Trump’s presidency has now entered its most dangerous phase. With little left to lose after an earth-shaking midterm wipeout, he is released from political restraint. He has accepted the result with apparent grace, dismissing the fact that the elections were a referendum on his presidency with the assertion that he was not on the ballot — an amusing claim, since he spent the campaign saying the opposite. The mood in the party is somber. The Florida governor Ron de Santis, mooted as a presidential candidate, has described the results as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans”. No doubt rightly, given its impact on prices at the pump, the vice-president JD Vance — also looking to his future — has averred “the reason we lost is the war”. They and many others are pointing the finger at Trump, but he may not care. 

In control of the House and Senate, the triumphant Democrats can launch as many legal challenges as they like. They can block legislation, launch investigations into his crimes and impeach him, but he retains the presidential veto, and the supreme master of the attention economy will not be out of the limelight for long. An adventure in Cuba would be a welcome distraction, and he may yet trigger a greater cataclysm in the Gulf. Trump’s second administration is the experimental refutation of liberal legalism. Post-Trump America is not a constitutional republic but an illiberal democracy, the triumph of politics and executive power over law and procedure.

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Those who believe Trump shares a mindset with the world’s leading tyrants are mistaken. Neither the Russian nor the Chinese leader displays his all-consuming narcissism. Putin is an archetypal creature of the Soviet system, a cold-eyed killer schooled in the art of survival. Xi is a suspicious autocrat possessed by the insecurity of his position. Putin’s aggression combines self-preservation — his own survival inseparable from that of his regime — with a neo-tsarist vision of a mystical “Russian realm” targeted for destruction by the West. Xi’s “Chinese dream” is the project of making China into the global hegemon and an unapologetic affirmation of Chinese civilization.  

Embodying nothing except his own emptiness and venality, Trump is the ideal dupe for these flinty tyrants. Possibly he fears Putin as the possessor of kompromat of some sort — there must be many possibilities — and he has certainly done business with the regime. But if Trump is behaving like a Russian asset, it is not because he was recruited as a Manchurian candidate in Moscow 40 years ago. Putin never expected Trump to become president (any more than Trump did himself) and seems to view him with bemused contempt. Trump sees the Russian dictator through the lens of his ideal self-image as strongman and admires him as a model of how to use state power to accumulate personal wealth. 

Those who speak of the Putinisation of America can point to undeniable parallels. Putin is a master of vranyo, the Bolshevik practice of telling lies that both speaker and audience know perfectly well are falsehoods — as when he denied that the “little green men” invading Crimea in 2014 were Russian troops. The goal is not persuasion but domination: by imposing a narrative that is transparently false, the very idea of a domain of facts independent of power is undermined. With his incoherent boasting — claiming to have “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability, then justifying a resumption of the war to destroy it — Trump also asserts power over facts. The difference is that Putin knows he is lying, whereas in Trump’s moment-by-moment solipsism, truth has no meaning.

For his critics, Trump is the kingpin of a Putin-style kleptocracy. It is true that his second administration has seen the presidency monetized to an unprecedented degree. Diplomacy has become a rent-seeking family business. Insider trading has been normalized. In August of this year, the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) launched a premier data feed allowing Wall Street banks and high-frequency trading firms access to his market-moving Truth Social posts milliseconds before they become available to the public, with subscribers paying a hundred thousand dollars a month for the service. 

By the time they leave office, Trump, his family and acolytes will have amassed immense riches. Likewise, Putin’s extraction of capital from Russia’s economy has, by some estimates, made him richer than Elon Musk. Yet wealth and government interact differently in Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America. Under Trump, the US is ruled by a variant of capitalism in which the state is used as a means of corporate enrichment at the expense of America’s strategic interests. In Russia’s version of state capitalism, corporate influence is curbed when it threatens the state itself. The same is true in China.

When Russia’s richest oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, became involved in opposition politics and negotiations to sell part of his oil company, Yukos, to American firms, he was arrested at gunpoint on his private jet, sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian penal colony and Yukos bankrupted. When the CEO of the Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, criticized China’s financial regulators, he was taken out of circulation and his business empire dismantled. In contrast, the Trump administration authorized the export of high-end computer chips of Jensen Huang’s Nvidia for export to China. During Xi’s visit to Washington, Trump bent the knee in more than one sense. He reportedly pitched the Chinese leader regarding purchases of American military technology, violating decades-long commitments to Taiwan and other allies. He prioritized corporate gain over national security and America’s standing in the world.

Trump’s “transactional” diplomacy consists of the exchange of American power for promises of private gain. The settlement of the Ukraine war being brokered by Trump’s special envoys, his son in law, Jared Kushner, and the real estate investor Steve Witfkoff, follows this playbook. A multibillion-dollar deal to acquire the international holdings of Lukoil, Russia’s largest remaining private oil company, has apparently been discussed, along with reopening the Nord Stream pipeline, blown up in September 2022. Elon Musk’s Space X — on Trump’s instructions, according to Musk — imposed speed limits on Starshield, which allowed Ukraine to intercept Russian drone and missile attacks. Sanctions have been paused, and Trump has called more than once for Zelensky’s removal. 

Trump’s aim is full-scale economic détente with Russia, which he believes will realize large profits for him and his coterie. Very likely he and they will benefit, but there is something spectral about the fabulous wealth envisioned in these sordid machinations. Why should Putin respect the terms of any deal? The “energy ceasefire” Trump believed he had agreed with him was flouted within hours. Much of Trump’s chicanery is based on fantasies — the reverse of realpolitik. If Ukraine is being sold out, it may be for next to nothing. 

Lured by dreams of financial gain, Trump has torn up whatever remained of an American-led “rules-based” order. This is more than the much-discussed passing of a unipolar order. American power is imploding, with the post-Cold-War leviathan now a floundering, flailing behemoth. Rather than an “unreliable friend”, the US seems closer to the enemies of the countries that depended on it for their security. Yet there can be no assurance that America’s new strategic partners will keep their end of the deal. When they met in St Petersburg in October, Witkoff praised Putin as a “humanitarian” for releasing an American prisoner captured in eastern Ukraine in April 2022. Such a toadying eulogy may be understandable. For the US, Yalta 2.0 may yield little more than the prisoner’s release. The presumed exchange is that Russia ends its support for Iran while the US forces Ukraine to surrender; but America has no way of ensuring Russia’s compliance, let alone that of China or Iran.

The Iran debacle itself began with a whim that set in motion a fateful escalation. The illusory prospect of another Venezuela-style coup, semi-magical in its flawless operational execution, was irresistible. What Trump described in March as “a little excursion” has been a forced march to strategic defeat. The result of decapitating the Iranian leadership has been to install a military dictatorship more repressive than the decaying theocracy it replaced. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has become a permanent threat to the Strait of Hormuz. The pre-war status quo, in which it was an open international waterway, is irrecoverable. 

This was not unforeseen. Similar bombing campaigns have been war-gamed many times, with similar results. As Barbara Tuchman showed in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984), history is not so much a catalog of error as a succession of follies whose consequences can be known in advance. 

However the war develops, America has forfeited its position in the Middle East. Over the past months, its bases in the Gulf and Iraq have been disabled and its armories depleted. Tens of billions of dollars have been expended using costly missiles against cheaper and more quickly replaceable drones. Iran’s partner in the “Axis of Resistance”, the Houthis have turned another vital waterway, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, into a high-risk corridor, while launching a deadly wave of strikes on Saudi airports and refineries.The Gulf monarchies are constructs of European colonialism propped up by American security guarantees that have proved effectively worthless. It cannot be long before regime change comes to the Kingdom, weakened by festering rivalries within the House of Saud since Mohammed bin Salman’s Ritz Carlton coup in November 2017. How could the debt-laden US withstand the collapse of the petrodollar, which channeled Saudi oil revenues into an AI-led stock market bubble already showing signs of bursting? 

Another “short, intensive” bombing campaign against Iranian nuclear and energy facilities, which seemed to be prefigured in the “limited” American strikes on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz early this week, would only postpone a further American retreat. Trump’s curtailing aid to Israel has been seen as reducing the likelihood of a resumption of the war. But Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump may still think they can “finish the job”.  

Iran’s economy is being slowly strangled by the American naval embargo that is blocking its seaborne oil exports. Yet the regime retains the capacity to devastate the Gulf’s energy production, causing acute shortages of diesel — the fuel on which the global economy runs — and irreplaceable agricultural chemicals. Undersea cables and data centers could also be attacked. The true Iranian nuclear option is disabling water and desalination plants. Weaponizing its geography, with its mountainous streams, inland rivers and lakes, Iran could wreak an enormous civilian catastrophe in the desert kingdoms of its Gulf enemies. 

At a global level, a species of total war is already underway. In the delirium of the Western mind, Gaza has been singled out as a unique catastrophe, but the reach of the battlefield into civilian life is practically universal. In Ukraine, Putin’s relentless bombardment destroys schools and scientific academies and cuts off electricity and water, aiming to render Kyiv uninhabitable and drive out millions of desperate refugees. Across Europe, Russia is orchestrating assassination, arson and cyber-strikes, together with drone strikes that could easily spiral into mass casualty events.  

The Baltic and Nordic states have fortified their defenses, but most European countries seem paralyzed. Poland — the most militarily prepared — is in the throes of constitutional crisis. Emmanuel Macron’s technocratic centrism has reached its endgame. Teetering on the edge of default, the Fifth Republic is rehearsing the upheaval that will come when Marine Le Pen enters the Élysée Palace — as must now be likely — and Jean-Luc Mélenchon mobilizes an insurrection against her. “Cost-of living” rioting and looting has spread to Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Germany, Switzerland and Albania, among other countries. It is hard to envision the French banlieues and AfD strongholds in former East Germany accepting the cost of deploying European troops indefinitely in Ukraine. Nor is it clear that Europe could afford to forgo the billions of euros’ worth of oil and gas it buys from Russia (which help Putin fund the war). A European solution is a mirage, and for all the heroic resourcefulness of its struggle, Ukraine cannot go it alone. Unless Zelensky’s supporters in Washington can somehow tie Trump’s hands, the logic of the situation is a brutal partition.

In America, Trump’s rise was a by-product of the neo-liberal cult of globalization. It was not simply an increase in inequality that stoked “populist” revolt. Whole sections of society were denied any productive role. Capital was exported and manufacturing offshored, labor imported and communities abandoned. With their workless families, drug habits and short lives, the human detritus of American industry could be safely left to molder on their reservations. Yet post-industrial decline has now affected much of the middle class. Occupations and career structures have melted into air. Neoliberal economics was the enterprise of re-engineering capitalism without a bourgeoisie, and the hollowing out of middle-class life has continued under Trump’s corporate kleptocracy. There was bound to be a countermovement from the Left. New York mayor Zohran Mandami’s “democratic socialism” is not a movement of organized labor. Like Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zack Polanski’s movements, it is a bourgeois populism, varnishing the status anxieties of heavily-indebted graduates and downwardly-mobile professionals with high-rent progressive causes. Incubated in campus seminaries of anti-Western orthodoxy, Mamdani’s leftism is set to be a deciding force in Democratic politics. 

A sea change is underway in the Republicans as well. As he limbers up for a presidential campaign in 2028, JD Vance is cultivating the same nativist constituency that is the audience of Tucker Carlson — aside from Trump, America’s most accomplished demagogue. A devil’s brew of anti-Semitism, historical revisionism and conspiracy theory is shaping up as the ruling ideology of the MAGA Right. As in Europe, the old center ground no longer exists. 

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The midterm clean sweep was a repudiation of Trump more than an endorsement of the Democrats. The winners included Dr Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan, US Senate) and Dr Abdul Hamawy (New Jersey, US House), Egyptian-born Muslims closely aligned with the progressive wing of the Democrats who campaigned strongly against the war. Foreign policy positions that used to be bipartisan are being questioned and rejected in both parties. Europeans who are still invested in the notion that the Trump era is an unfortunate anomaly would be wise to think again. Nothing is further from reality than a reversion to Nikki Haley-style interventionism. It is not fantastical to see the US becoming the first advanced post-Western state and joining Russia in a China-led Eurasian bloc. 

That does not mean such a concert of powers would be stable. If a trilateral summit between Xi, Putin and Trump is held at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Shenzhen scheduled for later this month, their exchanges may well come to nothing. In some ways this looks less like February 1945 and more like the run-up to August 1914. Now as then, great powers are engaged in wars for control of natural resources against a background of tangled and shifting alliances. With multiple players and no one in charge, miscalculation by any of them could bring disaster on all. 

Another future is possible, however. Rather than drifting towards another Great War, we may be entering an era of peace. A curious kind of peace, to be sure, accompanied by unending bloodshed. Proxy wars and urban terrorism will rage unabated. War and peace will, in effect, be one and the same. The West will cease to exist as a geopolitical or civilizational bloc. But joining forces with its adversaries will fuel another stock market boom, and what neo-Marxian theorists fondly call “late capitalism” will enjoy a new lease of life. Having used the neoliberal interlude to build a mercantilist juggernaut, China will re-establish globalization in a dirigiste form that entrenches its economic primacy, with Russia exploited as a vassal state. A certain equilibrium will prevail, underpinned by the shared interests of transnational ruling classes.

Then again, none of this may come to pass. The future may not be advancing authoritarianism but accelerating disintegration. If Taiwan is not easily absorbed, Xi’s autocracy may be overthrown, and China could revert to disunity of a kind recurrent in its history. Putin might be toppled by war-weary oligarchs, only to be replaced by a more extreme anti-Western despot ruling a nuclear-armed Muscovy surrounded by breakaway fiefdoms. The United States may fragment, with enclaves of anarchic high-tech vitality booming alongside wastelands of poverty and desolation, presided over by an enfeebled federal government.

But of one thing we can be certain. Donald Trump has brought Western hegemony to a close. A world-historical figure as much as Napoleon or Mao, the founder of MAGA has ushered in a post-American age.

Diesel fuel trades in a global market. Gulf states usually provide 20% of this market, and Russia another 10%. Notwithstanding Donald Trump’s new plan to suspend sanctions on diesel imports from the latter, both these supplies have been severely disrupted. Yes, crude oil is now leaving the Gulf via pipelines, while a shuttle system of state-owned vessels, protected by the US Navy, ensures volumes very close to their pre-war level.

But shipments of refined products and petrochemicals have not recovered. Ukrainian drone attacks have damaged several Russian refineries, perhaps also explaining Trump’s rising anger with President Zelensky, whatever the truth of this latest “energy ceasefire”. China, for its part, has also prohibited the export of refined products in an effort to control domestic prices. Little wonder the rest of the world’s refineries are hard-pressed to meet demand. First of all, there are simply fewer refineries. In 2000, Britain had 18 refineries. Today it has four. Many of the closed refineries were too small to compete internationally, but high industrial electricity costs and environmental regulations also helped make them uneconomic.

Second, a barrel of crude oil contains a variety of molecules that refineries break down into different products: based primarily on their boiling points. Gasoline is a light distillate with a low boiling point. Diesel and jet fuel are middle distillates with higher boiling points, while marine bunker fuel is a heavy distillate. Most refineries are built to process specific types of crude and produce a specific mix of fuels. Separating the different segments of a barrel of crude oil is a complex process; refineries cannot always adjust quickly, even if demand shifts from one product to another.

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Another factor is the shipping industry, which uses 4% of global oil production. In 2020, the United Nations’ International Marine Organization dramatically shifted global energy demand, when it compelled the world’s ship owners to stop using heavy marine bunker fuel, and start burning more environmentally friendly fuels like marine gas oil. Unfortunately, marine gas oil comes from the same segment of the crude barrel as diesel and jet fuel. While the impact of this change was initially masked by Covid, which reduced oil demand, this has permanently increased demand for middle distillates. That, in turn, has raised the cost of all shipping, flying and heavy goods transport, and made diesel and jet-fuel prices more volatile.

Britain now produces only half of the roughly 500,000 barrels of diesel it consumes every day. The rest is imported. Since Russian supplies were suspended in 2022, most of those imports come from the US, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Middle East. All over the world, refineries that can produce diesel and jet fuel are operating at maximum capacity. In the US, capacity utilization has reached 98%, the highest utilization rate in a quarter of a century. The “crack spread”, which measures the difference between what a refinery pays for crude and what it sells product for, is now three times its historic average. If refineries could produce more diesel, they surely would.

The headline-grabbing news in the UK has been £2-a-litre diesel. However, the fuel’s retail price has actually risen by less than the price of crude oil. Dated Brent crude is up 70% this year, while the price of diesel has risen by only 40%. This is largely because, in the UK, two fifths of the price of diesel is tax: which does not vary with the price of crude. Moreover, dated Brent is a spot price that changes with the latest news, while refineries producing diesel operate on more stable long term contracts.

Things look very different in America. The United States is the world’s largest oil producer, and its largest diesel exporter. Most of those exports go to Latin America, not Britain. Nevertheless, diesel fuel prices in the US have risen by nearly 80%, compared with only 40% in the UK. In fact, while retail diesel prices in the UK have risen by a smaller percentage than the price of Brent crude, in the US the opposite is true.

With diesel prices reaching the equivalent of $200 per barrel in the US, and crucial midterms coming up, the Trump administration had ample motivation to act. America is exporting 30% of its diesel production into a global market. At the same time, America’s own strategic petroleum reserve is at its lowest level in 44 years. Between 2021 and 2025, the Biden administration drew down America’s reserve by 45% — or 245 million barrels — largely following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. During that same period, all the other G7 nations together drew down their own reserves by only 40 million barrels. In other words, the US government provided the global market with 85% of the oil used to calm markets after the Russian invasion.

Always a proponent of America first, President Trump concluded that other nations should now draw down their own stocks, rather than continue to rely on American reserves. Trump’s threat to ban US diesel exports has anyway been effective, resulting in a commitment by other G7 members to release 100 million barrels of oil over just four months. As a result of this agreement, diesel prices in both Europe and the United States have declined slightly. For his part, Trump has also signed an executive order granting fuel tax breaks, usually reserved for farmers, to truckers. This latest diesel-exporting agreement with Russia — while mattering more from a geopolitical perspective — is also perhaps intended to help drivers at the pump.

Whether any of this will bring down prices enough to benefit Republican election prospects next month remains to be seen. What may be more long-lasting is the damage done to public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans increasingly view European governments as freeriders: unwilling to meet their Nato defense commitments, but quite happy to use America’s strategic petroleum reserve and diesel exports to keep their own fuel prices down. As for the Europeans, they see a transactional Trump administration extorting its allies for domestic political purposes. Both sides have a point. Either way, the old political adage remains true: if loyalty is a sentiment, leverage is a fact.

Andy Burnham has, thus far, been an avowedly domestic prime minister, with his focus on devolution, housing and social care allowing Miliband more control over foreign affairs. And until now, the role has in some ways suited Miliband well. On the eve of this week’s Labour Party conference, murmurs abounded of Cabinet splits over the economy and immigration. A shift in foreign policy, however, has been more warmly received within the party. Earlier this month, Miliband announced a series of sanctions on illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. He has integrated elements of his old brief at the Energy Department to push for “climate diplomacy”, and has been more explicit in his advocacy for European reintegration than either of the previous two office holders. This all provides easy ammunition for rival parties and for the British press, but it’s catnip for party members.

During his Conference speech in Liverpool on Monday morning, Miliband hit all these notes and provided a clearer view of what his foreign policy will look like. “The world order needs rebuilding anew,” he said, arguing that his approach would be one of “resilient idealism”. He had made the same points at a corporate reception the previous evening, where business leaders uninterestedly chatted and chewed. In front of Labour delegates on Monday, however, he was more at home. The crowd thunderously cheered his labeling of Israeli settlers as “terrorists”, and his declaration that “our future lies in a stronger, deeper partnership with the European Union”.

Left-wing dissent towards Miliband’s agenda has, therefore, come not from within the walls of the conference but right outside. On Sunday evening, more than 50 protesters were arrested for demonstrating in support of the proscribed group Palestine Action. When I walked past the scene, there appeared to be more police than agitators. White-haired radicals sat cross-legged on the grass — standing for an extended period would have put pressure on those joints — and held up homemade signs pledging fealty to the organization, surrounded all the while by a bored-looking ring of officers. The same evening, a smaller group of activists had confronted Miliband in Pizza Express, telling him his Israel position was insufficient and demanding he abandon his doughballs to address the protesters.

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This encapsulates one of the chief problems faced by Labour foreign secretaries at a time of war in the Middle East. While the Right-leaning press decries Miliband as an extremist enemy of the people, there will invariably be a coterie of progressive objectionists who will settle for nothing less than the nuking of Tel Aviv. At the same time, Miliband, a British Jew whose mother escaped a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, has had to put up with allegations of antisemitism for his action on West Bank settlements, just as security officials brief the press that his approach to the US-Israeli offensive against Iran was “petulant, pacifist, legalistic and very political”.

That Miliband is political is obvious: he is arguably the most ideological member of Burnham’s Cabinet, deeply interested in ideas in a way that the more interpersonally minded PM is not. “He’s more demanding [than Cooper or Lammy],” one FCDO official tells me. “But he knows what he wants. As soon as he came in, there was a plan for how he wanted things done.” Shortly after he became energy secretary under the leadership of Keir Starmer, Miliband spoke in an interview of the need to “move fast and build things”. Initially tipped to be Burnham’s chancellor, he has put paid to the idea that a move to the Foreign brief — which for some ministers feels more like an ambassadorial role — would neuter his political influence.

As part of this new shift towards a more ideological foreign policy, Britain will have to accept its own mediocrity. Much of Miliband’s messaging so far has reinforced the image of the country as a secondary power, rather than one that should be competing with the big boys in DC and Beijing. The West Bank announcement was made in conjunction with similar action from Canada and France, other middle powers with which Britain is forging closer ties to compensate for White House capriciousness. The UK has found some success as a driver of European action on Ukraine, leading the “coalition of the willing” at a time when Kyiv has been uncertain of US backing. Miliband insisted in his Liverpool speech that “our alliance with the United States remains essential”, yet he made no effort to hide this government’s diplomatic realignment. Britons are “proud Europeans”, he said, adding: “This is our continent.” In other words: these are our true friends, not America.

While Miliband has sought to portray his plans as a radical break from the Starmer years, some of his prescriptions bear a resemblance to what came before. His talk of “resilient idealism” is immediately reminiscent of Lammy’s promotion of “progressive realism” abroad. According to that doctrine, governments “do not have to choose between values and interests”, and Left-wing ideals can still shape practical responses to global conflict. Where Miliband differs from the more Atlanticist Lammy is in the course that he is charting away from Washington and more determinedly into the embrace of Europe. Indeed, it is hard to picture him (illicitly) fishing with JD Vance.

The Foreign Secretary, then, clearly sees an opening for Britain to become, rather than a leading power, a moral brake on the worst impulses of its betters. On Monday, he vowed to “put climate at the heart of national security”. When the UK takes on the rotating G20 presidency next year, it will “lead the efforts to manage AI so we keep our country and our world safe, and I say no tech titan should stand in our way”. Earlier this month, in relation to Gaza, he said that “Britain is not silent in the face of injustice and nor is it powerless”.

Yet Miliband risks making the same mistake as Lammy, attempting to navigate a multipolar world armed with the outmoded weaponry of the old liberal order. The UK has in recent weeks launched another round of “tough new sanctions” in Russia, with little evidence that they will have a greater impact than those which came before, while continued invocations of international law hardly deter Xi and Putin. Miliband’s assumption of a like-minded federation of European allies will be put to the test, too, by the possibility of continental powers such as France and Germany electing Right-populist, anti-Brussels parties into government in the coming decade. “Europe is not just our geography, but so much more,” he said as he called for a deeper partnership with the bloc on Monday. But how might he deal with a prospective AfD chancellor who wants out of the union altogether?

Miliband may be looking towards Europe, but these pledges are always made with one eye on Labour’s domestic popularity. The party faces a crucial by-election in Holborn and St Pancras next week, where Green leader Zack Polanski is seeking election in a constituency which in more than 40 years of existence has chosen only Labour MPs. There is a case to be made that Polanski’s initial success was the result of progressive frustration with Starmer, and that the Burnham conquest has brought the Left back onside. Miliband’s rhetoric against the Israeli government may have some moral grounding, but it also functions as an attempt to match Green radicalism on the issue.

His enemies won’t be surprised by this: he’s “Red Ed”, after all. Having been party leader for the first half of Labour’s decade of humiliation, Miliband has become a more polished, wily politician in the years since. But he’s still an idealist. “They say that as you age you become more cynical,” he declared during his Liverpool speech. “Why? Not me.” Talk of “resilient idealism” might sound appealing to the Labour base, but that resilience is only tested in times of crisis. As for realpolitik, nobody is mistaking Miliband for Henry Kissinger, but there are plenty within the party who would like him to take inspiration from one of Labour’s more hard-headed foreign secretaries — Ernest Bevin, who served in the Clement Attlee government from 1945-51.

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Bevin, a former union boss, had impeccable Left-wing credentials when appointed by Attlee, but quickly marked himself out as a realist on foreign policy. Recognizing that Britain was a fading superpower, he pushed for the creation of Nato, and its principle of collective defense, so that the country could call on a network of Western European partners ready to support its aims. He championed the development of a nuclear deterrent, and a decade earlier had admonished Labour’s pacifist then-leader, George Lansbury, for “hawking his conscience around”. Bevin also opposed the establishment of Israel, believing it would become a “racial state”, and maintained that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 had been a grave error of foreign policy.

Of course, Bevin failed in his attempt to block the foundation of Israel, his power only extending so far. Miliband, who has used his extensive Whitehall experience to circumvent obstacles that had thwarted his predecessors, is well-positioned to reshape the international order so that British objectives better match his own idealistic, Europhile politics.

And yet, the public may ask how far this serves the national interest. They would be entitled, too, to argue that Miliband’s Net Zero zealotry in the Energy brief constrained national industry, at a cost to the country’s hard-power capabilities. Britain has an opportunity to make something of what Miliband correctly perceives to be its secondary status, leading a set of fellow middle powers. But Miliband’s progressive ideals would be better served by pragmatism than by sanctions and stern words alone. “It’s hard to change the world,” he acknowledged in his Liverpool speech. Sometimes, it’s better to recognize the world as it is, and leave the idealism to the activists sitting cross-legged outside the conference gate.

Certainly, Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, is prepping for it. “I have stocks of rice, I have a hand pump at home, and I have also made preserves from fruit from my own garden,” he told the Polish magazine Fakt last week.

It is easy to mock Sikorski and his jam. But he does have a point. In times of war, nobody cares about the percentage of GDP that their country is spending on defense: they care about food and water. Not  that our military leaders and planners will listen, though; soldiers like to talk about battles and gear, not rice and jam.

Tales of heroic battlefield victories are far more persuasive, after all, than those of supply chains. And yet, defeat often comes because of weakness elsewhere. A few years before Napoleon lost his famous battle at Waterloo, he had launched a disastrous attempt to invade Russia. Although the brutal winter contributed to his failure, Napoleon had struggled to keep his troops fed and healthy. Hunger and disease took a terrible toll. As much as the enemy, it was his supply chains that thwarted him.

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Likewise, when the German high command unveiled its master plan to invade France in August 1914, the generals hadn’t factored in an unexpected heatwave. The right wing of the German army was to invade France from the north and encircle Paris. But the soldiers were marching in thick woolen uniforms and carrying heavy backpacks in 30-degree heat. As the men advanced, the supply lines fractured leaving the troops exhausted, hungry and weakened.

Meanwhile the Allied naval blockade of 1914 triggered food shortages in Germany which escalated over the years into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe. Germany and Austria did not lose the First World War on the battlefield alone, they also lost it in the warehouse and the kitchen. The people starved.

The food situation was better during the Second World War, but this time the critical shortage was of oil. Back then, the US produced over 60% of the world’s oil and together, the Allied powers controlled most of the global oil supply. But the German generals were heavily reliant on machinery that used diesel and the chronic shortage of oil was why Hitler diverted his troops from the outskirts of Moscow to the south of Russia: to capture the oil fields in Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. En route, they became trapped in Stalingrad and suffered their worst defeat of the Second World War.

The battlefield perspective of history, then, critically underestimates the importance of supply chains. The stories of Europe’s wars are understood much better in terms of logistics than in tales of battles.

And nothing has changed. One of the consequences of the Iran war is the fluctuating cost of crude oil. But that is only part of the story. As the Ukraine war has led to critical shortages of diesel and kerosene on global markets, the price of European diesel has gone through the roof. In a display of his classic short-termism, Donald Trump suggested that the US should stop supplying Europeans with diesel. He almost certainly did not think this through. If the US were to carry out his plan, Europe would suffer an immediate supply emergency. And we need only look at the vast number of diesel-powered lorries on European motorways to realize how critically reliant we are on the fuel. The economy would grind to a halt. It might be a smart idea if our leaders addressed that situation before heading into battle with the Russians.

But it’s not just diesel. The other shortage is natural gas. Iranian attacks have taken out 17% of liquid natural gas (LNG) production in Qatar, the world’s second largest LNG producer after America. Russia is the fourth — but Europeans have imposed an import ban on their gas. That’s why Europe is currently assessing whether it has enough fuel to get through the winter. And remember, this is still peacetime.

On the other side of the ledger is Russia. It, too, suffered from a diesel shortage last spring after Ukrainian attacks on its energy infrastructure. But Moscow immediately increased production in the east and halted exports of diesel to stabilize the situation. By doing so, Putin reduced the globally available supply of diesel and contributed to the rise in prices.

Russia’s food supply is also secure. This year, it had a bumper crop of grains, the wheat crop is forecast to be one of the best on record and oilseed production is also better than usual. Is this the “bad position” Rutte was talking about?

And let’s not forget those other vital commodities: good, old-fashioned money and debt. Russia is practically debt-free. It runs a small fiscal deficit because of the Ukraine war, but nothing compared with the crippling deficits of the US, France, and nowadays also Germany.

As a consequence, the West is vulnerable to a potentially crippling financial crisis. Last week, the interest rate on 10-year US Treasury bonds, the most important financial security on earth, rose to a 21-year high of 5.2%. Ordinary investors such as pension funds are dumping their US bond holdings because they are no longer secure following Joe Biden and Donald Trump outbidding each other in terms of fiscal irresponsibility.

All the while, the war in Ukraine drags on. And could get much worse this winter. The peace process is effectively dead; Putin gave up on it after Ukraine rejected his demand for the entirety of the Donbas region and is now determined to achieve his military goals by war alone. Ukraine is running short of interceptor missiles and so is more vulnerable to attacks on critical infrastructure. And there is no sign of Ukraine’s western supporters stepping up military supplies — if only because they need what they have for themselves. Exacerbating the situation in Europe are the attacks, possibly orchestrated by Russia, on western supply infrastructure for Ukraine within Germany and Poland.

So this is how the Ukraine war risks escalating. Consider if Russia shoots down a plane over Nato territory carrying supplies to Ukraine. If Nato were to retaliate with a strike on Russia, we would be at war. Over the past few months, my assessment of this scenario has shifted from small but non-trivial, to one with a significant probability.

We should be under no illusion about a war with Russia. We are absolutely not in a position to win. Whose bond markets are going to be blown up first? Who is going to run out of interceptor missiles first? Thanks to the much maligned Common Agricultural Policy, Europe is not going to run out of food. But on every other count — military, energy, finance — Europe is at a disadvantage.

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The West is losing two wars at once

By Wolfgang Munchau

That’s not all. There is a relatively plausible scenario in which Ukraine and Iran merge into a single West Eurasian war — and become the ultimate proxy conflict between the US and China. The love-in between Trump and President Xi Jinping of China notwithstanding, the rivalry between the US and China is and will remain the dominant geopolitical story of our time.

Trump’s war against Iran and Putin’s war against Ukraine have demonstrated how difficult it is even for a larger power to impose its will on a smaller adversary. Putin may have the advantage over Ukraine, but his struggles there suggest that war against Nato wouldn’t produce a quick or decisive victory.

More likely, it would be the kind of war where, in the end, nobody would care who won and who lost. You might as well stock up with jam.

But these risks, while worthy of focus in themselves, carry with them a deeper question. AI, like printing and writing before it, is the kind of technology that shapes the evolution of civilizations. In turn, how well societies adapt to those changes depends on the existing cultural landscape, including deep assumptions about human nature, the relationship between mind and body, and how society functions.

Here, concerns with AI safety throw the differences into sharp relief. While Trump dismisses safety concerns, the major AI companies increasingly agree on the need for safety. However, it remains to be seen whether this extends beyond rhetoric to a willingness to curb their own competitiveness. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s concern with ensuring China does not surge ahead may be honest — but it also provides a convenient reason not to follow through on slowing down frontier development. If China will build its own AGI anyway, better that a US firm gets there first. It might bring on the apocalypse, but at least it will be an American apocalypse rather than Armageddon with Chinese Characteristics.

Trump’s dismissiveness towards safety concerns seems to be in tension with the AI companies’ approach of calling for a slowdown that, for game theoretic reasons, they cannot implement just yet. But they both reflect a general modern Western concern with freedom from constraint. In the labs’ case this is often accompanied by messianic visions of AGI just beyond the horizon — a silicon savior which will achieve miracles ranging from eliminating pestilence to generating limitless material abundance. This is a vision of unbridled progress enabled by free competition and innovation, guided by the utopian visions of individual technologists but directed towards universal benefit.

A different version of this is represented by Trump and the deepening relationship between Big Tech and political power. On one level this is apparent in the entourage of tech leaders who accompanied Trump to China and attended this week’s summit. On another, it is manifest in the visions of technologists like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, their personal ties (volatile as those can be) with figures in the Trump administration, and, in the case of Thiel, the provision of AI as an instrument of law enforcement and military power. These are far from visions of universal benefit, instead being centered on national supremacy — a will to power channeled through transformative technology. This is the counterpart to utopian liberalism and the contemporary form of the Nietzschean impulse, channeling the drive for self-actualization into the strongman leader rather than pushing it as a universal objective.

Both visions have a common origin traceable through the Enlightenment and Christianity. This is a faith in the ability of the mind, expressed in the self, to operate independently of the body — and ultimately a desire to free it from physical constraints. Our society is one in which professional and personal existence is increasingly online, in which the work of the mind is elevated over that of the body, in which we express ourselves through self-applied identity labels dislocated from our biology, in which we are beginning to demand the right for our minds to choose when and how to end the existence of our bodies. This is fed by an economic culture of maximal choice — self-actualization through consumption. It should not come as a surprise that the contemporary West’s vision of AI is one of disembodied agents who reason and communicate solely via language and apparently require nothing else to become superintelligent. Pure, unconstrained digital selves.

Meanwhile, in China, they build robots as well as LLMs. Of course, the Americans do too, but the robots are far fewer. China has become a world leader in the field, giving it a major advantage in pursuing embodied AI — a potential path to AGI made that much more plausible by the fact that a robot-borne program can interact directly with the physical world. The Chinese government has pursued a systematic AI strategy for a decade and has done so as part of a wider focus on developing “new quality productive forces”, foundational technologies enabling a fourth industrial revolution. This is accompanied by a drive for energy security and electrification as well as comprehensive frameworks for AI governance — that is, the pursuit of policies across economy and society that enable the deployment and diffusion of artificial intelligence. The CCP has emphasized safety since the beginning, and identified early on that the requirements for AI would vary significantly depending on its application to areas as diverse as security and surveillance, manufacturing, infrastructure, law, healthcare, and care for the elderly. It has regulated accordingly, tailoring rules to each sector (including a remarkably robust and not unironic concern for consumer privacy). China’s companies face ruthless domestic competition, but also operate in a society which leapt from industrialization to digitalization in decades rather than centuries. They release their models earlier in development than their American counterparts, but do so in a country in which the Party-state is able to enforce and manage safety concerns in a way Washington cannot.

The CCP intends that China leads the world in AI, but does so in a way which maintains domestic and international stability. The promise of leadership, in the CCP’s view, will be realized not by the individual breakthroughs of a genius techno-utopian or the company he runs but by deploying the technology across manufacturing, healthcare, administration, and surveillance. Xi and his colleagues grasp that while LLMs (and other AI models) might appear to us as disembodied minds, key to the control of their development is control of the physical stuff that allows them to exist, right down to the minerals that go into the chips. And they understand that there is an opportunity to lead by providing the rest of the world with open-weight models and the international initiatives and regulatory frameworks to govern their use. It has been China that has offered a Global AI Governance Initiative, hosts the World AI Conference on governance, and engages in extensive AI and data governance agreements across the Global South.

None of this eliminates the potential risks of losing control. But it does mean that China is significantly better placed to mitigate them, and to respond effectively should they occur. None of the above, equally, mean that Chinese AI is inherently more benign. To the contrary, under the watch of the CCP it enhances an already pervasive surveillance machine, enables more efficient repression and pre-emptive action against potential dissenters, and grants the CCP a potent means to control the flow of information through Chinese society and beyond. On the plus side, in a world of Chinese AI we may well be less likely to all die at the hands of MechaHitler.

Just as self-actualization-through-technology, Nietzschean or utopian, has its conceptual roots in the West’s intellectual heritage, so this alternative vision of AI — an all-of-society enhancement that is context-specific, regulatorily-iterative, embodied, and safely controlled — has its roots in China’s. It is the kind of approach one might expect from a civilization whose philosophy has emphasized a continuous relationship between the mental and the physical, the mutual influence of society and the wider cosmos, and the complexity of the web of factors that influence individual behavior. Such principles lie behind ideas ranging from traditional Chinese medicine to Confucian moral self-cultivation, emphasizing propensity and interconnectedness over determinism and separation.

As with Western thought, this tradition has optimistic and pessimistic flavors. The countercultural impulse of the Daoist sage to retreat into the mountains and be at one with the way of the cosmos is the sibling of the Legalist statesman’s understanding that his enemies are best destroyed by comprehensively targeting the intricate network of economic, demographic, political, and military factors on which their rule depends. The Confucian conviction that all humans can improve themselves through practicing the correct rituals finds its counterpart in the Maoist awareness that those forced to repeat the same behaviors can be “brainwashed”.

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So there is much to fret over, regardless of who drives the direction of AI. Ultimately, it is hard to avoid the uncomfortable conclusion that this technology may well spell the end for the societies we in the West consider ideal. For many decades, if not centuries, our societies have seen rapid technological change, but never in that period have we been confronted by a technology with quite so much transformative power over how we receive information, how we communicate, and how we relate to others and ourselves. Writing and the printing press were technologies which, through interaction with economic shifts as profound as the emergence of a merchant class or the newfound sustainability of cities, enabled the thorough and often bloody transformation of political systems. Such technologies define the development of human civilization for centuries thereafter.

Printing emerged far earlier in China, and did so into a society that had developed many of the trappings of early modern European states centuries beforehand, from bureaucratic government to standing armies. But for us in the West, the arrival of printing caused immense disruption, ushering our societies out of feudalism and into an era of mass literacy that made liberal democracy possible. AI now appears to be a similarly transformative technology, and is swiftly being embedded in the bureaucracy, in the military, and across a corporate sector over which the government has little control. The institutions of Western democracies are ill-equipped to deal with such a radical shift in the creation, control, and distribution of information and the new centers of authority it is creating.

In contrast, China has developed its economy and institutions alongside the emergence and proliferation of digital technologies. It has also done so at a time when advances in science and technology tend towards an emphasis on complexity, messiness, and unpredictability. Contemporary scientific understandings of evolution or the relationship between mind and body, for instance, are entirely at odds with the mind-body dualism of the Enlightenment. A philosophy that worked for a world of steam and printing — discreet manipulable objects and Newtonian physics — is not necessarily up to the messier challenges of silicon and neural networks. A society whose systems of thought are predisposed to understand humanity and the world in a way which complements the science underpinning modern technology is surely likely to adapt to that technology more effectively — and implement it more effectively too. CCP-sponsored AI might very well wish to read the contents of your mind, but a brain-computer interface designed by Xunzi would perhaps be less likely to assume that one can straightforwardly transfer the mind’s contents to a machine with no ill effects than would one designed by Descartes.

For these reasons, it is likely to be China that ultimately better adapts to an AI-enabled world. It is not that China and the West are incommensurably different, nor that they do not face analogous challenges with these new technologies. It is simply that adaptation is an evolutionary process, and in evolution success depends not on perfection but on being marginally better suited to one’s conditions than the competition. China’s approach is much more orientated to the complexity of this technology, and unlike the US, China is building an architecture designed to facilitate the spread of its own vision. America risks failing to anticipate the profound domestic challenges AI is catalyzing, while China gains an international reputation as the more responsible AI superpower.

We should take this prospect extremely seriously. Of course, we must worry about US-China strategic competition, from the economic challenge of supply-chain interdependence to the escalation risks posed by two superpowers increasingly reliant on military AI. But we must also think about culture, and what might enable us to better adapt. This is especially pressing for those of us outside America and China. We face two alternatives — the apogee of unconstrained self-actualization or efficient, holistic security. Or, for the more pessimistic, MechaHitler or MechaMao.

It seems doubtful that the sitting US president will have spent much time with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But I feel confident that several of his lines in the “Song of Myself” might still resonate with Donald Trump. “I know perfectly well”, the poet says, “my own egotism”. Whitman is not alone in this self-consciousness. “I chant the chant of dilation or pride”, he goes on, “I show that size is only development”. A line like that could be the motto of any New York property developer. Whitman then asks, bringing a rare end-rhyme to development: “Have you outstripped the rest? are you the President?” Mr Trump could coolly answer: Yes.

With all this in mind, it is worth noting that Whitman penned a fair number of fraternal lines about China. In a poem of delirious cosmopolitanism, “Salut au monde”, he claimed: “I see the four great rivers of China, the Amour, the Yellow River, the Yiang-tse, and the Pearl.” We would now write Whitman’s “Yiang-tse” as Yangtze and his “Amour” as Amur; but what matters is that China’s rivers were flowing in the Brooklyn poet’s mind in the middle of the 19th century.

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Whitman even went to Qing-dynasty China, in a poetic transport, to see for himself how the common people lived. “I go among them”, he dreamed. “I mix indiscriminately”. And he found the people of China to be, in the blinding light of his ecstasy, no different from him or from the Americans of his day. “Each of us [is] inevitable”, he thrummed, “Each of us [is] limitless.”

We do not know what it is in Whitman’s ultra-democratic poetry that stirred something in a young Xi Jinping. But as China’s paramount leader returns to the US for another state visit, he surely knows that America has long dreamed of his people.

And it is not only in poetic reveries that the West and China have been friendly. Before the full-bore Industrial Revolution; liberal trade policies (and concomitant trade wars); and the high-watermark of Western imperialism in Whitman’s 19th century, the West and China had several hundred years of largely peaceful cultural, commercial, and intellectual contact. From roughly 1500 to 1800, China and the West rather candidly recognized each other as the world’s most advanced civilizations. Leibniz — a baroque savant and China-watcher avant la lettre — did not hesitate to call them “the two most cultivated parts of the world”.

More recently, and no less importantly, the 21st century’s two great powers were ultimately aligned in all three of the 20th’s great contests: the First World War, Second World War, and the Cold War. This is currently better known in Beijing than it is in Washington, London, and Brussels. And, because we rarely hear it in the West, it’s worth taking each conflict in sequence.

A couple of years before Whitman’s poems began to appear in translation in the pages of the New Culture Movement’s Young China magazine, the Chinese republic declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary. The casus belli was a lawless German strike, in February 1917, on a French transport ship sailing in international waters. Hundreds of Chinese nationals aboard the vessel had drowned. In March 1917, the Chinese parliament voted to break diplomatic relations with Germany. But this brought no change to Germany’s scandalous U-boat policy. In August 1917, Beijing then joined London and Paris, Petrograd and Washington in their titanic struggle against the Central Powers.

China’s man in Washington at the time was a formidable diplomat with an evocative name: Vi Kyuin Wellington Koo. In a letter printed a month or so later, in The American Journal of International Law, Wellington Koo notified the US Secretary of State of his government’s grave decision: “I have the honor to inform you that China… declares that a state of war exists with Germany and Austria-Hungary.” Notably, Wellington Koo stressed in this letter that his government would “observe all the stipulations of the conventions signed at the International Peace Conferences at The Hague”. The Republic of China, founded in 1912, would uphold the laws of “civilized warfare” that Imperial Germany had relinquished. In other words, Wellington Koo’s Asian republic was more civilized than one of Europe’s great monarchies.

In the Second World War, meanwhile, the Republic of China staked a similar claim, fighting alongside Washington in defense of civilization. But now, the lawless power China had to resist was Japan: a monarchical Asian ally of a post-monarchical Nazi Germany. On 7 December 1941, Japan struck Pearl Harbor without formally declaring war. This “treacherous” strike was made in violation of the conventional laws of war and later judged to be illegal — which is to say, uncivilized — by a postwar tribunal. The more immediate effect of Pearl Harbor was to forge a momentous link between the US and China.

Why so momentous? Well, on 1 January 1942, a statement titled the “Declaration by United Nations” was drawn up and signed at the Arcadia Conference in Washington, DC. The ur-document of the United Nations, it had four original drafters and signatories: the US, UK, USSR and China. It is no coincidence these four great powers still form the core of the UN Security Council (with France joining later). China belongs to the innermost circle of powers that created the postwar order, and the UN.

Just a couple of days after the Arcadia declaration was signed, Chiang Kai-shek — or “Generalissimo Chiang”, as he was known — accepted the “supreme command over all forces of the United Powers… in the Chinese theater”. The idea for this centralization of “United Nations” forces in Chiang’s hands came from President Roosevelt himself. And there can be no doubt that FDR had a strategic vision for what he called “the gallant people of China”. By May 1942, he was declaring that “in the future a still unconquerable China will play its proper role in maintaining peace and prosperity, not only in eastern Asia but in the whole world”.

China remained “unconquerable” at the close of the Second World War. But its anticolonial struggle had not decided the issue of a decades-long civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists. Of course, Chiang and the Republic of China did not hold the mainland; in the bitter fight for sovereignty, the Maoists prevailed. A successor republic, a “People’s Republic”, was formed in Beijing in October 1949. And with it, a steely party-state was formed which had immense debts to one of America’s other wartime allies: Stalin’s USSR.

The cruelties of China’s civil war and the fantastical complexity of early-Cold War geopolitics cannot be dealt with here. But two brief points can be made. First, China’s postwar settlement in no way cancels out the vast sacrifices made by the “gallant people” of the country during the Second World War. Second, the communist ascendancy in China was not preordained. Indeed, certain actions by the US may have moved the dial in favor of Mao and his Soviet-backed troops. Frank Dikötter has stressed in a recent book that it was FDR’s successor, President Truman, who put an arms embargo in place in 1946: not on Mao and his communist brigades, but on Generalissimo Chiang and his nationalists.

A 1946 New York Times headline tells us why: “Aid to China Hinges on Ending of Strife and Unification of Nation”. Truman confirms this in a personal note he sent to Chiang. In it, the US president made clear that his government’s “generous attitude” towards the Republic of China was highly conditional: Chiang had to demonstrate “genuine progress” towards achieving a “peaceful settlement” with Mao. In hopes of seeing a coalition government formed in Nanjing, Chiang’s capital, Truman leveraged US money and materiel, imposing more than one ceasefire which, in Dikötter’s view, “changed the course of the civil war”.

The early years of the Cold War were therefore treacherous and highly complex. There is much we still do not fully understand. But however we choose to reconstruct that era, it’s clear that a dangerous bloc-formation swiftly formed within the “Big Four” powers that built the UN: the US and UK in the “West”, the USSR and China in the “East”. And no one disputes that China, having aligned with Washington and London in the century’s first two global conflicts, took a hostile posture during the third. This revolutionary, Soviet-backed posture of Mao’s China held up for roughly two decades.

But it is surely worth noting that, for a great power with a 2,000-year history, that’s the blink of an eye. The People’s Republic of China had only been in existence for 22 years when President Nixon touched down in Beijing to make his visionary overtures in February 1972. In the years that followed, Maoist China decided to normalize relations with Washington. And, less than 20 years after that, due in part to the West’s strategic rapprochement with China, the Cold War ended.

This point is especially important. The liberal Nineties narrative of the USSR’s dissolution is highly Eurocentric — but modern China has never been a geopolitical periphery. Any rigorous account of the collapse of the USSR must frankly reckon with the fact that it was not only the Western powers, but the Western powers plus China, which created the conditions that doomed the Soviet system.

Strange to say, the US had a strategic commitment during the Cold War to what we would now call a sort of multipolarity. Cultivating ties with peripheral communist regimes was part of this strategy: Washington’s heavy investment in Tito’s Yugoslavia is a case in point. Nixon’s grand maneuver in 1972 was to invite Mao’s Beijing, a central communist regime, to form a third pole in the bipolar world order of the Seventies. And, indeed, a new pole was formed. “Without abandoning its communist trappings”, as Bruce Mazlish puts it, “China under Deng Xiaoping and his successors has been pursuing its own amalgamation of socialism, Confucianism, and capitalism in a unique blend.” The PRC’s scale is unique, too, and the systemic effects of its late-Cold War opening are often missed in Western discourse.

The triumphalist liberal narrative of the Nineties is also ideologized. Any serious account of China’s reopening to the West must reckon with the fact that it was not instigated or navigated in the early days by Western liberals. Whatever we make of this fact, the breakthrough diplomacy in China was undertaken by Western conservatives: Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, with some fine diplomatic play by Margaret Thatcher. Beijing has not forgotten who conceived its Cold War détente with the West. Nixon is highly respected in 21st-century China, as he seems to be among a growing number of young Americans.

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But China cannot be reduced to a partisan question in the West. It is too massive, too comprehensive, for that. Our ideologies do not capture it. And it cannot be stressed too heavily that it was Western diplomacy in the Seventies — not politics, not ideology — which drew Beijing back towards Washington, London, and Brussels. It was diplomacy which made “unconquerable China” a stabilizing presence in late-20th-century geopolitics.

It’s probably too much to hope for President Xi to be given a first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass during his stay in Washington, DC. But there is, in any case, a pair of words that Whitman brings forward in “Salut au monde” that still speak to the occasion. As he gazes out on the world of the 1850s, Whitman tells us that he sees “barbarisms” and “civilizations”. Not much has changed, perhaps. But this is no time for great-power barbarisms. The stakes are too high.

The task, then, is for China and the West to exemplify their long-related civilizations. Today, we’d be more likely to call them the world’s largest economic zones, and it’s tempting to see these tensions, over AI or rare earths, as insurmountable. But perhaps we shouldn’t be too quick to make the shift to brute economic calculation. For diplomacy is, ultimately, a civilizational legacy. And if diplomacy is what we need in the early 21st century, then surely we can find the strength and calm to engage in it: by returning to the deeper traditions which made several centuries of relatively peaceful trade and intellectual exchange possible between a strong China and a powerful West.

Some 86 years later, Britain is back Arabia, wooing a very different set of rulers. The Government has agreed to send an RAF Voyager tanker from its base in Cyprus to provide in-flight refueling for Saudi aircraft defending the kingdom against Houthi missiles and drones. Unlike Britain’s earlier direct strikes on the Houthis, in which RAF Typhoons took part, the present commitment is described as limited, time-bound and defensive. British support is not, officials insist, intended for Saudi strikes inside Yemen. Yet aerial refueling is never just symbolic. It enables aircraft to remain airborne longer, carrying Britain a little further into a war from which Saudi Arabia has spent years trying to extricate itself.

Britain supposedly withdrew from “east of Suez” more than half a century ago. In practice, though, it never entirely left, retaining close military relations with Jordan and Oman; a naval presence in Bahrain and the Gulf; and a defense industry tied intimately to the Saudi armed forces. As Sir William Patey, the former British ambassador to Riyadh, recently told the BBC, Saudi Arabia is Britain’s largest defense export market, while Britain is its leading supplier of advanced fighter aircraft. The relationship includes British-supplied Typhoons and air-defense systems, as well as continuing support for Saudi air operations under existing contracts. When Iran attacked Saudi Arabia, Patey added, Britain helped with the kingdom’s air defenses. The flags came down with the “winds of change”, then, but the infrastructure of influence survived.

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The Voyager’s mission may not be the return of former imperial power so much as the exposure of a continuing relationship normally hidden behind contracts, advisers and joint exercises. The Saudis, having been turned down by the United States, asked Britain to demonstrate that it remained a reliable partner. Andy Burnham then put the national-interest case more directly. “I go back to the point I made about cost-of-living pressures and acting to secure the interests of Britain and the wider region,” he said, “because of course Saudi Arabia has been experiencing attacks, is looking at potential further disruption, and we need to keep those pathways open.” The Houthis have seized the port of Mocha, and strategic Red Sea islands, tightening their grip on the approaches to the Bab al-Mandab, through which roughly a tenth of global trade normally passes. Their missiles have also reached Saudi territory, while attacks on energy infrastructure threaten pipelines designed to bypass the Strait of Hormuz. Altogether, that creates the possibility of a pincer squeeze on the world economy. What happens in the Gulf and Red Sea enters British and European politics through petrol prices, inflation and the cost of borrowing.

The crisis represents not simply the return of Mohammed bin Salman’s disastrous Yemeni war, but also the re-emergence in revolutionary form of Yemen’s ancient Zaidi political tradition. To treat the Houthis merely as an Iranian appendage threatening Western commerce is to misunderstand why bombing has repeatedly failed to subdue them. Iranian technology, components, training and revolutionary language have increased their power, and tied them to the so-called “axis of resistance”. Yet Tehran did not invent the movement and probably does not issue its daily orders. Its strength rests on the religious memory and political dispossession of Yemen’s northern highlands.

Zaidism differs significantly from the Twelver Shi’ism of Iran. Its name derives from Zayd ibn Ali, who died in revolt against the Umayyads in 740. In classical Zaidi doctrine, an imam did not inherit office automatically through an unbroken, divinely designated line. Rather, he had to be a qualified descendant of the Prophet through Hasan or Husayn, as well as learned, just, and also courageous enough to “come forth” against unlawful rule. The choice was elective only within this restricted sacred lineage. Armed resistance was not an accidental feature of legitimacy; it helped constitute it.

Zaidi imams ruled varying portions of the Yemeni highlands from the 9th century. Imam Yahya, who fought the Ottomans and consolidated an independent kingdom after 1918, was the last truly formidable representative of his order. His state was isolated and administratively thin, but he balanced tribes, including the Sunnis of the Tihama lowlands, dynastic claims, and foreign powers with considerable skill, including flirtation with Mussolini in the Horn of Africa. Italian connections alarmed the British in Aden, hence Freya Stark’s films and her appeal to the aristocratic pride of Yahya’s court. She contrasted Yemen’s hereditary religious hierarchy with a rampant appeal to dynastic snobbery, explaining that Hitler had been a paperhanger and that Mussolini’s father had been a blacksmith. Such details, she told her husband, “carry unexpected weight”.

The monarchy survived Yahya’s assassination in 1948, but not the republican coup of September 1962. Nasser sent an Egyptian army to defend the new republic. In one of the region’s more instructive confessional paradoxes, Saudi Arabia supported the Zaidi royalists. Wahhabi hostility to Shia belief mattered less than fear of revolutionary Arab nationalism. Britain also played a characteristically deniable role. Colonel David Smiley, an SOE veteran who had commanded the Sultan of Oman’s armed forces, advised Imam al-Badr’s royalists, and from 1964 directed a band of foreign soldiers that included former SAS men.

Britain is thus again assisting Saudi Arabia in a Yemeni war: but this time against Zaidi power rather than in its defense. The republic abolished the imamate but not the society that had sustained it. Zaidi scholars and descendents of Muhammad lost authority; Saudi-backed Salafi teaching expanded into the northern province of Saada; central government brought neglect, manipulation and intermittent repression. The “Believing Youth” movement began as a cultural and educational revival. Under the eponymous Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, however, it acquired a fiercely political theology and the now notorious slogan against America, Israel and the Jews. When President Ali Abdullah Saleh tried to crush it, Hussein was killed, and six wars followed between 2004 and 2010. Saleh, the master tactician who boasted of dancing on the heads of snakes, later allied with the enemies he had persecuted. Forces loyal to him helped the Houthis seize Sana’a in 2014. When, in 2017, he changed sides again, and sought an accommodation with the Saudis, they killed him. The movement had swallowed the snake-charmer.

Saudi Arabia intervened in 2015 expecting a short campaign. Years of air strikes devastated Yemen — without dislodging the Houthis. Yet it would be their attacks on Red Sea shipping following the Gaza war that brought a local movement and international stage. Sympathy for Palestinians is genuine and consistent with Houthi ideology. It is also politically useful. Palestine lets the movement mobilize a war-weary population, humiliate Arab governments and claim a stature beyond Yemen’s borders. A missile need not hit its target to work. The credible threat alone diverts ships, raises insurance costs, and turns a sectarian militia into an actor capable of taxing the global economy.

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Can anyone stop the Houthis?

By Reuel Marc Gerecht

Britain therefore confronts a genuine danger. But it also risks repeating an old error: mistaking superior machinery for political control. Freya Stark’s projector succeeded because it formed part of diplomacy. It flattered, persuaded and communicated. The Saudi air campaign, by contrast, showed the limits of firepower, especially when there is no plausible Yemeni order waiting to replace the people being bombed. As the Yemen specialist Elisabeth Kendall has warned, air strikes may degrade Houthi capabilities while increasing their popularity. Britain can help intercept drones; it cannot refuel its way to a legitimate government in Sana’a. Nor is the alternative to the Houthis a single coherent state. The internationally recognized camp contains Saudi clients, former Saleh loyalists, Islamists, southern separatists and competing tribal and regional forces. The UAE has sponsored secessionist allies, especially in the south, while Saudi Arabia has generally insisted on formal unity. The regions of Hadhramaut and al-Mahrah have their own identities and patrons. Oman, with its long experience of discreet mediation and its own British military history, fears disorder on its frontier.

In short, an east-of-Suez strategy built on royal relationships may preserve regimes more readily than it creates states. The Government’s distinction between refueling defensive Saudi missions and enabling offensive operations is therefore crucial but fragile. Patey assumed that Riyadh had not asked Britain to join direct strikes on the Houthis. Saudi oil and civilian installations were being attacked, he argued, and helping the kingdom defend them was legitimate. That is persuasive as far as it goes. But tankers do not decide the purposes for which an alliance is used; ministers do. The record of the earlier Saudi campaign gives little cause for confidence. Jeremy Hunt, then foreign secretary, spoke of his “frank conversations” with Saudi counterparts about human rights, while the Government defended British arms sales by citing the “extensive British training” given to Saudi pilots and the programmers of its “smart bombs” to limit civilian casualties. RAF liaison officers worked in the Saudi air operations center, ostensibly to help the kingdom comply with international humanitarian law. A former British official who had worked with the Saudis dismissed that claim in a single word: “bollocks.”

Britain now needs transparent rules, parliamentary scrutiny and an answer to the obvious question of what happens if the aircraft sustained by the RAF Voyager move from intercepting missiles to striking targets inside Yemen. Humanitarian law cannot be outsourced to the adjective “defensive”. In 1940, British power appeared in Sana’a as flickering images; today it arrives as invisible fuel. All the while, the Houthis warn that east of Suez, history never stays offshore for long.

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

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

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

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America has lost the will to fight

By Edward Luttwak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How the West can beat the rest

By Edward Luttwak

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

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

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

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

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

This is part of a broader offensive Trump has waged against NATO allies in recent weeks, for their refusal to send naval forces to help open the Strait of Hormuz. He told NATO members that they will “have to start learning how to fight for yourself” because “the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us”. Trump has also threatened to withdraw troops from Italy and Spain, and has once again raised the prospect of the US leaving NATO altogether. Asked in a recent interview whether he would reconsider US membership in the alliance, Trump replied: “Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration”. 

In this context, Germany’s sweeping rearmament program is widely presented as a positive step in the right direction — Europe finally taking charge of its own security. But does this narrative hold up? And how seriously should one take the US’s threat of leaving NATO? A closer look reveals a very different picture. 

Last month, Germany published its first-ever official military strategy, presented by Boris Pistorius, the country’s defense minister. Its core ambition is to transform the Bundeswehr into “Europe’s strongest conventional army” by 2035, and a “technologically superior” force by 2039, with the Federal Republic positioned as the continent’s leading military power and the primary partner for its European allies. To achieve this, the strategy envisages massive rearmament with long-range weapons, extensive deployment of AI, automation and autonomous systems, and a total force — including reserves — of 460,000 soldiers. The reserve is explicitly framed as a bridge to civilian society, signaling an intent towards broader social militarization. 

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By Aris Roussinos

The strategy has drawn sharply divergent reactions. Some hail it as a long-overdue step towards freeing Germany — and by extension Europe — from American military tutelage, given the US’s apparent “disengagement” from NATO. Others view it as a dangerous revival of German military nationalism, one that evokes the darkest chapter of 20th-century European history. Both readings miss the point. Germany’s rearmament is not designed to make the country more militarily sovereign — for better or worse. It is designed to elevate Germany’s role as the “vassal-in-chief” within the US-controlled NATO command structure. In this sense, the Trump-Merz spat should be seen as little more than political theatre. 

The document itself makes this plain. One of its key sentences reads: “NATO must become more European to remain transatlantic”. Germany’s role is conceived not merely as that of a frontline military actor, but as NATO’s logistical and strategic hub — the node linking Eastern, Central and Western Europe while maintaining the transatlantic connection to North America. In other words: Germany must rearm in order to sustain American hegemony on the continent. To paraphrase a famous line from the Italian novel The Leopard: “Everything has to change so that everything can stay the same”. 

This was made explicit in a recent post on X by Elbridge Colby, the US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Colby welcomed Germany’s new military strategy as a vindication of Trump’s pressure on European allies to rearm, framing it as a step towards what he calls “Nato 3.0”. His core argument is that Europe, led by Germany, must now convert the Hague Commitments — where Europeans committed to a landmark defense investment pledge, aiming to spend 5% of their GDP on defense by 2035 — into concrete military capability. He quoted Nato Secretary-General Rutte approvingly: “Air defense systems, drones, ammunition, radars, space capabilities — that is what will keep us safe”. On Germany specifically, Colby presented the new military strategy as proof that Berlin was finally stepping up after “years of disarmament”, noting that rechristened Department of War was already working closely with the Germans to accelerate the transition.

The strategy itself, as Colby quoted it, acknowledges that Washington “is increasingly shifting its strategic focus towards its Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific” and is demanding allies “step up their efforts to safeguard their own security”. Germany, in this framing, must become “an even stronger military ally to the United States” precisely because the US is repositioning elsewhere. 

This is simply a restatement of the “division of labor” that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced at the very outset of the Trump administration. He made clear that the US needed to pivot elsewhere — we now know that meant Iran, and ultimately China — and that Europe would therefore have to assume responsibility for “managing its own security”, meaning the maintenance of pressure on Russia through Ukraine. Europe duly obliged: it has increased its defense spending and has doubled down on support for Kyiv, including through the recently approved €90 billion loan. We are now watching the natural progression of that logic, as Europe assumes the full financial burden for the continuation of the proxy war against Russia. 

In short, the US is not “disengaging from Europe”; it is simply demanding that Europe contribute more to Nato, while remaining firmly embedded within the Alliance’s command structure — in short, that it pays more for its own subordination. 

This requires a reassessment of Trump’s broader strategy towards Russia. Though he is routinely accused of “appeasing Putin” — with critics citing his cut-off of US funding to Ukraine and his (failed) attempts to broker a peace deal — the reality is more complicated. Washington has long sought to force Europe to decouple from Russian gas and replace it with American LNG, and the war in Ukraine has allowed them to achieve just that — so much so that one has to wonder if America’s decades-long strategy in Ukraine, from helping topple the democratically elected government in Ukraine in 2014, to drawing the country firmly into Nato’s informal orbit, wasn’t designed precisely to lure the Russians into war. The bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline should always be understood as part of this strategy. This becomes even clearer in light of the latest US National Security Strategy, published in November 2025, which designates “American energy dominance” across oil, gas, coal and nuclear power as a top strategic priority, explicitly framing the expansion of American energy exports as a means to “project power”. 

This logic illuminates not only the US’s military campaigns against Venezuela and Iran, but also why, in order to keep Europe dependent on American energy and severed from Russian supplies, Washington has a structural interest in keeping the proxy war going. It’s therefore easy to conclude that the US was never genuine about its intentions to make peace with Russia. The only difference today is that the war is now being waged not only through Ukraine, but through Europe itself. 

In this light, the ostensible US “threats” to leave Nato — and the European establishment’s rearmament program, Germany’s above all — are revealed as components of the same strategy: keeping Europe subordinated to American geopolitical priorities. The new German military strategy is nothing more than Berlin fulfilling the role Washington has assigned it: holding the line against Russia while the US turns towards the Indo-Pacific and the Western Hemisphere. This is not nationalism, military or otherwise, but its opposite: the undermining of German and European core interests at the hands of a transnational elite.

In this context, Germany should be understood as the anchor of a new Europeanized Nato core, comprising Germany, France, the UK — and Ukraine itself (even if formally outside of the alliance). This too reflects a longstanding American design. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, the influential Polish-American diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted that “Franco-German-Polish-Ukrainian political collaboration… could evolve into a partnership enhancing Europe’s geostrategic depth”, adding that “America’s central geostrategic goal in Europe can be summed up quite simply: it is to consolidate through a more genuine transatlantic partnership the US bridgehead on the Eurasian continent”. 

This should dispel any remaining notion that what we are witnessing amounts to a move towards German or European strategic autonomy. It is no coincidence that Germany’s new military strategy identifies Russia as “the most serious and immediate threat” to European security — a claim that forms part of a broader European narrative warning of an inevitable war with Moscow in the coming years. At face value, this anti-Russian posturing might appear to reflect a distinctly “European” stance, one seemingly at odds with Washington’s public position. But this is largely an illusion. Not only has the European transatlantic establishment thoroughly internalized America’s strategic priorities, but the Nato command hierarchy makes the real chain of authority plain. 

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The Paris Agreement was a fantasy

By Thomas Fazi

Real operational control of the proxy war against Russia remains firmly in Anglo-American hands. At the top sits the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium, which translates political decisions into military objectives. The Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) — always an American general, dual-hatted as commander of US European Command — runs it alongside a British deputy. A German general coordinates staff work as Chief of Staff, but effective decision-making stays with the top two. 

Below SHAPE, operational command splits into two tracks: three Joint Force Commands (JFCs), the true theater commanders for large-scale operations, and three Component Commands covering air (Ramstein, Germany), land (Izmir, Turkey) and sea (Northwood, UK). MARCOM, the maritime command, has traditionally been UK-led, but the US recently took control of it, placing all three Component Commands under US command — a significant consolidation that has gone largely undiscussed. Even when a European officer commands a JFC — such as the leadership of JFC Naples, which recently passed from the US to Italy — the overall strategic direction remains under American control; JFC commanders implement objectives set by SHAPE. 

Two further structural dependencies reinforce American dominance. The first is the C4ISR concept of Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance: European allies are almost entirely dependent on US satellite, aerial and maritime platforms for real-time intelligence, surveillance and targeting — which together represent the backbone of Nato warfighting. Indeed, it has been acknowledged even by the Wall Street Journal that Ukraine’s deep-strike operations inside Russia — including, recently, against several oil production facilities — could not be conducted without American intelligence and satellite capabilities. The second dependency, less visible in public debate but potentially more consequential, is the dense presence of American staff officers embedded throughout Nato’s command structure at every level of the hierarchy, giving Washington an institutional grip that no change in command titles can easily displace. 

All of this should dispel any notion that the US is not deeply involved in the Ukraine war — or that it intends to leave Nato and truly “disengage” from Europe. Beyond the command architecture, the United States operates numerous bases and military installations across the continent, both within the Nato framework and under exclusive American control, which are indispensable to its global power projection. Ramstein Air Base in Germany — home to around 16,000 troops — functions as the hub controlling military drone traffic on a global scale, while coordinating American air operations across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. 

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation confirmed that, despite the public protestations of European leaders, US bases across the continent have functioned as the essential infrastructure for the American war on Iran. As the article put it, “Europe remains the bedrock of US force projection in the world”. Even Nato Secretary-General Rutte recently described the purpose of Nato as being a “platform of power projection for the United States”. 

Another element is what analysts call the “hidden dividends” of Nato: contracts and orders for American defense industries. This web of 1,300 agreements among the 32 member states that set standards for Nato weapons and equipment — covering everything from ammunition calibers to fuel-tank diameters — were originally imposed by Washington and overwhelmingly favor the American military-industrial complex. 

German and European rearmament, then, in the context of a supposedly more “European” Nato, is not strengthening European autonomy, but further eroding it. Not only does it make Europe complicit in Washington’s increasingly reckless military adventures, as the Iran war demonstrates, but more gravely still, it is pushing the continent towards a potentially catastrophic confrontation with Russia. Moscow is watching and responding accordingly. In a recent speech, Foreign Minister Lavrov stated openly: “A war against us has been openly declared. The Kyiv regime is being used as the tip of the spear. However, everyone is aware that this tip is unusable without Western supplies of weapons, intelligence data, satellite systems, training of military personnel and much more”. Lavrov added that Western leaders are actively preparing their publics for war with Russia — using Ukraine to buy time — and that Russia takes the threat very seriously. One cannot overstate the dangers of the path we are treading. 

A final observation is warranted. The French historian Emmanuel Todd has argued that much of what passes for nationalism in the West today — from Germany to Japan — is in fact a form of “imaginary” nationalism: vassalage towards the US dressed up as sovereignty. He contrasts this with “real” nationalism, a genuine sovereignty-oriented politics that is today largely absent. German neo-militarism, as argued here, falls squarely into the former category. But this does not mean that a “true” German nationalism — with its attendant aspirations towards continental hegemony — could not resurface. The militarization of German society and the hardening of anti-Russian sentiment are real and deepening phenomena. There is a historical precedent, after all. A century ago, the Anglo-American establishment tolerated the Nazi military build-up as an anti-Soviet bulwark — only for the German monster to eventually slip its leash. The domestic German context today is obviously very different — and of course one may argue, and hope, that a “true” German nationalism would recognize that the country’s genuine interests lie in peace rather than war. Even so, the parallels are impossible to ignore. 

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

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

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

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Europe should secure the Strait

By Edward Luttwak

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Iran means for Putin

What Iran means for Putin

By Ian Garner

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what I can do — rather than offer a range of uncertain forecasts — is assess the range of plausible outcomes to this conflict and consider how each will affect countries and people in different ways. There’s no scientifically accurate way of eliminating uncertainty; so let’s embrace it. This is not a trivial exercise: I can recall only a few times in my own life when the range of possible geopolitical and economic outcomes, good or bad, has been as wild as it is today.

With his “known-unknowns” and “unknown-unknowns”, Donald Rumsfeld has actually provided us with a useful starting place to assess outcomes. The unknown-unknowns are often more important, but they are beyond our reach. “Whereof one cannot speak,” said Wittgenstein, “thereof one must be silent”. These are what economist Frank Knight was referring to when he coined the notion of “unquantifiable uncertainty”, or true uncertainty, as distinct from outcomes that carry a small probability.

So while little of value can be said about the unknown-unknowns, known-unknowns are generally worthy of deeper reflection. We all know about the truly bad scenarios stemming from the war. Airlines may run out of kerosene in six weeks; the world could run out of fertilizer and basic chemicals if the blockade continues for much longer. We know that Asia would be hit the hardest, followed by Europe, with the US affected least.

There are also potentially good outcomes. Europe has been offered a reminder that its investments in energy independence are worthwhile — and this includes both nuclear and renewables. The European Greens were mad to oppose nuclear power, but they were right about renewables, if only from the perspective of energy independence.

Beyond the war, which should end eventually, there are other positive economic scenarios coming down the track. The most interesting part of the latest World Economic Outlook by the International Monetary Fund was not the central forecast, the risk of global recession: but, rather, the wide range of possible scenarios it also weighed up. We truly live in a world of Knightian uncertainty.

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Trump’s gamble with the West’s future

By Wolfgang Munchau

I’m talking here about plausible scenarios, those that have a reasonable chance of occurring: the known-unknowns. Of particular interest are those scenarios at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Some middle-of-the-road scenarios are plausible, of course: economic forecasters always use them for their forecasts. But they have no higher probability of occurring than the good or bad ones. What you really want is information about the spread of outcomes, not the average.

If you want to understand uncertainty, after all, the mean is your enemy. Politicians should care about the voter with the median income; the voter who, when income is ranked from poorest to richest, is sitting in the middle. He would be a different person from the man with the average income, because the super-rich distort the picture. It’s the “Bill Gates walks into the pub” problem, where a single billionaire raises the average income of a group.

There’s an old joke about the statistician who died crossing a river that was three foot deep on average. Real statisticians, of course, know about this stuff. The people most at risk of such misjudgments are those with a Statistics 101 background, who have been taught some powerful techniques they then unleash on an unsuspecting public: economists, journalists, doctors, epidemiologists and unfortunately also climate scientists.

One of the most catastrophic uses of averages is represented by the communication strategy of climate scientists, when, 10 years ago this week, they set a target to keep the increase in average global temperature to below 2°C. But what kills us is not the average temperature — the 2°C extra — but the extremes: floods, heat, forest fires.

These are the metrics the climate community should have communicated. When you’re told, after all, that the temperature is going to rise by a few degrees, you get the deckchairs out. Indeed, I heard one well-known political commentator claiming that it might be nice for the weather to be a little warmer in Northern Europe. When, on the other hand, you receive a flood warning, you get the sandbags out.

In short, how we communicate risk determines how we act, and misusing statistics inevitably leads to misjudgments.

So rather than making sweeping average claims about the future, whether about the climate or war with Iran, a better way of thinking about our planet in the medium term is by reflecting on how different plausible scenarios could affect regions in different ways.

The most important positive scenario we might consider is the AI-led productivity boom. It has not happened yet — but there are data points suggesting that it may be starting to happen. If it does, it would benefit the US a lot more than the rest of the world. After all, America invented the technology; Silicon Valley’s foundational AI models are ahead of everyone else’s; and the US’s AI infrastructure is far and away the global leader. China, for its part, is next in line. The People’s Republic may not have invented AI: but it was easily the most successful second mover.

Unsurprisingly, Europe will gain least from the AI revolution. The EU is still in data-protection mode, as much a function of its cultural stance as individual government policies. From LLMs to driverless vehicles, indeed, the Europeans have decoupled from most of our century’s cutting-edge technologies. Pharmaceuticals is the one important exception, but here too China is catching up fast. China also is ahead on renewable investments, but here, at least, the Europeans do better than the Americans.

When it comes to bad outcomes, then, Europe is at greater risk than its rivals. And I don’t just mean technologically. There is a plausible scenario that the war in Ukraine could spread, for instance to the Baltic states, and the US would almost certainly not come to Europe’s rescue. Donald Trump’s line about how the Europeans “weren’t there for us” when the US attacked Iran will keep ringing in our ears as the scenario of a European war grows — in my opinion, a non-trivial tail risk.

Similarly, the Iran ceasefire could break down and the violence spread across the Middle East. Yet while there’s a lot of uncertainty about all these scenarios, we can say with some confidence that there is no realistic scenario of war hitting America’s shores.

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Europe will lose the AI century

By Wolfgang Munchau

Absent any definitive forecasts, from this brief analysis, I can make some sharp observations. First: the US is clearly in a better position than everyone else. Second: the US is more likely to benefit from any upside scenario, and less likely to be hit by a downside one. I’d therefore warn against those heralding the end of US global dominance, let alone the end of Trump’s presidency. This is mostly wishful thinking. The President has certainly made some foolish decisions, but the US is still at the head of the pack.

Things don’t look so rosy for Europe: it will not benefit from a global productivity boom and will be disproportionately exposed to the bad scenarios. And in those areas where it is strong, it is under attack by China. East and South East Asia sit somewhere in between the two polar opposites — beneficiaries of 21st-century technologies, but not as much as the US. But even though Asia is at greater risk of disruption from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, it is still more resilient to shocks than Europe.

Whatever happens, one single forecast, or even a focus on two or three scenarios, can’t hope to capture the deep asymmetry of the uncertainty we’re currently facing.

But people who embrace uncertainty don’t think in terms of baselines. They don’t look for polls or projections. Nor do they seek to control that uncertainty. They seek to learn from it. Perhaps we could all learn from them. Forecasts are for losers, and once you’re comfortable admitting that you just don’t know — you might end up seeing things more clearly.

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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War is being hypernormalised

By B. Duncan Moench

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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China will win the Iran War

By Aaron Bastani

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. 

History is the mass grave of foolhardy peasant rebels who crumble the moment they meet serious military power. Yet the Czechs were lucky. For as it turned out, they started their revolt at the same moment as one of the most key pivot points in European history. Almost by accident, the Czechs would become the first people on the continent to successfully use gunpowder weapons. Once they did, the underlying math of military strength changed quickly and forever. The European knight, though he tried to cling on, would spend the rest of his days sliding into irrelevance.

Six centuries later, a similar scene is playing out before our eyes. The United States, long used to proclaiming itself the greatest military power mankind has ever seen, just rode out to crush the Islamic Republic of Iran. Almost everyone expected this war to be a quick affair too, for more or less the same reasons as the knights did in 1420. In our age, it is the professional pilot, flying a $100 million fighter, who represents the gold standard of military accounting. In this regard, Iran is just a modern version of Bohemia. Having been sanctioned into the ground for 40 years, with almost no international allies, Iran could never hope to field much of an air force even if it wanted to. By dint of necessity and desperation, Iran’s weapons in this war are cheap and mass-produced, mostly made domestically. Yet they still bite; over the weekend, the country’s “non-existent” defenses shot down an American jet, triggering a huge rescue operation and even more losses.

America still has 11 aircraft carriers, and Iran has zero; all the reports indicate that the Trump administration initially expected the fighting to be over in days, if not hours. Yet as we begin the second month of this quick and easy three-day war, with fresh reports that the world economy is about to crash down on our ears, it might just be time to ask if we’re not living through another pivot point in history.

Despite their superficial differences, after all, the American pilot and the German knight are very much the same kind of creature. They both inhabit a hallowed place within their respective militaries; they both consume an extreme amount of resources; and they are both the central figures in a huge project of cultural and military myth-making. It’s therefore useful to understand the history that produced the modern hero-pilot and the equally heroic medieval knight, and the way in which military history tends to shift from favoring big and costly weapons to cheap and mass-produced ones.

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America's new doctrine of Empire

By Aris Roussinos

Before Europe had its medieval knights, it had the Roman Empire. Institutionally, Rome never cared all that much for cavalry, which it often sourced from its allies or auxiliaries. Instead, the foundation of its might lay in the legionnaire, a heavy infantryman wearing standardized and mass-produced equipment. Rome’s greatest strength was that it was both big and organized, and so had the power to bring an almost infinite number of well-trained, well-armed men to bear. An individual Gaul or Briton might have been a better warrior than the Roman legionnaire, but the legionnaire was always a better soldier.

When the Roman Empire collapsed, Europe decentralized. Tax bases shrunk; state capacity degraded; large armies became impossible to field. It was this new reality that produced the knight. Over time, Europe’s new lords realized that a cheap and effective source of military power, in lieu of a state strong enough to train and equip armies on its own, was simply to offer land and tax benefits in exchange for soldiers. Frälse, the old Swedish term for the nobility, loosely translates into those who are exempt: by offering the king a certain number of mounted cavalry in times of war, families attained the right to avoid taxes and other obligations.

The early-medieval nobility of Europe were therefore essentially military contractors. Over time, they grew into a discrete social class, with their own political interests. And just like any other social class, the knights were supremely interested in making sure their position was never truly challenged. Their arms and armor were extremely expensive — a well-made suit of plate in 15th-century England cost almost three years of an archer’s wages — and their warhorses were too. Altogether, then, it often took the labor of whole villages to support a single knight. And, to be fair, the knight was very effective in combat, just as long as he wasn’t put up against an organized, well-trained enemy sporting effective weapons. Given the economic and political limitations of early medieval Europe, he almost never was.

The contemporary American pilot flying missions against Iran, by contrast, is the product of a somewhat different collapse. Air power did not exist before the First World War, and only hit its stride from 1939. But despite the hype, both world wars were still infantry wars. The three million Germans who invaded the USSR in 1941 were mostly organized in infantry divisions, relying partly on horses for their logistics. During both world wars, states equipped millions or even tens of millions of soldiers. The Americans, the Soviets, and the Germans; they all fought like the Romans once did, relying on their mass and scale and standardization.

This kind of mass warfare is gone, and it will not return in our lifetimes. The US Army in 2026 sits at approximately 450,000 active-duty personnel, which is only slightly more than the number of deaths that same army sustained from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima.

For many reasons — not least the challenges of instituting a draft during a time of political fragmentation — America, alongside pretty much every other industrialized country, has undergone a collapse in its ability to field mass armies. That’s shadowed by an even more dramatic collapse in their ability to produce weapons and ammunition at scale, as Western countries have deindustrialized and moved production abroad. It is in this era that the idea of the military has come to completely revolve around airplanes and air power. The rise of the American pilot has coincided with the collapse of its infantry.

As this military shift has happened, our culture has shifted too. Where the industrialized West once thought and acted like the Romans, venerating the ideal of the dutiful soldier, our culture is now increasingly geared toward the cult of the warrior, where victory is achieved by noble and heroic individuals. For a Napoleon or a von Moltke, the height of military accomplishment was the faceless infantryman. In today’s culture, the ideal is Tom Cruise in Top Gun, or a burly member of Delta Force. Perhaps the most iconic example of this shift is Pete Hegseth, the self-styled “Secretary of War”, who embodies a kind of hyper-aggressive machismo completely out of step with the institutional Pentagon. The older generals are dour soldiers, but Hegseth seems to view himself more like an epic Norse warrior, and even has the tats to prove it.

And just as medieval warriors had their armor and horses, so too do pilots have their steeds in the sky. The cost of a modern fighter jet is easily north of $100 million, but with out-of-control inflation across America’s decaying military industrial complex, that figure is constantly rising. Besides, the sticker price pales compared with the enormous cost of keeping planes operational and effective. It takes hundreds of people to enable a single pilot: an US aircraft carrier requires some 3,000 crewmen just to operate the ship, and an additional 2,500 to enable an air wing of 50-to-70 planes. But many more are engaged in fixing and supporting planes stateside, including the contractors who don’t show up in the numbers.

Just like the medieval knight, the American pilot is nearly invincible as long as he isn’t put up against an organized, well-trained, and well-armed enemy. In Vietnam, this turned out to be quite the problem. But after that bitter experience, America made a point to only pick fights with the likes of Panama, Grenada, and the Taliban. Moreover, at the time when US planes were truly at the cutting edge of military technology — that is, 50 years ago — computers were still in their infancy, long-range rocketry was inaccurate and expensive, and modern drones and satellite imagery were still a way off.

In those days, the weapons needed to destroy a fighter jet on the tarmac from hundreds of miles away were orders of magnitude more expensive, putting them well outside the range of poorer countries or terrorist groups. As mass warfare collapsed, meanwhile, conflict crept toward becoming a game for a tiny cadre of military elites. And though mechanized infantry and armored brigades were heavily involved in the Gulf wars, it is the pilots and the airpower that are remembered today. They have become mythological heroes, and their reputation today is that of an elite and unbeatable force. But as the knights in Bohemia learned to their costs, such reputations do not last forever.

As it happens, the Czechs in 1420 turned to gunpowder out of sheer desperation. Gunpowder wasn’t exactly new in Europe, but the slow and unwieldy nature of early firearms meant they were rarely used, and only then in specific situations. But gunpowder also had significant advantages. For one, it took almost no training to learn how to use a gunpowder weapon. For another, the damage they inflicted came from the chemical energy stored in the powder itself, meaning even women and children could use them effectively, punching through plate armor with ease. Early handguns were essentially just metal tubes at the end of a stick, meanwhile, making them cheap and easy to produce. Once the Czechs figured out reliable tactics that could compensate for the drawbacks of early guns — such as the very long reload time — the cream of Christian knighthood stopped being such a threat. Soon enough, the Bohemians would defeat several crusades against their homeland.

Today, the miniaturization of electronics is having the same revolutionary effect that gunpowder once did. The technology that allows you to stream movies on your iPhone can also be used to provide extremely accurate terminal guidance to an inexpensive suicide drone; strap a grenade to a Chinese toy drone and it becomes a nightmarish anti-infantry weapon. In the Seventies, the ability to precisely target American airbases from the air was something out of reach for many states. Today, an Iranian Shahed-136 can be bought at a significantly lower price than a 2026 Honda Accord, allowing any middle-class family to theoretically afford top-shelf precision airpower. Just recently, one such drone was used to totally destroy an American E-3 sentry aircraft on the runway, a plane that America doesn’t produce anymore but cost hundreds of millions of dollars when it did. One of Iran’s primary air-defense missiles is the very innovative 358 missile, rumored to be especially cheap owing to its use of off-the-shelf electronics.

Ballistic missiles are, of course, rather more expensive, and probably out of the reach of most private citizens. Yet they are still cheap enough to present a massive problem for American military planners. All the while, the same challenges that long afflicted America’s small-arms manufacturing sector are now impacting its fighter planes. For instance, the Air Force recently looted an aging KC-135 from the junkyard, and may now bring it back into service. This specific machine was delivered to the Air Force back in 1959, meaning it technically qualifies for social security. Hardly ideal: but American airpower is now so expensive that even America struggles to afford it.

In the collective imagination of the West, the American pilot remains a warrior-knight par excellence, capable of charging into a battle and defeating dozens of enemies on his own. In the much grubbier reality of today’s war, the American pilot is now flying an aircraft that might be 30, 40, or even 50 years old. He is up against an enemy armed with weapons designed in the 2010s and the 2020s, often leveraging technologies that didn’t even exist 10 or 15 years ago. Meanwhile, America’s pilots operate on a military doctrine that the Pentagon itself concedes is outdated and ill-suited for an age of cheap precision weaponry.

All this is now causing panic in Washington, as well as a curious form of cultural schizophrenia. Officially, America’s pilot-knights are flying into battle and utterly crushing their enemies. Iran now has no formal military, apart from the parts that are still blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Their missiles and drones are almost all gone, apart from the ones which aren’t, which is why American satellite companies are being asked to stop offering pictures of the damage they’re not inflicting. Most stunningly of all, the Iranians have been left with absolutely no functional air defenses — apart from those that just shot down several American aircraft.

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America’s military humiliation

By Malcom Kyeyune

That brings us to the most interesting part of the war so far: the recent felling of an American F-15 over the skies of western Iran, and the vast rescue mission that followed. The stranded airman was saved, but the operation still resulted in the destruction of perhaps half-a-dozen American aircraft in total, making it the worst day for the Air Force since Vietnam. In the official narrative, however, this was all a stunning success, full of pluck and heroism; President Trump called it “one of the most daring search and rescue operations in US history”. What country, other than America, could pull off something like that?

In a sense, the details of the story are beside the point. What matters is just that: the story. That this operation was both hugely costly and advanced no strategic goals is almost certainly true, but it is also irrelevant to how America now thinks of itself. This was once a society of soldiers; now it has become a society of warriors, and its entire self-image increasingly subsists on these kinds of tales.

But how long can they last? Once people stop believing in knightly prowess and valor, once they no longer think that the bold few can vanquish the peasants, whether they’re armed with guns or IEDs or Shaheds, their entire reason for existing disappears. And if people wake up one day and wonder why they’re paying hundreds of millions of dollars to train and support some hotshot pilot, when an ugly plastic drone running on a motorcycle engine can do the same job a quarter as well at a millionth of the cost, the American military will stop being the world’s most powerful military. Instead, it will become a sad and ridiculous anachronism.

That day has already arrived in many parts of the world, as more and more military planners watch what’s happening in Iran and Ukraine. But it has not yet arrived in America. And that is why there’s a blackout on satellite images, why the military is so cagey about reporting on casualty numbers, and why America’s increasingly limited resources are being spent on flashy rescue operations that achieve very little in the way of strategic objectives, even if they do look very cool. That is why the very last stockpiles of long-range, standoff weaponry have to be brought over from Asia to fight against an enemy that has already been defeated. It is why Americans are being told they will have to embrace a round of truly vicious austerity, as the most powerful military in the world gobbles up another $500 billion to support a war it is in fact handily winning with its eyes closed.

As this war that was theoretically won in the first 48 hours grinds on and on and on, America’s self-proclaimed Secretary of War has come under increasing criticism for his conduct. With his crusader tattoos, and his erratic behavior — asking God for “overwhelming violence” to smite “those who deserve no mercy” — there are those who wonder whether Hegseth is really fit for the job. But who other than him, with his big Jerusalem cross and the even bigger chip on his shoulder, is a better fit for this next pivot point in history? Who else but he could lead the very finest knights that all Christendom has to offer, out on their final, glorious charge?

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

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

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

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Trump’s gamble with the West’s future

By Wolfgang Munchau

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to end the Iran war

By Edward Luttwak

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

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

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

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

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

Such was the pre-Suez balance of power that these ideas were seriously entertained: not as idle reveries but as genuine strategic debates, with the outcomes backed up by the hard power of Britain’s military-industrial strength. Nor was this thinking the preserve of public-school soldiers and jingo adventurers; it was common in the Labour movement. Clement Attlee himself remarked that “we ought not to give the Americans the impression that we cannot get on without them”, while Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin called the Middle East a “lifeline” for the Commonwealth.

Today, such confidence has passed into history. The idea of a mighty Albion projecting her influence in the Gulf is laughable — whatever Donald Trump might now demand. Such is the state of our armed forces, indeed, that we are unable even to play the supplicant role afforded to us two decades ago during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Instead, Britain looks on in horror as Trump adds his own forever war to America’s growing list. Meanwhile, our prime minister makes a virtue of necessity. For once, his anti-interventionist position chimes with the public mood, even if it has been forced upon him by the ascendancy of Labour’s soft Left and the impotence of a mostly ship-free Royal Navy.

Common to many national disgraces, these embarrassments become an opportunity for a kind of military palingenesis: a rebirth of national prowess like a phoenix from the ashes. From the humiliations of the last decades, and with Britain confined to a spectator role as the “rules-based order” burns, a new political tendency is gaining popularity in the more intellectual corners of the Labour Party. A substratum of “Anglo-Gaullism” is now concentrated among the Left’s self-proclaimed realists, hawking a message of salvation-through-defense spending, with rearmament presented as a catalyst for national renewal.

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Already last year, the government’s Defense Industrial Strategy promised military spending would become an “engine for growth”, creating a “strong industrial base” and a “defense dividend” for “every nation and region”. Starmerism’s media outriders have demanded a “new political economy of defense” that integrates “Labour’s goals of economic, social and climate justice”. A defense-industrial “securonomics” will, they claim, reindustrialize Britain’s left-behind regions. If Glubb Pasha’s British Monroe Doctrine is no longer available, at least the hardware of defense-industrial capability can be restored, not least as it offers the kind of secure manufacturing work that makes nostalgic Labourites dewy-eyed.

The Iran War has turbocharged this new thinking, which sees war-like preparedness as the panacea for a policy trilemma: the solution to low growth, persistent regional inequality, and our newfound irrelevance on the global stage. Learned essays in the house journal of Labourism have lamented the unsustainability of the welfare bill, while bemoaning a Treasury orthodoxy for which “reindustrialization through defense spending will never meet a value-for-money test”. The argument has found fertile ground among Blue Labour types, with Maurice Glasman declaring upon the invasion of Ukraine that the return of war to Europe’s periphery “has given us the possibility of an industrial strategy”.

As far as it goes, this argument is appealingly simple. As the transatlantic alliance falters, now is the time to reallocate capital away from the benefits bill — and towards gleaming new arms factories, cyber war labs, drone swarms, frigates and the new domain of space. The New Jerusalem, in short, will be built with a bomb factory in every drab provincial town.

But the new military Keynesianism is based on a delusion. It refuses to confront the fact that defense spending is, in strictly economic terms, one of the very worst ways to promote broad industrial rejuvenation. The growth multipliers are weak and the long-term productivity gains are non-existent. Unlike, say, investment in large-scale capital projects, building things, creating new fixed assets in energy, transport or digital infrastructure, there’s little diffusion of defense spending through the wider economy. While the construction of new roads, power stations or tram networks might provide decades of cheaper inputs, rearmament has a severe opportunity cost. An arms factory might create demand for steel and provide jobs for workers in much the same way as a high-speed rail link — but the former produces few positive spillovers, while the latter can regenerate whole regions. Rather than building the lifeblood of work, jobs and economic activity for the next century, in short, this khaki-clad Keynesianism sacrifices domestic prosperity for a real or perceived threat from without, or else because of an illusory attachment to the idea of Britain as a “global player”.

In truth, building and maintaining a world-class military exists downstream of a serious level of industrial capacity that Britain now sorely lacks. In the days of Bevin and Glubb, Britain built over half the world’s exported cars. Today it’s around 4%. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the UK was second only to the US in its steel production. Today, it manufactures less than Iran and Brazil, not enough to satisfy even half our own national demand. For all Labour’s rhetoric about a manufacturing renaissance, we simply don’t have the basic foundations of a durable industrial ecosystem: steel production; petrochemicals; plastics and advanced materials; energy independence and abundance; and a self-reliant productive base that isn’t subject to the whims of international oil shocks or geopolitical wrangling.

Each, in turn, has been allowed to atrophy. Against this backdrop, the notion that Britain can will itself back into great-power status through defense investment alone is incoherent at best and fanciful at worst. You simply can’t build a credible military in an industrial void, and military spending is a terrible option for closing our yawning productivity gaps. If the opposite had been true, the Soviet Union would have been buoyed by the Politburo’s excessive commitment to the Cold War arms race — rather than brought low by system-wide sclerosis.

Bevin’s Britain was able to take a seat at the Potsdam conference as a global military superpower because postwar Britain was a great industrial exporter, not vice versa. Today, by contrast, we are a country disastrously unsuited to a deglobalizing, dog-eat-dog, protectionist age of competitive national production; a poor country by OECD standards, with Eastern European levels of GDP in some regions, but with a rich capital city that distorts our more dismal averages. If resilience is the watchword of our age, it is surely economic, not military, resilience that should take priority. This is a country facing its second major energy shock in less than a decade, and without any significant per-capita growth in the last two.

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Then arises the question of which war we are preparing for: a counter-insurgency; a neo-imperial intervention in the Gulf; a standoff with China in Taiwan; or a continental land war with Russia? Given the parlous state of procurement at the Ministry of Defense, are we to spend billions building yet more faulty hardware? Will we make the common mistake of every general, fighting the last war, building old-fashioned ships that can be destroyed by a naval drone costing a few thousand dollars in an age of asymmetric warfare?

If the principal threat today comes from Putin’s revanchist nationalism, it will be up to the new military Keynesians to explain why Britain must stomach yet more years of belt-tightening to prepare for war with a country that has failed to occupy even the Russian-speaking territories of a poor, dysfunctional, non-Nato country in which many voters habitually plumped for Russophile oligarchs. Having turned its nation into a pariah, and almost suffering a palace coup after attacking perhaps the most propitious place on Earth for a Russian invasion, is the Kremlin really about to attack Nato? That uncertainty is shadowed by the societal challenge here at home. In the dilapidated high streets of Britain’s regions, it is doubtful whether a beleaguered public see our capacity for military deployment, let alone the protection of some far-off military base, as an urgent daily concern.

Rather than busying ourselves with the dead end of Gaullist posturing, in short, perhaps we should start thinking of ourselves as the developing country that, in many ways, we so obviously are. Certainly, financial analysts have already begun tempering their investments in Britain, a country now displaying the dysfunctional features of an “emerging market”. Rather than Anglo-Gaullism, then, surely a far better model is Anglo-Dengism. Echoing the Chinese example, Britain today should look inwards, focus on problems closer to home, build, develop, reform, innovate, and Make Britain Rich Again, before finally concerning ourselves with the global status games beloved of men-of-a-certain-age who played too much Risk as a child.

As the pro-market reformers of the Chinese Communist Party understood, following the privations of three decades of peasant communism, to project yourself abroad, you must “hide your strength, bide your time”. Before sending aircraft carriers to reopen faraway straits or threatening foreign regime, we must first become a country capable of raising real wages and living standards for our own British citizens.

Ernest Bevin once demanded a nuclear bomb “with a bloody Union Jack on top of it!”. The Anglo-Gaullists fancy themselves his heirs. But Bevin — and Glubb before him — knew that power had to be consistently built at home before it could be brandished abroad. Today, we are attempting a reverse Bevin: indulging in a fantasy of power without the necessary foundations, painting the flag onto imaginary weapons we no longer have the means to sustain.

In truth, though, the erstwhile “Pearl of the Gulf” was always far more complex. Its rulers long envisioned themselves as leading a kind of Arab Switzerland, and with the UAE’s expansive and secretive finance industry, and its large population of foreign guest workers, you have to say they’ve succeeded. But where they haven’t succeeded — where, in fact, they now risk destroying the country’s whole future — is on foreign policy. For unlike the Swiss and their well-honed neutrality, the UAE has enmeshed itself in conflicts all over the region, along the way making for itself a prodigious list of enemies. And now, with their own territory under attack, they may finally be reaping what they long sowed abroad.

The United Arab Emirates is a fairly young country, and one new to the world stage. Founded in 1971 from the embers of the British Empire, it’s formed of seven semi-autonomous emirates, their respective emirs forming a Federal Supreme Council. In truth, though, the country is dominated by the two richest and most populous: by convention the Council’s president is always the Emir of Abu Dhabi, while its vice president and prime minister is the Emir of Dubai. Just as telling, the sovereign wealth funds of both these Emirates control enormous conglomerates, initially funded by oil revenue, and which are involved in a dizzying array of businesses at home and abroad. The most important of these is probably DP World, the Dubai logistics company that’s also one of the world’s largest port operators. The line between these powerful “private” businesses and the state is more or less a legal fiction.

Through the proceeds, Dubai has made itself an international city with all the style and class of Las Vegas, albeit minus the vice. It has the world’s tallest skyscraper; an indoor ski slope; man-made islands meant to look like a world map, but which were never developed and thus are returning to the sea. By reputation, the city is filled with influencers, young Russian “models”, digital nomads of all stripes, as well as various war profiteers and exiles. If, however, a recent Washington Post article refers to the city as an “oasis for business and partying” — the truth is that the great majority of Dubai’s population are foreign workers. Some are Western professionals, yes, but many more are South Asian Muslims in low-skilled jobs. In other words, the majority of people in the UAE are not spending their time partying, and indeed Muslims are banned from buying alcohol.

It’s commonly claimed that these workers are mistreated. Yet if abuse surely happens, the sheer number of foreigners who do make the trip suggests they know what they’re getting themselves into. Zakir Hussein, the younger brother of Saleh Ahmed, a 55-year-old Bangladeshi driver who was killed by missile debris, told the Guardian that following his brother’s death he did not want to return to the UAE. “But,” he added, “Dubai is the only place we know how to earn.” The scale of this is large enough that not just their families, but their countries depend on it: the World Bank estimates that remittances from the country to India, Pakistan, and the Philippines reached $47.5 billion in 2024. Besides, if you follow the law and don’t have a problem with living outside a liberal democracy, Dubai is safe and things work properly, certainly compared to the dysfunctional South Asian cities many migrants arrived from.

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Yet beyond the labor laws, the ultimate myth of the UAE centers on its neutrality. The country received plenty of attention, for instance, when it refused to participate in sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. For its part, a 2023 report from The Wilson Center fretted that the country was “non-aligned with a tilt towards China”. Yet while the country does attempt a balanced approach towards the world powers, the reality is that the UAE is a US treaty ally, hosting the Al Dhafra airbase outside of Abu Dhabi, home to 5,000 military personnel. Further, Dubai’s Jebel Ali port, though not technically a military base, is the US Navy’s largest port of call in the Middle East and commonly used by aircraft carriers. Little wonder the US State Department described the UAE as “vital” to supporting the country’s interests as late as last year.

More than this American connection, though, the UAE aggressively pursues what it says are its interests across the wider Middle East. As far back as 2011, it was a direct participant in the intervention against Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. In the aftermath, it then supported the regime of General Haftar, something that continues despite Emirati claims to the contrary. The UAE has also made enemies from Syria to Sudan, in the latter case backing General Dagalo and his Rapid Support Forces, both accused of genocide by the Biden administration. In Somalia, meanwhile, the Emiratis have entirely fallen out with the government over their support of the separatist enclave of Somaliland. The only recent intervention with any obvious national security connection to the UAE itself is Yemen, where they joined Saudi Arabia in its decade long war against the Houthis. Yet here, again, the Emiratis seem erratic at best, backing the so-called Southern Transitional Council — only for it to be defeated by a Saudi-backed alternative just days later.

The point of this hyperactive foreign policy is not entirely clear: besides a lust for gold and glory. Abu Dhabi and Dubai, after all, are both effectively private governments run by wildly wealthy businessmen. And if that explains the country’s glitzy domestic development — from man-made islands to ski slopes in the desert — its foreign stance might be understood in similar terms. To quote Dr Andreas Krieg, an expert on UAE foreign policy, the country seems to want the following: “Strategic depth, relevance, strategic autonomy, indispensability, access to resources, regional broker and hub.” In other words, the Emiratis want it all, and with basically unlimited funds they think they can get it.

Yet this frantic foreign policy is hardly without consequences. Tanzania’s Maasai tribesmen aren’t much of a threat — even if the UAE finally succeeds in taking enough of their land to build a big game hunting resort — but some of the country’s new enemies are dangerous indeed. Consider Yemen. Though it largely went unnoticed at time, when the Houthis were attacking Red Sea shipping last year, with the stated aim of harming Israel, they were also hurting their old enemy the Emiratis: who control many of the ports in the Red Sea and the so-called Suez Canal Economic Zone.

Meanwhile, the UAE has drawn the ire of anti-Zionists the world over for signing the Abraham Accords. Its relationship with Israel is overplayed, yet it has taken a reputational hit for maintaining relations with Israel throughout the Gaza War. At the same time, the UAE has what can only be described as an obsession with the Muslim Brotherhood, which it calls a terrorist organization, and which seems to stem more from the Brotherhood’s republicanism than its Islamism. Again, this arguably hints at the way in which the country’s absolutist style intrudes into government: what the emirs fear is less ideology per se, and more the threat of modern politics to their feudal, personal system of rule.

Either way, all this offers a stark contrast to the UAE’s self-cultivated image of a safe and reasonable country. Though they can certainly justify the US alliance in the name of stability, and can’t be held responsible for this current war, it is enough to make some people second-guess their vision for the country. To be fair, I don’t think that the “Dubai Dream” is dead, as so many have proclaimed. The UAE has a clear narrative here: that they did not want or ask for Trump’s war, even if they now seem to be returning to form and demanding the US secures the Strait of Hormuz by force, while imprisoning Westerners for breaching security laws by taking photographs of drone and missile attacks. 

It seems obvious, then, that despite their pronouncements of loyalty to the US, genuine neutrality might have served the UAE well. And as for the future? If there should be a major terrorist attack citing as its cause the UAE’s actions in Africa, or its “support” of Israel, it may cause citizens and guest workers alike to more seriously examine the country’s record. Just last summer, both the US and Britain issued warnings calling terrorist attacks in the UAE “very likely”. What’s more, in a society made largely of lower-class Muslim foreigners, it is nearly impossible to fully guard against radicalization. As in other aspects of the Dubai model, it’s increasingly clear that money can’t buy you everything, particularly when your guarantor is as erratic as Donald Trump.

Back then, after all, the United Kingdom was a fairly prosperous, settled nation, and would soon be on the winning side of the Cold War. As for Nigeria? A dictatorship with some crude oil. Now, of course, everything has changed. As Elizabeth’s son welcomes Bola Tinubu today, it’s Nigeria, not Britain, that holds the best cards. Indeed the UK’s long-term prospects feel rather uncertain — precisely why courting Nigeria, and countries like it, is so important to its future.

For much of the post-Cold War period, Britain and its Western allies could sort the world into two broad zones: stable and unstable. In the stable countries, money was safe, governments were predictable and the future discernible enough for long-term bets. In the unstable places, governance was erratic, investment risky, and violence never far off. This mental mapping had real consequences, shaping where capital, attention and diplomatic respect all flowed.

Nigeria long sat on the wrong side of that divide. With Marxist-Leninism just about still a going concern, the anti-communist Babangida was an important friend to have, likely explaining the 1989 state visit. At the same time, though, Nigeria’s economy was taken far less seriously. Through the Eighties and Nineties, after all, the country lurched through coups, aborted transitions and IMF austerity schemes, while its politicians acquired a reputation for predation and volatility. As late as 2016, David Cameron was filmed describing Nigeria as a “fantastically corrupt” country.

Over recent years, of course, our neat ideas of stability and corruption have started to collapse. A major war has raged on European soil for four years now, with the Baltics and Poland fearing for their very sovereignty. The Gulf, long an oasis of affluent calm, suddenly looks much less secure. America, hitherto the chief guarantor of Western stability, is now a country whose Capitol can be stormed by an angry mob, and whose president can levy tariffs or launch foreign adventures overnight. As for Britain, one-in-three Britons now believe civil war could occur here in the next decade.

This does not mean that Britain or America are “just like” Nigeria. But it does mean that disorder, or at least the serious prospect of it, is no longer something that simply happens over there. That in turn changes the relative position of countries like Nigeria. Their problems hardly vanish, but they no longer look like uniquely disqualifying flaws in an otherwise ordered world. Now, Britain’s Business and Trade Secretary Peter Kyle says that “the UK and Nigeria share a belief in the power of enterprise, innovation and education” — with a new strategic partnership between the two countries promising a flourishing of finance and fintech jobs.

To be clear, Nigeria still remains a difficult, exasperating country, whose promise has long been squandered by its own elites. Tinubu himself is hardly the personification of clean government, with allegations of corruption trailing him throughout his career. In this, Nigeria’s president shares much with the country’s broad political class. For instance, a court in London is currently hearing bribery charges against Diezani Alison-Madueke, Nigeria’s former petroleum minister, who supposedly spent £2 million at Harrods gotten from industry figures keen on government contracts.

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Meanwhile, though wealthier now than they were in 1989, most Nigerians remain poor, even as the state struggles to deal with a plethora of jihadist terrorists and criminal gangs. Kidnapping for ransom is so rife that it’s become a multimillion dollar industry of its own. The country’s size and natural resources have often made outsiders assume its eventual success is somehow inevitable. It never was — and isn’t now.

Yet it’s also true that Tinubu’s government, in power since 2023, has done something previous Nigerian administrations long avoided: embarking on reforms that acknowledged the country’s economic model was bust. Oil rents, import dependence, the sheer hustle of its citizens — none of these make an advanced economy. The broad direction of Tinubu’s changes, including lifting fuel subsidies and generally liberalizing the economy, have won praise from the IMF and World Bank. This matters not because their approval is all that matters, but because many Nigerians agree that the old system was unsustainable. The year before they were removed, the fuel subsidies consumed a quarter of Nigeria’s budget.

What many Nigerians rightly complain about is the brutal way in which Tinubu’s reforms were implemented. For instance, the sudden removal of fuel subsidies has drastically raised costs, with some basic staples now costing two or three times what they used to. That’s a big deal in a country where poor households spend up to 70% of their income on food. In other words, then, measures that look rational on an IMF spreadsheet can feel like punishment to regular citizens, especially if they’re already distrustful of their rulers. With 8-in-10 Nigerians expressing little to no trust in Tinubu’s government, he certainly has his work cut out for him.

Yet if Tinubu’s reforms succeed, Nigeria’s strategic position offers reasons to cheer. Aside from the country’s transition to democracy, the country’s GDP has also jumped eightfold since 1989, while its population has tripled to around 230 million, roughly 60% of whom are under 25. This makes Nigeria one of the youngest nations in the world, in sharp contrast to the aging societies of Britain and the wider West. That youthfulness offers both opportunities and risks in a land where some estimates put youth unemployment at around 50%. Fail to create enough jobs and the government is in trouble.

Nonetheless, Nigeria’s youthfulness remains a strategic fact. And besides, it has other strengths Britain can only dream of. Alongside the crude oil reserves it’s long been famous for — especially helpful given events in the Middle East — Nigeria also enjoys significant deposits of lithium, beryllium, zinc and other metals critical to technology supply chains. Britain needs access to critical minerals to power its renewable, high-tech and defense industries, even as it actively seeks to “full-proof” its supply chain over the years ahead.

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Britain has more basic reasons to cultivate economic ties with Africa’s most populous nation too. Since 2008, its GDP per capita growth has fallen to a sluggish 0.46% per year, hardly enough to cover the galloping rise in living costs. The country’s long-run economic story is hardly cheering either. In that context, a fast-growing market of over 200 million people looks less like a realpolitik ally — and more like an opportunity. Britain and Nigeria already do about £8 billion of trade a year, and British ministers have spent the last two years pushing new agreements in legal services, finance, education and energy. And why not? This is precisely the kind of fast-growing, English-speaking market Britain cannot afford to dismiss.

The feeling is mutual. For decades, and despite being such a vast oil producer, Nigeria imported much of the refined petroleum it consumed: its own state-run refineries barely functioned. Now, though, Aliko Dangote, Nigeria and Africa’s richest man, has built one of the world’s largest oil refineries in Lagos, spearheading investments in steel as part of a broader industrialization push. These are the most serious recent attempts to drag Nigeria up the value chain, and Britain can prod things along with targeted investment.

All the while, Nigerian immigration to the UK, reckoned to be around 300,000 over the last five years, means that the country’s cultural influence has blossomed too. Afrobeats stars now fill arenas and top music charts the world over, while the Nigerian diaspora is helping shape British society from KSI to Bukayo Saka — to Kemi Badenoch.

Altogether, then, it’s clear that Britain needs meaningful relationships in the rising global south, relationships based on more than postcolonial guilt, paternalism or nostalgia. In our increasingly dangerous geopolitical age, friendship is not ornamental. Rather, it shapes supply chains, diplomatic leverage and investment decisions. Britain can no longer simply announce its importance everywhere. It has to work out where history, language, and diaspora networks give it a real foothold, then build out from there.

Nigeria is one of those places. And while some on the fringes of British politics — both the radical Right and Left — are uncomfortable with that fact, Nigerians themselves seem far more relaxed. As a 2020 Ipsos survey of young Nigerians found, Britain’s people, government and institutions are the most trusted among foreign nations. Tinubu’s office has described Nigeria and Britain as sharing a “special bond”, while many wealthy Nigerians send their children to British universities, maintain homes here, and consider London a serious place to do business. Nigerians who live or spend most of their time in Nigeria itself have little time for the performative anti-colonial waxing some British-Nigerians indulge in here.

That, in turn, should prompt a change in British sensibility. A mature relationship with Nigeria cannot be conducted as though London still dispenses order while Nigeria merely receives it. The old imperial habit — part condescension, part nostalgia — is now not only unattractive but also impractical. If Nigerians are prepared to engage Britain as an equal, Britain will have to learn to reciprocate.

Whitehall is already learning these lessons in its dealings with countries like India, where capital, demography and strategic leverage increasingly matter more than inherited assumptions of rank. That is likely to become one of the century’s governing patterns: former imperial subjects, or once dismissed peripheries, gaining influence as Western states lose their monopoly on confidence. The sensible response is neither sentimentality nor resentment, but realism.

For all the genuine and awe-inspiring might of America’s war machine, geography has given Iran an advantage in the Strait of Hormuz to which there is no obvious military solution. It is difficult to imagine what the Marine Expeditionary Unit, currently steaming toward the Gulf from the Pacific where it had been deployed to deter China, can do to unblock the Strait. Even if the 2,500 deployable Marines seize Qeshm island, on the Iranian side of the strait, they and the shipping they are being sent to guard will still be within range of weapons systems located within the mainland city of Bandar Abbas — and among its half-million population — and in the craggy and desolate mountain ranges behind. Senator Lindsay Graham’s proposal of seizing Kharg island, more than 300 miles away at the other end of the Persian Gulf, would still require the taskforce to sail through the very same strait from which, fearful of losses, the US Navy chooses to steer well clear.

It is all very well for Trump to demand that European, or even Chinese, warships escort oil tankers through the narrow waterway, but there is a reason that the US Navy has refused the same task. What America cannot do without bearing politically unsustainable risk, and very little prospect of success, Britain certainly cannot, and it is petulant and ultimately risible of Trump to demand we try. As Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius rightly observed this week, “What does Donald Trump expect from a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to achieve there in the Strait of Hormuz, which the powerful American Navy cannot manage alone?”

In these inauspicious circumstances, the idea that Britain should be doing more to help does not seem compelling, whatever confused and rambling outbursts emanate from the imperial center. The single drone that hit the American hangar in RAF Akrotiri may have been an embarrassment for Whitehall, but it was hardly a catastrophe. The seeming absence of a ground-based air defense system may be a mysterious oversight, but as Israel and the Gulf kingdoms show, even the most modern and extensive GBAD installation does not provide total defense. The carrier that many Fleet Street hawks demanded should immediately sail for Cyprus is already busy in the High North. Indeed, its current deployment, announced last month, came after Trump’s own declarations that Europeans were paying such insufficient attention to Arctic security that America has the right to seize Greenland, and perhaps Canada too. It is not Britain’s responsibility to chase after every military whim, reasonable or otherwise, of our imperial patron. In any case, the whole purpose of Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas is to act as our unsinkable carrier in the Levant: in Cyprus, and in the skies over Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf states, the RAF is already active shooting down missile threats to regional allies, and there is no obvious logic in seeking to do more.

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Macron’s European flotilla, led by France, and assembling in the Eastern Mediterranean, displays more than a touch of overkill: for the level of threat it faces, Cyprus must now be the best-defended country in the world. It is certainly an impressive sight, and a galling one for British observers of our own naval decline — yet competing with France is not in itself a vital national interest. Rather than being driven by strict military necessity, this is an act of political theater in which European leaders can signal both their capacity to act decisively in concert when one of their number is threatened, and their willingness to maintain a certain distance from the United States in doing so. Dismissively quashing Trumpian suggestions that it might sail eastwards to the arena of America’s muddled war, Macron’s government clearly sees the deployment, coming so soon after the announcement that France will expand the defensive umbrella of its independent nuclear deterrent across vast swathes of Europe, as tangible proof of the latent power that a French-led Europe, independent of Nato, can muster in defense of its own interests. We are less weak than we tell ourselves, the flotilla says, and our erratic overlord less strong.

Politically, the implications of all this for Britain are unclear. Starmer’s government has, correctly, chosen not to commit itself to this war, which is unfortunately not quite the same thing as remaining entirely detached from it. There is not, after all, much difference between Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus, unwillingly hosted by Cypriots for use in wars of no interest to them, and the notional RAF bases here in Britain from which American long-range bombers set off to and return from their missions over Iran. For the Greens and Scottish Nationalists to condemn the use of these bases is entirely expected. Yet when we see the keen populist bellwether of liberal centrist opinion Ed Davey demand a fully independent British nuclear deterrent, something has surely changed. It is hard, now, not to palpably feel the tide of empire retreating, though this time round with us as the natives observing, with mixed feelings, the crumbling power of their imperial master. Living through a time of historic changes is a more disorienting and ambiguous experience than the confident hindsight of historians later pretends: we can expect our politicians to struggle with the new realities struggling to be born.

It is reassuring then, at a moment in which Britain’s Right-wing parties have not covered themselves in glory, that Reform’s initial gung-ho enthusiasm for America and Israel’s war was so swiftly backtracked by Robert Jenrick, a long-standing skeptic of foreign entanglements. If his colleague Andrea Jenkyns remains keen to commit British boots on the ground, this is at least beyond the power of the Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire to effect. Yet the spectacle of Reform’s headlong advance to war, and the party’s hurried retreat when faced with polling data, has perhaps obscured the Conservative Party’s own, and perhaps worse, stance on Iran, a position seemingly derived equally from recklessness and a shaky grasp of detail.

Badenoch’s insistence, perhaps extrapolating from her experience of World of Warcraft, that Britain should  “stop the archer” by joining in strikes on Iranian underground missile bases, rather than merely “catching the arrows”, would seem an odd and escalatory response to a UAV launched from Lebanon. Bombing an entirely different weapon system in an entirely different country would not prevent any recurrence of such attacks, presumably undertaken by Hezbollah, unless Badenoch also intends to bomb Lebanon. Yet doing so would require deconflicting and therefore coordinating with the Israelis in a bombing campaign that even the United States is steering clear of, against UAVs launched from mobile and most likely civilian vehicles, in the wooded and heavily-populated landscape of southern Lebanon. The moral, legal, and political risks of accidentally killing civilians, in an aerial campaign that has already killed hundreds, would be unacceptably high for little obvious gain, the product of a soundbite in search of a strategy.

In its latest and even more confusing iteration, published in the Daily Mail, Badenoch’s stance on the American-Israeli campaign is that she is “clear that Britain shouldn’t have joined in – I remain concerned that there isn’t a clear plan behind the strikes – but Britain should also not be neutral” and should “strike the missile and drone sites at source”. The Conservative Party’s apparent position on this urgent question of national security is that Britain should conduct its own entirely independent retaliatory bombing campaign, in the same airspace as American and Israeli jets and against much the same targets. Given the American aircraft losses already to friendly fire, we must presume that Badenoch intends the RAF to coordinate and deconflict with its American and Israeli counterparts, as well as, given Britain’s military shortcomings, leaning upon their support for surveillance and targeting data. How this is considered “not joining in” is hard to discern: the advantage for the nation, even harder.

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Why Farage is a Burkean

By Aris Roussinos

It seems unnervingly clear that, rather than starting “from first principles,” according to her characteristically high estimation of her own intellectual rigor,  Badenoch had settled on a political strategy of marketing herself as stronger on defense than Starmer, in which the outbreak of war initially seemed a useful backdrop. That the war she initially chose to back proved both chaotically mismanaged and domestically unpopular has now led her to defend, alone, this tenuous and isolated political outpost. On a matter of the utmost gravity, the only principles apparent seem to be feeding the needs of the Westminster media grid, and a desire to cosplay the Iron Lady for her dwindling audience.

If we are to truly start from first principles, they must be that Britain has its own interests, distinct from those of our allies in Europe and the United States, and it is only to those interests British leaders should attend. If the Iran War is an American party to which we have been invited but do not wish to attend, so is it the case that the European effort is something Starmer may wish to join, but to which we have not been invited. Greece did not send its jets and frigates to Cyprus to defend Britain’s SBAs, as British commentators affected to believe, but to reassure and protect its ethnic kin, maximizing the country’s political influence. In the same way, the broader, European effort has its own French political rationale, of advancing a Macronian vision of strategic autonomy, in which Britain serves little if any role. Rather than joining the war at arm’s length, as Badenoch may wish, our current refusal to take part is itself carried out with a certain insular detachment.

Yet the European consensus on this war’s regretful pointlessness, now uniting even the most Trumpian of continental governments, like those of Italy and Hungary, with the liberal center, provides Starmer with the political cover to stay out. At the beginning of this conflict, it was a contrarian position in the British press to unequivocally state that joining the fight is not in our interests: now it is, correctly, the mainstream political opinion in Westminster as across Europe as a whole. What a few weeks ago appeared an unusually bold stance from Starmer now seems boringly, obviously sensible: Trump’s increasingly erratic jibes to the contrary now inspire pity rather than deference. There may well be a case, when the shooting stops, for taking part in convoy escort and minesweeping duties in the Strait of Hormuz, but we and other Europeans should demand a reasonable price from this most transactional of American administrations. Above all, surely, we should require that Trump firmly and publicly commit himself to the territorial integrity and self-determination of both Greenland and Canada, the New World extensions of our European civilization: he may be a boomer, but Trump has no right to consume our rightful patrimony.

At this moment of historic American weakness, so swiftly following Trump’s intimidation of our home continent, we Europeans must be a little more ambitious in renegotiating the terms of our relationship. Yet instead, the Conservative and Reform politicians who would have blindly leapt into war now tie themselves in knots justifying arcane and incoherent positions, isolating themselves from both domestic opinion and the broader European Right. That they find themselves in this position seems almost more pathetic than lamentable, so devoid is it of any political or strategic sense. Like parents, all empires age, wither and then eventually die. Filial loyalty does not generally extend to jumping into the grave alongside them.

In short, we get a policy that will over time make the UK poorer in a quest to keep it rich. Yet as damaging as it is to the country’s long-term economic prospects, nobody can bring themselves to end it. And so, logically, amid economic stagnation or reversal, if some groups can maintain or even grow their wealth and income, as is the case with the triple lock, others must experience falls in their living standards and life opportunities. So even amid tepid growth, degrowth has started for some — namely, those whose livelihoods depend on income from labor rather than proceeds from capital.

Mind you, this revived class struggle now brings a novel twist: the owners include not just the uber-rich but people with comparatively modest incomes, such as pensioners whose capital is tied up in the funds that are today among some of the world’s biggest investors. Nevertheless, their livelihoods require preserving asset values no matter how sluggish the growth. The inevitable outcome is that workers get squeezed, both directly and indirectly: directly through higher taxes on labor — out with free tuition, in with the triple lock — and indirectly through fiscal and monetary policies that ensure asset values rise faster than the economy.

At the heart of this deepening political rift between capital and labor, driving a resurgence of anti-systemic populism on both the Left and Right and a turn against democracy by young people, is a reality that few whatever their politics want to confront. The rapid economic growth rates of the postwar period, which made possible the expansion of the welfare state and promises of future benefits that presumed an endlessly rising supply of resources, are not returning — because, as with the pursuit of the triple lock, we’re now trapped in a cycle where the pursuit of growth produces degrowth.

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Is this the end of private equity?

By John Rapley

Western economies have been slowing for decades, and a handful of rich countries have crossed the threshold between growth to degrowth in per-capita terms: while gross domestic product has kept rising in Germany and Canada, real per-capita income has begun declining. Almost everywhere else in the developed world, including Britain, growth has been close to stagnant since before the pandemic. And even the supposed star performer of developed economies, the US, whose real per-capita income has continued rising steadily, hasn’t escaped this trend towards deceleration, because its added growth results from added debt. If you deduct debt from growth to come up with a true picture of the economy’s dynamism, the country would have already started going backwards.

This partly has to do with profound shifts in the world economy, and in particular the relative decline of the West compared to the rising global periphery. But increasingly, there’s evidence of endogenous forces which act to inhibit growth — something I refer to as the “Icarus effect”. Simply put, as an economy grows richer, its growth rate slows, because it encounters forms of natural resistance that slow and eventually reverse growth.

The growth-retarding effect of Covid-19, the first truly global pandemic in history, has been obvious, but the bigger threat will come from climate change, whose deleterious effects are already creeping up on us. With the average annual number of extreme weather events having so far increased sevenfold since the Sixties, not only will capital be depleted but inflation will remain permanently higher due to the rising costs of production (the recent Mediterranean storms being just the latest event likely to jolt food prices this winter).

Yet while such feedback loops inhibit growth for the whole world, there also appear to be changes which specifically affect the countries where growth has advanced the furthest: the rich ones. Because in addition to external pressures, we’re now starting to better understand changes which occur in the internal environment — which is to say, within us, as individuals and societies. As a society grows richer, it undergoes social, political and cultural changes which reduce dynamism, raise vulnerabilities and diminish resilience, all while increasing the cost of preserving wealth.

To begin with, fertility declines, which raises a society’s average age. From there, the economically productive share of the population declines. As a proportion of total economic output, consumption therefore rises and investment declines. Meanwhile, the investment which does occur shifts in character, becoming more focused on dividends rather than long-term growth (which favors legacy industries). It also becomes more risk-averse, one manifestation of which is a shift towards real-estate investment: and real estate, of course, produces nothing. Consider Canada, Germany and Italy, all which have been among the slowest performers, even as real estate now accounts for a third of fixed capital formation.

Adding to this, fiscal and monetary policies become increasingly oriented towards preserving asset values, through such measures as Nimbyism and the shoring up of asset values after market corrections with bailouts and easy money — real interest rates were kept near or below zero for years after the financial crisis — since any fall in asset values would hurt the growing share of the population which lives off them. The anti-growth measures which follow are thus more a symptom than a cause of the Icarus effect, but the consequent rising cost of capital makes it harder for new businesses to form, reducing dynamism in the economy.

In addition to these changes, vulnerability to external shocks rises as a society grows richer. For starters, the more capital you have, the more there is to be destroyed in natural disasters, and while mitigation measures can reduce risks, they further increase the price of wealth preservation. But just as importantly, and in contrast to the prevailing assumption that “rich is resilient” — the assumption being that wealth provides you with the resources needed to adapt to and bounce back from exogenous shocks — there’s compelling evidence that the reverse may be the case.

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The cost of Trump’s tariffs

By John Rapley

The first hints of this came during the Covid pandemic, when it was widely expected that poor countries would do far worse than rich ones. The latter, so the theory went, could not only care for their sick but pay people to stay home and reduce transmission. In fact, on balance, poor countries emerged no worse from the pandemic than rich ones, and in many cases actually did better, all at a fraction of the cost borne by rich countries. For every dollar spent per capita in a developing country fighting the pandemic, developed countries spent 12; for all that money, the average death rate in the rich countries was only marginally better than in poor ones, while many of the poorest nations on Earth — especially in Africa — were star performers.

This probably shouldn’t surprise us. There’s a growing body of research in public health which suggests that regular exposure to disease prompts stronger immune response. Known as the hygiene hypothesis, this theory suggests that frequent exposure to natural shocks, from storms to floods, forces people to be adaptable and flexible. This research has been widened to look at societal resilience and finds exposure to shocks makes societies more resilient — in part because the weak states of poor countries make for strong societies, providing individuals with adaptive support through stressful times. Anyone who has lived in a developing country will be familiar with the community groups that form in neighborhoods or at churches, mosques and temples, and which provide everything from basic welfare and storm preparedness to watch groups in under-policed areas.

The upshot is that the mix of declining economic dynamism and resilience with rising vulnerability will mean rich countries take bigger economic hits from ecological feedback loops. Given their already slowing growth, moreover, this means they’re especially at risk of getting knocked backwards — when a country’s annual economic growth rate is around 1%, a shock like a pandemic or severe flooding can quickly tip it into recession.

Degrowth isn’t inevitable, but two things could make it so. The first is if Western countries try to carry on as we always have in the expectation growth will somehow return to past levels. That would only hasten the degrowth that has begun. The second is if we neglect the externalities of growth, especially climate change, in a quest to prioritize growth. That will produce the perverse outcome of accelerating our decline.

***

Icarus Economics: Why Rich Economies Are Struggling – and How to Fix Them (Atlantic Books) is out now.

Two centuries on, Vladimir Putin has framed his crusade against Ukraine as the path to recovering Russian vitality once more. Putin has repeatedly invoked memories of the Westernizing 18th-century Tsar Peter the Great, and of the Soviet Union, to equate expansion with renewal — and war as a method of national rejuvenation. Through its battle against Ukraine, Putin promised, Russia would reshape the international order, overturn Western dominance, and forge itself as a stronger, more unified society. A new, vibrant Russia could emerge from a conflict in which its army has slaughtered thousands of Ukrainians and faced death and destruction itself.

For years, state propaganda has ceaselessly pushed this vision. Occupied cities such as Mariupol are presented as showcases of a coming “new Russia”: rebuilt, modernized, and cleansed of European influence. A rash of new school textbooks describe a rising power reclaiming its historical destiny. Official imagery projects motion born of war: construction sites, patriotic festivals, soldiers as founders of a renewed nation. Even diplomatic theater — including the Russian media reception of Putin’s red-carpet welcome in Alaska — reinforces the impression of restored prestige, of a country returning to its rightful place at the center of global affairs. The war serves as the engine of historical revival; it is the catalyst for life renewed.

Exactly four years after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, of course, Russia’s war has failed. Endless casualties have bought barely a fifth of Ukrainian territory. The world has not reorganized itself around Russian power, while the promised internal renewal has failed to materialize. Behind the spectacle of official optimism, meanwhile, death has moved to the demographic, economic and cultural heart of public life. The mechanisms meant to restore national strength are instead consuming the human and institutional resources on which that strength depends. Russia’s leaders set out to escape the Necropolis. Now, though, the country is addicted to war, and entrenching itself as a land of the dead.

Wherever Russians live, death has found a burrow. Each month, some 30,000 new recruits depart from country towns and industrial outskirts, and another stream of wounded traipses back the other way. Official promises of rehabilitation, employment, and social prestige often dissolve into bureaucratic delay and indifference. Despite promises of grand new veteran support centers, complaints rumble on social and even state media about the difficulty of actually accessing them. Still, the wounded are the lucky ones. As many as 325,000 soldiers have been killed since the full-scale invasion began. The life expectancy of a Russian soldier in some places may be as low as 12 minutes. No major power has sustained losses on this scale in a single conflict since the Second World War, yet on and on the cycle of recruitment and casualty is repeated.

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Russia’s veterans are bringing violence home

By Ian Garner

The consequences are already visible far from the battlefield. Across provincial Russia, amputees hobble over icy streets; families reorganize themselves around absence; cemeteries spill over their old boundaries as the dead are put to rest. In one tiny village in far-flung Kamchatka, almost all the young men are gone: of 39 who signed contracts to fight in Ukraine, 12 are missing or dead already. Life is more brutal in other ways too. Domestic violence is up and veterans, accustomed to the amorality of the front, have committed a spate of murders. Just this week Rustam Nogmov, a former soldier, was jailed for the apparently motiveless murder of an 86-year-old woman.

Russia’s leadership makes no attempt to conceal this creeping presence of the funereal. A Kremlin-approved blend of Orthodox Christianity is today bound up with worship of the fallen from the Second World War and the casualties of the present struggle. Death in Ukraine, the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has claimed, “washes away all sin.” Images of fallen soldiers proliferate across everyday space, as if imitating icons of Orthodox saints. Roadside billboards bear uniformed portraits; official websites praise the young dead; memorial plaques fixed to school walls hang over children who sit at “heroes’ desks” commemorating the dead. Enrolled in state-sponsored youth organizations that teach military skills and the inevitability of battle, Russia’s youth are being fed into the same pipeline that is killing their elders.

Older Russians are roped in too. In carefully staged media stories, parents declare pride at their children’s death at the front. One mother from Stavropol claimed that, after her son died, she had dedicated herself even more fully to patriotic activities. “I focus,” she said, “on teaching lessons about bravery in schools, visiting museums, and attending exhibitions related to the special military operation.” The state’s commemorative machinery absorbs individual tragedies into a pantheon of sacrifice, where ordinary citizens, through death, can be elevated into symbols of national heroism — even as their living relatives are obliged to prostrate themselves before the very machinery that brought annihilation. The boundary between the living and the dead has begun to erode; participation in national life is parsed through the language of sacrifice and loss.

Thanks to the war, meanwhile, household finances across Russia’s shabby provinces now too contend with death. Enlistment, for all its risks, has become one of the few reliable paths to economic stability available to young men outside major cities. Recruitment bonuses, combat salaries, compensation payments to families of the dead — some of these bonuses, if the sometimes-reluctant state bothers to pay them, reach figures of $60,000 and more — have funneled vast sums into pockets after years of stagnation. Provincial towns that struggled to sustain small businesses now see new cafés, gyms, dog groomers, and other big-city amenities.

This influx of money creates the impression of renewal, but the new prosperity depends on citizens turning themselves into “human capital” out there on the western steppe. Without the war, there would be no boom. This is, as one analyst has put it, “deathonomics”. And where local economies go, so too the federal government has created a wartime overheating effect. Yet as the economist Alexandra Prokopenko starkly put it, the economy is destroying itself in its pursuit of war by “metabolizing its own muscle tissue.” Military expenditure absorbs an ever larger share of state resources, sustaining defense industries while weakening civilian sectors that depend on long-term investment. Factories linked to arms production operate at full capacity, but labor shortages intensify elsewhere as workers enlist, migrate, or are redirected toward wartime production. State spending — as much as 40% of it is now linked to the war effort — desperately prioritizes military needs over infrastructure, healthcare, and education, narrowing the foundations from which future development might come.

Output rises in sectors connected to the war effort, but the money is running out. All that is left is consuming more human capital — flesh-and-blood boys from Buryatia and Belgorod and Tatarstan. Skilled workers vanish from local economies. Younger cohorts face increasing incentives to exchange long-term prospects for short-term financial security at the front. Deprived regions in the provinces have become increasingly dependent on transfers that cannot exist without continued fighting: even as their men perish in the so-called “meat grinder,” the system demands ever more sacrifice. Economic stability begins to rely on conditions that steadily erode the society meant to benefit from it. And at the bottom of it all, “deathonomics” draws individuals into sacrificing themselves in the name of war.

Peace, under such circumstances, is all-but impossible. Demobilization would remove income streams that can sustain entire communities, while returning veterans would require medical care, employment, and social reintegration on a scale the state has rarely managed. Indeed, the history of Russia’s modern wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya suggests that this latest venture will not see troops integrated peacefully into society. Ending the conflict would expose weaknesses that wartime spending conceals — a paradox that the Kremlin has no plan to avoid. Death has not just become central to Russia as a visible category and a political religion. Today, it’s at the very heart of the Kremlin’s self-destructive economic program.

All the while, Russian culture, which has given birth to some of the greatest works in human history, has slipped into a coma. The Kremlin’s wars have often produced music and books of genuine import, their authors forcing Russians to confront what violence does to a society. Tolstoy’s early sketches from Sevastopol repudiated the bombastic heroism of official propaganda; Isaak Babel turned the Civil War into a record of cruelty, racism, and moral disintegration; Vasily Grossman produced the great tragedy of the Second World War in Life and Fate.

Each of these works bears witness to the ways that leaders justify their wars through sacrifice — and how, for ordinary people, morality can be corrupted by the temptations of death. Yet this distinguished tradition of war writing depended on the ethical insights of an intelligentsia willing to frankly confront corrosive wartime violence. Today, though, Russia’s most popular and insightful artists have mostly fled the country. Alla Pugacheva, perhaps the country’s most beloved singer and a familiar face for half a century, has been an outspoken critic from abroad, slamming the war as “terrible” and declaring that “to tell your homeland that it is wrong, that is patriotism”. But voices like these are barely heard in the motherland. Most of those that remain acquiesce to a state that now uses culture to promote its cult of death.

Russia in 2026 certainly doesn’t want for cultural production. Indeed, it produces a great deal. Unfortunately, what passes for culture here is increasingly administered with bureaucratic tedium. Patriotic grants, competitions, publishing initiatives, and a constant stream of “heroic” content optimized for online circulation — all comprises the most visible output. What the state’s organs desire, above all, are odes to soldiering and sacrifice. “Fan art” competitions and children’s poetry contests fill social media with images of soldiers in battle and death. Soldiers crop up on light entertainment shows on television. The state hands out awards to aging producers and writers who beat the drum of war most loudly.

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A constant stream of identikit, state-funded (and mostly ignored) Second World War movies clog up movie theater screens. The greatest state praise today is reserved for the purveyors of so-called “Z Literature”: the war veterans who write of their own experiences in Ukraine, meditating as they go on the necessity of bloodshed in crude and gruesome doggerel. A line in a poem by Alexander Pelevin, a veteran in his thirties whose writing has been awarded and praised by state media, sums up the genre: “‘Alive’ means only ‘not yet dead’. / I am the abyss; the one that reigns supreme.” Defined by the moment of death, the soldier’s life exists in limbo. He is morally empty — an abyss — yet by fighting and dying, he can become “supreme”. State commissions seek out such writers and lavish them with prizes.

But in a bitter twist, the state breaks even those it praises. Pelevin recently posted on Telegram about his own poverty: “Your Russian writer is broke, ruined, and in debt.” He begged for financial help from subscribers. The same state that fills public spaces with heroic portraits, sanctified language, and everyday rituals of death — this state struggles to provide stable support even for the poets who reinforce its narrative. Individuals, whether soldiers or writers, remain instruments in the hands of the state. Their cultural value lies only in what can be extracted from them: death.

The state insists that war generates new life. The longer the war continues, however, the more the Kremlin and society as a whole cannot escape its clutches without economic and social collapse. Yet all the while, the war itself is a burden, dragging Russia into an economic and cultural morass. This country stuck in its own moral stagnation, just like the Russia of the 1820s, is the inescapable necropolis of late Putinism.

A decade from now, Moscow may continue to glitter, sustained by media spectacle, distance from the front, and economic support from China. But elsewhere, the necropolis will surely have taken hold. Imagine a typical small town. The war memorial has been renovated again, its granite polished and its list of names extended. Across the street, the roof of the school — now named after a local dead military “hero” — still leaks. A café opened during the wartime boom stands all but abandoned, its prices beyond what most residents can afford. Recruitment notices take up space on a bulletin board alongside funeral announcements and pleas for money for wounded veterans. The faces of the dead look down from the local church. The living cling to the hopes of a new war to inject more money into their ailing town and empty bank accounts, even as they know it will take yet more sons and brothers from them. More war — more death — is the only way out of the catastrophe. In attempting to destroy Ukraine, Russia has not revived itself: it has turned itself into the land of the dead.

Today, we are already in the midst of a deep and deepening crisis of water availability. Though more than 70% of the world’s surface is covered by the stuff, almost all of it is seawater. In fact, on average, only around one in every 10,000 drops is accessible freshwater that humans can easily use. Demand for it has surged as global populations have grown, diets have changed and cities have expanded into arid regions from Riyadh to Mexico City.

With cities expanding faster than the water systems that sustain them, what was once a mere constraint has become a defining crisis of the 21st century. At the same time, the ways we live have depleted water sources or made them unusable — either because of pollution, because groundwater is being extracted faster than it is being replaced, because rivers are being dammed and diverted, or because natural buffers like wetlands are being reclaimed for other uses.

In 2023, the UN World Water Development Report warned that humanity’s relationship with water had become dangerously extractive, describing modern water use as “vampiric” and noting that around 3.5 billion people already experience severe water stress for at least one month every year. The problem has only become worse since the UN study was written.

A major report by the United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health published last month put it bluntly: we have now entered an era of “global water bankruptcy” in which societies are living beyond their hydrological means. Today, it notes, nearly three quarters of the world’s population lives in countries that are water-insecure or critically water-insecure; around 2.2 billion people still lack safely managed drinking water; groundwater depletion and land subsidence are already irreversible in many regions; and shrinking lakes, rivers and glaciers mean future supplies will become more scarce even if demand stabilizes.

Over the past 18 months, there has been much talk about how rare earths will rule our century.  Yet with half of the world’s 100 largest cities located in areas of high water stress, and many inhabitants seemingly oblivious to the risks, urban planners and policymakers are increasingly talking about “day zero”: the moment our taps run dry. The consequences could yet define our age — arguably far more than neodymium or cerium ever will.

Already, the signs are ominous. In 2017, for instance, Cape Town came within a hair’s breadth of becoming unviable, with city officials poised to shut down water infrastructure and tell inhabitants to gather rations from distribution points. Other major cities — as far afield as São Paulo and Istanbul — have struggled too, with some reaching genuine crisis. In June 2019, for instance, all four of the city’s main reservoirs in Chennai ran dry, forcing the Indian city’s 11 million residents to queue to wait for a small allocation of water brought in by trucks. In December, meanwhile, Tehran’s supplies came perilously close to exhaustion; Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, even talked of having to evacuate the capital.

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By Wessie du Toit

It is not just far-off places that are at risk here. Strikingly, a host of cities in well-resourced countries are also finding themselves under pressure  — including Los Angeles, New York, London. The case of the UK is instructive. Last May, Steve Reed, then the environment secretary, warned that “rapid population growth, crumbling infrastructure that has been left to decline, and a warming climate mean the UK could run out of clean drinking water by the middle of the next decade without a major infrastructure overhaul”. Such concerns are not new. As far back as 2010, almost a fifth of the territory of the European Union, and more than 10% of its population, were already exposed to water scarcity.

How, then, have we got to a position where global freshwater demand is expected to outstrip demand by 40% not in some abstract future — but in just four years time, by the end of this decade?

There are multiple overlapping factors at play here. The most obvious is demographic. The global population has more than doubled since 1970, meaning there are billions of new consumers of water for drinking, sanitation, food and energy. Patterns of consumption have also changed. For instance, data centers require vast volumes of freshwater to cool their servers. That figure already stands at roughly 560 billion liters a year, and, as cloud and AI workloads expand, could double by 2030. Just one facility gobbles up millions of liters of water a day, the equivalent to the annual household needs of tens of thousands of people.

It is hardly surprising, then, that engineers and policymakers have begun to explore radical alternatives — from relocating data centers to cold climates, to offshore platforms, or even to space, where cooling could be achieved without competing for scarce resources on Earth. The problem, though, is that for every step forward, humanity takes two back.

After all, massive man-made interventions in water systems mean that resources have been reallocated, redistributed and diverted, transforming ecosystems in potentially dangerous ways. China has built, on average, at least one large dam every day since 1949, and indeed now has more large dams than the rest of the world combined. But these dams can cause issues all their own. While they provide hydropower and irrigation, they also trap sediment, alter river flows and reduce downstream water availability, often exacerbating shortages for farmers and cities far downstream.

Alongside this, the past three decades have seen the fastest and greatest urbanization in history. More than half of humanity now lives in cities, with many expanding into regions that were never hydrologically suited to support large populations. Urban growth concentrates demand, often far from reliable surface water, leading cities to rely heavily on groundwater. That is not helped by inefficiency: in the UK, for example, an estimated three billion liters of water are lost every day because of leaks and decades of under-investment in pipes and treatment systems. Pricing too often fails to reflect scarcity, while governance struggles to keep pace with growth or adequately regulate water companies. The result is widespread inefficiency and uncontrolled extraction, with water treated as an inexhaustible input rather than a finite asset.

Indeed, the scale of groundwater extraction has reached levels that are reshaping the planet itself. Scientists have shown that so much water has been pumped from the Indo-Gangetic plains in northern India that the redistribution of mass has measurably shifted the Earth’s rotational axis, contributing to the movement of the geographic poles by several centimeters per year — something that has an impact on GPS accuracy, satellite navigation, and the precise measurement of time and space on which modern technology depends.

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One small comfort, at least, is that such upheavals — in principle if not scale — only fit the pattern of history. One of the earliest recorded wars, fought more than 4,500 years ago between a pair of Mesopotamian city states, was triggered by disputes over irrigation canals and access to river water in the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates. Stone inscriptions describe the destruction of dikes and canals as acts of aggression. From the very beginning of recorded civilization, then, control of water meant power, prosperity and survival: and denying it to others was a means of coercion.

Combined with those bubbling demographic and technological pressures, it’s unsurprising that this ancient pattern has only accelerated. Since 2022, incidences of water-related violence have almost doubled worldwide. These incidents range from attacks on pipelines and dams to protests that turn violent when communities lose access to drinking water or irrigation. In central Nigeria, for instance, clashes between farmers and pastoralists, driven in part by shrinking rivers and degraded grazing land, have killed thousands over the past decade, with entire villages burned and populations displaced. In Ukraine, meanwhile, the destruction of the Kakhovka dam in June 2023 unleashed catastrophic flooding downstream, cut off drinking water to large parts of the south of the country, and demonstrated how water infrastructure itself has become a direct weapon of war.

Looking ahead, several flashpoints stand out. The Indus basin is among the most dangerous. Under the Indus Water Treaty, India and Pakistan share one of the world’s most complex water systems. Signed in 1960, and often cited as a rare success of Cold War diplomacy, it was among the earliest major transboundary water treaties registered with the United Nations. Yet now, rising demand, glacier retreat in the Himalayas and infrastructure development upstream have all put the treaty under strain, with water increasingly framed in nationalist terms on both sides of the border. “I would like to tell the younger generation how this country was ruined,” as Narendra Modi put it in May 2025, adding that reading the Water Treaty today would leave Indians shocked. Combined with similar sabre-rattling from Pakistan, and things could easily escalate — with consequences that could easily transcend the Himalayas.

There’s scope for diplomatic blunders elsewhere, not least in northeast Africa, where Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam is reshaping power dynamics along the Nile. While Addis Ababa has viewed this enormous project as essential for development and energy security, Egypt has long feared existential threats to its water supply: over 90% of its freshwater comes from the river. Despite years of negotiations, no comprehensive agreement has been reached, leaving water as a persistent source of diplomatic and potentially military tension.

In the autumn of 2025, Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty warned the UN Security Council of Ethiopia’s “unilateral actions” and affirmed that Egypt “will not allow its water rights to be compromised and will take all measures guaranteed by international law and the UN Charter to defend the existential interests of its people”. Such statements are not just warnings — but implicit threats of armed conflict.

And if that again hints at how human foibles can mix with water politics to worrying effect, Western countries aren’t immune either. One might look, here, at water agreements between the United States and Mexico over the Colorado River and the Rio Grande, and which are being tested by prolonged drought, shrinking reservoirs and competing demands from agriculture, cities and natural ecosystems. Especially in the age of Donald Trump, where coercion is an increasingly popular tool for settling disputes, it isn’t hard to see how treaties signed way back in 1944 are either deemed void — or else renegotiated to American benefit and Mexico’s loss.

Another complicating factor is the way global climate patterns are shifting, unevenly and unpredictably. Some areas are experiencing far wetter conditions than historical norms, while others are becoming markedly drier. The problem is not simply scarcity, but volatility. Rain increasingly arrives in the wrong places, at the wrong times and in the wrong quantities. Long-standing assumptions about seasonality — when rains come, how long they last, how rivers respond — are breaking down.

These swings matter because infrastructure, governance and social systems are built for averages, not extremes. Pipes, reservoirs, canals and drainage networks were designed for a climate that no longer exists. To return to India, having effectively run out of water in 2019, Chennai upgraded its reservoir systems — only to be hit two years later not by drought, but by devastating floods.

The good news is that many of the technical tools to address water stress already exist. Desalination has expanded rapidly, particularly through advances in reverse osmosis that dramatically reduce costs and energy use. Wastewater recycling, stormwater capture, smart metering and leak detection can stretch existing supplies much further. Artificial intelligence and advanced modeling offer the possibility of optimizing distribution, forecasting shortages earlier, and managing systems dynamically rather than reactively.

Yet technology alone is not enough. Today’s world is also one of predation, in which vulnerabilities are increasingly easy to identify and exploit. Water infrastructure can be sabotaged, politicized, weaponized — as has happened in Gaza and Ukraine. Data systems can be manipulated. Dependence on single sources or cross-border flows can be turned into leverage. All the while, global governance looks fragile. International cooperation is strained as the world order buckles and cross-border solutions, essential for rivers, aquifers and shared basins, appear increasingly precarious.

Some may still hope that markets or innovation will quietly resolve the problem, and extraterrestrial data centers may yet do something to help. But water does not behave like other commodities. It is local, finite, and political: unlike rare earths or hydrocarbons, water cannot be stockpiled at scale, substituted or shipped across oceans to smooth out shortages; it must be consumed where it falls or flows. So when water is scarce, there is no global market to arbitrate supply — only hard decisions, made locally, about who goes without. In a century defined by ecological pressure, then, water sits near the top of the hierarchy of risks. This is not because it is unsolvable, but because it is foundational.

“Everything should be on the table in this situation,” proclaimed the leader of the Swedish Democrats, a member of the nation’s governing coalition. Similar views are being aired in the press. “The umbrella is gone,” writes one of Sweden’s largest daily newspapers, referring to the American nuclear deterrent, urging Stockholm to consider acquiring nuclear weapons itself.

This might seem surprising, not least given the long-standing Nordic reputation for gentle diplomacy. In truth, though, Sweden is an ideal candidate for joining the nuclear club, quite aside from the nuclear-armed opponent on its doorstep. Boasting one of the most sophisticated arms industries in Europe, a robust civilian nuclear power sector, and indeed an abortive scheme to build a bomb during the Cold War, Sweden has everything it needs to go nuclear — even though Nordic proliferation could be the death knell for the whole Nato alliance.

If America’s commitment to Europe no longer seems credible, the Nordics also can’t rely on partners closer to home. Certainly, the Nato goal of raising allied defense spending to 5% of GDP seems distant, while the continent’s stagnant economies, burdened by ballooning welfare schemes, show little appetite for higher defense budgets. Spain is emblematic of this attitude, with Madrid spending just 1.28% of GDP on its military. Calls to raise this level to 5% were dismissed by Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s Prime Minister, as “disrespectful”, and who instead pledged not to cut a single cent from welfare spending. Italy is in a similar position, while even France, the strongest proponent of European strategic autonomy, is unable to mend its bloated pension system.

In other words, the Nordic countries find themselves alone, menaced by a threat they view as existential. For most other European countries — with the exception of Poland and the Baltics — the Russian danger feels remote. Few expect Putin’s tanks to roll into Berlin or Rome. The Nordic countries, on the other hand, see Russia as a clear and present danger, and for good reason. Swedish intelligence has long warned of Moscow targeting Swedish territorial integrity. Norway reports that Russian aircraft have violated its airspace for the first time in a decade, that preparations for sabotaging its water system could be underway, and that Russian GPS-jamming is making an airspace incident increasingly likely. Just two weeks ago, Finland caught a ship suspected of sabotaging undersea cables in the Baltic. The pressure, in short, is rising, pushing the Nordics to consider more drastic security options.

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And internally, too, Sweden has reasons to go nuclear. The expertise accumulated in its civilian nuclear sector — control over the fuel cycle, reactor physics, supply chains — provides a solid foundation for military development. Another advantage is Sweden’s world-class manufacturing base. Unlike much of Europe, it never embraced the idea of a post-industrial society, and its defense sector is among the most modern and well-rounded around, producing everything from submarines to fighter jets. Saab has extensive experience with aviation, missile systems, and command and control; BAE Systems Bofors provides deep expertise with warheads, and explosives.

This engineering know-how dovetails with Sweden’s broader financial health. Of course, a military nuclear program is an expensive undertaking. Yet bucking the EU’s trend, Sweden has already increased its defense budget by 28% since 2023, with plenty of space for more. That makes Stockholm, alongside the other Nordics, financial outliers. They’re not gerontocracies laden with debt. Their pension systems, unlike those crushing Southern Europe and France, were prudently designed to adjust to changing demographic and economic conditions. Just as important, their fiscal health is stable. Financing a nuclear project would not be an insurmountable financial burden.

These economic strengths are also echoed elsewhere. In recent months, after all, Sweden has become something of a monetary safe haven, with a convenience yield lower than Switzerland’s. In layman’s terms, markets are eager to buy Swedish government bonds even at very low yields, effectively paying a premium to park capital in this famously stable jurisdiction. Borrowing to finance a nuclear program would therefore not be a problem for Sweden, especially if it shared the burden with the other Nordics.

As one Norwegian researcher bluntly declares, now that the US has lost the will to defend Europe, the only solution is a northern alliance equipped with a nuclear deterrent. Former Danish defense minister Jeppe Kofod has also proposed a Nordic defense union with the Bomb at its core. Commentators in the Swedish press are themselves discussing the idea, though whether Scandinavian jealousies can be tempered to create a joint nuclear umbrella remains an open question.

Yet perhaps the greatest challenge to acquiring the Bomb would be psychological. Sweden’s national identity is closely tied to pacifism, and Stockholm has long been an outspoken supporter of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). One could argue, however, that trading ideological commitments for national survival is not an unreasonable price to pay. Nuclear states do not fight with each other. As the deterrence theorist Thomas Schelling famously put it, the threat of the Bomb leaves something to chance, making one nuclear power extremely reluctant to roll the dice against another nuclear state.

All the same, the pursuit of a nuclear deterrent would be a radical development. The theorist of nuclear proliferation Jacques Hymans argues that it was not the NPT that prevented nuclearization around the world — but rather the absence of determined elites. Go-getting leaders like Charles de Gaulle or David Ben-Gurion are scarce. Still, existential threats, of the sort that Israel once faced, are precisely what inspire leaders to eschew dependence on a distant ally.

Sweden has an instructive record of policy independence. During the pandemic, for instance, it diverged from the Western consensus by rejecting lockdowns. In the Cold War, security concerns led Stockholm to explore the development of nuclear weapons. From 1947 onwards, the country’s ministry of defense saw the nuclear option as the most reliable way to stave off the Soviet threat. A decade later, the push for a Swedish deterrent accelerated as the military pressed for its development — most notably Supreme Commander Nils Swedlund, who despised political bargaining and viewed the issue as key to Swedish security.

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As Tony Jonter explains in his book on Sweden’s earlier effort to build the Bomb, political elites ultimately halted the project, which was opposed by the peace movement, feminists, and parts of the military. Yet as Jonter discovered later, it’s unclear whether the program was truly cancelled — or instead driven underground. Certainly, parts of the military remained skeptical about the effectiveness of the NPT and regarded nuclear weapons as a necessary backup. These rumors persisted for years. As late as 1994, The Washington Post noted that Sweden had preserved structures and components essential for producing nuclear weapons.

One can speculate whether a Nordic nuclear umbrella — perhaps also including Germany — is even viable. A similar structure has never been tried in the past, and the path of overt proliferation is probably a non-starter. Building a bomb in full view of the world would almost certainly provoke a military response from Moscow.

Yet as Sweden’s Cold War experience suggests, another scenario could involve following the Israeli model of nuclear opacity: developing a deterrent in secret while signaling its existence ambiguously once acquired, in a way that shapes adversaries’ behavior. Even here, of course, Israel could not have secured its own bomb without the tacit consent of the Nixon administration, and it remains an open question whether a Trump administration would follow a similar path here. “Immediately after the Cold War, one of the biggest instincts of the United States was to stop smaller countries from getting nuclear weapons, and that interest is still there,” says Sumantra Maitra, a consultant and expert on international relations. “I don’t think the Americans would be very happy to have Swedes with their fingers on the nuclear button, just like we didn’t want post-Soviet countries to have nuclear weapons.”

A third option, then, would be to imitate Japan. Over the years, Tokyo, through both official and unofficial channels, has made clear that it retains the technical capability to build a bomb, and the credible threat of nuclearization has been sufficient to extract firm security commitments from the United States. Latent capability, a so-called “technical deterrent”, could persuade Washington to provide the kinds of guarantees it now seems reluctant to offer.

De Gaulle once remarked that nuclear weapons make alliances obsolete. This is not quite true, as the Japanese example shows. Yet the Nordic pursuit of the Bomb would unequivocally mean one thing: Nato is just a façade, obscuring a reality of sovereign states with varying interests, defense constraints, and threat perceptions. Whatever happens next, anyway, the frantic fluidity of Northern Europe’s security environment means that the time to choose is now — if the choice hasn’t already been made. The rising threat level, coupled with the Nordic countries’ penchant for contrarian decision-making, suggests they are ready to follow in Japan’s footsteps. Either way, Europe’s future will increasingly be decided in its north, dog sleds or not.

Even though the poem was never actually written down, it ended very badly for its author. One or more informants in Mandelstam’s trusted circle memorized the lines and passed them on to the secret police. The poet was arrested and sentenced to internal exile, and later — after being rearrested and consigned to forced labor — died of illness in a transit camp. One might ask why, in circumstances of such extreme danger, Mandelstam had decided to speak his criticism at all? It was because the unceasing performance of lies had become so exhausting and diminishing. To feel that he truly existed, as a poet and a human being — or even that reality itself existed — he needed to proclaim the truth in the hearing of at least a few others. His wife Nadezhda Yakovlevna later said that he “did not want to die without stating in unambiguous terms what he thought about the things around us”.

In the last year, an unfamiliar way of talking has fully established itself in UK Labour government circles, chiefly evident in its utterances on the actions of US president Donald Trump and his entourage. It goes well beyond the usual diplomatic courtesies practiced among democratic nations. Instead it involves the rigorous self-vetting of public speech of the kind once practiced by the citizenry of the former Soviet Union as they moved through daily life, acutely conscious that the wrong word could trigger catastrophic results. Few people in the UK can now be unaware of the syndrome: from the outset of Trump’s second presidency, our leaders have sought to skate over any of their previous public criticism of the US president and have stubbornly withheld fresh criticism even when it is obviously due. The result is now an unusually extreme gulf between what we all know they believe and what they feel able or willing to say.

The rest of Britain has watched this political performance with varying emotions, but mainly the weary tolerance born of the consciousness of impotence. Those who follow politics may well know, for example, that the justice secretary David Lammy, formerly foreign secretary, previously called Trump a “woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathizing sociopath” and a “profound threat to the international order”. They may also recall that after the events of January 6, 2021, when a crowd of Trump supporters violently stormed the Capitol, Sir Keir Starmer told reporters that “President Trump has to take responsibility. What happened was appalling. It wasn’t protest — it was an attack on democracy. And responsibility lies with President Trump. No doubt about that. This is the culmination of years of the politics of hate and division, and this is where it leads.”

These were not controversial views at the time, nor were they confined to the left of politics in the UK or elsewhere. John F Kelly, the former Marine general who was Trump’s longest-serving chief of staff during his first term, unambiguously warned the world prior to Trump’s re-election in 2024 that his former boss met his definition of a fascist, would govern like a dictator if permitted, and had no concept of the Constitution. The thing that most worried him was Trump’s declared readiness to use the military against the “enemy within”, namely his fellow Americans. Even to say such a thing for political purposes, Kelly argued, was a “very, very bad thing, let alone actually doing it”. More than a dozen former Trump staffers, all self-described “lifelong Republicans”, came out in support of his remarks.

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With Starmer’s entry to Downing Street and Trump’s subsequent return to the White House, however, the Labour leadership’s observations were consigned to the memory-hole. A decision was clearly taken to manage a uniquely tricky diplomatic situation not only by refraining from denouncing Trump, but by overtly flattering a man widely thought to be unusually susceptible to praise. Last February, Starmer flew into Washington for his first meeting as British prime minister with President Trump. Shifting a gear beyond civility and into effusiveness, he brandished a letter from “His Majesty the King” inviting Trump for a second state visit. “This is really special,” he said, as if himself astonished by the King’s depth of admiration. “This has never happened before. This is unprecedented.” The next day there followed a memorably depressing scene in which Trump and his vice-president JD Vance, primed by a sycophantic reporter, made a strikingly crass verbal attack in the Oval Office on the visiting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

The British press and public have watched this process, and even at times applauded its guile, without ever believing in it. They know that Starmer has been doing it in an effort to protect both the interests of the UK and democracy in Europe, on two pressing areas in particular: the British economy, in his quest for a lasting US trade deal, and the defense of Ukraine against Russian aggression, in which US military and intelligence assistance is essential. Beyond that sits the necessity of American support for maintenance of the UK’s nuclear deterrent, and the unique closeness of US-UK intelligence sharing. Onlookers therefore initially understood that the prime minister’s flattery of Trump was wholly tactical, like someone trying to placate a madman on the top deck of a crowded bus by complimenting him on his hat. Yet it was also impossible to watch without a frisson of national humiliation. When there is an explicit gulf between someone who is free to speak their mind, no matter how unfiltered its contents, and someone who must habitually mute, conceal and flatter, it is a raw demonstration of power, and all onlookers know it.

The intensity of the UK’s “Trump-whispering” strategy thus far has been underpinned by two assumptions. The first is that the US president has a strong and sentimental attachment to the UK and that — if only Britain remains sufficiently “on side” — it will predispose him to offer us significantly favorable treatment. The second is the Foreign Office’s belief that it is cleverer than the incumbent of the White House, and can effectively steer and “manage” his wilder tendencies internationally. Nearly a year into Trump’s second term, both are looking hollow. Even given the erratic nature of the US president’s pronouncements on Ukraine, the bulk of his approach has served to appease and embolden Vladimir Putin while weakening Nato. A recent shift to underpin a European “coalition of the willing” security force with US guarantees has yet to be nailed down. Meanwhile, Trump’s increasingly frequent outbursts on the necessity for the US to seize and “own” Greenland — currently a semi-autonomous territory of Denmark — whether by purchase or military force, have sent shock waves through Denmark and the rest of Nato. Back home, the president’s declared intention to use American cities as “training grounds” for the military is proceeding apace. Last September, he advocated just that as part of tackling an alleged “war from within”, the very process about which an alarmed Kelly warned in 2024.

Few would argue that Starmer is a natural politician, but he does show signs of a conscience. Within this increasingly uncomfortable diplomatic straitjacket, he has done his level best to shore up support for Ukraine and Denmark. But the domestic political price of “Trump-whispering” is growing steadily higher. As time goes on, and the US administration’s moves become more extreme, its muting and confusing effect on the Labour front bench is becoming ever more noticeable. Last week, David Lammy proudly posted pictures of his White House meeting with JD Vance on X, even as Vance himself was on X vigorously defending the masked ICE officer in Minneapolis who shot dead Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and US citizen. Vance described the dead woman as a “deranged leftist”, deciding her culpability well in advance of any formal investigation. In the pages of the Spectator, the former Labour party éminence grise Peter Mandelson — recently recalled as Britain’s ambassador to the US over his links to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — energetically praised Trump’s “decisive approach” to foreign policy while scolding Europe for its “histrionics about Greenland”. Whatever moral nuances the UK government’s Trump game originally contained, they are increasingly abandoned or irrelevant as the US presidential court exercises its dark magnetism: you’re either in or you’re out. And if one justification for sycophancy was to buy time to pivot away from Britain’s overdependence on the US — time which should rightly be spent on a heavy and accelerated investment in the UK’s military and industrial base — then the Treasury is notably failing to enact it.

A paradox lies at the heart of a looming electoral problem for Labour. In surveys, between 60 and 70% of the British public hold an unfavorable opinion of Trump. Yet Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party — the most Trumpian on offer, with explicit links to the MAGA movement — is currently leading by some distance in the polls. Voters appear to yearn above all for direction and definition: they often say things like “I might not like everything Farage says, but I know what he stands for” while signaling the opposite about Starmer. The difficulty for Labour is that the accusations it seeks to direct at Reform — dog-whistle racism, social divisiveness, ambivalence on Russia, unrealistic economics — are partly nullified by its tactical, smiling silences over similar, or far worse, manifestations in MAGA.

Compelled into a “special relationship” cage and trapped in a kind of moral paralysis, a muted Starmer steadily appears blurrier, grayer and more inauthentic as Trump explodes in lurid technicolor. And despite Trump’s occasional magnanimous word for Starmer in the Oval Office, he will shed no tears for his British counterpart’s political difficulties: it is one of the most time-honored tricks of the imperial tyrant to manipulate an ideological opponent into gradually erasing himself. Yet Starmer’s current strategy of transatlantic ambiguity cannot hold indefinitely. He, his fractious party, and the wider country may soon have to choose openly between the path of cynical realpolitik and that of dangerous conviction, between Mandelson and Mandelstam.

I was there as a student and when I returned in 2023, to teach, a great deal had changed. The air base was long gone — it had been shuttered under Russian pressure in 2014 — and the US presence in nearby Afghanistan had vanished as well. The swaggering military contractors were getting drunk in some other bar somewhere else in the world. And the NGO sector that, as one interlocutor put it to me in the 2000s, was “growing like mushrooms after the rain” had all but disappeared. I currently live next to the old Soros Foundation building — which closed its doors in 2024 following the passage of a Russia-inspired “foreign agent” law. It’s a large complex and it looks beautiful, but I’ve never seen anybody go in or out; it feels like a mausoleum for a whole generation of hopes about Westernization and liberal democracy.

My experience living here has largely been about pondering an absence, one which has become all the more striking since Trump’s re-election, the closure of USAID last year and the near-termination of US soft power in the region — even before the White House made explicit their focus on the Western Hemisphere with this week’s daring raid on Venezuela. I can count on one hand the number of Americans I’ve met who live here and, probably on two, the number of Americans I’ve met who’ve even passed through. It’s a part of the world that is about as far away from the contiguous United States as it’s possible to get but that had at one point seemed integral enough to the Pax Americana for a base to be set up and for a certain amount of soft power to flow through here, both to lend logistical support to operations in Afghanistan and to radiate power deep into the territory of the former Soviet Union. Now that the tide has gone out, the question is: what does a society look like if it’s basically untouched by direct American influence?

Why the US should be expected to have any contact with a country like Kyrgyzstan is a fair query to start with. Look at a map zoomed out and the country seems to be swallowed in an embrace by China to the east and by Kazakhstan and — more distantly — Russia to the north. The country is poor, with a nominal GDP per capita of under $3,000, and has limited natural resources. It’s mountainous and largely rural, with proud nomadic traditions, a culture taking in elements from the Russian, Chinese, Arabic, and Turkic worlds, and its history couldn’t be more remote from America’s. But spend time here and a certain US influence becomes obvious enough. I am able to teach my journalism course in English at an international university with good comprehension from my students. My students routinely make fun of me for how behind the curve I am in following P. Diddy’s trial or not quite being able to explain who Charli XCX is. Many of them fantasize about living in the US. If I’m in a cab, it’s routine for the driver to suddenly put on speakerphone a brother or cousin who’s living in the States so that we can trade pleasantries with one another. Bishkek is filled with malls that give me flashbacks to the time I spent living in Los Angeles. And, as an American, I am treated with a respect and an interest that I don’t think I’ve quite experienced anywhere else in the world — there’s just a curiosity about Americanness that I think much of the rest of the world has moved past. Actually, my number one complaint living here is about the tinny American music played in coffeeshops that I am forever asking waiters to change or at least adjust the volume on.

If that influence seems superficial — just the flotsam of 21st-century pop culture — it can also deeply influence people’s life choices. Agnieszka Pikulicka, a Polish journalist who has published widely on Central Asia and writes the Turan Tales Substack, certainly thinks so. “Thanks to US involvement, a whole generation of Central Asians — not only Kyrgyz — had a chance to build their own NGOs and media, study in English according to Western curricula, travel abroad and absorb democratic values,” she tells me.

It’s not always so easy to know where to assign attribution, but those democratic values seemed connected to a relatively open culture where crime and corruption have steadily decreased and the economy has for years had reliable growth. The quiet but effective tourist slogan “You’ll Like Kyrgyzstan” gives a general idea. Meanwhile, in the region as a whole, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan finally, in the last decade, transitioned out of their Soviet-era authoritarian leaders — the latter in particular has undergone an eight-year period of striking liberalization.

If I were writing this piece a year or two years ago, that’s probably where I would have ended it — with America’s direct influence on the region ebbing away but with the region making progress on its own terms and in a way that was not incompatible with liberal democracy. Now, though, I am far less sure. Kyrgyzstan has, since I have been here, arrested opposition figures; closed the leading independent media outlet; fallen into a pattern of repossessing private property based on a reading of arcane laws; installed new “firewall” systems for controlling web access; and fallen deeper into “not free” status in Freedom House’s annual report. The notion of Kyrgyzstan as an “island of democracy” — flung around in international circles just a few years ago — is giving way, under President Sadyr Japarov who came to power in 2021, to a creeping authoritarianism. To give a very small but telling example: when I first came here, I really enjoyed jogging in the main sports stadium — the one also used by the national football team. The track would always be full of people, and it would be a really nice time — people jogging or working out in the exercise park. When I would talk about what I liked about Kyrgyzstan, that would be the kind of thing I would point to — I never in my life in America had the opportunity to go for a jog in Yankee Stadium. About a year ago, though, when I went to take my usual run, the gate was closed and an intimidating guard shouted at the high school team who had come for their workout that the stadium was now closed to the public and closed for good.

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I don’t want to draw too many inferences from events that are tied to Kyrgyz domestic politics, and it’s not as if there’s a clear cause-and-effect between, say, Trump’s election or the end of the war in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan’s authoritarian turn in the 2020s. But what clearly is true is that a sort of ideological vacuum showed up with the waning of US influence in this part of the world, and I suspect, in many other parts of the world that are in a similar place of choosing their geopolitical identity. The sense in the 2000s was that the future lay in the direction of capitalism and liberal democracy — as an irresistible trajectory for a developing country like Kyrgyzstan. That was far from seen as unequivocally a good thing — I remember concerns about “runaway capitalism” and about the loss of traditional culture — but it just seemed like a fact. That’s now far from the case. When I first returned to Kyrgyzstan in 2023, I was struck by how many more hijabs I saw around than I had noticed in the 2000s. The most visible manifestation of soft power in Bishkek is a gleaming mosque built and funded by Turkey. Chinese influence can be felt above all in large-scale infrastructure projects, such as roads and railways, financed by the Belt and Road Initiative. Russian influence is, not surprisingly, ubiquitous in a country that was part of the Soviet Union, with Russian widely spoken and Russian state media popular particularly among older people, but becomes distinctly more noticeable in the recent adoption of foreign agent laws or the Putinesque consolidation of political power around the President.

The deeper point I would make is that, in the battle to conceptualize the future, it now looks far less like an episode of American TV. One of my students, when we were going around the room introducing ourselves at the start of the semester, said as his kind of statement of purpose that he was “opposed to the LGBT agenda”. The phrase “human rights”, which seemed to be making its bid towards universalism in the 2000s, now — under the barrage of Russian state media — is understood as being inextricable from Western soft power. The US and its gold-paved streets might still figure in my students’ airy post-graduation plans, but they’re as apt to say something about Dubai or China — and the difficulty of getting student visas under the Trump administration has shifted their attention away from the US. Whatever the US was supposed to stand for — even if J. Lo can comfortably sell out her Kazakhstan tour, and the Back Street Boys can “get nothing but love” on theirs — is now in recession.

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Whether you think this is a deep loss or not reflects, of course, your underlying point of view. For Pikulicka, America’s inward turn directly undermines Central Asian civil society. “With Donald Trump taking a more authoritarian turn himself, those [NGO] groups have also lost arguments in their struggle against authoritarianism and local regimes, all of which have been tightening the grip over freedom of speech and — in the case of Kyrgyzstan — small but hard won democratic achievements,” she says. For Peter Leonard, a long-time editor at Eurasianet who now writes the Central Asian-themed Substack Havli, Trump’s reassessment of priorities may paradoxically lead to closer ties to Central Asia. “His vocal rejection of ‘woke’ politics is particularly appealing to conservative leaders in the region,” he tells me. “The president of Kazakhstan recently invoked Trump’s coolness toward LGBT values in an approving manner. This strongly suggests that US influence under Trump actually has room for growth, at least in political-cultural terms.” That new affinity with Central Asia seemed to produce surprising results at the end of last year in the C5+1 Summit in Washington where all five Central Asian countries signed far-reaching agreements with the US, including the eye-popping pledge for Uzbekistan to invest $100 billion in the US rather than the other way around.

Leonard’s is a very subtle point of view — that it’s not so much as if America’s influence in the region has waned as that the “brand” has shifted. Trump has a certain alignment with Central Asia that the more progressive NGO sector often didn’t. But living in Bishkek, where the volume of American influence is turned far down from where it was even a few years ago, I find myself reflecting on a vacuum— on the sense of something or other having been lost. What it is, I suppose, is some notion of the US as a force for good on a global scale. It’s not always so easy for me to tell if that’s something that Central Asians actually saw in the US or just what I hoped Central Asians saw, but there’s no question that propaganda from Russia has had its effect in depicting America as the origin point of various global conspiracies, while, especially with the closure of USAID, there is very little soft power initiative emanating from the US to counteract that impression. As Leonard thoughtfully says, there is a constructive role that the US could in theory play in the region. “It stands to bring investment with fewer political strings attached,” he says. “It brings knowledge transfer. And the US is legitimately, if self-interestedly, committed to advancing institutionalized integration among Central Asian states, which would make the region more sovereign and less dependent on China and Russia.”

There was a point in time when, no matter what else it might be, America was it — the future. Now that it’s become clear that capitalism no longer necessarily ushers in democracy and that the “American way of life” is not everybody’s cup of tea, there is a great lacuna in values on the international stage. Russia has been very aggressive in framing a vision of the future around conservative values; and China in doing so around a kind of state-managed technocracy. It’s far less clear now what the US stands for or why anybody should buy what it’s selling.

Since the operation to extract Nicolás Maduro from Caracas and fly him to the US to face trial, much has been said about how the American operation will shake up geopolitics and the world economy. China, which imports about half a million barrels of oil daily from Venezuela, has just lost a key strategic partner, delivering the advantage in the US-China rivalry to Washington. Meanwhile Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, which we keep being reminded are the biggest in the world, have now fallen into the grip of the US. With this control secured, America will control a vast supply of cheap energy, which it can use to enrich its oil companies, power its industrial renaissance and dictate policy to world energy markets.

But if all that were true, we’d have expected to see big movements in world markets. As traders digested the dramatic news, Chinese stocks would have plunged as the country’s growth prospects dimmed; oil prices would have either plummeted as the world anticipated the massive supply of new crude, or alternatively soared as the risk of conflict and attendant supply disruptions heightened; government bonds and the dollar would have rallied as investors flocked to the safety of US treasury paper in anticipation of wider conflict. That was, after all, what happened in past conflicts over oil: the 1973 Yom Kippur War tipped the world economy into recession, and the 1979 Iranian Revolution, by sending inflation skywards, helped bring down governments in the British and American elections in the next year.

But none of that came to pass this time round. Chinese stocks were up on Monday. Bonds barely budged. Currency markets revealed few signs of major movements to safe havens. The oil price moved sideways for most of the day. Essentially, traders were telling us there was nothing much to see here, folks.

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Put simply, little has changed. The suggestion that a sudden flood of Venezuelan oil will swell global supply rests on the apparent assumption that all you need to do is sink a well a few feet down and black gold, ready to put into automobiles and diesel generators, will come gushing out. In fact, Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is so degraded by years of neglect, and its business environment so difficult to navigate due to decades of corruption and poor governance, that the scale of investment required to revive production, refinement and exports is vast — typical estimates being north of $100 billion over 15 years.

Where will all that money come from? Venezuela is broke and, in the absence of US security or financial guarantees, is unlikely to suddenly obtain access to abundant cheap credit. Even though Venezuelan bond prices shot up some 24% on Monday, that means investors will still pay a mere 41 cents on the dollar — which, when converted into a yield, leaves Venezuelan interest rates well into double digits. As for the private sector, although in the wake of the operation US President Donald Trump said US oil majors would “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country”, those same companies have so far been noticeably silent on their own plans. A former executive for Chevron, the only American major that still has operations in the country, has floated the possibility of raising $2 billion for further Venezuelan investment. But the majors are, at least so far, waiting for more clarity.

With projects already underway elsewhere, it’s not clear what advantage they’d gain from suddenly re-allocating capital to Venezuela — not least because the long time-horizons involved would require a stable, predictable environment before the majors feel comfortable sinking money again. Which is to say, a regime change. And what happened on Saturday fell far short of that.

Instead, all that the weekend’s military operation accomplished was to change the leader, not the regime. And while the administration maintains that the new acting president Delcy Rodríguez, who is seen as a relative pragmatist among the Chavistas, will effectively do what the White House instructs it to do, the idea that the US can simply install a satrap and then retreat to the comfort of Pennsylvania Avenue stretches credulity.

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With hardline Chavistas still in control of the military and a network of militias throughout the country, Trump will find it difficult to shape events without putting boots on the ground. Assuming he doesn’t do that, he will likely get lip service and not much more from a leader that is likely to have a weak base of domestic support. It’s hard to imagine any Venezuelan leader who acts as a US puppet being able to retain significant backing from either rival elites or the population at large. If Trump does try to bolster her by sending in American soldiers to establish order, it will do to his presidency what happens to most presidencies that start with a major foreign invasion: mark the beginning of the end.

Americans seldom like foreign military incursions, except for those that are brief and successful, like last summer’s bombing of Iran. And as the President who was elected on a pledge to end the country’s “forever wars”, Donald Trump has little political leeway to commit resources to a major Venezuelan operation. With his Venezuelan action already polling badly, he can talk the talk but will find it very difficult to walk the walk.

Investors therefore know that little has changed, which is why their response to the operation has so far been to stand by and wait for more. Which makes one wonder, what was this all for? As a piece of theater for the home audience, the daring and stunningly effective intervention may have been a ratings hit. But if it now bogs the US down in a country which has previously given it a lot of grief, all while hurting America’s international standing, it risks turning into a Pyrrhic victory.

In fact, there’s something about this whole operation that feels strangely anachronistic. Although some see this fight as an extension of the US sphere of influence or even a battle over drugs, most of the commentary, at least in the Western media, has treated this as a resource war, a variant of the Great Game to secure control of a key resource and thereby gain a stranglehold over one’s rivals. The sort of great-power conflicts which defined much of the past two centuries.

But the world has changed. The global economy is far less resource-intensive than it once was, and its oil intensity has been in long-term decline. In the 20th century, the world economy was powered by oil and coal. Today, even though that remains the case, the world is rapidly transitioning to diversified supplies of renewable energy which depend entirely on local resources. Over time, the carbon intensity of the world energy supply will thus decline further, making oil less strategically important. That no doubt explains why China’s markets were unmoved by the weekend’s events — it had already reduced its dependence on Venezuela to the point it accounted for only about 4% of its total oil imports. The country is leading the world into the energy transition at a rapid pace, installing renewable energy and reducing its oil imports precisely to end such vulnerability to disruptions to global supply.

And while Western countries are following Trump’s lead and starting to temper some of their moves towards renewable energy, the rest of the world is instead following China’s lead. The main markets for Chinese exports of EVs and solar panels are now shifting from Europe to the developing world. What is driving their transition is not concern with climate change but the more immediate gain of reducing import dependence and foreign exchange bills.

If anything, Trump’s move on Venezuela will further incentivize developing countries to speed up their efforts to decarbonize their economies. American administrations of all stripes have demonstrated their willingness to use their control of energy and financial markets as weapons. What better way for developing countries to remove that weapon than by eliminating one’s dependence on what America — or any other country for that matter — controls? They’ll localize energy supply and look for other ways to manage their money than parking it in the US. (Perhaps not coincidentally, gold was one of the few assets whose price did move sharply higher on Monday). Ethiopia, with its abundant hydroelectric resources, recently banned the importation of internal combustion engine cars in order to reduce its fuel bill, while Ukraine is making its electrical grid more resistant to Russian bombs by shifting away from big power plants to rooftop solar. Europe, one recalls, fell into recession when the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine cut off its gas supply, so it knows a thing or two about strategic vulnerability.

All that helps to explain why oil has been in a long bear market and has largely shrugged off the events that would have once caused major shocks to world energy markets, from Middle East wars to Latin American invasions. Trump has devoted American resources to seizing a prize which will over time be increasingly less sought. Which is why when he brandished it before the world, investors scarcely budged.

For all the talk of a return to 19th-century style gunboat diplomacy, a lot has changed since the high age of European imperialism. As Robert Pape, a specialist in insurgency at the University of Chicago puts it, the capacity to resist imperial aggression today far surpasses then. Where Gatling guns once faced men with spears, today, potential guerrillas have access to modern lethal weaponry on an industrial scale. It takes a lot of gunboats to assert supremacy today. Trump thus faces an unpleasant choice: either cut bait now, or go all in and watch his presidency be defined by the successes, or more likely failures, of what will be seen as his war.

The European reaction to the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) has overwhelmingly been one of horror: at being cast out, weak and under-equipped, into a grown-up world full of terrors. Yet the framing that the NSS represents America’s “divorce” from European concerns seems precisely wrong. Instead, it marks the opposite. Walking back its Pacific commitments in the interests of a stable equilibrium with China; its “spreading [of] liberal ideology” in Africa; and its “misguided experiment” in urging Middle Eastern regimes into “abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government”, Washington’s new strategic doctrine is explicit in retreating to core interests. In its declaration of a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, Washington reasserts its traditional right to dominance over the Western Hemisphere. When it comes to our own continent, it makes clear that rather than casting us adrift, Europe is to be drawn closer into America’s now openly civilizational empire.

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With Washington confronted by two overt civilizational states — China and Russia — the NSS makes clear a division between the world without, in its declaration to maintain “good relations with countries whose governing systems and societies differ from ours”, and its new assertiveness in dominating the world within — the sphere that was, until recently, unabashedly called “Western civilization”. So, the NSS declares, Washington will “push like-minded friends to uphold our shared norms” in a process of cultural retrenchment limited to the “countries that share, or say they share, these principles” of Enlightenment liberty, drawn from Europe’s unique civilizational path. The NSS cannot be clearer that this is Washington’s aim: “We want to support our allies in preserving the freedom and security of Europe, while restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Again and again, the document emphasizes its civilizational focus: Europe’s “economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure”, it declares. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence”, because “America is, understandably, sentimentally attached to the European continent — and, of course, to Britain and Ireland.”

Yet rather than a civilizational state, Europe’s current form of governance looks more like a civilizational suicide note to the Trump administration. Like a stern parent gathering its wayward charge back into the family fold, the United States now limits its interest in the domestic politics of foreign nations to that of its European kin. As the Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau declared after leaving Brussels: “Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not. But we cannot pretend that we are partners while those nations allow the EU’s unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels to pursue policies of civilizational suicide.”

How much more explicit could Washington be over its determinedly civilizational ethos? Perhaps it is because such a worldview is now so alien to Europe’s rulers that this clearly and repeatedly expressed focus has been glossed over in European commentary so far. Or perhaps it is because they fear, while “perched in unstable minority governments” as the NSS cruelly if accurately observes, that it may strike a chord among the European peoples they so waveringly rule. Though expressed snarkily, The Economist’s defense editor Shashank Joshi is perhaps closer to the mark than most in tweeting “Trump national security strategy: Make Europe White Again.” Likewise the comment by the EU’s former high representative for foreign policy, Josep Borrell Fontelles, that Trump “wants a white Europe divided into nations, subordinate to his demands and voting preferences”. What both Joshi and Borrell frame pejoratively as a “white” Europe is, of course, the until-very-recently uncontroversial belief that individual European countries should remain the homeland states of their titular peoples: that Finland should be predominantly composed of Finns, for example, and Italy of Italians. This is, after all, the organizing principle by which almost every European state was founded, and over which many bloody wars have been fought.

As the NSS declares, in a frank manner that would invite censure if not police attention in Europe itself: “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter.” A Trump administration that has rejected any interest in the internal affairs of Asia, Africa and the Middle East has no desire to manage the tumultuous affairs of their diasporas in Europe itself. There is nothing to be gained, and much to be lost, for America in the total “Birminghamization” of Britain, or the replacement of Europe’s wider population by non-Europeans, especially after the failure of America’s experience of world hegemony, in which advocates of distant peoples were permitted to “suck us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own”.

Such a worldview is of a piece with Trump’s recent declaration that he will ban Third World migration to the United States, coupled with his preference for European immigration, and preferential asylum for white South Africans. Even within the Western Hemisphere, it is Canada that the Trump administration expresses the desire to annex, and not Latin America, where, the NSS declares, America’s interest lies in ensuring the region “remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States”. The Trump administration is increasingly strident in its declarations that the Hart-Celler Act, which opened the United States to non-European migration, was disastrous. In the President’s overt support of “remigration” — seen in its current, explicitly hostile focus on America’s Somali minority — the terminology of Europe’s Nouvelle Droite has entered the Oval Office, just as the Department of Homeland Security now spends its time tweeting openly Dissident Right memes. The borderless Utopianism of the 2000s, and the radical, racialized discourse and policymaking of 2010s liberals have brought about precisely the nativist reaction they were always warned against. Just a decade ago, all of this seemed unthinkable: now the rhetoric and policy goals of a few dozen Austrian, French and German Identitarian students are returning to Europe via the White House. For European Rightists, this may prove a mixed blessing.

The NSS declares that “the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism”, and that “our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory”. An unpublished version of the document seen by the Defense One website adds that “we should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life… while remaining pro-American”, and focus on specific countries such as Poland, Austria, Hungary and Italy “with the goal of pulling them away from the [European Union]”. The document’s assertions that Europe’s elites survive through “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition” — and “subversion of democratic processes” which “trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition” — imply that Washington will not look kindly on quasi-constitutional attempts to prevent Right-wing parties from gaining power: such as the forthcoming state elections in eastern Germany. Rather than actively helping Right-wing governments into power, then, it is more probable that the Trump administration will prevent faltering liberal administrations from clinging onto by dubiously undemocratic means.

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Yet while it is difficult to imagine the Brussels clerisy, already faltering against a populist upsurge driven by unwanted mass migration, rallying angry European voters against Trump on this exact matter, there are nonetheless risks for Europe’s Right-wing parties. Deepened integration — or rather subjugation — within America’s imperial realm would pose fewer immediate risks if a Republican victory, and a Vance administration, after Trump were a more certain prospect. But a win for a Democratic Party that is now increasingly Third Worldist in both composition and aspiration would surely mean that Washington’s might and influence would be deployed against the European Right just as nakedly and unsparingly. In any case, the gulf between rhetoric and action within the Trump administration has often been a wide one. Europe’s current elites can perhaps be forgiven for their “wait and see” approach: perhaps the Republicans will lose the midterms, and with them the opportunity to reset the empire according to their vision.

Yet the looming and unsatisfactory conclusion to the Ukraine War adds extra time pressure to Europe’s leaders, a sense of jeopardy which works in Washington’s favor. The war initially seemed, in a strange way, a blessing to Europe’s leadership: a chance to preserve their legitimacy, in demonstrating the strength, will, and autonomy of a united Europe and so stave off their reckoning at the hands of their voters. Instead, due to their incompetence, it has accelerated their downfall. Europe is simply not ready to confront Russia alone, and so must cling tighter to Washington’s skirts even as Trump mocks and reviles its leadership. A Europe that can defend itself against external threats — as the Trump administration claims to want — will, eventually, summon up the hard power to become an autonomous actor in a world of predatory empires. Some measure of independence may yet be found, in decades to come, from this terminal point of Europe’s century of humiliation.

It would, though, have been better to have asserted our autonomy before this moment of existential crisis, as France has long urged. Yet the Atlanticist elites too long insisted otherwise, and now bewail, with genuine bewilderment, the kicking they receive from the boot they were installed to lick. Now, faced with aggression from the East, they must subject themselves to humiliation from the West. Like the Byzantine officials who, at the Eastern Roman Empire’s lowest ebb, declared the Ottoman turban to be a better fate than the Papal tiara, the choice at this perilous moment is which subordination will prove less painful. The price of American protection, the NSS makes clear, is ideological conformity: it is not Europe being discarded by its imperial master, but its current leadership. For us Europeans, whom they have dragged to this civilizational nadir, their removal will at least be some small consolation.

Attitude and aptitude explain why the US and China are the sole superpowers of the 21st century. They also explain where it went wrong for Europe. We had aptitude and still mostly do. But we lost the attitude. We are the global virtue-signalers who lost our appetite for cutting-edge research a long time ago.

The China of the Nineties had the attitude, but lacked the aptitude, and sent its best students to Western universities to make up for it. The US has both — aptitude and attitude — and will continue to be a dominant global power for a long time to come.

Mokyr writes: “Unless accompanied by innovations and productivity growth, growth exclusively based on a cooperative ethic will eventually peter out.” He is a critic of the self-styled intellectuals in our societies who are motivated by reputation and peer recognition. This is a swipe at his own profession, and other pseudosciences like epidemiology that gave us the Covid lockdown, based on dubious models, and statistics that fail to meet professional standards. The mathematician and author Nassim Nicolas Taleb dismissed the economics profession as a “citation ring” — very much in the spirit as Mokyr.

There was a time when the Europeans had them both — aptitude and attitude. But that was a long time ago. Gottlieb Daimler invented the motor car, probably the single most successful product of the industrial age, in 1885. It would be several decades until the car revolutionized how we live. Modern suburbia would have been unthinkable without it. For the German economy in particular, the car was an invention that kept on giving — until this decade. We have reached the end of this long cycle of innovation. Germany still has a big car industry, but it is no longer making a lot of money. The future of cars is electric, digital and, in particular, Chinese.

The computer is the only other single product that has ever managed to rival the car — and surpass it — in terms of its economic impact. But that, too, took a long time. The computer did not have any discernible impact on productivity growth until quite recently. We are already seeing the impact of AI in some pockets of the labor market. AI is bad news if you are a wedding photographer, a freelance writer, or a legal assistant. It will end up killing millions of mid-tech jobs while creating new jobs in other areas.

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When China embarked on modernization under Deng Xiaoping in the Eighties, it pursued a strategy of export-led economic growth and invested the proceeds into innovation and modernization. The West misunderstood China’s strategy as one moving towards Western-style democracy or capitalism. In reality, it was always about strengthening the communist system, even under Deng, and making it more successful and resilient.

China also defied another Western economic policy consensus — that governments should never pick winners. Those old enough may remember how we all laughed about the Soviet Union’s five-year plans. No one was laughing last week when the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party agreed the 15th Five-Year Plan. It has been through these five-year plans that China managed to dethrone the German car industry, and to monopolize the technologies that would turn rare-earth minerals into magnets that are indispensable for high-powered engines. When Europeans tried picking winners, more often than not they ended up picking losers.

I remember a meeting I had in the early 2000s with the famous economist Edmund Phelps, who won the economics Nobel Prize in 2006. He gave me a daring prediction: Germany would decline relative to the rest of the world and to the rest of Europe. He said the reason was Germany’s obsession with old technologies like the car. His forecast ran counter to conventional wisdom, like those of the financial media, which upheld Germany as a virtuous role model. Phelps turned out to be right, but it took another two decades until Germany’s decline became visible to a lot more people. And it took two decades for the Nobel Prize committee to recognize the importance of innovation and disruption.

For four decades now, Europe has been falling behind the US, and now China, in all things digital. The EU has made matters worse with a string of legislation that weighs down digital technology. This deadweight began with data protection regulation from the 2010s, and stretched to more recently applied AI and crypto regulations, alongside laws to restrict the business of the US tech giants, and to force social media platforms to moderate their content. Europe still has good engineers, but we are a digital desert.

What China realized early on — and what Europeans in particular are mostly in denial of — is that there is a link between innovation and geopolitical power. It is interesting that the capitalist US and communist China both agree with Mokyr’s worldview, whereas the Left-liberal consensus in Europe and Canada is on the other side of that argument — the losing side. It is the tragedy of the political center that the radical ends of the political spectrum are more innovation-friendly.

Where can we observe that link? The US and its allies dominate advanced semiconductors; China dominates rare earths and their downstream products. Both superpowers therefore have geopolitical chokeholds on each other. Last week’s deal between Xi and Donald Trump was a ceasefire in a continuing cold war.

But by far the single most important link between innovation and geopolitical power is through the military. The geopolitical dominance of the US today had its origin in the postwar collaboration between the military and science. In the postwar era, the military became the biggest sponsor and customer of the rapid engineering developments of the electronic age. The internet was based on a communication protocol that was developed for the US military — a technology to allow data to be transmitted when communication got physically interrupted in one channel and re-routed through another. The single most important algorithm of the 20th century — the Discrete Fourier transform, without which modern digital devices would be unthinkable — had its origin in a meeting in the White House when a scientist decided he needed a faster way to identify signals from Soviet underground nuclear testing.

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Europe will clearly not regain geopolitical dominance, but there are second-best strategies. In AI, for example, most of the benefits will come from using it — not from making it. Some AI algorithms are open-source. In theory, Europe should still have a chance. In practice, it does not. Its tech regulation frustrates not only AI startups, but also broader use of AI. This is what Mokyr meant by “attitude and aptitude”. You need both to succeed. And Europe’s attitude is anti-innovation. Don’t be fooled by the EU’s overhyped Horizon Europe program, which is a pork-barrel spending program for second-rate universities. Europeans like to think of themselves as being innovative and “pro-science” — but they keep falling further behind the US and China. Europe’s priorities are to protect workers and existing industries.

Outside the EU, things look a little brighter. The largest European country most likely to succeed in this category is the UK. The UK is way ahead of the EU in AI investments. Yet after Brexit, the UK did not follow the EU in its generalized anti-tech crusade. The UK has a higher concentration of research universities that specialize in areas relevant to 21st-century science. One of the most exciting prospects is the development of a science corridor between Oxford and Cambridge. It will take a long time, but it is the right way to proceed.

The history of innovation since the 19th century holds two important lessons. The first is that the economic benefits of innovation are massive and can last for more than 100 years. The great European inventions of the 19th and early-20th centuries were not the result of luck, but of attitude and aptitude. The second lesson — the one that Germany is learning the hard way now — is that things end unless you keep innovating.

This is where the other half of this year’s Nobel Prize for economics comes in. It went to Philippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, who produced an economic model for “creative destruction”. This is a term coined by the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. Creative destruction is the mechanism through which new innovation can replace old. As every gardener knows, you have to let things die to grow something new. In the world of mainstream economics, this is a controversial statement. In the world of European politics, it is total anathema.

You can still see Daimler’s contraption on display at a museum in Stuttgart. This is where you have to go to get a whiff of attitudes and aptitudes lost a long time ago. It is in museums, and Grade A-listed buildings, where Europe still excels.

Both presidents had reason to be pleased. Each got what he wanted: a compromise which doesn’t cut off options, at least for now. Both achieved their specific aims: for the US side, the removal of many of the restrictions on Chinese exports of rare earths; for the Chinese, lower tariffs on their goods entering the US. They also managed to put off some of the hardest questions on how the US-China relationship will develop in the next few years.

Their similarity of intent was masked by their very different personal styles. Trump is freewheeling, improvisational, unpredictable. This is not to say that he lacks direction: for this meeting, he had a key goal of getting an agreement on fentanyl and rare earths, and he achieved both. Xi, in contrast, is tightly choreographed, sticking to talking points and bland language. (There is only one recorded incident of Xi making a joke during his relationship with the US: on a visit to America in September 2015, he declared that his anti-corruption campaign purging the Chinese Communist Party was “no House of Cards”, referring to the skulduggerous television show about a scheming US president). Trump has been warm in his language about Xi, calling him “respected” and referring to him as the “king of China”. Xi has said little about Trump personally.

Compare this disbalanced personal dynamic with each president’s relationship with Vladimir Putin. Putin is clearly able to adapt to Trump’s fixations and bugbears, as when he sympathized with the US President’s dislike of mail-in ballots (even though Russia makes wide use of digital remote voting), and assured him that he would not have invaded Ukraine in 2022 if Trump had remained president. Yet it’s hard to see Putin having a conversation with any Western leader, not just Trump, where the surface level conversation and deeper intent really match.

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The relationship between Xi and Putin, in contrast, seems genuinely quite close. Xi’s respect for Russia is not purely instrumental. His father Xi Zhongxun grew up in China’s revolutionary movement under the influence of Russian and Soviet literature, and seems to have passed on some of that interest to his son. (Joseph Torigian’s superb biography of Xi Zhongxun, The Party’s Interests Come First, notes Xi’s knowledge of relatively obscure Russian novels.) Putin, of course, has his own nationalistic view of Russian culture and its importance, and is willing to flatter China, although he seems to have little specific to say about its culture or society. This year, official records show that the two leaders have talked on the phone frequently and met at various international gatherings. Indeed, Trump posted disapprovingly on Truth Social during the Victory Day parade in Beijing in September, accusing Xi, Putin and Kim Jong-un of conspiring against America. There’s no record of a Chinese reply. Putin at least sometimes tries to reply to Trump in his own idiom. Xi never does.

On the core issue of trade, both gunslingers have put their weapons away — for now. China has made it clear that it’s able and willing to use restrictions on the export of rare earths and critical minerals to squeeze the US and other Western powers in the most sensitive parts of their supply chains. The US has likewise indicated that it’s prepared to take the hit to consumers that comes from restrictions on China by pushing tariffs up to unbearable rates. The possibility of mutual destruction has led to a temporary deal.

But the negotiations are nowhere near finished. The Trump administration says that China has agreed to restrict the export of fentanyl, which is responsible for severe opiate addiction in the US. Yet it’s hard to know how enforceable the fentanyl ban really is. In the end, fentanyl production in China, unlike the production of EVs or solar panels, is not subject to governmental oversight, and it’s going to be hard to track how much China really controls the drug. The export restrictions and tariffs have been lifted for just one year.

In South Korea, Trump and Xi managed to avoid some of the biggest questions that divide them. Perhaps the biggest issue is Taiwan, where policy seems to be changing at some speed on both sides. Over the years, Xi has made ever-louder comments about the need to “resolve” the Taiwan question — that is, its unification with the mainland — in public speeches. China’s military spending rose to over $314 billion in 2024, and the PLA Navy is developing its capacities for the kind of amphibious assault that would be needed for an invasion. While logistics do still make that particular outcome unlikely, Taiwan is nevertheless vulnerable to a blockade, as well as to cyberattacks.

For the past half century, even though the US switched recognition of China from Taipei to Beijing, the US has maintained a strong commitment to help Taiwan defend itself. Under the first Trump administration, senior figures such as the former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former deputy national security advisor Matt Pottinger made it clear that they regarded the defense of Taiwan as a top political priority. Joe Biden stated several times during his presidency that the US would defend Taiwan: he was so emphatic in this claim that his staff had to walk back the assurance several times to restore the “strategic ambiguity” that was supposed to define policy.

Under the new Trump administration, however, the position on Taiwan seems more fluid. A planned shipment of some $400 million worth of arms to Taiwan last summer was halted by the administration. Taiwan president Lai Ching-te’s attempt to transit the United States on his way to Latin America (where there are still a few states that recognize Taiwan) was also vetoed earlier this year. Of course, the US still provides plenty of military assistance to Taiwan in service of what has become known as a “porcupine” strategy for self-defense. But China seems less inclined to tolerate Taiwan’s status quo, and many in Taiwan are unsure that the US will offer them long-term protection if the situation changes suddenly.

Trump left Seoul declaring that he would visit China in April next year. So far, the Chinese side has been silent on a date. Clearly neither party would think it worth a presidential visit if there was nothing to sign off on. And many of the issues look intractable on both sides. The US has to decide whether Taiwan is worth defending: say no, and a democracy could be destroyed and American power in the Pacific permanently diminished; say yes and thousands of American lives could be lost in yet another far-off war. Meanwhile, China wants access to US high tech: American security officials are skeptical about the wisdom of allowing the export of high-level chips, while the tech magnates who are central to the new administration are keen to expand their market in China.

Above all, China wants to know whether the recent change in US foreign policy is real. Recently, the term “involution” (neijuan) has become popular in Chinese internet usage, referring to an increasingly inward turn of many of the youth in China’s competitive society. Today, China’s leaders are trying to work out whether the “involution” in the US is real, and if so, how that can be made to boost China’s rise to becoming the global power that sets the rules. The Seoul meeting did not come close to answering those questions. Perhaps the summit in Beijing next spring will do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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