyone knew who was causing the crime in El Salvador; by bypassing due process Bukele cleaned his country up. If you already suspect that human rights lawyers, judges and “experts” exist to block the popular will, the Borgian who promises to override them starts to look attractive. Rules are no longer a guarantee of freedom but an elite conspiracy to keep you down. And if the law is one battleground for the Bukeles, Mileis and Trumps of the world, culture is another. Empoli argues that “wokeism” has been a “godsend” for them: it intensifies conflict, forces people to choose sides and punishes the undecided — exactly what Borgians want. Like the Ancient Greeks in the civil war, who stripped political rights from those who refused to fight, or Dante, who exiled the fence-sitters to the vestibule of hell, Borgians are the most afraid of the unaligned. Anything that deepens polarization is fuel for their chaos machine.

According to the “predators” — and they are not entirely wrong — the institutions that once underpinned the liberal order have been hollowed out by identity politics and woke pieties; culture has already been captured. This is where apex predator Alex Karp comes in, for whom cultural failure is a symptom of the rot of the old regime and its vulnerability to attack. 

Karp’s book, like Empoli’s then, is partly an elegy: it is rooted in a sense of civilizational loss.

Yet it is also a manifesto on how to bring about the “reconstitution” of a “technological republic”. This, Karp argues, requires a broader “reassertion of national culture and values”, and a revival of shared identity and purpose. Silicon Valley’s engineering elite, he argues, has an “affirmative obligation” to defend the nation and to ensure it does not fall behind in the new arms race. After all, our adversaries “will proceed with the development of artificial intelligence for the battlefield whether or not we do”. But they must also take on a new duty: to articulate “a renewed sense of collective purpose — what the country is, what its values are, and what it will stand for”. Without this, the gains of the “software century” will end up serving a narrow, insulated elite. Reconstitution. Reassertion. Make It Great Again.

Unlike most tech bros, Karp has the intellectual chops to back his argument up: a BA in philosophy, a PhD on “jargon, aggression, and culture”. He knows the terrain he attacks. For him, nothing better captures the malaise of the humanities than the afterlife of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which metastasized into a worldview that made the West an object of permanent moral suspicion. The culprit is clear: an elite whose “most pernicious weapon” is branding swathes of political opinion it disagrees with as lowbrow and uncouth, and which is responsible for national decline, largely because their ideas dominate the nation’s institutions — it’s Rudi Dutschke’s Long March in practice. But where someone like Steve Bannon dreams of a populist countermarch, Karp imagines the cavalry arriving from Palo Alto.

Yet so far, he argues, the tech class has abdicated its responsibilities. When they are not policing the “wording and tone” of chatbots, they rush to raise capital for video-sharing apps and social platforms that track and monetize our every move. But ask them to work with the US military and they balk. Why? Because they’ve absorbed the values now dominant in elite institutions, namely that “a lack of belief in anything, except oneself perhaps, is the most certain path to reward”.

The obvious rejoinder is that refusing to work for the defense industry can be grounded in strong ethical beliefs, especially in a post-Iraq and Afghanistan world, regardless of your patriotism. At the same time, Silicon Valley has built medical technologies and other tools that plainly improve lives. It can also, if it chooses, put its weight behind efforts to protect citizens from the state. After all, mistrust of government is about as American as it gets; it is why, we are endlessly told, they need all those guns.

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For Karp, though, the stakes are too high to indulge such scruples in the unforgiving world now facing the US and its allies. (Incidentally, that formulation “and its allies” always reads like a piece of stray code from a previous program, language from a more politic era now passing into history.) Before arguing about the justice or injustice of a policy, one must understand leverage — or lack of it — at the table. As Donald Trump famously told his Ukrainian counterpart: “You don’t have the cards”. This is Empoli’s Borgian world, the one where, as Hobbes put it, “covenants, without the sword, are but words.”

Both Karp and Empoli believe we are sliding into a dangerous new era of conflict; both think the victors of the last round have grown complacent just as the terrain tilts beneath them. Empoli calls politics a “forever war” in which intellectuals are mostly useless; Karp quotes Sallust on Roman youth “consumed by luxury and greed”, unwilling to serve the state — the “Hard Times Create Strong Men” meme for the Georgetown set.

For Karp, the “strong men” are not Romans but founders in Patagonia fleeces. The West’s adversaries, he says, are ruled by people “closer to founders” than politicians — leaders whose “fates and personal fortunes” are so intertwined with the nations they rule that they “behave as owners”, free to act quickly without checks and balances. Karp, a founder himself, notes that founder-led companies outperform consensus-driven ones. “Nothing much of substance, and certainly nothing lasting, will be created by committee,” he says. But what is democratic government if not a committee of elected officials? This is Empoli’s Borgian in full roar: the dominant urge is always to hit “manual override”.

For Empoli, AI  is the culmination of the Borgian age: a power no one fully understands but that everyone must live under. The tech overlords, uninterested in history or philosophy, fail to see they are resurrecting a pre-Enlightenment world of magic and mystery. We will pray to AI, Empoli says, as our ancestors prayed to the old gods. The French theologian François Fénelon once warned that humans cannot expect a superior power to remain moderate — a lesson, Empoli fears, that has been forgotten just as such a power has finally appeared on the horizon. Like the Borgians, AI ignores process; all that matters is success achieved by any means.

Karp is inevitably more sanguine, arguing instead that AI is underused in the West owing to institutional timidity and cultural self-loathing. For him, AI is almost Trotskyite in its application: seize the power station, not the town hall. Don’t reform the diseased bureaucracy; build the infrastructure that renders it irrelevant.

Empoli gives you the view from the crumbling palace steps of the old order: the sense of being overrun by powers you neither control nor understand. Karp writes from the engine room, arguing that tech founders have both the ability and, more importantly, an obligation to harness those powers. For Karp, Silicon Valley has a debt it owes society because of the“vast license over broad swaths of the economy” that they were granted. “What should the public ask for in exchange? Free email is not enough,” he says. The grim truth is that free email and cat reels were enough: if you had told me in the late Nineties, when I got my first mobile phone, that one day it would log every place I visited and every step I took, I’d have said that 1984 was upon us. Now I use those functions to track my calorie burn. The story of humanity is never how quickly we forget, but how quickly we acclimatize.

Trump’s second term may well become the story of Silicon Valley’s political ascent. Karp notes approvingly that not all founders are apolitical. Elon Musk entered government, straddling space policy, the green transition and the public square for a time. Since January, we have watched something close to founder-style governance: a president who reviles cultural orthodoxy, loathes bureaucracy and wants to make decisions unencumbered by committees. Musk is not American-born; he can never be president. Still, the precedent is set. If a founder does indeed one day become president, the alliance of the oligarchy and the executive will be complete. The boundary between the state and the forces it exists to check will disappear, and America will find itself governed by a single circuitry of power. It may well be too much for the republic to bear.

Read together, Empoli and Karp’s books form a composite x-ray. Empoli shows you the rotting bones of the liberal order and the silhouettes of the predators that have learned to live through it. Karp gives you the brain chemistry of one of those predators — anxious, self-justifying, sometimes admirably clear-eyed, sometimes half in love with the very forces he says oppose us, our “geopolitical adversaries” with their founder-leaders who act unencumbered by tedious committee and Get Stuff Done.

The conclusion is unmistakable. The conquistadors are already here. Some wear uniforms, some keffiyehs, some Silicon Valley t-shirts. Some write elegant little books urging us to save the republic. All are interested in who controls data, drones, and the new gods of AI. And, as Empoli warns and Karp makes clear, they no longer seek merely to influence the republic; they are preparing to replace it.

So far, he has said the right things, apparently trying to govern with pragmatism. But the reality is that the future of Syria does not lie with him — and his fellow Sunnis — alone. Syria’s minorities will help decide the nation’s fate as well, and none is as large or powerful as its Kurds. They, after all, are the only real force in the country outside Damascus that can put a disciplined army in the field: the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which was built in alliance with the United States to destroy ISIS. No less important, they control about 70% of Syria’s oil and gas reserves.

That blend of military and economic neatly explains why, if Syria is to survive as a viable state, Sharaa must find a way to accommodate its Kurdish minority, which even amid the upheavals of war and displacement represent roughly a tenth of the country’s total population. Combined with a gaggle of other minorities — Christians, Alawites, Druze — Syria simply cannot be the Sunni Caliphate that Sharaa once sought.

Still, many Kurds remain wary. In the cafés of Qamishli, the main city of the Syrian Kurdish region popularly known as Rojava, people joke that Sharaa’s beard may be shorter — but his prayers are the same. They want Syria to work. They need it to. But behind the dark humor lies genuine fear: that a man defined by jihad can never build the pluralist state necessary to keep Syria together.

No one understands these tensions better than Aldar Khalil. Officially, he is a senior member of the Executive Committee of the Democratic Society Movement in Rojava — the Kurdish-run autonomous region in Syria’s northeast — and its most powerful figure. In reality, he is its de facto leader. Whether or not the Syrian state can hold together will come down, in large part, to the decisions he and a few others around him take.

To meet Khalil, I leave Qamishli and travel through pale emptiness to the town of Hasakah. At checkpoints, Kurdish fighters in faded fatigues wave me through. We enter the city and eat. Night falls and we wait for news. It’s time: follow the black car, we are told. We end up in a municipal building of some kind. Prominently displayed on a wall is a photo of Abdullah Öcalan, founder of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) who’s been in a Turkish prison since 1999, and whose picture you see everywhere in Rojava. We sit in a large room with Kurdish carpets on the wall. Coffee and bottles of water are laid out for us.

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Khalil enters with his security detail. He wears beige trousers and a checked shirt. I notice that his left hand is missing. Later I ask why, but nobody really knows. One of my guides ventures that it might have something to do with a grenade, but that’s just speculation.

Khalil’s manner is polite, controlled, his voice almost soft. “People in Syria began the revolution hoping for a democratic system,” he says. “But after the regime collapsed, what came was in total opposition to that: a government that wants to take us back 1,400 years.” He means Sharaa. “This is someone with a very restrictive mind,” Khalil continues flatly. “You cannot expect someone like that to change. Maybe he changes his name or city, maybe he speaks differently for the media — but his beliefs stay the same.”

So can the Kurds deal with such a man? “We are Syrians,” Khalil replies. “Either we cede from Syria — and we have no plans for that — or we need to work with whoever is in Damascus, we have to deal with him. We are forced to negotiate.” What about clashes with Alawites on the coast, and with the Druze in Suweyda earlier this year, which both led to brief revivals of Syria’s sectarian slaughter? Does Khalil blame the government for those? “Of course we blame the government.”

Khalil’s own vision is simple: a decentralized Syria, each community managing itself, united by loose federal ties. Fail, he warns, and the country will slide back into civil war, not just in Rojava but “everywhere in Syria”. Not that Damascus is the only threat to Rojava’s future. It was Turkey, after all, that armed and bankrolled Sharaa’s overthrow of Assad at the end of last year, and which has considerable sway with Damascus now. This also poses a considerable problem for Rojava, whose Kurdish forces President Erdogan sees simply as the Syrian version of the PKK — which it considers to be a terror group responsible for tens of thousands of deaths in its mountainous southeast.

“Recently we have had several meetings in Damascus with the Syrian government,” Khalil tells me. “But unfortunately, after every meeting, Damascus promises to form committees to work on integration and then, immediately afterwards, Turkey steps in to impede the process. At the moment, we have two delegations waiting to see what will happen next, because Turkey keeps undermining the negotiations.”

I leave Khalil and step into the night. The traffic is heavy. Concrete minarets stand tall in the gloom. The next morning I’m back on the road again. The sun is climbing high, flattening everything into gold and white. I drive near Qamishli airport, and, to my right, the Turkish border scars the horizon. Every few kilometers, a watchtower stands looking across. To my left, a Russian flag flaps limply over an armored compound.

It’s a physical reminder of the perennial role of outsiders here. Before I arrived, a regional expert explained the situation to me by way of analogy. “Think of Syria as a condominium,” he said. “Russia owns the walls, America the roof, and Turkey has the keys. Everyone else rents the space inside.”

He was exaggerating for effect, but I now see what he means. Everywhere I look in Rojava, there are signs of this uneasy balance: Russian soldiers buy bread from Kurdish stalls; American engineers fix irrigation pumps; Turkish drones strike sporadically. It’s a useful reminder of how crucial this region remains: Moscow still needs Damascus to keep its port on the Mediterranean, while Iran wants a corridor to the sea once more and the United States, half-hearted and weary, stays only to contain the remnants of ISIS.

To understand what this might mean for the Kurds, I meet Fawza Yusuf, co-chair of the Autonomous Administration’s Executive Council. Composed and cheerful, she heads the delegation that meets with Damascus, which is to say she’s the woman now negotiating the fate of Syria for the Kurds. Like Khalil, meanwhile, she stresses the importance of negotiating with the new regime in Damascus. “From the start we believed the only way is peace, dialogue, and negotiation,” she explains. “We must talk to Damascus directly — there is no other path.”

It is the language of a negotiator who understands both the limits and the possibilities of her position. “We have fought enough wars,” Yusuf continues, sipping black tea. “Now we need a country where our children can live.” Yet — and again like Khalil — she’s skeptical of Sharaa’s intentions. “Their policy is anti-democratic,” she says. “They still don’t recognize others. But we continue working.”

What she means by “working” is critical, both to the Kurds and Damascus, and it includes the slow-motion integration of the SDF into the national army. You cannot run an effective state unless you have a monopoly on the use of force, which comes through having sole control of its only army. The Kurds, for their part, accept this, albeit on their own terms. “We agreed with Damascus that we will join the Syrian army — but not as individuals,” she says. “We will join as brigades: the SDF will become three brigades in the national army and remain stationed here.”

The SDF gives Rojava leverage — up to a point. The force numbers roughly perhaps 70,000 fighters, most of them veterans hardened by years of war with ISIS. They’re battle-tested, and disciplined in light-infantry and counterinsurgency tactics, but lack heavy armor, air defense, and artillery. In open battle, then, they’d be little match for Damascus’s army or Russian airpower. Yet in their own territory – the plains and towns of the northeast – they could bleed any invading force through guerrilla warfare and local support.

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It is a clever sort of compromise: ostensible unity, but without surrender, even as Yusuf herself evokes a “decentralized” Syria going forward. Yet with many in Damascus seeing federalism as the short end of a secessionist wedge, optimism is perhaps harder in practice. Rhetorically, certainly, Sharaa is unequivocal about the need for a united Syria. “We must preserve national unity and civil peace as much as possible,” he said on 25 February, during the opening speech of the Syrian National Dialogue Conference in Damascus.

And if a Turkish-backed Sharaa is one worry for Yusuf, another foreign power looms large over Syria too. Israeli aircraft have long been a presence in the night skies, striking weapons depots from Damascus to Deir ez-Zor, sometimes near the oil fields the Kurds control. A weak, divided Syria suits Israel’s security. While Iran’s land bridge to Hezbollah fell with Assad, the Israelis want to ensure that Iranian militias cannot burrow their way into the nascent post-Assad state.

But Israel and the Kurds have much in common. Both perennial outsiders in a largely Sunni Arab Middle East, they have survived by living on the edge, sustained by vigilance. They have collaborated in the past, and, for many of the Kurds here, Israel is a model of the type of muscular independence they seek.

Yet the Israeli model the Kurds quietly admire – a small, embattled state that survived by building institutions, intelligence networks and deterrent power – offers both inspiration and illusion. Israel’s strength came from coherent leadership, outside backing, and a shared national narrative. The Kurds, by contrast, remain divided between rival parties and foreign patrons. Emulating Israel’s vigilance is one thing; reproducing its fortress statehood in the middle of Arab Syria is quite another.

There are other dangers in being seen as Israel’s proxy. The Druze of southern Syria learned that lesson when their perceived ties to Tel Aviv turned them into targets for both foreign jihadists and the Damascus regime. For the Kurds, then, any open alignment with Israel risks uniting Ankara, Tehran, and Damascus against them: a trinity of enemies they can hardly afford. Their survival, as ever, depends on balancing between powers without becoming the pawn of any.

And if Syria’s future depends on Rojava — secession would certainly wreck the country’s economy, and perhaps even rekindle the civil war’s ethnic butchery — the whole region hinges on it too. If Rojava unravels, after all, Lebanon’s sectarian truce could collapse; Iraq’s Kurdish-Arab balance might crack; Turkey would face renewed insurgency; Iran would push its militias deeper west. If Syria’s fate still depends on foreign powers, then, those same foreign powers are bound to Syria too — whether at the White House or closer to home.

On the Day of Atonement, the ghosts of history, never far from the collective Jewish consciousness, loom especially large. 52 years ago, in October 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack as the Jewish state prayed. Two years ago, in October 2023, Hamas butchers stormed out of Gaza, slaughtering, burning and abducting civilians. Repentance, memory, tragedy: all are intertwined now, and the silence over the city feels pregnant with foreboding.

But then, out of nowhere, bicycles appear: children racing fast and free down a city hollowed out, the echo of wheels on asphalt bouncing off tower blocks and Bauhaus apartments. Adolescent squawks of delight peel through the calm. For the young, at least, the streets have become a playground.

On 30 September, deep into the 10 “Days of Awe” between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, tawdry reality intruded on Israeli life yet again, as Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu unveiled their 20-point peace plan. Whatever you think of Trump, it must be welcomed. Two years on from October 7, two things are painfully obvious. The first is that Gaza cannot remain an open-air prison or battlefield forever. Something, anything, is needed to sketch out a future beyond reprisal and rubble. The second is that, like him or not, Trump remains the only leader with the power to corral Netanyahu, raise the necessary funds, and, if needed, impose the international consensus to bring peace about.

Here in Israel, meanwhile, government and opposition figures alike are trying to understand what exactly is being proposed and whether or not it can work. What is clear is that the plan is pitched both as an ending and a beginning. It proposes the eradication of Hamas rule, the installation of a new technocratic authority in Gaza, an international stabilization force to hold the ground, and an influx of foreign reconstruction money. Israel is to gradually withdraw its forces, albeit with security guarantees. Gaza will be demilitarized, its reconstruction contingent on continuing calm.

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The promise, then, is stark. No more October 7ths, no more dawn massacres, no more rockets into southern Israel. But what the plan includes is only half the story: what it omits matters too. Nowhere, for instance, does it define Palestinian sovereignty, nor does it explain the future of the West Bank or Jerusalem. It offers no timetable, no firm enforcement, no clarity on who pays for or implements what. And who, exactly, will make up the international force envisaged to keep the peace? Israel’s Arab neighbors will do pretty much anything to avoid sending soldiers into Gaza. Egypt cannot forget its bloody entanglement in Gaza in the Fifties and Sixties; Jordan’s king fears domestic blowback from his mostly Palestinian population.

As for the Europeans, they may provide training or money, but are hardly likely to send young men to police Gaza’s winding alleyways, not to mention its maze of tunnels. And even if a force is cobbled together, can Israel really afford to relinquish meaningful control? Last time it did, when Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it was rewarded with barrage after barrage of Hamas rockets.

Despite these uncertainties, every Israeli knows Netanyahu had little choice but to stand with Trump, smiling tautly, as the plan was unveiled. After two years of killing, and with his own corruption trial grinding through the courts, he needs America more than ever: to provide him with weapons shipments and financial guarantees, to say nothing of diplomatic protection at the United Nations. Accepting Trump’s plan also offers him a shot at redemption at home, a chance to recast himself not as the politician who let October 7 happen, but as the statesman who delivered Israel from endless war. It is a gamble, but then Netanyahu has always been a gambler.

Netanyahu, of course, is only one player among many. First there are Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, his far-Right coalition partners, who both view the plan as a betrayal. International forces, a reformed Palestinian Authority, the mere suggestion of a Palestinian political entity — all are anathema to their messianic worldview. As one senior opposition source tells me, “they thought this war could lead to annexation, even resettling parts of Gaza. This plan destroys that dream.”

But politics is politics, even for religious fanatics. Both men, once politically ascendant, are now in trouble. Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party is polling beneath the threshold for re-entry to parliament, while Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power has seen its popularity collapse after two years of death. For both men, then, continuing to prop up Netanyahu is the only way they can stay in power. “They will rail against the plan,” my source says, “but they are unlikely to collapse the government of their dreams.”

There’s another political dimension here too. The centrists Netanyahu spent years demonizing now offer his best chance of survival. Opposition leader Yair Lapid has already promised a parliamentary safety net, pledging to support the peace plan if Netanyahu’s coalition partners bolt. “We will not let this government be held hostage by extremists,” Lapid has said. It is a rare flash of consensus in a country so divided.

You can spot this consensus elsewhere too. The afternoon before Yom Kippur, in the polished anonymity of a Tel Aviv office block, I met with Yossi Cohen, the former director of Mossad. Famous for his perfect Lebanese Arabic, Cohen is the man who oversaw the theft of Iran’s nuclear archive and the assassination of the chief of its nuclear program. He also negotiated the Abraham Accords, which saw Israel strike normalization agreements with four Arab states.

“Trump, Netanyahu, Jared Kushner and his team, Middle Eastern leaders like Sheikh Zayed and states like Egypt are all in support of the plan,” Cohen explains. “I think this is the right thing to do. The war should only end once all the hostages are home, and what we’ll then see is not the end of conflict, but the end of this war. But I’m very much in favor of the plan.”

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Beyond security elites and the rough and tumble of the Knesset, what of regular Israelis? There is clearly huge appetite for a resolution to the Gaza horrorshow, both for the sake of the hostages, and, in some quarters anyway, for that of the Palestinians. But though polls show a majority of people here support a peace plan in principle, few believe it can be carried out. For years, after all, the two-state solution had majority support in Israel. But when people were asked if they thought it was not only desirable, but actually possible, that majority vanished.

For Trump himself, the calculation is less complicated. He wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and believes that he alone can bring seemingly unsolvable wars to an end. It’s central to his self-image as the dealmaker who can tame chaos and conjure peace where others only managed stalemate.

In the end, though, the Israelis and their American friends are only one side of this. And if the plan is awkward for Netanyahu’s coalition, it threatens to be suicidal for Hamas. It strips away their power, negates their ideology, and installs rival Arab actors in their place. How can its leadership possibly accept it?

When I met Cohen I asked him why Hamas would voluntarily agree to extinguish itself as the power in Gaza. Few, if any, in modern times have more experience of battling Israel’s enemies than him; and no one has greater experience of negotiating with those who once implacably, ideologically, opposed the Jewish state. “Pressure,” he replied. “When international bodies come in and Hamas realizes it cannot survive, and when its citizens in the streets turn against them, saying, ‘We can’t live properly under Hamas control,’ they may have no choice.”

Hamas isn’t the only Arab entity to have problems with the plan. For if Egypt and Jordan are reluctant to get embroiled in ruling the ruins of Gaza, other Middle Eastern governments will also hesitate to bankroll the Strip’s reconstruction without progress toward Palestinian sovereignty: which the plan deftly avoids. In this political climate, Saudi Arabia, courted by Washington for a grand normalization deal with Israel, will be unwilling to attach its prestige to a scheme that sidesteps Palestinian political rights. The Emirates and Qatar might contribute, but on their own terms.

Meanwhile Israel’s Doha strike earlier in the year – an operation that Cohen defended as a necessary signal – alarmed the Gulf. “We struck Doha not to interfere with Qatar’s role in the hostage deal,” Cohen tells me, “but to send a clear message: there is nowhere in the world terrorists can be immune.” The Prime Minister later apologized to Qatar’s emir for the civilian victims of the strike, but the episode underscored just how fragile regional consensus remains.

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All the same, Cohen remains bullish on expanding the Abraham Accords to Saudi Arabia. “Peace is always more important than war,” he says. “As a veteran of wars, I know this. I fought all my life — as a teenager in Lebanon, later against our enemies across the world. But it is worthwhile to build peace treaties. The Saudi track should continue.” His words echo Trump’s ambition to frame the Gaza plan as part of something larger, a step toward tying Israel and Sunni Arab powers into a common bloc.

Inevitably, Iran looms in the background. Cohen describes the recent conflict with Tehran as “one very important chapter in a long saga.” He recalls Israel’s strikes on enrichment facilities and air defense systems, delivered over the course of just a few hours: “We disrupted, destroyed, dismantled,” he says. Whether that deters Tehran permanently is another matter, but his point is clear: Israel sees Gaza not in isolation but as part of a continuum of threats, and any peace plan is measured against that strategic horizon.

Amid all this geopolitics and the realpolitik and the violence, the yearning for peace endures. In the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Jaffa, I see Arab men sitting on plastic chairs by the road, smoking and laughing. I see Israeli couples along the beach front doing the same. A political solution, however faint, must exist to bring these two sides together.

On Friday evening, Hamas’s response to the peace proposal came. The terror group has agreed in principle to release all remaining Israeli hostages — both living and dead — in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. It has also accepted the idea of transferring Gaza’s governance to technocrats. But it has not agreed to disarm; and its statement suggests it still wants a role in Gaza’s future.

While Trump responded positively, Netanyahu has not; he understandably insists he cannot accept any proposal that leaves Hamas armed. Added to which, over the weekend, several senior Hamas leaders stated that the group  would not be pushed out of Gaza and rejected absolutely any idea of an international force in the strip and a transitional administration

For now, then, a deal remains out of reach, and all sides remain stuck. The Israelis want to believe peace is possible but have been let down  too often before. Palestinians, for their part, want liberation, not endless foreign rule. Arab states want stability, but not at the cost of their legitimacy. America wants closure, but cannot guarantee it. For the moment, then, all sides remain stuck. Netanyahu’s promise of “no more October 7ths” is resonant; the reality of Hamas’s endurance, far-Right intransigence, and Arab skepticism all seem inescapable. Netanyahu clings to both power and Trump; Trump clings to his self-image of the peacemaker. Hamas clings to its guns and its desire for power. And ordinary Israelis and Palestinians cling to the hope that this time things might be different.

In and of itself, this is extraordinary. For decades, the recognition of formal Palestinian statehood was held out as a reward for a final treaty between the two sides. Now, though, the message to Israel (and indeed the United States) is unmistakable: the old orthodoxy has failed, and recognition is now not the prize for peace, but a tool to obtain it.

Complicating it all — as always in the most mediated and fraught conflict since 1945 — is emotion: on both sides. On the one hand, everyone from Hamas to the Green Party is delighted. On the other, the Israeli government, Jewish diaspora communities, and those rightly fearful of Islamist terror, are enraged, arguing that the move rewards Hamas for its barbarism on October 7.

For his part, Keir Starmer was at fastidious pains to deny this was the case. “Hamas is a brutal terror organization,” he said. “This solution is not a reward for Hamas… Because it means Hamas can have no future. No role in government. No role in security.” Either way, his move was inevitable. The cumulative toll of Israel’s campaign — tens of thousands of dead, alongside the absence of any realistic plan to end the war and indeed Benjamin Netanyahu’s explicit opposition to Palestinian statehood — has had its effect.

In this sense, it’s clear that recognition is a rebuke of Israel more than an expression of unqualified support for Palestine. Though other Western countries from Sweden (in 2014) to Ireland (in 2024) had already gone down this path, London, Ottawa and Canberra all held out. This was partly due to strong relations with Jerusalem, especially on security coordination, as well as a desire not to upset the United States.

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But with the US still against recognition, and Israel intransigent, the three middle powers decided this was the time to move. Sources tell me that the Government feels that recognition may be the only leverage they have left to try and change Israeli behavior on the ground.

Then, of course, is the question of domestic politics. For Labour voters, Palestine is not just a cause célèbre: it is a hugely effective mobilizing tool. They want action. And with sectarian issues now front and center for parts of the Muslim vote, and indeed costing Labour parliamentary seats, it’s no surprise that the party has moved to shore up its Left flank.

That said, it’s important to understand what recognition does and doesn’t — do. In the end, there is no escaping the fact that the state of Palestine is simply not a reality on the ground. Gaza is a war zone; the West Bank is ruthlessly contested. For now, recognition is solely a legal and political act. It won’t create mutually agreed borders, kick out settlers, and rid both the Israelis and the Palestinians of Hamas. Nor does it end the war or solve Israel’s legitimate security concerns.

Recognition does, however, do three concrete things. First, it formalizes Palestine’s diplomatic relationships with the rest of the world. Embassies replace missions; ambassadors present credentials. That matters for everyday statecraft: aid, trade, consular issues, and the slow, tedious work of institution-building.

Second, it reframes the conflict politically. By declaring Palestine a state, these three governments must now judge Israeli actions not merely through the lens of counterterrorism and occupation, but also inter-state norms. More robust pressure around the recognition of borders based on 1967 lines will follow — as will intensified scrutiny of settlement expansion, and more explicit linkage between Israeli policy and Western support.

Third, recognition pressures the Palestinians. Officials from London and Canberra alike know that recognition without reform will go nowhere. But by recognizing Palestine now, there is a political (and moral) imperative on its officials to ensure that it begins to function like one.

This will require two changes above all else. First, a decisive break with the tactics of October 7. Many Palestinians — and millions of their supporters globally — are desperate to relativize a massacre that was undoubtedly a crime against humanity. A leadership that cannot take an unequivocal stance against such violence must forfeit the support of the very states now recognizing it.

Second, Palestine needs serious governance reform: both in the West Bank and Gaza. The antisemitic school curricula; the Palestinian Authority’s “pay to slay” policy of making payments to the families of those killed or wounded during terror attacks; not to mention the widespread Islamist and jihadist presence across both territories — all this must go. A technocratic interim leadership, with a mandate to unify the security services and hold proper elections, is the minimum diplomats must demand in exchange for recognition.

That is currently impossible, what with a murderous Hamas and a corrupt and sclerotic Palestinian Authority. Britain, Australia and Canada will therefore now need to pour cash and various other forms of support, designed to both build and increase institutional capacity into the nascent state.

Israel’s response to all this has been predictably furious. Netanyahu and those around him feel that Hamas is being rewarded for October 7. According to a Netanyahu spokesperson, the Israeli prime minister’s message to nations recognizing Palestine is that “the people of Israel aren’t going to commit suicide because of the political needs of European politics.”

While Netanyahu lashes out, Israeli opposition figures blame him for what has happened. In a tweet, Yair Golan, leader of The Democrats Party, said that recognition was a “direct result of Netanyahu’s political abandonment: refusal to end the war and the dangerous choice of occupation and annexation.”

But Israel’s problems run deeper than internal dissension. I have seen, first hand from on the ground, how the country’s choices since October 7 have been driven by trauma. From the very beginning, the operational logic to destroy Hamas collided with humanitarian catastrophe, the absence of a plan and a nation’s collective anguish.

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The longer Israel fights without a credible political solution, the more it loses the goodwill of those it needs most: the Arab states who signed normalization to better contain Iran; the Europeans who defended its right to self-defense; and even parts of the Pentagon security establishment that have stuck with it for so long.

UK government sources have repeatedly made one thing clear to me in recent weeks. Recognition, they explain, is a warning from friends: security without politics produces only perpetual war and international isolation.

Israel also has another problem. Recognition happened despite US objections. Traditionally, the Anglosphere follows Washington on Israel-Palestine. But yesterday, it didn’t, a divergence that says two things. First: the Gaza war has disordered not just Middle Eastern but Western politics. Western leaders are recalibrating their positions in light of domestic opinion and international law. Second: the US monopoly over the Israel-Palestine “peace process” is gone. If Washington cannot or will not propose a credible pathway, others will try to improvise one, and publicly too.

Critics question why, if the UK, Australia and Canada were really so determined to put recognition on the table, they couldn’t at least dangle it as a prize for releasing the hostages. They also argue that recognition rewards intransigence: that it will embolden maximalists on both sides. Some of this will prove true. Israeli far-Right ministers are already spouting annexationist rhetoric; hardline Palestinian factions will claim the world has moved their way without the need for genuine concessions. And, of course, a Donald Trump who feels snubbed may offer yet more support to Netanyahu out of pure spite.

But those who support recognition will feel justified in arguing that the status quo led only in one direction: further West Bank annexation, more Gaza bloodshed, and decades more conflict. In the end, then, recognition is not a peace plan: but a stratagem to force one. The gamble, and it is a big one, is that it’ll finally force the Palestinians to accept serious, political and ideological reform — and Israelis to accept that perpetual war and endless occupation are not strategies worth pursuing. Whether or not it is realistic, this is now the policy. And, for the sake of both sides, we must hope it works.

It was the first time Israel has struck on Qatari soil, and, more than just shrapnel, its missiles carried two messages. The first is that Israel’s war with Hamas is now global. For decades, Hamas’s political bureau has operated from Qatar, tolerated by the United States, Europe, and indeed Israel, with Doha a useful channel for diplomacy. Hamas could plot, posture, and negotiate in five-star hotels while Israeli bombs flattened Gaza. The fiction was that these men, in their Gulf exile, could be treated differently from those directing the war on the ground.

By attacking Doha, Israel has made clear that this distinction is now a delusion. Yet, if anything, the second message is even more controversial. The men Israel tried to kill were reviewing Washington’s latest ceasefire proposal. By hitting them mid-discussion, it has therefore made the peace process itself a target. Israel has long raged at the diplomatic scaffolding that keeps Hamas at the table; the Doha strike is a challenge not just to Hamas but to the very architecture of mediation that has sustained the brief pauses in the Gaza war.

The strike could be a warning to get on with things, to accept the deal on offer. Let’s not forget that on 7 September, Donald Trump posted a clear warning on Truth Social: “The Israelis have accepted my Terms,” he said. “It is time for Hamas to accept as well. I have warned Hamas about the consequences of not accepting. This is my last warning, there will not be another one!”

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But after the strike, Trump’s tone was markedly different. He was, he insisted, “very unhappy about every aspect”. Whether or not he means this genuinely, he certainly needs to say it. Qatar is home to Al Udeid airbase, the largest US military facility in the region, and it’s central to America’s strategy in the Middle East. To allow Israel to bomb Qatar’s capital without clear condemnation is politically dangerous. On the other hand, neither can the White House afford to rupture ties with Israel, which gives Washington a strong foothold in the Middle East, and provides huge benefits in terms of access to military innovation and Israeli intelligence. Because of all this, Washington crouches awkwardly, half-ally, half-broker, trying to placate both sides while still playing mediator with Hamas.

For Hamas itself, the strike obviously is a big problem. As well as enjoying Doha’s hotels, prostitutes and offshore banking facilities, its leaders could also fundraise, spit propaganda, and participate in negotiations without any immediate threat of assassination. That’s over. And if they are not safe in Qatar, where are they safe?

The international response, meanwhile, has been swift and furious. UN Secretary General António Guterres called it a “flagrant breach” of international law, accusing Israel of deliberately undermining a diplomatic process in which Qatar had been playing a constructive role. Turkey went further, branding the attack “state terrorism”. Even Germany declared it “unacceptable”.

As for Qatar, Israel’s attack is almost personal. No wonder it denounced yesterday’s events as a “cowardly violation” of its sovereignty. Its role as mediator rested on a delicate balance: tolerated by the West, trusted by Hamas. Israel has just violated, if not ended, that neutrality. This is the new logic of escalation. The world is now a battleground; diplomacy cannot be used as a cover for impunity.

And if yesterday’s attack cut to the heart of global diplomatic norms, the broader consequences could be severe. The Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab states, were already under strain thanks to the bloodbath in Gaza. Arab leaders who signed them must now explain to their people why they stand alongside a state willing to bomb a Gulf capital. That said, as Jonathan Spyer, director of research at the Middle East Forum, observes, Qatar is not a participant in the Abraham Accords and indeed is an enemy of the UAE and Saudi Arabia in everything but name.

For Spyer, then, the logic here is clear. “Israel is at war with Hamas, because of the Hamas massacre of 1,200 Israelis in 2023,” he says. “Hamas just claimed responsibility for a murderous terror attack in Jerusalem. Qatar domiciles the Hamas leadership and plays a double game — facilitating Hamas activities and then presenting itself as a mediator.” Given all this, Spyer adds, it’s unsurprising that Israel should have attacked Hamas’s Doha leaders once it had the necessary intelligence and military capacity.

Yet ceasefire negotiations, however flawed, were one of the few lifelines in a war that has already killed tens of thousands. By bombing Hamas leaders’ mid-discussion, Israel may hollow out the space for diplomacy. If, after all, mediators can no longer guarantee the safety of participants, then what mediator will host talks? And without talks, the war grinds on, with no end in sight.

Hamas will now seek to turn the dead into martyrs, brandishing them to the world as proof that Israel is the enemy of peace. For its part, Israel did not kill the men it sought. But it has made clear that it is prepared to carry its fight wherever it deems necessary, regardless of diplomatic conventions.

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One of the clearest agents of change over the last decade has been the repeated erasure of political norms. In the West’s domestic politics, Donald Trump, Brexit and the rise of populism have torn up so much of what we once thought was politically immutable. Similar trends are clear internationally too. When the Iranians first struck Israel directly, in April 2024, people scoffed at the lack of damage it did. But I did not: I knew that the norm of direct Iran-Israeli confrontation was shattered. More direct conflict would ensue and so it did. Last night, yet another international norm — you don’t touch the GCC — has vanished too.

Sometimes we move from one era to another in a single event: think of 9/11 or the fall of the Berlin Wall. Generally, though, we do so more gradually, as the political and ideological scaffolding that held it in place slowly disintegrates. That seems to be happening here, as we move from our “Long Age of Peace” to what increasingly looks like “An Age of War”.

From the Israeli perspective, anyway, the imperative is clear: to move beyond an era defined by relentless terror attacks and perpetual conflict toward something resembling security. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has staked his legacy on a gamble: that overwhelming strength, and the repeated destruction of Israel’s enemies, can achieve what diplomacy with Hamas has not. Much of Western Europe, and the world’s international institutions, continue to insist that negotiations must be given space, that “de-escalation” is the only viable path. Israel, though, looks to its record of its hard-power gambles, from the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah to the extraordinary pagers operation, that have paid dividends both domestically and regionally.

Yesterday was yet one more gamble, perhaps Israel’s most dangerous so far. Now we will have to wait and see: if the international institutions and diplomatic norms of the postwar political settlement remain, or whether we are truly into a new epoch, in which to flourish, and indeed to win, states must now abide by an altogether new set of brutal political norms.

Despite his association with the Victorian era, Disraeli came of age during the Regency period. Born in 1804, he was steeped in Blake and Beethoven and all the other Romantics. Later, of course, he created the modern Conservative Party, yet he is arguably most famous now for being the only Jewish prime minister this country has had. Metaphorically, then, Disraeli did remove, or at least move, mountains. And as a Romantic, and a novelist to boot, he did so by using his imagination to self-fashion an identity that gave him the confidence, the “firm persuasion”, that a middle-class Jew needed to lead a resolutely Christian Tory party.

No book is better on this aspect of Disraeli than Adam Kirsch’s 2008 biography, which taught me two things. First, that a degree of self-mythologization is probably necessary for most worldly success, and unequivocally fundamental to political success. Second, that this process is primarily an imaginative undertaking, which is why a contemporary American literary critic could write so illuminatingly about a 19th-century British prime minister.

Early on, Kirsch notes how formative the exotic, Romantic figure of Lord Byron was for the young Disraeli. After leaving his unremarkable London school, Disraeli tried out a career in law, but gave it up for reasons articulated by the protagonist of his first novel Vivian Grey, who muses (probably correctly) that “to be a great lawyer, I must give up my chance of being a great man.” He then embarked on a Grand Tour, following Byron’s footsteps to Spain, Malta, Albania and Greece. His path was set: a Byronic life of Romantic action over bourgeois stability.

From the beginning, Disraeli’s imagination powered both his literary and political career. And it soon became obvious that letters alone would never satisfy him. As he wrote in his novel Contarini Fleming, “Would you rather have been Homer or Julius Caesar, Shakespeare or Napoleon? No one doubts.”

These words are spoken by Contarini’s father, but Disraeli was making the argument for himself. And this is the point. More than literary endeavors, his novels were the arena in which he worked his as yet incoherent theories — often contradictory and occasionally nonsensical — into a worldview that gave him the psychological basis for action. It is no coincidence that his greatest contribution to political thought, the development of One-Nation Conservatism, was articulated not in a political tract but in his novel Sybil.

The young Disraeli dabbled in get-rich-quick schemes that inevitably resulted in catastrophic debts that dogged him for decades. He also suffered a nervous breakdown that laid him up for two years. This period of Disraeli’s life again recalls Byron, who once wrote of “the lava of the imagination whose eruption prevents an earthquake.” To make matters worse, Disraeli also suffered public humiliation when it was revealed that the anonymous “man of fashion” who authored Vivian Grey, supposedly an insider’s account of high society, was in fact 21 years old, middle-class and — perhaps worst of all for Victorian England — a Jew.

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Through all of this, Disraeli still lacked a goal toward which he could channel his vast abilities, especially his imagination. Whether through books or politics, its lava had to erupt, or else he would continue to suffer earthquakes of the mind. Most powerfully cathartic for Disraeli, Kirsch argues, was confronting his Jewishness, which was both “the greatest obstacle to his ambition and its greatest engine”. The adult Disraeli was technically not a Jew: following a minor row with Bevis Marks Synagogue, his father, the gentle and scholarly Isaac Disraeli, had Benjamin baptized into the Church of England at the age of 12. It was a fit of pique that changed history. The right to sit in Parliament still required an MP to take an oath “upon the true faith of a Christian” (and would until the 1858 Jews Relief Act some 20 years after Disraeli first became an MP).

Despite his baptism, Disraeli’s Jewishness remained the central, unignorable fact about him. With his “olive complexion and coal-black eyes, and the mighty dome of his forehead (no Christian temple, be sure),” one contemporary remarked, “I would as soon have thought of sitting down at table with Hamlet, or Lear, or the Wandering Jew.” (And when people weren’t remarking on his Jewishness, it was his Mediterranean background). It didn’t matter that Disraeli had been converted, his very name screamed Jew — and it would anyway have been unthinkable to deny what he was. As Kirsch observes, “self-contempt was alien to his nature.” Disraeli’s preferred formulation was to claim that while his religion was Christian, his race was Jewish.

Nonetheless, he remained caught between two models of Jewishness in the English mind: the bloodthirsty, avaricious Shylock, and the grubby street peddler. These quasi-medieval tropes persisted because most British people at this time would never even meet a Jew. The community numbered around only about 25,000, concentrated mainly in London, as well as in provincial cities like Liverpool and Manchester. It was dominated by a mostly Sephardic elite descended from families who had fled Iberia in the 16th and 17th centuries, alongside a smaller Ashkenazi population of Central and Eastern European origin. The Sephardic community into which Disraeli was born was privileged. Largely middle-class, it engaged in trade, finance, and the professions, and was socially integrated to a degree uncommon for Jews elsewhere in Europe.

But legal disabilities and social prejudice persisted. Disraeli’s response, with characteristic chutzpah, was to create a third model. He simply claimed that his Sephardic Jewish family traced its roots back to ancient Phoenician settlers in Iberia who predated even the Norman barons of 1066. No mere merchants, Spanish Jews were landowners, as proven by a decree from the Emperor Constantine. This founding myth of Jewish noble lineage would justify Disraeli’s eventual adoption of a heraldic coat of arms complete with “Tower of Castille” crest.

It was, of course, a pile of old hogwash. There is no evidence that the Disraelis even came from Spain. Kirsch notes that as far as is traceable, the family came from the town of Cento in the Papal States; further back, they likely hailed from the Middle East. But it didn’t matter. What mattered is that this fiction provided Disraeli with the psychological armor to withstand a life of ceaseless antisemitic attacks. In 1835, when the Irish leader Daniel O’Connell attacked Disraeli for his Jewish heritage in the House of Commons, Disraeli’s response was unhesitating. “Yes, I am a Jew,” he replied, “and while the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”

All the while, Disraeli the outsider became an acute observer of the British class system. So completely did he understand how ancestral pride drove the aristocratic establishment running the Tory Party that he was eventually able to lead it. Not that anyone could really begrudge him inventing a pedigree when everyone else was at it too. Disraeli described the process simply: make a pile in banking, buy a peerage and throw a “halo of imagination” over “a humble or obscure origin.” Like Orwell, he understood that the English aristocracy was never a purely hereditary class but one constantly replenished by parvenus.

Disraeli’s own “halo of imagination” was able to transmute his Jewishness from a potential source of shame into a source first of pride and then of nobility. So powerful were Disraeli’s dreams of Jewish prestige and power that, at one point, they included fictionalized fantasies of restoring Jewish sovereignty to Palestine. Kirsch places two of his novels, Alroy and Tancred, alongside George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in the proto-Zionist canon. But these ideas remained fantasies. For Disraeli, as for Alroy, to become the “patriarch of a pastoral horde” in an Ottoman province was no substitute for leading the world’s great power. Like Blake, Disraeli would build Jerusalem here at home.

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Disraeli characteristically outlined his fantasies of Jewish success through his fiction — personified in the form of Sidonia. An international eminence grise who moves between parliaments and royal courts, Sidonia knows everyone and makes everything happen, albeit behind the scenes. Impossibly intelligent, sophisticated, and, in true Romantic style, jaded, Sidonia appears as a secondary character in Coningsby, Sybil, and Tancred.

As Kirsch observes, Disraeli intended Sidonia to be a “figure of great power and glamour.” But Disraeli’s wish fulfillment about domestic Jewish success was ultimately incontinent. As magnetic as he is, Sidonia is also an antisemitic stereotype: the unseen, controlling Jew whose tentacles are everywhere.

Great power and glamour were, though, what Disraeli wanted for his own life, and for this he had to reconcile his Jewishness with being a practicing Christian, which required yet more imaginative sophistry. As ever, he worked it out first in his fiction. As an Anglican priest argues in the novel Sybil, “the second Testament is avowedly only a supplement… Christianity is completed Judaism, or it is nothing”. The meaning, here, was clear. “I am the blank page between the Old Testament and the New,” Disraeli later asserted. Theologically suspect it may have been, but Kirsch explains how “psychologically necessary” it was for Disraeli to “pull off the delicate balancing act required of a Jew seeking to lead a Christian nation.”

And lead it he did. Serving as Prime Minister from February to December 1868, and again from 1874 to 1880, Disraeli was always willing to refashion himself for political purposes. In the 1840s, he made his name as the champion of the Tory landed interest against Sir Robert Peel’s repealing of the Corn Laws. Yet when he gained real power, in the 1850s, he quietly accepted free trade as irreversible, shelving attempts to restore tariffs in the name of political survival. In 1867, after years of warning that extending the vote would endanger the social order, he piloted the Second Reform Act through Parliament, dramatically expanding the electorate to working-class men. In this, he understood what Karl Marx never did: emancipate the working classes and they will often vote for conservatives.

And the engine for so much of this achievement? A pre-eminent Romantic passion: love of glory. As Disraeli told his constituents in an 1844 speech, “I love fame; I love public reputation; I love to live in the eyes of the country.”

Yet if Kirsch’s biography is partly compelling because Disraeli was an extraordinary man, his story also illuminates our national character. After all, this country has long bred Romantics. Consider Boris Johnson, the middle-class, Etonian scholarship boy and surely the most overt example of Disraelian self-creation in recent times. Where Disraeli had his novels to work out his politics, Johnson relied on the Classics, climbing his very own Cursus Honorum all the way to the top. If he seemed anachronistic, he knew it. He understood that this is not the 19th century. Britain is no longer the global hegemon, and the ambitions of a Disraeli would sound ridiculous today. So, instead, Johnson took his Romantic temperament, his pathological ambition, and subverted them through a P.G. Wodehouse-style schtick that made everyone laugh.

Conversely, Rory Stewart is a politician who took Disraelian self-fashioning too literally for contemporary tastes. Publicly fashioning himself through books — a solo walk across Afghanistan; governing an Iraqi province — Stewart explicitly used his writing as the imaginative ballast for his political career. “I had once dreamt,” he writes in his memoir, “of modeling myself on a classical hero.” Stewart told the world what a Romantic figure he was: and that was his undoing. Stewart did not, I suspect could not, leaven his self-image with self-deprecation. So while Johnson became PM, Stewart now spends his days getting patronized on a podcast.

The real problem, though, is when self-deception becomes unmoored from morality — and indeed reality. Just over eight years after I read Kirsch’s book, Donald Trump took office, and I saw that one, albeit extreme, conclusion of Disraeli’s self-fashioning had emerged in the near-pathological dishonesty and self-delusion of a man who credits Norman Vincent Peale’s book The Power Of Positive Thinking with much of his success. “Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.” What’s striking about this (banal) quotation from Disraeli’s Coningsby is how much it sounds like the self-help guff that Trump imbibed, and which spurred him to become the world’s most powerful man.

How, in the end, do you reconcile “firm persuasion” with reality? Stewart’s problem wasn’t that he was deluded; both Trump and Disraeli illustrate that egregious self-delusion can drive colossal success. It’s rather that he couldn’t tailor this self-mythologization, or self-delusion, to his circumstances, so different from the snobby, class-obsessed world of the Pax Britannica, where personal belief in individual greatness and destiny found its concomitant in Britain’s global primacy. For Kirsch, then, Disraeli was one of those rare humans “who imagine a life for themselves, and then actually bring it into being”. His statesmanship and his novelistic output are finally impossible to separate because both grew out of the profoundly Romantic conviction that the most important thing a man can create is himself. And that is why almost 200 years later history remembers him, just as it does Byron and Blake.

Serbia’s protests began back in November 2024, after the concrete canopy of the Novi Sad train station collapsed, killing 16 people. The people were quick to blame the disaster on government corruption and incompetence. The station’s canopy, after all, had recently been renovated by Chinese engineers. And though the authorities insist the project was “up to European standards”, no one believes that, especially when the relevant documents remain classified. 

Yet if Novi Sad was the trigger, the longevity of Serbia’s protests imply a deeper and broader malaise. Over the last nine months, they’ve morphed from anger over a single issue to a general movement for change, one encompassing the country’s very civic identity. At the center of it all is President Aleksandar Vučić, who over the last decade has morphed from a far-Right nationalist to a supposedly pragmatic pro-EU figure. Along the way, he has come to epitomize two things: both the long-standing ambiguity of Serbia’s geopolitical position, and a broader continent-wide slide towards populist autocracy. 

In a sense, Vučić’s very person is ambiguous. A man of relentless will and fertile intelligence, he is also famed for his oddly feminine lips (one of his nicknames is “pussy lips”). He has been in power for 12 years, circumventing the constitutional term limit by “doing a Putin” and switching between being president and prime minister. Those on the streets have had enough — and many blame Vučić personally. “He’s been in power for so long now, that for many of the protestors that is like a half of their lives,” says Marija, a young professional who has attended several protests. 

Among other things, Marija accuses Vučić of hollowing out state institutions, instead framing national life around his Serbian Progressive Party (SNS). Just as bad, she adds, is the fallout of the Novi Sad disaster. Apart from those still-unclassified files, she notes that only Serbs have yet been charged for the collapse. “It’s final proof for many not just of the cost of corruption but also the protection of foreign investors.” Other young demonstrators have similar complaints. “We want early elections, the reintroduction of democratic norms, an end of mass corruption,” says Stefan, an IT consultant. “We just want the chance to improve our lives.” Fair enough: with inflation around 5%, the cost of food and utilities rising, life here is getting tougher. 

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All this helps explain why, close to a year on, the protests are still going strong. As I walked through central Belgrade over the weekend, it was impossible to avoid the anti-government chatter after yet another demonstration. If, however, the anti-Vučić crowds are resolute, tensions have been rising. For eight months, things remained largely peaceful. But then, in June, police arrested hundreds of demonstrators, spurring their comrades to blockade roads. That, in turn, prompted the government to flood the streets with counter-demonstrators. Now, both sides are doubling down. Last week, anti-government protesters set the offices of the SNS on fire during a fifth consecutive night of protests.

The police responded with now-customary brutality in Belgrade and Novi Sad. In the city of Valjevo, they used stun grenades and tear gas on protestors. Dozens have since been injured in clashes, with hundreds more detained. According to one young activist named Milos, by now a veteran protester and talking to UnHerd using a pseudonym, the police are “brutal”, adding that they protect gangs of paid thugs to attack demonstrators. For his part, Vučić has said, with the type of prophylactic language beloved by dictators, that the government will not “remain unresponsive”.

It is, though, under pressure. SNS support has steadily eroded. According to a July poll, 54.8% now support the “student list” — an anti-government coalition, as the name suggests partly composed of the middle classes — compared to the 42.1% sticking to Vučić. But in the rural areas, and among the elderly, government support remains huge. The country, then, is polarized, even as some retired people are now coming out in support of the students, joined by less-educated Serbs tired of seeing their living standards drop. The President’s term ends in 2027, and he’s promised to step down then, hoping to mollify the public. But no one buys this; he’s said it too many times before.

All the while, the protests have brought out an increasingly autocratic strain in the President — and not just on the streets. The government now regularly accuses NGOs of plotting to destabilize the country with foreign funding. Serbian media is also less than free. Several pro-Vučić advertising agencies flood TV networks with overwhelmingly pro-government narratives. A 2022 study found Vučić received 44 hours of airtime over three months, 87% of it positive; the opposition got a mere three hours, and most of that was negative.

What has irked many young people I speak to here is that Serbia has been a candidate for EU accession since 2014. From then until 2020, the country received €1.1 billion a year from Brussels. In 2023 alone, it was responsible for 59.7% of Serbia’s total trade in goods. The EU, then, clearly has leverage over Serbia. But despite the protesters’ demands for security service reforms aligning closely with EU values, Brussels has said little about the upheaval, and almost nothing about the government crackdown.

No wonder many anti-government activists I met in Belgrade feel let down. There were noticeably few EU flags at the protests I attended. And while EU accession is not an official anti-government demand, it’s clear that people here were hoping for more from Brussels. “The EU betrayed those who believed in its values,” says Milos. “I believe government violence will increase. If so, we expect even greater resistance from citizens and more concrete support from other countries, and the European Union.”

I fear he will be disappointed. As Balkans analyst Tim Judah observes, the EU sees Serbia as one of Europe’s “stabilitocracies”, regimes that supposedly secure stability, pretend to espouse EU integration, but then engage in various insalubrious practices that undermine democracy and the rule of law. Vučić acts in increasingly authoritarian ways with limited pushback because he has so many avenues of leverage against the EU and the broader West.

As Judah explains, that begins with history. Though the wars of the Nineties feel distant now, Eurocrats still fear that latent ethnic tensions across the region could resurface. Certainly, memories are very much alive here in Belgrade. “The only genocide in the Balkans was against the Serbs” bawls white spray paint wrapped around a corner building in the city center, a reference to Croatian atrocities during the Second World War. Nearby, a former government building remains a deliberate ruin. It was bombed by Nato in 1999, and now stands as a monument to Western iniquity —though there have been attempts to turn it into a Trump Tower.

Vučić is also well-placed to play regional spoiler if he wants. An ally of ethnic Serbian leaders in Bosnia and Kosovo, he can easily encourage secessionist demands beyond his borders. As Serbia’s domestic crisis deepens, a Vučić who decides to stoke conflict across the Balkans to divert his people’s attention from internal problems could easily spark a toxic geopolitical conflagration.

Vučić’s leverage lies not just with the EU, but the West more broadly. Most immediately, and with the encouragement of both Brussels and DC, Serbia has been a huge arms exporter to Ukraine. From February 2022 to June 2024 alone, it exported $800 million worth of ammunition to Kyiv (which uses the same Soviet caliber stock), albeit via third parties. This is shadowed by other arms shipments, including artillery rockets and tank rounds. The US was also happy to see Belgrade to supply arms to Israel: it exported €42 million worth of arms to the Jewish state in 2024, a 30-fold jump from 2023.

Meanwhile, Rio Tinto, a British-Australian firm, is currently building a massive lithium mine in Serbia’s Jadar Valley. Set to be Europe’s largest, once completed it will fulfill 90% of Europe’s lithium needs, securing urgently needed supply chains for electric vehicles. Given the knife fight with China for rare earths, Brussels sees the project as having enormous strategic value. No less important, it needs Vučić to shepherd the scheme through in the face of huge domestic opposition: thanks to environmental concerns and the mine’s disruption to farmland. So if its policy toward the protests is unarticulated, it is clear: lie back and think of the lithium.

Vučić happily accepts Europe’s riches and frames EU accession as a goal, while he also makes friends elsewhere. China, so central to the Novi Sad station debacle, is a case in point. In November 2023, Belgrade signed a free trade deal with Beijing, the first of its kind in the region. Though Vučić claims the deal will lapse upon EU accession, if and when that happens, it almost certainly won’t. After all, China has also invested $10 billion in Serbia through the Belt and Road Initiative, mainly in infrastructure, and sent PPE and medical experts during the Covid crisis. “European solidarity does not exist,” Vučić declared at the time. “Serbia now turns its eyes to China.”

And if that again explains Vučić’s marked reluctance to investigate China’s role in the Novi Sad saga, Russia, too, enjoys a special role in Serbia. Belgrade imports its energy from there, while it also exports ammunition to Putin’s war machine via third parties, the mirror of its support for Ukraine. Vučić celebrates Victory Day in Moscow while the Kremlin says anti-government protests are Western-backed attempts at a color revolution — even as Serbia’s subtle diplomatic dance continues. The EU, after all, remains its leading investment partner, with Serbs enjoying visa-free travel to the bloc. 

Vučić’s strategy of leveraging East and West to maximize benefits for Serbia is, Judah argues, “embedded in the political DNA of Serbs.” It’s most fully exemplified in the figure of former Yugoslav leader Marshall Josip Broz Tito, who rooted his nation’s foreign policy in non-alignment, taking what he could get from all sides. When Tito took power in Yugoslavia, in 1945, he modeled much of his state on Soviet lines. The USSR supplied huge amounts of economic and military aid to its fellow socialist country, while Tito sent his officers to train in Moscow. At the same time, though, he was happy to receive arms from the US, which opened the door to military and economic aid from the West. In 1953, Tito even joined a military pact with soon-to-be Nato members Greece and Turkey, giving Yugoslavia effective access to the bloc without actually joining. 

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Serbia remains as non-aligned now as it was then, with Serbian officials boasting that their nation is ‘“the east of the West” and the “west of the East”. Given that modern-day Serbia lacks the size and resources of Tito’s Yugoslavia, Vučić must be even more adept at embracing the role and grabbing what he can. And with Brussels fatigued by enlargement negotiations with 10 countries, to say nothing of its epic problems from migration to energy, Vučić can be confident he won’t face much pushback. 

This, in the end, is the problem with the EU: it’s a supranational organization that speaks of its devotion to “universal” values, while its mandate is to quasi-govern a series of interlocking states with their own ethnic, political and historical narratives. Brussels must always balance a multiplicity of competing national interests if the train is to keep moving. And if this is clear enough in Belgrade, something similar is playing out elsewhere in Europe.

In December 2024, Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico met with Putin in Moscow; Hungary’s Viktor Orbán made a similar visit in July. Both countries have curtailed free speech and clamped down on political opposition. Fico is now working to dismantle judicial independence and undermine anti-corruption efforts. The result, like in Serbia, is internal unrest. From January to March 2024, Slovakia saw over 150 protests, including one in February when 110,000 people took to the streets. This then provokes more autocratic behavior, which the EU must duly ignore. And, like in Serbia, Brussels knows it cannot allow these countries to choose an anti-Western path.

As for Serbia itself, the protests continue, and the country’s future remains unclear. Should the protestors’ demands be met, Serbia will face snap elections and significant government reforms, accompanied by an acceleration of EU integration. This scenario is, however, plausible only if the students manage to appease the varied factions that support them. Fail and the country will enter a period of political instability: an inevitable consequence of a fragmented opposition, ongoing economic disruptions, and a potential backlash from pro-government forces. Should this happen, Vučić would likely return to power, especially as he probably remains the only Serbian politician capable of navigating the country through its current turmoil. 

All the while, the unrest continues. One recent afternoon, as I walk through Belgrade surveying the mess from yet another protest, I notice a rubbish bin in which someone has dumped a sign. “Revolucija”, it says simply, defiance amid the detritus.

Lying a mere six miles north of Jerusalem, Ramallah is a perennial strategic vulnerability for the State of Israel. It is also caught between two powers who dominate the lives of the people here. The Israelis occupy their land, and the Iranians seek any opportunity to enlist the Palestinians in their 40-year battle against the Jewish state.

Ramallah is the largest city in the West Bank, and it is ruled by Fatah, the largest faction in the multi-party Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The PLO has a violent past, but is secular and more moderate than its rival, Hamas, which is trained and funded by Iran, and (despite its base being Gaza) also has a long history in Ramallah. Also operating the area, more clandestinely, are Hamas’ military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, as well the even more psychotic terror group Islamic Jihad.

And now, if the Iranians have their way, these groups will turn the West Bank into an active front in their decades-long proxy war against Israel. Already there are signs of a stepping-up of terror activity. On Sunday, Israel’s General Security Service (Shin Bet) announced that it had thwarted a large-scale Hamas operation in Hebron, a city on the other side of Jerusalem. It was one of the largest cells uncovered in recent years, said Shin Bet, and its members were planning to carry out shooting and bombing attacks against Israeli targets. “They conducted training, gathered intelligence, and assembled explosive devices to carry out attacks in the West Bank and inside Israel.”

It was startling news. After almost two weeks of tit-for-tat missile exchanges with Iran, Israelis are now having to worry about Iranian proxies once again.

Ramallah is unique. Superficially, it’s like so many other Arab cities: crowded streets, pungent wafts of gasoline and food, variegated shop fronts and dangling electricity cables, all amid a din of shrieks, roaring engines and incessant honking.

But it is no traditional Arab city. As I drive 10 or so miles east from King David Street, near Jerusalem’s old city, the wide, smooth boulevards narrow and the roads get rougher. For a while, Hebrew intermingles with Arabic on the signage and then it disappears altogether. This, though, is an area encased within Israeli control. The currency is the Israeli shekel, and thousands of Ramallah’s people — and far more before the atrocities of October 7th — work in Israel.

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Along with Israel’s Arabs, though, the people here have typically preferred to stay out of the Iran-Israel War. And it’s not like they aren’t provoked. With around 450,000 Israeli settlers (excluding East Jerusalem) and over 100 Israeli illegal outposts in the West Bank, tensions here are constant.

Worse, many of the more vicious settlers have used Gaza as a distraction to steal more land and get yet more violent. Here, in December 2023, I found a city that even Palestinian Authority figures told me was ripe for another Intifada (uprising). But a sullen peace has held.

Now, though, with Hamas and Hezbollah crippled, Assad mouldering in Moscow, and much of Iran’s command-and-control military and nuclear infrastructure no more, the Mullahs are battered and humiliated. They need a win — and, no longer flush with proxies to ululate and lob ordnance at Tel Aviv, they need alternatives. The West Bank, and its capital Ramallah, offers an almost ideal solution. Over the past six months Iran-backed terror groups in the West Bank, particularly Islamic Jihad, have become yet more active, with the IDF carrying out intense operations in response. These include drone strikes and ground missions, during which, in some cases, large swathes of people have been displaced which has caused yet more anger.

There is opportunity for the Iranians here. The only question is: will they take it?

I arrive as the city is on strike. Settlers have killed three Palestinians, and the people, understandably enraged, are refusing to work. If Iran wants to exploit discontent here, Israel’s settlers are doing its work for it. Streets are deserted; occasionally groups of young men stroll by smoking and talking on their phones.

I drive up through a series of winding roads. In Ramallah, class is delineated by height. The city sits on the Judaean Mountains and the higher up the slope you live, the richer and more powerful you are.

Major General Akram Rajoub’s apartment gazes down over the city. The space is a delineation of power; the style is Soho House meets Mukhabarat. We sit around a hexagonal glass table with gold-colored inlay. A long dark wood dining table

takes up half the room. Framed photographs of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas gaze down at us. Rajoub was 16 years old in 1980 when the IDF arrested him on charges of membership in the Fatah movement, possessing a weapon, and shooting at an Israeli police station in the West Bank. He served 14 years. After the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, he joined its intelligence unit and became a brigadier general, then the director of the Preventative Security Apparatus (essentially the FBI of Palestine). He cracked down on Hamas, liaised with Israel, and was responsible for training Palestinian commanders in cooperation with the US and UK. No one knows more about the threat of pro-Iranian terror groups in the West Bank than him. Not least because he then went on to become governor of Nablus and Jenin, which are the West Bank’s Hamas and Islamic Jihad strongholds. A major challenge for him was dealing with these violent Iran-backed militias who were loyal to Iran not Palestine. The result is of course chaos. “When militias are armed and funded by foreign backing, two parallel power structures emerge, and the security situation deteriorates,” he says wearily.

He’s not wrong. In Jenin, the Palestinian Authority is supposedly in charge. But when Hamas and Islamic Jihad militias launch attacks from there, Israel’s response is swift and unforgiving. All Palestinians in the area pay the price for Iran’s meddling.

I ask him directly: “Do you think Iran has Palestine’s best interests at heart?”

His response is equally direct. “Iran has never cared about Palestine’s liberation. They see Palestinian groups as a tool, not a cause. By supporting Hamas and Islamic Jihad, they use Palestinian blood to keep Israel occupied and distracted from their nuclear program.”

Rajoub argues that to end the Iranian threat in the West Bank, Israel must end its occupation there. Without occupation, he argues, there’s no justification for armed resistance. Right now, the Palestinian people have lost hope of a state and stability. This makes them ripe for Iranian exploitation.

Looking at Ramallah’s deserted streets, it’s notable that people are willing to go on strike and forgo opening their businesses in already desperate times, and so I can’t help but agree.

Since 7 October, the Israelis have had the West Bank under even more onerous security measures, essentially dividing it into cantons. With its high unemployment, power shortages, and a general sense of despair, is is now fertile ground for Iranian-backed terror groups.

Be that as it may, polling suggests that West Bank residents, reluctant to see the conflict worsen, are gravitating toward Fatah rather than Hamas – but, according to a May 2025 poll conducted in the West Bank, the vote for Hamas stands at 38% and Fatah at 27%. Hamas’s vote has dropped over the past year and Fatah’s has risen, suggesting that the population doesn’t want more conflict. That said, Hamas is the popular choice in Fatah’s stronghold. It’s terrible news for the PLO, and great news for Iran.

Rajoub understandably sees danger. “There’s been a decrease in activity due to the crackdowns, but the ideology remains,” he tells me. “People still believe in Iran’s cause. It’s a dangerous seed that could sprout again when the time is right.”

If the seed remains, what about the practicalities?

For Iran to cause chaos for Israel here it needs a reliable weapons pipeline — and it used to have one, relying on Hezbollah’s smuggling network to move arms from Lebanon through Syria, across Jordan, and into the West Bank. According to Israeli expert Jonathan Spyer, weapons were first transported to Hezbollah’s base in Qusayr, Syria, then to farms in Homs and Damascus, before being smuggled into Jordan and the West Bank by local families like the al-Saeeds and al-Ramthans. In the past, it was small arms — pistols and AKs. By the summer of last year, it had become C-4 explosives, anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenades, and advanced missiles.

But Israel’s pager operation put Hezbollah, and then as a result Assad, out of the game — for now. There are already signs that the “Army of God” is starting to regroup. “Never count these bastards out,” a security source told me last week. “Sure, they’re weak right now. But they’ve been weak before and they came back.”

There is also danger closer to home for the Israelis. Outside a fried chicken shop in central Ramallah I speak to Mohammed, a local investigative journalist. “It’s odd,” he says. “While the Palestinian Authority uses AK-47s, Iranian-backed groups are armed with M16s, a weapon typical of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Some versions even resemble Israeli sniper rifles.”

These, Mohammed explains, come in via the Israeli black market. Here the journey is much easier — all you must do is cross the checkpoints from Israel into the West Bank.

And it’s striking how easy it could be. No one checked my vehicle as I entered or left the West Bank. Generally, there is a rigorous process on the way out. But that wouldn’t stop a smuggler entering with weapons, dispersing them and coming out clean. The Israelis are almost certainly aware of a lot of this. They know that a lot of pro-Iranian terrorists are probably walking around here with weapons.

Even if they don’t always use them. With a mischievous glint in his eye, Mohammed tells me that, with cash in the West Bank so tight, and the Iranians so rich, sometimes pro-Iran terrorists happily take Iranian cash with no intention of doing any actual terrorism. To satisfy their paymasters, they merely film themselves screaming “Allahu Akbar!” while firing a few rounds (often with weapons they already owned) close to Israeli observation towers. This grabs Israeli attention without any bloodshed. The would-be terrorists then send the videos to the Iranians (who are apparently happy with what they see) and pocket the cash. “These guys know the IDF will come after them,” says Mohammed, “but a lot less hard than if they’d killed anyone.”

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Palestinians often gather to protest against Israel at Aladdin Cafe, close to the City Inn Square. Here, I meet Yusuf Paraka, who was a field officer in the Preventive Security Apparatus (one of the West Bank’s internal intelligence agencies) in Ramallah for 30 years until he asked for retirement three months ago. Pro-Iranian terror groups were a big part of his job. They were also its biggest frustration as he attempted to hunt them down only to see them escape from a Palestinian controlled area into another where he had no jurisdiction.

I ask him about the recent Iran-Israel conflict. Whose side are the Palestinians on? “When Iranian missiles flew over from Jordan, people were cheering from the rooftops,” he tells me. “They were happy about it. But does that mean they’re happy with Iran? No. We are not persuaded that Iran will not destroy Israel with its missiles. Once again, Iran is bringing chaos to the Palestinians, leaving them to deal with the destruction of Gaza.”

Following the combined Israeli and US strikes last month, Tehran is in trouble. But it’s wounded, not dead. While the Mullahs are in greater danger than ever since the 1979 revolution, they still hold a monopoly on violence inside Iran. Their war with Israel and the West remains a core ideological and strategic objective, and there has been no Waterloo. The war continues, and with their capabilities in Lebanon, Syria, and Gaza diminished, the Mullahs need options more than ever.

“In the end, Iran is so dangerous not because of the money it gives. Palestinians can buy guns without Iranian money. But Iran changes the mentality,” says Mohammed. “They make this a religious war. And a religious war never ends.”

So while Israel refuses to improve life for Palestinians and continues to enable the worst impulses of the settlers, Iran will continue to find weakness and opportunity in the West Bank.

To my left, in the corner, there’s an old couple — he hunches, she has a walker — grumbling quietly to each other. On the floor are some Israeli youths: a tattooed couple in their early twenties. There is a silent middle-aged couple and another huge, hairy man, itching to get out of the shelter.

You can assess a country’s economic health by the state of its air-raid shelters. In Ukraine, they tend to be basic basement rooms. Here in Israel, the fundamental premise is the same — but there is a clear difference. They are better maintained and inspected; there are also more of them. Israel’s superior stock of shelters is a result of the country’s economic power, notwithstanding its far smaller population and largely non-existent natural resources. The Israeli economy has boomed this century, thanks in part to the efforts of the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

When Netanyahu became finance minister in 2003, he claimed that the country was “six weeks away from being Argentina”. Later, he would recall a conversation with his young son as the two stood in Tel Aviv looking at the skyline and comparing it to New York. “We’ll never be like them,” the boy said, to which Netanyahu replied: “Your father’s going to be finance minister. Believe me, we’ll be like them.”

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With its grandiosity, its detailing of his implacable belief in his own destiny, and the fact that it’s probably not true, the anecdote is Netanyahu in miniature. But he had a plan — to focus on privatization and liberalization — and its impact was immediate. GDP growth surged from 0.2% in 2001 to 4.2% in 2005. By 2020, Israel’s GDP per capita ranked in the global top 20, surpassing both the US and France.

This speaks to an inescapable fact. For good, and often for ill, “Bibi” gets things done. And this fact is inseparable from the weekend’s strike, the events since October 7, and indeed Israel in the 21st century.

Netanyahu is now a historically consequential figure. Everyone has an opinion on him (usually negative). And if he is going to take his country deeper into war, this time not against a terror group but against a country of 91 million people, he will need his population at least vaguely behind him.

So what do Israelis think? Before the horrors of October 7, Netanyahu’s popularity was already in decline. A Pew Research poll in August 2023 found 52% of Israelis viewed him unfavorably. A July 2023 survey by Israel’s top broadcasters projected his governing coalition would lose its majority.

After the October 7 attack, a poll by Dialog Center revealed 86% of respondents blamed the leadership for the failure. As the war dragged on, Netanyahu’s approval continued to plummet. By April 2024, 58% of Israelis said he should resign immediately. A March 2025 poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found 72.5% believed he should step down, with 48% demanding his immediate resignation. Additionally, 87% said he should take responsibility for the October 7 attack.

In the past week, though, Netanyahu’s coalition has received a boost. A Channel 13 poll shows Likud going from 24 to 27 seats, making it the largest party in the Knesset for the first time since October 7. The same poll shows that Israelis support his strikes on Iran — 75% back the campaign and only 17% are opposed. A separate Israel Democracy Institute survey found that 70% of Israelis support the strikes. Crucially, another poll found that 64% of respondents believe Netanyahu’s strikes are aimed at eliminating Iran’s nuclear threat, rather than being driven by domestic political concerns.

This is key. The Israeli public are not foolish. They know how cynical their prime minister is. As a fellow visitor told me amid the sirens and chaos: “This guy would sell not just his mother, but his children’s mother to stay in power.” If, despite this, the public believes he is doing, with conviction, what many Israeli leaders have talked about but held off from, Bibi may well have turned it all around.

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This is partly because the Israeli strike on Iran has boxed in Netanyahu’s political opponents. Straight after Israel’s 13 June attacks on Iranian nuclear facilities, Israel’s leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, could only limply say: “Yes, this government needs to be toppled, but not in the midst of an existential fight.” Lapid added: “I think he’s the wrong person to lead the country. But on that” — striking against Iran — “he was right”.

And if he was grudgingly positive then, Lapid was effusive after the US attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. “I congratulate President Trump and the brave American army for being part of a historical change,” he said unctuously. Later, he claimed that the strike had made the world “a safer place”. Lapid knows he cannot break ranks without being seen to be putting politics above the national interest.

Netanyahu and those around him could be forgiven for thinking that the 2026 elections could return him to power yet again. Next year, though, is a long way off. And there is also a caveat in all this: the polls hold, and the opposition is muted, for as long as the military operations succeed. Right now, those most exercised by Israel and US actions are the usual bolus of social media blowhards, bewildered Corbynistas, Islamic Republic stooges and Lincoln’s Inn human rights lawyers. To most Western observers, it is clear that the surgical neutralization of Iran’s nuclear facilities and its murderous military commanders is, in and of itself, a political and moral good. But what comes next is critical. And it could still all end in disaster.

And that is driving the Tel Aviv mood. This city is Israel’s liberal enclave. It is here that you will find those who most mistrust and despise Netanyahu. “This was probably inevitable,” says one liberal of the US strikes. “We’re glad it happened, but less confident that what comes now will be easy as what has come before. I support Bibi in this. But after this is all over, he will have to account for everything — and that includes the disaster of October 7. No way can that guy ever be prime minister again.”

But you can never say never with Netanyahu. The vagaries of Israel’s politics are unpredictable. As Joshua Hantman, a British-Israeli political consultant who has worked with politicians from both sides of the aisle, observes: “Polling may show Likud going from 24 to 27 seats. But the question is from where Bibi is getting those seats. In our parliamentary system, whereby leaders rule by coalition, if he takes those seats from other Right-wing parties, which seems the case, it is entirely irrelevant in our electoral system. He needs to take seats from the opposition block. Which he shows no signs of doing.”

Hantman adds: “Israelis understand the existential nature of this threat and support Netanyahu’s decision to finally do something about it. An ideal situation for a majority of Israel is, like Churchill, for Netanyahu to win the war — but lose the election.” But for Netanyahu to become Israel’s Churchill, an idea that most of the country would scoff at, he first has to actually win this war. And for that, he will have to do what is most difficult for him: park his ego and understand the limits of what can and cannot be realistically achieved.

Last weekend, over 100 first-person view Ukrainian drones whacked four air bases across Russia — the furthest in Siberia — severely diminishing Russia’s offensive air capabilities. Zelensky’s message was clear: we can hit you wherever you are, with technology you can buy for thousands of dollars or less on the internet.

Yet if operation Spider Web was part MacGyver, it was also part le Carré. The Ukrainians had their drones smuggled on trucks well in advance of the strikes. The weapons were hidden in containers disguised as sheds, before being transported into Russia by truck. These were then parked near the air bases, before Ukraine remotely opened their retractable roofs and launched their cargo to devastating effect.

Drones evoke a simple truth: hoard technology, especially military technology, and you centralize power. Disperse it and watch that power vanish alongside it.

Historically, war was an intimate affair. For millennia, the only way to kill someone was if you could see them. That remained true even with the invention of gunpowder. Machine guns and howitzers can certainly fire further, but still require proximity. The basic dynamics were always the same: men and machines clashed on the ground. Success depended on outlasting or overpowering the enemy through sheer force, numbers, or strategic positioning.

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In practice, that made logistics and supply lines crucial to war machines. And, as late as the 20th century, conflicts were won by states that could deploy the greatest amount of resources against the enemy. The key here was effectiveness (total output), not efficiency (the ratio of output to input). And this is partly why two behemoths dominated the Cold War world so absolutely. Notwithstanding their vast differences, the US and USSR enjoyed almost unimpeded control of their respective nation’s resources — and because they had more resources than their rivals, they became hegemonic.

But drones are different: representing are a step towards detaching humanity from hand-to-hand fighting. War is no longer only about mobilizing soldiers, but rather about sending autonomous machines to survey, target and even strike the enemy. This transforms war for would-be attackers: even if Spider Web’s drones had all been discovered or destroyed, the Ukrainian pilots operating them remotely would still have been safe.

There are broader implications here, especially in the way organized violence shapes society. Whoever deploys violence most effectively is best positioned to secure territories and resources, the foundation of political authority. The Gunpowder Revolution helped drag the West into civic modernity: by increasing the scale and scope of war, it increased the money needed to fund it. That, in turn, sparked the need for more sophisticated revenue-gathering systems, requiring greater centralization, a trend that persisted until the end of the last century.

Drones, then, have reversed this dynamic, decentralizing power and putting it into the hands of groups and individuals — or indeed war weary states facing a continent-sized enemy. Only governments have access to fighter jets and similar: an F-16 costs around $30 million and requires years of training to fly. Spider Web used drones that cost just thousands dollars, and which you can learn to pilot in days, even as they eliminated $7 billion of sophisticated military hardware in mere minutes. How’s that for power dispersal?

The result is inevitable: greater independence for smaller, poorer, or less militarily capable states. The Ukrainians remain reliant on US hardware, especially for air defense systems. As Russia daily pounds Ukrainian cities, they represent a lifeline for Kyiv. But the Americans are refusing to supply any more. So Ukraine flipped the script: rather than beg for more systems to ward off Russian attacks at the last moment, Zelensky’s generals used drones to disable them at source. This sends a clear message to Washington: while we need your support, we can execute high-level operations on our own.

Once again, this technological shift matters politically. That inevitably empowers Kyiv at the negotiating table, while putting pressure on Moscow to update its own air defense systems, designed to counter incoming missiles or aircraft.

Certainly, Spider Web’s timing suggests Zelensky and his generals understand the political ramifications of the drone revolution. The operation hit the day before Ukraine met with Russia in Istanbul for only their second face-to-face negotiations since 2022. This is no coincidence. As well as inflicting serious damage on Russia’s offensive capabilities, Spider Web shifted the power dynamic, given that throughout the negotiations Moscow has maintained its maximalist position.

We must, of course, be careful here: with Russia embarrassed by the fiasco, it will be less likely to make concessions in the short term. Russian officials and commentators in the state media have compared the attack to Pearl Harbor and called for retaliation. State media now call for a nuclear response. Meanwhile, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that, following the strike, he spoke to Putin who has promised, “very strongly, that he will have to respond to the recent attack on the airfields”. So for Ukraine, it has yielded nothing tangible. Besides, Putin has no interest in ending the war without first crushing Ukraine. Once again, that was clear at the Istanbul talks, when Russian negotiators announced that they would only agree to peace if Kyiv ceded large amounts of territory and accepted limits on the size of its military. A laughable, unserious proposal.

Spider Web may have put a spring in the step of the Ukrainian negotiators, they may feel they can look their Russian interlocutors in the eye more easily. But, alone, it will do little to end the war. As Tim Ripley, editor at Defense Eye tells me, the conflict will likely be decided on the ground, with drones merely supporting a more traditional attritional campaign. Certainly, the Russians seem to understand this. Their summer offensive is already underway: in the northeast, they’ve smashed Ukrainian forces in the Kursk region and continue their push into neighboring Sumy. Now, they’re swarming the Ukrainian lines across the Donbas with heavy assaults, backed by weekly missile and drone attacks — sometimes up to 300 at a time.

The tempo of the Russian offensive is only intensifying as the weather improves. Ground forces are mobilizing for a major push. All told, this is a major strategic moment for the Kremlin. By attacking on multiple fronts, Russia hopes to stretch Ukrainian resources and morale to breaking point. Yes, the Ukrainian air attack has damaged Russian bombers, but the Russian war machine is vast, and it keeps on coming.

And, of course, Putin could also order his own Spider Web. After all, if drones empower Davids, they’re also available to Goliaths: who, let’s face it, have far more cash, infrastructure and human capital behind them. What emerges is a situation where everyone is empowered by the new technology, from great powers, to small ones, to non-state actors like Hamas and Hezbollah.

How are the Israelis likely to respond to a mass Hezbollah drone attack that overwhelms their Iron Dome defenses and causes destruction and casualties to a degree previously impossible? And what might the Chinese Goliath do to the American one?

In short, drones may auger yet more chaos, more bloodshed, more war.

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And, all the while, the drones buzz on. China, for its part, is developing swarming machines that can operate in coordinated groups to overwhelm adversaries. The Chinese military has also integrated AI-powered drones that can autonomously identify and strike targets with surgical precision — harbingers of intelligent and totally autonomous warfare.

Other countries are rushing ahead too. Turkey’s Bayraktar TB2 drones have long helped Ukraine annihilate Russian forces. Israel’s Harop and Heron drones were among the first to showcase the technology’s versatility in intelligence gathering and strike capabilities. As all these nations advance drone technology, they shift the calculus of modern conflict by removing human risk from the battlefield and increasing the scale and precision of military operations.

We in the UK are yet to fully embrace the technology’s potential. Yes, Defense Secretary John Healey recently wrote in the Strategic Defense Review that “technology is changing how war is fought”. But what the Army needs now is action not words. Clever governments understand the need to balance expensive weapons systems with cheap, flexible drone technologies. States that refuse to learn waste billions on aircraft carriers.

To be sure, and as Russia’s summer offensive so luridly proves, many of war’s fundamentals remain: manpower and an industrial base are both crucial to victory. But morale of course matters too, and on that point Spider Web surely inflicted a deep psychological blow on Russia, one set to linger long after those smashed aircraft have been replaced. Indeed, the war in Ukraine is unlikely to end with a single battlefield defeat, but rather when one side’s morale fractures, finally leading to serious negotiations, regime change, or a collapse.

For the moment, both sides still fight with determination, and this psychological tipping point has yet to arrive. How we reach that point is the question. Thirty or even 20 years ago, it wouldn’t have even been in play. The Ukrainians might have been able to wage a guerrilla war against an occupying Russia — but holding off the enemy in the field would have been practically impossible.

Now, though, for all Russia’s resources, it’s not difficult to imagine its morale imploding if a particularly devastating drone assault obliterates a Russian target of monumental importance — or indeed Putin himself, who would once have been almost entirely safe over 1,000 kilometers from the frontline. But this is an age of power dispersal, and that changes things, if not as much as David might have hoped.

It’s just over an hour and a half since I set sail from Colonial Harbor, in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, and my boat is slaloming through blocks of ice that have calved off the Greenland ice sheet. There are massive bergs, larger than our 25-foot Targa 25 boat; floes the size of breeze blocks, and fist-sized clumps that Christian, the boat’s first mate, scoops out and dumps into a bucket with the fish he’s caught that are piled up inside it.

To my left, I see Naajat Inaat mountain, which, with its sheer face, could be the Great Wall in Game of Thrones. To my right is the peak of Aqitsoq, its side flecked with snowmobile tracks like the marks of a stalking predator.

Greenland has the world’s second-largest ice sheet after Antarctica. It covers about 80% of the island (which is only inhabitable at its edges), spanning 1,500 miles north to south and 680 miles at its widest point, reaching up to 12,000 feet at its rocky peak at Gunnbjørn Fjeld. And it is melting worryingly fast. The ice sheet’s average annual mass loss is now around 200 gigatons, equivalent to about 0.6 millimeters of the world’s sea-level rise per year.

If climate change has serious ecological ramifications, it also has serious geopolitical consequences.

Since observations began in 1979, Arctic sea ice has shrunk by 12% in a decade, making shipping lanes increasingly navigable; between 2014 and 2022, transit through the most popular route in the Arctic, the North Sea route, increased by 755%. Some studies project that, by 2035, some parts of the Arctic will be completely free of ice during summer months and hence totally open to international trade.

Out on the ocean, I can see this process first-hand. “The glaciers always melt a bit at this time of year,” says the boat’s captain Casper. “But not this much this early.” We pass another iceberg and hear a groaning noise. Casper becomes tense. “As the ice melts and these big pieces break off, they eventually shatter as well. They are basically ticking time bombs. If this breaks I’ll hit reverse, and we’ll get out quick.”

Whoever controls these shipping lanes is well-placed to control at least a large part of global trade, not least because Houthis are now attacking the Suez Canal and routes between Asia and the US are about 40% shorter through the Northwest Passage than through the Panama Canal. The Arctic also remains comparatively underused. In 2022, fewer than 1,700 ships passed through compared with over 23,000 through the busy Suez and 14,000 through Panama.

Little wonder Donald Trump has long coveted Greenland. Back in 2019, he suggested that the US should buy it from Denmark, citing its potential for resource extraction (it is rich in rare earth minerals), and the military advantages of its proximity to the Arctic. The Danes laughed it off, but Trump started his second term with even more aggressive rhetoric.

Then, in late March, Vice President JD Vance visited Greenland. At America’s Pituffik Space Base in the island’s far northwest coast, he echoed Trump’s vow to take control of the island, saying that this would be achieved through appealing to the people of Greenland, warning of increased Russian and Chinese activity in the area. Locals, though, refused to meet him.

But Trump and Vance are not the only ones casting lascivious eyes northwards. Vladimir Putin has intensified Russia’s military and commercial activity in the region. Moscow now operates six dual-use military bases and has a fleet of at least 40 icebreakers there; from 2017-2022, it conducted 60% of all investment in the Arctic region, principally developing infrastructure for transportation and natural resource extraction.

Since 2005, Russia has prioritized refurbishing 13 Soviet-era airbases and made 10 radar stations, 20 border outputs and 10 integrated emergency rescue stations operational at bases across its Arctic coastline. It now has more ground-force bases in the Arctic than NATO, while eight of its 11 submarines capable of launching long-range nuclear weapons are also based there.

There has also been a suspicious increase in attacks on Western facilities in the Arctic. Norway has reported numerous instances of fiber optic cables being severed at its satellite ground station, and cables at an ocean research lab torn away. No one can say for sure it’s the Russians, but everyone knows they are more than capable of this kind of sabotage.

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China, too, has the Arctic in its sights. Xi Jinping announced his ambition to make China a “major polar power’ back in 2014. There is a research station on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard called the Polar Research Institute of China. Beijing has also tried to buy Arctic territory here as part of broader efforts to establish a Polar Silk Road. Based around developing new trade routes across the Arctic region, this is an extension of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), designed to create yet more global Chinese trade routes, and influence.

While Biden was concentrating on Ukraine, China’s hold in the global north increased. And now Moscow is allying with Beijing. In 2023, they signed a cooperation agreement between their coast guards and conducted joint naval patrols in the region. The US is only now belatedly waking up to the importance of the area to hemispheric security, with JD Vance talking about the new reality. The White House knows that seizing Greenland would prevent both from cementing their Arctic presence.

The Arctic is now a prime battlefield for a modern Great Game, one that is likely to dominate a century beset by climate change and resource scarcity. In this new imperial age, the US, China and Russia are bound, ineluctably, for conflict in three areas: strategic defense, logistics and resources. This region is crucial to them all. Welcome to the age of the Global Arctic, with Greenland at its heart.

***

The city of Nuuk is a dowdy footprint of humanity on the southwestern edge of Greenland, an odd mixture of icy tundra and industrial estate. The outskirts and the port are a landscape of heavy goods vehicles, oil drums and belching smoke. Tangles of steel, that once formed industrial machinery, sit rusting by the sides of the road, poking through the snow like metal innards.

Life is tight for most people here, though there is support in abundance. Greenland, a local tells me, has the third largest public sector in the world: after Cuba and North Korea. The welfare state is also an important part of how Greenland operates. Of the annual five billion kroner grant from Denmark, a huge proportion goes on welfare. According to 2022 government statistics, 23.7% of the population receive unemployment, housing subsidies, child benefit, or some other forms of public benefits.

Life is also claustrophobic. In one bistrot, I spot Greenland’s now ex-PM feeding a baby. In the Nuuk Centre, Greenland’s only shopping mall, I see another ex-Prime Minister sipping a latte. The next day, in their tiny parliament I spot yet another former prime minister, not standing on ceremony, but informally dressed in dungarees and overalls.

The tiny population was swamped by journalists after Donald Trump said he wanted to annex the island. With the Danes outraged by his moves on their sovereign territory, the Greenlanders are caught awkwardly in between. They’re not keen on becoming the 51st state. According to a January (admittedly Danish) poll 85% of Greenlanders oppose joining the US, while 45% see Trump’s interest as a threat.

But nor are they totally happy with Denmark. History here is fraught. In 1953, Greenland was incorporated as an equal member of the Kingdom of Denmark, granting Danish citizenship to its people, but little political autonomy. By 1979, Home Rule was established via referendum giving Greenland control over a range of internal affairs, such as education and healthcare. The 2009 Self-Government Act gave Greenland more control over its police, judiciary and natural resources and underpins the political status quo. But less savory events live in the collective memory, not least the forced relocation in 1953 of over 100 Inuit families from Thule to accommodate the US Air Base, and a chilling 1951 Danish social experiment that snatched 22 Inuit children from their families and took them to Denmark to be trained as role models for Greenlanders.

For its part, the US does have history here, too. It defended Greenland during World War II when Denmark was under Nazi occupation, building several military bases there. It was crucial for refueling purposes for aircraft crossing the Atlantic. Its weather monitoring stations supplied early warnings for military operations (including D-Day), and the US navy used its waters to detect German U-Boat activity. After the war, President Harry Truman formally offered to purchase it for $100 million but this was rejected. Following that, a 1946 deal with Denmark formalized the US’s military right to operate bases here, while maintaining Danish sovereignty over the island.

Defense, then, has always been important to this part of the world. Today, if Russia were to fire missiles at the US, they would fly over Greenland and the North Pole. As a result, America’s Pituffik Space Base supports missile warning, missile defense and space surveillance missions. Trump wants the base to become part of the US “Golden Dome” missile defense system. Modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome, this would consist of a multilayer defensive system capable of destroying ground-based missiles from space, within seconds of launch.

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But the security of this territory is also vital for UK and Europe because of the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GUIK) gap, the naval chokepoint vital for Russian access to the Atlantic. If the gap is secured, the Russian Navy will be unable to venture outside the Barents and White seas, and Moscow’s ability to control maritime routes there will be totally undermined.

If defense and logistics are already setting imperial powers at odds in the Arctic, it is perhaps the third element that may yet transmute competition to conflict: resources.

Greenland has the world’s eighth largest reserves of rare earth minerals and other key minerals such as lithium and cobalt. These include 39 of the 50 minerals the US has deemed critical to national security and economic stability. Most notable are those minerals crucial to production of magnets for powering electric vehicles; those used in semiconductor chips to power AI technologies; and those used in military technologies, such as F-35 fighter jets (which contain 400 kg each) and Virginia-class submarines (over four tonnes each).

Following decades of rapacity in Africa, China now has access to the largest reserves of these minerals. It also accounts for almost 70% of rare earth mineral production compared with the US’s 12%. China supplies over 50% of US demand for 24 critical minerals, including more than 90% of its demand for rare earth elements. The US is obviously losing the minerals race, and Greenland would help close the gap, as would Ukraine’s deposits of rare earth minerals. The Americans understand it is a race they, and the West, cannot afford to lose, because that way lies Chinese hegemony.

***

The Inatsisartut, which houses Greenland’s parliament, is a squat grey building with wood paneling in the center of Nuuk. The politics are idiosyncratic. Greenlandic independence is an aspiration that goes back decades — every party has it on their ticket — but the fact that the world’s largest island has only 57,000 people makes the dream of secession fundamentally unfeasible. The rhetoric speaks more to a process of securing self-governance within Denmark, as well as nation-building. It will have to remain in a union: either with Denmark or someone else.

Outsiders are increasingly encroaching. Over the last seven years, says Naaja Nathanielsen, a government minister, three events have emphasized Greenland’s rising strategic importance. The first was the pandemic, which showed how fragile global supply chains can be, particularly because so many trade routes depended on China. Countries such as Greenland are now key alternative sources of critical commodities. Second was the climate crisis. “The need for green transition is not just leftist politics, it’s real,” Nathanielsen tells me. “Countries must cope with future energy needs. We have almost all the minerals necessary for green energy.”

Greenland is already 70% hydropowered (this will increase to 90% by 2030), and has enormous solar and wind potential. This makes it well placed to respond to the third crisis on Nathanielsen’s list, which is the war in Ukraine: Greenland could help Europe break its unforgivable dependence on Russian oil, gas and coal.

Yet it’s not enough to have resources: they must also be extracted. Over 80% of Greenland is covered in ice, often with few roads between settlements and mining deposits. Greenland’s ancient crystalline bedrock means that minerals are deeply embedded and hard to extract from hard and ancient rock. Rare earth minerals often come in a very low grade, meaning only a small percentage of the mineral in each rock is mined. So Greenland must rely on foreign help to properly exploit its natural wealth. A deal, beyond the existing status quo, will have to be made with someone. Trump is determined that it will be with him. So far, the Danes, and the EU, have done nothing but complain at US behavior. What is the alternative?

The Greenlanders I meet don’t want to be a part of the US, but they are open to more cooperation. The Danes are too, which is why Trump’s behavior is so confusing. It’s possible to achieve mineral extraction in a non-military, respectful, and supportive way, they repeatedly tell me. “Greenlanders are not a commodity,” is the phrase I hear over and over. Greenland is part of the Western alliance, and a fellow democracy, and its people believe they are entitled to respect. But the rhetoric makes people suspicious and afraid, and this is a problem — not just for the US and Greenland, but for the West as a whole.

Regardless of local mistrust, it remains that greater US cooperation is a win-win in everything from resources to strategic cooperation. “It’s not a debated issue,” says Nathanielsen. “We’re fine with more international involvement in Greenland, as long as we’re informed and involved.”

But the world is in crisis: and for as long as America’s geopolitical battle with China continues, expect Trump’s aggressive rhetoric to persist. “Those who grew up in the Eighties and Nineties were lucky to do so in a world of peace when prosperity was based on free trade and soft diplomacy,” Nathanielsen adds. “But that is changing and it’s very difficult to grasp this new, militaristic view of the world. The US interest in all these countries is strategic. It’s about Trump getting Washington’s geopolitical ducks in a row. I totally understand the logic behind it. It’s the approach I scorn.”

But if Greenland is a key battleground of the Great Game to come, Trump is its talisman: the harbinger of a new age, in which power is more unvarnished, and imperialistic impulses more naked. It is a new world, one that is being redefined by geography and climate. But as Casper said, as we sailed into harbor the previous day, “In Greenland, we always say that it’s not us who are in control, but Mother Earth, the field commander.” As the political temperature rises, and the ice caps continue to melt, we may yet learn this the hard way.

Everyone wants to talk about Donald Trump, possible US betrayal and whether there really is now an end in sight to this war. Confusion reigns, with Trump reacting belligerently to Putin’s suggestion of an interim government. He says he’s “very angry” and has again lashed out with the threat of tariffs. The President might promise peace, but the lines coming out of Kyiv, Washington and Moscow are consistent only in their acrimony and confusion.

Ukrainians remain shocked at Trump’s behavior. They cannot understand why he humiliated their president (only improving Zelensky’s popularity at home); they cannot understand why he parrots Kremlin propaganda (the latest being his claim that Ukrainian forces are surrounded in Kursk when they obviously are not). And, above all, they cannot understand why he has wanted to embrace Putin, a man who so clearly despises the United States.

Last week, though, following separate meetings with each side in Riyadh, the White House announced it had brokered a deal between Moscow and Kyiv to halt fighting in the Black Sea. This is a more limited agreement than the ambitious one discussed weeks ago in Jeddah. And the situation remains complicated. From the outset, Russia insisted that for any halt in hostilities it must get sanctions relief. It wanted its access to the SWIFT payment network restored and general banking sanctions lifted. Last Tuesday, the US agreed to this in exchange for a limited Black Sea deal. But then, on Thursday, a European summit in Paris declared there will be no lifting of sanctions — European buy-in essential for any deal to progress.

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So what we have is another Trump-induced diplomatic mess. According to former Ukrainian Defence Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk, things are at a stalemate. “We believe the Russians still have sufficient capability to put pressure on us, but not enough to make any serious breakthrough,” he tells me. “We don’t have enough to break through from our side either. No one can move any further.”

If the Russians don’t have the numbers to break through the Ukrainian lines they can, of course, mobilize yet more people, but this is not without a political cost, even for Putin. Moscow’s last mobilization was difficult. Thousands fled the country to dodge the draft, and Russia started signing people up from other countries. Despite this, they’re still attempting to build their reserves.

“They’re getting ready for another summer offensive, which will be difficult for us,” Zagorodnyuk says. “We have defensive power, so their offense won’t be as productive, but it won’t go unnoticed. But if they want to launch an offensive, this is the right time. The weather is ideal — it’s around 16°C now, which is perfect for their preparations.”

Given that the offensive hasn’t come, Zagorodnyuk wonders if their preparations haven’t gone to plan. Certainly nothing has changed in terms of their strategy. “Their goal remains eradicating and destroying Ukraine,” he added.

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As it stands, both sides need some form of respite, even if only temporary. Neither country’s economy is doing well and both militaries are exhausted. “They also have production problems,” adds Zagorodnyuk. “So they can’t ramp up production quickly enough to replace lost assets. If they’re put in a difficult position, they may go for a ceasefire, but they need to be in a very specific position for that. So, to expect them to agree to a ceasefire just because Trump asks them to — it’s not going to happen.”

But Trump can pressure Putin in several ways. First, he could give Ukraine the weapons it’s been requesting. These would include the missiles, real-time intel, long-range aviation, and the communication systems that Zelensky laid out in his victory plan for Biden. He could also drastically intensify sanctions — cutting off most of the international banking system from trading with Russia and targeting its oil trade. Biden didn’t want to do either of those. His approach was never full-throated.

Trump has now actually started talking about doing these things, hoping to bring Putin to the table. His threats to impose secondary tariffs on all oil coming out of Russia if Putin does not agree to a ceasefire suggest that he might be finally running out of patience. Perhaps the White House has realized that it can’t work with Putin, and that Trump can’t get him to behave equitably and honestly. But Putin will want to keep at least a charade of negotiations going. Partial ceasefires, shifting the goalposts, complaints, new proposals: this is the Russian negotiation playbook. We saw it play out from 2014-2020 with the Minsk Process, a series of ceasefires that never came close to ending the war (that began in 2014 not 2022) or stopping Russian aggression.

For now, then, Trump remains the ultimate variable. Say what you like about Putin, but he is at least consistent in his barbarism. Trump’s malice is compounded by whimsy. Before his most recent pivot away from Putin, he changed once again the terms of the deal by which Ukraine would give Washington a share of its huge mineral resources. Washington’s latest demand is for all of Ukraine’s natural resources income for years: Kyiv to send Washington all profit from a fund controlling Ukrainian resources until all American wartime aid was repaid, plus interest. Obviously, Ukraine cannot accept this, which allows Trump to blame Zelensky for being an obstacle to peace.

This all looked good for Putin previously, but as Zagorodnyuk cautions, you can never be sure. “Putin will just blame Ukraine for everything, so the question remains who will Trump decide to push, Ukraine or Russia. You never know with Trump.” So though life continues in Odesa, uncertainty, as ever, rules.

In a Tuesday night speech to Congress, notable for its 90-minute length and sustained crowing (interspersed with petty swipes and veiled threats), Donald Trump eventually got around to the subject that has dominated global politics since his outburst in the Oval Office on Friday: the war in Ukraine. “2,000 people are being killed every single week — more than that. They are Russian young people, they’re Ukrainian young people. They’re not Americans, but I want it to stop,” he said.

The more I observe international politics, the more I return to former Israeli statesman Abba Eban’s (typically dry) observation, that “political leaders do not always mean the opposite of what they say.” Trump has always been plain about who he is and what he wants (one of his few qualities is that he never pretends to be what he’s not). And he’s never liked Ukraine, and he’s never believed in its war of defense against Russia.

Trump’s speech came barely 24 hours after the announcement that he was pausing aid to Ukraine. As a result, tens of billions of dollars in military assistance, including the supply of not just future aid but arms and associated tech already earmarked (but not yet delivered) to Kyiv has been frozen. To do this to an ally under attack from a murderous neighbor is lethal, and morally treacherous. Ukraine is now dangerously exposed.

A cessation of aid is going to be difficult for Ukraine. Sources over there tell me that the army could continue fighting for anywhere up to a few months, longer if the Europeans really step up. But their message was clear: they need the Americans. I fear they are right. It’s hard to spend any time on the front without running into soldiers using US equipment, while almost all digital communications are run through Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service. For now, though, everything has stopped, except of course the Russian attacks.

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That doesn’t bother Trump. In any case, the US has done similar things in the past. Back in the Seventies and Eighties, Washington occasionally paused aid to Egypt when its policies ran counter to American interests, notably when Cairo started cozying up to the Soviet Union. Congress also often attempted to limit the Reagan administration’s aid to Nicaragua and El Salvador on account of their corruption and authoritarian governments. Aid has always been used as a means of chastising regimes that irritated them.

But to slap a longstanding US ally at war with one of Washington’s traditional foes? The only precedent for that is…Donald Trump — in 2019. That year, he halted aid to Ukraine for various supposed and different reasons, mainly, he said, because of Ukrainian corruption. Many suspect, however, that he did it because of Ukraine’s refusal to launch investigations into Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden, as Trump wanted to nobble his likely rival in the 2020 presidential election.

So why the power play this time? It seems that, in the end, the divide on Ukraine between the Europeans and the United States is the one at the heart of so many divorces — irreconcilable differences. In this case, it’s irreconcilable enemies. For the Europeans and Britain, Putin menaces their continent. The threat is on their doorstep, which makes it not just proximate but inescapable. For the Americans, though, geography intervenes. Trump knows this. As he said: “We have an ocean separating us, and they don’t.” It’s China that poses a more serious multi-pronged threat to Washington, ranging from conventional military competition to crime, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity. More than this, China is the only nation that is big and rich and powerful to conceivably challenge Washington for global dominance. Russia is too poor and dysfunctional.

From this position of relative safety, it’s small wonder Washington feels such dissatisfaction at the Europeans who, in its view, simply aren’t doing enough to protect themselves. To America, Europe looks recklessly blasé. As Trump stated last night: “Europe has sadly spent more money buying Russian oil and gas than they’ve spent on defending Ukraine, by far. Think of that. They’ve spent more buying Russian oil and gas than they have defending.” In fact, this American view long predates Trump (even if it wasn’t felt with such force). Biden mentioned it several times, and even Obama complained that “Europe has sometimes been complacent about its own defense.” They are right. In Europe, we have lived off American largesse for 80 years. We love welfare states and so we outsourced our security to Washington to pay for them. Whether we like it or not, in certain regards the true father of the NHS is not Nye Bevan but Harry Truman.

This sort of freeloading was always going to irk a president whose view of geopolitics is fundamentally mercantile. For Trump, everything is transactional. “If we have to safeguard everyone else, what do we get out of it?” is the attitude. As the President said, he wants to deliver “the greatest economy in history”. Behind the vague and typical boasting lies a note of fear. The American deficit, which sits at around $1.2 trillion, has concentrated minds. As the historian Niall Ferguson observed, when superpowers spend more on debt repayments than on defense, they soon cease to be superpowers. Washington did that for the first time last year. The trend must be arrested. The deficit must come down, or else the United States might go down with it.

No wonder, then, that the desire to bring in revenues is high on the Trump agenda; resources, be they in Ukraine or Greenland, are seen as a fruitful means to this end. His beloved, misunderstood tariffs are too, which “are not just about protecting American jobs. They are about protecting the soul of our country. Tariffs are about making America rich again and making America great again.” The stock market may yet have other ideas.

But for all those statesmen who don’t see Ukraine as a security issue, and are aware of how much leverage Washington has, Kyiv offers value only as a cash cow that can be bilked, not least from a man who’s spent his life bilking everyone he can. And make no mistake, he intends to bilk Ukraine. And it seems his playbook is working. Zelensky has been made to atone. In a letter which Trump read out last night he said: “Ukraine is ready to come to the negotiating table as soon as possible to bring lasting peace closer…. Regarding the agreement on minerals and security, Ukraine is ready to sign it at any time.” This is the deal that was due to be signed until the meeting between Zelensky, Trump and JD Vance descended into finger-jabbing acrimony.

The threat of facing Putin alone has also pushed Europe into action. Not only has Starmer promised that Ukraine’s Western allies would continue providing military aid to secure lasting peace and protect the country’s sovereignty. The PM has also declared the UK’s readiness “to put boots on the ground and planes in the air”, invoking a possible “coalition of the willing” for Ukraine’s defense.

Finally, Europe was getting its act together — rhetorically at least — which you’d think would be music to the White House’s ears. But then Vance hit the airwaves to tell the world that “If you want to actually ensure that Vladimir Putin does not invade Ukraine again, the very best security guarantee is to give Americans economic upside in the future of Ukraine.”

“That is a way better security guarantee than 20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years,” he said.

Apart from the inanity of the outburst, forgetting, perhaps, that the UK sent around 150,000 troops to Afghanistan and around 140,000 to Iraq, this response to the European willingness to do what the White House has repeatedly urged them to do is striking. But perhaps not surprising. If Kyiv can survive with only European help, then it may well be goodbye lucrative minerals deal. But more broadly, it is not in the US interest for the Europeans to become totally self-sufficient militarily. If that were to happen, Washington would lose the largest part of its leverage over a continent that is, in the end, the richest and most dynamic free space outside of the US. The ideal situation is for the Europeans to pony up much more cash yet still have to defer to Washington when it counts.

Understand this and understand that the White House is using Ukraine as a means through which to more broadly reorder international relations for a new era; in Trump’s machinations can be seen an adumbration of the world as he wants it to be.

So it remains to be seen, then, what Vance will make of what happened last night in Germany. In response to the White House’s outburst, it overturned the debt brake which prevents it from spending more on defense. “In view of the threats to our freedom and peace on our continent,” said Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin, the motto “whatever it takes” must now apply to the country’s defense. Merz now argues that defense spending must go above 1% of GDP. Isn’t this what America wanted?

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Given the heated tenor of the debate, it’s almost impossible to predict what Trump will do, but what is clear is that the United States is no longer a reliable ally. If we are back in the age of empires, then he is a fickle emperor indeed. The lesson for Europe is bleak but unambiguous. We are alone. While Moscow is revelling in Trump’s actions and China is seething at the imposition of tariffs, Europe has no choice but to become self-sufficient. We must understand that paying 3% of GDP for defense now is better than having to pay 6% five years down the line when the Russians are in the Baltics.

Of course, it’s not just foolish but dangerous to take Trump at his word. Of course his speech was filled with exaggerations and lies. The US hasn’t spent $350 billion on Ukraine; in fact, since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Congress has passed five spending bills to provide support to Ukraine, totaling about $174.2 billion. Meanwhile, Europe hasn’t merely spent $100 billion. A February EU fact sheet reported that its member states had provided about $145 billion since the start of the war, and then in February, the EU committed up to $54 billion for recovery and reconstruction.

Minerals, tariffs and the annexation of territory (“one way or the other, we’re going to get it,” he said about Greenland) — it could be the 1800s again in DC. Trump, let’s be clear, doesn’t like war: because it’s expensive. But he likes to fight (or “Fight! Fight! Fight!” as everyone chanted in that room yesterday), and to do so while making “great TV”. His weapons of choice are, it seems, economic, all backed up by massive US hard power in the background of course.

And so, for now, we continue to stumble into an uncertain future, unsure of where the whims of one man will take us next. Trump says it will be like nothing we have ever seen before. And we know we can take him at his word.

“We’re going to develop it, we’re going to create thousands and thousands of jobs,” he gushed while discussing Gaza’s potential to become the Middle East’s “Riviera”. This followed comments he made immediately after his inauguration about its “phenomenal location on the sea — best weather”.

The Palestinians who live in Gaza would, he continued, be taken in by Egypt and Jordan. Both countries, he was certain, would “open their hearts and will give us the kind of land that we need to get this done and people can live in harmony and peace”.

Benjamin Netanyahu, standing next to him, was clearly taken by surprise, though clearly also not entirely unpleasantly. These words were, he said, “worth paying attention to”. Trump, he added, “sees a different future for that piece of land that has been the focus of so much terrorism… I think it’s something that could change history”.

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In contrast, allies and adversaries across the world mainly reacted with the same horror that was written across White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ face as Trump outlined his vision. Hamas called the plan “racist” and vowed to prevent its implementation, while the Palestinian Authority described it — not incorrectly — as a severe breach of international law.

Jordan and Egypt were similarly outraged. Both receive huge amounts of US aid (third and fourth largest recipients respectively in 2023), which means that Washington does have considerable leverage. But when you consider what is being asked, and of whom, then even those colossal sums are likely to be inadequate.

Let’s start with Jordan. When it became an independent state, in 1946, it did so as a largely Palestinian one — led by a British-installed Hashemite monarchy. Today, one in five Jordanians is of Palestinian descent, while more than two million Palestinian refugees already live there. For Amman to absorb more would threaten its very viability as a Hashemite state.

There’s also a deeper anxiety here. Back in 1970, during the Black September conflict, Jordanian forces and Palestinian groups clashed after a failed assassination attempt on King Hussein and the hijacking of four planes by a Palestinian terror group. A massacre ensued, and only ended with the expulsion of the PLO from Jordan. The Hashemite monarchy internalized a lesson: give the Palestinians any room in the country and they will try to take control. Import a million or so now, and the result might not be so favorable. King Abdullah may not want to go against Washington, but if it’s a choice between that or the end of his monarchy then there is no choice.

Egypt is, arguably, even more vulnerable if there were a Palestinian influx. The idea that President el-Sisi, who overthrew the Brotherhood in a coup, will now import its offshoot, Hamas, is hardly serious. Nor can he afford to be seen as complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Polling by the Washington Institute a year ago found that 97% of Egyptians agreed Arab states should “immediately sever all diplomatic, political, economic, and any other contacts with Israel, in protest against its military action in Gaza”. El-Sisi has maintained relations with Israel. But imagine his people’s reaction if he helped Jerusalem empty Gaza.

An angry population is a destabilizing one. And Egypt is already an economic basket case, suffering from inflation, a nosediving currency and substantial debt. If it collapses, the region and the world will suffer the consequences. And if there is one state in the world that has a particular interest in Egypt holding together, it is Israel. To have 16 million desperate Egyptians on its border would probably be a threat greater than any it has yet faced.

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The anger at Trump’s Riviera has reverberated beyond Palestine’s immediate neighbors. Normalization with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been a longstanding goal of both the Trump and Netanyahu administrations, but after Trump’s words Riyadh was unequivocal that there would be no diplomatic relations with Israel without a Palestinian state. I know from multiple sources that the Saudis don’t actually care about the Palestinians; and that their crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is desperate for normalization with Jerusalem. But Trump’s real estate plan has left Riyadh with no alternative but to publicly support a two-state solution (which was not necessary for the signing of the Saudi-supported Abraham Accords). Since this is out of the question for Netanyahu, Trump has inadvertently pushed normalization further out of reach.

That the “plan” would be a gross violation of international law is probably irrelevant to Trump. But if he were to succeed in turning Gaza into a riviera, what does he think the millions of displaced Gazans would do? They would consider it a second Nakba. Gaza city would become a seafront paradise where residents sipped Negronis under rocket fire from Egypt and took cold plunges as Hamas terrorists emerged bellowing from tunnels across the border. US troops would be stuck there for decades. Surely a less-than-ideal scenario for a man who has repeatedly stated his desire to end US involvement in foreign wars.

Netanyahu understands all this. He is a sociopath with a messiah complex; he genuinely believes his destiny is to save Western civilization from the scourge of radical Islam. He is also the man who, before October 7, brought Israel to the brink of civil unrest. But he is also incredibly smart and probably the most able state leader in the world right now. His assessment that Trump’s proposal was “worth paying attention to” was pointedly mealy-mouthed — in contrast to his fascistic former coalition partner Itamar Ben-Gvir’s enthusiastic assessment that Trump’s plan represents “the only solution”.

But if this idea is dangerous, impetuous and unlikely to see the light of day, the impulse behind it (even though borne from instinct rather than design) — to think about a seemingly unsolvable problem in a new light, however crazed, is perhaps worthwhile. As policy, Trump’s Gaza plan is a disaster; as a thought experiment, it’s absurd. But such an unthinkable suggestion might actually kickstart the sort of unorthodox, disruptive thinking that has eluded more measured, knowledgeable and sharper minds for almost 60 years — and which has helped to keep peace so tortuously at bay for so long.

If 2024 was depressing, it was also instructive, in the Middle East at any rate. There, we saw the deepening of a trend which I suspect will come to characterize 2025 even more strongly: the shattering of political and policy beliefs so long and dearly held that they have amounted to orthodoxies. For the smart politician or state, this allows for sparks of opportunity amid the gloom.

Towards the end of the year, I was in Erbil, the capital of Kurdistan in Northern Iraq, discussing the supposedly imminent withdrawal of coalition troops from the country. Under Operation Inherent Resolve, Washington keeps 2,500 troops in Iraq and 900 in Syria, where the UK has 1,000-1,200 and 150-200 respectively. Their job is to work alongside local partners, like the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to prevent a resurgence of the terror group ISIS. Coalition forces also fill critical gaps in Iraqi security.

But Iran, which dominates Iraq through its proxy Shia militia groups, has long wanted us out. In September, the US and Iraq agreed to conclude the formal coalition mission by September 2025, though some troops will remain in advisory roles. The first phase of withdrawal has already begun. A final withdrawal means that Iraq will fall almost completely into Tehran’s grip. My interlocutor was Kurdish and, unsurprisingly, this worries him — as it does millions of Sunnis.

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There are, you see, many Iraqis who not only have no problem with Western intervention in their country, but don’t want it to end.

But I was surprised later when a Sunni Arab friend told me that many Iraqis love Trump because, in January 2020, he whacked Qasem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s Quds Force and the man responsible for so much violence in their country. No matter that Trump brought in a so-called “Muslim ban”, his Western “intervention” in Iraq was more palatable to a section of its people than Iran’s far more localized — and constant — meddling.

This speaks to a broader, unignorable truth: the reality on the ground in the Middle East is often not just merely different to what we read, believe or are told in Oxbridge Area Studies departments, but entirely at odds with it; as is our relationship to the region, and how that is often received by the people there. I was reminded of the great historian and Middle East scholar Elie Kedourie, an Iraqi Jew who ended up a professor at the LSE in London (and who was also married to my mother’s cousin).

Kedourie, who passed away in 1992, was famous for many books but what stands out is his genuinely iconoclastic 1970 work The Chatham House Version: and Other Middle-Eastern Studies. I still remember reading it for the first time, being struck not only by its percipience and extraordinary breadth of knowledge, but its literary style; and in his third language (after Arabic and French, too). It is a forensic dismantling of the “Chatham House” — the informal name for the Royal Institute of International Affairs think tank — analysis of the Middle East. For Kedourie, Chatham House stands as shorthand for an elite British view of the Middle East (and the Arabs in particular) that he argues is based around a mix of sentimentality, guilt, and self-flagellation brought together by a guiding tendency to favor romantic illusion over prosaic reality.

Kedourie was most scathing about the effect of this approach in his homeland of Iraq. He watched the British scuttle out of there, and indeed the region, during the end of empire, and let chaos ensue — and he damned them for it.

According to Kedourie, “The British left behind a region whose political, social, and economic structures were inadequate to sustain the independence they had promised and which they had uncritically imposed.” Add “Americans” alongside “British” and you’ll recognize not only the timeless wisdom of his words, but also the West’s ability to make the same mistakes, timelessly.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was a historic mistake. We should not have done it. But we did, and in so doing we removed a brutal and sadistic dictator, but one who nevertheless kept chaos at bay. Chaos that, lest we forget, is built into the Iraqi state, carved illogically from three Ottoman provinces, and filled with a toxic mix of Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. Iraq was constructed (by us and the French no less) as if it were designed to be a sectarian tinderbox; and once Saddam’s controlling authority was gone, that tinderbox erupted. Last year, on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, I reported for UnHerd from Baghdad where my fixer Ammar told me something that has lodged, ineradicably, in my mind ever since. “We had so much hope in the beginning,” he said. “Then the country turned to a path of blood, and then people started to want Saddam back to keep order. Even with all the misery he brought.”

And it’s not just Iraq where coalition troops are indispensable, but Syria too. There, they are concentrated mainly in the northeast and comprise a limited but strategic presence focused on counterterrorism, military partnerships with the Kurds, who control an autonomous region in parts of the north and east, and containing Russian and Iranian influence.

Following the fall of Assad — and was not the rapid fall of this supposedly immovable dictator yet another orthodoxy shattered — we hope that Syria is moving toward effective self-governance. But make no mistake, coalition troops are still needed there. The Turkish-backed Syrian National Army is already skirmishing with Kurdish forces, primarily the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who are allied with Washington in the fight against Islamic State, but which Turkey views as a threat due to their links to Kurdish groups it views as terrorists. My Kurdish friends on the ground are understandably worried. Without US forces on the ground, who knows what the SNA will do. The situation is made worse through the presence of the terror group Islamic State (IS). Over the first half of 2024 IS claimed responsibility for 153 attacks in Iraq and Syria (almost more than double the total number of attacks claimed in 2023). In that time, US forces along with the Iraqi security forces and the SDF have conducted 196 missions, killed 44 IS operatives and detained 166. According to US CentCom, “these leaders include those responsible for planning of operations outside of Syria and Iraq, recruiting, training and weapons smuggling.”

The Kurds also control Al-Hol Camp, where 10,000 to 12,000 imprisoned jihadist fighters and former IS members are imprisoned (the camp houses around 50,000 to 60,000 people, including family members of IS fighters, one of whom is Shamima Begum). If the Kurds come under sustained SNA attack, they will no longer be able to effectively control the camp, and thousands of Jihadis could go free. These are not just issues of Syrian and Iraqi security, but our own too. And finally, there is the problem of Russia and Iran. Both regimes are now under huge pressure at home and abroad, and they will grasp any opportunity to claim any sort of victory — Iraq and Syria offer them a chance.

We have a responsibility to the people of Iraq whose country we invaded, destroyed and now want to hand over to Iran. We have a responsibility to the people of Syria too, especially the Kurds, who fought with us to defeat IS. If we flee (again), we will abandon the region to chaos: just as Kedourie shows we did over half a century ago. Both US and UK diplomats have admitted to me over recent years the shame and awkwardness they feel because of the failed invasion. They are right to feel ashamed, but it is dangerous madness to leave Iraq, above all for the Iraqis we profess to care about so much.

So, why have we promised that we will? For the same reasons Kedourie identified over half a century ago: loss of nerve born from a failure of confidence. We fear being called occupiers or imperialists while the Iranians and Russians are shamelessly trying to rebuild the empires they have lost. Then there is Turkish President Recep Erdoğan’s drive across Syria, which is led by several geopolitical considerations but also the more far amorphous vision of rebuilding the Ottoman Empire there.

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By Edward Luttwak

In the name of anti-imperialism, we would hand these countries over to the worst imperialists of our day.

Action can indeed be disastrous, but so can inaction. We invaded Iraq in 2003, and it brought chaos and bloodshed to Iraqis. But in 2011, Barack Obama, haunted by Iraq’s legacy, refused to enforce his own red line and punish Bashar al-Assad for gassing his own people. He failed to act, and it brought chaos and bloodshed to Syrians.

And if we do cut and run, who suffers most in the countries we abandon? Again, we turn to Kedourie who, as a Jew, was always sensitive to the treatment of minorities (that supposedly sacred group in contemporary Western policy-making). He was just 15 when he witnessed, along with most of my maternal family, the June 1941 pogrom known as the Farhud (“Looting”) in which officers of the state murdered over 180 Jewish men, women, and children. For Kedourie, two lessons emerge, not just from the Farhud but post-imperial Iraq. The first is that living as a minority under the cosmopolitan Ottoman empire was preferable to a Sunni Iraq, increasingly gripped by notions of nationalism it had imported from the West, but which lacked the institutions and traditions to fully understand or implement. The second, was that, as the author Robert Kaplan has observed, Kedourie understood that Empire provided the kind of Hobbesian Leviathan needed to control a Middle East gripped by incessant turmoil and violence (which he exhaustively detailed in his work) and protect the weak from the strong.

Now I am emphatically not suggesting that the coalition remain in Iraq (nor to a far lesser extent Syria) to act as Leviathan. But when the US crowbarred itself in that role for close to two decades to suddenly abandon Iraq, not to its own people but to the far less palatable Leviathan next door, is not merely inadvisable, it is inexcusable.

All this is so obvious that mere loss of confidence seems inadequate to explain it. In fact, it is compounded by something else that Kedourie identified in the British foreign policy establishment: a deep strain of orientalist fascination with, and fetishization of, Arab culture (how else to explain its indulgence of that bloviating fraud T.E. Lawrence). This is then compounded by guilt: at the problems caused by their drawing of post-imperial borders and, perhaps above all, the foundation of the state of Israel. Simply put, British officials believed that the Arabs, once freed from the twin evils of Zionism and imperialism, would naturally establish peaceful, stable governments, without recognizing the challenges posed by centuries of division and conflict. Once again, add “Americans” to “British” and this book, which was written over half a century ago, could have been written this morning.

Kedourie understood that this was nonsense; he understood that what followed the end of empires was not a halcyon age of “authentic” liberation but often corrupt governance and mass violence; he understood, also, that it is only a “fashionable western sentimentality which holds that Great Powers are nasty and small Powers virtuous”. This phrase should be cast in bronze to hang over the desk of every FCDO and State Department official, and of every foreign news editor. Any temptation to view it as simplistic or exaggerated is swiftly disabused with consideration of the behavior of many Global South countries towards Russia’s attempted colonization of Ukraine. Being colonized a century ago may give you an insight into that particular form of suffering, but it clearly doesn’t extend to empathy for countries undergoing similar threats today, and it absolutely does not endow you with any superior ability to analyze contemporary geopolitics.

But most of all Kedourie understood the problem was not Zionism but, as Kaplan observes, that “the Ottoman Empire with its caliphate crumbled, leaving an Islamic civilization without a recognized religious authority. The result was various groups and factions and ideologies that competed for which one could be the most pure; that is, the most extreme. Today’s problems are old problems, going back to the decades of Ottoman decline, with the realization that the Middle East, from Algeria to Iraq, has still not found a solution to the final collapse of the Turkish sultanate in 1922.”

Still, though, it was Zionism, or more correctly the State of Israel, which supposedly sat and sits at the center of orthodox Middle East analysis and reporting today as a source of all instability — a font of original sin in a region that, without its cancerous presence, would surely exist as an oasis of tranquility. It is notable that directly challenging this orthodoxy has led to the greatest regional breakthrough of the last decade in the region, the 2020 Abraham Accords. That the series of normalization agreements between Israel and several Arab states were brokered by Donald Trump is extraordinary but perhaps also inescapable.

Only a man so divorced from the Western foreign policy establishment could go so directly against one of its guiding principles, as articulated by then-US secretary of State John Kerry in 2013. “I will tell you that peace between Israel and the Arab world is impossible without a Palestinian peace,” he said. “It’s not going to happen. You’re not going to get it.”

After Hamas committed the October 7 atrocities — which occurred just weeks after another star of the DC foreign policy establishment, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, declared that the Middle East is “quieter than it has been for decades” — Israel launched its war in Gaza. It then launched its war in Lebanon and took out the leaders of both Hamas and Lebanon, while also striking Iran directly for the first time. At each stage the world (most importantly the Americans) told Israel to stop. They told it to make peace. They told it that an extended war would be bad for everyone; and that it would strengthen Hamas. They said, going into Lebanon would be a bloody disaster (as would going to Rafah, where in fact the IDF managed to kill Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar); and that Iranian missiles could destroy large parts of its territory. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ignored them on every occasion.

I make no moral judgment on each of these actions, merely on their efficacy, which as of now, is proven. And Netanyahu was able to accomplish everything he has for a variety of reasons (not least that he wants to put off the post-war inquiries over October 7) but above all because he understands that the Middle East that matters is not that the one that triggers undergraduate protestors, or makes the hard Left go misty-eyed, or the one that aging Foreign Office or State Department mandarins fondly imagine.

And in this he follows Kedourie, whose work remains priceless not just because he was intellectually brilliant, but because he understood that what matters is not ideology or politics, but the reality on the ground, viewed without sentiment or, as far as possible, bias. He understood that history is not about ideology but about facts and evidence —as are the highest forms of reporting. As 2025 dawns, we can do a lot worse than look forward by looking back over 50 years to one of the greatest works by one of the great Middle East scholars of the 20th century, and use it to help us navigate the many challenges we face today.

Today, the parliament is electing former professional footballer Mikheil Kavelashvili as Georgia’s new president, and the protestors aren’t happy. Kavelashvili is a former member of the incumbent pro-Kremlin Georgian Dream party (though now ostensibly an independent) and a strong proponent of the “Global War Party” conspiracy that the West is driving Georgia into conflict with Russia. Worse, he is also a co-author of the controversial “foreign agents” bill that forced organisations receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register as agents of foreign influence.

But what most irks the protesters is the fact that he has no degree. “He’s a fool without even a university diploma,” is the phrase I hear over and over. The Soviet reverence for education lingers, a Georgian friend explains. That he was once a professional sportsman (albeit not a very good one) is irrelevant. “My Grandad voted for Georgian Dream,” says Georgi, a young activist handing out flyers, “but now he feels betrayed because they elected this idiot.”

Kavelashvili is known to be a puppet; he is easily controllable by the ruling Georgian Dream party and by Bidzina Ivanishvili (known generally as Bidzina), Georgia’s richest oligarch, former prime minister, founder of Georgian Dream and the man who runs the country. But there are so many who would do Bidzina’s bidding, surely, they could find a puppet with a university diploma? I ask

“That’s the point,” Georgi answers. “Bidzina wants to humiliate society. He is a true authoritarian. The message is simple: I’ll elect my horse, and you’ll suck it up.”

***

Recent events in Georgia are grimly familiar. The general election in October saw the pro-Kremlin Georgian Dream win 53.9% of the vote (with 37.7% for the opposition coalition).

The opposition, and international observers, accused Georgian Dream of electoral fraud. Georgian NGO, The International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy reported “serious (electoral) violations”, including “intimidation, ballot stuffing, multiple voting, unprecedented levels of voter bribery and expulsion of observers from polling stations”. Other accusations included violence in polling stations, suppression of media, intimidation of opposition voters, compromised voter privacy and so on. The central election commission carried out a partial recount involving about 12% of polling stations and 14% of votes but claimed there wasn’t “a significant change to previously announced official results”. 

Georgian President Salome Zourabichvili, whom Georgian Dream had previously endorsed but is now firmly anti-government and pro-Western, had declared that the opposition coalition was set to win. “European Georgia is winning with 52% despite attempts to rig elections and without votes from the diaspora,” she tweeted.

Things are so febrile because the election was about far more than just who governs Georgia. It was a test of the country’s democratic health as it sought — theoretically, as far as Georgian Dream was concerned — to join the EU. Brussels had previously warned Tbilisi that a free and fair election was essential to continue its trajectory to membership; it also warned that any fraud could lead to the revocation of Georgia’s visa-free regime within the Schengen Zone.

The government chose fraud. The European Commission said that it could not recommend opening membership talks for the EU “unless Georgia reverts the current course of action which jeopardises its EU path”. Tens of thousands duly hit onto the streets. The Georgian interior minister announced the purchase of several new water cannons in anticipation of more protests over coming weeks.

The government refuses to back down. Nor will the protestors, who believe they are facing a simple choice. In early November, the former prime minister and current opposition leader Giorgi Gakharia laid out the essence of things. “In Georgia, we are connected to Europe through democracy, and to Russia through autocracy,” he told me. “These elections are so important because they are about the clash between the European or Russian orientation of the country, and therefore between these two different political paths.”

Across eastern Europe, the central foreign policy problem (and, given its penetration of their politics, often domestic problem) for many states is Russia. For those who want a better future the choice is exactly what Gakharia laid out: on the one hand, Europe, democracy, and strategic partnerships with the United States; on the other, a future of Kremlin-controlled governments that hoard power, enrich their leaders, and kowtow to Vladimir Putin.

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One evening, a few days after Syrian rebels overthrew Bashar al-Assad, I saw a man on Rustaveli, waving the independent Syria flag. “This flag is a token of solidarity between us and the Syrian people,” he told me. “Syrians fought for 12 years to get rid of a brutal dictator backed by the same enemy who seeks to subjugate us here: the regime of Vladimir Putin.”

He wasn’t exaggerating. In 2008, Russian troops rolled into Georgia’s South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions. They have squatted there ever since. But during the election campaign Bidzina said that Georgia provoked the conflict and should apologise to Russia. For a country’s de facto leader to blame his own people for their invasion by a more powerful neighbour is perhaps the most sinister form of political self-abasement I have encountered.

The people were predictably outraged. Georgian Dream tried to row back on the statement, but the damage was done. And the comments were instructive because they show the world the influence Putin has even when he doesn’t invade or kill: he turns leaders into toadies, as surely as he seeks to turn nations into colonies.

And it’s all done under the threat of force. “If you don’t vote for us, the Russians will invade. Georgia will become another Ukraine” was another Georgian Dream election pitch. Exercise freedom of choice and Russia will hurt you: the threat wasn’t even veiled.

Just over a month after the election, on 28 November, the government announced that it had “decided not to bring up the issue of joining the European Union on the agenda until the end of 2028”. Until then, protests had been generally calm but at that point they erupted, largely due to provocation from violent riot police, which, like all enforcement arms of an authoritarian state, also began to target journalists.

In the Marriott hotel media centre on Rustaveli, I met Alexander Keshelashvili from the independent Georgian Online publication Publica. He was covering the protests on the night of 28 November, just after the government made its historic announcement. Things were tense but peaceful. He was standing by the side of a building with a few other journalists when a mob of police ran towards them. He felt someone grab him and drag him to the police lines. Then around six to eight of them formed a circle around him and began to beat him. They didn’t even tell him he was under arrest; they just punched and kicked him.

“At first, I thought it was a mistake. I was shouting, ‘I’m a journalist,’ but I heard some bad words regarding my profession, so I knew they had targeted me deliberately.” Alexander was taken to hospital where he was told he had signs of concussion, as well as that the police had broken his nose in several places, for which he needed surgery.

The parallels with Ukraine’s 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution are hard to ignore; and when I spoke to Georgians they agreed. That revolution also began when a pro-Kremlin government (led by President Viktor Yanukovych) decided to turn away from the EU and towards Moscow after Yanukovych reneged on his promise to sign the EU accession agreement and chose instead to join Putin’s Customs Union. The people came onto the streets and did not leave until Yanukovych had fled to Russia.

Walking around Rustaveli, echoes of Maidan were everywhere. Activist civil society is blooming just as it was in Ukraine a decade ago. Protestors are coming together to get organised. Legal assistance is provided to those arrested, first aid facilities are set up.

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In truth, anything the protestors can do to increase their collective potency is now a necessity. Just as the Yanukovych government did during the Ukraine’s EuroMaidan Revolution, Bidzina’s government has hired gangs of thugs known as “Titushky” to intimidate and beat up protestors. People were eager to show me videos of them attacking protestors, often women. One evening, I saw a row of home-made shields by the side of the road — planks of wood with handles nailed into them, amateurish parodies of riot police shields — for people to defend themselves the next time the police got violent.

The Titushky have spawned a reaction. One young activist, Tornike Mskhiladze, has set up an anti-Titushky group. “Tbilisi is really small. I know five of the Titushky. Methadone addicts with criminal convictions. After doing this work, police will wipe their convictions. I know how fucked up their lives are. They are the scum of the earth, like the worst people you can imagine. And they beat up women and the press,” he told me.

People, he explained, had begun to feel unsafe at the protests even though they were protesting peacefully. “So I started asking around: who wants to defend our citizens because our police are now working with criminals. We must defend ourselves with our bare hands. Many people joined me. It was spontaneous. It wasn’t like I created a group or anything.”

Shame is an important tool of opposition here. As I walked up to a street protest one evening I saw the police congregating by their vans, almost all wore masks — it was striking sight in a country still theoretically a democracy.

Georgi explained it to me. “In the beginning when police were beating the protestors opposition media would discover their identities from video footage and then go to their parents’ house and ask their mothers what they thought of their sons beating their fellow citizens. Their mothers would often start crying and wailing that their sons would never do this. After that, the police started wearing masks.”

It’s clear that that protestors will not be intimidated off the streets. But the question remains: where does this all go politically? To try to answer it I speak to Giga Bokeria, the leader of the opposition Federalists Party, and a man who likes to chain smoke and discuss Winston Churchill. “I want to be clear,” he says, puffing away. “When we talk about the moving toward the EU here, we are not talking about it as an institution only. It’s about an overall civilisational choice.”

This is why, he explains, the protests intensified after 28 November. “For one month the protests were purely about elections. After the [EU] statement all the fears about Georgian Dream, which were clear to some, but maybe not so clear to others, or they didn’t want it to see it, were confirmed.”

This includes many Georgian Dream supporters, who didn’t think the government would turn away from the EU. Now they are out on the streets. “You have to understand,” he says, “that for Bidzina it’s not about four years in power, it’s about eternity in power for the status quo that he creates. And for that he needs to break the will of society.”

Will the government get more violent? Could they start open firing on the people? Most Georgians I know dismiss this. This is not Ukraine or Russia, is the response I get. Bokeria, though, is more circumspect. “I can’t exclude that unfortunately. And it’s good you mentioned Maidan. There are a lot of parallels. It’s not led by any political group; indeed, it’s completely decentralised, but now we see first signs of self-organisation: every day different groups organise demonstration in different locations, and they coordinate themselves.”

He continues: “Now, I didn’t mention Maidan because government propaganda is referencing it to frighten people, to make them think that if they continue to resist there will be bloodshed and that it will be followed by war from Russia. But it’s our duty as citizens of this country to do what we can to defend our sovereignty and individual liberty.”

Beyond that, though, is the inescapable engine of geopolitics. Georgia sits at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. It is a transit hub for trade and energy between Europe and Asia, while its position along the Black Sea and proximity to Russia, Turkey, and the Middle East further amplify its importance. If you want to counter Russian influence in the Caucasus region, you need Tbilisi. Conversely, if Russia can erode its democratic institutions, it gains greater leverage over the entire region.

The lesson of Georgia is as clear and unignorable as that of Ukraine. You can never be Putin’s ally: you either stand up to him or become his serf. Georgia as well as Ukraine, as well as Israel and Taiwan, are all now frontlines of the West. Their people are battling to uphold the systems we built. We help them in their fight, for our sakes as much as theirs.

Right now, the rebels are at Umayyad Square in central Damascus; they have taken control of the State TV while explosions and gunfire can be heard in some neighbourhoods of the capital. These are likely to be bouts of sporadic fighting as pro-Assad militias try to make it to the coast or the Lebanese border.

Escape routes, though, are becoming hard to find. Damascus International Airport is closed, with all flights cancelled. The borders with Lebanon and Jordan are closed. The Syrian government has made no official statement yet, and the location of Assad and his family is unknown (though there are rumours that a plane he was fleeing in may have come down).

Syria is in chaos.

All eyes are now on Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist militant group in Syria that leads the rebel forces. Formed in 2017 through the merger of several factions, including Jabhat al-Nusra — al-Qaeda’s former Syrian affiliate — HTS is a tricky proposition. It emerged from al-Qaeda but it also later fought them. Jolani is educated, sophisticated and politically astute.

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He has by all accounts been on a journey since he was dispatched from Iraq with bags of cash to bring jihad to Syria. He seems to recognise that international terror is a busted flush and that political pragmatism and moderation — or at least the avoidance of overt brutality — are the way forward. Reports indicate that when it comes to fusing religion with politics his belief is “the real world has to guide your Islam, that you cannot force your Islam on to the real world”. On parts of Arab social media, he has acquired the nickname “Jolani-Zelensky”.

HTS’s reputation has soared as it has advanced across Syria. Its soldiers would seem to be avoiding civilian casualties for now and are careful not to be seen as an occupying military power. Incredibly, there have — so far — been no reports of old scores being settled. Instead, there is footage of Assad troops surrendering and being set free to go home (the foot soldiers at least) and of peaceful transitions of power at airports, police stations and so on. As one Syria analyst said to me, “I’m surprised we haven’t seen more images of Assad soldiers being lined up and shot, gathered in squares for public executions, minority persecution, displacement and so on.”

Unexpectedly, Jolani has been vocal about protecting minority rights. He has sought to portray a more moderate attitude in interviews and on the ground he has personally managed the surrender of Assad troops — offering pardons, and then handing over control of the areas to local councils and civil authorities.

Then there are the prisons. These are a shorthand for Assad’s barbarity. Social media is now drowning in videos of startled prisoners being released; of Syrians weeping with relief and joy to discover a relative imprisoned long ago is alive. It’s powerful messaging.

All of which is to say that if the military campaign is a success, the strategic communications have been a stroke of genius.

Not least because HTS remains problematic. Let’s not forget that not so long ago that its followers were selling foreigners to Islamic State to behead on YouTube. The US has designated the group a terrorist organisation and has a $10 million reward out for Jolani’s death or capture. If he intends to run for Syrian president — and there are a lot of Syrians who would love that right now — then the US bounty is a huge problem.

Assad had stamped on his people so hard for so long that what we are now seeing is the eruption of a sudden and colossal vacuum of power. For the moment, the only real contenders to fill it are Jolani and HTS. We must hope that Jolani’s conversion is indeed “Damascene”; the West simply cannot afford Syria’s implosion to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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It would be salient, then, to remember the lessons of the fall of that other tyrant, Muammar Gaddafi. He was overthrown and everyone was euphoric. The problem was that booting him out had been the goal unifying all the armed factions — and without it, they turned on each other, with predictably disastrous consequences for Libya.

It didn’t help that the UN was too slow to put in place an effective political process. As a result, the government formed in Tripoli wasn’t inclusive, but made up of the Libyans who had been in exile and making friends in western capitals — just as the Iraqi businessman Ahmad Chalabi had conned so many people in Washington and London into believing that the Iraqis would welcome him as a returning leader. We never learn.

Ten years on, Libya is a mess. Tripoli is ruled by gangs and there has been zero development. Benghazi is run by a pro-Russian maniac. The country has become jihadi training camp and a launchpad for people smuggling to Europe.

Right now, the best-case scenario for Syria — and, most likely, regional security — is that Jolani is true to his word. What emerges is an inclusive political process to federalism, endorsed and supported by the international community, with funding for development and recovery. A transitional justice process is set up for perpetrators of war crimes, and there are no more Wild West jihadi training grounds fuelling untold terrorism and conflict the world over.

Regionally, the effects are huge. We don’t know what comes next, but it is extremely unlikely that a group that emerged from a Sunni Jihadists is going to have much time for Shia Iran and its militias. As it stands, Iran can kiss its land bridge to Hezbollah goodbye, severely weakening both parties, and strengthening Israel.

Jerusalem will have to watch what happens in the Golan Heights but as of now the events benefit Israel. One rebel even went on Israel’s Channel 11: “Dear neighbours from the State of Israel…” he said, “I’m speaking on my behalf and for all the free people of Syria. The next phase will be a phase of harmony and of peace with the State of Israel.” Whether that is true is debatable, but an extraordinary statement nonetheless.

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Another winner is Turkey, which has clearly been funding and training HTS. It may now move on with plans to further degrade the Kurdish PKK that runs part of Northeast Syria. At any rate, my friends in Kurdistan are nervous, and reaching out.

But Assad’s fall is bad news for Moscow. Syria is Putin’s southern flank, and it looks like he has lost it. Being unable to protect his client makes him look weak, and he may now also lose his naval facility at Tartus. Russian planes have been landing there all day — doubtless to extract their men.

Syria is once more in revolution, and the region is once more in flux. I think again of the Homs clock tower. On 18 April 2011, thousands gathered at its base for a peaceful protest. In the early hours of the following day, security forces dispersed the crowd with live ammunition, killing several of the protestors. The “Clock Tower Massacre” lives on for Syrians, who are now be hoping that some form of justice, and improvement in their lives, is coming. We must pray that these hopes are not in vain.

Netanyahu, accused of starvation and directing attacks against civilians, has described the warrants as “antisemitic” and a “dark day in the history of humanity”. Keir Starmer has nonetheless effectively endorsed them.

It’s hard, though, to see how the warrants stand up as law. Israel is not a member of the ICC and Palestine, which along with human rights luminaries South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros, and Djibouti petitioned for the warrants, is not recognised as a state by many. Meanwhile, the Rome Statute that governs the ICC states that any member cannot affect “the rights and privileges” of a third party that is not a signatory.

It’s unsurprising, then, that the Israelis are enraged. The particularly egregious crime of starvation, according to the Statute, relates to “depriving [civilians] of objects indispensable to their survival, including wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions”. To prove this, the court must show that Israel acted with the deliberate intent of starving civilians. It’s hard to see how it can given Israel permits aid into Gaza daily. Food insecurity is not an indication of deliberate starvation; nor can Israel do anything to mitigate the hijacking of aid supplies by Hamas.

Yet more enraging, as far as the Israelis are concerned, the ICC is only supposed to intervene as a court of last resort when a nation is “unwilling or unable” to investigate alleged crimes itself. As Dr Yuan Yi Zhu, a fellow at Policy Exchange, points out: Israel’s “fiercely independent” prosecutors weren’t allowed the opportunity to investigate themselves before the ICC issued the warrants.

And the warrants aren’t only legally disreputable, they’re politically cretinous. They’re a gift to Netanyahu — who was reviled by many Israelis even before the negligence that allowed October 7 to happen. Now though, in the face of this type of external attack, the country is rallying behind him. The result? He will almost certainly feel emboldened. More military operations, not fewer, are likely in Gaza and Lebanon. And you can forget any idea of a negotiated peace — at least for the moment. If Palestine is putting out arrest warrants on Netanyahu, he’s hardly going to be making deals with them. It’s a colossal own goal.

All the more so given that America is not a member of the ICC and has an already antagonistic relationship with the organisation. Remember that back in September 2020, following the ICC’s decision to open an investigation into war crimes by US military personnel in Afghanistan, Trump used an executive order to sanction the prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, and another senior official, Phakiso Mochochoko. Bensouda eventually put the investigation on hold, and under Joe Biden, the US quietly withdrew the sanctions.

While Biden has dismissed the latest warrants as “outrageous”, American Senator Lindsey Graham has made clear that the incoming administration’s thoughts on them are even more robust. “If you are going to help the ICC, as a nation, enforce the arrest warrant against Bibi and Gallant… I will put sanctions on you as a nation,” he warned. “You’re gonna have to pick the rogue ICC versus America…We should crush your economy because we’re next,” Graham said. “Why can’t they go after Trump or any other American president under this theory?”

Certainly, the ICC’s choice of targets might be considered erratic. It never tried Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, for example, despite his use of chemical weapons against his own people. It claims (with levels of chutzpah usually associated with Israelis) that it has no jurisdiction because Syria is not in the ICC. And yet the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimates the death toll from that war to have been 613,000 with an additional 55,000 civilians believed to have died of torture in government-run prisons.

So if it’s all legally suspect and politically obtuse: why did the ICC do it? To say it is antisemitism alone is too simplistic. More credible is the idea that, as one international law expert told me, the ICC must have a diversity of judges, so it has a lot of mediocre people from countries across the world where legal standards are poor. “They just aren’t very good lawyers. Many of its judges are from the global south so from countries not favourable to Israel. Plus, if you are a human rights lawyer it’s taken for granted that you are anti-Israel.”

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The intellectual dishonesty of Shlomo Sand

By David Patrikarakos

There are many, especially on the Right, who claim that this proves that international law is an ass — or worse that it’s a “fiction”. But this is wrong: we need it to govern maritime rights and arbitrate on cross-border trade disputes. But on fundamental questions of national self-defence, and the defence of civilisation undertaken by people answerable to electorates, the idea that an institution such as the ICC has the essential competence or legitimacy to be the ultimate arbiter is massively stretching the power that international law should have.

A couple of days after the warrants were issued, I watched a clip from Channel 4 News in which human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, was pronouncing on the warrants. No one ever expected Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic to turn up in the dock in the Hague, but in the end his own people handed him over, he observed. Might not the same happen to Netanyahu when he “fell from power”?

His rhetoric only served to highlight the disconnect that pervades this world. For all the problems Israelis have with Netanyahu, it is fundamentally unserious to believe that they will ever throw him under the bus for fighting the terrorists who killed over a thousand of their fellow citizens and dragged hundreds more off to Gaza, no matter how much his actions have annoyed Djibouti.

The clash here is not just of political tribe or legal debate; it is of a fundamental understanding of reality. On the one hand, we have Robertson, the ICC and Keir Starmer (who privately refers to IHL as his “north star”) who believe that the bloody and chaotic practice of war can be ordered and adjudicated upon by bureaucrats in Holland.

On the other, we have Vladimir Putin and his war of conquest with its razed towns and cities, and Hamas’s psychopathic — and mediatised — barbarities. If the ICC’s vision ever had any basis in fact, it died in Gaza and eastern Ukraine, as I have seen first hand. This is the world we are now living in, and it will not yield to delusion, or legal sophistry.

The book he was promoting was called The Invention of the Jewish People, which argued that the concept of Jews as a distinct people with a shared lineage, culture and homeland didn’t exist until the arrival of 19th-century nationalism. The exile from ancient Israel in 70AD, a central event in Jewish tradition, he called a “myth”. These sorts of claims were, he wrote, thrown together to give the Jewish people a cohesive national identity and, inevitably and tediously, to justify Zionism.

Leaving aside that the phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” (“L’Shanah Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim“) — recited at the end of both the Passover Seder and Yom Kippur — dates at least from the Middle Ages, and that the book was intended to provoke, its objective was clear: the delegitimisation of Jewish nationhood and, by extension, any Jewish claims to the land of Israel. It was desperate stuff; even The Guardian’s reviewer wasn’t convinced.

And so, we come to his latest book Israel–Palestine: Federation or Apartheid?. Here, Sand “explores” two political solutions for the current conflict: a bi-national federation or what he terms an apartheid-like reality. There is, glaringly, no option of two states. The idea of a state for Jews, the state of Israel, is a non-starter.

It is from this bogus binary that we begin. What follows is expected: the first chapter opens with Sand quoting the Right-wing Zionist thinker Vladimir Jabotinsky, allowing him to make the case for Zionism being an entirely colonial endeavour. Predictably, there is no mention the continuous Jewish presence in the land since the defeat of the Jewish prince Simon Bar Kochba in AD135 and the fact that, apart from a brief period in the 18th century, the Palestinians who lived there did so as subjects of foreign rulers.

Jabotinsky, by the way, is more comprehensively dealt with by the other Israeli revisionist historian Avi Shlaim, in his book Iron Wall. I have my own issues with Shlaim’s work, but he is a harmless man and possessed of magnificent hair. I once sat in a lecture of his at university, marvelling at how it corkscrewed out of his skull in all directions, so white and flocculent you could stuff a duvet with it.

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Sand is a more aggressive polemicist, but he does make some valid points. His youthful activism was, he said, filled with hope that “the Israelis would see that, logically speaking, they simply could not expand their country at the expense of others while continuing to live in peace with them”. Few would disagree with that. He then goes on to lament that the articles he wrote and the marches he attended didn’t succeed in drilling this notion into the establishment — a sentiment also shared by many Israelis.

He fails to properly interrogate the degree to which the Palestinian side is culpable for the failure to reach peace. But again: fair enough. He’s far from alone in this. No, the bigger problem here is one of intellectual dishonesty. Take this — frankly pretty important — paragraph:

“And then October 7 came upon Israel, with Hamas’s brutal attack on areas next to Gaza. This horrible massacre bears certain similarities to the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, which was carried out by Christian Phalangists while the Israeli Defence Forces under Ariel Sharon stood by, allowing the attack to take place. It was the same Ariel Sharon who, later, in 2005, evacuated the Gaza Strip and contributed to Hamas’s rise to power, further exacerbating the discord within the Palestinian leadership.”

It doesn’t take much effort to parse this sort of guff. The biggest single massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is perfunctorily dealt with in a single line, before Sand moves on to invoke a massacre committed by Lebanese Christians almost half a century ago. As it happens, the two events “bear certain similarities” (mark the weasel phrase) to the degree that almost any acts of horrific violence do — and this illuminates nothing. He then castigates Ariel Sharon for literally doing what Sand says he spent most of his youth calling for: withdrawing from occupied Palestinian land. Sand goes on to describe how October 7 “came as an utter shock to the Israeli public”. I’d argue it came as a “shock” to any right-thinking person – unless you believe that Palestinians are savages, which I do not.

He then asks: “So what was the source of this raging hatred that translated into such terrible war crimes?” It was “convenient”, he says, “for many Israelis to explain the massacre in terms of the traditional hatred of Islam towards Jews, thus ignoring the long history of Muslim–Jewish relations since the Crusades and Salah ad-Din”.

Well, ok. It’s true that Jews tended to fare better in Muslim lands than in Christian ones, but they did so as dhimmis — religious minorities under Islamic rule who could not bear arms, hold various public offices, were generally forced to wear distinctive clothing, and often subjected to pogroms. And then there is the question of Jew-hatred.

Unlike most armchair pundits, I have been to both the West Bank and Gaza. There I have met countless Palestinians who impressed me with their charm, their stoicism in the face of undoubted suffering, and their hospitality. Many Palestinians are absolutely not antisemitic.

But there are also a lot who are; and they tend to be in Hamas. The conditions in Gaza will inevitably create resistance, but October 7 was about something else. Just weeks after the atrocity, I was shown footage of a jubilant Hamas terrorist calling his father after the attack. “Father… I killed 10 Jews with my bare hands,” he roared. “Check your WhatsApp. Father, be proud of me!” In Khan Younis, a member of Islamic Jihad told me that Jews are the descendants of pigs and apes and should be killed.

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These people are of little concern to Sand, whose sophistry leads him to his central concern: “Given these circumstances, can an exclusively Jewish state in the Middle East have any secure future?”

Again, to be fair to him, Sand understands the geopolitical Molotov cocktail that one state would be. But, he says smarmily, “as Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist idea, once said [of the idea of a Jewish state]: ‘If you will it, it is no dream.’”. Sand correctly points to the systematic settler theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank, and the reprehensible legal architecture that has sprung up to enable it, giving many incontestable examples of both. These “facts on the ground” make two states no longer viable, he argues. The reality, however, is that there is no “solution” to this nightmare other than compromise, and certainly not self-erasure by one side. Because in the end, when you strip away all the rhetoric, hate, and endless debates about history, the only germane fact is this: the land has two peoples, and neither of them are going anywhere.

Let’s be clear: the one-state “solution” is not an alternative for Israel but an alternative to Israel. To expect the only Jewish state in the world to voluntarily extinguish itself is fundamentally unserious. My family lived as Jews in Iraq for centuries — possibly even before the advent of Islam. But none of that mattered: a few years after Israel was founded, they were forced to leave for fear of facing violence or worse. This is why Israel exists. Against that there can be no retreat.

In a recent update to his book Jerusalem, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore proposes a different mental formulation for thinking about the future: “Two nations, two republics.” Two peoples living in two separate sovereign states alongside each other. This is the only viable future. Yes, the settlements must be dismantled (or equivalent land given from Israel). Yes, it will be an immense political (and indeed physical) undertaking, but it happened in Gaza, albeit on a smaller scale. It just takes political will. And for now, that is lacking on both sides.

Even so, we must hope that it will come because “one state” is not just delusional, it is dangerous. It helps to keep the conflict alive by making Palestinians believe that no compromise is necessary, which emboldens Israel’s fanatics and undermines its moderates. In the interim, both sides are condemned to interminable suffering. This is what matters. Not that people in Europe or the United States, which really do have long traditions of meting out colonisation and genocide, get to feel better about themselves.

Sand is an Israeli — though he has publicly declared that he no longer wishes to be considered a Jew — so he does have skin in the game. But in the end, one has to ask: what’s the difference between him and Netanyahu? Both are living in an alternative reality, talking about different variations of a one-state “solution” that, practically speaking, will only bring civil war, which the Israelis would win, as they have an army, navy and Airforce. Look around the Middle East and consider how non-Muslims fare in society. Look at Lebanon to see how trying to cram various confessions into a single entity has worked out.

So “two nations, two republics” it must be. It is the only hope of real justice for two peoples who are, however much they might wish otherwise, manacled to each other forever. The road will be long and incredibly hard — but remember, Shlomo, if you will it, if you truly will it, it is no dream.

Nate Silver’s compelling new book, Living on the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything, is ostensibly about mathematical risk, and how it can be understood and used to benefit society accordingly. But I think it’s more about something else: the way we live now. It’s the book Trollope might have written if he had spent his life not as a post office employee but gambling, reading libertarian philosophers and hanging around on the underbelly of 4Chan and Reddit.

The first thing to understand about Silver, best known for his polling website FiveThirtyEight, is that politics does not come naturally to him. As he tells us: “I played poker professionally before I ever wrote a word about politics or built an election model. I still feel more at home in a casino than at a political convention.”

From this starting point, Silver guides us through his world, a particular group of people who he describes as living in “the River”. Poker players, he explains, love water metaphors, and the River is full of “tributaries and niches” inhabited by various types who have indeed spent their lives in the underbelly of the internet and, most importantly for Silver, in casinos. Often, they have played poker for huge sums of money. But the River also has “a canon of influences and ideas”. These range from “game theory and Nash equilibria to expected value and marginal utility” and various other things you have only dimly heard of.

These are people obsessed with numbers, especially ideas of probability so important to games like poker (the book’s first section is all about gambling). This has several effects, not least that it all makes you live a certain way. River people like Silver are “EV maximizers” (“expected-value maximizers”): Rivermen (and, as Silver points out, the River’s inhabitants are overwhelmingly men) take an analytical, strategic approach to gambling, investing and other aspects of life, trying to calculate the most optimal “play” in any given situation. This leads them down some curious paths, not least when Silver considers whether it’s “EV maximizing” to have fries with your sandwich or opt for the healthy side salad. “It might,” he concludes, “depend on how good the fries are.”

For the River, sacred places are not Harvard Yard or the Capitol, but Las Vegas, a “shrine to risk-taking, excess, progress, and capitalism”. All of this is, of course, an affront to what Silver calls “the Village”, which “consists of people who work in government, in much of the media, and in parts of academia (although perhaps excluding some of the more quantitative academic fields such as economics). It has distinctly Left-of-centre politics associated with the Democratic Party.” It is, in other words, the River’s nemesis.

See what’s happening here? Almost all that the Village, shorthand for the established elites, has traditionally prized is viewed by the River with scepticism, not least elite higher education. And this is probably no surprise. It’s hard to think of places that would be less welcoming to Rivermen. More than this, if the River esteems poker players, hedge funders and venture capitalists (gamblers of a different stripe), its emperors are Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Elon Musk — all college dropouts (Musk, admittedly, only at postgraduate level).

What emerges is by now familiar: suspicion of “experts” or “elites” — and the desire to disrupt, or more correctly, take an axe to them. Confrontation is unavoidable. As Silver writes: “Harvard is the grand cathedral atop the hill — there is no more quintessentially Village institution.” So, when hedge funders such as Bill Ackman, rightly enraged by Harvard President Claudine Gay’s tawdry failures to condemn calls for genocide against Jews as hate speech, led the successful drive to remove her, it was “a symbolic coup” for the River. (“Want another sign that the Village and the River are explicitly at war?” Silver asks. “The New York Times’s copyright lawsuit against OpenAI.) VCs, Tech titans, data scientists, hedge funders — these are the master-gamblers of Silver’s universe. As he concludes: “The quants won… We’re living in their world.”

Naturally, this can be problematic. First off, revolutionaries almost always curdle into the despised elites they worked so hard to overthrow. Considering the market dominance of Venture Capital firms, Silver concedes that “if success is concentrated only among a few elite firms… to the point where they essentially can’t lose, then VC is becoming more and more like the incumbent institutions that Silicon Valley would deign to disrupt”. The Ivy League’s elite capture doesn’t disappear; it’s merely replaced by that of Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Google and Tesla.

And who are these people? Well, many of them are just Riverman who hit the jackpot. Elon Musk may be a first-rate engineer and businessman, but he’s also an example of what happens when an incel makes $200 billion.

Back in the day, to amass a fortune as an industrialist or oil baron, you had to at least deal with people. Now, the Masters of the Universe are more comfortable with code than conversation. A few years ago, I watched Mark Zuckerberg launch the metaverse, which he did while performatively “chatting” with a grinning — and to my mind clearly terrified — young woman. It was just weird.

Silver understands this. “In the River, it’s common to find people, like Elon Musk or the poker player Daniel ‘Jungleman’ Cates, who self-identify as having Asperger’s syndrome or autism,” he writes. “It’s also common to hear people refer to themselves or others with terms like ‘Aspie’… Depending on the context, this may be derogatory, but it isn’t always so.” For the River, this is more of a cultural marker than a medical diagnosis. What the mainstream views with suspicion or does not understand becomes a source of pride. What it prizes, like Ivy League universities, the River eschews.

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The problem with gambling and risk is that, in irresponsible hands, it can be catastrophic. Silver tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-king turned felon. SBF, he writes, is “a nerdy, overconfident, Adderall-popping, video-game-playing, youngish white guy who has a severe gambling problem and is probably somewhere on the autism spectrum”. This makes him “a common typology” for the River. But he is also a crook, which Silver well understands. SBF’s problem was that he could mouth all the platitudes about EV, Effective Altruism, Rationalism and all other River obsessions — one consequence of reading this book is that I finally understand Dominic Cummings’s blogs — but it made no difference. It’s not even that he didn’t understand risk: he just didn’t care.

So why did so many stats-literate, data-munching, probability-obsessed altruists and tech bros fall under his spell? Once more the answer centres on ideas about the way we live, or rather the way the River seeks to live, and how it will ultimately always fall short of its loftiest aspirations. You can try to game all aspects of life, seek out the EV in every situation, calculate the odds, run your models and algorithms, but in the end, you remain (for the moment at least) irreducibly human. In the words of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz when assessing the SBF disaster: “It must have been the cult of personality. I guess it’s the only explanation.”

And it’s sometimes the only explanation elsewhere, too. It’s no coincidence that gambling, geopolitics and war all centre on the effective calculation of risk. Of course, there are vast and obvious differences between them in terms of cost, scale and repercussion; not least because risk in gambling is typically confined to the realms of chance and individual choice, while geopolitics involves a vastly greater degree of multifaceted interaction and its consequences can be global.

But there is a similarity too: if many of today’s finest minds are gamblers, history has thrown its greatest thinkers at geopolitics. And even when the stakes are life and death, when the players are so various, the same patterns persist. The cult of personality moves history — and it does so repeatedly. The River may have given us SBF, but geopolitics gave us Mao and Stalin and Putin. This is the price of being human, and it will continue to be so. You can bet on it.

The Party of God had begun striking Israel in “solidarity” with Hamas and has not stopped since. But it was always careful not to escalate. Israeli security sources told me that the strikes were fastidious in their proximity to the border, delivering fatal payloads but also a clear message: Hezbollah would respond, but did not want war with Israel. This thesis was confirmed when the group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah gave one of his famous “bunker sermons” in which he congratulated Hamas on a masterful operation — not least the manner in which it had been absolutely and unequivocally carried out without the knowledge of him or his party of thugs. He said this more than once, in one form or another.

More to the point, pretty much every country in the world — even Iran — wanted to avoid an all-out regional war. But Israel was stuck. Hezbollah had de facto veto over daily life in northern Israel — something no sovereign state can allow — but Jerusalem had little choice to restrain itself.

A miserable stasis held. Until now.

Israel has seen civilians killed once more; and once more, it is enraged. Saturday’s rocket strike on a football pitch in the Golan Heights killed 12 Druze Israelis, all aged between 10 and 20. In response, the Israeli security cabinet has given authorisation to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant to decide when and how Israel will retaliate. Matters are not helped by the IDF’s conclusion that Hezbollah struck using an Iranian Falaq-1 rocket. Tehran cannot be divorced from the 12 Israeli deaths over the weekend — the crisis is regional.

In committing this atrocity, Hezbollah has made a big mistake, not least because it upended its own long-standing strategy toward Israel. Broadly speaking, Hezbollah bases its policy of force on a so-called “deterrent equation”. This is, according to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Center, built on four objectives: one, proactive attacks on Israeli targets; two, attacks in response to IDF offensive operations; three, attacks on key Israeli targets and infrastucture; and four, increasing the range of attack in response to Israeli attacks. The idea, outlined in May by the head of the Hezbollah faction in the Lebanese Parliament, is to keep Israel from “deluding itself into thinking it was capable of attacking Lebanon”.

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Above all, the “deterrent equation” is based on rules around the use of force, which primarily limit attacks to those on Israeli military targets within a range of 3-5km from the border. They also seek to kill soldiers and destroy military capabilities, while trying to avoid harming civilians. This preference, of course, exists only in theory; when Hezbollah fires rockets into Israeli cities, it knows that civilians are likely to be struck — especially given the sheer amount of ordnance it sends in.

As the fighting between the two sides has continued, Hezbollah has sought to tweak the “equation” by gradually escalating when it deems the situation appropriate — either through longer-range weapons during, say, a peak in the Gaza war or following the killing of one of its commanders. With regards to Gaza, its official position is that it will only stop attacking Israel when the war ends.

Unsurprisingly, Israel’s response had gradually taken shape in recent days. Reports on Monday claimed that two people died and three were injured in an Israeli drone strike outside the southern Lebanese town of Shaqra. Another was also killed and four wounded in Israeli airstrikes on a car and motorcycle driving between the towns of Mays al-Jabal and Shaqra. Netanyahu, for his part, has promised “harsh” retribution.

Strip away much of the geopolitical and strategic rhetoric and Hezbollah’s “equation” comes down to a simple tactic: mirroring. If Israel attacks deeper into Lebanon, Hezbollah will strike deeper into Israel. If Israeli strikes hit Lebanese civilians, Hezbollah will do the same south of the border. Indeed, Lebanese institutions demand it. Following an Israeli strike that killed three militants at the start of the war, Ibrahim al-Amin, the editor of the Hezbollah-affiliated daily al-Akhbar, wrote that the group should reasonably expect to act according to the “equation of symmetry”, which required it to carry out a military operation that would result in the death of at least three Israeli soldiers.

Yet now, Hezbollah finds itself in a deeply precarious situation. The group initially denied Saturday’s strike — perhaps unsurprisingly given that they killed not Jewish soldiers but Druze children. They realise that this is bad for them. Nasrallah must also know that the blame for further escalation now lies with Hezbollah: the consensus is that the group fired heavy rockets at an IDF base on Mount Hermon, above Majdal Shams, but that one of the rockets overshot the target.

During the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War, which began after a cross-border Hezbollah attack led to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others, Israel devastated large parts of south Lebanon. Afterwards, Nasrallah declared that, had he known that Israel would have reacted so ferociously, he never would have countenanced such a raid. Yet he also repeatedly boasted that Hezbollah had “won” the war. (As a friend in Beirut later remarked to me: “Any more ‘victories’ like that and we won’t have a country left.”)

More than anything, the conflict taught Hezbollah one overarching lesson, and it is the bedrock of the “deterrent equation”: do whatever you can to deter and inflict pain on Israel — but always keep it below the threshold of all-out war, because that you cannot win.

Today, however, that strategy is now at risk. When I returned to Israel early in the year, a government official told me that the elements within the IDF leadership were keen to take out Hezbollah. No longer, they reasoned, could they allow the northern part of their country to be held hostage to a terror group. No longer would they accept the north being emptied of its people. They understood the scale of the worldwide opprobrium that would follow. But the alternative — to live with a terror army perennially on your border — is, they concluded, worse. What other nation would accept that? And besides, the world has already turned against Israel — so why not take the opportunity to try to remove the country’s greatest terror threat?

One might think that the trajectory of the war against Hamas would give the IDF pause for thought. But this is post-October 7 Israel: an even angrier and traumatised nation. And the threat is undoubtedly very real. How many rockets should a country “accept”? How many civilians should be killed, before it responds with full force?

On Saturday, Hezbollah may have given them the green light they need. And if Israel escalates, Hezbollah — by its own doctrine — will be forced to escalate in turn. Then there is probably only one way this will end: in catastrophe, for Israel and Lebanon, and for the civilians on both sides.

The end effectively came last week, when Benny Gantz resigned and pulled his National Unity alliance out of the emergency government, exasperated by Netanyahu’s refusal to draw up a plan for the aftermath of the war. He was then joined by Gadi Eisenkot, the most moderate of the five members of the body. Netanyahu, presiding over a council that could no longer plausibly claim to represent a unified Knesset, was forced to pull the plug.

The problem here isn’t hard to glean. Gantz and Eisenkot were two of the more moderate voices in the coalition (and indeed contemporary Israeli politics). More than this, they are, unlike Netanyahu, both proper military men. Ganz is a former Chief of the General Staff; Eisenkot is a former Head of IDF Northern Command. Their resignation is a loss both to Israel’s military campaign and to its politics.

It was Gantz and Eisenkot who insisted a war cabinet be set up before they agreed to join Netanyahu’s emergency government in late 2023. Their rationale was twofold. First, the country needed to come together in a moment of national crisis; and second, they wanted to, as far as possible, sideline national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a couple of bloviating extremists with little military understanding or interest beyond constantly urging a more aggressive approach and rejecting any concessions for the release of the hostages. Over the past six months, these malignant cranks have spent much of their airtime arguing for the reestablishment of Israeli settlements in Gaza.

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The breakdown of the cabinet is, in certain regards, a microcosm of the problems facing Israel. For a start, the state’s ludicrous parliamentary system of almost pure proportional representation means that every single Israeli government is a coalition. This, in turn, means they almost always contain minor parties populated with various loons who are elevated to the role of kingmakers. It also means that governments tend not to see out their full terms. This is a legacy of Israel’s socialist beginnings; and it was perhaps the most egregious error David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founder, ever made. The results are plain 80 years later. Netanyahu feverishly needs both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to keep his coalition together — especially now. He has no choice but to take account of their various religious and political pathologies. Without them, he’s out.

Perhaps the second greatest mistake Ben Gurion ever made was to exempt the Orthodox Jewish Israelis from military service. He did this because, back then, there were relatively few of them (they made up around 5% of the population). They didn’t have to serve or pay tax, because they fulfilled their duty by “praying for the state”. Obviously, Ben Gurion knew this was nonsense, but it was the easiest way to keep them on side. The problem is: when you don’t have to pay taxes, and indeed get a host of benefits for doing essentially nothing, you tend to have a lot of children (as the Orthodox do anyway), especially when you get benefits for every child. There are now expected to be two million Haredis by 2033.

In early June, as the Supreme Court heard arguments that the exemptions are unlawful, dozens of Haredis blocked roads in protest. The tensions around this issue cannot be underestimated. At the turn of the century, I flew to Israel to take part in a debating competition when I was Chairman of Debating at the Inner Temple during an ill-advised (and ill-fated) foray into law. Inner Temple were the reigning champions and, with my debate partner Michael (a Northerner who had lived in Israel for 20 years), I had to bring the oversized trophy. For this, I purchased extra legroom seats on the El Al flight so we could rest the trophy securely in front of us. After dozing off for a while, I awoke to find the space occupied by two Haredis davening (praying). As they rocked back and forth, a look of disgust passed across Michael’s face. “Fuck off!” he roared. “Michael, you can’t speak to them like that,” I whispered, mortified. “Fuck ‘em — freeloaders,” he retorted. “And pay some fucking tax!” he bellowed at their retreating figures.

These issues have dominated Israeli politics for decades. Now, they threaten to unravel it. Netanyahu is a masterful politician, but, more than this, he is an old man desperate to stay in power. All his political skills are now devoted to this; winning the war is a secondary priority. He knows that when all this is finally done, the official enquiry will come and, as prime minister, he will not be able to escape blame.

With the more reasonable and more military experienced voices now gone, the prognosis for the sanity and pragmatism of Israeli government decision-making does not look good. Israel is engaged in a war in which its avowed and overarching objective — the total elimination of Hamas — has already failed. It had recent success in rescuing four hostages in operation “Seeds of Summer”, an extraordinary military operation involving its special forces. But the effect is ultimately limited. Especially given, as an IDF official admitted to me in Tel Aviv, there is a belief that many of the hostages are now dead. 

With no military solution likely, only a political one remains — to the degree that any “solution” to all this is possible, which I suspect it is not. The best that can be hoped for is a cease of hostilities and some kind of governmental transition to ensure that a terror group like Hamas cannot govern Gaza again. The problem is that there is now a nexus of interests at the centre of Israeli politics that is less interested in compromise. And pragmatism and compromise will always have to come from Israel because, even though Hamas started all this, Israel is a democratic state, and Hamas is a bolus of psychopathic thugs.

At several points since Hamas’s attack, I’ve returned to the words of a fellow Middle East analyst who, over a beer in a Jerusalem bar, summed up the Israel-Palestinian conflict to me in a single sentence. Looking more exhausted than anything else, he replied: “I think the technical term for all this is irretrievably fucked.”

To succeed in pushing the Russians out of Ukraine, Kyiv’s strategists needed to do two things: sever the land bridge (and supply lines) that linked Russia and Crimea, and regain control of important infrastructure such as the Zaporizhzhia Power Plant. It failed on both counts. From early June to mid-September, the Ukrainians only captured 305 square kilometres of territory. To put that in perspective, at that pace, it would take Kyiv over 50 years to push Russian forces back to the pre-2014 invasion borders. Added to this, during the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, as much as 20% of the weaponry Kyiv sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed.

This was a failure of both tactics and logistics. Kyiv’s lack of offensive operations in the preceding months allowed the Russians to build heavily fortified lines across the front, particularly in Zaporizhzhya. They worked on a principle of layers: of static defence of barriers, ditches, military positions and, above all, vast swathes of minefields. The Ukrainians used Western-donated heavy mine clearance vehicles to try get around these, but they could not escape the Russian surveillance drone units, which would call in their location to artillery and attack helicopters. Once these vehicles were destroyed, Ukrainian columns behind them were unable to move without triggering more mines. It quickly became a “kill zone” for Russian artillery.

Then there was the issue of strategy. Western, particularly American, advisors urged Kyiv to focus its offensive solely on the Zaporizhzhya axis to sever the vital Russian supply line. Instead, Kyiv distributed its forces across the front to try to break through in multiple areas — a diffusion of attack that meant they were unable to penetrate anywhere. The result is that, last month, the Russians were able to launch a counteroffensive of their own in the Kharkiv region; there has been hard fighting in the village of Lyptsi and town of Vovchansk ever since.

Sat roughly 19 miles from the Russian border, Kharkiv itself is now on the receiving end of almost everything Moscow has to offer. The latest are glide bombs: essentially conventional bombs that can be launched remotely instead of directly over the target. This means they can be fired from planes 60-70km away from the intended target — so from Russia — and out of the range of the Ukrainian air defences. During the initial phase of the Kharkiv offensive, Russia dropped 20 glide bombs on Vovchansk in one day alone. The Russians are pounding the city with them daily. On a street near the centre, I see an apartment building that was recently struck. Window-shaped squares are filled with plywood; the building facade is pockmarked with shrapnel holes. I drive past several buildings — all civilian — that have suffered the same fate. The Ukrainians had no way of defending against these new weapons until they were finally given permission to use US weapons on Russian territory.

If glide bombs are an innovation, century-old weapons are just as effective. In a park in Vovchansk, I meet Leonid, a captain in the Pioneers platoon, which lays and removes mines.

Leonid has just returned from fighting near the border, not too far from the Russian city of Belgorod. He is wiry, with large glasses, wispy grey hair and a moustache that curves around his mouth. He hasn’t slept for two days and reeks of body odour. He smiles at me; I like him immediately.

“This is the biggest mining operation in human history,” Leonid tells me. “Both in amount and density. There are tens of thousands of mines every few kilometres. It is done on an industrial level, by the Russians and by us too. The USSR produced millions of mines in case of war with Nato, and now these mines are used against us. I’d say 10% of all combat casualties are from mines.”

Leonid works with infantry and artillery units, which cover them with fire as they lay the mines. The sappers’ objective is, he tells me, to prevent enemy manoeuvres — to stop the Russians breaking through. “Their Russian offensive right now is fierce,” he says. “In front of us the line is stable, but the Russians have broken through on the right flank of our positions; and east from our positions in Vovchansk they are breaking through. It was poorly mined.”

The perennial problem, Leonid explains, is the lack of Ukrainian weapons. “Last year we captured a lot of Russian mines. We had so little equipment we had to use thousands of Russian mines from Izyium to Kharkiv and lay them along the border. We lack everything.”

My next stop is Kyiv, where the question of weapons — and the international cooperation that will decide to what degree Ukraine can continue to resist Russia — will be decided. But for the moment Leonid’s words put me in mind of something else: manpower. The Ukrainians are now struggling to recruit new soldiers: press gangs stalk the streets of almost every major city. I look at Leonid’s grey hair and wrinkled face. I ask how old he is, and he beams in response: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me / When I’m sixty-four?”

A few days later, back in Kyiv, I meet Colonel Hennadiy Kovalenko, Director of the International Defence Cooperation Department at the Ministry of Defence. “David, in England you count to five like us in Ukraine,” he says. We are sat in a coffee shop opposite his office, and he is holding out his hand. “One, two, three,” he adds, a finger going up each time. At the count of five, all his digits are extended; he leans forward and offers me his open hand to shake. “In Russia, they count like this.” His hand is open as he starts to count, a finger going down on each number. At five his fist is clenched, and he mimes a punch at my head. “And that, in a shell of nut, is the difference between us and Russians.”

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Since 2014, Kovalenko has been responsible for working with Nato and Ukraine’s foreign partners; everything from training to the supply of weapons falls under his purview. He begins by explaining the evolution of Ukraine’s army from 2014 to today. “In the initial phases of the conflict, the Russians were reading our minds: we used the same Soviet manuals and doctrines, so they knew how we planned our activities and so on. Then we created the Defence Education Advisory Group with the Americans and Brits. Once we started implementing new field manuals, our casualties dropped significantly.”

Key to this success was what the Germans call Auftragstaktik; a decentralised military doctrine emphasising initiative and flexibility for subordinate commanders. “It allowed our guys at the beginning of the hot war to delegate decisions to the lowest tactical levels. When the Russians were waiting for orders from the Kremlin or general staff, our guys were making decisions on the ground in accordance with the operational situation.”

When I ask about America’s recently announced aid package, Kovalenko explains that the logjam beforehand wasn’t fatal: European nations did not pause their shipments, while Washington was able to send smaller amounts of weapons and munitions through proxies. Yet many of the soldiers I have met on the front still cite “munitions” as the biggest problem they face. “The problem with the ammunition is not delivery, it’s production,” he replies. “It takes time for our partners to manufacture the munitions and ammunition we need in time.”

To speed up this process, the Czech government launched an initiative in February to provide Ukraine with 50,000-100,000 large-calibre shells per month — not through manufacturing them, but by going around the world buying them. By April, some 20 countries had joined the programme, financing the purchases with their own funds. Has it made a difference? “To be brutally honest, we have been promised 800,000 155 artillery munitions by the end of the year,” Kovalenko says. “We haven’t got any, but the deliveries are expected soon. It’s too early to say whether it’s working or not. We need to place production on Ukrainian territory — under certain security provisions of course and undertake joint ventures and technology sharing with our partners.”

Without the work of Kovalenko and others like him Ukraine would most likely not have held out for so long against Russia. The Czech initiative is likely to bear fruit at the right time. But divisions are growing. Ukraine’s top reconstruction official has just resigned after accusing the government of undermining efforts to build fortifications against Russia. And people are tired. The will to fight remains, but it is diminished. In the East many grumble about going to die in “Kyiv’s war”. Thoughts turn to possible solutions or at least anything that might offer a respite.

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Once again, my mind turns to mines. Ukraine is, according to the EU’s delegation to the UN, now the “most mine-contaminated country” since the Second World War. As of February, the State Emergency Service of Ukraine says the amount of territory potentially contaminated with explosive objects amounts to 156,000 square kilometres — 25% of the country’s total area. I can believe it: I’ve stood on the Ukrainian lines staring out at miles of them. It’s astonishing: swathes of land that have become a living death.

But that’s not all. Look at a map. You’ll see the area of contamination snake around Ukraine as it follows the line of contact between the two sides. It is without doubt as accurate an adumbration of the fighting as you can get, but to me it also looks like something more instructive: a border.

Experts assess that, at current rates, it would take 757 years to fully demine Ukraine. And while the speed of clearance would increase if the war ended, it is for the foreseeable future an immovable fact on the ground. And in this lies probably any – at least interim – political solution. The model here is North and South Korea, which are technically still at war and separated by a demilitarised zone and hundreds of thousands of mines. In reality, while relations are not rosy, they have not been fighting for decades.

It remains politically impermissible for Zelensky to talk about any territorial compromise. Just as no British Prime Minister could agree to give an aggressor Manchester and Surrey, so Zelensky can never publicly accept the loss of Donetsk and Crimea. But you can talk about a “ceasefire” — and those, if agreed with an honest partner (which Putin is not), can last for decades. It is, of course, an imperfect solution. But as things stand, the alternative may well be far worse.

It was a crime that sickened many even within the regime. It is perhaps some form of justice that Raisi was never able to shake the nicknames that followed: “the butcher of Tehran” or, less prosaically, Ayatollah-e ghatl-e ām (the Ayatollah of massacre). Even when he was elected to the presidency in 2021, while serving as head of the judiciary, it was with the lowest percentage of the vote in the Islamic Republic’s history.

He was also a lousy president. In a tenure marked by the systematic elevation of hardline figures at expense of moderates to key positions, the economy tanked, strafed by inflation at more than 40% while the Iranian Rial also plummeted. Then of course there were the anti-hijab protests that began in September 2022 when the country’s fetid religious police murdered 22-year-old Mahsi Amini for incorrectly wearing her hijab. The protests eventually spread to over 100 cities across Iran, during which the state murdered at least 551 people, including 68 children.

Raisi was talked about as a possible successor to Ayatollah Khamenei, who is — after years of rumours — finally dying. Already conspiracy theories are saying he was killed by rivals, notably Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, but this is nonsense. The truth is that Raisi never had a real chance. Firstly, because if Khamenei wants his son to succeed him, which he does, then that would probably happen — despite it being in total defiance of the republic’s founding principles, which rejected the dynastic principles of Iranian monarchy. But it is the fate of most revolutionary states to curdle into what they once most despised. And secondly, because no one beyond regime allies and a small percentage of religious and authoritarian headbangers actually liked Raisi. As well as the albatross of his butcher label, he was also a tedious man, lacking in any real charisma.

Of more relevance is what his death will mean for the state. Vice President Mohammad Mokhber has been named as interim president. Mokhber is part of a three-person council with the speaker of parliament and head of the judiciary that is now responsible for organising new elections for the president within 50 days. Mokhber, incidentally, was previously head of Setad — an investment fund linked to the Supreme Leader — and was sanctioned by the EU in 2010 for his involvement in “nuclear or ballistic missile activities”. He was subsequently removed from the list in 2012 but put back on in 2021 on account of his work for the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order (EIKO) — an organisation directly controlled by the Supreme Leader. The US Treasury, which also sanctioned him in 2013, claims that EIKO controls “large swathes of the Iranian economy, including assets expropriated from political dissidents and religious minorities, to the benefit of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and senior Iranian government officials.” Raisi’s immediate successor is thus cut from the same hardliner cloth — though his skills seem to lean toward stealing more than outright mass murder.

Raisi was a senior figure in the regime, but ultimately it was Khamenei who still ruled. His death is a destabilising event, but likely not a hugely significant one. This fact is clear from much of the regime’s rhetoric yesterday. In an official statement, Khamenei said that “the Iranian nation has lost a sincere, devoted and valuable servant”. The Cabinet described him as “a hero and servant of the nation and a loyal companion to the leadership [Khamenei]”, but critically added that there would not be the slightest disruption to the country’s management.

The regime also seems keen to stamp out rumours and conspiracy theory. While assorted nutters online are blaming the Israelis, a State-run news agency posted that the crash was due to a “technical failure”. This is almost certainly true: Raisi was travelling on a helicopter bought by the previous regime in the Seventies, part of a fleet that Iran had been unable to upgrade due to US sanctions on the aviation industry. Former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif duly blamed the US for Raisi’s death: “[The US] has sanctioned the sale of airplane and aviation parts to Iran and does not allow the Iranian people to enjoy aviation rights,” he said. “These will be recorded in the list of America’s crimes against the Iranian people”.

There you have it. An accident, though a happy one. If Karma does exist — and I have seen enough of geopolitics to be pretty convinced it doesn’t — it found Ebrahim Raisi yesterday.

What now for Iran and the wider region? Well, internally, the regime will ensure that it’s business as usual. A suitably pliant – and hardline – figure will be elected in 50 days’ time. It’s likely to be an uninspiring occasion. The 2024 parliamentary elections witnessed an even lower turnout than Raisi’s election, of just 41% (and even that is likely to have been massaged to some degree).

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Regionally and globally the picture is more mixed. The Israelis pay close attention to political changes inside Iran, especially abrupt ones like this. With Raisi gone, any potential opposition to Mojtaba’s succession is now bereft of at least a figurehead around which to congregate. Jerusalem can now expect a pretty seamless transfer of power among not just ideological bedfellows but within the same family. Khamenei’s world view will almost certainly continue to dominate Iranian political thinking, and this means no détente with the West, and a foreign policy based on aggressive adventurism and ideologically unyielding conflict with Israel.

Despite the death of Raisi and his foreign minister, Khamenei believes the West and its allies are weak and divided. There are no indications that Mojtaba believes any differently. With one of his closest allies now gone and his health failing, Khamenei, already paranoid, will double down when it comes to ensuring his legacy is in place. Forward defence, the basis of Tehran’s grand strategy, holds that the Islamic Republic, a revolutionary state, will never suffer having done to it what it did to the Shah. It will always fight abroad so it never has to fight within. And that is bad news, not just for those in Israel and beyond, but for those who would see a better future for the Iranian people too.

Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, is a tundra of low-roofed buildings and patchy roads lined with threadbare bush. It is the billboards, though, that stick in the mind. A combination of the generic and the personal, they offer everything from tempered glass to soft drinks to the chance, with the help of a professional medium, to become wealthy, get your ex back or simply take “revenge”.

This impulse for revenge, that “kind of wild justice” as Francis Bacon wrote, is doing its debased work across the region, not least among Zambia’s neighbours: Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to the north, and Mozambique, to the east. So far, the war in eastern DRC has seen 5.8 million people displaced in a population of 7 million; 72% of people now live on less than $1.90 a day. In northern Mozambique, nearly one million people have been displaced by conflict since 2017, 80% of whom are women and children.

It’s not just a regional problem. While the world has rightly focused on Vladimir Putin’s murderous invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza following October 7, Africa has descended to mass violence and, in some places, near anarchy. There were 104 conflicts across the continent in 2022, the deadliest year in Africa for more than three decades. And since the Sudan civil war broke out one year ago, 8.6 million people have been forcibly displaced, and more than 15,000 confirmed killed (though the actual figure is likely to be far higher).

African leaders have long understood the gravity of the problem. Last month, Hakainde Hichilema, the president of Zambia and current chair of Southern African Development Community (SADC), last month convened a summit to discuss the SADC’s peacekeeping deployments in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) — known as SAMIDRC and Mozambique (SAMIM). SADC is a southern African regional bloc that primarily deals with economic and political cooperation, but has increasingly been forced to focus on security concerns. In recent years, violence has concentrated the minds of SADC nations, and African leaders generally: never have peacekeeping forces been more necessary, more problematic — or, according to those on the ground, more inadequate.

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The SADC has already made some efforts to help DRC. Last December, it deployed a joint force to eastern DRC to fight the M23 rebel army, but it ran into difficulties. M23 is allegedly backed by Rwanda, which denies any involvement, though the UN accuses it of “direct interventions” to support the rebels. The summit concluded by reiterating SADC’s “unwavering commitment to provide both diplomatic and military support to the Government and people of the DRC”.

Separately, the United Nations has been running MONUSCO, its own peacekeeping operation, in eastern DRC for more than 25 years. At its peak, the mission was vast, with around 13,500 people attached to it. But it was always dysfunctional. In 2010, I spent time with various MONUSCO peacekeeping forces deployed across the country, and it was obvious that they were unable to effectively deal with the various militia groups berserking across the east. I embedded with Guatemalan peacekeepers in the jungle near the city of Bunia in eastern DRC. These were tough men, drawn from the ranks of Guatemala’s Kaibiles Special Forces whose motto was, memorably: “If I advance, follow me. If I stop, urge me on. If I retreat, kill me”. They were desperate to fight the gangs of murderers and rapists in the thick bush just kilometres away — in this instance the sordid Lord’s Resistance Army. But in practice, it was hard for them to get permission to engage. The most energetic I ever saw them was when we watched the 2010 World Cup Final on base, and they exploded into mass ululation when Andrés Iniesta scored a 116th-minute winner for Spain.

No wonder MONUSCO was always unpopular locally. The Congolese government was talking about kicking it out when I was there, and in December 2023, the decision was finally taken when a UN Security Council vote dissolved the force. It will be totally withdrawn by the end of the year. SADC will take its place.

The feeling on the ground is unmistakable: Africans want to take the lead in solving African problems. They have lost faith in the West to intervene. But wars aren’t the only problem they’ll have to face alone. Though the Islamist threat has largely disappeared from the international press, it continues to strafe Africa. Al-Qaeda offshoot Jama’at Nasr al-Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) is sluicing its way around Mali and Burkina Faso as well Benin. Meanwhile, al-Shaabab and the Islamic State West Africa province (Iswap) are busy murdering as usual. Last year saw 23,322 deaths from Islamist violence — a rise of 20% from 2022.

To make matters worse, there have now been seven successful coups in three years in the Sahel, which is experiencing a near-systematic disintegration of democracy. With that of course comes yet more violence: in 2023, fatalities in the region rose by 38% and civilian deaths by 18% from the previous year.

Change and leadership must come from within Africa. African peace-keeping forces are now the region’s greatest hope. But these forces must achieve far more than ending the slaughter — an evidently noble and much-needed aim, but only ever the first step. It is here that we usefully remember the second half of Bacon’s quote on revenge: “The more man’s nature runs to [it], the more ought law to weed it out.” The aim of peacekeeping is far wider: encouraging people to get around the table and reach political settlements. In the end, wars are never ended or resolved on the battlefield, but at the tables around it. Dialogue not drones is what brings peace. And Africa, more than almost anywhere else, needs political dialogue and the rule of law, not more conflict.

This is why SADC needs the West’s support. All this chaos is a blight for those who are unfortunate enough to suffer it, but it is also an opportunity for bad actors who wish to exploit it. Russia is now the leading arms supplier to sub-Saharan Africa, accounting for 25% of all sales between 2018 and 2022. Its mercenary Wagner Group spent the last several years killing and vacuuming up local resources. Since the death of its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin, it has been ominously re-named “Africa Corps” — and is now fully under Kremlin control. Meanwhile, China is Africa’s second largest arms supplier; its drones have been used in DRC among other places. It is also an increasingly influential friend and investor: between 2000-2022, Beijing’s state financiers have lent $170 billion to African nations. Conversely, between 2008-2022, US trade with Africa has decreased by 48%.

The result has been yet more instability. As a source working on regional security recently told me: “Zambia is a peaceful nation committed to the principles of stability and democracy, but we are living in a time where it’s hard for us to make sure those values and that stability are reflected across the region.”

Africans will take care of their own problems. But the West can still help them to restore stability. It may not be able to compete with the investment policies of China, but it can help fund African peacekeeping missions. More broadly, it can encourage greater African representation on the world stage: the September 2023 decision to give the African Union a seat at G20 was correct — though long overdue.

Dusk in Lusaka is sleepy. But with DRC and Mozambique next door, the people of this relatively tranquil city know that mass violence is never far away. And it is not just the region that is at risk, but the international stability that is already unravelling to levels not seen since the run-up to the Second World War. Africa needs the West’s help — and like Gaza and Ukraine, this is a crisis that affects us all.

Six months on from October 7, it’s hard to see how Israel can achieve its stated goals of dismantling Hamas and rescuing its remaining hostages. The IDF has only rescued three hostages during its ground operations in Gaza, which is a good indicator of how unrealistic the latter always was. But Hamas is also far from defeated: the terror group’s top three commanders remain at large, and its fighters are already re-emerging in areas of Gaza City that were supposedly cleared. Israel claims to have killed approximately half of its 40,000 fighters, but given the amorphous nature of the terror campaign, and the radicalising effects of Israel’s operations on the Gazan population, the notion of totally eliminating Hamas remains fanciful.

According to the February 2024 US Annual Threat Assessment report compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Hamas will be able to continue as “lingering armed resistance… for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralise Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allow insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces”. And all of this for near-universal global outrage and condemnation.

Israel had not just a right but a duty to respond to the October 7 atrocities. No state could stand by and do nothing. No nation could suffer such a loss and not respond. But the events set in motion by October 7 were always going to be about more than just Israel and Gaza. A localised war has now become perhaps the primary front in a much broader conflict between the American-led order on the one hand and, on the other, a loose axis of states with little in common except a common desire to oppose that order. In the Middle East, the primary player is Iran — and it is exploiting events with sadistic ruthlessness and efficacy.

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As ever, its strategy is somewhat ad hoc — especially given its own internal unrest and dying Supreme Leader — and based around opportunism as much as forethought. As ever, it also combines political and military objectives. Beyond Iran’s longstanding armed support for both Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah, its major concern — and indeed that of Hamas and all states opposed to Israel — was the apparent integration of Israel into the Arab world following the 2020 Abraham Accords, which saw normalisation (as opposed to peace) treaties between Jerusalem and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. Next up on the diplomatic slate was an even greater prize: normalisation with the Sunni Lion and home of Islam’s two holiest sites, Saudi Arabia. The thought was simply too nauseating for Hamas or Tehran to bear, and it was their desperate desire to sabotage further Israeli-Arab rapprochement that, in part, triggered October 7.

And it worked. For the moment, the Abraham Accords are holding. But a daily stream of the most visceral suffering from Gaza is enraging Arab populaces across the Middle East. For now, there is no talk of further normalisation. The February US threat report also assessed that “Iran will seek to use the conflict in Gaza to denounce Israel, decry its role in the region, and try to dissuade other Middle Eastern states from warming ties with Israel.” It was spot on. Tehran, which had arguably been more isolated in the region than Israel, has used the war to expand its regional diplomatic relations. In November of last year, el-Sisi of Egypt and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi had a meeting on the side of the Arab Summit in Riyadh to discuss a possible expansion of bilateral relations. Then, this February, the Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, went on a tour of Lebanon, Syria and Qatar. Tehran is on the diplomatic offensive.

Beyond other Arab states, Iran is bringing its influence to bear on what is a key constituency for all those who oppose the US order: the imperfectly termed Global South. It has found an appreciative audience there. It was not just South Africa but also Mexico and Chile who referred “the situation of the State of Palestine” to the ICC. Taken together, states totalling 60% of the Global South’s population have either directly or indirectly supported legal action on this issue. If those who oppose the status quo are to battle it efficiently, the states once known as “non-aligned” — now, instructively, a majority of the world — will be critical in the fight ahead.

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Then, of course, there is Iran’s violent military strategy. If Hamas was disappointed that the Quds Force didn’t come charging to their aid to fight the Israelis head-on (always a foolish notion), the war has highlighted the depth and scope of Iran’s capacity to mobilise its proxies. Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Islamic Resistance in Iraq (ISI) have all combined to strike the US and its allies across the Gulf and Middle East, significantly disrupting their international commerce flows. If nothing else, Gaza has allowed Iran to show the world the potency of its “forward defence” strategy. Even though Hezbollah has not opened an all-out second front on Israel’s northern border, it continues to divert thousands of IDF soldiers, and prevents the return home of 95,000 internally displaced persons in Israel. Meanwhile, there are many in the region who see the attacks committed by ISI and others on American forces as being the catalyst for the beginning of Washington’s talks with Iraq on the withdrawal of its final 2,500 troops there — something Iran has wanted for years. Once the US pulls out fully, there is only one power who will fill that void. The result is yet another expansion of Iranian power.

Israel is fighting back. A series of strikes against Iranian targets reached a climax (for now) on Monday, when Israel droned General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and various assorted underlings. Little-known in the West, Zahedi was an important figure to Iranian regional ambitions, until recently commanding the Quds Force unit responsible for operations in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Palestinian territories. Inevitably, the Iranians are vowing revenge. Khamenei promised that “the evil regime will be punished by the hands of our brave men. We will make them regret this crime and others like it.” Iranian state television also reported that, because part of the Iranian embassy was struck, the attack constitutes an attack on Iran.

Iran is matching this rhetoric with moves on the ground. On Monday, Hussein Moanes, a spokesman for the Iranian-aligned militia group, Kata’ib Hezbollah, announced that the Islamic Resistance in Iraq is preparing to “equip” 12,000 “Islamic Resistance in Jordan” fighters with a significant supply of weapons so that Iraq and Jordan can jointly attack Israel to defend the Palestinian cause. It is instructive that the Iranians feel that they can openly announce the presence of a proxy in a Sunni Arab state. The Sunni Arabs have far more ideological and historical enmity with Iran than Israel does (under the Shah of Iran, Tehran and Jerusalem were allies). But these are not normal times, and Iran is exploiting this fact relentlessly. Jordan, which is in essence a Palestinian state, has witnessed tremendous unrest over the war. Since 24 March there have been near-constant protests outside the Israeli embassy in Amann. Protestors routinely chant pro-Hamas slogans and call for Jordan’s withdrawal from its 1994 peace treaty with Israel. Once more, the Iranians step gratefully in.

A presence in Jordan is of serious strategic value to Iran. It affords greater opportunity for direct strikes into Israel, which it now also surrounds with its proxies. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq has already used Jordanian airspace for drone strikes into Israel — one shot down over Irbid in northern Jordan on 12 March was believed to be targeting Ben Gurion Airport. But more than this, it will allow Iran to stir political and social unrest in the West Bank, and to move equipment and materiel more easily over the border. Compared to Hamas, terrorists in the West Bank have limited resources or capacity to attack Israel. If Iran can make a success of its Jordanian proxy, that will change.

In the meantime, new threats emerge each day. On Friday, the CIA reportedly warned Israel that Iran is planning to launch an attack with a “rain” of drones, in revenge for its strike on Zahedi. If that happens, Israel will have to respond to an attack on its territory. Iran knows this, and likely calculates that any response, no matter how justified, will be seen as yet another example of belligerence from Jerusalem.

Yet much of this has been lost beneath the noise created by the focal point of the Gaza war. This week, Britain has been in understandable uproar over the death of seven aid workers, three of whom were British nationals. Condemnation piles upon Israel at the UN. Talk of sanctions grows. Washington, once the guarantor of international security, appears unable to stop the violence on both sides. And all the while, Tehran, the Middle East’s most murderous regime, continues to exploit events to its own advantage, and our cost.

It all kicked off last week, when Transnistria adopted a resolution condemning Moldova for the “economic and political blockade” of the region. It then called on Russia, the UN, the OSCE and the EU to intervene and protect the rights of its people — around 460,000 Russians and Ukrainians and a sizable ethnic Moldovan minority.

Transnistria, the narrow strip of land running between Moldova’s eastern border with Ukraine, illegally broke away from Moldova in 1990 and is unrecognised as independent by almost all the world, including the UN. But not Russia, of course, which maintains two motorised rifle battalions there. And as Russia performatively heeds the breakaway republic’s “call”, memories of eastern Ukraine in 2014 are inescapable.

I was there after the EuroMaidan revolution in which Ukrainians overthrew their Kremlin-backed President, the corrupt, convicted criminal Viktor Yanukovych. Over the following weeks I travelled across the country talking to so-called Ukrainian “separatists” (backed by Russia, we now know) who were saying exactly the same thing as the Transnistrian government is now. They were, they told me, calling on Russia to come and “rescue” them. They wanted their indigenous rights protected from the government of the country they were legally a part of. It was nonsense then just as it is now in Moldova.

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The catalyst for the Maidan Revolution in 2014 was Yanukovych’s last-minute refusal to sign the EU Accession Agreement in favour of Moscow’s Eurasian Customs Union. This year, on 7 February, Ilan Shor (a former Moldovan MP who is now sanctioned by US) went to Russia where he had a meeting with Leonid Kalashnikov who assured him that Moldova’s only chance of betterment was to join Eurasian Economic Union.

Gennady Chorba, a Transnistrian politician said his “government” will submit a request to the Kremlin to this effect during a special congress that last met in 2006. “This will be voiced to Russia on behalf of citizens living on the left bank of the Dniester River.” His statement came a few days after Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said the rights of pro-Russian separatists in Transnistria must be respected.  On 17 February, Russia relaxed its requirements for “compatriots” living abroad so that they do not now need to prove their Russian proficiency to resettle into Russia, so long as the individual was born in the former USSR.

Once again, the similarities with the situation in Ukraine are depressingly similar. In November 2023, Putin gave a speech referring to the concept of the “Russian world (Russkiy Mir)”: loosely speaking, people living in the former USSR, people who feel a “spiritual connection” to the motherland, people who consider themselves native Russian speakers, and people who are carriers of Russian history and culture – regardless of national affiliation. In reality, this means anyone the Kremlin would ideally like to annex, not least Ukrainians.

In 2014, before Russia sent in the tanks, they flooded eastern Ukraine with disinformation. I remember the memes and the tweets and posts on the contiguity of Russia and Ukraine, the perniciousness of the West (especially the EU and NATO) and the historical and cultural affinities and glories of Russkiy Mir. In this sense, even beyond Transnistria, Moldova is right in the Kremlin’s sights. And just like Crimea and the Donbas were never about just those regions, but the whole of Ukraine, this is also an operation directed against Moldova. It is the type of state that is in many ways guaranteed to give Putin a conniption: a former Soviet state that is also now a candidate for EU accession.

Moldova was granted status as candidate nation in June 2022 with the view to being a member nation by 2030. For the Kremlin, the prospect of Moldova joining the EU is almost as geopolitically and ideologically unacceptable as it was and is for Ukraine. What is happening now is merely the fruition of years (if not decades) of information and political subversion there (as across eastern Europe).

A few years ago, I traipsed across large parts of eastern Europe to assess the threat level of Russian information operations in the region — I wanted to know how the Russians were targeting the hearts and minds of the people there. As I sat in various dilapidated offices in Moldova listening to people delivering the various Russian narratives, it was clear that the Kremlin’s playbook was pretty rigid. It centred on a mythologising of Moldova’s soviet past: pointing to the supposedly elevated standards of living that both shared along with a glorious history. The inescapable fact, though, was Moldova’s weakness meant it couldn’t operate as a state without Russian help. Once more I could have been in Ukraine.

More narrowly, Russian disinformation narratives argued that the Moldovan government is a puppet of the EU and Nato and US. Europe is of course totally corrupt and a bastion of perversion in which corrupt officials are hankering to replace family values with LGBT rights. “What this means,” a fierce Moldovan journalist said to me, “is that they say if we join the EU our kids will be forced to become gay and it won’t be possible to beat your wife anymore.” I replied that this was surely couched in a more sophisticated language. “Barely,” she replied.

Like pretty much all former Soviet states, Moldova suffers from the twin curses of corruption and Kremlin influence. Politically, Moldovan politics remains vulnerable to its propaganda. In March 2022, just weeks after Russia’s all-out invasion, Ukraine banned its pro-Russia Regions Party, but in Moldova the pro-Russia Party of Socialists remains prominent in public life and has about a 20% share of the vote.

To make matters worse, the country has scant separation between politics and media. Former Democratic Party of Moldova leader and President Vladimir Plahotniuc, for example, have had significant media holdings, former President Igor Dodon has enjoyed close links with media oligarchs.

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Egypt is Gaza's most fickle friend

By David Patrikarakos

All the problems of Russian influence in Moldova can be cubed in Transnistria. For a start, its media space is separate. Broadcasts from the right bank of the Dniester are jammed, and the frequencies of Moldova TV broadcasters have been redistributed to rebroadcast Russian content. There are few purely Russian-language media in Moldova: Komsomolskaya pravda and Argumenty i Fakty (long-standing newspapers originating from Russian with licences in other post-soviet countries). Most are in two languages, Moldovan (Romanian) and Russian, or Moldovan (Romanian). It is a space into which Russia can broadcast more or less unopposed.

The Transnistrians are calling for Mother Russia. It will heed their call. This is how it begins. This is how it began in Ukraine. Moscow already has troops in the region, and sources tell me that the Russians have been sneaking what they call “saboteurs” into the region on flights.

But in the end, Transnistria as a region is of little importance to Russia beyond its ability to act as a garrison station on Ukraine’s southern border. But preventing Moldova from ever joining the EU and bringing it back into a new enlarged Russia are what most counts.

It is no coincidence that Putin is trying this when things on the battlefields seem to be turning in his favour, largely due to the delay in weapons from Kyiv’s allies.

This is the price of the West’s weakness: the war in Ukraine was never just about Russia and Ukraine, but wider Europe. We did not understand this when Putin invaded. But our failure to give Ukraine the means to fight most effectively has emboldened Putin. Now he has turned his eyes to Moldova — and we have only ourselves to blame.

We drove up, parked a way off, and had a look. The uniformed men had the surly arrogance of most border officials but overlaid with an air of proximate violence. I could understand Mohammed’s reservations.

Rafah is a metaphor cast in concrete and steel for Egypt’s fraught role in the decades-long conflict between Israel and Palestine. Egypt, the only other state apart from Israel that borders Gaza, has had an uneasy peace with Jerusalem since 1979. And as the most populous Arab state in the world (Sudan is second with less than half its numbers), its leaders know well that most of their citizens loathe Israel. Whoever rules Cairo is always juggling several flaming torches at once.

Officially, Egypt is, like all Arab states, a proud and steadfast supporter of the Palestinian cause. Just over a week after the October 7 massacre, president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi declared that “the Palestinian cause is the mother of all causes and has a significant impact on stability and security”.

But in terms of its Gaza policy, Cairo is aligned with the United States. It wants Fatah, which governs the West Bank, to take over the strip as a precursor to Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and an end to the violence. At the end of last year, Arab media was filled with reports that Egypt and the US wanted former Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to run Gaza. Cairo was seeking a “government of technocrats” and Fayyad, with his extensive connections in Washington and close relationship with PA President Mahmoud Abbas, was seen as the perfect candidate.

Egypt’s plan was fleshed out on Christmas Day: following a ceasefire, officials explained, Cairo would lead talks to bring together Hamas and the PA, after the latter was driven out of Gaza following its 2007 elections. The two groups would then create a joint “government of experts” to run the West Bank and Gaza ahead of future elections. “We are ready for this [Palestinian] state to be demilitarised, and there can also be a guarantee of forces,” Sisi outlined a month earlier.

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Is the West Bank heading for war?

By David Patrikarakos

Yet beneath the rhetoric is a more complex reality. First, there are the practical considerations. Gaza was in Cairo’s hands from the 1948 Israeli War of Independence until Israel’s conquest of the strip in the Six Day War of 1967. During those two decades, it made no attempt to found a Palestinian state, nor did it want Gaza to become a part of Egypt, let alone allow many Gazans into the country. Gaza is a problem that Egypt simply doesn’t want.

And since October 7, that has not changed. Soon after Israel began its offensive, Sisi warned that any “displacement [of Gazans] to Sinai means transferring the attacks against Israel to Egyptian territories, which threatens the peace between Israel and a country of 105 million people”. Egyptian officials worry that if refugees flow in and camps spring up, they would become recruiting grounds for extremist groups, particularly the various malign Islamic State offshoots marauding around Sinai. This is largely why, in November last year, the Egyptians met with CIA Director William Burns and flat-out refused to manage Gaza even temporarily. Nor did Egypt get involved with counterinsurgency operations, or take any responsibility for post-war security in Gaza — something it obviously has a vested interest in.

Second, of course, is the inescapable matter of ideology. If the Egyptians dislike Israel, then its leaders detest the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian pan-Islamic Islamist group whose professed aim is to set up a Caliphate ruled by Sharia law. Indeed, Sisi got his job via what they call a “military-led takeover” in 2013 against the former president and Muslim Brother, Mohammad Morsi. In other words, he really despises the Brotherhood — and Hamas, after all, emerged from Mujama’ al-Islami (“Islamic Centre”), an Islamic charity founded by one of the Brotherhood’s leaders in Gaza.

Egypt targets the Brothers with unyielding ferocity. In 2015, Morsi was sentenced to death for conspiring with foreign organisations including Hamas (he died four years later of a reported heart attack after collapsing in court). The following year, Egypt’s interior minister accused Hamas of assassinating a public prosecutor, leading one prominent talk show host to call for an Arab military offensive against Hamas. “I ask to strike the terrorist camps inside Gaza because terrorism always comes from within it, and the Arab countries must take action to reject the Hamas movement,” he said. But this isn’t a mere war of words. Cairo has also taken action on the ground, with the Egyptian military destroying 1,370 Hamas tunnels under Rafah in 2014; the following year, it used sea water to flood yet more tunnels.

Even so, there has been some cooperation between Cairo and Hamas when interests converge, notably in early 2020 when Hamas arrested an Islamic State member after Egyptian intelligence handed it audio recordings. The two sides also collaborated on the construction of a border wall in Sinai as part of their wider anti-Islamic State efforts, which also saw Rawhi Mushtaha, a member of Hamas’s political bureau, travel to Cairo to discuss security co-operation.

But like shrubs in the Sinai, these instances go against the norm. Hatred and fear of Hamas runs deep in Egypt’s rulers — which makes growing public support for the former’s war against Israel an increasing cause for concern. Recent polling conducted by the Washington Institute, for instance, found that 97% of people agreed that Arab states must “immediately sever all diplomatic, political, economic, and any other contacts with Israel in protest against its military action in Gaza”. Moreover, 96% agreed that Egypt should provide more humanitarian aid to Palestinians.

These are troubling figures. And not least because neither Sisi nor any of those around him will ever forget that Morsi was legitimately elected by a majority of Egyptians (though he then proceeded to blow that legitimacy by trying to change the constitution to effectively make him a modern-day pharaoh). The Brothers took power once, and they can do so again. But all Sisi can do is sit in his palace and watch on as the nation his people most despise tries to do the thing he most desires: destroy Hamas.

As each day goes by, Hamas in Gaza grows weaker, but the Brothers in Egypt grow stronger. It does not help that the country is also in the grip of a financial crisis of almost existential proportions. When people talk about the wider consequences of the Gaza war, it is normally about the possibility of the Middle East exploding. But lost amid this is the prospect of something just as bad: the very real possibility that the world’s most populous Arab state might implode first.