There’s every chance, here, that Burnham was familiar with Trotsky’s quip long before he entered No. 10. Like many Labour statesmen — Tony Blair and Keir Starmer among them — he enjoyed a youthful flirtation with the Russian revolutionary’s ideas. That’s three out of the last four Labour PMs confessing to intellectual dalliances with the founder of the Red Army. Blair and Starmer, alas, achieved high office only to strengthen Britain’s nightmare political economy of bloated arms-length regulatory regimes, rampant rentierism, privatized national assets, and tragicomic levels of state incapacity, leaving us doubly vulnerable to today’s global shocks.

Labour’s latest prime minister claims to be different, promising a rupture in this peculiarly British mode of governance. But these kinds of epochal shifts, revolutionary premierships on the level of Gladstone or Attlee, are rare indeed. Burnham’s own Trotskyist fling was experienced via the contemporary protestations of the Eighties political celebrity Derek “Degsy” Hatton — a sharp-suited Scouse firebrand (and fellow Evertonian) with a predilection for gold watches, expensive tailors, personalized number plates and “vulgar Marxism”. Hatton was the larger-than-life de facto leader of Liverpool City Council when it thrust itself daringly into the national spotlight, setting illegal budgets and implementing mass housebuilding initiatives even as its Whitehall grant was slashed. Hatton offered a New Deal-style, localized and limited Keynesian stimulus effort dressed in revolutionary garb.

Yet that garb was important, as Degsy basked in a kind of belligerent, workerist anti-intellectualism, poking fun at the academic, London-based New Left scene. The Scouse Trot was quick to differentiate the kind of Liverpool socialism he was enacting with what he himself called the “Loony Left” — “more concerned,” Hatton said, “about black mayors and gay rights than… about building new homes.”

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A teenaged Andy, fresh-faced and idealistic, would have seen Hatton on TV every night, fighting his birth city’s corner against Thatcherism. And it’s hard not to compare it to Burnham’s own stint as a righteously indignant mayor of Greater Manchester, railing against Covid lockdowns. But where Burnham’s anti-London combativity earned him the moniker “King in the North”, his former hero Degsy eventually became known as “King Rat”. After Hatton and his posse almost bankrupted Liverpool, expelled from Labour, and removed from office, he used his newfound infamy to launch a career in low-rent TV appearances and Christmas pantomimes. Now 78, he’s a successful property developer, albeit one awaiting trial for conspiracy to commit bribery and intimidate witnesses. There’s another instructive lesson for the prime minister: revolutions do have consequences, and often they are not especially positive.

Perhaps that history explains the caution Burnham has shown towards governing so far. To be sure, “resilience” has become the center-left’s economic watchword, overtaking the “efficiency” of the high neoliberal era. And why not? As the economist Wolfgang Streeck has noted, that hyper-global age entailed a “dictatorship of the lowest marginal cost” — all just-in-time supply chains, outsourced production, and highly mobile capital in search of the cheapest possible inputs. Yet if Burnham has imbibed the critique, and talks about a return to public control, reindustrialization, and economic security, his fine words have yet to translate into action. Yes, Burnham seems to have learned from Degsy, be a rebel — but not too much. Yes, embrace socialism — but not yet.

The problem, here, is that Burnham’s party doesn’t necessarily have time for moderation. The era demands a radical rupture because the old order has so palpably failed. As one MP tells  me, the prime minister represents Labour’s “last roll of the dice”, to see if there’s life in the old dog yet. It’s a sentiment you can hear elsewhere too. A thoughtful essay by one of Starmer’s former speechwriters recently pondered whether the party would “go gently into the sociological night”, abandon a diminished working class, and lean into its minoritarian status as an institution for progressive public sector workers and professional urban graduates. The nadir of British social democracy experienced under Starmer required a forceful internal response. Yet if MPs acted to remove one serially unpopular leader and install the man that polls and focus groups deemed most acceptable, it’s unclear, as Burnham prepares to take the podium in an airless glass-and-steel convention center, whether that’ll be enough.

There are reasons to think it won’t be, not least given the looming geopolitical storm clouds. “We’ve all become accustomed to shit economic news over the past 18 years,” says one backbencher. “It’s baked in at this point.” Still, there’s an aching dissonance emerging between the inchoate Burnhamite message of hope and change, and the slow realization that the light at the end of the tunnel may turn out to be an oncoming train. Certainly, most of the public have not registered the implications of Iranian-backed insurgents holding the global economy hostage. The number of people who think they will be worse off next year has decreased from 40% to 33% since April, with 20% now thinking they’ll be doing better. Yet Britain is more exposed than most, especially since successive prime ministers — Hayekian free-marketeers and former Trotskyists alike — have created a service-based, import-dependent economy, one reliant on foreign capital inflows and buoyant international trade.

The irony, of course, is that Burnham always wanted to be a domestic leader, with cost-of-living salves held up as the great unifying totem of his new regime. But as Trotsky also learned — when, for instance, his plans for world revolution were stymied by the Poles in 1920 — exogenous events have a way of intruding on even the best-laid plans. With the Bab al-Mandab blocked, inflation expectations are likely to be adjusted upwards. From there, gilt yields will spike accordingly. John Healey’s first Budget anyway seems unlikely to be cheerful.

Perhaps the best Burnham can hope for in the short term is to borrow from Starmer’s book and act the statesman on the world stage. And, to be sure, sanctioning West Bank settlement goods will play well with sections of Labour’s base, just as action on AI safety does to wavering Lib Dems. But that hardly equals a revised settlement on Britain’s place in the new multipolar order. Nor does it solve the problem of our impotence in the face of a Washington hegemon seemingly intent on causing chaos. Burnham is no Mark Carney or Emmanuel Macron, progressive leaders with their own grand projets on “strategic autonomy” and the future of “middle powers”.

More than any particular policy, though, Burnham should probably take a more general lesson from Degsy and his Trotskyist forebears: if you’re backed into a corner, then fight. Thatcher may have beaten Degsy in the end, but the struggle was just and necessary. As Leon said, revolutions have a way of calcifying, recommending as an antidote a “permanent revolution” more than the settled “socialism in one country” backed by Stalin.

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And there are plenty of candidates that a radicalized Burnham could choose to take on: the OBR and Treasury, which together treat investment as a liability rather than an asset; the Bank of England, which raises the cost of government borrowing by engaging in successive rounds of quantitative tightening; the ECHR, which would launch legal challenges against any moves to bring utilities back into public ownership without eye-watering sums being paid to foreign hedge-fund shareholders. “I think he’s doing well,” as one prominent backbencher puts it, but he “needs to grow in confidence… and generally speak and act with more clout and urgency.”

So rather than backing down against the legalistic instincts of the civil service, the orthodoxies of the Treasury, or the apoplexy of the business pages, perhaps Burnham should return to his roots, embody the tribune-of-the-people persona that served him well in the North West, and declare war against Britain’s established interests. An icepick to the head killed Trotsky’s revolution. Thatcher’s revolution killed Degsy’s in Liverpool. A ballot-box verdict, delivered with rather less drama, is what finishes leaders whose revolutions never even start.

Indeed, the more you learn about the Houthis, the less surprising it becomes that the group should have embarrassed the US Navy in 2024 and 2025 (in a foretaste of the second Iran war, Washington simply gave up firing its expensive missiles at Houthi forces), and fought a large Sunni-Arab coalition to a standstill between 2015 and 2019. Despite intense bombardments, and serious battlefield defeats, the Houthis have retained Sana’a, Yemen’s capital which they conquered in 2014. Only the Israelis, who briefly got into a missile exchange with the Houthis in 2025, have managed to deter them: they went after the Houthis’ oil supplies, energy infrastructure, ports, airports, and, perhaps most important, senior personnel. Sure enough, the Houthis stopped firing at Israel. But either way, it’s little wonder that the Houthis are now back, seizing land along the Red Sea littoral and the islands of Perim and Greater and Lesser Hanish, thereby putting into jeopardy Saudi Arabia’s capacity to export oil via its east-west pipeline.

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Without outside support, Sunni Yemenis would have had no chance on the battlefield against their Shi’ite countrymen. The Houthis have received some support from Hezbollah and Iran — but not nearly on the level that Sunnis have received from foreigners since the Sixties. Islamic history has occasionally seen fervent, martial highland peoples descend into conflict with more numerous lowland believers — and usually get the better of them. The Houthis are in this line: mountain Shi’ites who have managed to gain the upper hand over the cosmopolitan and fractious Sunnis.

During the North Yemen Civil War (1962–1970), the Zaydi royalists of the old Imamate survived a massive assault by the republican forces that had overthrown them. The Republicans included predominantly Sunni Yemenis, but also Zaydi Arab nationalists, and were backed by around 70,000 Egyptian troops equipped with Soviet tanks and aircraft. The Zaydi royalists, meanwhile, adopted highly effective guerrilla tactics. Again and again, they descended from their mountain strongholds, absorbing heavy losses. They were not able to capture Sana’a — but they were repeatedly able to regroup and return to the fight.

The war today is vastly more sectarian. Few Zaydis now fight alongside Sunnis, giving the more cohesive, dogged, and fit Houthi forces the advantage.

Still, since the Nineties, support from Shi’ites in the wider region has been crucial in shaping Houthi objectives. The Islamic Republic of Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah have actively sought to convert Zaydis, who follow a different creed and jurisprudence. These efforts have met some success: perhaps as many as 10% of Zaydis have accepted Iran’s “Twelver” branch of Shi’ism. These conversions are, however, just icing on the cake. Before the Lebanese and Iranians came calling, Zaydism as a faith had considerable revolutionary potential. Historically, Yemen’s Shi’ites have had activist imams: religious leaders who could also command troops. Where the Twelver Shi’ites of Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon could — before the Iranian Revolution in 1979 — sometimes look askance at clerics assuming political power, the Zaydis had no such reservations. Zaydi imams ruled as kings, more or less continuously, from 897 to 1962, when nationalist forces toppled the imamate. The main interruptions came during two periods of Ottoman rule, from 1538 to 1635 and from 1872 to 1918. Even then, the imams did not simply disappear: they retreated into the mountains, where they continued to exercise religious authority and, at times, lead armed resistance to the Ottomans.

Today, a spiritual alignment has unquestionably taken place — and a significant slice of the Zaydi community is now inside the Iranian orbit. The Houthis’ anthem — “God is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, Curse be upon the Jews, Victory to Islam” — would have seemed bizarre to most Zaydis before the radical revivalist movement of al-Houthi. Cursing distant America, or Jews as if they were a global menace, or even Israel as a part of a defining, individual creed would have been too modern.

More or less at war with the “official”, internationally-recognized government of Yemen since 2004, the country’s Shi’ites are on a winning streak. Indeed, since the Saudis, Emiratis, and a coalition of other Arab states tried to humble them from 2015 to 2018, the Houthis’ regional ambitions have grown. They have created their own supply and sanctions-resistant support networks in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, sometimes piggybacking on the Iranians, sometimes moving independently. With Iranian assistance, they figured out how to defy a Saudi naval blockade and US satellite reconnaissance. Indeed, the Houthis have been able to incorporate Iranian strategic planning into their own ambitions as well as any Iranian proxy. They have proven sharp adopters of Iranian-supplied drones and missiles, learning quickly how to build projectiles from either clandestinely delivered parts or from scratch — indeed, they have proved enthusiastic adopters of AI. 

It’s also a foregone conclusion that if Iran can gain control of the Strait of Hormuz and charge tolls, the Houthis will attempt to do the same through dominating the Bab al-Mandab, the chokepoint for all trade moving through the Suez Canal — as well as for Saudi oil via its pipeline. Even if Iran fails to dominate the Persian Gulf, indeed, the odds are that the Houthis will still try to curtail Saudi shipping. If successful, the Houthi’s ambitions – and greed — may direct them towards other commercial shipping.

Yemen is a very poor country, and the Zaydi mountain heartland now offers little of the trade that once made the Zaydi elite relatively rich within it. Enormous anger towards Saudis is common. When I was traveling among Yemeni Shi’ites before 9/11 and I needed a conversation starter, aspersing Saudis always worked. So targeting Saudi shipping is a given for the Houthis; and preying on others could become an irresistible financial temptation if they control the Bab al-Mandab. Raiding British and Indian trade in the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean in the 18th century was very good business for pirates of the Arabian Peninsula until the Royal Navy and Marines convinced them otherwise.

The US maintains Camp Lemonnier, its only permanent military base in Africa and the operational hub of US Africa Command, just across the Bab al-Mandab in Djibouti. President Trump wasn’t persuaded of the merits of using it to deny the Houthis a partial victory against his Navy in 2025. It’s a good bet that Trump will default the responsibility for stopping Houthi extortion onto European navies, especially the French, who also have a naval base at Djibouti. Trump is perennially capricious — but also firm in his conviction that Europeans are freeloaders.

Nonetheless, the problem that the West has with the Houthis is also a microcosm of the problem that the United States has with Iran: there is no clever, low-cost way to neutralize the enemy’s power. When, in 2015, he was the Saudi defense minister, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman clearly understood the long-term threat that the Houthis posed to his kingdom. The prince’s execution of the subsequent war may have been abysmal, but his analysis wasn’t. Neither the Saudis, nor the Emiratis, nor the Egyptians, nor the Jordanians, nor the Americans, nor the Europeans have been willing to put a lot of boots on the ground long enough to neutralise the Houthi war machine. Cairo’s unpleasant experience in Yemen in the Sixties — “Egypt’s Vietnam” — remains in the DNA of Middle Eastern military men. The combined Arab assault on the Houthis from 2015 onwards revealed a wariness of replicating the approach the Egyptians had used — trying to take the Houthis on in their heartland.

The Houthis know this. So do the Iranians, who have seen the most independent of their proxies become their most consequential ally. The strategic potential of Yemen’s Shi’ites now dwarfs the contribution of the Levantine Hezbollah to Iran’s remarkably consistent goal of weakening the West and their allied Arab governments in the Middle East. The Houthis aren’t nearly as sophisticated as the Levantine Shi’ites, who rival the Iranians in their formative contribution to the development of radical Shi’ism, and have proved rather better than the Iranians in maintaining the crucial interpersonal relations between Arab militants.

Yet the Houthis, who not long ago were mostly farmers and shepherds, have thrived in a primitive environment. Their relations with Somalia’s Al-Shabaab — a Salafist jihadist outfit, which in 2012 pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda and has often shown a savagery that rivals Islamic State’s — clearly show the Houthis have, like the Iranians, an ecumenical disposition toward anti-Shi’ite but anti-Western Sunni Muslim radicals. If left alone, the Houthis might well develop further, becoming emissaries of Iranian mischief far beyond the Gulf of Aden. Some Islamic militants — the Taliban in Afghanistan; Hamas in Gaza — keep their violence local. They don’t become members of the “global jihad” even though they may host or associate with Muslim radicals who do. But the Houthis’ creed certainly suggests an aspiration that could take them into a larger holy cause, especially if under the tutelage of more worldly Iranians and Levantines.

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Regardless, the Houthis have offered Tehran the best bang for the buck of all its proxies. We don’t have reliable figures on what the Saudis and Emiratis spent on their multi-year war against Yemen’s Shi’ites, nor what the Iranian subventions were to their co-religionists, but Tehran’s costs were unquestionably a small fraction of those on the other side. The Islamic Republic is now in a deep financial crisis, but supporting low-maintenance, enterprising Yemenis may still be practicable. Strategically, it remains a steal.

If the United States, the Europeans, and most importantly the Arabs who border and depend on the Red Sea, are serious about thwarting the Houthis, then they should revisit the history of the Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula. They checked the rebellious Zaydi imams with the patient application of brute force. (Even if, as soon as the Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918, a Zaydi Imamate came right back). That won’t happen again, however, unless the United States leads the way.

Today, there are so far no volunteers for this mission. The experience of the Egyptians in Yemen in the Sixties, like the more recent sojourns led by the Saudis and the Emiratis, all were bitter failures. The treasure expended didn’t match the gains. The Middle East excels at forcing cost calculations. The Houthis and the Iranians are banking that the years since 9/11 have worn down their enemies. They know that in a contest of wills, they have the unassailable high ground.

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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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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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 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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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.

But with the Trump versus the Mullahs show, nothing is guaranteed. Earlier this month, the International Maritime Organization affirmed the right to freedom of navigation for shipping. But it did so in a very IMO way — formally and a bit pointlessly — prompting Sal Mercogliano, a professor of maritime history, to respond: “Doesn’t do crap. You have to impose freedom of navigation with military force.” In the meantime, the situation for the seafarers who remain in the Strait is perilous — mines, drones, shallow waters — with militias and pirates among the dangers for those who choose to take a different route.

The blunt truth is that no nation has enough seapower to police the ocean. Back in 2010, I went to sea for five weeks on the container ship Maersk Kendal. It was research for my book about international shipping, Ninety Percent of Everything — so named as 90% of, well, everything you own arrives to you on a ship just like it. The mostly Filipino seafarers would greet me each morning with “SSDD, Miss Rose”. Same shit, different day. Now they will probably say, “Different shit, every day.” But even then, they were contending with Somali piracy, which was in full flow. China, the US and a combined EU taskforce had ships patrolling the ocean, but as one admiral told me, the ocean is so huge, it was like having a single police car for all of Western Europe. 

When Kendal passed through the Indian Ocean, I was uncomfortably aware that 544 seafarers were being held hostage not far away, just off Somalia. Everyone knew where they were: it’s tricky to hide a ship in the age of satellites and drones. I wondered at the time whether 544 bus drivers or 544 airline pilots being held hostage would get as little attention. But that was naive. The sea is different. You can do things at sea that you can’t do on land. By 2012, Somali piracy had been tamed. At shipping conferences you will hear that this was done by “best management practices” — zig-zagging and such — but that is nonsense. It was because ships started carrying armed guards. 

This is the shocking thing about these multimillion pound ships with their multimillion pound loads of oil and containers. They are unarmed. In 2010, the only protection we had on Maersk Kendal was a dummy on the poop deck — as if the Somali skiffs would turn back if they thought there were 22 people on board, not 21 — and a crew member standing on the bridge wings with binoculars. 

In Hormuz, ships have no protection either. They are easy prey. With the Western navies preoccupied, the Somalis have opportunistically reappeared in the Arabian Sea and western Indian Ocean and now hold hostage four ships and 67 seafarers. The pirates have issued a £3 million demand for the release of MT Honour 25 and released a chilling photo of the crew sitting on the floor of the bridge, with masked pirates and AK-47s as a backdrop.

When Honour 25 was first taken hostage, one of its crew managed to send a voice note to his family in Karachi, Pakistan. His son Muzammil Ahmed Ansari told Al Jazeera what his father, 53-year-old Mehmood, had managed to say. “He said, ‘We are hijacked, reach out to the company, to people, to the government.’ He said there were pirates on the ship, all armed. He panicked, but he said, ‘Don’t worry, ask the government to deal with it.’”

That was in May. Mehmood is still a hostage. Chirag Bahri, who was held hostage by Somali pirates for nearly eight months in 2010, is not surprised Somali pirates have surged. “They are criminals and they want easy money.” With Trump’s catastrophic war against Iran taking all the attention, pirates have taken advantage of the distraction. 

Suggested reading

Hormuz: Iran’s dire Strait

By Peter Frankopan

If that weren’t enough, the Houthis, a Yemeni militia, popped up again after months of peace, threatening Saudi Arabia-linked ships that pass through the Red Sea. They don’t even have to actually attack: the threat is enough. Already container giants such as the French firm CMA-CGM have told ships to seek shelter, and have canceled transits through Suez. Suddenly if you’re a group or a state with a grievance, maritime chokepoints are a fashionable lever to pull. The Ukrainians are now attacking what they call Russia-linked ships in the Black Sea, although many ships do not carry Russians. 

The broader picture is that the Gulf is static and hardly anything is moving. Now the Suez Canal is risky again, as is Bab-el-Mandeb strait, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. These all make up the main highways of cargo movements. Where are ships supposed to go? The long way round, probably. It hasn’t yet come to that, but when the Houthis last issued shipping threats, ships began to travel around Africa instead. It’s longer — by 10 to 14 days — and more expensive, but the premiums that insurance companies insist on increasing in war wouldn’t apply and your ship could probably arrive at its destination with both crew and cargo intact. 

Meanwhile it’s the seafarers — the truck drivers of the sea — who suffer most. On 11 July, marine engineer Herambh Karmarkar, a 30-year-old man from Pune, wrote to his family in India: “Our ship has safely crossed.” His ship, the Cyprus-flagged CFS Galaxy, was making its way out of the Strait using the Oman route: this way hugs the Omani coastline and is supposedly protected by the US, though it is very difficult to find out what this protection actually consists of. Herambh was wrong. Hours later, Iranians attacked his ship, probably to terrify other ships into taking the northern route near Iran, and paying for the privilege. Herambh was killed.

A glance at the Recent Incidents section on the UK Maritime Operations Centre (UKMTO) website confirms this sort of thing is now routine: Attack 8 August. Attack 7 August. Another attack 5 August. The UKMTO is careful to report when all crew are safe, but still, the media usually report that ships are being attacked. What if we rephrased it? Civilians are being attacked. Ships do not drive themselves, and although a couple of ships have recently been abandoned, about 6,000 seafarers — who are, remember, civilians — are still stuck on their stationary ships, because stopped ships still need maintenance. And they are targets. 

How many seafarers have already been killed in this war? Currently the estimate is 17 non-Iranians. Iranians, meanwhile, say they have lost 44 men, including 16 fishermen. If the category of seafarers were to include naval personnel, the number is much higher: when the US nuclear submarine USS Charlotte torpedoed the Iranian frigate IRIS Dena in early March, 104 sailors were killed, according to Iran. 

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How shipowners are getting rich off Hormuz

By Rose George

But we expect naval personnel to die in a war. That’s what they signed up for. There is no such commitment in merchant seafarer contracts. Of course merchant seafarers can fight: during the First and Second World Wars, the merchant navy lost more personnel than the Royal Navy, proportionately, and showed astonishing bravery. But in the modern world, merchant seafarers are civilians, and they should get protection. The broader picture, though, is that the proportion of civilian deaths in conflict has been rising for decades. In 2024 alone, according to the UN Human Rights Office, civilian conflict deaths rose 40% globally. So perhaps the deaths of the men who are bringing you your gasoline and cornflakes should be acceptable. You would think so, given how long it took the media to start noticing that ships attacked by drones and missiles had people on them. 

The latest surge in violence means most transit attempts have stopped. Figures from the maritime intelligence agency Windward AI show 11 inbound transits and seven outbound, a tiny fraction of the pre-war 140 or so transits a day. However, there are now credible reports of companies offering huge financial incentives for crews willing to undertake a transit. Before the latest attacks, the Sinkor Group, the world’s largest operator of supertankers, offered seafarers six months’ salary for one round trip. Other companies are adding 60 days’ salary to what should be a 30-day round trip. 

So has Hormuz changed shipping? Shipping faces constant crises and usually bounces back. But it is hard to see that happening now. For a start, dark transits are way more common than they were before this war began. Russian ships were always good at going dark: this means switching off their AIS (automatic information system), or flying a false flag or inputting false data about their cargo or destination. Now everyone is at it. Since the Houthis decided to threaten Saudi Arabian ships, Saudi ships carrying oil from Yanbu, the port at the end of the Saudi oil pipeline, have gone missing from ship tracking sites: eight turned back, reported Lloyds List, but 11 went dark.

This won’t affect consumers, necessarily — the oil will still be transported, and so will the iPhones and Lego bricks and Toyotas and sugar. But it will affect life at sea. Not everyone at sea is a criminal, but there is no better place to be a criminal than at sea.

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

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

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

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

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

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America has lost the will to fight

By Edward Luttwak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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America has lost the will to fight

By Edward Luttwak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How the West can beat the rest

By Edward Luttwak

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

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

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

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

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

To answer that question, try traveling to the AT&T Stadium. Not far from downtown Dallas, it’s hosting nine games at this summer’s World Cup. Yet despite being criss-crossed by highways, the stadium is almost comically hard to reach by public transport. Yes, there are shuttle buses for bewildered European supporters. But the whole trip, including an awkward train transfer, takes some 90 minutes, compared to just 20 by private car. From Kansas City to Miami, other host stadiums are similarly tricky to reach, even as 45% of Americans lack any access to public transport whatsoever. 

The point, here, is that the US is utterly dependent on cars and trucks to function. Roughly speaking, the average American consumes 22 barrels of oil per year. The average Brit uses less than half that; the average Italian about a third. For all the talk of infrastructure and energy independence, trains and passenger rail remain the houseplant that Washington forgets to water — decade after decade, now going on nearly a century.

Even in a famously embattled industry, it’s been a uniquely difficult year for American rail. In February, Amtrak canceled service between New York and Boston due to intense blizzards, giving intra-state passengers no sense of when service would return. That’s echoed by a more general malaise. Even living in the Acela Boston-DC corridor — where train services are far more extensive than anywhere else in the country — passengers will often be maddeningly frustrated. NJ Transit trains into New York are so frequently canceled for “overhead wire” failures that passengers must now warn their colleagues and employers that, on any given day, thanks to the country’s third-world infrastructure, they might simply not make it into the city.

A great many on the online Right prefer to blame the dysfunction of American rail on Amtrak and the rail industry itself. But, in most cases, that’s unfair. Unlike American secondary education — where high spending coexists with mediocre outcomes — US rail is generally starved of funds. The problem is not a disconnect between spending and performance; it is the simple absence of investment. In total, the federal government spends only about $30-35 per person on rail, whereas Sweden routinely spends roughly 10 times that. Even Germany, lately facing mounting criticism over the decline of its own rail network, spends roughly six times more per capita.

You can’t bake bread without flour. And given the meager funds they have to work with, Amtrak and other American rail systems punch well above their weight in both functionality and reliability. This raises the question: if rail is considered vital across much of the wealthy industrialized world — including in China, a country every bit as vast — why is it still treated as the ugly runt of America’s transit system?

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The romance of sleeper trains

By Niall Gooch

The boilerplate answer involves the country’s uniquely anti-statist brand of politics, not to mention its hyper-individualist mindset. No doubt that’s partly true. American political culture is characterized by what communitarians call “thin” social ties — with most citizens preferring privacy and autonomy to a dense communal life. It’s clear that a great many Americans would, if given the choice, still prefer to commute inside personal, metal bubbles than sit near their social inferiors on the train. But the deeper reality is that even the option of public transport is rarely available to the vast majority of Americans. Only about 15% of urban Americans boast walking-distance access to metros, commuter rails, or suburban rails, compared to about half in Western Europe and three quarters in South Korea. 

All this dysfunction is in fact the long-arc result of a deliberate — and criminal — conspiracy to destroy American passenger rail during the most critical years of the country’s urban development. In other words, the country’s toxic relationship with passenger rail did not begin organically. Nor did it emerge, as most presume, from some spontaneous cultural preference for cars and highways. Living in today’s wasteland of car parks and strip malls, it is difficult to imagine now, but during the Depression only one in 10 Americans owned a car. Of course, they still got around, just mostly on streetcars or other forms of rail.

Throughout the long 19th century, and even during much of the Second World War, streetcar systems were at their high point. Streetcars, like those still remaining in New Orleans and San Francisco, were plentiful, safe, and widely used in nearly every major American metro area. In my hometown of Salt Lake City, my great-grandfather Wilhelm Vincent Herrmann rode the streetcar each day from Utah’s capital to Ogden, a distance of over 50 miles. In a city that wasn’t even among the nation’s 30 largest, residents could travel easily on beautiful, ornate streetcars — often between cities and, in Salt Lake’s case, even up steep mountain canyons. At one point, Salt Lake had 18 different streetcar lines. All that remains today is Trolley Square, the old streetcar hub long since converted into a posh shopping mall.

As for intra-city passenger rail, what made it so different from European rail wasn’t necessarily the level of service offered — but the fact that most networks were owned privately by power companies, who founded them merely as an avenue to sell their electricity. Then, in 1936, the federal government passed the Wheeler-Rayburn Act. This well-meaning anti-monopoly bill forced power companies to sell all unrelated business holdings that didn’t actually supply electricity. The law of unintended consequences was particularly cruel here, for this singular act opened the door to a nefarious takeover of America’s passenger rail services. It was a mistake that would forever change the landscape of American life and, ironically, allow the auto companies to create a total monopoly over not only urban transit but eventually the structure of everyday American life — how people moved, where they lived, and how they worked.

When the electric companies were forced to sell off the streetcar-system operations, General Motors president Alfred P. Sloan saw blood in the water. In 1936, a powerful alliance of American auto manufacturers, tire makers and oil interests, all led by Sloan, operated a coordinated campaign to buy up nearly all the country’s intercity passenger rails — then rip them out of the ground.

To hide his direct involvement in the plan, Sloan first created a holding company: the notorious National City Lines (NCL). He then recruited a former Minnesota bus driver called Roy Fitzgerald to head the organization. Fitzgerald would operate as the frontman while GM’s president and his other investors — from Standard Oil to Firestone Tires — directed the operation from the shadows. In this effort, Fitzgerald was the perfect stooge: posing as a plucky small-town entrepreneur, he claimed he was just looking for opportunity, something he found in the nation’s financially struggling streetcar systems, which he purchased simply to “streamline.”

Like villains from a Depression-era film noir, Fitzgerald and his crew of corporate goons would show up at city councils and commissioners’ offices wearing two-tone spats and Panama hats. Then these ersatz entrepreneurs would pressure — and likely bribe — local officials into allowing them to purchase their city’s streetcar systems. They often claimed that they wouldn’t destroy these systems, but merely create a more “modern” arrangement that also included buses. It didn’t turn out that way.

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In nearly every case, within months of acquiring ownership, this phony consortium dramatically cut the rail mileage offered; raised fares; and started doing everything possible to turn the public against public-transit systems. In Los Angeles, after the NCL bought up the city’s once-extensive rail system, streetcars went from appearing every five minutes to every 10, then 12, and then, after a while, every 30. From there, they used the predictable slump in ridership to declare the whole system untenable. Over a 12-year period, between 1938 and 1950, National City Lines and its subsidiaries gained control of train systems in St Louis, Baltimore, Salt Lake City, Oakland, Los Angeles, and 20 other US cities. In most cases, they canceled the majority of services, and paved over or ripped up the streetcar tracks within a year.

Eventually, federal prosecutors took GM and the executives to court. In 1949, seven defendants were found guilty of “conspiracy to monopolize interstate commerce” — but all avoided jail. The judge deemed their crime no more serious than a “traffic violation”, fining them the ludicrous sum of one dollar each. General Motors and the other corporations involved were fined the maximum amount of $5,000 (roughly $60,000 in today’s money). That’s quite the deal for permanently eliminating your primary transit competitor and forcing an entire nation into a car-centric mode of life.

Had the auto industry’s campaign failed — and there were several whistleblowers trying to sound the alarm — the country’s landscape, economy and, yes, even foreign policy would likely look completely different. Just as no one voted for the war with Iran, Americans didn’t vote for the car-centric hellscape they now inhabit.

The downstream consequences of this change have been vast. For one thing, they’ve helped produce a sedentary population unable to tolerate walking even short distances, a key reason why 74% of US adults are overweight or obese. Combined with mass smartphone addiction, which keeps people in conceptual bubbles as they move mostly in their cars between work and home — an experience devoid of “third places” — this landscape of psychic isolation has greatly deepened social anomie and political division.

Roughly two-thirds of Americans now believe members of the opposing political party are completely immoral, with studies showing that the longer a person’s car commute, the greater their likelihood of serious anxiety and depression problems. Much of today’s cascading social dysfunction is downstream from the fact that we rarely do anything anymore except drive — in private — and interact for long stretches only with people we deliberately choose. How can a culture respect public goods when public space itself is rarely experienced?

The landscapes we build ultimately build us in return. And just as US cities were not always the asphalt and strip-mall monstrosities they are today, America wasn’t always a body politic that greeted its government’s wars of choice with a shrug. Indeed, both these points are connected: the physical structure of a nation shapes the political imagination of its people. When a society is built around highways, oil dependence, and endless suburban sprawl, it begins to unsurprisingly think and behave like a codependent society that can’t imagine life without those things. Cheap gasoline becomes a constant strategic necessity. Foreign oil fields become matters of American national security. And preemptive wars fought in the name of abstract notions of “freedom” begin to look less like aberrations and more like the logical extension of an atomistic infrastructure that operates with no concern for the public.

In Facial Justice, England has been devastated by the nuclear armageddon of a Third World War in which most of humanity has perished. In the New State that emerges, beauty is rationed, envy criminalized, and an unseen ruler governs survivors through loudspeakers. Freedom has been exchanged for security, individuality for fairness, and politics for management.

The ruler is known as the DD, or Darling Dictator. He addresses the populace as “Patients and Delinquents” in the reassuring tones of a radio host. Equality and Envy — the two Es — are the positive and negative poles of the regime. If one citizen possesses what another lacks — especially female beauty, grace or charm — resentment follows, threatening social harmony. Physical differences that confer distinction must therefore be managed: women judged too attractive are “betafied” by surgery and compelled to wear standardized masks lest they provoke jealousy among their less favored sisters. Those judged too plain may be improved. The state does not abolish beauty. It regulates it.

What sounded absurd in the Sixties now feels oddly familiar. We inhabit a culture obsessed with facial images: filtered faces, injectable faces, algorithmically rewarded faces. We denounce beauty privilege while monetizing attractiveness on an industrial scale. Hartley, who was probably gay, though perhaps not sexually active, was described by Ottoline Morrell as a well-mannered, dull, fat man. He grasped that physical appearance would become political terrain.

His insight strikingly anticipated arguments about female appearance in Iran and other Muslim societies, long before words like hijab, chador and burqa entered the Western lexicon. In the Islamic Republic, female appearance has long been a matter of state concern. Compulsory veiling, morality patrols, regulation of adornment, suspicion of autonomous female beauty: these are not incidental features but part of a wider attempt to police the public sphere.

Veiling is usually justified in terms of modesty: protection against spiritual harm, challenges to personal space and privacy, and the potentially disruptive effects of the male gaze. Yet many educated Muslim defenders also present it in egalitarian terms. The veil, they argue, reduces the erotic and status competition generated by female display. This competition is not only between men. Women compete with other women in the currency of appearance and desirability; men compete for access to that currency and for the honor associated with controlling it. Hartley would have recognized the logic instantly. Beauty confers individual social capital. Therefore, like other forms of capital, it must be managed.

A woman may lose sleep over another woman’s eyelashes as easily as a man may lose his reason over her face. Hartley’s satirical observation is that envy, once treated as a political principle rather than a moral infirmity, can justify almost anything. If beauty wounds the unbeautiful, beauty must be corrected. If distinction generates grievance, distinction must be flattened. If desire unsettles public order, desire must be masked.

Iran also supplies a paradox Hartley would have relished. For decades Tehran has been one of the world capitals of cosmetic surgery, especially rhinoplasty. Nose jobs became so common that bandages themselves turned into status symbols, sometimes worn by women who could not afford the actual procedure. Alongside this ran a discreet market in hymenoplasty: the restoration of virginity through surgery in a society publicly committed to premarital chastity. Beneath official modesty flourished a commerce in self-presentation, concealment and bodily correction.

Hartley’s New State works by the same contradiction: moral severity above ground, restless vanity below. His heroine, Jael 97, is not liberated from beauty by the regime’s doctrine. She is made more conscious of it. The mask that is supposed to abolish comparison intensifies it. The women who have been betafied remain alert to gradations of face, figure and charm. They read one another’s defects and advantages with the acuity of prisoners studying rank. The more the state tries to abolish vanity, the more vanity migrates into coded signs, furtive glances and forbidden longings.

Michel Foucault, who famously enthused about the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, saw in it a form of political spirituality: a revolt against the deadening managerialism of Western modernity. He was fascinated by a popular uprising that seemed not merely economic or ideological, but metaphysical — a revolt conducted in the name of sacrifice, martyrdom and collective transformation. What he seems to have missed was that rebelling against managerial discourse simply generates new management criteria. The Islamic Republic did not abolish bureaucracy. It sacralized it, bringing the body, the street, the classroom, courtship ritual and the female face under new forms of supervision.

Hartley, who came from a privileged background and despised proletarian aspiration, saw more clearly than Foucault how regimes will “discipline and punish” whatever their revolutionary provenance. They may govern not only through prisons and police, but through faces, clothing, shame, sexual codes and approved emotional display.

His insight gives Facial Justice a relevance far beyond Iran. It applies wherever appearance becomes a moral index; wherever language is policed less by law than by fear of social exclusion; wherever individuals learn to anticipate the judgment of unseen wokeism. Nobody commands; but everyone must comply. He anticipated the way contemporary, market-driven power prefers to regulate conduct without seeming tyrannical. His unseen dictatorship rules through announcements, inspectors, slogans and the mediated presence of loudspeakers. Citizens hear the Voice more often than they see authority embodied. Public life becomes a sequence of nudges, rituals and behavioral corrections. Hartley’s inspectors are not jackbooted thugs but smiling officials in magnificent flamboyant outfits. They cajole rather than bully. 

Similarly, Hartley’s language regime has many contemporary echoes. Citizens must navigate verbal booby-traps. Formulaic gestures accompany approved terms. One says the right thing in the right tone at the right moment, even though, as in most tyrannies, accepted speech may be coupled with hints of ironic disdain. Any formal slippage is not merely mistaken but morally suspect. Effective censorship works in this manner. If people internalize the code, the censor need not bother.

Facial Justice also anticipates the marriage of politics and therapy. In the New State, cinemas show murders and violent crime not for pleasure but as aversion treatment. Emotional responses are recalibrated by experts. Today’s equivalents are milder, but the impulse is recognizable: trigger warnings, compulsory sensitivity training, therapeutic disciplinary language, institutional concern with “harm”, “safety”, “trauma” and “wellbeing”. These terms may often be necessary and humane. Hartley’s warning is not that distress is unreal, but that once distress becomes a governing category, authority acquires a new moral vocabulary. The patient must be protected from himself; the delinquent must be cured of his delinquency; the citizen must be adjusted.

Hartley’s satire, though gentler than Orwell’s, has bite, with green, even hippyish conceits about nature in the nuclear wasteland. Flowers are scarce and revered because plants are believed to suffer. Trees too acquire an almost sacred status: to damage one is treated less as practical vandalism than as moral transgression. Plastic and synthetic replicas are safer and more manageable than living plants. This should be read as a warning against moral systems that lose proportion. Once politics becomes a competition in purity, absurdity is quick to follow.

Why did Hartley, best known for The Go-Between, write so bizarre a fantasy? One answer may lie in his old-fashioned Tory dislike of the leveling temper of post-war Britain: ration-book drabness, bureaucratic earnestness, the suspicion of privilege and excellence. But Facial Justice is more than a hymn of Waugh-like reactionary nostalgia, though there may be elements of such. It is also a protest against confusing resentment with justice.

Here the book still has relevance. Much contemporary rhetoric promises dignity but delivers flattening. We are urged to celebrate diversity while distrusting distinction, praise individuality while policing deviation, expand freedom while narrowing acceptable opinion. The contradiction is not accidental. Modern egalitarian culture often wants difference without hierarchy, identity without inequality, self-expression without offense, beauty without envy, and freedom without risk. These are admirable aspirations until they are made administratively compulsory. Hartley recognized that a society which cannot tolerate the wounds produced by comparison may end by mutilating the things compared.

The invisible ruler in Facial Justice gives the novel particular relevance to contemporary Iran. Richard Bulliet — Professor Emeritus of Middle Eastern History at Columbia University and one of America’s foremost scholars of Iran and Islamic society — recently reflected on the possibility that Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the former Rahbar, or Supreme Leader, may not just be avoiding public appearances for his own safety, having seen his father and much of his family wiped out in an American air strike. He may choose to remain unseen while authority continues to flow through networks of Revolutionary Guards, and other officials. In Shi‘ite political theology, absence need not mean weakness. The Hidden Imam is absent yet sovereign. His invisibility, like that of Hartley’s Darling Dictator, can deepen his mystique. The DD is heard everywhere, seen rarely, and therefore enlarged by imagination. Visibility can diminish rulers. Distance can magnify them.

Donald Trump is the opposite temperamentally. He craves visibility, camera angles, crowds, instant reaction. Yet Trumpism too depends on symbolic mediation: the staged gesture, the social-media blast, the prop on the desk. His approach is exemplified by the notorious red button joke: according to various accounts, Trump likes to toy with visitors using a red button on his desk. He presses it with theatrical gravity, lets alarm spread around the room, then a butler appears with a Diet Coke on a silver tray. According to Miles Taylor, a former senior official in Trump’s first administration, the joke is meant to display presidential power while making light of it. Whether apocryphal or not, such stories capture something psychologically plausible about Trumpism: immense authority staged as entertainment. 

The deeper danger, as journalist Simon Tisdall has argued recently, is that when nuclear-armed states behave impulsively, theatrically and without visible strategic discipline, they encourage precisely the proliferation they claim to prevent. If countries conclude that only atomic weapons guarantee survival, then brinkmanship becomes advertisement. Iran did not possess a bomb before the present war. After the US-Israeli bombardment, threats of stone-age annihilation and the endless deferment of diplomacy, Iranians may now conclude they really need one. Nobody goes after North Korea.

The red button joke is an emblem of personalized sovereignty reduced to theater. This is why I believe Hartley explains aspects of the present better than many fashionable theorists such as Michel Foucault. He saw politics moving beyond the old opposition between dictatorship and democracy into a stranger zone where democratic forms survive while behavior is increasingly managed; where equality becomes moral theater; where rulers may be hidden priest-kings or hyper-visible celebrities, yet both depend on symbolism more than statesmanship.

The deepest insight of the novel, however, is that catastrophe strengthens the appetite for control. Hartley’s New State is born from atomic devastation. Scarcity, trauma and fear make citizens accept rules they might once have mocked. Safety becomes sacred. After disaster, masks feel reasonable (remember Covid?). Hartley imagined what follows when catastrophe and triviality meet: a civilization rebuilt not on wisdom but on managed grievance. 

Orwell warned that power might one day stamp on a human face forever. Hartley suggested a colder, more plausible paradigm. Power would first improve the face, standardize it, veil it, correct it, cover it with something hygienic and approved — then ask us to smile behind the mask.

Demands on American and Israeli intelligence will increase regardless of whether the war stays cold or heats up once more. Donald Trump obviously doesn’t want to fight the battle to open the Strait of Hormuz. This means that Tehran, sensing victory, will probably be emboldened elsewhere, perhaps even trying to reactivate terrorist operations against American and Israeli targets. Iranian terrorist operations, which have ebbed and flowed through the years, haven’t been well run for some time. Some recent assassination attempts against Iranian expatriates have been awkwardly if not incompetently planned and executed. But when there is a will, ways improve. 

Beyond protecting against this possible resurgence, US and Israeli satellite surveillance of the bombed sites with buried enriched uranium will obviously continue. Ditto the bombed underground military facilities and factories involved in missile and drone production. According to Israeli intelligence officials, the Iranian regime is using the current ceasefire to clear access to crucial conventional weaponry. After the 12-Day War, and up to the start of the current conflict, Israel didn’t seem particularly worried by the state of Iran’s bombed nuclear plants. That may be because their long-distance assessment of the damage done was severe, or because they had reliable intelligence assets providing them with reassuring information.   

In either case, it’s doubtful that Tehran can now sprint to the bomb: the damage is far too great, both to personnel and the country’s uranium-enrichment facilities. The same may also be true of the stockpiles of centrifuge parts unaccounted for by Barack Obama’s nuclear deal. Counterintelligence concerns alone may well paralyze Iran’s ambitions for some time, as the intelligence ministry and IRGC try to figure out if Israel penetrated their nuclear inner sanctum. The conspiracy-addled nature of Iranian officials will incline them towards taking a counterespionage buzzsaw to a lot of innocent people, further convulsing what’s left of the country’s nuclear establishment.  

The Iranian regime, if it lasts, will eventually get around to testing Israeli and American intelligence. It wouldn’t be surprising to see it do this slowly through a small reconstituted nuclear program, perhaps by building another facility for turning uranium hexafluoride into metal, or by building new, advanced centrifuge cascades: then see whether anyone notices. If the regime managed to actually detonate a crude nuclear device inside Iran, the blast would likely guarantee the Islamic Republic’s immunity from further attacks. For Mossad and Aman, Israel’s military intelligence wing, the need to penetrate and report on what’s left of Iran’s nuclear program remains paramount. 

There are other focuses too. Assessing how many and what kind of missiles and drones the Islamic Republic will be able to build — and how quickly, given the damage to factories and supply lines — will surely consume a lot of Israeli attention. Another question will be whether the Russians and Chinese are meaningfully supporting these efforts. An Iranian victory at Hormuz might well have a decisive impact on Beijing, which could become far less circumspect in how it supports Tehran. If, months from now, the United States is still dueling with Iran over the Strait, then the CIA and other initialisms of US intelligence certainly won’t redirect resources to other foreign challenges. Surging intelligence capabilities on a target rarely produce a bonanza — unless information can be gleaned through technical means. 

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Fortunately for the US, satellites and intercept are two strong suits, while the Islamic Republic’s chatty ruling elites often have a hard time being disciplined about secure communications. Before the current war, Israel obviously had a network of local agents, all of whom aided military operations. Maintaining secure communication with these agents after all hell has broken loose and the internet has gone down could be hard, especially if timely communications are still needed for active operations. Another challenge is that information in wartime can degrade quickly, not least if it’s needed for assassinations. On this, Iranian counterintelligence outfits are undoubtingly working overtime, trying to figure out what Israel did and block its future actions. For the moment, it’s a good bet Israel is using some form of encrypted satellite-based system to reach its spies — and Iranian counter-intelligence officers are surely doing their best to locate those transmissions.    

That hints at broader challenges. Future recruitment efforts by either Israel or America will likely be more challenging; contacting IRGC officers will simply be harder than before. Both Americans and Israelis “cold pitch” Iranian officials: that is, walk up to a target and, with little chit-chat, ask him to work for them. Such pitches don’t have a great track record and IRGC officers don’t usually travel to places where either American or Israeli operatives can safely reach them. 

It’s possible that Israel’s recruitment of so-called “covert-action” agents — whose primary task would be to give logistical or tactical intelligence support to an Israeli military operation (imagine Iranian Kurds or Azeris helping Israel launch drones) — has also allowed some access to important Iranian officials. Really talented agents can occasionally recruit others without having direct contact with their foreign case officers.

But developing these contacts indirectly would be devilishly risky. As a rule, intelligence services don’t like mixing covert-action agents — who in Iran would be easier to recruit given the disgruntled minorities living on the country’s borders — with “foreign-intelligence” assets who report on government policy and suchlike. Covert-action agents often work in teams; foreign-intelligence agents almost never do. If Israel has been able to mix the two successfully, these operations would be serendipitous. 

Developing new assets in Iran with Iranian counterintelligence services on high alert will be daunting — unless internal dissent leads to waves of Iranians, especially ethnic Persians, eagerly ratting on the theocracy and the Revolutionary Guards. Israeli officials sometimes give the impression that this is exactly what has happened, with average Iranians somehow getting information out to the Israelis about the whereabouts and movements of senior Iranian officials, allowing the IDF to target them. If this is happening in the way Israeli officials suggest, then untrained Iranians and Israeli intelligence have found a means of communication that allows for almost real-time targeting irrespective of whether the internet is working. 

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A sign that the Iranian regime might be cracking would be more IRGC volunteers to Western intelligence services. Mass defections don’t appear likely — the regime’s spiritual and financial hold on its hardcore supporters has always been impressive. As average Iranians have fallen away from the regime by the tens of millions, loyalists, seeing themselves as the guardians of Islam and a nation besieged by disbelief, depravity, and Satan’s paladins, have only grown more determined. Throughout this war, we’ve seen the IDF or Mossad attempt to intimidate or turn senior military commanders and officials via threatening telephone calls. It’s still too soon to have a scorecard on what happened, but it appears Israel hasn’t so far reaped the desired results. Even so, we might yet see more senior officials having serious doubts. Iranian memoirs, leaked conversations, and intrepid Western scholarship conducted inside Iran over the last 30 years suggest that doubt is infecting ruling families.

Intelligence success is inevitably tied to how much risk clandestine services and their political overlords are willing to endure. The Islamic Republic is an existential threat to the Jewish state; to the United States, the clerical regime is surely not. Despite murderous Iranian machinations, since 1979, Washington has been reaching out to Tehran, under both Democrats and Republicans, both openly and secretly. This quintessentially American disposition to say “Hi!”, hoping for a reset of the regime’s enmity towards the United States, has affected, sometimes seriously, how the White House, and therefore the CIA and the Pentagon, have approached Iran policy. No such hope has ever altered the fundamental Israeli analysis of the Islamic Republic. The regime’s lethal antisemitism, present since its birth, is tightly tied to how it sees and reacts to the world.  

These differences help explain why the Israelis have had the patience and fortitude to work the Iranian target in ways that have been impossible for American or European intelligence services. Even today, after numerous deadly Iran-orchestrated terrorist strikes against Americans; after kidnapping plots against US citizens; after planned assassinations against senior US officials; after the deadly Iranian covert action in Iraq, which cost hundreds of lives — Americans who didn’t have doubts about assassinating members of Al-Qaeda or the Islamic State can still feel a bit squeamish when Washington helps Israel off Iranian officials. To that extent, the clerical regime has always benefited from Iran’s cultural magnetism and historical preeminence. 

Besides, major American intelligence operations against the Islamic Republic will require bipartisan support in both the House and Senate intelligence committees. That seems unlikely. Democrats have been trying to find a less hostile modus vivendi with the Islamic Republic since Bill Clinton. With Obama and the nuclear negotiations, it became a passion. This passion has since been deflated, especially in January when the theocracy savagely attacked its own people. But the reflex to engage, and to feel guilty about American actions — especially the now-mythologized coup in 1953 against Mohammad Mosaddegh, and basically everything Trump has done since 2017 — seems set in stone. 

The intelligence war against Islamic Republic will therefore likely remain overwhelmingly an Israeli mission, with the US in a supporting role. Mossad now has an Iran regime-change desk. The Israelis hadn’t traditionally been fond of regime change in the Islamic world, primarily because they had such a low regard for the possibility of salubrious political evolution among Muslims. Tehran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles altered this calculation. So too did the realization that “mowing the lawn” in Iran isn’t the same as cutting the grass in Lebanon and Gaza. It requires US approval from the get go, which even under Trump may not be forthcoming.

In a long-term clandestine campaign, Mossad and Aman don’t have many options available to them beyond continuing assassinations and sabotage. These actions can possibly fly under the American radar — that really depends on their size, targets, and whether Washington could envision blowback. Israel could also try to feed Iran’s simmering ethnic tensions, where violence is already common, especially among the Kurds and Baluch. Both have established armed opposition groups, making weapons deliveries easier and less of a counterintelligence headache; these groups internally police themselves and, as they are often tied together by blood, are less open to Iranian intelligence penetration. Netanyahu supported, likely drove, a joint Israeli-American operation to support an armed Kurdish uprising in Iran during the current conflict; it appears that Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan learned of the plan and called Trump, who aborted the operation.

These actions cannot bring the regime down — and the Israelis know it. But they could be seriously annoying to Tehran. Especially if armed with shoulder-fired missiles or heavy machine guns, these groups certainly could harass the IRGC more effectively. And if Israeli-aided ethnic irruptions happened while larger protests occurred elsewhere in Iran, this might seriously strain the regime’s mobile internal-security forces. Certainly, this ethnic route, operationally, seems like a better option than trying to get significant quantities of weaponry to the confused, leaderless Persian opposition, which could take years to organize and risks simply giving supplies to the IRGC.  

Minority-targeted operations do run the risk of alienating Persians, who whatever their views of the Islamic Republic almost universally believe that minorities don’t have the right to secession and must not challenge the supremacy of Iran’s Persian identity. Iranians who want to topple the Islamic Republic could cheer, or anyway be apathetic towards, rebellious minorities being crushed by the theocracy. 

Despite all the difficulties involved, the Israelis still may try to arm, or protect from the air, an Azeri or Persian insurrection. Rebellions within these two groups would give the regime pause. Given their numbers and how important they are within the regime, Azeris are the only ethnic minority, if they were to rebel en masse, that could collapse the Islamic Republic. The Israelis may recall, however, that while armed opposition to the Shah by the late Seventies was certainly frustrating for his SAVAK intelligence service, it didn’t ultimately challenge the monarchy’s survival. In 1979, the army collapsed for entirely unrelated reasons. 

The key then was the ability of Ruhollah Khomeini’s people to piggy-back on and guide the anger of what eventually became a widespread revolutionary movement, where the military and civilian elites no longer supported the monarchy. When it mattered, Mohammad Pahlavi was unwilling to kill his countrymen in large numbers; the theocracy has shown no such hesitation. Any armed struggle against the Islamic Republic would have to defeat a far more determined foe.

For the Israelis, getting payback against the Islamic Republic may nonetheless make the ethnic card compelling, overcoming the objections of Persian expatriates and internal dissidents who worry about Persians losing their primacy in the country — to say nothing of the ugly internecine strife that could result. Meanwhile, the Israelis will certainly keep collecting intelligence on all Iranian personnel involved with the nuclear and missile programs, with the aim of eventually eliminating them. Knocking off the occasional Iranian politician could also become standard practice, regardless of possible American objections, since such operations would continue to convulse Tehran’s counterintelligence establishment, cast doubt on the integrity of Iranian communications, and discombobulate the daily life of the ruling elite.

Though many Americans and Europeans might want to believe that only diplomacy offers a solution to the current conflict, Mossad, Aman, and the IRGC know better. For them, it’s a duel to the death. 

By installing democratic government in Iraq, the neocons imagined, they would set off an America-friendly movement for democracy across the region. As the influential foreign policy analyst Michael Ledeen wrote in September 2002: “it is impossible to imagine that the Iranian people would tolerate tyranny in their own country once freedom had come to Iraq.” He added that “Syria would follow in short order”. Of course, things did not quite turn out this way. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq proved to be drawn-out, bloody and humiliating disasters. 

This February, when the United States and Israel launched a new war in Iran, there was understandable speculation that the neocon agenda had been resurrected by its supposed nemesis, Donald Trump. It does appear that Trump was persuaded to take up unfinished business on behalf of Israel and hawks in the US foreign policy establishment. He may also have inferred from last year’s protests in Iran that destabilizing the government could spark a popular uprising. But despite Trump’s occasional claim to be seeking freedom for the Iranian people — one among many stated rationales for the war — it is impossible to believe that he, or perhaps anyone, shares the erstwhile neocon conviction that democracy could be spread across the globe. 

That conviction was an artifact of the unchallenged American hegemony of the Nineties and 2000s. Trump’s blundering sequel, in which the increasingly isolated president raves about blowing Iran off the face of the earth, even as the Iranians hold the global economy hostage via the Strait of Hormuz, only emphasizes how distant we are from that world of two decades ago. We can scarcely imagine the sublime vistas glimpsed by those who dreamed of bringing about the End of History, spurring on a worldwide convergence on liberal democratic institutions. Yet there it is, in black and white, in the 2002 US National Security Strategy. This document, also known as the Bush Doctrine, pledged to “actively work to bring the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world”.

Does this mean that the End of History was no more than a baseless, dangerous fantasy? A new book by Ian Shapiro, After the Fall: From the End of History to the Crisis of Democracy, argues that it was not — though his vision of the End of History is more modest than that of the neocons. Shapiro, professor of political science at Yale, thinks that “different and vastly superior possibilities” were on offer after the fall of Communism in 1991, even if those possibilities did not include overthrowing authoritarian governments willy-nilly and spreading democracy to places where it had little chance of taking root. Rather, what emerged from the rubble of the Iron Curtain was “a real chance to extend and deepen the rules-based international order” through the United Nations and other multilateral institutions. According to Shapiro, this opportunity was squandered by the shortsighted and foolish decisions of Western leaders, and especially American ones, of which the War on Terror is a prime example. In pursuing their End of History fantasies, Bush and co. closed the routes that actually existed to a new and better world.

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By Peter Frankopan

It was Bush’s father, President George H. W., who showed what that world might look like. During the first Gulf War of 1991, he carefully rallied 42 countries to eject Saddam Hussein from Kuwait, but stopped short of toppling the dictator so as to respect the parameters agreed by the UN Security Council. He thereby acknowledged the principle that, as Shapiro writes, “even great powers must negotiate with adversaries, and they often invest in norms and institutions to help manage their conflicts lest they become overextended”. The younger Bush demonstrated no such wisdom, and it was often lacking in Bill Clinton and Barack Obama too. 

An amnesia has set in during the Trump era, nurturing the impression that, for all its missteps, American power before 2016 was the largely benign lynchpin of a functioning rules-based order. In fact, as Shapiro details, America’s actions since the Nineties have amounted to a steady demolition of any possibility that such an order might take shape. Trump marks a new iteration of an existing pattern, not a break with it. 

The War on Terror anticipated Trump’s Iranian gambit not in its ideology but in its recklessness. Bush, like Trump, was elected on a platform of reducing foreign entanglements. He was a tax-cutting president who could not, or did not want to, cough up the resources necessary to finish the wars he started. The approach taken by both men (strategy is too generous a word) answer Shapiro’s description of “Ready! Fire! Aim!” In Afghanistan and Iraq, as in Iran today, the US started out by decapitating the leadership and decimating governing institutions; one of its first actions in Iraq was to fire 85,000 civil servants. 

Then there was the Bush administration’s dismissive attitude to international legitimacy. The 9/11 attacks brought condemnation from leaders across the Muslim world, and offers of solidarity and support from, among others, China and Russia. The Taliban government was willing to assist in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, as was the Pakistani leadership. But the US spurned such cooperation, sidelined the UN, and through its actions alienated much of the world. Its preference was for “coalitions of the willing” — alliances acting outside international legal frameworks — and for the uncompromising stance captured in Bush’s phrase “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”. 

As with Trump’s misfiring tariff diplomacy, which has inadvertently revealed China’s ability to resist American pressure, the neocons demonstrated the limits of American power rather than its extent. It is little discussed today, but the 2006 election victory which preceded Hamas’s seizure of the Gaza Strip came as a result of America’s desire to show progress in its democracy agenda. The Bush administration insisted that the elections be held, despite warnings from the governing Palestinian Authority, and was then outraged at the results. 

The War on Terror was not the only instance where the US thumbed its nose at the world. Shapiro is no less scathing about the humiliation of post-Soviet Russia during the Nineties and 2000s, when Russian leaders went to extraordinary lengths to show goodwill towards the United States, and were repaid with the expansion of Nato up to their borders. Whether a less antagonistic course would have avoided the Russian military aggression we see today is impossible to say, but many prominent voices at the time warned of just that outcome. Another excoriating chapter deals with the response to the eruption of civil war in Libya in 2011. In this case the UN approved a limited intervention to secure a ceasefire, only for France, Britain and the United States to flout this conditional support by aggressively pursuing regime change. This enraged countries around the world, and threw the region into anarchy, creating a breeding ground for terrorist groups and a pathway for gangs to smuggle migrants to Europe.

Trump, then, is not the aberration we make him out to be. He has extended to America’s traditional allies the imperious attitude that it has long shown towards other parts of the world (often with those same allies clinging to its skirts), and he has enlarged the scope of his predecessors’ bullying tactics to include trade. Who can miss the Trumpian overtones of Hillary Clinton’s remark at the death of Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, “we came, we saw, he died”?

Yet Shapiro’s chronicle of foreign policy failure is so damning that his explanation for it — bad decision making and bad ideas — feels inadequate. Nor does it lend much credence to his counter-factual scenario, which asks us to imagine the US binding its own hands for the sake of international harmony and cooperation. As a political scientist, albeit one who has been admirably critical of his own discipline in the past, Shapiro is keen to demonstrate that an informed reading of history, empirical studies and behavioral science would have steered politicians towards better decisions. To show that he is not just indulging in hindsight, he reminds us constantly that there were people on the scene who warned against the mistakes that were made and saw the paths not taken. But this still raises the question of why the leaders in question kept listening to the wrong people, and kept misjudging their situation so badly. And here Shapiro answers more clearly than he seems to realize. 

The underlying theme of After the Fall is that Western leaders were undone by short-sightedness, arrogance, imprudence, a sense of invulnerability, delusions of grandeur, and above all, by hubris. These are defects of character; not in the sense of personality, but of the habits of thought and judgment which mark the actions of individual leaders and the governing classes to which they belong. To think in this way does not fit comfortably with the analytical models and policy wonkery of contemporary political science. Though populist politicians such as Trump are routinely analyzed in terms of character, we tend to treat this as a special measure demanded by the peculiar nature of populism itself. 

Yet character was central to a classical understanding of political action which was still alive in the 20th century, and which stemmed ultimately from ancient Greece and Rome. One part of this understanding is simply to acknowledge the tragic nature of human fallibility. Leaders make bad decisions because they are people with vices as well as virtues. But historians and dramatists in the classical tradition also recognized that character is shaped by historical circumstance. Civilizations rise and fall because they produce people, and leaders, with particular strengths and weaknesses according to the challenges and opportunities that history presents them with. Voltaire expressed one version of this theory with his remark that “history is filled with the sound of silken slippers descending the stairs and wooden shoes coming up”. Wealth and power do not always cultivate the virtues needed to sustain them.

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Against the Mad King

By Sohrab Ahmari

If we scrape away the surface of Shapiro’s narrative, where a series of politicians succumb to erroneous beliefs and stumble into one disaster after another, what we find is a familiar morality tale of imperial apogee, overreach and decline. More particularly, we find leaders demonstrating a catalog of character flaws which were set in motion by the temptations of enormous power. Ideas matter, of course. During the War on Terror, for instance, a mistaken image of reality informed by neocon ideology had disastrous consequences. But such utopian conceits do not gain traction at random; in this case, they appealed to an American political elite which believed itself capable of reshaping the world. 

Even Shapiro’s later chapters, which deal with the corrosive effects of neoliberal economic orthodoxy in the End of History period, show the same thread of wishful thinking, complacency and irresponsibility. Free trade and globalization were held to be inevitable in much the same way as the spread of liberal democracy; politicians treated disaffected voters with a similar disregard as they did their international counterparts; and financial and business interests recognized no more restraints on their freedom than presidents and their advisors did. 

The simple truth in all of this slips out belatedly in the concluding remarks of After the Fall: “they did it because they could get away with it.” Western leaders were drunk on power; they were powerful enough, in other words, to be careless of the limits of their power, a condition which invariably leads to it being exhausted in self-destructive follies. Shapiro contrasts the last 35 years of foreign policy with the more enlightened decisions of American leaders after the Second World War, who supported international institutions and helped to rebuild their vanquished enemies into allies and trading partners. The crucial difference, of course, is that those leaders did not enjoy the illusion of untrammeled power and historical inevitability; they had the threat of the Soviet Union to sharpen their minds.

The question now is whether the challenge of Chinese power will change the character of US leadership, resulting in greater prudence and restraint, as rivalry with the Soviet Union once did. The fact that Trump has blundered into another Middle Eastern quagmire, creating a fresh distraction from the long-promised pivot to Asia, is not a promising sign. Perhaps America’s prestigious universities and think-tanks should devote less attention to political science, and more to the study of character in decision making. 

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

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

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

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Europe should secure the Strait

By Edward Luttwak

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Iran means for Putin

What Iran means for Putin

By Ian Garner

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their reasoning was that Turkey, which has the second largest standing army in Nato, was not to be trifled with. More to the point, they saw the attacks as a category error. Turkey was just not the enemy. Ankara’s official self-image is of a natural mediator, a regional heavyweight whose cultural understanding of its neighborhood is deeply rooted in a 600-year Ottoman past. It had loudly denounced the US-Israeli strikes while working its back channels to bring them to a halt. In other words, the missiles targeted Turkish self-esteem. For all its condemnation of US action, and despite saber-rattling at Israel, Turkey was being lumped into the imperial camp it had so loudly refused to join. It was a cruel blow that when talks between the Trump administration and the mullahs in Tehran finally took place, they happened in Islamabad and not Istanbul.

Even before the fog of this conflict lifts, Turkey, like countries elsewhere, is busy calculating who comes out on top. The cui bono matrix is not difficult to run. By most calculations, as Iran goes down, Turkey goes up. Of course, the current high price of oil is a spanner in Turkey’s disinflation policy, and risks undoing three years of sacrifice that dragged inflation down from a high of 75% per annum to (a still staggering) 32%. Yet as with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria, a weakened Iran increases Turkey’s strategic and commercial clout. In the long term, it reinforces Turkey’s effort to be an energy and transport hub, and allows it to compete with Dubai as the regional commercial center. That’s shadowed by opportunities further afield: just last week, Turkey’s foreign minister signed a “strategic partnership” on trade and security with Britain.

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Erdoğan's new world order

By Lily Lynch

As that last deal implies, all this is also good for the Turkish defense industries — not just drones but warships and even fighter jets. Israel views this with some alarm, and Benjamin Netanyahu has warned against an “emerging radical Sunni axis” in which Turkey is, presumably, the crucial pivot. In truth, the danger of a confrontation between a US ally and a fully paid-up member of Nato is slim. Ankara’s greater fear is that a badly wounded and unstable Iran will be a running sore even greater than the Syrian civil war — prompting a refugee crisis along a common 534-kilometer border, or else fueling Kurdish irredentism.

Thumbing back to before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Turkey may have been suspicious of the Shah’s ambitions to turn Iran into a dominant Middle Eastern power, but relations were largely cooperative. While there was no direct causal link, it is not fanciful to think that the rise of a Shiite theocratic regime in Tehran gave confidence to the Sunni religious Right in Turkey, which was gathering strength in those years. That Turkey was in danger of becoming “another Iran” was the newspaper cliché of the day. It is now ironic to think that a preferred solution for the pious government ruling in Ankara would be a stable but weakened secular regime in Iran. The worst option would be for Iran to emerge from the current conflict as master of the Strait of Hormuz, emboldened and unbowed.

Whatever the outcome, the people of Iran may well conclude that they are classic victims of “the curse of oil”, a rueful malediction preventing nations from converting natural resources into the well-being of their citizens. The Turkish people might conclude that they suffer from a different sort of hex: “strategic significance”. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been at the helm of his country for well over two decades, pioneering the art of transactional international relations while Donald Trump was chasing starlets and Viktor Orbán was still Brussels’ idea of a model democrat. His governments have managed to leverage geography and regional importance to insulate Turkey from external pressures and democratic accountability at home. The question now is whether the war will finally strip away that insulation, exposing Ankara to pressures it has long managed to arbitrage. The answer lies in understanding how profoundly Turkey has changed under Erdoğan’s rule — and whether that change can still work in his favor.

It might be a stretch to say that Turkey underwent a form of regime change in the 2002 elections that brought Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) to power. But it is fair to say that those elections obliterated a whole generation of politicians. No party in the previous parliament managed to gain a single seat. In a result reminiscent of Hungary under Orbán, and under a system that rewards the largest party, the AKP won two-thirds of MPs with barely a third of the popular vote. Erdoğan, a former mayor of Istanbul, was still a banned politician at the time, having served a brief prison sentence for “exploiting religion to political ends” by reciting a nationalist poem at a political rally — a blatant form of judicial casuistry which he was later to apply to his own political rivals.

Erdoğan’s political instincts and impassioned rhetoric peppered with references to Islam spoke to the concerns of first- and second-generation urban migrants. His party portrayed a greater acceptance of religion in public life as part of a wider struggle to make Turkey more democratic. Until recently, an aggressively secular Turkish military was a controlling presence in political life. Still, it is important to remember that what brought the AKP to power was not so much a tide of Islamic feeling as an economic crisis. A decade averaging 70% inflation was followed in 2001 by the collapse of the Turkish lira.

Today, it is again inflation, much more than Iranian Kheibar Shekan missiles, that most threatens the Erdoğan government. The parallel with Orbán is inexact — the GDP of Istanbul alone is roughly 1.5 times larger than all of Hungary. Yet like the jobless Hungarian premier, Erdoğan faces the predicament of a populist leader who now strains to be popular. And, like autocrats everywhere, Turkey’s leader has cultivated a patronage network and a praetorian guard of cronies who will do anything to keep their champion in power. The result is an increasingly disillusioned society that watches its country drop like a stone in international indices of democratic rights and press freedoms. A common reckoning is that 90% of Turkish media is under direct government control. But here’s the rub. The AKP still suffered its worst defeat since coming to power in the 2024 municipal elections, not just failing in the big cities but losing conservative heartland strongholds such as Bursa, Kütahya and Adıyaman.

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Why Turkey’s Kurds are tired of fighting

By Matt Broomfield

A year after Ekrem İmamoğlu — the popular Istanbul mayor widely seen as the most credible presidential challenger for the 2028 elections — won a second term by 10 percentage points in 2024, the government moved to arrest him on corruption charges. The tactic was familiar: Selahattin Demirtaş, the charismatic leader of the pro-Kurdish party, has spent years in prison despite the European Court of Human Rights repeatedly ruling his detention was politically motivated. The court issued a similar ruling for the philanthropist Osman Kavala, imprisoned since 2017. Kavala’s offense was to support civil society activism, his aggravated life sentence now a warning pour décourager les autres, or in this case other businesspeople tempted to support a dissident cause.

As the constitution stands, Erdoğan is not eligible for another presidential term, but few doubt he will overcome that obstacle. And though current polls show him unable to beat a CHP opponent, his current strategy is to use the courts to run that party into the ground. Mayor after CHP mayor is now being arrested, while the party leadership may be legally disbanded. Turkey, once a viable candidate for EU membership, has long ceased to be the poster child for how democracy can flourish in a Muslim-majority society.

The Antalya Diplomacy Forum, Turkey’s annual showcase conference held earlier this month, offered a revealing snapshot of where Erdoğan’s transactional model now stands. Dozens of heads of state attended. American and Iranian officials circled the same rooms without meeting. The mood was less about solving the Hormuz crisis than recalibrating for a world in which Washington is, to put it mildly, unpredictable. In such a world, Erdoğan’s strongman politics finds a ready audience. Tom Barrack, the US ambassador to Ankara, was explicit about the new dispensation at the public forum. “This part of the world,” he said, “respects only one thing: power. And if you don’t reflect power, if you reflect weakness, you are on your heels.” To hammer his point home, Barrack even lauded Erdoğan by name.

But as the price of food rises, as the middle classes try to send their children abroad, and as elected leaders go to jail, Turkish citizens may not be quite so sanguine about the cost to their civil liberties. Turkey pundits used to describe the country’s fault lines as lying between military and democratic politics, between secular and pious — but these binaries may have been more symbiotic than they appeared. Think of the Victorian optical toy, the thaumatrope: a bird painted on one side, a cage on the other. Spin the disc fast enough and the bird appears inside the cage. The question, as Turkey navigates the turbulence of its neighborhood’s most dangerous war in a generation, is whether the disc is finally slowing down — and whether, when it does, the bird will still be there.

Molan’s fate, and the Iranian missiles that continue to strike targets across northern Iraq, encapsulates the grave threat faced by Kurds and their political representatives. Rumored US support for a cross-border Kurdish assault on Iran has failed to materialize, leaving the Kurds exposed on the frontlines of a war they didn’t start. Three more Kurdish fighters were injured in a fresh strike just hours after Donald Trump announced the extension of a fragile ceasefire.

Yet beyond the Kurds and their unending fight for self-determination, Molan’s death also points to a broader crisis, one rapidly reaching boiling-point right across Iraq. Compared to Iran’s well-publicized ties to Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, Tehran’s network of Iraqi Shia militias receive relatively little attention abroad. But amid missile strikes and the high-profile kidnapping of a US journalist, US-Iraqi relations are now at their lowest ebb since 2003. Just this week, Washington cut Iraq off from dollar shipments altogether, demanding its nominal partner sever ties with Tehran and arrest militia members accused of attacks on US bases. As Trump’s standoff with the Revolutionary Guards continues, his war on Iran looks set to spill over onto yet another country.

The semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), established following the Gulf War, has long been a loyal partner to the West. One street in the capital Erbil was recently renamed after John Major, honoring Britain’s own role in establishing the safe haven in Iraq’s mountainous north, today home to around six million Kurds. So when the American press started leaking news that the US and Israel were looking to “arm the Kurds” in the early days of the 2026 war, it seemed a repeat of that same partnership could be on the cards in neighboring Iran, itself home to some 10 million Kurds. The Islamic Republic has killed tens of thousands of its own Kurdish population over the years, including during 2022’s “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising and in response to massive protests this January.

But according to Hoshyar Siwaily, the head of foreign relations for the KRI’s governing Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), reports of an imminent US-backed cross-border operation were fake news. “Even when the KRI is facing continuous missile and drone attacks, from both Iran and our neighbors in Iraq, the West has not provided the KRI with the means to defend itself,” Siwaily tells UnHerd. “We’ve been asking the US and our European partners to provide us with air defense systems, which we think they would be willing to provide — but Baghdad’s position hinders that kind of direct assistance.”

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Revenge of the Kurds

By Matt Broomfield

US forces stationed in Erbil operate their own air-defense system at the city’s airport. That means some protection for locals; busy shopping streets are peppered with falling shrapnel more than direct missile impacts. Still, it’s better than Kurdish regions outside the capital, which have no such shield. That includes the camps housing the various exiled Iranian Kurdish parties, sheltering under the wing of their more successful Iraqi brethren, and where most of the Kurdish casualties have been concentrated.

Hassan Sharifi is a senior representative of the KDP-I, the largest and oldest Iranian Kurdish opposition party. “We don’t have any role in starting this war between Iran and Israel and the USA, and we don’t have any role in it continuing or stopping,” he says, wearing a military-green version of the traditional Kurdish cummerbund as he speaks in his party’s Erbil headquarters. “And yet Iran continues to strike us, all day every day.”

Both domestically and abroad, scapegoating the Kurds has long been an attractive option for Iran, as it fights its asymmetrical war with the West. Washington’s careless hints at a partnership between the Kurds, the US and Israel have only poured oil on the fire. Adib Khaladyan, a political representative for another Iranian-Kurdish opposition group, counts members of his own small party among the dead. “We have refrained from any attacks on Iran since 2005, but they have never ceased attacking us,” he tells UnHerd in the lobby of an Erbil hotel included on an Iranian hit list for allegedly sheltering US and Israeli intelligence agents. Khaladyan, for his part, denies this charge. “There’s no concrete evidence Israel is supporting any Iranian Kurdish party,” he says, adding that the Islamic Republic nonetheless targets Iranian Kurdish parties and the houses of their members.

In any case, decades of political exile and internal repression by Tehran mean their scope for action within Iran itself is relatively limited, with the Iraqi-Kurdish authorities pragmatically keeping their Iranian guests on a tight leash. “We are not willing to let these [opposition] political parties use Kurdistan as a base to launch their attacks against Iran,” Siwaily says, pointing to a 2023 agreement between the KRI, Baghdad and Tehran aimed at disarming the Kurdish-Iranian opposition. But though the Kurds haven’t fired a single bullet against Iran throughout the two-month conflict, the war has reached their doorstep anyway. As well as contending with over 700 Iranian strikes since the war began, Iraqi Kurds have faced fire from their Arab compatriots.

As the leading force of the Shia Muslim world, Tehran has long sought influence in majority-Shia Iraq, home to both Shia Islam’s most sacred sites and the seminaries that honed the Islamic Republic’s religious leaders. While the US was busy backing Kurdish aspirations in the north during its wars with Saddam Hussein, Iran supported militias in the Shia south. Iran-backed insurgents went on to resist the post-2003 US occupation, before growing in strength and influence as they joined the fight against ISIS. Scores of militias, grouped under the banner of the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF), can today field hundreds of thousands of fighters. More than that, they regularly launch missile attacks at US bases and assets across the region — including, of course, the Kurds.

Tehran has a well-known policy financing and training regional proxies like Hezbollah and the Houthis, enabling them to attack common foes in Israel and the US. But Iran’s Iraqi allies are arguably more valuable still, providing not just military cover, but billions of dollars in cash. These militias dominate Iraqi politics through the “Coordination Framework” of Shiite political parties, helping Iran achieve massive control over Iraq’s political, economic and legislative apparatus. To that extent, “militia” is a misnomer for a network that may still engage in checkpoint-level corruption at the grassroots, but which at the state level runs vast construction, agriculture, real estate and infrastructure enterprises. Especially as it struggles with sanctions and now a blockade, Iran is more reliant than ever on billions of dollars arriving from Iraq via shell companies and informal transfers, with the PMF for instance deploying a complex scheme to make $1.5 billion from Iraq’s black-market exchange rate.

While Washington and Tehran continue their will-they-won’t-they dance over a ceasefire, meanwhile, another set of highly significant negotiations is taking place in Iraq. The Baghdad political establishment is currently struggling to overcome a five-month deadlock and elect a new prime minister. A candidate elected with heavy Iranian backing has already been directly vetoed by President Trump under threat of US sanctions — but the pro-Iranian bloc is now trying to advance another pick, himself already sanctioned by Washington. US Special Envoy Tom Barrack this week stopped in Erbil before flying down to Baghdad, arriving in the capital to lobby for US interests to be respected. A senior member of the Revolutionary Guards was elsewhere in the city, making the opposite case for Iran. Hezbollah may be decimated, and Tehran in turmoil, but in Baghdad the US-Iranian struggle continues on an equal footing.

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I was detained by Greece’s migrant police

By Matt Broomfield

Since the 7 October attack and Israel’s bloody reprisals across the Middle East, the Iraqi front has remained relatively quiet, as Iran’s proxies concentrated on consolidating and institutionalizing their power. The PMF’s penetration of Iraq was underscored this month when they plucked US journalist Shelly Kittleson from the streets of Baghdad and fired drones at a US diplomatic convoy from within the capital. All the same, US and Israeli strikes killing scores of PMF militiamen have not yet been met with an aggressive response.

Now, however, the hour of reckoning may finally have come. This week, the US has stopped all dollar shipments to Iraq’s central bank, and suspended all security coordination with the Iraqi government. Besides the Kurds, the US has its allies in Iraq’s formal security forces. Unfortunately for Washington, the PMF is larger and better-financed than Iraq’s actual army. If, in other words, the US and Israel ramp up their strikes, this political and economic struggle could yet devolve into outright civil conflict, pitting the PMF against Iraq’s beleaguered armed forces plus Sunni and tribal armed groups. Such chaos would, of course, create room for militant Islamists of all stripes — an especially concerning scenario given the US has just airlifted nearly 6,000 ISIS detainees from Syria and deposited them into Iraqi custody.

The shock-waves would certainly extend to Kurdistan, the USA’s last solid ally in Iraq, where political parties are struggling to plot a course through a sea of historic enemies. Even the pro-Western KDP has fostered a pragmatic alliance with the pro-Iranian presidential candidate in Baghdad. Iran, for its part, continues to exert deeper influence across Iraqi-Iranian borderlands controlled by the KDP’s historic rivals in the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). It was here that Kurdish hospitals turned away the wounded Kurdish fighter, fearing Iranian reprisals.

“Although we are partners of the USA,” says the Kurdish politician Siwaily, “we would like to stay neutral, because this war is bigger than us.” But though Trump has now extended his ceasefire deadline, missiles continue to fly over Kurdistan, and the drums of war are sounding in Baghdad. Staying neutral might well be wishful thinking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

People still think shipping is an old-fashioned business. After all, even giant container ships usually travel slower than your grandparent drives. But overseas trade has increased fourfold since 1970 and it is still growing. Today, 90% of everything we consume comes to us by 100,000 ships and 1.5 million seafarers, though you wouldn’t know it until a crisis comes along. When the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010, and all aviation stopped, supermarket shelves didn’t empty. That’s because we rely on shipping: but just don’t realize it.

In this latest crisis, there are thought to be more than 800 ships stuck on either side of the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway that Iran has essentially invaded — the Strait’s waters belong half to Iran and half to Oman — with threats of mines and drones. Despite Donald Trump’s dubious claim that 34 ships had gone through the strait on Monday, and despite muddled talk of closures and reopenings, for now hardly anything is moving. Before the crisis, after all, traffic through the Strait averaged 100-150 vessels a day. On Saturday, it was less than 20.

Only a fifth of the world’s oil supply is at issue here — but from the noise you’d think it was all of it. In fact, the blocked supply disproportionately affects nations that get most of their oil from the Gulf. South East Asia and Japan are suffering most. Even so, this is a problem that affects us all. As the International Energy Agency recently warned yet again, this is the largest disruption in history, adding that demand for oil is likely to fall by 88,000 barrels per day, as buyers adjust to a depleted supply and find alternatives. In economics, this is known as “demand destruction”, and it’s the surest outcome in a very unsure situation. At the worst point so far, the price of a barrel of oil surged to $150.

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By Anonymous Seafarer

All the while, the crisis is expensive in other ways too: idle ships still cost money to run; crew members have to be paid, sometimes double their wages as hazard pay; charterers (who rent ships) have to pay rental even if the ship is going nowhere fast. Factor in port rates — several thousand dollars a day  — and ships can cost thousands of dollars to operate, even when they are idle. Cruise ships face higher costs because while a modern tanker can operate with a crew of a dozen, cruise ships employ thousands of people, and they all need to be fed and paid.

Nor does anyone know when this will end. In its latest World Economic Outlook released last Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund stated that in an “adverse scenario with larger and more persistent increases in energy prices”, global growth will slow to 2.5%, compared to a 3.4% growth rate in 2024-5.

As is always the way, the pain would not be distributed evenly. Of richer countries, the UK gets the worst forecast, with a growth rate of 0.8%, down from the IMF’s January prediction of 1.3%. (The IMF pointed to Britain being a net energy importer and therefore being more exposed.) In its very worst scenario, the Hormuz crisis might push the world into recession.

What is less widely reported, however, is that, for some, this crisis is actually good for business. Consider freight rates, which for ships operating away from the warzone have increased dramatically. Some tankers now cost $100,000 a day to charter. That’s some 10 times the average — but they’re still being chartered. “No shipowner is going through a slump as such,” says Willmington. “It’s actually been beneficial for ship owners.”

It helps, too, that global sea lanes are very much a seller’s market. While shippers can offload cargo safely away from the war region, they’ll struggle to transport it overland. Modern container ships can carry some 20,000 containers — and no one has 20,000 trucks at hand to transport that much cargo. Local rail services are also poor.

A Reuters investigation into how 17 containers of two-by-four planks of timber were sent to their destination is sobering. The Austrian wood should have left Croatia by ship, then traveled straight to Dubai. Then, a smaller feeder ship would have taken it to Qatar, making the total journey time about 45 days. The war has wrecked these arrangements, with the Austrian timber now not expected to reach Doha for another month. Meanwhile, each container was surcharged $3,600, on top of usual freight costs, another boon for owners.

Another option is to pay for expensive storage, with no idea of how long the situation will last. Oxford Economics, a think tank, suggests that the crisis will last two months. “We assume that traffic levels will rise to around 50% in May and June,” it’s stated, “before gradually recovering to normality over the following six months.”

Then there’s the human element: tankers, after all, don’t drive themselves. On those 800 trapped ships are an estimated 20,000 seafarers. Most come from the developing countries that supply shipping’s labor pool: largely the Philippines and India. They are stuck on their ships, with no end to their sentence in sight. Some but not all crew are on double “hazard” pay. Shipping managers can in theory change crews, as most ships are anchored on either side of the Strait and are therefore accessible. But there are very few people willing to sign up to sit in waters where drones fly overhead and they can hear explosions, yet another challenge for hard-pressed industry accountants.

To be fair, the shipping industry has weathered crises before, though with varying success. It took nearly two decades for shipping to fully recover from the 2008 financial crisis, and only then because Covid increased consumer demand massively, helping shipping too. During the years of awful Somali piracy, when hundreds of seafarers were taken hostage in the Indian Ocean, one of the most common shipping routes, ships began to pass around the Cape of Good Hope instead: it took longer and cost more, but there were no attackers in small boats.

For Hormuz, though, geography limits options. Two large pipelines, in Saudi Arabia and the UAE respectively, can send oil to ports on the Red Sea. But their much smaller capacity can’t replace the pre-crisis 20 million barrels a day that transited the Strait. That, at least, leaves one certainty: business as usual is not returning for a very long time.

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.

Banal as it may appear when viewed up close, this concentrated form of a uranium isotope is perhaps the most sought-after ornament among nations. It makes intoxicating promises: energy independence, military supremacy, carbon-free electricity, foolproof insurance against regime change.

Just as gold and diamonds have the intrinsic power to trigger acquisitive lust within certain greedy individuals, highly enriched uranium has the same beckoning effect on thirsty nation-states. At least three countries — Iran, North Korea and Pakistan — have dangerously leveraged themselves in its pursuit, spending vast sums of capital on moonshot nuclear programs and nearly starving their own citizens as a result. Producing it inside a massive industrial facility costs at least $150,000 per kilogram once tens of billions of dollars of startup costs have already been sunk. And it is worth exponentially more on a potential black market should it ever be peeled away from close supervision.

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The irony of this desire, though, is that uranium has rarely lived up to its utopian promises. In fact, it usually brings a new level of trouble and a welter of unforeseen consequences. The combined hope and disappointment of uranium now serves as a thread connecting various furores and difficulties, national and international. In Britain, the Government’s ambitious Net Zero target has driven up energy costs and prompted renewed calls for a greater reliance on nuclear power. Britain’s peers, too, are rediscovering their interest in this form of energy supply. At the same time, the world is at the mercy of the crisis in the Middle East, at whose heart is the longstanding problem of Iran’s nuclear program and the unknown fate of its stockpile of highly enriched uranium (HEU).

US and Israeli bombing missions have demolished the above-ground campus of the enrichment facilities at Isfahan and done an unknown amount of damage to the subterranean chambers where scientists reportedly built an assembly line of centrifuges to do the delicate work of separating the wobbly isotope U-235 from the “natural uranium” of U-238. Since the former occurs in a ratio of about 0.7%, this is like picking a few red sprinkles out of a bowl of cupcake batter. The U-238 must be reduced to uranium hexafluoride gas and run through the spinning centrifuges hundreds of times before the substance can become fissile enough to sustain a chain reaction — a state known as weapons-grade.

Notoriously, President Trump claimed that Iran’s nuclear bomb factories at Natanz, Isfahan and Fordo had been “completely and totally obliterated” in a joint Israel-US air attack last June, an assertion he contradicted in a Florida speech on March 27 in which he admonished listeners: “Remember, they were two weeks away… If we didn’t knock the hell out of them, they would have had a nuclear weapon within two to four weeks.”

The more sober assessment by most intelligence agencies — that Iran’s enrichment capabilities have been significantly degraded — still leaves open the question of what happened to the estimated 400 kilograms of HEU that may still by lying in the wreckage, and whether the US military should commission a commando raid to seize or destroy the canisters of gaseous material — if they are even still located at the facilities. This week’s ceasefire may only give the Iranians more time to squirrel away a portion of their stockpile. Though it is almost impossible to hide the underground city required to process ore into weapons-grade uranium, the finished material itself can be easily concealed, transported and stored elsewhere for an indefinite period.

Such an operation would amount to the most complex recovery missions of the last 80 years. US Special Forces would have to secure one or more tight perimeters in the middle of a hostile foreign nation for as long as several weeks, while combat engineers burrowed through a tomb of rubble in search of small targets. The Iranian military would certainly hurl missiles and other deadly objects into the excavation site while the hunt was underway. The operation might even require an airstrip to get all the equipment in and out via cargo plane. While extravagant and dangerous, the costs of this scenario would still be a fraction of the estimated $3 trillion spent on the eight-year occupation of Iraq — another war of regime change sold to the public as a crusade to seize and destroy uranium.

The pursuit of a nuclear weapon may well end as the last misstep of the Islamic Revolutionary government of Iran. But it also illustrates the unique psychological hold of uranium on the consciousness of the United States, the inventor of the atomic bomb and thus far the only nation to use it in wartime. Guilt and fear descended immediately after Hiroshima. The Manhattan Project transformed itself into the civilian Atomic Energy Commission in 1947 and changed its mission to spreading “peaceful” uses of uranium and its sister product plutonium. This involved touting nuclear power plants as miracle domes capable of generating electricity “too cheap to meter” and helping nations from Jamaica to the Belgian Congo acquire experimental reactors. Perhaps not coincidentally, some of these global energy programs — notably in Israel and Pakistan — turned into undercover programs to divert enough fuel to make a weapon. In both cases, the rationale was that this was the only way to preserve sovereignty in a hostile neighborhood.

Now some in the UK are looking to uranium in similar messianic terms, though for a different goal: as the only sustainable path for meeting Net Zero emission goals within the next quarter century. The Government has made a call for a nuclear power “renaissance” to quadruple its generating capacity, thus getting free of the Russian natural gas chokehold, rising AI dominance of the grid, and nasty greenhouse emissions, all in one deft stroke. This is despite some unpleasant realities. Previous “renaissances” have run aground on the hard realities of just how much it costs to build a new nuclear plant (£35 billion for one that generates 3.2 gigawatts, less than 10% of the national baseload), combined with the enduring problem of waste disposal and the unquantifiable risk of a catastrophic accident.

Talk of a nuclear-powered future got hot and heavy in the first decade of the 21st century, for example, backed by Panglossian discourse (including a book with the unfortunate title Power to Save the World) until a 2011 earthquake and tsunami ravaged the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan in a way that its designers had not anticipated. The fallout from that incident went beyond leaking contaminants: the biggest damage was to the long-term future of an energy source that creates a waste product hazardous for half a million years merely to boil water into steam. Germany phased out its nuclear grid as a result, as did Belgium. Even in France — where up to 74% of the baseload is provided by a fleet of 57 aging reactors — the government announced plans to reduce its dependence to 50%, though this goal keeps getting postponed. France used to view nuclear power as a pillar of its nationalism; not so much anymore.

The promise of uranium isn’t completely chimerical. Parity in nuclear weapons between Nato and the Soviet bloc may well have been the deciding factor in preventing a third European war in the 20th century. Whether justified or not, the leaders of North Korea certainly point to their arsenal of weapons — estimated at 50 — as the amulets that keeps the American and South Korean troops on the borders from invading. Air pollution from coal-burning plants has doubtlessly killed more people than nuclear accidents which, in the past 61 years, have proven relatively rare, though the United States still has not devised a permanent way to dispose of spent fuel rods, which emit deadly levels of radiation. The haphazard temporary fix of keeping them in concrete shells called dry casks means that up to 80 nuclear power plants across the country are guardians of a gruesome buried treasure.

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Just as the instability of the U-235 isotope gives the substance its tremendous power, the inherent dangers of a “nuclear solution” to a foreign policy dilemma, or to an effort to limit emissions, means that the call of the unstable element ought to be treated with extreme caution. Whenever he gets frustrated with Western interference in his Ukrainian project, Vladimir Putin likes to remind his listeners that he could convene the world’s greatest barbecue on command, a threat that grows more tired with each telling, even as the American president seems to emulate him with loose talk of genocide and civilizational erasure that points inescapably toward the sabre of the US nuclear armory. He has asked his advisors why they shouldn’t be used in ordinary warfare, made a priapic threat to North Korea about the bigger size of the “nuclear button” on his desk, and has mused about detonating them inside hurricanes to limit damage to coastal areas. He has the sole authority to launch them, with no legal mechanism to overrule him.

When I was writing a book about its origin and uses some 15 years ago, an official at an Australian mine told me she thought of the substance in anthropomorphic terms: a seductive character not unlike Mozart’s Don Giovanni who tries to appear respectable but cannot help reverting to his sinful state. Nations that succumb to the charms of uranium and embark on a secret weapons program put themselves at risk of preemptive invasion. Those that embark on a nuclear “renaissance”, building new power stations in an era of solar proficiency and improvements in battery technology, expose taxpayers to the risk of funding a whole circus of expensive white elephants dotting the countryside.

The lure persists, just as it did in the beginning. In 1945, when the world’s first batch of U-235 pellets were brought to the Los Alamos lab in New Mexico, the scientist Otto Frisch watched in fascination as the dull metal cubes started to oxidize and harmlessly turn blue. They looked weirdly beautiful, even though they would soon amount to embodied death for the residents of Hiroshima. “I had the urge to take one,” he confessed. “As a paperweight, I told myself.”

The resulting system would amount to a major concession to the Islamic Republic, which didn’t collect any fees for permitting passage before the war. At least one vessel has already paid $2 million to pass. If that becomes the going rate, Iran could pocket some $70 billion to $90 billion a year, according to a JPMorgan estimate — in effect, obtaining through fees the reparations to which Tehran insists it is entitled for the destruction caused by the war. Hence, Karl’s question.

Trump’s response: “We’re thinking of doing it as a joint venture. It’s a way of securing it — also securing it from lots of other people. It’s a beautiful thing.”

Ponder the absurdity: a joint venture with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which just showed its capacity to unilaterally close the strait and thus cripple global energy markets. It’s the sort of bullshit — sorry, there’s no better word — that defines his rule, especially in his second term. Call it mad-king governance, in which the intellectual inconstancy, mercurial moods, and sheer gambling audacity of a single man are supposed to substitute for modern technocracy.

Except, mad-king governance is utterly exhausting for Americans and the world. And the process is so messy, the results so lousy, the risks so high, that the mad king is making liberal technocracy look better by comparison. One yearns to cry out: Bring back Hillary, bring back the Obamaian wonks, give us a thousand interagency briefing memos and think-tank white papers — policy formed in the pre-populist age may have been bad, but it wasn’t this bad.

I kid. Mostly. Pre-Trump technocracy, to adapt a famous adage of Mitterrand’s, contained in itself all the elements that made Trump’s rise inevitable. Above all, it removed important questions from democratic contestation; no matter which party voters elected, they got ruinous free-trade deals, pointless foreign wars, and open borders. In 2016, Trump got himself elected president precisely by re-politicizing the questions that voters had been told were beyond their ken.

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Trump was never the one

By Sohrab Ahmari

Trump, in other words, put his finger on a real crisis of democracy, and one that America had confronted going back to the beginning. Given its complexities, modern society requires complex administration. But in carrying out this function, administrative agencies can come to override the democratic will, often to the benefit of themselves and other elites. This, in turn, provokes backlash, with the popular classes sometimes elevating a brash figure to take on all the wonky bastards.  

The classic American case is the Second Bank of the United States. The bank was a pillar of the Hamiltonian state, designed to ensure the steady but disciplined flow of credit in the new republic as it set out to industrialize its economy. The BUS fulfilled this function with admirable effectiveness, as well as serving as a profiteering money-market actor in its own right.

Yet it also came to be seen, not unjustly, as a vehicle for the Northeastern commercial establishment and unfriendly to workers, farmers, and a rising class of small entrepreneurs in the South and West. Moreover, although the bank was established by Congress and partially funded by taxpayers, its leaders strenuously resisted democratic oversight and even used their financial might to bend election outcomes to their preferences.

The bank’s opponents found a champion in Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee militiaman who despised all paper money and saw the BUS as unconstitutional. Jackson, known as “Old Hickory” for his toughness, set out to destroy the BUS — and succeeded. Having failed to plan for the aftermath, however, the Jackson administration turned to local banks to serve as substitute depositories for government funds. 

The Jacksonians soon learned to their chagrin that small bankers were far more vulnerable to graft and mismanagement than the big federal institution. The immediate issue of the Bank War was a rash of wildcat banking and a recession, and a US banking system that for much of the 19th century was much more crisis-prone than those of comparable industrial states, like France and Britain, with more centralized banking systems. What the BUS needed was better democratic oversight. There were good proposals in Congress for ensuring this, which Jackson ignored, choosing instead a Hulk-smash strategy that ended up creating more problems than it solved. 

This fact pattern should be disconcertingly familiar. To be sure, Jackson was far more mentally disciplined and systematic than Trump. Indeed, Old Hickory doesn’t deserve the mad-king label. But Jackson’s flawed fight with the BUS also describes the self-defeating course of much Trumpian “reform.”

Consider tariffs and free trade. Trump identified a very real crisis, of course: a world trade system that profited Wall Street and China but sapped US manufacturing capacity and decimated working-class jobs and communities. But like the Jacksonians, the Trumpians could smash, but not design and develop. They imposed tariffs on certain Chinese goods in the first term, but it was left to the Bidenites to actually implement something like an industrial policy, especially focused on renewables and semiconductors.

Upon returning to office, Trump once more set out to restructure the trade system, with tariffs emerging as his only tool for doing so. Not even bothering with legislation in Congress, he used dubious statutory authority to impose across-the-board tariffs, derived using a cockamamie formula, on every corner of the Earth, including islands uninhabited by humans. It was unclear how imposing levies on bananas would revive manufacturing. Nor could the administration explain why all trade deficits, with all nations and in all sectors, had to be eliminated. Nor, finally, were the tariffs coupled with workforce development or industrial policy — the additional ingredients needed for a genuine manufacturing revival.

Then Trump went into mad-king mode, imposing and removing tariffs, raising rates and slashing them, based on pure caprice and in response to the gyrations of equity markets. Like Oprah dispensing prizes to her audience members, the mad king handed down tariff threats to every foreign country that dared to disagree with him, including some of Washington’s oldest and most reliable allies.

Eventually, the US Supreme Court held that Trump lacked the statutory authority he claimed for his tariffs. Manufacturing revival, the ostensible purpose of the policy, was all but forgotten. And indeed, it isn’t happening: in the first year of the second Trump administration, the United States lost more than 100,000 manufacturing jobs. And only about a third of voters approve of his handling of the economy, compared with nearly two-thirds who disapprove. Trump’s mad-king shenanigans not only failed to fulfill one of MAGA’s central promises, but may have even undermined the credibility of an important tool for protecting US industry.

It was his recent Iran war, however, that comprehensively sealed the debate on the dangerous folly of this kind of governance. As two administration officials, one current and one former, told me in almost identical words, with the Iran war, “there was no interagency process” — none of the usual compilation and exchange of views between different parts of the security and foreign-policy apparatus aimed at helping presidential decision-making. There was just the king and his favorite senatorial and Fox News jesters.

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How Trump saved the Left

By Ryan Zickgraf

Start with his rhetoric surrounding the conflict. Shut up, Trump effectively told those of his supporters jarred by his decision to join Israel’s war against Iran, given his 2024 campaign pledge of a “peace” administration. Wasn’t MAGA supposed to pivot away from Mideast wars? “MAGA was my idea,” he countered. “MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else.” Le MAGA, c’est moi.

The objectives were ever-shifting: changing the regime and putting Iran’s destiny in the hands of its people; degrading military capacity; stopping a nuclear program that had already been “obliterated” in the course of the earlier 12-Day War; reopening the Strait of Hormuz; not reopening the Strait of Hormuz, because we don’t need it anyway; you better “fucking open it, you crazy bastards,” otherwise America will “wipe out a whole civilization”; OK, how about we both run it in a joint venture?

Often, management of the war was based on the state of the stock market. It became a joke on Iranian state TV that Trump eased up on operations on Sundays to ensure the Dow could climb into the green on Mondays, then ramp up the war come the next weekend, when markets closed. If it were a true war of necessity, of course, the nation would fight it to the end, even if it meant destroying everyone’s 401(k)s. But only a mad king adjusts daily tactics in a war of choice based on equity values.

The upshot is a battered but strategically victorious Iran. The regime didn’t collapse, but hardened its internal position. Iran’s ballistic firing ability was judged to be improving as the war went on. Relief from sanctions and tariffs are on the way, per Trump himself. And above all, Tehran realized it doesn’t need a nuclear weapon when it can shut off one of the world’s economic arteries at will. And notice: Trump devoted nearly all of his remaining political capital to carrying out one of the long-time goals of the very hawkish “deep state” that had long sought his political destruction. Except he did it poorly, in mad-king fashion.

So what’s a better way? In the view of the American Founders, the answer is political contestation and compromise of the kind that’s supposed to take place, especially, in the legislative branch. But so long as Congress is more or less moribund, and American lawmakers see their jobs as auditioning for cable news, the country is fated to lurch between mad kings and imperious bureaucrats. Both are bad. Still, after what we lived through in 2025 and 2026, I say bring back the wonks.

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

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

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

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

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

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War is being hypernormalised

By B. Duncan Moench

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

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

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

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

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China will win the Iran War

By Aaron Bastani

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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America's new doctrine of Empire

By Aris Roussinos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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America’s military humiliation

By Malcom Kyeyune

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today’s headlines suggest that neither Wotton’s irony nor Callières’ restraint has survived the new diplomacy. Washington says talks with Tehran are “going very well” even as military preparations continue. Iran denounces the terms as one-sided while keeping the diplomatic door ajar; European ministers warn that the conflict cannot be separated from wider confrontations with Russia. In an era of “policy by tweet”, then, what presents itself as realism looks, on closer inspection, like something older and less stable: a return to personalized statecraft, part feudal pageant, part mafia-style armed bargaining.

Donald Trump stands at the center of this shift. His postponement of threatened attacks, while marshaling troops and marines for a possible ground invasion, reflects a businessman’s transactional approach to international affairs — one that has had some purchase in the Western Hemisphere. But Iran is not Venezuela. Here, the same method risks producing not leverage but escalation, hardening positions into what increasingly resembles the religiously charged confrontation encouraging the same ideas of martyrdom and sacrifice that allowed Iran to weather the Iraqi onslaught of the Eighties.

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By Michael Lind

What we are witnessing, in short, is not merely a crisis over Iran but a transformation in the culture of international policymaking. Late-night tweets by an aging leader now reverberate globally in real time. This marks a departure from the centuries during which international affairs, however imperfectly, were conducted through institutional channels that imposed a degree of predictability. In the digital era, diplomacy appears to be reverting to something closer to a pre-Westphalian condition: less governed by procedure, more by impulse; less mediated by institutions, more by personalities. Between Wotton’s irony and Callières’ restraint lies the enduring tension at the heart of diplomacy: the management of truth, trust and interest within a shared framework of rules. That framework — laboriously constructed over centuries — now looks shaky indeed.

Diplomacy, as it originally evolved, was designed precisely to restrain the arbitrary exercise of power. It became what the writer and diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson called a “skilled and difficult art”, embedding political action within recognized procedures governing the transition between war and peace. Its central premise was simple: states, not individuals, are the primary actors in international affairs. The contrast with today is striking. Decisions once filtered through diplomatic channels are now compressed into social media declarations, often addressed as much to domestic audiences as to foreign governments.

Marshall McLuhan’s famous aphorism that “the medium is the message” captures the significance of this change. A tweet is not merely a message conveyed through a different medium; it alters the nature of the act itself. It is immediate, public, performative. It collapses the distance between deliberation and declaration, bypassing the slow accretion of consensus on which diplomacy depends. In such a space, ambiguity — once a resource of diplomacy — becomes a liability, even as clarity can easily slide into provocation.

This transformation is reinforced by the erosion of formal diplomatic channels. In the Iran crisis, after all, negotiations have involved not only established officials but also informal envoys operating through fluid and sometimes opaque lines of communication. Steve Witkoff’s globetrotting is a case in point. All the while, European diplomats view such arrangements with skepticism, questioning both their coherence and their credibility. The result is a curious inversion: the most powerful state in the international system seems to be undermining the very structures that make diplomacy intelligible. To see how much of a departure this represents, it is worth recalling how those structures first emerged.

In the ancient world, envoys traveled between courts bearing messages that could avert — or precipitate — conflict. The Greeks developed rules governing treaties and war; the Romans treated agreements as legal instruments while manipulating them to advantage; Byzantium professionalized negotiation through trained envoys. Yet these practices remained personal. Rulers negotiated with rulers; alliances were sealed by marriages; agreements depended on honor as much as law.

It was only from the later Middle Ages that diplomacy acquired more robust institutional form. Wotton’s dig aside, the Venetian Republic provides a striking example here. Its diplomatic archive contains documents covering a formidable nine centuries, from 883 to its eventual destruction by Napoleon in 1797. This can be read as a vast parchment intelligence network, mixing gossip with sharp observations from the courts of Europe and beyond. The famous “relazioni” analyze neighboring states in forensic detail — measuring rulers, armies and economies with cool detachment.

For the Venetians, and soon for other Europeans too, policy became cumulative, grounded in institutional memory and precedent more than personality alone. These developments culminated in the Peace of Westphalia. Concluded at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and involving some 190 delegations, it established the principle that states — territorial units governed by sovereign authorities — were the primary actors in international affairs. The system that followed was refined in later settlements, notably the Congress of Vienna, which codified rules of diplomatic precedence and representation.

That legacy is now under strain — not just from social media, but also the provenance of the new diplomacy’s leading actors. To understand Middle Eastern politics, particularly its manifestations in the Gulf, it is well worth starting with the Muqadimma, by the renowned North African scholar Ibn Khaldun. Born in Tunis in 1332, he is often seen as a precursor of Western political and social theorists from Machiavelli to Marx. Leadership, according to Ibn Khaldun, exists through superiority, and superiority through a concept he calls asabiyya. An Arabic word, it is usually translated as “group-feeling” or “clannism”.

More to the point, drawing on asabiyya allows us to more clearly understand this shift in practice. In Khaldunian terms, power rests not on abstract institutions but on the cohesion of ruling groups, often organized around family or clan, and buttressed by endogamous practices such as marriage between first or second cousins. The force of asabiyya resists impersonal structures and tends to revert, under pressure, to personalized forms of rule. Across the Arab Gulf , petrodollar wealth has reinforced these patterns. In these tribal monarchies, political authority remains tied to ruling families whose internal cohesion — not public legitimacy — underpins the state.

Iran, for all its authoritarianism, presents a more complex model, combining clerical power with electoral mechanisms and a layered constitutional structure. Seen in this light, the drift towards personalized diplomacy reflects a convergence: the erosion of the public domain in the West meets the persistence of kin-based systems elsewhere. The comparison with the medieval world becomes instructive. Before the modern state system, political authority was personal. Kings operated within networks of kinship and rivalry; agreements were contingent; reputation was central. Conflict could be ritualized. Jousting offers a suggestive parallel: a controlled encounter governed by rules, yet driven by personal honor. Victory conferred prestige; defeat entailed humiliation. The contest was as much about display as outcome.

There is, however, a crucial asymmetry. Israeli and US reliance on targeted assassination reflects the logic of personalized power. Yet applied to Iran, it risks confusing visibility with vulnerability. Unlike many Arab regimes, Iran possesses a dense institutional structure in which authority is distributed across clerical bodies, elected institutions, and the security services. Power resides not in individuals alone but in an interlocking system capable of absorbing losses and regenerating leadership. The paradox is clear: strategies based on personalized power can fail against systems whose resilience lies in institutional depth.

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No less important, the feudal approach to foreign policy is also bewildering for everyone else. European leaders, already divided over Iran, respond not to coherent strategies but to shifting signs from Washington. The lack of consultation undermines trust; volatility undermines credibility. Nor are regional actors themselves exempt from these challenges. Personalized diplomacy may allow for rapid engagement, but it also undermines predictability. Relationships become central — but also fragile. For the Gulf states, particularly the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, the implications are vast.

If, after all, American policy appears contingent on personal relationships rather than institutional commitments, the incentive to hedge increases. This may take the form of diversified alliances or, more ominously, the pursuit of independent deterrence. Reports that Saudi Arabia is gathering uranium, together with its longstanding links with Pakistan, raise the question of whether Israel’s regional nuclear monopoly will remain uncontested. Such calculations belong not to a stable order but to a system in which trust is eroding and guarantees are no longer taken at face value.

Of course, none of this implies a simple return to the medieval past. States remain powerful, and institutions persist. But the balance between institutional constraint and personal agency is shifting. And unlike the jousts of old, the consequences will not be contained to sport.

Start with the first trend. Democratic politicians have come to understand that the base of the party is deserting the Jewish state. The atrocities in Gaza during the war that followed the Oct. 7 attacks resulted in a civilian death toll that has been too much to stomach for anyone on the Left — and for an many on the Right, as well, not least Tucker Carlson. 

Now the Israel consensus in the United States, once unified across the two major political parties, has been shattered by Trump’s war in Iran. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu relentlessly promoted war; Trump was all too happy to oblige; and as a result, America is mired in a global catastrophe that has been, at least in part, Israel’s making. The poll numbers are disastrous: almost 60% of Democrats and half of independents view Israel negatively, according to an NBC News poll released last week. This is a sharp increase from a few years ago, and it’s highly unlikely that the Jewish state will win back many of these voters, since the young hate the Zionist mission with the greatest intensity. This under-40 cohort will age and carry its views with it, while the more sympathetic middle-aged and elderly will die off. 

For many decades, criticism of Israel was the third rail in American politics, but leading Democrats are now unafraid to break with precedent. California Gov. Gavin Newsom calls Israel an “apartheid” state. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona senator, has sworn off donations from the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the largest pro-Israel lobby, as has Ro Khanna, a progressive lawmaker from California. Last year, JB Pritzker, the billionaire Illinois governor who once sat on the AIPAC board, voiced support for a Senate resolution that would have blocked American arms sales to Israel. Even Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish and may end up the most prominent hawk of the 2028 race, has been sharply critical of Netanyahu.

The second Leftward surging through the Democratic Party, popular opposition to the Iran war, presents the party with a clear opening: Trump ran on opposition to Mideast regime-change wars, but he has now launched a large operation that may soon entail the deployment of ground troops — of which only 7% of voters approve, according to a Reuters poll last week. But it is yet to be determined if the Democrats will capitalize on this opportunity. Opposition to the war has been clear enough, but certain Democrats, especially the older legislative leaders like New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, run the risk of merely stating their opposition on procedural grounds.

When Trump launched the bombing campaign in Iran, Democrats in Congress fumed that they weren’t consulted first. Israel hawks like Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, weren’t necessarily upset that a war with Iran was happening — it was more that it wasn’t sanctioned, that Congress didn’t get its say, as it did when George W. Bush declared war on Iraq. These leaders suggested that if Congress could have signed off on the bombings, perhaps the chaos would have been more palatable.

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For Democrats to find a way forward, the party will have to be unequivocally antiwar, in the same way it is moving toward the position, soon to be entirely mainstream, that conditions must be placed on military aid to Israel, if it is to receive any aid at all. The Left will have to move on from lamenting the lack of congressional hearings to a clear and forceful denunciation of the war. Yes, accountability to Congress matters. But as Trump, like the two Republican presidents before him, immolates the Middle East, it’s hardly the main point.

Most crucially, Democrats will have to be the party that is, without question, against all war. MAGA must not outflank the Left on the isolationist front again. The always dubious proposition of a Republican “peace” president has lost credibility, and Democrats must take advantage of it.

The war in Iran is a reminder of just how badly Democrats, Kamala Harris and Joe Biden in particular, failed in 2024. Biden, of course, was senile, and never should have run again; Harris was put in the unenviable position of replacing him without having competed for a single primary vote. But then Harris ran one of the worst campaigns in living memory, ducking the media and struggling to articulate any serious domestic policy vision.

When it came to foreign affairs, however, she equivocated less — and the hawkish posture she landed on gave Trump the opening he needed to best her in every swing state. “Make no mistake, as president, I will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend American forces and interests from Iran and Iran-backed terrorists, and I will never allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon,” Harris said in October 2024, in a call with Jewish voters. “Diplomacy is my preferred path to that end, but all options are on the table.”

All options are on the table sounds an awful lot like what’s happening now. Granted, Harris is not unstable like Trump, and the odds are far lower that as president, she would have launched such a controversial military operation. Yet it was rhetoric like this that allowed Trump and his followers to hustle to Harris’s Left and promise voters that MAGA, with its vow to put America first and end foreign entanglements, would be the less risky option. When Stephen Miller, in November 2024, posted that “Trump said warmongering neocons love sending your kids to die for wars they would never fight themselves,” and that “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace,” plenty of Americans believed him. It was a lie, but one the Democrats allowed to pass unchallenged, especially as Harris campaigned with Liz Cheney, an unreconstructed neoconservative who celebrated her father’s legacy.

The new generation of Democratic politicians is wiser than Harris. Despite an onslaught of scandal related to an alleged Nazi tattoo (since removed), Graham Platner, a proudly Left-wing oyster farmer, has been a fundraising juggernaut who could very well knock out Schumer’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills, in a primary race for Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s Maine seat. Platner is an Iraq War veteran who is unapologetically against the war in Iran. He has a fierce, compelling antiwar message that may well launch him to victory. Speaking with a CNN reporter recently, Platner likened Trump’s Iran bombing and troop deployments to Iraq. “We find ourselves here with another war that should not be happening, that is resulting in destruction and horror — all frankly on the taxpayers’ dime,” he said. “That is money that should be spent here in the United States on schools, on hospitals, on infrastructure.”

“Won’t that leave troops in harm’s way, if you vote to defund this operation?” the reporter asked. “No,” Platner said, “because the troops should just not be in harm’s way. End the war. Bring people home. Stop bombing. We can end it.” 

That’s all that needs to be said. Stop bombing, bring home the troops. If Democrats can distill this message plainly — if the party can equivocate less, and avoid the traps Harris laid for it in 2024 — it can quickly outflank a GOP defined by Donald Trump. Few wars in modern American history have been more unpopular at the outset than the bombing of Iran, and voters will only sour further on the conflict as energy prices remain high and the economy stagnates. Unlike in the aughts, today Democrats will take little political risk in being antiwar. During the Iraq War, politicians had to contend with the long shadow of 9/11. They had to beat back accusations of hating America or not sufficiently supporting the troops. They had to, like past generations of liberals, worry about red-baiting, and fend off implications that a belief in civil liberties or pacifism meant they wanted to comfort the enemy within.

Now all they have to do is speak like Platner. Stop killing — and stop wasting money. If Democrats truly want to be the party of peace, their future is plenty bright. 

Netanyahu hasn’t granted any interviews to Israeli media since the start of the war, but his statements in English, including this one, have left many of his compatriots confused. After all, at the end of last summer’s 12-Day War, Netanyahu proudly proclaimed that “we removed from ourselves two immediate existential threats: the threat of annihilation by nuclear bombs, and the threat of annihilation by ballistic missiles.” That bombastic statement now looks questionable, to say the least. If the two “existential threats” had already been removed less than a year ago, then why are we at war again, focusing on the same two objectives?

The confusion, and the resulting strategic overstretch, trace back to the notion of “existential” threats in Netanyahu’s discourse. To wit, Netanyahu exaggerated not just about the outcome of the June 2025 war, but also the severity of the threat posed by the Islamic Republic — to his own political benefit and the Jewish state’s detriment. 

It’s clear that the Tehran regime was — and remains — a threat to Israel: Its leaders vow publicly to destroy the Jewish state, fund terror organizations that have been murdering Israelis for decades, and have laid the groundwork for developing nuclear weapons. So yes, to state the obvious, Iran is a threat that Israel must take seriously. But not every threat is an existential threat, one that should be placed at the very top of a country’s list of national priorities, eclipsing other threats in terms of the resources and intelligence devoted to it.

Describing the Iranian threat as an existential one has been at the core of Netanyahu’s politics for decades. His pitch to Israeli voters has been simple: Iran threatens our very survival as a country, and I’m the only one who can stop the mullahs in Tehran from exterminating us. He campaigned on this issue time and again, and it helped him remain in power continuously since 2009, except for the brief 18 months in 2021 and 2022, during which Israel’s short-lived “Government of Change,” led by Naftali Bennett, temporarily replaced him.

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Israel’s opposition leaders during this period often upheld Netanyahu’s framing of Iran as the top threat, even if they criticized some of his tactical choices, such as his controversial speech before the US Congress denouncing Barack Obama’s nuclear deal in 2015. But for the most part, none of the opposition leaders has fundamentally challenged the idea that Iran should be placed atop the list of potential threats to the Jewish state.

A rare exception came in the summer of 2014. That’s when Tamir Pardo, the then-director of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency said in a closed-door briefing that the conflict with the Palestinians, not Iran, is the biggest security threat to Israel. The quote was published by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, where I work, and made Netanyahu furious.

Netanyahu had appointed Pardo, yet the latter’s comments directly contradicted Netanyahu’s worldview. Netanyahu, while constantly emphasizing the Iranian threat to Israel, had for years treated the Palestinian issue as a minor nuisance, a small problem that could be “managed” indefinitely and that shouldn’t distract from the Iran crisis.

Pardo, by contrast, suggested that the Iranian threat was one Israel could manage. To Pardo’s mind, it was the Palestinian problem — Israel’s military occupation in the West Bank and Hamas’s rise to power in Gaza — that could someday explode in ways that would truly endanger the country. “The Palestinian question is the top external threat [to Israel],” he said at the time.

Netanyahu wasn’t convinced, and the spy chief’s comments were soon forgotten. When Netanyahu delivered his speech to Congress in March 2015 — conveniently for him, just two weeks before that month’s general election — no one in the Israeli political system challenged his assertion that the Islamic Republic was the biggest threat endangering Israel.

After his 2015 victory, Netanyahu took two substantial policy decisions that showcased his view of Iran as Israel’s top threat, and his corresponding view of the Palestinian issue as a mere distraction. First, he convinced President Trump to blow up Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. That move set the stage for a sequence of events that eventually led to the current war, as the Tehran regime intensified its nuclear activity without the constraints of the JCPOA. Israel responded to this by increasing its own preparations for war with Iran, in order to prevent it from developing a nuclear weapon.

Second, Netanyahu approved Qatar’s cash payments to Hamas in Gaza as a mechanism to keep the Gaza Strip from flaring up. The Qatari payments, which over the years amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars, were a terrible idea: they directly strengthened Hamas and allowed the Islamist organization to turn itself from a militia into an army of terror. But Netanyahu and his supporters in the Israeli media justified it at the time as a brilliant ploy to keep the Palestinian front quiet, while Israel focused on Iran — the “existential” threat.

To be fair, Netanyahu wasn’t alone in adopting this “Iran first, Palestinians last” strategy. He had many willing partners in the top ranks of the Israeli military — a reality reflected in the diversion of ever-more resources over the years toward anything related to a future war with Iran: fighter jets, missile-defense systems, nuclear submarines, covert operations, and more. It seemed that for the more “glamorous” sectors of the armed forces — those responsible for overcoming the Iranian threat — budget was never an issue.

At the same time, Israel’s “regular” army — the ground forces responsible for protecting the borders and policing the occupied West Bank — was gradually hollowed out. There were older, retired generals who warned over the years about this dangerous trend, warning that the military wouldn’t be ready in case of a surprise attack from Hamas in the south or Hezbollah in the north. But their warnings were mostly ignored or dismissed. The Iran-as-existential doctrine became dogma.

In that sense, Israel’s stunning recent achievements against the Islamic Republic — the aerial domination of Iranian skies, the decapitation of the senior leadership, deep Mossad penetration of the regime — shouldn’t be viewed separately from the equally stunning failures of the Israeli military on Oct. 7. These are two sides of the same coin, two elements of a deliberate strategy to focus completely on the threat from Iran, while dismissing the Palestinian issue as a minor problem that can be kicked down the road with Qatari bribes in Gaza and the aid of the corrupt and increasingly unpopular Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

In retrospect, and in light of what we know today about Oct. 7, the Gaza War and the two Israel-Iran wars, it’s at least worth asking if Netanyahu’s set of priorities has been wrong all along. Hamas on Oct. 7 killed some 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 250 hostages. Tens of thousands of Israeli families had to be evacuated from their homes, and hundreds of Israeli soldiers died in the Gaza war that ensued.

That war, which also led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians and the destruction of large parts of the Gaza Strip, also harmed Israel’s international reputation in unprecedented ways, as evident in recent polls showing that for the first time ever, more Americans sympathize with the Palestinians than with Israel. This by itself is a major strategic crisis for Israel, and it will only get worse in the future, since the levels of support for the Jewish state are significantly lower among younger respondents in virtually every poll on this subject.

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America is turning on Israel

By Rajan Menon

Israel’s two wars with Iran, by comparison, have so far resulted in the deaths of approximately 60 Israelis — this, despite Iran firing almost 1,000 ballistic missiles at Israel, including direct hits against a hospital, residential buildings, and energy infrastructure. The Iranian regime is currently fighting a war of survival, and it may indeed survive by shutting down the Straits of Hormuz and choking the global economy; but in terms of the direct damage to Israel, the Islamic Republic has been much less destructive than Hamas or Hezbollah.

All this doesn’t mean that Israel should have ignored the threat posed by Iran, nor that it was a mistake for Israel to take military action against Tehran in June 2025 and again in February 2026 (the question of whether Washington should have joined Israel in those two wars is a separate one). The ballistic missiles that did penetrate Israel’s air-defense system caused extensive damage in Israeli cities. And to be sure, the nuclear threat is one Israel can never treat lightly, not least from Iran, a country ideologically pledged to Israel’s elimination. But it’s still important to ask whether the singular, years-long focus on the Iranian threat, and the dismissal of the Palestinian issue as a sideshow, had turned out to be a strategic blunder.

This question isn’t just important for our understanding of the past; It should be treated with urgency today, as Hamas tightens its grip over postwar Gaza, and Israeli far-Right extremists are trying to set the West Bank on fire with nightly attacks on Palestinian communities. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority — which today controls approximately 40% of the West Bank, and works hand-in-hand with Israel to thwart terror plots there — is on the verge of collapse; the tens of thousands of men employed in its security forces could soon be left without paychecks, but with their weapons in hand, a potential nightmare scenario for the Jewish state.

Once the second Israel-Iran war ends, Netanyahu will probably boast once again that an “existential threat” has been removed, no matter what the actual results on the ground and regardless of whether or not a third war with Iran will be needed in the future. He will describe Israel as stronger than ever — “a regional superpower,” in his words, that can bomb targets thousands of miles away on a daily basis and suffer painful but tolerable losses at home thanks to its advanced air-defense systems.

Maybe some parts of this description will even be true. But Israelis and supporters of the Jewish state abroad will be wise to remember the lessons of Oct. 7. We must ask ourselves if the real existential threat to Israel is truly buried under the sand somewhere in Iran — or whether it is actually found in our own inclination to bury our heads in the sand and ignore much more dangerous things happening right next to us.

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

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

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

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Trump's reverse Suez

By Aris Roussinos

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

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

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

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

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

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By Aris Roussinos

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

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

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

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

Indeed, there’s plenty of evidence that the second oil crisis is already here.

On Oct. 17, 1973, the Arab members of OPEC announced a 5% monthly production cut after Washington airlifted weapons to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Next came a full embargo against the United States and the Netherlands(the latter boasted one of Europe’s most pro-Israel governments at the time and was used as a staging ground for US support to the Jewish state).

The price of crude surged to $11 a barrel, up from $3, in a matter of weeks. American gasoline prices jumped 40% by November. Lines formed at filling stations. The Western world was in crisis. The US economy tipped into stagflation and remained there for the rest of the decade. By the end of the 1970s, then-President Jimmy Carter gave a speech diagnosing a national “malaise” and a “crisis of confidence.” He also urged his countrymen to wear sweaters in lieu of burning fuel to warm themselves.

The embargo lasted five months. The damage lasted a decade. Japan, which imported almost all its oil, restructured its entire industrial base around electronics and fuel efficiency. That pivot made Japan’s economy more innovative, the envy of the world for the next 20 years. The crisis also created the International Energy Agency and the first serious strategic-petroleum-reserve frameworks that still exist today: after what the global economy went through that decade, countries wanted to deal with the issue collectively, coordinating in preparation of the next embargo.

But there is a crucial difference between then and now. In 1973, the disruption resulted from a political decision by producers to turn off the tap. Supply could theoretically have been restored the minute politics changed.

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Trump is trapped by the logic of war

By Wolfgang Munchau

What we confront now, as a consequence of Trump’s Iran war, is more complicated: chokepoint closure, damaged infrastructure, insurance markets in disarray, fields shutting in (temporarily closed). And the scale is simply not comparable. Around 20 million barrels a day move through the Strait of Hormuz, roughly 20% of global consumption and nearly a third of all seaborne oil trade. The 1973 embargo, damaging as it was, didn’t come close to these conditions. This is a supply disruption brought about by Iran in response to Tehran being attacked by two nuclear powers, and its ramifications won’t soon be contained, much less reversed.

The Strait of Hormuz is 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest. That makes room for two shipping lanes, each two miles across. Around 100 vessels a day transited the strait in normal times, 60% to 70% of them tankers or liquid-natural-gas carriers. Saudi Arabia moves 38% of the crude that transits the strait, Iraq another 22%, and the United Arab Emirates 13%. The top five exporters between them account for 93% of all the crude that goes through that passage.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have constructed pipelines for just this type of contingency. Together, they can route about 2.6 million barrels a day around the strait, approximately a third of Gulf export volumes. Iraq and Kuwait have no such option, however. And Qatar, which supplies roughly a fifth of the world’s LNG, has no alternative route to market, either. This is a structural problem that sheer capacity alone can’t overcome.

Since Feb. 28, commercial shipping through the strait has nearly ground to a halt. Tanker traffic dropped 70% in the first days and then fell to near zero as jacked-up insurance premiums rendered the economics impossible. Most of the vessels still moving are from the Iranian dark fleet. Washington has been reluctant to target them, wary of what Tehran would do to Gulf energy infrastructure in retaliation. Protection-and-indemnity war-risk coverage was suspended as of March 5. The Trump administration floated the idea of sovereign-level tanker insurance, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent quickly walked back the brainstorm. That would have put US taxpayers on the hook for damaged cargo, while the US Navy has made it clear that it lacks the ability to offer protective escorts in the near future.

In short, without insurance, ships don’t move.

Iraq’s three main southern oilfields have seen production collapse by 70%, falling to roughly 1.3 million barrels per day, down from 4.3 million. Onshore storage is filling because there is nowhere to send the crude. Fields that shut in don’t simply restart if and when a ceasefire is announced. Reservoir pressure, infrastructure condition, damaged terminals — all factor in, to the world economy’s detriment.

The timeline for restoration is weeks at best and months in the most realistic cases. Even today, the market is pricing a clean restart. Yet that assumption has very little basis in how the Middle East actually operates.

Brent, a key oil benchmark, is now trading north of $106 a barrel. That is the number that gets attention, but it is everything that this number triggers that needs to be examined.

Liquefied petroleum gas and naphtha (liquid hydrocarbon used in the petrochemicals industry) move through the Persian Gulf in enormous volumes, and almost nobody outside the energy sector thinks about them. Naphtha is what petrochemical plants, heavily concentrated in Northeast Asia, run on. Those plants make plastics, fertilizers, packaging, and the agricultural chemicals that go into growing the food we consume. When naphtha supply is disrupted, the effects don’t show up at the pump. They show up six to twelve weeks later in the price of a bag of flour, a bottle of cooking oil, a box of cereal.

We watched this in slow motion after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Russian and Ukrainian wheat, corn, sunflower oil, and fertilizer were never formally sanctioned. But the disruption to trade finance, shipping insurance, and port logistics was enough to send food prices into a commodity super-cycle that hit Egypt, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Bangladesh harder than anywhere else. Governments already stretched by their Covid fiscal response had nothing left to absorb the extra shock. The Third Gulf War threatens a repeat — on a much wider scale.

Then there’s LNG. Qatar has declared force majeure on LNG exports, freeing itself from delivery obligations, after drone strikes hit its export infrastructure. Qatar accounts for roughly a fifth of global LNG supply. The IEA estimates a full Hormuz closure would pull more than 300 million cubic meters per day out of the global gas market, about twice what Nord Stream carried at its peak. There is no spare liquefaction capacity sitting idle somewhere that can cover that. Australia, the United States, and West Africa are all running near full capacity. Asia and Europe will end up competing for the same cargoes, bidding up prices that eventually land on ordinary consumers.

A ceasefire in the next 30 to 60 days, followed by a slow normalization of shipping, probably keeps Brent somewhere between $110 and $130 and takes at least half a point off global GDP.  That is the optimistic scenario, and it requires things to go well politically in a region where things have a habit of going, well, boom.

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The Bush GOP never went away

By Michael Lind

Beyond 90 days, the picture darkens considerably. Shut-in fields, damaged port infrastructure, an insurance market that can’t simply switch back on, storage constraints that have permanently altered production profiles in some fields. Iran’s own military spokesperson has already warned publicly to get ready for oil at $200 a barrel. Analysts at Rystad Energy have Brent at $135 by June if the war runs for four months. Markets are not pricing that yet. They were not pricing a pandemic in February 2020, either.

The IEA, founded in the wake of the 1973 crisis, has now coordinated the largest emergency stockpile release in its 50-year history: 400 million barrels across more than 30 countries, with the United States contributing 172 million barrels from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It is an extraordinary intervention. It is also, as analysts at Bernstein noted, only about 15% of the daily supply lost due to the Hormuz closure. The barrels also take 60 to 90 days to meaningfully reach the market. It buys time but doesn’t fundamentally deal with the problems outlined above.

The United States isn’t insulated from these price shocks. The Trump administration has been fighting to tame inflation, and that fight gets considerably harder if oil stays above $100 a barrel for any length of time. Trumpian spokesmen gloat about domestic production, serenely unaware that oil and gas are fungible global commodities: a chokepoint several thousand miles away will drive up prices everywhere else — that is, unless Washington is prepared to contemplate an export ban.

The picture is still bleaker elsewhere. As consumers, China, India, Japan, and South Korea together account for around 75% of the crude that transits the Persian Gulf. China alone sources more than half of its 11-million-barrels-a-day import requirement from the Middle East. For those countries, this is literally the lifeblood of their economic development.

And as it was in 1973, the people who absorb the worst of it will not be the ones with the hedges and the trading desks. They will be in Cairo buying cooking oil, or in Karachi watching the price of flour move out of reach. They will be working-class Trump voters on low incomes who need to fill up their tanks to get to work. Half a century on from the first oil crisis, a narrow passage can still bring the global economy to its knees.

By now, some of the Right-wing radicals in Trump’s MAGA coalition must be likewise wondering what it was all for. Trump was going to end foreign military adventures, and clamp down on low-wage and illegal immigration. But now America appears to be two weeks into a war of choice in the Middle East, and has just announced plans to ease restrictions on the H2A visa, which allows American farms to hire foreign seasonal workers. 

How did we end up here again? The whole point of Trump, to his base, was supposed to be ending forever wars and clamping down on immigration. And in fairness, Trump really has reduced American expenditure in Ukraine, and has been more effective than his predecessor on some aspects of migration. Notably, Trump has reduced crossings at America’s southern border by an order of magnitude. 

But his administration’s attempts to find, detain, and deport those already in the US have been more of a mixed bag. The White House boasts of over 600,000 deported and a further 1.9 million “self-deporting”, claiming negative net migration to the USA in 2025 for the first time in 50 years. But other policies have been less effective — or had more impact in the media than on actual numbers. Notably, high-profile standoffs between ICE officials, migrants, and protesters across progressive strongholds such as Minneapolis and Los Angeles have been received with distaste everywhere except inside the Right-wing filter bubble, especially after the deaths of Renée Good and Alex Pretti. 

This combative approach arguably did more to catalyze domestic opposition to immigration enforcement than to deport migrants. Critics have pointed out that Barack Obama managed to do more actual deporting over his presidency than Trump has to date, without all the “security theater” and controversy. 

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The paradox of MAGA populism

By Richard Bourke

But if the argument has focused on ICE, Trump’s real sticky wicket is low-wage labor. I’m just about old enough to remember when the Left considered immigration a workers’ rights issue, and Left-wing old-timers such as Bernie Sanders can still sometimes be found pointing out that the biggest beneficiaries of mass migration are the corporations that use foreign labor to depress domestic wages. In this context, as Matt Stoller noted recently, a leader whose goal really was mass deportations might begin not with high-profile street raids, but by quietly targeting the corporations that employ illegal workers. And yet, under Trump there has been much hue and cry about criminals, and considerably less about raiding construction firms, warehouses, or farms. 

Against this mixed report card, recent changes to seasonal worker visa rules have been received with outrage by Trump’s migration-restrictionist base. And no wonder: last year, Trump officials promised a “100% American” workforce enjoying “higher wages and better benefits”, and a deportation programme with “no amnesty” for farmworkers. So why is he reneging on this now? 

It’s perhaps fairer to see this policy as evidence not of betrayal but of a wicked problem — one that is, in truth, faced by most Western economies. The technical term for the dilemma is “Baumol’s cost disease”, which describes the way productivity doesn’t increase at the same pace, in every sector. This causes problems over time, as even low-productivity sectors still have to raise wages, unless they want all their workers to leave. This means that wages in sectors where work can’t easily be automated either become increasingly unaffordable, or else the sector itself becomes bizarrely costly. 

Classic examples are healthcare, childcare, and education. The high-touch human component in such work can’t easily be automated, and because of this has become increasingly cost-pressured and expensive over time. But the same dynamic also applies to some aspects of food production, especially where a task is routine but also requires delicacy and human judgment. Across agriculture in general, innovation has rendered many kinds of work much more efficient; but while you can do this with plowing or crop irrigation, it’s much more difficult to do the same thing to (say) harvesting strawberries. 

Here, Baumol’s cost disease is rampant. So what is a farmer to do when national average wages have risen to the point where it costs more to pay strawberry-pickers than you can earn selling the strawberries? The answer, latterly, has increasingly been migrant workers from countries with lower wage expectations. Fruit-picking robots do exist, but not every farmer has a spare £150,000. And in any case that pays a lot of wages — especially where these are low-wage foreign seasonal workers, or illegal migrants willing to work cash in hand for a pittance. 

Already last year, as Trump’s border reforms began to bite, American Big Ag was warning last year that Americans would not be willing to do this work. This is sometimes treated as excuse-making, or expressing contempt for native populations. But a more neutral explanation is that farmers can only afford to pay wages at a level well below what would be necessary for subsistence in modern America. And as they’re not offering this, Americans don’t want the work. This is Baumol’s cost disease in a nutshell. 

The only way to change this would be to increase farmworkers’ wages sharply, which would in turn either mean farms went bankrupt or the price of food would have to go up. Perhaps unwisely, last year the New York Times tackled this dilemma by warning that Trump’s border policies would end up by forcing up the price of avocados, prompting much derision about coastal libs and their luxury problems. But the core of the argument stands even for those who don’t care for guacamole; after all, pushing up the cost of farm labor and thus of farm produce, doesn’t just affect avocados. It affects the whole grocery basket, for everyone. And while it’s possible to get by without eating avocados, it’s not possible to get by without eating. And along with ending forever wars and lowering immigration, the third leg in Trump’s electoral stool was tackling the cost of living. This is not compatible with doubling the cost of a weekly grocery shop by tossing a bomb into the economics of farming. 

This is all now further complicated by Trump’s war in Iran. Trump insists — or at least, insisted in February — that inflation is falling. His media opponents disagreed even then; since the war in Iran began, oil prices have fluctuated so dizzyingly that many economists have given up trying to make predictions beyond a weary expectation that the overall effect is likely to be inflation. 

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As a major energy producer, the United States is somewhat insulated from these effects, at least by comparison with Europe. But gasoline and diesel prices have risen in the USA as well, with knock-on effects throughout the economy. We can assume that this will in turn push the cost of living in the wrong direction for ordinary Americans. And we can perhaps understand that Trump might be reluctant to pile further misery on his electorate by clamping down on the only relief available to the cost-diseased fruit picking sector — foreign seasonal workers — and thus spiking the cost of living still further. 

Animal Farm is usually read as a warning about the theory and practice of communist revolution. But perhaps Trump’s looming failure on all three legs of the MAGA electoral stool — wars, migration, and prices — points to a still bleaker reading about the futility of revolutions full stop. After all, even though prices and low-wage immigration seem linked by the wicked dilemma of Baumol’s cost disease, bombing Iran would seem, at least to an outsider, to be optional.

Indeed Trump campaigned on not taking this option. And yet here he is, again. Meanwhile the sheer variety of half-baked Trumpian rationales offered so far for the attack suggests he’s just decided to do it, and is throwing explanations at the electorate in the hope that one will stick. 

It is tempting to conclude either that he’s bonkers, or that a reason for the attack exists which is not available to the general public, and that perhaps wouldn’t be accepted if it was made known — but which, once you’re in the driving seat, is inescapable. This is the only possible explanation for the way presidency after presidency ends up in the same place, and the same conflicts, even after insisting they won’t. 

Would it be fair to say, in the pigs’ defense, that the structural pressures of their role in the overall farm nudged them, by degrees, into patterns of behavior that increasingly resembled the humans they deposed? Is that an excuse, or just an explanation? Either way, it bodes ill for any putative future revolutionaries hoping to seize the machinery of some state or other, and point it in new directions — including every populist government-in-waiting currently aspiring to emulate Trump by reforming, restoring, advancing, or otherwise making their own country great again.

For if such dilemmas exist, then even the most well-intentioned pig will, once he takes the role of the farmer, eventually become him. In this sense, the New Right’s revolutionaries have discovered, unhappily, that you can’t both promise lower food prices and also lower migration without eventually disappointing someone. Similarly, it seems at least possible that comparable wicked problems exist in foreign policy, such that bombing Iran seems as necessary and prudent from inside the White House as it seems from without a reckless betrayal of the base. 

But in a sense, too, we should hope that this bleak reading of Animal Farm is true. For the only other possible explanation is bleaker still: that Trump simply doesn’t care about his base, and perhaps never really did. 

Right now, Trump has three choices. In scenario one, he sticks to his four-to-five week timetable, flattens the place, declares victory and gets out without destroying the Islamic Republic. The Strait of Hormuz would at this point not be truly secured. Scenario two is that he continues his campaign until the Strait is open, and he’s assured it’ll stay that way. That might involve using a limited number of ground troops to secure the Iranian coastline abutting the Strait. There would be no regime change in this scenario — but at least Washington would have reopened the Persian Gulf.

There’s also a third scenario: Trump concludes that, for as long as the existing Iranian regime is in power, the Strait cannot be secured. To get the job done, he must launch a full-scale invasion. Yet as Condoleezza Rice, national security advisor and later secretary of state under President Bush just reminded us, it took his administration a full year to prepare for the occupation of Iraq. There are currently no signs that an equivalent operation is being planned for Iran.

Scenario one would be the ultimate defeat, on the scale of Vietnam. It would stand as the greatest political and military misjudgment of our time — and for that reason alone, I would rule it out.

We are currently in the midst of scenario two. The difficulty commentators have during wars is that they’re not privy to classified information. Trump may have information that gives him the confidence to think America can totally destroy the Iranian regime’s military capabilities. I therefore can’t exclude the possibility that he is right, and that his critics are wrong.

History, however, would suggest otherwise. During the build up to the Iraq War, George W. Bush and Tony Blair wanted to believe the briefings they received from officials. Officials, for their part, delivered the briefings their political masters wanted to hear. I was a newspaper editor in Germany at the time, and attended one such high-level briefing. Unfortunately, the information I heard turned out to be completely wrong. The big conclusion I drew then is that privileged information doesn’t necessarily mean leaders make wise decisions.

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On Iran and the Left

By Yanis Varoufakis

And certainly, based on what’s happening so far in Iran, it’s clear that the Trump administration misjudged the power of asymmetric warfare. It also misjudged the changed nature of military supply chains. Twenty years ago, military power was all about weapons of mass destruction, missiles, warplanes and tanks. And, to that extent, I do believe that the US has indeed succeeded in destroying a large portion of Iran’s conventional military infrastructure.

But the regime’s most potent weapons are mines and kamikaze drones, each costing just a few tens of thousands of dollars. If one of these were to hit an oil tanker, and cause an oil spill in the Strait of Hormuz, the effect would be devastating. No ship would be able to pass until the waters are cleared. And even if the US were somehow able to reopen the Strait, it would still have to protect every single ship — whereas the Iranians only need a single successful hit to close the Strait once more.

That’s asymmetric warfare: and the Iranians are leveraging their one and only strategic advantage for all it’s worth. They have already carried out drone and missile attacks on ships on oil installations in the Gulf states, and may also have laid mines in the Strait. The strategic objective of the Revolutionary Guards is very similar to strategies employed by both Russia and Ukraine: to come out on top in a prolonged war of attrition. The Iranian calculation is that the US will ultimately fold under economic and political pressure.

That may be the best strategy available to them, but it is not guaranteed to succeed. Scenario three, a full ground invasion, still looms in the background. If chickening out is politically catastrophic for Trump, and the current air campaign fails, what else can he do but prepare for scenario three? It is not what he wanted. But at the point when he finally makes the decision, it may be the obvious thing to do. If you have no other options left, the impossible becomes the inevitable.

Clearly, this would clash with what Trump long promised: no more wars in distant lands. Nor do I doubt that he meant it when he said it. But when you’re in the hot seat in the White House, your job is to manage conflicting objectives. When faced with a choice to unseat the Revolutionary Guards in a six-months ground war, or suffer a humiliating defeat, we should not automatically assume that Trump would choose the latter.

We should also not underestimate the role of Israel. I know that many inside the Israeli government expected Trump to force regime change in Iran at some point during his second term. And now, if Trump were to chicken out without getting the job done, he’d leave Israel humiliated and exposed. To be clear, the US is clearly the senior partner in the relationship, but Israel had at least some influence in Trump’s decision to go to war. Why, then, wouldn’t Netanyahu exert similar influence in how to end the conflict?

Of course, I am not predicting anything here. Unexpected events intrude. They already have. But based on what is publicly known, and on conversations I had ahead of the invasion, I would want to keep an open mind on any of those options. And since few people expect scenario three, I would call it the “underpriced” option. It is not necessarily likely, but a lot more probable than many think. Besides, an extended air campaign and boots on the ground are hardly mutually exclusive, and could overlap for a time.

Another factor here is how the Iran war interacts with Ukraine. For Europe, the rise in oil prices that resulted from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a geopolitical disaster. Why? Because it destroys the continent’s strategy to starve Russia of its oil revenues. The price of Urals oil, the benchmark for the oil sold by Russia, has risen from under $40 per barrel to almost $90 — and lately peaked at over $100. In February, before the Iran war started, Russian oil tax revenues had fallen to around $4 billion per month, after oscillating between $6-10 billion per month since 2022. If Urals oil stays at this price, meanwhile, Russian oil tax revenues would jump to around $10 billion a month: enough to fund Putin’s war.

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Why Trump's Epic Fury is doomed

By Wolfgang Munchau

It’s obvious, then, that Europe’s strategy rested far too much on oil prices staying low, something I always thought was naive. Even before this month’s shock, Russia wasn’t running out of money, and now it definitely won’t. The truth is that Europe has no strategy for a Ukrainian victory — and never did. It’s just that now, this reality is becoming impossible to ignore.

As for the future, the oil markets are ominous. After initially taking a relatively optimistic view, they now expect a longer war. The Russians themselves believe that the oil prices will remain elevated for another year. And if Trump were to pursue his war for a longer period, he would really need to force Ukraine and Russia to cut some kind of deal. No wonder he’s already piling up pressure on the beleaguered Kyiv government. As Trump told NBC: “I’m surprised that Zelensky doesn’t want to make a deal. Tell Zelensky to make a deal because Putin’s willing to make a deal.”

Certainly, I don’t think it is possible for the West to fight two wars at once: against Russia in Ukraine and against Iran. The US is already running low on some supplies, while Ukraine itself is facing an acute shortage of air defense missiles. One war has to end for the other to proceed. And for Trump, Iran is the priority.

It would be comforting to know that a strategic operator is pulling the strings in the background, someone like Colin Powell, when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War. Trump, unfortunately, has surrounded himself with sycophants. The image of Marco Rubio, secretary of state and national security advisor, being forced by Trump to wear shoes that are too big for him, tells us all we need to know. All I can say, then, is that the logic of war has taken over — and it’s driving America on.