There is a problem with giving the Democrats too much credit for the shellacking the GOP just received, however. It’s a tremendous misunderstanding of American politics.

At a time like this, one must be reminded that America’s modern political system is little more than a two-party cartel masquerading as a liberty-loving democracy. When things go wrong — which, over the last quarter-century, has been more often than not — there’s only one lever for US voters to pull: blue or red. Or, as an Iranian embassy mocked earlier this year, Coke versus Pepsi. One choice is more feminine and multiculturalist, the other more masculine and nativist. But for all their ostensible differences both parties are captured institutions that pursue the ruthless economic agenda of their wealthy donors under the cover of culture-war pyrotechnics.

Not since the fall of the New Deal coalition in the early 1970s has either party genuinely resembled a political organization representing the people. Let’s be frank: both parties have been corrupt as shit for the entirety of Millennials’ and most of Gen X-ers’ lifetimes. They paper over their economic Caesarism with moral-economy crusades enabled lately by social media’s divisive algorithms. It’s a testament to the powerlessness we all feel that this perverse situation is thought of as “just the way things are.”

But history tells us that eventually, the delicate fabric holding a zeitgeist together begins to fray. We’ve seen that potential in the protests across France and much of Europe over the last month. America is on the verge as well — but in a manner more characteristic of its general political passivity.

We all know our politicians are servants of the one-percenters. Most of us live with only modest hopes. Mainly, we wish that a few sizable crumbs will fall off the ruling class’s table every now and again. However, under Trump’s second term, the GOP took advocacy for the one percent to Lex Luthor-like levels. And there’s no better example than how Trump and the GOP have addressed the economic ill effects not only of the war in Iran, but of the data-center gold rush and the trillion-dollar AI buildout that runs adjacent to it. Literally no one — except vested interests — wants data centers built anywhere near their locales, yet the GOP made protecting this industry and resisting all AI regulation their top priority.

Only two days into his second term, Trump stood in the White House with Sam Altman and Larry Ellison to bless Stargate, a half-trillion-dollar data center project, having already torn up the Biden administration’s AI-safety order. Soon after, Trump installed a tech billionaire, David Sacks, as his “AI czar.” Then the GOP leadership padlocked a 10-year federal ban on all state AI regulation onto Trump’s first signature spending bill — drafted so that state laws greasing the buildout could remain legal. Meanwhile, any laws restricting a data center’s power draw or water use become unenforceable. The Senate then, rightly, stripped it out 99-1.

Trump’s response was simply to sign an executive order seeking to preempt the states’ AI laws anyway, a decree which then collided with a surge of state-level data-center regulation laws throughout blue, red, and “purple” states alike.

James Carville might be a tool of the Democratic establishment, but his catchphrase, “It’s the economy, stupid”, is as true as it is cliché, and it’s the core reason for the GOP’s flop. If you get outside the Beltway or the New York media circles, you quickly realize Americans still hate the Democrats. But they now hate Trump and the Republicans even more.

A choice between two, though, is only one more than none. It’s a fact that makes American politics entirely simple. People didn’t like the “Biden economy”, so they pulled the red lever two years ago. They didn’t like what the red lever bought them, so they again pulled the blue lever. If the middle class continues to erode under the Democratic president that might be appointed in 2028, they’ll eventually pull red again. MAGA, though, is dead.

The magic and absurdity of Trump has always been the audacity of his billionaire-populist carnival act. It was the greatest act of class ventriloquism in American politics since the rise of Andrew Jackson and his notorious “Jacksonian Democrats.” For the last decade, through his rambling P.T. Barnum performances, Trump gave America’s poor and working class the feeling of having a leader who understood what took place in their lives. Trump of course never understood working people’s daily dilemmas — but he detested the same people they did. During the mania of “Woke 1.0,” that seemed important.

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For all his flaws, Trump also really understood branding. His followers all got an immediately recognizable uniform and it only cost $34. It didn’t matter that their red hats were actually made in Bangladesh. People gave Trump continual leeway because they hated the woke scolds that much. At the beginning, it also didn’t matter that the billionaire donor class got every single tax carve-out it wanted. Everyone was so tired of the identity-based victimology that burst to the surface under Obama’s administration. They wanted that moralizing control-freak tripe out of their lives, and Trump promised to deliver.

At Trump’s demotic rallies, everyone went home feeling like they finally had a president who wasn’t part of the HR mafia making their work lives miserable. Because Trump talked like them, they assumed he was like them. They were willing to give it time. A public figure who was that hated by the woke mobs earns a long leash with the poor and working class. But patience with their Cheeto Jesus savior was ultimately measured in grocery bills and rent increases.

This week, his time ran out. Over the last two years, voters witnessed the same gaslighting betrayals they had already endured during Obama’s obscene handling of the bank bailouts in 2009 and 2010, then Biden’s paternalistic Covid mandates. The gaslighting became all too familiar over the last two years. Trump was not just “one of the boys” after all. Rather, he was just management in working-class costume.

The signs of GOP disaster have been present for months. In mid-August, manosphere comics Shane Gillis, Mark Normand, and Ari Shaffir appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast and began talking about the need for “another Teddy Roosevelt” who would take on big business and super PACs. Rogan stated it plainly: “We thought he [Trump] was going to do it, but it’s clear he’s not going to do any of those things.”

That was the moment everyone should have known it was over for MAGA. For months now, nearly all the Trump supporters I know have been reckoning with a profound sense of shame. Their buyer’s remorse is palpable. They fell for a con man and most of them accept it now.

We must also admit that 21st-century Right-wing populism is an abject failure. Too many populist-adjacent intellectuals hitched their wagon to Trump’s confidence man act. Everyone should have known better, yes. But their excitement to see wokeness get its comeuppance obscured their better judgment. Often, though, the enemy of our enemy is not in fact an ally, much less a friend; at least not when it comes to taking on the greatest system of organized wealth in human history.

Because of Right-wing populists’ ill-fated choice to support Trump, not only JD Vance but any GOP nominee’s chance of retaining the presidency in 2028 is extremely low. There will now be lots of bad-faith “Oh yes, please run her” takes from the Right about the prospect of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez standing as Democrat presidential candidate. But wise observers know AOC has the charisma and the support from the base to win. In the social media age, Americans prize youth and beauty above nearly everything. Anyone who thinks Ocasio-Cortez is too young or inexperienced to be president is naive. This is her moment — just as 1960 was Kennedy’s and 2008 was Obama’s.

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Only a true populist like Marjorie Taylor Greene could potentially save the GOP’s chances in 2028. That is presuming she and Tucker Carlson don’t go through with their recent threats to start a new political party. Regardless, Greene is probably shrewd enough to sit the next election out. All of which means that whether it’s AOC or some other Democrat taking the Oval Office in 2029, wokeness as an ideological imposition is far from dead. The NGO class and the DEI administrative apparatus will ride back into power on the Democrats’ surrogate economy — and Trump will turn out to be the worst thing that ever happened to the anti-woke cause.

This is more serious than it sounds. Since Trump’s infamous 2015 ride down the escalator, anti-wokeness has been the magic elixir holding a disparate coalition together. All that’s over now. Voters won’t forget that, when twice given the opportunity to govern, Trump betrayed the middle class, both domestically and abroad. Worse, he used his Roy Cohn-taught tactics to shift the blame for all the economic pain Americans feel onto imaginary enemies. And since the Democrats cannot get significant legislation past Trump’s veto, the GOP will continue to absorb the disaster of today’s AI-driven economy for two more years.

To compete nationally again, the Republicans will have to do more than rail against wokeness and “shitlibs.” They need what the Democrats needed after their years in the wilderness: a Bill Clinton-like figure. Recall for a moment what Clinton’s New Democrats actually did in the early Nineties — they shed the social libertinism that working-class voters blamed for the crime waves and chaos of the Seventies, and then paired a renewed appreciation for social traditionalism with the appearance of economic moderation. That it all ended up as a massive neoliberal con doesn’t change the lesson.

The party rebuilt itself by giving abandoned voters the one thing they’d stopped believing it offered. The GOP needs the same remake, but inverted. It needs genuine economic populism — against the data-center land grab, the AI buildout, the donor class that profits from both — paired with the anti-progressive cultural instincts it already owns.

Will it happen? Every honest observer knows the odds are long. A party remake like that means breaking with Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, and the rest of the tech-lords — the very men now writing the party’s checks, boosting its top media operations, and building massive data centers in counties that never wanted them. Without anti-wokeness, Wall Street, and tech-billionaire money, who even is the modern Republican Party?

And if the GOP refuses its medicine, the future will belong to another fusion: the AOC-and-El-Sayed “New New Democrats” pairing of the economic populism Americans want with the NGO-designed progressivism they’ve learned to tolerate.

These are desperate economic times. No one should underestimate that pairing’s durability. Voters will hold their noses and swallow the DEI pill — and maybe even renewed mass immigration — if it comes wrapped in anything resembling the New Deal.

In the wake of the Democratic blowout in Tuesday’s midterms — South Carolina, Kansas, and Texas have gone blue — beware the preachers of holy complexity bent on obfuscating the obvious: President Trump and the GOP broke their pledge of peace, launched an ill-conceived war with Iran, and thus exacerbated an affordability crisis they’d been elected to solve. 

To be sure, other failures marked the first two years of the Trump administration: the chaotic tariff regime, the grotesque corruption, the performative cruelty of ICE, Trump’s own descent from mere reality-TV vanity to ballroom-obsessed, Neronian caprice. But the Iran war — given both its inflationary effects and galling betrayal of one of Trump’s core pledges — looms largest.

The preachers of holy complexity have good reason to avoid this bare truth. Because it indicts their entire project: a hawkish foreign policy that sees US and Israeli interests as identical or nearly so. Its advocates have for years underwritten Israeli maximalism at great cost to American global prestige and domestic well-being. After the ballot-box shellacking wrought by the Iran war, that project faces a bleak future in mainstream American politics. 

Voter polling — what actual voters tell pollsters upon leaving the precinct — is rarely this unambiguous. Nine of 10 voters identified the cost of living as a major concern as they headed to the polls. Only a quarter of voters described the condition of the US economy as “excellent” or “good”, while three-fourths described it as “not so good” or “poor”. And a staggering 87% of voters said they were very or somewhat concerned about the price of gas and diesel.

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Most telling: about 60% of voters told the Associated Press that the Iran war was a mistake. Yes, fewer identified the Iran war as a “crucial” factor than did the cost of living. Then again, the war itself is a cost-of-living issue. 

It’s also true that, as political economist Justin Vassallo noted in these pages, the current inflation is partly structural, having to do with the general trend toward de-globalization. But since energy prices ramify through the economy, the Islamic Republic’s (predictable) closure of the Strait of Hormuz in response to the US-Israeli invasion has unquestionably aggravated the affordability crisis.

As one senior Trump official told me recently, the administration shouldn’t have been “adding the short-term energy shock” of the Iran war to the structural inflationary trends. 

Or take it from outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who recently said: “Some of these Republicans are saying, “Oh, well, the gas, don’t worry. It’s no big deal.” . . . No, no. Listen, we’ve just got to be honest. Gas is higher. It hurts people, working-class people, and it’s higher because of the Iran conflict. That’s just the fact. If you can’t admit that to voters, then you’re gaslighting them, and they’re not going to listen to you on other things.” Even Fox News pundits — yes, them — openly lamented the war’s baleful effects on GOP campaigns Tuesday night.

This matters because, ever since Jerusalem demanded that Washington join its 12-Day War, the hawks and neoconservatives insisted that a military intervention in Iran would be popular, or at least not unpopular. “There is no US downside to striking the Iranian regime,” counseled the former George W. Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen in January, a month before the full invasion. A few weeks into the war, he cheered: “The Trump Doctrine is here. It ends forever wars” (the Iran quagmire has now entered its ninth month).

The hawks also went out of their way to pooh-pooh the economic downsides of the war. John Podhoretz of Commentary (where, full disclosure, I once served as senior writer) reassured a radio host that “I don’t think the American people care very much, they’re very uninvested in this. Unless gas prices go up to $250 a barrel, and suddenly it costs $9 a gallon at the pump, what cost is being inflicted on any individual American by this conflict? There is no cost. There is no cost!”

News Nation host Batya Ungar-Sargon said: “The markets seem to have … a kind of anti-Trump Derangement Syndrome, in which Trump can do no wrong. It seems that no matter what he does, the markets love it. … Even while the US blockade was on, the markets seemed totally oblivious.” 

Never mind that the blockade is still on, and that Gulf oil is transiting with great difficulty and at high expense. Ungar-Sargon identifies as a populist of sorts, and thus knows well that what happens to equity prices often has very little to do with the economic conditions of ordinary people. Indeed, in March 2025, she wrote in praise of Trump’s plan to shift the US economy away from finance and toward manufacturing. The headline: “Trump vs. Wall Street”. (But when there’s an unpopular war to defend, one reaches for the nearest non sequitur.)

And when, over the summer, there was a chance at a negotiated settlement in time to extricate the GOP from the Persian Gulf mess, the hawks assailed the talks — relentlessly. “Mr. President, Give Up on a Nuclear Deal With Iran”, urged The Free Press. Which also published the following not-at-all-uniformly-hawkish opinions: “America Will Regret Withdrawing From Iraq”, “Houthi Defeat Is Closer Than We Think”, “The Dangerous Pause in Iran”, “Danger Lurks in JD Vance’s Negotiations With Iran”. You get the idea.

“Trump’s Iran strategy is working,” argued Thiessen. “His vice president isn’t.” (Why the opprobrium targeting JD Vance? Because the Vice President had taken the lead on negotiations with the Islamic Republic.) Ben Domenech slammed Vance as “Hillbilly Obama” for trying to clinch the deal. The hawkish elements of the religious Right dutifully stepped up to claim a just-war case for preemption and against diplomacy; papal teaching suggested otherwise.

These voices, to be clear, weren’t marginal or irrelevant to Trump’s decisionmaking. Far from it. Although many of them began as Never Trumpers, and even prayed that the Trumpian chalice might pass from them in 2024, these pundits and outlets rebranded themselves as MAGA true believers (or respectably Trumpian, in the case of The Free Press). More than that, they took it upon themselves to police the Right’s boundaries, framing the movement’s antiwar dissidents as unrepresentative at best and traitors at worst.

Trump listened. As several administration sources have told me — including both hawks and restrainers — the President in his second term ignored the usual executive-branch processes. The “deep state” had throttled him during his first term, in his view, and he now preferred to hear from loyalists only. He watched a lot of Fox News, and heard directly from pro-Israel mega-donors such as Miriam Adelson. 

One consequence was the lack of foresight and lousy planning that marred the operation, not least Team Trump’s disregard of the Hormuz threat. The echo chamber of yes men and women also, paradoxically, led 2024’s “peace” candidate to realize a long-cherished goal of the more hawkish elements of the deep state he once denounced.

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In the event, the results are disastrous. Trump is hemmed in at home, and while he will retain greater scope for action abroad, his ability to keep waging the Iran war will depend upon congressional Democrats’ power of the purse. The deeper tragedy is the collapse of the remarkable coalition he put together that, by 2024, encompassed the multiracial working class, including half of Hispanic men and a fifth of African-American men. The Iran war, as I warned in these pages in September, was driving a re-realignment favoring Democrats.

But the outcome is worse still for the hawks themselves, especially those who had come to treat American and Israeli interests as one and the same, and to take the aspirations and tone of Israel’s hard Right as an unimpeachable guide for US policy. It had gone too far. At one point last year, US State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce described the United States as “the greatest country on Earth” before pausing to correct herself: …next to Israel.” (Cleanliness, recall, is next to godliness, not the other way around.)

Where will they go now? The Middle East hawks still enjoy tremendous institutional power. But their worldview can no longer be considered to be in the American mainstream. Republican elected officials no less than Democratic ones can read polls, and foreign policy must enjoy some degree of domestic buy-in. Even before the GOP’s Iran-war rout, the polling was clear: Israel — at least, in its current, maximalist iteration — is massively unpopular among Democrats, Independents, and younger Republicans. 

Probably, as a number of Trump World sources told me on Tuesday, the hawks will remain part of the broad conservative coalition. But it’s hard to imagine them in the cockpit of Republican governance going forward. Negotiating their long-overdue demotion, however, will prove far from simple.

Then Trump turned toward Iran. The Russia-Ukraine war dropped in US foreign policy priority list. Now, because of oil and gas, it’s back at the top again. Trump realized that he cannot be at war with two of the largest oil and gas countries in the world. Iran may only be seventh on the list of the world’s largest oil producers, but by closing down the Strait of Hormuz, Iran indirectly affects some 20% of global oil production.

Russia, however, is the world’s second largest producer of both oil and gas. The Europeans dismissed the recent US-Russia diesel deal as another stunt by Trump, and it’s true that it won’t affect gasoline prices in the US by much. If it had been an isolated deal, I wouldn’t have paid much attention either. But it wasn’t. Trump followed up with actions he had hitherto shied away from.

The first sign came last Wednesday morning. Ukrainian media reported that, overnight, the country’s forces had experienced sudden restrictions on Starshield, the military part of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite system. Ukrainian drones were losing signal when they traveled faster than 160 kilometers per hour. The sudden throttling of the service disrupted several Ukrainian drone missions.

The presumption within Ukraine was that SpaceX had imposed those restrictions on behalf of the US government. And the next day, Reuters reported that the order came directly from the White House, which had been angered by Ukraine’s continued targeting of Russian refineries. So this was not a technical service disruption, but a ruthless application of the kill switch. All we got from the White House, though, were news leaks. No official statements. Not even a tweet. For the Trump administration, this is not normal.

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Along with the news of the throttling of Starshield came suggestions that the US had ended intelligence sharing. On the night of 12 October, Russia launched a volley of ballistic missiles at Ukraine. Normally, US intelligence would give the Ukrainians a warning. But on this occasion, there was no heads-up — and the results were horrendous.

Until that point, intelligence sharing had been one of the most important components of the defense of Ukraine. The Americans have satellite-based infrared systems that can detect ballistic missile launches, and the Ukrainians could rely on it.

But things had changed. Two days after the attack, it was reported that the White House had discussed ending the sharing of intelligence. John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, wanted to continue sharing intelligence — but others, it seems, didn’t. Trump denied that the US had cut intelligence sharing. Indeed, it is possible that Russia may have used weapons that resisted detection. We should at this point treat the disruption of information flows as suspicious, but unexplained, even if that flow now seems to have definitively resumed.

Then, late on Friday, Trump used an executive order to waive the implementation of sanctions against Russia under the Graham Act, whose goal was to deprive Russia of financial resources that allow it to wage war against Ukraine. Named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump had signed it into law only last month.

The secrecy, the reports of meetings inside the White House, the reports from Ukraine itself, and the suspension of the Graham Act: together these developments give us a coherent picture, even if some of the details are still missing. They tell us that the US is no longer actively engaged in the defense of Ukraine.

That’s different from the situation in late February last year, when Trump and Zelensky clashed in the White House. After that meeting, the US paused weapons deliveries and financial assistance. The White House also cut off intelligence sharing for a week, but then resumed it.

But what the Americans are doing now is far more coordinated. And it presents the Europeans with a conundrum. They will attempt to mitigate the effects of this change in US policy, however, there is not much they can do. They can offer intelligence from their own satellite network, but this will not match the communication quality Ukraine’s fast drones require to function as intended.

Nevertheless, Zelensky turned up at the European Council in Brussels last week, where EU leaders took another opportunity to show their solidarity with the Ukrainian leader. He is a regular guest there. But beneath the bonhomie, tensions are rising. Ukraine is running out of money faster than the Europeans had expected. Last December, the Belgians vetoed the sequestration of Russian funds that are sitting, frozen, in a Belgian bank. The EU reluctantly agreed a €90bn loan to Ukraine, money they themselves borrowed, pretending that Russia would eventually have to pay back this loan. The loan was supposed to plug Ukraine’s funding gap for this year and next.

As it turns out, Ukraine now needs another €70bn. Marine Le Pen, the front-runner in the French presidential election race, has promised that, if elected, she would cut off all support for Ukraine. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, has promised more funding, but this money is not showing up anywhere in his government’s own budgets.

While Zelensky revels in the public admiration of Europe’s leaders, then, the foundations of Western support have been getting shakier. Now it is getting even harder, because the US is actively conspiring against Europe. The deal under which the US buys 4.8 million tons of diesel from Russia looks like an attempt to restart commercial relationships. I expect this will be the first of several natural resources deals between the US and Russia.

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I could, for example, see a deal struck over Russian gas. Envoys have been discussing extending their new commercial partnership to the defunct Nord Stream pipeline that used to carry gas from Russia to Germany. This would be an ironic twist, because it was the first Trump administration that placed sanctions on the German and Russian operators who were building Nord Stream 2, a successor pipeline.

In September 2022, the section of piping that runs below the Baltic Sea was sabotaged. A Ukrainian commando is accused of being behind the explosion. The trial against one of the suspects started in Germany last week, and it promises to give us a lot of details of this operation, including information about the extent of Zelensky’s involvement.

Germans will be watching closely. Like Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, the hard-Right Alternative for Germany is also opposed to Ukraine aid. The AfD has, over the past year, enjoyed a fast rise in the opinion polls. The Ukraine war is one of the themes most central to its campaign, and the trial will be a gift to them that will keep on giving.

Trump’s negotiators recently pressed the Europeans to release parts of the frozen Russian assets: to make them available for a special Ukraine investment fund, rather than directing them toward further fighting. The Europeans rejected this request, because their plan is to fund Ukraine’s war with Russian money. I am reminded of the old Thatcher joke about why socialism does not work: because socialists run out of other people’s money. If the EU got its wish and were able to sequester the Russian money, given how fast Ukraine is spending money, it would not last for long.

Additionally, the EU is exploring the possibility of giving full membership of the bloc to Ukraine, but membership can only help fund the reconstruction of Ukraine if accompanied with large fiscal transfers. Right now, Germany is leading a group of countries that are opposing a plan by the European Commission to increase the size of the next EU budget. The Europeans say one thing, but do another: a classic case of revealed preferences clashing with stated preferences.

Politically, and financially, the room for maneuver by the Europeans is decreasing. The Europeans need the US, but the US, having enthusiastically supported Ukraine under Joe Biden, has become first a reluctant supporter and now a country that no longer pretends to support Ukraine. I doubt very much that, come 2029, even a Democratic president would expend political capital on a war, which by then would have been waged for seven years.

Wars usually end when one side is running out of food, oil, or other critical supplies. It is delusional to think that with an oil price at $110 a barrel, the world’s second-largest oil producer is running out of money. The war will end eventually, most likely with a dirty peace deal that will leave the Europeans in shock.

I suspect that it will happen during the remaining two years and three months of the Trump administration. Trump has been too inconsistent for any such forecasts to be made with complete certainty. But I am confident that last week’s decisions will go down as the turning point in this war.

Donald Trump’s latest attempt at escalating to de-escalate in the Middle East conflict has not had the desired effect. Since the bombing began over the weekend, bond yields have been rising across the world, the price of oil has shot back up and stock markets have turned shaky. 

On Tuesday, the conflict deepened further, with Iran launching missile and drone attacks at multiple American bases in the region. On Wednesday, Iran accused America, whose strike was reported to have hit a wedding party, of a “war crime”. If the exchange continues, with neither side making a show of retreating, the effects could multiply in severity. That’s because all of this is happening at a time when financial strains are beginning to become visible in the world economy — in both stock and bond markets, and in economies where growth is slowing but inflation remains stubborn. 

The AI bubble had already moved into a delicate phase. The hyperscalers who have driven the investment boom sustaining the US economy — counting among their number Anthropic, OpenAI, Amazon, Google and Microsoft — have burned through their ample reserves of cash and, to maintain the massive build-out of data centers and infrastructure, have now started turning to credit markets. They’ve been able to borrow on favorable terms because the rapid rise of their share prices has provided them with ample collateral. Those rising share prices have, in turn, been swollen by huge profits, creating a virtuous upward cycle which makes the new debt being taken on appear eminently manageable.

Unfortunately, though, all is not as it appears. A close look at the numbers reveals that tech leaders are making big money only because they’re spending big money. The actual rate of return on their investments is so far barely sufficient to cover the cost of depreciation of their assets, and from a long-term perspective they are essentially breaking even. Meanwhile, to justify their current very generous share valuations, the hyperscalers would need to see continued rates of profit growth that would amount to more than a doubling every year. This may be too much to ask: total revenues (not profits) from global AI sales have only just begun to surpass depreciation costs, which suggests that margins remain very tight.

Most importantly, the hyperscalers’ ascent has been underwritten by a massive expansion in the US national debt, with federal fiscal deficits expanding faster than the economy itself. More than half of US corporate profits have been funded by these deficits. Further flattering profit growth is that many more companies are today private than was the case a few decades ago, funded by private equity and venture capital, where creative accounting can keep weak performance “off the books”. But as depicted in Warren Buffett’s famous analogy of skinny dippers being exposed by a retreating tide, that sort of sleight of hand gets quickly exposed in a downturn.

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Two things could bring the blistering AI rally to halt: a drop in demand for its products, or a drop in the supply of the credit sustaining the boom. It is the latter which may now be coming into play. The fundamental driver of rising bond yields is falling bond prices, since the two move in opposite directions to one another: as bond investors demand lower prices on the bonds they buy, the effective rate of interest paid by the issuer goes up.

Over the last few years, Western governments have issued so many bonds to fund their spending that investors are getting stuffed to the point they can take no more. It began during the Covid pandemic, when governments borrowed an average fifth of GDP just to keep their economies from collapsing. It then continued during the recovery phase, and in the US was turbocharged by a bipartisan consensus to thereafter throw caution to the wind. Through both the Biden and Trump administrations, the US government ran large fiscal deficits in order to fund an investment boom, the former directly through government programs and the latter through tax cuts. But the end result is a national debt that has doubled in just the last ten years, and whose growth shows no signs of slowing down.

Add to that mix, then, the shift of hyperscalers from investing their savings to raising money in corporate bond markets, and the global demand for credit now exceeds its supply by a significant margin. Central banks could plug the gap by “monetizing” the debt — essentially, printing new money and then using it to buy government bonds — but are reluctant to do so because inflation remains above their target rates. And inflation has remained so sticky in large measure because of the same fiscal stimulus that is pumping money into the economy without producing equivalent growth.

Inflation had, however, shown signs of moderating over the summer, in part because the ceasefire between the US and Iran had allowed energy prices to fall back down. Had that continued into the autumn, we might have seen central banks lower interest rates further. Instead, due to the resumption of hostilities in the Middle East, oil prices are once again rising. Although this will raise gas prices, the greater damage will come through the prices of distillates like diesel, which are driving up transportation and farming costs just as the northern harvests are coming in. So the fertilizer shortages caused by the war are now starting to turn up in food prices on store shelves.

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This price resurgence comes at a most inopportune time. If it persists, the autumn inflation readings could prod central banks to further raise interest rates, raising credit costs for everyone. No G7 country will feel the weight of this expense more acutely than Britain. UK gilts have carried a premium for the last few years, imposed initially after the 2022 Liz Truss moment and then worsening after the 2024 election, when the incoming Labour government’s implausible tax and spending commitments caused investors to doubt the financial acumen of the British Treasury. The impact of perceived British mismanagement is that UK gilt yields are now the highest of any G7 country, and each day’s inching further upwards makes the government’s difficult situation even worse.

So pity the Chancellor, John Healey, who at the end of October will deliver his first Budget. Healey’s fiscal headroom, the gap between revenues and budgeted expenditure that he can “play with”, was tight to begin with and is now narrowing towards zero. At this rate, come Budget day, he will have to deliver bad news — either further spending cuts or tax increases. Either would probably bring an end to Andy Burnham’s honeymoon period, which has seen his net approval rating rise steadily since he became Prime Minister.

And if Andy Burnham faces a cold new reality, Donald Trump may become a lame duck. The odds of a Democratic sweep of Congress in the November elections, currently tilted slightly in their favor, will probably lengthen if gas prices go back up, inflation rises and credit card costs become more burdensome. Inflation that has been running over 3% has now begun to erode the incomes of ordinary Americans, and the bottom half of the economy can be forgiven for thinking there’s already a recession.

What has kept the economy from contracting has been the heavy consumption of the top half, fueled by the wealth effect of the stock market rally. So, if interest rates were to choke off the supply of credit and slow that growth, the market might fall as prices realign with the new reality. In that event, the reversal of the wealth effect could tip the US economy into recession, accelerating slowdowns elsewhere.

Worryingly, the capacity of Western governments to tackle recessions is not what it once was. As the Bank for International Settlements noted in its annual report, recent years have seen government debt rise during downturns, but without a concomitant decline during economic recoveries. The rainy-day funds of Western governments have then been further depleted by the rising demands of defense expenditure, aging populations and adaptation to climate change.

It seems unlikely that the rise in bond yields we’ve seen over the last week could continue much longer without something cracking. As debt-laden governments are forced to commit ever more of their revenues to interest payments — in the UK, they now suck out more money than the defense and Home Office budgets combined — they will have to either cut spending or raise taxes. 

In the US, such fiscal austerity would drain the supply of money that has kept the economy revving. That, in turn, would hit the profits of the tech companies inflating the bubble just as their access to credit dries up. In short, the scale of the recession could stand in direct proportion to the scale of the boom which preceded it, at a time western governments would be more constrained in their ability to engage in counter-cyclical policies. With the American economy already slowing and the job market at a virtual standstill, a slide into negative territory could deepen the hardship already being felt by many working people, strengthening the wind now filling the sails of political populists.

Thus, between the limited fiscal firepower of Western governments and the chariness of their central banks, reluctant to stimulate amid persistent inflation, this is not the time for a recession. Let us hope that Trump soon finds a different way out of his Middle East quagmire.

Trump is such a natural at this, though, that he can have a similar effect on Europe’s elite. There’s the spectacle of Emmanuel Macron massaging his ego and Mark Rutte calling him “daddy” — but however unedifying this may be, it is just diplomacy. Stranger still is the way they often seem to cede to him, unforced, a kind of moral authority. Trump brings out their masochistic streak; they become eager participants in his hobby of Europe-bashing. What pathetic little leeches we are, they cry out, when the President attacks them for being defense freeloaders, exploiting American goodwill: he has us bang to rights. 

They do not take this line on other aspects of the White House’s critique of European policy. They do not say that Trump has them bang to rights on free speech or trade or energy or immigration — to say this would be to admit the defeat of an entire moral worldview. But on the specific subject of defense their usual reflexes are suspended. All of a sudden they turn MAGA. We have been free-riding for decades, they say; Trump is “simply right” that Europe should spend more. It was only a matter of time, one can almost hear Mark Rutte suggest, before somebody intelligent and manful enough would catch on.

This is not the posture of MAGA’s European outriders. Europe’s insurgent Right-wing parties tend to take a more hard-headed view of American objectives. The nationalist Right in France, Italy, and Germany has a long tradition of anti-Atlanticism: they never subscribed to the view that American support for European defense was an act of supreme, selfless benevolence. Indeed, they increasingly appear to recognize that MAGA is an albatross around their necks. Giorgia Meloni recently had a public falling-out with Trump; she knows, in a country where only 8% have a favorable opinion of the President, that some distance from the White House can only be a good thing. Beatrix von Storch of the AfD may have a “Make America Great Again” cap on her desk in the Bundestag; but, at the same time, her party and its base tends to look at Trump’s America with a certain coolness. 

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The case for de-escalation with Russia

By Wolfgang Münchau

They are well aware that Trump is extremely unpopular in Europe. His reckless statements and interventions, and his encroachments on the sovereignty of other countries, can be a major liability for Right-wing politics internationally — as the cautionary tale of Pierre Poilievre in Canada goes to show. One wonders sometimes whether MAGA understands the toxic effect it can have on “sovereigntist” Right-wing parties in the rest of the world, and even exploits this in order to keep the establishment parties in charge.  

For Europe’s establishment parties are the real marks for Trump’s rhetoric on defense. They are the lackeys whose humiliation Trump craves and enjoys. They are used to taking their orders from Washington, and defense spending is an easy concession for them to make to Trump, in word if not in action — easier, anyway, than accepting his counsel on immigration, energy, or other areas of policy that he is wont to berate them about. So somehow, in this single instance, the Trumpian line has become a piece of European elite consensus. Sanna Marin, the former prime minister of Finland and now a strategic counselor for the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, wrote for the Economist last year commending the American taxpayer for having aroused from his slumber to question “why they should shoulder more of the cost of European security than Europe itself”. Alex Younger, the late chief of MI6, said similarly: “We have been infantilized and it hasn’t been healthy… we should be extraordinarily grateful to America for its generosity.” He likened Europe to a spoilt child on a “trust fund”, a spoilt child which now has to toughen up, get wise, and make its own way in the world. A belligerent Russia, the argument runs, is Europe’s problem, not America’s — and so it’s high time that Europeans take matters into their own hands. 

That Europe should spend more on defense, and on containing Russian aggression, is a fair proposition, and one which many previous American presidents have supported. “Nato 3.0”, where Europe assumes principal responsibility for its own defense, could indeed be a good thing for Europe — and, perhaps especially, for Ukraine. This is a message which Britain badly needs to hear, especially now that John Healey has conveniently forgotten the national security imperatives that caused him to resign as Defense Secretary less than three months ago. None of this means, however, that Europe’s leaders should accept the framing that American support for European defense was motivated by “generosity”, which Europeans have been greedily exploiting and for which we should now be “extraordinarily grateful”. If Europe has been “infantilized”, then that is something that the Americans deliberately engineered, over the course of many decades. Trump is not meting out “tough love”; he is not Matron making the medicine go down, or a wealthy father cutting off his pampered, profligate children “for their own good”. The “trust fund” was always an investment, and quite a profitable one at that. 

The Americans realized, after being drawn into two world wars, that isolationism was a risky and unworkable strategy. They had an interest in preventing future war in Europe. They were anxious to prevent nuclear proliferation, and to stop countries like France and Italy from falling into Communist hands. The end of the Second World War left them in a fortuitous position in Western Europe, and one they were in no hurry to relinquish. They got — and still enjoy — a military foothold in Europe, which can come in handy when, say, they want to direct logistics and communications from somewhere within striking distance of Iran.

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Suicide is a tragedy, not an argument

By Samuel Rubinstein

It was a good arrangement, while it lasted. America got fat off Pax Americana. We in Europe got a lot out of it too: a “holiday from history”, the luxury to spaff billions on welfare; billions which, in a previous age, would have been spent on dreadnoughts and munitions. Not that we Europeans were totally useless on military matters: we tended to accept that our obligations were a two-way street. If the Americans were footing the bill, then it was only fair for them to expect what little military assistance we could offer during their moments of need. That guided the decision made by many European countries to join the American-led coalition in Afghanistan and Iraq. One reason Trump’s Greenland gambit earlier this year left such a bitter taste in many European mouths is that Denmark was one of America’s more devoted European allies. Denmark had the third-highest per-capita casualty rate among Nato nations in Iraq and Afghanistan, behind America and Britain. Trump’s obsession with gratitude could easily be turned on its head. The Americans could say thank you for our help in the War of Terror; the Americans could say thank you for Ramstein, Lakenheath, and Fairford. 

The European country which has come closest to implementing Trump’s advice is of course France. France clears its Nato target of 2% of GDP on defense, and seems to spend it more effectively than other countries do, including Britain. Earlier this year this caused Britain some embarrassment when French warships, rather than British ones, sailed to Cyprus after the RAF base at Akrotiri was hit in an Iranian drone strike. France pulls its weight. And France, to the chagrin of George W. Bush’s White House, did not join the war in Iraq. Nor does it host US bases on its soil: General de Gaulle chased all of them out in the Sixties. Because France has tended to pull its weight, it has also enjoyed more strategic independence from America in foreign policy. The two go hand-in-hand. 

Suppose, now, that the rest of Europe were to follow Trump’s admonition to the letter. Suppose that the rest of Europe were to become truly “sovereigntist”, perhaps under the aegis of MAGA’s sister movements on the populist Right, and to figure out what the French figured out long ago. Is that an outcome that Trump and his coterie would actually want to come about? Recall Trump’s fury earlier this year when the Kingdom of Denmark moved a few dozen troops to another part of the Kingdom of Denmark; or his rage that European countries did not fall immediately into line when he embarked on his Iran adventure. Those countries would be a lot less pliable than they currently are if they really did get their defense spending in order. Nor is it the case that Trump is that invested, in general, in the sovereignty of his European allies. He routinely makes demands about how they should direct policy on fossil fuels and immigration, and with whom they should and should not trade. 

Europe’s leaders should, as ever, be careful not to take Trump’s words at face value. But even if they do, they are unlikely to put them into action: as John Healey’s recent U-turn reveals, welfare spending must always come first. Their hope is that Trump is succeeded in the White House by someone with a less capricious attitude toward their allies, someone who understands the upsides of the postwar arrangement, and thinks that it is still worth paying for. The alternative — slashing welfare to fund defense — is somewhat more conceivable under parties on the nationalist Right; but the practical consequences of that, a Europe composed of sovereign states capable of pursuing their own interests as they define them, would not be to Trump’s liking. Trump claims to want Europe to stand on its own two feet, but he does not want Europe to be strategically independent. He should, perhaps, be careful what he wishes for. 

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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America has lost the will to fight

By Edward Luttwak

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.

The British and the Europeans, having held back from joining the American attack on Iran, have been enjoying a sense of collective moral superiority over President Donald Trump. This leaves them unable to see that the United States is executing a geopolitical checkmate that will define the 21st century. The checkmate is that America is now quietly building a new Suez. This new Suez isn’t a trench dug in the sand; it is a pipeline of electrons and light connecting America to the stars.

As a result, the world no longer needs that two-dimensional map of Earth. The new map is three-dimensional. It connects Earth to space and renders terrestrial blockades completely irrelevant. Why are the Americans speeding up the move into space? Because that’s where we find treasures in the form of unlimited energy, unlimited resources, unlimited mining, refining and manufacturing, and control of the most important warfighting domain — space itself. After all, America is fighting the war in Iran mainly from space. The Artemis launch is not a coincidence. It is confirmation of the plan’s progress.

And the plan works like this. If Iran closes the Strait, the closure has absolutely zero impact on a Starlink V3 mesh network beaming tactical data and artificial intelligence from low Earth orbit. The US is now relocating the central arteries of the global economy — computation, communications, intelligence and even energy production — into space, permanently removing them from the reach of earthly geopolitics. Space is the new form of what Leninists called the “commanding heights”. In all, the US is bypassing the earthbound chokepoints with a new supply chain of atoms: safe nuclear energy, light that flows from the sun, and even — via small mobile modular nuclear reactors and the new materials that will make nuclear fusion possible — stars that fly in a box.

While the global media mocks and decries Trump’s warmongering, then, it fails to register the decisive moves on the geopolitical chessboard. Before cornering the Iranian leadership, the US had systematically cut off its cash flows and eliminated its key collaborators, especially across Latin America. In Venezuela, the US took control of the oil supply by removing Nicolás Maduro and cutting a pragmatic deal with his successor. In Mexico, the US removed “El Mencho”, the head of the most important energy-controlling cartel in the country. The result is that these nations don’t dare sell their oil molecules if the US doesn’t approve of it. The US didn’t do regime change; it did regime control and molecule monopoly. The world must buy American now.

The US wins both ways. It has the molecules that matter. Chip production depends on helium, and the world’s largest helium reserve is now in Abilene, Texas. While the world shuts down fertilizer plants for lack of the ammonia and nitrogen that Qatar can no longer supply, the US has pioneered in the production of green ammonia, which is produced using only water, air, and electricity. By mixing green ammonia with captured carbon, the US now produces green urea, a critical component of fertilizers. When combined, green ammonia and green urea are the first fertilizer in history that is completely delinked from the global natural gas market. That’s the holy grail of resource independence, because it represents a total decoupling of food production from the fossil fuel grid.

In addition, the US now has everything it needs to produce electric vehicles and batteries. Formerly, its supply of sulfuric acid, which is necessary for the production of these products, would have been badly affected by the bombing of Qatar’s Ras Laffan industrial hub. But today, American firms know how to capture sulfur as a byproduct of America’s new nickel and copper mines. What’s more, America can use its home-grown sulfur to turn its phosphate reserves, and those of countries such as Morocco, into even more fertilizer. America is therefore not only the only fertilizer-secure breadbasket left on Earth; it is also beginning to control other countries’ supply of fertilizer.

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The space war will be won in Greenland

By Pippa Malmgren

The demand for old-fashioned molecules of oil, gas and petroleum byproducts is currently driving a highly lucrative flow of cash into the United States. But that is merely the short-term arbitrage of a dying economic model. The true strategic demand has shifted toward a vastly more sophisticated architecture of power: one based on atoms, electrons, and photons. We are moving away from the crude combustion of dead biology and toward the mastery of next-generation nuclear fission, the pursuit of nuclear fusion, the electron-orchestration that is the essence of digital computation, and the literal beaming of solar light into American power grids. Other Western countries are chasing wind and solar power, which are plagued by intermittency and are limited by battery manufacturing. America, however, is aiming to build baseload capacity fit for multiplying energy demand. In short, it is shooting for the stars.

The question is how long the new nuclear energy transition will take. People think it will take 30 years of regulatory red tape and $30 billion to build a new nuclear power plant. They missed a historic event on 15 February. Hardly any news media covered Operation Windlord, in which small modular reactors (SMRs), based on the reactors that have powered nuclear submarines for decades, were shipped on massive Globemaster C-17 aircraft from March Air Reserve Base, in California, to Hill Air Force Base, Utah. The reactors were then trucked to the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab for testing and evaluation. This was the first-ever air transport of a nuclear microreactor, and therefore a milestone demonstration of deployability.

The Americans are envisioning a world where nuclear power is mobile, distributed, and available on demand any time and anywhere. These innovations are about delinking power from geography. While the legacy world bleeds over massive, vulnerable oil tankers, the atomic future runs on TRISO fuel pellets (tri-structural isotropic particle fuel) that are entirely meltdown-proof and produce zero emissions. This fuel cannot be easily weaponized, for the radioactive material is locked inside diamond-hard poppy-seed-sized ceramic shells. These shells cannot be melted down or easily broken apart, and if they could, it would kill the engineers doing it. The Department of Energy calls it “the most robust nuclear fuel on earth”. No pipelines required. Stars in a box.

Nuclear fusion, in theory an even more transformative source of power, is still derided as being perpetually “50 years away”. But the critics are looking at the wrong bottleneck. The constraint is no longer the atomic material. It is the vessel required to hold the plasma, and the hyper-precise attosecond lasers needed to pulse and manage the hydrogen isotopes: atoms rather than molecules. By doing millions of simulations in minutes, AI is collapsing the time needed to get to fusion. As new materials and AI advance, fusion is on course to become a reality. Not that it’s the only bet being placed by Washington: DARPA, the US military’s innovation unit, recently beamed 800 watts of power across 5.3 miles of open air using a directed laser. Just to flex the absolute audacity of their success, the scientists used the wirelessly transmitted energy to pop popcorn at the other end. Wireless energy transmission is no longer a sci-fi abstraction; it is a reality.

Look at the geopolitical board: Iran is bleeding its resources to control the old, flat molecule-driven economy, while the Artemis program aims to permanently free the US by shifting to the management of atoms, electrons and light. Conquering the cosmos requires abandoning archaic chemical rockets in favor of nuclear-powered spacecraft. Ultimately, it’s a tale of two paradigms: the Artemis generation is building an atomic architecture to entirely unshackle the global economy, while the regime in Tehran is desperately trying to keep a chokehold on the molecules that the global economy currently depends upon.

The US has been explicitly clear about this strategy, though the legacy pundits were too busy laughing at the President to notice. In late 2025, the State Department launched Pax Silica: a strategic framework declaring that if the 20th century ran on oil, steel, and vulnerable maritime chokepoints, the 21st century will run on compute, data, and critical minerals. It is the official, silicon-based replacement for Pax Americana. To physically build this new architecture, the Department of Energy unleashed the Genesis Mission. It is gathering the combined data, capabilities and technologies of the seventeen National Laboratories, including Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Sandia. The goal is to double American R&D output in just 10 years. To do it, Washington is executing a two-part strategy: handing the leading scientists exascale computing power, and allowing AI to access the massive, never-before-tapped vaults of the classified, proprietary data that has been generated by America’s top scientists since the Second World War. This will turn 80 years of compartmentalized and classified science into active training data, enabling scientists to optimize the design of nuclear reactors and discover new alloys that could eliminate foreign supply chain dependence entirely.

Those supply chains are a remnant of the era in which we were bound by what we could extract. We had to shape existing materials into what we needed. A tree, for example, could become a boat. Now we can create new realities by painting with electrons and by constructing new materials, atom by atom, that never existed before. This is how new “metamaterials”, as they are called, are being built. These are artificial structures engineered at the atomic level to bend the laws of physics. For example, instead of relying on natural chemistry, scientists can now build microscopic patterns of atoms and electrons that can manipulate light, radar, and sound, allowing them to construct stealth armor that bends radar around a fighter jet. Google has already discovered over 380,000 new materials and over two million new crystals this way thanks to its new Willow chip, which can be built via similar methods. Formulas are replacing materials. Abundance is replacing scarcity.

That scale of abundance will require a vast amount of energy — and Elon Musk isn’t waiting for SMRs and nuclear fission to supplement American power grids. To sustain his AI endeavors, Musk aims to produce one terawatt of compute (that is, computational power) annually — 50 times the current global capacity. Earth does not have the land, the cooling water, or the power grids to sustain that. So he is relocating intelligence to the heavens. Musk has just announced his plans to open the world’s largest semiconductor factory; 80% of its output is designed for orbital data centers linked by Starlink lasers. Google’s Project Suncatcher is following suit, launching solar-powered satellites designed to harvest orbital energy and beam it down alongside data. The strategy is ruthlessly simple: if the Earth cannot support the future, let the Old World to duke it out on the ground while America moves its economy into space.

Empires are scavengers. We’ve fought brutal wars over mud, powering our civilizations by burning the molecular remains of long-dead biological matter. It was a subterranean era of power. But the Americans have stopped looking down at the old two-dimensional map of the world. By looking up, they are executing a Promethean shift: pulling the physical mechanics of the sun and the stars down to Earth and domesticating these empyrean forces. By packing the heavens into steel boxes, they are intending to power a literal “Golden Age” of human flourishing.

Pundits might laugh at the grandiosity, but they are forgetting the lessons of history. Before 1840, naval power was a hostage to the wind. The deadliest galleon was worthless once the breeze died. Then the British launched HMS Nemesis, the world’s first iron-hulled steam warship. By moving from sails to steam, Britain could power up shallow rivers, shocking military planners. Nemesis decoupled the power of the British Empire from what were thought to be the limits of nature. The Americans are simply doing it again, only this time with atoms instead of steam. Washington is merely reading from Britain’s old playbook.

The irony is that the British once possessed the exact ruthless foresight they are currently failing to recognize in the Americans. In 1911, the Royal Navy was the undisputed master of the seas, running entirely on domestic Welsh coal. It was safe, familiar, and utterly secure. But a young Winston Churchill recognized a brutal truth: comfort is the enemy of supremacy. To gain absolute speed and efficiency, he gambled the survival of the British Empire on the distant oil fields of Persia. In doing so, he helped save the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, now BP. It was, in essence, a battle between, on one side, bureaucrats and Welsh coal barons, who wanted to manage the mud they already owned; and, on the other, a visionary who was willing to trade certain security for absolute supremacy. Abandoning coal seemed madness, but Churchill was right.

Decades earlier, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli pulled off an even more audacious masterstroke. He saw that the new geopolitical map was not the open ocean — it was a narrow, yet unbuilt trench though Egypt. In 1875, while Parliament was in recess, Disraeli borrowed £4 million and bought the Suez Canal from a bankrupt Khedive. Disraeli didn’t just buy a canal; he secured the central artery of global power, and locked in a hundred years of naval dominance, even as his rivals were still squinting at the old map. Today, the US is doing the exact same thing with atoms and celestial compute — securing the new Suez before the Old World realizes the canal has moved. Washington is simply running Disraeli’s playbook, but in the stars instead of in the sand.

Some British entrepreneurs understand that a new era is upon us. Space Solar, a startup based in Oxfordshire, aims to beam continuous, clean energy directly from orbit to Earth. Wales-based Space Forge is currently proving that semiconductor manufacturing and in orbit refining is actually more efficient in the vacuum of space. Pulsar Fusion is making progress on the long road to fusion-powered rocketry, and it was Rolls-Royce ingenuity that created the modern SMR. Britain clearly possesses the intellectual capital to make a success of the atomic transition. Europe does too. But for now, they merely tinker on the edge of the three-dimensional map while the Americans aggressively claim the territory. The Chinese and the Saudis are also racing forward. Saudi is training a new generation of scientists at KAUST, its flagship science and technology university, and investing in a wide range of nuclear, solar and space technologies. China is on a par with the US. Others need to catch up.

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Military drones will upend the world

By James Kingston

The endless diplomatic handwringing over Iran’s exact proximity to a traditional nuclear warhead entirely misses the point; their capacity to create a dirty bomb was already a functional reality even if delivery on an ICBM was not. The intentions were clear. When Tehran, which had been negotiating with the US in Geneva earlier this year, finally abandoned the charade, the US delivered a kinetic reminder that its red lines were not suggestions. Iran’s retaliation was a brutal validation of the American thesis. Blindsiding neighbors like Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, and Bahrain, Tehran demonstrated a terrifyingly precise strike capability, reaching as far as Diego Garcia. The regime also struck desalination plants, crucial to the region’s water supply. Washington successfully eliminated the men in charge, but the molecules remain trapped: oil, gas and especially H20, water. The attacks on desalination plants gave pause to everyone in the region. The chokepoints for water, oil, and natural gas outlived the leadership because the old world economy remains a captive in this geography. Trump offered Europe the only geopolitical strategy the Old World has left: take the molecules while you still can.

The grand, cosmic irony of the current crisis is America’s response to Iran’s nuclear threats. For decades, the West has been agitated by Tehran’s atomic ambitions. Yet the ultimate American counter-move to Iran’s nuclear threat isn’t just a barrage of conventional airstrikes; it is the mass deployment of next-generation nuclear power. It is a new grand strategy of nukes on nukes. How does the US neutralize a hostile regime holding ransom the world’s oil supply? By rapidly building a new nuclear power grid, thus removing Iran’s leverage, and by building a space-based missile defense system that can down incoming Iranian warheads. The US is answering the threat of nuclear extortion with the reality of nuclear emancipation. It does not matter if the stars in a box are not yet fully operational or if nuclear fusion doesn’t happen tomorrow. What’s important is to see the value of the Suez Canal, as Disraeli did, before it is built.

Even as they build the future, the architects of this transition are capable of bungling the present. Trump’s loose lips have offended Mohammed bin Salman and alienated the Qataris, causing the Gulf states to hedge their bets and perhaps to back away from Washington. These are clumsy and avoidable errors. The war in Iran will continue to be messy. Yet the American industrial machine will persist in its celestial pivot. China, having plundered American IP, is following, and so will others once the architecture is proven to work. They’ll soon realize that these historic technological pivots are not optional, whether from sail to steam, from coal to oil, from combustion to compute, or from molecules to atoms.

The fatal flaw of the transatlantic intelligentsia is that they confuse the man with the machine. One may thoroughly loathe Donald Trump, but translating distaste for his manner into an assumption of industrial weakness is geopolitical suicide. The American innovation engine does not care about European sensibilities. While the Old World is busy looking down at the old two-dimensional map, they must soon realize that they are hostage to waterways, muddy ditches, and dictators. Washington, meanwhile, is looking up. The American empire is exchanging molecules for atoms and straits for stars.

The pandemic dumped jet fuel into the growing counter-disinformation machine while extending its controls into the physical world. That brought the information state into people’s everyday lives. This was something different from the drama of false allegations about Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia that plagued the Trump presidency. Though Russiagate dominated the news cycle, it was essentially a political crime against abstractions like the “rule of law” and the “democratic process.” Normal people who did not devote their time to scrolling newsfeeds could mostly choose to ignore the sordid Trump-Russia drama. Covid lockdowns and vaccine mandates removed the “normie” exemption.

The senseless cruelty of preventing people from attending outdoor weddings and visiting sick relatives in their final moments. The images of authorities in New York City placing locks on children’s playgrounds. Authorities in Venice, California, using bulldozers to shovel thirty-seven tons of sand into the city’s iconic skatepark to prevent kids from playing outdoors. Prolonged school closures that isolated children and caused generational learning losses, hurting poor and disadvantaged kids worst of all. The brazen flouting of these restrictions by the upper classes and political elites. At Barack Obama’s 60th birthday party, for instance, where the former president and his hundreds of celebrity guests on Martha’s Vineyard danced with their faces exposed while the army of workers hired for the event were forced to wear masks. The fact that the technique of lockdowns was imported into the United States from the authoritarian surveillance state of China, where the virus originated. The even more galling fact that mere discussion of the virus’ origins was labeled a racist conspiracy by the most venerated institutions of science and journalism.

By imposing excessive and arbitrary policies while attempting to conceal vital information about the pandemic, the state provoked a public backlash. In turn, government officials treated the backlash not as legitimate democratic dissent, but as proof that unregulated misinformation was fueling domestic extremism. They responded by doubling down on the same policies, tightening their information controls, and imposing new methods of digital cancellation like “debanking” that cut off people’s access to their own financial accounts. Official repression and popular revolt fed off each other in a cycle that radicalized both sides and laid bare the realities of mass manipulation and digital dependency in the information state.

***

On February 15, 2020, as people were just learning about Covid, the World Health Organization head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus, and is just as dangerous.” His statement came almost a month before the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared a pandemic. The “infodemic” not only preceded the physical pandemic, it was, in the words of the world’s foremost health authority, “just as dangerous.”

The following month, all the major tech platforms — Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube — released a joint statement pledging that they would be “jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus” while also “elevating authoritative content”.

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“The containment of the coronavirus pandemic will necessitate a global surveillance network capable of identifying new outbreaks as soon as they arise,” wrote Klaus Schwab, head of the Davos-based World Economic Forum (WEF), in a book published at the start of the pandemic that announced its aims in the title, COVID-19: The Great Reset. The global surveillance network Schwab described had a second purpose. Beyond detecting the spread of new viruses, it could monitor the information environment and shape the public’s response to new policies. Yet the category of “authoritative information”, which would supposedly prevent future “infodemics”, was less reliable than its name suggested.  

Members of the public who had eyes to see could not help but notice that whatever the experts vehemently declared about Covid could be reversed a day later. Health authorities like the WHO and US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were often acting on incomplete information to rush out policies heavily influenced by political considerations in the name of “science”. Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of Google subsidiary YouTube, said her platform’s publishing policy called for “removing information that is problematic”. Examples of problematic information she named included people advocating vitamin C and turmeric as cures for the coronavirus and “anything that would go against World Health Organization recommendations”. Meanwhile, the WHO frequently changed its recommendations, which meant the meaning of misinformation changed from day to day.

By following its own rule, Google would have been forced, at various times during the pandemic, to ban posts that advocated wearing masks, that characterized the virus as highly contagious, or that suggested that it might have come from a laboratory, since all those went against official stances taken by the WHO. The CDC was similarly inconsistent, changing its policy on masking at least three times in the span of two years. The agency originally discouraged their use before endorsing it, then finally acknowledging that the cloth masks most Americans used could not stop the fine aerosols that spread Covid — a fact that Anthony Fauci had privately acknowledged at the outset of the pandemic in a February 2020 email.

Despite the inconsistencies of the public health authorities, experts from the disinformation field proved flexible enough to enforce every new pronouncement as if they were both moral imperatives and matters of settled science. When Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton suggested that Covid-19 could have escaped from the Chinese virology laboratory in Wuhan at the epicenter of the outbreak, he was swiftly attacked by journalists who all seemed to use strikingly similar language. The Washington Post labeled the idea of a possible lab leak a “conspiracy theory that was already debunked”. A reporter who was then at Politico accused Cotton of “spreading rumors… that were easily debunked within minutes”, while The New York Times chided Cotton for spreading what it called a “conspiracy theory.” Given the apparent consensus, Facebook banned users from discussing the lab leak theory under its misinformation policy. That May, The Washington Post’s top fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, wrote that it was “virtually impossible” for the virus to have come from a lab. A year later, Kessler published a new article explaining “How the Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory Suddenly Became Credible.” And a short time after that, Facebook quietly reversed its policy, posting a notice that read, “In consultation with public health experts, we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”

In June 2020, the US government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, sponsored the creation of a nominally independent organization called the Election Integrity Partnership whose mission was to monitor and remove election-related misinformation online in the lead-up to the November election. A consortium of four groups (two universities, a private defense contractor, and a Washington think tank), the EIP’s mandate, according to one of its founders, a former chief security officer for Facebook, Alex Stamos, was to “try to fill the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves”. With more than 100 employees scouring social media sites for speech that they deemed misinformation and flagged for suppression or removal by the tech companies, the EIP did the kind of work, according to Stamos, that the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations” to do on its own.

Immediately after the election, one of the four groups that made up the EIP, the Stanford Internet Observatory, spun off into a new information-monitoring initiative called the Virality Project. In a seamless transition from elections to public health, the project collaborated with the surgeon general’s office and the CDC while policing social media for what it labeled vaccine and pandemic-related misinformation. One email sent by a Virality Project staffer to multiple social media companies recommended that the platforms take action even against posts that described “stories of true vaccine side effects”, specifically “true posts which could fuel hesitancy”. 

Back in 2017, two academics affiliated with Harvard had created a novel category to describe speech that was factually true, but undermined official interests. They called it malinformation and defined it as speech “based on reality, used to inflict harm on a person, organization or country”. Could constitutionally protected criticism of the US government be classified as malinformation? Only the information regulators could say for sure since all power rested in the authority to define the terms. The government seized the opportunity. In the very first month of the Biden administration, CISA rewrote its mission from focusing on foreign disinformation “to focus on general MDM”, an acronym for misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation — a three-part classification developed by the 2017 Harvard paper that coined “malinformation”. The machinery of the information state had completed its inward turn. Rather than defensively protecting critical infrastructure from outside attack, the agency would now “be responsive to current events” inside the US.

Without any public deliberation or legislative debate, without any formal amendments to the Constitution, the authority to censor that which was true but deemed harmful had become the law… not quite of the land, but of the society online that was ruled by code. The more arbitrary the health policies became, the better they propped up the authority of the information regulators.

***

At 77, Joe Biden was the oldest major-party candidate to ever run for president, and it showed. Heading into the November 2020 election against Trump, he looked unsteady, even feeble, in his limited and carefully stage-managed public engagements. Biden’s voice would trail off mid-sentence. He would forget what he was talking about or refer to someone who had died as if they were still alive.

Given his frequent verbal gaffes, blank stares, and ghost-white pallor, there were concerns about his health and mental fitness for office. But the powerful fact-checking bureaus in the press dismissed these concerns as Right-wing conspiracy mongering, misinformation, and ageist discrimination. One Homeland Security bulletin leaked to the media detailed an alleged Kremlin plot to manipulate American voters by spreading “unsubstantiated allegations” about Biden’s declining mental health.

With the election only a few months away, Biden’s campaign announced that he would not hold any public campaign rallies due to Covid-19. Biden added, in an offhand comment to reporters, “This is the most unusual campaign I think in modern history.” Not long after that, Biden won a most unusual election.

After losing the election, Trump spent two months challenging the results and stoking the fury of his supporters with a manic “Stop the Steal” campaign that mixed reasonable questions of electoral interference with absurd and wildly irresponsible claims that prodded at the fragile basis of civic peace. The effort culminated on January 6, 2021, when a large pro-Trump demonstration that had assembled in Washington, DC, to challenge the election results splintered off into a riot at the US Capitol building. Ugly scenes of Trump supporters rampaging around the Capitol and fighting with police officers blanketed the news.

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In a symbolic register, the images of protesters dressed like Vikings marauding inside the Capitol building were uniquely threatening to American democracy. But, despite the symbolism, the riots were disorganized and ineffectual. Moreover, January 6 fit into a larger pattern of political violence that had played out over the previous year. The nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, which had taken place six months earlier, were orders of magnitude larger and more destructive than the pro-Trump riot. Nineteen people were killed in violence connected to the BLM protests, which spread to more than a hundred cities across the US and caused over $1 billion in damages.

And yet the elite establishment overwhelmingly supported the BLM movement and sympathetically pandered to its demands such as defunding the police. Nancy Pelosi, the powerful Speaker of the House, posed for a photo op kneeling in a brightly colored African kente cloth to show solidarity with the protesters. Public figures who for months had vilified public gatherings as deadly superspreader events suddenly celebrated the sight of tens of thousands of demonstrators crowding in the streets for BLM marches. One petition signed by more than 1,200 health officials declared it incumbent on members of the medical profession to offer “unwavering support” to the protesters. The ruling tech platforms, like Google, Facebook, and Twitter, all vocally endorsed and amplified the BLM movement.

In contrast, the response to January 6 was as swift and decisive as any political fallout in recent history. One day after the Capitol melee, Facebook banned the sitting president from posting on its platform. Then Twitter banned Trump permanently, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence”. PayPal and its subsidiary Venmo blocked the accounts of individuals and groups involved in organizing the pro-Trump demonstrations, as well as a Christian crowdfunding site raising money for the protesters. GoFundMe announced that it would remove fundraisers promoting conspiracy theories and “misinformation” about the election. 

To be sure, one could reasonably argue that the threat posed by rioters storming the Capitol and threatening to overturn the election justified the response. That was a political judgment. But the coordinated campaign of digital disconnection reflected a profound transformation in the American system of government. It exposed the outline of a new power structure that operated outside of the formal government by controlling the strategic heights of the information space. A cartel of Silicon Valley tech companies had accomplished in days what Congress failed to do over four years: it shut Trump up and silenced his movement. For a while, at least.

Biden’s inauguration a week later came as a mere formality. The first Trump presidency ended the moment he lost his means of speaking directly to the public, which social media had initially provided, propelling him into the White House, and then unilaterally revoked. The invisible hand of the information regime, once it decided to reveal itself, simply hit mute on the most powerful man in the world. In doing so it revealed an essential rule of power in the digital age: sovereign are they who control the information.

This is an edited extract from The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control, by Jacob Siegel (Henry Holt & Company).

As Thomas Kuhn reminds us, paradigm shifts are a funny thing. The transition from one to the next is a topsy-turvy affair. Often, it’s unclear for decades or even centuries what the new paradigm will look like. It’ll likely take years for that reality to fully set in for Western allies. But when the German government starts requiring all men under 45 to notify authorities for even three-month stays abroad — in case they’re needed for emergency military service — something big is afoot. You could say the same about how the British government had to release statements saying it wouldn’t let the US — its colonial kin and closest ally — use its bases for anything other than “defensive” bombings.

These are not isolated incidents, but clear indicators that America’s allies are beginning to hedge against it. Regardless of whether President Trump fully backs down from the ledge, or ultimately makes good on his threats to unleash “hell” upon the Islamic Republic of Iran, confidence in US legitimacy cannot recover when the leader of the supposed “free world” enters into yet another war of choice, then openly threatens that “a civilization will die tonight.” All of which occurred less than 24 hours after the country’s democratically elected chief executive released an expletive-filled social media post mocking the Islamic faith and childishly toying with the idea of a holy war between Christianity and Islam. What could go wrong? 

It’s true that the sensitivity movement is full of word-mongering ninnies, but words, especially from world leaders, still matter. Not since 1945 has a Western head of state been so reckless in his public rhetoric regarding matters of war — nor so rash in his threats of mass death of civilian populations. Regardless of the ultimate outcome of Trump’s outlandish behavior, America and Israel’s war of choice has become a peace of necessity for others, not only for the US’s Gulf allies but the entire global economy. 

Others now have no choice but to fix what Washington has broken. After all, the world remains totally dependent on a steady stream of not just fossil fuels, but also the pretense that its North American hegemon deserves to lead for one simple reason: it, more than any other global empire before, has pursued the interests of “peace,” “democracy,” and “self-government.” So much for that fable.

One great irony of Trump and his MAGA movement is that they worship institutions and US-centric economic dynamics they don’t remotely understand — and therefore smash at will. MAGA worships American supremacy but operates with only a comic-book understanding of its origin and function. They know the American myths, but from the IMF to the World Bank to the dollar-backed power of Wall Street, they seem utterly indifferent to how their country projects strength in the real world. 

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More than that, they don’t seem to grasp that American hard power has always been shadowed by soft. It’s certainly true that the US has always pursued its self-interest above all else. But it also put forward things like the Marshall Plan, greatly aiding the recovery of Western allies in their time of need. For his part, Franklin Roosevelt famously barred bankers from participating in the Bretton Woods negotiations, establishing the financial system that not only guaranteed American financial hegemony — but also secured middle-class prosperity not just in America but across much of the Western world. Fast forward and the NGOs that Trump, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel all loathe actually play a key role in securing American interests abroad. Say what you like about the Clintons, Obamas, and Blairs of the world. At least they understood how the global liberal order worked and were responsible enough stewards not to risk its annihilation merely to protect their egos. 

If, however, you’re a billionaire and all your friends are billionaires who see the world as a plaything, full of pawns who owe you merely for gracing the world with your one-of-a-kind contribution, then what’s come before doesn’t seem like anything more than a workaround, and which a dozen Stanford grads can fix in a few days. That system, though, was not built on raw force alone, but on the classical liberal values of the balance of power, restraint, and civic legitimacy. These are the very elements Trump and his cronies now set aside with ease. 

For this crowd, though, society, let alone the carefully constructed global economic order, are things you can tweak in your spare time, between sending rockets to Mars or playing 18 holes at Mar-a-Lago. That position, it hardly needs saying, is anything but conservative. As Joseph De Maistre argued, a nation is something “no more of its own creation than a language.” This collectivist vision of nationalism couldn’t be further from Trump’s. The President’s view is that of a man who believes “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Or else there’s Pete Hegseth, Trump’s “Secretary of War”, who openly boasts that the US is ready to “negotiate with bombs” until Iran makes the deal the White House wants. 

There’s no coming back from this; there will be no Obama redux. We’re living through the greatest military predicament and civilizational-level turning point since at least the Cuban Missile Crisis. A zero hour that, no matter what, will not end well for either the United States or the liberal economic order as a whole. I don’t just mean reputationally. Grown fat off the US providing their military security for some eight decades, Europe and the EU are not remotely ready to take up the mantle of Western leadership in America’s stead. They’re still coming to grips with the reality that their entire social democratic structure has been funded in large part by the US providing free military protection. What comes next will be messy, and no one in the West is ready to manage it.

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In tangible terms, it turns out that pretending to care is indeed a form of caring. One can recognize that “international law” is indeed mostly fiction. But it — like the country’s immaculately conceived constitution — is a mythological fiction that allows the liberal order to exist. Trump, though, does not understand this kind of nuance, seeing all constraints on American supremacy as unnecessary liberal niceties. In truth, though, these aren’t merely the pretenses of liberalism, or even progressive neoliberalism, but rather the entire pretense of the American liberal-democratic order — including the “conservative” ancien régime of William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt that Trump apes for cheap plaudits from his MAGA devotees.

That brings me to another great irony. Trump was elected to stop China — and yet he has delivered the perfect situation for Beijing to prove the superiority of its governance model. As opposed to its so-called liberal, so-called free market opponents, poised to crumble in a matter of weeks without a constant supply of cheap oil, China’s mercantilist synthesis has proved incredibly robust. Despite pundits proclaiming for 20 years that China will soon turn the corner and their model will collapse, the complete opposite has proven true. 

China appears to be the only major world power equipped to handle an economic storm like the one caused by Iran capturing the Strait of Hormuz. This war also illustrates that the CCP, not the US, is at the forefront of military strength, which it correctly anticipated would be defined not by $15-million interceptor missiles and $14-billion aircraft carriers, but by $20,000 drones, which China just so happens to specialize in.

As we transition to the Chinese century, Beijing also will not have to live with the shame of having a crazed chief executive bomb civilian electrical plants, water facilities, bridges, and train tracks. As Michael Lind recently argued in these pages, both long and medium term, this war only plays directly into China’s hands. Trump, though, has done it — he’s killed the neoliberal globalism just as his base wanted. The collateral damage is only beginning to reveal itself. 

On 25 May, 1961, President John F. Kennedy told Congress that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” The speech was prompted by Yuri Gagarin’s momentous feat, the previous month, in becoming the first human in space, thus casting doubt on American technological supremacy. Five days later came the Bay of Pigs fiasco, when a CIA-backed invasion of Cuba catastrophically failed. In response to this double blow, Kennedy promised the Moon.  

His speech was stirring but in retrospect rather hollow. Kennedy struggled to explain why a lunar mission was so important. In private, he confessed that “I’m not that interested in space.” On another occasion, he said: “Don’t you think I would rather spend these billions on programs here at home, such as health and education and welfare?”  But, he lamented, the country has no choice: American prestige “is too heavily involved.” 

That same vagueness is evident today. As NASA now puts it: “We’re going back to the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and inspiration for a new generation of explorers.” Similar promises were made back in the Sixties; giant leaps would be made for mankind. The rhetoric disguised the fact that the lunar mission was simply a Cold War pissing contest.  

After Gene Cernan left the lunar surface on 14 December, 1972, America abandoned the Moon. NASA wanted to launch a Mars program, but Richard Nixon vetoed the idea. The race with the Soviets had been won, American prestige restored, and so further missions seemed pointless.  There was nothing left to gain, no riches to harvest.  

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Though Nasa loves to compare itself to the 16th-century explorers, in truth the comparison is facile. Space travel isn’t remotely like what Magellan once achieved. Those explorers brought back treasure: gold, silver, tobacco, potatoes. The barren nature of the Moon is the best explanation for why humans have not returned. There are no potatoes there.

Artemis, just like Apollo, is being justified in terms of man’s innate need to explore. The eventual plan is to land near the lunar South Pole, where there might be frozen water. Nearby is the Aitken Basin, the largest impact crater in the solar system, which penetrates deep into the Moon’s crust, thus providing a graphic representation of its formation. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Americans are exploring how to live without affordable healthcare.

During one of the many debates on Nasa budget in the Seventies, Congressman Edward Koch, the future mayor of New York, confessed: “I just can’t for the life of me justify voting for monies to find out whether or not there is some microbe on Mars, when in fact I know that there are rats in Harlem apartments.” Senator Walter Mondale made a similar point, arguing that “it would be unconscionable to embark on a project of such staggering cost when many of our citizens are malnourished.”

Every president since Nixon agreed, arguing that there were too many pressing problems on Earth to justify massive expenditure in space. But then along came Donald Trump. He’s hopelessly attracted to shiny objects, and there are few things shinier than manned space travel. He probably expects that the great patriotic pride once generated by the 1969 Moon landing can be replicated. That seems unlikely, given the current fractious state of America.  At the very least, he perhaps thinks that Artemis might provide a distraction from his myriad problems.

Throughout most of its life, Nasa has been seen as a highly respected public agency, an image carefully cultivated but never fully deserved. A huge proportion of its budget has gone toward public relations. The agency’s reputation has depended heavily upon artifice. Projects like the Moon landing itself were shaped not by scientific curiosity but rather by a cynical aim to impress those who controlled the purse strings. NASA, really, is a giant machine for spending money. Huge risks were taken, as the Apollo 1 fire and the Shuttle disasters demonstrated, in order to please a public addicted to adventure. Impatience and ambition led directly to the three horrific disasters which killed 17 astronauts.   

There’s great similarity between Apollo and Artemis, but also important differences. Kennedy intentionally created a mood of consensus behind the lunar project. Lucrative contracts were distributed among the 50 states, encouraging the feeling that everyone was involved in this great lunar venture. That’s not the case today, since Trump has a habit of rewarding his cronies and cares nothing for consensus. Kennedy also enjoyed a healthy economy, with money to spend on big public works projects. The national debt in 1961 was just $289 billion; it’s over $37 trillion today. One also suspects that, with Congress emasculated, Artemis won’t be subjected to the rigid oversight that once applied to Apollo. That’s frightening, given Nasa’s habit of cutting corners on safety.

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This entire enterprise reeks of Musk. The latest Artemis mission will involve a Nasa rocket, but, as the program proceeds, the involvement of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starship will steadily increase. The details of Musk’s deal with Trump are shrouded in mystery, but it’s safe to suspect that some quid pro quo is involved. Trump’s enthusiasm might have something to do with the $250 million that Musk donated to his 2024 presidential campaign. While we’re encouraged to believe that today’s adventures in space are privately funded, in truth SpaceX has so far received $17 billion in government funding, with future payouts expected to exceed $56 billion.  

Musk wants to settle a million people on Mars by 2050, with the first colonists arriving by 2030. He has outlined plans to “terraform” the planet, turning it into an Earth-like environment by exploding nuclear bombs in the polar regions to release the carbon dioxide held there. A weather system, breathable air, oceans, lakes, flora and fauna are all promised.  

The big question, though, is: “What’s the point?” Why build a colony on Mars if Earth’s environmental problems could be fixed for a fraction of the cost? Musk counters that humans need to become interplanetary in order to survive as a species. “There’s always some chance that something could go wrong on Earth,” he said. “Dinosaurs are not around anymore!’ When Musk talks about space he sounds like a 13-year-old addicted to video games.  

The space industry has two faces. The great achievements that have transformed our lives have occurred in near space thanks to boring, unmanned satellites. Advances in communications, weather forecasting, intelligence gathering, have all brought enormous benefit. But there’s still this obsession with astronauts, this insistence that space must have a face. Nasa still believes that attracting funding depends heavily on producing heroes.  

“A rat done bit my sister Nell”, the African-American poet Gil Scott-Heron wrote in 1970. “But Whitey’s on the moon.” Apollo was never as popular as Nasa pretended. Opinion polls showed great support for the individual missions, but, when the public was asked about increasing the NASA budget, support was consistently below 50%. White males loved Apollo, but women, people of color and the poor questioned its obscene cost. I doubt that a president who taxes the poor to pay the rich and cuts basic services will be able to inspire enthusiastic support for Artemis. Americans have grown tired of these absurd expressions of vanity, these futile pursuits of prestige.  

As the war enters its second month, we find ourselves at a moment of maximum uncertainty. The Strait of Hormuz is besieged by missile launchers. The oil price has surged. America’s Nato allies are balking at Trump’s demands for help. Trump has announced a five-day postponement of strikes on Iranian power plants, claiming that Iran and the US are now in peace talks — only for a senior Iranian official to deny that such talks are taking place. All the while, domestic pressure is mounting on Trump: his allies want him to finish the job or get out.

Will Trump double down to achieve a complete and unquestionable victory, perhaps through a territorial takeover of the Strait of Hormuz? Or will he claim the action he’s already taken as a total win, blame his allies for failing to secure the peace, and walk away? Will the global economy ride out the chaos — or should we expect recessions?

With these questions in mind, the Swift Centre has consulted its forecasters on what is likely to happen next.

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1. Will the US send in the army?

If President Trump wants to secure a clear victory, the most urgent question facing the Pentagon is whether aerial dominance is sufficient. If not, then does the US commit significant troops — not just special forces, but a brigade — to secure critical strategic territory? A ground war would be highly unpopular with most Americans — but it might be the only way to destroy the remnants of Iran’s nuclear program or control the critical supply chain through the Strait of Hormuz.

To analyze the prospects of a ground war, the Swift Centre professional forecasters were asked about the likelihood that the US will deploy more than 1,000 troops into Iran before May 31st 2026 — providing a median forecast of 30%.

The forecasts were made before Trump claimed that peace negotiations were underway, but they take into account the President’s volatility. Of particular significance is Trump’s statement, when asked about the prospects of a ground war, that “nothing is off the table”.  

As one forecaster observed: 

“The simple fact that the door was not closed was a meaningful turning point. Previous presidencies (including 45th) had not hesitated to rule it out even if that meant losing some strategic advantage.”

That the 11th and 31st Marine Expeditionary Units (MEUs) are en route to the region has added weight to this possibility. These units, though relatively small, are designed for the kind of targeted territorial seizures now being discussed in Washington. Forecasters are particularly focused on the crown jewel of Iran’s oil export infrastructure: Kharg Island.

“[The deployment of 1,000 troops on Iranian soil] is most likely to happen if the US tries to seize Kharg Island or secure the Strait of Hormuz… Strikingly, a thousands-strong Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) has been dispatched from Japan to the Middle East. It will arrive in the region well before May 31.”

Some suggest Trump has held an obsession with the island for decades, citing a 1988 interview where he claimed “One bullet shot at one of our men or ships, and I’d do a number on Kharg Island. I’d go in and take it”.

But a large commitment of American troops would entail significant risks — and the taking of territory would not necessarily bring the US closer to achieving its goals. As a more skeptical forecaster put it:

“It is very difficult to determine what military objective would be simultaneously risk tolerant for political leaders and effective in changing the political will, economic conditions, or combat conditions to warrant using them to attempt to take any territory.”

Ultimately, President Trump needs to weigh his priorities for this conflict in the context against the political risks in an election year. One forecaster put it bluntly:

“Does he have the guts to send over a thousand soldiers though?… That’s bound to bring a high number of coffins back home, and this is not going to look good six months before the midterms”.

2. For how long will the Strait of Hormuz be at a standstill?

The Strait of Hormuz, being the world’s most critical economic choke point, is being held hostage by Iran. The IRGC has calculated, correctly, that if it can hold up the shipping, it can cause worldwide economic havoc, thus creating leverage for itself.

So far, the strategy seems to have been effective. The International Energy Agency has already stated that this war is causing the largest ever disruption to oil markets and that oil flows will take months to recover after the war ends. If Trump seems more interested in peace talks, it is probably at least in part because he fears that Iran can inflict economic pain on the US and its allies.

We therefore asked our forecasters how long it would take for the Strait of Hormuz to return to a “normal” flow of traffic following a US withdrawal or indefinite cessation of military action. Our yardstick for “normal” was the point when the seven-day average of ship arrivals reaches 60 per day, as reported by IMF Portwatch.

The result was a median forecast of three weeks. On paper, a three-week lag sounds manageable. However, the distribution of our forecasts reveals a worrying long tail. The forecasters believe there is a 90% chance the Strait will be back to normal within eight weeks — but that leaves a 10% chance that the disruption could last even longer than two months. The physical and legal friction of war cannot be wished away by a presidential decree or a declaration of victory. As one forecaster noted:

“The requirements are: 1) Demining the area, 2) insurers and carriers agreeing to resume transit and ships physically getting back to the Gulf, and 3) about seven days of high enough traffic to build the moving average”.

In other words, there is no switch enabling the world to go from zero to “normal” in only a few days.

Beyond the logistics, there is a deeper risk: that the cessation of military action does not equate to a restoration of the status quo. Forecasters are weighing the possibility that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), having survived the initial US onslaught, permanently weaponizes the Strait. One forecaster noted:

“If the IRGC survives, which is the most likely scenario… They will instead see it as an opportunity for leverage on their enemies and will act to control their access. With that in mind, I think they will set it up as a toll gate, charge ships for the privilege, and be selective as to who they let pass.”

The longer the war goes on, the greater the risk to infrastructure that would be required to get the supply chain back to normal levels. A forecaster who felt the most likely scenario was a fast reopening warned that it could take up to 12 weeks, noting the possibility of the Strait being heavily mined. The same forecaster warned that it would be in the Iranian regime’s interests to slow down the reopening.

A toll gate would be a nightmare scenario for global trade. It would place a tax on the West while favoring Iran’s allies, like China and India, whose ships have already begun to trickle through the Strait again. For Trump, this creates a secondary dilemma: walk away and allow the value of the Strait to be extracted by Iran, or stay and commit to the very type of “forever war” he has spent his political career railing against.

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3. Will the war cause a recession in the West?

The ripples of the Iran conflict are already washing against the shores of the world’s largest economic blocs. European economies, having failed to make a quick recovery from the Covid pandemic, were already struggling with the effects of the war in Ukraine, and are vulnerable to the fallout from the war in Iran — not least because the EU has failed to secure its own energy supply. A key question, then, is: will the US or the EU fall into a recession in 2026?.

The Swift Centre’s current aggregate forecast places the likelihood of such a recession at 35%. While this might not yet be a coin-flip, it represents a dramatic elevation above the historical base rate — estimated at around 10-15% for these regions. The key factor here is energy. As one forecaster noted:

“Europe didn’t need for the Strait to be closed in order to already have issues, so I’m pretty concerned”.

The forecasters note a stark gap in vulnerability between the two economic blocs. While the US can look to its own domestic petrochemical resources to smooth out price shocks, Europe remains perilously exposed to the flow of gas and oil from the Persian Gulf. 

“The EU bloc is more vulnerable than the US with growth being anemic anyway and [its] dependency on oil from the Gulf region being higher.”

In part, the economic danger is represented by the price at the pump, which is often the focus of the mainstream news. But other risks include potential shortages of critical industrial materials such as aluminum, fertilizer and helium. Swift Centre forecasters note a troubling cocktail: the war in Iran is coming at a time when the private credit market in the US is in trouble; when there are significant structural constraints on European industrial growth; and when Trump’s own tariff policies are causing inflationary pressure on the American economy.

If the “toll gate” scenario in the Strait becomes a reality, then, the temporary shock of war could transform into a structural economic drain. One forecaster cautioned that “if Hormuz strait remains functionally closed for months… the risk rises dramatically”. The EU, facing a potential multi-year natural gas shortage, will be hoping for a quick resolution, but time is running out.

Nevertheless, there is hope. Some forecasters are more bullish on the economic resilience of the EU and US. They note that consumer demand, which remains healthy, is a reliable predictor of whether the US faces recession, and that if the US stays out of recession, then the EU generally does the same. “The US has experienced gas prices this high many times,” one forecaster wrote, “and there are many tools that can be used to manage or lower gas prices.” Perhaps Trump’s hand is stronger than his claims of peace talks would suggest.

Nobody in the world is completely independent, but many countries are more robust than we are. Russia has proven resilient, shaking off Western sanctions, which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows the country. China, too, is clearly resilient. And the US is more than resilient. It is a country that thrives under adversity, very much in accordance with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of “Antifragility”.  Modern Europe, however, is most certainly not antifragile. With every shock, it weakens. After the Covid pandemic, the US reconnected with its pre-pandemic growth trajectory. The Europeans, mostly, did not. Our GDP settled at a level below its previous trajectory — growing at an increasingly lower rate.

It is now happening again. Only three weeks into the US-Iran war, European interest rates have risen and there are reports of gas shortages. Why are the European gas tanks almost empty? Why have the Europeans not built a large strategic oil reserve, like the US and China, or gas reserves lasting for several years?

The very essence of dependency is when you let others do your strategic thinking. In Niall Ferguson’s biography of Kissinger, the ex-secretary of state is quoted as saying back in 1966 that “the present system encourages too many of our allies to shift the costs and the responsibilities of the common defense to us”. This has been a theme in transatlantic relations ever since, as Europe’s culture of dependency expanded into other areas, including technology. It’s like a drug addiction that started out casual and harmless but eventually became destructive.

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The problem with political addictions, especially those that have been allowed to fester for decades, is that they become hard to reverse.  For example, Germany made itself dependent on Russia for its gas supplies for the two decades until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. It took a war to end it. At that point, the Germans switched towards gas from the US and Qatar and replaced one dependency with another. They are dependent on gas because they persisted in killing the only two energy sources they had: coal and nuclear. Yes, there is clearly a good environmental reason to phase out coal, but this wasn’t the right time. To end both coal and nuclear together, and to do so simultaneously, is hopping mad. Nobody understood nuclear engineering better than the Germans; they gave up on an important energy source, as well as a technology.

If you prioritize strategic independence, the right policy mix for European countries would be the kitchen-sink approach and do everything: nuclear, renewables, gas, and coal. If one goes, you still have the others. The idea that Europe, which is one of the least resource-rich places on earth, has a choice in this matter is delusional. The Europeans Greens were right about renewables, but they messed up by turning it into an ideological debate. So did the parties on the Right, who were anti-renewables. I think this is just as stupid.

Europe hasn’t just sacrificed its energy independence, but its military independence too. Our European armies are in a dreadful state. The decay cannot be adequately measured in terms of military spending as a proportion of GDP. The metric vastly understates the true extent of the dilapidated state of our armed forces. General Sir Richard Barrons, a former commander of Britain’s Joint Forces Command, said that the British Army, were it to act alone, “could seize one small market town on a good day”. I have heard similar comments from German Bundeswehr generals. They all agree they couldn’t fight Russia. When Europe spends on average 2% of its GDP on defense, and the US spends 3.5%, this does not even begin to tell you what’s really going on. If you measure it in terms of what security the money has bought, the gap is much bigger than the one between those two headline numbers.

Because of this, we cannot supply more weapons to Ukraine. We don’t have any left that we can discard without endangering our own security even further. Europe’s armed forces also fail to attract the right people. I know of someone who was rejected by the German army over a decade ago on the grounds that he was overqualified. Back then, the German army was a welfare program for unemployed young men. This was when Ursula von der Leyen was Germany’s defense minister. Today she is President of the European Commission,

The reason why we Europeans hyperventilate so much about Donald Trump is that he threatens our dependence on America like no one else has ever done. He threatened to pull out of Nato unless we spend more money on defense. And now one of the many unintended consequences of his war against Iran, which is a big political and military miscalculation, is that it exposes the weaknesses of our energy policies. It really is his war, and our problem.

If we have to pay for our own defense, our own energy security, and for Ukraine, out of our own pocket, then the math is quite simple: we can no longer afford cradle-to-grave welfare systems. We Europeans arrogantly look down on Americans because the US has food stamps where we have guaranteed citizens’ incomes. We Europeans lived in a delirious state, one in which we mistook our own pathetic dependence for cultural superiority. Once you are at such an advanced stage of delusion, it is going to be very difficult to reconnect back to reality. I don’t see any political party, in any European country, on the Left, the Right, or in the center, that has a concrete strategy for an independent Europe. All that is on offer is different forms of dependency.

This leads naturally to the question of what to expect going forward. Until about a decade ago, I was moderately optimistic that the EU, or rather the eurozone, could emerge as a vehicle for geopolitical power and independence. If the euro had been fortified by a capital markets union, and a sovereign debt instrument, the EU would have acquired an instrument of geopolitical force, very much in the way the US is exploiting the dollar, and its dominance of the global financial market, as a tool for geopolitical sanctions.

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The eurozone crisis was the moment when it became clear that the EU would not go down in this direction. It was a decision of historical importance. The opportunity came, and it went. The EU chose the soft option, a central bank bailout that transformed an acute crisis into the low-burner, long-term decay the EU finds itself in today.

The most probable way for change to occur is through an existential crisis, brought about by one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, pestilence, famine or death. We had a pandemic. Then a war. Then another war. Fertilizer shortages might  lead to a famine. The global financial crisis was an important historical event, but it was not the big one. There is no preordained timeline to any of this. The state of delirium can easily outlast all of us. But however long it persists, it is unsustainable. This won’t go on — not because it shouldn’t, but because it can’t. A dependency is only ever sustainable if the side you depend on plays along. Trump has broken that link. I think it’s unlikely that even a Democratic successor would reestablish it. You can no longer be a drug addict when the supply runs out.

The real irony here is that we Europeans used to be the ones that others were dependent on. But no more.  Connally’s famous quip about the dollar being the US currency and Europe’s problem had a European precursor: the Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich. He once said of France, the dominant continental power in the 18th and 19th centuries, that “when France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches a cold”. Today, it’s America that’s sneezing — and Europe can’t shake its cold.

In Marx’s view, this magnificent achievement involved one or two misfortunes: mass poverty, grotesque inequalities, blighted lives and grinding exploitation. It also brought with it perpetual wars between competing capitalist states, the extermination of colonial peoples, and a rapacious social order in which more or less everything from love to art to sport was subject to the profit motive. Yet Marx didn’t allow his fury at these atrocities to dim his admiration of the class that gave birth to Balzac and Dickens, Mozart and Mendelssohn, Rembrandt and Turner. “Bourgeois” for him was never simply a swear word. Instead, he held in tension a positive and negative judgment of that class, in what was known as a dialectical approach in the days when radical young men wore sideburns and denim suits. He especially appreciated their insolent upfrontness. The feudal order had concealed its brutality behind church, monarch and lord of the manor, but with capitalism it was out in the open. “All that is solid melts into air,” he remarks in the Manifesto, “all that is holy is profaned, and humanity is at last compelled to face with sober senses its real conditions of life.”

The middle classes worship fact rather than fancy, use rather than ornament, the material as against the ideal. They tell it like it is, instead of spinning utopian dreams or fantasizes of King Arthur. The dominant literary form was now not epic or romance but the realist novel, tales of ordinary men and women rather than of gods and demons. Religion was still an active force, but more for the sake of social cohesion than love of God. The Victorians feared that morality would collapse without the Almighty, and the collapse of morality might bring with it political disaffection. What Walter Bagehot called the “ceremonial” aspect of British society, with its quaint cults and esoteric rituals, still flourished, but truth and reality were increasingly a matter of land, cash and property. What mattered was what you could touch and taste, buy and sell.

In commending the middle class’s lack of hypocrisy, Marx is perhaps a touch too charitable. If the Victorians were crassly materialist, they were also remarkably high-minded. Fantasizes of King Arthur did indeed continue to be spun, not least by the man whose poetry was Queen Victoria’s bedside reading, Alfred Tennyson. In civilized circles, money was still as unmentionable as excrement, and Freud was to detect some fascinating relations between the two. This coyness lingers on: even today, the British speak of appointing someone to an academic post, while the Americans talk of hiring. Despite this, the gap between materialism and idealism has always been starker in the States than it is in Britain. Brits are more likely than Texans to be embarrassed by the high-toned rhetoric of Our Brave Men and Women in Uniform or This Wonderful Nation of Ours. Hyperbole like this borders on the impolite in the UK, where it’s customary to play yourself down, not wear your heart on your sleeve and not lavish praise on your own children.

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The Americans, however, have invented an ingenious way of reconciling their spiritual high-mindedness with their love of money. This is to turn the pursuit of profit into an enterprise every bit as spiritual as Buddhism. America has a dream — but it’s a dream of power, prosperity and infinite self-expansion, not of community or humility or selfless devotion. It’s an idealism of the will, not of the soul, and only one can play at a time. This is why it’s not entirely true to see Donald Trump as having abandoned the usual lofty American talk of God’s Own Nation and other such blasphemies for a coarser, grosser, in-your-face discourse. There’s no denying that he’s coarse and gross, but one needs to remember that in the Land of the Free, making an enormous amount of money is itself a kind of spiritual project. Idealism is built into everyday life, not a spirit that soars above it. The Puritans who founded the United States believed that worldly success might be a sign of God’s favor, so that the material and the ideal were linked from the outset.

They’re also linked in the sense that the millionaire is a kind of magician. He can change the world with a stroke of the pen or a word on the phone. Money is a brute fact, but one which can make the most extravagant fantasy become real. Fantasists like Trump can’t stand the recalcitrance of the world and want it to be instantly pliable to their touch. Most of us have to adapt our desires to reality, whereas autocrats can do the opposite. No doubt it all goes back to the breast. The infant feels hungry and out pops a nipple. It’s not the smartest way of preparing for adult life, even if it keeps you alive.

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There’s something to be said for the idea that Trump has stripped some of the veils of rhetoric from a brute reality. He doesn’t say much about God, freedom and democracy, which US Presidents are supposed to do. He was once photographed holding a Bible and looked as uneasy as if he was cradling a rattlesnake. Instead, he talks about oil, rare minerals, grabbing other people’s territories and flogging off their resources. 19th-century imperialism felt the need for some vacuous moral platitudes in order to explain why they were killing and enslaving so many people. The White Man’s Burden was one such cliché, as was the notion of bringing the fruits of civilization to the barbarians. Today, the fruits of the barbarians are being brought to the civilized, as with Trump’s weird desire to own a bunch of polar bears in Greenland. It’s like threatening a nuclear war if you can’t have Wales. Yet he quite often dispenses with the usual deceitful rationalizations for such behavior. His is the language of realpolitik, not of the preacher.

It may be that American imperialism is a roundabout way of teaching geography to the younger generation. Americans are notoriously bad at knowing whether, say, Vienna is to the north or south of New Zealand, or what the capital of Scotland is, and invading other countries involves having to look at maps to make sure you raze the right place to the ground. A lot of American citizens know exactly where Vietnam is, which was one of the few benefits of their visit to the place some decades ago. There might, however, be rather less painful ways of obtaining this kind of knowledge. Globes, for example.

Governing classes have long known that power works most effectively when it’s intangible. The ideologies which shape us most profoundly aren’t sets of doctrines. They form the invisible color of daily life, the taken-for-granted values built into our behavior. The state is wary of smashing up political demonstrations, not so much because it has tender feelings for the demonstrators but because power which becomes too conspicuous tends to lose its credibility. It much prefers to work deviously, obliquely, without having to reveal its steel hand. To do so preserves the illusion of its neutrality, a view of the state questioned by a renowned thinker who believed that its purpose was to protect private property (no, not Marx: Cicero). Trump, however, is doing just the opposite in Minneapolis and elsewhere. He takes a positive delight in parading his power, turning it into theater and spectacle, using ICE officers as an extension of his monstrous ego. It’s a gross violation of the bourgeois playbook.

It didn’t take two deaths in Minneapolis to alert the world to the excessive violence of the United States. It’s the only English-speaking country which uses the word “aggressive” positively. Freud argued that what’s wrong with the superego isn’t that it punishes us, but that it punishes us well beyond our culpability. It lays obligations on us which it knows we can’t fulfill, then fills us full of guilt because we can’t live up to its insanely unreasonable demands. In short, it’s not only punitive but malicious, sadistic and vindictive. And all this is betrayed by the pointless surplus of violence it wreaks upon our heads.

Such a surplus has long been evident in the United States, fueled by its Puritan heritage. Ten police cars with their sirens screaming close in on a single septuagenarian shoplifter. Six or seven ICE officers pile themselves on top of a single protestor. This isn’t just because every cop in town likes to grab a piece of the action when his radio starts to crackle. It’s also the result of a Puritan fear of chaos and a paranoid insistence upon order. Allow one individual to get out of hand and before you know where you are (a key phrase in this style of argument) millions of them will be running wild searching for toddlers to eat. Power of this kind is irrational, which is why it provokes those it oppresses into rebellion in order to oppress them even further. This is what is unfolding in Minneapolis.

Puritans like clean distinctions and neat antitheses. Their minds are intolerably tidy. America is the land of the good guys versus the bad guys. All police officers are heroes and all Somalis are scum. No previous President, however, would have used those latter words. He would have tarted them up in fancy moral phraseology. With Trump, however, what you see is for the most part what you get, which sounds like honesty but is in fact callousness. We seem to be moving into a post-ideological era — not ideology in the sense of convictions, but in the sense of actions and beliefs which try to mask their ugliness in exalted speech. The cop who killed George Floyd didn’t even try to look as though his life was under threat. Americans are sometimes admired for telling it like it is, unlike us two-faced Brits. What the admirers forget is that how it is can be pretty revolting.

It’s not trying to be an Alpine fantasy, and the locals love it. A driver who takes me up there tells me his son used to spend spare afternoons on the hill. Not this year, though, it’s been too warm. They’re waiting for snow.

The silent emptiness up the mountain contrasted strongly with the hubbub below, where a media circus had descended. But even as the world was sent into wild panic over Trump’s fantasy invasion, Nuuk showed little sign of alarm.

This remote, immense, frozen island has become a key locus in the grand narrative about the changing world order. When something is far enough away, too little known, you can make up almost any reality about it and sell it to millions. Distance can be an accelerant for fiction.

In 1991, during the American-led assault on Iraq, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote a series of essays later collected as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. He did not deny the bombs or the deaths. His argument was more unsettling: for much of the world, he insisted, the war existed primarily as a media event. The continuous stream of briefings, graphics, satellite images, and missile-camera footage created a self-contained spectacle.

It is hard not to reach the same conclusion about Greenland. The territory is unusually vulnerable to projection. It is geographically enormous and demographically tiny; an Arctic blank space on the map with just enough geopolitical significance to attract big fantasies. It was effectively a closed country until 1953, with a Danish-Norwegian trade monopoly restricting access and prohibiting tourism. As a result, Greenlanders had limited contact with other people beyond the colonists and their systems. Authority and power were concentrated in Copenhagen.

Yet the Second World War opened Greenland up to a degree. American military bases appeared along the coast, and Greenlanders ordered items through major American mail-order firms. Radio broadcasts and newspapers emerged. A growing American presence also increased pressure on Denmark to invest more heavily in Greenland’s development. The result was rapid modernization, which delivered remarkable new amenities even as it triggered a deep cultural disruption for the indigenous Inuit community.

A visit to a small Nuuk supermarket depicts the reality of the island: inside, aisles are packed with exotic goods, all of it, with the possible exception of fish, imported via Denmark. For while Greenland enjoys a certain autonomy, it does so alongside a dependency on Copenhagen for logistics and economic support — annual subsidies are around 4.3 billion Danish kroner, roughly £500 million.

But Greenland’s valiant attempts to turn political autonomy into practical control over its own development are strangled by the long arm of bureaucracy. The island’s grandest project — a mega school — is the most frustrating example of its unshakeable subservience.

Locals talk about the school with a mixture of anger and embarrassment. Impressive and imposing, the beautiful modern building has so far cost around €80 million. It has been in the works for nearly a decade but is unusable because it failed to account properly for European regulation.

In a place this small, a school is more than just a school. It is a declaration about the future: we will grow; we will educate; we will be a substantial community. That Greenlanders want such a school speaks to the positive vision many have of their country: a belief in modern infrastructure, in institutions, in a place that doesn’t have to apologize for being small.

But the fact that it stands as uselessly as the ski slope — its corridors and classrooms ghostly and empty — feeds an alternative, darker local narrative: that Greenland lacks not ambition but capacity; its systems can’t reliably deliver. Self-rule, which Greenland has had since 2009, might seem empowering on paper, but this power is now in the hands of a people with little governance experience. The potential for mismanagement is writ large in the school with no children.

The problem lies in the country’s economic history. As one economist tells me, Denmark is often described as “socialistic” but it thrives because it maintains a workable tension: public planning and welfare on one side, market dynamics and private capital on the other. In Greenland, though, some of Denmark’s more rigidly socialistic impulses were exported — and the island became, at times, a kind of petri dish for technocratic social engineering in ways Denmark itself was not. The result is an economy that grows, but not in a way that consistently translates into opportunity. It lacks the instincts of an advanced market-led economy.

The fragility shows up in the data. Economists expect GDP to grow by just 0.5% in 2025 — barely above the pandemic year of 2020. The slowdown reflects reduced activity on major airport construction projects and weaker shrimp catches, one of Greenland’s main export earners. Cod fishing has helped cushion exports, but the broader picture is of an economy struggling to generate new engines of growth.

Long seen as a future pillar, the tourism industry has been expanding, and publicity from Donald Trump has certainly helped. But Greenland has a short summer and capacity is already near its ceiling. The Economic Council notes that without more flights, hotels, and infrastructure, tourism cannot significantly lift national output. Mining, often presented politically as a path to greater economic independence, remains largely at the exploration stage, with only limited extraction underway. You can see why Trump’s economic approach might appear more compelling to some.

Whether or not you accept his framing, the outcome is visible on Nuuk’s streets: a town where the state is present and functional, and yet certain people remain invisible.

One morning, I see a man sprawled across the steps of a nearby shop. He looks unconscious. He is not dressed for the cold. While two locals hover nearby, uncertain what to do, another outsider and I intervene. We call for help. An ambulance arrives within minutes. The paramedics are calm, unflustered. They lift him onto a stretcher with the practiced composure of people who have done this before. It’s unclear, however, if he’s a victim of substance abuse or a stroke.

The high rates of alcohol dependency and domestic violence compared with other Nordic societies are often linked to the speed with which traditional subsistence communities were pushed into a cash economy and urban housing within a single generation. To be homeless here, in a place where the welfare state reaches so far and winter temperatures can descend regularly to as low as -20°C, feels almost unfathomable. Several people talk to me about what they call a “left-behind” Greenland: people who did not find a foothold in the new economy that followed modernization.

But Greenland’s darkest secret is the degree to which gambling addiction is soaring across the country. Even under Danish regulatory oversight, public-health data suggests problematic gambling affects up to 22% of men and 18% of women — markedly higher than in Scandinavia. Researchers and social workers link this to a mix of factors: rapid modernization that disrupted traditional social structures, long winters and geographic isolation, high unemployment or underemployment in some communities, and the normalization of state-run lotteries that are easily accessible even in small settlements.

It should come as no surprise that the voters drawn to the most populist pro-independence rhetoric often come from communities that feel they have gained little from the Danish-funded system — or feel diminished by their dependence on it. The appeal is less ideological than emotional.

Representatives of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, which advocates for the communities across the Arctic, frame the debate not simply as one of national romanticism but of Indigenous rights and dignity. They argue that Greenland’s economy was built in ways that prioritized administrative integration over local ownership, leaving communities reliant on Danish funding yet with limited authority over how development unfolds.

“We do not wish to debate which state is better or worse to live in or is a better or worse coloniser,” Sara Olsvig, the Council’s chair, told the press the week I was there. “Rather, we want to debate how we improve Inuit lives, livelihoods, wellbeing, and self-determination across all our regions.”

In that sense, Greenland’s homeless problem and the stalled mega school are not separate stories. They are different sides of the same political coin: a society whose strategic value is rising on the world stage, even as everyday foundations — schools, healthcare, stability — lag behind. The consequences ripple outward: household debt, family strain, and pressure on already fragile social systems.

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In this context, it’s not hard to see why Trump’s provocative post in 2019, a picture of a gold-tinted and Trump-branded tower block on the icy Greenland rock, and the caption “I promise not to do this to Greenland”, landed so badly. Critics suspected he was hiding his intentions in plain sight. John Bolton even said it out loud: Trump really did want to build a casino on the territory. The problem wasn’t that it sounded ridiculous, but that it was so plausible. After all, the US had done it before. Indigenous land rights and self-sovereignty in North America have long been entangled with outside interests seeking legal gray zones for gaming empires, with lasting social costs for locals.

The idea that a newly independent Greenland might be steered toward becoming a new offshore Las Vegas or tax haven, welcoming spivs and speculators as fiscal saviors, would follow a well-worn pattern where small jurisdictions push to monetize sovereignty when other economic levers are weak.

In theory, the country’s harsh and expansive terrain, small population, and still-developing regulatory capacity make it highly susceptible to taking shortcuts to economic independence. Moreover, everyone knows Trump’s transactional approach to geopolitics often mirrors his business career: places are assets and leverage is value. The President’s renewed interest in the island is, understandably, stirring fears that Greenlanders may be taken down this darker path.

The risk for Greenland, in that case, is not annexation in the literal sense, but a subtler dynamic in which investment flows become tied to extraction rights, special zones, or deregulated sectors that promise revenue quickly but leave long-term governance burdens at home. The risk, in other words, is of following Iceland’s pre-2008 trajectory, when financial growth outstripped supervisory capacity, and the eventual crash forced the state into years of crisis management rather than easy prosperity.

That returns us to the tendency to see Greenland as a strategic object rather than a people. In reality, Nuuk is a place where teenagers play Xbox and kids sledge in the afternoon, where the built environment is utilitarian — blocks and functional forms — and where the weather still dictates the day much more so than ideology.

Even the politics, so often flattened into “independence versus Denmark versus America”, is more pragmatic than outsiders want. People argue, certainly. The independence question is real. There is resentment toward Denmark and a clear historical sensitivity about its rule. But there is also fear about what might happen without Danish subsidies and institutional scaffolding. Alongside populist independence parties whose energy draws significantly from those who feel left behind, there are “remainer” Greenlanders, culturally closer to Denmark, cautious about abrupt rupture. But across the spectrum, what I hear most often is that Greenlanders just want better lives, respect, agency, and investment that works — ideally on their terms, not others’.

Such pragmatism has deep roots in Greenland. Long before Washington, Copenhagen, or Beijing took an interest, the Inuits here believed that there was Sila, the visible world, and Silap Aappaa, the invisible one that shapes it. The words blur weather, mind, and world to create a single idea of balance. The Inuits believe Sila is damaged when the rules and taboos that govern balance in the world are broken.

The ancient concept offers a generous frame for Nuuk’s current social contradictions: modern Greenland is negotiating a new equilibrium between visible systems — Danish welfare structures, European regulations, global supply chains — and less visible forces: cultural memory, historical trauma, spiritual inheritance. Walking through town, past the closed school, the supermarket, the frigid harbor, it is hard not to see Greenland through that Inuit lens.

Greenland’s geography places it between key powers at a uniquely sensitive time. It feels like this island is destined to address a disrupted system by emphasizing rebalancing. Global powers should be mindful that avoiding a catastrophic rupture of the world order probably begins not with buying Greenland, but with allowing Greenland to find that equilibrium within itself.

But there are 21 other member states who have not been sanctioned. One is Italy. Giorgia Meloni has already said she told Trump that his tariff threat was a mistake. I think it was too. But is Meloni going to break with the President over a patch of land that is far away and irrelevant to Italy’s security and economy? Will Spain? Or Greece? Or Malta and Cyprus? What about eastern Europe? Will Viktor Orbán, Andrej Babiš, and Robert Fico — the populist prime ministers of Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia respectively — run to the rescue of their liberal friends in Denmark? Even Poland, with a government that is as pro-EU as it can get, is hardly going to sacrifice its strategic alliance with America over a few rocks of ice near the Arctic.

The truth is that the Europeans never really cared about Greenland. It was the first country to leave the EU – in 1985 – long before Brexit. It’s a fishing nation; fish is over 90% of its exports. And it left because EU fisheries policies would have deprived it of the right to manage its own stocks. Greenland could have been the EU’s, had it really wanted to keep it.

So here is my bold prediction: Trump will win his battle for Greenland. The Europeans will not stop him, for they are weak and divided. The irony is that the EU chose this military and geostrategic weakness. It chose to deprive our militaries of necessary resources in favor of welfare transfers and support for NGOs. A decade ago, the eurozone had an opportunity to create a political, economic and financial union in response to the sovereign debt crisis. But it chose not to because it was inconvenient. Meanwhile, the UK chose to leave.

When the European member states of Nato decided to bow to Trump’s pressure and increase defense spending last year, they did not create a European defense union. They can’t agree on anything: a joint Franco-German-Spanish fighter aircraft project is on the rocks because the three countries cannot agree the workshare. Instead, each has only reinforced its dependence on the US. Everybody thinks they are better off with their own special relationship. But as Benjamin Franklin once said: “He that lies down with dogs, shall rise up with fleas.”

And the Europeans have just woken up, and this time they are really cross, clamoring to issue press statements to condemn Trump. I am hearing commentators urging the EU to deploy the Anti Coercion Instrument, a legal device that came into force two years ago to counter economic pressure from adversaries. They insist that the EU is stronger than it thinks. It is the world’s largest single market and customs union, is it not? And it deems itself a regulatory super-power.

It is deluded. The EU’s single market is full of regulatory barriers. Its hostile green and tech regulation did not change the world for the better; it succeeded only in damaging Europe’s competitiveness. As a result, unlike China and America, Europe will not share in the AI boom. The EU, in its current form, is further from becoming a superpower than it was 30 years ago.

A union in which member states retain full sovereignty is only as strong as its weakest member. And that’s Germany right now. Given the state of Germany’s economy, and its dependence on the US, it would be utter madness for the EU to retaliate against Trump’s tariffs.

What also mitigates against joint action is the bloc’s lingering delusion that someone or something out there is going to stop Trump. Last year, European leaders believed that the financial markets would push back against his tariffs, only to be shocked that after an initial wobble, Wall Street lined up behind its President. When the Trump administration went after Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, last week, the markets missed another opportunity to crash. Now the Europeans are convinced that the Supreme Court will block the tariffs.

On this narrow issue, they may actually be right. But they are missing the bigger picture. We know there is going to a Supreme Court ruling tomorrow that may be the long-awaited ruling on the tariffs. We know that some of the justices reacted with skepticism to the legal arguments in a hearing with Trump’s lawyers. There is indeed a chance that the Trump administration will lose the case. I can already see The Guardian’s celebratory headlines.

But even if the ruling goes against Trump, he will still win. This case is not about whether a US president is allowed to impose tariffs for reasons of national security. It is about whether the Carter-era International Emergency Economic Powers Act is the correct legal base for his tariffs. Trump chose IEEPA because it gave him the largest degree of discretion. But there are alternative laws that would allow him to get the same done.

Trump could, for example, reinstitute a crippling tariff bureaucracy as he did with steel and aluminum. I recall a story from a German exporter of agricultural machinery who was forced to list the steel and aluminum content of the 15,000 parts of the product. He gave up. It was an impossible undertaking.

In protest at this latest tariff threat, the European Parliament decided to freeze the ratification of the EU-US trade deal, under which it promised to cut tariffs on US goods to zero. As a result, the deal may collapse. Similarly, the UK-US deal is also now at risk. I don’t think Trump is quaking in his boots.

The President has many ways to force the Europeans into line. He could impose his own peace treaty on Ukraine, side-lining the EU. He could also go further and switch off US intelligence sharing not only for Ukraine, but for European Nato members as well. He could also announce that he would not authorize US troops to protect any Nato countries that push against American interests — effectively giving Vladimir Putin free license to wage war in Europe.

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It is hardly surprising, then, that the only people outside the US who celebrated his tariff announcement were the Russians. Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of Russia’s Direct Investment Fund and a Putin adviser, posted on X that finally the US and Europeans have something important to talk about in Davos this week.

So, what are Europe’s options? The EU was never going to be a military alliance, but at least it had chance to become an economic one. To be ready for a geopolitical fight today, though, the EU would have needed to evolve into a political union a decade ago. The eurozone crisis between 2008 and 2015 was the final, missed, moment where the bloc could have taken that step. Since then, Right-wing parties have been on the rise in France and Germany; so has euro-skepticism. The window for political unification has closed.

So should Europe send more troops to Greenland? Fight the guy, some hot-headed commentators suggest, transitioning from complacency to panic without a moment’s pause. Fight Putin and Trump at the same time? I think not. Such a move would be Europe’s “Charge of the Light Brigade” moment.

No. The only option the EU has now is to let Trump be Trump. These tariffs reveal the US strategy. He does not seek a military solution. He is not a natural warrior. Nor are we. So, with no alternative on offer, let’s drive up the price. And when all is said and done, why not hand him the Nobel Peace Prize too?

But amid the noise there is signal. Finding that signal, and discerning what the future is likely to hold, is the mission of the Swift Center for Applied Forecasting, where we apply scientific methodologies to scenario analysis and forecasting to predict the future. In 2025, we successfully predicted that major threats dominating the headlines would fail to materialize. We correctly forecasted a significant war between India and Pakistan would not occur; that H5N1 would not become a devastating pandemic; and that the global oil market would be resilient to price shocks despite the conflict between Israel and Iran. Conversely, we identified quieter, yet critical geopolitical shifts, such as the rising risk of US engagement in Venezuela, weeks before the mainstream press acknowledged this reality.

What does 2026 hold? The starting point is to know where to look. With that principle in mind, we have identified specific scenarios for 2026 — five relating to technology and five relating to geopolitics — that we believe are underrated and worth watching. In each case, resolution one way or another will dictate geopolitics for years to come or constitute a significant step toward a landmark in human history.

Technology

1. Will any, or all of, OpenAI, Anthropic or SpaceX IPO?

The potential initial public offering (IPO) of OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX in 2026 would mark a new era for frontier technology. These firms will no longer be AI and rocketry startups, but full-fledged geopolitical assets. Crucially, an IPO forces transparency. For years, the capabilities and financials of these labs have been shrouded in NDAs and corporate secrecy. But a public listing would require the disclosure of risk factors and expenses such as compute costs. It would also require published revenues rather than opaque comments during podcast interviews. It would effectively serve as a public audit of the AI market, revealing whether the path to AGI is truly the profit utopia many believe.

An IPO for any of these entities would very likely to be the largest technology listing since Alibaba or Saudi Aramco. It would absorb significant liquidity from capital markets and would stand a good chance of setting valuation benchmarks for the entire AI and aerospace sectors for the coming years.

Each of the three companies is driven by an insatiable need for liquidity to fund the next generation of capital-intensive projects. It may be possible for all three of them to IPO in 2026. Our forecasters note that the prospect of artificial general intelligence (that is, AI with across-the-board human-level capabilities) and multi-planetary life has captured much of the market’s interest. 2026 may represent the optimal window to convert that hyperbole into public capital before the excitement fades or regulation arrives. However, the capital required for all three to IPO will be substantial — enough to leave a question mark over whether all three will IPO.

2. Will an AI system exceed 85% on the key intelligence benchmark?

How do you measure the capability of an AI model? By using “benchmarks”: suites of tests that assess the model’s ability to solve a range of problems. The ARC-AGI-2 benchmark is widely regarded as the only test that effectively measures “fluid intelligence”: that is, the ability to learn and generalize from novel information. While large language models (LLMs) can pass the Bar Exam by reciting law, ARC-AGI requires them to solve abstract visual puzzles they have never seen before. The average human scores between 60-65% on the test. A score of 85% is generally seen as the threshold for AGI-level performance on this specific benchmark.

Earlier in 2025, no AI model scored more than 24% on ARC-AGI-2. But Poetiq AI, a system that acts as a “reasoning layer”, or wrapper, on top of existing frontier models like Gemini, recently scored 54%. The fact that a small team of six researchers could leverage existing models to originally break the 50% barrier suggests that the underlying intelligence of current models is yet to be fully exploited.

The view persists that LLMs are merely “clever parrots”, but if a model were to score 85% it would be an important development. In short, it would constitute powerful evidence that we are getting closer to creating a general reasoning model. This would likely trigger an acceleration in investment and add fuel to the concerns of those calling to regulate frontier AI models.

Some of our forecasters are bullish. They argue that if a wrapper can double performance in a few months, the integration of these reasoning techniques directly into the training of GPT-5 or Claude 4, the leading models produced by OpenAI and Anthropic, could easily bridge the gap to 85% in 2026. More skeptical forecasters argue that the curve will flatten; the jump to 54% picked the “low-hanging fruit” of reasoning, but the final 30% represents a fundamentally harder class of difficulty.

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3. Will a private fusion energy company achieve net energy gain?

Energy is the hard constraint on the AI revolution. Data centers, between them, are as hungry for energy as are small nations. As such, the search for a dense, clean, and scalable power source has intensified. Achieving “net energy gain” — that is, producing more energy from an experiment than is put into it — in a private facility would be an important milestone, for it would signal that fusion is transitioning from an experiment to an engineering and commercial problem. It would unlock substantial investment and could fundamentally alter the long-term projections for climate change, industrial capacity, and geopolitical energy dominance.

The probability for this event in 2026 remains low. The historical precedent is that technical progress consistently lags behind promised schedules. This precedent, understandably, weighs heavily on forecasts. But new developments contradict that pessimism. While only the government-run National Ignition Facility (NIF) has publicly achieved net energy gain, investors are piling capital onto attempts to repeat the feat in private facilities. Companies such as TAE Technologies, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, and Helion are deploying high-temperature superconducting magnets and advanced computational modeling that were unavailable a decade ago. For a private sector facility to achieve this would demonstrate fusion is becoming a commercially viable alternative to natural gas and fission — unlocking a scalable energy source that is capable of meeting the demands of the AI revolution.

A critical development to watch is the intersection of politics, media, and energy. Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) has announced a merger with TAE Technologies in a deal valued at over $6 billion. The combined entity aims to site its first utility-scale power plant next year. Devin Nunes, CEO of TMTG, has explicitly linked this move to “ensuring America’s AI supremacy” by providing the massive power required for future data centers.

While constructing a plant and achieving net gain are vastly different milestones, the aggressive timelines of private firms suggest that 2026 could see a breakthrough for private fusion. If a private company achieves what NIF did, but in a way that is commercially viable, the energy markets will price in a future of abundant power long before the first electron hits the grid.

4. Will Tesla deliver its first Optimus robot to paying customers?

While LLMs displace cognitive labor, humanoid robots target physical labor. Optimus is Tesla’s humanoid robot prototype. There are several hurdles to widespread commercial release of humanoid robots — with those problems including battery density and real-world motion and navigation — but if Optimus reaches the market, it would be a sign that humanoid robots have become commercially viable.

The implications for the labor market would be huge. Humanoid robots do not need breaks and are increasingly physically capable. If their dexterity and reliability improve, and the cost of running them comes down, then they will start to become serious competitors to human workers. Once a robot costs around $15/hour to operate, human wages for the equivalent tasks will be difficult for businesses to justify.

Elon Musk views Optimus as potentially more valuable than its car business, and competitors are on the march: companies like Agility Robotics and Figure AI are already running pilots in factories. Naturally, Swift Centre forecasters remain skeptical that mass adoption of humanoid robots will occur in 2026, viewing pilot programs within Tesla’s own factories as more likely than general retail availability. However, this is a crucial invention to watch in the months ahead.

5. The AI race: Will a Chinese company beat the US models?

The narrative of US leadership in AI is built on the assumption that export controls and superior talent will keep Western models ahead. However, if a Chinese company were to release an open-source model that beats Western closed models on a “time horizon” benchmark — which measures the ability of an AI to autonomously complete long, complex tasks — then the assumption of US leadership would be immediately weakened.

Already, the gap between US and Chinese models is closing faster than analysts anticipated. The next battleground isn’t just about chatbots that can write poetry. Instead, it is about “agency”: AI that can plan and execute complex tasks on its own. If a Chinese lab such as DeepSeek releases a model that tops the charts in autonomy, and gives that model away free of charge, that lab would be flooding the market with free, high-level intelligence. This would undercut the business models of the US tech giants and mean there was a real threat to the US’s leadership on frontier AI.

In short, it would prove that the US’s attempt to gatekeep the future is floundering, leaving Washington with next to no leverage and Silicon Valley with no monopoly. Swift Center forecasters are therefore closely watching AIs’ performance against the time horizon benchmark set by the AI evaluation organization METR.

Geopolitics

While technology seeks to drive the world into a new era, geopolitics in 2026 is defined by fragmentation and the conflicts of old. The post-Cold War order is fraying, and in its place is emerging a new round of protectionism, regional blocs, and raw power politics.

1. Will the Supreme Court strike down Trump’s emergency tariffs?

Since taking office, President Trump has leveraged emergency executive powers to impose broad trade tariffs, including a blanket 10% tariff on all global imports. The constitutional legality of these powers is now being tested in the US Supreme Court.

A Supreme Court ruling against Trump’s emergency tariffs would be a defining constitutional moment for the US in 2026. A strike-down could hamstring the administration’s economic agenda. It could also create chaos in global markets, for importers, having paid billions in import duties, will seek billions in refunds. Such a ruling would force the administration to seek alternative, and probably more aggressive, legal avenues to enforce their desire for protectionism.

Our forecasters note that this is a high-stakes legal battle with the potential for significant economic fallout. The administration argues that tariffs are a national security tool, citing precedents from the Nixon era. However, the Supreme Court has shown some resistance to executive overreach.

In response, the administration might use the Smoot-Hawley Act or the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to provide legal justification for tariffs, signaling that the trade war will continue regardless of the ruling. A defeat would have the additional significance of being framed by the administration as an abuse of power by the courts, hampering the economic will of the people. But a win for Trump would show just how powerful he has become.

2. Will Russia and Ukraine agree to an indefinite ceasefire or peace agreement?

A ceasefire in 2026 would redefine the security architecture of Europe. It would almost certainly leave Russia in control of significant Ukrainian territory, validating the use of force to redraw borders. It would also force difficult conversations about the lifting of sanctions, the reconstruction of Ukraine, and the future of Nato. Conversely, a failure to reach an agreement risks an embarrassment for the Trump administration while prolonging the human, economic, and financial costs of the war. It also prolongs the risk of the war escalating into a direct conflict between Nato and Russia.

A peace in 2026 is unlikely to be a true resolution. More likely is an “indefinite ceasefire” akin to the Korean Peninsula’s frozen conflict. This allows both sides to claim partial victory — or simply survival. The key variable to watch is the terms of security guarantees for Ukraine and how seriously they are enforced.

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3. Will Benjamin Netanyahu still be Prime Minister of Israel?

After two years of war in Gaza, and a shorter war between Iran and Israel, the Middle East is in a fractious state — with consequences for us all. Central to what happens next will be the political survival of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister who took Israel to war. His coalition relies on the Israeli far-Right, making a two-state solution or normalization with Saudi Arabia difficult if not near-impossible. If Netanyahu loses, the probable winner will be Naftali Bennett. Bennett’s path to victory will require a coalition with centrists and possibly Arab parties. The departure of Netanyahu could therefore create an opportunity for a diplomatic reset between Israel and its neighbors.

This year, Netanyahu faces both an election and the resolution of his corruption trial. While the polls currently show him losing to a centrist coalition, the Israeli opposition is fractured, and Netanyahu is a master campaigner. If Netanyahu survives 2026, he will probably move to finalize his overhaul of the judiciary. Specifically, he could seize control of the Judicial Selection Committee and pass the “Override Clause”, which would allow his government, if it has a majority in the Knesset, to ignore Supreme Court rulings. This would effectively end the independence of Israel’s judiciary, removing the last barrier to permanent annexation policies and shielding Netanyahu from his own corruption trial.

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4. Will Reform UK win the most seats in the 2026 Welsh Senedd and England local council elections?

While the world watches Washington, a quiet political earthquake is building in Wales. The 2026 Senedd elections will use a new voting system that swaps “First Past the Post” for “Closed List Proportional Representation”. Insurgent parties such as Reform UK are expected to benefit from this new system, for as they can convert vote share into seats more efficiently than under First Past the Post.

After 27 years of the Labour Party’s governance in Wales, there is a feeling of voter fatigue. Issues such as NHS waiting times and controversial 20mph speed limits have been highly unpopular with working-class voters, who are flocking to Reform UK. Reform, riding high on its local election victories and strong public polling, could take control of the Senedd in 2026, with Plaid Cymru being the other major horse in the race. If Reform, the Right-wing party led by the Brexiteer and MP Nigel Farage, wins the most seats, it would be a historic shock to the UK’s political system.

A victory for Reform in Wales would be more than just a headache for Keir Starmer, Rachel Reeves and Labour; it would be a resounding signal that the traditional Westminster parties are losing their grip on power. Just as voters in the US, France, and Germany have punished incumbents for perceived failures on immigration and economics, Welsh voters appear ready to reject the norm. If Labour loses the Senedd — a socialist citadel the party has held for nearly three decades — it would signal that there are no safe havens from the rising challenger parties. It would demonstrate that the disconnect between the governing class and the governed has reached a breaking point from which traditional parties may not recover.

5. Will the Iranian regime fall?

There is growing unrest in Iran over the soaring cost of living. Across social media there are numerous videos of cars being set on fire during running battles between protesters and security forces, with several deaths already being reported. Many protesters have called for ending the rule of the country’s Supreme Leader, while others have called for a return to the monarchy.

While street protests are not new to the Islamic Republic, the recent events signal a shift in the political risk. The coordinated strikes by the “Bazaar” (the conservative merchant class) represent a historic break between the regime and its traditional economic backbone. Student unrest is common; merchant class unrest less so. This signals a substantial shift in the risk of the unrest turning into a crisis that the Iranian government can’t control.

Already, the Islamic Republic faces difficulty in de-escalating the protests. This is because the driving force is not just inflation, but fiscal rigidity. The regime faces significant spending pressure following the return of UN sanctions and the costs of the 12-Day War with Israel in June. Reports suggest that projected oil revenues now cover only a fraction of administrative costs: perhaps as low as 5%. This forces a stark trade-off. Does the government concentrate funding on security, or on the maintenance subsidies that previously helped manage social unrest? Our forecasters have noted the government’s decision to close public offices in 26 provinces. Officially, the reason for this was “energy conservation”, but given the context of mild weather and the country possessing the world’s second-largest natural gas reserves, it instead suggests the state is running on empty.

On the Islamic Republic’s side is that it remains the strongest regional ally to China and Russia. Iran sends ~90% of its oil exports to China, and China is Iran’s largest trade partner. Iran is also the only country in the region actively and publicly supplying Russia with military equipment for the war in Ukraine. However, with Chinese demand for oil lessening, Beijing’s willingness to bail out Tehran may be waning.

Should the regime fall, the geopolitical realignment would be profound. It would represent a strategic victory for the United States and Israel, while dismantling a central pillar of Chinese and Russian influence in the Middle East. The fallout would be felt directly in Europe, where the loss of Tehran’s drone and missile supplies would damage Russia’s war effort in Ukraine. Regionally, Hezbollah and the Houthis would lose vital support, dramatically reducing their capability to continue destabilizing the region.

Collectively, as we look forward to what 2026 may bring, we see rapid technological advancements matched by growing geopolitical tensions. Yet the dawn of genuine stability across the Middle East may be breaking on the streets of Tehran.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right now, President Donald Trump’s policy towards Venezuela is running such a risk, and Trump, the consummate political stage director, knows it. His gun has been on the wall ever since he began his military buildup in the seas around Venezuela in late August. For the past several weeks, he has played for time by conducting a foreign policy reminiscent in its unpredictability of a fraternity hazing ritual. He has periodically threatened military strikes against targets in Venezuela, walked back those threats, claimed that President Nicolás Maduro’s regime needs to fall, and suggested a meeting with Maduro and brokering a deal. All the while, he has conducted periodic open-sea strikes on Venezuelan and Colombian drug boats.

But now, even from the perspective of an American public generally sympathetic to Maduro’s removal, the drama has gone on too long. Trump knows that in order both to save face internationally and to avoid American voters’ perception that he’s jerking them around, he needs to do something, soon. For Maduro, that makes the next few weeks exceptionally dangerous.

Trump’s first instinct is usually to use military threats to compel a deal — a deal that persuades a rogue state to follow a course better aligned with American interests. (In fact, the only case in which Trump has made public military threats and then followed through came this past June in his bombing of Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility.) But if Trump is still holding out for a deal that convinces Maduro to address his main concerns — to take a hard stand against drug and human trafficking — he will be disappointed. There is simply no peace deal that advances US interests to be had with the Maduro government. 

This is not primarily because the Venezuela of onetime bus driver Maduro, and his predecessor Hugo Chávez, is an untrustworthy partner, untrustworthy though it certainly is. The country expropriated ExxonMobil’s Venezuelan oil fields in 2007. A decade later, it compensated Exxon for a tenth of the fields’ worth, and only when compelled to by an international court. Given these circumstances, it would be reasonable for American leaders never to trust a Venezuelan Chavista regime again. But the main reason that no deal with Maduro can help the US is that he lacks the power to deliver on any of the promises Trump will be looking for.

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In today’s Venezuela, significant swaths of the country, including those most involved in the distribution of drugs, are functionally outside government control. In the country’s West, the Colombian National Liberation Army runs cocaine across the Colombian border and distributes it using local airstrips. Much of the country’s South, along the Brazilian border, is held by megabandas — that is, large and armed criminal groups — like El Tren de Aragua, which distribute drugs internationally. Even many territories involved in mining, which is Venezuela’s largest legal industry after oil, are functionally ungoverned. 

None of this means, of course, that government officials are not involved in Venezuela’s illegal commerce. The opposite is true — it’s their lifeblood. But it does mean that the Maduro government is not in a position to put a stop to any of it, even if Trump were to make them a very attractive deal. A government crackdown on drugs would mean pitched military confrontations between the cartels and a Venezuelan army that is undersupplied, underfed, badly commanded, and old. The chances that Maduro would take a chance at being humiliated, whatever he promises Trump, are slim.

There are many in the US government and media who still believe Maduro can effectively address Trump’s concerns over drug trafficking and migration if he chooses to. After all, they say, he has effectively remained in power for almost a decade and a half; he can’t be totally ineffectual. But such optimism displays a confusion between regime stability and regime effectiveness. 

While it is true that stable regimes typically achieve stability through the legitimacy accorded by effective governance, Maduro’s is an exception. His is a regime that is totally ineffective but surprisingly stable. Venezuela’s public safety, order, and social welfare system have broken down almost entirely, to the point that 30% of the country’s population has left during Maduro’s reign– for Colombia and destinations further abroad, including the U.S. Its economy hasn’t been stable enough even to report an annual GDP figure since 2014. And yet, last year Maduro managed quite easily to remain in office despite losing an election, marginalising his opposition while consolidating power.

Why? Because since the mid-2010s, Maduro has been running a criminal enterprise rather than a state government, and he runs that enterprise well. He has achieved stability by tying the fortunes of Venezuela’s military and civil power brokers so tightly to the country’s endemic graft, corruption and drug trade that they know they can only survive as long as Maduro remains in power. Hanging the sword of Damocles over the heads of all one’s rivals can be as powerful a guarantor of regime stability as democratic legitimacy itself. 

In this sense, President Trump is correct to call the Venezuelan government itself a sort of cartel, which the administration did two weeks ago when it designated the Cartel de los Soles (a Venezuelan colloquialism for Maduro’s graft-ridden government) a foreign terrorist organisation (FTO). Maduro’s government is not a cartel in the same sense that El Tren de Aragua is, but it is one insofar as its existence depends upon illegal commerce. 

It might be tempting for Trump to meet with Maduro, receive a grant of oil or mining concessions, and declare victory. But such concessions, as we know from ExxonMobil’s experience, would not be worth the paper they are printed on. Neither would a promise to crack down on the drug trade. The only near-term Trump-Maduro deal that could serve American interests would not be peaceful. It would not involve sanctions relief or a decrease in military pressure. It would be a deal in which the US military has free rein to attack drug distributors in Venezuela, and in exchange for Maduro’s non-interference, we leave him alone. But if that’s going to be the deal, why make a deal at all?

If Maduro had a slim chance of convincing Trump otherwise, he might have bungled it on Sunday. It was then that the Venezuelan National Assembly (controlled by Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela) announced that it would be conducting its own investigation into the Trump administration’s alleged second strike to kill survivors on a drug boat carrying Venezuelan nationals. The war crime allegations, first reported in the Washington Post, have ignited a media firestorm and spurred a US congressional investigation. Trump and his Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, have claimed to have no advance knowledge of the strike and have dismissed the story as a distraction. Further reporting by the New York Times has cast doubt on whether the second strike was intended to kill survivors (which would have been a war crime), as opposed to fully destroying the boat and drugs on board (perfectly legal under the laws of war). 

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Venezuela has reached its nadir

By John Masko

It is tempting for foreign adversaries, when the transparency of American democracy brings to light some scandal favourable to their case, to press their advantage by piling on. Those weaker adversaries who know how to negotiate with President Trump, however, do not do this. They know that there is no surer way to provoke the president’s ire than to make him look bad on the world stage. Instead, they garner his sympathy with public shows of flattery, modesty, and deference, even while holding to their own bottom line. No one understands this better than Vladimir Putin, whose handling of the American president is usually virtuosic.

Until recently, Maduro seemed to be following Putin’s playbook. He made no attempt to fight the legitimacy of the strikes, and did not even acknowledge that any of the boat’s crews were Venezuelan until last week. But with this most recent strike, the temptation for him to piggyback on the US. Congress’s own investigation seems to have been irresistible. Venezuela’s government has now not only admitted that there were Venezuelans aboard the boat, but launched its own investigation into the US’s purported criminal activity. The presumptuousness of this gesture is likely to infuriate Trump and drive him further away from the negotiating table. 

With no desirable deal on the horizon, Trump faces a strategic quandary. If his opening gambit was to persuade Maduro to leave office peacefully, through an overwhelming show of American force, that effort has clearly failed. With the magnitude of the US military buildup and the FTO designation for the Venezuelan government (an unprecedented move that opens possible legal justifications for regime change), it is hard to imagine any means by which Trump could further turn up the heat without ordering an actual attack. He ran up against the limits of his foreign-policy-by-threat this past weekend, when he attempted to declare, via his social media app Truth Social, that the airspace over Venezuela was closed — an announcement that the Maduro government denounced and then ignored.

Now that Maduro has called his bluff, what is Trump’s next step? Militarily, he has a few options. He could initiate a land strike against cartels operating in Venezuela’s South or West. This would be a logical extension of the drug boat strikes. Such a campaign might compel Maduro into making a deal that provides for continued American anti-drug policing in Venezuela. Alternatively, it could draw Maduro’s army into direct conflict with American troops, giving Trump a pretext for forcible regime change. Trump could also skip the formality of attacking cartels and instead attack Maduro directly with airstrikes or a ground assault, working with opposition leaders to install a post-Maduro government. Either of these options carry some risk of an Iraq-style “forever war”, should Venezuela’s opposition government prove unable to consolidate power.

The other option is a covertly-led coup. This option would likely offer a higher likelihood of post-regime-change stability than a direct American attack, and would demand less future involvement from the US. But given Maduro’s tight control over his inner circle, Trump may have to wait a long time for such a plot to come together. One can’t help but wonder whether, if such a coup had been immediately possible, it would have happened already. Either way, it is Trump’s move. 

Over the last few months, Trump has orchestrated a crescendo worthy of Beethoven’s most powerful symphonic finales. But big crescendos must lead somewhere; they cannot simply peter out. To make narrative sense, Chekhov’s gun must be fired. If Trump acts against Venezuela, either with an attack on Maduro’s regime or on the cartels he protects, he introduces uncertainties. Uncertainty as to what will follow — an orderly restoration under the leadership of dissidents like Nobel Laureate María Corina Machado, civil war, or something in between; and uncertainty over what American resources will be required, and for how long. 

But politically, the consequences of inaction at this late date would be worse. Over recent months, Trump has declared a great reversion in American strategy — from the Wilsonian aspiration of making the world safe for democracy to the Rooseveltian one of making the Western Hemisphere safe for the United States. He chose Venezuela as that strategy’s first proving ground. And if all it takes to stop that strategy is the obstinacy of a single South American crime-boss caudillo, Trump will have shown his administration to be worse than impotent. It will take years, and a new administration, for any foreign adversary to take such American pressure seriously again.

Trump, it would seem, has detected an opportunity to enthuse his evangelical supporters. But Nigeria’s troubles are about more than Trump, American politics, or simplistic “West versus Africa” narratives. Nigeria is a state that is failing at its most basic duty: protecting its citizens.

Tens of thousands have been killed in recent years by jihadist groups and various militias. In the past year alone, thousands more have died; 3.6 million Nigerians are internally displaced — more than the entire population of Qatar. Another 400,000 have fled the violence to neighboring Niger, Chad and Cameroon.

Whole villages have been razed, farms and schools abandoned for fear of violence. A kidnapping economy has metastasized into one of the most lucrative industries in the country; in some regions, families now expect to pay ransom as routinely as school fees. The violence is not episodic. It is systemic, grinding and national in scope. Life in vast swathes of the country is lived under constant threat.

Trump has characteristically oversimplified the crisis by framing it solely as Christians besieged by Islamist extremists. Yes, many Christians have been murdered for being Christians, in churches. But the violence is often, if not always, indiscriminate, and Muslims have also been killed in large numbers. Many attacks are driven by resource disputes and opportunistic criminality wrapped in religious rhetoric.

In Nigeria’s northwestern region alone, there are over two dozen major criminal groups whose activities involve violent robberies, the extortion of motorists, kidnappings for ransom, and illegal mining. As the African Center for Strategic Studies has noted: “Even though they sometimes call on God during attacks or while making propaganda videos, these criminal gangs do not discriminate against their targets based on religious affiliation.” For these particular groups, Islamism is more of a useful rallying cry to lure recruits than their core activity, and Muslims are just as likely to suffer violence at their hands. Moreover, considering 46% of Nigerians — 133 million people — live in extreme poverty, scarcity is a defining feature of everyday Nigerian life. This fuels a fierce competition for resources that can sometimes spill into intercommunal violence that is more driven by socioeconomics than identities. And the Nigerian government cannot, and will not, bring an end to the anarchy. Nigeria is not simply living through religious war — it is living through state abandonment.

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Anti-racists are patronising Africa

By Remi Adekoya

In fairness, the Nigerian government faces immense challenges in combating insecurity. With a population of 230 million, four times that of Britain, Nigeria is policed by some 370,000 underfunded, under-equipped officers. For comparison, Britain has 170,000 better equipped officers. Nigeria’s military, meanwhile, is stretched thin, fighting jihadists and various armed militias across the country. Even the most capable government would struggle under these conditions.

Still, acknowledging these challenges does not absolve Nigeria’s rulers of responsibility. There is something revealing about the reflexive response from some Nigerian officials and Western media eager to “correct” Trump by emphasizing that Muslims are also dying. The implication is perverse: that a representative distribution of victims somehow redeems the Nigerian state. That Trump is exaggerating. “Yes, thousands have been killed,” the BBC reports, “but there is no evidence Christians are disproportionately targeted.”

Imagine that logic being applied to Britain: that mass murder is somehow less of a crisis if all faiths are represented in the body count. This is the modern version of the old racist shrug: “Just the usual violence in Africa.” Regrettable but normal, nothing to get all worked up about.

The Nigerian government’s official response to Trump’s threat has been to invoke Nigeria’s “sovereignty.” The problem is not with the principle itself, but with how it is being invoked as a shield not for Nigeria’s people, but for its rulers.

It is an easy tactic: the principle of sovereignty retains a quasi-religious aura despite the sometimes questionable outcomes of its practice for regular people. It brings to mind autonomy, dignity and resistance to foreign domination. That is why corrupt elites enthusiastically exploit its emotional power to divert attention from their negligence. Sovereignty has been used as a license for governments to neglect or, in extreme cases like North Korea, even kill their own citizens: after all, the argument goes, no one outside has the right to question what happens inside our borders. Meanwhile, the ordinary Nigerian buries children, pays ransoms, flees farms, and lives with the terrible knowledge that their government will not come to save them.

The contrast between Nigerian rulers’ rhetoric of sovereignty and their actions would be comic if it were not tragic. They decry Western meddling while sending their children to Western schools, stashing the funds they have looted in Western banks, and jetting off to Western hospitals after a sneeze. Nigeria’s current president Bola Tinubu prefers French hospitals, which he regularly visits, over those he oversees in Nigeria. His predecessor, Muhammadu Buhari, favored London hospitals, eventually dying in one of them earlier this year. Nigeria’s rulers don’t trust Nigerian hospitals with their own care because they know they have grossly neglected and underfunded them. Where is their patriotism on this front? Can anyone imagine a French president or British prime minister jetting off to a foreign country anytime they needed medical care? What would that say about the seriousness of French or British “sovereignty” Nigeria’s political rulers, who have usually built fabulous levels of wealth through corrupt practices in politics, speak of reliance and national pride while moving around in heavily-armored convoys that speed past the insecurity endured by the citizens they govern.

In healthy democracies, mass killings trigger reckoning — inquiries, resignations, reform. In Nigeria, they trigger wooden statements of condolence from the government and little more. Nigerians complain that sometimes even these perfunctory presidential condolences take a while coming after mass killings. The political classes accept the violence because it does not touch them. They are secure behind their layers of security. And the consequences of their hypocrisy are visible in polling that would alarm the leaders of any genuine democracy: 83% of Nigerians today say they have little or no trust in President Tinubu’s government; 82% say the same of the legislature while 79% distrust the judiciary.

Nigeria’s institutions have been hollowed out by state capture and patronage. Elections are routinely rigged and manipulated. The system is not corrupt; corruption is the system. A democracy becomes a “shadow state” — to borrow the phrase of the political scientist William Reno — when informal power networks and elite interests override institutions. The corruption directly fuels insecurity: funds designated for counterterrorism efforts are often embezzled by senior military officials, undermining the entire exercise. In such systems, insecurity is not an aberration; it is a constant. And it is treated as a crisis only if it threatens the survival of elites.

So why, among the general indiscriminate violence, are Nigerian Christians so often attacked, with impunity, for being Christians? It is because the country’s rulers calculate that Christians are less likely than Muslims to respond to violence with more violence and large-scale violence. Conventional wisdom in Nigeria has it that the country’s Muslims, especially its more fervent faithful concentrated in the northern regions, are volatile if they perceive any threat to their faith. So, if the situation were reversed, and Christian terrorists were regularly slaughtering Muslims in Mosques, Nigeria’s government would be seriously concerned that a full-scale religious war could erupt. They would move more swiftly to apprehend the Christian attackers to placate Muslims, if only for the self-preservative motive of fearing they might lose control of the situation completely.

Nigeria’s Christians, meanwhile, are seen as less likely to respond with mass violence to attacks on them by jihadists, and so in the brutal arithmetic of Nigeria’s rulers, their killings are more ignorable. They are not seen as representing a threat to elite survival. Life is disturbingly cheap in the eyes of Nigeria’s ruling class — especially when that life belongs to the poor and the powerless. Contrary to their rhetoric, they simply do not place the same premium on human life as Western, and many other governments do. This is often the case in too many other African states.

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By Wessie du Toit

Tinubu, Nigeria’s current president, once forfeited $460,000 to US authorities to avoid further investigation into his alleged links to drug trafficking. He once famously told his supporters, “Power is not served à la carte. Fight for it, grab it and run with it.” This is hardly the language of a guardian of noble principles. It is high time the world started distinguishing between the people of Nigeria and a political class that claims to speak for them. This is especially true if that political class often attains its positions of power through manipulated and sometimes openly rigged elections, as Tinubu himself is accused of doing. Elite sovereignty without accountability is but impunity draped in a flag.

None of this means the answer lies in American boots on Nigerian soil. Military interventions in Africa usually produce more damage than solutions. The 2011 NATO-led intervention in Libya which led to the overthrow of the government of Muammar Gaddafi and subsequent disintegration of Libya readily comes to mind. Nigerians and Africans generally are rightly allergic to paternalism masquerading as humanitarianism. But the rejection of foreign intervention cannot become the acceptance of perpetual slaughter. That is why it is good that Trump is ramping up pressure on Nigeria’s rulers to tackle insecurity more energetically. He should bring maximum pressure to bear on them in this regard, including personal sanctions. They need to believe that not acting could potentially trigger US actions that would cost them their power and privileges. Their self-preservative instincts are the only plausible pathway towards making them take action to properly fund and equip Nigeria’s security forces, curb the corruption that fuels insecurity and address the socioeconomic deprivation that makes recruitment into violent groups so easy.

Nigerians deserve the same safety as Britons or Americans. If “sovereignty” is to mean anything, it must begin with the right of citizens not to be hunted in their own homes. States do not exist to be sovereign. They exist to provide their citizens an environment that is safe and enabling of their prosperity. Sovereignty is merely supposed to be the best means to achieving those ends.

For too long, cynical leaders in Nigeria have used the language of national pride while behaving as though the state is their personal estate. They invoke the ghost of foreign domination to deflect attention from domestic plunder. Yes, Trump’s comments were self-serving. Yes, they were framed to please an American evangelical constituency. Yes, one can question why he is not considering US intervention to stop the larger-scale slaughter currently ongoing in Sudan, for instance. But to downplay Nigeria’s ongoing crisis because one dislikes the messenger is not going to help the four million Nigerians currently too afraid to return to their homes. Their suffering will not be eased by diplomatic platitudes, nor by misguided military intervention. One need not trust Trump or American foreign policy to recognize that a government not protecting its citizens should not be able to hide behind flags and slogans indefinitely. From this point of view, anyone putting unignorable pressure on the Nigerian government to finally do its job is doing a good thing.

In architecture, monumentalism means power and historical significance. Think of the Egyptian pyramids, which were constructed as elaborate tombs for the pharaohs, and our own Mount Rushmore. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum, the American-born son of Danish immigrants, conceived the idea of using jackhammers and dynamite to carve the faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln into the Black Hills of South Dakota. “American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life,” Borglum said. He wanted to memorialize America’s greatness in a way that would stand the test of time.

As a political movement, monumentalism is a policy agenda that commemorates people, events, and ideas — it conserves public memory for the next generation. The current moment, more than perhaps any other point in American history, calls for aggressive monumentalism. Since at least the Sixties, progressives have waged a multi-front war on public memory. 

They have undermined our system of education, rejected Christianity’s presence in national life, and insisted that America is irredeemably flawed. Supreme Court rulings in 1947 and 1962 effectively ended the centuries-long presence of Christian ideals in public education. Thereafter, activists filled the gap left by Christianity’s absence with leftist ideology. By some estimates, Howard Zinn’s famously controversial A People’s History of the United States (1980) is now used in as many as one-in-four high school history classes. Zinn, a self-described anarchist-socialist, deliberately ignored any historical facts that would have hindered his portrayal of America as a genocidal, imperialist, plutocratic ethnostate. But even if such attacks on cultural memory had already been going on for decades, the year 2020 was the Left’s Year Zero. 

After George Floyd’s death, monuments across the country were demolished, defaced, and desecrated. Remember the enthusiastic dismantling of statues of Confederates like General Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. Progressives cheered the attacks, claiming that the monuments were emblematic of “systemic racism.” But the city of Richmond, Virginia created the monuments to reintegrate the nation in the aftermath of a bloody civil war. In destroying them, progressives reopened old (and mostly healed) wounds.

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By John Michael Greer

The iconoclasm that erupted in 2020 does not just target memorials to the Confederacy. In Rochester, New York, the seat of the 19th-century anti-slavery movement, a statue of Frederick Douglass, who called the city his home, was toppled. The rioters tried to throw it into the Genesee River. Why? Because when progressives attack American monuments, they aren’t targeting particular memories of history. They are trying to wipe away all of it, and replace national memories with false ones, which they conjure in the public mind by erecting new monuments to the symbols of their revolution. So, as monuments to Thomas Jefferson were felled, statues of George Floyd were raised.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project was an effort to replace the memory of the birth of our nation in 1776 with a fictitious founding in 1619, when the first ship of captured Africans came to our shores. The authors’ goal was to change America by changing how Americans remember the past. Their license to do so depended on humiliating the public, and convincing American citizens that their history had nothing worth remembering.

As the cultural revolutionaries laid waste to public memory, it wasn’t immediately clear how to counteract their efforts. While previous generations of Americans built up the nation in a monumentalist spirit, that spirit has been draining out of public life for decades. Perhaps because, in the years after the end of the Second World War, the past had been sufficiently memorialized: it lived in the hearts of all Americans. But the pride and triumphalism of one generation were replaced by the cynicism of the next. The political Left began to aggressively erase public memory — particularly through revision of school curricula. After that, many Americans no longer agreed upon what, specifically, we ought to remember. 

Donald Trump had some ideas. Trump didn’t become a monumentalist once he reached the presidency — he always was one. A teetotaler who seldom appears in public without make-up on his face, Trump is what Russians call a muzhik, a man’s man. He is brash, aggressive, and relishes a challenge. Before the self-proclaimed “builder president” was in a position to commission new monuments, he was building his own. Trump’s buildings in cities like Atlantic City and Las Vegas were maximalist in style and ambition, paying tribute to wealth, luxury, and risk. His first great works transformed the skyline of Manhattan. And, of course, Trump’s skyscrapers were also monuments to Trump himself. They were grand, gold-plated, and lavishly embellished. Before building Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, Trump purchased the air rights of a neighbouring property to prevent anyone from building a skyscraper that would block his views. He wanted “soaring picture windows versus tiny ones, an aesthetic consideration that was of the utmost importance”, as he wrote in his book Never Give Up. 

But as his political career began in earnest, Trump directed his attention to creating monuments that memorialized America itself: our heroes, our victories, and our history. Trump made tentative monumentalist gestures in his first term. The 1776 Commission, an advisory body tasked by the president with creating strategies for delivering a patriotic education, was a laudable effort to combat the damnatio memoriae embodied by the 1619 Project. As he prepared to hand the presidency to Joe Biden, Trump issued an executive order to establish a “National Garden of American Heroes” consisting of statues of the most notable figures from our history. But when Biden took office, he (or his surrogates) issued an executive order revoking Trump’s plan.

Trump’s second term puts monumentalism at the heart of the agenda. On day one of his second term, Trump signed a memorandum (eventually formalized in an executive order titled “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again”) which directs that federal public buildings should respect “classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” Trump embraced a style of architecture that originated in democratic Athens and republican Rome, not necessarily because he prefers order, proportion, and symmetry, but because this particular style is a symbol of America’s founding principles. 

The recently-passed “Big Beautiful Bill” sets aside funding to ensure the National Garden of American Heroes will be completed. And several of Trump’s other executive actions demonstrate his commitment to conserving public memory, including one that orders the Secretary of the Interior to take action if “since January 1, 2020, public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of Interior’s jurisdiction have been removed or changed to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history, inappropriately minimize the value of certain historical events or figures, or include any other improper partisan ideology.”  

Unsurprisingly, Trump’s actions have drawn criticism from progressives, who argue that he is monumentalizing a nation that no longer exists. They point out that the United States had fewer than five million people at its founding, most of them white and Christian. Today, the country’s population is 350 million people of every race and creed, and the critics claim that a coherent, common identity called “American” is impossible to achieve in such a diverse nation.

But the Declaration of Independence exposes such claims as lies. Americans are not defined by skin color, or wealth, or religion, but by life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — unalienable rights which the government must secure. The commonality of American citizens remains rooted in these fundamental principles envisioned and articulated 250 years ago. 

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In America, new organizations dedicated to this work are springing up. One such group called More Monuments is explicitly devoted to hastening an “American Renaissance” by “commission[ing] landmark monuments and awe-inspiring megastructures that define a new era of American craftsmanship.” On 4 July 2026, the 250th birthday of the nation, More Monuments will unveil a 650-foot tall “Colossus of George Washington.” The public, too, seems to have a renewed appetite for monumentalism: a viral movement to clean the Statue of Liberty has been gaining steam.

The new monumentalism that is unfolding is not limited to the United States. Burgeoning political movements in Europe, represented by parties such as AfD and the Sweden Democrats, are aimed at recovering traditional European culture by remembering the history of distinct European peoples. Unsurprisingly, the iconoclasts working to erase European history read the monumentalist effort to safeguard public memory as a kind of bigotry. It’s nothing of the sort, but they are right to fear it. 

The damage wrought by the Left’s attack on memory demands that patriotic writers and artists create new monuments that are worthy of a monumental people. Their task, which we might call a Great Remembering, is to transmit the nation’s traditions and values to future generations, ensuring that young Americans and immigrants to this country can look upon our monuments and read the record we have made. In doing so, we will restore the public’s fading memory of the great lives and historical triumphs that have shaped our way of life. 

One hundred years ago, Gutzon Borglum pointed to Mount Rushmore and said: “America will march along that skyline”. What moves the country forward is not the free market or the federal government, but individuals striving after their heroes. Only time will tell if Donald Trump becomes the fifth face carved into Mount Rushmore. 

The phrase “sleeping with an elephant” has come to define US-Canadian relations in the minds of many Canadians. But since President Trump launched his second term in Oval Office, the elephant has been neither friendly nor even-tempered. In fact, its twitches and grunts have recently become more like angry kicks and menacing roars, especially with Trump’s imposition of a 25% tariff on most goods from Canada.

Rather than meek acceptance, however, the response in Canada has been a surge of nationalist sentiment. Only, at the helm of this patriotic revival is a new prime minister, Mark Carney, for whom the substance of Canadian identity amounts to little more than . . . globalism, multiculturalism, and liberal proceduralism.

Trump has offered varied justifications for his punishing tariffs. He alleges an uncontrolled stream of illegal immigrants and fentanyl pouring across the border, notwithstanding the Canadian government’s serious efforts at interdicting such flows. He is on much firmer ground when he points to the trade imbalance between the two countries, with Canada running a significant trade surplus with the United States; about 20% of what Canada produces is consumed by Americans.

At a meeting in Mar-a-Lago, Justin Trudeau, the recently ousted prime minister, protested that such tariffs would “kill the Canadian economy”, eliciting from Trump a suggestion that Canada would be better off as the 51^st state. This line was initially heard by most people as a jest, but Trump has become fixated on the idea. Remarks about the US-Canadian border as an “artificially drawn line” have fueled fears that his real endgame is annexation.

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Perhaps Trump is just trolling, something that certainly wouldn’t be out of character for him. But a recent post on his Truth Social website signals that he may mean business. “The only thing that makes sense is for Canada to become our cherished Fifty First State”, he wrote. “This would make all Tariffs, and everything else, totally disappear”. Trudeau, for one, takes Trump at his word, stating that he believes the real aim of the tariffs is nothing less than “a total collapse of the Canadian economy because that will make it easier to annex us”.

Trump’s tariffs and his annexation rhetoric have had consequences that he surely did not intend. Canadians have never been big flag-wavers, but sales of Canadian flags have skyrocketed, American liquors are being pulled from store shelves, grocery stores are slapping labels on domestically produced items, and many people are scrapping travel plans to the United States. A movement to boycott US goods is underway.

The tariffs have also been a godsend to the governing Liberal Party. Trudeau’s plummeting approval ratings threatened to deliver his party a crashing defeat in the election to be held later this year. But when Trudeau’s unpopularity prompted his resignation, the Liberals were forced to replace him as party leader and prime minister. Mark Carney, an economist and banker with no previous experience in elected office, won in a landslide in the party vote. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the Liberals are now inching their way back up in the polls, though they still face a steep uphill climb.

Carney’s victory speech on 9 March tapped into the rising nationalist sentiment. Switching back and forth from English to French, Canada’s two official languages, he called out Trump for “trying to weaken our economy”. But more than the Canadian economy is at stake, he warned: “The Americans want our resources, our water, our land, our country. If they succeed, they will destroy our way of life.”

What exactly did Carney mean by the phrase “our way of life”? Hockey, maple syrup, Tim Hortons, and politeness come to mind. But the features of Canadian identity that Carney highlighted were all political or institutional, such as universal health care and the country’s strong tradition of social programs and wealth redistribution. He also lauded Canada’s much-vaunted policy of multiculturalism: “America is a melting pot. Canada is a mosaic.”

“America is not Canada. And Canada never, ever, will be part of America in any way, shape, or form”, he declared to an enthusiastic audience. He made it clear that the future of Canada now depends on pivoting away from economic integration with the United States to seek more “reliable” trading partners.

Carney also sought to attach the odor of Trump to the opposition party, insinuating that the Conservative standard-bearer Pierre Poilievre “worships at the altar of Donald Trump”. To accuse Poilievre of kneeling before the US president may be an overstatement, but he has voiced support for many of Trump’s policies and has a reputation of being cozy with MAGA types. He recently accepted the endorsement of Elon Musk, an action that may come back to bite him.

Still, Carney is an unlikely champion of Canadian nationalism. Born in the Northwest Territories, he spent most of his adult life outside Canada, studying at Harvard and Oxford, then working for Goldman Sachs in London, New York, and Tokyo. After a stint as the governor of the Bank of Canada, he in the same role at the Bank of England. He holds both British and Irish citizenship, making him an EU citizen.

From the perspective of nationalism, it is noteworthy that he stoked controversy at the helm of the Bank of England when, prior to the Brexit vote, he decried leaving the European Union as the “biggest domestic risk to financial stability”. Many interpreted his remark as a political intervention that overstepped his job description.

Carney also has strong ties to globalist elites, with memberships in the G30, the World Economic Forum, and the Bilderberg Group. In short, he is the quintessential Davos Man, a cosmopolitan technocrat and financial bureaucrat with a newfound fondness for nationalist rhetoric.

Arguably, what Carney defends as “our way of life” is a vision of Canadians as good global citizens pulling their weight within the rules-based international order that Trump seeks to dismantle. As Canadian political scientist Tyler Chamberlain has observed, “Canadian identity is bound up very closely with multilateralism, international organizations, and free trade. That’s the kind of nationalism that is playing well today”. Meanwhile, Canadians watch American television, cheer American sports teams, and “think like Americans in many ways that really matter — but we have health care.”

Carney is a specimen of what Canadian political philosopher Ron Dart calls liberal nationalism, which is of relatively recent vintage, the chief precedent for the present moment being Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s trade disputes with Richard Nixon. “Liberal nationalism usually emerges from a position taken by the United States at a given moment that threatens certain elements of the Canadian economy”, says Dart. It tends to be reactive and narrowly focused on economics.

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It differs from what Dart calls High Tory nationalism, “which comes from a much deeper grounding in the Canadian soul”. Its most prominent exponent in the 20^th century was the philosopher George Parkin Grant, but it harks back to the founding of Canada as a nation that sought to preserve British and French traditions that were foreign to the society taking shape in the United States. Instead of placing a premium on liberty and individualism, like the Americans, the Canadian High Tory tradition aspired to a more orderly society oriented toward the common good of the whole.

Over time, however, Canada was transformed into what Grant called a “branch plant satellite” of the United States, a supplier of raw materials to the superpower that had emerged postwar as the “spearhead” of the dynamic liberal capitalist order. As early as 1965, Grant lamented that Canada was ceasing to exist as a sovereign nation. Dependent on the United States for both markets and defense, Canada was being absorbed, culturally and economically, into the behemoth to its south. Canada’s formal political independence might still persist for some time, Grant thought, but only due to a kind of inertia.

Grant believed that Canada was being swallowed up into an emerging global order helmed by the American hegemon. In a surprising twist, the American republic that now threatens Canadian sovereignty is a nation in open revolt against that liberal hegemonic order. Living within the gravitational field of the United States, Canada has always retained ties to its older roots in Europe. Ironically, Trump is now forcing Canada to become more internationalist in the name of Canadian nationalism.

But Dart believes this current upsurge of liberal nationalism is shallow. Though intensely felt at the moment, it is also likely to be ephemeral, lasting only as long as MAGA’s reign, since it is motivated by an external threat rather than a living memory of older Canadian traditions. “If you have no memory of anything”, he says, “then what holds you together? What holds Canadians together at this point is anti-Trumpism.”

Many of us have wondered the same thing about the tens of thousands of consultants and paper pushers embedded in America’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” complex. According to data compiled by the research firm Coresignal, nearly 43,000 people were employed in DEI-related roles last year, up from 35,000 in 2022. That means America was on track to have more DEI specialists than commercial airline pilots (56,000) in the coming years.

But we know what pilots do. What exactly do DEI apparatchiks do all day in Anno Domini 2025? We may soon find out.

Last week, President Trump issued his own Severance of sorts. On 22 January, federal DEI employees were placed on paid administrative leave “effective immediately”. As a result, many are being flung back into the private economy at an inopportune time. DEI initiatives had already been hemorrhaging support in the C-Suite and among rank-and-file workers over the past two years; the private sector might soon be just as much of a DEI dead end as the government.

I don’t want to sound flippant about mass layoffs. Losing your job sucks, and extirpating DEI from the government is a mission Team Trump has taken up with McCarthyite zeal. It may cut too deeply. Trump’s decree also revoked the 1965 Lyndon B. Johnson order that created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC was tasked with preventing unlawful job discrimination “without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin” in the private and public sectors; ending it could have plenty of negative consequences, intended or not.

Here’s the thing, though: the modern DEI state isn’t a righteous flowering of the decades-old civil-rights movement; it’s a four-year-old tumorous outgrowth of panicky progressive paranoia about identity politics. LBJ and MLK would probably snicker if they knew that the main mission of contemporary DEI departments isn’t economic redistribution, but fussily policing the language and manners of college-educated professionals.

DEI is a relatively novel bureaucratic form invented whole cloth by the enlightened liberals of the white-collar world in the summer of 2020 (who says America can’t invent anything new anymore?). After the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, there was a dizzying moment when everyone seemed to be asking, “What can I do to stop racism”? Or more precisely: “How can the Best Buy chain of electronics stores stop racism”?

The lanyard class in board rooms, college campuses, and nongovernmental organizations all over the country responded in the only way they knew how: by creating new bullshit jobs.

The anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 coined the pithy phrase “bullshit jobs” to describe the rebirth of medieval feudalism in the modern corporate world, with the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. Bullshit jobs are the polar opposite of “shit jobs” that are disproportionately blue-collar, paid by the hour, and performed by the serfs. Bullshit jobs tend to be held by the college-educated lords. They’re salaried, sometimes generously, but have little social utility. Graeber said that they are “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”.

The longer your job title is, and the harder it is to explain what you do to a stranger, the greater the chance that your job is superfluous. So it goes with DEI “experts” hired to enrich the workplace with diversity and equity — the latter is a fuzzy term that even Bernie Sanders threw up his hands when asked to define.

Exactly how full of shit are DEI jobs?

Graeber’s taxonomy places bullshit jobs into five categories: Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers, and Taskmasters. DEI jobs could fit all five conceivably.

Consider Flunkies (workers whose purpose is to make their superiors feel important) and Goons (those who deceive others on behalf of their employers). Since the rise of DEI, executives grilled about their anti-racism initiatives by the media can simply gesture vaguely at their middle-management DEI Flunkies and walk away. The Goons are the ones mystifying what they do via the dark arts of public relations. Brands could wallpaper over bad behavior like union-busting by appearing to be Taking a Stand for social justice, even if they weren’t quite sure what that meant or what came next after all that standing.

I say this as a former Goon. In 2022, I did some contract work for a small ad agency hired to do DEI-related anti-racist campaigns. The company was helmed by a black woman, who outsourced much of the creative work to freelancers like myself. There was something bitterly ironic about being a straight white guy whose job was to design woke social-media posts — for Pfizer, among others — about the importance of celebrating Juneteenth. But that job was the kind of grift that helps disguise the fact that the whole DEI world is smoke and mirrors.

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The same goes for the people Graeber considered “Box tickers” — those who create the appearance that something useful is being done, when it emphatically isn’t. Will your company unionize or provide your employees with better health care? No, but how about promoting a Queer BIPOC Awareness Day? When I was a reporter covering Atlanta’s public-school system in 2023, I was puzzled by the fact that the district was spending $3.5 million a year on DEI. If your student population is 72% black, what does it mean to diversify it? Were white and Asian children “underrepresented”? No one could tell me. Additionally, three-quarters of Atlantic public-school students couldn’t even read at grade level. But why teach kids how to read when you can “uplift Indigenous voices” instead?

Likewise, “Taskmasters” are the bullshit-job artists who create extra work for those who don’t need it, and that’s what DEI seems to do best. For four years, white-collar office workers have endured the same self-serious seminars on pronouns and “unconscious bias”, and have had to pretend to care about self-congratulatory “awareness” days with social-justice-y slogans. It was all premised on the theory that the way to beat racism is to be hyper-aware of race at all times — the rough equivalent of being told to treat intrusive thoughts about the possibility of death by moving into a cemetery. So, it’s no surprise that a growing body of research shows that DEI undermines diversity, rather than strengthening it.

To make matters worse for out-of-work DEI professionals, corporate America has been cutting back on all bullshit jobs recently amid a surge of consolidation, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the growing realization that many remote workers and middle managers weren’t adding much value. So will there be sufficient demand in other fields for someone in a suit who can lead dour Robin DiAngelo “White Fragility” support groups or write passive-aggressive emails to those using the term “pregnant women” rather than “birthing people” on Slack? That’s anyone’s guess.

Back in the Obama days, those whose hard-hat jobs were outsourced or automated away were told to “learn to code” and join the information economy. But now that the blue-collar sector is hot, maybe it’s time to tell ex-DEI workers: learn to hammer.

Donald Trump is a master at disrupting stale bipartisan orthodoxies and remaking the politics of familiar issues. He did so with free trade and industrial policy in his first term, forcing even the Biden administration to adopt his views. This time around, his tough stance on the border, which helped him win in November, may form the next consensus. America’s mental-health crisis — recently highlighted by a string of horrific attacks in the New York subway system — presents another such opportunity.

That crisis consists of the four million or so adults with untreated serious mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The result is homelessness, mass shootings, random subway violence, and incarceration, especially in Democratic areas that shifted sharply to the Right in the 2024 election. Trump can disrupt and realign the status quo — provided he ignores small-government zealots in his own camp. 

The mental-health crisis stems more from partisan agreement than disagreement. In his hit 2023 book, The Best Minds, author Jonathan Rosen noted that “Left and Right often met at the gates of the asylum.” He was referring to how, back in the 1960s, the deinstitutionalisation of the mentally ill was a joint effort of fiscal conservatives and progressive civil libertarians: the former shuttering mental hospitals in the name of austerity, the latter for autonomy’s sake. In the six decades that followed, the number of psychiatric beds nationally dropped to 35,000 down from 560,000.

That coalition still controls mental health-policy six decades later. Reformers and relatives of the seriously mentally ill have long called for allowing Medicaid, America’s public-insurance programme for the poor, to fund care in specialised psychiatric hospitals. Yet the move has long been opposed by a coalition of Republicans, who believe it would cost too much money, and Democrats, who worry that it would risk mass re-institutionalisation.

Enter Trump, whose first term mental-health agenda was underrated. Trump appointed a dedicated change agent as his mental health czar and weakened (if not removed) restrictions on the use of Medicaid for psychiatric hospitalisation. A second Trump administration raises hopes of further progress.

One reason to be optimistic about mental health is that the Trump-led GOP is less fiscally conservative than previous iterations. Greenlighting Medicaid funding for more adult beds in specialised psychiatric hospitals would cost $3 billion to $4 billion a year. This cost should be owned up to. Yes, savings could be realised from reduced spending on jails and homeless services and a serious reform agenda would slash funding for the numerous and pointless wellness programmes within the federal mental health budget.

Yet to DOGE-ify the discourse on mental health would risk repeating the mistakes of the past. One of the original sins of deinstitutionalisation was the belief that serious mental illness could be treated on the cheap. We learned the hard way that it wasn’t enough to offer meds and benefits to former asylum patients and expect them to take matters in hand from there. Schizophrenia is a chronic condition, characterised by episodic emergencies that necessitate extended supervision. Real reform will require a bigger mental-health budget. Hospitalisation, particularly, is an expensive intervention if we want to ensure high standards of care.

Sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. As blue-city voters complain and the data show, public transit and street conditions have recently worsened. In last November’s election cycle, some high profile progressive prosecutors were voted out of office, and Californians passed Proposition 36, which strengthened penalties for low-level crimes. The proposition’s nearly 40-point pass margin signals that the politics of law and order are almost as popular in California as Donald Trump is in West Virginia.

Treating serious mental disorders and fighting crime are different government functions. But the reality is that a Democrat who votes to crack down against retail theft will likely also support a more paternalistic turn in mental health. Paternalism needn’t, and almost surely won’t, mean the return of the asylum order. Every Western nation deinstitutionalised its mentally ill, and none has brought back former asylum systems.

Community-based mental health will remain central, but nestled within that system must be a more robust stock of psych beds than is currently available to the seriously mentally ill Americans. And many forms of paternalism stop short of hospitalisation, such as programmes that mandate outpatient treatment programs, such as mental-health courts and New York’s Kendra’s Law, which gives judges the power to order people to receive care.

Bipartisan policymaking used to be more common in America. It was dealt a fatal blow by Democrats, 15 years ago, when they overrode traditional legislative norms to ram through ObamaCare. We’ve forgotten the old model’s two attractions: bipartisan reforms give cover to politicians facing competitive reelection races — and they’re more sustainable in the long term. When the backbench party wins power, it won’t immediately set itself to undoing the previous administration or Congress’s achievements, because their fingerprints are on those achievements, or some of them.

The framing is crucial. Untreated serious mental illness tends to be seen as an “urban” problem, in a way that harms the chances of federal-level reform. New York City plays a large role in this conception because of its media profile and the fact that most everyone uses public transit, thus bringing the broader population into direct contact with the unsheltered homeless in all their untreated acuity.

In most of the country, where private transportation is the norm, the crisis of mental illness is more hidden. But it strikes rich families, such as Sam Altman’s, as well as the poor, and those in rural America, where housing may be cheaper but psychiatrists and other specialists are practically non-existent.

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Families are one group for whom the mental-health crisis is not at all hidden. The community-based system in many respects is really a family-based system. Government assigns to families supervisory functions that, in decades past, were handled by massive asylum programmes.

Caring for an adult schizophrenic child entails interminable fights over taking meds and not taking street drugs. They’re prone to paranoia but also to trusting too much, making them easy prey for malefactors such as drug dealers and financial scammers. They can be irrationally risk-prone or overcautious to an extreme. The strange hours, hoarding, atrocious hygiene habits, and property damage: mental illness overwhelms family caregivers. It also sometimes makes them victims of violence. One 2016 study estimated that the seriously mentally ill commit more than 1,000 family homicides each year. Most matricides and patricides involve serious mental illness.

To promote reform, we should frame untreated serious mental illness as more of a family problem than an urban one. Thinking about how government may best support family caregivers is the most coherent way to build an effective mental-health system, one that anticipates crises before tragedy strikes.

Perhaps that framing may also build more support among Republicans, the party of family values. In terms of the policy, a realignment on mental health should be structured around more spending on services for the seriously mentally ill and more paternalism. New York and other major cities would benefit. But they would be far from the only beneficiaries.