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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now that the noise has receded, it is a good time to listen. I am not hearing of a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive. What I am hearing instead is the thud of Russian jackboots marching deeper into the parts of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine that Vladimir Putin does not yet control.   

Meanwhile, in the southwest of the Arabian Peninsula, the Houthis have taken control of the strategic port city of Mokha. The city lies just to the north of the Strait of Bab el-Mandeb, which connects the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. So far, the Houthis have not been able to interdict shipping through the Strait, as Iran did in the Strait of Hormuz. But since capturing Mokha they have also seized Perim Island, in the middle of Bab el-Mandeb, putting them in a far stronger position to threaten passing ships. If they succeed in closing the Strait, Iran and its allies would control the main maritime bottlenecks of the Middle East. 

That spells economic peril for the West. Before the war, the vast majority of oil produced in the Arabian Peninsula traveled through the straits of Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb. Right now, about 400,000 barrels of Saudi Arabian oil flow through Bab el-Mandeb per day, only a small fraction of production. And after the Houthis captured Mokha, the price of Brent crude, the international benchmark, is back to around $100 per barrel. This is not the short, sharp oil-price shock that the markets had anticipated when the Iran war started. Leon Panetta, who was director of the CIA under President Obama, now warns of a “forever war”, with no signs of it being resolved one way or the other.  

Economists and central bankers have neatly divided the economic consequences of the war into three scenarios: baseline, adverse and severe. I would describe the situation we are in today as adverse, heading towards severe.  

A crude oil price of $100 translates into higher prices for petrol, diesel, heating oil, kerosene and other downstream products. A severe winter could lead to heating gas shortages in Germany, for the country’s storage tanks are already at record-low levels. A $100 oil price is not one at which our Western economies function smoothly.  

It is a price, however, at which the Russian economy functions very well. And oil, ominously, is what links the two wars. The longer the war in Iran lasts, the greater the financial boost for Russia, whose main exports are oil and gas. As a result, an unwelcome scenario presents itself: the US loses its war against Iran, and Ukraine loses to Russia. 

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Most wars do not end in outright victories or defeats. My central expectation for both is a messy draw: some dirty deal that would leave Iran charging money for passage through the Strait, with Trump and his business associates getting a cut. For Ukraine, I would define a draw as Russia keeping its presently occupied territories and obtaining assurances that Ukraine will stay outside Nato. But the odds of a bad outcome, from a Western perspective, are shortening.  

For one, there is clearly a risk that other European countries might be drawn into the war — just as there is an escalation risk in the Middle East. The two wars could also fuse into a broader Eurasian conflict that acts as a proxy war between the US and China. 

And I doubt that the aging societies of Western Europe have the stomach for a sustained fight. These countries are having to borrow money to meet their defense spending targets. Nor do they have an excess of young men eager to fight the Russians in a war that could later involve the use of nuclear and chemical weapons. In the event of war, our massive wealth and income redistribution systems would have to be painfully cut back, with millions thrown into immediate poverty. 

It is easier, then, to send money to Ukraine without committing troops. Ukraine has received hundreds of billions of pounds in military and financial support from the West, but Russia has still managed to outspend it. Russia hit a short recession earlier this year but is now recovering, in part due to the rise in the oil price. 

At the same time, the US, and by extension Ukraine, is suffering from a shortage of interceptor missiles used to take down incoming missiles and drones. Despite its formidable military capabilities, the US is not geared up for a long war. Its weak link is the supply chain. The same is happening in Europe, where decades of running down defense spending have taken their toll.  

Britain has an army of 75,000 troops, a force so depleted that it could only “seize a small market town on a good day”. These are the immortal words of General Sir Richard Barrons, a former military commander and co-author of the UK’s recent defense review.  

So what makes us so certain we can stop Russia winning in Ukraine? The Russians, too, are brimming with confidence. They are so confident of victory right now that they are no longer even interested in peace talks. 

When Steve Witkoff, Donald Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, visited Vladimir Putin last week, it turned into a toe-curling embarrassment. Putin was happy to receive them and hear their sycophantic praise. But he did not appear in a hurry to cut a peace deal, and the commentary in the Russian media about the visit was caustic. Dmitry Drize, a political commentator at Kommersant FM, wrote: “The visit followed the standard formula — arrival, restaurant, reception in the Kremlin… One would really like to see something more.” 

We have clearly moved beyond the period of US-Russian rapprochement marked by the Anchorage summit between Trump and Putin in August last year. At the time, Russian elites fell over themselves in their praise for Trump. No longer. Putin has the look of a man who thinks he can win.  

He has miscalculated before and may do so again. His invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was a shambles. But the Russian army regrouped, and Russia is today in a stronger position than its opponent.  

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For many in the West, though, the idea of a Russian victory is still too painful to contemplate. If we treat something as unthinkable, we do not think about it. But underestimating your enemy is exactly how you lose wars. Even after four and a half years, I do not understand the strategic objective of Western support for Ukraine. I am not questioning the principle, but I fail to see what exactly the intended purpose is in concrete strategic terms. 

One of the few in Europe who pretends to have a strategy is Radosław Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister. His words do not reassure me. He once defined the strategy as one of exhausting the enemy, much as the Allied Powers defeated Germany in World War I. But the situation today is not comparable. Russia has not hit critical energy shortages as Germany did back then. The idea that we would win an endurance contest against Putin when oil prices are high seems over-optimistic. 

Last week, Sikorski claimed in a separate interview that the EU economy is nine to 10 times larger than that of Russia. This is not merely a false statistic; it is a Napoleonic-scale misjudgment of the size of Russia. Measured in dollars, the EU is indeed much bigger. But because Russia has been cut out of the dollar markets, that’s not a smart way to look at relative size. The best way to compare ourselves with a country like Russia, China or Iran, especially for military purposes, is purchasing power — literal bang for the buck. On that metric, the EU is three times as large as Russia. And even that does not tell us what we need to know, because the EU is spending only a tiny proportion of its economic output on helping Ukraine, whereas Putin is spending a lot more.  

The military metrics tell no more flattering a story. The EU has 1.3 million active military personnel, approximately the same as Russia. But in terms of military production, Russia beats the EU hands down. For example, Russia produces 3.4 million large howitzer shells per year, substantially more than the EU’s projected annual capacity of two million. This is true for many other weapons categories as well.

Back in March, Trump said the White House expected the war to last for four or five weeks. But historians have seen that kind of delusion before. When Germany started World War I in August 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm confidently told his troops: “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” Today’s equivalent is the assertion that Russia and Iran are easy to defeat because we are so much richer than them.

The bottom line is that Trump has no strategy for the Middle East, just as Europeans have no strategy for Ukraine. We are rich and creditworthy enough to keep supporting Ukraine and battle Iran a little longer. But in either case I struggle to see a path to victory, for we are not willing to put our money, and our troops, where our mouth is. 

Thus 11 September, 2001, that dire shock whose collision momentum irresistibly knocked us out of reality as we had understood it — perhaps because we had failed to understand it accurately — and into something terrifying, agonizing, unformed. Maybe Pearl Harbor felt like this, at least to isolationist homebodies who ignored developments in Poland and Manchuria; the American Civil War, calamity though it was, had telegraphed itself for years; sad John Quincy Adams intuited its approach though he died before it came.

And then the little child got a stomach ache; the bomb went off; the South seceded and a pair of hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers. At first we were bewildered. We could not understand “why they hate us”. But in its own time, the new reality grew distinct. It was necessarily grimmer than the old, because we were at war with shadowy murderers to whom we had paid too little attention.

If this were a happier essay, I would write that the shock improved our comprehension of the world, but that isn’t so. Not long after we invaded Iraq in 2003, to confiscate imaginary weapons of mass destruction and punish Saddam Hussein for 9/11, with which he had absolutely nothing to do, the Iraqis whom we were impoverishing, torturing and shooting very naturally began killing ever more of us and each other. In 2004, I was in California’s Imperial Valley, a poorish, agricultural, fairly pro-military place, when I heard people say: “We liberated them, but they don’t appreciate it. We’re trying to help them, but they’re mean.” And why had the 9/11 hijackers been mean? Well, “they hated us for our freedoms.”

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We the Americans (never mind the politicos who got us into this) were the little children who maybe or maybe not should have known better, and 11 September was the ant poison left over from the Cold War. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, that was a vicious atrocity; hence we were right and just to support the Afghan resistance. However, we should not have collaborated with the Saudis on bankrolling, arming and letting loose Islamic extremism. We thought we could stir up the Mujahideen to bleed the “Evil Empire” — which they did — Roger, Wilco, over and out! — but what then? Spent, the Russians withdrew in 1989, while we rested on our laurels.

Right then, when the Afghans were still grateful to Reagan and the CIA, we could have spent a pittance on mosques, hospitals, running water and girls’ schools, and maybe helped to build peace. In Yemen, I have seen schools and clinics labeled “A GIFT FROM THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITY”. In 2002, at least (I have not been back since), the Yemenis remembered those gifts. They did not hate the Europeans as they hated us. As for us, buttoning up our wallets, we walked away from the Afghan warlords we had enabled. Once the power vacuum grew literally murderous, the Taliban sprang up, promising to replace robberies, kidnappings and rapes with a literalist Muslim society — an awfully persuasive response to the atheists who had burned women alive and drowned “reactionary feudal elements” in Marxist-Leninist cesspools. What tune were we whistling then? The Afghans had served our turn, so about them we no longer cared a rat’s ass. Now we could crow about a “peace dividend”.

***

Osama bin Laden was a brave and effective Mujahid. Maybe he took our money, or possibly he sucked entirely on Saudiya’s tit. When did leaving him alone with his toys and zealots become imprudent? This ordinary citizen cannot say. But once he commenced uttering explicit threats, meanwhile appearing implicated in terrorist acts, why wasn’t he stopped? Much has been written about the cavalier indifference of the Bush administration, which preferred to look for excuses to “take out” Saddam. The intelligence community itself blamed “the wall” imposed by Congress in the Seventies, after revelations of FBI-CIA collusion in various abuses, including widespread illegal surveillance of American citizens. This partition between spookish entities, we are plausibly told, prevented FBI and CIA cadres from sharing enough information to “connect the dots” and stop the hijackers in time. As the 9/11 report told it, “the wall” now “regulated the manner in which such information could be shared from the intelligence side of the house to the criminal side. These procedures were almost immediately misunderstood and misapplied.” So down came “the wall,” and, to the government’s credit, I will say that there have been no 9/11-sized attacks on American soil since 2001.

Of course, thousands of Middle Eastern civilians have been killed to further that outcome. How many died for no good reason? How many were justifiably tortured? (My answer is none, because I disbelieve that torture is ever justified. But in my magisterial objectivity let me now quote a “CIA veteran” from the other side, circa October 2001: “A lot of people are saying we need someone at the agency who can pull fingernails out… The only question then is, do you want to have CIA people in the room?”.) How many suitcases of hundred-dollar bills have passed out of oversight? What cost have we paid in civil liberties to achieve our tenuous tranquility? I remember the so-called PATRIOT Act, one of whose provisions was that librarians must on request turn over a list of books checked out by a specific patron, and then keep secret from him or her that the list has gone to the government. Ah, freedom; oh, democracy! We citizens gave in and gave up; we left PATRIOTic tricks up to our protectors, because by definition they knew best. But did they? Has the War on Terror been making us more or less safe?

This August, I was reporting from Kuwait, where I found significant hatred of America and Israel. Our stupid, vicious bully of a President goes on exacerbating Muslim hostility with his Iran war, which in Kuwait has increased food prices and triggered retaliatory Iranian drone casualties to people and infrastructure. One man told me that while he did not support Iran “even 1%”, he stood against America “more than a thousand percent.” His position requires a fairly lofty will-to-hate. That is why I see another 11 September coming. Maybe this time it will entail swarms of drones. Meanwhile, we go on making enemies and strengthening their accusations against us. I guess that’s the American way.

As the 11 September report admitted: “Coalition warfare also requires coalition policies on what to do with enemy captives. Allegations that the United States,” to take just one instance, “abused prisoners… make it harder” — who would have thought it? — “to build the diplomatic, political and military alliances the government will need.”

The victims of 9/11  were innocent, and their murderers evil. I am grateful to the intelligence community for killing the killers. As for the waterboarders and blithely careless shooters and detonators (doubtless they are still at it in some “black site”), how can they not make war into a perpetual motion machine? We citizens never know what well-intentioned cruelties they are up to today and tomorrow. And how can we imagine what we cannot see? From Yemen I remember rectangular windows and round windows like kaleidoscopes of multicolored glass, and, in the old city of Shibam in Hadramawt, a cluster of gingerbread or halvah blocks very occasionally ornamented with satellite dishes. My friends and neighbors will likely never go to Yemen. If they ever hear that we dropped a Predator drone over there, that will mean as much to them as learning that we did something classified on Saturn.

The US, we are told, has a representative government. Abe Lincoln called himself our servant, as well he might. Although King Donald takes furious exception, our representatives are supposed to be temporary servants. (Just wait until he makes terrorism great again in his illegal third term!) In Congress and the judiciary branch, decisions made on our behalf are least supposed to be public. As for the executive branch, its purpose, wrote John Adams, is to do whatever must be done with secrecy and dispatch. Obviously, when the Twin Towers fell, the American masses remained in and of themselves unqualified to decide how to react. How many could have distinguished Iran from Iraq, or located Yemen on a world map? How many could say that Saddam was or was not a 9/11 kingpin? So the chief executive decided for America: get Iraq! I do wish he had worked with other world leaders to map out al-Qaeda targets, instead of dragooning his “coalition” into an unjust war based on a lie.

As for his war with Afghanistan, was it effective? Did it gain its purpose? With our military out, and the Taliban inevitably as strong or stronger than before — Americans go on disbelieving in their populist appeal — I can’t exactly applaud Bush’s victory. But maybe we killed a lot of bad guys, and not so many good guys as to create more bad guys than before we started. How can I know? Doubtless he’s proud of his accomplishment.

***

Yes, we Americans remain blind to Yemen, though even an ill-educated ISIS cadre may possess an excellent visual understanding of his sector of Target America; thanks to the internet he might even have soared up the 405 past the Getty Center, exiting at Mulholland Drive to ascend the green coastal hills and then roll down across stone canyons and round the moist green hills with the San Fernando Valley below; there are the enemy’s white houses; perhaps he hates the more expensive ones most; let’s say that he sees Los Angeles as we cannot see Hadramawt, but does he see us, the ones whom he would kill? I remember chatting with some Talibs about Americans. That was how I learned that we are all prostitutes, gang bangers, homeless addicts, perverts pornography addicts; because these men had all worked in the United States, and therefore thought that they knew us; of course the only work they could get was pumping gas in the red light district, selling cheap liquor to alcoholics or manning the counters of “adult” bookstores. No wonder they had a bad notion of us. And no wonder, too, that my neighbors can’t tell a Talib from a Shi’ite from a Sikh. (“Come on, Bill; they’re all ragheads!”) What turban-wearers do they ever see on their screens but America-hating evildoers?

Again I propose that we set aside a fraction of what we burn on surveillance and drone strikes, and spend it on what will benefit people, and make them friendlier toward us. After years of careless carnage and brutality, it will take more years to soften their hearts. But why not build schools? If the Islamists blow them up, build them again. The locals will take eventual note of who seems to be addressing their interests. Otherwise we can “shock and awe”, but then what? We believe in our own kindness, so why not convince them of the same?

At home, meanwhile, we are now proving the Talibs right by spreading libels about non-white, non-Christian immigrants. Texas politicos fulminate about clearing their state of Muslims. Well, then, why shouldn’t Muslim countries cleanse themselves of American military bases?

I wish, here, that American Muslim organizations would more clearly distance themselves from extremists. I wish there could be a place (or, as post-9/11 Americans would say, “a safe place”) for Muslims and non-Muslims to meet, possibly to share food or practice calligraphy (illuminated Qurans are some of the most beautiful works I have ever seen). You see, I am a lucky man. I can wish away without responsibilities, and keep blaming others.

***

The UK has endured a heartbreaking number of high- and low-level terrorist attacks. From my possibly outsider perspective, it seems that many Muslim immigrants have integrated into British society sufficiently to live anonymously, but not enough to feel accepted. Perhaps it is like that in the Algerian neighborhoods of France, the petri-dishes of Belgium and Germany.

My conclusion — an impractical one in my country now that the Bigot-in-Chief is deporting people right and left — is that immigration ought to be managed mindfully. It should benefit both the hosts and the new arrivals. In a better America, a municipality with a shortage of workers might bid to take, say, 1,000 people, in exchange for infrastructure grants or tax breaks. If the new arrivals are Muslim, then an organization such as the Committee on American-Islamic Relations (which somebody in Texas has pronounced terrorist; for my part I am fond of it and its members) could arrange a meet-and-greet, perhaps with some church volunteers, to teach the respective parties that in our country women can wear short skirts (or have sex with other women) and that no one should be forced or tricked into consuming pork and alcohol. Whenever I go to a foreign place, I feel more at ease once I have found a big brother or big sister to teach me the local mores and help me make friends. Why wouldn’t a new immigrant feel the same?

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Meanwhile, one thing I can do right now (as can you) is to reach out to those who seem “other” or even positively alien, before their feelings of rejection render them isolated and estranged. It is the grinding little quotidian incivilities that irritate us into resentment.

Consider the possibilities. We could close our borders, abandon our global capitalist empire to China and Russia and devolve into an autarky. Without cheap imported plastics, rare earths for their cell phones and a committed export market, even the most radical Trumpeter Swans might grow disgruntled then. Or we could isolate and surveil immigrants in hopes of precipitating out the haters. My suspicion is that this treatment would defeat its own purpose. (In 2004, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, 70 to 90% of Iraqi detainees “had been arrested by mistake.”) Or, thirdly, we could welcome them into our community and treat them according to the Golden Rule. Which of these would be easiest, cheapest and kindest?

***

The Pentagon Papers proved that American Presidents were willing to escalate an ever-more-obviously unwinnable war in Vietnam to look tough in elections. As for our 9/11 goon squad — Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and that bunch — it might despite warnings from the intelligence community have truly believed that Iraq was behind the attacks Or, perhaps, they simply felt impelled to “do something”, with Iraq already on the “to do” list. Who can say? The executive branch’s necessary Adamsonian qualities of secrecy and dispatch protected it from oversight and embarrassment long enough for Bush II to steer the country into disaster and then step down without fear of punishment.

One of the most serious deficiencies of our rotating representative system is that any chief executive’s theory of foreign policy can suddenly be contradicted and undone by his successor. Just consider the sharp transition from Carter to Reagan, or Clinton to Bush II. And so, returning to the matter of the Afghan Mujahideen, who drove out the Soviets in 1989, we can if we like blame Bush I, who as a former CIA supremo should have understood the necessity for maintaining ties with his proxies and their weapons;.ut we could also point a finger at Clinton, in whose time Afghanistan grew more volatile — why didn’t he re-engage with the people who were still our friends? (A year before 9/11, the Talibs were still in my hearing expressing gratitude to America.) Did anybody in Washington care?

It would be lovely had there been some sage at State and Defense to assure us: “We’ve been following this issue ever since we ramped up the Mujahideen in 1979. Here is how events have evolved, and so our current national interest can be served as follows…” But with the Soviets beaten, and still more so with the collapse of their system in 1991-92, Afghanistan became irrelevant, which is another way of saying that our Afghan policy was ultimately incoherent, like our current Venezuela policy (kidnap the head of state, blow up random fishing boats) or our Iran policy (threaten, bomb, declare victory and repeat).

Our Vietnam policy continued until the Pentagon Papers got leaked. Then it finally began to founder. If and when we are ever relieved of President Trump, some new politician can end the Iran war, or else continue it in some way that is the same only different; then my neighbors will be satisfied, and forget all about it. But the Iranians, Turks, Saudis, Kuwaitis, Omanis, Qataris and Emirates will not forget. Someday we’ll wonder why they hate us.

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

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

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

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

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

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By Samuel Rubinstein

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

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

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

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

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The great Net Zero showdown

By John Rapley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, however, all these pillars of the postwar order are collapsing at once, and largely in the same theater. The American-Israeli war in Iran, the ongoing migrant crisis at Ceuta, the dismantling of Hamas’s hold on Gaza — it’s easy to imagine these are discrete events. But they aren’t. They are the load-bearing assumptions of the postwar settlement giving way altogether. When empires are ready to collapse, the gods of history have a way of creating splintering geopolitical emergencies that push toward entropy. The Dow Jones might hit 60,000, and the world might soon have its first tech-trillionaires, but on some level we all know these signs of progress and stability are just mutually agreed-upon fiction. What we’re living through now is the Great Unspooling of the postwar liberal order.

The postwar order began with the Holocaust. The discovery of the Nazi death camps completely remade the Western moral imagination. Thereafter, any sustained suggestion that ethnicities or religious groups differ in their readiness for Western institutions became taboo. Out of that hesitation to acknowledge the reality of profound cultural differences came the belief that nations must henceforth be “ideas” rather than long-fought inheritances. Along the way, the West promised that Jews would never be left to the mercy of antisemitism — a vow that took institutional form in the state of Israel. For 80 years, these vows held. But now they’re breaking down, with the war in Iran and the attempted dismantling of Hamas.

To that extent, Marx got it wrong. It wasn’t class-conflict, exactly, but immigration and a dependence on population growth, that are the great “contradictions” of liberal capitalism. The West has become a system dependent not only on cancer-like growth to survive, but also on population enlargement, for which it must have ever-increasing markets and thus ever-increasing populations capable of supplying them. Insert mass immigration from non-European origins to societies with mostly European ancestry, wrap it all in a narrative of innocence in which every migrant merely seeks a “better life” — with no ancillary consequences whatsoever — and you have liberal capitalism’s core contradiction, its timer set to explode.

Over the last decade, it’s become increasingly popular among the more cynical portions of the online Right to believe that the West will “fall” as a result of mass migration from non-European societies. Even the anti-populist Right suspects, as Jonah Goldberg argued in The Suicide of the West, that Western culture is in the midst of an extended self-immolation. Certainly, the ground-swell of resistance to mass migration explains President Trump’s rise as much, if not more, than any other factor. Ten years ago, in that fateful GOP primary loaded with more than a dozen “serious” candidates, Trump was the only one to realize the fervor of the resistance against immigration boiling up from the American demos. 

And now, a decade later, with Covid and the Biden presidency intervening just to extend the fun, we’re still living through the same dilemmas, except now the immigration issue is more prevalent in Europe, and it all could come to a head with Trump’s ill-fated decision to launch a war in Iran. 

Every US president since Jimmy Carter would have liked to launch a regime-change war against the mullahs. Yet when looking at the practicalities, they decided the chances of prevailing without astronomical financial costs, not to mention loss of life, were simply not viable. The result was funding Saddam Hussein, the Iran-Iraq War, then two separate military campaigns to remove Hussein from power and of course a two-decade-long occupation of that intractable nation on Iran’s eastern border. Nearly $7 trillion later, here we are: the Middle East less stable than ever, and Iran able to hold the global economy hostage by choking off free passage through the Strait of Hormuz.

Insert a chief executive without a sophisticated understanding of either international politics or the tenuous nature of the postwar order, and now we’re six months into a kiss-and-kick battle where even conservative outlets are questioning the sanity of Trump’s decision-making. A rational mind would accept that there are truly only two options left at this point. Either admit defeat and leave with our tails between our legs — just like we did in Saigon in 1975 and Afghanistan in 2021, and are now quietly starting with our bases in Iraq — or else “fully committing” as Sean Hannity, Mark Levin and a coterie of others on the Right keep suggesting. That latter approach would likely mean an all-out bombing campaign against Iranian electrical grids and water treatment plants, perhaps even with lower-threshold “tactical” nuclear weapons.

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America: land of the cheats

By B. Duncan Moench

The fact that Trump hasn’t yet pulled the metaphorical trigger, and indeed seems reluctant to do so, is chock-full of irony. After all, the kind of no-holds-barred military approach Trump continues to threaten is precisely the one used by the Allies against both Hitler’s Germany and Imperial Japan. And while there are plenty of reasons to have qualms about the bombing of civilian targets in Germany and Japan, it’s also hard not to conclude that the ruthlessness of that effort motivated their unconditional surrender, paving the way for the very postwar order now threatened by Trump’s quixotic refusal to go all-in. 

All the while, the President’s own Penelopean method of dealing with Iran — weaving by day, unraveling by night — proves that the United States, and the broader Western world whose helm it still commands, no longer has the stomach to defend its own interests to the actual death. Perhaps it’s simply that in an age where internet-connected video cameras sit in the palms of even the poor and destitute, no Western leader, not even Trump, can green-light the killing of tens of thousands of civilians overnight. 

Benjamin Netanyahu, of course, is not so squeamish. And his willingness to be despised — by West and East alike — exposes a fault line the postwar order was built to conceal. The Holocaust may be the origin point of contemporary Western liberalism, but the modern State of Israel has never mistaken itself for a member in full standing, bound by the same pieties and constraints. In the West, as the notorious GOP operative Lee Atwater understood, “perception is reality” — yet Israel, almost alone among nations, has decided it can live without the West’s good opinion. That indifference is the tell. Even if the Israelis are ultimately correct in their assessment of what needs to be done, their indifference to perception will have consequences. 

The “Judeo-Christian tradition,” it turns out, was always a hyphen doing the work of a treaty — another tenuous invention of the post-1945 settlement. It is now failing like the rest of this dying edifice. From the Israeli perspective, the country is trapped in an existential battle for survival. October 7 proved their enemies will stop at nothing — not even if the result is their own annihilation — to undermine the Israeli “settler colonialists.” In many ways, Hamas’s atrocity was the moral grand finale of the suicide bomber. It proved there are no boundaries of barbarity the Islamists will not cross, while Israel itself clearly cannot constrain itself by the niceties of the Geneva Convention and the make-believe agreements of international law. 

It’s hard, here, to argue that Israeli resolve is wrong-headed. Notice, though, that none of our inherited categories can hold during this war. All through the postwar period, it was easy for America to cast its enemies, whether Fidel Castro or Ho Chi Minh or Saddam Hussein, as the “next Hitler,” or anyway, something close. But whatever its many cruelties, Hamas is certainly not a threat on that scale, and neither is its ally Iran. With the absence of viable communist and fascist movements, the great tension of world politics, as Benjamin Barber so aptly put it 30 years ago, has become “Jihad vs. McWorld.” Two monoliths of cultural excess, both lacking self-reflection, much less true spiritual or intellectual growth: one neoliberal, the other neofeudal.

It’s a cliche to say that Islam never had something like the Protestant Reformation — and, as Reformation historians like to point out, the cliche gets it backwards. Modern Islamism arguably is Islam’s Reformation, what with its scriptural literalism, its iconoclastic fury, its millenarian certainty. But what Islam has arguably never had is what came after: the cultural exhaustion that provided the space for a genuine liberalism to come about. Perhaps, it will eventually get there. Perhaps it won’t. One thing, though, is certain — neither the United States’ military, nor Israel’s, can force any realization upon it. 

Yet if the settlement can’t be imposed abroad at gunpoint, it will not come from naively believing that all who seek residence in the West come with a willingness to respect its core tenets of tolerance and individual responsibility.

The broader illiberal treatment of women by some non-Western immigrants to Europe is a ticking time bomb. While many of the abusers were only Muslim in culture — they are far from practicing — that only intensifies the point of conflict. As people from Islamic countries dissipate across the globe, tensions are likely to continue rising, especially as Western populations continue to reject mass immigration at every electoral opportunity. Western leaders, of course, are more eager to prove their cosmopolitan bona fides and dedication to postwar liberal principles. 

Eventually, this divergence between what most of the population wants and what leaders prefer will bring down governments across Britain and the Continent, whatever liberal stalwarts like Andy Burnham might do in the short term. Meanwhile, as evidenced by Abdul El-Sayed’s triumph in Michigan’s Senate primary last week — overcoming the party establishment and a record $65 million in outside money — the Democratic Party is living through a takeover by an internal youth faction for whom the entire idea of border integrity is suspect. El-Sayed has previously favored not only abolishing ICE but making Michigan a “sanctuary” state for illegal and undocumented immigrants. 

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Did MAGA create the Ceuta crisis?

By Juan David Rojas

Which brings us to something that’s rarely discussed, in the US anyway, about the war in Iran: it has the direct potential to destabilize not just the Middle East, but the whole of Europe too. Whether MAGA were really involved in constructing the crisis or not, what the nearly 70,000 migrants who stormed Ceuta over recent weeks prove is that, in the blink of an eye, mass migration could destabilize nearly any European nation. Or else there’s 2015, when Angela Merkel decided it was a fantastic idea to allow 1.5 million migrants fleeing the war in Syria — some of whom were merely pretending to have been displaced — into Germany. 

Within a decade, Germany, even in its most urban and populated areas, went from a safe nation with high levels of social trust and generous social safety nets, to something rather different. Some 25 years ago, I studied in Germany on a student visa. In the land of the autobahn and Dunkelweizen beer, the concept of ungovernably dangerous areas was simply unheard of. Not anymore. Germany’s a different place now. The change might irreversible. And, depending on how the war in Iran goes, Europe’s political and social problems surrounding immigration could become even more intractable. If the Iranian regime does indeed eventually collapse, Western Europe and the UK would face an immigration crisis unlike anything since, you guessed it, the Second World War.

At the last war’s conclusion, with Hitler dead in his bunker, more than 10 million ethnic Germans were expelled from East Prussia and across Eastern Europe — many from lands which had been German-speaking for centuries. Few know anything about these expulsions, because to recognize German trauma in any way is to risk association with Nazi sympathies. In the postwar liberal era, we treat as the greatest error in all human history the belief that ethnicity and culture have anything to do with a nation’s aptitude for democratic life, which explains the great contradiction of sustaining the modern liberal order. The West built its dominance on precisely that conviction of its own superiority — then amputated that part of its thinking, with the missing limb now functioning like a phantom appendage, tormenting every political faction with an itch it cannot find a way to scratch.

The West — including very much so the Anglosphere — was not always so polite. From the American Revolution to 1945, most Anglo-American elites — Left and Right — believed the capacity for democracy was a biological trait, available only to what were once complacently called Anglo-Saxons. Supposedly, democracy was invented by ancient Germanic tribes, then carried to Britain by the 5th-century Saxons, perfected by the Glorious Revolution and then perfected again by the United States. This “germ theory” of democracy’s origins was no fringe folklore. Everyone from Jefferson to Teddy Roosevelt advanced it, and Woodrow Wilson taught it — his textbook The State tracing the origin of self-government exclusively to “Aryan” racial stock. 

The idea of democracy being limited by Saxon biology was, of course, absurd. Japan and South Korea run more functional democracies than either the US or the UK. The mythical Saxon tribes Wilson revered were in fact illiterate raiders who had never seen, much less cast, a ballot. The point here isn’t that their orthodoxy was correct. The point is that the men who built the America we know believed wholesale in what you might call “ethnopolitical” thinking right up until 1945 made voicing that perspective out of the question.

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How MAGA became the war party

By Sohrab Ahmari

In the end, though, the discoveries of the Nazi death camps made every link between peoplehood and political inclinations verboten. For the next 50 years, nearly everyone in the English-speaking humanities pretended the Anglo-supremacist paradigm never existed, or else quickly filed it away as little more than a curiosity within the catch-all term of “white supremacism.”

The taboo against ethnopolitical thinking produced a strange two-way traffic across the Atlantic. Western Europeans looked to America for models of flourishing multiculturalism — importing, in effect, that American civic-creedal idea that a nation is an “idea” rather than an inheritance. Meanwhile, American academics imported the Frankfurt School, German Marxist exiles who managed the neat conceptual trick of outsourcing blame for the Third Reich onto the “authoritarian personality” of intolerant commoners — this from an intellectual Left whose predecessors had written the Weimar Republic constitution, held the Reichstag during the entirety of its life until 1933, and still failed to stop Hitler. Hannah Arendt’s harder lesson, that modern evil becomes banal because bureaucracy strips agency from nearly everyone, sat poorly with progressives and Left-liberals in love with bureaucratic re-engineering, so the Frankfurt version won. Ever since, the transatlantic Left has agreed on a few core principles: the people are the problem, borders represent prejudice, and anyone can be made a good liberal citizen. 

The postwar taboo of ethnopolitical thinking produced a soft-skulled liberalism that can no longer say who belongs. Why? Because belonging is for “everyone.” It’s kind, in a way, to treat every border as a prejudice. But it’s the brand of kindness a 5-year-old offers to strangers whom they should probably not trust. This, to be clear, isn’t to embrace blood-and-soil nationalism, but rather a full-throated embrace of cultural differences and making decisions based on an accurate understanding of them. Iran was always going to fight their “Great Satan” to the death, something Trump both failed to anticipate and seems reluctant to do himself. 

The last irony of the Great Unspooling belongs to Donald Trump: the arch anti-immigrationist, who would happily restore the norms of a world before 1945, may yet be the one who finishes off the Anglo-American, postwar order. Not by tearing up its treaties or even by mocking its pieties, but by refusing to back down in Iran merely to save face, but then excusing this action as what’s necessary to “save Israel.” Thus, unleashing upon Europe precisely the migration wave that its post-Holocaust morality cannot repel and its populations are incapable of absorbing. The further irony may be that doing anything less may put Iran and thus, eventually, Hamas, in a stronger position than it occupied not only prior to the war, but prior to Oct. 7 itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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Trump can still win the Iran war

By Edward Luttwak

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

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

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

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

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

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Will the Gulfies dump Trump?

By Reuel Marc Gerecht

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But for how long can his reverie last? After all, rumors of diminishing stockpiles only confirm what a lot of folks, though perhaps not the President, have known for weeks: the US will shortly run out of crucial missiles, drastically impairing its offensive and defensive capacities. The senior brass in the Pentagon have made it clear through leaks that they want an “off-ramp” from this conflict. As for Iran, and despite the considerable damage done to its missile and drone capabilities, it seems able to keep Hormuz effectively closed and its Arab neighbors burning for however long is needed.

Little wonder, then, that an ever-more-mocking regime insists there will be no deal that doesn’t recognize its right to levy tolls on ships passing through the Strait. To highlight its belligerence yet further, it now also wants to deny passage of any US warship into the Persian Gulf. Tehran further claims it’s negotiating directly with Oman to establish new rules of navigation, cutting Washington out. That last part probably isn’t literally true. Oman has exuberantly played both sides: working with Washington, sometimes sincerely and secretly, to hurt the clerical regime, even as it helps Iran evade American sanctions. Given the way the wind is blowing, however, the Sultanate will now surely listen more attentively to what the Islamic Republic wants.

All the while, Tehran is gleefully making it impossible for the White House to withdraw from this war — barring a flat-out surrender in the Persian Gulf, which would also inevitably weaken, if not flat-out demolish, the US sanctions regime. Certainly, Iran’s leaders believe they’ve got both the military high-ground and sufficient economic resilience to outlast the American blockade.

That matters: for it’s the blockade and sanctions, not more US bombing, that worries them most. The fact is that Islamic Republic is an economic basket-case. The regime is well aware that its abysmal management of the country’s statist economy, to say nothing of rampant corruption, has sparked small protests that can quickly accelerate into big ones. Now add war damage. If Tehran actually envisions the blockade lasting, then it’s certainly in its interest to goad Trump into a more intense conflict now. This could well create the pressure needed — from missile shortages; the Gulf Arab states; and, perhaps most consequentially, from Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent, who thinks a lot about financing the US debt and bond markets — for Trump to give up. Iran closely follows American commentary on the war, and knows all about how it’s making the President, and the Republicans, less popular by the day.

If Trump wants out of this duel — if he has neither the intention of waging a battle for the Strait of Hormuz, nor the stamina for a protracted blockade of the Persian Gulf — then he will have to find a means to give Tehran its tolls. In practice, that might mean a few more bombs before letting the Gulf Arabs, the Iranians, and everyone else who lives off Gulf oil and gas to figure it out among themselves.

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Welcome to Fortress Iran

By Arta Moeini

Trump says now he’s putting his chips on the blockade, which could last until the clerical regime cracks, or until a Democratic Congress or market forces dictate otherwise. Certainly, if Bessent believes that important energy factors are enough to keep energy markets and inflation relatively stable, then Iran’s assessment of Trump’s economic patience may prove incorrect. There are reasons for American optimism here, from an increase in US natural-gas exports, which lessen the damage done elsewhere, to the fact that  upwards of eight million barrels of oil are still coming through the Strait each day.

Not that America’s Middle Eastern destiny is really its own to decide. It’s increasingly clear that the Gulfies, despite Saudi Arabia’s new defense pact with Pakistan and Turkey, and for all the chatter about a revitalized Sunni Gulf Arab alliance, are prepared to pay Iran to stop the war. To Trump’s great dismay, Riyadh even prevented the use of its bases and air space when Trump last seriously tried to open the Strait in May. This highlighted what had been clear about Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman since 2019, when Trump failed to respond to an Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities: he no longer views the President as a reliable guarantor of his kingdom’s security. MBS, then, has become like the cautious Saudis of yesteryear. In 1996, after the Iranians blew up Americans at the Khobar Towers housing complex, they initially hid the intelligence from Washington for fear that even the détente-seeking Bill Clinton might bomb Iran in reprisal — and Saudi Arabia would suffer the blowback.

A protracted blockade can only work if Washington can keep Iran and its Houthi allies from launching damaging missile and drone barrages against Gulf energy infrastructure, including pipelines, and oil tankers in the Red Sea, which Saudi Arabia is using to offset the decline in shipments through Hormuz. The more the blockade squeezes the regime, the more inclined it will be to escalate into missiles and drones against the Gulf Arabs.

Much to Iran’s displeasure, however, tribute-paying Arabs might not shred American sanctions. After all, the Gulfies are unlikely to completely dump Washington. Facing Iran with no US backup is likely still scarier than facing the Islamic Republic with a humiliated, retrenching superpower behind them. Old habits die hard, and so too does the hope that America might somehow recover. Like Oman, the other Gulfies might well be discreet: paying Iran through opaque credit mechanisms and barter via trans-Gulf shipping. In this scenario, Tehran would let oil or LNG tankers pass in exchange for much-needed civilian and military supplies. A wounded sanctions-regime that significantly increases Iranian business costs might still linger on.

That still leaves the perplexing, insufficiently highlighted nuclear problem. The Israelis have emphasized their worries about Iran’s deeply buried nuclear facility beneath Pickaxe Mountain south of Tehran. Trump has mentioned the site, and threatened to bomb it. What’s in no doubt is that examining what’s happened at the mountain recently calls into question Israel-American narratives about damage to Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.

Somehow, the Iranians installed thousands of centrifuges, either assembled or in parts, after the 12-Day War last June. No one in the White House or Israel has yet publicly explained how this could have happened. Did the CIA or Mossad know that the regime was transporting thousands of centrifuges into Pickaxe? Trump has said this site was being watched around the clock. Israel, too, has its own surveillance. So if Washington and Jerusalem only learned about these activities after the fact, they have an alarming intelligence gap.

Whatever the truth, all these centrifuges must have come from somewhere, suggesting the Iranians might have thousands more hidden away. For that matter, they might also have the parts to quickly rebuild a plant for making uranium metal from uranium hexafluoride gas. To make a bomb from there, all they’d need to do is build a sphere and a trigger, something we know they had workable plans for as far back as 2003.

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Spycraft will decide Iran's fate

By Reuel Marc Gerecht

Among the many deficiencies of Barack Obama’s nuclear deal was that we had no accounting of Iran’s hidden stockpiles, which we nonetheless knew existed. A wide array of paperwork, normally given to the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, was never turned over. Critical interviews of key personnel, again normal for the IAEA, weren’t done either. Pickaxe may anyway mean that the 12-Day War didn’t actually set Iran’s nuclear program back very far. Besides, if the regime really did get thousands of centrifuges into a closely surveilled mountain undisturbed, how can Washington possibly know that it also didn’t get generators down there to power them? Certainly, closed-door hearings of Congressional intelligence oversight committees are surely urgently in order.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, Bernard Lewis, the great Anglo-American historian of the Muslim world, started speculating what the Middle East would look like if Western powers withdrew and only Israel remained as an outpost. Lewis thought the past would probably repeat itself: Iran and Turkey, the two heavyweights of the “gunpowder age” of Islamic history, would likely hold sway once again. In the early Nineties, Turkey was already rediscovering its Ottoman Muslim identity, reanimating its Middle-Eastern appetites. Iran as the Islamic Republic hadn’t yet exhausted its revolutionary potential, despite the horrors of the Iran-Iraq War and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini. As for the Arabs, Lewis thought they were unlikely to coalesce into a competitive military force, leaving them to align themselves with either Turkey or Iran, as they had once chosen the US or the Soviet Union.

Thirty-five years on, this seems like a decent prognostication. Neither Turkey nor Iran has the power to dominate the Middle East as they once did. But they can fill a vacuum. And more than Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, whose grand Islamist-cum-nationalist ambitions may not have a successor, the Islamic Republic has shown it has staying power and a lot of young men willing to kill thousands of their own people, as well as foreigners, to keep the dream of a new Islamic Middle East alive. It’s a blessing for the region that the Iranian regime’s internal resources don’t match its foreign ambitions. But Tehran may well have what it takes to humble the Arab side of the Persian Gulf. If it can do that, and gain the revenues that will flow from these tributaries, then a lot of other things will become possible, especially if the United States won’t be there to stop it.

This is Laura Loomer we’re talking about, though, not some pundit across the aisle with whom Kristof simply “disagree[s].” She’s the 33-year-old self-styled investigative journalist who, through a combination of incendiary rhetoric and a close relationship with President Trump, successfully polices the MAGA movement. Understandably, she is — or at least, used to be —  a long-time enemy of the mainstream establishment.

Loomer has a history of rhetoric that should disqualify her from any favorable mention from Kristof. On Oct. 9, 2023, she tweeted: “The people in GAZA were given plenty of time to evacuate. Israel is going to burn it to the ground today and it will be uninhabitable, which is the way it should be. Watch today for jihadist sympathizers online who cry about ‘human rights violations’ and ‘genocide.’ Those people are terrorist enablers.… If all of the Islamic neighboring nations care about the people in Gaza so much, then they can open their borders and take them. But not even the neighboring Islamic nations want those people. That’s the elephant in the room, right? Nobody wants them because they behave like barbaric wild animals.”

Her posting habits haven’t changed much since. Last month, Loomer tweeted: “Ban Muslims from holding office in America.” Adding, “this time, make it a Muslim Ban as it was intended to be. Not an Islamic travel ban.” And last week, she suggested that she should become Secretary of Homeland Security. 

“I promise you I will actually make ICE the paramilitary force it should have always been to round up and forcefully remove jihadist invaders and Third World illegal aliens from our country. I will get the job done.” (The job’s current occupant, Markwayne Mullin, is apparently insufficiently anti-Muslim, having met with the Qataris.) DHS Secretary Loomer’s first order of business would be to send Leftist uncle-nephew commentator duo Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker “back to Turkey.” 

In the run-up to the 2024 election, Loomer warned that, should Kamala Harris become president, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Among those who rebuked her for her comment was the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, who called Loomer “toxic.” (As it happens, Loomer has reportedly mused about taking up Graham’s role as national uber-hawk in the wake of the senator’s death.) Or take how, two years earlier, she attended a white-nationalist convention and attempted to appeal to them, notwithstanding their hatred for Jews like herself: “I consider myself to be a white advocate.” 

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The uniparty media’s pro-war twins

By Nikos Mohammadi

Loomer used to be vehemently critical of Ukraine and its wartime president, Volodymyr Zelensky. But as the Trump administration has changed its position, Loomer has shifted, too — to enthusiastic endorsement of the war. And so, in the latter half of July, she went on a trip to Ukraine and later released a 45-minute, overwhelmingly softball interview with Zelensky. While she was there, a sequence of “respectable” liberals, center-Left and center-Right alike, forgot their misgivings to loudly celebrate her. 

On a CNN panel on July 23, a day before Loomer released the interview, the network’s anti-Trump but Right-tilting commentator S.E. Cupp argued: “If she’s gonna do propaganda, I’d rather it be Zelensky’s version of propaganda than Putin’s.” Cupp, praising Loomer, additionally intoned, “It’s one thing to be a keyboard warrior; it’s easy to say things from the safety of the patio at Mar-A-Lago. It’s much different when you go to a place.” 

Erin Burnett, who was moderating the panel (and who herself conducted a more-than-flattering interview with Zelensky back in 2023), then turned to former Obama adviser David Axelrod. Burnett noted that Loomer “had these opinions on Ukraine which were based on propaganda and a lack of any kind of experience there” — before rather quickly listing some of her more controversial comments. Axelrod, in response, opined on Zelensky sitting down with Loomer: “My goodness, the things one has to do to save their country.”  

Other prestigious outlets and personalities have also changed their tune on Loomer. Peter Harrell of the Carnegie Endowment said that her ideological shift and her interview with Zelensky were “a powerful reminder of the importance of being open to engaging with people you might profoundly disagree with.” The journalist Eli Lake, writing in The Free Press, hailed Laura Loomer as a “lifelong learner.” Batya Ungar-Sargon, the self-described “MAGA Lefty” who has attacked Trump World racism in the past, amicably interviewed Loomer following her return to the United States. And just this week, Neera Tanden — president of the Center for American Progress, the Clintonian think tank — retweeted Loomer.

Loomer is far from the only unhinged character feted by respectable liberals in recent months. Her coastal-cosmopolitan mirror is Masih Alinejad, another online activist and self-described journalist. Born in Iran but based in New York, Alinejad has made a career, partially bankrolled by the US government, in being an Iranian emigre who says precisely the right thing from a feminist perspective for Western hawks. 

Alinejad’s first New York Times op-ed appeared in July 2018. Bari Weiss, then an opinion editor at the paper, enthused on Twitter: “Her name should be known by anyone who describes herself as a feminist.” Alinejad returned to the paper of record in January 2026 — to make a human-rights case for war with Iran. Lamenting that Trump hadn’t yet bombed her home country, she concluded, “inaction has a body count.”

Regardless of what she’s talking about, Alinejad’s dominant mode is theatrical. We’ve seen her weep with joy on the city streets over the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We’ve also seen her in a bathing suit doing a cold plunge alongside a man to demonstrate that she couldn’t legally do the same in Iran. These are perfectly understandable reactions for a woman who has suffered under the Islamist tyranny of the mullahs. The problem is that her dramatic mode of expression is used to legitimize a massively unpopular war, which has plunged Washington into yet another Middle East quagmire. 

When New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani condemned the US-Israeli strikes on Iran in February, she took to Weiss’s CBS News to sarcastically offer him a spot in one of her “safe houses” — she claims to have been targeted by the Iranian regime, and to be under constant threat of assassination. Recently, she threw a fit about her Citi Bike not working, because Mamdani would rather arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than see to basic services functioning. Never mind that the Citi Bike program is privately operated by Lyft and therefore doesn’t fall under the mayor’s purview. And she’s unabashed by her errors: she went on Persian-language media in the aftermath of the US attack on the Minab girls’ school that claimed 175 lives, to recant her support for the war. “It’s obvious I’ll sometimes be wrong,” she said in Persian. 

Despite such incoherencies, Alinejad gets invited to places like the Aspen Ideas Festival, where she broke into song (poorly), supposedly to test whether any men in the crowd would get “aroused.” Women in the Islamic Republic are not officially allowed to sing solo in public. This was intended to be a demonstration of the evil of the Iranian regime, which is understandable, but all Iranian men seemed to fall into the dragnet of her condemnation. “Men are the problem,” she said and pointed to her co-panelist, the Iranian-born Leftist essayist Arash Azizi (an UnHerd contributor). Azizi had suggested that Iran should not be kicked out of FIFA over the country’s restrictions on female spectators at sporting events. “These are the men in my country. My women go to stadium; they get killed,” Alinejad said. 

Both of these activists, Loomer and Alinejad, are often ridiculous in their self-presentation and sketchy on their facts, so why do respectable news organizations champion them, and what does it say about American liberal institutions’ claims to “respectability”?

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How MAGA became the war party

By Sohrab Ahmari

The mainstream is being especially kind to Loomer right now. The AP, which is supposed to be a neutral news wire, spoke to Loomer in a Kiev bomb shelter, a story that made its front page on July 26. “Although Loomer may have changed her mind about Russia’s invasion, her bigoted views have not budged,” was the most critical note in the AP’s report — referring to how, when Loomer initially arrived in Kiev, she posted, “One thing I really love about Ukraine is I haven’t seen a single Muslim here.” 

The AP should have also acknowledged that Loomer’s defense of Ukraine is at least partially on racial grounds: she believes in a “based” Aryan Ukraine in opposition to an Asiatic, Eastern Russia. Loomer’s original tweet about there not being “a single Muslim” in Ukraine made oppositional reference to an old Putin remark from 2015, that “Islam plays [an] important role in Russia.” But the AP left that out, only focusing on the comfortable pro-war-with-Russia crossover.

Ukraine does have a native, Muslim minority in its Tatars, and the drone factory Loomer visited there, pledging to “kill Russians” in honor of Sen. Graham, is owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Rinat Akhmetov. Akhmetov, in case his last name doesn’t give it away, is a Muslim. Loomer appeared to be unaware of the connection. 

One possibility is that the people who work for news organizations, all products of America’s liberal class, are either subconsciously or knowingly reinforcing Washington’s overarching view of the world. Loomer is now saying what we like, so let’s boost her. Take, once more, CNN. This was the network that, during Trump 1.0, ran ads about how “this is an apple,” no matter how many people “scream ‘banana, banana, banana’ over and over and over again.” The implication being that MAGA — those low-class news-questioners — wanted you to believe the apple was a banana. 

Nine years on, “banana screamers” who advance US geopolitical aims appear to be better than those who don’t.

The “centrist respectability” was always a lie. Because their interests now align, Loomer, like Alinejad before her, gains the endorsement, however uneasily or cheekily, of the US liberal establishment. It would be difficult to provide a better example of unquestioning adherence to dogma. Geopolitics trumps all.

This new state, forged in the crucible of conflict with two nuclear powers, pursues a militarized sovereignty that renders it simultaneously insular and strategically aggressive. Paradoxically, however, this emerging Iran presents President Trump with a workable chance to exit the Middle East to focus on rebalancing the US-China relationship, promoting domestic industrial renewal, and securing the Western Hemisphere — priorities laid out in Trump’s 2025 National Security Strategy.

Khamenei’s most notable move is the elevation of Mohsen Rezaei as secretary of the country’s Supreme National Security Council, which coordinates decision-making across the state’s various security and military agencies. Rezaei is a close adviser to Khamenei, and is the longest- serving commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, having overseen Iran’s war with Iraq in the 1980s. The council was most recently headed by Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr after an Israeli air strike killed its high-profile secretary Ali Larijani in March. 

While Zolghadr has taken on a new role as Khamenei’s political adviser, his removal is a blow to the pragmatic-conservative bloc that has coalesced around the speaker of the Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, since Larijani’s assassination. Qalibaf, of course, has been Vice President JD Vance’s chief interlocutor in the stalled effort to bring the war to a negotiated settlement. Zolghadr’s replacement by the hard-line Rezaei is a telling indicator of the new supreme leader’s views on how the US-Iran talks were handled.

The previous arrangement — which empowered Qalibaf and Zolghadr — had effectively sidelined Khamenei from direct oversight over Iran’s deep state: his passive role repeatedly became a source of controversy in the negotiations. Khamenei’s hiding (due to fear of assassination) didn’t help the situation. In appointing Rezaei to lead the security council, Khamenei is now seeking to regain control and diminish what he likely sees as Qalibaf’s excessive influence in the system.

The Rezaei appointment is coupled with a run of high-level appointments in the Iranian military. These include Maj. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi as commander in chief of the IRGC and Maj. Gen. Ali Abdollahi as chief of staff of the armed forces. Both men are IRGC commanders who played leading roles in the Iran-Iraq War. 

Not all of the appointments are anti-Qalibaf. Having led Iran’s primary operational command in the current war, Abdollahi is a close ally of Qalibaf’s, having served as his deputy in multiple positions. Vahidi, meanwhile, is Rezaei’s protégé going back to the ’80s. Seen in tandem, the appointments represent a careful balancing act aimed at preempting potential internal power struggles and stamping the new supreme leader’s authority on the security state as a whole. 

At the same time, the appointments underscore Khamenei Jr.’s tightening grip on power and Tehran’s hardening — if audacious — strategic trajectory.

At first glance, the appointment of “security-first” veterans ensures that while the state’s military and logistics are run with efficiency, its overarching direction remains uncompromising. The Islamic Republic’s leadership views the conflict with Washington through an existential lens. This perspective turns the state’s red lines into rigid, non-negotiable realities for the nation as such. After all, when survival is at stake, any regime’s internal fractures yield to a unified front, as dictated by necessity and shared strategic priorities.

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The dangerous martyrdom of Khamenei

By Arta Moeini

Yet, this defensive consolidation and rallying around the flag in the face of war doesn’t mean that internal politics have gone away. Nor does it imply that long-term institutional and ideological rivalries have ceased. Rather, beneath the surface of wartime unity, Iran’s deep state remains locked in a fierce, quiet civil war between two competing factions — not over the Islamic Republic’s desired end state, but over how to get there. The resolution of this internal struggle, combined with Mojtaba Khamenei’s evolving leadership strategy, could also determine the fate of the Middle East.

The internal schism splits Iran’s security establishment between those who advocate for a technocratic Islamic Republic with normal ties with the rest of the world; and those who believe the only way to safeguard Iran’s sovereignty and national security is by turning the country into an autarkic fortress capable of fierce power projection in its near abroad.

The first faction is composed of technocratic-military elites and conservative clerics. Qalibaf is their most visible representative. But there are many others, including the cleric Ali Asghar Hejazi, the network’s main powerbroker, who served as an intelligence consigliere to Khamenei Sr., and who remains the deputy chief of staff at the Office of the Supreme Leader. This camp views the state through the lens of (Islamic) legitimacy and bureaucratic rationality. Having witnessed the devastating economic and physical toll of protracted conflict, its members advocate a “smart authoritarianism” — a model akin to Putinist Russia or post-Mao China. For them, Iran’s military and nuclear leverage aren’t holy relics, but strategic bargaining chips to be traded for sanctions relief, economic stabilization, and regime survival.

Opposing them is the regime’s old-guard intelligence and military network, spearheaded by Rezaei, Vahidi, and former IRGC chief Yahya Rahim-Safavi. The faction’s most critical internal enforcer is the ruthless shadow operator Hossein Taeb, Mojtaba Khamenei’s confidant and the former chief of the IRGC Intelligence Organization, now appointed to head the Basij paramilitia that operates as an auxiliary branch of the IRGC. This faction is unyielding about defending what it regards as the true principles of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and subscribes to a doctrine of permanent mobilization and attritional warfare. Members view any diplomatic overture or concession on the nuclear dossier not as statesmanship, but as an existential trap designed by Washington to trigger systemic collapse. To them, the Strait of Hormuz and the country’s uranium stockpiles are vital instruments of deterrence, never to be bargained away.

When Mojtaba Khamenei assumed power following the death of his father, many anticipated an immediate purge of the establishment. Instead, Khamenei bided his time in the shadows and honored his father’s appointees, exercising a remarkable degree of strategic patience. Most notably, he chose to retain Ali Asghar Hejazi at the apex of the security apparatus, despite reports that Hejazi had actively sidelined Mojtaba in the final years of the elder Khamenei’s life and had lobbied against a hereditary succession.

This decision was not born out of affection, but systemic necessity. The new leader understood that in a period of intense external threat and internal transition, sacrificing his own personal agency and desire for vengeance was the price of preserving state stability. He needed Hejazi’s institutional memory and control over the vast web of state bureaucracy to prevent systemic paralysis during an existential war. 

The upshot is that, despite the monumental shift in leadership brought about by the US-Israeli assassination of Mojtaba Khamenei’s father, up until now, little has changed in Tehran since the war politically or structurally. The regime’s characteristic dual-track approach remains intact: Tehran brandishes its sword (Vahidi and the IRGC drone and missile attacks), even as it shows a diplomatic face to the world in the form of Qalibaf’s Cheshire Cat grin.

But the continuity wasn’t destined to last. As Mojtaba Khamenei consolidates his power, he is systematically building a parallel architecture to dictate his own distinct authority and vision — one that marks a sharp departure from his father’s era and its strategic ambiguity. The reshuffling of the SNSC to install Rezaei is a signal to the technocrats: the regime has entered a state of permanent warfare.

Put another way: the Western fantasy of a sudden internal collapse has failed. External aggression has instead hardened the state, expanding its domestic control and revitalizing its elite cohesion — a case study in the remarkable resilience of regimes that fully embrace the structures of the modern total state. Unlike the ideological rigidity of civilian hard-liners like Saeed Jalili, Mojtaba Khamenei’s rising faction is deeply pragmatic and militaristic about state survival. Yet, this is a pragmatism entirely divorced from Western integration or liberal norms, using autarky not as a temporary shield, but a structural choice (as long advocated by Rezaei himself).

Where Qalibaf’s technocrats seek survival through a win-win diplomatic deal or a grand bargain with Washington, Mojtaba Khamenei’s camp — bolstered by Rezaei’s uncompromising stance on Iran’s absolute sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz — seeks to translate raw military defiance and the ethos of resistance into permanent strategic gains. The latter group views Iran’s nuclear and military capabilities as critical levers to achieve the maximum deterrence needed to avoid the historical fates of disarmed states like Libya.

With the security-first crowd at the helm, the future of Iran is, in short, an autarkic, anti-American fortress that refuses to surrender its security assets or exchange its sovereignty for Western promises or economic incentives. 

The autarkists are convinced that Donald Trump is constitutionally erratic, aggressive, and untrustworthy; and that the only language his administration understands is that of strength. Consequently, they believe that the only way to free Iran from the looming shadow of war is if Washington comes to recognize and accept its defeat and is publicly humiliated — underscoring the futility of future military action. It’s a risky strategy, to be sure, but one they feel is the only solution to re-establish Iranian deterrence given Trump’s particular psychology.

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How the ‘American Way of War’ failed in Iran

By Michael Lind

Paradoxically, this intensely inward-looking and sovereigntist Iran presents Trump with a realistic opening to fundamentally redraw the Middle Eastern landscape. A true realist foreign policy framework must reject the failed dogmas of regime change and endless “forever wars.” Instead, it must embrace a ruthless pragmatism centered on America’s core national interest alone: avoiding protracted entanglements in a region that is of secondary importance (at best). Realism doesn’t require trust; it requires predictable, self-interested state actors; and an insular, survival-focused Iran is far more predictable than a desperate, collapsing state driving a regional civil war.

By abandoning its penchant for primacy and military intervention in the Middle East, Washington can shrewdly leverage Iran’s consolidated, predictable power structure to enable the region’s (long-disrupted) natural balance of power to return. The emerging regional alignment — reinforced by the landmark Mecca defense pact that Egypt and Iran can eventually join — has already underscored the rise of the ME5 (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and Iran) in a post-American Middle East. 

These five sovereign regional heavyweights are increasingly demonstrating a desire to manage their own neighborhood, explicitly rejecting being dragged into an unwanted regional war or serving as platforms for unilateral American military adventures, as seen in the Persian Gulf states’ recent resistance to assisting US naval blockades. In fact, a major motivating factor behind Riyadh’s and Tehran’s détente since 2023 remains their shared, pragmatic exhaustion with being used as proxies in strategic rivalries of external great powers. This is why the Saudi-Iranian reset has survived nearly six months of regional war — even military strikes on Saudi ports in the Red Sea by the Iran-aligned Houthis in Yemen.

But such a strategic reset can’t be brought about unless Trump alters his perception of Iran. He must give up the pipe dream of liberalizing the Islamic Republic, and end America’s decades-long pursuit of a “grand bargain” aimed at transforming Iran’s domestic society. Instead, Trump must heed his own vice president’s counsel, abandon containment strategies that prioritize the interests of foreign states like Israel and the United Arab Emirates over the American people, and swap Cold War-era Manichean mentalities for a transactional recognition of a bounded Iranian sphere of interest in a polycentric world. 

Unlike Nixon’s opening to China, shifting Iran policy wouldn’t hinge on a formal deal or bilateral treaty between Washington and Tehran. By merely accepting Iran as an enduring regional power that will neither relinquish its sovereignty nor tolerate foreign meddling, Trump has a unique Nixonian opportunity to withdraw from the Middle East and offload regional security onto the ME5 themselves. 

This nascent regional equilibrium, sustained by a balance of indigenous powers, rather than an expensive and deeply resented American military umbrella, would finally provide Washington with the strategic off-ramp it has sought for a generation — freeing the United States to retrench, preserve its great-power status, and focus on its most vital priorities at home and abroad.

“Kamala [Harris] leaning all in on starting many new bloody wars in the Middle East,” wrote Stephen Miller on X, adding in a different post: “Kamala’s closing pitch: INVADE THE MIDDLE EAST!” And again: “Trump will end and prevent war in the Middle East.” Laura Loomer — the 9/11 truther and Mar-a-Lago regular — warned that a Harris presidency would not only saturate the White House with the scent of curry, but risk triggering “WORLD WAR III.”

Yet MAGA today is arguably the most hawkish faction on the American scene. Its ideologues — not least Stephen Miller and Laura Loomer — braid a run of unrelated conflicts, foreign and domestic, into a single struggle against what the administration calls “Third Worldism”: a nebulous enemy category encompassing Iran and the Eurasian great powers, Latin American Leftists and drug-traffickers, Somali migrants, and the Zohran Mamdani wing of the Democratic Party.

The bitter truth, especially for those of us who once saw promise in conservative populism, is that the movement was always structurally vulnerable to this turn.

Eighteen months in office, the second Trump administration has waged a full-on war with Iran, while largely abandoning the diplomatic track on Ukraine. Team Trump, moreover, has racked up various “smaller” interventions: regime change in Venezuela (and, perhaps soon, Cuba); bombings in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Ecuador; and a lawless campaign of strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific that has killed more than 200. 

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The triumph of Lindsey Graham

By Sohrab Ahmari

How did we get here?

Part of it has to do with the nature of the Republican Party and its mighty donor class. The “restraint” faction — conservatives who advocate a lighter footprint abroad, or who insist that Washington conserve scarce resources for the rivalry with China — locked down many national-security jobs in the new administration. But assistant secretaries of this-and-that don’t write checks, and they can’t get the commander in chief on the phone the way, say, Miriam Adelson, the casino heiress and pro-Israel mega-donor, can.

Then there is GOP coalitional politics. The South has been a party stronghold since the 1960s at the presidential level and, since the ’90s, down the ballot. As blue states and cities have declined, the region has drawn people, capital, dynamism, and, with them, political power. As the writer Michael Lind has noted, the South is also home to a more martial culture than much of the country (the late Sen. Lindsey Graham was no aberration).

Florida, especially, exerts an immense gravitational pull. It is no accident that Loomer — who has recently emerged as a champion of Ukraine after years of disparaging the country and its cause — is Florida-based. So are a host of other hawkish voices: The Babylon Bee, the satirical-ish evangelical magazine; the podcaster Dave Rubin; and many smaller stars in the pro-war constellation. And that’s not to mention Florida’s Cuban-exile population, whose omni-hawkish worldview the GOP must serve to win in the Sunshine State. For many of these figures, the “war” is one long front stretching from the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, and from thence to the Caribbean. 

But the deepest factor is ideological. Populism, almost by definition, needs an enemy — a “hegemonic formation,” as the Left theorist Chantal Mouffe puts it, against which to organize mass political energy. During his first presidential bid, Trump aimed his followers’ oppositional energy mostly against the bipartisan elites who had plunged America into pointless forever wars in the Middle East, while abandoning the working class to the vagaries of corporate globalization.

All along, though, there was another side to Trump and MAGA — the one whose critique of porous borders, a perfectly legitimate populist issue, veered into talk of immigrants as “rapists.” Beginning in the first term, as Trumpism was translated into governance, the economic populism mostly fell by the wayside. His sole legislative achievement back then was a tax cut for corporations and the wealthiest Americans. This partly owed to Trump’s own plutocratic instincts, and partly to the familiar personnel and sheer inertia of the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, the Right’s best-organized institutions set about healing these ruptures — refitting populism to the old agenda of oligarchic economics and pro-Israel hawkery. The National Conservatism conferences, Project 2025, and the like: in retrospect, all served this purpose.

An example is MAGA’s treatment of Big Tech. The populist problem with Big Tech had once been its overweening market power and lack of accountability; but slowly that objection morphed into decrying the use to which the firms put that domination: namely, promoting “wokeness.” Once Elon Musk owned Twitter, renamed X, the lopsided power he exercised over the platform ceased to be a problem at all. And where the MAGA Right had once faulted the “pro-war uniparty” of the Bushes and the Clintons for diving head-first into Mideast quagmires, the rhetoric shifted beginning in the second Trump administration: the sin now isn’t the breaking of nations, but bothering to rebuild afterward or pretending to care about democracy in Muslim lands.

I encountered a version of the latter firsthand, while profiling Pete Hegseth, the then-newly confirmed secretary of defense, aboard his plane on a visit to migrant-processing operations at Gitmo. He and his closest aides were keen to have me know that Hegseth is a former soldier who had learned the lessons of the post-9/11 wars. At the time, I took this to mean opposition to ill-defined missions and overreach abroad. In fact, it meant no longer bothering with even the pretense to moral universalism that had guided the earlier conflicts. Now we just blow stuff up — this, it turns out, is the “new” in the “New Right.”

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If this newly reconstituted Right isn’t in the business of doing real populism — if it indeed enjoys the backing of the likes of Jeff Bezos and Musk — then against whom can it organize its energies? Already, in the early 2020s, one could see the pseudo-populist elements of the Right road-testing “woke communism”: a category that framed the assistant professor scraping by on $30,000 a year as a subversive “elite” (while Musk came across as a subaltern hero).

More recently, the Right has settled on “Third Worldism” — a term that appears no fewer than 40 times in a new State Department document on “Cuba: The Capital of 21st-Century Communism,” which elevates the puny and faltering Havana regime into a powerful enemy state that could endanger the American way of life at any minute.

The Third Worldist menace is vaguely brown, vaguely communistic, and much easier to “do” something about than confronting the internal contradictions that wrack working- and lower-middle-class America. To deal with Third Worldism abroad, you don’t have to marshal bills through Congress and strike careful compromises with Democrats. You can just fire off missiles — foreign and defense policy being the area in which the president and the executive branch enjoy a near-unchecked latitude, at least as the Constitution has been interpreted for the better part of a century. 

And it can justify a lot: brutalizing migrants almost as enemy combatants, calls to denaturalize the likes of Mamdani and Rep. Ilhan Omar, a grinding, aimless new war in the Persian Gulf — all while covering over the failure to shift the immigration system to a skills-based one, say, or to renew the industrial base.

There is only one problem. Taken to its logical terminus, this ideological agenda will bring the United States much closer to a total conflict — World War III, if we must use Trumpy language — than anything contemplated by even old-school hawkish strategists like Robert Kagan, William Kristol, and Max Boot. Let alone that warmonger of Miller’s and Loomer’s 2024-era nightmares — Kamala Harris.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yet responsible progressives and populists seeking a more restrained foreign policy would do well to study the sources of his success: how he was able to advance his expansive foreign-policy vision through the great vicissitudes of the past three decades, even as his own party’s base turned against foreign interventionism. A more restrained foreign policy won’t succeed unless the restrainers master Graham’s arts.

Graham — a son of the working class, who raised his teenaged sister after their parents died young — had an overabundance of what the ancient Greeks called phronesis: the practical wisdom essential to effective political activity. Politics is an art of prudence, of making practical judgments, adding allies, and compromising wherever possible — while putting up a fight when absolutely necessary. Principle and ideas matter, but the practicing politician can’t, and shouldn’t, hold himself to the same standards as the philosopher or even the journalist.

Graham understood this. Maybe he understood it a little too well, but in the final analysis, he got closer to the truth of politics than did most of his enemies.

Nowhere was this more apparent than his response to the rise of Donald Trump and Trumpism. Like many others in the Republican establishment, Graham initially balked at the former New York developer and reality-TV barker’s bid to take over the party of Lincoln. “If we nominate Trump,” he warned on social media during the 2016 GOP primary, “we will get destroyed … and we will deserve it.”

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Once Trump became inevitable, Graham made his peace. And thereafter, he remained doggedly loyal, championing most of the president’s domestic issues and rising to his personal defense in the face of the underhanded lawfare that bedeviled Trump for the better part of a decade. Graham came around forcefully in recognizing the Russiagate hoax for what it was and resisted the first impeachment attempt over Trump’s “perfect” Ukraine phone call (remember that?). The South Carolinian also understood Trump’s almost-compulsive need to vent — to have somebody around to shoot the shit with. And he made himself constantly available, over the phone and on the golf course.

Graham’s loyalty and personal warmth paid dividends and gathered compound interest, which he would then cash out when it came time to promote his pet causes. He could disagree with Trump — over his Syria withdrawal, the Afghan drawdown, and the Ukraine war — without blowing up the relationship. And during the second term, his proximity allowed him to push for the hawks’ holy grail: a full-on war with Iran.

To note all this isn’t to endorse the substance of any of these policies. But Graham’s record tends to vindicate those inside the Trump administration — many of them opposed to the late senator’s agenda — who wish restrainers in Congress could be a bit more strategic. The likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie dynamited their Trump ties over antiwar principle; Graham went to the afterlife having gotten his Iran war.

Beyond his masterful management of Trump, Graham was also a consummate legislator of the old-school, Tip O’Neill variety: clubby, compromising, and surprisingly willing to break with the Right when a measure served the national interest (by his lights). For example, he backed the Biden administration’s CHIPS and Science Act, aimed at bolstering the domestic semiconductor industry, as well as the 2022 bipartisan gun-safety bill. Such across-the-aisle efforts didn’t endear him to the small-government faithful, and he earned his 59% lifetime score from the keepers of Republican orthodoxy at Heritage Action. But bipartisanship built up political capital on the Hill that he could expend elsewhere.

Like the best of modern lawmakers, moreover, Graham was a master at directing oodles of federal development cash to his home state. Visit his X account, and you’ll see most of his feed devoted to showcasing the bacon he brought home as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee: a Coast Guard base in Charleston, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration facility (also in Charleston), a federal grant to replace 18 bridges across the Palmetto State, and on and on. It’s true that Graham was a beneficiary of Israel Lobby and defense-industry largess. But he likely wouldn’t get re-elected if it weren’t for his relentless developmentalism (or pork-barrel politics, if you must).

Even as he relished congressional wheeling-and-dealing, Graham could be ferocious in a fight. For my money, his single best moment as a lawmaker came during the 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. As the holes in rape accuser Christine Blasey Ford’s account were widening in public view, Graham publicly excoriated the Democrats who’d used her in a quest to destroy Kavanaugh.

“What you wanna do is destroy this guy’s life, hold his seat open, and hope you win in 2020,” Graham said, his body and voice shaking. “You’ve said that, not me.… I would never do to [Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor] what you’ve done to this guy. This is the most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.” The oration is well worth watching in full. To me, it was the decisive pivot that made Kavanaugh’s eventual confirmation possible.

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Finally, and perhaps most crucially, Graham stood for a comprehensive account of why American power is good, and what its exercise on the world stage is meant for. His worldview was, as one writer for Responsible Statecraft has noted, essentially that of an old Cold Warrior: unbending support of proxies and allies against larger nation-state adversaries, the passionate if hypocritical and uneven promotion of democracy abroad.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, that worldview lost its coherence and salience. The sheer hyperactivity to which it gave rise over the past quarter-century drove Washington into more than one quagmire, dissipating American power and corroding its domestic foundations. Graham-ism has now reached its apotheosis in Trump’s Persian Gulf War III, which has forced the president to choose between prolonged economic pain or an embarrassing quick exit.

Yet the lesson for the restraint camp — my camp, as it should be clear — is that we need some larger moral vision or story, a plausible substitute for Graham-ism. “Get out of everywhere all at once” is no more credible or responsible than his “Fight everyone, everywhere, all at once.” I’m not sure we have such a substitute on hand. Likewise, if Graham overestimated the reserves of American power, I sometimes worry that the restraint camp underestimates them. The passing from the stage of the likes of Graham and Sen. Mitch McConnell provides an opening for developing such ideas and translating them into political action.

Graham’s Senate career offers a template for the sort of practical wisdom the task requires. He was as wise as a serpent, if too far from the innocence of a dove.

His cheerfulness owes to what he sees as a concrete win in the Swiss negotiations. “One of the things we wanted to come out with,” he tells me, was a “channel on the Iranian side” for reducing conflict. “Which we did. They were like, ‘OK, fine, we’ll send somebody from the IRGC to go hang out in Doha with somebody from CENTCOM,’ and that’s how we’re going to settle a lot of these disputes.”

Such a channel, if it works, could also serve as Vance’s electoral lifeline. Politically, Trump’s Iran war has presented the vice president with the biggest conundrum of his career. He is seen, rightly, as the team captain of the “restrainer” faction within the Trump administration — reluctant to intervene abroad and seeking a rebalancing of US power towards the homeland. Suddenly, he had to defend an outright hot war with Iran.

By disposition, the vice president has to constantly tell a cohesive story about why he’s taking a given position at a given moment: a story that somehow re-integrates everything else he’s professed up to that point. Thus, for example, unlike most Republican office-holders and -seekers, who simply made peace with Trumpism once it became inevitable, Vance had to retell his own story in a way that rendered his conversion intellectually coherent.

That conversion meant championing a more humble foreign policy, a reluctance to enter conflicts in secondary regions if it meant distracting from domestic renewal. How would he integrate this war into that story? Diplomacy, in a word. Vance resolved to own the talks that commenced soon after the first bombs dropped. Last weekend, that effort took him to a luxury resort tucked into the verdant slopes on the shores of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland, where he and his Iranian counterparts met for talks mediated by Pakistan and Qatar.

Agreement in principle around a new security channel between the US and Iranian militaries was perhaps the biggest breakthrough of the Lake Lucerne peace summit. Such a mechanism may sound technical, but its existence could remake the face of the Middle East. The fact that it’s on the table is also a testament to what seemed unthinkable a few weeks ago: a comeback for Vance and the restrainers.

It all turns on a galaxy-sized if, of course. As Vance himself tells me, whether Iran’s “rhetorical flexibility is going to be met with action, that’s the big question hanging over all of this”. And that’s not to mention the Israelis and their media and political allies in the United States, who are working double-time to scupper the emerging arrangement — and framing Vance as a tool of the Islamic Republic for pursuing it.

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The summit itself was revealing mainly for the conversation on the edges. Members of the media and diplomats from the four countries — Iran, Pakistan, Qatar, and the United States — spent hours milling about the resort’s lobby, where immense windows framed a view of the lake glinting far below. I’d been granted a US-flag credential, but I also speak Persian, permitting me to steal snatches of Iranian officials’ chatter. Mostly, they were concerned with lunch options, the Iran-Belgium World Cup match coming up that night, and other such banalities.

However, I did overhear one Iranian diplomat say, “The whole world is tired of this — inshallah, we’ll get something done here.” That hinted at a genuine hunger for a deal that the mullahs’ cold public statements rarely betray. A state-TV reporter, meanwhile, said, “The resistance-front media” — outlets associated with the Lebanese Hezbollah — “are watching us closely.” Don’t you dare sell out the Party of God, in other words. That, too, was interesting: a reminder that Tehran, like Washington, is sometimes the one being wagged by its clients, rather than the other way around.

The Iranian side’s discomfiture was a constant factor. Are we really doing this, wheeling and dealing with the Great Satan, assassins of the martyred imam? It was a sign that something quietly momentous was unfolding in the Alps: the quasi-normalization of relations between the United States and the Islamic Republic — a process paradoxically made possible only after a full-on kinetic confrontation.

This was evident, above all, in the human interactions and small courtesies that resulted from delegates being stuck together for the better part of 48 hours: a joke about a malfunctioning elevator; the shared struggle to keep a manic press corps at bay. At times, the possibility of quasi-normalization became too much to bear for the Iranians, leading to protocol snafus.

At noon on Sunday, the media were ushered into a ballroom for the opening of a quadrilateral meeting, featuring the top leaders from all four states. A handshake between Vance and Iran’s top negotiators, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, was expected.

Vance, Pakistani premier Shehbaz Sharif, and Qatar’s Sheikh Mohammed filed in. So did their respective teams, including Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s personal envoys. Hugs were exchanged (Sharif, especially, seems to have a physical love language), and everyone took their spots. Everyone, that is, except the Iranians. As the awkward minutes wore on, Vance looked nervous. Eventually, Araghchi showed up — looking even more nervous and determined to avoid Vance’s glance, let alone the vice president’s hand — before stepping out just as swiftly as he’d come in; Ghalibaf was nowhere to be seen.

Vance and the others delivered encomia to Trump, a peacemaker possessed of a “visionary and very dynamic leadership”, as Sharif put it, the oil practically seeping across the floor. Then the staffers shoved the assembled hacks out of the room. Only afterwards were we allowed to glimpse Ghalibaf as he and Araghchi speed-walked to the ballroom. The Ghalibaf-Vance greeting, whatever form it took, would remain hidden from the public’s gaze.

Back stateside, hawkish pundits were quick to frame this as an Iranian snub — a “humiliation” for Vance. Yet the four parties had already met in various formats earlier that day, including direct US-Iranian talks. Only afterward came the missing-handshake drama.

My own impression was of Iranian agitation, not hauteur: they were prepared to shake Vance’s hand on camera before the full implications suddenly hit them, not least among their domestic audience. The Iranians, after all, have their own anti-diplomacy Laura Loomers and Mark Levins, and theirs can do much worse than angry X posts and cable-news rants.

Even so, the two sides seem to have found a way to talk to each other through the occasionally strange optics. They’ve had practice. “The first time we ever sat down with them,” Vance recalls, “was in Istanbul, and it almost felt like a performance — they had to get certain things out, they had to attack us for certain things, and it was sort of difficult going. But then it got to a good place where we were able to actually have a conversation. There was a little bit of that element this time, too: ‘We didn’t ask for this, but the Iranian nation is great, et cetera, et cetera. But we’re happy to talk about peace.’”

Thus, when Trump threatened that the Iranian side wouldn’t have a country to return to if they didn’t behave themselves, Tehran’s negotiators grumbled, and rumors of a walkout circulated on Iranian media and at the hotel. But the talks, in fact, continued throughout.

A more difficult challenge for Vance is the substance of the deal being hammered out. A talking point taken up (for different purposes) by hawks and doves is that the new deal — summarized ahead of the Lucerne talks in a memorandum of understanding — is no better or even worse than President Barack Obama’s arrangement. That deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA], constrained Iranian nuclear capacity in exchange for limited sanctions relief. And, the argument runs, it didn’t require an invasion that led to the shuttering of the Strait of Hormuz and further American concessions to open it back up.

“There are many things I don’t like about the comparison to the JCPOA,” Vance counters, “but one of them is that the MOU is a much more generic document than the JCPOA.” He goes on: “It really is a foundational document: let’s open the Strait, let’s stop shooting at each other, and let’s see if we can make a nuclear deal. And from their perspective, it’s, ‘Let’s lift the blockade, let’s stop shooting at each other, and let’s see if there’s a sanctions deal.’ That’s fundamentally where it’s coming from.”

The vice president adds that the Iranians are offering “things radically different from the JCPOA”: a much more rigorous inspection regime and the “elimination” of the Islamic Republic’s existing stockpile of enriched uranium. “The flip side,” he tells me “is that they really want a fundamentally transformed relationship with the United States and the world — [and] I don’t know where we’re going to be able to land in the middle.”

A transformed US-Iran relationship and, therefore, a new Middle East — therein lie the promise and peril of the current diplomacy: for the region and for Vance’s political prospects alike.

Start with the regional prospects. The Trumpians — not just Vance, but also the likes of Kushner and Witkoff, who treat the Middle East as a real-estate problem — envision a more integrated region in which everyone talks to everyone else, even enemies. And the everyone very much includes Tehran. Enmities will no doubt persist, and violence may still erupt, but the flare-ups can be contained. Just this aspect, Vance argues, makes the deal more attractive to the Persian Gulf monarchies, which generally detested the earlier JCPOA.

The Arabs, Vance tells me, appreciate the new deal “because of the conversations they’re having with the Iranians. . .  The Emiratis — by far the most hawkish, by far the most pro-Israel country in the [Gulf Cooperation Council] — they’re having conversations with the Iranians that have never happened before, including with the IRGC, about various types of economic incentives — ‘Here’s what we’d need to see to make your country investable’ — and the Iranians come back and say, ‘Okay, yeah, we’re willing to do all those things.’ ”

Which brings us to the political upside. The vice president’s dislike of Operation Epic Fury is the worst-kept secret in Washington. But if he succeeds diplomatically — and no one is more acutely aware than he of the weight of that conditional — he can fold the Iranian subplot into a longer narrative arc in which all things work together for the good: yes, there was another war, an unpopular, ill-defined one — but behold the new Middle East that emerged from it.

Standing athwart this vision are two powerful counterforces. One is Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose dreams of a big regime-change war and “total victory” are now just that — dreams. The new memorandum, even more so than the JCPOA, accepts Iran in its current form as a permanent fixture in the region. What Bibi is fighting for now isn’t the nuclear terms or even the fate of the Gulf — it’s whether he can still move against Hezbollah in next-door Lebanon. Jerusalem wants to bifurcate the Lebanese front from the Iranian one. The memorandum ties them together, as Tehran demands.

At a brief news conference concluding the summit, I asked Vance how he would characterize progress on the Lebanon question. He described it as “very good” and touted the “deconfliction” mechanism outlined at Lucerne. Then he added something more: “Israel, and every other nation in the region, has the right of self-defense. But we want to make sure everyone has that right of self-defense in [a] background where we’re talking about how to de-escalate.”

Untrained ears could easily miss the two remarkable shifts embedded in those seemingly unremarkable lines. The first: Washington, not just Tehran, is now pushing for de-escalation across all fronts. The second: this was the first time — certainly in my nearly 20 years covering the region — that an American leader spoke of the right of self-defense of Middle Eastern nations other than Israel. It is an astonishing index of how far the Jewish state’s standing has shifted, on both sides of the aisle.

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Still, envisioning something is one thing, getting Israeli leaders to go along is quite another, as US presidents have learned to their chagrin going back decades. How will Washington operate a deconfliction mechanism developed in talks to which the Jewish state wasn’t a party?

Aboard Air Force Two, Vance could only point to the limited progress so far. “I think we’re now [at] 48 hours where the ceasefire in Lebanon has effectively held. And even five days ago, the Qataris, the Pakistanis were calling me, like, ‘Here’s this, here’s this, here’s this.’ And I look at the side-by-side of where we were four or five days ago compared to three weeks ago, and it’s like — yeah, it’s annoying, we’re going to keep working on it, but it’s a lot better than it was a few weeks ago. It’s just a continuous process.”

The other obstacle is posed by Iran’s hard-liners, with their tendency to overplay a good hand. Vance is keenly aware that this is a regime whose supporters still daily cry “Death to America”. But he’s also managed to get its more reasonable elements to do business. The ideological foundations of the Tehran regime are real enough. But so was the quasi-normalization that took place atop those Alpine heights.

Vance is cautiously optimistic. “They’re certainly talking differently than they have in the past,” he tells me. “There’s a whole host of reasons why that’s true. But whether the action will follow, whether the final deal actually meets some of what they’re promising in general terms — that’s what we have to figure out.” For now, he’s partially managed to pull the story back to his preferred plot line. More twists and turns no doubt lie around the bend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Edward Luttwak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An inconclusive failure, then.

Yet instead of asking why America’s war in Iran has been a failure, the better question is: why would anyone expect any major American war, anywhere in the world, to be a success? Far from being an isolated instance that can be blamed on Trump’s incompetence, this war is only the latest in a series of American expeditions that drag on for years, only to backfire and empower US enemies. From Korea to Iran, the story of American military policy since World War II has been one blunder after another, in which tactical achievements are followed by strategic defeat.

It is popular to blame the American president’s bad decisions or personal traits for such fiascos, but the history of major American strategic failures since 1945 can’t be explained solely or even primarily based on the performance of leaders from Truman to Trump. The underlying cause of America’s strategic tragedy — its chain of short-term tactical successes followed by strategic failures — is what experts describe as the American Way of War — a failing style that future American leaders must seek to reform. 

Like President Barack Obama before him, Trump was elected in part because he was viewed as an alternative to the hawks who brought about the “forever wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq. And just as Obama proceeded to launch new American military campaigns in Libya and Syria, so Trump in his second term has brought about the war in Iran, with immediate consequences for the global economy, caused by rising prices for oil, that are far more consequential than were the global consequences of the Korean, Vietnam, and Afghan wars in the eras in which they were fought.

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America is losing Cold War II

By michael lind

But the pattern isn’t all that different from those earlier adventures. The Korean War, which caught the United States by surprise, began with Communist North Korea’s invasion of the Western-aligned South on June 25, 1950, influenced by an American blunder: Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s exclusion of South Korea from America’s defense perimeter in Asia, in an unwise speech on Jan. 12, 1950. 

Stalin was quick to take advantage of the invasion, urging Mao’s Communist regime, which had seized power in China a year earlier, to enter the war. The result was a bloody stalemate that Stalin, the sponsor and supplier of North Korea and China, kept going in order to drain American resources. At the same time, Stalin orchestrated the parallel war of Soviet-backed Vietnamese Communists against American-backed France in Indochina. Only after Stalin died, on March 3, 1953, did his successors in Moscow negotiate the partition of Korea and Vietnam with the United States and its allies in 1954. At the cost of more than 36,000 American fatalities and more than a million Korean lives, Washington was only able to restore the former division between the two Koreas at the 38th parallel.  

The tense, armed truce in Korea has persisted to this day. In Vietnam, the North Vietnamese Communist regime and its South Vietnamese insurgent allies, backed by the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, fought to establish a united Vietnam and succeeded in 1975, after a failed Americanization of the conflict that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans dead, as well as those of some 2 million to 3 million Vietnamese, plus more in Cambodia and Laos. The great-power victor of the Vietnam War was the Soviet Union, which for the remainder of the Cold War turned Vietnam into its largest military base outside of Eastern Europe. 

The all-out invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the United States, following the earlier, limited Gulf War of 1991, similarly resulted in an “own goal” for Washington. Undertaken along with the war in Afghanistan, in the aftermath of 9/11, the US invasion caused Iraq to disintegrate along ethnic and sectarian lines into anarchy, in which al-Qaeda, ISIS, and other Islamist organizations flourished. Instead of bringing to power a pro-American democracy that would permit permanent bases on Iraqi soil, the war replaced Saddam’s secular Baathist regime with a satrapy of Shiite Iran. Last January, Iraq declared that the withdrawal of US forces from its territory was complete.

Obama, elected in part on the basis of his opposition to George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War, then led America into new military quagmires in Libya and Syria. In 2011, NATO, led by the United States, deposed Libya’s dictator Muammar Qaddafi. The result has been continuing fragmentation and anarchy in Libya. In Syria, beginning in 2014, Washington perversely waged a low-level war simultaneously against both sides in a civil war — Islamist militants, on the one hand, and the government of dictator Bashar al-Assad, on the other. Once again, the American strategy backfired. At the end of 2024, Assad and his family fled to Russia. Syria’s president today is Ahmed al-Sharaa, an al-Qaeda warlord whom the US until 2025 had named on its Specially Designated Global Terrorist List.  

This brings us to the war in Afghanistan (2001-2021), the longest war in American history. The purpose of the war was to topple the Taliban, the Islamist faction that had provided a safe haven for Osama bin Laden and his allies before the 9/11 attacks. The result? Following years of warfare under the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, the Biden administration beat a chaotic retreat in August 2021. The victor is the Taliban, which came to power and has imposed a repressive Islamist regime, stripping women, ethnic minorities, and dissidents of rights and carrying out public floggings and executions for crimes including  “illicit relationships.” 

What is striking is the frequency with which major American wars have ended by bringing US enemies to power or allowing them to remain in power. Today, following the deaths of more than 80,000 American soldiers, and millions of Koreans and Indochinese, North Korean Communists aligned with Beijing and Moscow rule North Korea, while Vietnamese Communists rule united Vietnam. Syria and Afghanistan are governed by former anti-American jihadists.

In the case of Korea, it can be argued that the 72-year truce was a partial success that has allowed South Korea to develop and flourish. Even so, North Korea has nuclear weapons with which it threatens America and its East Asian allies, has deployed thousands of troops to fight in Putin’s war in Ukraine, and continues to tie down American military forces in Asia. 

To these humiliating American strategic failures, the Ukraine war might soon be added. In 2022, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, President Joe Biden declared, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Today, Putin is still in power and Biden is out of power. The Ukraine War, which has been prolonged as a result of Western military and economic support for Kiev, is likely to end at some point in Russian control of both Crimea and much of eastern Ukraine — yet another embarrassing and costly strategic defeat for the Uncle Sam.

“But other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” Compared to the strategic defeats of US foreign policy in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya, US strategic victories in the last seven decades have been few and far between. The most significant strategic victory came with the success of the US strategy, shared with post-Maoist China, in arming insurgents to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in 1989 — a policy that did not require the commitment of any American troops. The United States and its NATO allies, with minimal coalition losses, and together with Russia, also helped to bring an end to the wars of the Yugoslav Secession by 1995. Otherwise, the few US strategic victories in recent decades have involved small-scale interventions, both peaceful and violent, in America’s western hemisphere sphere of influence — Panama (1989), Haiti (1994), Venezuela (2026).

All of this can be attributed to the American Way of War, which is shaped by the goal of achieving maximum military objectives with minimum American fatalities, due to the US public’s aversion to significant losses, not only of draftees but also of professional American soldiers in combat. To minimize American losses, the United States has long relied on technology, hoping that air power and conventional big-unit warfare will break the will of enemy regimes.

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During the Korean War, the United States dropped more bombs on the Korean peninsula than were dropped in America’s entire Pacific campaign during World War II. In Vietnam, instead of engaging in a classic, low-level counterinsurgency campaign, Uncle Sam relied on bombing and air-support by helicopters against insurgents and North Vietnamese infiltrators in South Vietnam, and deployed defoliants and herbicides like Agent Orange to destroy South Vietnamese forests and crops. In Afghanistan, the United States sought to minimize the loss of pilots by using expensive drones. In all of these cases, America’s advantages in high-tech industrialized warfare failed to prevent strategic stalemate (Korea) or total defeat (Vietnam, Afghanistan). Given these historic precedents, it comes as no surprise that America’s initial tactical successes in the war against Iran, including the massacre of Iran’s top leaders and the degrading of much of its military capacity, have failed to dislodge the repressive Islamist regime or end the conflict.

The unsuccessful American Way of War is not merely technological, but also political — a category that includes both domestic US politics and geopolitics.

In domestic politics, when a president launches what is hoped to be a brief, successful war, there is often a “rally-around-the-flag” effect (though this has been missing in the case of the US-Israel war against Iran). If there are American casualties, however, over time the rising number of body bags and the perception that no end to the conflict is in sight lead the American public to turn against the war, to the point that most Americans come to prefer abandoning the effort and “bugging out” to further losses in blood and treasure.

But even after the public has turned against a war, domestic political factors can result in its prolongation for years — or, in the case of Afghanistan, for decades — through multiple presidencies. On the one hand, wartime presidents are mindful of rising public opposition to a doomed war. At the same time, they fear that they or their party will be accused of weakness and defeatism by hawks in both parties and will suffer electoral setbacks. So in order to avoid blame, presidents from Johnson to Bush, including Trump in his first term, have flinched from withdrawing from a quagmire and passed the disaster to a successor in the White House who can serve as the scapegoat for American military defeat.

American domestic politics, then, makes it politically easy to start wars and hard to end them.

At the geopolitical level, American leaders’ lack of commitment provides an advantage for US enemies. What is a vital interest for the enemy — the survival of the North Korean regime, the conquest of all of Vietnam by Communists, the survival and if possible the triumph of the Taliban — is only a lesser interest for Washington. In the case of enemy dictatorships, the existential threat is personal. A lost war may mean execution, imprisonment, or exile for dictators and their allies and families.

To be sure, America’s war leaders pretend that the United States, like its enemies, has vital interests in the foreign war, often invoking memories of the Nazis and World War II or warning of “domino effects” throughout a region or nuclear mushroom clouds rising above American cities. But this has proved insincere: Washington has refused to mobilize the country for all-out war, eschewing means such as regimentation of the economy and a wartime draft, suggesting that the threats haven’t been existential, after all. 

The underlying problem, then, is the American Way of War itself, with respect to both military means and strategic ends. Since World War II, there has been a mismatch between America’s reliance on high-tech, air-power-intensive, big-unit warfare and the actual requirements for success in many low-intensity conflicts, as well as a mismatch between American public opinion and the trigger-happiness of much of America’s bipartisan political elite.  

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The American people and American politicians alike prefer a war like World War II, which for the United States lasted only four years and ended with total victory and regime change in the enemy countries. At the same time, the US Army would prefer to fight Field Marshall Rommel in North Africa, with few collateral civilian casualties, and the US Navy would prefer naval battles far from centers of population. What Americans want is a limited war in which a complete victory against demonized or genuinely demonic enemies is possible. When that cannot be achieved, war is unpopular with American civilians and soldiers alike. There is no appetite for brutal, protracted, low-level counterinsurgency campaigns in foreign mountains or jungles, where enemy soldiers and civilians are intermingled. 

It’s unlikely  that Americans will ever support the transformation of the US military into a permanent colonial-style constabulary specialized in assisting proxies and fighting or assisting insurgencies in broken countries around the world. In light of this, the only way to avoid repeated strategic failures is for there to be much higher domestic political obstacles to American presidents’ tendency to resort to war. 

But Congress lost control of the process for launching war to the executive branch in the Truman years; there has not been a formal declaration of war by the United States since 1942, when Congress declared war against Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary, having earlier declared war against Japan, Germany, and Italy following the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. The launching of new and failed wars like those in Libya, Syria, and Iran by presidents like Obama and Trump after they campaigned as relative doves proves that it is still too easy for American presidents to drag America into war and still too hard for presidents to get out.  

Breaking this sad pattern of repeated, large-scale American strategic and military failure will require Washington to align its foreign policy with the values of most Americans, not simply replacing one dove-turned-hawk with another in the White House.

An instructive moment came on April 3, when Iranian defense forces managed to shoot down an American F15E fighter over the Zagros Mountains, deep inside Iran. There followed an anxious couple of days as the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and American combat search-and-rescue personnel raced to locate the two surviving aviators. The pilot was picked up within seven hours. The injured weapons-system officer, meanwhile, hid out in the mountains with little more than a pistol for protection. After what one senior military official described as “one of the most challenging and complex in the history of US special operations”, involving  four bombers, 64 fighters, 48 refueling tankers, 13 rescue aircraft and hundreds of ground personnel, the stricken officer was eventually picked up by a couple of second-hand Airbus propeller planes, executing a low-tech Plan B. The raiding force had got stuck on a soft runway.

President Trump could claim “WE GOT HIM!” — but like the war itself, the rescue came at an extraordinary cost. Numerous expensively tricked-out special-ops airplanes and helicopters were destroyed in the process, and America seriously hindered its own ability to make any such rescues in future. The escapade compounded what had already been an expensive few weeks for the US Air Force. Days earlier, the service had suffered its heaviest loss since the Vietnam War, when cheap plastic unmanned airplanes powered by commercial electronics raided Price Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, damaging a number of KC-135 tanker planes and blowing a E-3G Sentry airborne radar plane in half. Another lesson from Iran is that the best fighters can be ambushed: hit by infrared-homing missiles at close range, launched from 4×4 vehicles that can quickly blend into civilian traffic.

Taken together, these incidents appear to confirm a narrative about 21st-century warfare that has built throughout the Russia-Ukraine war and is now taken as read by many armchair generals. The days of expensive, high-tech machinery like the F-15E (estimated cost: $100 million apiece) are numbered. The future belongs to unmanned aerial vehicles — or drones, as no one in the military likes to call them.

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By Aris Roussinos

The death of the fighter jet is not a new prediction. After another US pilot, Scott O’Grady, was recovered after his F-16C came down over a Bosnian mountainside in 1995, advocates for a new class of armed, unmanned air vehicles, or UAVs, quickly found a new slogan: “UAVs don’t have mothers.” It looks as if we’re going to have that discussion again.

Fighters are not only painfully expensive to buy; they cost tens of thousands of dollars per hour to fly and the air-to-air missiles that they carry cost $1 million to $2 million each. We must also consider the amount of time it takes the US Air Force to train people to use these machines: two years for a frontline pilot, five more years to raise them to a formation leader, and a decade or more to “command pilot”. Salaries and benefits have to compete with a healthy airline industry. Major live warfare exercises are not only expensive, but increasingly limited in scope. Air combat is reliant on electronic networks — but this makes it easy for an adversary to eavesdrop, making realistic live training even harder. These are painful costs. Designing and developing a new fighter, however, is more than painful. The US and many of its allies have bet the house on the Lockheed Martin F-35, a project that celebrates its 30th anniversary this November. However, troubles with new computers and software mean that F-35s delivered since September 2023 are still not combat-ready. Research and development for the fighter’s new electronics upgrade was most recently estimated at $16.5 billion — well more than half of the R&D tab for the all-new B-21 bomber, which learned lessons from the F-35 and other programs and has, by all accounts, been far better managed

And because fighters take decades to develop, the adversary will adapt and the world will change. The Eurofighter Typhoon was designed in the Cold War for supersonic missile jousts against Soviet fighters. It’s still being developed and modified, mostly to make it a better bomber — because until recently there was no high-end air threat. Britain, Italy, and Japan are meanwhile getting started on the Edgewing, a new stealth-fighter project under the Global Combat Aircraft Program, or GCAP. One of the challenges: none of the companies involved has started a new fighter project since the early 1990s, so most of the people who did it are long retired.

So it’s no wonder military planners and budgeteers are thinking about motherless unmanned aircraft again. Leading the charge in the United States are tech bros like the Hawaiian-shirt-wearing Palmer Luckey, founder of defense startup Anduril. Luckey talks about using Silicon Valley culture to build lethal new weapons “without bankrupting the United States in the process.” He promises to be able to move from the design stage to the front line in weeks, not decades.

But before you ask whether drones can replace fighters, you might want to ask what a drone is. The question is complicated by the fact that air-force people, by and large, hate the word “drone” — which actually applies to three very different things.

The first type of drone is a first-person video (FPV) drone, which borrows consumer technology to create a high-tech equivalent of an infantry mortar. Cheap enough to be used against individual soldiers, precise, lethal, but limited to the range of the control link and their batteries.

Then there are one-way attack (OWA) drones like Iran’s Shahed — which is not really a drone but a cheap cruise missile. Their airframes are molded plastic shells, and their petrol engines are little more sophisticated than a lawn-tractor motor — but what they do have is precise guidance. Israeli missile-defense pioneer Uzi Rubin said in the 2010s: “If you have an iPad, you have the parts for a guidance system.” Missile designers can get around local jamming of satellite navigation, since everyone can access terrain pictures of the entire world. OWA drones use these and cameras to find their targets.

The third class of drones, under active development in America, France, Sweden, and elsewhere, are much larger. They resemble small jet fighters, fly at more than 600 miles per hour, and carry the same weapons as today’s manned combat aircraft.

The three classes pose different threats to the fighter. In June 2025, over a hundred FPV drones were smuggled deep into Russia in ingeniously modified trucks, whereupon they emerged to destroy at least ten aircraft in five locations. Still, repeat successes seem unlikely now that the element of surprise has ceded.

Shahed-type OWA missiles are a threat to fighters because they can do much of their job cheaply and without putting pilots at risk. While there is a running argument over the unit cost of the Shahed and its Russian variants, most estimates suggest that it’s in the tens of thousands of dollars — in other words, about the cost of flying a fighter for an hour. These missiles are not stealthy, but their size makes them difficult to shoot down, and because they are cheap and programmable, dozens of them can “swarm” on a target, striking simultaneously from different directions. They also have a long enough range to reach air bases well behind the lines, so they can directly threaten fighter aircraft on the ground. And if you launch fighters to intercept them, you’re on the wrong side of a “cost-imposition” problem — it costs you more to shoot one of these things down than your adversary paid to launch it.

The “small jet fighter” class of drone has meanwhile been pitched as more of a like-for-like replacement for manned fighters, matching them in range and speed, other than short high-speed sprints. In theory, they should be cheaper over the long-term, too, because a fighter airplane spends most of its flying hours training pilots.

However, military aviators have diligently sought to keep them in their place: they have doubts as to whether they are ready, and fear that budget-cutters will push them prematurely to the front. The US Air Force has named them Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) to make it clear who’s the boss. Other anodyne names include “remote carriers” or “autonomous collaborative platforms”. The prototypes being tested in the US are about one-fifth the size of an F-35. But that’s an awkward compromise. They’re big enough to need runways, bases, and shelters — but too small to deploy over long distances, except a few at a time in the Air Force’s overburdened cargo fleet.

So right now, the momentum is with the second class of drone — the  “cheap cruise missile” group. Dozens of companies are springing up. Some are producing Shahed look-alikes. Others (such as the Netherlands’ Destinus, produced in collaboration with the German arms giant Rheinmetall) are developing their own jam-resistant navigation systems, molding their own airframe parts, and designing their own jet engines.

These weapons will undergo less rigorous testing than precision cruise missiles from established companies (like the American Tomahawk or the Anglo-French Storm Shadow) and will be built to commercial (i.e. less-than-military) standards. That might mean more failures — but at much less than a tenth of the cost. What makes them work is cheap, generic computing. They can navigate when GPS is jammed and identify their targets and pick aimpoints with simple daylight or infrared cameras — inverting the way their costly predecessors were made.

So, game over for fighters? Not so. The fighter is going to do what it’s done repeatedly over its 110-year history: adapt. Fighters from 1915 to the 1940s were pretty simple: one pilot, engine in front, fixed machine guns. Bigger and more complex aircraft emerged in WW2, some with radar and some, like the legendary Mosquito, big enough to carry bombs. The late 1950s brought supersonic speed and guided missiles, and the guns disappeared until Vietnam experience showed that both guns and maneuverability were still needed, resulting in the specs for today’s F-16 and F-15.

So fighters are versatile. The only target that has never been assigned to a fighter is a submarine. Teamed with a tanker and/or a cargo aircraft — itself a modified airliner, not exotic or expensive — the fighter can strike targets more than 1,000 miles away from its base, or deploy itself around the world while a warship is still pulling out of port.

Cheap cruise missiles, meanwhile, are not alternatives to the fighter but, rather, complements to the fighter’s flexibility and reach. Fighters have carried precision cruise missiles since the early 2000s.

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As for the specter of large, reusable pilotless fighters, we should be skeptical of the US Air Force’s preference to keep them small and cheap and instead consider where Sweden seems to be headed. (Despite not fighting a war since 1814, Sweden has done an amazing job of keeping up with, and sometimes surpassing, much richer nations in combat air technology.) Saab’s advanced-projects team, dubbed Rainforest, is leaning toward a fighter-sized unmanned vehicle. Sweden is also the acknowledged leader in linking fighters into a network. A group of four Gripen fighters operate as a real-time network, compiling signals from four sets of electronic and infrared sensors, and from airborne radar surveillance aircraft, into common high-fidelity target tracks.

Consider how this might work: if an unmanned aircraft has half the lifetime cost of a Gripen (a reasonable goal), six aircraft could fly in formation, two with crew and four unmanned, with similar sensors, software and weapons, for equal cost. The formation spreads over tens of miles of sky. The uncrewed aircraft may be out in front at low altitude, not transmitting on their active radars, but prepared to launch weapons with a flight time in seconds. Last summer, Saab demonstrated an AI system to execute an air-to-air missile attack, calculating the attack path, missile launch and evasion; the same technology could support command pilots in a mixed manned and unmanned formation.

Having a crewed aircraft in the mix helps to deal with an ethical dilemma: autonomy. The idea of a weapon that searches for targets and uses its own computers to decide who lives and dies still makes people squeamish. I have engaged in simulations where a group of unmanned vehicles was operating with almost complete autonomy, detecting and identifying targets and assigning different tasks to different aircraft. Nevertheless, a high-resolution radar image of the target was transmitted to the human mission controllers so they could authorize the attack. In military parlance, this is known as having a human “on the loop” rather than “in the loop” — but it hinges on the assumption that data can reliably reach the human controller, in the face of jamming.

There is one way to make communications virtually impossible to jam, however: keep them to line-of-sight between two points. That’s where the manned fighter may remain indispensable:  operating within a cloud of unmanned adjuncts and missiles that simultaneously provides physical defense and attack, as well as creating, in military parlance, a robust line-of-sight network.

So that next-generation fighter might look very different from today’s aircraft, but the fighter has changed shape many times since the First World War. And that’s why it doesn’t surprise me, and rather encourages me, that the aircraft at the center of the new British-Italian-Japanese Edgewing project looks the way it does.

It’s a big beast, with a broad delta wing that recalls Britain’s famous Vulcan,  a 100-ton atom bomber,  more than a turn-and-burn fighter. It will hold what is technically known as a metric bleepton of fuel. It’s designed to be stealthy, but it’s going to be more than that — the modified Boeing 757 that’s being used to test its electronics is festooned with big antennas that won’t fit on a small unmanned aircraft, for detection, jamming and even generating beams powerful enough to reset the adversary’s electronics. The engines, for the first time in any aircraft, are being designed from the outset not just to provide thrust for flight, but power and cooling for electronics.

So GCAP is a fighter in the conventional sense — but it’s also a carrier for autonomous weapons, a command node, and a data center. A good time to remember that the most influential and versatile combat aircraft of WW2, the de Havilland Mosquito, was three times the size of a Spitfire and went after battleships.

There is a bigger picture, too. Those battleships took the lion’s share of defense spending up to the Second World War — but only one battleship put on contract after 1940 was ever completed, as an era of military technology based on steel and steam gave way to an age of jet engines, missiles, nuclear weapons, and electronics.  That was also a time when defense technology led all other developments and gave us mass air travel, satellites and computers.

We’re now in a time where commercial tech is in the lead, and wars are fought with information as well as explosive weapons. If aircraft like the Edgewing jet are going to replace the thousands of fighters in the world, they will be forced to evolve: and reluctance to accept change will not stop it happening. The Iran war will result in the demise of neither the IRGC, nor the jet fighter, nor the unceasing development of warfare.

The Strait of Hormuz crisis has exposed the extent of Britain’s vulnerability. The Food & Drink Federation recently announced that food inflation could hit 10% by the end of the year as a result of the war. Its earlier forecast was around 3%. Food shortages are also possible: The Times reported last month that a potential shortage of carbon dioxide — essential to the process of slaughtering livestock — could lead to a scarcity of chicken, pork and other staples in UK supermarkets.

Modern agriculture requires a safe and stable flow of fossil fuels, and so is deeply affected by what is happening in the Middle East. Two of the biggest costs for British farmers are fuel and fertilizer, and the prices of both are soaring. Growing crops requires a lot of fuel — whether you’re plowing, drilling and spraying crops or harvesting, drying and refrigerating them. Farmers are given some duty-relief on fuel in the form of red diesel, which helps to keep food prices down for consumers. But in wartime, this is not enough. Red diesel for my farm was 70-75p per liter before President Donald Trump sent in the first missiles. It is now more like £1-£1.15 per liter. 

Then there’s synthetic fertilizer, which is the biggest single variable cost for many farmers. In recent decades, the world’s food production system has become heavily reliant upon ammonia and sulfur from the Middle East. Around a third of the global trade in raw materials for synthetic fertilizers flows through the Strait of Hormuz. So the crisis has caused the price of fertilizer to skyrocket.

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Big Food has devoured British farmers

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Right now, it is crop planting season. Farmers have two choices in the face of rising expenses — buy less fertilizer and accept lower yields, or buy fertilizer at the inflated prices and pass on the higher costs to the consumer. Either way, food will become much more expensive.

The farmers I’ve spoken to this week say that the cost of growing crops in the UK has risen because of the war by as much as £150-£250 per hectare. That’s £30,000-£50,000 in extra costs for a typical 200-hectare arable farm. At this rate, some nitrogen-hungry crops, such as wheat, barley and oilseed rape, might not be worth planting this year. Farmers are nervous of borrowing tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds to get a crop in the ground when they know they’re probably not going to get a fair return on their investment. Jack Highwood, who farms in Kent, tells me he used to grow 300-400 acres of arable crops, mainly milling wheat — “enough to feed Kent for a week”. But he has stopped sowing crops because the cost of growing is now above the market price. 

The dairy farmers I’ve spoken to say that the Iran war has added £200-£500 to the cost of every dairy cow, or £30,000-£75,000 to a herd of 150 cows. Many British dairy farmers were making a loss on every liter of milk even before the Iran war; they are now in a battle for survival, accruing huge debts. Even on a small beef and sheep farm like ours, the impact of the war is likely to be in the tens of thousands of pounds. 

Lou Osman, a shepherd from Cambridgeshire, told me he uses three tanks of fuel a week traveling between his flocks. His fuel costs alone have gone up £180 a week. He told me he hadn’t sown any synthetic fertilizer this spring so would have less grass and raise fewer sheep this year. He is unsure whether his business can remain viable with spiraling costs. He is not alone. 

All this probably means that your groceries are going to cost more. The Iran war has exposed a major flaw in our food system: after Brexit, the government stripped English farmers of their production subsidies, which up until then had ensured that producing food was always profitable — no matter the geopolitical climate. Now, the financial risk of farming falls entirely on the farmer. That means, in times of strain, farmers are likely to reduce their output to be on the safe side. And this makes the nation highly vulnerable to food shortages.

My father, who was a farmer like me, thought he had a social contract with the nation: to feed society in return for a degree of protection and support. That contract has been ripped up by successive governments; feeding the nation is no longer a political priority. 

For years, politicians have turned a blind eye to farming. In fact, recent governments have made farming more difficult at every opportunity: not only eliminating production subsidies, but failing to deliver universal environmental schemes, introducing inheritance tax, raising employment taxes, rolling out more red tape, and signing free-trade deals that undermine our farmers by forcing them to compete with cheap, poor-quality produce from abroad. There is little or no understanding in government about how these changes might affect Britain’s food production.

This is pretty dangerous considering the worst threats to our food security may be yet to come. New military technologies are emerging on the battlefields of Ukraine that could profoundly alter our national security. Highly sophisticated Ukrainian drones are now regularly attacking targets up to 1,000 kilometers away. If this technology fell into the hands of our enemies, think how it could undermine our civilian infrastructure. The day may come when drones will be able to travel even longer distances in unfathomable numbers, aimed at us by an enemy intent on disabling our country, or intimidating us into submission. 

Could Britain withstand a major attack on its food system? With a decent strategy it might have a chance. We have an amazingly productive land mass on the temperate edge of the Atlantic. We also have some of the best farmers in the world, who currently produce about 60% of the food we need. 

The problem is that the government has allowed food production to become unprofitable for farmers, as well as highly centralized — so we have serious bottlenecks in our food system. Most supermarkets hold very little stock. And it takes tens of thousands of lorries to transport the nation’s food every week from farms to shops and food outlets: even a 10% drop in available drivers can result in empty shelves (remember Covid). The supermarket system works out of a handful of giant distribution and processing centers with incredible throughput volume, but which are highly vulnerable because they are run by computer systems that can be hacked. It also relies on refrigeration, and so is vulnerable to energy shortages.

On top of this, Britain imports lots of its food from places vulnerable to climate change, natural disasters or geopolitical chaos. Traditionally, we imported many of our fruits and vegetables from Almeria in Spain, but that region is now struggling with water shortages. So, increasingly, we’re sourcing fresh produce from West Africa instead, especially Sierra Leone. The whole system depends upon stability, peace and the free flow of goods — but can we guarantee that in West Africa? What’s more, our imports are almost all squeezed through two ports: Dover and Felixstowe. If these ports were ever taken out of action, we’d be in trouble. 

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The good news is that there are plenty of ways to make our food system more robust. After the Second World War, British farmers started using ammonia nitrate to grow crops; now, we are addicted. But there are ways we can wean ourselves off this addiction — at least to some extent. We can lessen our reliance upon synthetic fertilizers by using rotational and regenerative farming to improve the health of British soil. By introducing crop rotations and re-integrating livestock into arable (crop growing) systems, we can fertilize more of our land naturally. 

We can also lessen our reliance upon foreign fruit and vegetables by supporting growers across the UK to make a sustainable living. We can design and develop horticulture in urban areas, with allotments and urban farms, where food production will be most needed in any future crisis. (Paris, remember, was once a leading light of food production, farming small areas intensively to feed countless urbanites.) We can stop subsidizing mindless schemes to take land out of food production in order to build houses or solar farms or pursue the worst excesses of corporate “offset” rewilding. We can be way more discerning about where we import food from, and encourage farmers to produce certain foods we’re lacking. And we can shore up our supplies of synthetic fertilizer by protecting the Billingham ammonia plant in Teesside — the last plant in the country that produces ammonium nitrate.

As it stands, a large part of Britain’s cheap food system relies upon massive fossil fuel flows, and we have done way too little to insure against the risks — risks that are swiftly becoming reality. A Which? report released yesterday found that three million UK households are already being forced to skip meals to cope with the rising cost of food. We urgently need politicians of all stripes to start thinking about farming and food as national priorities. 

The shoeshine boy of our age is the US soldier who placed a $400,000 wager on Polymarket, a betting exchange, ahead of the January capture of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. But the strangest story of all is one that most people have easily missed for it is hidden deep inside the financial pages. America’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that several Gulf States, including the United Arab Emirates, have requested dollar swap lines with the US. In a swap two parties agree to exchange something — in this case, US dollars for the UAE’s own currency, the dirham. A swap line would be an arrangement where UAE can trigger a swap at a moment’s notice.

But why would they want to do this? The UAE is very wealthy. The amount of dollars it already holds is more than 10 times the size of the US administration’s Exchange Stabilization Fund, which would be the counterparty to the swap. Gita Gopinath, a former deputy director and chief economist of the IMF, says this may indicate that “the consequences of the Iran conflict are far greater than what we see priced in markets. Such explorations do not arise lightly, even behind closed doors.”

Brad Setser, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, writes that there is something radically new happening here. To him, it looks like a dodgy off-balance sheet transaction “with the Emirates getting the upside”.

Manipulation of betting markets and dodgy swaps are plausible tell-tale signs of a coming financial crisis. I do not know how the Iran war will end, but the diplomacy is more difficult than President Donald Trump pretends; this was illustrated over the weekend when the US President called off the planned trip to Pakistan by his envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner. A full diplomatic solution will take time to prepare and agree. Once agreed, it will take more time to put into place. This will take months. Even then, oil and gas prices will not drop back to where they were before because the war has caused permanent damage to infrastructure such as pipelines and processing facilities. Shipping and insurance companies will take time to assess when it will be safe to resume travel through the Strait of Hormuz.

If Iran were to receive any revenues from traffic through the strait, as Trump has suggested, that would set a costly precedent for the world economy — a tax on international shipping. Inspired by the Revolutionary Guards, the Indonesian finance minister, Purbaya Yudhi Sadewa, said his country, too, was considering imposing a toll on ships passing through the Strait of Malacca. This strait is even more important to the global economy than Hormuz. Approximately 40% of global trade passes through it.

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These measures would defy the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which establishes the principle that no state has sovereignty over the seas. If we gave up on this idea, it would be a leap back into the ages of pirates and gunboat diplomacy. We would not only be undoing the past 30 years of globalization but the last 200. Times would indeed be different if we went down that path.

We should not think for a moment that a quick and dirty peace deal, a US capitulation, would be the least bad outcome for the global economy. The biggest risk for the world economy is not a spike in oil prices, nor temporary shortages of urea and helium. Supply shocks are bad, but they are the kind of shocks for which you can prepare.

The bigger short-term risk would be a new global financial crisis, one that could be triggered not only by a long war, but also by a bad settlement. By that, I do not mean a collapse in stock markets as a primary driver of the crisis. If the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz were to lead to a global recession, it could unleash a whole sequence of crises in other parts of the financial sector, for sovereign private debt in particular. That’s why people like me, who follow global financial flows, are so spooked when they hear about the US/UAE conversations regarding a currency swap. If this were just a dodgy deal, that would probably be the most benign explanation. But it could also mean that they are preparing for a cardiac arrest in the global financial system. In this scenario, UAE banks might find it suddenly very difficult to borrow dollars; and in this case, a swap line would help keep the global financial system moving. But that system would be under extreme stress. And in this scenario, we would no longer be talking about the price of diesel or shortages of kerosene but about a Greater Depression. And, yes, stock prices would fall too. But that would be the least of our problems.

There is one big difference, though, between today and 2008. Back then, world leaders came together to fix the crisis. The Group of Twenty, until then a debating club of central bankers and finance ministers, held its first G20 summit at the level of heads of state and government in November 2008 in Washington. The Americans, the Russians, the Chinese and the Europeans were all sitting around a table, ready to set up new financial rules and agree a coordinated economic stimulus. For the first time, European leaders whose countries took part in the euro met as a distinct Eurozone. Our multilateral governance system was still intact then.

I have no nostalgia for those days. What the leaders decided back then worked in the short term but caused long-term damage to Western economies and democracies. Monetary quantitative easing and fiscal austerity were the most disastrous economic policy decisions anyone has taken this century. Both happened without democratic checks and balances. The reasons why the multilateralists got so upset about Brexit was that it was the first successful backlash against multilateralism.

So I am not mourning the passing of the age of multilateralism. But we have to understand the consequences of its passing. If the global economy went into a cardiac arrest, as it did in late 2008, we should not expect our politicians to come together as they did then and agree on a quick fix — or any fix. They will blame each other, as they do now. This new financial crisis will play out without proper intervention.

In such a world, one that has abandoned multilateralism, it will be more important than ever for the superpowers to exert strategic restraint. China looks superficially restrained politically, but its economic policies are beyond reckless. Indeed, China is by far the biggest contributor to global economic imbalances. And China may, at some unknown point in the future, launch a military attack on Taiwan.

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Welcome to the age of uncertainty

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Vladimir Putin is no man of restraint either, and nor is Trump. We know that Trump is, by nature, an impulsive gambler. There is no chance that anyone would confuse him with a strategic actor. He clearly miscalculated when he ordered the attack on Iran. It would be a triumph of hope over experience if Trump were to embrace the idea of strategic patience going forward. Trump and his secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, have surrounded themselves with yes-men. There is nobody in the administration left willing to speak truth to power. Hegseth fired critical generals together with senior officials, most recently John Phelan, the secretary of the Navy. Trump has no permanent national security adviser. Mario Rubio, the secretary of state, fills this role part-time. We know that JD Vance was a war skeptic, but he is not going to stand up to Trump either.

The current generation of Europeans leaders are rules-based creatures, none more so than Prime Minister Keir Starmer. They are mourning the passing of the multilateral age. Strategic, long-term thinking is alien to them.

Amid the gloom, there is, however, one big potential upside. AI remains the optimists’ most plausible story, a rational reason for market valuations being as high as they are today. AI is potentially the most significant innovation since electricity. It could change the way we work and live more than any other technological innovations we have experienced in our lifetimes.

But the age-old rules of investment still apply. This time can only ever be different to the extent that AI will affect economic productivity growth. The effects of AI have only just started to show up in some economic figures in the US. I myself believe that AI will be a life-transforming technology. But we won’t know for sure for some time yet.

This, in turn, means that the spoils of AI will almost surely not arrive in time to save us from the folly of this war, and the commercial and financial havoc it will unleash. In that sense, this time will indeed be different, but not in a good way.

The starting point for our discussion is his new book, Solidarity: The Work of Recognition, a scholarly work of philosophical history and theology but whose title (a word deeply associated with the labor movement and the political Left) is laced with politics from the start. He is quick to explain what the book is not calling for. True solidarity, per Lord Williams, has nothing to do with cheap gestures of allyship with suffering people of the type found on social media. “I’m aware of the danger of a kind of sentimentality about that; the performativity that just says: Well, this makes me feel better, so never mind if it makes a difference.”

Nor is his version of solidarity simply the equivalent of empathy or fellow feeling — it is something closer to a fundamental acknowledgment of how each of our individual selves can only exist in relation to one other. “So much of the mythology we’ve all imbibed takes for granted that a self is something you got when you were born. It just comes. It’s given to you in the cradle like the fairy godmother’s gifts, and it comes with a little package of rights and entitlements and attitudes. And you go out and you negotiate with the property that is your self and its entitlements. The discussion I’ve been trying to get into comes at it from a very different angle: to say, well, what if you’re always involved, before you’ve asked to be?”

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So far, who could disagree with such an invocation? But as Lord Williams knows well, this quickly gets to the core of most contemporary political battles. Solidarity, yes, but with whom? To whom do we owe our primary allegiance? The Right will commonly prioritize those closest, and the Left reminds us of our duties to those further away. Even trade unions were formed out of enlightened self-interest — fellow workers protecting their own position by standing together as one. While a recognition of common humanity with all people is a laudable Christian goal, I ask whether real-world solidarity will always be strongest between closely knitted groups who share a common objective?

“The short answer is yes, obviously. Within something like a trade union context that makes sense as it makes sense in a family or a nation — there will be a felt level of solidarity that’s much deeper. The challenge is whether that becomes something that closes itself off from explorations of what interests you have in common with the stranger, even the threatening stranger… In the chapter on Dietrich Bonhoeffer I touch on that. When he says, echoing Dostoevsky, that we’re supposed to be taking responsibility for everyone, there’s a bit of me as there would be a bit of everybody I think, who says: Yeah, well, we can’t do that, can we? And it’s possibly even rather dangerous to try. But what he glosses that to mean is: you’re never going to come across another member of the human race for whom you have no responsibility. There’s never somebody who can say, in advance: well, I’m not going to bother about that sort of person.”

So does that mean it is theologically and morally acceptable to care more for those close to us than those further away?

“The bare fact is, of course we do and we would be ridiculously subhuman if we didn’t. If we were not emotionally and imaginatively aware of the people nearest to us, what kind of awareness or responsibility could we have for those at a distance? Clearly, to adopt the Peter Singer line of Effective Altruism, and that school of thought which says there is no case at all for feeling towards those closest to you more strongly than you feel for those further away — that just seems to me deeply abstract. It lands you with individuals who remain effectively locked in their own terms, and are simply doling out indifferent benevolence. I don’t think that works… I’d want to say: of course, recognize you will feel towards your family, your fellow countrypeople, more strongly. But it’s also about that kind of relation, that sense of shared good or shared project that inches out towards something broader.”

The most literal application of this conundrum is of course the vexed question of immigration. Most of Lord Williams’s public pronouncements on the topic have been to remind people of the humanity of immigrants and to resist any demonizing of them. But if immigrant arrivals are at such a high number that it is disrupting and damaging the home society, is it therefore a morally defensible and virtuous position to want to restrict and reduce immigration — even if that means individuals don’t get the better life they would like to have by coming?

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“My worry is not so much about immigration numbers as such. There are lots of arguments you can have about what a reasonable, sustainable level of migration is. My worry is much more about the ease with which immigrants, in whatever number, are automatically regarded as bogus asylum seekers. That is the slogan that’s traded. They are regarded as intrinsically hostile to what we call our way of life. The effect of that is to undermine, and I would say corrupt the life that we have, the things we are proud of in our own society: the degree to which we believe we are a law-governed, a just and a welcoming society.”

So it is morally acceptable, in his view, to advocate for greater immigration restrictions?

“In principle, yes.”

Another current application of this moral conundrum would of course be climate change. The proper response to rising temperatures offers another balancing act between solidaristic action across all of humanity versus economic protection of those living here and now at home. Just last week, Williams was the number one signatory to a public letter to the proprietor of this publication, Sir Paul Marshall, criticizing the climate skepticism espoused by GB News, in which he is an investor, and his public disparagement of Net Zero as a policy. It’s a bit close to home but I thought it would be odd not to ask him about it. Why is opposition to Net Zero not just another public policy disagreement on which good people can disagree, rather than a moral problem that needs public letters by clergymen?

“How we respond to what is, I think, agreed to be a climate emergency is a moral issue. For that moral issue to be fairly and fully considered, it’s important that all public outlets give a reasonably detached and, if possible, generous account of what the issues are. If there are some outlets which appear to resist this, we would like to hear more about why…”

But, rather like the question of immigration restrictions, if I come to a judgment, after careful consideration, that on balance the destruction done by Net Zero to our national economy, and the suffering that flows down from that, exceeds the theoretical good it would do to temperature rises over the longer term, is that not a reasonable judgment for me to make? It doesn’t make me a bad person?

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“It doesn’t make you a bad person. I’ve said already that there is an argument to be had about that. But the worry is whether what’s being presented is adequately comprehensive of the issues involved… The questions about whether Net Zero as a policy is destructive of our national economy, and therefore the wellbeing of those vulnerable communities we’ve mentioned earlier — it’s not as if that has not been addressed by some of those advocating for Net Zero. There’s quite a lot in the bank on that subject. And there’s also the concern that in the short to middle term, the degradation of the environment in other parts of the world will equally impact us, if not addressed… Back to the migration question. Environmentally driven migration is already a factor in parts of Africa and parts of Asia — it’s not going to go away and that wave will move back towards us. So it’s not as if you can draw an absolutely clear disjunction between the good of the immediate neighbor and the good of the distant neighbor.”

The harshest line between the competing claims of these two groups come from the Christian nationalists — a growing presence in the politics of both the US and the UK. How does he define Christian Nationalism, and what is his reaction to it?

“It’s one of those terms which you can throw around without ever standing still long enough to define it. But I think among the things it can mean would be a benign version (or a less malign version) which says: the Christian heritage has shaped the kind of society this is, its signs, its legacies are around us, and there’s nothing to be ashamed of or afraid of in recognizing that and we would be wrong just to tear up that legacy. I don’t find a great problem with that. There’s a less benign form which would say: what we need to do is to recover that heritage in a way which disadvantages or marginalizes other kinds of presence in our society. And the most malign of all is: our national identity is absolutely bound up with the will of God. The good of the nation is the will of God. End of story. And that’s what we have seen in the Russkiy Mir rhetoric of Putin and his ecclesiastical acolytes.”

Just last week, in a discussion at The Spectator about Christian nationalism, Lord Williams went even further, referring to the American political culture as “demonic”. Predictably, it caused a stir on social media, with right-leaning Americans duly expressing outrage and crying foul. What exactly did he mean by it?

“A couple of things in my mind. One was certainly the normalization of extraordinary public displays of aggression, a kind of rolling back of civil standards and expectations. I know this sounds terribly old maidish, but I am still shocked at the profanity that the chief executive of a nation can use in public. When did that become acceptable? I find myself really disgusted by that — but that’s not demonic as such. The demonic is the erosion of standards of truthfulness in public life and the normalization of violence in word and deed.”

The example Lord Williams gave was Pete Hegseth invoking the will of God in the Iran military campaign. I ask him: by using the word “demonic” is he not guilty of demonizing his political opponents? He might have said that Hegseth was misguided, perhaps not very intelligent, or making a grave mistake. But to call him demonic is to suggest something different, which is that he is animated by a malign spirit.

“Animated by a malign spirit,” Lord Williams confirms, “which is not necessarily Pete Hegseth. I’m rather old fashioned in believing in the Devil. I actually do believe that there are malign forces in the universe and that people who may not have consciously malign or diabolical designs can be manipulated and exploited by those destructive forces. When I call something demonic, I’m not saying that we demonize any individual — God forbid — but that we recognize the diabolical as an element of gratuitous destructiveness which finds a way in where it finds a leak.”

Does he believe, then, that the Devil is at work in the Trump administration?

“The Devil is at work in you and me. The Devil is at work in every institution. Sometimes it comes to the fore more clearly. And at the moment, I worry that something is being normalized, licensed and allowed into the room which ought to be regarded (to put it with Anglican politeness) with considerable suspicion.”

If these interventions sound unusually political for a church leader, the Pope has been going even further recently. His opposition to the Iran war is so explicit that he has called on American Catholics to contact their own congresspeople to register their opposition to it. I wonder, does Lord Williams think such a direct intervention in the political process is crossing a line? Has the Pope gone too far?

“I don’t think it’s all that novel. If you look at the history of papal and clerical interventions in elections — appeals to people to vote this way rather than that — the Vatican was doing it in Italy in the post war period. It’s not new. The global reach is perhaps new… I’m very relieved that the Pope has been clear about what the tradition of just war does and doesn’t permit. That has to be said. You can’t pretend that this is something that fits into that framework.”

So what you’re saying is that the Iran war cannot be morally defended on Christian principles?

“It will not fit into the category of a just war. A just war, in the tradition, has usually four-or-five prerequisites… A justifiable exercise of force needs to be a response to someone else’s direct aggression; it needs to be declared by legitimate authority, not just somebody’s whim; it needs to be conducted in a way that doesn’t subvert the ends of justice, which means that civilian lives have a right to be protected as far as possible; it must have a clear goal and an exit strategy so that it doesn’t go on indefinitely. None of those seem to me to be very conspicuously met in this instance — and I’m speaking as somebody who has no brief for the Iranian regime whatsoever. I think it’s an appalling theocratic tyranny. It ought to go. But as we’ve seen in other instances, when regime change is brought about by compromised and compromising means, the results are not always the change you are looking for.”

It shouldn’t surprise that church leaders like the Pope and current and former Archbishops of Canterbury should tend to encourage peaceful rather than militaristic means. But if the militaristic approach is ungodly, how should we then think about the “church militant” that Christians pray for in the Anglican liturgy every time they take communion?

“We’ve tried over Christian history, in all sorts of ways and contexts, to imitate other kinds of militancy. And my feeling about that is: well that worked, didn’t it! I want to ask: how does Christ change things? One thing I think you can be fairly sure about in the New Testament is that he doesn’t use the techniques of available power systems. ‘This is how the kings of the gentiles work.’ What we do in our militancy for the faith, that is our committed and courageous attempt to witness to what we’ve been given and make it available to others, we do by lives of holiness — which means an awful lot of hard work for the vast majority of us who are nowhere near that level and who resort to shortcuts all the time.”

Is that approach working though? It feels like the Church is decreasingly, not increasingly, influential. Perhaps a more assertive approach would work better?

“We’re not told to make it work. We’re told to be faithful and to trust in God… The more we’re imprisoned by the notion of whether we are making the kind of difference we want to be seen to be making, the less room there is (sorry, sermon time) for God to be God in it all. Very often the truth is that gentle growth does happen when there is manifest commitment and dedication. I worry about a church too preoccupied with strategy — with schemes for solving problems — and not preoccupied enough with its own integrity as a community of witness and prayer.”

Does that mean he thinks that the Church of England has become overly bureaucratized?

“In a word, yes.”

And whose fault is that?

“What about Satan! I did say, and I meant it, that the diabolical enters everywhere. Being not some character with horns and a tail, but that pull to the destructive and that pull towards a kind of idolatry of the self and the corporate self and its well being and security and control.”

So actually, the Church of England becoming overly bureaucratized is also, in its way, demonic?

“In its way, yes.”

Rowan Williams insists he is not planning to become more politically involved. He is working next on a new volume of poems, and a book with Brenda Hale on assisted dying. But there is something about the frankness of his statements that suggests he is enjoying their impact. Might we see more interventions in his retirement years?

“You’ll have to wait and see, won’t you? But I don’t want to be a politician in my declining years. I want to learn how to prepare myself for a Christian death. And I’m not joking.”

Such violent mood swings have become a recurring feature of this strange war, reflecting Donald Trump’s whimsical decision-making. But one consistent theme has been that the US President would like to keep the war as brief as possible and has been frustrated by his inability to force it to a rapid conclusion. 

The Iranian regime, which has been prepared to absorb a lot of punishment, has used Trump’s impatience to its advantage, and still appears to believe that time is on its side. Nonetheless, it too is showing signs of exhaustion, with its negotiation team reportedly staying back to craft a fresh proposal after the Americans left. The resulting willingness of both sides to carry on talking has thus brought a wave of relief to investors. 

Still, we should hold our breath and hope for good news. There’s already a lot of damage baked into the economy — damage that will become more apparent, and more painful, as the year progresses. Everything now hinges on these peace talks succeeding. If they fail, things could turn south quickly.

So far, the economic harm of the war has been fanning out across the world gradually, at the lumbering pace of an oil tanker moving across the world’s oceans. It showed up first within the Gulf region, then in nearby Asia and Africa. It turned up in Europe last week, and this week began to reach the United States, with the last tankers to have left the Strait of Hormuz before the war broke out now arriving at their destinations. As a result, if the Strait is not reopened soon, refineries across the world will soon have to start cutting production. Should we reach that point, even the supposedly most sheltered economies, like the United States, will start experiencing shortages.

Given how badly the global economy was affected by oil shocks in the 20th century, it’s fortunate that panic-buying, long queues and energy rationing haven’t shown up in more places, being confined so far largely to Asia. After all, given that something like a sixth of global oil production has been taken offline, along with crucial exports of fertilizers and helium, the head of the International Energy Agency declared the resulting shock to the world economy worse than any previous energy crisis, including those of the Seventies. 

But what has softened the blow so far has been a buffer of oil accumulated by many countries prior to the war. Some countries, such as China and Japan, had long-standing strategic reserves. They and others have also benefited from the fact that it takes weeks for cargoes to reach them — again ensuring that shortages have taken a while to kick in. J.P. Morgan estimates that refineries have been able to run through those stocks until now, minimizing the impact of the sudden shortage. But the Bank expects that, over the coming days, those buffers will run out. While $4-a-gallon gasoline may seem excessive to Americans, it may only be the start.

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All this is contrary to the simplistic narrative that was circulating after the war broke out. The war’s victims, the narrative went, would be those countries which depended most on Gulf oil. China, by this telling, would suffer, whereas the US, since it was a net exporter of petroleum products, would come out a winner. But this isn’t how the war is doing its harm. What matters is not the scale of the shock to hit the economy, but its ability to absorb it. 

So, while China imports a lot of Iranian oil, it also accumulated large buffer stocks before the war and has been decarbonizing its economy for years, giving itself considerable resilience. The country was thus able to absorb a temporary hit. Nevertheless, it now appears to have burned through its fat. The strains are beginning to show, with rising costs and supply shortages starting to affect the manufacturing powerhouse. Moreover, the impact on global demand is hitting Chinese exporters, which in March recorded a sharp drop from earlier in the year.

Although further removed from the conflict, many Western economies had less of a cushion to absorb the inflationary shock. The dependence of many European countries on natural gas supplies from the Gulf was rapidly exposed. Britain, which was already struggling with relatively high inflation and interest rates, has taken a particularly big hit, since consumers already struggling with rising expenses now face the added burdens of pricier petrol and steeper electricity and heating bills. And as for the US, its relative distance from the conflict, the stimulus of tax cuts and its status as a net exporter of petroleum products have given it some resilience. 

Nevertheless, it matters little that the US can gain a windfall off new oil sales, because the oil and gas sector accounts for a measly 1% of the country’s economy. Everyone else, not least the beleaguered manufacturing sector that Trump promised to revive, is facing higher prices, which are helping to both drive up interest rates and empty out wallets. Not only did the recent reports on Consumer and Producer Prices reveal US inflation shooting up on the back of rising energy costs, but inflation had already been rising in recent months, and not just due to energy prices. In short, this inflation problem probably won’t be transitory.

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Price increases are manageable when outstripped by wage growth, but this is not happening in Western economies. Until now, American wages have stayed afloat on the back of lavish government spending, but it seems unlikely that a prolonged decline in real wages will not eat into consumption. Ordinary Americans hardly care that other countries have it even worse than theirs. They elected Trump to restore good jobs and bring down prices, but instead, prices are soaring, job growth is all but stagnant and real wages, which have declined since he took office, have now turned negative. That is, expenses are rising faster than paychecks can hope to meet them.

This helps to explain the recent collapse in consumer confidence, which last week was reported to have reached the lowest point ever recorded, with consumers expecting their finances to worsen and prices to rise over the next year, which will likely make their spending behavior more cautious. As of now, the only thing propping up the US economy appears to be rich consumers whose incomes have been swollen by tax cuts and the wealth effect of a buoyant stock market. 

As far as that goes, the Trump administration has so far managed the messaging to investors fairly effectively, repeatedly sending signals that peace is around the corner and thereby minimizing anxiety. This has helped to keep the market steady, which is for Trump the acid-test of his presidency and indeed of his conduct of this war, but at a possible cost: it buys more time for the administration to negotiate, in the hopes of securing the sort of surrender the Iranians are currently unwilling to contemplate; but it also prolongs the standoff. The markets haven’t collapsed, but nor has the Strait reopened, not least since the US is now enforcing a blockade of its own.

In the meantime, cracks in the wall of complacency are emerging. Goldman Sachs estimates that the rising cost of inflation will wipe out the stimulus from the tax cuts. That leaves the stock market to do the heavy lifting of keeping rich Americans spending. Expectations of a strong US earnings season, which just got under way, may well produce a rally in the next couple of weeks. But as the year progresses and the baked-in impacts of the war hinder the economy, the market could subsequently settle into a funk. In the best case, if the war ends very soon and normal business resumes, pent-up demand and damaged supply-chains could keep inflation higher than before, hurting the earnings of consumer-facing firms. In the worst case, if the war goes on for months, inflation and interest rates could rise sharply, potentially triggering a market meltdown and perhaps a recession. As it stands, Polymarket puts the chance of an American recession by the end of 2026 at around 30%. A prolonged war would raise those odds, and a market meltdown would probably push them over 50%. And in the event of a downturn, rising debt levels would make it hard for governments to commit to counter-cyclical fiscal policies without driving up interest rates and thereby choking off investment, while rising inflation would make it hard for central banks to cut interest rates.

Put it all together and we have a fragile European economy, a Chinese one whose export-engine may slow down amid weakening sales, and an American economy headed into possible difficulties. With the world economy looking decidedly fragile, it’s no surprise the IMF this week warned a re-escalation of hostilities could knock its growth down to the lowest levels since the pandemic.

Right now, optimism that an end to the showdown is nigh has kept oil prices from spinning out of control. Nevertheless, the gap between the futures market, where oil is trading at under $100 a barrel, and the physical market, where a barrel of oil now fetches $150, is growing huge. The first price reflects the hope the war will end soon, the second the reality that it hasn’t and the global shortage is worsening. 

That divergence can’t continue forever. If the peace talks fail and hostilities resume, the future price will move upward. If they succeed and the Strait reopens, the spot price will fall and everyone will be able to start rebuilding. All eyes will therefore be on Islamabad this week, to see if the peace talks resume and yield progress. If they do, we can resume breathing. But if talks fail and hostilities resume, we can head for the proverbial bunkers.

The Easter Rising of 1916 and the martyrdom of Husayn at Karbala more than 12 centuries earlier may belong to radically different historical worlds. One was an abortive insurrection in the capital of “West Britain”; the other a 7th-century massacre on the plains of Iraq, when Husayn, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, was slaughtered with his family by the forces of the Umayyad caliph Yazid. Both, however, acquired their enduring force from the afterlife of sacrifice. In each case, bloodshed was transfigured into drama, defeat became moral victory, and death became a claim upon the living. Patrick Pearse, architect of the Rising, understood this instinctively. His language of “blood sacrifice” was not just a metaphorical flourish — but a statement of political theology. 

In their stupidity, the British supplied the necessary martyrs. What might have remained a failed rebellion became the founding narrative of the Irish state — a drama replayed in commemorations, monuments, and even the naming of railway stations after the dead heroes. The molding of martyrdom into nationhood also opens avenues for satire, when the language of redemption, once detached from lived suffering, becomes performance. Seán O’Casey saw this with pitiless clarity in Juno and the Paycock. His Captain Boyle, a man sustained by bluster and fantasy, converts St Paul’s grave defiance — “O death, where is thy sting?” — into music-hall bathos: “Death, where is thy sting-a-ling?” The line gets a laugh, but it should also give pause.

In Shia Islam, the paradigm is older, deeper, and more systematically ritualized. The martyrdom of Husayn is not simply remembered; it is re-enacted. Through the commemorations of Ashura — with processions, lamentations, ritual self-flagellations and passion plays — Karbala is made permanently present. It furnishes what might be called a “grammar of endurance”: oppression confirms rather than negates the moral order; suffering anticipates vindication. The parallel with Ireland is not exact, yet in both cases geography is secondary to narrative. What matters is the structuring idea: that unjust death generates authority, that sacrifice binds community, and that loss can be converted into a durable political resource.

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This grammar acquired a specifically national form in Iran with the Safavid revolution of the 16th century. Here the new ruler Shah Ismail shifted from being the awaited imam or messianic figure of his Turkoman followers and adopted Twelver Shiism as the state religion. In Twelver Shiism, the true imam in the line of Ali and Husayn remains in “occultation”. This means that his awaited return, at which point he will bring about universal peace and prosperity, is deferred indefinitely. In adopting this theology, Shah Ismail did more than enforce a doctrinal shift. He also marked out a civilizational boundary. Iran came to define itself not only against its immediate rivals but against the Sunni ecumene dominated by the Ottoman Empire, whose legal and institutional life was shaped by Hanafi legal orthodoxy. The adoption of Shiism thus functioned as a form of geopolitical differentiation: a way of inscribing religious distinctiveness into the fabric of statehood, not dissimilar to the way Ireland resisted the imposition of Anglican Protestantism by embracing Roman Catholicism, a doctrine imposed on the ancient Irish church by enthusiastic Vatican appointees. 

Over time, Persian historical consciousness became fused in part with a sacred history whose emotional center, like that of Ireland, lay outside the nation’s borders, at Karbala, while its eschatological horizon pointed toward the return of the Hidden Imam — one whose return will signal the end of the world — in the line of Ali and Husayn. The result was a national identity underpinned by a narrative in which injustice, suffering and deferred redemption were not contingencies — but structuring principles.

Seen in this light, the resilience of the Islamic Republic — which has both confounded and annoyed Trump — is hardly surprising. What sustains it is not simply repression, nor even ideology in the narrow sense, but a historically sedimented fusion of religion, memory and nationhood. External pressure, instead of weakening resolve, risks activating precisely those symbolic frameworks that transform adversity into confirmation of purpose. This is not confined to Iran. Across the Gulf, in Bahrain and in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, Shia communities remain politically marginalized. In Lebanon, their more activist community faces obliteration by Israel. The 2016 execution of the cleric Nimr al-Nimr in Saudi Arabia was intended as deterrence. Instead, it functioned as martyrdom — a contemporary re-enactment of the Karbala paradigm, especially with its transnational resonance. Pressure on Iran cannot be neatly contained within its borders. It touches a wider theater in which sacrifice remains a potent political force.

The Irish comparison is illuminating precisely because it is asymmetrical. Irish Catholicism formed part of a universal Church extending far beyond the island, while Twelver Shiism was historically a minority tradition that became nationalized. Yet both sustained identity under pressure through narratives of suffering and perseverance. In Ireland, after all, Catholicism functioned as a carrier of national identity under Protestant domination; in Iran, Twelve Shiism performed a comparable role vis-à-vis a wider Sunni world. In both cases, martyrdom provides a language through which political weakness can become the catalyst for moral agency.

The complementarities are not total. Irish national identity, articulated largely in the English language after the erosion of Gaelic, and the Vatican’s historic preference for Latin over the vernacular, lacked the linguistic distinctiveness that often anchors nationalism. It therefore required symbolic intensification. The cult of 1916 compensates for that absence. Martyrdom, in this sense, becomes a substitute for language: a means of binding community through shared acts of remembrance rather than through linguistic difference.

Yet there are instructive parallels when it comes to education. In mid-20th-century Ireland, the Catholic Church exercised a form of soft theocracy, controlling schools, shaping curricula, and supplying a moral intelligentsia through institutions such as the famous Maynooth seminary. If the language of sacrifice helped sustain Irish Catholic identity under external domination, it was the later exposure of clerical abuse that corroded its moral authority from within. From the Nineties onwards, a succession of official inquiries — most notably the Ryan Report and the Murphy Report — laid bare a pattern that was not merely episodic but systemic: the abuse of unmarried mothers and their children by clergy and religious orders, compounded by institutional habits of concealment, transfer, and denial. What shocked Irish society was not only the scale of the wrongdoing, but the disjunction between the Church’s historic role as guardian of national virtue and its failure to protect the most vulnerable within its care.

The consequences were profound. A Church that had once exercised near-hegemonic influence over education, welfare, and the moral imagination of the state found its authority abruptly relativized. Attendance at Mass declined, vocations dwindled, and the deference that had long insulated clerical authority gave way to scrutiny, anger, and, in many cases, indifference. The symbolic economy of sacrifice — so central to both Catholic devotion and nationalist memory — was inverted. No longer did suffering signify redemption; it testified instead to betrayal.

For now, the Irish case may diverge from the Iranian one. After all, while the Islamic Republic has certainly faced its own crises of legitimacy, its clerical establishment has not been discredited by a comparably documented pattern of abuse against children within religious institutions. The persecution of gay behaviors, however obnoxious, may not yet be seen as conflicting with mainstream Islamic values. The erosion of authority in Iran proceeds along different lines — political repression, economic mismanagement, generational estrangement — rather than the moral implosion triggered in Ireland by revelations of clerical wrongdoing. But the crash may yet come: if and when the horrors of the brutal repressions earlier this year come to light. 

Perhaps Ireland will point the way. Maybe O’Casey’s instinct about the fragility of sacred language is instructive. Here the idiom of martyrdom that once underpinned national cohesion now carries a more ambivalent charge: still potent as memory, but no longer sustained by an unquestioned ecclesiastical authority. Once the credibility of the institution that utters it is compromised, the rhetoric of sacrifice risks tipping into parody. The distance between “thy sting” and “sting-a-ling” is not merely comic. It marks the point at which a culture ceases to believe its own consolations.

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There’s an irony here. The educational system overseen by the Church proved unexpectedly effective. The rigor of the Leaving Certificate, often contrasted favorably with the British A-level system, helped produce a highly literate and analytically capable population. The same structures that enforced conformity also cultivated habits of critical judgment. When the Church’s moral authority collapsed in the wake of abuse scandals, those habits enabled a remarkably swift cultural shift. Within a generation, Ireland moved from one of the most observant societies in Europe to one of the most secularized.

A comparable paradox may become visible in Iran. The Islamic Republic has invested heavily in education, expanding literacy and higher education to levels that place Iranian students in competitive global standing, particularly in science and engineering. Despite rules forcing them to adopt the headscarf, women have achieved striking levels of educational attainment. As the researcher Rasmus Nielsen has noted in his global survey of secondary science education, the teaching of science, including evolution, in Iran is on a par with that of most Western countries. 

The comparison with the Sunni world is instructive here. Even in relatively secular countries such as Turkey the teaching of evolution — a prerequisite for basic science education — has been marred by culture wars similar to those raging in parts of America. In Saudi Arabia, Iran’s principal Sunni rival, evolution is barely mentioned in secondary education texts except in advanced biology courses, where it is introduced as “a fallacious and blasphemous theory derived by the Englishman Charles Darwin, who denied Allah’s creation of humanity”. 

As in Ireland, Iran’s educational attainment carries an inherent tension. A system designed to reproduce ideological conformity has helped create a population capable of questioning the very structures that govern it. The protests that erupted with the 2009 Green Movement, and after the death of Mahsa Amini 13 years later, were not only about patriarchal rules and clerical authority. Instead, they revealed a deeper contradiction between clerical governance and an educational agenda oriented toward modernization.

The contradiction has intellectual and theological roots. Ernest Gellner’s distinction between Islam as a “cult of the Book” and Christianity as a “cult of the Person” requires modification in this context. It applies most neatly to Sunni Islam and Protestantism. But Shiism, with its focus on the Hidden Imam and its eschatological expectation of return, introduces a principle of personal mediation closer to Catholicism. Its theology, like Catholic Thomism, contains rationalistic elements that can assist the advancement of science. Authority is not confined to text; it is embodied, transmitted, and anticipated. This eschatological horizon intensifies the dramaturgy of sacrifice. Karbala is not merely remembered; it is unfinished. Its resolution lies in the future. 

The Iranian intellectual tradition reinforces this dynamic. Shia thinkers from the Ismaili tradition that holds to a Living Imam — that is, a living, present spiritual leader rather than a hidden one — articulated a vision in which reason and revelation were intertwined, and in which truth possessed dimensions that could not be reduced to text alone. One might call this “pre-verbal” revelation. Such frameworks facilitated Islam’s expansion into non-Arab intellectual milieus — from Gujarat to the High Pamirs — where conversion required philosophical depth as well as legal adherence. They also helped embed belief in a structure where adversity itself is meaningful, where suffering confirms rather than undermines the moral order.

What emerges from this comparison is not a simple analogy, but a warning. When sacrifice becomes foundational, politics is tempted to follow suit. The dead acquire authority over the living; compromise begins to resemble betrayal. Pearse’s rhetoric of blood sacrifice has long made Irish liberals uneasy for that reason. The revolutionary deployment of Karbala in modern Iran has similarly enabled the mobilization of grief as a political resource.

Predictions of imminent collapse in Tehran, whether issued from Washington or Jerusalem, have often proved misplaced. You can bomb bridges and clinics, assassinate leaders, tighten sanctions — or even blockade ports and take over ships. But what you cannot easily dissolve is a solidarity rooted in a narrative that interprets suffering as moral, even ontological, vindication. The retreat of the Church in Ireland shows that such structures can eventually unravel, but only from within, and often through the unintended consequences of the very institutions that sustained them. Iran may yet follow a similar path, but not by bombs.

But the Strait of Hormuz crisis is something else entirely. The Strait is still blockaded, meaning that about 20,000 seafarers are stranded on more than 1,600 vessels. I am one of those seafarers: a senior officer currently on board a loaded supertanker. We have been stuck in the Persian Gulf since 28 February.

Since then, we have endured nearly 50 days of military planes passing by, of drones flying and being shot down. Sometimes debris hits a fellow tanker. We’ve heard explosions near and far, and sighted fires in the distance. Sighted from afar, those fires might be on the shore or on offshore platforms; it’s hard to tell. But on one occasion, there was no ambiguity. On 31 March, when the Al Salmi oil tanker was hit by an Iranian drone while at anchor in Dubai, we were close enough to see the fire unfold in real time.

It was a privileged view, in a sense, but a disturbing one. Because supertankers are designed to carry crude oil, on-board fires are extremely dangerous. I couldn’t ignore the fact that what happened to the Al Salmi could have happened to us. Watching it burn felt like looking into a mirror.

But work must go on, even when we’re at anchor. We’ve had to continue our routine jobs, such as navigational watches — the bridge is manned 24 hours a day, even at anchor — machinery maintenance, and cleaning. One of the few things that’s changed is the amount of maintenance we do on deck. In the interest of safety, we are largely limiting the area we cover to the part of the deck closest to the accommodation area, so that nobody gets stranded outdoors should danger arise. Those of us who carry out these on-deck duties do so in pairs while carrying an ultra-high frequency radio.

We will probably remain at anchor, carrying out these duties, for a long time. We have provisions and fuel, both provided by the shipping company we’re working for. As for drinking water, we have desalination equipment on board the ship, so we’re not going thirsty. We know of other crews who don’t have even those basics. The idea of crossing the Strait of Hormuz, where we would risk being attacked ourselves, is much scarier than continuing to wait.

But waiting has its own downsides. We are frightened, and we are busy, yet we are also bored. Long voyages are always liable to get boring, but when a ship is at anchor, the boredom — for some subconscious reason — becomes more intense. I’m reading a lot, watching TV when our satellite internet allows, and following the news. My crewmates sometimes fish or work out. But it’s not enough; the crew is tired and mentally unwell.

The reactions to the stress of this situation vary, and by now I’ve seen everything: from inappropriate jokes and needless arguing to grown men crying and a full-blown panic attack. All the crew are facing their own demons while sitting here, waiting. And for every crew member here, there is a group of people on shore facing their own worries, frustrations and fears of having their loved ones stuck here. I know my family has been worrying about me.

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Since we’re in a warzone, my crewmates and I are on double pay. Even so, we are fighting hard to sign off and be relieved by other seafarers. We were not given a choice to be stranded here. Those who replace us, if they decide to come, will have made that choice. We all have the right to refuse to sail, but as long as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to mainstream companies, there is really no commercial pressure to get the vessel to sail and therefore no reason for our employer to relieve us. That makes the vessel effectively a prison.

The last time anything like this happened was the Covid pandemic, when seafarers were kept on board for months with no access to shore. At least back then there was no risk of drone attacks. But it was still a difficult time for us, and it seems that nothing has really changed. We are still treated partly as hostages, partly as mythically resilient beings, the backbone of the world, who will endure everything for the sake of bringing the cargo to shore.

But we are humans: we are fragile, we have families, and we are dependent on others – in our case the shore personnel who top up our supplies and are supposed to keep us safe. An office worker ends their day, closes the computer and leaves work to go home. We want to do the same, either at the end of our contracts or if we are put in a situation so dangerous, and so far beyond our control, that we don’t wish to continue.

To help us cope with the situation, our employer has provided mental health resources, helplines and live chats, all of which can provide momentary relief. But therapy relies on knowing someone, on trust building between the patient and the doctor, whereas these helplines are like speaking to a stranger. I doubt that, once our contracts are up, we’ll be given much help. I fear that a lot of what we have experienced here will take months or years to wash away.

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I have to remind myself that, up till now, I’ve almost always enjoyed my job. It’s challenging, it pays well, it gives you a lot of time off – about four to six months each year. It’s an office with an amazing view, and it’s a chance to see other countries and to connect with people from other cultures. After all the time I’ve spent nurturing this career, I want to reach the top, to become a captain.

But this is the first time that I’ve had to seriously re-examine my choice of becoming a seafarer. It feels as if my company has no empathy, or even shame, because it is keeping its employees on board against their will in a situation that could actually kill us. I don’t want to stop being a seafarer, but if things go on like this I’ll have to: partly for the sake of my safety, but mostly for the sake of my dignity.

Naturally, I’m following the news non-stop. Our supertanker is a small part of a surreal moment in history. We’re not on shore in Iran or Lebanon, where war is a constant reality, but we’re in a position a little like the eye of the hurricane.

But this hurricane is man-made. I dislike Trump immensely; I also dislike Iran’s regime immensely. I tend to see this war as an unwanted attack from a bully country, while still at the negotiation table, with very little understanding of the consequences of its actions. There are no right sides in this war, all have done terrible things, and in the end, no one will win.

As for me and my crewmates, what we need above all else is clarity: a plan from our employer as to when we will be relieved. Not knowing, silence, is a terrible poison to have on board a ship. Now that a ceasefire is in place, I feel that we have a window of opportunity in which to get people out and in. Our fear is that if the Strait remains closed, and attacks resume on airports and other infrastructure, then we will be stuck here much longer than the weeks that have already elapsed.

Pakistan has not been alone in its recent diplomatic exertion: Turkey and Egypt also helped bridge positions behind the scenes, while China reportedly weighed in at a critical juncture. Pakistan’s prime minister Shehbaz Sharif also thanked Saudi Arabia for providing “invaluable support” to the entire process. The diplomatic efforts have been so extensive that some say that recent weeks have laid the tentative foundations for a post-war regional order, one in which countries that have taken the initiative to secure a ceasefire could play a leading role. A quartet sometimes referred to as STEP — an acronym for Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and Pakistan — is being touted as a possible vehicle for maintaining peaceful coexistence with Iran while acting as a check on Israel. The development builds on existing trends. That the war’s mediation was enacted entirely by non-Western countries reflects the continued emergence of a more assertive Global South, along with its concomitant: a diminished United States and a curiously absent Europe.

The foreign ministers of Pakistan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Egypt met twice last month, first on the sidelines of a summit of Islamic countries in Riyadh, and later in Islamabad for the first multilateral diplomatic meeting of its kind since the war began. That Pakistan would play host made sense: the country nurses good relations with Iran, the US, and China. The premier aim of the second meeting was orchestrating a ceasefire, but it may have contained the seeds of something more. If there is adequate diplomatic will, the coming together of these countries could translate into a reduction in regional dependency on the United States for everything from arms procurement to vanishing security guarantees. In all likelihood, regional powers will have to step in to fill the vacuum left by a weakened United States. According to the New York Times, “many” of the 13 military bases in the region used by American troops have been described as “all but uninhabitable”. “This is the physical architecture of American primacy, and Iran has essentially rendered it useless in the span of a month,” Marc Lynch, director of the Project on Middle East Political Science at George Washington University, said last Thursday. The new reality will likely demand a concerted response. As former US ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman tells me, “West Asia, like Europe, is now in search of new arrangements to replace the Pax Americana.”

All four countries share a common interest in securing and maintaining peace. Though Saudi Arabia opposed the war before it began, the country was repeatedly targeted by retaliatory Iranian strikes, which prompted their position to change mid-conflict. After a few weeks, the Saudis decided that if the US started the war, then the US should finish it. And yet, their participation in the quartet indicates that they have also been hedging. Meanwhile, Pakistan and Turkey have real reason to fear that state collapse in Iran could spill across their borders. “In the event of Iranian nation-state collapse, the potential for more chaos in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province could be exploited by armed factions fighting the Pakistani government,” Giorgio Cafiero, CEO of Gulf State Analytics, tells me.

Similarly, Turkey shares a 534-kilometer border with Iran, and is concerned that Kurdish militant groups could pose a cross-border security threat in the event of state collapse or a US-Israeli fomented uprising. Meanwhile, in Egypt, soaring energy prices and trade route disruptions — particularly those affecting shipping through the Suez Canal and Red Sea — have placed more pressure on an already brittle economy. Pakistan’s economic situation is also delicate: the country had only just begun to recover from one of the most devastating economic crises in its history when the war began. There were other sources of worry for Pakistan as well: the country is home to the second-largest Shia Muslim population in the world after Iran; at least 26 protesters were killed in clashes with police in Pakistan after Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed in a US-Israeli airstrike last month. Much of Pakistan’s Shia population regarded Khamenei as their spiritual leader.

Significantly, all four countries have also been eager to secure good relations with President Donald Trump. All are founding members of his so-called “Board of Peace”. Bilateral relations have also improved during the President’s second term. Last year, Trump returned from a visit to the Gulf touting that Saudi Arabia had pledged $600 billion in investments in the United States. Turkey-US relations also appear to be on better footing, a development rooted both in the personal rapport between Trump and President Erdoğan and in revised US policy: the Trump administration lifted crippling sanctions on Syria last year, and supported the integration of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) with the Syrian army, two of Turkey’s key demands for post-Assad Syria. The government of Pakistan announced last year that it was nominating Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, while in the White House, Pakistan’s army chief and de facto ruler, Field Marshal Asim Munir, is known as “Trump’s favourite field marshal”. And when Trump announced last year’s supposed ceasefire in Gaza, he did so in the seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt — against a backdrop emblazoned with the words “peace in the Middle East”.

Despite all this Trumpian backscratching, the Israeli-US war on Iran has inevitably forced some nations to revise their thinking. For many, the Americans have discredited themselves, both as reliable negotiators and guarantors of security. “The envoys fielded by the Trump administration are persona non grata with Iran due to their repeated participation in deceptions to facilitate surprise attacks and their perceived amateurish incompetence,” Freeman says. Further, he suggests that the Israeli-American assault on Iran demonstrated indifference towards many allies in the region. “It has become apparent that the United States cannot defend them against Iran and that it assigns military priority not to them but to Israel,” he says. It’s now clear that they need “a new security architecture in their region to coexist with Iran and to deal with the direct and indirect threat from Israel as well as unconditional American support for Israeli aggression”.

Recent events are likely to lead to greater regional cooperation — a process that was already well underway before the latest war on Iran began. After Israel’s attack on Qatar was met with only the faintest of rebukes from Washington last year, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia signed a Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement; like Nato’s Article 5, the agreement stipulates that “any aggression against either country shall be considered an aggression against both”. The move was widely interpreted as a sign the Saudis were no longer relying on the United States for their defense. In January, it was reported that Nato member Turkey was also thinking about joining the Saudi-Pakistani defense pact. This generated talk of a so-called “Muslim Nato”, a development that is probably still far off, if it’s even possible at all. But more piecemeal defense pacts are very possible. Experts have noted that these countries complement one another: Turkey has a large defense industrial base, while Pakistan has nuclear weapons. And Saudi finance would be a welcome balm on both countries’ ailing economies.

Meanwhile, Europe is nowhere to be found. The EU’s influence in the region and the world is at its lowest ebb in recent memory. With its singular preoccupation with Ukraine, Europe has effectively become a single-issue continent. Indeed, there was no European involvement in the Iran War mediation efforts at all. When British prime minister Keir Starmer announced he was travelling to the Gulf to demonstrate his support for the ceasefire last Wednesday, he was roundly mocked on social media as the face of British impotence and irrelevance. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen faced similar opprobrium for Europe’s passivity when she announced her own support for the ceasefire and gratitude for Pakistani mediation. Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte flew to the United States last Wednesday in a slapdash effort to convince Trump not to follow through with threats to pull the US out of Nato. In a servile interview on CNN, Rutte said that the world was a safer place “thanks to Trump’s leadership”. With the exception of Spain and some vague gestures at independent thought from Austria and France, most European leaders have appeared largely content to play the role of pliant vassals.

European acquiescence contrasts with Turkish assertiveness, with Ankara appearing especially intent on shaping the emergent order to its liking. Before leaving for a meeting of the quartet in Islamabad on 28 March, Turkey’s foreign minister Hakan Fidan spoke to an audience in Istanbul about the need for the region to take responsibility for its own problems. “Our region should not be vulnerable to external intervention anymore,” he said. “We need to break this vicious cycle with a common vision and joint endeavor, and we are going to achieve it through regional ownership.” The concept of “regional ownership” is something the Turkish government has promoted extensively in recent years. It “implies that major developments in the region directly affect Turkey, and therefore Turkey has an obligation to be involved in order to shape their course”, Mustafa Caner, assistant professor at the Middle East Institute of Sakarya University, tells me. “If extra-regional great powers act recklessly and irresponsibly, regional countries must assume responsibility themselves.” Other members of the quartet concur. As one Pakistani official told me, “together, [the four countries] represent a form of cooperative, action-oriented diplomacy from the region that has been absent for too long”.

But last Wednesday, the Financial Times alleged that Pakistan’s mediation hadn’t been so self-directed after all. According to the report, Trump had ordered Pakistan to secure a truce, since the US purportedly believed that Iran would be more likely to accept the offer “if it was delivered by a Muslim-majority neighbor state”. A blunder made by Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif fueled speculation that Pakistan was doing Trump’s bidding: when the premier posted the ceasefire proposal on X, he mistakenly included a subject line that read “draft — Pakistan’s PM message on X”. Some interpreted this as evidence that Sharif’s team had posted a statement written by the Trump administration. But a Pakistani official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, pushed back against suggestions that Pakistan was merely acting on Trump’s behalf. “For any successful role of a facilitator, you need to have the trust of both sides and their common belief that their interests are better served by coming to the table,” the official said. “Therefore, the question of one party pushing Pakistan to play a certain role doesn’t arise.”

The other three STEP countries also share a desire to present themselves to the world as peacemakers. At the opening ceremony of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza last November, Egyptian warplanes flew a banner that read “Welcome to the land of peace”. The country has been eager to depict itself “as a beacon of peace and civilization in a volatile region”. In recent years, Turkey has hosted multiple rounds of peace talks between Ukraine and Russia, leveraging its “in-between” geography to promote itself as a reliable alternative to Western mediation. And at the beginning of Trump’s second term, Saudi Arabia rolled out the red carpet for high-level negotiations between the United States and Russia. Cynics may be tempted to view the “peacemaker” nation-branding as a kind of “peace-washing” — an attempt by strongmen to distract from mounting domestic woes and put on a humanitarian face for the world. And yet even the most virulent of critics probably prefer that these peace initiatives exist rather than not.

It remains to be seen whether the quartet’s diplomacy contains the seeds of something more lasting. As JD Vance left the failed talks in Islamabad on Sunday morning, he hinted that a peace agreement may still be reached soon. Successful mediation in the current conflict might give the quartet the confidence and momentum necessary for a more durable bloc to take root. Either way, there is no going back to the previous state of affairs. While Iran is unlikely to succeed in forcing the full withdrawal of the US military from the Middle East, the American role will almost certainly be reduced. For those with the political will and diplomatic imagination, this should set the stage for a new order to emerge.

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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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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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. 

I thrilled to that haunting, mechanical roar. As a boy, I had been promised a future of technological marvels; here was their fulfillment. I thrilled also to images of missile stockpiles exploding and of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps headquarters vanishing in plumes of bilious smoke. I was happy to hear of Ayatollah Khamenei’s demise; and I enjoyed seeing the faces of  mullahs and Iranian military commanders crossed out by red Xs in US and Israeli online propaganda. 

There isn’t a little boy on the planet who doesn’t light up at the idea of killing the bad guys. Nor is there a man in whom something of that little boy — and his moral clarity — doesn’t live on. 

A vocal, politically diverse cohort of Americans, however, have betrayed that healthy impulse. When the ayatollah was killed, The New York Times wistfully played down his reign of terror, while the “globalize the intifada” crowd held vigils to mourn him. Rather than express relief at the regime’s decapitation, most elected Democrats have framed the joint Israeli-US campaign as an illegal, unprovoked act of aggression. Legacy media understated our successes and catastrophized missteps. The Economist, in an article headlined “Advantage Iran,” declares that “a month of bombing has achieved nothing.” Across social media, partisans of what Josh Hammer calls the “Retard Right” — dabblers in low-IQ anti-Semitic conspiracism, such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes — reinforce this narrative. They boost pro-Iran propaganda that wildly overstates the success of Iranian missile attacks on American bases and Israeli cities, while minimizing the extent of the damage the campaign has wrought on Iran’s military.

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The terror of the aged woman

By Justin Lee

The prevailing tone has not been measured, morally serious criticism of our objectives (or lack thereof) or the means chosen to achieve them, but of glee at the prospect of Trump’s — and thus America’s — failure. For Democrats, that glee anticipates a bloodbath for the GOP in the November midterms, and a third round of impeachment theater in 2027. The Retard Right is eager to see the same thing, for a different reason: they want to punish Trump for being, in their fevered telling, Benjamin Netanyahu’s servant.

This trash discourse is stealing oxygen from the conversations that matter. 

I write this as a pacifist and a Christian, who has reluctantly come to adopt the theory of the just war — in a world sometimes so fallen that all of our options are tainted with evil, we must pursue what good we can, knowing that we will ask God’s forgiveness later. In such a situation, intransigent pacifism devolves into sentimental moralism. I believe this is where we find ourselves with Iran; as a consequence, my pacifism must yield to the calculus of just-war theory.

We’ve known for some time that Iran, if it so chooses, could in a few weeks enrich enough weapons-grade uranium for up to 16 compact nuclear warheads. But the stakes have been much higher than the publicly known. Last week, when the IRGC launched two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that houses a joint US-UK military base, the world learned that Iran is capable of striking London. And setting aside the specter of nuclear weapons, as a modern, industrialized country, Iran also possesses enough cesium-137 and cobalt-60 to make any number of dirty bombs, which could be packaged into missiles capable of striking most European capitals. As an erratic regime sworn to destroy the West, this makes it an imminent threat to NATO.

To pass just-war muster, among other criteria, a war must be pursued as a last resort. But as the theologian Oliver O’Donovan explains in The Just War Revisited, “the ‘last’ resort is bounded by the last practicable moment for effective action.” On Feb. 24, Reuters reported that Tehran was in the process of acquiring supersonic anti-ship missiles from China. Had it done so before Israel and the United States attacked, the cost of engagement would have soared astronomically. Although the Trump administration has done a poor job communicating this to the American people, it does appear that we chose to strike just as the window for effective action was set to close. 

Thus far, our actions have been very effective. The war with Iran has been more one-sided than perhaps any large-scale conflict in history, with America and Israel inflicting losses on the enemy in wild disproportion to what we’ve suffered ourselves. Khamenei and more than 40 of Iran’s top-ranking officials have been killed in air strikes, as have most of the Assembly of Experts tasked with selecting his successor. By destroying Iran’s navy and neutralizing up to 90% of its ballistic capabilities, Washington has already ended Tehran’s ability to project power in the Middle East, and we’re on track to scuttle what remains of the country’s nuclear ambitions. 

What’s more, China and Russia had outfitted Iran with their most advanced defense technology, hoping that their Iranian proxy would keep Uncle Sam indefinitely bogged down in the Middle East, and thus ill-equipped to fight on other fronts. But this technology has proved utterly useless against the US military, both in Iran and Venezuela, signaling to Beijing that its ambitions in the South China Sea could be much costlier than anticipated.

These are substantive gains, and perhaps the Trump administration — notwithstanding its inconsistent messaging — will judge them sufficient. But a more decisive victory involving regime change (or at least regime moderation) is conceivable. Were that to occur, America would have direct influence over one-seventh of China’s oil imports and the ability to impede its Belt and Road Initiative, giving us plenty of leverage to dissuade it from invading Taiwan. 

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By Sohrab Ahmari

It is conceivable — yet the public discourse fails to conceive of it. We fail to celebrate our military victories; we show no pride for our military capacities; and we barely honor the fighting spirit of the men and women who serve. When the war began, the Twelver Shia death cult that controls Iran had just murdered thousands of its own citizens for protesting the regime’s abuses — yet many among us identify America as the bad guy. 

My feelings are the opposite: while I mourn the loss of innocent lives and remain wary of the war becoming protracted — especially as President Trump weighs the possibility of sending in ground troops to secure Iran’s uranium — I am also optimistic. After nearly five decades of indulging the Iranian regime’s mayhem, we have dealt it a measure of justice, and thwarted its apocalyptic aspirations. And the geopolitical scales are rebalancing in a way that may yet produce justice on an even grander scale.

A nation’s character is judged by whether it is willing to sacrifice for what it deems to be a greater good, and whether it can take pride in its own strength and do the work necessary to maintain it. There is nothing virtuous about a weak man who chooses not to fight. His choice hardly counts as one. But a strong man trained in combat who chooses peace has exercised judgment of real moral weight. These are the qualities that I hope we rediscover, and learn to nurture in the coming months. While it may be hard to see today, amid the hysteria of its opponents, Trump’s Iran war may just bring about such a transformation.

“These people” are the million-plus civilians displaced in Lebanon since fighting resumed between Israel and Hezbollah in early March. Sweeping IDF evacuation orders, encompassing most of southern Lebanon and the entirety of Beirut’s southern suburbs, have made one fifth of Lebanon’s population homeless in just a few weeks. Almost all of them are Shia Muslims. Israeli officials claim that the orders are intended to protect civilian life in their campaign against Hezbollah, creating enormous free-fire zones where bombs can fall. But Lebanon has walked, and often slipped from, a demographic tightrope many times since its founding in 1943, and to move people here is to move politics. 

All told, Lebanon is just half the size of Wales. Within its borders, Sunni and Shia Muslims, Druze, and Christians from 12 denominations share space, resources and control. Syria’s civil war saw Lebanon take in more than a million refugees, most of whom remain today. This diversity creates a mix so febrile that Lebanon hasn’t risked a census since 1932, fearing that the demographic assumptions upon which so much of Lebanese society is based might be proved wrong. In this, history is a warning. The demographic upset caused by an influx of Palestinian refugees, after Israel’s founding in 1948, was a big factor in the start of Lebanon’s own civil war from 1975. 

Lebanon’s confessional politics, designed to prevent the ascendance of one group over another, represents the chaotic web of invisible frontiers that span the country. Delineated by religion, history, fear and periodic violence, these frontiers split regions, encircle cities, isolate neighborhoods, and divide even the tiniest of villages. They are marked by roads, rivers and mountains but an uninformed visitor might remain oblivious to crossing them. Like a vase that has shattered and been repaired, Lebanon will break along the same lines if it falls again. Israel knows this well — and is pushing the vase to the very edge of the shelf.

Zahlé is a border town on one of these invisible frontiers. Founded around 300 ago, it is young by the standards of the Levant. Its position on the main Damascus-Beirut highway quickly made it prosperous, and it is now the third-largest town in Lebanon and the largest Christian city in the Middle East. Behind it, to the west, the heights of Mount Lebanon separate it from Beirut and the sea. To the east, the Bekaa Valley stretches out towards the anti-Lebanon and Syria. 

The vast majority of Zahliots are Melkite Catholic and Maronite, aligning the city culturally and politically with the Christian communities of Mount Lebanon and Beirut. But Beirut lies on the other side of the mountain, over a hair-raisingly narrow and potholed road that regularly closes in the winter. Economically, it has stronger links with the Bekaa, where the majority of the population is Shia and the rule of law is superseded by a complex mix of clan dynamics and Hezbollah hegemony. An oft-repeated saying here holds that Zahlé has its heart in Beirut but its stomach in the Bekaa.

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As well as running his restaurant, a simple spot offering grilled-chicken sandwiches and plates of hummus and salad, Masaad has been a mukhtar for 30 years. Mukhtars operate as local registrars, responsible for issuing official paperwork for a village or neighborhood. They are also important community figures, intimately familiar with their wards. When I ask Masaad what his constituents are afraid of, he looks incredulous, as though the question is profoundly stupid. “What are they afraid of? Everything! People are displaced, the state is broken, the banks took everyone’s money. The people most at risk are the ones at the extremities. Look, when it snows and the high roads get closed, the government opens the roads to the ski resorts but they don’t open the road to Zahlé.”

Lebanon’s recent history — one of socioeconomic collapse; massive, but ultimately failed, reform protests; the apocalyptic port explosion of 2020; soaring poverty and war — has made brittle even the glue sealing its cracks. Masaad’s comment about ski resorts references a deep well of resentment, as a thin slice of Lebanese society lives the good life while most struggle to get by. The state is seen as utterly impotent, the banks as thieves. Few are impressed by sectarian leaders who have achieved little but decline for decades, and their patronage is turned to as a last resort. Asked if Zahlé can rely on support from the Christian political parties, Masaad — a Christian himself — waves his hand derisively. “Curse the Christians, they all hate each other.”

In this atmosphere of abandonment and internal estrangement, the Israeli strategy of isolating Hezbollah and its base risks tipping Lebanon into all-out civil strife. Israeli messaging directed at Lebanon has, since the first round of this war in 2024, strenuously tried to frame its campaign as against Hezbollah, not Lebanon. So strenuously, in fact, that it has sometimes achieved an air of surreal gaslighting. On 13 March, an Israel aircraft dropped leaflets over Beirut urging the Lebanese to reject Hezbollah. “This land is yours,” they proclaimed. Yet within days, senior Israeli figures were advocating for the annexation of swathes of southern Lebanon. “The current war in Lebanon must end with a radical change,” said Israeli finance minister Bezelal Smotrich. “The Litani must be our new border with the state of Lebanon.” That river meets the sea some 19 miles inside Lebanese territory.

As Michael Young explains, that’s part of a broader strategy. “Hezbollah is a force that’s anchored deeply in the Shia community,” says the senior editor at the Carnegie Middle East Center. “What the Israelis are trying to do is break the relationship of the Shia community with a specific geographical area in which Hezbollah had created a virtual state within a state.” In Young’s view, the goals of this strategy stop short of pushing Lebanon into civil war. “They understand that they need to restrict Hezbollah within a broader society that can contain it and make it weaker, but they know that if you destroy all of Lebanon, the force that’s most likely to emerge from that is Hezbollah.”

Hezbollah was born in the wreckage of Lebanon’s last civil war, in conditions that appear eerily similar to those emerging today. Back in the early Seventies, the country’s Shia community lacked effective political representation, and therefore didn’t receive the same level of state resources and protection as sects boasting more entrenched political networks. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, aiming to remove the threat posed by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, which had gained a firm foothold in the south. The insults and injuries of occupation were a galvanizing force for Shia communities. The Bekaa Valley, where the grip of occupation forces was looser, became a base for a patchwork collection of resistance groups.

The then-new Islamist regime in Iran saw an opportunity in the nascent Shia resistance forming in the Bekaa. Revolutionary Guard advisers and resources were sent to Lebanon, where they trained and organized these groups until, eventually, they coalesced into Hezbollah. As well as resisting Israeli occupation and attacking Western interests in Lebanon — a suicide truck bomb in 1983 killed 241 US Marines in Beirut — Hezbollah sought to fulfill the unmet needs of the Shia, providing services, employment and welfare. In this way they established their “state within a state”.

Even as the party became the dominant political force in the country, Hezbollah continued to lean heavily on a vision of the Shia as a sidelined minority. For the past decade or so, this narrative may have been more rhetoric than reality, but Israel’s attacks have now plunged the Shia community back into poverty. Today, in Christian East Beirut, housewives in yoga gear drink $10 matchas and complain about the whine of IDF surveillance drones overhead. A few hundred meters away, West Beirut is covered in the tents of Shia displaced from the south, sitting in the rain and wondering if they will ever be able to return home — or if they even have a home to return to.

Alongside the violent reopening of a class wound that never truly healed, another occupation appears imminent. Israel has massed forces on the border and started an incursion intended to create what it euphemistically calls a “security zone” up to the Litani. Even if Smotrich’s threat of annexation doesn’t happen, that would still constitute an occupation of 10% of Lebanon’s territory.

In short, the conditions are forming for a disastrous sectarian collapse. If Israel is hoping to defeat Hezbollah, and then deal with a neutered-but-coherent Lebanese state, they may have underestimated just how much the country has fragmented. That fragility is everywhere, running through every crack and seam of society.

The further you get from the invisible frontiers, the more this fragility has bloomed into fear. In Christian Ashrafieh, an affluent Beirut neighborhood of colonial-era villas and French restaurants, I’ve heard people say that they “hope the Israelis can finish the job we started.” Or, referring to the displaced, “How can they expect us to live with these people?” There are also many in Ashrafieh, especially among the young, who have set up kitchens and donation drives for displaced families. But they are battling a strong underlying sense that the war is happening because of another group, a somehow less Lebanese group. 

In Zahlé, where daily life demands interaction, these tensions are expressed more subtly, and are tempered by pragmatism. Salim Ghazale, Zahlé’s mayor, is a civil engineer who has spent most of his career working on infrastructure projects in the Gulf. He returned to Lebanon and ran for the mayoralty in 2025, bringing a desire to “help build the state” and a project manager’s zeal for efficiency. “We learned lessons from the fighting in 2024 and set up crisis management committees to prepare months ago,” he tells me with pride. “We leaned on the municipal police to vet people arriving. Nobody wants to take in Hezbollah.”

Zahlé is currently hosting around 6,500 internally displaced people (IDPs), mostly from the Bekaa, and Ghazale claims that the process has been smooth so far. “We don’t want to burn any bridges,” he says. “Zahliots own a lot of land in Shia-dominated areas in the Bekaa and we process a lot of the agricultural produce from there.” 

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Despite Zahlé’s calm, there are signs of caution. More municipal police officers than usual are visible on the street. At the large roundabout, where traffic exits the Beirut-Damascus highway, a technician is up a ladder installing a new set of surveillance cameras. Once again, it seems clear that these suspicions have been nurtured by Israeli tactics. In 2024, IDF bombing also focused on predominantly Shia areas. But there were several attacks on IDPs who had taken shelter in remote Christian-majority villages in the north, notably Aitou. These strikes were widely read as a warning against taking people in, compounding existing sectarian paranoia.

Nor is it just the sectarian seam that’s so evident in Zahlé. Some here also lament an absent or obstructive state. “I don’t think there is an issue of integration in these frontier communities,” is how Ghazale puts it. “The problem is how to bring them back into the state.” At the same time, though, the mayor seems equally frustrated when government flexes its muscles. Local municipalities send their tax revenue to Beirut, from where it is redistributed nationally. Ghazale claims that successful, tax-paying communities are effectively penalized under this system, held in hock to towns with whom they feel no affinity. “Financial decentralization would allow communities to decide how they live,” he says, “If you want to live Kandahar-style, you can. If you want to live Beirut-style, you can.”

That acid allusion to the Taliban aside, the real threat to Lebanon’s future is revealed in this contradiction. Sectarian tensions are historic, deep and inflamed by the current war, inequality severe and entrenched. But when even the most state-oriented communities in Lebanon view the government as deadweight or worse, it is hard to see how Lebanon can maintain its coherence in the face of the Israeli war machine.

Because Lebanon’s sectarian power blocks are often identified as synonymous with religious identity — Sunni, Shia, Christian, Druze — it is easy to think that politics and religion are identical here. The reality, of course, is more complicated than that. There are priests and imams who preach division and those who preach reconciliation. In Zahlé’s church of Saydit al Najat (Our Lady of Salvation), the approach to the town’s soul is as reasonable as its mayor’s approach to crisis management.

“As a church we keep saying that we are Lebanese and must support each other and pray for everyone affected,” says Father Elie Maalouf before he delivers his mass. “The trouble is, before there were shared goals. Today everybody is working towards their own ends.” He looks tired as he finishes rolling a cigarette and pours himself another coffee from a thermos, as though there is nothing new in this story. “From long ago Israel has tried to divide. We tell people to be aware of this because when they leave we will still be living together.”

Later on, Zahliots gather in the church for the evening mass, coats and hair damp from the chilly rain that has been falling all day. The congregation is subdued, drowned out by the grandeur of the church’s interior. The fresco that circles the walls was painted by two artists. One Russian, one Ukrainian; their work completed before those two communities collapsed into war. There is an air of grim determination in the rituals of the mass, fitting for this orderly, independent-minded town that finds itself neither here nor there.

Leo has been increasingly explicit, over recent weeks, about condemning the conflict in Iran. His Palm Sunday words have been interpreted as a rebuke specifically to those within the Trump administration who seem keen to accord the conflict a religious edge. I can see how people might think so when Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, was recently reported praying: “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation”, and imploring God to grant his soldiers “wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy”.

Was this what prompted the Pope to tell the crowd in St Peter’s Square, on Sunday, that “Christ, King of Peace, cries out again from his cross: ‘God is love! Have mercy!’”? In other contexts, the Pope has been happy to address military personnel, such as Italy’s Military Ordinariate; Roman Catholicism also has a lengthy and well-developed theory on what comprises “just war”.

But several notable Catholic Americans, considerably more Right-aligned than Pope Leo, have also expressed concerns over the justice of this war: either reserving judgment, or outright condemning it. What, in turn, this points to is a fairly recent but important change, internal to a bloc that American secular liberals used to treat as monolithic and also, they hoped, moribund: conservative Christians. Specifically, the growing influence of Catholics on the American Right — and in particular, theological differences that risk widening into real-world political fissures, catalyzed by the war in Iran.

The relationship between Roman Catholicism and America has never been entirely comfortable. The original Pilgrim Fathers were Puritan radicals, and the newly founded United States inherited their aversion to papal authority. Tensions reached boiling point in the 19th century, with a large influx of Catholic migrants to the USA from Germany and Ireland, leading to animosity and some anti-Catholic violence. Though this later eased, an era of relative indifference to Catholic Americans arguably just reflected their largely working-class status, and hence comparative lack of political clout.

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More recently, though, elite conservative America has grown steadily more Catholic, both in its politicians and also its intelligentsia. Vice-President JD Vance is a Catholic convert; Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a cradle Catholic. Six of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices are Catholic. A number of the influential New Right thinkers whose ideas have powered the Trumpist caucus, such as Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule, are also Catholic.

And as highly educated, politically agentic Catholics have grown more numerous and influential in the USA, so the most influential Catholic of all is now also American: Leo XIV. But this sense of tentative rapprochement between the Church of Rome and the most constitutively Protestant of modern polities is now showing signs of tension — especially as it encroaches on the political instincts of the nation’s heartland Evangelical Christians.

This faultline has been thrown into relief by the war in Iran. From the outset, that conflict has been a joint US-Israeli operation, founded on the longstanding alliance between these nations. And while this is driven partly by resource and security concerns, in the view of many Evangelical Christians it also has a religious dimension. The secular liberal press has been keen to play this up, publishing pieces highlighting the religious views of Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, presumably with the aim of painting him as an irrational fanatic. But there’s also a grain of truth to it, in the sense that many Evangelical American Christians view Israel as having a special prophetic significance.

The suggested real-world corollary of this varies accordingly, but has often helped to underpin American support for Israel. Perhaps most prominently, the Dispensationalist method of Biblical exegesis, popularized in the 19th century by John Nelson Darby, interpreted the nation of Israel as a key centerpiece in the prophetic narrative of Jesus’ second coming. 

There are variations on dispensationalism, but the core of it is that Scripture should be interpreted literally, and God’s plan for the world is twin-track: one destiny for the elect of the church, and another for the nation of Israel, which will unfold once the elect are taken up in the Rapture. After this, a great struggle will ensue with Antichrist, in which the existing geopolitical nations will play an important role — especially Israel. This epic final struggle will end in the return of Jesus, with his already-raptured saints, to lead a thousand-year earthly reign as prophesied in the Book of Revelation.

It’s hard to say how many American Christians hold to some part of this worldview. The prophetic sensibility, and the millenarian feel, has arguably been baked in since the pilgrim days of Protestant radicalism. But, importantly, for the most part this broader strain of Christian thought tends to view Israel as both a legitimate state and people, with a right to exist, and also as having sacred significance.

A great many real-world political consequences flow from this. For example, in 2018, Hegseth suggested that a Jewish temple might one day be rebuilt on Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was statement clearly referencing prophecies in both Jewish and Christian traditions — but challenging to Muslims given this is currently the site of Al-Aqsa mosque, a sacred site in Islam. Prophecies concerning the destruction and reconstruction of temples in this location form an ongoing religious backbeat to conflict in the region. Hegseth has reportedly moved away from dispensationalism, toward more “postmilennial” views, but is likely to be aware of such narratives.

By contrast, the Roman Catholic view on Middle Eastern geopolitics tends to take a less prescriptive, or literalist line. As formalized in the Catechism published after the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), a special theological link exists between the historic peoples of Israel and the Catholic Church. But, importantly, within Catholic thought the theological descent from Judaism has not generally been taken to imply specific political obligations, or prophecies concerning events in the temporal world. The modern Church is emphatic about condemning any policy that might legitimize antisemitic bigotry, but stops short of the prophetic account of Israel embraced, for example, by dispensationalists.

Thus, there is often more reticence among Roman Catholics than Evangelicals on the matter of active political involvement in the Middle East. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, for example, that JD Vance is widely viewed as the most skeptical voice in Trump’s administration as regards ongoing American involvement in Iran.

This is where Pope Leo appears to be coming from when he speaks out against the war. Explicitly: that Christians ought to aspire to peace and brotherhood, not war. And, perhaps, implicitly: that there is nothing of special Biblical significance about this war. It’s just a war, and peace is better.

The challenge for faithful Catholics in this context is treading the acutely politicized line between prophetic accounts of real-world politics, and allowing reticence to slip, due to crude thinking or lack of charity, into hostility toward Jewish people. In the case of the commentator Candace Owens, a Catholic convert, this appears to have become highly conspiratorial, albeit by now at best ambivalently Catholic (Leo XIV has spoken out repeatedly against giving harbor to antisemitism).

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Trump's betrayal of his base

By Mary Harrington

Recently, too, the former Miss USA Carrie Prejean Boller was removed from Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission after a heated argument with a Jewish commission member on Zionism. Boller is a recent Catholic convert from Evangelical Christianity, but was later taken to task by the conservative American bishop Robert Barron, also a member of that commission, for her intemperate behavior.

Perhaps in a spirit of seeking to resolve these tensions, not long after the Boller brouhaha Jay Richards, a Heritage Foundation fellow (and another Catholic convert) published a careful effort at disambiguation, in a DC Catholic publication, on the various types of Zionism. If this all sounds too inside-baseball for words, the takeaway should be that an American Right that was once overwhelmingly Evangelical or WASP is now adapting, on the hoof, to the presence and considerable influence of homegrown American Catholics, whose perspective on long-settled matters interacts in sometimes surprising ways with existing currents of American Christian belief.

Careful bridge-building of Richards’ kind may yet achieve a new accommodation. But one thing that seems likely as a consequence of this is ongoing internal disagreement within the American Right on how literally, or indeed militarily, Biblical prophecy should be pursued in the Holy Land. In his article on Zionism, Richards suggests the apocalyptic account of Israel that emerged from dispensational cultures is viewed among other Christian denominations as “over-reading, if not misreading, of often cryptic biblical texts”. This careful phrasing, by a seasoned Washington philosopher-politico, is the kind of muted admonition that can translate down the line into substantial differences of view on the best course of action.

Historically, as a majority-Protestant nation, America has not accorded much weight to what the Pope says. Should Catholic influence continue to rise within the Land of the Free, might that change? Would this even count for much, set against the calculations on resources and trade routes empires have to make to preserve their might? Who knows.

But it’s not impossible that, should the balance of power continue to shift between Catholic and Evangelical decision-makers, so too in time the American diplomatic stance in relation to the Middle East may also become less interventionist. In the meantime, the bombs keep falling; and I dare say, in Rome, Leo XIV will continue to pray for peace.

Speaking not to the American people, but to the Saudi Future Investment Initiative Conference in Miami Beach, Trump went on to show officials from the Persian Gulf region a video clip proclaiming his “100% approval rating” — without noting that it came from a single poll gauging the views of self-described “MAGA Republicans” — before declaring that “Cuba’s next, by the way, but pretend I didn’t say that please.” 

Welcome to the Boomer-uncle war, launched with calamitously vague objectives not mainly because the president fell in thrall to Israeli influence — but because he embodies a broken American gerontocracy: an aging generation of leaders whose perceptions of America’s relative power are stuck in the halcyon 1980s and ’90s; and whose yearning for the war spectacles of old is now fulfilled by short online clips, long-term strategic considerations be damned.

Trump’s wartime command closely resembles the Boomer uncle who can’t help himself from scrolling through social-media reels at the Easter dinner table. His briefings as commander in chief now reportedly consist of two-minute-long highlight reels that show “stuff getting blown up,” as NBC News recently reported. His attention can only be permeated by ever-escalating spectacle, chasing the high of a more intense “fire, boom, fire, boom.” An anonymous White House official has told the media that the president’s efforts to end the conflict are likewise driven by the fact that he’s “bored and wants to move on.” 

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Netanyahu’s attack on US diplomacy

By Heather Penatzer

The trouble is that this time, someone else besides MAGA Boomers gets a vote: namely, the Tehran regime. The Iranians, of course, are good at spectacle and even social-media “dunking” — witness Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf’s post trolling CENTCOM over the destruction of an AWACS command-and-control aircraft (“caused by a clogged kitchen pipe”). But for the Islamic Republic, the trolling and spectacle serve a larger strategic imperative: to impose high enough costs on Washington and Jerusalem to prevent a third “excursion,” even if this means Iran taking a bad beating, too.

The same cannot be said for the Boomer uncle in charge in Washington. Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that “war is the continuation of politics by other means.” He meant that war itself isn’t an outcome, but rather the means to achieve some political end or range of ends. So what has been the political end pursued by the American military “excursion” in Iran? Trump himself doesn’t seem to know.  

Since the initial American attack on Feb. 28, Trump and his administration have continually moved the goalposts. First it was to support regime change — empowering the Iranian people to control their own “destiny,” as Trump put it in his early-morning speech announcing the war. Then we were told that this was actually an exercise in Venezuelan-style coercive decapitation, in which we would keep the regime in place and continue to assassinate successors to Ayatollah Khameinei until we “find another Delcy [Rodriguez],” in reference to the Maduro deputy tapped to lead that country as an American cat’s paw. 

Later, the objective was to destroy Iranian long-range missile capabilities and to destroy the Iranian nuclear program that we were told had been “obliterated” last June in the course of the 12-Day War. Still later, the war became about reopening the Strait of Hormuz — a problem that didn’t exist prior to American military action. “The objective of the war has become undoing the consequence of the war,” as one online wit put it, adding: “the stupidest war in history.” Most recently, the State Department struck reopening Hormuz from the list of objectives, reprising instead the destruction of capability, which is a tactic not a political objective.

This inability to articulate strategic goals is mirrored by the administration’s failure to consider the consequences of action. While the early pro-war motto of “you can just do things” may be true, it risks obscuring an important countervailing fact: namely, that others can do things, too. Iran’s closure of the strait and the resulting disruption of the global economy weren’t unexpected to anyone paying attention; the IRGC had been preparing for decades to close that chokepoint in response to an invasion. The 2023-2024 Houthi attacks on a similar bottleneck in the Red Sea demonstrated the asymmetry in costs for this type of conflict, showing how relatively cheap projectiles can become overwhelming for expensive and high-tech American weaponry.  

We knew these things before Feb. 28, just as we knew that the Islamic Republic would be preparing for another attack after last June’s incursion. The economic fallout from both the closure of the strait and the destruction of petrochemical infrastructure isn’t yet clear, but one thing is certain: despite the weak attempts to spin this in Trump’s favor, no one benefits more from this disruption than China and Russia. The former, China, is seeing a boost to its renewables industry (Trump scrapped US investments in America’s analog); the latter, Russia, is making a mint from oil sales since Team Trump un-sanctioned its exports (and some of Tehran’s oil exports, as well).

Speaking of China and Russia, both are likely celebrating America’s fumbling pivot back to the Middle East. Apart from the asymmetric impact of the energy crisis, the depletion of US missile stockpiles and relocation of materiel from East Asia have underscored the brittleness of American hegemony. Notably, THAAD air-defense systems are being removed from South Korea (a state with whom America has a formal defense alliance) for use in Israel (with whom Washington has no such alliance). 

More than 25% of America’s THAAD stockpile was used last summer to defend the Jewish state following Benjamin Netanyahu’s attack on Iran in June. Such depletion harms the US ability to project power and defend allies in other regions. Plus, the rapid exhaustion of long-range interceptors and air defense should be alarming for anyone who genuinely believes that there is a threat to the American homeland. While America may not “run out of bombs,” it is running short on the expensive, sophisticated weaponry and radar that enable US air-defense systems.  Replacing these stockpiles will take years, and is also dependent on rare-earth minerals, of which China controls a significant portion of the global supply (98%, in the case of gallium).

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Bibi’s ‘existential’ obsession

By Amir Tibon

So what have these expenditures won? No faction on the American Right should be content. For the America First populists: skyrocketing prices and a pivot away from domestic issues such as immigration, poverty, and addiction. For the defenders of Western Civilization: a degradation of those distinctive values the West claims to represent, as the US increasingly takes up Israel’s Gaza-style methods and rhetoric (“maximum lethality, not legality,” to quote Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s edifying hip-hop rhyme glorying in a new disregard for the laws of war). For the congressional Republicans who have largely ceded legislative power to the executive: a newly energized Democratic Party likely to capitalize on these blunders come November. And even for the neoconservatives and pro-Israel hawks: no regime change, no democracy, and collapsing primacy. 

None of these groups should trust that Trump will advance their policy aims, for he has no ideology but spectacle. For a man whose life has been so defined by pageantry and performance, the crowning achievement of his presidency is shattering the illusion of American invincibility.  Like a dying animal lashing out, this paroxysm is more pathetic than powerful. 

Yes, those who influenced Trump bear some blame: from the ultra-hawkish Sen. Lindsey Graham (who used childish word-association games to persuade Trump that he’d clinch a Lincolnian or Rooseveltian legacy by invading Iran); to overconfident Israeli intelligence that recently prompted Vice President JD Vance to dress down Bibi (for overselling an Iranian uprising). Yet the buck stops at the Oval Office and the Resolute Desk: susceptibility to such pressures demonstrates just how unsuited to lead Trump has become.  

Anyone who can be manipulated by Graham belongs in a care facility rather than the Oval Office, and those who continue to enable such embarrassment deserve to answer for the damage they’ve done. As long as Trump continues to seek the next “boom,” the next war, too, will have no political purpose beyond perverse spectacle.

It is hard to imagine today the degree of optimism everybody had about the war when Helmuth von Moltke, the German military commander, executed a version of the Schlieffen plan. Kaiser Wilhelm II told his soldiers: “You will be home before the leaves fall from the trees.” Young men left their jobs to go to the front. Older men, like the German sociologist Max Weber, lamented their inability to fight. In Britain, too, the general expectation was that the war would be “over by Christmas”. Trump predicted that the Iran war would last four to five weeks. We are now in week five.

Initially, in 1914, Germany’s war went according to plan. The Germans pushed through Belgium, encountering British forces near Mons, and then moved quickly over the border into France, pushing the French and British armies some 250km to the south. The Germans came within 40km of Paris. But the seeds of failure were already sown. They advanced, but they failed to surround the city. The quick encirclement – Schlieffen’s grand plan — did not happen.

As the Canadian historian Holger Herwig writes in The Marne 1914 about the Schlieffen plan: “It was a single roll of the dice. There was no fallback, no Plan B. Speed was critical; delay was death. Every available soldier, active or reserve, was deployed from the first day of mobilization. The sounds and sights of two million men trudging across Belgium and northeastern France with their kit, guns, and horses in sweltering 30-degree heat, stifling humidity and suffocating dust was stunning, and frightening.”

And herein lies the problem with grand strategy: it unravels on contact with the unexpected. Reality has a nasty habit of sabotaging even the most carefully laid plans. As Herwig tells it, the German troops were simply not prepared for the summer heat.

The Franco-British counter-offensive started on September 6 with the Battle of the Marne, the single most consequential battle of the First World War. Essentially, the Allied Forces managed to split the two German armies, the one that came from the north towards Paris, and the other further east. On September 9, the Germans began a general retreat, and by September 12 they had fallen back to the Aisne in the north. This was the beginning of the trench warfare that would dominate the Western Front for another four years. It ended with Germany’s total exhaustion, militarily and financially.

Historians have examined in great detail why Germany, the military and economic superpower of its time, lost the war. But the most important reason was apparent in those first six weeks: there was no plan B. The Schlieffen plan did not account for the weather. Nor did it consider what might happen if the war dragged on: acute supply difficulties.

Donald Trump, too, has no plan B. In fact, it’s hard to decipher if he ever had a plan A — whether it was toppling Iran’s government, weakening its nuclear capabilities or crushing its regional influence. Certainly, the American decapitation strategy succeeded at a purely technical level; Khamenei was killed in the opening strikes. But Trump’s bombardment underestimated the enemy, who was swift to escalate matters. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked the Gulf states allied to the US and Israel. And it hit the US where it is most vulnerable: its reliance on the global economy and the global financial markets. I concluded a while ago that the West is so dependent on imported raw materials that it is not in a position to fight any substantial wars – with countries like Iran, Russia or China. So it is proving.

This was also the case for Germany in 1914: it was very strong, but also extremely vulnerable to supply shocks. Germany produced around 70% of its food domestically, and was dependent on imports for fertilizers and intermediate goods. It’s a familiar story. Today, the West is running into shortages of helium and urea, essential for the production of semiconductors and fertilizer respectively.  

This is something military planners, then and today, rarely have in their blueprints. Von Schlieffen and von Moltke were members of the aristocracy. They were focused on the big picture. They had little interest in the grubby business of mines and heavy industry. Similarly, the US military did not consider that there might be supply shortages for radars or interceptors. If the likes of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have one advantage over us, it is that they understand raw materials and supply chains at a much deeper level than we do.

At the weekend, things escalated further. The Houthis, who control large parts of Yemen, entered the conflict with an attack on Israel. If the Houthis were to close the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, where the Red Sea passes through to the Gulf of Aden, the world would be on the verge of its biggest oil and supply-chain crisis ever. Around 30% of global container shipping passes through the Suez Canal.

There are also important differences to the First World War. But these are not necessarily comforting. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 also started with a miscalculation leading to a long war of attrition that is yet to conclude. But unlike Germany in 1918, Russia is nowhere near the point of exhaustion — precisely because it has sounder supply chains.

Europeans have recently been framing the debate about their security solely in terms of the Russia-Ukraine war. They fear a Russian attack more than anything else. A far more immediate vulnerability, however, is their energy dependence. There are plausible scenarios of acute energy shortages ahead. The greater threat from China is not that it sells us cheap cars, but that it might stop selling us rare earth metals.

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Trump's war is Europe's problem

By Wolfgang Munchau

I always thought the Americans were strategically smarter than Europeans. That was indeed the case for the US-led postwar world order. But I didn’t factor in Donald Trump. He is clearly not a strategic global actor. And he is currently blowing up whatever goodwill he has in the Middle East on a war with no concrete goal or exit strategy. The best outcome right now would be one in which Iran agreed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and not to pursue a nuclear program. But this is essentially a return to the status quo of 2015, when the Iran nuclear deal was agreed — probably Europe’s last foreign policy success story. As part of this deal, Iran accepted limits on its nuclear program, like a cut in its stockpiles of enriched uranium. It was Trump who left the accord.

If the goal of this war is to effect regime change, then, a ground invasion will be required. This may yet come to pass: the Pentagon is already preparing for such an eventuality. But to succeed, such an invasion would have to be of an order of magnitude bigger than Iraq. We are talking about First World War levels of troops. With reserves, Iran has around one million troops. If the US puts 10,000 “boots on the ground”, this is not going to result in regime change. And if, as is mooted, Trump were to invade Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf, Iran’s core oil export hub, the Iranian and the Houthis would hit back at oil and gas infrastructure elsewhere in the Middle East.

I am sure that US and Israeli strategists have more information available to them than even the best-informed commentators. But as the hard-fought experience of past wars shows, information does not prevent leaders from making mistakes.

Perhaps the single most important lesson of the First World War, then, is that you should not base your strategy on a single roll of a dice, as Herwig put it. Smart gamblers know that too. I always thought that, for all his many faults, Trump was a smart gambler. But in this war, which is far from over, the cards are stacked against him.

A week before the Iraq War began, in the middle of the night, I got on a filthy, retired Greyhound bus commandeered by unreformed communists. Together we went to an anti-war protest on the Washington Mall. Roughly 50,000 people showed up. In the days before smartphones, it was easy for mainstream media outlets to downplay resistance to the war, or indeed pretend it didn’t exist. Many supported the Iraq War, but just as many did not. Either way, back in those lost pre-smartphone days, the country argued, protested, debated heavily and often. Many politicians and journalists embarrassed themselves repeating Bush propaganda. For good and for ill, talk about the war was everywhere, and that’s just not the case now.

Now, though, American politics now operates in a post-kayfabe era. In the sweaty, steroid-filled world of professional wrestling, “kayfabe” refers to the meticulously maintained illusion that everything in the ring is real: the melodramatic rivalries, the improbable alliances, the blood feuds. Up until the late Nineties, wrestling promoters protected this illusion because they believed the entire spectacle would crumble if the audience understood that the whole thing was choreographed. But as the new millennium dawned, rising public cynicism meant wrestling bosses stopped trying to hide the truth: and instead asked the audience to just embrace the ludicrous nature of the spectacle.

Something similar has happened in American politics under Trump — yet unlike what liberal politicians and commentators seem to believe, the fall of American kayfabe was inevitable. Trump was merely the conduit for obscene forces already at work within American institutions. The Iraq War, in many ways, was the last great performance of American political kayfabe. For anyone paying attention, the pretexts for the war in Iraq were comical — but at least people were paying attention. More than that, the government still felt obligated to construct a coherent narrative for war, the media still treated political messaging as something that needed to be defended, and the public still believed that exposing lies might actually change policy. The performance had not yet collapsed; the audience was still expected to believe the show was real.

In the post-liberal, post-kayfabe era of American politics, not only is the public too preoccupied with the latest happenings in their social media algorithms, nearly everyone has given up on the idea that American politics is anything other than the theater of the absurd. No one embodies that oeuvre better than Donald Trump himself. From his Dadaesque speeches to his frat-boy mannerisms, nearly everything about Trump is larger than life, beyond belief, and too much to bear. The President is the very definition of “over the top” — the living, breathing singularity of absurdity. The gravity of Trump’s supreme ridiculousness pulls nearly everything and everyone into its orbit, then down into a dark psychic funnel of confusion where we must constantly ask ourselves, “Wait, did he really say that?” “Is he doing what I think he’s doing?” “This man is our President — is it all a joke?”

It’s tempting, of course, to compare all this with previous debacles. Wasn’t Dubya a joke too? Well, it’s true that the Iran War, Iraq, and even Vietnam feel similar in their dubious justifications and blood-stained pointlessness. Nonetheless, the trajectory of this latest war continues to evolve along its own absurd imperial logic. Unlike with Lyndon Johnson, after all, no longer does the American president seem to care if the public deeply opposes the war, nor even if the Wilsonian pretense of “making the world safe for democracy” is even halfway believable. Trump simply proceeds as if his own population’s reservations didn’t exist, unabashedly pursuing not national self-interest but something closer to an nth-generation copy of “national self-interest” distorted through a childhood game of telephone.

Don’t believe me? Just compare Condoleezza Rice’s justification of the Iraq War:

The Iraqis are building weapons of mass destruction, we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud — pass it on.

To Trump’s meanderings on Iran:

We are in the “final moments” to prevent Iran from getting a nukes… Not good… Not good.

So while it’s tempting to laugh, everything about the Trump era has been characterized not by comedy, but what late-stage Soviet anthropologist Alex Yurchak called “hypernormalisation”, a concept made famous by Adam Curtis in his 2016 film of the same name. Little could have been more prescient than Curtis seizing on this idea right before Trump took office.

“Hypernormalisation” describes the idea that during the later stages of a dying empire, politics becomes defined by bureaucratic ritualism, ideological decay, and surreal, performative politics. All the elites inside the Soviet Union knew that the leadership was lying. Eventually, by the early to mid-Eighties, Soviet citizens did too. The fraud of the whole system was obvious and undeniable. But nearly everyone went along with the charade anyway, because there was simply nothing else to be done. My fellow Americans: we are here. We know the language is fake, the justifications are recycled, and the outcomes are predictable, yet the machinery continues anyway.

Who, besides the most MAGA diehards, believe that the war in Iran is necessary, much less worth its absurd economic consequences? Whether it’s the price of gas at the pump, the inflation of everyday goods, or the possibility of food shortages due to the absence of necessary fertilizers, all of these downstream effects of the war in Iran are likely to be more economically consequential than anything that ever occurred because of Vietnam or Iraq. Yet Americans still can barely look up from their hand-held gambling apps and TikTok feeds to muster concern. Even as its consequences become intimate, the war feels distant and immovable.

A majority of Americans disapprove of the war in Iran. An even greater majority want the war to end quickly. Only 25% approved of the initial air strikes that launched the war in the first place. Practically speaking, no one other than true-believer followers of Trump and Netanyahu wants what’s currently happening. Unfortunately Trump’s constant breaking of every norm of political etiquette over the last decade has so turned up the dial that Americans — and everyone on Earth — have been lulled into accepting it as normal.

Certainly, we all seem completely uninterested in trying to mobilize any kind of serious opposition. In the early days of Trump’s ascendancy, the Democrats and their legions of legacy-media allies jumped the gun so many times trying to portray Trump as a “fascist” and a “threat to democracy” — long before anything substantial actually took place — that we’ve all become numb to the grotesquely out-of-control actions now actually happening inside Trump’s White House. On Monday, according to the Financial Times, over $580 million in financial bets were made on the oil futures just 15 minutes before the President’s announcement of supposedly “productive conversations” with Iran.

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By B. Duncan Moench

Whether it was someone in the Trump family or their friends or confidantes, whoever made these futures trades likely made out with more than $1 billion in profit. All this insider-trading corruption surrounding the White House has followed a distinct pattern throughout Trump’s second administration, including polymarket bets made prior to the conflict in Venezuela. While nearly every American I know is financially struggling, our political insiders extract generational wealth by gambling on events they control from start to finish.

In “normal” times — when the country wasn’t at war, facing mass job losses, or runaway inflation — these corruption scandals, which are worse than anything that happened under Nixon, would dominate the discourse. But Democrats and their media allies conducted perhaps the greatest “Boy Who Cried Wolf” campaign in modern Western politics. Long before Trump took office, they declared him an existential threat in the most alarmist terms possible. After a while, everyone stopped listening, which only contributed to our current hypernormalisation. Everything is always the “end of democracy” — and so nothing ever is.

Six months ago, when Pete Hegseth pushed for the Department of Defense to change its name back to the Department of War, it seemed little more than a perverse stunt. But, in fact, it couldn’t fit better with our new post-liberal, post-kayfabe reality. Just seven months later, Trump and Hegseth launched the most aggressive and unpopular war in the nation’s history and yet few Americans believe there’s anything to be done about it. That’s hypernormalization working its magic. The spectacle becomes so overwhelming, so frenzied, so totalizing, that you stop seeing it as a performance and start forgetting there was ever anything else.

The dystopia of the Iran war, then, is not that it began on illegal grounds, or that the justification for it barely makes any sense, or even that most Americans oppose it. Its dystopia lies in that none of this seems to matter. The machinery of the American empire now runs independent of public opinion, political norms, or even coherent rhetoric. Maybe Trump will “TACO” and wrap up the conflict in the next few weeks. Or maybe, to cover up his failure to anticipate the difficulties of the war, Trump will be the first head of state to drop a nuclear weapon post-Nagasaki. Who knows.

In 21st-century America, our wars begin, they spur corporate profiteering, and then presidential cronies suck billions out of our economic system placing bets on events only they can accurately anticipate. Everyone knows all this is happening, but the response is not outrage or protest — it’s total resignation. This is what hypernormalization looks like in practice. A society that knows what is happening, knows it is absurd, knows it cannot last, and yet continues behaving as if everything is perfectly normal. But, hey, maybe there’s something good on Paramount plus. I hear they’re merging with HBO Max, that might be alright… or unimaginably terrible. Who knows.