Over May and June, Europeans have experienced two record-breaking heatwaves just a couple of weeks apart. Across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Southern England, temperatures reached 5-12°C above seasonal averages. Indoors, people are not doing better. Approximately 45% of urban European regions are experiencing levels of indoor Wet-Bulb Globe Temperature, a measure of the body’s ability to cool itself. 

In Europe, this is the most severe heatwave ever recorded. In 2003, the first major heatwave of this century, daytime heat like this would still have been ten times less likely than today, while nighttime temperatures such as this summer would have been more than 100 times less likely in 2003. The climate baseline has shifted. Similar circulation patterns to the ones described below have historical analogues, but now it produces significantly hotter temperatures than it did in the mid-20th century. Europe has no choice but to adapt.

Why Europe?

As Europeans endure yet another week of record-breaking temperatures, while searching for ways to cool off, they must have asked themselves more than once, “Why?” Europe is sitting at the intersection of several independent physical processes, all of which happen to be pushing in the same direction. These phenomena happen in a broader context of a planet that is experiencing an increase of the average temperature: +0.27° C per decade. Human-caused climate change makes every heatwave stronger and more likely.

Europe’s proximity to the Arctic is a relevant factor for what is happening there. The region, covered with snow and glaciers, is warming at a rate that is at least three times greater than the global average. This is called Arctic amplification. It’s driven by the reduction of the albedo (which means, from Latin, whiteness) of the region. Why is the color of the region so relevant to temperature increase? For the same reason we would rather wear a white shirt on a hot summer day instead of a black one. To put it simply, we prefer to reflect the light (i.e. the heat) instead of absorbing it. The same principle applies in the Arctic, at planetary scale: As the white snow and ice melt, they reveal darker surfaces underneath, such as ocean or bare ground, which absorbs more solar energy. The more it absorbs heat, the more it increases its temperature and leads to further melting, in a self-reinforcing feedback loop. 

Because of the increasing Arctic temperature, the temperature difference between the Arctic and the European continent is gradually narrowing. Part of the scientific community thinks that this has serious consequences on the mechanism that allows Europe to have a temperate climate. Usually, the polar jet stream, a narrow band of fast-moving air at 8–12 kilometers and up, flows because of the temperature contrast between cold Arctic air to the north and warmer air to the south. It’s like Europe is sitting in a sushi conveyor belt, waiting for all the kinds of Japanese dishes to be served. 

Whether Europe likes the dish or not is not really a problem. The positive aspect of this is the fact that it flows, giving the spot to the next one. No matter if the belt (i.e., the jet stream) will bring a wet spell or a cold snap; none of it will last too long. But if the belt gets stuck, Europe will be forced to eat the dish that it has in front of it, whether it may be a bluefin tuna nigiri or a mayo California roll. That’s the problem with the jet stream slowing down: a heat dome stays over a region for days or weeks rather than moving on. This structure is called Omega block because it resembles the shape of the uppercase Greek letter omega, Ω, with the “hot dome” centered over Europe flanked by two lows.

Beyond the influence of air currents, usually Europe also benefits from the ocean currents’ influence. Indeed, Europe sits at the terminus of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which is a system of ocean currents that normally transports enormous amounts of heat from the tropics northward. Essentially it is another conveyor belt. It is a mitigating factor for Europe’s climate. AMOC was the main reason why a city like Paris had historically much milder summers than Moscow, which is at the same latitude, but without the maritime Atlantic influence. But AMOC is , and as it does, European summers start behaving more like continental ones, but on a warmer baseline.

Why is cleaner air making things worse?

A curious factor in Europe’s accelerating warming is, paradoxically, its cleaner air. Over the last decades, Europe decreased its air pollution, but this came with a cost. Sulfate and nitrate aerosols from pollution made clouds more reflective, casting sunlight back to space and ultimately shielding the region from the warming. After Europe cleaned up its air (for good public health reasons), this accidental cooling shield was removed, unmasking extra warming that was there all along due to greenhouse gases.

The ocean tells a version of the same story. In 2020, new international rules slashed the sulfur content allowed in ship fuel, and cargo vessels crossing the North Atlantic and Mediterranean suddenly stopped seeding the sky above their wakes with sulfate haze. from 2023 and 2024 point to this cleanup as a likely contributor to the unusually fast warming now showing up in both basins.

Why is Europe so vulnerable?

“In the European region, heat stress is the leading cause of climate-related death in the region,” WHO Regional Director Dr. Hans Kluge. Why is Europe so vulnerable? According to World Weather Attribution, heatwaves already cause more in Europe than all other natural hazards combined. Air conditioning is not widespread in the continent (only 20% of European homes have it, compared to roughly 90% in the United States) because it is simply not accustomed to such oppressive heat. Schools, hospitals, transport: They are all designed for a different climate. Europe’s ageing population is another factor to consider in order to get a sense of the extent of the perils of this new normal climate.��

This situation is deepening the existing socioeconomic inequalities, as vulnerability is higher for those with uneven access to air conditioning or heat-resilient housing, particularly for elderly people living alone, homeless populations and migrants. Moreover, outdoor workers, particularly in construction and agriculture, are at high risk for heat-related injuries.

The immediate future offers little reassurance. Europe has already absorbed two distinct heat episodes — one in late May, one beginning in mid-June — with barely a week of relief between them. This back-to-back structure is itself significant. Recovery time matters as much as peak temperature, because soils, buildings and human bodies accumulate heat across successive events. A landscape that never fully cools becomes, with each new episode, progressively more vulnerable to the next. Whether further episodes strike in July and August is not something physics can predict precisely. What it can say is that the atmospheric conditions favoring these events are not going away. 

Due to global warming, these very high temperatures are now expected regularly during the summer months in many European capitals. What was a once-in-a-century event is becoming decadal, then annual. This can lead to a massive disruption of the healthcare system. During the summer of 2022, more than 60,000 people across Europe died as a result of extreme heat. Even in the following, significantly cooler summer, over 47,000 heat-related deaths were recorded. A toll running into the thousands only a few weeks into summer 2026 fits a worsening trend. According to , by 2050, with no further adaptation, this could rise to 120,000 heat-related deaths every year in the Region.

Moreover, the sharp rise in electricity demand — driven by the increasingly widespread use of air conditioning to cope with the heat during these weeks of intense heat — has put Europe’s energy infrastructure under severe strain. Belgium is a case in point: Electricity prices hit a above 1,000 euros per megawatt-hour at sunset as solar output dropped just as demand was still running high.��

The irony of this feedback loop is evident: cooling demand drives fossil fuel consumption, which drives further warming. This is clearly not a once-in-a-lifetime event. Europeans must now contend with a hotter Europe, one that is here to stay. Infrastructure must adapt, or else more Europeans will suffer.

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That’s exactly what happened in 2017 when Emmanuel Macron sneaked through the crowd of traditional parties and groupings to face off in the final round against Marine Le Pen, head of the extreme right-wing Rassemblement National (National Rally [RN]). She inherited the mantle from her more extreme father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, a scrappy politician execrated by many for his occasional outbursts of antisemitism and his sentimental nostalgia for Nazi rigor. Under Marine’s milder tone of leadership, over the past two decades the RN has slowly gained traction among the electorate, especially in rural areas. It currently holds the most parliamentary seats in the National Assembly.

In a lengthy unfolding judicial drama, a court decided, somewhat ambiguously, to end the suspense about whether Marine — who had been declared ineligible for a period of five years — should be allowed to run. It left the door open for her to declare her candidacy.

In the following exchange, provoked by American political scientist Ian Bremmer’s of Marine Le Pen’s decision to run for the presidency despite her criminal conviction, three observers of French politics — Flavius Mihaies, Peter Isackson and Olivier Lavinal — share their feverish thoughts about what this means and where it might lead.

Flavius opens by locating what Bremmer’s analysis leaves out

Bremmer’s achievements are many, and his Eurasia Group was where a few of 51�Թ� Editor-in-Chief Atul Singh’s and my Oxford classmates aspired to work. Bremmer also began his straight-talk, casual-style video blog around the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which I thought was a clever format: short, to the point, engaging, if not entertaining, thanks to his slightly buffoonesque mannerisms — as if Guido from Italian actor and screenwriter Roberto Benigni’s had a baby with Oxford Analytica.

But it also became painfully obvious that, like many of his peers in the Western intelligentsia, he was unable to widen his intellectual or cultural aperture enough to understand the conflict from outside the Washington-London axis — a paradox given his company’s name. So, we were left with the buffoonesque only. Fortunately, we had 51�Թ� to lean on.

Something similar is happening here. Bremmer misses the political meaning of Marine Le Pen’s candidacy. The keyword missing from Ian’s analysis is “sovereignty.”

Ms. Le Pen speaks to many French aspirations for regained sovereignty. Yet that word does not appear anywhere in Ian’s analysis. As for the claim that her name still carries the shadow of her father Jean-Marie — the party’s founder, whose open antisemitism and xenophobia still alienate many older conservatives — that may well be true. But an equally important question is whether she can inspire sufficient confidence that she can shift the perceived or real center of French government decision-making from Brussels back to Paris. That, in part, may determine whether she can finally break through her alienation of those older conservatives.

Likewise, while Ian argues that the criminal conviction poised to energize her base will repel the traditional-right voters she needs to convert in a runoff, many French, in fact, see that conviction through another lens entirely — another keyword absent from Ian’s analysis: lawfare.

And the reason a Le Pen–Mélenchon runoff is a credible scenario is precisely that both candidates are competing for the same mantle of sovereignty. Whether either can credibly convince voters that they have the capacity to move the center of gravity of French decision-making back from Brussels to Paris will, in part, determine the outcome of the election. So it is not the extremes closing in on a hollow center, as Ian argues, but two rival claimants to the same sovereigntist mantle.

Peter agrees, then turns to why the French public is so poorly equipped to judge between them

I agree with Flavius’s take, but I will add this. In the average Frenchman’s mind, there is absolute confusion about what politics is in France today. At the moment, the Marine drama is part of an entertainment cycle. Most people are clear about which politicians they hate, though not very clear about why they hate them other than it seems to be the thing to do among friends.

There’s a good reason for the confusion. Nobody knows what any of the issues are, which means that everything will depend on the perception of the state of the economy next spring.

The RN has no program, but neither does anyone else — except Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (France Unbowed), which everyone outside of his party, especially the Socialists (his allies in the 2024 Nouveau Front Populaire), has been conditioned to hate. This is because of Mélenchon’s overweening personality, to say nothing of the fact that he’s far more articulate than any of the established party candidates.

Add to that the fact that Europe is in a deep crisis that its current leaders refuse to acknowledge as they cling to the nostalgia of living together as a happily disunified group under the protection of the Lord of the Castle in Washington. And what a Lord he is this time around.

The media, including Le Monde, which was once the lighthouse of France, have for at least the last ten years focused on making all the issues unintelligible and reminding people that the only thing of interest, apart from inflation, is the latest pedophile or domestic murder story, natural or unnatural catastrophe — devastating fires for the moment — or record-breaking canicule, reporting the climate crisis as a weather crisis. France is in a state of induced incapacity to think and articulate its real problems.

Now the one wild card nobody mentions, because they have no means of making sense of it, is former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. I can imagine a scenario similar to Macron in 2015, who had no party and no serious public image. Worse, he came to the fore as a member of former French President François Hollande’s team. It was the incoherent behavior of the traditional parties that opened the door to Macron’s candidacy. And he won because — and this has always been my opinion — a Le Pen, Jean-Marie or Marine, can inch towards 50% but will never cross the finish line, for multiple reasons.

But given the extreme state of confusion, even that principle may not hold. We’re in for a roller-coaster ride.

Olivier joins, endorsing most of the diagnosis while sharpening one point and contesting another

What a refreshing exchange of views. Refreshing because it is intelligent. I agree with Flavius and most of what Peter said, including on Le Monde. I have one comment and one point of disagreement.

My comment is about the power of the anti-system candidates: in a chaotic environment devoid of strong political direction, the tighter the system — media, justice, and so on — draws the noose, the more popular these candidates become. To an extent, US President Donald Trump illustrated this before and beyond anyone else; his strength grew with the attacks. Personally, I don’t believe that Le Pen will face Mélenchon next year. But, for the first time, I believe that Le Pen may have a chance to win it all.

My point of disagreement with Peter concerns de Villepin. While I share Peter’s initial enthusiasm and was very interested in de Villepin’s coming out last year, I don’t think he will hold the distance. He is already showing signs of loss of momentum. His positioning is smart, and he is eloquent. But, while different, Macron’s approach to power capture is outdated now. Dominique de Villepin will have a hard time personifying novelty and staying the course without the support of powerful stakeholders. And the political parties are still very much alive. 

Peter takes the objection seriously, and answers it with precedent rather than conviction

I take your point about de Villepin and consider it the reasonable default position.

I think it remains feasible by appealing to precedent. Ten months before the 2017 election, Macron was a political cipher, a non-entity. It was former Prime Minister François Fillon’s that changed the entire equation, opening a pathway for an unknown without a party.

Macron eventually won because the traditional blocs had fallen into a state of total inanition. He appeared to represent a different approach, Jupiterian if you like, possibly worth experimenting with, whereas France was not prepared for experimenting with someone called Le Pen. De Villepin may be planning a Macron-style scenario. On the other hand, I don’t see how he could get the media support Macron got ten years ago. The Nouvel Obs rapidly developed a crush on Macron. There is a serious, and I think justified, resurgence of Gaullism, as evidenced by French diplomat, writer and director Antonin Baudry’s two-part on wartime De Gaulle.

Yes, there’s the martyrdom factor in favor of Le Pen, but the ankle bracelet could also, just because of the symbolism, have the opposite effect.

My real point is that there are so many unknowns, including geopolitical earthquakes that normally don’t send tremors into national elections but this time could. Even the November mid-terms in the US will be a factor. I’d hate to be a bookie required to put odds on anybody or any scenario.

Finally, just to highlight the level of absurdity of a situation in which the electorate is condemned to live in the darkness of a world that evokes Ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s cave, where what passes for reality appears only as a two-dimensional projection, I offer this quote from English journalist Thomas Fazi on the state of European political culture today. Referring to the continent’s leadership, he :

[M]ost Europeans appear entirely oblivious to the fact that an undeclared war is being waged against a nuclear power in their name — and that with every new escalation their leaders are gambling that Moscow will simply go on absorbing the blows forever.

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King of the North challenges London’s political orthodoxy

Jenkins believes that Burnham stands apart from recent British prime ministers because of his background and his political experience. Rather than emerging through Westminster, Burnham spent nearly a decade as mayor of Manchester, where he developed a policy platform centered on stronger local government, public investment and regional empowerment. As Jenkins puts it, Burnham is “very much unlike his predecessors” because of his biography, political path and policy agenda.

Singh places this argument in historical context, noting that Britain has produced several prime ministers from modest backgrounds, including Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Keir Starmer. Even so, Burnham’s rise from Manchester rather than Westminster remains unusual.

Additionally, Singh and Jenkins explore Burnham’s working-class upbringing, his Catholic background and his experience as the first member of his family to attend university. Unlike most recent prime ministers, Burnham is a Cambridge graduate. These experiences, together with his years outside what he calls “the Westminster bubble,” allow him to connect with voters who feel ignored by Britain’s political elite.

Burnham’s personal story has appeared to resonate with working-class voters who have defected from Labour during the Brexit era. His struggles with what he later described as imposter syndrome reinforce an image of a politician who personally understands the struggle of moving up in society.

New Manchesterism and break with New Labour

The conversation turns to Burnham’s governing philosophy, which he calls Manchesterism. Singh explains that the original 19th-century Manchester School championed free trade and laissez-faire economics, whereas Burnham has repurposed the term to describe a more interventionist approach with more government involvement. However, New Manchesterism involves devolving power away from Westminster to local bodies in the UK.

Jenkins highlights several reforms Burnham introduced as Mayor of Greater Manchester, including bringing buses back under public control, capping fares, improving regional transport and advocating greater investment in technical education and council housing. He argues that Burnham’s visible improvements, such as Manchester’s bright yellow buses, demonstrated that the government could still deliver practical results at a time of widespread political cynicism.

Singh agrees that Burnham deserves credit for improving regional planning and transport integration but says that Manchester’s wider revival also reflected broader economic forces. Foreign investment, growth in technology and life sciences, sovereign wealth funding in sports a la Manchester City, similar investments in real estate that have lowered rents compared to London, and the city’s expanding knowledge economy have all contributed to the city’s resurgence. Burnham successfully “rode a wave” of economic transformation while also helping shape it.

Much of the discussion contrasts Burnham’s priorities with those of former Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair recently argued that Labour should focus primarily on artificial intelligence, national competitiveness and Britain’s role in the global economy. Burnham instead emphasizes inequality, local communities and rebuilding public trust from the ground up.

Jenkins states that Burnham represents one of the first major center-left leaders to develop a comprehensive response to the populist politics that emerged after Brexit and Donald Trump’s election. Rather than dismissing those voters, Burnham seeks to address the economic frustrations and regional inequalities that fueled their dissatisfaction.

Critics question Burnham’s consistency, pointing out that he previously opposed devolution when he was part of the Westminster bubble before opportunistically embracing them when he became a mayor. Even so, Singh and Jenkins agree that Burnham has fundamentally shifted Labour’s emphasis away from Westminster and toward local communities. His proposal to devolve greater authority to cities and regions reflects both practical experience and a broader political strategy.

A difficult inheritance and Burnham’s big test

Despite Burnham’s popularity, Britain faces severe problems. Singh outlines a daunting economic landscape that includes high public debt, persistent fiscal deficits, deteriorating infrastructure and mounting welfare costs. Burnham inherits what he calls a “poisoned chalice” after years of economic stagnation and institutional decline.

Jenkins observes that many important questions remain unanswered. Burnham has spoken extensively about local government, housing, transport and vocational education but far less about national economic management or foreign policy. Whether Manchesterism can successfully expand from governing a city to governing an entire country remains uncertain.

Singh and Jenkins further examine Burnham’s dispute with Blair over Labour’s future direction. As noted earlier, Blair and Burnham have different visions of the future. The former prescribes a top-down approach to drag the UK to the heart of the global economy while the latter pushes for a bottom-up approach that puts communities first. Clearly, Blair and Burnham not only have policy disagreements but also fundamentally different worldviews.

Singh and Jenkins go on to place Burnham within the bigger picture of Anglo-American politics. Singh compares Burnham’s rise with earlier political realignments led by Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Blair in the days before the populism of Brexit and Trump. Burnham is now attempting to define the next phase of that political cycle by offering a center-left alternative based on local empowerment instead of more globalization.

Neither speaker sees an easy path ahead. Jenkins believes Burnham is an exceptionally skilled politician who has successfully navigated both local and national politics, though he stresses that success in office will require considerable luck alongside political talent. Singh is more pessimistic, arguing that Britain’s fragmented political landscape and mounting economic pressures make lasting success unlikely regardless of who occupies Downing Street.

Burnham has already altered the terms of Britain’s political debate. Whether Manchesterism ultimately reshapes the country or becomes another short-lived experiment will depend not only on Burnham’s leadership but also the larger economic, political and geopolitical forces no one really controls.

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After a poor showing at the local elections, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer is increasingly vulnerable. Lying in wait is Andy Burnham, the mayor of Manchester known as the King of the North. Burnham has just won a by-election to parliament, clearing his path to 10 Downing Street.

A shallow victory masks a deeper crisis

At first glance, Labour’s 2024 election victory appeared overwhelming. The party won 411 seats out of 650 in the House of Commons after the Conservatives had secured 365 seats in 2019, breaching Labour’s fabled red wall in the North. Yet it was a shallow victory. The number of votes went down, even as seats went up, suggesting that Labour’s mandate was far weaker than its parliamentary majority implied.

Starmer entered office with a reputation as an honest, decent and hardworking public servant, and an excellent lawyer. What he lacked, however, was vision, direction, agenda, policies and governing philosophy. Like former prime minister Rishi Sunak, Atul says, he displayed the “charisma of a dead mouse,” combined with U-turns and damaging lapses in judgment that quickly undermined public confidence in his leadership.

Almost immediately after Starmer took office, his blunders reinforced that perception. The decision to scrap a popular winter fuel handout for pensioners provoked an immediate backlash. He also admitted accepting free clothing and football tickets from wealthy donors, damaging the image of integrity that had helped bring Labour to power. The appointment of Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US revived old controversies when it came to light that the “Dark Lord,” a nickname for Mandelson, was close to infamous sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

For all his faults, Starmer had some genuine achievements. He helped steer international support for Ukraine after US President Donald Trump largely withdrew American backing. Starmer also worked to position Britain for a leading role in the AI revolution. Importantly, he brought net immigration down from the record levels that had fueled support for the populist right. 

Broken Britain looks to Burnham

Starmer’s governing philosophy rested on a simple proposition: “Tories were responsible for all problems in the UK.” Yet Britain’s malaise cannot be pinned on the sins of one party. Broken Britain has endured years of economic stagnation, strained public services and declining confidence in political institutions. As veteran journalist Andrew Neil observed, the country has been by a “parade of mediocrities.”

Political instability has become the norm. Britain had five prime ministers in 37 years and then cycled through seven in ten years, leaving successive governments focused on surviving rather than governing. As Atul puts it, living in Britain today is “like watching the Romans turn into Italians.” One can see a slow erosion of national confidence rather than a dramatic collapse of the country.

These pressures on the country have exposed Labour’s internal contradictions. Labour presides over an unwieldy coalition of liberal and left-leaning middle classes, working-class white voters and minorities, which now comprise mainly Muslims. Holding together such a broad alliance becomes increasingly difficult as economic pressures and cultural divisions deepen.

Against that backdrop, attention has shifted to Burnham. Mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017 to 2026 and the member of parliament for Leigh from 2001 to 2017, Burnham served in several cabinet positions under Gordon Brown, ending up as Secretary of State for Health from 2009 to 2010. 

Burnham identifies as a socialist and is associated with the soft left faction of the Labour Party. He also presents himself as a politician guided by faith. A Catholic like former prime ministers Boris Johnson and Tony Blair, he attended a Catholic school and has said that “Catholic social teaching underpins my politics.” Unlike Johnson and Blair, who attended Oxford, Burnham studied English literature at Cambridge. No less than 31 British prime ministers have been Oxonians, while only 14 have been Cantabrigians. Burnham will become the first Cambridge man to enter 10 Downing Street since Stanley Baldwin, who was prime minister from 1935 to 1937.

Burnham’s ascent to the top job has been gradual. He finished fourth in the 2010 Labour Party leadership election, then came second to Jeremy Corbyn in the 2015 election. During the Covid pandemic, Burnham dramatically raised his national profile by standing on the steps of Manchester Central Library in October 2020. Dressed in jeans and a worker’s jacket, this ambitious politician harshly criticized the Johnson government’s Covid restrictions.

Burnham is a slippery politician who has changed his positions opportunistically. In 2015, he opposed devolution of health services to local leaders as shadow health secretary. Less than a year later, Burnham reversed course and championed devolution. By this time, he was running for mayor of Greater Manchester, and devolution meant he would enjoy greater power. The public forgave Burnham for his opportunistic inconsistency and his popularity continued to grow. When he applied to stand as Labour’s candidate for the House of Commons in the 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election, Starmer shot it down. The prime minister was keeping a potential rival out of Westminster and, unluckily for him, Labour not only lost that seat but in third place. Once Labour poorly in the local elections, Starmer’s position was untenable and Burnham’s entry into 10 Downing Street inevitable.

Starmer’s greatest political challenge has come not from the Conservatives but from within his own party. As Broken Britain continues to struggle, Labour’s future will be shaped not by the man in Downing Street, but by the King of the North.

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Great Britain has churned through of government in the past decade, installing and quickly discarding leaders of differing parties, philosophies, ethnicities and genders. But one thing has stayed constant throughout: the PM’s tone of voice. Listeners — even American listeners like me — can’t mistake the posh, Oxbridge elocution of England’s upper class, which instantly conveys that the speaker was bred to rule Britannia in spare moments between squash matches and cocktails.

So, when Andy — everyone calls him that, just “Andy” — picks up a microphone, it shocks the ear that he talks a bit like the former Beatle Ringo Starr. And Burnham’s accent — the voice of a middle-class boy from England’s hard-pressed, postindustrial North, around Manchester and Liverpool — is merely the tip of a political and cultural iceberg.

After a runaway victory in his June parliamentary election, Burnham took only hours to force the resignation of incumbent Prime Minister and fellow Labour Party member . He has also waged open, if civilized, warfare with former Prime Minister and Labour elder statesman over their party’s foundational principles and standing with the British public. And he’s announced unprecedented plans to restructure the national government by implementing a political ethos that has been dubbed “.”

But Burnham’s ambition reaches even farther. When he formally ascends to the leadership of Labour, England’s historically dominant center-left party, Burnham will confront a wave of hard-right, conservative populism that over the past decade has swept not just Great Britain but Western Europe, the US, South America and points beyond. After ten years of global futility, Burnham is proposing Manchesterism as a new brand of left-leaning counterpopulism, a formula for reconnecting traditional liberal parties throughout the West with those working- and middle-class voters who have defected in droves. 

Like his recent predecessors in 10 Downing Street, Burnham confronts huge obstacles, and it’s anyone’s guess whether he can make Manchesterism work. But his success or failure will determine more than just the direction of England. It’s likely to influence the 2028 US presidential election and the shape of politics in beleaguered capitals around the West.  

A different kind of populist emerges��

Viewed from a certain angle — the vantage often occupied by his partisan and ideological detractors — Andy makes for an unconvincing populist. He has spent more than 30 years in politics — nearly all his working life — and for the first 20 of those he built an utterly traditional, establishment-ordained : Cambridge University graduate, parliamentary staffer, Member of Parliament, Cabinet posts under multiple prime ministers and two unsuccessful campaigns to occupy the top job himself.

Then came the moment that exploded European politics and Burnham’s career: June 23, 2016, the day that British voters voted to pull their country out of the European Union. The referendum was driven by a fiery brand of anti-globalist, anti-immigrant, socially conservative populism that, until that moment, had been held to the margins of English politics. Britain’s then-Prime Minister, David Cameron, and most of his Conservative Party’s hierarchy joined hands with prominent Labourites to vehemently oppose Brexit. They were stunned when a ragtag coalition anchored in the countryside and led by a splinter-party politician named Nigel Farage eked out an angry victory.

Elsewhere in the world, Brexit seemed to open the floodgates. A similar right-wing uprising ripped through American politics just a few months later, when Donald Trump was elected US President. The fever would eventually spread to France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, Brazil, Argentina and other Western democracies. For the next ten years, establishment politicians and liberal parties throughout the West would flail aimlessly and fail to contain — or even clearly comprehend — this .

For Burnham, Brexit was the last straw — or so he thought. Deeply disillusioned by the Labour Party’s failure to mount an effective anti-Brexit campaign, and increasingly uncomfortable in London’s halls of power, Burnham shocked his colleagues by abandoning Parliament and standing for election to become mayor of Greater Manchester. This was widely interpreted as some form of surrender or self-deportation.

In Britain, political decision-making over many aspects of the nation’s daily life is and placed in the hands of Parliament, known colloquially as Westminster, and the country’s professional civil service, or Whitehall. Local governments historically have been granted limited power and even less money. And, while London and Manchester are separated by a 200-mile drive, the cultural distance between them is far greater. To say that London’s governing class views gritty, blue-collar Manchester as unfashionable is an exercise in classic English understatement. Burnham seemed like a Premier League football star who suddenly quit to join a third-tier squad in Wales.

But then something odd happened. Parliament spent the next decade trying to sort the wreckage of Brexit and managed only to enrage the British public even further. Burnham spent the next decade trying to revive the fortunes of downtrodden Manchester and managed to become the most popular politician in England.

Manchester as Burnham’s political proving ground��

After Brexit, as myriad prime ministers shuffled ineffectually through 10 Downing Street, the public’s attitude toward them never wavered: They detested every one. Five consecutive Conservative PMs were evicted in failure, including , the former mayor of London noted for his theatrically ridiculous haircut and countless scandals, and , whose first and only proposed budget so terrorized financial markets that she was ousted in about six weeks.����

When parliamentary elections were held in 2024, public revulsion propelled Labour to a historic majority — about two out of every three seats in the House of Commons. Yet their mandate evaporated in months. Prime Minister Starmer avoided scandal but committed a series of punishing political missteps and his party was routed in elections for local offices this spring. amounted to a screaming, rollercoaster plunge from the heights at which it began.

The chief beneficiary of this unbroken chaos has been Farage, the Brexit leader, who has steadily built his Reform Party into a national political force. Some polls predict that, if parliamentary elections were held today, Farage would prime minister. So, in June, panicked Labourites threw Starmer overboard and frantically grasped for someone, or something, that a chronically disaffected electorate might actually like.

The someone that they came up with was Andy Burnham. And the something that they found was buses. Specifically, yellow buses.

If there is a single image that launched Burnham on the road from Manchester back to Westminster and captures the essence of Manchesterism, it is one of Manchester’s bright yellow buses, the most visible hallmarks of Burnham’s time as mayor. By now, Burnham has retold his version of the Bee Line story countless times.��

In the 1980s, under Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the “Iron Lady,” bus services in Manchester and other major cities were divested from local government ownership and sold off to private companies. Over the years, service deteriorated dramatically while prices soared. After taking office, Burnham established a franchise system that enabled his government to force improvements in bus operations. He set a maximum ticket price of £2 ($2.67) to travel anywhere in the Manchester area. And he slapped a coat of yellow paint on the entire fleet to ensure his changes would not go unnoticed. 

They didn’t. The fact that anyone, anywhere in government might be able to accomplish anything, to bring about even a small tangible improvement in daily life, caught the Manchester public’s fancy. Burnham spent his days tightening the nuts and bolts of municipal machinery, bringing a pragmatic, nonideological approach to his job that he called “putting place ahead of party.” His approval ratings shot skyward and an approving buzz spread south. Soon enough, Burnham acquired a new nickname back in Westminster: “.”

Nowadays, detractors are quick to sneer that fixing a bus line does not qualify Burnham to manage Britain’s economy or conduct foreign affairs. And if you’re looking for clues regarding how he would undertake either of those imposing tasks, you’ll find few. Throughout his parliamentary campaign — and in the 2024 book he coauthored with his friend, Liverpool Mayor Steve Rotherham, Head North — and diplomacy earned barely a mention.

But this is precisely the point where the political contours of Manchesterism clearly emerge. While the establishment ponders the fate of the globe — and patronizingly insinuates that a provincial mayor is too small to wear the mantle of prime minister — Burnham and his supporters are preoccupied with the sorry state of affairs at home. A decade after Brexit, many Britons, particularly those in the hinterlands, feel no less fleeced and abandoned by the forces of globalism and remain no less pissed off about it.

But unlike Farage and his fellow Brexiteers, who directed public anger at EU edicts emanating from Brussels and a stream of multiethnic immigrants changing the face of British society, Burnham has identified a new villain: Westminster and the anonymous bureaucrats of Whitehall. And unlike the racially charged, scapegoating rhetoric of Brexit, Burnham calmly maintains that he not only feels the public’s frustration but can actually make things better.

Burnham sums up the foundations of Manchesterism in a single word: . (In the US, the Democratic Party has landed on a somewhat analogous title for its ongoing campaign against President Trump’s economic policies: affordability.) Manchesterism includes a detailed policy agenda to shrink the economic gulf separating struggling towns like Manchester and Liverpool from the burgeoning prosperity of London. But more broadly, Manchesterism is a frontal assault on the cultural slights and ancient insults of Britain’s class system. As Burnham tells it, that is a campaign he has waged for much of his life.

The personal roots of Manchesterism��

Populist movements and their leaders often are defined less by what they are than by what and who they are not. Burnham has gone to some lengths to describe who he is not. Take, for example, his Cambridge degree. Burnham turns this unassailable credential of England’s ruling class on its head, explaining that while he may have graduated from Cambridge, he never fully belonged there.

The son of a telephone company employee and a receptionist, and the first in his family to attend university, Burnham wrote in Head North that “my first interview at Cambridge makes me cringe even now.” Burnham aspired to St. Catharine’s College, one of Cambridge’s 30 or so semi-autonomous constituent colleges, founded in the 15th Century. He describes ascending a stone staircase, entering a wood-paneled room and encountering a professor who proffered him a glass of sherry. “The professor asked me whether I saw any parallels between The Canterbury Tales and a modern package holiday,” Burnham recalled. “I was still pondering what the question meant when the rejection letter dropped on the doormat a few days later.” He was granted a second interview by Fitzwilliam College, which was founded 400 years after St. Catharine’s specifically to enroll less-privileged students for whom Cambridge had theretofore been off-limits. Burnham was dogged by “” as a student at Fitzwilliam, he wrote, and needed years to feel even remotely comfortable.

Twenty-five years ago, in his to Commons after he was elected to represent a Manchester-area constituency, he set out some of the same themes he sounds today. He had barely entered office when a major industrial concern announced plans to close a local plant and move 250 jobs to Eastern Europe. “I am worried that an air of inevitability is growing around the loss of manufacturing jobs in Great Britain, with the use of vague terms such as market forces and globalization,” he said. “This is dangerous.”

But the defining moment of his parliamentary career came in 2009, on the 20th anniversary of the infamous . On April 15, 1989, two traditional pillars of English football (or soccer, as we Americans would have it), Liverpool and Nottingham Forest, met for a high-stakes match at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield. More than 50,000 people were crammed into quarters far too small to accommodate them safely, and a catastrophic human crush occurred in a standing-room section filled with Liverpool fans. Ninety-seven people were killed.

In the following days, local police that the deaths were caused by drunken Liverpool supporters who forced their way into the stadium and assaulted officers. But the people of Liverpool, including fans who attended the game and witnessed everything, vehemently disputed this version of events and never accepted it. Two decades later, emotions still ran so raw that a commemoration ceremony drew more than 30,000 people who greeted a representative of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown with catcalls and jeers. That representative was an ashen-faced .

The next day, Burnham prevailed on his boss to open a new investigation into Hillsborough. The concluded that police not only committed gross negligence and mismanaged the crowd in ways that directly caused the disaster but subsequently lied and doctored witness statements to conceal their culpability. The actions of Liverpool fans were not a contributing factor.��

For Burnham, the realization that Liverpool had been denied the truth about Hillsborough for more than a generation was a turning point. “I always say that I took my first steps out of Westminster on 15 April 2009,” he wrote in Head North. “Things would never be the same after that day. I had experienced the way our political system fails people in a very personal way … The spell was broken and I had fallen out of love with Westminster.”

Even now, as he returns in triumph, Burnham is keeping one foot outside Westminster, both symbolically and literally. In late June, he made his after Starmer’s resignation, appearing in Manchester and attired in the uniform he adopted while mayor: blazer and collarless t-shirt, sans necktie. As he tugged his jacket, he cracked, “It’s been such a wrench to leave that I’ve had to get special permission for what people in Westminster call my Manchester clothes.” And he announced that, as prime minister, he would split his workweek between London and Manchester, establishing a satellite office he dubbed “Number 10 North.”

Just as he painted Manchester’s refurbished buses bright yellow, Burnham is creating an image of himself as an outsider rather than an insider, maintaining personal distance from the power structure he is about to take over. It is a dance on a political highwire, a sophisticated exercise in having things both ways. If Farage and his Brexiteers were content to cast themselves as pitchfork-wielding villagers storming a decadent castle, Burnham is suggesting that he is an ordinary bloke who can make government do extraordinary things. Should he succeed in moving Manchesterism from rhetoric to reality, the result might indeed be extraordinary.

From local success to a national governing vision��

The most detailed roadmap of Manchesterism is , Burnham’s hybrid book that combines personal biography and political manifesto. (In populist movements, the two are virtually always intertwined.) Head North is constructed as a series of conversations between Burnham and his close pal and political doppelganger, Rotherham. It reads a bit like the script of an old-fashioned, Hollywood buddy movie — think Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, or Paul Newman and Robert Redford — that follows the high jinks of two slightly mismatched besties as they trade quips, bond and somehow carry the day.

Burnham and Rotheram never met as boys but grew up close by each other around Liverpool, both in working- or middle-class families. They shared similar passions: Rotheram is a maniacal Liverpool fan who survived the Hillsborough disaster, and Burnham is equally devoted to Liverpool’s underdog, cross-town rival, Everton. But while Burnham chose academics and Cambridge, Rotherham entered the trades and emerged with the rough hands of a brick mason. He eventually followed his father into Liverpool local politics, earned a degree and landed on the Liberal benches of Parliament around the same time as Burnham. They became close personally but continued along different career tracks. Burnham was tapped for leadership; Rotherham deployed his acid, blue-collar wit to get under the skin of his Tory antagonists.

Their professional lives converged in mutual disgust about the time of Brexit. Rotherham was the one to suggest that the two quit Parliament and seek to lead Liverpool and Manchester; after some convincing, Burnham agreed. They had different personalities and temperaments, but possessed a shared vision for their cities and were attacking very similar problems. From the beginning, they relied on each other as sounding boards, allies and mutual cheerleaders. The results suggest that their partnership produced something even greater than the sum of its parts.

As mayors, they gradually forged the policy and political project that others would later name Manchesterism. An equally descriptive title could have been “Way Less Westminster.” Unsurprisingly, it has not gone over well in London. As Burnham was circling shark-like around Starmer in late May, former Prime Minister Tony Blair weighed in with a 5,000-word entitled, “The Labour Party Is Playing With Fire Over Its Future and the Future of the Country.”

Blair argued that the real problems facing Labour and Britain are not “the Westminster bubble” (a favorite Burnham catchphrase) or Starmer’s milquetoast personality. “We don’t have a worked-out, coherent plan for the country in a fast-changing world,” Blair opined, referencing “epochal change in the geopolitical order” and “the technology revolution led by developments in artificial intelligence.” So, as former prime ministers will do, Blair offered his own ten-point program, which included “adaptation to an AI world,” “a Reimagined State” and plenty more Great Big Ideas. Not one of his 5,000 words was “inequality.”

Burnham may well have picked this fight a few days earlier when he declared his intent to end “40 years of neoliberalism,” a movement with which his former boss is inextricably linked. And he wasted no time swinging again in , saying Blair had fundamentally missed the point. “The fall in the living standards of millions, and the reality that life has got harder for most year on year since the financial crash in 2008, is, I believe, the gaping omission in his analysis,” Burnham wrote. Theirs was less a philosophical dispute than a clash of world views. Blair was gazing down on the future from 30,000 feet; Burnham was watching it unfold at street level.

Indeed, Manchesterism is designed to produce clear, concrete changes that average citizens, particularly those outside London, can see and feel. The top of Burnham’s agenda is “devolution,” a bland euphemism for snatching some major programs away from Westminster and Whitehall and handing them over to local governments and officials like, well, mayors.�� During the , then-Prime Minister Johnson imposed quarantine rules and funding levels on Manchester that Burnham blasted as imperious and egregiously unfair but was powerless to change. It was a searing experience, and he appears intent on restructuring a consequential portion of national government to prevent similar episodes in future.��

And as wonky as it sounds, devolution could turn out to be clever politics. The unofficial slogan of the Brexit movement was “;” Burnham describes devolution in similar terms. “Let me say this directly,” he has vowed. “The days of Whitehall fighting the devolution of power to the nations and regions are over for good.” If devolution leads to more success stories like Manchester’s Bee Line, a jaded electorate just might perk up. And that, in turn, could help Labour take back control of political territory now occupied by Farage and his Brexiteers.

Can Manchesterism revive the center-left?��

Another key element of Manchesterism, education reform, springs directly from the life experiences of Burnham and Rotheram, and the lingering injuries of class. For university-bound students like Burnham, the British educational system offers a clearly delineated path toward their goal. But for Rotheram and others like him, there are few options, and all feel decidedly second-rate. Burnham wants to create a technical and trade education track that is on par with its academic counterpart: organized, rigorous and respected. On this subject, he scarcely contains his anger.

“The different paths that Steve and I took in life, even though we were born only three miles apart, are an illustration of Britain’s two worlds and its great social divide,” Burnham wrote in Head North:

Steve was clearly capable of attending a top university, as were my parents, but his life circumstances, the era in which he grew up, and an education system which was then, and is still now, very responsive to the influence of class, social connections and money meant it was probably a non-starter … In England, there has always been a serious snobbery at play when it comes to education.

There’s more. Noting that over 1 million people are on waiting lists for council houses — what Americans would call public housing — he has vowed that “Number 10 North will oversee the biggest council-house since the post-war period.” He wants to pass a requiring police and public employees to answer questions truthfully the first time they are asked. Oh, and the UK’s historically famous lack of a written constitution? Burnham wants to write one. (That last will stay on the back burner for now.)

There are a few small details that Burnham has yet to suss out. Such as, how does he plan to for his programs at the same time the country needs a huge increase in defense spending? And how will he respond when the inevitable foreign crisis rears its head and knocks him off-script? His answer to date: Stay tuned.

But Burnham argues persuasively that the stakes of his bet on Manchesterism are enormous. After a decade of governmental fecklessness, Burnham positions his regime as Labour’s last chance to get right with an exhausted electorate. Farage and his Reform Party are clamoring for new parliamentary elections, which must take place no later than three years from now, and the clock is ticking toward a liberal political nightmare. The parallels between Farage and Trump are obvious, and Burnham speaks of a potential Farage administration as looming dystopia, or worse, something akin to Trump’s America.

There are equally clear parallels between Burnham’s efforts to articulate and operationalize Manchesterism in England and the struggles of progressive political parties throughout the West to find their own winning strategies. The next US presidential election is more than two years away, but America’s Democratic Party is already caught up in an intense struggle to choose its candidate to succeed Trump.

A handful of state governors who reside well away from Washington are positioning themselves as political insurgents and champions of the common folk. These aspirants — who include Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Illinois’s J.D. Pritzker, California’s Gavin Newsom and Kentucky’s Andy Beshear — find little of merit “inside the Beltway,” a phrase that literally refers to the highway network encircling Washington but is the rhetorical equivalent of Burnham’s “Westminster bubble.” Shapiro proudly and profanely fashions himself as a guy who can “.” There’s little question that they and their rivals will be monitoring how Burnham gets on at Number 10 North. And taking notes.

The ultimate test for Manchesterism��

As Burnham prepares for his first day at the new job, he has faced intense speculation about every aspect of his plans, so it was no surprise when a journalist pressed him on one of his urgent priorities: . Burnham is on schedule to formally take office the day after the final match of the World Cup. So, if England wins, he was asked, would he declare a bank holiday — that is, give the whole country a day off? “I think we might be getting ahead of ourselves,” a grinning Burnham replied. “We do have to live in hope. But it might be a bit premature to be speculating (about an England victory). We can hope and pray that it happens.” And then, invoking the long-running travails of his beloved Everton, he added, “I am an Evertonian. I don’t bank on anything when it comes to football.”

Burnham could just as easily have been assessing his own prospects, and those of Manchesterism. His improbable journey from Westminster to Manchester and back again has defied convention and been propelled by a singular political vision, a contrarian sensibility and a share of luck. Burnham will need all those and more on the road ahead.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Andy Burnham and “Manchesterism”: The New Face of Populism? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

That policy debate can sound abstract. It is not. In Ethiopia, Professor Meareg Amare was in social media posts that identified him by name, photograph, workplace and home address, and falsely accused him of backing the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. His son, Abrham, later said he understood immediately that the posts were a death sentence. Amnesty International that platform failures to adequately moderate content contributed to serious abuses against Tigrayans during the war in northern Ethiopia.

That warning matters because the medium is increasingly video. By the end of 2025, video accounted for 76% of all mobile data traffic, with social media video comprising % of smartphone video traffic in sampled European networks. Video is potent because it stacks image, voice, music, captions, pace and the seeming intimacy of a familiar face into one persuasive package. Research on parasocial relationships suggests that one-sided familiarity with a creator can heighten trust and perceived credibility, making audiences more receptive to that person’s claims. That is excellent for education, journalism and public communication. It is equally useful for manipulation.

Video has become one of the world’s dominant forms of public persuasion, yet verification still lags behind. With limited exceptions, fact-checking has been too slow, too patchy and too far removed from the viewing experience.

The human cost of unchecked misinformation

Meanwhile, the consequences keep recurring. In April 2024, after the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel during a livestreamed church service in Wakeley, Australia, rumors raced through WhatsApp while the video bounced across phones; within hours, police officers were injured in the riot that followed. In Britain that summer, false claims about the Southport attacker — especially the lie that Axel Rudakubana, the teen convicted of killing three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class, was a Muslim asylum seeker — helped fuel riots across England and Northern Ireland, targeting communities with no connection to the crime. A society need not be poor, fragile or far away for this pattern to take hold. It needs grievance, speed and a public primed to experience video as proof.

These harms also do not fall evenly. Especially in countries already in conflict or crisis, the spread of misinformation and disinformation can intensify violence, acts of discrimination, and abuse against human rights defenders, racial and religious minorities, women politicians, humanitarian workers and others. But governments too often justify the of free expression — and, increasingly, the shutting down of the internet — by citing misinformation and “fake news” when they wish to silence criticism or other opinions they find politically problematic. It’s vital that standards and systems established to address harmful misinformation be rooted in respect for freedom of opinion and expression as defined in international human rights law.

Platforms’ failures and limitations

That same human rights lens should also be applied to the platform systems designed to respond to misinformation. Meta’s Oversight Board warned that coordinated networks can game Community Notes, that the system can privilege dominant groups over minorities, and that it should not be introduced in crisis or protracted conflict conditions.

And the empirical record for Community Notes on X is sobering as well. A 2025 Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA) of X’s full public dataset found that more than 90% of submitted notes never reached the public. In English, only 7.1% of submissions from January 2021 through March 2025 were published, falling to 4.9% in early 2025. Average publication time in 2025 was 14 days. A Washington Post found that among election-related false or misleading posts where users had already written accurate, relevant notes, 91% never became visible.

Recent evidence further sharpens the timing problem. A 2025 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that Community Notes attached within one to 12 hours reduced repost growth by 49.6%. But once notes slipped into the roughly two-day range, the effect on repost growth fell to 6.2%, and the total repost reduction across a post’s life was effectively zero.

A path forward: real-time verification

The big question, then, is whether context can appear while the video is still shaping perception. It can now. Technology such as offers one example. This browser extension overlays real-time verifications like subtitles, checks claims against depersonalized web searches and integrates factual reliability scores from independent media-rating agencies. The broader point is not about any one application; it’s that the technology now exists to meet viral claims with contextual verification at the speed and scale the medium demands.

This matters for human rights, public safety and countries that still imagine themselves insulated from these risks. False accusations carried by video can inflame a neighborhood in Sydney, a city in England, a borderland in East Africa and spread through a diaspora community worldwide. They can trigger a mob against immigrants, a retaliatory attack on a religious minority or a crackdown later justified as restoring order. The pattern endures because the architecture of outrage does; velocity first, questions later, if at all.

Our societies should treat safer information infrastructure as we’ve learned to treat smoke detection, emergency alerts or fraud monitoring — as essential. An information safety layer must work in real time, across languages and before the damage compounds. People must still be free to speak, document, argue and dissent. But they should also be free to choose third-party software that can add context immediately, when a falsehood is still taking hold.

That is the standard by which this debate should now be judged: whether verification can appear before a viral falsehood hardens into a weapon. We now have a choice. Technology exists to address social media misinformation for people and institutions who want to do so today. We can keep accepting an information order in which viral falsehoods outrun verification, or we can adopt one in which facts can outrun misinformation, while still protecting lives and public order.

[Iain Levine is a consultant on human rights and was previously a director on Meta’s human rights team. Avi Tuschman is a Stanford StartX entrepreneur and the founder of .]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Real-Time Verification Is the Only Way to Stop Viral Lies appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The key characteristics of the new state-corporate symbiosis include:

• Elite deviance and uncontrolled corporate power — the “” coined in 2007 by Kean and expanded upon in 2025 in his The Rise of a Tech Oligarchy — whereby unaccountable “doers” disproportionately amplify their financial returns and influence at the expense of and individual sanctity (the “done-to”). The new AI-focused and techno-oligarch-dominated societies and economies are characterized by authoritarianism and “” personalities. See also “ ” , , corporate , corporate , .��
• Blurring of state and corporate interests, with governments (e.g., US President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, most Western nations) becoming over-reliant on technical expertise and services from private corporations (Elon Musk’s AI ventures, Technion, Elbit, Palantir, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, etc.).
• Multinational/global reach (e.g., European state sovereignties under , if not political coercion, by US and Israeli high-tech companies).
• Convergence/coalescence of malign ideology, motivations, methodology and technology (e.g., data abuses, social control abuses, military/policing abuses against civilian populations, etc.). See, for example, chapters 5 and 11 in Vol 3 of (2021).
• , whereby Internet and social media giants seek to control not just information exchange between individuals but also information about them and, worse, “predictive sources of behavioral surplus,” the being mass control of populations for commercial gain.
• Political hypocrisy, such as Trump’s claims of “liberation of the individual” hiding an increasingly fettered and repressed US citizenry courtesy of the Heritage Foundation’s radical-right blueprint; Trump’s presidency replacing liberal elites with illiberal elites; favouring Republican-run constituencies while punishing Democrat administrations via voter rezoning/, postal vote restrictions, gerrymandering, withholding funds; of both undocumented migrants and US citizens, including homicides and deportations without due process; by the White House to investigate and prosecute political opponents, civil servants and former officials who dare challenge White House ideology and opinions; accusations of Palantir-assisted mass by the Trump administration.

Case study: Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies, a leading US-based software company, provides IT solutions for governments, intelligence agencies and commercial clients, including data integration, analysis and AI platforms for very large data sets, with a focus on decision-making, military and surveillance applications. Established in 2003, three of the co-founders retain substantial and controlling ownership: Peter Thiel, Chairman; Alex Karp, CEO; and Stephen Cohen, President. Major institutional shareholders include Vanguard Group, BlackRock and State Street Corporation.

It is that the company received early funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) company In-Q-Tel.

Palantir now has substantial operations and clients in North America, Europe and elsewhere. Its growing market capitalization is variously quoted by market analysts at over $300 billion and possibly $350 billion.

Palantir and the Trump White House

The company has an extremely close relationship with the Trump White House. For example, Vice President JD Vance is a former Palantir employee who has long been mentored and by Thiel. This has included a $15 million contribution to Vance’s 2022 senatorial campaign. Palantir staff have also been seconded to government departments in Donald Trump’s second presidency. Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security, is also reported to have a close relationship with Palantir, including significant in the company.

It has also been reported that Palantir supports radical-right Christian nationalist causes that form part of the movement seeking to impose permanent illiberal Christian supremacist governance on the US. For example, Palantir was a corporate sponsor of Trump’s Freedom 250 Christian nationalist event, , in May, which featured Trump’s cabinet member Pete Hegseth, the self-styled Secretary of War and an aggressive of Christian supremacy. Other sponsors included Deloitte, Mastercard and United Airlines. The event was criticized for allegedly rewriting American history and for its evangelistic style in promoting religious supremacy contrary to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

In addition to Palantir’s well-established business relationships in the US with corporations and both federal and state government functions, the following are four examples of Palantir’s major prospecting and client activities in three other countries — the UK, Switzerland and Israel. These are followed by an examination of the stated political ideology, motivations and commitments of Palantir’s top executives, and questions about the company’s authoritarian ethos and its close engagement with hegemonic authoritarian regimes.

UK National Health Service

The National Health Service (NHS) was launched in July 1948 to provide cradle-to-grave medical care for the total population of the UK, regardless of status and ability to pay. The NHS and numerous emulations in other countries have developed almost exclusively in capitalist economies, in which socialism or socialist politics are not of the hard-left extremist kind but part of a pragmatic, eclectic approach to social order, human rights and modernity. Although established by a Labour (socialist) government in 1948, the NHS has been retained by all mainstream UK political parties (including the Conservatives) ever since.

The UK’s NHS is not seen as an ideological artifact of one political creed but as an all-party-agreed necessity for a civilized society, mindful that the provision of health care for all is a human right guaranteed by the UN Universal of Human Rights, 1948.

Disagreements between the major UK political parties are rarely about the necessity of an NHS but usually about its best design, organization and policies, and how much public money should be invested in it. The NHS is so popular that for any British political party to suggest that it should be scrapped or diminished would amount to political suicide. Despite operational difficulties and growing waiting lists in recent years (now reducing), this universal health care (UHC) model, funded by compulsory social insurance contributions from citizens over their working lifetimes plus general taxation, is jealously guarded by the general population. Woe betides any parties who advocate its dissolution and replacement by privatized medicine, seen as a return to the “bad old days” before 1948, when only those with enough money received proper health care. 

Private health care is available in Britain for those who can afford it or related private medical expenses insurance, but it is not the main provider or option for most citizens. The UHC model is in stark contrast to the US health care system, where private medicine and private medical insurance prevail, resulting in large numbers of citizens who are unable to pay receiving little or no health care. The Affordable Care (informally known as Obamacare) reduced the number of under-65s without health insurance from 48 million in 2010 to 28.1 million in . This number continued to fall modestly but by had risen again to 26.7 million.

So, any foreign interests, whether governments or private enterprise, that seek to upend, interfere with or financially exploit the UK’s NHS should beware. The American pharmaceutical industry is one such group that has managed to persuade the UK government (with President Trump’s backing) to allow it to sell a defined range of high-priced pharmaceuticals to the NHS. In the US, the prices of pharmaceuticals in general are usually orders of magnitude higher than the same items in the UK. Such high prices have little to do with actual manufacturing costs but reflect the very high profit margins demanded by US pharma giants, mindful of their stock values and shareholder dividends. Unsurprisingly, the British public has become very concerned about what to them looks like a vehicle for outrageous price gouging at the expense of the British taxpayer, with this first agreement being a for a mass attack on NHS finances by American private pharma companies.

Palantir is clearly not a pharma company but represents yet another private business sector (with the Trump White House’s fulsome backing) seeking to embed itself as indispensable to the governance of Britain, namely initially, large-scale data handling and analysis. One of Palantir’s target interests is the NHS, whose patient data covers a population of some 70 million. Palantir’s initial NHS England 7-year (five years plus a two-year optional extension), awarded in November 2023, is to design, build and operate the Federated Data Platform (FDP). The FDP brief is to enable better data sharing across the NHS, better coordination of patient care and improved operational efficiency across the numerous regional and local Trusts that make up the NHS delivery model.

The UK government has expressed satisfaction that Palantir will do an excellent job. However, of the British public indicate that more than two-thirds of respondents are unhappy with the large scale of Palantir’s penetration into public sector contracts such as the NHS, and 40% do not trust Palantir to honor its obligation not to access individual patient data. Indeed, the recent decision by the NHS to apparently shift from its previous policy of not allowing access to individual patient data to now granting Palantir unlimited access has caused some political and media consternation nationally, such as in the .��

At the local level, too, such as in the Folkestone & Hythe District of the county of Kent, the respected “speaking truth to power” online news and blog site has recently weighed in on the same doubts about the trustworthiness of Palantir regarding individual patient data protection.

Others Palantir for providing the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) with surveillance and targeting software that aids and abets contravention of human rights, and wonder rhetorically whether Palantir’s access to NHS individual patient data will bring similar conduct to Britain. Others see Palantir’s NHS FDP project as just one in a whole spectrum of dubious penetration and aiding-and-abetting activities across UK health care, policing, defense, social care, environment and immigration enforcement.

UK policing

Palantir has already made considerable inroads into UK , the largest being London’s Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). The major so far has centered on the MPS’s use of Palantir’s AI software to track and the force’s 33,000 police officers. However, the Karp-Zamiska manifesto setting out Palantir’s authoritarian intellectual and political ideology appears to have provoked a wider concern among UK lawmakers and others about the “values and ethics” of Palantir for this company to be allowed access not only to UK policing but also to other sensitive government functions such as the Ministry of Defence and the Financial Conduct Authority. Members of Parliament have variously the Palantir manifesto as a “parody of a RoboCop film” and “the ramblings of a super villain.”

Recently, Palantir has announced that it will the Mayor of London because (as within his statutory powers) he has blocked Palantir’s contract with the MPS.

Additional have been raised about the potential for Palantir to use UK NHS individual patient data plus surveillance technology to enable UK policing to target and monitor migrants, racial groups, religious groups and political dissidents, based on its experience in the US with ICE.

The growing public “trust deficit” and resistance that Palantir faces in the UK is largely one of its own making. Its arguably bullying and dismissive “trust us, we’re Palantir” responses to considerable criticism and concerns raised by the public, civil society organizations, politicians and lawmakers have added to Palantir’s damaged image and credibility. Although the UK government has welcomed Palantir’s data management expertise, it has, nonetheless, paradoxically, identified the country’s growing over-reliance on such US techno-oligarch firms as a threat to . UK government minister Liz Kendall warned in April of the country’s dependence on US technology for its critical defense infrastructure, as well as its economic dependence on US-owned digital technology. Her solution includes the UK now being on a “critical mission” to develop its own sovereign AI capabilities.

Alleged interference with Swiss sovereignty and civil rights

As in the UK, Palantir’s access to sensitive national data has raised much disquiet in Switzerland, including a scandal that is still unfolding. Since 2018, the company has developed a strong relationship with Ringier — Switzerland’s largest media group — with Palantir developing Ringier’s AI platform across the company’s media, sports and marketplace divisions. In 2024, a renewed 5-year strategic extension to Palantir’s contract was announced. However, from 2020 to 2022 — a period when Palantir was prospecting Swiss government departments — Palantir’s Executive Vice President in Switzerland apparently also served on the Ringier board. This fact was only revealed much later, and the lack of earlier transparency raises questions about Palantir’s corporate governance and integrity.

In December 2025, the independent Swiss magazine Republik ran a two-part into Palantir’s Swiss activities, involving 59 freedom-of-information (FoI) requests. The investigation found that formal audits by the Swiss Army and other government organizations had determined that Palantir’s systems were fundamentally incompatible with Swiss data protection laws or with Swiss national security and sovereignty.��

The nub of the problem centered on American companies operating abroad being subject to the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data , which could lead to US government demands for access to any or all of their records and data related to their overseas activities. This could be for any purpose, including criminal investigations into fraud, tax evasion, trafficking or money laundering, links to terrorism or US national security threats, or just plain intelligence agency “snooping.” This non-negotiable, supervening extraterritorial jurisdiction right held by the US government was deemed by the Swiss government to be intrinsic to Palantir’s product offering. As Palantir could therefore not guarantee that sensitive Swiss government data would always remain exclusively confidential to the Swiss authorities, their was discontinued.

Unsurprisingly, eyebrows have been raised in the UK, and questions have been as to why the British government (which faces comparable Palantir risks to those arising from Palantir’s Swiss predicament) appears unconcerned.

However, cancellation of Palantir’s contract was not the end of the matter. Instead of suing Republik for defamation, Palantir filed a “right-of-reply” lawsuit in the Zurich Commercial Court to force Republik to publish a counternarrative or rebuttal from Palantir. As the Republik articles reported on public records, the legal and factual basis for Palantir’s lawsuit is puzzling.

Informed suggest that Palantir’s motive is to Republik with what amounts to a legal move well known in the UK, called a SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). SLAPPS are typically used by celebrities, wealthy figures, high-profile business executives and large corporations against anyone who has caused them embarrassment and/or loss by revealing facts or allegations about their conduct and motives. While seemingly a reasonable response to unfounded allegations, SLAPPS have become notorious as a vexatious means by the wealthy and powerful to suppress legitimate public inquiry, especially by small publishers. Moves to SLAPPS in the UK are slow-moving but have achieved some government backing.

Palantir its case. Whether Palantir is unconcerned about the adverse publicity their lawsuit has generated, or even aware of it, is unclear.

Palantir’s Israeli business activities

In 2024, Palantir and Israel signed a strategic intended to “harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions.” This partnership is the latest development in a long-standing, close relationship that goes back at least a decade across multiple levels, both within Palantir and the Israeli government and its national security functions. For example, former Israeli Prime Minister and Head of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) Military Intelligence Directorate, Ehud Barak, is reported to have advised on and facilitated venture capital involving Palantir.

In recent years, many successful high-tech start-up companies have been formed, both in Israel and the US, by young Israeli entrepreneurs typically in their 20s and early 30s. Many of these are former leading-edge IT and AI specialists in the IDF and, more specifically, its clandestine cybersecurity and intelligence service called . It is highly likely that a number of these specialists will also have joined Palantir. Other similar firms established by ex-Israeli intelligence officers include and Black Cube, both of which have been heavily censured for alleged unacceptable intelligence activities in several EU countries and, in Black Cube’s case, electoral interference in Slovakia. NSO has also been under investigation by the European Parliament over its Pegasus “spyware” in phone hacking of EU staff, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), journalists and lawyers.

Former 8200 commander Yair Cohen established the cyber division of , one of Israel’s largest defense electronics firms. Elbit specializes in high-resolution specialist cameras and vision systems used in military, security and intelligence applications, for example, surveillance and targeting. Elbit has a joint research with the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion). Palantir enjoys a commensal relationship with Elbit and Technion within this fraternity.

Both Palantir and have been involved in controversy within Britain over their surveillance businesses as well as over their close involvement in Israel with the IDF and its Gaza War activities. Their collaboration with the IDF on surveillance and targeting technology and services has been regarded by as amounting to aiding and abetting alleged and genocide, such as targeted assassinations, mass slaughter of civilians (, apparently confirmed by an Israeli official) and “.” Denial of complicity by Palantir has not been helped by CEO Alex Karp holding a company board meeting in Tel Aviv in January 2024 during the Israeli bombing campaign to show solidarity with Israel and its methods in Gaza and Western companies that fail to show similar support.��

Palantir’s political beliefs and manifesto

In 2009, Thiel stated in a in the Cato Unbound journal: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” While clear and erudite in its language and opinion, it nonetheless presented a dystopian polemic about the alleged increasing dysfunctionality of capitalism and representative democracy and the need, in his view, for a step-change libertarian revolution that only unconditional embrace of the kind of technologies that Palantir excelled in could provide.

By 2025, Thiel’s early ideas had been expanded by his colleagues Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska into a , The Technological Republic, which included a political manifesto of 22 assertions and objectives to create this revolutionary nirvana. The manifesto is undoubtedly radical, and polemically so, in its rhetoric and assertions. Many of the enumerated assertions are highly debatable, for example, numbers five, six and seven, which essentially call for a return to a militaristic outlook by government and society, including compulsory national military service. It very much appears that the Trump White House, in the person of Hegseth, has already taken the hint in terms of his constant bellicose rhetoric and public “warrior” memes, while Trump himself has embarked on his Iran War, has invaded Nicaragua and is threatening to attack Cuba.

The Karp-Zamiska manifesto list has received much media ; for example, American journalist dismisses it as “steeped in oligarchic hubris and authoritarian nihilism” and promising only “a dystopian future.”

Nevertheless, the manifesto does include some surprisingly liberal suggestions. For example, item nine suggests that society should be far more tolerant and forgiving of those who have devoted their time and skills to public life and who may, for example, suffer opprobrium, hyper-criticism or ill-health as a result. Similarly, item 11 advocates that society should refrain from Schadenfreude (“harm-joy”) and not gloat or rejoice when opponents experience ill-fortune. Item 20 demands that “pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted.”

My overall assessment of this manifesto is that it presents as an unstructured, almost random evangelical list of topics, assertions, emotions and even passionate feelings of Karp and Zamiska, ranging from the superficial to the profound, from the peripheral to the fundamental, and from the trivial to the maximal. Such a demonstration of chaotic thinking is hard to fathom, but reminiscent of Trump.

The manifesto reveals a belief in unbounded individual freedom and free-market capitalism, backed by the militant application of AI and technology by corporations and governments to achieve these aims by eliminating democratic interference. War should be embraced as a necessary “might is right” instrument to impose a nation’s supremacy on other nations, and citizens (but not the techno-supremacists, of course!) should accept their unavoidable imposed sacrifice in that endeavor.

The manifesto includes an implicit contradiction, namely that some individual and mass freedoms and human rights must be eliminated to ensure the unbounded freedoms of other parties, i.e., the freedoms of the most powerful (and most deserving — supremacists like the Palantir demagogues) to expunge the freedoms of the less powerful (and less deserving). It has an inherent “jungle logic” of survival of the most ruthless.

From their published statements, Karp and Thiel appear to lack emotional intelligence and self-awareness, despite elements of mawkish compassion for others less fortunate. In a paraphrased summary, they appear to be saying to the masses (the “done to”):

Trust us, we’re Palantir, we always act honorably, ethically and altruistically. Trust us, with our superior intellect, vision and technological wizardry, we know far better than you plebs what is good for you and what needs to be done. Listen to our honeyed voice of reason. Just lie back and accept all the benefits and the sunny uplands of the brave new world we are creating, while accepting some personal sacrifices.

And, to their prospective government clients, they appear to be adding “scareware” :

Listen to our honeyed reasoning, the pure, unassailable logic of the salvation we offer you. We have no interest in your data content, honest. We are paragons of virtue and have innately altruistic motives. BUT BE WARNED, if you don’t do as Palantir commands, then catastrophe awaits you.

As observed in 1887: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Today, this is about the quiet usurpation of political control and state governance. Palantir and similar companies no longer act as adjuncts to keep political elites in power but, as Ukrainian political scientist Anton argues, to supplant them as the all-powerful hegemons who are hell-bent on determining all existential quantities and qualities of human life itself.

Is the “presumption of regularity” dead? Is representative democracy dying?

In the US, all is not well with its governance, and the unhealthy relationship between government and private corporations looks ever more corrupt. The supreme irony of Trump’s boast in 2016, that if elected he would “” of corrupt politicians, special interests and wealthy influencers in Washington DC, has not been lost on political observers and journalists. He has simply enlarged the swamp and replaced the “liberal elites” he so despised with his own “illiberal elites.”

Under Trump’s second presidency, the Project 2025 plan for the wholesale dismantling and repurposing of the structure, institutions, processes, norms and standards of America’s 250-year representative democracy is already more than in less than two years. It is no longer safe, if it ever was, for any US citizen to rely on the so-called “presumption of regularity,” i.e., that government ministers, politicians, officials of state, members of the judiciary, police officers, military officers, etc., can always be presumed to act at all times with the utmost integrity, honesty and non-corrupt purpose.��

The presumption of regularity has been replaced by the cynical presumption of irregularity, whereby citizens increasingly believe that a subverted democratic system is now operating against their interests and cannot be trusted or relied upon to act in the common good. Instead, they witness techno-oligarchs, such as those at Palantir, telling them — with compliant government ministers and politicians nodding in agreement — that the pre-AI democratic world is dying, if not dead. As observes, such oligarchs want to snuff out democracy and humanity in short order.

There is a real risk that some democracies (especially the US) could easily slide into a takeover by ethnoreligious nationalist supremacists and a possible totalitarian dictatorship. Is a Trump-led US heading for civil war and a totalitarian one-party state reality? Some observers, such as psychiatrist Dr. , are pointing that way. What lies beyond 2028? Are techno-oligarchs such as Palantir’s bosses aiding and abetting? Vance is an ex-Palantir employee, mentored and financed by Thiel, a connection that has raised considerable . In most democracies, such personal financial largesse from a corporate leader to a senior politician would warrant at least serious investigation and possibly criminal prosecution for “buying” political influence; Palantir staff are seconded to the Trump government departments; Palantir has close links to Miller; and Palantir was a corporate sponsor of .

Evidence suggests that the Trump White House has been trying to export the Project 2025 formula to subvert/convert European and other sovereign states into adopting Trumpian ideology. For example, Vance has openly European countries overall for failing to adopt Trump’s ideas and policies, while praising European radical and far-right conservative parties and leaders (e.g., supporting the electoral campaigns of the far-right in Germany and in Hungary) and also the far-right ’s anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim campaign in the UK.

This is an obvious continuation of Steve Bannon’s , a pan-European populist (some say subversive) Christian nationalist radical-right campaign launched in 2018, although, as with the current Trump White House’s Christian supremacy policy, the “Christian” element was more rhetorical than any actual piety in practice. Bannon, a former Trump strategy adviser during his first presidency, is recognized as a key architect of Make America Great Again (MAGA). It is reported that the Palantir oligarchs are split on whether to aid and abet such apparent political interference outside the US.��

Public mistrust in corrupt governance and undue corporate influence

Generally, in Western democracies, there has been an erosion in recent years of public trust across all levels and forms of government and authority. In the UK, for example, this is evidenced by an upending of traditional voting patterns, with voters no longer prepared to grant elected representatives and the national government much time to fix outstanding problems or grievances. overall nowadays believe very little of what politicians of any party tell them and assume they are all self-serving liars whose promises are worthless. Corporate and government malfeasance, corrupt relationships and general sleaze thrive with impunity. Examples of increasingly harsh authoritarian policies (e.g., policing of public protests, surveillance of “thought crimes,” abuse of to suppress dissent) are now . This has all led to considerable political turbulence, with the ruling Labour Party now under both external and internal pressure and openly asking if Britain is ungovernable.

Draconian and highly subjective policing, potentially being used to deter and intimidate legitimate protesters, is bad enough. Also concerning is the bias and self-censorship manifest in the reporting of such protests across the media. For example, according to a by Des Freedman, pro-Palestine marches are almost universally tagged by the media as “hate marches” even though the vast majority of protesters express wishes for peace and justice, while reports of far-right marches, for example those organized by , anti-Muslim founder of the racist English Defence League, choose not to use the term “hate march” despite the many hate messages present. A rare exception is the more balanced in The Times on May 16.

Freedman’s report implies that either UK media editors are biased towards pro-Israel and anti-Muslim ideology, or they may be open to manipulation on such issues by organs or agents of the state. If the latter, it is likely that high-tech AI services will have played at least some role in that chain of manipulation, and also at the technical level of policing, crowd surveillance and targeting. Whether Palantir might be involved is speculative. 

Palantir bosses present themselves as saviors of humankind while apparently acting to save only themselves and their “tech bros” (and their authoritarian, if not totalitarian, and self-serving political clients) at the expense of mass humanity. Thiel, Karp and Zamiska may talk like frank but saintly salvationists running The Last Chance Saloon for humankind, but they seem far removed from being real altruists and intellectual giants. It all looks like pseudointellectual fakery, thinly disguised sophistry.

However, their true “success” lies in bamboozling weak, gullible and self-serving political leaders and governments into swallowing it all. In the UK and some other countries, the latter has willingly, and in some cases enthusiastically, allowed Palantir to manipulate, if not dictate, priorities in the political and governance agenda behind the scenes. Unlike the Swiss, they have allowed the Palantir “tail” to wag the sovereign “dog.”

[ edited this piece.]

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Actually, the outgoing British Prime Minister didn’t say those exact words: A character in Toy Story 5 did. But the sentiments are a match. Earlier this year, Starmer tightened online safety laws to include AI chatbots; now he has announced a ban on social media for under-16s. Yet even the minister responsible for implementing the ban sounded gloomy when she : “I have no doubt children who are currently on social media, for whom it’s an integral part of their lives, will try and get around the ban, and many will succeed.”

Technology Secretary Liz Kendall conceded the restrictions would not be foolproof but that the move was about “resetting expectations” for teens and even younger children over what they had access to. She might have added that teenagers in particular have a habit of ignoring, contravening and sometimes rebelling against expectations. And they will do so again.

The ban will be as successful as pretty much any other ban. It will have effects, probably spectacular effects, but not the ones intended. That’s the thing about bans: They incite people. The instant a thing or piece of behavior is prohibited, it instantly becomes more attractive. Even people who haven’t experienced whatever is banned before can hardly wait.

Starmer is missing the irony. He’s not the only one, though he might have taken time to glance back in history at other notable attempts to extinguish habits that have only inflamed them. Here’s a guide to some of the more combustible cases.

Alcohol

, the prevention by law of alcohol manufacture and sale in the United States, was inarguably the most paradoxically productive ban in history. It became the catalyst for the growth of illegal liquor production and its widespread sale, as well as the rise of unlicensed nightclubs and bars owned and run by opportunist entrepreneurs. It cultivated a network of organized crime that thrives to the present day, remaining Prohibition’s most enduring legacy: the .

At a time when industrialization was transforming the US and an embryonic consumer society was beginning to take shape, American culture was also affected by a religious revival that encouraged the abolition of slavery and temperance — this being the abstinence from alcoholic drink. The influence of what was known as the became felt at political levels. In 1846, the state of Maine introduced a legal ban on alcohol; similar legislation followed.

In 1920, Congress passed the National Prohibition Act, better known as the after US Representative Andrew J. Volstead. The popular appetite for booze was undiminished, of course, and smugglers, known and bootleggers (from smugglers’ practice of concealing bottles in their boots) initially brought in liquor from abroad. Soon, unlawful distilleries and distribution networks emerged, which became manna from heaven for the then primitive, secret Italian body of gangsters who controlled operations until and beyond Prohibition’s end in 1933.

By then, the Mafia, once a loose assembly of miscreants, had transformed into a sophisticated national arrangement. It had its own hierarchy and amenable politicians who helped it become a near-invulnerable criminal enterprise.

Books

Historically, religious and state interests have banned reading material in attempts to control what passes as knowledge. Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang started the trend in 213 BC when he ordered the of history and philosophy books. The Spanish Inquisition, established 1478, parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy, while the Catholic Church scientific texts by Galileo. American Puritans Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan in 1637 for satirizing their ways.

Fears of political rebellion motivated suppression in the 19th and 20th centuries. Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto faced in countries like Germany in 1878 under Anti-Socialist Laws. The concept of destroying books to suppress independent thought and maintain social conformity was explored by Ray Bradbury in his classic dystopian novel, Fahrenheit 451.

Sexually explicit themes have led to famous obscenity battles. The US and United Kingdom James Joyce’s Ulysses from 1922 until 1933. Similarly, England D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover from 1928 until 1960, when a landmark , Regina v Penguin Books, Ltd, legally permitted its publication. The UK legally prohibited Vladimir Nabokov’s from 1955 to 1959. The US and UK Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer for nearly 30 years starting in 1934, until a 1964 US Supreme Court , Grove Press v Gerstein, finally cleared it. In all cases, the attempt to stop people reading the books whetted the appetite of readers.

Many books we now regard as classics, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four faced bans in and the , respectively.

Starting in the 1970s, US school boards J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye from curricula. They officially prohibited teachers from recommending what became a seminal novel due to its vulgar language and themes of teenage rebellion.

Pop music

Hundreds of popular songs have faced total radio bans, varying wildly between the UK and US due to different broadcasting laws. While the UK’s BBC issued official national decrees, American censorship relied on uncoordinated bans from major regional radio networks. Censors on both sides generally targeted songs across five broad categories.

1. On grounds of taste: The BBC regularly banned “teen tragedy” discs for being too morbid. Ray Peterson’s Laura I Love Her (1960) and The Shangri-Las’ of the Pack (1964) became prohibited in the UK due to romanticizing death. Yet both tracks aired freely in the US and became best-sellers.

2. Sexually explicit material: The BBC controversially Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax (1984) from its airwaves for its lyrics (“when you wanna come”). Paradoxically, the scandal helped it become an immense hit.

3. Drug-related themes: Dozens of major American stations the Byrds’ Eight Miles High (1966) from dozens of major US stations after a prominent American industry journal, Bill Gavin’s Record Report, labeled it a “drug song,” severely halting its commercial momentum. Not so in the UK, where the track met with far less scrutiny and bolstered the band’s strengthening reputation.

4. Disrespectful or political content: The BBC totally the Sex Pistols’ anti-monarchist anthem, God Save the Queen (1977), for disrespecting the Royal Family. It remained legal to buy in stores and is, of course, now a classic.

5. Shadow ban: Following the September 11 attacks in 2001, the media giant Clear Channel issued a massive corporate to over 1,100 US radio stations, effectively wiping Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door off the airwaves.

Piety and pop music never mix well: The latter is brash, irreverent, unruly and often deliberately offensive. It’s meant to be. Outsiders never quite get this.

Religion

Legally prohibiting a practice, excluding people or banishing things is one thing. Controlling beliefs, especially strongly-held beliefs based on spiritual apprehension rather than evidence is quite another. So, bans on religions have been scarce: just two in history — Albania in 1967, and Democratic Kampuchea (now Cambodia) in 1975.

• Albania: founded his country’s Communist Party and rose to prime minister in 1945. He drew support from the Soviet Union. As a stalwart devotee of Stalin, Hoxha adopted ruthless methods in his modernization program, confiscating land, nationalizing businesses and eliminating opponents. He also outlawed religion, closing churches, mosques and religious institutions and placing the state in charge of Albania’s cultural and intellectual activities. Possessing a Bible or Quran became an offense punishable by years in prison, until the regime collapsed in December 1990. Hoxha himself came from a Muslim family.

• Kampuchea: In 1975, Cambodia’s five-year civil war ended and the Khmer Rouge rebels led by communist assumed control, proclaimed “year zero” and embarked on a reconstruction process that killed 1.7 million people, almost a quarter of the population, and considered parents unnecessary. Like Hoxha, Pol Pot was an adherent of Stalinism. The Khmer Rouge destroyed about 95% of Buddhist temples and wrecked both Christian churches and Muslim mosques. Many surviving sacred buildings transformed into pigsties, storage sheds or prisons. Invading Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge government in January 1979.

In both cases, religious belief returned. Albania is now constitutionally secular and its main denominations are Islam and Christianity. Theravada Buddhism is dominant in Cambodia, though there are Muslim and Christian minorities.

Cannabis

The legal suppression of cannabis became a catalyst for its global visibility. First banned federally in the US via the 1937 Marijuana Tax , the prohibition backfired by piquing public curiosity.

The 1936 propaganda film perfectly illustrated this backfire. Originally conceived as a public warning about the “devil weed” driving youth into insanity and crime, the movie acquired a cult status as a popular source of amusement and unintentional comedy. By the 1960s, cultural serendipity transformed the plant. A countercultural generation adopted cannabis as a symbol of defiance. It became an emblem of to the Vietnam War and of alternative values in the US, UK and beyond.

The irony deepened. By forcing cannabis into the same underground market as hard narcotics, the law inadvertently turned cannabis into a “gateway,” granting users access to more addictive and destructive drugs like heroin and cocaine. Decades of enforcement failed to crush demand. If anything, they revealed the futility of punitive laws.

Public perceptions shifted in the 21st century. In 2012, Colorado and Washington became the first US states to recreational use, initiating a period of reform. Today, the transition of a once-outlawed weed into a lawful, taxable commodity and one with medical value, serves as the final irony. Once a symbol of rebellion, cannabis is now an industrial .

Australia’s social media

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese this ban in December 2025 amid public anxiety over online harms, mental health and addictive algorithms. He intended the legislation to protect young people by restricting access to major platforms, though evidence emerging suggests this has not been the case.

A central reason is the widespread use of workarounds. These include creating accounts with false dates of birth, using older accounts, borrowing adults’ accounts and exploiting weaknesses in age-verification systems. Rather than eliminating social media use, the ban simply changed how many young people accessed it.

Independent economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research discovered that only in four teenagers obeyed the ban. Australia’s own eSafety Commissioner reinforced the same pattern. One study by BMJ found that around of teenagers under age 16 are still using social media. Many social media platforms don’t even use , as Australian law doesn’t mandate its application. In other words, the enforcement mechanism barely registered in everyday use.

Additionally, the BMJ study found that the ban has barely affected how much time teenagers under 16 spend on social media. It has not eliminated access, nor meaningfully reduced it. Australia’s social media ban was an effective concession to public anxiety, Albanese’s attempt to assuage a moral panic. But not a practical policy capable of governing the digital environment it claims to regulate.

The legislation also reflected a naive assumption that technology companies could effectively police users’ ages and online behavior. This underestimated both the technical limitations of age assurance and the ingenuity of young users. At the same time, public debate concentrated overwhelmingly on the risks of social media while paying comparatively little attention to its educational, social and communicative value.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of .]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The sheer volume and velocity of information, often contradictory, frequently biased and sometimes deliberately misleading, demands more than just passive consumption. It demands active, disciplined engagement, a form of cognitive fitness that, much like physical fitness, requires consistent training and intentional maintenance. In an era defined by polycrisis and perpetual uncertainty, our ability to think clearly, critically and adaptively is our most valuable asset.

This deluge of information has a profound effect on our mental fitness. Consider the daily onslaught. One moment, we are grappling with the implications of on global trade, and the next, we are trying to comprehend the intricacies of strategic competition between superpowers. We witness political dramas unfold, from Washington to Caracas, and hear analyses ranging from insightful to inflammatory. Simultaneously, the media itself undergoes a profound transformation, as explored in of Netflix’s role in developments within the film industry and the broader “media war.” Each of these issues, individually, presents a significant cognitive load. Collectively, they threaten to overwhelm our capacity for understanding and considered judgment.

Beyond the headlines: the cognitive load

Our brains are remarkable organs, but they are not infinitely scalable processors. They possess inherent biases, shortcuts and limitations that, while often efficient in simpler environments, can become liabilities in a hyper-complex, information-dense world. When confronted with a constant stream of breaking news, expert opinions, social media debates and partisan rhetoric, our minds tend to revert to familiar patterns: confirmation bias, tribalism, and a preference for simple answers over complex truths.

This isn’t a failure of intelligence; it’s a failure of training. We are, in essence, asking our minds to run a marathon without ever having practiced sprinting, let alone endurance. The result is often mental fatigue, a retreat into echo chambers, or a cynical disengagement from issues that desperately require our attention. We might feel informed because we’re constantly consuming, but true understanding — the ability to synthesize, analyze, and form independent judgments — often eludes us.

The illusion of understanding

The illusion of understanding is particularly dangerous. We read a headline, skim an article, or listen to a soundbite, and believe we grasp the full scope of an issue. Yet, global affairs, economics, and even local politics are rarely reducible to simple narratives. The rise of a multipolar world, for instance, is not a binary shift but a dynamic, multifaceted evolution with historical roots and unpredictable consequences. 

When we settle for superficial understanding, we become susceptible to manipulation, whether from state actors, corporate interests, or even well-meaning but ill-informed voices. We lose the capacity to challenge assumptions, question motives, and critically evaluate the frameworks through which information is presented. This cognitive vulnerability undermines democratic processes, fosters division, and hinders our collective ability to address pressing global challenges.

Building a cognitive “mind gym”

To counter this, we need to actively cultivate what I call a “Cognitive Mind Gym.” This isn’t about becoming an academic or an expert in every field; it’s about developing mental habits and practices that strengthen our intellectual resilience, sharpen our critical faculties, and enable us to navigate complexity with greater clarity and purpose. Just as physical exercise builds muscle and endurance, cognitive exercises build mental agility and robustness.

Exercise 1: critical filtering and information hygiene

The first step is to become a discerning gatekeeper of our mental inputs. This means consciously selecting information sources, prioritizing depth over breadth, and actively seeking out diverse perspectives, even those that challenge our preconceptions.

Scrutinize your sources. Don’t just read what is said, consider who is saying it, why they are saying it, and where they are saying it. Is it a primary source, an analytical piece, or an opinion column? What are the potential biases of the publication or the author? This is particularly vital when examining topics such as the evolution of the multipolar world or narratives surrounding global strategic competition, where perspectives are often deeply entrenched and emotionally charged.

Be an active consumer. Move beyond passive scrolling. Engage with content by asking questions: What is the main argument? What evidence supports it? What is not being said? How does this information connect to what I already know, or contradict it?

Consider your informational diet. Just as we manage our food intake, we must manage our information intake. Limit exposure to sensationalism and endless news feeds. Schedule dedicated time for in-depth reading and reflection, rather than constant, fragmented consumption.

Exercise 2: cultivating cognitive empathy

Understanding complex global issues requires more than just processing facts; it requires understanding motivations, cultures, and historical contexts different from our own. Cognitive empathy is the ability to step into another’s shoes intellectually, to understand their worldview, their fears, and their aspirations, even if we don’t agree with them.

Think beyond an ‘us vs. them’ mentality. When analyzing geopolitical tensions or domestic political divides, resist the urge to immediately label one side as “good” and the other as “bad.” Explore the underlying reasons for actions, the historical grievances, the economic pressures, and the cultural narratives that shape behavior. 

Seek alternative perspectives. Actively seek out voices and analyses from different cultural and national backgrounds. Understand that a policy that seems rational from one capital might be viewed as an existential threat from another. This fosters a more nuanced understanding of global dynamics, like the rising global strategic competition Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at Davos.

Exercise 3: embracing nuance and complexity

The human mind naturally seeks patterns and simplicity. While useful for survival, this tendency can be a hindrance when dealing with genuinely complex systems. Geopolitics, economics, and societal change are rarely linear or monocausal.

Resist simplifying issues. Be wary of explanations that offer a single cause for a complex problem or a simple solution to a deeply entrenched issue.

Identify interconnections. Understand that issues are interconnected. US tariffs impact global supply chains, which affect local economies, which can fuel political discontent. A crisis in one region can have ripple effects across continents. Train your mind to see these connections rather than isolating problems.

Be more accepting of ambiguity. Learn to be comfortable with not having all the answers, and with the idea that multiple, sometimes contradictory, truths can coexist. The world is often messy, and our understanding of it will always be incomplete. The goal is not certainty, but informed judgment.

Exercise 4: the power of deliberate reflection

In our fast-paced world, reflection is often seen as a luxury. In reality, it is a necessity for cognitive maintenance. Reflection is the process by which we consolidate new information, challenge existing beliefs, and refine our understanding.

Schedule pauses in your routine. Dedicate time each day or week to simply think about what you’ve learned. How does it fit into your existing mental model of the world? Has anything you’ve encountered challenged your previous assumptions?

Express your ideas by journaling or discussing with others. Articulating your thoughts, either in writing or through discussion with trusted, diverse-minded individuals, can clarify your thinking and expose gaps in your understanding. This process forces you to move beyond passive consumption to active synthesis.

Revisit topics and revise your opinions. Our understanding of global affairs is not static. Revisit complex topics periodically, incorporating new information and perspectives. What seemed clear yesterday might appear different today with added context.

Why this matters for global citizens

The cultivation of cognitive fitness is not just a personal endeavor; it is a civic imperative. In a world where information can be weaponized, where narratives compete for dominance, and where global challenges demand collective action, the ability of individuals to think critically and independently is paramount.

When citizens are cognitively fit, they are less susceptible to propaganda, more capable of informed participation in democratic processes, and better equipped to hold power accountable. They can discern genuine threats from manufactured fears and identify opportunities for cooperation amidst conflict.

From personal clarity to collective resilience

By consciously building our Cognitive Mind Gym, we transform from passive recipients of information into active participants in the global dialogue. We move beyond simply reacting to headlines and begin to proactively understand the forces shaping our world.

This collective cognitive resilience is the bedrock upon which a more informed, engaged, and ultimately, more stable global society can be built. It empowers us to not only understand the complex challenges of our time but to contribute meaningfully to their solutions. In an age of unprecedented complexity, the most powerful tool we possess is a well-trained mind. Let us commit to exercising it.

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For Europe, the consequences arrive quickly. Higher energy costs fuel inflation, put pressure on manufacturing, weaken industrial competitiveness and complicate monetary policy across the eurozone. The continent may not be launching strikes in the Gulf, but the structure of its economy ensures it cannot isolate itself from the consequences.

The economic shock is only the visible layer of a deeper geopolitical problem now emerging across Europe. At its core, the Iran War is exposing the limits of Europe’s long-standing ambition for strategic autonomy. The conflict is highlighting Europe’s continued dependence on external security guarantees, the growing strain from simultaneous commitments in Ukraine and the Middle East, and widening tensions within the transatlantic alliance over burden-sharing and defense responsibilities. Far from being a temporary regional crisis, the war is revealing structural weaknesses that may shape Europe’s economic and strategic position for years to come.

Europe’s strategic contradiction

For years, European leaders increasingly spoke about “strategic autonomy.” The phrase reflected a growing recognition that Europe could not indefinitely rely on external powers to secure its geopolitical and economic interests. The current crisis reveals how incomplete that ambition still remains.

Washington has increasingly encouraged in maritime security operations in the Red Sea and Gulf region publicly, but the requests remain limited: naval coordination, intelligence sharing, missile defense cooperation and burden sharing.

Strategically, however, the implications are much larger. Europe is already committed to sustaining Ukraine militarily and financially. Ammunition stockpiles remain strained. Air defense systems are limited. Defense industrial production is expanding, but not fast enough to sustain simultaneous long-term crises across multiple theaters. The emergence of a second geopolitical front creates a dilemma that Europe is not structurally prepared to manage. Deeper participation in Gulf operations risks military overstretch and gradual entanglement in another prolonged Middle Eastern conflict. Yet refusing American requests carries risks of its own.

US President Donald Trump and several figures surrounding his foreign policy orbit have repeatedly argued that Europe benefits disproportionately from American security guarantees while contributing insufficiently to collective defense burdens. Recent tensions around NATO targets have further exposed widening fractures inside the alliance.

The Iran war is intensifying those tensions. European governments increasingly fear being pulled into strategic escalations driven primarily by Washington’s calculations, while Washington increasingly views Europe as hesitant, dependent and strategically unreliable.

This is Europe’s alliance trap. Joining the crisis risks overstretch. Remaining distant risks transatlantic fracture and strategic marginalization. Either path weakens Europe’s position.

A two-front security crisis

The timing could hardly be worse. Europe is already confronting the largest military crisis on its eastern border since the Cold War. Support for Ukraine has required sustained financial commitments, industrial mobilization and political coordination across NATO on a scale few European governments anticipated in 2022.

Now, a second crisis is emerging simultaneously across Europe’s southern strategic periphery. Military resources cannot be expanded infinitely. Naval deployments to secure maritime routes reduce flexibility elsewhere. Intelligence assets become stretched across multiple theaters. Rising energy costs place additional strain on already fragile European economies, while governments continue to increase domestic defense spending.

Meanwhile, Russia is benefiting indirectly from the instability. Higher global are strengthening Moscow’s export revenues and partially offsetting the pressure generated by sanctions. Prolonged instability in the Gulf is also diverting Western political attention and military focus away from Ukraine. What began as a Middle Eastern conflict is gradually reshaping the broader European strategic environment.

This is how modern geopolitical crises spread. Not necessarily through territorial expansion, but through interconnected systems: energy, finance, logistics, alliances and industrial supply chains.

The return of strategic exposure

For decades after the Cold War, Europe benefited from an unusually favorable geopolitical environment. American power underwrote security, while relatively stable globalization supported growth and industrial integration. That environment is disappearing.The international system is becoming more fragmented, coercive and transactional. 

Economic interdependence is increasingly functioning as leverage rather than protection. Strategic competition now shapes technology access, maritime routes, financial systems and industrial supply chains simultaneously. Europe is entering this environment while still lacking full control over many of the systems on which its prosperity depends. Its remains vulnerable to external shocks. Its military architecture still relies heavily on American strategic capabilities. Its financial markets remain deeply exposed to geopolitical instability transmitted through global energy and shipping networks. The Iran war illustrates this reality with unusual clarity.

European governments are not determining the trajectory of escalation between Iran, Israel and the United States. Yet Europe remains deeply exposed to the consequences through inflation, energy costs, alliance obligations and financial instability. The continent absorbs strategic consequences without exercising proportional strategic control. That imbalance is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

NATO’s emerging internal strain

The deeper significance of the crisis may ultimately lie inside NATO itself. For decades, NATO functioned not simply as a military alliance but as a stabilizing political structure linking American and European strategic interests together. The alliance assumed shared priorities, relatively predictable American leadership and a broad consensus regarding collective security. Those assumptions are weakening. Washington increasingly frames alliances in transactional terms, emphasizing burden sharing and strategic reciprocity. Europe, meanwhile, increasingly fears abandonment on one side and entrapment on the other. The Iran war sharpens both fears simultaneously.

The war in Ukraine has already exposed strains in military production, burden-sharing and long-term strategic sustainability. The Iran conflict introduces a second layer of pressure by forcing Europe to confront crises on multiple fronts simultaneously while remaining dependent on Washington for core security guarantees. The problem is not simply military capability. It is a strategic asymmetry. Washington retains escalation flexibility because it controls the larger share of military capacity. Europe, by contrast, absorbs many of the economic and political consequences of escalation while exerting less influence over the decisions that produce them. This imbalance gradually transforms alliances themselves.

European policymakers increasingly speak about strategic autonomy because they fear dependency. American policymakers increasingly demand greater European contributions because they fear overextension. Both sides are reacting to the same structural reality, but in opposing ways. The result is not necessarily an alliance collapse. It is something more unstable: an alliance that still exists militarily while weakening politically and psychologically.

The illusion of distance

European policymakers have often treated instability in the Middle East as geographically distant from Europe’s core security environment. That distinction no longer holds. Modern crises move through systems rather than geography alone. Energy flows, shipping routes, insurance markets, financial networks and industrial supply chains transmit instability outward with extraordinary speed. The war may be concentrated in the Gulf, but its effects move directly through the arteries of the global economy. Commercial shipping through the region has already faced rising insurance costs and pressure to , increasing costs across global supply chains. At the same time, in European energy and inflation expectations is again reshaping monetary calculations across the eurozone.

A disruption in Hormuz affects European manufacturing. Rising shipping premiums alter industrial costs. Energy volatility reshapes inflation expectations inside the eurozone. Alliance tensions complicate NATO cohesion. Even uncertainty itself becomes economically destabilizing as investment slows and fiscal pressure rises. Europe is rediscovering a structural reality it hoped globalization had softened: dependence creates exposure.

Europe’s real problem

The deeper issue exposed by the Iran War is not simply energy vulnerability or military overstretch. It is Europe’s incomplete transition from economic power to strategic power.

For years, Europe attempted to balance geopolitical dependence with economic strength. That balance is becoming harder to sustain in a world increasingly shaped by coercion, fragmentation and hard power competition.

The Iran war is therefore not only a Middle Eastern crisis. It is a warning that Europe’s position within an international system is becoming less stable and less forgiving. Until Europe resolves the contradiction between its geopolitical exposure and its limited strategic autonomy, it will continue to face crises it cannot prevent, wars it cannot fully influence and consequences it must nevertheless absorb. And the more unstable the international system becomes, the more dangerous that imbalance will become.

[ edited this piece.]

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Ten years of change

Guardiola was employed by Premier League club Manchester City at the time. The club is owned by the Abu Dhabi Group, the majority shareholder of which is Emirati royal and billionaire Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan. One wonders what would have happened had Guardiola been employed by London club Tottenham Hotspur, which is owned by an investment company ENIC, controlled by British billionaire Joe Lewis and his family. The club’s strong historical ties to the Jewish community in North London has long shaped its identity, with its ownership and fanbase reflecting that association for decades.

Guardiola has now left the Manchester Club after ten years, during which his team won every honor available. His tactical approach, influenced by basketball, has affected other coaches around the world: possession, screens and set pieces became commonplace in the sport.

Barely a month after Guardiola started at the club in July 2016, another incident shaped sport, this time in an altogether different way. NFL player Colin Kaepernick during the American national anthem on August 26, 2016, before a preseason game. He later switched to kneeling to show more respect to military veterans, but his meaning was still clear. That summer had seen deadly police shootings in the United States: Police shot and Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota, leading to widespread protests across the nation.

Remember: With notable exceptions, wider events ostensibly do not affect sports. Governing organizations warn athletes not to express opinions, views or perspectives of any kind on controversial topics. The template came about during Avery Brundage’s presidency of the International Olympic Committee, from 1952 to 1972. Brundage this into the Olympic charter and other sports followed. American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos created a major cause célèbre in 1968 when they affirmed their to Black Power, a radical movement that emerged in the 1960s, on the victory rostrum of the Mexico Olympics. They were sent home and punished, as if to send a warning to others.

Times had changed by the time of Kaepernick’s action. Indifference had given way to anger and sports governors, as well as competitors, were either prepared or forced to break with convention. Even England’s usually cautious football authorities not only allowed the knee, but freed up a period of time before games for players to make the . Tennis players, especially Naomi Osaka, publicly her views, sometimes wearing special face masks. Women’s sport mobilized as a platform for LGBTQ+ rights and became arguably the most effective advocacy organization ever.

If they want to suspend me … it’s OK

“I am not neutral,” said Guardiola during his February address. The Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester condemned similar in support of the Palestinian cause made last summer, to Manchester City’s chairman, Khaldoon Al Mubarak, that the 55-year-old’s comments “put the lives of British Jews in Manchester, including those who support your football club, in danger.”

Apart from Palestine, Guardiola’s other main commitment is Catalan independence. “I was delighted to be called up, but you can’t deny what you feel, and I feel very connected to my country, to Catalonia.”

In Manchester, Guardiola wore a yellow in press conferences and on the touchline in support of Catalonia political figures who had been arrested during violence when Spain’s national government banned Catalan’s independence referendum in 2017.

This was too much even for the newly-aware English football. The Football Association wrote to Guardiola on at least two occasions, instructing him to stop wearing the ribbon — it contravened rules against displaying political messages. The Association fined him , but he continued wearing it for months, even during the League Cup final against Arsenal in February 2018.

This provoked Guardialo to : “They can suspend me for doing that, but the other people are in jail. If they want to suspend me — UEFA, Premier League, FIFA — it’s OK.”

For over a century, sport cultivated an image of neutrality. Athletes were expected to compete, shake hands and leave the world’s conflicts outside the stadium. Administrators enforced the principle consistently. From Brundage’s Olympics to the of Smith and Carlos in 1968, the message was clear: Politics and sport did not, or at least should not, mix.

The last decade has changed that understanding. Kaepernick’s protest coincided with a broader cultural shift in which silence increasingly came to be seen not as neutrality but as acquiescence. The rise of Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement and campaigns for LGBTQ+ rights encouraged competitors to use their visibility as a platform. What had once been regarded as an abuse of sporting status became, for many, a responsibility attached to it.

Yet the new freedom has limits. Athletes and coaches have not acquired an unrestricted licence to comment on anything they choose. The boundaries of acceptable expression have moved. Guardiola’s own career illustrates the point. His support for Palestine has attracted criticism, but it has not threatened his position at a club owned by Abu Dhabi interests. One might reasonably ask whether the same tolerance would have applied had he chosen a different cause. What if he had repeatedly criticized restrictions on gay rights in parts of the Gulf? What if he had used his platform to champion LGBTQ+ campaigns in a manner that embarrassed his club’s ownership? The answer is unknowable, but the question itself is worth asking.

The transformation of sport since 2016 has not abolished limits on political expression, but it has redrawn them. Some causes have become legitimate, even expected: inclusivity, anti-racism and opposition to discrimination. Others remain sensitive, awkward or potentially career-threatening, particularly where they intersect with state power, commercial sponsorship or entrenched cultural norms. The old ideal of neutrality has weakened; it has not been replaced by unlimited freedom.

Maverick or emblem?

Seen in this context, Guardiola is less a maverick than an emblem of a new sporting age. His interventions on Palestine and Catalonia are controversial not because they are unique, but because they expose the growing difficulty of separating sport from the societies in which it operates. Clubs are owned by states, leagues are global businesses and athletes possess audiences that rival those of conventional media organizations. The expectation that they remain publicly neutral now appears increasingly artificial.

Yet the disappearance of neutrality has not produced unlimited freedom. The new sporting culture permits some forms of advocacy more readily than others. Causes associated with race, gender and sexuality have gained institutional legitimacy; criticism directed at owners, sponsors or governing bodies may still encounter resistance. The key shift is not the arrival of political speech in sport, but its uneven regulation.

The question is not whether sport is political. That argument was settled long ago. The more revealing question is who gets to speak, on what issues and under what conditions?

Guardiola’s significance lies precisely here. His decade at Manchester City coincided with sport’s transition from a culture of barely stifled silence to one of selective expression. Far from standing outside this transformation, he became one of its most visible symbols.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of .]

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Today, Germany has been shaken by a series of political and economic crises — from the Covid-19 pandemic to war in Europe — fueling nostalgia for a more optimistic and ostensibly uncomplicated past. In that search, attention often turns to the early years of Angela Merkel’s chancellorship — and to the 2006 World Cup, the subject of a recent three-part German series.

That nostalgia is easy to understand. In 2006, Germany welcomed the footballing world under the slogan “A time to make friends.” Flags covered balconies and cars; public screenings of matches turned into festivals. German footballer Philipp Lahm opened the tournament with a curling shot into the top right corner against Costa Rica, and �ұ�������Բ�’s run to the semifinals helped shape the tournament into what many remember as weeks of seemingly carefree celebration. The German news magazine Der Spiegel : “A happy nation — Germany, a summer fairy tale — the World Cup becomes a national Love Parade,” referencing the country’s once famous techno parade to evoke mass celebration. The magazine suggested that Germany had begun to “settle into its own history.” In a country long defined by its struggle with the Nazi past, this was a loaded idea.

For many, the tournament symbolized a newfound ease with national identity. Then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan remarked, “Here you see a united and happy German people … No one sees the spirit of today’s Berlin or of the Germans as being in any way connected to the past.” 

The narrative of a carefree summer — one in which Germany supposedly showed what it is really like — has become something of a national myth. Questioning it is often seen as needlessly negative. For many, it feels like a spoilsport attack on the “ of their lives.” Not even later corruption allegations surrounding �ұ�������Բ�’s successful bid to host the 2006 World Cup sufficed to fundamentally shake this collective memory.��

In light of growing far-right and exclusionary views — and rising support for authoritarian and anti-immigration positions — an uncomfortable question must be asked: How harmless was the “summer fairy tale” really? What kind of impact do large-scale sporting events have? And how do they shape and intensify national sentiment?

Sporting events and national identity

Major sporting events like the FIFA World Cup have become central moments of collective communication in modern societies. They are mass media events with enormous reach and a powerful capacity to mobilize emotions and participation. These events are far from politically neutral. They function as global stages where political, social and economic interests are expressed and advanced.

show that such events can affect how strongly people identify with their nation. A key factor is the degree of emotional and practical engagement: The more people feel involved — through shared experiences, celebrations and media consumption — the stronger their sense of belonging becomes.

Through their narratives, symbols and rituals, sports and media mega-events make the host nation emotionally tangible. In Irish-American political scientist Benedict ’s sense, the “imagined community” of the nation becomes something people can actually feel. In Germany, football-driven patriotism has thus become a mass phenomenon deeply rooted in the social mainstream.

At the same time, research points to double-edged effects. A German found that pride in national sporting success is positively correlated with nationalism and xenophobia, raising doubts about whether sports can foster patriotic attachment without simultaneously reinforcing exclusionary attitudes.

by the University of Marburg suggest more strongly that the 2006 World Cup contributed to an increased acceptance of nationalist views: “Individuals surveyed after the World Cup expressed more nationalist and less purely patriotic attitudes than those surveyed before the tournament.”

The myth of the “summer fairy tale”

These studies challenge the dominant images of 2006 that continue to shape �ұ�������Բ�’s collective memory. German writer Max Czollek reflected in 2018:

In , people behaved as if they were shaking off a heavy burden they had carried for a long time … Germans experienced the World Cup as a collective sense of relief that it was finally acceptable to wave the national flag again, like in the past.

The sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer had already dismissed the image of a peaceful, open-minded patriotism in 2006 as “ nonsense.” His warnings about the risks of so-called “” were often seen as overly pessimistic. In hindsight, however, they appear strikingly prescient.

As of 2026, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is monitored by �ұ�������Բ�’s domestic intelligence agency, has become the largest opposition party and leads national polling in some surveys. Although it has never been part of the federal government, it has shaped political discourse for over a decade. It has steadily pushed the boundaries of what is considered acceptable further to the right. Its growing strength has raised concerns about democratic stability.  Reflecting this, voices within the governing coalition led by incumbent Chancellor Friedrich Merz have described the current government’s success or failure as a make-or-break moment for German democracy.

Exploiting patriotism politically

The 2006 World Cup can be read as a highly visible moment in the broader normalization of national pride — and as a symbolic loosening of what some had long described as an excessive or “misplaced” sense of historical guilt. It helped make a vocabulary of national identification more socially acceptable, creating an emotional and symbolic terrain that far-right actors later found easier to appropriate. The AfD did not invent these sentiments; it sought to capitalize on them. 

If this link seems far-fetched, consider Götz Kubitschek, a key figure in �ұ�������Բ�’s far-right intellectual scene, who the AfD’s strategy as “normalization patriotism” — a deliberately low-threshold, broadly appealing and seemingly harmless form of national identification designed to serve as a common point of reference.

In a 2025 special issue titled “Football: The National Sport – The Heartbeat of a German Passion,” the far-right magazine Compact claimed that patriotism “releases feel-good hormones.” After �ұ�������Բ�’s early exit from the World Cup in Qatar, the right-wing conservative weekly struck a nostalgic tone, recalling the 2006 “summer fairy tale” as “collective loosening-up toward a more relaxed, unselfconscious patriotism.”

The AfD itself openly recognizes the political and identity-building power of sport. In its 2025 policy guidelines on sports, the party emphasizes that sporting success fosters “ identification with one’s own nation,” explicitly citing the 2006 World Cup as a key example.

This strategy fits into a broader modernization of right-wing extremism. It marks a departure from the more overt neo-Nazi subcultures that were still prevalent in 2006, and that had dismissed the World Cup’s mainstream, apolitical enthusiasm as a shallow, system-conforming display.

Patriotism as a vehicle for historical revisionism

The normalization of patriotism as part of the AfD’s broader identity is closely linked with its ethnonationalist and revisionist approach to history — one that seeks to downplay or reframe the memory of Nazi crimes and their victims. In its 2016 party manifesto, the AfD called for an end to what it described as the “” of German historical memory to the period of National Socialism, advocating instead for a more “balanced view” that emphasizes supposedly positive and identity-forming aspects of German history.

Leading figures within the party have made this position explicit. Alexander Gauland, the party’s honorary chairman, notoriously referred to the Nazi era as “a of bird droppings in over a thousand years of successful German history.” Björn Höcke, one of its most influential and controversial extremist figures, demanded a “ turn” in the country’s politics of remembrance.

Similarly, party chairwoman Alice Weidel has rejected the widely accepted German framing of May 8, 1945 — the day of Nazi �ұ�������Բ�’s surrender — as a “ of liberation,” arguing that it is inappropriate to celebrate what she describes as the defeat of one’s own country. Against this backdrop, her call for Germany to “ proud of itself again” becomes part of a broader political project — one that links national self-affirmation to a redefinition of how history is remembered and interpreted.

For actors seeking to promote a more affirmative national narrative, the 2006 “summer fairy tale” can function as a useful point of reference within a broader national narrative: one in which the Nazi past serves primarily as a negative backdrop to a supposedly renewed, democratic present. This framing can obscure deeper continuities and mask broader social tensions.

Distraction in the euphoria of sport

Moments of national self-celebration and patriotic euphoria can create societal blind spots, masking those tensions. Even as Germany celebrated its “summer fairy tale” in 2006, the country was already experiencing a wave of far-right violence. Between 2000 and 2007, the neo-Nazi terrorist group National Socialist Underground () ten people, most of them of Turkish descent.

Victims’ families held demonstrations during the World Cup. Yet for years, investigations wrongly focused on the victims’ social circles — shaped in part by racist stereotypes. The NSU’s responsibility for the murders, as well as the extent of failures within �ұ�������Բ�’s security agencies, only came to light in 2011. The contrast is striking: While the country celebrated itself as open and welcoming, the most serious far-right murder series in postwar Germany remained largely unrecognized at the time.

A more nuanced patriotism

As the next World Cup approaches in the US, similar dynamics may come into view. The Trump administration is likely to use the tournament to project belief in American exceptionalism (“America First”) through highly visible, “.” A form of patriotism long rooted in an “ of America-branded totems, like flags and statues” — a tradition amplified and radicalized by President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement.

But does patriotism inevitably have to lead to self-aggrandizement and political instrumentalization? Or are there other ways to express a sense of national belonging?

Attachment to one’s country can also be self-critical and nuanced. The German-Iranian writer Navid Kermani articulated this in a 2014 speech in the German Bundestag marking the 65th anniversary of �ұ�������Բ�’s Basic Law. Rejecting the idea of a “normal” and “unstrained” relationship with the nation, he : “There never was such a normal and unstrained relationship — not even before National Socialism.” Instead, German history has always contained both “an excessive, aggressive nationalism” and “a strong tradition of self-criticism, a commitment to Europe, and a turn toward cosmopolitanism.”

Echoing a by former Chancellor and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize Willy Brandt, Kermani concluded: “A good German cannot be a nationalist.”

And yet, Kermani in a different Germany: “Not a boastful one, not the swaggering one … a country that has matured through its own failures and no longer needs grand displays … This is the Germany I love.”

[ edited this piece.]

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Life under constant threat

Schäffer returns from Kyiv with a stark assessment of life in Ukraine. On the surface, daily life continues much as it would in any European capital. Cafés remain open, people go to work and public spaces stay active. Yet beneath this normality lies continuous danger.

Residents live with frequent air raid alerts delivered through mobile applications and public warning systems. When alarms sound, people must quickly assess whether the threat is immediate or whether they can continue with their daily activities. Schäffer describes hearing drones being intercepted near Kyiv shortly after an alert, a reminder that danger remains ever-present.

He considers the defining characteristics of Ukraine today to be resilience and fatigue. With the war now lasting longer than World War I, civilians continue to endure repeated attacks while trying to preserve some sense of normal life.

Russia’s escalating campaign

Khattar Singh notes that Russian missile and drone attacks intensified dramatically in late May, including large-scale strikes on Kyiv and renewed use of advanced missile systems. Schäffer rejects Kremlin claims that the escalation is simply retaliation for Ukrainian actions.

Instead, he argues that domestic pressures within Russia are driving the increase in attacks. According to Schäffer, the Kremlin faces mounting challenges as the war drags on and battlefield results fail to deliver the decisive victory initially promised.

He also emphasizes that civilian infrastructure has become a deliberate target. Citing figures presented by Katarína Mathernová, the European Union’s ambassador to Ukraine, Schäffer notes that there were only in 2025 when Russia did not strike civilian infrastructure and no such days in 2026.

“We need to really be open with this,” Schäffer says. “They have not only tried to continue their genocidal attacks.”

He points to strikes on cultural institutions and essential infrastructure, including water-treatment facilities, arguing that these attacks are intended to make civilian life increasingly difficult rather than achieve major military gains.

Beijing, Washington and the changing geopolitical picture

The conversation turns to the broader geopolitical context. Khattar Singh highlights the timing of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Beijing shortly before the latest escalation.

Schäffer believes the visit itself was planned long in advance and was not directly linked to the attacks. However, Moscow may have viewed the international environment as favorable for escalation, particularly given what he sees as limited resistance from major powers.

Schäffer says that Washington’s attention has shifted overwhelmingly toward the Middle East, leaving Ukraine largely absent from senior American messaging even during major Russian attacks.

“There is an absolute blind eye from the current US administration when it comes to Ukraine,” he says.

This perceived disengagement removes an important deterrent and creates uncertainty about the future of Western support. He characterizes US President Donald Trump’s approach as erratic and questions whether the US remains committed to defending democratic partners in Europe.

Europe’s concerns and Ukraine’s battlefield position

While much international attention has focused on developments in the Middle East, Schäffer believes that European leaders remain aware of Russia’s renewed offensive. Leaders such as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and French President Emmanuel Macron have publicly condemned the attacks.

Simultaneously, he acknowledges that European governments face immediate political pressures related to energy prices and economic stability. Events affecting the Strait of Hormuz have a more direct impact on voters than developments on the Ukrainian front, creating competing priorities for policymakers.

Schäffer also pushes back against narratives suggesting Ukraine is collapsing militarily. “The momentum on the battlefield on the front line is shifting towards Ukraine,” he states. Russia, he posits, remains unable to achieve its original objective of capturing the Ukrainian capital.

Nevertheless, war fatigue affects both Ukrainian and Russian societies. The conflict increasingly resembles a prolonged struggle of endurance rather than a contest likely to produce a rapid breakthrough.

Europe’s security challenge

The discussion concludes with concerns about Europe’s broader security posture. Khattar Singh points to the withdrawal of some US military assets from Germany and questions whether Europe possesses sufficient air-defense capabilities if Russian aggression expands beyond Ukraine.

Schäffer argues that European governments understand the threat but are moving too slowly to address it. He warns that Europeans often underestimate the psychological impact of living under constant missile and drone threats, something Ukrainians experience every day.

For Schäffer, the central lesson is that Europe can no longer assume American leadership will reliably fill security gaps. Instead, European states must strengthen both military capabilities and public preparedness.

Supporting Ukraine remains the most effective way to prevent wider instability. The longer Europe delays building its own resilience, the more vulnerable it becomes to the security challenges emerging on its eastern frontier.

[ edited this piece.]

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We have now evolved into a civilization whose citizens typically spend half or more of their waking hours in front of a screen. Our lives are saturated with advice from multiple sources of authority. Politicians explain what policies we should support. Celebrities tell us what we should buy, believe and become. Scientists hired by tobacco companies spent decades telling us what we shouldn’t worry about. The word “should” is everywhere — and it almost never means what it pretends to mean.

When a politician says the country should move in a certain direction and that you, the engaged voter, should back their bill, they mean: This serves my interests, and I have painted it in your colors. When a brand-sponsored expert says you should feel reassured about some product or policy, they mean exactly what one of them dared to out loud back in 1979: “Doubt is our product because doubt defeats the facts already in your mind.” Facts annoyingly prevent us from understanding the wisdom of the experts, who alone know what we should do.

Fortunately, some sources of true facts exist, or so we’ve been thought to believe. When editorialists of serious newspapers — even “ of record” — explain how the government or the economy should work, they are advertising their own preferred ideology. If you share that ideology, you’ll most likely come away with a clearer idea of what other people should do, and thus dispense yourself from any undue effort. If you don’t share it, you should consult a different source.

The moral vocabulary of public life is largely a performance. “Should” is its favorite word precisely because it borrows the authority of ethics while remaining perfectly hollow. The word “should” is the workhorse of this vast industry. It is useful precisely because it borrows the grammar of ethics while committing to nothing. Whenever we hear the word should, we need to awaken our critical faculties.

A telling example with all the best intentions

In a recent article published here on 51�Թ�, authors Farris Hamzeh and Natalia Hidalgo described the very real quandary that confronts an increasingly helpless Europe:

“Europe, meanwhile, has faced mounting domestic pressures and tests to its relationship with the US… Europe to formulate a unified response to meet the moment. This initial hesitation gave way to a disjointed set of , with some European governments aligning with the US while others questioned the legality of US–Israeli strikes.”

These facts are painful for those of us who live and work in Europe and feel deeply concerned about its future. Yet, for all of us — including the authors of the article — it is often unclear what “Europe” even means, especially when talking about recommended public policy. Does it refer to the European Union? To Europeans themselves, many of whom have only a vague understanding of what the EU is, how it works and whom it represents?

Or perhaps “Europe” refers collectively to all the countries on the European continent, or at least to a supposed consensus among a majority of them. In some people’s minds, it could refer only to those seen as its leaders: especially Germany, France and the United Kingdom (which is not even in the EU). And what about the perception put forward by US geopolitical analysts who now frame the continent’s imagined divide as a struggle between “Old Europe” or “New Europe?” Talking about what Europe thinks and what it should do is by definition a perilous task.

This Devil’s Advocate always seeks clarity in the dossiers he studies. I need to determine who’s to blame for the confusion. Very objectively, I find this state of affairs concerning the very agency of Europe particularly inimical to formulating meaningful advice. The authors of the article, however, appear undaunted. In their concluding paragraph, they make a bold recommendation about what the phantom called “Europe” should do: “Europe should seek to drive a wedge between Iran and Russia, isolating the latter. Expediting the peaceful resolution to the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz is the best action Europe can take today.” 

It’s an intriguing idea, with unimaginably complex implications. To “drive a wedge,” you need a driver. Who is that likely to be? Their advice will likely appeal uncritically to readers whose worldview already treats the isolation of Russia as self-evidently desirable, a reflex deeply rooted in US policy since the Cold War. But, taking some critical distance — always a wise reflex — two important questions come to mind. Is it even feasible? And have we imagined the unintended consequences? As a tentative answer to the latter, I would submit that recent history teaches us that attempts to isolate Russia have a strong tendency not only to backfire but also to cause endless headaches for the perpetrators.

Had the authors used the word “might” instead of should, they could have gone on to address the difficulties of formulating and executing the policy they recommend. They could equally have begun evoking the longer-term consequences of such a policy. “Should” allows them to conclude their article with a sense of resolution. But does the reader feel that anything is resolved? And, quite frankly, will any of us Europeans act to take their advice?

Language, logic and moral force

This example should serve to help us reflect on how easy it is to create confusion with a word like should. When the authors say Europe should isolate Russia, they are recommending a concrete action. But when we say to a friend about to travel, “you should have pleasant weather in Athens in October” or “there should be an available room at the hotel,” we are literally predicting (probabilizing) on the basis of past knowledge. Such statements have no overt or hidden moral force. The auxiliary should seems to float between one extreme — Kant’s categorial imperative: “You should never lie, ever” — and uncertain but reasonably calculated speculation about what might happen in the future.

It’s this ambiguity that may lead us astray. And it’s against this backdrop that we must consider one of the more remarkable habits of our digital moment: millions of people, apparently unsatisfied with the quality of manipulation on offer from their politicians, celebrities, corporate scientists and editorialists, have decided in moments of doubt to an AI chatbot instead: What should I do?

The problem on the AI side is twofold:

• Chatbots are designed always to provide a “best” response even when there is no obvious one available, which is already an invitation to hallucination.
• The famous problem of sycophancy, or the tendency to approve everything the human prompter says, encouraging that person to persist even when danger signs indicating possible pathological behavior are present.

Numerous experts in AI behavioral practices have now emerged to warn us of the risks. Among the “5 practices to Avoid with Artificial Intelligence,” Professor Jairo G. Sarmiento Sotelo using “AI as a therapist or friend.” Applications that propose “therapy” with AI have recently emerged. Even the most sophisticated therapeutic chatbot “cannot understand the deep context of trauma, and it has no ethical or legal responsibility.” Obviously, an all-purpose chatbot is likely to prove even riskier.

What I say you should and shouldn’t do!

If you really wish to qualify for AI sanctity, this Devil’s Advocate makes the following recommendations:

1. You should use dialogue with an AI chatbot to explore two things:
   • original insights of “great ideas” you’ve never heard other people formulate that you think will help you better understand the complexities of the universe and human societies; 
   • nagging doubts you have about ideas and beliefs other people have persuaded you to adopt.
2. You should expect the chatbot 1) to flatter you, 2) to begin by offering the most banal, largely accepted explanations of the phenomena you’re interested in. Both of these signal a negative, uninspired beginning that it will be your job to move beyond and correct.
3. Don’t be fooled by its initial predictable response. Challenge it, even to the point of saying sarcastically, “that’s exactly what I expected from an AI bot,” and then find ways of breaking down its banality.
4. Never ask it, “What should I do?” Instead, ask it about who or what sources may provide you with further insight. It will actually help you find them.

I’ve called this the “sparring partner” approach, which I claim can help our society achieve true democracy to replace the simulacrum of democracy our overlords have bequeathed to us. It can also serve to improve our own mental health… so long as we keep sparring.

Finally, take this on board. I’ve just listed several things you should and shouldn’t do. I know nothing about your needs and ambitions. Therefore, you will be perfectly justified in taking none of them seriously.

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post On the Meaning (and Danger) of “Should” appeared first on 51�Թ�.

– William Shakespeare,

In January 1776, , a major figure during the American Revolution, published Common Sense in support of the Patriots’ cause. According to , “[w]riting in clear and persuasive prose, Paine collected moral and political arguments to encourage common people in the Colonies to fight for egalitarian government.” Historians believe that Common Sense had a huge impact on the widespread support for the Declaration of Independence.

Paine wasn’t always successful, however. His in England “was marked by repeated failures. He had two brief marriages. He was unsuccessful or unhappy in every job he tried. He was dismissed from the office after he published a strong argument in 1772 for a raise in pay as the only way to end corruption in the service.” Sound familiar? Then he met in London, who gave him letters of introduction and suggested he go to America and seek his fortune there. The rest is history.��

That is why there is delicious irony in allying Paine with the reverse proposition of Brexit: the push for the UK rejoining the EU — in some capacity, ASAP. This, in effect, would be a third chapter of a long-running UK–EU saga. First, the UK joined the European Economic Community (), the forerunner to the EU, in 1973. Second, the UK decided to leave the EU in 2016, formally exiting in 2020 — largely due to concerns about loss of sovereignty and whipped-up negative public sentiment about the EU.

Note that Paine had a negative sentiment about the UK. That is why he left for the New World and became a Founding Father of the US. So it is ironic that Paine’s words hit the nail on the head when it comes to the timing of a new UK–EU relationship. In 1776, Paine wrote, “the time hath found us” in regards to the question of when the perfect time would be for America to seek independence from Britain. As this English-born American knew, is everything. That timing for the UK and the EU is now when it comes to the question of returning to a closer relationship, including full membership.

The upsides of a closer relationship

For a tighter re-union, the EU and UK each need to identify the significant net benefits of a closer, re-formalized relationship where timing is propitious. Lengthy articles, discussions and political maneuvering have held forth ad nauseam on this issue. Action is needed now. As with prophetic, peripatetic Paine, here are several reasons for and against the UK and EU seeking a “de jure” agreement — yet again.

The biggest “pro” identified is trade. The UK’s trading partner is the EU. In 2024, the EU accounted for 41% of UK exports and 51% of UK imports. The EU imports machinery, mineral and chemical products, transport equipment, and base metals from the UK. The UK imports the same from the EU, plus foodstuffs, beverages and tobacco. Financial services, travel and telecommunications flow both ways.

The UK also has significant value-added capabilities for the EU when it comes to defense. Already, the UK has bilateral agreements with France’s Lancaster House, �ұ�������Բ�’s Trinity House and Norway’s Lunna House. In addition, the UK and Poland are negotiating a defense and security treaty. Plus, the UK has significant defense partnerships beyond the EU: a NATO ; the Five Eyes , an intelligence-sharing alliance with the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; and the UK–US Technology Prosperity , a series of financial investments from US tech firms.��

In 2024–25, the UK had a $80.7 (£60.2) billion defense , which is expected to increase to $83.4 (£62.2) billion in 2025–26. There is also the UK’s nuclear , selective global force projection and lead status. This is all useful towards a stronger EU in today’s and tomorrow’s unpredictable relationship with the US, especially considering the US has threatened to troops from Germany.

However, the UK is struggling with budgetary issues. This is where the UK would greatly benefit from recent defense initiatives by the EU. The European Defence Fund (EDF), European Defence Industry Programme (EDIP) and Security Action For Europe (SAFE) are some examples. These initiatives support EU member states, developing, strengthening and rationalizing their defense industrial base through loans and grants.

Additionally, the traditional decision-making triangle between France, Germany and the UK is now broken. Paris and Berlin have been left in a difficult ��ê�ٱ�-à-��ê�ٱ�. This is true on many subjects, but especially on defense. This is due to the lack of military culture in modern Germany, coupled with the need to increase its defense budget and forces — a need pushed by Washington and, more importantly, by the Russia–Ukraine War. A rapprochement with the UK would certainly help facilitate the defense debate between the top EU member states. In this context, the UK, France and Germany should advocate for a healthy ��é�Բ�����-à-�ٰ��Ǿ���.

Of course, there are also the practical reasons. The UK and EU are compatible geographically, socially and politically. Both entities share important common values, especially location, which can never be understated. English remains the predominant working EU language, and yet, ironically, the UK is no longer a member of the current EU!

A partnership is also completely reasonable when you consider how economic, political and cultural issues will benefit, especially when it comes to industries such as agriculture, fisheries, tourism and entertainment. In addition, the UK, as demonstrated historically, is a useful historical counterbalance (aka bulwark) — or rather a complement — to Germany and France, providing long-term political, social and economic stability and heft to the EU. As far as health or phytosanitary standards, the UK population’s attitude and request for safety is now closer to the rest of Europe than to the current US deregulatory policy.

There is also the foreign policy aspect to think of. By formalizing its relationship with the EU, the UK can add a powerful “anti-venom” to neutralize positions taken by the current US administration. Canada, Greenland/Denmark, Iran, Lebanon, NATO and the Falkland Islands are examples of American fiascos in handling international relationships. These fiascos underscore the need for the UK and the EU to come up with more forceful consolidated responses to the US on international issues.

Constant monitoring is the only way to avoid the cons

Of course, as with everything, there are downsides. In the UK’s eyes, the biggest con for a UK–EU partnership is perceived expanded bureaucracy. This was a previous problem that caused a majority of the UK voting population to sour towards EU membership. The UK government had already kept its distance from Brussels, notably by of the common currency, the euro. Yet the idea of the loss of national sovereignty became popular amongst Brexit supporters who voted to reclaim it in 2016. The situation on the other side of the channel is, however, different from what it was ten years ago. The European Commission, under pressure from the EU member states and the European Parliament, has started a process of simplification: cutting red tape wherever necessary to ease life for citizens and businesses. This development, however, needs close attention and better communication with constituents in member states as well as the UK.

A new UK–EU relationship will also require continuous vigilance, monitoring and action to ensure costs don’t exceed benefits, and that those benefits are collectively affordable and proportionate. It is important to mention here, however, that the benefits from being part of the “EU club” are far from being tangible or financially quantifiable. Nevertheless, the benefits are real, including soft power attraction, stabilization and education. Again, this needs proper communication. Politicians, public intellectuals and journalists must explain to the British population the multiple dimensions of the rapprochement. The “remain” camp never explained these complex benefits properly at the time of the Brexit referendum. In light of that experience, pedagogy is crucial.

For all the benefits of closer ties with the EU, the UK has to be watchful. The 27-member EU needs new mechanisms for coming up with its budget and handling collective decision-making. As demonstrated by Hungary’s of a $103 billion EU loan to Ukraine, individual states are able to EU Council decisions because many of them require unanimity. What could happen to Ukraine could also happen to the UK. Having said that, there are no clear showstoppers within the EU barring a closer relationship with the UK. Of course, British voters who voted for Brexit ten years ago could choose to steer clear of the EU again.

A step-by-step strategy is better than a one-time approach

While the pros seem to outweigh the cons, it also seems unlikely that a direct, immediate approach to rejoin the EU would be successful. Currently, there is too much unresolved political scar tissue largely due to the UK’s constant volte “farces” and referendums. Note that referendums are often unpredictable and counterproductive. France, the driving force behind the formation of the EU, nearly voted no in a on the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which led to the founding of the EU.

David Cameron, the British prime minister from 2010 to 2016, did not learn from this French experiment. In retrospect, his foolish decision to hold a referendum on the UK’s EU membership backfired spectacularly. In 2013, Cameron claimed that if his Conservative Party won the next general election, he would negotiate the UK–EU relationship and then hold an in/out referendum on staying in the EU. Other party leaders he only suggested a referendum to placate the Euroskeptic faction in his party and retain his hold on power. In the 2016 referendum, around of voters opted for Brexit.

British voters have been divided on this emotive issue. So, rather than a direct re-application to rejoin the EU near term, a step-by-step approach seems more sensible. This approach should also give the necessary time for a proper, fact-based communication campaign. The “leave” campaign led by Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage won the narrative war against “remainers” Cameron and George Osborne. This time, the pro-EU Brits will have to dominate the narrative.

The pro-EU camp needs a new communication approach that tackles the issue of sovereignty. so dear to extremists. This camp must explain how, in the 21st century, the sovereignty of the UK is better protected within the EU. As a small island nation of about people, the UK does not have much leverage against behemoths like China, the US or Russia. The UK within the EU is much stronger than the UK all alone.

Yet no pro-EU campaign can shy away from addressing issues such as bureaucracy or migration. Note that both issues are increasingly being tackled more openly and effectively in the EU than a decade ago. Recently, David Miliband, a former British foreign secretary, has that the UK needs “national consensus” on rejoining the EU. He has also said that the UK needs a reset of its relations with the EU, but admitted that rethinking the UK–EU relationship is a long-term, not immediate, goal.��

As Miliband said, the EU is in constant evolution. British leaders have to take this into account and explain that, just like the UK, the EU today is quite different from what it was prior to Brexit. The UK would be joining a more realistic and effective EU — this is an important argument in the narrative favorable to rapprochement. Furthermore, the world itself has changed. As pointed out earlier, the Trump administration has presided over far too many international fiascos. Changes like he Covid pandemic, Russi–Ukraine War and the US/Israel–Iran War have forced the EU and even the UK to change.

THE GIBRALTAR GAMBIT

Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory, shares a border with Spain, which is part of the EU. The 2026 EU–UK Trade and Cooperation , which established cooperation between the two entities following Brexit, did not address the Gibraltar–Spain border. This left many individuals and businesses in a gray area, as the UK is not part of the Schengen Area, the EU’s open-border zone that allows for free travel between EU member states.

The UK and the EU arrived at the 2026 agreement after years of negotiations. This agreement is still in the process of . Yet it is a useful proxy to refer to on how to maneuver through the UK–EU relationship under current circumstances.��There are several key aspects of the 2026 draft agreement. The first is border freedom: The deal aims to remove la verja de Gibraltar, the fence on the border between Spain and Gibraltar. Removal of the fence enables Gibraltar to become part of the EU Schengen area. The agreement also secures the rights of over 15,000 daily commuters who live in Spain but work in Gibraltar. While technically outside the EU single market/customs union, Gibraltar will align its laws on goods, customs and travel with European at its airport and port.

In addition, the agreement ensures that Spain’s sovereignty over Gibraltar remains intact while allowing for the new operational arrangements. In 1704, British and Dutch forces the Gibraltar peninsula during the War of the Spanish Succession. Spain then ceded the territory to Great Britain under the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the war. Notably, though, Spain does not acknowledge UK sovereignty over Gibraltar. During the 1980s, Spain began demands for the UK to cede the territory back.��

So, though not yet ideal or necessarily scalable, the Gibraltar gambit could provide a useful step-by-step precursor for the UK to rejoin the EU. In addition, there are accommodations regarding Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and other regions, which could contribute to a step-by-step approach toward a closer UK–EU relationship. 

Timing is everything and the time is now

When voters chose Brexit, they assumed that the UK would regain the bulk of its sovereignty back from the EU and avoid much of the EU’s bureaucracy. That assumption has proved largely false. Moreover, the costs of Brexit are now painfully clear. These costs have been well researched and have proven to be significant, even though Brexit has been a bit of a slow burn. 

Based on almost a decade of data since the 2016 referendum, estimates suggest that Brexit had hit economic growth. By 2025, Brexit had the UK’s GDP by 6–8%. The latest economic from the UK’s Office for Budget Responsibility assumes that imports and exports will be an estimated 15% lower in the long run.��

Voters had also assumed that migration to the UK would decline. This, too, has proven false. Migration to the UK has increased since the 2016 days. Clearly, the narrative of blaming the EU for the migrant crisis during the Brexit referendum was far from true.

In a nutshell, the UK and the EU have changed, and so has the world itself. Given the increasing unreliability of the US, the rising aggression of Russia and the meteoric rise of China, the UK and the EU need each other. Their economies are intertwined inextricably. Geographically and culturally, the UK and the EU are extremely close. Therefore, a “re-union” with the EU is in the UK’s best interest. 

Yet this reunion cannot occur tomorrow or with another referendum. Sovereignty in the UK lies with the British Parliament. Therefore, an act passed by a simple majority suffices to reestablish closer ties with the EU and, in the not-too-distant future, a “re-union.” Just as the UK should follow its well-established rules, so should the EU. Returning to Paine’s Common Sense, “the time hath found us,” and we need to act now. 

[ edited this article.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post A Different UK Within a Different EU in a More Dangerous World appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The of caught European leaders off guard. Unlike past foreign interventions, the US did not present a clearly articulated and coherent (an event or action that justifies or allegedly justifies a war or conflict) to its domestic audience, nor did it seek to win the buy-in of its Western allies before initiating hostilities. Instead, the fluidity of Washington’s justification of its war, ranging from stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons to regime change, to feeling the need to a unilateral Israeli action, stood in contrast with the concreteness of the hard choices confronting Europe.

While Washington workshopped explanations for the war, Europe to formulate a unified response to meet the moment. This initial hesitation gave way to a disjointed set of , with some European governments aligning with the US while others questioned the legality of US–Israeli strikes. , eager not to relive the public backlash that followed its involvement in Iraq, denied the use of jointly-operated military bases in its territory, setting up a with US President Donald Trump. Europe’s scattered posture reflects the challenge of walking a fine line between appeasing the US, its main partner, and becoming a scapegoat for an unpopular war.

Facing difficulties in resolving the war on its own, President Trump called for allies to deploy warships alongside the US Navy to help open the Strait of Hormuz. While France demonstrated a resolve to protect its interests by an aircraft carrier group to the region, there has been a general reluctance among Europeans to . Adding this to the decision of some European countries to close their airspace or prohibit the use of jointly operated bases has fueled Make America Great Again’s (MAGA) long-standing portrayal of Europeans as free-riders, unwilling to stick their necks out to protect shared interests. Though criticism of NATO from the White House is nothing new, comments made by Secretary of State Marco Rubio the alliance’s value are an unmissable signal.

Security squeeze

Despite their reluctance to get involved, the security and economic spillovers of the conflict have become too significant for Europe to confine itself to rhetoric. What began as a joint US–Israeli meant to a few days against the Iranian nuclear program, missile capabilities and leadership has a regional conflict with global implications, grinding on into its third month. Whether or not Europe agrees with the US rationale, the breadth of the war’s impact makes detachment , compelling Europe to stand up for its .��

Europe has often justified its distance in the conflict by that “this is not our war.” However, within days of the US–Israeli strikes, Iranian drones were launched at a UK Royal Air Force base in , and NATO missiles over Turkey.��

Tehran’s decision to close the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping has exposed Europe’s dependence on both and imports. The EU had taken to wean itself off Russian oil and gas in the aftermath of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. That progress is now under threat, with rising causing inflation and fuel shortages across various industries. With the spring planting season already underway, European farmers are to access the fertilizer they need at an affordable cost, threatening to drive up food prices.

While the energy squeeze constitutes a problem for Europe, it has proved a boon for Russia.�� Moscow is seeing fossil fuel jump to a two-year high, which could serve as a to Ukraine’s intensifying campaign on Russia’s oil export infrastructure. The Trump Administration’s decision to and then a sanctions waiver until May 16 also contributed to Europe’s woes. Given a pass by the US, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin might be increasingly insulated from economic pressure, while European leaders face growing discontent in their electorates.

Turning with the times

These developments underscore how difficult it has become for Europe to insulate itself from the wider repercussions of the conflict. Furthermore, these should serve as a wake-up call to Europe and NATO that blind faith in America can no longer be placed. 

The Trump Administration’s whiplash policy on Ukraine, Greenland, and now Iran is not a one-off incident, but rather evidence of a broader pattern in which Washington is steadily eroding its credibility on the global stage. Although disagreement between the transatlantic allies is to be expected, Europe cannot allow itself to be cowed into joining costly fights because one ally, no matter how important, has made a decision unilaterally. 

Instead, European leaders ought to engage in the war on their own terms, with a unified voice that signals strength. They should continue to resist alignment with the US’ military-first approach. After the White House the UK for being slow to offer help, Europe may find it more palatable to engage the issue on its own terms.��

Europe’s extensive network of military bases and logistics centers, which facilitates US operations in the Middle East, provides the continent with that should be used to prevent further escalation of the war. Europeans ought to strive to push for an end to the conflict; the sooner stability in the Strait is restored, the sooner pressure can be directed toward constraining Russia, while allowing the US to redirect military technology and capabilities back toward Ukraine.��

Europe can monitor activity in the Strait to ensure freedom of navigation and safe transit. To that end, the UK and France on April 17 that they will be spearheading a mission similar to the coalition of the willing to secure maritime trade routes in the Strait of Hormuz. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has readiness to team up with Gulf countries to create alternative energy export routes. Together, these moves represent a constructive step forward supporting the principle of freedom of navigation and improving energy security.��

Stop start

With Washington and Tehran still miles apart in stop-start peace negotiations, Europeans could offer to support negotiations. While America today is not the ally they remember, Ursula von der Leyen emphasized that Europe the world as it is: “The idea that we can simply retrench and withdraw from this chaotic world is simply a fallacy.” Only with a coordinated effort to advance a diplomatic resolution and restore safe navigation does Europe have the chance to prove that the continent can stand as an equal partner.��

The Iran war may not have begun as Europe’s war, but its consequences have become Europe’s problem. The Iran crisis is sapping Europe’s resources and political capital and drawing its attention away from the Russian threat in Ukraine. Europe should seek to drive a wedge between Iran and Russia, isolating the latter. Expediting the peaceful resolution to the standoff in the Strait of Hormuz is the best action Europe can take today. 

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Will Iran be Europe’s Zeitenwende? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

As the EU moves toward full implementation of its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism () — a policy that places a carbon price on imports based on the emissions generated during their production — exporters around the world are confronting a new reality: Access to the European market will increasingly depend not only on price and quality, but also on the carbon intensity of manufacturing. CBAM was introduced by the EU to prevent “carbon leakage,” in which companies shift production to countries with weaker climate regulations to avoid stricter environmental costs in Europe.

For countries like Indonesia, the implications are especially significant. The EU remains an important for Indonesian industrial goods, including steel, aluminum and other carbon-intensive manufactured products. At the same time, Indonesia’s industrial sector still heavily on coal-powered energy, making many of its exports vulnerable to higher carbon costs under the EU system.

For exporters in these sectors, CBAM is no longer a distant Brussels regulation; it is becoming a market access requirement. The question is not whether Indonesian industry will adapt, but whether that adaptation will be orderly and cooperative, or chaotic and punitive.

That is why Brussels and Jakarta should immediately establish an EU–Indonesia CBAM Working Group — a formal platform that brings together government agencies, industry representatives, technical experts and exporters from both sides to coordinate compliance, share standards and prepare industries for the transition to carbon-based trade rules.

Without such coordination, the risks are substantial. Indonesian exporters could face rising compliance costs, declining competitiveness and gradual exclusion from one of the world’s largest markets. Europe, meanwhile, risks turning a climate policy designed to encourage global decarbonization into a source of geopolitical resentment and trade friction with emerging economies.

The case for a working group

A working group would help turn that potential friction into structured coordination. The benefits of such a working group would extend beyond avoiding trade disputes. If designed properly, it could become a practical mechanism to help Indonesia’s industry transition to a carbon-regulated global economy while ensuring that Europe’s climate agenda does not alienate key economic partners.

Its first priority should be solving the biggest practical challenge facing Indonesian exporters: . For many firms, especially outside multinational supply chains, the main barrier is not the carbon price itself, but rather the technical complexity of compliance. Companies will need to calculate and report the emissions embedded in their products, provide verified production data and meet European reporting standards in order to continue exporting smoothly to the EU market once CBAM enters full implementation in 2026.

Emissions accounting, product-level data, accredited verification, default values and the treatment of indirect emissions are not minor bureaucratic details. They will increasingly determine which companies remain globally competitive and which struggle to access foreign markets.

Second, the working group could help ensure that decarbonization efforts in countries like Indonesia are not overlooked. Indonesian industries are in cleaner production, carbon market development and renewable energy integration. But without structured coordination with European regulators, many of these efforts may not translate into lower compliance burdens under CBAM. A formal bilateral platform could help develop mutual understanding on reporting standards, carbon accounting methodologies and potential recognition mechanisms before disputes emerge.

But achieving these outcomes will require the working group to be designed as more than a narrow diplomatic forum. It should be industrial, not merely governmental. That means bringing together not only officials from Brussels and Jakarta, but also manufacturers, industry associations, financiers, technical experts and exporters themselves. Too often, trade dialogues remain confined to ministries while companies are left to navigate complex regulatory transitions alone. In the case of CBAM, that approach would almost certainly fail.

The group’s mission should therefore be practical and industry-focused: developing sector-specific road maps, expanding technical training, coordinating emissions verification systems, supporting smaller exporters and creating early-warning mechanisms for future regulatory changes as the EU gradually expands CBAM’s scope.

Balancing domestic reforms and international compliance

Skeptics that Indonesia should focus primarily on strengthening its own domestic carbon pricing system rather than building special coordination mechanisms with Europe. But this is a false choice.

Indonesia indeed needs stronger domestic climate governance and more credible carbon market reforms. Those efforts will be essential for the country’s long-term industrial competitiveness in a decarbonizing global economy. Yet domestic reform alone will not solve the immediate compliance pressures Indonesian exporters will face when CBAM enters full implementation.

Many companies do not have the luxury of waiting for ideal policy sequencing. They will soon need to comply with complex European reporting standards, emissions verification requirements and carbon accounting rules in order to maintain access to EU markets.

Some policymakers and business groups in both Europe and Indonesia also that existing trade dialogues, chambers of commerce and occasional industry seminars are already sufficient to manage the transition. Their assumption is that CBAM compliance will gradually evolve through market adaptation, as companies learn to adjust over time without the need for a dedicated bilateral mechanism. But that underestimates the scale and speed of the transformation now underway.

CBAM is not simply another technical trade regulation involving product labeling or customs procedures. It directly links market access to carbon emissions, industrial energy systems and climate governance. That means the transition will affect not only exporters, but also investment decisions, manufacturing competitiveness and long-term industrial strategy.

Occasional consultations and fragmented business forums are unlikely to provide the level of coordination required for such a structural shift. Without a more institutionalized framework, misunderstandings over compliance standards and uneven readiness across industries could quickly escalate into wider trade tensions.

Coordination matters more than ever

History offers several warnings about what happens when major regulatory or environmental standards are introduced without sufficient coordination between developed and developing economies. European restrictions on palm oil linked to deforestation, for example, years of political backlash in Indonesia and Malaysia, where policymakers viewed the measures as discriminatory trade barriers rather than cooperative climate policy. The lesson is clear: When global rules are imposed without meaningful adjustment mechanisms or institutional dialogue, they often harden into geopolitical grievances.

CBAM risks creating a similar dynamic if countries like Indonesia are left to navigate complex compliance requirements alone. But if Europe and Indonesia instead build structured coordination early — through technical cooperation, industrial transition planning and regular dialogue — the mechanism could evolve into something more constructive: a framework that supports decarbonization while preserving trust between advanced and emerging economies.

Europe CBAM is designed to prevent carbon leakage, not erect green trade walls. Establishing an EU–Indonesia CBAM Working Group would be the clearest way to prove it. Because by 2026, carbon policy will no longer sit at the margins of trade. It will be trade.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Indonesia Should Not Let Carbon Rules Become a Trade War appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In my role as Devil’s Advocate, I’m reminded of some of the saints of the past who got through despite my pleading against them. We could compare the challenge our civilization is facing today with regard to AI to the one  Saint Vincent de Paul faced in 17th century France. 

Now that Pope Leo XIV has weighed in on the troubling question of AI’s integration into our society, this comparison appears eminently worth considering.

St. Vincent observed the severe humanitarian crisis that struck 17th-century France as a consequence of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). Even though the core of the drama played out in what is now Germany, France felt the effects very directly due to the mass migration that all extended wars tend to provoke. An unbridled, exceptionally violent war between competing Christian communities spilled over into France. This alone would have been enough to upset France’s demography. Compounded by famine and plague, the conflict caused entire swaths of northeast France to be emptied of their stable population.

The saint had an exceptionally creative managerial mind. He dedicated himself to bridging the massive divide between the wealthy French aristocracy and the destitute refugees by creating organized networks within the local economy. He founded the Confraternities of Charity, teaching wealthy women how to systematically assess families’ needs, distribute food and find employment. In other words, he did what modern governments appear incapable of doing: getting the wealthy motivated to contribute, organizing effective redistribution of vital resources, constructing an effective safety net for a refugee population and educating the poor and even the rich (in their civic responsibility). Moreover, he organized an effective employment network that coordinated professional training with the needs of Parisian workshops.

The historical context has obviously changed since Vincent’s time. The recipes that worked four hundred years ago cannot be applied today. In that sense, the marketing conditions for sanctity simply aren’t as favorable as they once were.

Still, it may be worthwhile referring back to the saint’s successful attempt to address a historical trauma as we examine the challenge Pope Leo has outlined in the first encyclical of his papacy: Magnifica humanitas. If St. Vincent responded to the needs of a distraught population who saw its environment and source of livelihood disrupted beyond repair by an increasingly anarchic war, we may need something similar in the age of artificial intelligence, when tools apparently capable of thinking but animated by unpredictable and even unknowable intentions have already invaded our workplaces and homes. 

We now live with the promise or threat — how you see it depends on your point of view or penchant for paranoia — that these invaders spawned by an alien self-generated algorithmic culture will be making all our critical decisions for us.

What’s the Pope’s beef?

One of the worrying predictions that no one can reliably confirm or deny — but there are plenty who do both — is that AI will eliminate a significant portion of existing jobs that will not be replaced. In a society in which jobs are synonymous not just with livelihoods but with survival, some may feel a new Vincent de Paul may be needed to create a new balance. The pope is in a position to canonize new saints but not to do their specific jobs in our secular society that change the way people live and work.

Leo highlights five major areas of concern:

• Dehumanization & the “Optimization” Trap: Human beings should not be regarded as “projects to be optimized.” Even if Silicon Valley one day declares that superintelligence has been definitively achieved, AI can never replicate the human capacity to suffer, grow and love.
• The Normalization of War and especially the threat of increasingly autonomous weapons systems.
• Erosion of Truth and Disinformation, including the increasingly pervasive hyperreality of deep fakes.
• Economic Injustice and Worker Displacement: the logical result of a narrow focus on profit
• The Warping of Younger Generations, due to the fact that our society has failed to inculcate critical thinking skills.

St. Vincent would have focused on the fourth point, economic injustice. And, indeed, the questions of human dignity, war, disinformation and the sacrifice of the young are all in some sense tributary to that concern. Reporting on the event, Al Jazeera that “in his encyclical, which spans nearly 43,000 words, the pope insisted that AI must not be left solely in private hands and called on policymakers to protect the rights of workers and keep children safe from the technology. He also urged AI companies to cool down their competition.”

The core issue concerns the fact that a technology capable of transforming human relations and our shared economy has clearly been “left solely in private hands…” which, by the way, in today’s world are principally masculine hands. Vincent de Paul’s success depended on being effective in putting pressure on aristocratic men to support his efforts. But he was far more effective, in a very concrete way, with wealthy women.

In contrast to the way philanthropy works today, the wealthy women who collaborated inside Vincent’s network exercised an extraordinary amount of independent executive and financial decision-making power. Today, philanthropy is not only mainly about how masculine billionaires manage the immense wealth they accumulate. They’re much too busy to spend time managing their concern for others. Instead, they typically entrust the decision-making to other men — financial advisers and asset managers — who are by definition immune to the needs of a suffering population.

If Mackenzie Scott (Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife) stands as a notable to the dominant pattern of modern, hyper-calculated billionaire philanthropy, we need to remember that her extraordinary generosity would likely never have been possible had the pair not divorced. Moreover, the reasoning behind her encouragement of new grassroots or system-disrupting ventures bears little resemblance to Vincent’s head-on tackling of severe, immediate social ills like wartime displacement and starvation.

A 21st century religious war wilder than the Thirty Years War?

David Streitfeld writing for The New York Times another contrast with the traditional way of framing the ethical challenge and response to growing and seemingly uncontrollable social ills. Rather than focusing on the contours of the problem itself, it frames the Pope’s initiative as if it was a competition for influence, and one that the Pope clearly has no hope of winning. “The old religion challenging the new,” Streitfeld tells us “is a dramatic story, the stuff of thrillers.” One might add, “and The New York Times �����������������.”

Not only does he point out that Silicon Valley has produced a new religion, a new belief system, in which the wealthy (extremely wealthy) are unlikely to respond to people’s real needs, he makes it clear that the reason that will not happen is that they are focused on a different challenge: replacing the God of St. Vincent de Paul’s 17th century religion by their own egos. He quotes Steve Jobs: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

In his encyclical Pope Leo expresses his deepest concern when he observes that “those who control A.I. will impose their own moral vision, which will become the invisible infrastructure of these systems.” Almost as a rebuke to Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei, who wishes to endow Claude with a “soul,” Leo adds: “A more moral A.I. is not enough if that morality is determined by a few.”

Streitfeld tries to reassure his readers that the war between Rome and California will not take place. “Those who know both Silicon Valley and the Vatican say any expectations of a head-on confrontation, much less a holy war, are misguided.” Why? The journalist has the answer: “In any case, if Leo confronted Silicon Valley outright, he would probably lose.”

But Steitfeld is fascinated by the idea of a battle. That’s how US journalism works. If it isn’t a contest between two parties showing off their muscles, why even talk about it. When nothing else works its Democrats vs Republicans. News, even for the Gray Lady, is a permanent Super Bowl.

Not only will Silicon Valley beat the Vatican, he makes it clear that we need to remain alert for the emergence of a new divinity. “A former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski,” he tells us, “set up a church in 2017 to ‘promote the realization of a Godhead based on artificial intelligence,’ closed it and then opened it again in 2023.”

Streitfeld’s article ends without drawing its own conclusion but it makes it clear who it’s betting on as it quotes Greg M. Epstein, “the humanist chaplain at Harvard and M.I.T.” “Big Tech is essentially its own religion with its own theology and rites, not to mention its own power and influence. Pope Leo’s encyclical will be automatically viewed as false doctrine.”

All of which leaves this Devil’s Advocate wondering: Will this new religion produce human saints or AI agent saints? And how will its future Devil’s Advocates judge their dossiers?

Or has one of those new trillion dollar firms actually invented an AI Agent built to play the Devil’s Advocate?

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Sweden is already a pluralistic society��

The phrase “a Muslim country” is often misused to manipulate language and political communication. Far-right actors in Europe often misuse it to present a descriptive social fact as “a civilizational threat.” This is even the case in Sweden, which is already a plural, individualistic and multi-faith society.��

Statistics Sweden’s latest population projections the country at about 10.6 million people. While Sweden does not maintain a comprehensive official register of religion, public information identifies Muslims as the country’s largest non-Christian faith group, and estimates that Muslims made up about 8% of Sweden’s population in 2020.

This means Muslims in Sweden are not some strange or external presence. They are citizens, residents, workers, students and voters. Many are born in Sweden, educated and active in everyday life in society. 

Therefore, there is no inherent contradiction between being Muslim and being Swedish unless Swedishness itself is redefined in ethnoreligious or collectivist civic terms. If by “a Muslim country” one means a society that includes Muslim citizens and residents, then Sweden already fits that description in a limited sociological sense. 

Pluralism in Sweden is not limited to formal demographics since it is reflected in the fact that the country’s institutions, public spaces and everyday social life already include people with different beliefs, customs and social experiences. In practice, this means that Swedish society is not organized around one uniform way of living, believing or identifying. Different ways of being Swedish already exist and coexist within the legal and democratic order.

This is important to understand because public debate often treats pluralism as though it were something recent, unstable or externally imposed. But Sweden has for a long time been shaped by internal social change, international movement and cultural diversification. Generations have now grown up in a country where classmates, colleagues, neighbors and fellow citizens do not all share the same background, language or religious tradition. For many people, this is not a future scenario but an everyday life social reality.

Such understandings also matter because language shapes political imagination. If Muslims are constantly described as evidence of national decline, then ordinary diversity is transformed into a negative narrative. That move is central to exclusionary and collectivist politics because it turns pluralism into a threat. A religious minority is no longer seen as part of the population, but as a sign that the nation is supposedly losing itself. Muslim populations around the world are far too diverse, politically, socially and denominationally, to be seen as part of one giant extremist community. 

Islam is not Islamism

Islam is a world religion followed by over a billion people in many different ways. Therefore, a serious democratic debate must begin with a distinction that many political actors often blur by mixing Islam with Islamism. The difference is that Islamism is a that seeks to use religion as an instrument of state power and social control. When those categories are merged, criticism of extremism quickly becomes suspicion toward Muslims in general.

This is why the repeated use of Iran as proof of “what Islam leads to” by the far-right actors in Sweden is so misleading. Iran is not evidence of Islam itself. It is evidence of what happens when a state monopolizes religion, represses pluralism and denies people freedom of conscience. The Iranian regime is an of an authoritarian system and a theocracy, not about Muslims in general.

What this rhetoric also ignores is that many of those resisting authoritarian rule in Iran are themselves Muslim in religious, cultural or social terms. Thereby, actions and deeds of such individuals are proof that Muslims are part of the struggle for freedom, dignity and rights worldwide. 

It is also vital to understand that the Muslim community in Sweden is not a singular social or political actor. It is better understood as a set of communities by different migration histories, national backgrounds, class positions, languages and degrees of religious observance. Muslims in Sweden include people with a history in Bosnia, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Somalia, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Turkey and other societies, as well as converts and Swedish-born individuals who have grown up in Swedish schools, neighborhoods and institutions. Some arrived as refugees fleeing war and persecution, while others came through family reunification, study, work or long-term settlement.

Muslims in Sweden also in how they relate to religion itself. Some are highly observant and active in mosque life, while others relate to Islam mainly through family background and more moderate lifestyles. Some are Islamists and socially conservative, while others are secular-minded, socially liberal or feminist. Many Muslims are mainly concerned with ordinary matters such as education, employment, housing, family life and social mobility rather than theology or ideology.

This diversity is often ignored in Swedish public debate, where Muslims are less as individuals and communities than as a symbolic category linked to integration, crime, extremism or cultural conflict. They are often spoken about as if they formed one coherent bloc with one worldview and one political agenda. That is misleading. It erases the differences between recent arrivals and second-generation Swedes, between practicing believers and culturally Muslim secular individuals, and between those who are socially integrated and those facing exclusion.��

The current political discourse often also ignores that many Muslims in Sweden have themselves Islamism, sectarian violence, authoritarian rule or religious coercion. For that reason, reducing such a broad and internally diverse population to a single civilizational or ideological threat is not only unfair but false, untrue and irrational.��

The real threat is democratic exclusion

The far-right rhetoric still suggests that Muslims remain permanently outside the national “we,” no matter how integrated, loyal or socially active they may be. With far-right politics, citizenship becomes conditional rather than universal and “” rather than institutional. One of the results in official liberal-democratic systems is that religious minorities are transformed into a test of whether democratic belonging is truly equal.

This matters even more in Sweden, where the far-right Sweden Democrats have a major force in national politics and where migration, integration and national identification have moved further in the public debate. It is important to understand that Islamist extremism exists and democratic states must confront violence and radicalization seriously. But that task becomes harder when politicians blur the line between political ideology and religious identity.

The Sweden Democrats have in Swedish racist, extreme nationalist and far-right networks that were shaped during the 1990s. During that time, the party communicated about the need to “defend” the Swedish race and that immigration should be stopped more or less completely. For the last 20 years, the party has worked hard to normalize its public image and become more electorally acceptable, but its political rise has still depended heavily on presenting migration and Islam as an existential threat to Sweden.

Despite branding themselves as the new conservatives, the party’s main message remains that belonging to Sweden is defined by Christian religion and ethnicity, while such rhetoric is often combined today with references to national citizenship and, ironically enough, to liberal “Swedish values.” 

At the same time, many Muslims in Sweden face a difficult of problems such as the labor market exclusion, residential segregation, negative media framing, discrimination and repeated suspicion in public debate. Muslims are often discussed less as individuals than as a social “issue” connected to integration, crime, extremism or cultural issues. This is also happening in the more European context, where the anti-Muslim sentiments and attitudes have grown in relation to terrorism, gang crime, frustrations over failed integration and demographic change. As a result, ordinary Muslims are often treated as symbolic carriers of wider societal fears even when those fears are caused by more complex social, economic and political problems and challenges.

The real danger to Sweden does not come from Muslims identifying with the country and participating in its democratic life. It comes from those who refuse to accept that Muslims are already part of Sweden and who therefore treat pluralism itself as a threat.

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Sweden’s Election and the Dangerous Fiction of Becoming “a Muslim Country” appeared first on 51�Թ�.

For Moscow, this pause is precisely what it wanted. With the world’s attention now fixed primarily on Iran, and oil prices allowing Russian leadership to recover revenues lost in recent years, Russia is counting on this moment as a window of opportunity to strengthen its negotiating position before negotiations resume. The spring thaw has ended, and Moscow sees another chance to improve its position on the battlefield — and thereafter to adjust its negotiating stance depending on success or failure. 

The moment Russia has been waiting for

The warring parties were unable to reach an agreement at the last round of talks, as the focus was on merely trying to placate US President Donald Trump by demonstrating a sincere willingness to negotiate. Yet the energy with which the US presidential administration approached these talks left hope for an end to the hot phase of the war between Russia and Ukraine. It gradually narrowed the parties’ room for maneuver in the negotiations, drawing them closer to a final choice: either say “yes” to a deal, or upset Trump and incur his displeasure — something neither Russia nor Ukraine could afford.

Negotiations will have a greater chance of success when one or both sides of the conflict are critically exhausted — economically, militarily and psychologically. That is not currently the case.

The momentum of the negotiations has been lost. Russia now has the opportunity to conduct yet another large-scale summer campaign in 2026 in an attempt to bring the remaining territory of Donetsk Oblast under its control. There are no signs that Russian leadership intends to abandon its claims to full control over 100% of the Donbas, nor any indications that Russia will forgo a summer campaign — its fifth. Moscow will draw its conclusions in the autumn.

Negotiations may resume at some point during this campaign, but they would likely be without any substantive changes in the positions of Moscow and Kyiv since their last meetings mediated by representatives of the Trump administration.

A duplicated strategy

Russia’s negotiating tactics resemble North Vietnam’s approach during the Vietnam War, where talks lasted more than four years before the Paris Agreement was signed in 1973. At those negotiations, North Vietnamese representative Le Duc Tho repeatedly restated his country’s demands and refused to compromise. He sought to wear down the negotiators on the other side and compel them to make concessions while continuing military pressure on South Vietnam in parallel. 

Moscow is now doing the same. It is firmly holding to its key demand that Ukraine cede the portion of the Donbas still under its control. Russian leadership is hoping either to achieve that result directly or exhaust the other side’s negotiators and resolve the matter on the battlefield.

Oil prices change the equation

Problems in the Russian economy are the most critical factor capable of influencing Moscow’s negotiating position. Economic sanctions, Ukraine’s strikes on Russian oil infrastructure and the decline in global oil prices in recent years have all weighed negatively on the health of Moscow’s economy and created the primary risk to financing its military industry and armed forces. 

According to Russia’s , oil and gas revenues in 2025 declined by 23.8% compared to 2024. However, as the Middle East conflict drags on, Brent crude prices have recently above $95 per barrel. The price of Russian Urals crude oil on tankers at Indian ports $98.93 per barrel, while crude oil in Russian ports traded at just over $73 per barrel. On the day before the US-Israeli operation against Iran began, Urals was priced at around per barrel. Russia has thus gained the opportunity to stabilize its economy for at least several months, and this is happening precisely on the eve of a new summer campaign.

NATO under pressure, Europe in a bind

The US exit strategy from the Iran conflict remains unclear, as do its timelines. A prolonged conflict will require ever more resources and attention from Washington. On March 17, Trump explicitly expressed his dissatisfaction with NATO countries’ failure to respond affirmatively to his request for assistance in unblocking shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. He also the war was a “great test” of the alliance’s relations with the US. Trump, already a major critic of NATO, may now draw conclusions that negatively affect the cohesion and unity of the alliance.��

This directly bears on the security and defense of Europe. European countries and the EU as a whole find themselves under unrelenting pressure from the East, as well as from a US administration displeased with European nations’ conduct within NATO. Europe could consider joining US efforts in limited Middle East operations, in exchange for asking Washington to help with the Ukrainian conflict. However, doing so would require Europe to take on a serious risk of being drawn into a prolonged war in the Middle East, which it cannot currently afford. Moreover, there is no guarantee that Trump would be satisfied with the limited participation of other NATO members and might continue his pressure on European allies.

Russia will attempt to exploit the contradictions within NATO, demonstrating to Europe that Moscow has no intention of backing down from its demands and that European states must yield to Russia’s terms. Russia has an interest in drawing the US and European countries into a long escalation in the Middle East, thereby diverting their attention and resources from support for Ukraine. Ukraine may find itself severely worn down as a result of another summer campaign, which could further deplete its human and material resources. 

In a situation where the US administration is aggrieved at its NATO allies and has concentrated its attention on Iran, Russia may attempt to restore its relations with Europe. Moscow may offer Brussels and other European capitals a return to peaceful coexistence, but it will seek to do so from a position of strength and demand serious concessions in return. Russia has Europe the right to participate in negotiations on Ukraine, but this is merely one more element of pressure on Brussels’ position. Russia wants to talk with Europe only about recognition of Moscow’s spheres of influence in Eastern Europe and the restoration of economic cooperation on terms dictated by Russian leadership.

Two scenarios for the rest of 2026

Now, with the US distracted by Iran, Europe facing pressure from Trump within NATO, global oil prices continuing to rise and the discount on Russian Urals oil narrowing, Moscow has the opportunity to conduct another offensive campaign and adjust its demands afterward. For Russia, this may be the last window of opportunity to improve its position in Ukraine, and Russian leadership will not fail to seize it.

Following the results of the 2026 summer military campaign, Russia’s negotiating position may shift from what it was in 2025. In the event of success on the battlefield and the military conquest of the remaining parts of Donetsk Oblast, or significant advances by Russian forces in other parts of Ukraine, Russia may harden its negotiating stance. It could also demand the transfer of all of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts, as well as the creation of a neutral zone along the entire border between Russia and Ukraine. This would, in essence, mean the withdrawal of Ukrainian armed forces from the border. 

If, on the other hand, Russian forces have not significantly improved their battlefield positions by October–November in the course of the forthcoming offensive, and if the Middle East conflict is resolved and oil prices return to the $60–70 range per barrel, Russian leadership may be more receptive to seeking a compromise and a ceasefire along the current front line. A window of opportunity has now opened for Moscow, which it will attempt to exploit to improve its position in Ukraine through military means. However, when that window closes, Russia’s negotiating position will almost certainly have changed.

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Negotiations as Strategy: Moscow’s Window of Opportunity in Ukraine appeared first on 51�Թ�.

He hates parties. He hates small talk. He hates long dinners. He hates teaching. He , whom he has described as mostly stupid and boring. He hates his own face, which he once asked a photographer not to capture because it looked, he said, like something that belonged in a film called He has told a student who came to him with a personal problem to, in his words, . He said this and laughed. The student laughed too. The audience watching the interview laughed.

This is the strange gift of Žižek. He has made despair into a genre.

At 76, the Slovenian philosopher conducted a recent by video conference, at his own insistence, because he dislikes traveling and hates crowds. “I hate people,” he told his interviewer, half-laughing, half-grimacing. This was not a slip or a provocation. It was a statement of settled conviction. 

What is remarkable is not that a man of Žižek’s temperament exists. Difficult men of difficult temperament are common enough in intellectual history. What is remarkable is what has been built upon: a philosophical system, a political program, a publishing empire and a global following, all resting on a single unexamined emotional fact. The world as experienced by Slavoj Žižek feels fundamentally, irremediably wrong.

The question nobody has seriously asked is whether that feeling is a philosophical position or a symptom.

A pessimistic worldview 

has a characteristic cognitive style: a sense that surface pleasures conceal hidden rot, a compulsion to locate the negative within the apparently positive, a catastrophism that feels, from the inside, like clear-eyed realism. Articulate depressives are often experienced by others as unusually perceptive. They mistake their pathology for acuity. So do their admirers.

Run through that checklist against Žižek’s oeuvre. You get a near-perfect match.

He has admitted, on record, that seeing stupid people happy makes him depressed. He offered this not as confession but as cultural commentary, as though happiness in the wrong hands were itself a form of social dysfunction. Behind the joke is a man for whom other people’s contentment registers as an affront. That is a description of : the inability to experience or sanction pleasure as legitimate.

His philosophy follows the same circuitry. The central move in almost everything Žižek writes is the puncturing of the apparent good. In , his psychoanalytic tour through popular cinema, he asks what hidden Catholic teachings lurk in Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music (1965), what fascist dimensions underlie Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and what ideology James Cameron’s Titanic (1997) perpetuates. Every beloved cultural object, examined through his lens, reveals something rotten at its core. Every chocolate box contains a turd. He does not merely analyze ideology in film. He cannot stop doing it. That compulsion, the need to peel back every surface and confirm that darkness lies beneath, is the signature of a particular kind of mind. Not a dialectical one. A depressive one.

Cinema, he once declared, is the ultimate perverted art: It doesn’t give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire. This is a sophisticated observation, and also the observation of someone for whom desire is always, at some level, a trap. 

A vicious spiral of dissatisfaction

, a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, shared similar views through the controversial ideas he propagated. But in his later work, Lacan described the : the idea that a person can build a workable, even pleasurable relationship with their own compulsions and private sources of satisfaction, what psychoanalysis calls jouissance. Žižek has no interest in this Lacan. He gravitates entirely toward the Lacan of the death drive, of desire as something that can never be satisfied. It is the depressive reading of Lacan. And Žižek has spent his career building a philosophical architecture to confirm what he already knew in his bones.

His political philosophy operates by the same mechanism, only the stakes are higher.

Žižek calls himself a . He has done so for decades, through the fall of the Soviet Union and the failures of actually existing socialism everywhere. When pressed on what, exactly, this communism would look like, the , which he has given in various forms, is that he does not know. He is more interested in the failure of every existing alternative than in constructing one of his own. When pushed for positive content, he retreats to ’s famous quote from his prose work, Worstward Ho (1983): “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This has been received, in certain quarters, as radical honesty. It is worth considering whether it is something else. The inability to picture a liveable future in concrete terms is a clinically recognizable feature of depression. The depressive knows, with certainty, what is wrong. The good, in any specific form, eludes him. Žižek’s communism is not a program. It is a permanent diagnosis without a prescription. And it has found a massive audience among people who feel the same way, people who have concluded that everything is broken and are not entirely sure they want it fixed.

Contempt as a philosophical method

Žižek’s contempt is promiscuous. He has liberal democracy, capitalism, humanitarian intervention, identity politics, the progressive left, the academic left, the populist right, Greenpeace, mindfulness culture and American linguist and activist Noam Chomsky, his one-time ally, with whom he spent most of 2013 in a very public feud. He hates ecology’s tendency toward what he calls pseudosuperego personalization: guilt-tripping individuals over recycling instead of pushing for systemic change. The word hate appears in his interviews in the way other people use, think or feel. It is his primary register.

This, too, is a clinical feature. The depressed are not indifferent to the world. He is exquisitely sensitive to it, and that sensitivity tends to organize itself around irritability and contempt rather than sorrow. The sadness is there, beneath the surface, but it expresses itself as disdain. Žižek has turned this into a philosophical posture. It reads as rigorous. It is, on closer inspection, pain dressed up in Hegel.

Intimacy, fantasy and failure

His personal life, to the extent he has disclosed it, follows the pattern. He has been married three times. He has described himself as constitutionally unsuited to real intimacy, someone who prefers the fantasy of the other to the actual person. In , he writes about the fundamental disappointment that structures love: that the beloved is never, in reality, what desire is projected onto them. This is a philosophical observation with a long history. It is also what a man tells himself when closeness keeps going wrong.

He has a standard line for students who bring him their personal problems. He asks them to look at him, observe his tics and mannerisms, and ask themselves why they would seek advice from a madman. He deploys this with considerable charm. But beneath the performance is something worth taking seriously. He is telling his students, his readers and anyone who will listen that he is not well. Nobody quite believes him, because he says it with such evident enjoyment.

The universalization of personal despair

That is the paradox at the center of the Žižek phenomenon. He has turned his dysfunction into entertainment, into theory, into a brand. The compulsive verbal overflow, the physical tics, the shirt-tugging, the way one sentence multiplies into five, these are not stylistic affectations. 

They are the behavior of someone managing considerable internal disorder through the only mechanism that has ever reliably worked: thinking out loud, in public, without stopping. He fears being unable to work, he has said, more than death itself. That is not a philosopher’s observation. That is a depressive’s confession. The work is not an expression. The work is containment.

None of this would matter if it stayed personal. But Žižek has done something significant. He has universalized his pathology. He has taken the structure of his inner life and built a philosophical system that presents it as the correct way to see. The depressive’s certainty that happiness is false, that beneath every good thing lies a horror, that the future cannot be pictured, that other people are mostly exhausting, that the only honest response to the world is permanent vigilance against it. All of this repackaged as insight.

And his readers have agreed. In their hundreds of thousands.

The culture that rewards bleakness

There is something to be learned here, not about Žižek but about the milieu that produced and sustains him. Left intellectual culture, at least since the 1980s, has developed a pronounced bias toward the bleak. Optimism is naïve. Hope requires justification. Anyone who believes things might improve has not, we are implicitly told, read enough . Žižek did not create this culture, but he is its most entertaining product and its most effective salesman. He has given people permission to mistake their despair for sophistication.

The cruelest irony is this. Žižek has devoted his career to the critique of ideology, to showing how apparently neutral positions mask unconscious investments, how what we take to be objective analysis is always shaped by forces we have not examined. He is brilliant at this. He applies it to cinema, to politics, to popular culture, to love, to Coca-Cola.

He has never applied it to himself.

A man who finds happiness in others depressing, who cannot picture what the good would look like, who has structured an entire worldview around the inexhaustibility of what is wrong: His ideology is not communism. It is his nervous system. The revolution he is calling for is not political. It is the one he cannot quite bring himself to have.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Slavoj Žižek: The World’s Saddest Revolutionary appeared first on 51�Թ�.

This is not simply a regional matter. It is a strategic opportunity for the US and the international community to support stability, economic growth and cooperation in a region that urgently needs all three.

Geopolitics meets economic reality

Cyprus’s geography places it at the frontline of regional developments. Instability in the Middle East, fluctuations in global energy markets and shifting security dynamics all have direct economic consequences. For an island economy on imports, rising transportation and energy costs quickly translate into inflationary pressures that affect households and businesses alike.

These pressures are compounded by the unresolved (the historically rooted conflict between the Greek and Turkish communities in Cyprus). The absence of a comprehensive settlement has created structural constraints — particularly for the Turkish Cypriot side — most notably restrictions on direct trade and transportation. These are not natural economic limitations; they are artificial constraints that distort markets, raise costs and limit opportunity.

Yet despite these realities, Northern Cyprus continues to demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adapt.

Tourism as strategy: authenticity, access and untapped potential

remains a cornerstone of the TRNC economy — and a powerful example of resilience in action. In 2024 alone, more than 1.3 million visitors stayed in tourist accommodation facilities, contributing to a broader ecosystem that supports employment, services and investment. Northern Cyprus offers something increasingly rare in today’s global tourism landscape: authenticity. Its coastline remains largely unspoiled, its cultural identity is distinct and its history is layered in a way that invites exploration.

Consider , the once-abandoned district of Famagusta. Today, its carefully managed reopening offers visitors a uniquely powerful experience — a place where history, memory and renewal intersect. Walking its streets is not only a journey through time, but a reminder of Cyprus’s unfinished story.

Equally compelling is the , often described as one of the last untouched corners of the Mediterranean. Its golden beaches stretch for miles, free from overdevelopment, while wild donkeys roam the landscape — symbols of a simpler, more authentic connection to nature. For travelers seeking meaningful, sustainable experiences, this is a destination that resonates.

Despite international constraints, access continues to improve. Ercan International Airport — recently with a modern terminal capable of handling up to 10 million passengers annually — serves as the primary gateway. Due to political restrictions, all flights currently operate via Türkiye, increasing travel times and costs. Yet even within these limitations, connectivity remains robust, with hundreds of weekly flights linking Northern Cyprus to major Turkish cities. Furthermore, tourism infrastructure continues to expand. New boutique hotels, restaurants and high-end hospitality investments reflect growing confidence in the sector. Port and airport data show millions of annual entries into the TRNC, underscoring the scale and resilience of visitor flows.

Sustainability is also becoming central to our long-term tourism strategy. A leading example is the Alagadi Special Environmental Protection , where conservation programs protect endangered sea turtles such as Caretta caretta and Chelonia mydas. These initiatives not only preserve biodiversity but also position Northern Cyprus as a destination aligned with global ecotourism trends.

Beyond tourism: building a multipillar economy under constraint

While tourism remains vital, it is only one pillar of a diversifying economy. Higher education has emerged as a major success story. Universities such as Eastern Mediterranean University (EMU) attract students from across Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, creating a dynamic international environment. EMU’s global recognition — including its among the world’s top young universities by Times Higher Education — demonstrates the quality and competitiveness of TRNC institutions. These universities are not only educational centers but economic engines, supporting housing, services and innovation.

Other sectors are also gaining momentum. Real estate development, digital services and entrepreneurship are expanding, reflecting broader global trends. At the same time, policymakers are investing in infrastructure, renewable energy and digital connectivity to reduce external vulnerabilities. 

Yet here again, the Cyprus Issue imposes unnecessary costs. The requirement that all international flights route through Türkiye, for example, increases ticket prices, limits market access and contributes to broader inflationary pressures. These are constraints that could be alleviated through a political solution — unlocking efficiencies that would benefit the entire island.

The Cyprus Issue: from constraint to opportunity

For decades, the Cyprus Issue has been viewed primarily through a political lens. But its economic implications are equally significant. A comprehensive settlement based on sovereign equality would not only resolve longstanding disputes but it would also transform the economic landscape of the island. TRNC President Tufan Erhürman has put forward a pragmatic to restart negotiations, grounded in clear principles and a defined timeline. His approach reflects a recognition that progress must be structured, realistic and rooted in equality.

The potential benefits are substantial. Cooperation in energy, tourism and infrastructure could unlock new sources of growth. The Eastern Mediterranean’s resources, if managed collaboratively, could become a driver of regional stability rather than tension. Trade and connectivity could expand, reducing costs and increasing competitiveness.

But achieving this requires international engagement. The US and its partners have a critical role to play in supporting a fair and lasting solution — one that recognizes the rights and realities of both communities on the island.

Resilience is not enough

The story of Northern Cyprus is, in many ways, a story of resilience. For decades, the Turkish Cypriot people have navigated uncertainty with adaptability and determination. Businesses innovate. Institutions evolve. Society remains forward-looking.

But resilience alone should not be the end state.

The goal must be to move from resilience to opportunity — from managing constraints to unlocking potential. This requires addressing the root cause of many economic challenges: the unresolved Cyprus Issue.

A call for engagement

For international audiences, the message is clear. Northern Cyprus is not only a place shaped by history — it is a place defined by possibility. Its economy is dynamic. Its tourism sector is vibrant. Its people are committed to building a stable and prosperous future.

What is needed now is the political framework to match that ambition.

International support and engagement — particularly from the US — can help create the conditions for a comprehensive settlement based on sovereign equality. Such a resolution would not only benefit the people of Cyprus; it would contribute to broader regional stability at a time when it is urgently needed.

In a region often defined by uncertainty, Cyprus has the potential to become a model of cooperation, stability and shared prosperity. The opportunity is there. The question is: Will the international community seize it?

[ edited this piece.]

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As soon as our housemistress had made the announcement to us that morning, illicit bracelets were promptly pushed under the sleeves of our tucked-in school shirts. The newly-appointed headmaster (or “the Master” as he was referred to, bizarrely enough), clearly thought the enforcement of the lengthy dress code too lax for his standards. So, he took it upon himself to straighten us up into the prim and proper student body of a school that took its discipline very seriously indeed. 

I had been attracted by the school’s ambitious academic environment. I had enrolled expecting a good education, but I hadn’t fully considered the culture shock I was about to experience after years of enjoying an exceptionally high degree of agency as a homeschooler. 

While ironed blazers and floor-grazing uniform skirts made for excellent marketing material for strict parents, behind this veneer of decorum I observed the rebellious reality of teenagers in an atmosphere of repressive regimentation. They had become experts in the art of subversion rather than the disciplined students the school had expected.

Regimentation can lead to repression, which in turn leads to rebellion

Heavy-handed attempts to control have a tendency to backfire, as if the strictness compels people to act out. In some of my friends, particularly those with stereotypical Tiger parents who demanded obedience to their infallible parental wisdom, I noticed the same pattern: the stricter the parent, the sneakier the child. The parents do not know how their child dresses or how she spends her weekends. She pretends to be out studying, ready with photographs taken beforehand in case the parents need proof. She jumps out the window to meet the boyfriend she is not allowed to have.

Growing up with distinctly non-traditional parents myself, I was used to a dynamic of open communication, so I was often puzzled by their need for secrecy. After I experienced strict regimentation for the first time at boarding school, I began to understand why children of disciplinarians often end up leading a double life. Once autonomy has been denied to you, it’s all you strive for.

It is not necessarily the rules that provoke rebellion, but the absence of any rationale for them. Either the adults provide no justification (after all, students answer to the school and not the other way around!) or no justification really exists, since much of the discipline enforced is a euphemism for conformity. For instance, it seems unlikely that student behaviour or performance would be impacted by wearing black socks (as many dared to) instead of the sanctioned navy. Such rules felt jarring to me after I had become used to spending hours studying in pajamas and bedroom slippers. When the rules seem more like an arbitrary list, it makes it hard to understand them. 

With teachers jumping out of alleyways to exclaim their outrage at your untucked shirt, it becomes difficult to trust that the rule-makers have your best interests and not mere optics in mind. The school administration begins to feel like an annoying adversary. And any rule-breaking that follows only furthers the administration’s hostile attitude towards the students they deem to be irredeemably unruly. That, in turn, leads to more spite among the students, creating a vicious cycle of both sides increasingly alienating the other.

This mutual lack of trust can lead to dangerous consequences. I have seen people whose experimentation with rule-breaking has gone very wrong. A classmate told us about the intensely negative reaction to weed she had when she tried it; she teared up as she recounted the experience. She hadn’t felt comfortable sharing this with either her strict parents or the equally strict housemistress at school, fearing that it would lead to more restrictions. Authority figures that seem solely controlling rather than supportive can end up isolating the ones they’re supposed to be watching out for. Consequently, students may not get the opportunity to properly process harmful experiences and lack the advice needed to make better decisions. 

You cannot balance on your own if you have always ridden with training wheels

The school recently reduced some freedoms exclusive to Sixth Formers (students in their final two years of school), known as Sixth-Form “privileges,” tightening rules to be more similar to those for younger years. The idea was that 17- and 18-year-olds, who would soon be starting university, still require rigid scaffolding to properly manage their time.

I would argue that freedom is not just a “privilege.” It is also responsibility — a responsibility for yourself, which is a defining part of life as an adult. Does a school that dictates and keeps track of what students wear, when they wake up, when they eat, when they study, how they study, when they exercise adequately prepare them for life at university? While a regimented schedule would certainly help younger students instill a healthy routine, spoonfeeding structure to pre-university students does not seem conducive to developing the independence they will very soon require.

External discipline also does not automatically translate into long-term internal discipline. From my vantage point as a former homeschooler, I realized it may even be demotivating. Used to managing my own academic progress, I pride myself on my drive to achieve my goals. I imagined I would easily adapt to the school’s scheduled study sessions. However, with timely knocks on my door every day to check up on me, my self-motivated decisions to honor the responsibility for my own education turned into a mandated, monitored chore.

Finding a balance

Instances of rebellion like dress-code violations or underage drinking seem inevitable in an environment like this. But if too much control tends to authoritarianism, absolute freedom leads to anarchy. The solution is obviously not a laissez-faire approach to managing a large group of teenagers. 

Instead, I am advocating for creating an incentive structure that is more sensitive to teenagers’ penchant for defiance. I have attended another British boarding school that has a contrasting, more unconventional philosophy on disciplinary action. 

At this school, the rules were liberal: no uniform, freedom to spend time outside of school hours anywhere in the city (as long as they disclosed their location periodically), and 10:30 PM curfews to be in your room, but sleep whenever you see fit. This was as close to a university experience as you could get, and that was the point. Students were given a high degree of freedom. Restrictions were implemented only in cases where that freedom was abused. If you had unauthorized absences from or late arrivals to class, you risked losing the ability to go out on the weekends. The school was observant, not ambivalent, to how students used the freedom given to them. This created an obvious incentive to better manage the flexibility we had. People responsible with the liberties could continue to enjoy them.

Compare this with the Master’s school philosophy: maintaining order with an iron hand, and deeming the slightest relaxation of restrictions a great “privilege.” When the sanctions for rule-breaking do not feel significantly worse compared to the regimentation already in place, what is the reward for being good?

Gedogen: pragmatic, not preachy

The difference in attitude between the two schools was never as apparent as in the way they conducted assemblies. 

In the large hall, a teacher declared, “Please stand,” as the Master walked in — dressed in robes. I remember my disbelief the first time I watched this caricature of a British boarding school experience unfold before me. The assemblies created a spectacle out of the school’s discipline and authority hierarchies. Antiquated practices were continued without any of the lightheartedness that would have turned them into endearing traditions. Once, all students were lectured about how, as young people, we suffered from a kind of “temporal illiteracy” and had “no grasp of our own mortality.” One can argue about how accurate the sentiment is, but I wonder if sermonizing is the most effective way of communicating with said temporally illiterate people. 

In the other school, what assemblies lacked in ceremony, they made up for in substance. One of the deputy principals, with whom students were on a first-name basis, spoke to us about cigarette packets found littered near the school campus. After reminding students again of the risks of smoking and school rules, she acknowledged that some students would still smoke anyway. She emphasized that while these students were choosing to make a harmful personal choice by smoking, because of the littering their poor decision was also an unacceptable nuisance to others. We were spoken to as capable young people in charge of our choices and their consequences, which encouraged students to react with more maturity.

Rather than a school that dealt with older students through proscriptions and prescriptions, the second school used responsible pragmatism. By trusting them to have a high degree of freedom and stepping in when that was genuinely mishandled, rule-breaking seemed less glamorous and more like a poor decision. The school’s philosophy reminded me of “Gedogen,” the Dutch policy of tolerating the violation of certain laws where strict enforcement may be more disruptive. While telling us about this, my tour guide in Amsterdam had also shared the anecdote of his parents smoking weed with him before he left for university to remove any tempting sheen of forbiddenness the activity might have had. While this is a shockingly lax approach, it captures what I observed across these two boarding schools: although regimentation does provide the appearance of discipline, a liberal approach can be more effective in achieving its reality. Interestingly, that was the tour guide’s first and only time smoking weed.

[Cheyenne Torres edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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With the defeat first of Germany and then of Japan, citizens of the Western world began the task of putting behind them the horrors of the disastrous three-decade stretch that began in 1914, dominated by wars and economic collapse before being drawn to a close by the ominous spectacle of two atomic bombs launched on urban populations from the air. Once those horrors were behind us, a new phase of history could begin. And it was impressive. The French still refer to it as “les trentes glorieuses” — “The Thirty Glorious [Years]” — between 1945 and 1975 in which Western nations became convinced that the economy and global culture were on an upswing that might indeed go on forever.

This feeling of unbridled optimism grew and expanded in a reassuringly measured way for the first half of the “glorious thirty,” despite the rapid emergence and persistence of a Cold War replacing the hot one that ended in 1945. This psychological war between opposing economic theories and political ideologies provided the equivalent of the kind of ominous background musical score Hollywood used to maintain suspense. But no one was eager to see the finishing credits. It had the effect of installing deeply within everyone’s psyche a lingering fear of an imminent nuclear confrontation. Those who lived through that period will recall that the tranquillity induced by the superficial but very real prosperity of the new consumerist culture was regularly punctuated by moments of “duck and .” Prosperous consumers began asking themselves the annoying question: “When, thanks to our trend of upward mobility, will I be able to afford an individual bomb shelter?”

There was a real frightening moment in October 1962: the Cuban missile crisis. But Americans who lived through that period remember the decade of the 1950s, dominated by the paternal presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower, as an era of voluntary conformity. These were good times. No reason to rock the boat. Everyone who was white — as well as a select few among the racial minorities — was encouraged to get a degree, secure a job, obtain a mortgage and, more generally, fall into line. “Falling in” nevertheless meant dealing with the perspective of “fallout,” nuclear fallout.

The price of happiness

The 1960s began quietly on a note of continuing consumer confidence. All that was thrown off kilter in November 1963 with the assassination of a president. America’s youth turned away from the prevailing trend of the ‘50s to fall in line and march towards success. They replaced it by a new trend of falling out of line. Apart from political protests and the refusal to accept assassination as a tool of governance, falling out of line included engaging in widely shared licit and illicit pleasures (notably drugs and sexual liberation thanks to a new reading of Jefferson’s “pursuit”). It was a new twist on the consumer society and the pursuit of happiness.

The developing disaster of the war in Vietnam began to undo the trente glorieuses, even if the idea of unlimited prosperity remained the accepted norm, the dominant idea driving the civilization forward. The carefully designed configuration of the pieces on the postwar chessboard — the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade that would evolve into the World Trade Organization — had produced the image of a largely stable “rules-based” international order. It malfunctioned from time to time, like any complex system. Before the end of the century, only a few realized that it was rapidly losing its coherence.

The first sign of structural damage became apparent in 1971 when US President Richard Nixon decoupled the US dollar from gold, dismantling the hitherto brilliantly successful monetary order crafted at Bretton Woods in 1944. As chess logic goes, it was equivalent to a black pawn taking the white team’s queen. Nixon subsequently resigned and the US effectuated a humiliating retreat from Vietnam. The petroleum shock following the Yom Kippur war in 1973 provoked a pattern of increasingly confused defensive moves by the principal chess player. The petrodollar had taken over the role of gold, without actually replacing it. Although it held off the checkmate, it created a permanent state of instability of West Asia, transformed into an increasingly exposed powder keg.

The fall of Saigon in 1975 temporarily cured the US of its military adventurism. Once bitten, twice shy. But contrary to the proverbial logic, the trauma of Vietnam would return with the dawn of the 21st century. In the meantime, the collapse of the Soviet Union provided a new glimmer of hope for a remake of the trente glorieuses. Historian Francis Fukuyama announced the of history. The US model, driven by the peaceful operations of Starbucks and McDonalds, was set to refashion global culture. The European nations believed they could provide a sophisticated variation by adopting a “supporting role” in the screenplay provided by Hollywood. The European nations united (but failed to unify) as they conjoined their economic forces in a glorious European Union endowed with its own rival, but non-threatening currency, the euro.

For nearly a decade, a new order seemed to have prevailed. But then came the true but unexpected Y2K bug. The 20th century and its largely reassuring second half ended not with a whimper, but a bang, on the morning of September 11, 2001. That iconic moment cast a shadow on everything that appeared positive about the expiring century and the triumph of the consumer society. 

Looking back at it today, we are only beginning to see that from start to finish, the historical logic wasn’t about constructing peace and prosperity. The system depended at its core on strategizing war, conducting ruthless competition and deploying skulduggery, aggressivity, manipulation. Everything we felt we had discarded in 1945 now appeared to be present at the core of the system. It wasn’t Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin, but whatever it was, it revealed a growing taste for domination and, along the way, provided multiple examples of a continued taste for genocide. The illusion that order had been definitively restored following World War II was precisely that: an illusion.

German novelist Thomas Mann was a prophet in our midst. No one took him seriously when, in his 1945 titled, “Germany and the Germans” (Deutschland und die Deutschen), he presented the chilling argument that Hitlerism — as a psychological and political phenomenon — had successfully infected the world, potentially outlasting the Third Reich itself. Two years later, US President Harry Truman passed the National Security Act and created the CIA, without that it would consciously or unconsciously derive inspiration from the science of Hitler’s Gestapo.

Evil had not disappeared, but simply gone into hiding

One way of characterizing how people now think of the 20th century is that the first half of it saw the Devil unleashed, especially in Germany and the Soviet Union. Those two nations produced the century’s iconic demons: Hitler and Stalin. In the second half of the century, everyone not named Thomas Mann felt comforted by the idea the Devil had been exorcised. The wisdom and hard work of a new class of disciplined leaders who believed in their class’s commitment to virtue accomplished this noble task.

When Satan seemed to peer at us again from behind the backdrop — for example, when charismatic leaders were assassinated — we were regularly told it was the work of a lone gunman. There was no reason to suspect diabolical machinations. By the final decade of the century, all was on track for Fukuyama’s end of history.

We could feel it during the wonderful decade of the . It was “morning in America.” A new start to a golden age began under the benign English-speaking leadership of US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The culture of individual success had begun replacing the culture of shared prosperity. And, almost on cue, the dreadful Soviet Union that had spawned Stalin, had the courtesy to collapse and usher in a peaceful, unipolar world, from which all devils would be permanently banished.

Everything changed in September 2001. The devils had returned. They were spreading a new plague, with a new name: Global Terror. They were out there somewhere, in faraway lands that nevertheless threatened the livelihood of those of us who were committed to cultivating our gentle prosperity. The fact that our prosperity depended on access to resources from those faraway lands meant that we had good reason to fear the troublemakers, especially those who were far away.

That mentality led to a series of increasingly futile 21st century “forever wars,” the latest of which began only a few months ago. Spreading havoc abroad has become more than a habit. It was clearly an addiction. All in the name of protecting the precious way of life, the fruit of our pursuit of happiness, which we also believe is the key to everyone’s prosperity… so long as they fall in line. But it’s that same mentality that has destabilized the institutions and ultimately undermined the productive capacity of the very civilization we’re now striving desperately to defend.  

In short, far from being exorcised, the Devil is back on his throne and he is amongst us. We simply refuse to acknowledge his presence. We continue to believe he has been permanently exiled without realizing that we’ve been hosting him in our midst all this time. How else can we explain the fact that the US Department of Defense has now been not just renamed, but restructured as the Department of War? Back in the chaotic 20th century, we had two principal enemies: Germany and Japan. We could focus our hatred on them in times of war. Now the enemies are everywhere. Even allies are enemies. They all deserve our hate. So it appears in Donald Trump’s America.

What about Europe?

The EU is not only fraying at the seams, it is lost in the woods of its mindless bureaucracy. These two images up King Lear’s “loop’d and window’d raggedness.” Europe produced maximum horror in the first half of the 20th century. The scenario of chaos may be reemerging today. World War I became possible thanks to the convergence of an industrial revolution and intense competition between competing European colonial powers. The combination of industrial efficiency and unlimited extraction allowed them to build their own military-industrial complexes that inevitably produced the monumental clash of 1914, when they began seriously testing their prowess against one another.

The sense of civilizational unity in the West — notably between the US and Europe, but also among European nations — remains today, but only at the formal level. The thread that holds it together is weakening as we watch the tension grow. It can only thrive by believing there are enemies out there that will unite us in a common effort. But it’s becoming more and more difficult even to name those enemies and be certain of their evil intentions. 

Is Russia really an enemy of Europe? That appears to be a matter of belief, but there are no concrete facts to back it up. And China? The US has obvious reasons to see it as a rival, but does that make it an enemy of Europe? Apparently, if Washington sees China as its principal enemy, Europe has no choice but to follow suit. 

Is Iran a terrorist state threatening the West? Europe didn’t think so when it signed the in 2015 and remained in it even after Trump withdrew. Where’s the threat to our civilization? It only exists if Israel, which isn’t in the West, is deemed to symbolize the West. That symbiotic connection seems to work for the US, but does it make sense for Europe?

In contrast, we may be seeing a return to a state we claim to have cast off in 1945, in which the enemies of European nations are other European nations. To some extent, that is already the case when we consider the case of Russia, a nation that, at least since the Great, has always been European. Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, its leaders have sought to integrate Europe. And it’s always been Washington that refused.

This is truly a turning point, but not exactly the former German Chancellor Olaf Sholz referred to. We may be witnessing a return to the nightmare scenario of both 20th-century world wars. 

What’s surprising is that few people seem to notice. �ұ�������Բ�’s current chancellor, Friedrich Merz has announced its ambition to rearm and become Europe’s dominant military power. Doesn’t that ring any bells? Shouldn’t we look back and remind ourselves that many people in the US and the UK, prior to the outbreak of World War II, regarded Hitler with sympathy, admiring his ability to establish order? American financial and industrial interests made the of Nazi �ұ�������Բ�’s economy possible. It was only when he invaded Poland that they woke up in surprise.

Angels to the rescue?

Are any of Europe’s current leaders concerned by �ұ�������Բ�’s newfound ambition to become the continent’s new military powerhouse? Have European media begun to raise the alarm? So far, only a few public thinkers have allowed themselves even to evoke the danger. 

Italian geopolitical analyst Thomas Fazi and French historian and Emmanuel Todd are outliers. Both of them see the risk and offer contrasting but ultimately complementary analyses. Todd fears that France will be a likely future victim of any policy that encourages German rearmament. “For Germany, only hierarchical relationships are conceivable,” he tells us. “The Germans want to dominate Europe because it suits their temperament.”

Fazi wouldn’t disagree, but he makes a complementary . “This is not nationalism, military or otherwise, but its opposite: the undermining of German and European core interests at the hands of a transnationalised globalist elite — Merz is, after all, a former BlackRock executive — that views permanent war and militarisation as a way to entrench its wealth and power at the expense of European prosperity and security.”

The debate will undoubtedly continue. For our own safety and well-being, we should hope that it will amplify, but the consequences are in all cases unpredictable. The big question for Europe is twofold:

1. Is it poised, despite its best intentions, to return to the logic that prevailed during the first half of the 20th century? (Todd’s concern)
2. Is it destined to consolidate its identity as an obedient but permanently humiliated vassal of the US military-industrial complex? (Fazi’s focus)

The devils are loose and, similar to a century ago, Europe is their playground. Are there any European leaders capable of summoning up Abraham Lincoln’s “ of our nature” to rein them in again?

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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France, Italy and Spain pushed back against US military operations related to the war, while Britain kept its support carefully limited. Then US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to reaffirm America’s commitment to NATO’s core collective-defense principle. That sequence matters. It suggests that when the White House cannot win allied consent, it is prepared to make uncertainty itself an instrument of power.

When Article 5 becomes conditional

Hesgeth’s refusal to reaffirm the US’ commitment to NATO is a more serious development than the usual transatlantic quarrel. NATO was never meant to function as a protection racket in which security guarantees remain solid only as long as allies fall into line behind unrelated American wars. Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is the political heart of the alliance because it every member that collective defense does not depend on whether the White House is pleased with them on any given week.

When Hegseth treated that commitment as something effectively subject to presidential discretion, he did more than create an awkward headline. He introduced a dangerous idea into the alliance’s bloodstream: that treaty credibility can be made conditional on political obedience. Even if no formal change follows, allies have heard the message. Once heard, it cannot easily be unheard.

A war allies will not own

The allied refusals themselves should not be dismissed as symbolic irritation. They reveal something larger about how this war is being seen outside Washington. France reportedly overflight rights for aircraft connected to the conflict. Italy to certain US war-related flights. Spain went further, its airspace and making it clear that NATO could not be used as a backdoor into a war Madrid considered unjustified.

Earlier, Trump had publicly NATO allies “cowards” for failing to support the campaign. Those are not the dynamics of a coalition rallying behind a shared strategy. They are the dynamics of an administration discovering that its partners see the war not as collective defense, but as a war of choice for which Washington wants retrospective buy-in.

Raising the price of dissent

What makes this episode even more revealing is the way Washington has begun to raise the price of dissent. European governments that American weapons through the Foreign Military Sales program have been to expect delays because the Iran war is draining US stockpiles. Estonia and Finland have publicly that they were notified about those delays. Now Trump has the withdrawal of 5,000 troops from Germany and hinted at deeper reductions to come.

Taken separately, each move can be explained away as an inventory problem or a force-posture review. Taken together, they tell a clearer story. The White House is beginning to convert dependence on allies into leverage. If allies will not support the war, they may be reminded how much their own defense planning still depends on American decisions.

From leadership to leverage

This is where Trump’s contradictions become more than a personal weakness. He still talks as if American primacy remains intact: The US leads, others adjust and dissent can eventually be managed through pressure. But the response to the Iran War suggests something else. America can still coerce. It is less able to persuade. That is a crucial difference.

Hegemony, in its most durable form, does not rely on constant threats against allies. It rests on a mix of legitimacy, predictability and the sense that following Washington, however imperfectly, remains safer than resisting it. Once the hegemon begins punishing allies for declining to join its wars, it is no longer operating from unquestioned authority. It is operating from insecurity.

The British response offers a glimpse of where this can lead. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has not staged a theatrical break with Washington, but he has that the war and the wider volatility around it strengthen the case for closer British ties with Europe on both security and the economy. That may sound modest, but in strategic terms it is not.

Hedging rarely begins with declarations of divorce. It begins with adjustments in habit. Governments start building alternatives, widening their options and reducing the political cost of future distance. The more Washington treats alliances as instruments to be switched from reassurance to punishment, the more allies will look for ways to dilute their exposure to American volatility.

What allies learn from pressure

For American policymakers, this ought to be a moment for sobriety. Instead, Trump and Hegseth seem determined to prove that coercion can substitute for strategy. They appear to believe that if allied capitals are reminded often enough of their dependence, resistance will soften. More likely, the opposite will happen. States that feel bullied do not become more invested in America’s wars; they become more careful about how much of their own security architecture is tied to American discretion. That means more scrutiny of base access, more appetite for European coordination, more demand for procurement diversification and, over time, more willingness to imagine a post-American security order even if no one is yet ready to name it outright.

That is why this moment matters far beyond the immediate question of Iran. The issue is not only whether Trump can compel a little more compliance from nervous allies in the middle of a war. The larger issue is what kind of international system the US is building when it uses treaty ambiguity, arms delays and troop withdrawals to discipline partners that refuse to endorse its choices.

A country confident in its leadership does not need to hold its alliances hostage. It can absorb disagreement without making its guarantees seem conditional. What Trump is revealing, perhaps more clearly than he intends, is that America’s problem is no longer just overstretch in the Middle East. It is the erosion of a form of power that once made allied cooperation feel natural rather than forced. When that kind of power starts to fade, punishment becomes tempting. It is also a sign that the old order is already weaker than Washington wants to admit.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In the ensuing weeks, American and Israeli forces the largest naval fleet elimination since the Second World War, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt. They destroyed over 140 Iranian vessels, crippled ballistic missile production facilities with 5,000-pound bunker-buster munitions and erased infrastructure that has menaced the world for decades.

Following the degradation of the regime’s military-industrial complex, a debate has emerged within Western diplomatic and academic circles. Proponents of conflict-resolution paradigms argue that the optimal is now a cessation of hostilities. They leveraging the regime’s current vulnerability to negotiate a permanent ceasefire, strike a diplomatic bargain and establish a stabilized status quo in the Persian Gulf.

However, this diplomatic approach rests on the assumption that the Islamic Republic of Iran is a conventional nation-state. It presumes the leadership in Tehran prioritizes traditional calculations of border security, economic self-interest and national preservation. Conversely, an of the Islamic Republic reveals a totalitarian framework whose foundational ethos, institutional architecture and worldview do not with the traditional Westphalian system of sovereign states.

To accurately assess the strategic requirements of this conflict, historical comparisons are instructive. The closest structural analog to the Islamic Republic is not a Cold War superpower or a conventional authoritarian dictatorship; rather, it is from 1933 to 1945. Both systems a reliance on a collective, totalitarian ideology oriented toward absolute endpoints. Both centralized authority at the expense of independent legal and legislative institutions, subordinating them to a supreme leader. Both utilized paramilitary organizations to enforce domestic compliance and pursue expansion. Furthermore, both regimes a systemic, religiously and racially defined antisemitism as a core tenet of their geopolitical objectives.

Therefore, proposing a negotiated settlement with the remnants of the current regime presents the same strategic risks as seeking diplomatic accommodation with Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Such an approach risks allowing the regime to use treaties as tactical pauses rather than binding resolutions. As philosopher Karl Popper in his “paradox of tolerance,” extending unlimited tolerance to fundamentally intolerant systems ultimately threatens the liberal society itself.

Consequently, Operation Epic Fury represents more than a regional security dispute; it is a fundamental clash between incompatible governing models. A durable peace cannot be achieved through diplomatic compromise with the Islamic regime. A definitive resolution necessitates the comprehensive dismantling of the regime’s coercive apparatus and total ideological capitulation.

The Munich fallacy and the illusion of pragmatic diplomacy

A fundamental error of modern Western diplomacy is the cognitive trap of mirror-imaging — the deeply ingrained assumption that all adversaries ultimately share the same basic motivations regarding peace, economic prosperity and national survival. Western democracies, by their very nature, operate as “status quo” states. They seek geopolitical stability, predictable international markets, the peaceful flow of global commerce, and the management of disputes through established institutional frameworks and international law. The Islamic Republic of Iran, however, has operated entirely as a “revolutionary state” since its violent inception in 1979.

For the ruling clerics in Tehran, the state itself is merely a temporary, earthly vessel for perpetuating the revolution. The 1979 revolution was never conceived as a nationalist uprising to secure better material conditions or democratic rights for the Iranian populace; it was explicitly designed as a vanguard movement to overturn the entire global order. The first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, framed the revolution as an eternal struggle to export a radical, fundamentalist vision of Islam far beyond the borders of Iran, dividing the entire world into the oppressed and the oppressors, and completely the bipolar “East versus West” geopolitical structures of the era as inherently corrupt and illegitimate.

This revolutionary, totalizing imperative closely mirrors the underlying dynamic of Nazi Germany. Dictator Adolf Hitler did not view the German state as an end in itself, but strictly as the mechanism through which to achieve a racially purified, millenarian empire that would dominate the globe. For the Nazis, the ultimate goal was the realization of the thousand-year Reich, an ideological that necessitated permanent mobilization, relentless warfare and the subjugation or extermination of “inferior” peoples. For the Islamic Republic, the ultimate goal is the realization of an Islamist utopia, the destruction of Western liberal hegemony and the violent preparation of the world for the of the Mahdi, or the Twelfth Imam.

Because both regimes view their struggles through a messianic, existential and uncompromising lens, they cannot be contained by traditional, rational deterrence strategies. In an ideologically driven system, pragmatic calculations regarding economic stability or human life are always subordinated to theological or racial imperatives. If a regime genuinely it is executing the divine will of God — or the biological destiny of the blood — it will willingly absorb catastrophic human and economic losses rather than abandon its core mission. Asking the Islamic Republic to abandon its nuclear ambitions, cease its sponsorship of global terror networks or recognize the right of its neighbors to exist via a negotiated treaty is akin to asking the Nazi regime to voluntarily abandon its racial laws at a negotiating table in Geneva. The aggression is not a policy choice that can be bargained away; it is the regime’s very reason for existing.

Despite the overwhelming historical and empirical of the Islamic Republic’s totalitarian and exterminationist nature, there remains a persistent lobby in Western capitals that argues for de-escalation and diplomatic engagement. This argument is the direct intellectual descendant of the disastrous of the 1930s.

In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from the Munich Conference clutching a piece of paper, having traded the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany in exchange for a solemn promise of “peace for our time.” The fundamental flaw of the was the belief that a totalitarian dictator could be satiated by territorial concessions or diplomatic recognition. Instead of securing peace, the concessions merely validated Hitler’s utter contempt for Western weakness, bought the German war machine vital time to finalize its rearmament and paved the way for a devastating global war that consumed tens of millions of lives.

Over the past decade, Western diplomatic engagement with Iran — most notably through the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action () and subsequent, desperate attempts to revive it — has exactly the Munich fallacy. The underlying premise of these negotiations was the belief that by lifting crippling economic sanctions, unfreezing billions of dollars in assets and welcoming Iran back into the community of nations, the regime would moderate its extreme behavior, empower its so-called “reformist” political factions and begin to prioritize domestic economic development over its revolutionary, expansionist ambitions.

The results of this diplomatic gamble were entirely predictable to anyone who understood the nature of totalitarian ideology. The Islamic Republic did not use the massive influx of billions of dollars to build hospitals, improve failing infrastructure or alleviate the suffering of the Iranian people. Instead, the regime this newfound wealth directly into its imperial, revolutionary project. They vastly expanded their ballistic missile arsenals, accelerated their drone manufacturing capabilities (eventually the Russian Federation with kamikaze drones for its brutal war of aggression in Ukraine) and massively the “Axis of Resistance” across the Middle East. The financial relief provided by Western appeasement the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, the relentless Hezbollah rocket barrages that caused large-scale in northern Israel and the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea that paralyzed global shipping

Providing a diplomatic off-ramp to the Iranian government following the military impacts of Operation Epic Fury could signal broader geopolitical vulnerabilities. It validating the strategic utility of employing proxy militant groups to test and exhaust Western diplomatic endurance. This could incentivize global militant organizations by demonstrating that a nuclear-threshold state utilizing aggressive regional tactics can compel diplomatic concessions and survive significant military retaliation.

Such a precedent could bolster anti-Western coalitions, signaling to nations like Russia and China that allied resolve can be outlasted. As former Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid stated following the onset of the 2026 war, the current hostilities do not represent a conventional dispute over borders or tariffs, but rather an conflict with a regime fundamentally opposed to its neighbors’ existence. Consequently, an effective strategic goal must move beyond a temporary ceasefire that permits the existing ideological and military infrastructure to rebuild.

Velayat-e Faqih and the ��ü������������Գ�����

The political architecture of Iran functions as a totalitarian system that direct structural parallels to the Third Reich of the 1930s. To achieve their respective ideological visions, both regimes recognized the necessity of systematically eradicating all competing sources of moral, legal and political authority.

In Nazi Germany, the legal and moral foundation of the entire state apparatus was the ��ü������������Գ�����, or the “leader principle.” The word, will and desire of Hitler constituted the ultimate, unchallengeable law of the land, effortlessly overriding any constitution, legislature or independent judiciary. Hitler was not merely a political executive or a head of state; he was elevated to the status of the ideological conduit for the destiny of the German race, possessing absolute and unquestionable authority over every facet of public and private life. The state existed solely to execute his will.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is governed by an eerily similar doctrine known as (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist), a concept pioneered and weaponized by Khomeini. Before 1979, traditional Shi’ite political thought largely advocated a form of ; because the Twelfth Imam (the Mahdi) was in occultation, all earthly governments were as inherently flawed and clerics generally advised waiting for his messianic return before attempting to establish a pure Islamic state. Khomeini radically and forcefully reinterpreted this centuries-old theology. He asserted that, in the Mahdi’s absence, a supreme, righteous cleric must wield absolute political and religious power over society to prepare the way for the end of days.

The doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih institutionalizes the absolute authority of the supreme leader over all state and religious affairs. This position structurally supersedes nominally republican institutions — including the elected presidency, the Majlis (parliament) and the judiciary — by maintaining direct, unilateral control over the armed forces, state media apparatuses and the centralized economic conglomerates that govern the national economy.

The doctrines of the ��ü������������Գ����� and Velayat-e Faqih both function to neutralize democratic institutions and reduce elections to performative exercises. Just as the ��ü������������Գ����� rendered the obsolete to consolidate dictatorial power, Velayat-e Faqih subordinates Iran’s republican structures to the supreme leader. The Guardian Council, an unelected body of clerics and jurists, strictly vets all electoral candidates based on their loyalty to the state. By disqualifying individuals who do not demonstrate ideological commitment to the revolution, the regime restricts political competition to approved loyalists and systematically eliminates genuine political pluralism.

The Nazi and Iranian dictatorships rely on procedural theater and absolute information control to mask their unaccountable governance. Nazi �ұ�������Բ�’s Ministry of Propaganda weaponized the media for ideological mobilization, a function directly replicated by Iran’s state broadcasting monopoly, strict censorship apparatus and targeted internet blackouts. As a result, both systems profoundly moralize and securitize political dissent: Opposition to the Nazi party was prosecuted as treason against the race, while opposition to the Islamic Republic is legally as moharebeh (“enmity against God”), a capital offense.

The Schutzstaffel and the IRGC

The bifurcation of the military apparatus constitutes a primary structural similarity between the Islamic Republic and Nazi Germany. Because totalitarian regimes frequently distrust traditional armed forces — which typically prioritize professional ethics and loyalty to the nation-state over a specific radical ideology — they establish parallel military organizations dedicated exclusively to the ruling ideology and leadership to secure absolute power.

In Germany, the traditional army (the Wehrmacht) was with suspicion by Hitler. It was therefore shadowed, infiltrated and eventually dominated by the Schutzstaffel (SS). The SS was not merely a military unit; it was the elite, ideological vanguard of the Nazi Party. It operated completely outside the bounds of normal military law. It ran the vast network of concentration camps, enforced draconian racial purity laws, operated the domestic secret police (the Gestapo) to crush internal dissent and eventually fielded its own massive, fanatical combat divisions (the Waffen-SS) to wage wars of annihilation abroad.

In Iran, the traditional national army (the Artesh) has been entirely eclipsed and marginalized by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).�� Established after the 1979 revolution to prevent conventional military intervention, the IRGC has into a dominant economic, political and military organization structurally mirroring the SS. By controlling substantial sectors of the Iranian economy, the IRGC secures independent funding that circumvents civilian oversight.�� Furthermore, it suppresses domestic opposition through its paramilitary , while its intelligence branch oversees political prisons and the systemic execution of dissidents.

Furthermore, both the SS and the IRGC extensive, deeply loyal foreign networks to export their ideology and wage war beyond their borders. During the Second World War, the Nazis commanded numerous non-German Waffen-SS divisions, recruiting ideological sympathizers, anti-communists and antisemites from across occupied Europe and the Middle East to fight and die for the Reich.

Similarly, the IRGC’s elite external operations branch, the Quds Force, has spent decades constructing and commanding a vast, multinational . The IRGC funds, arms, trains and directs a network of foreign proxy militias that as the expeditionary forces of Iranian totalitarianism. This includes the heavily armed Lebanese Hezbollah, the Palestinian terror group Hamas, the Houthis in Yemen, and various Shi’ite militias in Iraq and Syria. The IRGC has even organized specific foreign fighter divisions, such as the (composed of Afghan refugees) and the (composed of Pakistanis), deploying them as shock troops to prop up the murderous Assad regime in Syria.These proxies do not act independently; they are extensions of the IRGC’s will, holding foreign governments hostage, destabilizing the region and spreading terror on Tehran’s behalf.

Negotiating with the smiling, suit-wearing diplomats of the Iranian Foreign Ministry while the IRGC retains its military and economic hegemony is a fool’s errand. It is structurally equivalent to negotiating a peace treaty with the German Foreign Ministry in 1943 while allowing to retain full command of the SS, the concentration camps, and the military-industrial complex. The diplomats are merely the velvet glove hiding the iron fist of the ideological vanguard.

The fusion of European and Islamic Antisemitism

The ideological framework of the Iranian regime directly connects mid-century European fascism with modern radical Islamism. The antisemitism to the Islamic Republic is not merely a byproduct of the contemporary geopolitical dispute concerning Israel and the Palestinian territories. Rather, it as a foundational ideology that was significantly influenced and transmitted to the Middle East by Nazi Germany.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Third Reich engaged in a massive, propaganda effort directed specifically at the Middle East. Nazi ideologues realized early on that their specific brand of biological, racial antisemitism — which categorized Arabs and Persians as inferior alongside Jews — did not easily translate to Islamic populations. Therefore, the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda, working closely with the Foreign Office, meticulously tailored its messaging.

Through the incredibly popular Persian and Arabic shortwave broadcasts of Radio Zeesen, Nazi propagandists European, pseudoscientific conspiracy theories of Jewish global domination with historic, anti-Jewish themes cherry-picked from early Islamic texts and traditions. These broadcasts manipulated religious sentiment; Hitler was frequently not just as a strong political leader fighting the British and the French, but as a quasi-messianic figure. In some Persian broadcasts, Hitler was even with the Twelfth Imam, a savior who had arrived to destroy the Jews, crush the communists and liberate the Islamic East. The Nazi struggle was explicitly compared to the Prophet Mohammed’s historical clashes with Jewish tribes in Arabia.

Among the dedicated, daily listeners to the Radio Zeesen broadcasts in the late 1930s was a young, radical cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini. The German political scientist Matthias Küntzel has how Khomeini absorbed these European antisemitic conspiracies and masterfully integrated them into his radical Shi’ite theology. In Khomeini’s seminal political tract, Islamic Government, the Jews are depicted not merely as temporal political rivals or infidels, but as a cosmic, supernatural evil attempting to establish a “Jewish world state” to subjugate humanity and destroy Islam from within.

When former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei or senior IRGC commanders speak of “Zionists,” they are not referring to a political nationalist movement. They use the term identically to how Hitler used the word “Jew” — as the dark incarnation of absolute evil, a demonic force responsible for all global suffering, economic hardship and moral decay. This worldview makes the physical destruction of the State of Israel not just a political preference or a territorial ambition, but a profound theological and historical necessity.

For the IRGC and the supreme clerical leadership, history is not a slow march toward progress; it is hurtling toward an apocalyptic, bloody showdown. In this millenarian framework, the physical annihilation of the Jewish state is required to trigger the messianic age. It is a mindset that actively embraces and glorifies martyrdom. The regime views the death of millions — including the death of their own citizens and their proxy fighters — as an acceptable, even glorious, price to pay for ultimate ideological victory.

This is why the Iranian pursuit of a nuclear weapon is so uniquely terrifying. For a rational, status quo state, nuclear weapons serve as the ultimate deterrent against invasion. For a messianic, totalitarian regime that views extermination as a religious mandate, a nuclear weapon is not a defensive shield; it is an offensive tool of divine retribution. You simply cannot negotiate a rational, enduring compromise with a regime that the Holocaust while simultaneously the next one and the extermination of a neighboring nation as its most sacred duty.

Discerning the Iranian nation

The totalitarian regime must be clearly distinguished from the people it violently subjugates. Just as the Nazi party terrorized and murdered millions of Germans who rejected its racist fanaticism, the Islamic Republic operates not as a representative government but as a hostile occupying force over the Iranian nation.

A war against the Islamic Republic’s military infrastructure is fundamentally distinct from a war against the Iranian people. For decades, the Iranian populace has actively resisted the theocratic dictatorship. Through the 1999 , the 2009 , the 2017/18 , the 2022–2023 “” movement and the subsequent uprisings of 2026, citizens have repeatedly faced live ammunition to demand an end to clerical rule. In response, the regime consistently employs mass violence, utilizing the IRGC and the Basij to kill thousands of unarmed citizens, blind protesters and execute dissidents in sham trials.

Recent empirical data illustrate a distinct division between the regime’s ideology and Iranian public opinion. Polling by the Netherlands-based Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN), which uses secure digital networks and virtual private networks (VPNs) to circumvent state censorship, reveals a rapidly secularizing, highly educated society that opposes the status quo.

According to GAMAAN’s extensive, weighted 2024 and 2025 surveys, the internal collapse of the regime’s legitimacy is nearly absolute:

• A staggering 81% of Iranians residing inside the country explicitly reject the Islamic Republic entirely, answering “No” when asked if they want the current system to continue. This opposition rises to an incredible 99% among the Iranian diaspora.
• Support for the fundamental “principles of the Islamic revolution and the Supreme Leader” — the very core of the regime’s justification for ruling — has plummeted to a mere 11%.
• Over 73% of the population explicitly supports a transition to a democratic, secular political system, entirely rejecting the concept of clerical rule.
• Crucially, the regime’s anti-Western and anti-Israel fanaticism is overwhelmingly rejected by the populace. Nearly 70% of Iranians believe the regime should immediately stop calling for the destruction of Israel, and over 60% the government should negotiate directly with the US to resolve diplomatic tensions.

In the wake of the 2026 US-Israeli military strikes targeting Khamenei and the IRGC headquarters, the streets of Tehran witnessed a profound, deeply duality. While regime loyalists and paid paramilitaries mourned in organized, state-mandated gatherings, vast numbers of citizens celebrated the strikes in the privacy of their homes, and occasionally in the streets, hoping they signaled the imminent collapse of the dictatorship.

The younger generation, deeply connected to global digital culture despite government firewalls, is actively turning away from state-sponsored Islam. They are meaning and identity in Iran’s rich, pre-Islamic, Persian heritage, increasingly viewing the 1979 revolution not as a moment of national liberation, but as an alien, barbaric imposition akin to the 7th-century Arab conquests. Treating the clerical regime as the legitimate, permanent representatives of the Iranian people is not just a strategic error; it is a profound moral failure. Such diplomatic engagement effectively abandons a captive, sophisticated nation that is actively striving for its own liberation and eager to reintegrate with the international community.

The imperative of ideological surrender and denazification

Mid-20th-century history offers a structural blueprint for addressing ideologically mobilized regimes resistant to traditional deterrence. The Allied victory in Europe did not stem from a negotiated truce with the Nazi party in 1944. It required the unconditional military and ideological surrender of the German state, followed by a systemic, generation-long process of .

The Allied powers recognized in 1945 that defeating the Wehrmacht militarily was insufficient for securing long-term peace. Allied forces systematically dismantled the institutional and ideological apparatus of the German state. Authorities outlawed organizations such as the SS and the Gestapo, banned ideological symbols, rewrote educational curricula to remove militaristic and racist doctrines, and prosecuted regime architects at Nuremberg. This realignment functioned as a necessary cognitive and institutional process to destroy totalitarian structures and reintegrate Germany into the international community.

Western policymakers must apply a similar strategic paradigm to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Operation Epic Fury achieved necessary military milestones. The of 140 naval vessels and the targeting of underground cruise missile facilities are significant tactical achievements. However, the ultimate strategic objective must remain the collapse of the regime and the complete dismantling of its ideological state apparatus.

A comprehensive strategy must target the institutions of ideological reproduction alongside kinetic military operations to secure the unconditional surrender of a regime rooted in a theology of martyrdom. A viable post-conflict blueprint must implement a systemic “de-Khomeinification” process, structured around several core objectives.

First, the IRGC and the Basij operate primarily as ideological enforcers and paramilitary networks, making their integration into a democratic state structure impossible. Post-conflict authorities must disband them entirely, return their economic assets to the public treasury, and hold their leadership accountable in international or legitimate domestic tribunals.

Second, the constitutional mechanisms elevating the clergy above the law, the judiciary and the electorate must be abolished. Future legal frameworks must codify the separation of religion and state to protect the political system from authoritarianism and religious institutions from political co-optation.

Third, the Iranian educational system requires a systemic overhaul to remove radical Islamist ideology and antisemitic propaganda. Similar to the removal of Aryan-supremacist textbooks from post-war German schools, educators must establish a secularized and objective curriculum.

Finally, Western allies must adopt strategies reminiscent of the Cold War toward the Soviet Union to empower the Iranian public. Democratic nations should actively support internal dissidents, fund independent labor unions, provide secure communications technology and strengthen civil society networks to organically fill the power vacuum following the regime’s collapse.

The post-regime transition period will inevitably generate significant security risks. The sudden loss of central command following leadership decapitation strikes currently leaves elements of the IRGC and its regional proxy networks operating autonomously. This vacuum increases the short-term probability of asymmetric warfare, piracy and terrorism. Nevertheless, the prospect of short-term instability must not deter the strategic objective of removing the totalitarian structure.

Israeli strategist Dan Schueftan this difficult phase as “violent maintenance,” reflecting the reality that uprooting an entrenched radical ideology requires sustained fortitude. Abandoning the objective of regime collapse due to concerns over short-term instability guarantees a more severe long-term outcome. An ideologically intact — even if militarily degraded — Islamic Republic will likely retreat, accelerate its underground nuclear program, and prepare for future geopolitical confrontations.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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In that same column, I asserted that I was “tempted to view the current crisis as something beyond politics in the sense that no set of political measures can address the causes and reestablish order.” Can we now be experiencing the ultimate, fatal and irredeemable crisis of unintended enlightenment that exposes the entire edifice of the traditional European/North Atlantic worldview for what it is: at its essence, a centuries long campaign to destroy civilizations… including its own?

As usual, it was the effusive personality of the current president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, who, devoid of any sense of shame, articulated the true intention of his peer group — which more skilled communicators usually seek to disguise — when he typed this on Truth Social for all the world to ponder: “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

What better way to remind us of the kinds of thoughts entertained — largely unconsciously, but also quite frequently consciously — by generations of European conquerors who believed they were placed on earth to play a modest (and sometimes immodest) role in their race’s collective mission to replace all existing societies and cultures by their particularly refined brand of “civilization?” From St. Louis (Louis IX of France, one of the modest ones), to Belgium’s King and Adolf Hitler (supreme paragons of immodesty), entertained the conviction that what they were doing was improving the world by imposing on the less enlightened a more evolved civilization. When it wasn’t about massacring and exploiting natives and clearing the land, it was about marketing. In fact, alternating the two turned out to be the ultimate key to success perfected during the 20th century’s far more palatable pax americana. Fully armed hard power comfortably accompanied, if not abetted, by well-funded soft power.

Trump has taken the US and the world one step beyond.

A long and still developing history

During the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) Europeans applied a logic of violence they had already experimented with locally in the Americas to their own population. The Reformation had conveniently fractured Europe into two competing “civilizations,” Catholic and Protestant. Many of today’s historians frame that painful episode as a combat for the “internal colonization” of Europe, in which tactics of total war, demographic displacement and state-sanctioned plunder were perfected at home before being exported globally to the rest of the world, usually in the name of profitable commerce. The Dutch and English East India companies, both created at the cusp of the 17th century, led the way abroad.

Long before today’s paragons of bellicosity, Trump and Bibi Netanyahu, two enterprising military leaders — Holy Roman Empire commander Albrecht von Wallenstein and the brilliant general, Count Tilly, author of the traumatizing Sack of Magdeburg in 1631 — distinguished themselves as engineers of industrial caliber violence against the Protestant enemy. England offered its own acolyte: Oliver Cromwell, who honed his trade with particular efficacy in Ireland, gracing history with the Sack of Wexford in 1649. Many historians consider Wallenstein, who was also a businessman, the godfather of our modern military-industrial complex. For three full decades, both sides justified massacres, torture and executions of religious opponents as “justice” or “purification” carried out explicitly in the name of their faith.

Geoffrey Parker is perhaps the most eminent but certainly not the only historian to that the Thirty Years’ War spawned a level of professionalized violence and logistical ruthlessness that changed European behavior for centuries to come. A taste for ideologically or ethnically motivated violence became implanted in the European mindset. Most of the action was concentrated in what is now modern Germany, though it quickly spilled over into much of central Europe. Thirty years of chaos spread across Bohemia, Silesia, the Rhineland, Saxony, Swabia, Bavaria and northern Germany along the Elbe and Oder. The “Westphalian Order” that eventually emerged in 1648 had the effect not only of ending what seemed an interminable conflict, but also drafting a new set of rules that would ultimately define our modern world order as a system dominated by nation states.

In his book, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, Antony Anghie suggests that the culture generated by a 30-year conflict followed by the new Westphalian order encouraged European leaders to “export” the continent’s inherent chaos and violence to the Americas, Africa and Asia. 

What Europe managed to do for itself in 1648 provided a model to be imposed, mutatis mutandi, to the rest of the world. At the Berlin Conference (1884–1885), the actively colonizing powers of Europe, inspired by the lessons of Westphalia, duplicated it by devising a much needed extension. They divided an entire continent, Africa, into appendages of the now well constituted nation states of Europe. 

Following a logic derived from Wallenstein’s “businesslike” approach to conquest codified as “effective occupation,” the Berlin assembly of civilized nations established what appeared to be a rational principle: European powers couldn’t just claim land; they had to demonstrate they could control and exploit it. 

From Westphalia to Berlin, the entire philosophy of war as practiced by Europeans took on a new character. It has seen a few variations, but we see it playing out even today across our entire civilized Western culture, and not just in the mindsets of Yahoos with names like Trump, Netanyahu and Pete Hegseth. Their mindset took a very tangible form on the American continent in the 19th century when it was formulated as “manifest destiny.” That same doctrine appears evident today as the driver of Israel’s actions regarding not only its permanently occupied population, which it seeks to ethnically cleanse, but also in the fact that Netanyahu’s government has also become specialized in exporting the idea to all its neighbors. Europe was content with 30 years of brutality 400 years ago. Israel appears to be stretching its war of cruelty to a record-breaking 80 years. Christian fundamentalists in the US are applauding it as the first act of the Apocalypse.

In light of the violence of our ongoing wars in Iran, Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine, we might find the idea of reflecting on the historical significance of Europe’s devastating Thirty Years’ War as at least theoretically instructive. Parker, cited above, why we should pay attention to history in a video recorded ten years ago. Listening to it today, it’s impossible to dismiss the impression that it’s a commentary on current events. Parker warned us at that time that our policies were “perhaps precipitating the worst economic crisis since the Depression.” He encourages us to “start organizing for the next disaster.” It’s a sobering thought to think that at the time of the recording, it wasn’t Trump the warmonger but Barack Obama, the “peace president,” who was reigning over the US and “the free world.”

The German model

The heritage of the traumatic war that devastated Europe in the 17th century has endured and persisted. The most extreme near-contemporary example was, of course, Nazi Germany. This might lead us to conclude that Germany stands out as the culture most inclined towards extreme cruelty. Germans have long been aware of this. Postwar Germany struggled to find the corrective and finally came up with a solution: its “culture of remembrance” (Erinnerungskultur). As a nation, post-World War II Germans are expected to draw the consequences, even on a personal level, of the shame of the Holocaust.

But a strategy designed to repair or at least prevent from repeating the errors of the past hasn’t produced the expected results. Instead of becoming hypersensitive to the evil associated with acts of genocide, all recent German governments not only consciously ignore manifest genocide when practiced by its historical victims, they appear to regard it as a “right” Israel earned due to the suffering Germany subjected them to.

But it doesn’t stop there. Within its own borders, Germany has restricted free speech by enforcing a strict adherence to the IHRA of antisemitism that conflates criticism of the policies of the manifestly bellicose government of Israel with antisemitism. Authorities mobilize the laws against those who think differently. Berlin and Frankfurt have banned pro-Palestinian demonstrations and have clamped down in many cases with excessive use of force. One of the most controversial (and absurd) aspects is the targeting of Jewish artists and intellectuals. For example, the “Jüdische Stimme” (Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East) has had its bank accounts frozen and its events canceled by state authorities.

Do the German authorities believe that this is an appropriate way to express their people’s shame and exorcise their ancestral guilt for actions conducted nearly a century ago? The rest of the world may see through the charade. �ұ�������Բ�’s fanatical defense of a nation that demonstrates day after day its own taste for fanatical violence indicates that the Germans have failed to learn the true meaning of the dictum “never again.” 

If the damage these behaviors and laws have done to democracy was limited to Germany alone, there might be less reason to complain. But we can now see that German media barons have begun applying it beyond their own borders. Mathias Döpfner, the chairman and CEO of Axel Springer, heads a media group that includes WELT, BILD, Politico, Insider and Morning Brew and most recently, in March 2026, one of the pillars of the British press, . Upon assuming ownership, Döpfner informed his British staff that they must align with what he calls his five “Essentials,” which he claims defines a framework for journalistic freedom while requiring intellectual commitment. Here are the five points:

1. We stand for freedom, freedom of expression, the rule of law and democracy.
2. We support the right of Israel to exist and oppose all forms of antisemitism.
3. We advocate the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe.
4. We uphold the principles of a free-market economy.
5. We reject political and religious extremism, as well as all forms of discrimination.

Döpfner urged those who disagree, including on Israel and antisemitism, to seek work elsewhere. 

It’s time for this Devil’s Advocate to ask a diabolically significant question: Why is Germany as a political entity so consistently attracted to the practice of genocide?

And I’ll add one more: Germany committed no less than two historical genocides in the 20th century. The first took place in its colony in in 1907. Why does Döpfner insist on imposing his nation’s penchant for genocide on the outside world? While doing so, he mocks a pair of ideas long associated with the practice of legitimate democracy: freedom of speech and journalistic integrity.

Recently, �ұ�������Բ�’s chancellor, Friedrich Merz, vowed to build “Europe’s strongest army.” This leads me to wonder: Have we learned nothing from the history of the Thirty Years’ War, the 1884 Berlin Conference or Hitler’s Third Reich? Or have we simply learned all the wrong things and forgotten what counts?

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post A Taste for Genocide: Why the West Can’t Shake Its Most Violent Habits appeared first on 51�Թ�.

But Bulgaria is not an isolated case. Across Europe, and especially among EU candidate countries, foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) has become a defining lens through which political stability and democratic resilience are judged. FIMI is by the European External Action Service as:

A mostly non-illegal pattern of behaviour that threatens or has the potential to negatively impact values, procedures and political processes. Such activity is manipulative in character, conducted in an intentional and coordinated manner. Actors of such activity can be state or non-state actors, including their proxies inside and outside of their own territory.

When discussing EU enlargement, FIMI is mentioned throughout the European Commission’s 2025 enlargement package . Across candidate countries in the Danube and Central Europe region, it is framed as the ultimate threat in foreign, security, and defense policy. In — the exposed country to FIMI — FIMI-related terms appear nearly as often as “rule of law,” a cornerstone of EU accession. But here is a catch: Resilience to FIMI is not an official EU accession criterion. Then, is it legitimate for this growing concern to become an unwritten rule? Or is it merely a convenient justification for keeping EU enlargement perpetually out of reach?

FIMI: an enlargement challenge��

It cannot be denied that FIMI is not only a security threat but also a challenge to EU enlargement. FIMI’s effects directly impact key requirements of the (the rules that define whether a country is eligible to join the EU). It undermines democratic institutions by targeting trust in elections, independent media and public administrations, all of which are essential for accession readiness.��

FIMI also promotes alternative geopolitical narratives that encourage alignment with actors such as Russia and China, thereby reducing support for EU integration and weakening the convergence with EU standards.

The impact is particularly visible in the Western Balkans (WB), where the of disinformation between July and September 2025 was largely anti-EU narratives. Disinformation mostly portrayed the EU as behaving in a fascistic manner toward WB countries, suggested religious bias in enlargement decisions and framed EU policy as driven by frustration toward Russia. Such narratives significantly erode public trust in the accession process. As a result, FIMI not only reduces public support for EU membership but also weakens domestic political incentives to pursue reforms and to close accession chapters.��

In this sense, FIMI can slow or obstruct the enlargement process. In extreme cases, it can be argued that advancing with accession under such conditions could “ the integrity of EU decision-making and the sustainability of its functioning.”

FIMI as the rising unwritten criterion

Despite this reality, absent from the Copenhagen criteria and not explicitly embedded in the (the body of common rights and obligations that bind all Member States to the EU), FIMI does not formally fit into any single accession chapter. Yet, in practice, it has become a recurring cross-cutting concern in the candidate countries’ 2025 enlargement package .��

These reports show that FIMI is addressed across multiple negotiation chapters: chapter 10 (digital transformation and media), chapter 23 (judiciary and fundamental rights, related to questions of freedom of expression, freedom of assembly and association, implementation of legislation/institutions, public service broadcaster and internet), chapter 24 (justice, freedom and security, related to fight against terrorism and prevention of radicalization and violent extremism), chapter 28 (consumer and health protection) and last but not least chapter 31 (foreign, security and defense policy). 

Here lies the paradox: While FIMI is not formally codified as an accession criterion, in practice it functions as one, shaping EU assessment across multiple policy areas. The paradox goes even further when looking at the EU’s actions that persistently translate a lack of a comprehensive on the link between EU enlargement and countering FIMI.

The enlargement rules were designed for tanks and treaties to capture traditional state security and diplomatic concerns, not for trolls and algorithms. So where does FIMI fit in all this? The EU appears to be addressing 21st-century hybrid threats with a 20th-century accession toolbox. 

The risk of FIMI becoming a selective political tool��

This legal and empirical ambiguity creates significant room for FIMI to serve as a selective political tool rather than an objective criterion for EU accession. If enlargement is to remain a “strict, fair and merit-based process based on objective progress,” as the has repeatedly emphasized, then what are the objective and measurable criteria used to assess resilience to FIMI?��

This increasing emphasis on FIMI as an obstacle to EU enlargement is further disturbing, as two of the five countries by FIMI in 2025 are EU member states: France (second place) and Germany (fourth place). This illustrates that FIMI is not only an external challenge affecting candidate countries alone, but also a structural vulnerability within the EU itself. And yet, this buzzword is increasingly invoked to justify slowing or complicating enlargement negotiations.��

At the same time, some candidate countries, most notably Moldova, have developed remarkable capacities to counter FIMI, to the extent that Moldova now frames this resilience as an asset in its EU accession trajectory. Moldova’s “ and field-tested solutions to Russian hybrid threats” demonstrate that what matters is not how much a country is exposed to FIMI, but rather the effectiveness of its response mechanisms. This point has also been acknowledged in the last year, alongside additional and endless reform requirements. In this sense, Moldova illustrates how FIMI can contribute to the securitization of enlargement by justifying stricter conditions and slower negotiation progress.��

FIMI is, of course, an enlargement challenge. However, it also appears that FIMI conveniently shifts responsibility for enlargement onto the candidate countries, enabling the EU to frame slow progress in terms of “they are not ready” rather than “we are not willing.” While FIMI is clearly not the sole reason for stagnation in the enlargement process, it has become a particularly convenient one.

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A landslide that signals rupture

Rimanyi describes the election as more than a decisive win. With 55.3% of the vote translating into a two-thirds parliamentary majority — 141 out of 199 seats — Tisza has achieved the kind of mandate rarely seen in European politics. Turnout reached roughly 80%, underscoring the scale of public engagement.

For Rimanyi, the magnitude of the outcome carries particular meaning. He calls it a “popular rejection of 16 years of Orbán government;” the result reflects accumulated dissatisfaction rather than a narrow electoral swing. While pre-election polling had pointed to a Magyar victory, the scale of defeat for Orbán’s right-wing Fidesz party — especially among government-aligned pollsters — turned the outcome into a genuine political upset.

The result also reflects a generational shift. Younger voters, many of whom have only known Orbán’s leadership, played a decisive role. Their participation suggests not only dissatisfaction with the present, but a desire to redefine Hungary’s political future.

Economic strain and campaign contrast

Economic conditions form the backbone of Rimanyi’s explanation. Hungary’s post-2010 growth model, he argues, faltered after external conditions worsened. EU funds declined, global conditions tightened and inflation surged to the highest levels in the European Union during 2022 and 2023. As costs rose faster than wages, public frustration deepened.

Rimanyi frames this as a structural problem rather than a temporary downturn. He notes that the system “ran out of steam,” leaving Hungary caught in a middle-income trap where productivity lags and living standards stagnate. Voting behavior became more pragmatic, driven by household economics rather than ideological alignment.

Simultaneously, the campaign itself highlighted a contrast in political style. Magyar’s grassroots approach — touring small towns and villages often overlooked by national politicians — helped him build a broad support base. His focus on everyday concerns, from wages to cost of living, resonated more strongly than the government’s emphasis on geopolitical messaging.

By contrast, Fidesz’s communication strategy appeared increasingly detached from voter priorities. Its focus on external threats, particularly Ukraine, failed to address domestic economic pressures. Rimanyi suggests that voters ultimately prioritized tangible concerns over abstract security narratives. He also notes that the visit of US Vice President JD Vance during the campaign had little to no impact. Vance has low name recognition in Hungary and arrived without concrete economic commitments, reinforcing the perception that Orbán’s ties to Washington produced rhetoric rather than tangible benefits for Hungarian voters.

System fatigue and political backlash

Beyond economics, the election exposed deeper institutional tensions. Rimanyi points to a series of late-campaign revelations from insiders, including allegations that state institutions were used for partisan purposes. Among the most striking was a military captain — previously the public face of the armed forces’ recruitment campaign — who broke ranks to describe chronic underfunding and claimed that most personnel would not support Orbán. This intervention, largely overlooked in Western coverage, resonated strongly with Hungarian voters. These developments reinforced perceptions of overreach within a highly centralized system.

He characterizes the dynamic as “state capture.” This use of public institutions to target political opponents crossed a threshold for many voters. While corruption had long been part of the political discourse, these more direct allegations appear to have intensified public backlash.

The election result, therefore, reflects not only dissatisfaction with governance but also fatigue with the broader political structure. It represents a rejection not just of Orbán’s leadership but of the system that sustained it — and, notably, of older opposition parties that failed to offer a credible alternative in the past.

A different governing approach

Magyar’s rise ties closely to his positioning as both insider and outsider. A former Fidesz affiliate, he leveraged his familiarity with the system to critique it, presenting himself as someone capable of reform from within while breaking decisively from past practices.

Rimanyi emphasizes that Magyar’s appeal lies less in ideology than in pragmatism. Rather than framing his movement along a traditional left–right spectrum, he has presented his Tisza party as a broad coalition focused on practical improvements. This “big tent” approach reflects the diverse electorate that delivered his victory, bringing together voters from across the political spectrum.

Policy priorities are likely to follow this pragmatic line. Domestically, the emphasis will remain on economic stabilization and administrative reform. Internationally, the shift may be more measured. Rimanyi expects a more cooperative stance toward the European Union and a less confrontational approach on issues such as Ukraine, while maintaining certain limits, such as not exporting lethal military aid.

What comes next for Hungary

The immediate future remains uncertain. Rimanyi outlines a wide range of possible outcomes for Orbán and Fidesz, from internal fragmentation to sustained resistance through institutional influence. The coming weeks, before Magyar is sworn in on May 9 and his new government fully consolidates power, may prove decisive in determining which path emerges.

Still, Hungary’s broader orientation could shift. A government more aligned with EU policy frameworks and less closely tied to Russia would mark a notable departure from recent years. Yet the extent of this change will depend on how firmly Magyar translates electoral momentum into durable policy.

Rimanyi frames the election as both an end and a beginning. It closes a long chapter in Hungarian politics while opening a more uncertain one, shaped by high expectations and structural constraints. Whether this moment becomes a lasting realignment will depend on how effectively the new leadership addresses the economic pressures and institutional tensions that brought it to power.

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The conflict, which began in 2014 and escalated into a full-scale invasion in 2022, has affected not only the two countries directly involved but also the broader international system. What initially appeared as a war that could produce a clear outcome now raises a more complex question: Will there be a true winner, or only two exhausted losers?

Over the years since the war began, the steady erosion of both sides’ military capabilities, the growing scale of external involvement and the repeated failure of diplomatic efforts have all pointed in a similar direction. This is no longer a war moving toward victory, but one settling into a prolonged strategic deadlock — one that increasingly looks structurally incapable of producing a decisive winner.

From blitzkrieg expectations to stalemate

On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin what was expected to be a rapid and decisive military operation. In the early days, Russian forces advanced quickly across multiple fronts, the outskirts of Kyiv and creating the impression that the capital could fall within days.

That expectation did not last long. Ukrainian resistance proved far more resilient than anticipated. Russian advances slowed, then stalled and in some areas were pushed back. What began as a fast-moving campaign gradually turned into a grinding war of attrition, particularly along the Donbas axis and the southern front.

In this sense, the war began to diverge from earlier short conflicts like the 2008 Russia–Georgia war and instead moved closer to a prolonged and costly confrontation. The failure to secure a decisive early breakthrough marked a turning point — not just militarily, but strategically.

Russia’s strategic overreach and a new Afghanistan

From the outset, the invasion appeared to rest on assumptions that underestimated both Ukrainian resistance and the scale of Western response. Over time, comparisons with the Soviet Union’s experience in have become more frequent. This isn’t because the conflicts are identical, but due to similar patterns of overextension, rising costs and diminishing returns.

Despite early operational advantages, Russia has been forced to adapt. Initial expectations of rapid territorial control gave way to a slower, attritional approach. Non-state actors like the Wagner Group played a visible role in certain phases of the war, particularly in battles such as Bakhmut, though their influence has since declined. Auxiliary forces, including Chechen units, have also been present, but without fundamentally changing the broader trajectory.

At the same time, the material and manpower costs have increased. Western suggest that Russian casualties have reached significant levels. Beyond the battlefield, sanctions, diplomatic isolation and reduced global influence have added further pressure. What was intended as a demonstration of strength has, in many ways, turned into a prolonged test of endurance.

Shrinking influence from the Middle East to the Caucasus

The war has also affected Russia’s position beyond Ukraine. Its ability to project influence in regions such as the Middle East and the Caucasus has become more limited. While Moscow maintains a presence in Syria and continues to engage with regional actors, its capacity to operate simultaneously across multiple fronts has weakened.

Institutions like the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) have also shown of strain, with member states pursuing more independent policies. In parallel, Ukraine has expanded its diplomatic and military partnerships, particularly with European countries, strengthening its position within a broader Western security framework. This shift does not mean a complete loss of influence for Russia, but it does suggest a gradual redistribution of geopolitical weight under the pressure of a prolonged war.

Sanctions, frozen assets and growing dependence on China

For the Putin administration, already reliant on energy revenues to sustain its wartime economy, one of the most significant shocks has been the EU’s decision to Russian assets. As sanctions intensified, Russia’s growing economic and strategic dependence on China has become increasingly visible. Beijing has expanded its role as a key trade partner, increasing purchases of Russian oil and gas at discounted rates while also providing financial channels that help Moscow mitigate the effects of Western restrictions.

This growing asymmetry, however, is not without long-term implications. As Russia has become increasingly dependent on Chinese markets, financing and logistical networks, Beijing’s potential leverage over Moscow has expanded. In practical terms, this may allow China to shape the terms of economic cooperation to its advantage. This includes securing favorable energy prices, influencing infrastructure routes and limiting Russia’s room for independent strategic maneuver. While this does not translate into direct political control, it creates a structural imbalance between Russia and China.

Looking ahead, this dependency could become even more drastic if Western sanctions remain in place. Over time, this dynamic may constrain Russia’s ability to act autonomously not only in economic terms but also in broader geopolitical decision-making, particularly in regions where Chinese and Russian interests do not fully align.

Beyond economics, cooperation between the two countries has deepened in the military and technological domains, including joint exercises and selective equipment transfers. Diplomatic backing from China in international institutions has further allowed Russia to retain a degree of global maneuverability despite its relative isolation.

Taken together, these developments point to a gradual but meaningful erosion of Russia’s strategic autonomy, with Beijing gaining increasing leverage over Moscow’s long-term decisions. In this sense, comparisons with the Soviet experience in become more relevant.

Ukraine’s heavy price and conditional resilience

For Ukraine, the costs have been devastating. Large parts of the country’s infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed, millions have been displaced and economic losses have staggering levels. Historical traumas, from the Holodomor to Chornobyl, add another layer to the national experience of crisis.

And yet, Ukraine has not collapsed. With sustained Western support, it has managed to maintain resistance and even develop aspects of its domestic defense industry. This has allowed it to remain an active participant in the war, not merely a dependent actor.

Still, this resilience is conditional. Without continued external support, sustaining the same level of resistance would be extremely difficult. In that sense, Ukraine’s strength is real, but not entirely self-sufficient.

Lessons from Armenia and Central Asia

Other post-Soviet contexts offer partial points of comparison. Armenia, for example, has in recent years shown signs of toward a more pragmatic foreign policy approach, seeking to reduce tensions through diplomatic means. Similarly, Central Asian states have generally their relations with Russia through careful balancing rather than open confrontation.

Ukraine’s trajectory has been different. Despite attempts at negotiated frameworks such as the Minsk agreements and earlier security arrangements, the conflict escalated into full-scale war. This suggests that while pragmatic diplomacy can sometimes reduce tensions, it is not always sufficient in the face of deeper geopolitical confrontations.

What could break the deadlock?

If the war is indeed locked in a cycle of mutual exhaustion, the real question is not who will win, but what might bring it to an end. Several possibilities stand out.

is a frozen conflict, similar to the Korean Peninsula. Front lines would stabilize without a formal peace agreement. While large-scale fighting would likely decrease, the underlying hostility would persist, effectively institutionalizing instability. This model is shaped by an asymmetric security architecture: South Korea is a part of the US-led security system, hosting American forces and relying on external support. North Korea, by contrast, remains heavily isolated, economically constrained and governed by a highly militarized system with limited external support. If this model were applied to Ukraine, it would imply that the conflict remains unresolved but becomes a permanent fixture of the landscape.

Another possibility is a negotiated settlement. This would require difficult compromises from all sides. Ukraine would likely seek security guarantees, even if full NATO membership remains out of reach. Russia, on the other hand, would aim to preserve at least part of its territorial or strategic gains. Western actors may gradually shift from supporting outright victory to backing a plan that offers both parties a way out.

A third scenario is escalation. This could take several forms. One possibility is deeper NATO involvement through expanded intelligence sharing, greater integration of air and missile defense, or increased logistical and advisory support for Ukraine. Another is regional spillover, where the conflict begins to affect neighboring NATO states through airspace violations, border incidents or hybrid operations, raising the risk of direct confrontation between Russia and the Alliance. This has already happened with Russian drones entering Polish and Estonian airspace. In a more extreme case, miscalculation or accidental engagement between NATO and Russian forces could open a new theater of war with new actors involved.

The absence of victory and the persistence of loss

At this stage, the war appears less like a contest that can be won and more like a condition that both sides are forced to endure. Ukraine continues to fight, but at immense cost and with heavy reliance on external support. Russia continues its campaign, but under growing economic pressure, diplomatic isolation and increasing on China.

Neither side is collapsing, but neither is clearly advancing toward victory. What emerges instead is a form of balance defined not by success, but by sustained loss. One side faces long-term erosion, the other ongoing destruction. And as time passes, the distinction between winning and simply continuing becomes harder to draw. Ultimately, this may be the defining feature of the conflict: not a war that ends in victory, but one that gradually settles into exhaustion.

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Exile has traditionally been understood as a territorial threshold: Once a dissident reaches a democratic state, persecution is assumed to end. However, contemporary authoritarian governance challenges this assumption. Authoritarian states increasingly project coercive power beyond their borders through surveillance, intimidation, cyber operations and pressure on family members. This practice, known as transnational repression, undermines conventional notions of democratic sovereignty and protection.

In classical political theory, denotes exclusive authority within a defined territory. However, transnational repression complicates this framework, as, while authoritarian states may lack territorial jurisdiction in Europe, they can still exert coercive influence within democratic countries. This results in a sovereignty paradox as formal authority remains intact, but informal coercion penetrates borders.

How the Iranian regime’s repression transcends borders��

According to Freedom House’s 2023 on transnational repression, authoritarian governments have carried out hundreds of documented incidents of cross-border repression since 2014, with Iran among the most active perpetrators. Transnational repression takes many forms, including digital harassment, surveillance operations and threats against relatives of activists abroad. The goal is not always physical violence. In many cases, cross-border repressive functions as a form of psychological deterrent.

Domestic and transnational repression are interconnected. The characterizes civic spaces in Iran as “closed,” citing systemic restrictions on journalists and civil society actors. Cross-border intimidation thus extends the logic of internal governance. Where dissent is criminalized domestically, suppressing it abroad becomes a logical extension of that strategy.

Human rights organizations have documented patterns of coercion by proxy. and describe cases in which Iranian dissidents in Europe are subjected to retaliation against family members back home. The UN Special Rapporteur on the landscape of human rights in Iran has similarly highlighted cross-border intimidation practices. Such cross-border coercion poses a substantial challenge to European legal systems built on the concept of territorial harm.

Transnational repression threatens European democracy

However, the responses from European capitals remain fragmented. The of the EU has imposed targeted sanctions on Iranian officials responsible for human rights abuses. Meanwhile, �ұ�������Բ�’s of the Islamic Center Hamburg signaled concern about foreign state-linked influence structures. Yet these measures address individual nodes rather than systemic architecture. When exiled dissidents self-censor out of fear for relatives back home, authoritarian regimes achieve deterrence without resorting to overt violence within Europe.��

Parliamentary inquiries in the UK have warned about expanding foreign interference by authoritarian actors, including Iran. The pattern is cumulative: Each unaddressed case reinforces the perception that intimidation carries limited cost. Addressing this challenge requires conceptual and legal adaptation. European states must adopt several practices. These include a move toward harmonized legal definitions of state-linked intimidation, coordinated evidentiary standards for cross-border coercion and structured cooperation between intelligence and judicial authorities. Digital security assistance for high-risk activists should also be institutionalized rather than applied ad hoc. Moreover, Public attribution of foreign intimidation networks can strengthen deterrence.

Ultimately, asylum is not merely a humanitarian gesture. It is a sovereign commitment. If dissidents who sought refuge remain vulnerable to external coercion, the promise of democratic protection weakens. Transnational repression, therefore, challenges the ability of European democracies to defend political freedom within their own jurisdictions. The sovereignty paradox will persist unless liberal states adapt their legal and strategic frameworks to directly confront authoritarian states’ cross-border coercion.

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The fading of historical memory in Europe

Husson begins by arguing that contemporary European leadership lacks the historical experience that once shaped diplomatic caution. Leaders of the Cold War era, he notes, had lived through the devastation of two world wars and therefore understood the stakes of confrontation. This memory informed figures such as French President Charles de Gaulle, German Chancellor Willy Brandt and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who encouraged dialogue with the Soviet Union and contributed to ending Cold War tensions. By contrast, Husson believes today’s leaders have lost that sensibility. He describes “the lack of memory” as the defining problem shaping current policy choices.

For Husson, this generational shift has coincided with growing intellectual alignment with American strategic thinking. He suggests that younger European leaders absorbed a worldview emphasizing ideological clarity and decisive action rather than the historically grounded pragmatism that once characterized European diplomacy. This shift, he argues, has weakened Europe’s ability to act independently and to pursue negotiated settlements. Without leaders capable of challenging escalation, the continent risks drifting toward confrontation rather than compromise.

Ukraine’s complex history and competing identities

The discussion then turns to Ukraine as a case study of how historical complexity is often ignored in contemporary policymaking. Husson emphasizes that Ukraine’s regional diversity reflects centuries of shifting borders and cultural influences. Western regions were historically tied to Central Europe, while eastern areas developed closer links with Russia and the Soviet Union. These layered identities, he argues, complicate attempts to frame the conflict as a simple clash between two distinct civilizations.

Husson challenges narratives portraying Ukraine and Russia as entirely separate historical worlds. He calls it “absurd” to claim that the two share nothing in common, pointing to linguistic and cultural overlaps that developed over centuries. Isackson reinforces this point with personal reflections on family history and linguistic continuity, underscoring how identity in the region cannot be reduced to clear national categories. For Husson, ignoring this complexity has encouraged policies that deepen division rather than promote reconciliation.

He also recalls interviews conducted in eastern Ukraine, where many residents identified as Ukrainian yet opposed confrontation with Russia. These memories illustrate how local perspectives often diverge from geopolitical narratives promoted by outside actors. The failure to account for these nuances, he argues, has contributed to a conflict that pits Europeans against each other instead of encouraging diplomatic compromise.

Contradictions in threat narratives

Isackson raises another issue dominating European political discourse: the claim that failing to defeat Russia in Ukraine could lead to broader Russian expansion across Europe. Husson sees this argument as internally inconsistent. On one hand, Russia is described as militarily weak for failing to secure quick victory; on the other, it is portrayed as capable of sweeping across the continent. He highlights this contradiction to question the coherence of current rhetoric.

Husson argues that such narratives reflect what he calls an “Americanization” of European political thinking. Instead of traditional balance-of-power diplomacy, leaders increasingly adopt binary frameworks that divide the world into opposing camps. This shift, he contends, contrasts with earlier European diplomatic traditions, which emphasized coexistence among competing systems. By abandoning that approach, policymakers risk escalating conflicts rather than managing them.

The framing of global politics as a struggle between democracy and autocracy, Isackson suggests, echoes earlier crusading mindsets. Husson responds that past European diplomacy focused less on transforming other societies and more on maintaining stability between them. That pragmatic tradition helped Europe avoid major conflicts for long periods, Isackson says, and remains relevant today.

Neutrality, collective security and diplomatic traditions

Isackson and Husson then examine Russia’s long-standing calls for a neutral security zone in Europe. Husson traces this concept back through Soviet and post-Soviet thinking, arguing that Moscow has repeatedly sought arrangements based on neutrality and collective security. While interpretations differ, he sees continuity in these proposals and believes they reflect a broader European tradition of balancing interests rather than imposing ideological uniformity.

Husson contrasts this with modern approaches that prioritize ideological alignment. He argues that diplomacy historically avoided judging the internal political systems of other states and instead focused on managing coexistence. His primary concern, he explains, is not endorsing any particular regime but “securing peace in Europe.” This emphasis on stability over ideological competition reflects his broader critique of current Western policy.

Isackson adds that the concept of indivisible security — recognizing that one state’s safety depends on its neighbors — could provide a foundation for renewed diplomacy. Both speakers suggest that returning to this principle would require acknowledging competing interests and accepting compromise.

Toward a multipolar diplomatic future

The conversation concludes with a discussion of initiatives aimed at reviving diplomatic thinking. Husson outlines plans for an international school of diplomacy designed to bring together students from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Such collaboration could foster a multipolar mindset and rebuild the skills needed for negotiation in a fragmented world.

Husson also emphasizes the importance of cultural understanding and shared education. Training future leaders together could increase trust and encourage cooperation across civilizations. He ends on a hopeful note, expressing confidence that renewed emphasis on equality and mutual respect can help restore diplomacy. By acknowledging diverse perspectives and rejecting exceptionalism, the international system may move toward a more stable multipolar order.

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Historical modesty warns us to view Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s stunning in Hungary last Sunday as only possibly another such historical inflection, not necessarily an actual turning point. Orbán could come back to power if the opposition fails to live up to its promises. Autocrats in other countries might see the situation in Hungary as a warning sign and crack down even harder on their populations. Nevertheless, his electoral defeat was important.

Orbán was not just a local strongman, but rather a central model and muse for an entire generation of nationalist right-wing leaders, including US President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) imitators. If the architect of “,” as he boasted, can be routed, despite a captured media, tilted institutions and deep corruption, that raises implications far beyond Budapest.

We cannot yet know whether this is the beginning of a long global backlash against authoritarian nationalism or a localized setback. But several forces now converging — from economic strain and war fatigue to Trump’s visible physical and mental decline and the humiliation of his chosen lieutenants — suggest that the winds may finally be shifting against the nationalist right.

Orbán’s illiberal model

Orbán’s importance was never just about Hungary’s just under ten million citizens. Since returning to power in 2010, he consciously branded himself as the avatar of a modern form of illiberalism, democratic in form but authoritarian in practice. He tightened control over broadcast media and large parts of the press, channeled state contracts to cronies, reshaped the courts and electoral rules, and used xenophobia and culture-war politics as glue. 

For American and European populists, Hungary became a kind of nationalist TED talk convention. Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest while former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, American political activist Tucker Carlson, Claremont Institute intellectuals and social-conservative activists paraded through Orbán’s orbit. Conservative activist, former FOX News commentator and lobbyist Matt Schlapp’s Center for Fundamental Rights approximately��€1 million (~$974,659) in 2022��and over��€2 million (~$2,173,913) in 2023��from state-funded Hungarian foundations to co-organize the CPAC conferences. There is substantial evidence of Hungarian government funding for CPAC events, primarily through state-linked foundations and think tanks.

Hungarian Prime Minister-designate Péter Magyar after his victory that Orbán diverted taxpayer money to fund CPAC as part of a “criminal offense” involving party financing. Magyar an immediate halt to taxpayer funding for CPAC and pledged to establish anti-corruption agencies to investigate these payments. Out in the open, meanwhile, Republican politicians from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Vice President JD Vance to Budapest to pay homage to Fidesz and learn from what they openly espoused as a model for the US.

The rise of Magyar

Despite all the countervailing winds, Orbán did not merely lose; he lost badly. His party’s vote collapsed after years of seemingly unassailable dominance. He had designed a system to entrench himself and suffocate the opposition. Yet voters, mobilized by a new movement under Magyar, broke through. For American politics, the symbolism is powerful. The regime that MAGA elites openly admired as a blueprint has just been overthrown at the ballot box.

The story of ’s rise matters because it shows how to beat a deeply entrenched populist regime. Magyar is not a left-wing revolutionary. He is a center-right figure who came out of Orbán’s own party, roughly analogous to former US Representatives Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, who finally, from inside the Grand Old Party (GOP), broke decisively with Trump. That background gave him credibility with voters who had once supported Orbán.

Magyar built a movement, not merely a party. Deprived of fair access to the media, he went directly to voters, especially in rural areas where Orbán’s media environment had been most suffocating. Magyar traveled relentlessly, holding town halls and rallies, using social media as a force multiplier. The opposition parties, including the left, swallowed their pride, thought strategically and accepted Magyar’s leadership, uniting behind him even though he was to their right on most issues.

Magyar notably rooted his campaign in everyday concerns, what we call the affordability crisis, health care, education and, above all, the cost of living, while still framing Orbán as a threat to Hungary’s democratic future and European orientation. He often the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956 to arouse patriotic feelings and turn the citizenry against Russian domination and interference. Hungarians didn’t just tire of Orbán’s culture war and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s influence; they tired of stagnant living standards, demographic decline and the sense that neighboring countries were doing better.

During the Cold War, Hungary enjoyed “,” the highest standard of living within the Warsaw Pact. Today, the Hungarian economy (in terms of purchasing power) has fallen behind Romania, a significant blow to national pride. Hungarians look across their borders and see that their economic decline was not inevitable, but rather the product of bad, corrupt governance.

Magyar’s campaign promises to defend democracy and fix people’s material problems were crucial. The anti-Trump forces in the US should take note, however, that he did not exaggerate Orbán’s threat to democracy, nor did he concentrate on wedge-issue culture wars; instead, he focused on bread-and-butter issues. Liberal democracy won in Hungary not as an abstraction, but as a promise to improve daily life under an honest government.

The limits of populist governance

Trump’s rise in 2016 was part of the same global upsurge that lifted Orbán and fueled Brexit. Nationalist parties and leaders could channel legitimate grievances about migration, globalization and the failures of centrist elites into a politics of resentment. They could promise simple solutions and muscular “strongman” leadership without having to demonstrate competence.

But demagoguery governs badly. Orbán’s Hungary offers a case study. Once in power, strongmen face the same stubborn realities as democrats: pandemics, inflation, geopolitics and economic complexity. Populism cannot protect a domestic economy by erecting barriers against the entire globe. Populism cannot pretend to listen to the voice of the people while it silences any dissent. Populism cannot pretend to be defending the interests of the common man while enriching the already wealthy and powerful. After all the bluster, populist authoritarians tend to revert to crony capitalism, institutional hollowing-out and theatrical nationalism instead of sound policies.

Trump fits this pattern. Twice now, he has ridden anti-incumbent waves to power, first in 2016 against the Obama-era Democratic establishment, and again in 2024 against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris amid post-COVID inflation. Americans who voted for Trump did so primarily because they believed he would turn the economy around for them. But Trump and his family have profited enormously, while the net worth of average Americans has stagnated. As of March 2026, Trump’s net worth has increased by approximately��$3 billion to $4.2 billion��since returning to office in January 2025, with estimating his total wealth at a record $7.3 billion, up from $4.3 billion in 2024.

Trump’s second presidency is already visibly failing on its own terms. His , launched impulsively and then managed erratically, has rattled oil markets, worsened an already acute affordability crisis and brought the Strait of Hormuz to the brink of closure. Gasoline prices, already a source of voter anger, have climbed further. Voters may not follow every twist of Middle Eastern diplomacy, but they understand six-dollar gas.

Like Orbán, Trump tries to distract from policy failure with melodrama: social-media tirades, personalized feuds and symbolic gestures designed for the base. But there are growing signs that the spectacle is wearing thin. Even many Americans who once voted for Trump now show signs of exhaustion and disillusionment. The man who once seemed, to his admirers, like an iconoclastic outsider now looks like a tired, angry incumbent.

Trump’s late-night screeds on his own Truth Social platform have become longer, more erratic and more self-pitying. At least on Twitter, he was limited to 140 characters. Posting an of himself as Jesus, not merely blessed by Christ, but��as��Christ, and lashing out at the pope is the kind of grandiose behavior that, in any other era, would raise urgent questions about a president’s fitness for office. The “stable genius” shtick is shading into something more disturbing.

Corruption and cronyism exposed

Corruption also lies in plain sight. Americans are increasingly aware that Trump governs as he does business, by enriching family, cronies and co-investors. From Middle East envoys with vast financial stakes in the region to cronies profiting from regulatory changes, the pattern is unmistakable. Special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner not only have no credentials to negotiate an end to the Iran War — they have no technical expertise in the details of nuclear weapons, nor any background in history and diplomacy, as is normally required of high-level negotiators — but they also have substantial business dealings in the region and the outcome of the war will personally affect their own self-interest. Orbán’s downfall reminds voters that crony corruption is not just “how politics works” but rather is what happens when populists with disdain for expertise run a government.

Vance embodies this problem. Once a bestselling critic of Trumpism, he reinvented himself as a loyalist and is now tied to Trump’s misadventures abroad and at home. He for Orbán just before the Hungarian strongman’s rout. The high mark of chutzpah was Vance complaining about foreign interference in domestic elections while he was actively on the stump for Orbán’s party. He then traveled to Islamabad to help sell Trump’s Iran policy and came home empty-handed as the war worsened. Even Trump’s treatment of Vance, sending him to do the dangerous, thankless work while Trump an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event with Rubio, underscores the dynamic.��

In any other presidency, a foreign war would take precedence over just about any other issue. But Trump thought it would be a good idea to take Rubio to watch UFC fake fighters put on a Vaseline-rubbed mixed-martial-art cosplay rather than deal with statecraft. This is not the behavior of a confident leader grooming a serious successor, but rather that of a flailing boss toying with subordinates.

Authoritarian decline and coalition fractures

Trump’s actions are reminiscent of late-stage authoritarian movements elsewhere, when once-feared lieutenants begin to look ridiculous, and being close to the leader starts to look like a political liability rather than an asset. Vance’s much-touted conversion to Catholicism now sits awkwardly alongside a with an American pope who embodies a morally serious, anti-authoritarian Catholicism, and who clearly wants nothing to do with Trump’s court. The Pope is also a savvy organizer, against whom Trump is flailing.

When US President Richard Nixon was behaving as erratically as Trump does now, as the consumed his presidency, there were similar worries about whether the chief executive was mentally capable of carrying out his duties. The (which addresses presidential succession and the temporary transfer of power) was seriously considered. But in Trump 2.0, there is no adult backup in the White House or conscientious generals in the military — such as former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, retired Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond McMaster or retired General Mark Milley — to guide us through such a constitutional crisis.

The clash with the pope matters politically because it exposes a fissure inside Trump’s own coalition. For years, many white evangelicals and conservative Catholics offered elaborate rationalizations for their support of Trump, casting him as a flawed but necessary instrument in a larger culture war. Many believed God had chosen him to lead America. They accepted his insults, his affairs and even his boasts about sexual assault as the price of power.

But many of those voters are recoiling from the imagery of Trump as a quasi-divine figure and from direct attacks on a pope who speaks in recognizably Christian terms about peace, human dignity and the perils of idolatry, with a Chicago accent. When rank-and-file evangelicals and Catholics criticize Trump openly on these grounds, they offer what political scientists call “,” the cues elites give their followers to take unpopular stances. These kinds of changes do not happen overnight.

In Hungary, Orbán retained impressive support on paper until quite late. But once a critical mass of respectable figures begins to defect, or simply to speak candidly about a leader’s failings, momentum can shift quickly. Voters suddenly feel they are not alone in their misgivings. What was once unthinkable, breaking with “their” leader, becomes, at first, possible, and then inevitable.

Historical parallels and future implications

History does not repeat itself, or even rhyme, as the old cliché goes, but it does offer patterns. The current moment has resonances with several earlier inflection points in liberal democracies. The Progressive Era marked a reaction against the corruption and inequality of the Gilded Age. Reformers did not overthrow capitalism, but they imposed constraints, antitrust laws, regulation and social insurance, which made it survivable for ordinary people.

The civil-rights movement equally represented a profound moral and political break with the “respectable” segregationist laws of the mid-20th century. For years, it was unclear whether the cause would prevail. Then, abruptly, the combination of movement pressure, political leadership and cultural change produced a new consensus and a new generation of leaders that would have been hard to imagine in the 1950s.

The Thatcher–Reagan era then saw a turn away from postwar social democracy and activist government toward market liberalism and limited government. For young conservatives at the time, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 victory, soon followed by US President Ronald Reagan’s in 1980 and the emergence of Pope John Paul II in the Vatican, created a sense that history’s momentum had shifted in their favor.

Orbán’s defeat, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s resistance in Ukraine and Magyar’s emergence in Hungary may play a similar galvanizing role for defenders of liberal democracy today. Two leaders from small countries with big megaphones in Central and Eastern Europe are showing that it is still possible to both resist Kremlin-linked illiberalism and speak convincingly to their citizens’ immediate material needs. Their example should put to rest the idea that only a nationalist strongman can channel popular frustration or that only the far left can credibly oppose inequality and corruption. A broadly liberal, anti-authoritarian politics can be tough on borders and security, serious about economic grievances and uncompromising on democratic norms.

If Orbán’s defeat offers lessons for the US, they are not about importing Magyar’s precise policy platform. They are about coalition, leadership and moral clarity. In Hungary, long-time liberals and leftists accepted a center-right, ex-Orbán figure as their standard-bearer because he was the candidate best positioned to win. In the US, that translates into a willingness among Democrats, moderates and anti-Trump conservatives to unite behind candidates, sometimes imperfect ones, who are serious about defending democratic norms, fighting corruption and improving living standards. Above all, it means jettisoning purity tests and focusing on the issues that matter to regular voters instead of to the loud fringe.

Voters respond not to ideological checklists, but to leaders who seem to understand their lives and can explain in plain language how things can get better. The most effective Democratic voices today are those who treat affordability, education, safety and the border as real problems, not as talking points to be brushed aside, while drawing a bright line against authoritarianism and bigotry.

The centrality of anti-corruption and the need for action

As the Hungarian opposition showed, opposing corruption and illiberalism is not ancillary to economic progress; it is central to it. In the US, that means making clear that Trump’s crony capitalism is not an unfortunate side effect, but a primary reason why ordinary people keep losing ground while insiders thrive. It is important to resist two temptations. The first is despair, the conviction that Trumpism is an unalterable feature of American life. The second is complacency, the belief that history has now turned, that liberal democracy is once again “inevitable” and that our only task is to ride the wave.

The truth lies between. Orbán’s fall, the limits of Trump’s war and the visible fraying of his personality cult all suggest that we may be entering a period of backlash against nationalist authoritarianism. New coalitions are forming, new leaders are emerging and even some former loyalists are beginning to peel away.

But history offers no guarantees. Inflection points only become turning points when people act, when citizens organize, when parties make courageous choices, when leaders articulate a compelling alternative and when institutions prove stronger than demagogues.

Hungary’s voters have reminded the world that even a deeply entrenched illiberal regime can be defeated democratically. The question now is whether Americans, facing a weaker but still dangerous form of Trumpism, can learn from their example and seize the moment before it slips away.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Why Viktor Orbán’s Defeat Matters appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The Military Service Modernization , which entered into force on , is an overdue correction. It rebuilds the state’s ability to register, examine and, if necessary, conscript young men for service in the Bundeswehr (the German armed forces). It also contains a controversial provision linking prolonged foreign travel for 17- to 45-year-old men to military registration — a rule that the government has now in peacetime after public backlash.

Critics see a creep toward authoritarianism and a betrayal of post-war �ұ�������Բ�’s pacifist consensus. But if one takes both the state’s duty seriously to protect its citizens and the lessons of European history, the logic of the new framework is compelling. Germany needs a larger, more capable army. It needs legal tools to mobilize quickly if Russia’s war spreads, if NATO fractures or if new crises emerge. And it must build this power within a robust constitutional framework that guards against abuse.

Reforming �ұ�������Բ�’s defense: the path to a modern conscription system

A Germany that refuses to arm itself adequately is not more moral. It does not make a society of Gutmenschen (virtuous citizens), but rather of weak and vulnerable people, much more dependent on others. Besides, the 2026 reform does not restore the blanket, open-ended draft of the Cold War era. Instead, it constructs the machinery that would make a genuine conscription system work if activated.

All males born in 2008 or later will receive a mandatory questionnaire on turning 18. They must disclose basic personal data, indicate their willingness to serve and list any additional nationalities they hold. Women can participate voluntarily, but the constitutional basis for compulsory service remains gendered.

After the 2011 of conscription, Germany stopped systematically collecting such data. Today, the Defense Ministry lacks precise knowledge of how many potential soldiers exist in each cohort, their health status and their skills. In a crisis, this ignorance would be crippling. Re-establishing Wehrerfassung — military registration — is a precondition for any credible defense posture.

Next will come the phased reintroduction of medical examinations (Musterung). Starting with volunteers in 2026 and expanding to all eligible 18-year-old men, the Bundeswehr will again conduct health checks to determine fitness for service. This moves Germany away from an abstract, paper-only draft and back toward a concrete understanding of who can actually carry a rifle, maintain a tank or operate a radar.

The new law further requires the creation of a needs-based conscription mechanism (Bedarfswehrpflicht). The law stops short of an immediate, general draft. Instead, it empowers parliament to activate conscription in targeted ways if voluntary recruitment falls short. The government’s is to increase the ���ܲԻ����ɱ���’s strength from about 184,000 active troops to between 255,000 and 270,000 by 2035. Without the option of compulsory service, this is unlikely to be achievable.

The exit-permission clause

The controversial “exit-permission” clause fits into this architecture. As amended, Section 3, Paragraph 2 of the nominally requires men aged 17 to 45 who are resident in Germany to obtain approval from a Bundeswehr Career Center before staying abroad for more than three months. An earlier version of the law limited such a requirement to declared emergencies. The new text extends it to peacetime.

On paper, permission is “to be granted” so long as full conscription has not been activated, and refusal must not impose “particular hardship” on the applicant. In other words, as long as military service remains voluntary, the state is not supposed to stop anyone from leaving. The provision is less about stopping travel than about maintaining an accurate conscription register: Who is where, and for how long. In a real mobilization, that information could be decisive.

The exit rule once it became widely known, months after the law was passed. The outrage has two main roots. The first is procedural. The provision was buried in cross-references in a long modernization bill. The Defense Ministry did not publicize or explain it, and when newspapers finally reported on it in April, Career Centers themselves lacked clear procedures. Young men technically had a legal duty to seek permission for multimonth trips abroad, but no functioning mechanism to fulfill that duty. That is bad lawmaking by any standard, and it gave critics an easy target.

The second root is �ұ�������Բ�’s understandable obsession with civil liberties. Conditioning the right to leave one’s country on approval from a military office, even if approval is automatic, touches a nerve. �ұ�������Բ�’s guarantees freedom of movement and general personal liberty. Traumatic memories of state control over travel are deeply embedded in political culture, from the Nazi era to 40 years of communism in the east and the division into two Germanies during the Cold War. Opposition parties and legal scholars argued that a peacetime permission requirement could not be reconciled with these guarantees.

Under heavy criticism, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius that as long as service is voluntary, there will be no practical permission procedures; an administrative directive will suspend implementation. In other words, the legal lever exists, but it is locked in a cabinet marked “break glass only in case of emergency.”

This outcome is actually a sign of a functioning constitutional democracy. Parliament legislated for worst-case scenarios; the executive scaled back the application to match current needs and rights guarantees; courts remain available as a backstop if the rule is ever used in earnest.

But it is also a reminder of the deeper tension Germany must navigate: how to arm itself seriously without sliding toward the abuses of its 20th-century past.

Assessing �ұ�������Բ�’s military readiness

To understand why a strongly pro-armament stance is not warmongering but realism, one must begin with the Bundeswehr’s current condition.

For years, Germany spent well NATO’s notional 2% of GDP defense benchmark. Successive governments made lofty promises about European security while quietly allowing the armed forces to shrink and age. Training hours were limited by budget constraints and ammunition stocks. Soldiers complained of a lack of basic kit, from functioning radios to winter clothing. Key weapons systems — tanks, helicopters, aircraft — were often unavailable due to maintenance problems and spare-parts shortages.

The suspension of conscription in 2011 accelerated a cultural shift. Military service ceased to be a near-universal experience for young men and became a niche career path. Many draft-age men in the late conscription years had opted out of uniformed service by choosing community work instead. When the draft disappeared altogether, so did a major channel through which the Bundeswehr connected to society at large.

Meanwhile, the technological gap widened. Modern warfare depends on integrated air defense, cybersecurity, drones, electronic warfare and robust logistics. �ұ�������Բ�’s procurement system proved sluggish and risk-averse. By the time Berlin announced its (“turning point”) in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the gap between rhetoric and reality was enormous.

It is against this backdrop that the new law’s personnel focus must be judged. Without enough trained people, no amount of money for hardware will suffice. And without a functioning registration and mobilization system, Germany would be dangerously slow to respond to a sudden deterioration in its security environment.

The case for a stronger, larger German military is not abstract.

�ұ�������Բ�’s role in European defense

Russia’s war against Ukraine demonstrates that large-scale mechanized warfare in Europe is not a relic of the 20th century. A revanchist Kremlin has shown itself willing to erase borders by force. So far, the front line has remained east of NATO territory, but there is no law of nature that guarantees it will stay there.

At the same time, the political foundations of NATO’s deterrent power have been shaken. US President Donald Trump America’s willingness to defend allies he deemed delinquent on defense spending. His rhetoric, including remarks suggesting Russia should be free to “do whatever” it wants to undermine allies, made explicit what European strategists had long feared: US security guarantees may not always be sacrosanct.

Even if future US administrations reaffirm their commitment, the message has landed in Berlin: Europe must prepare for a world in which the American shield is thinner, more conditional or, in the worst case, withdrawn.

In such a world, German weakness is dangerous. A militarily feeble Germany cannot anchor European defense. It cannot credibly deter aggression on NATO’s eastern flank. It cannot support vulnerable partners. Nor can it shape the security architecture that might emerge if NATO were to weaken or fragment.

The choice is not between armament and peace, but between responsible, democratic armament and the illusion that others will always fight �ұ�������Բ�’s battles for it.

A strongly pro-armament stance in today’s Germany does not mean embracing militarism. It means accepting that the use or credible threat of force is sometimes necessary to defend a liberal order and building the capabilities to exercise that force under strict civilian, constitutional control. In this light, the Military Service Modernization Act is a step in the right direction. It treats defense as a national responsibility, not an afterthought. It restores tools, registration, medical examination and conscription triggers that every serious state with a conscription tradition maintains. It signals to allies and adversaries alike that Germany is no longer content to be a security free-rider.

Ensuring a responsible and transparent approach to military service in Germany

To make this project compatible with �ұ�������Բ�’s history and civil-liberty commitments, some guardrails are crucial, beginning with transparency and parliamentary oversight. Any move from registration and voluntary service to actual compulsory service should require explicit parliamentary authorization and be accompanied by open debate. Hidden clauses and poorly communicated rules, such as the initial handling of the exit-permission provision, undermine trust and feed fears of a slippery slope.

A strong constitutional review will also be necessary. The Federal Constitutional Court should, if asked, scrutinize measures that condition core freedoms, such as movement, on military needs. A clear doctrine distinguishing necessary and proportionate wartime measures from disproportionate peacetime restrictions would help legitimize the system. �ұ�������Բ�’s post-war success rests partly on the willingness of courts to place limits on state power; that must continue.

A set of meaningful alternatives but narrowly tailored protections for those who refuse to fight because of conscientious objections should also be included. A modern conscription system need not be purely military. Civilian service in critical infrastructure, disaster relief or social care can complement uniformed duty. Robust procedures for conscientious objection should remain in place. The key is not to force everyone into combat roles, but to make clear that citizenship in a vulnerable democracy entails obligations as well as rights. Within those guardrails, however, Germany should embrace a straightforward truth: Rebuilding the Bundeswehr is not just acceptable; it is necessary.

�ұ�������Բ�’s shift towards military readiness and strategic responsibility

For too long, Berlin profited from a strategic environment shaped by others. It enjoyed cheap Russian gas, benefited from Chinese demand and was sheltered under American security guarantees. That era is ending. Like bankruptcy, it came gradually and now all at once. Germany now faces a world in which authoritarian powers are more assertive, alliances more contingent and the costs of military unpreparedness potentially catastrophic.

In that world, the new conscription framework is less a radical departure than a long-overdue normalization. It is what serious countries do when they acknowledge that they may, at some point, have to defend themselves and their neighbors without relying on someone else’s sons and daughters.

Yes, parts of the law were drafted clumsily. Yes, the travel-permission clause in its original peacetime form overreached, and the government was right to scale it back. But to use that misstep as a reason to reject the broader project would be to confuse procedural flaws with strategic necessity.

Europe needs a militarily capable Germany, not to dominate, but to stabilize. Germans who, with good reason, invoke history to argue for restraint should also remember a different lesson from their past: that power vacuums can be as dangerous as power excesses. A Germany that cannot defend itself invites either domination or dangerous dependence.

Arming responsibly, building a credible conscription-based mobilization system and embedding it all within the rule of law is not a betrayal of post-war �ұ�������Բ�’s values. It is their logical extension into a more dangerous century. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once that the Germans are either at your throat or at your feet. That verdict was obviously too harsh. But a grain of truth resides in the witticism that Germans have shown themselves to be either too militaristic or too pacifist. It is high time for some common-sense middle ground.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post �ұ�������Բ�’s Return to Conscription Is Not a Mistake; It’s an Obligation. appeared first on 51�Թ�.

I am 44, German, and have lived and worked in Vienna for over a decade. I found out about this provision the same way most people did: through a social media post. That alone should give pause.

A paragraph hidden in plain sight

The��Military Service Modernisation ��(Wehrdienst-Modernisierungsgesetz []) came into force at the start of the year as part of �ұ�������Բ�’s broader effort to rebuild its defense capabilities. The policy rationale is straightforward: Germany wants to�� the Bundeswehr (German armed forces) from roughly 184,000 to over 260,000 active personnel by 2035, and it needs to know where its military-age population is in the event of mobilization. Germany is simultaneously��sending mandatory to all 18-year-old men��this year (voluntary for women), building a clearer picture of available manpower.

The legal mechanism requiring advance approval for extended stays abroad is not new.��A existed in German law since 1986. What changed on January 1 was the trigger: Previously, the rule only activated in a declared state of tension or defense. Now, it��, even in peacetime.

That is not a minor administrative tweak. It is a fundamental shift in how Germany defines the relationship between the state and citizens in the security domain. And it ended in a .��

The week that followed

Once the provision came to light, the reaction was swift and politically broad. From the Greens to the Alternative für Deutschland,��virtually every party in the Bundestag . Some comparisons made — Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance leader invoking the Berlin Wall — were overwrought. This is a democratic government, not an authoritarian one. But the breadth of criticism carried a signal worth taking seriously.

Within days, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius that “we are suspending the permission requirement as long as military service is voluntary,” adding that different rules would apply in a crisis or defense situation. What had been presented as a considered legislative measure was effectively reversed under a week of public pressure, without a substantive parliamentary debate.

The real problem is not the policy

Europe is remilitarizing. That sentence would have seemed alarmist five years ago; today it is simply a description of political reality. Estonia, Finland, Poland and Sweden — countries that never lost sight of what security requires — have been�� by a growing number of EU members reconsidering or reinforcing conscription frameworks. Germany, which�� mandatory military service in 2011, is trying to reconstruct the institutional muscle memory that others never let atrophy. Strategically, the direction is difficult to contest.

What this episode exposed, however, is a governance failure that could prove costly precisely because the direction is right. A provision�� of men entered into force on January 1, generated no public information campaign, produced no application infrastructure and was discovered three months later through a report by the . The Federal Ministry of Defence promptly confirmed the finding to the German news agency . When the legal basis for a significant restriction on individual freedom is enacted without public communication or parliamentary spotlight, trust in the very institutions that need public buy-in is eroded before policy can take effect.

A pattern worth watching

This is not uniquely a German problem. Across Europe, the logic of security preparation is outpacing the democratic conversation required to legitimize it. Governments are rebuilding defense frameworks that were deliberately dismantled after the Cold War, doing so at speed and under pressure, often in legislative packages that receive little scrutiny. From a planning perspective, the rationale is coherent. The process frequently is not.

For countries in Central and Southeast Europe — Poland, the Baltic states, the Western Balkans — the rearmament debate carries a different texture. These are societies where the memory of occupation and war, as well as the proximity of threat, have kept collective security in public consciousness. They have been making this argument for years. They were right. But being right about the destination does not make the journey automatic.

�ұ�������Բ�’s stumble over a single paragraph of its Military Service Act is a small illustration of a larger risk: that Europe rearms its institutions without renewing the civic compact that makes those institutions legitimate. An army that citizens distrust is a weak army. A security policy that is quietly legislated, reversed under pressure, and poorly communicated rests on fragile foundations.

What should come next

The suspension of the approval requirement is a sensible short-term response. What is needed now is not just a public conversation, but a structured one. First, clarity: Who is affected, under what conditions and through which procedures? Second, visibility: Legal provisions of this scope cannot remain buried in technical legislation. Third, comparability: Germany should actively draw on models from countries where conscription has remained embedded in democratic practice.

The contrast with Austria, where I live and work, is instructive. Vienna never abolished conscription, and its approach to citizens living abroad reflects a different philosophy: notification, not permission. Under section 11 of the Austrian Military Act, men who relocate abroad for more than six months are required to promptly their regional military command and register with the nearest Austrian embassy or consulate. Those who permanently reside outside Austria are typically upon while abroad, and their obligation becomes relevant again upon return. No advance approval is required. The state stays informed; the citizen retains the presumption of freedom.

That distinction between a system built on notification and one built on permission is precisely what �ұ�������Բ�’s critics have been pointing to. It is also what separates an accepted system from one that risks being contested. 

Europe’s security challenge is real. Meeting it requires not just legal frameworks and defense budgets, but governments willing to explain, justify and build genuine consent for the obligations they are asking their citizens to accept.

Hiding a paragraph in a 37-page bill is not how you do that.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post �ұ�������Բ�’s Conscription Misstep Exposes a Deeper European Problem appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Cybersecurity, particularly in jurisdictions such as the US, has traditionally been framed as a defensive discipline, preventing intrusion, restoring systems and limiting disruption. That framing no longer captures new forms of exposure. The most consequential cyber risks facing private banks emerge when nothing visibly fails.

This exposure becomes critical in areas where private banks within regulatory frameworks that increasingly emphasize the traceability, justification and suitability of financial decisions. In such contexts, the integrity of decision-making is not only an operational concern but a matter of regulatory and fiduciary accountability.

As long as platforms remain online and business continuity plans operate as designed, no immediate financial loss is typically recorded. Yet the informational in which regulated decisions were formed may have shifted in subtle but material ways. In that scenario, the institution remains operational. The question is whether it remains .

Modern private banks extensively on automated and semiautomated processes to generate regulated such as risk classification, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, suitability , credit and surveillance controls. These systems are engineered for continuity. They are designed to avoid abrupt breakdown. When upstream data quality , when dependencies introduce distortion or when external conditions change in ways not fully anticipated, the machinery rarely collapses. It continues to produce outputs that appear coherent and compliant.

The governance gap: fiduciary accountability in the age of automated logic��

From a governance , this is precisely the danger. An institution may remain procedurally compliant and technically resilient while becoming substantively exposed. With being delivered on time and documentation in a timely way, the assumptions underpinning those decisions may nevertheless no longer hold with the same strength. If the informational premises were compromised, the reasoning based on the observation that “the was running” does not answer the fiduciary question of whether the decision truly served the client’s best interest.

In such cases, fiduciary accountability is tested . Across major financial jurisdictions, expectations are converging toward greater scrutiny of how decisions are formed. Institutions are required to demonstrate not only that processes functioned, but that the underlying reasoning remained reliable, explainable and aligned with client interests. It arises when regulators reconstruct the file, when clients question outcomes or when litigation forces explanation. At that moment, system is irrelevant. What matters is whether the institution can that its judgment was formed on reliable foundations. Whenever decision-making becomes embedded in data pipelines, model calibrations and third-party integrations, cyber risk ceases to be a peripheral operational concern. It becomes a structural condition of governance.

Moreover, automation a familiar asymmetry. Responsibility remains anchored to the institution and its leadership. Causality, however, is dispersed across complex technical , data configurations, integration logic, vendor , model behavior and design assumptions made long before any specific decision is rendered. When are challenged, explanations often fragment across technical, contractual and procedural boundaries. Each may be accurate. None alone resolves whether fiduciary standards were met.

The architecture of trust: securing the soul of the decision

Private banking adds a further dimension. Its value rests on continuity, discretion and reasoning across decades. A visible breach can be repaired and . A silent erosion of decision integrity is more corrosive. It undermines the bank’s capacity to explain itself convincingly. Credibility, once weakened, is difficult to restore.��

Given this context, we need to acknowledge that judgment in a digital private bank is no longer solely a human . It is embedded within infrastructure. When that infrastructure is , failure does not always translate as downtime. It resembles doubt.

In conclusion, cybersecurity in private banking is only about operational resilience; it is about fiduciary credibility. And fiduciary credibility is harder to rebuild than any system. The institutions that will distinguish themselves are not only those that demonstrate strong perimeter defense or rapid recovery, but those capable of clearly and demonstrating that the integrity of their decision-making remains intact even when the informational environment is under strain. This shift is visible across both the US and European regulatory environments, where the ability to defend decisions is becoming as critical as the ability to execute them.��

[Ainesh Dey edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Beyond the Breach: Safeguarding the Integrity of Private Banking appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Upon seeing this message, most English speakers will wonder what the hell Sunil and I are talking about.

It has to do with a book he’s reading, called Alex’s Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics. Chapter one covers counting systems used in various societies — the Arara in the Amazon count in pairs, the Revolutionary French tried to make clocks count by tens and the Babylonians counted in base 60. But the most interesting counting system, to me, was the one used by shepherds in Lincolnshire, England, to count sheep.

1. Yan
2. Tan
3. Tethera
4. Pethera
5. Pimp
6. Sethera
7. Lethera
8. Hovera
9. Covera
10. Dik
11. Yan-a-dik
12. Tan-a-dik
13. Tethera-dik
14. Pethera-dik
15. Bumfit
16. Yan-a-bumfit
17. Tan-a-bumfit
18. Tethera-bumfit
19. Pethera-bumfit
20. Figgit

So when Sunil told me that covera pimp dik bumfit and bumfit pimp dik was 69, all he really said was that 9 + 5 + 10 + 15 + 15 + 5 + 10 = 69, which is true.

I find this counting system fascinating, and not just because counting pimp, dik, bumfit, figgit is hilarious and fun.

First of all, you’ll notice that this system is a hybrid base-five, base-twenty counting system. You have unique words up to ten, then compound words (Tan-a-dik = Tan + dik = 12) up to 15 (bumfit), then some more compounds with bumfit up to figgit (20).

Secondly, this counting system felt weirdly familiar to me. Yan and one, tan and two, tethera and three, pethera and four. What about dik? Well, this is clearly similar to dec, the Latin root for ten (French is dix, Spanish is diez, Italian is dieci). Even figgit looked familiar — the Latin ��ī�����Գ�ī, meaning 20, sounds a lot like figgit. My first thought was that this system is some kind of corrupted Latin, mixed with whatever Celtic language existed in Lincolnshire before the Roman conquest.

I wasn’t right about this, but I was close.

Consonant shifts and Proto-Indo-European

Why does pethera, which begins with a “p,” sound familiar to four, anyway?

Consonant shift! Linguists have discovered regular patterns of consonant shift that occur as languages evolve. The most famous of these sound shifts are the shifts that transform into its daughter languages (Latin, English, Sanskrit, Persian, etc.).

states that the Proto-Indo-European consonants underwent predictable, regular evolution as they evolved into Proto-Germanic and Germanic daughter languages.

For example, the Proto-Indo-European word for “brother,” ��ʰ��é��₂tŧ�� (something like “breh-ter”) evolved into the Proto-Germanic ����ōþŧ�� (“b����-�ٳ���”), and eventually into the Old English ������þ�ǰ� (“b����-�ٳ�ǰ�”).

By the way, that funny letter þ is called , which is an Old English letter pronounced “th.” If you had to read in high school English class, you might remember seeing þ all over the place.

“Father” is another good example of regular consonant shifts. Proto-Indo-European *���₂tḗr (“peh-ter”) evolved into Proto-Germanic *�ڲ���ŧ��, and eventually Old English ��æ����.

So “p” and “f” are linguistically very similar, especially in a Germanic language like English. Pethera and four could easily be derived from a common Indo-European ancestor.

The idea is similar to ��ī�����Գ�ī (Latin) and figgit (Lincolnshire shepherd’s dialect). The “f” and the “v” are very similar sounds, followed by the “g” and “t” sounds. Try pronouncing “vigint” ten times fast and see if it morphs a little into “figgit.”

It was at this point, while googling consonantal shifts, that I found this video from Numberphile, with one of the least searchable titles I’ve ever seen. From Numberphile, I present the gloriously titled :

In the video, Professor Roger Bowley says that the yan-tan-tethera number system is Celtic and predates the Roman conquest of Britain. So my theory of corrupted Latin is wrong — actually, both Latin and this obscure Celtic dialect have a common ancestor in Proto-Indo-European!

This explanation of the yan-tan-tethera origin fits much better than mine does. Wikipedia has a whole list of different variations on the yan-tan-tethera for various English regions.

Apparently, this weird-ass counting system is actually a very old counting system that probably predates the Roman conquest of Britain, and it’s linguistically related to all the other Indo-European languages! Some of the words are even the same!

But wait, what about bumfit?

Consider the bumfit, and make sure it’s hovera covered

Bumfit is a hilarious word. However, I don’t think “bumfit” sounds like “fifteen” at all. Nor does “hovera, covera” sound like “eight, nine” in any way. But if all the numbers in the yan-tan-tethera counting system are derived from Proto-Indo-European, how did eight and nine (*��₽�ḱt���₃ and *��₁né�ܲ� in Proto-Indo-European) become hovera, covera?

The explanation from the same says that bumfit and the rest are Proto-Celtic numerals that died out in modern English. The Welsh numerals do have something in common with the yan-tan-tethera system:

The Welsh pymtheg is … sorta similar to bumfit, I guess? And the Welsh pump, deg, pymtheg, ugain is at least partially recognizable as pimp, dik, bumfit, figgit.

The Ancient British word for twenty, �ɾ��첹�Գ�ī, is essentially identical to the Latin ��ī�����Գ�ī (remember, in classical Latin, “v” is pronounced “w”), so I guess the Wikipedia page’s claim that multiples of five are highly conserved checks out.

But this hypothesis seems somewhat lacking to me. Where do you get hovera (8) and covera (9) from? The Welsh versions are wyth and naw, and the Ancient British versions are oxtu and nawan. That’s not even close.

Counting Rhymes

Another friend of mine, Jill, mentioned to me that she had just finished reading The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone, and the book had mentioned that the children’s nursery “Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock” was originally a .

Short, common words, learned early in life, tend to be the most constant throughout language evolution (“mama,” “father,” “brother,” etc.). In the same way, counting rhymes, taught to children at a young age, are highly conserved linguistically.

This led me to the fantastic “The Secret History of ‘Eeny Meeny Miny Mo,’” by Adrienne Raphel, on the origin and history of counting rhymes. Seriously, give this article a read; it’s fascinating.

I would venture a guess that pretty much every English-speaking schoolchild knows some version of the rhyme:

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers, let him go
Eeny meeny miny mo

This rhyme has a darker history than I knew. According to Adrienne Raphel:

In the canonical Eeny Meeny, “tiger” is standard in the second line, but this is a relatively recent revision. If it doesn’t seem to make sense, even in the gibberish Eeny Meeny world, that you’d grab a carnivorous cat’s toe and expect the tiger to do the hollering, remember that in both England and America, children until recently said “Catch a nigger by the toe.”

Didn’t know that one. Yikes. But it seems that this is a fairly recent revision of a much more ubiquitous class of counting rhymes. In Denmark:

Ene, mene, ming, mang,
Kling klang,
Osse bosse bakke disse,
Eje, veje, vaek.

And in Zimbabwe:

Eena, meena, ming, mong,
Ting, tay, tong,
Ooza, vooza, voka, tooza,
Vis, vos, vay.

However, while reading this article, one particular rhyme caught my eye.

In 1830, children in Scotland chanted:

Zinti, tinti,
Tethera, methera,
Bumfa, litera,
Hover, dover,
Dicket, dicket,
As I sat on my sooty kin
I saw the king of Irel pirel
Playing upon Jerusalem pipes.

In that rhyme, found in Scotland, we see “tethera, methera, bumfa, hover, dover, dicket,” all recognizable yan-tan-tethera numbers. Raphel goes on to connect this counting rhyme to the same yan-tan-tethera counting system we’ve been discussing, which she gives as:

Yan, tan, tethera, methera, pimp,
Sethera, lethera, hothera, dovera, dick,
Yan-dick, tan-dick, tether-dick, mether-dick, bumfit,
Yan-a-bumfit, tan-a-bumfit, tethera bumfit, pethera bumfit, gigert.

Now I see what’s going on. The yan-tan-tethera counting system is much more than simply a linguistic evolution of the ancient Proto-Indo-European numbers; it’s a counting rhyme! Likely, it is designed to be a memory aid for a nonliterate population that needs to count things.

Some of the numbers are the same as ours — multiples of five, especially, are conserved from their Proto-Indo-European roots, but the system as a whole is meant to roll off the tongue as a rhyme, as unforgettable as “eeny meeny miny mo.” In fact, the children’s nursery rhyme “Hickory Dickory Dock” probably has its in this ancient Celtic counting rhyme, via the numbers “hothera dovera dick.”

The reason the yan-tan-tethera numbers are so fun to say out loud is the same reason that epic poetry is written in rhyming meter — repetitive, rhyming lines are very easy to memorize, which is enormously important for primarily oral cultures.

This really blew my mind.

It turns out that the yan-tan-tethera counting system really was familiar to me, and probably you too — every schoolkid in America already knows it as “Hickory Dickory Dock,” though its origins as a Proto-Celtic counting system are long forgotten.

[Dylan Black first published this piece on .]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post A Brief History of Dik: Indo-European Linguistics and Counting Rhymes, or, Dik + Pimp = Bumfit appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The document was addressed personally to President Donald J. Trump of the United States, in keeping with what participants described as “standard diplomatic protocol for declarations of this nature,” though no officials could immediately confirm the precedent for that protocol when asked by reporters.

Among those present and signing were Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland. Mr. Tusk, who arrived last and signed with what witnesses described as “a certain theatrical flourish,” was referred to throughout the proceedings by an unofficial honorific that spread quickly among the delegations: Polonius. Mr. Tusk was said to be aware of the nickname and to have taken it in good humor, though he declined to comment on whether he found it apt.

Viktor Orbán of Hungary was notably absent. His office issued a brief statement saying he had not been invited, which was confirmed by four officials with direct knowledge of the guest list, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly confirm whom they had deliberately not invited.

“We wished to act with all appropriate urgency. This is why, having finalized the text in the final week of March, we waited until today to release it.”

The text of the declaration

The declaration, drafted over approximately four days by a working group of senior legal advisers, runs to slightly under two pages and opens with language that several historians of American constitutional documents described, when reached by telephone, as “familiar.” The full preamble reads as follows:

Excerpt — European Declaration of Independence, April 1, 2026

When in the course of European events it sometimes becomes necessary to think about who we are and how we live (without thinking about who we were in our colonial past) and to break the bonds that prevent us from being separate and equal powers trying to manage the global economy, a decent respect for our somewhat compromised dignity compels us to state the position on which we have hitherto remained silent.

To wit, we proclaim our equal and separate right to declare and wage our own wars in West Asia and elsewhere around the globe, as well as back the genocides of our choice, as befits any independent political entity. We regret any inconvenience this may cause to unfolding events, but we trust that your own precedent that took place 250 years ago will help you understand the urgency of this act.

Furthermore, we assert our sovereign prerogative to impose tariffs of our own devising, to conduct our own trade negotiations with parties of our choosing, and to organize our own security arrangements without prior consultation with or approval from Washington, Mar-a-Lago, or any other executive residence or golf property.

We hold these geopolitical truths to be negotiable, that all blocs are created with overlapping interests, that they are endowed by their treaties with certain inalienable prerogatives, that among these are the right to a unified agricultural subsidy regime, the unimpeded movement of professionals across member-state borders, and the pursuit of a competitive single market.

In testimony whereof, we have caused the seal of the European Union to be affixed to these presents, along with the signatures of such non-EU members as have been graciously permitted to append their names in a supplementary column to the right, formatted, it must be noted, in a slightly smaller font.

Reactions and context

The declaration was the culmination of a process, officials said, set in motion by the expanding scope of the United States-Israeli military campaign against Iran, which has reshaped strategic calculations across the continent. Several leaders, speaking to reporters after the signing, said the document had been in preparation since the final days of March — a timeline that, they were at pains to stress, reflected careful deliberation rather than impulsiveness.

“We did not wish to act in haste,” Ms. von der Leyen said at a brief press conference held in the castle’s Great Hall, beneath what is believed to be a reproduction of a sixteenth-century tapestry. “This is why, having finalized the text in the final week of March, we waited until today to release it.”

She did not elaborate on what had been gained by the intervening days. A spokeswoman later confirmed that the delay had allowed time for the document’s signatories page to be properly typeset.

Mr. Macron, who signed third and paused briefly to recap his pen before handing it to Mr. Starmer, said the choice of Elsinore had been intentional: “There is a question being asked here. It is not unlike another question famously associated with this place. We believe we have answered it.” He did not specify which answer Europe had chosen.

Mr. Merz said the declaration represented “the logical conclusion of a process that began some time ago and has been accelerating in ways that those responsible for accelerating it perhaps did not fully anticipate.” He added that Germany remained committed to dialogue, cooperation, and the rule of international law, and was simply choosing to pursue those commitments independently.

Mr. Starmer, for his part, noted that while the United Kingdom was not an EU member, the spirit of the declaration was one in which Britain could “wholeheartedly share, at least in this particular regard and subject to parliamentary review.” He signed in blue ink. All other signatories used black.

The White House had not responded to a request for comment by the time of publication. A spokesperson for the National Security Council said she was “not aware of any such document” and asked that it be sent over by secure fax.

Historical echoes and practical questions

Scholars of transatlantic relations were divided on the declaration’s legal standing, its diplomatic implications and, more fundamentally, its coherence as a framework for international action. “It’s a gesture,” said one professor of European constitutional law, who asked not to be named because his tenure review is pending. “A significant gesture, but primarily a gesture. The question is whether gestures, when signed at sufficient altitude in a sufficiently old castle, acquire the character of policy.”

Several signatories acknowledged that implementation would require further discussion. A joint working group was announced to address questions including, but not limited to: which wars Europe intended to wage, in what sequence, under whose command and whether a common European war would require a qualified majority in the Council or could proceed under enhanced cooperation. A subcommittee on genocide backing criteria was said to be meeting in Geneva next Thursday, with an indicative agenda circulated but not yet agreed.

Officials confirmed that Mr. Orbán had not been invited specifically because, as one diplomat put it, “the spirit of the declaration is that we are declaring independence, not that we are providing an opportunity to register objections to the concept of independence at length and then block the communiqué.”

“It is not unlike another question famously associated with this place. We believe we have answered it.”

The document ends with a provision — Article VII, Paragraph 3, footnote (b) — specifying that the declaration “shall enter into force upon ratification by the relevant national parliaments, a process estimated to take between eighteen months and the heat death of the current geopolitical order, whichever comes first.”

After the signing, participants repaired to a reception in an adjoining hall, where they were served smørrebrød and a locally produced sparkling wine. Mr. Tusk — Polonius — was seen in conversation with a senior Commission official near a window overlooking the Øresund strait. Asked later what they had discussed, he said: “The view. It is very fine. You can see Sweden from here.”

He paused. “We did not invite Sweden either, but for different reasons.”

The document was to be transmitted to the White House by courier, officials said, with a digital copy sent by encrypted email and a decorative framed version dispatched separately via registered post. It was unclear whether anyone was expected to respond.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Her earlier memoir, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History (2021), established her as a rare writer capable of weaving rigorous political philosophy into a lived autobiography — a quality that earned it extraordinary international acclaim. In Indignity: A Life Reimagined, she goes even further. 

What makes Indignity philosophically extraordinary is not merely its scope, though that scope is vast, running from Constantinople to Salonica to Tirana to the prisons of Burrel, but its governing question: what becomes of a person’s dignity when the state has the power to name them, surveil them, archive them and ultimately to decide, on paper, whether they lived or died? That power, Ypi argues, is never innocent, and its victims are never simply historical.

As an example, let me quote the German constitution of 1949, written specifically to remind us that dignity takes work and intention from everyone: 

Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar.
Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt.

Human dignity shall be inviolable/untouchable. To respect
and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.

— Grundgesetz, Artikel 1 (1949)

The catalyst of the story was a photograph

Indignity is a hybrid novel-memoir, a book that moves between archival research and literary imagination, between historical fact and the admission that facts alone can never reconstitute a life. Its governing epigraphs — one from Immanuel Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (“Everything has either a price or dignity”) and one from Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Human Beings — announce from the outset a work that breathes philosophical ambition, situating itself within the German Idealist tradition’s deepest preoccupations: what it means to be a moral person, and whether that meaning survives our deaths.

The book begins with a photograph — a honeymoon of Ypi’s grandparents, Leman and Asllan, at a luxury hotel in Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1941 — discovered one day on a stranger’s social media page, accompanied by venomous comments that sought to reduce her grandmother Leman to a caricature: collaborator, spy, fascist accomplice.��

Ypi’s response is not a refutation but a quest. She travels to the Albanian State Security archives to retrieve her family’s secret police files, and from this bureaucratic excavation grows a three-part narrative spanning the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the interwar scramble for the Balkans, the Italian and Nazi occupations, the rise of Enver Hoxha’s hermetic communist state, and the long aftermath of exile, surveillance, and dispossession that crushed two generations of her family. 

Who decides who we are?

At the heart of Indignity is the terrifying ease with which a totalitarian regime can claim authority over a person’s identity. Ypi’s grandfather, Asllan, was a man of considerable standing — his father, Xhafer Bey Ypi, had served as Albania’s tenth prime minister. Yet the communist state reduced him, in its files, to “enemy of the people,” imprisoned him for decades on fabricated charges of collaboration with British intelligence and stripped the family of property, status and freedom of movement. Her grandmother Leman, born in Salonica to an Ottoman administrative family of cosmopolitan refinement, was reclassified as a class enemy, surveilled for years and eventually declared dead by the secret services — not because she had died, but because an informant’s false denunciations had been discredited and the file needed to be closed. The state simply wrote her out of existence. 

In a chilling discovery, Ypi realizes that the surveillance file she has been reading belongs partly to another woman who also bore the name Leman Ypi — two lives entangled by bureaucratic error, both equally erased. The archive, Ypi writes, “structures events in the same way grammar structures thought: regulating an amorphous mass of discourse, establishing patterns of transmission, prescribing who says what, when and with what implications.” To be named in those files was to have one’s story colonized; to be absent from them was no freedom either, only a different kind of obliteration.

The book is equally attentive to the ways in which political violence deforms intimate life. Relationships — between spouses, between parents and children, between friends who may or may not be informants — are never merely private under a totalitarian regime. Asllan’s friendship with Enver Hoxha, his school companion who went on to found the Albanian Communist Party and rule the country until 1985, is one of the book’s most haunting threads: It shows how the personal and the political are not just adjacent but lethal when they collide. 

Ypi reconstructs, with great delicacy and uncertainty, how her grandparents’ marriage — forged in elegance and cut short by arrest — was also shaped by contingencies of empire, displacement and political allegiance that neither could entirely control. The chapters on the population exchanges mandated by the Treaty of Lausanne, the Greek and Albanian borders redrawn around living people like chalk lines around bodies, capture with particular force the violence of state-imposed identity. It demonstrates how a family could find itself suddenly belonging to a nation that had not existed when its members were born, required to prove belonging in the land of their birth, stripped of property in Salonica that was now Greece’s to dispose of. Regimes, Ypi demonstrates, do not simply oppress individuals; they reshape the conditions of love, loyalty and recognition within which persons form themselves.

And then there is the most piercing question the book poses: Who protects who we are when we die? Ypi is prompted to write, in part, by the brutal fragility of her grandmother’s posthumous reputation — vulnerable to the cruelties of social media, to the reductions of strangers who found in a honeymoon photograph an occasion to convict. In death, Leman cannot speak for herself, cannot shape her own narrative, cannot refute the lies. Ypi frames this as a Kantian problem: Kant held that dignity is the property of rational beings capable of self-legislation, of giving the moral law to themselves. But the dead are no longer capable of self-legislation. Does that mean their dignity evaporates? Or does it persist as a demand — a claim on the living to remember rightly? “Does dignity require someone’s continuing existence — an active capacity to defend that dignity, protect it from assault, stand up in its name?” Ypi asks. 

Her answer, arrived at slowly and through pain, is that dignity is not merely a private possession but a relational achievement. It must be sustained by those who remain, which is why writing — imagining the truth of a life with the full awareness that imagination is not the same as documentation — becomes an act of moral obligation. The book is that act. In a remarkable coda, having discovered that the other Leman Ypi has no living descendants and exists only in the secret police files, Lea Ypi decides to adopt her too: To give her, as she puts it, “the dignity of memory.”

Reading Indignity in this light, one cannot help but hear the resonance of a far older conflict — one that Western philosophical tradition has never entirely resolved.

The ghost of Antigone still haunts us

“Zeus does not / Justice does not / the dead do not / what they call law did not begin today or yesterday / when they say law they do not mean a statute of today or yesterday / they mean the unwritten unfailing eternal ordinances of the gods / that no human being can ever outrun”

Anne Carson — (New Directions, 2012)

In Sophocles’ Antigone, Creon, the king of Thebes, decrees that the body of Polynices — Antigone’s brother, slain in civil war — shall be left unburied, exposed to carrion birds and denied the rites that the dead require. The edict is and punitive: Creon has decided that this traitor shall not only die but be unmade, stripped of the rituals through which a community recognizes a life as having been fully human. Antigone refuses. She buries her brother in obedience to the gods’ will. Divine law, older and deeper than any human ordinance, demands that the dead be honoured. When Creon demands to know how she dared transgress his edict, she answers with perfect clarity: The gods’ unwritten laws are not subject to the override of any magistrate. For Antigone, there are three competing authorities — the city’s laws, the divine order and the voice of individual conscience. When the city’s laws violate the other two, conscience must prevail.

The parallel with Ypi’s predicament is striking and philosophically productive. Creon’s decree, like the Albanian communist state’s archive, is a political act masquerading as a legal one. It is, at its core, an exercise of sovereign power that claims the authority to define reality. This man was a traitor; this woman is an enemy; this person is, by official decree, dead. Antigone’s insistence that there is a law above the city’s law — the unwritten law that obliges us to honour the dead — is Ypi’s insistence too, though she pursues it through secular and Kantian rather than divine coordinates. 

For Ypi, the “unwritten law” that compels her is the moral imperative to treat persons as ends in themselves and never as mere instruments of history, ideology or bureaucratic convenience. Her grandmother — and the other Leman Ypi, the stranger she adopts — must be remembered rightly, not because God commands it but because to do otherwise would be to collude with the violence that reduced them in the first place. 

Creon’s tragedy was his refusal to see that political authority has limits: that the city cannot claim sovereignty over the dead without doing violence to what makes the living human. Ypi’s book enacts the same insight across four generations and half a century of Balkan catastrophe, demonstrating that the tension Sophocles dramatized — between the state’s demand for obedience and the individual conscience’s demand for justice — is not a problem ancient tragedy solved. It is the permanent condition of political life, and it is with us still.

Indignity is a book of unusual intellectual and moral seriousness, and of considerable beauty. It does not resolve the questions it raises. It is too honest for that. It insists instead with the force of lived and even embodied history (Erlebnis), that those questions matter: Who has the right to name us, to archive us, to decide the meaning of our lives? What do we owe the dead who cannot answer for themselves? And where, when the city’s laws fail and the gods are silent, does individual conscience find its ground? These are Antigone’s questions. They are also ours.

For those who would like to listen to a reading of Antigonick, the experimental translation by Anne Carson, you can find it .��

[A special thank you to Professor , Rome, ��formerly University of Bologna, who helped me connect with Antigone and find the quote from the German Constitution.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Dead Cannot Speak For Themselves appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Although President Trump ultimately cooled his interest in acquiring European territory, Europe briefly faced a dire situation: For many staunch Atlanticists, the prospect of defending themselves against a US military land grab signaled the end of an era. Following the shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Europe now finds itself caught between an aggressive Russia and an unpredictable US.

For Germany, these developments are particularly worrying. A country that has long prided itself on its close relationship with the US, its major role in advancing European integration and its determination to build a constructive relationship with Russia now finds itself in a world turned upside down.

As Germany contemplates how to organize its defense in this altered security environment, , both within and outside the country, have concluded that, now allegedly bereft of American protection, Germany should acquire its own nuclear weapons. However, Berlin is not likely to go down this path. Even though the world has changed and Germany is now investing heavily in its conventional defense, the costs of a national nuclear option would far outweigh any potential benefits.

Breaking nuclear taboos

The German nuclear debate started during the 2016 US presidential campaign when candidate Trump questioned long-standing US policies of protecting allies. Some German observers that the loss of the US “nuclear umbrella” was becoming increasingly likely, which would force Germany to pursue a national nuclear option. However, when it became clear that President Trump did not intend to question the US’s nuclear commitment to Europe, the debate quickly died down.��

Still, Trump’s return to the White House, which resulted in an even more aggressive stance towards Europe, reignited the nuclear debate. Some German have commented on the need for alternatives to a fading US commitment, but have getting into specifics. The most vocal proponents of a German bomb are a few security experts in academia, as well as journalists. Parts of �ұ�������Բ�’s conservative press, in particular, are fueling this discussion. Guest authors are regularly invited to write about the need for a German bomb. also seem eager to educate reluctant German decision-makers on the fundamentals of robust nuclear policy. Even the arts and culture sections of some newspapers are startling unsuspecting readers with by previously unknown authors portraying Germany as being in urgent need of its own nuclear weapons. These authors seem to relish their role as nuclear taboo-breakers.

However, closer inspection reveals that �ұ�������Բ�’s self-styled taboo-breakers are at best reluctant arsonists. For instance, most German proponents of a national nuclear option rarely express their views unequivocally. Most are content merely to refer to the new security situation, in which one must now “think the unthinkable.” Only a few dare to go further. proposed that Germany should simply buy 1,000 nuclear warheads from the US, thereby becoming a nuclear power virtually overnight (while leading to the imminent collapse of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty []).

Others argue that the treaties committing Germany to permanently renounce weapons of mass destruction , as the conditions for these commitments no longer exist — “rebus sic stantibus.” This line of argument would enable Germany to withdraw from the Two-Plus-Four that paved the way for its reunification. It could then follow up by withdrawing from the NPT, which West Germany joined in 1969 as a non-nuclear-weapon state. Once these legal obstacles were removed, the argument goes, the path to the bomb would depend only on financial resources and technical know-how.��

Consequently, proponents of nuclear weapons argue that, like Japan and South Korea, Germany should invest in “nuclear latency,” i.e., the maintenance of the basic technologies necessary for a national nuclear weapons program. However, �ұ�������Բ�’s exit from nuclear power generation has left the country with very little “nuclear latency.”

Moreover, as the British and French experiences demonstrate, the financial costs of a national nuclear program would be enormous. Developing a true nuclear option — which must include command systems (including satellites) and delivery vehicles (such as missiles or submarines) — would take 20 years or more, which seems too long to deter a belligerent Russia. 

Concerns from �ұ�������Բ�’s neighbors��

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, those in favor of a German bomb tend to avoid the question of what would happen if Poland, Italy and other larger European countries were to follow �ұ�������Բ�’s example and initiate their own nuclear programs. Even if Washington dropped any objections to allied countries acquiring nuclear weapons, a German bid for the bomb could trigger a major political earthquake with unforeseeable consequences.

If official government about Germany wanting to build Europe’s strongest conventional armed forces are already in Europe and beyond, what would happen if Berlin were to commit to a national nuclear weapons program? Old resentments among �ұ�������Բ�’s neighbors, which have been kept in check until now, would resurface. Germany would make a tactical gain, but suffer a strategic loss.��

�ұ�������Բ�’s withdrawal from several major international treaties would strike fear into many Europeans more than Moscow’s nuclear weapons would. Although the German public’s towards nuclear weapons remains fickle, the idea of their country developing its own nuclear arsenal would hardly be widely approved of.

In a speech in February 2026, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that Berlin was engaged in talks with Paris on nuclear matters, but hastened to add that Germany was opposed to “different zones of security” in Europe. This message was intended to reassure �ұ�������Բ�’s neighbors that Berlin was looking at the broader European context and not seeking a privileged position under a strictly bilateral Franco-German deterrence framework. In sum, whatever the reasoning behind a German nuclear arsenal, no German government would pursue it.��

�ұ�������Բ�’s NATO Option

Germany has two options for organizing its nuclear protection. The first is NATO. Since the 1960s, NATO has had a system of “nuclear sharing” in place that balances Washington’s desire to maintain decision-making power over nuclear use with the interests of non-nuclear states in political and military consultation, without undermining the NPT. In practical terms, this means that Germany and several other NATO allies maintain specialized fighter jets and crews that could carry US nuclear warheads in times of conflict. Nuclear sharing is a laborious compromise, but it represents the greatest degree of nuclear cooperation possible between sovereign nation-states. 

Despite the Trump administration’s use of stark language to cajole European allies into increasing their defense budgets and conventional military strength, the US has not challenged its commitment to extended deterrence in Europe. As the US “nuclear umbrella” has effectively prevented allies from developing their own nuclear arsenals, the US would gain little but lose much by abandoning it. Therefore, as long as Washington does not openly raise doubts about the “nuclear umbrella”, neither will European governments.

While long-standing French calls for European “strategic autonomy” may sound more pertinent today than a few years ago, they only apply to the conventional realm. On nuclear matters, France would prefer to maintain the status quo, including a continued US nuclear presence in NATO Europe.

�ұ�������Բ�’s European Option

All this explains why the NATO option remains �ұ�������Բ�’s preferred solution. However, what if “Option A” were to fail, and the US were to withdraw its nuclear protection from Europe? In this case, Germany would seek to organize its nuclear protection within the framework of a nuclear-armed EU. West Germany explicitly mentioned this possibility when ratifying its accession to the NPT in 1975, stating that the NPT should not hinder the European integration process.  At that time, this was still purely hypothetical, but it demonstrated considerable foresight. Should the transatlantic security partnership collapse completely, the European option would become �ұ�������Բ�’s “Plan B.” 

Clearly, such a “Europeanization” of nuclear deterrence would be extremely challenging. Setting aside the unusual proposal of one prominent German analyst to have a “” circulate among the capitals of major EU member states, the nuclear arsenals of the UK and France were designed solely to protect their respective national territories. These are traditional “sanctuary weapons” that were neither intended nor built for a pan-European extended deterrence mission.

While the UK has allocated its nuclear weapons to NATO, France has consistently emphasized its national sovereignty in nuclear matters and has even to join NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group. Furthermore, the UK is no longer an EU member, and its nuclear arsenal relies heavily on cooperation with the US. Although France and the UK have moved closer together on nuclear matters, neither is likely to unequivocally commit to providing extended deterrence for the rest of Europe. Complicating matters further, the two staunchly anti-nuclear EU members, Austria and Ireland, are likely to obstruct attempts to establish an EU-wide nuclear culture.��

Therefore, the most likely would be for interested European nations to establish a European Nuclear Planning Group similar to NATO’s and to participate more regularly in French and British nuclear exercises. Another option would be to strengthen existing consultation and cooperation agreements, such as the 2024 between the UK and Germany. French dual-capable aircraft could regularly visit air bases in other European countries, and major EU foreign policy documents could contain more references to nuclear issues. Taken together, these measures could project a semblance of European nuclear solidarity, though they could not fully compensate for a loss of US nuclear protection.��

Keep calm and deter

For all these reasons, arguing in favor of a German nuclear program remains largely an intellectual exercise. �ұ�������Բ�’s reluctant nuclear arsonists aren’t actually setting fire, but merely playing with it. Many of them know full well that their calls will not translate into official policy. Nor will �ұ�������Բ�’s commitment not to possess weapons of mass destruction be rendered meaningless by a few toughly worded op-eds. “Rebus sic stantibus” is not a magic spell from a Harry Potter movie that can set the world right again.

Even if Germany does not go nuclear, however, the debate holds an important lesson: The US “nuclear umbrella” is far more important than some analysts and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic dare to admit. It spares Europe a destructive debate on nuclear-driven renationalization and spares the US the prospect of having to deal with a multinuclear Europe. Therefore, both sides of the Atlantic should refrain from making reckless statements about the diminishing credibility of the US “nuclear umbrella” or the desirability of new national nuclear options. Perhaps those who boast about “thinking the unthinkable” should try “thinking the thinkable” first.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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According to the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP), the international system is undergoing “intensified fragmentation and geopolitical polarisation” as competition among China, Russia and the US reshapes the global order. In this context, the behavior of states that are neither great powers nor small, dependent states is crucial to systemic stability.

Why the middle matters

Middle powers matter because they offer more than geographic or economic weight; they constitute a relational space that sustains cooperation even when the largest actors retreat into rivalry. 

Middle powers are not solely defined by material capacity but by their strategic behavior, which explains that these states “leverage their resources through selective leadership, niche diplomacy and active engagement in specific issue areas.” Their influence arises not from overwhelming force but from credible, flexible diplomacy embedded in international networks.

Yet middle power behavior cannot be purely transactional. Unlike great powers, which can absorb reputational costs through sheer weight, middle powers depend on a consistent record of principled engagement — the moment their positions appear for sale, their value as mediators and bridge-builders evaporates. Strategic flexibility is only credible when it rests on stable principles.

Notably, some of the most effective middle power actors — Norway, Qatar, Singapore and Switzerland — formally present themselves as small states, yet their diplomatic footprint tells a different story. 

This capacity to function between poles gives middle powers a unique stake in stability — they thrive not by domination but by preserving openness and predictability in a world where rivalry threatens to narrow options for all.

The pressure to choose — and the value of autonomy

Great power rivalry today extends beyond security to trade, technology and supply chains. The pressure on other states to align is real. Yet for most, alignment is neither simple nor costless.

Kazakhstan, for example, openly maintains relations with Russia, China, the EU and the US — not out of indecision, but as deliberate diversification that enhances its strategic autonomy and flexibility. As Thomas Greminger, the author of the GCSP brief, explains, this diversification gives such states greater agency while preserving room to maneuver amid competing pressures. And, Türkiye offers an even sharper illustration: a NATO member that nonetheless purchased Russia’s S-400 missile system, demonstrating that strategic autonomy is exercised not only outside alliances, but sometimes in deliberate tension with them. 

Scholars describe this as “flexilateralism” — shifting coalitions across different issues and configurations — or simply “multialignment,” where a state maintains simultaneous partnerships across rival blocs without fully committing to any.

Autonomy in this sense is not neutrality in a moral vacuum but a careful exercise of agency — preserving space for diplomacy, cooperation and engagement across rival blocs.

When geography constrains

Geography shapes middle power behavior, but does not determine it. A strategic location between major powers can amplify diplomatic options — Kazakhstan’s position at the crossroads of Russia, China and Central Asia sharpens rather than limits its multivector diplomacy, while Qatar’s contested neighborhood has pushed it toward mediation and strategic connectivity as survival tools. But geography can also become a trap.

Countries wedged between Russia and the West — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine — cannot exercise middle power agency in the same way; their contested position pushes them toward bandwagoning rather than bridge-building. The difference between a middle power and an “in-between country” is ultimately less about location than about the political space available to make independent choices.

Communication when giants drift apart

As great powers communicate less directly, middle powers often keep vital conversations alive.

The GCSP Policy Brief highlights that middle powers deploy a range of diplomatic strategies — including bridge-building, coalition formation and mediation — to bring parties into dialogue and cooperation. It points specifically to cases like Oman and Qatar playing roles in regional mediation, facilitating negotiations between actors that might otherwise lack direct channels.

This kind of facilitation rarely makes headlines. But preventing escalation matters. When crises do not escalate into conflict, when lines of communication hold even loosely, fragmentation is contained.

Coalitions without camps

Global institutions are under strain. Consensus is harder to achieve. Formal mechanisms stagnate.

In response, middle powers are forging issue-based coalitions that sidestep rigid bloc politics. Rather than insisting on universal agreements that exclude major disagreements, these coalitions generate functional cooperation on shared risks — climate, health, food security and technology governance.

The GCSP brief notes that by forming ad hoc alliances and working collectively, middle powers can help “repair, adapt and stabilise the international order” precisely through these narrower but productive agendas.

This cooperation does not require full alignment on all strategic questions; it is rooted in practical outcomes and shared interests in avoiding collapse into zero-sum rivalry.

Greminger’s most concrete proposal points in exactly this direction. During the Cold War, a group of neutral and nonaligned states — the so-called “N+N” — played a quiet but decisive role in facilitating dialogue between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, contributing to the stable European security order that emerged from the Helsinki Process. He asks whether a similar coalition might be needed today: Should the current Ukraine conflict move toward settlement, reconstructing a European security order will require more than deterrence — it will need committed, credible states willing to facilitate risk reduction, confidence-building and arms control. Could that coalition include middle powers like Kazakhstan, Norway and Türkiye alongside traditional neutrals like Austria, Ireland, Malta and Switzerland, with Germany and Italy as cooperative security anchors? The question is deliberately open, but the precedent is real.

Economic connectivity as a stabilizing force

In a fragmented world, economic interdependence is not just a driver of prosperity. It is a buffer against division.

Middle powers often act as connectors, integrating regional trade networks and hosting platforms for economic cooperation. Financial and logistical corridors, middle powers help build complicated efforts to draw hard bloc lines in the global economy, reducing incentives for complete decoupling.

Even outside the GCSP brief, analysts note that middle powers can exercise influence by mobilizing coalitions and exploiting opportunities where great powers are indifferent or immobilized, essentially shaping cooperative spaces where larger players otherwise struggle to do so.

The risks of erosion

Stabilizing the middle is no guarantee. Strategic autonomy can be squeezed by coercive tactics. Economic levers can become tools of political pressure. Domestic politics may harden into pro-alignment rhetoric.

Here, the GCSP brief highlights that middle powers’ agency depends not just on capacity but on political commitment and diplomatic skill, observing that countries like Norway, Qatar and Switzerland combine principled engagement with reputational credibility to act as effective bridge-builders.

These dual attributes — conviction and craft — are what allow middle powers to operate as stabilizers in fractured environments.

Holding the system together

The international system need not collapse, and rivalry among great powers will surely continue. Yet the degree of fragmentation the world ultimately experiences will depend not only on the behavior of the largest states, but on whether enough mid-level states sustain cooperation, connectivity and dialogue.

In this sense, middle powers do not just fill gaps left by great power abstention. They actively shape the contours of the emerging order — not by opposing or neutralizing superpowers, but by keeping diplomatic and institutional space open.

As the GCSP brief illustrates, middle powers are uniquely positioned to contribute to stability precisely because they do not seek domination but manageable, predictable cooperation in an unpredictable world.

Their success is not a function of overwhelming force, but of relational influence — a blend of credibility, commitment and strategic autonomy. Yet realizing this potential is not automatic. It requires coordinated action, long-term vision and the willingness to lead on principled yet pragmatic agendas. In this sense, the resurgence of middle powers may be the most viable path to sustaining a rules-based international order in an increasingly fragmented and multipolar world, if they choose to act collectively and in time.

[This is an op-ed, summarized version of the publication for the GCSP, where you can find all the sources.]

Roberta Campani had some follow-up questions for the author, which he answered. You can find their exchange below:

1. On Escalation and Structural Change

Roberta Campani: Your policy brief describes a fragmented but still manageable international order. Do the recent US-Israeli strikes on Iran represent a qualitative shift from fragmentation to open confrontation? Has the structural environment for middle powers fundamentally changed?

Thomas Greminger: The recent US-Israeli strikes on Iran have only further strengthened our perception of a polarized and fragmented world order where great powers choose to follow what they perceive to be their interests without any consideration of international law. This is not to say that I wouldn’t condemn the way the Iranian regime has been treating its population. So, I see a further erosion of international law with unpredictable repercussions on regional stability and the global economy, but no fundamental changes of the structural environment for middle powers.

2. On Credibility and Negotiation

Roberta Campani: When major powers signal openness to negotiations and then rapidly escalate militarily, how does that affect the credibility of diplomacy itself? Does such behavior narrow the space in which middle powers can operate as mediators?

Thomas Greminger: It undermines the credibility of diplomacy and, more specifically, conflict mediation. Just imagine that the Omani Minister of Foreign Affairs, tasked to mediate between the US and Iran, was still reporting in Washington on what he perceived to be fairly successful negotiations in Geneva, when the decision to attack militarily was taken. Compare my comments to the :

3. On Strategic Autonomy Under Pressure

Roberta Campani: You argue that middle powers rely on strategic autonomy and diversified partnerships. In moments of acute crisis, does the pressure to align intensify to a point where autonomy becomes unsustainable? How resilient is the “middle” under coercive conditions?

Thomas Greminger: Yes, this may well happen. We have, for instance, witnessed several cases where middle powers came under US tariff pressure and felt obliged to offer major concessions. I believe that resilience can be strengthened through regional alliances that offer stronger bargaining power.

4. On International Law and Norms

Roberta Campani: Many middle powers anchor their diplomacy in multilateral norms and international law. If great powers appear willing to bypass or reinterpret these frameworks, does that weaken the normative foundations on which the middle power agency rests?

Thomas Greminger: It does. At the same time, middle powers have an intrinsic interest to preserve and rebuild a predictable, rules-based international order because they don’t dispose of the might necessary to impose right. The good news is that they can still rely on a large majority of states that continue to believe in international law. There is also still a large majority of states that continue to believe in addressing global challenges through international cooperation.

5. On the Risk of Systemic Fragmentation

Roberta Campani: Is the greater danger today the rivalry itself — or the erosion of trust in diplomatic signaling and institutional commitments? In other words, what threatens the middle more: power politics or unpredictability?

Thomas Greminger: I believe it is easier for middle powers to adapt to power politics that remain stable and thereby predictable over a certain time, as we have seen in the 19th century, than having to deal with the high degree of unpredictability that marks current times.

6. On Collective Action Among Middle Powers

Roberta Campani: Your brief hints at coordination among middle powers. Do you see realistic prospects for collective middle-power initiatives in de-escalation or crisis mediation in the current environment?

Thomas Greminger: We are seeing some initial signs of such alliances. An example is regional powers aligning in response to the war in Gaza. It is true that many mini-lateral structures have popped up in recent years that address specific challenges in a pragmatic, ad-hoc way, but most of them actually serve great power interests. Clearly, middle powers would have to aim for such alliances much more systematically. This would often also imply readiness to overcome regional differences.

7. On Switzerland’s Role

Roberta Campani: Given Switzerland’s diplomatic tradition and your own background, do you see particular responsibilities or opportunities for neutral or non-aligned states in preventing further fragmentation?

Thomas Greminger: Yes, absolutely! At the same time, Swiss foreign policy is very busy regulating its long-term relationship with the EU, dealing with the repercussions caused by the wars in Europe and in the Middle East, and responding to the challenges of the neomercantilist trade policies of one of its most important trade partners. There is therefore a need for a lot of political leadership and commitment for exploiting the opportunities offered to middle powers like Switzerland. It would like other middle powers also to look for creating new cross-regional alliances, perhaps similar to the Human Security Network operating successfully some 25 years ago.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The continent was split over support for the US-led coalition in the Middle East. Paris and Berlin refused to back it, whereas leaders from mainly former communist states, like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, alongside a few Western allies, Washington’s call for action. Donald Rumsfeld, the American Secretary of Defense, in a press conference at the NATO headquarters in 2003:

You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s “old Europe.” If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the East. And there are a lot of new members.

Rumsfeld, effectively a political ambassador of US President George W. Bush, dismissed the assembled Franco-German opposition in the manner that only a superpower that felt itself globally predominant could. This controversial distinction between “Old” and “New” Europe captured the geopolitical reality of that moment: On security matters, recent EU entrants aligned more closely with the US, while the traditional Western European powers charted a more independent course. This would endure as one of the signals of how the “war on terror” changed the US perspective of its European allies and vice versa.

Fast forward to the 2020s, and US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has begun to mirror this divide. There is no shortage of parallels between the hawkish of the Bush era and Trump’s revival of the “with us or against us” ethos, often the White House’s will against allied consensus.

In both cases, Europe’s major powers have struggled to restrain Washington’s impulsiveness when its leader is fixated on a course of action. But there is a distinct element to Trump’s invocation of such turn-of-the-century paradigms, and it has more to do with security and the cohesion of the European theater than with anything else.

The new transatlantic reality

Back in December, a leaked draft of Trump’s allegedly laid out a plan to prioritize American support for a select few European governments, explicitly listing Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland as countries the US “work more with … with the goal of pulling them away from the [EU].” The document advocated backing European political forces that champion “sovereignty,” a serious pivot from most of the US’s post-1945 stance of bolstering European integration.

The strategy hints that officials in the current US administration might view a nonmonolithic Europe as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. Decades ago, a certain US secretary of state whom Washington should call if it wanted to speak to Europe, implying the fragmented nature of the continent’s political authority.

Today, the question may no longer need to be asked. If governments more sympathetic to the American leadership can offset Brussels, then America might be able to advance its interests by working with a more ideologically aligned subgroup of states rather than the EU as a single bloc. Seen in context, this goes beyond a single policy proposal and toward a broader rethink of Washington’s approach toward the EU, with a strategic emphasis on some of its members. Throughout the history of European integration, the Brussels elite has consistently avoided a two-tier or multispeed Europe, but this might suit the White House’s priorities just fine today.

Such a strategy could be particularly challenging for European governments because, while transatlantic rifts have occurred before (some more alarming than others), US administrations have traditionally exercised a degree of restraint and strategic calculation rather than seeking to weaken or undo the European project.

During the Suez Crisis of 1956, Washington compelled Britain and France to withdraw from Egypt, yet did so of a broader postwar order in which European integration remained central to American interests. Similarly, West �ұ�������Բ�’s Ostpolitik in the 1970s US containment policy at the time, but America regarded it as a disagreement the alliance rather than a reason to undermine Europe’s unity.

In the 1990s, Washington’s frustration with the European governments’ divided and stalled response to the wars in and exposed the serious limits of Europe’s ability to act. Still, it did not turn the US away from the idea of working together with its allies. Even later disputes, such as the US hesitation during NATO’s , were still treated as disagreements over who should lead and who should pay, not as attempts to undermine Europe’s institutional core.

Alas, this might be changing. What seems to set the current US administration apart from its predecessors after World War II is that its differences with Europe now seem less about specific policy disputes and more about viewing divisions within the continent as strategically advantageous.

The east and the west

This hinges on two separate but overlapping divides: Rumsfeld’s “Old” vs. “New” Europe paradigm, which splits the European project along geographic and historical lines, and the decades-old distinction between so-called “Atlanticist” and “Europeanist” states. Within a longstanding in European affairs, Atlanticist-oriented countries tend to prioritize NATO and a tight bond with Washington when it comes to their security, whereas Europeanists emphasize Europe’s capacity to act independently of the US, both on defense and on the global stage. Historically, the latter has appeared through several conceptions, be it of independence, French President Emmanuel Macron’s or .

The two rifts often reinforce each other. Poland and its neighbors, for example, have long seen the US as their ultimate security guarantor, a view shaped by their history and proximity to Russia. During the Iraq War, these countries stood firmly by the US, and today they remain to trust American protection than the prospect of a joint EU defense force, even amid current ruptures within NATO. They firmly believe the US security umbrella remains indispensable for the continent, at least for now.

While this is slowly shifting due to the Trump administration’s rhetoric, Eastern and Central European states have been moving away at a much slower pace than their Western allies. By contrast, nations like France have historically championed a self-reliant Europe, and President Macron has warned that the EU must not be merely “,” repeatedly urging the development of a European defense capacity that can operate without US involvement.

Certainly, internal divisions beyond geographical and regional context play a considerable role here as well. In Poland, for instance, Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s pro-European stance coexists uneasily with the more Trump-sympathetic voice of President Andrzej Duda, while in the Czech Republic, President Petr Pavel’s steadfast support for a stronger European pillar of NATO clashes with the MAGA-like rhetoric from recently elected Prime Minister Andrej Babiš.

These splits suggest that Europe’s response to the current U.S. administration remains shaped not only by regional security concerns but increasingly by domestic political competition – perhaps another point of contention welcomed in Washington.

Nevertheless, as both sides seem to be gradually adopting a in response to the White House’s strategy, there are signs that even in Central and Eastern European capitals, such alarming rhetoric go uncontested. European states have against Trump’s attempt to reframe the EU’s trajectory much as they did against Bush’s attempts in 2003. What’s more, Trump’s approach may be inadvertently strengthening the Europeanist position and catalyzing the very European unity and self-reliance that America has demanded, at least publicly.

As a result, every time Washington floats an idea like a punitive tariff on EU goods or throws doubt into whether it will come to the defense of its NATO allies if needed, it strengthens the hand of those in Europe, even in Central and Eastern European capitals, who argue for “strategic autonomy,” or at least a stronger European defense pillar within the alliance. Yet, recent defense spending and preparedness mean Eastern European Atlanticists now see themselves as the upholders of Western security and, though welcoming the recent increase in NATO spending from Western European capitals, have “Old Europe” leaders for their delayed response and a supposed lack of resolve.

United and divided

Understandably, many new variables play into these emerging divisions, as the issues of today and the discourse across the Atlantic have inevitably changed. It might no longer be only about coalition building, defence spending, and the survival of NATO, as tensions are brewing over migration policy, relations with China and Russia, and the very future of European integration. But the pattern is familiar. Trump is effectively encouraging a “New Europe within Europe” in an alliance of sovereignist, America-friendly governments, positioned against an “Old Europe” often perceived as too multilateralist and liberal.

Thus, it is no understatement to say we are witnessing uncharted territory for the transatlantic alliance in the post-1945 era. From the late 1940s through the 1960s, Washington played a key role in fostering European integration, beginning with the Marshall Plan, which tied US economic aid to cooperation among participating European countries. Subsequent American Presidents had often been ambivalent about this emerging “Brussels,” especially when it came with what they inevitably saw as a Gaulist, anti-American agenda. But throughout the Cold War, the strategic conclusion was that European unity was inevitably in the American interest. When President Bush occupied the White House at the turn of the century, he asked whether this should change. As President Trump sits in the Oval Office today, the answer is becoming clearer and clearer.

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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So says , with a measure of defiance. She’s someone who understands that endurance, not provocation, is her greatest transgression. She is now 67: For more than four decades, she’s offended religious leaders, unsettled moral guardians and insulted polite society. Yet none of those affronts has proved as subversive as her refusal to exit quietly. In a culture organized around novelty and replacement, she’s managed to weaponize longevity.

Madonna’s career might be seen as a sequence of calculated shocks: The wedding dress writhing of “,” the supposedly sacrilegious imagery of “,” the BDSM themes of . A notable biography of her is subtitled . But her subversive moments, however incendiary at the time, were ephemeral. If anything, her most renegade accomplishments often went relatively unnoticed. Like earning $50 million (£26.7 million), a record for a female singer in 2004. Or selling more than 400 million records, including albums, singles and digital. Grossing more than $1.3 billion from her tours, another record. In 1992, she signed a then-unprecedented $60 million with Time Warner.

But what really distinguishes Madonna is not the intensity of any single provocation or her prodigious earnings but the cumulative force of her continued presence. She’s outlived her critics, her imitators and many of her contemporaries. The real scandal is not what she did but that she survived so long.

Her endurance matters not simply because it is unusual but because it allowed her cultural experiment to take place. Over decades, Madonna tested the limits of exposure, turning private life into public performance until the distinction between the two appeared to dissolve. What started as provocation became a template for modern celebrity.

The zeitgeist

In February, she sat in the front row at Dolce & Gabbana’s Milan Fashion Week , her arms wrapped around her knees, heavily tinted glasses shading eyes that have seen nearly every iteration of fame in the modern era. Leather gloves accessorized her black outfit, a theatrical flourish that harked back to her Erotica of 1992–93 (gloves, corsets and leather were part of the visual vocabulary she borrowed from fetish subcultures and, in that tour, repurposed for public consumption.) Across the mirrored runway, models twirled in lace and pinstripes, reflecting Madonna’s many incarnations of the past.��

To call Madonna a diva is almost tautological. She is the very definition of a temperamental, world-renowned singer, famed for her volatile temperament and for being notoriously difficult to please. Formidable, demanding, exacting, she’s a force as likely to exhaust collaborators as she is to enchant audiences.

Her epigones and successors — Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, included — entertain, enchant, influence and inspire, yet all seem anodyne next to Madonna. None has matched her performative ferocity, her willingness to court scandal and alchemize controversy into precious metal. Forty years in, Madonna remains unrepentant, uncontainable, unyielding, the center of attention. She may no longer shape the zeitgeist on her terms, but she remains part of it.

In the 1980s, the world was barely aware of cellphones, the internet was inconceivable and social media was something English novelist H.G. Wells might have dreamt up. Madonna arrived in this landscape as a wannabe dancer who soon learned how to take the cultural pulse. She figured out that the press (as it then was) could either proclaim or annihilate her, that audiences rewarded artists who aroused as well as just entertained them, and who provided spectacle as well as song and dance. She decided to combine them all. In doing so, she did more than respond to a shifting world; she helped catalyze a further shift, scandalizing at every opportunity and dissolving the binary between private and public.

The experiment

Madonna Louise Ciccone moved to New York in 1978, a 20-year-old with nothing but ambition and a few borrowed instruments. She danced, drummed and sang with local bands before releasing her debut single “” in 1982 and her first album, , in 1983. By 1984, her second album, , produced by Nile Rodgers, cemented her international status. The video for the title track and her at the MTV Video Music Awards in a wedding dress simulating masturbation was a foretaste of what was to come.

In 1985, few could imagine a woman deliberately inducing scandal and usually achieving the results she desired. Madonna’s real innovation lay in recognizing something earlier entertainers had missed: Scandal had changed its meaning. No longer necessarily career-ending — as it had been in the cases of Roscoe Arbuckle, Ingrid Bergman and Errol Flynn — controversy had become a resource. Madonna didn’t provoke randomly; she choreographed provocation, each gesture and outfit a calculated engagement with public sensibilities. Audiences, she seemed to conclude, actually enjoyed being outraged: the surge of anger, shock and indignation was oddly satisfying. This may appear obvious today. In the 1980s, it was radically contrarian.

Her 1989 album marked what might have been a Eureka! moment. Madonna appeared to sense that audiences would demand ever more from stars. This was before ’s launched in 1992, allowing viewers to eavesdrop by watching what became known as reality TV. Madonna seems to have arrived at a broadly similar conclusion: Audiences were turning into peeping Toms.

Her ambition was not to shock for its own sake, but to maintain attention by disclosing more and more of what once passed as a private life — and without inhibition. Madonna became, in essence, her own living experiment in making her personal life open to inspection. Before her, entertainers like Elizabeth Taylor had, in the 1960s, allowed private lives to seep into public view via a more cautious media, but this was rare or sensational and delivered to surprised audiences by the then-nascent paparazzi. Madonna made it a career strategy, presenting her personal self as indistinguishable from her stage persona and inviting audiences to witness. Not just witness: Audiences were encouraged to judge her; condemning Madonna was integral to her success.

Like Semtex

The 1990s solidified Madonna’s role as a cultural provocateur. The Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991) documented her tour with unprecedented candor, offering glimpses into backstage rivalries, rehearsals and intimate moments, all alongside the theatricality of her onstage performances. The film predated reality television by years, yet already anticipated its voracious appetite for the minutiae of celebrity.

Around the same period, her book Sex and the album pushed boundaries of sexual representation, blending performance, fetishism and artifice. She intentionally offended, proving unequivocally that scandal was like Semtex, a powerful explosive, but very pliable so that, handled carefully, it can be turned into different shapes. In the years that followed, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian corroborated this when they appeared on that would have ruined show business careers in earlier times.

Yet Madonna’s influence went beyond shock and outrage. Critics like recognized her as a harbinger of postfeminist performance: She demonstrated how a woman could be sensual, assertive, ambitious and aggressive while curating her image in a way that conferred power. From this perspective, being sexy was a form of empowerment. Madonna’s conquests were both commercial and symbolic, reframing what it meant to be a female entertainer in a male-dominated industry. Her affectations, from the pink cone bra to platinum blonde hair, were signifiers of her autonomy.

By the mid-1990s, Madonna was both a diva in the operatic sense and a pioneer in media literacy. Her aforementioned 1992 renegotiation with Time Warner secured her own record label. She remained a polarizing figure: The world alternately praised and disparaged her, keeping her relevant. She had transformed scandal into art and fame into an instrument of social influence. The celebrity landscape she helped sculpt is what we see all around us today.

Even into the 2000s and 2010s, Madonna’s career reflected a Darwinian adaptability to changing environments. The 2003 MTV Video Music Awards with Britney Spears sparked a viral debate, raising questions about bisexuality. Tours such as and albums like demonstrated a willingness to collaborate with younger artists while retaining her signature sound. Her postfeminist sensibilities, rooted in self-expression and independence, carried through to her later albums and public appearances. At the 2023 Grammys, she to critics, accusing them of “ageism and misogyny.”

Diva provocatrix

Today, Madonna’s presence at Milan Fashion Week is emblematic of both her longevity and her continued authorship of the fame narrative. She’s still a model for what it means to inhabit the public sphere on one’s own terms. Unlike many successors, she hasn’t become her own tribute act. She’s refused to trade on nostalgia and strives to remain relevant. A figure whose demands, exacting nature and unyielding vision have shaped not only the entertainment industry but the very ways in which audiences understand and appreciate spectacle, Madonna evokes a reminder about the way we live — vicariously, voyeuristically, derivatively and by proxy.

Her legacy is inseparable from the media she mastered and, to be fair, was mastered by. Madonna didn’t merely reflect social and technological changes — she anticipated them, attempted to manipulate them and tried to force the world to respond. It did: From MTV to social media, from the controversy of Like a Prayer to the candor of Truth or Dare, she engineered a dialogue with audiences that has altered our relationship to celebrities. Many will not think this is such a good thing.

Madonna belongs in the same pantheon as Maria Callas (1923–77), Judy Garland (1922–69) and Barbra Streisand (b. 1942), all imperious figures feared as much as revered for their exacting standards and refusal to accept reality when it failed to conform to their visions. Like them, Madonna has attracted detractors as well as worshippers, her difficulty inseparable from her distinction. Yet she added something new to the tradition: Madonna was not simply a diva but a diva provocatrix, a performer who treated outrage as an artistic medium. While there are many contemporary stars of immense wealth and visibility, none appears willing — or permitted — to embody the risk, volatility and sheer force that once defined the type. Perhaps Madonna truly is the last of them.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of ]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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That world is largely gone. Since the US from the JCPOA in 2018 and, together with Israel, turned increasingly to unilateral kinetic action against Iran, Europe’s most tangible diplomatic success has become the stage on which its influence is steadily eroding. The massive US–Israeli on Iran launched on February 28, 2026, and the subsequent killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on March 1, marked not only the decapitation of the Islamic Republic’s leadership but also laid bare Europe’s strategic paralysis and its profound doubts about the way American power is now being applied.

The case for confronting Iran — and Europe’s unease about how it is being done

There is a serious, substantive case for confronting the Iranian regime, up to and including efforts to bring about its end. Effectively, the US and Iran have been in a shadow war since . Tehran’s network of proxies has killed more than American servicemen in Iraq alone and has US and allied bases across the Middle East.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), now officially listed as a by the EU, has orchestrated or supported operations targeting civilians and infrastructure from the Levant to the Gulf. This is a regime whose leaders “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” and have backed those slogans with missiles, militias and terrorism. Ending the rule of a government that openly calls for the destruction of US and European partners and acts to that end is, in principle, a perfectly defensible strategic and moral objective.

Not only that, but Iran has developed biological weapons and can launch . also has sleeper terror cells in Latin America and could try to infiltrate Europe and the US, if it hasn’t already.

Many European policymakers, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, quietly, and sometimes openly, recognize the danger. For them, an Iranian regime willing and able to the Strait of Hormuz, attack EU-flagged vessels, destabilize Gulf monarchies and edge toward nuclear weapons is not an abstraction but a direct threat to European security and prosperity. But if the case for confronting Iran is strong, the way the US has chosen to wage this war, and the reasons President Donald Trump appears to have for doing so, are far more troubling to European eyes.

A personalized American war

In previous eras, American presidents who embarked on wars of this magnitude, however flawed their decisions, at least made an effort to answer two basic questions: Is this in the American national interest? And what is the political endgame? Trump’s approach is different. Because his administration is so thoroughly personalized, the key question appears to be: How is this in my interest? How will this shape my image as an actor on the world stage? Trump has always possessed a predator’s instinct for exploiting his opponents’ weaknesses. He is now deploying that instinct globally, probing for vulnerabilities he can exploit to glorify his own legacy. He has already pointed to the successful external pressure that helped topple President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela as a model he can replicate in Iran, overlooking the fact that the Middle East is an entirely different strategic and political landscape.

For Europeans, this is the heart of their discomfort. The war in Iran may be justifiable as a confrontation with a bloodthirsty state that has harassed Western interests for decades. But it is being conducted by a Washington that increasingly seems to substitute presidential ego for strategy, and media cycles for end-state planning.

Europe’s fractured response

European foreign policy toward Iran has undergone a dramatic transformation since the first missiles fell. For years, Brussels clung to the JCPOA as the embodiment of its preference for negotiated solutions. Even after the Trump administration reimposed sanctions in 2018, the EU3 tried to keep the deal .

That posture collapsed in late 2025. With Iran expanding enrichment and stonewalling inspectors, the EU3 the snapback of UN sanctions, effectively ending what remained of the JCPOA. By early 2026, European diplomacy had already shifted from salvage operation to damage control.

The outbreak of a US–Israeli war in 2026 accelerated this transformation. In a striking break with past caution, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has publicly for a “credible transition” in Iran that reflects the democratic aspirations of its people. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas Khamenei’s death as “an open path to a different Iran.” These are not the words of a bloc neutral on regime change; they are the vocabulary of a Europe that has, at least rhetorically, moved closer to endorsing it. Yet this new language masks deep internal fractures.

Member states are sharply split on how far to go in supporting the war and an implied regime-change agenda. Germany, under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has largely avoided criticizing US strikes and stresses solidarity with Washington. Merz has gone so far as to that international law is becoming a thing of the past and that Israel and US tactics should not be criticized if Europe shares US objectives on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. Berlin’s view reflects both long-standing Atlanticism and a sober recognition that a nuclear-armed Iran would be catastrophic for European security.

The UK, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, has aligned closely with Washington militarily and diplomatically. London has always allowed the US to use its bases in Cyprus for strikes on Iranian missile sites and frames its role as “defensive,” aimed at protecting shipping lanes and allied forces. The UK government initially to grant the US permission to use the Diego Garcia base for potential strikes against Iran, citing legal concerns. However, this stance was , and permission was later granted for limited, defensive and specifically targeted operations. Post-Brexit, the UK sees unwavering support for the US not just as a strategic choice but as a core element of its identity as a global actor.

France, while also a close US ally, has taken a more ambivalent stance. Paris has bolstered its regional military presence after its base in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was by Iranian missiles, but it has been more outspoken than Berlin or London in insisting on respect for international law and a clear post-war political roadmap. French policymakers are acutely aware that France has economic stakes in the region and that there is a significant domestic debate over another Middle East war.

Spain and several Southern European countries have the war outright as a violation of international law. For them, the US–Israeli campaign against Iran looks alarmingly like previous interventions — Iraq, Libya, Syria — where Europeans paid heavily in terms of migration, terrorism and economic disruption without having a meaningful say in the original decision to use force.

Strategic risks: escalation, sea lanes and economic shock

This patchwork of responses has left Brussels struggling to speak with a coherent voice. On paper, EU institutions call for de-escalation, respect for international humanitarian law and a renewed diplomatic track. In practice, some member states are facilitating military operations while others denounce them, and the Commission’s own rhetoric edges toward support for transition in Tehran.

To Tehran and to many observers in the Global South, the current situation looks like another European double standard, as member states loudly preach international law in Ukraine, but quietly accept its creative reinterpretation in Iran.

Trump has presented the war as a low-cost, high-impact campaign in which air and cyber power can force political change in Tehran. Europeans with operational experience in the region are more skeptical. In the modern era, there are few, if any, examples where air power alone has toppled a regime and produced a stable successor. Even is not a true precedent, since in that case Libyan forces were on the ground advancing against Muammar Qaddafi. In Iran, by contrast, the regime’s security forces remain cohesive, and nationalist sentiment has been inflamed by the perception of an existential foreign threat.

Khomeini, for all his radicalism, always pulled back from directly provoking a full-scale US attempt to destroy the regime. He knew that the US had the capacity to do it. Today’s leadership in Tehran, decapitated but not defeated, has every reason to believe that it is already under such an existential assault. That removes any remaining incentive for restraint. The logical response, from their perspective, is to escalate as far as possible and to fight to the death.

Europe’s fear is that Washington has not fully grasped what that means. A regime that believes it has nothing left to lose can drag the entire region, and by extension Europe, into an escalating conflagration. If Trump is not prepared for that, Europeans argue, he owes his own citizens and his allies a frank explanation of the rationale, the risks and the endgame. So far, that explanation has not been forthcoming.

Europe on the front line of the consequences

The war has immediate operational consequences for Europe, particularly at sea. As Iran and its proxies intensify attacks on maritime traffic in retaliation for US–Israeli strikes, the EU is debating an expansion of its Red Sea naval mission, . An expanded mission could secure critical trade routes, especially for energy and container traffic transiting between Asia and Europe. Signaling European resolve might protect its own interests, rather than merely free-riding on US naval power. But the enlarged role could also deepen military entanglement, turning European ships into direct targets of Iranian missiles, drones and proxies.

Europe can’t easily proclaim a neutral, law-centric position while its vessels help contain Iran’s retaliatory capabilities. For some in Brussels, reinforcing Aspides is necessary to preserve Europe’s economic lifelines and credibility. For others, it is precisely the sort of incremental step that could transform the EU from wary observer into active belligerent in a war whose strategy it does not control.

European economic interests in Iran have already shrunk dramatically since the US withdrawal from the JCPOA, but they have not disappeared. Before sanctions snapped back, European energy giants and industrial firms — French, Italian, German and others — saw Iran’s vast gas reserves and large consumer market as major long-term opportunities. Even under , European companies and banks have remained attentive to potential future access, while member states like Italy, Greece and Spain track Iranian energy flows as part of their broader diversification strategies.

The war has revived Europe’s greatest nightmare: an energy crisis triggered by instability in the Gulf. Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and its strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure have sent gas prices , doubling in a matter of days. For heavily import-dependent economies such as Germany or Italy, this is not an abstraction but a direct hit to households and industry.

Beyond energy, EU agencies warn of potential refugee waves of “unprecedented magnitude” if Iran’s population of is further destabilized. Europe still bears the political scars of the 2015 ; another influx triggered by a war it did not initiate but is seen as condoning could be politically explosive, strengthening far-right forces and deepening divisions inside the Union. In short, even as formal trade and investment with Iran have withered, Europe’s economic and societal exposure to instability in Iran and its neighborhood remains immense.

Europe’s strategic dilemma

This war crystallizes a broader shift in Europe’s perception of the US. On one level, the old dependency remains. The EU still relies heavily on American hard power to deter Russia, protect sea lanes and provide strategic enablers, from intelligence to logistics, that Europe lacks at scale. Many Central and Eastern European governments, in particular, view US power as indispensable.

On another level, however, the way Washington is using that power in Iran reinforces every European anxiety about an increasingly personalized, unpredictable America. The US appears less bound by multilateral procedures and legal constraints than by the impulses of its president and his political calendar. European interests are consulted late, if at all, and often treated as secondary to domestic political needs in Washington.

To some in Europe, the US now looks less like a guardian of order and more like a great power ready to launch regime-change wars whose costs will largely fall on others. The result is a dual sentiment in European capitals, a reluctant recognition that there is a strong case for confronting Iran and that only US military power can credibly do it, coupled with an equally strong fear that this power is being wielded without a coherent strategy and with little regard for European vulnerabilities.

The most frustrating aspect, from a European perspective, is that this conflict should have been precisely where the EU could make a constructive difference. With Tehran weakened but not destroyed, Arab Gulf states desperate for security and the US searching for a viable endgame, there is a real need for a diplomatic framework that can rein in Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, address regional security and provide off-ramps to de-escalation. In the past, Europe’s ability to convene, mediate and design such frameworks was one of its few distinctive strengths.

Instead, by passively condoning the decapitation strike against Khamenei while refusing to engage openly with the regime-change implications of the war, Brussels has undercut its credibility. It now risks being seen as a moralizing actor that invokes international law when convenient, looks away when its allies violate the same norms and offers only vague calls for “dialogue” when hard choices are required. If the war ends with an unstable, embittered Iran and a shattered JCPOA framework, Europe will have lost not only influence in the Middle East, but also one of the last proofs that its model of power — legalistic, diplomatic, multilateral — can shape events.

The stakes for Europe’s strategic future

Uncertain wars rarely yield stable outcomes. Air strikes can decapitate regimes; they cannot, on their own, build legitimate successors. Iran’s leadership has every incentive to fight to the bitter end. The regime’s fall, if it comes, could unleash a wave of chaos, refugees and nuclear insecurity whose front line will be Europe, not the US. Iran itself could fragment. of Iran is made up of minorities, many of whom resent the Persian majority. There has long been an active and violent low-level insurgency by armed Kurdish groups (many based in Iraq) fighting for autonomy or secession.

For that very reason, diplomacy should not be dismissed. But neither should the reality that the diplomatic track is now intertwined with a war prosecuted by a Washington whose motives are, in European eyes, uncomfortably personal. Europe needs to reconcile three truths. First, there exists a powerful case for confronting an Iranian regime that has waged war by against the West for decades. Second, the way the US is currently applying its power in Iran is dangerously personalized and opaque. Finally, the EU cannot afford either moralistic passivity or automatic alignment, but rather must define and defend its own interests, even when that means resisting both Tehran and Washington.

Whether Europe rises to that challenge, or resigns itself to being a sidelined commentator on a war that will shape its own security for years to come, will be one of the defining tests of its strategic maturity. If Europe is serious about once again playing a serious strategic role in international affairs, this is the moment to put up or shut up.

[ edited this piece.]

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The current freeze draws a direct, haunting parallel to the 1992 Mykonos Restaurant assassinations. On that September night in Berlin, Iranian agents executed Dr. Sadegh Sharafkandi, the Secretary-General of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (PDKI), alongside three aides.

In April 1997, after a that exposed the inner workings of the regime’s “Special Affairs Committee,” a German court took the historic step of naming the highest echelons of power — including Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and then President Hashemi Rafsanjani, among others — as the architects of the massacre. The EU’s response was swift: For the first time, every member state recalled its ambassador.

Yet, the resolve was fleeting. Within months, European officials were already rushing back to Tehran, desperate to resume the “Critical Dialogue” that had supposedly been suspended. Using the 1997 Iranian election of the “reformist” Mohammad Khatami as a convenient exit ramp for their principles, EU diplomats were soon seen seeking permission to re-enter Iran, effectively burying the Mykonos verdict under a mountain of new trade agreements. Today, however, that cyclical retreat seems impossible; the “reformist” illusion has shattered, and the door is being locked from the outside — an absolute blockade that remains impenetrable unless the regime undertakes a seismic, foundational reversal to dismantle its own political architecture.

The end of engagement

That 30-year hope — that trade and diplomacy could moderate the Islamic Republic’s behavior — finally died in the streets of Tehran over the last two years. In late January 2026, the EU closed a dark circle of history by formally the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization.

It is a move of profound symbolic and legal weight: the very same IRGC and its shadow proxies that orchestrated the 1992 Mykonos murders have finally been branded with the label they earned three decades ago. This long-overdue alignment with Washington raises a haunting question: “What if?” Had Europe stood firm and declared the IRGC and its branches a terrorist organization alongside the US back then, the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East — and the security of the Iranian diaspora in Europe — might look fundamentally different today. Instead, 30 years of hesitation allowed the regime’s paramilitary arm to entrench its influence and refine its machinery of repression.

Now, the divorce is absolute. The EU has achieved energy dependence on Iran, cutting off the investments that once served as Tehran’s lifeline. The conversation has turned toward the “nuclear” option: the total of Iranianembassies across the continent. Influential Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) argue that as long as these missions are used to coordinate transnational repression, they have no right to exist on European soil.

De-platforming the regime: a parliament of fury

The physical manifestation of this decoupling is most striking within the halls of European power. In January 2026, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola took the extraordinary step of all Iranian regime officials and diplomatic staff from entering the Parliament’s premises.

“This House will not aid in legitimizing a regime that sustains itself through torture,” Metsola declared. This ban represents a jarring departure from the era of “appeasement diplomacy.” Not long ago, EU officials were lining up to meet their counterparts in Tehran, with female leaders often obeying regime orders to be during their visits. Those images of “veiled diplomacy” are now being replaced by a total eviction of the regime from the heart of European democracy.

This institutional ban provided the backdrop for even more visceral acts of protest. In a moment that defined the current session, Italian MEP Isabella Tovaglieri recently stood before the chamber and a photograph of Ali Khamenei. The collective anger was further cemented in February 2026, when the Parliament issued a blistering condemnation of the UN for sending a to the regime — a blood-stained insult to the estimated 35,000 Iranians killed in recent state violence.

Europe’s hard pivot

The landscape shifted irrevocably on February 28, 2026. The decapitating US and Israeli that claimed the life of Khamenei and his top military command have forced a hard pivot in European capitals. While the EU initially refrained from joining the kinetic phase of the assault, the regime’s response has made continued neutrality impossible.

In its final, agonizing throes, Iran has launched indiscriminate missile and drone strikes that targeted Gulf states and impacted European interests, viewing any Western presence as a fair target for its frustration. This unprovoked aggression against European assets has fundamentally altered the calculus in Brussels. Western leaders now realize that the IRGC is not a state actor to be contained, but a terminal threat to be neutralized. The “Critical Dialogue” has been replaced by an urgent necessity to counter the regime’s desperate and final acts of regional aggression.

The images of MEPs tearing up portraits of the Supreme Leader mark the funeral rites of a failed policy. Europe is finally standing on the right side of history; with the regime’s indiscriminate strikes on European interests having shattered the last shreds of diplomatic hesitation, Brussels is now forced to move beyond mere condemnation. 

The strikes of February 28 did more than remove a Supreme Leader; they removed the final barriers to a unified Western front, signaling that Europe will finally have to join the US and Israeli assaults to neutralize Iran’s remaining infrastructure. This shift also represents a long-overdue closure for the 1992 Mykonos assassinations; by with organized Iranian Kurdish forces on the ground to topple the regime, the US is finally helping to enforce a judicial verdict that was long deferred by European trade interests.

In this new geopolitical reality, Europe simply cannot afford to antagonize US President Donald Trump by standing against him or failing to provide the support his administration demands. Consequently, as Iran continues to lash out against the region and Western interests, the EU is no longer just “decoupling”; it is now preparing for the total collapse of the political architecture it once tried to save and aligning its strategic weight with the inevitable transition of power.

[ edited this piece.]

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This Devil’s Advocate is tempted to view the current crisis as something beyond politics in the sense that no set of political measures can address the causes and reestablish order. The obvious symptoms concern the economy, but the quandary Europe’s governments and populations are facing is more existentially challenging than mere economic dysfunction. We should see this as a spiritual crisis, in the sense that it implicates Europe’s spirit or soul. To borrow a metaphor from Europe’s historical past, it resembles a case of demonic possession.

We need to examine the patterns revealed by the symptoms. The first is the absence of any form of nuanced thinking. At the geopolitical level, this directly translates as the unwillingness and resulting incapacity to practice any recognizable form of diplomacy when reacting to a conflict. Classic diplomacy requires the careful and discreet investigation of chains of cause and effect accompanied by a serious effort to probe into the sources of all the concerned parties’ intentions and motivation. This leads to the formulation of hypotheses that can produce an informed judgment about the current state of play — obviously marked by tension — and the multiple possibilities of resolution. Investigation and nonlinear reasoning precede the formulation of a propositional framework that may lead to resolution. Judgment, specifically informed judgment, is part of the process and can be neither the starting nor the ending point.

What we see today is the opposite. Let’s consider the two major ongoing conflicts Europeans have been unable to even contribute to settling: Ukraine and the Israel–Palestine conflict. In contrasting ways, both represent a potential existential threat to European identity. The starting point used by most European leaders in both cases is a simplistic statement of peremptory judgment. Simplism reigns within a political system where it’s possible to take seriously the idea that, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler with a nuclear arsenal and that anyone who hints at a possible genocide on the part of Israel is antisemitic. Those who dare to entertain informed positions deviating from those simplistic views — people like Swiss military expert or UN rapporteur — may be “excommunicated,” which includes being literally deprived of status by banks, credit agencies and businesses.

Now, the notion of judgment can have two curiously contrasting meanings. We only need to think about the perceived difference of connotation between “exercising judgment” and “passing judgment.” Confusing those two meanings will inevitably lead to abuse, especially if the stakes are war and peace, or even an individual’s well-being, as in the case of Albanese and Baud. Exercising judgment refers to a patient process of weighing evidence to clarify pertinent facts, understand relationships, characterize motivation and eventually deliberate on a response or plan of action. This is a dynamic, open-ended process. Passing judgment brutally ends the process as it pronounces the final verdict. The verdict is a moment of stasis that only emerges at the end of the process of judging. It marks the point at which exercising judgment stops.

Judge not that ye be not judged

Regarding the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, European leaders have clearly preferred to skip the process and instead work from a preordained verdict. In the case of Ukraine, Europeans renounced from the get-go any effort at processing the evidence. From day one, four years ago this week, European leaders aligned with a preformulated verdict. It took the form of a narrative and read something like this: “Russian President Vladimir Putin, a criminal madman who enjoys the status of dictator (despite the fact that he was democratically elected), chose to realize his wildest, darkest fantasy and began a campaign aiming at the conquest of Europe. He began modestly by attacking ‘unprovoked’ a weak neighbor, who was minding its own business.”

This adopted narrative made available to the media in 2022 originated from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, not from Europe itself, even though exercising judgment about the status of Ukraine should properly have been the object of a European debate. But this entire episode and its latest developments, notably between Hungary and the European Union, proves that the messy process of debate, which requires exercising judgment, has yielded to the far more efficient habit of pronouncing verdicts.

History tells us that at least two very prominent European leaders in 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, read the available evidence in a different way and the US President of the time, George W. Bush, of their analysis. That might have led to a debate, but their protestations were duly ignored by Bush, “the leader of the free world” (a title generally understood to be the chief magistrate of the free world, responsible for rendering verdicts and sentencing).

Thirteen years later, in 2021, the newly-elected US President Joe Biden declared that the world was locked in a struggle between light and darkness, democracies and autocracies. A kind of geopolitical Super Bowl. As the leading non-dictator, Biden made the judgment call everyone else on the democracy side was expected to follow. He required we all agree that Putin is a criminal (“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”). There was no need to consider the Russian president’s plea to sit down and work out an architecture for European security, one that would begin by examining the concerns on all sides. Biden, the anti-autocrat, made it clear to all his friends and allies that they must not fall for Putin’s ploy. Like any self-respecting non-dictator, Biden could be certain that his own “judgment” is what all his wise allies would follow.

And follow they did. I can vouch for the fact that since February 2022, the dominant media here in France have been consistently preaching this verdict on Putin. And, with few other available sources to inform them, most French people are willing to believe it. Believing it, by the way, means refusing to rethink it unless provoked to do so by those same media.

For anyone who has paid attention to history and in particular French President Emmanuel Macron’s occasional homage to the doctrine of “strategic autonomy,” this may seem paradoxical. Barely three months after the invasion, Macron dared to stand up to the non-dictator in Washington by impertinently recommending a path through (horror of horrors!) diplomacy. “We must not humiliate Russia,” Macron , “so that the day the fighting stops, we can build a way out through diplomatic channels. I am convinced that it is France’s role to be a mediating power.” Macron had failed to understand that the non-dictator had dictated the final verdict and that the rest of Europe had dutifully aligned with it.

Since that time, Macron himself has understood that it was in his interest to align with the judgment of the non-dictator. He has since become perhaps the most vocal of the anti-diplomatic war party. He even took the initiative of France’s diplomatic corps “that he regards as elitist and homogeneous” — in other words, capable of exercising judgment independent of the verdicts of a democratically elected “” president.

Trump’s unprovoked invasion of the White House

In the three remaining years of Biden’s non-autocratic reign, everything seemed to be running smoothly towards the fulfillment of yet another forever war provoked and supported by the US, but this time designed specifically to exhaust Russia. All might have gone well had not the annoyance of a democratic election gone awry leading to the Blue non-dictator’s replacement by a Red non-dictator, current US President Donald Trump, who nevertheless affected the style of dictators. Before his invasion of the White House, Trump had promised to uninvade Ukraine within 24 hours.

That never happened, partly because the European leaders who had followed the persuasive tactics of the previous US non-dictator didn’t trust the new guy (who was, in fact, another old guy in two senses of the word: in age and due to the fact that he had already served four years as a “new guy”). But it wasn’t just that they didn’t trust Trump. They had committed to the previous non-dictator’s plan for their own future and even bought into the idea that sacrificing the health of their own economy was the kind of generosity that would permanently endear them to any Oval Office non-dictator, whom they could regard as their “.”

Over the past decade, I’ve repeatedly claimed that our civilization has developed an unhealthy taste for “hyperreality” as a substitute for reality. It has transformed our field of perception. Reality in a quantum universe is complex and messy, impossible to pin down. It plays out according to an inherent, intuitive, organic logic whose interplay we can perceive but not even hope to fully understand.

We have to get on with our lives and so we need others to break it down for us, reconstruct its components, combine them in new ways and simplify their underlying logic in ways that might make sense to us. This may come at the cost of distorting reality’s logic beyond recognition, but that’s no matter. We loyal citizens of the consumer society will not only passively consume it when it’s offered to us, but we’re usually happy to pay for the best version of it.

Politics in our democracies (i.e. non-autocracies) has become hyperreal. Trump himself is the ultimate figment of hyperreality who sums up all the deepest trends in US culture: superficiality, celebrity wealth, individualistic independence of collective meaning, greedy consumerism, belief in assertiveness as the highest virtue, disregard for history and context, narcissistic self-celebration, preference for win-lose logic over win-win logic simply because recognizing a winner is the whole point of competing. These trends do not stand at the core of US culture, but they have emerged powerfully from it, and they appear to have accelerated in recent decades.

Exorcising devils

People on both sides of the Atlantic have long understood that despite some common cultural sources the US and Europe are different. Following World War II, Europe became aware of the subtle ways in which its economy and culture were becoming Americanized. But there was always a sense of resistance. The project that led to the realization of the European Union exemplified the ambition to share things with the US but to affirm one’s difference. That tension still exists among Europe’s populations, but it has clearly been abandoned by its political leaders.

To the honest observers who study the complex reality of history, the simplistic rhetoric — to a great extent “made in the USA” — to which Europe’s political leaders appear addicted has penetrated most of its public institutions, including mainstream media. The rhetoric conveyed by leaders and media so far deviates from simple rationality that the metaphor of demonic possession appears an appropriate characterization of it. It is as if these people and their institutions were possessed by an unidentifiable parasite, a modern devil that requires some novel form of exorcism.

In the European tradition, demonic possession is traditionally described as a disease of the soul involving commerce with the devil, conceived as an intelligent being that seeks to control innocent humans, even overtaking the body’s normal metabolic processes. Europe has long been suffering from the disease that robbed it of its inherited sense of identity. The two European wars of the 20th century that immediately turned into world wars planted the seeds.

So it may now be time to wonder whether Europe, having lost its human autonomy, is in the hands of the devil, and if so, who might that devil be? Where should we look to find the diabolical presence? Is it a person, a cabal or a system? And if it’s a system, who maintains it and how do they become part of it?

These are questions we definitely intend to come back to… if only to begin to independently “exercise our judgment.”

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

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US President Donald Trump, however, is not only pushing the historic turning point that Scholz put in motion in 2022 too far, but also sowing disruption in German domestic politics. In doing so, he is bringing the so-called “” back into the current geopolitical scene. This term is historically associated with European anxieties about �ұ�������Բ�’s strong tradition of militarism and nationalism.

The German question

After �ұ�������Բ�’s in October of 1990, fears emerged that the country’s central geographic position, industrial might and warmongering history could transform it into a potential threat to the rest of Europe. With the sudden strengthening of Germany, indeed, the delicate balance of power upon which the European had been built was turned upside down. A newly empowered Germany, it was believed, could always trigger back latent nationalistic instincts.

Not surprisingly, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher strongly such reunification, dreading that a too-powerful Germany could undermine European stability and endanger her country’s security.

To deal with these fears, �ұ�������Բ�’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Francois Mitterrand came up with the same answer: transforming the European Economic Community into a European . On this basis, the December 1991 of the European Union, approved in the Dutch city of Maastricht, came into being.

The reasons that had motivated both leaders in creating the European Union, however, were exactly the opposite. Kohl wanted to strengthen his country’s links with Europe to keep his fellow citizens’ nationalistic instincts in check, while Mitterrand wanted to strengthen Europe to keep Germany in check. 

Three decades after the emergence of the European Union, Scholz’s Zeitenwende did not raise fears among their fellow Europeans. With an aggressive Russia at the borders, the idea of a stronger military Germany was well received by them. If anything, European distress came not from a strong Berlin, but from a weak one. 

Trump 2.0’s actions, however, are turning things upside down by generating European anxieties about a Germany that could become militarily too strong and politically too nationalistic. In the words of historian and political scientist :

But left unchecked, German military dominance might eventually foster division within the continent, France remains uneasy about the fact that its neighbor is becoming a major military power … In the worst-case scenario, competition might return. France, Poland and other states could attempt to counterbalance Germany, which would divert attention away from Russia and leave Europe divided and vulnerable”. 

Trump’s three-lane avenue

But how is Trump turning things upside down? This takes shape through a three-lane avenue. The first lane propels NATO European members to invest up to of their GDP in defense. The second materializes by to abandon NATO, or, even without doing so, by threatening to disregard the alliance’s Article 5 — the cornerstone of collective security — thus sowing anxieties about America’s reliability. The third takes shape by legitimizing and seeking to �ұ�������Բ�’s ultra-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is considered an extremist organization.

The first and second avenues have converged, forcing European NATO members to make much larger defense disbursements while seeking European strategic autonomy. However, this is not as easy as it sounds. No other European country can match Berlin’s military expenditure, which by 2029 would budget $189 billion annually. That is, three times more than in 2022. In total, Germany plans to expend more than $750 billion on defense over the next four years. If this is accomplished, Germany would again become a great before the end of the decade.

However, with smaller economies, larger public debt or tight social welfare commitments, the rest of Europe will not be able to follow suit. Having the largest economy in Europe translates into much larger absolute , although, as a percentage of GDP, it could equal what smaller economies allocate to defense. Moreover, countries with higher public debt or tighter social welfare obligations, like France or Italy, have less fiscal space to raise defense outlays. As a result, while Germany was able to its debt brake to invest heavily in defense, many others cannot do the same. All of the above create the conditions for Germany becoming Europe’s military . At least in conventional military terms.

As if this were not enough to create a tremendous power imbalance in Europe, Trump’s third avenue lane aims at putting an extreme right party, the AfD, at the helm of Germany. As Deutsche Welle’s Hans Pfeifer :

The party is also becoming increasingly openly extremist. AfD officials use Nazi slogans, pose with their hands on their hearts in front of Adolf Hitler’s bunker, wear clothing from the mail-order catalogue of �ұ�������Բ�’s largest neo-Nazi organization, and call themselves the “friendly face of National-Socialism.”

Not surprisingly, AfD was as an “extremist” organization by �ұ�������Բ�’s intelligence services.

A military Gulliver under an extremist government

Although important sectors of the population see with fear the rise of AfD, opinion polls show that it has already Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative bloc as the country’s strongest political force. Under those circumstances, the active support this party receives from the President of the US and top members of his administration plays an important role in legitimizing and normalizing it in the eyes of the German people. Specially relevant in this regard was the Trump administration’s of the validity of a 1,100-page report by the German intelligence agency, labeling AfD as “a proven right-wing extremist organization.”

The possibility of a European military Gulliver controlled by a “proven right-wing extremist” government is thus an important one, courtesy of Mr. Trump. If this materializes, a powerful bulwark against liberal Europe would emerge. The largest economy and military in Europe would be at odds with both the and , representing a major historical shift in post-1945 German foreign policy. If so, the “German Question” rather than Russian aggression would become Europe’s biggest problem.��

��Contrariwise, �ұ�������Բ�’s military strength will certainly not be a bulwark against an aggressive Russia. Indeed, AfD is as the most Russophile party in German politics, maintaining a friendly, mutually supportive relationship with the Kremlin.����������

After the first eight decades of continuous peace in Western Europe’s recorded history, Trump is actively sowing the seeds of upheaval.

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He reaffirmed the US commitment to NATO’s core deterrence mission and to collective defense principles. Even though phrased in transactional language of burden sharing, defense spending targets and monetary contributions, the underlying architecture was not repudiated, which implies that Washington does not intend to abandon Europe’s security umbrella. Rubio framed the relationship less as a community of shared liberal values and more as a strategic partnership contingent on reciprocity. The subtext was clear: Europe must invest more in its own defense and industrial resilience. The tone was firm but not dismissive.

Competition with China naturally remains the organizing principle. Europe was encouraged to align more closely with US positions on export controls, supply chains and technological safeguards, reinforcing the idea that transatlantic relations will remain increasingly linked to broader systemic rivalry. In short, Rubio sketched a future that is pragmatic, security-anchored and conditional — but not isolationist.

While US President Donald Trump’s at times bellicose rhetoric over the past year has focused on America being “taken advantage of” vis-à-vis US defense guarantees, to reconsider NATO commitments if allies do not meet spending thresholds and an “” framing that sometimes blurred into skepticism about multilateralism, Rubio’s remarks were notably more disciplined and less incendiary. He did not dwell on threats of withdrawal. He avoided language implying that alliance commitments are optional. Instead, he presented burden-sharing as a mutual-strengthening mechanism, not a precondition for protection.

That tonal shift matters. It reframes the debate from punitive leverage (“pay up or else”) to negotiated recalibration (“we need a stronger European pillar within NATO”). The substance — Europe must spend more — remains consistent, but the delivery was different: steadier, less theatrical, more institutional and in a sense, more believable.

Recalibration, not retrenchment

A year ago, Vice President JD Vance was more of long-term US commitments abroad, especially regarding Ukraine and broader European security. His framing leaned toward retrenchment and domestic prioritization, suggesting that Europe should assume primary responsibility for its own neighborhood and that US involvement should be sharply limited.

Rubio’s speech, by contrast, did not signal retrenchment. It implied recalibration, not retreat. While Vance emphasized constraint and the limits of American obligation, Rubio emphasized reform and restructuring within an ongoing alliance. The difference is subtle but significant: Vance’s approach reads as strategic narrowing; Rubio’s reads as conditional stewardship.

For Europeans parsing nuance, that distinction is consequential. It suggests internal variation within the Republican foreign policy ecosystem — between nationalist retrenchment and conservative internationalism. They are right to derive some comfort — but not complacency. NATO was not repudiated; US engagement was affirmed, not disavowed; the language of alliance endured; and there was genuine reason for hope.

But that comfort should be cautious because, of course, the ultimate direction of policy rests with the president. The speech did not restore a values-first framing; rather, it embedded the alliance within metrics and expectations. Domestic politics will continue to drive policy volatility and congressional funding debates, and electoral pressures and populist currents will remain structural variables. Europeans should therefore view the speech as evidence that a Trump administration may not seek a dramatic rupture — but they should not assume insulation from pressure or conditionality.

From tone to policy: the implementation test

If the Trump administration were to operationalize Rubio’s tone, five concrete steps would need to be taken. The first step would be to ensure budget clarity by sustaining or increasing funding for European Deterrence Initiative programs and NATO commitments to signal seriousness. The second step is institutional engagement, which requires the US to participate in high-level NATO summits, engage in routine consultations with EU institutions, issue coordinated communiqués and pursue meaningful diplomacy. Third is maintaining coherence in Ukraine policy by avoiding abrupt funding interruptions or unilateral concessions. Fourth is establishing structured US–EU dialogues on export controls and technology standards to demonstrate that alignment with China is more than rhetorical. Finally, the administration would need to eliminate sudden, public threats to withdraw from alliance obligations to ensure predictability.

Without these actions, Munich will be remembered as atmospherics rather than policy.

A post-romantic alliance

So, Rubio’s speech reflects a broader reality: The US is unlikely to abandon Europe, but it is equally unlikely to return to a sentimental conception of the transatlantic bond. The alliance is entering a post-romantic phase. It will be measured in capabilities, spending levels, supply-chain resilience and strategic alignment.

Europeans should neither panic nor relax. Instead, they should accelerate defense integration, expand industrial capacity and prepare for a more autonomous strategic role. Ironically, doing so would both hedge against US unpredictability and strengthen the alliance Rubio appeared to defend.

If the Trump administration translates Rubio’s rhetoric into institutional continuity and disciplined execution, transatlantic relations may stabilize at a new equilibrium — leaner, tougher, less rhetorical, but still intact. If not, Munich will join a long list of speeches that reassured allies briefly while structural rupture continued. The real test is what is funded, signed and sustained in Washington.

[Daniel Wagner is CEO of Country Risk Solutions and the author of numerous books on international relations.]

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Since the then-Prince’s decision to grant an to BBC television in 2019 to discuss his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, his life has been sliced open and examined forensically. The interview caused a reputational cataclysm, making Andrew appear aloof and indifferent. After that, the media have examined and interpreted his every gesture and treated every silence as evidence. The police have acted decisively and pitilessly. Where once a public would have looked away to avoid witnessing the impropriety, they have glared intently and without inhibition.

There’s no protective shield of deference, no instinctive reluctance to look too closely. Instead, there’s a degree of disclosure that would once have been unthinkable: Continuous, intimate and often unforgiving. The House of Windsor, once cushioned by mystique, is now consumed as spectacle — global spectacle. This transformation didn’t occur suddenly, nor can it be attributed to a spontaneous change in journalistic policy, the rise of the tabloids or global satellite broadcasting, though all these contributed to the cultural shift of the 1980s.

This transformation occurred when Diana appeared. Young, photogenic and emotionally legible, she didn’t merely join the royal family; she altered its relationship with the media and thus its visibility. When that changed, so did everything else. The protocol unraveled, and the monarchy has struggled to manage ever since.

Royal mystique

Before Diana, the royal family was presented like characters in a Noël Coward play: elegant, composed and emotionally self-contained. They were visible but inaccessible; ever-present yet remote; simultaneously touchable and untouchable. The media reported on ceremonies, births and funerals, but rarely intruded on private emotional affairs. Royals were not expected to reveal themselves. Their authority depended, in large part, on their opacity and mystique. They were less individuals than personifications of majesty.

Elsewhere, however, a new and more invasive form of journalism had begun to develop. In postwar Italy, freelance photographers adopted aggressive tactics to capture candid images of famous figures, most notably Elizabeth Taylor, whose life the media turned into a scandalous spectacle for audiences around the world in the 1960s. The paparazzi, as they came to be known, transformed the relationship between public figures and the media. Privacy became provisional, subject to negotiation or violation depending on commercial value. Yet Britain’s royal family remained largely insulated from this development. Even the publication of photographs showing in intimate circumstances with Roddy Llewellyn in 1976 represented a disturbance or a crack in the royal mystique — depending on perspective. The monarchy absorbed the shock and resumed its usual stately equilibrium.

Diana’s arrival coincided with wider cultural changes that would make such equilibrium impossible to sustain. The 1980s witnessed the rapid expansion of celebrity culture, fueled by global television, mass-circulation magazines and a growing appetite for personality-driven narratives. Fame itself was becoming democratized and commodified. Diana entered royal life not as a seasoned media strategist but as a young ���Բ�é�Գܱ� whose emotional openness aligned, perhaps unwittingly, with this newly-developing environment. The traditional reserve of royalty was alien to her: She allowed audiences glimpses of vulnerability, loneliness, uncertainty and emotional wounds, all the time offering a new kind of pleasure — guiltless eavesdropping.

Her closest counterpart was not another royal but iconic pop star Madonna, whose ascent during the same decade exemplified a new kind of fame built on continuous exposure, uninterrupted scandal and perpetual reinvention. Madonna’s attention-acquisition seemed to have a strategy, while Diana’s usually appeared reactive. Both women thrived by making common cause with a media that rewarded accessibility and a certain narrative tension. Both blurred the boundary between private experience and public performance. Diana didn’t overwhelm the media with drama and narrative; however, by making herself visible and accessible, she normalized a new conception of the monarchy as an august institution, but one that could be seen and understood through the same interpretive lens as celebrity.

Fairytale

Diana’s marriage to then-Prince Charles III was presented explicitly as a fairytale, not as retrospective embellishment but as contemporary cultural framing. On its wedding-day front page, the Daily Mirror described the occasion as “the fairytale wedding,” while publishers quickly consolidated the narrative in longer form, including a 1982 biography of Diana subtitled .

When the marriage began to unravel, the media did not abandon this narrative so much as invert it. Headlines lamented that “the fairytale is over,” preserving the story’s mythic structure even as its emotional valence shifted. Diana remained the innocent protagonist, while Camilla Parker Bowles (now Queen Camilla) — cast as “the other woman” — assumed the role of antagonist. The monarchy had been translated into the language of folklore.

Diana’s own actions reinforced this construction. Her willingness to cooperate with journalists, to communicate indirectly through carefully timed disclosures and, ultimately, to submit to the now-notorious with Martin Bashir in 1995 marked a decisive break with royal precedent. No member of the royal family had ever spoken so candidly, or so publicly, about intimate emotional pain. The interview did more than reveal personal suffering: It redefined expectations of the monarchy. Audiences no longer saw them as protected.

Bashir, it was later learned, had procured the Diana interview using ethically questionable methods. He would later conduct similarly revealing with Michael Jackson, another global figure whose life became inseparable from media scrutiny. While there is no moral equivalence between the two interviews, taken together, they suggest that, by the mid-1990s, royalty and celebrity occupied the same symbolic terrain. Both were subject to the same processes of exposure, interpretation and commodification. Diana stood at the center of this convergence. She was not merely its most visible casualty but its most consequential catalyst.

Her death in 1997 marked the end of her life but not the end of her influence. If anything, her absence intensified her symbolic presence. The extraordinary public grief that followed revealed the depth of emotional investment she had inspired. Millions mourned not simply a princess but a figure they felt they knew intimately. The monarchy, by contrast, appeared uncertain, its traditional reserve suddenly out of step with public expectation. The institution that had once defined the terms of its own visibility now struggled to respond to forces beyond its control.

The logic of celebrity

In the decades since , the media environment she helped shape has expanded and intensified. The rise of digital platforms has accelerated the circulation of images and narratives, while audiences have become active participants in the construction and dissemination of scandal. The royal family now exists in a system that rewards exposure and punishes concealment. Transgression is both condemned and consumed. Public figures are elevated, scrutinized and, when they falter, subjected to ritualized humiliation.

This dynamic has affected Diana’s sons. Prince Harry has adapted to the logic of celebrity, relocating to the United States and engaging directly with media institutions that his mother helped legitimize as sites of royal storytelling. His wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, brought with her an understanding of media culture shaped outside the constraints of monarchy. Together, they have navigated a world in which royal identity is still a constitutional status, but one that amplifies narrative consequence.

While some royals have adapted and evolved in the ecosystem, others have fared less successfully. Andrew, once secure within the protective structures of , has found himself exposed to the same unforgiving scrutiny faced by disgraced celebrities in other fields. His fall from public grace illustrates the extent to which royal status no longer guarantees insulation from reputational collapse. Despite maintaining his innocence, Andrew has been treated not as a prince apart, but as a public figure subject to the full force of media scrutiny and legal process.

In February, Mountbatten-Windsor was into custody by police following a raid at his Sandringham home, the episode captured by photojournalists. He is the first senior member of the royal family to be detained by authorities in circumstances of this kind since was taken prisoner in 1647.

The death of Elizabeth II removed the last enduring link to the era before this transformation. Her reign had provided continuity and an element of stability, preserving the appearance that the monarchy existed above media attention. Her successor, Charles — Andrew’s brother, of course — now presides over an ancient institution that must operate on a modern cultural landscape, one in which visibility is a necessity and can be a liability.

Diana’s legacy lies in the terrain she transformed: Her influence continues to shape how monarchy and media interact. The manner in which she conducted her life and her relaxed relationship with journalists meant that the distance between the monarchy and the media would diminish during her life and keep diminishing after her death. The consequences of this change continue to unfold. 

Would a more deferential media even approach a subject that could have alienated consumers as easily as it could have excited them? Andrew was never the most popular figure in the royal family, but some could have bridled at the sensationalism afforded his apparent errancy. It’s doubtful that a police force in earlier times would have whisked Andrew away from his home to a police station for questioning and returned him home in a manner befitting a bank robbery suspect. These are hypotheticals, but not unanswerable: No, in all cases. It’s difficult to imagine the Mountbatten-Windsor scandal unfolding as it has before, say, 1990. 

Audiences today are fascinated by rule-breaking but equally by its baleful consequences. Our curiosity isn’t natural but cultivated, and nowadays participatory, sustained by social media tech that allows constant observation and interaction. The royal family, once insulated by reverence, now exists as a permanent object of scrutiny, its struggles consumed as both cautionary parables but, more usually, plain entertainment. We’re enthralled by the prospect of an English prince entangled in an international web of patriarchal exploitation and leaked documents on investment opportunities.

Diana may be gone, but the conditions she helped create remain. She altered not only the monarchy’s relationship with the media but the public’s relationship with the monarchy. And perhaps the monarchy itself. The House of Windsor no longer exists as a realm apart. It is part of the same unforgiving system that governs all modern fame. Andrew’s case illustrates the final consequence of Diana’s revolution: monarchy no longer stands apart from celebrity culture. It operates inside it — exposed to its volatility, dependent on its visibility and vulnerable to its judgments.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of ,�� published by Bloomsbury.]

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The intellectual of the 21st century finds himself between a hammer and an anvil. On the one hand, there is freedom of choice and the broad availability of media representing all political orientations and formats, from full-fledged printed newspapers to bloggers with no professional journalistic training.

On the other hand, the emergence of a phenomenon of mass entry into journalism gives rise to autonomous branches of propaganda, whose breadth is equally vast: from old state newspapers to influencers who may lack strong analytical abilities, but who nevertheless possess inherited public trust from the past and a talent for engagement.

As a result, even such powerful authoritarian systems as President Vladimir Putin’s Russia are unable to control and turn into a single mouthpiece of propaganda not only liberal and opposition Russian media and opinion leaders, but even media loyal to the regime itself.

The resulting picture is this: numerous pro-Putin Russian bloggers, independent of federal channel institutions, are able to simultaneously convey different emotional tones to the actions of the authorities, creating meanings without crossing into the opposing camp.

Mythology from below: autonomous propaganda

One blogger, well-read in Russian history, may take Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina — as a result of which the tsar acquired the full scope of a punitive apparatus for terror against the elites of that time — and link it to the case when, in the early 2000s, Putin began a the oligarchs of the “” (a clan of businessmen united around Boris Yeltsin), in particular against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who financed .

Without delving into the details, our fictional blogger may fervently compare Putin to Ivan the Terrible. And the image he creates of Putin as a “fighter against traitors,” or, in a more literary form, a “purifier of the Russian land,” has every chance to become fixed and crystallize into a myth.

Especially if one takes into account the of a monument to Ivan the Terrible in Vologda on November 4, 2025, and the prevailing attitude of the Russian people toward oligarchs. According to , 43% of Russians are unequivocally opposed to the presence of oligarchs in politics.

From another, more sober perspective, Khodorkovsky was simply a rather successful businessman who was in negotiations with , an international giant, for a $6.5 billion deal and a stake in his company. Putin’s actions, meanwhile, were more likely reactive behavior, provoked by the factors of the upcoming presidential elections, a strategy of political survival and personal prejudices against the oligarchic “Family.”

As a result, at that time, publications began to appear in the press, both international and Russian, with headlines such as “an attack on business.” All of this, to put it mildly, does not lead to investment or to easing the conduct of business in Russia.

Further on, from another intellectual angle but with similar convictions, a blogger may equate Putin’s rule in the economic sphere and neoliberalism, basing such judgments on a style of governance grounded in the suppression of elite groups in order to strengthen power.

Under former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, these were trade union leaders and members of her party; under Putin, oligarchs and opposition parties. The resulting image is that of a tough, classical liberal. , one of the last reformers before the Russian Civil War, is also often invoked.

And once again, the fictional blogger leads the reader onto the pages of myth, where there is no place for truth about the relationship between the state and business without the analogies of myth-making.

Upon closer examination, the myth of Putin as an economic liberal, ready for harsh measures to rid the market of politicization, does not withstand the facts. Together with his community of security officials, the curtailment of the oligarchs’ economic power precisely in order to remain . Putin facilitated this through the destruction of Khodorkovsky, who financed the opposition, and through a strategy of winning elections by exploiting toward oligarchs.

As can be seen, in reality, Putin had no plan to construct an economic philosophy of market and law in the new Russia. And while neoliberalism and Thatcherism carry ideas of the primacy of the market over the state, Putin, wishing to preserve his security officials from manipulations against oligarchs, suppresses business for electoral success.

Through his real actions, Putin delivers the final blow to the myth, leaving only the image and a political-technological design.

Mythology from above: state propaganda

If in the previous case the myth arose “from below,” through the numerous interpretations of bloggers and commentators, thereby distancing us from the truth, there also exists a phenomenon opposite in its motivation — when a myth is constructed “from above.”

The myth is constructed through institutions that deliberately shape symbolic meaning. In the second case, the myth ceases to be merely an emotional narrative and becomes an instrument of political design. Let’s illustrate motivation with an example from art:

For genuine conservatives, the value of classical art lies in the traditions of painting. They will create or purchase works by those artists who strive to reproduce the techniques of the old masters and to make copies not for the sake of copying itself, but for the sake of preserving traditional techniques. Here lies a deep metaphor of symbolism that, in this case, explains the features of conservatism.

When repainting a work by an old master, we primarily strive to replicate the technical methods and the master’s tradition. Only afterward do we think of the painting as a copy. The opposite extreme is the purchase of so-called “kitsch” paintings. Such art often has only one aim: to oppose contemporary art while hiding behind the myth of the great art of the past, without any connection to the real traditions of that past.

Here we encounter a new function of myth, also inherent in politics: an appeal to nonexistent traditions. To myths of forgotten customs, resurrected by propaganda and appearing morally outdated for the modern world. A tradition that does not unite contemporary people is a dead tradition. In politics, such an approach, with its appeal to ancient traditions, is considered crudely nonconservative.

In the case of Russia under the authoritarian rule of Putin’s regime, this practice shifts into the mode of propaganda. Since the time of Yeltsin, the appeal as a “centuries-old tradition” has ignored the fact that the institutional fabric of the Russian Church was destroyed in the 20th century, and that the religious practice of the majority of Russians today does not correspond to the model presented by the authorities as a “historical norm.”

After the Revolution of 1917 and the persecution of the Church, people, in order to survive, were forced to remain silent about their past and their family religious traditions. And despite the restoration of churches after World War II, Orthodoxy in the USSR remained largely within , with a loose and selective set of religious rules.

This made it possible to preserve Orthodoxy: according to surveys, about of Russians identify as Orthodox. However, only 10% attend religious services at least once a month. Among the youth, the connection to religion is even more ephemeral: fewer than 34% of those aged 18–25 consider themselves Orthodox.

This delivers a visible blow to the myth of Russia’s religious tradition. For a tradition that does not unite contemporary people slowly dies. Today’s reality is such that religion occupies a symbolic, but not a practical, place in the spiritual and personal enrichment of Russians.

Result: a political institution is created that, as a result of its history, has lost the ability to rely on tradition. It now stands on an imitation of tradition, which does not lead to the unification of society.

Philosophical result: the creation by the authorities of a myth of traditions is dangerous, first of all, because it substitutes the concept of “tradition” with myth. As a result, an illusion of a strong society rooted in tradition is created. In reality, however, dead traditions hinder the formation of human associations and, subsequently, of civil society.

The absence of “civil society” plays directly into the hands of any dictator or autocrat of the Putin type. Today, thanks to the illusion of a strong, traditional society created in Russia, propaganda can justify even the most horrifying adventures, such as the war in Ukraine, which under the pretext of “protecting the Russian Church and language,” without taking into account the reality of traditions in Ukraine and relying solely on the myth created within Russia.

Reflections on the method of symbolism

The paradox: by recognizing myths of perception, formed at different levels of propaganda (systemic media, bloggers), as false, we risk endangering other people’s right to the otherness of judgment.

At the same time, an unspoken law of intellectuals states that emotions derived from figurative creativity correlate only weakly with a realistic understanding of politics, since they are instruments for creating myth. Thus, a question arises from this paradox: how are we to seek truth in a world where an established myth of perception intertwines with the political tradition of symbolism and the right to dissent?

We cannot eliminate emotions and personal judgments from the linguistic practice of politics. As , politics is the highest sphere of the community. By a political community, Aristotle understood a union of people that includes all smaller unions and exists for the sake of the highest good. After all, what is good in one action for a single individual can become a potential good for the entire state.

Yet emotions and symbolic thinking, surprisingly, can also lead to good. For example, by reinterpreting what is happening through art, we can generate new, interesting perspectives and methods of inquiry. But can we also reinterpret it for the highest union itself, for the understanding of the political?

For practice, let us consider an example of a thought experiment using the method of symbolism. Through a method of topologizing the categories of history, sociology and politics, we combine them with metaphors from art, which replaces, in our consciousness, definitions of political categories with images, opening the path to pure cognition of the features of the object under analysis. Let us begin the experiment and take musical genres as metaphors:

Russian waltzes are regime propagandists. Russian marches are the right-wing opposition. Russian absurdist theater is the left-wing opposition. Historically, the theater of the absurd was in Russia and arrived there from abroad. In the same way, the Russian opposition, hiding abroad from Putin, loses trust within the country.

The result of the symbolic analysis: we obtain a new characteristic of the left-wing opposition in Russia (distrust on the part of Russians) while reflecting on musical genres. Such an analysis can also be applied to more complex phenomena. Its main goal is to help thought look at old things through new concepts, which fits perfectly into the work of the intellectual.

And in answering the question of this section, it is necessary to view the task of “debunking myths” without the prism of myths themselves. In a world of information as fast and fluid as shifting sand, it is difficult to get to the truth simply by discarding false options.

The modern intellectual needs not so much a new method as a new strategy of work, a strategy for preserving concepts and ideas. And in order to protect oneself from crisis while doing so, the method of symbolism described above helps to develop ideas through a strategy of acquisition without destruction.

Politics: The path of creativity

The duty and principal challenge of Eastern European conservatives lies in whether they are able to reinterpret the myth of Putin in such a way as to cleanse it of falsehood, while at the same time preserving a space for symbolic thinking, without losing creativity and tolerance for ideas.

In other words, to protect conservatism from the danger of turning into a mythical cult, which threatens our desire to preserve the intellectual tradition of symbolism represented by multifaceted images ranging from Hobbes’s Leviathan to the Ship of Theseus.

Thanks to this tradition, conservatism retains the deep inner meaning of literature and the depth of imagery. In contrast to this symbolic method stands the desire to simplify and fix the image of the political in a way that would be convenient for propagandists, for example: “Putin is the savior of Europe” or “Putin is the defender of traditional values.”

The duty of Russian thinkers, meanwhile, is to free Orthodoxy from the propagandistic myth of an “eternal tradition” and to grant it the respect it deserves within the framework of a real tradition of memory and respect for the past.

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