Officials, meanwhile, look on them all with scorn. In the Foreign Office, politicians are considered movable — and discardable — pieces of furniture. In a memorable scene from Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey and the Cabinet Secretary discuss reshuffles, complacently agreeing that “power goes with permanence. Impermanence is impotence. And rotation is castration.”

Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, Britain has churned through seven prime ministers, nine defense secretaries, and 11 foreign secretaries. Our elected leaders are rotated so often that no one has the balls left to introduce new ideas. The result? Britain has a monomaniacal, single-issue foreign policy: backing Ukraine in its war against Russia, something it pursues at the expense of practically everything else.

In his first speech as prime minister, Andy Burnham described how he was “acutely conscious” of being Britain’s seventh PM in a decade. To correct that record, he said, “requires my generation of politicians to raise our game”. But here, he faces a considerable challenge. The bureaucrats will have already assumed that he will be replaced in the next three years, and their respective ministers probably sooner.

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Meanwhile, even when they’re in office, our elected leaders appear to have little influence over the direction of policy, canceled out by civil servants who spend most of their time gossiping about them. There is always a creative tension between the inertia of the permanent staff and the energy of elected officials. But the merry-go-round over the past decade has shifted the balance of power decisively towards the gray suits.

In his first statement as Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband spoke of the need to end the war in Iran, bring peace to Israel and Palestine, and stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine. This is exactly what his predecessors would have been told to say by their officials — just keep on fighting to the last Ukrainian in a country which has seen its population halve since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ministers used to arrive loaded with their own ideas. I worked in the Foreign Office for 24 years, and William Hague is the last foreign secretary I recall capable of bending the bureaucratic machine to his will during his four-year tenure. He did this by having a clear vision for what he wanted to achieve, but also by retaining a studied (if aloof) courtesy when working with permanent staff and by deploying well-liked junior ministers like Alastair Burt to help him deliver. I organized the London Conference on Libya for him at five-days notice in 2011, and his showpiece Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative in 2012, just 12 days ahead of time.

Hague also opened 50 new diplomatic missions around the world and boosted the Foreign Office budget by grabbing £140 million of  overseas development funding, recruiting the help of Andrew Mitchell, minister at the now-dissolved Department for International Development. Hague re-opened a foreign language school closed under New Labour, and launched a Diplomatic Academy. Altogether, then, he seized back some control over Foreign Policy from No. 10, following its capture by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell in the aftermath of 9/11.

During those years, the Foreign Office had a renewed sense of purpose; Hague was secure enough in his job to whip the bureaucracy into action, despite efforts by Sir Simon Fraser, then the permanent secretary, to water down his efforts and do things on the cheap. The Foreign Office multi-year budget settlement doesn’t assume the arrival of new ideas; Fraser thought the Prevention of Sexual Violence Initiative was a wasteful diversion of effort. Having forked out for a gleaming new language center, he set up the Diplomatic Academy on a shoestring. I had to beg and borrow money from other government departments to pay £70 million on the 2013 G8 Summit.

Unfortunately, even Hague was castrated in the end, with Foreign Office officials ensuring that Britain was shut out of the French-led Normandy peace process for Ukraine in June 2014. Britain had played a leading role in imposing sanctions on Russia after the annexation of Crimea but while David Cameron hoped that sanctions against Russia would be a temporary measure, officials saw them as the main effort. Now, Cameron had become obsessed with the obviously pointless task of blocking Jean-Claude Juncker from becoming European Commission President, sucking up most of Britain’s diplomatic bandwidth in this failed endeavor.

The French President Hollande had managed to get Presidents Putin and Poroshenko around the table with Chancellor Merkel in order to hammer out a process to resolve the conflict in the Donbas, but the Foreign Office dismissed its importance. Its Russia experts said: “Well, the Americans aren’t touching Hollande’s peace initiative so why should we?”

Britain has shut itself out of efforts at peace in Ukraine ever since. Phillip Hammond simply refused to engage with the Russians directly in diplomacy and the habit of not talking to the Russians stuck, while the Ukraine crisis slowly got worse. with officials coolly in control. During his tenure at King Charles Street, Boris Johnson was quickly dismissed as “not up to the job”, while his successors as foreign secretary have been rated by the extent to which they followed the policy scripts drafted by their officials.

As for Britain’s latest prime minister, a senior Labour insider told me recently that Andy Burnham is “absolutely not a warmonger”. Still, he has since handed over blueprints for British-made components for long-range missiles to Kyiv, even though Zelensky is in deep trouble domestically following a spate of corruption scandals among his inner circle, alongside growing internal repression. Burnham has also backed further deep strikes by Kyiv into Russian territory, even as Ukraine faces the prospects of having its energy infrastructure obliterated over another cold winter, with insufficient air defense to prevent the inevitable. All the while, Burnham has offered to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” at a cost of £4.5 billion per year to British taxpayers.

To his credit, Miliband has now shifted UK foreign policy to take a tougher position towards Israel, starting with his recent sanctioning of trade with West Bank settlers. But I have seen no evidence of any change of tack on the war in Ukraine which, by conservative estimates, has killed or injured over two million people on both sides since 2022.

It is clear to me, then, that Burnham and his government have been given the usual script by his officials — and decided it’s too difficult to change.  To understand why you must understand how the Foreign Office works. That begins with Whitehall’s vast Russia blob. A large cross-Whitehall Russia Unit sits in the Foreign Office in King Charles Street yet, remarkably, it appears unable to come up with new ideas beyond continuing to back Ukraine — then crossing its fingers and hoping for some miraculous breakthrough against Putin.

There are several reasons for this. The main one is that, since 2015, leadership of the Russia Unit has been shared by the Foreign Office and the intelligence community. This followed the creation of a £1.5 billion Joint Security Fund to increase coordination across departmental lines. Of course, our spies conduct vitally important work for this country — but they should be a tool of foreign policy, not its author. Putting them in charge of Britain’s Russia policy has inevitably indulged their self-serving instincts. No enemy means no budget. It’s no coincidence that the 2018 post-Salisbury reflection retreat was held with great hospitality at MI6’s training center at Fort Monckton.

Second, a vast increase in staffing quantity doesn’t equate to quality. When I visited GCHQ in 2017, some of the new staff I met didn’t obviously appear to have any background knowledge or experience on Russia, instead just representing seats to be filled. The same is true in the Foreign Office. New people are shipped in, listen with great admiration to the old sweats in the Eastern Research Group, then quickly toe the party line. There is no critical challenge function.

Added to that, the British press, which is stock full of ex-military and intelligence types, snuffs out any suggestion of engagement with Russia to end the war, which is shouted down as “appeasement”. People who express an alternative view are called out as Kremlin stooges.

Yet, diplomacy isn’t about friendship but rather talking to those with whom you most disagree — ideally before shots are fired but especially when the missile are flying.

Of course, diplomacy is only one arm of foreign policy, alongside warfare and espionage. Yet while the UK has pumped billions into the spying, it has disinvested in diplomats. Hague’s dream of driving up country-specific expertise has long withered on the vine, and there is now a dearth of officers with Russia knowledge. The Foreign Office continues to have a woeful track record in foreign language attainment, including Russian. Speaking foreign languages is increasingly seen as an optional extra, especially at a time when British universities are shutting down foreign-language degree programs. As with country-specific knowledge, so too with diplomatic skills. When I left King Charles Street in 2023, there was still no systematic program of diplomatic skills training.

As I quickly learned from my own time in Moscow, you simply cannot operate effectively out of the British embassy there unless you speak Russian and have some basic skills in talking to people who violently disagree with you. When the Russians  do agree to meetings, their officials will only talk in their native language, even if they are fluent in English. I recall one chap who would batter me with machine-gun Russian, then turn up at residence receptions speaking better English than me. Having kicked out so many of our embassy staff, the Russian state knows full well that any new folk who turn up from London are, more often than not, ill-equipped to do their jobs.

Diplomats also need to get out of their grand embassy building, meet ordinary people, and have tough conversations at the ministries. I often had slanging matches with Russian contacts over vodka yet ended on good terms. Many Brits get disgruntled with disagreement; Russians get disgruntled at dissembling — and suspect you are up to something behind their backs.

There’s a broader point here too. The Russians don’t care if we don’t talk to them or not. Yet out of a sense of self-righteous indignation, and a vastly over-inflated sense of our place in the world, we remain snootily aloof, even as we reduce ourselves to a diplomatic nonentity. I can’t remember a time when Britain has appeared so irrelevant.

The policy of talking about Russia and not to Russia has now been been set in stone since July 2014, an aversion to dialog that has now infected all the major states in Europe, such that no one can see the value in pursuing an end to a war in Ukraine, which is costing us billions and making us less safe. But amid all this, the basic facts remain the same. Heavily indebted and de-industrialized, Britain’s army is at its smallest for 200 years. Burnham can’t even commit to increasing defense spending because the country is skint. More than that, Ukraine cannot win a war against Russia. The state is bankrupt and operates on the basis of payday loans from its European sponsors. Little wonder Zelensky has just asked for another $27 billion from Europe: his ministry of defense has already spent money earmarked for the second half of this year.

Meanwhile, despite the seizure of $300 billion of its foreign exchange reserves in February 2022, Russia has rode high oil prices and now has an additional $420 billion at its disposal, most of that in gold. Its debt is 20% of GDP. Certainly, Russia has suffered petrol shortages following Ukrainian deep strikes, yet it continues to export vast amounts of unrefined crude oil around the world at a time of constrained supply. Ukraine and Europe are both energy dependent, leaving them at the mercy of high prices, shuttering factories from the Midlands to the Ruhr.

At the same time, Russia has built up a formidable industrial base, one that consistently outperforms the US, Britain and Europe combined in munitions production. Britain, of course, has spent decades outsourcing defense production to fat-cat contractors who fleece us and consistently deliver kit that arrives late and often doesn’t work. Graft in Ukraine hardly helps either. Western allies have tipped $350 billion into Ukraine in the hopes of beating Russia, some of which has been stolen by Zelensky’s cronies.

I visited Kyiv several times while stationed at the British Embassy in Moscow and corruption was the issue that ordinary people wanted most to be tackled. Western “support” has not helped Ukraine discover the peace and independence its rapidly shrinking pool of citizens deserve. Two thirds now wanting the war to end, a reversal from demands for the total defeat of Russia four years ago.

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Since we don’t want peace — but are too weak to actually fight Russia directly — economic sanctions have become our principal lever to affect Putin’s thinking. But here, again, British policy simply hasn’t worked. Before anyone accuses me of being a cheese-eating surrender monkey, I’d point out that I personally authorized around half of the UK sanctions against Russia after the war broke out in 2022. At the time, their stated purpose was to encourage “Russia to cease actions destabilizing Ukraine or undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine”. That manifestly hasn’t happened.

To be sure, sanctions have changed the structure of Russia’s economy since 2014. But the moment of peak pressure was between 2014 and 2016, when Russia was hit by the double whammy of sanctions and low energy prices. Since then, Russia has completely reoriented its monetary and industrial policy to embrace a weak ruble as an article of faith, managing inflation while piling up its reserves and prioritizing its state-owned energy and defense monopolies.

Russia’s fortress economy — a mix of monetary austerity and military Keynesianism — means that it can keep on fighting with little risk of running out of money. Its large population also means that Ukraine will run out of men before it does, even as both countries have already suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries. Engaging with Putin to broker peace in Ukraine therefore isn’t weakness: but necessity. Diplomacy isn’t about friendship, it’s about conflict resolution.

The Foreign Office has produced no new ideas to resolve the Ukraine conflict since 2014. If Andy Burnham really wants to pass the “Makerfield test” — ensuring that every government policy helps working people — he might come up with his own ideas on foreign policy: rather than reading the standard script he is given by the Foreign Office mandarins. It’s time for Burnham to grow some foreign policy balls or, even better, ask Ed Miliband to do so.

Over 154 pages, a new report by Anthropic details some of the ways in which its Claude model has been misused over the past several months. With its talk of cyber-attacks, espionage and propaganda, it makes for terrifying reading, especially given how many actors — from Russian hackers to Chinese spies to Iranian propagandists — are now using the technology. As for Anthropic, it is able to monitor and assess how its systems are being used in real time, allowing the firm’s threat-intelligence team to track how Claude is being used.

One of the most eyebrow-raising examples comes from Yemen, particularly striking given the Houthis have established a presence on Perim Island, a strategically important position in the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Control of the island could strengthen the militants’ ability to threaten shipping through this narrow southern gateway to the Red Sea and Suez Canal, the primary maritime corridor linking Asia and Europe.

It’s striking, then, that Anthropic’s team identified a weapons-engineering cell in the north of the country that used Claude to work on three distinct programs, including a guided rocket and a ballistic missile with a range exceeding 2,000 kilometers. Tracking this activity made it possible to reconstruct the militia’s engineering workflows.

To put simply: the Houthis — or their affiliates or hired helpers — effectively used Claude Code as a substitute for software engineers, getting it to help develop guidance, navigation and control systems; integrate an open-source autopilot into a flight computer; tune controls; and even run simulations. Several Claude operations ran at once: one coding, another researching, and a third checking the first agent’s work. This was not mere experimentation by geeks with laptops. After all, it apparently resulted in the test-firing of a guided rocket. When this seemingly failed, the results were quickly plugged back into Claude to diagnose what had gone wrong.

Anthropic says it has no evidence that an operational weapon was ultimately fielded, but the episode exposes an uncomfortable weakness in the way AI safety controls currently work. It is worth noting that Claude would not simply agree to design a missile on request; in fact, Anthropic says its safeguards blocked many of the Houthi cell’s requests. Still, they did not block all of them. By disguising the purpose of individual requests, and distributing the work across multiple sessions, the engineers were able to bypass controls.

Next stop: Iran. Here, we’re shown evidence of how Claude has been used to support propaganda, espionage and domestic repression. Again, this was not simply a matter of asking a chatbot to knock out a few inflammatory posts. Anthropic describes three operations in which Claude helped construct the machinery of an influence campaign: including writing campaign manuals; designing fake online personas; and compiling databases of people and organizations to target.

In one example, official intelligence bulletins were fed into Claude and transformed into content for different audiences — from Farsi to Arabic, Urdu to English — with the tone shifting alongside the language.

Iran also used Claude to disguise government narratives as the work of foreign writers. One network produced material intended for more than 100 online Iranian channels, including ones linked to the IRGC. More than that, Anthropic found evidence that Iranian propaganda was being camouflaged, falsely attributing arguments and findings to respected Western institutions like CSIS or the Brookings Institute.

More specific examples of Iranian AI-built propaganda are just as disturbing. Tehran-linked actors have been using Claude to build detailed profiles of hundreds of Israelis, and members of the Jewish diaspora, installing malicious software to steal people’s usernames, passwords and other login details. Elsewhere, Claude built a system to track US naval forces, securing personnel information from military photographs, among other sources.

The implications here are stark. Iran is hardly a superpower — and the Houthis certainly aren’t either — yet AI allows both to develop systems that would once have taken armies of engineers, programmers, analysts and linguists. That, in turn, opens the door to further disruption by non-state actors, causing chaos on the cheap. If the war in Ukraine shows how drones and other simple gadgets can nonetheless hamstring a well-armed opponent, AI could now do the same for espionage, cyber-warfare, propaganda and weapons development.

It’s telling, here, that even serious powers are learning these lessons too. After all, Anthropic’s tools have also been extensively used in Russia, despite the latter already boasting a formidable espionage apparatus of its own. That, however, hasn’t stopped Moscow from using Anthropic’s tech to make its activities better, faster and harder to tackle. That’s clear enough in the case of Midnight Blizzard, a hacking group closely linked to, or indeed part of, Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service.

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In practice, the hackers seemingly used Claude to make phishing attacks more convincing, while also helping them break into computer systems more effectively. For instance, hackers used the AI to double-check whether security software had spotted newly installed malware and, if it had, rewrite the code and try again until it slipped past the defenses. These tools were then deployed against a swathe of targets outside Russia: including government ministries, intelligence and defense bodies, think-tanks, and more. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Ukraine and its drone industry feature prominently.

It has been fascinating, too, to see Claude turning up in the toolkit of another major power: China. Again, the examples here are remarkable in their scope, with an outfit likely based in central China using Claude to spy on roughly 50 organizations worldwide, spanning industries from energy and healthcare to finance and technology.

One obvious question is why China would plump for the foreign-made Claude, not least given the People’s Republic has DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi and other domestic AI tools to choose from. Though Anthropic’s report does not address this, the obvious explanation is that, for some jobs — not least a Chinese police-surveillance project — China thought Claude was the best option: particularly for coding, technical research, and coordinating complicated tasks.

According to Anthropic’s report, Chinese companies have also attempted to scale and distill Claude’s capabilities. Again, China hardly lacks engineers, data or computing power. But, just as a pace-setter is invaluable in a marathon, so too can Anthropic be exploited by its rivals, another reason to doubt Trump’s latest claims.

Nevertheless, it would be a stretch to conclude, as Trump has done, that America is winning, let alone has “won”, the AI race. If anything, indeed, the episode illustrates the peculiar nature of that contest. American companies may build the most capable models — but once those capabilities exist, the US’s adversaries can use them to their own advantage.

In a broader sense, meanwhile, these varied use cases put a subtler spin on all that breathless talk of AI collapse. The technology has hardly invented espionage, or propaganda, or ballistic missiles. But it is reducing the amount of expertise, labor and time required to do them all. Whatever the claims of looming extinction, the technology is being used, in nefarious ways, by a variety of flesh-and-blood actors right now. Rather than mass suffering and death, we should perhaps be more immediately worrying about our credit-card details being sold and our accounts drained — not by AI agents, but by human criminals a lot like us.

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In an open letter published around the same time as his company’s report, Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, seems to acknowledge that the threat architecture has changed — and fast. Building AI too quickly is dangerous, he writes, but failing to build it risks placing the most powerful technology of the age “in the hands of authoritarian powers”. Any attempt to slow AI and tech development in the US is a threat: if the democratic world slows down, Amodei argues, “CCP-associated projects will pull ahead, creating significant national security risk”.

Among other measures, Amodei is therefore demanding tighter restrictions on the sale of advanced AI chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China; a crackdown on chip smuggling and remote access to overseas data centers; and measures to stop Chinese companies distilling the capabilities of American frontier models. If these measures work, Amodei adds, they could “widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3-5 years.”

Seen in another light, though, Amodei’s proposals look a little more complicated. As CEO of a company preparing one of the largest flotations in history, arguing that its technology is so dangerous that the government needs to intervene in the market around it is unusual. He wants tighter controls on advanced chips; stronger restrictions on the dissemination of frontier capabilities; measures to stop competitors catching up; and government assistance to overcome antitrust problems. In all, it looks like a bid towards establishing a monopoly, rather than simply a concern with the consequences of new technologies. The longer the furor over the monopoly persists, anyway, the longer foreign misuse of Claude will remain obscured: to the West, if not its enemies.

This is a field that is moving extraordinarily fast, reason enough to take the warnings seriously. But the last few days have raised more questions than they have answered: about how immediate the dangers really are, who should decide how quickly AI develops, and about where safety and national security end and commercial self-interest begins. The risks are plainly enormous, as are the opportunities. What is less clear is whether we are witnessing genuine panic among those closest to the technology, or the opening moves in a struggle over who gets to control it. It may well be both.

***

This article was adapted from the Global Threads Substack.

Compared to the election of 2026, the difference is like night and day. Though 2006 was, in essence, a true watershed election, one that ended an entire political era, the political rhetoric of the day hardly reflected it. Back in those days, the campaign saw genuine debates about the policy differences between the major parties, as the Moderates, restyled the “New Moderates” by their then-leader, angled to make the case that Sweden’s old social-welfare model had become stultified and unresponsive, and that the Social Democrats themselves, so used to automatically gliding into power every election, were unwilling to reform. The most famous Moderate slogan from that election was “Det Nya Arbetarpartiet” — literally branding themselves as Sweden’s new (and only) working-class party.

Today, by contrast, elections in Sweden bear increasing resemblance to the electoral process of the United States, right down to the political rhetoric used by both sides. In 2026, after all, both political blocs were eager to dub this election the most important, most critical, most life-and-death election in history. If the evil Right-wingers won, fascism and darkness would descend on all and sundry, and there wouldn’t even be a Sweden left come 2030. If the crazed leftist Islamo-Marxists won, meanwhile, tens of millions of immigrants would descend on the country; no election would ever be winnable again due to changed demographics; being heterosexual or white would soon be punishable by death; and Sweden would shortly become Europe’s first Islamic emirate.

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Of course, the problem here is that the “evil Right-wingers” have been in power for the last four years. Despite some internal drama, the four parties that make up the so-called “Tidö government” — the Moderates, the Liberals, the Christian Democrats and the Sweden Democrats — have ruled the country largely without incident, and certainly not with jackboots sounding in the distance. Some things, like food-price inflation, have certainly got worse, but it’s hard to blame that on any specific policy. Meanwhile, big planks of the 2022 election, like massively expanding Sweden’s fleet of nuclear power plants, have quietly been thrown overboard in the last few years. But, again, there is no reason to think anything would have been different had the so-called “Red-Green coalition” been in power instead.

Certainly, it’s unsurprising that electoral participation actually plummeted this time round. The figures, with turnout in the eighties, would, of course, be impressive in many other countries. But for ultra-democratic Sweden, this is one of the lowest figures since the Second World War. The point, of course, is these figures hit up against the electoral rhetoric. If the future really was at stake, and this really was the last election before migrants or fascists destroyed the state, why did fewer people than ever bother to vote?

The answer is probably structural. In Sweden, just like in America, the louder the pundits’ voices, the less elections actually seem to matter in terms of hard policy. Nobody talked about the looming end of the Swedish democratic system or nation in 2006, but the choices on offer were actually meaningfully different. Today, though, those meaningful differences are becoming rarer and rarer. Consider the American example: as the Trump campaign put it in the lead-up to the 2024 election, a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote for sending America’s sons and daughter to war against Iran, and a vote for ruinous price inflation and unaffordable gas at home. To be fair, that description is probably true as far as politics under a Kamala Harris presidency would have turned out. Unfortunately, the idea that Trump was against these things turned out to be a huge lie. No matter which side you picked, the end result was the same.

This dynamic seems to have spelled the end of the current Tidö government. It came into power with much fanfare, promising a drastic reduction of immigration. Yet critics are today quick to point out that little has changed in terms of migrants granted citizenship. And, indeed, even as a government of the Right looks slated to be replaced by a government of the Left, the chances of anything meaningfully changing in the other direction look very slim as well. The number of granted asylum applications may have diminished, after all, yet other forms of migration — for family reunification or labor — have picked up the slack. Other policy differences between the political blocks, notably attitudes toward Natos, have been retired too. One way or another, business as usual looks set to continue.

One doesn’t need a crystal ball to make that prediction in 2026: the general trend in Europe is that little will change whoever you vote for. Once again, that’s clear on demographics. Boris Johnson promised to cut down on immigration: what he delivered was the “Boriswave”. Giorgia Meloni, the current Italian prime minister, belongs to a party that traces its history back to the Italian fascists. Yet despite these august credentials, Meloni’s tenure in power has seen her quietly increase migration. The structural reasons for this aren’t hard to understand: Italy’s demographics are terrible and the country has long been plagued with financial woes. No matter how much Meloni might rage against immigration rhetorically, her deeds aren’t particularly different from anyone else. Perhaps a figure to Meloni’s Right — such the former army officer Roberto Vannacci — would finally change course if voted into power. But the question one has to ask here is simple: why didn’t Meloni do it?

Perhaps our political classes have simply given up because the problems are too intractable. It wouldn’t exactly be shocking if that was the case, and it would mean that America and Europe are in the same boat. Consider the fact that, less than two years ago, the second Trump presidency promised to fix the deficit, reindustrialize America, and cut huge amounts of waste from the budget. Back then, DOGE was at the top of the news cycle, for good and for ill. Today, that organization no longer even exists. Americans, after trying to fix the national debt or stop the forever wars in the Middle East, simply gave up. It was too hard to change anything meaningful. The same might be said of the Europeans and migration: trapped by the remorseless logic of globalization and with native birthrates that simply refuse to go up. Amid these seemingly intractable challenges, why not grant another few thousand visas? Voters are perhaps to blame here too, unwilling to countenance much change, whatever they might claim in vox pops.

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Whatever the cause of this malaise, in it we can spot the paradox of European politics in the 21st century. We can all clearly see that monumental, historical changes are happening. Wars and energy shocks rage all around us, deindustrialization and demographic problems keep getting worse and worse, and yet everyone seems too afraid to do much beyond shouting, with the rhetorical temperature seemingly rising in inverse proportion to actual policy solutions. But as the American economist Herbert Stein put it, things that cannot go on forever simply won’t. If fixing pensions or finding a new geopolitical strategy or addressing the deficits is too hard for anyone to make the attempt, there will eventually come some sort of crisis that forces the change that politicians have been avoiding.

Unlike 2006, the election of 2026 was heralded the most important Swedish election of our lifetimes  — if not the most important election ever. Every election these days seems to be the most important election ever, of course, and just as in America or the United Kingdom, the more important an election is, the less anyone expects anything to actually change. But as the Middle East burns and an energy crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Seventies approaches, the age of business as usual may be ending sooner than many people think.