Early on we see Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong), shot from behind, sitting in a chair at a desk, silhouetted by floodlights that must be burning into his face. We’re given to think that this is one of those infamous congressional hearings in which Zuckerberg has conducted himself as a sort of spirited robot, admirably defiant but also less than endearing as a representative of his business sector. Except it’s not Congress, it’s a small auditorium inside the Facebook campus, on whose stage sits Zuckerberg at a theater-prop desk. So it’s not a congressional hearing. It’s preparation for a congressional hearing, upcoming, a high-stakes training performance run by a specialist in “crisis communications”, an elegant and sensible black woman from the UK named Raya (Wunmi Mosaku), and she’s posing the expected questions to him and coaching him to do his best impersonation of a human being as he answers them.

The crisis-PR session is contentious from the start, simply because Zuckerberg is an impatient and arrogant mogul who doesn’t want to be there, but it grows outright hostile when someone else besides the British lady starts asking questions, a sharp-talking man sitting high in the auditorium, in the shadowed seats behind the floodlights, a man named Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr). Garrigan used to work with Zuckerberg at Facebook but stepped away from the company, and from a billion dollars in stock, out of principle. The British lady has brought in Garrigan, to Zuckerberg’s surprise and chagrin, because she wants a stout, smart adversary to give Zuckerberg a real workout before he goes before Congress. The Garrigan character is fictional but seems loosely based on early Facebook investor and later Facebook critic Roger McNamee.

As the film proceeds, the segments of the crisis PR session pieced throughout the narrative grow more dramatic and contentious, with Garrigan taking over the questioning and the session’s status as mere theater, practice before the real thing, fading into the background. These segments start to resemble scenes from an actual inquest, with Garrigan descending from the high seats to debate at closer quarters, and the arrogant Zuckerberg growing defensive and flustered under the gathering weight of Garrigan’s moral rightness.

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This is where the unseemly vanity comes in. Garrigan is clearly the film’s oracle, the bearer of its critical perspective and the speaker of its moral truths. In other words, he is Aaron Sorkin’s movie stand-in for Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin has made a movie fantasy in which, like a Torquemada for the good guys, he gets to put the evil robot Mark Zuckerberg under a hot lamp and make him sweat and stutter with some righteous questioning.

It’s fitting, given the inquisitorial spirit Sorkin breathes into the story so directly and shamelessly, that the critical takeaway from his film is basically: Facebook needs to censor more. In her memoir, The Power of One, the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen acknowledges that identifying and removing bad content raises often-insurmountable logistical and political challenges. For that reason, she tends to advocate algorithmic tweaks that weaken the bias for outrage and propaganda, along with a broader (though probably unworkable) desire for companies like Facebook to be more transparent about their programming and their internal research. But Sorkin, through his Carrigan avatar, presents the content challenge as one of mere common sense and moral courage, a willingness put the public good above profit and remove bad posts and bad actors from the site.

But merely putting Zuckerberg under his fantasy Inquisition isn’t enough for Sorkin. He has to decorate his simplistic message about bad content with an excited string of exclamation points. He does this by reversing time, so that Zuckerberg’s late-2021 PR session is presented as prologue for the riot that sore loser Donald Trump ginned up at the US Capitol 10 months earlier, and the riot is thus presented as the real-world manifestation of Zuckerberg’s defense of his business model, which in turn rests on various invocations of free speech.

Now, as someone who values free speech very much, I would not choose Mark Zuckerberg as my preferred defender of this foundational value. The phrase gets tainted with some potent self-interest on its way out of the mouth of the centibillionaire founder of Facebook. Indeed, an illiberal opponent of free speech who is also a filmmaker would be tempted to use the unlikeable Zuckerberg’s not-disinterested voicing of this hallowed idea, “freedom of speech”, as a way to discredit that idea.

I will not accuse Aaron Sorkin of doing this. I will accuse him of coming very close to doing this, of being heedless and power-hungry, in the way of many progressive activists and bureaucrats keen to impose direct regulation and censoring of political ideas, on social media platforms and elsewhere. Zuckerberg represents one side of a sticky dilemma that Sorkin pretends is neither sticky nor a dilemma. The ideal of free speech emerged at a time of pamphlets and newspapers and parliamentary debate. It is an odd fit, historically and practically, with globally democratized social media platforms, which do in fact reward odious forms of expressive novelty that do, sometimes, have violent and destabilizing effects. And yet treating the problems of social media as matters of problematic content — “misinformation” and “disinformation” and “extremism” — involves you in illiberal censorship more or less as a rule. Frances Haugen at least gestures at this dilemma. Aaron Sorkin treats it as just something Mark Zuckerberg would say to make money.

One odd side-effect of Sorkin’s vain, personalized fixation on Zuckerberg, and his righteous glee in hanging January 6 around Zuckerberg’s neck, is that these moves let the real architect of that idiotic moment, Donald Trump, off the hook. Trump almost certainly could have summoned an audience to Washington for his pathetic post-election tirade, and then sicced his army of moron-patriots on the Capitol building, without Facebook’s help.

But the bigger problem with Sorkin’s focus on problematic content is its shallowness as diagnosis. To see this you just have to juxtapose the earnest fixations of The Social Reckoning with technology headlines in the days and weeks before its release – a crusading movie about misinformation on social media landing amid revelations about AI swarms hacking into companies and governments, AI systems poised for recursive self-improvement, AI slop invading all forms of writing so that links of trust between teacher and student and reader and writer are forever poisoned, all of these events hinting at a possible near future in which we will be keenly nostalgic for a time when misinformation seemed like a big deal to people like Aaron Sorkin.

My point is not that The Social Reckoning was already painfully outdated the moment it was released, though it was. It’s that it identifies a tiny mole on the vast, fast-growing, anti-human body of digital technology. Its focus on content and misinformation and all that stuff barely touches the actual villainy of Facebook, and its massively profitable acquisition Instagram (purchased for a mere one billion dollars), and TikTok, and X/Twitter. The business logic of these platforms, the relationship they forge with their users (who are not customers, in the traditional sense), is essentially extractive, parasitic, vampiric. As a form of entrepreneurship, it more closely resembles the creation of life-ruining gambling apps, or manufacturing highly addictive Tianeptine (“Gas Station Heroin”) for general sale, than it does the selling of cars or refrigerators.

It’s often said that the product these companies sell for profit is our attention, and that is to a meaningful extent true. The growing dominance of short-form video on social media platforms is a sign that this particular mechanism of engagement is the best, most potent attention-hack yet discovered, as anyone who’s awoken in self-disgust from an hour-long trance of “reels” or “shorts” understands. But this experience reveals the content fixation of Aaron Sorkin, the official liberal worries about “misinformation” and “democracy”, as laughably beside the point.

In other words, the bad content that finds its way onto social media is a superficial problem, compared with the technological form that defines everyone’s participation in these platforms. This dehumanizing relationship of our dopamine systems with our computer devices was consciously designed, by people, for profit. Yes, the fact that these platforms enable bullying and degrade the mental health of certain teenagers, as The Social Reckoning mentions, is appalling. But by far the greater, deeper, larger-scale offense is that they strive, systematically and intentionally, to make everyone’s children addicted to their platforms, for profit.

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If you researched tech and social media in the 2010s, as I did for my book on family life, Little Platoons, one response you may have had was shock at the utter shamelessness of this enterprise. In 2013, a tech consultant named Nir Eyal wrote a bestselling book called Hooked: How to build Habit-Forming Products. It was filled with insights gleaned from behavioral psychology about how to program apps and platforms so that people’s use of them becomes compulsive. You see, you use a “variable schedule of rewards” to mess with people’s evolved bias for finding patterns in their experience, which lets you hijack their reward systems so they act like the rats famously programmed by B.F. Skinner. Indeed, there’s a company whose original name cynically invoked our vulnerability to such programming, Dopamine Labs (the name later changed, perhaps from a belated dose of shame, to Boundless Mind). Stanford University, the academic hub of so much tech innovation, still houses something called the Behavioral Design Lab, which has helped a generation of tech entrepreneurs refine a practice that goes by the creepily perfect Silicon Valley name “Persuasive Technology”.

This business project of inducing compulsive screen use in teenagers has largely been successful, and one of its results is that kids, their attention spans measurably degraded by the everyday psychedelia of their short-form video feeds, don’t read so good anymore. Kids everywhere not only don’t read books but, as teachers and professors will attest, can’t read books. Well done, TikTok.

I suspect progressives’ superficial focus on extremist social media content, which flared up around Trump’s 2016 election and persists in such forms as The Social Reckoning, owes in part to their long-held belief in the internet and social media as forces of liberation. For them the problem had to be the dangerous exception of extremism, not the drab, dehumanizing rule of social media addiction and stupefaction, because admitting the latter would have been to indict social media as such. And, for progressives, social media was where un-listened-to young people and oppressed identity categories went to empower themselves through self-expression. To criticize the very use-model of social media was to join stodgy luddites like me whose secret motive, they said, was to silence the marginalized people who had finally found their voices online. This corny equating of self-expression with political emancipation has characterized the post-revolutionary Left since at least the Sixties, but it became a true cultural and political force in the trauma-informed progressivism of the 2010s.

Idealizing social media platforms as tools of emancipatory expression was always naïve, given the distortive power of those tools, the subtle manipulations that made them irresistible and, thus, profitable. But it seems even more naïve now, at the unquiet dawn of whatever AI is on the verge of becoming, because it turns out that all this self-expression, all our speaking into our computer cameras and computer mics, indeed this typing-for-the-internet I’m doing right now, was and is destined to be fed as training matter into programs of machine intelligence. Listen to Larry Page describing, in 2000, the AI dreams that have been guiding Google from the beginning. It’s all for AI. It always has been.

In this light, Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning registers as not just quaint and silly but downright ideological. The film is a publicity coup for its ostensible villain, Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is no less a visionary than Larry Page. It’s likely that, from the early years of Facebook, he saw the busy activity of its users as not just as a source of huge advertising profits but as training material for his own contribution to the world-historical project of machine intelligence. Zuckerberg has been inducing us to feed the machine by which, after we’ve been rendered unfit to govern ourselves by digital technology’s prior stage, he and the other moguls of AI mean to replace us. Compared to this, accusing him of allowing the spread of misinformation, or blaming him for January 6, is a convenient distraction, if not a compliment.

Rather than predictions, let’s focus on what we know. The coming of AI is the biggest structural shift happening to the global economy right now. If the massive AI investments currently under way in the US succeed, the payoff for the world will be enormous. If they fail, we will go into recession. There is a scenario where they fail in the short-term but succeed in the long-run. Remember the dotcom bubble in the late Nineties? The bubble burst. Dotcom didn’t.

Big financial crises generally do not happen when the stock market falls, but when people and governments take on too much debt. The global financial crisis started with a subprime mortgage bubble. Today’s equivalent could be the rise in debt to fund the AI boom.

One of the few Wall Street insiders to predict the 2008 crash was Steve Eisman, who featured prominently in Michael Lewis’ book The Big Short, and who was portrayed by Steve Carell in the subsequent film. Eisman said in a recent podcast that he predicted Armageddon once in his life — but isn’t quite ready to do it again.

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That reluctance is probably wise. For if AI almost certainly is the most transformative technology since the invention of the steam engine, we don’t yet know when and how this transformation will happen, and whether it’ll justify the massive debts currently being accrued by the largest industry players.

The so-called hyperscalers — large tech companies that operate data centers and cloud-computing infrastructure — are estimated to incur capital expenditures in the region of $600-800 billion in the US alone this year. Eisman notes that 70% of hyperscaler AI revenue comes from only two companies, OpenAI and Anthropic. This pair accounts for around a third of the hyperscalers’ entire cloud computing revenue, and though Anthropic is on a roll right now, OpenAI is currently undershooting revenue forecasts. More worryingly, Sam Altman’s firm has suffered an exodus of senior staff, a sign, perhaps, that something is going seriously wrong. Certainly, if any of the big AI companies were to go bankrupt, this could unleash a chain reaction of defaults.

Global financial crises are always caused by chain reactions; the Great Depression and the global financial crisis were both chain reactions within the banking sector. What most of these crises also have in common is a sudden explosion in debt. The logic, however, does not go the other way: just because debt is rising, and stock prices go up, you cannot conclude that it will inevitably lead to a crisis. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for people to borrow money, and debt-funded investments that fuel future productivity gains are a good thing.

But if you believe this narrative, and I do myself, you have to watch out for things going the wrong way. After all, though the dotcom bubble had a solid underlying rationale — that the internet would give rise to very profitable businesses — the investors of that era were in too much of a hurry. Many of the companies that eventually succeeded had not yet been founded.

Whatever these challenges, the subprime crisis of the early 2000s was fundamentally different. It was, to be blunt, a scam from the outset. Banks gave people no-questions-asked teaser mortgages that the borrowers could not conceivably service once interest rates reset. Then banks repackaged the mortgages into financial products and sold them to naive investors, all with the collusion of the rating agencies. Once mortgage delinquency rose, most of those “triple-A” products became worthless.

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Those varied histories explain what happened next. When the dotcom bubble burst, recovery soon followed. When subprime exploded, however, it triggered a chain reaction throughout the world. This was infamously true in the eurozone: after US mortgage products turned into junk, banks found themselves sitting on billions worth of worthless products. Many got into financial difficulties. Governments bailed them out, but in smaller countries with large financial sectors, finance ministries overextended themselves. This is how the Greek sovereign crisis started, and how it spread to Spain, Portugal, and Ireland.

Today,  there is still a potential for global chain reactions — but the mechanisms would be different. Over the years, China and Germany have accumulated massive trade surpluses against the US. As a result, both countries have large investment stocks in American companies. If the AI bubble blew up, and if that resulted in a US government bailout of big tech, the combination could trigger falls in both global stock markets and the dollar’s exchange rate. This would be a double whammy for the Europeans: a strong euro would kill the continent’s export industry, while all those American investments would suddenly be worth far less.

Yet if this suggests any crisis would quickly cross the Atlantic, none of this tells us if a crash is actually coming. How, then, to answer this question?

One vital thing to reiterate is that the rationale underpinning the AI boom is fundamentally correct. AI matters not because ChatGPT can do our children’s homework — but because it can transform countless different industries. The fate of legal assistants suggests this is happening already, with AI promising to transform everything from finance to accountancy, perhaps even journalism. The automation inherent in these changes could encourage manufacturing productivity to skyrocket, making goods cheaper and leaving workers with more free time.

Another reason for optimism is how quickly AI models are improving. Anthropic’s Mythos model was deemed too dangerous for ordinary users and had to be neutered before it was released to the wider public. OpenAI released its latest model GPT 6.0 only a few days ago; I have not been able to test it yet, but the broad progression in quality has been astounding.

To be clear, I am not predicting a Panglossian utopia. Friction in the transition will be enormous. Yet I think that if an AI crash does happen, it wouldn’t be caused by AI as an idea, or even as an industry, but, rather like the dotcom crash of the Nineties, because of excessive optimism and unfortunate timing. With firms taking on so much debt, the risk is that they’d be forced to repay before their investments started paying off. Another risk, for Wall Street anyway, is that China’s open-source software ends up overtaking the top US companies.

So even if the big picture story of an AI-led productivity boom is correct, the investment story is more complicated. We can have both — AI as a life-transforming technology, and an AI bubble that triggers a toxic chain reaction in financial markets. The single biggest node here would be the American government. The rise in US debt to the symbolic benchmark of $40 trillion should give us all pause for thought. If the US economy were to continue to grow at 2-3% as it has done in the past, all would be fine. Contrary to forecasts, Donald Trump did not crash the economy. Yet he is piling on a ton of debt, and if the AI bubble bursts, and the US economy falls into recession, those levels would suddenly look dodgy.

And if Eisman is getting nervous, so too are some of the world’s top investors. The Norwegian sovereign wealth fund, for instance, which is still the world’s largest, says it wants to diversify its government-bond portfolio away from the US. That should be a warning sign for the rest of us, especially given the way government and private debt can fuse during a financial chain reaction.

This is how it might start. First, a large AI company gets into trouble. So do several large investors. The US government then comes under pressure to bail out the financial sector, but has already accrued too much debt itself. At this point, the Federal Reserve steps in to buy US government debt and cut interest rates. Inflation duly rises further, the dollar crashes — and the crisis spreads to the rest of the world.

But remember: what goes for the stocks markets that predicted nine of the last five recessions also goes for columnists and financial experts. Our ability to predict financial crises is not great. But what we can do, at least, is prepare for one. And the time has come, I think, to do just that.

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.

But the politics have been surprising. The Right is increasingly skeptical of these measures on the grounds that it risks moving us towards a “papers please” internet, with an end to anonymity and free discourse. In this groundbreaking interview with UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers, Professor Haidt addresses their concerns directly, and makes the case why Right-wingers should support his campaign.

What follows is a transcript of their conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

Freddie Sayers: Many will be familiar by now with the concerns around social media usage among younger people — and most people share those concerns to some extent. Yet a lot of people, particularly on the political Right, are increasingly anxious that the kinds of measures you’ve been arguing for, and which are now finally being adopted, pose a threat to freedom of speech and the free internet. Are they wrong to be concerned?

Jonathan Haidt: This campaign has been bipartisan almost everywhere, but the Right has, in general, been a little more supportive. Here in the UK, it’s different. Why? Well, I think it’s because here you’ve had governments for many years now arresting people in mass numbers for tweets. We are in the country that gave us our liberal principles, the country that gave us John Stuart Mill. Your government has laws that are cracking down on what people say on content, and that is really a bad thing. And so I think many people on the Right — because they have been very much victims of that — are starting from that distrust of regulations. I want to acknowledge that that is a real risk.

Whenever people think about regulation, their mind jumps to “the government is going to judge speech and decide if this passes, or this does not”. Now that is a nightmare for free speech and that’s something that we almost never see in the US, because that is so clearly contrary to the First Amendment. But you don’t have the First Amendment here. So, the first thing to say is, when regulations focus on the content of speech, that’s a problem. There are a few very limited areas where we think it’s okay for the government to say, “You cannot post this, you cannot access this”, but that has to be very, very rare. In the UK, there are laws that focus on content — you can’t say something that will offend people in certain ways, you can’t say things that you know will cause upset — and that’s what leads to all the problems.

What I’m talking about are design-based solutions. When you say: here are the platform features that are causing the threats to children. Do they have to always be getting notifications, even at night? Is that a necessary feature? Do they have to be connected to anonymous strangers when they’re 12? There are design features that can be changed that would have a huge impact on child safety, and that have generally no impact on free speech. That’s where I want the UK to really focus: design-based, not content-based.

FS: The current prime minister has said that he wants to bring in a ban on social media for under-16s. That includes Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, X, and Facebook. It is being described as “Australia plus”, so it’s a little bit stronger than what they brought in over there. Already the reaction from many people on the political Right has been that it’s somehow a stalking horse. Elon Musk says it’s “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, designed to bring in a new era of censorship. Many people are also very anxious about this. The fear is that, if you have to prove your adulthood when you access the internet, it is the beginning of a registration process and the end of online anonymity.

JH: They are right to be concerned about a dystopic world in which you have to show papers to access the internet, and I can see some countries doing that. It’s not that that risk isn’t real. But what we’re doing in Western countries, and certainly what Australia did, is nothing like that. It’s not about accessing the internet, it’s about the moment of account creation. If Australian kids want to go to YouTube and search for videos on “how should I kill myself?”, they can do that still. There is no restriction on access to content in Australia.

At the moment of account creation — when you are signing a contract, with terms of service — the law at present says if you’re seven years old, but you say you’re 13, you’re in. You can give away your data to the company, and the company can take everything from you: they don’t need your parents’ consent, your parents won’t even know. That’s the status quo around the world right now.

What the Australia Bill says is that at the moment of signing a contract, the company has an obligation to verify that you are old enough to sign the contract. Otherwise, all children are on social media from the age of nine or 10.

We can all agree that signing a contract is a big deal. The moment you sign that contract, you are giving away everything to a company that is going to exploit it, sell it, and use it against you. The question is, at that moment, how do you feel about giving up one bit of information — “are you over 16: yes or no?” With device-based verification methods, if your device knows how old you are — if the Apple or Google operating system knows how old you are, as they do — if they simply say back to the platform “yes” or “no” at the moment of registration, there’s no privacy risk. It is a one-time check done just before you give away all your data for the rest of your life. That’s what the debate is about. It’s not “do I have to show a passport to access Wikipedia, or any other site?”, it’s “when can I sign a contract?”

FS: Aren’t device-based age checks ineffective, though, because many of these devices are shared between siblings. All of these platforms also have a normal-browser way of accessing them, so you just need to get a laptop in a family home and start typing in the URL, and bingo, you have access.

JH: The current situation is that each kid has one or two devices. By the time you’re 12, you probably have a laptop for school, and you have a phone or an iPad. Your parents don’t want you going to porn, they don’t want you setting up an Instagram account — but right now, they’re powerless. We cannot raise our kids the way we want, we cannot stop them from opening as many accounts as they want, unless we keep them always away from the internet. The companies have pulled our kids into a trap, surrounded them with technology that we can’t monitor. No matter how hard we try, we can’t really do a good job of it. Parents are crying out for help.

Let’s imagine the case where things pass in the UK, and let’s hope that quickly the verification methods move towards “device-based” rather than what’s happened in Australia.

Australia went first, and on most of the platforms you now have a face scan. That doesn’t work that well, but it’s okay as a first step, just showing proof of concept. The Australian law specifically says “platforms, it’s your job, but you cannot only ask for a government ID, you must provide a way to do it that does not involve an ID”. And so for now, most of the platforms are using Yoti, or you can go out to another platform and do a face scan to see if you’re old enough, and then come back with a signal, “yes or no”. So that’s how things have started, and if that was the way it was going to stay, then I would not be as enthusiastic. But here’s the really cool thing: the Australians have created a market for better age verification. The tech industry is nothing if not innovative and quick to meet a market need. And so once Australia announced that it was doing this, and once it was clear dozens of countries were following, many companies began competing to make better systems. Apple and Google have each come out with APIs that make it much easier for any platform to verify age. So it’s getting much better.

Let’s imagine I’m a parent: I’ve got a couple of kids, they each have one or two devices, and I don’t want them doing these things. Now I can set their devices, and I say “no, my kid is this old”, and he can’t change it. Now, when he uses that device, if he goes to Pornhub, he can’t use it. As you said, he’ll go to his older brother’s device, he’ll go to a friend’s device. Yes, that’s true. But you know what? That amount of friction would be a game-changer. Right now, every kid can check any site they want instantly: while they’re waiting for an elevator, while they’re sitting on the school bus, while they’re in class. It’s the constant access that’s really devastating their attention, their development. And so, if we can introduce any friction, that would be so great. Just as we do when we say, “you know what, you can’t buy alcohol, you have to find an older brother to get it for you”. That’s friction. Of course kids get around it, but drinking ages do work to at least lower the usage.

FS: Should you really have conceded that device-based is the only defensible way to do this, because there’s no point doing it if it doesn’t work. The other argument you hear a lot is: kids are so smart, they’re going to find ways around it. Not only borrowing their older brother’s hand-me-down iPhone. There’s VPNs, there will be new systems just as ingenious as the new age-verification solutions. What’s the argument against saying, “well, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it in a draconian way that actually works”?

JH: Consider the strategic question: would it have been better if the Australians came in really draconian? I think the answer is no, because, first of all, you have to remember where the world was two years ago when they passed this legislation. People thought this was impossible to do, or that it was too bold. People will be upset. The kids will riot. It’s going to be horrible. And in general, in a free country, governments should not be banning things that are popular, unless there’s a damn good reason. If the legislators get too far ahead of public opinion, there’s going to be a revolt.

The Australians went first. They probably assumed, as we all did two years ago, that this would be very hard to do, that there would be a lot of opposition. So they went in carefully. They are exploring new territory. If they had gone in draconian, saying, “Right, you just have to show us your passport, show us your driver’s license”, that would have been really bad. That would have been like a “papers, please” social media. And so the Australians decided to go in soft — they thought, let’s just first ask them to do something.

That made sense when they enacted it. But since they enacted it on 10 December, there’s been a global tipping point. That’s because when the Australian law went into effect, there was a lot of news coverage, which was overwhelmingly positive, and a lot of commentary on social media. People were saying, “Look what the Australians are doing. Hey, why can’t we do that?” And everybody saw that the Australian law was a good thing. This is why we saw so many countries follow in January, February, and March. In those three months, the world tipped. In those three months, we also had the trials in Los Angeles. Meta and Google were found guilty of designing for addiction, and the world saw the quotations from their staff, the quotations about how they were aiming for addiction. Grok put out the nudify button. So there was global disgust at what this is doing to kids. Now there is enormous public support from the Right and the Left: wherever you look, you find majorities of parents, often very large majorities, saying “yes, we want this”.

And now, whoever goes in next can be more draconian. So, as a strategic question, the answer is that the Australians did the right thing by going in soft, but every other country can go in harder and harder as the technology improves, and as the public support for it improves.

FS: A libertarian or civil liberties campaigner listening to this interview might be concerned by what you’re saying, because it implies that there is a gradually tightening noose. It’s exactly what the conspiracists most fear, which is that they will start gentle, and then, as Jonathan Haidt has just confessed, every year they’re going to get tighter and tighter. Fast forward five or 10 years down the line, and the free internet no longer exists.

JH: That’s a reasonable thing to think, because governments sometimes work that way. What I’m talking about is not tightening the noose on kids or people or speech. What I’m talking about is holding companies to a low standard at first, just to get started, and then raising the bar. You have to do better. As the technology improves, it should become more accurate, and more privacy preserving. That is the progress we’re seeing, and that’s why I’m so excited about device-based verification, because it poses zero privacy risk. Nobody wants to show a driver’s license to access pornography sites — there is a real risk that they would get hacked. Instead, Pornhub could just send down a ping — “This device? Yep, okay, you’re in.”

FS: Another argument that’s often made against you is that power should sit with the family, not with the government. Many conservative-minded people want solutions that are about empowering parents to better control what their kids see, rather than the word “ban”, which is a kind of anathema. Why can’t we find solutions that say, “this is a better way for mom and dad to raise their kids in the way they want”?

JH: If there was a way that parents could make these choices, and if most parents were successful in that, then I’d want to follow that route, because the great majority of parents don’t want their kids on Instagram or TikTok or Pornhub. But we’re 15 or 20 years into the social media age, no one has found that way. Even two married parents who have PhDs, understand tech, and try really hard to restrict their kids’ digital environment usually fail. A lot of people in Silicon Valley send their kids to schools with no technology. A lot of them keep their kids away from technology because they know the parental controls don’t work well. It’s a cat and mouse game once you go down that route. We’re talking about the most equipped families, with two parents, lots of money, and lots of time. And even they can’t do it.

Most kids are not growing up in that environment. Most kids are growing up with a single parent or in a working-class home where there’s not a lot in the way of resources, and mom says, “I’ve got to make dinner, here’s the iPad”. That’s the way kids are growing up. If you say, “Oh, parental choice”, you’re condemning most kids to a life in which their parents just can’t manage it, and they are basically at the mercy of all the companies.

So yes, in theory, the more parental choice you give, the better. I fully agree with that, but why is it that large majorities of parents on the Left and the Right want the government to set age limits? The same goes for cigarettes: do we think it should be the parents’ choice whether a kid can buy cigarettes in a store, or do we think the store should age check? Parents need help; they want an age limit, as on other dangerous products. If something is addictive, hyper sexual, or shows horrific violence, we put age limits on. Social media has all three of those properties.

I would add that what I’ve observed is that the social conservatives tend to be the quickest to see the threat and to want age limits. I think that’s because social conservatives are the most sensitive to threats to the family — commercial incentives, porn exploitation, sexualization of girls. These companies are brilliant, they’re rich, they’ve hired the best psychologists, whose goal is to addict your child. That’s what they’re trying to do. Do families want some help guarding their kids against predatory companies? Hell, yes.

FS: What’s interesting is that in the minds of some famous nominal social conservatives, this dilemma has played out in recent years, and the more pro-tech argument seems to have won. I’m thinking, for example, of JD Vance: this is someone whose whole political outlook is based on the idea that predatory companies have hollowed out the middle class, the industrial base, that big tech has been incredibly damaging. In fact, in 2022 he gave an interview to a Catholic magazine where he called for an outright pornography ban. Now, in 2026, the same person is spending a lot of his time criticizing things like the UK’s Online Safety Act and measures to control social media access as part of a stealth censorship program. What’s your analysis of what’s going on in that kind of political scenario?

JH:  The US has never done anything. We created this monster, we unleashed it on the world, and we said, as long as you say you’re 13, you’re in, and we haven’t done anything since 1998 to help. The one bill that almost made it through two years ago,  the Kids Online Safety Act [KOSA], was modeled partially on the British age-appropriate design code. It said companies have to do certain things if they’re going to serve children. It didn’t have an age limit, but said companies have to have age-appropriate features. And it was opposed in Congress by the Republicans. It passed the Senate 91 to three — overwhelming bipartisan support in the Senate. It goes to the House, the tech industry really concentrates on the House. The objection is, this might violate free-speech. So it gets stalled.

So, even though most House members were supportive, even though it passed through the first committee very strongly, it was never brought up for a vote. And the argument given by the House leadership was, “Oh, it has free-speech concerns.” Okay, so then what happened? Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, got involved and said that X was fine restricting it to over 16s. She got involved to try to address the free-speech concerns. She tweeted something strongly supportive of Kosa, and then Elon retweeted her, which we take to be a signal that X, Elon, Linda are supportive of protecting kids if you separate it from concerns about regulating speech. And then Donald Trump Jr. also tweeted in favor of KOSA, and then the First Lady, Melania, who was very active in supporting the non-consensual Deep Fake Porn Act – the Take It Down Act. So we have a lot of signs from the Trump administration that if we’re talking about protecting kids, we’re in, but if you’re going to pass a law that’s that says, like, “You can’t say this, you can’t say things that are offensive”, then we’re going to come down hard on you, because we know what we know what happens when you go down that road. So, again, it’s about keeping them separate: we want design-based solutions that will make it safer for kids, that will allow countries and companies to age-gate, that’s what we want, we don’t want speech regulation — and if you separate them, then I think Vance’s concerns will be satisfied.

FS: The strange thing, looking from outside America, is that this genius creation of social media and big tech came from there. It has conquered the world, and now it is countries outside America that are finally trying to restrict it: Australia, European countries, now the UK. Within the US it doesn’t seem to be happening at all. What’s the prospect inside America for your campaign to actually get somewhere?

JH: When I wrote The Anxious Generation, I thought: our Congress is broken, our politics is so easily corrupted by legal donations. I thought, okay, how do we solve this problem when we don’t have any support from Congress? And so I wrote the book focusing on norms, on four norms to roll back the phone-based childhood: no smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, and far more independence, free play and responsibility in the real world. Those were the four norms laid out in The Anxious Generation, and I thought we’ll have to do this without the government.

But the two things I didn’t fully realize are: one, we have 50 states, and those state governments mostly work. They jumped into action, the states have been amazing. More than 40 of our 50 states have, within a year and a half of the book coming out, passed legislation for phone-free schools. State governments have been amazingly active at trying to protect kids, and it’s totally Right-Left. There is no red-blue difference. So, other than Congress — which is partly bought — we are getting a lot of action in the US.

The other thing I didn’t fully appreciate was just how active the rest of the world would be. Beginning with Australia, but as soon as Australia went into effect, more than a dozen countries, France being the first European country — and then Spain, Scandinavia, Greece. There’s also a huge tech lash in the US now, especially around AI. Look, they fooled us once on social media, they took our kids. They’ve escaped responsibility, they’ve never been able to be sued until this year, they’ve behaved abominably towards our kids in social media. They did the same thing with ed tech. They pushed it into the schools, and now it’s damaging test scores. They tricked us on ed tech, and now people are pretty skeptical about AI in America. What I’ve seen is that, in the developing world, they’re more gung-ho about tech. In the West, we are much more negative, and, in America, especially about AI. So, I think two years ago I was thinking the way you just did, but I think the whole world has changed in the last two years.

FS: It’s also about money, though, isn’t it? Tech is a huge growth engine in the American economy. A lot of the lobbying, a lot of the diplomacy with the European Union is about American tech companies having access to these markets. And these kind of restrictions impact their business model.

JH: That’s right.

FS: How can you solve that? I mean, there is no American administration that is going to want to clip the wings of the best thing in its economy?

JH:  I don’t think that’s true. We were all techno-optimists in the Nineties. The reason that American law said that no one can sue these companies, you have complete freedom from liability, no one can sue you for what people post, which was interpreted broadly, is because we thought that way back then. “This is this new technology, it’s amazing.” When we all saw the internet the first time, I mean, it was incredible. And Congress basically said, “let’s not clip the wings, let it rip”. That was 25, 30 years ago. Things are really different now; a lot of people are crying out for regulation. A lot of people feel oppressed by these companies. A lot of people see the damage.

FS: Do you think the mood is changing against them?

JH: Oh, yeah. The mood is changing very fast against them, especially because of AI. The rollout of AI has been deeply threatening to people, as I think it should be. It’s not just the job apocalypse, which is coming, it’s many other threats.

FS: So you think an American administration would take a hit on the economy in order to introduce these restrictions on tech?

JH: It’s not clear to me that it’s a hit to the economy. Okay, those growth stocks, they might grow a little slower, so there would be some financial implication, but it’s not that it would slow down the economy. It can’t be good for the American economy to make our children stupider and stupider and sicker and sicker every year — that just can’t be a long-term growth strategy for the US. While China is able to say, “our TikTok is healthy, kids don’t get notifications”,  China is also able to regulate. It can’t be a growth strategy to let tech do what it wants to our kids.

Also, in terms of how we get out of it, the companies are in many ways more powerful than countries. I think the best analogy is the British East India Company, which basically was given a license to conquer, pillage, do what you want, start wars, kill people. That’s essentially what our tech companies have been given, and the Trump administration has been pretty aggressive in threatening countries: “if you do this, we’re going to put tariffs on you.” I don’t think that’s appropriate to do. I don’t think that’s historically been done to our friends, at least not to this degree, so I think whatever future administration, whether it’s Republican or Democrat, I don’t think they’re going to be as aggressive in threatening countries who try to pass child-friendly legislation. Now that it’s most of the developed world countries standing up at the same time, it’s a different game.

FS: Final question. You are talking to a somewhat conservatively-minded person. Imagine this person has been burnt over the last seven years. They went through the Covid era, they witnessed draconian curtailments to their liberty, all done using do-goody language about protecting public health. They saw a conspiracy between government and social media to censor what should have been perfectly legitimate political speech, and they are deeply skeptical of people using the word “ban” in connection with something that sounds virtuous in terms of helping people. They might agree with you, they might have kids that they’re anxious are on their phones too much, but they’re done with people coming in saying “we need to help you by banning this or restricting your freedom” — what is your message to them?

JH: What I’ve learned from thirty years of studying political psychology is that each side, the Right and the Left, the libertarians — each of them are wise to certain threats to society or the family, and in a well-functioning society, each one is voicing those concerns, and there’s a mechanism for balancing them or taking everyone’s concerns into account. So, conservatives and libertarians need to constantly be witnesses to the fact that whatever is proposed could be misused. You can’t just trust the government to do what it says, they need to be the watchdogs.

But I would also say: as conservatives, you are also the most sensitive to threats to the family. Even back in the Eighties and Nineties, it was conservatives who were saying that we can’t just have these sexually explicit lyrics surrounding our kids, we can’t just have porn everywhere. Conservatives are the canaries in the coal mine for the moral degradation of our children. Conservatives should keep speaking up for that, that we can’t be raising our children in a toilet, we can’t be having our government decide what anyone can say. Keep voicing those concerns, and that’s how you end up with a really good policy in your country.

This has to happen. The status quo is just completely unworkable. The climate that kids are being raised in is not just degrading, it’s not even good for free-speech. Kids are afraid to speak honestly on social media, it makes them lie, it makes them present a false self. The status quo is horrible for everyone. It has to change, and it’s going to change. The question is, are we going to do it well in ways that are privacy-preserving and that don’t give governments the right to judge who can say what, or are we going to do it badly?

I think the UK is really ground zero for this debate, because you do have a problem with government curtailing of speech, but you are also the founders of liberalism in the sense of individual liberty. So, I’m really hopeful that it works out well in the UK, and we need the conservatives to be voicing their strong concerns, their right to be concerned. But I’m confident, given what I’m seeing, and given the broad public support that we have to deal with this problem. I’m confident that we’re going to get it right — maybe not in every country at first — but let’s see how things go, and let’s learn from each other. I think we can do this, and I think we have to do this.

Since the dawn of America, the military has articulated some version of this pledge, solidly staking its claim on the monumental work of building the American man. While the military’s masculine archetype was formed inside the wire, it went mainstream long ago, evident by a dizzying array of cultural tokens, from war movies and toy soldiers to cargo pants, Boy Scouts, bodybuilding, and the Hummer.

America is today in general agreement around certain precepts that all men should aspire to, among them strength, discipline, and self-sacrifice. On close inspection, however, it becomes abundantly clear that these traits are calibrated to enhance the aims of the military state, not the man. In truth, each tenet has nuggets worth living by. But as broadly interpreted today, these characteristics fuel stoicism, self-destructiveness, and nihilism, forming an outlook that is beneficial for cold battlefield environments but not at all equipped to handle the emotional complexities of civilian life.

I first heard about “the Forge”, as insiders call it, in late 2020, when a group of concerned parents reached out and told me the place was falling apart. “We, the parents, paid for a product, we were promised a product,” Scott Newell, a former parent and alumnus, told me back then. “And then they switched the product out and turned it into bullshit.”

For much of its history, the Forge resembled a patriotic paradise. Cadets ranging in age from 12 to 21 aimed to build their bodies and sharpen their minds on a verdant, 100-acre campus located on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Yet when I first dug into the school, I discovered an acrid strain of masculinity that was raw, violent, fiercely hierarchical, and quickly mutating out of control. I uncovered stories of vicious beatings, brutal rapes, predatory grooming, and widespread racism and misogyny. I was told about incidents of waterboarding, whippings, brandings with scalding forks, forced piercings, even horse abuse. These boys of the Forge were hurting, but had only learned how to hurt.

During the previous four academic years, local police had responded more than 300 times to incidents on campus, including for cadets as young as 13 experiencing psychiatric crises and demonstrating suicidal behavior. In the spring of 2016, a promising 18-year-old cadet named Carey Lecamp killed himself in his dorm room. Most shocking, perhaps, was the behavior of the men in charge, who showed not only willful ignorance of this culture, but active complicity in it. They retaliated against boys who spoke out, fixed grades to burnish the school’s reputation, and padded their own pockets.

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Trump’s military takeover

By Malcom Kyeyune

The Forge’s military high school closed in May, but its brand has remained surprisingly resilient. Its junior college remains open, as of this writing, and officials have floated plans to spin off the old high school into a charter. The Forge has further fortified its future through a training partnership with the Pennsylvania National Guard, plus an NSA-certified cybersecurity program and a gestating drone-pilot initiative. In October 2025, the Forge became the first signatory to President Trump’s “Compact for Higher Education Excellence”, which demands, among other things, that participants ban affirmative action and crack down on programs that “punish, belittle” or “spark violence against conservative ideas”. Three months later, in January 2026, the feds issued a $1 million grant to the Forge. It tasked the troubled academy with developing accreditation standards for military schools across America.

The Forge has also exported its brand overseas through a satellite campus in Qatar that imposes its punitive practices on an even younger cohort —­ elementary school kids — a sign that, even after perilous battlefield defeats in the Middle East, the image of the upstanding American military officer remains attractive on the world stage.

The story of the Forge points to an even bigger scandal: the dysfunction of America’s military education system more generally. The nation’s dozens of military schools exemplify the stubborn influence and overall emptiness of military ideology, the cruelty of military training and masculinity, and the entire institution’s reliance on schoolchildren. Yet they are still generously funded and enormously influential in shaping the public image of the American man. Their alumni control powerful institutions: four US presidents, including Trump, have attended military schools, as have a handful of Fortune 500 CEOs, dozens of lawmakers, and top figures in the Defense Department, America’s largest employer.

These schools propagate a view of American masculinity that is predicated on the wobbly assumption that man is violent by nature. In a 2025 speech before every senior American defense official, Trump’s self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth passionately defended this premise and derided pacifism as “naive and dangerous”. “It ignores human nature and it ignores human history,” Hegseth argued. “Either you protect your people and your sovereignty, or you will be subservient to something or someone. It’s a truth as old as time.”

Hegseth is right that men have fought many wars. But those leading them have never relied on innate aggression to naturally show itself. Rather, they have cultivated violence, often in closed and highly controlled educational environments. And often for years. Since America’s founding, military brass have painstakingly developed and refined a military curriculum that breeds loyalty, teaches obedience, and constructs violence, all the while convincing the public that conflict is a hardwired male instinct.

Instead, the military’s muscular masculine archetype has become one of America’s most coveted assets. Those who secure it make a devil’s bargain. The male military identity is ultimately false, and fleeting, for it is meted out in small doses by men in power, who, for institutional purposes, always withhold unconditional acceptance. Military masculinity is unsustainable. Real self-actualization is never achieved. Some men, having fought their way up the military hierarchy, come to see the tragic fact at the heart of the military system: the military does not make them stronger; it alters and degrades them, sometimes forever.

Far before they see the front lines of battle, many cadets are diagnosed with PTSD, a condition that represents a powerful rejoinder to the assertion that violence is natural. If the human propensity for violence is innate, then it wouldn’t create such persistent pain and mental turmoil in its wake. The mother of one cadet I met saw her boy transform from a warm and idealistic schoolboy into a withdrawn adult who drinks to excess and sleeps with a hunting knife under his pillow. Other cadets told me they go to bed with weapons in close proximity, or, decades after graduation, remain wracked by nightmares and anxiety stemming from their time on campus. One cadet sued the Missouri Military Academy in 2022 after allegedly facing weekly beatings so bad he attempted suicide while on break in hopes of forever forestalling his return.

The Pentagon has always understood the profound impact of schooling on shaping society, which explains why the military has secured a prominent place for itself in academia — establishing five service academies, like West Point, plus various war colleges, a combat studies institute, a defense university, and a national intelligence university. The military also oversees 5,200 ROTC programs in public colleges and high schools, and supports state-run, religiously chartered, and private military schools, like the Forge. These schools rear the elite military officer class; though lower down the ranks, enlisted troops are exposed to an abridged military education, too, via boot camp, which provides its own kind of schooling.

The Pentagon’s reach extends to even younger populations, too, in programs that appear innocuous, like the Boy Scouts or the Young Marines, and into civilian colleges and universities by way of hefty research grants. Between 2014 and 2024, Johns Hopkins University, as one example, received more than twice as much money from the Defense Department as it did in tuition.

The Pentagon likes to frame its training methods as peer-reviewed and pedagogical, a claim bolstered by its well-appointed military schools and their trappings, from grassy quads to academic robes and degrees. All this has elevated, distinguished, and validated the world’s most brutal profession, making bloodshed scientific and deriving an “art” of war.

Yet it is power, not art, which is the true nucleus of these military environments, an indoctrination tool serving as both reward and punishment. Many of the cadets I spoke to didn’t enter these schools seeking power. Many had previously faced bullying, family strife, economic insecurity, or other antagonistic conditions. What they truly sought was armor, not weapons. Once they enter the system, however, these young aspirants are cultivated to want power. That is because they find themselves in an atmosphere of insecurity that is most easily remedied through force. The best way to secure a modicum of peace is by climbing to the top of the hierarchy within the corps of cadets. At West Point and other military schools, the first year cadets at the bottom are called “plebes”, or commoners. At the Air Force Academy, they’re known as “doolies”, which apparently stems from the Greek word doulos, meaning slave. At the Virginia Military Institute, they’re labeled “rats”. The only way to move up is by following the rules and targeting the weakest links. This structure is clarifying, for it suggests that the military does not tease out latent aggression — it breeds it.

Many service members resist the military’s efforts to capture their minds. Some snap out of it early, rebel against it late, or never believe to begin with. But there are also men who lose themselves entirely. Those who become reflexively pro-military should not be seen as weak or gullible. Many entered the field with a child’s mind: malleable, optimistic, and a bit reckless. It is no mistake that the troops serving on the front lines are called the infantry, or that the military school rank of “cadet” translates in French to “youngest child”. War may be commonly described as a man’s game, but it’s boys who have long fed and fueled the whole enterprise.

The military seeks young people not because they are the most physically adept, but because they are the most emotionally vulnerable. One study found that military cadets are often characterized by their sharp sensitivity, strong impressionability, and increased emotionality. Another 1975 paper showed how the military reshapes boys through three interlocking components: “the acceptance of psychological control, the equation of masculine identity with military performance, and the infusion of raw aggression into the entire military mission.”

Modern enlistment age in America was initially set at 21, then pushed down to 18, then 17 with a parent’s permission, where it stands today. The average enlistment age today is 19. These are adults in the government’s eyes, but many remain fundamentally innocent, years away from fully developed brains. The few who harbor violent tendencies at this age generally have a history that’s led to it.

Many boys who join share a tragic and misguided rejection of their youth and are impatient to become men — a transformation the military is happy to facilitate. It hastens their growth through heavy doses of pain and stress, often frontloaded in the early days of training, or in the first academic year. Some who make it through proudly refer to themselves, and each other, as “old men”. Military schooling, or training, precludes natural, more complex versions of manhood from sprouting. What forms in its place is something strange and uncanny: a child’s face extinguished of youth and its accompanying traits, like sweetness, empathy, imagination, and whimsy.

Beyond the military’s promise of manhood is the interrelated assurance of bringing meaning to life. The military understands children’s dreams, aspirations, and anxieties, and it promises to give them what they need, whether it’s status, money, schooling, family, or just a place to escape. It pledges to wipe away an existing identity, and that’s often exactly what people want — the chance to reinvent themselves in a new world. Cadets and recruits alike are cut off from friends, family, and lovers, and told to make new ones; they are given new haircuts, new diets, new clothes, and exposed to new ideas. Marine general Charles Krulak once testified proudly to the transformative potential of the service via one of his economically disadvantaged recruits, who, after emerging victorious from the crucible of training, cried out “I am somebody!”

Much like war itself, the training experiences of cadets are marked by sharp contrasts, highs and lows, hate and love, comedy and tragedy. Some benefit from order, and through the academies’ call to shared sacrifice, they develop a powerful sense of belonging. Others graduate broken or feeling ostracized. Some try to escape. Others die. Many find father figures or make lifelong friendships, including, at times, with kids who have hurt them. There is intense and intentional trauma bonding at these places, part of the military’s drive to build friendship and loyalty via shared moments of intense agitation. All of this serves to ensure that soldiers disgorged onto the barren fields of combat stay dependable and connected — through their commitment to each other more than to any politics motivating the conflict.

For many boys, the military feels like the only true path to become a American man. Many embrace alternative paths when they are offered. But there are few and dwindling paths into other forms of public service, few purely peaceful avenues to defend the nation or show strength.

When an anti-war movement sprouted during Vietnam, millions rushed to the cause, providing not only a direct threat to the Pentagon’s immediate aims, but also an alternative path to meaning. My own father as a youth, anxious to escape his turbulent family life, flirted with ROTC and, before that, military school — Valley Forge, in fact. But after attending a pacifist Quaker school, and finding a father figure at Boston University in Howard Zinn, he ended up a leader in the anti-war movement during Vietnam. My dad could just have easily become a hard-boiled colonel, but there was another option available to him, and he took it.

The peace movement my dad joined offered an alternative model for manhood. This helps explain the verve with which the military moved to violently shut it down. Since Vietnam, the military has continued to work to maintain its grasp on our perceptions and practices of manhood and to cast any countercultural forces as weak and effeminate. Over this same period, American society has mentored and championed girls in ways that have created new and transformational opportunities that redefine what it means to emerge into womanhood.

In the absence of fresh meanings and directions for men, our military’s violence-affirming ideologies powerfully persist, animating unnecessary conflicts and overtaking America’s masculine ideas. This is now spawning radical, revanchist, and vengeful undercurrents among soldiers and civilians alike.

Yet despite mounting evidence, Pentagon officials and other government leaders have failed to step in, and in some cases are actively obscuring problems, sometimes even feeding them. Today, the facts are clearer than ever: military schooling is an increasingly dubious and, when poorly overseen, potentially dangerous form of teaching, one that has spawned polarization, male isolation and frustration, and a child abuse crisis hiding in plain sight. It’s also utterly ineffective at winning wars. And yet the military’s coercive, even cultish, curriculum nonetheless continues to be broadly and blindly declared as essential.

***

Extracted from God Forgives, Brothers Don’t: The Long March of Military Education and the Making of American Manhood by Jasper Craven (Simon & Schuster). The book will be published in the UK on 2 July.

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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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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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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After all, virtually all the tariffs will survive unaltered. In the short-run, the President is covered. On Friday night, immediately after the Supreme Court ruling, he invoked Section 122 of the 1974 Trade Act, signing an executive order to impose an immediate 10% tariff on the rest of the world. On Saturday, he raised that figure to 15%, the maximum allowed under the Act. The tariffs will kick in tomorrow — but despite what some journalists have claimed, none of this is “defying” the judges. On the contrary, Trump is merely implementing their ruling.

The catch is that Section 122 has a time cap of 150 days. That takes us until late July. At that point, Trump could get Congress to extend the period further. It may be possible, and legally more risky, for him to reset the clock. Or he could let the tariffs lapse before applying a new 150-day batch. Whether or not this holds up in court, it will buy him time to get ready for his real tariff fightback.

The point, here, is that all the Supreme Court did on Friday was tell the President that he should have picked a different legal basis for his tariffs. This is still a big deal — but not quite as big as you might imagine.

To understand exactly what happened requires a deep-dive into US trade law. When, on 2 April last year, Trump stepped into the White House Rose Garden to declare “Liberation Day”, he used a law dating from the Jimmy Carter era. The 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, was a response to the two oil crises of that decade. IEEPA gave the president unprecedented rights to act in response to a crisis, from freezing foreign assets to confiscating foreign property.

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Importantly, though, IEEPA says nothing about tariffs. Yet Trump picked it as the legal basis for his Liberation Day tariffs — and this is what the Supreme Court objected to. In essence, the Court ruled that the US faces no immediate emergency, unlike in the Seventies. In any case, tariffs fall under a different set of laws. The Court decided against the US administration with a majority of six to three, with Brett Kavanaugh one of the dissenting justices, and the legal disagreement essentially about who decides what constitutes an emergency.

In his minority opinion, Kavanaugh made one point that is not contested: that the ruling would have little effect in real life. As he puts it “numerous other federal statutes” allow Trump to impose tariffs legally — “albeit perhaps with a few additional procedural steps”.

What are those procedural steps? Quite simply the two big trade acts through which presidents normally levy tariffs on other countries. They’re hardly arcane: Joe Biden used them too. The first is the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, specifically Section 232 on national security. It allows the president to levy tariffs on products he deems to be a potential threat to national security. The Trump administration already levied tariffs on several products under this act — cars and trucks, steel and aluminum. There is also copper, furniture, lumber, and timber. The Supreme Court ruling has no effect whatsoever on these Section 232 tariffs, and indeed the Trump administration may yet use it to stick tariffs on foreign airline parts and pharmaceuticals. If this happened, the Canadians and the Europeans would suffer most.

Section 232 tariffs only concern goods for which a national security argument can be made: notably critical raw materials. Dolls imported from China, or French luxury handbags, clearly do not fall into that category. The heavy lifting that yielded most of America’s tariff revenue before Trump’s Liberation Day announcement came from Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act. That’s also where most of the action on future tariffs will come from, now that the Court has blocked the IEEPA route. Section 301 is about unfair trading practices, like violations of trade agreements, or any policies that are deemed to discriminate against US businesses. Trump will have little difficulty here, with Section 301 playing into his rhetoric that foreign trading partners are out to cheat America.

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That, of course, still leaves one question: why did Trump go down the IEEPA route to start with, when he had these other laws at his disposal? The answer involves understanding the President himself. Trump is a man of transactions, not procedures — and both the 1962 and 1974 acts are heavy on procedure, typically taking about a year to enact. In the case of Section 232, the Department of Commerce must first investigate the effects of the relevant imports on national security. There are maximum, but no minimum, time limits. There are no formal appeal procedures, but there are legal safeguards in place to prevent the process from being cynically short-circuited. The investigation takes at most 270 days, after which the president has 90 days to decide whether to act. In practice, the process is a little faster, but not much. Back in 2017, Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum took almost a year to enact.

Section 301, too, requires a formal procedure, in this case by the US Trade Representative. A typical 301 investigation takes 6-12 months from start to finish. Those investigations come with depositions and hearings, and end with a long report. After four years, the tariffs must be reviewed.

Bureaucracy, in short, intrudes. This explains why Trump first chose IEEPA as the legal basis for its tariffs: for its speed and what we might therefore call its “threat factor”. Not for nothing did Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, once refer to tariffs as the gun on the table.

Yet if the 1962 and 1975 acts are big on paperwork, Kavanaugh is again right that Trump will ultimately be able to get his way — and Congress will be unable to stop him. Another advantage of both laws, after all, is that they are firmly in the president’s gift to enact.

Here, then, is the timeline: the temporary 15% tariffs will kick in this week, buying Trump the space to impose the bureaucratic procedures that make them permanent. He could even end up raising the total level of tariffs if he so wished; I myself foresee a scenario where tariffs on cars from the EU and the UK go up by a tenth. That is even as he uses the law to bolster his broader argument about America’s economic position. “They rip us off,” he said of the EU a year ago. Well, that is precisely what Section 301 is about.

So if you hate Trump, you may well celebrate the Supreme Court ruling as a symbolic defeat. If, however, you hate the tariffs, you have no reason to cheer: the powers of the President to impose tariffs unilaterally are not affected at all.

Why, then, are people celebrating? I’m reminded here of the lawfare against Trump ahead of the 2024 election. I remember the BBC in particular expressing gleefully confidence that the New York criminal case against Trump would deprive him of the means of launching an effective campaign. In that particular case, the US Supreme Court came to Trump’s rescue. What has always helped Trump is a tendency by his opponents to overestimate the effect of legal games.

A deluded German commentator described the ruling as an “embarrassment of historic proportions”. There is an awful lot of “peak Trump” commentary about. Statements such as these may be designed to make us Europeans feel better, but they just don’t hold up to scrutiny. The tariffs were Trump’s most important economic policy decision — and they will stay, even as he has almost three more years of his four-year term.

The real problem with Trump is not that he is a buffoon, but that he learned how to game the political system. Not all of the mud he throws will stick. But a lot will. The President may no longer hold his tariff gun, but an economic bazooka remains, and it is pointing at the rest of us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The United States has had an ambivalent relationship with the British monarchy, then, for as long as the United States has existed. But while this relationship is certainly “special” in the ironic sense, that revolutionary legacy of republican hostility often seems tempered with something warmer. If anything, the hostility more frequently seems to flow the other way. The British institutional reaction to Edward VII’s relationship with American divorcée Wallis Simpson was scorn at a perceived social inferior and gold-digger. In America, though, the response was curiosity at the American woman who had captured the heart of a king. More recently, at least to begin with, something of the same mood surrounded the marriage of Prince Harry and the American actress Meghan Markle. 

The current President of the United States, too, is known to be a fan of the British monarchy: he paid a warm tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II on her death in 2022. So today, as Donald Trump begins his first state visit since his Presidential inauguration in January, everyone around Keir Starmer is hoping that a dose of royal pomp and ceremony will pour balm on a “special relationship” that has, latterly, looked more than a little threadbare. 

Will it work? The day and a half Trump will spend in the UK is programmed like the most high-end imaginable private tour of Museum Britain, that curated subset of the British Isles popular with tourists eager to see the “typical England” of their imagination (and of the oeuvre of Richard Curtis). Should official Britain succeed in containing Trump in this museum zone, suitably diverted with guards of honor, a Red Arrow fly-by, historic carriages, lavish banquets, and a visit to Windsor, plus the undivided attention of the Royal Family, the cumulative effect will no doubt be enjoyable for Trump, if also hermetically insulated from the Britain the rest of us live in.

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Meanwhile, it speaks volumes about the restive mood of Britain as an un-curated whole that there will be no public procession; in fact, no public-facing element at all. This is reportedly because of security fears, in the face of far-Left agitation. But what if it’s also to minimize the risk of Trump seeing those parts (or denizens) of the country that aren’t part of the Museum Britain picture, and forming too accurate an impression of how the rest of us live? Worse still, what if it afforded us too accurate an assessment of our own leadership? If officials want to spare Trump the sight of (for example) Birmingham’s cat-sized rats, or indeed our thriving national business in supplying free seaside accommodation for undocumented workers, it may also be too awkward to display in public our poorly, footling constitutional King, beside the brash, bouffant, and genuinely ascendant Trump. 

This is, after all, a man who, despite being formally a president, has far closer to monarchic powers than any current British leader, either crowned or elected — and who, besides, leads the West’s foremost superpower. What if Britons looked at Trump side-by-side with King Charles, and drew the wrong conclusion about which of the two was more kingly?

I’m being a little facetious here, but not entirely. Charles’ mother, Elizabeth II, reigned during a post-war political consensus that viewed nation-states as on their way to obsolescence, and the future a bright one of internationalism. Her reign was one of dignified stoicism in the face of relentless diminishment to a cryptic cipher: the sole speck of absolutist grit in the liberal-democratic oyster. Concurrent with her death, though, that future has vanished. History is back with a vengeance, as are strongman leaders. 

And as the United States continues its tumultuous slide toward fully post-liberal governance, a corresponding aesthetic shift is afoot — of which, like it or not, Trump is a leading edge. The incumbent ruling class doesn’t like it: from the FT’s performative shuddering at Trump’s “turning the White House into Mar-A-Lagoland”, to the New York Times’ prim distaste at the way his gilded décor evokes “the crudeness of the times”, everyone who did well in the spreadsheet-brained Clinton/Obama salad days of management consultants and financialization thinks he’s ghastly. But outside Bluesky and the rarefied world of wealthy progressives, it seems, the world likes ghastly. 

And no wonder. History is well and truly back: the world is no longer borderless, or, conversely, is more borderless than electorates would like. War is back on the menu, even in Europe. The same America that dismantled the British Empire in the name of national self-determination is murmuring about colonizing overseas territories. But nor is this the old industrial age of standing armies and tanks and planes; today, it’s data cables, terrorism, liminal warfare, bot farms and drones. Biotech is proliferating: Silicon Valley mavericks are gene-editing their babies. The vibe shift is here; it’s weird, and loud, and more than a little sci-fi. 

Against this, it’s the dressed-down technocrats of the Obama era that feel obsolete, along with their sans-serif fonts and “discreet luxe”. And this plus the obvious popularity of Trump with at least a large subset of his own electorate all points to a possibility that no one but America’s progressive “No Kings” protesters (and perhaps Curtis Yarvin) wants to consider: that if any Western state today can be said to have as its leader something approximating a Royal Brute, it’s America. 

Emanations from the vicinity of the Palace suggest that His Majesty King Charles is, like his great-great-great-grandmother Victoria, not amused. Back in July, a nameless “friend of the monarch” told (of all outlets) the Daily Beast that Charles is worried Trump will use his upcoming visit to embarrass British officials on the topic of immigration into Europe. Trump has, after all, already called the inflow of migrants from Africa and Asia “a horrible invasion that is killing Europe”, a remark that the King’s unnamed friend says “appalled” Charles, after a “lifetime promoting tolerance and compassion”. 

It is of course impossible to know whether or not this nameless source spoke to the press with the King’s support or not. There have been other such suggestions of dislike, which indicate this may really reflect Charles’ views. If it does, he would only be echoing every other upper-class idealist of the boomer generation who took John Lennon’s Imagine as prophecy, and really believed that history had ended and that tolerance and compassion could now bloom forever. Even so, this naïve partiality shows Charles in an unfavorable light compared to his mother, who both had her own views on politics and nonetheless remained perfectly reserved through a lifetime of duty as Britain’s figurehead. 

Arguably, though, it shows him in a still more unfavorable light compared to Trump himself. For however ghastly Obama liberals (and perhaps also Charles III) think Trump is, the Donald’s breezy insistence on saying whatever the hell he likes is far more kingly than any amount of passive-aggressive whispering to the press via underlings, no matter how you gussy that up as royal stoicism.

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To be fair to Charles, he is in a difficult position. He presides over a skint and increasingly fractured post-imperial rump Britain. His own royal legacy is bound up with a Commonwealth whose membership includes many countries that obviously, actively view Great Britain as at best a mark to shake down for “reparations” or remittances, if not an active enemy. At the same time, support for the constitutional monarchy of which he is a head persists mainly among small-c conservative Middle Englanders for whom, in the age of mass migration, Charles’ avowed internationalism and extension of “imagined community” to the Commonwealth feels at best misguided if not, according to some more febrile social media posters, actively treacherous.

Amid all these tensions, perhaps Charles feels he has no choice but to communicate his views obliquely, in hints and whispers. But the unfavorable comparison between Charles III and Donald Trump is not just about confidence. It’s also about power, and the freedom to aestheticize power: a willingness to “just do things”, as the kids say, and to be a bit extra as you do it. The ancients framed this as a virtue, “magnificence”, meaning to spend in accordance with your rank, especially on goods of wider civic value, such as ornate architecture.

It would be a stretch to call (for example) Trump’s remodeling of the White House Rose Garden as an exclusive private members’ club “magnificent” in this sense; the logic is too commercial. But when Henry VIII demolished a thousand years of monastic history, he did so to realize their value, to fund his wars and lavish spending. Today, the bloom of gold across every White House surface speaks to a similar sensibility: one ruthlessly focused on realizing assets and then exerting power through displays of wealth and, where necessary, the recently re-titled Department of War. If Britain were ruled today by a Henry VIII rather than a Charles III, would a man known in the sixteenth century for his quick temper, unpredictability, vast appetite and, of course, numerous wives be more like our current monarch, or more like Trump? I think we all know the answer.

Many American republicans, of both the small- and large-R variety, are proud of their national origin story, in which a war of independence was fought to escape the yoke of “the Royal Brute of Great Britain”. But in a twist of fate, 250 years on they appear to have gained a magnificence-loving leader of their own, one whose mercurial, Henrician forcefulness so completely eclipses the impotent, passive-aggressive titular monarch of now much-less-great Britain, let alone its insipid, technocrat PM, as to make the old country look weirdly leaderless.

But perhaps the more accurate assessment is that Britain is not leaderless at all. Rather, we are de facto ruled as a province from imperial Washington, by something far closer to the old-fashioned kind of king. And from this perspective, the dissident agitating for independence isn’t some American Thomas Paine. Rather, it is King Charles, impotently signalling via nameless aides his resentment at the subordination of his kingdom to the Royal Brute of Greater Britain.

Yet there is at least one significant difference between Cold Wars 1.0 and 2.0. In Cold War 1.0, ideological dispute between Left and Right mapped directly onto geopolitical conflict. The First Cold War was a trial of state strength, measured in terms of military might and the extent of a country’s diplomatic influence. But it was also a competition between social systems, political visions and rival ideologies: the capitalist markets of the West versus the socialist command economies of the East. It was a trial of whether competitive, multi-party liberalism could extract more political legitimacy from its citizens when compared to communist single-party states. The trial, then, was about more than innovation in weapons systems; it also involved questions of individual rights and state legitimacy.

By contrast, the ideological fissures of today’s cold war do not clearly map onto these international rivalries. Instead, they yield a much more complex picture of political tension and geopolitical rivalry. It is true that China is still ruled by a Communist Party that won power back in 1948, but China is not the champion of Leftism in the way the USSR was. There is now a stock market in Beijing — China’s third stock market, after Shanghai and Shenzhen — and, by some reckonings, China has more billionaires than the US itself. Many of these billionaires made their fortunes after China began to enmesh its economy with the world’s. The USSR was part of Comecon, the autarkic trading regime of the Eastern bloc that kept its members sequestered from the wider world economy, but the Chinese and US economies are deeply intertwined. This much is evident from the complexity of the tariff negotiations currently underway between the two countries’ trade negotiators. 

At the same time, the two powers’ navies menace each other in the Pacific. The tensions between the countries are real, but so is their inter-dependence. Each side represents one of the two wings of global capitalism, with industrial capital concentrated in China and finance capital in the US. While Donald Trump has been vocal in accusing China of stealing American jobs and exporting poisonous fentanyl to US consumers, he and his administration have been relatively muted in their political criticism of the Chinese regime. This makes sense when one considers that China, like the US, is capitalist, and that China, by the same token, offers little ideological challenge to US global leadership. Ironically, as China’s industrial might has grown, its ideological influence has diminished. Red China was never ideologically more powerful than in the heyday of Maoism, when China was much weaker. Back then, Red China sought to inspire a global guerrilla war among the Third World’s legions of poor peasants, also claiming the allegiance of student radicals on Western campuses. (Impressed by China, the Black Panthers notoriously sold copies of Mao’s Little Red Book in order to raise money for guns.)

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Today, China’s infrastructural investments are helping those countries of the Global South convert their poor rural folk into urban city-dwellers. But former Western Maoists such as Bernard-Henri Lévy have become neo-conservatives, obsessed with bloody crusades to spread democracy to the Middle East, while China quietly consolidated its rise. 

In Cold War 1.0, Maoist ideological excess compensated for China’s relative weakness when compared to the military might of Soviet Russia. Today the roles are reversed: it is Russia that now occupies the relatively weaker position in the new Sino-Russian alliance. Predictably enough, it is Russian leader Vladimir Putin, more than Chinese leader Xi Jinping who has put most effort in trying to cultivate his own state as an alternative ideological pole in the international system. Putin rails against Western hegemony and has tried to style himself as a champion of global conservatism and family values against the spread of transnational Western liberalism. Yet Putin’s ideological reach is even more limited than that of Chairman Mao. His posture is fundamentally reactive and defensive, and his cultural defence of the Orthodox Church and “Russian world” will, by its very nature, have limited reach beyond Russia itself. While Trump is slowly tightening the noose of anti-Russian sanctions in an effort to induce a ceasefire in Ukraine, it is unsurprising that the White House has expended so little effort in criticising Putin’s vision of the crabbed, distempered Russian bailiwick. 

So where, if not between China and the US, or the US and Russia, can we find the key ideological battle line of Cold War 2.0? The line does not run so much between East and West as within the West itself: between the US and Europe. That the US is fighting an ideological cold war with Europe is most obvious in the diplomacy of Trump’s vice-president, J.D. Vance. Vance unleashed the opening volley in this ideological attack in his extraordinary speech delivered at the Munich Security Conference in February, when he calmly and methodically took apart the dismal record of European states on individual liberty and democratic rights. He criticized EU interference in the Romanian presidential elections of the previous year and even named the British anti-abortion activist Adam Smith-Connor, arrested in 2024 for silently praying outside an abortion clinic. In doing so, Vance adopted the same manner and tone that American leaders adopted when speaking out about the squashing of popular opposition in the Eastern bloc and the maltreatment of Soviet dissidents such as the physicist Andrei Sakharov or writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Following his speech, Vance met with Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) leader Alice Weidel — a figure of obloquy for the European liberal orthodoxy. On his current holiday in the Cotswolds, Vance has not only once-again criticized the British record on free speech, he is also meeting Robert Jenrick — the dissident rival to the current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch.

When was the last time that a Chinese or Russian dissenter achieved the renown of Smith-Connor, by virtue of being cited in a speech by a major US political figure? The barbs do not come from Vance alone. Marco Rubio, Trump’s Secretary of State, has criticized the German state’s suppression of the national-populist AfD party as “tyranny in disguise”. EU leaders rallied together against Vance’s assault, with former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz defending continental restrictions on free speech. The German foreign office even took to X to criticize Rubio for interfering in Germany’s internal affairs. This is to say nothing of the years of bitter invective that have been hurled by European politicians and commentators against Trump ever since 2016. They have denounced him as a pro-Russian stooge, a demagogue and a fascist — only to downplay such remarks years later. Even Trump, who has mostly left the international ideological battles to Vance, embarrassed UK prime minister Keir Starmer on his recent private visit to Scotland. The mere mention of free speech by Trump was enough to induce gurning, tortured denials from Starmer.

There are some important differences between the former cold war and its new pan-Atlantic counterpart. When Western leaders denounced communism in the first cold war, they did so by arguing that the Soviets’ centralized economy, and appropriation of private property, was necessarily a totalitarian enterprise. Vance, by contrast, takes the Europeans to task for falling foul of their own ideals rather than realizing some larger sinister purpose. More recently, he has also accused Europe of engaging in civilizational suicide through its unwillingness to halt mass migration. The historically unprecedented inflows represent not only a divergence from the legacy of the Western civilization shared by the US and Europe, but a flouting of the elites’ democratic compact with their people. Repeatedly, voters have indicated their exasperation with the scale of mass migration; repeatedly, they have been ignored.

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Vance’s ideological confidence, as he suggested in his speech in Munich, rests on the democratic mandate won by Trump. Barracked by Vance and his colleagues, European leaders react defensively, for they are more used to bureaucratic haggling in the committee rooms of Brussels than dealing with European voters. As with any cold war, both sides recoil from full-frontal assaults: they beat hasty retreats, seek to patch up relations and make assurances of enduring alliances. But there is no mistaking the underlying political drift.

This Euro-American ideological cold war reflects the underlying political and even economic divergence between the US and Europe. Not only does the EU cling to its outdated political model — that of a supranational trade bloc designed for the technocratic regulation of globalization — it also remains ideologically and strategically committed to the economic policies of that bygone era, too. At the top of the EU’s agenda remain multilateral free trade deals, deindustrialization and expensive renewables. By contrast, the Trump administration is wielding a strong democratic mandate in its effort to re-industrialize North America behind tariff barriers that penalize Europe. It is expanding its use of fossil fuels and reducing its reliance on renewable energy.

Ideological crusades abroad, including Vance’s, always reflect domestic needs. In this case, MAGA’s desire is to assert national interests over the liberal globalism championed by the Democrats. That Vance can afford to launch an ideological cold war on Europe reflects a hard material reality: Europe simply matters much less to the US in Cold War 2.0 than it did in the first cold war. Vance can afford to be so pointed in his criticisms of the liberal, globalist EU because he knows that Europe needs America more than America needs Europe. The EU is dependent on the US for both its security and its energy, but offers little to the US in its struggle with China.

Whereas the first cold war fused ideological and geopolitical rivalry into one great bipolar stand-off, Cold War 2.0 seems like it will be characterized by financial multipolarity (as the primacy of the dollar is gradually eroded), geopolitical bipolarity (between China and the US), and ideological tripolarity, between the populist-democratic US, the liberal-technocratic EU and a conservative Russia. As an island nation formally independent of the EU, Britain — like other middle powers — might find that this new world order is rich in opportunities. It also benefits from lower tariffs than those imposed on the EU. But seizing such opportunities also requires a willingness to duck and weave in pursuit of our national interest, and, so far, our stubbornly globalist uniparty has been unwilling to show much political dexterity. For Britain, as for many other states, seizing the national interest will require internal political renewal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The trade talks between the US and the EU have not been going well. This is because the two sides disagree fundamentally about the numbers and what they mean. The total trade volume between the EU and the US is $1 trillion. It is the world’s single largest bilateral trading relationship. The EU has a $230bn trade surplus — it exports more than it imports. The EU says its surplus is much smaller if you include services.

Bilateral numbers are complicated. I prefer to look at the bigger picture — the current account of a country against the rest of the world. That tells us that the EU has been running large and persistent surpluses for a long time. Trump is exaggerating. But he also has a point.

Trump wants the EU to pry open the Single Market to US-made cars and US beef. The EU imposes tough regulatory standards designed to protect domestic manufacturers and farmers from foreign competition. As the British know better than anybody, the EU is not flexible when it comes to the Single Market. If the talks fail, and Trump ends up imposing the high tariff, the EU will retaliate. Trump may then retaliate back. He may impose a punitive tariff on European wine and champagne, maybe also on luxury cars.

It would be time to get the popcorn out for what promises to be the ultimate geopolitical fight: a trade war between the world’s two largest trading partners.

A small tariff, like the 10% base tariff he announced on 2 April — Liberation Day — acts like a tax on consumers. We should not worry too much about it. Economically, it is not much different than our own VAT. Exporters and consumers will take it on the chin. A 50% tariff, or higher, gets us closer towards a trade embargo, because nobody in their right mind would pay this money unless they are desperate.

The view that I am picking up from Brussels is that it is worth putting up a fight because Trump will fold. After all, he already folded over China. I am not sure that this is a good comparison.

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The best way to make sense of Trump is not in terms of what he says, or tweets, but in terms of what he decides. His actions tell us that he often rows back, but that he is also serious about trade tariffs. The 10% base tariff will stay. And so will the 25% tariffs for steel and aluminum, and for cars. We are not talking tariffs or no tariffs, but about 10, 20 or 50%.

His decisions so far also tell us that he is ready to cut deals for two specific reasons. The first relates to supply chain security. This is why his ludicrous tit-for-tat trade war with China unravelled. At one point, US tariffs on Chinese goods went as high as 145%. At those rates, no trade takes place. The port of Los Angeles became very quiet, very quickly. The shelves at Walmart emptied out. Trump got a lot of complaints from companies that relied on Chinese imports for their supply chains — often just small widgets that are difficult to source elsewhere. The problem was not that the Chinese goods suddenly became more expensive. They were no longer for sale.

There is the old joke that if you owe a small amount of money to a bank, you are in trouble. But if you owe a large amount, the bank is in trouble. Trump was the bank in this scenario. China is a big exporter, and the West has become dependent on it for critical supplies. Normally, in a trade war, the importers have the upper hand. But it always depends on what they are importing. If you are importing your drinking water, you are not in the stronger position.

Trump folded over China because he underestimated just how dependent the US had become. But the EU is not China. It exports luxury cars, like Porsche and Ferraris. The main US exports to Europe are oil, gas and airplanes, and of course digital services. The EU itself is not a player in the digital world. It can impose punitive taxes on digital services, but this would be deeply unpopular in Europe. It cannot source its digital services from anybody else, except China. It also badly needs US oil and gas.

But do Americans need a Porsche or an Audi? Or champagne? Or a Gucci handbag? Perhaps the most supply-chain critical EU exports to the US are machine tools from Germany, but there are often alternative suppliers from Japan or South Korea. Another potential dependency are pharmaceuticals. But there are huge stockpiles in US warehouses right now as the industry prepares for tariffs.

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My European friends seem to be a tad optimistic in their view that the EU is in a stronger position. I see the EU as more dependent on the trading relationship with the US than the other way around. China is the boss in the US-China trade relationship. But the US is the boss in the US-EU trade relationship. In other words, the EU is not China.

The second reason that Trump might fold, or retreat, would be a bond market crash. He already pulled back when the markets panicked over his Liberation Day tariffs. But I am not persuaded that this prospect will cause him to be gentle toward the EU. A US president can do things to quell a bond market crisis, like forcing the central bank and the banks to buy government bonds. That does not stop a crisis from happening in the first place. The bond market vigilantes absolutely hated Trump’s budget last week. Moody’s, the rating agency, downgraded US debt in anticipation. The so-called reconciliation bill passed the House of Representatives with a single vote, but the bill has now run into stiff opposition in the US Senate, including from Republican senators. If passed, it would lead to an explosion of US debt in the long run, and endanger the role played by the US dollar and US treasury bonds in the global financial markets. A failure of the US-EU trade talks would not be the cause of global bond market rout — but it could be a trigger.

That might help the Europeans. But they could easily get caught up in it too. It is not as though Europe is a safe haven. France and Italy have even higher rates of debt than the US. Germany’s debt is projected to rise, and its economic growth is weak. If anything were to happen to the US bond market, I don’t think it would reshuffle the cards in the US-EU trade relationship much.

This is why, in the language of Trump, the EU does not hold strong cards. One big problem for the EU is that Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, is not an equal partner in the trade talks. She cannot force the French to open up their agricultural markets to US beef or loosen the regulatory protection that mollycoddles the German car makers. Whatever she offers, she has to get approval from EU leaders first. It is easier for the EU to say No in the EU’s 24 official languages than to say Yes, because that a Yes would require agreement from the EU’s 27 leaders.

Trump’s ideal counterpart in a negotiation is a king, a tyrant, or a British prime minister. On matters such as trade or investments, they are all principal agents. If Keir Starmer says the food standards come down, they will. He has a massive majority in parliament. The European Commission is not a principal agent. It is more like an estate agent. It collects offers for consideration.

If the Europeans were strategic, they should let Trump be Trump, not retaliate, and instead focus on solving their internal problems: they could open up the clogged Single Market, reduce bureaucracy and cut business taxes. Its internal barriers are bigger than any external tariffs imposed by Trump. But that is not the mood in Brussels right now. They are up for a fight.

They want to fight Trump on the western front, and Vladimir Putin in the East. They think they are on course for a glorious victory in Ukraine, and that they end up putting Trump in his place and get the American voters to see the error of their ways. Well, good luck with this. My own sense is that the purpose of Trump’s policies is to divide Europe. For example: What consequences would a high tariff on the EU and a low tariff on the UK have for the UK-EU trading relationship?

If this is the goal, he will probably succeed.

The CCP is now working on an even larger dam, one that will tame the mighty Yarlung Tsangpo, Tibet’s longest river. This new edifice will generate three times the hydroelectric power of the Three Gorges Dam. Depending on the geographical provenance of its building materials, the new dam will probably add another few microseconds to each day on Earth.

Microseconds, being a millionth of a second, are imperceptible, but China’s march into the future is becoming impossible to ignore. This is a country whose forays into gigantism include the world’s biggest building, longest bridge, largest air terminal and — to its deep shame, one imagines — third-largest skyscraper. Long derided as a manufacturer merely of low-quality, imitative goods, China is threatening to lead the world in anti-aircraft drone swarms, humanoid robots, gun-toting robo-dogs, hypersonic fighter jets, and maglev hyperloops that will, sooner or later, make China’s existing network of high-speed trains look as rusty and decrepit as its antediluvian counterparts in Britain.

The comparison, though unflattering, is instructive. In cost, at least, Britain’s second-ever high-speed rail project — the first was the Eurostar — matched China’s flair for gigantism. But it was reduced in scope, piece by piece, until it became a connection merely between Birmingham and the suburbs of London. While Britain made a eunuch of its grandest infrastructure project, failing to build a late-20th century iteration of a technology we invented in the 19th, the Chinese were pioneering, in the form of the maglev hyperloop, a technology we might not emulate until the 22nd.

In many respects, China is outperforming even the United States. As the winds of change howl, look for taut windsocks. We can see one in the form of the Techno-Industrial Playbook, the product of a pan-institutional banding-together of dozens of American think-tankers. Many of these think-tankers, over the course of their careers, have been principally concerned with economic growth. But the playbook is something more muscular: a plan for reinvigorated American technological strength, a plan via which the country can reinvigorate its industrial base, attract the world’s top talent, and take control of important resources such as rare earth minerals. It is a sign of changing times and, to use a well-worn phrase, interesting times.

As for Britain, there has been talk in this publication and elsewhere of Anglofuturism: a neo-Gaullist project via which the country might be propelled into a future that, though founded on what is now frontier technology, feels like home. But if any country is currently and coherently reifying such a vision, it is China. To use the coinage of the artist Lawrence Lek, a Londoner of Malaysian-Chinese extraction, we can call this vision Sinofuturism.

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Any attempt to understand Sinofuturism must begin with the pit out of which China has bootstrapped itself. China’s “Century of Humiliation” began with the mass opium addiction fomented by the East India Company in the 1830s and continued with the resultant Opium Wars. China’s defeat by the British was followed by defeat by Japan and the attempted carving-up of the country by a greedy host of foreign powers. This wretched period finally ended, according to the Chinese telling, with the foundation of the People’s Republic of China, following a 22-year civil war, in 1949. Much misery lay yet in store: Mao alone is believed to have been responsible for 65 million deaths, through both mass murder and the famine that resulted from the “Great Leap Forward”.

Britain and America, in living memory and beyond, have been spared the agonies of famine and state-sanctioned mass murder. Those of us native to the postwar West are probably incapable of fully understanding the effect on the Chinese psyche of those traumas and humiliations. But we do know that China yearns to be the best, to be the biggest, to command respect, and to be invulnerable both to rival powers and to nature itself.

It is in this respect, in that domineering attitude to nature, that we can see one of the most significant differences between China and the Anglosphere. China, says Thomas White, a sinologist at King’s College London, sees nature as a resource, as something to be exploited and engineered. “There is a faith in the ability of humans to intervene in ecological processes in order to improve them, rather than a sense that human impact is inevitably detrimental.”

We can see traces of this attitude in China’s ecology-wrecking dams, its weather-altering geoengineering and its desert-defying Great Green Wall. In these endeavours there is an inheritance from the millennia-old Chinese dream of taming floods. It was a dream realized by the legendary engineer, Da Yu, whose labors secured him emperorship of the Xia Dynasty. Five-thousand years after Yu’s supposed existence, the Chinese press paid Jiang Zemin, the engineer-turned-president who oversaw the building of the Three Gorges Dam, the profound compliment of calling him “the new Da Yu”. (If you continue to doubt the significance of this kind of engineering to Chinese governing, note that the Chinese word for politics — 政治 — contains an ideogrammatic element denoting “water management”.)

Most of China’s great nature-defying projects would be out of place in the West. To return to the debacle of HS2, one imagines that the Chinese were mystified to learn that Brits spent £100 million to build a shed for the benefit of rare bats. Perhaps they are also mystified by our willingness to waylay large infrastructure projects on account of individuals who might be bothered by noise or are unwilling to be moved. In contrast, the building of the Three Gorges Dam entailed the displacement of at least 1.4 million people.

This disregard for the human is another foundational difference. Whether you ascribe it to collectivism, Confucianism or a post-traumatic invulnerability to complacency, Sinofuturism is, by and large, disinclined to make way for the individual. It is this illiberal tendency, to a Western eye, that fosters some of the most appalling examples of the CCP’s inhumanity: the political imprisonments, the constant surveillance, the abuse of animals, the fearful neighbors, the indentured Uyghurs. China’s dominance of global manufacturing, even on behalf of companies headquartered in the West, is at least partly dependent on forced labor. Sinofuturism has involved the pulling of levers that Westerners would be unwilling to touch.

Cheap labor, too, has been a tremendous asset to Chinese manufacturing — as has rampant IP theft and the cornering, via dealmaking in the Democratic Republic of Congo and elsewhere, of the entire industrial supply chain. Thanks to these factors and others, China has clawed itself back to the technological frontier. In the ninth century, Chinese monks discovered gunpowder; in the 21st, we learned this April, Chinese engineers have successfully tested a non-nuclear hydrogen bomb, unleashing an intense fireball without needing to use radioactive material. But more important than any particular new technology, says William Matthews, of Chatham House, is China’s mastery of the production of technology. “The real potential China has technologically is that, because it’s got such enormous manufacturing capacity, it has the potential to implement AI systems that are designed for logistics optimization and supply chain optimization.” Faster and more efficient manufacturing allows China to spam out electric vehicles and other technologies that the CCP has judged in advance to be worth dominating.

Doing all this automatically — replacing all that cheap labor with robot arms and so on — is a project currently underway, for China, like the West, faces the civilizational challenge of a tumbling birth rate. The West has tried to cheaply address the problem by importing millions of migrants, thus storing up further problems while impeding (and in some cases retarding) the development of automation. China’s program of automation looks the better bet.

And the CCP’s goal, says Matthews, is to lead the way not only in robotics, but in other emerging technologies, such as AI and quantum computing. “It aims to use these as a basis for effecting what amounts to a qualitative shift in economic power, similar to the original Industrial Revolution, that will lead China to a position where actually economically, at the national level, it outcompetes the United States.”

America remains the wealthier country, and the home, as Elon Musk has pointed out with regard to Sinofuturism, of the hyper-futurist project that is Starship. But China is growing in civilizational confidence, the effects of which are visible not only in its space program, which is aiming to build the first moon base, but in its architecture. It is telling, in this respect, that Xi Jinping has banned “oversized and xenocentric” buildings, of which the “big pants” skyscraper, which resembles a pair of trousers, is a notorious example. The result of the edict is that China’s multiplying cityscapes will no longer be the plaything of experimental Western modernists. Sinofuturism’s larger infrastructure, writ in monumental concrete, will retain its herculean Maoist drabness. But pre-revolutionary design tropes, such as courtyards and the use of feng shui principles, are becoming more visible in the country’s newer building projects.

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What, though, is the end-state of Sinofuturism? To the extent that China remains a communist state rather than an autocracy sui generis, it is not of the proselytizing variety. The USSR wanted to spread Communism around the world; the leading members of the CCP, according to Matthews, have little interest in such evangelism. “Their ideological position is one that’s based on the idea of distinctive civilizations with their own value histories. There’s a desire to displace the United States, but that, I think, is with a view to minimizing external interference.” There is little evidence that Xi wants the Chinese flag to flutter over Western capitals, though an annexation of Taiwan might make us reconsider that assumption. As does the Chinese march through our industry, property and universities.

And as America might discover in a war over Taiwan, hegemons tend not to come in pairs. The Thucydides trap is well-documented, and one emerging technology in particular might be the key to domination. It is not an uncommon view among AI researchers that the first country to develop artificial superintelligence will secure for themselves an indefinite global hegemony. This country’s sovereign AI, according to certain prognostications, will outthink its opponents at lightning speed, rendering those opponents harmless. Matthews envisages a slower takeoff of AI capability, and a more enduring bifurcation between American and Chinese systems. But the prospect of Chinese domination of AI, and of a world shaped by the CCP’s values above all others, ought to focus the mind.

There is much to deplore about modern China. But the West might, at the same time, examine its confidence and ambition. If it is to be the values of the Anglosphere, rather than those of the CCP, that define the next centuries, then we ought, pragmatically, to consider how it is that China has revitalized itself so effectively. We should not wish for a government that would displace 1.4 million people to build a dam, but nor should we wish for a government that allows individual Nimbys to block infrastructure that would benefit tens of millions. The Victorians had more centralized planning power than we do, and the result is that we still skulk around in the structures they left us. More fundamentally, they wanted to build things that would last. We need to rediscover those long-dormant muscle fibers.

Democracies are very good at industrial innovation, but less good at long-term industrial planning. China’s recent progress in AI is the fruit of a plan set down in 2017. I’m told that, a little later, the British government was warned by experts that it had a brief window in which to corner a new technology called a large language model. The government acknowledged the opportunity but did not act on it. Training runs multiplied in cost and Britain no longer has the option of getting ahead. A reinvigorated West, along the lines of the one envisaged in the Playbook, will need to relearn how to design, and stick to, far-sighted industrial plans.

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China is ready for battle

By John Rapley

That applies in particular to trade. As America’s allies are currently discovering, erraticism is not an attractive feature in a customer. And much of the developing world sees China, instead, as a more worthwhile partner, with the result that China has secured reliable supplies of every important mineral. But there are many downsides to the handing of economic dominance to China, which is, at best, indifferent to the liberal internationalism that has brought such prosperity to the world. To this effect, the economist Noah Smith writes that, in comparison to postwar America, a dominant China “will be less interested in creating freedom of the seas for other nations, and more narrowly concerned with protecting its own trade… [And] for all the sneers directed at America’s self-appointed role of ‘world police’, it was more willing to stand up to regional conquerors than China has proven so far.” Embrace the Belt and Road Initiative in haste; repent at leisure.

The irony is that China is, in certain intellectual respects, a child of the West. In a glib sense, that is to be expected of such a prolific thief of IP, but the phenomenon goes much deeper. As White observes, the Chinese faith in human reason and progress, and in humanity’s ability to triumph over nature, have a “direct lineage to the Enlightenment”. And Marxism, of course, with all its ideas about the progression of history through certain stages, is itself a Western invention.

In every Chinese reach for greatness, then, one can discern at least a vestige of what we can think of as civilizational anxiety of influence. It is an anxiety that is borne not only of that uneasy intellectual inheritance, but of the long and torturous Century of Humiliation. And it is an anxiety that, should things continue in the present vein, will persist for much longer than the primacy of the West. As if suffering from sleep paralysis, we are becoming aware of our sclerosis, but are not yet able to arrest it. Our political classes are responding to this dangerous new world with a combination of clumsiness and naivety. What the moment requires of the West, though, is a project of revival — one that is pragmatic enough to analyze what is effective about Sinofuturism, but bold and self-confident enough to surpass it.

The tellers count out piles of pesos worth $500, $300, $100 or whatever the relatives are able to send from their wages picking tobacco, mixing cement, or washing dishes. These “remittances”, as the money sent home is called, have kept Ixmiquilpan afloat for decades along with its surrounding villages, an area dominated by the indigenous Otomí people. While Mexico suffers heavy cartel violence, Ixmiquilpan is a fairly peaceful area. Families use the dollars to build sprawling homes on ancestral corn fields, put money into community groups to construct parks and churches, or they open grocery stores and taco stalls. But most of the dollars are used to just keep food on the table.

Despite Donald Trump waging a crackdown on undocumented migrants, especially those with criminal records, migrant dollars keep flowing south. In February, Mexico received $4.4 billion in remittances, according to Mexico’s Central Bank which tracks transfers. That was a 0.8% fall compared to the same month last year but it’s still historically a huge number. In total in 2024, Mexico received a record-breaking $64 billion in remittances, the second highest in the world behind India.

Inside the United States, the Trump administration has been making high-profile raids that make media splashes in both English and Spanish. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem even went on an operation where she rather awkwardly pointed a rifle at an agent’s head as she spoke into the video camera in front of a heavily armored vehicle. The administration has been flying deportees on military planes and it released videos of migrants with the amplified sounds of chains. Most controversially, it deported alleged Venezuelan gang members to the unforgiving CECOT prison in El Salvador. (Lawyers for many of the deportees claim they were innocent people caught up in the sweep because of tattoos of football teams or local carnivals).

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All of this is on people’s minds here. María Quezada, 61, lines up to collect money sent to the family from a brother working in construction in North Carolina. “They need to keep quiet there in El Norte,” she says, using a common term for the US. “They are worried right now. This famous president, he doesn’t like migrants.” Yet others have high hopes that their own families will be okay. “I think those who get deported are the ones who have done something wrong,” says Benita Huerta, 30, as she cradles a baby in her arms. “If you don’t owe anything, you should be fine.”

The issue of the US-Mexico border, of millions of migrants swimming over the river and of smugglers sneaking in fentanyl, was a core factor that drove the MAGA movement and propelled Trump to power. Since returning to office in January, Trump has indeed transformed “The Border”, sending troops to the Rio Grande, virtually shutting down asylum claims and pressuring Mexico to hit drug cartels. The number of “encounters” by Border Patrol agents (the government term for when agents find migrants on the border area) has plummeted 94% since a record high under Joe Biden in 2023. The amount of fentanyl seized has gone down 73% since September.

Yet while deportations make headlines, the overall numbers have stayed fairly steady under Trump. The frequency of deportation flights has been similar to the last months of Biden and the total quantity of deportees appears to be slightly lower.

While Trump has massively reduced the number of new migrants coming in, therefore, he has not cut deeply into the estimated 11 million undocumented migrants already in the United States. (Some claim the true figure is much higher.) It’s hard to predict Trump, but if he does eventually do real mass deportations, as has been threatened, then it would massively disrupt many businesses, especially farms, construction sites and restaurants by taking away their workers.

In Ixmiquilpan, almost every family has members working in the US. Most of them went over illegally, either plodding over the seething desert or swimming over the river — although they usually went some years ago. None I speak to has had a loved one deported since Trump regained power, although I find several who were deported under previous presidents.

Heriberto Pedraza, 58, who sits on a sidewalk a few blocks from the central square. He says he worked construction for two decades in the US, mostly in Florida, but was deported in 2009 under President Barack Obama after he was caught drunk driving. (The liberal hero Obama actually has the record for the highest number of “removals,” at over 3 million. Migrant activists call him the “deporter in chief.” This was in response to a rising number of undocumented workers at the time and use of expanded agencies). Pedraza said he never tried to return after that. “The Nineties were a great time to be in the United States. But things have changed now,” he says. “I’m happy here in my hometown.”

Immigration over the US-Mexico border has gone in waves over the past century. In the 1910s, people in northern Mexico fled over the Rio Grande from the desperado armies of the Mexican Revolution. From the Second World War to the Sixties, millions of Mexicans went over legally to toil in fields in what was called the Bracero Program to bring over farm workers. In much of central and southern Mexico, including Ixmiquilpan, people began heading to the United States in big numbers from the Eighties. This coincided with a 1986 amnesty for undocumented migrants under Ronald Reagan, which could have encouraged further immigration.

“It used to be that men here would go to Mexico City to get work,” says Martín Rodríguez, 75, as he sits in the shade in his tire repair shop on the outskirts of Ixmiquilpan. “But then it changed. Instead of people saying, ‘I’m off to Mexico [City], they would say, ‘I’m off to El Norte.’” Locals went especially to Florida and North Carolina, where they built particular links with towns and jobs, although they worked in many other states, from Kentucky to Michigan.

Emigration from Ixmiquilpan probably reached a peak in the 2000s, but then hit a wall with the Obama deportations and great recession. Another problem was that cartels took over the Mexican side of the border running the human smugglers, or coyotes, and making it dangerous to cross without paying them. Locals tell me that coyotes now charge as much as $15,000 to go from Ixmiquilpan to a US destination, and most can’t afford that.

Instead, the record wave of migration under Biden was from elsewhere; more than two-thirds of those caught crossing in his term came from countries other than Mexico, especially Venezuela, Honduras, Guatemala and Cuba but also as far afield as China and Central Africa. This was due to instability and violence in those countries and increased use of refugee claims; many applied for asylum rather than just sneaking over to work like the people of Ixmiquilpan used to.

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The difficulty in going to the US means those already there fear coming home. A woman waiting to pick up money has a tear in her eye when she tells me she hasn’t seen her daughter in 15 years. But despite living away for decades, migrants still loyally send money home.

Many migrants from the area now have children who were born in the United States and are citizens. The American influence means that many in Ixmiquilpan speak English as well as Spanish and the indigenous Otomi tongue (which the locals call hñähñu). You can see this influence in palatial houses amid the cinder block shacks, with migrants using techniques they learned building walls in North Carolina and adding in their own touches like Romanic pillars. There are also hundreds of half-finished houses scattering the villages waiting for those last dollars.

Some residents have tried hard to turn the remittances into a sustainable economic base. In the nearby village of Puerto Dexthi, Hilario Cerroblanco, 59, saved money from construction to build a small factory using a local plant to make brushes. “We need businesses so we can stay here,” he says. He secured orders from some shops in Mexico City but it’s hard to compete with Chinese plastic goods.

A lot of locals have been more successful selling cement and tools for migrant families to build their homes, or food stalls to spend the dollars on delicious meals. Ixmiquilpan market is buzzing with families. They are eating sheep that has been slow-cooked for more than ten hours in ovens carved in the earth, and they are drinking fresh green juice of celery, parsley, and nopal cactus. It’s a vibrant atmosphere that has been built on decades of global movement and cross-border transfers. But as turbulent new politics smash this old order, the resilient community of Ixmiquilpan will have to adapt to the new era.

It’s just over an hour and a half since I set sail from Colonial Harbor, in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, and my boat is slaloming through blocks of ice that have calved off the Greenland ice sheet. There are massive bergs, larger than our 25-foot Targa 25 boat; floes the size of breeze blocks, and fist-sized clumps that Christian, the boat’s first mate, scoops out and dumps into a bucket with the fish he’s caught that are piled up inside it.

To my left, I see Naajat Inaat mountain, which, with its sheer face, could be the Great Wall in Game of Thrones. To my right is the peak of Aqitsoq, its side flecked with snowmobile tracks like the marks of a stalking predator.

Greenland has the world’s second-largest ice sheet after Antarctica. It covers about 80% of the island (which is only inhabitable at its edges), spanning 1,500 miles north to south and 680 miles at its widest point, reaching up to 12,000 feet at its rocky peak at Gunnbjørn Fjeld. And it is melting worryingly fast. The ice sheet’s average annual mass loss is now around 200 gigatons, equivalent to about 0.6 millimeters of the world’s sea-level rise per year.

If climate change has serious ecological ramifications, it also has serious geopolitical consequences.

Since observations began in 1979, Arctic sea ice has shrunk by 12% in a decade, making shipping lanes increasingly navigable; between 2014 and 2022, transit through the most popular route in the Arctic, the North Sea route, increased by 755%. Some studies project that, by 2035, some parts of the Arctic will be completely free of ice during summer months and hence totally open to international trade.

Out on the ocean, I can see this process first-hand. “The glaciers always melt a bit at this time of year,” says the boat’s captain Casper. “But not this much this early.” We pass another iceberg and hear a groaning noise. Casper becomes tense. “As the ice melts and these big pieces break off, they eventually shatter as well. They are basically ticking time bombs. If this breaks I’ll hit reverse, and we’ll get out quick.”

Whoever controls these shipping lanes is well-placed to control at least a large part of global trade, not least because Houthis are now attacking the Suez Canal and routes between Asia and the US are about 40% shorter through the Northwest Passage than through the Panama Canal. The Arctic also remains comparatively underused. In 2022, fewer than 1,700 ships passed through compared with over 23,000 through the busy Suez and 14,000 through Panama.

Little wonder Donald Trump has long coveted Greenland. Back in 2019, he suggested that the US should buy it from Denmark, citing its potential for resource extraction (it is rich in rare earth minerals), and the military advantages of its proximity to the Arctic. The Danes laughed it off, but Trump started his second term with even more aggressive rhetoric.

Then, in late March, Vice President JD Vance visited Greenland. At America’s Pituffik Space Base in the island’s far northwest coast, he echoed Trump’s vow to take control of the island, saying that this would be achieved through appealing to the people of Greenland, warning of increased Russian and Chinese activity in the area. Locals, though, refused to meet him.

But Trump and Vance are not the only ones casting lascivious eyes northwards. Vladimir Putin has intensified Russia’s military and commercial activity in the region. Moscow now operates six dual-use military bases and has a fleet of at least 40 icebreakers there; from 2017-2022, it conducted 60% of all investment in the Arctic region, principally developing infrastructure for transportation and natural resource extraction.

Since 2005, Russia has prioritized refurbishing 13 Soviet-era airbases and made 10 radar stations, 20 border outputs and 10 integrated emergency rescue stations operational at bases across its Arctic coastline. It now has more ground-force bases in the Arctic than NATO, while eight of its 11 submarines capable of launching long-range nuclear weapons are also based there.

There has also been a suspicious increase in attacks on Western facilities in the Arctic. Norway has reported numerous instances of fiber optic cables being severed at its satellite ground station, and cables at an ocean research lab torn away. No one can say for sure it’s the Russians, but everyone knows they are more than capable of this kind of sabotage.

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China, too, has the Arctic in its sights. Xi Jinping announced his ambition to make China a “major polar power’ back in 2014. There is a research station on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard called the Polar Research Institute of China. Beijing has also tried to buy Arctic territory here as part of broader efforts to establish a Polar Silk Road. Based around developing new trade routes across the Arctic region, this is an extension of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), designed to create yet more global Chinese trade routes, and influence.

While Biden was concentrating on Ukraine, China’s hold in the global north increased. And now Moscow is allying with Beijing. In 2023, they signed a cooperation agreement between their coast guards and conducted joint naval patrols in the region. The US is only now belatedly waking up to the importance of the area to hemispheric security, with JD Vance talking about the new reality. The White House knows that seizing Greenland would prevent both from cementing their Arctic presence.

The Arctic is now a prime battlefield for a modern Great Game, one that is likely to dominate a century beset by climate change and resource scarcity. In this new imperial age, the US, China and Russia are bound, ineluctably, for conflict in three areas: strategic defense, logistics and resources. This region is crucial to them all. Welcome to the age of the Global Arctic, with Greenland at its heart.

***

The city of Nuuk is a dowdy footprint of humanity on the southwestern edge of Greenland, an odd mixture of icy tundra and industrial estate. The outskirts and the port are a landscape of heavy goods vehicles, oil drums and belching smoke. Tangles of steel, that once formed industrial machinery, sit rusting by the sides of the road, poking through the snow like metal innards.

Life is tight for most people here, though there is support in abundance. Greenland, a local tells me, has the third largest public sector in the world: after Cuba and North Korea. The welfare state is also an important part of how Greenland operates. Of the annual five billion kroner grant from Denmark, a huge proportion goes on welfare. According to 2022 government statistics, 23.7% of the population receive unemployment, housing subsidies, child benefit, or some other forms of public benefits.

Life is also claustrophobic. In one bistrot, I spot Greenland’s now ex-PM feeding a baby. In the Nuuk Centre, Greenland’s only shopping mall, I see another ex-Prime Minister sipping a latte. The next day, in their tiny parliament I spot yet another former prime minister, not standing on ceremony, but informally dressed in dungarees and overalls.

The tiny population was swamped by journalists after Donald Trump said he wanted to annex the island. With the Danes outraged by his moves on their sovereign territory, the Greenlanders are caught awkwardly in between. They’re not keen on becoming the 51st state. According to a January (admittedly Danish) poll 85% of Greenlanders oppose joining the US, while 45% see Trump’s interest as a threat.

But nor are they totally happy with Denmark. History here is fraught. In 1953, Greenland was incorporated as an equal member of the Kingdom of Denmark, granting Danish citizenship to its people, but little political autonomy. By 1979, Home Rule was established via referendum giving Greenland control over a range of internal affairs, such as education and healthcare. The 2009 Self-Government Act gave Greenland more control over its police, judiciary and natural resources and underpins the political status quo. But less savory events live in the collective memory, not least the forced relocation in 1953 of over 100 Inuit families from Thule to accommodate the US Air Base, and a chilling 1951 Danish social experiment that snatched 22 Inuit children from their families and took them to Denmark to be trained as role models for Greenlanders.

For its part, the US does have history here, too. It defended Greenland during World War II when Denmark was under Nazi occupation, building several military bases there. It was crucial for refueling purposes for aircraft crossing the Atlantic. Its weather monitoring stations supplied early warnings for military operations (including D-Day), and the US navy used its waters to detect German U-Boat activity. After the war, President Harry Truman formally offered to purchase it for $100 million but this was rejected. Following that, a 1946 deal with Denmark formalized the US’s military right to operate bases here, while maintaining Danish sovereignty over the island.

Defense, then, has always been important to this part of the world. Today, if Russia were to fire missiles at the US, they would fly over Greenland and the North Pole. As a result, America’s Pituffik Space Base supports missile warning, missile defense and space surveillance missions. Trump wants the base to become part of the US “Golden Dome” missile defense system. Modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome, this would consist of a multilayer defensive system capable of destroying ground-based missiles from space, within seconds of launch.

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But the security of this territory is also vital for UK and Europe because of the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GUIK) gap, the naval chokepoint vital for Russian access to the Atlantic. If the gap is secured, the Russian Navy will be unable to venture outside the Barents and White seas, and Moscow’s ability to control maritime routes there will be totally undermined.

If defense and logistics are already setting imperial powers at odds in the Arctic, it is perhaps the third element that may yet transmute competition to conflict: resources.

Greenland has the world’s eighth largest reserves of rare earth minerals and other key minerals such as lithium and cobalt. These include 39 of the 50 minerals the US has deemed critical to national security and economic stability. Most notable are those minerals crucial to production of magnets for powering electric vehicles; those used in semiconductor chips to power AI technologies; and those used in military technologies, such as F-35 fighter jets (which contain 400 kg each) and Virginia-class submarines (over four tonnes each).

Following decades of rapacity in Africa, China now has access to the largest reserves of these minerals. It also accounts for almost 70% of rare earth mineral production compared with the US’s 12%. China supplies over 50% of US demand for 24 critical minerals, including more than 90% of its demand for rare earth elements. The US is obviously losing the minerals race, and Greenland would help close the gap, as would Ukraine’s deposits of rare earth minerals. The Americans understand it is a race they, and the West, cannot afford to lose, because that way lies Chinese hegemony.

***

The Inatsisartut, which houses Greenland’s parliament, is a squat grey building with wood paneling in the center of Nuuk. The politics are idiosyncratic. Greenlandic independence is an aspiration that goes back decades — every party has it on their ticket — but the fact that the world’s largest island has only 57,000 people makes the dream of secession fundamentally unfeasible. The rhetoric speaks more to a process of securing self-governance within Denmark, as well as nation-building. It will have to remain in a union: either with Denmark or someone else.

Outsiders are increasingly encroaching. Over the last seven years, says Naaja Nathanielsen, a government minister, three events have emphasized Greenland’s rising strategic importance. The first was the pandemic, which showed how fragile global supply chains can be, particularly because so many trade routes depended on China. Countries such as Greenland are now key alternative sources of critical commodities. Second was the climate crisis. “The need for green transition is not just leftist politics, it’s real,” Nathanielsen tells me. “Countries must cope with future energy needs. We have almost all the minerals necessary for green energy.”

Greenland is already 70% hydropowered (this will increase to 90% by 2030), and has enormous solar and wind potential. This makes it well placed to respond to the third crisis on Nathanielsen’s list, which is the war in Ukraine: Greenland could help Europe break its unforgivable dependence on Russian oil, gas and coal.

Yet it’s not enough to have resources: they must also be extracted. Over 80% of Greenland is covered in ice, often with few roads between settlements and mining deposits. Greenland’s ancient crystalline bedrock means that minerals are deeply embedded and hard to extract from hard and ancient rock. Rare earth minerals often come in a very low grade, meaning only a small percentage of the mineral in each rock is mined. So Greenland must rely on foreign help to properly exploit its natural wealth. A deal, beyond the existing status quo, will have to be made with someone. Trump is determined that it will be with him. So far, the Danes, and the EU, have done nothing but complain at US behavior. What is the alternative?

The Greenlanders I meet don’t want to be a part of the US, but they are open to more cooperation. The Danes are too, which is why Trump’s behavior is so confusing. It’s possible to achieve mineral extraction in a non-military, respectful, and supportive way, they repeatedly tell me. “Greenlanders are not a commodity,” is the phrase I hear over and over. Greenland is part of the Western alliance, and a fellow democracy, and its people believe they are entitled to respect. But the rhetoric makes people suspicious and afraid, and this is a problem — not just for the US and Greenland, but for the West as a whole.

Regardless of local mistrust, it remains that greater US cooperation is a win-win in everything from resources to strategic cooperation. “It’s not a debated issue,” says Nathanielsen. “We’re fine with more international involvement in Greenland, as long as we’re informed and involved.”

But the world is in crisis: and for as long as America’s geopolitical battle with China continues, expect Trump’s aggressive rhetoric to persist. “Those who grew up in the Eighties and Nineties were lucky to do so in a world of peace when prosperity was based on free trade and soft diplomacy,” Nathanielsen adds. “But that is changing and it’s very difficult to grasp this new, militaristic view of the world. The US interest in all these countries is strategic. It’s about Trump getting Washington’s geopolitical ducks in a row. I totally understand the logic behind it. It’s the approach I scorn.”

But if Greenland is a key battleground of the Great Game to come, Trump is its talisman: the harbinger of a new age, in which power is more unvarnished, and imperialistic impulses more naked. It is a new world, one that is being redefined by geography and climate. But as Casper said, as we sailed into harbor the previous day, “In Greenland, we always say that it’s not us who are in control, but Mother Earth, the field commander.” As the political temperature rises, and the ice caps continue to melt, we may yet learn this the hard way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Car bombs are one of the many terrifying weapons in the arsenal of Mexico’s cartels as they battle over territory, not only to traffic and sell drugs, but to steal oil from pipelines, smuggle migrants over the US border, and extort businesses, among other crimes. They also wield weaponized drones that drop makeshift bombs unleashing shrapnel and nails. They lay landmines that kill soldiers in their Humvees as well as farmers. And they build fighting vehicles known as “monsters” that look like they are out of Mad Max, with walls of bulletproof steel and battering rams.

Mexican soldiers have been out in force fighting the cartels since 2006, and the new Left-wing president Claudia Sheinbaum has promised to keep up this militarized strategy. But the troops have failed to quell the death toll (or perhaps made it worse): Mexico has suffered over 400,000 murders since the army crackdown began almost two decades ago. During this period, many security officials have themselves been found working with cartels, including the former security minister Genaro García Luna, who was sentenced by a New York court in October.

Living and reporting in Mexico since 2001, I have covered the conflict in depth and it’s as bad as ever. In recent months, I’ve been in a village in Guerrero state that suffered attacks with armored drones, and in the city of Culiacán, where residents have shut themselves in their homes because of the violence, calling it a “narco pandemic”, in allusion to the Covid lockdown. Over the years, I have seen horrors that I couldn’t have imagined such as going into a morgue with 49 bodies that were all decapitated and had their hands and feet cut off.

It’s a complex conflict that spirals across Mexico with dozens of different groups, ever-changing frontlines and unclear rules. The cartel war is a fight that the Mexican army can’t win yet can’t pull out of. And it’s a conflict that Washington needs to be wary about getting dragged deeper into.

The United States is already involved in Mexico’s cartel war. Agents for the DEA, FBI, Homeland Security and CIA run operations against drug traffickers, using undercover agents and stings. Washington gives aid to Mexico City, partly in return for holding back migrants and hitting narcos. US companies sell arms to Mexican security forces, and gangsters smuggle an iron river of guns over the Rio Grande.

But Donald Trump has called to bring the US military into the battle. “When I am back in the White House, the drug kingpins and vicious traffickers will never sleep soundly again,” Trump said in a 2023 statement. Rep. Dan Crenshaw introduced legislation for authorization of US military force against cartels. “You need something that says, ‘You have finally pissed off the gringos. You finally did it,’” he told me last year. Trump has picked Ronald Johnson, a retired colonel and former CIA liaison to special operations, as ambassador to Mexico.

I used to think that scenes in the movie Sicario of US special forces sneaking over the border to take out cartels were pure fantasy. Now I think there is a chance such operations could really come to pass. But Washington should avoid getting drawn too deep into this quagmire.

The Republican hard-liners rightly blame cartels for trafficking fentanyl; they buy precursor ingredients from Chinese pharmaceutical companies and cook it into the lethal substance in labs south of the border. They are also right to call out US overdose deaths as a true national catastrophe; several years saw over 100,000 overdose deaths, with fentanyl in about 70% of cases.

Yet the problem with the call to bomb cartels is not only that it would inflame cross-border tensions, especially if civilians were killed, which could put American lives in danger of revenge attacks. It’s that it wouldn’t stop cartels.

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The cartels are not composed of a few arch villains who can be taken out. They are sprawling networks with look-outs, runners, gunmen, traffickers, “mules”, businessmen, accountants, and plenty of police, soldiers, prosecutors, and mayors on the payroll. A study published in Science found cartels were one of the biggest employers in Mexico with 160,000 to 185,000 members. I think that is an underestimate. Even if US special forces were to blast away 1,000 cartel operatives then more than 99% would still be standing.

Furthermore, US forces could not take out one cartel and declare victory. There are about 20 significant groups, from the biggest cartels to powerful regional players to important local mobs, and dozens more affiliated gangs and crews. As US drug agents have discovered from decades of experience, when they weaken one cartel, another steps up and it often just creates more violence and fragmentation. The US arrest of the kingpin Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada in July has created a devastating civil war in the Sinaloa Cartel that is drowning the state in blood.

The call to bomb cartels gets into the question of what kind of conflict we are dealing with south of the border. Mexico’s cartel war is not officially a war. In 2017, a British think tank claimed Mexico had the world’s second deadliest armed conflict after Syria. But Mexico’s foreign ministry in response released a forceful communiqué arguing that it is a criminal problem. “The report irresponsibly points to the existence of an ‘(non-international) armed conflict’ in Mexico,” it said. “This is incorrect. Neither the existence of criminal groups nor the use of the Armed Forces to maintain order in the interior of the country are sufficient reason.”

I think the Mexican conflict is a weird mix of crime and war and we don’t have the best language and legal norms to deal with that. Yet the same is also true for various countries in the Americas, from Jamaica to Honduras to Brazil to Ecuador. Cartels wield paramilitary forces, people flee their villages and towns, and Mexico is littered with mass graves. Yet the gangsters are not ideological and are looking to make money rather than sweep to power like the Taliban. And to recognize Mexico as having a legal armed conflict would be to recognize cartels as belligerents with rights under the Geneva Convention.

There are no missile attacks or full-on aerial bombings. It’s a brutal battle but one that paradoxically allows much of Mexico to live outside the bloodshed. When you go to much of Mexico, you might be surprised how ordinary it feels, from colonial towns with bustling markets to hipsters sipping lattes in the trendy quarters of big cities. Mexico City is a thriving and popular capital and the Caribbean beaches are bustling with record numbers of tourists. Mexico has a trillion-dollar economy and a big middle class despite the crime. It’s a weird duality of violence alongside normality.

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If the United States were to classify cartels as terrorist groups, it would create other issues. Those fleeing over the border to claim asylum would have their cases strengthened. US gun stores could be charged with providing material to foreign terrorist organizations.

Perhaps Trump is using the threat of violence to pressure Mexico to act. In November, Trump stated he would put 25% tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods if they didn’t stop migrants and fentanyl coming in. On 3 December, Mexican security forces made what they claimed was their biggest fentanyl bust ever.

Such pressure could have a long-term effect. Mexico might not be able to eliminate cartels right now but it could manage to force them to reduce their fentanyl trafficking. Seizures at the border in the coming months will see if that is the case. That would be a positive development and also stop the poison spreading in Mexico. But the United States would still have to deal with fentanyl being made elsewhere, including on US soil.

The United States could create a new robust law against cartels, this novel type of paramilitary organized crime spreading in the hemisphere. But it would need to wield the law in US cities, where cartels move vast quantities of drugs, money and guns. And Mexico has to try and reduce the bloodshed in its homeland. Right now, perhaps the best it can hope for is reducing the worst crimes. In the future, it would have to go through some fundamental change to really become a less violent society.

Cartel bosses like to bathe their guns in gold and jewelry. The Mexican army has many such captured weapons in a base in Mexico City in what is known as the “narco museum”. A gleaming captured pistol there has words carved on the side saying, “only the dead have seen the end of the war.” And Trump’s unlikely to change that.

America put Jabbar together, America took him apart.

Domestic terrorism is frightening precisely because it incubates within the body politic. If a terrorist is a foreigner, it can be said that he failed to appreciate the resplendent magnitude of America’s promise. He had never donned a beer helmet. He didn’t understand the glories of Must-See TV. Or else he understood it all too well, swelling with murderous resentment. But the domestic terrorist is an autoimmune disease, assailing the very system that nurtures him. Jabbar hardly spent the last several months training at some terror camp in the Hindu Kush; until recently, he had worked at consulting firms such as Deloitte, where, according to The Wall Street Journal, “he was paid the equivalent of nearly $125,000 a year.” This guy’s network was LinkedIn, not Al Qaeda.

After each mass shooting or terror attack, we begin the collective actuarial task of apportioning cultural and political blame. After the 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon, Salon published an article under the remarkable headline: “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.” The author, David Sirota, is no fool: He was trying to make a point about how Muslims are unfairly blamed en masse after paroxysms of Islamic fundamentalism. And, yes, his outlet was going for clicks. But he and his editors were also playing the game we always play.

In Jabbar’s case, the blame game is deceptively straightforward. He was a convert to Islam and adorned his truck with an ISIS flag. To commentators on the political right, this was the “globalized intifada” that the most ardent pro-Palestinian activists have been calling for. It’s notable, though, that he seems to have turned to jihadism only recently, as personal disappointments and financial obligations piled up. Islamism was the last, deadly stop on his journey to all-American loserdom.

It is, of course, of paramount importance to investigate Jabbar’s ties to extremist groups. But those determined to tether him to radical Islam miss the point. Jabbar had far more in common with Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer, than with Osama bin Laden: A quiet rage builds over the years. Marriages fail. Ventures collapse. 

Just watch the 2020 video Jabbar recorded to promote his real-estate business. He is crisply dressed and uses all the right corporate lingo. His office is neat, with a poster touting “discipline” behind his right shoulder. But there is no enthusiasm to his voice, no light in his eyes.

There was a time when the military was a route into a decent life, especially if followed by a college degree. Jabbar was a veteran and college graduate, but these institutions didn’t provide him with stability — or a sense of community. And if his social-media feed is anything like yours, or mine, it was full of glamorous people living their best lives, shifting the paradigm, crushing it, leaning in. It isn’t difficult to imagine the widening gulf between the real and the digital becoming intolerable.

His military service is a notable and alarming indicator, one he shares with another recent attack. Shortly after the carnage in New Orleans, a man later identified as Matthew Livelsberger blew up a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel Las Vegas, killing only himself while wounding at least seven. Both Jabber and Livelsberger served in the US Army and had received multiple commendations. They served their country before turning sharply against it. And though we all think we know why — Palestine, the manosphere, guns, Trump, video games, Soros, vaccines — the truth is that the breakdown is more complicated, and more perniciously institutional, than such narratives permit.

Abandoned by elites over Vietnam — a war engineered by so many of our best and brightest that they should have held the 1965 Yale-Harvard football game in Saigon — the armed forces have never really recovered their standing. Nor, it’s worth noting, has the US military won a major conflict outright in nearly a century. Today, the military reflects American pathologies instead of expunging them—and those issues are far deeper than whatever “wokeness” exercises Trump and his nominee to lead the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth.

Other cases are even harder to fathom. Just hours before the slaughter in New Orleans, the FBI arrested a Virginia man who was in the possession of “the largest cache of ‘finished explosive devices’ ever found in the FBI’s history.” According to The New York Times, the suspect, Brad Spafford, had a #NoLivesMatter insignia on his backpack. He wasn’t a social-justice activist (#BlackLivesMatter), nor a pro-police conservative (#BlueLivesMatter). Spafford was a nihilist. He simply wanted to kill. 

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The loss of institutional integrity is everywhere, and you can plainly see it. A few years ago, Tablet editor Alana Newhouse wrote an essay headlined “Everything Is Broken,” in which she advised readers to “give up on our current institutions,” since “they already gave up on us.” That is perhaps possible if you have sufficient social capital, as well as capital in the bank account. But if you are Jabbar, already living on the margins, dragging failed businesses and failed marriages behind you, giving up isn’t going to look quite so easy. 

What I mean to say is that Jabbar didn’t “fall through the cracks,” as the cliché goes. The cracks have widened into canyons spanning entire sectors of society. Sure, maybe a social worker missed obvious warning signs. But what ails the people, no social worker can fix. That is not to malign programs that help veterans suffering from PTSD, women escaping abusive relationships, or those struggling to pay their mortgages. These are necessary in a country that makes mere existence into a savage free-market contest. But perhaps we should think about what it is that we exist for, other than mere animal survival. 

It takes no great leader to condemn a killer like Jabbar. But it will take an exceptional figure to name, let alone address, the societal ills that he and Livelsberger and Spafford embody. Doing so will not be politically expedient. But it is also necessary. We can’t go on much longer treating the Dow Jones Industrial Average as the true index of our collective health.

After the attack in New Orleans, there was some discussion among the relevant parties over whether the Sugar Bowl — a high-stakes football game — should still take place at the Superdome. The decision was made to postpone until Thursday night, whereupon fifth-ranked Notre Dame blunted second-ranked Georgia’s formidable air assault, the Fighting Irish beating the Bulldogs, 23 to 10.

The question of whether a football game is to be played after a national tragedy is truly one of the great modern quandaries of our time. Two days after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, the Dallas Cowboys played the Cleveland Browns in Cleveland. It wasn’t a happy contest. “This was a game that nobody was interested in playing, coaching, watching, or writing about,” a columnist observed.

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And yet the show must always go on. There is a relentlessness to American life that foreigners perceive more readily than those born here. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,” D.H. Lawrence observed. “It has never yet melted.” In the decades since that observation, it has only become more true, not less. When, in 2001, the NFL cancelled a weekend of games in the wake of 9/11, Brian Billick, who coached the Baltimore Ravens, disagreed with the decision. “I don’t want cowards to dictate what we do in this country,” he said, “That’s where my anguish is right now.” 

If we had real public intellectuals, perhaps they could help make sense of the moment. But they ceased to matter long ago. Now, you head to X (the app formerly known as Twitter), which will give you the take you already had, just a few notches angrier. The same huge and impersonal forces that ripple through all of us can crack some. If you have the material and psychic armaments needed to survive a moment such as ours, consider yourself lucky. Fewer and fewer people do.

And yet, the show goes on. Before the rescheduled game, NPR ran a segment about the Sugar Bowl and the people who attended despite the attack. An on-the-ground correspondent spoke with a man from Cincinnati who had come with his son, both “decked out in Fighting Irish gear.” The fan said that he had been watching the news and had come to the conclusion that it was safe to be there. “So, I have no issues,” he said, failing to understand that he was being asked a moral question that went beyond his own safety.

As if to help him along, the correspondent explained that the fan had been “a senior at Notre Dame back in the 1981 Sugar Bowl, when the Fighting Irish played Georgia and lost big time.” Back in the studio, the host chuckled. “OK, so he’s looking for payback,” she said.

Such harrowing accounts are all too common in the vast wilds of Northern California, uniting residents urban and rural, rich and poor, Right and Left. Lands that were filled with fire-tolerant glades of oak under Native American stewardship are now dense pine forests brimming with flammable biomass. Everyone here has a story about forest fires. Locals’ accounts are served with strong opinions on the political failings of both the Californian Democrats under Gavin Newsom and the Trump-led national GOP. Over the last decade, the West Coast has given us a glimpse into the future of ecological calamity. Now, as the islands of Greece crackle and fume, and as California’s latest wildfire sweeps into Nevada, we can already intimate how these infernal events can reshape a community, igniting all of its underlying social ills. 

Judging by California’s experience, one’s chances of recovering from a forest fire diverge greatly along class and geographic lines. Despite some palliative measures, the California and Federal government, ostensibly committed to the victims of climate change, is visibly asleep at the wheel. Sacramento is leaving its urban and rural peripheries, poverty-stricken inner-city sectors and remote townships to suffer the brunt of escalating fire destruction. The Carr Fire was succeeded by the even greater August Complex Fire in 2020 (which engulfed 379,613 hectares to become the largest fire in Californian history). But August’s damage is dwarfed by the relatively small Camp Fire in 2018. The Camp Fire became the state’s deadliest, killing 85 people and bulldozing the town of Paradise. Many of the smaller settlements I drove through still seem like ghost towns: depleted of life not only by fire but reactively high rents and rocketing insurance premiums.

At the site of the Carr Fire, victims talk of a “fire tornado” ripping through their homes. Its path took it through the small Gold Rush settlements of Whiskeytown, Old Shasta, and French Gulch, and towards the heart of Redding. The Carr formed part of a new wave of fires produced by a combination of climate change, human population, dodgy infrastructure, and the hot Diablo Winds that blow in from the eastern mountains and deserts. California has, always, faced forest fires — but these are new beasts. Together, environmental and human forces have transformed wildfires from manageable occurrences into cataclysmic disasters, rampaging through the dense biomass of pine forests and chaparral shrubs that overgrow without controlled burn operations.

There, I meet Jennifer Gibson, the post-wildfire coordination ecologist for the National Parks Service who lost her own home to Carr. Starting in the centre of Redding, we drive out to Whiskeytown Lake. Vast clusters of blackened pines jut up along mountain lines in what used to be dense forests; what once resembled an alpine vista now appears as a scene from Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. And the people here have a dystopian choice to make. Some choose to stay, embracing the pioneer spirit, rebuilding their houses in less-flammable material. Others believe that much of California will one day be uninhabitable and leave, seeking more northerly and temperate lands to settle. “You could hear the propane tanks going off, the sky was red, ashes were raining down. I wake up, and it looks like a war scene,” Gibson says. “After the Carr Fire, I don’t know where to live in California that would feel safe.” But Gibson’s experience is an economic issue too: the combination of the Carr and Camp fires has pushed up construction contractor prices and rents, forcing many to move inland to Idaho and Montana, where costs are lower.

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We walk up to Gibson’s house — a burnt-down log cabin, with only the stone foundations remaining. “The wind up here was like giant bellows, feeding the fire into a frenzy. All the houses around here were burnt down,” she says. “It hurts coming back, I’m thinking about selling the land.” Dowling tells me that poor government and insurance company responses have led to general resentment, and even conspiracy, against the state and large corporations. “Distressed people have suspicions… a lot of people would substitute the term ‘insurance company’ for ‘the government’… they blame the system.”

It’s not an unfounded sentiment: upon examination, California’s fire problem soon becomes a problem of state capacity. Across much of the American West, fighting wildfires has become a complex and inefficient bureaucratic system of local, state, federal, park and even private services. But the problem spirals well beyond the remit of firefighters. Wildfires are a profoundly political problem, intersecting with high homelessness rates, rural and urban divides, declining corporate-run infrastructure, and conspiracy theories around politically motivated arsonists.

The specific ignition that started the Camp Fire had corporate origins, coming from a faulty powerline owned by California’s largest utility firm, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). Ensuing lawsuits for liabilities of $30 billion bankrupted the group. Indeed, systems failure in outdated infrastructure is an increasingly common cause of wildfire and other environmental disasters, such as the recent Ohio Derailment. As the California historian Mike Davis points out in his essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn”, Californians live in a “separate and unequal” system of fire prevention funding, regulation, and media attention. The wealthy in the Hollywood Hills, and what Davis calls “the fire coast” of the Santa Monica Mountains, continue to rebuild larger and larger houses after each wildfire while mouthing shallow support for “green” causes.

In contrast, LA’s urban working classes and peripheral rural towns such as Paradise suffer broken infrastructure and displacement. Some leave California permanently while others, rendered homeless by fires, live in encampments that themselves increase the risk of fire because cooking there is done on open flame. Across both LA and Northern California, I saw huge encampments established in the dry scrublands, where urban infrastructure meets the forest. Many homeless people mention that these areas near flammable scrub are the only places not actively swept by the police or subject to complaints from wealthy house owners. These homeowners, often Nimbys, also reject the planned densification of social housing, and rezoning — all policies that might reduce the likelihood of ignition by safely housing those in encampments.

Many, such as Davis, have tended to see California’s forest fires not just as an ecological problem, but a deeply political one. Davis took aim at policies stoked by an elite that had distanced itself from material and environmental realities. The state capacity built between FDR’s New Deal and Nixon’s environmental legislation has been slowly eroded. Consequently, an incredibly complex and failing system was unleashed by deregulation and a Democratic Party that prioritised its elite urban constituents. Davis, writing presciently at the high watermark of California’s reduction of state capacity in the Nineties, argued that the state was caught in a now-familiar doom loop: “Each new conflagration would be punctually followed by reconstruction on a larger and even more exclusive scale as land-use regulations, and sometimes even the fire code, were relaxed to accommodate victims [prompting further fire].”

Indeed, the irrational zoning laws, prohibition of multifamily apartments, lack of social housing, and high rents across California have led some to identify homelessness as a key ignition factor in itself. “There are social issues we need to take care of,” says Assistant Chief Scott Corn of the Shasta-Trinity Unit of CAL FIRE. “Homelessness and drug abuse — we have seen fires start from those two sources exponentially. People will intentionally light fires because that’s the state of mind they’re in [on opioids and meth]. They’ll willingly tell you: ‘I lit the fires because the voices told me to.’” He explains that most of the fires used to be accidental. “Now, when we go to a fire where no crime was involved… that’s a pretty rare thing.” Illegal, energy-intensive marijuana operations can also malfunction and start blazes — to the extent that local conservatives have formed militias and other groups to shut them down and protect farms.

I head into the mountain ranges around Redding with Dan Dennett, another assistant chief in charge of fuel reduction operations in the area. As we climbed in altitude, lines of black pine stumps and desiccated oak trees filled the horizon. Bundles of underbrush, stacked like funeral pyres, burn on the roadside. Dennett is a strong advocate of a more interventionist approach to the problem: fuel reduction through logging, removing undergrowth, bulldozer CATlines, and fuel breaks. These are all techniques which have been controversial with environmentalist groups and scientific studies, who argue that denser forests actually retain flame-retardant moisture better. “The California Environmental Quality Act had good intentions, but it really handcuffed the timber industry,” Dennett says. “Without logging, there’s too much biomass, and the access roads for the fire service aren’t maintained.”

There’s no consensus on protecting California from fire, only an intense debate, which rages inside the fire-fighting institutions themselves. A number of its participants are engaged in political and economic lobbying, advocating different solutions such as technological fire suppression, controlled burns, rewilding approaches, and what has come to be known as TEK (traditional ecological knowledge). However, defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, who make many of the Forest Service’s aviation tools, compete against these organisations, along with logging consortiums and rancher associations. Despite this, attitudes towards total fire suppression have been souring as many locals embrace more holistic forest “management” techniques such as controlled burns. Some note that as forest fire frequency declines, acreage, time scales and destruction rates skyrocket.

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I later speak to Jaime Tarne, who has been involved with wildland firefighting and the science behind fire management since her first season in 1975 with the Forest Service. Instead of hardware, Tarne focuses on the need for auxiliary aid, mental-health services, and community support, as fires become more frequent and deadly every year. “This is something that, during my career, was ignored. You’re away from your family; you have friends who die. You don’t walk back into your home life. It’s not normal. If you make a career out of [wildland firefighting] you will lose friends.” Tarne says this has less to do with funding than human errors in high-stress situations: “People die because mistakes are made. Mistakes are made about how to fight the fire. Mistakes are made about when to leave. There’s a lot of ego in firefighters — there’s a machismo attitude. There’s an issue of not wanting to say no. But climate change is radically changing the severity of fires.”

Despite the difficulty of these working conditions, technological capacity, sponsored by aerospace companies, is only growing. Out in the remote ranchlands of Shasta County, I witness a hugely complex and coordinated set of aerial drops. Several light aircraft and helicopters circulate over a practice fire, dropping large amounts of water and flame retardants in a billowing orange haze. Both CAL FIRE and the Forest Service seem keen to show me these eye-catching displays. However, access to average firefighters was restricted. The aerial firefighters and smokejumpers I did meet only gave vague outlines about their training schedules.

Firefighters’ first mandate is to prevent property damage and save lives — an admirable mission. But, beyond the short term, many see a “war” against fire as merely palliative, if not inflammatory in the long run. The Biden administration is slowly starting to turn its gaze towards the issue of state capacity, especially concerning the environment. However, the encouragement and funding of what has been termed a “fire-industrial complex” may lead to unintended consequences as corporations funded by government contracts look to maintain the profitable problem of fire just as they once did war. Yet, at the same time, long-term holistic solutions to fire are often not vote-winners for average citizens understandably concerned about their houses, farms, cattle, and livelihoods.

Whichever angle you approach California from, whatever your social priorities, fire is nearby. More and more, conflagrations are becoming a symptom of the wider problems of the Golden State, from the hollowing-out of local government, to the venal corporate agenda that has come to replace it. In this regard, even as fires blaze across the globe, California still leads the pack.

The answer, I think, is epitomised in a single book. Written by Ben Wattenberg and Richard M. Scammon in 1970, The Real Majority: An Extraordinary Examination of the American Electorate charted the political centre in the new Nixonian age. Over half a century on, it still offers deep insights for navigating a society in flux, even as it shrewdly leavens its electoral insights with clear and evocative language. Especially with Donald Trump the new American leviathan, moreover, The Real Majority offers another enduring truth — if liberals fail to occupy the heartland of American politics, wily conservatives will rush to get there first.

After their defeat in the 1968 election, Democrats pondered the future. The loudest insurgents were the so-called New Politics liberals, progressive activists who sought to push their party Leftwards. This meant replacing the New Deal coalition, anchored by middle-income voters, with the so-called McGovern coalition: a heady blend of youth voters, African Americans, the poor, and the educated middle class. Activists believed this grouping comprised a majority that could push the country in a more progressive direction.

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Scammon and Wattenberg dismissed these ideas as arithmetically foolish — and therefore politically hopeless. Insatiable data hounds, they made psephology The Real Majority’s foundation. The authors knew all the relevant players across Capitol Hill, yet rejected cocktails with senators for slogs through the electoral weeds. As they put it: “It is voters, not insiders, who elect candidates.”

Not that any of this theorising is hard to unpick. On the contrary, The Real Majority makes its case with literary aplomb. “The great majority of the voters in America are unyoung, unpoor, and unblack,” is how the authors put it: “they are middle-aged, middle-class, and middle-minded.” A generation before algorithms micro-targeted soccer moms, Scammon and Wattenberg macro-targeted America’s archetypal Middle Voter. She wasn’t a peacenik anthropology major, but rather a 47-year-old housewife, married to a machinist in Ohio. Her concerns, not that of the activist class, comprised the real “center of American politics”.

Far more than a postmortem, then, The Real Majority offered Democrats a roadmap back to power, one obliging the party to abandon decades of ideological baggage. Since the Great Depression, after all, its power had rested on the issue of economic prosperity. Yet by the late Sixties, the glory days of the New Deal felt very far away. From violent anti-war protests to Black Power radicalism, the authors argued there was now a new core in American politics, one less focused on unions or wages, and more on social cleavages. In this unfamiliar new era, the duo therefore urged for New Deal activism in economics, but also toughness on these new-fangled cultural pressures. As the duo warned, if they failed to get serious on what they called the “Social Issue” then they could wave their electoral future goodbye.

This is hardly surprising. Through the Sixties, after all, rates of violent crime had doubled or even tripled. And yet like the 2020s, liberals responded by equating law-and-order with racism. In one memorable passage, the authors brilliantly evoked the bleating progressive activist, one depressingly resonant five decades on. “Lady, you’re not really afraid of being mugged; you’re a bigot.” On Vietnam, meanwhile, liberals hemmed and hawed before finally dismissing Americans as imperialists — when what they should have done was take charge and explained how they’d end the war.

These insights, so fresh then and so familiar now, didn’t come from nothing. On the contrary, The Real Majority’s intoxicating blend of clear-eyed policy prescription and psephological analysis can be traced straight back to its authors. For the former, we have Scammon to thank. Born in 1915, to upper-class parents in Minneapolis, the precocious youngster once organised the entire globe into voting precincts. The Second World War interrupted his doctoral work in political science. But soon enough, the young Captain Scammon was devising West Germany’s postwar elections. That prompted a stint in the State Department and a 1961 appointment to head the Census Bureau.

By the late Sixties, Scammon was the nation’s preeminent source on all things statistical: but still needed help translating his deep electoral insights into something more tangible. Enter Joseph Ben Zion Wattenberg. Born in 1933 to East European Jewish immigrants, he came of age in a Bronx hothouse of Leftwing Zionism. A writer and editor, he dabbled in children’s literature and trade journals, and failed in two runs for local office. By 1962, Wattenberg discovered Scammon’s Census Bureau and its decennial Statistical Abstract of the United States. Drawn to this compendium of numerical facts, Wattenberg interviewed and then befriended Scammon.

This partnership would soon spawn The Real Majority, a project aimed at saving liberals from themselves. Scammon’s data allowed them to see beyond the facile McGovern coalition, even as Wattenberg’s vivid penmanship turned mountains of data into a page turner. “To know that the lady in Dayton is afraid to walk the streets alone at night,” he evocatively explained, “to know that that her brother-in-law is a policeman, to know that she does not have the money to move if her new neighborhood deteriorates, to know that she is deeply distressed that her son is going to community junior college where LSD can be found on the campus — to know all this is the beginning of contemporary political wisdom.”

When the book was finally published, in the fall of 1970, it raced up the New York Times bestseller list. A restless political animal, Richard Nixon read pre-publication excerpts of The Real Majority with a mixture of interest and alarm. And no wonder: it was written by Democrats to defeat him, even as aides warned the book offered a “workable blueprint for our defeat”. A lengthy White House memo on the work soon circulated. “Republicans,” it cautioned, “cannot allow the Democrats to get back on the right side of the social issue.” Soon enough, this became official White House strategy for the midterms and beyond.

Nixon, in an act of political jujitsu, used The Real Majority’s blueprint to do the unthinkable: win blue-collar Democrats. Through the Social Issue, he built an enduring Republican majority, making liberals into allies of disorder. To achieve this, Nixon searched his bag of political tricks. After a rally in San Jose, California, the president’s advance team stalled his exit to coincide with the appearance of anti-war protesters. With his enemies moving in, Nixon muttered “this is what they hate to see” and leapt onto the hood of his limo, thrusting both arms upward into his trademark Double-V. The crowd howled obscenities and hurled stones, eggs, and vegetables. Finally, Nixon’s motorcade drove away through a hail of debris. Windows were smashed, aides frightened; but Tricky Dicky got the media images he wanted. The corpulent Donald Trump could only dream of such a stunt.

The San Jose stunt enabled Nixon to pillory his “thousand haters”. Aligning himself with the Dayton housewife, he called for an end to “appeasement” of the “thugs and hoodlums”. Decades later, you can still almost hear the Glendas of America nodding vigorously in agreement. Nor did The Real Majority’s influence end there. William Safire, a Nixon aide and amateur linguist, noticed a change in the national lexicon. “Elitism” and “permissiveness” — long relegated to academic jargon — entered the mainstream. Just as The Real Majority predicted, a backlash against disorder had taken root. This allowed Nixon to paint himself as the moderate defender of what he himself called the “silent majority”.

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It took liberals far longer to grasp these lessons. In November 1972, George McGovern, the star of American progressivism and eponymous hero of that much-vaunted coalition, was thrashed by Nixon. In fact, the result would be the greatest landslide ever won by a Republican presidential nominee, with Nixon securing over 60% of the vote. The South Dakota senator’s antiwar activism, dovetailed with his support for universal basic income, may have thrilled the Left. But McGovern was, in the words of a political ally, the candidate of “acid, amnesty, and abortion”. As one Middle American bluntly told a journalist: “McGovern? He’s for dope.”

And if Democratic failure in the early Seventies soon paved the way for Reagan, The Real Majority is far from a historical artefact. For if our current moment has deep echoes to the late Sixties, the book remains eerily applicable to the age of Trump. Even now, the “great majority” of American voters remain “middle-aged, middle-class, and middle-minded”. That’s clear enough from the election last month: middle-income and middle-aged GenXers broke hard for Trump. To these Americans, inflation and crime outweighed the boutique worries of the activist class.

One enduring lesson of The Real Majority, then, is this: whoever wins the centre wins elections. Here’s another: if Democrats ignore Wattenberg and Scammon, repeating the mistakes of the New Politics and focusing on trans rights and climate catastrophism over bread-and-butter basics, conservatives will continue to dominate the national conversation. Even then, progressives aren’t sure to absorb the book’s wisdom. As Wattenberg once cracked, The Real Majority alienated “most every liberal in America — except those it converted”. Yet the facts are stubborn, whatever the year.

The autopsy determined that he had been stabbed several times, then covered in gasoline and burnt alive. Holmes was 18. The day before, in a message posted on Snapchat, he had warned his friends and family that his life was in danger.

“Alkhion Dunkins, Yzire Jenkins-Row and Zahmire Welcome,” he wrote. “If something happens to me, know those three.”

***

Half a century earlier, the writer Joan Didion had travelled to San Francisco to report on the “social haemorrhaging” of Sixties America. She wanted to bear witness to a nation’s decay and reveal its impact on a disoriented youth. These children, she wrote, “drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins”; these children “were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together”.

On San Francisco’s streets she found a generation numbed by narcotics and ideological incoherence: a youth no longer in revolt — but in stupor. “It was not a country in open revolution,” she wrote in her essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America.”

That was 1967. But what of today? If San Francisco once embodied a country collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, where is our Bethlehem?

As the curtain falls on an election campaign defined by its own ideological incoherence, there is no longer one single locus for the nation’s disaffected. For at least a decade, there have been many Bethlehems here: Philadelphia, Oakland, Seattle, San Francisco. And more recently, this “haemorrhaging” has spread to unexpected corners of the country.

Today, one place more than any other embodies this anomie. A rust-belt city that serves as a mirror to the nation. A city in America’s most important battleground state; in a county that has predicted the winner of every US election since 1912 bar three. A city that happens to be called Bethlehem.

***

Here, on the surface at least, the centre appears to be holding. Bethlehem is safely ensconced in Pennsylvania’s portion of the Greater Appalachian Valley, and bisected by the gentle Lehigh River. It oozes college-cute charm. Tim Walz held a rally at one of the city’s high schools back in September and was mocked for admitting “we can’t afford four more years of this”. But in Bethlehem, the gaffe went mostly unnoticed.

Earlier this year, it was awarded Unesco World Heritage Status, and it feels like the city is still celebrating. On Bethlehem’s Main Street, crimson leaves fall to the pavement, where they turn to gold. There is a choir of beautiful churches, an ice cream parlour, two taprooms — one selling beer; the other organic olive oil — and a shop selling Palestinian flags.

At one end, almost out of sight, Donald Trump’s campaign team have set up an office. “The building is owned by a Democrat,” the flag-seller tells me, before shrugging. “I guess money talks.” On the city’s fringes, Trump and Harris yard signs face off against each other, while Democrat billboards flank its entry roads.

True to its name, Bethlehem has always been drawn to the Holy Land. Since 1741, when devout Moravian travellers founded the settlement on 24 December, Christmas has been central to the city’s identity. Within six years, it boasted America’s first decorated Christmas tree. These days, it’s known as the “Christmas City” and, from November onwards, tourists come to worship in the city’s festive gift shops. The most devout get married in the opulent Hotel Bethlehem, where December weddings start at $18,000. “It was perfect,” purrs one Bethlehem bride.

But across the river, the rusted hulk of the city’s former steelworks speaks to a different chapter in the city’s history. If Bethlehem gave America its Christmas spirit, it also built its backbone. The Chrysler Building, Alcatraz Island, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge — all were forged with steel produced in its 16-story blast furnaces. By 1940, roughly 40% of New York City’s skyline was constructed with materials from Bethlehem Steel. Three years later, during the Second World War, its workers constructed the equivalent of one battleship per day. As Walz said during his visit, it was Bethlehem Steel that “freed the world from Nazi oppression”.

Then came the post-war reconstruction, when Japan and Germany rebuilt their own plants, and more efficient steelworks were devised in America. When the global recession hit in the Eighties, Bethlehem Steel’s fate was sealed. It clung on until 1995, when the city’s steelmaking tradition died in one final nostalgic cascade of fire and ore. A worker whistled “Amazing Grace” over a speaker system on the furnace floor, and the steelworks fell silent.

Today, the land is owned by that other great American business: a casino company. Many of the old factory buildings remain empty and fenced off; a handful are occupied by start-ups and event companies. Tucked away at one end is the casino, whose shopping centre, spa and dizzying array of 4,000 betting terminals attract gambler-tourists ferried in and out on coaches from New York’s Chinatown. Britney Spears held a show there in 2018; next month, Engelbert Humperdinck is flying in.

Under the shadow of the five remaining defunct furnaces, I find Tom Sedor, a third-generation steelworker. His family history charts the industry’s decline. Sedor’s grandfather was a blacklisted union man during the First World War. His father was also a union man, until he was killed when a furnace blew up in 1948. Sedor himself worked on the plant’s electrics, right up until Bethlehem Steel closed.

“The hardest part was the Rule of 85,” he explains, where a worker could only retire with a full pension if their age and period of service added up to 85 or more. “Many men had to go to other plants, mostly in Baltimore, and that led to a lot of divorces.”

Sedor, 83, will be voting Democrat, but only because, as a lifelong union man, he could never vote for Trump. “At least Harris has visited Pennsylvania, unlike Hillary Clinton,” he says. But will life get better? “I don’t think so. Take the casino. Yes, it brings jobs, but they’re not well-paid.” He points out that the minimum wage in Pennsylvania is the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour; more than half of the rate in neighbouring New Jersey.

“How is anyone supposed to pay their rent with that?”

***

At the time of his death in April 2018, Tyrell Holmes rented a flat with two of his killers, Alkhion Dunkins and Yzire Jenkins-Row. “Back then, the landlord didn’t care how you made your money,” says one former resident.

On the night of the murder, just after midnight, neighbours heard a fight break out in their third-floor apartment. There was a shriek followed by a crash — and then silence. Holmes had been strangled unconscious. He was then dragged down the stairwell and thrown into an idling car. It quietly drove off.

Today, the block of flats on East Raspberry Street, a short walk from Bethlehem’s centre, is owned by a different letting company, but a handful of its residents remain the same. Elle, 31, has lived in the flat next to Holmes for six years. “I used to let them into the building when they forgot their keys,” she tells me. They played loud music, she says, but “didn’t cause any problems”. On the night itself, Elle and her husband came home just before 3.00am, after closing up a nearby bar. “They were next door, quickly packing up their shit — and then they just left.”

The next day, a forensic team arrived. She never saw the young men again.

“The building is still a piece of shit,” Elle adds. “They don’t fix anything.” But at least the rent is relatively cheap: it costs $1,100 a month for a two-bedroom flat, half the price of the going rate. “I’ve been lucky they haven’t raised it,” the tattoo artist admits.

Just around the corner, a new block of flats is being built, where a new studio costs around $2,000. “At least five of these developments have gone up in recent years,” Elle says, “and nobody local can afford them.”

But these flats aren’t built for those born in Bethlehem. Since the pandemic, wealthier residents of New York and Philadelphia have been moving in, just a 90-minute commute. Coupled with Bethlehem’s growing student population — it boasts two private universities — and rental and house prices rose by 40% between 2019 and 2023.

Priced out of their homes by the newcomers, 111 former residents now live on the streets, many of whom are fed by New Bethany, a food bank not far from the steelworks. “This is the worst we’ve ever seen it,” says its director Marc Rittle. He estimates there’s been a 91% increase in homelessness since the pandemic, when the government increased food stamps and cash assistance to those on lower incomes. But when the pandemic was officially declared over in May last year, that support was withdrawn.

The fall-out was unforgiving. Walk east along the south bank of the Lehigh River, past the “No Trespassing” sign and over the rusted railroad track. There, under a motorway bridge, lurks evidence of the city’s homelessness crisis: a camp that, in the dusk sunlight, might have been built by Huck Finn. The despair is ordered. Thick duvets lie across a corrugated metal platform; knee-high piles of books slouch against the back wall; at the far end a dozen DVDs are waiting to be watched on a television that doesn’t exist.

Carlos, 57, has been here a year, after the company that employed him as a forklift driver shut down. “The weekends are particularly hard,” he explains, as the nearby food bank is closed. Despite coming to America from Puerto Rico almost 40 years ago — a third of Bethlehem is Hispanic — he has no identity papers, which means he can’t apply for housing or financial support.

“I’ve just got to be hopeful,” he says calmly, when I ask about the election. “That’s all I got.” And he shrugs.

Across the river, some 50 other people have set up a larger encampment, but Carlos prefers the quiet. Sometimes he goes over to fish with them. There are 30-odd tents. Most of their occupants are waiting for manual work to come around, but few are as hopeful as Carlos. Some have lived there for more than five years, and plan to stay for another five. “This is our home now,” says one. Further up the river, another says he’s too busy to talk; he returns to his plank of wood and starts to aimlessly drill holes.

George, by contrast, doesn’t need a tent. Instead, despite working at New Bethany and claiming social security, he spends each night sleeping in his car. Last year, his rent increased from $875 to $1,000 — and he couldn’t afford the difference. “I park down by the hospital,” the former construction worker, 69, explains. “It’s one of the safest places you can stay because of the security guard.” To avoid suspicion before nightfall, he moves from carpark to carpark, along with a small cortège of other car-sleepers.

Unprompted, George describes how, after his daughter died in June, he started drinking to forget the pain and the elements. “But I drank so much I got hospitalised and have been sober since,” he adds. And now he feels the cold.

When I ask how his daughter died, he replies as if I should already know the answer: “Fentanyl.”

***

Over the past five years, there have been more than 600 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem. As one resident, whose flat overlooks the dumpster where Tyrell Holmes was burnt alive, told me: “There are drug deals here every night.”

Five days before Holmes’s death, five members of Bethlehem’s “Money Rules Everything” (MRE) gang robbed a drug dealer. Such “drug rips” — where dealers or suppliers are targeted — had become increasingly common in Bethlehem.

The robbery didn’t go to plan. As the young men escaped with a bag of marijuana, one dropped his phone. When the dealer turned it on, there were two faces on its background: Alkhion Dunkins and the phone’s owner, Tyrell Holmes.

The police are still piecing together what happened in the short period between that night and Holmes’s murder. Witnesses have been reluctant to provide testimony or evidence; in 2021; one of the killers, Jenkins-Rowe, was accused of witness intimidation from his prison cell. (In Pennsylvania, first-degree murder still carries the death sentence.)

But some facts are known. After the robbery, Alkhion Dunkins — Holmes’s flatmate and fellow MRE member — started to receive threats from the dealer the gang had targeted. Holmes, meanwhile, had become the subject of an internal investigation. He stood accused of stealing from MRE and associating with members of a rival gang.

“Tyrell lived two lives,” a friend tells me. “But he didn’t deserve to die like that.” She tries to explain why many of their male friends were drawn into crime: “They feel like drug dealing is the only way they can live. There isn’t much out there for them, and they’re trying to control the chaos.” When I ask if she thinks the election will alter anything, she responds: “Nothing is going to change. If anything, everything is going to get worse. It always does.”

Elle, Holmes’s next-door neighbour, agrees. “What pisses me off is that both parties only care about minute things when there’s so much other shit going on.” I ask what she means. “Abortion and stuff is obviously important. But what about the economy? What about the drugs?”

Fentanyl has continued to flow through Bethlehem’s backstreets since the last election. “When I was 16, three of my best friends got addicted to heroin,” Elle says. “But now heroin doesn’t even exist. It’s just fentanyl. It’s everywhere.”

This year alone, there have already been 52 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem, down on last year but still significantly higher than the national average. Indeed, in the state as a whole, one Pennsylvanian dies of an overdose every two hours. Dotted around Bethlehem are purple boxes containing Naxolene, which is used to reverse opioid overdoses. There is one in the visitor centre at the steelworks, next to a vending machine selling snacks.

Those who overdose in Bethlehem skew young. They are mostly the children of the steelworker generation, and sometimes the grandchildren. In San Francisco, Didion met a five-year-old girl whose mother feeds her acid. In Bethlehem, the situation is as desperate. Earlier this year, a mother pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after her two-year-old son died of a fentanyl overdose in her home. She had fallen asleep with the child’s father, who awoke to find their son unresponsive, his lips turned blue.

When I visit her house, nobody answers the door. Further up the street, her family’s business is still in operation. It claims to be Bethlehem’s “most trusted” seller of windows.

***

Before Holmes was murdered, there were at least four gangs operating in and around Bethlehem. Most had alliances with other street organisations — the Latin Kings in Chicago, for instance, or the African-American Bloods in Los Angeles and their rivals the Crips.

But Money Rules Everything was different: it was a strictly “neighbourhood gang” — it was born in Bethlehem.

When it was founded in 2013, MRE’s eight or so members took over the city’s Pembroke housing development. Less than a 10-minute drive from Bethlehem’s World Heritage sites, Pembroke is home to 196 low-income housing units that the council now wants to demolish. Squatting on the city’s borderlands, the estate is flanked by a petrol station and a dusty park overlooked by a sweet factory.

Maggie is sitting in the project’s playpark. She lived on the estate with her boyfriend Lewis until two years ago, when their house was destroyed in a fire. Maggie, 33, now stays with a friend nearby; Lewis, 50, surfs Pembroke’s sofas — or, when there isn’t one free, sleeps in a tent in a nearby wood. “There’s no real financial support,” he tells me. “Everyone here is in some sort of trouble,” Maggie adds.

Neither Lewis nor Maggie are registered to vote. “What’s the point?” Lewis asks. Maggie claims a man came by a few weeks ago asking if she wanted to put her name down. “Afterwards, he offered to sell me weed,” she adds.

When he was growing up, Tyrell used to spend a lot of time in Pembroke, and I ask if they remember him. “We all remember that kid’s death,” she says. “The one who was burnt.” And his killers? Didn’t they grow up around here too?

“Oh yeah,” Maggie adds. “One of their moms still lives here.” She points. “That house there. The one with the light on.”

When Tyrell Holmes named his would-be killers, he didn’t know one of his oldest friends would be among them. He had grown up with Miles Harper; their families had even attended the same church when they were children. But for Harper, fraternising with a rival gang was worse than sin.

To date, Harper is the only killer to have pleaded guilty to Holmes’s death; when he was sentenced in 2019, he was already in prison for shooting two men outside a shopping mall. Holmes’s other three killers are due in court next spring; nobody in Bethlehem doubts their guilt. Even the judge admitted he’d never presided over such a pitiless crime.

“I’m Miles’s mother,” says the woman at the door when I explain why I’m standing on her porch. Tonie Harper is reluctant to talk about her son, saying only that little has changed on the Pembroke estate since he was arrested. Only slightly more forthcoming is Miles’s older brother, Xavier, a puckish figure in his late twenties.

“I was just praying when you arrived,” he explains. “It’s clearly a sign.” When I ask if he agrees with his mother that life hasn’t improved over the past six years, he says that it’s what God would’ve wanted. When I ask about his brother and Holmes, he repeats himself. Every question is met with the same response: an appeal to God. The conversation briefly turns to politics. He won’t be voting in the election.

A friend of Holmes later puts me in touch with his older brother. Now 27, he lives in Florida, where he works in construction after serving a four-year term in the army.

“Tyrell was a good kid,” he says. It’s Bethlehem that’s bad. “It’s like a horror movie — it’s like a dark hole there.” He’s not keeping up with the police investigation. He has no explanation for the bleak impulses behind Holmes’s murder. Nobody does.

No one knows how an 18-year-old was led into the dark hole which led to him being strangled, stabbed and then burnt alive. Few seem to care. In 1967, Didion concluded that, “once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomisation could be reversed”. Half a century later, the pretence endures. Despite Bethlehem being a “political battleground”, the city’s hopeless fringes are still ignored: regardless of who wins, things will continue to fall apart.

“There’s nothing special about Bethlehem,” Holmes’s brother adds. “It’s the same as everywhere else.”

I ask him about the election, and Bethlehem’s outsized role in picking its winner.

“I don’t care,” he says. “You might as well flip a coin.”

***

This article was first published on 4 November, 2024.

Texas today is irrepressible. If the numbers are right, it could soon pass California and become America’s most populous state. Texas is also the nation’s second youngest state, even as it enjoys higher net migration than any of its peers. Tellingly, many new arrivals are exiles from the Golden State. This buoyancy isn’t hard to understand. Shaking off its reactionary heritage, Texans now wallow in progress, building more and making more than anyone else, with some boozing and dancing as they go. At its best, in fact, this blend of high-tech growth and gentle multiculturalism could yet rebuild America — if, that is, its worst conservative instincts can be repressed.

In a sense, Texan success within the United States is ironic. After declaring independence from Mexico, in 1836, it enjoyed a reputation as a place to “flee” the tyranny of Washington. By the time it joined the union, nine years later, the 28th state was dominated by planters and ranchers, groups that eagerly embraced both slavery and the Confederacy. After losing the Civil War, Texans were left bitter and impoverished, their natural bounty in hock to far-off Northern bankers. To quote Wilbert “Pappy” O’Daniel, governor and then senator in the Forties, Texas had become “New York’s most valuable foreign possession”.

For all its bloody-minded independence — Steinbeck was surely right when he called Texas “a nation in every sense of the word” — it would ultimately be the federal government that dragged the state’s marshes and prairies into the 20th century. The New Deal brought electricity to remote rural areas, and massively expanded the all-important Houston Ship Channel. The boom in a quintessentially Texan product surely helped too. “Oil is money,” the historian Robert Bryce has written. “Money is power.”

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Dovetailed with a degree of racial pragmatism, with Houston desegregating far more easily than Atlanta, Texas also began to move beyond its dependence on oil and gas. Prodded along by LBJ and other native sons, for instance, Houston emerged as the centre of a gigantic new space centre. And if that banished memories of the city’s parochial past — as recently as 1946, the writer John Gunther grumbled about hotels filled with cockroaches — other towns rose too. Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin, together known as the Texas Triangle, are now home to two-thirds of the state’s population and 70% of its GDP.

Not, of course, that this is simply a historical tale. For if 20th-century Texas flourished on a mix of social peace, low taxes and light-touch regulation, their successors are sipping much the same brew. The numbers here are clear. Texas’s overall tax burden, according to one recent study, ranked 37th out of 50: hardly the best, but much better than California (5th) or New York (1st).

That’s shadowed by less irksome regulations, something that unsurprisingly meant more construction. Drive around any of the big Texas metros, particularly the suburbs, you’ll see new buildings everywhere. Permissive zoning laws mean that what, until recently, were rural pathways are now packed with cars and fast-food joints. Most of Texas is profoundly suburban, but there’s also a vibrant life in the inner cities. That’s especially true of Austin, where an 82-storey residential tower, soon to be the state’s tallest building, joins a score of high-rises near the fabled Sixth Street entertainment district. The whisky joints and honky-tonks, plying punters with reasonably priced booze and loud music, are echoed by new residential developments: over the past decade, Texas has built three times as many homes as California.

This has allowed Texas to keep housing prices low, attracting young millennials tired of frittering away their paychecks in West Hollywood, Crown Heights or the Tenderloin. And if this influx saw Dallas gain $6 billion in gross income from other states last year — even as New York lost $60 billion — it’s not just white hipsters leaving paradise for Texas. The state is especially popular among African Americans and Latinos, hardly surprising when these groups do so much better in Texas than in Chicago or Boston.

That speaks to another strength of the Texan experiment. For if low taxes and cheap homes lure talent, they also attract jobs for them to fill. Once again, the statistics here are plain. Over the past five years, Texas job growth has been three times faster than California and 10 times faster than New York. Far from being a Wall Street satrapy, Texas now boasts some of the largest firms in the land, from Exxon to AT&T, Tesla to Dell. Even Joe Rogan has settled here, buying a vast Austin villa for $14 million. As these names imply, meanwhile, Texas is quickly gaining a reputation for cultural and technological innovation. Houston hosts the world’s largest medical complex, while the legacy of Nasa means the state also bristles with defence startups.

Quite apart from African Americans tired of Yankee snow and poverty, this bonanza is equally attracting foreigners. Consider somewhere like Fort Bend County, the sprawling suburbs west of Houston. From an infamous hotbed of the Klan, the community is now an easy mix of blacks, Asians and Latinos. Locals even brag about hosting America’s third-largest Hindu temple, made of bricks shipped in from India.

Not that the laidback culture here can be understood by numbers alone. Unlike other parts of America, Texas seems to avoid our moment’s worst racial neuroses. In part, that’s simply a question of prosperity: with Texan Latinos far likelier to own a home than their peers in Los Angeles or San Francisco, they tend not to see themselves as victimised “people of colour”. The state’s elites soon realised that Mexican Americans represented a vital and winnable constituency. While Californian Republicans alienated Latinos by pushing Proposition 18, banning undocumented migrants from public services, the former Bush insider Karl Rove tells me the Texas GOP takes a far softer stance. The strategy’s paying off: Latino areas, notably the Rio Grande Valley, went red for the first time ever in November.

At the same time, there are signs that the Texas miracle may only continue: the local economy is likely to benefit from the second Trump presidency. How could it not, when “drill, baby, drill” is a key plank of his platform? For their part, other Trumpworld figures make similar noises. Chris White, the incoming energy secretary, hails from the west Texas oilfields, making him the ideal candidate to exploit reserves that could yet encompass half the country’s output. Certainly, White’s background makes him an outlier: many top energy executives are more interested in appeasing environmentalists than extracting black gold.

Combined with other growth figures — if Texas is set to become America’s most populist state, Houston could become its second-largest city by 2100 — and it’s tempting to see Texas as a model for the country to follow: one that encourages entrepreneurship while retaining traditional social values. It’s a recipe that some Texan Democrats believe the party needs to follow, especially if they want to reach Latino voters. “Family, church, deep roots and entrepreneurship and the desire to weave into American life,” summarises Henry Cisneros, the former mayor of San Antonio and once a Democratic presidential candidate. “The Democrats sometimes go too far and push [people] to the Right.”

Not that a prosperous future is necessarily assured. Arguably the biggest threat to the state’s ascendancy comes from neanderthal elements inside the GOP. They’ve already shown their fangs, attempting to push Christian doctrine into the curricula of public schools. A draconian abortion ban has also been promoted by Ken Paxton, the state’s ultra-conservative attorney general, who’s equally trying to prosecute out-of-state doctors for prescribing abortion pills. This bill is widely unpopular, and seen among veterans of both parties as a threat to GOP power.

“If the identity Left is killing California, far-Right identity politics could be the ruin of Texas,” explains Steve Pedigo, a native Texan and assistant dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. Pedigo is particularly worried by attempts by the Texan Right to impose conservative policies on localities, similar to what progressives are trying to impose on more conservative parts of California. That’s bad enough in San Francisco — and an absolute anathema to freedom-loving Texans.

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Yet as stupid as these policies are, they’ve yet to change the political complexion of the state. Texans, Cisneros argues, are essentially practical, and prefer a regime that boosts their economic prospects over one that panders to them as victims. Texan Democrats hardly help themselves here. Over recent years, they’ve run culturally progressive figures like Beto O’Rourke: catnip to Eastern papers but dubious to Texans themselves. This year, the state duly continued its tilt to the Right, forcing the local Democratic party chairman to resign in disgrace.

Not that we should write off liberals just yet. As Texas grows, both in population and diversity, the state will need to rediscover its inner LBJ, focusing on genuine shared prosperity amid the high-rises and McMansions. Prayer meets and flag-flying aren’t substitutes for poor schools and inadequate roads, especially as the economy only grows and grows.

The hope here is that Texans remain sane, putting their faith in centrist politicians who promote social justice without succumbing to culture war manias. Happily, there are promising signs across the Texas Triangle, with Democrats and Republicans alike sticking to their moderate guns. One good example is Mattie Parker, the dynamic and nonpartisan mayor of Fort Worth. “I govern a diverse, young city,” Parker tells me. “People want the schools better, and the business leaders also don’t like extremes. They want the lights on, and the streets paved.”

Certainly, Texans themselves seem to think just such a future is possible. Almost 70% believe their state is among the best in the land, and nearly 30% see it as superior to all others, figures far higher than in New York or California. When I was last in Texas, I saw this optimistic spirit myself. Earlier this year, on a chilly Austin night, a well-known local musician called Patrice Pike took to the stage at a wood-panelled spot called the Saxon Club. After a raucous gig, Pike looked down at her crowd, a heady blend of blue-collar types and hipsters and superannuated hippies. And then, she made a dramatic show of Lone Star unity. “I know you have different views,” she said, “but we all love Texas.” Whatever our nation’s ceaseless squabbles, it’s hard to disagree.

The autopsy determined that he had been stabbed several times, then covered in gasoline and burnt alive. Holmes was 18. The day before, in a message posted on Snapchat, he had warned his friends and family that his life was in danger.

“Alkhion Dunkins, Yzire Jenkins-Row and Zahmire Welcome,” he wrote. “If something happens to me, know those three.”

***

Half a century earlier, the writer Joan Didion had travelled to San Francisco to report on the “social haemorrhaging” of Sixties America. She wanted to bear witness to a nation’s decay and reveal its impact on a disoriented youth. These children, she wrote, “drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins”; these children “were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together”.

On San Francisco’s streets she found a generation numbed by narcotics and ideological incoherence: a youth no longer in revolt — but in stupor. “It was not a country in open revolution,” she wrote in her essay, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. “It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America.”

That was 1967. But what of today? If San Francisco once embodied a country collapsing under the weight of its contradictions, where is our Bethlehem?

As the curtain falls on an election campaign defined by its own ideological incoherence, there is no longer one single locus for the nation’s disaffected. For at least a decade, there have been many Bethlehems here: Philadelphia, Oakland, Seattle, San Francisco. And more recently, this “haemorrhaging” has spread to unexpected corners of the country.

Today, one place more than any other embodies this anomie. A rust-belt city that serves as a mirror to the nation. A city in America’s most important battleground state; in a county that has predicted the winner of every US election since 1912 bar three. A city that happens to be called Bethlehem.

***

Here, on the surface at least, the centre appears to be holding. Bethlehem is safely ensconced in Pennsylvania’s portion of the Greater Appalachian Valley, and bisected by the gentle Lehigh River. It oozes college-cute charm. Tim Walz held a rally at one of the city’s high schools back in September and was mocked for admitting “we can’t afford four more years of this”. But in Bethlehem, the gaffe went mostly unnoticed.

Earlier this year, it was awarded Unesco World Heritage Status, and it feels like the city is still celebrating. On Bethlehem’s Main Street, crimson leaves fall to the pavement, where they turn to gold. There is a choir of beautiful churches, an ice cream parlour, two taprooms — one selling beer; the other organic olive oil — and a shop selling Palestinian flags.

At one end, almost out of sight, Donald Trump’s campaign team have set up an office. “The building is owned by a Democrat,” the flag-seller tells me, before shrugging. “I guess money talks.” On the city’s fringes, Trump and Harris yard signs face off against each other, while Democrat billboards flank its entry roads.

True to its name, Bethlehem has always been drawn to the Holy Land. Since 1741, when devout Moravian travellers founded the settlement on 24 December, Christmas has been central to the city’s identity. Within six years, it boasted America’s first decorated Christmas tree. These days, it’s known as the “Christmas City” and, from November onwards, tourists come to worship in the city’s festive gift shops. The most devout get married in the opulent Hotel Bethlehem, where December weddings start at $18,000. “It was perfect,” purrs one Bethlehem bride.

But across the river, the rusted hulk of the city’s former steelworks speaks to a different chapter in the city’s history. If Bethlehem gave America its Christmas spirit, it also built its backbone. The Chrysler Building, Alcatraz Island, the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge — all were forged with steel produced in its 16-story blast furnaces. By 1940, roughly 40% of New York City’s skyline was constructed with materials from Bethlehem Steel. Three years later, during the Second World War, its workers constructed the equivalent of one battleship per day. As Walz said during his visit, it was Bethlehem Steel that “freed the world from Nazi oppression”.

Then came the post-war reconstruction, when Japan and Germany rebuilt their own plants, and more efficient steelworks were devised in America. When the global recession hit in the Eighties, Bethlehem Steel’s fate was sealed. It clung on until 1995, when the city’s steelmaking tradition died in one final nostalgic cascade of fire and ore. A worker whistled “Amazing Grace” over a speaker system on the furnace floor, and the steelworks fell silent.

Today, the land is owned by that other great American business: a casino company. Many of the old factory buildings remain empty and fenced off; a handful are occupied by start-ups and event companies. Tucked away at one end is the casino, whose shopping centre, spa and dizzying array of 4,000 betting terminals attract gambler-tourists ferried in and out on coaches from New York’s Chinatown. Britney Spears held a show there in 2018; next month, Engelbert Humperdinck is flying in.

Under the shadow of the five remaining defunct furnaces, I find Tom Sedor, a third-generation steelworker. His family history charts the industry’s decline. Sedor’s grandfather was a blacklisted union man during the First World War. His father was also a union man, until he was killed when a furnace blew up in 1948. Sedor himself worked on the plant’s electrics, right up until Bethlehem Steel closed.

“The hardest part was the Rule of 85,” he explains, where a worker could only retire with a full pension if their age and period of service added up to 85 or more. “Many men had to go to other plants, mostly in Baltimore, and that led to a lot of divorces.”

Sedor, 83, will be voting Democrat, but only because, as a lifelong union man, he could never vote for Trump. “At least Harris has visited Pennsylvania, unlike Hillary Clinton,” he says. But will life get better? “I don’t think so. Take the casino. Yes, it brings jobs, but they’re not well-paid.” He points out that the minimum wage in Pennsylvania is the federal minimum of $7.25 an hour; more than half of the rate in neighbouring New Jersey.

“How is anyone supposed to pay their rent with that?”

***

At the time of his death in April 2018, Tyrell Holmes rented a flat with two of his killers, Alkhion Dunkins and Yzire Jenkins-Row. “Back then, the landlord didn’t care how you made your money,” says one former resident.

On the night of the murder, just after midnight, neighbours heard a fight break out in their third-floor apartment. There was a shriek followed by a crash — and then silence. Holmes had been strangled unconscious. He was then dragged down the stairwell and thrown into an idling car. It quietly drove off.

Today, the block of flats on East Raspberry Street, a short walk from Bethlehem’s centre, is owned by a different letting company, but a handful of its residents remain the same. Elle, 31, has lived in the flat next to Holmes for six years. “I used to let them into the building when they forgot their keys,” she tells me. They played loud music, she says, but “didn’t cause any problems”. On the night itself, Elle and her husband came home just before 3.00am, after closing up a nearby bar. “They were next door, quickly packing up their shit — and then they just left.”

The next day, a forensic team arrived. She never saw the young men again.

“The building is still a piece of shit,” Elle adds. “They don’t fix anything.” But at least the rent is relatively cheap: it costs $1,100 a month for a two-bedroom flat, half the price of the going rate. “I’ve been lucky they haven’t raised it,” the tattoo artist admits.

Just around the corner, a new block of flats is being built, where a new studio costs around $2,000. “At least five of these developments have gone up in recent years,” Elle says, “and nobody local can afford them.”

But these flats aren’t built for those born in Bethlehem. Since the pandemic, wealthier residents of New York and Philadelphia have been moving in, just a 90-minute commute. Coupled with Bethlehem’s growing student population — it boasts two private universities — and rental and house prices rose by 40% between 2019 and 2023.

Priced out of their homes by the newcomers, 111 former residents now live on the streets, many of whom are fed by New Bethany, a food bank not far from the steelworks. “This is the worst we’ve ever seen it,” says its director Marc Rittle. He estimates there’s been a 91% increase in homelessness since the pandemic, when the government increased food stamps and cash assistance to those on lower incomes. But when the pandemic was officially declared over in May last year, that support was withdrawn.

The fall-out was unforgiving. Walk east along the south bank of the Lehigh River, past the “No Trespassing” sign and over the rusted railroad track. There, under a motorway bridge, lurks evidence of the city’s homelessness crisis: a camp that, in the dusk sunlight, might have been built by Huck Finn. The despair is ordered. Thick duvets lie across a corrugated metal platform; knee-high piles of books slouch against the back wall; at the far end a dozen DVDs are waiting to be watched on a television that doesn’t exist.

Carlos, 57, has been here a year, after the company that employed him as a forklift driver shut down. “The weekends are particularly hard,” he explains, as the nearby food bank is closed. Despite coming to America from Puerto Rico almost 40 years ago — a third of Bethlehem is Hispanic — he has no identity papers, which means he can’t apply for housing or financial support.

“I’ve just got to be hopeful,” he says calmly, when I ask about the election. “That’s all I got.” And he shrugs.

Across the river, some 50 other people have set up a larger encampment, but Carlos prefers the quiet. Sometimes he goes over to fish with them. There are 30-odd tents. Most of their occupants are waiting for manual work to come around, but few are as hopeful as Carlos. Some have lived there for more than five years, and plan to stay for another five. “This is our home now,” says one. Further up the river, another says he’s too busy to talk; he returns to his plank of wood and starts to aimlessly drill holes.

George, by contrast, doesn’t need a tent. Instead, despite working at New Bethany and claiming social security, he spends each night sleeping in his car. Last year, his rent increased from $875 to $1,000 — and he couldn’t afford the difference. “I park down by the hospital,” the former construction worker, 69, explains. “It’s one of the safest places you can stay because of the security guard.” To avoid suspicion before nightfall, he moves from carpark to carpark, along with a small cortège of other car-sleepers.

Unprompted, George describes how, after his daughter died in June, he started drinking to forget the pain and the elements. “But I drank so much I got hospitalised and have been sober since,” he adds. And now he feels the cold.

When I ask how his daughter died, he replies as if I should already know the answer: “Fentanyl.”

***

Over the past five years, there have been more than 600 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem. As one resident, whose flat overlooks the dumpster where Tyrell Holmes was burnt alive, told me: “There are drug deals here every night.”

Five days before Holmes’s death, five members of Bethlehem’s “Money Rules Everything” (MRE) gang robbed a drug dealer. Such “drug rips” — where dealers or suppliers are targeted — had become increasingly common in Bethlehem.

The robbery didn’t go to plan. As the young men escaped with a bag of marijuana, one dropped his phone. When the dealer turned it on, there were two faces on its background: Alkhion Dunkins and the phone’s owner, Tyrell Holmes.

The police are still piecing together what happened in the short period between that night and Holmes’s murder. Witnesses have been reluctant to provide testimony or evidence; in 2021; one of the killers, Jenkins-Rowe, was accused of witness intimidation from his prison cell. (In Pennsylvania, first-degree murder still carries the death sentence.)

But some facts are known. After the robbery, Alkhion Dunkins — Holmes’s flatmate and fellow MRE member — started to receive threats from the dealer the gang had targeted. Holmes, meanwhile, had become the subject of an internal investigation. He stood accused of stealing from MRE and associating with members of a rival gang.

“Tyrell lived two lives,” a friend tells me. “But he didn’t deserve to die like that.” She tries to explain why many of their male friends were drawn into crime: “They feel like drug dealing is the only way they can live. There isn’t much out there for them, and they’re trying to control the chaos.” When I ask if she thinks the election will alter anything, she responds: “Nothing is going to change. If anything, everything is going to get worse. It always does.”

Elle, Holmes’s next-door neighbour, agrees. “What pisses me off is that both parties only care about minute things when there’s so much other shit going on.” I ask what she means. “Abortion and stuff is obviously important. But what about the economy? What about the drugs?”

Fentanyl has continued to flow through Bethlehem’s backstreets since the last election. “When I was 16, three of my best friends got addicted to heroin,” Elle says. “But now heroin doesn’t even exist. It’s just fentanyl. It’s everywhere.”

This year alone, there have already been 52 opioid overdoses in Bethlehem, down on last year but still significantly higher than the national average. Indeed, in the state as a whole, one Pennsylvanian dies of an overdose every two hours. Dotted around Bethlehem are purple boxes containing Naxolene, which is used to reverse opioid overdoses. There is one in the visitor centre at the steelworks, next to a vending machine selling snacks.

Those who overdose in Bethlehem skew young. They are mostly the children of the steelworker generation, and sometimes the grandchildren. In San Francisco, Didion met a five-year-old girl whose mother feeds her acid. In Bethlehem, the situation is as desperate. Earlier this year, a mother pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter after her two-year-old son died of a fentanyl overdose in her home. She had fallen asleep with the child’s father, who awoke to find their son unresponsive, his lips turned blue.

When I visit her house, nobody answers the door. Further up the street, her family’s business is still in operation. It claims to be Bethlehem’s “most trusted” seller of windows.

***

Before Holmes was murdered, there were at least four gangs operating in and around Bethlehem. Most had alliances with other street organisations — the Latin Kings in Chicago, for instance, or the African-American Bloods in Los Angeles and their rivals the Crips.

But Money Rules Everything was different: it was a strictly “neighbourhood gang” — it was born in Bethlehem.

When it was founded in 2013, MRE’s eight or so members took over the city’s Pembroke housing development. Less than a 10-minute drive from Bethlehem’s World Heritage sites, Pembroke is home to 196 low-income housing units that the council now wants to demolish. Squatting on the city’s borderlands, the estate is flanked by a petrol station and a dusty park overlooked by a sweet factory.

Maggie is sitting in the project’s playpark. She lived on the estate with her boyfriend Lewis until two years ago, when their house was destroyed in a fire. Maggie, 33, now stays with a friend nearby; Lewis, 50, surfs Pembroke’s sofas — or, when there isn’t one free, sleeps in a tent in a nearby wood. “There’s no real financial support,” he tells me. “Everyone here is in some sort of trouble,” Maggie adds.

Neither Lewis nor Maggie are registered to vote. “What’s the point?” Lewis asks. Maggie claims a man came by a few weeks ago asking if she wanted to put her name down. “Afterwards, he offered to sell me weed,” she adds.

When he was growing up, Tyrell used to spend a lot of time in Pembroke, and I ask if they remember him. “We all remember that kid’s death,” she says. “The one who was burnt.” And his killers? Didn’t they grow up around here too?

“Oh yeah,” Maggie adds. “One of their moms still lives here.” She points. “That house there. The one with the light on.”

When Tyrell Holmes named his would-be killers, he didn’t know one of his oldest friends would be among them. He had grown up with Miles Harper; their families had even attended the same church when they were children. But for Harper, fraternising with a rival gang was worse than sin.

To date, Harper is the only killer to have pleaded guilty to Holmes’s death; when he was sentenced in 2019, he was already in prison for shooting two men outside a shopping mall. Holmes’s other three killers are due in court next spring; nobody in Bethlehem doubts their guilt. Even the judge admitted he’d never presided over such a pitiless crime.

“I’m Miles’s mother,” says the woman at the door when I explain why I’m standing on her porch. Tonie Harper is reluctant to talk about her son, saying only that little has changed on the Pembroke estate since he was arrested. Only slightly more forthcoming is Miles’s older brother, Xavier, a puckish figure in his late twenties.

“I was just praying when you arrived,” he explains. “It’s clearly a sign.” When I ask if he agrees with his mother that life hasn’t improved over the past six years, he says that it’s what God would’ve wanted. When I ask about his brother and Holmes, he repeats himself. Every question is met with the same response: an appeal to God. The conversation briefly turns to politics. He won’t be voting in the election.

A friend of Holmes later puts me in touch with his older brother. Now 27, he lives in Florida, where he works in construction after serving a four-year term in the army.

“Tyrell was a good kid,” he says. It’s Bethlehem that’s bad. “It’s like a horror movie — it’s like a dark hole there.” He’s not keeping up with the police investigation. He has no explanation for the bleak impulses behind Holmes’s murder. Nobody does.

No one knows how an 18-year-old was led into the dark hole which led to him being strangled, stabbed and then burnt alive. Few seem to care. In 1967, Didion concluded that, “once we had seen these children, we could no longer overlook the vacuum, no longer pretend that the society’s atomisation could be reversed”. Half a century later, the pretence endures. Despite Bethlehem being a “political battleground”, the city’s hopeless fringes are still ignored: regardless of who wins, things will continue to fall apart.

“There’s nothing special about Bethlehem,” Holmes’s brother adds. “It’s the same as everywhere else.”

I ask him about the election, and Bethlehem’s outsized role in picking its winner.

“I don’t care,” he says. “You might as well flip a coin.”

Since the onset of the conflict in Ukraine, the West has sought to isolate Russia through sanctions and diplomatic pressure. And yet Kazan will be welcoming heads of state or high-ranking officials from 32 countries, including the bloc’s four new entrants — Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates — as well as numerous other countries interested in membership, including Turkey, the first ever Nato country to consider joining. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will also be present.

The event testifies to the growing influence of the Global South — or the Global Majority, as the Russians call it — and its search for an alternative to the US-led system. Some 40 nations are reportedly on the waiting list to join, with Saudi Arabia and Indonesia expressing serious interest, further illustrating the growing attractiveness of this “non-Western club”. Membership is seductive to those nations seeking alternatives to Western-dominated economic and financial structures which are often accused of jeopardising the economic development, social stability and national sovereignty of weaker countries.

It’s particularly telling of the West’s tone-deaf approach to the rest of the world that, to the former’s surprise, so many countries expressed an interest in joining the Brics after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war. Ironically, the West’s sanctions regime — and especially the freezing of $300 billion of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves, an unprecedent act of economic warfare — is what motivated many countries to look for alternatives to the dollar-denominated Western financial infrastructure.

The expansion of the Brics, coupled with the growing interest from the Global South, underscores the geopolitical power shift underway — from the West to Rest. Indeed, the Brics bloc already wields considerable economic clout. The group’s combined GDP, when adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP), accounts for 35.6% of the global economy, surpassing the G7’s share of just over 30%. In terms of population, the disparity is even more striking: Brics nations are home to 45% of the world’s population, while the G7 accounts for less than 10%. With India, China, and Russia’s GDP expected to grow by approximately 4% this year, compared with 2% for Western economies, and with more countries set to join, the Brics have the wind of history in their sails. No wonder this summit is being described as a “Bretton Woods for the Global South”.

Nonetheless, Western countries have often dismissed the institutional relevance of the Brics, pointing out that the bloc is little more than a loose association of countries with often diverging economic and geopolitical interests. Furthermore, it has failed to offer a concrete alternative to the Western systems. While it is true that the Brics have privileged economic and infrastructural mutual cooperation, and the wider concept of “connectivity”, over formalised governance structure, this might be about to change.

Russia has played a driving role in the Brics’ evolution, instrumental in the initial formation of the group, the hosting of its first summit, the admission of South Africa, and the subsequent push for expansion. Positioned as a mediator between China and India, Russia has managed to maintain a key role within the organisation, making it a vital player in any institutional leap forward.

Now Russia has set the bloc a new strategic goal: de-dollarisation. The sanctions against Russia and the freezing of its assets by Western powers have underscored the need for financial independence, making the de-dollarisation agenda not just aspirational but a necessity — not just for Russia but for other countries as well. The main response so far from the rest of the Brics has been to increasingly settle their international trade in national currencies rather than the dollar, with remarkable outcomes: the volume of trade settled in the currencies of member nations has already surpassed that of dollar-based transactions.

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But aside from the creation of the New Development Bank (NDB), which operates as an alternative to Western financial institutions like the IMF and World Bank, little has been done so far in terms of creating a valid alternative to the Western international financial-monetary infrastructure — a new Bretton Woods, so to speak. Could Kazan mark the beginning of a new era in this respect? So far details have been sparse, but in recent months speculation has been rife about the Brics’ plan to launch, possibly during the summit, a full-blown new global monetary ecosystem.

This would include a much-touted “Brics currency” — a unit of account used to settle international transactions and manage balance-of-payment problems, not to be confused with an actual supranational currency à la euro — as well as a groundbreaking blockchain-based international payment system aimed at providing an alternative to existing global financial systems, such as Swift, and the dollar-based financial infrastructure. The system would use blockchain technology to enable secure, transparent and immutable payment transactions across Brics member countries. Blockchain’s decentralised nature would eliminate the need for a central intermediary, making cross-border payments more efficient and less susceptible to censorship or interference from external entities.

The proposed payment system would not only support the de-dollarisation agenda but also provide a much-needed financial safety net for countries facing Western sanctions. If successful, this initiative could become the cornerstone of a new, decentralised global financial order that relies on digital technologies to challenge the dominance of the dollar. As Oleg Barabanov, programme director of the Valdai Discussion Club, a Moscow-based think tank, explains, this “could be the first step towards truly strengthening de-dollarisation within the Brics and broader non-Western world”. At the same time, countries “will retain full sovereign control over the traditional currencies of the Brics countries”.

Of course, this programme presents political as well as technical challenges. It’s important to note that not all the member states are on the same page on this issue. While Russia and China (also) want to use the Brics as a means to challenge the global dominance of the US — hence Russia’s insistence on the need for the new payment system to be completely decoupled from the dollar — not all members agree with this adversarial approach. Countries such as India, Saudi Arabia or Turkey are arguably more interested in rearranging the seats around the global table rather than building a new dining room altogether. But at a time of growing power bloc rivalry — and as the West leans more and more towards an “either you’re with us or against us” zero-sum mentality — how long will they be able to keep a foot in both shoes?

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The 2024 Brics summit in Kazan couldn’t come at a more pivotal time for global geopolitics and economics. With significant economic and demographic weight, the Brics have the potential to reshape global governance, especially if they succeed in creating an alternative global financial architecture. Challenges remain, as noted, particularly in terms of managing the group’s non-hierarchical structure and accommodating the various positions of existing and aspiring members, but the Kazan summit may very well lay the groundwork for a new era in global economic relations.

How should the West react to these momentous changes? Given there’s little it can do to stop the ineluctable shift towards multipolarity, threatening countries that move away from the dollar, as Trump recently did, will only achieve the opposite effect; indeed, Western countries, especially in Europe, are already paying a high price for the West-Rest decoupling. They could choose, instead, to engage with the rest of the world on an equal footing, in the knowledge that a smaller share of global GDP doesn’t necessarily mean a lower standard of living — a lesson the Americans could learn from many European countries.

But the current geopolitical confrontation is about much than just economics. It’s about the end of five centuries of Western global dominance. And if history is anything to go by, we know that established powers rarely, if ever, accommodate the rise of other powers. No wonder, then, that the current global clashes are increasingly framed in civilisational terms. As Russia, Iran and China gather in Kazan to posit their new world order, it is quite possible that rather than auguring a new era, the meeting will be remembered as just another step on the road to conflagration — something which, arguably, is already playing out on the European eastern front as much as across the Middle East.

The Chinese understand the bewitching power of the panda, using them as tools for soft power outreach and diplomatic communication. When, for example, all those animals on loan to the US and UK were recalled  earlier this year, experts in “panda diplomacy” warned that this tracked steadily worsening relations between China and the West.

But following Xi Jinping’s recent visit to the United States, we’ve seen a further exchange of panda platitudes. First, Chinese officials hinted that panda loans to America might once again resume. Then, White House mandarins responded with enthusiasm. The geopolitical subtext is clear: US-China rapprochement may be in the offing.

The first modern instance of panda diplomacy was in 1941, when Soong Mei-ling, wife of Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek, presented “a chubby pair of comical black and white furry pandas” to an American zoo. At that point China had only been a republic for three decades, and these creatures made an ideal choice of Year Zero symbol: though widely distributed in the Pleistocene era, today they’re found only in a small region of central China, making them distinctively Chinese. Meanwhile, in a culture ancestrally rich with animal emblems, pandas came with neither astrological connotations nor — unlike the mythical dragons — symbolic links with the imperial rulers so recently deposed.

Following the Kuomintang’s exile to Taiwan in 1949, the early uncertainty of the Chinese Communist successor regime’s relationship with the West is exemplified by the story of the WWF’s first poster-panda. Chi Chi was born in the wild in Sichuan in 1955, and kept in Beijing Zoo for two years, before being loaned to Moscow Zoo along with another panda at the request of Soviet diplomat Kliment Voroshilov in 1957.

At the time, most panda gifts were bestowed on other Communist states, including several sent to North Korea, all of which died due to poor treatment. Chi Chi was more fortunate: sent back to Beijing after Russian scientists mistook her for a male and requested a female instead, she was sold to Heini Demmer, an animal broker, who sought expressions of interest from American zoos. But the US Government, who still recognised only the exiled Kuomintang administration in Taiwan, refused to allow her entry, asserting that the US embargo on goods from China extended to pandas.

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Demmer took Chi Chi on a tour of European zoos instead, including a 1958 stop at London Zoo. It was originally intended as a short visit. But she proved so popular that the zoo purchased her, and she remained a star attraction in London for the rest of her life. Three years later, she inspired the naturalist and painter Sir Peter Scott to design WWF’s first logo, when the charity was founded in 1961.

Between Chi Chi’s arrival in London, until shortly after the WWF’s foundation, the postwar People’s Republic of China focused less on international relations than its own internal transformation. Over this short, brutal period, China embraced a regime-imposed version of the industrialisation that, in the West, had taken a century or more. Acclaimed by Mao as the Great Leap Forward, this five-year plan focused on boosting steelmaking and agricultural output, with little regard for side-effects.

The side-effects were numerous nonetheless. The most notorious was famine: an estimated 20 to 30 million Chinese citizens starved to death during the Great Leap Forward. But as the historian Elena Songster notes, another was ecological devastation. This was both due to new farming incursions into former wilderness, and also to a rise in hunting, as desperate people killed and ate anything they could catch. In turn, this prompted a shift in government policy from research to nature preservation, with Beijing mandating the creation of nature reserves, and new regulations to control hunting.

So the Great Leap Forward impelled a rapid shift in the Chinese state’s approach to the natural world — one that echoed shifts also under way in the West. Even as the WWF was founded, in the hope of protecting wildlife from Western depredations, new Chinese regulations both acknowledged the value of their natural resources, and also sought to preserve them from exhaustion.

As Songster recounts, a pivotal 1959 policy paper argued further that “rare and precious” species were valuable not just on commercial but also symbolic grounds. These national “monuments” showcased China’s uniqueness — especially the giant panda. Between 1957 and 1982, a total of 23 giant pandas were presented to foreign countries.

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China has continued to industrialise and grow — and the relative balance of geopolitical power has shifted accordingly. Perhaps nothing is more emblematic of once-imperial Britain’s relative decline in that balance, than the 1984 agreement by Margaret Thatcher to hand Hong Kong back to Beijing. But another CCP policy change the same year also reflected China’s growing confidence: the decision that panda diplomacy would henceforth be conducted not via panda gifts but panda leases.

As of 1984, all pandas are the property of the Chinese government. They are sometimes leased to foreign states in exchange for annual fees, but may be recalled at any time. Any baby pandas born to leased pandas are also the property of China. And panda leases serve not just as a vector for overseas diplomacy but also, within Chinese domestic discourse, as proxy for public sentiment concerning international relations. Ya Ya, one of the pandas whose US lease expired this year, occasioned outrage on Chinese social media when images showing her in apparently poor condition were published.

But these gentle creatures have also acquired other, less officially-sanctioned resonance. Pandas are notoriously reluctant to mate in captivity, and the birth in captivity of live panda cubs is a cause for global news headlines. Researchers have offered many explanations for this, including that simply being horny and in proximity to a panda of the opposite sex isn’t enough: pandas have to fancy each other too.

When shipped to Moscow to mate with An An, one of the other panda cubs originally shipped there from China, the WWF poster panda Chi Chi showed no interest in her prospective panda suitor. Instead, she expressed sexual interest in her human male keeper, suggesting that a lifetime in captivity had left her radically confused as to what desire is for.

And it appears that pandas are far from the only species reluctant to mate in captivity. The panda was an effective logo choice for the WWF not just for visual impact, but also because their distinct ecological niche is so obviously vulnerable to habitat destruction as a consequence of modernity. And as has become apparent in several decades of conservation effort, outside that wilderness niche pandas simply do not thrive.

It’s growing increasingly apparent that the extractive, resource-consuming aspect of modernity has a recursive effect on humans too. Over the century of panda diplomacy, rising economic and technological development has been paralleled by falling global fertility rates. Research suggests these phenomena are closely linked. Last year, China’s population began shrinking, too. The reasons for China’s now very low birth rate are complex, but suggested factors broadly resemble those in the developed West, and include expensive housing, social atomisation, and mutually exclusive demands on women to achieve both maternally and professionally.

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Perhaps we could say of high-tech modernity across both East and West that, whereas we have been trying for decades now to protect elements of the natural world from the depredations of modernity, we have been less assiduous about extending similar protection to our own nature. The right to follow in Chi Chi’s footsteps and unmoor sexual desire from reproduction is enshrined as a moral and political desideratum, even as that reproductive end has itself variously been problematised and technologised. Much as with female pandas in captivity, who submit to all manner of invasive fertility-related procedures, human women in low-fertility countries are also now presented with (or exploited by) an ever more invasive battery of scans, studies, and procedures, framed by activists as normal — and with about as much of an impact on overall species fertility as scientists’ efforts with pandas.

It is far from clear whether China will ever resort to the Western strategy of kicking the demographic can down the road, by inviting inward immigration. In the meantime, once-meteoric Chinese growth is likely to level off, making China a less likely future threat to the United States — even as flattening domestic consumption makes wealthy, friendly overseas trade partners ever more appealing. As East and West confront their respective population-related challenges, then, we might read the brief halt and sudden revival of panda diplomacy as mutual acknowledgement that the superpowers probably need one another more than they need a new Cold War.

But if the central demographic challenge is the same for both, it’s far from clear that either has much idea of how to address it.

Back at the very germination of the modern age, in 1440, Thomas à Kempis pointed out that: “Wherever you go, there you are.” We owe most of what we call “civilisation” today to industrial and post-industrial modernity; but we now face the effects of that modernity on our own ability to self-replicate. We cannot, after all, create nature reserves for ourselves.

Manchin’s rejection of the Democrats has been a long time coming. His voting record is complex, diverging from the party line on numerous occasions. A lifetime member of the National Rifle Association (NRA), Manchin opposed the more progressive elements of his party after Sandy Hook. And as one of the few anti-abortion Democrats in Congress, he has consistently voted in favour of restrictions on abortion access. Meanwhile, his support for the coal industry — an important economic driver in his home state and the industry that made him a millionaire before he entered politics — has often put him at odds with their green agenda. He was also the only Democrat to vote in favour of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination in 2018, drawing the ire of many within his party, and he voted with Donald Trump more than 50% of the time.

Manchin’s ideology is consistent, though. It’s grounded in the history of West Virginia, a former Democrat stronghold that has become solidly Republican in recent years. And his conservative bent could be perceived as a survival strategy. After all, he is currently staring down a 55% disapproval rating in West Virginia, as he contemplates seeking another term in the Senate. His opponent is likely to be the state’s Republican governor, Jim Justice, a former conservative Democrat who switched parties. And one does wonder: why doesn’t Manchin jump ship to the Republican Party, given his voting patterns seem slightly more aligned with theirs? Trump, in 2022, actually suggested on Truth Social that Manchin be brought into the GOP.

But Manchin’s comments signal a desire to reject both major parties. In America, there is a large cadre of “politically homeless” voters: roughly 49% of the electorate according to some polling. Where once they might have been drawn to candidates who could see the other side’s point of view, these voters now seem disenchanted with party politics altogether, put off by the extreme fringes of the Republicans and Democrats alike. Manchin is appealing to them.

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While polls show dissatisfaction with candidates within both parties, Manchin’s potential candidacy would inevitably benefit one of them. He could appeal to a critical 1% or 2% in Rust Belt swing states such as Pennsylvania and Michigan, which would probably be enough to tilt the scales in favour of the GOP.

More broadly, his rhetoric is a sign of a shift in American politics. Bipartisanship and consensus decision-making, celebrated ideals for nearly three decades after the end of the Second World War, have lost their lustre, ceasing to animate the base of either party. Marginal struggles currently define internal and external political battles. But Manchin and allies, such as former Democrat Krysten Sinema — now representing Arizona in the Senate as an independent — believe there’s still a silent majority to be found in the centre, one that is indifferent to the culture war that drives the loudest political engagement. 

Manchin’s paradox is that, while the most active voters are increasingly drawn towards the extremes of their respective parties, he is gambling on the centre. While his voting record paints a picture of a moderate Democrat — often erring on the conservative side — this suggestion of a third-party candidacy implies a critical redefinition of his political stance. Instead of being the swing vote within his party, Manchin would be a fulcrum between the two major political forces. Would he survive it?

Much of Manchin’s political career has been characterised by his unusual resilience in the face of the onrushing deep-red political tides in West Virginia. His endurance owes much to his somewhat unconventional stances, which resonate with a Rust Belt populace disenchanted by what they perceive as the Democratic Party’s preoccupation with identity politics at the expense of working-class concerns relevant to their area, such as the protection of jobs in fossil fuel industries.

But is there a national appetite for this brand of centrism? The country is polarised. The Pew Research Center has found that twice as many members of the two main American parties now view their opponents unfavourably, compared to 1994. In a sociopolitical environment where labels — LGBTQIA, America First, MAGA, they/them — have become essential to the identities of young people, not to mention their self-marketing, will there be significant support for a “No Labels” campaign?

Third-party bids have gained some traction in America’s political history. Billionaire Ross Perot’s Reform Party campaign racked up some impressive numbers in 1992 and 1996. But while Perot aimed to transcend partisan politics in order to win, Manchin appears more focused on exerting influence to create a moderate shift in policy. If he runs, he’s more likely to follow in the footsteps of activists such as Green Party nominee Ralph Nader, remembered more for inadvertently tipping the scales in favour of Republican George W. Bush in 2000 than for his actual campaign. And since America today is even more polarised than in the Nineties, ultimately the implications of a third-party bid are more dangerous.

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The mooted “No Labels” party does seem like a hurried experiment in political transcendence, a far too simple answer to the broad discontent with the current political binary. But if Manchin wants to be remembered as the man who shed the shackles of partisanship, this move may tarnish the legacy he has already created for himself. His bold attempt to coax the country towards the centre could end up deepening the divisions he has exposed.

This has been the case with his prior attempts to preserve or create a “centre” on controversial issues. On gun control, Manchin co-sponsored the bipartisan Manchin-Toomey bill following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012, which proposed expanded background checks for gun sales. Seen by much of the Left as an inadequate middle-ground solution, it failed to gain traction. As a result, the United States has been unable to make even minor changes related to background checks, and the two sides have only become more entrenched.

On energy policy, Manchin’s support for the fossil fuel industry is out of step with his party’s support for a progressive “Green New Deal”, while his reluctance to fully endorse the coal industry’s unregulated expansion has drawn ire from the Right. Manchin has recently joined with Republicans to oppose the climate legislation to which he had added a degree of moderation. But in general, seeking the centrist position in America does not lead to a union of the factions; rather, it leaves the centrist isolated, at odds with both sides.

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His campaign would simply highlight the structural flaws of America’s political system, in which centrism can empower extremism. Part of the problem is the dynamics of party primaries. Candidates often find themselves compelled to pander to the ideological extremes to gain the nomination, pushing them away from the centre. Even if they later shift, their original stances are remembered; in the long run, this discourages bipartisan cooperation.

Here is a lesson for moderates, if they really want to effect change: instead of conforming to extremism, they should look to their long-term influence on political norms and the policy-making process, as Manchin at least tried to do prior to signalling his frustration with the Democrats. They need to somehow communicate the importance of pragmatic governance, and the necessity of compromise in a democracy — ideally through political advertising that emphasises the value of bipartisan dealmaking over ideological purity, of “fighting gridlock” and “getting things done”.

It won’t be easy. Divide and conquer has always been a potent strategy for generating enthusiasm, and centrists such as Manchin are working in an atmosphere where both parties are cynically leveraging polarisation. Democrats have recently started funding extreme Republican primary candidates, whom they believe will be easy to beat in the general election. It’s a manoeuvre that, while it may yield short-term electoral gains, could backfire, by enabling candidates with more extreme views to gain power. And, if moderates abandon the major parties, they will only empower these extreme candidates, driving the Democrats and Republicans further and further apart. It would be an ironic outcome for Manchin, who claims to want the parties to come together.

So what is Manchin really trying to achieve? He has been a self-avowed independent within the Democratic Party for years; his last-ditch embrace of a potential “No Labels” movement, then, could be characterised as an act of egoism. At the age of 75, Manchin is probably not seeking political longevity. Rather, “No Labels” feels like a legacy move. Manchin might just be looking back at his long career of crossing party lines, and making a final, and perhaps sincere, plea for American politics to move back to the centre. 

Then again, if he is against the erosion of collective solidarity by personal politics, there would be an irony in him launching a highly individual campaign. There’s no point standing in the ideological centre if you’re there all by yourself.

A survey from the Pew Research Center released last month showed that there is a rapid decline in Catholisism among American Hispanics — tumbling from 67% in 2010 to 46%. “That’s consistent with other Latin American countries, such as Brazil, where large numbers of Catholics have converted to Evangelical Christianity,” says Dr Andrew Chesnut, Professor of Religious Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. The “health and wealth” promises of Pentecostalism in particular are driving people across the continent to Evangelical churches. “The interesting difference between Latin America and the United States,” says Chesnut, “is the percentage of religious ‘nones’, which has tripled to 30 percent in 12 years. In Latin America, they’re only usually in the 12-14 percent range.”

Nones are people who have no faith at all, and they are fast swallowing up white Christian America — now firmly a minority. In 1996, the year Bill Clinton was sworn in for his second term as president, almost 65% of Americans identified as white and Christian. Now, only 44% do. In 1990, only 7% of Americans said that they were nones, but that figure has increased four-fold over the last 30 years, largely because of young people. Today, almost half of Gen Z — young adults born from 1997 onwards — say they have no religion.

For a long time, American exceptionalism saw the United States buck the European trend of secularisation. And faith among Hispanics, who tend to come from more religious backgrounds than white Americans, remained particularly strong. Catholicism was seen, even among the young, as part of their identity — but “the inflexibility of the Church to modernise its dogma and doctrine in terms of blessing, same sex marriage, and female clergy really is culturally out of touch with Millennials and Generation Z”, Chesnut says. High-profile sex scandals have also put people off — too much even for the Latino community’s cultural Catholics. People who once ticked the box identifying as Catholic, even if they weren’t regularly attending, are now firmly in the “none” camp. And Hispanics are now abandoning the faith as fast as the rest of the country.

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Ryan Burge, author of The Nones: Where They Came From, Who They Are, and Where They Are Going, suspects that changes in Hispanic faith have to do with how devout your parents were when they came to the United States. “If they are super devout, you’re more likely to stay Catholic,” he says. “If they really weren’t religious at all, you’re much more likely to become a none.” But there is a third way: “If they’re kind of on the fence about religion, then you might become Evangelical.”

The material promises offered by born-again churches are also attractive. A Pew study in 2014 found that 49% of Hispanics who were raised as Catholics but have become Protestants say that an important factor was finding a church that “reaches out and helps its members more”. Moreover, the prosperity gospel preached in Evangelical churches rewards hard work — a philosophy that often appeals to those who’ve signed up to the American Dream, which reassures them that if they put in the effort, they’ll be rewarded. Faith healing is also an attractive offering, given that health care is usually out-of-reach for working-class people in the United State.

Assimilation is often a primary aim. “We’re seeing a rising number of conservative Hispanics jumping the fence from Catholicism to Evangelicalism, because Evangelicalism is a very American religion,” says Burge. Immigrants to the United States often have more malleable identities, and “becoming an Evangelical is a way to jump into the mainstream of your town or city”, says Burge.   Evangelical Churches are a marker of a new life and new identity. Being born again is both a spiritual and actual experience: you’re baptised as a follower of Jesus, and as an American. Some scholars describe conversion to Evangelical faith as a kind of safety mechanism, stemming from the belief that Hispanic immigrants become more American, and less deportable.

The change in the religious landscape reflects a bigger picture in American politics: the stark, and increasingly pronounced, city-rural divide. The “God Gap” is a part of that: if you’re in a big city,you’re likely to be secular; in a rural area, you’re likely to be church-going — or at least religiously-identifying but not attending. Politically, these religious shifts are beginning to have a real impact: the Democrats are making gains in secularising regions, while the Republicans are on the march in places where religion is on the rise.

Hispanics are increasingly adopting the cultural markers once dominated by white Americans — and with that has come a change in party allegiance. In the 2020 election, Hispanic Evangelicals voted almost 50/50 for Trump and Biden, while two-thirds of Hispanic Catholics voted for their co-religionist Biden. In Hispanic-majority Miami-Dade County, which Hillary Clinton won by 30 percentage points in 2016, Biden won by only seven in 2020.  Even more striking is Texas, long vaunted as a state preparing to turn to the Democrats. This would be electorally disastrous for the Republicans: Texas is the second largest state in the electoral college. But along the Texas-Mexico border, in the Rio Grande Valley, the number of votes for Republicans has jumped astronomically. After losing Starr County, in southernmost Texas, by 60 percentage points to Hillary Clinton in 2016, Donald Trump lost it by just five to Joe Biden in 2020. Next door in Zapata County, which Clinton won by 33 percentage points in 2016, voters flipped entirely for Trump. These are counties that identify as almost entirely Hispanic or Latino — and who have long been assumed to be flag-waving Democrats.

But Hispanics here, unsurprisingly, feel the threat of deportation more keenly than most, given their proximity to the border. That anxiety often manifests as a preoccupation with job security, and one’s place in the community — ideas central to the conservative worldview.

“Hispanics who are conservative culturally, socially and religiously are moving into places around the Rio Grande Valley,” Burge says. “And they’re really changing the political and social culture of those places.” Religiosity, like Republicanism, has massively increased in the region. In 2010, about 33% of Starr County claimed they were part of a religious congregation. By 2020, that number was 73%. Conservative Texas Democratic congressman Henry Cuellar describes the region as “homogenous, deeply religious, pensively patriotic, socially conservative, and it’s hurting economically.” In other words, naturally Republican.

Whether the conservative or the Evangelical turn came first is difficult to say, but they often go hand in hand, motivated by the same feeling: that the liberal, secular world is closing in on people with conservative values. And given the GOP is so clearly losing the demographic battle, it has been willing to accept Hispanics — particularly evangelical Hispanics — as all-American patriots. Though Catholicism has historically been tied to Hispanic identity, for first and second generation migrants who feel compelled to prioritise assimilation over their heritage, a fork in the road is clear: become a non-believing, big-city Democrat, or a small-town Evangelical Republican.

The absence was especially surprising to Furio Tedeschi, the artist who designed the bull. He had submitted his design to Tradestation with “huge, mechanical balls” — only for the firm to neuter it. “Prosperity and wealth shouldn’t have any gender,” a company official explained. It might seem odd that a symbol of the overwhelmingly masculine crypto community — it is estimated that 94% of crypto accounts are owned by men — has been castrated in the name of diversity. But for a product built on faith, appearances matter.

That the price of various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, began a spectacular decline only weeks after the bull was neutered is the kind of irony that crypto-types would otherwise revel in. But as the realities of the “crypto winter” set in, there wasn’t much joy to be had in a community known for its in-joke culture. The collapse of a number of prominent crypto firms, such as FTX, last November saw crypto crashing to lows that hadn’t been seen for years. The price of Bitcoin dropped to $16,000, only a year after it reached a record high of $69,000, seeming to herald the end of a Bitcoin boom.

These rapid fluctuations in crypto prices were keenly felt in the neutered bull’s new home. While Miami might not yet attract as many crypto transactions in dollar volume as San Francisco and New York City — though it is fast gaining on them — it is one of crypto’s undisputed cultural centres, and has the fastest-growing number of tech jobs in the country. Describing the city as one that moves from “from hustle to hustle”, Miami mayor Francis Suarez has repeatedly praised crypto, once saying that it offers a “tsunami of opportunity”. Natural disasters aren’t usually a metaphor leaders reach for when promoting their cities. But in Miami’s high-risk, high-reward culture, where boom and bust cycles are part of doing business, his phrase feels appropriate.

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Suarez has opted to surf the tsunami, using traditional methods to promote crypto business, including a favourable ecosystem of tax breaks and friendly legislation, combined with an attractive lifestyle for workers. These perks have created considerable momentum for firms to move there: investment in Miami-based crypto start-ups jumped from $6 million in 2020 to $745 million just one year later. There has also been a steady stream of Bitcoin parties and conventions, encouraging potential investors to associate crypto with a lavish lifestyle. Indeed, some have had a little too much fun with crypto: last month, the US Securities and Exchange Commission froze $100 million in assets of Miami-based crypto company BKCoin and one of its co-founders, Kevin Kang. Describing it as a Ponzi scheme, in which investor funds were mixed with Kang’s, the SEC alleges that $371,000 alone was spent on sporting tickets, holidays and an apartment in New York City.

There are plenty of reputable crypto enthusiasts who argue that the currency is a hedge against inflation, and a bulwark against corrupt governments. The blockchain ledgers on which it is stored are said to be incorruptible, and the complex mathematical equations required to unlock the coins constrain supply. But these digital assets also undoubtedly attract those looking to launder fiat currency from dubious sources. One report last year found that $8.6 billion was laundered through cryptocurrency in 2021, up by 30% from the previous year. It’s the currency of choice from Mexican drug cartels, who pump about $25 million through it annually, to Russian mafia figures, one of whom was extradited from Greece to the United States last year, charged with a $4 billion laundering scheme.

Miami has, inevitably, seen a number of high profile crypto-related arrests. In January, Anatoly Legkodymov — a Russian national who legally resides in China, operated the crypto exchange Bitzlato out of Hong Kong, and did his work in Miami — was arrested by Florida authorities for running a $700 million “haven” for funds “intended for use in criminal activity”. Months earlier, a respected 76-year-old University of Miami professor of global crime networks was jailed for money laundering. He had been working with Alex Saab, a Colombian national and “super facilitator” for sanctioned countries looking to do business in global markets, who used Venezuelan cryptocurrency Petro Gold for many of the transactions.

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How Miami has come to attract these sorts of international figures is largely a matter of geography and demographics. The city’s culture is inextricably tied to its location in the centre of the Americas. It is closer to many Caribbean nations than to Washington DC, and acts as a transport hub for those travelling between North and South America. It also has one of the highest immigrant populations in the country, whose experiences have probably influenced the city’s general attitude to authority. Cuban émigrés have been arriving steadily since the United States first began overthrowing their governments in the Thirties, and the ascension of Castro in 1959 meant that many new Floridians had a decidedly anti-government bent. In the Seventies and Eighties, while the rest of the world was struggling through oil shock recessions, a flood of cocaine money saw Miami transformed from a tourist outpost into a major metropolis, and a place where prosperity often has shady roots. In the past decade, Miami has become an attractive alternative to London for highly upwardly mobile Russian and Chinese citizens looking for somewhere to make a reliable investment.

But some turn to crypto out of necessity. Of US cities with over 100,000 people, Miami has the largest “unbanked” population; around one in five residents doesn’t have a bank account. This is more likely due to the enormous number of undocumented workers in the city, who live from cash payment to cash payment, than to money-laundering kingpins. And when many traditional money exchanges closed their doors during the pandemic, migrant workers turned to crypto to send back home.

This is where two very different perceptions of crypto intersect: while some Miamians sell it to achieve the good life, others use it to keep themselves and their overseas families alive. And even if some of the world’s shadiest elements are attracted to crypto, so are some of its most influential: giant Silicon Valley VC firm Andreessen Horowitz continues to plump for it; in its recently-released 2023 report, it called for “crypto computers, not crypto casinos”.

Next month, Miami hosts Bitcoin 2023, the annual convention that last year introduced the neutered crypto bull to the world. It has been suggested that the currency, in the intervening 12 months, could become entirely worthless — one website has tracked 473 instances of prominent people falsely declaring it dead. But those who aren’t following Bitcoin’s daily fluctuations may not have noticed that it has quietly risen almost two-thirds since last Christmas. Its association with shady money and macho risk-taking is a symptom of economic malaise rather than a sign that crypto itself is the rot. Crypto is not going anywhere.