Macron would never do anything so crass as to present his bill before rendering a service, but he’s well aware that the traditional Saudi recompense for military support is a very large order for combat aircraft. The French desperately need such a sale to save their once-thriving Dassault firm, which has fallen on hard times because of its current offering — the non-stealthy and non-advanced Rafale fighter that nobody wants.

Back in 1985, it was British aircraft manufacturing that was in freefall. It was saved by the fabulous Al Yamamah contract, which supplied £40 billion of Saudi cash to both the British aviation industry for its mostly unwanted aircraft, and to an entire tribe of intermediaries. The latter successfully avoided scrutiny for decades, until Scotland Yard’s Serious Fraud Office belatedly launched an investigation so successful that it had to be shut down on national security ground by a remarkably unembarrassed Tony Blair in 2006.

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Now, once again, the British aviation industry is trying to survive with a jet fighter programme that nobody wants. It has a temporary partnership with the Italians, whose air-force will never be sent into combat, and who see their participation as the only possible way of keeping their engineers and manufacturing workers employed; and with the Japanese, who see the tripartite deal as a bargaining chip in their negotiations with America’s Lockheed monopoly for Tokyo’s next fighter.

The fact that Saudi Arabia turned to the weakened French and the bashful maidens of the Labour Party for military support is a sharp reminder of one of the few constants in the ever-changing Middle East: the inability of the Saudi monarchy to defend itself. That requires some explanation because Saudi Arabia’s armed forces are both well armed and also very large as compared to the country’s native-born population of 18.8 million. There is a total of 280,000 active-duty career personnel in land, air and naval forces and another roughly 75,000 in the paramilitary national guard, which has evolved from a come-as-you-are Bedouin levy into an orderly paramilitary force like Italy’s Carabinieri, so that the Kingdom has a total of 350,000 in its armed forces. By way of comparison, Turkey’s population is more than four times as large as Saudi Arabia’s, but its military and paramilitary total of 680,000 is only twice as large. Moreover, Saudi forces have well-built bases, impressive headquarters, modern weapons, and have received excellent training from American, British, and other military instructors at all levels, including newly retired US generals.

But the one thing they cannot do is fight Saudi Arabia’s enemies, including the currently very dangerous Houthi rebels, most of whose combat personnel consists of visibly unwashed men in skirts and sandals toting old AK-47s, but which also include teams trained by Iranian experts capable of launching ballistic missiles and anti-ship drones smuggled in by Iran. Wielding the latter, they have attacked Mecca and are now seriously impeding Saudi oil exports from the Red Sea terminal at Yambu.

Yet even now, there is still no sign of a Saudi offensive into Yemen to engage the Houthis in full force. The reason is that, for the Kingdom’s ruling family, the most deadly danger has long been a military coup d’état — such as the one which ended Iraq’s monarchy and killed every single member of its Husseini ruling family on 14 July 1958. On that day of explosive savagery across the centre of Baghdad, none of the monarchy’s supposed friends and allies were of any help, and local British diplomats, who had until recently ruled the country via interposed Iraqi officials, barely made it out alive.

Against that danger, the successive heads of the Saudi ruling family have implemented the most effective remedy possible: divide and rule, not against foreign enemies, but within their own armed forces. For that reason, the different combat elements of the armed forces are geographically separated in the country’s vast territory, and commanded by different princes in charge of various parts of the ministry of defence, all of which are subordinate to the minister himself, Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud. (Prince Khalid is the grandson of the House of Saud’s patriarch, King Abdulaziz, and a younger brother of the crown prince, prime minister, and real power in the land: Mohammed bin Salman.)

Even with all those royals in there to secure the House of Saud’s control, the ministry of defence is denied a monopoly of force in Riyadh and other urban centres, because the country’s cities are also garrisoned by the entirely separate Saudi Arabian National Guard which has more than 150,000 men, and is ultimately commanded by yet another grandson of the kingdom’s founding monarch. The smaller Border Guard with roughly 15,000 men plays a crucial role in emergencies because it strictly controls who enters and leaves the country by air or sea. The Border Guard is also controlled by a grandson of King Abdulaziz, as is the most closely watched and carefully controlled of all the kingdom’s forces: the Royal Guard, which protects Mohammed bin Salman. Finally, there is the elite Saudi Arabian Emergency Force, of some 35,000 men, which is under the control of yet another separate body.

In theory, there is nothing to prevent a combined offensive of all these different forces against the Houthis. For all the competing lineages of their chiefs, they are all Sunni Muslims of the vehemently anti-Shi’a Wahhabi creed. The Houthis, for their part, are not the much-loathed Twelver Shi’a of Iran and Saudi Arabia’s eastern province, but the distinctly more heterodox “Fivers”.

In practice, however, the careful differentiation of Saudi Arabia’s military and security forces that is meant to prevent them from ganging up to overthrow their rulers — the Royal family as a whole — has deprived them of an overall sense of cohesion, the most important of all attributes in facing enemies in combat. Military strength is total force multiplied by cohesion: if there is no cohesion, there is no strength.

Within the different armed forces there is a further impediment to cohesion because some of their officers are Royal family “inheritors”. This means they receive a stipend automatically as well as their salaries. Others, however, only have their salaries, which can be much lower than the royal family stipends, yet they are all supposed to serve and fight to protect their country.

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The Saudi fear is that if they ever order some of their F-15s into action to bomb the Houthis, or indeed any other enemy, non-inheritor pilots might choose to attack one of the kingdom’s princely palaces instead as a prelude to an all-out military revolt. It would be an aerial version of the military insurrections that destroyed the Egyptian and Iraqi monarchies.

Because of this not illogical fear, the Saudis have long relied on the Americans to protect them, supplemented at times by the British and French. In recent years, they have even called on the Turks and Pakistanis, who have so far refused to send any troops to fight the Houthis, the most urgent threat faced by Saudi Arabia. That refusal suggests that they are even less likely to send forces to confront Iran’s much larger threat.

The Saudis’ Emirati neighbours have not given up on the Americans either, even if they have enlisted Israeli weapons to defend them — some of them operated by Israeli troops, at least initially. The Saudis might do something similar in the low-key manner of an industrial investment, to obtain anti-missile capabilities they can learn to operate for themselves. Ultimately, though, the inheritors must learn to share Saudi Arabia’s vast flow of oil revenues with everybody else, or else risk losing more than just their wealth.

Why was Iran attacked with scarce and expensive BGM-109 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles — costing around $3 million each — rather than ordinary gravity bombs dropped by fighter-bombers? Accuracy cannot be the answer: with so-called “JDAM” guidance kits, regular bombs become very accurate indeed, and they are still simple enough to be mass-produced cheaply.

Nevertheless, US forces had launched 850 Tomahawk missiles against Iran by 27 March this year, amounting to almost half the country’s global stockpile, though the Pentagon has since announced a huge $22.9 billion contract for more Tomahawks. Air-launched AGM-158 missiles, some of whose models can fly up to 1,000 miles, and which cost as much as $1.6 million apiece, were also used, along with Army’s Precision Strike Missiles are yet more expensive.

What makes these missiles so costly is their great virtue: they are all so-called “stand-off” weapons, which can safely be launched hundreds of miles from their targets. This means an attacker’s aircraft can remain outside enemy air space, where they could be exposed to detection by radars, and then to interception by air-defense fighters and surface-to-air missiles. There is simply no way of producing such missiles cheaply. They need powerful rocket propulsion and complicated electronic guidance to fly such vast distances and hit their targets successfully.

All this is very straightforward, and hardly a novel development in the evolution of warfare. As early as 1940, Winston Churchill’s seemingly instinctive understanding of the technology meant that Britain famously had 22 “Chain Home” early-warning radars along its southern and eastern coasts. Without them, RAF fighter pilots would have had to rely on chance encounters with German aircraft, and could not possibly have resisted the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.

From there, the bombing of Germany itself was soon enabled by the war’s greatest British invention: the “cavity magnetron” that made airborne radars effective. Herman Göring, the monstrous but highly intelligent head of the Luftwaffe, quickly recognized it as a decisive technological advance, one condemning German bombers to defeat. That is when he stopped opposing the very first “stand-off” weapons: the V1 and V2 missiles, launched from the Continent, the first fiendishly difficult to stop and the second unstoppable without surface-to-air missiles.

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Yet unlike Britain in the Forties, Iran today has no effective radar detection or tracking network. Its badly outdated radars are easily deceived by the advanced electronic countermeasures installed in every US combat aircraft. Otherwise, they are simply destroyed by anti-radiation missiles or blinded with barrage jamming.

Moreover, even if US aircraft arriving to bomb Iran were somehow detected and tracked, the Islamic Republic has no effective way of shooting them down. Its combat aircraft are badly outdated, encompassing, among other things, some ancient Chinese fighters; French Mirages flown from Iraq on the eve of the 1991 war; and a number of highly celebrated but in fact grotesque homemade modifications of the US F-5, which entered service half a century ago. Iran does, perhaps, still have a few once-powerful F-14 Tomcats — but none of these aircraft could survive an encounter with the US Air Force’s powerful F-15 fighter-bombers.

Nor can Iran’s forces shoot down US aircraft with surface-to-air missiles. Its few extremely old US-made Hawk anti-aircraft missiles are thoroughly outdated, and their wiring is seemingly very palatable to rats. Iran also has some Russian anti-aircraft missiles, acquired recently but dating back to Soviet times. They were well-engineered during the Cold War and would potentially be very capable even now — if, that is, they had not long since been left behind by US and Israeli electronic countermeasures. This crippling shortcoming also applies to Iranian attempts to update Soviet-era anti-aircraft missiles, and to efforts to develop homegrown alternatives. That leaves so-called “MANPADS”: small, shoulder-launched missiles, and which can sometimes work at extremely short range.

Though they are greatly celebrated by the regime as colossal technological achievements, Iran’s anti-aircraft missiles, and the rest of its air defenses, are so ineffectual that despite flying several thousand sorties over the country, including right over Tehran, the US has lost only two aircraft, both to Russian-made MANPADS. The Israeli air force, for its part, has lost no manned aircraft whatsoever. It did admittedly lose a Hermes 900 unmanned reconnaissance drone — promptly recovered and publicly displayed in Tehran amid self-congratulatory festivities from the Revolutionary Guards, which only revealed their inability to defend the country against the attacks they had provoked.

The broad meaning of all these details is easily summarized: because of Iran’s backward air defenses, there was no real need to use scarce and expensive “stand-off” weapons to target the country. Normal gravity bombs with cheap guidance kits would have been sufficient to do the job — with the notable exception of Ayatollah Khamenei’s deep-underground command headquarters. For that, Israel relied on the world’s most advanced air-launched weapon, its own Blue Sparrow, which flies straight up through the atmosphere before descending to its target with extreme precision and tremendous kinetic force.

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Nor, of course, are the implications here limited to Iran and the Gulf. Having needlessly used so many stand-off missiles to target Iran, US inventories are worryingly low in the event of the “Chinese contingency”: the invasion of Taiwan that Xi Jinping, unlike his predecessors, refuses to rule out. Any Chinese assault might start with subversion, with the activation of Chinese agents in Taiwan’s armed forces, but amphibious landings would have to follow — against which Tomahawk missiles would be the prime US weapon, alongside local anti-ship missiles.

But having examined all these technical details, we nonetheless arrive at something else entirely, a much more intractable problem than any munitions shortage could ever be: a fundamental change in the entire American attitude to war, which I described as “post-heroic” as far back as the Nineties when its first signs emerged.

This amounts to a truly drastic shift. What started with a proper striving to limit the casualties of war by every means possible — starting with prudent statecraft to avoid war in the first place, and extending to prudent tactics — has now devolved into the current predicament: whereby the US must spend billions on extremely elaborate stand-off missiles so as to further reduce risks to its pilots, which were already very low to begin with, against the vainglorious and incompetent Iranian enemy.

The risks of flying over Iran are evidently so low that they are almost comparable to the everyday risks that ordinary passengers face on some lesser Third World airlines, some of which I could not avoid using on a regular basis to reach my Amazonian ranch (not without some trepidation, amid habitual delays, frequent cancellations, and several very hard landings, only one of which ended in a veritable crash).

Nor is the drastic decline in the tolerance of combat risks by the Pentagon chiefs — and even more by the White House — limited to the US Air Force. From the start of the current round of fighting, at least 4,000 82nd Airborne troops, and some 6,000 Marines, arrived at American bases in the Gulf. They could have physically secured the desert islands and islets in the Persian Gulf all the way through the Straits of Hormuz, preventing expedient mine-laying and rocket attacks by Revolutionary Guards. They represent the Islamic Republic’s only remaining threats to the traffic of oil tankers, liquified natural-gas vessels and fertilizer bulk-carriers that affect the world economy, because every one of Iran’s warships and submarines were sunk when the conflict began.

In the event, the White House was so frightened by the possibility of even minimal combat casualties that it made no attempt to keep the Gulf secure and the Straits open, thus allowing Iran to claim victory even to this day. To an extent, then, we should be thankful for the Air Force’s reliance on expensive stand-off weapons: at least it prevented the White House from imposing some abrupt and unilateral ceasefire, merely because a handful of pilots were lost.

It might be tempting to attribute America’s drastic post-heroic turn, in which it was preceded long ago by almost all its Nato allies, to Donald Trump’s dismal performance as a war leader.

To begin with, he refused to explain why the war had to be fought, even in a few grammatical phrases read before the TV cameras. From there, he abruptly accepted a ceasefire justified by a very dubious “memorandum of understanding”, concocted by his war-averse and frankly isolationist vice president; his son-in-law; his favorite wheeler-dealer Steve Witkoff; and Pakistan’s practiced deceivers, who rightly view Americans as easy marks, having obtained billions in aid to allow US trucks to reach Afghanistan while at the same time supporting the Taliban.

Then Trump abruptly reverted to fighting, again without any explanation. Again, that would have required the immense sacrifice of reading four or five grammatical phases before the TV cameras. But, most unfortunately, America’s “post-heroic” turn cannot be blamed on the easiest target; if it were really all Trump’s fault, I could not have predicted that historic transformation in a series of lengthy Foreign Affairs articles decades ago.

After excluding any straightforward political explanations, and ruling out a sudden upsurge of pacifism — that perfectly coherent humanistic creed which has never prevented a single war — I was left with biology: specifically the fall in female fertility, which had already declined to 2.2 in 1994 and is now down to 1.57, well below the 2.1 replacement level.

That, in turn, means that very few families now have more than one boy, or girl for that matter, making each one too precious to sacrifice. In case anyone is in a hurry to move on to other things, viewing the refusal to fight wars as a solution rather than a problem, there is that other effect of the baby shortage: the biological decrepitude of the entire nation as it relentlessly ages. That, it goes without saying, is a challenge that no amount of Tomahawks can correct, and which our rulers absolutely refuse to address.

But there is a way. And to discover how, it is important to recall how this latest bout of warfare started: with June’s botched “Memorandum of Understanding”. This was hurriedly negotiated in chronically treacherous Pakistan by Vice President Vance — whose many talents do not include any expertise about the millenarian ideology of Iran’s current rulers — and Trump’s two favorite businessmen: his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and the real estate lawyer, Steve Witkoff, who habitually closes deals very rapidly by not being too obsessive about the details.

Unsurprisingly, then, the MOU was so loosely worded that it could be read as surrendering the Persian Gulf to Iran — as well as its direct opposite. And it was also inevitable that the surviving Revolutionary Guard officers who now rule Iran would go for the maximum; all along they have boasted about their glorious victories, so they were hardly going to stand down and let America’s Arab and Sunni friends ship out their oil, liquefied natural gas, and fertilizers undisturbed.

So they made an unprecedented and plainly illegal claim of sovereignty over the whole Gulf, together with a demand for transit fees. When Iran started attacking ships to assert its claim, the Trump administration imposed a total embargo on the Islamic Republic’s oil exports, both from their major Persian Gulf terminal on Kharg Island, and from a much smaller terminal at Jask, out on the Indian Ocean coast beyond the Gulf.

Because Iran’s usable foreign exchange reserves are very small, Trump’s oil export embargo had an immediate impact. Not only did it hamper Iran’s ability to import rocket fuel, drone motors and other such urgent necessities from China, it also slowed its money transfers to Shi’a allies in Iraq, to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to Yemen’s Houthi militia that controls the country’s Red Sea ports.

Not that this prevented the Houthis from faithfully serving Iran’s interests, and opening up a new front in the war, by threatening ships attempting to pass through the Bab-El-Mandeb straits in the Red Sea. Up to five million barrels a day of Saudi oil exports — almost half of the total Saudi capacity — pass through that waterway, via a pipeline to the Red Sea port of Yambu, itself activated after Hormuz was closed. If the Houthis succeed, it is inevitable that the price of oil will jump even higher than its current $100-a-barrel rate.

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Meanwhile, in Iran itself, the stop to oil exports has collapsed the value of the rial. It now costs 1,900,000 rials to purchase one US dollar in Tehran; a year ago it was 590,000 rials. This is the best illustration of the runaway inflation currently being suffered by Iranians.

The inflationary pressure is landing acutely on the salaried of Iran’s two biggest cities, Tehran and Mashad, including the military personnel of the Artesh (the regular armed forces), the Revolutionary Guards, the employees of government ministries and the Bonyads (the Islamic charities that control much of the economy), and the Basij paramilitary security forces. Essential items are unaffordable. In the latter days of each month, these workers and their families must depend on heavily subsidized bread for all their meals.

But for its rulers, as we now know, Iran’s continuing immiseration means nothing at all. Behind the hollow pretense of a ghostly Mojtaba Khamenei, who is equally powerless whether he is alive, dead or comatose, the Revolutionary Guards and Basij auxiliaries are now in sole control, and it is the invocations of their paid “eulogists” (Maddahan), who are not trained clerics but rather but inspirational orators, who spell out their victory plan.

Their message is simple: if the war is pursued vigorously enough, the Twelfth Imam, Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan, who has remained hidden from Sunni killers since the year 874, will return as the redeemer, the Al Mahdi, to install Shi’a Islam as the world’s only religion. They insist that Iran is on a path to certain victory. And this, they assert, is simply because its enemies are no better than spoiled children, unwilling to accept any diminution of their sinful and luxurious lives, while Iran’s rulers for their part will accept any hardships, and any number of casualties, to simply resist. And to resist is to be victorious, in their telling.

Since the White House remains infected by its “no-boots-on-the-ground” syndrome, President Trump refuses to risk deploying even a small number of troops to the desert islands in the Persian Gulf to secure its transits, so it might seem that Iran must win.

But in every war, each side has its center of gravity — the one asset that cannot be sacrificed. For Iran, it is the Revolutionary Guard leadership. Since the latest round of fighting began, Iranian missiles and drones have targeted Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United Arab Emirates, but, strikingly, not Israel. The Revolutionary Guards could easily draw Israel in by launching missiles towards it, or ordering its Houthi auxiliaries to do so. They have chosen not to.

The reason why is no mystery. The bombing capacity of the United States is far greater, but only the Israelis have demonstrated a consistent ability to find and kill Iran’s top leaders — and a willingness to do so. In Washington’s foreign affairs and intelligence bureaucracies, by contrast, there is a dogmatic opposition to attacks against political leaders. This is a principle valid enough in almost all cases; in all the decades of Arab-Israeli warfare there was no attempt to attack state leaders by either side. But when a leadership is willing to impose unlimited sacrifices on its own population, it is no use inflicting more hardship on that same population — and the leaders are the only valid targets. The argument recently advanced, that US negotiations were hampered by the killing of Iran’s more experienced leaders, is spurious; experienced or not, they had publicly and loudly refused any real solution: as they had to, in fear of the Revolutionary Guards.

Yet American strategy continues to target the country’s economy and infrastructure rather than the regime itself. The very latest word from Trump is that he will order the destruction of a major bridge — and highly mountainous Iran depends on its bridges — for every ship that is hit in the Persian Gulf. But destroying bridges would only raise the cost of war; removing the Revolutionary Guard leadership could end it. It would immediately comfort the desperate, oppressed population, and might sooner or later bring to power new leaders less eager to enjoy the luxuries of Islamic martyrdom.

For the roughly 650,000 Jews of the new mini-state, who sang and danced that day in May 1948, the very strict embargo was much more than an inconvenience. The British had already supplied their best fighter aircraft and tanks to the Egyptians, and armored cars with cannons to Transjordan’s Arab Legion, the best Arab army and still led by British officers. All the while, the British rulers of what remained Mandate Palestine until midnight on 14 May 1948 had done their best to stop any attempt to smuggle weapons into the future Israel with full US support — a number of Las Vegas Jews, not necessarily accountants, doctors or lawyers, went to jail for sending mere hand guns to their coreligionists. The intent, clearly, was to guarantee an Arab victory, the exact opposite of the myth of Anglo-American help for Israel which is taught as fact across the Muslim world.

President Truman did recognize Israel immediately, at the urging of his Great War comrade and best friend Eddie Jacobson. But the Secretary of State, the retired five-star general George Marshall who had led the US to victory against Nazi Germany, was immensely more authoritative than ex-Vice President Truman. He simply ignored Truman’s recognition, flatly refusing to receive the new state’s first envoy, who was bound to ask for weapons Marshall was determined to deny.

Focused on keeping the Russians from overrunning Europe, Marshall had no time for an ephemeral micro-state that would soon vanish in defeat. American interests in the Arab world were not yet that important — Saudi Arabia’s giant Ghawar oil field had just been discovered — but Arab oil mattered while the Jewish statelet could never amount to anything. That the State Department was run by antisemites was true but at that point irrelevant, because Marshall was no antisemite: his solution for the Jewish refugees still in European camps was to waive anti-immigration laws and bring them all to the US.

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The determined Anglo-American attempt to strangle Israel at its birth was partly foiled by newly liberated Czechoslovakia, which had plenty of leftover machine guns and ammunition, as well as some Spitfires and other fighter planes that it was eager to sell. The Jews, for their part, had some transport aircraft and pilots, but they could not reach Israel without a refueling stop. The State Department and the Foreign Office knew all about this desperate attempt to circumvent their embargo, and they moved to deny Israel’s use of every single European airfield. Only Tito’s Yugoslavia allowed the use of a single runway in Montenegro, at the insistence of Mosa Pijade, a Sarajevo Jew and close wartime comrade of the Marshal.

In the end, that minuscule cargo was enough to secure Israel its independence. Yet even after the Jews defeated their Arab enemies, the State Department did not give up, strenuously and successfully opposing any US arms sales to Israel, even after the Soviet Union started sending hundreds of aircraft and thousands of tanks to Arab governments. The US only relented after Israel defeated the Arabs in June 1967, again without any US-supplied weapons and instead relying on second-hand British tanks and new French fighters sold for cold hard cash.

This history matters because it puts paid to the idea that Israel is entirely dependent on US largesse. There are people, including some in the Trump administration, who imagine that cutting American aid would irreparably damage the Jewish state. Israel’s population today is not 650,000, but nine million, including two million loyal Arab citizens who supply one in four of its doctors and a great many engineers.

And precisely because of that long history of denials and embargoes, those nine million are enough to support disproportionately large and diverse military industries. They would mitigate any would-be restrictions on US support, especially because Israel neither has nor needs the biggest items, whether aircraft carriers or the B-2 bombers that flew all the way from Missouri to bomb Iran’s vast nuclear installations at Natanz, Fordo and Isfahan.

That raises the old question of Israel’s own nuclear weapons, which have long been known to exist as bombs, as well as tactical and ballistic missile warheads. But it also raises a major mystery: why did the US have to bomb three different centrifuge installations? Just one of these, the Natanz centrifuge-enrichment plant, had an immense 2,500 square-meter hall at ground level, and two similarly sized subterranean halls with space for up to 50,000 centrifuges, far more than enough to separate the uranium needed for a number of bombs.

Moreover, while Natanz alone dwarfs Israel’s nuclear-weapon center on the Dimona road, fully visible to passing travelers, Iran built another large centrifuge hall under a mountain in Fordo near Qum, and then yet another, triplicate installation south of Isfahan. Adding up those sites — alongside other large workshops at Parchin — one can tell that Iran has spent many times more than Israel, without completing even a single bomb. Then there is the question of time. Israel acquired its first bomb by 1967, nine years after the project started with a small 24-megawatt French research reactor, when it was still an agricultural country of 1.8 million with no industry to speak of. By contrast, Iran bought its first centrifuge from Pakistan in 1989, to then spend increasingly vast amounts of money for 37 more years, all without acquiring a weapon.

In the Middle East, there is always one and the same explanation for all such mysteries: corruption, in which fanatics engage with equal enthusiasm. One glimpse suffices. On 27 November 2020, the Revolutionary Guard’s top nuclear expert was assassinated by a satellite-aimed machine-gun when returning to his villa in Absard, a swanky hill town some 45 miles from central Tehran. That luxuriously long commute, to sleep well away from Tehran’s pollution, proves nothing in itself. But its sheer largesse hints at why the centrifuge installations were triplicated, and the entire centrifuge effort duplicated by a 40-megawatt heavy-water nuclear reactor. With their priority access to Iran’s revenues, at the expense of much-needed water, gas and electricity works, the Revolutionary Guards can afford to do everything on the largest scale, including monumental headquarters in Tehran and several other cities.

Compare that to Professor Ernst David Bergman. Born in Karlsruhe, he headed Israel’s bomb nuclear project with Germanic discipline from start to finish, living with his family in two bedrooms and an eat-in kitchen on the premises of his laboratory, allowing him to commute on foot. That too explains how a state of nine million can research, develop and manufacture the world’s heaviest battle tank, a full range of tactical and strategic missiles, and the interceptors that inaugurated humanity’s first instance of space warfare two years ago.

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Israel became an enthusiastic military ally of the US when it received its first-ever combat aircraft specifically built for its air force in October 1968: a large two-engine, two-seat, McDonnell Douglas F-4E Phantom. Its arrival at a remote desert base was supposed to be a state secret of the highest order, but I heard about it that very day, from a taxi driver whose base-refueller son heard a just-landed pilot exclaim, again and again, “what an aircraft! I would marry it if I could.”

Having survived until then on war-surplus and a few French aircraft, Israelis reacted to the start of US military aid with deep, genuine gratitude, eagerly pursuing any opportunity to reciprocate. Israel’s Mossad was inside the Soviet Union, which the CIA could only watch from afar, and offered up all it uncovered. After its October 1973 tank-warfare victories, Israel also supplied the US Army’s Fort Monroe tacticians with every bit of data for their, and Nato’s, revolutionary “fight outnumbered and win” manuals, explicitly based on the desperate Golan Heights fight in which 200 Israeli tanks destroyed four times as many Soviet-built Syrian tanks.

Israel’s enemies always present it as cynical about its US alliance, but in my many encounters over the years, extending to the current war, that is not what I have heard. Rather the opposite: deep concern at any sign of American weakness in facing the Chinese, Russians or anyone else, including Iran’s self-destructive fanatics. Deep satisfaction when the United States suddenly spurts ahead, as it always does, after seemingly being on the verge of being overtaken, as happened with AI and the Chinese most recently. And, of course, a great eagerness to contribute Israel’s research and development talents, whose fruits are now built into some of the most capable US weapons, most conspicuously in the F-35 fighter jet, whose innovative helmet-mounted piloting system was entirely developed in Israel.

Just recently, I heard White House voices claim that Netanyahu’s tenacity has become obduracy. This is a fair comment — but what is not are the suggestions by the same voices that Iran’s new leaders are very reasonable, and that Revolutionary Guard liaison officers should be received at US Central Command forward headquarters, to clear up any misunderstandings, face to face. Iranian attacks on passing tankers duly ensued, followed by more US bombing. By contrast, while it was very much also their fight, Israel’s pilots sat in their cockpits for hours to reach and bomb Iran’s distant missile launchers, which were attacking US bases and US allies, as well as Israel itself.

In Nato, it has long been understood that the US Navy must rely on European minesweepers and mine-hunters for its possible Persian Gulf needs, because it cannot fit such short-range vessels in its perpetual inter-oceanic transfers. But not one European Navy even tried to obtain permission to join the US Navy in the Gulf when that help was much needed. Israel, on the other hand, would never refuse any military help it could provide, as countless US officers have known for decades. That counts for much in a world where US allies give ingratitude a bad name.

When the latest but probably not last Iran war started on 28 February 2026, the first victims, for once, were not innocent bystanders but rather Iran’s rulers and executioners, the supreme dictator Ali Khamenei; the Chief of the General Staff and head of Iran’s armed forces, General Abdolrahim Mousavi; the Minister of Defense, Aziz Nasirzadeh; the head of military research & development, Hossein Jabal Amelian; his predecessor Brigadier General Reza Mozaffari Nia, Esmail Khatib, the Minister of Intelligence; his deputy for Israel affairs, Yahya Hosseini Panjaki; some other officials, and also the private citizen Mojtaba Khamenei, son of Ali Khamenei but utterly unqualified for the emphatically non-hereditary supreme leader position. Mojtaba Khamenei has not been seen nor heard since the bombing, and is certainly mutilated if still alive.

Iran’s furious response to this mass decapitation was the launch of ballistic missiles — not just against Israel and US bases in the region but also against mere bystanders. Of the 1,471 launched missiles from the start on 28 February until 20 April, some 650 were aimed at Israel, 563 landed in the territory of the United Arab Emirates that has long helped Iran’s wrecked economy, 265 landed in Kuwait, where some US aircraft are based but which has always aided Iran, 215 attacked Qatar, which shares its vast natural gas field with Iran, a country that Qatar has never harmed, 194 struck Bahrain, the main regional base of the US Navy, and 135 were aimed at Saudi Arabia, in spite of its complete neutrality.

Iran’s very primitive missiles have been much less lethal than the German V2s of 1944 — some 3,225 of which killed more than 7,000 people in England and Belgium — but with their huge mass of metal they inflicted much property damage even if their warheads did not explode. The older and more abundant Kheibar Shekan weighs 17 metric tons with its 750kg warhead, the newer and larger Khorramshahr weighs close to 20 tons and delivers multiple warheads weighing up to 1,500kg.

What Iran achieved with its 650 missiles aimed at Israel was to damage many buildings and kill 27 civilians and one off-duty IDF soldier, though some 3,000 more were injured across the country, some of them seriously.

While Iran attacked civilians with its very inaccurate missiles, both the US and Israel relied on extreme precision to destroy underground missile assembly plants, detected missile launchers, rocket fuel depots and mixing plants. This entire subterranean industry was the result of many years of very high spending, largely funded by the diversion of the funds urgently needed to provide water supplies for Iran’s second city Mashad, historic Yazd and other cities but for Tehran above all, which may even have to be evacuated, according to Iran’s only elected leader, president Masoud Pezeshkian.

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By Reuel Marc Gerecht

The dam-building and water supply budgets were not enough, so the nation-wide electrical generation funds were also diverted to the Revolutionary Guards’ missile industries, and also the funding needed to pipe the country’s unlimited natural gas supplies to every city. As a result, last winter and into March when the war started, horribly polluting mazout, residual oil, had to be burned to keep Tehran’s people from freezing, because neither electrical nor gas heating was sufficient in the winter months, even with global warming.

The regime was thus on the edge of systemic failure on the eve of the war, but has now been saved by the way the war was fought — and not fought. The mass decapitation of 28 February allowed surviving Revolutionary Guards officers to take over in Tehran, very much as the SS did in Berlin after Hitler’s death on 30 April 1945, eagerly killing anyone who wanted to surrender until Russian troops arrived two days later.

But this time no troops were approaching Tehran, truly mission impossible because of geography alone if nothing else. Nobody in his right mind could contemplate an advance over 800 miles of desert and mountains on the only road from the Bandar Abbas on the Gulf coast to Tehran, with its 13 million people. If only a tenth still support the regime — that many are salaried in the army, police, part-time militia, Revolutionary Guards and the Bonyad foundations that own much of the economy — it would be enough to start a long season of urban warfare.

No such invasion plan had even been suggested by anyone, so there was no justification for the pre-emptive “boots on the ground” hysteria loudly manifest from isolationist backwaters and White House Vice Presidential staffers alike. As it turned out, however, the hysteria generated by wholly imaginary invasion plans had very real consequences, which in fact determined the outcome of the war till this day.

To understand how fears over a non-event brought about a veritable defeat, one must return to the other military action that occurred just before the start of the bombing, on 28 February. This already seems a long time ago, because everybody in the White House would have laughed at the suggestion that President Trump would ever come to terms with the Revolutionary Guards. Some 3,000 paratroopers of the rapid-response force of the 82 airborne division were sent to the Gulf, to join the 5,000 Marines of the 11th and 31st Marine expeditionary units already there.

They were more than enough to counter the entirely predictable — and predicted — Revolutionary Guard response to the bombing, which was to try to stop the flow of tankers and bulk carriers delivering crude oil, liquefied natural gas and fertilizer down the narrow seaways in the mostly shallow Persian Gulf from Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar and — partly — from Saudi Arabia, which can send half its oil by pipeline to the Red Sea, and the United Arab Emirates, which has a pipeline to the Indian ocean for half its oil.

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Can Britain's military be saved?

By Edward Luttwak

The Revolutionary Guards and Iran’s navy could not attack the tankers and bulk carriers with their warships, armed motorboats or submarines, all of which were efficiently sunk soon after the bombing started. But they could endanger navigation by dropping sea mines from any traditional dhow or fishing vessel, and even by attacking passing tankers with their anti-tank missiles. That would be enough to cause insurance companies to suspend their coverage, thereby stopping Persian Gulf supplies to the world economy.

That is where the airborne troops and Marines could be highly effective. With ample helicopter transport to take up positions for hours or days on uninhabited Persian Gulf islands and deserted coastal tracts to secure nearby navigable channels, and with strong tactical air support only minutes away to minimize combat risks, they were fully capable of defeating any interfering enemy forces.

By sending them into action, the US could have denied any oil shipments from Iran’s oil terminal at Kharg Island and from lesser terminals at Qeshm and Jask on the Indian Ocean beyond the Gulf, thus cutting off most of Iran’s oil export revenues. At the same time, those ground and air forces could minimize any interference with the tankers and fertilizer bulk carriers transiting from Iraq, Kuwait, the Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia into the Indian Ocean, minimizing the war’s impact on global commodity markets.

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu had asked only for assured resupplies of aerial munitions when it came to the pre-emptive bombing of Iran’s ballistic missiles, hoping to avoid the danger of an all-out attack that could overwhelm Israel’s defenses. He was surprised and pleased by Trump’s decision to join in and take command of the offensive. He did not pause to consider the possibility that he was forming an alliance with a weaker power, which would let him down.

By then, 28 February 2026, a total of 1,150 Israeli soldiers and local security officers had been killed since the war started on October 7, 2023, the equivalent of 39,100 dead US soldiers given the 1:34 population ratio.

Netanyahu, who was widely unpopular even before the war, was politically unaffected by the loss of more than 1,000 soldiers, but 1,150 killed in action — let alone 39,100 — would have quickly ended the Trump presidency via a fast impeachment with enough Republican votes, among vast coast-to coast mass protests. In other words, Netanyahu’s exclusive reliance on his personal dialogues with Trump, which left Israel’s Foreign Ministry and Intelligence a mere bystander, blinded him to the great change that had transformed the United States into a post-heroic country, no more willing to engage in combat than our NATO allies. Nor is it a political or even a cultural transformation that might be undone by strong leadership, but rather the unavoidable consequence of the collapse in female fertility, now down to 1.6. It means that very few American families have two or more boys, such that one might fall in combat without the family’s extinction. Almost every US combatant is now a “Private Ryan”.

That is why a prudent opposition to more wars in pursuit of quixotic aims — such as the 2003 Iraq war that I testified against before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, seeing no chance of bringing democracy to Baghdad, and the Afghan war to modernize unwilling populations — has been transformed into a “boots on the ground” psychosis. Also present within the White House, it equates small-scale and short-lived commando actions with another endless war, nullifying the tremendous strength of US air power, allowing the Revolutionary Guards to win with very few fighters and very few small boats.

So this war fought by an irresolute President has not only allowed America’s worst enemies to come out the winners in spite of their utterly disastrous national policies, primitive missile engineering and clumsy military operations, but has also degraded US military strength down to European levels, because troops that cannot be risked in combat even for great gains are of little military value.

Until relatively recently, British defense secretaries were much envied by their European counterparts — because they were allowed to conserve as much real combat strength as possible by cutting everything else to conserve money for training and realistic exercises, as well as the continuous maintenance it requires. Typical in that regard was Healey’s namesake Denis, a fiery socialist and decorated beachmaster at Anzio, who served as Labour’s defense secretary from 1964-70. No relation to his 21st-century successor, this elder Healey worked closely with his cabinet colleagues to cut costs on buying warships, aircraft, bases and the like, to focus instead on what really matters: training, munitions and maintenance.

That may seem like mere common sense. But since the post-Cold War drawdown that was underway by 1991, almost every European defense ministry has wasted increasing proportions of their diminishing defense spending to keep increasingly empty bases open — often just to preserve civilian janitors and ground-keepers in a job, and retired NCOs in their attached housing. Also bloated are the officer corps of most European forces, increasingly disproportionate to their shrinking personnel totals. The Spanish army is perhaps the leading champion here. Despite shrinking from 280,000 men in 1990 to just 75,000 today, it has preserved every formation command, and every regional headquarters and geographic command, including one for the Canary Islands, headed by a three-star army general and flanked by navy and air force counterparts.

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Altogether, these commands absorb a remarkable percentage of the total armed force personnel: all just to keep up appearances, and jobs for generals and admirals. Nor is the Spanish army unique in this self-sabotage; Madrid’s wasted defense spending, which may even reflect the policy preferences of its pacifist government, is merely an exaggerated version of knowingly wasteful policies across Europe. By a remarkable coincidence, for instance, every branch of the Italian armed forces — as well as the civilian police, the customs police, and the carabinieri military police present in every town — buy almost all of their pistols, rifles and machine guns from privately owned Beretta. The French are arguably even worse offenders: all their combat aircraft are slated to come from the privately-owned Dassault Aviation, and for all the lobbying of British firms they are not allowed to become monopolies.

The root cause of John Healey’s complaint is that to preserve those envied British defense practices, to retain a disciplined focus in using taxpayers’ money to buy actually usable combat capabilities, there are minimum funding levels which must be respected. All concerned know perfectly well that spending on “combat readiness” is like buying cut flowers: which must be bought anew each day, at the expense of furniture that can last for decades or even centuries. In other words, doing defense for real is, much more than anything else a government does, like running a restaurant open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. This is true even when compared with health care, in which the vast majority of patients do not require round-the-clock intensive care.

The real thing, the upkeep of true combat capabilities, has also required other forms of institutional discipline: including avoiding service in UN peacekeeping forces which never in fact carry out their mission to protect civilians if they have to use their weapons. The longest-lived such specimen, UNIFIL in Lebanon, has failed to execute its mission — of keeping Hezbollah from Israel’s border — even for a single day. Yet that has not prevented the participation of numerous Nato officers in over the years, including Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Karremans, the commander of the Dutch battalion meant to protect thousands of Bosnian Muslims gathered in the UN-declared “safe zone” of Srebrenica in July 1995.

We know how that turned out. Yet despite Karremans failing to follow orders and defend the enclave, ultimately allowing Serb fighters to kill some 8,000 men and boys, he was still promoted to full colonel upon returning to the Netherlands. Nato armies continue to retain a great many generals whose only “field” experience was in UNIFIL, to which the British Army formerly sent a single officer, and who was very soon withdrawn (it currently contributes exactly two personnel to the mission).

What have the British people ever obtained from their expensive “cut flowers” armed forces — that cost twice as much to operate as their European counterparts? Well, when asked to fight, they fight. A very recent example was the bombing of Houthi anti-ship missile and drone-storage sites in Southern Yemen by RAF Eurofighters. They flew out of Akrotiri, Britain’s sovereign base in Cyprus, despite being over 1,500 miles from Yemen in the Eastern Mediterranean.

When I asked the chief of another European air force — one that also flies Eurofighters — if his pilots could fly the same mission, he said “no” without a moment’s hesitation. To strike targets at those distances, he explained, you would need an aircraft with a sleep cot and a toilet; a cramped fighter cockpit is apparently not enough. And, in any case, you also need air-sea rescue continuously available along the way. Without it, he said, any flying mishap becomes a death sentence. That is also true of the RAF, of course, but its pilots crave the opportunity to fly real combat missions far too much to indulge their fears.

At the same time, British reluctance to get involved in the Ukraine war has not prevented SAS troopers from helping Zelensky’s government — officially just with training, but in practice with likely more. In sober strategic terms, there is nothing especially important about these examples. But think of the alternative: 3.5 million active Nato personnel, from Canada to Turkey, who eat breakfast, lunch and dinner in uniform every day — almost none of whom is ready to fight in earnest for any reason whatsoever.

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John Healey’s predecessors could count on cabinet support to maintain the British difference, but things are now changing. Not only are many modern cabinet ministers in charge of ever-expanding social and healthcare spending — inevitable with an aging population — they are also increasingly attentive to Britain’s defense industry. The latter generally hates cut-flowers “combat readiness” spending just as much as any pacifist. Why? Because it takes many millions of pounds from their preferred weapon-system “programs”, which are comfortably long in duration, and which can last even longer if they are multinational in nature.

That is the case with the current British-Italian-Japanese jet-fighter project, which will keep many in stable employment — before its inevitable dissolution, when the British will defect to the American jet on offer once their bargaining chip becomes useless. The competing Franco-German fighter project has just died, after Berlin belatedly discovered that Dassault meant to control every part of the project, as befits the French Beretta of combat aviation.

Compared with all this, the first Healey had an easy time of it. The House of Commons was still full of war veterans, many of them working-class talents like himself, who entered the army as privates but soon rose through the ranks. They all knew what combat readiness meant, and were ready to defend it from industry as well as the social-welfare crowd. Evidently, the second Healey chose to resign to issue a wake-up call, because he could not obtain the funding needed to preserve a critical mass of competence in each branch of Britain’s Armed Forces. I well remember the day when my own regiment — the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in which I learned to shoot, carefully, to make each bullet count — was amalgamated into the Green Jackets to preserve funds for “readiness”. If Healey’s sacrifice of his high ministerial position remains unheeded, unpleasant consequences will ensue sooner or later, as they always do.

The US could assure victory even if the regime survived the decapitation it had suffered on the war’s first night. Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed, along with his defense minister, his chief of staff, and the Revolutionary Guards chief, among others. Subsequently, the US launched an unimpeded bombardment of missile factories, stored missiles, missile launchers, and the Revolutionary Guard headquarters in Tehran, Mashhad and lesser cities.

Act I, therefore, ended swiftly. As for Act II, the US deployed thousands of Marines and 82nd Division Airborne troops to Qatar and nearby bases. But nothing happened. Tehran came to resemble Berlin after Hitler’s death, with the SS guards left in sole control, still able to hang anyone who wanted to stop the fighting, but with no plans at all to avert imminent defeat. In 1945, it was the arrival of Russian troops that finished off the last SS holdouts, just as the arrival of American troops mopped up the last Nazi holdouts in Bavaria.

Nobody expected an American army to advance to Tehran from the nearest port of Bandar Abbas on a single highway, across 800 miles of mountains and deserts, to venture into a city of more than ten million, to drive the Pasdaran Revolutionary Guards out of town, and scare the Basij militia into changing back into civilian clothes. It would have made for a very arid quagmire, with plenty of incidental US casualties even if there were no concerted and determined resistance.

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Europe should secure the Strait

By Edward Luttwak

But the arrival of thousands of Marines and Airborne troops offered an altogether more realistic, far quicker and definitely very much safer path to victory. And when, as a defense contractor, I heard of the deployment, which occurred along with the far more publicized air campaign, I assumed that it had that rather obvious purpose, which arises from the geography of the Persian Gulf — hardly terra incognita in the Pentagon, which has been dealing with the Gulf and its recurrently threatened oil tankers for decades.

By now everyone at all interested knows that the Persian Gulf varies in width from roughly 180 miles opposite Bahrain to the 35-mile width of the Strait of Hormuz, but the navigable channels of the mostly very shallow Gulf are much narrower.

Most relevant for the US Marines and 82nd Airborne troops are the islands in the Persian Gulf, from which it is possible to secure safe passage for friendly tankers by denying them to Iranian anti-ship missile teams, by precluding minelaying attempts, and by detecting all manner of other threats with low-altitude helicopter patrols. Unlike the current American plan to give tankers military escorts, taking the islands deals with the problem closer to the root.

Some islands are closer to Iran’s mainland than others, but all can be denied to Iran’s ground forces from nearby shores. There is abundant close air support available from Al Udeid base in Qatar and elsewhere. Only one Island, Qeshm, is at all large, at 580 square miles, almost twice Manhattan’s 305 square miles. The rest are much smaller, and none could be overrun from the mainland as any coastal outpost might be.

To avert further damage to the global economy, everyone’s oil and gas exports — from Iraq and Kuwait up north down to Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura and Qatar’s liquefied gas — must be secured. (The Emirates have their Fujairah terminal on the Indian Ocean, out of danger.) If the islands are used as bases for highly mobile US units, it is eminently feasible for them to keep the exports secure.

As for the denial of Iran’s oil exports, it is already accomplished; its Kharg island principal oil export terminal has been disarmed, and in any case the US Navy is stopping any attempts to ship out Iran’s oil by tanker.

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Stopping Iran’s oil export revenues is enough to reduce the country’s power day by day. Iran entered the war with minuscule foreign exchange reserves for a country of ninety million, and the government receives very little hard currency from traditional exports. The merchants who sell carpets, pistachio nuts, saffron and pomegranate juice do not repatriate the foreign exchange but use it for luxury imports. Iran’s economy is now wrecked. The Rial has collapsed to 1.3 million for $1. That inflation means that many can only have plain bread with their water

The Chinese have supported Iran politically, but they are not sentimental, and will not ship missile fuel precursor chemicals, or anything else, without payment. Hezbollah’s surviving leaders might be sentimental, but their men depend on their salaries and must search for other employment if unpaid. The Houthi leaders, too, might be sentimental, but in the misery of Yemen they really need their pay to buy flour.

Russia is a very important supplier for Iran, with fast Caspian shipping routes from Astrakhan in the Volga delta to Amirabad only 750 miles away, or even less from Russia’s closest port in Makhachkala. But again, Russia is itself at war and cannot be generous. In other words, the power of the regime must diminish day by day without oil exports — which can be denied indefinitely, if all others can export their oil.

Given all this, why the inaction? Why do the fine troops remain idle? I fear that the answer is the arrival to the United States of what I have called the “post-heroic” syndrome. It is the historically unprecedented but now widespread refusal to accept the risk of casualties, even if very few, even if warranted by the most important interests. It is not a matter of ideology, for it originates in the drastic decline of female fertility. When mothers habitually had three or more children, one might be lost in combat but the family lived on. Now, few women have two children, let alone three. Average fertility in the US is only 1.6, well below the 2.1 replacement rate — and most combat losses result in the extinction of a family.

Hence the political tolerance of the casualties of war has drastically declined. On 9 November, 2022, President Macron abandoned Opération Barkhane. With just over 5,000 French troops, the operation had long protected the immense territories of five Sahel ex-colonies, but Macron feared that a small number might die. Putin fights in Ukraine with mercenaries without a single Russian conscript. The mere suggestion that Nato troops might guarantee a Ukraine ceasefire, if one were ever negotiated, was enough to trigger sheer panic in Italy, where on 1 April, 2025, Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani and Defence Minister Guido Crosetto stood side by side in front of TV cameras to rule out “any possibility whatever” that Italian soldiers might be deployed in Ukraine, even after a cease-fire. 

For the United States, the post-heroic syndrome means that if, say, a thousand US troops were killed while finally defeating Iran’s very dangerous rulers, President Trump’s reward could be a swift removal from the White House by impeachment, with the help of Republican votes. If that is why US Marines and Airborne troops remain idle, the time has arrived to turn to contractors who need not fear elections or impeachments.

The US has too many other interests — both in the Middle East and beyond — to be Israel’s unconstrained ally in its endless fight for survival. And then there is the sharp “post-heroic” asymmetry between the two nations. American tolerance for war casualties is certainly still higher than Europe’s, where President Macron abandoned 1.9 million square miles across the Sahel, long secured by just 5,000 French troops, to the jihadis, apparently terrified that 10 might be killed at once. When that number of French troops died on a single day in Afghanistan, President Sarkozy’s presidency was irredeemably ruined. 

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has lost 1,152 soldiers without political consequence — whereas Trump would be impeached, with plenty of Republican votes, if a population-proportionate 50,732 Americans were killed while fighting Iran. The same is probably true even if that number were halved, or quartered.   

More generally, meanwhile, Netanyahu should have declined Trump’s heart-warming offer to be Israel’s superpower ally because of the very same free-wheeling pragmatism that induced Trump to get involved. Pragmatism has its virtues, and so does Trump’s perpetual optimism. But there are still some unyielding realities in this world, including geographic ones. One of these is that about a fifth of the world’s oil, about a fourth of its liquid natural gas, and over 10% of its fertilizer, travels through the Strait of Hormuz. 

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Iran’s naval warships and submarines are no more, and even the Revolutionary Guards’ motorboats are mostly destroyed. But there are still at least 10 islands that must be denied to infiltrated Revolutionary Guard units to ensure the Persian Gulf’s navigable channels are truly safe. There are also some 1,500 miles of Iranian coastline, every mile of which must be constantly surveilled, in granular detail, to detect and destroy any anti-ship missile launcher or similar threat.

That calls for quite a lot of deployable troops — many more than the 5,000 Marines bandied about these days — with the resultant exposure to casualties. The US may be more willing to bear casualties than Europe, but each death nonetheless entails a political cost much higher than was the case during the Vietnam War, whose soldiers were born when the US fertility rate was well over 3.5. Every death is a tragedy, obviously, but losses must be even more intolerable now that few families have more than one child. 

One can see why some perfectly reasonable people respond to all this by asserting the simple truth that American power is ultimately generated by its own magnificently inventive society, kept in funds by the world’s most courageous investors — European financial prudence is now the biggest obstacle to European progress — and not by anything beyond America’s shores. It is now very possible to imagine a US that is still the leading superpower, by virtue of its vastly superior technology, but without being a global power. 

Abandoning the Persian Gulf to Iran’s Shia supremacists, who would quickly control the Arab side as well, would be a very long step in that direction, and there are even good excuses to assuage the shame factor. That is the “defection” of the European allies, whose very existence as independent states originated in the US decision to remain in Europe after the end of the Second World War. 

This defection was already very plain last year, with the frankly astonishing refusal of most European allies to acknowledge the deadly peril of Iran’s roughly 400 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium which, as the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency patiently explained at the time, would allow Iran to produce at least 10 fission bombs in short order.

Yet when dozens of Israeli fighter bombers — and seven US B-2 stealth bombers — demolished Iran’s nuclear installations on 25 June last year, there was no outburst of gratitude across European capitals, each of which would otherwise have had to contend with nuclear-armed Revolutionary Guards, whose willingness to kill tens of thousands of their own citizens suggests a readiness to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of Western unbelievers. 

But there was no applause, no gratitude, no support — only more “anti-colonial” polemics against Israel, and even more anti-American resentment, as if the conjunction of nuclear weapons with fanatics waiting for the return of the Twelfth Imam and the “end of history” were not a danger unprecedented in history. 

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This time around, when Israel’s aim was to prevent its own destruction from a gigantic barrage of Iranian missiles, by attacking missile factories and underground storage sites, and the US aim was to destroy the headquarters and depots of the Revolutionary Guards and their murderous Basij militia, with the faint hope of an uprising, the response was not just a lack of gratitude. It was outright sabotage through the denial of access to US bases or the prohibition of overflights. The first defector was Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s impeccably elegant bourgeois prime minister, who rules his country by herding over a dozen Leftist and regional separatist parties in coalition. 

It was not that Sánchez denied the support of his country’s armed forces — which feature such wonders as a pair of proudly Spanish-made submarines that cost as much as nuclear subs, and an army which has 150 generals for perhaps 4,000 combat-ready soldiers. What Sanchez denied was the use of the Rota naval station, and the Torrejón and Morón airbases, important for US deployments to the Middle East as the first refueling stops after crossing the Atlantic.  

President Macron, who long ago gave up his attempt to modernize France, followed by also denying US military overflights and, more ambitiously, trying to deny freight overflights carrying cargo for US bases. Even Giorgia Meloni — the same one who kept flying to Palm Beach to seek favor at Trump’s court — denied the use of the Sigonella airbase in Sicily.

The British government has been altogether more cooperative, quietly allowing unfettered use of US fighters stationed at RAF Lakenheath, and also the use of RAF Fairford with its especially long runways for the refueling transits of US bombers. Even so, Britain farcically demanded the right to approve individual targets; as if they were not routinely switched in the course of operations.

Trump’s reaction to the performative anti-Americanism of Sánchez, Macron and Meloni has an extra edge. But even Americans who intensely dislike Trump understand that a new elite anti-Americanism now exists across Europe, an embittered reaction to its glaring failure to keep up with US innovation. Yet now that the US has left Iran without an airforce or a navy, Trump has invited the Europeans — the very countries that need oil and gas from the Gulf — to send their own armed forces to secure the Strait. At the very least, they can gain recompense from the Arab states that Iran attacked. 

Just as with any other feat of accumulation, this too is the result of disciplined persistence. In the regime’s case, that meant allocating Iran’s limited foreign-currency earnings to what really mattered: not waterworks against desertification, not gas pipelines to bring cheap gas to the cities, not desalination plants to overcome water shortages even in Tehran, but rather the production of very large numbers of long-range missiles to attack Israel and other countries.

This enormous industrial effort has been underway for years, yet it was greatly accelerated by the transfer of $1.7 billion to Iran by the Obama administration. Officially, this was merely an overdue refund for canceled military orders dating back to the time of the Shah. But the payment’s first installment — $400 million in stacked banknotes — was sent on 17 January, 2016. This just happened to coincide with the release of several Americans from Iranian captivity, and the coming into effect of Obama’s grand diplomatic achievement: the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

In those early weeks of 2016, one would hear the initials “J-C-P-O-A” proudly enunciated by Obama staffers even at lowkey Washington gatherings. Why? Because, its supporters claimed, the deal would definitively end Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons. It limited Iran’s uranium-235 enrichment to just 3.67%, with dangerous levels only kicking in at 60%. Iran was also permitted a meager 300 kilos of nuclear material.

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But for Robert Malley, head of Obama’s Iran team, this technical win was outweighed by a more emotionally satisfying achievement. Having grown up in a household where Algeria’s FLN nationalists were much celebrated, and where traditional Arab rulers and Israel were greatly deplored, Malley hoped the JCPOA would stop US-Iran frictions. That, in turn, would allow Obama to finally sideline both the embarrassing Saudis — with their over-the-top gold-bathtub polygamy — and the insufficiently humble but very demanding Israelis.

Given those tacit but clear preferences, one can understand why Obama disregarded all Saudi warnings about the Revolutionary Guards. This was a Shia supremacist organization, but its long-term plan was nonetheless to become the hero of all Arabs, Sunnis included, by defeating Israel and taking the Temple Mount. Mecca itself was another aim. Meanwhile, US diplomats in Saudi Arabia — who reported that Iranians arriving for the Mecca pilgrimage were seemingly eager to assert themselves by picking quarrels — were dismissed as having gone native.

Israel was worried too. It noted that the Revolutionary Guards were taking a rising proportion of Iran’s oil revenue — itself increased by the JCPOA — to build more missiles, to increase their number of U-235 separation centrifuges, and to expand both their own forces and those of auxiliaries abroad. Those warnings were too well-documented to be dismissed out of hand. Yet nothing was done, for action would have spoiled Obama’s great diplomatic success.

To be fair, Obama was not responsible for what happened next. After the JCPOA removed all export restrictions on Iran, the country’s hard-currency earnings from oil exports rose. The Revolutionary Guards swiftly demanded an even larger share of the total, even after oil prices started to dip.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president from 2005 to 2013, and who was famous for his slogan about the sofreh — the traditional tablecloths of modest households, focusing attention on the needs of Iran’s poor — seems to have complained. But Qasem Soleimani and the Revolutionary Guards were in the ascendancy with Ayatollah Khamenei. So while Ahmadinejad was set aside, the Revolutionary Guards claimed an increasing share of Iran’s oil revenues.

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By Edward Luttwak

It was then that the Natanz complex was hugely expanded to accommodate two immense centrifuge cascades, of 25,000 centrifuges each, while an entire separate centrifuge cascade was installed deep underground at Fordow. Meanwhile, a weaponization facility was established in Isfahan, to go with one at the Parchim base near Tehran.

I have never heard a convincing explanation for these projects: far more than needed even for many bombs, let alone civilian electricity production, and especially in a country with unlimited natural gas. Corruption is hard to prove in a dictatorship with so much oil money sloshing around. But even here, graft cannot always stay hidden. When Mossad killed the chief nuclear scientist of the Revolutionary Guards in November 2020 — using a remote-controlled machine gun placed inside a parked Nissan van — he was being driven on his hour-long twice-daily commute from Tehran to Absard: a fashionable hill town where rich Iranians go to escape the capital’s pollution. Families without personal chauffeurs tend to visit Absard only on weekends, and generally settle for simple lodgings. But this nuclear scientist seems to have been unusually wealthy by Iranian standards.

At the same time, the Revolutionary Guards also spent immense sums on ballistic missile fuel and other components — including the multiple “cluster” warheads now causing much damage in Israel. The sheer scale of Iran’s missile production is itself amazing too, with 3,000 the low estimate for the longer-range types targeting Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities.

All the same, neither Israel nor any other country has been as harmed by the Revolutionary Guards as Iran itself. Because the Islamic Republic has overspent its oil export earnings — not at all huge for a country of 90 million — it has neglected to make investments elsewhere. Especially urgent is water supply, needed for major cities including Tehran, whose 13 million inhabitants now face the possibility of desertification-driven evacuation. Mashhad, with three million inhabitants and Iran’s second-largest city, is in the same predicament. Located near the Afghan border, its problems are aggravated by Taliban dam building, as are many smaller cities, including ancient Yazd with its Zoroastrian eternal flame.

What all these places desperately need is a new supply of desalinated seawater, pumped all the way from the Persian Gulf. With three times as much natural gas as the US, Iran could produce all the water it needs, just as Israel is doing — but that would have required vast investments starting decades ago. Iran’s grossly insufficient electrical supply is another victim of Revolutionary Guard overspending, with frequent power cuts whenever temperatures fall and more heating is needed.

We keep being told that Iran’s population cannot liberate itself for the simple reason Trotsky long ago identified: popular insurgency could conquer the Bastille in 1789, but by the Twenties Trotsky’s Red Army had Maxim machine guns that could mow down any number of demonstrators. Iran’s Basij and Revolutionary Guards have done just that, and can do so again.

That being true, the US-Israeli war still has a purpose: to destroy Iran’s missile and drone factories and inventories. For as long as they exist, they will permanently threaten the Gulf states, just as they have already closed the world’s largest airport in Dubai, and which continue to menace water-desalination plants in Qatar and oil-separation facilities in Saudi Arabia.

Whatever their leaders say in public, nobody of consequence on the western side of the Gulf wants Trump or the Israelis to stop undoing the damage that began with Obama’s once-celebrated JCPOA. That deal, it is now clear to see, did not stop nuclear enrichment towards the bomb — and indeed accelerated every other danger emanating from the Islamic Republic.

All manner of extravagant non-military missions — advancing political feminism in Afghanistan, among many others — are quickly added to already luxurious supply requirements and end up feeding well-connected contractors and their expensive lobbyists. Soon enough, the actual cost per bullet fired makes it too expensive to kill enough uncooperative locals to accomplish the mission.

Trump’s Iran war is most definitely of the boot-less variety — and the shoes of the covert operative in Tehran and elsewhere are all on Israeli feet. This neatly eliminates the built-in failure mechanisms of past US interventions. Aside from “nation-building” fantasies bound to fail, troops on the ground mean casualties, which raise the political price of calling off an expedition with its goals visibly unachieved. Thus losing interventions persist: for almost 20 years in Afghanistan, which was supposed to last the 90 days needed to find and kill Bin Laden’s band, and over eight in Iraq, even though Saddam’s regime was brought down in less than a month.

But to go from non-failure to success, two things must be done. The most urgent, even if it is not actually the most difficult, is to demolish Iran’s capacity to launch the ballistic missiles and the explosive drones that have so far landed from the Gulf to Israel to Cyprus, killing some civilians and wounding more.

Because only a small fraction of the missiles produced by the Revolutionary Guards — whose quality controls are not up to Toyota standards — actually do enter boost phase, do reach their apogee, and then do descend correctly with enough precision to hit somewhere in the right country and not fall into the sea, they too have a cost-effectiveness problem just as US shooters did in Afghanistan. In fact, the total cost to Iran per Israeli or Arab killed or wounded is extravagantly high, and that of course means that the cost of preventing those very few casualties with missile defenses is just as extravagant.

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Even so, the US and Israel cannot just sit back and do nothing merely because Iran’s missiles and drones are not cost-effective. Every day and every night, therefore, US and Israeli fighter-bombers must fly out to the missile storage and launcher sites scattered across western Iran to detect and destroy missiles on their just-erected launchers, even as others drop steel-jacketed 2,000-pound penetrator bombs where they detect underground storage sites. Now that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait and Qatar are all asking for anti-missile interceptors, and there is a danger of exhausting the supply, heavy bombers are also attacking Iran’s missile-storage sites whenever they are detected.

Another unavoidable military, or rather naval task, is to ensure the safe passage of oil and LNG tankers from Persian Gulf ports into the Indian Ocean and beyond through the Straits of Hormuz, which are only 21 miles wide in their narrowest parts. As it is, the tankers carrying Gulf LNG to the world are the objects of recurrent Iranian threats to “close the straits”. Iran cannot do this with a lock and key, nor does it have to: it would be enough to visibly damage a couple of tankers headed for the Straits to discourage the rest from even trying. Iran is not one of the world’s great naval powers, but in October 2023 it had both the 14 frigates and three submarines of the regular Artesh navy, and the corvettes and fast-attack missile boats of the Revolutionary Guards, with which to hit a tanker or two.

It follows that every one of those vessels had to be destroyed pre-emptively, not a difficult task even for the unassisted Israeli airforce, let alone for the US Air Force and Navy, which now has two aircraft-carrier task forces within striking range of all parts of Iran.

The much greater challenge in trying to replicate the Venezuela model of intervention, one that stops live threats and sets a dictatorship on a better path, with no US troops and no occupation, is to recruit and empower a less-than-horrific regime figure: one who has enough authority to steer the government in the right direction.

That is how Delcy Rodríguez, who was Maduro’s notably hardline and seemingly ultra-faithful vice president, but who eagerly accepted the job, was chosen as the interim ruler of Venezuela. With the help of her brother, Jorge Jesús Rodríguez Gómez, who usefully presides over an obedient national assembly, she has performed tolerably well, expelling Iran’s agents from Caracas (Maduro’s narco partners were the first to flee), liberating political prisoners, and stopping the flow of free oil to Cuba.

Delcy Rodríguez was not recruited to serve as the interim viceroy because she was any more liberal or pro-American than Maduro — or more opposed than him to drug-dealing — but because she was able and willing to overcome resistance to the drastic changes the US is demanding and which are visibly underway.

Iran’s best candidate to lead the country on a path to democracy — once the war has thoroughly demoralized and dispersed the Revolutionary Guards, and sent the low-paid Basij militia in search of better employment — has every possible virtue but one. For one thing, Masoud Pezeshkian personally represents multi-ethnic Iran very well. He is an ethnic Azeri brought up in Iran’s most significant Kurdish-speaking town, while also being immersed in secular Persian culture more vigorous than ever after the Ayatollahs tried to kill it. Even better, Pezeshkian is that great rarity in the Muslim world: a president who was actually elected.

After the sitting President Ebrahim Raisi, a former prosecutor who had imposed thousands of death penalties, was killed in a helicopter crash in May 2024, Saeed Jalili, an equally extremist replacement, offered his candidacy. But at that point, Iran was the scene of increasing anti-hijab protests, while the economy had started to sink under the weight of foreign sanctions.

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Ayatollah Khamenei therefore decided to allow Pezeshkian’s candidacy. A technocrat rather than a fanatic, it was hoped that Pezeshkian would encourage Iranians to vote instead of abstaining, offering evidence that the Islamic Republic enjoyed a measure of popular acceptance. With a veteran nuclear negotiator alongside him, Pezeshkian obtained many more votes than Jalili and became president on 6 July, 2024, amid great hopes that there would soon be a new nuclear agreement, that Iran’s economy would be rescued by rising oil exports, and that it might even enjoy some foreign investment.

Those hopes were crushed when Khamenei withdrew his support from any real nuclear negotiations, and refused to divert the country’s foreign-exchange earnings from the Revolutionary Guard towards rebuilding Iran’s horribly neglected water and energy infrastructures; unlimited gas is of no use without pipelines.

Pezeshkian tried his best, most notably by loudly warning that Tehran’s entire population, which exceeds 10 million, might have to be evacuated because of a sheer lack of water — unless a vast emergency program was started immediately. But even that did not stop the continued diversion of most of Iran’s hard-currency earnings to hugely overbuilt nuclear projects, and to produce more and more ballistic missiles and support expensive foreign militias. In other words, Pezeshkian was powerless.

But since then, the Revolutionary Guards have been decapitated by US and Israeli ultra-precision bombing; many of their officers have died alongside the Arab militias they armed, trained and led to utter defeat; and more have been killed by the systematic bombing of their distinctive headquarters in Tehran and other cities. All their grand plans have very visibly failed, there is no more money for the Basij — and there is no credible replacement for the fanatically extreme but very experienced and wily Khamenei. Yes, the regime quickly chose his son Mojtaba Khamenei, but Iran’s theocracy must be headed by a supremely expert religious scholar (faqih), which cannot just be named as such by the Revolutionary Guards: he must be recognized by the top Shi’a academies in both the Iranian city of Qom and Najaf in Iraq. Mojtaba utterly lacks those credentials, and the scholars cannot possibly accept him as his father’s replacement.

All that leaves Pezeshkian, who is alive and well, as the last man standing. Assuming that he has enough Azeri and other followers to protect him, he could be Iran’s bigger and better answer to Delcy Rodríguez.

The brave investor was Ali Ansari, a fervent supporter of Ayatollah Khamenei’s dictatorship and proud owner of a £33-million London mansion. He did not have to strive hard to obtain bank loans from the Ayandeh bank, which he fully owned and which offered high interest rates to attract deposits. Because everyone knew that Ansari was close to the regime, depositors were sure that they would be repaid and they were quite right. When the bank, whose largest client was Ansari himself, collapsed in October 2025, it was taken over by the long-established state-owned Melli bank, which immediately paid back the depositors with banknotes printed by Iran’s central bank.

But it was all too much for Tehran’s Bazaar merchants who could not unsee the obvious corruption at the heart of the regime that the Ayandeh bank scandal had exposed. To compound matters, the bank’s depositors were repaid with freshly printed banknotes that could only produce more inflation, on top of all the ocean of money printed for the Revolutionary Guards and their now-defeated Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi appendages.

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Traditionally religious, the Bazaaris continued to support the regime until its costly non-stop extremism finally resulted in direct warfare with Israel itself. The 12 days and nights of unresisted Israel air strikes from 13 to 25 June 2025 destroyed nuclear sites and army bases, as well as the regime’s military reputation. Even before Donald Trump’s B-2 bombers delivered their 14 heavy bombs on multi-billion-dollar nuclear installations as the final blow, the ever-boastful Revolutionary Guards had been exposed as incompetent buffoons who could not even protect their top generals and nuclear engineers from assassination in their own homes.

When the value of Iran’s rial collapsed, falling below one million to the dollar by October, the Bazaaris could no longer restock anything at all, imported or not, thanks to the ever-rising prices. They closed down on 28 December, announcing a strike and triggering protests that have since spread nationwide. Unable to find food, would-be shoppers were the first to demonstrate, quickly attracting others to generate increasingly large protests.

On 8 January this year, Reza Pahlavi, son of the last Shah, called on Iranian city-dwellers to go out to “conquer and control the centers of the cities”, specifying an 8pm start time. When many thousands heeded his call, Reza acquired instant credibility with the Washington officials and Arab rulers who had long ignored his claim that he could summon Iranians at large to challenge the Ayatollah regime. That Trump scoffed at the claim even after the mass demonstration is a curious error prompted by the isolationists lurking in the White House, who are contradicted by the photos and films of tens of thousands marching under the Iranian royal flag. Reza also appealed to the Artesh, the regular army, to assert itself. Long overshadowed by the much better-funded but now discredited Revolutionary Guard, its 300,000 men could step in and take over — if, and only if, the Revolutionary Guards are first targeted by the US.

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That is how a Trump air strike could change the course of events. Its targets are obvious: the two headquarters of the Revolutionary Guards in Tehran, the Nasser-e and Quds-e, each housed in buildings well separated from civilian housing; and their equally distinctive buildings in Iran’s other cities starting with Mashad, Isfahan, and Shiraz.

The argument for the air strike is that it could bring down the now hated regime, but also that it would make Trump a man of his word. He distinctly threatened attacks if the regime started killing people, as it has done on the scale of thousands, with more deaths every day. As of now, however, Trump says that the regime assured him that there would be no more executions, to the great joy of J.D. Vance and his fellow isolationists.

The latter’s argument is that things could go wrong even if the US action is confined to several air strikes in the course of a single day. That is, of course, perfectly true of any military action — but it did not happen on 22 June last year when the nuclear targets were destroyed without incident. Nor did it happen when Mr and Mrs Maduro were lifted out of Caracas without any American being bruised in the process.

In addition to Vance and his cohort, our beloved Saudi friends are also very much opposed to any US intervention that might release 90 million Iranians from the cage of the clerical dictatorship. However hostile they are to today’s regime — which has attacked them more than once with missiles that burned oil installations — the Saudi monarchy and the lesser princedoms would be far more threatened by their close proximity to an exuberantly democratic Iran, which would be further liberalized socially and culturally by a flood of returning exiles from Hollywood, Stockholm and all points in between.

For others around Trump with darker thoughts, there is another reason to oppose any US action against the murderous Ayatollah regime. In addition to the Iranians and uncounted Yemenis, Iraqis, Syrians and key US interests right across the Middle East, Israel might also benefit from the demise of its most persistent enemy. That is reason enough for Tucker Carlson, and other vocal critics of Israel, to oppose any military action against the failed and murderous regime.

So once again it is up to Trump and his super-loyal and highly effective Secretary of State, Marco Rubio — the same one who argued that Maduro could be removed swiftly and cleanly. Luckily, Rubio paid no attention to Tucker Carlson’s predictions about Iran last year. So much for a war that “would kill thousands of Americans” and “which we would lose”.

For Trump, the Venezuela scenario presents significant intertwined problems. Firstly, his officials must come up with “stabilization” policies to rebuild, or at least patch up, the country’s horribly decayed public services — the result of years of thievery and neglect. Secondly, he must persuade his own followers, who are devoted to the credo of “America First”, that what is going on is not, repeat not, “nation-building” — the infamous military malpractice that ensured the very expensive US defeat in the Vietnam War and, decades later, in Afghanistan.

By stating that Venezuela’s notoriously hardline vice-president would remain in place to rule in place of Maduro, implicitly over an unchanged government, Trump was signaling to his alarmed followers that he was not seeking “regime change” and that the US would not start spending billions to build the government of a new and democratic Venezuela. The only spending that he has so far mentioned is the investment of US oil companies to rehabilitate Venezuela’s long-neglected oil fields and increase their output and profitability.

I was frankly surprised to hear Trump talk of Venezuela’s “immense” oil reserves, rhetoric which not only provides ammunition to anti-American propagandists, but which is also factually wrong. As everybody in the trade has long known, those reserves are only “immense” for practical purposes if the country’s very heavy oil can be extracted — and given that huge investments are necessary to do that, the reserves cannot be profitable unless oil prices rise far above current, or even remotely probable, levels.

As things currently stand, Venezuela can only produce one million barrels a day of oil. If its petroleum infrastructure is rehabilitated, it could quickly double its production. Then, with more investment, it could double it again to four million barrels a day, the level of Iran and Iraq, not of Saudi Arabia, the US or Russia.

Trump’s restraint in letting the regime continue essentially as is — but for an end to its logistic support of Colombian drug shipments to the US and Europe, and to its ties with Cuba, Iran and Russia — is unlikely to last.

Past US attempts at “nation-building” amounted to very costly failures because the task was entrusted to the US armed forces, whose deep and varied expertise did not, and does not, include the techniques of imperial governance. Such statecraft moreover requires the confident assertion of a decisive civilizational superiority — terribly unfashionable these days but the only possible justification for imperial rule.

It was a feat last accomplished by General Douglas MacArthur, from the moment he arrived to rule Japan on August 30, 1945, fully ready and willing to make decisions on anything that came his way. That included the feasibility of Emperor Hirohito’s continued rule, which he emphatically favored, ultimately having his way in spite of global opposition by endorsing the execution of hundreds of captured Japanese officers, which culminated with the 1948 hanging of seven top imperial lieges.

Compare that with David H. Petraeus’s record as US commander in Afghanistan. He thought it wise to piously mumble about the “Holy Koran” in a land ravaged by Islamist extremism — once even in response to the killing of a female Norwegian lieutenant colonel by a mob which had been stirred to action by a state-salaried Imam lying about a Koran burning in Florida.

Venezuela is neither Japan nor Afghanistan, however, but a structurally misgoverned Latino republic, which once nonetheless thrived thanks to its oil revenues that were collected directly by the state, and which once also enjoyed democratic elections, clean drinking water and affluence. Now its people starve as the wealthy elites are in exile and have been replaced by several million Chavistas who do little or no work to collect their wages and benefits as militia members. All the while, disorder appears to be increasing on the streets of Caracas.

What does Trump intend to do if not nation-build? How does he convince his followers of his actual intent? And who will produce the necessary stabilization policies?

What the country needs is rebuilding, and that starts with the economy. The country’s devastating decline began when Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998, quickly replacing capitalist failure with communist failure imported from Cuba. But unlike Cuba, whose only competitive industry is prostitution for hard-currency tourists, Venezuela was always rich in oil. The greatest economic crime that Chavez initiated, and that Maduro completed, was the destruction of the country’s once-admirable state-owned oil company Pedevesa. Before Chavez began replacing its executives and even engineers with his unqualified followers, the company was very efficiently run by a cadre of highly professional petroleum engineers.

It was not enough for Chavez to weaken Pedevesa’s profitability by giving large amounts of oil to Cuba for free: he replaced its executives with his political hangers-on, and then did the same even with its production engineers. Because Brazil’s oil industry was growing during those same years, and because Pedevesa had an excellent reputation, many of its expert employees migrated to Brazil, and inevitably Venezuela’s oil output started to decline, eventually down to one million barrels of oil per day or fewer, instead of three million and more.

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When Maduro took over, he might have saved Pedevesa — and his country’s economy — by expelling the Chavez parasites and issuing a call for the company’s veterans to return. Instead, he chose to earn US dollars by using the Venezuelan armed forces to help the Colombian drug cartels send their goods to the US, Canada and Europe by land and sea.

Now the key to Venezuela’s recovery is the return of the diaspora. The wealthy Venezuelan exiles in the Dominican Republic’s La Romana enclave, as well as in Key Biscayne, Florida, and beyond, include highly skilled professionals who are badly needed back home. Yet while they may be celebrating Maduro’s ouster, they are unlikely to return until the country is fully stabilized by others.

The far larger number of very recent exiles — in the millions — who have fled as far as Chile to feed their families are much more likely to return because they have no wealth to live on, nor have they settled down. Facilitating their return with the provision of transport and food is the one thing that the US could do with its military means, along with the implicit threat of more air strikes if the militia prevents the return of the exiles to their abandoned homes. That is all the US can do without a politically and practically impossible return to “nation-building”.

Having seized control of Venezuela, the US must restore the country to working order and do so quickly. Otherwise it will soon exhaust the patience of Trump’s America First followers — who have every reason to be skeptical.

This time, however, there was only silence until the full 28-point plan appeared. The effect was compounded by the extremely tight deadline. Volodymyr Zelensky and his government were allowed a mere seven days — until 27 November — to accept or refuse the proposal: just one of whose requirements, Ukraine’s withdrawal from active battlefields where its troops are even now fighting the Russian advance, would justify prolonged deliberations to say the least.

The very first official European reaction to Trump’s plan only made matters worse. Taking time out of a pointless G20 summit in failing South Africa — without American, Chinese, or Russian leaders present — Ursula von der Leyen reminded the US that since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, now 1,000 days ago, Europe had donated a total of €181 billion, including grossly over-priced weapons, to help Ukraine. That happens to amount to less than 1% of the €19.99 trillion that makes up the combined annual GDP of the European Union.

As against that, the US has spent a combined total of $175 billion on Ukraine since the start of the war, while concurrently devoting a great deal to defend China’s Asian neighbors — from Japan and Taiwan, to scattered island republics in the Pacific — from non-stop provocations. These include everything from the 500-boat intrusions of Chinese “fishing militias” to outright aggressions by Beijing’s rapidly expanding armed forces.

The Europeans constantly forget, just as the Americans constantly remember, that the world does not start or end in Europe, and that China not only presents a direct military threat to US allies — recall those frequent naval intrusions — but is also the opportunistic hotel burglar of our age. It does not smash its way into countries, but tries to open every door as it goes down the corridors of the world, with promises, gifts, loans, or bribes, before suddenly presenting the geopolitical bill. Consider what happened in Sri Lanka, where Beijing tried to convert a harbor-construction loan into a Chinese naval base, sited to threaten both Indian coasts.

To understand Trump’s abrupt 20 November announcement, alongside that shockingly sudden 27 November ultimatum, it is also necessary to invoke yet another date: 6 May, 2025. This was the day when the President, returning from the Persian Gulf, received a full US Navy briefing about the fight with the Shi’a Houthi rebels in Yemen, which he promptly called off, once he heard the essential facts.

Funded by Iran and armed with many anti-ship drones — as well as anti-ship and ballistic missiles sent by Iran — the Houthis quickly joined Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel: attacking ships in the Red Sea, coming or going to the Suez Canal.

In theory, the Houthis were supposed to attack Israeli ships, or ships sailing to Israel, but in practice Israel receives very little sea freight via the Red Sea, and sends even less: almost all its exports consist of high-end electronics, pharmaceuticals and polished diamonds, all much too valuable to be sent by anything slower than air freight. Israel’s only bulk import — oil from its ally Azerbaijan — comes via the Mediterranean. So the Houthis used their Iranian drones and missiles to attack other ships, damaging many and sinking some.

Because the world’s shipping insurance companies promptly raised their rates, shipping via the Red Sea and Suez Canal fell steeply, as more and more ships to and from Asia avoided the danger by going all the way round the Cape of Good Hope and the great bulge of West Africa. Thus the most important of commercial routes, from Shanghai to Rotterdam, was extended by some 4,900 nautical miles, adding roughly 12 extra days to the average journey.

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For some trades, the extra costs were easily absorbed, and for others they were fatal. But the losses to Europe’s Mediterranean ports and the cities that depend on them — Barcelona, Marseille, Genoa and Gioia Tauro among others — caused by the loss of traffic was absolute: Europe’s freight now arrived in Rotterdam or Antwerp and continued to French, Italian and Spanish cities by rail, leaving the Mediterranean ports bereft of Asian traffic.

By then, Trump had heard that the fight with the Houthis was extremely expensive for the US Navy. Its destroyers, built to defend its multi-billion aircraft carriers from Russian and Chinese anti-ship missiles, only had $2.5-million “standard missiles” to attack Iran’s cheap drones and crude anti-ship missiles, themselves copied from older Chinese designs.

It was at that point in the US Navy briefing that Trump asked about European navies and their role in fighting the Houthis.  When he heard that just the Mediterranean navies of France, Italy and Spain — had some 200 combat vessels including aircraft carriers, he naturally asked how many of their ships were fighting the Houthis. And he was genuinely shocked by the answer: almost none.

All three countries had refused to join the suggestively named Anglo-American “Prosperity Guardian” mission because it involved some air attacks against Houthi weapon depots. This reticence disregarded the fact that the Houthis were not Yemen’s government but merely rebels. Either way, after doing nothing, the EU navies stationed two small ships in the upper Red Sea under the hugely over-publicized “Aspides” mission, which intercepted a total of four Houthi ballistic missiles, alongside 18 drones. Compare this to the 400 drones and missiles intercepted by the US Navy, all at 100 times the cost.

Upon receiving this information, Trump did not ask his National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, who is also the Secretary of State, to convene a meeting to discuss US options: he simply ordered the US Navy to immediately abandon the Prosperity Guardian fight against the Houthis, supposedly employing some choice language about the idiocy of exhausting US naval missile stocks to safeguard the commercial freight of Nato Mediterranean countries: whose own warships lolled idly by instead of defending their commerce.

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All this set the stage for Trump’s new approach to the Ukraine war. America had just helped Israel defeat Iran — as well as its proxies, the Assad regime of Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas — with a total military aid budget of $3.8 billion: or less than 0.5% of total US military spending. The Israelis, for their part, had immediately mobilized 700,000 active-duty troops and reservists after the war started on October 7, out of a total of  7.7 million Israeli Jews and Druze subject to military service.

As for Ukraine, its population still exceeds 36 million. Yet its army has never exceeded a million soldiers. Millions of Ukrainians of military age have not served a day in uniform, with some having bought exemptions and others having fled to Poland, Germany or as far afield as Thailand. Yet all this pales in comparison with Ukraine’s EU allies. Despite including 450 million inhabitants, or 5.5% of the world’s population, it has just 1.5 million men in uniform. That number reaches 1.9 million counting paramilitary forces, every one of whom eats three meals a day in their camps, barracks, bases and ships at sea — but none of whom are available to fight.

And the number of EU troops sent to Ukraine? Zero. That is ultimately why the Trump plan has made its concessions to Putin. It is not a pretty spectacle to see Washington replacing unconditional support for Ukraine with an ultimatum to end the war or else. But it really must focus on the global Chinese threat, especially when the Europeans have proved such unreliable partners.

Besides the EU, or more likely a compact of major European countries, could easily take full control of the situation if they wished: by simply sending troops to help Ukraine, if only for logistical support and equipment repair well behind the front. This would pose very little risk to themselves, while releasing Ukrainians for combat roles and immediately changing attitudes to the EU — or at least to the contributing nations — in the White House and in the US Congress.

If even that is too much, the EU’s entire machinery of pretended military strength will be exposed as a fraud, and so will its claim to challenge White House priorities, shaped by global rather than just European realities.

During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump already advertised his extreme dissatisfaction with allies who took advantage of America’s free-trade fanaticism — regardless of huge trade deficits — to deny US exporters access to their own markets even as they flooded the country with cheap imports. Trump was equally unhappy with allies who were “free-riding” US military protection, while spending very little on their own defense: in many cases not even 2% of their GDPs.

Japan was squarely in the line of fire on both accounts. On economics, structural obstacles to US imports had persisted even after years of talks, while on defense Japan was not devoting even 1% of GDP to defense, with 2% a far-off fantasy.

At the time, I was under contract with Japan’s foreign ministry — not to lobby the US government or any such thing, but to help redefine the country’s national strategy. That was Abe’s own personal focus, and therefore I met him every time I went back to work in Tokyo. He himself told me how very worried he was about the possibility of a Trump victory, a worse problem for him than for other leaders.

Obama, after all, had already caused him needless problems, including sending Caroline Kennedy as his ambassador to Tokyo. That empty-headed celebrity degraded a post previously held by eminent ex-speakers of the House or Senate Majority leaders, who Japanese prime ministers could usefully consult. On top of that, Kennedy took it upon herself to publicly criticize Abe for visiting the nationalistic Yasukuni Shrine very dear to his core constituency, an unprecedented impertinence for an ambassador.

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It was in that fraught context that Abe decided to ignore all protocol rules, and brush aside both the foreign ministry’s traditional caution and indeed US law, to try to meet Trump as soon as possible after his surprise election. His aim? To explain — truthfully enough — that his own goal was to make Japan a much stronger ally for the United States: neatly pre-empting anti-Japan policies even before they were formulated by Trump’s “transition team”.

And so it was that, on the afternoon of 17 November 2016, Abe and his interpreter met with the President-elect in his family apartment in Trump Tower. Trump’s daughter Ivanka was present, as was his son-in-law Jared Kushner — but as they all sat comfortably on sofas, there were no officials or note-takers in sight.

That not only ensured a relaxed atmosphere, but also provided legal protection against the US Logan Act which prohibits private US citizens, including Trump before his inauguration, from negotiating with foreign governments.

As it happens, Abe liked Trump, and vice versa, and each believed the other’s assurances that they would step in whenever officials allowed disagreements to get out of hand. In fact, over the years that followed there were no US-Japan quarrels, and more immediately word got back from Tokyo that Abe thought Trump very reasonable — and a better negotiating partner than the studiously reserved Obama.

This feedback persuaded Trump that he could ignore State Department reservations, just as Abe had ignored his famously over-cautious foreign ministry, and bargain face-to-face with foreign counterparts, just as he had countless times before as a real-estate magnate.

In addition to less memorable encounters, Trump’s personal diplomacy in his first time culminated in the unprecedented June 2019 encounter with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. They met right on the DMZ, which Kim actually invited Trump to cross, making him the only US official to ever have stepped on North Korea’s soil. Some televised cordiality ensued while the TV cameramen had a bit of a rugby scuffle.

In the aftermath, in an astonishing display of collective amnesia, Trump’s critics kept saying that the Trump-Kim meeting had achieved nothing, because the DPRK had refused to give up its nuclear weapons. Yet that ignored how things had been before: with an alarming build-up of threats against South Korea, which Trump defused by his meeting with Kim.

Now, Trump is once again traveling in Asia to defuse a rise in mutual threats. But though North Korea remains as quiet as ever — a continued testament to Trump’s adept diplomacy six years ago — the President faces a much bigger crisis: with Xi Jinping’s China.

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After mounting threats against Taiwan, and even a date-specific 2027 invasion plan, over recent months China has launched a broad campaign of geoeconomic escalation. One obvious example is Beijing’s politically deadly import boycott of US soybeans, whose exports to China went from 985-million bushels in 2024 to zero so far in 2025. The US, for its part, has revoked the small-package tariff exemption, once set at $200 but more recently at $600, which allowed a tsunami of Chinese clothing and gadget postal-order imports at extremely low prices, which drove many remaining US small manufacturers out of business.

This escalation culminated in last week’s Chinese attempt to limit the US products that can be made with imported Chinese-refined rare earths. This is an unprecedented intrusion, and one which incidentally exposed years of policy paralysis. The fact is that “rare earths” are not all that rare; they only seem so because unreasonable environmental restrictions virtually prohibit processing in the US.

Either way, ahead of his vital meeting with Xi on Thursday, Trump has prepared in the usual way — buttering up his Chinese counterpart with unreciprocated praise and fulsome compliments. Yet he is also loaded for bear with the tariffs America has already imposed, which really weigh heavily on the Chinese economy, whose years of ultra-rapid growth are but a fading memory.

The Chinese middle classes that invested their savings in apartments for rental — because bank deposits earned virtually nothing, while the stock market mostly lost money for investors — must now rent them for very little — with huge numbers unrented impoverishing their owners. Unfortunately for them, far too many housing blocks were built before the construction companies themselves finally collapsed.

Meanwhile, China’s huge investment in railways and roads has also slowed: too many high-speed trains were traveling empty. That means that the parents of many poorly educated youngsters, who can no longer find construction jobs, must support them instead. As for their well-educated compatriots, they can no longer expect to immediately find a good job in the cities—in huge numbers, they are living in basements on menial gig-economy jobs. In short, China is overbuilt and over-supplied for a rapidly aging and falling population, and needs access to the insatiable American consumer to have any real growth.

Having imposed tariffs unilaterally — simply because he is not paralyzed by free-trade dogma — Trump can now reduce them in exchange for Chinese concessions. That includes a return to soybean imports, with farmers an important pillar of the MAGA coalition, and a toning down of truculent threats to invade Taiwan. On the other hand, Trump knows that he cannot ask the Chinese to stop supporting the Russian war in Ukraine.

As for Japan, Sanae Takaichi, its new prime minister, promises to end the post-Abe decline in US-Japan policy cooperation. Under Abe, a minimum of communications between officials in Tokyo and Washington was quite enough to ensure that both countries coordinated smoothly, for example to sustain the Philippines and other weaker countries threatened by China.

After Trump left office in 2021, and after Abe himself was murdered, everything had to be negotiated point by point. Abe’s successors hesitated to act as decisively as he did, meaning significant initiatives just petered out. Fortunately for Trump, Takaichi, the motorcycle rider, martial artist, and anti-immigration Right-winger, was very much Abe’s disciple.

And, certainly, their meeting seems to have been a success. Takaichi gifted Trump a golf putter that once belonged to Abe, while the pair signed a rare-earth minerals deal and reiterated tariffs agreement negotiated earlier in the year. But for their relationship to thrive over the longer term, Takaichi must herself do what Trump’s Argentine protege just managed to do very successfully: win a parliamentary election to gain more seats for her party, allowing her to rule without frail coalition partners.

So far, at any rate, Trump’s highly personalized diplomacy is again serving him well, though of course his meeting with Xi Jinping will be the biggest test of all. That Xi has just locked up top generals he had himself appointed means that there are cracks in his regime on top of the stalled economy, while Trump faces relentless opposition at home — so both men will try to be tough poker players, in spite of some weak cards.

The second was that they were utterly, totally wrong. This was only discovered by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, when he learned from his Arab friends — wealthy young men like himself, who were sons of princely potentates — that some Arab rulers would be interested in opening diplomatic relations with Israel if the US President were to ask them.

Trump handed the suggestion to his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, the former head of Exxon-Mobil, who had two decades of experience in negotiating with oil-country dictators and kings. (I once sat next to him in Astana in a small meeting with Kazakhstan’s then-dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev, which should have been a clash because of a hugely costly production failure by Exxon’s Italian partner, but instead became a contest in amiability.)

Tillerson had already criticized Kushner’s intrusions in US diplomacy, but nevertheless passed on the idea to his Near East Bureau. Its response was prompt and categorical: no Arab state would follow Egypt and Jordan in establishing diplomatic relations with Israel — or even discuss that possibility — until a “process” was solidly underway to implement the “two-state solution” with the establishment of a Palestinian state.

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The experts further warned that any attempt to push this non-starter would greatly damage US prestige in the region. So Trump sent Tillerson on the path to his resignation by telling young Kushner to go ahead and try his best. He was met with striking success. The Saudis readily agreed to open their airspace to Israeli civilian overflights, and permitted business travel from Israel, though they delayed a response on diplomatic relations. So did Oman, which had already received Netanyahu in 2018, and which also allowed over-flights.

The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, for their part, swiftly agreed to normalize diplomatic relations, as did Morocco. Israeli embassies were quickly established in each of those countries, while travel and commerce surged.

Kushner’s success was quite enough to convince Trump that the government’s Middle East experts were best kept out of any serious US diplomacy in the Middle East. And so Trump promptly gave the Gaza negotiation to his son-in-law and Steve Witkoff, a successful property developer uncontaminated by any faux diplomatic expertise.

In their negotiation over Gaza, Kushner and Witkoff had a determined ally in Egypt’s dictator, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who had come to power in 2013 by removing the elected Muslim Brotherhood President, Mohamed Morsi. When Hamas, the Brotherhood’s Gaza offshoot, celebrated their victory on October 7 two years ago, el-Sisi was directly called upon to join the fight. But that threat vanished as soon as Israel started demolishing Gaza’s high-rises and fancy condominiums. Nobody in Egypt wanted to share that fate.

It was enough for Witkoff and Kushner to negotiate a prisoner/hostage swap accompanied by a final ceasefire, which Hamas’s surviving leaders had no choice but to accept when Qatar made it clear that it would not pay for more hopeless resistance. In endorsing Trump’s plan, as negotiated by Witkoff, Qatar promised to rebuild Gaza; Israel promised to release prisoners and to withdraw in stages; Hamas promised to release the hostages and hostage corpses; but nobody promised to send an army to protect the hapless people of Gaza from Hamas and clan gunmen.

As for that Palestinian state much in demand from Berkeley, California to Rome, Italy, neither Egypt, nor Israel, nor Qatar, is likely to put much effort into it, after the one so carefully planned in Oslo, in the Nineties, self-detonated.

Trump, Kushner and Witkoff have been vindicated, for now, by the currently holding and the return of the hostages. Can we assume, then, that all the governments which have recognized “Palestine” as a state will immediately drop any lesser priorities, such as helping Ukraine, to actually construct this Palestine, complete, of course, with a freely elected parliament?

Dutch F-35 fighters bagged four of the drones, and the others went down by themselves: they were not bombardment drones, just plastic decoys without explosive warheads. Debris aside, in fact, the only damage was the destruction of a house near Lublin, caused not by the Russians, but by a sophisticated $1.9 million US air-to-air missile. It had been launched by a Polish F-16 fighter at a drone — and missed.

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, was quick to use the Russian incursion to call for more defense spending, urging Nato members to spend 5% of their GDPs on defense. This week’s latest apparent drone incursion, this time over Denmark, has raised the pressure even further: especially now that Scott Bessant, the US Secretary of the Treasury, is warning that Trump has no plans to send more troops to help out his European allies.

But simply raising defense spending will not turn Europe’s states into genuinely effective military powers. For one thing, the GDP criterion is much too vague to mean much. Finland, for instance, spends only 2.4% of its GDP on defense and yet can mobilize some 250,000 determined soldiers. Other Nato members, which spend much more than the Finns, obtain far less for their money.

Moreover, focusing on GDP instead of force requirements — so many battalions, artillery regiments, fighter squadrons — is nothing but an invitation to cheat, an opportunity lustily taken up across the continent. The latest Spanish submarine, for instance, is not imported for €1 billion or so from Thyssen-Krupp, which supplies navies around the world with competent, well-proven submarines. Instead, it was proudly designed and built at the Navantia state-owned Spanish shipyard: for €3.8 billion, roughly the cost of a much bigger French nuclear-powered submarine. As a feeble justification for that absurdly high cost, Spain’s defense minister cited a supposedly advanced air-recirculation system — so greatly advanced, in fact, that it is not actually ready, and will not be installed even in the submarine’s next iteration.

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Soon, though, Italy will outdo Spain’s platinum submarine: by including a new bridge to Sicily, set to cost some €13.5 billion, into its 2% of GDP Nato spending quota. The government’s excuse is that some 3,000 Italian troops may need to cross the Strait of Messina were the Italian army ever to be fully mobilized. But it would be much cheaper to fly them individually, each trooper in his own luxurious private jet. Even without the bridge, meanwhile, Italy’s cheating on the 2% target is bad enough. Most notably, much of the Italian Navy’s spending goes towards warships made by Italy’s state-owned Fincantieri shipyard. But there is not enough money for the fuel and maintenance expenses to operate more than half of them, meaning another industrial subsidy is camouflaged as defense spending. All the while, Italy refuses to increase its defense budget beyond the very modest target of 2% — which it has yet to meet.

As for Germany, three and half years since the start of the Ukraine war, with ever more ambitious rearmament plans loudly promised, the total number of personnel in uniform has actually slightly decreased. And, aside from beginning a multi-billion euro purchase on an Israeli missile-defense system, nothing much has happened. Despite its high demand in Ukraine, even the battle tank, that German specialty, is being produced in very, very small numbers: so low that the annual output could be lost in a morning of combat. In May 2023, indeed, a meager 18 Leopard tanks were ordered to replace older models lost in Ukraine. The expected delivery date? Between 2025 and 2026! Then, in July, Germany purchased a further 105 advanced Leopard 2A8s. That is the number needed to equip a single brigade, the German force stationed in Lithuania — and they are expected to arrive in 2030!

The sad truth, then, is that Germany has yet to start working in earnest to correct the extreme neglect inflicted on its armed forces during the long Merkel premiership, when she kept saying that “even if we had the money we would not know how to spend it”. All the while, German helicopters lacked rotors and tanks lacked engines. The exceedingly slow recovery of the German army is especially frustrating because Nato is not actually short of air or naval forces. What it lacks are ground forces, soldiers more simply, or rather soldiers actually willing to fight. Having added Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to the alliance, tiny countries with outsized defense needs, the alliance faces a severe troop deficit across the entire Baltic sector. The troops so far sent by Nato allies, such as visiting Alpini battalions from Italy, cannot improve the maths.

With its 38 million inhabitants, Poland could certainly raise an adequate army to defend its two borders with Russian Kaliningrad and Russian-dominated Belarus. But its governments have persistently chosen not to do so, rejecting conscription followed by reserve service along Finnish or Israeli lines. In November 2021, just four months before Ukraine’s invasion but with every sign that Russia was on the move, Poland had just 42,000 combat-ready soldiers. That is more or less the right number for a country of 38 million — if, that is, Poland were located somewhere between Fiji and Tonga.

And now, even after the drone attack, Prime Minister Tusk still refuses conscription, the only way to generate the large forces Poland needs to defend two fronts. The official explanation is that conscription under communism subjected 18-year-old recruits to humiliation rituals, which all too often slid into torture and even rape. Those are practices which the Poles like to explain are caused by the infiltration of the Red Army’s notorious “dedovshchina” (“reign of old-timers”) system of abuse by older soldiers. But the reputation of Poland’s pre-communist army was no better here, and indeed for Belorussian, Jewish and Ukrainian conscripts things could be much worse.

The truth, then, is simpler: Polish youth are just as post-heroic as their peers across Europe. Unlike their predecessors, they do not feel the urge to prove themselves in combat, let alone to serve as long as it takes to defend their countries. The many young Ukrainians in Poland, who fled their own country to avoid being conscripted to defend it, do nothing to induce patriotic attitudes. Nor does it help that Warsaw constantly talks up the few thousand US combat soldiers foolishly deployed in Poland. As Bessant’s latest comments imply, this is a force that will be evacuated rather than reinforced if there is a major Russian offensive, but which now induces young Poles to say that if “Nato” wants more troops, let them send more Americans.

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In Britain, for its part, the post-heroic refusal is irrelevant. His Majesty has only 73,847 full-time soldiers at his disposal, most of whom are recruited from the small subset of British families with strong military traditions. Foreign recruits with similar backgrounds make up the remainder, most notably the 4,127 Gurkhas, but also some from Fiji. The French Foreign Legion has fewer than 9,000 soldiers — self-selected aspiring warriors from everywhere, and whose French officers are just as atypical. But the rest of the French Army is so far gone that even among the 11,000 supposedly elite Troupes de Marine, less than half are willing and able to fight.

As for the other European armies, the less said the better. The Danes and Swedes announced with great fanfare that they were joining Finland in introducing conscription: only to accommodate so many demands for exemptions that in 2024 they enrolled some 10,000 troops between them, as compared to 77,000 Finns 18 year olds drawn from a far smaller population. The Belgians and Dutch, who used to provide three armored divisions to Nato, might now field a tenth of that: a mere three battalions. The Italian, Spanish, Portuguese armies do not even train in earnest anymore. Their exercises are bored drills, their maneuvers theatrical displays scripted to look good, instead of being deliberately disrupted by supervisors to test the mental and physical agility of officers and men as in real maneuvers. As total numbers shrink, moreover, those armies did not reduce the number of officers anywhere near proportionately, meaning many Nato armies have plenty of generals but very few combat-ready troops for them to lead.

All of the above explains why Putin’s motley army — home-grown mercenaries from Russia’s poorest backwaters, convicted criminals and North Korean slave soldiers — can nevertheless frighten European governments into rearming at great expense. As for Donald Tusk and his Poles — they would do well to learn the lessons of another Russian incursion in September. Not in 2025, but in 1939, when the French army did not move, and the Royal Air Force did not bomb. The difference now, of course, is that Poland really could defend itself, if it emulated the Finns across the Baltic and conscripted 18-year-olds, while continuing to add trained soldiers to its reserve units. Fail, however, and Putin will only keep pushing.

The answer is not that complicated: the naysayers desperately longed for an Israeli defeat. Some, including Tucker Carlson, even wanted an American defeat, a thing only possible if either Trump or Netanyahu had been foolish enough to send an army all the way to Tehran through a vast country 80 times the size of Israel. The overlooked implication is that, absent a lunatic attempt at regime change by ground invasion, Iran’s defeat had to be a foregone conclusion: Israel is a very modern Western state, whereas Iran is only a superficially modernized theocracy.

For a generation brought up on “post-colonial” grievance studies, taught to despise and revile the Europeans who set out in their fragile little ships to conquer the world, it is distressing to think that so little has changed when it comes to the balance of military strength. Hating the West as they do, especially “settler” states like Australia, Canada, the US and more loudly Israel, they want to see their homelands humiliated.

But everybody now understands that Israel controlled the skies over Iran for just as long as it wanted, even though it did not have even a single long-range combat aircraft nor adequate refueling tankers. Rather, it simply had a Western air force. In practice, that means its pilots and commanders are not mere chancers, but rather earnest professionals who accept the limitations of their equipment and strive to overcome them — for example with unique air-launched ballistic missiles used as range extenders.

The essential Western quality that wins wars is the willingness to acknowledge errors and defeats, and so avoid repeating them. Hezbollah’s now-dead founder Hassan Nasrallah openly admired Israel’s investigative report on the 2006 war he himself had started, a report which respected no military secrets nor reputations in harshly criticizing both Israel’s prime minister and his military chief. Both subsequently resigned for the conduct of the war.

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Given the surprise October 7 attacks, which cost the lives of so many, there will no doubt be many uncomfortable revelations this time too. Together, they will most certainly end Netanyahu’s political career, in spite of his undeniably victorious strategy, if only because of his inherent and undeniable prime-ministerial responsibility. Nor should he be surprised: after the 1973 war, which also started with a surprise attack, this time on the Suez Canal, it was Prime Minister Golda Meir who had to resign and leave politics, despite having just led her country to victory against Egypt and Syria.

By contrast, Ayatollah Khamenei opened his first post-combat speech by warmly congratulating the people of Iran on their “very great” victory and the brilliant successes of their armed forces, including their magnificent “True Promise IIII” missile offensive. Perhaps readers of the Tehran Times, who had just seen major buildings in their own city reduced to ruins, were consoled by reading that Iran’s formidable missiles had ravaged both Haifa and Tel Aviv. More emphatically, they are told that Iran’s missiles destroyed Israel’s ministry of defense in the heart of Tel Aviv, and the Mossad headquarters just north of the city, both of which passing Israeli commuters can still see are perfectly intact every day.

Unmentioned in Iran’s media was the very prudent conduct of the country’s pilots: not one dared challenge the Israeli aircraft overhead. That is unfortunate, for though their planes are certainly outdated, a dogfight could have ensured the IDF pilots ran out of fuel before they could return to base.

Nor is this an exclusively Middle Eastern problem. Neither India nor Pakistan has acknowledged its air combat losses in the fighting of two months ago. On the contrary, each side has proudly recounted how many enemy fighters its brave pilots shot down, even as their respective medias have duly broadcast fantasy videos of great victories.

That inevitably means that errors are never exposed nor corrected, even as the malpractice of strictly-by-the-book routine drills, instead of real combat training, continues unabated. This is hardly a new phenomenon. A Pakistani pilot who flew with the Jordanian air force as far back as the Six-Day War is still a celebrated ace in local media. Even now, it breathlessly recounts how terrorized Israeli pilots could not survive his deadly shooting — even as the historical record shows that Jordan lost every one of its combat aircraft on the very first day of fighting.

To be sure, neither the West nor the rest is homogenous. When it comes to military professionalism and truth-telling, Japan was certainly a Western power by 1905 when it defeated the Russians in the Far East. Even ten years earlier, in fact, Japan’s fleet of older and smaller vessels had already defeated China’s modernized navy of European-built ships. By contrast, there are, and have always been, European military forces that can neither fight in earnest nor acknowledge their crippling deficiencies in combat morale and leadership.

In recent years, some of their troops have even managed to participate in the occupations of both Afghanistan and Iraq — without achieving anything, of course, but without being found out either. The US officers in charge did their part by assigning their allies to the least dangerous areas, but they themselves came up with their own creative remedies, including paying the enemy to allow them to pretend-patrol without being attacked. US and British officers higher up the chain of command were happy to indulge these tricks, studiously avoiding any inquiries that might have uncovered the truth.

The Biden administration did the same thing when Houthi attacks in the Red Sea disrupted global commerce. Though the Mediterranean ports in France, Italy and Spain were severely impacted, the three countries refused to intervene. Nevertheless, Biden dutifully sent the US Navy to join British warships in fighting the Houthis, while RAF aircraft flying out of Cyprus bombed Yemen too. Their French, Italian and Spanish allies, however, were nowhere to be seen, despite the fact that defeating the Houthis should have been a strategic priority for them.

But when Trump found out that the Mediterranean navies were entirely absent from the fight — despite boasting hundreds of combat vessels, including aircraft carriers — he abruptly ordered the US Navy to withdraw completely. With each US missile sent against the cheap drones and missiles of the Houthis costing $2.5 million, the White House refused to follow Biden in defending European economic interests without even asking them to join the fight. And, yes, there is a European Union naval mission. But its two small vessels are prohibited from cooperating with US or British forces, and are very carefully stay out of trouble in the upper Red Sea — ultimately achieving nothing.

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China, of course, is the great unknown when it comes to combat. The country’s vast accomplishments of the past two millennia, in every realm of human creativity, were accompanied by an unending series of defeats at the hand of grossly outnumbered invaders, well documented since the Xiongnu of the 2nd century BC. Things continued like that until 1945, when the badly outnumbered Japanese troops who garrisoned much of the country could not be dislodged by either Nationalist or Communist troops, in spite of the ever-diminishing supplies they received from Japan under bombardment. Nor could the Chinese prevail against Vietnam in 1979, when they tried and failed to protect their Khmer Rouge allies in Cambodia from Vietnam’s advancing troops.

After failing to advance, and suffering some 26,000 dead, the People’s Liberation Army simply withdrew, abandoning the Khmer Rouge to its fate. Since then, China has become far richer, acquiring much more advanced weaponry in every category. But it is still unknown if Chinese units will actually fight. This is especially given the legacy of the one-child policy — now abrogated, but whose effects will linger for two decades — which means that every soldier is the only child of two whole families: both of which will be extinguished on his death.

Xi Jinping likes military parades and greatly celebrated Colonel Qui Faobao, who started the June 2020 fight with Indian troops up at the Galwan river in remotest Ladakh. But no army composed of single sons has ever fought in history, and the death of four Chinese soldiers at Galwan remained undisclosed for eight months, while the CCP made extraordinarily elaborate preparations to soften the blow once the announcement was made. And if there is even a minor clash over Taiwan, it is unlikely that only four will die.

Given the timing, this was a persuasive invitation for Iran’s actual rulers, the surviving Revolutionary Guard commanders who had thus far eluded Israel’s assassination campaign, to accept the double ceasefire offered by Trump’s envoy in Qatar — between Iran and the US, and Iran and Israel. And for their own safety too: at this point, nobody in Iran’s hierarchy could ignore the fact that Israel’s Kidon (“sword”) operatives hadn’t descended with parachutes, but rather were living in bourgeois comfort in Tehran, with plenty of local accomplices who would spot targets for them, and cover their tracks.

In reality, though, only the ceasefire with Israel was still to be agreed: the ample warning Iran had given of its own missile attack against the US base in Qatar was the clearest possible signal that the regime’s rulers preferred to accept the loss of their vast nuclear installations, rather than provoke further US attacks.

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But in any assessment of the events of the past few days, it is arguably just as instructive to consider events which did not take place, as well as those which did. For one thing, nobody on the ground was killed by the US bombardment. Because attacks on the nuclear plants in Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow were fully expected, all three locations were evacuated of personnel. And, usefully, 16 trucks were watched arriving at Fordow to remove steel casks of highly enriched uranium before the bombing — finally revealing the top-secret location that the International Atomic Energy Authority inspectors had long suspected, but never been able to confirm.

Nor, more importantly, was Iran’s Khark island tanker loading terminal targeted. Long the prime source of the foreign exchange that paid for Iran’s Chinese rocket propellant, North Korean uranium-shaping tools, and all the other materiel needed to transform Iran into a nuclear-weapon power, this would have been an easy air strike, with a very big economic payoff. Iran’s pathetically small foreign-exchange reserves would have been exhausted in a matter of days without the wire-transfers sent to Iran’s central bank as soon as each tanker is loaded.

But a functioning Khark island is useful leverage. It has been kept intact to ensure Iran’s good behavior with its Persian Gulf neighbors, ensuring it doesn’t escalate and target their oil infrastructure, including Saudi Arabia’s gigantic oil terminal at Ras Tanura, where more than eight million barrels of crude oil are loaded onto tankers every day.

It may seem odd that Israel is minded to protect Saudi, which has condemned it for the retaliation against Iran’s ballistic missile attacks. But in addition to a growing de facto cooperation between the nations — which started with El Al’s permission to overfly Saudi Arabia from 31 August 2020 — if Saudi oil exports were interrupted, the price of gasoline would sharply increase in the US, very seriously weakening President Trump and validating the isolationists.

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Oil is a powerful player in the current war, affecting Iran’s calculus too. The semblance of a parliament in Tehran, headed by Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, who is much admired as an ultra-extremist by the extremist majority (even after his wife was spotted returning from an Istanbul shopping trip with 20 suitcases), has just voted “to close the Straits of Hormuz” to all exporters but Iran, including Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United Emirates. Even Iran’s mostly inoperable warships could do that quite easily, by simply attacking a few tankers. But such a move would disrupt the world’s most important oil transit chokepoint, cause oil prices to explode globally, and escalate geopolitical tensions, including antagonizing China. Thus far Iran’s rulers have ignored their parliament’s recommendation. Another non-event.

Nor have we yet to see any US planning for military intervention in Iran, let alone an invasion. It seems that even the Right-wing militarists in the Trump administration have finally absorbed the lessons of Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq II: the United States can do many things and quite a few of them very well, including destroying any target worthy of a bomb, but it cannot successfully operate in any country to protect or defeat its government — if only because of an incurable lack of accurate intelligence.

Yes, Iran’s population has been terrorized by religious fanatics ever since February 1979, and they have been greatly impoverished by their very costly and now presumably wrecked nuclear adventures. But to enlist outside support, they must first act to save themselves by rising to attack their oppressors. The members of the Artesh, Iran’s regular army, were sharply diminished in status and means with the rise of the Revolutionary Guards and not all of them would fight for the Ayatollah and his regime. So a successful uprising is not at all impossible, but it would still require the vital spark that can only come from a few daring rebels — not from foreigners, however well meaning.

Not long before President Trump decided to ignore the anti-interventionists in his own MAGA movement to join Israel in fighting Iran, his once close associate Tucker Carlson solemnly warned that “the first week of a war with Iran could easily kill thousands of Americans. It could also collapse our economy. An attack on Iran could very easily become a world war. We’d lose.”

But Trump was persuaded to enter the fight when he was told by Israel’s uniquely effective intelligence apparatus that all that would be needed to finish the job was one bombing raid by seven bombers with 14 bombs, and 24 cruise missiles. No boots on the ground. No casualties. And no nuclear bomb for Iran.

The simple truth, too easily forgotten, is that the isolationists squarely won the debate. Europe might still today suffer under Nazi rule had Japan not destroyed isolationism by attacking Pearl Harbor. Stalin’s army could not have survived the Wehrmacht’s onslaught without the American and British help it received from 1941, including 400,000 trucks.

Now, again, American isolationism is a far more potent force than anyone in Europe is willing to recognize. They include a noisy fringe of antisemites, who are more prominent these days because Iran is the prospective enemy and Israel the ally.

But the movement’s roots do not derive from old hatreds, as was true of interwar isolationism, fanned as it was by Irish Anglophobes and German-Americans who had been harassed in the First World War and who cheered Nazi victories from Warsaw to Paris. This time, rather, isolationism is empowered by a perfectly realistic appraisal of the American wars in Indochina, in Afghanistan after 2001, and in Iraq from 2003.

Each of those wars — which added trillions to the public debt and cost the lives of many Americans — began because of a colossal and inexcusable intelligence failure. Those failures, moreover, are even more shocking because the relevant intelligence did not need to be snatched from enemy headquarters by daring feats of espionage. All the White House had to do, from Vietnam to Iraq, was pick up a standard reference book.

Consider President Kennedy, who sent US forces to Vietnam to deny Chinese control of Indochina. So passionate was JFK about his war that he personally chose the Army’s new jungle handbooks right in the Oval Office. But had he instead read a few pages on Vietnam’s history, he would immediately have learned that the very identity of the Vietnamese people had emerged in opposition to Chinese expansionism, so the best way of keeping China’s influence out of Indochina was to send weapons to Hanoi.

That is exactly what President Truman did in 1948, when he ordered that money, supplies and weapons be rushed to Tito who, communist though he was, had decided to keep Stalin’s Soviet army out of Yugoslavia. But Kennedy chose a different path, and many Americans were killed or maimed to fight against the most anti-Chinese nation on earth.

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America lacked intelligence at the start of its Vietnamese adventure — and hardly had more by the end. Why? Because, it seems, to understand foreign countries is just not an American talent, and indeed the hugely expensive “intelligence community” of 16 different agencies barely even tries. The CIA’s officers are the best educated of the lot, but they too resolutely refuse to learn foreign languages, except perhaps bar-room Spanish. One exception are the so-called “language officers”, but they stay at headquarters. Even Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, knew no Arabic at the start of his tenure and refused to learn any thereafter. His deputy also spoke no Arabic, despite the fact that bin Laden used speeches to inspire and direct his followers.

No wonder America’s 21st-century wars were intelligence disasters before anything else. Certainly, America’s entry into Afghanistan after 9/11 was both necessary and unavoidable. Because I had myself designed the US Army’s Training and Doctrine Command’s “Mountain Division” Format; had once visited the country unlike almost everyone else in the Pentagon; and also enjoyed a personal friendship with the man himself, I knew exactly what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld planned to do.

First, less than 3,000 US troops would be sent via Uzbekistan to make contact with the anti-government Northern Alliance, still holding out north of Kabul. Once they jointly attacked Taliban forces, and the latter gathered to fight, they would be bombed to pieces by B-52 heavy bombers. After doing that a few times, US troops would travel to known al-Qaeda camps, killing anyone who still remained there. Finally, every US soldier would go home.

Had anyone told Rumsfeld, a practical man who had done well in business, that US forces would remain in Afghanistan for almost two decades, he would doubtless have been horrified. As it was, under Rumsfeld’s successors, the US remained in Afghanistan for expensive but utterly futile attempts at “nation-building”, which included the supply of an ultra-modern constitution complete with a female parliamentary quota larger than the female presence in the House of Commons or the US House of Representatives.

That provided the Taliban with a very strong argument — again one that Pentagon officials could have avoided by reading any book on the country — because very few Afghans, either male or female, believe that women should speak in public, let alone argue politics with men.

And that was just one of several disastrous intelligence failures. When US generals demanded billions of dollars for an “Afghan” army, I argued vehemently against this stupid waste of money, reminding them that the British Indian Army’s loyal and effective troops served in regiments whose manpower was drawn entirely from a single ethno-religious community. Otherwise, I warned, soldiers were more likely to fight each other rather than the Taliban: because no “Afghan” identity truly existed.

Unfortunately, the US-funded Afghan Army, which claimed 180,000 men at its peak, threw together ethnic strangers without a common language, including historic enemies like Tajiks and Pashtuns. This artificial army unsurprisingly surrendered to the Taliban without a fight in August 2021, even as 714 US, NATO and fellow Afghan soldiers were killed by the very Afghan troops who were meant to be their allies.

Every other part of the Afghan state — from the schools to the courts — were just as flawed. All that remains of the $2.3 trillion the US spent on Afghanistan are the Dubai bank accounts of those Afghans clever and corrupt enough to steal the money that would have been wasted in any case. That is ultimately what over 2,400 Americans died for in Afghanistan.

The intelligence failure was even worse in Iraq. Not long before the 2003 invasion, I was called to give my views to the Senate foreign relations committee, chaired by the future President Biden, accompanied by a witness for the Bush administration. In my testimony, still online, I argued that although Saddam Hussein presided over a brutal dictatorship, he was saving lives every day: by keeping the Barzani and Talabani Kurds from killing each other; by keeping the Kurds as a whole from killing their Turkmen neighbors; by keeping Kurds and Turkmen from killing their Sunni Arab neighbors and vice versa; and by keeping Sunnis from killing Shi’as and vice versa — though I did omit the high probability that Shi’a religious dynasties would kill each other.

During my testimony, the administration witness accused me of racism, because I had clearly implied that Iraqis were incapable of democracy, the right of every human. He went on to say that I was doubly wrong because the Iraqis were the best educated of all Arab populations, and included no fewer than 100,000 engineers. When I suggested that a Baghdad University degree could be had for $50 dollars, frame included, I only made matters worse.

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Yet once again, the exchange shows the utter failure of US intelligence. Had the CIA director circulated a simple political study of Iraq, everyone on Capitol Hill would have understood why the emergence of a functioning democracy could not happen spontaneously just by removing Saddam Hussein, and would instead require decades of tranquility and political education.

The CIA even failed to present the simple argument that destroying Saddam Hussein’s forces would allow the bitterly anti-American Iran of the ayatollahs to extend its influence into Iraq — unless the US Army became a permanent Mesopotamian constabulary to contain Iran’s influence.

One soldier who served in Iraq, and therefore learned from personal experience how Americans were sent to fight and die for no reason, is Vice President Vance, who has placed several like-minded officials in key positions. At any rate, these varied disasters neatly explain the rising isolationism right across American political life, even if Trump’s intention is merely to add a few heavy bomber sorties to Israel’s war, thereby denuclearizing Iran for years to come.

Perhaps these new isolationists do not believe Trump. Or else they do, but fear what the Pentagon and the intelligence community will do with his one-night strike plans. Perhaps they fear that after the bombing, there will be more fighting, and even calls for “nation-building” to repair the damage. After all, their fathers were sent to Vietnam because of Washington’s pathetic ignorance, and they themselves served in George Bush’s quagmires.

Most people understand that Israelis are allies fighting for their lives, and are not Vietnamese, Afghans or Iraqis, out to get what they can from rich, naive Americans. More people also know that the Israelis would never want Americans to fight for them, except for a few bomber crews for a single night.

But after years of lies, of foolish optimism by eager, ignorant generals, these new isolationists are determined not to be deceived again. It will therefore take a firm decision by Trump to bring the Iran war to an end, with the destruction of the Fordow centrifuge deep underground — the one thing the Israelis cannot do for themselves without risking the lives of hundreds of commandos very far from home. Either way, Trump himself should emphatically rule out any attempt at regime change, let alone nation-building. You do not need the CIA to tell you that trying will end in ruin.

His predecessors, and especially Mohamed El Baradei, in charge 1997-2009 when it first became clear that Iran’s nuclear efforts were aimed at weapons and not energy, were extremely polite international diplomats, who presented the IAEA’s reports on Iran in very restrained language — as if they were describing purely academic research.

Grossi’s reports were entirely different. He was a diplomat until he arrived at IAEA, but from the start of his career in the Argentine foreign service, he had immersed himself in technological questions, acquiring a great deal of engineering expertise over the years.

From the start, Grossi’s investigations in Iran focused on the country’s vast effort to “enrich” uranium, to increase the proportion of radioactive U-235. Some energy reactors can operate with zero enrichment by using heavy water moderators, while others work very well with 3-4% enrichment, or a maximum of 5% of U-235.

Because the infrastructure needed to enrich uranium is extremely expensive, only a handful of the 31 countries that operate nuclear reactors have ever tried it themselves. Most simply buy it from the cheapest source, often Russia as well as France, the US and Kazakhstan.

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But Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. The IAEA has inspectors who dutifully investigate nuclear installations — or rather those voluntarily shown to them. But they can only ask to visit nuclear installations that show up in freely available satellite photography. There was one in Iran that Grossi wanted to visit starting very early in his tenure: Parchin, some 15 miles south-east of Tehran. But his requests were persistently refused. Previous IAEA chiefs would have moved on to other things, but for Grossi it was the turning point: he had found the place where Iran was preparing to shape uranium and assemble its nuclear weapons.

From then on, his reports made it increasingly clear that Iran’s enormous expenditures, on some of the largest nuclear installations in the world, meant that it was after nuclear weapons as soon as possible. The main Natanz building has an area of 2.7 square kilometers, enough for no less than 50,000 centrifuges. It is clearly meant for the mass production of nuclear weapons, in parallel with the production of hundreds of ballistic missiles. Neither India, nor Pakistan or Israel, all of which have nuclear weapons, have ever attempted anything remotely on that scale.

What happened next was that Grossi started warning everyone that Iran would soon become a nuclear power, one ruled by religious fanatics pursuing the Shi’a vendetta against the world’s Sunnis for killing the last descendant of Muhammad at Karbala back in 680 AD, and for whom the destruction of Israel is key to supremacy over the entire Middle East.

When the Israelis realized that European leaders — but also Russia and China, and indeed the Biden administration — ignored Grossi’s increasingly alarmed warnings that a nuclear Iran was only months away, they waited for Trump to intervene. In this, they were immediately reassured when the US sent B2 bombers to its Diego Garcia base, each capable of destroying even Natanz.

But then Trump met resistance from the isolationists in his own administration, while he himself evidently did not want to begin his tenure with a war. Instead, he appointed a New York lawyer with no Iran or nuclear expertise to negotiate with the Islamic Republic. Unfortunately, Steve Witkoff was so poorly informed that he immediately accepted the enrichment level that Obama had negotiated, and which Trump had vehemently attacked as much too dangerous.

That is when the Israeli government — not just Netanyahu, but the entire defense ministry leadership alongside Mossad — understood that their country would very soon be faced with a nuclear Iran. It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Operationally, the seemingly impossible challenge was to bomb large nuclear installations a long way from Israel without a single strategic bomber. Aside from the immense Natanz installation, other essential targets included large buildings in the Parchin base not far from Tehran, where the bomb would have been assembled. There were other vital targets too, including the uranium hexafluoride plant near Isfahan. On top of all that, the Israelis would also have to attack the hundreds of Iranian long-range missiles aimed at Israel.

To reach all these targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day — with 60 Mirage fighters and little else. Copying Formula One racing crews, to quickly refuel and re-arm the same few aircraft to attack again and again, Israel’s highly trained ground crews multiplied its air power, while its pilots made the most of their few bombs with extreme precision.

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This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible — but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.

And, of course, there are also Israelis on the ground, including the ones who killed Iran’s two top military leaders. Yesterday, Al Arabiya had two successive reports on Hossein Salami, commander of the Revolutionary Guards. The first was Salami’s warning that Iran’s retaliation for any attack would be “unprecedented”. The second, a few hours later, relayed Iranian state TV’s confirmation that Salami had been killed. He, too, was surprised, as well as all the experts who explained that Israel could never do it alone, without US heavy bombers.

It is obvious that there was no such equilibrium on 23 February 2022, when Russian columns started rolling towards Kyiv, and Russian President Vladimir Putin had just described Ukraine not merely as Russian, but as the homeland of the very first Russian state: Kievan Rus’.

That warning of an imminent invasion was quickly confirmed by satellite photographs of long columns of Russian armored vehicles preparing to advance. It was then that the US President, the French President and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, together with every other active European ally, had an opportunity to arrange an emergency meeting and issue a categorical warning to Russia, dovetailed with a convincing promise of maximum support to Ukraine.

There had been plenty of time to prepare for that moment — in fact eight years, given thinly disguised Russian soldiers had first infiltrated and then invaded the two Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Luhansk in April 2014, when Crimea was also seized.

But when the moment came, and Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, there was no cohesive and determined power ready to respond quickly and effectively. NATO had done just that several times during the Cold War, by promptly reinforcing threatened allies with thousands of air-lifted troops from the so-called “Allied Command Europe Mobile Force”.

That, however, was the old, pre-enlargement NATO, which was still a veritable military alliance of countries capable of defending themselves, and help weaker allies in trouble, and whose chronically weak Mediterranean member states, with the most resplendent uniforms and least combat strength, had no Russian troops on their borders.

But once very deserving yet utterly indefensible countries such as Estonia were included in NATO — along with Poland, which mustered just 42,000 combat soldiers out of its population of 33 million a mere three months before Putin’s full-scale invasion began — it stopped being an effective military alliance.

Instead, it became a kind of social club. The NATO calendar is full of meetings at the “Supreme Allied Headquarters” in Mons in Belgium, where all manner of military and related issues are addressed often very professionally and quite freely — except that nobody is allowed to mention, however politely, even the most glaring military shortcomings of fellow allies, which undermine important war plans.

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The highpoint of the NATO calendar is the splendid summits with all flags flying, in which the arrival of new countries is greatly celebrated, regardless of their ability to actually defend themselves. Both heads of state and heads of government are invited to those gatherings on the premise that there is strength in numbers, with no concerns about the inherent difficulty of reaching any agreements in such a vast crowd.

In the last summit, held in Washington DC in July 2024, Biden’s confusion of President Zelensky with Putin added a touch of humor to otherwise gloomy proceedings: nobody in attendance offered any suggestions on how to end the war in Ukraine.

What proves that NATO is no longer a genuine military alliance was that nothing was done in the last pre-war days before Putin’s invasion finally began. The satellite intelligence that revealed Russian forces on the move also showed that they were already in assault formations. But even then, five days remained to fly fighter-bomber squadrons to forward bases.

Yet even inaction would have been better than what actually happened. Instead of ordering the rapid deployment of tactical airpower to bases in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom, the Biden administration instead evacuated US diplomats from Kyiv, starting a panic that induced the evacuation of some 20 other diplomatic missions.

For its part, the German government made clear that the Nordstream II pipeline project, further increasing Berlin’s dependence on Russian gas, would not be stopped even if Ukraine were invaded.

Only the courageous determination of Zelensky, together with his Defense Minister Resnikov and Kyiv’s stalwart mayor, prevented a collapse — starting the resistance that continues until today.

It is enough, then, to review the sequence of events to understand why Putin was not deterred back in February 2022: there was no watchful Great Power in Europe to do the deterring alongside the United States, thereby replacing the loss of NATO’s operational capacity and deterrent credibility caused by its expansion into indefensible territory.

But a recent and seemingly uneventful meeting between the leaders of Britain, France and Germany clearly suggests where that missing Great Power may be found: in a solid strategic compact, carefully negotiated between the three countries to jointly support the US response to an imminent crisis — or, if necessary, to induce a US response they jointly favor.

Whatever the differences between the three governments, they could certainly act with much greater agility than NATO as a whole ever could. Tripartite agreement is clearly easier than contending with dozens of European NATO members, from Estonia to Norway to Spain.

Except for Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, no NATO member deliberately obstructs alliance decisions. But each has its own objections to joint action against particular countries. For example, the populations of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and North Macedonia are predominantly Christian Orthodox, and their governments are typically unwilling to act against Orthodox Serbia — or indeed against Russia itself.

As Islamic countries, Turkey and Albania are very likely to object to any action against a Muslim antagonist, while the government of the day of any member state may object to any use of force if the ruling coalition at that time happens to include a pacifist party.

Even if none of those specific obstacles to prompt action appear in any given crisis, the civil and military representatives of each member state will still want to be heard when the use of force is imminent, and that alone could fatally delay responding to a sudden threat.

Against all those impediments to quick action, the alternative of a permanent three-country compact — in effect a synthetic Great Power — is very promising.

There are, of course, obvious challenges. For one thing, even a synthetic Great Power must have formidable capabilities, and these days neither the UK, France nor Germany is a veritable Great Power.

That category is defined by the ability to wage war independently, without needing any significant support from allies. To be sure, Britain did exactly that in reconquering the Falklands from Argentina, sending an expeditionary fleet over an unprecedented 8,000 miles in a display of strategic courage, which almost failed because of the bravery of a handful of Argentinian pilots — and which would have been suicidal against a more competent adversary.

If, however, the limitations of the three powers are well known, the magnitude of their combined capabilities should not be underestimated.

When it comes to ground forces, the British Army these days has some 70,000 soldiers all told, while its French counterpart is under 100,000. Yet both contain a high proportion of units that are actually capable of fighting, in contrast to most other NATO armies.

As for the German army, it had shrunk to less than a tenth of its Cold War strength under Angela Merkel, who ridiculed Trump’s call for more spending in 2018 as totally unnecessary in peaceful Europe — even though Russian forces had already infiltrated southeast Ukraine.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine caused as much confusion as alarm in Germany, as in most of Europe, because under various labels pacifist parties constrained both thinking and defense budgets. It is only now, under its newly installed Chancellor Friedrich Merz, that a serious rearmament effort is finally underway. It is set to focus on armored forces — still the German specialty — which would complement British and French light infantry and commando units.

The synthetic Great Power proposed here would be much better off at sea, where the British and French fleets each operate aircraft carriers. Both fleets also have nuclear-powered submarines, much less vulnerable than surface vessels and armed to attack enemy ships and subs alike. The latter also do not need large numbers to control vast ocean areas: if just half of the 10 now operated by the British and French navies were deployed, they could interdict any Russian naval operations in Atlantic and Arctic waters.

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As with the ground forces, the size of the British and French air forces is less important than the fact that they “are for real”. Thus while the Royal Air Force, the Italians and the Spanish all operate Eurofighters with a significant bombload, only the RAF has actually used them to attack the Houthis from its sovereign base in Cyprus (another overlooked British asset): even though they were inflicting a great deal of damage on the Italian and Spanish economies and almost none on the British.

In theory, this gap is just a matter of politics, but there is also a fixed cultural difference: Royal Air Force pilots are ready and even eager for action, a sentiment shared by French pilots who until recently flew many distant missions into Africa.

A simple decision by the British, French and German governments to operate a joint foreign and defense policy coordination office would be quite sufficient to announce the arrival of the Great Power missing from the European scene.

There would be no need to burden this office with any duties except a timely response to active or imminent threats of war, meaning it would only require the designation of very few senior diplomats and military officers of each country, seconded from their ordinary duties to serve as joint “crisis managers”.

The one thing necessary to make it work is that these individuals would each need immediate access to their respective leaders in the event of a crisis, overcoming the inevitable resistance of all others who must be left out.

The mere announcement that Britain, France and Germany had decided to coordinate conflict policies from a single joint office would no doubt trigger outrage, protests and even nervous breakdowns in the left-out European capitals that still pretend to matter — even as they refuse to help with the Houthis let alone Putin. Brussels, too, would be outraged, where for all her charms President Ursula von der Leyen cannot conceal the inability of the European Commission to help assure Europe’s safety from threats large or small.

Having fought with and against each other in two world wars, France, Germany and the United Kingdom now have a new opportunity to combine forces and endow Europe with the Great Power it urgently needs. If they do not act, more wars are likely.

By 8 May 1945, the Americans had only taken a very small part of Japan — the 11.5 square miles of Iwo Jima island — a conquest very expensive in blood: 6,821 US troops were lost and three times as many were seriously injured. Japanese combat was very different from that of the Americans: they would fight to the death with no thought for their own survival, and their tactics were designed to circumvent the vast superiority of American firepower. Victory over the remaining 145,937 square miles of Japan, therefore, would inevitably come at the cost of far more lives than all the allies had worldwide.

The Japanese had no intention of surrendering. They were determined to continue to inflict such heavy casualties that the allies would give up their demand for unconditional surrender and instead accept a negotiated settlement that would assure the continuation of the imperial dynasty — a strategy they called Ketsugō (Operation Decisive). And, with more than three and a half million Japanese troops still on duty in the home islands, not counting those being evacuated from China and Korea, they had the manpower to make it happen. Beside combat forces, which would attack using aircraft and small arms, there was the Civilian Volunteer Corps — all able-bodied men and women armed with rifles and pistols taken from the British, Chinese and Dutch troops defeated earlier in the war. But what really made the Japanese so confident, what made them truly a force to be reckoned with, was their extraordinary stoicism. Uniquely, they really did prefer death to surrender.

But because Ketsugō was not studied properly by foreign historians for decades, a false narrative took hold — one that serves as useful propaganda for the Russians to this day. This asserts that when the first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, Japan was already defeated. Cut off from oil supplies immobilizing aircraft and ships, surrender was only days away at most. The only reason the bomb was dropped, in this telling, was to frighten Stalin into accepting US supremacy in Europe in spite of the superiority of the Red Army. The deaths of the men and women of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the prolonged suffering of the survivors poisoned by radioactive fallout were most cruelly inflicted for cynical American political purposes.

Every part of this narrative is wrong. In reality, when Hiroshima was bombed, Japan could still count on as many as 10,000 aircraft for kamikaze suicide attacks. Second, nobody in the chain of command, from President Truman right down to Paul Tibbets, the 29-year-old pilot of the B-29 that dropped the “Little Boy” fission bomb, knew anything about immediate radiation or the subsequent radioactive fall-out — apart from the sheer size of the explosion, they had no idea of what they were about to unleash. The reason the bomb was dropped was that US military leaders and President Truman were terrified by the thought of all the Iwo Jima battles it would take to conquer the rest of Japan.

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Despite the desperate damage inflicted, the bomb did serve one enduring purpose. For decades after, all of us remembering VE day in May 1945, looking at those pictures of celebrating couples kissing enthusiastically, could be certain of one thing: there would be no more wars in Europe. That certainty was not because of the actions of the United Nations, utterly ineffectual even then, nor the result of some Great Power diplomacy in the Security Council, which only fails when it is most needed. Instead, the very long peace that Europe enjoyed — an unprecedented 77 years without a major war — was “the sturdy child of (nuclear) terror”, as Churchill said, a thing far more reliable than any human wisdom. And this only came when the bomb was dropped two months after the emotional celebrations of VE day.

That was still true on 24 February 2022, when Putin, who had been creeping into the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, dramatically escalated and invaded Ukraine outright, aiming straight for its capital, Kiev. For it wasn’t the protective arm of nuclear deterrence that failed on that fateful day and led the Russians to make their reckless move. It was the failure of NATO, and its attendant governments, to reaffirm deterrence in word and deed during the weeks and days of growing tension before the invasion.

In fact it can be argued that the Biden administration unwittingly triggered the Russian escalation when, at the behest of the always-wrong CIA, which was predicting the swift fall of the city, it evacuated the US diplomatic mission in Kiev. That, in turn, precipitated a mass flight of other Western (and Middle Eastern) diplomats. Even worse, the German government contrived to outdo Biden’s foolish move by declaring that it would not stop the Nord Stream II doubling of gas imports from Russia, even if there was “some incident” in Ukraine. For the German-speaking Putin it was a big green light to invade.

Russia’s “post-modern” invasion did not rely on firepower. It aimed to capture Kiev and conquer the country by giving the impression of strength: the image of that endless double column of armored vehicles was a powerful one. When that fashionable fantasy collided with the reality of stubborn Ukrainian defenders firing anti-tank rockets at very close range, Nato’s leaders had an opportunity to take immediate action. They could go into an emergency session to demand an end to the fighting, and a prompt return to pre-combat positions.

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But no such session happened because only the British and the new Nato members who had long lived under Soviet rule were willing to oppose the Kremlin head-on. The Biden administration was mostly focused on “avoiding escalation” and the French, Germans and Italians as usual loudly demanded a voice in Nato’s decisions while offering only platitudes when it was their turn to speak .

As a result, on VE day 2025, a war still rages while a fragmented alliance struggles to cobble together an effective defense strategy. So as flags are waved in celebration of that long-past victory, men are again dying, and European governments again hoping that the US will step in and do the heavy lifting. It was, after all, an approach that worked well enough in the past, when the US had far larger forces and Russia was everyone’s bad guy.

But today everything has changed. There is an enemy that the Americans are more worried about than Putin: Xi Jinping, the Mussolini of our time, who is determined to show that today’s Chinese are courageous and formidable fighters, unlike their defeated ancestors. And as China openly prepares for war, the US has no choice but to prioritize the “Indo-Pacific”. Perhaps, as Europe finds itself abandoned, or at least insufficiently protected, and unwilling to rearm in earnest, it is now the time to ask: for how long will the nuclear deterrent hold?

How did the US pay for that first wave of cheap low-tech imports? Partly with earnings from American agricultural exports, as well as some irresistible consumer products such as Coca Cola and cigarettes. Increasingly, though, America paid for its Adidas by selling Treasury bonds, eagerly bought by up exporters. That, in turn, drove up the dollar, and made foreign wares even more competitive.

But this model came with a downside. In the US, producers of low-tech and craft products started going out of business, even as the newly unemployed were encouraged to abandon hard industrial jobs for splendid new positions in the services sector. Go into foreign-exchange trading, they were told, whose winnings could earn you more money in a day than a lifetime spent turning out garden tools — which now anyway arrived more cheaply from overseas.

In speeches, articles and lectures, the country’s elite hailed the passing of our grim industrial economy, instead looking forward to a future where everyone could be a marketing consultant or a financial adviser.

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It was only small-minded people, fixated on the hourly-wage data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who noticed that industrial workers who made $30 an hour working on assembly lines did not in fact become foreign-exchange traders earning $3,000 an hour. When their competition-hit factories shut down, rather, they were much more likely to turn up as shopping mall security guards paid a pittance.

As far back as 1993, I myself published a book called The Endangered American Dream, in which I tested the claim that the replacement of the industrial economy by the service economy was a Good Thing. In the event, I found that it was only a Good Thing for South Korea, Taiwan, the lower end of the Japanese economy and the poorest European regions. All these places kept out foreign — including US — imports while exporting vigorously to the US. Stateside, where lower-tech industries were collapsing, the American heartland suffered too.

Fentanyl had yet to arrive. But in those towns, fathers could no longer provide a dignified life for their children, heading off with their lunchpails to work in the factory down the street. Instead, they counted themselves lucky if they could get a job at Walmart, at much lower pay, and selling cheaper imported versions of what they once made themselves.

My book included a warning that social breakdown would open the way for some form of product-improved fascism in the US. But reviewers failed to notice that, as they contemptuously slammed my protectionist idiocy, daring as I had to question the secular religion of the ruling elite: unlimited free trade that would make the whole world richer. That is true, but globalization also made American industrial workers poorer, certainly too poor to send their children to college, at a stroke destroying the American Dream that was.

Worse was to follow. Instead of prudent and limited protectionism — replacing industrial collapse across the US with a much slower transition, providing enough time to upskill at least the sons of industrial workers — Bill Clinton and the Davos free trade consensus opened the US to unlimited imports from North America. That was a great blessing for local industry, and the foreign companies from all over the world that started producing in Mexico, which then trucked their products across the Rio Grande without any limits.

Nobody in the US elite noticed that every other industrial country impeded US industrial imports, either via arbitrary regulatory hurdles or even outright conspiracy. Consider South Korea. The government finally removed its de facto prohibition of US car imports (rich Koreans loved utterly impractical Cadillacs), only to ensure that General Motors would not be able to rent a showroom anywhere in Seoul. Traitorous landlords tempted to offer their space were threatened with harsh retaliation: by the very same officials who had smilingly signed the auto free trade agreement with the US. South Korea, of course, is a country that enjoys the protection of US troops until today.

Then, China’s industrialization accelerated. That carried the country from Mao’s deep misery — which I experienced first-hand in 1976, when the whole of Beijing smelled like an open sewer — to great prosperity. Once again, this wealth was largely built on industrial and craft exports to the US, whose market was totally open to China, even as China’s market was largely closed to US exporters. Some of these barriers have since come down, but the process is not complete even now.

It was Chinese imports that finally drove most US factories out of business, taking much of our remaining industrial base with them. Increasing quality at a steady clip, while constantly expanding capacity, Chinese industrialists were also helped by continued purchases of US dollar bonds. Artificially pushing up the greenback, this again made Chinese imports even cheaper.

Why balk at China’s generosity in offering 97-piece toolsets that can be picked up for a few bucks at Walmart? No reason at all — if Americans are only viewed as consumers. But while the entire US elite celebrated free trade, an astonishing number of Americans lost the last of the good jobs that upheld families, towns and cities.

Trump’s tariff plan is simple: impede free trade so that surviving industrial and craft enterprises can survive, while other firms both old and new are re-launched with better technology, allowing them to become global exporters while still paying good wages. True, global wealth is favored by unlimited free trade. But, in the process, lower-income workers in developed countries are impoverished, even as higher income people everywhere get wealthier. While Clinton, the Bushes, and the lord of Martha’s Vineyard Obama supported free trade, as did the wealthy elite they hang out with, Trump is keen to reward his lower income supporters. Unsurprisingly, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times are outraged.

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And then there is another thing. It turns out that without a civilian shipbuilding industry, the US Navy can only make hugely expensive prototypes, not the 200 warships we need. The same is true of other sectors, including civilian aviation: Boeing is currently years late in delivering tankers to US and allied air forces (the Israelis must rely on 65-year-old converted airliners), and also terribly behind in fulfilling orders for commercial airlines around the world. Why? Because of the collapse of those machine shops, which trained skilled workers, and which ensured they could walk into any Boeing factory at a pinch.

As for the labor supply, cutting gigantic Federal gifts to rich universities — which turn out unlimited numbers of sociologists and sexologists, and who often end up working for the government in some capacity — will give us more workers, and perhaps some more plumbers too.

All of the above is more than enough to justify today’s temporary global turmoil, but there is one more consideration too. Unless the US industrial economy is vigorously rebuilt, the US armed forces will have to import their vehicles and weapons. From where? Likely China, so good luck with that.

All the Pentagon had to rely on were CIA defector reports, rarely helpful and quickly outdated. But it was a second display, in 1955, that sowed panic in Washington. That July, 10 Mya-4s flew past the Tsushino airfield reviewing stand, before diving out of sight and returning with eight more, creating the false impression that the Soviets had 28 such aircraft overall. Wrongly assuming that Moscow had ramped up production from two to almost 30 in a single year, the US predicted that, by 1960, the Soviets would have 800 Mya-4s, enough to attack even smaller American cities.

In the meantime, the Mya-4’s Mikulin engines primarily designed by captured German engineers proved unsuitable for intercontinental flight: they were too fuel-hungry to reach Washington DC. But terrified into action, the US military establishment started down a path that would revolutionize technology for the rest of the century, while also turning the US into a computer superpower. So long as it pays for truly new technology with a broad scope, and not for more of the same, even unnecessary military spending can still prove very useful, turning the wealth it absorbs into innovation and economically important technological advances. It’s a valuable lesson for governments considering how to rearm in our own time.

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From Britain to Germany, Europeans finally seem serious about rearmament. Given that will inevitably require cuts in pensions and other public services, the economic benefits of innovative military spending deserve special scrutiny. Certainly, this has been the secret recipe of the Israeli economy, which has grown very well over the decades despite colossal military spending. Even during the war year of 2024, with much of the labor force under arms, the Israeli economy still grew by 1%.

The key here is Israel’s focus on truly advanced weapons, mostly absent from Europe’s antiquated armed forces. The Iron Dome is one familiar example, but there is also the “Arrow” that intercepted Iranian ballistic missiles well above the atmosphere, in mankind’s first experience of space warfare. Soon, Israel will also launch the world’s first directed-energy weapon, much like the Martian “heat ray” that H.G. Wells described back in 1897.

What all these systems have in common is their very advanced software, whose broad commercial applications employ many of the 15% of Israelis who work in high-tech, the highest proportion of any nation on earth. These people are all members of a still-expanding profession — one ultimately sparked by the Mya-4 panic.

After those Soviet fly-pasts, the young Jack Kennedy, already campaigning for the White House, ferociously denounced Eisenhower’s lethargy on the so-called “bomber gap”. The American elite and public had barely absorbed the huge shock of the first Soviet thermonuclear bomb, which had come just a year after America’s. It was therefore with broad support that the Pentagon decided to go all out in response to the perceived Soviet threat.

Even though the Korean War was over, and the Vietnam War had yet to start, the 1955 defense budget consumed 9.4% of the US GDP. Today, despite the collective groans over Pentagon spending, its budget comes to just 3.4%. One US response to the seemingly formidable Mya-4 threat was to build over 2,000 four-engined B-47 jet bombers, which needed refueling bases across the Atlantic to reach Russia and back. Next came more than 700 eight-engined B-52s, which could fly anywhere in the world from bases safely inside the US. They still fly today, and remain the only aircraft capable of destroying an entire military base with a single bomb load.

Both bomber programs were tremendously expensive — but nowhere near as costly as the defensive response to the Soviet threat, whose momentous consequences still linger.

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The US Army had lately lost its air arm — in 1947, the US Air Force became a separate service — but strongly asserted its own air defense role. It spent hugely on upgraded German anti-aircraft rocket projects, resulting in the Nike anti-aircraft missile system, whose batteries protected both home cities and US bases abroad. For its part, the Air Force produced jet interceptors, which just like the British Spitfires were designed to swiftly gain altitude and target Russian bombers. They were followed by the unmanned Bomarc, effectively nuclear-armed drones designed to destroy two or three bombers at once.

To detect approaching Soviet bombers, radar stations were built along both US coasts, and up in the Arctic along the “Distant Early Warning Line” spanning Alaska, Canada, the Faroe Islands and Iceland. But the principal challenge remained: how to direct (“vector”) interceptors all the way from take off, until they could detect Russian bombers on their own short-range nosecone radars, and then target them with their guns and air-to-air missiles.

That was not just difficult, it was mission impossible. True, the British had managed it in the Battle of Britain, when fighter pilots were informed by radio where enemy squadrons were arriving, to then see them through their windscreens — if the visibility was good enough. Later in the war, the first airborne radars could detect bombers a few miles out even in dense clouds — if they worked perfectly, as they sometimes did.

But this solution could not simply be scaled up. First, incoming Soviet bombers would drop thermonuclear weapons. That meant it was no use to intercept just some of the attackers, as the RAF did with Luftwaffe bombers on their way to London or Glasgow, in order to wear down enemy attackers over weeks and months. In the nuclear age, there would be nothing left to defend, unless all or almost all enemy bombers were successfully stopped.

Then there was the simple question of scale. The US and Canada are some 80 times larger than the United Kingdom. Unless fighter aircraft could very reliably be directed to the enemy over long distances, the entire defense plan would crumble.

The difficulty, then, was to integrate radar readings from many different stations, while ensuring that radars could distinguish between individual enemy aircraft. Informal gatherings of radar and early computer experts — so-called “summer studies” — provided the answer to this apparent mission impossible: giant computers distributed across the US and programmed to track Soviet bombers from first detection to interception. The problem of course was that no giant computer existed, nor any way to program them.

With unlimited funds and the methods just invented in the “summer studies” both were developed in record time. The result was SAGE: the Strategic Air Ground Environment. There were 27 stations in all, each boasting a pair of huge AN/FSQ-7 computers. Doubling up was necessary as a failsafe: if even one of the 60,000 vacuum tubes in each computer failed, which happened often enough, the machine malfunctioned, though data processing would continue on its own. Together, the twin computers weighed 250 tons and required an acre of floor space (and yes, my cheap old laptop is more powerful). Each was operated from 100 “system consoles” which included the already familiar circular radar display — and a lighter and ashtray because an entire intercept sequence might fail if the operator had to leave the room for a smoke.

IBM — already famous for typewriters and cash registers — built the AN/FSQ-7s by adding some 7,000 engineers and technicians. They soon acquired the skills that would allow IBM to conquer the world. The company’s 360 “mainframe” model knocked foreign manufacturers right out of the market.

But it was the least visible part of this vast enterprise that proved most consequential. In order to operate, the computers needed detailed step-by-step instructions: in other words software. Because of its enormous scale, SAGE trained the first ever cohort of software writers, and indeed it was the mathematician Margaret Elaine Hamilton, who programmed for SAGE from 1961, who invented the term “software engineer” to describe her trade.

Given all the advantages the United States was to derive from its leap forward in producing both mainframe computers and software, it would be churlish to claim that SAGE was unnecessary because the Soviet bomber threat never materialized. But the great lesson of SAGE is that rearmament can advance economies as nothing else — so long as the money is not spent mostly on the classic weapons that both generals and established military industries invariably want.

The first signs emerged back in 2017, during the years of Trump One, when the US for the first time acted very directly against China’s techno-economic rise. Seeing its increasing threat, the Administration cut off access to some of the advanced technology that China really needs, starting with advanced microprocessors, the “chips” of both missiles and smartphones. Tellingly, this was the one Trump policy that Biden did not reverse. Indeed, his Administration tried to strengthen the technology export controls.

Now, as Trump Two kicks off, America is dealing with a distinctly more aggressive China. It has become clear that Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” is not about a richer or a happier nation, but rather a stronger and indeed more warlike one. He has been visiting the different headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army to urge the assembled officers to be ready to fight — to really fight, and win! Further, it seems that defectors have reported that Xi has told members of the Central Military Commission to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.

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So while the immediate rationale behind the humiliation of Zelensky in the White House would have been to soften up Russia and obtain a prompt ceasefire, and start negotiations for a territorial compromise, it was all done in the service of Trump’s larger and longer term ambition of neutralizing China. In this, he is pulling off a “reverse Nixon”: instead of courting China to oppose the USSR, as Kissinger and Nixon did in 1972, Trump wants to detach Moscow from Beijing.

Of course, today’s Russia is but a shadow of the still vigorous USSR that Nixon had to contend with. But even in its much-weakened state, Russia still adds a great deal to Chinese power. It provides everything from jet engines for Xi’s fighters (its own remain stubbornly unreliable), to Polar access via Russia’s arctic ports, railway access to Western Europe via Kazakhstan and Moscow, and overland access to Iran and the Middle East.

More simply, Russia’s immense territory interposed between China and the “West”, both in Europe and North America, would function in war as the Pacific Ocean serves the US, from San Diego and Pearl Harbor to Taiwan and China.

Trump is much better placed to bargain with Putin than Biden ever was — for one thing, he never insulted Putin as Biden did. But that is not the main reason why Trump has a decent chance of pulling off this diplomatic maneuver. These days, one of Putin’s growing worries is the territorial integrity of easternmost Siberia, Russia’s Maritime Province.

Local officials and academics in Vladivostok voiced acute concerns about Chinese intrusions even during my last visit in 2019 — before the sharp increase in China’s relative power caused by the Ukraine war. Since then, things have only grown more concerning.

Ultimately, the problem is demographic. Eastern Siberia — officially the “Far Eastern Federal District” — is a tad smaller than Australia, much bigger than the European Union and twice the size of India, but only had a population of 8.1 million at the last count. Meanwhile, China’s northernmost big city Harbin has more than 10 million inhabitants all by itself, while its Heilongjiang province has 30 million, and Inner Mongolia another 24 million.

As the Chinese increasingly outnumber Russians along that immensely long and scarcely patrolled border, there are other shifts there to alarm Moscow. One small example tells a significant tale. In 2023, the Chinese government abruptly issued an ordinance that mandates the use of the pre-Russian name “Haishenwai” for Vladivostok, in place of the previous “Fúládíwòsītuōkè” — which was clearly a meek attempt at a Chinese pronunciation of the Russian name.

This seemingly innocuous linguistic tweak belies a deep historical resentment. The Chinese still remember with great bitterness the collapse of imperial power in the 19th century, and the ensuing territorial losses under “unequal treaties” and forced concessions to the British, French, Japanese, Austro-Hungary, Germany (in Qingdao where good German beer is still made), and even Italy, in Tianjin.

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Over time, most of those territorial losses were revoked, including Hong Kong that reverted to China in 1997, but not the biggest territorial losses by far, which were extorted by Imperial Russia in 1858 and 1860. They now constitute a slice of Siberia and Russia’s Maritime Province in the Far East, including Vladivostok. In spite of the passage of time, many in China still remember the lost territories and the old humiliations only too keenly. Let’s not forget why the Russians invaded Ukraine.

Then, more recently, another warning appeared, with China’s very quiet but momentous request to build a modern container port in the bay of Slavianska, in Russia’s Maritime Province south of Vladivostok, where Chinese territory arrives within 11 miles of the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese certainly have a very good reason to build the port: the economy of the entire its north-east, the “rust belt” Dongbei, has long suffered from its distance from a seaport. As the economy there is transformed, so the Chinese threat increases.

So, yes, it is certainly a key Western interest that the war in Ukraine ends advantageously, with an agreed territorial settlement not imposed by either side. Equally, it is vitally important that Russia should not be as dependent on China as it now is. Europe may have its head stuck in the sand in this regard, but it seems that Trump has spotted this opportunity, realizing that in Putin’s pursuit of a favorable outcome in Ukraine there is an opportunity to detach him from Beijing. While it might seem far-fetched, even for this most unpredictable of presidents, the televised humiliation of Zelensky did seem to indicate that Nixonian intent.

Yet barely had Ratcliffe opened his mouth than he faced furious attack. The CIA’s carefully cultivated friends in the press — media relations, Hollywood included, are the agency’s outstanding skill — assailed the director and the White House for a dangerous misstep. “He might be right that a leaner CIA could be meaner,” proclaimed David Ignatius in The Washington Post. “But how can he be sure the buyouts aren’t paring more muscle than fat?” Actually one must hope that many, very many, will take their chance to leave. The sad truth, confirmed by my extended work as a contractor for the CIA, to say nothing of encounters in the field, is that the Agency lost its way years ago — and now increasingly relies on secrecy to conceal its decay.

The CIA does have plenty of people who serve in “stations” overseas. That’s a dramatic term, for these places are actually humdrum offices in foreign embassies. This is where CIA officers work when they serve abroad, in full view of their host country’s intelligence services, which can keep them under constant observation if they so wish. That happens in China and Russia, of course, but also in places like Athens. Because Greece was a country where CIA employees were attacked during the Cold War, officers there are still monitored for their own good.

It is therefore obvious that officers working out of embassies find it impossible to “do things that no one else can do” — or indeed very much at all. In allied countries, CIA officers need not be detected, let alone followed, because they are “declared” to their host country. Not that this really matters: everyone knows who they are anyway.

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The CIA does have another category of officers, one it strives very hard to misrepresent as the real thing, as people willing to do “what no one else can do”. These are the NOCs — the “non-official cover officers” — who do not live in diplomatic housing and do not work in diplomatic offices. Instead they live “on the economy” in regular flats and houses, pretending to be business people, or retirees, or artists, or anything else that sounds sufficiently innocuous.

That begs the question: why is Ratcliffe complaining? In theory, NOCs seem to fit the bill of dynamic field officers, and the CIA certainly does its best to keep their true identity secret. Some years ago, in fact, its officials made a huge fuss when a NOC’s identity was compromised in the course of a political controversy leading up to the Iraq War.

What is missing though, is that crucial line: “going where no one else can go”. The truth is that the most secret of all CIA secrets is that NOCs only serve in very safe countries, most unlikely to arrest (let alone torture) agents if they are detected. Think of France, Italy or Thailand: all places where reporters, tourists and maiden aunts travel safely every day.

One NOC who tripped up while trying to cajole secrets from a trade official — the latter was willing if the NOC slept with him, became indignant when she refused, and reported her to local security — did all she did (and refused to do) in a major European capital. Once the scandal came out, she was flown back to the US without incident. Another NOC officer I knew was competent enough to operate covertly in Warsaw, but only when Poland was no longer a communist country and was trying to join NATO.

There have been a few cases of US citizens recruited to visit dangerous countries: including one case I know of which ended in disappearance and probable death. But that particular individual was not a trained CIA officer, willing to risk all for the country, but rather an older gent hired expressly for the job. Remarkably unqualified, he would not have uncovered any secrets even if he had stayed uncaught.

In other words, then, the CIA does not have true undercover agents, genuinely competent intelligence officers who can enter foreign countries covertly, that is through legal entry points but with a persuasive false identity, or else in clandestine fashion by slipping over the border undetected. Without one or the other, the CIA will always find it impossible to have officers in hostile countries.

Take Iran for example. The CIA considers the Islamic Republic a no-go zone — because, ever since the seizure of its embassy in 1979, the US has had no diplomatic presence there. For this reason, so the theory goes, Langley has no officers who can enter the Islamic Republic, blend into the population, and begin conducting operations.

Actually both those things are highly feasible: there is no way that the gendarmerie, the regular army or the Revolutionary Guards could possibly guard Iran’s 3,662 miles of land borders against infiltration. More to the point, Mossad gets in and out of Iran at will. Smuggling agents in either covertly or clandestinely, the Israelis regularly pull off spectacular coups against their Iranian foe. That includes everything from the theft of truckloads filled with nuclear documents, to the killing of heavily guarded nuclear scientists. Mossad even got to Ismail Haniyeh, the erstwhile leader of Hamas, by blowing him up while he was staying in a heavily guarded Revolutionary Guards VIP guesthouse — supposedly within a “secure” government zone in Tehran.

One could reasonably argue that the US is powerful enough not to need such exploits. Yet the CIA certainly needs to operate in Iran — and in China and Russia — to achieve something much less dramatic than assassinations: verifying “assets”. To take a theoretical example, imagine a medical doctor from Isfahan, recruited by the CIA on a visit to Frankfurt. Before returning home, he agrees to send information he hears from his son: a nuclear engineer, or perhaps an officer in the Revolutionary Guards, in exchange for money deposited to a German bank.

There is no need for James Bond skills to check the source’s credentials. A world-class holiday destination, complete with stunning Safavid architecture around its vast main square, Isfahan will always attract foreign tourists. Nor would an agent need much to verify the authenticity of the new asset. Things would be as simple as visiting the doctor in his office and verifying he exists: tourists get upset stomachs all the time. With a few questions, none of them compromising, the officer could also ensure that the man recruited in Frankfurt really is a doctor, and not a trolling security man or else just a con artist angling for a quick buck.

This is only a hypothetical, but there is clear evidence that Langley suffers in the real world too. For decades, certainly, the Agency has struggled to verify its assets: it was only after the fall of the Soviet Union that the CIA realized that, though many doubtless existed, they actually worked for the Russians, while genuine defectors were compromised by clumsy attempts at communication.

There have been more recent bungles too. After Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Agency wrongly predicted that the Zelensky government would not fight in earnest, even suggesting Russian troops would conquer Kyiv within 24 hours. That frightened the White House into evacuating all US diplomats, which in turn caused another 20 countries to do the same. That might even have demoralized Zelensky into surrendering — but for the fact he already knew the CIA was incompetent.

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The essential challenge here is language skills. Even Obama’s CIA director, famed for his supposed Middle East expertise, apparently struggled with Arabic. Despite studying the language in Cairo, and serving in Saudi Arabia, he asked me to stick to English when we once met. With personnel like that, it obviously becomes much harder to engage with sources abroad, let alone survive for months at a time in hostile territory.

The reason for this inadequacy, it turns out, is not that Americans are notoriously lazy about learning foreign languages. Rather, the wound is self-inflicted by the Agency itself, something I totally failed to understand for many years, even though I worked closely with one CIA director and was a close friend of two more. The situation only became clear when my truly stellar research assistant, who went on to a splendid career elsewhere in government, applied to join the Agency at my suggestion.

Despite knowing two difficult languages really well, my colleague was rejected very early in the process. Why? Because of the CIA’s inflexible method of “vetting” applicants. They were not interviewed by experienced operators, nor by accomplished analysts with a deep understanding of their patch. Instead, would-be agents have to fill out tedious security forms, listing every place where they ever lived, or even just slept in for a single night. They also have to list every person they have ever had dealings with — whether tenants or landlords, lovers or friends, no matter how fleeting the relationship ultimately was.

It goes without saying that the sort of young American suited to life as a NOC — those who have studied or lived overseas, and are equally comfortable working or flirting in foreign languages — stand no hope of passing the security screening. Many of the security people I have run into seem to be Mormons, disciplined folk who forgo alcohol and even coffee. Applicants born in Utah, raised in Utah, who studied in Utah and married a spouse from Utah sail through the application process. But when tasked with working an asset overseas, they are destined to fail.

That, of course, leads to one further question: why? Why has the CIA been so obsessed with security that it excludes the people it needs? One explanation is that it is just too big. With over 20,000 staff, it employs far too many people to be vetted by individual experts. Rather, it must rely on very stringent criteria, applied by rather simple people, to exclude all risk — and the most promising candidates. Whatever the cause, anyway, it’s clear that Ratcliffe is right to make room for fresh talent, whether hard-nosed agents in the field or insightful analysts back home.

Back then, war was obscured from public view. But now the entire world can watch the fighting, the killing and the destruction in color, up close and in real time — though we are mainly shown dead women and children, rarely the fighters. And as a result, wars are interrupted, by ceasefires, demanded by distant Presidents and Popes and applauded by the world’s watchers as they wait for the antagonists to renounce their fight. But rather than renounce their fight, they pause to recover their strength for the next round of fighting.

We’ve seen this over and again, since the obliteration of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan: especially in the Middle East. Hamas is only the latest enemy of Israel to be constrained by a ceasefire, only to rearm and proclaim its intention of fighting again. And thus is the cycle of violence perpetuated for another generation.

Since the arrival of the UN Security Council on 24 October 1945, ceasefires, truces and armistices have interrupted wars across Africa and Asia before they could bring peace. Consider Korea, 72 years ago, when the war between North and the South was interrupted by an armistice signed by now long-dead generals. Since then, there have been deadly incidents now and then, but not one day of peace negotiations.

For Israel, the first of many UN-imposed ceasefires arrived on 11 June, 1948. Both the Foreign Office and the State Department had totally opposed Israel’s May 15 declaration of independence, but were sure that the Arab armies, with their artillery, armored vehicles and warplanes would soon solve their problem: by defeating the Jews who at first only had rifles. When, to their great surprise, the Jews began advancing, the UK and US quickly agreed to impose a UN truce. It did not last, and nor did a second truce, and the fighting only ended on March 10 a year later.

War would return with the start of the Sinai campaign on 29 October, 1956 that ended on 7 November, 1956, when Israel’s advance was suddenly halted by a US-Soviet agreement at the UN Security Council to impose one more ceasefire. Then came the Six-Day War, in 1967, which did not last for seven because of another ceasefire imposed by the UN Security Council.

Once again, that would not end the fighting. In October 1973, Egypt and Syria launched what became known as the Yom Kippur War, against an Israeli enemy totally unprepared for their assault. No Security Council ceasefire arrived to stop them, even if things soon changed once Israel counterattacked. On each occasion — in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973 — Israel had much more combat strength than diplomatic leverage: the only thing that really matters on the world stage.

What of Israel’s most recent conflict? Hamas’s surprise attack on October 7 was followed by Israel’s counteroffensive. The ceasefire calls duly arrived — from the UN General Assembly, assorted EU voices, and (of course) the Pope.

A ceasefire so early in the fighting would have left Hamas victorious. But unlike previous occasions in Israeli history, the US President remained silent, allowing Israel to keep fighting, month after month, for a full year and beyond.

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Yayha Al-Sinwar’s October massacre was made without any provisions to protect Gazan civilians from Israel’s counterattack, and came complete with planned and filmed atrocities to provoke a massive IDF response. From Sinwar’s perspective, the more Israel bombed Gaza the better. Because global public opinion would be aroused to support the Palestinians, he assumed politicians around the world would once again impose a ceasefire: long before Israel could seriously degrade Hamas’s infrastructure.

This time, though, the ceasefire did not come. Despite constant attacks from his domestic critics, Netanyahu mustered his very slim parliamentary majority to persevere in a war that continued to widen. First Hezbollah, with its 150,000 rockets and missiles, entered the fray. They were soon joined by the Houthis in Yemen, and by Iranian agents in the West Bank, and finally by Iran itself, which in two air attacks, bombarded Israel with some 320 ballistic missiles, each the size of a tanker truck, along with cruise missiles and drones.

Under continued criticism, not least from retired Israeli generals accusing him for waging a slow war of attrition while Israel was under worldwide attack (both literal and rhetorical) for killing “innocent civilians” — a term never used for Germans and Japanese burned in or out of their homes — the Israeli prime minister could offer no answer nor excuse. All Netanyahu could do was echo Churchill and keep buggering on.

This perseverance, this refusal to accept a ceasefire until Donald Trump imposed one just before his inauguration, finally paid off. Over 18 months of fighting, Israel wrecked Hezbollah and incapacitated Iran, ultimately causing the fall of the Assad regime in Syria. That, in turn, cut Iran’s supply lines to both Hezbollah and Hamas, making it impossible to rearm them for another round.

No longer able to charge Netanyahu with pursuing a pointless war — he had undeniably won a major victory against Israel’s enemies in Lebanon and Syria — his critics have instead criticized his refusal to stop the war to recover the hostages.

Hamas, for its part, is claiming to have won a very great victory. And while Israel will no longer need to worry about renewed Iranian funding for Hamas, pointless now that Nasrallah is dead and Assad in exile, the arrival of a ceasefire has prevented the final destruction of the group as a threat to the Jewish State. Wars, after all, are tragic indeed, but only their interruption by well-meaning outsiders also makes them futile.

The distinct national identities of its Alawite, Arab Christian-Orthodox, Druze, Kurdish, Armenian, Ismaili and Arab Shia populations were all recognised under Ottoman rule. And when France obtained the territory in 1919, it strove to accommodate plural identities by creating two separate states: an Alawite one in north-west Syria and a Druze one in the south-east.

But when the French gave up their attempt to control Syria in 1946, a Sunni Arab, Shukri al-Quwatli, became the country’s president. He did not discriminate against the minorities, but he did send troops with Transjordan and Egypt to invade Israel in 1948 in the name of Sunni Arab solidarity. He had high hopes of conquering the Galilee, because the Syrians had tanks and artillery left behind by the French, while the Jews only had rifles, some machine-guns, and a couple of antique 1906 howitzers.

The ensuing Arab defeat came as a terrible humiliation, which prompted the first of Syria’s many coups. The next president, General Husni al Zaim, only ruled for 137 days but set enduring precedents: although he had been in charge of the fighting as the Army Chief of Staff, he blamed civilian politicians for Syria’s defeat, and second, he was not an Arab but a Kurd — the first of a series of non-Sunni Arab rulers, found in no other Arab country.

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During the next 21 years, 17 presidents followed one another. And three of those years were under Egyptian rule. In 1958 Gamal Abdel Nasser, then the very embodiment of Arab nationalism, had been invited to rule Syria as well, in what became the United Arab Republic. The Syrian elite, desperate for stability, had simply given up on independence.

This experiment in Arab unity lasted for three years and 219 days, long enough to teach the Syrian elite both civil and military that the rule of much larger but much poorer Egypt was very costly. A military coup dissolved the United Arab Republic on 29 September 1961, and six more presidents tried to rule Syria. But stability would come in November 1970 when Hafez al-Assad took control as military dictator before naming himself the president in February 1971.

With Hafez al-Assad there was no more beating around the bush on the question of ethnicity, never even mentioned by all his predecessors. He was an Alawite, therefore only a very nominal Muslim (they drink wine and believe in the transmigration of souls), and he relied very largely on fellow Alawites to control the levers of power, from the command of air force squadrons and every armoured unit within reach of Damascus, to the customs service that generated revenue much more reliably than taxes, and the police which recruited informants in every part of Syrian society.

It was Hafez-al Assad’s father, Suleiman, who had laid the basis of subsequent Alawite power over Syria. In June 1926, along with other notable Alawites, he sent a letter to the French Prime Minister Leon Blum, to explain why his people — mostly peasant farmers in those days — could never live under Muslim rule. “The spirit of hatred and intolerance plants its roots in the heart of Muslim Arabs toward everything that is non-Muslim,” he wrote, warning of the risk to Syrian minorities if France granted independence. At the time the French were organising their colonial army for Syria, and thought it prudent to favour Alawite applicants along with Druzes, Ismailis and a few Christians, all much more likely to be loyal to France against majority Arab Sunni demands for independence.

The disproportionate number of Alawites in the officer corps allowed Hafez al-Assad to seize control of the armed forces in 1970. But the elevation of Alawite farmers into the ruling class would ultimately undo the 54-year long regime of Assad father and son that finally collapsed two weeks ago. The sons of farmers moved into Damascus and other Syrian cities to exploit their Alawite connections to occupy lucrative government positions or work in state-connected firms, and were less and less willing to serve as soldiers, gendarmes and spies to protect the regime from its enemies.

For many years this enfeeblement of the Alawites was masked by the rise of Iran’s power in Syria. Tehran’s militantly Shia rulers needed bases in Syria to build up Hezbollah in Lebanon, and to claim overall Muslim leadership against Israel. They therefore chose to accept the exceedingly heretical Alawites as both Muslim and Shia.

Iran’s support allowed the Assad regime to cling to power for years, even in the face of the mass “Arab Spring” protests led by the Sunni Arab majority that started in December 2010. The Revolutionary Guards trained Shia recruits from Iraq and as far as Afghanistan to repress the Sunni majority rebels all over Syria, while relying on higher grade Hezbollah units to reconquer strongly held towns and city quarters, with bombing support from Syrian aircraft and Russian fighter-bombers.

Determined to resist by all means possible including the use of chlorine and mustard gas, the regime survived for another 14 years. But it could not survive Israel’s demolition of Hezbollah, and its clear-cut aerial victory right over Tehran. The thousand or so Sunni fundamentalist rebels of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham who drove into Aleppo on 29 November, would easily have been stopped by a Hezbollah battalion in the past, but not this time. And neither could Iran’s Revolutionary Guards be flown to support the regime because the Israelis would not have allowed it. After Iran’s air force did not even try to resist Israel’s 26 October attack near Tehran, the entire edifice of Iran’s military power was exposed as a sham. Assad fled just in time to avoid certain death.

The Foreign Office, State Department Near East Bureau, and French Quai d’Orsay should pause to reconsider this history. The Alawites might be beaten down but not the Kurds in the north-east, nor the Druzes in the south-east.

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There are other ways to accommodate plural identities. Switzerland, for example, once the scene of civil war, caters to the diverse preferences of its multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, and multi-religious population with 26 different cantons, each of which has its own government, constitution, and primary language. The last time Swiss took up arms against each other was in 1847, but the newest canton, French-speaking Jura, only acquired its independence in 1979.

Of course, there are glaring differences between ultra-prosperous and perfectly tranquil Switzerland and war-ravaged Syria, but the former’s accommodation of diversities at the local level is far better than any attempt at nation-wide ethnic/religious accommodations, as in India, where the original idea of helping the lowest-caste “untouchables” that started under British rule has escalated over the years into a system of privileges (including in university admissions) for whatever group is strong enough at the ballot box, including a newer “Other Backward Classes” category that embraces almost a third of the population. A unitary Syrian state without strong local governments would be disastrous, especially because each city and some larger towns has its own distinct urban culture shared by most ethnicities and religions.

Perhaps the Syrians are best left alone to rebuild their state as they see fit. But if benevolent Western officials do intervene, they should not automatically favour a unitary and centralised state — a preference unfortunately shared even by American officials who come from a federal state. A confederal Syria would be a much better alternative.

But when Israel’s air force counterattacked on 26 October, destroying targets in more than 20 locations across Iran, not one of its aircraft was even challenged. Exposed as vulnerable in its own capital, the Ayatollah regime is weaker than ever. And now, perhaps, the revolutionary wind that engulfed the Assad dictatorship could blow all the way to Tehran, as Iranians throw off their fundamentalist masters.

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The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be manoeuvred into fighting a war against Iran. Conscious of what had happened to Bush when he ordered the invasion of Iraq, Obama started his tenure by apologising for America’s erstwhile support for the Shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

As late as this January, when an Iranian drone killed three American soldiers in Jordan, there was no US retaliation against the Islamic Republic. Israel, too, was subject to Obama’s rule. On 13 April, Iran launched 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles against the Jewish State. Jake Sullivan, the US National Security Advisor and a former Obama official, was frantic as he acted to prevent any Israeli counterattack, implicitly threatening the loss of US military aid if Israel retaliated. A bewildered Pentagon official wondered if Sullivan had close relatives living in Tehran.

Yet no amount of US pressure could stop Israel’s final crushing of Hezbollah. It started on 27 September, with the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, alongside his entire high command. Iran’s response, a few days later, was massive: over 190 ballistic missiles, each the size of a fuel tanker truck, which might have killed thousands were it not for Israel’s unique Arrow interception system.

Once again, Sullivan tried to stop Israel’s retaliation, but this time he failed. On 25 October, Israel launched air strikes that revealed the extent of Iran’s weakness. IDF planes attacked Iranian targets at will, including a key missile production unit in the top-secret Parchin base, just 19 miles from Tehran. That was enough to prove to Iran’s enemies that there was no real strength behind its façade of strategic superiority. All the country had left were the Revolutionary Guards.

It fell to Mohammed al-Jawlani, head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, one of the several Syrian anti-regime groups, to test Iran’s residual power. He chose as his target Aleppo, historically Syria’s most important city and second in population only to the capital Damascus.

Al-Jawlani’s variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hezbollah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hezbollah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus Airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

That left Iran with no quick-reaction options at all: there was no other airport securely held by Assad’s collapsing forces. Nor could Iran risk trucking troops into Syria overland across Iraq. Not even its own Shi’a militias, with tens of thousands of armed men, could have secured their passage across Kurdish controlled north-east Syria.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenceless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hezbollah, clearly they cannot even defend themselves, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.

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If that happens, Iran’s long-forgotten regular armed forces, denied modern weapons and reduced to playing second fiddle behind the Revolutionary Guards, might also make their move. That would certainly decide the fate of the regime: if a sizeable part of their 350,000 men were to act. Nobody can know if regular Iranian officers and men are less inclined to support the dictatorship than the Revolutionary Guards, but Iran recently had elections in which the hard-line candidate was squarely defeated. Nor is there much evidence that Iran’s soldiers, sailors and airmen are enthusiasts for the regime that leaves them without any modern aircraft, land weapons or warships.

The fall of Iran’s dictatorship, which for so long has combined intense repression at home with aggression abroad, would not solve the Middle East’s problems overnight. But it would certainly liberate many Iranians, and finally end Iran’s support for murderous Shi’a militias from Iraq to Yemen. Syria, in short, could just be the start.

Especially in the conduct of foreign policy, Trump 1.0 was happy to hire respected officials suggested by the establishment — but who nonetheless turned out to be totally wrong for him. One was General Mattis, his first Secretary of Defence. Mattis was a true warrior who in 1991 led the Marines to Baghdad in record time. But he also happened to be a Democrat, who fiercely resisted all of Trump’s policies and even tried to appoint Hillary’s candidate for the Pentagon as his own deputy. Trump had to replace him, at great political cost.

Another mistaken appointment was Rex Tillerson. Trump’s first Secretary of State, he came recommended by such establishment luminaries as Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. Tillerson had spent his life in the tough and supremely realistic oil business. But as soon as he moved into his seventh floor office, he became enslaved by State Department dogma. One was that the US needed French and German approval for any plan to rebuild Nato, already depleted after years of under-funding. That inevitably ensured that nothing would be done: Berlin did not want to spend anything and Paris had nothing to spend.

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The end result was Trump’s highly publicised quarrel with Angela Merkel, who patiently pointed out that war was utterly improbable in Europe, so that buying guns and ammunition would just be a waste of money. It goes without saying that elite opinion on both sides of the Atlantic backed the learned chancellor’s flawless logic, as against Trump’s boorish ranting. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we all now know that the President was right — and the policy elite wrong. A better Secretary of State could have advanced Trump’s policy much more effectively by activating Germany’s own military experts, bitterly aware of the sad state of their country’s military. They might also have lobbied the German press, setting the stage for a very different meeting with Merkel.

Beyond the question of appointments, the foreign policy challenges of his first term should have taught him two things. One: present the Europeans with ultimatums rather than just requests. Two: ignore State Department dogma on anything important. That second point is obvious enough after Trump’s first presidency. Consider, for instance, the plan Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner came up with to bring peace to the Middle East. Their idea was simple: they would ask their friends in Bahrain, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to open diplomatic relations with Israel.

Coming from a young businessman with no Middle East policy credentials, Kushner’s proposals were immediately dismissed as childish by Tillerson and his minders at the State Department. As they patiently explained, no Arab state could possibly agree to open diplomatic relations with Israel until the Palestine problem was solved, and any attempt to pursue such an absurd project could only end in refusals that were humiliating both for Trump and his country. But in the end, almost all accepted Kushner’s proposal. Only Saudi Arabia delayed, and even Riyadh immediately allowed Israeli airliners headed east to overfly its vast territories, at huge savings in time and fuel.

Given all this, Trump 2.0 will undoubtedly be guided in his foreign policy by his own closest supporters — rather than by any specious bureaucratic dogmas. That certainly applies to the Ukraine war, which cannot end unless Putin agrees to end it. Diplomatically, Trump will start with a significant advantage: unlike Biden, he never insulted Putin, and this would allow Putin to accept a compromise peace without being criticised as weak. I expect intense action soon after Trump’s inauguration.

Not that conciliation can work with Iran. Knowing that his own Democratic party had a long tradition of military interventions, from Truman in Korea to LBJ in Vietnam, President Obama was determined to prevent war with Iran. His method was to embrace the Ayatollah’s regime, by offering it economic favours that greatly increased Tehran’s oil revenues. And this policy persisted even after it became obvious that the money was not being spent on the needs of Iran’s population, but was instead being funnelled to its nuclear programme and to proxy militias across the region.

When Trump assumed office in 2016, strict controls on Iran’s oil revenues sharply reduced the regime’s military expansion. But when Biden replaced Trump, Obama’s Iran policy was resumed; his exceptionally conciliatory Iran coordinator was back in action; and Tehran’s greatly increased oil revenues funded the multi-front war currently underway across the Middle East.

As it happens, one of Biden’s last moves was to send B-52 heavy bombers to the Middle East, in an attempt to deter any more Iranian ballistic missile attacks, fearing that Israel would react by destroying Iran’s export terminal on Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf. Though Trump will certainly act immediately to squeeze Iranian revenues, if that is not enough those B-52s might well come in handy, notwithstanding the fact that Trump is an instinctive anti-interventionist.

Nor has Trump only learned foreign policy lessons since leaving the White House in 2021. He is also much better prepared to deal with his own party. Never a Republican until he ran for president, Trump now appreciates that today’s GOP is very different from the old cliche of country clubs, free trade and low taxes. Apart from anything else, the Republican establishment has stopped resisting state power across the economy and society. By 2023, after all, there were some 22 million civil servants at all levels of government, and even that understates the number of Americans who now live off the state, funded by grants from all manner of NGOs.

Whenever the Democratic Party controls a bureaucracy — from counties to the federal government — it expands it by granting public money to “nonprofits” that promise to improve public education, promote renewable energy or help the poor, among other good things — while being Democratic Party operatives. These NGOs also pay generous salaries to their executives: long before Michelle Obama became a “centimillionaire” after her eight White House years, she received a handsome paycheck from a hospital nonprofit in Chicago.

That’s how the Democratic Party pays for its manpower. Under Trump 2.0, the President’s officials will work hard to ensure that the Republicans in the House and Senate are rigorous in their scrutiny of every part of the federal budget, resisting the temptation to swap favours with the Democrats at the taxpayer’s expense.

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No less important, this second Trump presidency will finally grapple with the question of domestic manufacturing. Under Trump 1.0, after all, the Republicans continued to demand free trade with China, which Trump opposed, and now opposes even more, because it enriches America’s chief geopolitical antagonist. Combined with the likely slashing of red tape — a phenomenon that afflicts every industry from Hawaii to Maine — this could yet spark a domestic manufacturing boom. That is surely needed: while the Japanese are able to build cheap and attractive kei cars with engines under 660cc, US manufacturers are forced to sell cars that can safely be driven at high speeds, even to customers who simply want to go shopping nearby. Not that deregulation will be limited to the American automotive sector. The oil and gas industry will doubtless benefit even more, while the aviation sector urgently needs aggressive anti-monopoly action to break up the somnolent Boeing and uncreative Lockheed.

In the end, though, Americans ultimately elected Trump to stop illegal migration. I am therefore confident that, by inauguration day in January, the administration will have presented a robust plan for the border. For starters, the right of asylum will be limited to those who really need protection from political or racial persecution, and who account for less than 1% of those who entered the US under Biden. The practice of airlifting thousands of monocultural illegal immigrants to small towns — notably the 1,500 Mauritanians who abruptly arrived in Lockland, Ohio — will end immediately. Why? Because illegal immigrants will immediately be sent back across the border as soon as they arrive. This was done effectively enough under Trump 1.0, and much has been learned since.

Beyond the policy arena, meanwhile, many Americans might plausibly suggest that no amount of legislation can capture the real meaning of Trump’s victory: the country’s verdict on everything from political prosecutions and critical race theory to its biased media and the unashamed moral bankruptcy of its entertainment industry. What’s clear enough, at any rate, is that Americans crave something different, and as he enters the White House for the second time, Donald Trump can offer just that.